They're not hypocrites, they're just smarter than your average middle-American Christian. If you're engaged in holy war, your diety would probably prefer you ignore some of the minor rules in order to win for them. A soldier should eat pork today if it means that none of their descendents will be forced to eat pork by the food services branch of the Great Satan.
Thank god that patents require full disclosure: it'll be nice to be told what the hell they're talking about in something other than marketing-speak FAQs...
Seriously: they don't seem to have the consumer-side of the equation all fleshed out. Visa won't be too happy if I start charging micropayments to my card whether the merchant randomly gets the money or not. Are they going to be using the same probability trick for consumers? Are they going to be aggregating purchases? Are they going to use accounts like PayPal? Come on, Rivest, fess up!
Now I was certainly protected from "all that" all through highschool and well into university, however this has resulted in a new problem: I feel like my life is boring because I missed all the pointless and banal experiences. I have a friend who got married a year into university. Why? Because she had all the "experimenting" she'd need in highschool. Getting it out of her system allowed her to jump straight to adulthood. Whereas I'm floundering half-way...
I will buy a console when I can use it to play a 16-player game of CounterStrike or Tribes using a mouse and keyboard the way god intended. I was really amazed at how good the controls were the first time I played Halo, until I realised that their innovation consisted of making a console game almost as playable as Quake I. And if I want to masturbate to *Hot* *Nude* *Plummers* I'll bring my NES out of retirement: I only play multiplayer games and although consoles are getting better they just aren't targetted at that market.
Despite how unhappy I am with the current state of consoles, I truly wish they could meet my needs. That way I could delete my Windows partition and put my hardware $ into SCSI RAID and other, more mature, penis enlargement purchases.
So if I want to read these things, what exactly do I have to do? The comics aren't in Amazon. DC's unnavigatable page seems to have nothing more than the Sneak Peak from months ago. Shouldn't Warren's site have a link to his baby?
I don't read comics, I don't know where to buy these things! Here I am, out on the Internet, money burning a hole in my pocket and nobody is willing to take it from me.:(
The Patriot Party's platform is naive and inconsistent. It feels like the work of one or a very few number of people rather than a party. Their platform has something every Canadian will like and something every Canadian will loathe.
Wait a sec, there are other parties in Canada?! Oh, you mean PQ. Whew, for a second there I thought we had a two-party system...
But in all seriousness, I always thought that the Westminister System had better checks&balances than the American System -- because if the leader of the government went crazy, the other MPs could easily throw him out. But lately I've realised that it's not that the US's checks&balances don't work, it's that most possible opponents worship the Govenor^H^H^H^H^H^H^HPresident.
When my alma matter was approached by Cisco and asked to become a training partner they told them to try the local college instead. Plugging together black boxes does not have academic merit.
In order to copyright something, you have to have authored it or paid someone to author it. Since your DNA is a perfect blueprint for most of the other things you mention, the debate boils down to the authorship of DNA. I'd argue that DNA authors itself, but at the very least shouldn't your parents have more of a claim on it than yourself?
Aside: if I claimed to be God and therefore owner of all DNA, do you think there'd be a court case to prove that I wasn't?
In the ICPC, the set of available languages is restricted because the participants are using secured computers (to keep them from getting on the Net and causing trouble on the LAN). You'd think it wouldn't be a problem if participants could submit a binary compiled at home. However the whole point of this contest is for Caltech to see what ideas everyone else has come up with -- so they want to make sure they can read your source code.
As someone who spends more time reading research papers than working with an actual Turing Test bot, I'd just like to point out that the academic community has abstracted the term "Turing Test" into something a little more useful:
A Turing Test is a means for judging the humanness of the behaviour of a software system. The test consists of giving similar input to both a human and an implementation of the software and then comparing or subjectively judging the output. This is often done in an interactive fashion.
