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You can get several versions of this from this page, including a pdf version or a plain text version.

You can get several versions of this from this page, including a pdf version or a plain text version.

SRP is available to commercial and non-commercial users under a royalty-free license. The Internet played a significant role in SRP's early development; without it, SRP would not have received anywhere near the amount of analysis and feedback that it has gotten since it was first proposed and refined. It is thus fitting that the Internet at large can benefit from the fruits of this endeavor. Since SRP also works around existing patents in the area, it gives everybody access to strong, unencumbered password authentication technology that can be put to a wide variety of uses.

SRP is available to commercial and non-commercial users under a royalty-free license. The Internet played a significant role in SRP's early development; without it, SRP would not have received anywhere near the amount of analysis and feedback that it has gotten since it was first proposed and refined. It is thus fitting that the Internet at large can benefit from the fruits of this endeavor. Since SRP also works around existing patents in the area, it gives everybody access to strong, unencumbered password authentication technology that can be put to a wide variety of uses.

I don't understand "The problem with BASIC is you have to trust the end point", unless you mean you have to give them a password that you might also be using on other sites. Of course by even giving them the digest of the password, you let them mount an offline dictionary search. That means that the site also needs to keep the digest secret from attackers who might also want to do searches, so again you have to trust the site's security.

I agree with Netscape that unencrypted BASIC is good enough for a lot of purposes (how bad is it if someone intercepts your Slashdot password and changes your user preferences?). Applications that need more security (online banking) need enough design attention that buying a certificate ($125/year) isn't that big a deal. Low traffic sites can always use self-signed certificates which cost nothing (but pop a browser dialog when the user first connects). Really high security applications should use SSL client certificates instead of passwords. That avoids the need for any shared secrets. If you really want to use passwords over an unencrypted channel, it's best to use a protocol like SRP, though like SSL, SRP would have been a problem before the DH patent expired.

Yes, if you look at the spectrum of all possible web applications, there's probably some examples where Digest is slightly preferable to the next best alternative, but with SSL easily available Digest just doesn't seem like a big deal any more.

I can't believe that the story about the mouse doesn't include pictures and a description of Engelbart's first mouse. Outrageous!

The problem with your conclusion is that waste is more radioactive when it comes out of the reactor. Radioactivity has to do with how stable a particular isotope is, it is not a measure of how effectively an element can be used as a fuel.

U-235 (the fuel isotope) is fairly stable but it fissions well. When you bombard it with neutrons, it breaks apart into isotopes of other elements. These isotopes are highly radioactive (unstable) but not easily fissionable. They will continue to be radioactive until they reach a stable isotope.

Now, most of the radiation is shed pretty quickly and within about 500 years the waste is less radioactive than the original fuel.

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclea r-faq.html

The standford link has that info about halfway down under the question, "Q. What about nuclear waste?"

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reac tion/etc/faqs.html

Now you are correct in wondering why we don't re-use fuel. In order for it to be re-used, it does need to be reprocessed because there is too much unusable waste in the way for the fission to be efficient. Thanks to the Carter Administration, the US doesn't do any reprocessing. So we have more waste and less efficiency.

Both those FAQ's are pretty good and cover your questions better than I can. Hope they help.

We must also take into account the political pressure these scientists are under...

Do you want an example? In my lifetime Dinosaurs have gone from cold-blooded to warm-blooded and back. The accepted norm has been that they were big, slow scavengers, then that they were fast hunters. You know what finally settled it? In the movie _Jurasic Park_ Spielberg chose to make them fast agile warm blooded hunters. Now few people argue with that. "Dinosaurs moved fast. I saw it in a movie"

Your example doesn't prove your point. In fact, it is not even the same thing. The general population may think that dinosaurs moved fast, but that doesn't change the fact that theories constantly evolve and change, frequently *despite* political pressure.

In fact, there was a recent report about how some paleontologists now think that T. Rex was a rather slow mover. The general public might not be aware of this, but those who concern themselves with dinosaurs certainly are.

Actually this chart shows a pretty good correlation between climate and solar activity. Of course, perhaps Stanford isn't a reputable university.

