I think the problem people have is that if you create an intelligent machine, you don't have to write software that writes software. The machine will LEARN to write software.
And how many people do you know who can learn to write software? I look forward to my super-intelligent computer staring at itself for several hours, confusing the power switch and the floppy disk eject, and killing itself.
This also prevented the "mob rule" problems inherent in true democratic governments
The electoral college does nothing to prevent mob rule. The principle of a democracy is that the majority opinion is the one that is enacted. If you think this is mob rule, what's the alternative?
To guard against 'mob rule', if by mob rule you mean the majority maltreating the minority, you have a constitution which sets out basic rights which apply to anyone, and which in theory are not affected by the democratically-elected government.
This is where Natapoff is completely wrong: the purpose of a democratic electoral system is to allow the expression of the will of the largest part of the population. This is why a system of preference voting is better than a first-past-the-post election, because the choice is likely to be closer to what more people want. It's hard to see how an electoral college could deal with preference voting.
Despite what Natapoff thinks, the value of an election is nothing to do with allowing an individual elector to change the result: if we wanted to do that, the ideal electoral system for Natapoff would be if we XOR-ed all the votes together. That way every decision who to vote for would change the outcome. This, of course, would not be an expression of anyone's will, but for Nat that's unimportant.
It's also important to remember it's a scientific truth that there's no perfect system of voting. (Sorry no cite for this.)
And of course, giraffes didn't start with necks like they do now; it was a process of gradual increase in height coupled at various points with the different adaptations that make life with that long a neck bearable.
Re:Trial by money as bad as patent idiocy
on
Patent Warfare
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· Score: 1
The only way out of this is to adopt the English system whereby the loser in a civil suit has to pay both his own and the other sides costs.
This system doesn't work either (speaking as a Ukanian citizen), because the cost of bringing a case to trial is often prohibitive even if you feel you will win. It's all very well being awarded your costs at the end of a trial, but if it costs hundreds of thousands of pounds before the case even gets to a full court hearing, you're not even going to get to court unless you're rich.
Many people have relied on the protection of this system, especially by bringing libel actions against people telling unwelcome truths. Individuals such as the late fraudster Robert Maxwell, and noted conspiracy theorist, liar, safe-cracker, racist and all-round bad employer Mohammed Al-Fayed, have used such writs to attack their critics. All but the surest and richest newspapers back down when faced with the possibility of millions of pounds costs and a similar amount of damages.
If judges showed more discretion in the allocation of costs here, it might make some difference by discouraging trivial lawsuits where corporations spend millions and little damage is done. Removing the abused laws entirely is attractive but I doubt this is realistic nor entirely desireable, as most of them serve legitimate purposes as well as illegitimate ones.
What is needed is to make justice as swift and as efficient as possible, so people cannot drag out pre-trial proceedings for years and bankrupt their enemies before the case is ever heard. Although how to do that without shooting all the lawyers is a difficult question. And I'm not sure we have enough bullets.
Hasn't anyone patented cookies? Forcing anyone wanting to dump a cookie on my machine to consider if it was worth a $30,000 licence fee might lead to them being a little more selectively used.
The important part is that you tell them you have violated it. If they fail to respond to this within a reasonable period of time (say 6 months to a year), it will weaken their case if they eventually do decide to sue you, and would make it more difficult to sue anyone else.
there is a computation that can cause a particular state to be selected with near 100% probability
Does this mean that the result of a quantum computer's calculation will never be 100% definitely the correct answer? With conventional electronic computers, we assume that (for simple calculations at least) debugging can be performed which will result in a program which has effectively a 100% probability of getting the right answer - if we can calculate 100+200 and 300+400 in our C program we assume we can find 200+300.
But if there's some factor involved in the function of quantum computing that means we may obtain different results for 200+300, even if the probability of getting 500 is 99%, then such computers would surely have limited usefulness.
Is this an inherent limitation, or can it be solved by engineering?
Under -very- rare curcumstances it is possible to be forced to reveal ones vote.
Yet another instance of how you weak and feeble Americans lag behind British efficiency. All British ballot papers are numbered and stored. These numbers are recorded against the voters' names. Therefore it is easy to tell exactly who voted for whom.
This system is, I believe, occasionally used in combatting electoral fraud. However, it does fairly blatantly go against the notion of secret ballots, even if the papers are kept locked up and no one without legitimate interest (e.g. Special Branch police officers) has access.
Who in their right mind would buy a zip drive today?
It makes sense if you've got a console with no hard disk. Of course, you could develop a hard disk add-on, but, uh, I can't think of any reason whatsoever, sorry....
