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Let anyone submit a program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpuses as output.

S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P
... or the Kolmogorov-like compression ratio.

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

Compression program and decompression program are made open source.

If Larry has any questions about the wisdom of this prize he should talk to Craig Nevill-Manning.

If, in the unlikely event, Craig Nevill-Manning has any questions about the wisdom of this prize, he should talk to Matthew Mahoney, author of "Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence"

"The Turing test for artificial intelligence is widely accepted, but is subjective, qualitative, non-repeatable, and difficult to implement. An alternative test without these drawbacks is to insert a machine's language model into a predictive encoder and compress a corpus of natural language text. A ratio of 1.3 bits per character or less indicates that the machine has AI."

This "K-Prize" will bootstrap AI.

OK, so he can christen it the "Page K-Prize" if he wants.

A quick search on KeyKOS makes one wonder: Does it have anything in common with GNU's microkernel efforts? Anyone cares to post a brief overview of KeyKOS, possibly in connection and/or comparison to Mach/HURD?

Short answer: yes it does, and it is actually one of the main reasons why I look forward to use Debian GNU/Hurd in the future. Let me quote my old post from January with some background and interesting links to more informations about KeyKOS:

Still, you can't block every hole in security. Sometimes you just have to hope, right?

Yes, you can. No you don't. Software is just an applied form of discrete mathematics. "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it," as Donald Knuth once said. It is possible to present a formal proof of correctness for any algorithm. It is nearly impossible and certainly impractical when you have a big mess of spaghetti code like with most of software that is utter crap, but it is possible nonetheless when you know what are you doing and design appropriately, with very clean, small and isolated parts of your system responsible for enforcing its security policies. Take a look at such operating systems as KeyKOS and EROS. E.g. read Verifying Operating System Security paper by J. S. Shapiro and S. Weber: "This paper presents a proof of correctness of the EROS operating system architecture with respect to confinement." Read some essays by Norman Hardy, especially those on Capability Theory. This is hardly a new idea, see GNOSIS: A Prototype Operating System for the 1990s paper by Bill Frantz, Norm Hardy, Jay Jonekait and Charlie Landau, written more than 25 years ago. The bottom line is: it is certainly possible to have a 100% secure system, but developers don't bother because users don't care.

And here is a newer post of mine asking exactly your question about KeyKOS capabilities in connection to the recent development of The Hurd, in the First Program Executed on L4 Port of GNU/HURD discussion two months ago:

When the first programs run, it is just a matter of time before there is a functional L4 port of Debian GNU/Hurd (or just Debian GNU?). I really like the design of the Hurd, but what I'd like to see the most are not the "POSIX capabilities" but the real capabilities as described in the 1975 paper by Jerome Saltzer and Michael Schroeder, The Protection of Information in Computer Systems. (For those who don't know what am I talking about, I recommend starting from the excellent essay What is a Capability, Anyway? by Jonathan Shapiro, and then reading the capability theory essays by Norman Hardy. As a sidenone I might add that I find it amusing that people who say that there are other advantages than only Digital Restrictions Management of using TCPA/Palladium-like platforms usually quote security fe

"That's because traditionally, with a few notable exceptions, client-side Java apps suck. They're clunky, slow, and they look like arse."

Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Guess I better stop downloading F/OSS software like these.

http://argouml.tigris.org/files/documents/4/0/argo uml-0.16.1/jws/argouml-en.jnlp

http://www.johnmunsch.com/projects/HotSheet/HotShe et.jnlp

http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/software/idv/we bstart/IDV/idv.jnlp

http://www.crosswire.org/bibledesktop/stable/bible desktop.jnlp

http://www.geovistastudio.psu.edu/autobuild/gvstud io-full.jnlp

http://molo.concord.org/software/

[There's a LOT of java software out there]
http://community.java.net/projects/alpha.csp?only= hosted

And the fun thing is that on SuSE, Java Web Start is already set up. Click on the JNLP links and it'll automatically download, and set up (Warning some are large downloads).

