If I'm understanding things correctly (and there's no guarantee that I am) the "problem" is that a lot of documentation is generated from source code (structured comments in C and Java, pod files in Perl, doc-strings in Python, etc). For example, dOxygen generates the HTML files that you browse, so a signed version of those HTML files isn't available anywhere. The solution is to require anyone wanting authenticated documentation to install the tools needed to generate it from the authenticated source.
They're proposal is very similar to one I made here and at Content Agenda (it's the last comment on the page) a month or two back. Their proposal seems much more detailed.
I would've sworn that I submitted my version to copyright.gov, and got a confirmation, but I can't find any evidence of it now. Hopefully, it will be considered as an additional vote for this version.
http://rangevoting.org/VenHist.html describes how the republic of Venice elected its Doge, the highest ranking official. In some of the phases of the process, it is similar to the random assignment of music to one of Salganik's eight artificial "worlds", which had to work with a much larger population. (Note that Venice had a population of 150,000 in 1630, roughly one two-thousandth the current population of the US.)
Nominees were often chosen by committees, who in turn were selected by a hopefully-incorruptible random process (involving selecting balls from urns) then the election for that position was among those who had been nominated. By having multiple stages of both random and election processes the Venetians tried to make the system incorruptible (thanks to the randomness) but also striving for maximum quality (due to the democratic electing-the-best processes).
Thus the process for electing the Doge, as of 1268 (when it was employed for the election of Lorenzo Tiepolo), had reached this amazing almost-final form [Lane p.111; also described by Lines p.156]:
1. Choose 30 of the Great Council members (of whom there were 1000-to-1500, typically; all male) by a random process;
2. Reduce them to 9 by random processes;
3. The 9 name 40 nominees;
4. The 40 are reduced to 12 by a random process;
5. the 12 name 25 nominees;
6. Reduce them to 9 by random processes;
7. The 9 name 45 nominees;
8. Reduce them to 11 by random processes;
9. The 11 named 41 (all of whom had to be ageâ¥40 years);
10. The 41 elected the Doge (from among nominees they chose; any of the 41 could write a name on a slip of paper, and from then onward, that name was a candidate) by range3 voting!
11. This choice theoretically was subject to approval or veto by the mass of the people (assembly) but I am unaware of any instance in which that veto was exercised. This perhaps meant this step was a mere formality with the People not really having any power. But another interpretation is that the threat of a veto kept the Grand Council honest in its choice they refused to risk the embarrassment of a veto.
In this process, only the penultimate step â" the election â" "really mattered" â" the rest was mainly intended to make the identity of the 41 unpredictable hence making the process (hopefully) uncorruptible. The 41, during their deliberations, were sequestered rather like the juries in modern-day big-time criminal cases. This again was presumably intended to insulate them from corruption.
OK, I read the entire thread. As I did so, I realized that it looked familar. I think that I read the whole thing a year ago in response to an earlier posting here. It struck me then as a tempest in a teapot. It still does.
Since Mr. Reyk hasn't filed suit, it's totally academic what the 'madwifi fuckers' did or did not do.
In other words, if a copyright owner chooses not to bring a lawsuit, no one else can bring one on his/her behalf. So yes, any discussion of what happened is academic, just like discussions about Lori Drew or Hans Reiser. You can discuss and argue all that you want, but nothing you say will have any legal standing. Maybe, if enough people scream about something, you can encourage a prosecutor to look into something (as apparently happened with Lori Drew), but since copyright cases are civil suits, not criminal cases, I don't see you making much headway there. I don't know why Mr. Reyk hasn't filed a suit. Maybe he's lazy. Maybe he and the accused have a private understanding that we know nothing about. Who knows? I don't know and I don't care.
The anthorpic principle applies to conditions that were in place from the beginning of the universe. Your version applies to events that may happen at some point during the evolution of the universe, and thus doesn't apply.
You seem to be using a very specific definition. Have you read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle? Pay particular attention to the parts that discuss why we are living when we do.
