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The acceptable face of spyware

Dear Bill:

The following argument is so old it should probably be modded redundant, but given Steve's mental faculties, perhaps it bears repeating.

1 - Pirates will not be hurt by this as they have corporate keys, etc
2 - Genuine customers will be annoyed by this
3- Therefore this makes no sense

By presupposing your customers are dishonest Microsoft creates tremendous ill-will. This would, of course, normally be a bad thing. Worse - they have that nice monopoly so it doesn't really matter. This causes unhappiness and resentment, even amongst ridiculous Redmond fanbois like Paul Thurrott and Ed Bott.

So, my friends, there is only one way out. If we want to be happy, Windows must be kill -9'd.

The quantum particles in the phenomena you speak of do not communicate at a distance. Entanglement just means that a particle has a kind of "twin", but there is no information exchanged between the two locations. But telepathy implies that you are communicating over a distance.

Towards the end of the initial period, it became clear that this combination of ideas made an elegant mathematical system as well as a practical programming language. Then mathematical neatness became a goal and led to pruning some features from the core of the language. This was partly motivated by esthetic reasons and partly by the belief that it would be easier to devise techniques for proving programs correct if the semantics were compact and without exceptions. The results of (Cartwright 1976) and (Cartwright and McCarthy 1978), which show that LISP programs can be interpreted as sentences and schemata of first order logic, provide new confirmation of the original intuition that logical neatness would pay off.

I am getting sick of pure mac zealots praising Intel since WWDC announcement.

I also see you pay $100 yearly to .Mac service and you claim the parent being "devotee".

Apple does not announce professional workstation line because there is NOTHING from x86 (Intel) to have Quad G5 specs right now.

People becoming Intel fanatic after WWDC calling concerned Quad G5 owners make me sick indeed.

You call a 64 bit, RISC processor having vector processing unit several year old design... When will Intel reach Altivec specs? SSE3?

Please don't comment about professional workstations, they have nothing to do with your consumer grade shareware applications or games.

Did you watch World Cup Excerpts? Quad G5 is designed for such usage and those people using them does not come to slashdot to comment.

Apple kinda gave up the computer business, they offer stylish Intel whiteboxes with some stylish OS to keep the "computer company" image. You really want the truth? Quad G5 is the LAST true Macintosh coming from Apple.

Rest are locked down, DRM chip having Intel white box crap. You use x86 generic computer and you can't even decide what brand of x86 to use.

Want more truth? I bet you bought a "macbook" pro (!), there is a multiplatform game in hand "World Of Warcraft" which is coded by Blizzard. Use bootcamp , run game on both OS'es and compare fps.

Also read some sites like http://www.power.org/about/faq/ before claiming PowerPC is old arch.

Oh check this too: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype= userpage&username=Ilgaz

As there are no Mactel folding@home right now, I wonder how Team Mac OS X is number 11 with these "old" CPUs
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype= teamstats

I am getting sick of pure mac zealots praising Intel since WWDC announcement.

I also see you pay $100 yearly to .Mac service and you claim the parent being "devotee".

Apple does not announce professional workstation line because there is NOTHING from x86 (Intel) to have Quad G5 specs right now.

People becoming Intel fanatic after WWDC calling concerned Quad G5 owners make me sick indeed.

You call a 64 bit, RISC processor having vector processing unit several year old design... When will Intel reach Altivec specs? SSE3?

Please don't comment about professional workstations, they have nothing to do with your consumer grade shareware applications or games.

Did you watch World Cup Excerpts? Quad G5 is designed for such usage and those people using them does not come to slashdot to comment.

Apple kinda gave up the computer business, they offer stylish Intel whiteboxes with some stylish OS to keep the "computer company" image. You really want the truth? Quad G5 is the LAST true Macintosh coming from Apple.

Rest are locked down, DRM chip having Intel white box crap. You use x86 generic computer and you can't even decide what brand of x86 to use.

Want more truth? I bet you bought a "macbook" pro (!), there is a multiplatform game in hand "World Of Warcraft" which is coded by Blizzard. Use bootcamp , run game on both OS'es and compare fps.

