That kind of technology being moved into the semiconductor industry for mass reproduction and economies of scale is still a long ways out and I personally think Moore's law will lose steam before then.
I would say it's pretty much lost steam already. If you take a function that can't exploit multiple cores, then the single core performance has not improved much in a while. More cores is a "cheat" that extends it somewhat but I doubt 10+ cores makes any sense for end users so it won't scale much further than it already has.
The other bummer is power, even though there's a massive focus on power savings now running a CPU/GPU at 100% draws more and more power. The latest AMD offering, the HD 5950 is bumping the head into the 300W ATX limit, and most agree it's designed to overclock for more. Or it is perhaps the same bummer, since it's the main reason 10GHz+ cores aren't practical.
Fortunately, I think there'll be a lot of innovation in other areas, particularly in networking (fiber, 4G mobile broadband), storage (SSD) and form factor (think iPhone, Wii controller, OLED displays and whatnot).
You are assuming you would get a sane jury, and not one like:
Prosecutor: "Is it true the FBI found child porn pictures on your computer?" You: "*Deleted* pictures" Prosecutor: "And you admit downloading these files via Limewire" You: "By *accident*" Prosecutor: "I rest my case" Jury: "He admitted downloading child porn, where's the nearest tree to hang him?" Judge: "You can only give him 20 years in prison" Jury: *grumble* "Well, 20 years it is then"
Seems like one of the most dangerous things you could possibly do in the US these days is search for something like "sex" on P2P and just set the whole bunch to download. I mean clearly anyone who'd do that is so perverted they deserve life in prison.
This should be a civil matter, no one should have to spend any nights in jail for even the worst cases of copyright infringement.
I disagree with that on two points: 1) People doing it for profit, if you sell it I have no sympathy 2) Unpublished works, not local release but before world premiere
The second because I have very little sympathy for region codes and such, but if we want global simultaneous launches then there has to be a delay between final edit and launch for production and distribution. In that period I think the copyright holder should have very strong protections.
Just one note on BluRay, most the movies there are not compressed for size. They know they'll ship on a 50 GB medium, so they let the bitrate flow almost free. Normally around 0.2-0.3 bits/pixel is ideal, if you multiply up with resolution and FPS that'll match most rips otherwise you would increase resolution. By that standard 50 GB would be enough for QuadHD/2160p, in short it's overkill. And they usually spend 10 GB on a sound track that'd be 3-4 GB in FLAC (lossless) - not that compression would hurt. a stereo 256 kbps AAC track like from iTunes Plus is completely transparent and you can multiply that up with number of speaker pairs in a 5.1/7.1 setup.
Some of them just go ridiculously off the deep end like Futurama on BluRay - they've managed to waste 30 GB but the damn near transparent encodes are 3-4 GB, much of that being the sound track. If you want a more realistic number, 10GB should be around right for a 1080p movie. Still quite a bit, but that's quite doable for advanced Internet nations. I could do that faster than real time, at which point I'd be the one with instant gratification - just click and start playing. And I'm still envious of everybody on fiber...
That would be trivial to do if we were still doing BMP and WAV files, where one bit = one speck of noise. But on the file/network level we use a ton of compression, and the result is that a bit error isn't a bit error in the human sense. Bits are part of a block, and other blocks depend on that block. One change and everything that comes after until the next key frame changes. That means two vastly different results are suddenly a bit apart.
Of course, no actual medium is that stable which is why we use error correction codes, Reed-Solomon being the most common. With those you can fill in any x% of missing information perfectly or if you miss a few bytes too much you have a bunch of digital junk, because the matrix isn't solvable. So failing at say a 25% recovery rate, you instantly drop from 100% to 80% of the information, then you lose everything up to the first key frame of anything recovered because it's all deltas. What's left just isn't worth showing to anyone, it's not noise in any human meaning of the word.
