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For those who want to see whats so funny about that, heres the current state as of this month.[PDF] (according to syracuse U)

But really everything i have been hearing in the last fews (didnt wired do something on this a few years ago? or was it sciam?) has been suggesting that the web will be semantic driven. Is this what a netwide OS suggests? or not necessarily?

ps = sorry im not a code geek...

The world record for words per minute (170) was typed on a Dvorak keyboard.

http://sominfo.syr.edu/facstaff/dvorak/blackburn.h tml

- IP

I just did a search for "world record typing speed" (just to check on reasonable figures) and found this, which also mentions her fastest speeds were on a dvorak.

Admittedly, I did have to do some digging to find the preferred pronunciation of "Dvorak"- I had been pronouncing it like the name of the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak (of "From the New World" fame), which is usually pronounced "dvôr'zhäk," sounding sort of like "vor-jahk." However, although August Dvorak, inventor of the Dvorak keyboard, was a cousin of Antonin, according to this site, the inventor's family prefers an Americanized pronunciation. Dvorak. Duh-vor-ack. Not that hard, is it?

Also, 200th post!

Tell that to this girl: http://sominfo.syr.edu/facstaff/dvorak/blackburn.h tml!

Okay, okay - so even that link says she was a crap typist on QWERTY, but I think it's funny :P

To quote:
"the question is not whether you will be able to obtain a patent, a patent most certaily will be able to be obtained. In fact, by some estimates well over 90% of all patent applications ripen into some form of an issued United States patent."

And from another example:
The fact that a patent can be obtained or has been obtained does not mean that a valuable asset has been obtained, and this "invention" is a wonderfully vibrant example of that. There must always be consideration given to whether the protection that is or could be obtained is worthwhile to obtain in light of the intended use.

So if Bezos wants to waste his money on lawyers, good for him.

To quote:
"the question is not whether you will be able to obtain a patent, a patent most certaily will be able to be obtained. In fact, by some estimates well over 90% of all patent applications ripen into some form of an issued United States patent."

And from another example:
The fact that a patent can be obtained or has been obtained does not mean that a valuable asset has been obtained, and this "invention" is a wonderfully vibrant example of that. There must always be consideration given to whether the protection that is or could be obtained is worthwhile to obtain in light of the intended use.

So if Bezos wants to waste his money on lawyers, good for him.

Huh? The story's supposed to end with the line "VAXen, my children, just don't belong some places." :-)

The IRS? HAHAHAHA! The IRS has so badly mismanaged their IT projects that they're generally recognized as the worst of the bad government contract managers. Their old data system is barely limping along but after spending tens of millions they're no closer to a working replacement than they were two years ago.

Here's one example there are many, many more.

We can all breath a giant sigh of relief if they get the new main system online before the old one throws in the electronic towel. Any time you ask anyone in the IRS group how things are going, you'll always get the Air Force salute (shoulder shrug) in response.

Now see, its hard to tell if your being sarcastic or are deadly serious. The first (ugly) I would agree is quite hideous, at least not in that shot, the second (ugly), while not to my taste, is quite pretty, and the third (women) is, to my eyes at least, one of the most stunningly gorgeous creatures I've seen in a long time.

Beauty is of course in the eye of the beholder, so YMMV, but perhaps more extreme examples might have been better.

Oh, woe to be British and lumbered with all these ugly, ugly, women.
They're not glamourous or sexy, which is why Hollywood won't touch them with a bargepole.

If only we could produce hotties like Madeleine Albright, Condaleeza Rice, and Barbara Bush.

Typing, Fastest. Mrs. Barbara Blackburn of Salem, Oregon can maintain 150 wpm for 50 min (37,500 key strokes) and attains a speed of 170 wpm using the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (DSK) system. Her top speed was recorded at 212 wpm. Source: Norris McWhirter, ed. (1985), THE GUINNESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS, 23rd US edition, New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

How does she type so fast? The key, so to speak, is in the keyboard design. Blackburn will type on nothing but the Dvorak keyboard, which has vowels on one side and consonants on the other, with the most frequently used letters on the center row. "It makes much more sense than the standard, so-called Qwerty keyboard (named after the first six letters on the top row)," Blackburn said. In fact, it was the Qwerty keyboard that was her undoing in high school typing class back in Pleasant Hill, Missouri.

