How many points do they get if their answer is an entire citation?:)
I wonder also whether it's so simple to copy solutions off the internet, in the course of my work whilst looking for solutions to problems, I've seen quite a lot of crappy answers and "solutions".
Trouble is often when I and my colleagues are stumped it seems like nobody else knows the answer either. Google etc shows up pages and pages of the wrong answers or the same question in hundreds of mailing lists and groups but no answer:).
"explicitly forbade reusing your own work without proper citation. It was considered plagiarism. We never got recycled homeworks like your example,"
Of course you should never get that in that case, because if that is the rule, then if teachers/professors recycle assignments without proper citation they would be infringing that rule too.
Dolores should be the one in big trouble, not that friend who recycled his own answer - if his opinion had not changed then he could use the same answer to the same question.
One would normally hope to have learnt something new since, but since he got 95% maybe the room for improvement was low anyway.
Did Dolores cite the previous professor in her assignment question? She should actually have been sacked if she didn't do that, since she was implicitly passing off someone else's work as hers. And she being in a position of authority should be setting a better example.
By doing what he did - crossing out the prev professor's name, he's actually calling her out on it. Which not surprisingly she didn't take very well.
As for the marks, I don't see why he should get a zero at all. She might give him a different grade, but a zero is very different from 95% for the same question. If the assignment isn't too ambiguous then one of the professor is grading poorly;).
In my opinion, if you copy from a fellow student AND you cite your "sources", then it's not plagiarism. It's plagiarism if you copy someone else's work and pass it off as your work.
But depending on the person grading you, you might not get very good marks for that if "your" entire answers are citations of someone else's work.
FWIW I have copied homework from friends before, but I used to correct it as well (and let them know)- for some stuff it's often easier to tell if something is wrong or right, than to actually work it out yourself from scratch.
"Look at it this way: why would you sink a wad of cash into R&D if someone else can just clone your chip."
There are lots of companies in China making their own stuff AND rampantly copying each other. They still seem to think they can make money, and I bet more than a few do.
It takes time to copy stuff. So you might make money _first_ and establish brand awareness, distribution channels and market share first, gain buyer trust etc.
I have no problems with people copying my code (I hope they improve it significantly). What I have problems with is if people copy my stuff and tell _lies_ about it (fraud, plagiarism, misrepresentation etc). So maybe they could be required to say in small print "This product is a copy of Brand X Model Y, or uses tech in Brand X Model Y" (only if it's true of course;) ).
If someone made a copy and pretended to be the original (same box, same name, same address to contact for support etc), now that's a BIG problem - and you don't need to resort to patents and copyrights for that sort of thing.
I've just bought a Made in China radio controlled helicopter - if someone made a copy and put their label on it, I'd still go for the original till the copy is proven - because I can't be sure if they really made a 100% copy and didn't cut _more_ corners (heh I bet the original cut corners too, but for the past X _years_ that model has been out, it seems acceptable by many). So there will be a large number of people who would still buy the original.
By the time the copy turns out to be just as good or better, hopefully the original manufacturer would have come out with something even better.
That sort of thing is good for the _market_. It's not _easy_ for you the manufacturer, but hey aren't there plenty of big free market fans in the USA?
Nowadays patents and copyrights are just anti-competitive tools, especially with the timespans involved - you never need to compete against your old product - so companies like Microsoft can dare to do something like Vista.
Imagine if copyright was just 7 years. Microsoft would have to really make something _significantly_ better than Windows 2000, and Microsoft Office 97.
BTW in China some company actually copied NEC, as in pretended to be NEC, but they even made their own products which NEC never made. Now that's so wrong, but I also wonder if some of the employees might actually have thought they were actually working for NEC;).
"our government is too corrupt to realize that it's going to get us all killed"
Despite all the FUD in the US, I find it very unlikely that China will ever do a first strike on the USA in the forseeable future (20 years).
They might attack Taiwan, or nearby countries (they did Tibet), but I strongly doubt they'd attack USA (unless the US hits them first).
Whereas from history it's pretty hard to rule out the USA striking first on any particular country around the world, or have the CIA mess the country up with coups and stuff look up the history of a fair number of South American countries, Middle Eastern countries etc.
The offensive military capabilities of China aren't that great.
The offensive military capabilities of the USA are pretty good, plus the USA has military bases "everywhere".
The US citizens should be more afraid of the US Gov than China.
"You see, if you need to wake up earlier, you go to bed earlier - it cancels out! Not difficult is it?"
Some people actually do try to go to bed earlier, they just can't get to sleep earlier.
