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Re "Tax rates will not be able to keep up with citizens working and getting free cash."

When discussing social welfare systems with people over the years, I've found the phrase "getting free cash" is a very strong indicator that the person in question has a poor understanding / hasn't done their research. Sadly I'm too old and too tired these days to explain it over and over again, so if you actually care you might want to read this link - http://www.basicincome.qut.edu... - and hopefully it will give you a starting point from which to do further research (if you want to) into models that avoid the poverty traps of current systems.

Why the fuck the TFS quotes a source from Phys.org, when you can straight to QUT and get THEIR press release Super bananas – world first human trial (which has a lot more detail)

The problem is that the happy hooker is a lie, pretty woman is not reality-TV. No mentally stable, non-self-loathing woman with options will choose to be come a prostitute.

I won't necessarily accuse you of lying, but multiple studies show the opposite of what you claim in places where prostitution has been legalized (most of the negative aspects of prostitution are precisely because it's illegal):

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/16398/
"Sex workers interviewed in 2003 (after legalisation) were compared to a prior study of this population conducted in 1991 (before official regulation of the sex industry)." ... "Overall, the sex workers reported roughly equivalent job satisfaction to Australian women"
I.e. legalized prostitution workers have the same job satisfaction as other working women.

http://newswire.uark.edu/article.aspx?id=16181
“The findings suggest that these women are not forced into the prostitution market but rather choose to enter it for many of the same reasons that people enter the conventional job market – money, stability, autonomy and even job satisfaction.”

The video at the Ceres Solver page reminded me a lot of the RatSLAM project. A project about mapping streets using a single camera as the only mapping sensor.

Related video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0XSUi69Yvs

RatSLAM paper here:

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/32812/1/32812_Milford_2011000124.pdf

Engineers and Computer Scientists have this sorted with LaTeX. Others can take advantage of graphical editors for LaTeX like LyX, and generate publication quality manuscripts. The typeset output from the LaTeX IEEE template is not identical to what the IEEE finally typeset, but it is a very close copy. Similarly the Microsoft Word template is pretty good too.

I know many journals only want 'plain text' and then do the typesetting. There is a lot of skill in this and it does cost money. Perhaps if the journals received LaTeX formatted text then the paper could be open access for free? Fat chance.

Open Access is required at my university, and we are required to publish the 'accepted version', but not the 'published version' (with some exceptions). OAKList provides a reference for publication policies.

Not as pie in the sky as you might think.

My gut told me that satellites may still be able to use GPS, and this article seems to bear me out. I will admit that the specifics (and the huge block of text) are above me, but a quick skimming implies I'm correct.

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/16076/

http://www.marketingcomm.qut.edu.au/news/news-event.jsp?news-event-id=13650

What is the risk from our home printers?
It all depends how you use them and what the ventilation is like in your home. If you print a page or so from time to time, in a reasonably ventilated house (some windows opened), it is unlikely that particle concentration would reach levels of concern. If however, document after document was printed for a long period of time, in an enclosed room, then the particle concentrations could reach levels of concern.

