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Because of its underlying purpose, I was automatically opposed to this legislation idea until reading your comment. You're right, though. Getting the information out in a forum such as school, where the real issues are often discussed by teachers who are more interested in discussing ideas than in indoctrinating students on what to do and not to do, might be the best thing to happen for reforming copyright law.

Maybe they should throw in a bit of information about fair use too?

The original page rank worked exactly like this:
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html [By: Brin and Page]

Of course it has been modified over the years, but yeah, the basis of PageRank has been released already.

Well, you missed the deadline for making comments to the "Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies" proceedings that the Copyright Office is conducting. Too bad. I'm sure your comments on this issue would have been more useful than mine were.

Perhaps you could still contact the Stanford Center for Internet and Society folks who were spearheading an effort to collect comments on cell phone locking and they could use your comments as an addendum or something.

Shout out to Lessig for his blog entry that pointed these folks out to me.

Ok, I've worked in gravity for a while, but unfortunately I haven't time right now to go through this guy's paper. Several things are setting off my B.S. detector, though.

First, this guy is not a "noted" physicist, let alone a noted gravitational physicist, as far as I can tell. He published some papers in accelerator physics while affiliated with the Naval Research Lab. He has no publications, or as far as I can tell, training in general relativity. He's now affiliated with some company ("Starmark, Inc.") in San Diego. Furthermore, gravitational physicists generally give talks at gravity conferences (or at least physics conferences), not space engineering conferences (which have drastically lower standards when it comes to gravity, since the organizers of the conference typically have no GR background).

Second, I skimmed the preprint of his (unpublished) "antigravity" paper. He claims that a distant observer watching a particle fall into a black hole, in the (initial, local) rest frame of the particle, will see the black hole to approach the particle, and then cause the particle to accelerate away from the black hole. This is not in any weird "warp drive" spacetime, but in ordinary Schwarzschild spacetime — such as the spacetime outside of a star or a planet (!). Yes, you read that right, according to him, even planets create antigravity (if you're traveling fast enough). This bears no relation to anything I know about orbits of particles in Schwarzschild spacetime.

Then he mentions performing a Lorentz transformation of a particle trajectory into the frame of a distant observer. This is impossible. You can only apply a global Lorentz transformation to a flat (Minkowski) spacetime, not a curved spacetime (such as Schwarzschild). Well, you can apply a transformation to a flat tangent space at a point in a curved spacetime, but you can only transform a vector in the tangent space at that point, not an entire trajectory that spans a continuum of points. It is true that Schwarzschild geometry is asymptotically flat for "distant" observers, and he's speaking of transforming into the frame of a distant observer, but the fact remains that you cannot Lorentz transform a worldline that is not entirely within an approximately flat region of spacetime (and his trajectories definitely aren't always far from the gravitating body).

Now, you're free not to buy my suspicions, because as I said I haven't the time to go through all his calculations and see what's up (general relativity calculations are a pain in the ass). My bet, however, is that he's simply misinterpreting a coordinate quantity as having physical meaning. This is a common error for GR beginners (and you can see a prime example of it in the crackpot A. Mitra, who claims that black holes contradict the Einstein field equations based on his misinterpretation of coordinate derivatives in Schwarzschild spacetime). The thing about GR is that you can write solutions in any coordinate system you want, and you have to make sure that the quantities you're calculating are physically meaningful, and not just an artifact of whatever coordinates you happened to choose. Anyway, that's my guess based on what this guy has written so far and the kind of errors I see people make when making "wild" claims in GR. But it's also possible he simply made a math error. I am not betting, however, that he has suddenly discovered antigravity lurking within the ordinary Schwarzschild metric.

Must be a Cal grad...

Yup.. and apparently you didn't graduate at all.

For example, he is apparently an MIT graduate, but at MIT Community Home Pages only his alumnus email address is listed, not a web page. More significantly, a search for his name on the MIT web site turns up nothing.

Finally, a thesis search for his name on Barton, the MIT library catalog, also turns up nothing.

So let's assume he didn't submit a thesis at MIT. Where did he get his PhD to qualify as a visting scholar at Stanford? And why isn't there any trace of it available via the web? Maybe he doesn't have one. Just speculation on my part... Maybe Alexander F. Mayer does have a PhD in physics, but there is no trace of it on the web.

