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Randy Bank's program PLTMG uses fortran for computations and C code for graphics. It works quite well.

Other people who've weighed in on this subject include prominent researchers like Jpseph Goguen

Check out the teeth on that guy...

When I was in grad school, I did a paper on the Windows interface from an end-user design perspective, and it sucks. Surely there are other ways to handle a GUI that might make sense.

Other people who've weighed in on this subject include prominent researchers like Jpseph Goguen, Terry Winograd, and Eben Moglen.

Right now I'm not proposing a solution, either, but I am working on understanding the problem.

Actually, current evidence points to the immigration of H. Sapiens from Eurasia to the Americas accross the Berings Straights land bridge in three separate waves from 7,000 to 40,000 years ago. Thus 100% of the /. readers in North and South America are "descended from immigrants". The only difference is in the number of generations since the immigration.

2. The lanugae is not truely Turning complete. Which could have been fixed by taking some more time and making the language more complete.

On what basis do you make this claim? Turing (note spelling) completeness can be achieved in very simple languages (for example: Iota) and judging by the Cg language spec. I can't see any reason to doubt that Cg is.

Was there something specific you were thinking of?

Early AI assumed they could define the input output relations of their systems ignoring the details of the real world. I.e. people would write programs to pass the turing test. Wouldnt it make much more sense to build systems that learn from radio or video. Such systems might one day be able to learn to imitate people without any supervision.

People

Richard Stallman -
Eric S. Raymond -
Larry Wall

Linux Programming

Unix

Programming Methodologies

C Programming

C++ Programming

Perl Programming

Network Programming

Open Source

A good analysis of this story is here.
Also more info here.

• Your body fat doesn't just sit there. It makes estrogen-like hormones. Even in guys. The more of these you have circulating, the more likely your prostate (or your breasts--yes, males too) will develop a tumor.
• It correlates with colon cancer. Cause unknown.
• Fat-soluble anything gets stored in your fat. If you have lots of fat, any fat-soluble poisons (natural or man-made) that you consume have a place to stay. Less fat, less room for stored fat-soluble molecules.

The algorithm he used was NOT a genetic algorithm, although it could be called an evolutionary algorithm. comp.ai.genetic FAQ

I thought all printing companies were stationary, unless they operated from the back of a lorry.
Oh wait, you meant 'stationery'

'The Spelling Fascist'

This is your ammunition when users come and ask
why the wireless network is slower than the wired network with fewer users (preventing contention adds more overhead in wireless)

The right answer is: wireless networks are just plain slower than wired ones. Wired networks claim 100Mb/s access and wireless ones claim ~1/10 of that at 11Mb/s.

Actually CSMACA (as opposed to CSMACD the medium contention handling mechanism wired 802.3 networks use) really plays only a small part in the speed of .11 networks. It's the format of .11 physical layer packets and quality of current PHY layer chips which limits the throughput of most solutions to around 4 Mb/s.

New cards coming out from US Robitics using TI 802.11 silicon get consistent throughput close to 7Mb/s. Linksys also uses the TI ACX100 chipset, but doesn't have quite the marketing machine USR does.

If you need more speed you ought to check them out. Still not like a wired network but a hell of a lot better than 4 Mb/s.

This is your ammunition when users come and ask
why the wireless network is slower than the wired network with fewer users (preventing contention adds more overhead in wireless)

The right answer is: wireless networks are just plain slower than wired ones. Wired networks claim 100Mb/s access and wireless ones claim ~1/10 of that at 11Mb/s.

Actually CSMACA (as opposed to CSMACD the medium contention handling mechanism wired 802.3 networks use) really plays only a small part in the speed of .11 networks. It's the format of .11 physical layer packets and quality of current PHY layer chips which limits the throughput of most solutions to around 4 Mb/s.

New cards coming out from US Robitics using TI 802.11 silicon get consistent throughput close to 7Mb/s. Linksys also uses the TI ACX100 chipset, but doesn't have quite the marketing machine USR does.

