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Nice review!

I just got this book and it's clear the author has really done his research. His writing style is also very clear, concise and well thought out. Not overly chatty or pandering, yet not dryly accademic either. Precisely the kind of computer book I'd want to write!

I'm glad the reviewer didn't try to talk a lot about why people should be interested in functional programs, however I must say that the ability to write large complex algorithms in very few lines, and prove mathematically that it works is simply a miracle in some situations. If you need to write a compiler (or do any other set of complex alogirthms on large recursive data structures, especially those that could take advantage of tagged unions, like Abstract Syntax Trees do) you should check out OCaml. And it doesn't hurt that it can figure out the type of all your functions and variables for you :)

Oh, and if you happen to get this book, and want to play with OCaml, you can get the OCaml translation of the data structures in this book here.

I dont' know if very many programmers will ever program in a purely functional language, however it seems that languages of the future will have to include things like first class functions and closures, as they are incredibly useful. I know Ruby and Python already support a lot of it.

Oh and in case anyone's wondering, it *IS* possible to encapsulate things like notion of state, error handling, and I/O in a purely functional language ("side effect free" language) using something called monads. Now there's a fun concept to wrap your brain around!

Hope some people here are brave enough to dig into a book like this that requires a bit of math, and more than a little faith at some points :)

Cheers,
Justin Wick

4.1.8. PureFun

When we query Google for that question, we immediately discover that this 2003 talk by Eco is a rehash of a talk he gave in 1995, and a very similar talk he gave in 1996, and again in 1998, and yet again in 2000 . Each of those talks contains the Napoleon/Kant/encyclopedia example. So Eco has been giving much the same talk for almost a decade now.

A search at Amazon.com reveals that Bertrand Russell compared Napoleon and Kant back in 1935, and mentioned that Kant never travelled more than 10 miles from his home town of Konigsberg, Germany. Eco has presumably read Russell, one of the great philosophers and essayists, and may have lifted the Kant/Napoleon example from Russell.

So we've learned something important about Eco himself, something he didn't tell us. He's less creative and original than he would like us to think. Before Internet searches, it would have taken considerable scholarly research to discover that. Now, anyone can do it in a few minutes.

IBM in fact has demonstrated Shor's algorithm

... the "gates" are in fact carefully crafted laser pulses ...

In 1787, Mozart invented A Musical Dice Game for Composing a Minuet. Given the results of the game, I assume that one can derive the dice numbers that created it. (If not, it shouldn't be hard to modify the game to possess that property.) Now, play the game using a fixed string of bits instead of a random number generator. The result is very definitely music, and it isn't steganography.

The use of a Mozart encoder and decoder would be even more powerful than Ka-Blamo.

For the Sobig.f statistics, check out the virus stats page of the University of Vienna also.

For the Sobig.f statistics, check out the virus stats page of the University of Vienna also.

• Post-Experiment Key Generation
  
  Only after a measurement run is completed, Alice and Bob compare their lists of detections to extract the coincidences and generate the quantum keys. Taking into account the time uncertainties of all measurement electronics in our system, we can implement a coincidence window of 5 ns. All the communication for generating the quantum keys and testing the security of the quantum channel is done by Alice's and Bob's personal computers via the standard computer network.

I'm running 5.1 on my Thinkpad T20 almost without any problems. Which Thinkpad Model do you use? Maybe you can find some info at http://gerda.univie.ac.at/freebsd-laptops/, which lists not only Thinkpad laptops.

Besides, your women are only better looking if you like big lasses with hairy pits and legs.

Even though I read a little German, I found the legal stuff a bit taxing...

As long as we're wishing, I wish redhat would let people run their own up2date servers. I don't know of a way to do that. I would much prefer to keep a local repository of updates and let my machines log into that with the up2date stuff.

autoupdate does the trick ...

http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/~johann/browser.html

/me shows you.

I hate to break it to y'all, but in the human eye, each spot in the fovea is occupied by one receptor, which is maximally sensitive at one wavelength -- in other words, it works the way that current digital cameras work. (Random Googled link.) I suppose that if the human eye needed to determine the color of a particular "pixel", it would have to interpolate, just like a CCD camera... but that's a moot point, because that doesn't actually happen in our visual system. (It's much, much more complicated than that.)

