Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is on the way to this too. They installed wireless hubs in the 3-story ceiling of the student union where they get poor reception just about everywhere, and are probably overly expensive and will soon be obsolete. This seems like a bit of a waste of money, really.
I would rather have a nice workstation in the lab, or another research project started.
But RPI is number one wired school in america now that they have mandated every freshman to buy a laptop before attending.
I know that/. is largely a club/message board kind of place more than it is a news organization, but "Good Guys" ? ?? Don't get me wrong. From what I can tell, RAMBUS are a bunch of jerks. From what I know, I agree with the sentiment in the article, but sometimes I would like to see a bit less bias in the articles themselves. The reason is that it makes the source of some of my knowledge of current events suspect. Can I trust Slashdot to paint a fair picture of a situation when they post a story about it? Not always...
In this case, I am wondering what RAMBUS is thinking.. Why are they doing this? Are they truly just a bunch of jerks? Why do they feel that they have rights to some of this technology? I mean, certainly someone there thinks they have a case. The more I read/., the more I think that all these companies are evil demons trying to take away my liberties and other people's hard work. Is this truly an accurate assessment? Surely someone can speak for RAMBUS to explain why they think that they are in the right on this matter.
I have NO DOUBT that if I was at a private school, I would have been screwed. [...] The only thing that saved me was her accountability to the law. She had no proof of wrongdoing,
I'm not sure I follow your logic. You're saying that you were saved because your accuser had no proof of wrongdoing, then make a blanket accusation against all private schools without any proof of your own.
I don't have proof, no, but judging by their attitudes, I would have been gone, with or without proof because a private school doesn't need a reason to deny someone admissions to the school.. They can just say "leave."
This is more poignant of a problem when it comes to children with special needs, such as autism or dyslexia. And the fact is that part of what you are paying for when you give taxes is for that child less fortunate.
Vouchers are a selfish initiative. People don't seem to understand that taxes are an investment in your community. They go to help people less fortunate and to maintain roads, etc. And in return you geta functioning society, and one in which if you were ever o unfortunate as to have a child like that, you wouldn't just be up shit creek.
(The cost of caring for these children is really quite alot when placed on an individual)
People with money have more choices in educating their children, they also have the resources to sue the school district to force the district to pay for their kid to attend private school. It really sucks when you know that the schools could do a better job helping your kid to succeed, but you can't afford to make them do it and you can't afford to take your kid somewhere else
THat's funny, because my parents are going through a similar situation with public schools and the fact of the matter is, if the parent fights for something (no lawyer needed) they can get it. Just about anything that is helpful to the student. A parent can choose their childs class if they have reason, they can choose the school within the district if there is a reason, or even a different district and get transportation to it, if they need it. If someone told that line of bull to my parents, or to me when I have kids, they would be eating a shit sandwich, because that kind of treatment is against the law.
I think that's the whole idea of Linux. From a design aspect, Linux is more of a bazaar, where everyone puts a piece in. It works pretty well for the hobbyist. If you want something more consistent and slower moving, try FreeBSD, or a commercial Unix.
There are many issues floating around in this story, and I don't want to hit on all of them, but on that struck me as pretty relevant to the goings on of today is the fact that they went to a private school.
This story is an example of why vouchers are a bad idea. Private schools can do whatever they heck they want, and are not bound by all of those things that public schools are. They don't have to give their students freedom of speech, they can force them to participate in prayer, and generally be bigoted jerks if they want. There is no recourse except to find another school. What a wonderful way to ostracize people from the community.
I think that even though this is a story in general about persecution in schools of "geeks", I think that the fact that it was a private school aggrivated this situation.
And yes, I can give an example
When I was in high school, years ago, the one of the junior librarians at the school allowed me to use their computers to snoop around the campus network to satiate my curiosity. See, what they had was an old school cataloguing system written in LISP (believe it or not) and if you went to load up a catalog (which were limited to filename lengths of 3 characters, you could load a different catalog. Anyways, you could imagine what happened if a person typed 'CON'.:) (DOS System) So when I found this, I asked if I could look around a little bit and see how the system worked... I did so for a few weeks during lunch and the ever ubiquitous 'snack' period, and it was pretty cool. Until one of the computer's power supplies died, and guess who they blamed. I have NO DOUBT that if I was at a private school, I would have been screwed. Why? The dean wanted me gone. She was convinced of my guilt and thought I was just a little shit. The only thing that saved me was her accountability to the law. She had no proof of wrongdoing, and because of that, it was later discovered by the administrators with more than one brain cell, that it was likely not my fault. Still, the younger librarian was probably chastized and I never really went in there very much anymore.
