You know, in Quake 3 Arena, you can hit Single Player, Skirmish, pick a map, hit Next, pick your opponents, and set a Time Limit and no Frag Limit. Like say for 15 minutes. And that's when the game ends.
The "fair tax" as described in the book does not allow you to deduct things because they were for "business use." The rule is, if you consume it, you have to pay tax on it. The only time you don't have to pay tax is when you're buying for resale.
I suppose the only loophole here is if you buy a bunch of inventory for resale and then sell it at a loss (thus causing the retail price to be less, and the tax to be less). But it would be really suspicious if the company you own bought only one Bugatti Veylon for "resale" and then was unable to sell it at full price and so sold it at a stupendous loss to, ah, you...
Jump to page 25 of the second set of slides, where the author shows two time vectors at an angle to each other. If you have two observers, one with each time vector, then each observer thinks that the other is slowed down. Each sees redshifted light from the other.
This angle between time vectors can be caused by gravity or by the curvature of the universe.
In the gravity case, it is used to explain discrepancies in all sorts of measurements, from the Pioneer spacecraft, to the changes in the orbits of various celestial bodies, to discrepancies in the GPS, to the apparency that a U.S. atomic clock and a French one will each think the other is ticking slower. This is what most of the first slide show is about.
In the cosmological case, the idea is that the universe is round (see page 28 of the second presentation) and that the redshift that we think is due to the expansion of the unverse is actually due to the curvature of the universe, i.e., a galaxy around the universe from us will appear to have slower time, because its time vector is going in a different direction than ours. A galaxy ninety degrees around would appear to have time completely stopped, so it would be invisible to us (frequency of zero). Galaxies further away than that would be going backwards in time from our perspective, but we can't see them.
This is an idea I have not seen before. It seems really neat to me. It seems plausible but then (a) I can't personally verify the observations that he claims validate his theory; he could have produced fake graphs and they would fool me, but I would think it would be easy for him to get caught at that, and (b) even though I've had calculus up to differential equations, I never had non-Euclidean geometry or higher-dimensional stuff, so I can't actually follow his calculations very well. Then again, I didn't try very hard.
We shall soon see if he has made a significant error. The numbers and the observations will tell the story; either they work out, or they don't.
Geniuses are human beings -- and every human being should be allowed to rise to the level of his own potential, rather than being forced to conform to the herd.
Ok, let me rephrase that: all the new revenue-generating applications these days are on the Internet.
Microsoft’s dominance in Windows and Office, and the dominance of other established PC software companies, is part of the reason why this is so. It’s far easier to make money offering a web service (which is still frontier-territory) than by competing against established giants on their own turf.
...is that if you want to make money, it is useless to target the PC. The PC is dead as a target when it comes to commercial application development.
He isn't trying to replace your PC, he's trying to explain why companies just aren't developing PC software anymore.
All the revenue-generating applications these days are on the Internet. (Games are one of the big exceptions, but even PC games these days have to use the Internet in some way to be commercially viable.)
Paul Graham has been saying the same thing for some time. And I think they’re right!
Imagine if such a planet were habitable (that is, a planet with three suns). Think about how much of our human existence is dictated by the cycles of our single sun. I wonder how different things would be with three suns.
Yeah, imagine if the three suns lined up every thousand years. A Gelfling might have to find the shard and heal the Dark Crystal.
My guess is that this is a timing attack. While thread 1 generates an RSA key, thread 2 times itself performing various instructions. If thread 1 is using the FPU to do a multiply, the FPU won't be available for thread 2 right away, so there will be a measurable delay. Thread 2 can then determine when thread 1 is running multiplies.
If my hunch is correct, an OS could fix this by allowing a process to enter a "secure mode" which would force the other thread on the same CPU to be idle when that process was scheduled.
That's just what I was thinking! 57 million Chinese people have internet access, but they only get to see 1/4 of the internet, so that works out to 14.25 million.
If I recall correctly, MMIX uses its whole huge register file as a stack. All of your instructions specify register numbers as counted from the top-of-stack. Stack space is allocated and deallocated in frames, not a register at a time. A frame must be small enough to fit in registers. The stack spills to memory if it overflows, and refills from memory if it underflows. It does not have to spill/refill on a frame boundary. But activation records for compiled C routines could nest five or six deep and not spill. An inline routine can still allocate and release its own activation record.
Not all the registers are used in a stack-like way; some of them are global for your program and some of them are global to the OS. There are a couple of special registers that indicate where these regions start in the register file. The remainder of the register file is used as a stack.
