Slashdot Mirror

I work in this lab. Specifically, I'm working on objective analysis of RNA sequence alignment heuristics.

Yes, it's the same Knuth. But Boyer-Moore is almost always a better algorithm to use.

You *do* realize that there has never been a "Palestine" as a nation-state either. That land was once part of the Ottoman Empire, which was then given in a mandate to the British after the Ottoman Empire was dismantled under the League of Nations post-WWI. The 1948 UN Partition of Palestine did however, set aside land for a Palestinian homeland. If you look at maps of the partition scheme and post 1948 war maps, you'd notice that Arab nations around Israel managed to swallow up large amounts of land set aside for the Palestianians. Not a single nation, wanted the Palestinian nation there. For example, Trans-Jordan wanted the entirety of Palestine to itself, which is also what I believe Egypt and Syria wanted. Israel, naturally, didn't want to be so squished between gun implacements.

Here's a map of the UN plan and here's one post war of independence. Notice how the area known as the West Bank, which was gifted to the Palestinians, isn't Israel... nor Palestinian...

Both are cultures not of hate, but cultures where children are born of fire. Political leaders on both sides tend to be war heros, who still remember being shot at by the other side.

Check out the Sharkware project. I think this was actually mentioned on Slashdot recently.

ATM scanners

Learning AI is not impractical for a single player stand alone game but it is not as "exciting" nor do single player system have enough computing power and "experience" to really put a nueral net through its paces.

That's why we need evolving neural nets that can take advantage of the fact that several copies of the game run on distributed computers. Some process like NEAT (NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies) could evolve neural networks, with each game instance being a test bed for a particular "revision" of the network.

this is not Informative in the least, its absurd. Neural Network methods have outperformed explicit techniques in many areas for a long time, same goes for GAs. In fact, a combination of the two methds has also been very effective. See NEAT for an example.

Something that's a lot shorter and easier to remember and incredibly useful today (despite having been around quite a while) are Shniederman's 8 Golden Rules of UI design.

Obligatory linkage:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/almstrum/cs370/elvi sino/rules.html

According to the article, it's Advertising.
According to UTexas.edu it's Philosophy:

http://directory.utexas.edu:1760//uid%3D1531548460 %20%2B%20cn%3DRyan%20Samuel%20Pitylak%2Cou%3DColle ge%20of%20Liberal%20Arts%2Cou%3DStudents%2Co%3DThe %20University%20of%20Texas%20at%20Austin%2Cc%3DUS

Ryan Pitylak
Ryan Samuel Pitylak
Junior, Philosophy
College of Liberal Arts
ryan@payperaction.com
+1 512-320-9930
2002a Guadalupe St # 290
Austin, TX 78705-5609-02

Name: Ryan Samuel Pitylak
Title: Junior, Philosophy
College/Department: College of Liberal Arts
E-Mail: ryan@payperaction.com
Home Phone: +1 512-320-9930
Home Address: 2002a Guadalupe St # 290
Austin, TX 78705-5609-02

Worked rather well.

I was with you right up until To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. As an atheist and a free-thinker, such language offends me. If the church and the state really are separate, let the m0therfuckers pay taxes just like everyone else.

Actually, the jerk is a Junior majoring in "Philosophy"...

Philosophy.

He has allowed the university to publish his directory information which says he is a philosophy major.

According to some articles published in August, he lives in this $450K house. Notice how the home is in trust for himself. Probably hoping to keep it when his scam falls apart. According to the UT Directory he lives near campus, but that looks like that's just a P.O. box. The e-mail address in the UT directory goes to payperauction.com.

This post is interesting, because NIMA/NGA (the mapping arm of the Department of Defense) has just announced plans to remove a huge number of its aeronautical charts from public access, as announced in a Federal Register (PDF) message November 18. The restrictions would take effect October 1, 2005. This has been heavily announced on the FAA's mapping website.

To quote: NGA aims to protect the sources and integrity of its data, honor its bilateral agreements restricting nongovernmental use, avoid competition with commercial interests, and allow NGA to focus on its primary customers and mission, supporting the Department of Defense.

