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This is a very cool idea. There is a gig going on in little Logan, UT this week about Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education Conference. (The pod-casts will be available soon.) And one of the keynote speakers (Joris Komen from Namibia) mentioned this.

Just imagine how we may learn in the future with the current OpenCourseWare movement at MIT and other colleges and universities around the world. This conference has outlined several possible ways, but more are needed. I won't entertain with the details of the conference, but if you are interested check it out and think about what you might do to make this soon-to-be-available technology actually work.

At some point you have to draw a line between what is "normal" and what is not.

• Utah State University
• New Mexico State University
• Washington University at St Louis
• University of Texas
• University of Colorado
• Arizona State University
• Pennsylvania State University

I came across this sometime ago. This professor claims to build artificial brians using FPGA based hardware. Not sure what the status of the project is now.

I don't know if you're directly responsible for the Zen stuff, but there's an excellent Novell mailing list that might be of help.

http://netlab1.usu.edu/novell.faq/nvfaq-b.htm#B000

Good luck etc.

It's not like it's somehow better for the environment to throw compost in the trash than it is to pitch banana peels - they will decompose in the landfill just as nicely as they decomposed in your kitchen

Not true. Landfills are sealed to avoid polluting ground water. Thus a landfill is an environment mostly free of water and oxygen, so organic wastes do not decompose readily. This site has some good information on landfill decay, including this interesting fact:

Make sure you remove the message that is at the top of the file before you try to compile it :). It's not commented out.

I uploaded the entire file, so here it is:

land.c It has the checksum kludge in it as well.

DO NOT use this on a computer that you do not own or do not have permission to test on.

It is very serious though, and I am totally shocked that MS hasn't fixed this yet (or perhaps they did fix this, but then somehow reverted to old code).

I compiled land.c on linux and and then had it test my powerbook (OS X.3.8) on an open port. Nothing happened, thus it's not exploitable.

If anyone is interested, I had to modify the program to get it to work in linux (the structures have changed since this was originally written).

Here is a patch so you can test other OSes.

land.diff

Curse you slashcode! It won't let me inline the patch. Oh well. Download it if you want it.

A professor in computer science at the Utah State University (USU) is building robots to help people with disabilities, according to the Utah Statesman in this article . The story, which is more focused on the professor than robotics, carries several anecdotes, such as an embarrassing voice recognition system. After a blind man cleared his throat, the robot misinterpreted the sound as a sign that the man wanted to go to the bathroom. Later, every time a man cleared his throat before speaking, the robot changed directions and insisted to guide him to the restrooms. Even if the article is entertaining, this project at USU is far more ambitious. In fact, they want to design RFID-enabled robots mounted on mobile carts which will welcome blind persons at the entrance of a supermarket and guide them through the store. I bet you'll never find those carts at a Wal-Mart store, but read more...

First, let's look in detail at the failure of the voice recognition system.

Vladimir Kulyukin, assistant professor in the department of computer science, works jointly as a computer science researcher and for the

Center for Persons with Disabilities . He said he had an especially embarrassing moment here at the Center for Persons with Disabilities involving a robot and a speech recognition system.

"We figured we could speak to the robot in English, and using the voice recognition system the robot would interpret the commands and obey them. I quickly realized that just wasn't possible," he said.

He said a blind man found the glitch in the system when he cleared his throat and the robot misunderstood the sound to mean the man wanted to go to the bathroom.

"Every time the man cleared his throat, the robot would immediately change directions and guide him into the bathroom," he said. "It was an especially embarrassing moment in my research," he added.

Of course, this is only a very small part of the project, which will deploy radio frequency identification (RFID) tags for use in robot-assisted indoor navigation for the visually impaired.

"Simply speaking, we are trying to develop a robot for use as a mobile grocery cart used for the blind in supermarkets," he said. "The robot would meet the blind person at the door and, by the push of a button, would lead the person to different areas of the store."

