If you read the article carefully, you will see that the 10^60 number refers to chess, not go. In go there are 10^170 legal positions. Building a complete game tree would take at least 361! (10^768) nodes, but considering captures, this number grows to a stunning maximum of 10^(10^48) nodes. Good luck with the brute force;-)
I am a reasonably strong amateur player (currently 3 dan), and I'm willing to bet that no computer will beat me at go in the next 50 years (Assuming I don't get a brain tumor/dementia/etc).
The ranking system you describe is not entirely correct, as professional ranks are closer together than amateur ranks.
An amateur that has just learned the rules of the game is usually ranked at 40th-30th kyu. This then ranges up to 1st kyu. From there is continues with amateur 1st dan trough amateur 7th dan. Professionals range from 1st dan to 9th dan, with a 1st dan professional being of roughly equal strength to an amateur 7th dan and the strongest professional 9th dans being equivalent to a fictional 10th dan amateur rank.
Usually, if a player gets more than 9 stones in advance, he is instead given 10 points for any stone above the 9th. The maximum possible number of points the opponent can make in such a game is 369 (361 points on the board, plus capturing the first 9 handicap stones, minus his own move), so the maximum possible difference in strength for which this system still works is a 45 grade difference. Anything higher than that and black can claim a default win because he has that many points ahead. The weakest possible player is therefore usually ranked at 35 kyu (35 kyu grades + 10 dan grades makes 45).
Box office sales and loss to piracy are pretty much totally unrelated. Downloading a movie just cannot compete with seeing that movie in a good theater. It can, however, compete with seeing that movie off a bought or rented DVD or tape.
The big losses that are being complained about are not the loss of ticket sales, but the loss of DVD/tape sales and rental. No big Hollywood production can recoup it's production cost from ticket sales alone, not by a long shot. Most of the actual revenue is made trough sales, rental and especially through related merchandise.
Yes I know this is bad for the enviroment, but the simple fact is its not like China is colony of the US and we are forcing th govt to accept the waste, THEY ARE BEING PAID !!!!!
If CHINA chooses NOT to give a shit about its citizens it on them, and THEY should have to answer for it.
This is NOT about the US, get it understand it and live with it.
Now, the people, well thats unfortunate, it really is, BUT IT THEIR GOVERMENTS(CHINA) FAULT !
So what you're saying is that if entity A (the US) pays entity B (China) to do something bad to entity C (The local chinese population), that entity A has no responsibility?
That would mean that if I (A) hired some thug (B) to beat you (C) up, that I am not responsible. That it's completely B and C's problem (the thug and you)?
Robo Rally: Program your robot to tackle a dangerous factory floor full of escalators, pits, crushers and lasers. Not to mention other robots.
X Net : Be the provider to offer the most popular content, be it games, recipes or pr0n.
Buy a better connection to the backbone and serve
even more!
Mag Blast: Use your fleet to protect your mothership, while simultaneously trying to blast other players ships. It is require to make sounds simulating your attacks (Ptew Ptew! Put Put Put! Zap! Take that evil spacelord!)
Illuminati: Secret conspiracies everywhere! Do you own the postal service? Who's the man behind the IRS? And what are those damn aliens up to now?
Chez Geek: Name says it all really. Play with geeks, live with geeks, geeks everywhere
Hacker: The computer crime card game (Anyone who even tries to remark that the game should've been named Cracker then will get his behind liberally kicked!) With an Interesting read on online free speech in practice.
Silicon Valley Tarot Another 'name says it all, really' car game. Tell your own Silicon Valley future...
Friday (Nov 3), An organisation called BREIN (acronym which translates to Protection Rights Entertainment Industry Netherlands) issued a cease-and-desist to the dutch website www.napster.nl for linking to illegal music. They
have 48 hours (not including the weekend) to remove all links.
The website's creator, Johan van Vliet, refuses to remove these links. He is referring to a recent deep-linking case in the Netherlands in which deep linking to newspaper articles was deemed legal.
Although newspaper articles are copyrighted material, they are published on the web freely, which seems an entirely different case to me.