I am quite excited by the confluence of advances in prize awards for technology advancement, and advances with the theory of compression. I'm convinced that if a substantial prize award can be created for dramatic advances in natural language text compression, it will lead directly to a solution to the most critical aspect of the "AI problem" -- that being the problem of the explosion of words without concomitant understanding. I had high hopes for the Internet being the new Gutenberg press leading to a new enlightenment but I'm concerned that without dramatic advances in AI to correlate the huge corpus being generated, the benefits of the new enlightenment may be too long in coming to save us from ourselves.

My work on a legislative proposal for fusion technology prizes was picked up by one of the founders of the Tokamak program. The more recent X-Prize award has a renewed the popularity of such prizes.

As a consequence I've been suggesting the creation of a new prize based on Kolmogorov complexity. As argued by Mahoney in "Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence":

"The Turing test for artificial intelligence is widely accepted, but is subjective, qualitative, non-repeatable, and difficult to implement. An alternative test without these drawbacks is to insert a machine's language model into a predictive encoder and compress a corpus of natural language text. A ratio of 1.3 bits per character or less indicates that the machine has AI."

A simple prize criterion would be for the first program producing a major natural language text corpus, with the size of the program being less than 1.3 bits per character of the produced corpus. Smaller intermediate prizes would help spur broader interest.

I would have thought that the shape of the drop in the top would have been shaped more like [a teardrop]

If you remove the top few percent from both the US and European numbers (ie: the richest people) then the numbers become more or less equal.

There is actually more income inequality in Europe than in the United States.

This has been shown by sociologist Glen Firebaugh in his book The New Geography of Global Income Inequality.

So if we take away the top X%, the numbers become even more unequal.

Of course, you can always check this site for all extra-solar planets found, and method they were found with.

Yeah, that's a pretty good idea! I was going to respond that there is no way I could find the paper in question but I think I did :) There's a number of other papers that cover the same sort of studies that are cited on that page too.

"However, it also contains significant quantities of aerosols and organic compounds (hydrocarbons), including methane and ethane."

"Interestingly, there are also trace amounts of at least a dozen other organic compounds (i.e. ethane, hydrogen cyanide, carbon dioxide) and water. The organics are formed as methane, which dominates in Titan's upper atmosphere, is destroyed by sunlight. The result is similar to the smog found over large cities, but much thicker. In many ways, this is similar to the conditions on Earth early in its history when life was first getting started. But it is this thick hazy atmosphere that makes it so hard to see Titan's surface."

I'm just a programmer who enjoys cool code and cool ideas. I'd likely start with FVision and add SIFT. I haven't yet found any details on the algorithm they're using to do 'reverse raytracing'. Anyone else has some pointers?

This fact alone is enough to dispense with programming languages that attempt to use large numbers of low quality programmers by inhibiting polymorphism with static type declarations. Compile time assertions are only one kind of test and do a lot less for quality assurance than allowing flexibility in choosing the test points on a more succinct body of code.

Just FYI, academic search engines certainly do already exist. For example, CiteSeer.

...demonstrates that it is possible to measure the quantum properties of two interconnected artificial atoms at virtually the same time.

Also,

...virtually the same time.

...demonstrates that it is possible to measure the quantum properties of two interconnected artificial atoms at virtually the same time.

Also,

...virtually the same time.

Slowsort is even better than bogosort. Read about it in Pessimal Algorithms and Simplexity Analysis (1986).

Some references found through a quick citesser search:

C. Krick, F. Meyer auf der Heide, H. Räcke, B. Vöcking, M. Westermann: Data Management in Networks: Experimental Evaluation of a Provably Good Strategy. Theory Comput. Syst. 35(2): 217-245 (2002)

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/meyeraufderheide99prov ably.html

http://citeseer.csail.mit.edu/krick99data.html

Considering that Mars has somewhat Earth like range of temperatures, how is it possible for ice to form at sea-level just 5 degrees north of the Equator? I am not saying that its not a possibility but the only way it is possible is via the Snowball Effect, as it happened on Earth 600 million years ago. But how can that be possible either if Mars is not that hot? Any solutions from fellow /.'ers?

