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is to use some other package (maybe any other package) for graphing! In a project about ten years ago, Excel wasn't very good for 600 data points. When I needed to plot several thousand data points, it went into abject failure mode!

I used Grace (http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/) for that project (and for many others since then) and have had no need at all for other Excel graphs.

Completely agree with "Computer science is not a prerequisite for most programming", after all, programming isn't Computer Science.

The amount of times I hear 'oh, I'm a Computer Scientist too' when, upon enquiring further, it turns out that they've spent 3 years at university essentially studying - no, scrap 'studying', insert 'learning' - some sort of framework and a bit of Java and Python ffs. Writing an Android app isn't studying Computer Science; and no, you're not a Computer Scientist. Now I will concede that at some institutions you will learn some proper CS-underpinning stuff, but only at some of the better institutions. My own had the right idea - they have a sign up saying 'The computers are for email and writing-up, please use the whiteboards for the Computer Science'.

There's nothing to be ashamed about either - if you find that you're actually not a Computer Scientist. Truth is, we don't really need very many Computer Scientists! Think of them as being more like theoretical physicists if you like. Or better still, Materials Scientists. Materials Scientists know a lot of chemistry and physics - you need to if you want to create new interesting materials: The Physics Nobel in 2010 was more or less a Nobel for Materials Scientists ("for ground-breaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene"). Materials Scientists create new materials which in turn are used by engineers, e.g., Civil Engineers. Civil Engineers don't need to understand the deepest underlying properties of a material in order to use it in a project. In turn, the workers actually building stuff don't need to be Civil Engineers and/or Architects - they have their own set of skills. At one end you have the few, at the other the many.

We've over used the term 'Computer Science' - after all - it sounds good doesn't, "I'm a scientists!". Drives me mad. A simple test - here's a link to some proper Computer Science. IF you can follow this - and a bit more than roughly, then you're good to go: https://eccc.weizmann.ac.il/re...

Also, slashdot had a great posting maybe a year ago that I've lost track of and dont have time to look up about a huge Israeli study in regards to nutrition that was showing some interesting results in regards to how relative to the individual how the body processes food is.

Yes, this is also an area of research I am very interested in. I think I know the study you are referring to.
https://genie.weizmann.ac.il/p...

Here is another nice review,
https://genomemedicine.biomedc...

And this one was on Slashdot a few months ago,
http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

Here is a page with some examples.

Here is a PDF of the paper, which has more examples.

I don't think it means much. Instead of showing that humans see better than computers, it really just shows that this one researcher is bad at programming computer vision systems. If he took his dataset, and made it a Kaggle Competition, I think someone would design a computer vision system that would do much better than his.

This seems to be the project the article is talking about: http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~dannyh/Mircs/mircs.html

You can make the algorithm as complex as you'd like, but at the end of the day, you have an input and output(s). You may decide to take a long time to get there, but at the end of the day, I know what you did when the code ran.

This is referred to as "black-box" reverse engineering in the paper. You know what the code did for one input. And if you injected every possible input to the program, at the end you'd have worked out a complete specifications for the function. But how long will that take? It's not always "the end of the day". For functions with a wide range of inputs, it could take the life of the universe to map them all unless you know what you're looking for in advance.

Right now, obfuscation approaches for software usually have some small chocking point to attack. It might be an encryption wrapper around the main binary. Bust that with a debugger, you can get to unobfuscated code for the main system, and then really start to work your way through the program.

But if you have to fight this every step of the way, where all you do is inject inputs and get an output to figure out what the program does, it will take you forever to reverse engineer things. That's the claim of the paper. The code itself is so obfuscated that you can't read it straight and understand it, ever. It looks like random junk. All you can do is run it with an input and see what comes back, and from that reverse engineer what it does. Assemble enough of those and you can see how the program really works. But that black box teardown process--determining possible inputs, injecting them, collecting outputs, and then deriving the function behavior--is time intensive enough that it may not be practical to actually do it anymore. You don't learn anything from reversing any component that speeds handling the next; you have to attack them all like this.

