I think most thought it was more likely than not that he did it. Just that there were reasonable alternative theories (ran away to frame him, insane best friend that claims to have murdered people still alive are 2 that I can think of).
I think a lot of people here wanted to believe he was innocent, perhaps because of the open source connection, perhaps because they could relate to him, I don't know. I always thought that the alternative theories were pretty weak - there was no evidence that crazy best friend did it and no real motive for Nina to try to frame him by fleeing to Russia without her kids. On the other hand there was a large amount of physical evidence, which taken together (and considering Hans' complete lack of a plausible explanations for any of it) didn't leave a reasonable doubt in my mind. Or the juries mind. And now a lot of people here have to admit that the police and the jury were right.
Ok, no. As of June 25, they stopped supporting AVG Free 7 in order to get their free users on the Updated AVG Free 8. Incidentally, AVG 8 is the version with the problem this story is describing if you installed the IE toolbar. Anyway, 0.32 seconds for a Google search would show you the latest free version.
Ok, I should clarify. I've been running 7.5 free version for a few months now. In the last 30 days before June 25th, I would get daily popups saying "7.5 is being discontinued, upgrade to 8.0 (pay version) to stay protected. If this isn't slimey, I don't know what is.
Come on, it's not that hard to find. I too had to upgrade from 7.5 in the last few days and I didn't have any problem finding the link to the free edition. It's hardly fair to call them slimy just because you failed to read the page they sent you to. Anyway, AVG free.
>They are notifying you because your house previously had a premises license. However as it's now domestic (I presume) then simply notifying them that it no longer has a premises license and that it is a domestic dwelling should be enough.
Obviously. But it's their job to figure that out. I'd ignore them or send a letter which simply states that you will not be paying licenses for any music played on the premises as they are not public performances (but don't tell them why they're not public). Don't do their job for them.
In my mind, a lot of these are questionable at best, but any organization that places a poorly-written piece of garbage like "The DaVinci Code" on a list of the top 100 books in the past 25 years immediately loses my respect.
You're right - it doesn't deserve to be in the top 1000 let alone the top 100. They do deserve some kudos for including Neuromancer, Sandman, and Watchmen though.
The naming scheme was arbitrary but it became a common colloquialism to refer to that class of machine as 16 bit. The press for example, refered to the Amiga, the ST and the Megadrive as 16 bit. I sometimes wonder if it's a bit of a UK/Europism though as US people often make that correction. Google for "16 bit era" to see how widespread the naming convention was.
As someone else pointed out, if you are going to refer to the 68K as a 16 bit processor then you should also refer to the Pentium and later x86 processors as 64 bit processors. Since the press doesn't do that they have clearly seen the error of their ways.
The simple fact is that the 68K series implements a 32 bit ISA. The 68000 itself happens to have a 16 bit data bus but the data bus width has no relevance to anything.
Most references to "16 bit era" apply to the game console market of the time which was dominated by the SNES which had a 16 bit CPU.
Most people would refer to a machines like the C64 or the ZX Spectrum as "8 bit" machines for the same reason. Both of these machines had a 16 bit data register, the accumulator. Are you sure? I thought the 6502 had an 8 bit accumulator. It did have a 16 bit address width but other than that it's a purely 8 bit CPU.
It was a 32-bit computer. That depends how you define "32-bit". The 68000 was internally 32-bit, but its data bus was still only 16-bits. (Sinclair's QL, which was hyped by them as a "32 bit" computer was considered by others to be an 8-bit machine because its 68008 only had an *8* bit data bus). The only measure that really mattered back then was the width of the general registers (later on the address width became significant too). By that measure the 68000 is a 32bit processor. The data bus width really is irrelevant.
Do you have any evidence to suggest that viewing child porn (or, more specifically, cg child porn) increases crimes against children? There does seem to be some evidence that it does, though nothing totally convincing. Wikipedia is a good starting point.
I want to add to what cynicsreport said earlier in this topic. The word "cult" has commonly accepted definitions, and if Scientology fits that definition, then the sign was a statement of fact. What's fact got to do with it? He's not being sued for libel or slander. He's being prosecuted because his sign (allegedly) had "representations or words which are threatening, abusive or insulting". I doubt many people who are not Scientologists will agree that he's guilty, but whether Scientology fits the definition of a cult is totally irrelevant to the case. To make an analogy, it doesn't become acceptable to use a ethnic slur to describe someone just because they are actually of that ethnicity.
You can't really "recruit" FOSS developers. They'll join if they find your project and find it interesting enough. The best thing you can do is increase exposure. So why, when you managed to get a story posted to/., did you decide to hide what the project is? You had the perfect opportunity to expose thousands of developers to your project and you decided not to take that opportunity. Bad move.