Believe it or not, the law and public schools are actually designed to protect people like us, when it comes down to the wire.
I wonder if MS is planning on that source code leaking out, which it probably will. Come on, there's gonna be one person in that large amount of people that will be willing to leak to source code to the general public.
It might lead to some creative patches for the UI. Maybe replacing the paperclip with a penguin? And it would probably really help with the windows emulators that people are writing (WINE). Hrm.
The story seems to be/.'ed, but at first glean of what I see on here about it, this seems like a horrible idea. Certainly the creators of GNU Linux want people to honor their own licencing parameters. How can they come around and endorse the violation of someone else's licence.
I am not in bed with Adobe, and I realize that they are sortof a pain in the butt, but it would be hypocritical for people who want to change the way software is legally developed/distributed/used should really take into consideration that when they do something that violates someone's licensing, it makes them look like a bunch of burnt-out former software pirates who are looking for a justification of a free ride. Please don't let that be the picture that is painted of a legitimate group of people with honorable concerns and ideology.
Now I can run amazing apps like GIMP or GNOME in the awesome power of Win2k!! Seriously! This is useless! Win2K already has things like that but better! Pronounced "Photoshop" and "The Windows GUI". What self-respecting Win2K user would want useless Loseix apps running on their flawless boxen?
Um, this is obvious and maybe I am feeding a troll, but Photoshop is not free, and doesn't come with Win2k, so I don't see your point, unless you are a software pirate or have tons of money lying around. For the rest of us, free software is nice to have around, even with the politics aside.
This is a great idea. The windows operating environment is so far removed from the *nix philosophy. The idea of using tools and having a shell that is really powerful has fizzled away. Hopefully this will allow people to see the power of having such a tool.
Everytime there is a story about overclocking on Slashdot the naysayers flood the forums with comments about how terrible an idea it is to overclock. They say things like "You only save a little bit and spend more on cooling..." or "Your chip will be unstable and then have a shorter life."
Also, I would like to point out that those who think that overclocking is simply stupid, they should look at the current state of the hardware industry. They, in a sensem overclock their chips all of the time. That's why they need more cooling apparatus. Its part of the design of the chip.
Even more damning is the new thing with copper leads. You hear great things about it making a faster chip, but if you talk to a materials engineering undergrad, he'll tell you that the people designing those chips don't know if the copper is going to diffuse into the insulation and cause failure in the next 3 years or not. The fact of the matter is that these companies are pushing barriers to be competitive, and if a person is smart enough and interested enough to try, they can expand the efforts of the manufacturer even more.. After all, a 400 MHz chip is typically the same as a 500MHz chip of the same model, its just that ones passed certain QC tests while the others didn't.. So if you have a 400 MHz chip, its quite possible that it will be stable at a higher clock, if you bother to extensively test it and monitor its temperature. You can afford to do more rigorous testing on an individual CPU than Intel or AMD can when they ship thousands of these things at a time.
Although one may successfully argue that a brilliant proof or algorithm is art, I don't think that the converse can be shown. Art, though usually carefully constructed does not require the same level of rigor that a piece of code, or mathematics, requires. This is why, typically, the traditional meaning of the word "art" is usually more expressive than a mathematical proof. Our art is limited by the bounds of rigor.
That being said, there is certainly art involved in designing a user interface, or even an API to provide the most aethetic and "natural" way for people and programmers to interface with your game/code. This is the subjective art involved in coding.
The problem that I have found with alot of people that code is that they don't have the rigor to back up their art. They do things too much by 'feel' when they could be getting better performance if they were more rigorous in writing algorithms. I guess that's a cost/benefit analysis between writing code fast, and writing fsat code. I've always leaned towards the latter when I've had a choice.
BTW: The dangers of lack of rigor are demonstrated in some of the post-modern literary theories, such as deconstructionism, fathered by Jacques Derrida. (IMHO)
You know, I realize that the SAT's are useless, but there are a lot of smart people out there who may not have applied themselves in high school very much, but can score well on the SAT's because they are smart, not because they've crammed for them.
