Well then look into a technology called "blue force feed" or FBCB2. Essentially, most US units these days walk around with various identifying systems. It's easy for a human to accidentally shoot one of these folks, but virtually impossible for a computer under positive control to make that mistake. Of course, you'll always get the short circuit, cosmic ray, or something else to break the turing machine model at some point, so nothing is foolproof. But I think the parent poster had a point.
Friendly fire as a percentage of casualties has remained more or less constant for centuries-- up until the current Iraq war. One of the interesting things about technology on the battlefield right now is how much fewer friendly fire casualties it's allowing.
I owned a stone house in Pittsburgh when I lived there. I thought I'd bought a gray stone house, but when it needed repointing and got spray-washed, I discovered I owned a yellow, red, tan, and generally pretty interestingly-colored stone house. The stones had just all turned gray because of the soot through the 20th century. So it doesn't always turn out like that.
But "crypto" isn't a security system, it's a technology. How those published algorithms are used in a product can be either a "band-aid" or a solid architectural approach. For example, forcing all executables to be signed would go a huge way towards preventing malware, and use the "crypto" algorithms mentioned. But so would enforcing all executable memory to be no-write except by the pager-- something that may be just as effective and actually more palatable to the "anything that smells like DRM is evil" Slashdot crowd, but is much more "band-aid" like.
I have "Funny" at -5 and "Insightful" at +2 so I stop getting the stupid Slashdot jokes at the beginning of every conversation... so I still don't get to read most of the parent poster's post, I guess.
More interesting to me than irregular verbs is my son's usage of opposites. He wants me to "plug out" the vacuum cleaner, "buckle out" of his car seat, and-- my favorite-- "shut up" the computer (the opposite, of course, of "shut down"). Also the usages of "hot" or "warm"... the difference between something that is too hot such as food, and something that is too hot like a thick blanket in summer. (When I told him the blanket was too warm for summer, he asked me to cool down the blanket.) The other day he tried Tabasco sauce for the first time, and learned another usage of "hot".
So are these usages converging the same way as verb irregularity?
I look through Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution, and I can't find the part where Congress Shall Have The Power to make cars better.
I know it's an overused clause, but the interstate commerce clause seems a LOT more relevant to cars than it does to marijuana grown in someone's closet in California. I can easily see keeping the way motor vehicles are built safe and reasonable as being relevant to interstate commerce. As for activities, such as speed limits, seat belt use, driver's license testing, and other things you DO with the motor vehicles-- those laws are all left to the states, as they should be according to the Constitution.
This argument doesn't make sense to me, as flash chips are selling at much higher quantities than hard disks already. Flash MP3 players and embedded devices are everywhere, and the margins on flash manufacturing aren't that high. I suspect prices are being driven down as fast as technology is allowing them to, and that building more products based on them will only drive prices higher as supply outstrips demand.
From all scientific evidence we are complicated finite state machines.
Really. Could you please link to this evidence? It was my impression that it's an open question whether or not quantum uncertainty is involved in sentience or not.
Einstein said that "God doesn't play dice with the universe." There are quite a few schools of thought these days that say that that's ALL God does with the universe.
As far as I know, anything that absorbs heat from the outside also absorbs it from the inside. If it was reflective, it would keep the sun heat out but also the data center heat in. A black box under a white sunshade seems like the best of both worlds. (I Am Not A Physicist.)
Neither. 1. Meat being muscle, it's not that. 2. Living being is too vague a term to use here, so it doesn't really fit that... 3. The article discusses a mouse, so "human" is right out. 4. We're talking about a group of undifferentiated cells-- usually ones that would otherwise be destroyed. 5. The benefits are to poor, rich, athiest, Christian (except Christian Scientists), and the rest of humanity. 6. "Let's see" is incorrect, since you obviously didn't even glance at the article description, let alone its concents
You might have gotten the word "or" right, but it's not looking good.
These discs will presumably play on any player that correctly implements BD+. If a player has a bug in its BD+ implementation, it will need a firmware update to fix it. Since these are the first two discs released with BD+, they're the first one to really test it in the field.
