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You think it's simple to take a human process and automate it?

The innovation happened because the inventor was promised, by the patent system, a monopoly on the innovation. Without that promise, the innovation wouldn't have happened.

Furthermore, intellectual property rights aren't intended to do anything. They have no goal. We offer legal protection to intellectual property rights because it's the right thing to do. Period.

Indeed, that's why you have to make sure your wording can be interpreted as broad as possible.

How many patents have you written?

Seriously; I'm asking. Because, you see, you don't do this.

I guess you'll retard^H^H^Hort (look, it's infectious!) by throwing another bunch of petty insults in my general direction, so I'll leave it at this. If you really want to document yourself better, then stop worrying about job security for a moment and read a bit about it. Then maybe the next time you can reply with arguments instead of with insults.

I have no doubt about your knowledge of the patent system (and probably IP in general), but you sound like a mindless drone just repeating his mantra's over and over again, not listening to anyone else because he's convinced he's right and anyone who disagrees with him cannot possibly know what he's talking about, or is a "self-hating apologist" or some such (I'm honestly surprised you haven't called me a communist yet). I really do hope you have some happy moments from time to time as well.

I like the idea of treemaps.


http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/index .s html


Hehe, it was originally made to see what was taking up all the room on an 80MB hard disk :)

There's various software available based on this concept, most working like "du", except that you get the results graphically. You typically see a large picture on screen of what directories and files are taking up the most space. It looks like a piece of Mondrian artwork, with the size of rectangles corresponding to the size of space taken, so it is easy at a glance to see what is hogging all of the disk space. It can be drilled down, of course, by clicking to zoom in.

A quick Google search revealed SequoiaView:


http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/


Unfortunately this only runs on Windows, but I'm sure there are similar Linux programs available.

That link was very interesting. I read the whole thing and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Here's a clickable link.

As someone who comes from Estonia, let me offer a few reasons on how this change happened:
1) Geographic and cultural closeness to Finland. Finland is one of the most wired countries in the world, and the multitudes of cell-phone carrying Finns crossing the border to buy cheap booze left a strong impression, creating more demand for telecommunications infrastructure. Never underestimate the power of neighborly envy :)
2) Liberal and fast growing banking system. Banking was probably the fastest growing sector in Estonian economy in the nineties, being built from ground up and supported by the fiscal policy of the government. Estonian banks invested heavily in technology and as a result I could do more in an Estonian online bank (like sending money to anyone in the country in a matter of seconds, free of charge) in 1995 than I can do today in a US online bank.
3) Prioritizing computer and Internet education in schools. This was a fortunate brainchild of some younger politicians, and as a result computers are a natural thing in younger people's lives now. See this link or the Tiger Leap site for more information.

It would be good if pure research were put into the "public domain", particularly when it is paid for by tax dollars.

There is an interesting NYT article today about a call for federally funded research to be more freely available, instead of in expensive and restrictive journals. It's about time- there are many expensive for-profit journals, whose worth is determined by reputations established primarily by the refereeing process. Referees are usually academics not paid by journals. Since the NSF or NIH is often paying for the researcher (who is doing the hardest work) and the universities are paying for the referees (who are doing the next hardest part of the work) and the labs and resources are usually paid for by universities (often the greatest expense) it is remarkable that the
journals have been getting away with making big piles of money for essentially being clearinghouses and middlemen. In mathematics, there has been some resistance, including some from bigshots, to these journal monopolies, but change towards cheaper/free/non-profit journals has been slow. I choose to submit my research to reaonable journals on this criteria, but that means that I will never submit my work to some of the most prestigious ones. In medicine, where journals often restrict researchers from even discussing their results with colleagues or media until the article appears, this could be a massive chage. Many scientific journals do not permit you to post your own research on your web page and hopefully this overdue movement towards free distribution gathers momentum.

For those of you in the Washington DC metropolitan area, you can get liquid nitrogen ice cream at the University of Maryland. Every year the university celebrates Maryland Day, which is basically an excuse for the university to show itself off to alumni and the general public. At any rate, out in front of the physics building they always have a bunch of cool geeky experiments (crushing a soda can with magnets, firing a pencil through a two by four , superconducting levitation etc) Including making ice cream out of liquid nitrogen. They basically give you a foam cup, pour some vanilla flavored cream in, give you a spoon, and tell you to stir real fast as they pour in the LN2. Tastes pretty good, but its really hard ice cream.