If you need more speed you ought to check them out. Still not like a wired network but a hell of a lot better than 4 Mb/s.

Neale, who travelled 2946 km with his position being plotted online, and also Heather.
While I'm here, a related tangent: FLIP

Here's your friendly /. neighbourhood rhetoric wonk weighing in... I have to wonder what the semantics, grammar, and rhetoric of the Longhorn interface are going to be. In case you're wondering, the underlying ideational structures of the interface create its meaning, and make the difference between dumb and intelligent design, useful and frustrating, easy-to-learn and Adobe ;) and so on. So far I haven't been too impressed with much of anything MS, rhetoric-wise. Some pretty impressive people (not just weirdos like me) have also weighed in on the importance of this issue, like:

Terry Winograd
Joseph Goguen
Eben Moglen
Neil Randall

and a bunch of lesser lights including Neil Stephenson.

While I'm not against innovation, I have a hard time imagining that MS could actually come up with something more intelligent than these folks, all of whom, I notice, aren't working for MS. Even Neil Randall, who apparently took some money from MS to do a study works for the University of Waterloo (hi, Neil!).

Maybe I'm just a Jaded Cynic, but I have to wonder.

And it's not just travel time, it's the launch windows: you could only make the trip when Earth and Mars are somewhat close together. Making the journey when Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the sun is not very appealing.

A Physics class at UCSD has an online handout that describes a trip you can make without burning your engines all the way there. In other words, you break from Earth's gravity and get in an orbit that will land you and Mars in the same place sometime in the future. Problem is, the travel time is nine months. (One way.) And you can only leave earth for this journey once every 26 months, or you wont be in the right place.

The project homepage, with papers and downloads, is here.

You can read a piece about the 15-year-old kid behind it here.

This is not just the work of one individual; see http://activecampus.ucsd.edu

To toot my own horn, I helped them get started with a personal project of mine, which was mapping out the wireless access points at UCSD. See here: http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~ghamerly/wireless.html

I'm not directly involved with the active campus project, but they started by using some of my data. I got data by collecting it with my gps and laptop as I rode my bike around campus.

This is not just the work of one individual; see http://activecampus.ucsd.edu

To toot my own horn, I helped them get started with a personal project of mine, which was mapping out the wireless access points at UCSD. See here: http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~ghamerly/wireless.html

I'm not directly involved with the active campus project, but they started by using some of my data. I got data by collecting it with my gps and laptop as I rode my bike around campus.

The university is using a program called "Active Campus" that you can download for your Journada. You have to have an account, though, to track someone from the web. Here is their webpage.

NOTE: They are using PHP :)

The programs that have competed seem to have received far less attention.

I wonder what English for Norweigan is?
Perhaps "Norwegian"??? Jeez, at least use a spell-checker.

As in Webster's dictionary...

Ok, so i downloaded some of the mp3s and listened to them. I would have thought my soundcard died, except i was listening to _music_ a few minutes before and i could hear it just fine. That's when i looked at the spectum analyzer it was blank. No sound to hear. So i though "i could do better than that." So here's a recording of my Altec computer speakers cranked, outputting noise from the rest of my system. The persistent message-from-space style thumping is the jornada- i think that's from the usb connection to the cradle but it has an 802.11b card so it could be that. (If i removed the jornada from the cradle the thumping would become less frequent, but the undocking sound would blow the speakers.) At about 10 seconds i started moving my cordless mouse, which makes a (vaugely lightsabre-ish) humming noise and, odly, a bit of a thud every time it goes over a link in mozilla (fukt if i know why that happens). Perhaps it's not better, but you can at least hear it. And if you happen to be offering record contracts you can check my contact info page ;-)

Anyone intersted in what's going on in computer music should look into these software packages: max/msp, reaktor, supercollider, melodyne, ableton live, absynth, Audiomulch. While I also use stuff like Reason, these programs are more "forward thinking" and non-traditional.