Maybe I'm mistaken,but alot of times those smart kids grow up in college and do quite well for themselves and the universities they attend.
Wow, this is a nice move. Hopefully some other companies will take a hint and do something similar....
Even so, I've never really liked the premise by which winmodems work. They use the sound card and clock cycles to generate the modem-y sound, and then send it out on an RJ-45 (or whatever phone cable is). You'd think in the day of cheap hardware, it wouldn't cost that much to just adda nother processor (small) onto the modem itself and free up the other hardware a bit.
Also, wouldn't it be nice if other generic winmodem manufacturers see this open standard of sorts and comply to it?
For those who know, can this winmodem driver be ported to BSD and other OS's pretty easily?
This is a little ominous for standards organizations, as it said in the article. If these organizations can't enforce rules governing the conduct of these money-grubbing companies, then they will continue to do this kind of garbage.
I don't see why they wouldn't be held to such a standard, if they signed a legally binding agreement to disclose patents relating to standards technology when they joined. It seems like if they held out on purpose, it is their own fault.
Ok, I cannot believe someone hasn't beought this up yet, but I can't see how encryption technology is relevant to what terrorists are doing to pass on messages.
How long to terrorist's messages need to be, anyways?
What am I getting at? Well, an unbreakable encryption system has already been made, and it has been around for years, and could be implemented with a pen and paper. What you need is a once-used cipher that is longer than the text being transmitted (a random cipher).
So, joe terrorist could carry around a CD-ROM with 640 Megs of random ciphers and just about any message could be secretly transferred.
So what excactly is the point of banning encryption because of this instance, when it really doesn't matter? Certainly terrorists have CD-Burners and 20 year old books on encryption (and have read the first chapter)...
In case anyone is interested, this may be a more appropriate link to that story: The Full Story
I sure hope that the/. editors were not trying to spin this story their way. I like coming here because usually if the comments are biased, they at least link to good sources. I hope that doesn't change.
After buying a video card from Diamond and repeatedly getting shafted by their tech support (first they said they didn't support AMD, then later they said that they didn't feel like supporting my video card anymore), I will not have anything to do with this company if I can help it. Maybe this is off topic, but I feel like I must say it.
I agree. It is possible that if we study these things, we would be one step closer. And certainly if computational power keeps on increasing it could be possible that we are living in a world where sentient computers exist and can be built.
My point was that its probably not gonna happen next week.:)
I wonder if it would be possible to emulate this with software; it could be a big leap in AIs being able to recognize patterns.
Applications are endless...user friendly anticipation of commands, targeted ads, digital sentience...
Well, the problem is think of what a difficult problem that would be, at least from a logical standpoint. You would have to program something to respond to an emotion someone or something else was exhibiting. This kind of thing has been tried for years and it is REALLY hard to reduce emotions to, say a neural network, a bayesian believe network, or a decision tree.
Yes, it would be a great leap forward, and maybe a close study on WHAT this cell DOES (if we can take it apart and look at it) would be very helpful. Maybe it would provide some insight for us, and what you say would be possible. But the idea of having something respond to emotion is really a really old one, and as it stands right NOW, its a long ways away from being completely solved.
But yeah, it would be hella cool. That would be some killer app.
Absolutely not! For one, it doesn't unravel the problem of consciousness much at all, really.. There are still heated arguments over what we know a priori or what we don't know, IF prior knowledge exists or not, how such cells described in this article could be used to make a functioning brain, etc.
That being said, for a person to resolve that there are mysteries unexplainable without any reason for saying it is POOR judgement. Certainly there is evidence of the unexplainable in Mathematics, where Godel proved the impossiblily of having a complete system of mathematics, but he produced proof of such a problem, and there are concrete examples.
As scientists, humans have probed the smallest parts of matter and seen pretty closely what they ARE. And that is because we have been patient and determined to do so. How many people in the 1800's said that physics was done, that there were no more discoveries to be made? QUITE A FEW.
We can understand all of this about matter, yet our brains are made of matter, and we have trouble turning that glass of science inward on ourselves. But to say that it is impossible, or a bad idea to do so, is silly. The more we understand about ourselves, the better we can survive in our environment, and maybe the longer we will be around to have children and grow exponentially like nanobots eating away at the earth. (just kidding).
