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But, digital has the advantage of incredible convenience. I can shoot a picture, crop it, and post it online in 30 minutes. When making portraits, I can capture a dozen pictures and keep the best ones. And I can see the final image immediately and decide whether to try other poses. This introduces more spontaneity and experimentation into photography.

Also, digital lends itself better to certain creations, like animated snapshows (example, example, tutorial).

So, digital cameras are inferior if you'll use them exactly like a film camera. But if you take advantage of the instant feedback and negligible cost-per-shot, digital can promote great creativity.

AlpineR

But, digital has the advantage of incredible convenience. I can shoot a picture, crop it, and post it online in 30 minutes. When making portraits, I can capture a dozen pictures and keep the best ones. And I can see the final image immediately and decide whether to try other poses. This introduces more spontaneity and experimentation into photography.

Also, digital lends itself better to certain creations, like animated snapshows (example, example, tutorial).

So, digital cameras are inferior if you'll use them exactly like a film camera. But if you take advantage of the instant feedback and negligible cost-per-shot, digital can promote great creativity.

AlpineR

But, digital has the advantage of incredible convenience. I can shoot a picture, crop it, and post it online in 30 minutes. When making portraits, I can capture a dozen pictures and keep the best ones. And I can see the final image immediately and decide whether to try other poses. This introduces more spontaneity and experimentation into photography.

Also, digital lends itself better to certain creations, like animated snapshows (example, example, tutorial).

So, digital cameras are inferior if you'll use them exactly like a film camera. But if you take advantage of the instant feedback and negligible cost-per-shot, digital can promote great creativity.

AlpineR

I had to go dig up my SANS notes for this one. I'm not a mathematician and I'm not some stego expert. I just attended the seminar.

According to what it says here, when you embed data in an image, you have to alter the color table and this increases the number of near duplicate colors. A normal bitmap has very few duplicates, a stego'd bitmap has many. In the example, a bitmap of a forest scene jumps from 2 duplicate colors to 1046 after being stego'd. Why? Ask an expert, I just work here. When the number of duplicate or near duplicate colors aproaches 50, usually there is a hidden file in the image.

Going to what you said, colors in an image are not randomized, and a random bit stream would stand out exactly for that reason.

This is an article on detecting stego I found on Google, want more info, ask the author.

The SR71 Blackbird first flew in 1964 and is still the fastest plane in the sky. Publicly at least.

Perl is a write-only language. You aren't supposed to be able to read it

Ever seen APL?

If they're from Russia they're cosmonauts. That said, they have, IMO, worse food than American astronauts. But then again, I'm not Russian so I can't appreciate the succulent flavor of sturgeon with jellied sauce or chicken paste with plums. Much more info is available on this page.

Astro/cosmo-nauts tend to lose their appetites and experience changes in their sense of taste after 60 to 80 days anyway, so the gourmet stuff is most useful at the beginning of the trip. After that, a much less, um -- subtle -- approach is required. According to this story people in space crave spicy, garlicky food as their sense of taste diminishes (Cosmonauts asked NASA to send garlic and onions).

But in the end, any trip to Mars will have to grow its own food. This story from last year about the Russian Mars plans mentions that this is exactly what they intend to do. Mmmm...wheat and quail.

Whats a math Ph. D. worth these days average in the US? I'd gamble somewhere around $100,000 a year, but please comment if I'm off by a lot.

A cursory glance at Google shows you're probably off by about a factor of 2:

Google cache of Georgia Tech grads' starting salary offers

University of Maryland professors' salaries (math is under CMPS)

Other programs do the same (have a separate security dedicated process). Check ssh and its privilege separation, and postfix and its multitude of little processes.

Take a look at: Systrace

have a look at systrace, which is an attempt at providing a means of reviewing/restricting an application's access to system resources.
http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/systrace/

v

How many people can hold the handle that turns the crank? Or in modern terms, how much juice can you reasonably throw at these beautiful monsters!?

So with this in mind, I don't think it's too off-topic to mention this article which talks about the gutting of funding for fuel cells. Or this student research paper site which talks about the inherent economy of different sources of energy in various terms. (Warning! They are pro-nuclear, so YMMV!) Also, if you are interested in where this topic takes you you should stop off here to follow up on whatever takes your fancy as far as energy production goes. They've got a veritable mountain of info. Check out their hydrogen economy stuff.

