This is Hachiya, the guy who made Sony's pink teddy bear logo if you know it. I collaborated with him once in 95. His show is on now until April 11 in Roppongi, Tokyo if you are in Japan. Though I couldn't go to the opening my first reaction is kewl! since I like Nausicaa and the second after reading his homepage is I hope nobody gets killed.
His comment of 2/20 is that he's looking for investment.. 20 million yen (around $200K) for phase 2 and double that to finish the entire project (phase 3). On the top page he does note he takes full responsibility for any accidents in the project which has no relationship to the movie etc. Also mentions on hearing that when applying for a grant you need to fill out about 1 mm of documents for every hundred dollar bill, that must mean for $100K you must need 1 meter??
But I would like to know 3 things..
1. Do the aerodynamics comments consider that in the movie it is ridden with the legs in the air, something like an inverted hanglider, but I expect stabilized by the thrust?.. And what about clothing and curving your body to produce more lift? Any [powered?] hangliders out there? Also considering there could be some kind of pressure sensors in the handles to see what the rider is doing. Just wondering..
2. What kind of thrust would be needed to enable the Moewe (meh-veh.. MEV? in Japanese) wing to take off / leap into the air as quickly as in the film?
3. What kind of engine would be the lightest, most efficient thing that could do that? Wondering what this would weigh if built of carbon fiber.
Resolving Power?
on
Brine on Mars?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I keep seeing references in the rover news about the microscopic imager, but is this really a microscope, or is it just magnifying as much as say a desktop macroscope for opaque objects (they let you see things around the size of a hair okay..? If there were things the size of microorganisms in the briny reaches, could we see them? It is impossible for the layman to look at the closeups we've been seeing and understand how big the field is.
Seriously these guys should get together with the guy who asked about how to demo his terabit bandwidth! If you suppose the Brazilians are sending 5 gig cinema files one theater at a time, he could deliver them all simultaneously, live to the audience, and not worry about replacing bad hard disks in the rain forest every week. You know it's gonna happen...
I think CLIPS is the AI engine I once found, it's by NASA, free and recently updated. Many variants and commercial forks. Found it again after losing it, thanks to this thread. Some links from the aifaq.
: A Tool for Building Expert Systems. Maintained by Gary Riley.
fuzzyCLIPS
Some other NASA soft:
COBWEB/3 (ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov) ?
AUTOCLASS AutoClass is an unsupervised Bayesian classification system for independent data.
PRODIGY cs.cmu.edu Integrated Planning and Learning System
Seriously this sounds like a bad idea, think of all the ill will you generate! Anyway I wonder if it is impossible to use an amplitude reversed wave to shield horizontal propagation of the boom, like sound-cancelling earphones. Then remembered the U.S. supposedly experimented with sonic weapons but (supposedly) gave up because it propagated in all directions and backfired on the troops. (Of course robots or air drops could deliver them so this could be apocryphal). I'd be surprised if neighbors couldn't sue to get them to stop these explosions, unless they are really in the boonies.
IANA physical chemist and I haven't read the article (my bad). When I first saw this I wondered if it might be better to use this catalyst in something with an amazingly high surface area like a spongy radiator, and draw air through it at high power, rather than just go for the (maybe) relatively low surface area of a house. Then I saw a quote about the porosity of the paint being useful for drawing the NO2 into it, so it seems the paint is a 3-dimensional catalytic reactor or whatever you call it. Neat!
So my question is how much actual surface area is being used, if everything happens at an air-paint interface, or if not then how much NO2 can be catalyzed per hour per volume of paint? Would it be doubled if a few coats of paint were used, etc.
Seems vulnerable to traffic analysis, as someone mentioned you don't use a combination lock that sends packets all over the world. People will want more complicated sequences, but it will take more time to send them and they may have to resend due to TCP packets coming in different order. But even so anybody on your network or the server's network should be able to see what's going on, how secure is that? And if the server ever responds to your ip from any port then you likewise hosed.
On the other hand this does seem to be an interesting way to one-way send information to the server. I was thinking of playing solitaire using Bruce Schneier's algorithm using a port for each card of a deck.
IANA cypherpunk, but there seem to be a number of ways to treat the set of all closed ports as a numerical space that would be interesting for encrypted communications.
For example you could convert a one-time pad, a private key, or a set of communication channels into a list of port numbers. For a short message at least, you could send with pretty good security (although the list of ports, if not their hash values, would be known to the outside world).
To me this knocking stuff sounds like it only *reduces* security and provides lots of interesting clues to men in the middle. The intriguing part seems to be that you can send a good deal of information through a large number of half-connections in parallel, but this may have already been tried by other people. Of course if the message is simple enough that a single ping to a single prearranged port number is enough to convey it, then you would seem to have a pretty strong system though its existence would certainly be uncovered sooner or later. But if this became popular I suppose the advantage would be in being able to assign certain ports to prearranged values, both for encryption purposes and also to reduce the amount of data you actually need to send.
Okay this is obvious bullshit, somehow Americans have come up with representatives who think they have carte blanche to promote all kinds of fascist principles. Forcing identities to be checked on whois is not going to solve anything. It's not the same as application for an SSL certificate.
As Dave Farber says, photons don't need passports.
That said, Japan has an unpopular policy which only allows a company to have a single domain, they have to pay bucks and provide stamped documentation, and it is serious. That's why everybody gets U.S. domains (ever wonder why dotcom domains are running out?). There also happens to be a law for privacy in Japan unlike the U.S., but I do not think anonymity is thought so important here (though it should be considering how corrupt everything is).
Anonymity on the Internet and finding ways to strengthen it may be one of the great things about the U.S., and as a very eloquent poster implies earlier with the Federalist Papers, one can easily imagine that fashionable ideas about security may seem quaint and trite a few years later. People with more objectivity tend to look at the U.S. today and wonder why the entire fucking value system is spontanteously undergoing a spectacular meltdown.
I have provided technical support to these and related projects, which were initiated by journalist and MIT Media Lab member Bernard Krisher, in Cambodia from Japan for several years. However there is a limit to what I can tell you since I did not make Motoman myself and have not been to the site. Perhaps someone else on the project is seeing this, I'll also mention to the project leader.
In the past I have mentioned this project in Slashdot threads and made I think the first public presentation on it at GLOCOM in Tokyo last year. Bernie has in Cambodia created a newspaper, an orphanage, about 200 schools, a major hospital, and a telemedicine program among other things. The Princess Diana fund for landmine injuries was involved and we sold a poster from photomosaic.org. A campaign was set up to buy mosquito nets to save a family from malaria for a few bucks. This is all because Bernie Krisher now retired felt it was time to give something back to the world. He puts himself physically on the line. Also the two of us did the northkorea.org project FYI which is closed but got about a quarter million dollars during the famine (the first well publicized one) in North Korea. The design is crude but I was able to update it quickly over telnet for a number of years for nothing, and the feedback loop we made got onto CNN twice and gathered many donors.