Also read some sites like http://www.power.org/about/faq/ before claiming PowerPC is old arch.

Oh check this too: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype= userpage&username=Ilgaz

As there are no Mactel folding@home right now, I wonder how Team Mac OS X is number 11 with these "old" CPUs
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype= teamstats

Have a look into using Planet CCRMA (http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/) for Redhat/Fedora. It gives you a special low latency kernel and with the ability to connect various APPs using Jack, it might be able to do the whole integrated thing you want. I really like it, but then I've never used Logic and my needs are probably different to yours...

I didn't argue that it's fundamental, whatever that means; I argued that physicists love the hell out of it because it's so accurate. I've just always considered its importance overblown because a lot of it is twisted to match the data. I'm not joking when I write that the community is considering adding ten more free variables to it. That's what they need to make neutrino oscillation work. You tell me, if everyone and their dog thinks it's a kludged up piece of shit, why does it still get accolades like those I've quoted--normally only with the caveat that "it doesn't cover gravity?" Do they think it's correct or not?

1. http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/vvc/theory/model.htm l
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_model
3. http://particleadventure.org/particleadventure/fra meless/standard_model.html

The scientists are right and Einstein wasn't 100% correct.

If option (1) is true, it means we're entering that sort of post-Einsteinian "What the hell's going on here" phase in science, where we have a theory that we thought is good and we have some measurements which we also know are good and conflict with the theory. This will lead to lots more experiments being done and allow us to invent hyperspace faster.

Totally. Get me off this crazy planet! Seriously. I've been paying attention to various things like this (with the help of /.), and I can't wait for Gravity Probe B to (hopefully) raise some more questions, among other projects.

With this planet's increasing inhospitability, I'd like to at least check out Mars in my lifetime. Perhaps there's intelligent life over there, 'cause there's certainly not much here.

See http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use _Overview/chapter9/9-b.html

for a dicussion of the criteria regarding 'fair use'.

Music sampling is a fairly dangerous area, and likely relies primarily on the first factor -- the transformative one.

That said, "positive freedom" as described in the article strikes me as quite a hideous, patronizing concept. It co-opts the individual's role of deciding for himself his actions, whatever they might be and however he might decide. It restricts "freedom" to doing those things that some other person or some collective thinks fit in with that individual's fundamental purpose or his self-actualization. I might condemn the actions of some individual. I might think he is giving in to his "baser instincts." But I would not have the audacity to force him to behave in some way I think is more noble, and then try to claim I was increasing his "positive freedom."

2) Doesn't this count as fair use.

Well let's check the four factors:
Commercial or private uae: -1, Commercial
Factual or creative work: -1, Creative
Whole or parts of work: -1, Whole
Hurts the market: -1, Yes it hurts the market for derivative works

If there's a market for a derivative work (like say a toy after a kid's movie), that is under all normal circumstances the right of the copyright holder, even if the copyright holder chooses not to. Quote Standford:

"For example, in one case an artist used a copyrighted photograph without permission as the basis for wood sculptures, copying all of the elements of the photo. The artist earned several hundred thousand dollars selling the sculptures. When the photographer sued, the artist claimed his sculptures were a fair use because the photographer would never have considered making sculptures. The court disagreed, stating that it did not matter whether the photographer had considered making sculptures; what mattered was that a potential market for sculptures of the photograph existed. ( Rogers v. Koons, 960 F.2d 301 (2d Cir. 1992).)"

The last one can be a bit complicated since sometimes the use is fair despite reducing the market (e.g. forcing consumers to rebuy items), but in this case it just slams it home. There is a potential market for censored movies (derivative works) and a commercial company is trying to profit from it without compensating the copyright holder.

No, they support the point that genetic differences are a useful medical/biological concept.

And I am arguing that self-identified race is a good shorthand for one's position in the genetic distribution.

The correlation with nominal racial categories is at best local, at worst none at all.

Scientists at Stanford think otherwise. See here:
http://mednews.stanford.edu/releases/2005/january/ racial-data.htm

I have seen East Indians categorized. . . . extremely unsatisfactory to your average racist.