There's a great line from the seminal paper on this subjectOn the (Im)possibility of Obfuscating Programs: "Any programmer knows that total unintelligibility is the natural state of computer programs (and one must work hard in order to keep a program from deteriorating into this state)" Extracting meaning from source code, being able to predict what some lines of code will do, it's hard. Ideally you'll just be able to read the code, make sense of it, and then reverse from there. Most systems that are thoroughly cracked have some sections where it's hard, but once you get those the remaining code is straightforward to read. And in fact, it's impossible to make something where you cannot reverse it. The question though is how long it will take.

If no sense is ever made of the code, you can only apply the "black-box" reverse engineering, where you inject inputs, watch outputs, and from there determine what the code does. You can't prevent that, but you can make the box so big that such work is impossible to do. That's what this technique tries to accomplish. You never find an easy part to the code you can read; all you ever find are ones where you have to map every input into an output to figure out what the code does.

There are actually some decent enlargement algorithms out there that can do better than you would probably think possible. Take a look at the vision chart image. GIGO is an unbeatable law, but there's a lot more you can do with "bad" input than most geeks think. Dude below talking about license plates has the right idea. If the missing information is present elsewhere in the image, or if you have prior knowledge, you can use that to reconstruct portions of the image you want. The more repeating patterns in the image, the better.

MRi is technically just a euphemism for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) imaging. The N was dropped because it of the obvious stigma that word possesses outside of scientific circles. We already have structures of these proteins solved by NMR. The next challenge is indeed to view these molecular systems in-vivo. I doubt that these techniques will actually make it out of the research setting. MRi's with fields higher than 3T are having trouble being approved by the FDA for clinical use. This is complicated by the fact that high field instruments are really expensive to begin with. Other scientists are working hard to advance the image quality in other ways.

The extremest form of emphasis on OOP in teaching CS, objects-first, as seen, for example, in Kölling's Objects First with Java, has been heavily criticised lately in the computer science education community. One recent visible critique was Moti Ben-Ari's Objects Never? Well, Hardly Ever! (PDF, unofficial version to avoid ACM paywall), (paywalled official ACM version).

Similar things are happening at my own university, where objects-first has been seen as an important preparation for future programming work. The CS course for engineering majors who won't be doing any more programming switched from Java to Python and covering OOP briefly at the end of the course; the CS course for CS majors and others who will be studying more programming is due to do the same this autumn.

The function: f=d(x+u/d(x))-d(x+v/d(x)) would calculate the depth gradient of the pixel. It's possible to reconstruct a three dimensional shape from a 2D image .

Then your problem is trying to match a human skeleton to the shape. If you know the curvature of the gradient at a particular point, you can eliminate some body parts. A head is mostly spherical and within a particular maximum/minimum, limbs and the torso are more cylindrical with a linear depth along one axis. Look for that linearity, and you could determine that is a limb and what direction it is aligned in.

In addition to BOOST, you might want to consider looking at other projects. Some that might be a good fit, and might need developers are :

- GSL : The GNU Scientific Library is a scientific toolset for C and C++. These tools are quite modular, and you might be able to find your own module to code.

- Plotting software : Help to any of the plotting programs would be a real boon for all scientists. This could involve developing non-linear fitting algorithms, GUI, or statistical analysis. Look at SciDAVis and possibly GRACE.

- non-linear fitting : C++ Minuit, or a CERNlib project may be a good match--I'm not sure whether these are only developed internally.

good luck!

Grace is the robust industry-quality tool for making publication ready graphs with quite extensive data analysis capabilities. The best of all mentioned here, if you don't need 3-D.

First, there are PRNGs which can boost a seed of perfect randomness into arbitrarily much cryptographically guaranteed pseudo-randomness. (It'll be as hard to break the pseudo-randomness, as it is to break the crypto.) I'm no expert on this, but read this if you're interested: http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/foc-book.html

However, a shaken die isn't even a PRNG in any reasonable sense of the word. A die well-shaken in a symmetric cup, by a chaotic system, is real randomness in the sense that the rolls will be a stationary independent sequence. It'd take some work to convince me that I'm wrong on this, but I'll listen.

Here is a shitty way to use a biased die in such a system for randomness (it just uses the die as a coin, and uses von Neumann's method; if I were smarter I'd do better). Label the faces 1,2,3 as "A". Label the faces 4,5,6 as "B". Roll the die repeatedly and each time "AB" comes up, mark that as "0". Each time "BA" comes up, mark that as "1". (Making sure not to reuse letters. I.e., "ABA" does not count as "01" but "ABBA" does.) Note that the sequence of 0s and 1s you mark down is uniform independent random.

