Get an insanly fast (and probably expensive) database.
In this database, I would store the location of every word in each document. (ie. somewhere is words 17 and 87, over is word 45, there is words 98, 109, and 1)
When somebody searches for 'somewhere*over*there' I would query the database for a list of the locations of 'somewhere', 'over', and 'there', sorted by the document they originated from.
Now it should be easy to find the documents which have the words in the right order. Simple look for documents where the location somewhere is less than the location of over is less than the location of there.
This would probably require a very fast, large database to accomplish, but it could be done.
Your assuming that the teacher is in the same room as the student. There is no reason that a system such as VNC couldn't be used by a teacher to monitor students in a distance learning situation. If the schools have decent network access (many do), and the desktops are kept fairly graphically simple (which they could be), it would be not be significantly more difficult to monitor a class from anywhere in the world that it would be from an administrative computer in the classroom.
I'm using VNC right now to type this message. Using VNC, I have complete control of my X session, even as I sit in a computer lab across campus from my dorm room. VNC is at least as good as PC-Anywhere, which we use regularly at my co-op job to control computers on the other side of the country. I haven't played much with BO, though, so I can make any comparison there.
You get what you pay for. It costs more, but go for the name brand, 'professional grade' solutions rather than the $9.99 Radio Shack special. Look through the appropriate sections of an Allied or Newark catalog for some ideas.
...is the Wiremold UL2065BD, availible at Allied Electronics (Damn I sound like an ad!). 6' long, 24 outlets, 15' power cord . I bought one of these for a bench at work because we have a lot of little things that we need to plug in, and it got annoying to have to unplug one device to plug another in (Keeping the current limitations in mind). If you are looking for something with surge protection (and you don't mind rack mount), my suggestion is the Tripplite IBAR 12 Ultra, which we use at work in some of the equipment racks.
The college I attend (you can figure it out from my e-mail address) requires at least five co-op terms as part of their undergraduate program. I have a co-op with a company which designs and manufactures medical devices, a co-op position which I have had since my senior year in high school. In the two years I have worked there, my experiances have been nothing but positive. Yes, I have occasionally done a number of things that could be considered boring, repetitve, etc, but these experiances are more than balanced by the interesting and educational experiances which consume most of my time.
I also have a lot of friends who have co-op positions that they really hate. In most cases, it is either because they are working in a field other than where their interests lie, or they work for an employer whose attitute towards co-op is that they are cheap labor.
When you interview for a co-op position, you should make it a point to talk to the students you will work with. Find out what they do. If they mainly do busywork, you probably don't want the job. Find out how many different departments the student have worked in. There should be pleanty of opportunity to move around, but students should not be bounced from department to department too much, often it can take a couple months to really com up to speed.
I attend a university where all computers on the student subnet (dorms and on-campus apartments) are located behind a firewall. Although the firewall blocks direct access to all ports, almost all services are availible throught the socks5 protocol. The downside is that you can run a publically accessable server since it can't be seen from the outside.
But I don't think you will get much supprot here, as many/.'ers have an absolute no filtering is good filtering view. In some ways, I agree. I think that government has absolutly no business mandating filtering, as it amounts to censorship. However, I have no problem if individual or private institutions (i.e. families, businesses, etc.) choose to impliment filtering. Additionally, I have no problem with schools implimenting filtering, as the purpose of internet in schools is purely educational, and any other use (porn or otherwise) costs the school money and resources.
The argument against filtering in schools and businesses is not so much 'I should be able to look at porn at work or in my high school computer lab' but 'The current filtering technology blocks usefull, informational and educational sites while not blocking much of the material it was intended to block'. The solution to the latter argument is a filter that works. (As hypothetical as it may be).
Making a filter that works is not a trivial task. There are many compainies out there that have spent lost of time, money, and resources making filters that don't work right. Good luck.
Place several radio beacons around and in the intended area. Have each transmit on a slightly different frequency. If the robo-mower knows the frequency that the beacons are transmitting at, knows the frequency it is receiving the beacons on, and knows the speed at which it is moving, it should be able to use the doppler effect to figure out where it is compared to the known locations of the beacons. (At robo-mower speeds, though, the doppler shift may be to small to measure accuratly within the confines of a robo-mower.) This would also add a degree of safety. If the robo-mower detects that it is moving away from all of the beacons, it would shut off immediatly (and somehow call for help) since it is probably outside the intended area. As I said a sentance or two ago, the trick here would be to properly detect the very small doppler shifts without relying on expensive (both in money and power) hardware.
I really don't think the purpose was to produce space-worthy sats, but to give undergraduate studends an opportunity to work hand's on with the technology. I don't think there are enough opportunities like this in our undergraduate programs.
I think that for this to be viable for frequent on the fly reprogramming, you would have to have a RAM based PGA. As far as configuration wars, if you had a RAM based PGA, I would imagine that you could swap areas of the PGA to disk or other storage just like we swap memory from RAM to a swap file/partition. When GIMP requested resources for image processing, if there wasn't enough space available, you would simply swap out blocks that haven't been used lately. When those processes go to use those blocks again, they would be swaped back in at the expense of some other not-used-lately portion of the PGA.
But than again, I only saw an hour long talk on the subject, so I don't have any idea how practicl e these ideas are.
Genetic screening has the potential to become the most effective preventitve healhcare procedure of the new century. If you can identify individuals at risk for a disease, they can be given preventitive medication and can be monitored so that treatment can begin in the earliest stages of the disease. However, if individuals refuse to take part in genetic screening because it can (and as this article shows it will) be used to deny not just insurance benifits, but possibly also to deny access to education, employment, and many other aspects of our daily lives.
World governments need to set clear and fair standards concerning the use of genetic information. First, genetic testing can not be a requirement for anything, especially insurance. Second, every individual should have to give explicit permission for each entity given access to the results of genetic testing. Finally, it should be as illegal to discriminate based on genetic testing as it is to discriminate based on visible genetic attributes such as race. Only then will I volunteer genetic information for the purpose of genetic testing or screening.
Think about it. When the radio was the primary source of of entertainment, the next big thing wasn't a better radio, but the television. The next big thing as far as telivision goes wasn't the introduction of color, but of cable services which offered a greatly expanded choice of programming. With this in mind, how can one believe that the 'next big thing' after the internet will simply be an incremental improvement (and im not quite sure the author's personal utopia is an improvement) on the internet?
The next big thing, whatever it ends up being, will not come from a self-improtant consultant, but from the mind of bright student somewhere, who probably doesn't even realize yet that their crazy idea will revolutionize the infromaion/entertainment industry.
I attended a presentation sponsored by my college's ECE department on what the speaker called "Elastic Core Microprocessors". The idea is that if a microprocessor were made with programmable gate arrays, it could change its design during program execution. This way, various functional blocks of the microprocessor could be created on the fly, as needed. If I'm doing a lot of floating point calculations, I can create a few extra floating point units. If I'm not, those gates could be used for other purposes. Heavily used functions could even be implimented in the chips logic gates rather than in software.
Effectivly, this would make a CPU-Burner possible, although I think it would be a while before we can make high-end processors this way.
...this hash could be used by the consumer, vendor, and credit card company to authorize and authenticate transactions.
Couldn't someone steal the hash in the same way they can today steal the actual credit card number? Once stolen, the hash would be as useful as the card number itself.
I think 500m is many times closer that jumbo-jets fly to each other in mid-air, so 500m (which I imagine is many times more error that this system would have) may not be a big deal.
GPS works by detecting the very slight differences in the time it takes a the signal to travel from each satelite to the receiver. As you increase altitude, your distance from the satilite changes, so the times it takes for the signal to travel from each satilite to the receiver changes. So, yes, GPS can determine altitude.
Seriously tho, an agency ( govermental, non-profit, even for-profit ) needs to be set up with regulatory authority
A for-profit group with widespread regulatory authority? That sounds like bad news to me. Just imagine if the RIAA or MPAA were given regulatory authority over electronic media distribution. Oops...My mistake...the DMCA did just that!
The college I attend (look at my e-mail address to find out who), does not officially ban the use of Napster or similar systems, (although the AUP does forbid using the network to violate local, state, or federal law). Instead, they choose to block Napster bound traffic at the socks sever. Officially, their justification is that widespread use of Napster displaces bandwidth which could otherwise be used for eduactional uses. However, some in our Computer Services department have hinted that the real reason is fear of a lawsuit, either from the industry or individual artists.
By not officially banning Napster, the administration can hold on to the claim that they do not censor or restrict network access, freedom of speech, etc. Yet at the same time, they can also make the claim, if pressured by the RIAA, that they are being a responsible service provider by not allowing access to the supposedly evil Napster.
I wonder how one of these would compare to a gasoline or propane generator for amateur radio field use. It would seem that without moving parts, there would be less electrical noise from the arcing. (There may be more noise, though, from the inverter circuit used to convert the DC output from the fuel cell to AC line levels.) Even if the electrical noise were the same, the audio noise would be much less. (Anyone who has been to a 10+ transmitter field day, or other temporary station using a generator, knows that generator noise can be a real problem.) Also, would the fuel cell be too fragile to transport on a trailer?
2) Campus police.. are they 'real' police? Can they sieze things? (I honestly have no idea.. someone fill me in?)
In this case, I don't think this is an issue. Their administration was notified of a possible crime, handed it over to campus police, (who real or not, often "investigate" most non-serious/non-violent campus crimes) who obtained a search warrent. It sounds to me that everything was handled properly as far as his rights go. (I still wouldn't want to be him right now)
The campus police did not just choose to confiscate his computer. They were able to get a search warrent allowing them to sieze his computer equipment.
I aggree though, that it would be very wrong for the campus police to sieze his equipment without any search warrent or anyother hint of due-process.
I think what a lot of people here are missing is that his computer was not seized for violating school policy, but for violating copyright law, and then only after a search-warrant was issued.
Slashdot Mirror
This would probably require a very fast, large database to accomplish, but it could be done.
Your assuming that the teacher is in the same room as the student. There is no reason that a system such as VNC couldn't be used by a teacher to monitor students in a distance learning situation. If the schools have decent network access (many do), and the desktops are kept fairly graphically simple (which they could be), it would be not be significantly more difficult to monitor a class from anywhere in the world that it would be from an administrative computer in the classroom.
I'm using VNC right now to type this message. Using VNC, I have complete control of my X session, even as I sit in a computer lab across campus from my dorm room. VNC is at least as good as PC-Anywhere, which we use regularly at my co-op job to control computers on the other side of the country. I haven't played much with BO, though, so I can make any comparison there.
You get what you pay for. It costs more, but go for the name brand, 'professional grade' solutions rather than the $9.99 Radio Shack special. Look through the appropriate sections of an Allied or Newark catalog for some ideas.
...is the Wiremold UL2065BD, availible at Allied Electronics (Damn I sound like an ad!). 6' long, 24 outlets, 15' power cord . I bought one of these for a bench at work because we have a lot of little things that we need to plug in, and it got annoying to have to unplug one device to plug another in (Keeping the current limitations in mind). If you are looking for something with surge protection (and you don't mind rack mount), my suggestion is the Tripplite IBAR 12 Ultra, which we use at work in some of the equipment racks.
The college I attend (you can figure it out from my e-mail address) requires at least five co-op terms as part of their undergraduate program. I have a co-op with a company which designs and manufactures medical devices, a co-op position which I have had since my senior year in high school. In the two years I have worked there, my experiances have been nothing but positive. Yes, I have occasionally done a number of things that could be considered boring, repetitve, etc, but these experiances are more than balanced by the interesting and educational experiances which consume most of my time.
I also have a lot of friends who have co-op positions that they really hate. In most cases, it is either because they are working in a field other than where their interests lie, or they work for an employer whose attitute towards co-op is that they are cheap labor.
When you interview for a co-op position, you should make it a point to talk to the students you will work with. Find out what they do. If they mainly do busywork, you probably don't want the job. Find out how many different departments the student have worked in. There should be pleanty of opportunity to move around, but students should not be bounced from department to department too much, often it can take a couple months to really com up to speed.
I attend a university where all computers on the student subnet (dorms and on-campus apartments) are located behind a firewall. Although the firewall blocks direct access to all ports, almost all services are availible throught the socks5 protocol. The downside is that you can run a publically accessable server since it can't be seen from the outside.
But I don't think you will get much supprot here, as many /.'ers have an absolute no filtering is good filtering view. In some ways, I agree. I think that government has absolutly no business mandating filtering, as it amounts to censorship. However, I have no problem if individual or private institutions (i.e. families, businesses, etc.) choose to impliment filtering. Additionally, I have no problem with schools implimenting filtering, as the purpose of internet in schools is purely educational, and any other use (porn or otherwise) costs the school money and resources.
The argument against filtering in schools and businesses is not so much 'I should be able to look at porn at work or in my high school computer lab' but 'The current filtering technology blocks usefull, informational and educational sites while not blocking much of the material it was intended to block'. The solution to the latter argument is a filter that works. (As hypothetical as it may be).
Making a filter that works is not a trivial task. There are many compainies out there that have spent lost of time, money, and resources making filters that don't work right. Good luck.
Place several radio beacons around and in the intended area. Have each transmit on a slightly different frequency. If the robo-mower knows the frequency that the beacons are transmitting at, knows the frequency it is receiving the beacons on, and knows the speed at which it is moving, it should be able to use the doppler effect to figure out where it is compared to the known locations of the beacons. (At robo-mower speeds, though, the doppler shift may be to small to measure accuratly within the confines of a robo-mower.) This would also add a degree of safety. If the robo-mower detects that it is moving away from all of the beacons, it would shut off immediatly (and somehow call for help) since it is probably outside the intended area. As I said a sentance or two ago, the trick here would be to properly detect the very small doppler shifts without relying on expensive (both in money and power) hardware.
I really don't think the purpose was to produce space-worthy sats, but to give undergraduate studends an opportunity to work hand's on with the technology. I don't think there are enough opportunities like this in our undergraduate programs.
I think that for this to be viable for frequent on the fly reprogramming, you would have to have a RAM based PGA. As far as configuration wars, if you had a RAM based PGA, I would imagine that you could swap areas of the PGA to disk or other storage just like we swap memory from RAM to a swap file/partition. When GIMP requested resources for image processing, if there wasn't enough space available, you would simply swap out blocks that haven't been used lately. When those processes go to use those blocks again, they would be swaped back in at the expense of some other not-used-lately portion of the PGA.
But than again, I only saw an hour long talk on the subject, so I don't have any idea how practicl e these ideas are.
Genetic screening has the potential to become the most effective preventitve healhcare procedure of the new century. If you can identify individuals at risk for a disease, they can be given preventitive medication and can be monitored so that treatment can begin in the earliest stages of the disease. However, if individuals refuse to take part in genetic screening because it can (and as this article shows it will) be used to deny not just insurance benifits, but possibly also to deny access to education, employment, and many other aspects of our daily lives.
World governments need to set clear and fair standards concerning the use of genetic information. First, genetic testing can not be a requirement for anything, especially insurance. Second, every individual should have to give explicit permission for each entity given access to the results of genetic testing. Finally, it should be as illegal to discriminate based on genetic testing as it is to discriminate based on visible genetic attributes such as race. Only then will I volunteer genetic information for the purpose of genetic testing or screening.
Think about it. When the radio was the primary source of of entertainment, the next big thing wasn't a better radio, but the television. The next big thing as far as telivision goes wasn't the introduction of color, but of cable services which offered a greatly expanded choice of programming. With this in mind, how can one believe that the 'next big thing' after the internet will simply be an incremental improvement (and im not quite sure the author's personal utopia is an improvement) on the internet?
