Uh, for crosscut shredded, there's a little combinatorial search problem to solve.
It's not so bad for strips: the search space is only size n! for n strips. Let's say 50 strips: that gives you ~1e64 possible arrangements. But most of those are patently bogus, because the strips contain so much information, and besides flipping a strip or two is not going to make much difference to the reconstruction and will be easy to fix.
For crosscut, things are a little scarier. Now we have something like 2500 chads. Worse, many of these chads will be very similar-looking: the heuristics to sort them out are going to be tough. So the search space is much more difficult, as well as ridiculously huge.
I teach combinatorial search, and have a doctorate in its application. I can imagine some techniques that would probably work. But I'd hardly assign this problem to my students.
Yes, your NOC better get their Cisco gear out of service until they have the patch in. Otherwise someone could crash the Cisco and make your network connection unusable!
Or something... "We had to destroy the network in order to save it."
Mapmakers will commonly seed slight defects into their maps (e.g. nonexistent roads) to detect copying.
A related practice in software engineering is "fault seeding", in which bugs are deliberately injected into code to see if they are found during V&V. (The deliberate bugs should be removed before the product ships, of course.:-)
I know you were just funning, but folks may want to know that the OOo and fontconfig developers are working together, and fontconfig support is likely to appear shortly. This would be a Good Thing: many of my remaining problems with OOo are font-related.
While OOo doesn't currently have fontconfig support, the fontconfig and OOo developers are actively working on it, and with luck it should be in shortly. I agree: it will be a relief.
...for some reason you have no choice in determining your character's initial starting location, appearance, or gender, which are chosen for you seemingly at random.
This was generally a good review. Unfortunately, the reviewer completely failed to explain the finer points of character creation.
A unique feature of real life is that, while players cannot choose their own character attributes, new players can enter the game only when their characters have been created by players already online. The mechanic is that two players of opposite gender and appropriate age and alignment combine their attributes randomly to create a new PC. This mechanic makes the gender attribute more than superficially significant: much of game play,
including many socials, are gender-specific.
The newly-created avatar actually encumbers the female "mother" character for 9 months, after which it typically spends time as essentially an item in the mother's inventory.
Character creation is normally part of the "parenting" system referred to in the review, although it is not uncommon for characters other than the creators to parent the newbies.
Many players of real life find character creation among the most enjoyable aspects of the game. There is a practice-only option for character creation: in fact, practice character creation is itself one of the most popular activities in real life, and is discussed endlessly in-game.
Some character classes in real life, for example, the "nerd" class, are usually nominally male, but essentially genderless from the gaming POV. Perhaps the reviewer's character is a nerd: if so, I'd encourage use of the in-game training and character mods to develop some character creation skills. I think the reviewer might be surprised by how much fun they can be.
Did you know that recipes are not protected intellectual property under US law? One would expect that in this situation, there would be massive "recipe piracy"...and indeed there is. One would expect that most folks who create recipes would be unable to make a living at it...and indeed they are.
Yet, somehow, there still seems to be no shortage of recipes in the US. Every amateur cook I know has books and books of the things clipped from magazines, copied from friends, hacked up to suit their tastes. Nonetheless, more arrive all the time.
I think it is great if some cooks, and some artists, can manage to eat and pay bills by exercising their art. However, there are worse indignities than having a day job.
You know what's funny, I used to think 70 or 75 was a good solid refresh rate. Now that I run 85hz, I can see the flicker at 70 and every now and then at 75.
Keep squinting, friend. Soon you will see the fnords.
My biggest issue with expensive handhelds is that I am likely to drop a handheld, step on it, run over it, lose it, etc. I can't afford to do that with a device that costs more than about $100. So I carry a recon Visor, and backpack a laptop around when I need more. Uggh.
I'm seriously tempted by the older Zaurus, which is now $150-ish, but by the time all the accoutrements are added, it's still just out of range for me.
I think "libraries of congress" and "Voxwagon beetle" are more suitable terms... hey dude.. this HDD can store 0.69865 libraries of congress and that computer goes 1.79 times faster than your Civic:-P
Not as funny as you think: that is likely how the horsepower came to be...
