Pi, like everything else, compresses down to one bit, given the correct decompression algorithm. (It is generally nonsense to talk about how well something compresses without specifying something about the algorithm you mean to use.)
Usually, "X compresses down to one bit for a correct algorithm" is a snarky answer, but in this case, it actually makes sense. Generally one has to define those algorithms as a table, where "X" is what the decompression function returns for "1", which definately feels like cheating. In this case, though, one can provide a finite algorithm to compute as many digits of pi as you please, so it makes sense.
In fact, we compress pi down to one or two bytes, with a mathematically defined decompression sequence you can use if you want, all the time. In fact, I've done it three times in this post already, where two different two byte sequences stood in for the infinite series that is that number. Can you find them?
I was going to say "Real hackers don't depend on teachers to learn languages", but that's just a very isolated special case of the general principle.
If you honestly don't know anybody using something other then COBOL, Java, or a little C++, you are horribly, horribly disconnected from several exciting communities dedicated to increasing the power of the programmer. If you don't know the why multiple languages are useful, that is a grevious flaw in your education that you need to take immediate steps to rectify, and nobody's going to do it for you but you. Moreover, I don't mean to be offensive but you're so far behind you won't even understand the explanation of why you're behind; you need to be in the position of having used a couple of languages before you can understand comparisions!
Language differences are nothing like the difference between kde and gnome; it's more like the difference between GUI and CLI.
Don't wait for someone to teach you; you can't afford to while you're competing with people like me who know at least 10 languages well and can pick up a new one in a week (and I'm nothing special). I strongly suggest you rectify your ignorance.
'Course, if you don't, and you want to keep your attitude, no skin off my nose. That much less competition for me.
(*chuckle* I wish I could see you in an interview situation where someone asks about the differences between languages and you gave your post as the answer. They might not even bother to finish the interview.)
The whole point of this is you shouldn't be waiting for somebody else to look around for you, but here's some hints anyhow. I strongly suggest you spend a few months each on Perl, Python, a functional language like Haskell, and several APIs of some sort, like wxWindows or XML parsing. That's more educational then you might even think directly, since you'll get introduced to event-driven programming (though you may have seen it in Java), handling complicated data structures in general, and a lot of other useful things, not just "XML processing" and "GUI development". All of these things have great, free tutorials online.
I gotta say, I'm getting pretty damned tired of these posts. Not only do people who post this sort of thing merely prove that they are incapable of making distinctions between good and bad things without resorting to child-like simplifications of categories ("Microsoft: ALL PURE EVIL. Linux: ALL PURE GOOD. No exceptions possible, lest the world become a complicated place with gray areas and stuff!"), they get up on their high horse and berate everybody else for being mature enough to say "Yes, X is largely evil, but action Y is a good thing overall." Talk about opening one's mouth and removing all doubt...
Even one person can do good things while being more-or-less evil, or do evil things while being more-or-less good. Instead of accusing everyone of being a hypocrite (and perhaps worse yet, moderating such things as "Insightful" of all things! as of this writing, the parent isn't moderated but previous messages of this type often are), why not grow up, get with the program, and recognize that under the label Sony is a complex company, comprised of thousands of complex human beings, that can not be boiled down to one word "evil", OK? And hold the insufferable "Look, me see hypocrites! You dare think Evil Thing did good thing? Hah! What you think next? Linux may not be God's Gift To Man in every way? Fool, Linux is All Double-Plus Good! No Evil possible! Gray areas impossible! Detailed thinking just hypocrisy! Ugh says so!"
She's supposed to be plain, cold, arrogant and inflexible.
Your description made me think of Anne something-or-other, the Weakest Link chick/bitch/woman. Not an American actress, as you mentioned. I think she could do it, but we'd have a hard time looking past where we've already seen her. Compared to the butchering the rest of Asimov's ideas will suffer at the hands of Hollywood, making Susan Calvin a little British would be the least of the film's faults.
Bicentennial Man was a bloody miracle; I can't imagine any other Asimov story being treated well by Hollywood anytime soon.
To calibrate my opinions against specific other people's opinions on a known movie, so that if I'm ever wondering about a movie in the future, I know who to turn to for a review.
Foundation is actually the Roman Empire, and the first Foundation story (the prequel where Seldon is an actual character, and I mean the one that appears in the first book, not "Forward the Foundation" or whatever that tripe was much later published to cash in on the Foundation name) is the actual fall of Rome.
Any relationship to current times should be considered thought-provoking, but do note that to the extent we are currently stagnatng, it is not complete; technology is still developing at a rapid pace, which is a major difference from the Empire yet.
Re:Population control device
on
239 MPG Car
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· Score: 2, Funny
Actually, it turns the car into a sure-fire population growth device.