This is bad! Those great TPC charts (sample from U. Tex. Perry-Castaneda Library) that make excellent roadmaps and topographic charts are specifically marked for restriction. These charts are also seen in a lot of military-styled movies and films as backdrops on walls.

We aren't talking about weapons targeting charts, which are already classified. We're talking about basic topographic maps with foreign detail. Based on my minor involvement in GIS it looks like the Pentagon may be jockeying to eventually outsource its map production to commercial firms. But regardless, this will be a loss.

How is it cute? I know the technical level here on slashdot is now quite low, and not everyone has a computer science background, but starting a list at 0 is quite the norm. I will let the man Dijkstra educate you. http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/ EWD08xx/EWD831.html/

Fine-tuning is not an argument in favor of supernaturalism. In fact, it is evidence against supernaturalism. Beyond that, it's also questionable whether there even is fine-tuning, let alone the meaning of it. See also this discussion.

I've been thinking about this one for a while now. In fact it was part of a thunk on how to create driverless traffic. Meaning you get to relax on the way into work, the car gets you there on time with little or no hassle.

My thoughts were generally, each car is a node in a network of cars. They'd use a network built with the cars surrounding yours. In close traffic like rush-hour you might still be able to hit 60mph on average with very few slowdowns simply because every car knows where every other car WANTS to go and so accommodations are made automatically, perfect merges. Sort of like this except traffic's flowing in the same direction. :)

Even if a user chose to drive the car himself. If all cars have the computer and telemetry of the cars around them, all cars would be able to react to the one lone self-drivers foibles because his car tells all the others what's going on.

Of course if somebody hacks his transponder then you might have some trouble. As with any technology, there's an upside and a downside.

And then I stop and think, wouldn't this all go away if I was just telecommuting instead?

The interstate highway system was the government doing the bidding of the malicious auto manufacturers. The main reason there was a need for the interstate highway system is because the auto manufacturers bought and dismantled key interstate rail tracks. This eliminated any other choice for the government. They had to either build the interstate highway system or get into a cold-war-esque economic game of chicken with the auto manufacturers, with the auto manufacturers trying to buy and dismantle the rail systems faster than they were built.

The truth, as usual, is much more interesting than silly conspiracy theories. In 1919, Col Dwight Eisenhower participated in the Army's Transcontinental Motor Convoy. Much of the time the convoy was forced to travel on dirt or mud roads at a speed of about 6 MPH. During WWII, General Eisenhower got a good look at the autobahns in Germany that had made it possible for the Germans to rapidly shift troops around. This was the genesis of the Interstate Highway System started under President Eisenhower in the 1950s.

Are you saying that roads were, historically, only built for the military?

Well, yes and no, but I wasn't referring to roads in general. I was referring specifically to the Interstate System. You know, I-70, I-80, I-35. The original name was the "National System of Interstate and Defense Highways."

http://www.eisenhower.utexas.edu/highway.htm
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/programadmin/interstate.ht ml
http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/dl/InterstateHi ghways/InterstateHighwaysdocuments.html

Referring to roads in general, the Romans built the best and longest lasting roadway system. Roman roads were originally built wide enough for a garrison to march down them. Sounds like military use to me. http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/history/romanrd.htm .

Interesting, my Googling turned up a value of 1.07 for Saturn here and here, so I assumed that 1.07 was the correct value. Further googling reveals estimates of Saturn's surface gravity ranging from 0.74 to 1.19.

but if you want to use game theory to analyze sex, here's an article about faking orgasms.

a : 1;
#b : 0;
b : a;

Check out Maxima, my Calculus 2 teacher tries to give it a plug in class about every week. Its actually very powerful. http://maxima.sourceforge.net/ http://www.ma.utexas.edu/maxima.html

Agree with heroic Hertzfeld (more info in Programmers at Work ). I'd add Warnock and also strongly endorse Wolfram (whose invincible iconoclasm is admirable). And PARC should be better represented, I'd cite Adele Goldberg for the under-appreciated Smalltalk-80. At least she gets to contribute to Cringely's Triumph of the Nerds.

