Ask any serious scientist to explain some facts like mind reading, alien abduction or other of this kind. Most likely he will refuse to give any scientific explaination. Telling that all those facts are false could not be called scientific... however it could be true. Nevertheless, there are topics that are closed for any serious discussion. That's right, 90% of them is nonsence... But 80% of everything is nonsence. Those topics are closed not because they are 'unscientific' themselves, but because of the tradition. And because too many idiots are talking stuff about those topics.
One day the Paris Academy told the world that rocks can not fall from the sky, because there are no rocks in the sky. How many rocks in the sky do we have today ?
Every day I'm sending them about 30 emails in spam report. The same spam keeps coming again and again.
Well, even if they wanted... They'd have to hire at least the whole population of China. Or invent a REAL artificial intelligence, which itself has more value than all our Yahoo mails.
Now we have robots to think for us. Great. All we have to do is to have some beer and relax... no, wait. We need machines that will take beer and relax for us.
Do you realize that teenagers has less stable psychic than older people ? Do you know that teenagers has a strong tendency for commiting suicide ?
See here for list of articles
What if one of those girls will kill herself, impressed and frustrated by that 1000000000$ fee ?
RIAA will not be responsible for murder.
Just look around - more and more things are above normal person's ability to "tinker" or repair it. There was RS-232. It was easy and convenient. Everyone could make an add-on for the PC to do some task, using RS-232. Search the net - there are hundreds of home built devices that use this simple interface. Now we have USB. Faster, more features. But it is very hard to implement. Was it really necessary to do it in such complicated way ? I don't think so. I think there was an intention to make the interface that only large companies would be able to use. Remember the story of PC. IBM made a very simple device, everybody could do the same. That device has been built using very strict and open standards. For example, there was a completely documented hardware CGA/EGA interface. Now we have dozens of different SVGAs and no standard at all. We should rely on vendor's device drivers. Linux suffered from such politics a lot. There was a word 'engineer' - someone who can invent or construct different things - machines, cars, devices, tools. The key point is that they are different things. Nowaday's 'engineers' can built something very special - typically one part of a machine. One particular kind of software. When there is not exist one human or small group of people who can observe and discuss the whole information in some area, the progress in that area stops. The classic idea of invention came to its end now. Corporation can not invent anything, but only human brain can.
OK, let's read: "Public entities should procure the software that best meets their needs and should avoid any categorical preferences"...Agreed... "for open source software, commercial software, free software, or other software development models.
Now, what do this mean ? It means that the MS Internet Explorer (free),MS Windows NT(commercial), MS Windows CE (commercial, open source) are made under different development models.
Now let's ask authors : what is the development model ? Isn't it something about development ?
Their statement means that if one writes a program as a commercial software and then decides to make it free, without changing even a single line of code, it will suddenly become a program, made under the different development model !
Diagnose : 1) they do not know what they are writing about.
2) it is not the "development model" that matters.
Yea! Umm! Zhkxw! Fwpfpfuuu!
We have already mangled the natural language and
created a bunch of programming languages.
Now this new effort requires standardization.
Just imagine the video tape learning new voice features of Windows 2XXX !
Open file - Off!
Close file - Buff!
Save file - Grm!Grm!
Imagine teachers telling students how to
properly pronounce the "Set preferences" (PfGfGrrf!)
Imagine "holy wars" between adherents of
MicroQuack(tm) and FreeGrunt(GPL).
Originally, the Turing test was just as you proposed. However, there is another problem : some testers will mistakenly decide that humans are computers. This means there should be some statistics gathered. So the criteria should be something like this - the probability of recognizing computer as human must be the same as the probability of recognizing human as human. However, this form of the test will lead to the following paradox : testers, informed about the possibility of high artificial IQ will eventually tend to make more mistakes when talking to humans. On the other hand, if all testers will be unavare of existence of the machine IQ, they will treat every correspondent as human.
If they are trying to patent the METHOD of
generation of sequences of notes, everything is
OK. I'm not reproducing their method dialing a number.