Everyone knows the best way to have another kid is to give away all the baby stuff to somebody else. (I have a part of my family that has done this at least twice.) Similarly, by buying a vehicle with no space for a kid, one is ensuring that they will have a kid.
That's why my wife and I bought a used minivan last time we went car shopping. Since we have plenty of space for kids, we figure Mother Nature will pick on somebody less prepared. Should we ever decide to conceive, we'll have to pick up some two-seater convertable and sell one of our larger vehicles.
Unfortunately, having run around this loop a few times in my head, the only solution I see is weathering the storm somehow, anyhow, until the natural forces catch up to the "off-shore" companies, the rising tide raises all boats, the "off-shore" workers demand more money, and "off-shore" isn't competitive anymore.
How long that will take I don't know. It's not like the off-shore people need to make it to perfect parity; there's cost with having your programmers that distant, not in touch with customers, not speaking your native language as well, etc., that will eventually make it more expensive to go offshore then hire locally. But I'm not enough of an economist to know when that will be.
The good news is that this can't last forever. The bad news is that with the shit that passes for "government" in places like China, the wages could be artificially depressed for a while. Hopefully when China's current government dies off some people with more progressive policies will be installed. (I don't forsee full-fledged self-earned democracy, but one can hope.) China's playing with this, but I can't see the current regime allowing it forever; as soon as some capatalists get rich, that means they get powerful and the current power elite will cut them down... anyhow, I'm rambling now but you get some idea about the kind of thinking this can take.
Or better yet, develop the skill to turn the boring bits into neat bits.
If you're doing something repetitive, that's a big, in-your-face hint that it's time to abstract somehow. Perhaps write some personal libraries, or a little language to rapidly solve the problem, or something else. Learning what is part of becoming a truly excellent programmer.
Only once in my programming career have I been assigned to do something truly boring, and that was converting 50 Word documents to forms people could fill out online, which due to the fact that no two people make a form in the same way, had nothing that could be abstracted out. But then, that wasn't really programming either.
(Oh, and school assignments, which suck because they actually teach you not to abstract, both because they're too small to matter, and even when the prof. claims the code will be re-used in a later assignment, inevitably something changes in the later assignment which screws your abstraction over. The real world is, believe it or not, not like that; I don't know how to explain it but real-sized projects may have rapidly changing requirements but there's still room for development.)
You sound like you know what you're talking about, but should you really be discussing issues of a legal nature with the psuedonym "Lionel Hutts"? Perhaps you should find a more respectable identity to assume on Slashdot.
My prediction is they will watch their hits drop precipitously for a while and start backpedaling.
Ah, but you see, they don't measure success in hits. They measure it in revenue or profit. In fact, if it costs them more to serve a page to a non-customer then they get from advertising on the page, reducing the hit count might well be a good thing!
One nice thing about the downturned economy is a renewed dose of sensibility on the part of businesses. I still wish they'd think a little more long term, but learning that you can't eat or sleep in "mindshare" is at least a little reality check...
You missed a critical phrase: Since it is the entire article.
Fair use considers how much of the text is used, and using the whole thing all at once is almost certainly to be found a violation by the judge.
Additionally, fair use considers "monetary damages" caused by the use. Since the Post has a subscription system and not just the standard advertisements, "monetary damages" could be very significant; people who might have subscribed instead just read it here.
IANAL either but most people extremely seriously overestimate the power of fair use. Posting the article was a copyright violation, to a high enough degree of certainty I don't feel the need to qualify that with any variation of "probably".
Remember... the law is not what you think it is, it is what the the law says and how a judge interprets it. The Slashdot community as a whole is very incorrect in its interpretation of "fair use".
Addendum to Tzoq's message: A lot of the claims made by the conspiracy theorists, like that exact one, are falsifiable without too much effort. Rather then arguing endlessly, why not try taking a photograph of a thin black line on an extremely bright background? (Be sure to match the "alleged" conditions on the moon, which is a brighter daylight then we get even down here, because there's no atmosphere. Also match the film they would have used, as a different formulation might be able to distinguish between the line and white on Earth, but perhaps not survive on the moon for other reasons. Very few lights can match sunlight... another easily testable assertion.) You can argue from ignorance until your lips fall off, or you can try it for yourself, find out how many of the conspiracy theorists arguments fall flat, and draw the natural conclusions about their arguments.
What some other people here forget is that by-and-large, the noise created by a PC's fans are stationary signals.
No, they are not.
Don't take my word for it. Record some and run it through your favorite MP3 player, with a reasonably sized FFT filter going in realtime. Watch the FFT display jerk spasmodically. Even the wiggling isn't as regular as you think; if you could do an FFT of the FFT, you'd see that. It's noise, it really is, and even if it sounds to your ear like it's "the same" noise, your computer hears it as anything but.
