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Until then, it's all bullshit hype.

For an example of a real engineer, read this . Of course, it's the USPTO that mistakes hype for substance...at the cost of the true innovators in this country.

Howard Salis

They also sell Wintel supercomputers. We recently got one.

I have not had the pleasure of using it yet. Hopefully I won't have to...

They also sell Wintel supercomputers. We recently got one.

I have not had the pleasure of using it yet. Hopefully I won't have to...

Hmmmm.... I remember doing mobius out of paper in topology classes, but somehow we never made a klein bottle.

I read the whole article, they do talk about geometry, they do talk about topology, but nowhere do they show you how to make a klein bottle out of paper...

Hmmmm.... I remember doing mobius out of paper in topology classes, but somehow we never made a klein bottle.

I read the whole article, they do talk about geometry, they do talk about topology, but nowhere do they show you how to make a klein bottle out of paper...

Yes. I wrote the same functionality for my employer. There are several ways to safeguard you.

The biggest problem is not the key distribution, but if you are using pre-shared keys, then by spoofing DNS and redirecting the IKE messages to an evil host, a dictionary attack on your pre-shared keys may be launched. See a detailed analysis on the attack, and it is feasible when you can redirect traffic (IKE exchange messages) towards you by poisoning the DNS.

If you are using RSA-SIG or RSA-ENCR, ask for certificate, and validate that their ID, their corresponding certificate field, and your idea of their ID match. That'll eliminate almost all the attacks.

Not all. Just poisoning the DNS reply one can DoS you, he may not have any way to establish IKE with you, and get your sensitive traffic sent to him.

Best is to have an ACL, which will authenticate phase 1 SA only if the peer's certificate contains some specific values in their CN/DN and other relevant fields.

-K-

self-serving sleazy politicians will make sure that brain scanners are *extremely* illegal

This is a fine point, and I don't dispute it.

However, politicians have other defenses as well. One such defense is changing the form of the question. Remember they are always at risk of having anything they say proven wrong, so they try not to say anything with interesting truth value at all.

One common politician trick is to make sure all questions about what they support are single-place predicates ("Do you favor lower taxes?") and not two-place predicates ("Do you think it's more important to have lower taxes or better schools?"). By doing this, they can be in favor of everything good but omit the critical bit--how much they're in favor of each thing, and therefore what their actual priorities are. I'm sure this is not the only trick they use.

(Incidentally, I've noticed a surprising similarity between the problem of detecting whether a politician is someone you should trust and the Turing Test. Or maybe I shouldn't be surprised. Maybe the essential question is the same--"is this person for real?")

Furthermore, I've been fascinated for a long time by an analysis of the late HP Grice called The Rules of Conversational Implicature, which basically assert that the relevance of speech is often not carried in its propositional, or per se, truth value, but rather in what is written between the lines. (Grice offers techniques for making this more concrete than you might expect.) I've often thought it would be interesting to see some implementation of Grice's rules applied to the various legal arenas involving speech acts (slander, fraud, perjury, etc.) I don't think it's practical (yet), but if it could be, it would yield fascinatingly different results than what we get now. Poking about in Google reveals at least one good writeup of Grice's position, though there must surely be others.

God I fucking hate that book. They use it at my univ along with another "Electronics" by Hambly that covers semi-conductors. The Electronics book, is not too great of a book either, but it's 1000x better than that piece of shit Nilsson book. I think EE/CompE students should unite and butn all Nilsson books.

I've actually been working as an undergrad assistant in a lab at UT Austin that is very active in the MINOS consortium, so it's pretty cool to see the experiment getting some attention.

There are some neat photos of the detector; the steel scintillator modules weigh about 5,000 tons (!), and you can see one as it is lifted into place. The detector uses something like 2000 16 channel photomultiplier tubes (I don't remember the exact number of tubes) to detect the showers of particles that are created as neutrinos interact with the steel scintillator plates, and the data from those tubes is processed to reconstruct events. Did I mention that the whole thing is in a cavern about 1/2 mile underground to reduce background noise from cosmic rays?