Simply because people mistakenly identify their genetic cluster (race) does not mean that there is no biological basis for the existence of the clusters. Furthermore, error rates for self-identified race must be lower than your anecdotal evidence would imply, because of the finding of the same Stanford study linked above.

One would think that out of all people, IBM staff would be familiar with the ATM or the Halting Problem.

First, I don't see the relevance, so I suspect you don't understand the halting problem[*]. You've probably heard it phrased as in the Wikipedia article: "a general algorithm to solve the Halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist. We say that the halting problem is undecidable over Turing machines." You've probably heard arguments reducing other problems to the Halting problem and concluded that automated reasoning about programs is impossible.

By some word juggling and de Morgan's laws, Wikipedia's statement is equivalent to "there exist program-input pairs for which the halting problem cannot be solved with a general algorithm." I'd say those should be quite rare if you're doing "reasonable" things.

The common examples of undecidable programs involve "finding counterexamples to famous conjectures in number theory". I'm guessing your programs don't do that. There generally should be straightforward indicators of your programs' progress - input file pointers, size of internal data structures, iterators. If IBM Research put all their effort into the Halting problem and their program still couldn't tell if your program terminates, it might be because your program is screwed up. Thus, "our program can't tell if your program halts for all input" probably means "rethink your algorithm", just as "your program does not halt for input X" does. The same goes for other properties which can be reduced to the halting problem.

It'd still be a hard thing to do, though. I think most existing checker tools examine only a function at once, and I'm not aware of any attempts to do anything so sophisticated even at that level.

the bugs that this article is talking about are the simples ones.

Simple but common, which make them great bugs for static analysis. But if you want fancier examples, look at these bugs the Stanford Checker (now Coverity) found in the Linux kernel.

Also wouldn't this 'static bug detection' be unnecessary if Java was a strong typed language? The idea of casting is of-course a powerful one, but it is this idea that is probably responsible for the most non-business related bugs in the code

Java is a strongly-typed language. If you cast something incorrectly, you get a ClassCastException. The runtime knows the type of every object. You may have meant "totally statically-typed language". In any case, the answer's still no - the System.gc() example that you found too simple is an obvious counterexample.

In any case, I would rather see people do something than nothing, so I guess bug detectors better than no bug detectors, but in reality I would rather have the developers write good unit-tests.

They're another way to find bugs, and the bugs they find are not a subset of those found by unit tests. There are a lot of classes of bugs that can't be found easily with unit tests (race conditions!). There are a lot of environments in which it is difficult to write unit tests (embedded code, kernel code, GUI code). And fundamentally unit tests require you to come up with the input that breaks it. If there's a case you never considered at all, they just won't have the same value as a second pair of eyes on your algorithm, which these static analysis tools effectively are.

Does this sort of reasoning sound familiar?

"Does it work in the normal case? Yup. If the list members, commas, and trailing null come to BUFSIZE-1 characters? Yup. BUFSIZE? Yup. ... What if an individual element overflows this smaller buffer? Oh, it can't, because that's over log(INTMAX) by

Sorry, but the disavowal of differences between races is running up against more and more scientific evidence to the contrary. Human racial groupings may not be as discrete as species, but they have medical relevance.

The reality of race
http://mednews.stanford.edu/releases/2005/january/ racial-data.htm
http://www.policyreview.org/DEC01/satel.html
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0002A35 3-C027-1E1C-8B3B809EC588EEDF

Medical significance of race
http://jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/080501/m et_6870358.html
http://www.marrow.org/NMDP/black_african_american_ patients.html
http://p221.ezboard.com/fbalkanhistoryfrm17.showMe ssage?topicID=2.topic

http://robots.stanford.edu/cv.html

see the more detailed C.V. in which this guy states that he had gained a B.Sc. in Medicine etc. Well the Problem is that German Universities have only awarded B.Sc. since 1999. So he is a liar. Furthermore, there does not exist a B.Sc. in medicine and neither you could have studied medicine at Hildesheim Unviersity in the first place, because there is no medical school.

