> What does the slashdot community think of this development in the ongoing cat-and-mouse game going on between big media and what is available online?
Big Media is screwed.
Unless of course they develop new business models.
> Writing an AI for a Real-Time Strategy game provides the same challenges involving reasoning over imperfect and uncertain information. It also adds planning, including joint and partial plans, and resource management to the mix.
AI research is extending into all types of gaming. For the past few years there have been a couple of dedicated conferences - CIG, AIIDE - and a special sesson on games at CEC. Google should turn up their proceedings, or at least an index that tells what kind of things are being studied. There was also a special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computing dedicated to games last year.
Curiously, much of the AI-in-games work uses the evolutionary approach.
> If anything I would argue that Poker is best suited to research involving modeling of an opponent, since knowing how your opponents play is key to creating an optimal strategy.
IIRC, the Best Paper from this year's CIG went to a study of opponent modelling in poker.
> I'd like to know how it happened. What attracts some of the best researchers in the world to Alberta? It sure isn't the balmy weather (unless you take balmy to mean nuts). It may or may not be a cultural mecca.
> The fact that Joe Lieberman couldn't keep his website running is a good metaphor for why he lost this challenge by someone who even a few months ago was a nobody.
Such a metaphor would seem to imply that his loss was due to cluelessness. AFAICT it's actually because >0.5 of the Democratic voters in CT think he's a Republican in all but name, and wanted a change more than they wanted the perks of having a senior legislator.
> Sadly, if you leave the company in the hands of the techs, we tend to have little to no business sense and therefore the companies we run tend to go down in flames, in spite of the incredible products we might offer. (See: Digital Equipment Corporation. They had 64-bit before everyone else. Not only that, but they had a laptop that was 64-bit and running Windows NT, OpenVMS and Digital Unix. We're still not there today.)
DEC started sliding down the tubes when they started replacing their field engineers with sales reps for their regular site contacts. You couldn't get the most basic sort of technical question answered with an "I'll ask someone", and that usually came back garbled. Also, the leaner roving maintenance force consisted more of parts changers who knew less about your system than you did, rather than anything that merited the name 'engineer'.
Also, they dealt in minicomputers, and got squeezed out by the growing power of PCs. They might have won out if they'd brought down the price of their Alphas, but they didn't.
Blame the bean counters for their demise, not the techies.
Political hacks have been sponsoring spin in books and the "news" media since forever. What's new here is that they now see the blogosphere as important enough to merit attention.
> > First to file still allows prior art - why wouldn't it?
> Suppose first to file allows prior art. In the case of the person filing the claim not being the inventor, there would be prior art from whomever was the inventor.
And the net effect of the 'reform' is to replace inventor lawsuits with prior art lawsuits. The difference being that in the latter case no one gets control of the idea.
Now little guy will get screwed more vigorously than before. The law isn't clearing the courts; it's eliminating any meaningful right of redress.
> Yes, it is true. It cost many millions of dollars to take a product from inception (whether it's a compound created in a laboratory, or a plant natives have been using forever) through all the preclinical and clinical trials that are necessary to obtain regulatory approval. Not only that, it often costs nearly the same, or sometimes even more, for products that get near the end of clinical trials, and present a side effect that all the preclinical trials failed to display (whether it's because the preclinical subjects were unable to tell the researchers about the side effect, such as something severe that only represents itself seldomly but with no visible signs, or because the non-human test subjects simply didn't experience the side effect).
Critics claim that the pharmaceuticals spend 10x as much on advertising as they do on research. Ultimately the patent merely fuels the saturation advertising that hits you every time you turn your television on to check the news.
Also, patents notwithstanding, the pharmaceuticals aren't interesting in developing drugs that address some very serious health problems, if they don't think the market will be big enough to give them a big ROI for the development.
The system is broken in ways that patent reform isn't going to fix.
> Wow, a bill that solves none of the many real problems with the patent system. Way to go lawmakers!
Ah, but it does solve the problem of letting little guys take the rights for their inventions back from the big IP holders who have enough money for the "patent everything in sight" strategy.
> Back in the day there were proposals about using neutrinos to communicate with submarines and other military vehicles around the planet, since neutrinos can travel through the Earth. Since a military vessel would have to have a very small neutrino detector (to keep its mobility), the detection of neutrinos by this thing would be super low. IIRC, expected usable bandwidths (not sure if they actually did the experiment or not) would be something like a byte per day, which is obviously too low to be useful for military.
