Having seen both the Robot Olympics and Robot Wars, on the BBC, made by the same company, I came to the opinion that AI robots built with routines in advance are tedious and dull. Robots being piloted by little (or big) kids that want to smash up the opponent robot are great fun, especially when they knacker their opponent and go after the house robots twice their size and twenty times their cost... and win.
Even with 'advanced AI', I'd bet that most robots would spend matches searching the arena for their opponent in a weaving search pattern. Perhaps you've been playing those FPS arena games if you think AI robots would be good, because I can tell AI is rubbish in the real world.
While I agree with most of your sentiments, my real dislike of the Carnivore (or RIP in the UK) situation is this:
Citizens don't mind that their government agents are able to obtain wiretap warrants on specific people, because the warrants have to come from a particularly high authority and there must be a valid reason for obtaining each and every individual wiretap. The privellege of being able to legally listen in on someone's conversations is balanced against the level of evidence required to be submitted in advance, and also the accountability for your actions if you wiretap for malicious reasons rather than investigating crime.
However, with these new systems, the government agents now have full unguarded access to most but not all of the country's email. There is full anonymity for the agents involved, and there is no accountability. They do not need to give any reasoning to obtain the authority to spy on people, because they've installed near-blanket surveillance on their nation.
Onto the topic of an open-source versus secret carnivore, I'd like to see that there really was a system of authority in operation, ie only the named person's email is captured. As for criminals reading the code to get out of the surveillance, firstly the FBI would be using this to _monitor_ someone, and if it all goes quiet they would investigate why, and if it's via manipulations to get out of the monitored stream, they could trace through that with the ISP and close any hole. Secondly, simply not using email or using an ISP without Carnivore will get you out of trouble, as will end-to-end encrypted IPv6 streams when they hit mainstream, much more effective than reading thorough source code.
Carnivore is the stuff of Orwellian futures, and I just want to see some declaration of accountability to the public here, not demonizing of Internet users as drug dealing terrorist paedophiles.
RSA is easily 'crackable', if you have the private key. The reason RSA works as encryption is that it uses two seperate keys, one to encode and one to decode, and you can't get the decoding key from the encoding key. It's worth as an encryption method is that it covers a plainly visible plaintext with a completely secret key.
This has nothing to do with SDMI, which _will_ require that a decryption key is on the media and/or on the media player. If it's a
necessary part of a software player, I just have to trace that player's execution to get both the method and a key that works with that method.
Lazy North America listeners who need Taggert subtitles because stretching to understand a native English speaker with a Glasgwegian accent is too hard?
"Hey pal, glescas pure dead brilliant, so it is, by the way. Seez a shwalley o yer buckie."
Translation for human beings: "Sir, Glasgow is a wonderful city. Please offer me some of your drink."
Sadly, the west coast crew dominate the pool of 'Scottish' actors, and do the nation a disservice by giving the impression we're all like that. And it's Taggart, by the way.
The "only terrorists, drug dealers and paedophiles are on the 'net" argument is complete rubbish, and a lame excuse for legitimate total invasion of privacy by Government snoops. The trouble is that this pathetic attempt to pull the wool over everyone's eyes has succeeded.
What next? "All criminals and deviants have skin
anomolies, so we need the right to strip people naked at any time, provided we have reasonable suspicion... of course, all hot sexy chicks are very suspicious and will definately need to strip off all the time."
Re:And about time too...
on
Qt Going GPL
·
· Score: 1
And if it weren't for "ideological squabbles",
what's the betting that Qt would have a
"freeware" license for a binary library and
header file? And Linux, for that matter? No,
one of the most important drives in people
(IMHO) are their ideologies.
As RMS keeps saying, freedom is important, and now
we're seeing people percieving the value
of freedom. OK, the issue of the QPL vs GNU GPL license compatibility is completely obnoxious legalese, useless for much more than flaming,
but it's nice to see TrollTech making a deep
sacrifice and jumping into the frying pan for
the sake of public concern. It's OSS
showbiz, the irony here is TrollTech is one
of the few "Open Source" bandwagon jumpers that
had a free (speech) product in the first place.
