Why waste the money on the robot parts? We've been breeding fully human sociopaths for centuries. How would not having a soul really have made your average Hannibal Lecter any worse?
On the contrary side, if the soul isn't colocated with your center of self-awareness, then is it possible to take out the soul and transplant it into someone else? Could I get two souls that way? This quickly becomes an absurd discussion...
Re:Sagan Spinning In His Grave?
on
Explaining SETI
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· Score: 1
The difference is that the blank tape could have been easily caused by aliens, but any hidden message in the digits of pi could only have been placed there by God or at least something with very powerful control over our universe. This really was the whole point of the book, although I admit it would be a little harder to get across to the average movie-goer. Sometimes the big thoughts are hard to explain, I guess.
Re:The aliens have left the phones off the hook
on
Explaining SETI
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· Score: 1
There is a lot of evidence
in The Bible that suggest that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by beings with advanced technology.
No, what's in the bible is stories which were handed down as oral tradition for centuries before being written down. That's hardly evidence. Now the discovery of a layer of radioactive dust under the present-day location of Sodom and Gomorrah, or a crater at the center of the site might be evidence, but just being in the Bible doesn't make it evidence.
Very interesting and worthy of a front-page story IMHO, you should submit it (and probably already have I imagine). I'm not holding my breath expecting to see it posted, though. I thought the "Business Justification" section was very interesting:
cgi one-process-per-socket model, which is really an Apache limitation, isn't it? One could write a web server that used separate threads versus new processes. I wonder how well this works under Linux, where theoretically a new process is almost as fast as a new thread.
globalization/unicode support - I didn't see that one coming, but if FreeBSD is really lacking in that area, then I guess Microsoft had a good point.
development cycle time/tools - I couldn't really find much to back this up, other than that VC++ was better than GCC (not really a justification) and that it was easier to find memory leaks with native Windows debugging tools. It sounds more like the Hotmail team wasn't aware of all the debugging capabilities available with FreeBSD + free software, but then again I don't currently use MS tools so maybe I would be surprised.
?Without 2600 (he would) probably be one of those pot-smoking, crack-sniffing guys who gave up
on life a long time ago.?
See the difference? Good, because the Post apparently can't, those morons. (And no, that's not flamebait, the technical term for using the '?' thing is moron, because the tool that fixes it is called the "demoronizer".)
Someone sent a subscription for a pornography magazine to his 82-year-old grandmother...It's not as if he doesn't relish the fight. "I describe myself as an adrenaline junkie," says Ritz, 51...
So if his Grandma's 82 and he's 51, then Grandma must have been 31 when he was born. So Grandma had Mom at age 15, and Mom had Dave at age 15.
Another great "new feature" from those "innovators" at Microsoft - Grip has been able to rip mp3s at top speed for quite a while now. Sounds like WM7 was a great step back from the existing tools for mp3.
DVD playback would be nice, though, but I'm not sure what I'd do with album art. I don't sit there and watch my mp3 player, I launch it and then listen to music while doing other stuff. I suppose the art would be nice to have if I got curious about it, but it's not really a world-changing feature IMHO.
How prophetic - in fact, Fraunhoefer is already starting to charge creators of encoders. Just because they haven't totally cracked down on it yet doesn't mean that they won't do so in the future, just like Unisys did with GIFs.
I agree that fragmentation is bad, but I don't see any alternatives at this point. I guess we'll see if using a free format is important enough to people for them to pass up any compression improvements from WMA. I'm not holding out a lot of hope for the non-/. crowd, though.
This was also done in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, although just with rail-launched boxes of lunar rocks rather than asteroids. Still quite destructive, though.
It is difficult to keep up with. Some of my problems I traced down to:
I had to get the guile lib from ftp.gnucash.org rather than the one from my distribution (some difference of being compiled with pthreads vs. without)
I had to install a bunch of -devel stuff (helix Gnome is your friend here)
I had to get a new version of slib, which is a Scheme library
I had to jump through even more hoops to install Guppi which is used for charts in GnuCash, including generating the elusive libpython1.5.so, which Guppi uses but even the Python team doesn't support! Although I think now you can build GnuCash without Guppi charts so this might not be such a big deal.
And I still don't have online help, because I haven't quite figured out how to get the sgml tools setup right. So you're right, it is a big pain to get configured but it's a great app once you've got it working. Hopefully the requirements for building and using it will settle a little with the next big stable release. The gnucash-users and gnucash-devel mailing lists are also a great source of configuration advice since pretty much everyone on the list went through the same problems.
