I really wish people would get over their pathological (and I mean that literally in the psychological sense) terror of radioactive materials. Even if this rocket had contained radioactive materials, it is highly unlikely that they would do any significant harm to anyone, because it would either be dispersed more or less harmlessly, or come down in one lump not likely to be near anybody in Texas. Either way, radioactive substances are just dangerous substance, which the space shuttle is already full of, not a malevolent entity intent upon destroying all life. It's not even the most dangerous substance around, it's somewhere in the middle. (There are a lot of things more directly toxic then radioactivity; people die from many of them like "ethelyne glycol" every day.)
If there's one thing I hate science fiction for (albiet not always the good stuff), it's for training people that radioactivity is thousands of times more dangerous then it actually is. (Try explaining to some non-science type people around the concept of "background radiation", and watch them either totally disbelieve you because they think it would kill them if it really existed, or proceed to start panicking. Seen both of these personally.) Our brainless, scientifically incompetent media (ever seen the science requirements for a Journalism degree at a University?) only reinforces this ignorance.
A lot of VMs already exist, even if you don't always see them. Anything that "compiles" to anything other then direct machine code is already running on some virtual machine.
I believe current Perl already does this, just completely internally. IIRC, OCaml does this, along with the option of compiling to a "true" executable. Python compiles to a Python virtual machine; the ".pyc" files are the virtual bytecode for that machine and are cross-platform; any Python 2.1.pyc will work on any other Python 2.1 install. In addition, Jython will take Python code and convert it to JVM code.
VMs aren't that hard to build, as evidenced by the profusion of them. Standardizing on one has strong implications for the kind of language that can be run on top of it; witness the recent disappointment in the dynamic language community with some of the.NET decisions, which would have hampered the execution speed of those languages. (Which I believe Microsoft wants to fix.)
In fact, building a VM is often the best solution anyhow, as it give you a controllable layer for optimization, a controlled abstraction, and relatively easy cross-platform building. And for a skilled programmer already working with parsing and compiling some language, it's not that much extra effort to build overall.
VMs seem to me to be like programming languages; they aren't that hard to make. What's hard is making a really good one, and what's even harder is making one that everyone likes, which may not even be possible since I still here people bitching about RISC vs. CISC, despite the fact that the debate is nearly moot on modern processors. At the very least, true standardization into "One True Virtual Machine" is very, very premature; what I believe is that it's as bad an idea as trying to standardize into "One True Language", with almost a one-to-one correspondence for the reasons why they are a bad idea, and it should not happen ever.
(Which of course should not be confused with saying that any given VM should not standardize; that's obviously OK.)
Just for the record, the "correct answer" to your conundrum is to get the widget writers on board with the testing stuff. They need to add methods for testing, things that might expose inner details (readonly) about the widgets and other things that technically violate OO principles, so that testing can be done.
Other things such as matching pieces of the picture and such would also be nice.
It'll never be easy to test a GUI, but right now GUI widgets are almost entirely focused on giving commands and limit the information you can extract back from them to screen position, size, and little else. I want to be able to assert that my textbox can handle text of the size 50Ms with all of it being visible, which is exactly the sort of thing a user requirement might be. (Indeed, I think of this example because of a text dialog I just dealt with for entering a Wireless access key that was two chars too short; if you're that close, why not go for the gusto and let me see the whole thing for visual verification of correctness?) In fact you can do some of this in some widget sets; Tk will let you do that exact test, for instance. But it's haphazard from a testing point of view, because it wasn't implemented for testing.
The other thing we need is a way of inserting all user-sourced events cleanly, and in a well-documented and supported manner, directly into the event loop as if they came from the user, indistinguishable from user input to the rest of the application. Again, haphazard, poorly-supported and poorly-documented abilities to do this exist in some toolkits, but since it's not meant for testing it's often not complete or completely undocumented.
I hear what you're saying, but I'd guess it more likely to be known as The Corporate Decade.
Two reasons. One, the "Me" decade was already here, the 80's. Two, the "Me" decade was called that because a whole lot of people were quite selfish and materialistic, which seemed odd at the time but now we're more used to it. The "Mine" decade doesn't work so much because it isn't a whole lot of people being grabby, it's just a small bunch of insatiable corporations and their leaders being unimaginably grabby.
Re:It's the same as any other software
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Copyright Rumblings
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· Score: 2, Informative
The authors are indeed every single person who contributed to the code. That's why it's nearly impossible to re-license any open source project after a few people have worked on it, because you need to get permission from every single person who worked on it, or remove their code. c.f. Mozilla's dual-licensing efforts.
If a piece of software is continually updated, the copyright for that incarnation will be as well. This should make sense. If you go back X years (where X is the copyright expiration) and download a copy that is exactly as it was then, then that is in the public domain, even if elements of it survive unchanged in the current version.
Basically, the rules are straightforward, it's just that some actions (like relicensing) because prohibitively expensive because they require too much agreement from people that you may not even be able to find again.
