While you're cutting out the middle man, why don't you also cut out the fossil fuels, the plants/animals they came from, and get you energy right from the sun?
Yeah, our current solar techniques are inefficient. But the way we're using fossil fuels isn;t much better. Think about it. Millions of years of solar energy collection by plants, and indirectly throguh animals, wen tinto making those fossil fuels. And we're draining it all in a few centuries.
I agree. Skip the middle man. Tap solar power to split the hydrogen out of the water.
There are no hydrogen "free lunches" sitting out there waiting for us to take advantage of them. The problem is that most of the sources of hydrogen take more energy to get hydrogen from than they provide in energy output from burning the hydrogen (or reacting it in a fuel cell).
There are no free lunches waiting, but you can build a system to get free lunches. Sure, solar is expensivce to build, and low yield, but if you build enough of it, can that power used to extract hydrogen from water? Once you get it going, it's free. You put no energy in, you just use the sun. And you can augment the unstable solar enegergy from teh sun with traditional electricity from power plants.
As for the "free lunch" of the fossil fuels, its not free. We're not paying for it, though. The dinosaurs did. And you can be damn sure it took a lot more energy to get those fossil fuels where they are today then we will ever get out of them.
The trouble with fossil fuels is the circuit to create them is HUGE! It ges back millions of years to solar energy power plants, some plants being eaten, those animals dying, being compacted and cooked in the crust, and eventually drilled and pumped up by us. Just because the lunch was paid for millions of years ago doesn't mean it was free.
Why even do that? Why not use solar panels to run a current through water (don't ask me the details, I read this elsewhere) to separate it into hydrogen and oxygen? You let the oxygen go into the atmostphere, and store the hydrogen. Later, to release the energy, you let the hydrogen recombine with oxygen from the air, releasing energy and producing water. Its a very short circuit to get from water to water, and the energy inputs and outputs are simple.
As far as I've read, there have been successful (so far) gene therapy experiments where people with defective genes preventing them from developing an iommune system are now capable of doing so thanks to a rtero-virus insetring a correct copy of the failed gene. To me, that sounds like direct genetic manipulation.
if you "personify" evolution, you create more abstraction than necessary
"Aye captaion, I'm giving her all she's got!" What the hell was Scotty thiking? Did he really think the Starship enterprise was a living creature, and female at that? Perhaps when he said he was giving her everything he's got, he had somehoe suplanted the image of is estranged wife taking all of his wealth and posessions onto the starship? It certainly is confusing. If only those lousy StarTreak writers would've avoided using personitifcation.
I personified evolution only because it is easier to talk about things this way. By saying that we are one of evolution's experiements, I mean that we are just another intermediate result of the process of evolution. And by no means are we a closed system. Every other part of evolution impacts us as we impact it.
However, while we are not closed, we are a lot more cohesive within ourselves than we are, say, bound to storks (despite the stories we hear as children). A change in one of our genes is bound to have amuch more profound impact on ourselves than a change in our genes would affect storks. Likewise, a stork's genes have a very small, indirect impact on our evolution.
Now, as far as unpredictability, everything is subject to the same random forces in nature -- the collision of atoms, radiation from space, etc. However, we have this thing called a brain. And our brain has become sufficiently complex that it can react to information (i.e. stimuli from outside it) and have that reaction have an impact. Plants don't have brains. They're reactions to stimuli are a lot more direct. Animals do have brains and their actions are little more indirect. We have brains that most would say are of a higher order (even if only by one degree). Thus, the output of the system that is a human to stimuli is more complex than the output of a plant. A plant grows towards sunlight. A human could move into the sunlight, out of it, put up its hand to made a funny shadow.
That said, oneof the impacts the output of our brain can have is to genetically modify ourselves. Plants, as far as I know, are subject to direct mutations as a result of errors in copying or mutations in place (from chemical interference, radiation, etc.) Through these mutations genetic variation arises. sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad. However, our brains is an extra input into genetic variation now. We can directly modify our genes. Ultimately, the output of our brain that is to modify our genes comes from stimuli all originating in the environment (and oursleves, since we are partof that environment). It is our more complex brain that has allowed this potential for faster and perhaps more-efficient genetic variation.
So when I say evolution experimented with a different kind of evolution by way of our brains, I'm really saying we happened to evolve these brains and the side effect is that these brains allow us to be able to modify our own genes. Its a fast-track to genetic variation. Whethe rthis is good or bad has yet to be seen. So far it is good because we haven't yet wiped out our species. If it is bad, and we add ourselves to the list of extinct life forms, then this evolutionary path will have ended.