PS. We are not talking about Alexandre Mayer.

For example, he is apparently an MIT graduate, but at MIT Community Home Pages only his alumnus email address is listed, not a web page. More significantly, a search for his name on the MIT web site turns up nothing.

Finally, a thesis search for his name on Barton, the MIT library catalog, also turns up nothing.

So let's assume he didn't submit a thesis at MIT. Where did he get his PhD to qualify as a visting scholar at Stanford? And why isn't there any trace of it available via the web? Maybe he doesn't have one. Just speculation on my part... Maybe Alexander F. Mayer does have a PhD in physics, but there is no trace of it on the web.

PS. We are not talking about Alexandre Mayer.

For example, he is apparently an MIT graduate, but at MIT Community Home Pages only his alumnus email address is listed, not a web page. More significantly, a search for his name on the MIT web site turns up nothing.

Finally, a thesis search for his name on Barton, the MIT library catalog, also turns up nothing.

So let's assume he didn't submit a thesis at MIT. Where did he get his PhD to qualify as a visting scholar at Stanford? And why isn't there any trace of it available via the web? Maybe he doesn't have one. Just speculation on my part... Maybe Alexander F. Mayer does have a PhD in physics, but there is no trace of it on the web.

PS. We are not talking about Alexandre Mayer.

I did my experimental particle physics PhD on an experiment named BaBar, you know, like the elephant. Are you telling me that isn't public-friendly?

A similar experiment based in Japan is called Belle and one in upstate NY called CLEO. One of the other experiments at the LHC is called ATLAS. They all seem reasonably public-friendly names (but then I am one of the folks you are saying don't know what a public-freindly name is, so I suppose my views are irrelevant).

As to the PR, it's pretty hard to make particle physics accessible to other physicists, let alone the general public. The essence of the question that BaBar and Belle were trying to answer is "Is CP violated in strong interactions?". It generally takes several years of university physics just to understand the question. The most "successful" PR projects never even seem to get to the crux of the project.

Incidentally, the answer is "yes, maximally". Your tax dollars at work!

Mostly sadcore (tm), not to be conflated with common ennuicore (tm).

That's not what I call progress.

*paste rant*

Having animations and other silly stuff (like _pauses_ before actions)just adds latency, and wastes CPU.

If I could choose a "low latency/delay" theme or option then that would be great.

I would have thought that most experienced users would know where their gui stuff (windows, dialog boxes, menus etc) went without needing any animations to give them a clue- progress/status indicators excluded of course.

All this waiting half a second or so before actually doing the stuff is ridiculous. Like requiring pauses before opening submenus. I can understand that immediately opening and drawing large submenus in the days of MHz processors and slow 2D cards can slow down your computer to unproductive levels. But the last I checked my PC was running significantly faster than 1.5GHz.

If there's going to be any time wasting or procrastination done, it should NOT be by the computer.

Leave the time wasting to the humans. Human time is more important than computer time. And like most people, I've only got a finite time left on this world and if I'm going to waste it (like most people here ;) ), I sure won't want to waste it waiting for inane animations by silly developers trying to show how clever they think they are.

I remember recently people here were complaining about annoying cut scenes in games.

Well those animations are just like those cut scenes in games. Sure if you can interrupt the animations on-the-fly then it's not so terrible, but uh, it's still going to get quite old after the nth time...

That sort of thing mostly belongs in some "Pimp My GUI" TV show, or fan-boy/"ricer" gatherings.

It's like having your car engine spin some colourful nonfunctional propeller just because it looks cool. Or having your expensive semi-automatic car's UI make cute noises and flash pastel numbers before shifting to the appropriate gear. If I'm going to have my car engine spin something it's got to be something useful like a supercharger or aircond compresser. If my car is going to flash something on my windscreen it should flash an extrapolated icon of a toddler hidden _behind_ a parked car, based on the legs it spotted under that parked car, especially if the toddler is moving towards my path (I don't think very highly of cars that drive themselves - given the sort of "geniuses" around, it's not going to happen within a decade or maybe even two, but there are so many ways that cars could help drivers drive better).

Let's see some real progress OK?

Most of the stuff we currently have on our computers is not really that advanced _conceptually_ from what Douglas Englebart demonstrated nearly 30 years ago. Just compare the Novell demo, current popular GUIs and Englebart's demo - 30 years and that's it?