For extra bonus points (and to really enhance your understanding of what noise really is!), open that noise recording in a sound program. Zoom in really tight, until you can see one wave cycle (from 0, to max, to 0, to min, back to 0 again. It may cross 0 a few times in that span, so eyeball it. You can't really be wrong, so it's not that big a deal, as long as the two ends meet up when you're done.) Copy that sound for 1 or 2 seconds worth, and play it. (Copy and paste it twice, highlight that, copy and paste again, and duplicate that; you'll be into seconds in no time.) Take a moment and ask yourself what you expect this to sound like. Then play it. Is that what you expected? Still don't believe me? Take a larger snippet, three or four waves.
Noise is really, really dynamic, and you can't predict what it is going to do next.
Oh, and there's no such thing as noise cancellation, by the way, only cancelling certain sounds at certain isolated locations. That's why you need two headphones, one dedicated to each ear, to cancel noise. A single microphone cannot cancel noise for two ears across a set of frequencies, period, especially if it doesn't know where those ears are.
Again, don't take my word for it, draw it. Draw equally-spaced concentric circles emanating from a point. Draw equally spaced concentric circles of the same size emanating from another point. The distance between the two concentric circles is the frequency, and let's say one circle's lines is the bottom of the signal, and the other the top. The places where the circle touch the sound is canceled (in this hopelessly perfect little world where nothing is interfering with the sound). In the middle of each of the little quadrangles you build, the sound is doubled. You'll see it's impossible to complete and totally cancel the sound unless the two sources are exactly the same... which is not surprising because that's equivalent to preventing it in the first place!
And lest ye think that you can put your ears at two of the meeting points (again, totally and completely ignoring the sound's interaction with the environment)... draw another set of circles using the same sources, but multiplying the distance between each concentric circle by, say, 8/7s. And 1/3. And 87/34s. And everything in between. All at once.
Please try these things before trying to pick them apart; human intuition and wave phenomena are notoriously poor bedfellows.
It would be great if reality were that cooperative, but unfortunately there is no such thing as a "constant or regular, repetitive sound", unless you're talking a digitally-generated sine wave out of a good speaker.
This become especially noticable with high-pitched sounds (or components of sounds) you are trying to cancel. Suppose for the sake of argument there's a 5,000 Hz sound you are trying to cancel that varies randomly in absolute pitch over the course of a second or two by up to 1%, or +/- 50Hz. (1% is easily detectable with training of any sort, but still a lot of people won't notice it, esp. in a noisy situation like fan noise.) Kick in a fudge factor for the fact that your mic can probably barely "hear" that as it is. If your sound canceller is not instantly reactive, it will "cancel" sound from the past (and it can only react at the speed of sound at best), and you could turn an annoying high pitched sound into an annoying 20-50Hz sound, that for bonus points is phased all over the place with all kinds of fun harmonics. Thanks, but no thanks.
And this assumes some sort of ideal environment. It's actually quite hopeless because each speaker of the laptop, assuming it even has two, will affect both ears, plus the reflections of each speaker, plus the reflections of the noise. Real noise dampers put one damper on each ear, because the interaction between the two would take a very challenging math problem and make it an impossible one.
Oh, and the sounds your speaker is making can't reach the mic, either. (Because the sounds can't be cancelled at both of your ears and the mics... in fact, you'll be lucky to manage cancelling the sound at one ear, let alone three places!)
In short, the laptop noise canceller would be interesting to see what kind of crazy phased noises you could get out of your environment, and could even conceivably be useful in some small degree to someone mining their environment for sound effects (musicians, sound effect artists) as an intriguing filter on the world, but for actual noise cancellation, you might as well just stick your fingers in your ears and hmm loudly.
i saw once, was to show that it is indeed impossible to save the entire human population.
Such a statement must inevitable rest on a set of assumptions. As such, that's not a bad thing, but it should be considered in order to understand the true nature of the statement.
At current technology, and all reasonably-likely foreseeable technology, yes, it is impossible to get even a vanishing fraction of the population off the Earth. It's impossible to even keep up with the birth rate.
On the other hand, the very definition of the Singularity is that it is the/a point past which all previous conceptual frameworks for understanding the actions of humanity fail us. ("A" because many people make IMHO well-reasoned arguments that say that Singularities are very POV-based; that for a Medieval alchemist, we're well on the other side of what for him would be a Singularity.)
Considered for instance in terms of raw energy, assuming cheap, easy fusion or better, there's plenty of power on the planet to take the whole of humanity off, and if you're willing to import power from other sources, we could take the whole biosphere with us. (Not that we want to, per se, but that it's possible.)
