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Images at NASA from the Pioneer robot, and a whole slew of links from one Dr. Meshkati.

The images, in particular, are of very high quality, but are uncaptioned.

NASA's page, with commentary, is found here.

8 Bits of Power

I took a great class while an undergrad at USC: CNTV-466, taught by Leonard Maltin (the movie critic guy). The nature of the class is a discussion unto itself, but my point here is Maltin's philosophy of watching movies, which you have hit on the head of the proverbial nail.

Maltin's philosophy is to try to understand what the intentions of a particular movie are, so that it can be reviewed in that context. As you and others have mentioned, most movies are not of the caliber of American Beauty (which we screened a month before opening night, with Anette Benning as the guest!). Yes, comparatively, Mars Attacks! is a pile of mindless drivel -- but as a hokey comedy, I don't think it gets much better. And for me, Waterworld is a decent movie (average plot, nice scenery), if you ignore the whole "smokers" sub-plot as well as the end of the movie, when all of the lame-ass morallity sub-plots come to fruition.

Yes, there are some truly horrible movies out there. These tend to be the ones that fail to live up to their own intentions. (Waterworld, for example: in a world without dirt -- a major plot element and intention of the movie -- how were they growing the tobacco for their cigarettes? Hydroponics? In the dark bowels of the Exxon Valdez? Get rid of the whole "smokers" thing and it isn't so bad...) But summarily judging against a movie because it is not Academy Award(tm) quality is stupid and shortsighted.

Most movie critics are idiots. But after that class, I have respect for what Maltin says -- even if I later disagree with his opinion.

And for the record, I saw Red Planet last night. The shower scene does not live up to my expectations, but there are enough gratuitous "nippy" scenes to keep me happy. The only two "errors" that really stood out in my mind were the DNA code messup (ATGC, not ATGP) and calling the little critters "nematodes" -- they look a lot more like crustaceans or insects, not little worms.

With respect to the above, this movie is much better than Mission to Mars. I would rather have limited, unemotional dialogue (RP) than hokey, overly emotional dialogue (M2M), and the only product placement that I noticed were the technical labels on their space suits (Toshiba and Hughes are the only two I can recall). And the dramatic scene where one person EVA's to rescue the other while tied by umbillicus to the main ship: a nice, happy ending in RP. That one scene in M2M is what pushed me over the edge -- I was willing to forgive its faults until that point, and after that I was looking at my watch, waiting for it to end...

But I've never heard anyone describe how, even in the most general terms, a science of such a thing would look. What's the molecular/genetic equivalent of binary math?

A couple of very fair questions. To answer the first I would refer you to my earlier post linking to the article in Wired about this. For a more in depth look at this there are 4 papers USC has published on this subject. Fair warning, quite a bit of this goes beyond "even in the most general terms".

As to your question concerning the the comparison to binary math, it's oddly very similar. DNA uses what amounts to a 4-bit word in it's chemical make up. I could go into more depth here, but that would only serve to show my igorance in this. Follow them links for decent descriptions.

Wasn't Len Adelman, (The "A" in RSA,) working on DNA-based computers a while back?
From what little I remember, he had shown that the computers did not need to be electrical in nature, rather they could perform calculations chemically. (By observing how the DNA re-combined.)
Does anyone remember more of the details, or am I imagining this?
I wish /. would do an interview with Len Adelman - One of the most fascinating minds around today, in my book.

Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo

(PS: Found the reference: Here )

Why?
Because a lot of people are forced to program in C...

I'm not a fan of C, the library has some horrid things (like routines without buffer-overrun checking), and the language is very low level. But when working with other people, sometimes C is a necessary evil
What to do? You can get some higher level programming using BetterC, a C library that gives you Eiffel-like exception checking with a minimum efficience penalty, and without leaving your favorite C compiler.
It's my Nirvana, I don't use debuggers anymore...