And if you check with the German-to-English translation site he should have been honest about the real translation

http://pda.leo.org/ende?search=vordiplom

AND THIS LIAR is PROFESSOR at STANFORD

There is so much scam out there, it is incredible. Law makers really should clamp down on scientific misconduct much harder, like in sports, where atheletes have to take a doping test, scientists and researchers, need to take every year an academic integrity test. There needs to be also a system which awards whistle-blowers more fairly.

http://www.tableausoftware.com/

Sure, it's not open source and it costs money, but it does everything you're asking. For you to roll your own, your company is going to end up paying you a lot more than that costs and then what happens when something doesn't work or if you leave?

http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/0605 03.html
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/schedule.html

http://www.tableausoftware.com/

Sure, it's not open source and it costs money, but it does everything you're asking. For you to roll your own, your company is going to end up paying you a lot more than that costs and then what happens when something doesn't work or if you leave?

http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/0605 03.html
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/schedule.html

I've had the pleasure of meeting and chatting with Vijay Pande, who runs F@H. He's done a remarkable job with the project and has numerous awards and published papers on the work of the F@H team. They've done a lot of work and quite frankly, targetting p53 is far more useful than looking for ET.

It's a shame F@H lost its placement in the Google Toolbar. It was there for a while but apparently is gone now.

Folding@Home (the Stanford project, distinct from WCG, but not exactly "competing"), is accessible to both x86 (Windows/Linux) and PowerPC (Mac G3, G4, G5) processors. Mac systems make up around 5% of the total CPU's in Folding@Home, and 5 of the top 100 folding teams are Mac-oriented, well above Apple's 3.5% US and 2% worldwide market share.

(By the way, the above link provides access to Folding team home pages; click on a team in the list and a link to its home page will appear near the top of its stats page).

Folding@Home is developing a BOINC client, currently in closed beta testing, which will supplement (NOT replace) the conventional F@H client. It is coming along slowly because BOINC itself is a moving target. However, as far as I know, SPARC/Sun/Solaris support is not part of the Stanford group's plans.

As a long time participant in Folding@Home, I appreciate the project's achievements in basic research, the participants' respect for scientific endeavor, the atmosphere of mutual friendly support in the project forum (slow-loading; wait for it) and team forums, and the project leaders' commitment to free and open disclosure of scientific results. In contrast to the WSJ's description of the SETI project, Folding@Home is a d.c. project for grownups.

Aside, the avalanche of arguments about Big Pharma seems to me totally beside the point, as it has only the most tenuous connection with Folding@Home and even less with SETI.

The fold@home project is a thousand times more useful to society. Don't look for little green men until the native men, women, and children of this planet are leading healthy, decent lives.

Personally, I've been submitting my space cycles to Folding@home for about five years now. Since I'm a gamer and don't want to risk my cycles being used during gameplay, I use the screen saver version, which comes with the added advantage of having pretty cool visuals of the folding process that always prompt questions from my friends.

-Grym

"As you can see by their actions, rather than their words... Notably at Stanford University, Washington University, Munich University, Scripps Research Institute, Oxford University etc.

http://folding.stanford.edu/about.html
http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/rah_about.php
http://boinc.bio.wzw.tum.de/boincsimap/project.php
http://predictor.scripps.edu/about_team.php
http://www.grid.org/projects/cancer/index.htm

So... Who are you again? Yeah, you're a guy reading Slashdot... Getting much research done?"

Grr....I can't let this go.....

I'm a guy who was once associated with one of labs/projects mentioned above. I was working on the problem for years, and have a great deal of expertise in the area.

I can also tell you that the project is complete and utter crap, from a scientific perspective. The PI routinely misrepresents the project goals, claiming "possible" results that could never, ever come from the type of research performed. In general, the "science" is poorly-conceived and improperly controlled, and most of the "experiments" are methodologically flawed. I can't post my name here...it would be career suicide.

As one of the authorities to whom you seem so desperate to appeal, let me assure you: if you are devoting your resources to this project, the world would be a better place if you simply turned your computer off.

