Slashdot Mirror

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/
http://www-bcs.mit.edu/people/jyawang/demos/plenoptic/plenoptic.html

While we don't require all MSCS students to complete a research thesis, some students pursue a departmental honor called a "distinction in research". It's a great option if you're at all interested in research or considering a possible Ph.D program or a career as a researcher. The goal is to produce work that is publishable in a journal or a conference.

http://cs.stanford.edu/degrees/mscs/classes/planning/

I guess it is not required for a masters degree, however every top level school that I can find gives the opportunity for research. Sometimes as a student you have to take the initiative and make the most out of your education.

At the very least, it is directly applicable in various areas of computer science, if not software engineering

The Master of Science degree in Computer Science indicates two things to prospective
employers. First, it guarantees that you have a broad grounding in computer science as a
discipline. Second, it certifies that you have studied a particular area in detail and thus have
additional depth in a particular specialty. Both components are important to the Masterâ(TM)s
program, and it is not possible to secure a Stanford MSCS degree that does not meet both
requirements.

When there is more CO2, plants do better.

Some plants grow better with higher CO2 levels, like poison ivy. However other plants grow slower. There are winners and losers wherein some plants grow faster and others slower under high CO2 levels. The same is true under higher temperatures.

Oh, BTW, "The jolt of carbon dioxide also boosted the most-toxic forms of poison ivy's rash-raising oil".

So, please, stop trying to insult the intelligence of people on slashdot until AFTER you have educated yourself about how the world works.

I suggest you do the same.

Falcon

You mean like this study. Let me quote from it:

"Most studies have looked at the effects of carbon dioxide on plants in pots or on very simple ecosystems and concluded that plants are going to grow faster in the future," said Field, co-author of the Science study. "We got exactly the same results when we applied carbon dioxide alone, but when we factored in realistic treatments -- warming, changes in nitrogen deposition, changes in precipitation -- growth was actually suppressed."

In other words, higher levels of CO2 really did cause all plants to grow more, until they started screwing with other environmental variables based on what they THINK a future atmosphere (and temperature) will be like. In other words, they screwed with the gas and baked the plants in the oven until they stopped growing so they can say, "See, GW is bad!"

So when you say, I should do the same, I already did.

It seems to me that you haven't read any papers on breeder technology. Waste from a breeder is not 'hot' for 10,000 years - the point of burning up the long half life actinides is to eliminate them from the waste stream, making what little waste there is very hot for a very short time. That's how radiation works - things are either very hot for a short time or moderately hot for a long time.

You realize that all of the nuclear waste in the US today is stored on-site in casks either _in the open_ or in a shallow pool of water?

I would suggest you read up on modern reactor technology (and existing, proven technology that Clinton canned like the IFR) before you rehash arguments based on information from the 1950's.

How long does it take your transistor radio to switch on? What about your television? (Unless it is decades old, it is probably two seconds or less.) When you turn on your kitchen tap, how long is it before water starts coming out

General purpose computers with complex operating systems that start dozens of applications during boot are relatively new technology compared with what you list. The PC is what, 20-30 years old depending on your definition of Personal and Computing?

I bought a house that had been in probate for a year. The water lines had been flushed with air. When I got the water running, it took maybe 30-40 seconds for the water to pressurize the line and come out the faucet.

Also, I've used old restored radios from the 1920s that had to warm up the tubes before they worked. 'Boot' times on those were around 2-3 minutes. Beautiful pieces of wood furniture, but horrible impractical compared with an 'almost instant' boot iPod.

To use a car analogy, One hundred and twenty years of innovation can do a lot. When you got into your automobile this morning did you remember to manually advance the engine timing and work the clutch leavers while someone cranked over the engine to get it started? No, you put the key in ignition and turned it.

But it's still nice to see someone taking note that Ubuntu can be dog slow starting up. Just one more reason to keep the system running your favorite distributed app while away.

Uranium is a finite, non-renewable resource

Uranium is finite in the same sense that solar power is finite. With breeder reactors, the uranium on earth will be sufficient for billions of years.

Yes, I said billions.

There are tons of people working on better electric storage system technology. This makes it sound like they are doing the engineering on their own.

