The thing about Bin Ladden is that has motive, the means, and we know that he trains terrorists. Is it that far of a jump to think that at some level he was involved? How much evidence is needed?
In a word, yes. He may have the motive, means and opportunity, but it doesn't mean he did it. If you habitually drive fast and you own a fast car, would you like to be convicted on the grounds of "well, the cops heard something doing 100mph last night, they didn't see it, but we all know you do that sort of thing"?
Evidence is needed that Bin Laden was involved. When this exists (and that share-dealing looks like a good place to start looking), then something will be done. Until then, any action is premature.
Don't dismiss "The Hobbit" offhand as a children's book, any more than you'd do the same for "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" (CS Lewis was a close friend of Tolkien, BTW), "Wind in the Willows" (and the sequels by William Horwood), the Harry Potter series or Pratchett. All of these are children's books, or at least were originally written as children's books.
"The Hobbit" has quite a lot of light entertainment in it which makes it less heavy going than some of the children's books above (TL,TW&TW is definitely older children only!) but there's still some bits which are darker than usual, which gives it the depth many children's books (and adults' books, for that matter) are sadly lacking.
Grab.
PS. I know I'll get flamed for mentioning Harry Potter.:-) And I forgot to mention Alan Garner's Wierdstone books as well.
What else do you read? If you only read Star Wars and Star Trek novels, or Pratchett, you're likely just looking for some light entertainment. LotR is emphatically not that. Not that there's anything wrong with reading SW/ST/Pratchett (I love Pterry's work), just that comparing them is like comparing Shakespeare and a Hollywood action film - both may be fun/interesting, but they've got very different styles!
Try your hand at "Cryptonomicon" or "Snow Crash" by Neil Stephenson (or "Interface" by the same author, writing as Stephen Bury). If you hate the detail in them, the way that the story branches fractally to cover odd corners of each character's experience, culture or technology and then resumes the main story a page or two later, then you'll not manage LotR. If OTOH you can deal with the complexity of Cryptonomicon, then LotR is definitely for you.
One warning - the language in LotR is intentionally "old-fashioned", since it was modelled on old Saxon/Norse fantasies. This may make some of the conversations sound stilted - it requires a little suspension of disbelief to imagine that ppl would actually talk that way, the same as reading/watching Shakespeare.
Sometimes, yes. In some cases though, the compiler has more tricks up its sleeve. The issue is that a mature compiler has been programmed using the combined optimisation strategies from many _really_ good engineers; unless you've learnt every trick that all those engineers know, the compiler may be able to out-perform you, given the same piece of code to implement.
Of course, the compiler can only work with the C that it's given by the coder. There's things you can do like making structures an even power-of-two size which will speed the code up; this is a trade-off against memory usage which only the coder can make. But after that, it's up to the compiler to make it as efficient as possible. For instance, on some processors a compiler may implement a integer multiply by 9 as "shift-by-3, add original value" which is often faster than a single multiply instruction, and most engineers wouldn't write their C this way.
Sure, you can use a screwdriver as a hammer, but it'll take longer!
Think of an everyday problem. Let's say I have a directory of 100-odd files and I want to distribute them into a half-dozen directories. WIMP interface - multiple selection, drag-and-drop, job done in seconds. CLI - ls, type in every filename individually, ls again bcos your previous ls has scrolled off the top of the screen (no scroll-bars in text-only mode, remember:-), type more filenames, etc. I rest my case. And you can rest yours, half an hour later, when you've done in 30 minutes the job that I did in 1 minute!
There's tools for problems. If I want to dig out a swimming pool, don't tell me that the one true way is digging it with a spoon, when I've got a perfectly good mechanical digger parked round the corner! Similarly, a mechanical digger is no damn good when you go on an archaeological dig. WIMP is the best tool for most situations, it's only in the remaining cases that knowing CLI will save you much time and effort (mostly involving grep).
Do kids really know less about the underlying structure of computers these days? Back in the 80s, most computers, regardless of whether they _could_ be programmed by the owner, were just used as games machines. No-one sold a C-64 or a Spectrum on the basis of being a good machine to learn programming on! Some of us learnt how to program them, and we learnt the underlying structure. The rest only learnt to type "load", hit return, and press play on the tape player.:-) Maybe the issue is that more kids are _wanting_ to do stuff with computers now that the Web is fashionable, and everyone has to learn somewhere, so the kids who previously would not have learnt anything past "load" (or "insert cartridge") are actually starting to learn how computers work properly. This can't be all bad! Trouble is, everyone has to start somewhere, so someone like yourself has to field the dumb questions.