You've found a point I missed talking about, the "contract" argument. Good catch. But I don't buy it. Let me explain.
For pretty much all of history, a moral contract has required an explicit interaction between the contracting parties. The notion that I am implicitly entering into a contract with someone that I don't know by taking some action is an interesting legal concept. However, I find it highly questionable to believe that I am morally bound by a contract that the other side is ultimately essentially unaware that I have even entered into.
If artists want to bind me with an explicit contract at the time I purchase their work, I agree that I have a moral obligation to honor that contract. To continue my previous example, in Biblical terms this falls under the injunction to "not bear false witness" and to "let your yes be yes and your no be no". Lacking an identifiable, explicit agreement, I find myself no more morally bound than if the EULA said that "by purchasing this CD, you agree to stand on your head". Indeed, it may: I never read the things.
Obviously, there's no reason I need to buy media from the *AA except for grins: indeed, I buy little. I find it relevant that you think that the sort of analysis I am proposing "makes the tech community look unreasonable": I think it's precisely the sort that makes us look reasonable to the general public, as evinced by their current practices. It's the *AA advertising campaign that I find unreasonable looking.
(BTW, I think this is a bit offtopic, but you claim that "It's not even as if we're talking about ideas here, only implementations - this is a discussion about copyrights, not patents, we're covering actual implementation work, not `Wouldn't it be great to have a story with a talking frog in it.'" Note that copyright isn't what it used to be. If your talking frog too-closely resembles Michigan J. Frog, Warner Brothers will sue you. If your talking frog too-closely resembles the Frog Prince, Disney will sue you. And so forth. Copyright, as currently interpreted by the courts, covers characters, settings, etc.---ideas.)
You have a moral obligation to use works of art under the reasonable conditions set by the artists.
I find this statement (admittedly taken out of context) quite fascinating. I'm trying to think of any historically relevant philosopher of morality that has ever suggested any sort of moral obligation even remotely like this, and am coming up empty. Yet this is the result of the *AA advertising binge: the people of the world have come to believe that whatever their television tells them is not just the law, but morally imperative.
I'm a Christian, and I'm trying to think, as an example, what Biblical imperatives I am violating when I rip a CD and give it to a friend. "No stealing" is the obvious one, but it is quite difficult for me to equate stealing (depriving another of something) and duplicating (making a copy of something)---they are such different activities on the face of it! I am ripping a CD I paid for, after all: I'm surely not depriving anyone of anything more tangible than "an opportunity to sell to my friend", which is an abstract concept indeed. If I feed my friend lunch, do I not equally deprive someone of this opportunity?
I thought of a few more possible justifications, but at the end of the day I'm afraid I cannot see the moral imperative. As far as I can tell, there is no basis for a moral obligation to use artists' works in the way they direct. I will continue to use them as I like, as folks have done for as long as there has been art.
i would love to see people like yahoo POP3 implement SSL, but i suspect with a large (non-paying) userbase, the processor time required by the extra SSL encryption overhead would probably cripple their servers during peak times...
This is what RC4 is for. In spite of all the potential weaknesses in this stream cipher, it is still believed to be secure if used properly. RC4 is dirt cheap per byte, and a standardly-available SSL option.
Gold's article says that Crookes' radiometer has invariably rotated in the opposite sense to the expected one. The black side of the paddles invariably recedes from the light, and many explanations have been offered, but not including that which would seem the most obvious: the absence of radiation pressure on the bright side.
This is either incredibly naive or incredibly disingenuous. Crooke's radiometer is well-understood: air heated by the black side of the paddles expands and pushes the paddles away from it. Operate the radiometer in a vacuum, and it doesn't move---proving only that dim light bouncing off tiny paddles cannot overcome significant friction. Reduce the friction, and the radiometer works just as expected (see the link).
The thing about unrefereed, unedited pubs is that these days it is not that hard to get anything even slightly clueful published in either a refereed conference or journal or a reasonably-edited popular publication: there are lots of venues. So when an extraordinary claim shows up on arxiv, you should probably figure it's nonsense unless experts tell you otherwise.