I quess quess it's a matter of an opinion what is considered a "break", but the required 2^69 is still pretty damn much. According to http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/287428.html it's (complexity theory wise) somewhere in the neighbourhood of breaking 880-bit RSA! To give some more perspective, breaking of RSA-512 (about 1/1000th of breaking RSA-880) in 1999 took thousands of computers and several months of distributed computations. So it's quite safe to say that it's still not easy to find collisions in SHA-1.

I'm aware it's been said, but above all, run conduit. No other current solution is more easily upgradable or futureproof.

It says that large enough random data will eventually generate data with a specific meaning to us. Check out this paper from the University of Texas.

One of my science group teammates in the Faculty of Engineering, UNAM already worked on this phenomenon. They built an associative machine (AI pattern recognition program) using a block of memory filled with random data.

In short, Ramsey Theory is nothing but the scientific explanation behind the Bible Code: It's RANDOM DATA. Period.

Well, the guys at Princeton just earned a "-5, stupid" moderation from me. Bet they didn't predict this ;-)

Further to that:

http://www.psu.edu/ur/NEWS/news/Neandertal.html

Says it better than I can.

J&J was in a shear panic over that incident. And they did what they did because they felt the company was dead if they did not. Bottom line. Nothing more nothing less.

Quite frankly, I don't really care why J&J recalled Tylenol (though Tamara Kaplan of Pennsylvania State University implies in the above article that the executives of J&J were genuinely remorseful) the fact of the matter is that they recalled it in under a week. Kaplan says:

"As the plan was constructed, Johnson & Johnson's top management put customer safety first, before they worried about their companies profit and other financial concerns...This was unusual for a large corporation facing a crisis...An article by Jerry Knight, published in The Washington Post on October 11, 1982, said, "Johnson & Johnson has effectively demonstrated how a major business ought to handle a disaster."... Many executives attribute the success of the comeback to the quick actions of the corporation at the onset of the Tylenol crisis. They think that if Johnson & Johnson had not been so direct in protecting the public interest, Tylenol capsules would not have reemerged so easily."

Whether J&J's motives were altruistic or selfish, in this incident they acted with the public good in mind, and that is what matters. The blanket statement that "All companies" act in selfishly all the time is clearly false. As is one that proposes altruism on behalf of all companies.

If you look at the article a few days ago on Google's prize money for creative ideas, you'll realize that Google gives more to its employees in bonuses than its founders make. The two founders make a few Million a year (2M-4M), and the company gives out 12 Million to employees on successful products every quarter. This does not make Google a perfect company, but it certainly is not the soulless, horrible organization you describe all companies as.

While I certainly understand that not every company thinks exclusively of the public good, what I was intending to show is that if a company does act for public good, it does well.

When J&J moved to protect its customers, its customers responded by trusting it. MCI has shown that it does not have my interest at heart. I don't trust MCI. Bottom line.

Longhorn will be the first release of Windows authored completely after Microsoft began their Trusted Computing Initiative and released .NET. Longhorn will reimplement and convert major Windows subsystems to managed code.

This really starts to get boring. I have already written about it countless times only to get completely ignored every time I dare to point out that the emperor is naked.

I find it truly amusing that people who say that there are other advantages than only Digital Restrictions Management of using "trusted" computing and Palladium-like platforms usually talk with great enthusiasm and excitement about the new and innovative security features that have already been implemented in the 1970s for crying out loud, only better and with no strings attached. All TCPA zealots are usually completely ignorant of the existance of such operating systems as KeyKOS or EROS with formal proofs of correctness for God's sake and without all of the silliness of "trusted" computing.