Yeah, guess you're right about the news footage. Although it's not that widely used since most of us don't have good enough connections (30 minutes delay to watch 2 minutes of footage is a shitty deal IMO, although I guess judges would have better links than that!:-)
The ABC news producer was "grilled"; does that mean "formally reprimanded" or just "asked why she was doing it"? The former would be ABC having their heads up their ass; the latter would be completely normal and no big deal. She could have avoided the latter with a 2-line email to IT and her manager, if she'd thought about it for a minute or two beforehand.
I'm not proposing making decisions in ignorance. I said that where the case in question requires access to this information, the judges should have unrestricted access to that information. I also said that these would be unusual cases which would not occur very often, so making these a special case is justified. I stand by this. Does every case involving hookers require the judge to spend a couple of hours watching pr0n on the Internet? This is only justified if the case involves some bizarre form of video (like those crush films that came up recently), and this kind of case will only come up a few times a year in the whole of the country!
It may be illegal to mess with the mail; OTOH it's perfectly legal for your employer to open letters sent to you at work, on the grounds that these are sent to you as a representative of the company, not as a private individual.
Sometimes yes, but that's an incredible minority. Sometimes an investigative reporter will have to as well, but does that mean that every employee of every radio station, TV station and newspaper in the country should be allowed access? If one person needs access a year, out of an organisation of several hundred thousand, it's easier to make a special case for them than to let everyone go hog-wild. Don't forget that all these porn and music downloads will be slowing the network down, so a judge doing REAL work will be impeded!
Common sense, man. If you need access to it, you ring IT, tell them "I'm doing some investigation of XYZ, so don't be surprised if some dodgy pages show up". Job done. Takes 30 seconds at most, and the cost of a phone call. As against months of investigations, hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but downloading pornography, streaming video (mostly pornography again) and music are NEVER job-related activities, unless you're (a) a professional musician or (b) a hooker. Since few judges fall into these categories, I think we can safely say that filtering porn and music downloads will not affect the judges' ability to use the web for research and make informed decisions.
Of course, if the filtering is broken then it will. But some reasonably smart filtering (better than the crap the libraries decided to use) would solve that. Alternatively, just set the software to forward a list of "suspicious" pages to the admin. A few hits on "sex" will be ignored; a few dozen hits will be checked. The basic knowledge that you can be found out will be enough to stop ppl using it for that. This is the way most companies work, and it works just fine.
You want to do it on your home machine, go ahead. It's your machine, your network connection, and your money paying for the dialup. You want to use someone else's network, you have to play by the rules for that network.
As a typical English British specimen, I can inform you that my British English teacher would have used that Damascus sword (had it been available ten years back) to decapitate the entire class if we'd used punctuation on the outside of quotes! For example,
(a) Who said, "We shall fight them on the beaches"?
(b) Macbeth said, "Is this a dagger that I see before me"?
(a) is correct. (b) is not, unless the context is that you are asking whether Macbeth actually said that - phrased as a statement it is incorrect. The grammar examples in the link are valid for both British and American English; the spellings, however, are a different matter...;-)
And why I'm posting about grammar on Slashdot, I don't know. Ah well.:-)
cf. Radical vegans, "do other primates have voting rights?", considerable debate... Friday night drunks, "we're really cool and the girls love us", considerable debate...
The fact that one small group may believe it doesn't make it true, or even worth everyone else bothering with. The rest of the world sees this and laughs. Remember, this article was put in as a funny, not as a serious question.
Chess is not a sport. Nor are poker, backgammon or mental arithmetic, since none involve any physical skill at all. Snooker/pool/billiards may _just_ make it in there, since it requires considerable hand-eye coordination, which is physical skill. Chess only requires the hand-eye coordination necessary to close fingers over a piece, move it to another square and hit a timer button.
Cool. So it's OK for the US to go out and kill ppl who support causes the US doesn't agree with. But if it's OK for the US to do that, it's also OK for other countries to do it. Afghanistan, maybe? Or would you say it was perfectly legitimate if North Korea or Cuba landed a missile on the centre of Washington?
"Korea and Viet Nam are two good examples of what happens when we're not so happy with another country."
The good example being, the US gets its ass kicked when it tries to act as "world policeman"? Try a better example...;-)
Hey, d'you know how highly customised these processors are for chess? And how highly optimised the code is to do the solving? Trying to split it over multiple processors with different architectures and serious latencies between them is a losing bet, at least for a real-time solution.