So, I apologize for using the term unpredictable when really I meant to describe the increased complexity in input/output the human brain has compared to simpler brains or plants. However, I do object to your objection to my personification of evolution for the sake of description. I think its a valid literary tool.
Here's my view. If we've evolved to evolve ourselves, then we're just evolutions way of evolving faster. Of course, we're just an ongoing experiement, as is all evolution. We continue on our path of faster eovlution until we fail. Until we fail, we're successful by reason of our existence.
Suppose we're smart and we make small modifications very carefully and imrpove our bodies and our population survives. That means evolution has crossed under the generational boundary necessary to pass on mutations because we can pro-actively spread them within generations. We've then been a good experiment for evolution because we've successfully figured out how to experiment faster without ending ourselves.
On the other hand, if it turns out our brains were laden with too much greed and we chose some very short-sighted changes, we could end up wiping ourselves out. Evolution's experiment with us will have failed, and all that will be left will be the slower-evolving animals who must mate to pass on genes.
The interesting part is, we're a pretty unpredictable experiment because we can sit here and debate this. We don't even know what we'll do next. Maybe we'll invent weapons powerful enough to destory everything on the planet. Oh wait, we already did and we somehow managed to not kill ourselves. Maybe our primitive self-preservation instinct is stronger than our stupidity. If so, it saved us once and hopefully will save us from evolving ourselves out of existence.
OK, yeah, the human body is not designed fro extremely long lives. The whole point of ths article is to make humans live loger. That means altering the tihings that would cause us to die so that we don't die. That would necessarily include your list of items as well. We'll just engineer more stable DNA and support systems for DNA, stronger hearts, et.
I've had several watches throughout my life, but my Seiko Kinetic has lasted me nearly 4 years now. That's a lot considering my usual abuse terminates a watch in under a year. I got this one while honeymooning in the Carribean. I never have to wind it, it never gets scratched (and I've banged it on everything), and it always keeps the correct time!
So why don't you use IM bots, an IM client or server that has ogging, etc.? Both exist (SmartBuddy was a beta version of an AOL IM bot, and Trillian I know at least has client-side logging, and logging could easily be added to the open-source Jabber server).
Let me educate you on Java. It runs on many popular platforms without modification. No need to track down an implementation of emacs, vi, whatever for your platform. Run Linux at home and Win32 at work? Us jEdit on both with the exact same settings!
What benchmark did you use to decide coding in Java was slower than coding in Perl? KLOCs?
Honestly, its the languages shortcuts that make programming any faster or slower. Shortcuts might be syntactical shortcuts (... || die;), library shortcuts (Collections.sort(...);), etc. Each language has some.
Now, while I haven't used Perl seriously in a couple of years, I would venture to say the CORE Java API is richer than the CORE Perl API, and Perl has a much more capable syntax than does Java.
I've been using jEdit off and on for a year now, most recently very seriously. jEdit is still quite ugly in some areas, but quite nice in others:
Nice:
100% Java
Nicely done Win32 laucnher
Tons of plugins
Nice and easy way to install/update plugins
Concise, Java-based installer
Configuration is extensive
Not so nice:
No javaWebStart link available
Icons are ugly
Toolbars/docking is very fixed and wasteful
No hex editor! (not even a decet plugin)
Configuration organized haphazardly
Disclaimer: I use jEdit as a text editor, not an IDE
I used JCreator for about 6 months. Even got work to chip in for a license (until I got laid off). I liked it, but I've been since forced to use eclipse 2.x, and I like it even better. Yeah, it lacks some things, btu now that I've got a faster computer and tons of memory, its not an issue.
How about a nerual network. When I first took an artificial neural network class in college, I was blown away. So simple. So elegant. And so powerful!
Like you describe, they require training, but they are MADE for pattern recognition. Artificial neural networks are already used in certain niches of programming. But maybe someone could make them more general purpose for general programming.
I remember one example we saw in class was building an XOR neural network. It was incredibly complicated compared to a typical digital XOR gate. But the neural network used to remove unknown noise from a signal was surprisingly simple.
Neither do you. The base pairs in DNA work in groups of 3. There's 4^3 possible combinations then, in one group... 64. However, there are only about 25-30 different results. It has been shown that the various combinations that lead to the same result are nearly-optimal. That is, the liklihood that any one base pair would be incorrectly copied as another is least likely to have an effect on teh result of that group.