And no, this is not only my opinion that we don't need DRM to get security. I am not the only one who says that everything that TCPA can possibly do to security can also be done in software, with the only exception of DRM, and in fact it has already been done, decades ago. I am not really surprised at all why it is completely ignored by the TCPA and TCI pushing industry. I am only outraged that there are so many naïve people who once again will gladly do anything no matter how dumb it is, if only their good uncle Bill Gates says that it's good for them.

Please, people, if you want to learn about real systems security, then read some old papers by Jerome Saltzer, Michael Schroeder, Norman Hardy and Jonathan Shapiro. If you want to learn about cryptography, read texts by Bruce Schneier. Microsoft is not a reliable source of knowledge in that field.

People always ask me where are the real innovations in systems security and I always say them that they are in the seventies, and have been being ingnored since then by major software vendors because people don't demand using them. This story and this thread is a great example: "Yeah, this version of Windows may suck, but still I am looking forward to buy the next one."

This will dramatically lessen the exploitation potential of code flaws in the Windows application libraries. Microsoft has to maintain support for legacy application, but that doesn't mean they can't get a fresh start on the underlying code, and doesn't mean that existing Microsoft applications can't be converted to managed code as well.

Wait, I've already heard it... In 1995, 1998, 2000, 2003... Oh, you mean that this time they really mean it?

When the first programs run, it is just a matter of time before there is a functional L4 port of Debian GNU/Hurd (or just Debian GNU?). I really like the design of the Hurd, but what I'd like to see the most are not the "POSIX capabilities" but the real capabilities as described in the 1975 paper by Jerome Saltzer and Michael Schroeder, The Protection of Information in Computer Systems. (For those who don't know what am I talking about, I recommend starting from the excellent essay What is a Capability, Anyway? by Jonathan Shapiro, and then reading the capability theory essays by Norman Hardy. As a sidenone I might add that I find it amusing that people who say that there are other advantages than only Digital Restrictions Management of using TCPA/Palladium-like platforms usually quote security features, which have already been implemented in the 1970s, only better and with no strings attached. Those TCPA zealots are usually completely ignorant of the existance of such operating systems as KeyKOS or EROS with formal proofs of correctness without all of the silliness.) Are there any plans to have a real capability-based security model available in the Hurd?

But the small size doesn't make most systems faster. Running the same Unix API, L4 adds execution time overhead beyond the default monolithic Linux kernel, about 5%. (Does anyone know the figure for Linux-on-Mach? I know it's much greater than 5%....) However, there are some significant advantages having to do with debugging, maintainability, SMP, real time gaurentees, memory management, configurability, robustness, etc. Detailed discussion here.

From the overview:

Kernels based on the L4 API are second-generation -kernels. They are very lean and feature fast, message-based, synchronous IPC, simple-to-use external paging mechanisms, and a security mechanism based on secure domains (tasks, clans and chiefs). The kernels try to implement only a minimal set of abstractions on which operating systems can be built flexibly.

Other links: L4KA homepage, background info, more info with some historical L3 links.

Frankly, I think L4 is very much the right way to do things. I wish I could say the same for other parts of HURD.

May be this. Apple clearly sees the mouse as an obstacle only neccesary at the moment, not in the future. By forcing the one-button mouse agenda, they make it easier to accentuate the GUI via keyboard (now) or voice (in the future). Smaller and smaller devices are coming, and they won't have the luxury of having any mouse buttons.

The link goes to a vision of how humans interact with computers in uh... ...2011, I guess since the actor refers to 2006 as 5 years ago. I see some of the elements in MacOS like iChat AV system wide document search (in Tiger). Actually, the screen itself could be viable as electronic ink in 2011 so the video is very much spot on for the future.

The video is somewhere near the bottom of this page.
It's pretty cool.
Apple commercials

Perhaps the best sign of a high-technology civilization that we can detect is a planet that suddenly emits a burst of gamma rays and then stops emitting any signals forever...

