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Yeah, the term dates back at least to the 1990s. The classic survey paper (over 1000 citations!) on the subject is "Ensemble Methods in Machine Learning" [pdf] by Tom Dietterich (2000), for those who want to glance through a survey. Though be warned that some of its specific conclusions are now dated--- e.g. there's been a *lot* written in both statistics and machine learning since then on what boosting "really" is and why it works.

Dietterich presents the more machine-learning view of it, focused on algorithms, combination of predictions, iterative refinement, etc. The best survey from a statistical approach is probably Ch. 16 of this book by three Stanford profs, which you can probably read some of on Google Books.

This sound familiar to the wonky research that was showcased a couple of weeks ago - that gamers are fat, depressed, and have an average age of 35. Data collection is everything. A sample of students taken only from Stanford, or Harvard, MIT, CalTech, is hardly representative of the nation as a whole. Those who get into these schools typically have SAT and ACT scores well above average - in both Math and English (viewing the demographics page at the study's homepage confirms this). In fact, if other research is to be believed, these are the types of people that are least likely to use Twitter, Facebook, etc excessively.

A more comprehensive study would grab a frequency weighted sample that looked at a larger number of students at large public universities, as well as a significant number of students from community colleges.

Unfortunately, when I go to the site, all of the pages under "methods" are giving me 404s.

As a programmer it scares me genuinely to see your post get rated +5 Informative. GOTOs have no place in man made code. There are so many reasons why not to use GOTOs, and only very few situations that GOTOs make for cleaner code (specifically, the usually implemented break, last and next GOTO surrogates). If one of the people in my team uses GOTOs I tell them off.

It's good that Knuth isn't on your team:

"By the way, if you don't like goto statements, don't read this. (And don't read any other programs that simulate multistate systems.)"

Most of the proposed "upgrades" are worse. There was a "Clean Slate Program" at Stanford, but the general idea was to put the network firmly under the thumb of the carriers, turning the Internet into something like mobile telephony. That didn't fly.

IPv6 and IPSEC would fix most of the problems down at the IP level. It might be useful if the FCC mandated that US ISPs must support IPv6 to consumers by some date. More likely, China may mandate IPv6; they need the address space. The 2008 Olympics was mostly run on IPv6, so the technology is working there.

Here's one anyway, regarding the banning of the film from viewing in British schools: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7037671.stm

Liar.

Straight from the article:

The Department for Children, Schools and Families was not under a duty to forbid the film

In other words, the film must be taught as an educational resource, rather than as a political instrument. I've had plenty of math books (even at the college level) with more than 9 errors in them. Even the famously-inscrutable series of CS books by Donald Knuth has a lengthy list of errata. Given that we're talking about a popular film about a politically-sensitive issue, I feel that 9 errors is more than forgivable.

It also certainly wouldn't hurt for children to be taught how to analyze a controversial issue from a scientific and logical perspective -- although it's still somewhat rare, this sort of "Theory of Knowledge" curriculum is slowly making its way into High Schools in the US and Europe, which I feel is a Very Good Thing.

Also don't forget that scientific consensus can and does change.

Jaws

--

Citibank Hack Blamed for Alleged ATM Crime Spree"

Hackers breach Heartland Payment credit card system

I see lots of people wailing about midichlorians...

Perhaps they are not aware of the theorized origin of mitochondria?

In a nut-shell, they appear to have started as endosymbionts which enabled animals cell precursors to process energy more efficiently, much like legume's can process nitrogen more efficiently because of their own endosymbionts.

The medichlorians simply appear to be an endosymbiont that enhances supernatural abilities. (It is possible that this symbiosis causes structural changes in the host which produces the effects; much like legumes produce root nodules when hosting Sinorhizobium. This would render the "black market midichlorian injection" idea moot-- it would take months of incubation, perhaps years, to develop the needed adaptations resulting from being a host. This may also explain the need to train little jedi school kids when they are still in diapers in order to get full effect as well.

Compared to the stormtrooper armor, this one is at least plausible (in as much as supernatural abilities are plausible to begin with.)

My thoughts exactly. They probably developed a new algorithm for finding the best results. There is no need for a new crawler. Found this link on search engine architecture which is helpful. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

But wherever you depart, in the least, from the similarity of the cases, you diminish proportionably the evidence: and may at last bring it to a very weak analogy, which is confessedly liable to error and uncertainty.

As someone who's educational background is in Philosophy, I find it very odd to see ID rolled out at all. The whole notion was put to bed for philosophers a long time ago (2nd year Phil. of Religion dealt with this, for me). The fact that it's being dressed as science these days is lamentable. The argument from design wasn't good philosophy and changing its clothes won't make it science.

