if you somehow magically got somebody in the US that could help you, they'd finish the call in 5 minutes, no prob. if you got India, not only would it take an hour,
The problem here is Dell neglected to account for the customer's time. It's easy for them to overlook, since they don't think they are paying for it, but in a way, they are. Every minute the customer is on the line, they pay a minute of opportunity cost. Thus, while the customer time is free to Dell, it is not free to the customer, and they perceive themselves are paying for the call, in the form of productive work they could have done that is not being done.
This is a very common problem, and it is exacerbated by the number of people who don't realize their time is valuable and hold entities like Dell accountable for the time they take to handle their problems. Indirectly, Dell will pay for wasting their customer's time, as they have learned. I hope this lesson propogates around the rest of the business world too.
(As in everything in life, a balance is required. One should not go through life seeing time solely in terms of money, because there are many things money can not buy. But by the same token, you should not value your time at "zero"; the "productive work" I refer to above may not be monetary, it may refer to time spent with family or something else you find beneficial.)
However, you'll find a careful reading of the DMCA reveals that none of the exclusions really quite applies to them; a good lawyer might be able to get them protected but I would bet against them.
Mostly they get by because they will remove content if requested, and nobody who cares cares quite enough to sue them on behalf of "the world" when they are satisfied to have their own content removed. In other words, they are basically OK because nobody cares to sue them. Strictly speaking, archive.org probably is the world's largest copyright violation.
This goes to show that sometimes if you break the law in a big enough way, you can get away with it.;-)
(Not responsible for the results of any actions based on taking that sentence to heart. For entertainment purposes only. etc.)
This is Yet Another Example of how copyright laws are breaking down. If you're going to cite something academically, should you perhaps have the right of mirroring the content you are citing for the sole purpose of providing a backup if the original goes down, or even just changes?
Copyright law says no, that's copyright infringement.
But copyright law is based on the assumption that a published thing, like a book, is concrete and can't be changed, and can be referred to, forever and ever amen, by the same name, page number, etc. This is obviously no longer true. Should copyright law be changed as a result, now that the old idea of "expression" is breaking?
There is one difference though - no one keeps to 40hr weeks - your work schedule depends on the project. I've known my friends back home to work even on weekends when a project deadline is near. It may sound bad, but for young 21-25 year olds, it's not a big pain. It also creates the kind of productivity that took Japan to the top - societies can afford to have comfortable 40 hr. weeks after they have advanced enough (and then see their jobs being taken away by other places where THEY are willing to work 60 hr. weeks)
The problem is, if you're writing software the right way most of the time over 40 hours a week is wasted. "Work smarter, not harder" in programming jobs is not an empty motto, it's the very essense of using your time effectively.
And from what I've heard, a lot of the code from India does indeed have all the hallmarks of throwing manpower at problems better solved with more elegant solutions.
60 hours a week will get you ahead in manufacturing. 60 hours a week in a programming position will not get you ahead vs. 40 hours a week, vs. my programming skills. There's a reason the variance of productivity between programmers is the single most significant factor in the productivity of a team.
"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from; furthermore, if you do not like any of them, you can just wait for next year's model." - Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Which has been condensed by popular usage into "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from." (So close, Dr. Tanenbaum, yet so far.;-) )
With knowledge of possible IP infringement by IBM and others, it would have been illegal for these gentlemen not to follow up on it as agressively as possible.
You meant to say "as aggressively as is still legal." Being a CEO does not give you the right to engage in extortion or to make untrue statements.
I think the assumption you are making is that NLP and SR have to convey the same amount of information to a computer as speach does to a human being.
Well, I wouldn't call it an "assumption" so much as the "definition of NLP". The whole point of NLP is to get as much out of the text as humans do. If you're happy about constraining the language in advance, it's a lot easier... but then it's not natural language processing, it's unnatural language processing.
There's nothing "wrong" with that, of course, but it's not NLP by definition.
If your native tongue (assume english) can represent the literals, then why can't something else represent the commands?
In theory, nothing, though good luck coming up with a reasonable interface.
My personal favorite is gestures + speech, where one specifies the nouns and one the verbs at any given time, probably trading off rapidly. We use that a lot in the real world, too....... but that's not NLP either;-)
I was just answering the question as posted; I think you meant something else then what you technically said. Again, nothing wrong with that;-); NLP is the holy grail but lesser things are still useful.
