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You might want to look at ZPL.

I think you are missing the point. A single photon of light is sent down an optical channel made out of artificially produced diamond particles. The sender measures the photon using one of two methods A or B. Which method is used is randomly determined. The measurement results in one of two values (i.e. left or right, up or down.) The sender records the method of measurement and the determined value. The two measured states represent 1s and 0s in binary. The photon travels down the channel to the receiver. The receiver measures the photon using either A or B. Also determined at random. When the stream is complete the receiver tells the sender which measurement method was used for each photon. The sender then tells the receiver which photons were measured with the same methods. The binary data from any photons that were not measured with the same method is deleted from the message. This results in a series of 1s and 0s. Please note - even at this point the message can not be compromised - because THERE IS NO MESSAGE!

The next step in the process is validating the security of the transmission. This is done by comparing the binary results for matching photons. There are several ways to do this. One way is to use a process that splits the binary list into blocks using randomly chosen members of the list so that the list can be compared a block at a time. By comparing blocks at different parts of the list any interception of the data can be detected. How? If two photons were measured with the same method and the measurements don't match it means the data was corrupted. This could result from noise of various kinds, including interception. Too much noise is a strong indication of eavesdropping. Remember - the eavesdropper can only choose one of the two measurement methods and once the photon is measured the other measurement method is rendered invalid. That's why they call it "quantum". So for any photon measured by the eavesdropper there is a chance the receiver will get the wrong binary result even with the measurement method that matches the sender. Enough wrong matches and the eavesdropper is exposed. At this point there is still NO MESSAGE!

If they determine that no interception has occurred they use a normal bit parity check to eliminate errors. After each segment of the check they discard a bit from a prearranged location in the block (first, last, etc.) to reinforce security. By making the block sizes bigger as errors are discarded they eventually derive usable bit lists. These bit lists are then modified by prearranged formula and the resultant string becomes the key. And it is at that point that there is finally a message.

Currently, commercial quantum cryptography systems are available, but they are are expensive. Some major players in the development of quantum cryptography systems include IBM, NEC, DARPA, Toshiba, Fujitsu, MIT and Harvard. There are sure to be breakthroughs and roll-outs in the near future. Interestingly, one problem affecting the implementation of this new technology is the transmission of data over distances. Optical amplifiers evidently 'observe' the photons, thus rendering them useless. I guess that's just more proof that there really is a 'ghost in the machine'.

billy - who has nothing he needs to encode

There are several clients available, here, here, and here, and there are many others. Hope that helps.

http://blackbox02.cs.washington.edu:11223/PCBSD-0. 5a-x86.iso.torrent

http://blackbox02.cs.washington.edu:11223/PCBSD-0. 5a-x86.iso.torrent

This has nothing to do with vanity.

I do use spellcheck (in OO.org these days rather than MS Word). For example, I'm perfectly capable of typing "funciton" rather than "function" -- I tend to reverse the ti when I'm in a hurry.

I stopped using the grammar-checker in MS Word because it's often wrong. (I realise that I'm not the first person here to post that link, BTW.) Not only does Word miss grammatical errors, but it frequently tags perfectly valid grammar as erroneous, a behaviour which I find extremely counterproductive. In fact, "maddening" would not be an inaccurate way to describe it, especially because -- unlike the case with spellchecking, where it's possible to add new words to the dictionary -- there's no way to teach the grammar-checker that a particular grammatical usage that it labels as "wrong" is in fact correct.

Having spent on the order of ten thousand hours over the last six or seven years using MS Word (several books plus dozens of articles, reports, technical specs, etc. -- Office versions 97, 2000, 2003, XP), I came to the conclusion that its grammar checker knows heaps less than I do. It often fails to catch simple mistakes. I see no point in allowing it to annoy me all the time with false positives that it's too brain-dead to be trained out of producing. I invariably spend less time proofreading for grammar myself.

When somebody makes available an accurate, intelligent, and therefore useful grammar-checker, I'll consider using it.

At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, we are implementing something we call the HI-Space table, which uses a camera to track hand motions as well. Ours doesn't need special gloves, though. You can walk up to the table and move your hands around and it watches any number of hands, doing any number of poses. It detects objects that are placed in the space and recognizes them if they are in the database. We have voice recognition, too, so it can respond to spoken commands.