About Cambodia: most of Cambodia has no phones, no electricity, no mail, nothing! It is really a different world, like maybe 3rd or 4th world. A lot of the things I suggested when hearing about the Motoman project from Bernie were not logistically possible, or not the most important considering the extreme focus needed to get this sort of thing going.
For example the email network is not open to the outside Internet, though at MIT there is an engine which will get search results based on emailed requests. There is no realtime email through a satellite or ham (I'd like to find out more about that if anyone is knowledgeable about ham radio in this area since I suggested it). I suggested that teachers would be able to network together on a mailing list they share, but while this might happen one day at the moment it is all administered centrally. It is extremely cool that the governor is suddenly on the email though, and they take it seriously. The people at MIT and in Cambodia have already accomplished a lot. The bikes also can be used in emergencies to get sick people or to deliver medicine. As I understand it, it is a major undertaking just to get drivers and daily issues that crop up squared away, the bikes don't even stop unless they are specially flagged to do so. But they have already I believe delivered one girl to a hospital for a serious problem.
If you have information about satellite, balloon or ham radio in the area, or about 3rd world computing (simputer and I believe there was a Laotian computer) I'd like to know (mattr atnospam telebody dotcom). Please also cc to bernie atnospam media dot mit dot edu (since my email provider is not happy and my vps is not set up yet). Also anyone can participate by making donations, for example in the cambodia schools project the world bank provides a matching donation and you get your name on a school. For a little more you can get them a solar panel and maybe computer for email, which makes it the village communications hub. And calling all geeks, your expertise may very well be welcomed if you are willing to go to Cambodia, even for a short time maybe.
As someone asked about the address, email bernie or I believe there is a camnet address, if you want to contact those villages. No bang path (though I have mentioned it, and fidonet..) Someone (andreMA) mentioned troposphere scatter. (or heck, meteor trail scatter..) if anyone has concrete information about that I'd like to know. Someone asked about pringles cans. I did a bunch of net research a while back and it looked like a Yagi antenna or any line of site tower would basically be bound by the
I was on a premed track in college, but got out of it (this is 15 yrs ago). I am now in IT and business coordination.
A lot of people say it is a dead end industry and maybe they are right, at least people seldom seem to make money decisions based on quality. HOWEVER I have to tell you that I was taking organic chemistry and wanted to be a doctor like my father. HE told me to get out of medicine because the writing was on the wall, unless I absolutely had to be a doctor. Now with the way doctors are looked down upon and have their lives run by insurance companies, combined with the seaming freedom of open source software, I can totally understand one reason the poster might want to leave medicine.
Let me just say that what I really wanted to do was nanotech but it was 10 years too early. I'd be doing bio/nano now if I was in college now. Medicine plus information technology is not at all dead, it is one of the major amazing, growing fields now. Of course if you are interested in doing medicine somewhere you don't have to join an HMO, you could move, also I can recommend you to the Sihanouk Hospital in Cambodia which a friend started and they also need good physicians.
My suggestion is to take some time to consider what you enjoy in medicine and IT, and see how they combine. Also you might be in a very good position to start a lucrative venture with programmers and get a big chunk of investment from someone. This is a HOT field. If you like the research side there are also likely opportunities. Why not spend a lot of time looking at what people are doing in bioinformatics, medical research, therapeutics, neural science, etc. Good luck and report back!
I don't get it, if up until recently XFree86 was GPL-compatible and now it suddenly isn't, why not just somebody roll back their local mirror of the CVS a week and fork it while maintaining GPL compatibility?
I have no problem with giving people credit and use XFree86. But if everybody did this any distro would suddenly get bloated with liscenses and anybody who's not a lawyer would suddenly have to start wasting a lot of time making sure it is legal, every time they do anything, forever! -That or be a scoflaw, which then makes it harder to protect the GPL.
XFree86 people must think they are superior or more critical to the open source community than other projects, or that they have no responsibility to people who have contributed thinking it would remain GPL, or that their new request is so minor that people will comply and kid themselves that it isn't important.
Now I am not an expert on XFree86 nor have I done more than read every post over 3 this time. Sorry. So, if it really was GPL, the question is how fast is a fork going to appear? I believe if you download software under a certain liscense then it cannot be changed out from under you.
I think we have long passed the point where logical conclusions can be beaten down with suggestions of weak-mindedness. Suspension of disbelief should be relegated to works of fiction.
If you stop to think logically about the history of Microsoft, it is just too much to swallow! It just isn't possible that such a team of intelligent engineers and scientists, run by the richest man in the world, could possibly have missed these things. Sheer human bloody-mindedness just can't answer for such a long-running history of security breaches intertwined with a history of utterly unethical monopolistic behavior!
Don't even start wondering about why all these worms are suspiciously un-malicious. It is way off the bell-curve.
For those not used to applying lofgic to the news, this means all these things were intentional and expected. Discovery of a backdoor and exploit by a worm is equivalent to the planned end of a product lifecycle. Guess what the product really is.
I mean, these guys must really get steamed when they have to act like bumbling idiots every time one of their "security holes" (ha-ha) makes the news! Whether or not they are due to attempts to secure ground for their corporate clients, or to directives by U.S. security organs, is quite moot as we end up at the same point. So wouldn't Microsoft stand to gain in the end by admitting these things were all intentional, and cleaning up their image as a bunch of totally incompetent nicompoops? Sheesh, how many nincompoops do you know who are laughing all the way to the bank like Microsoft does so routinely it is predictable?
I think it is only fair to Microsoft employees to exercise a bit of cold logic on their behalf. It's not like they haven't figured it out, mostly, I mean they are a bunch of smart cookies! But they are only human and probably most have families to care for, and so I think they deserve to be recognized as not total incompetents (at least half of them) but probably mostly just wage-slaves who have been bound hand and toe, just pounded into submission, to protect the image of the monolith that generates the income of the richest man on the planet. So here's to all you victims!
When I first read the headline, I thought M$ would win since the guy thought the site was cool because it sounded like Microsoft. But then I quickly realized, who cares this sort of thing goes on every day and being a programmer the guy ought to be able to make a company with his own name even if he was "Mic Ro".
Obviously they should offer him 10 or 20 times what Rowe asked for it. When you spell it in languages that don't use the Roman alphabet, which is most of emdollar.com's growth market, it *looks and sounds* EXACTLY like "Microsoft".
King forgets that 35% of the world's mad scientists *live* in Tokyo and they are working on an alternate physics that will render into atoms all structures above 2 stories in locations with too many consonants.