There is a very thorough benchmark comparing Linux (kernel 2.2.12) to
FreeBSD (4.0). The benchmark takes time to analyse file system
performance, kernel timings such as contexts switches and use of
memeory managers and thread/process creation, all tied up with an
excellent summary.

I think some people have underestimated the state of the art in autonomous heli's today. The article mentioned CMU's autonomous helicopter. There are several other schools with experience in this area, such as MIT (Draper Lab), Stanford, Georgia Tech, etc. I work on the autonomous heli project (http://www-robotics.usc.edu/~avatar) at USC. I'll try to give a summary of capabilities that our current and past heli's have had. These heli's are of the small RC variety. Our current model weighs about 25 kg. It can fly autonomously at low speeds (under 5 m/s). It can do point to point navigation using GPS. It can follow a moving object on the ground, such as a human or ground robot. We've had take-off and landing capabilities on previous heli's and expect to demonstrate the same on this heli sometime in the next two weeks. We've done all this on processors no more powerful than a 486, and on small research grants. One thing that CMU's heli can do that ours can't is to follow an arbitrary quintic spline trajectory in space. There are still flight profiles that have yet to be demonstrated AFAIK. These include inverted and fast forward flight. The latter is difficult because the dynamics of the system change at high speed, and you need a lot of space, more than we have on our small urban campus. I'm just trying to make the point that a reasonable research effort by NASA, building on existing technology, can produce a very capable vehicle for exploring planetary bodies.

The Technical Program is interesting...

-jerdenn

The Technical Program is interesting...

-jerdenn

I have many problems with your rebuttal, and took the time to write a rebuttal to your rebuttal :). I have used Napster and find it a tantalizingly easy way to find and get music. However, unlike you, I have no illusions using Napster to distribute music is legal or right. Anyway, I don't feel like composing a version of my response in Slashdot's HTML code, so I'm just going to provide a link to it.

My Response to your Rebuttal

I too cheerfully await a response from you.

you can see for yourself if you don't believe me...

> I think the program and the paper describing the encryption will be successfully deep-sixed.

Actually, if you happen to have a copy of the paper you can still quote it under the fair use doctrine, whatever the copyright holder says about it.

Of course fair use does not allow posting the entire article, but it does cover citing parts of the article verbatim if you are discussing it or merely want to drag it in to make a point. For instance, if you were trying to convince your local library not to install Cyber Patrol, you could cite the article's claim that the Church of the SubGenius site is blocked in all categories except sex education.

Of course, the established doctrine of fair use does not mean you won't be getting e-mail from Mattel (You can tell it's from Mattel, it's e-mail!), but you could presumably get a clean win on that one in court, and perhaps even a cease & desist against Mattel.

Oh, yeah: IANAL. If you get thrown in the Mattel Jail, sue someone else.

Hell, my telling you about the fair use doctrine might even be illegal under the recent wave of legislation.

--

Short answer, yes.

There are 12 categories the administrator can toggle on and off. There are 2 categories which cannot be disabled. Any site blocked in the latter categories are always blocked. In earlier versions peacefire was blocked for all 12 - "Violence / Profanity, Partial Nudity, Full Nudity, Sexual Acts / Text, Gross Depictions / Text, Intolerance, Satanic or Cult, Drugs / Drug Culture, Militant / Extremist, Sex Education, Questionable / Illegal & Gambling, Alcohol & Tobacco" however it was apparently not on one of the reserved lists, so it would be possible to access it by turning off all administrator changeable settings - but it would not be accessible using the settings any user is actually going to use - if a parent (or other administrator) sets the program to block any of the categories it is listed under (and who would buy the thing if they didn't want to block at least one of those?) then peacefire would be blocked.

I have heard (but cannot confirm for sure at this point) that after this latest brouha they have finally been added to the reserved (not toggleable) list as well.

The reserved list certainly contains some strange choices. http://133.205.62.133/~coga/ for instance, and http://202.26.1.170/~t2m-n/ don't seem to have any objectionable material I can see.