If they are claiming copyright for the actual sequences,
they have to register them all, either in separate statements, or all together,
on a large piece of paper. I think it is illegal to claim copyright on something that is not published somehow (correct me if I am wrong).
So, they must at least place the whole list at their site. 10^11 bytes, you say ?
He observed a second airplane immediately swing behind the first in a follow like manner and swoop down on the Pentagon only to pull up at the last second, out of the smoke cloud, and fly away
This is very important. Pictures, taken at NYC also clearly shows the presence of ANOTHER SMALL PLANE of the same type as described above.
Please note, that the area in NYC (and, I believe, also over Washington is closed for flights.) Coincidence ??? See photos here:
All those registrars are english-speaking.
If you want offensive names, you should register
english words in non-english speaking countries
and vise versa.
Example - www.zaebali.com - the same word in russian.
BTW. there are also f-u-c-k.com, oFoUoCoKo.com,
fukck.com and variants. There is always a way
around.
But the latest update at the disk, one
that will be restored when you 'pull out the cord',
will be 2 phases old. A bit more than in
journalling systems.
Some years ago I tried to participate in several
open-source projects. What really surprised me
is that nobody seemed to notice my and other's
bug reports. I can not insist on inplementing
fixes at once, but hey, guys, say something !
Later I wrote a letter to Raymond, after
reading his 'Cathedral and Bazaar' pointing
to the problem. He answered that there is no such problem. I am using a lot of free software, but
the best free programs were made by individuals.
The Raymond's famous article discusses a kind of
new relationships between people, the whole new
culture. As management is 80% psychology and
psychology is 80% based on culture, it means that
new culture needs new management. They are talking about 'gift culture'. But nations with this kind of culture (Polynesia, Russia) somehow
managed to achieve some, maybe humble, results.
It's a topic to study.
If I am saying that
the job should be done by those people who can
do it better, does this make me an anarchist ?
Do problems that some anarchists have had in the past authomatically apply to all anarchists of the present and future ? Is studying history incompatible with logic ?
if anybody needs a lesson in the way the real world works, it's the geeks
I do not care about so-called 'real world'.
It is stupid, cruel and illogical. Geeks are clever, nice and logical. If anybody needs a lesson, it's real world. If laws are wrong, they should be changed. Laws, not people should be changed. The best laws can be written by geeks, not lawyers. Like best programs are written by programmers, not lusers. Dixi.
Unless you are a software developer...
There are following outsourcing myths: Outsourcing can help finish the project faster In fact yes and no. Actually any contract work is done faster than at-home development. This happens because contractor is interested in finishing his work in time and is more resistant to the pressure from future users or resellers of the product. One programming law says that the probability of corrections to the initial design is proportional to the time of development. Home developes more likely will incorporate changes and shift timeline, contractor will insist in next release of the product, which is better. On the other hand, code is code and it is impossible to write it faster. Outsourcing will result in a bad product because they do not know our business realities Wrong. Taking average business person and average programmer, tell me - who is smarter ? Also if a foreign company takes the project, it is high chance that it is not their first one. Outsourcing will result in bad documentation Maybe. It depends on you. Write it in a contract, and assign someone to check the result. Homegrown teams usually make no documentation at all. Outsourcing will result in bad support. Can be so. Add training your personnel to the contract.
The financial part of the problem look like this:
consultants who are working on your site costs the same, or even more than regular domestic contractors. Developers abroad costs much less.
The financial success of your enterprise depends on how the work can be distributed between these groups.
1. Theorem. For any given number of computers,
placed in any organisation, there is always at least one rational reason for buying more. The same thing happens with IT workers. They are providing job for each other.
2. Nobody knows and there are no means to determine, how many IT workers (or any kind of other people or things) counry actually needs.
3. Many US companies attracting foreign workers suffers from overqualification. When they needs regular coder, they find out that they can hire analyst for the same money. But good analyst can be bad coder.
4. It is impossible to grow programmers in few months, but it is possible to print more dollars,
and then force others to use it with help of army, navy and politics.
5. We in USSR had similar experience. We has had one of the best intelligence services in the world. So some stupid guys in government decided that it is easier to steal designs of electronic chips than to spend money on inventing them. They stole thousands of designs. But the whole industry could not evolve beyond 80286.