One of the best things about our system is that it is completely untethered and intuitive. There is no training period, and no device to put on. You are interacting with the digital world by manipulating in the physical world.

I write applications for the table. There are a lot of issues that come up that you wouldn't normally think about. For example, with many hands in the space, it's easy to have people doing conflicting things. Actions are not so clearly defined, either. For example, when selecting a button, do you point to it? For how long? What if your finger moves a little?

We are currently conducting user studies to see in what ways the HI-Space table is better than the desktop and cave environments, and we're looking for other applications and organizations interested in using this technology.

http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/hispace//
http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/hces//

contact me at bob [dot] baddeley [at] pnl [dot] gov

It's similar. I googled for "hydraulic society" and found link this entry on Karl Wittfogel's "oriental despotism".
When the egyptians built a water grid everyone relied on, the local government guy was able to make himself a god emperor.
In new jersey, garbage pickup was traditionally handled by the mafia. Try to go into the garbage business without their approval, and your trucks get blown up. Local governments are like the mafia, but without all the checks and balances.

This thread is focused on a false dicotomy:
big dumb corporation, or government. Us deep thinkers call that the fallacy of the excluded middle. Yes, the current wired model of broadband is a dinosaur. I'm paying $50/mo to the cable co because i don't like the fine print on verizon contract. Wireless networks are where things are headed. I wish slahsdotters were doing a better job of giving me info on the real costs of setting these up and running them. Real costs will affect the doability of these things.
But government, or even the mafia, are among the worst choices for who should run them.
If the open source movement doesn't want to step up, at least we could look to the third sector -
nonprofits, foundations, private schools, churches, the girl scouts....
But i see no inherent reason this couldn't be done as a business. Encrypted wireless signal with a rented unscrambler at a reasonable rate (say $5/mo? does that work?), or something backed by ad revenue, or corporate sponsorship. The pepsi network eg. Again, what works will be determined by the numbers, and I don't have the numbers.
But government should be avoided if there's any other way to do it.

Well something I wasn't familiar with at least was that Canadians had the same Japanese internment camps that the USA had in WW2. Just an example of something I've heard a lot of hand wringing about in the United States but not much finger pointing at Canada. Cheers.

Yeah, just smash it.

I use Autoclave. Although people don't support it anymore, I've never had a problem with it.

Well commercial interests are supposed to push this, but there's simply no market for it yet, so we're dependant on government funding. Hopefully that will change in the next 20 years. Here's some cool space propulsion technology. When will we see a flight test of this stuff?

If you are wondering, how fingers positions tracked by camera, pay attention to small black and white squares on the end of the fingers. Those are square-shaped markers used in the ARToolkit - Open sourced, multiplatform Augmented reality library. ARToolkit is esy to use and with camera connected to PC and having camera SDK you can esily write your own augmented reality application. There are augmented relity libraries for cellular phones and pocket pc in development.

You know, it could still be really cool and quite inexpensive...

...if they made it something like this!

plus explosions of course.

oh yes.

With the software, at least, there is some hope...

I'm constantly writing wrappers around things to make them sane, and re-implementing stuff in a hopefully more useable way. Now if only the'd let me BSD licence the results.

Now if I only had time to work on a consed replacement, like I've wanted to do for quite a while. That is the most unholy piece of software I've ever seen... "../chromat_dir" and "../phd_dir" are HARD CODED in the source!

I need to think of a way to convince the higher-ups to let us hire some heavy-CS-background people. Things might work!

I'm really not surprised this wasn't a success. A lot of companies blindly go after "emerging markets" without really understanding them. In particular, price isn't as big of a deal as some people think it is. For example, people vastly underestimate the buying power of people in India. Even if everyone was able to afford a computer, what would they do with them? They have no training, no experience, and no support infrastructure.

Interestingly enough, there are some business models that work well. Take the "village PC" model. One person in the village buys a computer (possibly with village assets), supports it, rents out time on it, etc. Everyone in the village, regardless of their technical expertise, benefits from the technology. This model has also worked well for mobile phones.

