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Aqumix.1017 net.micro utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ittvax!qumix!msc Fri Feb 19 12:18:04 1982 IBM PC I am trying to connect an IBM personal computer as a terminal to my vax. I have the asynchronous communications package from ibm but it is not good.

It is written in basic and is so slow that the speed of writing to the screen is about 600 baud. Also there does not appear to be any way for the vax to erase things from the screen. A backspace code from the vax is sent to the screen as a blotch (actually it looks like a tiny ace of spades). Also it uses a peculiar protocol for transferring files involving XOFF CR and XON CR which I think is going to present difficulties.

Has anyone tackled these problems yet or am I the guinea pig? I think I'm going to have to write a new terminal emulator program which is not in basic. Naturally I would be ecstatic if someone has done it already and could mail me a copy of their program.

As to the pc itself, it is a nice little box and the documentation is pretty reasonable. I have the color graphics controller, the epson printer and controller, a second disk drive, an async comms. card and full expansion of the memory on the mother board.

A word of warning: don't buy one from computerland. Mine was ordered on November 6 last year. In January I received a cpu and a keyboard with the color graphics card and the async comms. card. A b/w monitor and its controller were also ordered but have yet to arrive. We didn't even get a PC-DOS disk with the initial order. We had to badger our local computerland into copying one of their disks for us. The printer didn't arrive until a few days later and the second disk drive only arrived two days ago. A 64k memory expansion card has yet to arrive. Of course I really don't know if the problems are ibm's or computerland's. You have to make up your own mind.

In short the pc was completely unusable when first delivered due to missing key components.

Mark Callow

There are already a number of useful Free-as-in-Speech add-ons to proprietary library tools, such as Prospero and DBA. These are largely possible because they use the standardized bits in the tools to which they add value: z39.50, TIFF, etc. As you suggest, it's definitely a niche which is proven to work, with these small solutions paying off big-time to many institutions. This might seem off-topic, but the more of these small tools we have the easier it gets to start hooking them together into environments like the one the original ? poster is asking about.

I think the answer to the "why's Z so slow?" dilemma is like what Larry Wall (I think) said about Perl and Python: that Perl's worse than Python because people wanted it worse. Work on z39.50 began _long_ before SQL92 hit the markets in working products.

A key area where many vendors and publishers are starting to work together around new open standards and even code is content linking, mostly because they have to. They don't necessarily want to, but _not_ allowing linking to external sources diminishes value, and they're all catching on finally. So there's some hope, but we've got to keep hacking to keep them honest. Trust me, it works -- when a long-proprietary-code/data-vending .com sees 600 lines of GPL'd perl which can kill off their product line, they're more than willing to start offering up more interoperability if not freeing up their code. It's better for everyone.

As a researcher in pattern recognition who also manages a band, this topic holds particular interest for me.

I haven't read the article but it would surprise me if this method was more effective than a frequency/power spectrum (the distribution of sound energy over all frequencies) or even a basic neural net classifier (both mentioned by previous commentors) at stylistic classification of music. Fractal dimension reduces the whole waveform to a single number; a frequency/power spectrum contains a lot more information. (For the fractally challenged: a straight line has a dimension of 1, and a solid plane a dimension of 2; a music waveform has some fractional dimension between 1 and 2... it's roughly a measure of the regular "squiggliness" of the waveform. Fractal dimension is not necessarily a measure of self similarity as is implied by the news brief; it's just that the self similar patterns that we popularly call "fractals" have an interesting fractal dimension, like 2 2/3 or something.)

I think music recognition technology is the key to resolving the conflict between artists who want to make money off their recordings and fans who want to sample a wide variety. It's a tough business folks; Metallica doesn't deserve much sympathy but most bands are extremely exploited by record companies and deserve to make as much money as possible off their art. Someday releasing a record will also entail releasing a host of net-bots that look for unauthorized, publicly available copies of the music.

Stylistic classification is not that hard. Much harder is reliably recognizing a particular piece of music (i.e. creating a bot that scours the net, looking for copies of "Master of Puppets"). It's easy to fool a frequency power spectrum classifier, for example, by tacking on some tones to the end of the track, or reequalizing the track, or adding some low frequency inaudible noise.

This is where AI steps in. The biggest feather in the cap of AI is the technology used in 95% of all speech recognition systems: Hidden Markov Models (they are probabilistic versions of deterministic finite state automata, for those geeks out there who have been subjected to the torture of a class in computer science theory). The same technology can be used to identify pieces of music.

I have three similar questions:

Will the MindPixel Digital Mind Modeling Project be open source? Will GAC be an open consciousness? Will your database of MIST stimuli be freely available for the use of other artificial consciousness researchers?

I've discerned some of your intent from the arcondev archives and from Jeff Elman's Finding Structure in Time. You seem to believe that the amount of effort required to carry out your experiment mandates some kind of economic incentive structure to get people to participate; as I understand it, you intend to issue participants stock in MindPixel Corp proportional to their contribution, and then share the profits from any commercial exploitation of the result.