Analogies are great explanatory tools, but they are not arguments in the vast majority of cases.

Forgive my cynicism but in my experience, humans are not altruistic at all. Like monkeys, we do what we do because it benefits us.

I'll forgive your cynicism, but you've got to work on your ignorance.

Except that if you actually click through the word "Altruism" to the writeup, you'll see that they mention kin selection and reciprocity in the very first paragraph.

Also, the word "altruism" is not outmoded in the scientific literature. Nor is it a synonym for helping behavior. In fact, that seems to be the source of your confusion. Altruism refers to behaviors that benefit others but not the individual doing the behavior -- and in the context of TFA (and many philosophical discussions), evolutionary advantage is not considered "real" altruism. "Altruism" is thus being used here to refer to helping behavior that confers no evolutionary advantage. Which is why it is a mystery from an evolutionary perspective. QED.

Except that if you actually click through the word "Altruism" to the writeup, you'll see that they mention kin selection and reciprocity in the very first paragraph.

Also, the word "altruism" is not outmoded in the scientific literature. Nor is it a synonym for helping behavior. In fact, that seems to be the source of your confusion. Altruism refers to behaviors that benefit others but not the individual doing the behavior -- and in the context of TFA (and many philosophical discussions), evolutionary advantage is not considered "real" altruism. "Altruism" is thus being used here to refer to helping behavior that confers no evolutionary advantage. Which is why it is a mystery from an evolutionary perspective. QED.

Although (to reply to my own post), an interesting study [PDF] I ran across while looking for that other one suggests American attitudes towards robot employees are warming up in some areas:

We present a study of peopleâ(TM)s attitudes toward robot workers. ... We found that public opinion favors robots for jobs that require memorization, keen perceptual abilities, and service-orientation. People are preferred for occupations that require artistry, evaluation, judgment and diplomacy."

The reason no one has paid attention to this theory or area is because it is total bullshit, and he used a thin grasp of his Philosophy 101 to try and paint over the shit. It still smells like shit.

It is called "Intentionality" (and NOT 'I intend to go to the store' type Intentionality). I would say he is several hundred years too late to the party on it. For a quick appreciation of just what a hack he is try this:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/

For those that do not want to dive in to all the ugly details to understand a big of the above, I can point out the problem in simpler form.

Did you notice how this guy is still defining the intelligence of his system using human intelligence? Well, there is a very good reason why we have to use human intelligence as the benchmark for AI.

The quickest way to accomplish good, low-cost journals is by mass resignations of editorial boards from top (expensive) journals and then starting a low-cost alternative. It has happened, under the leadership of giants like Knuth and I am hopeful this becoming more widespread shortly. The current system is not sustainable.

With "fetching the stapler" you probably mean the STAIR-robot? I don't know how that particular robot was programmed. I did have a look at some of the papers from DARPA participants though. The winning robot basically uses a laser scanner and a camera. It then segments the image into drivable/planar terrain and other terrain not fitting that assumption. This system would be completely unfit to perform a different task such as recognising objects (other cars, houses, pedestrians). There are various projects in map building (SLAM), 3D object recognition (various methods), object classification (various methods), task planning, motion planning, ... However all this approaches only work in a limited domain and they are not well integrated with each other. I would be content with having a robot which is "smart" enough to do part of my household work by the time I retire.

Majority is populism.

An aristocratic view is entirely different. You can also read Horkheimer/Adorno.

Would they pay you what it's worth? That's the real question. I mean, you'll have to keep your gear on, and be okay with them maxing your bandwidth, you'll have to buy new drives when they thrash yours to bits, and chances are, they'll pay you pennies.

It's one thing to do something like Folding@Home where all they're doing is swiping cycles and some ram space...That's just a bit of electricity, little extra heat in your house. Actual magnetic storage is a whole different world.

My apologies, but this is the last comment I can write. I'm struggling under the weight of academic deadlines, and I don't want to fail out of school because of my Slashdot addiction...

Meehl does not actually show that CO2 causes warming, he relies on the research of others to do so. In fact, while this may be a slight exaggeration, about all Meehl did here was to integrate the work of a number of other authors.

At least you're aware of the exaggeration, if not the magnitude or (more importantly) the fact that this criticism could be applied to any research that expands on previous results... which includes nearly every paper in the history of science.

This is indeed a claim made in a real journal. But it's far more controversial than you're implying. The maximum impact of this mechanism has been estimated to be responsible for no more than 23% of the 11-year cyclical variation of cloud cover.