This is why we need "trust" to be a property of P2P networks... Surely there's examples of trust systems out there to borrow from, but I've never known how one would work, so here's my proposal:
Each client maintains a list of who he trusts (maybe by IP, maybe by some key, etc.). You might add someone to your trust list when you find a file they have that you want, youd download it, and find it *is* good uality.
Now, was your search propogates your P2P network, trust decays. Let's say we start with the value 10. For each hop farther away, if the client is trusted by you, subtract 0. Uf they're trusted by a client you trust, subtract 1. If they're not trusted by a client you trust, subtract 2.
This yields 9 degrees of freedom for strangers that can be connetced back to you through a chain of clients who trus each other. This yields only 5 degrees of freedom for a chain of clients who have no trust amongst each other.
With the small amount of thinking I've put to this, I can't see why it wouldn't work. Is something likths already beig developed?
OK, here's an attempt to play devil's advocate...
The whole point of copyrights in the constituion is to provide INCENTIVE to authors so that they WILL create. The fear was that without such incentive, non one would create... "Why should I write book? What do I get out of it?"
So, what are the different incentives you could fathom?
Securing a limited monopoly to the uathor so they can profit from their works
Giveng them... A BRAND NEW CAR!!!
Giving them the comfort of mind to know that even if they shoudl die, their children (and grandchildren) will still be ok
An all-espense trip to grlitzy Las Vegas!
Yes, the consitution said the monopoly is given only to the authors. But it was to give them incentive. Securing their children's well-being, as any good parent would like to do (who is the beneficiary of you and your wiife's life insurance policy?). That also is an incentve to create.
Now, whether or not its constitutional for Congress to grant that incentve is another story.
For instance, almabench makes 5,844,000 calls to java.lang.Math.asin(D), which then calls java.lang.StrictMath.asin(D) 5,844,000 times. The same is true of the 11,688,000 calls to atan2()... they're also passed along to StrictMath (only abs() is called as many times as atan2()). The beauty of writing java code is *not* knowing that these sorts of things are going on, no? For best *performance*, however, we have to work a little harder
Are you crazy?!. You think Java is supposed to let you get away with NOT knowing how your code works and interacts with the code it relies upon?
Java, like any other language, needs to be scrutinized for performance problems. If you profiled and found that you code called java.lang.Math.asin, which in turn called java.lang.StrictMath.asin, then you should've re-written your code to use the second method directly. If it was in a third party piece of code, then you should've severely questioned the authors, and yoruself for using it. If it was in a benchmark,t hen you have to ask yorself if this benchmark is a good benchmark to use.
I've encountered this myself several times. For instance, Ineeded to parse a big file based on lines and pipes (|). I figured it'd be easiest (i.e. fastest for me to get the code done) to just use java.util.StringTokenizer. When it turned out to be far too slow for what I needed, I profiled it. It turns out StringTokenizer is optimized to separate Strings into tokens when there are several possible tokens to separate on. In my case,once I rea da line, I just needed one delimitter. Hand-writing my own tokenizer for handling the special case of just one character provided far supoerior results and is in use today.
Rapid Development: because there is a huge core set of standard APIs, as compared to C++, any programmer can sit down with an expansive toolkit when writing a new app. This saves a lot of time by not having to reimplement those tools, or find 3rd party tools. Even if you have a set of 3rd party C++ libraries you like to work with, there is no guarantee that every 3rd party C++ library is going to work on every OS (I once worked in a shop compiling their code to 6 UNOIX platforms and NT -- what a pain!)
HotSpot: As someone else pointed out, HotSpot will improve things at runtime, where you have a lot more information available to you, instead of just compile-time. The author of the article used HotSpot Server which is made to optimize under very different circumstances (for example, extremely long runtimes).
Secure Software: By this, I mean avoiding things like buffer overruns. When you check your array bounds before accessing an array, you can be sure you won't overflow the array. Of course, it is slower. But even HotSpot optimizes a lot of this way (so I've heard, but I don't know exactly how). Sure, you *could* do this in any other language, but opbivously people don't. They get arrogant and assume that they'll never have bad data and just read to the end of a stream. Voila, you've just created a potential exploit!
Everything Else: One of the big factors remaining is just HOW you write code in Java. As someoneelse pointed out, there are a ton of Objects in Java, (almost) every function is virtual, everything is linked dynamically, etc. These things slow Java down, btu also make it more uniform which makes it easier (faster) to learn, in my opinion. If you made every function in your C++ classes virtual, used RTTI and Strings to do runtime linking, etc. your C++ programs would be slower too!
Incidentally, my sister acquired language at a much younger age than I did (she was forming complete, gramatically correct sentences at the age of 2), and yet her earliest memory is of preschool at age 4.
Be careful talking about the age of acquiring language. I never talked until I was 3. But I was very capable of understanding language. 2 weeks before my scheduled appoinment with the speech therapist, I started speaking in complete sentences (whereas before, it was only a baby-like grunt here or there). I don't know why I started talking, but I certainly understood things going on before I talked (I could get across that I wanted a cookie, for example).
Incidentally, my earliest memory is from when I was around two... my Duplo train was up-side-down in a slight arc on the plush two-tone green (70's) carpet in the family room, half a floor down in our tri-level. I was eating a cookie with my back aginst the kitchen wall as my mother was putting up some fake brick crap behind the fridge.
Yes, and the proof-of-concept for centralized internet monitoring is already underway in China. The Bush administratio has only to follow their lead, an we too will be on track to be as free as China one day!
3 years ago, we got big bonuses. The year after that, we got $50 gift certificates. Last year, we got nothing. This year, we got laid off. Now quit complaining!
I disagree with your reasoning, but not the result to your argument. I don't think people like to steal. And I don't think people will always go for the "free" route. I could walk to work fo free, but instead I pay for a car and its maintinence. This keeps me out of the weather, its faster, and its more confortable. Its more convenient (i.e. easy).
When it comes to piracy, I don't think people do it because its free. I think they do it because the total effort/expense to them is less than obtaining it in the store. But, thee quality isn't as good. You dn't get the lyrics, cover art, etc with your pirated MP3 (oh, wait, this is Slashdot... I should've said Ogg).
Now if people could download legitimate MP3s (read: no DRM) of their favorite band, get a JPEG of the cover, XML of the lyrics to plug into their favorte MP3-player's Karoke add-in, and were registered to get preferred tickets at concerts, sneak previews of upcoming albums, etc... all for say $0.50, I think a lot of piracy would be curbed.
But because what someone considers to be the cost/reward of piracy is subjective (in fact some peole may see a personal advantage in the CHALLENGE of getting around the piracy) that you will never stamp out piracy. BUt you can curb it tremendously by conidering it a competitor rather than futility fighting it as a crime.
So, I don't think people like to steal. They just steal because its easier and what they get isn't much less than what you'd get in the store.
No big surprise to me. We all just read that Mono works with ASP.NET, now, along with all of its past successes. Why shouldn't a future, fully.NET version of Microsoft Office work on a Linux implementation of the.NET platform?
Honeslty, I think.NET is very akin to Java (not just the language similarites, but the bytecode/CLR, VM, libraries, etc.). In fact, I think Microsoft will give up their OS monopoly that they've been beaten up about. Just before they giove it up, though, they'll finsih porting everything to.NET amd then sue any platform running.NEt without a license. Trading one monopoly for another.
"Elon Musk, founder of Zip2 and PayPal is planning to build a launcher for small satellites. Much of his personal fortune come from all of the money he stole from legitimate paypal users. The amount of money he plans to spend on this project is not much more than Denis Tito spent on his space station visit. The difference is that this venture actually tries to do something productive. Elon is also behind the Life to Mars mission."
Slashdot Mirror
While you're cutting out the middle man, why don't you also cut out the fossil fuels, the plants/animals they came from, and get you energy right from the sun?
Yeah, our current solar techniques are inefficient. But the way we're using fossil fuels isn;t much better. Think about it. Millions of years of solar energy collection by plants, and indirectly throguh animals, wen tinto making those fossil fuels. And we're draining it all in a few centuries.
I agree. Skip the middle man. Tap solar power to split the hydrogen out of the water.
There are no hydrogen "free lunches" sitting out there waiting for us to take advantage of them. The problem is that most of the sources of hydrogen take more energy to get hydrogen from than they provide in energy output from burning the hydrogen (or reacting it in a fuel cell).
