My experience with Red Hat has been that it only works until you do something with it, at which point it starts behaving badly. Red Hat seems to me to go to extreme lengths to hide what's actually going on in your system, so you can't maintain it manually, and the automatic tools are not perfect. This is actually the way in which it reminds me of Microsoft: there are a number of arcane and totally unintuitive (but friendly) rituals you have to do in order to keep the whole thing from exploding when you touch it.
Not that I expect the business world to realize it, but being a company of any size is much less stable than being a community group. In ten years, Red Hat probably won't have gone out of business. But debian probably still won't have gone into business. MicroSoft may not have been liquidated by the government, but it doesn't matter because their customers will have had to replace everything 4 times anyway. Of course, there will be at least one maintained Red Hat-derived distribution in ten years, so the trust isn't entirely misplaced.
I'd think this would be a pain for entering text, because eyes just aren't as much under control or dextrous as hands. It would be better (for most people) to just use a typing method which uses hands but keeps the wrist relaxed.
On the other hand, it would be really nice to use something like this for scrolling and changing pages. That way you could read things without moving anything except your eyes (which you obviously have to be moving anyway). That might actually make it nicer to read text on a good monitor than hard copy, because you don't have to change pages. You just get to the bottom of the page and glance at the corner, and then it flips to the next page. Or you could have the window scroll such that you continue looking at the same line as you move your eyes to the top of the window.
The problem is that once the particular Playmates have been dropped in, you have to keep them around for 6 months. And I bet a Playmate who's been stuck at the south pole for a few months isn't going to be any fun at all.
Re:Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi
on
Sen To, X-Men 2
·
· Score: 2
The US DVD includes the original soundtrack and a set of English subtitles. At least, the DVD I watched last night had the right color balance and I watched it in Japanese with English subtitles. DVDs these days generally have soundtracks from the region they're for and the region they're from, and subtitles for both of these and frequently others.
For that matter, dubs are getting much better these days. Evidentally the anime world has discovered that there are actually decent English-speaking voice actors. I still prefer subs, but when I watched Cowboy Bebop on DVD, the dubbing wasn't jarring (like, for example, Ranma); I had to actually notice that they were speaking the wrong language in order to realize I'd forgotten to set up the DVD.
For that matter, you may notice that this is a fantasy story, and would likely be enjoyed by kids who can't read (or can't read quickly enough to follow it). The US DVD will mean you don't have to read all the subtitles to your little cousin when your relatives come over and want to watch something.
Even if some spam is actually offering you something you want, you probably don't want to receive it in your email. You may not want to send your spam to/dev/null, though, if you might get an offer for something you actually want. In this case, you'd want to set up a file that it gets sent to, and then search it for interesting stuff on occasion.
Of course, anyone offering something interesting to a list of email addresses probably also has a web site, and you could find the information with Google when you want it.
It makes me wonder why they don't make a habit of winning a bunch of money at blackjack, and then immediately losing it again. Hang out in the casino playing a lot, encouraging the other players by winning, and then leaving with just the money they arrived with. Casinos aren't hurting so much for space in the pit or care too much about the perks they give to the player that they'd kick you out if you're not taking money away from them.
Since the fun is in controlling the game by skill and smarts, there's not really any reason to get yourself kicked out for winning too much.
Restricting distribution of the public key isn't necessary. Restricting automatic decryption is a better idea: if you get an encrypted message, don't let the user include it in a reply to anyone who didn't sign it.
The attack message can't be signed (either by the attack or by the original sender), because it's a specially-constructed ciphertext where the attacker doesn't know the plaintext (until you send it back), and it's not the original message, so nobody could have signed it.
With this UI, you get a bunch of garbage and when you reply, your mailreader doesn't let you include the garbage, so you just say "You sent me garbage; you'll have to try again" rather than sending back the garbage.
So I got both the question and the answer wrong? Probability is really tricky.:) Okay, here's what I actually meant:
You need 23 people to have better than even odds that a pair of people has the same birthday. You need >200 to have better than even odds that somebody has your birthday. If you have a group of 100 people, you should be surprised if someone has your birthday, but not if there are other people who share a birthday.