According to most scientistics, the retreat in the West Antarctic ice sheet has been occuring for 10,000 years.

Also on BBC, Ice thickens in West Antarctica

Sun is hotter, but shrinking (mass energy conversion, you know).

Maybe we should realize that perhaps some of the global warming hype is just hype. Everytime there is a heat wave on the news coasts, there a new round of global warming stories. Normal climate variability is large, and modern winters are not the warmest ever (or even in modern history). Check out Minnesota 1877. The observed long-term warming trend since 1900 is not unusual in terms of climate history.

BTW, risk of Kyoto protocol is followed in 100% of the expected cost, because it is certain damage to world economy.

"Windows has this Add/Remove program feature, how about extending this to Add/Remove/Pay."

I think that feature already exists. Isn't it called passport?

You install some shareware and MS uses your credit-card to pay for it?

OK, bad joke. Ill go stand in the corner now.

.haeger

Play Soccer: Hattrick
Cure Cancer: Team 249

Say, don't you think Knuth looks like Darth Vader?

How did you come by a check for $2.94? I thought all his bounty checks were powers of two.

Please see the following quote, from this page:

During the months of September, October, November, and December, I will not be reading any mail about purported errors in my books, because all the master files are at Stanford in a standalone computer that will be turned off. After Y2K I'll get back to the routine of bug-fixing as usual. (Any rewards for bugs reported during my downtime will be increased by adding interest compounded from the time they were received.)

I emailed my first bug on Sept. 22, 1999. The letter from Knuth was postmarked Jan. 10, 2000. Inside the envelope, I found the following note:

24 December 1999

Dear helper,

While I was away from Stanford during the last four months of 1999, my home computer - on which I keep all the master files for my books - was shut off. Thus I had to wait to process all errata until returning home this week.

Thanks for your patience awaiting my reply. I have computed the amount of your reward by adding interest at 5%, compounded continuously from the day of your letter until 1 January 2000.

I'm writing the checks today, but Stanford will be closed next week; so my secretary will not be able to mail this letter until Y2K is with us. With luck, however, the US Postal Service will survive and will deliver your check before your patience wears too thin.

My books owe a great deal to careful readers like you. Therefore I hope you'll continue to let me know whenever you find anything wrong.

Best wishes for the year 2000 and beyond!

Cordially, Don Knuth

Of course, I was spellbound!

I think that it's neat that you do all your Springer-Verlag manuscripts in TeX. Kudos to you.

I have prepared half a dozen SV manuscripts, in various venues, including Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). some are here

I've NEVER used TeX or LaTeX in those preparations.

Just another prespective...

Asim

www.asimjalis.com

NIME

CCRMA program

Joe Paradiso @ at MIT Media Lab doing some interesting stuff

enjoy

SPEKE

SRP

PAK

SNAKE

This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts

It makes you wonder how much of this is based on theoretical linguistics and formal semantics, and how much is based on good old fashioned statistics and optimization.

If you have any doubts on which way the decision should have gone, you should read The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig. In it, he explains how we accidentally got to this system of telephone companies being required to not control the content of the lines, even though they control the wiring and switches, but on the other hand, cable companies are allowed to completely control the wiring, connectors (cable boxes), and content.

The internet is the way it is (great, that is), due to lack of control over the content. For example, I can talk however I want to another computer on the internet, just as long as I abide by a few rules (e.g., using IP). The potential for innovation is great when you have an open-content and open-controls (routers, firewalls) system.

At line point AT&T owned the entire telephone network, being granted a government-approved monopoly. At this time, however, you weren't allowed to connect non-approved devices to any part of the network. This was done to ensure the 'stability' of the network (the trusted-client ideology). When the monster was broken up, these restrictions were removed, and this helped ensure the Internet could grow over the telephone lines (e.g., everyone could connect their own modem without needing approval).

With cable companies controlling every aspect of communication, however, the potential for innovation is extremely limited. Having to ask for permission to communicate on a network entirely destroys the freedom to experiment and try new ideas. This is why cable companies should be regulated like telephone companies.