The detector is supposed to come online and start collecting real data in 2004.

Another very interesting neutrino experiment is SNO, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, which is in an underground mine in Canada. SNO resolved the solar neutrino problem; people previously couldn't explain why we weren't seeing the right number of neutrinos coming from the sun - it turns out that they "oscillate" and change into other types of neutrinos, and SNO verified this. The neutrino oscillations also imply that they have a non-zero mass (explanation beyond the scope of this comment ;)

The point of MINOS is to observe neutrinos from a controlled high-energy accelerator beam, rather than whatever we get from the sun, to very accurately measure the oscillations.

I've actually been working as an undergrad assistant in a lab at UT Austin that is very active in the MINOS consortium, so it's pretty cool to see the experiment getting some attention.

There are some neat photos of the detector; the steel scintillator modules weigh about 5,000 tons (!), and you can see one as it is lifted into place. The detector uses something like 2000 16 channel photomultiplier tubes (I don't remember the exact number of tubes) to detect the showers of particles that are created as neutrinos interact with the steel scintillator plates, and the data from those tubes is processed to reconstruct events. Did I mention that the whole thing is in a cavern about 1/2 mile underground to reduce background noise from cosmic rays?

The detector is supposed to come online and start collecting real data in 2004.

Another very interesting neutrino experiment is SNO, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, which is in an underground mine in Canada. SNO resolved the solar neutrino problem; people previously couldn't explain why we weren't seeing the right number of neutrinos coming from the sun - it turns out that they "oscillate" and change into other types of neutrinos, and SNO verified this. The neutrino oscillations also imply that they have a non-zero mass (explanation beyond the scope of this comment ;)

The point of MINOS is to observe neutrinos from a controlled high-energy accelerator beam, rather than whatever we get from the sun, to very accurately measure the oscillations.

I've actually been working as an undergrad assistant in a lab at UT Austin that is very active in the MINOS consortium, so it's pretty cool to see the experiment getting some attention.

There are some neat photos of the detector; the steel scintillator modules weigh about 5,000 tons (!), and you can see one as it is lifted into place. The detector uses something like 2000 16 channel photomultiplier tubes (I don't remember the exact number of tubes) to detect the showers of particles that are created as neutrinos interact with the steel scintillator plates, and the data from those tubes is processed to reconstruct events. Did I mention that the whole thing is in a cavern about 1/2 mile underground to reduce background noise from cosmic rays?

The detector is supposed to come online and start collecting real data in 2004.

Another very interesting neutrino experiment is SNO, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, which is in an underground mine in Canada. SNO resolved the solar neutrino problem; people previously couldn't explain why we weren't seeing the right number of neutrinos coming from the sun - it turns out that they "oscillate" and change into other types of neutrinos, and SNO verified this. The neutrino oscillations also imply that they have a non-zero mass (explanation beyond the scope of this comment ;)

The point of MINOS is to observe neutrinos from a controlled high-energy accelerator beam, rather than whatever we get from the sun, to very accurately measure the oscillations.

I've actually been working as an undergrad assistant in a lab at UT Austin that is very active in the MINOS consortium, so it's pretty cool to see the experiment getting some attention.

There are some neat photos of the detector; the steel scintillator modules weigh about 5,000 tons (!), and you can see one as it is lifted into place. The detector uses something like 2000 16 channel photomultiplier tubes (I don't remember the exact number of tubes) to detect the showers of particles that are created as neutrinos interact with the steel scintillator plates, and the data from those tubes is processed to reconstruct events. Did I mention that the whole thing is in a cavern about 1/2 mile underground to reduce background noise from cosmic rays?

The detector is supposed to come online and start collecting real data in 2004.

Another very interesting neutrino experiment is SNO, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, which is in an underground mine in Canada. SNO resolved the solar neutrino problem; people previously couldn't explain why we weren't seeing the right number of neutrinos coming from the sun - it turns out that they "oscillate" and change into other types of neutrinos, and SNO verified this. The neutrino oscillations also imply that they have a non-zero mass (explanation beyond the scope of this comment ;)

The point of MINOS is to observe neutrinos from a controlled high-energy accelerator beam, rather than whatever we get from the sun, to very accurately measure the oscillations.