Kulyukin said the robot would ideally be mounted on mobile carts, but the level of funding for the technology here at USU is not sufficient for marketing the project.

But they already built prototypes. And below are two pictures showing this RFID-equipped robotic guide (RG) for visually impaired people (Credit: Vladimir Kulyukin)

For more information, here is a link to Vladimir Kulyukin home page -- which is not always available. From there, you'll have access to various pages covering his research interests and his publications.

You might also want to read a paper named "RFID in Robot-Assisted Indoor Navigation for the Visually Impaired," available as a PDF document (6 pages, 124 KB). Here is the abstract.

We describe how Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) can be used in robot-assisted indoor navigation for the visually impaired. We present a robotic guide for the visually impaired that was deployed and tested both with and without visually impaired participants in two indoor environments. We describe how we modified the sta

A professor in computer science at the Utah State University (USU) is building robots to help people with disabilities, according to the Utah Statesman in this article . The story, which is more focused on the professor than robotics, carries several anecdotes, such as an embarrassing voice recognition system. After a blind man cleared his throat, the robot misinterpreted the sound as a sign that the man wanted to go to the bathroom. Later, every time a man cleared his throat before speaking, the robot changed directions and insisted to guide him to the restrooms. Even if the article is entertaining, this project at USU is far more ambitious. In fact, they want to design RFID-enabled robots mounted on mobile carts which will welcome blind persons at the entrance of a supermarket and guide them through the store. I bet you'll never find those carts at a Wal-Mart store, but read more...

First, let's look in detail at the failure of the voice recognition system.

Vladimir Kulyukin, assistant professor in the department of computer science, works jointly as a computer science researcher and for the

Center for Persons with Disabilities . He said he had an especially embarrassing moment here at the Center for Persons with Disabilities involving a robot and a speech recognition system.

"We figured we could speak to the robot in English, and using the voice recognition system the robot would interpret the commands and obey them. I quickly realized that just wasn't possible," he said.

He said a blind man found the glitch in the system when he cleared his throat and the robot misunderstood the sound to mean the man wanted to go to the bathroom.

"Every time the man cleared his throat, the robot would immediately change directions and guide him into the bathroom," he said. "It was an especially embarrassing moment in my research," he added.

Of course, this is only a very small part of the project, which will deploy radio frequency identification (RFID) tags for use in robot-assisted indoor navigation for the visually impaired.

"Simply speaking, we are trying to develop a robot for use as a mobile grocery cart used for the blind in supermarkets," he said. "The robot would meet the blind person at the door and, by the push of a button, would lead the person to different areas of the store."

Kulyukin said the robot would ideally be mounted on mobile carts, but the level of funding for the technology here at USU is not sufficient for marketing the project.

But they already built prototypes. And below are two pictures showing this RFID-equipped robotic guide (RG) for visually impaired people (Credit: Vladimir Kulyukin)

For more information, here is a link to Vladimir Kulyukin home page -- which is not always available. From there, you'll have access to various pages covering his research interests and his publications.

You might also want to read a paper named "RFID in Robot-Assisted Indoor Navigation for the Visually Impaired," available as a PDF document (6 pages, 124 KB). Here is the abstract.

We describe how Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) can be used in robot-assisted indoor navigation for the visually impaired. We present a robotic guide for the visually impaired that was deployed and tested both with and without visually impaired participants in two indoor environments. We describe how we modified the sta

A professor in computer science at the Utah State University (USU) is building robots to help people with disabilities, according to the Utah Statesman in this article . The story, which is more focused on the professor than robotics, carries several anecdotes, such as an embarrassing voice recognition system. After a blind man cleared his throat, the robot misinterpreted the sound as a sign that the man wanted to go to the bathroom. Later, every time a man cleared his throat before speaking, the robot changed directions and insisted to guide him to the restrooms. Even if the article is entertaining, this project at USU is far more ambitious. In fact, they want to design RFID-enabled robots mounted on mobile carts which will welcome blind persons at the entrance of a supermarket and guide them through the store. I bet you'll never find those carts at a Wal-Mart store, but read more...