Now, this technology does sound like a great way to increase the resolution of digital cameras, if it's feasible. However, all this "neuromorphic" stuff is pure marketing. (Though I admit that "Foveon" is a clever name.)

Liquid Audio's days are numbered [...] The board voted unanimously in favor of a $57 million stockholder cash payout. They would rather sell the company, but if there is no buyer then they would probably have to liquidate the company.

Okay, maybe this is a stretch, but hear me out. I believe pi is considered to be normal. See here and here for background on what "normal" means. Essentially, it says the digits are equally distributed over the long run. I believe then, that you can also prove that by exploring sufficiently deep within pi, you will find every conceivable string of digits (ie, in any order you desire and of any length). I think my math is reasonably correct here, but feel free to put me back on track.

Anyways, if this is the case, all digital works are already rendered in pi. All past and future audio master recordings are already in pi. All source and binary distributions of all software are already dumped in pi. Etc.

So the implication is: Am I breaking simple copyright law or the DMCA by computing pi? Am I a criminal for posessing a sufficiently large dump of pi's digits? If I find the rip of a new audio CD in pi, can I keep it?

I don't quite understand where this Inexpensive crap came from. RAID was around long before IDE RAID controllers started showing up and of course SCSI RAID arrays almost always use very expesive disks. It's Redunant Array of Independent Disks, always has always will be.

It probably comes from the original reseach paper... A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks in the Proceedings of SIGMOD International Conference on Data Management, 1988. (Pages 109-116.) SCSI drives were an inexpensive option compared to other storage technologies that offered high performance and fail over safety.

Over time the acronym expansion was changed to become "redundant array of independent disks" as RAID become more popular (and affordable) for smaller systems.

Some references: here, here and here

Although simpler, I prefer portsupgrade. It is a nice little Perl script that does the job of replacing a port.

Some months ago I wrote a short paper on the (then, 0.9.12) new XINE user interface which was really horrible to use. They took that "real-world device" metaphor too far; you can also observe this in other (preferably multimedia) programs (a detailed analysis on the Apple Quicktime Player can be found on the Interface Hall of Shame), XMMS also comes to my mind as an example on how not to do it.

So: Better have one theme that keeps focus on usability than tons of ugly, non-intuitive and mis-metaphored skins.

For the last eight months, we have been using autoupdate at our site to keep about 50 RedHat Linux boxes up-to-date. It seems to work pretty well. Though, this red carpet stuff looks pretty interesting too.

Australia

ftp://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Brisbane)
Austria

ftp://ftp.univie.ac.at/systems/linux/Mandrake/8.2/ i586/ (Vienna)

ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/linux/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Vienna)
Belgium

ftp://ftp.belnet.be/packages/mandrake/8.2/i586/
Costa Rica

ftp://ftp.ucr.ac.cr/pub/Unix/linux/mandrake/Mandra ke/8.2/i586/
Czech Republic

ftp://ftp.cesnet.cz/OS/Linux/Mandrake/mandrake/8.2 /i586/ (Brno)

ftp://ftp.fi.muni.cz/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Brno)

ftp://klobouk.fsv.cvut.cz/pub/linux-mandrake/Mandr ake/8.2/i586/ (Prague)

ftp://mandrake.redbox.cz/Mandrake/8.2/i586/

ftp://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz/OS/Linux/Dist/Mandrake/m andrake/8.2/i586/ (Prague)

http://ftp.fi.muni.cz/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Brno)
Denmark

ftp://ftp.dkuug.dk/pub/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Koebenhavn)

ftp://ftp.sunsite.dk/mirrors/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Aalborg)
Estonia

ftp://ftp.aso.ee/pub/os/Linux/distributions/mandra ke/8.2/i586/
Finland

ftp://ftp.song.fi/pub/linux/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Espoo)
France

ftp://ftp.ciril.fr/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Nancy)

ftp://ftp.club-internet.fr/pub/unix/linux/distribu tions/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Paris)