Quoting from the book:

The argument of the cable industry in favor of monopoly was simple: We need, they argued, incentives to risk the investment to build out cable TV. That build-out would be worth it to us only if we could be certain to recover out investment. This certainty would be adequately provided if we had complete control over the programming on our network. If we get to pick and choose the shows we run, and we get protected monopoly status in the local markets we run cable for, then we will have sufficient incentive to build out cable to secure our needs.

Not a bad deal, if you can get it. And even though "every major policy on how cable should be regulated recommended that cable operators be required to provide at least some degree of non-discrimatory access to unaffiliated program supliers," Congress and the FCC ignored these recommendations. Cable was given control over the physical infrastructure that build their network and over the code layer that made their network run.

I could go on and on, but I strongly recommend you read "The Future of Ideas". Lessig is technically-aware, but he writes to layman. He is a master of the arguments for freedom in cyberspace.

It's interesting to also note that DSL, since it is deemed a communications network, is regulatory-required to be 'open'. This means the telephone companies are forced to allow other ISP competition to use DSL lines.

If you have any doubts on which way the decision should have gone, you should read The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig. In it, he explains how we accidentally got to this system of telephone companies being required to not control the content of the lines, even though they control the wiring and switches, but on the other hand, cable companies are allowed to completely control the wiring, connectors (cable boxes), and content.

The internet is the way it is (great, that is), due to lack of control over the content. For example, I can talk however I want to another computer on the internet, just as long as I abide by a few rules (e.g., using IP). The potential for innovation is great when you have an open-content and open-controls (routers, firewalls) system.

At line point AT&T owned the entire telephone network, being granted a government-approved monopoly. At this time, however, you weren't allowed to connect non-approved devices to any part of the network. This was done to ensure the 'stability' of the network (the trusted-client ideology). When the monster was broken up, these restrictions were removed, and this helped ensure the Internet could grow over the telephone lines (e.g., everyone could connect their own modem without needing approval).

With cable companies controlling every aspect of communication, however, the potential for innovation is extremely limited. Having to ask for permission to communicate on a network entirely destroys the freedom to experiment and try new ideas. This is why cable companies should be regulated like telephone companies.

Quoting from the book:

The argument of the cable industry in favor of monopoly was simple: We need, they argued, incentives to risk the investment to build out cable TV. That build-out would be worth it to us only if we could be certain to recover out investment. This certainty would be adequately provided if we had complete control over the programming on our network. If we get to pick and choose the shows we run, and we get protected monopoly status in the local markets we run cable for, then we will have sufficient incentive to build out cable to secure our needs.

Not a bad deal, if you can get it. And even though "every major policy on how cable should be regulated recommended that cable operators be required to provide at least some degree of non-discrimatory access to unaffiliated program supliers," Congress and the FCC ignored these recommendations. Cable was given control over the physical infrastructure that build their network and over the code layer that made their network run.

I could go on and on, but I strongly recommend you read "The Future of Ideas". Lessig is technically-aware, but he writes to layman. He is a master of the arguments for freedom in cyberspace.

It's interesting to also note that DSL, since it is deemed a communications network, is regulatory-required to be 'open'. This means the telephone companies are forced to allow other ISP competition to use DSL lines.

It's only a matter of time before other fields catch up. Remember, the web was invented for the purpose of high energy physicists at the CERN and SLAC labs being able to look up citations online, so we've got a ten year head start on, say, historians or economists.

If a book is out of print and no longer being sold, should the gov't have the right to continue to tax the author simply because the gov't feels that IP has value?

Yes. This is called a "copyright renewal." It was a feature of the Copyright Act of 1909, abolished for new works in 1976 and for all post-1964 works in 1992.

If I create a GPL'ed program, retain the copyright to it many folks the world over find it to be an incredibly useful bit of code (one that helps lots of companies save money / generate revenue) should I (as the owner of the IP) be taxed year after year because the gov't determines that bit of code has value?

After ten years, how much value do you still perceive in that code? You could just donate the code to the PD and stop paying the renewal fees.

Lawrence Lessig, a law professor and author of popular books about thought monopolies, has advocated a return to copyright renewal. Here's my slightly modified version of his system: Make copyrights on new works last 10 years. Then every 5 years, you have to file an extension to keep your monopoly, you can only file an extension a small number of times (I'd say 13 times, for a maximum term of 75 years), and after 25 years have expired, compulsory licensing under RAND terms for both verbatim copies and derivative works comes into effect.