I'm not saying that this is likely or possible or desirable (or not), I'm just saying that such facts must be considered in context, or they can mislead you. Certainly there is no hidden natural law of the universe requiring that all of humanity stay on the planet; just the well-known one of gravity, which has several known workarounds, even at our current level of understanding.
Take "killer strain" figuratively, not literally; the point is the idea that "mutations -> wild success", and "more mutations->more wild success" is false.
Nature has put into DNA many checks and switches to prevent rampant mutations, which the humans will not bother to put in, or won't be aware of. Organism loose, mutating at will, and you got yourself a killer strain of urinary infection-causing organisms.
Speaking generally, those checks are not placed in the organisms to protect the greater biosphere, as you implicitly claim. Why would urinary tract bacteria put in mutation controls if by removing them they could become a "killer strain", vastly more successful? Sounds like it's all gravy for the urinary bacteria, no?
The real reason those checks exist is that in general, mutation is bad. As you make a given generation take on more and more mutations, the probability approaches 1 that at least one of those mutations will be fatal. This is a slight oversimplication, but the probability that two mutations "cancel" or that one buffers the other, while non-zero, is even smaller then the odds of one mutation being neutral or beneficial, and can be ignored, especially as the number of mutations in a given offspring increases (because it takes those small probabilities and starts raising them to large powers, sending them to 0). As you get up into the tens, hundreds, or thousands of mutations (that aren't on introns), the organism just isn't going to survive that.
Thus, mankind will indeed need to copy those checks and balances, or his organisms will swiftly die. In fact, almost anything we could "build" right now would swiftly die in the real world, which is immensely more hostile to life now then it was several billion years ago. That may sound wierd, but it's true; show any weakness (AIDS, for instance) and any of millions of types of bacteria, animal parasites, insects, fungi, viruses, and assorted other nasties are literally ready to eat you for lunch, all of which you can currently repel, come to some form of balance with, or avoid for the most part. It will be a long time before Man creates anything truly original, and even longer before it is strong enough to threaten anything seriously.
Try it. It won't hurt anything, it's just a telnet connection. You'll get a good lesson in the value of human-comprehensible text-based standards.
Don't neglect the 80; it's vital. Depending on what telnet program you use, you may need to figure out how to direct it to connect to port 80 instead of the standard telnet port.
Comedy Central recently re-ran a Sat. Night Live skit on that theme. "Mr. Bond, you have 127 venereal disease, including 18 we haven't identified yet. We've named them after you: Bond 1, Bond 2, Bond 3, etc." **beep beep beep** "Excuse me Mr. Bond, I have to go. Good god, Bond 17 has broken out of its beaker!"
One of the better such things I've seen, and I'm not generally a Comedy Central fan. I think they actually had Pierce Brosnan on for that show, so it was even one of the real Bonds.;-)
In related news, scientists report no progress in determining why the best computer code is written at 4:27 AM on a tuesday morning surrounded by a box of Mountain Dew.
If the scientists would just get a good night's sleep and return to the code the next day, they would discover that the reason they are having difficulty figuring out why the code is so good at 4:27 AM is that the code is complete garbage when seen in the light of day.
Unless you're one of the single digit percentage people in the world with truly unusual sleep needs, if the code you're writing at 4:27 AM is the same quality as the code you write during normal hours, your code must be seriously shitty all the time!
Sleep! Most of us need it, and I often wonder how many of those who don't are just fooling themselves...
Take this post for instance. What I ought to do is just hit CTRL-W to close the tab and go to bed, 'cause this is worthless flamebait. Instead, because my judgement is impaired because it's late where I am, I'm going to post this and subject myself to CowboyNeal-only-knows how many self-styled "sleep masters" explaining how they need only 10 minutes of sleep a week. Learn from my incipient disaster... sleep!
A neat idea but unfortunately, even "per-line" or "per-char" is the wrong dimension to measure. You'd really need to keep track of it per patch (or per commit in CVS terms, or whatever).
A contribution to a work means that part ownership of the copyright of that work goes to the contributer. (There are some interesting potential legal landmines with regard to what would constitute a "work": Single source file? Whole distribution? My guess as a non-lawyer is a court would go with "All of the above".)
The only way to strip out a propreitary bit of code would be to roll back through a source-control program, remove all the commits from the source history, and rebuild the program with new, non-owned code. So you'd need a way to mark commits as "proprietary", and roll them out.
Another thing you could try is keeping two trees, one "pure", and one with the proprietary stuff, and make sure to factor out any differences such that you can swap in the pure or proprietary code at any time. Takes a bit more design, but hey, that's true of most open source anyhow.
Slashdot Mirror
Pi, like everything else, compresses down to one bit, given the correct decompression algorithm. (It is generally nonsense to talk about how well something compresses without specifying something about the algorithm you mean to use.)