What I don't see mentioned very often, if at all, is the implicit assumption in distributed systems such as git, that a single person has ultimate integration responsibility and authority in order to form the official/mainline release. That is, given a single tree that is considered the main one from which all others ultimately derive (Linus' tree in the Linux case), there is absolutely no way for tools such as git to allow collaborative maintenance of that tree. In the end, the owner of that tree must perform all checkins to the tree, and must resolve all merge conflicts themself. This is a dual problem in that it wastes the time of a potentially talented developer (e.g. Linus) doing the mundane work of merging and integration, and the additional problem that if this mainline tree owner is not an expert in some particular area of the code, they are likely to make mistakes when resolving conflicts or performing other integration tasks. The reason you don't see it mentioned very often is because it's not really an issue. You just need that single person to be able to trust at least some of the developers they get changes from. Get the trusted "lieutenants" to do the merging for their particular areas. They can even delegate responsibility further. Since in a centralised system you have to trust all the developers to do merging this is no worse, and potentially better.
Yes, but the point is that it encourages and allows behaviour that is not desirable in a corporate development environment - local checkins. You CAN push your changes to it but equally you CAN just check stuff in locally. In some contexts this is great - but I think in corporate environments it promotes risky behaviour.
Look - it's a tool - you can use it responsibly or use it irresponsibly - with the right set of rules and processes I'm sure it can be made to work. Local checkins are what really get my goat;-)
I think local checkins promote better behavior. With traditional version control
the work developers do between checkins is not backed up and has no version control applied. That's ok if people are checking in often but if checkins are only happening every few days or less often then it can be a problem. With local checkins you at least get the benefits of version control locally. And let's face it: if you can get developers to a central VCS system then you can get them to push their changes to a central repository when using a distributed system.
it's not clear to me that Google can relinquish safe harbor status for one complaint without also relinquishing it for all other complaints. Far better to let the user deal with it - all they have to do is post a counter notice. And the user eats all costs of business interruption while the disputed content stays down for a minimum of two weeks (10 business days). Yes. If the cost is really that high the user is free to sue to recover those costs. The law sucks, I'm not defending it. I just don't see why people expect Google to assume the risks.
Google can give up safe harbor protection but it's not clear to me (IANAL) that they can do so for a single complaint. And why should they? All the user has to do is to post a counter notice. Why should Google expose themselves to possible liability just to save a user having to post a notice?
Insta-caving to takedown notices just encourages them to abuse them more tomorrow, so this should not be looked upon as a good thing. Sure, if they sent YOU a takedown notice, maybe it would be prudent to take it down since you can't really lift a lawsuit even if you ARE in the right, but then there's even that 1% chance they find against you and you lose your shirt. Google on the other hand, has deep pockets and real lawyers on retainer that can evaluate a takedown notice, determine if it's something they need to comply with or not, and tell them where to shove it if they can. The copyright owner can still sue the user regardless of whether Google honors the takedown notice or not. Google refusing in no way protects the user from liability, it only increases Google's potential liability. Yes, they may stop some incorrect notices, but the user can do that just as easily by simply filing a counter notice.
Well, they don't *have* to take it down. It's just that if the DMCA complaint is valid, then Google and the person responsible for posting the content can both be held liable if Google doesn't. IANAL, but it's not clear to me that Google can relinquish safe harbor status for one complaint without also relinquishing it for all other complaints. Far better to let the user deal with it - all they have to do is post a counter notice. It's not hard. Why would or should Google risk themselves just to save a user from having to post a counter notice?
From a legal standpoint, it looks like it's wise for Google to always take stuff down. However, from a customer retention standpoint, it might be wise for Google to occasionally refuse when DMCA notices are blatantly inaccurate. That is true only if there are other ISPs that refuse to take down content. I'm not aware of any.
The law is clear: they get a notice they have to take down the material in question. Of course they have a legal department, and that department will be telling them to take it down.
If Google have received a notice then they have no option but to take down the site. Someone needs to file a counternotice, then Google will reinstate them.
I think you're missing the point a bit. SETI is irrelevant because it takes a small amount of time to physically expand throughout the galaxy compared to the age of the galaxy, even at sublight speeds. That is the Fermi paradox: if there is space faring life out there then they should be here or have been here by now. At the very least they should have sent probes everywhere. The Drake equation is related to the Fermi paradox, it identifies some of the possible candidates for the "Great Filter" and attempts to quantify the factors but it's largely guess work and irrelevant to the conclusions of the article.
Further, it is ANYTHING BUT reasonable to assume that if there were space-faring, expansionist species, that they would be here by now. Again, you are anthropomorphizing, among the many other ASSUMPTIONS that are present in that argument. It's not anthropomorphizing, it's simple mathematics. Time to explore the galaxy is on the order of millions of years at worst, the age of the galaxy is at least a hundred times larger than that. The fact that we have no evidence of alien civilization is evidence that space faring life is rare or non-existent. It's not proof, but it is evidence. If your position is that space faring life is common then you have to have an explanation for the Fermi paradox - and stuff like the Zoo Hypothesis does look like anthropomorphizing to me. It's really the Fermi paradox that you have to resolve if you want to disprove the conclusions of the article.
(from your other reply)
I would also like to point out another logical fallacy in TFA: it presumes that there is "A Great Filter" (working his).
There is absolutely no reason to make this astounding presumption. But in fact it is critical to his argument: he professes that "THE Great Filter" must come either before or after our current state of "evolution". This is a HUGE assumption and he should not be allowed to get away with it.
It is VASTLY more likely that the kind of evolution he envisions is tested more-or-less continuously, with occasional "bumps" in the path...
Unless you believe that the universe is filled with space faring life you have to accept that something is stopping space faring life from appearing (and that something is what were referring to when we say "Great Filter"). But the Great Filter doesn't need to be a single evolutionary jump (the article states as much), and there is no reason that there couldn't be more than one. You're right that the possibility of multiple filters isn't really addressed in the article but it doesn't really change the conclusions. Even if we are partly through the filters, evidence of other life is evidence that any filters that life got through weren't very effective. That's bad news for us because we really want to find out that the bulk of the filter(s) is behind us, but it can't be if two out two types of life we're aware of has made it through.
The idea of a Great Filter is not new. The term actually comes from href=http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html>a paper by Robin Hanson, which draws similar conclusions to Bostrom's, but even that paper isn't the origin of the idea.
Too many variables are left out. For example, there is the assumption that if we have not contacted intelligent extraterrestrial life, it is because they can't effectively communicate with us.
For just one example, it does not give weight to the possibility that, say, they can contact us but choose not to, for any number of perfectly valid reasons. He does talk about that case. The problem with it is that every single alien species must withhold contact. It also requires secure communications - if any species used broadcast radio at any point in their development then we might be able be able to detect it. The more species there are the less likely this scenario (which is know as the Zoo Hypothesis) is - it only takes one species to break the covenant. But if there are only one or two space-faring aliens out there then the conclusions are just as valid as if life is common but only one or two species have got to the space-faring stage then there is still a "great filter" preventing most species from getting there.
There are plenty of possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox. He doesn't cover all of them in the article, but he does cover a lot of them. The most plausible explanation is that there is no space-faring life out there, but his argument doesn't hinge on that being the real explanation. His argument is that evidence of life that is less developed than us is evidence that the "great filter" exists and that we have not reached it. Evidence of space-faring life would be welcome because it would be evidence that it is possible to get past the filter.
It does not pay to overly-anthropomorphize. You are talking about alien life, not necessarily clones of humans. I don't think the author anthropomorphized at all. And it works both ways: you can't assume that all alien species think alike enough to agree to withhold contact either. Given that they are as alien from each other as they are from us it's more reasonable to expect a wide range of behaviors, and if only one species has an expansionist mindset then they should have reached here.
The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations. He said as much on page 1:
The question "Where are they?" is thus at least as pertinent today as it was when the physicist Enrico Fermi first posed it during a lunch discussion with some of his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory back in 1950.
But he takes it further than Fermi in that he is saying the any evidence of less advanced life is bad news for us because it is evidence that whatever prevents intelligent life from spreading through out the galaxy is something we haven't encountered yet. And whatever that thing (the "Great Filter") is, it pretty much must be terminal - something that is merely a setback is not relevant given the age of the galaxy. And since we have no evidence that any other civilization has survived it the chances that we will survive it must be very low.
The guy dismisses the possibility that most civilizations evolve in some direction other than midlessly colonizing every star they can reach.
After all our own civilization has pretty much lost interest in anything beyond putting up more geostationary TV transmitters.
What if most evolve beyond physical forms? What if most lose themselves in virtual realities. What if many simply don't bother leaving their own solar system because the speed of light proves to be unbreakable and they aren't interested in planting colonies that will have little or no contact or impact on their own civilization?