Heh, I was a part of a space failure myself. We were using pretty much off-the-shelf equipment, but it passed NASA spec shake and thermal testing. What probably did it in was radiation...in low earth orbit we figured there wouldn't be much risk of radiation problems.

If we were to do it again, we probably would have had some kind of radiation-resistant reset system, because building the whole thing in rad-hard would be very expensive (our budget was $1500 plus donated equipment!) But having a few rad-hard devices to reset the box in case of a crash would probably have been affordable.

About 100 amateur radio operators contacted our payload, and relayed their GPS coordinates to others using amateur packet radio. At the same time, the GPS unit on board the Spartan satellite transmitted its position to listeners on the ground as well. But had it not crashed after about 17 hours, it is possible that several hundred other amateur radio operators would have used it.

Ugh. Another flame-war sparked by those who favor "disclosure". In the minds of some, "disclosure" and "exploit code" are synonymous; anyone who feels differently must be in the "anti-disclosure" camp. As expected, the "disclosure" mujahedin trot out their usual line of reasoning, which is roughly: "if sploits are outlawed, only outlaws will have sploits." And of course, they make the same shrill, baseless ad hominum accusations of sell-outs and cover-ups. Please.

I have some bad news for those who believe that the value of vulnerability information will somehow be irretrievably reduced simply because exploit details are not included.

Let's go to the videotape, shall we? In 2000, Arbaugh, Fithen, and McHugh at the University of Maryland published an IEEE article on the lifecycle of vulnerabilites, based on CERT/CC reporting data. The article contains quite a bit of empirical data and several useful charts. Here is the money quote:

The argument for releasing vulnerability information to the public stems from the belief that crackers already know the information -- but system administators don't... In our research, we found that automating a vulnerability, not just disclosing it, serves as the catalyst for widespread intrusions.

The notion that somehow it doesn't matter if the exploit code is published is just hogwash. It does matter. It makes a decisive difference in the rate of incident occurrences, as the data shows. The number of zero-day exploits is a tiny trickle compared to those that come later, after scripts are widely circulated.

Vulnerability disclosure is critical to making systems more secure. Vulnerability information needs to be freely available to the public. But posting detailed "proof of concept" code that can be easily converted into an automated attack script is another thing entirely. Posting exploit scripts in public forums is, as P.J. O'Rourke once put it, "like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." It is reckless, and irresponsible. Self-important glory-seekers who wail that their livelihoods are at risk, it seems to me, need to develop some more marketable skills.

Why is everyone on slashdot so paranoid.

This paper was in the Workshop on Economics and Information Security that was held last week.

I was at the workshop and decided to submit this.

Who do they think they are? NY Times?

the double-checked-locking pattern is thread-safe

Bullshit.

The "Double-Checked Locking is Broken" Declaration.

It has a lengthy explanation of why it is broken in Java (because of possible reordering) and also a proposal for fixing the problem. Also see Bill's paper, in which he tells of discussions he had with Guy Steele (as in Gosling, Joy and Steele, The Java Language Specification).

the double-checked-locking pattern is thread-safe

Bullshit.

The "Double-Checked Locking is Broken" Declaration.

It has a lengthy explanation of why it is broken in Java (because of possible reordering) and also a proposal for fixing the problem. Also see Bill's paper, in which he tells of discussions he had with Guy Steele (as in Gosling, Joy and Steele, The Java Language Specification).

I work at a computer lab at my school doing basic things like helping people save (seriously) and sorting what people print so that they don't have to separate it from the hundreds of other pages that other users have printed.

This is not hyperbole. The printer we have here is an hp laserjet 9000, and it prints about 50 pages a minute. At peak usage here (there are 60 total computers in the lab) it will print for 2 straight hours, stopping only when it jams. Many of these print outs are annoyingly wasteful - powerpoint presentations printed out 1 slide to a page, with 72 pt font, instead of 6 to a page or an outline view, or huge volumes of online textbooks that you just KNOW this person isn't going to read. My record is 1000 pages, counted by the number of times I've had to put new paper in, for one user. Ironically enough, I'm at this job right now, watching people get angry as the stack of paper on top of the printer gets bigger with no lab assistant to distribute it ;) Posting on slashdot is significantly more stimulating than sorting printouts, believe it or not.