So it's very disappointing to see the proclaimed "state of the art" in GUIs seems to be the equivalent of blue LEDs on cooling fans.

Anyway the future would probably be "thought macros". Initially it'll probably start with users training their "artificial brain augmenters" by thinking of some arbitrary thing/item/concept and then associating it with an action they want the computer to do.

The thought recognition thing is there - just mostly only done on nonhumans so far.

Combine that with an enhancement of the "seeing with tongue" technology and you'd have input/output.

Add wireless technology and enhanced "home automation" and you'd have virtual telepathy and virtual telekinesis.

Homosexual sex was widespread in the Middle Ages and there is abundant information on what church writers and secular legislators thought about it. Shoddy or partisan scholarship and a distinctly modern disdain of homosexuals by scholars until recently marked much of the discussion of the history of this medieval homosexuality. Since 1955, and especially since 1975, much work has been done that is of reasonable quality [1]. The concentration has tended to be on the Church's, or society's, attitude to homosexuality. This paper takes a different tack and looks at the personal experience in the Middle Ages of those we would now call homosexuals and the structures in which they were able to experience their sexuality. Their experience fits in with the wider experience of sexuality in Middle Ages and this also will be considered. Naturally, we can say little about what sexuality felt like for individuals, but a possible framework for their experience can be reconstructed from existing sources. This will be, necessarily, a framework for the experience of homosexual males for significant information exists only about men and boys [2].

The main focus of the present paper will be on the experience of homosexuality for individuals and on what can be gleaned about the subcultures or other kinds of social networks homosexuals belonged to in diverse medieval periods. There are theoretical issues to face in this inquiry, about the concept of homosexual and homosexuality, and the overall place of homosexuality in the study of medieval sexuality. Only after looking at these will we move to a consideration of sources and the uses that can be made of them. A examination of the often ignored issue of why people engaged in homosexual activities will help us to focus better on the core of this paper which will be to consider those medieval societies in which we have knowledge of homosexuality and to see if they fit into any typology. The typologies looked at are of the types of homosexuality we can see present and at the social contexts in which this sexuality was expressed. ...

Very clearly there were distinct types of sexual activity in different periods and areas, but these activities do not seem to accord with any particular social organization of homosexuals: there was a pederastic emphasis in the Spain, with a developed subculture, and there were relationships conducted on a more equal basis in areas where there is little evidence of homosexual social organization. What has become clear is that homosexuality existed in immensely varied forms in the Middle Ages. A global approach to the whole period is of some use and interest, but to try to understand the lives of homosexual individuals it is necessary to consider their local circumstances and the structures in which they lived.

Homosexuality.

With the decline of the Roman Empire, and its replacement by various barbarian kingdoms, a general tolerance (with the sole exception of Visigothic Spain) of homosexual acts prevailed. As one prominent scholar puts it, "European secular law contained few measures against homosexuality until the middle of the thirteenth century." (Greenberg, 1988, 260) Even while some Christian theologians continued to denounce nonprocreative sexuality, including same-sex acts, a genre of homophilic literature, especially among the clergy, developed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Boswell, 1980, chapters 8 and 9).

The latter part of the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries, however, saw a sharp rise in intolerance towards homosexual sex, alongside persecution of Jews, Muslims, heretics, and others. While the causes of this are somewhat unclear, it is likely that increased class conflict alongside the Gregorian reform movement in the

That may be due to the fact that "species" is a term so vague as to be scientifically useless.

See the discussion in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Species

Two days there was an article that said that "Time Has a Geometry" which seems to explain a lot of the unexplained stuff with a relatively small extention to the relativity equations. Among other things, the red shift that is used to measure distances in the universe was mis-calculated, and when the new theory is used, the dark matter and dark energy is no longer needed.

Check page 5 for a list of what among other things is affected:
http://www.stanford.edu/~afmayer/docs/Lecture2Sign ed.pdf

The main page is at:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/0 5/006254

If what he says proves to be correct, a lot of books will need to be re-written.

Now, as to his claims, there are many. Most, if not all, seem to me to rely on his concept of "gravitational transverse redshift" GTR, which in turn (he claims) follows from "a simple thought experiment" on slide 6 of his first lecture, "A Correction to the Gravitational Model". A little though shows his conclusions on slides 6 and 7 to be incorrect. If A sees B's clock running slowly and B sees A's clock running slowly this leads inevitably to a contradiction - an inescapable paradox.