You didn't RTFA. It covers this point on page 4:
For all these reasons, it seems unlikely that the galaxy is teeming with intelligent beings that voluntarily confine themselves to their home planets. Now, it is possible to concoct scenarios in which the universe is swarming with advanced civilizations every one of which chooses to keep itself well hidden from our view. Maybe there is a secret society of advanced civilizations that know about us but have decided not to contact us until we're mature enough to be admitted into their club. Perhaps they're observing us as if we were animals in a zoo. I don't see how we can conclusively rule out this possibility. But I will set it aside in order to concentrate on what to me appear more plausible answers to Fermi's question. Note, he says "voluntarily confine themselves". If civilizations are being involuntarily confined to their home planets then whatever is causing that is the "Great Filter".
Or what if we just got lucky and got a galaxy to ourselves? That's pretty much what he'd hoping for. His logic shows that any evidence that life is common in the galaxy is evidence that we will be destroyed sometime before we can colonize the galaxy.
Options suck. It doesn't need to be an option. Just resize the field automatically until the user sets the size of the field themselves and then leave it alone. Ideally there should be a way of setting the default size too, but you could probably get away without it.
... the feature they're offering is silly and pointless. No, it's not. At the most fundamental level software's purpose is to do what the users want it to do. I hate software which acts like it knows what I want better than I do.
As a shareholder, i would sue them for wasting money. You'd lose, and get laughed at for trying it. Management in publicly held companies have an ethical responsibility to maximize value for the shareholders, but they have no obligation to agree with those shareholders as to how to go about it. As a shareholder you have two options if you don't agree with the job management is doing: you can sell or you can try to change the management by exercising your voting rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't it more a matter of reasonable doubt?
I think most thought it was more likely than not that he did it. Just that there were reasonable alternative theories (ran away to frame him, insane best friend that claims to have murdered people still alive are 2 that I can think of).
I think a lot of people here wanted to believe he was innocent, perhaps because of the open source connection, perhaps because they could relate to him, I don't know. I always thought that the alternative theories were pretty weak - there was no evidence that crazy best friend did it and no real motive for Nina to try to frame him by fleeing to Russia without her kids. On the other hand there was a large amount of physical evidence, which taken together (and considering Hans' complete lack of a plausible explanations for any of it) didn't leave a reasonable doubt in my mind. Or the juries mind. And now a lot of people here have to admit that the police and the jury were right.
Ok, I should clarify. I've been running 7.5 free version for a few months now. In the last 30 days before June 25th, I would get daily popups saying "7.5 is being discontinued, upgrade to 8.0 (pay version) to stay protected. If this isn't slimey, I don't know what is.
Come on, it's not that hard to find. I too had to upgrade from 7.5 in the last few days and I didn't have any problem finding the link to the free edition. It's hardly fair to call them slimy just because you failed to read the page they sent you to. Anyway, AVG free.
>They are notifying you because your house previously had a premises license. However as it's now domestic (I presume) then simply notifying them that it no longer has a premises license and that it is a domestic dwelling should be enough.
Obviously. But it's their job to figure that out. I'd ignore them or send a letter which simply states that you will not be paying licenses for any music played on the premises as they are not public performances (but don't tell them why they're not public). Don't do their job for them.
In my mind, a lot of these are questionable at best, but any organization that places a poorly-written piece of garbage like "The DaVinci Code" on a list of the top 100 books in the past 25 years immediately loses my respect.
You're right - it doesn't deserve to be in the top 1000 let alone the top 100. They do deserve some kudos for including Neuromancer, Sandman, and Watchmen though.As someone else pointed out, if you are going to refer to the 68K as a 16 bit processor then you should also refer to the Pentium and later x86 processors as 64 bit processors. Since the press doesn't do that they have clearly seen the error of their ways.
The simple fact is that the 68K series implements a 32 bit ISA. The 68000 itself happens to have a 16 bit data bus but the data bus width has no relevance to anything.
Most references to "16 bit era" apply to the game console market of the time which was dominated by the SNES which had a 16 bit CPU.
Most people would refer to a machines like the C64 or the ZX Spectrum as "8 bit" machines for the same reason. Both of these machines had a 16 bit data register, the accumulator. Are you sure? I thought the 6502 had an 8 bit accumulator. It did have a 16 bit address width but other than that it's a purely 8 bit CPU.What's the difference?
One of those possibilities is elegant (divine even) and the other implies a God that can't create a system that can look after itself.You can't really "recruit" FOSS developers. They'll join if they find your project and find it interesting enough. The best thing you can do is increase exposure. So why, when you managed to get a story posted to /., did you decide to hide what the project is? You had the perfect opportunity to expose thousands of developers to your project and you decided not to take that opportunity. Bad move.