ftp://ftp.info.univ-angers.fr/pub/linux/distributi ons/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Angers)

ftp://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/linux/distributions/mandrake /8.2/i586/ (Paris)

ftp://ftp.proxad.net/pub/Distributions_Linux/Mandr ake/8.2/i586/ (Paris)

ftp://ftp.u-strasbg.fr/pub/linux/distributions/man drake/8.2/i586/ (Strasbourg)

ftp://linux.ups-tlse.fr/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Toulouse)
Germany

ftp://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/Mandra ke/8.2/i586/ (Esslingen)

ftp://ftp.de.uu.net/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/

ftp://ftp.fh-giessen.de/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i58 6/ (Giessen)

ftp://ftp.fh-wolfenbuettel.de/pub/os/linux/mandrak e/dist/8.2/i586/ (Wolfenbuettel)

ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Goettingen)

ftp://ftp.join.uni-muenster.de/pub/linux/distribut ions/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Muenster)

ftp://ftp.leo.org/pub/comp/os/unix/linux/Mandrake/ Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Munchen)

ftp://ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i5 86/ (Chemnitz)

ftp://ftp.tu-clausthal.de/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i 586/ (Clausthal)

ftp://ftp.uasw.edu/pub/os/linux/mandrake/dist/8.2/ i586/ (Wolfenbuettel)

ftp://ftp.uni-bayreuth.de/pub/linux/Mandrake/8.2/i 586/ (bayreuth)

ftp://ftp.uni-kassel.de/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i58 6/ (Kassel)

ftp://ftp.uni-mannheim.de/systems/linux/mandrake/8 .2/i586/ (Mannheim)

ftp://ftp.vat.tu-dresden.de/pub/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Dresden)

ftp://ramses.wh2.tu-dresden.de/pub/mirrors/mandrak e/8.2/i586/ (Dresden)

ftp://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/Linux/ mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Aachen)
Greece

ftp://ftp.duth.gr/pub/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Thrace)

ftp://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Athens)
Hong Kong

ftp://ftp.wisr.eie.polyu.edu.hk/linux/mandrake/8.2 /i586/
Hungary

ftp://ftp.linuxforum.hu/mirror/Mandrake/8.2/i586/
Ireland

ftp://ftp.esat.net/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/
Italy

ftp://bo.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Bologna)

ftp://ftp.edisontel.it/pub/Mandrake_Mirror/Mandrak e/8.2/i586/
Latvia

ftp://ftp.latnet.lv/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/
Netherlands

ftp://ftp.nl.uu.net/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/

ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/Mandrake/Man drake/8.2/i586/

ftp://ftp.surfnet.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/Mandrake/M andrake/8.2/i586/

ftp://ftp.wau.nl/pub/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Wageningen)
Poland

ftp://ftp.ps.pl/mirrors/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Szczecin)

ftp://ftp.task.gda.pl/pub/linux/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Gdansk)
Portugal

ftp://ftp.dei.uc.pt/pub/linux/Mandrake/Mandrake/8. 2/i586/ (Coimbra)

ftp://tux.cprm.net/pub/Mandrake/8.2/i586/
Russia

ftp://ftp.chg.ru/pub/Linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Chernogolovka)
Singapore

ftp://ftp.singnet.com.sg/opensource/linux/Mandrake /8.2/i586/
Slovakia

ftp://spirit.profinet.sk/mirrors/Mandrake/8.2/i586 / (Bratislava)
Spain

ftp://ftp.cesga.es/pub/linux/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Galicia)

ftp://ftp.cica.es/pub/Linux/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Sevilla)

ftp://ftp.rediris.es/pub/linux/distributions/mandr ake/8.2/i586/
Sweden

ftp://ftp.chello.se/pub/Linux/Mandrake/8.2/i586/

ftp://ftp.chl.chalmers.se/pub/Linux/distributions/ Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Gothenburg)

ftp://ftp.du.se/pub/os/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Dalarma)
Switzerland

ftp://ftp.pcds.ch/pub/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Neuhausen)

ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mirror/mandrake/8.2/ i586/ (Zurich)
Taiwan

ftp://linux.cdpa.nsysu.edu.tw/pub/Mandrake/mandrak e/8.2/i586/

ftp://linux.csie.nctu.edu.tw/distributions/mandrak e/Mandrake/8.2/i586/

ftp://mdk.linux.org.tw/pub/mandrake/8.2/i586/
Turkey

ftp://ftp.ankara.edu.tr/pub/linux/dagitimlar/Mandr ake/8.2/i586/ (Ankara)
United Kingdom

ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/sunsite.uio.no/pub/un ix/Linux/Mandrake/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Canterbury)
United States

ftp://ftp-linux.cc.gatech.edu/pub/linux/distributi ons/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Georgia)

ftp://ftp.cise.ufl.edu/pub/mirrors/mandrake/Mandra ke/8.2/i586/ (Florida)

ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Linux/Mandrake/mandr ake/8.2/i586/ (NY)

ftp://ftp.nmt.edu/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (New Mexico)

ftp://ftp.orst.edu/pub/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Oregon)

ftp://ftp.tux.org/pub/distributions/mandrake/8.2/i 586/ (Virginia)

ftp://ftp.umr.edu/pub/linux/mandrake/Mandrake/8.2/ i586/ (Missouri)

ftp://ftp.uwsg.indiana.edu/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586 / (Indiana)

ftp://linux-cs.tccw.wku.edu/pub/linux/distribution s/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (WKU-Linux, Western Kentucky University)

ftp://mirror.aca.oakland.edu/linux/mandrake/8.2/i5 86/ (Michigan)

ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/linux/Mandrak e/8.2/i586/ (Wisconsin)

ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Illinois)

ftp://mirrors.ptd.net/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Pensylvania)

ftp://mirrors.secsup.org/pub/linux/mandrake/Mandra ke/8.2/i586/

ftp://uml-pub.ists.dartmouth.edu/mirrors/ftp.mandr akesoft.com/pub/Mandrake/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (New Hampshire)

ftp://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/mirrors/mandrake/Mandra ke/8.2/i586/ (Hawaii)

http://mandrake.dsi.internet2.edu/Mandrake/8.2/i58 6/ (For Internet2 academic institutions only)

How do you divide 365 by 7? You don't. Thus, there are 36.5 "dekades" per year (which is just plain stupid). "Hey, y'all, let's make a metric week sound just like the normal word for ten years! Great!"

Buh. Anyway, didn't the French try a 10-day week? And didn't it blow up in their faces? Furthermore, would this be a system similar to this one? I don't know, I don't like having a "Uranusday", especially in the Posterior Halfweek.

Quantum teleportation is not new. It has been done and published 1997 [Nature vol.390, 11 Dec 1997, pp.575] by Weinfurter & Zeilinger. The experiment was in Innsbruck, Austria (which is not a typo of Australia). The website contains interesting details on the experiment.

it is a bit of a pain in the butt having to apply patches to my RedHat server each month

Try AutoUpdate. It does a good job keeping RedHat up to date.

Red carpet is a great tool for people learning what's going on in their system, and providing explanations of what all the packages are for. After you've got mor than a few boxes, it becomes really unruly to keep them 'current'. I'm running about 80 redhat boxes here, all of which are nicely kept up to date using autoupdate. The update server fetches from ximian and redhat nightly, and the workstations update themselves from there weekly. No worries about bandwidth!

It can be run from cron (so root gets e-mail reports) and you can configure it to just download the updates (it does also update the updates so the older ones get deleted) or to install them automatically for you. It can compare the remote updates against those installd on your system or against a set or rpms you specify. It can even upgrade your kernel updating the LILO or GRUB configuration if you tell it to do so.

I'm using it to download and (for some of them) install all the Red Hat official updates for 6.2 and 7.2., also Ximian GNOME (w/o the Red Carpet bloat and using FTP or [S]HTTP so no proprietary server portion as in up2date is necessary), the unofficial HDE 2.2.x rpms maintained by Benjamin Reed at ftp://ftp.opennms.org/people/ben/, ..

It really shines when the repository maintainer does publish the dependency database (created by using nothing more than rpm and the autoupdate script itself) along the packages.

Give it a try, you will not regret.