They charge me based on how much it costs to produce their stuff, divided by the minimum number of people they expect to see it. If more people show up, they profit.
But you'd be willing to force them to choose between working for free and not working (on creative stuff) at all.
I read the book about two months ago. I have mixed feelings.
On the bad side, it's too short and too densely packed. I felt like I was being rushed from one thing to another so quickly that I couldn't figure out what was going on. The book required me to notice very subtle details, when I missed one I felt like ''huh?'' and had to go back and re-read before I realized, "oh, that explains it." I thought Wembleth came off as a pathetic character (although I understand why he had to be that way -- a ringworld native, caught in the middle of battles he cannot be expected to understand -- I still inwardly rebel against it), I thought the very little rishathra that was in the book was unenjoyable compared to what it was in the second and third books, and I thought in a few places that scant attention was paid to the kinds of sensory details that make good fiction seem real.
On the other hand, some of the ideas in the book were really wonderfully surprising and unexpected. The book succeeds in being mind-expanding in spite of some of its flaws.
On balance, I can't help but think that if Niven had put a little more time and care into it, it might have been a really great work.
If a person chooses death in order to avoid a fate worse than death (such as living to see his country overrun by, e.g., terrorists, and knowing that he could have done something about it, but did not, because he was a coward) then that's moral. However, if a person has the ability to really live, and chooses death or something that leads to death, that's immoral.
"I'm willing to kill you if you infringe my rights" doesn't sound like the beginnings of a non-aggression pact to me.
It seems strange that you seem to prefer rooting everything in feelings instead of facts. Facts are more reliable.
By describing the left, right, and center in U.S. politics, I was not attempting to imply that no other views are possible, or that those three points form a line into which all possible views fall. My point was that none of these views is based on facts. Ergo, a fourth view is possible. (And of course an infinite number of irrational views are possible, because they don't have to be constrained by each other or by facts.)
Politics is about organizing society. Law is backed by the guns of policemen and the military. Culture is not. Culture is the window-dressing whereas politics is the walls. It is legal to be uncultured and rude. Might not make you popular, but that's beside the point. When you break the law, you are more than just unpopular. You can be fined or jailed or, in extreme cases, executed. [In many paragraphs like this I mean "you" in the indefinite sense, not you personally.]
The Jim Jones Cult was organized in a way that posed a mortal danger to its members. This danger was apparent to people long before the Kool-aid was passed around. Some people chose not to see it. The first danger was that the cult required people not to think for themselves, but instead to accept the word of Jim Jones, on faith. Being able to think for oneself is a requirement of survival.
Reality isn't "about perception," reality is what people perceive. Whether or not they understand what they perceive, and whether they are willing to admit to themselves that they perceive it, depends on a lot of things, including how much they know and how rational they are and what misconceptions, if any, they have.
People can disagree about whether an act is just or unjust, but it cannot actually be just and unjust at the same time. People can disagree about whether I shot Abraham Lincoln or not, but I have to have either shot him or not. Disagreements can exist, but contradictions cannot. Obviously we wouldn't need courts and legislatures if everybody agreed all the time. But if we could disagree and yet all be right, then we wouldn't need them either.
The purpose of court cases is to resolve disagreements, not just allow them. The same can be said of politics. How do you tell whether a court is resolving a disagreement correctly? You look at the facts, all of them, and the reasoning that flows from those facts. And you compare that to the court's facts and reasoning. All this also applies to a political process. When you look at the facts, you may make errors, but the only way to detect those errors is to keep looking at the facts. The facts are, by definition, always right.
That's why I'd rather take a side and be wrong than sit in the middle where, apparently, it is believed that nobody can ever really be sure they are right about anything. A middle like that seems to deny the existence of facts, although of course not all of them. Only the ones that can be used to prove morality or justice.
Your morals are what you use to keep yourself alive. If you default on your morals, your endanger your own life. Your rights are what you expect society to grant you in order for you to stay alive. If other people deny you your rights, they threaten your life.
A person's mere willingness to die -- or kill -- doesn't mean anything, because people can be rational or irrational (and there's more than one way to be irrational). But whether a person lives or dies, whether a person can survive (if he chooses to) or must perish (regardless of his own choice in the matter), is an objective fact, amenable to observation and analysis.
It is this observation and analysis that politicians are failing to do all over the political spectrum. When they do it, they are inconsistent and incomplete, but the reason why we still have some civilization left is because some politicians make some life-affirming decisions now and then, or because some politicians made them in the past and they still haven't been completely undone. The Declaration of Independence is an example of the latter.