So, I got a little off track, but what I'm trying to show is that people with computers are perfectly capable of wasting paper.

Furthermore, how often do you really WASTE a piece of hand-written paper? All of the paper I actually write on (who, me, pencil?) is used for notes and scribbling diagrams or algorithms, which I do on paper even though I have a computer. It takes effort to waste writing, so I don't do much of it. But all it takes is the click of a button to print a webpage or someone else's class notes ;)

I would imagine that the school thought of this when some teacher or professor said "hey, I've handed out like 500 xeroxes this week alone, let's just make the students get computers so I can email it to them instead." THAT is where the wastage probably came in, not with student's papers and such. I don't have any insight on that, particularly, but it seems like the validity of the argument would really depend on how much paper they distribute.

And so, the point!
When you're doing your study, make sure to find out the school's current paper distrobution rate.

Dark Matter isn't the only explanation for Fritz Zwicky's 1993 observation.

MOND or Modified Newtonian Dynamics proposed by Moti Milgrom is I think better. If I were to bet on someone winning a future Nobel, Milgrom would be the person.

I'm driving the VLT as I type this...sentence was interrupted for a preset...I'm back now.

Anyway, I know a number of scientists that seriously consider the Newton's may not work at large scales. Nature recently rejected a paper from some rather prominent that seemed to confirm that gravity behaves differently at large scales. But, science is very reluctant to change its equations and publication will have to await more data.

Just remember - Dark matter may not exist. Be skeptical of those who treat it as fact.

MOND FAQ

Dark-Matter Heretic [This is a wonderful article]

Dark Matter isn't the only explanation for Fritz Zwicky's 1993 observation.

MOND or Modified Newtonian Dynamics proposed by Moti Milgrom is I think better. If I were to bet on someone winning a future Nobel, Milgrom would be the person.

I'm driving the VLT as I type this...sentence was interrupted for a preset...I'm back now.

Anyway, I know a number of scientists that seriously consider the Newton's may not work at large scales. Nature recently rejected a paper from some rather prominent that seemed to confirm that gravity behaves differently at large scales. But, science is very reluctant to change its equations and publication will have to await more data.

Just remember - Dark matter may not exist. Be skeptical of those who treat it as fact.

MOND FAQ

Dark-Matter Heretic [This is a wonderful article]

In answer to your question: Civil Aircraft navigate using a variety of methods. Depending on where in the flight programme these are, this could be anything from VOR (Very High frequency Omni Directional Range) system to a Heading Select system ILS system or ADF. The Nav system itself functions using a variety of inputs including VOR (Military systems operate on TACAN (Tacital Area Navigation) which uses UHF rather than the mid band frequencies that VOR uses), Compasses, Accelerometers, Gimballs, Gyros as well as Ground Mapping RADAR fixes, GPS (these days), JTIDS (Joint Tactical Information Distribution System -Military again), On-Top fixes, HUD fixes and Offset fixes in addition to ADF (automatic direction finding) These inputs are used for comparison within the autopilot which uses a triplex (usually) voting system to decide what to show and what to do. (obv this various from system to system) So, finally, in response to your question, yes the plane does use a compass to navigate and whilst all these sub-systems are designed to promote redundancies within the larger system, they are taken into account and in the event of a larger systems failure, may be relied upon more than the pilot may realise - hence one of the major problems in over reliance on redundant systems...your perceived level of safety increases thereby causing you to change your actions accordingly and hence reducing the overall safety of the craft. - But thats another story. Incidentally, the reasons for not using cell phones on planes are neatly put at this link Airborne operation of PEDs [PDF] (I am not a pilot)

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~pugh/java/bugs/

We've found that even very simple bug pattern detectors turn up dozens or hundreds of bugs in production code.

The good news is that as bug-finding techniques mature and become more widespread, more bugs can be found during development rather than after applications are deployed.

Nope!