If you don't want to explore the mysteries of the mind, then don't. But don't get angry when other people do so with success.
This is interesting, because there are neurological disorders in which people are unable to attribute mental states to other people (Autism) and there hasn't been a really good explination for the problem. One person wrote a book called "Mindblindness" which discussed the very problem, and his answer was a theory of mind that was compartmentalized, meaning that there were different parts of the brain that performed specific fucntions, and that an autistic person brain was missing or had problems with that particular region.
However, if there are cells like this, it would go further in explaining this problem as well as possibly diagnosing it. If these cells are clustered in one area of the brain, it would go a long way to showing that the brain is compartmentalized in that way, vs. being more of a pure neural network kind of idea that others believe.
This discovery may have very severe impacts on the philosophy of mind and discussions of Neuroscience. The problem of "other minds" has long been an issue for the eliminative materialist, and such a cell's discovery gives them something to talk about when a cartesial dualist asks them about it.
I just read the whole policy and wow, they just keep on getting better.
Yes, they do. After all, could it be that they are taking a cue from open source projects like distributed.net and using it to maybe make some money? What criminals! How dare they run a business!
1. They can download stuff to your computer and make it do work.
2. It works like a screen saver and you are not ALLOWED to disable it. You also cannot un-install Windows or they will simply kill you.
Yep, they will kill you. Seriously, what is so bad about letting a company use your clock cycles for goods / services? Hell, enough people do it for free. Maybe Juno should try cracking RC-5 and you would be less angry at them.
3. They can make your computer call their servers to upload results and any other thing they find on your computer, because you wont know.
4. They may require you to keep your computer on 24 hours a day, and oh by the way are NOT responsible for the electricity it consumes. Why should they be, you're stupid not to have read the policy in the first place.
Whether they reserve the right to upload anything on your computer to their servers or not, do you think it might be possible that they are uploading the results they are paying you to compute? Yes, paying you in the form of a PPP connection.
5. They are not responsible for any damages caused by your computer working on a problem while you are not on it. This will probably include very intensive Mathematical Calculations that I know a overclocked processor will just love.
Oh, come on. This is just whining now. Do you really, honestly, and truly believe that your computer is going to melt because its calculating sin 34 to 5943 decimal places instead of rendering images of toasted demons all over your monitor? A clause like this is pretty common in all software, even back in the shareware days when programmers would abdicate themselves from responsibility of what their program unintentially did. As a user, it is usually worth taking the risk. Businesses that like to crash people's computers don't generally make money (with the exception of MS)
6. They can send someone to your house to turn your computer on if you leave it off. Why not. It
Yeah. I want that job.
7. They can all laugh at you for actually agreeing to this. Then having Jim win the office pool becasue he guessed right on the amount of people that never will read the agreement anyway.
Are you going to blame Juno for their users not reading the contract? You have to be pretty lame to think that there isn't a price to pay for a service like Juno. I used a free ISP service for a bit. I had no illusions about the rights I was having taken away from me for it. Look, most people don't give a rat crap if someone is looking through their garbage or the last 5 internet sites they visited. Its useless information to them.
Yes, companies like this are sorta gay. I think its rather dumb too, and the business model is likely to fail. I agree there. I even agree that people should be more mindful of what they agree to when they click through things on their computer. Totally true. And companies shouldn't try to hide their agreements, but make them upfront. A click through licence is pretty up front. It takes like 1 minute to scan through one of those things and look for nasty buggers. People who don't do it are ignorant or lazy (or both).
My point is, that Juno shouldn't be flamed for offering a service like this. They aren't violating anyone's rights. Instead, people should be educated about what they can get into with these free services, and should be mindful of what they are giving up, and if they are willing to do so. I think that the power of data mining w/ targeted advertising, etc is underestimated by the general public. That's because it is new. People will eventually see that those of us who guard our privacy do so not because we are paranoid, but because we don't want to be subject to the immense power of targeted mass-advertising. It is annoying, and sometimes it is downright uncomfortable. But as long as they don't realize it, companies like Juno will still be around, and will continue to have the right to run their business as they see fit.
Slashdot Mirror
I would rather have a nice workstation in the lab, or another research project started.
But RPI is number one wired school in america now that they have mandated every freshman to buy a laptop before attending.
