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Education

University of Florida Eliminates Computer Science Department 628

Posted by timothy from the gator-fans-on-the-line dept.
DustyShadow writes "The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.7 million. The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered remnants into other departments. Students at UF have already organized protests, and have created a website dedicated to saving the CS department. Several distinguished computer scientists have written to the president of UF to express their concerns, in very blunt terms. Prof. Zvi Galil, Dean of Computing at Georgia Tech, is 'amazed, shocked, and angered.' Prof. S.N. Maheshwari, former Dean of Engineering at IIT Delhi, calls this move 'outrageously wrong.' Computer scientist Carl de Boor, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and winner of the 2003 National Medal of Science, asked the UF president 'What were you thinking?'"
Encryption

Blazing Fast Password Recovery With New ATI Cards 215

Posted by CmdrTaco from the feel-safe-yet dept.
An anonymous reader writes "ElcomSoft accelerates the recovery of Wi-Fi passwords and password-protected iPhone and iPod backups by using ATI video cards. The support of ATI Radeon 5000 series video accelerators allows ElcomSoft to perform password recovery up to 20 times faster compared to Intel top of the line quad-core CPUs, and up to two times faster compared to enterprise-level NVIDIA Tesla solutions. Benchmarks performed by ElcomSoft demonstrate that ATI Radeon HD5970 accelerated password recovery works up to 20 times faster than Core i7-960, Intel's current top of the line CPU unit."

Comment Thought Probes (Score 1) 1021

by Ogre-On (#29650775) Attached to: What Belongs In a High School Sci-Fi/Fantasy Lit Class?
If you pick up the (unfortunately out of print) philosophy texbook Thought Probes, you'll find several excellent short stories, together with good commentary on their philosophical implications. It includes "The Cold Equations," "Cloak of Anarchy," "The Star," and numerous other excellent, substantial, reasonably short texts and the commentaries are thought provoking for the teacher as well as students.
The Internet

Kazaa Founder Wants Us To Find "Legitimate" Files 75

Posted by timothy from the how-very-thoughtful-to-take-notice dept.
Just because I'm an writes "The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Kevin Bermeister and Michael Speck have been developing technology to return search results on file sharing programs that point to pay-for content from the copyright holders. The article reports that there are trials planned for Australian ISPs, with interest from elsewhere on the globe."

Comment Melancholy Elephants (Score 1) 547

by Ogre-On (#19200097) Attached to: The Case For Perpetual Copyright

They say elephants never forget... and have you ever seen an elephant who looked happy?

In Spider Robinson's short story "Melancholy Elephants," he points out a huge problem with perpetual (or even lengthy) copyright, coupled with perpetual storage (memory). It stifles innovation, and worse, leads to stagnation in the arts.

There are a finite number of aesthetically pleasing ways to arrange a finite number of notes, a finite number of colored pigments, or a finite number of words. Remember the monkeys and Shakespeare? Without intending to -- without ever having been exposed to an earlier work -- it is quite possible that portions of a new creative work will substantially resemble portions of an earlier work. And that's enough to qualify as plagiarism.

Shakespeare's work was "substantially similar" to other, already-existing creative works... suppose he'd been subject to litigation for that?

We need to be able to forget.

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