Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Dilemma, Privacy, Chess
Front-row seats. zer0vector writes "The previously mentioned camera that was attached to the external fuel tank on Atlantis gave some great shots of launch this afternoon on NASA TV. During the feed, it looked like the ejection of the solid rocket boosters damaged or obscured the camera, leading to a fuzzy image during the fuel tank separation stage."
SkyNet has not yet achieved consciousness. DrEnter writes "According to this Yahoo article, Vladimir Kramnik has defeated 'Deep Fritz' (apparently the world's most powerful chess computer) to take the lead, 2.5-0.5 (the first game was a draw). You can find out more details at the contest site."
Damned if you do, but also if you don't. cybaea writes "A recent article in InfoWorld argues that the latest Windows 2000 and Windows XP Service Packs may be illegal for health care providers under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. To make matters worse, not installing the Service Packs may also be illegal. Damned if you do, damned if you don't ..."
Dad, please switch to a real operating system. It's still spreading. deego writes " An e-mail-borne computer virus that lets crackers control infected Windoze machines remotely continues to spread and constitutes the most severe attack this year. The worm, known as W32.Bugbear, or I-Worm.Tanatos, infects computers that use Microsoft's Windows operating systems. It was first spotted a week ago and has spread to dozens of countries. Article here."
Please sit down first. calib0r writes "CNN.com is running an article on the most recent events dealing with the nissan.com lawsuit. Salon.com ran an article about this a few months ago. More information can also be found here."
Just about EVERYTHING is illegal under HIPAA. I've never seen such ridiculously stringent specs. If you want a good laugh, check out www.hipaacomply.com and read through the technology FAQ's. Even faxing is restricted.
What's your damage, Heather?
But Uzi Nissan, whose family name is also the name of a month in Hebrew and Arabic[...]
"We've always seen this case as protecting the Nissan brand and not about money," he said. "What we are saying is the word Nissan by itself is our registered trademark and we're the only ones with the right to use the name Nissan by itself."
Have each machine analyze a different two-ply scenario, and play the min-max move. Granted, this only scales "linearly" (as opposed as the holy grail of parallelizing the alpha-beta search algorithm) but a one move deeper search could be enough to trounce Kramnik.
If Nissan Motors wanted to have an exclusive name, they should have made one up.
They took an existing word (in 2 languages, nonetheless) which also happens to be a surname. Now, they can't expect exclusive rights over that name.
During the feed, it looked like the ejection of the solid rocket boosters damaged or obscured the camera...
That can be a problem for the crew too, or used to be. Each SRB has rocket motors that separate it from the external tank at around two minutes MET. Debris from these motors can get on the forward orbiter windows. Not too many years ago the shuttle flight software was changed - a "window washer" mod - to fire the FU RCS jets for a few seconds at SRB seperation to keep the windscreen clear of debris.
Just thought you'd be interested to know...
--JIm
The real test of playing strength is results, of course. Although we have too small a sample size (for both chess computers) to be truly scientific, so far it looks like Deep Blue was stronger than Deep Fritz.
Grr! Arg!
Why is this video only 1:44?
Why cut off before SRB sep?
Why did live TV coverage switch to long-range cameras right at SRB sep?
What is wrong with this whole picture?
It may be that before launch they realized that the camera would be smoked by the SRB separation rockets but being too late to fix they gave instructions to cut away at that point.
Conspiracy freaks will come up with plenty of other explanations.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
We've been told at my University that we (as system administrators) can go ahead and click the "I accept" on any Microsoft service pack or hotfix, our licensing agreement with M$ overrides anything they put in a EULA.
Microsoft could actually wind up violating their own agreement if they take action not specified in the big license.
Does anyone honestly beleive that this guy wasn't trying to take advantage of Nissan's trademark? That he didn't cackle with glee when he registered the address? If you aren't going to use English as the standard for judging common words then you need to use common sense. For all I know "Kodak" is the most common surname in Mongolia. The fact that this has gone to court tells me that Mr. Nissan played hardball when they were negotiating a payoff; I'm guessing he demanded seven (maybe eight?) figures like most cybersquatters instead of just taking a fair settlement for his lucky last name.
That said, even while as a programmer I'm somewhat rooting for Deep Fritz, as a fellow man I can't help but be in awe of the fact that Kramnik is able to think better than a machine that "thinks" millions of times faster than him.
Why? I can, for instance, look at a picture of my wife and identify her as my wife in a fraction of a second. The best image-recognition software in the world can't reliably do even that simple task.
I'm not the least bit surprised to see a human beating a computer in a complex activity like chess, and that's with lots of handicaps in Fritz' favor (it doesn't have to analyze an image of the board in order to determine where the pieces are, for instance). The amazing part is not the human beating the computer, but the computer beating the human (which won't happen in this case, but it's getting close).
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Also, it bear mentioning that Uzi has spent well in excess of one million dollars defending his own last name from these assholes who didn't even use the name "Nissan" in the States until well after Uzi had registerred the domain and used it for his own business.
