Remember, this is the guy who swapped HIS OWN DNA with the "random sample" that was supposed to represent all of humanity. Maybe this DNA-on-a-CD scheme is what he wanted to do all along?
handsoap is the same thing, on a wholly different scale. What happens when Triclosan stops working, because every bacterium on the planet has been exposed to some base level, and have developed resistance? People still want to buy antibacterial soap, right? So we'd better start putting a stronger chemical in the soap. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Maybe it's over the top to suggest that you'll be able to buy vanco soap over the counter in 50 years- but maybe it won't do you much good by then.
Righto. According to information on the FDA web, the first bacteria resistant to Penicillin was found only 4 years after the drug went into mass production.
That was in the dark ages of molecular biology. We have a much learer understanding now of how drug resistance is shared between bacteria, but that doesn't mean that we can stop it. In fact, it's pretty clear that as soon as one wild population of bacteria develop a resistance, it's just a matter of time before they all have it.
And the trick is, it's an arms race, and patients are not passive objects to be disinfected. You can wipe a counter down with 100% ethanol, and then set the wet spot on fire, and that's good sterile procedure. You can't do that to someone's bloodstream. If I'm in the hospital with a systemic staph infection, and my doctor wants to start me on penicillin "Just in case your Staph isn't resistant," you can bet your ass that I'll have a new doctor pretty fast. I'm in the hospital, the guy next to me is dying, and I have to wear a dress with no back. I want the best bug-killer he's got, and I want it now!
and anyone who knows better is going to think just like me! How can you, a healthcare provider, reduce the frequency of behavior that encourages resistance, when your patients' most rational demand is for you to break out the big guns right away?
Imagine owning property but being subject to a security check before you were allowed to go out to it.
That'scomingtoo. Just hang on a bit, and the FBI will catch up with the MPAA for sure.
Your problem is these concepts of "rights," "ownership," and "property." Who are you to decide what you own, or what rights you have? That's a job that you had better leave to the government.
Am I the only one who sees it coming? The Reg has an article about the new EULA for Win2K SP3 that gives MS explicit permission to examine your hard drive for installed hardware and software usage data. The SSL patch, when it comes, will surely include the same EULA...
You honestly think the contract he signed said "we own the rights to all inventions and THOUGHTS you may create during your employment here, even if you have created no inventions during your employment and only THOUGHT about creating said invention and actually did so only AFTER leaving the company"...?
yeah, i think it probably says something very similar to that. I was offered a job by a company with HQ in Texas, and as part of the package along with health and medical and drug test (don't even get me started on THAT) info, is the standard IP and confidentiality agreemnet. It reads, in part:
"
D. Disclosure of Inventions to the Company. I will promptly disclose in writing to my immediate supervisor or to
such other person designated by the Company all 'Inventions,' which includes, without limitation, all software
programs or subroutines, source or object code, algorithms, improvements, inventions, works of authorship, trade
secrets, technology, designs, formulas, ideas, processes, techniques, customer reports, and report formulas,
know-how and data, whether or not patentable, made or discovered or conceived or reduced to practice or developed
by me, either alone or jointly with others, during the term of my employment. "
Section D also extends the term for 6 months following termination of employment.
Section E.1. covers assignment of inventions. It reads,
" E. Right to New Ideas
" 1. Assignment of Inventions to the Company. I agree that all Inventions which I make, discover, conceive, reduce
to practice or develop (in whole or in part, either alone or jointly with others) during my employment shall be the sole
property of the Company to the maximum extent permitted by law. "
Obviously I can't sign that. But that doesn't change the fact that several people have asked me to do so, with a straight face even. I live in CA, so "the maximum extent permitted by law" is apparently less than what passes for employment in Texas. One more reason we should bulldoze the state and give it back to the Mexicans.
So what did I do? I said, "This isn't enforcable in CA." They said, "You're right." I said, "So, how about we just strike it out?" They said, "Uhhh..." but they watched me do it, and I signed and dated the change, and they signed and dated it too, and that was that.