Look here and this one is really interesting IMO.

When they get a breakthrough on high capacity systems it will make a lot of things possible that currently are not, not just cars. It is the battery technology that really puts the hobbles on generating your own electricity at home. Well, that and solar collector technology as well as HOA restrictions etc.

If I could get tax breaks to install a 95%+ self sufficiency system I'd do it in the blink of an eye. Having an electric car on top of that would be even better. I would like a nice little commuter car or two; 40 mile range is great if it will also support solar trickle charging while parked etc.

With an initial investment, I could become 95% free of the grid ... well, if I could do that, I'm all in... big time.

You have to have a run of fiber directly between hither and yon for communications to be secure.

One can use quantum teleportation to build quantum repeaters. Add an out of band signal for addressing, and it shouldn't be that hard to make a quantum encrypted network - direct connection not required. If men in the middle rearrange the addressing data, the only thing that happens is that the signal doesn't arrive at the correct destination; the adversaries still can't clone the particle, so they still can't break quantum crypto.

Here is a paper describing what appears to be essentially the same problem: "Interpolation of bathymetry data from the Sea of Galilee: A noise attenuation problem"

It can be downloaded from http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/antoine/Research/GEO/GuittonClaerbout.pdf

The paper contains several images similar to the Google bathymetry map, with rectangluar noise. However, thanks to software cleaning they managed to remove most of that noise.

The purpose? Ironically, "The ultimate goal is to produce a good map of the depth to bottom and images useful for identifying archaeological, geological, and geophysical details of the sea bottom. In particular, we hope to identify some ancient shorelines around the lake and meaningful geological features inside the lake. The ancient shorelines could unravel early settlements of archeological interest or old
fishing ports".

I give these guys a better chance of finding something relevant, as they analyzed 10-meter scale data, rather than playing around with,Google Earth... :)

It scares me when nitwits like you post garbage like the following:

Without measurements, I can say with certainty that our climate is changing.

Because as we all well know, human memory is fallible.. Not just that, extremely fallible. Not to mention extremely vulnerable to self-delusion, unconsciously-induced Selection Bias and Confirmation Bias, and to false memory planting.

You may not agree with the scope and severity of the climate change. Fine. But to deny that it is happening shows a complete inability to observe the world around you over the course of decades.

"To deny that it is happening" - I didn't see that. I did see an argument over whether it is man-made, and the entire ARTICLE is about the supposed "scientists" who are engaging in poor science because they are engaging in Selection Bias and Confirmation Bias quite deliberately, invalidating all of their supposed "research."

The IT guy in me thinks that's a waste of FLOPS.

• Folding@Home
• SETI@Home
• Rosetta@Home
• Bunch of stuff at grid.org

In this financial climate? Only if those projects are willing to pay you (hah!) or you really believe in supporting what they do.

The wanna-be businessman in me thinks its probably a waste of money as well.

You look like you're in a position to use virtualization to create X application servers over Y machine servers ... but you'd need all the IT staff and customer support, etc. to get that going. It's too bad you can't sell your CPUs to Amazon for their cloud computing since it's all pretty much anonymous but I guess either way I think about it you would need a pretty hefty internet connection.

There's really hardly any money to speak of in plain old CPU cycles. Amazon does OK out of it, but their model relies on being really big. Most of us don't operate at that size.

OTOH, if you can offer some sort of value-add, you can charge more. For example, you might run and support specialist applications for small businesses; there's a reasonable amount to be made in that area, but you need to be thinking then in terms of not just having computers but support staff too and, indeed, a whole business. You can't do it half-assed; this isn't the tech bubble.

Have you thought about just selling the servers?

As others have explained, that may well be a solid suggestion. Right now, better to have cash in hand than servers you don't need.

The IT guy in me thinks that's a waste of FLOPS.

• Folding@Home
• SETI@Home
• Rosetta@Home
• Bunch of stuff at grid.org

The wanna-be businessman in me thinks its probably a waste of money as well.

