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You're making an assumption.

This cuts through the possibility of infinite regression, and also hints at a way of testing whether a universe is simulated. I personally have serious doubts that our universe, with its demonstrable complexity, could be simulated, since the simulator would have to be several orders of magnitude more complex, to be able to store the state of all particles.

There is a possible escape, mentioned in The Matrix, which is that the simulator "cheats" by not simulating to the same level of detail in all areas. Maybe Bishop Berkeley had the right idea to ask "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?". If the simulator cheats, then maybe not all falling trees do make a sound.

Translated into physics, this would mean that some unobserved actions might not totally follow the same laws as observed actions. I'll let the Quantum Mechanics experts see how well this fits their observations. If anything, I feel QM disproves the cheating simulator - since an observed particle with collapsed wave function needs less information to describe it than an uncollapsed set of possibilities. But maybe our universe needs more stress-testing to see if the simulation breaks down.

Anyway, our planet already contains 6,337,052,626 separate universes, and counting...

cd /usr/src/linux && make mrproper && make menuconfig

make clean && make dep && make bzImage && make modules && mv /boot/bzImage /boot/bzImage.old && mv /lib/modules/SOMETHING /lib/modules/SOMETHING-old && make modules_install && mv /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot

/sbin/lilo

modprobe usb-visor

I agree with the AC. But you can get most of Greek philosophy online.

You can get Plato's Republic online from project Gutenberg:

Gutenberg Etext

Book VII contains the allegory of the cave. This describes people who live in a deep cave seeing only shadows of the real world outside as things pass in front of the cave. These people, knowing nothing else, believe the shadows are the real things. Plato says that what we consider real are shadows of a higher reality. An accomplished philosopher can see beyond the shadows to the deeper reality.

For those who can't map this to the topic at hand:
The shadows are the virtual reality. The greater reality is what Neo awakes into. Neo is an accomplished philosopher.

"Belonging" means ... To have exclusive rights over.

Do you believe that such exclusive rights, as they are currently defined by law, match prevailing moral standards? Including the ban on singing "Happy Birthday to You" in public without the permission of AOL? Most people I ask are surprised that some older works are still under copyright, which can only mean that the exclusive rights in those works exist only in the legal code, not the moral code.

If you're using "theft" in a moral sense, match it up with a moral code. For rights such as the Bono Act and the DMCA that exist only in the legal code, only the legal definition of "theft" (the taking of physical property, such as larceny, automobile theft, robbery, and embezzlement) makes sense. Mixing legal and colloquial senses of a given word willy-nilly would in Microsoft executives getting life sentences for "killing" the competition. Though many Slashdotters would like to see that happen, I don't believe such a punishment would remotely fit the crime, morally or legally.

"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will
eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the
Internet, we know this is not true."

You have to give them enough time. Some monkeys have done it. That quote is hilarious anyway.

An Anonymous Coward writes "Apparently, Christopher Columbus, an Italian navigator in the employ of the Kingdom of Spain has found a way to navigate west across the Atlantic Ocean to new territories in India." No word yet on we can expect broadband internet access there, but this could be a mighty blow to the RIAA.

As this page reminds, Enoch died in cryptonomicon and came back later on.

I knew that wasn't a plot hole.

Interesting indeed.

> Yet, I see no huge overarching "war on speeding" for example.

Actually, there is. it's just not as popular because more voters speed than blow things up.

However, the main idea is the same. There is no clear causality between speeding and accidents (although there may be correlation) but speed limits are relatively easy to monitor and enforce so, since most motorists tend to break them at least occasionally, they became a convenient source of income for the police. Think of it as a selective "road tax".

Some interesting pages are:
- COUNTERACT THE MYTH.
- Speed Limit Fears: Lying with Science.

Nobody got outraged when that new-fangled mechanical auto-mobile contraption started to outpace the world's fastest human runners.

Allow me to recommend to you the legend of John Henry. About the time period you mention, too. I always mention this story in the Intro AI class I teach.

Why not just use Linux Software RAID? That way you don't have to worry about drivers, and don't need to spend the extra money on RAID controllers, just add any normal ATA66/100/133 controller. The same sort of thing is available in Win2k server (don't know about other NT versions).

If you have a motherboard that has on-board RAID already, that's 4 channels, add another card, and you can have 6 channels, enough for a terabyte of RAID5.

Nothing will blow your mind like reading Nietzsche however especially Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy for the Future.