As you can see by their actions, rather than their words... Notably at Stanford University, Washington University, Munich University, Scripps Research Institute, Oxford University etc.

http://folding.stanford.edu/about.html
http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/rah_about.php
http://boinc.bio.wzw.tum.de/boincsimap/project.php
http://predictor.scripps.edu/about_team.php
http://www.grid.org/projects/cancer/index.htm

So... Who are you again? Yeah, you're a guy reading Slashdot... Getting much research done?

Personally, I think protein folding is lame because I know that the IP generated is going to be locked up for the next 70 years.

Since people posting FUD gets modded up like crazy here I guess I have to repost this:

From the Folding@home FAQ

"Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.

Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site."

For instance, you can read the 37 papers generated so far here.

Personally, I think protein folding is lame because I know that the IP generated is going to be locked up for the next 70 years.

Since people posting FUD gets modded up like crazy here I guess I have to repost this:

From the Folding@home FAQ

"Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.

Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site."

For instance, you can read the 37 papers generated so far here.

of course the WSJ would much rather you where crunching numbers for their drugs companies under the guise of "fighting cancer" or "protein folding" so your results can be turned into their profit (you didnt think that cure/treatment would be free like your CPU did you?)

From the Folding@Home FAQ:

"Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.

Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site."

It seems FoldingAtHome has one downside...

Sounds like a versio of the prisoners dilemma http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/prisoner-dilemma /

Except in theis case it's developers avoiding working for SCO. But the less who do, the better the chances for someone else to get the prize. So there's an incentive to break ranks. Maybe be the one and only developer.

Think of it as a lottery with your integrity against winning a fast car.

I think that a plausible explanation (or at least one that deserves more research) is the Pilot Wave theory proposed by de Broglie-Bohm. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/ and other numerous sites for a discusion of this proposition. (Disclaimer: I have never been a big fan of the Copenhagen Interpetation.) Nonetheless, I feel that an explanation which obviates the "observer problem" and explains decoherence merits looking at.

I came across this site with images of the shuttle rollout to the launch pad. A few pages in are some panoramics as well. Whatever its technological flaws, the shuttle is pretty to look at. I wish everyone involved the best until we can get the shuttle's replacement off the ground!

" I am all for fighting spam, but given how unreliable spam black-lists are such actions simply damage the internet. "

Under the FAI definitions paragliders and hang-gliders are both in the same category of foot-launced unpowered aircraft, they both have loosely similar flight-characteristsics, tend to share the same airspace and consequently in many countries they (now) share a regulatory body.

Thus it was I came to be on an instructors' course some years ago when the subject of accident prevention and reporting was being discussed and one thing I remember very distinctly about that was that the same mistakes tend to be made time & time again. I guess this applies to all fields, programming as well, but on this occasion it was pointed out how accident reports of 5 years before looked pretty much like the accident reports currently submitted to the association. I guess the statistics were probably lower than you might think and the majority of incidents involved sprained ankles and broken wrists but the causes were typically pilot error, over-confidence, carelessness &/or neglect - the same reasons hang-glider pilots had been having accidents for 20 years.

Likewise it took a few dead paraglider pilots before the introduction of a certification regimen under which manufacturers of gliders were required to submit new their models for testing - a regimen which 10 years ago had recently matured but which bore remarkable similarities to the certification schemes under which hang-gliders had been regulated since the 1970s. And of course the testing for hang-gliders had been introduced for the same reason - dead pilots, just in the early 1970s they were the result of simple Rogalio hang-gliders entering "luffing-dives" whereas in the early 1990s the cause was paragliders "collapsing" in turbulent air &/or finding themselves stable in flat-spins or spirals.

A previous poster wrote that "the freedom with which Nausicaa sails around the skies on a flying machine light enough to carry yet strong enough to carry out some hairy aerobatics has figured in many a daydream" but wings that achieve this goal, this dream, are already widely available. Just because they don't look quite like the one out of your favorite comic book, I don't think that's a great reason to learn aviation design the hard way.