Where are Dijkstra and Wirth (who did far more than most people realise - Wirth essentially created a European "Sun Microsystems" at ETH)? Remove the "+10:American" bias - but Knuth should probably be mentioned at least twice. :)

Has anyone given any thought as to how a programming language should be structured so that it would be easy to code by waving things with particular smells in front of the computer? If not, why not?

Seriously, this is not a design goal for programming languages. Programming languages are meant to a) be not ambiguous, and b) match or impose a way of thinking. Neither of these map particularly well onto spoken languages, because the bloody syntax (to keep it nonambiguous) gets in the way.

This is also why Edsger Dijkstra felt that natural programming was not a good idea.

target is gone in xhtml 1.0 strict

The "target" attribute still exists in the Transitional and Frameset versions of HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0. XHTML 1.1 does not have a Transitional or a Frameset version; however, it is a modularization of XHTML which means that the same functionality can be easily re-introduced. For example, Jacques Distler has produced a page using the "target" attribute which is valid against an extended XHTML 1.1 DTD. This is one of the major selling points of XML-based markup and having true XML parsers as clients.

There have been lots of reports in the last 5 months about the control of digital systems through direct brainwave interpretation--email, video games, prosthetics, etc. The Air Force and Duke U. have had monkeys flying flight simulators by thought for 1-2 yrs now. Their work has been the result of interpretation of understood wave patterns for arm and hand movement, and not requiring the "training" the UW subjects needed for playing pong. The target system would mimic a mechanical response the subject is already familiar i.e. arm hand movement.

But this success so far has only been acheived intrusively, by putting a hole in the subject's head and directly accessing the brain to capture EM activity. The real problem now is interpretting the brainactivity through the skull, scalp and hair. With the many amputies coming back from war, a great deal of effort is being made to develop these type of systems for control of prosthetic limbs in hope of improving quality of life for these soldiers...but to do it without putting more holes in their heads. The goal is to have such a system functioning within the next year or two.
http://www.angelfire.com/az3/newzone/mku.html
http://www.actlab.utexas.edu/~magsig/pinecone.htm
http://www.mindfully.org/Technology/2003/Brain-Imp lant-Read10nov03.htm

We can make fun of all the misspeaking that Dubya does, but we can't mock Gore for saying "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."?

In context, Gore's words were quite accurate. Just as we say that Bush II invaded Iraq even though he's not out there with a rifle, or we say that "Eisenhower created the Interstate system" even though he wasn't out there with a bulldozer.

So, no, you shouldn't distort an accurate statement and then mock the distorted version. Especially where there's so much else about Gore worthy of being mocked. I'm all for mocking politicians, just keep it accurate.

Before, I had to write a meta-search engine for research papers (papersearch), but maybe now all we'll need is google.

The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulations, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.

Please have a look at some facts.

To answer your question, no Ukranians are not "Aryan", but neither are English or German. Maybe you're confusing Indo-Iranian ("Aryan") with Indo-European. Indo-Iranian (Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi, etc), Italic (Latin, French, Italian, etc), Slavic (Russian, Ukranian, Polish, etc) and Germanic (English, German, etc) are all branches of the Indo-European language tree.

Wait, you mean the Right DOESN'T stand for massive debt, runaway government, censoring scientific research, intrusive laws, lack of oversight, lack of foresight, and a general lack of intellegence (military and otherwise)? That they aren't the ones attempting to descecrate this country's Constitution by converting it into a common dictionary to define a word that already means what they want it to mean? That it isn't about changing your story every time you're caught in an open lie? (so tell me, where are the WMDs? Why aren't Canadians keeling over in droves from their shoddy and impure medicine?)

If you don't like Bush and his Congress are doing, then you should have broken tradition (which seems to be Standard Operating Procedure for the Right, whenever convenient) and held a real race for the primaries.

I'm posting this AC to avoid the obvious karma whoring complaint. I'll bookmark it and check back to see what YOU think the Right stands for.