Whoever thought up the names of the two machines needs to get a grant or something! Green Destiny, mmmmmmm! Q, grooowwwl!

So far I'm pretty happy. The UI is okay, and things are pretty nice. However, I've had a lot of problems. (all in OO writer)

• I had serious problems with bullets. They all just changed to bullets with the number 10 in them. After spending about an hour on this, I found it as a fixed bug with a workaround.
• I've had the program crash once and my machine crash once (due to something else.) Both times I've lost work because there is apparently no crash recovery.
• Saving as HTML doesn't seem to work very well. In this directory you can see the HTML file has had some of its graphics messed up pretty badly, while others are just fine. I think that if I group each drawing into one drawing this problem will go away. But still...
• The spell checker is nice, but I can't see away to get it to ignore punctuation. So everytime I have two puncutuation marks back-to-back it calls it an error.
• You can't change the default bullet that is generated by hitting the "bullet on/off" button. You'd think it would use the list1 style or something, but it doesn't.
• If you want to contribute to openoffice.org you have to sign your code over to Sun. As far as I can tell, this means they can use it for whatever they want (StarOffice for example...)

Given all of these complaints I still expect I'll finish this using OOo. It seems to work well enough and I'd like to move away from MS tools if possible.

So far I'm pretty happy. The UI is okay, and things are pretty nice. However, I've had a lot of problems. (all in OO writer)

• I had serious problems with bullets. They all just changed to bullets with the number 10 in them. After spending about an hour on this, I found it as a fixed bug with a workaround.
• I've had the program crash once and my machine crash once (due to something else.) Both times I've lost work because there is apparently no crash recovery.
• Saving as HTML doesn't seem to work very well. In this directory you can see the HTML file has had some of its graphics messed up pretty badly, while others are just fine. I think that if I group each drawing into one drawing this problem will go away. But still...
• The spell checker is nice, but I can't see away to get it to ignore punctuation. So everytime I have two puncutuation marks back-to-back it calls it an error.
• You can't change the default bullet that is generated by hitting the "bullet on/off" button. You'd think it would use the list1 style or something, but it doesn't.
• If you want to contribute to openoffice.org you have to sign your code over to Sun. As far as I can tell, this means they can use it for whatever they want (StarOffice for example...)

Given all of these complaints I still expect I'll finish this using OOo. It seems to work well enough and I'd like to move away from MS tools if possible.

Well, I guess it was just a matter of time. Now we have artificial hearts (pop-up warning), artificial lungs, and artificial kidneys. (I mean that we as a society have them available to us as a technology, not that we as individuals actually have those things inside us, though some of us no doubt do.)

How long before we also have artificial skin to hold our artificial hair? How long before we decide what to put in our artifcial stomachs with our artificial brains?

The human race is about to step aside to make room for the cybernetically enhanced. May God have mercy on our souls. My one request is that none of my organs run anything made by Microsoft. See you in the future.

Enjoy.

I was kind of sorry to see that ASM's inventor, Yuri Gurevich, left the University of Michigan for Microsoft Research. However, I'd probably take private research over the hassle of teaching while doing research.

Actually, AsmL has a quite interesting story.

AsmL is one of the various implementations of the language known as ASM (Abstract State Machine, as stated in the story), developed mainly by Yuri Gurevich in the last ten years. The language in itself is nice, similar to LISP in some aspects: no local environments, totally dynamic scoping, higher-order, mostly untyped.

There are several implementations (see this U.Mich. page), even one in Tcl release under GPL/LGPL/MPL (XASM).

As far as Asml goes, I tried it. Version 1.5 is a compiler to the Visual C++ language (it's not really C++, you know). The pair is slow: on a small project (~ 300 lines with comments) it took some seconds to compile to C++, and then about 10 (ten) minutes to compile to native code (on a Celeron 433, 640MB ram, Win98 (it's a dual-celeron, but you know, 98 doesn't use the other processor)). Then, it failed to execute due to an unitialized pointer error. Fact is, AsmL does not have pointers! I threw it away, and rewrote the project in Perl ;-)

The University of Notre Dame and University of Michigan both use an AFS/Kerberos set-up for large volumes of accounts.
Notre Dame offers accounts on their Solaris/SPARC machines to every student at the university. Michigan's CAEN is also an AFS/Kerberos system for the whole College of Engineering.