Today's radicals prefer to base their decisions on some ideology or other, but inevitably an ideology which itself is based on faith. Not observation, not analysis, just pure faith. Whether it's in God or in the evil of capitalism. Or both. That's their mistake. Then you've got the middle, which is just a bunch of compromisers and appeasers who stand for nothing.
Politics is about organizing a society. A society can be organized in a life-promoting way, or in a way that poses a mortal danger to its members. The purpose of law is not to impose views on people, it's to prevent them from killing each other. Beyond that, it doesn't really matter whether they take the red pill or the blue pill.
If people are extremely passionate about politics, it's for good reason. Politics is a matter of life and death. Many people understand this even though they may be very wrong about whether their political ideas will actually have the effects they predict. History is the only guide to that. But extreme moderates like you do not understand it. You think that there is no difference between facts and feelings, no difference between one view and another, no difference between imposing views on people by force, and preventing them from being so imposed.
And that makes yours one of the most dangerous political views of all.
It may sound like a trifling issue, but writing "the" before a country name can be quite offensive by insinuating that their nation is a mere region instead of a soverign country.
I beat the Slashdotting! I found out about this on Doom World and I've been playing with it all day.
Couple of helpful hints for Windows users. First, run cube.bat in the root directory; the cube.exe in the bin directory mysteriously crashes if you run it directly. (Well, it did on my system.) Second, if you have a slower system, like I do, you might actually want to edit that cube.bat file and set the resolution to 640x480 instead of 1024x768!
Slashdot Mirror
The Polywell will get there first.
You know, in Quake 3 Arena, you can hit Single Player, Skirmish, pick a map, hit Next, pick your opponents, and set a Time Limit and no Frag Limit. Like say for 15 minutes. And that's when the game ends.
I've been doing that for years.
The "fair tax" as described in the book does not allow you to deduct things because they were for "business use." The rule is, if you consume it, you have to pay tax on it. The only time you don't have to pay tax is when you're buying for resale.
I suppose the only loophole here is if you buy a bunch of inventory for resale and then sell it at a loss (thus causing the retail price to be less, and the tax to be less). But it would be really suspicious if the company you own bought only one Bugatti Veylon for "resale" and then was unable to sell it at full price and so sold it at a stupendous loss to, ah, you...
Jump to page 25 of the second set of slides, where the author shows two time vectors at an angle to each other. If you have two observers, one with each time vector, then each observer thinks that the other is slowed down. Each sees redshifted light from the other.
This angle between time vectors can be caused by gravity or by the curvature of the universe.
In the gravity case, it is used to explain discrepancies in all sorts of measurements, from the Pioneer spacecraft, to the changes in the orbits of various celestial bodies, to discrepancies in the GPS, to the apparency that a U.S. atomic clock and a French one will each think the other is ticking slower. This is what most of the first slide show is about.
In the cosmological case, the idea is that the universe is round (see page 28 of the second presentation) and that the redshift that we think is due to the expansion of the unverse is actually due to the curvature of the universe, i.e., a galaxy around the universe from us will appear to have slower time, because its time vector is going in a different direction than ours. A galaxy ninety degrees around would appear to have time completely stopped, so it would be invisible to us (frequency of zero). Galaxies further away than that would be going backwards in time from our perspective, but we can't see them.
This is an idea I have not seen before. It seems really neat to me. It seems plausible but then (a) I can't personally verify the observations that he claims validate his theory; he could have produced fake graphs and they would fool me, but I would think it would be easy for him to get caught at that, and (b) even though I've had calculus up to differential equations, I never had non-Euclidean geometry or higher-dimensional stuff, so I can't actually follow his calculations very well. Then again, I didn't try very hard.
We shall soon see if he has made a significant error. The numbers and the observations will tell the story; either they work out, or they don't.
The servers are congested right now. Apparently BOINC has a really short timeout. Just wait a few hours and try again.
I tried it at around 7 PM CST, and it prompted me for a proxy server. I tried it again at 11:30 PM CST and it worked.
Geniuses are human beings -- and every human being should be allowed to rise to the level of his own potential, rather than being forced to conform to the herd.
Most Americans are anti-intellectual because most intellectuals are anti-American.
Ok, let me rephrase that: all the new revenue-generating applications these days are on the Internet.
Microsoft’s dominance in Windows and Office, and the dominance of other established PC software companies, is part of the reason why this is so. It’s far easier to make money offering a web service (which is still frontier-territory) than by competing against established giants on their own turf.
...is that if you want to make money, it is useless to target the PC. The PC is dead as a target when it comes to commercial application development.
