One of these is my Random art. You could have old-style prints of random art, or you could cover your walls with LCD's and have random art change all the time. The pictures will never be the same. But I do not know if your department would agree to buy a large number of large LCD's...
Indeed, what he suggests is not rubbish, but it is not new either. In domain theory, which dates back to late 1960's, a common way to handle an undefined, or diverging computation, is to use a special element bottom. What was done in this article is not original at all: he adjoined bottom, which he denotes by , to the extended real line. This is known as forming a flat domain. In fact, it has been long known that for computational purposes it is better to adjoin to the (extended) real line not only bottom, but approximations of reals as well, so that one obtains a continuous or algebraic domain, see e.g. [1]. As can only be expected from "science journalists", they are completely clueless and unable to judge originality or authority of "science" they report on.
References:
[1] D. S. Scott. "Data types as lattices." In G. Muller et al., editors, Proceedings of the International Summer Institute and Logic Colloquium, Kiel, volume 499 of Lecture Notes in Mathematics, pages 579-651, Springer-Verlag, 1975.
I teach introductory Java programming to students who have had about one semester of basic programming already (loops, basic arrays, stdout). In the previous course they use Textpad and compile "by hand". I start with a simple IDE that was designed specifically for teaching, it is DrJava, see http://www.drjava.org/ . It's open source and was developed at Rice University. There is also its cousin DrScheme, see http://www.drscheme.org/ , for teaching scheme. The main features of DrJava are: simple editor, "compile all" button, a simple debugger, and (very useful for teaching) a java "command line". The command line is cool because it allows interactive work. I don't have to recompile every little thing just to show them how simple things work. Later on in the course we switch to Eclipse.
On a smaller scale it is easy to prevent computers from successfully scanning a portion of the web because it is easy to provide instructions on how to access a web page so that
humans can easily and quickly follow those
instructions, but
it is very hard for computers to follow the
instructions.
For example, you can have a surfer follow instructions such as "enter the first letter
of each word in this sentence and we will let you through to our Humans only web site". The answer is
easy for humans and hard for computers because language understanding is a hard problem.
Note that the answer must contain sufficiently
many bits of information so that it is hard
to get it right by trying out all answers.
Work like this is being done at Carnegie Mellon
University, but I cannot find any links to it
right now. Maybe if a couple of hundred of you
harrass this person he might agree to write a little slashdot article about it.
As usual the version of the news published "for the masses" does not actually tell us what is going on. Here is the original paper "Playing Hide and Seek with Stored Keys" by Adi Shamir and Nicko van Someren that the article is referring to. It's in PDF format. The abstract says:
"In this paper we consider the problem of efficiently locating cryptographics keys hidden in gigabytes of data, such as the complete file system of a typical PC. We describe efficient algebraic attacks which can locate secret RSA keys in long bit strings, and more general statistical attacks which can find arbitrary cryptographic keys embedded in large programs. These techniques can be used to apply lunchtime attacks on signature keys used by financial institutes, or to defeat authentication type mechanisms in software packages."
Now we actually now what this is about. As far as I am concerned, the interesting application would be if No Such Agency sifted communications channels of a planet to find the keys. They can afford to do it if it's computationally cheap enough.
Slashdot Mirror
In Slovenia we also get pre-filled tax returns by mail, and have to return them only if we disagree with them. It saves a lot of time for most people.
One of these is my Random art. You could have old-style prints of random art, or you could cover your walls with LCD's and have random art change all the time. The pictures will never be the same. But I do not know if your department would agree to buy a large number of large LCD's...
References:
[1] D. S. Scott. "Data types as lattices." In G. Muller et al., editors, Proceedings of the International Summer Institute and Logic Colloquium, Kiel, volume 499 of Lecture Notes in Mathematics, pages 579-651, Springer-Verlag, 1975.
I teach introductory Java programming to students who have had about one semester of basic programming already (loops, basic arrays, stdout). In the previous course they use Textpad and compile "by hand". I start with a simple IDE that was designed specifically for teaching, it is DrJava, see http://www.drjava.org/ . It's open source and was developed at Rice University. There is also its cousin DrScheme, see http://www.drscheme.org/ , for teaching scheme. The main features of DrJava are: simple editor, "compile all" button, a simple debugger, and (very useful for teaching) a java "command line". The command line is cool because it allows interactive work. I don't have to recompile every little thing just to show them how simple things work. Later on in the course we switch to Eclipse.
For example, you can have a surfer follow instructions such as "enter the first letter of each word in this sentence and we will let you through to our Humans only web site". The answer is easy for humans and hard for computers because language understanding is a hard problem.
Note that the answer must contain sufficiently many bits of information so that it is hard to get it right by trying out all answers.
Work like this is being done at Carnegie Mellon University, but I cannot find any links to it right now. Maybe if a couple of hundred of you harrass this person he might agree to write a little slashdot article about it.
Now we actually now what this is about. As far as I am concerned, the interesting application would be if No Such Agency sifted communications channels of a planet to find the keys. They can afford to do it if it's computationally cheap enough.