Wikipedia defines the anthropic principle as "Our human understanding dictates that the only kind of universe we can occupy is one that is similar to the one we are in. If it were a completely different kind of universe, no human would occupy it."
I'm (semi-seriously) proposing a similar statement, "the only kind of universe we can occupy is one where the Earth wasn't destroyed by high-energy physics experiments. If Earth were destroyed, no human would occupy that universe."
If you believe in the many-worlds interpretation (and apparently 42% of physicists do), then there should be worlds where the LHC didn't fail, and even some where the SSC was built and activated. But if high-energy physics experiments can destroy Earth, then those worlds no longer contain observers, so the only worlds that we can observe are those where the experiments were never activated. So, every time an event prevents high-energy physics experiments from occurring, it is additional evidence that those experiments are dangerous.
BTW, this hypothesis could also explain the Fermi paradox. Intelligent life could be quite common if it normally destroys itself. Only in an infinitesimal fraction of the many worlds would intelligence survive, due to strings of "lucky accidents", and they would see themselves as alone. Only when they explore other stars would they discover that other stars have planetary-mass black holes orbiting them. You know, I may turn this into a sci-fi story.
Has anyone besides me realized that this means that the LHC does have the potential to destroy the Earth? In many universes, the SSC was completed and started, resulting in the destruction of the Earth and killing all observers. For most of the surviving parallel worlds, the LHC was recently turned on and Earth was destroyed. Only those universes where a failure occurred still survive, but since only those universes contain observers, i.e. us, no one has yet realized the danger. Most of these parallel Earths will be destroyed when the LHC is restarted in 2010, again leaving the surviving observers in a universe where another unlikely failure has happened. I wonder how many failures will have to occur before the physicists realize that the many-worlds interpretation is correct, and that the LHC needs to be abandoned?
Jet contrails apparently serve to cool the Earth during the day, as they reflect solar radiation, while at night they serve to warm the Earth, by trapping heat. So for maximum effect, you'd want to only dissipate the contrails created during nighttime flights. This would include not just "red-eye" flights, but air cargo operations like FexEx. Measurements taken during the grounding of all commercial flights following 9/11 indicate that there was a two degree increase in the range of day/night temperatures, so elimination of just the nighttime contrails could lower temperatures by a degree or so.
As a third-year B.Sc. EE student, I had to take Partial Differential Equations. Of course, double-e's also had a special class that crammed four different Math department classes into a single semester. I remember Fourier transforms being one of them, but my memories of the other three have faded.
It doesn't actually shutdown your computer, it restarts it and suspends it once it comes back up. So if you shutdown after applying an update the next time you "boot" you will have the update applied as normal.
The downside is that everytime you shutdown you actually go through a full length cold boot + suspend. It's just shifted the startup time onto your previous shutdown time.
That's interesting. For some reason, my Win2K laptop has developed a habit of spontaneously coming out of sleep mode after 20 minutes (and it won't hibernate at all!), so I wrote a simple little AutoHotKey app that at it's heart runs a loop:
Delay:= 6 ; wait six seconds the first time through
Loop
{
Sleep, %Delay% * 1000
; lots of GUI code omitted here
DllCall("PowrProf\SetSuspendState", "int", 0, "int", 1, "int", 0)
Delay:= 30 ; wait thirty seconds thereafter
} The only downside is that whenever I do want to use the thing, I have to hit "Break" within 30 seconds of waking up. I hadn't thought about it before, but I don't see any reason why I couldn't have that script run at boot time and get the same results as ASRock.
Due to the proximity to the Sun, the Galactic centre is the brightest and most extended source. This makes it easier to detect than any of the small dark matter subclumps that are distributed over the sky. If one of them should also be detected, it may be devoid of any stars.
I'm interested in that last sentence. Does the gamma radiation push away hydrogen and dust, preventing the formation of stars, or does dark matter exhibit a repulsive gravitational force, clearing a region of space around it? Without referring to Wikipedia, the latter seems unlikely, but the former seems like something we should worry about. How much gamma radiation are we talking about? Should we worry about one of these clumps drifting near the solar system and sterilizing everything? (And if so, how much of an effect would these clumps have on the Drake equation?)