Another thing you need to remember that hasn't been pointed out yet is that while the forces do indeed propogate upwards, they disperse. They don't maintain their strength in the way I'm almost certain you're imagining, they get weaker and weaker, until quite rapidly they are simply swamped by simple friction and other electromagnetic effects and get absorbed into the system as incredibly tiny amounts of heat.
This is why when you jump on the ground, nobody on the opposite side of the planet suddenly feels a bump. The forces disperse to effective nonexistance (since they can't be conceivably detected anymore). Even really really large bumbs like Richter 7.5 earthquakes require very sensitive devices to detect them after a few hundred miles.
The DMCA partially protects Google in their caching. I say "partially" because a close reading of the bill shows that it is debatable whether or not they qualify for the caching provisions, but after a while they should have a certain amount of de facto protection, I would hope.
In addition to their compliance with the DMCA notification, they also provide a help page and automated removal system for the desparate. (See the last section of the page for the DMCA notification instructions, which involve physical letters and legal affirmation of ownership.)
Note that this is the "good" provision of the DMCA, preventing people from being liable for content they merely cache, not actively provide.
Since in this country the military isn't above the law, they'd still have a hard time finding something illegal that Google did. They don't have the luxury of simply not liking someone, like in some countries. If they don't want to be cached, the law says it is their obligation to opt-out, not Google's.
I'm sorry, but his style could be a lot of things, but fast-paced it was not, or I wouldn't still be wondering when the story is going to start on page 100.
I made it to about 400. I was still waiting for the story to start.
I don't know about you (literally), but I've got a degree in computer science and I found the anecdotes and random, pointless explanations of things like the Halting problem (which ties into the story in no way that I could see) actively boring, since I knew it well enough to spot the occaisional typo. (To be fair, it seemed largely accurate and I do believe they were typos, not mistakes. Although it's exactly the kind of explanation that leaves a 16 year old reader thinking he actually knows something about the Halting problem and other explicated topics when in reality they couldn't answer the simplest homework problem in a real cirriculum about them, let alone actually use the information correctly.) Subtract those and you're left with almost nothing that even a Slashdot reader could like; a slow boring story, taking forever to get there, and when it finally gets there, nothing happens.
One of the other messages in this thread defends this as "The rambling is the whole POINT. Kind of like if you're driving through really interesting scenery, you might not care about getting to your destination quickly." OK, but the scenery in question is an Iowa cornfield, not a Colorado mountain range. And you're doing 10mph or so, tops. I'll wade through long books; I liked A Deepness in the Sky despite needing about 200 pages chopped out of the middle and heck, I even thought Battlefield Earth was a decent romp (though no classic) for its time at 1000 pages... but they actually did something memorable. 400 pages of Cryptonomicon and I was hardpressed to come up with one interesting thing that had happened; contrast to A Deepness in the Sky where something worth remembering happens every 50 pages or so and despite the fact that I read it years ago, and Cryptonomicon last month, I remember A Deepness In the Sky much more vividly.
Actually, that performance was in Windows with the 3DMax 2001 benchmark; I have little confidence that vast improvements can be made on that number with a driver change, no matter what the OS is.:-(
Forgot to mention, yes, I did read the article. And frankly, I have no confidence in this chip as a desktop component, and S3 is once again fooling itself. I think the odds are about 1 that this will end up in cheap laptops, just like the Savage chips only significant showing is in laptops.
(It might end up in cheap crap Via motherboards, but only an idiot buys a desktop motherboard made by Via, no matter how cheap, as I've learned from repeated harsh experience.)
Rest assured that it will be better then the current state-of-the-art of low-end S3 laptop chips (talk about oxymoronic...). I have a Via TwisterK with the current S3 chip, and the only regret I have for buying such a low-level laptop is that the 3D performance on this 1 GHz Duron is roughly equivalent to a Voodoo I. (Otherwise I've been happy with it because I didn't buy it for 3D performance, I bought it because even the crappiest laptop on the market today is still a kick-ass portable Linux machine.)
There seems to be two different types of CS students, the one you name and the hackers. Quoted:
Contrary to stereotype, hackers are
not usually intellectually narrow; they tend to be interested in any subject that can provide mental stimulation, and can often discourse knowledgeably and even interestingly on any number of obscure subjects -- if you can get them to talk at all, as opposed to, say, going back to their hacking.
It is noticeable (and contrary to many outsiders' expectations) that the better a hacker is at hacking, the more likely he or she is to have outside interests at which he or she is more than merely competent.
That's me, and a few others I know. Sometimes it seems the split is fairly strong, though it's hard to know.
The TV show Alias set up a Followers of Rambaldi fake site, which I've seen but may not be working now. (Much info is on this fan site.) Also in alias they once mentioned an IP address directly, and while I couldn't determine what that computer was (legally;-) ) because it wasn't running any obvious services, it did exist, which makes me wonder if it was deliberate or if the show's author's didn't consider that a randomly selected IP address stands a pretty good chance of existing now-a-days.
And I once located the source information for a quick display on the Egyptian god Seth used on Daniel Jackson's screen in Stargate: SG-1. It was actually from a wierd site that I assume is info for a role-playing game, though it gave no hint that the site didn't really believe it and it's sometimes hard to tell... I often wonder if the web site was told what use their text was put to.