Yup - here's an email I recieved a couple of days ago from the university (in Australia): Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:35:38 +1000 5 of 202 To all QUT Students: Advice and warning about music files on the QUT network 1. Warning about music files and the QUT network 2. What about using P2P software? 3. What happens if I get caught with infringing music files? 1. Warning about music files and the QUT network It is not legal to copy your music CDs to use on QUT equipment, despite recent changes to Australian copyright law. These changes have made it legal for individuals to copy sound recordings without the permission of the copyright owners in some circumstances only. (Copyright Act 1968 Section 109A). Those circumstances are: You must own a legitimate copy of the source recording from which you make your copy, You may use the copy you make only for private and domestic purposes, You may play the copy only on a device that you own. If you do not abide by all these conditions, the copy you make will be infringing, unless you have obtained permission from the copyright owners. It is against the QUT Information Facilities Rules to store or play infringing files on University equipment. So do not use University equipment to store or play music that you might have copied from your own CD's, unless you can prove (1) that you have permission from the copyright owners and (2) that the music is for QUT- related purposes. Even if you have paid for the music from a legitimate site like Telstra's BigPond Music or Apple iTunes, or you have the permission of the copyright owner, you may still be in breach of QUT Information Facilities Rules if the music is not for QUT-related purposes. If you use your own equipment at QUT, such as a personal music player, to play or store your copied recordings purely for your own enjoyment, then that would not infringe the IF Rules. 2. What about using P2P software? You are cautioned against using University networks and machines to deal with music in digital form, either by ripping, burning, peer-to-peer networking, file-sharing, file-swapping or downloading from sites offering MP3 or other file formats of copyright music. If done without the express permission of the copyright owners, these activities are against QUT's Information Facilities Rules and may also result in an infringement of Australian copyright law. Even if your actions are done with the permission of the copyright owner, you may be in breach of the IF Rules if the music is not for QUT-related purposes. 3. What happens if I get caught with infringing music files? QUT logs network activity at all connected locations, including off-campus. These logs are used to manage IT resources, including detecting security breaches and resolving faults, and to investigate possible unlawful activity or breaches of QUT statutes and rules (see MOPP F/1.2.7 and Schedule 1 of QUT's Information Facilities Rules). If in the course of system maintenance, music files are discovered on university equipment, you will be asked to prove that you have the permission of the copyright owner and that the music is for QUT-related purposes. Penalties for students for breaches of the QUT IF Rules can include suspension of your QUT Access account. Representatives of MIPI (Music Industry Piracy Investigations) carry out surveillance of internet sites and traffic, looking for instances of illegal music use, with a view to possible prosecutions. In November 2003, three young Sydney men were found guilty of criminal offences for online music infringement although they did not make any money out of their activities. Two of them received jail sentences. In 2004, a court order permitted MIPI to raid several universities in Australia as part of the legal action against the owners of the Kazaa file-sharing software. The music industry in the USA has taken legal action against the filesharing software Limewire. The QUT Information Facilities Rules can be found at: http://www.mopp.qut.edu.au/Appendix

Did the same thing 1.5-2yrs ago. http://www.mquter.qut.edu.au/mobile/ARTFilterDX/ARTDX.html Had to cut some corners, because as you said CE is a pain, but works pretty well to be honest. Managed to get it running on pretty much every WM5&6 Smartphone/PocketPC that I've come across.

This URL seems to be the paper that presents the approach.

Australia's University of Technology in Queensland

Call me naive... but you usually get 'Bad Science' published in peer review journals.
The research is published in:

He, Congrong and Morawska, Lidia and Taplin, Len (2007) Particle emission characteristics of office printers. Environmental Science and Technology.

probably not out for free download yet though.

You can read the abstract here if you like.

There are many researchers who are approaching this problem and aiming to put trust measures PDF file

While it may not be the holy grail in the format that is described in the article it is always possible to add additional social measures to the framework (similar to what has done to filter out trolls and and off topics here in /.)
That is why research is important and although you only read about how it is formated there are definately more research addressing the credibility problem. It is just that you need to have a common basis of understanding (i.e. data format) clarified first before you can extend it to the next problem. Of course the problem with the Semantic Web is deciding on exactly how and what needs to be represented.

It is relatively easy with MD5. It would probably require less than a week of time on a modern computer, possibly only hours.

If you spent 10 million on an SHA-1 cracking box, it's estimated that it would take about 127 days to find two colliding files.

Here is a PDF that's my source for this information.

An additional problem is that you can embed interesting things in .pdf, .ps or even HTML documents. You could embed both the evil code, and the good code. Then use a colliding block someone found a long time ago to choose between the evil code and the good code. So, once even one collision is found, it's possible to leverage that one collision into all kinds of existing documents because of the block nature of the two algorithms.