This is simply wrong. Why? Because "duplication" isn't the legal test to see whether intellectual property has been misappropriated. When code is copied, it's often changed and tweaked substantially, so in court the original author will still claim misappropriation. A lot of code out there tends to look similar, so it will be difficult to show you DIDN'T use Microsoft code.
In short, Microsoft in one fell swoop has eliminated a huge chunk of.NET developers from ever contributing to Mono, pretty much.
The FiOS box has a battery that it will use until the battery is 80% depleted, then it will shut down the system. However, if you need to make an emergency call, there's a "no, really" button you can press on the box to get the remaining 20%. They also give you a second battery you can swap out if you really need it. Still not as good as "always on" copper for days of no electricity, but good enough for almost any practical situation you're likely to find in most of America.
Re:If someone patents something stupid, do we care
on
IBM Patents Checking a Box
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Almost every other piece of software follows the old click-first-item, shift-click-last-item model. (Or ctrl-click individual items.) It's been in use since... Well, as long as I can remember using a GUI, and I'm really hard-pressed to think of any other way that selections work.
I believe, like many other standards in GUIs, this was first introduced as a standard by Apple and documented in the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines in the 80's (although I'm sure someone did it somewhere before that). Later Microsoft began using a similar standard, while XWindows was still using a "select copies, and right-click pastes" into the 90's, at least in twm and many of the common window managers (not sure what Motif did here).
I think you're pretty much describing "America's Army". Although I haven't played it since they stopped making a Mac version, it treated the accuracy aspect more like a simulation than a game. Any activity dropped your accuracy significantly. As did bullets landing nearby (so "strafing" fire actually WORKS), being far from your unit/leader, jumping, moving, falling, being hurt, etc.
Between that and the "dead means dead" in a given round, I liked that game a lot more than the "spawn and kamikaze" style play I see in a lot of multiplayer FPSes.
Perhaps... but families like to watch movies, too. If the rumors about them hyping the Blu-Ray aspect is true, it could dovetail nicely. The PS3 is a really nice movie, streaming media, gaming, etc., box. It could sell to families as an HD movie player. Sony could keep the price at its current level but package two controllers, the Blu-Ray remote, a movie and LittleBigPlanet and move a LOT of systems.
This is silly. The GPLv3 is very different from the GPLv2 "in spirit", but no one is calling foul on it, nor would it be easy to defend in court. The GPLv3, for the first time, departs from the "share and share alike" nature of the source code and attempts to dictate what hardware it should be allowed to run on and what hardware makers are allowed to do. This is not in the same spirit as GPLv2, which is about software freedom. RMS changed his mind, then managed to sell it to people as "closing loopholes" when it's clearly a very different license.
The most useful thing about the Newton for me was sketching quick ideas. The "handwriting" recognition could turn crude hand-drawn boxes into straight-sided rectangles, connecting lines really connecting them, and jotted notes into text. It was the ultimate Visio-type communication device. It's also something that can't really be done right without a stylus, and Apple's iPhone marketing seems to indicate Apple thought a stylus was a mistake, so I don't hold great hope for the iPhone turning into a Newton.
The toughbooks have the mindshare, but the Mercedes of rugged laptops is IMHO the Itronix GoBook XR-1. (disclaimer: I work for General Dynamics.) But unless you're planning on taking this aboard a bouncing Stryker in desert heat or into a swamp in combat situations, any "MIL-STD 810F"-ruggedized laptop is almost certainly overkill.
For an office environment, the consumer/business laptops are all basically made by the same people at the same facilities out of the same parts these days. Get whichever one has the features you need at the price you like with the plastic shaped the way you think looks good.
One of the most sensible things any of the presidential candidates have said so far is that the federal government should mail 1040EZ tax forms pre-filled-out. If you're getting money back and you do nothing at all, you've just "done your taxes" and you get your check. You can still fill out your tax form manually if you really want to, but I'll bet this would save many millions of dollars and hours of American spending.
By that math China is the world's sole superpower, since they can field the most grunts.
