The voters will automatically imply that your action of reducing costs will lead to lowered taxes and BAM!! you're elected.
I'm no grammar NAZI or anything, but occasionally I come across usage guides in my dictionary, and one that I've come across all the time is that you should never mix up "imply" and "infer". This seemed strange to me, since I'd never heard anyone use them 'wrong'. It seemed as weird to have that in a usage guide than, say, "Don't confuse "fly" with "throw" or something. You're the first one I've actually heard use the "alternate" (nonstandard) forms. Cognrats!
problems with contaminating other planets with bacteria and Earth-based life. Hello: we already douse all probes in Dial antibacterial soap first, to make sure we don't give any other planets weird fungi that we later claim were the first life found on other planets! (Sorry I don't have a non-cached link, the page seems to be down.)
That said, as for your: I'd rather send people there than have it sit in pristine condition Why? What's so good about having people there? I say go after the Earth-based problems, and don't do things like spend three percent of our government's money on a trillion-dollar program just to get humans in a place they aren't very suited for being in the first place. When we've got the luxury of having solved most Earth-based problems, then you go after the extraneous stuff like that. Until then, I'm happy if we just do information-gathering type things: for that, you DON'T need people anywhere but in their office-chairs, except for whoever actually has to slingshot the probes into space. (Or have things changed since then? I might be dating myself here....[in a strictly platonic way, of course.])
interesting data on the quantities of water in the Martian crust...
You know, doesn't this mean that all this other searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence is pretty counter-productive? If there's water right there on Mars, chances are there would be intelligent life there within a few billion years too. (It's the initial part of the thing that takes awhile...once you've got cells, the growth is like, exponential man.)
Instead, we're sending probes up there when we KNOW there's no intelligent life yet. It's like barging into the prenatal ward every few minutes while your wife's about to give birth to say "are you done yet?" Believe me, when she's done, you'll know!
At this rate, within the foreseeable future we'll have groped every planet capable of sustaining life with these stupid probes. Ever consider that under these conditions, intelligent life won't want to evolve? People like to be left in peace (that's why they get all fussy about the anal probes they constantly imagine aliens violating them with)...don't you think other would-be life might feel the same way?
Now what we need is some game that provides a playable veneer over an actual problem that benefits from human judgement Consider Everquest. I've never played it (would get way too addicted) but hear that people have jobs in it, such as making shirts or swords or whatever. Now, no real-world good comes from this time, because you're pretending to be putting physical work into a physical product.
Most slashdot users however spend most of their days doing various forms of information-processing. Replace "making shirts" with "writing a perl/python script to do x", perhaps you could find some way of doing that without even breaking the Middle Earth setting, and WHAMO, people's productivity skyrockets.
Intel did this in response to my post here[1] (on April 26th of last year!), in which I outlined just this kind of program, but mentioned "All this is very processor-intensive, but so far it's very straight-forward." So, of course, Intel releases it openly.:)))
>but for the average joe out there, who would
>want to pay for it? Not this joe. That's for sure
I would, and/am/, as soon as they reply with an address to send the check to. I serioulsy need this source of advertisement, for the reasons I outlined in my previous post. Think about it from the point of view from someone who watched/no TV/.
I don't know about you, but I sucked up probably several dozen dollars' worth of bandwidth through my company LAN downloading movie trailers from them. Kinda' sucks that they're just giving up now, not even setting up a subscription-based something or anything -- I don't watch TV but do see movies occasionally, and this is a majro blow to my movie-marketing exposure, which we all know is the main way we choose which movies to watch. If you want to show your support, contribute a dollar or something here[1] and maybe we can get them to give us/something/.
Maybe if they see a few thousand people show their support with a token gesture, they'll think about scrapping together a subscription-based something...
NOTE: Does anyone knows of a company that has something like Amazon's honor system but without the 15% commission?
...a thingumbob[1] that does hardware RAID-0 on two of these things.[2] Then it's perfect.
The fact is, I've a) become really really distrustful of all built-in hard-drives, after having like three or four of them fail (in two different home computers) within a two year period, two of them being "redundant" and failing at once, and not just the controller, and, what's more, with very clean power coming in. I just don't trust anything with moving parts anymore. Truth is, one gigabyte is more than enough for everything I need except media files, which don't need to be dynamically backed up (i.e. they only need one backup EVER, which is no-problem).