MIT's Athena project is pretty interesting (and also partially uses an AFS/Kerberos scheme), but it probably won't help you set up a quick public network of Linux machines since it focuses more on the research side of things (not to mention the fact that it's been actively worked on since 1983!).

In general, you will probably want to decide between an AFS/Kerberos set-up or an NFS set-up.

With AFS/Kerberos, you as the administrator would directly control a pool of servers ("Vice") which physically contain the data in every user's account. The client machines ("Venus") would get temporary "tickets" from the central Kerberos server (which you also control) to access their accounts which are stored on Vice.
In the NFS scenario, the physical location of accounts is totally decentralized and distributed across all the machines that users actually work on. This means less work for you as an administrator, but it also means less security since random users' data is actually stored on the disks of the computers in the user pool (in AFS, Vice machines are considered to be "locked in closets" to which only the administrators have physical access). It's good to remember a golden rule, "physical access to a computer always implies root access." Using a tomsrtbt disk for example, you can change the root password on just about any Linux machine with a floppy drive.

Since Vice (in the AFS scheme) computers are presumably kept behind locked doors, you avoid this type of problem. However, AFS is harder to maintain, and you probably have to pay Transarc for a commercial version.

For more info on AFS/Kerberos and NFS, I recommend surfing the ACM Digital Library, in which you can find the seminal papers on these various technologies (if you're an ACM member and have access). You may also be able to find case studies there (which I found to be surprisingly hard to find on the web).

The University of Notre Dame and University of Michigan both use an AFS/Kerberos set-up for large volumes of accounts.
Notre Dame offers accounts on their Solaris/SPARC machines to every student at the university. Michigan's CAEN is also an AFS/Kerberos system for the whole College of Engineering.

MIT's Athena project is pretty interesting (and also partially uses an AFS/Kerberos scheme), but it probably won't help you set up a quick public network of Linux machines since it focuses more on the research side of things (not to mention the fact that it's been actively worked on since 1983!).

In general, you will probably want to decide between an AFS/Kerberos set-up or an NFS set-up.

With AFS/Kerberos, you as the administrator would directly control a pool of servers ("Vice") which physically contain the data in every user's account. The client machines ("Venus") would get temporary "tickets" from the central Kerberos server (which you also control) to access their accounts which are stored on Vice.
In the NFS scenario, the physical location of accounts is totally decentralized and distributed across all the machines that users actually work on. This means less work for you as an administrator, but it also means less security since random users' data is actually stored on the disks of the computers in the user pool (in AFS, Vice machines are considered to be "locked in closets" to which only the administrators have physical access). It's good to remember a golden rule, "physical access to a computer always implies root access." Using a tomsrtbt disk for example, you can change the root password on just about any Linux machine with a floppy drive.

Since Vice (in the AFS scheme) computers are presumably kept behind locked doors, you avoid this type of problem. However, AFS is harder to maintain, and you probably have to pay Transarc for a commercial version.

For more info on AFS/Kerberos and NFS, I recommend surfing the ACM Digital Library, in which you can find the seminal papers on these various technologies (if you're an ACM member and have access). You may also be able to find case studies there (which I found to be surprisingly hard to find on the web).

I dunno where you go to school but all the college girls around here look alot oder than that one. try this or this or this etc.. etc..

I dunno where you go to school but all the college girls around here look alot oder than that one. try this or this or this etc.. etc..

I dunno where you go to school but all the college girls around here look alot oder than that one. try this or this or this etc.. etc..

I found an article (in Swedish) here about the fact that "tribal?" people are a lot more generous than they have to be. I'm not sure that I'd like to call them socialist. I'd think that it's more in our nature to share our wealth, food, money or data.
I can't seem to get the original story (in English), but a few links are here and here.
You could probably just do a googlesearch for "Joe Henrich" and find better links.