I have two problems/arguments with this:
1) Economic reward as the sole means to incent participation ("production") is an unprovable axiom underlying most economic theory. It totally disregards the human needs to create, communicate, and form communities. The success of the open source software movement has proven this assumption wrong. People can and will participate for other reasons; in fact, the commercial character of your project may disincent some people, especially the audience here. Have you considered other incentives? (I'm not taking issue with the incentive, but rather that it seems to be based in part on keeping the results private.)
2) You yourself have emphasized Elman's point about the "importance of starting small." I think this statement and his initial failures also indicate the importance of starting multiple times. If your project is closed, it will prevent (to borrow a software development term) "forking" the consciousness. A single GAC will tell you less than many GACs.

• From "Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present" (fascinating reading all the way through - check out the part about iAPX 432), we have "IBM's choice, the 8086". Read this on an empty stomach. It's fairly incredible.
• A note from the Usenet Oldnews archive - ucbvax.2667 - commentary contemporary to the imminent release of IBM's PC. Interesting mainly because of when it was written.

Surgery based on this technology would be a bad idea! Keep in mind that the human body changes over time. This is living tissue, not a machine! Most eyes go from normal or nearsighted (whichever the case may be) in their youth to (slightly) farsighted in their middle age and get worse from there.

I expect that the slight local aberrations which this adaptive optics technology measures and corrects change even more over time. That would make surgical correction a bad move, as the correction would develop into more aberrations over time.

Also, current LASIK and other laser surgery techniques are rather crude and can leave you with less than perfect vision. Furthermore, they are known to introduce glare, halos and other gost images of things with very high contrast. i.e. the quality of local visual perfection actually goes down, especially in the periphery. You'd most likely need more adaptive optics after LASIK than before.

Laser surgery produces scar tissue in an otherwise perfectly clear tissue which had a lot of clean, local structure (neat hexagonal patches, for example). I just can't see why healed, scarred tissue should be superior to what grows naturally, even if imperfectly.

Finally, adaptive optics improve vision especially in low light situations. LASIK is known to make your eyes worse under these same conditions. Doesn't sound like a good match to me.

Frankly, I prefer an external device that can be periodically retuned to perfectly (or as closely as can be, at least) match the current state of my eyes.

Check the I Know Why Refractive Surgeons Wear Glasses site for more details on laser eye surgery.

That wouldn't last long.

One of my favorite professors here at UC San Diego does a ton of interesting work regarding AI in search engines. Some are document based (like find things related to this document) and others have to do with merging to delated document heierarchies. And still some others use GAs to do protien recognition and docking. Very cool stuff. His web page is here , but the page looks a little out of date. And if you want any more info, send me or him an email.
Best of luck,
Ben
bshapiro@ucsd.edu

One of my favorite professors here at UC San Diego does a ton of interesting work regarding AI in search engines. Some are document based (like find things related to this document) and others have to do with merging to delated document heierarchies. And still some others use GAs to do protien recognition and docking. Very cool stuff. His web page is here , but the page looks a little out of date. And if you want any more info, send me or him an email.
Best of luck,
Ben
bshapiro@ucsd.edu

Hypertext Webster Gateway: Moira

From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) (web1913)
Moira NL., fr. Gr. ?. (Greek Myth.) The deity who assigns to every man his lot.

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"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16

These ones are snazzier, sure, but the Selsius worked find and sounded great...

-D.

I wanted a more precise definition of Public Domain, and the part that grabbed me was "Public domain means no copyright -- no exclusive rights."

Why should we give exclusive rights to a singular organization when the real idea is to share it with everyone?

I don't think giving the FSF copyrights is the only way that they can protect free software. I think I'd like to see them as a watchdog for public domain software

The big problem with chess is that the tree is VERY large- how big isn't known but estimates vary over a large range (see netchess and wolfram mathworld). There are certainly more chess positions than there are atoms in the universe, but the lines that lead to them are mostly worthless, so they don't matter and can be pruned away. Let's pick a tree size of 10^60-10^70 for arguments sake.

This is way beyond the scope of even distributed computing like SETI. It's usually reckoned that chess is unsolvable by brute force.

Normal computer techniques can handle about trees with about 10^20 positions or so, depending on how much hardware you can throw at it, and how long you wait.

However there are a couple of approaches that can reduce the exponent by a factor of 2 each in chess:

• Quantum computing
• Alpha-Beta pruning

As another poster noted, the current state of the art is 7 bits. You would need probably need 100s of thousands of bits to do chess. And the cycle time for current computers are measured in seconds rather than nanoseconds, but then again no optimisation for speed has been done AFAIK.

Finally it depends on the actual size of the chess tree. It may very well be there is a forced checkmate at say, move 40, in which case we would find it. But if there are only draws by repetition, under perfect play, the tree probably becomes impossibly large even with quantum computers.

