Wow, some very good points with regard to my very off-the-cuff remark. I really haven't found a political philosophy that indicates exactly what I feel. I could be a conservative except:
I'm open to new things, and I don't think many conservatives (or at least those in politics) are
I believe in freedom of speech, expression, and religion, and many conservatives don't agree with those freedoms when they threaten closely held religious beliefs.
Likewise, I could be a liberal except:
I'm fiscally conservative (and BTW a monster tax cut doesn't count as fiscal conservativism in my book)
I'm not too happy with affirmative action
I support the right to bear arms, which many liberals don't agree with when it threatens their closely held beliefs
As you can see, I've got some issues:)
I suppose I could be a libertarian, except that I would worry that such a government would allow business interests too much control over society due to their vast resources. So in general I vacillate between Libertarian and fiscally conservative liberal. I would totally support the Libertarian party if corporate citizenship were revoked.
My mistake - you are entirely correct. I had read a section in their FAQ about how Ximian GNOME wasn't a Linux distribution, just an add-on, and somehow I twisted that into thinking it was an add-on for GNOME, rather than an add-on for Linux (and hopefully other OSes at some point).
Feel free to completely disregard my fevered rantings in the future, if you don't already:)
My totally uninformed and madly speculative opinion is that it's like the POSIX layer in Windows NT - no one ever uses it, but it was added to achieve sufficient buzzword compliancy and allow sales to organizations which required support for that particular standard even if they didn't use it. I'm not saying that was the sole motivation behind this development, but it didn't hurt:)
That was true until everyone noticed how much money you could make in the field a few years ago. Now it's about 50/50 as far as loving your job (IMHO).
Yes, and we know what kind of crime it is: ThoughtCrime!
Yes, by merely professing to a certain opinion, even if you've never harmed a living soul, you're automatically a criminal. This may come as a surprise to you, but any time a government can tell you what to think, you're a lot closer to Fascism than you think you are. Are you ready to start burning Fascist books in the street, and after that maybe trashing some of their businesses?
And how exactly is being a Communist better than being a Fascist? Stalin killed plenty of people too, you know, and communism can lead to nationalized hate just as easily as any other form of dictatorial government.
Sometimes it gives me pause to defend the right of Nazis (whom I personally abhor) to speak their minds, but I absolutely loathe defending the right to speak of those who would deny such rights to others. I guess it's just the curse of being a "damn liberal" in an enlightened-but-not-quite-entirely age...
Hang on there - just because the Russian government isn't able to do something in their own country (and may not even want to, since they didn't invite the FBI to come in and arrest these guys) and the FBI does have the means and the opportunity to do so, doesn't give the FBI the right to do so. That's what being a sovereign nation means - you can maintain your territorial integrity even when it annoys other countries. If other countries violate your territory, you make an incident out of it as a matter of course.
In reality, if you don't defend your territory enough, you end up not being sovereign any more, because there's no world organization that enforces nations' rights against each other. But that's another story.
If they approached us for help on getting somebody in our country, and if it
was all according to extradition treaties, we'd help them out.
If another country approached the U.S. for the extradition of a criminal, and the U.S. didn't recognize the crime (say, distributing soft-core pornography to Muslim countries, or sending Nazi memorabilia to France (the horror)) and so didn't hand the U.S. citizen over, and then a foreign power lured said citizen out of the country, entrapped them to get their password, and then used said password to steal information out of U.S. territory, you can bet the U.S. government would have a cow. If they didn't, then it would be open season on U.S. citizens the world over.
Good point. The Russian government should really make an international incident out of this, since it is deception of their citizens with intent to take property held in Russia. There's no way the U.S. would allow another nation's government to do this to to a U.S. citizen. Unfortunately, Russian law enforcement is probably happy enough to be rid of these guys without having to go to the trouble of catching them that they won't do a thing.
And people complained about the U.S. being the world's policeman before? Just you wait....
That's because Ximian/Gnome is and add-on to an existing Gnome installation, you silly Windows person you. Although Gnome on Windows probably would be a step up in the UI department. I know you can get gtk+ on Windows, how about Gnome?