The whole logic of having a "reserved" list is questionable, what exactly is this software supposed to block outside of the 12 user selectable settings? And why do political sites wind up listed under many if not all of those 12 categories, when most are clearly innappropiate? Sexual acts, violence, nudity, gambling satanism and drugs on peacefire?

Of course, if you had read the essay you would have known this already. Better grab it quick, before the Uni turns yellow and orders the prof to take it down.

http://math.usc.edu/~oliverm/linux
http://na.mathematik.uni-tuebin gen.de/~oliver/linux

Yes, I too got a good chuckle over that. Then I started formulating ways in which college sysadmins would restrict access anyway. Granted, I'm not a sysadmin, I know nothing about sysadmining, but I got into college, right?

Okay, AFAICT with this you can escape the dangers of having specific IPs blocked, specific ports blocked, specific hosts blocked, etc. So much so that sysadmins would pretty much have to block access to the entire freakin' net to stop it all.

Why do people assume they won't do this? Bad publicity for the college? News flash: all publicity is good publicity in the long run. Even horrible, life-ending publicity will be good for the institution five, ten years down the line. People will forget the cause and nature of the bad publicity and only remember that there was publicity at all. It's hard for people to remain upset for long periods of time. Even if a college eliminated network access to the internet, within a few years everyone would forget about it. Especially if they were not the only college that did it. Trust me on this one.

Oh, boo hoo, they've taken my access to the internet away. Well, maybe, maybe not. Maybe they just double their modem pool and make everyone dial in. Maybe, like was the case not so long ago, you would have to specifically request network access, and then would be strictly monitored for so-called abuses.

Or maybe they don't take away network access at all. Maybe they just put insane restrictions on it. Here at USC, the solution was to place restrictions on bandwidth. But those restrictions are still fairly liberal. Who is to say that a college couldn't place a restriciton of, say 10 MB total network traffic per ethernet port ber 24 hour period? Exceed it, and your ethernet port is automatically shut down for, say, 72 hours as punishment. Light web browsing, checking your email, etc., wouldn't be impeded, but it sure would make trading files (any type of file, be it mp3s, warez, whatever) extraordinarily difficult.

Just some thoughts. People who post challenges like gnullsoft has done should be prepared for people to take them up on it.

Yes, I too got a good chuckle over that. Then I started formulating ways in which college sysadmins would restrict access anyway. Granted, I'm not a sysadmin, I know nothing about sysadmining, but I got into college, right?

Okay, AFAICT with this you can escape the dangers of having specific IPs blocked, specific ports blocked, specific hosts blocked, etc. So much so that sysadmins would pretty much have to block access to the entire freakin' net to stop it all.

Why do people assume they won't do this? Bad publicity for the college? News flash: all publicity is good publicity in the long run. Even horrible, life-ending publicity will be good for the institution five, ten years down the line. People will forget the cause and nature of the bad publicity and only remember that there was publicity at all. It's hard for people to remain upset for long periods of time. Even if a college eliminated network access to the internet, within a few years everyone would forget about it. Especially if they were not the only college that did it. Trust me on this one.

Oh, boo hoo, they've taken my access to the internet away. Well, maybe, maybe not. Maybe they just double their modem pool and make everyone dial in. Maybe, like was the case not so long ago, you would have to specifically request network access, and then would be strictly monitored for so-called abuses.

Or maybe they don't take away network access at all. Maybe they just put insane restrictions on it. Here at USC, the solution was to place restrictions on bandwidth. But those restrictions are still fairly liberal. Who is to say that a college couldn't place a restriciton of, say 10 MB total network traffic per ethernet port ber 24 hour period? Exceed it, and your ethernet port is automatically shut down for, say, 72 hours as punishment. Light web browsing, checking your email, etc., wouldn't be impeded, but it sure would make trading files (any type of file, be it mp3s, warez, whatever) extraordinarily difficult.