Pretty much any micropayment system you can think of can be implemented, fairly cheaply, today.
The problem is getting people to use them. It's a social problem, one that must be combatted with user-friendly engineering, a compelling design (not technical design of the servers and stuff which like I said is really easy, but a design for how to use it, both on the surfer and content provider side), and a large enough advertising budget to cause a massive shift in attitudes about online content.
The tech is effectively irrelevant until those hurdles can be jumped.
Re:Chemistry is fun-damental
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Uncle Tungsten
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· Score: 3, Insightful
No, computer science is fundamental! Reality is just computation on the lowest level! That's why quantum computers are so cool, we can harness this computation in the most direct manner possible! Didn't you read "A New Kind of Science"?*
"Every significant scientific discipline will find a way to cast itself as the most fundamental discipline in the universe." Somebody-or-other's rule, not mine. Even the English/Sociology folks got into the game with Post-Modernism.
Actually, every time you write a proof and somewhere along the way, you switch the order of the operands for some addition or multiplication, you are using commutivity. So a whole fucking lot of proofs end up using it, even if they don't specify it directly. Same for associativity.
Nor are these "trivial" uses, either; if you couldn't use commutivity as part of the equation re-writing process, many very common transforms become impossible... even the simple act of dividing "3x+2" out of an equation becomes difficult to set up if you can't re-order anything. (Remember that if you have x * 3 and you don't know multiplication is communitive, you can't rewrite that as 3*x, and thus you couldn't use that as part of 3x+2.)
In fact one would be hard pressed to find a non-trivial proof where commutivity isn't used implicitly, and you may find it very challenging (possibly even beyond your skill or downright impossible) to correctly re-write the proof without using commutivity.
(I speak in this post of "traditional" math, such as a normal person sees in school, somewhere up through low-level Calc. As others have pointed out, as you get higher into math, you encounter number and symbol systems where communitivity does not always hold. You typically meet one, "Matrix Math", in high school.)
This is a real problem, which affects other areas of research as well, e.g. AI.There is a pseudo-religious, notably unscientific meme that basically says,...
While I won't deny that is part of it, that is not the whole story, especially when it comes to AI. There is also "Well, hmmm, we did that and it wasn't half as good as we thought it would be. That's not truly thought."
Same for animals; the fact is these "researchers" won't ever win because we are what we are, and we are the only ones we are. No matter how many parlor tricks a chimp or ape may learn, they still aren't as good as humans, or they would effectively be humans. Same for dolphins and everything else.
The primate researchers need to be realistic and realize they are never going to convince anybody that the other primates are just as smart as us, because they aren't. If they were there would be little or no debate. I assume that's the "bar" the person in the article was bitching about, because it's the only one I can think of and the only one they might get frustrated over.
(It's worth pointing out that at least part of the reason dolphins will never outsmart us anytime soon without our help is their bodies. Bodies are intricately tied to intelligence; without the ability to manipulate their environment easily in significant ways, plus being in a technilogically hostile environment, an ocean-born dolphin could have twice our brainpower in some theoretical sense and still not stand a chance in any practical intelligence test. Change their bodies without changing their brains significantly, to the extent that makes sense biologically (it's not like there are "brain" genes per se), and the matters may change a bit. Brains aren't enough. The other primates face disadvantages in this arena too, though they are not as pronounced. There's a bit of a catch-22; the brainpower (mostly through a larger head, apparently) to use the enhanced body need to develop roughly at the same time. Neither are necessarily useful on their own; an input-starved brain will turn its neurons to other tasks, where, say, an opposable thumb without a brain to effectively use it is also useless. This is somewhat simplified.)
With all due respect, if you "tend to not read [Space Navy]" and go mostly for near-future stories, you're not in a position to talk about what's in "many books". I know non-human aliens exist; I've got bookshelves full of them.
I'd start you off with Forward's Dragon's Egg and Starquake (a sequel to Dragon's Egg), where humans are really just perhipheral characters. Those are not "space navy" stories, and technically take place in the near future, although time is a bit flexible in those books, as you'll see if you read them. Larry Niven's Known Space has non-human aliens to varying degrees; if you think the Puppeteers feel too "human", recall they speak in our language with our idioms for their own benefit, not because it's their native language. Vernor Vinge's aliens are usually well fleshed out, and humans are quite diverse too; try both "A Fire Upon the Deep" and "A Deepness in the Sky". The first is a "space opera" but only in form, not in style.
For a somewhat different approach, read Tolkien, including the Silmarillion; the Elves are not human, and that really comes out in the Silmarillion.
If you read all that and still think everything is "too human", then I think you're asking for a level of alieness that can't exist meaningfully in a human mind, in which case I in all seriousness suggest hallucinogenic drugs, such as were popular in the sixties. You might also try what was called "New Wave" sci-fi (of which Harllison is probably a reasonably accessible example of), where the stories are so alien it actually takes work to figure out what they are about. (You might like that; a lot of New Wave sensibilities made it into Cyberpunk, although Cyberpunk is a good deal easier to follow.)