You linked to Amazon, but it's also available here in English on Project Gutenburg.

Maybe you can help me out here. You state that you can own an idea. That an idea is property. How does that work?

From your comment, it appears that you are a writer. Are you saying that all the ideas you use in your works are original-never-before-thought-of? If so, then Congratulations! Good for you! Pretty much all of the books I read contain ideas that the authors have drawn from elsewhere, either from other novels or other's experiences etc.

I don't think it's possible to own an idea in the same way you can own a car or house or pencil. Even your manuscript you have for your most recent novel. If come in and take your manuscript, I have taken your property. If I copy it, you still have your manuscript, so I haven't stolen anything. I have violated your legally given exclusive right for reproduction and distribution of your novel. I have infringed your copyright, which is entirely different.

If copyrights effectively limited ACCESS to works, you might have a point. But they don't. In fact, copyrights ENCOURAGE access to works, by giving publishers a profit motive to print more copies of them.

That may have been true at one point, when publishing a novel was a cumbersome and expensive process, but not anymore. I think I read earlier today that I can get 500 novels on a cd for free! It might be a bit more difficult for the publisher to give me access to all these books if they had to get permission from each of the authors' estates.

http://www.ibiblio.org/fosphost/exhost.htm

(Originally pointed out on Google Answers' question Opensource infrastructure projects

Anyone knows about any other hosting sites or SW?

Best PG book ever:
Square Root of 4 To A Million Places, The
A must read...

I agree. I'd also add that Rez iz IMHO the most original game I've seen since Tetris.

Anyway, to contribute slightly to the topic, the credits of Rez say: Dedicated to the incredible creative soul of Kandinsky.

Vasily Kandinsky was an early 20-th century painter and musician, one of the first abstract painters, and also a synesthete - his paintings are as close to music as paintings can get, and it is very easy to imagine music while examining his artwork. He once said that color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.

Wait a minute here, I am confused. How could you not have your own distro, I mean, it seems that everyone else does.

Ever seen any of Jackson Pollock's stuff? Then you know what I mean. Abstract Expressionism is a politically correct way to say "I can't draw/paint so I slapped some crap on the canvas and voila."

Just a suggestion. Before talking out of your nether regions you might want to actually spend a few minutes looking into the subject. Pollack's sketchbooks, for example, prove that he was quite adept at representational art. He chose to forge into uncharted artistic regions, and struggled greatly before achieving success. There's a reason why he's still famous almost 50 years after his death.

I mean, I know it's really cool, and staggeringly original, for you to presume that you know what Art is more than the entire art community, but really. Everybody got a good laugh over Malevich...in the 7th grade. Then hopefully we picked up a book or two and learned something.

Islam bring us science, mathematics, philosophy, astronomy and humanism when we was in the dark age.

Islam bring us science, mathematics, philosophy, astronomy and humanism when we was in the dark age.

ahem, here is the Gutenberg Text

No, you've got it wrong.

Monica is a small monitor calibration tool.
Phoebe is a Redhat release.
Rachel is a resource loading toolkit for Java Web Start/JNLP

If you head over to the main Gutenberg Library site and search for "Time Machine" the audio book appears to come up. It would seem that ibiblio has the book on its FTP (and available for download) for at least "Time Machine". If you're looking to get started here's a direct link to the zip.

Is Doctor Fun the oldest comic on the Internet?

No. That would be "Where the Buffalo Roam" by Hans Bjordahl. "Where the Buffalo Roam" started in 1991, and had its own Usenet group long before Doctor Fun came along, and is still running on the web.

Why not a guide to hardware mods instead?

It seems the folks over at Novell have the answer to making the "immature" Linux OS more ...

I paused at that statement. My first thought was where would they even find a copy of an immature Linux OS. But alas, not all is lost. It seems our friends over at ibiblio.org have archived a number of different versions of immature Linux, ready for download. Check it out:

• Debian 0.91
• Redhat 2.0
• Slackware 1.1.2
• SLS 1.05

There are others here.

It seems the folks over at Novell have the answer to making the "immature" Linux OS more ...

I paused at that statement. My first thought was where would they even find a copy of an immature Linux OS. But alas, not all is lost. It seems our friends over at ibiblio.org have archived a number of different versions of immature Linux, ready for download. Check it out:

• Debian 0.91
• Redhat 2.0
• Slackware 1.1.2
• SLS 1.05

There are others here.