The stated metric of compression was "file size", as reported by 'wc -b', not "disk space". This metric was used by both challenger and challengee. The challenge wasn't intended to cause people to write better code, because the provider of the challenge knew that the problem was unsolvable. The only purpose of the challenge was to provide a bit of sport for the elite of the compression usenet world. If the whole thing was planned around "let's laugh at people who think they've found the Philosopher's Stone", then I don't see how turning the tables on the so-called "experts" is really contrary to the spirit of the contest. Either way, somebody thinks they've got a sure thing and that there's no way the other side can win.
I understand the argument that you're making that certain things should be able to be taken for granted in such challenges, but I don't think it's a worthwhile challenge if you don't specify everything up front and then as people solve the problem you say to them "no, you can't do it that way, everybody knows that's just cheating". The provider of the challenge supposedly had much more of a background in the topic of compression and should have been able to easily word a challenge without loopholes (just a reference to avoiding techniques which had been proved to fail from the FAQ would have been sufficient, for example).
Since Mike was willing to put up money based on a challenge which didn't really prove what he thought it did, he should hand over the money to Patrick for providing a worthwhile education in specifying your problem clearly.
I suspect Patrick knew about this hole all along, but chose to go through the challenge to find out if Mike would really admit the error in the specification of the challenge, or if he would try to back out. I only wish I'd thought of it first!
I think the moral is that if you think you're so smart, and you want to set up a public challenge to prove how smart you are and/or how inviolable a certain concept is, you'd better be smart enough to word the challenge so as to prevent fairly obvious technicalities/loopholes in your challenge. This wasn't a brand-new loophole, Mike even knew about it from the FAQ to begin with and he still couldn't phrase a challenge that avoided this problem.
If you're going to put your money where your mouth is, make sure you know what you're talking about.
Which article were you reading? He had 218 compressed files! (Admittedly without real-world compression, but within the rules of the contest there was compression.)
It's not cheating if you follow the rules of the contest as explained to you, and create a winning entry as defined by those rules. The creator of the challenge is at fault for not creating a challenge that would rigorously prove the point he was trying to make. Shame on Mike, if anything - he should know better how to construct a correct challenge, since as he said he has a FAQ about exactly this sort of thing.
I agree that in the real world, no actual compression occurred, and the compression gurus seem to be correct that a general solution to the compression challenge is impossible. Under the logic of a challenge which allowed tailoring of the compressor to the input and multiple files for the output, however, compression did occur. Unfortunately for the challenge provider, he allowed the problem space to be sufficiently dissimilar to reality for the problem to be solvable.
Although you submitted it as plain text, the browser might still interpret it as a tag./. doesn't seem to insert [pre] tags around plain old text postings, I'm not sure why.
The problem is not that ECN support is needed at the other end, the problem is that ECN uses bits which were otherwise reserved, and routers which don't know ECN are dropping packets based on the contents of reserved fields which they don't know anything about. If anything is broken, it's network hardware that's assigning new meanings to bits that it shouldn't assume anything about.
I just thought it was interesting that it was reported as an FBI arrest, not a British arrest with FBI participation. If this keeps up, Jon Johanson may have something to fear from U.S. law enforcement after all...
So far, the machine has the edge. The great Russian champion Garry Kasparov lost a six-game match in 1997 to IBM's Deep Blue.
Totally disregarding the last few centuries of humans who were better than machines, of course. The average chess-playing computer has only recently become better than the average chess-playing human, especially when you consider that the average chess-playing computer has been essentially hand-tutored by great chess players. I bet if I had that level of tutoring, I could beat many of the chess-playing machines on the market too.
Not that the machines won't have their day, and not that the day isn't at hand, but the article makes it sound like humans have been behind from the start and that isn't correct.
That is a good reason, thanks for the explanation. I'm still not sure that it's the best use of resources, but it does sound like it provides some useful information.
Thats why
their parents need to keep them away from situations that could be bad for them by doing things like funding programs that make it
hard for kids to get drugs.
That's fine, but unfortunately those programs make it hard for adults to get drugs, and adults should be allowed to make their own decisions as long as they're not hurting anyone. So, if you can "save the children" without infringing on my civil liberties, go right ahead.
Just because it's legal for adults doesn't mean that it's legal to be bought or sold by people under the
age of 18! It's illegal to sell tobacco to kids!