"This is indeed a claim made in a real journal. But it's far more controversial than you're implying. The maximum impact of this mechanism has been estimated to be responsible for no more than 23% of the 11-year cyclical variation of cloud cover."

Estimated by whom? I have already shown you at least one peer-reviewed paper (although you objected to the journal's lack of reputation for "hard science") in which the estimation was far over what you state here. (Which, I admit, appears to be validly refuted for a specific period of time.) But if you are going to make an argument, as you seem to be doing here, then refute my source with one of your own, otherwise you are wasting my time.

That estimate was by T. Sloan and A.W. Wolfendale in the article I originally linked... that's the link which was originally followed by "[iop.org]" before you quoted it. Also, the paper you previously found contains similar criticisms of Svensmark 1998 on its second page.

But there are a lot of complex interactions going on here, including the fact that reflection by CO2 tends to be logarithmic... requiring a doubling of CO2 concentration to equal an incremental increase in reflection. ... Books could be written about it and probably will be.

Yes, of course. The fact that CO2 absorption depends logarithmically on concentration has been known since 1900 when Angstrom and Koch first measured it in a tube filled with CO2. The absorption dropped by less than 1% when Koch lowered the pressure by 33%, which convinced an entire generation of climatologists that CO2 wasn't dangerous because it was already "saturated." In other words, they believed that adding more CO2 wouldn't warm the planet. ( Ångström, Knut (1900). "Über die Bedeutung des Wasserdampfes und der Kohlensaüres bei der Absorption der Erdatmosphäre." Annalen der Physik 4(3): 720-32. published online 308(12): 720-32 (2006) [doi: 10.1002/andp.19003081208] )

But this research is 109 years old. Books have already been written about it. As early as 1931, Hulburt used the brand-new theory of quantum mechanics to study absorption in more detail. He concluded that doubling CO2 would warm the Earth by 4C. This is still the conventional method of expressing "climate sensitivity" with respect to CO2. (Although it's important to note that this convention ignores feedback effects which very likely sum up to produce a net positive feedback effect.) His predict

Making multiple backup copies protects against losing the secret (the root key in this case), but clearly increases the risk of theft. Secret sharing is the way to backup and still be secure. In a "k out of n" secret sharing system, the secret is divided into n pieces, any k of which allow perfect reconstruction of the secret. What's amazing is that any k-1 tell absolutely nothing about the secret! The easiest to understand is a k-1 out of k system. For example, taking k=5 and assuming the secret is 1000 bits long, the first four pieces of the secret are totally random bit strings, each 1000 bits long. The fifth piece is the XOR of the secret and these four strings. It's not hard to see that any four pieces tell nothing, but all five produce the secret when XORed together. More complex k out of n systems are not too much harder to understand. For example, a 3 out of 5 system can be based on the coefficients (A,B,C) of a quadratic function y = Ax^2 + Bx + C. The coefficients can be determined by any three points (x,y) which lie on the graph. If C is the secret, and the 5 pieces of the secret are five points (x1,y1), (x2,y2), (x3,y3), (x4,y4) and (x5,y5) on the graph, then any 3 of them determine (A,B,C) and hence the secret C. But any 2 or less of them tell us absolutely nothing about C. Arithmetic is done in a finite field so that C is a bit string or similar. Martin Hellman http://www-ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/ http://nuclearrisk.org/

Thanks for the link. You're right, it is a good paper. I'm sorry that I missed it.

The Folding@home nVidia/ATI GPU clients are even more important: F@H Client Statistics. By themselves, they account for roughly 3/4 of the project's FLOPS count.

I also find it somewhat ironic that, in a discussion where I'm arguing in favour of an equivalency between computer science and mathematics, you use a mathematical theorem to find fault with my argument.

It's just that there are limits to what you can prove with formal logic techniques. For example, you can't prove that every computer routine terminates for every input. For example is newton's method is an algorithm that may or may not terminate depending on the inputs. If you want a contrived example, imagine using newton's method to calculate rocket trajectory and implement guidance routines. You might consider simulated annealing unprovable to terminate.

Finally, here's a concrete example of how software's relation to math confounds formal methods: Switch Stability is Undecidable.

Compared with ancient Greek philosophy, let alone modern philosophy, religion is already just ignorant, unsophisticated, incongruent, biased, politicized, dishonest babble.

