When a search asks for, say, "cheese fondue" the array for "cheese" and the array for "fondue" are retrieved and merged using a sorted list merge (fast, since the arrays are already ordered). The result is a list of document id's that were in both lists, i.e. documents containing both words.
That would work ok, except that the process of updating the lists would be very expensive. Indexing every word in the interenet would be trivial, but keeping the addresses for those words in sorted order would be extremely non-trivial.
Imagine the word 'test' for example. You gotta believe that 'test' is on about a hundred million web pages, with more being added each day. That's one hundred million sorted addresses- probably taking up more than 800 disk blocks (100,000,000 / 4096 bytes block / ~30 bytes address). Every time you add a new page with the word 'test' (or take one away), you have to update the list. That's a lot of disk block rearranging. Now multiply this by all the words on the web and you can see what a huge amount of rewriting has to be done. I don't think linear address lists would cut it.
Now they could have some kind of funky indexing scheme for all the addresses. But its still freakin expensive to update them all. The article mentioned they update every 28 days. Does this mean they stop everything every 28 days to update- or does it mean that it takes 28 days to do an update? Regardless, this could mean that Google is always 28 days out of date. Another search engine that beat this number could potentially compete by saying they are more up to date.
You have to imagine that as the internet grows larger, that this is going to get even more time consuming.
I'm not sure I understand where the threat lies for Gates & Co. Why is he so afraid of the GPL. It doesn't hurt him. Or could it be that he wants to starve the GPL or legally destroy it because some of the MS code, unknown to us, actually contains GPL code? Hmmmm...
How would that be different from someone saying that you couldn't feed their page through a translator? Both systems would be an end-user activity that adds value, in the user's mind, to the information already present in the website. If they want to be able to click on every occurrence of the word "grits," then, well, that's up to them.
Its different because when you send a page through a translator, you get to choose the language you translate it into. In this case, Microsoft dictates where the links go- not you. Or, even if it is possible for you to modify it- they know that most of their customers will not be savvy enough to do that.
This smacks of the "frog in boiling water syndrome" If you throw a frog into boiling water, it will jump out. But if you put a frog in cold water and slowly bring it to a boil, it will cook to death. Yes, this "feature" is not total control over users. But Microsoft wants to get people used to the idea that their browser will put hooks (pun intended) into their web pages. Once that becomes acceptable, they can slowly impose more and more types of redirection toward their own information. Since we accepted the first, there will only be a slight adjustement to the second, third, etc.
Of course with every new imposition...er... feature, there will be critics who decry it, but for the most part, the attitude will be, "yeah so what, its only a little thing, and you can opt out."
Eventually of course, Microsoft will dominate the information most people recieve via their web browser- but we will be used to it by then and there will be little we can do to change it. Of course, if you moved to East Elbonia for five years and came back, you would be shocked at the level of control they have. Complaining, you would recieve only annoyed stares from the other people who would wonder what you were so uptight about.
What disturbes me about The Animal more than the fake review is the implied beastiality in the preview. Could we please not show a man wanting to hump a goat on a commercial during kid shows? Talk about low standards.
I noticed that a lot of the product placement ads were digitial REMOVED
Hey, now all we need is some home set-top box that will digitally remove all ads and product placements. Update the thing with the latest logos and have it search and destroy on a frame by frame basis. Even replace the ads with logos that you choose - like pictures of your family or scanned in wacky packages.
People now can become completely disconnected from reality because there is always a 'news' publisher/broadcaster who is willing to cater to the whims ofthat customer.[snip] where previously we only had the option to choose rose colored glasses, or not.
That's a bit pessimistic. I like the greater access. I take it upon myself to read many more sources for my news so I can get a broader understanding. Especially I like to read foreign newspapers online. Like the Times of India or Inside China Today or the BBC or Pravda. For those of us who were tired of the same old sources, its a real revolution in current events knowledge. All these are in English. It's awsome. For more check out Yahoo's list of foreign papers.
Now the population at large has the 'opportunity' to suffer from what the Romans called the Imperial Diease, the condition of becoming acustomed to having every desire fulfilled, every whim satisfied and every gross pleasure gratified.