I expect that .pdf and .ps documents rarely see code review looking for evil code. So it's quite likely something like this would go compeltely undetected until the evil version was released into the wild causing a ton of confusion and lost time before someone figured out what was wrong.

What are they going to do? Literally prevent you from copying ISOs? Can you just change the file extension and keep copying? Is changing file extensions prohibited by the EULA as well? Or will Microsoft finally include magic file(1) with Vista so they can correctly detect file types?

The only way I will be running any version of Vista is under VMware. There has to be something sandboxing this crap off for my real work, but I'm sure I'll need to test under Vista.

What are they going to do? Literally prevent you from copying ISOs? Can you just change the file extension and keep copying? Is changing file extensions prohibited by the EULA as well? Or will Microsoft finally include magic file(1) with Vista so they can correctly detect file types?

The only way I will be running any version of Vista is under VMware. There has to be something sandboxing this crap off for my real work, but I'm sure I'll need to test under Vista.

In my shop, our weakest bits are our third party components. However, we would not be as far along as we are without these components. This is also nothing new. Components have been around for a long, long time. The first place where components took off was GUI. When's the last time you wrote a message pump? Books like Better, Faster, Lighter Java and the push towards SOA are all about reusable components. The move now is to componentize the business tier. BPEL and YAWL are technologies that attempt to make it easy to publish and consume business process components. Assembling components is about build versus buy and accelerating schedules and it is also about reducing complexity (reducing maintenance costs) because good component based development (whether yours or someone elses) reduces coupling.

at QUT all the audio visual theaters used to give lectures have MP3 recording software built into the pc that controls the lights and mic, an always-on-top recording app, which is simply a subject code and a duration you want to record for - 1, 2 or 3 hours ... the process of then uploading the MP3 to the subjects website is also automatic. Not all lecturers use it, but it's there, and easy to use, if they want to. I think it's total crap that he's charging again for the recording.

There seems to be an ongoing effort to make ruby run well on the .NET-framework aswell, check out IronRuby or Ruby.NET for further reading. Ruby.NET supposedly runs on Mono although it requires a few patches.

I'm studying business and IT at QUT (Brisbane, Australia). The staff there have the technology to "podcast" lectures if they wish. It's done on a unit by unit basis. Mostly my IT lectures do it. It doesn't have the drastic impact that some might think. Students who don't attend lectures won't change their behaviour as a result of podcasting. The lectures slides are released also as the course progresses so this is just "another medium" for communicating the information. Yes, some students cram before the exam but that is their call. University is not primary school - it's for big kids!

If the lecture materials are available online as well as a video of the lecture, how are students who don't go in to Uni "bad"? As long as they watch it, if they can get the same level of comprehension off it then who cares!

A couple of the lecturers at my Uni are only offering their classes via video download and not physically teaching classes.

When my company, a very small software house, looked into integrating with workflow systems, we quickly came across this site:

http://is.tm.tue.nl/research/patterns/

Which contains a list of workflow patterns which they use to compare the expressiveness of different workflow solutions. Finding many of them lacking, they have now gone on to produce YAWL http://www.yawl.fit.qut.edu.au/ which aims to address the shortfalls of the systems they looked at. I found it quite a nice academic approach to a problem which the rest of the industry seems to approach with a lot less rigour.

The solution we ended up going with however was Object Connections Common Knowledge http://objectconnections.com/products/CommonKnowle dge.asp, which is similar to YAWL in many ways.

...is available here

I am suprised that they did not include Adios. The nicest feature is the ability to run multiple Linux kernels in userspace (User Mode Linux). It also comes with heaps of security tools on the LiveCD.

Have a look at the YAWL project of the Business Process Modelling Group at the Queensland University of Technology. YAWL stands for Yet Another Workflow Language and is based on petri nets. The BPM group claims it can model any workflow pattern. Link: http://www.yawl.fit.qut.edu.au/.