(On a related note, Brad Templeton has a very interesting article on linking rights.)
I'm not so sure about your comment on Most programmers still choose performance over stability and security.
Most will choose stability, and I think, no I hope more are choosing security when programming but this also falls under the category of human error.
A lot of programmers are just not aware of their
errors. Most programs with buffer overflows may
be very stable in theory, but they assume that
the user will not make errors. Or assume that noone will ever enter a string longer than 1024 characters. Or maybe they don't expect anyone to
use an other interface than their own, and put their security in the wrong place
A lot of programs still in use today were written in a time when the internet was still a relatively friendly place. I hope books like this one will
make programmers today more aware of the problems
that plague the internet in it's new form.
In my opinion, many of the security problems that plague the internet (and computers in general) are
caused by the fact that companies still put their priorities in the wrong place. Most programmers still choose performance over stability and security.
An example:
The article mentions buffer overflows,
which, in my experience, have been virtually deleted in a language like Java. Sure, checking array bounds every single time may be a performance hit, but I will choose a performance hit over a security hit any day.
Basically, when you write software, don't make
assumptions. Not on anything. I've seen plenty
programs crash because they tried to access the network and found that it was not installed, or
play a sound and find the device busy.
We may not be able to fix the people, but I think fixing the the software is possible. All it requires is ridding the world of software licences that deny responsibility. Once financial gain is
at stake, corporations will put a lot more time
into security, and hopefully a lot less in screwing eachother for financial gain.
Why would the internet need One Language?
With initiatives like Babelfish, I suspect the future holds a multilanguage internet, with translational functionality built-in in your browser.
is NOT to replace mp3. With the current widespread use of mp3's, I think new codecs stand very little chance of replacing mp3 quickly and completely.
The smart way to go about it, is to slowly shift
your codec into the market. In this case, I would try to get Ogg-support in WinAmp and the like, and facilitate Ogg-trading on napster and it's peers. If people can transparantly mix their mp3's and oggs, you will get to a point where people are saying: "Hey, this piece of music is available in both mp3 and ogg format, but oggs are a lot smaller, so I think I'll download that one."
I did actually read the article, but I missed that part, sorry. I have the bad habit of skipping lines that don't look interesting when I'm reading fast:-)
If we're talking about hacks that are still being talked about, then how about the worm written by Robert T. Morris that brought down most of the Internet in 1988?
If it's legal to patent discoveries of how things in nature work, just think of the opportunities that have been missed! Newton could've patented gravity... (Did you licence the gravity you are using to keep your feet on the ground? No? Then I demand that you start floating right now!)
Slashdot Mirror
If you read the article carefully, you will see that the 10^60 number refers to chess, not go. In go there are 10^170 legal positions. Building a complete game tree would take at least 361! (10^768) nodes, but considering captures, this number grows to a stunning maximum of 10^(10^48) nodes. Good luck with the brute force ;-)
I am a reasonably strong amateur player (currently 3 dan), and I'm willing to bet that no computer will beat me at go in the next 50 years (Assuming I don't get a brain tumor/dementia/etc).
The ranking system you describe is not entirely correct, as professional ranks are closer together than amateur ranks.
An amateur that has just learned the rules of the game is usually ranked at 40th-30th kyu. This then ranges up to 1st kyu. From there is continues with amateur 1st dan trough amateur 7th dan. Professionals range from 1st dan to 9th dan, with a 1st dan professional being of roughly equal strength to an amateur 7th dan and the strongest professional 9th dans being equivalent to a fictional 10th dan amateur rank.
Usually, if a player gets more than 9 stones in advance, he is instead given 10 points for any stone above the 9th. The maximum possible number of points the opponent can make in such a game is 369 (361 points on the board, plus capturing the first 9 handicap stones, minus his own move), so the maximum possible difference in strength for which this system still works is a 45 grade difference. Anything higher than that and black can claim a default win because he has that many points ahead. The weakest possible player is therefore usually ranked at 35 kyu (35 kyu grades + 10 dan grades makes 45).
See BBSpot for details...