I believe their main concern is getting it done in real time. Like weather forecasting or 3-D graphics, the techniques for solving the problem have been identified many years ago - the only problem is seeing how much processing power (and algorithm optimisation) you can put in to reach a certain level of "good".
The problem occurs if there's any static charge on you. You pick up the serial cable and touch one of the pins, the cable may also end up with a charge on it. Plug it into the PC, and the serial port gets a static shock. This could (although you'd need quite some charge!) damage the serial port. Or you could do a similar thing by touching the serial port pins during the process of plugging the cable in. A really severe static charge could break through the serial port chip to the power supply and cause a spike on that which would damage other devices, although that's highly unlikely - you'd really have to be trying to build up that kind of a charge on yourself.
Of course, if the serial port connector is mounted on the mobo, then the force of plugging and unplugging it could bend the mobo slightly, which in the case of a badly-made and badly-mounted board could be enough to break a track. Or the connector could simply have failed through overuse.
More details on this are required. To win this, the plaintiffs are going to have to prove (a) that their mobos are damaged, (b) that the damage could have been caused by the Hotsync, and (c) that it was Palm's fault rather than the mobo manufacturers releasing a dodgy product. Frankly, (c) sounds a much more logical option.
Bull. This has nothing to do with the face recognition system. If you read the article, you'll have spotted that the photo appeared with a caption under it "THIS MAN WAS NOT IDENTIFIED AS A WANTED CRIMINAL" (my caps). The identification was some woman who rang the police and said, "I've just seen a picture of my ex-husband who's wanted for XYZ on the cover of the paper". She got it wrong, but the police HAD to investigate on the chance that she was right.
What do _you_ think the police should have done? You get a tip-off like this, would _you_ just let it go? Of course not, you'd follow it up. Which means finding the person and saying, "We've been told are going under a false name, and you're actually Mr. John Doe, who's wanted for XYZ. Is this the case? Do you have some ID, or can you get some ppl to vouch for you, to demonstrate that you're not?" Why do you think this is so unreasonable? Or is a policemen not allowed to investigate someone unless he _personally_ has seen them committing the crime, and can _personally_ identify them? If so, kiss goodbye to them convicting the mugger who attacks you on the street, even if you saw his face, know his name, and know where he lives!
Surprise - your article made it as of 4:44am this morning. Looks like there's just a bit of a delay on it...
Of course, if there's a week's delay between the news coming out and it being reported on SlashDot, doesn't the claim to deliver "news" seem rather lame? And if it's "stuff that matters", why wait a week to report it?
Well that's going to suck then. Please god, someone else take the helm! Unfortunately, corporations can't use the same rules that ships use, like relieving the captain of command when he goes stark raving mad.
I think "Star Wars 7: The Search for Plot" would be a start. To be followed by "Star Wars 8: I Can't Believe It's Not Bantha".
Point is, _none_ of them were in on the joke. Every one of them had been set up. The humour isn't in what they said, but in the fact that you could get them to say it bcos they thought it would make them look good and get them publicity.
And it isn't quite humour, although some of it was funny. It's a serious issue, when you can demonstrate that leading social figures will bang on about something they know nothing about, given very little encouragement. It makes you think a bit more about the pronouncements that the politicians come out with on policing, drugs, etc - how much of these have they actually thought about themselves, or how much are they simply doing for self-publicity at the instigation of one or other single-issue pressure group?
If you want plain hilarious, then Dom Joly will do. But there's nothing significant in the results of that. Half an hour after Dom Joly, you'll have forgotten it, unless there's a particularly good bit to tell your friends the next day - you certainly won't think about it any deeper. Brass Eye sets out to make you think about it.
An even better program was one done by a leading stand-up comedian (Lee Evans, IIRC), which involved exposing various major social political institutions. For instance, reporters won't actually ask politicians hard questions at a press conference, bcos then they won't get invited to the next press conference. When this guy got up at a press conference and actually asked the hard questions, there was a look of horror and embarrassment from all the reporters, like the reaction to someone telling a fart joke loudly in a posh restaurant. Like "how dare he, doesn't he know what the rules are here?"
These may be funny in that they show up leading figures, but the real issues underlying them are not at all amusing.
Taco's got 1.1 Gigs of attachments from his friends? I must be lucky then, all my friends are smart enough not to click on files attached to emails that look dodgy!
And this is rather blatant. I mean, do many ppl have friends who send an email saying 'I send you this file in order to have your advice'? Everyone I know passed 3rd-grade English...