"You should maybe get a hat, the sun's affecting your brain."
Nah, nothing to do with the sun, I peaked at 9, and it's been mainly downhill from then. Plus, I'm a slashdotter - I spend most of my time indoors.
Anyway, I think it's best to just set one time for a particular timezone and be done with it, if people prefer more daylight in the evening in summer then fix the timezone accordingly.
Nah what we should have is a reality TV show, with nominees being taken from preliminary rounds and then in the finals viewers vote to "vote them off the planet".
If voters vote for a very disliked person, "such an event would unify the world as never before".
It's a bit like Survivor;).
I suggested this a few years ago, around that time my country (Malaysia) had a stupid astronaut program - which is basically we pay for some silly chap to transfer public money to Russia (and probably some local crony pockets). I proposed that instead we should be allowed to vote a few politicians for one way trip to space. Even if they decline the trip, it would be worth it.
I'd personally use something else other than OpenBSD, because once I start running services on it, it's the services which tend to have most of the security problems, and that's the same on all platforms.
I believe OpenBSD has also had at least one remote kernel exploit in recent times.
"2007-03-05: Core develops proof of concept code that demonstrates remote code execution in the kernel context by exploiting the mbuf overflow."
Sure OpenBSD is paranoid about security, but for all they do I don't really see that it's significantly much better for the loss in functionality and performance.
Oops, anyway my point is if you are north or south enough the difference between summer and winter are big enough that the 1 hour change is just silly.
But anyway I think we both agree- just fix it at something reasonably tolerable and leave it there.
As for "wastes energy", that's quite subjective - people might be spending more time doing stuff they enjoy rather than asleep, and so naturally more energy is used.
After all if everyone was asleep or dead, the energy "wasted" would be a lot less;).
In the old days people might have used less energy in the day than they did in the night. Nowadays that might not be true in some places.
Good to see some progress finally being made after all these decades. Been waiting for this sort of stuff and _more_ for quite a _while_.
Given that the tech for reading brain patterns is getting more and more viable ( http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/114843/game-on-with-the-braincontrolled-pc.html ), all you need to do is get a computer to associate thought macros with the pictures (and audio) the computer and you are getting at the same time.
Why try replacing the brain with computers to do perception etc? Augment it[1].
1) Your brain is good at perception and recognition. 2) Computers are fairly good at retrieval and retention.
So what you need is to train yourself to semi-automatically "label" "important" stuff with identifiable enough brain patterns/thought macros.
Recognition: you look at stuff, and you might rapidly think "YYY,Picture=Ball,ZZZ" (replace YYY with whatever unique thought macro you choose to tell the computer you're thinking to it, and ZZZ = done").
Retrieval: you could think "Ball", and the computer could show stuff (starting with candidates in a likely context) and you could think "Nope" and then it cycles rapidly (playback) till your brain goes "Yep!" - which would be quite quick after some practice.
If you can't really remember the exact tag, you could try via time ("recent past", etc), or other contexts.
Oh yeah, once you have that thought macro thingy, and add wireless networking, you could think "lights on" and your computer could do it for you - virtual telekinesis (I tried to get the ICANN etc to reserve a.here TLD to make it easier to do DNS location of stuff by physical context - http://jukebox.here/ would be a different jukebox in different places, but the ICANN obviously had better things to do like allow domain tasting, and.info, also tried writing an internet draft but it never became and RFC oh well)
You could also do some virtual telepathy - think of something, retrieve it, share it with someone.
And that's why I think copyright is a big barrier to progress - such pervasive recording and sharing will upset the RIAA etc.
They will want more than a penny for your thoughts, and they'll think those thoughts belong to them too .
And you might be forced to have DRM in your ebrain/iBrain or whatever.
I suggest we better fix that copyright and patent crap now:).
[1] I also suggest that there are differences between replacing the brain with AI stuff, and augmenting the brain with AI stuff. One might think they seem the same, but the philosophy and goal is different. The long term end result might be the difference between who is the rider and who is the horse.
This is called competition. It means you have to make stuff that not just anyone can recreate easily.
If you don't like so much competition, you'll have to find a different market which is not as competitive - try making furniture or cakes, or wedding photography.
Or find a niche which is either not as competitive (customers will still use you even if you're not as good), or where you are better than the rest.
Well, it's not as bad as some computer hardware sectors. Look at AMD, it's not as if their CPUs are that crap. Their CPUs are significantly better than their previous year's CPUs, and in fact before Intel's Core stuff they were much faster than Intel's P4 stuff. But now AMD is losing 600 million dollars or more. And they still have to invest billions to keep up whether or not they can sell the chips they make.