One thing that I've never understood in scifi is that the aliens are always quite a bit like us.
Then you need to read better sci-fi.
If all the sci-fi you consume is in moving picture form, though, the answer is of course economic. I'd guesstimate we're still five to ten years away from casual use of non-human, but human-quality (i.e., not puppets) characters on television and in movies. After that there is still the psychological barrier of getting your audience to connect to a non-human character.
The BSA is our enemy because of their history of being jack-booted thugs, and using wild accusations and what boils down to vigilantism to accomplish their goals of ruining people's lives.
They may cause people to move to open source but the collateral damage is too much.
Such a system would be distro-independent and would not require packages to ever be created.
No it wouldn't and yes it would, respectively. Distros have standards about where files go, and files in the wrong place can cause unexpected and difficult to diagnose failures. Moreover, if you don't notify the package system of these rogue programs your DEPEDENCIES files created, you're liable to end up with another instance of them on your system. In that case, the least of your problems is the wasted disk space; the odds of one or both of them stomping on each other's configuration files or binary compatibilities or something are extremely high, even for one package. Libraries could be a complete disaster here.
As the AC sibling to this points out, you might consider Gentoo. Learn a little about how to twiddle ebuilds when you need to and you'll go a long way towards what you want, probably.
For reference, not for one-up-manship, Gentoo has this built directly into the emerge/ebuild system.
A side effect is with only a little bravery, you can usually slightly modify an ebuild to work with a new version of something, sometimes as easily as just renaming the ebuild file, and still be very confident that the uninstall of the old version and install of the new version will be perfectly correct, despite the fact that no "official" distro guardian is even aware of your ebuild.
Many people are not aware these things exist, but given their wide (if quiet) availability, users should consider the use of some kind of sandbox during installation a requirement for any distro management system they are considering.
I do not understand this, but graphical package managers have been the one single consistent failure for me in Linux, since Redhat 4.2.
Every single graphical package manager I've ever tried, with the emphasis on tried, to use has failed miserably for one reason or another. Red Hat 4.2's package manager seg faulted. In my Debian era, the Debian graphical managers were the only programs to consistently crash on me, once even leaving the system databases in an inconsistent state. kportage on my current Gentoo system segfaults every time I actually try to install something; I can browse the ebuilds and look at them, but not touch. Mandrake's graphical manager that I used somewhere around 7.0-ish would occasionally fail to segfault long enough to install a package or too, but it too would bomb out miserably, potentially corrupting files on the way out.
I've never understood why something that you'd expect to be the linchpin of a user-friendly distribution has always failed so miserably and so downright reliably for me over the years, over all the computers, all the distros, and all the install options I've tried for them. Fortunately, there was dselect, apt-get, and now emerge which provide good enough text-based utilities.
(I don't mind at all text-based utilities for installation. But graphical browsing of the available packages, by category, with a pane for the category, the description, the metadata, etc. is much nicer then anything you can do in text when you're just wandering around the distro seeing what is available.)
Re:There's the good teachers, and the bad ones.
on
Professors vs. WiFi
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· Score: 1
This is effectively a private message to oneiros27, though it may be of general interest and is certainly off-topic. (Hence, the +1 has been turned off. Please don't burn your mod points modding this down further.;-) It is, after all, related to the meta-topic of paying attention in class.)
That being said, I slept in class. I don't know what it is about classes, but unless the teacher made it interesting, I couldn't stay awake.
It's a long shot but you may have an obscure allergy/reaction to something in the classrooms. I had an AI class that I could *not* stay awake in, despite engaging with the class and finding it interesting, and being awake for every other class.
I finally tracked it down to the carpeting, believe it or not. The carpet was brand new, and many carpeting manufacturors use formaldehyde to (I assume) prevent the carpet from molding. It takes a couple of *years* for that to dissipate completely, even in well-ventilated rooms. It turns out I have a reaction/allergy (don't know which, assume reaction) to formaldehyde which puts me to sleep in about an hour at the concentration in that room.
Later discussion with my grandmother, from whom I seem to have inherited this reaction, indicates that had I stayed in the room even longer, I would have eventually gotten bad, pounding headaches. One of the things I have to remember when I get a job is to mention this before it's an issue, though apparently this is a common enough reaction that a lot of places will spring for formaldehyde-free carpeting as a normal policy, even if the purchase requester isn't clear on why that's a good thing.
This also explained some other incidents in my life; I always went to sleep in high-school biology, now because I believe the room was suffused in formaldehyde from the preserved specimens. In the unlikely event that a kid of mine goes to a public school I need to remember to mention this to the administration so we can work something out.
If you're going to a school where all of the classrooms have had something recently done to them, including but not limited to carpeting (painting for instance, you might be reacting to a pigment), you may wish to consider that possibility. One thing you can try is to go into one of those rooms if possible out of class and see if you still can't stay awake, despite doing something interesting and unrelated to the task.
