Yes. There's a book about cryonics and all kinds of other "science on the edge" called "Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition" by Ed Regis, which is a great read. It stops just short of making fun of them all, but there's a lot of anecdotes about some pretty... special people in it. Read it, it's fun.
*Looking it up*. Hmm, actually the dog wasn't frozen, it was cooled to just a bit above freezing. All its blood was replace by a blood substitute, then it was held at 34F for about half an hour. Then he was warmed up, his blood replaced again, and he was fine. This was done at Berkeley University.
But on the previous page there is a story about a cat brain, which was frozen, in Japan. Its blood was replaced by glycerin, it was kept frozen for six months, then it was warmed and its blood was replaced again. There were brain waves, that looked very similar to normal cat brain waves.
Since it seems you were confusing the two, you probably read the book:)
Such perfect move databases already exist. They started with all the positions with only the kings, they are all draws. Then they produce all the positions with an extra piece that convert to two kings (king takes) or that lead to an end position (for instance K and R mating a K). Since all positions are in the DB, you can deduce the perfect best moves. Some simple positions that look like a draw turn out to be mate in 224, that sort of thing.
The best databases for this do all positions with 5 pieces (so two kings plus three other pieces), and that takes up 4 cdroms.
Doing the six piece version is much, much bigger. For every position in the 5 piece databases, there must be about 55 legal ways to add another piece, and there are ten different pieces that can be added. So about 4x550=2200 CDs for the six piece positions (on that order, anyway, this is a very imprecise guess).
The initial position has 32 pieces. Fit on a DVD? Hahahaaaa... The size of the universe is a limit on storage.
In fact a quick time control is a huge advantage to the computer. No human can beat a computer at blitz, we need time to see the tactics. But with longer time controls, it's strategy that counts, and computers are still absolutely hopeless at that.
For instance, go to the site of last year's Dutch championships, in which Fritz also played. There is a Java applet with the games at http://chess.lostcity.nl/java/AppletNK2000.html. Click on round 7, the game Van Wely-Fritz SSS*.
The computer was absolutely hopeless and could do nothing at all during the whole game, because of the closed position without tactics. He will be mated after a few more moves, but the operator resigned.
Chess computers are, in essence, still brute force programs, albeit with a lot of pruning. There haven't been many advances in chess AI in ages. Their strength is going up pretty slowly, considering the hardware speed increases.
His style (positional, extremely good at tiny technical nuances, fantastic endgame, nerves of steel) make him a far harder opponent for computers than Kasparov was when facing Deep Blue (and he didn't reach his own level then).
The computers won't have a chance, unless the time control is quite fast.
Once you give up a right (such as privacy) it's nearly impossible to get it back.
The proposed law is actually an attempt to increase privacy. There are government institutions that are allowed to access this data, and all the rest should be kept away.
The EU already has far harsher privacy laws than the US.
What is *your* idea of Python and its future?
on
Ask Guido van Rossum
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· Score: 5
There are a lot of "golden Python rules" or whatever you would call them, like "explicit is better than implicit", "there should be only one way to do it", that sort of thing. As far as I know, those are from old posts to the mailing list, often by Tim Peters, and they've become The Law afterwards. In the great tradition of Usenet advocacy, people who suggest things that go against these rules are criticized. But looking at Python, I see a lot more pragmatism, not rigid rules. What do you think of those "golden rules" as they're written down?
What's your idea of the future of Python? Since the PEP process, a lot of new feature ideas have been put forward, and a lot of people feel uncomfortable with quick change to a good language (Python 2.1 is again excellent though, congrats). Do you think or hope Python will be finished one day? If not, isn't the alternative an endless string of added features? "Python 3000" was an idea of a sort of ideal Python that would be worked on, but as I understand Python will now evolve more gradually.
Argh, hit the submit button by mistake, so now I fucked up myself. Of course there was a < in there but I didn't quote it, I was going to whine about "uses only six bytes more!" while invoking it using a whole extra process, and I wasn't going to post at score 2, but whatever. Bah.