Generalizing to the reactions of the whole group, there are probably a number of people who have duplicated birthdays. Those people should be surprised, but nobody else should be.
The birthday paradox is just a distractor in this problem; if you pick a random person out of a group of 200, that person should be surprised to be picked, but nobody else should be surprised by the situation, because the random person wasn't anyone special from their points of view. Of course, the chosen person is being surprised about something different from what other people are being surprised about.
In the birthday paradox situation, the people who have duplicated birthdays should be more surprised than other people, because not only are there duplicated birthdays (expected) they were chosen to be one of them (unexpected).
Unless, of course, they're taking a class with their twin sister.
Okay, so here's the situation: everyone is stunned by an elaborate terrorist strike. There seems to be the beginnings of another one, and it's got something to do with your field of study. There are bad economic times, but your field is still somewhat in crazy startup mode.
What are the chances that you'll suddenly die of a stress-related illness?
Far more often than conspiracies, and probably competing well with coincidences, are the situations where people's perceptions of the situation actually significantly affects what happens. Remember, the placebo effect is significantly stronger for a number of conditions than the best medicine we know of. There are many conditions (including RSI) which turn out to be caused by a slight physical effect, a lot of stress, and the knowledge that the condition is common.
I have to point out something about the classroom experiment mentioned in the article. The students whose birthdays are the same as other students in the room reported being more surprised than the other students. But this is, of course, totally logical. As the article says, it takes over 200 people to have better than even odds that someone has your birthday. Therefore, you should be surprised whenever someone does. Of course, it's likely to happen to somebody. And so somebody should be surprised, and people who know this person (and not most of the others) should be a bit surprised, and most of the people should be totally unfazed.
We can't kill the music industry. It's big, and the companies involved do too many other things. It's highly unlikely that the big names would ever decide to ditch music and just sell game systems and internet access. Even if they were getting no profits from their music parts, they'd probably use their other resources to try to do something about it, rather than giving up.
Therefore, if we want to stop them, what we need to do is give them a viable business model. We have to actively help them do things we like. </desmond-tutu>
Is it worth $.25/song to have the music industry's attempt at a business model compatible with consumer rights succeed? Wouldn't you pay $.25/song if the RIAA would chill out? Think of it as buying influence, and you'll realize that you're getting a lot for your quarter that you don't get from the P2P networks.
Just think: they set up this thing. It appears on slashdot, with a favorable article. Everybody goes there and gets a couple of songs. They make more money in a few hours than they can ignore. If people are interested in paying to make Blender open source, won't people be even more interested in paying to make the RIAA reasonable? Oh, and there's also this music thing, but that's not important.
I bet they replaced *really* old UNIX boxes with Linux boxes. Moore's law gives you about '92 for when machines were 1/92 as fast as they are now. Probably it's a calculation they only care to do once a day, and they couldn't justify buying a new UNIX box to do it if it was still getting done on time. The thing about Linux is that you can just buy a machine if you feel like it, because the hardware is cheap. And whenever you buy a machine, it's significantly faster than the machines you had before.
They're talking about a wireless uplink, not wireless to the devices (because they don't have any wires going to the house). In this case you don't need to be omni-directional, because neither your house nor your upstream provider are going to wander around. Of course, air and terrain features don't transmit as well as fiber or coax, so you'd still be wasting some power. On the other hand, you might expend more energy trying to maintain a wire than you waste with wireless.
Learning to do social interaction is an important advance, because it makes the robot much easier to control. Learning to schmooze isn't that important, but it's a good test case for things like understanding tone of voice and subtext, which are really important for comprehension. For industrial applications, this is obviously unnecessary, but for disaster recovery, it would be extremely useful to be able to communicate with the robot with natural language to tell it what to do, ask it about what it is doing, and allow it to report on its surroundings.