The author is Gerald Teschl

The URL is:

http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~gerald/ftp/autoupdate /index.html

-- Ramiro

If you want to update easily, install autoupdate:
see here
and add a file called kde.dld in /etc/autoupdate.d/ containing:

# configuration file for kde update
# please choose a mirror close to you
Host=ftp.kde.org
DldAll=0
FTPRetry=2
FTPWait=10
DldRecurse=0
Dir=/pub/kde/stable/2.2.2/RedHat/7.2/

or wait that the packages are available thru MandrakeUpdate.

FUD is a fact of life. As a hacker I don't like FUD, either, but it should be clear that you can't fight Microsoft FUD with conventional or even logical arguments. FUD, sadly, is the only way to go.

Microsoft is scared shitless about open source, and what it can do to its unethical monopoly. Calling Microsoft's FUD for what it is hasn't even made them flinch. The only thing that management listens to, after all, is FUD, so what reason should stop Open Source from making FUD arguments against the Evil Empire?

Let's face it, people in management and people who don't know better have only emotions to rely upon. I don't see anything particulary wrong with creating some FUD to cloud those emotions and make them look at the facts that Microsoft is run by a megalomaniac who wants to have legal authority to basically become the first global internet government, supported by taxes like renewable licensing.

Further information and links at the research group from Austria that ran the first experimental verification of quantum teleportation.

I didn't know there was a soft drink called White Lightnin'. I was thinking about the beverage Merle Haggard sang about in Okie from Muskogee, the same kind Robert Mitchum ran in Thunder Road. I think Mitchum sang the Ballad, too. I just remember white lighnin' and mountain dew being euphemisms for moonshine whiskey. There's a silly song about mountain dew that's innocuous enough for kids to sing as a campfire song. I thought the hillbilly ad campaign was pretty corny; it's remarkable that they've been able to reposition it as something that people who consider themselves cool would even consider drinking. (It's not too bad with Cruzan's Pineapple Rum)

I didn't know there was a soft drink called White Lightnin'. I was thinking about the beverage Merle Haggard sang about in Okie from Muskogee, the same kind Robert Mitchum ran in Thunder Road. I think Mitchum sang the Ballad, too. I just remember white lighnin' and mountain dew being euphemisms for moonshine whiskey. There's a silly song about mountain dew that's innocuous enough for kids to sing as a campfire song. I thought the hillbilly ad campaign was pretty corny; it's remarkable that they've been able to reposition it as something that people who consider themselves cool would even consider drinking. (It's not too bad with Cruzan's Pineapple Rum)

Well, on RH and Mandrake, i use autopdate.
one main advantage is that u can put it in your cron.daily... it's pure commande line, and works well. I think that as far as updates as concerned, this should always work this way.

I am sure that in both cases, that it is possible with either some switch settings or additional step somewhere.

I was wondering if the possibility of having a unified database for the packages might be reasonable, maybe an XML/RDF based database which then both apt-get and RPM can use mutally.

I was wondering if some of the concerns of those that aren't big fans of RPM are to use gnorpm and/or Redhat's Up2date. They seem to have some nice GUI aspects that make installing packages a little easier as well as providing for the ability to identify and install needed dependencies like apt-get does.

Or maybe some other tools like Auto Update or AutoRPM

Also would use of the package transalation tools like alien help in the two working together?

I think one of the concerns over all the recent hits on many of the distributions, which was one of the weaknesses in the Standard Linux projects has been inconsistant packaging. Perhaps, combining the projects may be beneficial to both parties so that other innovations and work can be done elsewhere.

BreezyGuy

I know apt-update was around first, but there is now a nifty utility for Redhat distros to automatically have them download and install all the updates for your particular version.

It's called autoupdate, and can be found at http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~gerald/ftp/autoupdate /index.html.

Not only can it grab updates from a ftp server, but it can also snag them via NFS or whatever from one of your servers, which has already downloaded them. You don't have to download the updates twice.

So you'd just have a cron job on a Linux box which uses autoupdate to download everything from ftp.redhat.com or a mirror, and then each of your clients could run a cron job an hour later that grabs the updates from your main server.