Anyone with a long enough memory - http://slashdot.org/yro/00/05/20/045253.shtml - will remember when
Oxford University pulled a student's DeCSS page, only to discover it wasn't offering
the real DeCSS anyway. It seems lawyers have
some special powers over normal human beings,
allowing them to trample on the rights of any
they want.
it beggars belief that [x86] still persists
in a largely unchanged form.
It certainly does - especially as the x86 is
just a few steps up from the Z80 architecture.
It does explain why Spectrum emulators are
so fast:).
But, seriously, the yoke of backwards compatibility is a what will destroy the PC
in the long run. PCs can't get anything like
1GHz performance out of 1GHz CPUs, because
they're actually hardware emulators of the
pathetic 1970's 80x86 instruction set, which
is still here today because few people
wanted to pay for their apps to
be ported every time a faster CPU came out.
PCs are also cripple by having to use a
single-tasking 16 bit BIOS at heart, but
can you imagine what it would cost to update
this on the millions of PCs out there?
Unless Billy G decrees it, then it's not going
to happen.
I hope that one day we will _have_ to give up
the entire PC software architecture and only access it through emulation. Then people might
see the real fruit of these hardware innovations.
Plus, 90% of the instructions are completely useless, so ignore them, and you got a reduced instruction set computer right away.
That's how Motorola's last-ditch 68060 works.
Some normal instructions cause an unimplemented
instruction exception, and have to be emulated
purely in software. This makes them something
like 400 cycle instructions, so 'optimised
for 68060' simply means all the emulated
instructions are avoided.
Why doesn't this review tell us at least one thing that computers can't do. Is this a P-time vs NP-time maths book? Is it a social problems book? What? Just tell us!
Slashdot Mirror
...Jonathan Pearce does the commentary.
Having seen both the Robot Olympics and Robot Wars, on the BBC, made by the same company, I came to the opinion that AI robots built with routines in advance are tedious and dull. Robots being piloted by little (or big) kids that want to smash up the opponent robot are great fun, especially when they knacker their opponent and go after the house robots twice their size and twenty times their cost... and win.
Even with 'advanced AI', I'd bet that most robots would spend matches searching the arena for their opponent in a weaving search pattern. Perhaps you've been playing those FPS arena games if you think AI robots would be good, because I can tell AI is rubbish in the real world.
While I agree with most of your sentiments, my real dislike of the Carnivore (or RIP in the UK) situation is this:
Citizens don't mind that their government agents are able to obtain wiretap warrants on specific people, because the warrants have to come from a particularly high authority and there must be a valid reason for obtaining each and every individual wiretap. The privellege of being able to legally listen in on someone's conversations is balanced against the level of evidence required to be submitted in advance, and also the accountability for your actions if you wiretap for malicious reasons rather than investigating crime.
However, with these new systems, the government agents now have full unguarded access to most but not all of the country's email. There is full anonymity for the agents involved, and there is no accountability. They do not need to give any reasoning to obtain the authority to spy on people, because they've installed near-blanket surveillance on their nation.
Onto the topic of an open-source versus secret carnivore, I'd like to see that there really was a system of authority in operation, ie only the named person's email is captured. As for criminals reading the code to get out of the surveillance, firstly the FBI would be using this to _monitor_ someone, and if it all goes quiet they would investigate why, and if it's via manipulations to get out of the monitored stream, they could trace through that with the ISP and close any hole. Secondly, simply not using email or using an ISP without Carnivore will get you out of trouble, as will end-to-end encrypted IPv6 streams when they hit mainstream, much more effective than reading thorough source code.
Carnivore is the stuff of Orwellian futures, and I just want to see some declaration of accountability to the public here, not demonizing of Internet users as drug dealing terrorist paedophiles.