Just because you put in lots of work and $$$ doesn't guarantee you profits, as AMD has found out even if you do quite good work, it might not be "good enough". Commodity high tech = crazy market.
I've proposed to various OSS people before for them to make a payment site where people can more easily to donate money to individual developers. But nobody really seemed interested - it's a fair bit of work (legal etc). And it might end up a bit more about marketing yourself with the usual politics, but who knows OSS devs might still get a bit more money:).
Right now if I wanted to give some driver developer some $$$, it's pretty hard.
"people seem to cope OK with them, week in week out"
Well you can cope with not enough sleep. It doesn't mean it's good for you.
DST offsets of 1 hour _might_ make sense in some places where daylight hours reduce by 1 or 2 hours in winter.
But for other places I don't see the point - it's still going to be mostly dark in winter anyway. No point fooling yourself that way, after all we've already got this new fangled electric lighting thing nowadays.
I currently live in an equatorial region, but I've stayed for a few years in a country with DST, and I don't think DST was worth the hassle.
BTW, China has just one timezone, I'm not sure how people like solar noon happening at 15:00... I wonder when their mealtimes are in those areas.
I like FastCGI because it's cleaner than stuff like mod_perl (and seems more robust too).
It's like CGI in that you can write FastCGI apps in all sorts of different languages, and they are more portable across different webservers (if they support fastcgi and you can figure out how to turn it on).
Years ago I tested my FastCGI perl apps which were on Apache on a Zeus webserver and they worked fine (can't recall if they worked faster, they might have:) ). Unless Microsoft has been naughty again, they'd probably work fine on IIS7 too.
Unfortunately for Zeus, Apache was fast enough (Zeus then was definitely faster for static stuff).
Some people object that fastcgi is old and "development has stopped". To me it just means the line (interface) was drawn at the right spot - don't need to keep moving it about so much or changing it. People keep saying you get so much more control with mod_perl etc, but fastcgi is good enough for webapps - you can practically spit out whatever HTTP headers you need, I don't forsee needing to write a program for Apache to suddenly do something other than HTTP/HTTPS (e.g. POP3), so what would mod_perl make easier? Sure mod_perl is a bit faster, but if you're using perl already;).
Though FastCGI isn't as popular, I just hope webservers don't stop supporting it.
Excerpt: "The device takes the form of a headband with three electrode plates pressed to your forehead. The quick calibration tool measures brain and facial muscle activity, with a certain amount of movement or calmness of thought required to move a box to the right degree."
While we died embarrassingly quickly in the first few rounds, after ten minutes we could walk in straight lines and fire only when we wanted, rather than all the time. Strafing proved harder, but we could still have a reasonable fight with the bots even if we were hardly going to challenge pro-gamer Fatal1ty."
Some Mac people figured it out early (at least by 2001) http://rentzsch.com/macosx/securingFirewire
The FreeBSD people were already using it way back in 2002, quote: "As you know, IEEE1394 is a bus and OHCI supports physical access to the host memory. This means that you can access the remote host over firewire without software support at the remote host. In other words, you can investigate remote host's physical memory whether its OS is alive or crashed or hangs up"
In other words it doesn't matter what OS it is or whether there is even an OS.
Oh yeah there's also "Linux Kernel debugging over Firewire" but that's recent - 2006.
Well I'll like to see real evidence that computer controlled cars would do much better than humans in "real life" conditions - none of this perfect _infinitely_ long roads that lead to nowhere, or perfect circle stuff.
Try typical length roads that merge or enter a city with a junction.
1) If you have enough cars on the road and most are heading to a similar place and that destination does NOT support highway speeds, they will have to slow down. So if "downtown" has a traffic light and the average speed becomes 30kph (optimistic;) ), the long line of cars heading "downtown" will eventually have to travel at 30kph on average.
2) Merging well is hard for most people, so when just one person gets it wrong you slow down both roads for very many cars. You may think computers can do better, but the last I checked most human programmers aren't very good at programming computers, and computers are even worse than programmers at programming computers;).
3) If you have heavy traffic, how big a gap should you leave for merging? If you only leave a gap enough for safe driving between your car and the car ahead, how do merging cars fit in without slowing down? Remember if you slow down, it means the car behind you has to slow down too, in order to leave a safe gap, and if another car tries to merge between your car and the car behind, that means the car behind has to slow down even more and so on till everybody has to go really slow or even stop.
