Dead Racists Society

In America, we have the government create and release a free computer game about the army. In Soviet Russia, computers make a game out of the army.

No, wait.

In China, they create a game about torturing and executing corrupt government officials:

An online game in which players can torture and kill corrupt officials that Chinese authorities set up to teach people about the perils of graft is a roaring success, state media said today.

"Incorruptible Fighter", developed by the government of east China's Zhejiang province, was launched just over a week ago and has been downloaded more than 100,000 times, the Southern Metropolitan Daily reported.

...

The game, which lets players get ahead by killing officials by means of "weapons, magic or torture," is based on well-known incidents taken from Chinese history.

But the parallels in modern China of people struggling against seemingly insurmountable corruption are clear.

To advance to a new level, the player must enter an "Anti-Corruption College" to be lectured in more detail about ancient cases, the Southeast Business newspaper said.

The game is so popular that the server it was on crashed.

I'm not entirely sure I understand this article, but it seems that there were (at least) two competing theories for how an infant learns sounds: one said that it was hard-wired in the brain, and another said that the child picks it up. Well, apparently someone made a computer program modeled off a child's learning patterns, and discovered that the computer picked up vowel sounds as well as the child did, giving some credence to the latter theory.

"The debate in language acquisition is around the question of how much specific information about language is hard-wired into the brain of the infant and how much of the knowledge that infants acquire about language is something that can be explained by relatively general purpose learning systems," said James McClelland, a psychology professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

McClelland says his computer program supports the theory that babies systematically sort through sounds until they understand the structure of a language.

"The problem the child confronts is how many categories are there and how should I think about it. We're trying to propose a method that solves that problem," said McClelland, whose work appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Expanding on some existing ideas, he and a team of international researchers developed a computer model that resembles the brain processes a baby uses when learning about speech.

He and colleagues tested their model by exposing it to "training sessions" that consisted of analyzing recorded speech in both English and Japanese between mothers and babies in a lab.

What they found is the computer was able to learn basic vowel sounds right along with baby.

A computer, Chinook, has perfected the game of checkers:

An invincible checkers-playing program named Chinook has solved a game whose origins date back several millennia, scientists reported Thursday on the journal Science's Web site. By playing out every possible move — about 500 billion billion in all — the computer proved it can never be beaten. Even if its opponent also played flawlessly, the outcome would be a draw.

Chinook, created by computer scientists from the University of Alberta in 1989, wrapped up its work less than three months ago. In doing so, its programmers say the newly crowned checkers king has solved the most challenging game yet cracked by a machine — even outdoing the chess-playing wizardry of IBM's Deep Blue.

...

Checkers — or draughts, as the game is known in Britain — is played on a board of 64 dark and light squares, though each opponent's 12 game pieces are allowed to move only diagonally along the dark squares. Chinook was not designed to "think" through all permitted strategies on its own but to memorize the consequences of every possible move, allowing it map out a start-to-finish strategy that would, at worst, result in a draw.

With assistance from some of the world's best checkers players, Schaeffer and his team introduced rules of thumb into their massive computer program and then allowed it to capture information about winning and losing moves, tweaking it along the way. In building the database, the program assembled the 39 trillion pieces of information needed to determine all possible outcomes when 10 or fewer checkers remain on the board.

Next, the team built a database of beginning moves that would eventually lead players to the endgame. The final challenge was to forge tight links between the game's start and finish.

"The whole strategy in solving a game is to shrink that middle part until it disappears, so your beginning game and your end game connect," Littman said.

On April 29, Chinook did exactly that when it determined that perfect play by both sides would always lead to a draw.

I think it's clear that the next step is global domination. We have no choice but to surrender to our robot, checkers-playing overlords.

A German man who threw his computer out the window in the middle of the night got nothing but sympathy from the police:

Police in the northern city of Hanover said they would not press charges after responding to calls made by residents in an apartment block who were woken by a loud crash in the early hours of Saturday.

Officers found the street and pavement covered in electronic parts and discovered who the culprit was.

Asked what had driven him to the night-time outburst, the 51-year-old man said he had simply got annoyed with his computer.

"Who hasn't felt like doing that?" said a police spokesman.

A while ago, Terry Pratchett had to switch publishing companies for the people putting out his books in Germany from Heyne to Goldmann. The reason? They were inserting ads into the copy:

"There were a number of reasons for switching to Goldmann, but a deeply personal one for me was the way Heyne (in Sourcery, I think, although it may have been in other books) inserted a soup advert in the text ... a few black lines and then something like 'Around about now our heroes must be pretty hungry and what better than a nourishing bowl'... etc, etc.

My editor was pretty sick about it, but the company wouldn't promise not to do it again, so that made it very easy to leave them. They did it to Iain Banks, too, and apparently at a con he tore out the offending page and ate it. Without croutons."

That website has a scan of the offending book here. And a commenter here says that this also happened to German translations of Star Trek novels.