If you filled the whole submarine with dry-cleaning fluid, it should make a decent detector.
> I think we're moving to a society where just being suspected of a crime will be so bad (in terms of government harassment like no-fly lists, wiretapping, etc) that the most important thing will not be to make sure that the government can't read what you communicate, but rather have no reason to suspect you're doing anything they don't like. With current advances in data mining, it's going to be an arms race - the stenographers against the miners.
Feh. Lots of us abandoned Red Hat after the crappy RH9 and following carpet snatch. Red Hat didn't die then, and it isn't going to die now. Ubuntu's not going to change that any more than Gentoo did.
Re: dumber than an arkansas hound dog, these guys
on
Halving Half Lives
·
· Score: 1
> I love the "informative" mod, btw. Nice touch.
And the first reply has been moderated as "redundant".
> you slow down an atom to near absolute zero, you would be lengthening the half-life, say from 200,000 years to 400,000 or whatever, because the binding energy would stay the same, just the ability of the particles to break free would be reduced because of the slowed movements between the particles. you might even generate a spike in atomic activity when it warms up.
FYI, radioactive decay isn't caused by thermal energy. Notice the lack of a term for temperature in the relevant equations.
> how does some of what passes for scientific papers get accepted, anyway? box tops? there's a lot of stuff that the mass media picks up on and publicizes that just can't stand the smell test.
One might ask a similar question about Slashdot moderation.
Slashdot Mirror
> What does the slashdot community think of this development in the ongoing cat-and-mouse game going on between big media and what is available online?
Big Media is screwed.
Unless of course they develop new business models.
> "The media companies asked us to do this ..... so we had to do this."
> Interesting - after all, thats precisely the line Apple uses about the DRM in ITMS songs.
At least we know who their real customers are.
> Writing an AI for a Real-Time Strategy game provides the same challenges involving reasoning over imperfect and uncertain information. It also adds planning, including joint and partial plans, and resource management to the mix.
AI research is extending into all types of gaming. For the past few years there have been a couple of dedicated conferences - CIG, AIIDE - and a special sesson on games at CEC. Google should turn up their proceedings, or at least an index that tells what kind of things are being studied. There was also a special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computing dedicated to games last year.
Curiously, much of the AI-in-games work uses the evolutionary approach.
> If anything I would argue that Poker is best suited to research involving modeling of an opponent, since knowing how your opponents play is key to creating an optimal strategy.
IIRC, the Best Paper from this year's CIG went to a study of opponent modelling in poker.
> I'd like to know how it happened. What attracts some of the best researchers in the world to Alberta? It sure isn't the balmy weather (unless you take balmy to mean nuts). It may or may not be a cultural mecca.
Can't say in general, but regarding game AI, Alberta has a big, well-known research program.
> You guys direct linked a $15/mo server?!!!??!!!?!?!?!!!??????
It will only blow one fuse; $15 is about what it will cost to fix it.
> The fact that Joe Lieberman couldn't keep his website running is a good metaphor for why he lost this challenge by someone who even a few months ago was a nobody.
Such a metaphor would seem to imply that his loss was due to cluelessness. AFAICT it's actually because >0.5 of the Democratic voters in CT think he's a Republican in all but name, and wanted a change more than they wanted the perks of having a senior legislator.
"Our stuff is better than the competion because mix(fear,uncertainty,doubt,buzzwords,technobabble, lies,brainfarts)."
News at eleven...
> Sadly, if you leave the company in the hands of the techs, we tend to have little to no business sense and therefore the companies we run tend to go down in flames, in spite of the incredible products we might offer. (See: Digital Equipment Corporation. They had 64-bit before everyone else. Not only that, but they had a laptop that was 64-bit and running Windows NT, OpenVMS and Digital Unix. We're still not there today.)
DEC started sliding down the tubes when they started replacing their field engineers with sales reps for their regular site contacts. You couldn't get the most basic sort of technical question answered with an "I'll ask someone", and that usually came back garbled. Also, the leaner roving maintenance force consisted more of parts changers who knew less about your system than you did, rather than anything that merited the name 'engineer'.
Also, they dealt in minicomputers, and got squeezed out by the growing power of PCs. They might have won out if they'd brought down the price of their Alphas, but they didn't.
Blame the bean counters for their demise, not the techies.