There's a few FPSs have cheats for edge-only graphics ideal for a vector display. I think Turok on the N64 did this, but I don't know any others. It shouldn't be too hard to sort anyway.
If you have taken a full digital logic course in college (1 semester), and take a VHDL course, you can design a CPU.
It amuses me that almost every introductory book on hardware design with Verilog or VHDL uses designing a CPU as an example/exercise. I've one book (Digital Design with Verilog HDL, by Sternheim, Singh, Trivedi) which actually starts with a CPU as its first project, and then advances to a UART serial controller and a floppy disc controller.
The moral is that CPUs running microcode are actually one of the easiest things to design. Most of the circuitry of a modern CPU is taken up with cache, look-up tables and multipliers; the actual control logic to decode microcode instructions is dead simple.
Like John Q. Public is gonna buy this thing, build/buy the Russian equivalent of a Saturn V rocket, build/rent the associated launch pad and facilities, just to launch this piece of DOGSHIT.
All you need is a big catapult. Or one of those ramps like in 'When Worlds Collide'. No?
This is ridiculous. Software companies will do anything to avoid releasing products that actually work.
If I buy a piece of software, I might accept the odd bug, especially if bug lists are available, but there's too much shoddy software that appears to have had about 3 minutes testing by a blind guy with no keyboard.
The German attempt to invade Britain, Operation Sealion, was planned for 1940. However, their air forces were defeated in the Battle Of Britain in summer 1940, and without air supremacy they could not invade. All plans were abandoned by the start of 1940, and by summer 41 the Germans were making overtures for peace.
The USA entered the war in Dec 1941.
The British defeated the Germans in Africa in 1942, and the USSR stopped the German push eastwards in the winter of 1942-3. All this was accompanied with minimal US help.
It's true that the USA played a major role in Western Europe, in 1943-45, but by that time Britain was in no danger, and the Soviets were fighting back. So, while the US contribution was appreciated, it was only part of a much larger effort.
What worries me about missile defence systems is that if your neighbour gets one, all the missiles aimed at them are just going to get blown up as they fly over you, and even if they don't detonate, you're still gonna get covered in plutonium. Therefore, it's in everybody's interests to stop their neighbours getting these systems.
If you live about 30 miles outside New York or Washington, you should be very afraid no matter what system America gets. But then you probably deserve it, suburban scum.
He was talking about the asteroid defence system, not Star Wars (he was responding to the question, not to Browne's answer). Since the whole world has an interest in such a system, they should all contribute.
Don't you think that many people have a legitimate interest in knowing if the software they're about to spend large amounts of money on can be hacked in 30 seconds by a band of script kiddies? Or should they just trust the makers to tell about security flaws in their products?
Cos this isn't going to stop hackers, any more than the copyright laws stop file sharing. It's just going to be an embarrassing waste of time and money.
Because we have been given life for a purpose, and it's not our place to decide when to end it.
Great argument. Sadly you have no proof, being motivated only by religious texts which are open to many and varied interpretations. Doesn't free will enter into it somewhere?
There is no real argument against suicide. You can tell people life isn't all bad, that it's a beautiful world, etc, but you cannot use logic in these situations: people seldom follow logic at the best of times, and in the grips of despair and/or mental illness, scarcely ever.
Also there are many cases in our society where suicide or near-suicide are held to be virtuous. What about the soldier who throws himself on top of a grenade, or the martyr who goes to his/her death rather than utter a meaningless repudiation of his/her faith? Other religions, notably Islam, have even stronger notions of virtuous death, leading to suicide bombers and jihads.
Not to mention the central place of suicide in literature: Romeo And Juliet, Tristan And Isolde, The Sorrows Of Young Werther, much of the Romantic tradition. I suppose you would like to ban any presentation of suicide as a glamorous or romantic thing to do.
Of course, we should stop people committing suicide whereever possible, but don't tell me suicide is wrong based on the convictions of a religion based on someone who voluntarily died on a cross.
There are also legitimate reasons for information on suicide to be available, e.g. to help us spot people likely to commit suicide and remove items they could use.
On the other hand, and I'm not defending the old system, they're worse off since 1990 (life expectancy down 10 years, vastly increased crime, no rise in the standard of living, etc.) I guess the moral is, even a 3rd world country can get a space program if it wants it enough.
Yes! What we need is a space hotel! Zero-G honeymoon suite and all. Not too sure about the swimming pool though.
Seriously, how much longer before this is a commercial proposition? It might take around $500 million dollars, maybe a bit more (knowing space contractors), but how many people would be prepared to pay $1m for a week or two? I mean, if that many people want to go in an aging Soviet death-trap, who wouldn't want a sleek, marble-lined Hilton in orbit?