If you have heavy traffic and there are insufficient free slots for merging traffic, merging without slowdowns becomes _impossible_.
If you force huge gaps between cars, it shifts the problem further upstream - it means you can't put as many cars on the road so you have to prevent cars from leaving houses or car parks till a slot is available:). So while average road speed will go up, you might be still forced to wake up early in the morning to get your slot unless you're one of the lucky VIPs who get the "leave at 8:50 and reach at 9:00" slot. Such a solution would be hard for most people to accept. I suppose you could propose that people bid $$$ for slots, but is that solution much better than the problem?
It's trivial to simulate all this in your head, doesn't take a brilliant scientist to do it. Don't even need to understand fancy math equations.
Basically everything is nice and easy when there isn't heavy traffic, but human controlled cars travel pretty fast in those scenarios too. When there's heavy traffic, I don't think there's very much you can do. You cannot eliminate heavy traffic - people are too similar, 80% of the people want to have breakfast, lunch, dinner at similar times, on special occasions a lot of them want to be together, on payday weekends many want to blow away their money.
Just provide information so that humans with a choice can choose to avoid the heavy traffic areas (or leave later). People who have to leave and think it's worth it, will still leave. The others can leave later or go elsewhere.
Augment humans with computers don't keep trying to replace them with computers. Will computers thank you for it? Will computers be happier? Augment vs replace may seem similar in some cases, but the philosophy is different, and I suggest that the long term results are different. You may still see the same two entities (humans and AI), but who is the rider and who is the horse;).
No it should be complicated so that they write it on a piece of paper and put it in their wallet or purse.
Then the IT security policy is: 1) Keep your wallet/purse and their contents safe. 2) If your wallet/purse goes missing, call up IT (after calling the banks to cancel your cards etc) to disable your account till you can be reverified.
If you do this, even if they are given new passwords every 3 months, there's no big change to their workflow.
In most sane hybrid or electric (or fuel cell electric) cars there's regenerative braking.
With capacitors like these there's a wider range of acceptable deceleration speeds for regenerative braking.
When you brake in such cars some of the kinetic energy is converted back to electricity, the rest is dumped as heat.
If you don't brake too fast the motors are used as dynamos, if you brake too fast I believe conventional friction brakes are used (so more wasted energy).
I suspect they probably also use resistors and heatsinks for dumping excess energy when regeneratively braking. This is because the batteries might not be able to handle the power coming back in, so you have to throw away the rest:(.
The less energy you waste during braking the more likely you are to get closer to "highway-style" mileage in "stop-start" city driving.
In fact in "highway" driving there's a lot more wind resistance, so you might actually start to see cars having better mileage figures for "city" driving than "highway".
I don't like spam nor do I send any or want more spam.
BUT actually I think spammers should be able to send spam within certain limits.
What they should not be able to do is tell so many lies just to try to make money.
Spammers should not be able to: 1) Pretend they are someone else (use someone else's email account and name in the From line) 2) Make false claims about their products or themselves 3) Sell illegal stuff 4) Send pictures of penises/goatse.cx to Aunt May if she hasn't said she wanted them - I think there are laws against this already, way before the Internet got popular.
So if they do that sort of stuff you should be able to get them for fraud or criminal impersonation etc. In the USA: "Criminal impersonation is a class 6 felony."
If spammers didn't keep pretending they were someone else, people who didn't want to listen to them could more easily filter them out.
I don't really think that there are that many spammers - from what I see most of us worldwide appear to be getting rather similar emails.
The cops should just try to buy stuff from spammers that appear to be doing dubious stuff and in their jurisdiction (not difficult - follow the money - if a US cop sees the money trail goes via anyone in the USA then go for it).
Just regularly catch the spammers breaking them and I think there'll be a lot less spam. The old laws are good enough, I think there just isn't the will to go around catching them.
Slashdot Mirror
How many points do they get if their answer is an entire citation? :)
:).
I wonder also whether it's so simple to copy solutions off the internet, in the course of my work whilst looking for solutions to problems, I've seen quite a lot of crappy answers and "solutions".
Trouble is often when I and my colleagues are stumped it seems like nobody else knows the answer either. Google etc shows up pages and pages of the wrong answers or the same question in hundreds of mailing lists and groups but no answer
"explicitly forbade reusing your own work without proper citation. It was considered plagiarism. We never got recycled homeworks like your example,"
Of course you should never get that in that case, because if that is the rule, then if teachers/professors recycle assignments without proper citation they would be infringing that rule too.