First, let's look in detail at the failure of the voice recognition system.

Vladimir Kulyukin, assistant professor in the department of computer science, works jointly as a computer science researcher and for the

Center for Persons with Disabilities . He said he had an especially embarrassing moment here at the Center for Persons with Disabilities involving a robot and a speech recognition system.

"We figured we could speak to the robot in English, and using the voice recognition system the robot would interpret the commands and obey them. I quickly realized that just wasn't possible," he said.

He said a blind man found the glitch in the system when he cleared his throat and the robot misunderstood the sound to mean the man wanted to go to the bathroom.

"Every time the man cleared his throat, the robot would immediately change directions and guide him into the bathroom," he said. "It was an especially embarrassing moment in my research," he added.

Of course, this is only a very small part of the project, which will deploy radio frequency identification (RFID) tags for use in robot-assisted indoor navigation for the visually impaired.

"Simply speaking, we are trying to develop a robot for use as a mobile grocery cart used for the blind in supermarkets," he said. "The robot would meet the blind person at the door and, by the push of a button, would lead the person to different areas of the store."

Kulyukin said the robot would ideally be mounted on mobile carts, but the level of funding for the technology here at USU is not sufficient for marketing the project.

But they already built prototypes. And below are two pictures showing this RFID-equipped robotic guide (RG) for visually impaired people (Credit: Vladimir Kulyukin)

For more information, here is a link to Vladimir Kulyukin home page -- which is not always available. From there, you'll have access to various pages covering his research interests and his publications.

You might also want to read a paper named "RFID in Robot-Assisted Indoor Navigation for the Visually Impaired," available as a PDF document (6 pages, 124 KB). Here is the abstract.

We describe how Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) can be used in robot-assisted indoor navigation for the visually impaired. We present a robotic guide for the visually impaired that was deployed and tested both with and without visually impaired participants in two indoor environments. We describe how we modified the sta

I know I am getting into this debate late, in terms of /. experience, but here is my personal take on the whole thing:

I actually sat down and downloaded the climate modeling software and put it on the computer that I am writing this reply on. I even ran it through a whole cycle and one of those "50,000" modeling runs was done on this computer.

I was willing to try and get it to do a couple more "runs" on my computer, but the software had a serious bug in it when you have a hard crash on your computer, like getting struck by lightning, or otherwise from a blackout condition where the computer shuts down hard and quick. Windows in general doesn't do too well when that happens either [yes, it is a Windows box... sue me if you like], but when that happened, I couldn't get the software up and going. I was going to delete and reinstall the software hoping to solve the problem, but I simple killed the software altogether after what happened next.

I spent some time on the message boards looking around at the basic assumptions behind the climate model being used. I also spent some time reading from the software designers, and really tried to dig around the website, asking a few very good hard questions. I've also spent some time studying climatology, and even spent some time helping to gather and input some historical weather data for the Utah Climate Center where we gathered weather data going back to the late 19th Century and put it into a machine-readable format. BTW, this is rather unusal to do this to have daily weather, temperature, and precipitation data going back that far. Most climate data used in modeling goes only back to the 1970's at best.

From what I saw on the website, it was politically motivated from the start to prove that there was global warming occuring. On the basis of all of the sensationalist news stories that seems to be coming out right now, it seems to confirm my theory.

There were legitimate items that were missed in the model, and ways to improve to modeling that may or may not prove global warming and/or cooling. Variations of things like increases in solar radiation, increased volcanic activity (over multi-annual periods of time), and assumptions regarding human impact on the environment were totally missed, or at least ignored and put into context of something that doesn't affect the climate. Some posters on the web pages proved that it wouldn't take that much additional processing to add these extra variables, and that is the point too: There are a bunch of variables that affect the outcome of the climate and for the most part these variables are just guesses in the dark. Even a true understanding of what the interaction between different things like how warming of the ocean off the coast of Chile affects weather in London is still not totally understood, even though there are some pretty good theories.