Usually, "X compresses down to one bit for a correct algorithm" is a snarky answer, but in this case, it actually makes sense. Generally one has to define those algorithms as a table, where "X" is what the decompression function returns for "1", which definately feels like cheating. In this case, though, one can provide a finite algorithm to compute as many digits of pi as you please, so it makes sense.
In fact, we compress pi down to one or two bytes, with a mathematically defined decompression sequence you can use if you want, all the time. In fact, I've done it three times in this post already, where two different two byte sequences stood in for the infinite series that is that number. Can you find them?
Real people don't depend on "teachers" to learn.
I was going to say "Real hackers don't depend on teachers to learn languages", but that's just a very isolated special case of the general principle.
If you honestly don't know anybody using something other then COBOL, Java, or a little C++, you are horribly, horribly disconnected from several exciting communities dedicated to increasing the power of the programmer. If you don't know the why multiple languages are useful, that is a grevious flaw in your education that you need to take immediate steps to rectify, and nobody's going to do it for you but you. Moreover, I don't mean to be offensive but you're so far behind you won't even understand the explanation of why you're behind; you need to be in the position of having used a couple of languages before you can understand comparisions!
Language differences are nothing like the difference between kde and gnome; it's more like the difference between GUI and CLI.
Don't wait for someone to teach you; you can't afford to while you're competing with people like me who know at least 10 languages well and can pick up a new one in a week (and I'm nothing special). I strongly suggest you rectify your ignorance.
'Course, if you don't, and you want to keep your attitude, no skin off my nose. That much less competition for me.
(*chuckle* I wish I could see you in an interview situation where someone asks about the differences between languages and you gave your post as the answer. They might not even bother to finish the interview.)
The whole point of this is you shouldn't be waiting for somebody else to look around for you, but here's some hints anyhow. I strongly suggest you spend a few months each on Perl, Python, a functional language like Haskell, and several APIs of some sort, like wxWindows or XML parsing. That's more educational then you might even think directly, since you'll get introduced to event-driven programming (though you may have seen it in Java), handling complicated data structures in general, and a lot of other useful things, not just "XML processing" and "GUI development". All of these things have great, free tutorials online.
How about this?
Don't know if it was granted; I wasn't able to find any updates from Googling. Note that story dates from 2000.
I gotta say, I'm getting pretty damned tired of these posts. Not only do people who post this sort of thing merely prove that they are incapable of making distinctions between good and bad things without resorting to child-like simplifications of categories ("Microsoft: ALL PURE EVIL. Linux: ALL PURE GOOD. No exceptions possible, lest the world become a complicated place with gray areas and stuff!"), they get up on their high horse and berate everybody else for being mature enough to say "Yes, X is largely evil, but action Y is a good thing overall." Talk about opening one's mouth and removing all doubt...
Even one person can do good things while being more-or-less evil, or do evil things while being more-or-less good. Instead of accusing everyone of being a hypocrite (and perhaps worse yet, moderating such things as "Insightful" of all things! as of this writing, the parent isn't moderated but previous messages of this type often are), why not grow up, get with the program, and recognize that under the label Sony is a complex company, comprised of thousands of complex human beings, that can not be boiled down to one word "evil", OK? And hold the insufferable "Look, me see hypocrites! You dare think Evil Thing did good thing? Hah! What you think next? Linux may not be God's Gift To Man in every way? Fool, Linux is All Double-Plus Good! No Evil possible! Gray areas impossible! Detailed thinking just hypocrisy! Ugh says so!"
She's supposed to be plain, cold, arrogant and inflexible.
Your description made me think of Anne something-or-other, the Weakest Link chick/bitch/woman. Not an American actress, as you mentioned. I think she could do it, but we'd have a hard time looking past where we've already seen her. Compared to the butchering the rest of Asimov's ideas will suffer at the hands of Hollywood, making Susan Calvin a little British would be the least of the film's faults.
Bicentennial Man was a bloody miracle; I can't imagine any other Asimov story being treated well by Hollywood anytime soon.
To calibrate my opinions against specific other people's opinions on a known movie, so that if I'm ever wondering about a movie in the future, I know who to turn to for a review.
Quite effective, actually.
Foundation is actually the Roman Empire, and the first Foundation story (the prequel where Seldon is an actual character, and I mean the one that appears in the first book, not "Forward the Foundation" or whatever that tripe was much later published to cash in on the Foundation name) is the actual fall of Rome.
Any relationship to current times should be considered thought-provoking, but do note that to the extent we are currently stagnatng, it is not complete; technology is still developing at a rapid pace, which is a major difference from the Empire yet.
Actually, it turns the car into a sure-fire population growth device.