There you go. Irrefutable evidence. http://sominfo.syr.edu/facstaff/dvorak/blackburn.h tml/

No, it's just a half-truth.

I think that it is simply unclear how they projected it. It was the nineteenth century after all, and some weird ideas were followed: eg, you can type typewriter with just keys on the top row (I read this was intended, for what reasons I'm not sure). Probably it was some trial and error, and they came with an half-baked design.

Oh, the exercise to the reader, yes: here is a Guinness record.

I would tend to be suspicious of studies comparing qwerty to dvorak, since most people who learn dvorak learned qwerty first, whereas most qwerty users know only qwerty. Because of qwerty's ubiquity, it's very difficult to make an objective comparison.

I use qwerty and dvorak interchangeably, and am probably slower in both than if I had stuck with qwerty alone, but I find dvorak much more comfortable (and that's something that's much harder to quantify).

According to a quick google search, Barbara Blackburn is the fastest typist in the world and she uses dvorak. That carries more weight than questionable studies in my book, though I would prefer a better reference than a random web link.

Does anyone have data comparing the fastest known dvorak typists to the fastest known qwerty typists?

Why is it then that the world's fastest typists' use DVORAK? For instance: http://sominfo.syr.edu/facstaff/dvorak/blackburn.h tml

Plus, this post misses one of the key advantages of DVORAK: It reduces the various hand/arm injuries typing causes because you don't have to move your fingers as far.

Have you ever tried typing DVORAK? You'll quickly realize that its much, much easier on the hands.

Security and networking weren't part of the base design of Windows OR its predecessor,Dos, unlike all the *nixish operating systems, which were designed from the ground up with the intent of running multiple processes with multiple users.

Given that you're the one claiming that we shouldn't ignore the history of Windows when people pull you up on the stupidity of this comment, let me show you that you shouldn't ignore the history of Unix, which also WASN'T designed from the ground up with networking and security in mind.

From Dennis Ritchie:

"The first fact to face is that UNIX was not developed with security, in any realistic sense, in mind; this fact alone guarantees a vast number of holes."

Unix started out life with 14 character filenames.
No security.
No networking.

It wasn't until BSD that you had filenames up to 255 characters.

Learn some freakin' history.

Who will do the actual reading of all these books whose copyrights expired? And, under what terms will these reading performances be distributed?

Even if the text they read is public domain, the rights to the performance of the reading belong to the performer, and can be bought and sold if the performer chooses. He or she can also choose to release the performances into the public domain with a copyleft license. Obviously, this is what I would prefer. Then, the controversies of storage would be less pressing. There would need to be a fail-safe central archive of the recordings at maximum quality (maybe losslessly compressed, or not at all), and then the libraries would "loan out" compressed versions of these files in whatever format makes sense at the time. These days I'd say it's mp3; in the future, the format with the widest playback possibilities will hopefully be something better.

What I'm worried about is that the libraries will get commercial companies to do proprietary performances, so they will be much less free to distribute them according to the needs of their patrons. This is a real shame. For a long time I've wanted to have an open-source project to read certain classics in English whose copyright has expired. I've actually gotten started; see here. I think that if the libraries of the english-speaking world asked nicely and pooled their resources, they could get a whole bunch of the classics read by excellent performers, and released to the general public. I'm in the middle of listening to Ian McKellan reading The Odyssey and it's incredibly moving and entertaining. This isn't just for the visually impaired, you know.

Anyway, if libraries are going to do this, they have to do it right, because they won't get a chance to re-do it. I think they are setting themselves up for hardship if somebody else owns the rights to the stuff they distribute, even if it makes a few things easier at the start. So let's stop bickering about file formats and concentrate on the important stuff.

Well, do what us Canadians do : put a tuque over it!

Dude, did you fail to notice the pattern?

New York State, at 26.3 percent, ranks last in the industrialized world - behind Italy at 19.3 percent, the closest OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) nation. California is not far behind with 25.7 percent, and in President Bush's home state of Texas, 20.7 percent of the children live in poverty.