Have you ever watched Star Wars and wondered why R2D2 could understand speech, but could not speak?
Even in the 70's it was blazingly obvious which one of these two tasks was easy, and which one was difficult.
Neither?
Both are easy to do a 70%-80% job on. Both are freakishly hard to do 99.9% on. (Even we humans only clock in somewhere around 99.9%; your speech comprehension rate is not 100%, though some of that is because other people's speech production skills are also not 100%...)
Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?
No, on two counts:
It's hardly a breakthrough in natural language processing to shift load onto the human by making them learn a new language. What do you think "typing" is but a specialized sign language? Making them learn a new language defeats the whole purpose and makes for a rather hollow victory.
While "word rate" varies somewhat from culture to culture, "information rate" is basically a constant. To express "The little boy was hit by a blue ball and started to cry, but his mother cheered him up with some cookies." will take about the same amount of time in spoken langauge in all languages (meant for face-to-face interaction).
(It's actually somewhat surprising that there's as much varience as there is in the length of the written version of that sentence; you can see in many languages that speaking has been more importent then writing. I suspect over the next hundred years some of the more verbose letter-based written languages will start condensing down to be more like English, which is one of the more compact letter-based languages. Thank the Anglo-Saxons.)
Creating an acoustically simpler language will necessarily mean that artificial language will be slower to communicate with. (If you could communicate at the same rate as English, then by pretty much by definition it would as complex.) Again, "reducing" the problem like this isn't so impressive and doesn't really solve the problem.
And that's assuming what you really meant was "speech recognition pains". The real problem with "natural language recognition" is the stupifyingly complex sentences we utter, with their amazing context-sensitivity and ambiguities. NLP isn't a solved problem even on plain text which removes the vast majority of acoustical ambiguities that speech recognition has to deal with. (You still have problems like "ram" (verb, noun), but that's part of NLP.)
Basically, this is not useful for human-computer interaction. Limited forms of it have been useful in the other direction, though, but I don't know how the sounds mapped to information. AFAIK jet-fighter cockpits use acoustic signals, but they aren't used to convey digital information like words, they convey analog information like distances or speeds.
The Belle discovery was recently confirmed by researchers with the CDF experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, home of the Tevatron, the world's largest atom smasher. There the X(3872) is referred to as the "mystery meson."
I had that concern too, so I was looking for this. Sorry, but you earned this:
Personal websites are at a disadvantage under Google's Pagerank system. A new page isn't going to have many other pages linking to it, and for the most part, personal webpages won't end up with many other pages linking to them unless the content is very popular.
I disagree; you just need content good enough to be linked to.
Basically, I'm a nobody, but I still get a fair amount of hits from Google on things you'd think a "nobody" couldn't own. I'm still in the top ten for CBDTPA (9th as of this moment), and I'm getting a lot for "communication model" and "definition of censorship".
Not the top hit per se, but when you consider what I, "nobody", am going up against, it's not a bad performance.
But my homepage isn't the kind of homepage people here are ignorantly assuming all homepages are; it's got content, lots of content, nothing but content. (Technically, I do have pictures from my wedding posted but good luck finding them.) If it's linkworthy, people will come.
There is a bit of a chicken & egg problem, but once you get a few visitors, if the content is worthy it will expand from there. It's the 0->few transition that is really the hardest; failing to go from few->millions is typically your fault. (I speak from experience;-) )
The submlimation does not depend on a temperature gradient, it revealed it. The liquid nitrogen re-froze the water vapor that had sublimated so you could see it. The ice sublimated before it "knew" about the liquid nitrogen.
Like I said, you can observe it in your own freezer, where no (significant) gradient exists.
Question for someone who might know: How was the ice supposed to survive for billions (or for that matter, even thousands) of years? Ice sublimates. (You can see it directly that you don't even necessarily need low pressure environments; make ice cubes in your freezer and leave them for a few weeks. The ice cubes slowly but surely shrink.)
Once the ice/water vapor gets into the sun, it'll leave the lunar surface, since simple observation shows the Moon isn't capable of holding water vapor (or it would).
So how, theoretically, is the ice supposed to survive, even at the poles? Drop a few million tons of ice onto the Moon, even in a crater, and it'll disappear in a geologic blink of an eye. Maybe I'm missing something but I never expected to find ice on the moon because of this effect.