RSA is easily 'crackable', if you have the private key. The reason RSA works as encryption is that it uses two seperate keys, one to encode and one to decode, and you can't get the decoding key from the encoding key. It's worth as an encryption method is that it covers a plainly visible plaintext with a completely secret key.
This has nothing to do with SDMI, which _will_ require that a decryption key is on the media and/or on the media player. If it's a necessary part of a software player, I just have to trace that player's execution to get both the method and a key that works with that method.
Lazy North America listeners who need Taggert subtitles because stretching to understand a native English speaker with a Glasgwegian accent is too hard?
"Hey pal, glescas pure dead brilliant, so it is, by the way. Seez a shwalley o yer buckie."
Translation for human beings: "Sir, Glasgow is a wonderful city. Please offer me some of your drink."
Sadly, the west coast crew dominate the pool of 'Scottish' actors, and do the nation a disservice by giving the impression we're all like that. And it's Taggart, by the way.
Good! They can give it all back to Hasbro! See the History of Pacman to Quake II.
You must be a troll.
The "only terrorists, drug dealers and paedophiles are on the 'net" argument is complete rubbish, and a lame excuse for legitimate total invasion of privacy by Government snoops. The trouble is that this pathetic attempt to pull the wool over everyone's eyes has succeeded.
What next? "All criminals and deviants have skin anomolies, so we need the right to strip people naked at any time, provided we have reasonable suspicion... of course, all hot sexy chicks are very suspicious and will definately need to strip off all the time."
And if it weren't for "ideological squabbles", what's the betting that Qt would have a "freeware" license for a binary library and header file? And Linux, for that matter? No, one of the most important drives in people (IMHO) are their ideologies.
As RMS keeps saying, freedom is important, and now we're seeing people percieving the value of freedom. OK, the issue of the QPL vs GNU GPL license compatibility is completely obnoxious legalese, useless for much more than flaming, but it's nice to see TrollTech making a deep sacrifice and jumping into the frying pan for the sake of public concern. It's OSS showbiz, the irony here is TrollTech is one of the few "Open Source" bandwagon jumpers that had a free (speech) product in the first place.
Anyone with a long enough memory - http://slashdot.org/yro/00/05/20/045253.shtml - will remember when Oxford University pulled a student's DeCSS page, only to discover it wasn't offering the real DeCSS anyway. It seems lawyers have some special powers over normal human beings, allowing them to trample on the rights of any they want.
it beggars belief that [x86] still persists in a largely unchanged form.
:).
It certainly does - especially as the x86 is just a few steps up from the Z80 architecture. It does explain why Spectrum emulators are so fast
But, seriously, the yoke of backwards compatibility is a what will destroy the PC in the long run. PCs can't get anything like 1GHz performance out of 1GHz CPUs, because they're actually hardware emulators of the pathetic 1970's 80x86 instruction set, which is still here today because few people wanted to pay for their apps to be ported every time a faster CPU came out. PCs are also cripple by having to use a single-tasking 16 bit BIOS at heart, but can you imagine what it would cost to update this on the millions of PCs out there? Unless Billy G decrees it, then it's not going to happen.
I hope that one day we will _have_ to give up the entire PC software architecture and only access it through emulation. Then people might see the real fruit of these hardware innovations.
Plus, 90% of the instructions are completely useless, so ignore them, and you got a reduced instruction set computer right away.
That's how Motorola's last-ditch 68060 works. Some normal instructions cause an unimplemented instruction exception, and have to be emulated purely in software. This makes them something like 400 cycle instructions, so 'optimised for 68060' simply means all the emulated instructions are avoided.
The second article says "built using Intel's StrongARM technology". Surely they mean Advanced RISC Machines Ltd's StrongARM technology, which Intel did nothing but pay some money for.
That OS be Acorn's RiscOS. Anyone remember mode 22, for the visually impaired?
Why doesn't this review tell us at least one thing that computers can't do. Is this a P-time vs NP-time maths book? Is it a social problems book? What? Just tell us!