Just some thoughts. People who post challenges like gnullsoft has done should be prepared for people to take them up on it.

Thispackage might be what you're looking for.

The package is called called 'ext2read', and appears to be based on an older package called 'ext2tools', which gave you read-only access to ext2 partitions from Windows 95. Based on the screenshots, it looks like an explorer-type interface to your linux filesystem. It should be enough to copy files from your ext2 partitions while in Windows.

Good luck!

An unusually excellent article on the whole napster mess here at USC can be found here.

Basic summary: the folks at ISD (the network admins) issued a preliminary statement that they were going to ban napster due to bandwidth concerns and legal worries (even huge universities don't want to be sued). As you might expect, students expressed outrage at this proposed suppression of their so-called rights (this is a debatable issue, leave it for the next post). Then USC's legal department came back with their answer... and it was no!

Turns out that there is probably more chance of losing future lawsuits if USC starts censoring out certain websites, than if they just let students have free access to the entire net, no questions asked. (Think of all the problems that internet filters have.)

So, instead, ISD held a nice roundtable discussion with student groups and hammered out a compromise. The rule now stands that whatever site you want to access is open (the head of ISD was quoted as saying to the effect that he didn't really want to know where students were going!). The only limitation is on bandwidth: students who exceed 40% of their bandwidth allocation (about 500k/sec) for more than two consecutive hours will have their ethernet port shut down. It's a nice incentive, especially since they are really slow about reactivating ports. Everyone involved agreed that this was an acceptible outcome of the situation.

An unusually excellent article on the whole napster mess here at USC can be found here.

Basic summary: the folks at ISD (the network admins) issued a preliminary statement that they were going to ban napster due to bandwidth concerns and legal worries (even huge universities don't want to be sued). As you might expect, students expressed outrage at this proposed suppression of their so-called rights (this is a debatable issue, leave it for the next post). Then USC's legal department came back with their answer... and it was no!

Turns out that there is probably more chance of losing future lawsuits if USC starts censoring out certain websites, than if they just let students have free access to the entire net, no questions asked. (Think of all the problems that internet filters have.)

So, instead, ISD held a nice roundtable discussion with student groups and hammered out a compromise. The rule now stands that whatever site you want to access is open (the head of ISD was quoted as saying to the effect that he didn't really want to know where students were going!). The only limitation is on bandwidth: students who exceed 40% of their bandwidth allocation (about 500k/sec) for more than two consecutive hours will have their ethernet port shut down. It's a nice incentive, especially since they are really slow about reactivating ports. Everyone involved agreed that this was an acceptible outcome of the situation.

Okay, I'm not on ResNet here at USC, and dialup 53k isn't exactly the prime medium for trading around MP3s so I mostly don't, but... I do read the campus newspaper, so I know what's going on regarding Napster here on campus.

According to this Daily Trojan article, USC is planning to limit bandwidth rather than block any particular site. The really great thing about this is that after ISD (dept. in charge of network) let it be known that Napster was going to be banned outright, they actually paused to listen to the students (who were admittedly outraged) and sought the advice of the university's legal counsel. Not only did they listen, they changed their position and relaxed a bit, took a deep breath, and reevaluated why they were trying to ban Napster. The final decision was to:

automatically shut off the ethernet connections of students who use more than 40 percent of their allotted bandwidth - 500 kilobytes per second - for more than two consecutive hours

It is difficult to argue against that. I mean, really, when do you need that much continuous bandwidth? The only things I can think of are for uses that ISD probably bans already (like personal web servers).

