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Once this short and partial relapse to centralized commercial services will unevitably be sued to pieces (I mean, duh...), the next evolutionary step _will_ be anonymized P2P. The excellent OneSwarm protocol (implemented and working today!) has a very good change of becoming "the sh*t" when it comes to this I think, and I'm very surprised by the low buzz concerning it: http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu/ And for more general use, something like the (not equally yet implemented) Phantom protocol will probably have a place in the market too: http://code.google.com/p/phantom/wiki/MainPage

There are not just 5 english vowel sounds though.

http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/PhonResources/newstart.html

Oddly enough I remember my english teacher talking about 25 vowel sounds. I wonder how people come up with those numbers.

Since english is my second language I have to say that the way Americans pronounce the letters 'c' and 'z' if they spell them out, really is difficult for me to understand and reproduce. I just can't hear the difference. So while english has been easy on me some aspects are more demanding.

Yeah, while China is leading in LOLcat generation, those lazy Americans are just reconstructing entire cities in 3D... http://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/

Not the gesture support part, the $1 part. Cost wise it's probably cheapest, and it seemed to work sufficient for the apps in the demo.

Please tell me you don't think it actually COSTS $1.00 ?

It's a name for a type of gesture - like on Palm devices, lots of $1 implementations listed here.

I'd highly recommend you check out Classroom presenter from the University of Washington. It's what I and some friends have used previously with our tablets (currently a tc4200 but previously a tc1100) to give in-class presentations.

Most of the code you'd want is in FLINT and MPIR. Every single author of the paper (with the possible exception of Mark Watkins) is a developer of open source software. You can find the disk-multiplication code here: http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/robertwb/disk_mul/, published under what looks like a BSD-like license. Their email addresses are public, and I'm sure they'd happily send you the source.

Update, 9/20/2009: Other researchers have recently discovered a vulnerability in our original Vanish research prototype. Their work shows that the Vuze DHT on which we built the original prototype did not provide sufficient security properties, and that there are therefore attacks that can capture Vanish keys. We released a revised prototype on September 20, 2009. This revised prototype, which distributes keys across both the Vuze DHT and OpenDHT, invalidates this attack. In addition, we are working to further strengthen Vanish from two angles: (1) by hardening the underlying DHT for Vanish-like purposes and (2) by modifying applications to make more intelligent use of DHTs. Please see our new technical report for additional information about the currently known attacks and our defenses. Due to the complexity of the systems we are relying upon, we would like to strengthen our advice that users should be cautious if they want to use Vanish. At this point, Vanish should only be used for experimental purposes. We do encourage researchers, however, to analyze it and improve upon it.

MS licensed this technology, then called "Photo Tourism", from U of Washington in 2006 http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/

Key parts of this software are available as free software.

.

The teams actual site has more pics and videos, including St. Peter's Basilica, Trevi Fountain, and info on Venice.

http://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/

Whatever is actually happening, we can be sure that electrosensitivty is not actually caused by EM fields. There have been too many studies showing no link.

As I mentioned in my other reply, there are large industry forces which need to be considered when evaluating these studies. You'll also often find that the U.S. studies are all favorable to an industry, and only foreign studies disagree.

For another view, which clearly shows what a researcher is up against whose research results threatens an existing large industry, see this:
http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/march05/wakeupcall01.html

Note that he is an expert in DNA and DNA damage was clearly shown from exposure to an actual cell phone.

The aura of science is often used to make people believe exactly what the PTB want them to believe. Remember doctors on cigarette commercials, telling how great they were, while the tobacco companies were very well aware of the dangers? Careful who you believe, and check if they would lose their funding or even their career if they dared report anything which might cost a large corporation money (and or course some politician their campaign funding).

Real life is much messier than we want to believe...

Let's see if the third time's the charm. The linked article goes into detail on how "real" monopoles would be expected to catalyze proton (and neutron) decay. It's not deep detail, but I have a feeling that any explanation much deeper would be lost on anyone but theoretical physicists.

If they were real, physical, isolable monopoles, they might turn out to have some minor applications in energy production. (Yeah, I linked the same article upthread; it's interesting enough to repeat.) The claim is that they would make protons (and neutrons) decay promptly. Of course, if these folks were seeing that kind of monopole, they would have noticed side effects, starting with a sudden inability to keep their samples below 1 K.