Damnned if we use 'em.
In this case, I am wondering what RAMBUS is thinking.. Why are they doing this? Are they truly just a bunch of jerks? Why do they feel that they have rights to some of this technology? I mean, certainly someone there thinks they have a case. The more I read /., the more I think that all these companies are evil demons trying to take away my liberties and other people's hard work. Is this truly an accurate assessment? Surely someone can speak for RAMBUS to explain why they think that they are in the right on this matter.
I'm not sure I follow your logic. You're saying that you were saved because your accuser had no proof of wrongdoing, then make a blanket accusation against all private schools without any proof of your own.
I don't have proof, no, but judging by their attitudes, I would have been gone, with or without proof because a private school doesn't need a reason to deny someone admissions to the school.. They can just say "leave."
This is more poignant of a problem when it comes to children with special needs, such as autism or dyslexia. And the fact is that part of what you are paying for when you give taxes is for that child less fortunate.
Vouchers are a selfish initiative. People don't seem to understand that taxes are an investment in your community. They go to help people less fortunate and to maintain roads, etc. And in return you geta functioning society, and one in which if you were ever o unfortunate as to have a child like that, you wouldn't just be up shit creek.
(The cost of caring for these children is really quite alot when placed on an individual)
Capitalism only works with a sense of fair play.
THat's funny, because my parents are going through a similar situation with public schools and the fact of the matter is, if the parent fights for something (no lawyer needed) they can get it. Just about anything that is helpful to the student. A parent can choose their childs class if they have reason, they can choose the school within the district if there is a reason, or even a different district and get transportation to it, if they need it. If someone told that line of bull to my parents, or to me when I have kids, they would be eating a shit sandwich, because that kind of treatment is against the law.
You are living in a dream world if you think the little tax break for vouchers is really going to help the low-income family. You really are.
Distros do nothing but give people options..
This story is an example of why vouchers are a bad idea. Private schools can do whatever they heck they want, and are not bound by all of those things that public schools are. They don't have to give their students freedom of speech, they can force them to participate in prayer, and generally be bigoted jerks if they want. There is no recourse except to find another school. What a wonderful way to ostracize people from the community.
I think that even though this is a story in general about persecution in schools of "geeks", I think that the fact that it was a private school aggrivated this situation.
And yes, I can give an example
When I was in high school, years ago, the one of the junior librarians at the school allowed me to use their computers to snoop around the campus network to satiate my curiosity. See, what they had was an old school cataloguing system written in LISP (believe it or not) and if you went to load up a catalog (which were limited to filename lengths of 3 characters, you could load a different catalog. Anyways, you could imagine what happened if a person typed 'CON'. :) (DOS System) So when I found this, I asked if I could look around a little bit and see how the system worked... I did so for a few weeks during lunch and the ever ubiquitous 'snack' period, and it was pretty cool. Until one of the computer's power supplies died, and guess who they blamed. I have NO DOUBT that if I was at a private school, I would have been screwed. Why? The dean wanted me gone. She was convinced of my guilt and thought I was just a little shit. The only thing that saved me was her accountability to the law. She had no proof of wrongdoing, and because of that, it was later discovered by the administrators with more than one brain cell, that it was likely not my fault. Still, the younger librarian was probably chastized and I never really went in there very much anymore.
Believe it or not, the law and public schools are actually designed to protect people like us, when it comes down to the wire.
It might lead to some creative patches for the UI. Maybe replacing the paperclip with a penguin? And it would probably really help with the windows emulators that people are writing (WINE). Hrm.
I am not in bed with Adobe, and I realize that they are sortof a pain in the butt, but it would be hypocritical for people who want to change the way software is legally developed/distributed/used should really take into consideration that when they do something that violates someone's licensing, it makes them look like a bunch of burnt-out former software pirates who are looking for a justification of a free ride. Please don't let that be the picture that is painted of a legitimate group of people with honorable concerns and ideology.
Um, this is obvious and maybe I am feeding a troll, but Photoshop is not free, and doesn't come with Win2k, so I don't see your point, unless you are a software pirate or have tons of money lying around. For the rest of us, free software is nice to have around, even with the politics aside.
Duh.
This is a great idea. The windows operating environment is so far removed from the *nix philosophy. The idea of using tools and having a shell that is really powerful has fizzled away. Hopefully this will allow people to see the power of having such a tool.