Still, a search that said that there were no forced wins in say, the first 40 moves would be suggestive of a draw.

At any rate, I don't think that there's any reason to believe that instant-Inernet-communication will cause a language shift any different than that of folks of varying cultural backgrounds living in the same town. Despite the profound cultural mixing in New York (esp. in comparrision to, say, North Platte, Nebraska), you'll note that New Yorker English and North Platte English (save for some few vocab differences) are basically the same-- certainly not diffrent dialects, let alone different langauges.

Sure I'll be more specific :

J. L. Elman, Finding Structure in Time, Cognitive Science, 14:179-211, 1990. Simulation: ``Discovering lexical classes from word order'' pp 194-203. Jeff Elman's hompage is here, where you can find a copy of this paper in compressed postscript. You can see in this paper, NN's discovering lexical class, generalizing, and perdicting words. There is a simple HTML overview of Elman's paper here

I collected 450,000 MindPixels on the web in 1995/96. I've trained SRN's using that corpus and used PCA to look at the SRN's internal structure. Though the network did perform well (due the the small sample), it's structure is a complex fractal. (I should note, trained the network on a constrained prediction task; where after every word it saw, it had to predict only true or false)

And as for how I would generalize consciousness from such a system... Presenting MindPixels to a system is a Binary Turing Test (see my article: K. C. McKinstry, The Minimum Intelliget Signal Test, An Alternative Turing Test, Canadian Artificial Intelligence, Issue 41), that is much more objective than a traditional TT. It gives a probability that a system is human, that is reproducable. Thus, if I get a number back that is statistically indistinguishable from human, I must logically assume the system is human. That is feels, lives a life and is conscious.

A giant corpus of MindPixels collected and validated from a large number of people is a digitial model of self and environment. A NN experiencing the model, would be experiencing an average human life, in all it's details. If we ever hope to make a conscious machine, we need to get our experience into machines. AI's goal until now has been to make some sort of bootstrap system that would go out into the world and learn to be conscious just like children do. The AI community has shuned the 'code it all' philosophy (with the notable exception of CYC) as just too much work. But, the web changes all that. Now, instead of a small number of programmers trying to code a large amount of world knowledge (CYC), we can take an enourmous amount of 'programmers' each entering a minimum amount of consensus human experience (a MindPixel) and actually get the job done.

So, oh wise master of the universe, you would like to explain to me *exactly* how the force we call gravity works, and why this guy's attempts to use superconducting, supercoold materials to deflect that force will ultimately prove fruitless.

Next, I'll bet you'll tell me that there's no such thing as "left-handed material".

PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE
The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News
Number 476 March 24, 2000 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein

TOPSY TURVY: THE FIRST TRUE "LEFT HANDED" MATERIAL
has been devised by scientists at the University of California at San Diego.
In this medium, light waves are expected to exhibit a reverse Doppler
effect. That is, the light from a source coming toward you would be
reddened and the light from a receding source would be blue shifted. The
UCSD composite material, consisting of an assembly of copper rings and
wires (see figure at www.aip.org/physnews/graphics), should eventually
have important optics and telecommunications applications.

More details here.

Finally all us southpaws have a material we can call our own.

--

A qubit, as the article says, is a quantum bit. All this means is that there is some quantum system/subsystem where some quality, like spin or energy, can be decomposed into precisely to two states. An ananology would Fourier's theorem: Broadly speaking, it says that you can decompose any "nice" function into an infinite sum of sines and cosines. The quantum world is cool because often, just two basis functions, up and down, are needed to completely (a pun, for you math people) describe a space in which that numerical quality resides.

Such is the case here. The scientists, if I am not mistaken, are manipulating spin. Spin is a fundamental quantity in "classical" quantum mechanics; the spin quality of spin 1/2 particles, like electrons, can be wrestled out of special relativity (first finagled by Dirac); arbitrary spin falls out of special relativity + quantum field theory (if you know group theory, it's pretty simple :-).

Now, I think this experiment uses spin 1/2 particles, i.e. particles whose total "intrinsic angular momentum" is equal to h/(4*pi), where h is Planck's constant. The cool thing about spin 1/2 particles is that their space is completely described by two components, up and down. This is because h/(2*pi) is the smallest angular momentum quantum you can have, so in order for the possible states to be "legal," the differences between any pair of them must be a multiple of h/(2*pi). But since spin 1/2 particles have a total spin of h/(4*pi), the only possible states are -h/(4*pi) and +h/(4*pi).

So what's the deal with NMR? Well, NMR is nothing more than a method for manipulating/measuring spins/magnetic states using electromagnetic radiation. So, if the molecules in question are placed in a magnetic field, then there will be an energy difference between the up, down, and "mixed" states contingent on the alignment of spins w.r.t. to the direction of the magnetic field. This is as if it were possible for a compass to get stuck in the "south" position -- there's some potential energy caught up in there. In the quantum world, one can shoot a photon a system in the "north," or up, state and have it jump to "south," or down, or high-energy state. The simple requirements for the photon: It must have an energy equal to the difference in energy of the two states; and, it must carry the appropriate amount of angular momentum, important for more complex situations. So, these scientists have been able to manipulate bits by shooting radio waves at'em.