You look like you're in a position to use virtualization to create X application servers over Y machine servers ... but you'd need all the IT staff and customer support, etc. to get that going. It's too bad you can't sell your CPUs to Amazon for their cloud computing since it's all pretty much anonymous but I guess either way I think about it you would need a pretty hefty internet connection.

Have you thought about just selling the servers?

Scary, but not young. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-relative/

There are some great specialized online reference works that use the "cathedral" approach to good effect. As a mathematician, Planet Math comes up frequently, and it has a very well-defined, terse style which is usually much more clear than Wikipedia's mathematical muddles. On the other hand, I am always very happy when the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has relevant articles, since it takes a very scholarly approach which details the full history of the subject for millenia. When all three sources, Wikipedia, PlanetMath, and the SEP have info on the subject I want - pure bliss, I have a hope of getting it without having to dig into the original papers.

I would hope that other subject areas have similar quality online references. Maybe it is just too difficult to get specialists from many different fields to work together on one of these encyclopedias, so we will end up these large "chunks" of information available to people who know where to find them. The great thing is the internet makes these available for free.

"Also, you imply that the religious did not have anything whatsoever to do with advancing science."

I imply no such thing. Begin again. Free your mind.

Then you suggest:

"Something else that you seem to miss is that the ancients knew about seasons - actually, they had very accurate knowledge of the cosmos and were able to track the path of the sun and the stars very accurately. Just read up about the Inca, the Maya and the Egyptian pyramids. Also, read up on the temples in Asia and how many of them were really astronomical observatories."

I find it strange that you have an interest in this, but fail to see how this evidence directly challenges your primitive creationist world view. "The ancients" as you call them "knew about the seasons" because they had astronomers. They knew a lot more than the seasons. Any primitive person paying attention would figure out seasons. Knowing that you can plant and harvest, and when to plant, however, that takes a little more thought, and that is most likely the birth of science.

Early science may have been entangled with various local superstitions, as some astronomical knowledge was entangled with astrology, but to be most useful it must shed superstition.

Consider the Antikythera Device which demonstrates not only advanced astronomy but mechanical engineering knowledge which was lost, and remained unsurpassed for hundreds of years.

Science clearly has deep roots, deeper even than Christianity. Why didn't you cite any examples of scientists who were religious but not Christian? Possibly because the intellectual tradition of Christianity largely ignores the non-Christian and typically conflates religion and Christianity. They are not the same. You should "read up" on non-Christian scientists. Start here:

Lost History: the Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers, and Artists

Consider also the Archimedes Palimpsest. The great works of ancient scientists were considered valueless by Christians for hundreds of years. In a bit of irony, one such work has been revealed by modern science, hidden beneath the superstition painted over it. The paper was more valuable to the Christians than the knowledge on it. (This is an important fact tossed around as a throw away observation in most accounts of this palimpsest. However, it's worthy of some consideration. Christianity participated in and contributed to a collapse of the scientific understanding of the world. The paper was so valuable to them most likely because they couldn't easily make more themselves. That's how deep the collapse really was.) Thankfully the obsessive monks didn't burn it for warmth, and rather scraped it off and painted over it -- leaving the tiny ghost images of the original text below, for advanced X-Ray imaging to reveal, centuries later.

In fairness, two observations. Firstly, Christianity isn't the only religion which feels threatened by science (aka objective reality, aka factual truth which can be verified by observation). This seems to be a pretty common characteristic of most religion. Consider Scientology, which seems to be downright paranoid about outsider's attempts to learn about it. Modern Islamic fundamentalists like the Taliban and Al Quaeda have demonstrated that knowledge and science are their greatest enemy, scientists, doctors, and teachers are to be killed, schools converted to instruments of their own particular religious dogma.

Secondly, Christianity isn't a mon

Do them a favor. Get them to start thinking abstractly as quickly as possible. It will make learning ANYTHING much easier later.

"Beginning Logic," by E.J. Lemmon covers the sentential calculus.
"Language, Proof, and Logic" by Barwise and Etchemendy would be a fine way to continue, should you end up teaching the next level class next year. It covers the sentential calculus and moves on to quantification and the first-order logic.