On the other hand, the cost of space travel isn't falling that fast, and most millionaires seem to be either reclusive Howard Hughes types, or just incredibly boring ("Space? I'd rather go to Norway.") So I guess I'll just go to Switzerland for my holidays (no atmosphere).
You are right, it was not "electronic-mail" but that is not the point. When two words are combined like that, a hyphen must be inserted, thus the term "e-mail".
Sorry, Mr Webster, but you don't get to write the rules. There is no 'must' in language, only custom.
If we followed the nearest equivalents, atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb, we would write E-mail like A-bomb. Or T-shirt, which isn't an abbreviation, and must be written with a capital, because they don't look like a lower-case 't'.
The fact is, there is no precedent for 'e-mail' or 'email'. So just do what the hell you like.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly typical moderation, I'd say.
And how many people do you know who can learn to write software? I look forward to my super-intelligent computer staring at itself for several hours, confusing the power switch and the floppy disk eject, and killing itself.
The electoral college does nothing to prevent mob rule. The principle of a democracy is that the majority opinion is the one that is enacted. If you think this is mob rule, what's the alternative?
To guard against 'mob rule', if by mob rule you mean the majority maltreating the minority, you have a constitution which sets out basic rights which apply to anyone, and which in theory are not affected by the democratically-elected government.
This is where Natapoff is completely wrong: the purpose of a democratic electoral system is to allow the expression of the will of the largest part of the population. This is why a system of preference voting is better than a first-past-the-post election, because the choice is likely to be closer to what more people want. It's hard to see how an electoral college could deal with preference voting.
Despite what Natapoff thinks, the value of an election is nothing to do with allowing an individual elector to change the result: if we wanted to do that, the ideal electoral system for Natapoff would be if we XOR-ed all the votes together. That way every decision who to vote for would change the outcome. This, of course, would not be an expression of anyone's will, but for Nat that's unimportant.
It's also important to remember it's a scientific truth that there's no perfect system of voting. (Sorry no cite for this.)
And of course, giraffes didn't start with necks like they do now; it was a process of gradual increase in height coupled at various points with the different adaptations that make life with that long a neck bearable.
This system doesn't work either (speaking as a Ukanian citizen), because the cost of bringing a case to trial is often prohibitive even if you feel you will win. It's all very well being awarded your costs at the end of a trial, but if it costs hundreds of thousands of pounds before the case even gets to a full court hearing, you're not even going to get to court unless you're rich.
Many people have relied on the protection of this system, especially by bringing libel actions against people telling unwelcome truths. Individuals such as the late fraudster Robert Maxwell, and noted conspiracy theorist, liar, safe-cracker, racist and all-round bad employer Mohammed Al-Fayed, have used such writs to attack their critics. All but the surest and richest newspapers back down when faced with the possibility of millions of pounds costs and a similar amount of damages.
If judges showed more discretion in the allocation of costs here, it might make some difference by discouraging trivial lawsuits where corporations spend millions and little damage is done. Removing the abused laws entirely is attractive but I doubt this is realistic nor entirely desireable, as most of them serve legitimate purposes as well as illegitimate ones.
What is needed is to make justice as swift and as efficient as possible, so people cannot drag out pre-trial proceedings for years and bankrupt their enemies before the case is ever heard. Although how to do that without shooting all the lawyers is a difficult question. And I'm not sure we have enough bullets.
Hasn't anyone patented cookies? Forcing anyone wanting to dump a cookie on my machine to consider if it was worth a $30,000 licence fee might lead to them being a little more selectively used.
The important part is that you tell them you have violated it. If they fail to respond to this within a reasonable period of time (say 6 months to a year), it will weaken their case if they eventually do decide to sue you, and would make it more difficult to sue anyone else.
Does this mean that the result of a quantum computer's calculation will never be 100% definitely the correct answer? With conventional electronic computers, we assume that (for simple calculations at least) debugging can be performed which will result in a program which has effectively a 100% probability of getting the right answer - if we can calculate 100+200 and 300+400 in our C program we assume we can find 200+300.
But if there's some factor involved in the function of quantum computing that means we may obtain different results for 200+300, even if the probability of getting 500 is 99%, then such computers would surely have limited usefulness.
Is this an inherent limitation, or can it be solved by engineering?
Yet another instance of how you weak and feeble Americans lag behind British efficiency. All British ballot papers are numbered and stored. These numbers are recorded against the voters' names. Therefore it is easy to tell exactly who voted for whom.
This system is, I believe, occasionally used in combatting electoral fraud. However, it does fairly blatantly go against the notion of secret ballots, even if the papers are kept locked up and no one without legitimate interest (e.g. Special Branch police officers) has access.
