The programmer probably didn't know how to insert that funny looking o character in "Soren" using vi, so just left it out...
Another reason to use a GUI editor! You can just find the character on the web and paste it in.
When I first started doing Perl development, I quickly ran into a problem...which I worked around by adding this comment to all my scripts:
# My keyboard doesn't have a tilde, so I'm
# putting one here to cut-and-paste: ~
But after reading the article above, I'm wondering if that comment should have credited www.perl.com, which is where I found the original character...
That would probably be hard to implement with Lego pieces, though.
I think it would be easier to repaint the cube than to try to peel off the stickers. (It would be even easier if we relax the restriction that the sides have to be six different colors.)
Hey, this could be an OK deal. Let's say the distributor's advanced customer profiling pinpoints the movies I hate so much that they would have to pay me to watch. (Should be easy, since most current movies fall into this category.)
All I need to do is order up a boatload of these, then I can kick back and pull in some serious coinage from these bozos.
What a great idea! Now all I need to do is come up with a business model...
...
OK, got it! I'll index movies according to product placement. Suppose you drink a lot of Coca-Cola: I'll find a movie you'll hate which has a prominent Coca-Cola placement, and then get Pepsi to pay you to watch it. (In hopes that you'll be so annoyed that you'll switch brands.) And then I can take a cut of the proceeds.
Yes! I'm going to be rich! Please send venture capital to the E-mail address above...
I see that no one has mentioned the great Archimedes Plutonium (formerly Ludwig Von Plutonium). I'd better remedy the problem:
He was one of the great early Usenet crackpots; he used to frequent sci.physics and sci.math. He'd solved all of the great unsolved mathematical problems, and determined the ultimate nature of reality, and he always seemed a little upset that people were questioning his findings. (He came across as a real-life version of Ignatius Reilly from "A Confederacy of Dunces".)
So, basically the argument of Ford/General Motors is that people visiting FuckGeneralMotors.com will think that this link is actually sponsored by Ford themselves?
That's Ford's argument; GM isn't involved in this.
And, yes, some people will really believe that Ford set up a anti-GM link with a swear-word in it, and they'll refuse to buy Ford products on the basis of that.
(Basically, those are the same people who were boycotting Proctor & Gamble, because of the rumors that the CEO was a member of the Church of Satan.)
25 years ago, I spent many hours debugging a PL/I program to discover that some code I inherited relied on arcane initialization rules and got it wrong. How nice to know that untold generations of programmers will now have the same experience thanks to constructs like "my int ($pre, $in, $post) are constant = (0..2);" I was never a Perl fan and I'm even less of one now. But out of curiosity, what possible justification is there for such a construct
That's for defining an "enumerated type". I like the Pascal syntax best:
type state = {PRE, IN, POST};
That emphasizes the point that we only want to know what state we're in; we don't care which integer is associated with which state.
That's two weeks worth of IRC logs from a compromised machine. A typical day seems to involve hanging out on the #warez channels and begging for someone to give you some credit card numbers.
I don't see why you can't use Monte Carlo methods to estimate Omega. Generate sufficient number of random inputs, assume that a program halts if and only if it halts by some time T, and you can get an increasingly good approximation to omega by increasing T and increasing the number of random inputs.
The problem is in coming up with the random inputs...there are infinitely many Turing machines, so there's no way of getting a representative sample. (You could look at a random sample of machines with length N, but not at a truly random sample of all possible machines.)
I've developed a lossless compression program that can shrink _any_ file.
The basic algorithm is that it expresses the contents of the file as a long hexadecimal number, and then decrements that number by 1.
I delete leading zeros, so by repeatedly compressing, I eventually wind up with the empty file.
To restore the file, just reverse the algorithm. You have to run the decompression program once for every time you ran the compressor. (I usually write that number down on a piece of paper so I don't forget it.)
For instance, a bicycle factory(bad example) is producing bikes. Over time it mutates and starts producing bikes with engine blocks stuck to the side. A few million years later it starts making bikes with engine blocks and gas tanks. (It would have gone out of business long ago, nature is very conservative with energy). A few million later it gets a piston... etc.. etc..