The best keyboard I ever owned, far and away, was the Cherry
ANSI-standard keyboard I had on my Northwest Microcomputer Systems NMS85P circa mid-1980s. (The NMS85P was an excellent 8085-based S100 CP/M system that was favorably reviewed by Byte Magazine back in the day: my father owned 1/3 of NMS.)
This keyboard had a beautiful layout, and featured Hall-effect keyswitches: no electrical contact whatsover, quiet, and positive-action.
At one point, the bail on the space bar was broken in an accident, and my younger brother decided to fix it...with Super Glue. I came home to find the whole insides glued together. After 1/2 hour with acetone, I had cleaned out the glue---and the keyboard worked fine!
...Vivendi won't reconcile the accounts of Mp3.com members who are owed less than $50 (most of them)...
IANAL, but many US states' laws would allow residents to sue Vivendi in Small Claims court to recover this money. In Oregon, neither side may bring an attorney into court, and the cost of filing is quite low ($45-$80) and recoverable from the defendant if you win. I would guess offhand that in this sort of case, Vivendi would fail to appear and just cut you a check to save costs...
Small claims court is one of those resources that is underused by the "little guys" it was designed to protect. Again, IANAL, but I would consider taking advantage of it here.
I find it interesting that no one has mentioned a principal advantage of Debian at this point: it's free as in beer.
Yes, it is possible to install and maintain e.g. RedHat without paying $25-$100 every so often for their latest boxed set, but a look at the RH corporate bottom line suggests that it's not easy. When I administrated a number of RH systems at work, I used to buy a box regularly: the "big-bang" upgrades make this more or less compulsory, at least as long as downloading and burning cd-sized ISOs is still a pain.
Debian is the only major Linux distro I'm aware of that literally won't take your money for product. (Donations, of course, are gratefully accepted.) Further, apt-based continuous update means that you need never do a "big-bang" upgrade, so there's no hassle with ISOs.
Even Knoppix is free (which is amazing), and this is currently far and away the easiest way to install Deb: I'll put it up against the best commercial installers anytime.
So that's what I'd tell my water-cooler buddy in the article: "Save yourself $50/year, install Knoppix."
If you know what you want, you can run stable plus a few packages from unstable. It's a total and unecessary pain to set up, and then works like a charm forever ("the Debian Way"). Edit your/etc/apt/preferences file to have
This would be similar to Microsoft putting the axe in X-Windows for trademark violation.
Ever wonder why (up until about a year ago when the validity of the "Windows" trademark was litigated elsewhere) official X stuff was always carefully labeled either just "X" or "X Window System"? Heck, at one point, the X Consortium gave away T-Shirts reading "It's A Window System Called X, Not A System Called X Windows" in an attempt to forestall probable Microsoft lawsuits.
Heh. I was reading the source code for XGammon for some random reason a few months ago, and the README said
An Imakefile is provided now. Thanks to thomas@ghpc8.ihf.rwth-aachen.de and Bart Skinner (bart@skinner.cs.uoregon.edu)
and later
Portation: SunOS 4.1 4.2 bart@skinner.cs.uoregon.edu, was the first and many others.
I sat there for a moment trying to figure out who this Bart Skinner person was: I had done CS at U. Oregon in that time frame, and couldn't remember the name. Finally it came to me: it was me.
I had given the authors some help with the program back in the day and since totally forgotten about it. They had credited me (thanks!) but had confused the hostname of the machine I was on with my last name: as a result, I didn't recognize me for a moment.
It was a pretty obscure piece of code in its heyday. In 2003 it's even more obscure. A few months ago I was looking at the source...
The draft linked above is, AFAIK, identical to the published paper. Usenix rules allow preprints by the authors on the authors' web site.
The bottom line is that e-mail gets lost: anyone who acts as if delivery is 100% reliable is in a dream world anyway. Spam filter false positives are just one more way for e-mail to get lost. As long as it happens very infrequently, the probability of the lost message being something important is low for most folks (certainly for me). To a naive first approximation:
This is a small number for me: go measure your own e-mail and see if it is for you. Further, the naivete of the approximation is shown by saying that the probability of an e-mail being false positive is independent of its probability of being critical---most filters are more likely to get the critical cases right in my experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, for crosscut shredded, there's a little combinatorial search problem to solve.