On the stuff I've been reading about finding and fixing buffer overflows, it seems like it's generally not too hard to spot where these things could potentially happen.

From this statement I assume you are not a programmer. Buffer overflows caused by using known unsafe library functions (e.g. strcpy, strcat, gets, etc.) can be handled by simple pattern matching but actually investigating the code to make sure every memory/array access does not go out of bounds is not a simple pattern matching problem.

However some automated techniques have been developed to discover buffer overflows and similar errors in a generic manner. The most significant efforts I have seen are the Stanford Meta-level Compilation Project and the /GS switch in Visual C++.NET.

If anyone cares, Scott Draeker's wife (Kayt Draeker, aka Kathryn Rosa Sorhaindo Draeker) has a web page.

She's the one that was "listed in corporate papers as the company's secretary".

• Independent contractors are responsible for their own payroll taxes and red tape. This eases the paperwork burden on your employer, and at the same time allows you to conceal a good deal of otherwise taxable income.
• The BSA, SPA, and other assorted Software Nazis can not enter a private residence without a search warrant. It is nearly impossible to get a search warrant to look for pirated software. Thus there is no way to get caught doing this.
• Your employer is absolutely not liable for your use of pirated software to do his work, as long as the software is not present on his own premises. You are absolutely not liable unless the pirated software is discovered, in which case the BSA must prove that you have never had a license for the software (hard) and must get into your house to do so (much harder). I have not been able to find a case in which a search warrant was obtained to investigate personal/business use of pirated software.
• You will be entitled to unlimited free updates of Visual Studio, as long as Kazaa, Gnutella, and Freenet don't all collapse at once.
• Your employer may partially subsidize your broadband connection.

Whichever strategy you choose, I wish you the best of luck in exercising your fair use rights as a consumer.

Fair Use of the Day:

Gear v3.23 for Dos, OS/2 and Windows :s/n: G02632U89
News Robot v3.3 32 bits :name/PhrozenCrew@Efnet.#PC96 code/shvppkmt
Deepsky 98 1.03 :s/n: 082870
F/A-18 Hornet (mac) :100-98-4298
Adaptec EZ-SCSI v3.03 for DOS/Windows :s/n: 492848-01

Exactly as this study suggests! 1000 AD, carousing Vikings stumble accross North America. After half a milennium of heavy breeding and hard natural selection, more civilized Europeans arrive and discover "native" Americans.

:-] cheers,
thmx

Isnt this just another company that goes belly-up because they weren't making money in the first place? I believe that most companies (dot-coms) crashed because they thought that a nasdaq ticker would be some kind of miracle cure that would make money for them.

There are a few linux companes that does quite well and will continue to do so. Many hasn't gone public, and have no plans to do so, since they don't need money to expand or whatever.

First make money, then go public. You have a much better chance then.

But then, what the hell do I know?

.haeger

Soccer on the web: Hattrick

Cure cancer: Join Team 249

• defends this viewpoint in a strong tone, and is contemptuous of other viewpoints offered by slashdot readers

Or, actually followed, read and dissected the references given. The references quoted in response actually contradicted the statements made, and basically supported my point. Sorry, but they did, and I couldn't let that bluff slip past unchallenged... just as you quite rightly challenge my assertions. On the other hand, I did feel so bad about being all fierce and nasty that I even helped the respondant out by torpedoing my own assertion with salient quotes from the Betamax Decision, which is what I was rather hoping someone else would do for me to demonstrate that this isn't just a forum for skimmers and ranters. Hey ho.

• Previous case law has held that the following are fair uses of copyrighted materials:

• • Making personal backups of software.
  • Time-shifting television programs.
  • Format-shifting.
  • Compilation creation ("mix tapes")
  • Rebroadcasting radio in a business.

Ok, I've read the reference (very interesting, thanks), and the only one that I see confirmed is time-shifting publically broadcast television for a single viewing, from the Betamax Decision, which I already mentioned. None of the other cases appear to deal with personal/friends/family use, nor with the uses you quote. Sorry if I'm being dense, but can you actually explain which cases you're referring to? Oh, and off the top of my head, don't you need a public performance license to rebroadcast radio in a workplace?