And no mention of Sinclair (ZX81, Spectrum), Acorn (BBC micro), Commodore (C64, Amiga), Atari (games consoles, ST) et al...
Incidentally, the history is the history of the _PC_, ie. state of the art, multi-thousand-dollar machines. The history of affordable appliance-level computers is another story entirely.
You could fix that by checksumming individual paragraphs. If more than 95% of an email's paragraphs match the checksums of a known spam, it can safely be rejected. This will require more storage, but the processing time won't be significantly longer (the longest time is calculating the checksums, which will take the same time for individual paragraphs as for the whole message, since it's a per-character time).
You could even improve this when you've received several of the same by cross-comparing them and working out which paragraphs change and which stay the same. You could then combine the individual paragraph checksums into a single checksum, and only check that part of the message - that'll save on storage of lots of checksums.
The only trouble I can see is when this is one of those three-line ones that just says "Feeling horny? Go to here for XXX" or whatever. If those added some destination-specific heading, it would be difficult to set the filter tolerances tight enough so that genuine emails with one or two sentences that match don't get filtered.
"Thousands of bucks"? Where do you train? Me, I pay 30 ukp (about $45) per month for two sessions a week. It'll take over 4 years b4 I've put in "thousands".
To get yourself a teaching tool for martial arts, you'd need some kind of rotoscoping technique, tracking where your elbows, knees, and individual fingers and toes are, before you could genuinely achieve anything. And then you'd need a robot opponent to provide proper contact (you can't practise timing in empty air, and that's the key to getting a technique right). Be cool to make one though!:-)
Being realistic, this is to martial arts/sports games what those skiing and skateboard games with those swinging platforms are to the real thing, ie. nothing like.
For a classic example, consider the Enigma. Security through obscurity, in that no-one knew how the rotors were wired, or what the codes were. Had a U-boat commander not omitted to destroy his codebook, the U-boats would have owned the Atlantic for the whole war, Britain would have been screwed, and the US would never have bothered joining in a war where they'd've lost most of their troop ships on the way across the Atlantic. Even with that and with super-geniuses like Turing on the case, if the Germans had changed the codes more frequently or changed the rotor wiring once a year, we'd still have been screwed simply through the time it took to reverse-engineer the wiring.
Security _only_ through obscurity sucks when it isn't changed regularly enough. Security through obscurity is essentially communicating with a shared secret, the secret being the obscureness factor. Any codebreaker would tell you that the more signals you get with the same key, the easier it is to break those signals. So if you keep the obscurity and change the obscurity at regular intervals, no-one has enough time to reverse-engineer the old one before the new one is in place. This admittedly isn't great for stuff that's supposed to be long-term secret (eg. government stuff or bank details) but it's fine for something where the data rapidly becomes out of date (breaking news reports, for instance).
Of course, if it's sending something like a credit card number then you want _absolute_ security, so that someone 2 years later can't automatically break into your emails. And then I will agree with you, obscurity sucks the big one.
Nope. Had he released details to Slashdot or Kuro5hin, that would have been exposing it to public view. Using it for his own profit, that's illegal. The reporters did not use the papers for profit, except insofar as they were paid to be reporters.
An analogy (I hate/. analogies, cos they always suck, but I'll try to make this suck less.:-) Say you were an investigative reporter and discovered that a back door into a Federal armory was unguarded. You snuck in, took photos, snuck out, published. Kudos, Pulitzers, etc... But say you snuck in, stole a bunch of machine guns and made a killing (sorry:-) selling them openly. FBI, jail time, etc... Don't start on the "but taking a tangible object is different from taking something where the original thing is still there". Bullshit - copyright and IP laws are founded on that principle, and OK, they're way overkill now in the US, but the concept is sound (ask James Dyson whether he's glad he at least had the option of suing Hoover when they blatantly stole his invention).
You don't "deserve" the right to circumvent copyright restrictions, any more than you "deserve" a right to break into houses. You deserve the right to FAIR USE, which is what is currently denied, but not the right to distribute e-books for your own profit and rip off the authors, which is what is currently in progress.
Means there's a chance it might be... _funny_?!?!?! No, never! Can't have _funny_ comedy over here, it's the US, it's unconstitutional! Give me the reruns of Friends, Married with Children and Roseanne - laughing's bad for my plastic surgery.;-)
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The thing about Bin Ladden is that has motive, the means, and we know that he trains terrorists. Is it that far of a jump to think that at some level he was involved? How much evidence is needed?