The demo showed something like an article or a financial statement. There was a dot near the end of a sentence, and when you zoomed in, it was a spreadsheet with the financials. It was totally black and white (monochrome black and green, actually), but it looked really nifty. Everything pixelated like hell, but with some of the scalable interface components that Apple and Microsoft and probably others are working on, you could perhaps even do away with the pixelation.

I also found a website for Pad++.

From the SIGGraph article:

• We believe that navigation in information spaces is best supported by tapping into our natural spatial and geographic ways of thinking. To this end, we are developing a new computer interface model called Pad.

  The ongoing Pad project uses a spatial metaphor for computer interface design. It provides an intuitive base for the support of such applications as electronic marketplaces, information services, and on-line collaboration. Pad is an infinite two-dimensional information plane that is shared among users, much as a network file system is shared. Objects are organized geographically; every object occupies a well defined region on the Pad surface.

  For navigation, Pad uses "portals" - magnifying glasses that can peer into and roam over different parts of this single infinite shared desktop; links to specific items are established and broken continually as the portal's view changes. Portals can recursively look onto other portals. This paradigm enables the sort of peripheral activity generally found in real phy...

Wrong. Machine-verified proof of correctness is quite feasible. We did it twenty years ago. The DEC SRL people did a nice proof of correctness system for Java in the 1990s, before Carly shut down DEC research. It's hard to build such systems, but not impossible. The theory is well understood now, which wasn't true when we did it.

It's not that hard to prove loop termination. You must define some measure which, for each iteration of the loop, decreases. For many loops this is trivial. For most loops it isn't too hard. For loops so complicated that it's hard, add a loop counter to detect non-termination as an error.

Proof of correctness went out of favor because C won the programming language battle, and C semantics are so ill-defined that formalization is hopeless. Java, though, isn't bad.

The "design by contract" people have the right idea, but it's hard to retrofit design by contract to C++ in a sound fashion. If you're going to have object invariants, you need to insure that control never enters the object when the object is not in its stable state. This is a constant problem in C++, because you can call out of an object and then back in. (GUI systems are notorious for this.) You need to be explicit about inside/outside issues. There needs to be an explict way to say "control is now leaving this object" at the point you call something that could call you back. Without that, object invariants are meaningless.

Hardware proof of correctness tools are widely used. Look up VHDL verifiers.

The whole "hand in horns" sign ISN'T a rock-and-roll thing, ISN'T about Satanism (although Xtian extremists simply love to blame everything on so-called "Satanic Forces", and quasi/pseudo-satanic (as opposed to the Church of Satan folks) types love to pillage anything and everything that's remotely metaphysical or occult-related as "their own" to make it "evil"-er. Even the cops tend to regurgitate the same stupidities spouted forth by the masss media.

The Mano Cornuta is an ancient occultic symbol that's commonly (although incorrectly) attributed to Italians. It's used to ward off "The Evil Eye", not to invoke 'Ol Split-Hoof. The "Why" and "How" of heavy-metal artist's starting to use an ancient occultic symbol should be self-evident as the industry (still) clings to half-truths and misconceptions of "evil-ness" as part of it's "charm" and "allure" to impressionable minds.

Still, you can't block every hole in security. Sometimes you just have to hope, right?

Yes, you can. No you don't. Software is just an applied form of discrete mathematics. "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it," as Donald Knuth once said. It is possible to present a formal proof of correctness for any algorithm. It is nearly impossible and certainly impractical when you have a big mess of spaghetti code like with most of software that is utter crap, but it is possible nonetheless when you know what are you doing and design appropriately, with very clean, small and isolated parts of your system responsible for enforcing its security policies. Take a look at such operating systems as KeyKOS and EROS. E.g. read Verifying Operating System Security paper by J. S. Shapiro and S. Weber: "This paper presents a proof of correctness of the EROS operating system architecture with respect to confinement." Read some essays by Norman Hardy, especially those on Capability Theory. This is hardly a new idea, see GNOSIS: A Prototype Operating System for the 1990s paper by Bill Frantz, Norm Hardy, Jay Jonekait and Charlie Landau, written more than 25 years ago. The bottom line is: it is certainly possible to have a 100% secure system, but developers don't bother because users don't care.