I'll just drop another one into the list, namely PD. PD (or Pure Data if you prefer) is written by Miller Puckette who worked on Max, and has since re-written it as PD. Can be downloaded from here and there is a very useful site here.

PD is particularly nice because as well as letting midi + audio flow between the blocks in a particular patch, it will also let you handle 3d graphics primitives thereby letting you create generative video as well as sound.

Anyone intersted in what's going on in computer music should look into these software packages: max/msp, reaktor, supercollider, melodyne, ableton live, absynth, Audiomulch. While I also use stuff like Reason, these programs are more "forward thinking" and non-traditional.

I'll just drop another one into the list, namely PD. PD (or Pure Data if you prefer) is written by Miller Puckette who worked on Max, and has since re-written it as PD. Can be downloaded from here and there is a very useful site here.

PD is particularly nice because as well as letting midi + audio flow between the blocks in a particular patch, it will also let you handle 3d graphics primitives thereby letting you create generative video as well as sound.

We already have several graphical softsynths available:

Pd: http://www-crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/software.html

jMax http://www.ircam.fr/equipes/temps-reel/jmax/en/res ources.html

Also, there are also several well-respected text-oriented softsynths available:

Csound: http://www.csounds.com

sfront: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro/sa/sfman/user/ install/

The compressed video and sound are fine, as they are playable using the open-source code and can easily be considered the "usual form of the source".

From the GPL: "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it." Would you rather make modifications to a sound recording using a single stereo Ogg file, using a single stereo PCM WAV file, or using WAV files of the individual tracks (one per instrument) plus the script for the mixer?

I think in fact you are trying to make a bogus example to show that the GPL won't work. It works fine.

For terran bacteria withstanding vacuum is clearly more difficult than an atmosphere of carbon dioxide (Hmm we have that here), and inert gases. There is in fact an excess of material to feed upon. Not to mention that the lack of atmosphere on the moon results in an exposure to high levels of hard radiation.

I hope it's not too difficult for you to consider the possibilities of martian bacteria here on Earth.

In 1911, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes brought Mercury down to 4 Kelvin and witnessed a pure flow of un-resisted electricity.

As an undergraduate, I had a chance to perform this numerous times with various substances in my senior lab at UCSD. There is nothing more beautiful in physics than watching the resistance of your sample suddenly plummet to zero. It's a simple experiment that dramatically prooves a surprising, and still largely unexplained phenomenon.

For reference, Banias is the name of a river in northern Israel - one of the three sources of the river Jordan. It's a pretty area, and great for gentle hiking. There are nice pictures of it here, here, here and through Google image search

Its about these same ants & thier domination in cerain areasin the US. In argentina there is twice the genetic diversity as in California, probably same ratio to this supercolony too. This species apparently has developed the ability to take advantage of whats called a genetic bottle neck; something that to most species is detrimental.

It seems thier so succesfull they are killing off local ant species 10 times thier size, which is in turn killing off lizards and such that feed on those ants. Evolutions a bitch, eh?

here's a picture of the ants pattern of spread so far across the US

Its about these same ants & thier domination in cerain areasin the US. In argentina there is twice the genetic diversity as in California, probably same ratio to this supercolony too. This species apparently has developed the ability to take advantage of whats called a genetic bottle neck; something that to most species is detrimental.

It seems thier so succesfull they are killing off local ant species 10 times thier size, which is in turn killing off lizards and such that feed on those ants. Evolutions a bitch, eh?

here's a picture of the ants pattern of spread so far across the US

Cite that 90%.

I've heard that NASA spent 2 years developing a pen capable of writing in 0g. The russians used a pencil. Cite that 90%.

A lot of people have heard that. It's wrong.

That's exactly the point, don't just start acting, try the simplicity, haven't we learned anything with the fight Windows vs. Unix?

What does Win v. *nix have to do with removing CO2 from the atmosphere?

In case you missed it, Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide is rising exponentially, seaweed is limited in where it can grow, and growth is held in balance with the animals the eat it. Oh, something interesting about seaweed.