My lab was involved a few years back with an high performance computing experiment with self-healing FPGA's after exposure to ionising radiation.

They flew some off the shelf (non radiation hardened) FPGAs on the FedSAT-1 spacecraft.

I was involved with a different (GPS) payload, but i believe the HPCE payload was able to successfully self-diagnose and correct single gate errors on the chip. (http://www.crcss.qut.edu.au/comp/hpce.pdf)

I disagree that it would be unethical to refuse a case from the MPAA. We're not talking about defending a person accused of a gruesome murder who is most likely bound for death row. If lawyers refused a case like that, I could understand someone saying they are unethical.

But the cab rank rule doesn't apply in the United States.

In the United States and elsewhere, the general rule is that there is no duty for lawyers to accept work, except where the professional association or a court assigns them to the client. According to the International Code of Ethics of the International Bar Association, 'Lawyers shall at any time be free to refuse to handle a case, unless it is assigned by a competent body'.[62] While the cab rank rule does not apply in the United States, it has a strong foundation so far as barristers are concerned in England[63] and Australia.
http://www.law.qut.edu.au/about/ljj/editions/v3n2/ bagaric_full.jsp/

We're talking about an organization made up of one of the richest industries in America suing its own customers for even more money. While I don't agree with the concept of people downloading full movies, you have to wonder if the lawyers who take these cases are thinking with wallets when their firm gets the call from the **AA.

Visual Basic and Java and Python and Oberon and Object Pascal and Boo and Nemerle and Component Pascal and Forth and Lisp and Smalltalk and Logo and Tachy.

Some of the packages are still in the larval stages, but they're out there, and more are on the horizon.

You can put LIDS on such a live CD for intrusion rejection. Instead of booting from a physical CD, use PXE to pull the .iso from a private network. A server-oriented distro will fit in a 25-50Mb compressed filesystem. E.g. any member of a diskless cluster of LIDS-enabled reverse-proxy web servers can detect an attack, reboot from PXE and be back online in short order. You gain flexibility by having the boot image(s) on the private network (which can itself be running a live CD).

Have done this from scratch with RedHat, but there's now a live CD with LIDS, SELinux and UML: Adios. Haven't used Adios yet, but it's probably worth a look.

The RPM-based PLD Rescue CD is also a good starting point (though their web site is currently in flux).

As use of virtualization (VMware, UML, vserver, Virtuozzo) increases, it will be easier to view a virtual node as a combination of read-only boot image + configuration. VMware can even do magic with a read-only base disk image and multiple virtual machines having concurrent read-write access to increments to the base. Later updates to the ancestral base propagate to the virtual, composite 'child' images.

The basement comment implies that cost is your concern, not freedom.

A quick Google search shows that QUT is a member of the MSDN Academic Alliance, meaning that as a student you can obtain most relevant Microsoft software at no charge.

Although the official reason that GnomeBasic was dropped was because of "stagnation", the real reason that it died was because Mono was supposed to take it's place.

If that happened, I've seen no evidence of it.

While you can write Mono code in Java, PHP, Logo, Oberon, Pascal, Forth and Lisp, VB is still unavailable.

It's a pity such a popular language appears to be entirely ignored.

<a href="http://jmusic.ci.qut.edu.au">the jMusic web site</a>

Programming in jMusic is programming in Java, not in a meta-language or scripting environment. This means that the full power and cross platform independence of Java is maintained, it also means that the more you know about Java programming the more useful jMusic will be to you. Learning jMusic can be a fun way to gain Java programming skills while focusing on making music.

[...]Because jMusic has full access to the Java language and support structures, your jMusic work can be as extensive as Java allows (and that is VERY extensive).