This, and a number of other highly-rated questions where the answer is "Fedora" (followed by what will boil down to some hype for Fedora), should probably be moderated "Overrated" in the interest of presenting questions for which the answers the Red Hat CEO will give are not immediately obvious.
(Normally I wouldn't question moderation, but in interviews mods are more like votes, so this is a valid opinion.)
(And of course, in the event this gets rated highly it does not constitute a question.)
BTW, before criticising this 'solution', be sure you understand what an arms race is. I know you could further obfuscate it. But you could also further de-obfuscate it. And believe me, with a halfway intelligent system I can keep pace with you; for instance, if I write my cheating spammer so it brings things to my attention in real time as it can't figure them out, I can build a solution bank pretty quickly, not quite as quickly as you can create new challenges (well, maybe, if I'm better then the challenge writer), but certainly faster then you could deploy the new challenges. If you're not bypassing the arms race entirely, you're not winning, you're losing long term.
This is a common failing of understanding when thinking about these technologies. You're not going up against a machine, you're going up against an augmented human.
Read it again, more carefully. (If you'd replied to the issues with some sort of support or evidence of comprehensive, I'd be less snarky, but you show every sign of keyword-based comprehension.
Hmm, are you an AI?)
Also, there is no way that spammers can adapt to Bayesian filtering. It's different for everybody.
What they should do is use a question, written out in regular HTML text that is easy for a human to answer but hard for a computer. Example: What color is the sky on a cloudless day?
I'm afraid I'd have to recommend against using that question for blind people.
Might want to pick your examples a bit more carefully;-)
(Not that it's absolutely impossible they'd know the answer, but it's mere meaningless trivia to someone who has been blind from birth; I don't think I'd remember it.)
Think those are easy for basic AI bots?
Remember, you're not going up against the bots, you're going up against the bots as a proxy for a spammer. If you create a pattern "My name is $random_first $random_middle $random_last. What are my initials?" then the answer is something like
perl -pe 's/My name is (\w)\w* (\w)\w* (\w)\w*. What are my initials\?/$1$2$3/g'
(Try it on your question. Be sure to type the question precisely.)
Now you're back in an arms race against the spammers; the whle point is to avoid the arms race in the first place.
BTW, before criticising this 'solution', be sure you understand what an arms race is. I know you could further obfuscate it. But you could also further de-obfuscate it. And believe me, with a halfway intelligent system I can keep pace with you; for instance, if I write my cheating spammer so it brings things to my attention in real time as it can't figure them out, I can build a solution bank pretty quickly, not quite as quickly as you can create new challenges (well, maybe, if I'm better then the challenge writer), but certainly faster then you could deploy the new challenges. If you're not bypassing the arms race entirely, you're not winning, you're losing long term.
This is a common failing of understanding when thinking about these technologies. You're not going up against a machine, you're going up against an augmented human. (It's why I still think Bayesian filtering will fail eventually, too; the spammers can augment themselves with the same technology, fortunately they just haven't correctly figured it out yet. The clock is probably ticking, though.)
And if it is realistic, then how much more powerful are oil companies politically than electric power companies that the latter are going to just stand by and let this happen?
You mean, the power companies are going to force Intel to make their chips more wasteful, causing progress to halt and people to buy fewer Intel chips? Yeah, sure.
I mean, there's paranoia, and there's paranoia.
Come on, wake up. I won't claim that kind of thing never happens but by and large capatalism is too powerful; Intel isn't going to act against its own best interests for any mere money the power companies can throw at it, because it won't be worth it. Growth is worth more then mere money to Intel. (If you don't understand why, go learn about business; the explanation is too complicated for a Slashdot posting.)
The power company is made of people like you and me; far too busy to hover over various scientific journals and swoop around like super-villians repressing "dangerous" information.
To be fair, it's going to be really, really, really hard to introduce "personalized glitches" into the software just for Linux, because "Linux" isn't a single kernel the way DRDOS 9 (or whichever it was) was.
My kernel is almost certainly unique in the world on a binary level. Moreover, if Microsoft does try to glitch the emulator, whatever is hanging up the emulator can probably be patched around. Linux is a moving target, unlike proprietary binaries based on multi-year release cycles. Conspiracy theories aside, even if Microsoft deliberately tries to hobble Linux, it will probably fail to do so for more then a couple of months before the kernel is fixed.