Idealised, a Turing Test consists of a human and a program receiving a bitstream and sending a bitstream back. In most examples, this bitstream consists of text in a natural language and the input and output are expected to occur interactively. However it seems likely that intelligent aliens would fail this if they didn't know the language or could not respond at a speed acceptable to the judge. Therefore your traditional definition of "Turing Test" is seen to be arbitrary.
The rules are written in a very obscure minimalist fashion, so it took me a while to figure this out but: the game has not been defined! Your program is to get an input file and process it in a manner similar to a human. Currently the website is lacking examples of human output. Therefore, from an Information Theory perspective, we know absolutely nothing about the game.
Now, since I wasted my time figuring this out, I also decifered the instructions: basically the pool consists of a bunch of humans and "emulators" (programs). Each one is given a set of input files that they are supposed to transform into output files. Then the set of output files is run through a detector (human or machine?) that gives the participant some score. You win if your score is most like the humans' scores.
There's nothing I'd rather have for Christmas than Debian GNU/Solaris. By this, I mean Debian's look&feel with a Solaris kernel under the hood. Yes, I know Debian GNU/Linux supports the SPARC architecture, but I want the world-renowned performance of Sun's very own kernel plus the integration I expect from an OS + hardware vendor. Oh, and I want an enterprise-quality support contract.
Solaris, as an operating system, leaves something to be desired, both in the bundled applications and the ease of administration. Rather than cozy up to RPMs and port Gnome, I think you should just toss the baby out with the bathwater. Everyone knows that Debian is the best Linux distribution, and since they're already working on ports to Hurd and NetBSD your developers have some examples to study.
It would make me so happy, Scott. Please, pretty please?
PCs are just convenient examples in a Machine Organization class. You do not need to know where the parts are physically, but only logically. You do not need to know how they work but merely how they are used (leave the working to Computer Engineers).
I'm sorry you had such an applied Operating Systems course, hopefully you learned to think outside the box elsewhere.
Programming Language Concepts sounds okay, although I would prefer studying an existing language to creating a new one: God knows the Internet has enough toy languages that reinvent the square wheel.
I like your senior project.
Repeat after me: "CS does not equal programming." Computer Scientists do not all write code that will eventually be used by someone else. Perhaps you're confusing CS with Software Engineering?
God, imagine if every office building sold its night real estate to advertisers. It would be much easier than the CCC operation if the building were designed with central light control from the start, and with modern small floresents the wear would be insignificant. You sir, should have been shot before being able to come up with this idea.
Would you rather be a waitress or a construction worker? Teacher or an electrical engineer? Women are getting shafted at every level of our society, but personally I think it's their own damn fault.
Queen's University recently introduced a program in Biomedical Computing and has discovered a much better gender ratio of applicants than its regular Computing Science program. Obviously we believe this is due to the greater human involvement. Therefore: if you want women in CS, make it squishy!
Sorry to break it to you, but you can't really say most university students "belong" in their degree programs. Most students these days are in university to build character, get the prereqs for jobs or programs that require *some* bachelor degree (eg: law school), because their parents made them, or because it seems like the thing to do. As much as I'd like all of these people out of CS, I can't imagine English, Sociology, and History want to be even further diluted with slackers.
The worry is that if universities act more like businesses, they will stray from their academic mission, but on the contrary, it will give the serious students more opportunity for academia. We need to look at this cohort of customers and give them what they want and what society needs us to provide them: an education that makes them "educated". Trent is the only school I know of that shows any realisation of this in its CompSci Dept.: Trent has a whole class of courses called "Computer Studies", this includes the high-level IS courses SideshowBob advocates as well as popular philosophy courses on things like ethics and systems that are designed to make students think rather than teach them specific information.
I'd also like Software Engineering to be a seperate discipline, which leaves just enough serious students in CompSci that it can be folded back into Applied Mathematics.
If your CS program is teaching you how to muck around in a PC and customise a Linux kernel, you may be in for a surprise in grad school (unless you find an equally applied program). CS is about genetic algorithms and programming language design, it is not about particular hardware and operating systems. Mind you, I'd argue that HCI belongs in Software Engineering and Anthropology, if only it were so kind to stay the hell out of my curriculum.