Do you know what REAL security is? It's not in having a thirteen-character password with alphanumerics for root...what good is that if your file-system (hmmmm? ext2?) isn't encrypted? Anyone can break into your computer, steal your hard-drive (bad enough), then, to add insult to injury, read the bits off your partition, reconstruct all your personal files, and take up a long-distance relationship with your former girlfriend. Ouch.
Anyway, real security isn't in having a long password: it's in having your hard-drive in your pocket when you leave your home. Plus, I think it would do us all good to have to constrain ourselves to a gigabyte...it would keep me from mindlessly copying huge directory structures to three or four places as version control, or a DVD that I'll only watch two or three times a month...wow, how useful that it's on my hard-drive? or all those CD images that I tell myself make it SO much more convenient to play these games that, really, I only get an opportunity to do a few times a month, and generally just be wasteful just because I "have the space"...it comes to bite you in the end, because there's no convenient way to do a backup. If you really need to copy whole CD's to hard-drive, do it on one mounted "spare" or "media" and keep it separate from your "real" (keychain USB) drive. Now if only linux could boot off USB as I hear a mac can....
[1] that's the official word, not "thingamajig", according to my dictionary.
[2] This is probably a ten-dollar piece of equipment. How hard can RAID-0 be? All you do is double every write and read request, and if you ever get a fail on any read or or write, start chirping like mad and somehow indicate which drive gave it to you. Of course, I'd hate to be the one writing the routine for what happens when the read of the two drives returns disparate bits...maybe you do a few more reads and if the drives stubbornly disagree about the state of the bit, ask the user, in the true linux fashion [whatever the equiviliant is to "Unable to read bit 4 of byte at F332D:2AAE4:F22A." with three buttons, one labelled one, one labelled zero, one labelled retry."] then ask him/her to replace whichever is the older one...
One word, and one word only: booting.
You don't know the joy of not having to work your way around windows NT's monopoly on the MBR, or not having to juggle two or more kernels (y'know, the new one you just compiled) on the same partition, y'know, with a little script that selects the previous one on the next bootup, so that if you're totally fucked up, you can just reboot and get back to the unfucked up state, etc, etc, until you've started booting your non-primary partition or non-primary kernel off of a floppy. It's the simplest thing in the world.
Arthur Klebanoff, CEO of RosettaBooks, said, "We are delighted to take our marketing relationship with Adobe and our distribution services relationship with Reciprocal to the next level. RosettaBooks prides itself on being ePublishing leader for quality content, innovative marketing, and critically-acclaimed titles. This first of its kind offering of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None is
just the beginning of a brave new world of literature and technology."
Good God, I hope the man was joking, and not just Freudian Slipping us an advance warning....
link1Link2.
...The question is not whether he broke the law, he did...
Where have you been for the past forever? Dyema' broke no law, just as you're breaking no law by getting drunk off your
ass in your own home, provided you're allowed to purchase alcohol in your area, even though there are countries where being
intoxicated past a certain point is illegal. A 19 year old in France who buys a beer is breaking no law, and neither is the
man or woman selling it to him. Sure, over here the legal drinking age is 21, and over here we have a DMCA also. But Dyema' didn't
break the DMCA while he was over here. He did actions in russia, previous to his ever having come to the U.S., that had
he done them here, would have been illegal. The speech he gave is protected in a specific exception clause in the DMCA,
which allows unlimited discussion of cryptography, as long as its application is not sold to break specific copyrighted
software.
However unethical the DMCA may be, Dyema' did not break it.
However unethical underage drinking laws may be, then my 19 year old friend Ja'nos did not break them when he was over here mixing
drinks, even if he had drunk alcohol in
Hungary at the age of 18 before he ever came here! (Which is the legal drinking age over there).
Dyema did not break Russian or U.S. laws while in Russia.
Dyema did not break Russian or U.S. laws while in America.
Therefore, he is not a good test case to establish a precedent against the DMCA, which is an unethical law.
A good precedent would be someone who actually broke it.
Duh.
Where have you been?
Search Skylarov on the slashdot front page and read the +5 insightful comments on any one of the many resulting slashdot stories.
We've established this thoroughly. How can you still think that Skylarov broke the DMCA?
I assume an underage person is allowed to mix drinks, because I know someone so employed.
Dudes, you're over-reacting. "We hope to eventually release the source code for 1.0 under the GPL," says Patry.