Thank you very much for the excellent info.
This isn't a DNS blacklist though, I just wanted a basically a list of email addresses, subject lines, or message hashes that are known to be spam so it can be fodled, spindled, and mutilated.
I don't think these solutions are going to close down spammers the way I suggested in my vehement post, but they (especially Vipul's Razor I believe) have a lot of the things I was dreaming about!
Vipul's human network looks great though it seems that it might miss spam which personalizes itself per user (just a theory witout trying it, which I will) and DCC looks interesting in that it has fuzzy matching that tries to evolve with spam.
Brightmail's claim of 99.999% accuracy is pretty good, I suppose it would have to have humans in there somewhere. Anyway I'll check out Vipul and see what happens.
I think it would be very cool if companies were given money by governments to develop or implement antispam technologies, in addition to the other suggestions I had. Thanks again and here's to no more spam.
Maybe Yahoo's idea will work, though it seems to be quite porous and more of a surveillance tool than an antispam measure.. in fact it is quite plausible that this is Homeland Security's wet dream and is being sold by Yahoo on their request (though that is more paranoid than we have to be).
I have a concrete proposal at the end of this post so please read on.
Anyway someone mentioned the tipping point and I am reading this after cleaning a thousand spams out of my mail folder so I am ready to consider lots of things.
But one thing is definite about all this. If these guys were terrorists planning some horror and not just an army of rotten people bent on selling viagra and insurance, they would be shut down in a heartbeat. You can follow the money! (As many people have.)
Note these datapoints: - Telemarketers don't like getting phone bombed, as Dave Barry launched retaliation against an association of them. - Spammers are in it for the money - Their clients pay because they want to sell something. - Their clients are living in meatspace and are allergic to publicity. - Spam is by definition, easy to get since so many are sent from each machine. (In fact I get too many to even reply with "unsubscribe" to them all). - We all see spam, but can't stop it because the spammers are laughing at us by endlessly transforming their campaigns. The helpless feeling I suppose is similar to terrorism in that there is a feeling of a nebulous enemy profiting by your openness, there is nothing to grab hold of. - People are willing to pay money to stop spam. - Homeland security (probably) and the NSA and similar national organizations (definitely), and telcos and isps (of course) are sitting in front of the big routers around the world. This information can be coordinated. - Some big organization wants a steganography analyzer built quickly (recent slashdot story)
From this and a bit of blue skying and paranoia, I get:
1. Spam, which is subtly personalized and includes photos and hyperlinks, could be used as a communications network by terrorists, so definitely falls under the national security bailiwick. Ditto for viruses and worms, though they are maybe too visible.
2. Though maybe it is better to unlock the messages than to stop spam, from a security standpoint.
3. Certainly it is possible to make transparent who exactly is sending spam, and how the money flows from their clients. Both by surveillance and of course just trying to buy some of their services.
4. If it isn't illegal, they can't be put out of business and so long as they have clients, it is a "business opportunity".
5. But by focussing the anger of thousands of people on each client and detected spammer, this lucrative business can be turned into a financially losing proposition.
6. Finally, if we make it impossible for their clients to sell their wares, there will be no point to spamming. This suggests that rather than trying to secure all of the honest email, we should focus on removing spam from the network. I don't think blackholes work, however it is quite possible that a finer granularity and more intelligence might work. (See below)
So I welcome technical fixes against spam but think they should more involve information sharing than an attempt to cryptographically secure the email network, since the power of email is fundamentally that it is so easy to use.
I would propose that a group of people are selected around the world to manually go through their incoming email and note which emails are spam, preferably qualifying what type it is and using some simple tools to also note whether this is the work of nefarious arch-spammer types that play tricks on you, as opposed to honest mailing lists. It should be an open architecture which allows more than one organization to do the grading. Perhaps one will only filter porn, etc. I believe some large antivirus companies do something a little bit like this on an automated level to learn about thre
I took a course on postmodern literature, architecture, film, and theory at one of the Ivy Leagues around 1990. I don't want to say which one because I really liked my teacher.
I was called in to talk about my final paper which apparently disturbed her, as not being up to my normal participation. In fact it was a closely argued at least 30 pages which ended up that most of this is bullshit. She had given me an F on it, but changed it to an A because as she told me, she agreed.
Slashdot needs to implement another new editorial policy: if you have nothing intelligent or really funny/biting to say, don't! An interesting topic with a another half-assed presentation.
Obviously this is a developing field. The best models seem to use phrases from the original text, anyway the Mac OSX example above shows that it is useful to users willing to take it with a massive grain of salt, even if we are not into full computational sentience yet.
When it works even a little better it will replace all those awful grade school teachers who assign paraphrasing as a homework assignment. The reporters who might have been replaced by it will have already lost their jobs, except for the ones in AhaIndia of course who will paraphrase for the rest of us, usually at a marginally better level than the machine.
The research is interesting - and I'd like to understand Barzilay's notation is that APL or calculus of statement? - in the paper (pdf) I found on google. Also see the papers on her site.
Of course structured text is easier, and news stories are known to have most of the meat in the beginning, but this is great stuff.
One interesting older system is ThoughtTreasure which was built to understand a story and answer questions about it. The author also did work on news analysis ("NewsForms") too. There are tools out there, I've been making a survey myself too. If anyone has information about practical NLP tools for real world tasks please post.
I used to run BeOS on a dual 604e 9600 mac, it felt waaaay more responsive than my rh9 on a 128MB 500MHz laptop (dell inspiron 7.5k, which was pc of the year a few years ago). Thrashing is a big reason, I've got more running on linux I'm sure, but the BeOS' preemptive multitasking just made it feel like such problems which plague all windows systems at least, were nonexistent for BeOS.
Is the new kernel going to reach/exceed this level of performance for the desktop? This would be a big thing for the corporate desktop feel too, plus for me. Not that it is really important but can you play multiple movies and do other tasks without jumping? SGI Irix didn't used to be able to do that on even high end machines, don't know about now (well they will be running 2.6 I suppose..). I'd like to know if a modern distro will run in a sane manner for a gui desktop on 128MB of memory, (yeah I'll get more memory but..) and to know if I should make sure to put 2.6 on systems that need it (I'm thinking about a server which will do both I/O and visualization).
Well I've often read stories about the heroism of NASA engineers (and probably other countries have their own share but not as good PR) in which they save space probes via radioed commands. Only problem is it is having trouble on the surface of a planet and at least to the nonexperts it sounds like that means it was cracked up. But you know the power is probably still running, it is very possibly somewhere between a total disaster and a working probe. Time will tell.. and maybe later probes.
