John Gilmore sued then-attorney general Alberto Gonzales in 2005, complaining (among other things) that when airport security refused to let him on a flight without showing ID, that no one would tell him which law made that a requirement. Because that law was a Secret.
He lost. As best I can tell, he lost without him or his lawyers ever getting to see the text of the law he was theoretically violating.
Wouldn't it be nice if this technology was used to make a free citywide wireless internet? We just need a bunch of people with this ambition and it could be done. I once read a book, called When A Strange Comes To Town, in which some people had the same ambition. You can get the book from Project Gutenberg if you look around. It's a newer book that has never been copyrighted.
This is probably a garbled memory of Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. It is copyrighted, but you can indeed download it from Cory's website; it was released under a Creative Commons license.
I disagree. I'll quote someone else to make my opinion seem more important:
Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.
--Edsgar Dijkstra
Well, if you could somehow make your mass negative, wouldn't you be able to go faster than light? I'm honestly curious. I'm not a physicist, but would it ever be possible to have negative mass, even theoretically?
Short answer: Yes. It is possible to talk sensibly about something with negative mass--though there may not be any such thing in the real world.
Long answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyons
There are programs out there for auto-commenting get/set methods. Heck, there are programs that'll create basic get/set methods from your class variables and comment the functions at the same time.
Right. And those auto-generated comments are always useless. By their very nature, they can't add any information or insight that's not already in the function signature. They are completely without value.
I delete them with extreme prejudice (i.e., while swearing at the guy who cluttered up the code with that crap in the first place).
I've also done some testing with other transcendental numbers, such as e (2.718281828...), and they all seem to show great randomness properties, in the information-theoretic sense at least. However, I have a feeling to "trust" Pi more than e, given that you can write e in form of continued fractions with repeating patterns, and nobody has yet found a pattern in the continued fractions of Pi.
There's nothing about transcendental numbers that makes their digits random; pi and e happen to be special. For instance, the first number proven to be transcendental was (some variation on) 0.101001000100001000001...; that sequence isn't random by any definition.
As for my pseudo-random library project, my programming skills are quite bad, but if you have some knowledge of scientific computing (multiplication algorithms using FFTs, for example), you can contact me and I might revive the idea.
I'd recommend to anyone interested in projects like this to look at George Marsaglia's page; his tester may help you avoid releasing crap. You can also search Usenet archives (i.e., Google) for some generator source code he's posted. Knuth also has a very detailed treatment of pseudo-random number generation in TAOCP vol. 2.
What makes them more complicated? It seems to me that they just receive input, and, if that input meets a certain threshold in freqency (all nerve impulses have the same intensity), it generates output that is sent to whatever connects to it.
I think that the neurons in our brains have many more connections to other neurons than most artifical networks; common artificial neural networks are arranged in layers, which reduces the complexity significantly. Also, no one really knows what learning algorithm the brain is using, therefore even a perfect mechanical simulation at the neuron level might not act much like a real brain.
I`m from the u.k. though, so i may not know what i`m talking about re. usa law. but would have *have* to say anything to anyone?
The 5th amendment only prevents a person from being forced to testify against himself (or a spouse). You can be legally compelled to testify against someone else, or face the charge of contempt of court.
Albeit touchy, the question that comes to mind is if this book is worth discussing at all. From the review it is clear that the book is nothing much beyond a religious fairy tale with a thin layer of sci-fi (aliens). Apparently, what's "clear" is not necessarily true. While the book is obviously a "fairy tale" (what else are aliens, really?), it's not religious. And certainly not something you'd find on the average bookself of inspirational literature.
I dislike this article because of the length that he describes Mr. Hawking's condition. We never knew about Teddy Roosevelt's health while he was president, and it lead us to not question him because of something physical.
It's a human-interest story, and it's our flaws that identify us as human. Moreover, it is impossible to get even a glimmer of understanding of Hawking without confronting his disability, which has dictated most aspects of his life for the last thirty years. If you just want to know what Hawking thinks about physics and other weird bits of space and time, head down to your local university and read the physics journals. If you want to know the man himself, you have to see him in the wheelchair.
It seems clear that I2 will be closed to "general public" for some time, then I wonder how this could affect the life of those who (like me) are already out of campus life.
I think perhaps you misunderstand what I2 is. You're not alone: it's a FAQ: Internet2 is not a physical network that will replace the Internet. Rather, Internet2's goal is to bring together institutions and resources to develop new technologies and capabilities that can then be deployed in the global Internet. Universities will maintain, and continue to experience substantial growth in the use of, existing Internet connections, which they will still obtain from commercial providers.