And vice versa, how will some Chinese person write, for example, umlauted characters (å, ö, ä, ë and so on)
YOU see umlauted characters here, but I see normal capital cyrillic letters. This problem comes out of the default code page used.
Currently it is necessary to place meta content="text/html; charset=" http-equiv="Content-Type"
and
meta content="" http-equiv="Content-Language"
only into pages in languages, other than English.
The question is - If I have a web page in Russian,
and I want to provide a link to a page in Sweden,
what language should I declare for my page ?
AFAIK there are no means in HTML 4.0 (except using
UNICODE) to make multilanguage contents on one page (correct me if I'm wrong). At least all or most of original english-language pages with default character set should be updated. So the real problem is not how one will type the
link, but in just seeing it more or less
correctly.
No need to ' query every single disk-id '.
Patch software to use FreeDB as primary source, CDDB as secondary and to COPY
contents found in CDDB into FreeDB.
Then just sit down and listen.
I'm sorry. I'm practical
Just went to FreeDB and entered 'Queen' as
request. Here's what I got:
1: Deacon Blue / Queen of The New Year (Single)
2: Queensrÿche / Greatest Hits
3: Queens of the Stone Age / Rated R
4: Queens of the Stone Age / Rated R
5: Queensryche / Rage For Order ...
17: Element / Red Meat & Beauty Queens E.P.
23: Freddie Mercury / Queen
25: The Royal Philarmonic Orchestra / Queen's Rhapsody
This means that they have bad db format. Or wrong query format. Why didn't they just copy CDDB's format ?
There are so much effort in stopping adults from looking at pictures of naked teens and to stop teens from looking at pictures of naked adults.
I think that it is something wrong with logic in this world.
Monopolies are just placing things upside down.
Let's consider your example :
"Photocopiers encourage copying of books (Really, people do this... don't know why, it costs them more.)" I am in need of a book... last printed in 1895. No copyright can be applied. But I still need it. I'd pay money for even the possibility of copying it. The similar situation is everywhere : if someone can make money from copying of something then it will be copied by the owner of rights. Alternatively, if it is impossible to make money by mass copying of the thing, there is high possibility that this thing can be copied for free. Free software does not change this schema. It only introduces programs with starting price of 0.
"Audio tapes encourage audio piracy"
Not exactly so. If I paid for the right to listen
for some music, why should I pay for the right to listen to it using another media (but same ears)?
If the legislative says that copying CD to tape for personal use is illegal, then it should say that any interpretation of music is illegal. If someone is playing 'Yesterday' using his own guitar, he must pay for this right. And in
orchestra, every musician must pay ! No exceptions! Everyone is equal before the law.
But monopolies use law only where it makes profit for them. Law == Monopoly. Law is unfair.
"I like Sony Hardware... but this kind of makes them have a bad light."
Some words on SONY. There are two major AV giants
in the market - SONY and Panasonic. They say, in USA the "common subconscious" about them is
Sony is cool, hi-end; Panasonic is average, low-end. However, in Russia it is quite the contrary.
Panasonic sounds good and Sony sounds not so good.
Actually they are the same. It is people's minds perverted. "... Nobody in 19th century would beleive that it is possible to create the multinational company and earn millions by selling lemonade"
OK, I've already done this. Right yesterday I
wondered why the damn S**Y company still exists.
Just one example - their Digital8 technology.
Announced as a cheap alternative to
MiniDV, but at SONY's pricing it is exactly at the same rate with other's MiniDVs.
Bad TVs, average audio, everything is overpriced,
a lot of 'proprietary formats' - minidisk,memorystick, etc. Reminds some another company, doesn't it ?
Agreed. The blank password itself is not
a security hole. But there is a combination
of features: by default sa has blank password. by default the virtual user account under which xp_cmdshell is executed has
too much rights. by default the SQL admin GUI program remembers the admin password.
All this makes MS SQL the most common place
for attacks.