Maybe, but bearing in mind we currently have multiple gigahertz computers, most of the 3D graphics is dealt with by hardware, and interpreters are usually at worst only 20x slower (at the very worst), this means that your program will run as slow as machine code did about 4 years ago; but the graphics will go at full speed. I'll think I'll survive.

Also, Java is "interpreted" (actually it's typically a JIT, but it behaves like an interpreter), and that's currently about half the speed of optimised C or there abouts.

Also, check out dynamo, which is a machine code interpreter that interprets the same machine code as the machine it runs on somewhat faster than the microprocessor executes it (atleast about half the time anyway). It actually performs run time optimisation like code rearrangement and stuff, it's very clever.

Anyway, interpreters are not always slow; and they are usually plenty fast enough in practice.

I think quite a lot of FPS games have interpreters in them anyway to run the game code.

• Joining your local student ACM chapter. Better yet, run for office - I know they need the person power. If it doesn't exist, charter it!
• Want to attend a technical conference? Both USENIX and the IETF have programs designed to get students involved by providing stipends. Often, these programs are applied to by few students.
• If you prefer getting involved with a .com than a .org, consider that Apple gives away about 300 scholarships to their annual develpers conference in San Jose, WWDC.
• If you are an uber programmer, perhaps you should try registering as a student or evan as a competitor or presenter at MacHack.
• The Government is always hiring, and don't let anyone tell you that you have to get a security clearance to work on something cool.
• An earlier posted mentioned that the University IT department is a good place to work, and for the most part I agree - there are few other places with the budget and deployed network size of Univsersities that will teach you as you go.

Also, in general, universities strive to protect the intelecual freedom and privacy of their students and faculty (although U Wyoming seems to be an exception). For example the univeristy I attend (UMD) includes the following language in their AUP (which can be found in it's entierty at http://www.inform.umd.edu/aug/:

"To the extent possible in the electronic environment and in a public setting, a user's privacy will be preserved. Nevertheless, that privacy is subject to the Maryland Access to Public Records Act, other applicable state and federal laws, and the needs of the University to meet its administrative, business, and legal obligations."

While this language is admitadly quite weak it is better than nothing and would prevent monitoring of this kind unless it is determined that ISPs are liable for copyright infringment commeted by their users.

the Human Computer Interaction Lab at the U of Maryland might be a place to look. I don't know that they have exactly what you are looking for, but the are spending a bit of effort working on interfaces specifically for learning and special access needs and they are designed with commercialization of their products in mind.

Here's the U of Maryland page on the CAESAR project.

http://www.caesar.umd.edu/

True

Half Lives:
U-235 = 7.037 x 10^8 years
U-238 = 4.468 x 10^9 years
U-239 = 23.47 minutes
Th-90 (from U-234) = 7.5 x 10^4 years
Ra-88 (from above) = 1.6 x 10^3 years

Strontium:
90 - 28.5 years
94 - 1.235 seconds

Here is a picture similar to to the one in my Physics book on the decay of Uranium(its life forever until its stable)http://www.physics.umd.edu/deptinfo/facilit ies/lecdem/honr228q/notes/U238scheme.gif

From this Page
http://www.physics.umd.edu/deptinfo/facilities/lec dem/honr228q/notes/notesl.htm

True

Half Lives:
U-235 = 7.037 x 10^8 years
U-238 = 4.468 x 10^9 years
U-239 = 23.47 minutes
Th-90 (from U-234) = 7.5 x 10^4 years
Ra-88 (from above) = 1.6 x 10^3 years

Strontium:
90 - 28.5 years
94 - 1.235 seconds

Here is a picture similar to to the one in my Physics book on the decay of Uranium(its life forever until its stable)http://www.physics.umd.edu/deptinfo/facilit ies/lecdem/honr228q/notes/U238scheme.gif

From this Page
http://www.physics.umd.edu/deptinfo/facilities/lec dem/honr228q/notes/notesl.htm

The episode of Star Trek TNG with the two Rikers is "Second Chances" I think. In that episode a "duplicate" Riker is created in a transporter accident (nevermind the possibility that both would be duplicates for now). One on the Enterprise, one on a deserted planet. When the second Riker was asked to account for his existence, he says something like "I don't know who came back that day, but it sure as hell wasn't me". Can you really argue that Riker1 and Riker2 are the same person?

