And I'd really rather you hadn't given them my receipt, if I was among the customers. Just because you meant well doesn't mean you did the right thing. (On the flip side, our legal system is rather screwed up, and it seems entirely possible you'll get hit with far more than you deserve. Well intentioned minor problems should get minor punishments, and you certainly don't deserve to face the potential for complete financial ruin that any lawsuit carries these days.)
You've got multiple different trusts to society you need to keep in mind -- both your customer's privacy and your nation's security are part of that. Asking the cops for a warrant, or at least asking them which names they were looking for, would have been entirely reasonable. Open-ended fishing expeditions are just bad all around.
Because it is unfortunately rather difficult for the government to fire an employee who simply isn't doing a good job, if there isn't a nice, objective standard by which they're doing poorly. They want some way to make sure the examiners are being productive.
Of course there are better ways than what they're currently doing. I'm not trying to defend the current practice, I'm just saying it's an unsurprising result of a government bureaucracy.
It's not just at a national level, and it's not just the current administration. Much as I dislike them, I don't think the current administration is all that much worse than previous ones in this regard, and a lot of the fault rests with Congress, not the Executive branch.
I recently served on a grand jury handling general local level stuff. A typical indictment for ID theft would include fraud, atm card fraud (a special law! I'm sure making it super-extra-illegal helped), identity theft (yep, specifically illegal, even though it's hard to see what makes it ID theft instead of just, well, fraud), and usually a couple others.
My usual reaction to identity theft laws is "Aren't existing fraud laws sufficient?"
At least at first glance, however, this bill seems to be doing more, and doing it in a useful manner -- not solely a "well, let's make it more illegal!" type of bill.
I have no idea how the NYT normally operates, but I imagine it would be standard practice for them to simply declare the amount an outstanding debt and refuse to accept ads from MoveOn until it was payed. And if I were MoveOn, I don't think I'd want to lose the ability to run ads in the NYT over it.
In fact, Fuck, as in "Fuck you," isn't even properly a verb: English sentences without overt grammatical subjects. To summarize: "Fuck you or I'll take away your teddy bear" is not grammatically correct; neither is "Describe and fuck communism."
XKCD put it quite eloquently. These are not theories that any amount of rational evidence or logic will refute.
Re:Game complexity
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This argument is intuitively appealing, and imho it has a lot to say for it. However, it has one major shortcoming:
Define the game of 3-go to be playing 3 consecutive games of go; the winner of the 3-go match is the winner of the majority of the go games. If player A is 1 level better than player B at go, they will be more than one level better at 3-go, since their winning probability is up to 74% instead of 67%. So, by this definition 3-go is noticeably more complex than go. However, I can think of no meaningful way in which this is actually true.
Also, if you count steps from a human player who knows the rules and has played a couple games to a human expert, you get 40-50 ranks. But that human player is easily 30 ranks about the true "random but no suicides" computer player. It doesn't take much work to build a computer program 20 ranks stronger than the random player, but that is still a truly *awful* program.
In the early days of go programming, a very simple algorithm was defined. This is from memory, so it's probably wrong, but it went something like this. If you can capture an opponent's stone, capture a group chosen at random from the largest capturable groups. Failing this, if you have a group in atari that you can rescue from atari, rescue the largest such group. Failing this, if an opponent has a group with less than 4 liberties, play one of its liberties. Failing this, play a random legal move. This turned out to be remarkably potent against early programs, and will absolutely destroy a random player -- yet still lose to even the weakest of human players.
You missed a whole bunch of details that make the difference between fantasy and something worth pursuing in the near future. Perhaps the most important is that Lunar regolith is hard-packed and difficult to drill into, and also perhaps the most abrasive naturally occurring substance found. It's been pulverized to fine particles by repeated micrometeor strikes, packed firm by shock waves from strikes nearby, and had no erosion to smooth the edges. Oh, it's also statically charged. Have fun maintaining your machinery.
From its content alone, your post is completely indistinguishable from any other post by someone who claims to know how copyright works in the US. It should be obvious that just because you know you're right, that doesn't mean the rest of us can tell that just because you sound certain about it. So, please post a link to a reputable reference, rather than just adding another post going back and forth on the issue and clouding up the discussion.
