I believe you are missing the more important point (most of you in this thread). 'Random' is usually used as short for 'uniformely random' and would ultimately mean that any sequence of draws has an a priori equal probability to any other sequence of the same fixed length. Pseudo random generators do not have this property for long strings and most external events can't be guaranteed to have this property. The generators can be pretty good however, something that is often meassured by Spectral Tests (somewhat empirically). So when researchers talk about pseudo-randomness vs. true randomness, it is usually not so much about whether someone could predict the numbers as about whether long sequences have a truly uniform distribution.
In particular, simple classical PRNGs with internal states of 32 bits may have a cycle of about 2^31 numbers, i.e. the 2^31+1'st number you draw will always be the same as the first. Apparently the PRNG of theoretical choice today, the Mersenne Twister has a cycle of 2^19937-1.
Reading the letters only, I can't reach any conclusion as to what really happened. It seems to be word against word. I'm always happy I don't have to judge these cases, but as usual there is no lack of verdicts at Slashdot.
Sorry, I realize that looked superficially like trolling, but I meant it as a fairly serious analogy - why should we think that an organism can live in its own excretion?
Yes there is. If you can knock on it, it's hardware, and can be patented. If you can't, it's software, and you can copyright it. Why is this hard?
"It can be seen" = we'll try to twist this until the fact becomes hidden. "It can be seen" != "is true".
Because I can formulated my bubble-sort patent like so: "A machine, that you can knock on, that represents integers as [10 pages to explain] and sorts them by doing [10 more pages to explain]". As soon as you program your computer to do bubble sort it becomes exactly the machine I just described, and you are infringing on my patent.
We shouldn't be able to patent software for the same reason we can't patent mathematics. Copyright protection is sufficient and suitable for software.
That's oversimplifying. A piece of software can be seen as a component of a physical machine - which it in fact is whenever it would be used in practice (electrons arranged so-and-so in transistors etc.). There is no clear boundary between software and hardware because pretty much any interesting piece of hardware you look at today has some amount of software built in to it.
Would reducing the software patent lifetime to 5 years or even less be the thing to do?
I think that would solve the problem, say, in the same way that we could stop obesity by poisoning all refined sugars with arsenic.
Better to just abolish them altogether then.
I've filed two (fairly insignificant) software patents for my employer. Of course this is one way they fund their research and can afford having smart people (and some others like me) sitting around and coming up with fancy stuff. The process isn't inherently bad (imho). The problem both with patents in general but with software patents in particular is that it's so difficult to distinguish between good and bad patents. One thing I think is really bad is that it is so easy to patent the obvious solution to a problem that just hasn't been considered until now because (e.g.) some necessary technology hasn't been around. But how can we make a rule to disallow patenting of the obvious? 10 years from now anything could seem "obvious". Another "bad" thing is too general patents. But a flip side of that coin is that if your patent isn't general enough, someone might fine a tiny little thing to change and thereby circumvent it with hardly any effort at all.
So all in all I would probably be for abolishing software patents or at least making them far more restrictive until it becomes clearer how they can be well used. But this isn't because they are inherently bad, but because we haven't figured out how to define good boundaries yet. Within specific fields I think it might well be possible to have useful software patents.
Anything can be misinterpreted by someone who doesn't want to understand. I'd say implicit in this question is:
"According to whatever metrics you yourself apply when using the word 'best' in this context, out of the countries you have any knowledge or instinct about whatsoever, have you noticed any one that seems to have somewhat better email privacy laws than the other."
Now this is still not very precise, but I imagine if the best literary minds in the world got together and wrote a treaty on the subjects, cowards like us would still avoid answering the actual question by instead perpetuating an argument about the meaning of some word X.
Mod parent up please.
While I wouldn't go so far as to say that there's a nefarious plot from the Chinese government, cptdondo and DMiax make good points.
It has more to do with the interests of the nuclear industry than Japanese sensibilities. Ever since the Japanese nuclear trouble there has been a barrage of pro-nuclear stories, all reassuring us that everything is ok with nuclear.
Really? Living in Tokyo, I've been very much concerned with how western media rather blows that whole business out of proportions. They've had my relatives back home completely terrified for my safety. The radioactive leakage is a concern, but only one of many and the real tragedy is the 20-30,000 people killed by the tsunami. I swear, to me it seems many western people must think a radioactive mutated Godzilla is going to burst out of the Tokyo bay any minute now.
Whether or not the government is involved, it is still censorship.