At the other end of the U.S. spectrum, North and South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas were the top-ranked U.S. states - with 13 percent or lower child poverty.

The comparison has nothing to do with a disparity between what "we" call poor and what "industrialized" nations call poor.

Using a single and comparable measure of poverty, the United States ranks behind every single European nation. The only traditionally industrialized nation with a higher poverty rate than the United States is Russia.

Now, do you think poverty--as a condition of living--impacts national productivity? Do you think someone who can't pay their current bills, let alone afford skills training, while working diligently 80 hours per week, and never seeing their children, impact the economy positively or negatively?

If you're proud of the national results of the American economy, that's great. I encourage you to be proud of it. The economic figures are wonderful, and for that very large majority that can afford the benefits, we may offer one of the best standards of living.

But just imagine how much better it would be if we could drop the poverty rate by 10% more Americans, so that they can concentrate on their jobs and be more productive?

Reducing poverty is about equality of opportunity. Poverty is something that often strikes people by chance and circumstance, not personal decision, but once you've fallen into it, it's incredibly difficult to pull yourself out. Poverty is not the same thing as not having enough money for all the things you want, or all the things other people have. Poverty is when you don't have sufficient access to the very minimal resources you and your family need to survive--food, housing, health care, child care.

Imagine being impoverished. The first thing you're probably going to imagine is living in some trailer with a car up on block, eating cheap fatty ground beef. But you'd be wrong. That's not poverty. That's just not doing as well as a lot of people.

If you really want to understand it, think about being a married 40-something, with a few kids, while the industry you were trained for evaporates and goes overseas. Your bills don't stop just because you got laid off, and you know that because this episode of outsourcing is industry-wide, you can't get another job in your field of skill/expertise.

In the interest of paying the bills, you get a couple part-time jobs doing unskilled work. Your partner, who used to be able to stay at home with the kids, does the same. You start paying out-of-pocket for day-care while you and your partner are each working 60 or more hours per week in dumb jobs that your far over-qualified for. You start paying out-of-pocket for health-care, because not a single one of the employers between you and your wife offers benefits to part-timers.

You and your partner think about taking a skills-training class, to prepare you for a new industry, but realize that there's just no way to fit it into your schedule let alone pay for it.

So in the course of a year, you've now gone from:

*being a successful, but not rich, skilled-worker living contendly in a single-income family, whose family was taken care of.

to:

*being someone who works 60 hours per week in embarrassing jobs; who never sees your partner, who also works 60 hours per week; who barely gets to see, let alone supervise your kids; who has neither the free time or needed capital to change direction;

At the same time your monthly bills went up, and you and your partner combined still can't seem to cover them all. So you constantly face decisions between day-care and leaving the kids home alone, getting medical treatment and waiting out some undiagnosed symptom, buying food and paying rent, losing the car and buying your kid a single birthday gift, moving your whole family in with your parents and maintaining your dignity.

That's poverty. That's the economic and psychological burden that

The comparison has nothing to do with a disparity between what "we" call poor and what "industrialized" nations call poor.

Using a single and comparable measure of poverty, the United States ranks behind every single European nation. The only traditionally industrialized nation with a higher poverty rate than the United States is Russia.

Now, do you think poverty--as a condition of living--impacts national productivity? Do you think someone who can't pay their current bills, let alone afford skills training, while working diligently 80 hours per week, and never seeing their children, impact the economy positively or negatively?

If you're proud of the national results of the American economy, that's great. I encourage you to be proud of it. The economic figures are wonderful, and for that very large majority that can afford the benefits, we may offer one of the best standards of living.

But just imagine how much better it would be if we could drop the poverty rate by 10% more Americans, so that they can concentrate on their jobs and be more productive?

Reducing poverty is about equality of opportunity. Poverty is something that often strikes people by chance and circumstance, not personal decision, but once you've fallen into it, it's incredibly difficult to pull yourself out. Poverty is not the same thing as not having enough money for all the things you want, or all the things other people have. Poverty is when you don't have sufficient access to the very minimal resources you and your family need to survive--food, housing, health care, child care.