This whole idea was a nice try, but I am no longer involved simply because of the political angle that I got from reading the major participants, not to mention the leading researchers involved in this whole mess. In other words, I consider this to be bad science on the whole, and in the politically charged "atmosphere" of the global warming hypothesis, it is very difficult to keep a scientifcally neutral attitude regarding anything. From my experience as well, most of the schools also have professors that encourage the "solid" basis of human-influenced global warming, so it is very difficult to counter that culture if you are a student trying to study climatology that has a viewpoint counter to the prevailing attitude in acedemia. Simply put, if you don't publish a thesis or other papers that support global warming, you won't get a PhD.

This project, unfortunately, is an extension of that attitude, although I will admire a basic attempt to try and solve a difficult problem. The basic user interface for this software was cool, and it was neat to see a model of the Earth

That's not interesting or insightful. It's just a blanket statement.

"All local bread is better than global bread."

Is it? Is there any conclusive proof to this anywhere? As far as I can tell, both the local bakeries, regional grocery stores, and national chains all offer different kinds of bread - from nutritionally useless white bread to donuts to whole grain bread.

Food is cheap right now. It's one of the few things (along with tech) that gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper each year. And that's all food. From partially hydrogenated soybean oil (mmmmMMM!) to spinach and legumes. Milk does seem to be getting more expensive, in real terms, and I'm not sure if it's simply other costs going up and the Milk Price Support Program or something similar, increasing the overall costs, or what. It seems, however, that pricing differences between the producer and the consumer do not seem to correlate, even abroad.

But, in summary, not all mass produced food = cheap, not all mass produced food = poor quality, nor cheap = quality. I think the only difference is that for local food producers to compete, they have to have exceptional quality if they want to stay in business.

That's a great idea.

In fact, we could offer a way of only allowing the developers to verify the checksums to increase the trust rating on a file.

I'll think about a design and write something up. A standalone app and a firefox plugin that could verify downloads would be way sweet.

I'll put something up about the project. Contact me if you're interested in helping.

linky
linky
and version 2.0

No, this was not something from nearby but from directly underneath

This observatory is on the edge of the approach zone to the SLC airport (like Disneyland is on the approach zone to LAX... don't read too much into that), so it is possible that they had it shine in their face during decent. Still, it wasn't being tracked on them, they just happened to foolishly fly over the darned thing at the wrong time.

First of all, I have seen several posters here to /. that frankly don't know jack. I am serious here.

Now to explain why this laser was so powerful that it could be seen from the air at 40,000 feet or more, this is an incredibly powerful laser that is used by the Utah State University Department of Physics to study the upper atmosphere air temperature. BTW, that laser beam is a beautiful sight, and watching it go straight up to the zenith (apparently... just a few arc seconds of zenith if you are standing near the building) makes your mind follow the light and wander up to infinity (or at least 100 km up into the atmosphere).

My (almost... just two doors down the block from me) next door neighbor is one of the research scientist involved in the project. This is an ongoing project that has been running off and on for almost eleven years. If this were something brand new I might see the pilot having a right to complain, but this is something that is very old (well, comparatively old... it was approved under the Bush I administration for funding).

Frankly I don't know why the pilot didn't read his stinking charts. What were they, over 12 years old? If that were true the pilot should have his pilots license suspended anyway for that very reason alone. For those not in the know, just don't fly an airplane over Utah State University if you don't want to get blinded by the light.

The physics of this are also pretty cool. There are two parts, the laser that shoots out, and a light reciever that measures the intensity of the light coming back, and the timing of that light. From this information the temperature of the upper atmosphere can be obtained +/- about 1 degree C for the whole range of altitudes, and they don't even have to send up a sounding rocket to get the data.