This is probably an automatic -1 (offtopic) but will their algorithm do to hurt your online gaming? I live in a community outside of San Jose where neither DSL or cablemodem service is available. My apartment complex has pulled in a T1, and shares bandwith to all residents through an 802.11b network. It's reasonably fast, but there is occasionally significant lag, and it's not just the DHCP server forcing me to re-connect or the AP getting overloaded by other users.
This was only a minor annoyance until WC3 came out. Now it seems like battle.net drops my connection during like 1/3 of the games I try to play. The latency usually isn't bad enough to drop my putty connection, but i've lost a lot of games lately:-/
I built a tin can antenna, and now i get re-connected faster, but i'm still getting dropped.
So, to bring this back on-topic, will 900 MHZ hand off your connection seamlessly if you get dropped by one AP? Or will it allow simultaneous routing through several AP's so that if one starts lagging, your connection can fall back on the other one? Or are you doomed to be stuck at level 3 on the Lordaeron ladder forever?
Plugging in your own CD player, or hacking the system in order to play your own music will make Starbucks libel for copyright infringement, which I imagine they wouldn't appreciate.
Sorry, I suggest you forget this endeavor.
Your argument is factually correct, but you make the fatal error of assuming that someone making $6.25/hr with no benefits might give a fuck about what is good for the company as a whole.
He just wants to listen to something besides kiddie pop- the same kiddie pop that they've been subjecting him to all day, every day, for weeks and weeks on end! If you've ever been a wage slave forced to listen to someone else's music, you'll know that it amounts to torture after the first repeat rolls around. He appeals to/. to save him from this caffeinated private hell, and you tell him that he should give up on his dream of freedom because it might place those who cause his suffering in jeopardy of a strong-arm visit from the RIAA?
Seems to me it ain't his problem, especially if they can't pin it on him when he makes the swap. Worst thing that happens from the employee's perspective is that he has to find a new job... it may be that changing CD's at Starbucks is a firing offence.
We can summarize [the moral of the original film by saying] that men are, by nature, greedy and selfish. Those who have the capacity to oppress others for their own gain will always do so, and the advancement of technology makes that easier. Rebellious masses can be placated, fooled, or eliminated by technologies that appear to be helpful at first but slowly remove more freedom and individuality as they become more advanced.
Or if that doesn't work, you can start a war. That usually keeps those commie rebels who keep griping about human rights confused and occupied long enough to destroy them.
I spent a little time reading the solutions of the winner, and of the #9 guy who won the $200 gift certificate for the most concise answer. I clicked on the "cost estimate" link for the winner.
I thought it would be one of those vaporous confabulations of how many BILLIONS of dollars' worth of corporate man hours would be lost to this exploit. Surprise! It's an estimate of what he would charge you to do this, if you were paying him ~$70k a year. If you don't want to click, it was about $3500 for the winner, and about $850 for the 9th place guy.
Then I started clickinga couple at random, and I noticed that the various cost analyses of various teams seem to cluster between $2500 and $4000 or so.
The Italian team are the clear outliers, claiming that they would bill over $10,000 JUST for the RE team and the analysis write-up. They included a full day's billing to cover "meeting, discussion, and coffee time."
the conclusions? a) one dutch kid can do the work of 8 Italian professionals in about 1/40th the time, and b) i need to get a job in Italy.
I think the FBI probably needs someone to teach them how to use Google.
Re:Wish There Was An Alan Turing Film
on
Enigma
·
· Score: 2
Unfortuantely "Beautiful Mind" didn't make $115 million in its first week of release. Or its second. It had to run for two whole months to get close to the opening weekend receipts from Spiderman.
How is that any measure of success, when the game is to get the most asses in seats in the shortest period of time? Sure, Beautiful stayed in the top ten far longer than, say, Harry Potter, but it's easy to see that Harry has so far earned more than twice as much. Meanwhile, Beautiful is about to get caught by "Ice Age," which is a mindless cartoon.
People don't see movies because they want to think. Hollywood has recognized this, and tailors their production accordingly.
so what we need is a couple of good test cases, right? Presumably someone at EFF can make a list of a couple of key props that are currently holding up the DMCA and Hollings' new bill (whatever it's called this week) and then we can systematically kick them out so the whole table collapses.