It's not so bad for strips: the search space is only size n! for n strips. Let's say 50 strips: that gives you ~1e64 possible arrangements. But most of those are patently bogus, because the strips contain so much information, and besides flipping a strip or two is not going to make much difference to the reconstruction and will be easy to fix.
For crosscut, things are a little scarier. Now we have something like 2500 chads. Worse, many of these chads will be very similar-looking: the heuristics to sort them out are going to be tough. So the search space is much more difficult, as well as ridiculously huge.
I teach combinatorial search, and have a doctorate in its application. I can imagine some techniques that would probably work. But I'd hardly assign this problem to my students.
Yes, your NOC better get their Cisco gear out of service until they have the patch in. Otherwise someone could crash the Cisco and make your network connection unusable!
Or something... "We had to destroy the network in order to save it."
Mapmakers will commonly seed slight defects into their maps (e.g. nonexistent roads) to detect copying.
A related practice in software engineering is "fault seeding", in which bugs are deliberately injected into code to see if they are found during V&V. (The deliberate bugs should be removed before the product ships, of course. :-)
Old ideas, but quite useful.
2) No font config support
I know you were just funning, but folks may want to know that the OOo and fontconfig developers are working together, and fontconfig support is likely to appear shortly. This would be a Good Thing: many of my remaining problems with OOo are font-related.
While OOo doesn't currently have fontconfig support, the fontconfig and OOo developers are actively working on it, and with luck it should be in shortly. I agree: it will be a relief.
I think you'd like Moz: it has all the features you want, and is free and ad-free. The Moz mouse gestures seem to me very much on-par with Opera's.
Get a keychain USB drive. You can get a 64MB drive for less than $15 these days: should be plenty.
This was generally a good review. Unfortunately, the reviewer completely failed to explain the finer points of character creation.
A unique feature of real life is that, while players cannot choose their own character attributes, new players can enter the game only when their characters have been created by players already online. The mechanic is that two players of opposite gender and appropriate age and alignment combine their attributes randomly to create a new PC. This mechanic makes the gender attribute more than superficially significant: much of game play, including many socials, are gender-specific.
The newly-created avatar actually encumbers the female "mother" character for 9 months, after which it typically spends time as essentially an item in the mother's inventory. Character creation is normally part of the "parenting" system referred to in the review, although it is not uncommon for characters other than the creators to parent the newbies.
Many players of real life find character creation among the most enjoyable aspects of the game. There is a practice-only option for character creation: in fact, practice character creation is itself one of the most popular activities in real life, and is discussed endlessly in-game.
Some character classes in real life, for example, the "nerd" class, are usually nominally male, but essentially genderless from the gaming POV. Perhaps the reviewer's character is a nerd: if so, I'd encourage use of the in-game training and character mods to develop some character creation skills. I think the reviewer might be surprised by how much fun they can be.
Did you know that recipes are not protected intellectual property under US law? One would expect that in this situation, there would be massive "recipe piracy"...and indeed there is. One would expect that most folks who create recipes would be unable to make a living at it...and indeed they are.
Yet, somehow, there still seems to be no shortage of recipes in the US. Every amateur cook I know has books and books of the things clipped from magazines, copied from friends, hacked up to suit their tastes. Nonetheless, more arrive all the time.
I think it is great if some cooks, and some artists, can manage to eat and pay bills by exercising their art. However, there are worse indignities than having a day job.
Once they named an airport after Reagan, I gave up on any sense of propriety in governmental naming. An airport, for pity's sake!
You know what's funny, I used to think 70 or 75 was a good solid refresh rate. Now that I run 85hz, I can see the flicker at 70 and every now and then at 75.
Keep squinting, friend. Soon you will see the fnords.
My biggest issue with expensive handhelds is that I am likely to drop a handheld, step on it, run over it, lose it, etc. I can't afford to do that with a device that costs more than about $100. So I carry a recon Visor, and backpack a laptop around when I need more. Uggh.
I'm seriously tempted by the older Zaurus, which is now $150-ish, but by the time all the accoutrements are added, it's still just out of range for me.