The point is, anything available on Internet2 is available to everyone; the only difference is that when packets are sent inside I2, they're routed a bit differently. While I'm talking, here's my response (quoting again from the FAQ) to the accusation that the whole idea is elitist and intended to take back the Internet away from grubby corporate interests: A key goal of this effort is to accelerate the diffusion of advanced Internet technology, in particular into the commercial sector.
There is no conspiracy here to disenfranchise the non-academic user.
And with enough qbits, the problem of breaking a public-key goes from being exponentially hard to being soluble in polynomial time. Real, large-scale quantum computers could well kill public-key cryptography forever, forcing us to instead concentrate on secure systems for distributing private keys.
I've never felt the need before to respond to any of Katz's articles,even the ones that I've disagreed with, but the venom in this one has shocked me into needing to provide, if not an antitdote, some response.
First, and most simply, I think Katz is over-reacting. A software company has released a computer game. The designers and founders of the company wanted a game with overtly Christian themes, and, like all games, it is what its designers have made it. Now they've published, and they're hoping to attract an audience that's interested in entertainment with religious overtones.
Unfortunately, they've attracted Jon Katz, who seems to take all this as a personal attack. He writes, "Perhaps games like 'The War in Heaven' suggest some looming confrontation, an Armageddon-like battle out there in the digital ether for the collective souls of geeks." I can't fathom how he makes this leap. Eternal Warriors (the software company) hasn't done anything wrong: they haven't tried to suppress anyone else's work, they haven't said that everyone who doesn't buy their game is Devil-spawned, they haven't even said that playing _The War in Heaven_ will make you a better person than playing _Doom_ or _Quake_. (I'm sure Mr. Katz would have informed us had any these things even been hinted at.) Two guys have exercised their personal freedom to publish a game they'd like to play. Jon Katz has no right to make his accusations.
Also, the sentence quoted about refers to "the collective souls of geeks". This, and the strawman of the Massed, Single-Minded Force of Oppressive Religion that Katz so enjoys kicking, is such an dumb idea that no comment I could make can do it justice. As both a Christian and (how I hate this word) a "geek", I find it a loathsome simplification that has no place in any essay that can even pretend to be well thought-out.
It certainly is very positive; FreeBSD got 5 out of a possible 5 stars. Good -- FreeBSD deserves it. On the other hand, most of the platforms they've reviewed scored just as well. (The lowest performer, Novell NetWare, scored a mere 4 out of 5 stars.)
Worse, it's hard to take the "review" seriously; the author certainly didn't. It looks like he just flipped through a few web sites and summarized the conventional wisdom.
>Has there been any work on WINE and non-x86 processors? >I understand this is beyond the stated goals of WINE, but...
This was recently discussed on the wine development mailing list, when one of the active developers made a CPU emulator materialize out of thin air. Something like that brings non-x86's into the realm of possibility, but nowhere near practicality. Doing CPU emulation in addition to everything else is a tremendous burden. My guess is, don't look for non-intel Wine for a long time.
Winelib is a different story. It's intended to be much more portable. It serves a very different purpose than what you're hoping for, though.
Re:They might have a point, you know.
on
Quack!
·
· Score: 2
"I hate to say it, but kids are impressionable. When I came to school and stopped watching as much TV, I stopped talking like the TV talks. It's not hard to tell when someone has absorbed the TV-mind."
It ain't just kids...I decided I would have to give up _Beavis & Butthead_ when I realized that mine and my roommate's available supply of adjectives had dwindled to "cool" and "sucks". And this was my sophomore year of college...
(Don't get me wrong. _B&B_ was, at its best, hilarious. It's just... well, garbage in, garbage out, after all.)
This article is taking a subtly different stance than the one about movies: Then, the parent was actively approving her kids watching _South Park_. Here, Katz is saying that a kid not allowed to have his own TV is being repressed, even though that sort of thing tends to discourage active parenting.
Okay. Maybe it's not so subtle. I'm siding with active parenting on this one.
"Licht said about 60 trillion primary batteries are used each year. Both dry and alkaline batteries use manganese dioxide and zinc."
Huh. That's 30 new batteries, every day, for every man, woman, and child on the planet. I can't quite figure out what he's talking about, unless he's counting individual green plants as "primary batteries", since, after all, they do store up solar energy...
What caveats do you see that would keep us from moving towards a completely direct democracy?