Simplicity is much better, try preserving seaweeds instead of build expensive CO2 extractors and planting trees.

Nature is NOT simple. Have a look at how simple glucose metabolism is, and then consider it's one of the most basic processes for the majority of animal life.

Oh, and don't forget about the Hydrogen-cells engine, now a days it can be produced, but due to financial problems it is not as popular as it should be.

It's called a "fuel cell", and it's not extremely simple, either.

I'll give you credit and say, "There's one more troll sated."

woof.

I'll bet his answer to the Middle East situation is situation is, "If you guys would simply stop fighting, everyone will be happier."
The world is not a simple place, despite being filled with simple people.

Hmm... perhaps I should have mentioned this in the story item, I suspected there might be some confusion around this.

The "broadband" in question is not for the transmission of data, but rather the range of the seismograph unit. Broadband seismometers can register sound waves with periods from one-tenth of a second to 100 seconds.

Seismologists get better data if their instruments can "listen" to a broad range of frequencies. This has always been problematic, in that their is a lot of noise in underwater settings, and that's why they go to the trouble of sticking the unit in a caisson imbedded in the seafloor.

In Northern California the only one which is on the other side of the fault is an instrument located on the Farallon Islands.

I think you're going a little over the edge. If people make themselves believe that a robot = a human, that's just another of the (infinite) ways in which people decieve themselves. Protecting people from self- or group-enforced deception would require closing all churches, TV stations, movie theatres, schools, and libraries, as well as shutting down the entire Internet. If some old foozball wants to believe that his {robot,cat,dog,parakeet} is a human and act as if this is the case, who cares?

Conversely, if people don't make themselves believe that an artificial construct is a human, but believe that an artifical construct is a human "accidentally" or "naturally", it has serious implications.

In the abstract he states:

"In the Demographic Prisoner's Dilemma, neither assumption is made: agents with finite vision move to random sites on a lattice and play a fixed culturally-inherited zero-memory strategy of cooperate (C) or defect (D) against neighbors."

After his citation of Michael Oliphant's paper (1994) Evolving Cooperation in the Non-Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: The Importance of Spatial Organization published in Brooks, R. and Maes, P. (eds.) Proceedings of the 4th Artificial Life Workshop, pp 349-352, The MIT Press. Epstein proceeds to attempt to justify his paper in comparison to Oliphant's genetic-algorithm paper by emphasizing his definition "culturally-inherited" as follows:

"Perhaps it is worth emphasizing that, in adopting this assumption of a fixed agent strategy, we are not claiming that human strategies are literally hard-wired genetically. Rather, for modelling purposes, we are assuming that they are culturally transmitted from parents to children--vertically transmitted--with high fidelity, like certain religious or ethnic affiliations, tastes, and native tongues. 19 Below we consider the effect of degradation (mutation) in this vertical transmission fidelity."

This definition, as well as from his other descriptions of his algorithms differ in no way from Oliphant's 'genetic' tendencies to defect or cooperate, except to make the environment 2 dimensional instead of one dimensional and to make spatial structure evolve out of variation in "sight" rather than a simple gaussian distribution of mating -- neither of which can be used to distinguish "culturally-inherited" from "genetically-inherited" traits.

While it is interesting to extend Oliphant's work on genetic algorithms to 2 dimensions, it sheds little new light on the subject.

What would have been far more interesting, especially from the Brookings Institute's charter, and from Epstein's position of responsibility for defense policy analysis there, would have been to do a genuine investigation of cultural transmission in the presence of genetic selection as well as cultural selection:

1. Use Oliphant's model for the evolution of communications given in Oliphant, M. (1996) The Dilemma of Saussurean Communication. BioSystems 37 (1-2), pp 31-38 as the basis for the genetic evolution of cultural transmission.
2. Include Oliphant's genetic evolution of tendencies toward defection vs cooperation.
3. Allow certain internal states to override the genetic predisposition toward defection or cooperation.