If you're going to be sitting around for a while playing, you might like a good text adventure. There are a number of games that tell interesting stories and would be good for a long trip. See www.ifarchive.org and try Photopia, Anchorhead, or (if you want a real challenge) So Far. At 100-300k/game you should be able to bring a lot of games with you. Check out http://www.wurb.com/if/ to see what you might like.
I actually regularly read several newsgroups, which are quite active. Sure, there are trolls on occasion, and sometimes people get upset and leave, but these newsgroups are the central means of non-realtime communication for the particular topics they discuss, so people tend to come back. While newsgroups can be moderated, none of these are.
I think that Usenet isn't dying entirely. It's just that it doesn't work as well for non-topic-based social interaction as things that have been developed more recently, and so it has largely scaled back to the communities which have attached themselves to it. Groups like rec.humor have gone away in favor of things like livejournal, but livejournal is arguably better for what rec.humor was for in the first place.
I think we're seeing a diversification of communications mechanisms, such that there are ones with different strengths and weaknesses, and different mechanisms are used for different purposes, as appropriate. When all you have are talk, IRC, email, and news, everything looks like one or the other. If you want to discuss the events in your life with a group of people, you use news or email if that's all you have, but you use something more suited once it comes along.
Someday, those better means will be more public, hopefully. Consider: a blog mechanism with an open set of interacting sites. You set up a server, have an account on it, and it will identify you (as user@server) to other servers. You have a local log, and can post comments to other people, these being kept on your server but also copied into the log on the other server (if the owner of that server accepts comments from you).
Web services are a great idea for intra-company stuff. If you've got some application that everybody needs to use on the same data that doesn't work well in text (say, a project management program), you could either write a GUI for each platform and a protocol for connecting to the server for shared state, or you could have an internal web server running the service, skip both of these steps, and just code behavior.
For a lot of things, I agree that web services don't make sense on the open internet; there are a whole lot of things that ought to be static pages that get done with jsps (see shop.usps.com, for example).
I think the real test for whether something should be a web service is whether the users all want to interact with each other. If so, it makes a lot of sense to have a web service. If people are just doing their own thing and don't want to interact, web services don't make a lot of sense.
You shouldn't be able to entirely void yourself from liability, and you can't. If you read the details of the GPL, you'll find that the relevant sections say "to the extent permitted by applicable law" and "unless required by applicable law". This means you can probably still the authors of a program which intentionally damages your system, sends all you data to the author, includes a backdoor, etc., depending on where you are.
On the other hand, you should be able to offer a program to anyone willing to take responsibility for what they do with it. The world is no better off if people just keep their buggy programs to themselves. In order to have any software, you need the ability to limit your liability, up to some minimum, so long as the user is aware.
If you're giving it away for free, especially in an anonymous ftp/web context (such that you neither receive anything from the recipient nor even find out who the recipient is), you should automatically have the minimal liability. In fact, in this situation, the author is not involved in the process, and thus cannot agree to take on additional liability.
I'm a bit mystified about the warranty part, though. I can't imagine an implied warranty that you would get with stuff you got for free without a transaction taking place. What do you want, your money back? A different copy?
For OSS, the license is mostly a grant of restricted rights to copy and modify the software; use of the software is permitted because you own your copy outright and have fair use rights to it. With commercial software, the company refuses to let you buy it unless you agree to give up some rights you'd otherwise have.
There is one exception: the "No warranty" clause (GPL, section 11 and 12). This clause only makes sense in a usage context. If you're not using the software, you're not going to break anything with it. But, as is clearly stated above, you don't have to accept the license to simply use the software. This means that a user who made no changes to a GPL program could sue the makers for damages or try to use an implied warranty, although nobody else could.
Requiring that the user accept clauses 11 and 12 of the GPL in order to get the software, and requiring that anyone who redistributes the software must either impose 11 and 12 on the recipients or accept responsibility themselves, so far as I can tell, would be within the spirit of the GPL, since the GPL does impose essentially these conditions on the expected sort of user (who accepts the GPL and makes slight modifications).
Of course, in a sane country giving something away for free would carry as little liability as you could get with license restrictions anyway, but that is, unfortunately, not the situation, it seems.