Greek philosophy is in a lot of ways a precursor to Christianity (which I'm going to assume is the subject of conversation when people here start indiscriminately religion bashing due to the things done by fundamentalists in the US). One of the most significant concepts of Greek philosophy are 'practices of the self' which are discussed at length by Socrates in Plato's earlier and middle works (Plato's Alcibiades and Symposium come to mind immediately). These practices of the self are meant to be ways of living your life in 'the good' way in order to attain happiness. Socrates even went around talking to everyone he could find about how they should 'tend to their soul' (rough translation from psukhÄ"s epimelÄ"teon) and ended up getting sentenced to death for it. If you're starting to see parallels here to the Christ story and to the idea that you should live your life in a good Christian way in order to get into heaven (i.e. achieve happiness) that's because this Socratic philosophy led into stoic and cynic philosophy which were the ideological precursors to Christianity and the philosophies that immediately preceded the era of Christ's teachings. In light of this one might even argue that you can't understand western philosophy fully since you can't grasp it's historical context or evolution without understanding Christianity. If you want to learn more about this check out Michel Foucault's Hermeneutics of the Subject, which are a series of lectures he gave at the College of France in the early 80's and eventually produced the History of Sexuality Vol 2 and 3 which are two of the more significant works of contemporary philosophy.

As for modern philosophy, it has it's own problems (what follows is simply one branch of modern philosophy, but it will demonstrate what I mean, and it's a very influential and widely successful branch, so it should be relevant to modern philosophy as a whole). After Descarte the idea of the need for practices of the self to attain access to truth was discarded in favor of simple knowledge of the self (modern science can be seen as an offshoot of this, as long as you ask the right questions and run the proper experiments to provide you with the knowledge you need, scientific truth can be attained, how you lead your life is irrelevant). That's when spiritual practices became irrelevant for philosophy. And that all was fine while people like Kant and Locke were trying to justify particular systems of ethics within the new Cartesian framework, but then Nietzsche came around and overturned all of the philosophy which proceeded him by arguing for a new set of values defined by each individual for himself or herself (such an individual would be an ubermench in his rhetoric), thereby spawning existentialism.

The existentialists left behind Nietzsche's proposed set of values for the ubermench (and the values lay audiences often find so repulsive) the will to power, but held on to the idea that the individual needed to freely chose his or her own values (Sartre) or freely choose how to interpret what is valuable (Kierkegaard). Either way this relies on the freedom of the individual. The problem is that Foucault came around and developed his notion of biopower in the 1970s that makes it doubtful that the individual is ever in an environment in which he or she can make 'free' decisions. The influences of modern society and it's apparatuses on our system of values, ethics and how we lead our lives results in a breakdown of the freely choosing subject of the existentialists. Other major contemporary thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze have even gone so far as to claim the individual is gone a

Compared with ancient Greek philosophy, let alone modern philosophy, religion is already just ignorant, unsophisticated, incongruent, biased, politicized, dishonest babble.

Greek philosophy is in a lot of ways a precursor to Christianity (which I'm going to assume is the subject of conversation when people here start indiscriminately religion bashing due to the things done by fundamentalists in the US). One of the most significant concepts of Greek philosophy are 'practices of the self' which are discussed at length by Socrates in Plato's earlier and middle works (Plato's Alcibiades and Symposium come to mind immediately). These practices of the self are meant to be ways of living your life in 'the good' way in order to attain happiness. Socrates even went around talking to everyone he could find about how they should 'tend to their soul' (rough translation from psukhÄ"s epimelÄ"teon) and ended up getting sentenced to death for it. If you're starting to see parallels here to the Christ story and to the idea that you should live your life in a good Christian way in order to get into heaven (i.e. achieve happiness) that's because this Socratic philosophy led into stoic and cynic philosophy which were the ideological precursors to Christianity and the philosophies that immediately preceded the era of Christ's teachings. In light of this one might even argue that you can't understand western philosophy fully since you can't grasp it's historical context or evolution without understanding Christianity. If you want to learn more about this check out Michel Foucault's Hermeneutics of the Subject, which are a series of lectures he gave at the College of France in the early 80's and eventually produced the History of Sexuality Vol 2 and 3 which are two of the more significant works of contemporary philosophy.

As for modern philosophy, it has it's own problems (what follows is simply one branch of modern philosophy, but it will demonstrate what I mean, and it's a very influential and widely successful branch, so it should be relevant to modern philosophy as a whole). After Descarte the idea of the need for practices of the self to attain access to truth was discarded in favor of simple knowledge of the self (modern science can be seen as an offshoot of this, as long as you ask the right questions and run the proper experiments to provide you with the knowledge you need, scientific truth can be attained, how you lead your life is irrelevant). That's when spiritual practices became irrelevant for philosophy. And that all was fine while people like Kant and Locke were trying to justify particular systems of ethics within the new Cartesian framework, but then Nietzsche came around and overturned all of the philosophy which proceeded him by arguing for a new set of values defined by each individual for himself or herself (such an individual would be an ubermench in his rhetoric), thereby spawning existentialism.

