The issue with oxygenating Mars' atmosphere with algae or bacteria or any other simple life form is not just time. Mars has both insanely frigid temperatures, and insanely high temperature variations. Also, the atmospheric density is quite low on Mars. You'd have to get more mass into the atmosphere somehow. Finally, I don't think Mars has enough gravitational pull to hold in an atmosphere that humans could breathe. And without the sustained atmospheric density, you could never really get the temperature up to something in which humans could survive. -Matt
"The other is that for many public-key systems (if not all?), you'd need one version of each file for *every* private key meant to decrypt it, which in some settings might be a bit much if one runs into problems assigning groups"
This isn't how public-key crypto is usually done, and nor is it at all how Leknor suggested it. You generate a random key with which you encrypt the file. One key for the file! Then you take that key and encrypt it with the public key of the file's owner and the file's group (each group would have a public/private key pair). For each group on the system, you encrypt the group's private key in each of its member's public keys.
Then, when a user logs in, s/he can decrypt the decryption keys for files s/he owns, and the private keys for the his/her groups. With the group private keys, s/he can decrypt the decryption keys for files that s/he has group access to.
So the overhead is in storing a public key for every user and group, the private key for each group encrypted with the public key of each of its members, and for each file, two copies of the decryption key for that file, one encrypted in the owner's public key, one in the group's public key.
So you lose a couple kb per file, and (very generously) a meg for the user/group database if you have a system with several users. A system like sourceforge which has zillions of users would have several megs of overhead, but such a large system isn't likely to notice that with it's many many gigs of disk space. -Matt
I think your comments are right on the mark. At least for most people.
There are people who use a handle to create an alternate fantasy or 31337 identity. Fantasy identities are fine. (Almost) Everyone likes to play pretend now and then. As for the 31337 types, sometimes it's anonymity, sometimes wanting to pump themselves up, sometimes I-know-not-what.
But you can usually tell the difference between fantasy, 31337, and personal handles, though. DragonSlayer, LordDeath, and Cheetah (my preferred nick) are easily distinguished as different categories of identities. People actually gave me the nickname Cheetah in real life before I even knew what the internet was.
Which brings up an interesting point. Some online names are nicks, and some are handles. A nick(name) often is just that: an alternate name for someone that conveys some personal characteristic. A handle would be more likely a name to give someone a new identity.
All that said, it seems to me that Espy is a personal nickname, not a handle. And from what little I can hope to imagine about being in his shoes, I have to think that he probably chose quite deliberately not to make his illness publicly known online. Nobody knew what was 'wrong' with him, and it didn't show up in his online presence. So nobody thought anything was wrong with him and treated him with respect. And for someone with a severe disability, to be treated with respect instead of pity or compassion must be a welcome thing indeed. -Matt
I suspect that the reason that alcohol is given such a high severity for withdrawal is that it is VERY possible to drop dead if you try to cold turkey an alcohol addiction. Many drugs have severe and ugly side-effects from withdrawal, but most of them also have a fairly high survival rate. Alcohol is one of the few drugs that ca kill you if you try to cold turkey it. -Matt
The separation of church and state is implicit in the 1st ammendment. The 1st ammendment guarantees not only freedom of speech, but the freedom to practice your own religion provided that you don't stomp on anybody else (so religions that practice mass murder don't get special exception from the laws of the land). Implicit in the freedom to practice your religion is the right to be free from other people forcing your religion on you. To put things that are particular to any religion or group of religions into a school or other government-sponsored setting is (for good reason) considered to be trampling the rights of the people who don't practice that religion. Hence the separation of church and state. -Matt
Look at what you just said. "14mbps... can't touch good old 10baseT." Hmm... 14mbps can't touch 10mbps? And most people really don't need 100mbit for what they would use this for. 10mbit is enough to share files reasonably, do usable remote control via VNC or X, or whatever your program of choice is, and to play games. And that is about all someone is likely to do with a home network. Most people don't videoconference within their house.