For Lisp you could use ACL2. For Java you could use JML , together with Krakatoa, Why (which could also be used to program the solution) and Coq. For all the other languages that appear in the solutions list I think you're on your own.

Ah yes, and there are pictures of such a tiny PIN-stealing camera, disguised as an official leaflet holder:

These particular naughty people used a card reader as well, so they could copy the info off the magnetic stripe on the card as well.

We use an ok calendar you can find out more about here.
Evolution didn't seem to have any group calendar (at the time) and we were using some custom peice of junk software riding on top of Exchange (which we are trying to stop using as soon as possible, another reason Evolution wasn't a great choice). The biggest problem so far has been getting data out of a microsoft only format into something other programs can read (no suprise there). Thanks for the info we may have to look at the planner stuff, though we are currently using msproject 98 :-| (but a single copy of a newer version to use to convert to planner might not be too bad).

there all all kind of impediments to Space flights, as a mean to go from A to B, cost being one.
See HERE for a first try at speeding passengers across the pond.
Space vertigo is another. See an interesting paper here.

Of course that's why you're spraying anti-Israeli propaganda ;)

(a) Israel is building a big fuckoff wall *way outside* those borders, conveniently annexing large swathes of territory that do not belong to Israel with NO JUSTIFICATION

(a) Take a look at the map. Look at the scale. Israel is less than 50 miles across and 300 miles wide. It is smaller than California. And who's surrounding them? Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt. Israel did not have a treaty with Egypt until 1979, Jordan, until 1994. That means that this tiny country was surrounded by hostile countries. Countries that have gone to war against Israel four times betwen 1948 and 1972. Israel is small, is surrounded by hostile neighbors who explicitly have attempted to "drive the Jews into the sea." What would you do? If you say you would act any less agressively, you're either a pacifist or a liar.

(b) Israel is pursuing a systematic policy of colonising a foreign territory with 'native' Israelis

(b) Old news. They're pulling the settlers out. Though I agree with you that the settlements were wrong and stupid. The settlers are zealous idiots that have jeopardized the lives and safety of the less zealous Israeli citizen.

(c) Israelis forces are performing violent operations against civilian, terrorist and militia forces alike with no real concern as to which is which, outside its own territory, with no international sanction and indeed against international law and consensus

(c) And the exact same thing is happening in Iraq. If you have a force that hides in civilian territories, there will be civilian casualties. Unfortunately, the Hamas does not have clearly demarked buildings and uniforms for the Israeli army to combat! I'm sure if the Hamas was really concerned about their fellow Palestinian's lives they would do so. But they dont.

Let me ask you - suppose you had a neighbor who liked to throw grenades into your yard, mail you explosives in an attempt to blow you up, and has told everyone that their goal is to destroy you (this is Hamas' stated goal) and your family? How would you react?

(d) the Israeli government actually talks about maintaining the genetic purity of Israel (ah the irony) in the sense of making sure that at least 50% of Israelis are Jewish so that there can never be a 'democratic coup' inside Israel at election time

The state of Israel is a theocracy, by Jews, for Jews. The modern state of Israel might not have ever happened if it weren't for the Holocaust. Jews want to have a nation where it's safe to be Jewish, where they are never prosecuted for their religion or ancestry. As a democracy, they don't get that guarantee if the Arab population goes over 50%. Demise by war or demise by population expansion -- either way it means the end of the Jewish state.

By the way, You don't have to be born Jewish to become a citizen, so your "genetic purity" argument is bogus.

(e) Israel, unlike other nations, is completely ignored in all the hubbub from the west about nuclear proliferation despite possessing 100-200 nuclear warheads.

See my response to (a) above. It's not like it has Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. Israel, for its very survival, has to be tougher and meaner than any Arab country out there, or it will be run over and crushed.

Greens have moved beyond a lesser-evil approach to politics...

... I cannot under any circumstances accept nuclear power

...I cannot under any circumstances accept... genetically modified foods as a healthy alternative.

There are such simpler and more sensible ways to approach these issues. We could easily eliminate the need for nuclear power by conserving more energy.