Imagine being impoverished. The first thing you're probably going to imagine is living in some trailer with a car up on block, eating cheap fatty ground beef. But you'd be wrong. That's not poverty. That's just not doing as well as a lot of people.

If you really want to understand it, think about being a married 40-something, with a few kids, while the industry you were trained for evaporates and goes overseas. Your bills don't stop just because you got laid off, and you know that because this episode of outsourcing is industry-wide, you can't get another job in your field of skill/expertise.

In the interest of paying the bills, you get a couple part-time jobs doing unskilled work. Your partner, who used to be able to stay at home with the kids, does the same. You start paying out-of-pocket for day-care while you and your partner are each working 60 or more hours per week in dumb jobs that your far over-qualified for. You start paying out-of-pocket for health-care, because not a single one of the employers between you and your wife offers benefits to part-timers.

You and your partner think about taking a skills-training class, to prepare you for a new industry, but realize that there's just no way to fit it into your schedule let alone pay for it.

So in the course of a year, you've now gone from:

*being a successful, but not rich, skilled-worker living contendly in a single-income family, whose family was taken care of.

to:

*being someone who works 60 hours per week in embarrassing jobs; who never sees your partner, who also works 60 hours per week; who barely gets to see, let alone supervise your kids; who has neither the free time or needed capital to change direction;

At the same time your monthly bills went up, and you and your partner combined still can't seem to cover them all. So you constantly face decisions between day-care and leaving the kids home alone, getting medical treatment and waiting out some undiagnosed symptom, buying food and paying rent, losing the car and buying your kid a single birthday gift, moving your whole family in with your parents and maintaining your dignity.

That's poverty. That's the economic and psychological burden that

There is another aspect to that, of course. One of my professors, Scott Nicholson, discussed the problem on CNN. I thought there was something about it on the website, but I couldn't find it in a quick look this morning. Anyway, he did a small piece discussing how little of a phrase one actually needed to find matches on the web. Four or five words is often enough.

He took a poll in one of my classes about turnitin.com and other sites. The students were overwhelmingly against it. Not because we're cheaters, but because we agree with the McGill student who fought the system. Many of us, oddly enough, consider turning in papers to a service who will keep it on file a copyright violation.

Dr. Nicholson's solution, and that of many others in our school is to use stepped assignments. If there is a large paper due at some point in the semester, we have to submit paper proposals by a given date. For some, we need to have outlines or a short presentation for the class at a later date. Most professors will allow students to submit papers for critique in advance of the due date. All of this is to not only make it more difficult for someone to buy or obtain a paper from somewhere, but also to help the students plan and work on the assignment over the semester rather than putting it off until the last minute.

And then, if necessary, there's always the Google trick.

And you can do very nearly the same with 2 fingers ? Excuse me for doubting that. try typing some English prose, rather than shell commands and such. FWIW I also used to type faster than most people with only 4-6 fingers, but when I learned to "home row", after the initial drop in speed (while forcing myself to use the "correct" fingers) I eventually picked up about a 40% speed increase (estimated). Another advantage is that I don't have to look at the keys - I think that is what they call "touch-typing". Try it some time, hopefully you will experience the same benefits.

Notice all the different non-standard switches I had to use, which together help noticably. That's the sort of stuff you need to do to LAME before it produces acceptable results at very low bitrates. It is optimized only for 44.1KHz, so we should keep that in mind when we see the results. Notice now that none of these switches are being used for this test, so I'm almost certain that LAME will come out looking much worse than it is.

I would love for there to be a LAME-based encoder that is optimized for speech, low bitrates and sample rates. If it is made, I am prepared to re-encode all the readings that are (and are about to be) posted on my site.

Speaking of *BSD, I once had to make a technical support call to them. Here's the guy they have answering the phone these days. He told me he had to go into the vault to find the answer to my question. He put me on hold, and then the line went dead.

First off, copyrights wern't created because books were being coppied without the creators consent as they starved in the streets. They were created for publishers who wanted to take works out of the public domain and keep their competitors from printing the same works, and by Kings who wanted to censor the press by granting such publisher monopolies in return for them agreeing not to publish bad things about the monarchy. So your premise is bogus.