In case anyone was thinking, elliptic curve encryption will also be considered broken if a Quantum computer is built

Any advice for frustrated users, especially non-technical users?

So when do you combine this with Fleck's nude recognition algorithms to provide a service that can identify a person by partial nude picture?

The possibilities are endless!

Crichton's "State of Fear" is fiction, and should be treated as such.

That doesn't mean that the crowd which is arguing against doing anything about global warming is nuts.

The most accepted consensus out there is that Earth's climate changes. It may change relatively fast (dryads, little ice age, etc).

Less accepted (but still widely supported) is the idea that earth's climate is getting warmer.

I agree with the first point, and find the second point rather likely.

The evidence seems to indicate the earth's climate is naturally getting warmer, and, in addition, human pollution is further raising the temperature.

This brings up an interesting issue: Earth's climate will change even in the absence of human pollution. In short, we can't stop the climate from changing.

The question is: How much and how fast will human pollution change the climate by?

This is where I disagree with people and say: We don't know.

I've seen reasonable proposals that suggest normal volcanic activity produces greenhouse gasses on an order of magnitude far greater than human activity. If so, changing our habits will only have an effect until some ubervolcano erupts someplace, dumping a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere. Others disagree, saying that human activity dwarfs volcanic CO2 activity. (Interesting link how 1/10th of a square mile in Italy releases 150 tons of CO2 a day! Mt Etna releases 35k tons of CO2 a day. Here's another link about the over 2 million tons of CO2 (if my math is right) a day emitted by waterways in tropical forests.)

People who disagree with me tend to reply "But if we don't know, shouldn't we err on the safe side?"

The problem is that changing our ways has a cost. Or, as I like to put it: How many lives should we sacrifice in order to prevent a .1C rise? How many acres of wilderness do you propose destroying in order to prevent a .1C rise? How can we assess the risk and figure out what we are willing to spend and how far we should go? We can't.

Instead, we seem to run around trying to pass "feel good" treaties such as Kyoto without considering their effectiveness on global warming or their human cost.

Abstract: Since Shapiro published his work on embedded zerotree wavelet (EZW) image coding [1], there have been increased research activities in image coding centered around wavelets. In this letter, we first point out that the wavelet transform is just one member in a family of linear transformations, and the discrete cosine transform (DCT) can also be coupled with an embedded zerotree quantizer. We then present such an image coder that outperforms any other DCT-based coder published in the literature.

On heavily congested networks with many hidden nodes, rts/cts is your friend.

The bodies in advertisements come to represent an ideal that individuals seek to achieve, and hence provide the foundation for a masochistic or punitive relationship with one's own body. It becomes possible to think about one s body as if it were this thing which followed one about and attached itself unevenly to the ideal outline which lingers beneath (Coward, 1992, p. 416). The dislike for the body becomes pathological and has very real consequences such as low self-esteem, distorted self-image, eating disorders, and even changing the body through painful plastic surgery (Coward, 1992; Kilbourne, 1999;Wolf, 1991).

Increasingly, these consequences are manifesting in men, who are responding to a consumer culture that is less and less forgiving of those who are not sufficiently young, thin, and attractive. In response to these images of the perfect male, men are getting manicures and facials, dyeing their hair, concealing blemishes, and spending millions on plastic surgery.

In 1992, men spent $88 million on liposuction, facelifts, nose-reshaping, and eyelid surgery. This number increased to almost $130 million in 1997. In 1996, men spent $12 million on penile implants, and silicone calf and pectoral implants are rapidly increasing in popularity (Fraser, 1999). In addition, men now account for almost 10% of individuals suffering with eating disorders (Fraser, 1999). In short, men are increasingly dissatisfied with their bodies, go to great lengths to achieve a more youthful and hard-bodied appearance, and are suffering the psychological consequences that are a side effect of consumer culture.