Nothing beats writing secure code -- but since no program is perfect, you might as well have something to make upgrading software easy on yourself.
-Eric

The idea that progress is going through a sharp turn upward is not supported by the Kurzweil's reference to the "exponential", a curve that looks basically the same at any scale -- but on a more radical mathematical formulation that goes to infinity in finite time -- specifically by Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026 (give or take). No, this isn't just some New Age eschatology -- it was actually arrived at by looking at historic data and extrapolating into the future.

Here is an excerpt from "Spasim (1974) The First First-Person-Shooter 3D Multiplayer Networked Game" that discusses the origin of the Transhumanist conception of "The Singularity":

They were trying to realize a man-machine cybernetic vision of this magical little gnome named Heinz von Foerster and needed an email system to go along with it.
...
When the semester was over, I threw a few things into my '64 Chevy Impalla, and headed east on Interstate 80 across the Illinois border for Urbana and CERL. It was my first paying job as a programmer.

Arriving at the Mecca of networking and meeting the magical little gnome who founded second order cybernetics (symbolized by the Ouroboros) in his Biological Computer Laboratory was an amazing experience.
...
A vital side note: Heinz von Foerster had published a paper in 1960 on global population: von Foerster, H, Mora, M. P., and Amiot, L. W., "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D." 2026, Science 132, 1291-1295 (1960). In this paper, Heinz shows that the best formula that describes population growth over known human history is one that predicts the population will go to infinity on a Friday the 13 in November of 2026. As Roger Gregory likes to say, "That's just whacko!" The problem is, after he published the paper, it kept predicting population growth better than the other models. (see section 4.1 "Systems Ecology Notes") One of Heinz's early University of Illinois colleagues was Richard Hamming of "Hamming code" fame. Once while visiting the Naval Postgraduate School, I asked Dr. Hamming what he thought of Heinz von Foerster. Professor Hamming's response was "Heinz von Foerster: Now there's a first class kook!" I suspect Heinz's publication of, what Transhumanists call, "the singularity" had really gotten to Hamming -- not that Heinz wasn't eccentric enough get Hamming's goat in any case. Well, to continue this digression so as to give the damn Transhumanists a much-deserved keyboard lashing: It's one thing to be a guy like Hamming and denounce Heinz as a "kook" for following his formulae where they lead -- it's another to turn Heinz's formulae into a virtual religion, call it "the singularity" and totally forget where the idea came from the first place. I suggest the Transhumanists cite Heinz in the future whenever they refer to "the singularity" and think about his assumptions -- the primary one being that societies success varies directly with population size. It might be good to see if his model fits the data subsequent to the last check of which I am aware -- 1973 -- which just happens to be right at the point high population density societies decided to abandon their forward progress toward the space frontier.

• MMM Group at University of Nijmegen [publications]
• Machine Listening @ MIT Media Lab
• Affective Computing @ MIT Media Lab
• Musclefish

• Music, Cognition, and Computerized Sound, Perry R. Cook
• Music, Mind and Machine, Peter Desain and Henkjan Honing
• The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing, Steven W. Smith
• Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition, Christopher M. Bishop

