If you cannot sell, give it for free?

Is this one of those things?

Jasper offers free verification planning tool
Dylan McGrath
EE Times (08/30/2006 5:54 PM EDT)
SAN FRANCISCO — Verification-focused EDA startup Jasper Design Automation is making available a free tool for tracking the progress of verification plans, the company said Wednesday (Aug. 30).

Torture

Article 5 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights states "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment". According to wikipedia, this was adopted by United Nations (a.k.a UN) in 1948. I guess, since the inception of Article-5, it has been violated by almost every country in the world....ok maybe Switzerland did not violate it, yet.


A friend of mine indirectly encouraged me to look for torture literature on wikipedia. Here is a line from wiki entry on torture which is very fascinating and to some extent I would believe in that....


" In the Roman Republic, for example, a slave's testimony was admissible only if it was extracted by torture, on the assumption that slaves could not be trusted to reveal the truth voluntarily."

Although, this one I found quite stupid..."In medieval Europe, Often, defendants sentenced to death would be tortured prior to execution, so as to have a last chance that they disclose the names of their accomplices."

This is a good website about different torture techniques used all over the world. The background color of this website make the reading a little exciting.
"http://www.angelfire.com/darkside/forgottendreams/Tools.html"

California

If you are not doing anything in your life and the weather itself is not changing..life would be so boring. Perhaps thats why, this state have some of the most dynamic people in the country; otherwise this unchanging weather will kill you.

A Clone of me, in a parallel universe

Here is an interesting argument to prove that, somewhere far, far away, there is a planet which has life. It has humans and animals just like they are on earth. Not just that, It further goes to argue that, in some other planet, somewhere far away, there is an exact replica of myself, writting this, right now!!

Assumptions: The space is infinite, which has been proved to some extent by experimental data of cosmic rays detection.

Argument: The basic argument is, in an infinite space, anything is possible!!

In particular, what is the probability that life exists on another planet. It is some number which is not zero but infinitely small and very close to zero. But, since space is infinite, the probability of life in another planet approaches one. Another ways to see it, in a sample space where infinite number of events can happen, the probability of any arbitrary event happening, out of infinite events is "1". So If I pick that event to be, life exist somewhere else. In an infinite space, it surely is true.

Still not convinced, ok try this: Imagine in a bag, there are infinite number of balls with different weights. What is the probability that at least one ball in that bag weighs 1 pound?

Monte Carlo Methods

Monte Carlo simultion method is a technique to find numerical data for the behavior of a system (like variability, reliability, success rate, blah blah blah), where the exact computation of such data through analytical means is impossible. Such cases might arise in multi-variable equation, each with different probability distribution.

Now, from one of the best books on this method, this is what the author wrote on the first page.

"Monte Carlo is an extremely bad method, it should be used only when all alternate methods are worse"

Interesting, isn't it?