The existentialists left behind Nietzsche's proposed set of values for the ubermench (and the values lay audiences often find so repulsive) the will to power, but held on to the idea that the individual needed to freely chose his or her own values (Sartre) or freely choose how to interpret what is valuable (Kierkegaard). Either way this relies on the freedom of the individual. The problem is that Foucault came around and developed his notion of biopower in the 1970s that makes it doubtful that the individual is ever in an environment in which he or she can make 'free' decisions. The influences of modern society and it's apparatuses on our system of values, ethics and how we lead our lives results in a breakdown of the freely choosing subject of the existentialists. Other major contemporary thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze have even gone so far as to claim the individual is gone a

Wouldn't do not to reference related work such as the Stanford Camera Array - video here showing the multitude of neat tricks that can be done by processing images from multiple apertures into a single image: http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/CameraArray/CameraArray.mp4

The advent of inexpensive digital image sensors has generated great interest in building sensing systems that incorporate large numbers of cameras. At the same time, advances in semiconductor technology have made increasing computing power available for decreasing cost, power, and package size. These trends raise the question - can we use clusters of inexpensive imagers and processors to create virtual cameras that outperform real ones? Can we combine large numbers of conventional images computationally to produce new kinds of images? In an effort to answer these questions, the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory has built an array of 100 CMOS-based cameras.

I can see a scenario where the entire walls and ceiling of a room are a distributed camera, and the user could use a joystick controller to move the view point all around the room as required.

Wouldn't do not to reference related work such as the Stanford Camera Array - video here showing the multitude of neat tricks that can be done by processing images from multiple apertures into a single image:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/CameraArray/CameraArray.mp4

The advent of inexpensive digital image sensors has generated great interest in building sensing systems that incorporate large numbers of cameras. At the same time, advances in semiconductor technology have made increasing computing power available for decreasing cost, power, and package size. These trends raise the question - can we use clusters of inexpensive imagers and processors to create virtual cameras that outperform real ones? Can we combine large numbers of conventional images computationally to produce new kinds of images? In an effort to answer these questions, the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory has built an array of 100 CMOS-based cameras.

Multi-camera systems can function in many ways, depending on the arrangement and aiming of the cameras. In particular, if the cameras are packed close together, then the system effectively functions as a single-center-of-projection synthetic camera, which we can configure to provide unprecedented performance along one or more imaging dimensions, such as resolution, signal-to-noise ratio, dynamic range, depth of field, frame rate, or spectral sensitivity. If the cameras are placed farther apart, then the system functions as a multiple-center-of-projection camera, and the data it captures is called a light field. Of particular interest to us are novel methods for estimating 3D scene geometry from the dense imagery captured by the array, and novel ways to construct multi-perspective panoramas from light fields, whether captured by this array or not. Finally, if the cameras are placed at an intermediate spacing, then the system functions as a single camera with a large synthetic aperture, which allows us to see through partially occluding environments like foliage or crowds. If we augment the array of cameras with an array of video projectors, we can implement a discrete approximation of confocal microscopy, in which objects not lying on a selected plane become both blurry and dark, effectively disappearing. These techniques, which we explore in our CVPR and SIGGRAPH papers (listed below), have potential application in scientific imaging, remote sensing, underwater photography, surveillance, and cinematic special effects.

http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/

Wouldn't do not to reference related work such as the Stanford Camera Array - video here showing the multitude of neat tricks that can be done by processing images from multiple apertures into a single image:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/CameraArray/CameraArray.mp4

The advent of inexpensive digital image sensors has generated great interest in building sensing systems that incorporate large numbers of cameras. At the same time, advances in semiconductor technology have made increasing computing power available for decreasing cost, power, and package size. These trends raise the question - can we use clusters of inexpensive imagers and processors to create virtual cameras that outperform real ones? Can we combine large numbers of conventional images computationally to produce new kinds of images? In an effort to answer these questions, the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory has built an array of 100 CMOS-based cameras.

