One thing absent from this thread is the notion that the music industry is not trying to stop people from listening to music. They are dealers just like those sharing files. The RIAA just wants to make sure they are the only dealers around. They don't want to stem the demand for music (imagine those commercials - "Parents who listen to Sabbath have kids who listen to Sabbath"), they want to keep the supply of music limited to what they provide.
So it makes sense to target only the suppliers so as not to scare/'piss off too much' their main customer base.
I had one class in a classroom that had a laptop bolted to every desk. During lecture the professor encouraged us to use the web to find further information on questions he couldn't fully answer. I remember during a lecture on Huffman coding some students found a great Java animation of the algorithm that they sent to the professor who then displayed it on the projector.
But beyond just providing an instant reference the laptops provided a way to communicate with the professor during lecture without disrupting class and without fear of embarrasment. The professor set up an IM account that he left logged on during lecture. Anyone at any time could IM the prof questions, comments, or links to reference material anonymously and the professor could then answer them at a convenient point in the lecture. Some might argue that anonymity may not allow the professor to get to know about their students, but I feel that in large lectures, alot of questions go unasked because people feel too embarrassed to ask them. In our class the professor knew exactly when something he said needed clarification. I think the students benefitted greatly from what the technology allowed.
Well - I think the reasoning is that one is imitable by kids and the other isn't. The people who made this rule don't want to see kids going home and headbutting each other. They know kids can't go home and use their parent's lightsaber and accidentally cut off another kid's arm. It has much less to do with the graphic nature or gruesomeness of what took place. From some of the posts above, I think graphicness is the difference between G and PG (U and PG in the UK) whereas imitation is the test for whether kids under 12 should see it.
Remember the Ninja Turtles? At one point they changed Michelangelo's nun-chucks to a grappling hook while the other turtles kept their bladed weapons and sticks. The reason was that nun-chuck fighing was being imitated by kids with a potential for injury much higher than the other weapons.
Kids punch each other and do karate kicks at each other enough already. If the ratings people want to avoid showing them one more thing to do to each other I say that's fine. The solution to adults who want all of the action left in is not to attack the rating standards but to get the message to Lucas that he won't lose business if the movie is rated '12' or 'PG-13'.
The branching factor of a Chess game in the early stages is prohibitively large such that most PC programs can only go down about 20 levels on a decision tree. I believe advanced hardware has been able to go down 40 levels on a tree, but from that point on one has to use heuristics to estimate the score of that path of moves. There is also a problem with how exactly to score a series of moves. The most common technique is to simply count the number of pieces taken (weighted by piece) versus number of pieces given up -- but it is not obvious that simply taking more pieces is best way to evaluate a strategy. One of the more common problems is that a computer gets 40 levels down and has to stop processing and therefore returns an estimated score without realizing that on the next move his queen will be taken or something - thats called the horizon problem. Either way, one of the main advances of Deep Blue and I imagine other top programs was to program thousands of opening games and end games in so that it plays a significant amount by script - just matching what it sees to a particular game in its memory. These strategies were developed by consultation with top players who were brought in by IBM to tailor Deep Blue against Kasparov's style. This cuts reliance on decsion tree processing in the beginning and at the end where the computer can play out a scripted endgame and try to finish more directly.
"Incredibly stupid" is such a harsh phrase here. Inconsiderate maybe, but please, plenty of people don't care that they know whats going to happen in an episode. People are going to be entertained by what happens in the show regardless of what they know about it ahead of time. I knew what would happen in Fellowship of the Ring before I saw it, yet I thouroughly enjoyed it. Did you notice that the novelization of "A Phantom Menace" was released way before the movie came out and people still ate it up. Have you noticed that theforce.net has an Episode II script posted that coincides with every preview that has come out so far and that script was posted before any previews came out. These things would not get published if there was not demand for them. So don't act like there is some unwritten code of conduct on the internet where you don't post TV/movie spoilers and everyone agrees to this. You don't like to read spoilers and thats your perrogative. But don't act like everyone feels the same as you, and don't act like people who don't care about spoilers are morons. If the only thing that entertains is surprise plot twists then I can't imagine how you watch TV with all those syndicated and summer-time reruns. Can't enjoy a good rerun?? Sucks for you.
The police don't only have the function of solving crimes they exist also to deter crime. You don't put more cops on the street so that more criminals get caught so much as you put cops on the street to make criminals think twice about committing that crime. This seems like an excellent deterrent and the article says that car theft has dropped in other places where the bait cars were used. So, yes they spent taxpayer money on this, but I'd rather have my car not stolen in the first place than have the cops find it after its been chopped.
I don't know what's worse...
that someone felt the need to explain this reference to Slashdotters or that he got modded up for it.
Ability to quote Monty Python should be a prerequisite to being able to post here.
Halt, he who wishes to troll like me must answer me these questions three...
What is your userid?
What is your password?
What is the third question that the old man asks Arthur?
Fixing an open relay may be simple if you are a single user with your own domain, but its an entire different problem when you run a large network. The university I go to and work for (in a computing helpdesk position) is in the process of switching to authenticated smtp and its caused an unbelievable amount of headaches for us. The main problem is that a number of popular email clients do not support authenticated smtp very well (mainly on Macintosh) and yet we have users with all sorts of programs who won't switch over easily. We announced our plans a full three months before the scheduled switch-over and since the original email the helpdesk has received call after call from users who are either scared and confused or who are irate that they now have to give up using Eudora for Mac and switch to Netscape 4.78. No we can't recommend Mozilla or Netscape 6.2 because they are still basically beta - and Outlook poses a whole other range of problems.
Basically we've put off fixing our server thus far because of the headaches it would cause. Now we've got a ton of angry customers and alot of confused ones all because we got on the orbs list. And yet we've never received a complaint from our users about email being blocked -- just a bunch of threats from the orbs people. So now we're doing our part to prevent spam -- even if our customers don't understand why -- and man does it ever seem worth our while.
Vindigo already does this
on
Time for a Beer?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
If you have a handheld (Pocket PC, Palm, and certain internet enabled cell phones) and live in a major city, this has been available for months from a free app called Vindigo. Its even better in that it tells you directions to the nearest bars, restaurants, stores, and movies and it doesn't even need GPS as long as you know what block you're on. It also has reviews for everything -- which is extemely useful.
I don't want to sound like a marketing guy, but IMHO Vindigo is indispensible if you live near a place like NYC and often have trouble finding places.
Downsides: It is currently only offered in 18 cities and has ads but I bet that watch doesn't work all over the place either. The upsides are tremendous, though. Having a bar finder in a watch is all well and good, but if you already have a Palm you might as well get all the other useful info as well. You'll never have to wander around the Village looking for the Original Ray's Famous Pizza again.
Not that I advocate cheating but sometimes intelligence means knowing where to get the answers, too. One of the core values of computer programming that I've had drilled into me was that you should never have to write code that someone else has already written. In fact the first assignment in Brian Kernighan's programming class wasn't writing grep from scratch, but chiseling out grep from the ed source code -- the same way Ken Thompson created grep all those years ago. Don't discount the value of standing on other prople's efforts.
You poor sheltered soul. Get yourself to Aglmesis and learn the truth. Greaters may seem all fancy with those big soft chocolate chips but the only reason they're soft is because they're 50% vegetable oil. Greaters is all made in a factory - I'd take UDF over Greaters. For a real treat get yourself to Oakley and experience ice cream the way it was meant to be. You can't beat Aglamesis for atmosphere or quality.
Not only interesting, but one of the absolute best teachers I've ever had. There isn't a question that doesn't phase him. Who'd have thought crypto and security could be so interesting?
There's nothing stopping you from playing it in analog mode on your cd drive and recording this either - except the fact that it is no longer a digital copy. One interesting note is that some more popular players default to playing CDs in digital mode (Media Player for one). Judging from the article the noise burst would be audible to anyone using such a player (these would be the players with the cd visualizations). Their protection is not a hidden from normal consumers as they'd like to think. What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
"Princeton should teach you how to spell at least."
So they offer spelling classes at your university? Sounds top notch - you must have taken Spelling 102 "Movie Titles That Aren't Real Words". Personally I haven't taken a class called spelling since about third grade. Gattica, Gattica, Gattica, Gattica
What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
"jump on me for saing tat genetics is the only are where real progress has been made,"
Feel free to jump on me for not proof reading....stupid, flakey-ass eMachines keyboard at my parents house...
It has an instant World Wide Web access button on it though. What will they think of next??