• Tracking Musical Beats in Real Time, Paul E. Allen and Roger B. Dannenberg
• A Model for Musical Rhythm, Jeff A. Bilmes
• Autocorrelation and the Study of Musical Expression, Peter Desain, Siebe de Vos
• A Beat Tracking System for Audio Signals, Simon Dixon
• Prediction-Driven Computational Auditory Scene Analysis for Dense Sound Mixtures, Daniel P. W. Ellis
• A Similarity Measure for Automatic Audio Classification, Jonathan Foote
• Representing Rhythmic Patterns in a Network of Oscillators, Michael Gasser and Douglas Eck
• Adaptive Signal Models: Theory, Algorithms, and Audio Applications, Michael Mark Goodwin
• Recognition of Music Types, Hagen Soltau, Tanja Schultz, Martin Westphal, Alex Waibel
• Irrelevant Features and the Subset Selection Problem, George H. John, Ron Kohavi, Karl Pfleger
• Beat tracking with a nonlinear oscilator, Edward W. Large
• Modeling beat perception with a nonlinear oscilator, Edward W. Large
• Automatic Transcription of Simple Polyphonic Music: Robust Front End Processing, Keith D. Martin
• Musical instrument identification: A pattern-recognition approach, Keith D. Martin and Youngmoo E. Kim
• Music Content Analysis through Models of Audition, Keith D. Martin, Eric D. Scheirer, Barry L. Vercoe
• Musical Sound Information: Musical gestures and embedding synthesis, Eric Metois
• A Machine Learning Approach to Musical Style Recognition, Roger B. Dannenberg, Belinda Thom, and David Watson
• Resonanc e and the perception of musical meter, Large, E. W., & Kolen, J. F.
• Music-Listening Systems, Eric D. Scheirer
• Tempo and beat analysis of acoustic musical signals, Eric D. Scheirer
• Content-Based Classification, Search, and Retrieval of Audio, Erling Wold, Thom Blum, Douglas Keislar, James Wheaton
• Classification, Search, and Retrieval of Audio, Erling Wold, Thom Blum, Douglas Keislar, James Wheaton

And, of course, it does nothing about the man-in-the-middle attack.
Yes, it does. The man-in-the-middle can't re-generate the signal fast enough.
Have a look at this for more detail.

This is related to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. There's a very unsatisfying philosophical problem in quantum mechanics, related to the observer paradox. The Copenhagen interpretation is the classic "the multiple probababilities collapse when viewed by an observer", which works but seems bogus. The many-worlds interpretation (which Hawking says is "trivially true") is consistent with theory and observation, but disturbing to some people, since it involves each universe forking into all possible universes at some rate well below the femtosecond scale.

Physics has been thrashing around on this problem since the 1930s, and not much progress has been made, due to lack of experimental testability.

Science is prediction, not explaination - Fred Hoyle.

Einstein had a bigger brain by a little bit, but the left and right hemispheres of his cortex (IIRC) was connected, where in normal people it generally isn't. It isn't how many connections you have, it is how they are connected, and how they are used.

There is also some recent evidence that the increased information processing requirements of expertise lead to skill expansion over large areas of the cortex. Expertise in violin playing depends upon fine coordination of the left hand fingers and accurate coordination between the two hands. If expertise is related to increased cortical area devoted to finger coordination, we would expect expert violinists to devote more of their brain to finger coordination. This is indeed the case. Expert violinists have two to three times as much area cortical area devoted to their left fingers as nonviolinists (Elbert, Pantev, Wienbruch, Rochstroh & Taub, 1995). Moreover, the need of expert violinists to coordinate their two hands leads them to develop a larger connection between the two sides of the brain dealing with motor coordination compared to nonviolinists (Schlaug, Jaencke, Huang, Staiger & Steinmetz, 1995). Thus, there is not only theoretical but empirical evidence that expertise needs large amounts of brain to store and actively process its informational chunks. This suggests that a strong connection should exist between the capacity for acquiring expertise skills and brain mass.

I can only offer you a lowest estimate of the yearly growth - according to the "linux-counter" it is more than 60%. All other estimates give much higher growth rates.

My best guess is that less than 1% and more than 0.5% of the linux users register with the "linux counter"- that would be 12-24 Milions of the linux users today. You can download my graph showing the linux-counter growth together with RH-estimates here

Cats are more independent. You could start making software for a cat by making Oneko, the X cat, more responsive to its environment and give it more emotions than boredom. Not that its boredom can't be useful, as PURR-PUSS uses boredom as a trigger to try a more creative action, while learning [Andreae] by trial and error.

There is also a lot more stuff on adaptive behavior and machine learning out there.

To be clearer: 1174254928/321536935 = 3.65..!

The best thing is that I have e-mailed some of the distributed.net people (nugget first, later also dbaker,moose and silby) to ask what's going on. Imagine what have they answered? Nothing.

Linux accounts for more than twice as much cracked keys per day as Mac!
And it's share is growing, too. Yesterdays shares per OS:

Windows: 66.1%

Linux: 14.0 %

MacOS: 6.2%
Have a look at this graphs for details.