You're comparing people following an UPGRADE PATH to the users of Mac OS X. What the hell sort of comparison is that? Of COURSE the Vista userbase is growing -- people are switching from XP and older Windows systems. No such transition is presently occurring in Mac-land.
So, I've struggled with the issue of the really large numbers in game AI problems. In go, for example, there are about 10^170 possible legal board layouts for the 19x19 board.
There are (esitmiated) only about 10^81 atoms in the universe.
I'm not sure what you think the problem is. There are 361 board positions. Therefore you only need 361 pieces (atoms) to play.
Nuclear reactor control mechanisms are a much simpler, much more brute force operation than most people seem to understand. Gravity and water pressure, not logic and gates.
I think you're not giving such systems enough credit. If a mechanical system always does X whenever conditions A and B are met, then that's logic, IMO.
You might see some more modern technology used for recording or monitoring purposes, but the fundamental operations are not based on anything as unreliable as software.
I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying that hardware solutions are robust and software can never be? A hardware machine can have "bugs" in it just as easily as software can. It is protected against certain kinds of failures (RAM suddenly going bad, for instance) but that doesn't mean it can't be incorrectly designed.
Of course, I agree that there are very good reasons for such facilities to be electromechanically controlled instead of controlled by software, but I took issue with the implication that a system must be flawless just because it's build of atoms instead of bytes.
I'm curious why people would invent such a sport, when they could just RUN instead. I understand that normal walking is less stressful on the body than high-impact running, but the way you describe this "race walking" it hardly seems casual and free of stress. In fact, I could imagine giving yourself some weird injury due to the strain of trying to KEEP one foot always in contact with the ground while moving so quickly. Why not just let the legs come off the ground and RUN?
Walking isn't an unconscious process because it's too complex for consciousness -- what kind of argument is that? The most complex thinking that humans do (inventing new math, plotting the course of a rocket, designing a 10 million line software system, etc.) is all done CONSCIOUSLY. According to your argument, these tasks should be happening UNconsciously.
Walking is an unconscious process because it doesn't HAVE to be conscious. Why pollute our conscious minds with thought processes that are irrelevant, when all we're trying to do is walk to the fridge and get a beer?
Thought processes tend to be made unconscious once they have been learned and refined to the point where the conscious mind is no longer needed to supervise and correct mistakes. I've noticed this first hand when writing code. I no longer find myself thinking "Okay, I need to declare a variable called x," it just sort of comes out of my fingers, while my conscious mind thinks at some more abstract level. Didn't used to be that way. The ability to place tasks into your unconscious mind is a learned skill, I think.
3) It can be used to gather more intelligent statistics on how widely open source software is deployed, something which has been problematic in the past and I believe was even mentioned in a recent article here.
I am very glad someone had the balls to actually bring suit against Microsoft. I am sorry you do not have the balls to do that, pclminion, were you in the same situation.
The balls? What kind of "balls" does it take to sue a corporation? What's gonna happen if you lose? Do they execute you? Sorry, but a person who files a lawsuit is not some kind of national hero. He's just one more loser who thinks all his problems can be solved by suing someone's ass off. And anyway, I'd never be in his situation, since I make a point of never buying Microsoft's crap.
But when you fault that victim for standing up for him (or her) self by doing exactly what the law says you should do when one party to a contract violates the implicit terms of that contract (here a sales contract), you can't really cry foul when others see your criticism as equivalent to blaming the victim.
Thinking he's stupid isn't the same thing as blaming him. Yeah, there have been some classic lawsuits in the past which shaped everything which came after them. The Scopes trial comes to mind. Roe vs. Wade comes to mind. Some fool who got burned by buying a small item which is known to be a piece of crap and then sues for $5 million? I classify that as "idiot," not "defender of the consumer."
Consumers can already defend themselves just fine by not buying products which are known to be shit.
Class action lawsuits are great. Blaming the victim, as you seem to want to do, is lame.
I'm not blaming anybody. This guy is getting screwed by Microsoft -- why would I blame him? But when's the last time YOU sued because you bought a crappy product? Who the fuck does that? What MOST people do is stop buying from the crappy manufacturer and move on to something else.
To me this just seems like whining. "Whaa, I bought from Microsoft and their shit sucks!" Yeah well, who didn't know that?