The amount of damage Microsoft can do is finite, since they still have to run Windows on the system.
Times change. While what you say is definately the status of current law, it is certainly OK to question whether that law is a good idea.
Once upon a time, like oh, say, a decade ago, the only significant way to communicate for a company was to send forth written things, or videotaped things, or more generally things not under their control. We could then archive those things freely, and the company would not even be aware of it; libraries don't have to register with National Geographic that they are storing X years of their magazine, and National Geographic wouldn't care anyhow.
Copyright and other related laws were created to balance the interests of content "creators" and "consumers". (I put those in quotes because I no longer believe in that dichotomy, but for the purposes of this discussion we can use the terms.) If the balance changes, it's fair to question whether the laws should also change.
Does Archive.org have a right to exist? Or can the company now go after Archive.org and force the removal of their content, no matter what Archive.org wants? How does that affect the balances we've chosen as a society?
It's not obvious. It's probably not beneficial to society to allow people to whitewash history and allow only them to keep the history because they own an all-trumping "copyright" on it. That way lies 1984, only in the book the Ministry of Truth had to hire lots and lots of people to do the modifications since they didn't have computers. Sure, the companies have no obligation to maintain content forever, but can they prevent everyone else from doing so too? Should we create a "right to archive"? Should the public be allowed in to such an archive? How do we archive fee-based content? Do we need a legal concept of "abandonware"?
The real question is not what the companies have to do, but what we are allowed to do with "their" stuff to prevent them from pulling the wool over society's eyes.
These are not easy questions, but they really can't be answered with "This is what the law says now, it's it and that's that."
Y'all are missing the point, thanks once again to the many-headed beast that is the word "P2P".
In this case, the academics are strictly concerned with P2P as a network organization, with little regard to what apps are built on top of it. This has nothing to do with "Napster" or "Gnutella" as "file sharing systems". Instead, Napster and Gnutella are being studied by the academics because they are the only things you can get hard numbers for, because few-to-none of the academic P2P systems have been implemented on such a wide scale. They do not perfectly implement what the academics are studying but they are close enough to provide some data about how other systems might behave in the real world.
Academic P2P systems tend to concentrate on "pure" P2P, where there are no servers and ideally no "supernodes" (though they'll settle for dynamic organization that emerges from the protocol itself with no human intervention). This is a much different and much harder problem then "Let's share music!".
The closest to a wide-scale academic P2P system that has been actually deployed that I know of is Freenet; for ideological reasons (pure P2P, no servers) it shoots for the same goals that the academics shoot for for other reasons (mostly that pure P2P systems are hard enough to be interesting, whereas Napster's organization could be created by one teenager without much difficulty; no disrespect to Fanning but it's basically another varient of client-server). Note how much trouble it has had scaling up, just as Gnutella has had trouble; "pure P2P" is friggen' hard in the real world.
This is "old news" as a couple others have noted because of the peer review process, but to the academics this is valuable to have such peer-reviewed hard data, because you can model and simulate your network to your heart's content, but until you see it in the real world on a large scale you can't be sure it works. Without this kind of hard data they're adrift in a sea of pure theory.
This paper isn't for "you", so the fact that "you" don't understand what it's for or that "you" think this is useless is rather uninteresting. This paper is for academic P2P practicianers; if you don't know about academic P2P theory, you can ignore this safely. Academic P2P and what "you" think of as P2P are quite different.
(The "you" here is the "average Slashdot poster to this article. Apply it to yourself (or not) as appropriate.)
Note that in this paper "academic" is not used as a perjoritive; it's just that as I said, there's such a huge disconnect between academic and non-academic P2P goals that they hardly deserve to be lumped under the same name.
..if you can disable it, and the instructions mention that you can and explain how to, is this really that big a deal?
This is not adequate for two reasons.
First, many users will never discover it. For these users, the censorship is involuntary and permenent.
Second, Free speech is a right, not something any entity can predicate on an action at their whim.
The opposite might be acceptable, if the users could deliberately request this "feature". The fact no sane person would activate this "feature" also speaks to the fact it's a corruption of ethics.