Cat5 might be cheaper on the endpoints, but you have to consider the cost of getting the wires in. Most people's homes don't have Cat5, and I would question anyone who says that any more than a small percentage of new homes are getting Cat5 in them. Most people don't have multiple computers strung about the house, nor do they care enough about their computer to get extra wiring put in for it.
If you just want connectivity between points in your house, this is undoubtedly much cheaper than ripping your walls out to put Cat5 in. -Matt
setting privs on a script to 4755 will do jack. In linux, the setuid bit on scripts is ignored. If you want to run a script setuid, you have to have a special, setuid interpreter. This is how perl does this, via suidperl. -Matt
Blah. I first heard about this as a little kid watching the excellent animated movie, "Flight of the Dragons." I have no idea if it precedes Anne McCaffrey's book.
The movie laid it out this way: Dragons raid diamond mines that are in limestone rock. They swallow the diamonds, which stick in their craw, and then eat the limestone. The diamonds help break up the limestone. Then when it gets to the stomach, it produces the H2 gas. -Matt
You aren't the first one to think of this. However, there are several problems with this. First off, you would have effects coming from both specific and general relativity that would prevent the tip from exceeding the speed of light. Second, long before the tip got anywhere near the speed of light, the tube, wire, whatever, would be ripped into pieces by the centripetal force needed to keep it moving in a circle. -Matt
Absolutely. I started to learn to program in logo on an apple 2e when I was in 4th grade (10 years old). Logo was the only language we had. By the end of 5th grade I was already banging my head against the limits of the language and the computers.
Go ahead and start them out with C or Pascal. Visual Basic, for all its simplicity, has some severe limitations. C, for all its supposed complexity, has a very concrete and clear, if abbreviated, syntax. You don't have to, and absolutely shouldn't, try and teach them all about pointers until they have learned some about programming. By that I mean how to think through the algorithm and structure the program so that it works and is understandable. I think that was the most important thing I learned from the logo teacher I had in middle school. She knew how to teach the programming, completely independent of the syntax.
If you're kids are itching to get into programming, then they're probably smart enough to learn it.
One other thing to remember: It was years (YEARS!) before I ever wrote a useful program. Don't worry about thinking up useful programs at first. Think up programs that will teach the programmer how to program better! -Matt
Kawlyn provided a brief response that is a very short summation of part my oppinion, but I thought I'd add more.
There are at least two massive flaws with the idea that open-sourcing windows would be a useful way to break Microsoft's monopoly.
First off, there is the issue that Kawlyn mentioned: the cost of other companies diving into the Windows source code. It would be an enourmous expense for a company to get developers to the point where they could do anything useful to the source code. Buying programmers from Microsoft would likely be equally expensive. And Microsoft would definitely still have more than enough money to buy them back, leaving you behind ground zero. Getting the incoming capital to do this would be hard, in great part because of the second flaw.
The second major flaw is the marketing problem. Microsoft, for good reason and with a fair bit of truthfulness, can push the advertising angle that these other companies don't know Windows as well, and can't provide the level of support that Microsoft can. Other comapnies that try to do something useful to the Windows code base before they understand it fully are likely to introduce bugs, and so Microsoft can, for once, truthfully claim that their product is more stable and reliable than the competitor. The only market share that won't fall victim to this marketing is the part of the market that cares more about cost than quality. And Microsoft, given its enourmous coffers, can probably undersell any competing company that is still trying to pay its develoeprs to understand what the hell the source code is doing.
Open sourcing Windows might make it more stable in the long run, but unless the open sourcing was to a license that forbade commercial sale[1], it probably would have minimal effect on Microsoft's monopoly.
[1] The problem with this is that Microsoft could probably win an appeal against this because it would basically be forbidding them from doing business in that market sector. As much as Microsoft pisses me off, even I don't think that such a thing would be just, especially because of the precedent it might set.