You're incredibly misinformed. It was the authors getting screwed. Copyright came about to protect them.

Ironically, so is your conclusion. The simple observable measurable fact is - that for every creator that copyrights have financially benefited, there are thousands who they haven't helped a bit, hindered or even destroyed.

However, the others - the people who are not the creators - didn't actually contribute anything to actually putting the work together in the first place, so what makes you think that they deserve any kind of right to that material at all? Boo hoo - they're "destroyed" because they copied that material? Perhaps they shouldn't have copied it. Nobody forced them to. It wasn't like that material meant the difference between life or death to them. Color me unimpressed.

Your other implied premise, that noone will create worthwhile information without copyright monopolies, is also bogus.

So are you going to turn away 2 million concert goers nationwide who are willing to pay an average of over $40 a pop to see you entertain because they can copy your music online? Yeah, things will change when copyrights go away, so what, they need to change.


Without copyright, you return to the royalty system. The real royalty system - where royalty has to bestow upon you the title of "master composer" or some such nonsense, and then pay for you to live.

And no, you don't have to turn away 2 million concert goers. If you think that this way of working will benefit you, then it's your choice not to prosecute people who steal your material - and, if you prefer, to allow them to copy it legally without stealing. However, that doesn't mean that you should enforce that lifestyle on everyone else.

Similarly, you can't force anyone to release an original work under the GPL - no matter how much RMS might want that to be the case.

Autoboxing yes, but I don't believe that they have operator overloading in mind. I've heard Gosling say that it adds a lot of complexity to interpreting a program while adding relatively little expressive power.

(A picture of Gosling standing in front of a slide explaining what's wrong with operator overloading).

I'm definitely looking forward to autoboxing and the new printf-style methods. (Maybe variable-argument methods were what you had in mind?)

You mean like dragthing or XBar? Obviously these are OS X apps, but it sounds like the right concept.

• riding around on trains getting hit by lighning
• Mulling over the implications of spacetime
• Wishing you had a twin
• And still have time left over to play the violin

• riding around on trains getting hit by lighning
• Mulling over the implications of spacetime
• Wishing you had a twin
• And still have time left over to play the violin

Better yet, sue Kevin Bacon!

Yes, they are both theories. There is nothing scientifically factual about evolution whatsoever.

Your post demonstrates your complete lack of knowledge about evolution and about science. While I don't have time to get into specifics (late for work), I will post some links:

A nice set of links at syacuse university
Coalition for Excellence in Science and Math Education
National Center for Science Education

While I have no basis to make this broad generalization, I'd imagine that it's no different at RPI than anywhere else.

They were still phasing in the 4x4 curriculum and Total Laptop Domination while I was there, so my experience was probably somewhat different... but if it wasn't laptops, it was (gasp!) reading something other than the text or notes during class, or (GASP!) writing messages on paper to the person next to you. And this was WAY back in 1999! ;)

In some ways, the latter was even more instant than this so-called "Instant" Messaging technology, because you could snicker as soon as the person was half-done writing their snide or humorous comment to the point that the punch line was understandable.

Another benefit is the longevity of such comments - I have many notes between myself and the guy who sat next to me in class in my Human Physiology I notebook (the paper kind) that still refresh my memory of specific lectures. Class was made memorable by the daily choice of attire by the professor (they didn't call her "Jane, the Lion Tamer" for nothing) and subsequent note-taking on non-physiological topics.

I'm in a different kind of school now, and find that the frequency of laptop use/abuse in class is inversely proportional to the communication ability of the lecturer. There are some classes that I assume that I need to take a few notes and otherwise sit there, learning by osmosis. The rationale that everyone uses isn't one of "keeping back channels open to discuss classwork," but "staying awake and surviving through this class so we look alive and don't get called on." It is something of a survivalist response, but there have been times where the majority of the class has been in an AIM chatroom, and the victim of a random-assed question directed at one student by the prof has been assisted by classmates via AIM. This helps the student in saving face, but is it really helping learning?