There are no free lunches waiting, but you can build a system to get free lunches. Sure, solar is expensivce to build, and low yield, but if you build enough of it, can that power used to extract hydrogen from water? Once you get it going, it's free. You put no energy in, you just use the sun. And you can augment the unstable solar enegergy from teh sun with traditional electricity from power plants.
As for the "free lunch" of the fossil fuels, its not free. We're not paying for it, though. The dinosaurs did. And you can be damn sure it took a lot more energy to get those fossil fuels where they are today then we will ever get out of them.
The trouble with fossil fuels is the circuit to create them is HUGE! It ges back millions of years to solar energy power plants, some plants being eaten, those animals dying, being compacted and cooked in the crust, and eventually drilled and pumped up by us. Just because the lunch was paid for millions of years ago doesn't mean it was free.
Why even do that? Why not use solar panels to run a current through water (don't ask me the details, I read this elsewhere) to separate it into hydrogen and oxygen? You let the oxygen go into the atmostphere, and store the hydrogen. Later, to release the energy, you let the hydrogen recombine with oxygen from the air, releasing energy and producing water. Its a very short circuit to get from water to water, and the energy inputs and outputs are simple.
As far as I've read, there have been successful (so far) gene therapy experiments where people with defective genes preventing them from developing an iommune system are now capable of doing so thanks to a rtero-virus insetring a correct copy of the failed gene. To me, that sounds like direct genetic manipulation.
if you "personify" evolution, you create more abstraction than necessary
"Aye captaion, I'm giving her all she's got!" What the hell was Scotty thiking? Did he really think the Starship enterprise was a living creature, and female at that? Perhaps when he said he was giving her everything he's got, he had somehoe suplanted the image of is estranged wife taking all of his wealth and posessions onto the starship? It certainly is confusing. If only those lousy StarTreak writers would've avoided using personitifcation.
I personified evolution only because it is easier to talk about things this way. By saying that we are one of evolution's experiements, I mean that we are just another intermediate result of the process of evolution. And by no means are we a closed system. Every other part of evolution impacts us as we impact it.
However, while we are not closed, we are a lot more cohesive within ourselves than we are, say, bound to storks (despite the stories we hear as children). A change in one of our genes is bound to have amuch more profound impact on ourselves than a change in our genes would affect storks. Likewise, a stork's genes have a very small, indirect impact on our evolution.
Now, as far as unpredictability, everything is subject to the same random forces in nature -- the collision of atoms, radiation from space, etc. However, we have this thing called a brain. And our brain has become sufficiently complex that it can react to information (i.e. stimuli from outside it) and have that reaction have an impact. Plants don't have brains. They're reactions to stimuli are a lot more direct. Animals do have brains and their actions are little more indirect. We have brains that most would say are of a higher order (even if only by one degree). Thus, the output of the system that is a human to stimuli is more complex than the output of a plant. A plant grows towards sunlight. A human could move into the sunlight, out of it, put up its hand to made a funny shadow.
That said, oneof the impacts the output of our brain can have is to genetically modify ourselves. Plants, as far as I know, are subject to direct mutations as a result of errors in copying or mutations in place (from chemical interference, radiation, etc.) Through these mutations genetic variation arises. sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad. However, our brains is an extra input into genetic variation now. We can directly modify our genes. Ultimately, the output of our brain that is to modify our genes comes from stimuli all originating in the environment (and oursleves, since we are partof that environment). It is our more complex brain that has allowed this potential for faster and perhaps more-efficient genetic variation.
So when I say evolution experimented with a different kind of evolution by way of our brains, I'm really saying we happened to evolve these brains and the side effect is that these brains allow us to be able to modify our own genes. Its a fast-track to genetic variation. Whethe rthis is good or bad has yet to be seen. So far it is good because we haven't yet wiped out our species. If it is bad, and we add ourselves to the list of extinct life forms, then this evolutionary path will have ended.
So, I apologize for using the term unpredictable when really I meant to describe the increased complexity in input/output the human brain has compared to simpler brains or plants. However, I do object to your objection to my personification of evolution for the sake of description. I think its a valid literary tool.
I strongly disagree.
Here's my view. If we've evolved to evolve ourselves, then we're just evolutions way of evolving faster. Of course, we're just an ongoing experiement, as is all evolution. We continue on our path of faster eovlution until we fail. Until we fail, we're successful by reason of our existence.
Suppose we're smart and we make small modifications very carefully and imrpove our bodies and our population survives. That means evolution has crossed under the generational boundary necessary to pass on mutations because we can pro-actively spread them within generations. We've then been a good experiment for evolution because we've successfully figured out how to experiment faster without ending ourselves.