I've been reading for decades about the search for subatomic-particle-type monopoles, and all the wondrous things one could do with them. This sounds more like some kind of group phenomenon, an emulation of a monopole, if you will. Sort of like holes in a semiconductor, which behave in some ways like positive "things", but are actually just the absence of an electron in a lattice.

I'm guessing that these aren't the kind of "real" monopoles that would let us build super-powerful motors, or compact proton disintegrators, or whatnot. On the other hand, even though the semiconductor folks can't isolate and sell bucketloads of holes, they do turn out to be quite useful.

... that version of the Vostok ice core graph you included is horrendously misleading. If you don't overlay the two graphs on top of each other you can easily be fooled into thinking the data suggests that increased atmospheric CO2 lead to higher temperatures. When you do overlay the charts, it becomes clear that the increase in temperature slightly preceded the increase in CO2 in each cycle, including this one.

I've specifically addressed that point in 7 (f) of the index: "CO2 increases after temperature, so it doesn't warm the planet."

But since the tone of your response implies that you probably won't bother, I'll repeat myself once again: this phase lag isn't known with great precision, the worst case scenario has it lagging ~800 years out of ~5000 year deglaciations, and more fundamentally, the difference between the small Milankovitch forcings and the actual observed temperature swings shows that CO2 amplifies the natural forcing. CO2 is a strong greenhouse gas, make no mistake about that.

And I'm sorry if you're offended by ads. I tried really hard to force them to be non-animated, and only put them off to the side (I HATE interstitial ads with a burning passion.) And to be honest I make ~8 cents a day from them-- my dream is to have them make 30 cents a day so that the website pays its own hosting costs. And, yes, even though I've archived most of my responses for people to read, I still find it necessary to repeat myself because people keep bringing up the same strange talking points regardless of the scientific evidence. Again, sorry if this is horribly offensive to you.

WTF? Ares has a manager? P2P my ass! I'm using one swarm for now and on...

I can't give you pictures of the entire gyre, but there are several taken during the March 2008 DXpedition to Clipperton Island, a small (9 square kilometers, 3.5 square miles), uninhabited (and rarely visited) island in the North Pacific about 1100 km (700 mi) off the coast of Mexico.

Visitors to Clipperton were shocked to see the amount of detritus at the high-tide level on the beach, so far into the Pacific, and took a lot of photographs of it (e.g., here, here, and here). Ann Santos, one of the operators, noted in her blog,

Clipperton island is a place where you can see how much impact man has had on land and environment. Seeing the trash washed up on shore when I was on Kure Atoll in 2005 was nothing compared to what is on Clipperton. There are shoes, fishing nets, pieces of buys, lighters, bottles (both plastic and glass), tires and much more.

Most of their outdoor photos have plastic trash in them.

Every time I see one of these articles, I like to remind folks of a newer technology that seems to work really well: OneSwarm It does not require a central tracker. It totally kicks butt. The lack of a central tracker is a plus and a minus, though. It needs a web interface so that the noobs can join in with less pain.

OneSwarm is a new peer-to-peer tool that provides users with explicit control over their privacy by letting them determine how data is shared. Instead of sharing data indiscriminately, data shared with OneSwarm can be made public, it can be shared with friends, shared with some friends but not others, and so forth. We call this friend-to-friend (F2F) data sharing.

FTF website:

OneSwarm is a new peer-to-peer tool that provides users with explicit control over their privacy by letting them determine how data is shared. Instead of sharing data indiscriminately, data shared with OneSwarm can be made public, it can be shared with friends, shared with some friends but not others, and so forth. We call this friend-to-friend (F2F) data sharing.

Most of the damage to the powerhouse is not from the transformer. A transformer may have had and electrical fault that put a sudden overload on the generator. One of the generators has froceably removed itself from the generator deck and totaly destroyed another one next to it.

The cause of the generator failure (explosion) is not sure. Either torque from a short tore it loose, or the sudden shutdown may have cause emergency shutdown of the water. This can cause cavitation. Cavation is vacuum. Water has inertia. Water has been known to return to the vacuum space with force and damage turbins.

There was an incident when Ice Harbor dam was built in the Columbia River basin. Part of the testing was to test emergency shutdown. One of the gates closed too fast and cavitation occured as the water continued flowing out of the turbin due to inertia when the valve closed. The water returned back up and damaged the impeller. This was in the early days when the facility was built in the late 1950's. My dad was a power house operator there at the time. Fortunetly, this did not rupture the turbin or damage the generator.