Multi-camera systems can function in many ways, depending on the arrangement and aiming of the cameras. In particular, if the cameras are packed close together, then the system effectively functions as a single-center-of-projection synthetic camera, which we can configure to provide unprecedented performance along one or more imaging dimensions, such as resolution, signal-to-noise ratio, dynamic range, depth of field, frame rate, or spectral sensitivity. If the cameras are placed farther apart, then the system functions as a multiple-center-of-projection camera, and the data it captures is called a light field. Of particular interest to us are novel methods for estimating 3D scene geometry from the dense imagery captured by the array, and novel ways to construct multi-perspective panoramas from light fields, whether captured by this array or not. Finally, if the cameras are placed at an intermediate spacing, then the system functions as a single camera with a large synthetic aperture, which allows us to see through partially occluding environments like foliage or crowds. If we augment the array of cameras with an array of video projectors, we can implement a discrete approximation of confocal microscopy, in which objects not lying on a selected plane become both blurry and dark, effectively disappearing. These techniques, which we explore in our CVPR and SIGGRAPH papers (listed below), have potential application in scientific imaging, remote sensing, underwater photography, surveillance, and cinematic special effects.

http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/

What do you think about Unison and Postgresql?

http://harts.net/reece/pubs/2009/unison-UCSF-sfpug.pdf

Video of above presentation:

http://blog.thebuild.com/sfpug/sfpug-unison-20090311.mov
http://www.vimeo.com/3732938

See also: http://psb.stanford.edu/psb-online/proceedings/psb09/hart.pdf

Presenter is not very good though in my opinion :).

Of course there is no reason this is still not fixed (by being able to disable a:visited style)

If the issue were so simple, why has no major browser implemented a proper fix for this yet, despite the fact that we've known about the issue for nine years ?

A:visited is very useful to the user in some circumstances, so it's unacceptable to turn it off for every user in every circumstance. Firefox 3.5 added a hidden preference in case some users want to turn it on sometimes, but that solution doesn't work for 80% of the people out there. Personally, I think applying the "same origin" policy to a:visited is a better solution, but that hasn't been integrated into any mainline either.

Let me guess.. you are in your teens/early 20's..

You do realize that in the real world people play the prisoner's dilemma, right?

Of course until a judgement is delivered neither of us is wrong! Yet.

Going back to Boyle et al. did you notice how when the guy said "just make sure it's not a Simpsons character" he wasn't challenged. The writing between the lines here [I only just found there's an audio version, noscript!, it's much clearer now] is "this is how the law should be interpreted but not how it will be". I'm not really bothered how it should, just how it's going to be if someone has the balls to call Fox (or whoever's) bluff.

Boyle of course kills any possible discussion by claiming it's too facile a situation for him to even bother to cast his mind over - he mights as well say "if Hansen disagrees he's a moron", nice logic there. But, if *you* read the transcription you'll see that Hansen doesn't respond to this point, he's not been brought into the conversation yet - he responds to a different [straw man] question about is it against the law for a kid to say 3 words from a song or for a TV to be on in the background of a documentary (I think they specified it was a docu; these refer to the Simpsons and "everybody dance now" situations presumably).

If things were as clear cut as Boyle claims then Ms. Sewel's lawyer for the movie would have said "this is the clearest possible case of fair use, EMI will be laughed out of court". Would EMI really press a case they apparently knew instantly (according to Boyle) that they would lose. Indeed Ms. Sewel's lawyer should have pressed the point and offered to work no-win-no-fee. Also note we're talking 2005 here, no cases I know of have clarified the position yet - you'd think with publicity like in the NY Times that this "case" received that someone would have had the balls by now to push back with the support of the likes of Prof Boyle and the EFF. Even if Fox (eg for the Simpsons) go after you surely the US legal system can't be so corrupt that you can't win if Boyle is right.

Here's an idea for Prof Boyle - an documentary (advert length!) on Fair Use "if a film shows a TV on in the background [over his shoulder is Simpsons showing] or a person's cellphone plays a popular tune [Rocky plays on his cellphone]...". The ad would have all the "completely obviously Fair Use" material in. Then we'd have a bit more case law to look at methinks. Perhaps the opening of Wikipedia to video clips will lead to some litigation and clear up this area.

Tangentially, I find it strange that Profs Boyle and Hansen claim to disagree about the purpose of copyright - it is of course a deal between individual and state in which Boyle and Hansen are both right: an opportunity to gain from your creative labour protected by statute in exchange for placing your work in the public domain.

[ http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/amia-l/2005/10/msg00199.html - story with quote from Sewel about lawyers considered opinion]
[ http://blog.stayfreemagazine.org/2005/06/mad_hot_ballroo.html - ditto ]

I worked in intellectual property for the UK government. I read the entire post and did some back research on the Prof, FWIW. I've read a deal of statute and case law reports (not so many actual verdicts and far less of court transcriptions) for many aspects of US copyright law.

I agree that the situation is ludicrous that these sorts of cases should be free to use the material but in this instance I don't think Sewel would win a Fair Use case. I have the utmost respect for Prof Boyle particularly as I'm a user of CC licenses, his book is good too ( http://yupnet.org/boyle/archives/182 ). I hope I'm proved wrong.