So what are the morals? Is it really theft? Couldn't it be that the "capitalist philosophy" is flawed?
I don't know, but I'm sure that there is never a simple solution to anything.

wbr

.haeger

Oil CAN NOT be infinite.

Yes, true. But there's tons (in the vernacular sense) of methane just lying on the seabed.

Here's more info on methane hydrates and recent scientific examination. While there remains controversy about exactly where this methane originates (biological vs geological sources), everyone agrees that there's an insane amount of the stuff. While we might go wanting for oil some decades from now, there's plenty of hydrocarbon energy left. One of the current geological hypotheses is that the source is magma outgassing which would mean, yes, as you nearly put it, "the continents float on a layer of [hydrocarbons]."

Those security holes you are speaking of are only found in the free software version of SSH, OpenSSH, hacked together by Theo de Rat and his National Socialist friends.

The commercial version of SSH by Tatu Ylönen, OTOH, is completely secure and bugfree.

If only the rest of the world realized this and used commercial software instead of open source...

In reality it's a marsupial, not a mammal

public class Marsupial extends Mammal {
Marsupial code here...
}

I've worked in organizations up to a few thousand users and this system has worked fine. In a truly huge organization you'd end up having user names that look like AOL, though. Certainly in an educational environment I imagine a more authoritarian system would be warranted.

I don't buy it. The University of Michigan allows everybody to pick whatever they like. Their system, known as uniqname, has been running for at least a decade, and they must manage on the order of 75,000 users with a turnover of at least 10,000 per year.

The main reason to go with the hideous names that many places hand out is because it's slightly easier for the sysadmins, no matter that if it's a royal pain for the users.

I laugh especially hard at places that try to encode all sorts of information in the username, especially things like status (faculty, staff, student), school (undergrad or grad, engineering or liberal arts), or year of graduation. That may have been handy back before the invention of the network-connected database. But stuff like that changes all the time; making them change their ID seems much dumber than just looking up their status when you really need to know it.

I've worked in organizations up to a few thousand users and this system has worked fine. In a truly huge organization you'd end up having user names that look like AOL, though. Certainly in an educational environment I imagine a more authoritarian system would be warranted.

I don't buy it. The University of Michigan allows everybody to pick whatever they like. Their system, known as uniqname, has been running for at least a decade, and they must manage on the order of 75,000 users with a turnover of at least 10,000 per year.

The main reason to go with the hideous names that many places hand out is because it's slightly easier for the sysadmins, no matter that if it's a royal pain for the users.

I laugh especially hard at places that try to encode all sorts of information in the username, especially things like status (faculty, staff, student), school (undergrad or grad, engineering or liberal arts), or year of graduation. That may have been handy back before the invention of the network-connected database. But stuff like that changes all the time; making them change their ID seems much dumber than just looking up their status when you really need to know it.

Dr Mel Thusian
Ann Arbor University
Director of Particle Acceleration

Just a question:

I went to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and I've never heard of Ann Arbor University. Google hasn't either. Maybe you meant you meant that you teach at UMich but you're not listed in the university directory. I'm just trying to understand who's speaking here before I decide on your credibility.

I can only speak for my umich experience. gatech's honor code may suck, or it may not.

When I was at the University of Michigan as an engineering student, our honor code was (and still is) something my fellow students and I were proud of. I didn't know of anyone who cheated, and wouldn't have associated with them if I thought they were.

For the curious, here's the umich honor code

It looks like it's changed slightly since I was there: when I was a student, instructors were required to leave the room during an examination (now it says "the instructor need not monitor examinations in engineering classes.") We were required to write "I have neither given nor received aid on this examination." and sign it.

We didn't have proctors. We could talk to each other if there was a reasonable need to (e.g.: "my copy is blurry...does this say 6.7 or 8.7?") We could get up and leave the room, get a drink, go to the bathroom...

...and we didn't cheat. I failed more than one exam when I could have cheated and passed, and had friends that did the same--I recall one who wrote the pledge "I have OBVIOUSLY neither given nor received aid on this examination."

We had take-home exams from time to time. Same rules. Some homework was teamwork, other required you to do it yourself. But we played by the rules, and I think I'm a better engineer and person for doing so.