What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
There are alot of science fiction fantasies that people are expecting to become reality in the new century, eg warp speed and AI. And while I see us developing increasingly powerful supercomputers I don't see them gaining sentience -- ever. Similarly, as anyone who looked over this nasa website posted earlier today would agree that warp driven space travel is a long long way off. Honestly IMO the only major sci-fi topic that we've made significant progress on is genetics and cloning. We can clone mammals and we have the human genome in our reach. I have little doubt that genetically designing your children (ala Gattica) will be possible within 25 years. I say this knowing that my university (Princeton) is currently throwing the majority of its resources at genetic research over other important and cutting edge fields - including Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, EE, Materials Research and Computer Science. Genetics is where the money is going and where the results are happening. I've always found the genetics stories of science ficion to be the scariest, however. More and more I see that this is because the fears raised by those books and movies are closer and closer to becoming reality.
Now before you all jump on me for saing tat genetics is the only are where real progress has been made, let me say that I also agree that major progress has been made with the internet and that it has and will continue to change the world as it is more integrated into our lives. However I don't consider the internet to have been a fantastic dream of sci-fi come to life - I see it more as a foregone conclusion as soon as the first telegraph was built. Physics has had its time in the sun - biology is the cutting edge now.
What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
52001?? Aren't they assuming a bit much? We haven't even solved the Y10K problem yet. And you know we won't start working on it until 9996.
Also - why send DeCSS up there when they're using CDs to hold the data? Just send a good sharware CD ripper that expires in 18250395 days. That'll give them a good month to rip all the songs they want before they have to fork over 8 billion dollars (adjusted for inflation) to get the full version.
What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
What I always thought was good about our classes was that they made us compile our programs on many different compilers to show that we had clean portable code. The assignments were never too machine specific and every once in a while a certain amount of points were taken off if the code didn't compile cleanly with cc, lcc, gcc and Visual Studio with all warnings and pedantic options turned on. Alot of thimes they'd even run our code through lint for kicks. Let me tell you, even the beginners learned to write clean code quickly. And as a bonus we had to learn our way around Visual Studio (which is a skill in itself). Now as most of our programming was done on Solaris machines to begin with, I never had any problem with being forced into an environment I didn't like. But it help to be taught to rite clean code and gain experience in other environments.
What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
...was to write a unix shell. That may not sound so exciting but it was a helluva change from all the math problems we got. Mine wasn't too complicated - piping, redirection, job control but not scripting - and totalled about 1700 lines of not-so-streamlined code (although it can be done in considerably fewer lines).
The nice thing about this project is that it teaches the gritty parts of c (system calls and such) but can be easily broken up into smaller parts (parsing, piping control, job structures) that aren't so hard to understand by themselves. This aspect makes it good for a group to work on as well. Just be sure you have some expendable developement machines. FOR loops, fork(), and Murphy's Law don't mix too well. (our server crashed few times right before the deadline from infinite forking loops).
This may sound like dull systems programming but its the only project that kept me interested the whole semester because of the challenge.
Slashdot Mirror
So it makes sense to target only the suppliers so as not to scare/'piss off too much' their main customer base.
But beyond just providing an instant reference the laptops provided a way to communicate with the professor during lecture without disrupting class and without fear of embarrasment. The professor set up an IM account that he left logged on during lecture. Anyone at any time could IM the prof questions, comments, or links to reference material anonymously and the professor could then answer them at a convenient point in the lecture. Some might argue that anonymity may not allow the professor to get to know about their students, but I feel that in large lectures, alot of questions go unasked because people feel too embarrassed to ask them. In our class the professor knew exactly when something he said needed clarification. I think the students benefitted greatly from what the technology allowed.
Well - I think the reasoning is that one is imitable by kids and the other isn't. The people who made this rule don't want to see kids going home and headbutting each other. They know kids can't go home and use their parent's lightsaber and accidentally cut off another kid's arm. It has much less to do with the graphic nature or gruesomeness of what took place. From some of the posts above, I think graphicness is the difference between G and PG (U and PG in the UK) whereas imitation is the test for whether kids under 12 should see it.
Remember the Ninja Turtles? At one point they changed Michelangelo's nun-chucks to a grappling hook while the other turtles kept their bladed weapons and sticks. The reason was that nun-chuck fighing was being imitated by kids with a potential for injury much higher than the other weapons.
Kids punch each other and do karate kicks at each other enough already. If the ratings people want to avoid showing them one more thing to do to each other I say that's fine. The solution to adults who want all of the action left in is not to attack the rating standards but to get the message to Lucas that he won't lose business if the movie is rated '12' or 'PG-13'.