Slashdot Mirror
Ask any serious scientist to explain some facts like mind reading, alien abduction or other of this kind. Most likely he will refuse to give any scientific explaination. Telling that all those facts are false could not be called scientific... however it could be true. Nevertheless, there are topics that are closed for any serious discussion. That's right, 90% of them is nonsence... But 80% of everything is nonsence. Those topics are closed not because they are 'unscientific' themselves, but because of the tradition. And because too many idiots are talking stuff about those topics.
One day the Paris Academy told the world that rocks can not fall from the sky, because there are no rocks in the sky. How many rocks in the sky do we have today ?
in spam report. The same spam keeps coming
again and again.
Well, even if they wanted... They'd have to
hire at least the whole population of China.
Or invent a REAL artificial intelligence, which
itself has more value than all our Yahoo mails.
Now we have robots to think for us. Great. All we have to do is to have some beer and relax... no, wait. We need machines that will take beer and relax for us.
Do you realize that teenagers has less stable psychic than older people ? Do you know that teenagers has a strong tendency for commiting suicide ?
See here for list of articles
What if one of those girls will kill herself, impressed and frustrated by that 1000000000$ fee ?
RIAA will not be responsible for murder.
Just look around - more and more things
are above normal person's ability to "tinker"
or repair it. There was RS-232. It was easy
and convenient. Everyone could make an add-on
for the PC to do some task, using RS-232.
Search the net - there are hundreds of home
built devices that use this simple interface.
Now we have USB. Faster, more features. But it
is very hard to implement. Was it really
necessary to do it in such complicated way ?
I don't think so. I think there was an intention
to make the interface that only large companies
would be able to use.
Remember the story of PC. IBM made a very simple
device, everybody could do the same. That device
has been built using very strict and open standards.
For example, there was a completely documented
hardware CGA/EGA interface. Now we have dozens
of different SVGAs and no standard at all.
We should rely on vendor's device drivers.
Linux suffered from such politics a lot.
There was a word 'engineer' - someone who can
invent or construct different things -
machines, cars, devices, tools. The key point is that they are different things. Nowaday's 'engineers'
can built something very special - typically one
part of a machine. One particular kind of software.
When there is not exist one human or small group
of people who can observe and discuss the whole
information in some area, the progress in that
area stops. The classic idea of invention came to its end now. Corporation can not invent anything, but only human brain can.
OK, let's read : ...Agreed...
"Public entities should procure the software that best meets their needs and should avoid any categorical preferences"
"for open source software, commercial software, free software, or other software development models.
Now, what do this mean ? It means that
the MS Internet Explorer (free),MS Windows NT(commercial), MS Windows CE (commercial, open source) are made under different development models.
Now let's ask authors : what is the development model ? Isn't it something about development ?
Their statement means that if one writes a program
as a commercial software and then decides to make it free, without changing even a single line of code, it will suddenly become a program, made under the different development model !
Diagnose : 1) they do not know what they are writing about.
2) it is not the "development model" that matters.
Yea! Umm! Zhkxw! Fwpfpfuuu!
We have already mangled the natural language and
created a bunch of programming languages.
Now this new effort requires standardization.
Just imagine the video tape learning new voice features of Windows 2XXX !
Open file - Off!
Close file - Buff!
Save file - Grm!Grm!
Imagine teachers telling students how to
properly pronounce the "Set preferences" (PfGfGrrf!)
Imagine "holy wars" between adherents of
MicroQuack(tm) and FreeGrunt(GPL).
That's our future.
PS. Don't forget international sighs !
Originally, the Turing test was just as you proposed. However, there is another problem : some testers will mistakenly decide that humans are computers. This means there should be some statistics gathered. So the criteria should be something like this - the probability of recognizing computer as human must be the same as the probability of recognizing human as human. However, this form of the test will lead to the following paradox : testers, informed about the possibility of high artificial IQ will eventually tend to make more mistakes when talking to humans. On the other hand, if all testers will be unavare of existence of the machine IQ, they will treat every correspondent as human.
If they are trying to patent the METHOD of
generation of sequences of notes, everything is
OK. I'm not reproducing their method dialing a number.