The most disturbing comments I heard were from a student who visited another school and noticed that a few students were watching DVDs on their laptops during class. When she asked the prof about it, the response was a flippant "hey, at least they're coming to class."

There are certain classes in which I don't dare plug into the ethernet jack - not out of fear of the prof, but because I might be distracted and miss a good point by the lecturer or another student. I actually enjoy this environment more, since I don't feel the need to distract myself to stay awake.

I do feel somewhat guilty paying $234827539438579348573945834.56 a year (+/-) in tuition just to chat in class, even if some of the profs are begging to be talked about with classmates in real time to catch the humor of their phrases and mannerisms. I'm going up to my eyeballs in debt to learn; I an chat on AIM (iChat, really) anytime I want to - for free.

Perhaps it will force the issue of recognizing talented, engaging lecturers versus those who read off whatever's on the podium. Maybe schools should start using "percentage of time I was chatting on AIM during class" as a new criterion in faculty course evaluations...

IANAL, but my wife IS, and is currently studying for her BAR exam. Why is that of interest? The Constitutional law part.

It seems that literally ANY point can be argued as a breach of the commerce clause.
As proof I give you Katzenbach v. McClung. (ollie's BBQ)

A tiny, tiny local BBQ joint didn't want to serve blacks (only allowed take-out). Title II of the Civil Rights act claim is made against BBQ joint.

from THis website: Katzenbach v. McClung,44 (Ollie BBQ), held that since 70% of meat served at a restaurant located only 11 blocks from a major interstate highway is subject to interstate commerce, noting a "rational basis" for finding discrimination in restaurants had a direct and adverse effect on free-flow of interstate commerce."


Your paper plates could come from out of state. POWER and Electricity can come from out of state. Telephone service, etc.

Every BAR prep course recommends you trot out the commerce clause to question the constitutionality of anything- because its so damn broad.

P.S.- when I showed her your post, she giggled.

Dvorak users consistently report less effort in typing and that it just "feels" better, but they must be wrong since QWERTY is better. QED. Even though the fastest typer uses dvorak and other dvorak typers cleaned house in competitions, these results are all faked or "suspect". Even though all reason points to markets acheiving local maxima, just like theory says they should, Liebo insists that if one just defines the value of technology based on what the market has chosen then it proves that the market always right.

And oh yeah, therefore Microsoft never had an OS monopoly.

That's simply wrong. QWERTY was designed to speed typing up by spacing out the most used keys to different sides of the keyboard.

That is quite untrue. There have been many studies of touch typing over the years, and they have lead to a few simple guidelines for fast typing, such as:

• Place the most common characters on the home row, so your fingers rest on top of them for quick access.
• Your hands should alternate heavily, so one can position itself while the other is typing.

QWERTY does not follow either of these rules. Most keypresses are on the UPPER row, and a lot of words can be typed with only one hand (eg. minimum). Dvorak's layout ensures your hands stay on the home row, and its grouping of vowels makes it impossible to type one word with one hand only.

There's no need to trust me, though. You could always ask the current world record holder for typing, or read up on a Discover Magazine article that goes into much more detail.

HJ Hornbeck

Miami, not Miami.

BC, not BC.

Syracuse, not Syracuse.

Sorry for the unrelated comment, but I think this has to be posted. It concerns an example of the extremely ignorant attitudes towards war with Iraq: http://web.syr.edu/~mgkemp/dailyupdate.html

which could certainly contribute to at least the feeling of out-typing your modem.

You sure it wasn't out-typing an echo back from a busy host? Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and we're going to need certified high speed video of someone tapping on over 30 keys a second.

Here's a lady in the book or records who can hit a top speed of 212 wpm - by the above figures of 6 characters per word comes to 21.2 keystrokes per second, and allowing 10 bits / character (8 data, 1 start and 1 stop) - is also 212 baud - using, interestingly, a dvorak keyboard!

• One of the changes since the last time we heard about D is the addition of floats and doubles (32 bit and 64 bit floating-point types, respectively) in addition to the "extended" type (as much precision as available). This is absolutely a Good Thing -- extra precision can be just as bad as insufficient precision, and adding these types allows people to ensure that they're using the right precision.