I fess up, I'm being deliberately provocative. The very simple reason for that is that the DMCA and the nascent SSSCA make me deeply concerned for the future of P2P in specific and the whole concept of fair use in general. You must be aware that every time this issue rolls around, there's a flurry of posts about how personal non-for-profit use is fair, so neener neener Mr Government. I simply don't believe that is the case, and given the number of people that take what they read on Slashdot as gospel, I think that it's important to give an emphatic "No!" to that to balance the complacent "Yes!" posts.

You'll notice that we both referenced the EFF. I'd point out their extremely inflamatory - and highly inaccurate - language about the Felten case: "Judge Denies Scientists' Free Speech Rights". You just know they wanted to add a slew of !!bangs!! there. Looking at the actual ruling, the judge dismissed the case because the case - as brought - was no longer there to be answered. The language of the EFF's initial releases clearly - and completely falsely - implied that the ruling was anti-constitutional, when their actual gripe was simply that the case was dismissed before it became a constitutional issue. They clearly feel that sometimes it's more important to keep it simple, stupid than to provide a balanced view. And sometimes I find myself agreeing with them.

I'm also here to learn, and the first thing I learned on Slashdot is never trust anything. Don't trust what people say here. Don't trust them if they provide a plausible looking link. Follow the link, read the references, consider the sources, and verify them. Which is why I am questioning your (very interesting) link, and suggesting that you are - perhaps - making assumptions about what's in those cases. Feel free to let me know if I'm wrong, but be sure to quote the specific cases that support your fair use examples, because I'm not seeing them.

Can we agree on this?

• Judges are evolutionary, not revolutionary whenever possible.
• Peer 2 Peer sharing involves making permanent format-shifted copies of non-broadcast material and distributing these permanent copies in a potentially large scale but non commercial way outside of the home.
• There is no case law precedent for this situation, but there is for one that is a close evolution away from it. Specifically, for-profit copying and selling of content.

Pure P2P (not a Napster/Kazaa client/server hybrid) is going to go to a judgement sooner or later. The defence will be that it's fair use. In all honesty, I do agree that any unbiased court will consider that defence rather than dismissing it out of hand, but - and again, please quote specific case examples if I'm wrong - I don't see the case law that even remotely supports that assertion. In fact, it's more likely that a court will start from the very close example of commercial piracy, and spot that the only material difference is the not-for-profit nature. Oh, except for Morpheus. They're for profit. So there's no difference that I can see.

Or, in skimmer language: I'd expect P2P to be assumed guilty until proven innocent, and not the other way around.

Got a reference to a case that's a small evolution away that indicates otherwise? I suspect not.

http://graphics.stanford.edu/lab/soft/prman/Toolki t/AppNotes/appnote.25.html

Frequency clamping isn't the best or only way to deal with aliasing. Convolution is used too. Antialiasing is a big and scary field.

--grendel drago

And it is about rigidity Jamie. Rigidity is measured by the deformation in response to force. Force as you just learned is electromagnetic interaction between electrons of atoms. When a bullet hits flesh, a force is created between the two. Remember Newton? Equal and opposite and all that? The bullet and flesh have the same amount of force imparted on each but guess what Jamie. The bullet doesn't do shit. The flesh on the other hand is deformed. Less rigidity. Get it yet?

Now to emphasize the point that you are a fucking idiot as if your post didn't make that clear enough. I'll also explain why high velocity anything can go through anything. Whatever particle you're firing has momentum. When it hits the target the force created will be a function of the momentum of the objects (or kinetic energy, easy enough to switch between the two given m and v). The flesh target is at rest and the force causes deformation (and acceleration). The two results are obvious when 1) a person hit by a bullet has a bullet wound 2) a person hit by a bullet may be knocked down. Wanna know how rigidity affects this? Imagine a bullet through jello block. The jello block basically doesn't move and the bullet passes straight through. Imagine a bullet hitting a block of steel. That block won't have a dent but will pushed back. The bullet will be a lump of lead unrecognizable as a bullet.