Correlation is not causation. Student engagement does not strictly depend on quality, nor does quality strictly depend on engagement. Instead, it's a complicated dynamic mix, and my gut tells me quality has a larger influence on engagement rather then the way you seem to assume in your post. No matter how hard you try, you can not engage with a crappy class. On the other hand, a very good class makes it hard not to engage if you have any interest in the subject at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I really wish people would get over their pathological (and I mean that literally in the psychological sense) terror of radioactive materials. Even if this rocket had contained radioactive materials, it is highly unlikely that they would do any significant harm to anyone, because it would either be dispersed more or less harmlessly, or come down in one lump not likely to be near anybody in Texas. Either way, radioactive substances are just dangerous substance, which the space shuttle is already full of, not a malevolent entity intent upon destroying all life. It's not even the most dangerous substance around, it's somewhere in the middle. (There are a lot of things more directly toxic then radioactivity; people die from many of them like "ethelyne glycol" every day.)
If there's one thing I hate science fiction for (albiet not always the good stuff), it's for training people that radioactivity is thousands of times more dangerous then it actually is. (Try explaining to some non-science type people around the concept of "background radiation", and watch them either totally disbelieve you because they think it would kill them if it really existed, or proceed to start panicking. Seen both of these personally.) Our brainless, scientifically incompetent media (ever seen the science requirements for a Journalism degree at a University?) only reinforces this ignorance.
A lot of VMs already exist, even if you don't always see them. Anything that "compiles" to anything other then direct machine code is already running on some virtual machine.
.pyc will work on any other Python 2.1 install. In addition, Jython will take Python code and convert it to JVM code.
.NET decisions, which would have hampered the execution speed of those languages. (Which I believe Microsoft wants to fix.)
I believe current Perl already does this, just completely internally. IIRC, OCaml does this, along with the option of compiling to a "true" executable. Python compiles to a Python virtual machine; the ".pyc" files are the virtual bytecode for that machine and are cross-platform; any Python 2.1
VMs aren't that hard to build, as evidenced by the profusion of them. Standardizing on one has strong implications for the kind of language that can be run on top of it; witness the recent disappointment in the dynamic language community with some of the
In fact, building a VM is often the best solution anyhow, as it give you a controllable layer for optimization, a controlled abstraction, and relatively easy cross-platform building. And for a skilled programmer already working with parsing and compiling some language, it's not that much extra effort to build overall.
VMs seem to me to be like programming languages; they aren't that hard to make. What's hard is making a really good one, and what's even harder is making one that everyone likes, which may not even be possible since I still here people bitching about RISC vs. CISC, despite the fact that the debate is nearly moot on modern processors. At the very least, true standardization into "One True Virtual Machine" is very, very premature; what I believe is that it's as bad an idea as trying to standardize into "One True Language", with almost a one-to-one correspondence for the reasons why they are a bad idea, and it should not happen ever.
(Which of course should not be confused with saying that any given VM should not standardize; that's obviously OK.)
Just for the record, the "correct answer" to your conundrum is to get the widget writers on board with the testing stuff. They need to add methods for testing, things that might expose inner details (readonly) about the widgets and other things that technically violate OO principles, so that testing can be done.
Other things such as matching pieces of the picture and such would also be nice.
It'll never be easy to test a GUI, but right now GUI widgets are almost entirely focused on giving commands and limit the information you can extract back from them to screen position, size, and little else. I want to be able to assert that my textbox can handle text of the size 50Ms with all of it being visible, which is exactly the sort of thing a user requirement might be. (Indeed, I think of this example because of a text dialog I just dealt with for entering a Wireless access key that was two chars too short; if you're that close, why not go for the gusto and let me see the whole thing for visual verification of correctness?) In fact you can do some of this in some widget sets; Tk will let you do that exact test, for instance. But it's haphazard from a testing point of view, because it wasn't implemented for testing.
The other thing we need is a way of inserting all user-sourced events cleanly, and in a well-documented and supported manner, directly into the event loop as if they came from the user, indistinguishable from user input to the rest of the application. Again, haphazard, poorly-supported and poorly-documented abilities to do this exist in some toolkits, but since it's not meant for testing it's often not complete or completely undocumented.
I hear what you're saying, but I'd guess it more likely to be known as The Corporate Decade.
Two reasons. One, the "Me" decade was already here, the 80's. Two, the "Me" decade was called that because a whole lot of people were quite selfish and materialistic, which seemed odd at the time but now we're more used to it. The "Mine" decade doesn't work so much because it isn't a whole lot of people being grabby, it's just a small bunch of insatiable corporations and their leaders being unimaginably grabby.
The authors are indeed every single person who contributed to the code. That's why it's nearly impossible to re-license any open source project after a few people have worked on it, because you need to get permission from every single person who worked on it, or remove their code. c.f. Mozilla's dual-licensing efforts.
If a piece of software is continually updated, the copyright for that incarnation will be as well. This should make sense. If you go back X years (where X is the copyright expiration) and download a copy that is exactly as it was then, then that is in the public domain, even if elements of it survive unchanged in the current version.
Basically, the rules are straightforward, it's just that some actions (like relicensing) because prohibitively expensive because they require too much agreement from people that you may not even be able to find again.
