I remember hearing that he wanted to use some genuine AI in the film. I never did work out what that actually meant though. Any ideas I came up with just seemed odd. A virtual actor? AI camera work?
How plausible is it that we communicate with aliens through music and not something more advanced, like mathematics
Seems likely to me. Music will have easy to spot patterns, and there are only a limited number of ways in which you can encode it on to a radio signal (FM, AM, Polorization, PWM, binary signal versions of the above). Mathematics on the other hand would have to rely on known formulae and constants. Encoding a number such as Pi requires a number base, a direction (LSB first or MSB first), a format and an encoding method.
ET was a soppy kiddy fantasy flick about friendship. Jurrasic park was a monster movie. (Okay, so the science fiction themes were explored a bit more in JP, but that was more Michael Crichton's input)
Science fiction fans seem to like their films to be more thouroughly thought through.
Well, Spielberg has shown that he can make real films with Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, and even Jaws.
Admittedly the first two of these were a bit too emotional for my liking, but it does show that Spielberg does have some flexibility. It will probably be not quite the film that Kubrick would have made, but I think Spielberg will make a good job of it.
You shouldn't be offended. It's just the "Real coders don't eat quiche" argument.
There's a school of thought that states that if you use Assembler then you're a high level programmer. C is just about bearable if you only want to write a quick program that doesn't really do anything. You don't want to admit to using Java to these people. Being successful is no excuse.
(Why do I get the feeling people are going to take this too seriously.)
Then I invented the Warp drive. Then I invented the teleport. Then Iinvented the cloaking device. I think that was a mistake. I put them all in the same place and forget where I put them.
If anyone ever walks into an invisible spaceship please let me know.
Most spam send to a lot of people in the bcc field. I was quite pleased to find that Hotmail has implemented a system that sends bulk mail to a seprerate folder. So far it has correctly filtered out 4 out of 4 spams.
I hope Hotmail don't try to restrict this. solution. It really is very effective.
This idea (as well as the idea of high altitude circling planes) has been around for quite some time now. I would have thought that somebody would have invested the money in developing it. Is there some fundamental flaw in it that I'm missing?
If I were to tell you that there are approximately 31 600 000 seconds in a year, you would probably forget. You are much more likely to remember that to within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury.
Hey, its alright for you Americans. In Europe we have to wait until 3rd Jan 4159. Even in Japan it isn't going to happen until the year 3141 (Sometime in May).
It might be possible to make a genetic weapon targeted at specific racial groups. Right now, most nations with a decent scientific base would probably not be interested, but I feel Nazi Germany would have been able to put the research into a succesful "impure race" eradication virus, and 60 years wasn't that long ago.
This link points to the Australian patent office on line documents library, which contains a PDF about computer related inventions. The answer is broadly "Yes". Not that this is neccesarily a bad thing.
It does seem that they have actually looked into the subject a bit and decided on the sorts of things that are considered trivial and what is considered an invention rather than an abstraction.
No, I don't call myself an anarchist. It was a response to the person who claimed that if you thought you had the right to involve youselves in politics then you were an anarchist who wanted to tear down society. By that definition my views are extremist anarchist. Although if you notice, a lot of people ARE labelled Communist because they claim they want to share more. (Damn those goldarn Linux commies)
and you certainly don't have any "right" to involve yourselves in the legal and political processes of our country
I know I have a right to involve myself in the polital processes of my country. I could even become an MP if I could persuade enough people to vote for me. Although I am actually an anarchist except that I don't want to tear down the fabric of society. Just make people more responsible for their own actions
1. Companies could use patents to stop OSS from working.
True. But why should we be allowed to take somebody's origional idea and give it away after they spent so long working on it. Nothing wrong with giving ideas away, but nobody should be forced
2. If something is good, a lot of effort ist wasted to find something to work around a patent.
If something is good then the inventor deserves to be rewarded for coming up with the idea.