We could replace nuclear power-and coal and other dirty forms of producing power-with the abundance of solar energy which shines on our country.

1. Setup several email accounts. Most are reserved for sending bogus traffic (trolling for ye olde jack-booted thugs). One or two will be reserved for actual correspondence.
2. When zero-hour approaches, send messages indicating "something will happen in (some place) on (some date)" using the trolling accounts. The message is intended to draw attention and resources away from the actual target and attack methodology. These would be encoded using a method with known problems. The encoding method used should be crackable, but not easily - We can't appear to be too st00pid.
3. Send all "real" correspondence via high security encryption. To make it more interesting, I would pre-arrange with my cohorts that only messages sent at certain times of day, even using the "real" accounts, would be considered valid. All other messages would be "bait".

Wrong rodents, but still, gotta hand it to Disney for preparing us for the world to come.

On first reference, use a person's full name, including the middle initial, and title if important to the story. On second reference, use only the last name with no title. In the following example, for instance, we assume that on first reference the person was called Dr. Donald Drumm. The following are possible second-reference uses: The doctor agreed. Drumm agreed.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

More maps of Korea

North Korea is a monster made by her neighbors:

• Hyundai and South Korea gave the North $500 million dollars
• Japanese Pachinko players supported North Korea with their gambling

Accurately estimating the size of a cloud by eye is no easy feat and, as others have already pointed out, non-nuclear weapons can also make mushroom clouds -- either large conventional explosions or smaller explosions that take place inside tubes or silos

South Korea is building a new capital city. Supposedly this is because of overcrowding, but the new capital is farther south... out of artillery range of North Korea.

The explosion supposedly occured near a missile field. It's possible the North Koreans tried to test-fire a missile for their 56th anniversary and it blew up in the silo.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

On Kerry's medals.

Bush AWOL: Case Closed

It might be interesting to look at Ben barnes, who claims he helped Bush get into the TANG in 1968, as Lt GOV of Texas. The only problem being that Barnes was not sworn in as LT GOV until 1969 -- in May '68, when Bush was sworn into the Guard, Barnes was actually UN Representative to Geneva.

The LA Times and CNN investigated these exact allegations in 1999, and concluded there was nothing to them.

He's also a major Kerry contributor and lost his position at Lt Gov in a stock fraud scandal..

Using solar powersats eliminates the storage and most of the distribution problems (did you know you can run jetliners on beamed power? true story), reduces the cost of power and also reduces the enviro footprint from obvious and opaque solar arrays to more flexible and translucent rectenna arrays.

Each piece of serious space infrastructure you build (ISS isn't anything like serious) makes it easier to build other systems. For example, powersat construction provides a market for a space elevator and drives down the materials costs for everything but the ribbon - and transport up via the elevator drops the cost of a powersat considerably. Building a Moon-mine would also lower the cost of both powersats and elevator from a materials and technology, and of course the mine would be cheaper to start with prefab parts coming up an elevator and cheaper to build with powersats having already proven a lot of the technology.

We just need someone to bite the bullet and spend 0.1 Iraq Wars or Desert Storms to produce one piece, and the other pieces will happen. At the moment, the USA faces a dichotomy between a "liberal weiner" and a "right-wing nut-job", neither of whom will seriously back any such project.

I'm not trying to showboat myself here, but just for disclaimer/background, my name is Kathleen Fent, wife of CmdrTaco who runs this website.

I do work for the University of Texas at Dallas' Computer Crimes & Prevention institute. Some of the things my team has found out is that this is a pretty frequent occurance and that new technologies such as RFID are even more vulnerable. Right now with traditional magswip cards, you have scams such as clerks and waiters with portable mag-readers who can swipe the numbers from your card's magswipe and store them in their own database for thier own nefarious purposes leaving you with no clue as to how it happened.

An ever increasingly popular scam is card readers being installed over ATM machine slots that reads the card before the card enters the machine. Examples of this here. This makes things like PIN numbers and CVV2 numbers even more important for people to be careful with - its their last line of defense.

If you are interested in this topic, I suggest reading some of the papers I have posted over here on my blog.