Slashdot Mirror
if you somehow magically got somebody in the US that could help you, they'd finish the call in 5 minutes, no prob. if you got India, not only would it take an hour,
The problem here is Dell neglected to account for the customer's time. It's easy for them to overlook, since they don't think they are paying for it, but in a way, they are. Every minute the customer is on the line, they pay a minute of opportunity cost. Thus, while the customer time is free to Dell, it is not free to the customer, and they perceive themselves are paying for the call, in the form of productive work they could have done that is not being done.
This is a very common problem, and it is exacerbated by the number of people who don't realize their time is valuable and hold entities like Dell accountable for the time they take to handle their problems. Indirectly, Dell will pay for wasting their customer's time, as they have learned. I hope this lesson propogates around the rest of the business world too.
(As in everything in life, a balance is required. One should not go through life seeing time solely in terms of money, because there are many things money can not buy. But by the same token, you should not value your time at "zero"; the "productive work" I refer to above may not be monetary, it may refer to time spent with family or something else you find beneficial.)
How come archive.org seems to be above copyright law?
;-)
Archive.org invokes the DMCA safe harbor provisions (see bottom of that page for the DMCA boilerplate), which is described in Title II of the DMCA.
However, you'll find a careful reading of the DMCA reveals that none of the exclusions really quite applies to them; a good lawyer might be able to get them protected but I would bet against them.
Mostly they get by because they will remove content if requested, and nobody who cares cares quite enough to sue them on behalf of "the world" when they are satisfied to have their own content removed. In other words, they are basically OK because nobody cares to sue them. Strictly speaking, archive.org probably is the world's largest copyright violation.
This goes to show that sometimes if you break the law in a big enough way, you can get away with it.
(Not responsible for the results of any actions based on taking that sentence to heart. For entertainment purposes only. etc.)
This is Yet Another Example of how copyright laws are breaking down. If you're going to cite something academically, should you perhaps have the right of mirroring the content you are citing for the sole purpose of providing a backup if the original goes down, or even just changes?
Copyright law says no, that's copyright infringement.
But copyright law is based on the assumption that a published thing, like a book, is concrete and can't be changed, and can be referred to, forever and ever amen, by the same name, page number, etc. This is obviously no longer true. Should copyright law be changed as a result, now that the old idea of "expression" is breaking?
For an extended discussion of this, please see my communication ethics essay, particularly the section on the death of 'expression' (why copyright is totally broken).
There is one difference though - no one keeps to 40hr weeks - your work schedule depends on the project. I've known my friends back home to work even on weekends when a project deadline is near. It may sound bad, but for young 21-25 year olds, it's not a big pain. It also creates the kind of productivity that took Japan to the top - societies can afford to have comfortable 40 hr. weeks after they have advanced enough (and then see their jobs being taken away by other places where THEY are willing to work 60 hr. weeks)
The problem is, if you're writing software the right way most of the time over 40 hours a week is wasted. "Work smarter, not harder" in programming jobs is not an empty motto, it's the very essense of using your time effectively.
And from what I've heard, a lot of the code from India does indeed have all the hallmarks of throwing manpower at problems better solved with more elegant solutions.
60 hours a week will get you ahead in manufacturing. 60 hours a week in a programming position will not get you ahead vs. 40 hours a week, vs. my programming skills. There's a reason the variance of productivity between programmers is the single most significant factor in the productivity of a team.
Hey, it's still a lot smaller then Frank's Two Thousand Inch TV.
It dwarfs the mighty redwoods and it towers over everyone.
"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from; furthermore, if you do not like any of them, you can just wait for next year's model." - Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Which has been condensed by popular usage into "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from." (So close, Dr. Tanenbaum, yet so far. ;-) )
---
Doing my part to educate future generations
With knowledge of possible IP infringement by IBM and others, it would have been illegal for these gentlemen not to follow up on it as agressively as possible.
You meant to say "as aggressively as is still legal." Being a CEO does not give you the right to engage in extortion or to make untrue statements.
I think the assumption you are making is that NLP and SR have to convey the same amount of information to a computer as speach does to a human being.
... but that's not NLP either ;-)
;-); NLP is the holy grail but lesser things are still useful.
Well, I wouldn't call it an "assumption" so much as the "definition of NLP". The whole point of NLP is to get as much out of the text as humans do. If you're happy about constraining the language in advance, it's a lot easier... but then it's not natural language processing, it's unnatural language processing.