What do you want us to do about it from here? Obviously if they fire you based on untrue allegations and use this to limit your severance pay you could threaten to fight it, especially if this damages your ablility to get a job. (Maybe first try to get a job, get turned down, Profit..) Bottom line though is you can thank your lucky stars you aren't wasting any more of your vital energy on such a shit company. Get even by getting a better job somewhere. If this is how they really do business they may not be around for so long. If you really are pissed why not get in touch with everyone who's been fired in the past year and get their stories too.
I hope the spacecraft does well. I also wish it was possible to read an honest science story without the jabs from left field. Lost their edge? This is based on who's historical revisionism?
Is it rocket science for Slashdot to hire editors who would be considered satisfactory for any other publication to ensure that thousands of people do not have to have a moment of pristine delight spoiled by an editorial policy that rewards knee-jerk jingoism? And how is this even calculated when hours earlier photos were shown from the incredible Spitzer Telescope, which took off from the Cape Canaveral launch facility after being built between the U.S., U.K., and the Netherlands?
It's a simple backhanded comment like this that obviously makes a lot of people feel like they're being fed shit when they could be spending their energy more productively. Geek editor you are unfortunately thy worst enemy. Poster, keep it in your pants! Slashdot, please quickly hire some talent, dudes!
This is pretty cool, I guess Honda's on the run! (Sorry)
QRIO sounds like "Curio" i.e. Curious. Actually it means "Quest for Curiosity" and QRIO is also the name of a tiny Aibo-like robot Sony made in 2000 with the same exterior form. The big running robot was apparently called the SDR Series but after many changes (and names?) it got christened the QRIO as the little guy's successor. So I guess you could buy the little one and imagine it is similar to the big one.. it has some of the same technology too.
The interesting part is that the robot is really running, although not with the big strides you normally expect in human running. As opposed to walking there is actually a short timespan when both feet are in the air (20-40 milliseconds). When it lands it is really loud and you really feel like it is running. Also it is able to grab things so it can run with a ball, do a Japanese fan dance, etc. Apparently it can also get programmed to do tons of really hokey gestures.
Here are a couple links and finally a translation I made.
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/200312/0 3- 060E/ A separate English press release on the big one http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/QRIO/ English letter from CEO with a complex Flash-based piece about QRIO (the small one), its technology, inventor, visits around the world. There is a picture of a hand knocking it over (it can get up which is cool) and the technology section is actually pretty interesting. Actually it is really confusing since you can't tell how big these things are in pictures all the time, I thought at first that this was about the big robot! The small robot uses a special actuator technology which lets it move and dance fluidly, no idea if the big one has this too.
Translation of http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2003/1218/sony. htm
Latest News 12/18 QRIO Ran! Introducing the QRIO, Evolved by Sony - Acheiving the first running bipedal robot in the world -
Announced Dec. 18
On the 18th, Sony held a press conference showcasing the new technology behind their bipedal robot. There, Sony announced QRIO which has newly evolved from the bipedal walking of the past into a "running robot".
QRIO is a miniature humanoid robot announced in 2000 which could walk on its two feet. At the time it was called the "SDR Series", but afterwards went through various improvements and was renamed the QRIO in September 2003.
Toshitada Doi, Executive Vice President (photo)
The technology announced today enable walking, jumping, and cruising around. According to Sony Executive Vice President Toshitada Doi, "There is a harsh competition going on around the world in getting bipedal robots to run, but the QRIO is the first standalone robot with its own control and power systems in the world that has succeeded in running."
"Running" is defined as "leg-powered change of position including an airborne state in which both of the robot's legs leave the ground". In fact with the QRIO, there exists an instant of floating in the air that lasts about 20ms when walking and about 40ms when running.
Aside from basic movement straight ahead, it can also run from side to side and in a circular fashion. Also, from a standstill it can seamlessly change its movement for example walking -> running -> jumping.
According to Mr. Yoshihiro Kuroki of [Sony's] Entertainment Robot Company, in order to carry out the bodily control for walking and jumping, high performance control of sensors which measure its situation, road surface adjustment, adjustment to deal with external forces, shock absorption control and so on.. but from a mechanical standpoint it is apparently not greatly different from the old QRIO. Looking at the announced robot from the outside, one could not tell the difference from the old one.
(illustration captions) 1. A graph measuring the force on the floor. When jumping and running there is, though slight, a length of time in which t
Also Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneaux developed a while ago another Siggraph-shown art project called A-Volve. I think their server can take it.. Also here you can see the drawing screen. You make fish by drawing the schematic and they swim in a crt under real water.. and have kids who look and act a bit like the parents! Nice people too. See the interaction and a bigger picture. They also developed gesture recognition based projects and were at NTT's ATR lab in Kyoto. Now I think still at IAMAS in Gifu, Japan. This maybe precedes Igarashi's work though his is also great stuff.
A notification server protocol? cf. NTP/NNTP/SIP
on
RSS & BT Together?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Maybe a kind of event notification service would be useful (I get to it after a few comments...)
A) Sounds nice, but even without a torrent, using an open source hash algorithm (client and server agree on how to calculate the hash) would provide a way for the client to only download the hash value itself to check for freshness.
This way,
1 the author knows how many people have consumed the data and their general geographic distribution.
2 the author can make a decision to stop publication, which problematic but at any rate easier to enforce than if he or she starts out authorizing a torrent.
3 the author is free to pay for bandwidth if he or she will happily serve one per user just not a zillion per poller.
B) To be sure, it is easy to see who publishes an RSS feed / incites a Torrent download over somebody's infrastructure, whereas it is not so easy to discover the identity of an anonymous coward. You could also publish a pseudo-RSS feed itself exclusively over the torrent network using sequential filenames for more anonymity maybe..um.
C) Personally I have a current need for frequently updated RSS for a certain application and I'd set up a server that my internal network clients would poll frequently. But I'd still need for one machine to know the instant things change on the web too.
D) I'm wondering if a hierarchical network of servers might be useful here to publish event notifications. UDP is lossy, and we don't want to lose any events so that's out I guess. In NTP, various strata of time servers are used and clients try to sync to Greenwich time (light data) by the best route available. In NNTP, a client usually uses only one news server to get a fat feed, and different server owners often choose to handle only a subset of what's available in the whole world, which might also be the case (try serving every event of importance to someone in the world.. what is the bandwidth needed for that? How many bits to describe it in ip-like dot format?)
Probably there is another service that does what I'd like and it just flew out my left ear, but it just seemed to me that the best thing would be to combine the lightweight NTP network which lets clients synchronize their understanding of time despite general flakiness, and the NNTP network which allows different servers to decide to serve only certain segments of the worldwide aggregated feed.
And SIP does a lot of things that might be useful. And there is MDS (metacomputing directory service for the "semantic grid" - pdf / google's html). And there's Jini..