Everyone knows the best way to have another kid is to give away all the baby stuff to somebody else. (I have a part of my family that has done this at least twice.) Similarly, by buying a vehicle with no space for a kid, one is ensuring that they will have a kid.
That's why my wife and I bought a used minivan last time we went car shopping. Since we have plenty of space for kids, we figure Mother Nature will pick on somebody less prepared. Should we ever decide to conceive, we'll have to pick up some two-seater convertable and sell one of our larger vehicles.
Unfortunately, having run around this loop a few times in my head, the only solution I see is weathering the storm somehow, anyhow, until the natural forces catch up to the "off-shore" companies, the rising tide raises all boats, the "off-shore" workers demand more money, and "off-shore" isn't competitive anymore.
How long that will take I don't know. It's not like the off-shore people need to make it to perfect parity; there's cost with having your programmers that distant, not in touch with customers, not speaking your native language as well, etc., that will eventually make it more expensive to go offshore then hire locally. But I'm not enough of an economist to know when that will be.
The good news is that this can't last forever. The bad news is that with the shit that passes for "government" in places like China, the wages could be artificially depressed for a while. Hopefully when China's current government dies off some people with more progressive policies will be installed. (I don't forsee full-fledged self-earned democracy, but one can hope.) China's playing with this, but I can't see the current regime allowing it forever; as soon as some capatalists get rich, that means they get powerful and the current power elite will cut them down... anyhow, I'm rambling now but you get some idea about the kind of thinking this can take.
Or better yet, develop the skill to turn the boring bits into neat bits.
If you're doing something repetitive, that's a big, in-your-face hint that it's time to abstract somehow. Perhaps write some personal libraries, or a little language to rapidly solve the problem, or something else. Learning what is part of becoming a truly excellent programmer.
Only once in my programming career have I been assigned to do something truly boring, and that was converting 50 Word documents to forms people could fill out online, which due to the fact that no two people make a form in the same way, had nothing that could be abstracted out. But then, that wasn't really programming either.
(Oh, and school assignments, which suck because they actually teach you not to abstract, both because they're too small to matter, and even when the prof. claims the code will be re-used in a later assignment, inevitably something changes in the later assignment which screws your abstraction over. The real world is, believe it or not, not like that; I don't know how to explain it but real-sized projects may have rapidly changing requirements but there's still room for development.)
You sound like you know what you're talking about, but should you really be discussing issues of a legal nature with the psuedonym "Lionel Hutts"? Perhaps you should find a more respectable identity to assume on Slashdot.
Besides, it's Lionel Hutz.
My prediction is they will watch their hits drop precipitously for a while and start backpedaling.
Ah, but you see, they don't measure success in hits. They measure it in revenue or profit. In fact, if it costs them more to serve a page to a non-customer then they get from advertising on the page, reducing the hit count might well be a good thing!
One nice thing about the downturned economy is a renewed dose of sensibility on the part of businesses. I still wish they'd think a little more long term, but learning that you can't eat or sleep in "mindshare" is at least a little reality check...
You missed a critical phrase: Since it is the entire article.
Fair use considers how much of the text is used, and using the whole thing all at once is almost certainly to be found a violation by the judge.
Additionally, fair use considers "monetary damages" caused by the use. Since the Post has a subscription system and not just the standard advertisements, "monetary damages" could be very significant; people who might have subscribed instead just read it here.
IANAL either but most people extremely seriously overestimate the power of fair use. Posting the article was a copyright violation, to a high enough degree of certainty I don't feel the need to qualify that with any variation of "probably".
Remember... the law is not what you think it is, it is what the the law says and how a judge interprets it. The Slashdot community as a whole is very incorrect in its interpretation of "fair use".
OK, new category:
It sucked.
Good luck!
Addendum to Tzoq's message: A lot of the claims made by the conspiracy theorists, like that exact one, are falsifiable without too much effort. Rather then arguing endlessly, why not try taking a photograph of a thin black line on an extremely bright background? (Be sure to match the "alleged" conditions on the moon, which is a brighter daylight then we get even down here, because there's no atmosphere. Also match the film they would have used, as a different formulation might be able to distinguish between the line and white on Earth, but perhaps not survive on the moon for other reasons. Very few lights can match sunlight... another easily testable assertion.) You can argue from ignorance until your lips fall off, or you can try it for yourself, find out how many of the conspiracy theorists arguments fall flat, and draw the natural conclusions about their arguments.
Nobody is forcing ignorance on you!
What some other people here forget is that by-and-large, the noise created by a PC's fans are stationary signals.
No, they are not.
Don't take my word for it. Record some and run it through your favorite MP3 player, with a reasonably sized FFT filter going in realtime. Watch the FFT display jerk spasmodically. Even the wiggling isn't as regular as you think; if you could do an FFT of the FFT, you'd see that. It's noise, it really is, and even if it sounds to your ear like it's "the same" noise, your computer hears it as anything but.