So what? Donald Knuth doesn't use email since 1990. Does that also mean that, like what you are insinuating about Richard Stallman, he is somehow incompetent in the field of CS and IT? What does that mean, actually?

Knuth doesn't use personal email. His secretary prints out email addressed to taocp@[university address] so he can reply in writing. He doesn't communicate via email because he doesn't want to be so in touch with the world, not because he thinks email is a bad thing. Hell he barely communicates via post. His point in restricting communication is a personal one because he seems to value his time for research and his interests.

Knuth versus Email [stanford.edu]

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.

I'm not sure why Stallman doesn't like to use the internet, but it seems like he is more interested in the moral use of software and doesn't use it because I think he personally sees server side code as muddled with regards to the GPL (just my conjecture there). Knuth just likes his privacy. The two are totally different even if they are both for personal reasons. Pretty much all of our reasons for doing things are personal.

Knuth says no to email. You think that means his views should be discounted as well?

Well, this isn't quite true. Averaged over larger regions--such as a state or a country--there is wind all the time. Naturally, the larger the region, the more consistent the power will generally be for that region. There are several studies considering different regions and different technologies (i.e., current power infrastructure, or proposed HVDC lines). Below are some notable findings.

From Stanford (pdf): interconnected wind farms could provide 33-47% of baseload power in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.

In Europe, 20% of baseload could be from wind power with the current infrastructure (pdf), or 70% from wind (and 100% renewables) with a high voltage DC transmission network (pdf).

Other more local findings are 25% baseload in Minnesota, and 50% in the UK. The point, then, is that wind can provide much more power to the grid than previously thought, and is often reasonably economical.

I started dancing (primarily vintage swing -- Lindy Hop & Balboa) at age 23 with zero experience, rhythm, coordination, or fitness. Since then, I've driven 15,000+ miles just to dance and met hundreds of people across the northeastern US.

Dancing is a great way to make a wide variety of friends in all sorts of geographic locations.

*** Plenty of women, from a variety of backgrounds

*** Plenty of fellow geek men (ie math or sciences). Something about the structured social interaction and dancing makes it attractive to us. It's much less intimidating than going out to a club. Dancing is easier with a partner -- the responsibility for performing is diffused & shared, and coordination is biomechanically easier with someone else to help you. At least initially, the dance patterns are standardized (though there are many layers of variations and subtle differences that can be introduced at a higher level). Also, in an evening of social dance, you're expected to dance with a whole bunch of diff people, so you're forced to meet new people :-)

Women that I meet while dancing are never surprised when I tell them that I'm in CS. There are at least four male PhD student dancers (ballroom and swing) who work in my hallway. This phenomena is pretty general: high dance penetration in many CS, physics, and math departments around the country. I get a kick whenever I see a swing DJ post on a Bugzilla for a Linux media app, or geek out on hardware/software on the forums.

Good info: http://socialdance.stanford.edu/syllabi/musings.htm

Are you still in university? Great options.

*** Go to social dance club. They're usually pretty big, with plenty of n00bs. At my school, 90% of the active members are PhD students in math/science.

*** Go take the level one dance studio class (i.e. modern, ballet, hip hop). Gender ratio is in your favor for meeting women (about 10% guys, 90% girls). Plenty of awkward guys there, so you won't be too embarrassed. As one of the few guys in the class, you automatically stand out socially -- people will want to know why you're taking that class.

Been using a Linux DAW for about 5 years now and pretty darn fantastic at that. The amazing work of Fernando Lopez-Lezcano at Stanford's Planet CCRMA should pretty much blow the bejeezus out of anyone's mind. The work incorporating Ingo Molinar's patches (now mainstream, I believe) is truly remarkable. If you go latest greatest cutting edge, you will have issues, you just will. If you stay one release behind or two for a phenomenally stable production DAW, you will be pleasantly pleased. Also try Dyne:bolic and Studio64 , Dyne:bolic loads a low latency kernel on a live cd. For Dyne:bolic it's totally logical to have a hard drive for mounting, and also tons of ram as the live cd needs + the needs of the apps - I am not recommending Dyne:bolic for production but pretty spiffy on the fly. Just my 2 cents , (and no, I didn't fix that for ya.) http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/

Gaming of a deregulated energy system by crooked companies like Enron played a major part in those rolling brown-outs.

Except CA did not deregulate energy. Unfortunately many others think like you, that it was deregulated. Sure some regulations were dropped but others were added. First, generation and transmission were separated. The same company that generated energy could not also distribute it. Secondly while distributors had price controls, ie could not raise their prices, generators did not. Here's a paper from Stanford on California Electricity Deregulation[pdf].