There's something to be said for numerical superiority, but only if you can project that power. In terms of supply lines, transportation, air cover, mobile communications, etc., China probably can't effectively "field" as many soldiers as the United States. (You haven't really "fielded" anyone if they're sitting in a bunker all day hungry and without enough ammunition.) And when you also take into account technological and strategic force multipliers, I wouldn't worry too much.
If you think about it, the used and included FOSS in order to gain developers, and jumpstart increased interest in their platform.
They used FOSS tools and applications to actually implement sections of the kernel and low-level userspace, not just for developers and "increased interest". GCC is the MacOS X compiler, BSD is the UNIX user space, Darwin is the kernel. And as seen in WebKit and LLVM's clang, they're still making significant contributions-- far beyond most company's small patches and bugfixes-- to the FOSS community as well.
It will be interesting to see what the Darwin landscape looks like as of Leopard (the upcoming MacOS X 10.5). The iPhone was supposedly built on Leopard, and if the kernel is still sufficiently open source one could see it replacing Linux in some of these smart phones.
Great points. A lot of the "cost plus" contract awards require accurate a-priori estimation of progress to be made, which is silly when you're inventing something new. But still, a lot of this depends on specific contract vehicles and program managers. DARPA's a big space.
From the summary: No doubt UMG would prefer to make the former cheaper, while maintaining the current pricing for the latter.
No, UMG would like to charge MUCH MORE than current pricing for new music, I'm sure. My guess is that it's only Apple's near-monopoly on paid digital music downloads that are keeping prices in check. It's currently Apple vs. the music companies instead of consumers vs. the music companies, and Apple has the clout to win that battle, whereas we don't.
Our politicans have surrendered the long term, instead looking for the quick fix.
Except that they haven't. The DARPA spokesman in the article is right, and the "horizon" for DARPA (and CERDEC) programs are at LEAST 4-5 years out. In fact, some might argue that DARPA spends *TOO MUCH* money these days on pie-in-the-sky research and not enough on things that will directly benefit warfighters or civilians. Perhaps some particular program director is hard-nosed about this stuff, but it's certainly not true of DARPA in general.
Just peruse the list of some of the stuff DARPA is funding for proof of the long horizon:
Slashdot Mirror
Well then look into a technology called "blue force feed" or FBCB2. Essentially, most US units these days walk around with various identifying systems. It's easy for a human to accidentally shoot one of these folks, but virtually impossible for a computer under positive control to make that mistake. Of course, you'll always get the short circuit, cosmic ray, or something else to break the turing machine model at some point, so nothing is foolproof. But I think the parent poster had a point.
Friendly fire as a percentage of casualties has remained more or less constant for centuries-- up until the current Iraq war. One of the interesting things about technology on the battlefield right now is how much fewer friendly fire casualties it's allowing.
I owned a stone house in Pittsburgh when I lived there. I thought I'd bought a gray stone house, but when it needed repointing and got spray-washed, I discovered I owned a yellow, red, tan, and generally pretty interestingly-colored stone house. The stones had just all turned gray because of the soot through the 20th century. So it doesn't always turn out like that.
But "crypto" isn't a security system, it's a technology. How those published algorithms are used in a product can be either a "band-aid" or a solid architectural approach. For example, forcing all executables to be signed would go a huge way towards preventing malware, and use the "crypto" algorithms mentioned. But so would enforcing all executable memory to be no-write except by the pager-- something that may be just as effective and actually more palatable to the "anything that smells like DRM is evil" Slashdot crowd, but is much more "band-aid" like.
I have "Funny" at -5 and "Insightful" at +2 so I stop getting the stupid Slashdot jokes at the beginning of every conversation... so I still don't get to read most of the parent poster's post, I guess.
More interesting to me than irregular verbs is my son's usage of opposites. He wants me to "plug out" the vacuum cleaner, "buckle out" of his car seat, and-- my favorite-- "shut up" the computer (the opposite, of course, of "shut down"). Also the usages of "hot" or "warm"... the difference between something that is too hot such as food, and something that is too hot like a thick blanket in summer. (When I told him the blanket was too warm for summer, he asked me to cool down the blanket.) The other day he tried Tabasco sauce for the first time, and learned another usage of "hot".