Why do I bring this up? Because it seems that this power may also now be in the hands of ISPs:

Texas based ISP Redmoon has implemented software that hijacks pages being visited by their customers by placing Redmoon's own ads on these pages.

The technology is provided by NebuAD, which boasts that ISP delivered advertisements are an untapped source of revenue.

Every single web site owner is affected by NebuAD's technology: whether a site is running ads or not makes no difference, Customers of any ISP evil enough to run NebuAD's platform are going to see ads on every page on every site; ads that don’t benefit the content creator. It is important to note that these ads are NOT pop-ups, and this is not a free internet service; the ads are served as if they were part of the page, to paying internet customers who are NOT made aware that these ads have been inserted by their ISP.

Julie Amero is a substitute teacher in Connecticut. Apparently during one seventh-grade class, her computer popped up with dozens of pornographic images, which the kids saw and reported. She was convicted of "four felony counts of 'injury or risk of injury to, or impairing morals of, children.'" Each count has a maximum sentence of ten years in prison.

The defense tried arguing that a great deal of malware was responsible for the flood of pornographic pop-ups--a possibility the police didn't even check. Their expert witness, Herb Horner, determined "that the machine had been infected with multiple pieces of malicious software before she arrived at the school, and that these hidden programs were responsible for the pornographic deluge." The expert witness for the prosecution, Detective Mark Lounsbury, "a computer crimes officer at the Norwich Police Department", ran a program called ComputerCOP Pro to analyze the activity of the machine Ms. Amero was using. He countered that Ms. Amero was clearly guilty because--get this--the computer visited porn websites.

ComputerCOP scans the hard drive and reports on when each file was created or modified. Lounsbury says he is satisfied that Amero intentionally viewed porn in class because the logs show that her computer accessed various inappropriate sites while she was sitting at the computer.

"I take that at face value," Lounsbury told Alternet. "It's evidence. It speaks for itself. The pop-up defense is a Twinkie defense."

Lounsbury said that Amero must have navigated to pornographic sites in order to have infected her computer with obscene popups. "You've got to get that ball rolling," he said.

That defense transforms this from tragedy to farce. I am personally offended by that statement.

The article specifies that ComputerCOP "is not designed to definitively distinguish between user-generated clicks and the effects of malware." Saying that the computer "accessed various inappropriate sites while she was sitting at the computer" means nothing other than that porn popped up on the screen, which nobody has denied. Obviously the computer visited these sites, but that doesn't mean that Ms. Amero did so herself. On the contrary, Horner discovered that a "program called Pasco showed that malware had automatically redirected Amero's browser. Horner stressed that this particular form of hijacking is invisible to ComputerCOP Pro."

Via Tom Tomorrow

Well, it took me all of yesterday and several hours of today, but I created a program that will automatically download pages from GoogleBooks to my hard drive. Several hours spent to be able to download three hundred pages in a matter of moments. Well, okay, I only downloaded the 188 pages of The Negro at Home that I didn't download previously, but still.

Although this will just add to the great amounts of books I don't have time to read....

Being really cool IS one of the perks of being a computer scientist

And I find this comic hilarious, even though it is, technically, wrong.

Or Microsoft Dance Dance Office:

Ever feel like you're not making good enough use of your feet when you're catching up on your e-mail or sorting through all those digital pictures you took on that last vacation?

Computer scientists in Microsoft 's research division have developed a colour-coded "dance pad" with buttons you can tap with your feet - or jump on - to scroll through electronic files.

It may never make it to store shelves, but then again, Microsoft spends billions every year researching far-out technologies without worrying about whether every gizmo will sell.

This week the software giant held its annual internal trade show where hundreds of researchers were showing off their work. The "Step User Interface" technology was one of the concepts available for a sneak peek.

"This is just one off-the-shelf piece of hardware we can use," A.J. Brush, the lead researcher on the project, said after demonstrating the technology. "Now we're looking at broadening, thinking about accelerometers or other things you could strap onto your feet so you really could be just sitting at your desk and kicking your email away under the desk."

Best product description ever.

Sony patents 'real-life Matrix'

I think I speak for Jason when I say, "SKYNET!!"

Minesweeper is NP-Complete

Which means that I might have an infinitesimal chance of solving the problem after all.

In addition to these proof techniques, I have devised one of my own: Proof by Divination. I used it to show one of my algorithms would work correctly in my latest CS 381 homework; the proof went like this:

"Yea, and the Lord God spaketh unto Jeremiah; and He looked unto the method and saw that it was good."

In my CS 251 class, we cover various data structures of use in programming: trees, graphs, queues, stacks, etc. So oftentimes the professor will draw an example of how we might envision one of these data structures on the blackboard, and he'll occasionally ask the class to give him numbers to fill into the nodes. The first time he called on me, I said "pi". The second time, I said "e".

He doesn't call on me anymore.

---

And now, it's time for...
Duck's Classroom Corner
-with Professor Duck

Today, Duck will prove to you that 2ⁿ = 0, where n is any natural number.