The next big thing, whatever it ends up being, will not come from a self-improtant consultant, but from the mind of bright student somewhere, who probably doesn't even realize yet that their crazy idea will revolutionize the infromaion/entertainment industry.
I attended a presentation sponsored by my college's ECE department on what the speaker called "Elastic Core Microprocessors". The idea is that if a microprocessor were made with programmable gate arrays, it could change its design during program execution. This way, various functional blocks of the microprocessor could be created on the fly, as needed. If I'm doing a lot of floating point calculations, I can create a few extra floating point units. If I'm not, those gates could be used for other purposes. Heavily used functions could even be implimented in the chips logic gates rather than in software.
Effectivly, this would make a CPU-Burner possible, although I think it would be a while before we can make high-end processors this way.
...this hash could be used by the consumer, vendor, and credit card company to authorize and authenticate transactions.
Couldn't someone steal the hash in the same way they can today steal the actual credit card number? Once stolen, the hash would be as useful as the card number itself.
SagSaw short for Saggital Saw, a type of saw for cutting through bone which is made at the company where I co-op.
I think 500m is many times closer that jumbo-jets fly to each other in mid-air, so 500m (which I imagine is many times more error that this system would have) may not be a big deal.
GPS works by detecting the very slight differences in the time it takes a the signal to travel from each satelite to the receiver. As you increase altitude, your distance from the satilite changes, so the times it takes for the signal to travel from each satilite to the receiver changes. So, yes, GPS can determine altitude.
Seriously tho, an agency ( govermental, non-profit, even for-profit ) needs to be set up with regulatory authority
A for-profit group with widespread regulatory authority? That sounds like bad news to me. Just imagine if the RIAA or MPAA were given regulatory authority over electronic media distribution. Oops...My mistake...the DMCA did just that!
Solar flares, though, can cause geomagnetic storms which can seriously hinder HF communications.
Good luck on the exam, and I like your anti-spam address.
KC8DEI
The college I attend (look at my e-mail address to find out who), does not officially ban the use of Napster or similar systems, (although the AUP does forbid using the network to violate local, state, or federal law). Instead, they choose to block Napster bound traffic at the socks sever. Officially, their justification is that widespread use of Napster displaces bandwidth which could otherwise be used for eduactional uses. However, some in our Computer Services department have hinted that the real reason is fear of a lawsuit, either from the industry or individual artists.
By not officially banning Napster, the administration can hold on to the claim that they do not censor or restrict network access, freedom of speech, etc. Yet at the same time, they can also make the claim, if pressured by the RIAA, that they are being a responsible service provider by not allowing access to the supposedly evil Napster.
I wonder how one of these would compare to a gasoline or propane generator for amateur radio field use. It would seem that without moving parts, there would be less electrical noise from the arcing. (There may be more noise, though, from the inverter circuit used to convert the DC output from the fuel cell to AC line levels.) Even if the electrical noise were the same, the audio noise would be much less. (Anyone who has been to a 10+ transmitter field day, or other temporary station using a generator, knows that generator noise can be a real problem.) Also, would the fuel cell be too fragile to transport on a trailer?
2) Campus police.. are they 'real' police? Can they sieze things? (I honestly have no idea.. someone fill me in?)
In this case, I don't think this is an issue. Their administration was notified of a possible crime, handed it over to campus police, (who real or not, often "investigate" most non-serious/non-violent campus crimes) who obtained a search warrent. It sounds to me that everything was handled properly as far as his rights go. (I still wouldn't want to be him right now)
The campus police did not just choose to confiscate his computer. They were able to get a search warrent allowing them to sieze his computer equipment.
I aggree though, that it would be very wrong for the campus police to sieze his equipment without any search warrent or anyother hint of due-process.
I think what a lot of people here are missing is that his computer was not seized for violating school policy, but for violating copyright law, and then only after a search-warrant was issued.