• It would have been really nice to see the same thing for the math library functions; as it is, the only sin function is an extended -> extended function. IEEE doesn't require determinism on transcendental functions the way it does for arithmetic functions (which, I'm guessing, is why it isn't provided here), but there are times when it would be quite helpful.

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I don't know, it sounds like Einstein was more of a synaesthesiac (someone who perceives stimuli by non-normal or extranormal channels) than either an autistic or a drug addict, although I've never heard of someone experiencing thought as muscle sensation.

I can't tell you what it's like to experience flavours as colours, sounds as colours, smells as sounds, or the like, though (or thoughts as colours, smells, you name it) -- but if you know what I'm talking about, you'll recognize what I mean immediately.

In fact, I would argue against Einstein's having Asperger's Syndrome or other high-function autism disorders simply because he was so social and had so much affect (affect, not effect, though he had that, too) -- the photogenicity, the celebrity, and the overall social skills which he exhibited in spades during most of his life are traits which most high-function autistics never manifest. In fact, the DSM-IV specifically mentions "Qualitative impairment in social interaction." Somehow, a guy who can come up with snappy retorts like that isn't suffering from any impairment in social interaction at all. In fact, considering ordinary mortals' abilities to come up with the right zinger at the right time, he's probably got us beat.

According to this table, people convicted under DOJ's domestic terrorism program in the US were given a median (half got more, half got less) sentence of 37 months. Do you think the actions you were convicted for are comparable to the actions of those convicted under domestic terrorism?

I sort of work on SE Linux. Our group is unsponsored by the NSA (thus far). Since we are unofficially working on it, though, we hear birds chatter sometimes. The rumor mill around our office has been saying that it is not the case that Microsoft has done anything. What happened? A party, whose name shan't be mentioned, because we have not been told their name (we shall call them the Party), was given an SE Linux contract by the NSA. The NSA it seems didn't understand the GPL so well (or some lawyer of theirs who hammered out the contract didn't). The NSA contract said that the Party working on the contract could have propietary code, and could patent ideas used to achieve goals on the project. Much work was done on SE Linux in the mean time by the Party, but patents/etc are held on certain parts of the code by the Party, and therefore cannot be released under GPL. The quotes you see in this article heading make perfect sense to me in this context. The NSA didn't understand the GPL. And yeah, I would complain too if I couldn't have the complete source to my kernel...

Yes I hate Microsoft, but this article is kind of ridiculous...it uses some vague quote to make microsoft look bad. This is not the way to win the war.

Since this is just for fun, let's do some calculations. It's been a while for me, so forgive me if my math goes astray.

Let's suppose there were a convenient target, MirrorWorld, roughly 1 light-year away. We send our message by pulsing a high-powered laser toward the spot where MirrorWorld will be one year from now.

Ideally laser beams are tightly collimated, but even the best ones spread a bit. Let's suppose that the beam we use starts out about a millimeter wide, with a spread of 1 nanometer (10E-9 meters) for every meter of travel.

Now a beam of light travels about 9.5E15 meters/year, so by the time our beam hits MirrorWorld, it will be 9.5E6 meters (plus one millimeter) wide. That's not so bad - only about 75% the width of the planet earth.

Now, of course all our calculations were perfect, our execution flawless, and nothing unexpected happened to distort the curvature of space, so our beam will hit MirrorWorld dead center. Also, MirrorWorld is, a perfectly flat, perfectly reflecting surface, perfectly oriented to reflect all of the incident energy of our laser back to the position where the earth will be two years after we fired the beam without any loss and without increasing the rate of spread.

Of course, the beam continues to spread at it's original rate. After 2 years total travel, the energy in the orignal pulses would be spread across a beam about 1.9E+7 meters across. That works out to about 1.1E15 square meters of surface area by the time the beam hits the lens/antenna that we placed just outside the atmosphere (to avoid losses). If the lens is a perfect collector of energy, 1 square meter in size, we will receive 8.8E-16 joules for every joule transmitted in the original pulses.

Now, a table found here suggests that a ton of Uranium-235, used as fuel, contains about 7.4E16 joules. So if you burned a ton of U-235 per pulse, and your reactor and laser were 100% efficent, you could received 65.12 joules per pulse per square meter of receiving lens/antenna.