Another thing you need to remember that hasn't been pointed out yet is that while the forces do indeed propogate upwards, they disperse. They don't maintain their strength in the way I'm almost certain you're imagining, they get weaker and weaker, until quite rapidly they are simply swamped by simple friction and other electromagnetic effects and get absorbed into the system as incredibly tiny amounts of heat.
This is why when you jump on the ground, nobody on the opposite side of the planet suddenly feels a bump. The forces disperse to effective nonexistance (since they can't be conceivably detected anymore). Even really really large bumbs like Richter 7.5 earthquakes require very sensitive devices to detect them after a few hundred miles.
The DMCA partially protects Google in their caching. I say "partially" because a close reading of the bill shows that it is debatable whether or not they qualify for the caching provisions, but after a while they should have a certain amount of de facto protection, I would hope.
In addition to their compliance with the DMCA notification, they also provide a help page and automated removal system for the desparate. (See the last section of the page for the DMCA notification instructions, which involve physical letters and legal affirmation of ownership.)
Note that this is the "good" provision of the DMCA, preventing people from being liable for content they merely cache, not actively provide.
Since in this country the military isn't above the law, they'd still have a hard time finding something illegal that Google did. They don't have the luxury of simply not liking someone, like in some countries. If they don't want to be cached, the law says it is their obligation to opt-out, not Google's.
I'm sorry, but his style could be a lot of things, but fast-paced it was not, or I wouldn't still be wondering when the story is going to start on page 100.
I made it to about 400. I was still waiting for the story to start.
I don't know about you (literally), but I've got a degree in computer science and I found the anecdotes and random, pointless explanations of things like the Halting problem (which ties into the story in no way that I could see) actively boring, since I knew it well enough to spot the occaisional typo. (To be fair, it seemed largely accurate and I do believe they were typos, not mistakes. Although it's exactly the kind of explanation that leaves a 16 year old reader thinking he actually knows something about the Halting problem and other explicated topics when in reality they couldn't answer the simplest homework problem in a real cirriculum about them, let alone actually use the information correctly.) Subtract those and you're left with almost nothing that even a Slashdot reader could like; a slow boring story, taking forever to get there, and when it finally gets there, nothing happens.
One of the other messages in this thread defends this as "The rambling is the whole POINT. Kind of like if you're driving through really interesting scenery, you might not care about getting to your destination quickly." OK, but the scenery in question is an Iowa cornfield, not a Colorado mountain range. And you're doing 10mph or so, tops. I'll wade through long books; I liked A Deepness in the Sky despite needing about 200 pages chopped out of the middle and heck, I even thought Battlefield Earth was a decent romp (though no classic) for its time at 1000 pages... but they actually did something memorable. 400 pages of Cryptonomicon and I was hardpressed to come up with one interesting thing that had happened; contrast to A Deepness in the Sky where something worth remembering happens every 50 pages or so and despite the fact that I read it years ago, and Cryptonomicon last month, I remember A Deepness In the Sky much more vividly.
Actually, that performance was in Windows with the 3DMax 2001 benchmark; I have little confidence that vast improvements can be made on that number with a driver change, no matter what the OS is. :-(
Forgot to mention, yes, I did read the article. And frankly, I have no confidence in this chip as a desktop component, and S3 is once again fooling itself. I think the odds are about 1 that this will end up in cheap laptops, just like the Savage chips only significant showing is in laptops.
(It might end up in cheap crap Via motherboards, but only an idiot buys a desktop motherboard made by Via, no matter how cheap, as I've learned from repeated harsh experience.)
What is the market for this thing?
Cheap lapops.
Rest assured that it will be better then the current state-of-the-art of low-end S3 laptop chips (talk about oxymoronic...). I have a Via TwisterK with the current S3 chip, and the only regret I have for buying such a low-level laptop is that the 3D performance on this 1 GHz Duron is roughly equivalent to a Voodoo I. (Otherwise I've been happy with it because I didn't buy it for 3D performance, I bought it because even the crappiest laptop on the market today is still a kick-ass portable Linux machine.)
Actually, if you pay attention to the show, the websites they mention frequently really exist.
;-) ) because it wasn't running any obvious services, it did exist, which makes me wonder if it was deliberate or if the show's author's didn't consider that a randomly selected IP address stands a pretty good chance of existing now-a-days.
The one that leaps to mind is WhatBadgersEat.com used in the episode where the town is split in half and Homer is the mayor of the sucky half.
The TV show Alias set up a Followers of Rambaldi fake site, which I've seen but may not be working now. (Much info is on this fan site.) Also in alias they once mentioned an IP address directly, and while I couldn't determine what that computer was (legally
And I once located the source information for a quick display on the Egyptian god Seth used on Daniel Jackson's screen in Stargate: SG-1. It was actually from a wierd site that I assume is info for a role-playing game, though it gave no hint that the site didn't really believe it and it's sometimes hard to tell... I often wonder if the web site was told what use their text was put to.
Pretty much any micropayment system you can think of can be implemented, fairly cheaply, today.