He isn't trying to replace your PC, he's trying to explain why companies just aren't developing PC software anymore.
All the revenue-generating applications these days are on the Internet. (Games are one of the big exceptions, but even PC games these days have to use the Internet in some way to be commercially viable.)
Paul Graham has been saying the same thing for some time. And I think they’re right!
Imagine if such a planet were habitable (that is, a planet with three suns). Think about how much of our human existence is dictated by the cycles of our single sun. I wonder how different things would be with three suns.
Yeah, imagine if the three suns lined up every thousand years. A Gelfling might have to find the shard and heal the Dark Crystal.
My guess is that this is a timing attack. While thread 1 generates an RSA key, thread 2 times itself performing various instructions. If thread 1 is using the FPU to do a multiply, the FPU won't be available for thread 2 right away, so there will be a measurable delay. Thread 2 can then determine when thread 1 is running multiplies.
If my hunch is correct, an OS could fix this by allowing a process to enter a "secure mode" which would force the other thread on the same CPU to be idle when that process was scheduled.
That's just what I was thinking! 57 million Chinese people have internet access, but they only get to see 1/4 of the internet, so that works out to 14.25 million.
If that were the real intent, they could set up a content-neutral form of blocking, based on actual bandwidth usage.
since IBM started to embrace free software, they haven't done a bad move. On the contrary, they make very intelligent moves.
Just like a chess game. I wonder if they repurposed Deep Thought and Deep Blue toward developing software strategies.
If I recall correctly, MMIX uses its whole huge register file as a stack. All of your instructions specify register numbers as counted from the top-of-stack. Stack space is allocated and deallocated in frames, not a register at a time. A frame must be small enough to fit in registers. The stack spills to memory if it overflows, and refills from memory if it underflows. It does not have to spill/refill on a frame boundary. But activation records for compiled C routines could nest five or six deep and not spill. An inline routine can still allocate and release its own activation record.
Not all the registers are used in a stack-like way; some of them are global for your program and some of them are global to the OS. There are a couple of special registers that indicate where these regions start in the register file. The remainder of the register file is used as a stack.
They charge me based on how much it costs to produce their stuff, divided by the minimum number of people they expect to see it. If more people show up, they profit.
But you'd be willing to force them to choose between working for free and not working (on creative stuff) at all.
This insightful series of posts reveals the argument the FCC is going to use in court.
You laugh now, but the courts might just accept such a line of argument...
I read the book about two months ago. I have mixed feelings.
On the bad side, it's too short and too densely packed. I felt like I was being rushed from one thing to another so quickly that I couldn't figure out what was going on. The book required me to notice very subtle details, when I missed one I felt like ''huh?'' and had to go back and re-read before I realized, "oh, that explains it." I thought Wembleth came off as a pathetic character (although I understand why he had to be that way -- a ringworld native, caught in the middle of battles he cannot be expected to understand -- I still inwardly rebel against it), I thought the very little rishathra that was in the book was unenjoyable compared to what it was in the second and third books, and I thought in a few places that scant attention was paid to the kinds of sensory details that make good fiction seem real.
On the other hand, some of the ideas in the book were really wonderfully surprising and unexpected. The book succeeds in being mind-expanding in spite of some of its flaws.
On balance, I can't help but think that if Niven had put a little more time and care into it, it might have been a really great work.
If a person chooses death in order to avoid a fate worse than death (such as living to see his country overrun by, e.g., terrorists, and knowing that he could have done something about it, but did not, because he was a coward) then that's moral. However, if a person has the ability to really live, and chooses death or something that leads to death, that's immoral.
"I'm willing to kill you if you infringe my rights" doesn't sound like the beginnings of a non-aggression pact to me.
It seems strange that you seem to prefer rooting everything in feelings instead of facts. Facts are more reliable.
By describing the left, right, and center in U.S. politics, I was not attempting to imply that no other views are possible, or that those three points form a line into which all possible views fall. My point was that none of these views is based on facts. Ergo, a fourth view is possible. (And of course an infinite number of irrational views are possible, because they don't have to be constrained by each other or by facts.)
Politics is about organizing society. Law is backed by the guns of policemen and the military. Culture is not. Culture is the window-dressing whereas politics is the walls. It is legal to be uncultured and rude. Might not make you popular, but that's beside the point. When you break the law, you are more than just unpopular. You can be fined or jailed or, in extreme cases, executed. [In many paragraphs like this I mean "you" in the indefinite sense, not you personally.]