Uh, no. This is Antarctica, where most of the glacier is over land or supported by it in some way. If the glacier slides off, it would cause an increase (abeit slight) in ocean levels.

This is my biggest gripe with how the media messed up public perception of "global warming." The press focuses so much on "rising ocean levels" due to melting floating ice that they gave the cranks ammunition to debunk the science. The reality is that it should be called "climatic change" and is more likely to cause extremes of drought/flooding and drifting of ariable land than anything else. This website used to be a good resource for the topic, specifically arguing that the "greenhouse effect" is completely different from global warming.

Climate change is happening, but no one will take the problem seriously anymore, since what everybody feared would happen can't. (Leading to people ignoring what will happen.)

Linus marks his posts X-No-Archive these days to prevent them being included in the Usenet archive.

Linus came in on this thread and joined in the discussion, unfortunately his side of things isn't there you have to look in the plan9 version of the archive here

an example of Linus' humble prose (I'm not saying any of this is the wrong thing to say but some of it is not very as humble as you suggest):

(3) Implementation sucks. Irix and Plan-9 both get it wrong, and they
_pay_ for it. Heavily. The Linux code is just better. ...

And the plan-9/irix thing isn't. It's an abomination. ...

You don't like it. Fine. I don't care. You're myopic, and have an agenda
to push, so you want to tell others that "you can't do that, it's against
my agenda". ...

Welcome to the real world, Neo.

Stop playing around with those examples your professors showed you. They
had no relevance. ...

I can speak the newspeak as well as anybody else.

But when I speak it, I realize when I'm full of shit. ...

Ultimately, they'll probably do what DirecTV has done: issue groups of keys in tamper-proof hardware, and they revoke keys from circulation as they are discovered to be compromised.

This gets rid of the large majority of casual infringers, because they don't want mess with buying a new hacked card every month. Hard-core pirates will still go through the hassle, but they'll be a small minority. The media companies only have to re-issue legitimate smartcards (or whatever) to a low percentage of players per year, and the time/hassle economics dictate that most people will pay and participate in the DRM scheme.

A good paper on this subject: Long Lived Broadcast Encryption.

My fear is that the push will be to make players will be incapable of playing unencrypted content, so that cracked downloadable copies aren't of much use. I'm not sure how media companies could do that, unless they completely remove support for PC-based players.

Do you have a way of looking at the world that's more unbiased than the scientific viewpoint?

Speaking as a machine learning researcher, I can tell you for a fact that any answer to that question is absolutely meaningless. We have no good way of comparing bias. In fact, to compare two biases, we would have to make some assumptions about what parts of bias are important, which is itself a bias.

You can't prove that any way of developing hypotheses to explain facts is better than any other. (See The Need for Biases in Learning Generalizations for a start.) The best thing we can do is decide based on what seems to work - which, interestingly enough, is a biased measure. Religion, if it does nothing else, tends to be useful in perpetuating a species. Practitioners, in general, have both a survival and a reproductive advantage. Religious people (myself included) report that it makes them happy. Science also has a good track record in both areas. If you really must make them compete - and I'd rather not - I'd call it even.

Yes, ignorant atheists are at least as bad as ignorant religious fundamentalists. But I think the latter group outnumbers the former by a thousand to one.

My stuck-up-prick-o-meter won't stop beeping. Maybe I know too many brilliant, religious people. Maybe you should get out more.

Compare the number of religious folks who have undertaken proving the existence of God to the number of athiests who have tried to prove the non-existence of God. Both actions are equally ignorant. I think you'll find a decent representation in both camps - and definitely not "a thousand to one."

Note: I picked a link the grandparent might like, which concludes
"The Microsoft Corporation does not qualify as a monopoly, given the term's economic definition, however it can be ascertained that the company has engaged in anticompetitive, unfair strategies outlawed by antitrust legislation in the United States."
This is contrary to the finding of the court, which says, for example,
"33. Microsoft enjoys so much power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems that if it wished to exercise this power solely in terms of price, it could charge a price for Windows substantially above that which could be charged in a competitive market. Moreover, it could do so for a significant period of time without losing an unacceptable amount of business to competitors. In other words, Microsoft enjoys monopoly power in the relevant market."