The problem is getting people to use them. It's a social problem, one that must be combatted with user-friendly engineering, a compelling design (not technical design of the servers and stuff which like I said is really easy, but a design for how to use it, both on the surfer and content provider side), and a large enough advertising budget to cause a massive shift in attitudes about online content.
The tech is effectively irrelevant until those hurdles can be jumped.
No, computer science is fundamental! Reality is just computation on the lowest level! That's why quantum computers are so cool, we can harness this computation in the most direct manner possible! Didn't you read "A New Kind of Science"?*
"Every significant scientific discipline will find a way to cast itself as the most fundamental discipline in the universe." Somebody-or-other's rule, not mine. Even the English/Sociology folks got into the game with Post-Modernism.
*: Actually I haven't.
Actually, every time you write a proof and somewhere along the way, you switch the order of the operands for some addition or multiplication, you are using commutivity. So a whole fucking lot of proofs end up using it, even if they don't specify it directly. Same for associativity.
Nor are these "trivial" uses, either; if you couldn't use commutivity as part of the equation re-writing process, many very common transforms become impossible... even the simple act of dividing "3x+2" out of an equation becomes difficult to set up if you can't re-order anything. (Remember that if you have x * 3 and you don't know multiplication is communitive, you can't rewrite that as 3*x, and thus you couldn't use that as part of 3x+2.)
In fact one would be hard pressed to find a non-trivial proof where commutivity isn't used implicitly, and you may find it very challenging (possibly even beyond your skill or downright impossible) to correctly re-write the proof without using commutivity.
(I speak in this post of "traditional" math, such as a normal person sees in school, somewhere up through low-level Calc. As others have pointed out, as you get higher into math, you encounter number and symbol systems where communitivity does not always hold. You typically meet one, "Matrix Math", in high school.)
This is a real problem, which affects other areas of research as well, e.g. AI.There is a pseudo-religious, notably unscientific meme that basically says,...
While I won't deny that is part of it, that is not the whole story, especially when it comes to AI. There is also "Well, hmmm, we did that and it wasn't half as good as we thought it would be. That's not truly thought."
Same for animals; the fact is these "researchers" won't ever win because we are what we are, and we are the only ones we are. No matter how many parlor tricks a chimp or ape may learn, they still aren't as good as humans, or they would effectively be humans. Same for dolphins and everything else.
The primate researchers need to be realistic and realize they are never going to convince anybody that the other primates are just as smart as us, because they aren't. If they were there would be little or no debate. I assume that's the "bar" the person in the article was bitching about, because it's the only one I can think of and the only one they might get frustrated over.
(It's worth pointing out that at least part of the reason dolphins will never outsmart us anytime soon without our help is their bodies. Bodies are intricately tied to intelligence; without the ability to manipulate their environment easily in significant ways, plus being in a technilogically hostile environment, an ocean-born dolphin could have twice our brainpower in some theoretical sense and still not stand a chance in any practical intelligence test. Change their bodies without changing their brains significantly, to the extent that makes sense biologically (it's not like there are "brain" genes per se), and the matters may change a bit. Brains aren't enough. The other primates face disadvantages in this arena too, though they are not as pronounced. There's a bit of a catch-22; the brainpower (mostly through a larger head, apparently) to use the enhanced body need to develop roughly at the same time. Neither are necessarily useful on their own; an input-starved brain will turn its neurons to other tasks, where, say, an opposable thumb without a brain to effectively use it is also useless. This is somewhat simplified.)
With all due respect, if you "tend to not read [Space Navy]" and go mostly for near-future stories, you're not in a position to talk about what's in "many books". I know non-human aliens exist; I've got bookshelves full of them.
I'd start you off with Forward's Dragon's Egg and Starquake (a sequel to Dragon's Egg), where humans are really just perhipheral characters. Those are not "space navy" stories, and technically take place in the near future, although time is a bit flexible in those books, as you'll see if you read them. Larry Niven's Known Space has non-human aliens to varying degrees; if you think the Puppeteers feel too "human", recall they speak in our language with our idioms for their own benefit, not because it's their native language. Vernor Vinge's aliens are usually well fleshed out, and humans are quite diverse too; try both "A Fire Upon the Deep" and "A Deepness in the Sky". The first is a "space opera" but only in form, not in style.
For a somewhat different approach, read Tolkien, including the Silmarillion; the Elves are not human, and that really comes out in the Silmarillion.
If you read all that and still think everything is "too human", then I think you're asking for a level of alieness that can't exist meaningfully in a human mind, in which case I in all seriousness suggest hallucinogenic drugs, such as were popular in the sixties. You might also try what was called "New Wave" sci-fi (of which Harllison is probably a reasonably accessible example of), where the stories are so alien it actually takes work to figure out what they are about. (You might like that; a lot of New Wave sensibilities made it into Cyberpunk, although Cyberpunk is a good deal easier to follow.)
One thing that I've never understood in scifi is that the aliens are always quite a bit like us.
Then you need to read better sci-fi.