Of course, all of our classes weren't in the College of Engineering. In other colleges, there was no such honor code. Proctors walked up and down the aisles. No talking. No leaving the room. And far too many of them (the lesser non-engineering mortals) cheated like it was nothing.

If the gatech student in question knew and understood the rules and broke them anyway, then I have no sympathy for him. I didn't graduate U of M with a spectacular GPA, but I earned every 0.01 point of it.

That being said, if the article is correct in stating that gatech is now forbidding students to do any learning for the class from any sources than officially sanctioned Georgia Tech course materials and instructors, then I suggest he either get together with other like-minded students and faculty to change this system, or find a better school where he might learn something. Most of what I learned was a result of group study. Anything worth learning won't be comprehended totally the first time you read it or hear it in a lecture.

Wired had an article about a year or so ago . . .

Here's a link to the WIRED Article. The experiment you're talking about was called the Southern Ocean iron release experiment [SOIREE].

Some additional information on this strategy can be found here and here.

The problem behind any algae based solution is A) get enough nutrients to algae (thus the iron), and B) get the algae to sink to sea bottom where the CO2 won't just be released back into the atmosphere when the algae decomposes. The problem with this experiment was that A) worked, but B) wasn't addressed.

This looks to be one place to start:

http://www.lsa.umich.edu/lsait/default.asp

Do you have anymore?

OK, so what about It's raining? It's a kind of construction called a Dummy it. That is, the it has no meaning whatsoever (you're far from the first to be puzzled by it) and is used strictly as a placeholder, like the dummy hand in bridge, or the zero on 101. Why do anything that bizarre? Well, see, English Syntax has this Rule that says -- in ponderous and self-enforcing tones -- Thou Shalt Have A Subject In Every Finite Sentence. And thou must, indeed.

Handling 'it' is quite easy.

t.

Why not post an informational article about mathematics or information theory that might actually enrich or prove beneficial to the careers of Slashdot's readers?

The occasional reminder from the natural world about the strange things that actually happen in defiance of all the best theoretical simplifications is never a bad thing.

For the record, this new class of insect ranks somewhere between the Coelacanth and the Wollemi Pine on at least a couple of measures of significance. In both those cases the media got quite excited.

On the Linnaean kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species scale, the Coelacanth ranks as the only living member of class actinistia which shares a closer common ancestor with the tetrapods (including us) than does any other fish in the ocean. However the Woolemi Pine only ranks as a new genus of the Araucariaceae family, and any common ancestor with us is clearly much further in the past than that of this new insect "gladiator".

Seeing as the Linnaean txonomy project has been ongoing since Carl Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae in 1735, the illusion of completeness at higher levels ensures newsworthiness when something is discovered for which the closest related fossils known are tens of millions of years old.

So I really do see a similarities between finding a new bug in the Brandberg Mountains of Namibia and finding a new bug in software that had been running successfully for years.

BTW, I have no idea how anybody could imagine that calling a story "homosexual" would deter many Slashdot readers.

The reference is: Teasley, S.D., Covi, L., Krishnan, M.S., & Olson, J.S. (2000). How does radical collocation help a team succeed? In Proceedings of CSCW 2000 (pp. 339-346). New York: ACM Press.

Contact me or the authors and we can send you a pdf. See also the technical reports link from the CREW web page at crew.umich.edu

I have yet to see ANYBODY in this field tie the Pokletnov claims to the mainstream theory of gravity believed by most particle physicists, which is that it is caused by a particle called the Higgs Boson. What's interesting is that these mainstream physicists share many traits with Pokletnov to the untrained eye - they haven't really found the Higgs particle yet, they just think it's there because it ought to be, and without understanding of some really DEEP math the Higgs at first blush seems to be just as much handwaving as anti-gravity. Some of the best public-consumption stuff on the Higgs is to be found here, something about the (so far unsuccessful) search here, and an audio discussion with the inventor of the whole concept, Dr. Higgs himself, here. If you want to get into the serious math of the Higgs (good luck) one place to start is the bottom of the web page here.

Clinton was not impeached.

Wrong. Impeachment means that the House votes to send the case for a trial in the Senate. Just like a grand jury. He was impeached, but the Senate voted to not try him.