As with anything, there will be abuses and I agree with you that many will take that road. But I think the trade off of having more perspectives is worth it.
The only viable system is to take away between 25% and 75% of every person's income and redistribute it. The U.S., right now, is going with a figure of something like 45%, I believe. Yet we still call ourselves "capitalist". Ha.
"Redistribute" is a little heavy to describe what goes on. The taxes you pay supposedly benefit the society as a whole- defense, roads, schools, gov. services, welfare, etc.
Its not like the government is trying to give the money to your next door neighbor because he makes 10 grand less than you. Sure, some poorer people end up getting your money more directly but I believe these programs only constitute about 6% of the federal budget.
Your point about pure Capitalism is well taken however. It definately needs curtailed or it will harm society (as has been proven in the past).
Oh, yeah, and uhhh....Linus is cool. Long live Linus (see I stayed on topic).
My biggest complaint about Hollywood is that they don't seem to understand the difference between Hackers and Crackers. Oh well. When I tell people I decrypt DVDs, they usually look at me like I'm going to kill them
Look, why don't we just stop using the term Hacker to refer to hackers? Let's just surrender. We lost, they won. Hacker and cracker are synonymous in the mind of the public. Let's just give up the term and come up with another one. Like Dekkers (short for decryptors) or Exters (Gen-X elite extractors of information) or Pekkers (positive ex... er, ok maybe not that one).
If we are part of nature, then how can anything we do be unnatural. Beyond the childish anthomorphication of an abstract idea, the very phrase "unnatural" is an impossibility. (Unless you say we *aren't* part of nature, at which point you forfit the arguement that we can't shape the world as we desire).
So if an evil person rapes your wife and shoots you then that is the natural thing to do. Oh, sorry, I shouldn't have said evil since it was just "nature". This whole argument works fine until YOU are affected by it.
Once again the same Modernist claptrap that has caused "scientists" to experiment with radiation on retarded children, not treating people with diseases to record the results, etc. etc. etc.
Just like all actions, it will hurt and help depending on what viewpoint you are taking at the moment
Sorry, you can't use words like help or hurt. There is no such thing. There is only nature. Come on, stop limiting yourself with childish abstractions such as good and evil, help and hurt. Go all the way and say evil and good are the same neutral natural thing.
Religion is the single most dangerous invention of mankind, and it serves only to comfort those simple enough to believe in it.
You know, plenty of evil has been done in the name of Atheism too (just ask Mao and Stalin and Pot). The problem isn't religion, its us. Religion just becomes the excuse- the same as atheism is the excuse for communist kill-fests.
They will pull out their unarguable trump: It appears that way because God created it that way.
I've always been a little perturbed as to why the battle over evolution is quite so intense for those who believe in God or not. There seems to be this pervasive view on both sides that if evolution is true then God must somehow not exist. A leap of faith which cannot be reconciled from the facts.
Just because evolution is true does not indicate the non-existense of a creator who may have set the entire thing in motion. In fact, to my mind, it speaks of an incredibly sophisticated and intelligent God rather than the more "magic" God of the creationists. One may recall that Einstein himself came to believe in God after reflecting on the simplicity of the equations that define the universe.
Evolution can describe the mechanism, but there is still plenty of room for discussion as to why the mechanism is there and what its purpose is.
One day someone figured out that packet sniffers can be used on the network to see other people's POPmail passwords and AIM conversations, as well as whatever websites they are at. It is genuinely disturbing. However, I am terrified of telling our administration about this because of a kill-the-messenger syndrome.
Why not just send the message anonymously via the administrations' own mail accounts? That would get their attention.
Since the genetic material was taken from a person, that person could state that they legally own the clone. Obviously legal battles would ensue over this, but if they went the way of clone ownership by the originator of the material (or worse, the company that did the deed) then there would be nothing to prevent the "abuses". Except it wouldn't be called abuse because it would be legally OK to create a genetic copy of yourself and harvest its organs or make it your slave, etc.
In our current moral climate, whatever you can get through the courts becomes morality. There is less of an idea of a morality external to ourselves to appeal to. People that stand to gain from cloning may indeed put their resources into fashioning the law to their own ends. And there will be little moral outcry, since appeals to a universal morality are passe.