Instead of a gamma-ray glow map as seen from the Sun, I'd like to see 3d renderings of a whole galaxy where they artificially color dark matter to show where it is.
I believe that was the first picture. Of course it was 2-D in the article, but it had to have been based off of a 3-D model. Maybe the researchers could create a Quicktime VR movie that we could spin.
xterm with the "unreadable" font is great for keeping an eye on processes. I've used monitoring programs that displayed histograms using curses, which worked well in an unreadable xterm. These days, you can use "xterm -ai" to request active icons, which work similarly.
Wow, way to pull numbers out of your ass! $15 = $3600? If you play for 20 years!!! The servers wont be up that long. The time value of money means you either 1) will have to pay a higher rate in the future or 2) will be paying effectively less over time (as the value of the $15 decreases.)
I think that you misunderstood my position. My thinking was that if you start with $3600, you can withdraw $15/month forever, not just 20 years. As I said, I'm not a player, but it seems safe to assume that dedicated players will continue to play for the rest of their lives, and forever seems like a good first-order approximation to someone's lifetime. GP seems to feel that $15 is too much to spend for something that they could replicate at home. I was just pointing out a logical limit to how much they could spend and how easy it would be for them to break that limit. I think that $15 is a very fair price for someone who wants that experience; I don't.
AutoHotkey. You can write a macro that will watch what you type, and if the foreground window is your web browser (and optionally, if you're on/.) then it can replace any key you define with any arbitrary string. I haven't tried but I expect that apostrophe replacement is trivial. There are also macros that will drop the string <a href="CLIPBOARD-CONTENTS"></a>" at the current cursor position, leaving the cursor between the tags; and now that I've had to do it by hand, I suspect I can also find a macro to replace various characters with their escaped HTML entities.
Download the client. (Perfectly legal.) Download and run your own Mangos server. (Perfectly illegal.) Deprive Blizzard of money they don't need. I mean seriously NOBODY, ANYWHERE, needs to earn the $75+ million a month they make for their stupid little game.
WOW is a great game.... When it's free. For $15 a month it's a complete ripoff.
I can't remember if it was Will Wright or Sid Meier who said it, but one of those gaming legends said WOW was the best single player RPG they'd ever played.
I'm not a WoW player, but from a straight financial perspective, $15/month is equivalent to a lump sum of $3,600. That seems like a large amount, but it's your complete budget for setting up your own server; don't forget to charge a reasonable rate for the time you spend doing it. And before you go hog wild on the hardware, remember that all future upgrades need to be paid for from that same initial fund.
(To estimate a reasonable rate for your time, take your annual income and divide by the number of hours you actually work in a year; call it 2,000 for simplicity. I'm a consultant, my number is roughly a quarter of my company's quoted rate but they have a lot of overhead to cover.)
Probably more like this person. Why point to the sequel when the original is available? But who am I to talk; this was the first time I'd heard of this. No, I'm not a huge anime fan, but I occasionally watch it on CN, Spike, and G4. I'll keep my eye open for it.
"Mark Papermaster"? What is it with all the oddball last names in the technology business? There's Faith Popcorn, but wikipedia says her birthname was Faith Plotkin. But "Papermaster" sounds like someone who should be running either a D&D game or Dunder Mifflin (or Wernham Hogg, I guess).
Slashdot Mirror
If I'm understanding things correctly (and there's no guarantee that I am) the "problem" is that a lot of documentation is generated from source code (structured comments in C and Java, pod files in Perl, doc-strings in Python, etc). For example, dOxygen generates the HTML files that you browse, so a signed version of those HTML files isn't available anywhere. The solution is to require anyone wanting authenticated documentation to install the tools needed to generate it from the authenticated source.
http://fixunix.com/kernel/373556-ubifs-vs-logfs-rfc-patch-ubifs-new-flash-file-system.html has a great discussion about using a flash file system on a block device that's really a flash device with built-in wear-leveling. While neither participant seems to decisively change the other's opinion, several good arguments are made.