Aviation design is a really complicated discipline with lots of pitfalls, and mistakes may not show up until a wing has been flown for a number of hours, which is kinda inconvenient if you're flying at a few hundred feet at the time. Tailless aircraft are particularly quirky, and last time I checked (a few years ago, admittedly) there weren't many designs available - a tail is just a really easy way to ensure pitch and yaw stability.

Don't get me wrong - this looks like a really great toy, I'd love to have a play with it and I wish these guys the best, but I hope for their sakes that they've done their homework. The veteran pilots I've known who have lost friends to the sport (and I guess that includes me) haven't really known what they were getting into.

[template]
1 : [A dummy publication that acts as a model for the structure and general layout of another publication.]
2 : [Part of the object that stores pattern of instance variables.]

If we take the second meaning, then no, [your template above] IS NOT [actually a template in the classical sense.]. It's the [lack of a Smalltalk implementation] and [invalid syntax] which excludes it as [an object].

[It's like copying someone's fill-in-the-blank Slashdot posting, without the insight.]

[Next time, Google might help you make a suggestion a bit more appropriate to the thread.]

[Template (programming)]

But how about a nanofilter for SPAM!!!

You mean this one? (PDF) Or perhaps you would like a more proactive method? ;-)

And after the shameless plug, someone mod parent off-topic :P

Rather than waiting for ET to call or look for prime numbers, donate your spare CPU cycles to running the Folding@Home client. Its goal is to find out why proteins (mis)fold and how that affects things like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Cancer, Huntington's, and related diseases. Damn, would it be cool to have it be my computer that identified an alien signal... but since a close relative has been diagnosed with Parkinson's I'd much rather do something that's more immediately beneficial.

It'd be interesting to hear if/how the Folding@Home project has helped out groups like this.

There is no Z in Nietsche.

I'm only correcting you because you're a spelling nazi. There's nothing worse than a self-righteous jerk who can't even get it right.

Friedrich Nietzsche.

Of course, the OP didn't spell it right either.

I don't see how crap like this gets modded as insightful. The parent author clearly has no clue as to what the concept of Fair Use really is. Here, let me give you a little description, and I'll even use a reference or two.

Ref: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use _Overview/chapter9/9-a.html

In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and "transformative" purpose such as to comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work.

You see, legally, fair use is about sampling a copyrighted work in order to quote verbatum that work in something else, say, a research paper. You are legally allowed to do this without the permission of the copyright holder. You are also legally allowed to parody the work, as our famous Wierd Al does with most of his songs, and he can get away with it, legally.

What Fair Use is NOT about is allowing you to convert the work you have in hand into another form. While it may seem to fit into that set of words, the legal definition has absolutely nothing to do with the idea of 'I want to listen to CD as an MP3' without permission. Now do note that some companies may give permission for such conversion, but that is not fair use; that is their perogative as the owner of the copyright.

It's pretty easy to migrate from Solaris.

If we start hearing about big Win32 -> *nix migrations, THEN maybe we can say kill -9 to billy boy...

But more importantly, it's telling that we're not hearing about good, honest, honorable American migrations. We know all about Germans and the so-called "sport" they are hosting for the so-called "world"... and in any case, we know Linux isn't as reliable as Windows yet...

Experience tells me that such predictions are more wrong than they are right.

Depends on who making the prediction...

If it is lone column writer on some newspaper claiming that we will have Fusion power by 2015 because he saw a science fiction movie then chances are it won't happen.

If it is a small group of scientists with PHDs in nuclear science saying we will have fusion power by 2015 because they have done computer models then it is more likley to happen.

If it is a larger group of government officials, world leaders, and scientists saying we will have fusion by 2015 because they have allocated 1 Trillion dollars to the project then I'd say they will most likley be able to pull it off.

Also some trends are self fufilling prophecies. Take More's Law for example. There isn't anything that is a law about this trend and could up and stop anyday now. However, because this is the goal the market has set for itself, companies know they are expected to keep up with this trend.

With that in mind it we use Moore's law (and assume that this trend can continue) we can safley assume by 2018 (or 2020) that we will have enough MIPS or FLOPS (100 billion MIPS) in a $1,000 hardware to simulate all the several trillion neurons of a human mind in parallel and therefore StrongAI will at least be theoretically possible by this time.