And yes, I'd much rather have an atomic decay RNG. However, "perfect enough for cryptography" randomness isn't magic. People screwed up in the past, just because they weren't paranoid enough. Le chiffre de Vigenère was good enough for centuries.

[Citation needed]

Moni Naor. Verification of a human in the loop or Identification via the Turing Test. Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Weizmann Institute. [Online] 13 September 1996. [Cited: April 19, 2009.] http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/PAPERS/human.ps

This is the seminal paper that introduced the concept of CAPTCHAs. On page 3 in section two he suggested several potential sources of problems, including, "Handwriting understanding - given a handwritten word the user should type it. Again, it makes sense to add the kind of noise that people do not have a problem to ignore." And page 4 has this paragraph, "Another possible advantage of the scheme proposed is encouraging research in those areas that are chosen as challenges. One has to look at the problem of factoring numbers and see the tremendous algorithmic progress made there since it was suggested as a basis for cryptographic protocols to realize the potential."

While I'll grant you that the paper doesn't explicitly call out "OCR" as the problem to be solved, he does predict more research into whatever challenges are used, and he presents character recognition as one of the potential challenges.

Igor -- Technical graphing for Mac & Win -- So why not GNU Plot?

I suggest grace instead. It's easier to use than gnuplot, has a GUI and a CLI, can read data over a pipe and the output looks nicer.

I second that. If you add matplotlib and octave to this list, you can forget about Matlab altogether (unless you need some weird toolbox).
Personally, I've also been using xmgrace to prepare the figures for my papers for a long long time.
Finally, Fortran 90 (+ free libraries) for number crunching and I'd say you're all set.

http://www.scitech.technion.ac.il/index1024.html
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/zemed/english/float.php?page_name=float&cat=256&incat= (I participated in this, good program, but for graduating seniors only)

Check Scientific American, May 2006 page 45. More To Explore: www.weizmann.ac.il/udi/press

Related links: * LDX@MIT
* Physics of magnetically confined fusion [pdf]
* The main principles of magnetic fusion
* Magnetic fusion experiments at LANL
* High density magnetic fusion
* Has a good bit on magnetic confinement
* Can a magnetic field be used to contain plasma?
* International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor
* What's happening in fusion?
* Design of magnetic fields for fusion experiments [pdf]
* Wikipedia article on the topic
* Magnetized target fusion bibliography
* Plasma physics bibliography
* Databases for plasma physics

* Plasma physics laboratories
* List of plasma physicists
* Plasma on the internet

Related links: * LDX@MIT
* Physics of magnetically confined fusion [pdf]
* The main principles of magnetic fusion
* Magnetic fusion experiments at LANL
* High density magnetic fusion
* Has a good bit on magnetic confinement
* Can a magnetic field be used to contain plasma?
* International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor
* What's happening in fusion?
* Design of magnetic fields for fusion experiments [pdf]
* Wikipedia article on the topic
* Magnetized target fusion bibliography
* Plasma physics bibliography
* Databases for plasma physics

* Plasma physics laboratories
* List of plasma physicists
* Plasma on the internet

A cryptographer friend tells the story of an amateur who kept bothering him with the cipher he invented. The cryptographer would break the cipher, the amateur would make a change to "fix" it, and the cryptographer would break it again. This exchange went on a few times until the cryptographer became fed up. When the amateur visited him to hear what the cryptographer thought, the cryptographer put three envelopes face down on the table. "In each of these envelopes is an attack against your cipher. Take one and read it. Don't come back until you've discovered the other two attacks." The amateur was never heard from again.

That's what I thought you were thinking, which is why I asked. It's a reasonable thing to think, but in this case it's not correct.

AACS is an extremely clever system, designed specifically to avoid the exact issue you're referring to. While CSS had only a few keys, so that every unit in a given model of DVD player had the same key, AACS provides each *individual* player with a unique set of keys. This means that if you manage to compromise your player, AACSLA can revoke just your player, without affecting mine at all even if I have the same model and, indeed, even if mine came off the assembly line immediately before or after yours.