After this many years, I don't think there is any data online of the incident.
http://www.cbr.washington.edu/crisp/hydro/ihr.html
Ice Harbor dam was dedicated in 1962 by Vice President Lyndon J. Johnson.

A typical powerhouse looks like this.
http://www.cbr.washington.edu/crisp/hydro/hydrobon2.html This powerhouse is the second powerhouse on Bonniville Dam on the lower Columbia River.

Compare this page to the video of the other powerhouse in the video. Several generators are completely missing and one big hole in the floor is where the turbin under the generator was.

Most of the damage to the powerhouse is not from the transformer. A transformer may have had and electrical fault that put a sudden overload on the generator. One of the generators has froceably removed itself from the generator deck and totaly destroyed another one next to it.

The cause of the generator failure (explosion) is not sure. Either torque from a short tore it loose, or the sudden shutdown may have cause emergency shutdown of the water. This can cause cavitation. Cavation is vacuum. Water has inertia. Water has been known to return to the vacuum space with force and damage turbins.

There was an incident when Ice Harbor dam was built in the Columbia River basin. Part of the testing was to test emergency shutdown. One of the gates closed too fast and cavitation occured as the water continued flowing out of the turbin due to inertia when the valve closed. The water returned back up and damaged the impeller. This was in the early days when the facility was built in the late 1950's. My dad was a power house operator there at the time. Fortunetly, this did not rupture the turbin or damage the generator.

After this many years, I don't think there is any data online of the incident.
http://www.cbr.washington.edu/crisp/hydro/ihr.html
Ice Harbor dam was dedicated in 1962 by Vice President Lyndon J. Johnson.

A typical powerhouse looks like this.
http://www.cbr.washington.edu/crisp/hydro/hydrobon2.html This powerhouse is the second powerhouse on Bonniville Dam on the lower Columbia River.

Compare this page to the video of the other powerhouse in the video. Several generators are completely missing and one big hole in the floor is where the turbin under the generator was.

Time to switch to OneSwarm

One of the more interesting talks this week at the UW is the one on nano-ethics.

At first I thought this was going to be about the ethics of using nanotech to observe or interact, but now I'm starting to wonder if it has to do with the ethics of giving nanobots some frickin nano-lasers to rebel against us with.

Remind me to get some ablative undershorts.

Sheep sleep for only 3.8 hours per night . Which is only 50% saving on sleep. If you graft giraffe DNA onto your workers you get rid of 75% of their unproductive sleep (you might need bigger pens [cubicles] for them though, there's always a trade off).

I remember a posting about a solution called Vanish see ( http://vanish.cs.washington.edu/ ), that produces an encrypted email where neither the sender or recipient has the key and due to the nature or the cloud P2P key storage system the email becomes unreadable some 8-9 hours after creation. Using this idea with and a small access key protected application running on a remote server. It would allow me to store encrypted data on Amazon S3 for example in such a way that if I fail to access the volume at least once every 8 hours the volume key expires. This way, if I am arrested and held for more than 8 hours - period to last access, before questioning (which is likely) I can give law enforcement the access keys to my server application to extract my encrypted volume which will by that time have expired. This I can comply with the law, follow all their instructions and yet still not give them access to secret information. The only two proviso's being that the keys expire before I am asked and that I am allowed to keep silent until a question is asked without that in itself being incriminating. i.e. 'You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.'

You know what? The human brain isn't really that big of a deal. We can't computers to do hard AI problems that tiny brains are already able to do. For instance, pigeons can be trained to pick out styles of paintings, and even identify paintings by their painter for paintings they have never seen before, only been trained on other paintings by that painter. Oh yeah, and they can fly also. Their brain weighs 0.4 grams. Couldn't find any numbers about number of nuerons or connections. But shouldn't we be able to model tiny brains now, and have all these hard AI problems solved?

They're effective, but not perfect. The EDLs can be read from up to 30 ft away under typical conditions, and over 150 ft away under certain conditions. The sleeves reduce the read range to a maximum of about 2 ft. Depending on the card, the sleeve, and the condition the sleeve is in, the read range can be 0. I have a paper appearing at CCS '09 on this, but in the mean time, you can read the tech report (which is very similar): ftp://ftp.cs.washington.edu/tr/2008/10/UW-CSE-08-10-02.PDF

First off, it's been said that people only use 10% of their actual brain power.

This is False.