Who would have though that a mainframe manufacturer would keep prompting dead langauges? <g>

Whilst Algol isn't there, Oberon is, as is Ada, a shareware version of Forth, Haskell, Eifell, Pascal, Perl, Python (twice) and SmallTalk

jMusic isn't listed in the right section though.

jMusic is a Music V based compositional language written in Java which allows the user to do some pretty cool software synthesis, at low level, or upper levels, run realtime synth instruments, live samples, or MIDI data. It can be used for MIDI and audio composition. It contains tools for filtering, granular synthesis, FFT, and heaps more stuff. Check it out @ http://jmusic.ci.qut.edu.au

Have you looked at ADIOS??

These guys are doing some amazing stuff far and beyond what I was after, but their current release for a bootable Linux system is tops! I can walk up to the "secure" DELL WINNT machines at my university and do something useful with them (write and test PHP code on a local apache server).

Here

Try Component Pascal. You can get a compiler here which will compile to either the .NET platform or to Java byte code, so you still have access to all that underlying modern stuff if you really want it. :)

free() itself is the last thing. It scans the free list, starting at freep, looking for the place to insert the free block. This is either between two existing blocks or at the end of the list. In any case, if the block being freed is adjacent to either neighbor, the adjacent blocks are combined. The only troubles are keeping the pointers pointing to the right things and the sizes correct.

NOTE for MSVC users: As in any C application, the standard C calls malloc() and free() may be used to manage memory. If you are using the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler, it is VERY IMPORTANT to note a scarcely documented fact of the Win32 API, in that free() does not actually free the memory that is being accessed (as it does in most standard C compilers). MSVC will free the pointer to the memory but will not actually release the physical memory. To release the physical memory a call to the Windows extension function _heapmin() must be made. This function should be documented in Win32 API documentation but it may be noted that it is difficult to find a reference to it otherwise. If the application uses free() and malloc() but not _heapmin() then virtual memory issues will arise during extended use of the application.

Note [New feature hides ugly bug]In Visual C++ Version 4.0, the underlying heap structure was moved to the C run-time libraries to support the new debugging features. As a result, the only Win32 platform that is supported by _heapmin is Windows NT. The function returns -1 and sets errno to ENOSYS, when it is called by any other Win32 platform. [But what happens if you run an old VC < 4.0 compiled binary? Probably the old function gets called]

I don't think you understand what IL is. It's not bytecode, at least not in the Java sense.

What makes you say that ? It's very much a byte code, and it's very similar to JVM byte code (but with some refinements). See this paper for a good technical overview of the two VMs.

It is completely language agnostic.

That is much too strong a statement. No machine, physical or virtual, is completely language agnostic. They will favor some languages over others in terms of efficiency. That is, all languages can be made to run on any machine, but some will run more optimally than others. I saw an interview with the head designer guy of the CLR (I forget his name and title; it was on the MSDN Show) who was saying that his favorite language, Scheme, would not run as fast as it otherwise could because the CLR was not optimized for Scheme. That was just a engineering tradeoff they had to make. The same is true of physical CPUs; they favor some languages over others too.

But at least MS has multi-language support as a stated goal, unlike Sun who want everyone to write everything in Java.

This might be new in the US. I know a number of places are offering the Telecoms and Embedded Systems niche EE degrees. See an example at www.eese.bee.qut.edu.au/courses. For some reason, industry seems to think grads should be plug and play, with the result of the degrees being sought by entrants. A short sighted viewpoint but people with MBA's seem to think all degrees and graduate skills are the same as theirs.

Here is the Adios Boot CD, its a similar project, check it out.

here is one paper but not the original one i had, interesting comparison. BTW, to clarify: .NET CLR is also stack-based but a bit different in that it seems to have been entirely design for JIT compiling at the expense of interpretation. Also, designed for multiple lang suppor, which is a cool feature.
Unfortunately Java could have been revised faster but Sun sat on it's hands for too long and unfortunately MS came along and made it better. Hopefully since it is open MS won't be able to "break compatibility" too much and projects the dotgnum and Mono will be useable so that i can run programs on either Linux or Windows transparetly. That would be the ultimate goal...

Java limited people to one language, a language that many coders didn't like.