I spend time with my friends and loved ones even though there's not an extra hour in the day. Since I make sure to have a life at the expense of projects and such, I don't need an extra hour for my life. So if there were an extra hour in the day, there would be another hour left in the day after I'm tried of interacting with people.
If you arrange your life such that you spend enough time doing the things that are really important, in the unlikely event that an extra hour were added to the day, you'd spend it on something less important.
They're presumably backing down because it would be a terrible PR move. "We're neglecting our customers and suing people to try to cover this fact up" just doesn't go over well.
The question is what they were thinking in the first place; it's not like you can actually a company and have nobody know. Possibly they just wanted a bit more time in preparing patches before SNOsoft released details. I think it's most likely that think that people won't remember who this incident involved, and will just think "Some big computer company tried suing someone who found a vulnerability in their product. I'd better avoid that big company. Now, was it MicroSoft or Sun?" Of course, as nothing is coming of it, there won't be much in the way of records on the subject. Or maybe HP's lawyers have been spending too much time in Germany and think they should threaten/sue people in HP's name without HP's permission.
I think that a good AI go player will need to have a rich mental landscape, but that it doesn't need to think at all like humans think. Humans have a certain set of metaphors which are very natural simply because we've evolved the hardware optimized for them, so that we can move through the world reflexively. A computer go player definitely needs metaphors, but they do not need to be physical metaphors; humans play go with physical metaphors because that's what we have, but there may be better metaphors for go which we can't understand or use as well.
I'm fairly certain that a master go AI will have a definite intelligence, but it will be a very alien intelligence. It will have grown up in a world where turning by anything other than a right angle makes no sense, where the granularity of the world is noticeable, where the world is bounded on all sides.
Slashdot Mirror
My experience with Red Hat has been that it only works until you do something with it, at which point it starts behaving badly. Red Hat seems to me to go to extreme lengths to hide what's actually going on in your system, so you can't maintain it manually, and the automatic tools are not perfect. This is actually the way in which it reminds me of Microsoft: there are a number of arcane and totally unintuitive (but friendly) rituals you have to do in order to keep the whole thing from exploding when you touch it.
Not that I expect the business world to realize it, but being a company of any size is much less stable than being a community group. In ten years, Red Hat probably won't have gone out of business. But debian probably still won't have gone into business. MicroSoft may not have been liquidated by the government, but it doesn't matter because their customers will have had to replace everything 4 times anyway. Of course, there will be at least one maintained Red Hat-derived distribution in ten years, so the trust isn't entirely misplaced.
I'd think this would be a pain for entering text, because eyes just aren't as much under control or dextrous as hands. It would be better (for most people) to just use a typing method which uses hands but keeps the wrist relaxed.
On the other hand, it would be really nice to use something like this for scrolling and changing pages. That way you could read things without moving anything except your eyes (which you obviously have to be moving anyway). That might actually make it nicer to read text on a good monitor than hard copy, because you don't have to change pages. You just get to the bottom of the page and glance at the corner, and then it flips to the next page. Or you could have the window scroll such that you continue looking at the same line as you move your eyes to the top of the window.
The problem is that once the particular Playmates have been dropped in, you have to keep them around for 6 months. And I bet a Playmate who's been stuck at the south pole for a few months isn't going to be any fun at all.
The US DVD includes the original soundtrack and a set of English subtitles. At least, the DVD I watched last night had the right color balance and I watched it in Japanese with English subtitles. DVDs these days generally have soundtracks from the region they're for and the region they're from, and subtitles for both of these and frequently others.
For that matter, dubs are getting much better these days. Evidentally the anime world has discovered that there are actually decent English-speaking voice actors. I still prefer subs, but when I watched Cowboy Bebop on DVD, the dubbing wasn't jarring (like, for example, Ranma); I had to actually notice that they were speaking the wrong language in order to realize I'd forgotten to set up the DVD.