Of course we might need to take other things into account, but this is a better prediction of the future because it is based off current trends rather than saying "Look... We have a cars... And we have airplanes and they are both improving on their own field every year... Oh I have a cool idea... Someone could combine them and we can have flying cars in about 40 years!"

Without thinking about the social or technical problems one might be faced with a drunk driver flying their car into a building at 300mph. That said... The reason we don't have flying cars today is because we still can't drive the ones on the ground safely (40,000 died to car related accidents last year)

Speaking of which... (And if you want to talk about future trends and predictions) You should check out the talks given at the Singularity Summit. Sebastian Thrun (the head dev on the Stanley winning car at the DARPA 2005 grand challenge) gives a good talk on automated car technology and his goal to eventually see computers replace people as the drivers. We might not see anything for another 10 years to reach the market, but we know this stuff is feasible given enough research and technical effort. It will be interesting to see what the 2007 Urban Challenge will bring... And it will be more important than any of these CNN predictions.

I was a little surprised - maybe I did not dig deep enough - not to see a comment about one of the interesting and almost unique things that can be done with titanium, that is to make so-called shape memory alloys of titanium and nickel called "nitinol." See http://www.stanford.edu/~richlin1/sma/sma.html This stuff has the interesting property that deformation followed by heating can cause it to return to its original shape. There are a lot of interesting things that can be done with such a material including cardiovascular applications. It is true, however, that even a fairly large decrease in the price of producing titanium will have little effect on the final price of nitinol, given the further work necessary to make nitinol from titanium.

Exactly what I was thinking--tariff. But it didn't always work as planned

References to Knuth's volumes titled "The Art of Computer Programming" http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html are sprinkled liberally throughout many, many papers in computer science, especially wrt algorithms. It's more of an abstract art, as opposed to the "physical" arts like paintings and sculptures. You can't ignore the engineering aspect of it, yes, but if you manage to engineer a system well AND do so with simplicity, elegence, and creativity ... well, that distinguishes the true progessional.

What is it?

EXPO is a piece of software (written in a formal language called "owl", but they didn't tell you that), which provides a formal dictionary especially for experiments. The terms in this dictionary let you describe your experiment in a formal way. That's a bit messy, but then you're supposed to use an editor to help you. An editor for this language (called "protégé")can be fund at http://protege.stanford.edu/index.html. Download it (61 Mb., or 31 Mb. without the JVM) and use it to read the EXPO document.

What's it good for (in principle)?

Once an experiment is decribed in the OWL language using this dictionary, it can be searched automatically. You could automate queries such as "list me all published 3-factor experiments that test Ohm's law". Or "give me all 2-factor experiments that deal with lung-cancer, smoking, and gender and that use tomography as a diagnostic instrument".

Now at the moment you can do that too, but you'd have to spend quite a bit of time and know quite a bit about the field to be able to do this because you won't be able to do a full-text search (thanks to the publishers of scientific journals for this). And then you'd find that not everyone uses the same terms, and then you'll find only English-language results because you wouldn't know how to spell "lung-cancer" or "2-factor experiment" in Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese or whatever, but then again neither can many foreign language authors spell it in English (which doesn't ever seem to stop them from publishing however).

Such a schema (provided it's universal and standardised like the Dewey decimal system) would allow you to find your way in the fog of language. Unfortunately however, if anything we will probably see lots and lots of different standards ("standards are good ... we should all have one !") and properietary solutions with "enhancements" and "extensions" (read safeguards against portability).

What can we expect in the next 3 years?

Nothing useful, I'm afraid. In theory it's great but don't hold your breath. Any author would have to download an OWL editor, understand the editor, understand the formal language used, and then code up his/her article in OWL using the EXPO distionary, and submit it (in electronic form) along with his article. Good luck to you authors! Lets just hope no-one makes any tiny but significant mistake in describing their experiment, and that all authors take the time to learn this formal language and then use it.

If within the nect 10 years any significant amount (say more than 5% of all publications) annually will be coded in such a schema I'd be more than surprised.