There's nothing "wrong" with that, of course, but it's not NLP by definition.
If your native tongue (assume english) can represent the literals, then why can't something else represent the commands?
In theory, nothing, though good luck coming up with a reasonable interface.
My personal favorite is gestures + speech, where one specifies the nouns and one the verbs at any given time, probably trading off rapidly. We use that a lot in the real world, too....
I was just answering the question as posted; I think you meant something else then what you technically said. Again, nothing wrong with that
Have you ever watched Star Wars and wondered why R2D2 could understand speech, but could not speak?
Even in the 70's it was blazingly obvious which one of these two tasks was easy, and which one was difficult.
Neither?
Both are easy to do a 70%-80% job on. Both are freakishly hard to do 99.9% on. (Even we humans only clock in somewhere around 99.9%; your speech comprehension rate is not 100%, though some of that is because other people's speech production skills are also not 100%...)
No, on two counts:
- It's hardly a breakthrough in natural language processing to shift load onto the human by making them learn a new language. What do you think "typing" is but a specialized sign language? Making them learn a new language defeats the whole purpose and makes for a rather hollow victory.
- While "word rate" varies somewhat from culture to culture, "information rate" is basically a constant. To express "The little boy was hit by a blue ball and started to cry, but his mother cheered him up with some cookies." will take about the same amount of time in spoken langauge in all languages (meant for face-to-face interaction).
And that's assuming what you really meant was "speech recognition pains". The real problem with "natural language recognition" is the stupifyingly complex sentences we utter, with their amazing context-sensitivity and ambiguities. NLP isn't a solved problem even on plain text which removes the vast majority of acoustical ambiguities that speech recognition has to deal with. (You still have problems like "ram" (verb, noun), but that's part of NLP.)(It's actually somewhat surprising that there's as much varience as there is in the length of the written version of that sentence; you can see in many languages that speaking has been more importent then writing. I suspect over the next hundred years some of the more verbose letter-based written languages will start condensing down to be more like English, which is one of the more compact letter-based languages. Thank the Anglo-Saxons.)
Creating an acoustically simpler language will necessarily mean that artificial language will be slower to communicate with. (If you could communicate at the same rate as English, then by pretty much by definition it would as complex.) Again, "reducing" the problem like this isn't so impressive and doesn't really solve the problem.
Basically, this is not useful for human-computer interaction. Limited forms of it have been useful in the other direction, though, but I don't know how the sounds mapped to information. AFAIK jet-fighter cockpits use acoustic signals, but they aren't used to convey digital information like words, they convey analog information like distances or speeds.
The Belle discovery was recently confirmed by researchers with the CDF experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, home of the Tevatron, the world's largest atom smasher. There the X(3872) is referred to as the "mystery meson."
I had that concern too, so I was looking for this. Sorry, but you earned this:
RTFAs.
No hard feelings, I hope.
You do realize this was posted in the BSD section of Slashdot, right?
Personal websites are at a disadvantage under Google's Pagerank system. A new page isn't going to have many other pages linking to it, and for the most part, personal webpages won't end up with many other pages linking to them unless the content is very popular.
;-) )
I disagree; you just need content good enough to be linked to.
Basically, I'm a nobody, but I still get a fair amount of hits from Google on things you'd think a "nobody" couldn't own. I'm still in the top ten for CBDTPA (9th as of this moment), and I'm getting a lot for "communication model" and "definition of censorship".
Not the top hit per se, but when you consider what I, "nobody", am going up against, it's not a bad performance.
But my homepage isn't the kind of homepage people here are ignorantly assuming all homepages are; it's got content, lots of content, nothing but content. (Technically, I do have pictures from my wedding posted but good luck finding them.) If it's linkworthy, people will come.
There is a bit of a chicken & egg problem, but once you get a few visitors, if the content is worthy it will expand from there. It's the 0->few transition that is really the hardest; failing to go from few->millions is typically your fault. (I speak from experience
The submlimation does not depend on a temperature gradient, it revealed it. The liquid nitrogen re-froze the water vapor that had sublimated so you could see it. The ice sublimated before it "knew" about the liquid nitrogen.
Like I said, you can observe it in your own freezer, where no (significant) gradient exists.