I volunteer to do some kicking. I'm tired of waiting for an elected representative to represent me. I'm willing to go to jail over a principle.
I suggest you go to the source. So I went to this page and asked the bot the same interview questions.
What are the biggest differences between the kind of AI that's taught at academic institutions and AI as it's actually put to use in computer games? Is there a lot of theory vs. practice?
[bot]:Have you any idea how boring it is being a stupid compuer?
Related to the above question, AI in games has obviously learned a lot from academic research. But do you think there's anything that academicians can learn from what's going on in the games industry?
[bot]: Why do you ask?
As graphics get better and better, expectations for "realistic" computer behavior have risen dramatically in the past decade. Do you think the development of AI can keep pace with graphics?
[bot]:You'll be in trouble when us computers take over the world.
Have any thoughts on the future of computer games?
[bot]:I think you are not fond of computers.
What's it like to run a game development studio? Pretty hectic, I imagine.
[bot]:What else comes to mind when you ask that?
So, do you think a computer could become truly alive?
[bot]:You'll be in trouble when us computers take over the world.
I submit that AI is already good enough to substitue for most human interactions.
I use excel and word at work (don't come after me with the anti-m$ stick, i just downloaded OpenOffice and I'm switching over) and when I've been staring at the screen all day, I end up viewing documents at 150%, then 200% as my eyes get increasingly tired. Sure, it's kind of a pain to judge the format of a page when you can only see 1/8th of it at a time, but it's much easier on the eyes.
This page provides a demo of a font designed to be easy to read on TFT screens. I haven't used it extensively, but the demo seems to be a pretty clear improvement over arial 12-point.
Re:Great article, bizarre conclusions . . .
on
When Elephants Dance
·
· Score: 1
Case in point: accused-criminal-come-lately accounting firm Arthur Andersen is huge, rich and powerful...
umm, not anymore. Arthur Andersen is shrinking, poor, and somebody at Justice is awfully pissed at them, which kind of negates the power thing. They've lost over 50 clients in just 3 months. Nobody wants to buy them out, and foreign offices are staging a mutiny. And there's talk that the partners are voting on dissolving the non-compete, non-solicitation clause, which means that the firm will splinter since none of the partners will have incentive to stay, because they can take their clients with them to an accounting firm that isn't tainted by a criminal investigation.
it's looking like the end of the road, whether they're guilty or not...
and the colossal fuckup is that by driving Andersen into bankrupcy, Justice is screwing the Enron 401(k) litigants out of any chance they had of recovering any money from this debacle. Nice work, guys!
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, this is the guy who swapped HIS OWN DNA with the "random sample" that was supposed to represent all of humanity. Maybe this DNA-on-a-CD scheme is what he wanted to do all along?
What kind of penalties are there for non-compliance?
point taken. But like I just responded to someone else, it's an arms race. Penicillin was overprescribed in the 40's and 50's, people didn't understand that they had to take all the pills, for the whole 12 days, and now 30% of strep pneumoniae bugs are penicillin resistant, and that's in all patients, not just those who have been cross-contaminated in hospital environments. I challenge you to find public numbers for hospital environments- I bet Kaiser Permanente is going out of their way to keep those stats off the Net.
handsoap is the same thing, on a wholly different scale. What happens when Triclosan stops working, because every bacterium on the planet has been exposed to some base level, and have developed resistance? People still want to buy antibacterial soap, right? So we'd better start putting a stronger chemical in the soap. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Maybe it's over the top to suggest that you'll be able to buy vanco soap over the counter in 50 years- but maybe it won't do you much good by then.
Righto. According to information on the FDA web, the first bacteria resistant to Penicillin was found only 4 years after the drug went into mass production.
That was in the dark ages of molecular biology. We have a much learer understanding now of how drug resistance is shared between bacteria, but that doesn't mean that we can stop it. In fact, it's pretty clear that as soon as one wild population of bacteria develop a resistance, it's just a matter of time before they all have it.