BTW, This course demands that you to run Windows. Lecture videos won't work with Linux and even Mac! Don't know if thing have changed. http://scpd.stanford.edu/scpd/courses/ProEd/compSe c/

This is a much better use of idle time:

http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html

Is it that the border/immigration laws themselves are unpalatable? If so they should be changed.

The problem is that border/immigration laws will not make America substantially more secure because any point-of-entry security protocol is bound to be porous, and once inside the barrier there is no practical way of identifying illegal immigrants. Bush's laughable proposal of "tamperproof IDs for immigrants" neglects to account for the fact that immigrants are perfectly capable of faking citizen's IDs. Instituting universal, biometric IDs for citizens is a much, much harder political sell than for immigrants, so it is likely that most illegal immigrants will get fake citzen's IDs of one kind or another.

Furthermore, focusing on the border as if a wall could keep THEM out tends to make the whole security issue one of US vs THEM, which is silly. Timothy McVeigh was an American. The London bombers were Britons. Fighting terrorism is not primarily about securing borders. It is primarily about good police-work within healthy, supportive, open communities. Building walls and demonizing illegal immigrants does not further those ends.

To put my point about border security in geek-friendly terms, when building a secure, robust system there are two ways of dealing with pre-condition checking. The first is to do a one-time check at the entry of a block where a condition is required, and then let everything within that block proceed on the assumption that the condition has been met. The other is to check the condition immediately before it gets used, every single time.

The former is less resource-intensive, but the latter is the only way to be sure. For example, I've seen code that does something like this:

if (0 != pFoo)
{
      someMethod(pFoo);
}
else
{
      throw NullFooException();
}

and someMethod() merrily dereferences pFoo without checking it because the developer "knows" it has already been checked. But of course at some future date some poor maintenance coder will call someMethod() from somewhere else without checking, and things will blow up.

For real robustness (and real security) defense-in-depth is required. But in human societies that means a police state, which is far more dangerous to the life and liberties of citizens than the threats they are intended to counter. Remember--terrorism kills fewer people each year in the United States than falling down, suicide or HIV (in most years it is vastly fewer, but fewer even in 2001).

Perhaps future students will study the failure of WTC 7 which managed to collapse without getting hit by a plane, or how other buildings, which were designed with the possibility of a plane collision, also collapsed from small fires. Design failure? Maybe this is beyond an ordinary technical failures class, more along the lines of an Ethics class.

"Autopilot computer systems on Boeing 737s have been hit by a problem which has caused aircraft to change height without warning. It is believed that full details of the problem have been requested by the investigators into the crash of the British Midland 737 on the M1 motorway in January. One theory is that the crew were misled by cockpit instruments.

Six incidents have been recorded by British Airways on its aircraft but the company says there has never been any danger because the crews have always checked the autopilot actions against other cockpit instruments.

The problem occurs after a pilot enters a new height to the autopilot. The system displays the instruction, but under certain circumstances the aircraft moves to a different height and the autopilot then displays the new reading.

One senior British Airways captain says the autopilot seems to use instructions entered earlier, even as long ago as the previous flight.

British Airways has called the problem "random memory initiation" and says it is caused by unexpected electromagnetic conditions such as lightning, strong radar signals, or an electrical power surge. Boeing says it has no evidence of any accidents occurring because of the problems.(source: Risks Digest

China Airlines A300 Disaster

China Airlines A300 crashed at Japan's Nagoya airport, killing 264 of 271 people on board. The most likely cause of the crash was not solely the fault of software, but the confused interactions between software and human, in this case between the 26-year old copilot of the plane who was attempting to land the plane and the autopilot of the plane.

Two minutes before the plane was about to land, the autopilot of the plane went into take-off/go-around for reasons the investigation could not determine. In effect, this caused the autopilot to attempt to control the plane in a way that was directly opposite to what the human pilot was attempting to control.

(Source)

well people might doubt Mary Ann Davidson's understanding of the software industry, but at least she's hot!

Knuth's celebrated essay Literate Programming is available here. Also, Knuth has written an entire book on this subject whose complete text is available here.