I would take a look at them both. LPL comes with a CD-ROM with a model builder, a proof checker, and hundreds of exercises. Both are intended as non-mathematical introductions to logic, though LPL's final part explores some consequences of the theory of models, in mathematical terms. Even then, the language used is simple. Depending on your goals, LPL might be perfect, or over-kill.

When it comes to solving problems, nothing beats hard work

So you suggest we improve food production by hard work instead of by technology? Sorry, but that just doesn't cut. Technology is what drives progress on a large scale, hard work only work on a small individual scale, on the large scale its pretty much lost, unless its invested in building new technology.

Pascal's Wager could prove that he is actually being very rational by believing in a deity.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/

We started with The Muppet Show thinking that we'd eventually move on to The Dark Crystal, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock and so on. Wrong. There are an insane number of characters on The Muppet Show. Now, it's more of "how obscure can you get?" (e.g., the entire membership of Electric Mayhem) In general, we try to match the persona to the role of the machine. misspiggy = gigantic SAN volume, scooter = email, bobo = anti-spam, and so on.

It's a tad less polished and maybe a bit more buggy than Eagle, but FreePCB ( here ) is FOSS Windows software. It works sufficiently well for me to be very productive. I've used it to make all of the circuitry for the Stanford Solar Car Project ( here ).

It's much easier to use than Eagle and does make you go through as much bigma to get a board made.

It's most likely that you don't exist.

Damn p-zombies.

I have never encountered this particular definition during Propability theory. It's not my major though.

Try reading the following:

• Bayesian probability
• Bayesian Epistemology

While not research-related, may I suggest Mathcamp? It is truly high-level math, 5 weeks, international (not just Canada/USA: that's merely the geographical location). Alternately, try SUMaC at Stanford; more researchy and less high math, but very good from what I've heard from Mathcamp friends.

I'm wondering if the "time capsule" will be painted hunter-green and have the "WM" logo on the side. "No problem, we'll store the contents of your "time capsule" at our special "aggregation facility."" Some folks at Stanford seem to think it's a good idea.

Testing gravity on small distances is extremely hard because gravity is so weak. See http://www.stanford.edu/group/kgb/Research/gravity2.html for example. Cosmology is ongoing research, as you can see from the discussion around dark energy. In particular, measuring cosmological distances is a difficult problem. So one cannot say that gravitation were fully understood on cosmological scales.

This guy didn't have the doc yet, but I think he's got a heckuva lot of prior art even on Xerox. ;-)

Though I don't doubt that content owners would surely love to impose DRM on broadcast content, it's simply not provided for in the ATSC specifications for MPEG2 over-the-air transport streams.

Actually, the ATSC spec does allow any abitrary types of packets to be inserted into the stream. These could be used for DRM authorization, etc. The ATSC spec as adopted by the FCC is a more relevant link, as is the conditional access specification, which specifically deals with this sort of thing.

But, the FCC requires that the OTA broadcast be unencrypted, so normal MPEG-2 that is receivable by all will be there as long as the FCC controls the station license.

The upshot of this is that nothing prevents a station from sending a 480i MPEG-2 stream as the unencrypted one, and adding an encrypted MPEG-4 1080/60p stream for paying customers. At this point, only market forces (in particular, network affiliations) will keep this sort of thing from being the standard for OTA TV in the US.

What are you talking about? There are no "holes" to be patched--MPEG2 transport streams are unencrypted. Though I don't doubt that content owners would surely love to impose DRM on broadcast content, it's simply not provided for in the ATSC specifications for MPEG2 over-the-air transport streams.

The infamous Broadcast Flag--the only element of DRM to have ever loomed over broadcast television--is dead and buried. Besides, none of the DTV converters currently available have any DRM-compliance built in.

Barring the highly unlikely event that Congress decides to modify the ATSC spec after tens of millions of TVs with DTV tuners are owned by consumers, there is zero chance of DRM becoming an issue with digital television programming.

No offense to DARPA, not all of the navigation and vision algorithms in those cars with a whole set of high speed computers are really practical for use on smaller home service robots.