We're not going to squish MS out of existence with $5 mill. lawsuits. We CAN crush them by refusing to buy their shit.
I fully support going after Microsoft for this product defect. Just because Microsoft is big (and the consent decree is going to expire in November) does not mean Microsoft can get away with this.
So sue to have them fix the flaw and replace the systems of the affected users. Or have them refund the purchase price. Do you actually think MS designed the thing this way on purpose? Does their testing suck? Yeah, apparently. So why purchase at all from a company like that?
The main reason why I believe they are suing is due to the fact that the Xbox 360 is apparently improperly designed, thus this is not only a case about replacing the discs but providing the consumer with a properly functioning system.
If their product sucks that bad, why keep using it? Send it back and demand your money back, and use something that doesn't suck. This guy isn't going to get $5 million -- instead he's going to end up thousands of dollars in the hole. If he thinks he's going to send some kind of message, whether he actually wins or not, then he's a fruitcake. You'd have just about as much success teaching Satan some table manners.
Why not first try demanding that MS replace the disc? The idea of suing over such a thing sounds kind of silly. Yeah, if they refuse to replace it, I guess you could try suing them. That certainly doesn't sound cheaper than buying a new disc. Why would you want to inflict a lawsuit on yourself? If it really pisses you off that bad, stop using the Xbox 360.
For somebody who's posted no credentials of your own, your ridicule of Shannon is hollow. He measured the conditional entropy of English letters based on human trials and arrived at a particular value. The reason he did this was not because he thought letter-sequence prediction was some kind of wave of the future -- he did it to test an important theorem which predicts the minimum possible entropy of a sequence given a theoretically optimal encoding scheme -- and in doing so, he learned that humans come close, but not quite right up to, the theoretical limit.
Now THAT is an interesting result, wouldn't you agree?
Years later, some researchers have now used this number in a way that may or may not be appropriate (I think it's bogus, personally) -- but it has nothing to do with Shannon.
The way you take this article and somehow twist it into an attack on Shannon and Turing, is actually kind of sickening. At least you haven't been modded up.
In other places the idea of strict individual privacy is an alien concept. There are languages where there is no sensible translation of the phrase, "Mind your own business." As an American I cherish my privacy but isn't it possible that the want/need for privacy is in fact a learned social behavior, and NOT something intrinsic to all people everywhere?
Hell, in times past, newlyweds had to have sex on their wedding night in front of witnesses. Sometimes their parents.
I'm afraid that as more and more people decide that they don't need their privacy, they will communicate this idea to their children and grandchildren. We're possibly heading toward a future where privacy has been completely devalued.
This guy builds a trike with great glowing, whirling blades of death on the back and actually manages to ride it around for a while without getting shipped to Gitmo, and people just complain how it's not practical?
Speaking as someone terrified of flying, often close to pissing his pants whenever the wings wiggle
The wings are designed to "wiggle" because if they were perfectly rigid, they'd snap. When you see the wings flexing this should calm your mind, not terrify you. I know that most phobias are not rationally based, but still. The wing is doing what it was designed to do.
If the surface area of the wings is held constant, then fuel consumption can be reduced significantly, as the downward pull of gravity is shrunk as well.
It also means they can change the angle of the wing to something less aggressive, since less air needs to be displaced to maintain adequate lift (because, as you say, the plane is lighter). If they didn't do that, the plane would actually have to fly slower in order to maintain a constant altitude.
What I don't understand is how ANY sort of flying restriction is going to stop a determined attacker. What's to stop somebody from landing (a watercraft) somewhere along the enormous coastline of Hudson's Bay, and simply hoofing it through the Canadian wilderness to the US border and just walking into the country? If you're intent on blowing yourself up surely a little hiking isn't going to be a huge deterrent. And you get to see some beautiful country before you off yourself.
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You're comparing people following an UPGRADE PATH to the users of Mac OS X. What the hell sort of comparison is that? Of COURSE the Vista userbase is growing -- people are switching from XP and older Windows systems. No such transition is presently occurring in Mac-land.
Really, I don't get it.
So, I've struggled with the issue of the really large numbers in game AI problems. In go, for example, there are about 10^170 possible legal board layouts for the 19x19 board. There are (esitmiated) only about 10^81 atoms in the universe.