Question for someone who might know: How was the ice supposed to survive for billions (or for that matter, even thousands) of years? Ice sublimates. (You can see it directly that you don't even necessarily need low pressure environments; make ice cubes in your freezer and leave them for a few weeks. The ice cubes slowly but surely shrink.)
Once the ice/water vapor gets into the sun, it'll leave the lunar surface, since simple observation shows the Moon isn't capable of holding water vapor (or it would).
So how, theoretically, is the ice supposed to survive, even at the poles? Drop a few million tons of ice onto the Moon, even in a crater, and it'll disappear in a geologic blink of an eye. Maybe I'm missing something but I never expected to find ice on the moon because of this effect.
you shouldn't ask(/waste) the question.
This, and a number of other highly-rated questions where the answer is "Fedora" (followed by what will boil down to some hype for Fedora), should probably be moderated "Overrated" in the interest of presenting questions for which the answers the Red Hat CEO will give are not immediately obvious.
(Normally I wouldn't question moderation, but in interviews mods are more like votes, so this is a valid opinion.)
(And of course, in the event this gets rated highly it does not constitute a question.)
Hmm, are you an AI?)
Also, there is no way that spammers can adapt to Bayesian filtering. It's different for everybody.
And on that you're just empirically, provable (and proven) wrong. (Same link I posted in the first message.)
What they should do is use a question, written out in regular HTML text that is easy for a human to answer but hard for a computer. Example: What color is the sky on a cloudless day?
;-)
I'm afraid I'd have to recommend against using that question for blind people.
Might want to pick your examples a bit more carefully
(Not that it's absolutely impossible they'd know the answer, but it's mere meaningless trivia to someone who has been blind from birth; I don't think I'd remember it.)
Think those are easy for basic AI bots?
Remember, you're not going up against the bots, you're going up against the bots as a proxy for a spammer. If you create a pattern "My name is $random_first $random_middle $random_last. What are my initials?" then the answer is something like
perl -pe 's/My name is (\w)\w* (\w)\w* (\w)\w*. What are my initials\?/$1$2$3/g'
(Try it on your question. Be sure to type the question precisely.)
Now you're back in an arms race against the spammers; the whle point is to avoid the arms race in the first place.
BTW, before criticising this 'solution', be sure you understand what an arms race is. I know you could further obfuscate it. But you could also further de-obfuscate it. And believe me, with a halfway intelligent system I can keep pace with you; for instance, if I write my cheating spammer so it brings things to my attention in real time as it can't figure them out, I can build a solution bank pretty quickly, not quite as quickly as you can create new challenges (well, maybe, if I'm better then the challenge writer), but certainly faster then you could deploy the new challenges. If you're not bypassing the arms race entirely, you're not winning, you're losing long term.
This is a common failing of understanding when thinking about these technologies. You're not going up against a machine, you're going up against an augmented human. (It's why I still think Bayesian filtering will fail eventually, too; the spammers can augment themselves with the same technology, fortunately they just haven't correctly figured it out yet. The clock is probably ticking, though.)
And if it is realistic, then how much more powerful are oil companies politically than electric power companies that the latter are going to just stand by and let this happen?
You mean, the power companies are going to force Intel to make their chips more wasteful, causing progress to halt and people to buy fewer Intel chips? Yeah, sure.
I mean, there's paranoia, and there's paranoia.
Come on, wake up. I won't claim that kind of thing never happens but by and large capatalism is too powerful; Intel isn't going to act against its own best interests for any mere money the power companies can throw at it, because it won't be worth it. Growth is worth more then mere money to Intel. (If you don't understand why, go learn about business; the explanation is too complicated for a Slashdot posting.)
The power company is made of people like you and me; far too busy to hover over various scientific journals and swoop around like super-villians repressing "dangerous" information.
To be fair, it's going to be really, really, really hard to introduce "personalized glitches" into the software just for Linux, because "Linux" isn't a single kernel the way DRDOS 9 (or whichever it was) was.
My kernel is almost certainly unique in the world on a binary level. Moreover, if Microsoft does try to glitch the emulator, whatever is hanging up the emulator can probably be patched around. Linux is a moving target, unlike proprietary binaries based on multi-year release cycles. Conspiracy theories aside, even if Microsoft deliberately tries to hobble Linux, it will probably fail to do so for more then a couple of months before the kernel is fixed.
The amount of damage Microsoft can do is finite, since they still have to run Windows on the system.