Maybe you don't need a ton of U-235 per pulse. Maybe your lens can be very large and your receiver very sensitive. Still, it's worth noting that, according to this site the total combined production of U-235 by the US and USSR was only 1950 tons. That's 1950 bits of information or less, depending on your coding... so try not to be too wordy.

The above discussion took the long way around, just for fun, but you can dismiss this idea more quickly and easily by simply asking "where in the sky do I look to see a heavenly body (outside of this solar system) reflecting the light from the Sun?". If the answer is "nowhere", then there probably isn't any way for you to reflect a signal either.

I think I'll post this anonymously, in case I did something really stupid. Enjoy!

The CIP does not use the simple "printer controller" version of the i960 but the i960MX variant. The idea was to have a fault-tolerant system with hardware enforced capability-based security. The desire for fault tolerance is obvious but why would you want fine-grained security enforcement on an airplane? The concept was that you could have a tech with just a low-level clearance able to perform maintainance on a system that might contain more sensitive data.

Another reason for the i960 is that it supported some of Ada's features very well. For this type of system, you need both good speed and high code density. There is not a lot of memory on these systems as both board real estate and cooling are significant issues. You also want fast interrupt handling and timing predictability and the i960 was better at this than the "competition" of the time (e.g. R3000).

The CIP used many of the same ideas as the BiiN system (which also used the i960MX and an Ada OS.) Also note that the CIP is a backplane design: there are other processors in the mix including dedicated signal processors.

Defining a 'best' in electronic music is like defining a 'best' in rock....Electronic music has the most sub-genres of any music type I know of. Nevertheless, there are the major categories, but keep in mind that often the most talented artists do not confine their music to one type alone.

The most well known word for electronic music is probably techno, however techno != electronic, rather it is a type of electronic popular earlier in the 90s, while electronic music was growing more mainstream. You'll most often hear (for subgenres):

Techno | Trance | Drum n' Bass | Breakbeat | House | Jungle | Industrial | Ambient | Chill

often used with the modifiers 'hard', 'acid', or 'progressive' as in hard house, or progressive trance. In a lot of ways, these are self-explanatory...hard means that the music is rougher, and is usually faster paced; drum n bass consists of drum beats and heavy basslines.

Everyone here will try to tell you the best artist to listen to....but I can tell you for sure that I know no two people with the same taste in electronic music. You really have to discover for yourself the kind that interests you most. I suggest listening to some generic online radio if you want to know the mainstream electronica, most of which is a carryover from europe's tech-pop eurotrash trance. That's where you'll find the names most people will refer to you.

However, the best way to discover electronic music is to support your local scene. I would list true local websites, but being low-budget community supported as they are, I wouldn't subject them to the bandwidth of the slightest slashdotting. You can, however, find your nearest real record store (good electronic comes out on analog lps for real djs) and they will be happy to direct you to flyers and websites informing you of local happenings. Go out and hear some of your best local djs, and truly experience the music for yourself (many djs of different styles will play in the same night) - that will be the fastest path to knowing your interests. Also, once you find a dj you like, find out his/her influences, and that will point you to some excellent (lesser-known?) artists.

Some of the best cuts are the hardest to find, but there's a ton of great music out there. I wish you (all) luck, and PLUR!!

2002-07-12 12:59:21 Linux handheld vulnerabilities found (articles,pilot) (rejected) Its nice to know that there are some slashdotters out there trying to cover up these major vulnerabilities found in the Sharp Zaurus models. The people have a right to know. In an advisory posted Wednesday to a Syracuse University computer-science Web site, researchers said they had found vulnerabilities in Sharp's Zaurus SL-5500 and Zaurus SL-5000D handhelds. The flaws let attackers take control of the device's file system, giving them the power to overwrite files or lock the device so no data can be input through the keypad or touch screen.

Here are the results of a Google search for florida riley privacy supreme court. Google is your friend.

>250 WPM is not uncommon among most commercial secretaries

The world record holder for typing would have issues with your ideas of maxiumum typing speed.