As someone who was shopping for an Altima, I went to nissan.com expecting, like I'm sure the overwhelming majority of visitors, to find the Nissan Motor Corporation. I would wager that probably, oh, 99.9%+ of his traffic comes from people looking for the Nissan motor corporation (BTW: Nissan has been a brand name for many, many years. I knew about Nissan as the maker of my brother's 240Z's engine back in the early 80s, the car of which is from the mid 70s). From some of his actions, it sounds like he tried to capitalize upon this and started putting car ads, etc, on his site. Seems to me that he dug his own grave.
While plenty of web sites, blogs, and usenet discussions informatively describe and criticize the heavy handed tactics of companies like Nissan, Molson Canadian, and Gateway (2000), these companies need to start hearing vocally from consumers who will not buy their brands based on their overbearing legal tactics and we should compile and distribute a list of companies to target. More important than a boycott itself, the average joe and especially these company's dealers, sales, and marketing people need to know WHY we're upset.
Whenever these cases come up we read the lawyers and spokespeople telling us they have to do this to "protect the brand", or to "prevent consumers from being confused". Real squatters aside, this is generally total crap. Consumers in any demographic able to buy a car will quickly realize Nissan Computer != Nissan Motors and while brands need to be protected to a certain extent in order to avoid becoming generic (like kleenex, or xerox) the chance of "nissan" becoming a generic term is slim to none (and not just because it doesn't have an 'x'). Trademarks apply to specific categories only, and this limitation should help to prevent dilution happening from unrelated uses of the same mark. Companies that try to over extend their marks should do so only at their own risk, and I bet that willy nilly suing other users probably does more to imply dilution than just leaving things be (Ob.IANAL but this should be true even if it's not the actual law).
Actually, I doubt any of these cases stem from the marketing department, more likely the lawyers are trying to justify their salaries and budgets. But if the sales and marketing people thought these tactics were hurting their brand they could override legal in a second. Enough slashdotters are young professionals with a well paying job and interest in new products to present a very attractive demographic to these people. Let them know you're pissed!
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
Press releases touting this week's match boast that Fritz has beaten both Kasparov and Deep Blue. The win over Kasparov came, however, in a super fast kind of chess, where computers have a decided edge. And Fritz didn't really beat Deep Blue-it beat an early version of its software running on slower hardware.
Do I think that there is an added value to better algorithms and pruning methods over pure computational firepower? Sure, but you need to keep in mind that now that Deep Blue has been disassembled, there is no way to get an honest, head to head comparison.
As if it matters, I still get my but kicked by good old GNU Chess.
So who is naming these viruses? :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Since neither Hebrew nor Arabic is written with Latin characters, I find the "it's the name of a month" argument rather weak.
Erm... if you want to take that tack... "Nissan" in Japanese isn't written with Latin characters either.
---
Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
Lots of things have gone to hell when they became too "easy". This ease means the ability to be grasped by a moron, rather than actually utility of use by a skilled user.
Hence the number of morons on the Internet these days...it's so sad that I'm 21 and I can remember a time when if I went surfing randomly I would likely come across mostly pages of people smarter than I, whereas now it's a bunch of babbling "blogs" written by preteens who can't speak correctly and believe the world is all about consumerism and their junior high boyfriends.
Corporations should only get their stock ticker as a domain name and name servers would provide a list of possible matches based on the search term.
... doesn't not a legally binding contract make. Mainly because there is no way to prove whether you were the one who clicked it. This is why EULAs have never stood up in court (at least in the EU). The only way they could be made legally binding is for the software company to insist you return a signed form before allowing you to run setup.exe.
Yeah, right.
Someone is wrong on the Internet!
[Event "Brains in Bahrain Man-Machine Match"]
[Site "?"]
[Date "2002.10.08"]
[Round "?"]
[White "Deep Fritz"]
[Black "Kramnik, Vladimir"]
[Result "0-1"]
[ECO "C45"]
[PlyCount "100"]
[EventDate "2002.10.04"]
[SourceDate "2002.10.04"]
1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 exd4 4. Nxd4 Bc5 5. Nxc6 Qf6 6. Qd2 dxc6 7. Nc3 Ne7
8. Qf4 Be6 9. Qxf6 gxf6 10. Na4 Bb4+ 11. c3 Bd6 12. Be3 b6 13. f4 O-O-O 14. Kf2
c5 15. c4 Nc6 16. Nc3 f5 17. e5 Bf8 18. b3 Nb4 19. a3 Nc2 20. Rc1 Nxe3 21. Kxe3
Bg7 22. Nd5 c6 23. Nf6 Bxf6 24. exf6 Rhe8 25. Kf3 Rd2 26. h3 Bd7 27. g3 Re6 28.
Rb1 Rxf6 29. Be2 Re6 30. Rhe1 Kc7 31. Bf1 b5 32. Rec1 Kb6 33. b4 cxb4 34. axb4
Re4 35. Rd1 Rxd1 36. Rxd1 Be6 37. Bd3 Rd4 38. Be2 Rxd1 39. c5+ Kb7 40. Bxd1 a5
41. bxa5 Ka6 42. Ke3 Kxa5 43. Kd4 b4 44. g4 fxg4 45. hxg4 b3 46. Kc3 Ka4 47.
Kb2 f6 48. Bf3 Kb5 49. g5 f5 50. Kc3 Kxc5 0-1
Our society has come to the point where a corporate name that has been around only 20yrs or so can come along and demand that a person cannot use his last name, which has been around for 100's of years.
That's sick