Vision works better on home service robots that it does outdoors. Outdoors, getting a long enough baseline for a stereo pair is hard, except through motion vision. Humans only have stereo out to a few meters, anyway. SLAM (Simultaneous Location and Mapping) for mobile robots is getting quite good. Willow Robotics demoed their system at RoboDevelopment a few months ago, and the latest issue of IEEE Trans. on Robotics, a special issue on SLAM, indicates how good that's become.

But machine learning is facing some strong limitations when compared with the abilities of biological systems in coping with unsupervised learning in uncertain and dynamic environments.

I recently went over to Stanford to see the CS229 project presentations, and it's very impressive what small teams of students are getting done in one quarter. Self-guiding robot helicopters, for example. The field has moved away from neural nets; Bayesian statistics, with real theory underneath, works better.

the balance and slip control of Big Dog, applies to quadrupeds with the similar mechanical characteristics. If you are trying to imply that the results are relevant to humanoids, I suggest you read up on the loads of material on everything from 3d linear inverted pendulum model to spin angular momentum regulation and control for humanoids.

Been there, done that, own the patent on legged slip control. For systems which really use dynamic balance, the number of legs doesn't matter all that much from an algorithm standpoint. In fact, most real progress has been made by first getting the one-legged case to work. Key insights: 1) balance has priority over movement, 2) slip/traction control has priority over balance, 3) legs need three joints, not two, so you can play with the force vector at ground contact independent of foot position, and 4) legs are viewed as assets to be deployed to manage traction, balance, and propulsion. "Gaits" are an emergent behavior, the state into which things settle down when movement is not disrupted.

So basically he doesn't know whether their datacentres are plugged into coal power plants or nuclear plants, he's just making wild assumptions?

If they're located in the United States then they're almost certainly getting some percentage of their power from coal. If they happen to be getting a large percentage from hydro-electric, then they're driving up the cost and possibly preventing other consumers in the general area from getting 100% of their energy from hydro-electric. Same goes for nuclear.

Plus it's making it sound like Google gets the job done redundantly and you get the result from whichever does the job the fastest, which is obviously balls.

While it's true that Google doesn't use competing servers in that sense, it is true that a single will burn cycles on multiple machines. This description of Google's architecture talks about how a given query's terms are queried in different "barrels", which presumably may reside on different machines. In order to achieve the sort of latency they do, the process is a great deal more complicated than, say, a single query on a local database.

That's funny because mine generates 0g per hour. It's called nuclear power.

Where do you live that has 100% nuclear power? How was the nuclear plant constructed? How was the uranium mined and processed? How do the plant employees get to work? Nothing is free. If you really do live somewhere with 100% nuclear power then, yes, your footprint is much smaller than someone consuming coal-based power. But it's not non-existent.

Let's overlook the fact that most of electricity in New Zealand is produced by hydropower stations.

Were all the recipients of these tweets located in New Zealand? No. You also exaggerate the extent to which New Zealand is powered by hydro power. The latest statistics I found indicate about 54% of Kiwi power is hydro-electric. Another 11% is geothermal and wind. 24% is natural gas and 10% is coal.

I remember visiting SSRL about five years back as a site user. Protocol at the time was that you pretty much ate, slept, and worked at the beamline you were assigned to in 16-N hour shifts until your time ran out. Consequently there was food trash all over...and a huge ant infestation. Near the end of the time I joked that we ought to put one of the ants in the beam. About a year later, a study came out in Science investigating tracheal respiration in insects using synchrotron radiation.

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ
That should do it.

I love analogies

So does Douglas Hofstadter

But why use it you do not have too?

Computer science books and even my highschool basic programming class mentioned its not proper programming to use a GOTO. Is there any computer science professor that supports GOTO statements in programs?

GOTOs are not inherently bad. At some level, they're unavoidable. (Have you ever programmed in assembly language?)

As for CS professors, Donald Knuth uses and defends GOTO statements:

http://pplab.snu.ac.kr/courses/adv_pl05/papers/p261-knuth.pdf

(His code comments often make reference to why he uses GOTOS. For example, in his implementation of the classic Adventure game, he writes: "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.)" In http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/15puzzle-korf1.w, he writes: "as a full professor with tenure, I don't have to worry about being fired when I use |goto| statements.")