FUCK! Why are there morons like Jamie around. Jamie here's some advice: Better to let someone think you are an Idiot than to open your mouth and prove it.

Any moderators out there, if you are going to moderate my post it had better be as +4 informative. This was a really fucking educational reply for Jamie.

IANAL, so instead of arguing the point, I present this post as a list of expert opinions which contradict Rogerborg's position.

Rogerborg: Look, I'll spell it out again, shall I? There is no clause in fair use, there never has been one, that allows fair use for anything other than: (1) criticism and comment, (2) parody and satire, (3) scholarship and research, (4) news reporting and (5) teaching. To qualify for consideration under the fair use defence, your use must fall into these categories. You don't even get to argue the "negligible impact" until you've shown that you qualify. There is no case zero. There is no case six.

Current national security advisor Condoleezza Rice authored a paper on fair use in 1988, in which she states "The concept of fair use is necessarily somewhat vague when discussed in the abstract. Its application depends critically on the particular facts of the individual situation. Neither the case law nor the statutory law provides bright lines concerning which uses are fair and which are not."

As mentioned in the previous post, the Sony vs. Universal City Studios Case contradicts Rogerborg's black-and-white interpretation of section 107, as it defines time-shifting television programs as fair use.

Previous case law has held that the following are fair uses of copyrighted materials:

Making personal backups of software.

Time-shifting television programs.

Format-shifting.

Compilation creation ("mix tapes")

Rebroadcasting radio in a business.

In short, a wide body of experts seem to disagree with the viewpoint espoused by Rogerborg. I exhort you to consider this when reading his posts. I further ask that you consider that he was willing to defend his viewpoint so vehemently in spite of the contradictory expert viewpoints readily available.

IANAL, so instead of arguing the point, I present this post as a list of expert opinions which contradict Rogerborg's position.

Rogerborg: Look, I'll spell it out again, shall I? There is no clause in fair use, there never has been one, that allows fair use for anything other than: (1) criticism and comment, (2) parody and satire, (3) scholarship and research, (4) news reporting and (5) teaching. To qualify for consideration under the fair use defence, your use must fall into these categories. You don't even get to argue the "negligible impact" until you've shown that you qualify. There is no case zero. There is no case six.

Current national security advisor Condoleezza Rice authored a paper on fair use in 1988, in which she states "The concept of fair use is necessarily somewhat vague when discussed in the abstract. Its application depends critically on the particular facts of the individual situation. Neither the case law nor the statutory law provides bright lines concerning which uses are fair and which are not."

As mentioned in the previous post, the Sony vs. Universal City Studios Case contradicts Rogerborg's black-and-white interpretation of section 107, as it defines time-shifting television programs as fair use.

Previous case law has held that the following are fair uses of copyrighted materials:

Making personal backups of software.

Time-shifting television programs.

Format-shifting.

Compilation creation ("mix tapes")

Rebroadcasting radio in a business.

In short, a wide body of experts seem to disagree with the viewpoint espoused by Rogerborg. I exhort you to consider this when reading his posts. I further ask that you consider that he was willing to defend his viewpoint so vehemently in spite of the contradictory expert viewpoints readily available.

"which would certainly increase their user base."
Are you suggesting that MS needs a larger user base? Surely you must be joking.

Football on the web: Hattrick

Cure cancer: Join team 249

.haeger

We assume page A has pages T1...Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Note that if you have a bunch of bogus pages with low pagerank the pagerank for your page is going to be low, no matter how many of these pages you have pointing to you.

When I buy something I expect it to be functional, secure, nice and shiny. Hell, I spent money on the damn thing. Ofcause you/they should be responsible for the things you/they sell.

Open source or closed, if I spend money on it then they would have to give me my money back if it doesn't perform as it should.

.haeger

Football on the web? Hattrick is good fun.

Cancer is not fun. Help here. Join Team Sweden (249) and show that you care.

Yeah, I sorta thought that as I was writing the post, but the docs for STRIP do reference the st0 interface.

Hmmm....

-Z

See Pascal's Wager.