What will happen to the 'Net when the next big dotcomm to fall is eBay or Amazon, or Google? Especially since Google's USENET archive and WWW cache have become invaluable to a number of people.
Oh really? I bet a large number of the people to whom the Usenet archive is 'invaluable' would be absolutely outraged if they had to pay some small amount per month or per search. At some point, it's going to be charge or die for most of these companies (well, Amazon is a shop, that's different).
I'm reading this rather late, so noone will see my reply, but whatever.
Since his company apparently has problems and lots of people contant it for support for OpenSSH, couldn't he just start supplying it, for a fee?
It seems to me they should be capable of that, and they'd be in a great position to point out the advantages of using their own, commercial ssh...
There is a widespread belief that insurance companies discriminating against someone because they have a genetic predisposition to a particular disease is somehow "wrong", and I don't get WHY.
So, in the ideal case, the company should analyze your lifestyle, your genetic makeup, everything you do, and charge exactly what you will cost them, plus some fixed percentage of profit. How wonderful! Where can I sign up!
This is *silly*. The whole point of insurance it to spreak the risk. You don't know if you have some genetic disorder, do you? Maybe your cancer risk is 5% higher than Joe Public. Well, you just don't let them in. I want to hear you repeat that when you've been refused because of some odd defect that you never heard of (or get the option of paying 300%).
Once these companies are allowed to choose who they want to give insurance to, their point disappears, they shouldn't be allowed to make a profit without a point.
We understand you. This does not matter to you unless you are, one day, brought into court over this yourself. Or *something like this*. And then this case will count as precedent. And if the first few of these cases are lost, all similar ones will be lost later on.
If this one is won, you can later make your own code that circumvents the DMCA *without being afraid of being dragged to court*. Sure, when you are, and you loose, you just stop making your program. And you pay huge legal costs. Even though you were right!
You are affected because if the MPAA wins, they *could* sue your for relief successfully if you did something similar. So you just lost a right (making something like DeCSS without paying relief...)
We are complaining about a patent on spidering because spidering is bloody obvious. It's a breadth first search - get a page, index it, and store the links in it at the end of the queue. Continue. It's first year CS stuff at best. Patenting this is absolutely ridiculous. That's why we complain.
Remember the gloves the Vickies wore in the Diamond Age? Didn't get wet, stains just fell off... almost sounds like we're halfway there already. Coolness.
But then, it's compared to Goretex everywhere, and that has been around for a long time. It's pretty good if you do a lot of outdoor sports, but for most people it's not really useful. It's not *that* good. But this at least sounds like it's a lot cheaper and it can be applied to all kinds of materials! That is pretty cool, again.
And it's nanotech! I really thought that that wouldn't arrive for a long long time, if at all. It's not a 5cc sized super-super-computer yet, but it's at least useful, and most technologies don't become useful that quickly:-)
Dunno why I'm posting this, but I had a great night. Before 12, lots of food and beer, and board games (you know, the ones you play with real life people without a computer - they're great fun). After 12, more alcohol, lots of dance, etc.
There's a girl I was slowly, secretly falling in love with although I thought she absolutely hated me, but we danced tonight, talked a little, although she was drunk and therefore she didn't want to say too much, we're absolutely friendly now and she at least thinks I'm "interesting" - this is already such a breath of fresh air that I've had a grin on my face most of this new year. Certainly better than expected, I'm going to sleep now, happy, I hope your new year's night was a good one as well:-).
First girl who tells me she doesn't want to express herself when drunk, she's too unsure of herself, but absolutely wants to discuss this over ICQ... it's a sick world we're going to, but at least it's one I can handle...
Anyways, hope you're enjoying yourself as well, have fun, my year had a pretty positive start...
This sounds like the sort of thing that the European court will immediately shoot down. It limits trade in a way that is not good for consumers, for no particular reason other than that it's good for the producers of the movies. I don't see how this could hold out against the court. They usually do the right thing.
That's easy. They only have the patent in the US. They had it in a few other countries, but it's expired there.
WHy only ISPs?
That is a complete mystery to me. Web browsers are the software that make hyperlinks work, it seems irrelevant to me who the supplier of the cable in between is.
