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Sigh. Here is the CORRECT link to the article on the validity of the Supreme Court's behavior during the 2000 election dispute.

Webkit is forked of khtml dickhead. They are forced to give it away. If they where not there would be no code for you to look at.

The name refers to Bayesian networks.

A Bayesian approach to spam filtering

A simple mathematical introduction

This sounds similar to the devices that were used in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I have been anxiously awaiting these sorts of gadgets ever since seeing that movie. With a few extra advances in holographic technology this could lead to input devices that a perfectly tailored to your body shape and preferences.

This product should help end the debate of closed source or open source applications being more or less secure.

The feet of man who uses hypotheticals may no longer be aground.

Never argue with a drunkard, a woman, or a fool.

Proof by analogy is fraud.

Actually it's a criminal offense if it falls under NET, CTEA, or DMCA. It used to be a civil offense if there was no quid pro quo exchange, and each civil violation would have made a person liable for some actual loss, though it wasn't something that was enforced.

But after the MIT BBS case, which had to be dropped because there was no quid pro quo, the law was changed to account for one to many, but it was written in such a way as to criminalize equally one to many (new) and one to one violations (which were just civil, and probably unprocecutable). Thanks to this, if you tape a TV show for your mom (or a single song, or even sing her "happy birthday" in public) you have committed a federal crime which carries more significant penalties than manslaughter in most states.

There is such a tremendous disconnect between what people think is right and fair and what the law states, that it should serve as a red flag for constitutional review. (Lessig's outcome indicates that this may be futile without a major shift in perception.)

What one should watch for is an attempt by the copyright industry to create an obfuscatory sea change in the perception of copyright, steering it entirely free of it's constitutional mandate. They have been fairly successful in getting people to refer to guerilla antitrust as "theft," and have harped ad nauseum their view that copying a song is tantamount to walking into a record store and stealing it.

But saying so doesn't make it so. They are so painfully, obviously, hilariously wrong, that most people don't even try to think about it and soon it will require a child (or Thomas Jefferson) to point out the obvious: if I walk into a record store and take a CD, the CD is gone. If I copy the a song, the original is still there, "as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

A person may "own" a copyright, but that does not mean they "own" the information that is copyritten. You cannot own data, man. We, the People of the United States of America, to promote the progress of science and useful arts, grant for a limited time an "embarassing monopoly" to authors and inventors.

This is a critical distinction which has been carefully papered over by the entertainment industry and by their employees in congress: copyright is not and never was about protecting property or profit, it is a means to an end: the promotion of progress and science. It is constitutional only so much as it achieves that end. And it "may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody."

(Thomas Jefferson)

Not even.

Most game playing programs do not use rule-based reasoning like expert systems. They use look-head trees, the minimax algorithm with alpha-beta pruning.

lim --> ***

That's mathematical notation for the current AI situation: "The stars are the limit."

Chess-playing is not the definitive measure of man or machine. Rather, thinking is.

AI as a Whole has got a lot of Unified AI Systems going -- major endeavors racing into the Future towards the Technological Singularity.

The AI textbook AI4U may be ahead of its time in presenting machine intelligence, so future generations are left with the high-philosophy AI4Udex to delve into the deepest possible study of the now unstoppable Artificial Intelligence.

Contrary to public belief, this has in fact been done many times in the short history of AI. ALVINN was the first system that I learned of in my college AI classes, but a quick search on google returned many more.

CMU ALVINN

US VISTA

Temple Report on Autonomous Vehicle Systems

Do you use GOTO?

Changing the variable (object) value is another source of common mistakes, which must be eliminated. It's solved in Functional Programming

http://astro.temple.edu/~kmr/Chauffe2.mp3

This one lists 1994-1996.

And for good measure, here is a cached NY Times article listing major MS products their main competition and how they got the product. It's a little dated (from Oct. 1998) for example, it lists Visio as a PowerPoint competitor.

I'd love to spend some time doing a more thorough review of all their past acquisitions and what happened to the technology they bought but I suspect I won't have the time so if this is a starting point for some one else to do so, great. Anecdotally I'm afraid a fair number of their acquisitions were to eliminate the competition and kill the technology rather than actually acquire the technology to improve their products and I would love to see a factual assessment of their acquisitions.

Please write and publish a paper about it!

Such rhetoric, oh my.

This is a major breakthrough in computer science.

It also is quite unlikely, since Ahmdahl's law is a trivial observation that is completely independent of parallelization or even software engineering (it also applies to hardware design or even accounting). Basically, it says: if initially only 10% of X (CPU cycles, money, whatever you are trying to save) is spent in the part you are optimizing, there is an upper bound of 10% to the X you can save.

Sorry, wrong law. You seem to be thinking "90% of the time in 10% of the code", a rule of thumb that nobody to my knowledge has ventured to dignify with the term "law". Amdahl's Law (which IMHO doesn't deserve the dignity either) was an attempt to make a statement about the limitations of parallel computing. Relying on wrong assumptions, he drew wrong conclusions, and in the event, parallel clusters have gone on to scale nearly linearly into the tens of thousands of processors, a result he would have liked to have proved impossible.

Read more here.

Slight semantic fix -- I wrote tic-tac-toe last semester so I thought I'd point this out. The search is "min-max" - the method of speeding the search is "alpha-beta pruning" (or "cutoff", whatever). Here's a brief explanation.