3. Progress can be halted or stopped for a very long time.
I agree here. Technology is moving a lot faster now. Patents cause awkward 20 year gaps in advancement if the licensing is too strict
4. Third world is stopped from closing the gap in working knowledge.
I'm not sure about this one. I don't quite know how much effect the patents have on the Third World, or whether developing countries ever have strong IP protection laws
5. If everything belongs to someone, nothing belongs to the public, in spite of the fact that most ideas are not made on isolated islands. We all get our ideas from the society we live in - do we really have the right to prevent the public from using this ideas?
Sometimes, yes. But a patent needs more than just an idea. Some inventions have clearly had a lot of work put into them.
6. Patents are expensive. If you really have a good idea, chances are that you can't use them. Patents are for big companies only.
Its not too expensive for a single succesful person with the intelligence to produce a patent. ($2000 or so). The expensive part is defending it. Large companies can find a nitpicking difference between the two inventions and pay a lot of money to an expensive legal team.
The patent system needs to be cleaned up, and made more useful to the independent inventors, but it is still useful. If there wasn't this protection then it would be a lot easier for large companies to rip off other people's ideas.
When music was just "pieces of vibrating air in specific order" then there was virtually no copyright laws to speak of. Singers got paid for singing. Essentially they were buskers. People were happy to pay for a good song to encourage the singer to sing again. After it was possible to reproduce music (initially printed sheet music ) the copyright laws became stronger because it wasn't just vibrating air, but a physical representaion that people could sell. This had to be copyrighted to prevent people selling the hard work of others having put in no effort of their own.
Diverging from your observation a little, the internet changes this back. The singers just have a louder voice. But people aren't so willing to pay for it. Not because of meanness, but because paying online is a lot harder than throwing coins into a hat.
Yes you can. All you need to do is agree with the patent owner some means of licencing that is compatible with the GPL. Okay, so this isn't going to be easy, and patents do interefere with the concept of free software but its not totally incompatible.
There will always be somebody trying to screw us. We should always do whatever we can to screw others before they screw us.
Well, this is yet another incidence of the prisoners dilemma isn't it. (For those who aren't familiar with this, its explained here )
The most succesful solution to the iterated version has been shown to be tit-for-tat. i.e cooperate first, and then if you lose, do what the other player did last time. So if a country can agree with its allies that they shouldn't spy on each other, and they can each prove that they aren't, both countries win. The worst case is that the one that cooperated will be disadvantaged once. Unfortunately the stakes are a lot higher in this case, and nobody wants to risk losing the first time.
I was very impressed with GIMP the first time I saw it. I'm still quite impressed with it, but I find it a bit lacking when it comes to painting. It doesn't have a brush shaped cursor, so its very hard to work out where you're painting, and there don't seem to be enough tools.
So anyway, the question is what has changed since earlier versions? Most of it seems to be bug fixes.
You can't take a billion plus people and try to control their basic freedoms without some backlash...
You can. Its quite easy. All you need to do is persuade them that they want it. This is quite easy when you point out the crime rate in countries that don't restrict freedom is several times greater than those that do.
I totally agree with your point (except that I don't believe you comment that you can get "much much worse"). I wouldn't want ME to see those. And the people who say "We don't need to filter that" are causing more harm than good.
The trouble is that your site probably wouldn't be blocked. And if Slashdot isn't blocked, then people can access it very easily.
I wonder how many of the origional sites you got those from are blocked. Anyone who has a censoring program want to see? I don't think I've got the stomach for it.
Re:Too much infrastructure required
on
Flying Trains
·
· Score: 1
I wonder if Japan has a canal system. As far as I understand it, the WIG effect can be used on water as well as land, so running them on canals wouldn't be a problem. Then its just a matter of getting rid of all those annoying barges, and finding a way around those lock gates.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember hearing that he wanted to use some genuine AI in the film. I never did work out what that actually meant though. Any ideas I came up with just seemed odd. A virtual actor? AI camera work?
