RE: MIT student arrested for entering Boston airport with art project
Topic: Miscellaneous
3:15 pm EDT, Sep 21, 2007
Decius wrote:
She's extremely lucky she followed the instructions or deadly force would have been used," Pare told The Associated Press. "And she's lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue."
The quote above is a Massachusetts State Police Officer publicly threatening to murder an MIT student who accidentally showed up at the airport wearing an electronic art project. She has, yet again, been charged with carrying out a hoax. Remember kids, anytime a Massachusetts police officer is confused, its your fault for confusing them, and not theirs for being fucking stupid and paranoid, and you are likely to go to prison or worse if it happens.
Mint allows you to view all of your banking and credit card transactions side-by-side, making identifying all of your transactions much easier and faster than ever before.
How does this help you? We make it easy for you to track down erroneous charges or bank fees, and keep a closer eye on your money.
Mint even lets you label your transactions so you know what bills you need to split with your friends or roommates, know which ones need to be reimbursed for your company, and more.
Digg has begun its major site overhaul with the launch of new social networking features that make it possible to promote stories within a small circle of friends rather than the community at large.
Memestreams Circles...
In an effort to avoid a tyranny of the new majority, Digg’s new social features allow you to set up a group of friends and promote stories within the group, so you friends will see what’s important to you, even if it never makes the front page of Digg.
Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo. Curious about that speck in corner? Dive into a freefall and watch as the speck becomes a gargoyle. With an unpleasant grimace. And an ant-sized chip in its lower left molar. "Perhaps the most amazing demo I've seen this year," wrote Ethan Zuckerman, after TED2007. Indeed, Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images.
SeaDragon and Photosynth are amazing pieces of software. Blaise envisions that all the related images on the internet can be linked together based on the semantic information contained in the individual images. Imagine what that could do for local navigation.
I want the high res image zoom technology on my cell phone and I want the related images environment to be my next option of online street view maps.
Leck mich im Arsch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Topic: Arts
11:26 am EDT, Sep 12, 2007
Leck mich im Arsch (English: Lick My Ass) is a canon in B-flat major composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, K. 231 (K382c), with lyrics in German. It was one of a set of at least six canons probably written in Vienna in 1782. Sung by six voices as a three-part round, it is thought to be a party piece for his friends.
The song's title and lyrics are a reference to anal-oral contact, and may be more idiomatically translated as "kiss my ass" or "get stuffed". They have been used as evidence to support the contention that Mozart had Tourette syndrome.
Cellular freedom: bill would cut early termination fees, hidden charges
Topic: Society
12:42 pm EDT, Sep 11, 2007
Sen. Klobuchar believes that the bill would bring much-needed change to the cellular industry. "The rules governing our wireless industry are a relic of the 1980s, when cell phones were a luxury item that fit in a briefcase instead of a pocket," Sen. Klobuchar said in a statement. "Early termination fees are a family budget-buster; families should be able to terminate service without outrageous fees; know if their cell phone will work on their drives and in their home and office; and understand what to expect in their monthly bills once you pile on charges and fees. It's a simple matter of fairness."
I was just discussing with a friend last week how locking cell phones should be illegal. Hopefully some changes are put in place soon.
Automated email-based password reestablishment (EBPR) is an efficient, cost-effective means to deal with forgotten passwords. In this technique, email providers authenticate users on behalf of web sites. This method works because web sites trust email providers to deliver messages to their intended recipients. Simple Authentication for the Web (SAW) improves upon this basic approach to user authentication to create an alternative to password-based logins. SAW: 1) Removes the setup and management costs of passwords at sites that accept the risks of EBPR; 2) Provides single sign-on without a specialized identity provider; 3) Thwarts all passive attacks.
Bandwidth could become a form of "currency" with users paying for downloaded files by uploading more data themselves, researchers say.
The goal is to ensure that future content, particularly video, is distributed as fairly and efficiently as possible.
Computer scientists have have used the idea to develop peer-to-peer file-sharing software, which they are asking computer users to try out. They hope eventually to create a "global marketplace in bandwidth", where people can trade it as a commodity.
The researchers' free software, called Tribler, uses a modified version of the popular BitTorrent file-trading algorithm.
P2P is a legitimate model for data transfer. It wasn't so long ago that it had a bad connotation. However now, more and more companies are embracing it all the time. Ala system.net.peertopeer.
Vaughan Pratt presented "Top Down Operator Precedence" at the first annual Principles of Programming Languages Symposium in Boston in 1973. In the paper Pratt described a parsing technique that combines the best properties of Recursive Descent and Floyd's Operator Precedence. It is easy to use. It feels a lot like Recursive Descent, but with the need for less code and with significantly better performance. He claimed the technique is simple to understand, trivial to implement, easy to use, extremely efficient, and very flexible. It is dynamic, providing support for truly extensible languages.
Oddly enough, such an obviously utopian approach to compiler construction is completely neglected today. Why is this? Pratt suggested in the paper that a preoccupation with BNF grammars and their various offspring, along with their related automata and theorems, has precluded development in directions that are not visibly in the domain of automata theory.