Anyway we do want to know some things with at least one minute resolution. (A storm watch? A news headline so we can turn on the TV or video stream?) At TV stations I know people constantly are watching the TV out of the corner of their eye to see if something earth-shattering comes up. How about a chime to tell you to look instead? How else to people get First Post?;) I'd just like to beat normal notification systems for current events and website updates, for starters, based on a relatively robust and timely mechanism.
Maybe a low bandwidth network with some of these characteristics would be useful to distribute update event notifications that filter down to everyone's devces. A big company could have one or two machines consuming a global event notification thread, add events only it knows about, and serve this information on a push or pull basis to all its employees. Hmmm, tasty. Come to think of it I want something like that for another project too, Does anything already do this?
One interesting paper (2001) I found is on an emergency notification network based on subscribe/notify messages over SIP, a widespread voice over ip prot
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His comment of 2/20 is that he's looking for investment.. 20 million yen (around $200K) for phase 2 and double that to finish the entire project (phase 3). On the top page he does note he takes full responsibility for any accidents in the project which has no relationship to the movie etc. Also mentions on hearing that when applying for a grant you need to fill out about 1 mm of documents for every hundred dollar bill, that must mean for $100K you must need 1 meter??
But I would like to know 3 things.. .. And what about clothing and curving your body to produce more lift? Any [powered?] hangliders out there? Also considering there could be some kind of pressure sensors in the handles to see what the rider is doing. Just wondering..
1. Do the aerodynamics comments consider that in the movie it is ridden with the legs in the air, something like an inverted hanglider, but I expect stabilized by the thrust?
2. What kind of thrust would be needed to enable the Moewe (meh-veh.. MEV? in Japanese) wing to take off / leap into the air as quickly as in the film?
3. What kind of engine would be the lightest, most efficient thing that could do that? Wondering what this would weigh if built of carbon fiber.
I keep seeing references in the rover news about the microscopic imager, but is this really a microscope, or is it just magnifying as much as say a desktop macroscope for opaque objects (they let you see things around the size of a hair okay..? If there were things the size of microorganisms in the briny reaches, could we see them? It is impossible for the layman to look at the closeups we've been seeing and understand how big the field is.
Seriously these guys should get together with the guy who asked about how to demo his terabit bandwidth! If you suppose the Brazilians are sending 5 gig cinema files one theater at a time, he could deliver them all simultaneously, live to the audience, and not worry about replacing bad hard disks in the rain forest every week. You know it's gonna happen...
Pathfinder software archive
CLIPS
: A Tool for Building Expert Systems. Maintained by Gary Riley.
fuzzyCLIPS
Some other NASA soft:
COBWEB/3 (ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov) ?
AUTOCLASS AutoClass is an unsupervised Bayesian classification system for independent data.
PRODIGY cs.cmu.edu Integrated Planning and Learning System
Seriously this sounds like a bad idea, think of all the ill will you generate! Anyway I wonder if it is impossible to use an amplitude reversed wave to shield horizontal propagation of the boom, like sound-cancelling earphones. Then remembered the U.S. supposedly experimented with sonic weapons but (supposedly) gave up because it propagated in all directions and backfired on the troops. (Of course robots or air drops could deliver them so this could be apocryphal). I'd be surprised if neighbors couldn't sue to get them to stop these explosions, unless they are really in the boonies.
IANA physical chemist and I haven't read the article (my bad). When I first saw this I wondered if it might be better to use this catalyst in something with an amazingly high surface area like a spongy radiator, and draw air through it at high power, rather than just go for the (maybe) relatively low surface area of a house. Then I saw a quote about the porosity of the paint being useful for drawing the NO2 into it, so it seems the paint is a 3-dimensional catalytic reactor or whatever you call it. Neat!
So my question is how much actual surface area is being used, if everything happens at an air-paint interface, or if not then how much NO2 can be catalyzed per hour per volume of paint? Would it be doubled if a few coats of paint were used, etc.
Seems vulnerable to traffic analysis, as someone mentioned you don't use a combination lock that sends packets all over the world. People will want more complicated sequences, but it will take more time to send them and they may have to resend due to TCP packets coming in different order. But even so anybody on your network or the server's network should be able to see what's going on, how secure is that? And if the server ever responds to your ip from any port then you likewise hosed.
On the other hand this does seem to be an interesting way to one-way send information to the server. I was thinking of playing solitaire using Bruce Schneier's algorithm using a port for each card of a deck.
IANA cypherpunk, but there seem to be a number of ways to treat the set of all closed ports as a numerical space that would be interesting for encrypted communications.
For example you could convert a one-time pad, a private key, or a set of communication channels into a list of port numbers. For a short message at least, you could send with pretty good security (although the list of ports, if not their hash values, would be known to the outside world).
To me this knocking stuff sounds like it only *reduces* security and provides lots of interesting clues to men in the middle. The intriguing part seems to be that you can send a good deal of information through a large number of half-connections in parallel, but this may have already been tried by other people. Of course if the message is simple enough that a single ping to a single prearranged port number is enough to convey it, then you would seem to have a pretty strong system though its existence would certainly be uncovered sooner or later. But if this became popular I suppose the advantage would be in being able to assign certain ports to prearranged values, both for encryption purposes and also to reduce the amount of data you actually need to send.
Okay this is obvious bullshit, somehow Americans have come up with representatives who think they have carte blanche to promote all kinds of fascist principles. Forcing identities to be checked on whois is not going to solve anything. It's not the same as application for an SSL certificate.
As Dave Farber says, photons don't need passports.
That said, Japan has an unpopular policy which only allows a company to have a single domain, they have to pay bucks and provide stamped documentation, and it is serious. That's why everybody gets U.S. domains (ever wonder why dotcom domains are running out?). There also happens to be a law for privacy in Japan unlike the U.S., but I do not think anonymity is thought so important here (though it should be considering how corrupt everything is).
Anonymity on the Internet and finding ways to strengthen it may be one of the great things about the U.S., and as a very eloquent poster implies earlier with the Federalist Papers, one can easily imagine that fashionable ideas about security may seem quaint and trite a few years later. People with more objectivity tend to look at the U.S. today and wonder why the entire fucking value system is spontanteously undergoing a spectacular meltdown.
Hello,
I have provided technical support to these and related projects, which were initiated by journalist and MIT Media Lab member Bernard Krisher, in Cambodia from Japan for several years. However there is a limit to what I can tell you since I did not make Motoman myself and have not been to the site. Perhaps someone else on the project is seeing this, I'll also mention to the project leader.