I agree with most you said about the masses, though I'm not sure I'd go that far. But I disagree that it's time to "learn to use a typewriter", the free and technically savvy parts of the Internet is doing just fine. Why would we go anywhere as long as everything can be tunnelled on top of the existing one?
Also, I'm not sure if you misunderstand cause and effect. The repeated attempts to create "borders" on the Internet is exactly because people have understood how easy it is to circumvent them. Can't do $something in $country? Put it online on a server outside their juridiction, don't have a presence in that country and you can ignore those laws with impunity. How many times have YouTube been in the press because they have clips that aren't legal in their country of origin, but legal under US law? And for everything not illegal in Sweden, check the Pirate Bay (and for most of the rest too).
The only thing they can even touch is the stuff where they, against most reason, has managed to create one "world law" already. Like for example child pornography which is almost universally defined as under 18, even though in most of the world you can legally have sex with a 17 year old. Look at something like suprnova, it was huge and now it's gone but the world routed around it like nothing happened.
With each computer becoming more and more powerful, the less you need to find thousands of peers in a centralized solution. Everyone that's read about six degrees of Kevin Bacon knows we could do just fine with a F2F network - friend to friend. With enough bandwidth I'd happily "pipe" information from one friend to the other, without them ever knowing each other. Even if they could crush the central solutions, it'd be like chopping the tip off an iceberg, more would just rise to the surface.
I'm not sure that's necessarily true. Yes, players age and eventually get bored but there's an everlasting supply of teenagers with too much free time. If you just manage to sustain enough recruitment and don't do any horrible releases you'll always have customers. Seriously, I think WoW know their market too well now to fail. More levels, more dungeons, more quests, more gear, more spells, more crafts, more of the same but honestly, people have been playing chess for a few thousand years. It's not like we have to invent everything new every five years.
I'm sure there's a lack of GUI guides - most advice is to paste some obscure commands on the command line. But my biggest issue has been documentation that's just not relevant anymore. When they refer to switches that don't exist, configuration files that have changed formats, dialogs that aren't where they're supposed to be, or where basically the whole way of doing things have changed. Or it refers to an ancient command line way of doing it because the GUI tool didn't support it, but now it does.
Sometimes, the documentation is the right answer to the wrong question. For example, I've struggled with xorg.conf to make it recgonize all my mouse buttons and eventually it did, but that should have been autodetected (or from a device list) and a user-friendly mapping tool to let me choose what they'll mean. More "just work", less "documentation you must read because things don't work" really.
Another good example is the media players. I've fiddled with tons of switches there when what I'd like to do is double click and have the file play. It's great that they're there, if you need them. But it's not better manpages I want...
Well, the current solutions don't seem bandwidth starved, looking at the dual-channel vs triple-channel Nehalems. With a setup like that you could probably do multiple memory controllers and NUMA too, if you needed so I imagine there'll be enough.
I will correct you. I'm not from the US but I still know that Trademark law is completely different from copyright law and patent law. Please don't bunch them together.
Yes, but he's still right which makes you wrong. Trademarks can lose their protection if they become generic words, for example "aspirin" is no longer a protected trademark but a general name for painkillers. Obviously the trademark holder can't go around controlling what everyone says, but he has to at least take action against companies and others using it officially. For example, "to google" is starting to become a synonym for "to search (on the Internet)", but Google would quickly protest against anyone using that term for searching on Bing or Yahoo or whatever.
But on the flipside, in Scandinavia (and most of Europe) if you need a hospital or support for some physical limitation, you won't have to pay through your nose to get it, as this is seen as a basic human right. In the US, if you need constant medical attention and you don't have a steady revenue stream (or a big hoard of cash) you are pretty much screwed.