Nothing to worry about: after all, he's one of us, remember?
But I don't undestand something.
How can a closed-source work EVER be the next point-oh of a GPL'd framework? Wouldn't it mean rewriting it so that NONE of the code in the closed-source version has the "tainted" (virus-like) GPL code? Right now I have the whole source code (of an earlier version) on my hard-drive. Will the new version use none of this while it is closed-source?
Or is the current version not GPL'd at all, but only available on the whim of the author. That's not what seems to be the case. Does anyone know how this can be legal?
Robert.
Oh, and another thing, off-topic (since you're not going to see this because the story is too down the front page):
I found this cute message in the digits of pi 573034-573040 (that is, the sequence "...9422983..."[this link doesn't count the "3" before the decimal point.]). Of note is that 573034 is nearly 2^19th, the difference being exactly 32 less than 2*29*29*29: /* Function: find the secret text encoded in the 573034th - 573040th digits
of pi. (Where "14159" would be digits 1st-5th,
since pi starts 3."14159"...)
*/
#include//allow C++ standard input and output.
int main()
{
int num = 9422983;//define "num" as an integer equal to 9422983.
cout << "The following text's in the 573034th -573040th digits of pi:\n";
cout << "\"\n";//output " and newline.
int temp;//define temp as an integer.
while (num > 0) {// until we haven't processed the whole number, do:
temp = num & 0xF;//1 make temp the right-most 4 bits of the number
num >>= 4;//2 remove the right-most 4 bits from the number
cout << char('a' + temp);//3 output removed bits as an offset from 'A'
if(!(temp%2)) cout << " ";//4 if the offset is even, add a space.
}
cout << "\n\"\n";//output newline, ", and newline.
return 0;//ANSI standard return value on successful end.
}
dude and dude above you: I totally missed that part of the article! I thought it was like the previous slashdot article had been. Just a really massive (but conventional) display. Sorry.
"A 20-node Linux PC cluster powers the display wall, with each node consisting of a dual processor, 550 MHz HP Kayak machine equipped with a GeForce2 graphics accelerator card".
Why? Wouldn't the computers work just as well with no display card period, booting off of a network card that images them, afterward using remote tools only? And even if it DOES have a graphics card, why a GeForce2? I can't imagine that it's actually used. Can anyone see how it would be....?
"Although it is already the largest display wall in an academic setting, the wall is only half complete." Um...how do you build half a display? Unless of course it's one of those wussy grids of normal displays, wtih two inches of dead space between each node on it. Anyone know?
You had cells! I suppose next you'll tell me you had DNA, too, and could even so much as store what the hell you were for more than a generation. The luxury! Why in my day, wasn't nothing but primordial goop far as the eye could see! Wanted to store information? Good luck doing it before the Brownian motion buffetted you out of existence!
DNA! A nice cell membrane to live in! That was the stuff we used to dream about...when we weren't worrying about having our existence swashed out from under us. You celled organisms don't know the meaning of data. You don't appreciate the luxury you have. DNA! My God, what we wouldn't have given for the mere thought of it. goes off muttering to himself.
I could understand it if they said "We can take a sample of speech, for instance, an actor reading a script in a dead celebrity's role, and then digitize it into an inflection and reproduce the same inflection in a different voice."
But this isn't what they're saying: "The software [...] turns printed text into synthesized speech"
Which prays the question "How does the software know what inflection to associate with the printed text?"
I know that the same words can sound radically different. Take the phrase "one, two, or three" in each of the following contexts (not that none begins or ends a sentence):
"I can't imagine why ANYONE would want four subnets in their own house. I mean one, two, or three I can imagine, but four??"
Please press one, two, or three at the tone."
Okay, so it was in the early morning before 4. But can you be at all more specific? Do you have any idea whether it was at around one, two, or three AM?
Settings of four or five are considered dangerous, while settings of one, two, or three are considered to be within acceptible parameters.
I think that if you record yourself saying the above phrases, then crop out just the highlighted phrase, you'll find a different inflection in each one. Without understanding what a sentence says, or, more precisely, what the person means who is saying the sentence, the fact that you can produce any inflection won't help you determine which one is right.
I found Liz and Ike playing scrabble while very drunk, and putting on all sorts of none-sensical words. I even saw "Zisis's", using a piece of rice for an apostrophe! (Zisis is a greek convenience store near us).
I told Liz and Ike that I thought they were crazy. "Heheh, yeah we're crazy", Ike says, "but each of us only put one word down that broke the rules in a major way."
"Which words were those?"
" 'Zisis's' and 'Windology' "
Since Liz was the crazier of the two, I ventured a guess, "Liz's is Zisis's, isn't it?"
"Nope. Liz's is 'windology'. 'Zisis's' is mine." Ike replied proudly.
Anyway, the point of this exercise is to show that a human reader reading this can make the phrase "Liz's is Zisis's, isn't it" sound natural, but I bet any speech-synthesizing software that just follows rules will make it sound incomprehensible. That's because speech is more than reading things by set rules -- it is reading things to reflect your internal parsing of the sentence.
Not to mention the fact that actors can read the same line in a thousand different ways to show a thousand different "interpretations" (states of the character who speaks it, or parsings of the sentence). How will this software produce them, if it only has the same text to parse?
Either someone manually will give it an inflection, or it needs (or would need before truly being able to make good its claim) a human oral reading to "mimic", where it can use the synthesized voice to sound the same inflection in a different voice. Now that would, as the old mis-translated Coke slogan goes, "bring your dead relatives back alive."
Mere dancing with power brooms? Ha, now celebrities will be telling you about how easy to use AOL is. So easy to use, no wonder it's number 1 -- even among the dead!
Gee, I can hardly wait.
(It was intended to sound like "coca cola" when its Chinese characters pronounced).
a) You're right. quite a bit of processing.
b) I've already figured out a way around it! As a spammer, have your spam engine combine your sentences in arbitrary order. What about sentence matching? Set it so it adds removable phrases, I repeat you will never be charged, with modifyers like "seriously", and "we're not kidding", and even "very", "extremely", etc.
Your "Spam Engine Markup for Interception-Neutralization and -Avoidance Language"
(Seminal!) can have special tags telling you where you can put filler phrases. At the end, you can include a lot of random words from a news site or whatever, to throw off word-frequency analysis.
The idea is that it's a lot easier for a spammer to change things around in random order than it is for a mail server to order them back again for comparison. So, plan no-go:(
and, to make your point compreHENSIBLE (you're just not expressing yourself, dobbs), the html tags would differ from mailing to mailing. Thus, the seen text is the same, but the unseen text is different enough to mess any crc up. Simple solution: exclude all punctuation and html tags. Make all lowercase. Split the results on whitespace. Foreach(word), spell-check and accept the first suggestion of whatever spell-checker you're using (as long is it's deterministic, heh). Replace each word with a deterministic thesuarus's suggestion for what the most common word is that is sometimes its synonym. (This way simple thesaurusing can't mess us up). It doesn't matter if the 'whittled-down' version we're now working with doesn't make sense in English--as long as we can always get to it deterministically.
Now discard all articles and very common words (ones that don't convey information and can't be used to form whole sentences. Don't eliminate any verbs). You're left with the bare essence of what the emai conveys, and anything that's not in this can't be in the original. Then crc this one. Heheh, try to get around that, spammer.
Er, actually, one thing I notice is that I didn't address "random" spacing. My system wouldn't realize that "random" is a word there. Solution: don't split on white space, remove all white-space and then use a dictionary that lets you see how close something is to being a word, then add letters until you're now farther from being a word than you originally word, and pop that off as a separate word. You can look ahead slightly, so that you don't pop "nation" just because it's more of a word than "nationa" is, if the letters afterward are "lity".
let me rephrase these two paragraphs, for those of us who might be confused by them:
A Telstra spokesman confirmed today that a container ship at the focus of investigations behind the Southern Cross Cable cut yesterday also appeared to have caught the 25-year-old Tasman 1 cable linking Sydney with Auckland in New Zealand.
The 2Mbps link, which until Sunday was still used as a backup route across the Tasman Sea, has been decomissioned as repair costs outweigh the benefits of maintaining the link.
As previously reported, the "Southern Cross Cable" was cut yesterday, unintentionally.
However, another cable, a 25-year-old one linking Sydney, Australia with Auckland, New Zealand was also cut. It was a "Tasman 1" type cable.
The ship that is at the focus of authorities' investigations for the first cutting is apparently responsible for this second cutting also.
This is according to a Telstra spokesperson.
This second cut link was a 2Mbps link. It was still in use until it was accidentally cut, but only as a backup route. It goes across the Tasman Sea.
Since being cut, it was decided that the line would be not be repaired, since the benefits of maintaining the link aren't worth the high repair costs.
It is now being "posthumously" decomissioned with a celebration party.
Slashdot Mirror
Best Troll EVER. I post at +1 in your honor. I just about threw up.
I personally loved the karate brawl with the dairy cow
You would, Katz, you would...
Hi,
I'm writing in response to your sig. I may be interested in a trade, if you're up for it.
What do you think?
The voters will automatically imply that your action of reducing costs will lead to lowered taxes and BAM!! you're elected.
I'm no grammar NAZI or anything, but occasionally I come across usage guides in my dictionary, and one that I've come across all the time is that you should never mix up "imply" and "infer". This seemed strange to me, since I'd never heard anyone use them 'wrong'. It seemed as weird to have that in a usage guide than, say, "Don't confuse "fly" with "throw" or something. You're the first one I've actually heard use the "alternate" (nonstandard) forms. Cognrats!
problems with contaminating other planets with bacteria and Earth-based life.
Hello: we already douse all probes in Dial antibacterial soap first, to make sure we don't give any other planets weird fungi that we later claim were the first life found on other planets! (Sorry I don't have a non-cached link, the page seems to be down.)
That said, as for your: I'd rather send people there than have it sit in pristine condition
Why? What's so good about having people there? I say go after the Earth-based problems, and don't do things like spend three percent of our government's money on a trillion-dollar program just to get humans in a place they aren't very suited for being in the first place. When we've got the luxury of having solved most Earth-based problems, then you go after the extraneous stuff like that. Until then, I'm happy if we just do information-gathering type things: for that, you DON'T need people anywhere but in their office-chairs, except for whoever actually has to slingshot the probes into space. (Or have things changed since then? I might be dating myself here....[in a strictly platonic way, of course.])
interesting data on the quantities of water in the Martian crust...
You know, doesn't this mean that all this other searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence is pretty counter-productive? If there's water right there on Mars, chances are there would be intelligent life there within a few billion years too. (It's the initial part of the thing that takes awhile...once you've got cells, the growth is like, exponential man.)
Instead, we're sending probes up there when we KNOW there's no intelligent life yet. It's like barging into the prenatal ward every few minutes while your wife's about to give birth to say "are you done yet?" Believe me, when she's done, you'll know!
At this rate, within the foreseeable future we'll have groped every planet capable of sustaining life with these stupid probes. Ever consider that under these conditions, intelligent life won't want to evolve? People like to be left in peace (that's why they get all fussy about the anal probes they constantly imagine aliens violating them with)...don't you think other would-be life might feel the same way?
This is not off-topic.
Now what we need is some game that provides a playable veneer over an actual problem that benefits from human judgement
Consider Everquest. I've never played it (would get way too addicted) but hear that people have jobs in it, such as making shirts or swords or whatever. Now, no real-world good comes from this time, because you're pretending to be putting physical work into a physical product.
Most slashdot users however spend most of their days doing various forms of information-processing. Replace "making shirts" with "writing a perl/python script to do x", perhaps you could find some way of doing that without even breaking the Middle Earth setting, and WHAMO, people's productivity skyrockets.
Intel did this in response to my post here[1] (on April 26th of last year!), in which I outlined just this kind of program, but mentioned "All this is very processor-intensive, but so far it's very straight-forward." So, of course, Intel releases it openly. :)))
6 32 31
[1]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11896&cid=2
>but for the average joe out there, who would /am/, as soon as they reply with an address to send the check to. I serioulsy need this source of advertisement, for the reasons I outlined in my previous post. Think about it from the point of view from someone who watched /no TV/.
>want to pay for it? Not this joe. That's for sure
I would, and
I don't know about you, but I sucked up probably several dozen dollars' worth of bandwidth through my company LAN downloading movie trailers from them. Kinda' sucks that they're just giving up now, not even setting up a subscription-based something or anything -- I don't watch TV but do see movies occasionally, and this is a majro blow to my movie-marketing exposure, which we all know is the main way we choose which movies to watch. If you want to show your support, contribute a dollar or something /something/.
a ge /P32T4TFRI0LWCA
here[1] and maybe we can get them to give us
Maybe if they see a few thousand people show their support with a token gesture, they'll think about scrapping together a subscription-based something...
NOTE: Does anyone knows of a company that has something like Amazon's honor system but without the 15% commission?
[1]http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/my-pay-p
...a thingumbob[1] that does hardware RAID-0 on two of these things.[2] Then it's perfect.
The fact is, I've a) become really really distrustful of all built-in hard-drives, after having like three or four of them fail (in two different home computers) within a two year period, two of them being "redundant" and failing at once, and not just the controller, and, what's more, with very clean power coming in. I just don't trust anything with moving parts anymore. Truth is, one gigabyte is more than enough for everything I need except media files, which don't need to be dynamically backed up (i.e. they only need one backup EVER, which is no-problem).
Do you know what REAL security is? It's not in having a thirteen-character password with alphanumerics for root...what good is that if your file-system (hmmmm? ext2?) isn't encrypted? Anyone can break into your computer, steal your hard-drive (bad enough), then, to add insult to injury, read the bits off your partition, reconstruct all your personal files, and take up a long-distance relationship with your former girlfriend. Ouch.
Anyway, real security isn't in having a long password: it's in having your hard-drive in your pocket when you leave your home. Plus, I think it would do us all good to have to constrain ourselves to a gigabyte...it would keep me from mindlessly copying huge directory structures to three or four places as version control, or a DVD that I'll only watch two or three times a month...wow, how useful that it's on my hard-drive? or all those CD images that I tell myself make it SO much more convenient to play these games that, really, I only get an opportunity to do a few times a month, and generally just be wasteful just because I "have the space"...it comes to bite you in the end, because there's no convenient way to do a backup. If you really need to copy whole CD's to hard-drive, do it on one mounted "spare" or "media" and keep it separate from your "real" (keychain USB) drive. Now if only linux could boot off USB as I hear a mac can....
[1] that's the official word, not "thingamajig", according to my dictionary.
[2] This is probably a ten-dollar piece of equipment. How hard can RAID-0 be? All you do is double every write and read request, and if you ever get a fail on any read or or write, start chirping like mad and somehow indicate which drive gave it to you. Of course, I'd hate to be the one writing the routine for what happens when the read of the two drives returns disparate bits...maybe you do a few more reads and if the drives stubbornly disagree about the state of the bit, ask the user, in the true linux fashion [whatever the equiviliant is to "Unable to read bit 4 of byte at F332D:2AAE4:F22A." with three buttons, one labelled one, one labelled zero, one labelled retry."] then ask him/her to replace whichever is the older one...
Your sig quotes a hungarian title. Are you?
One word, and one word only: booting.
You don't know the joy of not having to work your way around windows NT's monopoly on the MBR, or not having to juggle two or more kernels (y'know, the new one you just compiled) on the same partition, y'know, with a little script that selects the previous one on the next bootup, so that if you're totally fucked up, you can just reboot and get back to the unfucked up state, etc, etc, until you've started booting your non-primary partition or non-primary kernel off of a floppy. It's the simplest thing in the world.
Good God, I hope the man was joking, and not just Freudian Slipping us an advance warning.... link1 Link2.
...The question is not whether he broke the law, he did...
Where have you been for the past forever? Dyema' broke no law, just as you're breaking no law by getting drunk off your ass in your own home, provided you're allowed to purchase alcohol in your area, even though there are countries where being intoxicated past a certain point is illegal. A 19 year old in France who buys a beer is breaking no law, and neither is the man or woman selling it to him. Sure, over here the legal drinking age is 21, and over here we have a DMCA also. But Dyema' didn't break the DMCA while he was over here. He did actions in russia, previous to his ever having come to the U.S., that had he done them here, would have been illegal. The speech he gave is protected in a specific exception clause in the DMCA, which allows unlimited discussion of cryptography, as long as its application is not sold to break specific copyrighted software.
However unethical the DMCA may be, Dyema' did not break it.
However unethical underage drinking laws may be, then my 19 year old friend Ja'nos did not break them when he was over here mixing drinks, even if he had drunk alcohol in Hungary at the age of 18 before he ever came here! (Which is the legal drinking age over there).
Dyema did not break Russian or U.S. laws while in Russia. Dyema did not break Russian or U.S. laws while in America. Therefore, he is not a good test case to establish a precedent against the DMCA, which is an unethical law. A good precedent would be someone who actually broke it.
Duh.
Where have you been?
Search Skylarov on the slashdot front page and read the +5 insightful comments on any one of the many resulting slashdot stories. We've established this thoroughly. How can you still think that Skylarov broke the DMCA?
I assume an underage person is allowed to mix drinks, because I know someone so employed.
he still won't be allowed to leave Northern California...
Which earnestly solicits the question "may he code???"
Dudes, you're over-reacting.
/* Function: find the secret text encoded in the 573034th - 573040th digits //allow C++ standard input and output. //define "num" as an integer equal to 9422983. //output " and newline. //define temp as an integer. // until we haven't processed the whole number, do: //1 make temp the right-most 4 bits of the number //2 remove the right-most 4 bits from the number //3 output removed bits as an offset from 'A' //4 if the offset is even, add a space. //output newline, ", and newline. //ANSI standard return value on successful end.
"We hope to eventually release the source code for 1.0 under the GPL," says Patry.
Nothing to worry about: after all, he's one of us, remember?
But I don't undestand something.
How can a closed-source work EVER be the next point-oh of a GPL'd framework? Wouldn't it mean rewriting it so that NONE of the code in the closed-source version has the "tainted" (virus-like) GPL code? Right now I have the whole source code (of an earlier version) on my hard-drive. Will the new version use none of this while it is closed-source?
Or is the current version not GPL'd at all, but only available on the whim of the author. That's not what seems to be the case. Does anyone know how this can be legal?
Robert.
Oh, and another thing, off-topic (since you're not going to see this because the story is too down the front page): I found this cute message in the digits of pi 573034-573040 (that is, the sequence "...9422983..."[this link doesn't count the "3" before the decimal point.]). Of note is that 573034 is nearly 2^19th, the difference being exactly 32 less than 2*29*29*29:
of pi. (Where "14159" would be digits 1st-5th,
since pi starts 3."14159"...)
*/
#include
int main()
{
int num = 9422983;
cout << "The following text's in the 573034th -573040th digits of pi:\n";
cout << "\"\n";
int temp;
while (num > 0) {
temp = num & 0xF;
num >>= 4;
cout << char('a' + temp);
if(!(temp%2)) cout << " ";
}
cout << "\n\"\n";
return 0;
}
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comment 61
Sorry.
dude and dude above you: I totally missed that part of the article! I thought it was like the previous slashdot article had been. Just a really massive (but conventional) display. Sorry.
Why? Wouldn't the computers work just as well with no display card period, booting off of a network card that images them, afterward using remote tools only? And even if it DOES have a graphics card, why a GeForce2? I can't imagine that it's actually used. Can anyone see how it would be....?
Um...how do you build half a display? Unless of course it's one of those wussy grids of normal displays, wtih two inches of dead space between each node on it. Anyone know?
DNA! A nice cell membrane to live in! That was the stuff we used to dream about...when we weren't worrying about having our existence swashed out from under us. You celled organisms don't know the meaning of data. You don't appreciate the luxury you have. DNA! My God, what we wouldn't have given for the mere thought of it.
goes off muttering to himself.
--
But this isn't what they're saying:
"The software [...] turns printed text into synthesized speech"
Which prays the question "How does the software know what inflection to associate with the printed text?"
I know that the same words can sound radically different. Take the phrase "one, two, or three" in each of the following contexts (not that none begins or ends a sentence):
-
"I can't imagine why ANYONE would want four subnets in their own house. I mean one, two, or three I can imagine, but four??"
- Please press one, two, or three at the tone."
- Okay, so it was in the early morning before 4. But can you be at all more specific? Do you have any idea whether it was at around one, two, or three AM?
- Settings of four or five are considered dangerous, while settings of one, two, or three are considered to be within acceptible parameters.
I think that if you record yourself saying the above phrases, then crop out just the highlighted phrase, you'll find a different inflection in each one. Without understanding what a sentence says, or, more precisely, what the person means who is saying the sentence, the fact that you can produce any inflection won't help you determine which one is right.I found Liz and Ike playing scrabble while very drunk, and putting on all sorts of none-sensical words. I even saw "Zisis's", using a piece of rice for an apostrophe! (Zisis is a greek convenience store near us).
I told Liz and Ike that I thought they were crazy. "Heheh, yeah we're crazy", Ike says, "but each of us only put one word down that broke the rules in a major way."
"Which words were those?"
" 'Zisis's' and 'Windology' "
Since Liz was the crazier of the two, I ventured a guess, "Liz's is Zisis's, isn't it?"