My point was that the makers (according to the stub) agree with the decision, and seem to be pretty decent about the whole thing. Why would you fret about censorship when pretty much everyone (who has rights to the work) are in agreement?
Seriously, I'm not sure what's so complicated about this. It's not like CDs are that much more expensive than buying stuff electronically. Plus, you have a backup copy that's going to outlast whatever media you rip it onto anyway as long as you keep it physically safe. Plus you have the booklet that goes with it.
But I don't want that. I don't want the gdmn booklet, nor the case nor the worthless plastic that is the actual cd. I don't want to wast time ripping songs off it, hell, I don't even want a cd player (though I have one in a box somewhere) and I don't want to waste more of my precious shelf space. I don't want to clean the worthless pieces of plastic, I don't want to see them or handle them. And all this is only the beginning of what I find wrong with your post.
The grievance here, I thought, was generally against sleazy business practices (bullying, monopolization, patent trolling...), none of which are in any way exclusive to Microsoft of course, but for which M$ (and by extension Bill Gates) has kind of become an icon.
The user can say I don't want to pass a health certificate,' he said. 'There may be consequences for that decision, but you can do it.
The user can say I don't want to run Windows. There may be consequences, but you can do it.
There fixed that for you, M$.
(Oh, did we forget to mention that that health certificate, de facto, requires you to run M$ Windows? That although there are Linux solutions around, 95% of ISPs don't support it?)
"someone" wouldn't need to do much extrapolation at all to drag me down, if they notice regular bumps over the pothole on the road to the town whore house [or whatever]. I wonder why the author I quoted above can be, as he writes, certain the app will not be used to track my movements. Not that anyone would care about my movements per ce, but let's imagine I'm a celebrity, politician, or something.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe you are missing the more important point (most of you in this thread). 'Random' is usually used as short for 'uniformely random' and would ultimately mean that any sequence of draws has an a priori equal probability to any other sequence of the same fixed length. Pseudo random generators do not have this property for long strings and most external events can't be guaranteed to have this property. The generators can be pretty good however, something that is often meassured by Spectral Tests (somewhat empirically). So when researchers talk about pseudo-randomness vs. true randomness, it is usually not so much about whether someone could predict the numbers as about whether long sequences have a truly uniform distribution.
In particular, simple classical PRNGs with internal states of 32 bits may have a cycle of about 2^31 numbers, i.e. the 2^31+1'st number you draw will always be the same as the first. Apparently the PRNG of theoretical choice today, the Mersenne Twister has a cycle of 2^19937-1.
... stupid people shouldn't have money anyway.
Reading the letters only, I can't reach any conclusion as to what really happened. It seems to be word against word. I'm always happy I don't have to judge these cases, but as usual there is no lack of verdicts at Slashdot.
You shit shit, but can you live in shit???
Sorry, I realize that looked superficially like trolling, but I meant it as a fairly serious analogy - why should we think that an organism can live in its own excretion?
What makes you think microbes cannot be resistant to alcohol? Some microbes literally shit alcohol.
You shit shit, but can you live in shit???
Yes there is. If you can knock on it, it's hardware, and can be patented. If you can't, it's software, and you can copyright it. Why is this hard?
"It can be seen" = we'll try to twist this until the fact becomes hidden. "It can be seen" != "is true".
Because I can formulated my bubble-sort patent like so: "A machine, that you can knock on, that represents integers as [10 pages to explain] and sorts them by doing [10 more pages to explain]". As soon as you program your computer to do bubble sort it becomes exactly the machine I just described, and you are infringing on my patent.
We shouldn't be able to patent software for the same reason we can't patent mathematics. Copyright protection is sufficient and suitable for software.
That's oversimplifying. A piece of software can be seen as a component of a physical machine - which it in fact is whenever it would be used in practice (electrons arranged so-and-so in transistors etc.). There is no clear boundary between software and hardware because pretty much any interesting piece of hardware you look at today has some amount of software built in to it.
Would reducing the software patent lifetime to 5 years or even less be the thing to do?
I think that would solve the problem, say, in the same way that we could stop obesity by poisoning all refined sugars with arsenic.
Better to just abolish them altogether then.