My major, Chemical Engineering, has about 40% chicks, as opposed to the Computer Engineering department here at USC, that has about 10% chicks. Hypothesis: the ladies are more attracted to guys with real-jobs instead of lifeless drones who screw their hard drives all day. By natural instinct, women choose paths in life statistically more probable for finding a sufficient provider for their family...not to mention a guy more likely to give them an orgasm in the sack. heh heh.
Eh, i'm just playing...the real reason that chicks choose chemE over compE is because chemE is a much easier major. Hypothesis: chicks are either a) inferior b) lazy or c) crafty.

scope my Super-Sick Webpage

My major, Chemical Engineering, has about 40% chicks, as opposed to the Computer Engineering department here at USC, that has about 10% chicks. Hypothesis: the ladies are more attracted to guys with real-jobs instead of lifeless drones who screw their hard drives all day. By natural instinct, women choose paths in life statistically more probable for finding a sufficient provider for their family...not to mention a guy more likely to give them an orgasm in the sack. heh heh.
Eh, i'm just playing...the real reason that chicks choose chemE over compE is because chemE is a much easier major. Hypothesis: chicks are either a) inferior b) lazy or c) crafty. check my Super-Sick Webpage

Of course it's up to you, but I'll be chipping in my free cycles.

It's hopeless to expect reform from within... the patent crisis is not even on the national agenda. The average person has never even heard of the issue.

The only viable medium-term strategy is containment. US-style software patents (and business model patents and other bogosity) cannot be allowed to spread to other countries. Containment efforts should therefore shift away from the US and towards other countries and cultures.

It would be very helpful, for instance, if influential Islamic clerics could examine the issue of patents on mathematical formulas and business models and determine if they are compatible with the Quran and Islamic teachings.

I'm not Muslim and have no idea... but usury and other practices are disallowed under Islamic law, so it's possible they would disallow software patents and issue a fatwa or legal opinion to that effect.

Broadly speaking, patents that cover small human ingenuities and artifices should be OK... but if the universe is the creation of God, then asserting ownership over fundamental laws of nature and mathematical formulas seems a trifle blasphemous.

A finding that software patents are un-Islamic would, in effect, permanently immunize the Islamic countries from this nonsense. It would create an invulnerable "patent haven" that would set an example for the rest of the world.

Remember, containment kept Communism in check until it collapsed under its own weight. It should work for "patent disease" as well... but it could take decades, and things will get worse before they get better.

Send RMS to Saudi Arabia... I'm not kidding.

Yeah, your entire screen might start to look like this [cheap javascript effects]

• http://www.ccli.org/nfp/index.shtml
  
• http://www.usc.edu/hsc/inf o/newman/resources/primer.html
  
• http://www.bygpub.com/nat ural/natural-family-planning.htm
  

I think the really important thing here is that the neural system almost certainly knew there were only four possibilities, and never had to respond 'none of the above'. So this is a comparatively simple two-bit classification problem, which is a far easier thing than what Dragon Dictate (or people) are trying to do, ie recognise a arbitrary string of phonemes, giving a combinatorial explosion of possible words. So the performance of this system probably is actually not that impressive.

But there is a huge interest building in biological neural networks' sensitivity to the temporal sequence of input spikes (rather than just the average rates of inputs spiking, which is what software neural networks try to model).

There was a talk I went to in London in June by Terry Sejnowski, who's head of the computational neurobiology lab at the Salk institute in California. Apparently, rather than neurons learning that signal A correlates with signal B (Hebbian learning), it's apparently surprisingly easy to wire two neurons up so that they are correlating signal A occurring just before signal B -- becoming more sensitised to this, the more times they see it, so they effectively they learn to predict signal B as soon as they see signal A.

This obviously appears to be very important for tracking objects at a low level, and as here in identifying temporal patterns (Sejnowski's suggestion was bats' echolocation); but it may be even more important at a higher level, for recognising causality (if this thing happens, then that good thing/bad thing) may happen, and perhaps for learned behaviour (if I do this, under these circumstances, then that happens).

htt p://www.usc.edu/ext-relations/news_service/release s/art/berger_liaw360x246.jpg

Looking closer at this pic and zooming in a bit.. I'm noticing something..