Times change. While what you say is definately the status of current law, it is certainly OK to question whether that law is a good idea.
Once upon a time, like oh, say, a decade ago, the only significant way to communicate for a company was to send forth written things, or videotaped things, or more generally things not under their control. We could then archive those things freely, and the company would not even be aware of it; libraries don't have to register with National Geographic that they are storing X years of their magazine, and National Geographic wouldn't care anyhow.
Copyright and other related laws were created to balance the interests of content "creators" and "consumers". (I put those in quotes because I no longer believe in that dichotomy, but for the purposes of this discussion we can use the terms.) If the balance changes, it's fair to question whether the laws should also change.
Does Archive.org have a right to exist? Or can the company now go after Archive.org and force the removal of their content, no matter what Archive.org wants? How does that affect the balances we've chosen as a society?
It's not obvious. It's probably not beneficial to society to allow people to whitewash history and allow only them to keep the history because they own an all-trumping "copyright" on it. That way lies 1984, only in the book the Ministry of Truth had to hire lots and lots of people to do the modifications since they didn't have computers. Sure, the companies have no obligation to maintain content forever, but can they prevent everyone else from doing so too? Should we create a "right to archive"? Should the public be allowed in to such an archive? How do we archive fee-based content? Do we need a legal concept of "abandonware"?
The real question is not what the companies have to do, but what we are allowed to do with "their" stuff to prevent them from pulling the wool over society's eyes.
These are not easy questions, but they really can't be answered with "This is what the law says now, it's it and that's that."
Y'all are missing the point, thanks once again to the many-headed beast that is the word "P2P".
In this case, the academics are strictly concerned with P2P as a network organization, with little regard to what apps are built on top of it. This has nothing to do with "Napster" or "Gnutella" as "file sharing systems". Instead, Napster and Gnutella are being studied by the academics because they are the only things you can get hard numbers for, because few-to-none of the academic P2P systems have been implemented on such a wide scale. They do not perfectly implement what the academics are studying but they are close enough to provide some data about how other systems might behave in the real world.
Academic P2P systems tend to concentrate on "pure" P2P, where there are no servers and ideally no "supernodes" (though they'll settle for dynamic organization that emerges from the protocol itself with no human intervention). This is a much different and much harder problem then "Let's share music!".
The closest to a wide-scale academic P2P system that has been actually deployed that I know of is Freenet; for ideological reasons (pure P2P, no servers) it shoots for the same goals that the academics shoot for for other reasons (mostly that pure P2P systems are hard enough to be interesting, whereas Napster's organization could be created by one teenager without much difficulty; no disrespect to Fanning but it's basically another varient of client-server). Note how much trouble it has had scaling up, just as Gnutella has had trouble; "pure P2P" is friggen' hard in the real world.
This is "old news" as a couple others have noted because of the peer review process, but to the academics this is valuable to have such peer-reviewed hard data, because you can model and simulate your network to your heart's content, but until you see it in the real world on a large scale you can't be sure it works. Without this kind of hard data they're adrift in a sea of pure theory.
This paper isn't for "you", so the fact that "you" don't understand what it's for or that "you" think this is useless is rather uninteresting. This paper is for academic P2P practicianers; if you don't know about academic P2P theory, you can ignore this safely. Academic P2P and what "you" think of as P2P are quite different.
(The "you" here is the "average Slashdot poster to this article. Apply it to yourself (or not) as appropriate.)
Note that in this paper "academic" is not used as a perjoritive; it's just that as I said, there's such a huge disconnect between academic and non-academic P2P goals that they hardly deserve to be lumped under the same name.
It's censorship.
Today they're redirecting you to an ad, tommorow they're blackholing anything they feel like it. It's the same technology; you should be concerned if they are allowed to get away with this. Once you start letting them tweak your messages, your free speech is gone.
[grabs crotch] Remedy this!
Snip.
..if you can disable it, and the instructions mention that you can and explain how to, is this really that big a deal?
This is not adequate for two reasons.
First, many users will never discover it. For these users, the censorship is involuntary and permenent.
Second, Free speech is a right, not something any entity can predicate on an action at their whim.
The opposite might be acceptable, if the users could deliberately request this "feature". The fact no sane person would activate this "feature" also speaks to the fact it's a corruption of ethics.