The math that makes this work is very cool. The original paper is at http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/PAPERS/2nl. pdf, and a decent layman's explanation is at http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=122363.

Because of this, there's nothing particularly special about breaking a hardware player, and no need to try to remotely update thousands or millions of uncompromised players. Also, there's no practical limit to the number of player keys the AACSLA can revoke. On average, the AACSLA has to "waste" 39 bytes of space on each HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disk for each revoked player. Given the capacities of the disks in question, it's no problem to produce disks that are unplayable on millions of compromised players, without affecting playability on millions more uncompromised players.

Grace can produce some nice results, but the Perl interface to it is just a wrapper around their terrible command line interface (maybe it's improved in the last few years, but when I tried it it was almost entirely undocumented and nigh-unusable).

Grace is an excellent free/open source 2D plotting program. It is in Motif, so some might call it "ugly," but I run it on Windows (it is packaged in cygwin), OS X, and linux. It is the most versatile F/OSS package I know of--both in terms of features & in terms of user interaction. In addition to the GUI (which many of the programs you list lack), you can use a command line interface or bindings for python, perl, fortran, C++, OCaml, octave, rlab, etc.

Grace is an excellent free/open source 2D plotting program. It is in Motif, so some might call it "ugly," but I run it on Windows (it is packaged in cygwin), OS X, and linux. It is the most versatile F/OSS package I know of--both in terms of features & in terms of user interaction. In addition to the GUI (which many of the programs you list lack), you can use a command line interface or bindings for python, perl, fortran, C++, OCaml, octave, rlab, etc.

I do most of my work in Perl, and the lack of a good chart package has been annoying for a very long time. GD::Graph will give you very basic (and not terribly ugly) line and bar charts relatively quickly, but that's about it; it's missing even rudimentary features that make it less than useful (eg error bars).

There just isn't a general purpose charting package for Perl that would even come close to JFreeChart. Grace can produce some nice results, but the Perl interface to it is just a wrapper around their terrible command line interface (maybe it's improved in the last few years, but when I tried it it was almost entirely undocumented and nigh-unusable).

So, if you want publication quality charts you basically still have to learn gnuplot, which is great, but sometimes just a little too involved.

At least this thread gives a nice summary of what the other languages have to offer: the PHP and Ruby packages aren't faring any better, but Python's matplotlib looks freaking beautiful.

No, I'm not confused at all, we're talking about HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, not DVD, and each individual player has a unique set of approximately 1000 keys. Many of those keys are shared across players, but no two hardware players have exactly the same set. To be precise, the scheme allows for a maximum of 2^31 players, so each player has 31^2 keys, the number required by the subset-difference tree algorithm which the AACS key revocation scheme is built on so that r individual players can be revoked with no more than 2r+1 key blocks per disk. For more details see the original subset-difference key revocation paper or for a more accessible overview of how it works try this one.

Who modded this up?

MD5 is busted wide open, and thats common knowledge. See http://cryptography.hyperlink.cz/MD5_collisions.ht ml for some examples of easy exploitations, or google md5 security. You can also take a look at http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~itsik/RC4/rc4.ht ml and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RC4 for a few insights into why you might not want to use RC4.

Maybe when you said "Chinese propaganda" you meant "solid cryptanalysis." I can see how it would be easy to confuse those two terms.

Reminds me a lecture I attended last year where Adi Shamir talked about one of his latest AES attacks.
Basically it uses information about the state of the CPU's memory cache and thus attacks processes on the same computer too.
Here's the paper.

I'm sure there's various public/private key, hash algorithms, etc. that could allow for post-vote verifiability, but doesn't that go against the whole anonymous voting principle?

No, they don't.

Well, it's correct to say that there is tension between the two, and that one condition is satisfied much more easily if the other can be ignored (and there are many, often subtle, conditions in play with voting systems). However, there is room in the middle to play around and come up with solutions that satisfy those conditions. There are systems where the voter can get a valid, sound, non-transferrable proof that their vote was properly registered and counted without revealing the actual contents of their votes. For example, here is a very interesting proposal from Moni Naor and Tal Moran that offers some very strong properties (at the expense of efficiency, in this case), and there are others that offer similar results (again, look at the work of Chaum and Neff -- very good stuff).