Say both A and B set their clocks simultaneously to zero, according to an observer at rest at a point O, halfway between A and B, while the spacecraft is at rest. The observer at O also sets their clock to zero at the same time. At this point both Mayer and Einstein would say that all three clocks are observed by A, B and O to be running at the same rate.

Let the spacecraft accelerate at rate g for t seconds according to the clock at O, which continues to be halfway between A and B. Then let the spacecraft coast - becoming an inertial frame again. Now all three clocks are again observed to be running at the same rate. According to Mayer though, O sees the clocks at both A and B to be lagging the clock at O, A sees the clocks at O and B to be lagging the clock at A, B sees the clocks at O and A to be lagging the clock at A.

We now move the observers and clocks at A and B to the location of O, taking great care to do so completely symmetrically, so that there is no reason to distinguish between A and B. Here is the paradox - according to Mayer, A continues to see B's clock lagging A, and B continues to see A's clock lagging B.

This is not the same as the twins paradox. According to O, who has been sitting in the middle all this time, the movement of A and B has been completely symmetrical and there is no reason to favour one over the other.

Since the rest of Mayer's argument, especially GTR, seems to me to depend on this thought experiment, and since his conclusions from the thought experiment are wrong, his remaining theoretical arguments will fall, unless they follow from other principles.

Now, as to his claims, there are many. Most, if not all, seem to me to rely on his concept of "gravitational transverse redshift" GTR, which in turn (he claims) follows from "a simple thought experiment" on slide 6 of his first lecture, "A Correction to the Gravitational Model". A little though shows his conclusions on slides 6 and 7 to be incorrect. If A sees B's clock running slowly and B sees A's clock running slowly this leads inevitably to a contradiction - an inescapable paradox.

Say both A and B set their clocks simultaneously to zero, according to an observer at rest at a point O, halfway between A and B, while the spacecraft is at rest. The observer at O also sets their clock to zero at the same time. At this point both Mayer and Einstein would say that all three clocks are observed by A, B and O to be running at the same rate.

Let the spacecraft accelerate at rate g for t seconds according to the clock at O, which continues to be halfway between A and B. Then let the spacecraft coast - becoming an inertial frame again. Now all three clocks are again observed to be running at the same rate. According to Mayer though, O sees the clocks at both A and B to be lagging the clock at O, A sees the clocks at O and B to be lagging the clock at A, B sees the clocks at O and A to be lagging the clock at A.

We now move the observers and clocks at A and B to the location of O, taking great care to do so completely symmetrically, so that there is no reason to distinguish between A and B. Here is the paradox - according to Mayer, A continues to see B's clock lagging A, and B continues to see A's clock lagging B.

This is not the same as the twins paradox. According to O, who has been sitting in the middle all this time, the movement of A and B has been completely symmetrical and there is no reason to favour one over the other.

Since the rest of Mayer's argument, especially GTR, seems to me to depend on this thought experiment, and since his conclusions from the thought experiment are wrong, his remaining theoretical arguments will fall, unless they follow from other principles.

If you look at his colleagues,

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/physics/people/visiti ng.html

then cross-reference a few of them:

http://www.gf.org/lfellow.html

Douglas N. C. Lin, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz: 1991

If you look him up he is all over about Astrophysics and applied mathematics.

Betty Young, Santa Clara:

Betty Young, Physics, a 1-year award from award from the University of California-Berkeley, on an NSF prime contract, providing $36,406 in continuing support for CDMSII: A Search for Cold Dark Matter with Cryogenic Detectors at the Soudan Mine.

Now if you research Betty you find this:

http://www.scu.edu/cas/physics/facultyandstaff/you ng.cfm

Associate Professor Santa Clara University
Santa Clara, CA 95053

Professor Young received a B.S. degree in Physics from the San Francisco State University in 1982. In 1990, she received a Ph.D. from Stanford University where she worked on the development of cryogenic particle detectors with superconducting sensors. After graduate school, she spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Particle Astrophysics at UC Berkeley. Since coming to Santa Clara in 1994, Professor Young has established a research group at Santa Clara University and continues to work with the multi-institutional Cold Dark Matter Search (CDMS) collaboration.