So are these usages converging the same way as verb irregularity?
I look through Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution, and I can't find the part where Congress Shall Have The Power to make cars better.
I know it's an overused clause, but the interstate commerce clause seems a LOT more relevant to cars than it does to marijuana grown in someone's closet in California. I can easily see keeping the way motor vehicles are built safe and reasonable as being relevant to interstate commerce. As for activities, such as speed limits, seat belt use, driver's license testing, and other things you DO with the motor vehicles-- those laws are all left to the states, as they should be according to the Constitution.
This argument doesn't make sense to me, as flash chips are selling at much higher quantities than hard disks already. Flash MP3 players and embedded devices are everywhere, and the margins on flash manufacturing aren't that high. I suspect prices are being driven down as fast as technology is allowing them to, and that building more products based on them will only drive prices higher as supply outstrips demand.
From all scientific evidence we are complicated finite state machines.
Really. Could you please link to this evidence? It was my impression that it's an open question whether or not quantum uncertainty is involved in sentience or not.
Einstein said that "God doesn't play dice with the universe." There are quite a few schools of thought these days that say that that's ALL God does with the universe.
As far as I know, anything that absorbs heat from the outside also absorbs it from the inside. If it was reflective, it would keep the sun heat out but also the data center heat in. A black box under a white sunshade seems like the best of both worlds. (I Am Not A Physicist.)
Neither.
1. Meat being muscle, it's not that.
2. Living being is too vague a term to use here, so it doesn't really fit that...
3. The article discusses a mouse, so "human" is right out.
4. We're talking about a group of undifferentiated cells-- usually ones that would otherwise be destroyed.
5. The benefits are to poor, rich, athiest, Christian (except Christian Scientists), and the rest of humanity.
6. "Let's see" is incorrect, since you obviously didn't even glance at the article description, let alone its concents
You might have gotten the word "or" right, but it's not looking good.
These discs will presumably play on any player that correctly implements BD+. If a player has a bug in its BD+ implementation, it will need a firmware update to fix it. Since these are the first two discs released with BD+, they're the first one to really test it in the field.
This is simply wrong. Why? Because "duplication" isn't the legal test to see whether intellectual property has been misappropriated. When code is copied, it's often changed and tweaked substantially, so in court the original author will still claim misappropriation. A lot of code out there tends to look similar, so it will be difficult to show you DIDN'T use Microsoft code.
.NET developers from ever contributing to Mono, pretty much.
In short, Microsoft in one fell swoop has eliminated a huge chunk of
The FiOS box has a battery that it will use until the battery is 80% depleted, then it will shut down the system. However, if you need to make an emergency call, there's a "no, really" button you can press on the box to get the remaining 20%. They also give you a second battery you can swap out if you really need it. Still not as good as "always on" copper for days of no electricity, but good enough for almost any practical situation you're likely to find in most of America.
Almost every other piece of software follows the old click-first-item, shift-click-last-item model. (Or ctrl-click individual items.) It's been in use since... Well, as long as I can remember using a GUI, and I'm really hard-pressed to think of any other way that selections work.
I believe, like many other standards in GUIs, this was first introduced as a standard by Apple and documented in the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines in the 80's (although I'm sure someone did it somewhere before that). Later Microsoft began using a similar standard, while XWindows was still using a "select copies, and right-click pastes" into the 90's, at least in twm and many of the common window managers (not sure what Motif did here).
I think you're pretty much describing "America's Army". Although I haven't played it since they stopped making a Mac version, it treated the accuracy aspect more like a simulation than a game. Any activity dropped your accuracy significantly. As did bullets landing nearby (so "strafing" fire actually WORKS), being far from your unit/leader, jumping, moving, falling, being hurt, etc.
Between that and the "dead means dead" in a given round, I liked that game a lot more than the "spawn and kamikaze" style play I see in a lot of multiplayer FPSes.
Perhaps... but families like to watch movies, too. If the rumors about them hyping the Blu-Ray aspect is true, it could dovetail nicely. The PS3 is a really nice movie, streaming media, gaming, etc., box. It could sell to families as an HD movie player. Sony could keep the price at its current level but package two controllers, the Blu-Ray remote, a movie and LittleBigPlanet and move a LOT of systems.