However, I don't think that breaking up Microsoft will do a lot to reduce their monopoly. It will split the monopoly into pieces, but those pieces will probably retain their monopoly. Microsoft's applications already are geared to work well with Windows. Splitting up the company won't change that. It would make it easier for other companies to gain inroads, however. The government could make reasonable demands that would limit the amount of sharing of secret and/or undocumented APIs between the babysofts. The government could require that such APIs are made available to competitors.
Even with that, though there is the age old problem of our love of stagnation, despite its lethality. Companies and people alike don't like change, and for good reason. It takes significant time and resources to migrate from one version of a software package to another. Upgrading from one version to another can be painful too, but it usually isn't as painful as switching. Every sane company includes in new versions of their software the ability to import data from the old versions.
So, if a breakup of Microsoft is to break the software monopoly, at least for something as big as the office suite, the government would almost have to demand that the babysoft assigned to applications create worse software than it previously did!
So what is my solution? I don't have one. I haven't thought about it very hard, either, to be honest. It's a tricky problem, and it is likely that the only real solution is to stop the further expansion of the monopoly, provide some incentives for competition, and then let time do its thing. All things are impermanent. Microsoft, Linux, *BSD, BeOS, and even our current concept of an operating system or a piece of software will eventually be left behind. -Matt
I think you misunderstood HalJohnson. When he referred to ramping up and supplying the hackers, he was referring back to his previous statement that they didn't want to sell the devices for more money, sans the service. It is completely unreasonable to expect them to sell you something at a loss without a way to recoup said loss. However, it seems to me that, if they can get production to keep up, that selling units at a profit to people who don't want the service would just increase their sales, revenues, and profits. It would even make sense if they limited the number of i-openers that they would sell without service so that they had enough in stock to fill all the orders for i-openers with service. For some reason, they don't seem to want to do that. -Matt
Reading this reminds me of the funny sessions that one can have with Eliza or Dr. Sbaitso. Questions and answers that are almost completely unrelated to one another, except for the occaisonaly hilarious coincidence.
For those who never met him, Dr. Sbaitso was a program included with some of the early SoundBlaster 16 kits. It was basically, as near as I can tell, a derivative of Eliza. It actually talked, though! It was a demo program for the mediocre text to speech software that came with the kit. I think (guess) Sbaitso stood for Sound Blaster Artificial Intelligence Talking .
I must have missed the controversy, or perhaps I'm looking at the wrong problem set, (gee, the pdf says 2000 ACM Programming Contest World Finals), but this doesn't seem to be at all vague. It is an application of graph theory. The classic question is 'what is the shortest route from node A to node B.' This just asks you to average all the answers to all the possible pairs of A and B.
Now, this does not mean that it is easy to do, or that I remember the algorithm I once learned for finding the shortest path from a to b on a graph, but I don't see why anyone with a bit of computer science knowledge wouldn't be able to understand the problem.
Of course, as I said, I missed the controversy, so that may not have been what the hubub was about. -Matt
"Patents cover machines and processes. Copyrights cover particular expressions."
A piece of source code is almost always an implementation of some process.
"things (like RSA) that are nothing but code."
Since when is RSA nothing but code? RSA is an encryption algorithm. The source code is an implementation of that algorithm (a.k.a. process). RSA can be described without a scrap of source code. It is a mathematical algorithm. -Matt
Have you ever read Orson Scott Card's The Worthing Saga? He describes a game very similar to this. Extremely realistic simulation of a world. Players buy countries to command. I suppose they could probably let people buy pieces of the country to sub-command too. A very interesting idea there. -Matt
I don't know if it has been kept very up to date, and I had some problems when I tried it about a year ago, but it clearly worked for some people when I looked at it. Some aspects of it are somewhat reminiscent of Cakewalk, I think.
Looking at the website, it looks like the developers have kept working, so I'd give it a shot.