In a word, yes. He may have the motive, means and opportunity, but it doesn't mean he did it. If you habitually drive fast and you own a fast car, would you like to be convicted on the grounds of "well, the cops heard something doing 100mph last night, they didn't see it, but we all know you do that sort of thing"?
Evidence is needed that Bin Laden was involved. When this exists (and that share-dealing looks like a good place to start looking), then something will be done. Until then, any action is premature.
Grab.
Don't dismiss "The Hobbit" offhand as a children's book, any more than you'd do the same for "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" (CS Lewis was a close friend of Tolkien, BTW), "Wind in the Willows" (and the sequels by William Horwood), the Harry Potter series or Pratchett. All of these are children's books, or at least were originally written as children's books.
:-) And I forgot to mention Alan Garner's Wierdstone books as well.
"The Hobbit" has quite a lot of light entertainment in it which makes it less heavy going than some of the children's books above (TL,TW&TW is definitely older children only!) but there's still some bits which are darker than usual, which gives it the depth many children's books (and adults' books, for that matter) are sadly lacking.
Grab.
PS. I know I'll get flamed for mentioning Harry Potter.
What else do you read? If you only read Star Wars and Star Trek novels, or Pratchett, you're likely just looking for some light entertainment. LotR is emphatically not that. Not that there's anything wrong with reading SW/ST/Pratchett (I love Pterry's work), just that comparing them is like comparing Shakespeare and a Hollywood action film - both may be fun/interesting, but they've got very different styles!
Try your hand at "Cryptonomicon" or "Snow Crash" by Neil Stephenson (or "Interface" by the same author, writing as Stephen Bury). If you hate the detail in them, the way that the story branches fractally to cover odd corners of each character's experience, culture or technology and then resumes the main story a page or two later, then you'll not manage LotR. If OTOH you can deal with the complexity of Cryptonomicon, then LotR is definitely for you.
One warning - the language in LotR is intentionally "old-fashioned", since it was modelled on old Saxon/Norse fantasies. This may make some of the conversations sound stilted - it requires a little suspension of disbelief to imagine that ppl would actually talk that way, the same as reading/watching Shakespeare.
Grab.
Sometimes, yes. In some cases though, the compiler has more tricks up its sleeve. The issue is that a mature compiler has been programmed using the combined optimisation strategies from many _really_ good engineers; unless you've learnt every trick that all those engineers know, the compiler may be able to out-perform you, given the same piece of code to implement.
Of course, the compiler can only work with the C that it's given by the coder. There's things you can do like making structures an even power-of-two size which will speed the code up; this is a trade-off against memory usage which only the coder can make. But after that, it's up to the compiler to make it as efficient as possible. For instance, on some processors a compiler may implement a integer multiply by 9 as "shift-by-3, add original value" which is often faster than a single multiply instruction, and most engineers wouldn't write their C this way.
Grab.
Sure, you can use a screwdriver as a hammer, but it'll take longer!
:-), type more filenames, etc. I rest my case. And you can rest yours, half an hour later, when you've done in 30 minutes the job that I did in 1 minute!
:-) Maybe the issue is that more kids are _wanting_ to do stuff with computers now that the Web is fashionable, and everyone has to learn somewhere, so the kids who previously would not have learnt anything past "load" (or "insert cartridge") are actually starting to learn how computers work properly. This can't be all bad! Trouble is, everyone has to start somewhere, so someone like yourself has to field the dumb questions.
Think of an everyday problem. Let's say I have a directory of 100-odd files and I want to distribute them into a half-dozen directories. WIMP interface - multiple selection, drag-and-drop, job done in seconds. CLI - ls, type in every filename individually, ls again bcos your previous ls has scrolled off the top of the screen (no scroll-bars in text-only mode, remember
There's tools for problems. If I want to dig out a swimming pool, don't tell me that the one true way is digging it with a spoon, when I've got a perfectly good mechanical digger parked round the corner! Similarly, a mechanical digger is no damn good when you go on an archaeological dig. WIMP is the best tool for most situations, it's only in the remaining cases that knowing CLI will save you much time and effort (mostly involving grep).
Do kids really know less about the underlying structure of computers these days? Back in the 80s, most computers, regardless of whether they _could_ be programmed by the owner, were just used as games machines. No-one sold a C-64 or a Spectrum on the basis of being a good machine to learn programming on! Some of us learnt how to program them, and we learnt the underlying structure. The rest only learnt to type "load", hit return, and press play on the tape player.
Grab.