Although I'm not a great fan of KDE, kpackage worked pretty well for me until I accidentally zapped my RPM db (don't ask, I'm a moron) and had to use the command line for a while. There's also rpmdrake I think for Mandrake, but I've never used it. Sounds like gnorpm might be more of the problem; I've never really used that tool too much.
What would be the best would be a tool which would query rpmfind.net and recursively track down all the packages you need, like an RPM apt-get front end. I've never seen something like that but hopefully it's out there somewhere. Maybe rpmfind.net links to a good front end?
Care to provide specifics on the problems with package management you experience? Because as far as I've done it, it's:
download the RPM
fire up kpackage (or your favorite front-end)
select the RPM you downloaded
click "install"
It even adds menu items for the new program(s). If your mime types are set up right (and in a recent distribution they should be), you can even click on.rpm files in a file browser to install them. So you can have one-click installation just the same as in Windows.
I agree that it's still possible to find unsatisfied dependencies that require you to download new packages, but this happens in Windows too sometimes. And an X front-end to apt-get could handle this automatically. There's probably already such a tool for both.deb and.rpm, I just haven't gone looking for it.
I have to agree - GnuCash is already great and is getting still better at a rapid pace. Right now many of the big improvements are in the unstable development version, but if you can get all of the dependencies worked out it's really sweet to use.
ObDisclaimer: Gnucash unstable is not for use with your real financial data, although since they've gone to a text-based file format with frequent automatic backups, in practice I do use unstable for my books with very few problems. But don't do it 'cause I said so.
Well, you could accept images in.xpm format, which is text but easily viewed as a pixmap image (it's sorta self-documenting). You just don't want to accept random binary data that you would have to retain a reader for as well.
Re:. . .but it could be a GODSEND to development.
on
Microchips That Evolve
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· Score: 1
The difference is natural evolution isn't directed to a specific end, so as a result after a few million years life forms are adapted to be survivors more than anything else. I'm just questioning whether directed evolution in a lab will really engender the same hardiness.
Even natural life forms aren't incredibly stable - all it takes is a new type of germ or a slight change in conditions to decimate or destroy a population. Life goes on, but those individuals have failed, and if we're talking about using GA-designed chips for anything important, you really want to avoid the individuals exhibiting unpredictable failure patterns.
By posting goatse.cx links they were able to
subvert the prevalent political message and perhaps make people start to think for themselves.
It's true - usually hitting one of those links makes me stop thinking "open source blah blah blah" and start thinking for myself: "dammit, hit the back button!".
Re:. . .but it could be a GODSEND to development.
on
Microchips That Evolve
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· Score: 1
It would be faster, but it might be a more "fragile" design than chips designed the old-fashioned way. If the fitness criteria you're applying to your chips is very narrow, then they may not have developed a way to deal with inputs which aren't within your training regimen. (Remember, one of the disadvantages of using GAs is that you often can't determine exactly why a particular approach works.) So it may be tough to predict how such a chip would react to bad input, whereas with a chip you've designed yourself you can specifically allow for that.
You can probably compensate for this problem by broadening your training regimen to include a representative sample of error cases, but for some problems you can't include them all and there may be no way to prove that your chip will be able to handle them all.
Slashdot Mirror
Why waste the money on the robot parts? We've been breeding fully human sociopaths for centuries. How would not having a soul really have made your average Hannibal Lecter any worse?
On the contrary side, if the soul isn't colocated with your center of self-awareness, then is it possible to take out the soul and transplant it into someone else? Could I get two souls that way? This quickly becomes an absurd discussion...
Lower, Beavis.
At last we'll soon know whether cyborg ants can be trained to sort tiny screws in space.
motto: "Gne's Not English"
The difference is that the blank tape could have been easily caused by aliens, but any hidden message in the digits of pi could only have been placed there by God or at least something with very powerful control over our universe. This really was the whole point of the book, although I admit it would be a little harder to get across to the average movie-goer. Sometimes the big thoughts are hard to explain, I guess.
No, what's in the bible is stories which were handed down as oral tradition for centuries before being written down. That's hardly evidence. Now the discovery of a layer of radioactive dust under the present-day location of Sodom and Gomorrah, or a crater at the center of the site might be evidence, but just being in the Bible doesn't make it evidence.
Don't waste your time on Catcher in the Rye, though - it isn't worthy of either burning or reading.
Hmmm, perhaps a new /. poll: best banned book you've read?
Very interesting and worthy of a front-page story IMHO, you should submit it (and probably already have I imagine). I'm not holding my breath expecting to see it posted, though. I thought the "Business Justification" section was very interesting:
An interesting read, though.
Actually, he said:
See the difference? Good, because the Post apparently can't, those morons. (And no, that's not flamebait, the technical term for using the '?' thing is moron, because the tool that fixes it is called the "demoronizer".)