We can't all be bothered to make educated decisions on every issue that the government has to deal with, while we can and should take the time to make informed decisions about who should represent us. Having elected representatives puts a layer of abstraction between us an the daily business of governing. Removing this layer would, I think, lead to a tyranny of special interests--mass voices with one overriding concern, incapable of compromise or reason.
These issues have been discussed in great detail in sci.math.research over the last few weeks. The final conclusion: lots of people continue to disagree with lots of other people. One of the best ideas that came out, in my opinion, is that the journal's real job is lending credibility to a paper. This purpose might be better served in the future by journals publishing reviews of articles available electronically, instead of the articles themselves. Of course, not every journal that's being published today could survive that way, but I don't think that's any real loss at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out Gilmore v Gonzales: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilmore_v._Gonzales
John Gilmore sued then-attorney general Alberto Gonzales in 2005, complaining (among other things) that when airport security refused to let him on a flight without showing ID, that no one would tell him which law made that a requirement. Because that law was a Secret.
He lost. As best I can tell, he lost without him or his lawyers ever getting to see the text of the law he was theoretically violating.
This is probably a garbled memory of Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. It is copyrighted, but you can indeed download it from Cory's website; it was released under a Creative Commons license.
(I liked it.)
I disagree. I'll quote someone else to make my opinion seem more important:
If you know the problem is in a snippet of code, you've already solved the problem.
The sun.* packages. You know, the ones that are intended to be used only internally, and aren't well-documented. You can review Sun's policy towards them at http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/faq/faq-sun-packa ges.html
I've also done some testing with other transcendental numbers, such as e (2.718281828...), and they all seem to show great randomness properties, in the information-theoretic sense at least. However, I have a feeling to "trust" Pi more than e, given that you can write e in form of continued fractions with repeating patterns, and nobody has yet found a pattern in the continued fractions of Pi.
There's nothing about transcendental numbers that makes their digits random; pi and e happen to be special. For instance, the first number proven to be transcendental was (some variation on) 0.101001000100001000001...; that sequence isn't random by any definition.
As for my pseudo-random library project, my programming skills are quite bad, but if you have some knowledge of scientific computing (multiplication algorithms using FFTs, for example), you can contact me and I might revive the idea.
I'd recommend to anyone interested in projects like this to look at George Marsaglia's page; his tester may help you avoid releasing crap. You can also search Usenet archives (i.e., Google) for some generator source code he's posted. Knuth also has a very detailed treatment of pseudo-random number generation in TAOCP vol. 2.
Thanks for the tip! I just won a TiVo.
The 5th amendment only prevents a person from being forced to testify against himself (or a spouse). You can be legally compelled to testify against someone else, or face the charge of contempt of court.
Albeit touchy, the question that comes to mind is if this book is worth discussing at all. From the review it is clear that the book is nothing much beyond a religious fairy tale with a thin layer of sci-fi (aliens).
Apparently, what's "clear" is not necessarily true. While the book is obviously a "fairy tale" (what else are aliens, really?), it's not religious. And certainly not something you'd find on the average bookself of inspirational literature.
I dislike this article because of the length that he describes Mr. Hawking's condition. We never knew about Teddy Roosevelt's health while he was president, and it lead us to not question him because of something physical.
It's a human-interest story, and it's our flaws that identify us as human. Moreover, it is impossible to get even a glimmer of understanding of Hawking without confronting his disability, which has dictated most aspects of his life for the last thirty years. If you just want to know what Hawking thinks about physics and other weird bits of space and time, head down to your local university and read the physics journals. If you want to know the man himself, you have to see him in the wheelchair.
I think perhaps you misunderstand what I2 is. You're not alone: it's a FAQ: Internet2 is not a physical network that will replace the Internet. Rather, Internet2's goal is to bring together institutions and resources to develop new technologies and capabilities that can then be deployed in the global Internet. Universities will maintain, and continue to experience substantial growth in the use of, existing Internet connections, which they will still obtain from commercial providers.
The point is, anything available on Internet2 is available to everyone; the only difference is that when packets are sent inside I2, they're routed a bit differently. While I'm talking, here's my response (quoting again from the FAQ) to the accusation that the whole idea is elitist and intended to take back the Internet away from grubby corporate interests: A key goal of this effort is to accelerate the diffusion of advanced Internet technology, in particular into the commercial sector.
There is no conspiracy here to disenfranchise the non-academic user.
And with enough qbits, the problem of breaking a public-key goes from being exponentially hard to being soluble in polynomial time. Real, large-scale quantum computers could well kill public-key cryptography forever, forcing us to instead concentrate on secure systems for distributing private keys.