Rather than going to his dinosaur-centric homepage, you're much better off learning about Dougal Dixon's works on Amazon. This reveals a book called The Future is Wild which uses computer graphics in a project much like After Man (and note that the co-author's last name is "Adams", perhaps fueling the original mistake). As well, we find that Man After Man was not only completed in 1990, it is now out-of-print. Plus you can pick up the companion book to the show The Wild World of the Future. And if you dig deep enough (hit #43), The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution. Amazing this Internet thing, isn't it?
Anyway, now that I'm done karma-whoring, allow me to discuss After Man:
I first discovered this book at my local library as a child, and it has since been taken out multiple times by each of my younger siblings. This is perhaps one of the great coffee-table books ever: even a single page is interesting, it is captivating no matter what your age or gender, and it's even educational! I can't think of a better textbook for introducing evolution to younger children. And it's even drawn and annotated in the style of Victorian zoologists. Perhaps my only complaint is all the boring birds: IIRC, only one of the flighted birds is physically unusual (it has feathers that extend its beak profile for catching insects).
Isn't part of the problem also that Canadian accounts are treated as foreign accounts and therefore not covered by some of PayPal's protections? I think a lot of the problem arises from the fact that PayPal isn't willing to set up country-specific bureaus like eBay or Yahoo! but wants to come up with an one-size-fits-all solution for the world. Obviously financial rules are going to be different in Canada compared to Carjackistan...
When buying expensive goods, you have to take opportunity cost into account. Say you buy some high-quality item and I buy the cheapest one I can find, if I have to buy a new one every 2.5 years and you have to buy a new one every 5 years, yours is not necessarily worth twice as much. Instead, the value of yours is dependent on what else I can do with my extra money. The simplest example is what if I invest it: after 2.5 years what percentage will I have to spend to replace my item? More complex examples are like the first purchase in NES Dragon Warrior: good armour, good weapon, or cheap both? (Now we all know that you should spend all your money on the weapon, because armour is for sissy bourgeois, but you get the idea...)
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They're not hypocrites, they're just smarter than your average middle-American Christian. If you're engaged in holy war, your diety would probably prefer you ignore some of the minor rules in order to win for them. A soldier should eat pork today if it means that none of their descendents will be forced to eat pork by the food services branch of the Great Satan.
Thank god that patents require full disclosure: it'll be nice to be told what the hell they're talking about in something other than marketing-speak FAQs... Seriously: they don't seem to have the consumer-side of the equation all fleshed out. Visa won't be too happy if I start charging micropayments to my card whether the merchant randomly gets the money or not. Are they going to be using the same probability trick for consumers? Are they going to be aggregating purchases? Are they going to use accounts like PayPal? Come on, Rivest, fess up!
Now I was certainly protected from "all that" all through highschool and well into university, however this has resulted in a new problem: I feel like my life is boring because I missed all the pointless and banal experiences. I have a friend who got married a year into university. Why? Because she had all the "experimenting" she'd need in highschool. Getting it out of her system allowed her to jump straight to adulthood. Whereas I'm floundering half-way...
Clearly, you're not doing enough drugs.
I will buy a console when I can use it to play a 16-player game of CounterStrike or Tribes using a mouse and keyboard the way god intended. I was really amazed at how good the controls were the first time I played Halo, until I realised that their innovation consisted of making a console game almost as playable as Quake I. And if I want to masturbate to *Hot* *Nude* *Plummers* I'll bring my NES out of retirement: I only play multiplayer games and although consoles are getting better they just aren't targetted at that market.
Despite how unhappy I am with the current state of consoles, I truly wish they could meet my needs. That way I could delete my Windows partition and put my hardware $ into SCSI RAID and other, more mature, penis enlargement purchases.