Here's a fun page on shapes that could be manhole covers, if the only criteria was not being able to be made to fall into a slightly smaller hole: Here

Then Man created...
Not Than.

The University of Minnesota has the same tunnels, and used to have the same "nobody allowed in the tunnels policy". Then someone realised that it gets cold in Minnesota, and these tunnels run between most of the buildings, so they opened them up. Most people still don't use them, often to get from twon bulding 100 feet apart you needed to travel 700 feet or more. Still I did use them on the coldest days when it wasn't too far out of my way to do so, and was surprized how few people were down there.

Mind you the tunnels are official open, but they are not well labeled, often you have to go through a door where they scratched out the "private" sign. If you didn't know that you are now allowed in them you would think it is an off limits area. (I don't know why that would stop a student, but appearently it did) There also were few signs, so you had to know where they led. More than once I've seen someone ask a maintance person where the tunnel to some building was only to find they were in the building.

If they want to go after this guy with a harrassment suit or something, then fine. But Intel is persuing this case on an extremely dangerous legal premise. They want to extend the legal premise of "trespass to chattel" to the internet data. The theory is that his messages (electrons) TRESSPASSED on Intel's computers. The EFF has an article on trespass to chattel and the internet.

Sure trespass to chattel could be (and at times has been) twisted to deal with spammers, but that would also mean it can be used to attack ANYTHING on the internet. The cure would be worse than the disease. Any and every internet message would be subject to tresspass violations from each and every server it crosses. This (long) paper explains how trespass to chattel can essentially destroy the internet as we know it.

Trespass to chattel should NOT be twisted to apply on the internet. Any judge who does needs to be hit with a cluestick.

-

I agree totally. I work for a local government entity, and we recieve lots of grant money from the state to manage various web projects (basically we just host the servers, etc). The problem is that in every case where we are not given a choice about what software to use, the software works exclusively with IE. This is quite frustrating, considering that I manage our Windows network from my RH 7.3 machine. It's actually at the point where I have to keep a Windows computer in my office solely for those times that I need to do something with one of these projects.

It's getting better, though. We recently received a grant to do a map server project, but were given control of the software that we use. We originally planned on using ESRI's ArcIMS, priced at about $12,000 at the time. We even went to the training and started looking at hardware. Then I found out about the MapServer project. Mapserver is an open source internet map server, with all of the usual features: it's free, it's more secure, it's faster, it's more stable, etc, etc, etc. So rather than buying a Win2K server (that's the only thing ArcIMS will run on) and ArcIMS we bought a Redhat server and installed Mapserver. Saved my company about $17K, and our mapserver is faster than any ArcIMS-based server I've looked at.

The best news, though, is that this has brought about a significant change in thinking in my company. Before, our Controller thought Linux was a "toy". She used to say, "If it's free it can't be any good." All the usual stuff you expect. Now, we have one Linux server, a Linux firewall, two Linux desktops, and plans to add two more Linux servers in the next 6 months. They also sent me to take my RHCE about a week ago, but I bombed the Installation section. I'm going back May 19.

What half of that has to do with Mozilla I'm not sure. Just thought you guys might like to hear a nice story on Monday morning.

Try http://movielens.umn.edu, it's a University experiment which recommends you movies based on the ratings you gave other movies.

Before you say there's no hope, talk to an administrator at your school; you may be able to take placement tests or something to get out of your current situation. States are required to provide educational support for all their students through high school (public anyway; private is a different matter).

Here's a link to the Arizona Dept. of Ed.. If you're really that good in math, you may want to be tested for "giftedness." (Note: being "gifted" has to do with smarts and the way you think; you may have lots of brainpower but not be gifted.) While I don't like that term (another matter entirely), public schools must provide "gifted" education, so this may be the loophole you're looking for (see page 18 of this pdf). (Caution: my school district counted the AP classes as gifted education.) Here's a link to the "gifted student" section.