Now whatever becomes of this Alex Mayer and his credentials are yet to be determined. However, I doubt Stanford would even allow him web space under the Physics department if he didn't have the credentials to back it up.

A little less than a year ago, a graduate student at Stanford gave a talk on light field photography at the University of Washington. The results were extremely impressive. Basically, by inserting an array of microlenses in front of the CCD, you can determine the direction of every ray coming into the camera. You lose resolution, but who needs 8 megapixels anyway? What you DO get is the ability to refocus the image in software, and take photos in low light and still retain a high depth of field.

I highly encourage you to check out his light field photography site, including his galleries, tech reports, and papers. It'll blow you away.

Via Stanford's people search, voila, his position with the University:

  Name: Alexander Franklin Mayer

  Web Page: http://www.stanford.edu/people/afmayer
  Organization: University
  Relationship: Affiliate
  Department: Physics

In short, have each component loosely coupled with the whole system, and make each component crash and restart (to a recent good state) on failure. When shit happens the whole system can go on working, and the component that crashed resumes work quickly.

c.f. http://crash.stanford.edu/

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/physics/people/visiti ng.html

He's not a Stanford professor, but he is working there at the moment, which is probably why he described himself as an "affiliate".

One of the founders of Google still has links to various publications (in PostScript format) about search engines, if that helps.

Same basic concepts apply today ... although they probably didn't anticipate the rise of Black Hat SEO which attempts to "beat" the algorithms.

The videos are down, I only managed to get the first one. Not impressed at all unless there are actual significant real improvements to functionality and usability that's not shown in the first video.

Having animations and other silly stuff (like _pauses_ before actions)just adds latency, and wastes CPU.

If I could choose a "low latency/delay" theme or option then that would be great.

I would have thought that most experienced users would know where their gui stuff (windows, dialog boxes, menus etc) went without needing any animations to give them a clue- progress/status indicators excluded of course.

All this waiting half a second or so before actually doing the stuff is ridiculous. Like requiring pauses before opening submenus. I can understand that immediately opening and drawing large submenus in the days of MHz processors and slow 2D cards can slow down your computer to unproductive levels. But the last I checked my PC was running significantly faster than 1.5GHz.

If there's going to be any time wasting or procrastination done, it should NOT be by the computer.

Leave the time wasting to the humans. Human time is more important than computer time. And like most people, I've only got a finite time left on this world and if I'm going to waste it (like most people here ;) ), I sure won't want to waste it waiting for inane animations by silly developers trying to show how clever they think they are.

I remember recently people here were complaining about annoying cut scenes in games.

Well those animations are just like those cut scenes in games. Sure if you can interrupt the animations on-the-fly then it's not so terrible, but uh, it's still going to get quite old after the nth time...

That sort of thing mostly belongs in some "Pimp My GUI" TV show, or fan-boy/"ricer" gatherings.

It's like having your car engine spin some colourful nonfunctional propeller just because it looks cool. Or having your expensive semi-automatic car's UI make cute noises and flash pastel numbers before shifting to the appropriate gear. If I'm going to have my car engine spin something it's got to be something useful like a supercharger or aircond compresser. If my car is going to flash something on my windscreen it should flash an extrapolated icon of a toddler hidden _behind_ a parked car, based on the legs it spotted under that parked car, especially if the toddler is moving towards my path (I don't think very highly of cars that drive themselves - given the sort of "geniuses" around, it's not going to happen within a decade or maybe even two, but there are so many ways that cars could help drivers drive better).

Let's see some real progress OK?

Most of the stuff we currently have on our computers is not really that advanced _conceptually_ from what Douglas Englebart demonstrated nearly 30 years ago.

So it's very disappointing to see the proclaimed "state of the art" in GUIs seems to be the equivalent of blue LEDs on cooling fans.

http://cse.stanford.edu/class/cs201/projects-99-00 /dmca-2k/css.html

Xing Corp made the mistake of not encrypting the player keys for their Windows-based DVD player, allowing the entire world to use their keys to decrypt DVDs.

to expand on the above, fair use is applied specifically to things such as academics being able to reference another's work without having to pay copyright, or is used to defend the right to satirise another's work, like making an iPod ad that features characters from a Disney/Pixar movie.

even under a very liberal reading of the fair use laws, it would be hard to legitimately shield news.google under Fair Use

in fact, one of the most obvious objections other media outlets would have is that news.google as it stands is practically a news outlet on its own. there are numerous people who really don't even want to read entire articles -- they're quite content to read the headlines and feel like they have read enough. in my own town, there are three free dailies competing with exactly that same amount of content. whereas with google, you get a few lines from the beginning of the story, with these "papers" you end up getting even less detail (but bigger pictures). hard to believe, even to see them in your hand, but one of those papers that specialise in nothing but glossy headlines also manages to distribute farther than most other print media in town. if i was running one of those papers, i'd be that i'd be thinking that news.google was a competitor.