Also, I would like to point out that those who think that overclocking is simply stupid, they should look at the current state of the hardware industry. They, in a sensem overclock their chips all of the time. That's why they need more cooling apparatus. Its part of the design of the chip.
Even more damning is the new thing with copper leads. You hear great things about it making a faster chip, but if you talk to a materials engineering undergrad, he'll tell you that the people designing those chips don't know if the copper is going to diffuse into the insulation and cause failure in the next 3 years or not. The fact of the matter is that these companies are pushing barriers to be competitive, and if a person is smart enough and interested enough to try, they can expand the efforts of the manufacturer even more.. After all, a 400 MHz chip is typically the same as a 500MHz chip of the same model, its just that ones passed certain QC tests while the others didn't.. So if you have a 400 MHz chip, its quite possible that it will be stable at a higher clock, if you bother to extensively test it and monitor its temperature. You can afford to do more rigorous testing on an individual CPU than Intel or AMD can when they ship thousands of these things at a time.
That being said, there is certainly art involved in designing a user interface, or even an API to provide the most aethetic and "natural" way for people and programmers to interface with your game/code. This is the subjective art involved in coding.
The problem that I have found with alot of people that code is that they don't have the rigor to back up their art. They do things too much by 'feel' when they could be getting better performance if they were more rigorous in writing algorithms. I guess that's a cost/benefit analysis between writing code fast, and writing fsat code. I've always leaned towards the latter when I've had a choice.
BTW: The dangers of lack of rigor are demonstrated in some of the post-modern literary theories, such as deconstructionism, fathered by Jacques Derrida. (IMHO)
Maybe I'm mistaken,but alot of times those smart kids grow up in college and do quite well for themselves and the universities they attend.
Even so, I've never really liked the premise by which winmodems work. They use the sound card and clock cycles to generate the modem-y sound, and then send it out on an RJ-45 (or whatever phone cable is). You'd think in the day of cheap hardware, it wouldn't cost that much to just adda nother processor (small) onto the modem itself and free up the other hardware a bit.
Also, wouldn't it be nice if other generic winmodem manufacturers see this open standard of sorts and comply to it?
For those who know, can this winmodem driver be ported to BSD and other OS's pretty easily?
I don't see why they wouldn't be held to such a standard, if they signed a legally binding agreement to disclose patents relating to standards technology when they joined. It seems like if they held out on purpose, it is their own fault.
How long to terrorist's messages need to be, anyways?
What am I getting at? Well, an unbreakable encryption system has already been made, and it has been around for years, and could be implemented with a pen and paper. What you need is a once-used cipher that is longer than the text being transmitted (a random cipher).
So, joe terrorist could carry around a CD-ROM with 640 Megs of random ciphers and just about any message could be secretly transferred.
So what excactly is the point of banning encryption because of this instance, when it really doesn't matter? Certainly terrorists have CD-Burners and 20 year old books on encryption (and have read the first chapter)...
I sure hope that the /. editors were not trying to spin this story their way. I like coming here because usually if the comments are biased, they at least link to good sources. I hope that doesn't change.
After buying a video card from Diamond and repeatedly getting shafted by their tech support (first they said they didn't support AMD, then later they said that they didn't feel like supporting my video card anymore), I will not have anything to do with this company if I can help it. Maybe this is off topic, but I feel like I must say it.
My point was that its probably not gonna happen next week. :)
Well, the problem is think of what a difficult problem that would be, at least from a logical standpoint. You would have to program something to respond to an emotion someone or something else was exhibiting. This kind of thing has been tried for years and it is REALLY hard to reduce emotions to, say a neural network, a bayesian believe network, or a decision tree.
Yes, it would be a great leap forward, and maybe a close study on WHAT this cell DOES (if we can take it apart and look at it) would be very helpful. Maybe it would provide some insight for us, and what you say would be possible. But the idea of having something respond to emotion is really a really old one, and as it stands right NOW, its a long ways away from being completely solved.
But yeah, it would be hella cool. That would be some killer app.
That being said, for a person to resolve that there are mysteries unexplainable without any reason for saying it is POOR judgement. Certainly there is evidence of the unexplainable in Mathematics, where Godel proved the impossiblily of having a complete system of mathematics, but he produced proof of such a problem, and there are concrete examples.