I live in Logan. It is a college town.

with that kind of ambition we'll be sipping pina coladas on mars in no time at all... who knows what distant planet we'll have colonized by the time our robots are as smart as crickets.

again (as I already placed a link recently in the reply to The Singularity Blinds Sci-Fi thread here on slashdot) I provide a link to Hugo de Garis page http://www.cs.usu.edu/~degaris/papers/journal.html

please take a look at articles on this page and one dated back to 2000 "AN ARTIFICIAL BRAIN : Using Evolvable Hardware Techniques to Build a 75 Million Neuron Artificial Brain to Control the Many Behaviors of a Kitten Robot"

after reading his articles ( and Hugo thoughts) it looks like - developing quite intelligent brains ( and packaging them into robot ( so they fit in size)) will take just some years to experiment more on similar brains and also to reduce size of hardware - not hundreds of years.

It could take maybe 10 -50 years - till we have results far beyond than developed roach brain and I could predict - by this time humans will not colonize much of distant planets ;)

Take a look at works by Hugo de Garis ( articles, papers) http://www.cs.usu.edu/~degaris/

on evolvable hardware.

Yes he uses evolution to develop artificial brains - but this is a hardware evolution and this is much faster that regular one ( that we know).

reading his works and some phylosophical notes really made my brain to think in a new way in the respect of evolution and if it is possible to develop ultra artificial brain like that predicted by Vernor Vinge. at least Hugo de Garis works give the sence that developing artificial ultrabrain is something achivable in foreseable future.

I think that the Russians generally use lower tech equipment because they lack the money, know-how, and facilities to build state of the art equipment, rather than a simpler is better philosophy.

• Multimedia standards - This is one of the areas that due to the emergence of the World Wide Web and other generally open applications has pushed this forward quite a bit. MPEG, PNG (MNG), and other standardized formats have really made a difference over the zoo of incompatable formats that there were even 10 years ago. There is still need to do more work in this area, and there are some items that really need review. Multimedia game design and the entertainment industry, unfortunately, are the major drivers of this sort of activity.
• Accessable Multimedia Materials - Due to the "eternal" copyright of many multimedia types (photos, audio clips, cinema in all its flavors) are copyrighted and impossible to use as "fair-use" for educational purposes except on a very limited basis. Court ruling on this strongly favor the media companies and make it almost impossible to use anything that is available. The Google image search is essentially worthless if you want to use it in any instructional software that would be used for more than a single section of a single course taught at only one university. I would love to see a Multi-media variant of Project Gutenberg where you could get central repository of multimedia items (a clip art library, music clips, video, etc.) that would be guarenteed to be totally public domain or released in some copyleft arrangement. There is quite a bit on the internet, but it is scattered around and really needs to be put together. There are some collections (I happen to have some content I'd like to donate) that simply needs to be put together, scanned, and released. If I had infinite resources and time I'd like to do this, and if it isn't going by the time I get close to retirement, I may get this going myself anyway. I just need to feed my family for now.
• Authoring System Support - There needs to be a standardizing the "glue" format that holds all of this multimedia information together with Unicode-based text that is appropriate in a computer-based learning environment needs to be worked out. HTML and its variants are pretty good, and there some fairly decent "authoring" tools available such as Authorware or Director, but these all have some hard limitations. The High Schools that I've seen are typically either using HTML or Power Point (I am not kidding here either) for routine stuff that is developed. University-level instruction is totally non-standard and often includes custom software written for the one project, which eats up almost all the time and resources of the project. Ideally I'd love to see an open-source project that would help put this sort of instruction together. It needs to be easy to use, but powerful enough that if you are willing to learn (with a shallow learning curve) you can get progressively more features to the point that you can write the entire authoring environment in itself (aka be Turing complete). Nothing I know of has this capability at th

I went to school at Utah State University. The Physics department had a green laser that they used for atmosperic research. It doesn't heat the air to do it, but it is certainly visible.