On the other hand, if it turns out our brains were laden with too much greed and we chose some very short-sighted changes, we could end up wiping ourselves out. Evolution's experiment with us will have failed, and all that will be left will be the slower-evolving animals who must mate to pass on genes.
The interesting part is, we're a pretty unpredictable experiment because we can sit here and debate this. We don't even know what we'll do next. Maybe we'll invent weapons powerful enough to destory everything on the planet. Oh wait, we already did and we somehow managed to not kill ourselves. Maybe our primitive self-preservation instinct is stronger than our stupidity. If so, it saved us once and hopefully will save us from evolving ourselves out of existence.
OK, yeah, the human body is not designed fro extremely long lives. The whole point of ths article is to make humans live loger. That means altering the tihings that would cause us to die so that we don't die. That would necessarily include your list of items as well. We'll just engineer more stable DNA and support systems for DNA, stronger hearts, et.
I've had several watches throughout my life, but my Seiko Kinetic has lasted me nearly 4 years now. That's a lot considering my usual abuse terminates a watch in under a year. I got this one while honeymooning in the Carribean. I never have to wind it, it never gets scratched (and I've banged it on everything), and it always keeps the correct time!
So why don't you use IM bots, an IM client or server that has ogging, etc.? Both exist (SmartBuddy was a beta version of an AOL IM bot, and Trillian I know at least has client-side logging, and logging could easily be added to the open-source Jabber server).
Let me educate you on Java. It runs on many popular platforms without modification. No need to track down an implementation of emacs, vi, whatever for your platform. Run Linux at home and Win32 at work? Us jEdit on both with the exact same settings!
What benchmark did you use to decide coding in Java was slower than coding in Perl? KLOCs?
Honestly, its the languages shortcuts that make programming any faster or slower. Shortcuts might be syntactical shortcuts (... || die;), library shortcuts (Collections.sort(...);), etc. Each language has some.
Now, while I haven't used Perl seriously in a couple of years, I would venture to say the CORE Java API is richer than the CORE Perl API, and Perl has a much more capable syntax than does Java.
- 100% Java
- Nicely done Win32 laucnher
- Tons of plugins
- Nice and easy way to install/update plugins
- Concise, Java-based installer
- Configuration is extensive
Not so nice:- No javaWebStart link available
- Icons are ugly
- Toolbars/docking is very fixed and wasteful
- No hex editor! (not even a decet plugin)
- Configuration organized haphazardly
Disclaimer: I use jEdit as a text editor, not an IDEI used JCreator for about 6 months. Even got work to chip in for a license (until I got laid off). I liked it, but I've been since forced to use eclipse 2.x, and I like it even better. Yeah, it lacks some things, btu now that I've got a faster computer and tons of memory, its not an issue.
Like you describe, they require training, but they are MADE for pattern recognition. Artificial neural networks are already used in certain niches of programming. But maybe someone could make them more general purpose for general programming.
I remember one example we saw in class was building an XOR neural network. It was incredibly complicated compared to a typical digital XOR gate. But the neural network used to remove unknown noise from a signal was surprisingly simple.
Neither do you. The base pairs in DNA work in groups of 3. There's 4^3 possible combinations then, in one group... 64. However, there are only about 25-30 different results. It has been shown that the various combinations that lead to the same result are nearly-optimal. That is, the liklihood that any one base pair would be incorrectly copied as another is least likely to have an effect on teh result of that group.
This is why we need "trust" to be a property of P2P networks... Surely there's examples of trust systems out there to borrow from, but I've never known how one would work, so here's my proposal:
Each client maintains a list of who he trusts (maybe by IP, maybe by some key, etc.). You might add someone to your trust list when you find a file they have that you want, youd download it, and find it *is* good uality.
Now, was your search propogates your P2P network, trust decays. Let's say we start with the value 10. For each hop farther away, if the client is trusted by you, subtract 0. Uf they're trusted by a client you trust, subtract 1. If they're not trusted by a client you trust, subtract 2.
This yields 9 degrees of freedom for strangers that can be connetced back to you through a chain of clients who trus each other. This yields only 5 degrees of freedom for a chain of clients who have no trust amongst each other.
With the small amount of thinking I've put to this, I can't see why it wouldn't work. Is something likths already beig developed?