The question is when are you "reasonably sure" that your numbers are unpredictable. Most random number generators used in practice are based on vague unsubstantiated claims about the randomness that occurs in various environments.

It is not at all true that it is sufficient for random sequences to be unpredictable to be useful. In many application knowing even one bit of information about a purported random sequence can destroy its usefulness.

As for the necessity of randomness in various applications, it is actually essential for many things. In particular for encryption, true randomness is vital. If an encryption scheme is proved to work well when truly random sequences are used, the proof (usually) says nothing about sequences which are simply unpredictable.

For a more detailed discussion, check out:

http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/r+c.html

They need a PARENT to encourage them ...
They need the right environment at home.
And they don't need competing forms of passive entertainment (TV).
Don't expect the school system to do it for you.

My 11 years old son Daniel programs using a variety of tools and has been doing so for a couple of years already (Visual basic, a variety of flavors of Logo, Game Maker. I'll let /.ers find out what he's using in this photo). He also does other creative things like creating scenes and animations using Art of Illusion - this also involves kind of programming, like creating procedural textures/materials. He learns some math/geometry doing this, since his programming experience drives him to manipulate the data (coordinates) directly to get exact results. He also learns some physics for getting the right results, like making gravitation work close to correct in this game (/.ers should be able to tell what link is the game. Hint: the file extension is .exe*). (well... It not just parent encouragement. After school activity played an important role. School only taught him to use the computer as a typewriter).

His 5 year old brother Jonatan already learned to do some "visual programming" using Game Maker, producing working games (though still not one another kid would want to play with. He does get useful things produced this way: Birthday "greeting cards" that can only be made using programming). The need to do everything that his big brother does is enough motivation.

___________________________
* I thought that the game should really be open sourced (or "free-softwared") but the Game Maker "sources" (.gm6 files) are actually binary, and though the license allows distribution of the created games, it's not clear to me how exactly it can be done with an Open source or CC license. Compiling the "sources" requires (gratis) proprietary software.

** comments, and suggestions of useful software that can encourage kids to becreative are welcome.

This parody basically sums it up. Eventually, the experts just stop bothering to check the proofs.

I do not understand what the fuss is about here. I am not talking about the ID-Evo debate. What the good Dr.Thornton seems to have discovered, is only a case of moonlighting, which is well known in biology. Moonlighting is the phenomenon when a single protein fulfills several, often unrelated and even more often unexpected functions in a cell. Biologists are aware of this fact, and hence understand this to be one of the basic ways in which molecular evolution occurs. The fact that an aldosterone receptor can exist before aldosterone is not really surprising. Drug designers are designing molecules all the time for which receptors already exist. Basically, I do not think that it is a novel as the NYtimes would have us beleive. Here is an interesting paper describing several such moonlighting occurences.[Warning: PDF]. Further a presentation for non-biologists on moonlighting is here One of the leading researchers in the field of moonlighting proteins is Dr.Joel Sussman. He works on how the AChE enzyme may be affecting a variety of other aspects in neural cell biology.

Uh, ridiculous. The charting code works, barely, but it's full of weird bugs, interface wackiness, and major, huge, usefulness-preventing limitations. My understanding is that a from-scratch rewrite of the Chart code was on the table for 2.0, but they didn't have the resources to do it and it got delayed, probably until 3.0. I use Chart for quick-and-dirty graphs when exploring data, but for real production graphs I use Grace.

Try looking in Dr. Procaccia's list of recent and unpublished papers , although I don't know if this specific model in question is included in any of those papers.

The Weizzmann Institute (from TFA) doesn't list it on their Press Release page

They did figure out how to get hydrogen using solar energy, but that was announced back in April.

In short, I doubt there's any deterimental health effects from this system.

Actually, strong IR light is bad for your eyes.

link 1
link 2
link 3

2. Your glasses don't reflect IR, your camera lens does (actually, they all have an IR filter to prevent it reaching the CCD/CMOS).

Many types of glass do reflect IR light.
Think about it a little more, are glass or plastic eyeglass lenses really going to be made out of THAT different a material than glass or plastic camera lenses?