Every access to FAT writes to the same area of the file system (the FAT), and this is what destroys old-style floppy disks.
That's why people use a flash file system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system#Flash_file_systems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAFFS is a good choice; it seems to be used in Android.
They're proposal is very similar to one I made here and at Content Agenda (it's the last comment on the page) a month or two back. Their proposal seems much more detailed.
I would've sworn that I submitted my version to copyright.gov, and got a confirmation, but I can't find any evidence of it now. Hopefully, it will be considered as an additional vote for this version.
Wake the fuck up.
Aww, why not let the fuck sleep, instead. The fuck deserves its rest.
http://rangevoting.org/VenHist.html describes how the republic of Venice elected its Doge, the highest ranking official. In some of the phases of the process, it is similar to the random assignment of music to one of Salganik's eight artificial "worlds", which had to work with a much larger population. (Note that Venice had a population of 150,000 in 1630, roughly one two-thousandth the current population of the US.)
Nominees were often chosen by committees, who in turn were selected by a hopefully-incorruptible random process (involving selecting balls from urns) then the election for that position was among those who had been nominated. By having multiple stages of both random and election processes the Venetians tried to make the system incorruptible (thanks to the randomness) but also striving for maximum quality (due to the democratic electing-the-best processes).
Thus the process for electing the Doge, as of 1268 (when it was employed for the election of Lorenzo Tiepolo), had reached this amazing almost-final form [Lane p.111; also described by Lines p.156]:
1. Choose 30 of the Great Council members (of whom there were 1000-to-1500, typically; all male) by a random process;
2. Reduce them to 9 by random processes;
3. The 9 name 40 nominees;
4. The 40 are reduced to 12 by a random process;
5. the 12 name 25 nominees;
6. Reduce them to 9 by random processes;
7. The 9 name 45 nominees;
8. Reduce them to 11 by random processes;
9. The 11 named 41 (all of whom had to be ageâ¥40 years);
10. The 41 elected the Doge (from among nominees they chose; any of the 41 could write a name on a slip of paper, and from then onward, that name was a candidate) by range3 voting!
11. This choice theoretically was subject to approval or veto by the mass of the people (assembly) but I am unaware of any instance in which that veto was exercised. This perhaps meant this step was a mere formality with the People not really having any power. But another interpretation is that the threat of a veto kept the Grand Council honest in its choice they refused to risk the embarrassment of a veto.
In this process, only the penultimate step â" the election â" "really mattered" â" the rest was mainly intended to make the identity of the 41 unpredictable hence making the process (hopefully) uncorruptible. The 41, during their deliberations, were sequestered rather like the juries in modern-day big-time criminal cases. This again was presumably intended to insulate them from corruption.
Go read the link again - note that Theo was talking about the OpenHAL code. http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/openbsd-misc/2007/9/13/259448/thread
OK, I read the entire thread. As I did so, I realized that it looked familar. I think that I read the whole thing a year ago in response to an earlier posting here. It struck me then as a tempest in a teapot. It still does.
Since Mr. Reyk hasn't filed suit, it's totally academic what the 'madwifi fuckers' did or did not do.
In other words, if a copyright owner chooses not to bring a lawsuit, no one else can bring one on his/her behalf. So yes, any discussion of what happened is academic, just like discussions about Lori Drew or Hans Reiser. You can discuss and argue all that you want, but nothing you say will have any legal standing. Maybe, if enough people scream about something, you can encourage a prosecutor to look into something (as apparently happened with Lori Drew), but since copyright cases are civil suits, not criminal cases, I don't see you making much headway there. I don't know why Mr. Reyk hasn't filed a suit. Maybe he's lazy. Maybe he and the accused have a private understanding that we know nothing about. Who knows? I don't know and I don't care.
The anthorpic principle applies to conditions that were in place from the beginning of the universe. Your version applies to events that may happen at some point during the evolution of the universe, and thus doesn't apply.
You seem to be using a very specific definition. Have you read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle? Pay particular attention to the parts that discuss why we are living when we do.