That is a truth with some caveats. Yes, if you are in need of real medical treatment then yes, if you're just disabled and need help... depends. There's been more than one case where they've put young 20-30 year olds in retirement homes because that's where they can deal with wheelchair users for example. Technically all your needs are met but it's crushing to live that way over any amount of time when you're 25 and they're 80 and don't exactly share your interests. There's not much of a budget for a social life unless you're able to get around on your own, they're supposed to help you more but well... yeah. Let's just say things happen much faster if you have money yourself and can fight for refunds afterwards instead of fighting to get it in the first place.
Actually, it would be more like the stories popping up about Wikipedia. Whoever has the most time, the most patience, knows the rules best, plays best with the system will win. Expect flash mobs, filibusters, wholly uninformed voting based on loose rumors because no one has time to read it all. Plus you really get mob rule, like Switzerland just outlawing minarets which is quite clearly aimed at restricting one minority's exercise of their religion. And finally, the people do not vote in the best interest of the people. Each person tends to vote what's best for themselves, which is a different thing entirely.
Let me take an example from Norway:
3.5 million eligible voters 2.6 million in workforce 2.5 million working 1.8 million working in private sector
Right now, the private workers are in a small majority among the total voters. Very soon the number of senior citizens will skyrocket and they will lose that majority. Everyone votes for their benefits and public sector people vote for their own salaries, who do they think will pay? It's two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner...
Dude, this is Scandinavia. We don't award insane damages here, in fact we generally give way too little IMO. People that have had their lives completely ruined, like 20 years innocent in prison get less than a million dollars. Murderers are often only required to pay 100-200k$ in damages. That is one of the reasons the TPB case became such a big deal in Sweden, for Americans a little over 4 million dollars is not that unusual, around here it's unheard of. There was for example here in Norway just recently about a 16 year old who got the biggest insurance payout ever after a traffic accident - 11.6 MNOK = 2.08 million USD. Still not much when he's probably got another 60 years to live and will need special care for the rest of his life.
The US has contributed a lot to the UN declaration to human rights (it was mainly written by US citizens) but hasn't actually ratified it. So those are rights of other people not US citizens. Some of these are implemented in state constitutions though.
So human rights only exist in so far as they're recognized by the government? That should cut down on the world's human rights violations...
How often do you upgrade your distribution for the core that is equal to Windows? Not very often, but in 6 months there's always some software that has made significant releases. Or drivers that have been updated, since in Linux they're in the kernel while Windows has a stable ABI (for better and worse). So there's always a good reason for a distro release, not so much for a Windows release.
The difference is that for Windows, releases = $$$ from sales, end of life forcing upgrades and so on. For Ubuntu there's no real difference, you say it's all major versions I say you might as well call it all minor versions since I haven't paid for any of them, like SP releases for Windows or 10.6.x upgrades to OS X. Yes, they did give them a codename and slapped a release date on it but it also costs them nothing.
There's really no apples-to-apples comparison to make between a few core components doing releases for money and snapshots of the whole community that just release as often as it's practical.
and human rights (which conveniently exclude the rights to basic food, shelter, job, and health care). And why the property is so sacred, of all the things a human being needs, such as "true" freedom (not just freedom to die from hunger), good health, or a family?
Do the libertarians have their own definition of human rights? Because the UN version has articles which are directly opposite of what you claim.
Article 16. (1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. (...)
Article 23. (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (...)
Article 25. (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, (...)
You can make movies accessible to the blind actually. It's called descriptive audio.
Sounds to me about as fulfilling one of the South Park episodes where there's this like über-epic battle going on, except they don't actually show the battle, only the kids watching it and saying stuff "this is the best battle ever", "bigger than LotR" and "man, I wish I had a camera". Don't remember which episode that was, but "movies for the blind" can't be much better. Then I'd rather go with audio books, at least they're written with that in mind that people can't actually see the characters and have to imagine it.
The point was that corporations aren't the government and aren't obligated to facilitate or provide you with opportunities for free speech in any way. Unless some net neutrality laws are passed, almost anything they put in the ToS is legal based on simply "my lines, my rules". They are granted some constitutional protections, but that's not relevant in this context.