(FWIW, I think you're right about this. But it would add a lot more to the discussion if you could actually include a reference.)
I think that the woman is probably liable (not guilty, it's a civil proceeding not a criminal one), and should be required to pay an appropriate penalty. However, the important thing to me about this case is that $220k is *not* an appropriate penalty. It's too high by an order of magnitude or two. In some of the cases the RIAA pursues, they clearly pursue the wrong defendant well past the point where it is clear that the defendant is not liable.
My objections to the RIAA are to their tactics, which are clearly intended to intimidate and extort, and are in many cases outright illegal. I also think that the punishment should fit the crime -- thousands per shared song does not seem to be connected to any real world concept of how much she's hurt anyone. A few tens of dollars in lost sales per song, perhaps multiplied by some amount as penalty (the penalty for getting caught doing the wrong thing should be more than it would have taken to do the right thing in the first place) would be reasonable -- and wind up at perhaps $100 per song, not $9000.
Of course, I also object for a variety of reasons to the DRM and other anti-customer tactics taken by these groups, but that's a different discussion.
But if 100Mbit class connection were cheap and you had one anyway (hey, it didn't cost much extra so why not), you might decide that you *did* care about offsite backups. If offsite is as painless as onsite, why not? It's like always-on connectivity was back in the era of dialup -- sure, no one needs it, but once you have it it changes the way you use the internet.
And I can think of plenty of things I'd like to do where higher bandwidth would be nice. Download Hi-def videos instead of renting them from the store (ignoring the difficulties with drm and what not for a minute). Better quality video on youtube. Something better than 64kbps for web radio broadcasts. Not just offsite backups, but offsite network-accessible home directories -- why can't I access my desktop the way I'm used to it on any computer I sit down at?
There's plenty of things to do with cheap fast bandwidth, and as it becomes available we'll discover what they are. It's a shame I can't buy a decent speed connection yet.
I didn't post to that, I merely applied a mod point (though somewhat late, I still felt it was worth it). I lost all mod and metamod priveleges without explanation for ~2 years (memory is vague on the exact period). They both have returned, however, and I now get mod points perhaps once a month.
Now you've simply pushed the problem a level higher, into the assembler / linker. Yes, it helps, but there are other techniques as well.
The most elegant technique I've seen goes like this. Maintain trusted dead-simple non-optimizing compiler A (possibly on a different machine). You also have untrusted compiler B, and it's alleged source SB. Compile SB with B, resulting in B. Compile SB with A, resulting in B'. These binaries will be different, but should be functionally equivalent -- B' is probably larger and slower, thanks to having used non-optimizing compiler A to make it. Now, use B' to compile SB, resulting in B''. Since B' and B should produce equivalent output, B and B'' should be bitwise identical. If they're not, you have a problem.
At this point, you simply (heh) have to trust that your OS isn't playing games like showing you different binaries than its running and such. Again, there are similar techniques to deal with this, but the problem can't really be removed without establishing a trusted chain all the way back to the chip fab, through the assembler, linker, compiler, and OS. It's a tough problem.
Of course, this basic problem was described quite eloquently by Ken Thompson. He went after the compiler, but the problem of proving that the binary you have matches the source you have is a tricky one no matter what.
There actually are some very clever solutions to try to catch cheating compilers like this, but none of them are trivial. It's a cat and mouse game, and there are actually proofs that winning either side completely is impossible.
That waste heat from the edge servers is heating homes and thus is an equivalent savings on the energy needed to heat homes.
No, it's not equivalent. It saves *some* (in the winter, not in the summer obviously), but it's most definitely *not* equivalent. A lot of people use gas heat, which is cheaper. Those that use electric heat are almost exclusively using heat pumps -- basically an air conditioner with the hot coils on the inside. Heat pumps expend electricity to *move* heat from outdoors to indoors. Typical coefficient of performance is in the range of 3-4. That means that every watt of electricity used, the heat pump puts 3.5W of heat into your home (the extra 2.5 coming from outside). As a result, running your heat pump is far more efficient than running your server.
(Of course, heat pumps get less efficient as it gets colder outside, just like air conditioners get less efficient as it gets hotter outside. In sufficiently cold climates their coefficient of performance approaches 1, but that doens't reallistically happen until below 0F or so.)