So why are 7-qubit systems important? Because, in addition to the "external" or ambient magnetic field, each little particle that has a magnetic moment also generates a magnetic field. Having a "strongly interacting" multi-qubit system gives you a much more reliable bit, because when some flip due to a photon, the stragglers are more likely to flip as well. This will help avoid the dreaded mixed states that can screw with your data in untraceable ways. As noted by Wineland of NIST, this cute strategy has sharply diminishing returns past 15.

The "trans-crotonic" acid is probably just some acid which is transparent to the NMR frequencies they're working at, and is nice all around for refractions, etc.

There is a simple, but informative page at UCSD that has pretty pictures showing what I've been blabbering about ...

I hope I've been helpful w/o being condescending!


*** Proven iconoclast, aspiring epicurean ***

League for Programming Freedom -- organization that opposes software patents and user interface copyrights.

Free Patents Pretty much what the name says. Patent reform. No software patents. Etc.

Patently Absurd-- Great, but old, article from Wired about the Patent office.

HTH

The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the "imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B.

The Turing Test is a slight adaptation of this imitation game. There are three players: an interrogator, a human being and a computer. The interrogator is connected to one person and one machine via a terminal, therefore can't see them. The interrogator's task is to find out which of the two candidates is the machine, and which is the human, only by asking them questions. If the machine can "fool" the interrogator, it is intelligent.

FYI, there is also another competition called the Loebner Contest, where a $100,000 prize is offered to the author of the first program to pass this Turing test. Bots have entered this competition often, with varied degrees of results.

Well, if you go back really far, it's not the same at all. Take a look at:

http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-New s/index.html

They're the usenet logs from 1981-1982. Life was beautiful

It seems the assumptions of the no-hidden variables theorem are too strong to rule out all kinds of hidden-variables theories.

PS: "Finite Precision measurement nullifies the Kochen-Specker theorem"

I found a page on bioluminescence after reading an an article on using bioluminescent dinoflagellates to monitor fluid flow about a month ago. I think most bioluminescent organisms use very similar proteins.

Something is fishy. (Pun pun pun) Why in the world do these people need to take that many expensive fishing trips? Luciferin-luciferase systems are understood. In fact, they are easy to buy and culture. Is there something special about jellyfish?

The toys are very cool, but this technology seems much less rare and expensive than the article implies.

I found a page on bioluminescence after reading an an article on using bioluminescent dinoflagellates to monitor fluid flow about a month ago. I think most bioluminescent organisms use very similar proteins.

Something is fishy. (Pun pun pun) Why in the world do these people need to take that many expensive fishing trips? Luciferin-luciferase systems are understood. In fact, they are easy to buy and culture. Is there something special about jellyfish?

The toys are very cool, but this technology seems much less rare and expensive than the article implies.

hmmmm. as a moderation choice, i like it. but my all time most-wished-for moderation category would be Retromingent .

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"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16

1. To produce, as a cause or agent; to cause to be.
2. So great a body such exploits to effect. --Daniel.
3. To bring to pass; to execute; to enforce; to achieve; to accomplish.
4. To effect that which the divine counsels had decreed. --Bp. Hurd.
5. They sailed away without effecting their purpose. --Jowett (Th. ).

Syn: To accomplish; fulfill; achieve; complete; execute; perform; attain. See {Accomplish}.

1. To act upon; to produce an effect or change upon.
2. As might affect the earth with cold heat. --Milton.
3. The climate affected their health and spirits. --Macaulay.
4. To influence or move, as the feelings or passions; to touch.
5. A consideration of the rationale of our passions seems to me very necessary fo r all who would affect them upon solid and pure principles. --Burke.
6. To love; to regard with affection. [Obs.]
7. As for Queen Katharine, he rather respected than affected, rather honored than loved, her. --Fuller.
8. To show a fondness for; to like to use or practice; to choose; hence, to frequ ent habitually.
9. For he does neither affect company, nor is he fit for it, indeed. --Shak.
10. Do not affect the society of your inferiors in rank, nor court that of the gre at. --Hazlitt.
11. To dispose or incline.
12. Men whom they thought best affected to religion and their country's liberty. - -Milton.
13. To aim at; to aspire; to covet. [Obs.]
14. This proud man affects imperial ?way. --Dryden.
15. To tend to by affinity or disposition.
16. The drops of every fluid affect a round figure. --Newton.
17. To make a show of; to put on a pretense of; to feign; to assume; as, to affect ignorance.
18. Careless she is with artful care, Affecting to seem unaffected. --Congreve.
19. Thou dost affect my manners. --Shak.
20. To assign; to appoint. [R.]
21. One of the domestics was affected to his special service. --Thackeray.