Although, as an interesting side note, in some states possession of tobacco by children is legal. So you can't buy it, but if Dad gives you some you can possess it (not sure about actually smoking). Makes you wonder what the legislature was on, doesn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, some very good points with regard to my very off-the-cuff remark. I really haven't found a political philosophy that indicates exactly what I feel. I could be a conservative except:
Likewise, I could be a liberal except:
As you can see, I've got some issues :)
I suppose I could be a libertarian, except that I would worry that such a government would allow business interests too much control over society due to their vast resources. So in general I vacillate between Libertarian and fiscally conservative liberal. I would totally support the Libertarian party if corporate citizenship were revoked.
I think Jon's name is absent because he's dead, and I doubt that he died of obsessing over new standards/advances. You were very poetic, though.
My mistake - you are entirely correct. I had read a section in their FAQ about how Ximian GNOME wasn't a Linux distribution, just an add-on, and somehow I twisted that into thinking it was an add-on for GNOME, rather than an add-on for Linux (and hopefully other OSes at some point).
Feel free to completely disregard my fevered rantings in the future, if you don't already :)
My totally uninformed and madly speculative opinion is that it's like the POSIX layer in Windows NT - no one ever uses it, but it was added to achieve sufficient buzzword compliancy and allow sales to organizations which required support for that particular standard even if they didn't use it. I'm not saying that was the sole motivation behind this development, but it didn't hurt :)
That was true until everyone noticed how much money you could make in the field a few years ago. Now it's about 50/50 as far as loving your job (IMHO).
That's funny, because I don't think I've heard a Marketing guy say anything besides those phrases. Maybe they have a lot of lunch meetings :)
Yes, and we know what kind of crime it is: ThoughtCrime!
Yes, by merely professing to a certain opinion, even if you've never harmed a living soul, you're automatically a criminal. This may come as a surprise to you, but any time a government can tell you what to think, you're a lot closer to Fascism than you think you are. Are you ready to start burning Fascist books in the street, and after that maybe trashing some of their businesses?
And how exactly is being a Communist better than being a Fascist? Stalin killed plenty of people too, you know, and communism can lead to nationalized hate just as easily as any other form of dictatorial government.
Sometimes it gives me pause to defend the right of Nazis (whom I personally abhor) to speak their minds, but I absolutely loathe defending the right to speak of those who would deny such rights to others. I guess it's just the curse of being a "damn liberal" in an enlightened-but-not-quite-entirely age...
Hang on there - just because the Russian government isn't able to do something in their own country (and may not even want to, since they didn't invite the FBI to come in and arrest these guys) and the FBI does have the means and the opportunity to do so, doesn't give the FBI the right to do so. That's what being a sovereign nation means - you can maintain your territorial integrity even when it annoys other countries. If other countries violate your territory, you make an incident out of it as a matter of course.
In reality, if you don't defend your territory enough, you end up not being sovereign any more, because there's no world organization that enforces nations' rights against each other. But that's another story.
If another country approached the U.S. for the extradition of a criminal, and the U.S. didn't recognize the crime (say, distributing soft-core pornography to Muslim countries, or sending Nazi memorabilia to France (the horror)) and so didn't hand the U.S. citizen over, and then a foreign power lured said citizen out of the country, entrapped them to get their password, and then used said password to steal information out of U.S. territory, you can bet the U.S. government would have a cow. If they didn't, then it would be open season on U.S. citizens the world over.
Good point. The Russian government should really make an international incident out of this, since it is deception of their citizens with intent to take property held in Russia. There's no way the U.S. would allow another nation's government to do this to to a U.S. citizen. Unfortunately, Russian law enforcement is probably happy enough to be rid of these guys without having to go to the trouble of catching them that they won't do a thing.
And people complained about the U.S. being the world's policeman before? Just you wait....
So, are you paid by the buzzword, or are you just doing it for fun like the rest of us?
That's because Ximian/Gnome is and add-on to an existing Gnome installation, you silly Windows person you. Although Gnome on Windows probably would be a step up in the UI department. I know you can get gtk+ on Windows, how about Gnome?
Of course, it's a turn-on if you don't want to wait around for SQL parsing. To each his own, I suppose.