Some of us would be quite happy with "Here's the linux binary; we won't help you with it, but we'll maintain a user support forum and pay attention to bug reports."
Or, "Here's the Windows binary and source code; that should get you started. We won't help you with the Linux port, but we promise not to actively hinder it with malicious firmware updates." After all, for a company making a hardware device, the profit center is the device, not the computer-side software. Why not make it open?
I'd agree in principle, but there are a lot of external costs that need to be factored in. Proper waste disposal for nuclear, waste disposal (CO2 and otherwise) for fossil fuels (including global warming impact etc), and environmental impacts from damning rivers and putting wind mills in flight paths. Less government meddling would be good, but forcing the market to properly account for all costs is good too ("internalize the externalities" to use the econ phrase). In the mean time, though, I'll take improvement where I can -- and I think nuclear is better than a foreign oil addiction.
It's not instead of. It's in addition to. "Pave Arizona with solar cells" vs "Build new nuclear plants" is a false dichotomy. All of these things are better than oil, especially given the foreign dependencies that entails. So we do several of them in parallel, while we figure out what the best answer is. My hunch is that we will continue to generate electricity from many sources for a long, long time to come. Just as the best approach to renewable energy is not solar, or wind, or hydro, or biofuels, but probably a mix of all of these, the best answer to reducing fossil fuel usage probably includes a mix of alternatives.
I'm not saying I think it will be a money maker. I'm saying two basic things: First, I think the budget needs to be comparable to the prize. $20M to $50M, not hundreds. Unless you happen to find an investor with *lots* of money to throw at it, but I think that gets a lot harder for a $300M budget than it was for SpaceShipOne's $30M. Second, if you're *not* spending hundreds of millions, you'd be a fool to count on it working on the first try (even if you are, it's debatable). If you're planning on a $50M budget, including two attempts, then you can't budget $35M for your launch vehicle.
Pixel has approximately the performance to go from a lunar transfer orbit to the surface (allowing for increased vacuum Isp, etc), but not much extra. The performance difference between GTO (geosynchronous transfer orbit, which is where you get the 4900kg number, not GEO) and LTO is nontrivial, but it isn't huge, either. I *think* a Falcon 9 (normal) could put Pixel on a LTO trajectory, but I'm not entirely sure I'm reading the data sheet correctly.
The prize winner may well fly on a Falcon 1 (or 1e); that wouldn't surprise me, but I honestly hope it's Carmack doing it off his own orbital platform. I rather doubt, however, that the prize will be won with a Falcon 9 launch. Of course, if someone like CMU actually comes up with a multi-hundred-million dollar budget, I'll probably be wrong:)
Falcon 9 (not Heavy) pricing starts at $35M. I'm hopeful that the prize can be won for less than that. Something like Pixel fits on a Falcon 1, I believe, but not with much performance to spare -- you only get to LEO, no extra, that way.
I don't think it's been clarified whether ballistic hops after landing qualifies; it's certainly been mentioned, but I'm guessing it doesn't count. If it does, it's clearly easier to bring along a bit of extra propellant.
The X Prize is an apt comparison. Estimates I've heard put Scaled's budget for the $10M prize at approximately $30M. I'm reasonably confident the prize can't be won for $20M -- but I think it can be won for not a lot more than that, as I said in my original post. The point of winning the X-prize was only in small part to prove it can be done. A large part was as the impetus for and partial funding of the early R&D for SpaceShipTwo. There are certainly markets available to you if you can win this prize, much like winning the X-Prize. But hundreds of millions in investment is harder to come by than tens of millions, and the market is in some ways less clear than it was for the X-Prize.
I think that winning this prize on a $200M budget is both uninteresting, and unlikely to happen (because you'll have trouble getting the $200M; a NASA style project might manage to win it on that budget in the allotted time, but then again it might not). A small innovative team might well win it on a much smaller budget; that would be both far easier to finance, and to me a far more interesting result. I don't know which approach I think has better odds, but I know which groups I'll be paying more attention to, and it's not CMU.
Slashdot Mirror
And I'd really rather you hadn't given them my receipt, if I was among the customers. Just because you meant well doesn't mean you did the right thing. (On the flip side, our legal system is rather screwed up, and it seems entirely possible you'll get hit with far more than you deserve. Well intentioned minor problems should get minor punishments, and you certainly don't deserve to face the potential for complete financial ruin that any lawsuit carries these days.)
You've got multiple different trusts to society you need to keep in mind -- both your customer's privacy and your nation's security are part of that. Asking the cops for a warrant, or at least asking them which names they were looking for, would have been entirely reasonable. Open-ended fishing expeditions are just bad all around.
Because it is unfortunately rather difficult for the government to fire an employee who simply isn't doing a good job, if there isn't a nice, objective standard by which they're doing poorly. They want some way to make sure the examiners are being productive.
Of course there are better ways than what they're currently doing. I'm not trying to defend the current practice, I'm just saying it's an unsurprising result of a government bureaucracy.
It's not just at a national level, and it's not just the current administration. Much as I dislike them, I don't think the current administration is all that much worse than previous ones in this regard, and a lot of the fault rests with Congress, not the Executive branch.
I recently served on a grand jury handling general local level stuff. A typical indictment for ID theft would include fraud, atm card fraud (a special law! I'm sure making it super-extra-illegal helped), identity theft (yep, specifically illegal, even though it's hard to see what makes it ID theft instead of just, well, fraud), and usually a couple others.
My usual reaction to identity theft laws is "Aren't existing fraud laws sufficient?"
At least at first glance, however, this bill seems to be doing more, and doing it in a useful manner -- not solely a "well, let's make it more illegal!" type of bill.
I have no idea how the NYT normally operates, but I imagine it would be standard practice for them to simply declare the amount an outstanding debt and refuse to accept ads from MoveOn until it was payed. And if I were MoveOn, I don't think I'd want to lose the ability to run ads in the NYT over it.
Actually, the entire point of the paper I linked is that that interpretation is incorrect.
In fact, Fuck, as in "Fuck you," isn't even properly a verb: English sentences without overt grammatical subjects. To summarize: "Fuck you or I'll take away your teddy bear" is not grammatically correct; neither is "Describe and fuck communism."
And, of course, XKCD has something to say about computational linguists.
XKCD put it quite eloquently. These are not theories that any amount of rational evidence or logic will refute.
This argument is intuitively appealing, and imho it has a lot to say for it. However, it has one major shortcoming:
Define the game of 3-go to be playing 3 consecutive games of go; the winner of the 3-go match is the winner of the majority of the go games. If player A is 1 level better than player B at go, they will be more than one level better at 3-go, since their winning probability is up to 74% instead of 67%. So, by this definition 3-go is noticeably more complex than go. However, I can think of no meaningful way in which this is actually true.
Also, if you count steps from a human player who knows the rules and has played a couple games to a human expert, you get 40-50 ranks. But that human player is easily 30 ranks about the true "random but no suicides" computer player. It doesn't take much work to build a computer program 20 ranks stronger than the random player, but that is still a truly *awful* program.
In the early days of go programming, a very simple algorithm was defined. This is from memory, so it's probably wrong, but it went something like this. If you can capture an opponent's stone, capture a group chosen at random from the largest capturable groups. Failing this, if you have a group in atari that you can rescue from atari, rescue the largest such group. Failing this, if an opponent has a group with less than 4 liberties, play one of its liberties. Failing this, play a random legal move. This turned out to be remarkably potent against early programs, and will absolutely destroy a random player -- yet still lose to even the weakest of human players.
You missed a whole bunch of details that make the difference between fantasy and something worth pursuing in the near future. Perhaps the most important is that Lunar regolith is hard-packed and difficult to drill into, and also perhaps the most abrasive naturally occurring substance found. It's been pulverized to fine particles by repeated micrometeor strikes, packed firm by shock waves from strikes nearby, and had no erosion to smooth the edges. Oh, it's also statically charged. Have fun maintaining your machinery.
From its content alone, your post is completely indistinguishable from any other post by someone who claims to know how copyright works in the US. It should be obvious that just because you know you're right, that doesn't mean the rest of us can tell that just because you sound certain about it. So, please post a link to a reputable reference, rather than just adding another post going back and forth on the issue and clouding up the discussion.
(FWIW, I think you're right about this. But it would add a lot more to the discussion if you could actually include a reference.)
I think that the woman is probably liable (not guilty, it's a civil proceeding not a criminal one), and should be required to pay an appropriate penalty. However, the important thing to me about this case is that $220k is *not* an appropriate penalty. It's too high by an order of magnitude or two. In some of the cases the RIAA pursues, they clearly pursue the wrong defendant well past the point where it is clear that the defendant is not liable.
My objections to the RIAA are to their tactics, which are clearly intended to intimidate and extort, and are in many cases outright illegal. I also think that the punishment should fit the crime -- thousands per shared song does not seem to be connected to any real world concept of how much she's hurt anyone. A few tens of dollars in lost sales per song, perhaps multiplied by some amount as penalty (the penalty for getting caught doing the wrong thing should be more than it would have taken to do the right thing in the first place) would be reasonable -- and wind up at perhaps $100 per song, not $9000.
Of course, I also object for a variety of reasons to the DRM and other anti-customer tactics taken by these groups, but that's a different discussion.
But if 100Mbit class connection were cheap and you had one anyway (hey, it didn't cost much extra so why not), you might decide that you *did* care about offsite backups. If offsite is as painless as onsite, why not? It's like always-on connectivity was back in the era of dialup -- sure, no one needs it, but once you have it it changes the way you use the internet.
And I can think of plenty of things I'd like to do where higher bandwidth would be nice. Download Hi-def videos instead of renting them from the store (ignoring the difficulties with drm and what not for a minute). Better quality video on youtube. Something better than 64kbps for web radio broadcasts. Not just offsite backups, but offsite network-accessible home directories -- why can't I access my desktop the way I'm used to it on any computer I sit down at?
There's plenty of things to do with cheap fast bandwidth, and as it becomes available we'll discover what they are. It's a shame I can't buy a decent speed connection yet.
http://xkcd.com/195/
http://xkcd.com/256/
I didn't post to that, I merely applied a mod point (though somewhat late, I still felt it was worth it). I lost all mod and metamod priveleges without explanation for ~2 years (memory is vague on the exact period). They both have returned, however, and I now get mod points perhaps once a month.
Now you've simply pushed the problem a level higher, into the assembler / linker. Yes, it helps, but there are other techniques as well.
The most elegant technique I've seen goes like this. Maintain trusted dead-simple non-optimizing compiler A (possibly on a different machine). You also have untrusted compiler B, and it's alleged source SB. Compile SB with B, resulting in B. Compile SB with A, resulting in B'. These binaries will be different, but should be functionally equivalent -- B' is probably larger and slower, thanks to having used non-optimizing compiler A to make it. Now, use B' to compile SB, resulting in B''. Since B' and B should produce equivalent output, B and B'' should be bitwise identical. If they're not, you have a problem.
At this point, you simply (heh) have to trust that your OS isn't playing games like showing you different binaries than its running and such. Again, there are similar techniques to deal with this, but the problem can't really be removed without establishing a trusted chain all the way back to the chip fab, through the assembler, linker, compiler, and OS. It's a tough problem.
Of course, this basic problem was described quite eloquently by Ken Thompson. He went after the compiler, but the problem of proving that the binary you have matches the source you have is a tricky one no matter what.
There actually are some very clever solutions to try to catch cheating compilers like this, but none of them are trivial. It's a cat and mouse game, and there are actually proofs that winning either side completely is impossible.
That waste heat from the edge servers is heating homes and thus is an equivalent savings on the energy needed to heat homes.
No, it's not equivalent. It saves *some* (in the winter, not in the summer obviously), but it's most definitely *not* equivalent. A lot of people use gas heat, which is cheaper. Those that use electric heat are almost exclusively using heat pumps -- basically an air conditioner with the hot coils on the inside. Heat pumps expend electricity to *move* heat from outdoors to indoors. Typical coefficient of performance is in the range of 3-4. That means that every watt of electricity used, the heat pump puts 3.5W of heat into your home (the extra 2.5 coming from outside). As a result, running your heat pump is far more efficient than running your server.
(Of course, heat pumps get less efficient as it gets colder outside, just like air conditioners get less efficient as it gets hotter outside. In sufficiently cold climates their coefficient of performance approaches 1, but that doens't reallistically happen until below 0F or so.)