Syn: To influence; operate; act on; concern; move; melt; soften; subdue; overcome; pretend; assume.

What a chump. And he wants to be President? Yeah, right...

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"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16

I'm the sysadmin for the PCASSO Project, which also handles medical information over the web. Our system is different: we do lab results, operative notes, demographics, and an audit trail. The next step in our development would be to implement messaging and/or multimedia.

If you take a look at our website and our publications, I think you will agree that the security strategy that the development team implemented is quite rigorous. We do three-factor auth (user/password, digital cert, challenge-response), and use non-anonymous SSL, so that both the server and the client have to be authenticated by digital cert. We also use Java for the client, instead of just a web browser, so we can protect the client enviroment a little more against trojan horses and to make the digital certs easier.

I can understand why you wouldn't want to do certs. They're difficult, require that you use something other than plain web pages, and require a time-delay to mail or pick up in person. But a simple challenge-response system shouldn't be that hard to implement.

The other main thing you should think about, and that PCASSO spent a lot of effort on, is the server security. We used a B2-rated OS (Trusted DG/UX) and implemented MAC labels in the database and OS. This is harder than using a standard OS and not labeling (the former sysadmin and I have an article in the October issue of SysAdmin magazine about some of the things we dealt with), but is far more secure.

--
-Esme

ought to be on the list. Read about it here.

There's a lot of good information over at the UCSD Shiley Eye Center. One of my good friend's wife is going to get Intacs next Wednesday at Shiley, we'll see how it goes. And if it works well, I may be next in line!

What I meant about "sucks to be him" was the attention to the "six female" students. There's this one fella that doesn't get any attention/credit to the project, just the rest of his team.

There are many (that is, isn't not uncommon) student run projects developing, designing, building, and even managing small scale spacecraft/space instrument projects. Check out the Space Grant College and specifically, the Colorado Space Grant Consortium. There have been an increasing number of females involved here, I might add.

And I do not get too upset with general accomplishments of an all male team, but rather get upset at what are specifically advertised as an all particular-gender team. That is, I expect women to be able to do as much as any man would do. Making a big deal out a women doing something tells me that you didn't think they could accomplish the task. It's this mentality I dislike. Apologies, I realize my comment was a little vague.

Again, I'm glad to see this work. I can't wait until this level of work occurs in high schools. There are some high schools that are beginning to be involved in these projects, so there's encouragement.

~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"

Some medical records are already online.

For example, I'm the sysadmin for a project called PCASSO (Patient-Centered Access to Secure Systems Online), which is led by Dixie Baker at SAIC and Dan Masys at UCSD. The basic idea is secure access for providers and patients over the net. We're currently at the end of a three-year grant, and are in the middle of a field test with a few hundred providers and a few dozen patients at a local university medical group.

And the whole focus of the project was security. It was designed from the ground up with HIPAA in mind. A little bit of detail is available at our website, but the basics are:

• Server runs B2-class DG/UX and Trusted Oracle 7, and MAC labels are implemented both in the database and in the OS.
• The client is a Java applet, so it can't damage the client env. No plaintext identifiers exist in the client env, and input is done using a graphical keyboard so the keypresses can't be captured.
• Multi-factor auth: username and password, plus challenge-response, plus digital cert. And, our SSL is not the usual anonymous kind, so both the client and the server have to prove who they are.
• Role-based access controls, so patients can't see patient-deniable data, and providers can see only their own patients' records (with provisions for emergencies, of course).

There was an article in SysAdmin magazine (no fulltext online, unfortunately :( ) last month where the previous sysadmin and I discussed some of our experiences with the system and with the users' reactions. Basically, doing things right is a pain, and some users (mostly the providers who are used to easy and unlimited access) hate the multi-factor auth. We'll have a better idea of what the patients think once we've gotten a critical mass and done some surveys.

i go to uc san diego, and for the most part, have been very happy here. you get a balance of theory and application which is nice. the programming is bent towards unix, although the computer graphics courses are taught on windows. the higher up you go in the courses, the more interesting things get. whether it's networking, parallel programming, computer security, or even the dreaded compiler class, you will leave ucsd with a good background in today's technology. in addition to learning c/c++, java, and perl in a variety of classes here, they also have a comparative languages course where you will learn others (my quarter it was python, ml, and prolog). another nice thing about ucsd is the fact that the san diego supercomputer center is on the campus. so, if you are bored with you cirriculum, you can at least go and play on the crays.

"The theme of the conference, however illusive, was this..."

Sigh. Another case where an obvious error is not caught by the spell checker... just how the theme of the conference was supposed to be " deceiving by false show", or " based on or having the nature of an illusion", I can't say. Yet another example of how the Internet has *not* helped with overall literacy in the population at large.

"The theme of the conference, however illusive, was this..."