I'm not sure what you think the problem is. There are 361 board positions. Therefore you only need 361 pieces (atoms) to play.What could that possibly prove?
"I owned that camera a few years ago. Then I lost it. I suppose somebody found it and used it to do this."
Nuclear reactor control mechanisms are a much simpler, much more brute force operation than most people seem to understand. Gravity and water pressure, not logic and gates.
I think you're not giving such systems enough credit. If a mechanical system always does X whenever conditions A and B are met, then that's logic, IMO.
Yes. We will hereby implement censorship of Slashdot just so YOU can read it.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. That any female with technical proficiency must be ugly as hell?
And then you guys wonder why you can't get dates.
You might see some more modern technology used for recording or monitoring purposes, but the fundamental operations are not based on anything as unreliable as software.
I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying that hardware solutions are robust and software can never be? A hardware machine can have "bugs" in it just as easily as software can. It is protected against certain kinds of failures (RAM suddenly going bad, for instance) but that doesn't mean it can't be incorrectly designed.
Of course, I agree that there are very good reasons for such facilities to be electromechanically controlled instead of controlled by software, but I took issue with the implication that a system must be flawless just because it's build of atoms instead of bytes.
I'm curious why people would invent such a sport, when they could just RUN instead. I understand that normal walking is less stressful on the body than high-impact running, but the way you describe this "race walking" it hardly seems casual and free of stress. In fact, I could imagine giving yourself some weird injury due to the strain of trying to KEEP one foot always in contact with the ground while moving so quickly. Why not just let the legs come off the ground and RUN?
Walking isn't an unconscious process because it's too complex for consciousness -- what kind of argument is that? The most complex thinking that humans do (inventing new math, plotting the course of a rocket, designing a 10 million line software system, etc.) is all done CONSCIOUSLY. According to your argument, these tasks should be happening UNconsciously.
Walking is an unconscious process because it doesn't HAVE to be conscious. Why pollute our conscious minds with thought processes that are irrelevant, when all we're trying to do is walk to the fridge and get a beer?
Thought processes tend to be made unconscious once they have been learned and refined to the point where the conscious mind is no longer needed to supervise and correct mistakes. I've noticed this first hand when writing code. I no longer find myself thinking "Okay, I need to declare a variable called x," it just sort of comes out of my fingers, while my conscious mind thinks at some more abstract level. Didn't used to be that way. The ability to place tasks into your unconscious mind is a learned skill, I think.
3) It can be used to gather more intelligent statistics on how widely open source software is deployed, something which has been problematic in the past and I believe was even mentioned in a recent article here.
"Maroon" == silly, possibly stupid alternate pronunciation of "moron." I hear it more and more lately.
I am very glad someone had the balls to actually bring suit against Microsoft. I am sorry you do not have the balls to do that, pclminion, were you in the same situation.
The balls? What kind of "balls" does it take to sue a corporation? What's gonna happen if you lose? Do they execute you? Sorry, but a person who files a lawsuit is not some kind of national hero. He's just one more loser who thinks all his problems can be solved by suing someone's ass off. And anyway, I'd never be in his situation, since I make a point of never buying Microsoft's crap.
But when you fault that victim for standing up for him (or her) self by doing exactly what the law says you should do when one party to a contract violates the implicit terms of that contract (here a sales contract), you can't really cry foul when others see your criticism as equivalent to blaming the victim.
Thinking he's stupid isn't the same thing as blaming him. Yeah, there have been some classic lawsuits in the past which shaped everything which came after them. The Scopes trial comes to mind. Roe vs. Wade comes to mind. Some fool who got burned by buying a small item which is known to be a piece of crap and then sues for $5 million? I classify that as "idiot," not "defender of the consumer."
Consumers can already defend themselves just fine by not buying products which are known to be shit.
Class action lawsuits are great. Blaming the victim, as you seem to want to do, is lame.
I'm not blaming anybody. This guy is getting screwed by Microsoft -- why would I blame him? But when's the last time YOU sued because you bought a crappy product? Who the fuck does that? What MOST people do is stop buying from the crappy manufacturer and move on to something else.
To me this just seems like whining. "Whaa, I bought from Microsoft and their shit sucks!" Yeah well, who didn't know that?