It seems the folks over at Novell have the answer to making the "immature" Linux OS more ...

I paused at that statement. My first thought was where would they even find a copy of an immature Linux OS. But alas, not all is lost. It seems our friends over at ibiblio.org have archived a number of different versions of immature Linux, ready for download. Check it out:

• Debian 0.91
• Redhat 2.0
• Slackware 1.1.2
• SLS 1.05

There are others here.

It seems the folks over at Novell have the answer to making the "immature" Linux OS more ...

I paused at that statement. My first thought was where would they even find a copy of an immature Linux OS. But alas, not all is lost. It seems our friends over at ibiblio.org have archived a number of different versions of immature Linux, ready for download. Check it out:

• Debian 0.91
• Redhat 2.0
• Slackware 1.1.2
• SLS 1.05

There are others here.

It seems the folks over at Novell have the answer to making the "immature" Linux OS more ...

I paused at that statement. My first thought was where would they even find a copy of an immature Linux OS. But alas, not all is lost. It seems our friends over at ibiblio.org have archived a number of different versions of immature Linux, ready for download. Check it out:

• Debian 0.91
• Redhat 2.0
• Slackware 1.1.2
• SLS 1.05

There are others here.

It seems the folks over at Novell have the answer to making the "immature" Linux OS more ...

I paused at that statement. My first thought was where would they even find a copy of an immature Linux OS. But alas, not all is lost. It seems our friends over at ibiblio.org have archived a number of different versions of immature Linux, ready for download. Check it out:

• Debian 0.91
• Redhat 2.0
• Slackware 1.1.2
• SLS 1.05

There are others here.

...to know everything you want to know about the Turing test.

comic here

;-)

TWW

Solution: Freemacs 1.6g

-uso.

It also led to GEOS on the Commodore 64!
Some screenshots

And, let's not forget a TRUE genius and pioneer, Doug Englebart. He predated the Alto. This guy is what engineering and technology is all about. Not the bunch of clueless kids (and women!) that are sucked into the indoctrination of universities these days....

Ah, my kingdom for a time machine to travel back to the 1960s. Men were men, electrical engineers actually liked electronics way before they went to school and there was no fooling around!

Back to the RFCs: the list above doesn't seem exhaustive. I found some more: 12 networking truths RFC, telnet randomly lose option and Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol

Back to the RFCs: the list above doesn't seem exhaustive. I found some more: 12 networking truths RFC, telnet randomly lose option and Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol

Back to the RFCs: the list above doesn't seem exhaustive. I found some more: 12 networking truths RFC, telnet randomly lose option and Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol

Like any compression algorithm, gzip seeks to summarize reigons of similar, predictable data while preserving aspects of dissimilar, unpredictable detail.. That applies for everything, from text to white noise. Saying that gzip is especially good at detecting fossils is like saying fishing poles are really good at telling the difference between a biscuit and a tractor.

You can safely determine a number of different things based on the compression yeild of file. I'll give you a practical, wonderfully self-serving example. Propaganda's random-transitive tile generator. Given a pile of several thousand source images, the engine will combine several of them according to random gamma values. When the final image data is made, the generator cranks out a GIF equivalent of the tile, and a bytecount performed. If the bytecount of the GIF file is unusually low, that means the tile came out of flat and monotone in appearance.. and is subsequently scrapped.

Net result: I can weed out featureless & shitty images without physically inspecting them by hand. Since I know ahead of time that only the good tiles come out of the process as 318KB-or-larger GIF equivalents, I can safely assume that anything that comes out to be lower than 318KB isn't worth keeping.

Net result: A constantly purified source of additional seamless images for subsequent passes of the engine.

Like any compression algorithm, gzip seeks to summarize reigons of similar, predictable data while preserving aspects of dissimilar, unpredictable detail.. That applies for everything, from text to white noise. Saying that gzip is especially good at detecting fossils is like saying fishing poles are really good at telling the difference between a biscuit and a tractor.

You can safely determine a number of different things based on the compression yeild of file. I'll give you a practical, wonderfully self-serving example. Propaganda's random-transitive tile generator. Given a pile of several thousand source images, the engine will combine several of them according to random gamma values. When the final image data is made, the generator cranks out a GIF equivalent of the tile, and a bytecount performed. If the bytecount of the GIF file is unusually low, that means the tile came out of flat and monotone in appearance.. and is subsequently scrapped.