Sigh. Another case where an obvious error is not caught by the spell checker... just how the theme of the conference was supposed to be " deceiving by false show", or " based on or having the nature of an illusion", I can't say. Yet another example of how the Internet has *not* helped with overall literacy in the population at large.

The other dangerous thing about online education is that often the instructor's coursework is appropriated by the school and then redistributed online without his or her involvement. The only conceivable reason for doing this is to reduce teaching expenses. Of course, as many have seen, the costs of producing an online course can often be higher per student than the original course, and involve more work, not less for instructor. Luckily, one of my former professors has already made these same arguments before, and much more cogently. Please take a look at the three essays at http://communication.ucsd.edu/dl and reconsider whether the principl so far governed online education are sound.

Methods of "soft-regulation" can be more dangerous than direct!

Reagle. Why the Internet is Good: Community governance that works well.

The US Constitution is an adept instrument of constraining direct legal regulation, "Congress shall make no law ...." However, modern regulation often is indirect, it sets incentives and disincentives for others (usually the market) to implement and enforce policies more effectively than the government ever could. Whereas Reidenberg suggests that governments should shift the "focus of government action away from direct regulation and towards indirect influence;" I find this trend to be frightening because he makes an assumption that I am unwilling to make: "The shift can, nevertheless, still preserve strong attributes of public oversight." [Reid97, 588] The US Constitution is poorly equipped to constrain indirect regulation.

Consider the following mechanisms of cyberspace regulation:

• direct: threat of violence, monetary penalties, and imprisonment by a centralized authority. Applies if you have a locatable physical presence or assets.
• indirect: direct methods are applied to third parties to create incentives or disincentives against the governed. (My ontology is similar to but differs from Reidenberg's [Reid97, 588])
• link : associate the resolution of a contentious proposal to one for which there is greater support. The US Government's Clipper III proposal linked the government's contested desire to access citizens' private encryption keys to the government's ability to grant much needed legal legitimacy to digital signatures.
• choke : regulate those that are easy to go after. Bavarian authorities prosecuted the head of the German Compuserve division for providing access to Internet materials including pornography and games that were violent or had Nazi imagery.
• gouge : regulate those that have deep pockets, often used with choke. A US Government copyright proposal criminalized the contributory infringement of copyright and made Internet Service Providers fiscally liable for the actions of their users.
• browbeat :threaten further regulatory action. US privacy policy has to date been predicated on the - rather weak - threat that if the "industry" doesn't self regulate, the government will get involved.
• herd : selectively place and remove liability to channel policy towards a goal without overtly setting the direction. "Mandatory self regulation" and safe harbor provisions are frequently proposed solutions to Internet issues.

These are the principal methods by which real world governments would like to regulate the Internet. Let us now turn to the methods the Internet has developed to regulate itself.

Methods of "soft-regulation" can be more dangerous than direct!

Reagle. Why the Internet is Good: Community governance that works well.

The US Constitution is an adept instrument of constraining direct legal regulation, "Congress shall make no law ...." However, modern regulation often is indirect, it sets incentives and disincentives for others (usually the market) to implement and enforce policies more effectively than the government ever could. Whereas Reidenberg suggests that governments should shift the "focus of government action away from direct regulation and towards indirect influence;" I find this trend to be frightening because he makes an assumption that I am unwilling to make: "The shift can, nevertheless, still preserve strong attributes of public oversight." [Reid97, 588] The US Constitution is poorly equipped to constrain indirect regulation.

Consider the following mechanisms of cyberspace regulation:

• direct: threat of violence, monetary penalties, and imprisonment by a centralized authority. Applies if you have a locatable physical presence or assets.
• indirect: direct methods are applied to third parties to create incentives or disincentives against the governed. (My ontology is similar to but differs from Reidenberg's [Reid97, 588])
• link : associate the resolution of a contentious proposal to one for which there is greater support. The US Government's Clipper III proposal linked the government's contested desire to access citizens' private encryption keys to the government's ability to grant much needed legal legitimacy to digital signatures.
• choke : regulate those that are easy to go after. Bavarian authorities prosecuted the head of the German Compuserve division for providing access to Internet materials including pornography and games that were violent or had Nazi imagery.
• gouge : regulate those that have deep pockets, often used with choke. A US Government copyright proposal criminalized the contributory infringement of copyright and made Internet Service Providers fiscally liable for the actions of their users.
• browbeat :threaten further regulatory action. US privacy policy has to date been predicated on the - rather weak - threat that if the "industry" doesn't self regulate, the government will get involved.
• herd : selectively place and remove liability to channel policy towards a goal without overtly setting the direction. "Mandatory self regulation" and safe harbor provisions are frequently proposed solutions to Internet issues.

These are the principal methods by which real world governments would like to regulate the Internet. Let us now turn to the methods the Internet has developed to regulate itself.

Methods of "soft-regulation" can be more dangerous than direct!

Reagle. Why the Internet is Good: Community governance that works well.