Here's a second example: In an Ahnold movie the villian has the ability to make a clone of himself and copy his memories to the clone (let's just pretend this makes it a duplicate). Ahnold seriously wounds villian1 so he pushes a button the create his duplicate, villian2. Since the villian was a nasty sort of guy he had no compassion for villian1 and wasn't interested in his whining, so he shot him in the head (I may be making up this part). How are they the same person?

One answer: you need both representational and causal properties. The "feeling of what happens" (as Antonio Damasio calls it) isn't the same instantiation of that representational content (whatever properties and content means). But I think this may be a kind of question begging.

Fragmentation of self is a second problem. If both Riker's have a different input by virtue of being in different places, the "feeling of what happens" is different and so our their brain states. But I don't know if I've solved the problem above. What does "self" mean.

Parfit is good on this (but don't expect him to solve anything).

Have a look at this article by James Hendler which talks about the use of the semantic web in an agent context. Trust is right at there at the top of the layering cake that make up the semantic web.

As for usefulness, time only can tell of course, but there is certainly a lot of research and development being invested in making this happen.

the java client app i always show people to convince them that java on the client is about 100 times faster than they thought is photomesa :

"PhotoMesa is a zoomable image browser. It allows the user to view multiple directories of images in a zoomable environment, and uses a set of simple navigation mechanisms to move through the space of images. It also supports grouping of images by metadata available from the file system. It requires only a set of images on disk, and does not require the user to add any metadata, or manipulate the images at all before browsing, thus making it easy to get started with existing images."

its fast and free (beer) and i use it every day

This isn't necessarily a good thing for sun in short term because it draws press attention to java's failure on the desktop.
However, if microsoft are forced to keep suns latest JRE as part of the standard windows install for a a few years (as the case drags on) then this will be a huge win for Sun.

java has arguably already won the enterprise-server-app war with the entire industry of players oracle,ibm,macromedia,... currently allied versus the beast and will probably win the handheld/mobile battle unless microsoft can defeat sonyErricson, nokia, sharp and palm... Java is currently a huge success everywhere but the desktop.

(aside)
Why has java failed on the desktop.... not just because of the redmond crew but because swing is 'kin huge bloated and considered slow. Swing will always be slow relative to naitive, but I love it because it stays ideologically pure to the spirit of write once run the same anywhere. Its fairly obvious that sun were looking at a 10 year roadmap when they released swing coz its gonna take that long before swing apps run imperceiveably slower than native apps (and no doubt will still look like shit by default). However, a machine shipping with XP today will be able to run swing applications ok.
(/aside)

Its only recent PC hardware that has began to run Swing at an acceptable speed. The timing of this ruling could make desktop java very compelling if it as seamlessly integrated into XP.2003 as it is in OSX

anyways i'm gonna carry on compiling my own p4 optimized sun j2SDK for Linux from source code using gcc3.. "export INSANE=true"woo hoo!

1.Check out photomessa. Its a free (as in beer, the toolkit is under Mozilla Public Licence), small and useful zoomable image browser
2.Install photomessa using java webstart (quick, easy, secure)
3.rethink your java speed prejudices

I lead the security group at the laboratory, where I hold a faculty post as Reader in Security Engineering.

I don't think Andersson is, as you suggest, biased against TCPA / Palladium and certainly not "heavily biased" (see Bill Arbaugh's comment below). His analysis does however point out very serious consequences of the TCPA / Palladium infrastructure. The consequences are what they are, Anderson just made a very good job in formulating them.

He is far from alone in his view on TCPA / Palladium. In fact, Bill Arbaugh, one of the inventors of TCPA (US patent 6,185,678 here), has second thoughts. His comment on Anderson begins:

We are all aware of the criticisms that the TCPA has received. Ross Anderson did a good job of explaining the problems in an abstract fashion, but I felt that there were some things left out (Privacy concerns).