If they are claiming copyright for the actual sequences,
they have to register them all, either in separate statements, or all together,
on a large piece of paper. I think it is illegal to claim copyright on something that is not published somehow (correct me if I am wrong).
So, they must at least place the whole list at their site. 10^11 bytes, you say ?
He observed a second airplane immediately swing behind the first in a follow like manner and swoop down on the Pentagon only to pull up at the last second, out of the smoke cloud, and fly away
This is very important. Pictures, taken at NYC also clearly shows the presence of ANOTHER SMALL PLANE of the same type as described above.
Please note, that the area in NYC (and, I believe, also over Washington is closed for flights.) Coincidence ???
See photos here:
http://www.cyberus.ca/~stany/
All those registrars are english-speaking.
If you want offensive names, you should register english words in non-english speaking countries and vise versa.
Example - www.zaebali.com - the same word in russian.
BTW. there are also f-u-c-k.com, oFoUoCoKo.com, fukck.com and variants. There is always a way around.
The only thing I can add :
Do not name anything you do 'PS 2' Failure guaranteed.
But the latest update at the disk, one that will be restored when you 'pull out the cord', will be 2 phases old. A bit more than in journalling systems.
Some years ago I tried to participate in several open-source projects. What really surprised me is that nobody seemed to notice my and other's bug reports. I can not insist on inplementing fixes at once, but hey, guys, say something ! Later I wrote a letter to Raymond, after reading his 'Cathedral and Bazaar' pointing to the problem. He answered that there is no such problem. I am using a lot of free software, but the best free programs were made by individuals. The Raymond's famous article discusses a kind of new relationships between people, the whole new culture. As management is 80% psychology and psychology is 80% based on culture, it means that new culture needs new management. They are talking about 'gift culture'. But nations with this kind of culture (Polynesia, Russia) somehow managed to achieve some, maybe humble, results. It's a topic to study.
If I am saying that the job should be done by those people who can do it better, does this make me an anarchist ?
Do problems that some anarchists have had in the past authomatically apply to all anarchists of the present and future ? Is studying history incompatible with logic ?
if anybody needs a lesson in the way the real world works, it's the geeks
I do not care about so-called 'real world'. It is stupid, cruel and illogical. Geeks are clever, nice and logical. If anybody needs a lesson, it's real world. If laws are wrong, they should be changed. Laws, not people should be changed. The best laws can be written by geeks, not lawyers. Like best programs are written by programmers, not lusers. Dixi.
There are following outsourcing myths:
Outsourcing can help finish the project faster In fact yes and no. Actually any contract work is done faster than at-home development. This happens because contractor is interested in finishing his work in time and is more resistant to the pressure from future users or resellers of the product. One programming law says that the probability of corrections to the initial design is proportional to the time of development. Home developes more likely will incorporate changes and shift timeline, contractor will insist in next release of the product, which is better. On the other hand, code is code and it is impossible to write it faster.
Outsourcing will result in a bad product because they do not know our business realities Wrong. Taking average business person and average programmer, tell me - who is smarter ? Also if a foreign company takes the project, it is high chance that it is not their first one.
Outsourcing will result in bad documentation Maybe. It depends on you. Write it in a contract, and assign someone to check the result. Homegrown teams usually make no documentation at all.
Outsourcing will result in bad support. Can be so. Add training your personnel to the contract.
The financial part of the problem look like this: consultants who are working on your site costs the same, or even more than regular domestic contractors. Developers abroad costs much less.
The financial success of your enterprise depends on how the work can be distributed between these groups.
1. Theorem. For any given number of computers, placed in any organisation, there is always at least one rational reason for buying more. The same thing happens with IT workers. They are providing job for each other.
2. Nobody knows and there are no means to determine, how many IT workers (or any kind of other people or things) counry actually needs.
3. Many US companies attracting foreign workers suffers from overqualification. When they needs regular coder, they find out that they can hire analyst for the same money. But good analyst can be bad coder.
4. It is impossible to grow programmers in few months, but it is possible to print more dollars, and then force others to use it with help of army, navy and politics.