In the past I have mentioned this project in Slashdot threads and made I think the first public presentation on it at GLOCOM in Tokyo last year. Bernie has in Cambodia created a newspaper, an orphanage, about 200 schools, a major hospital, and a telemedicine program among other things. The Princess Diana fund for landmine injuries was involved and we sold a poster from photomosaic.org. A campaign was set up to buy mosquito nets to save a family from malaria for a few bucks. This is all because Bernie Krisher now retired felt it was time to give something back to the world. He puts himself physically on the line. Also the two of us did the northkorea.org project FYI which is closed but got about a quarter million dollars during the famine (the first well publicized one) in North Korea. The design is crude but I was able to update it quickly over telnet for a number of years for nothing, and the feedback loop we made got onto CNN twice and gathered many donors.
About Cambodia: most of Cambodia has no phones, no electricity, no mail, nothing! It is really a different world, like maybe 3rd or 4th world. A lot of the things I suggested when hearing about the Motoman project from Bernie were not logistically possible, or not the most important considering the extreme focus needed to get this sort of thing going.
For example the email network is not open to the outside Internet, though at MIT there is an engine which will get search results based on emailed requests. There is no realtime email through a satellite or ham (I'd like to find out more about that if anyone is knowledgeable about ham radio in this area since I suggested it). I suggested that teachers would be able to network together on a mailing list they share, but while this might happen one day at the moment it is all administered centrally. It is extremely cool that the governor is suddenly on the email though, and they take it seriously. The people at MIT and in Cambodia have already accomplished a lot. The bikes also can be used in emergencies to get sick people or to deliver medicine. As I understand it, it is a major undertaking just to get drivers and daily issues that crop up squared away, the bikes don't even stop unless they are specially flagged to do so. But they have already I believe delivered one girl to a hospital for a serious problem.
If you have information about satellite, balloon or ham radio in the area, or about 3rd world computing (simputer and I believe there was a Laotian computer) I'd like to know (mattr atnospam telebody dotcom). Please also cc to bernie atnospam media dot mit dot edu (since my email provider is not happy and my vps is not set up yet). Also anyone can participate by making donations, for example in the cambodia schools project the world bank provides a matching donation and you get your name on a school. For a little more you can get them a solar panel and maybe computer for email, which makes it the village communications hub. And calling all geeks, your expertise may very well be welcomed if you are willing to go to Cambodia, even for a short time maybe.
As someone asked about the address, email bernie or I believe there is a camnet address, if you want to contact those villages. No bang path (though I have mentioned it, and fidonet..) Someone (andreMA) mentioned troposphere scatter. (or heck, meteor trail scatter..) if anyone has concrete information about that I'd like to know. Someone asked about pringles cans. I did a bunch of net research a while back and it looked like a Yagi antenna or any line of site tower would basically be bound by the
I was on a premed track in college, but got out of it (this is 15 yrs ago). I am now in IT and business coordination.
A lot of people say it is a dead end industry and maybe they are right, at least people seldom seem to make money decisions based on quality. HOWEVER I have to tell you that I was taking organic chemistry and wanted to be a doctor like my father. HE told me to get out of medicine because the writing was on the wall, unless I absolutely had to be a doctor. Now with the way doctors are looked down upon and have their lives run by insurance companies, combined with the seaming freedom of open source software, I can totally understand one reason the poster might want to leave medicine.
Let me just say that what I really wanted to do was nanotech but it was 10 years too early. I'd be doing bio/nano now if I was in college now. Medicine plus information technology is not at all dead, it is one of the major amazing, growing fields now. Of course if you are interested in doing medicine somewhere you don't have to join an HMO, you could move, also I can recommend you to the Sihanouk Hospital in Cambodia which a friend started and they also need good physicians.
My suggestion is to take some time to consider what you enjoy in medicine and IT, and see how they combine. Also you might be in a very good position to start a lucrative venture with programmers and get a big chunk of investment from someone. This is a HOT field. If you like the research side there are also likely opportunities. Why not spend a lot of time looking at what people are doing in bioinformatics, medical research, therapeutics, neural science, etc. Good luck and report back!
I don't get it, if up until recently XFree86 was GPL-compatible and now it suddenly isn't, why not just somebody roll back their local mirror of the CVS a week and fork it while maintaining GPL compatibility?
I have no problem with giving people credit and use XFree86. But if everybody did this any distro would suddenly get bloated with liscenses and anybody who's not a lawyer would suddenly have to start wasting a lot of time making sure it is legal, every time they do anything, forever! -That or be a scoflaw, which then makes it harder to protect the GPL.
XFree86 people must think they are superior or more critical to the open source community than other projects, or that they have no responsibility to people who have contributed thinking it would remain GPL, or that their new request is so minor that people will comply and kid themselves that it isn't important.
Now I am not an expert on XFree86 nor have I done more than read every post over 3 this time. Sorry. So, if it really was GPL, the question is how fast is a fork going to appear? I believe if you download software under a certain liscense then it cannot be changed out from under you.
I think we have long passed the point where logical conclusions can be beaten down with suggestions of weak-mindedness. Suspension of disbelief should be relegated to works of fiction.
If you stop to think logically about the history of Microsoft, it is just too much to swallow! It just isn't possible that such a team of intelligent engineers and scientists, run by the richest man in the world, could possibly have missed these things. Sheer human bloody-mindedness just can't answer for such a long-running history of security breaches intertwined with a history of utterly unethical monopolistic behavior!
Don't even start wondering about why all these worms are suspiciously un-malicious. It is way off the bell-curve.
For those not used to applying lofgic to the news, this means all these things were intentional and expected. Discovery of a backdoor and exploit by a worm is equivalent to the planned end of a product lifecycle. Guess what the product really is.
I mean, these guys must really get steamed when they have to act like bumbling idiots every time one of their "security holes" (ha-ha) makes the news! Whether or not they are due to attempts to secure ground for their corporate clients, or to directives by U.S. security organs, is quite moot as we end up at the same point. So wouldn't Microsoft stand to gain in the end by admitting these things were all intentional, and cleaning up their image as a bunch of totally incompetent nicompoops? Sheesh, how many nincompoops do you know who are laughing all the way to the bank like Microsoft does so routinely it is predictable?
I think it is only fair to Microsoft employees to exercise a bit of cold logic on their behalf. It's not like they haven't figured it out, mostly, I mean they are a bunch of smart cookies! But they are only human and probably most have families to care for, and so I think they deserve to be recognized as not total incompetents (at least half of them) but probably mostly just wage-slaves who have been bound hand and toe, just pounded into submission, to protect the image of the monolith that generates the income of the richest man on the planet. So here's to all you victims!
Obviously they should offer him 10 or 20 times what Rowe asked for it. When you spell it in languages that don't use the Roman alphabet, which is most of emdollar.com's growth market, it *looks and sounds* EXACTLY like "Microsoft".
King forgets that 35% of the world's mad scientists *live* in Tokyo and they are working on an alternate physics that will render into atoms all structures above 2 stories in locations with too many consonants.
I don't think these solutions are going to close down spammers the way I suggested in my vehement post, but they (especially Vipul's Razor I believe) have a lot of the things I was dreaming about!
Vipul's human network looks great though it seems that it might miss spam which personalizes itself per user (just a theory witout trying it, which I will) and DCC looks interesting in that it has fuzzy matching that tries to evolve with spam. Brightmail's claim of 99.999% accuracy is pretty good, I suppose it would have to have humans in there somewhere. Anyway I'll check out Vipul and see what happens.
I think it would be very cool if companies were given money by governments to develop or implement antispam technologies, in addition to the other suggestions I had. Thanks again and here's to no more spam.
Maybe Yahoo's idea will work, though it seems to be quite porous and more of a surveillance tool than an antispam measure.. in fact it is quite plausible that this is Homeland Security's wet dream and is being sold by Yahoo on their request (though that is more paranoid than we have to be).
I have a concrete proposal at the end of this post so please read on.
Anyway someone mentioned the tipping point and I am reading this after cleaning a thousand spams out of my mail folder so I am ready to consider lots of things.
But one thing is definite about all this. If these guys were terrorists planning some horror and not just an army of rotten people bent on selling viagra and insurance, they would be shut down in a heartbeat. You can follow the money! (As many people have.)
Note these datapoints:
- Telemarketers don't like getting phone bombed, as Dave Barry launched retaliation against an association of them.
- Spammers are in it for the money
- Their clients pay because they want to sell something.
- Their clients are living in meatspace and are allergic to publicity.
- Spam is by definition, easy to get since so many are sent from each machine. (In fact I get too many to even reply with "unsubscribe" to them all).
- We all see spam, but can't stop it because the spammers are laughing at us by endlessly transforming their campaigns. The helpless feeling I suppose is similar to terrorism in that there is a feeling of a nebulous enemy profiting by your openness, there is nothing to grab hold of.
- People are willing to pay money to stop spam.
- Homeland security (probably) and the NSA and similar national organizations (definitely), and telcos and isps (of course) are sitting in front of the big routers around the world. This information can be coordinated.
- Some big organization wants a steganography analyzer built quickly (recent slashdot story)
From this and a bit of blue skying and paranoia, I get:
1. Spam, which is subtly personalized and includes photos and hyperlinks, could be used as a communications network by terrorists, so definitely falls under the national security bailiwick. Ditto for viruses and worms, though they are maybe too visible.
2. Though maybe it is better to unlock the messages than to stop spam, from a security standpoint.
3. Certainly it is possible to make transparent who exactly is sending spam, and how the money flows from their clients. Both by surveillance and of course just trying to buy some of their services.
4. If it isn't illegal, they can't be put out of business and so long as they have clients, it is a "business opportunity".
5. But by focussing the anger of thousands of people on each client and detected spammer, this lucrative business can be turned into a financially losing proposition.
6. Finally, if we make it impossible for their clients to sell their wares, there will be no point to spamming. This suggests that rather than trying to secure all of the honest email, we should focus on removing spam from the network. I don't think blackholes work, however it is quite possible that a finer granularity and more intelligence might work. (See below)
So I welcome technical fixes against spam but think they should more involve information sharing than an attempt to cryptographically secure the email network, since the power of email is fundamentally that it is so easy to use.
I would propose that a group of people are selected around the world to manually go through their incoming email and note which emails are spam, preferably qualifying what type it is and using some simple tools to also note whether this is the work of nefarious arch-spammer types that play tricks on you, as opposed to honest mailing lists. It should be an open architecture which allows more than one organization to do the grading. Perhaps one will only filter porn, etc. I believe some large antivirus companies do something a little bit like this on an automated level to learn about thre
I was called in to talk about my final paper which apparently disturbed her, as not being up to my normal participation. In fact it was a closely argued at least 30 pages which ended up that most of this is bullshit. She had given me an F on it, but changed it to an A because as she told me, she agreed.
Obviously this is a developing field. The best models seem to use phrases from the original text, anyway the Mac OSX example above shows that it is useful to users willing to take it with a massive grain of salt, even if we are not into full computational sentience yet.
When it works even a little better it will replace all those awful grade school teachers who assign paraphrasing as a homework assignment. The reporters who might have been replaced by it will have already lost their jobs, except for the ones in AhaIndia of course who will paraphrase for the rest of us, usually at a marginally better level than the machine.
The research is interesting - and I'd like to understand Barzilay's notation is that APL or calculus of statement? - in the paper (pdf) I found on google. Also see the papers on her site.
Of course structured text is easier, and news stories are known to have most of the meat in the beginning, but this is great stuff.
One interesting older system is ThoughtTreasure which was built to understand a story and answer questions about it. The author also did work on news analysis ("NewsForms") too. There are tools out there, I've been making a survey myself too. If anyone has information about practical NLP tools for real world tasks please post.
Is the new kernel going to reach/exceed this level of performance for the desktop? This would be a big thing for the corporate desktop feel too, plus for me. Not that it is really important but can you play multiple movies and do other tasks without jumping? SGI Irix didn't used to be able to do that on even high end machines, don't know about now (well they will be running 2.6 I suppose..). I'd like to know if a modern distro will run in a sane manner for a gui desktop on 128MB of memory, (yeah I'll get more memory but..) and to know if I should make sure to put 2.6 on systems that need it (I'm thinking about a server which will do both I/O and visualization).
Well I've often read stories about the heroism of NASA engineers (and probably other countries have their own share but not as good PR) in which they save space probes via radioed commands. Only problem is it is having trouble on the surface of a planet and at least to the nonexperts it sounds like that means it was cracked up. But you know the power is probably still running, it is very possibly somewhere between a total disaster and a working probe. Time will tell.. and maybe later probes.
What do you want us to do about it from here? Obviously if they fire you based on untrue allegations and use this to limit your severance pay you could threaten to fight it, especially if this damages your ablility to get a job. (Maybe first try to get a job, get turned down, Profit..)
Bottom line though is you can thank your lucky stars you aren't wasting any more of your vital energy on such a shit company. Get even by getting a better job somewhere. If this is how they really do business they may not be around for so long. If you really are pissed why not get in touch with everyone who's been fired in the past year and get their stories too.
I hope the spacecraft does well. I also wish it was possible to read an honest science story without the jabs from left field. Lost their edge? This is based on who's historical revisionism?