First off, we know that 2ⁿ - 1 = 2⁰ + 2¹ + 2² + 2³ + ... + 2^{n - 2} + 2^{n - 1}
In binary, the i^th bit of a bitstring, starting at 0 and from the rightmost bit, is equal to 2ⁱ. Therefore, the righthand side of the equation becomes the bitstring 1111...11

But! In binary, the most significant (or left-most) bit is known as the sign bit, meaning that it indicates whether the number is positive or negative. Let's show our bitstring again, with the most significant bit highlighted:
     1111...11
Since the most significant bit is 1, this number is clearly negative. But negative what? To negate a two's-complement binary number, you invert every bit and add 1 to the result. Let's investigate further:
     1111...11 <= What we started with
     0000...00 <= After inverting each bit
     0000...01 <= After adding 1

So we see that the negative of 1111...11 is just 1; therefore, 1111...11 = -1.
But recalling our previous equality, we know that 2ⁿ - 1 = 1111...11, and by the transitive property of equality, we know therefore that 2ⁿ - 1 = -1.

After adding one to both sides, we arrive at our final result:
     2ⁿ = 0

Next class, Duck proves that the total number of dead in the Holocaust was also 0... or, as Duck might say, 2ⁿ.

---

Debora, you might want to stop reading at this point.




Y'all should visit this site.
Where else could you find a woman telling you that John Kerry eats fetal stems cells, will kill every unborn child in the world, will kill every newborn male of the Hebrews, and will elect activist judges like Saddam Hussein to the Supreme Court? That's something the liberal media won't report!
Nor do they seem to be making widely known the massive ignorance (or possibly denial) of Bush's constituency.

Updated Signs that You're a Hopeless CS Major:

You refer to dice as random-number generators.
You start coding in your head.
...before you get out of bed.
You watch the Animatrix and cringe at their programming fallacies.
You hear people talking about 'getting head' and 'getting tail' and you think they're talking about linked lists.
...and you jump into the conversation.
...enthusiastically.
...and don't understand why they're giving you such weird looks.
You think the phrase 'getting to third base' means 'converting decimal to trinary'.
You hear there's going to be a lecture on STD's and think it's about the ANSI standard.
You don't understand what the big deal is when you hear about parents forking children.
You precede all notes to yourself with two front-slashes.
You understand all the items in this list.

Updated Signs that You're a Hopeless CS Major:
You refer to dice as random-number generators.
You start coding in your head.
...before you get out of bed.
You watch the Animatrix and cringe at their programming fallacies.
You hear people talking about 'getting head' and 'getting tail' and you think they're talking about linked lists.
...and you jump into the conversation.
...enthusiastically.
...and don't understand why they're giving you such weird looks.
You think the phrase 'getting to third base' means 'converting decimal to trinary'.
You hear there's going to be a lecture on STD's and think it's about the ANSI standard.

When I told Henry that last one, he gave me a blank stare and said, "Well, what else would it be about?"

Or maybe just my CS 290 professor.

We have several programming projects throughout the year--I believe six in all--and we currently are (supposed to be) working on the second one. Someone e-mailed Professor Brylow asking about the possibilities of an organized errata page, in order to list changes to the specs when mistakes are found in the projects. This was very useful last semester in CS 180.

The professor replied, rather arrogantly, "I haven't had any projects that required errata since the mid 90's. I intend to have none this semester." Both statements, he informed us, were true.

On Wednesday he came into the lecture hall, lit up the projector, and wrote "APOLOGY" at the top, and underneath that "4 BUGS". We had found four bugs in the sample executable the TA's had written and given to us to emulate.

The professor had printed out his e-mail and read it aloud to a class of 110 students, then proceeded to tear up the paper and literally eat his words.

Yes. Definitely love Professor Brylow.

Updated Signs that You're a Hopeless CS Major:
You refer to dice as random-number generators.
You start coding in your head.
...before you get out of bed.
You watch the Animatrix and cringe at their programming fallacies.
You hear people talking about 'getting head' and 'getting tail' and you think they're talking about linked lists.
...and you jump into the conversation.
...enthusiastically.
...and don't understand why they're giving you such weird looks.
You think the phrase 'getting to third base' means 'converting decimal to trinary'.

*sighs* Well, someone asked me to post in here, and everyone knows that I have no free will, so here I am.

Some things people may not know is that I'm majoring in Computer Science currently. And I realized today that there is no hope for me. Why, you ask? Well, if you have to ask, you probably don't know me very well, so why the hell are you reading this? Shoo!

Signs that You're a Hopeless CS Major:
You refer to dice as random-number generators.
You start coding in your head.
...before you get out of bed.
You watch the Animatrix and cringe at their programming fallacies.
You hear people talking about 'getting head' and 'getting tail' and you think they're talking about linked lists.
...and you jump into the conversation.
...enthusiastically.
...and don't understand why they're giving you such weird looks.