A very interesting article, if a bit optimistic at times. The absolute certainty that free software has been better than non-free alternatives for at least five years, for instance. But I liked the talk of how the content industry wants to make everything into property, and how that model won't work in the end. Interviewer seemed to agree with him. And then, at the end of the article:
That freaked me out. Of course, it's absolutely normal for them to do that, I might put that there myself. But that's the point, isn't it? this stuff has already gone too far, that guy is too optimistic, everything is already property, and we all already play along.
How does he actually clog their servers, since most likely they have a faster internet connection?
You can send a single email to loads and loads of receivers. You send it once for every thousand users, use multiple rcpt to: clauses (like Bcc: does), but the mail server that handles your request has to split them up and do all the work.
Remember that spam never has your mail address in the To: header?
And of course, they may have been running M Sex Change...
Slashdot Mirror
*Looking it up*. Hmm, actually the dog wasn't frozen, it was cooled to just a bit above freezing. All its blood was replace by a blood substitute, then it was held at 34F for about half an hour. Then he was warmed up, his blood replaced again, and he was fine. This was done at Berkeley University.
But on the previous page there is a story about a cat brain, which was frozen, in Japan. Its blood was replaced by glycerin, it was kept frozen for six months, then it was warmed and its blood was replaced again. There were brain waves, that looked very similar to normal cat brain waves.
Since it seems you were confusing the two, you probably read the book :)
Doh, you don't dump their body in an incinerator. You sell all of their organs first.
The best databases for this do all positions with 5 pieces (so two kings plus three other pieces), and that takes up 4 cdroms.
Doing the six piece version is much, much bigger. For every position in the 5 piece databases, there must be about 55 legal ways to add another piece, and there are ten different pieces that can be added. So about 4x550=2200 CDs for the six piece positions (on that order, anyway, this is a very imprecise guess).
The initial position has 32 pieces. Fit on a DVD? Hahahaaaa... The size of the universe is a limit on storage.
For instance, go to the site of last year's Dutch championships, in which Fritz also played. There is a Java applet with the games at http://chess.lostcity.nl/java/AppletNK2000.html. Click on round 7, the game Van Wely-Fritz SSS*.
The computer was absolutely hopeless and could do nothing at all during the whole game, because of the closed position without tactics. He will be mated after a few more moves, but the operator resigned.
Chess computers are, in essence, still brute force programs, albeit with a lot of pruning. There haven't been many advances in chess AI in ages. Their strength is going up pretty slowly, considering the hardware speed increases.
Kramnik will cream the computer.
His style (positional, extremely good at tiny technical nuances, fantastic endgame, nerves of steel) make him a far harder opponent for computers than Kasparov was when facing Deep Blue (and he didn't reach his own level then).
The computers won't have a chance, unless the time control is quite fast.
The proposed law is actually an attempt to increase privacy. There are government institutions that are allowed to access this data, and all the rest should be kept away.
The EU already has far harsher privacy laws than the US.
What's your idea of the future of Python? Since the PEP process, a lot of new feature ideas have been put forward, and a lot of people feel uncomfortable with quick change to a good language (Python 2.1 is again excellent though, congrats). Do you think or hope Python will be finished one day? If not, isn't the alternative an endless string of added features? "Python 3000" was an idea of a sort of ideal Python that would be worked on, but as I understand Python will now evolve more gradually.
Argh, hit the submit button by mistake, so now I fucked up myself. Of course there was a < in there but I didn't quote it, I was going to whine about "uses only six bytes more!" while invoking it using a whole extra process, and I wasn't going to post at score 2, but whatever. Bah.
Typical usage should be /mnt/dvd/VOB_FILE_NAME | extract_mpeg2 | mpeg2_dec -
qrpff 153 2 8 105 225
Quick! Turing Test it! Let it submit those a few a day, let's see how many make it. What? You already did that?
Oh really? I bet a large number of the people to whom the Usenet archive is 'invaluable' would be absolutely outraged if they had to pay some small amount per month or per search. At some point, it's going to be charge or die for most of these companies (well, Amazon is a shop, that's different).