The branching factor of a Chess game in the early stages is prohibitively large such that most PC programs can only go down about 20 levels on a decision tree. I believe advanced hardware has been able to go down 40 levels on a tree, but from that point on one has to use heuristics to estimate the score of that path of moves. There is also a problem with how exactly to score a series of moves. The most common technique is to simply count the number of pieces taken (weighted by piece) versus number of pieces given up -- but it is not obvious that simply taking more pieces is best way to evaluate a strategy. One of the more common problems is that a computer gets 40 levels down and has to stop processing and therefore returns an estimated score without realizing that on the next move his queen will be taken or something - thats called the horizon problem. Either way, one of the main advances of Deep Blue and I imagine other top programs was to program thousands of opening games and end games in so that it plays a significant amount by script - just matching what it sees to a particular game in its memory. These strategies were developed by consultation with top players who were brought in by IBM to tailor Deep Blue against Kasparov's style. This cuts reliance on decsion tree processing in the beginning and at the end where the computer can play out a scripted endgame and try to finish more directly.
"Incredibly stupid" is such a harsh phrase here. Inconsiderate maybe, but please, plenty of people don't care that they know whats going to happen in an episode. People are going to be entertained by what happens in the show regardless of what they know about it ahead of time. I knew what would happen in Fellowship of the Ring before I saw it, yet I thouroughly enjoyed it. Did you notice that the novelization of "A Phantom Menace" was released way before the movie came out and people still ate it up. Have you noticed that theforce.net has an Episode II script posted that coincides with every preview that has come out so far and that script was posted before any previews came out. These things would not get published if there was not demand for them. So don't act like there is some unwritten code of conduct on the internet where you don't post TV/movie spoilers and everyone agrees to this. You don't like to read spoilers and thats your perrogative. But don't act like everyone feels the same as you, and don't act like people who don't care about spoilers are morons. If the only thing that entertains is surprise plot twists then I can't imagine how you watch TV with all those syndicated and summer-time reruns. Can't enjoy a good rerun?? Sucks for you.
The police don't only have the function of solving crimes they exist also to deter crime. You don't put more cops on the street so that more criminals get caught so much as you put cops on the street to make criminals think twice about committing that crime. This seems like an excellent deterrent and the article says that car theft has dropped in other places where the bait cars were used. So, yes they spent taxpayer money on this, but I'd rather have my car not stolen in the first place than have the cops find it after its been chopped.
I don't know what's worse... that someone felt the need to explain this reference to Slashdotters or that he got modded up for it.
Ability to quote Monty Python should be a prerequisite to being able to post here.
Halt, he who wishes to troll like me must answer me these questions three...
What is your userid?
What is your password?
What is the third question that the old man asks Arthur?
Fixing an open relay may be simple if you are a single user with your own domain, but its an entire different problem when you run a large network. The university I go to and work for (in a computing helpdesk position) is in the process of switching to authenticated smtp and its caused an unbelievable amount of headaches for us. The main problem is that a number of popular email clients do not support authenticated smtp very well (mainly on Macintosh) and yet we have users with all sorts of programs who won't switch over easily. We announced our plans a full three months before the scheduled switch-over and since the original email the helpdesk has received call after call from users who are either scared and confused or who are irate that they now have to give up using Eudora for Mac and switch to Netscape 4.78. No we can't recommend Mozilla or Netscape 6.2 because they are still basically beta - and Outlook poses a whole other range of problems.
Basically we've put off fixing our server thus far because of the headaches it would cause. Now we've got a ton of angry customers and alot of confused ones all because we got on the orbs list. And yet we've never received a complaint from our users about email being blocked -- just a bunch of threats from the orbs people. So now we're doing our part to prevent spam -- even if our customers don't understand why -- and man does it ever seem worth our while.
If you have a handheld (Pocket PC, Palm, and certain internet enabled cell phones) and live in a major city, this has been available for months from a free app called Vindigo. Its even better in that it tells you directions to the nearest bars, restaurants, stores, and movies and it doesn't even need GPS as long as you know what block you're on. It also has reviews for everything -- which is extemely useful.
I don't want to sound like a marketing guy, but IMHO Vindigo is indispensible if you live near a place like NYC and often have trouble finding places.