/postscript
for a solid overview of what Fair Use entails, Stanford University has a very thorough overview

Also, most fair-use cases fall under comment-and-criticism... eg. it's okay to use one image of Homer Simpson on the Homer Simpson Wikipedia page, because that's one way to identify Homer while commenting about him.

Also, fair use says that companies that profit off of other's copyrighted work, and especially companies who diminish the profits of the copyright holders, is unlikely to have a judge rule in their favor.

Also, most fair-use cases fall under comment-and-criticism... eg. it's okay to use one image of Homer Simpson on the Homer Simpson Wikipedia page, because that's one way to identify Homer while commenting about him.

Also, fair use says that companies that profit off of other's copyrighted work, and especially companies who diminish the profits of the copyright holders, is unlikely to have a judge rule in their favor.

This problem is not particular to Republican administrations--the very linkage of government and science almost guarantees some chicanery. Let's recall the halcyon days of the Clinton administration. In 1993, Princeton University physicist William Happer was fired from the Department of Energy because he disagreed with Vice President Al Gore's views on stratospheric ozone depletion. In 1994, President Bill Clinton rejected the finding from the Embryo Research Panel of the National Institutes of Health which declared that the intentional creation of human embryos for genetic research was ethical. Clinton simply banned any federal funding for such research.

  [Ted Koppel] closed the show by chastising Gore for trying to use the media to discredit skeptical scientists:

There is some irony in the fact that Vice President Gore----
one of the most scientifically literate men to sit in the White
House in this century----[is] resorting to political means to
achieve what should ultimately be resolved on a purely sci-
entific basis. The measure of good science is neither the pol-
itics of the scientist nor the people with whom the scientist
associates. It is the immersion of hypotheses into the acid of
truth. That's the hard way to do it, but it's the only way that
works.

The attempt to use Mr. Koppel to tar the reputations of his opponents brought criticism down on the vice president, and I learned of rumors that the Clinton White House had become nervous about the issue, and perhaps Vice President Gore himself was becoming nervous. In any case, on April 29, 1994, Dr. Lancaster's attorneys indicated they were ready to have him sign a retraction and apology.

In its press release celebrating the victory, the Center for Individual Rights stated:

Any attempt to alter or suppress a scientist's published views
after his death cannot be tolerated. This retraction is an im-
portant victory for science. Politics too often takes precedence
over scientific evidence. Had Dr. Singer not taken action
against Lancaster's false and defamatory claims, it would
have had a chilling effect on all scientists now confronting
political correctness on environmental issues.

Fair use is written into law:

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/primary_materials/code s/92chap1.html#107

The problem is it's not explicit. Fair Use is called a "limitation on exclusive use" meaning it's a limitation of copyright. And what considerations are used for determining Fair Use are outlined in copyright law. But it's all still at the judge's discretion, which means that you won't know if your use is "Fair Use" until you're sued and win the case.

My hero would be somebody like Donald Knuth. He is a true computer scientist and wrote TAOCP and TeX singlehandedly, amongst many other accomplishments.

As a future computer scientist, I would rather be in Knuth's shoes than in Gates's shoes or Jobs's shoes (even though I like Jobs a lot).

My hero would be somebody like Donald Knuth. He is a true computer scientist and wrote TAOCP and TeX singlehandedly, amongst many other accomplishments.

As a future computer scientist, I would rather be in Knuth's shoes than in Gates's shoes or Jobs's shoes (even though I like Jobs a lot).

I know this can sound weird, but Jobs is my hero. Not because what he did for all the people, but because something he said.

I was on my deepest depression crisis ever and I was already planning my suicide. I was sure that day would be my last day when I came across his speech at Stanford University. And his words made me rethink everything I was going through at that moment, and gave me enough strength to give up the plan and keep going.