If all the sci-fi you consume is in moving picture form, though, the answer is of course economic. I'd guesstimate we're still five to ten years away from casual use of non-human, but human-quality (i.e., not puppets) characters on television and in movies. After that there is still the psychological barrier of getting your audience to connect to a non-human character.
But the answer is still "read better sci-fi".
The BSA is our enemy because of their history of being jack-booted thugs, and using wild accusations and what boils down to vigilantism to accomplish their goals of ruining people's lives.
They may cause people to move to open source but the collateral damage is too much.
Such a system would be distro-independent and would not require packages to ever be created.
No it wouldn't and yes it would, respectively. Distros have standards about where files go, and files in the wrong place can cause unexpected and difficult to diagnose failures. Moreover, if you don't notify the package system of these rogue programs your DEPEDENCIES files created, you're liable to end up with another instance of them on your system. In that case, the least of your problems is the wasted disk space; the odds of one or both of them stomping on each other's configuration files or binary compatibilities or something are extremely high, even for one package. Libraries could be a complete disaster here.
As the AC sibling to this points out, you might consider Gentoo. Learn a little about how to twiddle ebuilds when you need to and you'll go a long way towards what you want, probably.
For reference, not for one-up-manship, Gentoo has this built directly into the emerge/ebuild system.
A side effect is with only a little bravery, you can usually slightly modify an ebuild to work with a new version of something, sometimes as easily as just renaming the ebuild file, and still be very confident that the uninstall of the old version and install of the new version will be perfectly correct, despite the fact that no "official" distro guardian is even aware of your ebuild.
Many people are not aware these things exist, but given their wide (if quiet) availability, users should consider the use of some kind of sandbox during installation a requirement for any distro management system they are considering.
I'd like to see front ends be a bit better.
I do not understand this, but graphical package managers have been the one single consistent failure for me in Linux, since Redhat 4.2.
Every single graphical package manager I've ever tried, with the emphasis on tried, to use has failed miserably for one reason or another. Red Hat 4.2's package manager seg faulted. In my Debian era, the Debian graphical managers were the only programs to consistently crash on me, once even leaving the system databases in an inconsistent state. kportage on my current Gentoo system segfaults every time I actually try to install something; I can browse the ebuilds and look at them, but not touch. Mandrake's graphical manager that I used somewhere around 7.0-ish would occasionally fail to segfault long enough to install a package or too, but it too would bomb out miserably, potentially corrupting files on the way out.
I've never understood why something that you'd expect to be the linchpin of a user-friendly distribution has always failed so miserably and so downright reliably for me over the years, over all the computers, all the distros, and all the install options I've tried for them. Fortunately, there was dselect, apt-get, and now emerge which provide good enough text-based utilities.
(I don't mind at all text-based utilities for installation. But graphical browsing of the available packages, by category, with a pane for the category, the description, the metadata, etc. is much nicer then anything you can do in text when you're just wandering around the distro seeing what is available.)
This is effectively a private message to oneiros27, though it may be of general interest and is certainly off-topic. (Hence, the +1 has been turned off. Please don't burn your mod points modding this down further. ;-) It is, after all, related to the meta-topic of paying attention in class.)
That being said, I slept in class. I don't know what it is about classes, but unless the teacher made it interesting, I couldn't stay awake.
It's a long shot but you may have an obscure allergy/reaction to something in the classrooms. I had an AI class that I could *not* stay awake in, despite engaging with the class and finding it interesting, and being awake for every other class.
I finally tracked it down to the carpeting, believe it or not. The carpet was brand new, and many carpeting manufacturors use formaldehyde to (I assume) prevent the carpet from molding. It takes a couple of *years* for that to dissipate completely, even in well-ventilated rooms. It turns out I have a reaction/allergy (don't know which, assume reaction) to formaldehyde which puts me to sleep in about an hour at the concentration in that room.
Later discussion with my grandmother, from whom I seem to have inherited this reaction, indicates that had I stayed in the room even longer, I would have eventually gotten bad, pounding headaches. One of the things I have to remember when I get a job is to mention this before it's an issue, though apparently this is a common enough reaction that a lot of places will spring for formaldehyde-free carpeting as a normal policy, even if the purchase requester isn't clear on why that's a good thing.
This also explained some other incidents in my life; I always went to sleep in high-school biology, now because I believe the room was suffused in formaldehyde from the preserved specimens. In the unlikely event that a kid of mine goes to a public school I need to remember to mention this to the administration so we can work something out.
If you're going to a school where all of the classrooms have had something recently done to them, including but not limited to carpeting (painting for instance, you might be reacting to a pigment), you may wish to consider that possibility. One thing you can try is to go into one of those rooms if possible out of class and see if you still can't stay awake, despite doing something interesting and unrelated to the task.
Correlation is not causation. Student engagement does not strictly depend on quality, nor does quality strictly depend on engagement. Instead, it's a complicated dynamic mix, and my gut tells me quality has a larger influence on engagement rather then the way you seem to assume in your post. No matter how hard you try, you can not engage with a crappy class. On the other hand, a very good class makes it hard not to engage if you have any interest in the subject at all.