Thanks for the info, that helped me understand the pros and cons a lot better. My dilema is that I struggled in math in High School so I'm very far behind now in college.

This is the emphasis i am working on: Information Technology

Could anyone with a degree or a lot of experience in CS tell me if it looks like a reasonable program? The reason I want to do this emphasis is because of my limited math abilities, however, I don't want to cheat myself of the proper education for a computer scientist.

has 50000 'neurons'. Does Steve Grand really think he'll approach mammalian intelligence with so few? I agree strongly with him giving Lucy a rich environment, but maybe he should be looking at using something like FPGAs to get more neurons on board for a reasonable cost. That's what Hugo de Garis is doing, and he had much more ambitious plans. The company he was working for failed though, so I don't know whether he's still making progress in actual building of AI. Anyone?

Yes the Satellite may have Infared on it but it also has Lidar which is Laser Radar. My local university has a lidar setup (or the green beam as its called around here). See the Utah State University link below.

Its used for atmospheric observations.

Utah State University - This page seems to be down at the moment
University of Western Ontario - Here is another University with one

The first of these online community projects is about to take off in the form of the OSLO Group's Open Learning Support, which is a formal collaboration with MIT to build community infrastructure that wraps around the OCW materials.

It's time outlaw gets(3) . Seriously, shouldn't any data-reading C library function that doesn't have a maximum buffer size parameter be deprecated, or better yet, removed ?

It looks like a 2. It's difficult to write smoothly and always looks out of place on the page.

I found a (pdf document) reference that has all of the letters and some tips on teaching.

I believe it was my own handwriting that led them to call it cursive.

--qtp.

If you're looking for moral issues related to technology, I don't know how appropriate this is for a report by any sane person, but my former AI prof would do nothing but go on about the impending war for creating machines that will be superior to humans. He sees the end of human species superiority as the most important moral issue of the next 50 years. He's a little odd, AI profs often are, but it does make for interesting reading. You can see his website here and his book about the "artilect war" here Good luck

If you're looking for moral issues related to technology, I don't know how appropriate this is for a report by any sane person, but my former AI prof would do nothing but go on about the impending war for creating machines that will be superior to humans. He sees the end of human species superiority as the most important moral issue of the next 50 years. He's a little odd, AI profs often are, but it does make for interesting reading. You can see his website here and his book about the "artilect war" here Good luck

Researcher David Wiley, who's built most of his reputation on Learning Objects, seems to agree. He's promoting Slashdot and K5 as Online Self-Organizing Social Systems that do a better job of gathering and organizing content than most course developers.

Apparently, he's received a NSF grant to study this.

Logan H.S. is located within stone-throwing distance of Utah State University, generally regarded as having the best computer science department in Utah.

Actually it all started with games.

Specifically a Mac game named Bolo based on a serverless ring topology and written by a fellow named Stuart Cheshire. He also happens to be a "Wizard without Portfolio" at Apple and the Co-chairman of the IETF Zeroconf Working Group.

You can still play it. Watch out - it can get pretty addicting.

Take a look here for a sample. This is what the ISP received, most likely.

Since you own this IP address, we request that you immediately do the following:

....

There really isn't anything that MediaForce can do. Their issue is with the user, not the ISP. I'm sure the ISP will be willing to answer any subpoena requests, but the idea of the ISP seriously thinking about disabling a customer because of one of these notices is silly.

Ask anyone who is in the right place at a big ISP. They'll tell you they get hundreds of these.

Adam

They used to mail me about breast enlargment, but then I stopped running gotmail, and the messages went away.

Use Gotmail, which downloads your hotmail messages to an mbox-style file. Or use hotwayd which appears like a POP3 server running on localhost, and uses WebDAV to get messages from hotmail (like Outlook Express). Either way, no web-bugs will get activated.

The added advantage is that you can pipe these through procmail/spamassassin just like ordinary incoming mail, and not have to manually delete all that spam.