So if I want to read these things, what exactly do I have to do? The comics aren't in Amazon. DC's unnavigatable page seems to have nothing more than the Sneak Peak from months ago. Shouldn't Warren's site have a link to his baby?
I don't read comics, I don't know where to buy these things! Here I am, out on the Internet, money burning a hole in my pocket and nobody is willing to take it from me. :(
The Patriot Party's platform is naive and inconsistent. It feels like the work of one or a very few number of people rather than a party. Their platform has something every Canadian will like and something every Canadian will loathe.
Wait a sec, there are other parties in Canada?! Oh, you mean PQ. Whew, for a second there I thought we had a two-party system...
But in all seriousness, I always thought that the Westminister System had better checks&balances than the American System -- because if the leader of the government went crazy, the other MPs could easily throw him out. But lately I've realised that it's not that the US's checks&balances don't work, it's that most possible opponents worship the Govenor^H^H^H^H^H^H^HPresident.
When my alma matter was approached by Cisco and asked to become a training partner they told them to try the local college instead. Plugging together black boxes does not have academic merit.
I'd say public domain: society has put a lot of $ into your upbringing.
In order to copyright something, you have to have authored it or paid someone to author it. Since your DNA is a perfect blueprint for most of the other things you mention, the debate boils down to the authorship of DNA. I'd argue that DNA authors itself, but at the very least shouldn't your parents have more of a claim on it than yourself?
Aside: if I claimed to be God and therefore owner of all DNA, do you think there'd be a court case to prove that I wasn't?
Obviously I didn't read closely enough. Thanks to everyone who covered my err.
In the ICPC, the set of available languages is restricted because the participants are using secured computers (to keep them from getting on the Net and causing trouble on the LAN). You'd think it wouldn't be a problem if participants could submit a binary compiled at home. However the whole point of this contest is for Caltech to see what ideas everyone else has come up with -- so they want to make sure they can read your source code.
As someone who spends more time reading research papers than working with an actual Turing Test bot, I'd just like to point out that the academic community has abstracted the term "Turing Test" into something a little more useful:
Idealised, a Turing Test consists of a human and a program receiving a bitstream and sending a bitstream back. In most examples, this bitstream consists of text in a natural language and the input and output are expected to occur interactively. However it seems likely that intelligent aliens would fail this if they didn't know the language or could not respond at a speed acceptable to the judge. Therefore your traditional definition of "Turing Test" is seen to be arbitrary.
And no, citations are not available upon request.
The rules are written in a very obscure minimalist fashion, so it took me a while to figure this out but: the game has not been defined! Your program is to get an input file and process it in a manner similar to a human. Currently the website is lacking examples of human output. Therefore, from an Information Theory perspective, we know absolutely nothing about the game.
Now, since I wasted my time figuring this out, I also decifered the instructions: basically the pool consists of a bunch of humans and "emulators" (programs). Each one is given a set of input files that they are supposed to transform into output files. Then the set of output files is run through a detector (human or machine?) that gives the participant some score. You win if your score is most like the humans' scores.
Dear Scott:
There's nothing I'd rather have for Christmas than Debian GNU/Solaris. By this, I mean Debian's look&feel with a Solaris kernel under the hood. Yes, I know Debian GNU/Linux supports the SPARC architecture, but I want the world-renowned performance of Sun's very own kernel plus the integration I expect from an OS + hardware vendor. Oh, and I want an enterprise-quality support contract.
Solaris, as an operating system, leaves something to be desired, both in the bundled applications and the ease of administration. Rather than cozy up to RPMs and port Gnome, I think you should just toss the baby out with the bathwater. Everyone knows that Debian is the best Linux distribution, and since they're already working on ports to Hurd and NetBSD your developers have some examples to study.
It would make me so happy, Scott. Please, pretty please?
Repeat after me: "CS does not equal programming." Computer Scientists do not all write code that will eventually be used by someone else. Perhaps you're confusing CS with Software Engineering?