I am writing this just after posting the parent; I am curious to see if someone flames me (i.e. does not read the article) or points out the comment "The Microsoft Corporation does not qualify as a monopoly" above. (Who cares what the court says, anyway.)

"I find the entire issue of Microsoft packaging Media Player with Windows to be utterly ridiculous. It's their product. If they want to make it only work with other products of theirs, that's their right."
MS pressured OEMs to only ship computers with MS operating systems and used their monopoly position to drive others out of "their market". I cannot see how you were modded anything but troll.

Consider a situation in which the transmission of encrypted messages is intercepted by an adversary who can later ask the sender to reveal the random choices (and also the secret key, if one exists) used in generating the ciphertext, thereby exposing the cleartext. An encryption scheme is deniable if the sender can generate `fake random choices' that will make the ciphertext `look like' an encryption of a different cleartext, thus keeping the real cleartext private. Analogous requirements can be formulated with respect to attacking the receiver and with respect to attacking both parties.

Deniable encryption has several applications: It can be incorporated in current protocols for incoercible ("receipt-free") voting, in a way that eliminates the need for physically secure communication channels. It also underlies recent protocols for general incoercible multiparty computation (with no physical security assumptions). Deniable encryption also provides a simplified and elegant construction of an adaptively secure multiparty protocol.

In this paper we introduce and define deniable encryption and propose constructions of such schemes. Our constructions, while demonstrating that deniability is obtainable in principle, achieve only a limited level of it. Whether they can be improved is an interesting open problem.

I would like to see a link to a PSU site on this story. Google can be too much like an echo chamber. You never get to the primary source. Searching through the PSU Portal yields only relatively bland pronouncements like this: "ITS highly recommends using one of the alternate browsers listed below for routine Web browsing." Security Problem with Microsoft Internet Explorer Web Browser (Updated July 12, 2004)

I would like to see a link to a PSU site on this story. Google can be too much like an echo chamber. You never get to the primary source. Searching through the PSU Portal yields only relatively bland pronouncements like this: "ITS highly recommends using one of the alternate browsers listed below for routine Web browsing." Security Problem with Microsoft Internet Explorer Web Browser (Updated July 12, 2004)

I submitted this same story with a lot more detail (but not the InformationWeek link) 28 hours prior to the timestamp on this story. It was rejected. Sure, mod me off-topic if you think I'm whining.

I posted my write-up in my journal for posterity's sake. Replies are welcome on this post in regards to the actual news story. Comments as to why you think the submission was rejected should only be posted in the journal. (You don't want to be off-topic, right?) Did I submit at the wrong time of day? Was the submission too long? Ok... enough whining.

I won't make you do unnecessary clicking, so here are some of the relevant links that I found:
Penn State's own news article
Chronicle of Higher Education article
ZDnet article

The journal entry also has comments taken from a PSU IT personnel listserv, as well as other links.

ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pc/OpenCD/
ftp://ftp.uni-bayreuth.de/pub/pc/TheOpenCD/
ftp://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/mirror /opencd/
ftp://ftp.freenet.de/pub/filepilot/windows/tools/t he_open_cd/releases/
ftp://ftp.uoi.gr/mirror/opencd/
ftp://neacm.fe.up.pt/pub/OpenCD/
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/theopencd.org/TheOp enCD/
ftp://theopencd.hands.com/theopencd/
ftp://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/gd.tuwien.ac.at/ pc/OpenCD/
ftp://carroll.aset.psu.edu/pub/windows/opencd
ftp://planetmirror.com/pub/opencd/
ftp://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/TheOpenCD/
ftp://cs.ubishops.ca/pub/windows/opencd/

"Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: You can type more than that for your comment."

This text here to combat the lameness filter.