The rest of your comments are simple flambait.

Soon after Sept 11, senior people in the military were quoted as saying that they wanted the entire Afghanistan/Middle East region to "glow with radiation."

So, no, I'm not surprised that the US wants to use nukes. Particularly against that axis of evil -- if you can't nuke them, who can you nuke? And if you can't nuke anyone, what are those nukes for?

I'll admit I don't know much about computer science, but I do know that it's important to keep your code clear, well-documented and easy to understand.

Well, unfortunately it's not always that simple. Let's take the Shiny Metal Brute Force Crypt Cracker v3.1.9 as an example. It can crack every single password encrypted with crypt(3) containing 1 to 8 lowercase latin letters. It uses a sophisticated cryptoanalysis method, which scientists call the "Brute Force". Its main purpose is to hide domain of my electronic-mail address from spammers (see my bio). Here's the source code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Shiny Metal Brute Force Crypt Cracker v3.1.9
#
# Copyright (C) 2001,2002 shiny@key.salt (shiny@output)
# http://slashdot.org/~Shiny+Metal+S./
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
# as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
# of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General
# Public License along with this program;
# if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
# 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
#
$x=substr$q,q,0,,q,2,if$q=q,plfeY04jaJnYI,;for
(++$_..$_<<3){qq,$q,eq crypt$_,$x and die
qq,$_.$x,for q,a,x$_..q,z,x$_}

As you can clearly see, the main algorithm used in this program (in the main loop) is able to always find every password (from the 1-8 lowercase latin characters set) but what does it mean? I had to use strong cryptography, because otherwise my electronic-mail address could be harvested by spambots (and therefore be used to perform unsolicited commercial mass mailing), but it also means, that this algorithm could be used to crack passwords from your /etc/passwd (or even from /etc/shadow), which usually contain passwords encrypted with crypt(3) and this could compromise the whole system security (imagine hackers having unlimited access to your PC). It's a very dangerous problem. Most of password cracking tools use the, so called, "Dictionary Method" to guess passwords, which mean that you're safe as long as you have a password like "wmctsbvg" or "obwhdrle" or even "awxolfrk", but this program will guess such passwords. My point is, that it can be to dangerous to publish a clear and well documented source code to such a dangerous tool. It could be used by one of many underground hacker groups, like the famous Script Kiddies, who don't even care that reverse engineering of this code is illegal under the DMCA. Fortunately, this program was written in Perl, which was found to be the only language, with mathematically proved possibility of secure one-way obfuscating (also known as WOL - "write only language", or WORN paradigm - "write once - read never"), so it is impossible to reverse engineer. The situation will be even improved when Perl 6 is released (read Apocalypse I, Apocalypse II, Exegesis II, Apocalypse III, Exegesis III and Apocalypse IV for a good introduction to this subject). That way, people can still use crypt(3) to encrypt their passwords, with no fear that hackers know how to crack them, the crypt(3) encryption method is as secure as before. When this program will be rewriten in Perl 6, the crypt(3) method will be actually even more secure than before, thanks to the strong source code obfuscation method. I hope I explained where the obfuscated code can be useful, but this is only one example, I'm sure there are many places where the good old obfuscation will be priceless for many decades. If you have any additional questions, feel free to contact me.

I think there were a great many more people who discoverd the 'Americas' before the Vikings, Chinese, and Europeans.

Old world origins of first Americans revealed in analysis of skulls
Early Brazilians Unveil African Look
First Arrivals

image editing app isn't worth $39.

Most major colleges and universities require a specific software for a class. We will take graphics for example. Yes, I would love it if all schools used the Gimp for graphic design classes however the school usually has a contract with a software company instead. So, how much is academic verison of Photoshop? IIRC it is about $300.

Sure would be nice to see universities dumping these commercial licenses and going with the free (as in beer and speech) software...

http://www.itd.umich.edu/microsoft/

Pyramids - any engineer worth his salt could work out how to build the Pyramids, working out how the Egyptians built the pyramids is a different matter. But the ancient Egyptians wouldn't have had a hope of building even the first Aswan Dam.

Well, to answer my own question, on Freshmeat there appear to be one or two.

Have fun!

299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!