"Nope. Liz's is 'windology'. 'Zisis's' is mine." Ike replied proudly.
Anyway, the point of this exercise is to show that a human reader reading this can make the phrase "Liz's is Zisis's, isn't it" sound natural, but I bet any speech-synthesizing software that just follows rules will make it sound incomprehensible. That's because speech is more than reading things by set rules -- it is reading things to reflect your internal parsing of the sentence.
Not to mention the fact that actors can read the same line in a thousand different ways to show a thousand different "interpretations" (states of the character who speaks it, or parsings of the sentence). How will this software produce them, if it only has the same text to parse?
Either someone manually will give it an inflection, or it needs (or would need before truly being able to make good its claim) a human oral reading to "mimic", where it can use the synthesized voice to sound the same inflection in a different voice. Now that would, as the old mis-translated Coke slogan goes, "bring your dead relatives back alive."
Mere dancing with power brooms? Ha, now celebrities will be telling you about how easy to use AOL is. So easy to use, no wonder it's number 1 -- even among the dead!
Gee, I can hardly wait.
(It was intended to sound like "coca cola" when its Chinese characters pronounced).
--
a) You're right. quite a bit of processing.
:(
b) I've already figured out a way around it! As a spammer, have your spam engine combine your sentences in arbitrary order. What about sentence matching? Set it so it adds removable phrases, I repeat you will never be charged, with modifyers like "seriously", and "we're not kidding", and even "very", "extremely", etc.
Your "Spam Engine Markup for Interception-Neutralization and -Avoidance Language" (Seminal!) can have special tags telling you where you can put filler phrases. At the end, you can include a lot of random words from a news site or whatever, to throw off word-frequency analysis.
The idea is that it's a lot easier for a spammer to change things around in random order than it is for a mail server to order them back again for comparison. So, plan no-go
--
and, to make your point compreHENSIBLE (you're just not expressing yourself, dobbs), the html tags would differ from mailing to mailing. Thus, the seen text is the same, but the unseen text is different enough to mess any crc up. Simple solution: exclude all punctuation and html tags. Make all lowercase. Split the results on whitespace. Foreach(word), spell-check and accept the first suggestion of whatever spell-checker you're using (as long is it's deterministic, heh). Replace each word with a deterministic thesuarus's suggestion for what the most common word is that is sometimes its synonym. (This way simple thesaurusing can't mess us up). It doesn't matter if the 'whittled-down' version we're now working with doesn't make sense in English--as long as we can always get to it deterministically.
Now discard all articles and very common words (ones that don't convey information and can't be used to form whole sentences. Don't eliminate any verbs). You're left with the bare essence of what the emai conveys, and anything that's not in this can't be in the original. Then crc this one. Heheh, try to get around that, spammer.
Er, actually, one thing I notice is that I didn't address "random" spacing. My system wouldn't realize that "random" is a word there. Solution: don't split on white space, remove all white-space and then use a dictionary that lets you see how close something is to being a word, then add letters until you're now farther from being a word than you originally word, and pop that off as a separate word. You can look ahead slightly, so that you don't pop "nation" just because it's more of a word than "nationa" is, if the letters afterward are "lity".
Sound good?
--
let me rephrase these two paragraphs, for those of us who might be confused by them:
A Telstra spokesman confirmed today that a container ship at the focus of investigations behind the Southern Cross Cable cut yesterday also appeared to have caught the 25-year-old Tasman 1 cable linking Sydney with Auckland in New Zealand.
The 2Mbps link, which until Sunday was still used as a backup route across the Tasman Sea, has been decomissioned as repair costs outweigh the benefits of maintaining the link.
As previously reported, the "Southern Cross Cable" was cut yesterday, unintentionally.
However, another cable, a 25-year-old one linking Sydney, Australia with Auckland, New Zealand was also cut. It was a "Tasman 1" type cable.
The ship that is at the focus of authorities' investigations for the first cutting is apparently responsible for this second cutting also.
This is according to a Telstra spokesperson.
This second cut link was a 2Mbps link. It was still in use until it was accidentally cut, but only as a backup route. It goes across the Tasman Sea.
Since being cut, it was decided that the line would be not be repaired, since the benefits of maintaining the link aren't worth the high repair costs.
It is now being "posthumously" decomissioned with a celebration party.
Phew!
--