In high school, I lived near the Twin Cities (Minnesota), and was pretty good at math. UMTYMP was a good experience for me. Once you test in (you need to know a little bit of algebra and be between 4th and 8th grades to start), you start with Algebra I & II the first year. The second year is Geometry and Trig, and then you do calculus until you're through high school. There may be something like this where you live.

FlatLand!
Flatland is a great way to visualize geometric shapes and concepts in 0d, 1d, 2d, 3d, and it begins to talk about 4d. Of course, 4d wasn't really understood when this book was written, but its a great and fun start.

I'd love to see a group lens for books. Movielens is awesome.

By Romans, Christians, and Muslims. Story here.

Don't forget that Rosalind Franklin's work provided the vital clues that allowed DNA's structure to be determined.

Mind you I've never trusted Jeff Goldblum, first he "steals" the discovery of DNA then it all goes wrong...

Great.... Firefly.com has a patent for this sort of thing, and now Microsoft has it (Microsoft bought them). Is this another case of something getting off the ground and then squashed because of lawyers?

I haven't looked into their patent on "this sort of thing" in particular, but I wouldn't be concerned.

First of all, collaborative filtering, a.k.a. "this sort of thing" was developed at about the same time at a few places, most notably MIT (hence Firefly) and the University of Minnesota (which lead to Amazon.com's recommendation systems, among others.) The U of M's research, which I was involved with, started out with recommendations/filtering of Usenet, but later moved into movie recommendations. They then formed Net Perceptions, Inc. which worked on Amazon, CDNow.com, and others.

I've done the occasional patent search on collaborative filtering, and all the patents cover particular methods and algorithms. The technique itself is not patented, and anyone can do it. See http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~karypis/suggest/index .html for one implementation.

This is significantly different from what Firefly was doing. For one thing, Firefly was based on explicit ratings: you would explicitly tell it what you think of a particular item. The song recommender in this case uses implicit ratings: your behavior is used to infer a particular rating. That was pioneered at the U of M.

In any case, this sort of stuff is used by everyone from Netflix to Tivo to Amazon, without patent issues. So you can too.

Great.... Firefly.com has a patent for this sort of thing, and now Microsoft has it (Microsoft bought them). Is this another case of something getting off the ground and then squashed because of lawyers?

I haven't looked into their patent on "this sort of thing" in particular, but I wouldn't be concerned.

First of all, collaborative filtering, a.k.a. "this sort of thing" was developed at about the same time at a few places, most notably MIT (hence Firefly) and the University of Minnesota (which lead to Amazon.com's recommendation systems, among others.) The U of M's research, which I was involved with, started out with recommendations/filtering of Usenet, but later moved into movie recommendations. They then formed Net Perceptions, Inc. which worked on Amazon, CDNow.com, and others.

I've done the occasional patent search on collaborative filtering, and all the patents cover particular methods and algorithms. The technique itself is not patented, and anyone can do it. See http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~karypis/suggest/index .html for one implementation.

This is significantly different from what Firefly was doing. For one thing, Firefly was based on explicit ratings: you would explicitly tell it what you think of a particular item. The song recommender in this case uses implicit ratings: your behavior is used to infer a particular rating. That was pioneered at the U of M.

In any case, this sort of stuff is used by everyone from Netflix to Tivo to Amazon, without patent issues. So you can too.

Now that somebody figured out how to paint the lid of an iBook, we're going to be assulted with Slashdot stories on all types of Lidart:

Including Pinup/Nose Art, Graffiti-inspired Art, and even 70s Van Airbrush-inspired art.

Here's a thought... Somebody draw the daVinci of the naked guy and put the apple over the naughty bits.

Ulp. I guess the same thing could be done with Mr. Goatse.

Idea withdrawn...

Actually, I think Tetris has been proven to be impossible to win (where "win" is defined as being able to play forever). There's a research paper that explains why.