The US Constitution is an adept instrument of constraining direct legal regulation, "Congress shall make no law ...." However, modern regulation often is indirect, it sets incentives and disincentives for others (usually the market) to implement and enforce policies more effectively than the government ever could. Whereas Reidenberg suggests that governments should shift the "focus of government action away from direct regulation and towards indirect influence;" I find this trend to be frightening because he makes an assumption that I am unwilling to make: "The shift can, nevertheless, still preserve strong attributes of public oversight." [Reid97, 588] The US Constitution is poorly equipped to constrain indirect regulation.

Consider the following mechanisms of cyberspace regulation:

• direct: threat of violence, monetary penalties, and imprisonment by a centralized authority. Applies if you have a locatable physical presence or assets.
• indirect: direct methods are applied to third parties to create incentives or disincentives against the governed. (My ontology is similar to but differs from Reidenberg's [Reid97, 588])
• link : associate the resolution of a contentious proposal to one for which there is greater support. The US Government's Clipper III proposal linked the government's contested desire to access citizens' private encryption keys to the government's ability to grant much needed legal legitimacy to digital signatures.
• choke : regulate those that are easy to go after. Bavarian authorities prosecuted the head of the German Compuserve division for providing access to Internet materials including pornography and games that were violent or had Nazi imagery.
• gouge : regulate those that have deep pockets, often used with choke. A US Government copyright proposal criminalized the contributory infringement of copyright and made Internet Service Providers fiscally liable for the actions of their users.
• browbeat :threaten further regulatory action. US privacy policy has to date been predicated on the - rather weak - threat that if the "industry" doesn't self regulate, the government will get involved.
• herd : selectively place and remove liability to channel policy towards a goal without overtly setting the direction. "Mandatory self regulation" and safe harbor provisions are frequently proposed solutions to Internet issues.

These are the principal methods by which real world governments would like to regulate the Internet. Let us now turn to the methods the Internet has developed to regulate itself.

Methods of "soft-regulation" can be more dangerous than direct!

Reagle. Why the Internet is Good: Community governance that works well.

The US Constitution is an adept instrument of constraining direct legal regulation, "Congress shall make no law ...." However, modern regulation often is indirect, it sets incentives and disincentives for others (usually the market) to implement and enforce policies more effectively than the government ever could. Whereas Reidenberg suggests that governments should shift the "focus of government action away from direct regulation and towards indirect influence;" I find this trend to be frightening because he makes an assumption that I am unwilling to make: "The shift can, nevertheless, still preserve strong attributes of public oversight." [Reid97, 588] The US Constitution is poorly equipped to constrain indirect regulation.

Consider the following mechanisms of cyberspace regulation:

• direct: threat of violence, monetary penalties, and imprisonment by a centralized authority. Applies if you have a locatable physical presence or assets.
• indirect: direct methods are applied to third parties to create incentives or disincentives against the governed. (My ontology is similar to but differs from Reidenberg's [Reid97, 588])
• link : associate the resolution of a contentious proposal to one for which there is greater support. The US Government's Clipper III proposal linked the government's contested desire to access citizens' private encryption keys to the government's ability to grant much needed legal legitimacy to digital signatures.
• choke : regulate those that are easy to go after. Bavarian authorities prosecuted the head of the German Compuserve division for providing access to Internet materials including pornography and games that were violent or had Nazi imagery.
• gouge : regulate those that have deep pockets, often used with choke. A US Government copyright proposal criminalized the contributory infringement of copyright and made Internet Service Providers fiscally liable for the actions of their users.
• browbeat :threaten further regulatory action. US privacy policy has to date been predicated on the - rather weak - threat that if the "industry" doesn't self regulate, the government will get involved.
• herd : selectively place and remove liability to channel policy towards a goal without overtly setting the direction. "Mandatory self regulation" and safe harbor provisions are frequently proposed solutions to Internet issues.

These are the principal methods by which real world governments would like to regulate the Internet. Let us now turn to the methods the Internet has developed to regulate itself.

Methods of "soft-regulation" can be more dangerous than direct!

Reagle. Why the Internet is Good: Community governance that works well.

The US Constitution is an adept instrument of constraining direct legal regulation, "Congress shall make no law ...." However, modern regulation often is indirect, it sets incentives and disincentives for others (usually the market) to implement and enforce policies more effectively than the government ever could. Whereas Reidenberg suggests that governments should shift the "focus of government action away from direct regulation and towards indirect influence;" I find this trend to be frightening because he makes an assumption that I am unwilling to make: "The shift can, nevertheless, still preserve strong attributes of public oversight." [Reid97, 588] The US Constitution is poorly equipped to constrain indirect regulation.