I've never felt the need before to respond to any of Katz's articles,even the ones that I've disagreed with, but the venom in this one has shocked me into needing to provide, if not an antitdote, some response.
First, and most simply, I think Katz is over-reacting. A software company has released a computer game. The designers and founders of the company wanted a game with overtly Christian themes, and, like all games, it is what its designers have made it. Now they've published, and they're hoping to attract an audience that's interested in entertainment with
religious overtones.
Unfortunately, they've attracted Jon Katz, who seems to take all this as a personal attack. He writes, "Perhaps games like 'The War in Heaven' suggest some looming confrontation, an Armageddon-like battle out there in the digital ether for the collective souls of geeks." I can't fathom how he makes this leap. Eternal Warriors (the software company) hasn't done anything wrong: they haven't tried to suppress anyone else's work, they haven't said that everyone who doesn't buy their game is Devil-spawned, they haven't even said that playing _The War in Heaven_ will make you a better person than playing _Doom_ or _Quake_. (I'm sure Mr. Katz would have informed us had any these things even been hinted at.) Two guys have exercised their personal freedom to publish a game they'd like to play. Jon Katz has no right to make his accusations.
Also, the sentence quoted about refers to "the collective souls of geeks". This, and the strawman of the Massed, Single-Minded Force of Oppressive Religion that Katz so enjoys kicking, is such an dumb idea that no comment I could make can do it justice. As both a Christian and (how I hate this word) a "geek", I find it a loathsome simplification that has no place in any essay that can even pretend to be well thought-out.
It certainly is very positive; FreeBSD got 5 out of a possible 5 stars. Good -- FreeBSD deserves it. On the other hand, most of the platforms they've reviewed scored just as well. (The lowest performer, Novell NetWare, scored a mere 4 out of 5 stars.)
Worse, it's hard to take the "review" seriously; the author certainly didn't. It looks like he just flipped through a few web sites and summarized the conventional wisdom.
>Has there been any work on WINE and non-x86 processors?
>I understand this is beyond the stated goals of WINE, but...
This was recently discussed on the wine development mailing list, when one of the active developers made a CPU emulator materialize out of thin air. Something like that brings non-x86's into the realm of possibility, but nowhere near practicality. Doing CPU emulation in addition to everything else is a tremendous burden. My guess is, don't look for non-intel Wine for a long time.
Winelib is a different story. It's intended to be much more portable. It serves a very different purpose than what you're hoping for, though.
"I hate to say it, but kids are impressionable. When I came to school and stopped watching as much TV, I stopped talking like the TV talks. It's not hard to tell when someone has absorbed the TV-mind."
... well, garbage in, garbage out, after all.)
It ain't just kids...I decided I would have to give up _Beavis & Butthead_ when I realized that mine and my roommate's available supply of adjectives had dwindled to "cool" and "sucks". And this was my sophomore year of college...
(Don't get me wrong. _B&B_ was, at its best, hilarious. It's just
This article is taking a subtly different stance than the one about movies: Then, the parent was actively approving her kids watching _South Park_. Here, Katz is saying that a kid not allowed to have his own TV is being repressed, even though that sort of thing tends to discourage active parenting.
Okay. Maybe it's not so subtle. I'm siding with active parenting on this one.
But another, more accurate thought is that the US Postal service is a branch of the federal govenment. See www.usps.gov . Note the .gov in the address.
"Licht said about 60 trillion primary batteries are used each year. Both dry and alkaline batteries use manganese dioxide and zinc."
...
Huh. That's 30 new batteries, every day, for every man, woman, and child on the planet. I can't quite figure out what he's talking about, unless he's counting individual green plants as "primary batteries", since, after all, they do store up solar energy
What caveats do you see that would keep us from moving towards a completely direct democracy?
We can't all be bothered to make educated decisions on every issue that the government has to deal with, while we can and should take the time to make informed decisions about who should represent us. Having elected representatives puts a layer of abstraction between us an the daily business of governing. Removing this layer would, I think, lead to a tyranny of special interests--mass voices with one overriding concern, incapable of compromise or reason.
These issues have been discussed in great detail in sci.math.research over the last few weeks. The final conclusion: lots of people continue to disagree with lots of other people. One of the best ideas that came out, in my opinion, is that the journal's real job is lending credibility to a paper. This purpose might be better served in the future by journals publishing reviews of articles available electronically, instead of the articles themselves. Of course, not every journal that's being published today could survive that way, but I don't think that's any real loss at all.
It requires a 3d accelerator card to run. Don't bother getting it if you don't have one.
There's no link from the article, but it's talking about this .