It makes sense if you've got a console with no hard disk. Of course, you could develop a hard disk add-on, but, uh, I can't think of any reason whatsoever, sorry....
There's a few FPSs have cheats for edge-only graphics ideal for a vector display. I think Turok on the N64 did this, but I don't know any others. It shouldn't be too hard to sort anyway.
It amuses me that almost every introductory book on hardware design with Verilog or VHDL uses designing a CPU as an example/exercise. I've one book (Digital Design with Verilog HDL, by Sternheim, Singh, Trivedi) which actually starts with a CPU as its first project, and then advances to a UART serial controller and a floppy disc controller.
The moral is that CPUs running microcode are actually one of the easiest things to design. Most of the circuitry of a modern CPU is taken up with cache, look-up tables and multipliers; the actual control logic to decode microcode instructions is dead simple.
All you need is a big catapult. Or one of those ramps like in 'When Worlds Collide'. No?
If I buy a piece of software, I might accept the odd bug, especially if bug lists are available, but there's too much shoddy software that appears to have had about 3 minutes testing by a blind guy with no keyboard.
Uh, that should read 'All plans were abandoned by the start of 1941.' So that's what Preview button's for.
The USA entered the war in Dec 1941.
The British defeated the Germans in Africa in 1942, and the USSR stopped the German push eastwards in the winter of 1942-3. All this was accompanied with minimal US help.
It's true that the USA played a major role in Western Europe, in 1943-45, but by that time Britain was in no danger, and the Soviets were fighting back. So, while the US contribution was appreciated, it was only part of a much larger effort.
If you live about 30 miles outside New York or Washington, you should be very afraid no matter what system America gets. But then you probably deserve it, suburban scum.
He was talking about the asteroid defence system, not Star Wars (he was responding to the question, not to Browne's answer). Since the whole world has an interest in such a system, they should all contribute.
Cos this isn't going to stop hackers, any more than the copyright laws stop file sharing. It's just going to be an embarrassing waste of time and money.
You think they'll ban debuggers? They can be used for so many nefarious purposes. Of course, some people at my work never use them.
This is all approaching the day when you'll need a government license to program a computer.
Great argument. Sadly you have no proof, being motivated only by religious texts which are open to many and varied interpretations. Doesn't free will enter into it somewhere?
There is no real argument against suicide. You can tell people life isn't all bad, that it's a beautiful world, etc, but you cannot use logic in these situations: people seldom follow logic at the best of times, and in the grips of despair and/or mental illness, scarcely ever.
Also there are many cases in our society where suicide or near-suicide are held to be virtuous. What about the soldier who throws himself on top of a grenade, or the martyr who goes to his/her death rather than utter a meaningless repudiation of his/her faith? Other religions, notably Islam, have even stronger notions of virtuous death, leading to suicide bombers and jihads.
Not to mention the central place of suicide in literature: Romeo And Juliet, Tristan And Isolde, The Sorrows Of Young Werther, much of the Romantic tradition. I suppose you would like to ban any presentation of suicide as a glamorous or romantic thing to do.
Of course, we should stop people committing suicide whereever possible, but don't tell me suicide is wrong based on the convictions of a religion based on someone who voluntarily died on a cross.
There are also legitimate reasons for information on suicide to be available, e.g. to help us spot people likely to commit suicide and remove items they could use.
Only if you count from 2 AD.
On the other hand, and I'm not defending the old system, they're worse off since 1990 (life expectancy down 10 years, vastly increased crime, no rise in the standard of living, etc.) I guess the moral is, even a 3rd world country can get a space program if it wants it enough.
Yes! What we need is a space hotel! Zero-G honeymoon suite and all. Not too sure about the swimming pool though.
Seriously, how much longer before this is a commercial proposition? It might take around $500 million dollars, maybe a bit more (knowing space contractors), but how many people would be prepared to pay $1m for a week or two? I mean, if that many people want to go in an aging Soviet death-trap, who wouldn't want a sleek, marble-lined Hilton in orbit?
On the other hand, the cost of space travel isn't falling that fast, and most millionaires seem to be either reclusive Howard Hughes types, or just incredibly boring ("Space? I'd rather go to Norway.") So I guess I'll just go to Switzerland for my holidays (no atmosphere).
Sorry, Mr Webster, but you don't get to write the rules. There is no 'must' in language, only custom.
If we followed the nearest equivalents, atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb, we would write E-mail like A-bomb. Or T-shirt, which isn't an abbreviation, and must be written with a capital, because they don't look like a lower-case 't'.
The fact is, there is no precedent for 'e-mail' or 'email'. So just do what the hell you like.