For extra bonus points (and to really enhance your understanding of what noise really is!), open that noise recording in a sound program. Zoom in really tight, until you can see one wave cycle (from 0, to max, to 0, to min, back to 0 again. It may cross 0 a few times in that span, so eyeball it. You can't really be wrong, so it's not that big a deal, as long as the two ends meet up when you're done.) Copy that sound for 1 or 2 seconds worth, and play it. (Copy and paste it twice, highlight that, copy and paste again, and duplicate that; you'll be into seconds in no time.) Take a moment and ask yourself what you expect this to sound like. Then play it. Is that what you expected? Still don't believe me? Take a larger snippet, three or four waves.
Noise is really, really dynamic, and you can't predict what it is going to do next.
Oh, and there's no such thing as noise cancellation, by the way, only cancelling certain sounds at certain isolated locations. That's why you need two headphones, one dedicated to each ear, to cancel noise. A single microphone cannot cancel noise for two ears across a set of frequencies, period, especially if it doesn't know where those ears are.
Again, don't take my word for it, draw it. Draw equally-spaced concentric circles emanating from a point. Draw equally spaced concentric circles of the same size emanating from another point. The distance between the two concentric circles is the frequency, and let's say one circle's lines is the bottom of the signal, and the other the top. The places where the circle touch the sound is canceled (in this hopelessly perfect little world where nothing is interfering with the sound). In the middle of each of the little quadrangles you build, the sound is doubled. You'll see it's impossible to complete and totally cancel the sound unless the two sources are exactly the same... which is not surprising because that's equivalent to preventing it in the first place!
And lest ye think that you can put your ears at two of the meeting points (again, totally and completely ignoring the sound's interaction with the environment)... draw another set of circles using the same sources, but multiplying the distance between each concentric circle by, say, 8/7s. And 1/3. And 87/34s. And everything in between. All at once.
Please try these things before trying to pick them apart; human intuition and wave phenomena are notoriously poor bedfellows.
It would be great if reality were that cooperative, but unfortunately there is no such thing as a "constant or regular, repetitive sound", unless you're talking a digitally-generated sine wave out of a good speaker.
This become especially noticable with high-pitched sounds (or components of sounds) you are trying to cancel. Suppose for the sake of argument there's a 5,000 Hz sound you are trying to cancel that varies randomly in absolute pitch over the course of a second or two by up to 1%, or +/- 50Hz. (1% is easily detectable with training of any sort, but still a lot of people won't notice it, esp. in a noisy situation like fan noise.) Kick in a fudge factor for the fact that your mic can probably barely "hear" that as it is. If your sound canceller is not instantly reactive, it will "cancel" sound from the past (and it can only react at the speed of sound at best), and you could turn an annoying high pitched sound into an annoying 20-50Hz sound, that for bonus points is phased all over the place with all kinds of fun harmonics. Thanks, but no thanks.
And this assumes some sort of ideal environment. It's actually quite hopeless because each speaker of the laptop, assuming it even has two, will affect both ears, plus the reflections of each speaker, plus the reflections of the noise. Real noise dampers put one damper on each ear, because the interaction between the two would take a very challenging math problem and make it an impossible one.
Oh, and the sounds your speaker is making can't reach the mic, either. (Because the sounds can't be cancelled at both of your ears and the mics... in fact, you'll be lucky to manage cancelling the sound at one ear, let alone three places!)
In short, the laptop noise canceller would be interesting to see what kind of crazy phased noises you could get out of your environment, and could even conceivably be useful in some small degree to someone mining their environment for sound effects (musicians, sound effect artists) as an intriguing filter on the world, but for actual noise cancellation, you might as well just stick your fingers in your ears and hmm loudly.
i saw once, was to show that it is indeed impossible to save the entire human population.
Such a statement must inevitable rest on a set of assumptions. As such, that's not a bad thing, but it should be considered in order to understand the true nature of the statement.
At current technology, and all reasonably-likely foreseeable technology, yes, it is impossible to get even a vanishing fraction of the population off the Earth. It's impossible to even keep up with the birth rate.
On the other hand, the very definition of the Singularity is that it is the/a point past which all previous conceptual frameworks for understanding the actions of humanity fail us. ("A" because many people make IMHO well-reasoned arguments that say that Singularities are very POV-based; that for a Medieval alchemist, we're well on the other side of what for him would be a Singularity.)
Considered for instance in terms of raw energy, assuming cheap, easy fusion or better, there's plenty of power on the planet to take the whole of humanity off, and if you're willing to import power from other sources, we could take the whole biosphere with us. (Not that we want to, per se, but that it's possible.)