Yes, cheapo motels will have analog lines. However, many of them won't have an easy way for you to plug your modem into said analog line. The more expensive places will almost always have a jack on the phone to plug your modem into so that you don't fry it or the PBX. It's the middle expense places that you have to watch out for as they might have a PBX with no analog sockets for modems...
However, I went on a month long road trip a couple years ago, and was quite glad to be away from the net, etc. for a while. There is a time and place for film cameras. Take a bunch of film, develop it when you get back. Road trip == vacation == time away from the stuff you normally do every day, IMHO. -Matt
I believe it was on the bad interfaces hall of fame that I saw the explanation for this. They had a screenshot of office 97 running in windows 3.1 (don't ask me how. Perhaps it was WINE). Office 97, instead of using the normal windows menu/etc. widgets, uses its own widgets. Thus any modifications to the windows widgets won't affect the office stuff. -Matt
The tendency of groups in power to fight change is not even remotely a new patter as Katz implies. Power holders have been doing this since the dawn of civilization. Change, by its very nature, changes how things work, which inevitably threatens the rule of those in power. Therefore, anyone in power must do one of two things in order to stay in power.
The first option, chosen by most power mongers, is to try to suppress all change. Any invention, change, or technological advance is branded heresy, traitorous, or in these digital days, as piracy.
The second option, which is almost never chosen by anyone who has power over any large chunk of anything, is to try and keep pace with the change. This, of course, is immensely difficult.
The catch is that those who try to suppress all change invariably end up getting toppled, because of the simple fact that you can't stop progress. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. You can't close Pandora's box.
The second catch is that it is almost impossible to keep up with all the change that goes on in the world. Those who try to keep up with it either end up becoming innefectual power holders, or they fail to keep up with it and revert to supression.
The stable system is the one where change is allowed, and power is transfered smoothly to those who have grown up around the newer systems (systems in the most general sense). Instead of a palace coup, the power is handed down to someone new, and the previous holder frequently hangs around to advise the new leadership on the <cliche>timeless truths of leadership</cliche>. This system always is a bit behind the current front edge of technology and whatnot, but is never so far behind that people say 'fsck these a-holes, we'll take control now thank you.'
If the MPAA, DVD/CA, etc. would embrace this, they would stand a chance of not losing it completely. However, organizations such as these almost never take the stable approach. They are concentrated on maximum gain, and maximum gain, in the short term, is had by suppression and extortion. They don't really care if the systems they are a part of topple five years after they drop dead. They are interested in becoming very rich now. -Matt
I recently read A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge. It was an excellent novel. Probably not the greatest thing for a 13 year old, but older readers (I'm 19, I don't mean that old:) would definitely enjoy it. It is a bit slow in the beginning, but once it gets going it is a very gripping novel that explores many new (or at least new to me) ideas, and puts an interesting spin on ideas that others have touched on before.
Has anyone else here read it? I'm horrible at giving a good idea what a book is about without spoiling it. Someone else want to provide a non-spoiler synopsis? -Matt
Sun sits there and wonders why everybody else is wasting their time with Linux. Everybody else sits there and wonders why Sun isn't doing anything while they reel in the mula. As much as I might dislike Java some days, I think this is good for both RedHat and IBM. IBM gets to have support done by someone who knows Linux, which makes them look good. RedHat gets more support contracts, which makes them have more money to fund developing more Linux stuff.
Does anyone else see the irony that IBM is making the bucks (minus licensing fees?) from Sun's Java technology on Linux, which Sun thinks is a waste of time 8^)
Your idea works in places where there is a surplus of job openings. However, if there is a surplus of applicants, the idea that business will be self-regulating in this matter completely falls appart as theory and history show. Corporations will not spend money unless they think doing so will make them money.
Slashdot Mirror
While I don't think that it's exactly what you're thinking of, the Kosmic Free Music Foundation is a large repository of Free (speech, beer) music.