So yeah, Jobs is my personal hero. No matter how great amount of money Gates throw at projects, Jobs is the guy who said the right thing at the right moment.

[And I tried to send him my story, but I'm almost sure he would never see it]

Let me play Devil's Advocate [Advocatus Diaboli v. Promotor Fidei], if you will.

A multi-cellular organism (e.g. a human) can be thought of as both an individual, and a colony organism. You are godlike, from a cell's perspective.
Next step: Gaia hypothesis. The geo-biosphere is godlike, from an individual organism's point of view (e.g. Thunder Gods, Rain Gods, &c.)
...
Postulate a pantheistic universe, where the total sum of that universe (like the total sum of your cells, intestinal fauna/flora, &c.) comprises a greater "individual" -- God.

Does this God [ultimate-collective-as-a-single-being] necessarily have to take an on-going, continious, active, and consious role in controling/"manipulating" the events effecting every tiny part of itself?

When was the last time that you checked in on state of each of the epithelial cells which comprise the cuticle on e.g. your left, middle, toe? How much concern do you have that each of your skin cells are fated to [soon] become part of your household dust?

How arrogant is it to assume that any ultimate God must be concerned with the every-day affairs of individuals?

I'm in the UK, and I just tested it. It works, it's just not advertised on the store homepage.

Just go to http://itunes.stanford.edu/ and click Open in iTunes. I've managed to subscribe to the "Best of Philosophy" podcast (Daniel Dennett has a talk on 'Intelligent Design' which looks interesting)

To all those stanford students that don't know, if you are on a Stanford IP address (or have an account) you can access quite a few neat lectures on http://scpd.stanford.edu I know most of my classes are on there (but I'm in CS).

Are you talking about this?

http://scpd.stanford.edu/knuth/

The article and the summary are very misleading. While there is some fluff through the iTunes protal, real classes are available (for a price) here. The technology is clearly there to both record the classes in a professional way and broadcast them (on campus they are available both over the internet and on TV.) It is very dissappointing to me that Stanford has not opened this up more and made it available for free to the public. I'm still hoping that in the future some administators will see the light and try to do something more like what MIT is doing. The equipment is in place to easily surpass OpenCourseware, if there were the motivation.

The article and the summary are very misleading. While there is some fluff through the iTunes protal, real classes are available (for a price) here. The technology is clearly there to both record the classes in a professional way and broadcast them (on campus they are available both over the internet and on TV.) It is very dissappointing to me that Stanford has not opened this up more and made it available for free to the public. I'm still hoping that in the future some administators will see the light and try to do something more like what MIT is doing. The equipment is in place to easily surpass OpenCourseware, if there were the motivation.

Between 1995 and 2001, I took almost all of my math courses at home on the computer through EPGY at Stanford. It's good to see that they're still trying keep ahead of the times, although I wish that more places of learning would pick up on the idea.

Stanford was still doing this a few years ago. You could even watch classroom lectures online through their stanford online service, which still exists. Of course, only paying students were able to get access to the lectures, but when I was a student there, I was able "audit" a bunch of extra classes from my living room.

Yep. I didn't see any URL. I tried going straight to iTunes and searching for "Stanford"--no luck. Somewhere else in the discussion, I found a link to:

http://itunes.stanford.edu/

which, in turn will link you back to iTunes and open the relevant iTunes section (which seems to be pretty well hosed at the moment).

javascript:openWindow('https://deimos.apple.com/We bObjects/ITCSBrowse.woa/wa/Browse?destination=Stan fordPublic','_blank',1,1,0);

I'm pretty certain demios.apple.com is not a Stanford server. I'm also pretty sure Stanford isn't paying for this service...

In short, they did it right, but they also did it so you can't get to it from iTMS proper... you wouldn't want to, probably, you wouldn't really want this conent popping up in an iTMS search I don't think.

The interesting inclusion of the "StanfordPublic" tag leaves open the possiblity for a "StanfordPrivate" tag, which might require a SUID for access to current course material... something that I think actually does exist, although I'm not sure of it... it could easily if it does not...