Wikipedia defines the anthropic principle as "Our human understanding dictates that the only kind of universe we can occupy is one that is similar to the one we are in. If it were a completely different kind of universe, no human would occupy it."
I'm (semi-seriously) proposing a similar statement, "the only kind of universe we can occupy is one where the Earth wasn't destroyed by high-energy physics experiments. If Earth were destroyed, no human would occupy that universe."
If you believe in the many-worlds interpretation (and apparently 42% of physicists do), then there should be worlds where the LHC didn't fail, and even some where the SSC was built and activated. But if high-energy physics experiments can destroy Earth, then those worlds no longer contain observers, so the only worlds that we can observe are those where the experiments were never activated. So, every time an event prevents high-energy physics experiments from occurring, it is additional evidence that those experiments are dangerous.
BTW, this hypothesis could also explain the Fermi paradox. Intelligent life could be quite common if it normally destroys itself. Only in an infinitesimal fraction of the many worlds would intelligence survive, due to strings of "lucky accidents", and they would see themselves as alone. Only when they explore other stars would they discover that other stars have planetary-mass black holes orbiting them. You know, I may turn this into a sci-fi story.
I'd classify it as satire.
No. I apparently needed to put a smiley face somewhere.
Has anyone besides me realized that this means that the LHC does have the potential to destroy the Earth? In many universes, the SSC was completed and started, resulting in the destruction of the Earth and killing all observers. For most of the surviving parallel worlds, the LHC was recently turned on and Earth was destroyed. Only those universes where a failure occurred still survive, but since only those universes contain observers, i.e. us, no one has yet realized the danger. Most of these parallel Earths will be destroyed when the LHC is restarted in 2010, again leaving the surviving observers in a universe where another unlikely failure has happened. I wonder how many failures will have to occur before the physicists realize that the many-worlds interpretation is correct, and that the LHC needs to be abandoned?
Jet contrails apparently serve to cool the Earth during the day, as they reflect solar radiation, while at night they serve to warm the Earth, by trapping heat. So for maximum effect, you'd want to only dissipate the contrails created during nighttime flights. This would include not just "red-eye" flights, but air cargo operations like FexEx. Measurements taken during the grounding of all commercial flights following 9/11 indicate that there was a two degree increase in the range of day/night temperatures, so elimination of just the nighttime contrails could lower temperatures by a degree or so.
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.climate/index.html
As a third-year B.Sc. EE student, I had to take Partial Differential Equations. Of course, double-e's also had a special class that crammed four different Math department classes into a single semester. I remember Fourier transforms being one of them, but my memories of the other three have faded.
It doesn't actually shutdown your computer, it restarts it and suspends it once it comes back up. So if you shutdown after applying an update the next time you "boot" you will have the update applied as normal.
The downside is that everytime you shutdown you actually go through a full length cold boot + suspend. It's just shifted the startup time onto your previous shutdown time.
That's interesting. For some reason, my Win2K laptop has developed a habit of spontaneously coming out of sleep mode after 20 minutes (and it won't hibernate at all!), so I wrote a simple little AutoHotKey app that at it's heart runs a loop: := 6 ; wait six seconds the first time through := 30 ; wait thirty seconds thereafter
Delay
Loop
{
Sleep, %Delay% * 1000
; lots of GUI code omitted here
DllCall("PowrProf\SetSuspendState", "int", 0, "int", 1, "int", 0)
Delay
}
The only downside is that whenever I do want to use the thing, I have to hit "Break" within 30 seconds of waking up. I hadn't thought about it before, but I don't see any reason why I couldn't have that script run at boot time and get the same results as ASRock.
Due to the proximity to the Sun, the Galactic centre is the brightest and most extended source. This makes it easier to detect than any of the small dark matter subclumps that are distributed over the sky. If one of them should also be detected, it may be devoid of any stars.