I think "libraries of congress" and "Voxwagon beetle" are more suitable terms... hey dude.. this HDD can store 0.69865 libraries of congress and that computer goes 1.79 times faster than your Civic :-P
Not as funny as you think: that is likely how the horsepower came to be...
You've found a point I missed talking about, the "contract" argument. Good catch. But I don't buy it. Let me explain.
For pretty much all of history, a moral contract has required an explicit interaction between the contracting parties. The notion that I am implicitly entering into a contract with someone that I don't know by taking some action is an interesting legal concept. However, I find it highly questionable to believe that I am morally bound by a contract that the other side is ultimately essentially unaware that I have even entered into.
If artists want to bind me with an explicit contract at the time I purchase their work, I agree that I have a moral obligation to honor that contract. To continue my previous example, in Biblical terms this falls under the injunction to "not bear false witness" and to "let your yes be yes and your no be no". Lacking an identifiable, explicit agreement, I find myself no more morally bound than if the EULA said that "by purchasing this CD, you agree to stand on your head". Indeed, it may: I never read the things.
Obviously, there's no reason I need to buy media from the *AA except for grins: indeed, I buy little. I find it relevant that you think that the sort of analysis I am proposing "makes the tech community look unreasonable": I think it's precisely the sort that makes us look reasonable to the general public, as evinced by their current practices. It's the *AA advertising campaign that I find unreasonable looking.
(BTW, I think this is a bit offtopic, but you claim that "It's not even as if we're talking about ideas here, only implementations - this is a discussion about copyrights, not patents, we're covering actual implementation work, not `Wouldn't it be great to have a story with a talking frog in it.'" Note that copyright isn't what it used to be. If your talking frog too-closely resembles Michigan J. Frog, Warner Brothers will sue you. If your talking frog too-closely resembles the Frog Prince, Disney will sue you. And so forth. Copyright, as currently interpreted by the courts, covers characters, settings, etc.---ideas.)
You have a moral obligation to use works of art under the reasonable conditions set by the artists.
I find this statement (admittedly taken out of context) quite fascinating. I'm trying to think of any historically relevant philosopher of morality that has ever suggested any sort of moral obligation even remotely like this, and am coming up empty. Yet this is the result of the *AA advertising binge: the people of the world have come to believe that whatever their television tells them is not just the law, but morally imperative.
I'm a Christian, and I'm trying to think, as an example, what Biblical imperatives I am violating when I rip a CD and give it to a friend. "No stealing" is the obvious one, but it is quite difficult for me to equate stealing (depriving another of something) and duplicating (making a copy of something)---they are such different activities on the face of it! I am ripping a CD I paid for, after all: I'm surely not depriving anyone of anything more tangible than "an opportunity to sell to my friend", which is an abstract concept indeed. If I feed my friend lunch, do I not equally deprive someone of this opportunity?
I thought of a few more possible justifications, but at the end of the day I'm afraid I cannot see the moral imperative. As far as I can tell, there is no basis for a moral obligation to use artists' works in the way they direct. I will continue to use them as I like, as folks have done for as long as there has been art.
i would love to see people like yahoo POP3 implement SSL, but i suspect with a large (non-paying) userbase, the processor time required by the extra SSL encryption overhead would probably cripple their servers during peak times...
This is what RC4 is for. In spite of all the potential weaknesses in this stream cipher, it is still believed to be secure if used properly. RC4 is dirt cheap per byte, and a standardly-available SSL option.
Gold's article says that Crookes' radiometer has invariably rotated in the opposite sense to the expected one. The black side of the paddles invariably recedes from the light, and many explanations have been offered, but not including that which would seem the most obvious: the absence of radiation pressure on the bright side.
This is either incredibly naive or incredibly disingenuous. Crooke's radiometer is well-understood: air heated by the black side of the paddles expands and pushes the paddles away from it. Operate the radiometer in a vacuum, and it doesn't move---proving only that dim light bouncing off tiny paddles cannot overcome significant friction. Reduce the friction, and the radiometer works just as expected (see the link).
The thing about unrefereed, unedited pubs is that these days it is not that hard to get anything even slightly clueful published in either a refereed conference or journal or a reasonably-edited popular publication: there are lots of venues. So when an extraordinary claim shows up on arxiv, you should probably figure it's nonsense unless experts tell you otherwise.