Some of us would be quite happy with "Here's the linux binary; we won't help you with it, but we'll maintain a user support forum and pay attention to bug reports."
Or, "Here's the Windows binary and source code; that should get you started. We won't help you with the Linux port, but we promise not to actively hinder it with malicious firmware updates." After all, for a company making a hardware device, the profit center is the device, not the computer-side software. Why not make it open?
I'd agree in principle, but there are a lot of external costs that need to be factored in. Proper waste disposal for nuclear, waste disposal (CO2 and otherwise) for fossil fuels (including global warming impact etc), and environmental impacts from damning rivers and putting wind mills in flight paths. Less government meddling would be good, but forcing the market to properly account for all costs is good too ("internalize the externalities" to use the econ phrase). In the mean time, though, I'll take improvement where I can -- and I think nuclear is better than a foreign oil addiction.
It's not instead of. It's in addition to. "Pave Arizona with solar cells" vs "Build new nuclear plants" is a false dichotomy. All of these things are better than oil, especially given the foreign dependencies that entails. So we do several of them in parallel, while we figure out what the best answer is. My hunch is that we will continue to generate electricity from many sources for a long, long time to come. Just as the best approach to renewable energy is not solar, or wind, or hydro, or biofuels, but probably a mix of all of these, the best answer to reducing fossil fuel usage probably includes a mix of alternatives.
Very true. There are lots of projects out there where the best (or only) way to find out is to wander down the hall and ask someone.
I'm not saying I think it will be a money maker. I'm saying two basic things: First, I think the budget needs to be comparable to the prize. $20M to $50M, not hundreds. Unless you happen to find an investor with *lots* of money to throw at it, but I think that gets a lot harder for a $300M budget than it was for SpaceShipOne's $30M. Second, if you're *not* spending hundreds of millions, you'd be a fool to count on it working on the first try (even if you are, it's debatable). If you're planning on a $50M budget, including two attempts, then you can't budget $35M for your launch vehicle.
Pixel has approximately the performance to go from a lunar transfer orbit to the surface (allowing for increased vacuum Isp, etc), but not much extra. The performance difference between GTO (geosynchronous transfer orbit, which is where you get the 4900kg number, not GEO) and LTO is nontrivial, but it isn't huge, either. I *think* a Falcon 9 (normal) could put Pixel on a LTO trajectory, but I'm not entirely sure I'm reading the data sheet correctly.
The prize winner may well fly on a Falcon 1 (or 1e); that wouldn't surprise me, but I honestly hope it's Carmack doing it off his own orbital platform. I rather doubt, however, that the prize will be won with a Falcon 9 launch. Of course, if someone like CMU actually comes up with a multi-hundred-million dollar budget, I'll probably be wrong :)
Falcon 9 (not Heavy) pricing starts at $35M. I'm hopeful that the prize can be won for less than that. Something like Pixel fits on a Falcon 1, I believe, but not with much performance to spare -- you only get to LEO, no extra, that way.
I don't think it's been clarified whether ballistic hops after landing qualifies; it's certainly been mentioned, but I'm guessing it doesn't count. If it does, it's clearly easier to bring along a bit of extra propellant.
The X Prize is an apt comparison. Estimates I've heard put Scaled's budget for the $10M prize at approximately $30M. I'm reasonably confident the prize can't be won for $20M -- but I think it can be won for not a lot more than that, as I said in my original post. The point of winning the X-prize was only in small part to prove it can be done. A large part was as the impetus for and partial funding of the early R&D for SpaceShipTwo. There are certainly markets available to you if you can win this prize, much like winning the X-Prize. But hundreds of millions in investment is harder to come by than tens of millions, and the market is in some ways less clear than it was for the X-Prize.
I think that winning this prize on a $200M budget is both uninteresting, and unlikely to happen (because you'll have trouble getting the $200M; a NASA style project might manage to win it on that budget in the allotted time, but then again it might not). A small innovative team might well win it on a much smaller budget; that would be both far easier to finance, and to me a far more interesting result. I don't know which approach I think has better odds, but I know which groups I'll be paying more attention to, and it's not CMU.