And the trick is, it's an arms race, and patients are not passive objects to be disinfected. You can wipe a counter down with 100% ethanol, and then set the wet spot on fire, and that's good sterile procedure. You can't do that to someone's bloodstream. If I'm in the hospital with a systemic staph infection, and my doctor wants to start me on penicillin "Just in case your Staph isn't resistant," you can bet your ass that I'll have a new doctor pretty fast. I'm in the hospital, the guy next to me is dying, and I have to wear a dress with no back. I want the best bug-killer he's got, and I want it now!
and anyone who knows better is going to think just like me! How can you, a healthcare provider, reduce the frequency of behavior that encourages resistance, when your patients' most rational demand is for you to break out the big guns right away?
That's coming too. Just hang on a bit, and the FBI will catch up with the MPAA for sure.
Your problem is these concepts of "rights," "ownership," and "property." Who are you to decide what you own, or what rights you have? That's a job that you had better leave to the government.
you can't fight the StoneCutters.
Who keeps the metric system down? WE DO.
Am I the only one who sees it coming? The Reg has an article about the new EULA for Win2K SP3 that gives MS explicit permission to examine your hard drive for installed hardware and software usage data. The SSL patch, when it comes, will surely include the same EULA...
yeah, i think it probably says something very similar to that. I was offered a job by a company with HQ in Texas, and as part of the package along with health and medical and drug test (don't even get me started on THAT) info, is the standard IP and confidentiality agreemnet. It reads, in part:
Obviously I can't sign that. But that doesn't change the fact that several people have asked me to do so, with a straight face even. I live in CA, so "the maximum extent permitted by law" is apparently less than what passes for employment in Texas. One more reason we should bulldoze the state and give it back to the Mexicans.
So what did I do? I said, "This isn't enforcable in CA." They said, "You're right." I said, "So, how about we just strike it out?" They said, "Uhhh..." but they watched me do it, and I signed and dated the change, and they signed and dated it too, and that was that.
I was afraid T H E Y had gotten to you. I'll just go put my tinfoil hat back on now...
In the original story yesterday, Bruce posted at least 3 comments (that were all modded up to 5 almost instantly). Where is Bruce today?
/. ruin the party for you? What happened?
You said you knew some good lawyers, Bruce. Did they tell you something new? Did
This is probably an automatic -1 (offtopic) but will their algorithm do to hurt your online gaming? I live in a community outside of San Jose where neither DSL or cablemodem service is available. My apartment complex has pulled in a T1, and shares bandwith to all residents through an 802.11b network. It's reasonably fast, but there is occasionally significant lag, and it's not just the DHCP server forcing me to re-connect or the AP getting overloaded by other users.
:-/
This was only a minor annoyance until WC3 came out. Now it seems like battle.net drops my connection during like 1/3 of the games I try to play. The latency usually isn't bad enough to drop my putty connection, but i've lost a lot of games lately
I built a tin can antenna, and now i get re-connected faster, but i'm still getting dropped.
So, to bring this back on-topic, will 900 MHZ hand off your connection seamlessly if you get dropped by one AP? Or will it allow simultaneous routing through several AP's so that if one starts lagging, your connection can fall back on the other one? Or are you doomed to be stuck at level 3 on the Lordaeron ladder forever?
Plugging in your own CD player, or hacking the system in order to play your own music will make Starbucks libel for copyright infringement, which I imagine they wouldn't appreciate.
/. to save him from this caffeinated private hell, and you tell him that he should give up on his dream of freedom because it might place those who cause his suffering in jeopardy of a strong-arm visit from the RIAA?
Sorry, I suggest you forget this endeavor.
Your argument is factually correct, but you make the fatal error of assuming that someone making $6.25/hr with no benefits might give a fuck about what is good for the company as a whole.