The best keyboard I ever owned, far and away, was the Cherry ANSI-standard keyboard I had on my Northwest Microcomputer Systems NMS85P circa mid-1980s. (The NMS85P was an excellent 8085-based S100 CP/M system that was favorably reviewed by Byte Magazine back in the day: my father owned 1/3 of NMS.)
This keyboard had a beautiful layout, and featured Hall-effect keyswitches: no electrical contact whatsover, quiet, and positive-action.
At one point, the bail on the space bar was broken in an accident, and my younger brother decided to fix it...with Super Glue. I came home to find the whole insides glued together. After 1/2 hour with acetone, I had cleaned out the glue---and the keyboard worked fine!
Boy do I miss that keyboard.
IANAL, but many US states' laws would allow residents to sue Vivendi in Small Claims court to recover this money. In Oregon, neither side may bring an attorney into court, and the cost of filing is quite low ($45-$80) and recoverable from the defendant if you win. I would guess offhand that in this sort of case, Vivendi would fail to appear and just cut you a check to save costs...
Small claims court is one of those resources that is underused by the "little guys" it was designed to protect. Again, IANAL, but I would consider taking advantage of it here.
I find it interesting that no one has mentioned a principal advantage of Debian at this point: it's free as in beer.
Yes, it is possible to install and maintain e.g. RedHat without paying $25-$100 every so often for their latest boxed set, but a look at the RH corporate bottom line suggests that it's not easy. When I administrated a number of RH systems at work, I used to buy a box regularly: the "big-bang" upgrades make this more or less compulsory, at least as long as downloading and burning cd-sized ISOs is still a pain.
Debian is the only major Linux distro I'm aware of that literally won't take your money for product. (Donations, of course, are gratefully accepted.) Further, apt-based continuous update means that you need never do a "big-bang" upgrade, so there's no hassle with ISOs.
Even Knoppix is free (which is amazing), and this is currently far and away the easiest way to install Deb: I'll put it up against the best commercial installers anytime.
So that's what I'd tell my water-cooler buddy in the article: "Save yourself $50/year, install Knoppix."
If you know what you want, you can run stable plus a few packages from unstable. It's a total and unecessary pain to set up, and then works like a charm forever ("the Debian Way"). Edit your /etc/apt/preferences file to have
Now you can say apt-get -t unstable install foo and the foo package will be installed from unstable and will be maintained. Have fun!This would be similar to Microsoft putting the axe in X-Windows for trademark violation.
Ever wonder why (up until about a year ago when the validity of the "Windows" trademark was litigated elsewhere) official X stuff was always carefully labeled either just "X" or "X Window System"? Heck, at one point, the X Consortium gave away T-Shirts reading "It's A Window System Called X, Not A System Called X Windows" in an attempt to forestall probable Microsoft lawsuits.
Good example otherwise, though :-).
Heh. I was reading the source code for XGammon for some random reason a few months ago, and the README said
and laterI sat there for a moment trying to figure out who this Bart Skinner person was: I had done CS at U. Oregon in that time frame, and couldn't remember the name. Finally it came to me: it was me.
I had given the authors some help with the program back in the day and since totally forgotten about it. They had credited me (thanks!) but had confused the hostname of the machine I was on with my last name: as a result, I didn't recognize me for a moment.
It was a pretty obscure piece of code in its heyday. In 2003 it's even more obscure. A few months ago I was looking at the source...
The draft linked above is, AFAIK, identical to the published paper. Usenix rules allow preprints by the authors on the authors' web site.
The bottom line is that e-mail gets lost: anyone who acts as if delivery is 100% reliable is in a dream world anyway. Spam filter false positives are just one more way for e-mail to get lost. As long as it happens very infrequently, the probability of the lost message being something important is low for most folks (certainly for me). To a naive first approximation:
This is a small number for me: go measure your own e-mail and see if it is for you. Further, the naivete of the approximation is shown by saying that the probability of an e-mail being false positive is independent of its probability of being critical---most filters are more likely to get the critical cases right in my experience.This old SatireWire article has a similar joke. If you want a mild laugh, Google for "initial pubic offering" and marvel at the number of hits.