Which language would that be, then? Would it be BASIC, or COBOL or ADA or Python or FORTH or PASCAL or C or PERL or FORTRAN or LISP or Scheme or Smalltalk or one of these?

In fact, surprise, surprise, there are over 200 different programming languages you can use to write Java VM programs in.

Hmmm...
Pascal
Scheme
Python

Actually ASN.1 is a formal way of specifying how to encode data into binary representations like BER, CER, DER and PER which do save bandwidth compared to XML.

Those of you that want to find out more about ASN.1, can pick up free e-books on ASN.1 here. There's some blatant propaganda in them for OSS Nokalva's ASN.1 compiler, but of course there's also snacc, an GPL'd open source ASN.1 compiler. Snacc however only generates code for encoding to BER, so you might also want to check out the a hacked version of snacc from Queensland University of Technology.

ASN.1 is a base technology for a lot of standards out there like X.509, PKCS and LDAP, the OSI application layer protocols etc.

Oh please, of course Root Mean Squared thinks that free software is good. Without free software, we wouldn't be able to easily do our statistics! Imagine doing our statistics with Excel, or some other M$ product. Gasp!

Whenever I see rms I think "root mean squared" from my days doing statistics in psychology. What do other folks think when they see RMS (or rms)? Oh, I mean, what do people think besides Richard M. Stallman? This isn't a question out of disrespect. It is question that digs into how people think, and categorize and use TLAs.

Go have a look at the SETI@Home Downloads page. Tell me there are no processors in there that might have vector-optimised maths units.

Go have a look at the Crusoe Technology page, or the VMWare site. Tell me that it's impossible to use hardware or software to emulate or translate from one instruction set to another. Besides, what's stopping the KrosnoConv "surplus military" stock being military-spec MIPS or SPARC clones? I didn't read the "about the company" bit, so I expected this was just an American company picking up after the excesses of the United States war machine.

Heck, check any Pentium III and tell me that it's impossible to execute another device's instruction set (8088) natively.

The only points that concerned me about the KrosnoConv boards were the Linux-in-Flash claim, and 32Mb of RAM per processor for less than $US200 (either very slow memory, or only 32Mbit perhaps, co-packaged RAM from the old 8086 days). There are projects out there to put Linux in a PC BIOS, or even an LS120. You can get CompactFlash cards, which behave like very small hard drives (either Flash memory pretending to be an IDE drives, or IBM microdrives really being IDE drives). But they're not cheap.

x86 is not the only architecture that SETI@Home supports. Why shouldn't someone produce an add-in card that uses your existing infrastructure? I would still be interested in getting a (cheap!) board full of heavy-maths processors to do hardware encryption for Virtual Private Networks, or even just a heavy duty key server.

I've already got the expensive bits like hard drives, network cards, monitors, cases and memory. I'd actually love to have a "parasitic" processor running its own OS, where I can download software to it, and have it process data that I store for it in my real RAM. Kinda like a multi-processor machine, where one or more processors are especially suited to encryption math.

Don't just spout "that's not how things work". Because with the introduction of technology like that used in the Crusoe, or even older technology like that used in VMWare, or any C64 emulator, you know this is how things work now.

IIRC, there was an article right here on /. about a 2.4GHz wireless DIY project a while ago... or maybe that was kuro5hin...

Anyway, if you have line-of-sight between the two houses, I'd go for wireless (preferably RF/microwave rather than 802.11 or other shorter-range types). Here's a list of links that you might want to take a look at:

Wireless Projects, Vendors, and Products: Big collection of links on all sorts of wireless networking. If you can't find something here, give up.

This is a general outline of wireless LAN.

Ah, here's a bit from /. (not the one I was looking for, but oh well...) about boosting Apple's AirPort to give better range.

..Ah, here we are - the DIY 10Mbit/s microwave project that was linked from /. earlier this year. This guy knows what he's doing, and it's not too expensive either.

Hope these help...