• Scripting Languages for Java
• Interactive Languages
• Non-interactive Languages

Intelligent Autonomous Systems, neat robot projects including a neural-network pole-balancer, with pictures and whitepapers
Link

Pole-Balancing Mini-Robot using neural networks
Link

Intelligent fuzzy logic and PCB fab with pictures and video
Link

Reinforcement Learning Pole-Balancing Applet by Appl
Link

Demonstrations of Several Solutions to the Pole-Balancing Problem by Jeff Lawson and Chris Lewis
Link

Well, I'm a student at the University of Minnesota, Morris and I volunteer at KUMM, where I try to play an ecclectic mix of both old favorites and obscurities as well as new music, so I'd suggest listening to our (Windows Media) stream. I've also archived playlists for my show here.

Well, I'm a student at the University of Minnesota, Morris and I volunteer at KUMM, where I try to play an ecclectic mix of both old favorites and obscurities as well as new music, so I'd suggest listening to our (Windows Media) stream. I've also archived playlists for my show here.

Traveling upon the public roadways is a right. Use a horse, walk, bicycle...
Driving a motor vehicle may not be.

"state govt can restrict driving on the public roads to drivers with valid current licenses, and restrict drivers to vehicles registered as having passed inspection, notwithstanding argument about a "right to travel". Hendrick v. Maryland (1915) 235 US 610"
" The plaintiff's argument that the right to operate a motor vehicle is fundamental because of its relation to the fundamental right of interstate travel ... is utterly frivolous. What is at issue here is not his right to travel interstate, but his right to operate a motor vehicle on the public highways, and we have no hesitation in holding that this is not a fundamental right. Berberian v. Petit (RI 1977) 374 A2d 791, 86 ALR3d 468"


"Minnesota Law and the Right To Drive" "Driving is a privilege, not a right, and because of this can be greatly regulated and restricted."

I found this to be the case when I was in college. At my school everyone had a laptop and an Internet connection in class. While the administrators tried to say how great this was for everyone, it proved to be more of a distraction than a learning tool. Nearly everyone was furiously typing during lecture, but it wasn't because they were taking notes, it was because they were IM'ing during the whole class. And then, after not listening to the lectures, the same people would complain to the instructors that the assignments and exams were too hard... As a result, several instructors enforced a no internet connection during class policy, which then resulted in everyone using the machines to play games such as solitare, and my personal favorite time waster dope wars. :-) On the days I really wanted to learn something I would leave the computer at home, and take a notebook and pen to class and force myself to pay attention.

I found it kind of funny that this ad (mirror) was displayed at the top of this page when I reloaded it to refresh the comments.

Other sources for stem cells include fat rolls, and as somebody else mentioned, umbilical cords.

• Net Traffic Doubling every 6 months -- Note, original report from Caspian seems to be removed
  

• Internet traffic growth: A gale or a hurricane?
  
• Comments on the Larry Roberts and Caspian Networks study of Internet traffic growth
  
• Internet growth: Is there a Moore's Law?
  
  

Check out Kennecott Copper Mine near Salt Lake City, UT. Don't worry, you'll be able to find it. It's purportedly one of two man-made features on Earth visible from space with the naked eye, the other being the Great Wall of China. (I don't think they're counting reservoirs.) If you arrive at the right time of day, you can watch them blast away the hillside using tons of explosives. The entire site is crawling with huge trucks and steamshovels, trains, pipelines and the like. The complex stretches for miles and miles, and there's a lot of interesting industrial stuff to see around the area in addition to the tour itself.

Another cool tour is the Soudan Underground Mine State Park in Soudan, MN. They run you deep, deep underground in an old iron mine, and show you what it was like working a mile below the surface. That's also where the University of Minnesota built their cosmic ray detection lab.

It`s a shame that Slashdot is using a photo of the aged Einstein as the Science ikon. He was young and handsome when he published his major results,
http://mbbnet.umn.edu/doric/icons/einstein.jpeg.
Anders Eg

You can see a sample of this type of map and learn a little bit about it at http://aprsworld.net/info/paper2002/giant-map-of-l a.php

-James Jefferson
KB0THN

Find me

I think mousemen are a great idea! The hot, stuffy Mickey Mouse suit would not be needed anymore. They could just hire a mouseman!