Net result: I can weed out featureless & shitty images without physically inspecting them by hand. Since I know ahead of time that only the good tiles come out of the process as 318KB-or-larger GIF equivalents, I can safely assume that anything that comes out to be lower than 318KB isn't worth keeping.

Net result: A constantly purified source of additional seamless images for subsequent passes of the engine.

Check out Peanut linux only 340mg download, not too bad.
Not mini enough? Did you miss the os news discussion on other linux distros Check some of the ones listed there. Good luck!

Ignoring the implication that people are incapable of writing their own music, a gathering of family and friends is not a public performance. If it were, we'd all owe Warner communications a bit: Fun Facts - Happy Birthday To You.

For the record, this is why chain restaurants sing their own versions. They are either afraid to lose or have already lost that it would be a public performance. And I have heard on the radio someone comment about how they'd have to pay because a mic picked someone up singing it. As it is 110 years old, this is a much more obvious abuse of copyright than the 'Free the Mouse' thing vs. Disney.

• now where is that "SLS" cd

There was never a SLS CD that I can remember of. At the time, even a *CD-rom drive* was a luxury :)

The distro was designed to fit on multiple floppies. You can grab a copy from here: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distribu tions/sls/

If I recall correctly (and it's mentioned in his recent Onion-AV-club interview), one of the major factors that made Berke Breathed retire was that comic strips were being shrunk to unreadable sizes. (This is currently really annoying me with Boondocks, even ONLINE fer Goodness sake!).

I always wondered, though, what if Berke had followed the path blazed by Dr. Fun , who from day 1 was publishing a 640x480 color image for each panel? Keep each daily strip 480 pixels high, and stipulate that it not be shrunk ... end of problem!

I would recommend PLIP if you have a parallel port, much faster. PLIP Install HOW TO.

As an example, the author takes issue with the SCO's claim that IBM must have stolen SCO trade secrets in order to improve Linux by saying "OK, then, diff the code."

Perhaps. But if I were you, do what I did: download the kernel changelogs for 2.4 (and if you like 2.2) and grep them for ibm.com (i.e. commits from someone at IBM).

For example, I fetch the changelogs from here. And then I ran:

$ grep -il "ibm\\.com" *

What?!? You're not running linux?!? Shame on you!

As you will see, most of the checkins involve bug fixes for IBM's JFS, some patches for IPV6, and few ones for s390. Gotta love version control, eh?

Suppose part of the validation test set for Monterey consisted of a stress test written by SCO and owned by SCO.

Project Monterey was a plan that never happened. It was a plan to put Unix on IA-64 machines that died during conception. What we have is a lot of white papers on the subject but no written, working code. Of course I could be wrong, and if there was working code it would have probably been written by IBM developers anyway with a "Copyright (c) 2000 IBM Corp." near the top of the sources.

Let us further suppose that code was used in the Linux development work, and found a key set of bugs. (Don't tell me it isn't possible that it would have been -- developers tend to think of tools as just tools, and forget that they may be encumbered.)

Probably, but one of the accusations SCO makes is that IBM allegedly handed out Unix code owned by SCO to Linux kernel hackers. And that Linux would not have advanced if IBM had not handed out said code. But so far, all code commits from IBM appear to be mostly patches to existing code. What's more SCO accuses IBM of handing out code from SCO Unix to improve Linux's SMP capabilities. However, Linux's SMP support was one of the primary reasons why IBM adopted Linux in the first place (for proof, see my earlier post in this thread). Ergo, by adopting an Open, Freely Available variant of Unix with SMP support would lessen their development efforts.

What I find rather interesting is Caldera's Logo on the IA-64 Linux page. And it lists them as one of the players in this project. And even more interesting is the missing links on SCO's website pointing to details of the Itanium Netfarm they have presumably made available to IA-64 Linux developers.

- casts polymorph other spell on grue... 0xB00F!

Now go and read Ulysses if you haven't done so already!

Ok, I'll bite. I made a lot of ASSumptions in my last post. I just did my homework at Mandrake's website and it looks like you've pretty much got it. The first bunch of CDs are pretty much the normal binary and source CDs and you can do whatever you want with them.

The only thing I saw that would be in question would be the fact that it comes with some third party commercial applications (such as StarOffice 6.0). I'm positive Sun has a 1 computer limit in the license. From the looks of it, Mandrake pretty much takes a hands off approach with third party applications in their license files (an example here) saying that users are held accountable by the author, not Mandrake.

Thanks for keeping me honest. :-)