Consider the following mechanisms of cyberspace regulation:

• direct: threat of violence, monetary penalties, and imprisonment by a centralized authority. Applies if you have a locatable physical presence or assets.
• indirect: direct methods are applied to third parties to create incentives or disincentives against the governed. (My ontology is similar to but differs from Reidenberg's [Reid97, 588])
• link : associate the resolution of a contentious proposal to one for which there is greater support. The US Government's Clipper III proposal linked the government's contested desire to access citizens' private encryption keys to the government's ability to grant much needed legal legitimacy to digital signatures.
• choke : regulate those that are easy to go after. Bavarian authorities prosecuted the head of the German Compuserve division for providing access to Internet materials including pornography and games that were violent or had Nazi imagery.
• gouge : regulate those that have deep pockets, often used with choke. A US Government copyright proposal criminalized the contributory infringement of copyright and made Internet Service Providers fiscally liable for the actions of their users.
• browbeat :threaten further regulatory action. US privacy policy has to date been predicated on the - rather weak - threat that if the "industry" doesn't self regulate, the government will get involved.
• herd : selectively place and remove liability to channel policy towards a goal without overtly setting the direction. "Mandatory self regulation" and safe harbor provisions are frequently proposed solutions to Internet issues.

These are the principal methods by which real world governments would like to regulate the Internet. Let us now turn to the methods the Internet has developed to regulate itself.

One of the first (if not the first) ARPANET mailing lists was HUMAN-NETS, formed before many Slashdot readers were even born. Many of the discussions there anticipated the Internet of today. It's a precurser to USENET, and to discussion sites like this. Unfortunately, although some of the last HUMAN-NETS postings are archived in http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/FA.human-nets /FA.human-nets-index.html, I don't know where earlier issues are archived.

Such an archive would be a record of the earliest wide-ranging (not just technical) discussion on a computer network.

-Ed

with max, you can have either MIDI or digital audio (with the MSP extension) flowing along wires that connect boxes. the boxes are objects that you can write in C. It's really good for doing real time control & interactive things.

jMax is scriptable in tcl (no java here, despite the name), and looks like it has the same midi/audio capabilities.

lately i have just started working with pd, which is miller puckette's current software platform. it uses the same box/wire and midi/audio ideas. see his page. It works on linux and also has a OpenGL graphics package GEM, so you can do 3d graphics with music.

now i have to choose between pd and jmax! oh sorry day :)

information is free.
the only question is:

The OED does not agree with Webster in this. The question is: whom shall you trust? :-)

the program for BeOS is called SockHop, read the overview to learn more about it. Sure programs have to be written for SockHop, but it looks powerful
--
http://www.beroute.tzo.com

the program for BeOS is called SockHop, read the overview to learn more about it. Sure programs have to be written for SockHop, but it looks powerful
--
http://www.beroute.tzo.com

There is SockHop for BeOS.

Programs have to be written specificaly for SockHop and use its base class instead of BLooper (Be's basic thread + event loop class) SockHop also uses a set of classes to handle routing of BMessages between threads.

As the paper said, there have already been a lot of other projects that use zooming. The best known example is probably Pad++ (Warning, site features frames and a resource-sucking applet).
The ideas of Pad++ are interresting (for example filters that you can move in front of data to transform its display) and worth a look, but I am not sure whether I would really like to work with something like that. On the other hand, maybe today's input devices just arnt ready for this.. zooming with a mouse is no fun...

The FCC is a collection of piss-boys and water-carriers for the major entertainment conglomerates. (Disney, Westinghouse, Sony, etc.) Expanding their purview to the internet will basically mean that they get to take (more) bribes from AT&T, Microsoft, WorldCom and GTE, and we, the users and builders, will get the shaft.

Just say no.

...is to overlap area codes. In Denver, you must dial all ten digits. It has nothing to do with long distance (where you must dial a 1 before the ten digit number). To call my neighbor, I have to dial all ten digits. The two area codes that are overlaid are 303 and 720.

I think a better method of chunking groups of numbers is better than adding larger numbers so that someone can have 10000 numbers just to use 500 to use a previous example.

A quick look, I see that Denver is not alone with overlaid area codes. I guess I feel better now.

~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"

This is a little off-topic as the original question was about GUI designer packages (not whether whether vi was better, chaps!). However, if you want to generate large amounts of HTML pages quickly from standard templates and have the facility to regenerate it after tweaking the template, other posters are right in recommending automation. (Personally, I hate any package that requires me to move my hands from the mouse to the keyboard more than once per minute. :-)

I've used the m4 macro techniques outlined in the following references and find them excellent for standardising pages and removing the worst pains of handcoded HTML. Every day, I find new ways to extend them. The downsides are coping with m4's syntax requirements (mind your quotes!) and the initial work creating your macros. If this doesn't suit, try some of the many other HTML preprocessing utils (see Freshmeat).

• Mechanical web authoring
  
• htm4l
  
• GNU m4 homepage
  

As an aside, some of the nicest pages I've seen used extremely effective graphics way beyond what I could draw - but were a pain to load and use. I've seen simpler sites that did nifty things with TABLE layouts instead.


Ade_
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