Seriously though - how are they going to enforce this without reading the information I'm sending over the net. Shouldn't that be Illegal?
Honestly, they don't care as long as you pay and nobody complains. This is just another case where if they get complaints from someone, they can terminate you for ToS violation. In reality, not much has changed - have you read some of them? There's usually enough insane terms to terminate anyone, any time anyway. This is just adding one more possible excuse to put on the termination notice.
I'm sorry, but that post is automatically -1, Redundant instead because it's been done to death, resurrected as a horse, flogged to death and beyond then turned into a zombie and still haunts this place.
A genetic algorithm (GA) is a search technique used in computing to find exact or approximate solutions to optimization and search problems. Genetic algorithms are categorized as global search heuristics. Genetic algorithms are a particular class of evolutionary algorithms (EA) that use techniques inspired by evolutionary biology such as inheritance, mutation, selection, and crossover.
I'm guessing the main feature here is crossover. Basically you have the eyebrows that look like the suspect in one, the jawline in another and it'll probably show you a crossover with both. With a little bit of memory of what features you've already voted for and against in the past you can "assemble" a face by parts adjusting the different features as you see them coming together. It doesn't really sound too complex to me, but making it actually work is a lot of effort.
I guess the working conditions depends on where, around here firefighters are definitely on call. I don't know the exact shifts but it's a mix of:
a) On duty = At the station b) On call = Phone on, sober, within a given travel distance c) Off duty = Drunk on safari in Africa for all they care
Oh, and they might optimistically try to call in everyone if there's a huge crisis, it's not sacred. You're just not required to be ready for duty.
It's pay all around, for the shifts, for being on call, for being called out, for the working hours, the whole lot. Not great pay for what they're doing, but they certainly don't do it for free.
Slashdot Mirror
That kind of technology being moved into the semiconductor industry for mass reproduction and economies of scale is still a long ways out and I personally think Moore's law will lose steam before then.
I would say it's pretty much lost steam already. If you take a function that can't exploit multiple cores, then the single core performance has not improved much in a while. More cores is a "cheat" that extends it somewhat but I doubt 10+ cores makes any sense for end users so it won't scale much further than it already has.
The other bummer is power, even though there's a massive focus on power savings now running a CPU/GPU at 100% draws more and more power. The latest AMD offering, the HD 5950 is bumping the head into the 300W ATX limit, and most agree it's designed to overclock for more. Or it is perhaps the same bummer, since it's the main reason 10GHz+ cores aren't practical.
Fortunately, I think there'll be a lot of innovation in other areas, particularly in networking (fiber, 4G mobile broadband), storage (SSD) and form factor (think iPhone, Wii controller, OLED displays and whatnot).
You are assuming you would get a sane jury, and not one like:
Prosecutor: "Is it true the FBI found child porn pictures on your computer?"
You: "*Deleted* pictures"
Prosecutor: "And you admit downloading these files via Limewire"
You: "By *accident*"
Prosecutor: "I rest my case"
Jury: "He admitted downloading child porn, where's the nearest tree to hang him?"
Judge: "You can only give him 20 years in prison"
Jury: *grumble* "Well, 20 years it is then"
Seems like one of the most dangerous things you could possibly do in the US these days is search for something like "sex" on P2P and just set the whole bunch to download. I mean clearly anyone who'd do that is so perverted they deserve life in prison.
Start a witch hunt to find who sent it. Remember, attack is the best defense.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of old memes. Oh wait, I don't have to, it's Slashdot.
If Intel has one-chip cloud computers, then slashdot has one-post beowulf clusters.
Vaporware is not faster than existing products.
Vaporware is always faster than existing products.
This should be a civil matter, no one should have to spend any nights in jail for even the worst cases of copyright infringement.