Last quarter, there were two good talks on technology for emerging and "invisible" markets here at the University of Washington. The first is a talk by Eric Brewer (UC Berkeley) entitled The Case for Technology for Developing Regions. An abstract, video, and MP3 of the talk are available from that site. The other talk was given by John Sherry of Intel's People and Practices Research Group. PowerPoint slides, an abstract, a suggested reading list, a discussion wiki, and more can be found here. I highly encourage you to check these talks out.

I'm really not surprised this wasn't a success. A lot of companies blindly go after "emerging markets" without really understanding them. In particular, price isn't as big of a deal as some people think it is. For example, people vastly underestimate the buying power of people in India. Even if everyone was able to afford a computer, what would they do with them? They have no training, no experience, and no support infrastructure.

Interestingly enough, there are some business models that work well. Take the "village PC" model. One person in the village buys a computer (possibly with village assets), supports it, rents out time on it, etc. Everyone in the village, regardless of their technical expertise, benefits from the technology. This model has also worked well for mobile phones.

Last quarter, there were two good talks on technology for emerging and "invisible" markets here at the University of Washington. The first is a talk by Eric Brewer (UC Berkeley) entitled The Case for Technology for Developing Regions. An abstract, video, and MP3 of the talk are available from that site. The other talk was given by John Sherry of Intel's People and Practices Research Group. PowerPoint slides, an abstract, a suggested reading list, a discussion wiki, and more can be found here. I highly encourage you to check these talks out.

As pointed out by a previous post, there is a mirror available. However, if you really want, you can use this torrent instead. The video is actually pretty interesting, particularly if you are interested in search or distributed systems.

... with formatting. It's generally considered 'Karma Whoring' when you post just a mirror link/mirror the text without being Anonymous Coward. Please consider not doing it.

-------------------
Link: norfolk.cs.washington.edu/htbin-post/unrestricted/ colloq/details.cgi?id=274

Google: A Behind-the-scenes Look

Jeff Dean

Abstract
Search is one of the most important applications used on the internet, but it also poses some of the most interesting challenges in computer science. Providing high-quality search requires understanding across a wide range of computer science disciplines, from lower-level systems issues like computer architecture and distributed systems to applied areas like information retrieval, machine learning, data mining, and user interface design. I'll describe some of the challenges in these areas, discuss some of the applications that Google has developed over the past few years. I'll also highlight some of the systems that we've built at Google, including GFS, a large-scale distributed file system, and MapReduce, a library for automatic parallelization and distribution of large-scale computation. Along the way, I'll share some interesting observations derived from Google's web data. Jeff Dean joined Google in 1999 and is currently a Distinguished Engineer in Google's Systems Lab. While at Google he has worked on Google's crawling, indexing, query serving, and advertising systems, implemented several search quality improvements, and built various pieces of Google's distributed computing infrastructure. Prior to joining Google, he was at DEC/Compaq's Western Research Laboratory. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1996 working with Craig Chambers on compiler optimization techniques for object-oriented languages.

http://norfolk.cs.washington.edu/htbin-post/unrest ricted/colloq/details.cgi?id=274

Jeff Dean

Abstract Search is one of the most important applications used on the internet, but it also poses some of the most interesting challenges in computer science. Providing high-quality search requires understanding across a wide range of computer science disciplines, from lower-level systems issues like computer architecture and distributed systems to applied areas like information retrieval, machine learning, data mining, and user interface design. I'll describe some of the challenges in these areas, discuss some of the applications that Google has developed over the past few years. I'll also highlight some of the systems that we've built at Google, including GFS, a large-scale distributed file system, and MapReduce, a library for automatic parallelization and distribution of large-scale computation. Along the way, I'll share some interesting observations derived from Google's web data. Jeff Dean joined Google in 1999 and is currently a Distinguished Engineer in Google's Systems Lab. While at Google he has worked on Google's crawling, indexing, query serving, and advertising systems, implemented several search quality improvements, and built various pieces of Google's distributed computing infrastructure. Prior to joining Google, he was at DEC/Compaq's Western Research Laboratory. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1996 working with Craig Chambers on compiler optimization techniques for object-oriented languages.

Unfortunatly, you can't rely on ASCII art 'cause retarded MUAs (like gmail) won't display messages in a mono-spaced font. That is a feature I've been requesting for ages.