If there is one thing I have learned about this universe, its that it abhors a sensical regimen. Nature never seems to want to play by the rules of exactness anyway.
Notice how nature uses spheres for the planets, but they are not perfectly in round. Weather patterns stay within limits, but are not predictable. People are kinda symetrical but not pefectly. In the mandlebrotz set, the forms are all similar but never exactly alike. There seems to be a principle at work where perfection is hinted at but never arrived at.
So its ok if our calendars are a little wacky. It just stands to reason in the current wacky universe we live in. Maybe God just figured that pefection would be too boring. I say go with it.
but I think it'll be a cold day in Hell before you see every record label willing to work with Napster
Not if they see BMG making huge amounts of money off it. No greed ridden corporate exec in their right mind would hold off joining a program on principle when there is money to be made.
Where's the value that Napster will provide to subscription-paying users, beyond what they will be able to get through other, illicit channels like Gnutella, IRC, and other free media? Why should I pay for their "service" instead of finding music for free elsewhere?
How about-
Knowing your money is going to the artist (yes- i know- BMG gets a cut, but its better than zip)
Knowing that you are not stealing. Morality is a good thing...
Getting good quality recordings instead of problematic ones.
Even though we cannot instantly transmit information using quantum entanglement, transmitting randomness is still very useful.
[snip]
Note that in quantum encryption, we are transmitting the code instantly. The actual message will arrive much more slowly -- at only the speed of light.
Why can't we transmit information this way? If by observing or altering the particle at my end, it causes the particle at the other end to be altered, I can send a message easily. I believe the experiment you refer to did just that. A change was made on the one particle which was recognized in the other particle. I could be wrong here- feel free to point that out. But I believe in essense the idea is that by touching one particle in some way, it nescessitates that the other particle was always conjoined to the first and so a message could in fact be passed.
If this is true, one could decide on a predefined syncronization series of changed particles within the background radiation of the universe (like a kind of modem sync). I could change a whole buncha particles and you could look at a whole buncha particles for the signal. Hopefully some of the particles you look at would be paired with some I changed. Once syncronized, we could send messages.
If this was possible you would even be able to send messages across vast interstellar distances (once you had the sync scheme). Maybe alien races already communicate this way:-) Nah, there's probably not enough paired particles from the big bang in sufficient quantities in the two seperate places. No free lunch and that kind of thing- but it might be theoritically possible.
Again, I'm way outa my league here, so feel free to point out if I misunderstood the experiment. I just think its a fun speculation.
So don't EVEN start to tell me that Atheists, Agnostics, and Humanists enjoy the same protection as everyone else in the US.
Umm, last time I checked, only religious people were having trouble using civic auditoriums. Frankly, the entire public school system already teaches humanism. Or at least it is areligious. Not that I care, but your point is rediculous.
But if you want religious rights for atheism, go for it. For by doing so you actually admit the truth- that Atheism is in fact a faith based religious viewpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
That would work ok, except that the process of updating the lists would be very expensive. Indexing every word in the interenet would be trivial, but keeping the addresses for those words in sorted order would be extremely non-trivial.
Imagine the word 'test' for example. You gotta believe that 'test' is on about a hundred million web pages, with more being added each day. That's one hundred million sorted addresses- probably taking up more than 800 disk blocks (100,000,000 / 4096 bytes block / ~30 bytes address). Every time you add a new page with the word 'test' (or take one away), you have to update the list. That's a lot of disk block rearranging. Now multiply this by all the words on the web and you can see what a huge amount of rewriting has to be done. I don't think linear address lists would cut it.
Now they could have some kind of funky indexing scheme for all the addresses. But its still freakin expensive to update them all. The article mentioned they update every 28 days. Does this mean they stop everything every 28 days to update- or does it mean that it takes 28 days to do an update? Regardless, this could mean that Google is always 28 days out of date. Another search engine that beat this number could potentially compete by saying they are more up to date.
You have to imagine that as the internet grows larger, that this is going to get even more time consuming.
I'm not sure I understand where the threat lies for Gates & Co. Why is he so afraid of the GPL. It doesn't hurt him. Or could it be that he wants to starve the GPL or legally destroy it because some of the MS code, unknown to us, actually contains GPL code? Hmmmm...