11 Neurons and 30 connections, hmm? Well, in the center (the big black circle) there's 11 little circles (or twelve if you'd call the third from the top on the left a circle.. looks like a mistake to me). Count all the lines going between these, and include the lines coming in from the left (the red ones) and the black one going to the big black circle and you have 30 lines.....

Anyone more knowledgable that I care to figure this one out? :-)


---

If you look at the chart provided in the video you'll see the 'Dynamic Synapse' ALWAYS beat the human subject pool. In the zero background noise test, the net was accurate 100%, while the humans were right only 90% of the time. However, to be fair they should create the same number of 'Dynamic Synapse' listeners as humans in the pool and then compare the average results of the 'Dynamic Synapse' pool to the average results of the human pool.

I get the impression that this net did not perform better "even" under noisy conditions, but "only" under noisy conditions.

Here's the original link
http://ww w.usc.edu/ext-relations/news_service/releases/stor ies/36013.html

If I'm right about that, then this development (while still insanely cool - don't get me wrong) might not be so surprising. As I recall from college brain-and-mind psych courses, humans use a variety of factors when singling out a lone voice or conversation in a noisy environment. These include spacial orientation, visual cues, etc. My prof called the "cocktail party effect". Rob them of these cues, and it isn't suprising that they are hobbled.

Also, computers have the mixed blessing of ignoring information patterns unless they are instructed to do otherwise. A person, listening to white noise, would subconsciously attempt to find meaning in every bleep and scratch. A computer, listening only for certain cues, can disregard the majority of the signal.

I would be interested in learning what rate of word recognition this system achieves. Current technology manages about 90%, which means one in every ten words is heard incorrectly. If they could improve that to 99.9% or even just 99%, we might actually get some speech-processors in Office desktop products.



-konstant

It's time for the studios and media to wake up and realize that the public isn't their bitch anymore.

By the way, Universal, do you plan on releasing anything resembling a good movie in the near future? Or do you intend on blowing all your dough on legal battles?

I assume because of the size of my area and school, I have not had nearly the trouble that is described here. I do fit the description though, every last point of it. I'm a nerd, a geek, whatever you want to refer to us as. But I am certainly no killer. I have played my fair share of violent games. But I am certainly no killer. It takes a heck of a lot more than that to "make" a person into a killer. There have to be pre-existing conditions, other problems, with deeper roots. Simply spending time in front of a computer screen doesn't turn a person into a cold-blooded killer.

I also know what it is like to have high school as a living hell. Middle school too. For years I have been singled out as the geek, the smart one who no one likes, but everyone suddenly is best friends with when they need help on their homework. It is, by no means, fun. Others are envious, jealous of the abilities of the geeks, the nerds. They turn that jealousy into hate, rage, and insults. They take out their own percieved inadequacy on us. For what reason? Simply because they are, themselves, too weak to handle it!

I, however, am somewhat atypical in a different way. I have found a way out, an escape from high school, away from the mindless peers who feel the need to raise themselves up by putting others down. No, I'm not going to kill people and go to jail (interesting, but stupid idea). I'm leaving high school, and going to a more conductive, productive environment at college/university. I want everyone to know that you can do it too. It is possible, and even sometimes encouraged, to leave high school a year early, go to college, fulfill your freshman year there, which concurrently filling your senior graduation requirements and graduating with your class. Some special programs exist for people wishing to do this. The ones I have encountered are at The University of Southern California and Clarkson University. Despite my acceptance to the Clarkson School (their special program), I have decided to take my education to the next level at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, whose support and project-based curriculum caught my eye.

So, my point is, you can do something about your situation. Those of you still early in your high school years, maybe there is less you can do. But there is hope ahead. Never give up, never forget who you are. Do not let yourself be defined by what is "in" or "cool." Be who you are, and do it without hurting others. Be persistent, and you will be heard.

---
Tim Wilde
Sysadmin, Dynamic DNS Network Services

Here's a link you can read without Javascript:

http://oj r.usc.edu/sections/features/99_stories/stories_tab let_040299.htm