So 1 billion neurons probably isn't far off from what we would use anyway.

Considering that we use all of our brain, I'd say that 4.5% is pretty far off.

Some reputable schools advertise on buses and TV as well. There was a TV commercial here last year for Washington State University where a student was shown opening doors in a school hallway to what were supposed to be different classrooms. When you open the door which was marked "Biology", there were zebras and dinosaurs roaming on a safari. When you open the door which was marked "Science", there were white coats holding test tubes and a space shuttle blasting off in the background. When you open the door to "Western Civilization", you were instantly transported to the Eiffel Tower. (Cue to roll eyes). Disclaimer: I'm a Huskie.

I remember how it was 15-20 years ago. It's clearly different. Now, if so much change has happen is such small time, I don't know in what kind of climate my son's children will live.

Ocean cycles, like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, have wavelengths of 30-60 years. They'll like live in the same kind of climate as you.

http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/

http://vanish.cs.washington.edu/download_src.html

  Are you blind? It's not free but definitely open source.

Well, to a true FOSS zealot it's not free, nor open source, unless it fits THEIR definition of "free software". Ironically their definition is sorta 1984'ish, with the words meaning something different than their literal meaning.

Also, for purity's sake you should have capitalized "Free" in this context.

http://vanish.cs.washington.edu/download_src.html

Are you blind? It's not free but definitely open source.

First, as is typical, the Slashdot article is three steps removed from the actual paper, which is worth reading.

It's kind of cute. What makes it work is that the indexing part of the Vuze platform, which is distributed over a few million user machines, has an 8-hour timeout. After eight hours, otherwise unused entries are purged from cache, like DNS cache expiration. So it's possible to use Vuze for unreliable short-term storage of key-value pairs.

(Normally, the Vuze hash is used as a index to BitTorrent blocks, and if there's a block on a server, the server puts it into the hash and refreshes it periodically, so the block stays indexed. But it's possible to put arbitrary key-value pairs into the distributed hash that have no relationship to BitTorrent blocks. If you put info in the hash and don't refresh it, it goes away after eight hours.)

So the sender generates a key, encrypts the message, spreads the key across some number of key-value pairs on random Vuze clients, sends a message telling what key-value pairs in Vuze contain the crypto key, and deletes the local copy of the key. The receiver gets the message, looks up the key-value pairs specified in the Vuze hash, reconstructs the key, decrypts the message, displays it, and deletes the local copy of the key. The receiving client has to do this every time the message is viewed.

This violates the Vuze terms of service, incidentally.

See their license at this page:

1. Software may not be modified except for personal, educational or informational purposes.

This is not free software, nor is it open source.

Of course full-disk encryption, as lots of people have already suggested, but since you want the thief's time to be wasted, remember to password-protect the BIOS and disallow booting from USB drives or external units. Same goes for GRUB if you were on Linux. That way the thief will not be able to resell the netbook.

Yes, the thief could remove the BIOS battery, but he would have to tear the case open. If he knew how to open a laptop without breaking it, he has more skill than I would associate with a petty thief.

You might also consider Adeona.

Nobody knows exactly how much data the average human brain can hold, but one estimate is 500 to 1000 TB. If the average adult human brain weighs about 1.3 or 1.4 Kilos, then "about 2 Kilos" would hold 1 Petabyte.

This pretty much tells the story:

"The disorder is seen often in identical twins: different studies have shown that if one identical twin has autism then there is a 63-98% chance that the other twin will have it. For non-identical twins (also called fraternal or dizygotic twins), the chance is between 0-10% that both twins will develop autism. The chance that siblings will be affected by autism is about 3%."

It looks partly genetic.

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/aut.html

And this linked page is from June 2.

(In the above post I meant 9 months, not 18 months.)

There is currently a movement to develop a language which can replace Fortran for high performance/productivity computing by focusing on parallelism, such as X10 and Chapel.

And it's a pretty good one: get OneSwarm and use it. Once it become popular, it will be very nice.

If they don't know you have it, they can't tax you on it.

Do you mean this, or something else?

But truly, where is the line? What about injecting human brain cells into mice? How about into chimps?

The differences between mouse, chimp, and human neurons are less significant than the higher organization of neurons. I couldn't find figures for numbers of neurons in chimps or mice, but this website indicates that humans have around a hundred billion neurons in the brain, the human brain weighing 1.3-1.4kg. The chimp brain weighs 420 grams. We have more cells in our brains than mice do in their entire body.