I disagree with that on two points:
1) People doing it for profit, if you sell it I have no sympathy
2) Unpublished works, not local release but before world premiere
The second because I have very little sympathy for region codes and such, but if we want global simultaneous launches then there has to be a delay between final edit and launch for production and distribution. In that period I think the copyright holder should have very strong protections.
Just one note on BluRay, most the movies there are not compressed for size. They know they'll ship on a 50 GB medium, so they let the bitrate flow almost free. Normally around 0.2-0.3 bits/pixel is ideal, if you multiply up with resolution and FPS that'll match most rips otherwise you would increase resolution. By that standard 50 GB would be enough for QuadHD/2160p, in short it's overkill. And they usually spend 10 GB on a sound track that'd be 3-4 GB in FLAC (lossless) - not that compression would hurt. a stereo 256 kbps AAC track like from iTunes Plus is completely transparent and you can multiply that up with number of speaker pairs in a 5.1/7.1 setup.
Some of them just go ridiculously off the deep end like Futurama on BluRay - they've managed to waste 30 GB but the damn near transparent encodes are 3-4 GB, much of that being the sound track. If you want a more realistic number, 10GB should be around right for a 1080p movie. Still quite a bit, but that's quite doable for advanced Internet nations. I could do that faster than real time, at which point I'd be the one with instant gratification - just click and start playing. And I'm still envious of everybody on fiber...
That would be trivial to do if we were still doing BMP and WAV files, where one bit = one speck of noise. But on the file/network level we use a ton of compression, and the result is that a bit error isn't a bit error in the human sense. Bits are part of a block, and other blocks depend on that block. One change and everything that comes after until the next key frame changes. That means two vastly different results are suddenly a bit apart.
Of course, no actual medium is that stable which is why we use error correction codes, Reed-Solomon being the most common. With those you can fill in any x% of missing information perfectly or if you miss a few bytes too much you have a bunch of digital junk, because the matrix isn't solvable. So failing at say a 25% recovery rate, you instantly drop from 100% to 80% of the information, then you lose everything up to the first key frame of anything recovered because it's all deltas. What's left just isn't worth showing to anyone, it's not noise in any human meaning of the word.
I agree with most you said about the masses, though I'm not sure I'd go that far. But I disagree that it's time to "learn to use a typewriter", the free and technically savvy parts of the Internet is doing just fine. Why would we go anywhere as long as everything can be tunnelled on top of the existing one?
Also, I'm not sure if you misunderstand cause and effect. The repeated attempts to create "borders" on the Internet is exactly because people have understood how easy it is to circumvent them. Can't do $something in $country? Put it online on a server outside their juridiction, don't have a presence in that country and you can ignore those laws with impunity. How many times have YouTube been in the press because they have clips that aren't legal in their country of origin, but legal under US law? And for everything not illegal in Sweden, check the Pirate Bay (and for most of the rest too).
The only thing they can even touch is the stuff where they, against most reason, has managed to create one "world law" already. Like for example child pornography which is almost universally defined as under 18, even though in most of the world you can legally have sex with a 17 year old. Look at something like suprnova, it was huge and now it's gone but the world routed around it like nothing happened.
With each computer becoming more and more powerful, the less you need to find thousands of peers in a centralized solution. Everyone that's read about six degrees of Kevin Bacon knows we could do just fine with a F2F network - friend to friend. With enough bandwidth I'd happily "pipe" information from one friend to the other, without them ever knowing each other. Even if they could crush the central solutions, it'd be like chopping the tip off an iceberg, more would just rise to the surface.
I'm not sure that's necessarily true. Yes, players age and eventually get bored but there's an everlasting supply of teenagers with too much free time. If you just manage to sustain enough recruitment and don't do any horrible releases you'll always have customers. Seriously, I think WoW know their market too well now to fail. More levels, more dungeons, more quests, more gear, more spells, more crafts, more of the same but honestly, people have been playing chess for a few thousand years. It's not like we have to invent everything new every five years.