Since his company apparently has problems and lots of people contant it for support for OpenSSH, couldn't he just start supplying it, for a fee? It seems to me they should be capable of that, and they'd be in a great position to point out the advantages of using their own, commercial ssh...
actually, he meant to say 'pounds.' ;)
Actually, 8 pounds of fuel would be quite a lot with gravity on Eros being what it is.
Deja is bought by someone with clue!! This makes my day. No more stupid portal stuff, but an essential resource back online. Yes!
So, in the ideal case, the company should analyze your lifestyle, your genetic makeup, everything you do, and charge exactly what you will cost them, plus some fixed percentage of profit. How wonderful! Where can I sign up!
This is *silly*. The whole point of insurance it to spreak the risk. You don't know if you have some genetic disorder, do you? Maybe your cancer risk is 5% higher than Joe Public. Well, you just don't let them in. I want to hear you repeat that when you've been refused because of some odd defect that you never heard of (or get the option of paying 300%).
Once these companies are allowed to choose who they want to give insurance to, their point disappears, they shouldn't be allowed to make a profit without a point.
If this one is won, you can later make your own code that circumvents the DMCA *without being afraid of being dragged to court*. Sure, when you are, and you loose, you just stop making your program. And you pay huge legal costs. Even though you were right!
You are affected because if the MPAA wins, they *could* sue your for relief successfully if you did something similar. So you just lost a right (making something like DeCSS without paying relief...)
This is scaries than I thought...
We are complaining about a patent on spidering because spidering is bloody obvious. It's a breadth first search - get a page, index it, and store the links in it at the end of the queue. Continue. It's first year CS stuff at best. Patenting this is absolutely ridiculous. That's why we complain.
But then, it's compared to Goretex everywhere, and that has been around for a long time. It's pretty good if you do a lot of outdoor sports, but for most people it's not really useful. It's not *that* good. But this at least sounds like it's a lot cheaper and it can be applied to all kinds of materials! That is pretty cool, again.
And it's nanotech! I really thought that that wouldn't arrive for a long long time, if at all. It's not a 5cc sized super-super-computer yet, but it's at least useful, and most technologies don't become useful that quickly :-)
Man, those were some INCOHERENT answers! With lots of CAPITALS! It's the DIRTY STUFF in USER SPACE, man!
So he got the questions yesterday evening, and the answers this morning? I bet he was already drunk when he received them :)...
There's a girl I was slowly, secretly falling in love with although I thought she absolutely hated me, but we danced tonight, talked a little, although she was drunk and therefore she didn't want to say too much, we're absolutely friendly now and she at least thinks I'm "interesting" - this is already such a breath of fresh air that I've had a grin on my face most of this new year. Certainly better than expected, I'm going to sleep now, happy, I hope your new year's night was a good one as well :-).
First girl who tells me she doesn't want to express herself when drunk, she's too unsure of herself, but absolutely wants to discuss this over ICQ... it's a sick world we're going to, but at least it's one I can handle...
Anyways, hope you're enjoying yourself as well, have fun, my year had a pretty positive start...
This sounds like the sort of thing that the European court will immediately shoot down. It limits trade in a way that is not good for consumers, for no particular reason other than that it's good for the producers of the movies. I don't see how this could hold out against the court. They usually do the right thing.
That's easy. They only have the patent in the US. They had it in a few other countries, but it's expired there.
WHy only ISPs?
That is a complete mystery to me. Web browsers are the software that make hyperlinks work, it seems irrelevant to me who the supplier of the cable in between is.
© Immaterial Incorporated
That freaked me out. Of course, it's absolutely normal for them to do that, I might put that there myself. But that's the point, isn't it? this stuff has already gone too far, that guy is too optimistic, everything is already property, and we all already play along.
You can send a single email to loads and loads of receivers. You send it once for every thousand users, use multiple rcpt to: clauses (like Bcc: does), but the mail server that handles your request has to split them up and do all the work.
Remember that spam never has your mail address in the To: header?
And of course, they may have been running M Sex Change...