Injecting human neurons into a mouse? Wouldn't do anything like make the mouse self aware. It would most likely cause seizures in the mouse. I have no moral objections to it, as long as it was done with a clear research goal. Otherwise, it's probably my tax dollars at work, and those immunocompromised mice they'd be using are expensive to maintain.

If researchers were wanting to make smarter mice, there's more to it than that. They'd first have to figure out how the human brain is made, what patterning differences exist, would have to change the mice, and wouldn't use human neurons. Again, there's not much special about them, it's the organization.

The line here is when they start making brains that look human like in mice. And those would be so big as to crush the mice, so I'm not really worried about that.

Anyway, why are we perpetuating this idea that biologists do morally objectionable research for kicks with their own money? Who is going to fund making a mouse think? Why would researchers be doing this? This would be expensive, would require grants, and wouldn't really have a purpose that I could see.

http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/

Printer Pirate(PDF warning).

Actually Photosynth started off as a PhD project called Photo Tourism. You can download the source code of Bundler (GPL license) as well. The idea of using geo-tagged photos to create a 3D view of the world is really cool. However there are various challenges: occlusion, moving objects (people, foliage, ...), changing illumination, different cameras, cameras with distortion. The software needs to be robust and discard those "outliers".

SceneLib is a software for simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) which essentially is a similar problem. However here the assumption is that the camera is always the same.

Creating a panorama with and Enblend on the other hand only allows pictures taken from a single view point.

Actually Photosynth started off as a PhD project called Photo Tourism. You can download the source code of Bundler (GPL license) as well. The idea of using geo-tagged photos to create a 3D view of the world is really cool. However there are various challenges: occlusion, moving objects (people, foliage, ...), changing illumination, different cameras, cameras with distortion. The software needs to be robust and discard those "outliers".

SceneLib is a software for simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) which essentially is a similar problem. However here the assumption is that the camera is always the same.

Creating a panorama with and Enblend on the other hand only allows pictures taken from a single view point.

http://www.uwpcc.washington.edu/documents/PCC/loziernaturesubmission2008.pdf

This seems to be describing the Alcubierre drive. The Wikipedia article is much, much better than the crappy article linked to from the slashdot summary.

It is the Alcubierre drive. Another good summary is from Analog, November 1996: http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw81.html

That's a little surprising, given that Linux is said to be a monolithic OS, not a kernel OS like Minix, and thus should contain lots of stuff that has nothing to do with device drivers or page tables. Are you sure this is not an artifact of by-hand inlining for efficiency? In other systems I've worked on or looked at, the truly "unsafe" stuff is quite small and confined to a few smallish modules -- but either they don't sweat the efficiency of a procedure call, or assume that inlining will make it better (or both).

SPIN says "most" of their code was written in the safe subset of Modula-3. They don't give an explicit line count, so I am guessing that means 49% was unsafe :-). http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/spin/www/

Singularity reports 90% in (safe) Sing#, about half of the unsafe code is the garbage collector. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=69431

I suspect very much that the number you report is an artifact of working in a language that is by default unsafe; there's no disincentive to sticking little unsafe bits of code here and there, so programmers do, and the result is a large volume of "unsafe" functions where you ought to just have a few unsafe functions that are frequently called. For example, Java "floatToIntBits" is a safe operation, but it has an unsafe implementation (it has a loophole, which can be used in an unsafe way). If you call the method, the calling code is safe, but if you inline it by hand, then it contains an unchecked cast, which is not known to be safe without further examination of the code.

Note that Singularity, SPIN, and Cedar all take a strategic approach to efficiency; by leveraging type safety, they can avoid the costs of a user/kernel context switch and constant rechecking of user inputs. The SPIN guys, long ago, reported great performance results from doing what in Linux would be the equivalent of putting the http server in the kernel. I've worked on Java systems that were designed in much the same way -- rather than invoking "native" code (which can be surprisingly costly, depend on GC and thread details) just drop into the "unsafe" implementation extension.

The actual rules for enforcing safety in language like Modula-3 or Cedar are simple, easy to understand, and not too hard to get right. That's not rocket science. Concurrent parallel realtime garbage collection -- that's rocket science, but if your application demands higher levels of assurance, you either work very hard at verifying and proving the GC, or else you use a less sexy algorithm (e.g., original Baker-style read barriers, or plain old stop-N-copy) and add more memory.