He's quoted in the article, and it's worth reading his stuff. His home page is here, and there's an archive of his ABC Who's Counting columns here..

Go read 'em.

It's almost too bad that I saw this so late. Given how much the math books of John Allen Paulos have entertained me. I really could have done some good karma whoring.

Many of them are about the bastardization of statistics, others not. My favorite is Mathmatics and Humor, short, interesting. Most are similar in that respect and pretty much all of them are written for the layman who doesn't have time for homework. All the ones I have were easy, quick, reads. And some of them I even paid full price for (normally I just pick up interesting looking stuff from half price books).

Most things have a qualitative and a quantitative aspect, the difference between how and how much. Math really isn't any different.

In that way, math with history might intersect with the history of Pi, and the solution of Fermat's Last Theorem (Unlocking the Secret of an Acient Mathmatical Problem, by Amir D. Aczel), both of which have been turned into interesting books.

But why math? Physics can certainly have a similar bent. And there are quite a few books that seek to explain the mysteries of quantum mechanics, and relativity in simpler, less rigorous, and less tedious, terms. Many of them aren't even written by kooks! To say nothing of those books that cronicle some of the more interesting discoveries that are crying to be made into a Nova special if not an actual movie. The book about the COBE experiment, I think it was called First Light, comes to mind. The personal drama is engaging enough to keep someone interested even if one finds the science, impenetrable, which I would think unlikly.

For whatever reason I dislike the vast majority of fiction, so I browse at Half Price Books and buy $30 or so of math and science books.

But it's all about what one hopes to gain. I don't hope to build a supercollider in my back yard, even if I could afford it and the DOE would sign off on it (and they might!). I seek more illumination about the world, and larger universe I get to live in, that, I can get from a book.

am I the only one who thought of insecticons as soon as I saw "fuel-eating bugs"?

• The Meaning of Life
• Ethics of Socrates, Xenophon, and Plato
• Philosophical Challenges to the Individual

Now THAT'S what I call "deep linking".

And you thought you were joking.

TOYNBEE IDEAS IN KUbricK'S 2001
RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

Ladies and gents, I think we have another WWDN fan!

Weird

You can find an artists conception of what these robots might look like in action here.

Don't you mean http://www.math.temple.edu/~cow?

Edward Shorter is the history of medicine chairman at the University of Toronto that is quoted in the article. Here is a page that seems like a review of his work on RSI. Mildly useful.

From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era

The Kennedy Family and the Story of Mental Retardation

Bedside Manners

So, the point of these links is this: This dude's whole career is based on bashing illness. He seems to think that almost any illness or disease is in the mind.

The pain in your wrist, elbow, arm, and back is fake. Do you hear me? Fake! Just ask Edward...

just go HERE

Trust me, it isn't goatshit or whatever

Having known only one reality, the young and techno-savvy can't quite imagine any other

He likes to make blanket statements about things he clearly has only the faintest knowledge of. To claim that there is no sense of real-world politics in the programming/hacking world is just plain idiotic. A better metaphor would be Prof. David Post's essay about Jefferson's Moose, and how people in the New World (be it physical or transcendental like the Internet) forge a path into the ensuing philosophical issues, like politics. If there is any hostility toward real-world politics in the Slashdotty community it is because it reflects exactly the same mindless tyranny espoused by George III over his Colonies. Such fascism is retroactive, not proactive. There is no need to look at the "real physical world" as some sort of more sophisticated place.

Not to suggest that physical issues don't matter, but I think the relationship Katz suggests is completely false. Take guys like Richard Stallman--he seems to have plenty of testosteroney motivation and his politics are precisely the opposite of Katz' description of the technocratic world.

This techno-elite, taking sophisticated knowledge of technology for granted, has lost touch with the vast numbers of people in the world -- the elderly, the poor, foreign-born -- who don't share their skills and confidence.

UTTER BALDERDASH. There are still liberal programmers. Jeez, doesn't everyone remember being picked on rather than praised for knowing computers? Didn't that turn anyone else into a Socialist?? :)

I almost think this essay is more about getting holier-than-thou over his Slashdot detractors rather than making a real statement about, well, anything. Too bad it makes him look like a big idiot to anyone who pays attention to politics.

On the other hand, I notice that all my 'progressive' tirades that a liberal might find insightful are never marked up--whereas flames of my philosophy usually are. Maybe Katz is right after all and I'm the only person here who can code in Java and also support society instead of corporations.

Ah well. I'll probably get a -1 and prove Katz right after all.

A vote for Gore is a vote for Bush. Nader in 2000!

The Rete match algorithm made rule-based systems computationally practical. Discovered by Charles Forgy in 1979 or so, it was probably the most important event in the expert systems boom of the 1980's.

here's a link to the fatbrain profile for the book A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper by John Allen Paulos.

Mr. Pierce said it wasn't easy, I think that his point is that it's possible. If there's demand, the market will make privacy easier. I think that there's demand and investors seem to agree. A good thing, IMO, because I strongly doubt that regulators would also agree.

Professor David Post wrote "What Larry Doesn't Get: A Libertarian Response to Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" just recently. It's quite a good read*.

While it hasn't gotten nearly the net.hype Professor Lessig's work did (Post is not from Hahvahd, after all, I think he's from Temple) but I think it's well-done. (I'd be interested in any Lessig rebuttals to that Post rebuttal, though.)
JMR

* I assume that my mention of the dreaded "L. word" will cause downward moderation, and I also don't care. :)