And your argument of using style for structured communication is bunk. What does colors and fonts have to do with your message, and how are they going to render in pine? Bullet points? What's wrong with an asterik?

If you want to sell me something, send me the URL of a webpage. If you want to effectivly communcate with me, send me a plain ASCII email. If you need back up images, send links to web page, but for the love of god don't email them to me.

yeah, read and send all your mail in plain text format..

Doesn't everyone have WebPine? It makes it oh so easy to avoid spam.

Especially when you run it inside Firefox 1.0.2

You could use Autoclave, but since it's being end-of-lifed, you could follow the Autoclave author's recommendation and use Darik's Boot and Nuke instead.

From [a link on] TFA:

8. Long paragraphs. Note: If you have a paragraph that is longer than a page, rewrite.

Also from [a link on] TFA:

Ph.D., University of Arizona

As U of A has a pretty good business program, these two statements are disjoint. Meaning: I find it unlikely that he did not violate his own (#8) rule within his PhD.

Oh, and ... well ... yes, natural-language parsing is difficult. You may see mentions of "n-p" in this discussion thread; suffice it to say that it is intractibly difficult to maximize linguistic flow and fluidity while also maintaining the syntax and "low-level" rules of a language. And, yes, MS Word does give silly suggestions - do something constructive like either turning it off or writing something better. To moan and gripe about software development without having a formal or structured knowledge of it is likely counterproductive - it'd be like your average /. reader, say, griping about a problem in chemical engineering

Know sweat. I can due tomorrow, but I knead to leaf by 1pm. Due you want to due that? If sew, I'll just be hear and we can do it on the fly. Don't make eh special trip though - :)

Run

if you actually read his curriculum vitae. Apparently he says "My current research interests are in three areas- E-Commerce, Open Source Software and Spam/Permission Marketing. At a very general level, I am interested in the impact of Information Technology(IT) on individuals, organizations and communities."

So, yeah, sure sounds like a prof to me ...

What, did you want an English Professor? They're all working at Starbucks.

that he is speaking not to harm Ceasar, but to make Ceasar a better person:

From his Most common mistakes by students:

"10. Not running Microsoft Word's spelling and grammar check."

From this we gather that he does want people to use the spelinng and gramer czechs ...

and

"11. Assuming that Microsoft Word's spelling and grammar check will solve all writing problems."

Which leads us to believe that he has a purpose to this critique of MSFT Word grammar checking.

I was handed this article from a retired researcher that was supervising me on my wifi research. http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/march05/w akeupcall01.html

I located two other government sources here and here.

Another poster also found it here.

I'd like to point out that while there is no direct mention of Trusted Computing, it calls for a "fundamentally different architecture", some sections mostly later in the paper apprear to describe Trusted Computing functionality, the experts they cite all appear to be Trusted Computing speciallists and proponents (in particular David Spafford was the author of the semi famous WHY_TCPA and TCPA_REBUTTAL papers), at least some of the committee members appear to have Trusted Computing ties, and an earlier Cyber Security Advisor gave a speech at the Washington D.C. Tech summit calling for Trusted Computing and for ISPs to eventually make it a mandatory part of terms of service for internet access. A call to fight worms and viruses and to Secure the National Information Infrastucture against terrorist attacks, to defend against Osama bin Laden himself. Yes, he actually cited bin Laden by name. chuckle.

-

...but here's a link.

you can find it here. I can't take credit for finding it there though. It was mentioned in one of the above posts.

Someone kindly provided an alternate link to the report (http://lazowska.cs.washington.edu/CyberSecurity.p df) and if MS or similar have ahand in it, it's fairly well removed - most of the comittee seem to be academics from a variety of Universities around the US. There's a the president of AT&T and someone from Dell, but otherwise it's mostly just academics. I see no signs of a slide into trusted computing - mostly just a lot of complaint about the relatively slipshod state of current critical IT infrastructure.

Jedidiah

http://lazowska.cs.washington.edu/CyberSecurity.pd f

whenever I browse Slashdot with Firefox the page just doesn't seem to be drawn correctly.

See that little icon in the upper right corner? The one that if you mouseover says "Firefox Upgrades to Download" or somesuch?