For that matter, you may notice that this is a fantasy story, and would likely be enjoyed by kids who can't read (or can't read quickly enough to follow it). The US DVD will mean you don't have to read all the subtitles to your little cousin when your relatives come over and want to watch something.
"The station's winter personnel are isolated between mid-February and late October."
If anyone deserves to get high-speed access to porn...
Even if some spam is actually offering you something you want, you probably don't want to receive it in your email. You may not want to send your spam to /dev/null, though, if you might get an offer for something you actually want. In this case, you'd want to set up a file that it gets sent to, and then search it for interesting stuff on occasion.
Of course, anyone offering something interesting to a list of email addresses probably also has a web site, and you could find the information with Google when you want it.
It makes me wonder why they don't make a habit of winning a bunch of money at blackjack, and then immediately losing it again. Hang out in the casino playing a lot, encouraging the other players by winning, and then leaving with just the money they arrived with. Casinos aren't hurting so much for space in the pit or care too much about the perks they give to the player that they'd kick you out if you're not taking money away from them.
Since the fun is in controlling the game by skill and smarts, there's not really any reason to get yourself kicked out for winning too much.
Restricting distribution of the public key isn't necessary. Restricting automatic decryption is a better idea: if you get an encrypted message, don't let the user include it in a reply to anyone who didn't sign it.
The attack message can't be signed (either by the attack or by the original sender), because it's a specially-constructed ciphertext where the attacker doesn't know the plaintext (until you send it back), and it's not the original message, so nobody could have signed it.
With this UI, you get a bunch of garbage and when you reply, your mailreader doesn't let you include the garbage, so you just say "You sent me garbage; you'll have to try again" rather than sending back the garbage.
So I got both the question and the answer wrong? Probability is really tricky. :) Okay, here's what I actually meant:
You need 23 people to have better than even odds that a pair of people has the same birthday. You need >200 to have better than even odds that somebody has your birthday. If you have a group of 100 people, you should be surprised if someone has your birthday, but not if there are other people who share a birthday.
Generalizing to the reactions of the whole group, there are probably a number of people who have duplicated birthdays. Those people should be surprised, but nobody else should be.
The birthday paradox is just a distractor in this problem; if you pick a random person out of a group of 200, that person should be surprised to be picked, but nobody else should be surprised by the situation, because the random person wasn't anyone special from their points of view. Of course, the chosen person is being surprised about something different from what other people are being surprised about.
In the birthday paradox situation, the people who have duplicated birthdays should be more surprised than other people, because not only are there duplicated birthdays (expected) they were chosen to be one of them (unexpected).
Unless, of course, they're taking a class with their twin sister.
Of course, if you consider how many of the "trusted circle" have been indicted or are being investigated for fraud of one sort or another...
Okay, so here's the situation: everyone is stunned by an elaborate terrorist strike. There seems to be the beginnings of another one, and it's got something to do with your field of study. There are bad economic times, but your field is still somewhat in crazy startup mode.
What are the chances that you'll suddenly die of a stress-related illness?
Far more often than conspiracies, and probably competing well with coincidences, are the situations where people's perceptions of the situation actually significantly affects what happens. Remember, the placebo effect is significantly stronger for a number of conditions than the best medicine we know of. There are many conditions (including RSI) which turn out to be caused by a slight physical effect, a lot of stress, and the knowledge that the condition is common.
I have to point out something about the classroom experiment mentioned in the article. The students whose birthdays are the same as other students in the room reported being more surprised than the other students. But this is, of course, totally logical. As the article says, it takes over 200 people to have better than even odds that someone has your birthday. Therefore, you should be surprised whenever someone does. Of course, it's likely to happen to somebody. And so somebody should be surprised, and people who know this person (and not most of the others) should be a bit surprised, and most of the people should be totally unfazed.
You must be thinking of DDDR, which lets you navigate the heap of a program as it's running by steeping up, down, left, and right.
But I hear they're working on DDDRM, which kills your program unless you only look at the data that the arrows say you can...
In a single day of illegal price fixing, MicroSoft overcharged consumers by more than Linux has since its introduction.