Political hacks have been sponsoring spin in books and the "news" media since forever. What's new here is that they now see the blogosphere as important enough to merit attention.
> [...] contains the foundations of what Wolfram would later go on and call 'cellular autonoma'.
Actually the term predates Wolfram by a long time. Wikipedia gives some references from 1968.
cellular automata.
> > First to file still allows prior art - why wouldn't it?
> Suppose first to file allows prior art. In the case of the person filing the claim not being the inventor, there would be prior art from whomever was the inventor.
And the net effect of the 'reform' is to replace inventor lawsuits with prior art lawsuits. The difference being that in the latter case no one gets control of the idea.
Now little guy will get screwed more vigorously than before. The law isn't clearing the courts; it's eliminating any meaningful right of redress.
> Yes, it is true. It cost many millions of dollars to take a product from inception (whether it's a compound created in a laboratory, or a plant natives have been using forever) through all the preclinical and clinical trials that are necessary to obtain regulatory approval. Not only that, it often costs nearly the same, or sometimes even more, for products that get near the end of clinical trials, and present a side effect that all the preclinical trials failed to display (whether it's because the preclinical subjects were unable to tell the researchers about the side effect, such as something severe that only represents itself seldomly but with no visible signs, or because the non-human test subjects simply didn't experience the side effect).
Critics claim that the pharmaceuticals spend 10x as much on advertising as they do on research. Ultimately the patent merely fuels the saturation advertising that hits you every time you turn your television on to check the news.
Also, patents notwithstanding, the pharmaceuticals aren't interesting in developing drugs that address some very serious health problems, if they don't think the market will be big enough to give them a big ROI for the development.
The system is broken in ways that patent reform isn't going to fix.
> Wow, a bill that solves none of the many real problems with the patent system. Way to go lawmakers!
Ah, but it does solve the problem of letting little guys take the rights for their inventions back from the big IP holders who have enough money for the "patent everything in sight" strategy.
> Back in the day there were proposals about using neutrinos to communicate with submarines and other military vehicles around the planet, since neutrinos can travel through the Earth. Since a military vessel would have to have a very small neutrino detector (to keep its mobility), the detection of neutrinos by this thing would be super low. IIRC, expected usable bandwidths (not sure if they actually did the experiment or not) would be something like a byte per day, which is obviously too low to be useful for military.
If you filled the whole submarine with dry-cleaning fluid, it should make a decent detector.
> I thin k we're moving to a society where just being suspected of a cr i me wi ll b e so ba d (in terms of government harassment like no-fly lists, wiretapping, etc) that the most important t h ing w i ll not be to m ake sure that the government can't read what you communicate, but rather have no reason to suspect you're doing anything they don't like. With current advances in data mining, it's going to be an arms race - the stenographers against the miners.
A little analysis reveals your cause for concern.
> MHO every single fucking arab and jew in the world needs to be put across someone's lap and given a good long hard spanking.
Don't overgeneralize. Not everyone in those groups is behaving badly.
So it wasn't a signal to shoot after all.
Feh. Lots of us abandoned Red Hat after the crappy RH9 and following carpet snatch. Red Hat didn't die then, and it isn't going to die now. Ubuntu's not going to change that any more than Gentoo did.
> I love the "informative" mod, btw. Nice touch.
And the first reply has been moderated as "redundant".
> What's wrong with just launching it into the sun?
If we pollute the sun we'll really be in trouble!
> you slow down an atom to near absolute zero, you would be lengthening the half-life, say from 200,000 years to 400,000 or whatever, because the binding energy would stay the same, just the ability of the particles to break free would be reduced because of the slowed movements between the particles. you might even generate a spike in atomic activity when it warms up.
FYI, radioactive decay isn't caused by thermal energy. Notice the lack of a term for temperature in the relevant equations.
> how does some of what passes for scientific papers get accepted, anyway? box tops? there's a lot of stuff that the mass media picks up on and publicizes that just can't stand the smell test.
One might ask a similar question about Slashdot moderation.
> And yes, it runs Linux.
Fortunately they haven't been able to find a driver for the anal probe.
> 1. McDonalds Fry Cook
No, if you have a degree in math they let you work the register.
> A senior Red Hat executive today maintained the Xen open source virtualisation environment was not yet ready for enterprise use
In other news, a senior Xen spokesman said Red Hat was not yet ready for enterprise use.
Why are the pronouncements of executives considered newsworthy?