Box office sales and loss to piracy are pretty much totally unrelated. Downloading a movie just cannot compete with seeing that movie in a good theater. It can, however, compete with seeing that movie off a bought or rented DVD or tape.
The big losses that are being complained about are not the loss of ticket sales, but the loss of DVD/tape sales and rental. No big Hollywood production can recoup it's production cost from ticket sales alone, not by a long shot. Most of the actual revenue is made trough sales, rental and especially through related merchandise.
That would mean that if I (A) hired some thug (B) to beat you (C) up, that I am not responsible. That it's completely B and C's problem (the thug and you)?
The industry has been gradually moving toward a 64-bit architecture, which multiplies the amount of data the processor can access by four billion.
Is what I read in the article. Now either they fixed their error, or someone didn't read the article very well...
Rock on CNN, indeed :-)
Friday (Nov 3), An organisation called BREIN (acronym which translates to Protection Rights Entertainment Industry Netherlands) issued a cease-and-desist to the dutch website www.napster.nl for linking to illegal music. They have 48 hours (not including the weekend) to remove all links.
The website's creator, Johan van Vliet, refuses to remove these links. He is referring to a recent deep-linking case in the Netherlands in which deep linking to newspaper articles was deemed legal.
Although newspaper articles are copyrighted material, they are published on the web freely, which seems an entirely different case to me. (On a related note, Brad Templeton has a very interesting article on linking rights.)
I'm not so sure about your comment on Most programmers still choose performance over stability and security.
Most will choose stability, and I think, no I hope more are choosing security when programming but this also falls under the category of human error.
A lot of programmers are just not aware of their errors. Most programs with buffer overflows may be very stable in theory, but they assume that the user will not make errors. Or assume that noone will ever enter a string longer than 1024 characters. Or maybe they don't expect anyone to use an other interface than their own, and put their security in the wrong place
A lot of programs still in use today were written in a time when the internet was still a relatively friendly place. I hope books like this one will make programmers today more aware of the problems that plague the internet in it's new form.
In my opinion, many of the security problems that plague the internet (and computers in general) are caused by the fact that companies still put their priorities in the wrong place. Most programmers still choose performance over stability and security.
An example:
The article mentions buffer overflows, which, in my experience, have been virtually deleted in a language like Java. Sure, checking array bounds every single time may be a performance hit, but I will choose a performance hit over a security hit any day.
Basically, when you write software, don't make assumptions. Not on anything. I've seen plenty programs crash because they tried to access the network and found that it was not installed, or play a sound and find the device busy.
We may not be able to fix the people, but I think fixing the the software is possible. All it requires is ridding the world of software licences that deny responsibility. Once financial gain is at stake, corporations will put a lot more time into security, and hopefully a lot less in screwing eachother for financial gain.
Why would the internet need One Language?
With initiatives like Babelfish, I suspect the future holds a multilanguage internet, with translational functionality built-in in your browser.
It's called STI (Search for Terrestrial Intelligence)
QuadHead, kinda makes you think of the matrix doesn't it? Go Matrox, We want IsocaHead cards for that real Matrix feel!
is NOT to replace mp3. With the current widespread use of mp3's, I think new codecs stand very little chance of replacing mp3 quickly and completely. The smart way to go about it, is to slowly shift your codec into the market. In this case, I would try to get Ogg-support in WinAmp and the like, and facilitate Ogg-trading on napster and it's peers. If people can transparantly mix their mp3's and oggs, you will get to a point where people are saying:
"Hey, this piece of music is available in both mp3 and ogg format, but oggs are a lot smaller, so I think I'll download that one."
I did actually read the article, but I missed that part, sorry. :-)
I have the bad habit of skipping lines that don't look interesting when I'm reading fast
If we're talking about hacks that are still being talked about, then how about the worm
written by Robert T. Morris that brought down most of the Internet in 1988?
If it's legal to patent discoveries of how things in nature work, just think of the opportunities that have been missed!
Newton could've patented gravity... (Did you licence the gravity you are using to keep your feet on the ground? No? Then I demand that you start floating right now!)