"So there." Well, that's me told! *bg*
:-)
Yeah, guess you're right about the news footage. Although it's not that widely used since most of us don't have good enough connections (30 minutes delay to watch 2 minutes of footage is a shitty deal IMO, although I guess judges would have better links than that!
The ABC news producer was "grilled"; does that mean "formally reprimanded" or just "asked why she was doing it"? The former would be ABC having their heads up their ass; the latter would be completely normal and no big deal. She could have avoided the latter with a 2-line email to IT and her manager, if she'd thought about it for a minute or two beforehand.
I'm not proposing making decisions in ignorance. I said that where the case in question requires access to this information, the judges should have unrestricted access to that information. I also said that these would be unusual cases which would not occur very often, so making these a special case is justified. I stand by this. Does every case involving hookers require the judge to spend a couple of hours watching pr0n on the Internet? This is only justified if the case involves some bizarre form of video (like those crush films that came up recently), and this kind of case will only come up a few times a year in the whole of the country!
It may be illegal to mess with the mail; OTOH it's perfectly legal for your employer to open letters sent to you at work, on the grounds that these are sent to you as a representative of the company, not as a private individual.
Grab.
Sometimes yes, but that's an incredible minority. Sometimes an investigative reporter will have to as well, but does that mean that every employee of every radio station, TV station and newspaper in the country should be allowed access? If one person needs access a year, out of an organisation of several hundred thousand, it's easier to make a special case for them than to let everyone go hog-wild. Don't forget that all these porn and music downloads will be slowing the network down, so a judge doing REAL work will be impeded!
Common sense, man. If you need access to it, you ring IT, tell them "I'm doing some investigation of XYZ, so don't be surprised if some dodgy pages show up". Job done. Takes 30 seconds at most, and the cost of a phone call. As against months of investigations, hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted...
Grab.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but downloading pornography, streaming video (mostly pornography again) and music are NEVER job-related activities, unless you're (a) a professional musician or (b) a hooker. Since few judges fall into these categories, I think we can safely say that filtering porn and music downloads will not affect the judges' ability to use the web for research and make informed decisions.
Of course, if the filtering is broken then it will. But some reasonably smart filtering (better than the crap the libraries decided to use) would solve that. Alternatively, just set the software to forward a list of "suspicious" pages to the admin. A few hits on "sex" will be ignored; a few dozen hits will be checked. The basic knowledge that you can be found out will be enough to stop ppl using it for that. This is the way most companies work, and it works just fine.
You want to do it on your home machine, go ahead. It's your machine, your network connection, and your money paying for the dialup. You want to use someone else's network, you have to play by the rules for that network.
Grab.
As a typical English British specimen, I can inform you that my British English teacher would have used that Damascus sword (had it been available ten years back) to decapitate the entire class if we'd used punctuation on the outside of quotes! For example,
;-)
:-)
(a) Who said, "We shall fight them on the beaches"?
(b) Macbeth said, "Is this a dagger that I see before me"?
(a) is correct. (b) is not, unless the context is that you are asking whether Macbeth actually said that - phrased as a statement it is incorrect. The grammar examples in the link are valid for both British and American English; the spellings, however, are a different matter...
And why I'm posting about grammar on Slashdot, I don't know. Ah well.
Grab.
cf. Radical vegans, "do other primates have voting rights?", considerable debate... Friday night drunks, "we're really cool and the girls love us", considerable debate...
The fact that one small group may believe it doesn't make it true, or even worth everyone else bothering with. The rest of the world sees this and laughs. Remember, this article was put in as a funny, not as a serious question.
Chess is not a sport. Nor are poker, backgammon or mental arithmetic, since none involve any physical skill at all. Snooker/pool/billiards may _just_ make it in there, since it requires considerable hand-eye coordination, which is physical skill. Chess only requires the hand-eye coordination necessary to close fingers over a piece, move it to another square and hit a timer button.
Grab.
Cool. So it's OK for the US to go out and kill ppl who support causes the US doesn't agree with. But if it's OK for the US to do that, it's also OK for other countries to do it. Afghanistan, maybe? Or would you say it was perfectly legitimate if North Korea or Cuba landed a missile on the centre of Washington?
;-)
"Korea and Viet Nam are two good examples of what happens when we're not so happy with another country."
The good example being, the US gets its ass kicked when it tries to act as "world policeman"? Try a better example...
Grab.
Hey, d'you know how highly customised these processors are for chess? And how highly optimised the code is to do the solving? Trying to split it over multiple processors with different architectures and serious latencies between them is a losing bet, at least for a real-time solution.
I believe their main concern is getting it done in real time. Like weather forecasting or 3-D graphics, the techniques for solving the problem have been identified many years ago - the only problem is seeing how much processing power (and algorithm optimisation) you can put in to reach a certain level of "good".
Grab.
It's surely possible, although unlikely.
The problem occurs if there's any static charge on you. You pick up the serial cable and touch one of the pins, the cable may also end up with a charge on it. Plug it into the PC, and the serial port gets a static shock. This could (although you'd need quite some charge!) damage the serial port. Or you could do a similar thing by touching the serial port pins during the process of plugging the cable in. A really severe static charge could break through the serial port chip to the power supply and cause a spike on that which would damage other devices, although that's highly unlikely - you'd really have to be trying to build up that kind of a charge on yourself.
Of course, if the serial port connector is mounted on the mobo, then the force of plugging and unplugging it could bend the mobo slightly, which in the case of a badly-made and badly-mounted board could be enough to break a track. Or the connector could simply have failed through overuse.
More details on this are required. To win this, the plaintiffs are going to have to prove (a) that their mobos are damaged, (b) that the damage could have been caused by the Hotsync, and (c) that it was Palm's fault rather than the mobo manufacturers releasing a dodgy product. Frankly, (c) sounds a much more logical option.
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Bull. This has nothing to do with the face recognition system. If you read the article, you'll have spotted that the photo appeared with a caption under it "THIS MAN WAS NOT IDENTIFIED AS A WANTED CRIMINAL" (my caps). The identification was some woman who rang the police and said, "I've just seen a picture of my ex-husband who's wanted for XYZ on the cover of the paper". She got it wrong, but the police HAD to investigate on the chance that she was right.
What do _you_ think the police should have done? You get a tip-off like this, would _you_ just let it go? Of course not, you'd follow it up. Which means finding the person and saying, "We've been told are going under a false name, and you're actually Mr. John Doe, who's wanted for XYZ. Is this the case? Do you have some ID, or can you get some ppl to vouch for you, to demonstrate that you're not?" Why do you think this is so unreasonable? Or is a policemen not allowed to investigate someone unless he _personally_ has seen them committing the crime, and can _personally_ identify them? If so, kiss goodbye to them convicting the mugger who attacks you on the street, even if you saw his face, know his name, and know where he lives!
Insightful my ass.
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Surprise - your article made it as of 4:44am this morning. Looks like there's just a bit of a delay on it...
Of course, if there's a week's delay between the news coming out and it being reported on SlashDot, doesn't the claim to deliver "news" seem rather lame? And if it's "stuff that matters", why wait a week to report it?
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Well that's going to suck then. Please god, someone else take the helm! Unfortunately, corporations can't use the same rules that ships use, like relieving the captain of command when he goes stark raving mad.
I think "Star Wars 7: The Search for Plot" would be a start. To be followed by "Star Wars 8: I Can't Believe It's Not Bantha".
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Point is, _none_ of them were in on the joke. Every one of them had been set up. The humour isn't in what they said, but in the fact that you could get them to say it bcos they thought it would make them look good and get them publicity.
And it isn't quite humour, although some of it was funny. It's a serious issue, when you can demonstrate that leading social figures will bang on about something they know nothing about, given very little encouragement. It makes you think a bit more about the pronouncements that the politicians come out with on policing, drugs, etc - how much of these have they actually thought about themselves, or how much are they simply doing for self-publicity at the instigation of one or other single-issue pressure group?
If you want plain hilarious, then Dom Joly will do. But there's nothing significant in the results of that. Half an hour after Dom Joly, you'll have forgotten it, unless there's a particularly good bit to tell your friends the next day - you certainly won't think about it any deeper. Brass Eye sets out to make you think about it.
An even better program was one done by a leading stand-up comedian (Lee Evans, IIRC), which involved exposing various major social political institutions. For instance, reporters won't actually ask politicians hard questions at a press conference, bcos then they won't get invited to the next press conference. When this guy got up at a press conference and actually asked the hard questions, there was a look of horror and embarrassment from all the reporters, like the reaction to someone telling a fart joke loudly in a posh restaurant. Like "how dare he, doesn't he know what the rules are here?"
These may be funny in that they show up leading figures, but the real issues underlying them are not at all amusing.
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Taco's got 1.1 Gigs of attachments from his friends? I must be lucky then, all my friends are smart enough not to click on files attached to emails that look dodgy!
And this is rather blatant. I mean, do many ppl have friends who send an email saying 'I send you this file in order to have your advice'? Everyone I know passed 3rd-grade English...
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And no mention of Sinclair (ZX81, Spectrum), Acorn (BBC micro), Commodore (C64, Amiga), Atari (games consoles, ST) et al...
Incidentally, the history is the history of the _PC_, ie. state of the art, multi-thousand-dollar machines. The history of affordable appliance-level computers is another story entirely.
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You could fix that by checksumming individual paragraphs. If more than 95% of an email's paragraphs match the checksums of a known spam, it can safely be rejected. This will require more storage, but the processing time won't be significantly longer (the longest time is calculating the checksums, which will take the same time for individual paragraphs as for the whole message, since it's a per-character time).
You could even improve this when you've received several of the same by cross-comparing them and working out which paragraphs change and which stay the same. You could then combine the individual paragraph checksums into a single checksum, and only check that part of the message - that'll save on storage of lots of checksums.
The only trouble I can see is when this is one of those three-line ones that just says "Feeling horny? Go to here for XXX" or whatever. If those added some destination-specific heading, it would be difficult to set the filter tolerances tight enough so that genuine emails with one or two sentences that match don't get filtered.
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"Thousands of bucks"? Where do you train? Me, I pay 30 ukp (about $45) per month for two sessions a week. It'll take over 4 years b4 I've put in "thousands".
:-)
To get yourself a teaching tool for martial arts, you'd need some kind of rotoscoping technique, tracking where your elbows, knees, and individual fingers and toes are, before you could genuinely achieve anything. And then you'd need a robot opponent to provide proper contact (you can't practise timing in empty air, and that's the key to getting a technique right). Be cool to make one though!
Being realistic, this is to martial arts/sports games what those skiing and skateboard games with those swinging platforms are to the real thing, ie. nothing like.
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Any microcontroller can perform computation. Therefore it's a computer. :-) It just can't do stuff that your _personal_ computer does...
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Not at all.
For a classic example, consider the Enigma. Security through obscurity, in that no-one knew how the rotors were wired, or what the codes were. Had a U-boat commander not omitted to destroy his codebook, the U-boats would have owned the Atlantic for the whole war, Britain would have been screwed, and the US would never have bothered joining in a war where they'd've lost most of their troop ships on the way across the Atlantic. Even with that and with super-geniuses like Turing on the case, if the Germans had changed the codes more frequently or changed the rotor wiring once a year, we'd still have been screwed simply through the time it took to reverse-engineer the wiring.
Security _only_ through obscurity sucks when it isn't changed regularly enough. Security through obscurity is essentially communicating with a shared secret, the secret being the obscureness factor. Any codebreaker would tell you that the more signals you get with the same key, the easier it is to break those signals. So if you keep the obscurity and change the obscurity at regular intervals, no-one has enough time to reverse-engineer the old one before the new one is in place. This admittedly isn't great for stuff that's supposed to be long-term secret (eg. government stuff or bank details) but it's fine for something where the data rapidly becomes out of date (breaking news reports, for instance).
Of course, if it's sending something like a credit card number then you want _absolute_ security, so that someone 2 years later can't automatically break into your emails. And then I will agree with you, obscurity sucks the big one.
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Nope. Had he released details to Slashdot or Kuro5hin, that would have been exposing it to public view. Using it for his own profit, that's illegal. The reporters did not use the papers for profit, except insofar as they were paid to be reporters.
/. analogies, cos they always suck, but I'll try to make this suck less. :-) Say you were an investigative reporter and discovered that a back door into a Federal armory was unguarded. You snuck in, took photos, snuck out, published. Kudos, Pulitzers, etc... But say you snuck in, stole a bunch of machine guns and made a killing (sorry :-) selling them openly. FBI, jail time, etc... Don't start on the "but taking a tangible object is different from taking something where the original thing is still there". Bullshit - copyright and IP laws are founded on that principle, and OK, they're way overkill now in the US, but the concept is sound (ask James Dyson whether he's glad he at least had the option of suing Hoover when they blatantly stole his invention).
An analogy (I hate
You don't "deserve" the right to circumvent copyright restrictions, any more than you "deserve" a right to break into houses. You deserve the right to FAIR USE, which is what is currently denied, but not the right to distribute e-books for your own profit and rip off the authors, which is what is currently in progress.
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Means there's a chance it might be ... _funny_?!?!?! No, never! Can't have _funny_ comedy over here, it's the US, it's unconstitutional! Give me the reruns of Friends, Married with Children and Roseanne - laughing's bad for my plastic surgery. ;-)
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