3. My optician is using some pretty bright light at my check-up. Enough to make a recording useless (read: saturate the CCD/CMOS), not enough to harm anyone.

It might appear bright, but you don't necessarily know what the spectra of the light actually looked like and therefore how much power was contained total.

Your private key could be sniffed out just by recording the sound your computer makes:
http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/

I'm not sure what crypto CPPM is using, but it is quite feasible to embed some damning information about the ripping computer (IP, MAC, timestamp, etc.) into the audio stream, and do so in a way that is resistant to analog resampling and other tortures. If the player really wants to be nasty, it can embed stuff like the user's password or credit card number (perhaps PK encrypted with the RIAA's public key). So basically think before you share.

The article in which this was suggested:
http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/PAPERS/fc20 00_abs.html

I've been using Grace for years to make my graphs for publications and presentations (and before that, I was using xmgr, its ancestor), which used to be more stable.

For more 3D and eye-candy stuff, VTK+Python is great

Finally, for my daily tasks, I use gnuplot a lot. Like another poster say, I may not be the most fanciest piece of software, but it does the job for me... Where I work, we were used to Matlab, but Mathworks (a truly rogue company if you ask me, but that's another subject) has decided to charge ridiculously high prices and my institute is in the process of dropping it. Some of my coworkers now use matplotlib, which seems to be pretty good.
Tried Excel (or gnumeric, which resembles it a lot, when it comes to graphics), but I never was able to use it efficiently.

This is all about generating massive shockwaves to examine the properties of matter in extreme conditions (without having to heat it up to enormous temperatures).

...using strong magnetic fields to accelerate aluminum plates to incredibly high speeds in a contraption that has a strong resemblance to a rail gun.

It doesn't accellerate the flyer plate linearly. A Z-pinch machine, which the Z-machine at Sandia is an example of, implodes a thin hollow cylinder of material, a fraction of a mm thick and about 1-2 cm in diameter and roughly 1-2 cm long. The Z-pinch effect causes the cylinder walls to collapse inwards at high speed, striking a target along the axis of the cylinder.

See for example http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/ZP/

High electrical current flows through the cylinder, which causes a magnetic field whose lines of force are circular around the wire. Basic electrical physics. Also basic physics, you get a force ExB (electrical field cross product with magnetic field). The sign of the force, from the direct electrical field and its induced magnetic field, is inwards towards the center of the cylinder.

So at high enough currents, the cylinder implodes.

There's no external magnetic field necessary. If you add one, then the implosion process is more even and stable, but that isn't necessary at all for the Z-pinch effect to work.

You can even do fairly safe home experiments in Z-pinching. Take a bunch of thin wires and a couple of nonconductive disks. Put the disks on a pole, then string the wires from disk to disk so that they form a cylindrical array. Solder all the ends at the top to one electrial lead and all the ends at the bottom together. Connect up to a power source. Watch the wires move inwards.

Z-pinch is just taking that effect, and putting the equivalent of the whole world's electrical power output through it instead of a small regulated power supply. A bit more force, eh?

Calling the Z-machine a railgun is like calling a F-16 fighter a really cool drag racer. Just because they're both fast and burn hydrocarbons doesn't make them at all the same thing.

BUY PRIMER -- take off cap -- spray.

Tried that. It wore off within minutes of typing.
Sandpaper doesn't work well either; it ruins the texture of the keytops. And whatever chemical abrasive will remove the letters will probably also damage the keytop plastic (I tried acetone and turpentine).

My solution? See here.

DANSE has a great review of a lot of different options. Most are cross-platform and scriptable and many are open source. They are interested in building python-based tools for neutron scattering experiments, so there is that bias to the wiki. But they have good screenshots & good pros/cons that many other projects can relate to.

As others have suggested, Grace is fantastic for 2D. Hippodraw is the most under-rated/unheard of that is also quite amazing. I use them both. I also use Matplotlib with my python work.

If you do LaTeX & script your plots, Gri is a good bet.

I have sometimes used gnuplot & Scigraphica, but they are less useful to me. A lot of other people still use gnuplot, so it is always good to have in the toolkit. It also has decent 3D that is not present in my preferred 2D programs. But it is uglier and clumsier than alternatives. Scigraphica wants to be Microcal Origin, but it isn't there yet. It also dropped out of development for quite a while.