Not every programmer is good and a good programmer will refrain from making the program harder to read or more difficult to debug when jr programmers modify it later.

GOTOs by their very nature encourage bad programming as much as pointers do.

Pointers encourage bad programming? No offense, but do you have any real programming experience beyond your "highschool basic programming class"?

But why use it you do not have too?

Computer science books and even my highschool basic programming class mentioned its not proper programming to use a GOTO. Is there any computer science professor that supports GOTO statements in programs?

GOTOs are not inherently bad. At some level, they're unavoidable. (Have you ever programmed in assembly language?)

As for CS professors, Donald Knuth uses and defends GOTO statements:

http://pplab.snu.ac.kr/courses/adv_pl05/papers/p261-knuth.pdf

(His code comments often make reference to why he uses GOTOS. For example, in his implementation of the classic Adventure game, he writes: "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.)" In http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/15puzzle-korf1.w, he writes: "as a full professor with tenure, I don't have to worry about being fired when I use |goto| statements.")

Not every programmer is good and a good programmer will refrain from making the program harder to read or more difficult to debug when jr programmers modify it later.

GOTOs by their very nature encourage bad programming as much as pointers do.

Pointers encourage bad programming? No offense, but do you have any real programming experience beyond your "highschool basic programming class"?

Your laptop has an acceleration sensor. It can be used to detect earthquakes.

http://qcn-web.stanford.edu/

Bert

http://www.physorg.com/news92674403.html

http://dgl.com/itinfo/2003/it030528.html

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/sabl/2006/Jul/06.html

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-PS3

I think the "real" solution, if you want good password security, is to use the following scheme:

pwd = hash(master_secret || site_id || site_counter).

That is, use as a password the hash value of your master password, something that identifies the site you're logging in at (say, "slashdot" for everything at slashdot.org), and a generation counter such that if your slashdot password gets stolen you can make a new one without changing your master password (and without changing password on your ~gazillion accounts).

There's a firefox plugin which does something like this, at http://crypto.stanford.edu/PwdHash/. It has the advantage that it doesn't require you to store any information [except your master password in your brain], and so you can compute your password on a friend's computer by visiting their webpage.

I think a solution based on this idea provides the best combination of usability and security. Note that you can of course still use different master passwords for different sites if you want.

I just saw the poster presentations from CS 229, Machine Learning, at Stanford. The current batch of projects aren't on line yet, but the ones from previous years are.

The projects were very impressive. A vision-guided autonomous helicopter. A system for separating out instruments and vocals from existing audio. A CAPTCHA solver. De-blurring of out of of focus images. Flower recognition. Recognition of hostile network traffic. And those were just a few of the projects. Machine learning really works now.

One potential flaw I just noticed in the way BD+ uses RSA is that they use the public exponent e = 3. This low value is known to open up multiple theoretical attacks as described in section 4 of this paper. Too lazy to register a Doom9 account to post that info on their forums...

More like several thousand if you burn up all the uranium and the thorium we can reasonably extract and don't waste any of it.

It is actually billions of years, not thousands or even millions. The reason is that, unlike oil, the raw material for nuclear power (uranium or thorium) is so energy-dense that we can spend extraordinary efforts on extraction and still come out ahead, both financially and energetically. Thorium, in particular, is about as common as lead: there is a LOT of it in the ground. See Cohen for the calculation that produces the billions of years figure.

How many journals have you read? This seems to be par for the course, as far as my experience goes.

I am a research mathematician. Part of my job is to read journals. Admittedly, these are mostly math and computer science journals, which you might not count as science. If you count only journals which are strictly (non-computer) science, then I read Nature and Science, but very rarely any others, and this level of bias is definitely not typical among what I read.

Almost nothing of value has happened in the field (especially in the US) since the SSC was canned.

I disagree

After assembly language everything is piece of cake.

Why not use Donald's Knuth MMIX language?

A couple of days ago Slashdot had Twenty Years of Dijkstra's Cruelty. In it, he proposed using a non-executable language to force the students to use formal methods to prove the correctness, rather than trial-and-error testing. [...] But would Dijkstra's course be a better starting point?