Its different because when you send a page through a translator, you get to choose the language you translate it into. In this case, Microsoft dictates where the links go- not you. Or, even if it is possible for you to modify it- they know that most of their customers will not be savvy enough to do that.
This smacks of the "frog in boiling water syndrome" If you throw a frog into boiling water, it will jump out. But if you put a frog in cold water and slowly bring it to a boil, it will cook to death. Yes, this "feature" is not total control over users. But Microsoft wants to get people used to the idea that their browser will put hooks (pun intended) into their web pages. Once that becomes acceptable, they can slowly impose more and more types of redirection toward their own information. Since we accepted the first, there will only be a slight adjustement to the second, third, etc.
Of course with every new imposition...er... feature, there will be critics who decry it, but for the most part, the attitude will be, "yeah so what, its only a little thing, and you can opt out."
Eventually of course, Microsoft will dominate the information most people recieve via their web browser- but we will be used to it by then and there will be little we can do to change it. Of course, if you moved to East Elbonia for five years and came back, you would be shocked at the level of control they have. Complaining, you would recieve only annoyed stares from the other people who would wonder what you were so uptight about.
What disturbes me about The Animal more than the fake review is the implied beastiality in the preview. Could we please not show a man wanting to hump a goat on a commercial during kid shows? Talk about low standards.
Hey, now all we need is some home set-top box that will digitally remove all ads and product placements. Update the thing with the latest logos and have it search and destroy on a frame by frame basis. Even replace the ads with logos that you choose - like pictures of your family or scanned in wacky packages.
That's a bit pessimistic. I like the greater access. I take it upon myself to read many more sources for my news so I can get a broader understanding. Especially I like to read foreign newspapers online. Like the Times of India or Inside China Today or the BBC or Pravda. For those of us who were tired of the same old sources, its a real revolution in current events knowledge. All these are in English. It's awsome. For more check out Yahoo's list of foreign papers.
Now the population at large has the 'opportunity' to suffer from what the Romans called the Imperial Diease, the condition of becoming acustomed to having every desire fulfilled, every whim satisfied and every gross pleasure gratified.
As with anything, there will be abuses and I agree with you that many will take that road. But I think the trade off of having more perspectives is worth it.
"Redistribute" is a little heavy to describe what goes on. The taxes you pay supposedly benefit the society as a whole- defense, roads, schools, gov. services, welfare, etc.
Its not like the government is trying to give the money to your next door neighbor because he makes 10 grand less than you. Sure, some poorer people end up getting your money more directly but I believe these programs only constitute about 6% of the federal budget.
Your point about pure Capitalism is well taken however. It definately needs curtailed or it will harm society (as has been proven in the past).
Oh, yeah, and uhhh....Linus is cool. Long live Linus (see I stayed on topic).
They did. This was a main story on NPR this morning (27th).
Look, why don't we just stop using the term Hacker to refer to hackers? Let's just surrender. We lost, they won. Hacker and cracker are synonymous in the mind of the public. Let's just give up the term and come up with another one. Like Dekkers (short for decryptors) or Exters (Gen-X elite extractors of information) or Pekkers (positive ex... er, ok maybe not that one).
So if an evil person rapes your wife and shoots you then that is the natural thing to do. Oh, sorry, I shouldn't have said evil since it was just "nature". This whole argument works fine until YOU are affected by it.
Once again the same Modernist claptrap that has caused "scientists" to experiment with radiation on retarded children, not treating people with diseases to record the results, etc. etc. etc.
Just like all actions, it will hurt and help depending on what viewpoint you are taking at the moment
Sorry, you can't use words like help or hurt. There is no such thing. There is only nature. Come on, stop limiting yourself with childish abstractions such as good and evil, help and hurt. Go all the way and say evil and good are the same neutral natural thing.
You know, plenty of evil has been done in the name of Atheism too (just ask Mao and Stalin and Pot). The problem isn't religion, its us. Religion just becomes the excuse- the same as atheism is the excuse for communist kill-fests.
I've always been a little perturbed as to why the battle over evolution is quite so intense for those who believe in God or not. There seems to be this pervasive view on both sides that if evolution is true then God must somehow not exist. A leap of faith which cannot be reconciled from the facts.