I like open source. But if you are agnostic (and have deep pockets), I always thought tecplot looked cool.

I had the same problem as you last year. I tried gnuplot, which is good if you need to do some quick plots but are generally looked on as excel quality. I recommend XMGrace for 2-dimentional stuff. (I've published papers using this). And Mayavi for 3-D. Makes some nice purdy pictures.

Over here.

Does bar charts.

Without any doubt, Grace is the best 2D plotting program there is. Everything is configurable so you can produce anything you can imagine. The output is publication quality; ready to go into papers, books, etc.

As several others mentioned gnuplot is a great program. If you would like a bit more GUI with your plotting I would recomend Grace (formally xmgrace). Its Free too. Website: http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/ It only does 2D plots but handles them very nicely, can do fitting, read tables of text file data, and is very customizable as far as lables go. I use it to plot out most of my data by pulling it straight from the output through an awk script to format the data slightly and then open Grace. Give it a shot. Good luck with 3D plots, but I might recomend maple. Again with a bit of an awk script you can format the data into a form maple can read and plot out.

I'm a cryptographer, posting belatedly. I don't know if anyone will see this or read it but I had to comment.

Almost all of the assumptions in this thread are wrong. The system does not work cryptographically in the way people imagine. The technology makes it possible to efficiently revoke INDIVIDUAL DEVICES, not entire model lines. Every device can have a unique key, even if there are millions of them. There is no necessity or desire to make people's non-hacked players stop working. As others have pointed out, this would be INSANE. That's not how it works!

Cryptographically, this system allows the data to be encrypted to any of millions or even billions of devices, using a very short encrypted key block. What happens is that if some of those (individual!) devices get revoked, the size of the key block increases. Amazingly, the size is dependent on how many devices get revoked, not on how many devices there are. If extracting keys from a device is complicated and expensive, and not too many need to get revoked over the lifetime of the system, it will be a success.

The cryptographic technique is described in a paper from Crypto 2001 called Revocation and Tracing Schemes for Stateless Receivers by Naor et al and is available from http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/PAPERS/2nl_ no_fig.pdf. I will describe an over-simplified version.

Imagine creating a binary tree with enough leaf nodes to hold all of the devices (again, this is individual devices, not model lines). Each device is associated with a particular leaf node of the tree. Now we assign a random AES key to every node of the tree, leaf nodes and internal nodes.

At manufacture time, each device is given all of the keys corresponding to its branch of the tree; that is, the key for its leaf node, and the keys for the parent, grandparent, etc. of that node, all the way back to the root node of the tree. As long as the disk is encrypted to one of these keys, the device can play the disk. Note that even if there are a billion device nodes in the tree this is only about 30 keys that a device has to hold, which is trivial.

Now, to create a disk, initially it is encrypted to the root node of the tree. All devices have the key for that node so all devices can play it. The key block is very short. But now suppose that someone manages to extract the secret device keys in their device, they get published on the internet (as happened initially with DeCSS), and everyone is able to use them to decrypt HD-DVDs. (BTW this system is also being used for Blue-ray! Don't think that's going to be any different!) Now what do we do?

What happens is that new disks are no longer encrypted to the root key. Instead, we partition the tree into subtrees that include every leaf node except the one which got its keys published. Now we encrypt the disk data to the root nodes of those subtrees, rather than to the root node of the whole tree. This will allow every other device still to decrypt the data, but that one hacked device can no longer decrypt new disks. The size of the key block grows based on the number of hacked players.

This is an oversimplified version because the size of the key block is bigger than desired. The paper above shows a more complex system, which is actually being used, which makes the size of the key block linear in the number of hacked systems. Assuming that hacking them remains relatively difficult, this should be an effective and efficient content protection system.

Basically this is the same method being used in current satellite TV systems, and for the past few years it has been successful enough that satellite piracy in the U.S. at least is largely a thing of the past.

*What* fundamental advances? Name them!

Firm semantical foundations, the Pi-Calculus, Game Semantics, Full Abstraction results for various languages, Zero Knowledge Proofs, Breakthroughs in Program Logics (Separation Logic, Honda-Logics), Proof-Carrying Code, Model-Checking.