By the way, trustedcomputing.org does not allow the general public to view the member list anymore. You can however see one list of 170+ member companies in Lucky Green's presentation below (links from http://www.cypherpunks.to/:

The slides from Lucky Green's DEFCON X talk, Trusted Computing Platform Alliance: The mother(board) of all Big Brothers, are now available in the following formats:

• PowerPoint (309k)
• PDF (511k)

Other resources with much information are:

• http://www.notcpa.org/
• http://cryptome.org/

when even one of the original authors of the spec has serious concerns about it: tcpa concerns

Jeff Goldblum


http://us.imdb.com/Name?Goldblum,+Jeff
as compared to
http://www.ipst.umd.edu/~yorke/ [Jeff York]

And yeah I know it was meant to be funny... but it didn't strike me so.

While there certainly are many other important contributors to the science of chaos theory, I find it hard to fault Yorke as a choice.

He basically defined (literally) the mathematical foundation for chaos theory as small variations in initial conditions leading to arbitrarily large variations in final condition. Not to mention coining the word "chaos". He's been working in the field since the beginning and still does. Now adays he informally heads the theoretical branch of the interdisciplinary chaos research group at UMD.

Of course the poor reporting is a different issue.

While there certainly are many other important contributors to the science of chaos theory, I find it hard to fault Yorke as a choice.

He basically defined (literally) the mathematical foundation for chaos theory as small variations in initial conditions leading to arbitrarily large variations in final condition. Not to mention coining the word "chaos". He's been working in the field since the beginning and still does. Now adays he informally heads the theoretical branch of the interdisciplinary chaos research group at UMD.

Of course the poor reporting is a different issue.

In the August 2002 edition of Scientific American, an alternative to Dark Matter is explored in the cover article. This alternative, called Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), basically (VERY basically) proposes that F != ma, and that there is a very slight exponential component to the curve at extremely low accellerations, such as is experienced by large galaxies interacting. At more "traditional" accelerations, the curves become virtually identical, and MOND behaves almost exactly like the classical equation governing motion.

A gateway to some knowledge about this topic is at The MOND Pages . I'm sure if people search around, they can find better sources, but it remains an interesting topic to discuss in relation to the "missing matter" problem. If this pans out, then maybe not much is really missing at all. Or maybe a lot is. Only time will tell which theory is correct.

Erioll

My reaction to your story isn't "Nah, that's impossible, BS" it is just "OK, but it is hard to see how this could be used in an investigation". You can't get a better answer than "I don't know".

Also note that the Condon Report which is still looked upon by most skeptics as the most comprehensive report on UFOs have a case which remains unexplained, and conclude that there is evidence for an extraordinary object (this is the single case they come to that conclusion for).

Those claiming to have a better explanation than "I don't know" will raise some eyebrows and if they offer a ahem, exotic explanation, they may see some ridicule, but I don't think any real skeptic will look at you as a kook for telling this story.

My reaction to your story isn't "Nah, that's impossible, BS" it is just "OK, but it is hard to see how this could be used in an investigation". You can't get a better answer than "I don't know".

Also note that the Condon Report which is still looked upon by most skeptics as the most comprehensive report on UFOs have a case which remains unexplained, and conclude that there is evidence for an extraordinary object (this is the single case they come to that conclusion for).

Those claiming to have a better explanation than "I don't know" will raise some eyebrows and if they offer a ahem, exotic explanation, they may see some ridicule, but I don't think any real skeptic will look at you as a kook for telling this story.

That document is a load of scare mongering [...]

...but it is a document which the inventor of TCPA himself, Bill Arbaugh, seem to agree with. He opens his comment on Ross Anderson with this statement:

"We are all aware of the criticisms that the TCPA has received. Ross Anderson did a good job of explaining the problems in an abstract fashion, but I felt that there were some things left out (Privacy concerns)." (my emphasis).

You write:

And I don't care if he uses words like "could" or "may" or any other wishy-washy term.

The rest of your comment, "Reality Master 101", builds on ignoring what Anderson is actually saying and is thus just a straw man argument, with which you have apparently fooled yourself.

1783 Montgolfier Brothers France

1849 George Cayley England

1871 Louis P. Mouillard "L'Empire de l'Air"

1878 Alphonse Penaud "Recherches sur la Resistance de l'Air"

1889 Otto Lilienthal "Birdflight as the Basis for Aviation"

1896 Otto Lilienthal dies

1896 Samuel P. Langley USA

1902 Frost Ornithopter England

1903 Wright Brothers USA

1906 Santos Dumont France/Brazil

1908 Glenn H. Curtiss

1908 Samual F Cody England
source, another source

Note, that the year of Lilienthal's death is also (not coincidentally) the last of his more than 2,000 flights (or glides, if you prefer). Interestingly, in the same year he had completed the construction of a powered glider (compressed CO2).