I'm sure there's a lack of GUI guides - most advice is to paste some obscure commands on the command line. But my biggest issue has been documentation that's just not relevant anymore. When they refer to switches that don't exist, configuration files that have changed formats, dialogs that aren't where they're supposed to be, or where basically the whole way of doing things have changed. Or it refers to an ancient command line way of doing it because the GUI tool didn't support it, but now it does.
Sometimes, the documentation is the right answer to the wrong question. For example, I've struggled with xorg.conf to make it recgonize all my mouse buttons and eventually it did, but that should have been autodetected (or from a device list) and a user-friendly mapping tool to let me choose what they'll mean. More "just work", less "documentation you must read because things don't work" really.
Another good example is the media players. I've fiddled with tons of switches there when what I'd like to do is double click and have the file play. It's great that they're there, if you need them. But it's not better manpages I want...
Well, the current solutions don't seem bandwidth starved, looking at the dual-channel vs triple-channel Nehalems. With a setup like that you could probably do multiple memory controllers and NUMA too, if you needed so I imagine there'll be enough.
I will correct you. I'm not from the US but I still know that Trademark law is completely different from copyright law and patent law. Please don't bunch them together.
Yes, but he's still right which makes you wrong. Trademarks can lose their protection if they become generic words, for example "aspirin" is no longer a protected trademark but a general name for painkillers. Obviously the trademark holder can't go around controlling what everyone says, but he has to at least take action against companies and others using it officially. For example, "to google" is starting to become a synonym for "to search (on the Internet)", but Google would quickly protest against anyone using that term for searching on Bing or Yahoo or whatever.
But on the flipside, in Scandinavia (and most of Europe) if you need a hospital or support for some physical limitation, you won't have to pay through your nose to get it, as this is seen as a basic human right. In the US, if you need constant medical attention and you don't have a steady revenue stream (or a big hoard of cash) you are pretty much screwed.
That is a truth with some caveats. Yes, if you are in need of real medical treatment then yes, if you're just disabled and need help... depends. There's been more than one case where they've put young 20-30 year olds in retirement homes because that's where they can deal with wheelchair users for example. Technically all your needs are met but it's crushing to live that way over any amount of time when you're 25 and they're 80 and don't exactly share your interests. There's not much of a budget for a social life unless you're able to get around on your own, they're supposed to help you more but well... yeah. Let's just say things happen much faster if you have money yourself and can fight for refunds afterwards instead of fighting to get it in the first place.
Actually, it would be more like the stories popping up about Wikipedia. Whoever has the most time, the most patience, knows the rules best, plays best with the system will win. Expect flash mobs, filibusters, wholly uninformed voting based on loose rumors because no one has time to read it all. Plus you really get mob rule, like Switzerland just outlawing minarets which is quite clearly aimed at restricting one minority's exercise of their religion. And finally, the people do not vote in the best interest of the people. Each person tends to vote what's best for themselves, which is a different thing entirely.
Let me take an example from Norway:
3.5 million eligible voters
2.6 million in workforce
2.5 million working
1.8 million working in private sector
Right now, the private workers are in a small majority among the total voters. Very soon the number of senior citizens will skyrocket and they will lose that majority. Everyone votes for their benefits and public sector people vote for their own salaries, who do they think will pay? It's two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner...
Dude, this is Scandinavia. We don't award insane damages here, in fact we generally give way too little IMO. People that have had their lives completely ruined, like 20 years innocent in prison get less than a million dollars. Murderers are often only required to pay 100-200k$ in damages. That is one of the reasons the TPB case became such a big deal in Sweden, for Americans a little over 4 million dollars is not that unusual, around here it's unheard of. There was for example here in Norway just recently about a 16 year old who got the biggest insurance payout ever after a traffic accident - 11.6 MNOK = 2.08 million USD. Still not much when he's probably got another 60 years to live and will need special care for the rest of his life.