• Vertex processing can (and often do) do lighting and coordinate transformations, but it does far more than that. It can be used for anisotropic lighting schemes, matrix blending/skinning, keyframe interpolation, surface deformation, various procedural lighting & texturing approaches, even pseudo-motion-blur & complete particle systems. Take a look at this pdf for some of the many uses found so far.
• Fragment processing is more for new ways of combining textures, fancy bump/reflection mapping, or creating procedural textures from scratch. You can do relatively complex mathematical operations (think "massively parallel SIMD") - even cool stuff like using textures as multidimensional lookup tables for further texturing. More than just "better access to texture memory".
• The pack/unpack processors are actually pixel pack/unpack processors, and AFAIK unrelated to vertices. They're used for encoding/decoding the myriad of possible formats of image data from the host (e.g. textures). OpenGL currently copes with a large number of possibilities (RGBA, BGRA, 32 bit, 48 bit, floating point data, different numbers of channels, etc), but a programmable processor will simplify all this, and also allow for more exotic encoding schemes like the various 2D and 3D texture compression formats around. One of the stated goals of OpenGL 2.0 is to reduce the huge number of vendor-specific extensions. A lot of those extensions deal with accessing textures.

All this will be done in software (although fragment processing is notoriously slow to do in software), but hardware already exists that does programmable vertex & fragment processing. It wouldn't surprise me if programmable pack/unpack hardware also existed on modern GPUs, and was just waiting for an API to expose it.

These are precendents that can make you win the case if you can keep the DMCA out of this:

[...] Over the years, the use of reverse engineering of software has been extremely controversial. In fact, there have been two major lawsuits concerning products that were written with the help of decompilation.

The first major lawsuit was Atari vs. Nintendo. In this case, Atari Corporation reverse engineered Nintendo's game cartridges in order to create alternative games that could run on Nintendo's system. The judge in this case found that decompilation was acceptable to figure out unprotected elements of the software. However, Atari lost the case because they used fraud to obtain Nintendo's source code from the Copyright Office [7].

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.

This is blatantly stolen from Stanford. The guy should be able to argue that he is reverse engineering for fair use, especially since he's advertising programming the system and backing up savegames & games. Of course, the DMCA is created to take away your rights to fair use by disallowing any decrypting.

I'd call upon Nintendo to prove that the device doesn't merely reverse-engineer for fair use, but it truly circumvents an encryption device. This means that they have to prove that such an encryption device exists. But of course, IANAL. You should really get a lawyer to look at this and write a letter back. And you're in big sh*t if you find out that Nintendo uses an XOR-encryption scheme for it's code ;)

See this[stanford.edu]
Prof. Englebart creates a hyperlinked carrot!!!!

BT sucks @ss

This is great stuff! Someone should enter this into the ongoing BT hyperlink-patent trial if it hasn't already been done. Check it out yourself: http://vodreal.stanford.edu/engel/07engel200.ram Looks very much like hyperlinking to me! And that was 1968!
Maybe the bad guys will now lose for a change.

1. Google_in_the_old_days didnt differentiate between results using who pays more principle.
2. Then they introduced sponsored links, NOT results.
3. Now for the first time, they actualy *rank* , the sponsored links based on who_pays-more.

I am not a star gazer, but it is hard to miss the current over here. Google sucessfully cashed in on the Page Citation Model , now for the Pre-IPO Google Inc. bsuiness sounds more interesting.
But lots of new cool stuff keep appearing on those pristine pages..i would surely like to see that continue. And..boy! do these things really mess up their interface.

(doh) Sorry about the links... Folding@Home Genome@Home.

(doh) Sorry about the links... Folding@Home Genome@Home.

As a student at Stanford University, I'm currently in a course called Sleep and Dreams, taught by the world's leading sleep expert, Dr. William Dement. It's an awesome class; he's really hammered home the concept of a sleep debt-he's been doing research on this field since the early 1950's, and has pioneered the concept of a sleep debt: typically you need 8 hrs and 15 minutes; if you get any less, it goes into a sleep debt that gets progressively worse. He's provided lots of evidence; I'm inclined to believe him more. The course books are huge, but read the lecture notes if you're interested...