This is not new. People already mentioned Genetic Algorithms & Genetic Programming here. Some even suggest this is the only way to do (future) engineering of very complex systems (e.g. Hugo de Garis, see his site, namely this article on "Evolvable Hardware". You may want also to look at his PhD thesis.

> very interesting
> Especially tried to cheat by standing on it's wingtips or similar

This a perfect illustration to the fundamental problem with evolutionary aproach to engineering. The evolutionary hype mostly goes along the lines of "you should only define what do you want (define fittness function) and the (nearly optimal) solution would be automagically evolved into existence". That's OK, but the very problem is in exactly defining "what do you want". The very term "cheating" suggests that researchers got something that satisfied their fittness function but was not "what they wanted". This means that their fittness definition was not correct (too simple?). Of course, we humans tend to blame somebody else: "it cheated". Perhaps, it is entertaining and fun to see such "cheating" in balsa-winged toy robot, but it may get far less fun if, say, in some (probably distant) future evolution-engineered robo-surgeon suddently decides to "cheat" a bit.

This is not new. People already mentioned Genetic Algorithms & Genetic Programming here. Some even suggest this is the only way to do (future) engineering of very complex systems (e.g. Hugo de Garis, see his site, namely this article on "Evolvable Hardware". You may want also to look at his PhD thesis.

> very interesting
> Especially tried to cheat by standing on it's wingtips or similar

This a perfect illustration to the fundamental problem with evolutionary aproach to engineering. The evolutionary hype mostly goes along the lines of "you should only define what do you want (define fittness function) and the (nearly optimal) solution would be automagically evolved into existence". That's OK, but the very problem is in exactly defining "what do you want". The very term "cheating" suggests that researchers got something that satisfied their fittness function but was not "what they wanted". This means that their fittness definition was not correct (too simple?). Of course, we humans tend to blame somebody else: "it cheated". Perhaps, it is entertaining and fun to see such "cheating" in balsa-winged toy robot, but it may get far less fun if, say, in some (probably distant) future evolution-engineered robo-surgeon suddently decides to "cheat" a bit.

This is not new. People already mentioned Genetic Algorithms & Genetic Programming here. Some even suggest this is the only way to do (future) engineering of very complex systems (e.g. Hugo de Garis, see his site, namely this article on "Evolvable Hardware". You may want also to look at his PhD thesis.

> very interesting
> Especially tried to cheat by standing on it's wingtips or similar

This a perfect illustration to the fundamental problem with evolutionary aproach to engineering. The evolutionary hype mostly goes along the lines of "you should only define what do you want (define fittness function) and the (nearly optimal) solution would be automagically evolved into existence". That's OK, but the very problem is in exactly defining "what do you want". The very term "cheating" suggests that researchers got something that satisfied their fittness function but was not "what they wanted". This means that their fittness definition was not correct (too simple?). Of course, we humans tend to blame somebody else: "it cheated". Perhaps, it is entertaining and fun to see such "cheating" in balsa-winged toy robot, but it may get far less fun if, say, in some (probably distant) future evolution-engineered robo-surgeon suddently decides to "cheat" a bit.

The pursuit of human level machine intelligence has been gaining momentum in the past decade. The introduction and advancement of biologically plausible neural networks, the work of John Taylor, Hugo DeGaris and others has led me to believe that we are finally approaching the realization of human level intelligence and cognition. However, these new advancements have diverged drastically from the techniques used in ALICE, do you still believe there is a place for ALICE style intelligence?

Well, it depends on what you're talking about...

It is well-known that near the equator and near the surface, the winds are generally light. But there is what's called the "Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone", an area of convergent winds. You can see that on a satellite picture of the western Pacific (look at the bottom edge, near the equator, obviously...). The latitude of this zone varies by season, moving always toward the summer hemisphere. It is an important component in what is called the "Hadley cell", which is an important circulation since it carries a great deal of heat from the tropics to the mid-latitudes and helps explain the placement of the major deserts. A good discussion of the very general "General Circulation of Earth's Atmosphere" can be found here, however some of the more interesting "facts" in it are currently in debate (for example, the existence of the Ferrel cell... the Hadley cell is definitely there, though).