The US has contributed a lot to the UN declaration to human rights (it was mainly written by US citizens) but hasn't actually ratified it. So those are rights of other people not US citizens. Some of these are implemented in state constitutions though.
So human rights only exist in so far as they're recognized by the government? That should cut down on the world's human rights violations...
How often do you upgrade your distribution for the core that is equal to Windows? Not very often, but in 6 months there's always some software that has made significant releases. Or drivers that have been updated, since in Linux they're in the kernel while Windows has a stable ABI (for better and worse). So there's always a good reason for a distro release, not so much for a Windows release.
The difference is that for Windows, releases = $$$ from sales, end of life forcing upgrades and so on. For Ubuntu there's no real difference, you say it's all major versions I say you might as well call it all minor versions since I haven't paid for any of them, like SP releases for Windows or 10.6.x upgrades to OS X. Yes, they did give them a codename and slapped a release date on it but it also costs them nothing.
There's really no apples-to-apples comparison to make between a few core components doing releases for money and snapshots of the whole community that just release as often as it's practical.
and human rights (which conveniently exclude the rights to basic food, shelter, job, and health care). And why the property is so sacred, of all the things a human being needs, such as "true" freedom (not just freedom to die from hunger), good health, or a family?
Do the libertarians have their own definition of human rights? Because the UN version has articles which are directly opposite of what you claim.
Article 16.
(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. (...)
Article 23.
(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (...)
Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, (...)
You can make movies accessible to the blind actually. It's called descriptive audio.
Sounds to me about as fulfilling one of the South Park episodes where there's this like über-epic battle going on, except they don't actually show the battle, only the kids watching it and saying stuff "this is the best battle ever", "bigger than LotR" and "man, I wish I had a camera". Don't remember which episode that was, but "movies for the blind" can't be much better. Then I'd rather go with audio books, at least they're written with that in mind that people can't actually see the characters and have to imagine it.
A commonly held false belief here at /.
In fact it does apply to them.
The point was that corporations aren't the government and aren't obligated to facilitate or provide you with opportunities for free speech in any way. Unless some net neutrality laws are passed, almost anything they put in the ToS is legal based on simply "my lines, my rules". They are granted some constitutional protections, but that's not relevant in this context.
Seriously though - how are they going to enforce this without reading the information I'm sending over the net. Shouldn't that be Illegal?
Honestly, they don't care as long as you pay and nobody complains. This is just another case where if they get complaints from someone, they can terminate you for ToS violation. In reality, not much has changed - have you read some of them? There's usually enough insane terms to terminate anyone, any time anyway. This is just adding one more possible excuse to put on the termination notice.
I'm sorry, but that post is automatically -1, Redundant instead because it's been done to death, resurrected as a horse, flogged to death and beyond then turned into a zombie and still haunts this place.
From wikipedia:
A genetic algorithm (GA) is a search technique used in computing to find exact or approximate solutions to optimization and search problems. Genetic algorithms are categorized as global search heuristics. Genetic algorithms are a particular class of evolutionary algorithms (EA) that use techniques inspired by evolutionary biology such as inheritance, mutation, selection, and crossover.
I'm guessing the main feature here is crossover. Basically you have the eyebrows that look like the suspect in one, the jawline in another and it'll probably show you a crossover with both. With a little bit of memory of what features you've already voted for and against in the past you can "assemble" a face by parts adjusting the different features as you see them coming together. It doesn't really sound too complex to me, but making it actually work is a lot of effort.
I guess the working conditions depends on where, around here firefighters are definitely on call. I don't know the exact shifts but it's a mix of:
a) On duty = At the station
b) On call = Phone on, sober, within a given travel distance
c) Off duty = Drunk on safari in Africa for all they care
Oh, and they might optimistically try to call in everyone if there's a huge crisis, it's not sacred. You're just not required to be ready for duty.
It's pay all around, for the shifts, for being on call, for being called out, for the working hours, the whole lot. Not great pay for what they're doing, but they certainly don't do it for free.