We can't kill the music industry. It's big, and the companies involved do too many other things. It's highly unlikely that the big names would ever decide to ditch music and just sell game systems and internet access. Even if they were getting no profits from their music parts, they'd probably use their other resources to try to do something about it, rather than giving up.
Therefore, if we want to stop them, what we need to do is give them a viable business model. We have to actively help them do things we like.
</desmond-tutu>
Is it worth $.25/song to have the music industry's attempt at a business model compatible with consumer rights succeed? Wouldn't you pay $.25/song if the RIAA would chill out? Think of it as buying influence, and you'll realize that you're getting a lot for your quarter that you don't get from the P2P networks.
Just think: they set up this thing. It appears on slashdot, with a favorable article. Everybody goes there and gets a couple of songs. They make more money in a few hours than they can ignore. If people are interested in paying to make Blender open source, won't people be even more interested in paying to make the RIAA reasonable? Oh, and there's also this music thing, but that's not important.
I bet they replaced *really* old UNIX boxes with Linux boxes. Moore's law gives you about '92 for when machines were 1/92 as fast as they are now. Probably it's a calculation they only care to do once a day, and they couldn't justify buying a new UNIX box to do it if it was still getting done on time. The thing about Linux is that you can just buy a machine if you feel like it, because the hardware is cheap. And whenever you buy a machine, it's significantly faster than the machines you had before.
They're talking about a wireless uplink, not wireless to the devices (because they don't have any wires going to the house). In this case you don't need to be omni-directional, because neither your house nor your upstream provider are going to wander around. Of course, air and terrain features don't transmit as well as fiber or coax, so you'd still be wasting some power. On the other hand, you might expend more energy trying to maintain a wire than you waste with wireless.
Learning to do social interaction is an important advance, because it makes the robot much easier to control. Learning to schmooze isn't that important, but it's a good test case for things like understanding tone of voice and subtext, which are really important for comprehension. For industrial applications, this is obviously unnecessary, but for disaster recovery, it would be extremely useful to be able to communicate with the robot with natural language to tell it what to do, ask it about what it is doing, and allow it to report on its surroundings.
If you're going to be sitting around for a while playing, you might like a good text adventure. There are a number of games that tell interesting stories and would be good for a long trip. See www.ifarchive.org and try Photopia, Anchorhead, or (if you want a real challenge) So Far. At 100-300k/game you should be able to bring a lot of games with you. Check out http://www.wurb.com/if/ to see what you might like.
Platform independant since 1981...
I actually regularly read several newsgroups, which are quite active. Sure, there are trolls on occasion, and sometimes people get upset and leave, but these newsgroups are the central means of non-realtime communication for the particular topics they discuss, so people tend to come back. While newsgroups can be moderated, none of these are.
I think that Usenet isn't dying entirely. It's just that it doesn't work as well for non-topic-based social interaction as things that have been developed more recently, and so it has largely scaled back to the communities which have attached themselves to it. Groups like rec.humor have gone away in favor of things like livejournal, but livejournal is arguably better for what rec.humor was for in the first place.
I think we're seeing a diversification of communications mechanisms, such that there are ones with different strengths and weaknesses, and different mechanisms are used for different purposes, as appropriate. When all you have are talk, IRC, email, and news, everything looks like one or the other. If you want to discuss the events in your life with a group of people, you use news or email if that's all you have, but you use something more suited once it comes along.
Someday, those better means will be more public, hopefully. Consider: a blog mechanism with an open set of interacting sites. You set up a server, have an account on it, and it will identify you (as user@server) to other servers. You have a local log, and can post comments to other people, these being kept on your server but also copied into the log on the other server (if the owner of that server accepts comments from you).
Web services are a great idea for intra-company stuff. If you've got some application that everybody needs to use on the same data that doesn't work well in text (say, a project management program), you could either write a GUI for each platform and a protocol for connecting to the server for shared state, or you could have an internal web server running the service, skip both of these steps, and just code behavior.