I'm not saying that this is likely or possible or desirable (or not), I'm just saying that such facts must be considered in context, or they can mislead you. Certainly there is no hidden natural law of the universe requiring that all of humanity stay on the planet; just the well-known one of gravity, which has several known workarounds, even at our current level of understanding.
Take "killer strain" figuratively, not literally; the point is the idea that "mutations -> wild success", and "more mutations->more wild success" is false.
Nature has put into DNA many checks and switches to prevent rampant mutations, which the humans will not bother to put in, or won't be aware of. Organism loose, mutating at will, and you got yourself a killer strain of urinary infection-causing organisms.
Speaking generally, those checks are not placed in the organisms to protect the greater biosphere, as you implicitly claim. Why would urinary tract bacteria put in mutation controls if by removing them they could become a "killer strain", vastly more successful? Sounds like it's all gravy for the urinary bacteria, no?
The real reason those checks exist is that in general, mutation is bad. As you make a given generation take on more and more mutations, the probability approaches 1 that at least one of those mutations will be fatal. This is a slight oversimplication, but the probability that two mutations "cancel" or that one buffers the other, while non-zero, is even smaller then the odds of one mutation being neutral or beneficial, and can be ignored, especially as the number of mutations in a given offspring increases (because it takes those small probabilities and starts raising them to large powers, sending them to 0). As you get up into the tens, hundreds, or thousands of mutations (that aren't on introns), the organism just isn't going to survive that.
Thus, mankind will indeed need to copy those checks and balances, or his organisms will swiftly die. In fact, almost anything we could "build" right now would swiftly die in the real world, which is immensely more hostile to life now then it was several billion years ago. That may sound wierd, but it's true; show any weakness (AIDS, for instance) and any of millions of types of bacteria, animal parasites, insects, fungi, viruses, and assorted other nasties are literally ready to eat you for lunch, all of which you can currently repel, come to some form of balance with, or avoid for the most part. It will be a long time before Man creates anything truly original, and even longer before it is strong enough to threaten anything seriously.
Try it. It won't hurt anything, it's just a telnet connection. You'll get a good lesson in the value of human-comprehensible text-based standards.
Don't neglect the 80; it's vital. Depending on what telnet program you use, you may need to figure out how to direct it to connect to port 80 instead of the standard telnet port.
Ah, thanks for the link! Well, I shot 50/50 or so on that message overall ;-) About par for human memory.
Comedy Central recently re-ran a Sat. Night Live skit on that theme. "Mr. Bond, you have 127 venereal disease, including 18 we haven't identified yet. We've named them after you: Bond 1, Bond 2, Bond 3, etc." **beep beep beep** "Excuse me Mr. Bond, I have to go. Good god, Bond 17 has broken out of its beaker!"
;-)
One of the better such things I've seen, and I'm not generally a Comedy Central fan. I think they actually had Pierce Brosnan on for that show, so it was even one of the real Bonds.
In related news, scientists report no progress in determining why the best computer code is written at 4:27 AM on a tuesday morning surrounded by a box of Mountain Dew.
If the scientists would just get a good night's sleep and return to the code the next day, they would discover that the reason they are having difficulty figuring out why the code is so good at 4:27 AM is that the code is complete garbage when seen in the light of day.
Unless you're one of the single digit percentage people in the world with truly unusual sleep needs, if the code you're writing at 4:27 AM is the same quality as the code you write during normal hours, your code must be seriously shitty all the time!
Sleep! Most of us need it, and I often wonder how many of those who don't are just fooling themselves...
Take this post for instance. What I ought to do is just hit CTRL-W to close the tab and go to bed, 'cause this is worthless flamebait. Instead, because my judgement is impaired because it's late where I am, I'm going to post this and subject myself to CowboyNeal-only-knows how many self-styled "sleep masters" explaining how they need only 10 minutes of sleep a week. Learn from my incipient disaster... sleep!
A neat idea but unfortunately, even "per-line" or "per-char" is the wrong dimension to measure. You'd really need to keep track of it per patch (or per commit in CVS terms, or whatever).
A contribution to a work means that part ownership of the copyright of that work goes to the contributer. (There are some interesting potential legal landmines with regard to what would constitute a "work": Single source file? Whole distribution? My guess as a non-lawyer is a court would go with "All of the above".)
The only way to strip out a propreitary bit of code would be to roll back through a source-control program, remove all the commits from the source history, and rebuild the program with new, non-owned code. So you'd need a way to mark commits as "proprietary", and roll them out.
Another thing you could try is keeping two trees, one "pure", and one with the proprietary stuff, and make sure to factor out any differences such that you can swap in the pure or proprietary code at any time. Takes a bit more design, but hey, that's true of most open source anyhow.