God, imagine if every office building sold its night real estate to advertisers. It would be much easier than the CCC operation if the building were designed with central light control from the start, and with modern small floresents the wear would be insignificant. You sir, should have been shot before being able to come up with this idea.
Would you rather be a waitress or a construction worker? Teacher or an electrical engineer? Women are getting shafted at every level of our society, but personally I think it's their own damn fault.
Queen's University recently introduced a program in Biomedical Computing and has discovered a much better gender ratio of applicants than its regular Computing Science program. Obviously we believe this is due to the greater human involvement. Therefore: if you want women in CS, make it squishy!
Sorry to break it to you, but you can't really say most university students "belong" in their degree programs. Most students these days are in university to build character, get the prereqs for jobs or programs that require *some* bachelor degree (eg: law school), because their parents made them, or because it seems like the thing to do. As much as I'd like all of these people out of CS, I can't imagine English, Sociology, and History want to be even further diluted with slackers.
The worry is that if universities act more like businesses, they will stray from their academic mission, but on the contrary, it will give the serious students more opportunity for academia. We need to look at this cohort of customers and give them what they want and what society needs us to provide them: an education that makes them "educated". Trent is the only school I know of that shows any realisation of this in its CompSci Dept.: Trent has a whole class of courses called "Computer Studies", this includes the high-level IS courses SideshowBob advocates as well as popular philosophy courses on things like ethics and systems that are designed to make students think rather than teach them specific information.
I'd also like Software Engineering to be a seperate discipline, which leaves just enough serious students in CompSci that it can be folded back into Applied Mathematics.
If your CS program is teaching you how to muck around in a PC and customise a Linux kernel, you may be in for a surprise in grad school (unless you find an equally applied program). CS is about genetic algorithms and programming language design, it is not about particular hardware and operating systems. Mind you, I'd argue that HCI belongs in Software Engineering and Anthropology, if only it were so kind to stay the hell out of my curriculum.
Rather than going to his dinosaur-centric homepage, you're much better off learning about Dougal Dixon's works on Amazon. This reveals a book called The Future is Wild which uses computer graphics in a project much like After Man (and note that the co-author's last name is "Adams", perhaps fueling the original mistake). As well, we find that Man After Man was not only completed in 1990, it is now out-of-print. Plus you can pick up the companion book to the show The Wild World of the Future. And if you dig deep enough (hit #43), The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution. Amazing this Internet thing, isn't it?
Anyway, now that I'm done karma-whoring, allow me to discuss After Man:
I first discovered this book at my local library as a child, and it has since been taken out multiple times by each of my younger siblings. This is perhaps one of the great coffee-table books ever: even a single page is interesting, it is captivating no matter what your age or gender, and it's even educational! I can't think of a better textbook for introducing evolution to younger children. And it's even drawn and annotated in the style of Victorian zoologists. Perhaps my only complaint is all the boring birds: IIRC, only one of the flighted birds is physically unusual (it has feathers that extend its beak profile for catching insects).
Isn't part of the problem also that Canadian accounts are treated as foreign accounts and therefore not covered by some of PayPal's protections? I think a lot of the problem arises from the fact that PayPal isn't willing to set up country-specific bureaus like eBay or Yahoo! but wants to come up with an one-size-fits-all solution for the world. Obviously financial rules are going to be different in Canada compared to Carjackistan...
When buying expensive goods, you have to take opportunity cost into account. Say you buy some high-quality item and I buy the cheapest one I can find, if I have to buy a new one every 2.5 years and you have to buy a new one every 5 years, yours is not necessarily worth twice as much. Instead, the value of yours is dependent on what else I can do with my extra money. The simplest example is what if I invest it: after 2.5 years what percentage will I have to spend to replace my item? More complex examples are like the first purchase in NES Dragon Warrior: good armour, good weapon, or cheap both? (Now we all know that you should spend all your money on the weapon, because armour is for sissy bourgeois, but you get the idea...)