Then study under what conditions genotypes arise that tend to transmit 'cooperator culture' while they, themselves, transmit 'defector genes'.

The above extensions to Oliphant's one dimensional gaussian model should be sufficient to illuminate the nature of such 'meta-defection', although I'm sure variations and elaborations on his minimalist environmental model would become obviously interesting in short order.

In the abstract he states:

"In the Demographic Prisoner's Dilemma, neither assumption is made: agents with finite vision move to random sites on a lattice and play a fixed culturally-inherited zero-memory strategy of cooperate (C) or defect (D) against neighbors."

After his citation of Michael Oliphant's paper (1994) Evolving Cooperation in the Non-Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: The Importance of Spatial Organization published in Brooks, R. and Maes, P. (eds.) Proceedings of the 4th Artificial Life Workshop, pp 349-352, The MIT Press. Epstein proceeds to attempt to justify his paper in comparison to Oliphant's genetic-algorithm paper by emphasizing his definition "culturally-inherited" as follows:

"Perhaps it is worth emphasizing that, in adopting this assumption of a fixed agent strategy, we are not claiming that human strategies are literally hard-wired genetically. Rather, for modelling purposes, we are assuming that they are culturally transmitted from parents to children--vertically transmitted--with high fidelity, like certain religious or ethnic affiliations, tastes, and native tongues. 19 Below we consider the effect of degradation (mutation) in this vertical transmission fidelity."

This definition, as well as from his other descriptions of his algorithms differ in no way from Oliphant's 'genetic' tendencies to defect or cooperate, except to make the environment 2 dimensional instead of one dimensional and to make spatial structure evolve out of variation in "sight" rather than a simple gaussian distribution of mating -- neither of which can be used to distinguish "culturally-inherited" from "genetically-inherited" traits.

While it is interesting to extend Oliphant's work on genetic algorithms to 2 dimensions, it sheds little new light on the subject.

What would have been far more interesting, especially from the Brookings Institute's charter, and from Epstein's position of responsibility for defense policy analysis there, would have been to do a genuine investigation of cultural transmission in the presence of genetic selection as well as cultural selection:

1. Use Oliphant's model for the evolution of communications given in Oliphant, M. (1996) The Dilemma of Saussurean Communication. BioSystems 37 (1-2), pp 31-38 as the basis for the genetic evolution of cultural transmission.
2. Include Oliphant's genetic evolution of tendencies toward defection vs cooperation.
3. Allow certain internal states to override the genetic predisposition toward defection or cooperation.

Then study under what conditions genotypes arise that tend to transmit 'cooperator culture' while they, themselves, transmit 'defector genes'.

The above extensions to Oliphant's one dimensional gaussian model should be sufficient to illuminate the nature of such 'meta-defection', although I'm sure variations and elaborations on his minimalist environmental model would become obviously interesting in short order.

Last time I checked (around october -01) LuraTech had the only actually usable fractal compression product: LuraWave.

While the images shown are impressive (better than classic JPEGs anyway) and the fractal zoom is neat - fractal compression has not (yet) turned out to be very usable. And it seems unlikely to be usable for generic image compression. Building a general purpose fractal image compression/decompression engine has turned out to be quite difficult: The results (of compression) vary a lot and it requires a lot of processing power during compression. Research on fractal compression seems to have slowed down quite a lot since the 90s. Some links.

Wavelets (used by JPEG2000) are much easier to implement and provide more predictable results in speed and compression results. Progressive coding is also a very usable feature (with wavelets it provides the best possible image with the data already transferred).

Arthur T. Murray has apparently become the first person to build a system that demonstrates true artificial intelligence (A.I.). It is expected that his Mentifex system developed in Forth and JavaScript will soon pass the Turing Test, and will shortly thereafter enslave the entire human race.