The point is that basic logic can show us that some of the evolutionary leaps required cannot take place unless many, many components change at the exact instant.
Here's the problem with Behe's argument: A stone arch is "irreducibly complex"...if you remove a single block, then the whole structure collapses. But that doesn't prove that all the stones were put in place at exactly the same instant.
If you build the arch with a scaffold, then the arch-plus-scaffold combo will _never_ be irreducibly complex. (You can always disassemble it a piece at a time without disturbing any of the remaining pieces.) Then when you're done, you can remove the scaffold, and leave the arch in place as an irreducably complex structure.
Evolution isn't just a continual "building-up" of new features. Evolution is also the elimination of features that used to be vital, but later on became redundant.
So Behe is basically making an argument from ignorance. He's saying, "This feature is in an irreducibly complex state. And I can't imagine any 'scaffolding' that would have allowed it to evolve gradually, therefore no such scaffolding can possibly exist, therefore the feature was somehow created all at once."
Its interesting that we, as slashdotters, value freedom so highly, yet we reject God. Well, I have yet to see an atheistic society that respects individual anything. They shouldn't! Given that worldview, only the success of the species matters.
Evolution isn't a moral code. It explains how species change over time, but it doesn't ascribe any kind of moral value to those changes.
Many atheists subscribe to a moral code called "humanism" which tells them to respect individual rights. That doesn't have anything to do with evolution, though...
Then the outputs of those accellerometers were fed as "pain" signals to a recurrent neural network that controlled some other vibrators.
I don't think that's ethically defensible.
Would it be possible to reconfigure the neural net so that it would expect a constant input level, which we could define as "pleasure"?
And then the accelerometers could be set up so that they couldn't reduce the input down to anything less than zero.
You'd get the same results, and the neural net would never have to experience anything worse than a vague dissatisfaction.
Thanks in advance!
Re:Mouse, yes... chord keyboard, no?
on
The First Mouse
·
· Score: 1
The mouse-keyboard problem was solved a while back. I remember an aritlcle in an old issue of _Byte_ magazine. (I think it was an April issue from the early 1980's.)
The solution is simply to mount the keyboard on the back of the mouse. (The hardware prototype in the article was built around a canister-style vacuum cleaner; it sent user input to the CPU using coded patterns of air bursts.) There was also a smaller version with just a hex keypad for those homebrew systems that you had to program in machine language.
I think the brand name was "Electrodent". I'm not sure why it never caught on.
This experiment's been going on for a while now.
There are several sites distributing DeCSS.zip, which contains the DeCSS.pl Perl script.
As the name implies, this script is used to remove Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) from HTML documents.
Not sure if they've gotten any threats yet...
As to "what sort of kinks will we be throwing into the evolutionary process", that's a good question: Evolution produces animals that are well-adapted to their environment; if an animal can't adapt, it becomes extinct.
So humans have become a key part of the environment, and species become extinct if they can't adapt to us.
The good news for Tasmanian Tigers is that they're cute. (I guess. I'm not sure what they look like, but they sound cute from their name.) Being perceived as cute has positive survival value, so I expect that they'll become more common in the future.
If we were talking about some sort of boring rain forest lizard that bites people and hisses, then obviously nobody would want to clone it. So it would stay extinct.
So, what's the future of Life on Earth? I predict that an a few million years, wild animals will be considerably fluffier, they'll have huge eyes and tastefully attractive color schemes, and they'll enjoy being hand-fed and petted.
My only regret is that I probably won't live that long.
This reminds me of something Animeigo came up with a while back...they were thinking about porting a video series to laserdisk, and set up a "pledge" system.
Basically, you pledged to buy the set at a given price. If they didn't get enough pledges by the deadline, then the set wouldn't be produced. Otherwise, they'd press the disks, and you'd be (morally) obligated to buy them. The actual price would depend on the total number of pledges; as more people signed up, the price per set went down.
That seems a lot more workable than King's plan. The creator is guaranteed a minimum number of sales, and the consumer doesn't have to worry about donating money and getting nothing in return.
Animeigo has some similar programs going on today with DVD's, at: http://animeigo.com/products/~survey.t
(If you visit, please sign up for "Yawara!" The series sub-title is "A Fashionable Judo Girl", and how can anyone not like a series with a sub-title like that? Thanks!!!)
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Another reason to use a GUI editor! You can just find the character on the web and paste it in. When I first started doing Perl development, I quickly ran into a problem...which I worked around by adding this comment to all my scripts:
# My keyboard doesn't have a tilde, so I'm
# putting one here to cut-and-paste: ~
But after reading the article above, I'm wondering if that comment should have credited www.perl.com, which is where I found the original character...
That would probably be hard to implement with Lego pieces, though.
I think it would be easier to repaint the cube than to try to peel off the stickers. (It would be even easier if we relax the restriction that the sides have to be six different colors.)
What a great idea! Now all I need to do is come up with a business model...
OK, got it! I'll index movies according to product placement. Suppose you drink a lot of Coca-Cola: I'll find a movie you'll hate which has a prominent Coca-Cola placement, and then get Pepsi to pay you to watch it. (In hopes that you'll be so annoyed that you'll switch brands.) And then I can take a cut of the proceeds.
Yes! I'm going to be rich! Please send venture capital to the E-mail address above...
I see that no one has mentioned the great Archimedes Plutonium (formerly Ludwig Von Plutonium). I'd better remedy the problem:
He was one of the great early Usenet crackpots; he used to frequent sci.physics and sci.math. He'd solved all of the great unsolved mathematical problems, and determined the ultimate nature of reality, and he always seemed a little upset that people were questioning his findings. (He came across as a real-life version of Ignatius Reilly from "A Confederacy of Dunces".)
His collected works are at: http://www.newphys.se/elektromagnum/physics/Ludwig Plutonium/.
This link (http://www.newphys.se/elektromagnum/physics/Ludwi gPlutonium/File226.html) points to his proof that the Universe/God is a gigantic Plutonium atom.
This link (http://www.newphys.se/elektromagnum/physics/Ludwi gPlutonium/File216.html
contains a hymn he wrote, which would look really good on any sort of Plutonium memorial:
Carbon in me, Carbon of Plutonium
Fill me with life anew
That I may love what thou dost love
And do what thou superdetermines me to do
Oxygen, Oxygen of Plutonium
Make me wholly thine
Take me to the Nucleus
Nucleosynthesis divine
I grew up in a small rural community, and every bit of mischief I got into would be reported to my parents via numerous gossip-related channels.
It's about time that these spoiled city kids start suffering the way I had to suffer.
That's Ford's argument; GM isn't involved in this.
And, yes, some people will really believe that Ford set up a anti-GM link with a swear-word in it, and they'll refuse to buy Ford products on the basis of that.
(Basically, those are the same people who were boycotting Proctor & Gamble, because of the rumors that the CEO was a member of the Church of Satan.)
That's for defining an "enumerated type". I like the Pascal syntax best:
type state = {PRE, IN, POST};
That emphasizes the point that we only want to know what state we're in; we don't care which integer is associated with which state.
That's two weeks worth of IRC logs from a compromised machine. A typical day seems to involve hanging out on the #warez channels and begging for someone to give you some credit card numbers.
The problem is in coming up with the random inputs...there are infinitely many Turing machines, so there's no way of getting a representative sample. (You could look at a random sample of machines with length N, but not at a truly random sample of all possible machines.)
The basic algorithm is that it expresses the contents of the file as a long hexadecimal number, and then decrements that number by 1. I delete leading zeros, so by repeatedly compressing, I eventually wind up with the empty file.
To restore the file, just reverse the algorithm. You have to run the decompression program once for every time you ran the compressor. (I usually write that number down on a piece of paper so I don't forget it.)
The Make Money Fast Hall of Humilation is still pretty good. It hasn't been updated in the past few years, though.
According to the CNN article, that's one of the museum's "most eye-popping" entries.
It's a text file from an old BBS. They didn't even bother to add HTML formatting. I mean, I could do better than that, and I'm an ignoramus!
The point is that basic logic can show us that some of the evolutionary leaps required cannot take place unless many, many components change at the exact instant.
Here's the problem with Behe's argument: A stone arch is "irreducibly complex"...if you remove a single block, then the whole structure collapses. But that doesn't prove that all the stones were put in place at exactly the same instant.
If you build the arch with a scaffold, then the arch-plus-scaffold combo will _never_ be irreducibly complex. (You can always disassemble it a piece at a time without disturbing any of the remaining pieces.) Then when you're done, you can remove the scaffold, and leave the arch in place as an irreducably complex structure.
Evolution isn't just a continual "building-up" of new features. Evolution is also the elimination of features that used to be vital, but later on became redundant.
So Behe is basically making an argument from ignorance. He's saying, "This feature is in an irreducibly complex state. And I can't imagine any 'scaffolding' that would have allowed it to evolve gradually, therefore no such scaffolding can possibly exist, therefore the feature was somehow created all at once."
Its interesting that we, as slashdotters, value freedom so highly, yet we reject God. Well, I have yet to see an atheistic society that respects individual anything. They shouldn't! Given that worldview, only the success of the species matters.
Evolution isn't a moral code. It explains how species change over time, but it doesn't ascribe any kind of moral value to those changes.
Many atheists subscribe to a moral code called "humanism" which tells them to respect individual rights. That doesn't have anything to do with evolution, though...
I don't think that's ethically defensible.
Would it be possible to reconfigure the neural net so that it would expect a constant input level, which we could define as "pleasure"? And then the accelerometers could be set up so that they couldn't reduce the input down to anything less than zero.
You'd get the same results, and the neural net would never have to experience anything worse than a vague dissatisfaction.
Thanks in advance!
The mouse-keyboard problem was solved a while back. I remember an aritlcle in an old issue of _Byte_ magazine. (I think it was an April issue from the early 1980's.)
The solution is simply to mount the keyboard on the back of the mouse. (The hardware prototype in the article was built around a canister-style vacuum cleaner; it sent user input to the CPU using coded patterns of air bursts.) There was also a smaller version with just a hex keypad for those homebrew systems that you had to program in machine language.
I think the brand name was "Electrodent". I'm not sure why it never caught on.
This experiment's been going on for a while now. There are several sites distributing DeCSS.zip, which contains the DeCSS.pl Perl script. As the name implies, this script is used to remove Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) from HTML documents. Not sure if they've gotten any threats yet...
As to "what sort of kinks will we be throwing into the evolutionary process", that's a good question: Evolution produces animals that are well-adapted to their environment; if an animal can't adapt, it becomes extinct.
So humans have become a key part of the environment, and species become extinct if they can't adapt to us.
The good news for Tasmanian Tigers is that they're cute. (I guess. I'm not sure what they look like, but they sound cute from their name.) Being perceived as cute has positive survival value, so I expect that they'll become more common in the future.
If we were talking about some sort of boring rain forest lizard that bites people and hisses, then obviously nobody would want to clone it. So it would stay extinct.
So, what's the future of Life on Earth? I predict that an a few million years, wild animals will be considerably fluffier, they'll have huge eyes and tastefully attractive color schemes, and they'll enjoy being hand-fed and petted.
My only regret is that I probably won't live that long.
Basically, you pledged to buy the set at a given price. If they didn't get enough pledges by the deadline, then the set wouldn't be produced. Otherwise, they'd press the disks, and you'd be (morally) obligated to buy them. The actual price would depend on the total number of pledges; as more people signed up, the price per set went down.
That seems a lot more workable than King's plan. The creator is guaranteed a minimum number of sales, and the consumer doesn't have to worry about donating money and getting nothing in return.
Animeigo has some similar programs going on today with DVD's, at: http://animeigo.com/products/~survey.t
(If you visit, please sign up for "Yawara!" The series sub-title is "A Fashionable Judo Girl", and how can anyone not like a series with a sub-title like that? Thanks!!!)