This is silly. The GPLv3 is very different from the GPLv2 "in spirit", but no one is calling foul on it, nor would it be easy to defend in court. The GPLv3, for the first time, departs from the "share and share alike" nature of the source code and attempts to dictate what hardware it should be allowed to run on and what hardware makers are allowed to do. This is not in the same spirit as GPLv2, which is about software freedom. RMS changed his mind, then managed to sell it to people as "closing loopholes" when it's clearly a very different license.
The most useful thing about the Newton for me was sketching quick ideas. The "handwriting" recognition could turn crude hand-drawn boxes into straight-sided rectangles, connecting lines really connecting them, and jotted notes into text. It was the ultimate Visio-type communication device. It's also something that can't really be done right without a stylus, and Apple's iPhone marketing seems to indicate Apple thought a stylus was a mistake, so I don't hold great hope for the iPhone turning into a Newton.
The toughbooks have the mindshare, but the Mercedes of rugged laptops is IMHO the Itronix GoBook XR-1. (disclaimer: I work for General Dynamics.) But unless you're planning on taking this aboard a bouncing Stryker in desert heat or into a swamp in combat situations, any "MIL-STD 810F"-ruggedized laptop is almost certainly overkill.
For an office environment, the consumer/business laptops are all basically made by the same people at the same facilities out of the same parts these days. Get whichever one has the features you need at the price you like with the plastic shaped the way you think looks good.
One of the most sensible things any of the presidential candidates have said so far is that the federal government should mail 1040EZ tax forms pre-filled-out. If you're getting money back and you do nothing at all, you've just "done your taxes" and you get your check. You can still fill out your tax form manually if you really want to, but I'll bet this would save many millions of dollars and hours of American spending.
By that math China is the world's sole superpower, since they can field the most grunts.
There's something to be said for numerical superiority, but only if you can project that power. In terms of supply lines, transportation, air cover, mobile communications, etc., China probably can't effectively "field" as many soldiers as the United States. (You haven't really "fielded" anyone if they're sitting in a bunker all day hungry and without enough ammunition.) And when you also take into account technological and strategic force multipliers, I wouldn't worry too much.
If you think about it, the used and included FOSS in order to gain developers, and jumpstart increased interest in their platform.
They used FOSS tools and applications to actually implement sections of the kernel and low-level userspace, not just for developers and "increased interest". GCC is the MacOS X compiler, BSD is the UNIX user space, Darwin is the kernel. And as seen in WebKit and LLVM's clang, they're still making significant contributions-- far beyond most company's small patches and bugfixes-- to the FOSS community as well.
It will be interesting to see what the Darwin landscape looks like as of Leopard (the upcoming MacOS X 10.5). The iPhone was supposedly built on Leopard, and if the kernel is still sufficiently open source one could see it replacing Linux in some of these smart phones.
Great points. A lot of the "cost plus" contract awards require accurate a-priori estimation of progress to be made, which is silly when you're inventing something new. But still, a lot of this depends on specific contract vehicles and program managers. DARPA's a big space.
From the summary:
No doubt UMG would prefer to make the former cheaper, while maintaining the current pricing for the latter.
No, UMG would like to charge MUCH MORE than current pricing for new music, I'm sure. My guess is that it's only Apple's near-monopoly on paid digital music downloads that are keeping prices in check. It's currently Apple vs. the music companies instead of consumers vs. the music companies, and Apple has the clout to win that battle, whereas we don't.
Except that they haven't. The DARPA spokesman in the article is right, and the "horizon" for DARPA (and CERDEC) programs are at LEAST 4-5 years out. In fact, some might argue that DARPA spends *TOO MUCH* money these days on pie-in-the-sky research and not enough on things that will directly benefit warfighters or civilians. Perhaps some particular program director is hard-nosed about this stuff, but it's certainly not true of DARPA in general.
Just peruse the list of some of the stuff DARPA is funding for proof of the long horizon: