As in the true copyright protection that lets billions of stolen mp3s get downloaded each day?
No, as in true copyright protection with reasonable limits to the terms of the copyright.
As in the copyright protection that cheats artists out of the fruits of their labors?
Again, no. Here you should replace "copyright protection" with "record labels" -- that is what cheats the artists otu of the fruits of their labors.
As in the copyright protection of p2p tools, which are essentially tools of theft, analagous to slim jims or other criminal tools.
...but nothing else seems to be happening today *grin*
How could you possibly say that? CNN is reporting that helicopters are tailing the ballot-toting Ryder truck in Florida at this very moment! This is better than O.J.!
Who knows, maybe the helicopters are following the worng truck and some guy moving to a new apartment is fearing for his life as these helicopters chase him.
Yes, perhaps so.
Since the tetrachromats can see an additional color between red and green (i.e. yellow?), they can distinguish finer variations of colors in the spectrum. The higher the bit-depth, the finer the differences between colors.
What looks like a smooth 32-bit gradient to you might look pathcy to a tetrachromat.
We've alreay know women see more colors than men for a long time...
HER: Honey, can you find my red shirt for me?
HIM: Yeah, here it is.
HER: No, dear, that's the magenta one. I wanted the red one.
HIM: Is this it?
HER: No, that's burgundy. Forget it. Just give me my cream sweater instead.
HIM: Cream? Is that white?
HER: It's almost white but has a little yellow in it.
HIM: Here it is!
HER: You moron! That's a khaki colored sweater. I wanted the cream one! MEN!
Even if Gore had won the Florida recount, what would it mean? They only recounted Democratic counties. And, as far as I'm concerned, the changes in counts are more due to human error now than machine error then.
Exactly! But its a double-edged sword.
Should either candidate be trying to claim a rightous victory from such a small margin? Bush is up now by 450 votes (out of 6,000,000 in Florida, a percentage of 0.0075%). Suppose Gore count scratch up enough vote to get up by 450 and we'd have the same miniscule margin. Yet Bush is talking like he is the undisputed winner and that Gore is an idiot for trying to wiggle around in that margin. If the situation were reversed, it would be the same.
The travesty isn't so much the butterfly ballots, voter intimidation, etc. Its the fact that the American election system allows for victories that are well withing the margin of error of the vote tallying methods. I think all close votes (maybe FL's 0.5% is a good boundary) should be determined in some other method (duel, vote-off, foot-race, etc.) rather than by meticuously recounting votes that still buzz around in that margin of error!
On an added note, in Palm Beach County, FL a local news station took that "butterfly ballot" and replaced the candidates with cartoon characters. They then asked small children which circle to mark to vote for a particular character. Guess what? They figured it out... (and, keep in mind, that ballot was approved by the Democrats, published in the newspaper, and sent to the home of every registered voter prior to the election.)
Again, another situation with many of the original variables removed.
Did the small school children have years of experience of reading left->right, top->bottom, left-page->right-page?
Were they the actual ballots, in the actual voting booth or simply paper copies? Were you in Palm Beach county to see if the ballot books were secured tightly enough in the voting mechanism that the arrows would line up with the holes mounted in the voting booth? I heard from someone in Palm Beach county who confirmed these suspicions.
On to the subject of the dimpled chad and all that. There were ballots that were clearly punched through for all other offices but "dimpled" for president. Was this voter incapable of punching the holes? I think not.
Your bias conveniently serves you. Think outside the box.
As with myself, a lot, if not a majority, of Americans vote for President and few other offices. Thus, there are bound to be many more pieces of chad left over from previous punches, and thus more chance for the chad to build up making it difficult or impossible to punch later ballots completely.
DISCLAIMER: This is not my theory, just one I heard on a call-in talk show. I happened to find it refreshing to hear someone giving fellow American's credit instead of thinking they're smarter than everyone else.
If a football game is lost by 1 point, it is still lost.
What if a footballgame is lost by 0.0167% of a point? Or, suppose that in the final second of the game, the ball was near the goal line -- but closer than the resolution it could be measured with.
Should the "losing team" give up? Should the winning team pretend to be the unquestioned victor?
So, we get a new format? Not that easy. What about the spotty support for PNG? What about the various competing vector image formats? What about the more aggressive wavelet based image compression?
First you have to have a good format, then it has to be accessible and affordable, then it has to be accepted. For the life of me, I can't figure out why PNG hasn't replaced GIF.
Actually, though, that's part of the final hurdle -- a Catch-22. No one will adopt it until web pages and browsers support it. Web pages won't support it until browsers do and browsers have no reason to until web page creators demand it.
Suppose this "certification" grows to be a way to certify that a program won't crash when you run it. Does this mean Microsoft's own products won't be able to run on Whistler?
What of the even greater paradox that Whistler will probably crash, so wouldn't be certified, so you couldn't even run Whistler in the first place?
However, somehow I doubt Microsoft would take it to that meaningful level. Instead, it will be a way for them to get more revenue, assert control, and get a listing of all Windows developers.
Didn't Apple used to make all software and hardware be certfieied by them before it could me sold as a product for the Macintosh? Isn't that bottleneck part of what made Apple rot? Could this be a blessing in disguise?
There was a story on PBS at least 1 year ago on walking robots. They covered the pogo-stick walker, multi-legged walker, and of course, Honda's robots. They're actually at least on their second generation of this beast. This second one is much more life-like in its walking, smaller, lighter, faster, etc.
The more interesting thing that I got from the special was the robot that *learned* to walk like an infant does. At power up, it is wobly and nervous. As the instructor helps it maintain its balance and catch it falls, the robot's AI (neural networked?) learns from its mistakes and improves. After a few hours, the bi-pedal contraption is able to walk on its own. That is, until it is turned off and its memory gone.
From CNet: Office 10 will offer five new document recovery tools that will strive to correct the instabilities found in previous versions of Office (and Windows) that resulted in wasted time and lost documents because of hung machines, spontaneous rebooting, mysterious error messages, and system crashes.
Rather than improve stability, they reduce the damage caused by instability. Why didn't they just direct those resources directly at improving stability?
Man! Security problems? Maybe I'm just evolutionarily advanced, btu I've never had "security problems" in Outlook. I once set up an exchange server by the seat of my pants in no time flat. Never had any problems at all. We even had sales people accessing it remotely. We had task assignment, calendaring, messaging, discussion groups, etc. It was a beautiful thing.
Then they switched to Lotus Notes. What a P.O.S. (and I don't mean point-of-sale).
5. Old maps show almost the exact shape of antarctica. But antarctica is covered with ice and we only know the shape of antarctica because of radar and other hi-tech stuff. So how did they do that?
Here's a link to information on the famous "Piri Reese Map" which showed Anarctica's true land-mass. The map was supposedly compiled from other maps he collected during his worldy travels -- some of which supposedly dated back to the LIbrary of Alexandria.
As others have pointed out, this is the typical behavior of new markets. But I believe there is a new factor here that adds to the magnitude of the swings: Amatuer web-based day-traders.
These folks were sucked in bu the idea of easy trading and the media's coverage of the "new economy". These inexperienced traders often buy stocks and sell them in the same day. They're in it for the short and fast ride. They also tend to be more reactionary to news and even rumors.
However, since they are making up an ever-increasing portion of traders, they are having a greater impact. Other traders cannot ignore them -- they must concede at least partially to them since they have a real impact.
I believe this influx of fledging traders can explain the more-wild-than-usual ride in this new market. Heck, I'd be one of these people too if I weren't too lazy to watch my stocks 24x7.
I don't remember if I learned of this on the news, net or radio, but...
There was a professor at some university like MIT who embedded a chip into his arm. The chip relayed the nervous signals in his arm back to a computer which recorded them. He was later able to play thos signals back to his arm to reproduce the movements he had made earlier in the day.
OK, that sounds great and all, but what about plate tectonics (SP?)?
I'm not sure about the Pacific floor, but I know the Atlantic floor is expanding -- so this applies to trans-Atlantic cables at the veyr least.
As the plates expand at the rate of [inces/feet?] per year, what happens to the cables? Is the growth small enough that the cables won't stretch to a critical frailty until after they've outlived their usefulness?
I have great respect for Roger Penrose, but I disagree with the need for quantum mechanics to account for the complexity of the brain. When you look at the power of a simple neural network, then mulptiplex and multiply that power according to the number of cells in the brain, a great amount of power is realized.
I think a great deal of insight can be found by realizing how the brain works. Imagine your brain isn't really in your body, but connected to a vast computer that is simulating stimuli and reacting to output from your brain (i.e. The Matrix). Your brain acts as a black box to the world. It develops over a number of years through trial & error testing dozens of different inputs (light, sound, taste, smell, touch, temperature, internal signals, time-domain information, etc.). If anyone were to take the time build a system they believe to be comparable and let it develop over 20 years -- then see how it compares -- we might be in for surprise.
As an inkling of what we might find -- people have developed a robot that can control its robotic arm and "sees" through a video camera. It starts off with a clean slate, but over a duration of hours, it begins to learn that when a certain signal (started at random) is sent, this "thing" it seems "moves". Eventually, it "realizes" that the "thing" is its "arm". Does it really realize it, or has it just associated certain outputs with certain inputs? Do we realize our arm is ours?
Keep in mind, my daughter is 5 months old and just now realizing her feet are hers -- at least, I suppose that she is realizing it.
If you can't describe your I-ness any more accurately, then how can you expect me to quantifiably explain it? That is part of the problem with people saying computers can't be [intelligent/conscience/sentient/etc.] -- those terms have varying definitions.
All I know is in the tiny bit I've dabbled in neural networks, I've seen a lot. I've seen memory, self-organizing maps, boundary detection, etc. -- all from very simple and small neural networks. Now when you consider that there are billions of cells in the human brain, you multiply those simple capabilities I listed before enormously!
I don't see humans as being anything more than one step away from the rest of the animals. We happen to have excessively large brians for our side (only humans and dolphins have significantly heavier than average brains for their body size), and because of that surplus of nerual power, we *seem* smarter -- just as a Pentium III computer seems able to do more than an 8086 (speech recognition, for example).
Slashdot Mirror
As in the true copyright protection that lets billions of stolen mp3s get downloaded each day?
No, as in true copyright protection with reasonable limits to the terms of the copyright.
As in the copyright protection that cheats artists out of the fruits of their labors? Again, no. Here you should replace "copyright protection" with "record labels" -- that is what cheats the artists otu of the fruits of their labors.
As in the copyright protection of p2p tools, which are essentially tools of theft, analagous to slim jims or other criminal tools.
And what are guns used for?
How could you possibly say that? CNN is reporting that helicopters are tailing the ballot-toting Ryder truck in Florida at this very moment! This is better than O.J.!
Who knows, maybe the helicopters are following the worng truck and some guy moving to a new apartment is fearing for his life as these helicopters chase him.
Yes, perhaps so. Since the tetrachromats can see an additional color between red and green (i.e. yellow?), they can distinguish finer variations of colors in the spectrum. The higher the bit-depth, the finer the differences between colors. What looks like a smooth 32-bit gradient to you might look pathcy to a tetrachromat.
HER: Honey, can you find my red shirt for me?
HIM: Yeah, here it is.
HER: No, dear, that's the magenta one. I wanted the red one.
HIM: Is this it?
HER: No, that's burgundy. Forget it. Just give me my cream sweater instead.
HIM: Cream? Is that white?
HER: It's almost white but has a little yellow in it.
HIM: Here it is!
HER: You moron! That's a khaki colored sweater. I wanted the cream one! MEN!
Exactly! But its a double-edged sword.
Should either candidate be trying to claim a rightous victory from such a small margin? Bush is up now by 450 votes (out of 6,000,000 in Florida, a percentage of 0.0075%). Suppose Gore count scratch up enough vote to get up by 450 and we'd have the same miniscule margin. Yet Bush is talking like he is the undisputed winner and that Gore is an idiot for trying to wiggle around in that margin. If the situation were reversed, it would be the same.
The travesty isn't so much the butterfly ballots, voter intimidation, etc. Its the fact that the American election system allows for victories that are well withing the margin of error of the vote tallying methods. I think all close votes (maybe FL's 0.5% is a good boundary) should be determined in some other method (duel, vote-off, foot-race, etc.) rather than by meticuously recounting votes that still buzz around in that margin of error!
Again, another situation with many of the original variables removed.
Did the small school children have years of experience of reading left->right, top->bottom, left-page->right-page?
Were they the actual ballots, in the actual voting booth or simply paper copies? Were you in Palm Beach county to see if the ballot books were secured tightly enough in the voting mechanism that the arrows would line up with the holes mounted in the voting booth? I heard from someone in Palm Beach county who confirmed these suspicions.
Your bias conveniently serves you. Think outside the box.
As with myself, a lot, if not a majority, of Americans vote for President and few other offices. Thus, there are bound to be many more pieces of chad left over from previous punches, and thus more chance for the chad to build up making it difficult or impossible to punch later ballots completely.
DISCLAIMER: This is not my theory, just one I heard on a call-in talk show. I happened to find it refreshing to hear someone giving fellow American's credit instead of thinking they're smarter than everyone else.
If that were the case, Gore wouldn't be trying to scratch up enough votes in Florida to win its electoral votes.
What if a footballgame is lost by 0.0167% of a point? Or, suppose that in the final second of the game, the ball was near the goal line -- but closer than the resolution it could be measured with.
Should the "losing team" give up? Should the winning team pretend to be the unquestioned victor?
First you have to have a good format, then it has to be accessible and affordable, then it has to be accepted. For the life of me, I can't figure out why PNG hasn't replaced GIF.
Actually, though, that's part of the final hurdle -- a Catch-22. No one will adopt it until web pages and browsers support it. Web pages won't support it until browsers do and browsers have no reason to until web page creators demand it.
Keeping in mind the opens ource ddevelopment model, how many developers contributed to the development of the baby?
What of the even greater paradox that Whistler will probably crash, so wouldn't be certified, so you couldn't even run Whistler in the first place?
However, somehow I doubt Microsoft would take it to that meaningful level. Instead, it will be a way for them to get more revenue, assert control, and get a listing of all Windows developers.
Didn't Apple used to make all software and hardware be certfieied by them before it could me sold as a product for the Macintosh? Isn't that bottleneck part of what made Apple rot? Could this be a blessing in disguise?
The more interesting thing that I got from the special was the robot that *learned* to walk like an infant does. At power up, it is wobly and nervous. As the instructor helps it maintain its balance and catch it falls, the robot's AI (neural networked?) learns from its mistakes and improves. After a few hours, the bi-pedal contraption is able to walk on its own. That is, until it is turned off and its memory gone.
From CNet: Office 10 will offer five new document recovery tools that will strive to correct the instabilities found in previous versions of Office (and Windows) that resulted in wasted time and lost documents because of hung machines, spontaneous rebooting, mysterious error messages, and system crashes.
Rather than improve stability, they reduce the damage caused by instability. Why didn't they just direct those resources directly at improving stability?
Then they switched to Lotus Notes. What a P.O.S. (and I don't mean point-of-sale).
5. Old maps show almost the exact shape of antarctica. But antarctica is covered with ice and we only know the shape of antarctica because of radar and other hi-tech stuff. So how did they do that? Here's a link to information on the famous "Piri Reese Map" which showed Anarctica's true land-mass. The map was supposedly compiled from other maps he collected during his worldy travels -- some of which supposedly dated back to the LIbrary of Alexandria.
These folks were sucked in bu the idea of easy trading and the media's coverage of the "new economy". These inexperienced traders often buy stocks and sell them in the same day. They're in it for the short and fast ride. They also tend to be more reactionary to news and even rumors.
However, since they are making up an ever-increasing portion of traders, they are having a greater impact. Other traders cannot ignore them -- they must concede at least partially to them since they have a real impact.
I believe this influx of fledging traders can explain the more-wild-than-usual ride in this new market. Heck, I'd be one of these people too if I weren't too lazy to watch my stocks 24x7.
Because then we wouldn't have story lines for great movies like StarGate .
There was a professor at some university like MIT who embedded a chip into his arm. The chip relayed the nervous signals in his arm back to a computer which recorded them. He was later able to play thos signals back to his arm to reproduce the movements he had made earlier in the day.
Similar idea, slightly different application.
Typically if you find two people doing the same thing in two disconnected places, it tends to beef up a theory.
Hey, I was trying tom be funny, not informative or insightful! Don't blame me!
I'm not sure about the Pacific floor, but I know the Atlantic floor is expanding -- so this applies to trans-Atlantic cables at the veyr least.
As the plates expand at the rate of [inces/feet?] per year, what happens to the cables? Is the growth small enough that the cables won't stretch to a critical frailty until after they've outlived their usefulness?
I think a great deal of insight can be found by realizing how the brain works. Imagine your brain isn't really in your body, but connected to a vast computer that is simulating stimuli and reacting to output from your brain (i.e. The Matrix). Your brain acts as a black box to the world. It develops over a number of years through trial & error testing dozens of different inputs (light, sound, taste, smell, touch, temperature, internal signals, time-domain information, etc.). If anyone were to take the time build a system they believe to be comparable and let it develop over 20 years -- then see how it compares -- we might be in for surprise.
As an inkling of what we might find -- people have developed a robot that can control its robotic arm and "sees" through a video camera. It starts off with a clean slate, but over a duration of hours, it begins to learn that when a certain signal (started at random) is sent, this "thing" it seems "moves". Eventually, it "realizes" that the "thing" is its "arm". Does it really realize it, or has it just associated certain outputs with certain inputs? Do we realize our arm is ours?
Keep in mind, my daughter is 5 months old and just now realizing her feet are hers -- at least, I suppose that she is realizing it.
All I know is in the tiny bit I've dabbled in neural networks, I've seen a lot. I've seen memory, self-organizing maps, boundary detection, etc. -- all from very simple and small neural networks. Now when you consider that there are billions of cells in the human brain, you multiply those simple capabilities I listed before enormously!
I don't see humans as being anything more than one step away from the rest of the animals. We happen to have excessively large brians for our side (only humans and dolphins have significantly heavier than average brains for their body size), and because of that surplus of nerual power, we *seem* smarter -- just as a Pentium III computer seems able to do more than an 8086 (speech recognition, for example).