KFMF Website
-Matt
The issue with oxygenating Mars' atmosphere with algae or bacteria or any other simple life form is not just time. Mars has both insanely frigid temperatures, and insanely high temperature variations. Also, the atmospheric density is quite low on Mars. You'd have to get more mass into the atmosphere somehow. Finally, I don't think Mars has enough gravitational pull to hold in an atmosphere that humans could breathe. And without the sustained atmospheric density, you could never really get the temperature up to something in which humans could survive.
-Matt
"The other is that for many public-key systems (if not all?), you'd need one version of each file for *every* private key meant to decrypt it, which in some settings might be a bit much if one runs into problems assigning groups"
This isn't how public-key crypto is usually done, and nor is it at all how Leknor suggested it. You generate a random key with which you encrypt the file. One key for the file! Then you take that key and encrypt it with the public key of the file's owner and the file's group (each group would have a public/private key pair). For each group on the system, you encrypt the group's private key in each of its member's public keys.
Then, when a user logs in, s/he can decrypt the decryption keys for files s/he owns, and the private keys for the his/her groups. With the group private keys, s/he can decrypt the decryption keys for files that s/he has group access to.
So the overhead is in storing a public key for every user and group, the private key for each group encrypted with the public key of each of its members, and for each file, two copies of the decryption key for that file, one encrypted in the owner's public key, one in the group's public key.
So you lose a couple kb per file, and (very generously) a meg for the user/group database if you have a system with several users. A system like sourceforge which has zillions of users would have several megs of overhead, but such a large system isn't likely to notice that with it's many many gigs of disk space.
-Matt
> But references guarantee you one thing: they
> always reference something, there's no such thing
> as a null reference.
Not quite true:
void func (int &a)
{
a += 5;
}
func(*(int*)NULL);
That should crash quite reliably =]
-Matt
I think your comments are right on the mark. At least for most people.
There are people who use a handle to create an alternate fantasy or 31337 identity. Fantasy identities are fine. (Almost) Everyone likes to play pretend now and then. As for the 31337 types, sometimes it's anonymity, sometimes wanting to pump themselves up, sometimes I-know-not-what.
But you can usually tell the difference between fantasy, 31337, and personal handles, though. DragonSlayer, LordDeath, and Cheetah (my preferred nick) are easily distinguished as different categories of identities. People actually gave me the nickname Cheetah in real life before I even knew what the internet was.
Which brings up an interesting point. Some online names are nicks, and some are handles. A nick(name) often is just that: an alternate name for someone that conveys some personal characteristic. A handle would be more likely a name to give someone a new identity.
All that said, it seems to me that Espy is a personal nickname, not a handle. And from what little I can hope to imagine about being in his shoes, I have to think that he probably chose quite deliberately not to make his illness publicly known online. Nobody knew what was 'wrong' with him, and it didn't show up in his online presence. So nobody thought anything was wrong with him and treated him with respect. And for someone with a severe disability, to be treated with respect instead of pity or compassion must be a welcome thing indeed.
-Matt
I suspect that the reason that alcohol is given such a high severity for withdrawal is that it is VERY possible to drop dead if you try to cold turkey an alcohol addiction. Many drugs have severe and ugly side-effects from withdrawal, but most of them also have a fairly high survival rate. Alcohol is one of the few drugs that ca kill you if you try to cold turkey it.
-Matt
The separation of church and state is implicit in the 1st ammendment. The 1st ammendment guarantees not only freedom of speech, but the freedom to practice your own religion provided that you don't stomp on anybody else (so religions that practice mass murder don't get special exception from the laws of the land). Implicit in the freedom to practice your religion is the right to be free from other people forcing your religion on you. To put things that are particular to any religion or group of religions into a school or other government-sponsored setting is (for good reason) considered to be trampling the rights of the people who don't practice that religion. Hence the separation of church and state.
-Matt
Look at what you just said. "14mbps ... can't touch good old 10baseT." Hmm... 14mbps can't touch 10mbps? And most people really don't need 100mbit for what they would use this for. 10mbit is enough to share files reasonably, do usable remote control via VNC or X, or whatever your program of choice is, and to play games. And that is about all someone is likely to do with a home network. Most people don't videoconference within their house.
Cat5 might be cheaper on the endpoints, but you have to consider the cost of getting the wires in. Most people's homes don't have Cat5, and I would question anyone who says that any more than a small percentage of new homes are getting Cat5 in them. Most people don't have multiple computers strung about the house, nor do they care enough about their computer to get extra wiring put in for it.
If you just want connectivity between points in your house, this is undoubtedly much cheaper than ripping your walls out to put Cat5 in.
-Matt
setting privs on a script to 4755 will do jack. In linux, the setuid bit on scripts is ignored. If you want to run a script setuid, you have to have a special, setuid interpreter. This is how perl does this, via suidperl.
-Matt
Blah. I first heard about this as a little kid watching the excellent animated movie, "Flight of the Dragons." I have no idea if it precedes Anne McCaffrey's book.
The movie laid it out this way: Dragons raid diamond mines that are in limestone rock. They swallow the diamonds, which stick in their craw, and then eat the limestone. The diamonds help break up the limestone. Then when it gets to the stomach, it produces the H2 gas.
-Matt
You aren't the first one to think of this. However, there are several problems with this. First off, you would have effects coming from both specific and general relativity that would prevent the tip from exceeding the speed of light. Second, long before the tip got anywhere near the speed of light, the tube, wire, whatever, would be ripped into pieces by the centripetal force needed to keep it moving in a circle.
-Matt
Absolutely. I started to learn to program in logo on an apple 2e when I was in 4th grade (10 years old). Logo was the only language we had. By the end of 5th grade I was already banging my head against the limits of the language and the computers.
Go ahead and start them out with C or Pascal. Visual Basic, for all its simplicity, has some severe limitations. C, for all its supposed complexity, has a very concrete and clear, if abbreviated, syntax. You don't have to, and absolutely shouldn't, try and teach them all about pointers until they have learned some about programming. By that I mean how to think through the algorithm and structure the program so that it works and is understandable. I think that was the most important thing I learned from the logo teacher I had in middle school. She knew how to teach the programming, completely independent of the syntax.
If you're kids are itching to get into programming, then they're probably smart enough to learn it.
One other thing to remember: It was years (YEARS!) before I ever wrote a useful program. Don't worry about thinking up useful programs at first. Think up programs that will teach the programmer how to program better!
-Matt
Kawlyn provided a brief response that is a very short summation of part my oppinion, but I thought I'd add more.
There are at least two massive flaws with the idea that open-sourcing windows would be a useful way to break Microsoft's monopoly.
First off, there is the issue that Kawlyn mentioned: the cost of other companies diving into the Windows source code. It would be an enourmous expense for a company to get developers to the point where they could do anything useful to the source code. Buying programmers from Microsoft would likely be equally expensive. And Microsoft would definitely still have more than enough money to buy them back, leaving you behind ground zero. Getting the incoming capital to do this would be hard, in great part because of the second flaw.
The second major flaw is the marketing problem. Microsoft, for good reason and with a fair bit of truthfulness, can push the advertising angle that these other companies don't know Windows as well, and can't provide the level of support that Microsoft can. Other comapnies that try to do something useful to the Windows code base before they understand it fully are likely to introduce bugs, and so Microsoft can, for once, truthfully claim that their product is more stable and reliable than the competitor. The only market share that won't fall victim to this marketing is the part of the market that cares more about cost than quality. And Microsoft, given its enourmous coffers, can probably undersell any competing company that is still trying to pay its develoeprs to understand what the hell the source code is doing.
Open sourcing Windows might make it more stable in the long run, but unless the open sourcing was to a license that forbade commercial sale[1], it probably would have minimal effect on Microsoft's monopoly.
[1] The problem with this is that Microsoft could probably win an appeal against this because it would basically be forbidding them from doing business in that market sector. As much as Microsoft pisses me off, even I don't think that such a thing would be just, especially because of the precedent it might set.
However, I don't think that breaking up Microsoft will do a lot to reduce their monopoly. It will split the monopoly into pieces, but those pieces will probably retain their monopoly. Microsoft's applications already are geared to work well with Windows. Splitting up the company won't change that. It would make it easier for other companies to gain inroads, however. The government could make reasonable demands that would limit the amount of sharing of secret and/or undocumented APIs between the babysofts. The government could require that such APIs are made available to competitors.
Even with that, though there is the age old problem of our love of stagnation, despite its lethality. Companies and people alike don't like change, and for good reason. It takes significant time and resources to migrate from one version of a software package to another. Upgrading from one version to another can be painful too, but it usually isn't as painful as switching. Every sane company includes in new versions of their software the ability to import data from the old versions.
So, if a breakup of Microsoft is to break the software monopoly, at least for something as big as the office suite, the government would almost have to demand that the babysoft assigned to applications create worse software than it previously did!
So what is my solution? I don't have one. I haven't thought about it very hard, either, to be honest. It's a tricky problem, and it is likely that the only real solution is to stop the further expansion of the monopoly, provide some incentives for competition, and then let time do its thing. All things are impermanent. Microsoft, Linux, *BSD, BeOS, and even our current concept of an operating system or a piece of software will eventually be left behind.
-Matt
I think you misunderstood HalJohnson. When he referred to ramping up and supplying the hackers, he was referring back to his previous statement that they didn't want to sell the devices for more money, sans the service. It is completely unreasonable to expect them to sell you something at a loss without a way to recoup said loss. However, it seems to me that, if they can get production to keep up, that selling units at a profit to people who don't want the service would just increase their sales, revenues, and profits. It would even make sense if they limited the number of i-openers that they would sell without service so that they had enough in stock to fill all the orders for i-openers with service. For some reason, they don't seem to want to do that.
-Matt
Reading this reminds me of the funny sessions that one can have with Eliza or Dr. Sbaitso. Questions and answers that are almost completely unrelated to one another, except for the occaisonaly hilarious coincidence.
For those who never met him, Dr. Sbaitso was a program included with some of the early SoundBlaster 16 kits. It was basically, as near as I can tell, a derivative of Eliza. It actually talked, though! It was a demo program for the mediocre text to speech software that came with the kit. I think (guess) Sbaitso stood for Sound Blaster Artificial Intelligence Talking .
-Matt
I must have missed the controversy, or perhaps I'm looking at the wrong problem set, (gee, the pdf says 2000 ACM Programming Contest World Finals), but this doesn't seem to be at all vague. It is an application of graph theory. The classic question is 'what is the shortest route from node A to node B.' This just asks you to average all the answers to all the possible pairs of A and B.
Now, this does not mean that it is easy to do, or that I remember the algorithm I once learned for finding the shortest path from a to b on a graph, but I don't see why anyone with a bit of computer science knowledge wouldn't be able to understand the problem.
Of course, as I said, I missed the controversy, so that may not have been what the hubub was about.
-Matt
BZZZZZZZZTT
WRONG
"Patents cover machines and processes.
Copyrights cover particular expressions."
A piece of source code is almost always an implementation of some process.
"things (like RSA) that are nothing but code."
Since when is RSA nothing but code? RSA is an encryption algorithm. The source code is an implementation of that algorithm (a.k.a. process). RSA can be described without a scrap of source code. It is a mathematical algorithm.
-Matt
Have you ever read Orson Scott Card's The Worthing Saga? He describes a game very similar to this. Extremely realistic simulation of a world. Players buy countries to command. I suppose they could probably let people buy pieces of the country to sub-command too. A very interesting idea there.
-Matt
I don't know if it has been kept very up to date, and I had some problems when I tried it about a year ago, but it clearly worked for some people when I looked at it. Some aspects of it are somewhat reminiscent of Cakewalk, I think.
Looking at the website, it looks like the developers have kept working, so I'd give it a shot.
Rosegarden
-Matt
Yes, cheapo motels will have analog lines. However, many of them won't have an easy way for you to plug your modem into said analog line. The more expensive places will almost always have a jack on the phone to plug your modem into so that you don't fry it or the PBX. It's the middle expense places that you have to watch out for as they might have a PBX with no analog sockets for modems...
However, I went on a month long road trip a couple years ago, and was quite glad to be away from the net, etc. for a while. There is a time and place for film cameras. Take a bunch of film, develop it when you get back. Road trip == vacation == time away from the stuff you normally do every day, IMHO.
-Matt
I believe it was on the bad interfaces hall of fame that I saw the explanation for this. They had a screenshot of office 97 running in windows 3.1 (don't ask me how. Perhaps it was WINE). Office 97, instead of using the normal windows menu/etc. widgets, uses its own widgets. Thus any modifications to the windows widgets won't affect the office stuff.
-Matt
The first option, chosen by most power mongers, is to try to suppress all change. Any invention, change, or technological advance is branded heresy, traitorous, or in these digital days, as piracy.
The second option, which is almost never chosen by anyone who has power over any large chunk of anything, is to try and keep pace with the change. This, of course, is immensely difficult.
The catch is that those who try to suppress all change invariably end up getting toppled, because of the simple fact that you can't stop progress. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. You can't close Pandora's box.
The second catch is that it is almost impossible to keep up with all the change that goes on in the world. Those who try to keep up with it either end up becoming innefectual power holders, or they fail to keep up with it and revert to supression.
The stable system is the one where change is allowed, and power is transfered smoothly to those who have grown up around the newer systems (systems in the most general sense). Instead of a palace coup, the power is handed down to someone new, and the previous holder frequently hangs around to advise the new leadership on the <cliche>timeless truths of leadership</cliche>. This system always is a bit behind the current front edge of technology and whatnot, but is never so far behind that people say 'fsck these a-holes, we'll take control now thank you.'
If the MPAA, DVD/CA, etc. would embrace this, they would stand a chance of not losing it completely. However, organizations such as these almost never take the stable approach. They are concentrated on maximum gain, and maximum gain, in the short term, is had by suppression and extortion. They don't really care if the systems they are a part of topple five years after they drop dead. They are interested in becoming very rich now.
-Matt
I recently read A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge. It was an excellent novel. Probably not the greatest thing for a 13 year old, but older readers (I'm 19, I don't mean that old :) would definitely enjoy it. It is a bit slow in the beginning, but once it gets going it is a very gripping novel that explores many new (or at least new to me) ideas, and puts an interesting spin on ideas that others have touched on before.
Has anyone else here read it? I'm horrible at giving a good idea what a book is about without spoiling it. Someone else want to provide a non-spoiler synopsis?
-Matt
Sun sits there and wonders why everybody else is wasting their time with Linux. Everybody else sits there and wonders why Sun isn't doing anything while they reel in the mula. As much as I might dislike Java some days, I think this is good for both RedHat and IBM. IBM gets to have support done by someone who knows Linux, which makes them look good. RedHat gets more support contracts, which makes them have more money to fund developing more Linux stuff.
Does anyone else see the irony that IBM is making the bucks (minus licensing fees?) from Sun's Java technology on Linux, which Sun thinks is a waste of time 8^)
-Matt
Your idea works in places where there is a surplus of job openings. However, if there is a surplus of applicants, the idea that business will be self-regulating in this matter completely falls appart as theory and history show. Corporations will not spend money unless they think doing so will make them money.