Virtually all of Stanford's EE and CS courses have been available on-line with streaming video for the past several years. Of course you have to pay a subscription or be on-campus to access them, but http://scpd.stanford.edu/ has them all there. The production is excellent: they have a dedicated producer who sits through each class and zooms/rotates/switches cameras to make sure that the lecturer and all the notes are captures. They also take higher-resolution captures and put them next to the video so you can make out figures more clearly. It's all done with Windows Media Player, but it works surprisingly well.

Good deal.

Sounds like a great idea!

Sounds like a nice counterpart to MIT's OpenCourseWare.

Unfortunately not... MIT's OpenCourseWare is well... Open.

Stanford on iTunes however requires an expensive piece of software (OS X or Windows) to use it.

I don't have a Mac, I don't run Windows - how am I supposed to access this?

I guess this what you can expect from a University that puts a 1 page FAQ in a PDF (why dear god, why?)

Good for some people I acknowledge, but no OpenCourseWare.

First of all, this has been around at Stanford since October 2005. This was covered at Ars Technica a month and a half ago (including the Stanford on iTunes site and store).

Second, this is also available at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, as well as other schools, such as UC Berkeley.

What's actually "new" here is that Apple has productized this service for educational institutions in the form of iTunes U, announced yesterday.

Though those who haven't heard of it before may be interested in Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement address at Stanford.

Please note that iTunes U operates on a different server (deimos.apple.com) than the normal music store (phobos.apple.com).

Since you mentioned CSLI at Stanford, they are in fact already working on a speech-driven (human to system and system to human) in-car radio and navigation system in collaboration with Bosch. The prototypes are very impressive, but unfortunately not many details are available on the public web.

So yes, this is cool stuff, but as you say, not _that_ cool.

You're missing the point! A better heatsink means that the heat gets more efficiently transferred to the computer's surroundings, therefore heating your room more efficiently.

I will grant you that computers make great space heaters--they not only heat the room, but they can do all sorts of interesting things in the mean time.

Here is an excerpt:

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma -- which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

Read it here: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/ jobs-061505.html

It is a truly inspirational speech considering the man didn't complete college and he went on to be the CEO of a multi-billionare dollar corporation.

I'm running it on a machine with a sempron 2.5 and 1GB RAM, and I'm running FC3. My ram is virtually always in full usage and my cpu load averages are always 1 +, basically because I also run Folding@home 24/7/365.

Even with that load FC3 still never uses swap and I can browse the net, stream media to my LAN and use any other programs without too much slowdown.

BTW, here's a list of the currently connected clients for information:

Azureus 2.3.0.6 Azureus 2.0.8.4 BitComet 0.60 Azureus 2.3.0.6 TorrentStorm 1.3.0.0 Mainline 4.2.0 Azureus 2.3.0.6 BitLord 1.1 Azureus 2.3.0.6 BitLord 1.1 BitLord 1.1 BitComet 0.60 Mainline 4.1.2 BitComet 0.61 BitLord 1.1 Azureus 2.3.0.4 BitComet 0.60 Azureus 2.3.0.6 BitComet 0.60 Azureus 2.3.0.6 Azureus 2.3.0.6 Azureus 2.3.0.4 Azureus 2.3.0.6 BitComet 0.60 Azureus 2.3.0.6 BitLord 1.1 BitComet 0.60 BitLord 1.1 BitComet 0.59 BitComet 0.60 Torrent 1.4.1 Mainline 4.3.4 BitComet 0.60 Azureus 2.3.0.7_B30 BitComet 0.61 BitComet 0.61 BitComet 0.57 BitComet 0.60 BitComet 0.60 BitComet 0.60 Azureus 2.3.0.6 BitComet UDP BitLord 1.1 BitComet 0.58 BitComet 0.59 BitComet 0.60 Azureus 2.2.0.2 BitComet 0.60 BitComet 0.56 BitLord 1.1 BitComet 0.60 BitComet 0.61 BitLord 1.1 BitLord 1.1 BitComet 0.60 BitComet 0.60 Torrent 1.3.0 BitComet 0.59 BitComet 0.60 BitComet 0.60 BitLord 1.1 BitComet 0.57 BitComet 0.56 BitLord 1.1 BitComet 0.57 BitComet 0.61 BitComet 0.59 BitComet 0.59 BitLord 1.1 BitComet 0.60 BitLord 1.1 Azureus 2.3.0.6 BitComet 0.59 BitComet 0.58 BitComet 0.61 BitLord 1.1 Azureus 2.3.0.6