Falcon

Well it is very simple, it plugs into a patients mind and resolves the small headache.
just kidding

The application, Folding@home, Explains what the application does on its main site http://folding.stanford.edu/. You donate computing power and bandwidth to a network. Basically functioning as a WAN, your system takes on a proxy role when engaging into the server. You download a application, which is basically a time table of usage, it will work calculations, and other roles for that subnetwork. Then you might assume your system is just doing one role, because of how you can connect other systems to utilize onto one folding. When really you are just plugging in more bandwidth and computing power for that time table. Folding@Home will use a small fraction of your systems computing power. Taking about as much resources as a screen saver runs on your system. Which it only seems more from that when the time table you download from folding@home is doing something else, but they just only will use so much system resources to do processes.

Your system doesn't become a life line, by any means. The Folding@Home project is basically helping a super computer calculate protein calculations or procedures in a far more productive pace. Allowing the super computer to finish calculations, that would take months, within days. By donated processing power from your system.

Maybe the NVIDIA writer should have written that NVIDIA invented the General Purpose GPU ? From the wiki it seems like they might have been pioneers there.

I still don't think it's a valid claim. Try reading Myer & Sutherland'sOn the Design of Display Processors, or Levinthal and Porter's Chap - a SIMD graphics processor. There was also the Ti graphics chips eg (34010). It happens all the time. IIRC many of the SGI machines were done with programmable hardware but I guess that wasn't exposed to the end user.

MOSS? Quite a piece of work, I must say. And yes, it does work. I was a TA that used it.

I have written bug reports which got no attention at all. For years I was laughed at in forums for describing this problem.

There are some tools, which don't get updated anymore, safecache and safehistory. Here are papers from 2006:

http://crypto.stanford.edu/sameorigin/

cb

For a pandemic, it is also helpful to have a war with massive troop movements from one place to the other such as during WWI with everyone living in tight quarters. It is thought to have incubated in the U.S., was carried over to Europe by our troops and then brought back to the U.S. by them.

http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/

So, this implies that this is how they teach Elementary and High School Math in China and India? My impression, albeit a few years out of date that they are both much more oriented towards "Drill and Kill" than the US system has been for many years. Of course, by doing this from an early age, those that have natural talent then have the materials necessary to move on to the next stage.

If a classroom of eighth graders can't figure out how long each piece would be if you took a rope 12 feet long and cut it into three equal length pieces, they are not yet ready for "free form" and "semester long projects" in math the next year (and, sadly, probably never will be as their counterparts in India likely could easily solve this problem instinctively in third grade as probably virtually everyone reading this could have).

You may have a Utopian view of what the typical student in the US has learned by the time they enter High School :)

I suspect the greatest difference between our failing education system and the best of China and India are that in those cultures from an early age, those who are pursuing academic pursuits are pretty much told that they must achieve to succeed and don't really have a lot of input into how to accomplish that. They also probably don't spend a whole lot of time "hanging out at the mall" or "just chilling" -- instead spending that time studying. This focus on education is not immediately lost when families arrive on our shores - but American parents and teachers have, by and large, have gotten soft - this is an interesting read...

The furthest back I could find complete tax brackets for is 1950 here.

Crudely adjusting for inflation, my current 2009 salary is approximately $5100 in 1950 dollars. Given the tax rates listed for 1950, I'd pay $916 out of that $5100 for an over-all tax rate of approximately 18%. Tax rates higher than the current high of 35% don't apply until you're making $24000 USD in 1950, which is equivalent to $210k USD today. So they're pretty much on par with current taxes except they tax the ever living hell out of anything over $210k, which is generally extra money that you don't need for basic subsistence.

I wish I could find the tax brackets for 1930 to show you that you probably had to make $300k USD in 1930 to get taxed 80%.

Indeed, even the creator of Fortran said "actually, that was a shit idea, we should all ignore it and use functional programming instead" in this paper.

Thanks for your input Mr2cents, thanks for the link too, see also Stanford Everywhere which I thought was nifty. :)

...Mari Baker was on the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast a few months ago; she gave an pretty interesting talk.

Actually, if you've got a long commute or like to jog and listen to stuff, the whole ETL archives are pretty good. Some of the ones featuring starry eyed (and heavily government subsidized) green-tech folks are kind of tedious, but, most are good stuff.

...Mari Baker was on the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast a few months ago; she gave an pretty interesting talk.

Actually, if you've got a long commute or like to jog and listen to stuff, the whole ETL archives are pretty good. Some of the ones featuring starry eyed (and heavily government subsidized) green-tech folks are kind of tedious, but, most are good stuff.