Do you know how LISP was created? http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/node3.html#SECTION00030000000000000000

Another way to show that LISP was neater than Turing machines was to write a universal LISP function [...] Writing eval required inventing a notation representing LISP functions as LISP data, [...] S.R. Russell noticed that eval could serve as an interpreter for LISP, promptly hand coded it, and we now had a programming language with an interpreter.

And that's the problem with Dijkstra's idea. As soon as the non-executable language is specified, some smart-alec's going to code an interpreter for it, and *poof* you're right back where you started.

I know it can still be used that way, but it seems to be more and more difficult to only code that way using C++, because you're going to have to use libraries at some point or another.

Yeah, those damned templated libraries with their: performance, type safety, design patterns, generic programming principles. I can't imagine why Java wasn't happy with containers of Objects and added Generics. C# definitely shouldn't have followed suit. All you need is void*, size_t, and int (*)(void *, void *), right?

The HiStar operating system does exactly that. You can install it in your computer and try it out.

The next major case, Sega vs. Accolade, created a much stronger precedent because there were no fraud issues involved. In a similar manner to Atari, Accolade reverse engineered Sega's Genesis technology to discover how to make games for their system. Accolade then created a book with the relevant (and non-protectable) elements of Sega's technology, and passed the book on to their developers. These developers created a new game, Ishido, to compete with Sega's games. In deciding the case, the court looked at many factors (including public policy concerns). In the end, the judge decided that reverse engineering software for the sole purpose of creating a compatible package is an acceptable use (under the "fair use" doctrine). In addition, the appeals court stated: "[i]f disassembly of copyrighted object code is per se an unfair use, the owner of the copyright gains a de facto monopoly over the functional aspects of his work - aspects that were expressly denied copyright protection by congress" [1]. Thus, the court decided to adopt the policy encouraging competition (as opposed to IP protection) in the software industry.

I did some of the audio portion of the reverse engineering for Accolade. I miss having to use an oscilloscope in the course of my software work.

Although your stories are very compelling, I'm afraid that I don't place much weight behind them. Why? Simply put, memory sucks, and is easily distorted.

The mysterious ghostly woman seen by both of you? Could it have been the light from a car's headlights? What about someone walking with a flashlight? As for the other woman, that could easily be explained by daydreaming.

One incident from my childhood comes to mind.

There was an empty house down the road from us, and my brother and I used to scare family and friends into thinking there were ghosts living in it. It was incredibly easy to feign fright over some imagined shadow, run away quickly, and then later get the mark to describe the ghoul in detail. My brother also managed to get some of his friends to start getting "signals" from their own houses.

Naturally, I wasn't there when your memories were formed, but I encourage you to treat them with great skepticism. To quote the bard, " Such tricks hath strong imagination,/ That if it would but apprehend some joy,/ It comprehends some bringer of that joy;/ Or in the night, imagining some fear,/ How easy is a bush supposed a bear!"

There is a lot about the physical world that we not only have never investigated, but never expected or suspected.

Incidentally, this is something that I absolutely agree with. The idea that we already understand everything is naive to the point of laughable. At the same time, though, just because we don't understand everything, that doesn't mean we should accept everything.

The trouble with tales such as yours is that although they are compelling, they are inherently unreproducible and in conflict with all "normal" understandings of the world.

Clicky:

http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

Unless you really, really like using tags (or it isn't available...), "Plain Old Text" works pretty well.

I don't know where you get the idea that schools are having their funding reduced. In fact public per capita spending in America on education, in real dollars, has risen dramatically. And it takes a much larger share of spending than it did 40 years ago, too.

Look at table two of this pdf for the figures.

The vast majority of public funding still goes to public schools despite the fact that the return per dollar spent is immensely better under a voucher program. If you're going by results, vouchers are the best education investment America is making right now. If you're going by ideology, you're sentencing low-income kids to public schools that are broken because of something completely different to a lack of funding. Public schools are failing for the same reason our automakers are failing. They can't make a competitive product because they are focused on keeping the current system in place. Free our schools to compete, and the improvement will naturally happen, almost as if guided by in invisible hand.

And this was only trolling very slightly, in the phrasing. I believe everything I wrote.