How plausible is it that we communicate with aliens through music and not something more advanced, like mathematics
Seems likely to me. Music will have easy to spot patterns, and there are only a limited number of ways in which you can encode it on to a radio signal (FM, AM, Polorization, PWM, binary signal versions of the above). Mathematics on the other hand would have to rely on known formulae and constants. Encoding a number such as Pi requires a number base, a direction (LSB first or MSB first), a format and an encoding method.
ET was a soppy kiddy fantasy flick about friendship. Jurrasic park was a monster movie. (Okay, so the science fiction themes were explored a bit more in JP, but that was more Michael Crichton's input)
Science fiction fans seem to like their films to be more thouroughly thought through.
Well, Spielberg has shown that he can make real films with Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, and even Jaws.
Admittedly the first two of these were a bit too emotional for my liking, but it does show that Spielberg does have some flexibility. It will probably be not quite the film that Kubrick would have made, but I think Spielberg will make a good job of it.
You shouldn't be offended. It's just the "Real coders don't eat quiche" argument.
There's a school of thought that states that if you use Assembler then you're a high level programmer. C is just about bearable if you only want to write a quick program that doesn't really do anything. You don't want to admit to using Java to these people. Being successful is no excuse.
(Why do I get the feeling people are going to take this too seriously.)
Real programmers use NMOS diagrams.
Then I invented the Warp drive. Then I invented the teleport. Then Iinvented the cloaking device. I think that was a mistake. I put them all in the same place and forget where I put them.
If anyone ever walks into an invisible spaceship please let me know.
Well, since this would destroy the patent office, I think this would be very popular on /.
Most spam send to a lot of people in the bcc field. I was quite pleased to find that Hotmail has implemented a system that sends bulk mail to a seprerate folder. So far it has correctly filtered out 4 out of 4 spams.
I hope Hotmail don't try to restrict this. solution. It really is very effective.
This idea (as well as the idea of high altitude circling planes) has been around for quite some time now. I would have thought that somebody would have invested the money in developing it. Is there some fundamental flaw in it that I'm missing?
Hmmm 31st of April......Hold on.....
30 days hath September, April, June and a tax offender..........
Nope, it can only work on the Martian calender.
(Learned from the fortune cookie program)
If I were to tell you that there are approximately 31 600 000 seconds in a year, you would probably forget. You are much more likely to remember that to within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury.
Hey, its alright for you Americans. In Europe we have to wait until 3rd Jan 4159. Even in Japan it isn't going to happen until the year 3141 (Sometime in May).
It might be possible to make a genetic weapon targeted at specific racial groups. Right now, most nations with a decent scientific base would probably not be interested, but I feel Nazi Germany would have been able to put the research into a succesful "impure race" eradication virus, and 60 years wasn't that long ago.
This link points to the Australian patent office on line documents library, which contains a PDF about computer related inventions. The answer is broadly "Yes". Not that this is neccesarily a bad thing.
It does seem that they have actually looked into the subject a bit and decided on the sorts of things that are considered trivial and what is considered an invention rather than an abstraction.
No, I don't call myself an anarchist. It was a response to the person who claimed that if you thought you had the right to involve youselves in politics then you were an anarchist who wanted to tear down society. By that definition my views are extremist anarchist. Although if you notice, a lot of people ARE labelled Communist because they claim they want to share more. (Damn those goldarn Linux commies)
and you certainly don't have any "right" to involve yourselves in the legal and political processes of our country
I know I have a right to involve myself in the polital processes of my country. I could even become an MP if I could persuade enough people to vote for me. Although I am actually an anarchist except that I don't want to tear down the fabric of society. Just make people more responsible for their own actions
1. Companies could use patents to stop OSS from working.
True. But why should we be allowed to take somebody's origional idea and give it away after they spent so long working on it. Nothing wrong with giving ideas away, but nobody should be forced
2. If something is good, a lot of effort ist wasted to find something to work around a patent.
If something is good then the inventor deserves to be rewarded for coming up with the idea.