Is it rocket science for Slashdot to hire editors who would be considered satisfactory for any other publication to ensure that thousands of people do not have to have a moment of pristine delight spoiled by an editorial policy that rewards knee-jerk jingoism? And how is this even calculated when hours earlier photos were shown from the incredible Spitzer Telescope, which took off from the Cape Canaveral launch facility after being built between the U.S., U.K., and the Netherlands?
It's a simple backhanded comment like this that obviously makes a lot of people feel like they're being fed shit when they could be spending their energy more productively. Geek editor you are unfortunately thy worst enemy. Poster, keep it in your pants! Slashdot, please quickly hire some talent, dudes!
This is pretty cool, I guess Honda's on the run! (Sorry)
QRIO sounds like "Curio" i.e. Curious. Actually it means "Quest for Curiosity" and QRIO is also the name of a tiny Aibo-like robot Sony made in 2000 with the same exterior form. The big running robot was apparently called the SDR Series but after many changes (and names?) it got christened the QRIO as the little guy's successor. So I guess you could buy the little one and imagine it is similar to the big one.. it has some of the same technology too.
The interesting part is that the robot is really running, although not with the big strides you normally expect in human running. As opposed to walking there is actually a short timespan when both feet are in the air (20-40 milliseconds). When it lands it is really loud and you really feel like it is running. Also it is able to grab things so it can run with a ball, do a Japanese fan dance, etc. Apparently it can also get programmed to do tons of really hokey gestures.
Here are a couple links and finally a translation I made.
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/200312/0 3- 060E/ A separate English press release on the big one
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/QRIO/ English letter from CEO with a complex Flash-based piece about QRIO (the small one), its technology, inventor, visits around the world. There is a picture of a hand knocking it over (it can get up which is cool) and the technology section is actually pretty interesting. Actually it is really confusing since you can't tell how big these things are in pictures all the time, I thought at first that this was about the big robot! The small robot uses a special actuator technology which lets it move and dance fluidly, no idea if the big one has this too.
Translation of http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2003/1218/sony. htm
Latest News 12/18
QRIO Ran! Introducing the QRIO, Evolved by Sony
- Acheiving the first running bipedal robot in the world -
Announced Dec. 18
On the 18th, Sony held a press conference showcasing the new technology behind their bipedal robot. There, Sony announced QRIO which has newly evolved from the bipedal walking of the past into a "running robot".
QRIO is a miniature humanoid robot announced in 2000 which could walk on its two feet. At the time it was called the "SDR Series", but afterwards went through various improvements and was renamed the QRIO in September 2003.
Toshitada Doi, Executive Vice President (photo)
The technology announced today enable walking, jumping, and cruising around. According to Sony Executive Vice President Toshitada Doi, "There is a harsh competition going on around the world in getting bipedal robots to run, but the QRIO is the first standalone robot with its own control and power systems in the world that has succeeded in running."
"Running" is defined as "leg-powered change of position including an airborne state in which both of the robot's legs leave the ground". In fact with the QRIO, there exists an instant of floating in the air that lasts about 20ms when walking and about 40ms when running.
Aside from basic movement straight ahead, it can also run from side to side and in a circular fashion. Also, from a standstill it can seamlessly change its movement for example walking -> running -> jumping.
According to Mr. Yoshihiro Kuroki of [Sony's] Entertainment Robot Company, in order to carry out the bodily control for walking and jumping, high performance control of sensors which measure its situation, road surface adjustment, adjustment to deal with external forces, shock absorption control and so on.. but from a mechanical standpoint it is apparently not greatly different from the old QRIO. Looking at the announced robot from the outside, one could not tell the difference from the old one.
(illustration captions)
1. A graph measuring the force on the floor. When jumping and running there is, though slight, a length of time in which t
Also Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneaux developed a while ago another Siggraph-shown art project called A-Volve. I think their server can take it.. Also here you can see the drawing screen. You make fish by drawing the schematic and they swim in a crt under real water.. and have kids who look and act a bit like the parents! Nice people too. See the interaction and a bigger picture. They also developed gesture recognition based projects and were at NTT's ATR lab in Kyoto. Now I think still at IAMAS in Gifu, Japan. This maybe precedes Igarashi's work though his is also great stuff.
A) Sounds nice, but even without a torrent, using an open source hash algorithm (client and server agree on how to calculate the hash) would provide a way for the client to only download the hash value itself to check for freshness.
This way,
1 the author knows how many people have consumed the data and their general geographic distribution.
2 the author can make a decision to stop publication, which problematic but at any rate easier to enforce than if he or she starts out authorizing a torrent.
3 the author is free to pay for bandwidth if he or she will happily serve one per user just not a zillion per poller.
B) To be sure, it is easy to see who publishes an RSS feed / incites a Torrent download over somebody's infrastructure, whereas it is not so easy to discover the identity of an anonymous coward. You could also publish a pseudo-RSS feed itself exclusively over the torrent network using sequential filenames for more anonymity maybe..um.
C) Personally I have a current need for frequently updated RSS for a certain application and I'd set up a server that my internal network clients would poll frequently. But I'd still need for one machine to know the instant things change on the web too.
D) I'm wondering if a hierarchical network of servers might be useful here to publish event notifications. UDP is lossy, and we don't want to lose any events so that's out I guess. In NTP, various strata of time servers are used and clients try to sync to Greenwich time (light data) by the best route available. In NNTP, a client usually uses only one news server to get a fat feed, and different server owners often choose to handle only a subset of what's available in the whole world, which might also be the case (try serving every event of importance to someone in the world.. what is the bandwidth needed for that? How many bits to describe it in ip-like dot format?)
Probably there is another service that does what I'd like and it just flew out my left ear, but it just seemed to me that the best thing would be to combine the lightweight NTP network which lets clients synchronize their understanding of time despite general flakiness, and the NNTP network which allows different servers to decide to serve only certain segments of the worldwide aggregated feed.
And SIP does a lot of things that might be useful. And there is MDS (metacomputing directory service for the "semantic grid" - pdf / google's html). And there's Jini ..
Anyway we do want to know some things with at least one minute resolution. (A storm watch? A news headline so we can turn on the TV or video stream?) At TV stations I know people constantly are watching the TV out of the corner of their eye to see if something earth-shattering comes up. How about a chime to tell you to look instead? How else to people get First Post? ;) I'd just like to beat normal notification systems for current events and website updates, for starters, based on a relatively robust and timely mechanism.
Maybe a low bandwidth network with some of these characteristics would be useful to distribute update event notifications that filter down to everyone's devces. A big company could have one or two machines consuming a global event notification thread, add events only it knows about, and serve this information on a push or pull basis to all its employees. Hmmm, tasty. Come to think of it I want something like that for another project too, Does anything already do this?
One interesting paper (2001) I found is on an emergency notification network based on subscribe/notify messages over SIP, a widespread voice over ip prot