Are you doing it pixel by pixel? Sometimes pixels are not discrete color units, in which case you might want to reconsider your algorithm. For example, if you have a mosaic effect from newspaper you've scanned in, pixels are going to mirror the little newspaper specks of color introduced by the printing process. Maybe you want to have some sort of averaging method?

Porison and Wandrell adapted CIELAB color models to account for the quirks of monitors. You need to have information on how far away people sit from the monitor, the resolution, the size, etc., but it's actually quite good. Here's a MATLAB implementation by Zhang at Stanford.

One problem I had when I was working with this is that the pixels were not lining up correctly. Try overlaying the images and the CIELAB error to make sure your results are sensible.

First, comparing the two systems' measurement accuracy is apples and oranges. UWB might be usable as a point-to-point ranging source, sort of like a stud finder, but it only tells you how far a given object is from, say, your handheld transmitter. GPS, on the other hand, gives you a three-dimensional position fix anywhere on earth (as long as you can see a reasonable patch of the sky). The two are simply not measuring the same thing. (Furthermore, a properly set up variant of GPS called a "differential" setup can deliver accuracy of better that 1cm.)

Second, UWB is not necessarily as low-power a system as is claimed in the article. Typical UWB transmitter power levels are around 1 milliwatt (typical cell phones are around 1 watt), which is ten times higher than what Cringely claims. (The idea is that because the energy is spread across a wide swath of frequencies, the power in any one band is relatively low.) Furthermore, UWB power levels are strongly dependent on the desired distance between transmitter and receiver.

Third, applications are currently being developed for using GPS and its variants indoors.

Finally, UWB can pose problems for GPS. The nominal GPS signal is, by design, about 15dB below the ambient noise floor -- that is, it's about 30 times quieter than the static you'd receive if you tuned a radio between stations. Thus GPS can be particularly sensitive to even very low-level intereference. I work in a GPS Lab and we have been examining the potential UWB-GPS interference issues for about the past two years. The point is, this is a big deal because GPS will likely be used in a number of safety-critical applications (e.g. landing airplanes) within the next 5-10 years. Dismissing the potential objections to UWB out of hand is therefore not only ill-advised, but potentially dangerous.

The list of publications on the lab's main page includes papers with detailed explanations of the points I've made above.

-FP

Oh, how quickly we forget Alba, the first cloned pet. Of course, the Alba story was much more interesting because he was an albino rabbit with jellyfish genes to make him glow.

I, probably like many /.'ers, watched a few of those videos and thought something along the lines of "man, those guys were so far ahead of their time, they had everything already done back then! Screw BT and their specious patents!". But go back and watch the demo again. Then scan the patent again. Doublas Engelbart's demo kept referencing hypertext within the same information store (computer). I couldn't find a reference to a local reference to remote information. Networking and even remote sessions are mentioned but never the context of a local link to a remote chunk of data. BT's patent appears to focus on hyperlinking menus being included with each chunk of data to allow easy access to further information.

Now, having said that, there are some key differences between the hyperlinks we know and love today and the system described in BT's patent. Links in the form of http://, ftp://, etc are known as URLs because they abstract away the differences in local and network locations and various protocols used for transmitting the data. It may be argued that hyperlinks are abstractions of a local data store, not a remote menuing system. Also of interest in BT's patent is the reference to the VIEWDATA system, some quick internet searching reveals systems that used color coded links that may qualify as prior art. Another major factor is the use of a mouse. BT's patent doesn't seem to mention anything besides keypad input methods while today's interaction with hypertext is primarily with some sort of pointing device.

Another thing to consider is BT's first major target in this. While other reports mention up to 17 ISPs being asked to pay royalties, Prodigy has gotten the majority of the attention. Wasn't Prodigy one of the larger online services back in the '80s? Might they have had an early interface system that consisted of numeric menus linking to additional information? Is BT going after one of the only true violators of the patent, hoping to scare the rest of the world into paying royalties? Are they deliberately setting up smokescreens, hoping to distract from the real issues in the case?

So, after a closer look, I still think that Mr. Englebart and his peers were way ahead of their time and I still say "Screw BT and their specious patents!", just for slightly different reasons.