Downsides: It is currently only offered in 18 cities and has ads but I bet that watch doesn't work all over the place either. The upsides are tremendous, though. Having a bar finder in a watch is all well and good, but if you already have a Palm you might as well get all the other useful info as well. You'll never have to wander around the Village looking for the Original Ray's Famous Pizza again.
Not that I advocate cheating but sometimes intelligence means knowing where to get the answers, too. One of the core values of computer programming that I've had drilled into me was that you should never have to write code that someone else has already written. In fact the first assignment in Brian Kernighan's programming class wasn't writing grep from scratch, but chiseling out grep from the ed source code -- the same way Ken Thompson created grep all those years ago. Don't discount the value of standing on other prople's efforts.
And how can ANYTHING compete with Graeter's?
You poor sheltered soul. Get yourself to Aglmesis and learn the truth. Greaters may seem all fancy with those big soft chocolate chips but the only reason they're soft is because they're 50% vegetable oil. Greaters is all made in a factory - I'd take UDF over Greaters. For a real treat get yourself to Oakley and experience ice cream the way it was meant to be. You can't beat Aglamesis for atmosphere or quality.
Not only interesting, but one of the absolute best teachers I've ever had. There isn't a question that doesn't phase him. Who'd have thought crypto and security could be so interesting?
There's nothing stopping you from playing it in analog mode on your cd drive and recording this either - except the fact that it is no longer a digital copy. One interesting note is that some more popular players default to playing CDs in digital mode (Media Player for one). Judging from the article the noise burst would be audible to anyone using such a player (these would be the players with the cd visualizations). Their protection is not a hidden from normal consumers as they'd like to think.
What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
So they offer spelling classes at your university? Sounds top notch - you must have taken Spelling 102 "Movie Titles That Aren't Real Words". Personally I haven't taken a class called spelling since about third grade. Gattica, Gattica, Gattica, Gattica
What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
Feel free to jump on me for not proof reading. ...stupid, flakey-ass eMachines keyboard at my parents house...
It has an instant World Wide Web access button on it though. What will they think of next??
What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
Now before you all jump on me for saing tat genetics is the only are where real progress has been made, let me say that I also agree that major progress has been made with the internet and that it has and will continue to change the world as it is more integrated into our lives. However I don't consider the internet to have been a fantastic dream of sci-fi come to life - I see it more as a foregone conclusion as soon as the first telegraph was built. Physics has had its time in the sun - biology is the cutting edge now.
What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
52001?? Aren't they assuming a bit much? We haven't even solved the Y10K problem yet. And you know we won't start working on it until 9996. Also - why send DeCSS up there when they're using CDs to hold the data? Just send a good sharware CD ripper that expires in 18250395 days. That'll give them a good month to rip all the songs they want before they have to fork over 8 billion dollars (adjusted for inflation) to get the full version.
What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
What I always thought was good about our classes was that they made us compile our programs on many different compilers to show that we had clean portable code. The assignments were never too machine specific and every once in a while a certain amount of points were taken off if the code didn't compile cleanly with cc, lcc, gcc and Visual Studio with all warnings and pedantic options turned on. Alot of thimes they'd even run our code through lint for kicks. Let me tell you, even the beginners learned to write clean code quickly. And as a bonus we had to learn our way around Visual Studio (which is a skill in itself). Now as most of our programming was done on Solaris machines to begin with, I never had any problem with being forced into an environment I didn't like. But it help to be taught to rite clean code and gain experience in other environments.
What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
Too bad carrier pigeons are extinct.
What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
super user-friendly ... yes ... no
superuser friendly
...was to write a unix shell. That may not sound so exciting but it was a helluva change from all the math problems we got. Mine wasn't too complicated - piping, redirection, job control but not scripting - and totalled about 1700 lines of not-so-streamlined code (although it can be done in considerably fewer lines).
The nice thing about this project is that it teaches the gritty parts of c (system calls and such) but can be easily broken up into smaller parts (parsing, piping control, job structures) that aren't so hard to understand by themselves. This aspect makes it good for a group to work on as well. Just be sure you have some expendable developement machines. FOR loops, fork(), and Murphy's Law don't mix too well. (our server crashed few times right before the deadline from infinite forking loops).
This may sound like dull systems programming but its the only project that kept me interested the whole semester because of the challenge.
multiple dimensions, huh how about the "Buckaroo Bonzai Effect" now there's a pretty catchy name
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here...this is the war room!!