I'm interested in that last sentence. Does the gamma radiation push away hydrogen and dust, preventing the formation of stars, or does dark matter exhibit a repulsive gravitational force, clearing a region of space around it? Without referring to Wikipedia, the latter seems unlikely, but the former seems like something we should worry about. How much gamma radiation are we talking about? Should we worry about one of these clumps drifting near the solar system and sterilizing everything? (And if so, how much of an effect would these clumps have on the Drake equation?)
Instead of a gamma-ray glow map as seen from the Sun, I'd like to see 3d renderings of a whole galaxy where they artificially color dark matter to show where it is.
I believe that was the first picture. Of course it was 2-D in the article, but it had to have been based off of a 3-D model. Maybe the researchers could create a Quicktime VR movie that we could spin.
xterm with the "unreadable" font is great for keeping an eye on processes. I've used monitoring programs that displayed histograms using curses, which worked well in an unreadable xterm. These days, you can use "xterm -ai" to request active icons, which work similarly.
The good news is that, like Ron Paul's supporters, I'll be able to easily tell if Diebold ate my vote.
Wow, way to pull numbers out of your ass! $15 = $3600? If you play for 20 years!!! The servers wont be up that long. The time value of money means you either 1) will have to pay a higher rate in the future or 2) will be paying effectively less over time (as the value of the $15 decreases.)
I think that you misunderstood my position. My thinking was that if you start with $3600, you can withdraw $15/month forever, not just 20 years. As I said, I'm not a player, but it seems safe to assume that dedicated players will continue to play for the rest of their lives, and forever seems like a good first-order approximation to someone's lifetime. GP seems to feel that $15 is too much to spend for something that they could replicate at home. I was just pointing out a logical limit to how much they could spend and how easy it would be for them to break that limit. I think that $15 is a very fair price for someone who wants that experience; I don't.
AutoHotkey. You can write a macro that will watch what you type, and if the foreground window is your web browser (and optionally, if you're on /.) then it can replace any key you define with any arbitrary string. I haven't tried but I expect that apostrophe replacement is trivial. There are also macros that will drop the string <a href="CLIPBOARD-CONTENTS"></a>" at the current cursor position, leaving the cursor between the tags; and now that I've had to do it by hand, I suspect I can also find a macro to replace various characters with their escaped HTML entities.
Download the client. (Perfectly legal.) Download and run your own Mangos server. (Perfectly illegal.) Deprive Blizzard of money they don't need. I mean seriously NOBODY, ANYWHERE, needs to earn the $75+ million a month they make for their stupid little game.
WOW is a great game.... When it's free. For $15 a month it's a complete ripoff.
I can't remember if it was Will Wright or Sid Meier who said it, but one of those gaming legends said WOW was the best single player RPG they'd ever played.
I'm not a WoW player, but from a straight financial perspective, $15/month is equivalent to a lump sum of $3,600. That seems like a large amount, but it's your complete budget for setting up your own server; don't forget to charge a reasonable rate for the time you spend doing it. And before you go hog wild on the hardware, remember that all future upgrades need to be paid for from that same initial fund.
(To estimate a reasonable rate for your time, take your annual income and divide by the number of hours you actually work in a year; call it 2,000 for simplicity. I'm a consultant, my number is roughly a quarter of my company's quoted rate but they have a lot of overhead to cover.)
Well in the olden days many people were named after their occupation. Maybe this guys forefathers were masters of papers?
Larry Niven had an early short story (a precursor of his Known Space series) in which a future society had resurrected this practice. Along with Farmer, there were people with surnames like Accountant. Sadly, there was no one named Temporary Part-time Libraries North-West Inter-library Loan Business Unit Administration Assistant.
Maybe this guy's forefathers were masters of papers?
You mean like these people?-)
Probably more like this person. Why point to the sequel when the original is available? But who am I to talk; this was the first time I'd heard of this. No, I'm not a huge anime fan, but I occasionally watch it on CN, Spike, and G4. I'll keep my eye open for it.
"Mark Papermaster"? What is it with all the oddball last names in the technology business? There's Faith Popcorn, but wikipedia says her birthname was Faith Plotkin. But "Papermaster" sounds like someone who should be running either a D&D game or Dunder Mifflin (or Wernham Hogg, I guess).