For a lot of things, I agree that web services don't make sense on the open internet; there are a whole lot of things that ought to be static pages that get done with jsps (see shop.usps.com, for example).
I think the real test for whether something should be a web service is whether the users all want to interact with each other. If so, it makes a lot of sense to have a web service. If people are just doing their own thing and don't want to interact, web services don't make a lot of sense.
You shouldn't be able to entirely void yourself from liability, and you can't. If you read the details of the GPL, you'll find that the relevant sections say "to the extent permitted by applicable law" and "unless required by applicable law". This means you can probably still the authors of a program which intentionally damages your system, sends all you data to the author, includes a backdoor, etc., depending on where you are.
On the other hand, you should be able to offer a program to anyone willing to take responsibility for what they do with it. The world is no better off if people just keep their buggy programs to themselves. In order to have any software, you need the ability to limit your liability, up to some minimum, so long as the user is aware.
If you're giving it away for free, especially in an anonymous ftp/web context (such that you neither receive anything from the recipient nor even find out who the recipient is), you should automatically have the minimal liability. In fact, in this situation, the author is not involved in the process, and thus cannot agree to take on additional liability.
I'm a bit mystified about the warranty part, though. I can't imagine an implied warranty that you would get with stuff you got for free without a transaction taking place. What do you want, your money back? A different copy?
For OSS, the license is mostly a grant of restricted rights to copy and modify the software; use of the software is permitted because you own your copy outright and have fair use rights to it. With commercial software, the company refuses to let you buy it unless you agree to give up some rights you'd otherwise have.
There is one exception: the "No warranty" clause (GPL, section 11 and 12). This clause only makes sense in a usage context. If you're not using the software, you're not going to break anything with it. But, as is clearly stated above, you don't have to accept the license to simply use the software. This means that a user who made no changes to a GPL program could sue the makers for damages or try to use an implied warranty, although nobody else could.
Requiring that the user accept clauses 11 and 12 of the GPL in order to get the software, and requiring that anyone who redistributes the software must either impose 11 and 12 on the recipients or accept responsibility themselves, so far as I can tell, would be within the spirit of the GPL, since the GPL does impose essentially these conditions on the expected sort of user (who accepts the GPL and makes slight modifications).
Of course, in a sane country giving something away for free would carry as little liability as you could get with license restrictions anyway, but that is, unfortunately, not the situation, it seems.
I spend time with my friends and loved ones even though there's not an extra hour in the day. Since I make sure to have a life at the expense of projects and such, I don't need an extra hour for my life. So if there were an extra hour in the day, there would be another hour left in the day after I'm tried of interacting with people.
If you arrange your life such that you spend enough time doing the things that are really important, in the unlikely event that an extra hour were added to the day, you'd spend it on something less important.
They're presumably backing down because it would be a terrible PR move. "We're neglecting our customers and suing people to try to cover this fact up" just doesn't go over well.
The question is what they were thinking in the first place; it's not like you can actually a company and have nobody know. Possibly they just wanted a bit more time in preparing patches before SNOsoft released details. I think it's most likely that think that people won't remember who this incident involved, and will just think "Some big computer company tried suing someone who found a vulnerability in their product. I'd better avoid that big company. Now, was it MicroSoft or Sun?" Of course, as nothing is coming of it, there won't be much in the way of records on the subject. Or maybe HP's lawyers have been spending too much time in Germany and think they should threaten/sue people in HP's name without HP's permission.
I think that a good AI go player will need to have a rich mental landscape, but that it doesn't need to think at all like humans think. Humans have a certain set of metaphors which are very natural simply because we've evolved the hardware optimized for them, so that we can move through the world reflexively. A computer go player definitely needs metaphors, but they do not need to be physical metaphors; humans play go with physical metaphors because that's what we have, but there may be better metaphors for go which we can't understand or use as well.
I'm fairly certain that a master go AI will have a definite intelligence, but it will be a very alien intelligence. It will have grown up in a world where turning by anything other than a right angle makes no sense, where the granularity of the world is noticeable, where the world is bounded on all sides.