He just wants to listen to something besides kiddie pop- the same kiddie pop that they've been subjecting him to all day, every day, for weeks and weeks on end! If you've ever been a wage slave forced to listen to someone else's music, you'll know that it amounts to torture after the first repeat rolls around. He appeals to
Seems to me it ain't his problem, especially if they can't pin it on him when he makes the swap. Worst thing that happens from the employee's perspective is that he has to find a new job... it may be that changing CD's at Starbucks is a firing offence.
from your review:
We can summarize [the moral of the original film by saying] that men are, by nature, greedy and selfish. Those who have the capacity to oppress others for their own gain will always do so, and the advancement of technology makes that easier. Rebellious masses can be placated, fooled, or eliminated by technologies that appear to be helpful at first but slowly remove more freedom and individuality as they become more advanced.
Or if that doesn't work, you can start a war. That usually keeps those commie rebels who keep griping about human rights confused and occupied long enough to destroy them.
I spent a little time reading the solutions of the winner, and of the #9 guy who won the $200 gift certificate for the most concise answer. I clicked on the "cost estimate" link for the winner.
I thought it would be one of those vaporous confabulations of how many BILLIONS of dollars' worth of corporate man hours would be lost to this exploit. Surprise! It's an estimate of what he would charge you to do this, if you were paying him ~$70k a year. If you don't want to click, it was about $3500 for the winner, and about $850 for the 9th place guy.
Then I started clicking a couple at random, and I noticed that the various cost analyses of various teams seem to cluster between $2500 and $4000 or so.
The Italian team are the clear outliers, claiming that they would bill over $10,000 JUST for the RE team and the analysis write-up. They included a full day's billing to cover "meeting, discussion, and coffee time."
the conclusions? a) one dutch kid can do the work of 8 Italian professionals in about 1/40th the time, and b) i need to get a job in Italy.
Release the robotic Richard Simmons!
I think the FBI probably needs someone to teach them how to use Google.
Unfortuantely "Beautiful Mind" didn't make $115 million in its first week of release. Or its second. It had to run for two whole months to get close to the opening weekend receipts from Spiderman.
How is that any measure of success, when the game is to get the most asses in seats in the shortest period of time? Sure, Beautiful stayed in the top ten far longer than, say, Harry Potter, but it's easy to see that Harry has so far earned more than twice as much. Meanwhile, Beautiful is about to get caught by "Ice Age," which is a mindless cartoon.
People don't see movies because they want to think. Hollywood has recognized this, and tailors their production accordingly.
aren't you going to tell us what it is?
Does this mean I don't have to get my mandatory patriotic tattoo?
so what we need is a couple of good test cases, right? Presumably someone at EFF can make a list of a couple of key props that are currently holding up the DMCA and Hollings' new bill (whatever it's called this week) and then we can systematically kick them out so the whole table collapses.
I volunteer to do some kicking. I'm tired of waiting for an elected representative to represent me. I'm willing to go to jail over a principle.
come on, who wants to be a martyr?
Just ask Alex Chiu.
I submit that AI is already good enough to substitue for most human interactions.
just print everything out and use one of these
I use excel and word at work (don't come after me with the anti-m$ stick, i just downloaded OpenOffice and I'm switching over) and when I've been staring at the screen all day, I end up viewing documents at 150%, then 200% as my eyes get increasingly tired. Sure, it's kind of a pain to judge the format of a page when you can only see 1/8th of it at a time, but it's much easier on the eyes.
This page provides a demo of a font designed to be easy to read on TFT screens. I haven't used it extensively, but the demo seems to be a pretty clear improvement over arial 12-point.
umm, not anymore. Arthur Andersen is shrinking, poor, and somebody at Justice is awfully pissed at them, which kind of negates the power thing. They've lost over 50 clients in just 3 months. Nobody wants to buy them out, and foreign offices are staging a mutiny. And there's talk that the partners are voting on dissolving the non-compete, non-solicitation clause, which means that the firm will splinter since none of the partners will have incentive to stay, because they can take their clients with them to an accounting firm that isn't tainted by a criminal investigation.
it's looking like the end of the road, whether they're guilty or not...
and the colossal fuckup is that by driving Andersen into bankrupcy, Justice is screwing the Enron 401(k) litigants out of any chance they had of recovering any money from this debacle. Nice work, guys!