5. We in USSR had similar experience. We has had one of the best intelligence services in the world. So some stupid guys in government decided that it is easier to steal designs of electronic chips than to spend money on inventing them. They stole thousands of designs. But the whole industry could not evolve beyond 80286.
And vice versa, how will some Chinese person write, for example, umlauted characters (å, ö, ä, ë and so on)
YOU see umlauted characters here, but I see normal capital cyrillic letters. This problem comes out of the default code page used. Currently it is necessary to place
meta content="text/html; charset=" http-equiv="Content-Type"
and
meta content="" http-equiv="Content-Language"
only into pages in languages, other than English. The question is - If I have a web page in Russian, and I want to provide a link to a page in Sweden, what language should I declare for my page ? AFAIK there are no means in HTML 4.0 (except using UNICODE) to make multilanguage contents on one page (correct me if I'm wrong). At least all or most of original english-language pages with default character set should be updated. So the real problem is not how one will type the link, but in just seeing it more or less correctly.
No need to ' query every single disk-id '. Patch software to use FreeDB as primary source, CDDB as secondary and to COPY contents found in CDDB into FreeDB.
Then just sit down and listen.
I'm sorry. I'm practical :
...
17: Element / Red Meat & Beauty Queens E.P.
Just went to FreeDB and entered 'Queen' as request. Here's what I got
1: Deacon Blue / Queen of The New Year (Single)
2: Queensrÿche / Greatest Hits
3: Queens of the Stone Age / Rated R
4: Queens of the Stone Age / Rated R
5: Queensryche / Rage For Order
23: Freddie Mercury / Queen
25: The Royal Philarmonic Orchestra / Queen's Rhapsody
This means that they have bad db format. Or wrong query format. Why didn't they just copy CDDB's format ?
There are so much effort in stopping adults from looking at pictures of naked teens and to stop teens from looking at pictures of naked adults.
I think that it is something wrong with logic in this world.
Monopolies are just placing things upside down. Let's consider your example :
"Photocopiers encourage copying of books (Really, people do this... don't know why, it costs them more.)" I am in need of a book... last printed in 1895. No copyright can be applied. But I still need it. I'd pay money for even the possibility of copying it. The similar situation is everywhere : if someone can make money from copying of something then it will be copied by the owner of rights. Alternatively, if it is impossible to make money by mass copying of the thing, there is high possibility that this thing can be copied for free. Free software does not change this schema. It only introduces programs with starting price of 0.
"Audio tapes encourage audio piracy"
Not exactly so. If I paid for the right to listen for some music, why should I pay for the right to listen to it using another media (but same ears)? If the legislative says that copying CD to tape for personal use is illegal, then it should say that any interpretation of music is illegal. If someone is playing 'Yesterday' using his own guitar, he must pay for this right. And in orchestra, every musician must pay ! No exceptions! Everyone is equal before the law.
But monopolies use law only where it makes profit for them. Law == Monopoly. Law is unfair.
"I like Sony Hardware... but this kind of makes them have a bad light."
Some words on SONY. There are two major AV giants in the market - SONY and Panasonic. They say, in USA the "common subconscious" about them is Sony is cool, hi-end; Panasonic is average, low-end. However, in Russia it is quite the contrary. Panasonic sounds good and Sony sounds not so good. Actually they are the same. It is people's minds perverted.
"... Nobody in 19th century would beleive that it is possible to create the multinational company and earn millions by selling lemonade"
OK, I've already done this. Right yesterday I wondered why the damn S**Y company still exists. Just one example - their Digital8 technology. Announced as a cheap alternative to MiniDV, but at SONY's pricing it is exactly at the same rate with other's MiniDVs.
Bad TVs, average audio, everything is overpriced, a lot of 'proprietary formats' - minidisk,memorystick, etc.
Reminds some another company, doesn't it ?
Agreed. The blank password itself is not a security hole. But there is a combination of features: by default sa has blank password. by default the virtual user account under which xp_cmdshell is executed has too much rights. by default the SQL admin GUI program remembers the admin password.
All this makes MS SQL the most common place for attacks.