From the article:
So if his Grandma's 82 and he's 51, then Grandma must have been 31 when he was born. So Grandma had Mom at age 15, and Mom had Dave at age 15.
Conclusion: he's a spam-fighter from Kentucky :)
There can be only one, McCleod!
offensive spelling, you're my hero! One might say you're a spelling vigilante, even :)
Another great "new feature" from those "innovators" at Microsoft - Grip has been able to rip mp3s at top speed for quite a while now. Sounds like WM7 was a great step back from the existing tools for mp3.
DVD playback would be nice, though, but I'm not sure what I'd do with album art. I don't sit there and watch my mp3 player, I launch it and then listen to music while doing other stuff. I suppose the art would be nice to have if I got curious about it, but it's not really a world-changing feature IMHO.
How prophetic - in fact, Fraunhoefer is already starting to charge creators of encoders. Just because they haven't totally cracked down on it yet doesn't mean that they won't do so in the future, just like Unisys did with GIFs.
I agree that fragmentation is bad, but I don't see any alternatives at this point. I guess we'll see if using a free format is important enough to people for them to pass up any compression improvements from WMA. I'm not holding out a lot of hope for the non-/. crowd, though.
This was also done in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, although just with rail-launched boxes of lunar rocks rather than asteroids. Still quite destructive, though.
It is difficult to keep up with. Some of my problems I traced down to:
And I still don't have online help, because I haven't quite figured out how to get the sgml tools setup right. So you're right, it is a big pain to get configured but it's a great app once you've got it working. Hopefully the requirements for building and using it will settle a little with the next big stable release. The gnucash-users and gnucash-devel mailing lists are also a great source of configuration advice since pretty much everyone on the list went through the same problems.
Although I'm not a great fan of KDE, kpackage worked pretty well for me until I accidentally zapped my RPM db (don't ask, I'm a moron) and had to use the command line for a while. There's also rpmdrake I think for Mandrake, but I've never used it. Sounds like gnorpm might be more of the problem; I've never really used that tool too much.
What would be the best would be a tool which would query rpmfind.net and recursively track down all the packages you need, like an RPM apt-get front end. I've never seen something like that but hopefully it's out there somewhere. Maybe rpmfind.net links to a good front end?
Care to provide specifics on the problems with package management you experience? Because as far as I've done it, it's:
It even adds menu items for the new program(s). If your mime types are set up right (and in a recent distribution they should be), you can even click on .rpm files in a file browser to install them. So you can have one-click installation just the same as in Windows.
I agree that it's still possible to find unsatisfied dependencies that require you to download new packages, but this happens in Windows too sometimes. And an X front-end to apt-get could handle this automatically. There's probably already such a tool for both .deb and .rpm, I just haven't gone looking for it.
I have to agree - GnuCash is already great and is getting still better at a rapid pace. Right now many of the big improvements are in the unstable development version, but if you can get all of the dependencies worked out it's really sweet to use.
ObDisclaimer: Gnucash unstable is not for use with your real financial data, although since they've gone to a text-based file format with frequent automatic backups, in practice I do use unstable for my books with very few problems. But don't do it 'cause I said so.
For those not in the know, what happened to TPJ that involved Earthweb and lawyers?
We still haven't figured out exactly how to make Greek Fire, have we?
Well, you could accept images in .xpm format, which is text but easily viewed as a pixmap image (it's sorta self-documenting). You just don't want to accept random binary data that you would have to retain a reader for as well.
The difference is natural evolution isn't directed to a specific end, so as a result after a few million years life forms are adapted to be survivors more than anything else. I'm just questioning whether directed evolution in a lab will really engender the same hardiness.
Even natural life forms aren't incredibly stable - all it takes is a new type of germ or a slight change in conditions to decimate or destroy a population. Life goes on, but those individuals have failed, and if we're talking about using GA-designed chips for anything important, you really want to avoid the individuals exhibiting unpredictable failure patterns.
It's true - usually hitting one of those links makes me stop thinking "open source blah blah blah" and start thinking for myself: "dammit, hit the back button!".
It would be faster, but it might be a more "fragile" design than chips designed the old-fashioned way. If the fitness criteria you're applying to your chips is very narrow, then they may not have developed a way to deal with inputs which aren't within your training regimen. (Remember, one of the disadvantages of using GAs is that you often can't determine exactly why a particular approach works.) So it may be tough to predict how such a chip would react to bad input, whereas with a chip you've designed yourself you can specifically allow for that.
You can probably compensate for this problem by broadening your training regimen to include a representative sample of error cases, but for some problems you can't include them all and there may be no way to prove that your chip will be able to handle them all.