The Jim Jones Cult was organized in a way that posed a mortal danger to its members. This danger was apparent to people long before the Kool-aid was passed around. Some people chose not to see it. The first danger was that the cult required people not to think for themselves, but instead to accept the word of Jim Jones, on faith. Being able to think for oneself is a requirement of survival.
Reality isn't "about perception," reality is what people perceive. Whether or not they understand what they perceive, and whether they are willing to admit to themselves that they perceive it, depends on a lot of things, including how much they know and how rational they are and what misconceptions, if any, they have.
People can disagree about whether an act is just or unjust, but it cannot actually be just and unjust at the same time. People can disagree about whether I shot Abraham Lincoln or not, but I have to have either shot him or not. Disagreements can exist, but contradictions cannot. Obviously we wouldn't need courts and legislatures if everybody agreed all the time. But if we could disagree and yet all be right, then we wouldn't need them either.
The purpose of court cases is to resolve disagreements, not just allow them. The same can be said of politics. How do you tell whether a court is resolving a disagreement correctly? You look at the facts, all of them, and the reasoning that flows from those facts. And you compare that to the court's facts and reasoning. All this also applies to a political process. When you look at the facts, you may make errors, but the only way to detect those errors is to keep looking at the facts. The facts are, by definition, always right.
That's why I'd rather take a side and be wrong than sit in the middle where, apparently, it is believed that nobody can ever really be sure they are right about anything. A middle like that seems to deny the existence of facts, although of course not all of them. Only the ones that can be used to prove morality or justice.
Your morals are what you use to keep yourself alive. If you default on your morals, your endanger your own life. Your rights are what you expect society to grant you in order for you to stay alive. If other people deny you your rights, they threaten your life.
A person's mere willingness to die -- or kill -- doesn't mean anything, because people can be rational or irrational (and there's more than one way to be irrational). But whether a person lives or dies, whether a person can survive (if he chooses to) or must perish (regardless of his own choice in the matter), is an objective fact, amenable to observation and analysis.
It is this observation and analysis that politicians are failing to do all over the political spectrum. When they do it, they are inconsistent and incomplete, but the reason why we still have some civilization left is because some politicians make some life-affirming decisions now and then, or because some politicians made them in the past and they still haven't been completely undone. The Declaration of Independence is an example of the latter.
Today's radicals prefer to base their decisions on some ideology or other, but inevitably an ideology which itself is based on faith. Not observation, not analysis, just pure faith. Whether it's in God or in the evil of capitalism. Or both. That's their mistake. Then you've got the middle, which is just a bunch of compromisers and appeasers who stand for nothing.
Politics is about organizing a society. A society can be organized in a life-promoting way, or in a way that poses a mortal danger to its members. The purpose of law is not to impose views on people, it's to prevent them from killing each other. Beyond that, it doesn't really matter whether they take the red pill or the blue pill.
If people are extremely passionate about politics, it's for good reason. Politics is a matter of life and death. Many people understand this even though they may be very wrong about whether their political ideas will actually have the effects they predict. History is the only guide to that. But extreme moderates like you do not understand it. You think that there is no difference between facts and feelings, no difference between one view and another, no difference between imposing views on people by force, and preventing them from being so imposed.
And that makes yours one of the most dangerous political views of all.
It may sound like a trifling issue, but writing "the" before a country name can be quite offensive by insinuating that their nation is a mere region instead of a soverign country.
I think the United States didn't get the memo.
There were a lot of alternate lyrics for that song, too.
I met her in the attic .40 automatic
with a
I met her at the bank
with a British Army tank
I met her in the tub
with a U.S. Navy sub
And so on and so forth. But I used to like to sing
Deck the halls with gasoline,
Light a match and watch it gleam,
Watch the school burn down to ashes,
Aren't you glad you played with matches?
I left the Fa-la-la out. And there was also
On top of Old Smoky, .44 Slug.
All covered with blood,
I shot my poor teacher
with a
And down at her funeral,
Her body was laid,
Some people threw flowers,
I threw a grenade.
Oooh, I'm going to cause a rash of expulsions with these old tunes! But I agree. What we need is zero tolerance for zero tolerance!
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur. Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.
If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
-- Howard Aiken
I beat the Slashdotting! I found out about this on Doom World and I've been playing with it all day.
Couple of helpful hints for Windows users. First, run cube.bat in the root directory; the cube.exe in the bin directory mysteriously crashes if you run it directly. (Well, it did on my system.) Second, if you have a slower system, like I do, you might actually want to edit that cube.bat file and set the resolution to 640x480 instead of 1024x768!