Dolores should be the one in big trouble, not that friend who recycled his own answer - if his opinion had not changed then he could use the same answer to the same question.
One would normally hope to have learnt something new since, but since he got 95% maybe the room for improvement was low anyway.
Did Dolores cite the previous professor in her assignment question? She should actually have been sacked if she didn't do that, since she was implicitly passing off someone else's work as hers. And she being in a position of authority should be setting a better example.
;).
By doing what he did - crossing out the prev professor's name, he's actually calling her out on it. Which not surprisingly she didn't take very well.
As for the marks, I don't see why he should get a zero at all. She might give him a different grade, but a zero is very different from 95% for the same question. If the assignment isn't too ambiguous then one of the professor is grading poorly
In my opinion, if you copy from a fellow student AND you cite your "sources", then it's not plagiarism. It's plagiarism if you copy someone else's work and pass it off as your work.
But depending on the person grading you, you might not get very good marks for that if "your" entire answers are citations of someone else's work.
FWIW I have copied homework from friends before, but I used to correct it as well (and let them know)- for some stuff it's often easier to tell if something is wrong or right, than to actually work it out yourself from scratch.
"Look at it this way: why would you sink a wad of cash into R&D if someone else can just clone your chip."
;) ).
;).
There are lots of companies in China making their own stuff AND rampantly copying each other. They still seem to think they can make money, and I bet more than a few do.
It takes time to copy stuff. So you might make money _first_ and establish brand awareness, distribution channels and market share first, gain buyer trust etc.
I have no problems with people copying my code (I hope they improve it significantly). What I have problems with is if people copy my stuff and tell _lies_ about it (fraud, plagiarism, misrepresentation etc). So maybe they could be required to say in small print "This product is a copy of Brand X Model Y, or uses tech in Brand X Model Y" (only if it's true of course
If someone made a copy and pretended to be the original (same box, same name, same address to contact for support etc), now that's a BIG problem - and you don't need to resort to patents and copyrights for that sort of thing.
I've just bought a Made in China radio controlled helicopter - if someone made a copy and put their label on it, I'd still go for the original till the copy is proven - because I can't be sure if they really made a 100% copy and didn't cut _more_ corners (heh I bet the original cut corners too, but for the past X _years_ that model has been out, it seems acceptable by many). So there will be a large number of people who would still buy the original.
By the time the copy turns out to be just as good or better, hopefully the original manufacturer would have come out with something even better.
That sort of thing is good for the _market_. It's not _easy_ for you the manufacturer, but hey aren't there plenty of big free market fans in the USA?
Nowadays patents and copyrights are just anti-competitive tools, especially with the timespans involved - you never need to compete against your old product - so companies like Microsoft can dare to do something like Vista.
Imagine if copyright was just 7 years. Microsoft would have to really make something _significantly_ better than Windows 2000, and Microsoft Office 97.
BTW in China some company actually copied NEC, as in pretended to be NEC, but they even made their own products which NEC never made. Now that's so wrong, but I also wonder if some of the employees might actually have thought they were actually working for NEC
"our government is too corrupt to realize that it's going to get us all killed"
Despite all the FUD in the US, I find it very unlikely that China will ever do a first strike on the USA in the forseeable future (20 years).
They might attack Taiwan, or nearby countries (they did Tibet), but I strongly doubt they'd attack USA (unless the US hits them first).
Whereas from history it's pretty hard to rule out the USA striking first on any particular country around the world, or have the CIA mess the country up with coups and stuff look up the history of a fair number of South American countries, Middle Eastern countries etc.
The offensive military capabilities of China aren't that great.
The offensive military capabilities of the USA are pretty good, plus the USA has military bases "everywhere".
The US citizens should be more afraid of the US Gov than China.
Your HT = Hyperthreading or Hypertransport?
His HT = Hyperthreading or Hypertransport?
"You see, if you need to wake up earlier, you go to bed earlier - it cancels out! Not difficult is it?"
Some people actually do try to go to bed earlier, they just can't get to sleep earlier.
"You should maybe get a hat, the sun's affecting your brain."
Nah, nothing to do with the sun, I peaked at 9, and it's been mainly downhill from then. Plus, I'm a slashdotter - I spend most of my time indoors.
Anyway, I think it's best to just set one time for a particular timezone and be done with it, if people prefer more daylight in the evening in summer then fix the timezone accordingly.
Nah what we should have is a reality TV show, with nominees being taken from preliminary rounds and then in the finals viewers vote to "vote them off the planet".
;).
If voters vote for a very disliked person, "such an event would unify the world as never before".
It's a bit like Survivor
I suggested this a few years ago, around that time my country (Malaysia) had a stupid astronaut program - which is basically we pay for some silly chap to transfer public money to Russia (and probably some local crony pockets). I proposed that instead we should be allowed to vote a few politicians for one way trip to space. Even if they decline the trip, it would be worth it.
I'd personally use something else other than OpenBSD, because once I start running services on it, it's the services which tend to have most of the security problems, and that's the same on all platforms.
I believe OpenBSD has also had at least one remote kernel exploit in recent times.
"2007-03-05: Core develops proof of concept code that demonstrates remote code execution in the kernel context by exploiting the mbuf overflow."
Sure OpenBSD is paranoid about security, but for all they do I don't really see that it's significantly much better for the loss in functionality and performance.
Oops, anyway my point is if you are north or south enough the difference between summer and winter are big enough that the 1 hour change is just silly.
;).
But anyway I think we both agree- just fix it at something reasonably tolerable and leave it there.
As for "wastes energy", that's quite subjective - people might be spending more time doing stuff they enjoy rather than asleep, and so naturally more energy is used.
After all if everyone was asleep or dead, the energy "wasted" would be a lot less
In the old days people might have used less energy in the day than they did in the night. Nowadays that might not be true in some places.
Good to see some progress finally being made after all these decades. Been waiting for this sort of stuff and _more_ for quite a _while_.
.here TLD to make it easier to do DNS location of stuff by physical context - http://jukebox.here/ would be a different jukebox in different places, but the ICANN obviously had better things to do like allow domain tasting, and .info, also tried writing an internet draft but it never became and RFC oh well)
:).
Given that the tech for reading brain patterns is getting more and more viable ( http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/114843/game-on-with-the-braincontrolled-pc.html ), all you need to do is get a computer to associate thought macros with the pictures (and audio) the computer and you are getting at the same time.
Why try replacing the brain with computers to do perception etc? Augment it[1].
1) Your brain is good at perception and recognition.
2) Computers are fairly good at retrieval and retention.
So what you need is to train yourself to semi-automatically "label" "important" stuff with identifiable enough brain patterns/thought macros.
Recognition: you look at stuff, and you might rapidly think "YYY,Picture=Ball,ZZZ" (replace YYY with whatever unique thought macro you choose to tell the computer you're thinking to it, and ZZZ = done").
Retrieval: you could think "Ball", and the computer could show stuff (starting with candidates in a likely context) and you could think "Nope" and then it cycles rapidly (playback) till your brain goes "Yep!" - which would be quite quick after some practice.
If you can't really remember the exact tag, you could try via time ("recent past", etc), or other contexts.
Oh yeah, once you have that thought macro thingy, and add wireless networking, you could think "lights on" and your computer could do it for you - virtual telekinesis (I tried to get the ICANN etc to reserve a
You could also do some virtual telepathy - think of something, retrieve it, share it with someone.
And that's why I think copyright is a big barrier to progress - such pervasive recording and sharing will upset the RIAA etc.
They will want more than a penny for your thoughts, and they'll think those thoughts belong to them too .
And you might be forced to have DRM in your ebrain/iBrain or whatever.
I suggest we better fix that copyright and patent crap now
[1] I also suggest that there are differences between replacing the brain with AI stuff, and augmenting the brain with AI stuff. One might think they seem the same, but the philosophy and goal is different. The long term end result might be the difference between who is the rider and who is the horse.
This is called competition. It means you have to make stuff that not just anyone can recreate easily.
:).
If you don't like so much competition, you'll have to find a different market which is not as competitive - try making furniture or cakes, or wedding photography.
Or find a niche which is either not as competitive (customers will still use you even if you're not as good), or where you are better than the rest.
Well, it's not as bad as some computer hardware sectors. Look at AMD, it's not as if their CPUs are that crap. Their CPUs are significantly better than their previous year's CPUs, and in fact before Intel's Core stuff they were much faster than Intel's P4 stuff. But now AMD is losing 600 million dollars or more. And they still have to invest billions to keep up whether or not they can sell the chips they make.
Just because you put in lots of work and $$$ doesn't guarantee you profits, as AMD has found out even if you do quite good work, it might not be "good enough". Commodity high tech = crazy market.
I've proposed to various OSS people before for them to make a payment site where people can more easily to donate money to individual developers. But nobody really seemed interested - it's a fair bit of work (legal etc). And it might end up a bit more about marketing yourself with the usual politics, but who knows OSS devs might still get a bit more money
Right now if I wanted to give some driver developer some $$$, it's pretty hard.
"people seem to cope OK with them, week in week out"
Well you can cope with not enough sleep. It doesn't mean it's good for you.
DST offsets of 1 hour _might_ make sense in some places where daylight hours reduce by 1 or 2 hours in winter.
But for other places I don't see the point - it's still going to be mostly dark in winter anyway. No point fooling yourself that way, after all we've already got this new fangled electric lighting thing nowadays.
I currently live in an equatorial region, but I've stayed for a few years in a country with DST, and I don't think DST was worth the hassle.
BTW, China has just one timezone, I'm not sure how people like solar noon happening at 15:00... I wonder when their mealtimes are in those areas.
I like FastCGI because it's cleaner than stuff like mod_perl (and seems more robust too).
:) ). Unless Microsoft has been naughty again, they'd probably work fine on IIS7 too.
;).
It's like CGI in that you can write FastCGI apps in all sorts of different languages, and they are more portable across different webservers (if they support fastcgi and you can figure out how to turn it on).
Years ago I tested my FastCGI perl apps which were on Apache on a Zeus webserver and they worked fine (can't recall if they worked faster, they might have
Unfortunately for Zeus, Apache was fast enough (Zeus then was definitely faster for static stuff).
Some people object that fastcgi is old and "development has stopped". To me it just means the line (interface) was drawn at the right spot - don't need to keep moving it about so much or changing it. People keep saying you get so much more control with mod_perl etc, but fastcgi is good enough for webapps - you can practically spit out whatever HTTP headers you need, I don't forsee needing to write a program for Apache to suddenly do something other than HTTP/HTTPS (e.g. POP3), so what would mod_perl make easier? Sure mod_perl is a bit faster, but if you're using perl already
Though FastCGI isn't as popular, I just hope webservers don't stop supporting it.
I'm OK with it if we really get to see everyone AND we get to know who is AND _was_ watching who :). That means some logs are kept on the watchers.
Basically it settles who watches the watchers - anybody if they have nothing better to do.
No fair if a Privileged Few get to opt out and we don't.
Would she be able to use this? With the following she might be able to control a computer and do more stuff.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/114843/game-on-with-the-braincontrolled-pc.html
Excerpt: "The device takes the form of a headband with three electrode plates pressed to your forehead. The quick calibration tool measures brain and facial muscle activity, with a certain amount of movement or calmness of thought required to move a box to the right degree."
While we died embarrassingly quickly in the first few rounds, after ten minutes we could walk in straight lines and fire only when we wanted, rather than all the time. Strafing proved harder, but we could still have a reasonable fight with the bots even if we were hardly going to challenge pro-gamer Fatal1ty."
But parrot is dead! ;)
Should be. It's a "feature" of Firewire.
Some Mac people figured it out early (at least by 2001)
http://rentzsch.com/macosx/securingFirewire
The FreeBSD people were already using it way back in 2002, quote:
"As you know, IEEE1394 is a bus and OHCI supports physical access to the host memory. This means that you can access the remote host over firewire without software support at the remote host. In other words, you can investigate remote host's physical memory whether its OS is alive or crashed or hangs up"
In other words it doesn't matter what OS it is or whether there is even an OS.
Oh yeah there's also "Linux Kernel debugging over Firewire" but that's recent - 2006.
Well I'll like to see real evidence that computer controlled cars would do much better than humans in "real life" conditions - none of this perfect _infinitely_ long roads that lead to nowhere, or perfect circle stuff.
;) ), the long line of cars heading "downtown" will eventually have to travel at 30kph on average.
;).
:). So while average road speed will go up, you might be still forced to wake up early in the morning to get your slot unless you're one of the lucky VIPs who get the "leave at 8:50 and reach at 9:00" slot. Such a solution would be hard for most people to accept. I suppose you could propose that people bid $$$ for slots, but is that solution much better than the problem?
;).
Try typical length roads that merge or enter a city with a junction.
1) If you have enough cars on the road and most are heading to a similar place and that destination does NOT support highway speeds, they will have to slow down. So if "downtown" has a traffic light and the average speed becomes 30kph (optimistic
2) Merging well is hard for most people, so when just one person gets it wrong you slow down both roads for very many cars. You may think computers can do better, but the last I checked most human programmers aren't very good at programming computers, and computers are even worse than programmers at programming computers
3) If you have heavy traffic, how big a gap should you leave for merging? If you only leave a gap enough for safe driving between your car and the car ahead, how do merging cars fit in without slowing down? Remember if you slow down, it means the car behind you has to slow down too, in order to leave a safe gap, and if another car tries to merge between your car and the car behind, that means the car behind has to slow down even more and so on till everybody has to go really slow or even stop.
If you have heavy traffic and there are insufficient free slots for merging traffic, merging without slowdowns becomes _impossible_.
If you force huge gaps between cars, it shifts the problem further upstream - it means you can't put as many cars on the road so you have to prevent cars from leaving houses or car parks till a slot is available
It's trivial to simulate all this in your head, doesn't take a brilliant scientist to do it. Don't even need to understand fancy math equations.
Basically everything is nice and easy when there isn't heavy traffic, but human controlled cars travel pretty fast in those scenarios too. When there's heavy traffic, I don't think there's very much you can do. You cannot eliminate heavy traffic - people are too similar, 80% of the people want to have breakfast, lunch, dinner at similar times, on special occasions a lot of them want to be together, on payday weekends many want to blow away their money.
Just provide information so that humans with a choice can choose to avoid the heavy traffic areas (or leave later). People who have to leave and think it's worth it, will still leave. The others can leave later or go elsewhere.
Augment humans with computers don't keep trying to replace them with computers. Will computers thank you for it? Will computers be happier? Augment vs replace may seem similar in some cases, but the philosophy is different, and I suggest that the long term results are different. You may still see the same two entities (humans and AI), but who is the rider and who is the horse
The review isn't so good on examining performance.
1) Inconsistent tests for the various file copies mentioned - so you can't really compare.
2) No write speeds listed for all.
Write speeds are significant if you are talking about copying GBs of data to the drive.
And for the write tests you have to ensure that it's all copied and written to the usb drive and not just cached somewhere.
No it should be complicated so that they write it on a piece of paper and put it in their wallet or purse.
Then the IT security policy is:
1) Keep your wallet/purse and their contents safe.
2) If your wallet/purse goes missing, call up IT (after calling the banks to cancel your cards etc) to disable your account till you can be reverified.
If you do this, even if they are given new passwords every 3 months, there's no big change to their workflow.
An external keypad is irrelevant, unless the password is more confidential and important than the data you are unlocking with it.
If you can't trust the computer you are exposing ALL your files to, you shouldn't make those files accessible to it.
Any malicious program in the computer can read the rest of the files once you unlock the entire encrypted partition for the entire computer to read.
Use a trusted computer to move the files to a different USB drive first.
In the old floppy days, sticking a floppy into an infected system could cause files in it to be corrupted.
How sure are you that malware writers aren't going to be doing that sort of thing.
In most sane hybrid or electric (or fuel cell electric) cars there's regenerative braking.
:(.
With capacitors like these there's a wider range of acceptable deceleration speeds for regenerative braking.
When you brake in such cars some of the kinetic energy is converted back to electricity, the rest is dumped as heat.
If you don't brake too fast the motors are used as dynamos, if you brake too fast I believe conventional friction brakes are used (so more wasted energy).
I suspect they probably also use resistors and heatsinks for dumping excess energy when regeneratively braking. This is because the batteries might not be able to handle the power coming back in, so you have to throw away the rest
The less energy you waste during braking the more likely you are to get closer to "highway-style" mileage in "stop-start" city driving.
In fact in "highway" driving there's a lot more wind resistance, so you might actually start to see cars having better mileage figures for "city" driving than "highway".
I don't like spam nor do I send any or want more spam.
BUT actually I think spammers should be able to send spam within certain limits.
What they should not be able to do is tell so many lies just to try to make money.
Spammers should not be able to:
1) Pretend they are someone else (use someone else's email account and name in the From line)
2) Make false claims about their products or themselves
3) Sell illegal stuff
4) Send pictures of penises/goatse.cx to Aunt May if she hasn't said she wanted them - I think there are laws against this already, way before the Internet got popular.
So if they do that sort of stuff you should be able to get them for fraud or criminal impersonation etc. In the USA: "Criminal impersonation is a class 6 felony."
If spammers didn't keep pretending they were someone else, people who didn't want to listen to them could more easily filter them out.
I don't really think that there are that many spammers - from what I see most of us worldwide appear to be getting rather similar emails.
The cops should just try to buy stuff from spammers that appear to be doing dubious stuff and in their jurisdiction (not difficult - follow the money - if a US cop sees the money trail goes via anyone in the USA then go for it).
Just regularly catch the spammers breaking them and I think there'll be a lot less spam. The old laws are good enough, I think there just isn't the will to go around catching them.