3. Progress can be halted or stopped for a very long time.
I agree here. Technology is moving a lot faster now. Patents cause awkward 20 year gaps in advancement if the licensing is too strict
4. Third world is stopped from closing the gap in working knowledge.
I'm not sure about this one. I don't quite know how much effect the patents have on the Third World, or whether developing countries ever have strong IP protection laws
5. If everything belongs to someone, nothing belongs to the public, in spite of the fact that most ideas are not made on isolated islands. We all get our ideas from the society we live in - do we really have the right to prevent the public from using this ideas?
Sometimes, yes. But a patent needs more than just an idea. Some inventions have clearly had a lot of work put into them.
6. Patents are expensive. If you really have a good idea, chances are that you can't use them. Patents are for big companies only.
Its not too expensive for a single succesful person with the intelligence to produce a patent. ($2000 or so). The expensive part is defending it. Large companies can find a nitpicking difference between the two inventions and pay a lot of money to an expensive legal team.
The patent system needs to be cleaned up, and made more useful to the independent inventors, but it is still useful. If there wasn't this protection then it would be a lot easier for large companies to rip off other people's ideas.
When music was just "pieces of vibrating air in specific order" then there was virtually no copyright laws to speak of. Singers got paid for singing. Essentially they were buskers. People were happy to pay for a good song to encourage the singer to sing again. After it was possible to reproduce music (initially printed sheet music ) the copyright laws became stronger because it wasn't just vibrating air, but a physical representaion that people could sell. This had to be copyrighted to prevent people selling the hard work of others having put in no effort of their own.
Diverging from your observation a little, the internet changes this back. The singers just have a louder voice. But people aren't so willing to pay for it. Not because of meanness, but because paying online is a lot harder than throwing coins into a hat.
you can't GPL it if someone's already patented it
Yes you can. All you need to do is agree with the patent owner some means of licencing that is compatible with the GPL. Okay, so this isn't going to be easy, and patents do interefere with the concept of free software but its not totally incompatible.
There will always be somebody trying to screw us. We should always do whatever we can to screw others before they screw us.
Well, this is yet another incidence of the prisoners dilemma isn't it. (For those who aren't familiar with this, its explained here )
The most succesful solution to the iterated version has been shown to be tit-for-tat. i.e cooperate first, and then if you lose, do what the other player did last time. So if a country can agree with its allies that they shouldn't spy on each other, and they can each prove that they aren't, both countries win. The worst case is that the one that cooperated will be disadvantaged once. Unfortunately the stakes are a lot higher in this case, and nobody wants to risk losing the first time.
I was very impressed with GIMP the first time I saw it. I'm still quite impressed with it, but I find it a bit lacking when it comes to painting. It doesn't have a brush shaped cursor, so its very hard to work out where you're painting, and there don't seem to be enough tools.
So anyway, the question is what has changed since earlier versions? Most of it seems to be bug fixes.
You can't take a billion plus people and try to control their basic freedoms without some backlash...
You can. Its quite easy. All you need to do is persuade them that they want it. This is quite easy when you point out the crime rate in countries that don't restrict freedom is several times greater than those that do.
Aparrently this site was banned http://www.cet.com/~bangs/page2.htm (Well, a page that redirects to it was) - This is just about sheet music
Obviously that was because of the piece "Air on a G-String". Good lord, I hope my children never listen to such filth.
I totally agree with your point (except that I don't believe you comment that you can get "much much worse"). I wouldn't want ME to see those. And the people who say "We don't need to filter that" are causing more harm than good.
The trouble is that your site probably wouldn't be blocked. And if Slashdot isn't blocked, then people can access it very easily.
I wonder how many of the origional sites you got those from are blocked. Anyone who has a censoring program want to see? I don't think I've got the stomach for it.
I wonder if Japan has a canal system. As far as I understand it, the WIG effect can be used on water as well as land, so running them on canals wouldn't be a problem. Then its just a matter of getting rid of all those annoying barges, and finding a way around those lock gates.