The stated metric of compression was "file size", as reported by 'wc -b', not "disk space". This metric was used by both challenger and challengee. The challenge wasn't intended to cause people to write better code, because the provider of the challenge knew that the problem was unsolvable. The only purpose of the challenge was to provide a bit of sport for the elite of the compression usenet world. If the whole thing was planned around "let's laugh at people who think they've found the Philosopher's Stone", then I don't see how turning the tables on the so-called "experts" is really contrary to the spirit of the contest. Either way, somebody thinks they've got a sure thing and that there's no way the other side can win.
I understand the argument that you're making that certain things should be able to be taken for granted in such challenges, but I don't think it's a worthwhile challenge if you don't specify everything up front and then as people solve the problem you say to them "no, you can't do it that way, everybody knows that's just cheating". The provider of the challenge supposedly had much more of a background in the topic of compression and should have been able to easily word a challenge without loopholes (just a reference to avoiding techniques which had been proved to fail from the FAQ would have been sufficient, for example).
Since Mike was willing to put up money based on a challenge which didn't really prove what he thought it did, he should hand over the money to Patrick for providing a worthwhile education in specifying your problem clearly.
I suspect Patrick knew about this hole all along, but chose to go through the challenge to find out if Mike would really admit the error in the specification of the challenge, or if he would try to back out. I only wish I'd thought of it first!
I think the moral is that if you think you're so smart, and you want to set up a public challenge to prove how smart you are and/or how inviolable a certain concept is, you'd better be smart enough to word the challenge so as to prevent fairly obvious technicalities/loopholes in your challenge. This wasn't a brand-new loophole, Mike even knew about it from the FAQ to begin with and he still couldn't phrase a challenge that avoided this problem.
If you're going to put your money where your mouth is, make sure you know what you're talking about.
Which article were you reading? He had 218 compressed files! (Admittedly without real-world compression, but within the rules of the contest there was compression.)
It's not cheating if you follow the rules of the contest as explained to you, and create a winning entry as defined by those rules. The creator of the challenge is at fault for not creating a challenge that would rigorously prove the point he was trying to make. Shame on Mike, if anything - he should know better how to construct a correct challenge, since as he said he has a FAQ about exactly this sort of thing.
I agree that in the real world, no actual compression occurred, and the compression gurus seem to be correct that a general solution to the compression challenge is impossible. Under the logic of a challenge which allowed tailoring of the compressor to the input and multiple files for the output, however, compression did occur. Unfortunately for the challenge provider, he allowed the problem space to be sufficiently dissimilar to reality for the problem to be solvable.
Although you submitted it as plain text, the browser might still interpret it as a tag. /. doesn't seem to insert [pre] tags around plain old text postings, I'm not sure why.
The problem is not that ECN support is needed at the other end, the problem is that ECN uses bits which were otherwise reserved, and routers which don't know ECN are dropping packets based on the contents of reserved fields which they don't know anything about. If anything is broken, it's network hardware that's assigning new meanings to bits that it shouldn't assume anything about.
I just thought it was interesting that it was reported as an FBI arrest, not a British arrest with FBI participation. If this keeps up, Jon Johanson may have something to fear from U.S. law enforcement after all...
Totally disregarding the last few centuries of humans who were better than machines, of course. The average chess-playing computer has only recently become better than the average chess-playing human, especially when you consider that the average chess-playing computer has been essentially hand-tutored by great chess players. I bet if I had that level of tutoring, I could beat many of the chess-playing machines on the market too.
Not that the machines won't have their day, and not that the day isn't at hand, but the article makes it sound like humans have been behind from the start and that isn't correct.
That is a good reason, thanks for the explanation. I'm still not sure that it's the best use of resources, but it does sound like it provides some useful information.
Just out of curiosity, how was a Welsh teenager arrested in Wales by the U.S. FBI? As Deng Xiaoping would say, "What about the U.K.'s sovereignty?".
That's fine, but unfortunately those programs make it hard for adults to get drugs, and adults should be allowed to make their own decisions as long as they're not hurting anyone. So, if you can "save the children" without infringing on my civil liberties, go right ahead.
Although, as an interesting side note, in some states possession of tobacco by children is legal. So you can't buy it, but if Dad gives you some you can possess it (not sure about actually smoking). Makes you wonder what the legislature was on, doesn't it?