Look - it's a tool - you can use it responsibly or use it irresponsibly - with the right set of rules and processes I'm sure it can be made to work. Local checkins are what really get my goat ;-)
I think local checkins promote better behavior. With traditional version control the work developers do between checkins is not backed up and has no version control applied. That's ok if people are checking in often but if checkins are only happening every few days or less often then it can be a problem. With local checkins you at least get the benefits of version control locally. And let's face it: if you can get developers to a central VCS system then you can get them to push their changes to a central repository when using a distributed system.The law is clear: they get a notice they have to take down the material in question. Of course they have a legal department, and that department will be telling them to take it down.
If Google have received a notice then they have no option but to take down the site. Someone needs to file a counter notice, then Google will reinstate them.
I would also like to point out another logical fallacy in TFA: it presumes that there is "A Great Filter" (working his).
There is absolutely no reason to make this astounding presumption. But in fact it is critical to his argument: he professes that "THE Great Filter" must come either before or after our current state of "evolution". This is a HUGE assumption and he should not be allowed to get away with it.
It is VASTLY more likely that the kind of evolution he envisions is tested more-or-less continuously, with occasional "bumps" in the path...
Unless you believe that the universe is filled with space faring life you have to accept that something is stopping space faring life from appearing (and that something is what were referring to when we say "Great Filter"). But the Great Filter doesn't need to be a single evolutionary jump (the article states as much), and there is no reason that there couldn't be more than one. You're right that the possibility of multiple filters isn't really addressed in the article but it doesn't really change the conclusions. Even if we are partly through the filters, evidence of other life is evidence that any filters that life got through weren't very effective. That's bad news for us because we really want to find out that the bulk of the filter(s) is behind us, but it can't be if two out two types of life we're aware of has made it through.The idea of a Great Filter is not new. The term actually comes from href=http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html>a paper by Robin Hanson, which draws similar conclusions to Bostrom's, but even that paper isn't the origin of the idea.
There are plenty of possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox. He doesn't cover all of them in the article, but he does cover a lot of them. The most plausible explanation is that there is no space-faring life out there, but his argument doesn't hinge on that being the real explanation. His argument is that evidence of life that is less developed than us is evidence that the "great filter" exists and that we have not reached it. Evidence of space-faring life would be welcome because it would be evidence that it is possible to get past the filter.
It does not pay to overly-anthropomorphize. You are talking about alien life, not necessarily clones of humans. I don't think the author anthropomorphized at all. And it works both ways: you can't assume that all alien species think alike enough to agree to withhold contact either. Given that they are as alien from each other as they are from us it's more reasonable to expect a wide range of behaviors, and if only one species has an expansionist mindset then they should have reached here.It's a very clear extrapolation of the Fermi Paradox. Where is the flaw?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations. He said as much on page 1: The question "Where are they?" is thus at least as pertinent today as it was when the physicist Enrico Fermi first posed it during a lunch discussion with some of his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory back in 1950. But he takes it further than Fermi in that he is saying the any evidence of less advanced life is bad news for us because it is evidence that whatever prevents intelligent life from spreading through out the galaxy is something we haven't encountered yet. And whatever that thing (the "Great Filter") is, it pretty much must be terminal - something that is merely a setback is not relevant given the age of the galaxy. And since we have no evidence that any other civilization has survived it the chances that we will survive it must be very low.
After all our own civilization has pretty much lost interest in anything beyond putting up more geostationary TV transmitters.
What if most evolve beyond physical forms? What if most lose themselves in virtual realities. What if many simply don't bother leaving their own solar system because the speed of light proves to be unbreakable and they aren't interested in planting colonies that will have little or no contact or impact on their own civilization?
You didn't RTFA. It covers this point on page 4: For all these reasons, it seems unlikely that the galaxy is teeming with intelligent beings that voluntarily confine themselves to their home planets. Now, it is possible to concoct scenarios in which the universe is swarming with advanced civilizations every one of which chooses to keep itself well hidden from our view. Maybe there is a secret society of advanced civilizations that know about us but have decided not to contact us until we're mature enough to be admitted into their club. Perhaps they're observing us as if we were animals in a zoo. I don't see how we can conclusively rule out this possibility. But I will set it aside in order to concentrate on what to me appear more plausible answers to Fermi's question. Note, he says "voluntarily confine themselves". If civilizations are being involuntarily confined to their home planets then whatever is causing that is the "Great Filter". Or what if we just got lucky and got a galaxy to ourselves? That's pretty much what he'd hoping for. His logic shows that any evidence that life is common in the galaxy is evidence that we will be destroyed sometime before we can colonize the galaxy.
... the feature they're offering is silly and pointless. No, it's not. At the most fundamental level software's purpose is to do what the users want it to do. I hate software which acts like it knows what I want better than I do.