We're not going to squish MS out of existence with $5 mill. lawsuits. We CAN crush them by refusing to buy their shit.
I fully support going after Microsoft for this product defect. Just because Microsoft is big (and the consent decree is going to expire in November) does not mean Microsoft can get away with this.
So sue to have them fix the flaw and replace the systems of the affected users. Or have them refund the purchase price. Do you actually think MS designed the thing this way on purpose? Does their testing suck? Yeah, apparently. So why purchase at all from a company like that?
I have a feeling you are trolling me, though.
What system is this that allows "nice" to raise priority for users other than root?
I don't know the answer, but there are a LOT of UNIX-like operating systems out there, and contrary to belief, they don't all work the same.
The main reason why I believe they are suing is due to the fact that the Xbox 360 is apparently improperly designed, thus this is not only a case about replacing the discs but providing the consumer with a properly functioning system.
If their product sucks that bad, why keep using it? Send it back and demand your money back, and use something that doesn't suck. This guy isn't going to get $5 million -- instead he's going to end up thousands of dollars in the hole. If he thinks he's going to send some kind of message, whether he actually wins or not, then he's a fruitcake. You'd have just about as much success teaching Satan some table manners.
Why not first try demanding that MS replace the disc? The idea of suing over such a thing sounds kind of silly. Yeah, if they refuse to replace it, I guess you could try suing them. That certainly doesn't sound cheaper than buying a new disc. Why would you want to inflict a lawsuit on yourself? If it really pisses you off that bad, stop using the Xbox 360.
For somebody who's posted no credentials of your own, your ridicule of Shannon is hollow. He measured the conditional entropy of English letters based on human trials and arrived at a particular value. The reason he did this was not because he thought letter-sequence prediction was some kind of wave of the future -- he did it to test an important theorem which predicts the minimum possible entropy of a sequence given a theoretically optimal encoding scheme -- and in doing so, he learned that humans come close, but not quite right up to, the theoretical limit.
Now THAT is an interesting result, wouldn't you agree?
Years later, some researchers have now used this number in a way that may or may not be appropriate (I think it's bogus, personally) -- but it has nothing to do with Shannon.
The way you take this article and somehow twist it into an attack on Shannon and Turing, is actually kind of sickening. At least you haven't been modded up.
In other places the idea of strict individual privacy is an alien concept. There are languages where there is no sensible translation of the phrase, "Mind your own business." As an American I cherish my privacy but isn't it possible that the want/need for privacy is in fact a learned social behavior, and NOT something intrinsic to all people everywhere?
Hell, in times past, newlyweds had to have sex on their wedding night in front of witnesses. Sometimes their parents.
I'm afraid that as more and more people decide that they don't need their privacy, they will communicate this idea to their children and grandchildren. We're possibly heading toward a future where privacy has been completely devalued.
Our race is doomed.
And any moron can tell you that labeling something "mature" or "for adults only" is the best way to attract children to it.
This guy builds a trike with great glowing, whirling blades of death on the back and actually manages to ride it around for a while without getting shipped to Gitmo, and people just complain how it's not practical?
You people fail utterly at nerd-dom.
Speaking as someone terrified of flying, often close to pissing his pants whenever the wings wiggle
The wings are designed to "wiggle" because if they were perfectly rigid, they'd snap. When you see the wings flexing this should calm your mind, not terrify you. I know that most phobias are not rationally based, but still. The wing is doing what it was designed to do.
If the surface area of the wings is held constant, then fuel consumption can be reduced significantly, as the downward pull of gravity is shrunk as well.
It also means they can change the angle of the wing to something less aggressive, since less air needs to be displaced to maintain adequate lift (because, as you say, the plane is lighter). If they didn't do that, the plane would actually have to fly slower in order to maintain a constant altitude.
Dude, try flying into Israel. Or out of it, for that matter.
What I don't understand is how ANY sort of flying restriction is going to stop a determined attacker. What's to stop somebody from landing (a watercraft) somewhere along the enormous coastline of Hudson's Bay, and simply hoofing it through the Canadian wilderness to the US border and just walking into the country? If you're intent on blowing yourself up surely a little hiking isn't going to be a huge deterrent. And you get to see some beautiful country before you off yourself.