As scientists, humans have probed the smallest parts of matter and seen pretty closely what they ARE. And that is because we have been patient and determined to do so. How many people in the 1800's said that physics was done, that there were no more discoveries to be made? QUITE A FEW.
We can understand all of this about matter, yet our brains are made of matter, and we have trouble turning that glass of science inward on ourselves. But to say that it is impossible, or a bad idea to do so, is silly. The more we understand about ourselves, the better we can survive in our environment, and maybe the longer we will be around to have children and grow exponentially like nanobots eating away at the earth. (just kidding).
If you don't want to explore the mysteries of the mind, then don't. But don't get angry when other people do so with success.
However, if there are cells like this, it would go further in explaining this problem as well as possibly diagnosing it. If these cells are clustered in one area of the brain, it would go a long way to showing that the brain is compartmentalized in that way, vs. being more of a pure neural network kind of idea that others believe.
This discovery may have very severe impacts on the philosophy of mind and discussions of Neuroscience. The problem of "other minds" has long been an issue for the eliminative materialist, and such a cell's discovery gives them something to talk about when a cartesial dualist asks them about it.
Yes, they do. After all, could it be that they are taking a cue from open source projects like distributed.net and using it to maybe make some money? What criminals! How dare they run a business!
1. They can download stuff to your computer and make it do work. 2. It works like a screen saver and you are not ALLOWED to disable it. You also cannot un-install Windows or they will simply kill you.
Yep, they will kill you. Seriously, what is so bad about letting a company use your clock cycles for goods / services? Hell, enough people do it for free. Maybe Juno should try cracking RC-5 and you would be less angry at them.
3. They can make your computer call their servers to upload results and any other thing they find on your computer, because you wont know. 4. They may require you to keep your computer on 24 hours a day, and oh by the way are NOT responsible for the electricity it consumes. Why should they be, you're stupid not to have read the policy in the first place.
Whether they reserve the right to upload anything on your computer to their servers or not, do you think it might be possible that they are uploading the results they are paying you to compute? Yes, paying you in the form of a PPP connection.
5. They are not responsible for any damages caused by your computer working on a problem while you are not on it. This will probably include very intensive Mathematical Calculations that I know a overclocked processor will just love.
Oh, come on. This is just whining now. Do you really, honestly, and truly believe that your computer is going to melt because its calculating sin 34 to 5943 decimal places instead of rendering images of toasted demons all over your monitor? A clause like this is pretty common in all software, even back in the shareware days when programmers would abdicate themselves from responsibility of what their program unintentially did. As a user, it is usually worth taking the risk. Businesses that like to crash people's computers don't generally make money (with the exception of MS)
6. They can send someone to your house to turn your computer on if you leave it off. Why not. It
Yeah. I want that job.
7. They can all laugh at you for actually agreeing to this. Then having Jim win the office pool becasue he guessed right on the amount of people that never will read the agreement anyway.
Are you going to blame Juno for their users not reading the contract? You have to be pretty lame to think that there isn't a price to pay for a service like Juno. I used a free ISP service for a bit. I had no illusions about the rights I was having taken away from me for it. Look, most people don't give a rat crap if someone is looking through their garbage or the last 5 internet sites they visited. Its useless information to them.
Yes, companies like this are sorta gay. I think its rather dumb too, and the business model is likely to fail. I agree there. I even agree that people should be more mindful of what they agree to when they click through things on their computer. Totally true. And companies shouldn't try to hide their agreements, but make them upfront. A click through licence is pretty up front. It takes like 1 minute to scan through one of those things and look for nasty buggers. People who don't do it are ignorant or lazy (or both).
My point is, that Juno shouldn't be flamed for offering a service like this. They aren't violating anyone's rights. Instead, people should be educated about what they can get into with these free services, and should be mindful of what they are giving up, and if they are willing to do so. I think that the power of data mining w/ targeted advertising, etc is underestimated by the general public. That's because it is new. People will eventually see that those of us who guard our privacy do so not because we are paranoid, but because we don't want to be subject to the immense power of targeted mass-advertising. It is annoying, and sometimes it is downright uncomfortable. But as long as they don't realize it, companies like Juno will still be around, and will continue to have the right to run their business as they see fit.