If convenient objects are just a quarter light year or so apart, then the journeys do not have to be so long.

Just make sure to bring along a whole lot of cheese doodles. we'll be sending GW with you. (smile)

Which brings up the question of who should we send as the the first people to travel?

Oh, wow. Those aren't the only scientific names you can find for those species. This website: umich says that the names are:

Wolves = Canis lupus lycaon

Hounds = Canis lupus familiaris

There are also places that use the names I did, but now I'm not so sure of my definition of species.

It's always seemed funny to me how the technologists take this field, which is tied irrevocably to philosophy, and ignore everything the philosophers say about it. For example, has there ever been a good refutation of Searle's Chinese Room argument?

oh no, there's quite a bit of foundational inquiry going on in the field. but there is also a growing awareness that the analytic tools we've inherited from our logicist and mathematician forefathers are really rather inadequate in reasoning about human behavior.

intelligence, as it turns out, isn't really very amenable to analysis from the traditional analytic stance. this is where the many paradoxes of logical representation come into play (the frame problem, the symbol grounding problem, searlean chinese room (which is a very subtle process/result argument veiled behind a rather crude part/whole paradox), and so on). these problems often stem directly from the philosophical tools used to talk about intelligence - and most spectacularly, from the analytic assumptions about the mind and the world.

it turns out to be much easier to analyze intelligent action using an existential stance. there is an increasing push within ai to draw from the hermeneutic analysis of heidegger and merlau-ponty in order to analyze intelligence not in terms of abstract information processing, but in terms of properties of existence in particular contexts. this approach is especially strong in the subfields of computer vision, robotics, and game ai - these are the areas that actually have to deal with humans in human environments, and coping in the everyday world turns out to be surprisingly harder than most abstract cogitation.

i will not repeat the argumentation here - see: hubert dreyfus, what computers still can't do (a bit dated by today's standards, but begun the critique of the analytic tradition in ai), philip agre, computation and human experience, and brian cantwell smith, on the origin of objects. they're wonderful expositions of where ai is headed philosophically.

but from this vantage point of view, the problems such as the chinese room argument appear completely defanged - like medieval angels-on-a-pinhead arguments stemming from an ill-suited theory of the world. :)

I'm surprised APL hasn't been mentioned. I wrote a few lines of APL a hundred years ago, and it's certainly not as popular as it used to be, but it was designed as a mathematical programming language. A couple of resources, obtained with Google, using this search rule. http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gc i213454,00.html http://www.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis4 00/apl/apl.html

This codec was developed by a German student in his spare time. He was dissatisfied with the quality of MP3, so made his own better codec.

Look at the MPEGplus home page for more information.

It achieves better compression than MP3 with better sounding results.

Also check out these webpages where other people have gone through a lot of trouble to compare audio codecs: Eric Mrozek's Audio Compression Page
Radified Guide to non-MP3 Encoders for CD Audio

Thank you for your comments, but the Ada FAQ (see section 2.6), a timeline of the language's history, and a writeup for a UMich course suggest otherwise. While S. Tucker Taft may have led the Ada 95 revision team and Jean Ichbiah led the Cii Honeywell Bull team designing the submission to the DoD (which became Ada 83), the design of the language is clearly not the work of a small number of people.

Rather, it was designed to meet a specification from a DoD working group and received feedback from hundreds of reports (and dozens of individuals or other groups).

While Robert Dewar's answer to "Was Ada designed by a committee?" is certainly witty, a rose by any other name would smell the same. Taft's answer lists -- for just Ada 95 -- not only the core "Design Team," but five other full- or nearly-full-time teams ("Language Precision Team", "Requirements Team", and three "user/implementor" teams) and the large group of "Distinguished Reviewers."

Given all that, I will retract my description of Ada as being designed by a committee -- it was in fact designed by a beauracracy!

(As for VHDL, I cannot find as detailed information on the web about its history, and don't have my VHDL books with me right now. However, the timeline at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg's VHDL-online -- with discussions and defining requirements taking up most of a decade -- suggests that it suffered from too many cooks at times.)

While I agree that Ada and VHDL are very expressive and powerful, it's not good to get rose-colored glasses about their history or (especially in VHDL's case) drawbacks.