Following in Lilienthal's footsteps, efforts to invent an airplane became commonplace in the 1890's. The majority of the efforts were in Europe, including Captain F. Ferber, Henri Robart, Solirene, Levavasseur, Clement Ader, Percy Pilcher, and Sir Hiram Maxim. In the U.S., prominent attempts were made by Octave Chanute and Samuel Pierpont Langley.

Wilbur Wright wrote in 1912 that "no one else grasped the basics of human flight as clearly and throughly as he did".
And I guess, they were not the only ones influenced by his writings.

From statements and writings left by the Wright brothers, it is clear Lilienthal was an important source of inspiration for their efforts

And not all pacificts are vegetarian, and being vegetarian (or gay) doesn't make you more of a pacifist.

Da Vinci designed a tank, an assault chariot armed with whirling scythes, and numerous pieces of Artillery. Not very pacifist.

Adolph Hitler sometimes considered himself to be a vegetarian, (A loose definition by today's standards: He ate some pork and fowl, but also ate alot of vegetables, spoke of the benefits of vegetarianism. Pretty radical in those days in Germany, the Pork Capital), and did not consider himself a pacifist.

This certainly supports the point that not all pacifists are vegetarian.

Before anyone takes this seriously:

unboiled lobsters are black-green
the Han dynasty ended in 220 AD timeline
lobsters are very popular food in China, especially the south.

the rest of it, I have never heard before. Maybe they were true in the sixth century, but I doubt it.

sorry, bad link. http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemaps/

Oh, it's not a guage, oh, why don't they print out a number... Sounds like a bunch of frustrated programmers who haven't had an idea of their own.

It's called human computer interaction. The doctor has his hands and eyes full. A small auditory queue of whether it's safe to try to move that robotic arm (via an APPROPRIATE interface, not the keypad on your keyboard) is of great benefit.

It's simple, effective, and doesn't require an understanding of networking or what the numbers mean. Low pitch bad, high pitch good (or whatever the mapping is) ... It's so simple, it's perfect. Like treemaps. Have you ever seen hiarchial data represented in such a useful manner?

Somehow, Bochs must connect to *real* hardware.

LinuxBIOS provides the hardware initialization for a multitude of *real* motherboards, while Bochs bios (designed for a single hardware "virtual" machine) provides interrupt services required to boot some PC OSs (like Windows). "ADLO" is the name of the wrapper around the Bochs BIOS which allows LinuxBIOS to make use of the BIOS interrupt services provided by Bochs.

all this and more here.

Has anyone actually read the links? This isn't the linuxBios project, it's a seperate project that adds 'trusted boot' to it.

From the umd site:
"Upon the completion of our research, open and closed source operating systems will have a high assurance bootstrap process available on a wide array of personal computer systems. In addition, the bootstrap process will include the capability for using cryptographic hardware-- in some cases tamper resistant. Providing a ``true'' trusted path from the power switch to the Operating System."

Sound familliar?

We will begin by augmenting the LinuxBIOS source, in conjunction with the core developers of LinuxBIOS, with the AEGIS secure bootstrap implementation. AEGIS provides provable integrity guarantees, under the assumption of the physical security of the system in question, through the application of induction and strong cryptographic checks.

ECJ is a typo in this case, but it does happen to be a real project (one that I've used for longer than I care to recall)

Nah, Univ. of Maryland's Office of Information Technology is pretty liberal with internet usage. I just read an article on it actually... they'll only flag your usage if you avearge more than 2 Mbps/s over a 24 hr period. So that's 21.6 GB of data. And I never signed anything about non-academic use when I went there. If it is policy, it's certainly not being enforced.

And the rest of UMD gets: Slow Internet Access in Residence Halls:

We are aware that Internet access in the Residence Halls has been extremely slow for many of you this semester and apologize for the inconvenience. We are investigating various methods of improving the performance of your data connections.

And by "slow", they mean 2k/s downloads, and 1k/s uploads. Oh, if only I had my 28.8 back...