Just because evolution is true does not indicate the non-existense of a creator who may have set the entire thing in motion. In fact, to my mind, it speaks of an incredibly sophisticated and intelligent God rather than the more "magic" God of the creationists. One may recall that Einstein himself came to believe in God after reflecting on the simplicity of the equations that define the universe.
Evolution can describe the mechanism, but there is still plenty of room for discussion as to why the mechanism is there and what its purpose is.
If you manage it right, you can get money for Work. Few people get to eat as a result of game playing. :-)
All right! Since the article says they will be commercially available in two years, that means we will have them in only 6 months :-)
Why not just send the message anonymously via the administrations' own mail accounts? That would get their attention.
Hey I wrote XINU back in college. Seriously we had to write the XINU operating system in my OS design class.
Since the genetic material was taken from a person, that person could state that they legally own the clone. Obviously legal battles would ensue over this, but if they went the way of clone ownership by the originator of the material (or worse, the company that did the deed) then there would be nothing to prevent the "abuses". Except it wouldn't be called abuse because it would be legally OK to create a genetic copy of yourself and harvest its organs or make it your slave, etc.
In our current moral climate, whatever you can get through the courts becomes morality. There is less of an idea of a morality external to ourselves to appeal to. People that stand to gain from cloning may indeed put their resources into fashioning the law to their own ends. And there will be little moral outcry, since appeals to a universal morality are passe.
That is just one of the dangers.
My comment...Why bother.
If there is one thing I have learned about this universe, its that it abhors a sensical regimen. Nature never seems to want to play by the rules of exactness anyway.
Notice how nature uses spheres for the planets, but they are not perfectly in round. Weather patterns stay within limits, but are not predictable. People are kinda symetrical but not pefectly. In the mandlebrotz set, the forms are all similar but never exactly alike. There seems to be a principle at work where perfection is hinted at but never arrived at.
So its ok if our calendars are a little wacky. It just stands to reason in the current wacky universe we live in. Maybe God just figured that pefection would be too boring. I say go with it.
Just saw this news post on Zophar's about a guy running Linux on his Dreamcast
Would that only the opposite were true :-)
A communications breakdown can only mean one thing...
Invasion!
What if I just duplicated the entire Slashdot site and posted it without ads? Does that answer your question? Idiots.
but I think it'll be a cold day in Hell before you see every record label willing to work with Napster
Not if they see BMG making huge amounts of money off it. No greed ridden corporate exec in their right mind would hold off joining a program on principle when there is money to be made.
How about-
That's a few right there. Works for me.
Even though we cannot instantly transmit information using quantum entanglement, transmitting randomness is still very useful.
[snip]
Note that in quantum encryption, we are transmitting the code instantly. The actual message will arrive much more slowly -- at only the speed of light.
Why can't we transmit information this way? If by observing or altering the particle at my end, it causes the particle at the other end to be altered, I can send a message easily. I believe the experiment you refer to did just that. A change was made on the one particle which was recognized in the other particle. I could be wrong here- feel free to point that out. But I believe in essense the idea is that by touching one particle in some way, it nescessitates that the other particle was always conjoined to the first and so a message could in fact be passed.
If this is true, one could decide on a predefined syncronization series of changed particles within the background radiation of the universe (like a kind of modem sync). I could change a whole buncha particles and you could look at a whole buncha particles for the signal. Hopefully some of the particles you look at would be paired with some I changed. Once syncronized, we could send messages.
If this was possible you would even be able to send messages across vast interstellar distances (once you had the sync scheme). Maybe alien races already communicate this way :-) Nah, there's probably not enough paired particles from the big bang in sufficient quantities in the two seperate places. No free lunch and that kind of thing- but it might be theoritically possible.
Again, I'm way outa my league here, so feel free to point out if I misunderstood the experiment. I just think its a fun speculation.
Umm, last time I checked, only religious people were having trouble using civic auditoriums. Frankly, the entire public school system already teaches humanism. Or at least it is areligious. Not that I care, but your point is rediculous.
But if you want religious rights for atheism, go for it. For by doing so you actually admit the truth- that Atheism is in fact a faith based religious viewpoint.