I'm currently working on a final for a computer music class using Max/MSP. There's a fairly large research group at UCSD involved in computer music, and lots of other computer arts things.

http://www.crca.ucsd.edu/old/crca.html

If you're talking about all in one solutions, I would think that highly-programmable software such as pure data, being free and fairly (?) open would top the list, along with less open, but also powerful, packages like MAX/MSP. And if you're talking about Reason, I would think that all-in-one (cheap) packages such asOrion would deserve a mention.

I don't really use (beyo0nd experimentation) any of that software, though - sticking to my own buggy stuff and my hardware synths - so I'm no expert - but next time I update my own (very limited and crash-prone) software synth, it will certainly be a DirectX instrument and maybe a pure data object.

If anyone would bother to do a search on Google for "argo floats" you would also quickly discover that they submerge for ten days, come up for a half a day and then go back down, so this will at least reduce the risk of the things getting prop scars. They also don't stay in one place (another poster asked about this). In fact there is a page where you can track where the current floats are in real time. Pretty Cool actually.

You're actually off by about a factor of 10.

7.4 billion miles ~= 11.8 billion km

Which would mean that it actually takes 11 hours to get there at the speed of light... just like the radio message sent by NASA that was mentioned in the article. =) Doh!

Am I alone in finding the fact that there was a mistake making distance conversions in a thread about NASA rather funny?

Erm... Not necessarily. First, you've got to get the chip unharmed out of whatever packaging it's in. That can be made significantly difficult, not least in that you've got to make sure that the chip doesn't blow up at you.

I agree with most of what you write, but I think that you should emphasize the fact that there was a /hell/ of a lot more than "several towns" where people had decided anarchism was the best way to run their lives. In fact Catalonia and Aragon were almost exclusively anarchist and Barcelona itself was anarchist predominantly.

The other important thing that you don't emphasize is that Communists were active in trying to destroy the anarchists, there was a non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin and Uncle Joe wanted to keep Europe re-assured.,

It's also important not to forget the trotskyist POUM which was a small but active presence and also suffered from the May Day purges.

for more math than you probably want to look at, you can try:

http://sdphca.ucsd.edu/pdf_files/PHP04331.pdf

It's a paper on how to trap neutral atoms and it's pretty neat the way they get the fields to cancel out.

Okay. Many people are submitting news stories that report on the subject second or third-hand; here is the original paper:

UCSD Sleep Study, which appeared in the February 15, 2002 issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry (AMA journal).

Though I strongly believe in all of the posters who rightly point out that (causality -ne correlation), the article explicitly states that the conclusions take into consideration variables such as age, diet, exercise, previous health problems, and risk factors such as smoking, in comparing longevity among the participants

While yes, most claims over global warming and the like are vastly exaggerated, some of what you say is not strictly correct.

1. Not sure. One thing I do know in the time I have spent doing atmospheric physics is that people are smarter than that. Temperature data is FAR FAR FAR more than a few thermometers in cities

2. There is an experiment called ATOC which has been doing just that for several decades. While this mightnt yet be long enough, the trend seen so far is for warming.

3. This is no longer correct. The satellite data to which you refer has more recently been analysed, and shows a warming effect. I believe the effect that was ignored was the spiralling in of the satellites over time, but im not sure.

4. Eh? millions of years? and you can see a cause and effect? What's more, your next point contradicts this one. CO2 and water are known greenhouse gasses. Even mars is warmed by a few degrees by its atmosphere.

5. Yes, there is a known dampening effect on greenhouse gasses. The other one is the warmer it is, the faster C02 dissolves in the ocean, leaching out as rock.

Zero-knowledge proofs are quite interesting because they're so counter-intuitive. See here for an explanation of what a zero-knowledge proof is. Google around for more.

To let people know the costs of some of these journals, here are a couple of sites to look at.

First, a general overview of costs in the mid-90s (done in 2000, so just imagine how expensive they are now!) can be found here.

A more recent review of chemistry journals can be found here. It is amazing to think that some of these journals cost ~$4.50 a page (neuroscience journals are even more expensive!).