I've filed two (fairly insignificant) software patents for my employer. Of course this is one way they fund their research and can afford having smart people (and some others like me) sitting around and coming up with fancy stuff. The process isn't inherently bad (imho). The problem both with patents in general but with software patents in particular is that it's so difficult to distinguish between good and bad patents. One thing I think is really bad is that it is so easy to patent the obvious solution to a problem that just hasn't been considered until now because (e.g.) some necessary technology hasn't been around. But how can we make a rule to disallow patenting of the obvious? 10 years from now anything could seem "obvious". Another "bad" thing is too general patents. But a flip side of that coin is that if your patent isn't general enough, someone might fine a tiny little thing to change and thereby circumvent it with hardly any effort at all.
So all in all I would probably be for abolishing software patents or at least making them far more restrictive until it becomes clearer how they can be well used. But this isn't because they are inherently bad, but because we haven't figured out how to define good boundaries yet. Within specific fields I think it might well be possible to have useful software patents.
the side effects would give you projectile diarrhea.
whoa, awesome! </voice of Otto the bus driver from The Simpsons>
And here I thought the title must relate to some kind of automated video analysis, you know, what-is-porn-what-is-not.
I'd love to see parallel versions.. Much more action that way. Confusing? I think it could be beautiful.
Anything can be misinterpreted by someone who doesn't want to understand. I'd say implicit in this question is:
"According to whatever metrics you yourself apply when using the word 'best' in this context, out of the countries you have any knowledge or instinct about whatsoever, have you noticed any one that seems to have somewhat better email privacy laws than the other."
Now this is still not very precise, but I imagine if the best literary minds in the world got together and wrote a treaty on the subjects, cowards like us would still avoid answering the actual question by instead perpetuating an argument about the meaning of some word X.
Perhaps Switzerland.
1,000 millisieverts... is that, like, 1 million microsieverts or something?
Mod parent up please. While I wouldn't go so far as to say that there's a nefarious plot from the Chinese government, cptdondo and DMiax make good points.
It has more to do with the interests of the nuclear industry than Japanese sensibilities. Ever since the Japanese nuclear trouble there has been a barrage of pro-nuclear stories, all reassuring us that everything is ok with nuclear.
Really? Living in Tokyo, I've been very much concerned with how western media rather blows that whole business out of proportions. They've had my relatives back home completely terrified for my safety. The radioactive leakage is a concern, but only one of many and the real tragedy is the 20-30,000 people killed by the tsunami. I swear, to me it seems many western people must think a radioactive mutated Godzilla is going to burst out of the Tokyo bay any minute now.
Whether or not the government is involved, it is still censorship.
My point was that the makers (according to the stub) agree with the decision, and seem to be pretty decent about the whole thing. Why would you fret about censorship when pretty much everyone (who has rights to the work) are in agreement?
radical news: someone behaved in a mature and sensible way!
Seriously, I'm not sure what's so complicated about this. It's not like CDs are that much more expensive than buying stuff electronically. Plus, you have a backup copy that's going to outlast whatever media you rip it onto anyway as long as you keep it physically safe. Plus you have the booklet that goes with it.
But I don't want that. I don't want the gdmn booklet, nor the case nor the worthless plastic that is the actual cd. I don't want to wast time ripping songs off it, hell, I don't even want a cd player (though I have one in a box somewhere) and I don't want to waste more of my precious shelf space. I don't want to clean the worthless pieces of plastic, I don't want to see them or handle them. And all this is only the beginning of what I find wrong with your post.
Tiling WMs, people.
The grievance here, I thought, was generally against sleazy business practices (bullying, monopolization, patent trolling ...), none of which are in any way exclusive to Microsoft of course, but for which M$ (and by extension Bill Gates) has kind of become an icon.
The user can say I don't want to pass a health certificate,' he said. 'There may be consequences for that decision, but you can do it.
The user can say I don't want to run Windows. There may be consequences, but you can do it.
There fixed that for you, M$.
(Oh, did we forget to mention that that health certificate, de facto, requires you to run M$ Windows? That although there are Linux solutions around, 95% of ISPs don't support it?)
Space, it seems, is simply not a good place to have sex.
The quoted text doesn't really give any reason not to have sex in space - though several for why it is a bad idea to try and have a baby.
Giv'em Nixon.
oh wait, he's dead.
What's worse? Attacking someone's borders, or slowly disrupting and degrading confidence in their entire national economic well-being?
Attacking someone's borders.
"someone" wouldn't need to do much extrapolation at all to drag me down, if they notice regular bumps over the pothole on the road to the town whore house [or whatever]. I wonder why the author I quoted above can be, as he writes, certain the app will not be used to track my movements. Not that anyone would care about my movements per ce, but let's imagine I'm a celebrity, politician, or something.