So, the tropics aren't totally wind-free and are actually quite important to what happens through the rest of the world. I believe that it's been calculated that the average residence time of an air parcel in any one hemisphere is about 2 to 4 years, meaning that most parcels travel between hemispheres decently frequently.

Other factors to include is what's called the "Quasi-Biennial Oscillation" or QBO. This is strictly a lower stratospheric phenomenon (30 hPa is a pressure with sea level around 1000 hPa... 30 hPa is somewhere around 30 km above sea level.)

For some info on the QBO, check out:
http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/~cwhung/qbo.html
http://tao.atmos.washington.edu/data_sets/qbo/

Hope this helps. In short, a balloonist could be able to cross the equator. But you'd want to avoid it since the equator is normally pretty stormy.

-Jellisky

On the other hand, I have found some of the responses educational.

One angle is the "follow the money" angle

Another, equally viable, is the "See the Source Code" angle.

As seen in this PDF file, property rights are often considered as a "bundle of sticks", a collection of rights which taken collectively create the concept of property and ownership. (although this is usually seen in land and realty situations, I can see how it applies elsewhere)

This ties directly into the license vs ownership arguments, etc. and would have to be sorted out in detail

Try Gotmail, the hotmail downloading/forwarding perl script, or pop3hot a shareware ($18) proggie that bridges pop3 to hotmail accounts.

I spent some time working on a similar project at the University of Washington in the Aero-Astro department. It was part of a group of nanosats funded by the AFOSR and DARPA.

These small satellite projects are good for design classes because they are small enough that one year's class can complete the design and the simplicity of the satellites makes for cheap overall costs. Thus, the university can usually afford to fund the construction of the satellite. Actually seeing your hard work being launched on a mission is quite fullfilling.

STS-108 also contains GAS Payloads...which are basically just canisters that can be rented, usually by universities and space agencies. Experiments are flown in these canisters and they range anywhere from boiling water to growing plants, testing the effects of microgravity. I am the webmaster of the Utah State University GAS Team and we sent up a payload on this shuttle with 3 powered experiments and a few passive ones. Glad the shuttle finally got off the ground!

"Plut is not recyclable (except in bombs)"

Wrong.

Here is one of many search returns from google.

An excerpt: "Even though the U.S. government is opposed to a civilian plutonium fuel industry, it does see the merits of using the nation's surplus plutonium from nuclear weapons as nuclear fuel. When mixed with uranium and used in a nuclear power plant, weapons plutonium changes into a form of plutonium that is less suitable for use in a weapon.

Using weapons plutonium in mixed-oxide fuel would make U.S. nuclear disarmament steps more irreversible, and it would make the residual plutonium less attractive to terrorists or agents of renegade nations."

Evil? I think not. I think a backward, Luddite attitude is far more evil.

There is another nanosatellite program that's going to fly soon called ION-F. This is a group of 3 10 kg nanosats that fly in formation that are supposed to launch in 2002. They'll be used to studdy the ionosphere.

Yes, the author was overbroad with that statement. All languages work on a restricted set of phonemes; there are some 200+ identified, but no one language uses near that number. Hangul covers all the Korean phonemes, but not much else.

Here's a good description of Hangul. If you check this page, you'll notice I was wrong about the vowels; they don't seem to describe their own pronunciations at all, but rather the yin and yang elements of their sounds :-P.

More on topic, how long until we see some benchmarks on Tom's Hardware or some such site that tells us how often this 'clock modulation' kicks on under load? The white paper at Intel's site says the PROCHOT# signal is available on an external pin, it would be an easy thing for someone with motivation to hook up a 'scope or data logger to this pin and watch it do it's thing.