Try clicking on that and downloading the upgrades.

I did that and since then have never had any problems.

Now, the stories I could tell about WebPine glitches are another matter...

Well there's John Cramer who has just published an alternate theory explaining the RHIC resluts and has also published a couple of novels based on experimental high energy physics.

>For example, I've got my own wildcard domain -- anything at this domain goes to me.

1. SMT (Simultaneous Multi Taskings):
href="http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries /perfmgmt/pdf/SMT.pdf
http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/smt/

2. SMP (Symmetric Multi Processing) (many cores & CPUs)

3. VMX (Virtualization MaXhine) (many logical machine's clones)

1. Will does Linux64 support SMT, SMP and VMX? and enhanced NPTL?
2. Will does PS3 (with their CELLs & APUs) support SMT, SMP and VMX?
3. Will does AMD64 support SMT, SMP and VMX? (SMT+Toledo+Pacifica+Turion+...)

open4free © : I'm Dr. Throughput. Take a good note for our future!!!

It uses fast task switching of 2 or 3 or 4 cycles of many soft-tasks using only one real core (more cores better!).

open4free ©

This work is very similar to some work that was presented at last years siggraph using graph cut optimization titled Interactive Digital Photomontage by some researchers at the University of Washington. This stuff is really cool and has applications outside of just re-coloring black and white. For example, compositors in the film industry adjust the color composition of scenes that were filmed during the day to look like they were filmed at night. Sometimes they just need to tweak the color because the art director isnt happy with it. Other times it's because they introduced CG elements into live action scenes and they dont quite match. If they can tweak those colors interactively, without authoring masks, it is faster than re-rendering the scene and that saves money.

Very cool stuff.

Pete

I assume this experience has lead you to evaluate the various options for your IMAP server software. What do you use?

I'm not the OP, but I used Courier for years, and then I switched to BINC ("BINC is not Courier").

There's also the old, hairy UW-IMAP package.

Quit Slashdot!

Seismic Webcams

It's back to the future, is it?

P.S. I see this study was done at my alma-matter, the University of Washington. I wonder if my old roommate Jim Oliver might have been affected, since he did handstands from our 7th floor balcony railing - maybe he should have been wearing a tin-foil hat? ;-)

http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/klee/misc/qs-ba nner-01.png

I completely agree. I work in mathematical biology and know a number of people who work on these models , here at the UofA and LANL. The "until we can predict everything" garbage is the typical argument of people who don't understand modeling. Biology is frequently complicated, but not ALWAYS complicated. What if people said "Oh, light, you can't model that, it's too complicated, that Hilbert space garbage will never get you anywhere?" There is only one way to figure this out and that is to try to build models. Models of epidemics can actually tell you quite interesting things. There are not necessarily so many variables that you can't get anywhere. Take ecology. Understanding/modeling the rainforest is really hard. But not everywhere is that complicated. How about the Antarctic or the tundra? The Namibian desert? Too complicated to ever understand?

Some diseases are understood alright, like tuberculosis. Others are harder. Models suggest things to look for. Don't think the issues you thought of in two minutes are lost on the investigators who have studied these things their entire lives. The natural progression of earlier models of disease is to incorporate network topology through network theory and agent based models. There are already interesting results such as vaccination on a scale free network is useless if you miss the nodes with highest degree.

http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0205260
http://www.csss.washington.edu/Papers/wp23.pdf

It is true that in some situations there is no particular course of action that will do much. Just like there is little defense from an atomic bomb. But don't you want to make sure?

Democracy is a myth designed to make the weak think that they play by the same rules as the strong. People not voting is in part due to the collective action problem, but see also No Treason No. 4.

The simplest solution is to stop voting these folks into office.

That solution is actually not simple, because first you must overcome the collective action problem.

I'm curious... could these be related to 'Sprites' in any way?
http://www.ess.washington.edu/Space/AtmosElec/spri teinfo.html

These models are just an icing on the cake. And I understand that errors cannot be calculated propertly for these models, partly because the errors will take a long time and partly because the models are not exactly thus errors cannot be shown to be correct. But one should never say that data from ice core samples is not as reliable just because they said so. That plain ignorant and stupid.