Now if they would only cross-breed humans and gophers, we could have a real Goldy Gopher...

Eutelsat are launching Hotbird 7 (13e) on the 28th, so maybe things will be ok this time because they're using Ariane 5 instead of a Proton, oh shit.

As for Astra 19.2e, they're pretty fucked, the birds 1K was meant to replace date from 1991-94 and Astra 1A which launched in 1988 died in ~2002, so draw your own conclusions.

The PDA I use is a Newton MessagePad 2100. It's an awesome tool. I carry it around with me most of the time. I take all of my college lecture notes [1] on it using handwriting recognition (which comes in incredibly handy when you are trying to find something- don't just page through, do a full-text search!); I use it as a 'net pad with 802.11b (regular ethernet when I'm at school) and web browsers, irc, email, telnet; I use it for data collection any analysis with a spreadsheet; I use it for writing papers, between NewtonWorks (WYSIWYG) and a small TeX interpreter; I use it for coding, in Forth, Lisp and NewtonScript, with and without the keyboard, whether I'm just trying to find a number quick or writing a full blown application.

That's most of what I do. I never sync. I backup onto a memory card, but a Newton does not need a desktop to be useful. I had to use a desktop in order to put on the driver for ethernet, but past that, everything else I've been able to install using it. Unlike the 3600-series iPAQs (are they still this bad?) I get a lot more than 2-3 hours of battery life, so I only have to charge once a week. I usually get a few weeks out of a charge of the NiMH battery if I'm not doing much with the wireless ethernet... if I am using it for an hour or so a day, about a week.

A while back, I tried both a Jornada 720 and an iPAQ 3150 to replace the Newton, and for doing real work it just isn't practical yet for me. Someday, my own PDA environment/OS Dynapad will be mature enough to be useful, but not for a while. Until then, I'm going to stick to the Newt, preferring to have a PDA be a computer that supplants some of the activities I do at a desktop or laptop rather than being an overpriced electronic organizer or status symbol...

[1] But I stopped putting them up online- no one wanted my messy notes. :)

A Parable

An interesting example that is related to this is a talk that one of my professors gave at the Instructional Technology Fair yesterday at my college. The title of his talk was "Is Microsoft Word Inherently Evil?" and he addressed some serious questions about the power that one's use of Word gives to MS over how we communicate. One of the biggest points he made was that MS Word (unlike HTML) is neither a standard nor open, as MS can change the Word file formats whenever it wants, thereby causing older versions of Word to not be able to read documents created in newer versions. The outline for his talk is here.

An interesting example that is related to this is a talk that one of my professors gave at the Instructional Technology Fair yesterday at my college. The title of his talk was "Is Microsoft Word Inherently Evil?" and he addressed some serious questions about the power that one's use of Word gives to MS over how we communicate. One of the biggest points he made was that MS Word (unlike HTML) is neither a standard nor open, as MS can change the Word file formats whenever it wants, thereby causing older versions of Word to not be able to read documents created in newer versions. The outline for his talk is here.

On a slightly different tack - the
Sleipner A oil platform sank because of a bad design, caused by inaccurate computer based modelling (using an FEA tool inappropriately). In this case it was the data not the software.

1.) Patriot missile failure
2.) Intel f*cking up floating-point calculations in one of their chips
3.) High-tech toilet glitch (no, really!)
4.) Windows ME

Hey This professor still uses a typewriter. Why? Cuz he's tool cool for school.

well, to be fair, he has a secretary who reads and prints his e-mail and checks his phone mail. Gosh, I wish I was that important! (or had the disposable income to afford a personal slave^H^H^H^H^H assistant...

But the important AND ON TOPIC thing here is: use the tools that work. If you need additional functionality don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. However, there are times when you will have to give up your old ways (no more pulse dial phones, granpa!)

Should've been from the highly irrelevant-dept I think, especially considering that Blender has now been Open-Sourced! [U.S. Mirror | Dutch Mirror]