- Securing a limited monopoly to the uathor so they can profit from their works
- Giveng them... A BRAND NEW CAR!!!
- Giving them the comfort of mind to know that even if they shoudl die, their children (and grandchildren) will still be ok
- An all-espense trip to grlitzy Las Vegas!
Yes, the consitution said the monopoly is given only to the authors. But it was to give them incentive. Securing their children's well-being, as any good parent would like to do (who is the beneficiary of you and your wiife's life insurance policy?). That also is an incentve to create. Now, whether or not its constitutional for Congress to grant that incentve is another story.Are you crazy?!. You think Java is supposed to let you get away with NOT knowing how your code works and interacts with the code it relies upon?
Java, like any other language, needs to be scrutinized for performance problems. If you profiled and found that you code called java.lang.Math.asin, which in turn called java.lang.StrictMath.asin, then you should've re-written your code to use the second method directly. If it was in a third party piece of code, then you should've severely questioned the authors, and yoruself for using it. If it was in a benchmark,t hen you have to ask yorself if this benchmark is a good benchmark to use.
I've encountered this myself several times. For instance, Ineeded to parse a big file based on lines and pipes (|). I figured it'd be easiest (i.e. fastest for me to get the code done) to just use java.util.StringTokenizer. When it turned out to be far too slow for what I needed, I profiled it. It turns out StringTokenizer is optimized to separate Strings into tokens when there are several possible tokens to separate on. In my case,once I rea da line, I just needed one delimitter. Hand-writing my own tokenizer for handling the special case of just one character provided far supoerior results and is in use today.
Be careful talking about the age of acquiring language. I never talked until I was 3. But I was very capable of understanding language. 2 weeks before my scheduled appoinment with the speech therapist, I started speaking in complete sentences (whereas before, it was only a baby-like grunt here or there). I don't know why I started talking, but I certainly understood things going on before I talked (I could get across that I wanted a cookie, for example).
Incidentally, my earliest memory is from when I was around two... my Duplo train was up-side-down in a slight arc on the plush two-tone green (70's) carpet in the family room, half a floor down in our tri-level. I was eating a cookie with my back aginst the kitchen wall as my mother was putting up some fake brick crap behind the fridge.
Yes, and the proof-of-concept for centralized internet monitoring is already underway in China. The Bush administratio has only to follow their lead, an we too will be on track to be as free as China one day!
3 years ago, we got big bonuses. The year after that, we got $50 gift certificates. Last year, we got nothing. This year, we got laid off. Now quit complaining!
I disagree with your reasoning, but not the result to your argument. I don't think people like to steal. And I don't think people will always go for the "free" route. I could walk to work fo free, but instead I pay for a car and its maintinence. This keeps me out of the weather, its faster, and its more confortable. Its more convenient (i.e. easy).
When it comes to piracy, I don't think people do it because its free. I think they do it because the total effort/expense to them is less than obtaining it in the store. But, thee quality isn't as good. You dn't get the lyrics, cover art, etc with your pirated MP3 (oh, wait, this is Slashdot... I should've said Ogg).
Now if people could download legitimate MP3s (read: no DRM) of their favorite band, get a JPEG of the cover, XML of the lyrics to plug into their favorte MP3-player's Karoke add-in, and were registered to get preferred tickets at concerts, sneak previews of upcoming albums, etc... all for say $0.50, I think a lot of piracy would be curbed.
But because what someone considers to be the cost/reward of piracy is subjective (in fact some peole may see a personal advantage in the CHALLENGE of getting around the piracy) that you will never stamp out piracy. BUt you can curb it tremendously by conidering it a competitor rather than futility fighting it as a crime.
So, I don't think people like to steal. They just steal because its easier and what they get isn't much less than what you'd get in the store.
Honeslty, I think .NET is very akin to Java (not just the language similarites, but the bytecode/CLR, VM, libraries, etc.). In fact, I think Microsoft will give up their OS monopoly that they've been beaten up about. Just before they giove it up, though, they'll finsih porting everything to .NET amd then sue any platform running .NEt without a license. Trading one monopoly for another.
"Elon Musk, founder of Zip2 and PayPal is planning to build a launcher for small satellites. Much of his personal fortune come from all of the money he stole from legitimate paypal users . The amount of money he plans to spend on this project is not much more than Denis Tito spent on his space station visit. The difference is that this venture actually tries to do something productive. Elon is also behind the Life to Mars mission."