According to UK law, yes. I've posted it elsewhere, but effectively anyone who writes for a "publication" is allowed under UK law to not reveal the source of facts that they acquire for that publication. Unless a court orders otherwise, which is the case here, so nobody would have any protection in this situation.
Yeah, the UK is the most primitive EU state in this regard.
Actually, I'm informed that most journalists believe France to be the worst EU state for freedom of press.
England, France and some other countries have very unpleasant things, such as colonialism, in their histories, and it would be so much easier to forgive them for this if they put their current affairs in order in some way.
I can't think of any EU state other than Belgium that doesn't have a colonialist, imperialist or otherwise expansionist past. Europe had a very violent middle-ages.
Set up a proper legal system which guarantees the same results to everyone for the same actions
The only possible such system is one in which actions either always succeed (i.e. a police state) or always fail (i.e. anarchy). Any other system recognises that justice is subjective and leaves the eventual decision up to people, and as nobody is infallible sometimes decisions are made in the opposite way to the way they should go.
created electoral systems in which multiple parties can truly succeed,
Based on the evidence that a significant number of seets in the House of Commons are now held by Liberal Democrats, it seems clear to me that it is possible for 3 parties to succeed in the UK.
But as the UK loses its security council seat to the EU and moves its army into EU control, we'll start civilizing them.
These things are many, many years away. Don't count your chickens 'til they're hatched.
> some of ours isn't even owned by McDonalds and Microsoft
No, it's owned by Rupert "Bloody" Murdoch, instead.
Although we do have some good laws that are supposed to protect journalists from this kind of behaviour, it does not extend to preventing the seizure of the server.
Section 10 of the 1981 Contempt of Court Act states: "No court may require a person to disclose, nor is any person guilty of contempt of court for refusing to disclose, the source of information contained in a publication for which he is responsible unless it is established to the satisfaction of the court that it is necessary in the interests of justice or national security or for the prevention of disorder or crime."
If a court was satisfied that the information was necessary in the interests of justice, they have a right to demand it.
I hear this argument a lot, and you're right - it would work... but here's the thing - If you put a pentium I computer with a 2 gig hd or something up in front of an entire lab for internet access, I would wonder about the reliability. What I mean is, at work here I was doing something similar - but when the non-rendundant power supply in the 1995 based computer died, my entire part of the office lost net access, which is bad.
My experience in this: I've been using a 1995 PC (I suspect similar to yours) for this very purpose for about 6 years. I've had just one PSU failure and one HDD failure over this time, each requiring about 2 hours to fix (I had spare parts on hand).
4 Hours downtime in 6 years is pretty good, you know? That's over 99.99% uptime!
A spare HDD and PSU cost almost nothing. Nothing if you have a friend with an old machine he doesn't need any more.
It will NOT do. A software firewall is not a replacement for a hardware firewall.
1. The article poster suggested that if it was compatible with the OS he used, he'd be happy with Kerio (a software firewall).
2. If all you care about is inbound packet filtering (i.e. you don't care about stopping outbound attacks after you've been infected), then software firewalls perform pretty close to hardware firewalls in most circumstances.
Get off your high horse. For most people's purposes, Windows Firewall is adequate.
I've been thinking for a while that we need some innovation in game AI. It's the one area that really hasn't progressed very much lately. Sure we've got a bit more processor time to throw at it, but that doesn't really achieve that much.
New approaches are needed, and I think machine learning is the way to do it.
Also note that most machine learning algorithms require lots of floating point arithmetic. I'd gladly sacrifice one of my pixel rendering pipelines to it in order to get better gameplay./me has been fragged by a dumb bot on his own team one too many times.
Computers are becomming faster all the time, certanly SOMEDAY chess will be solved. (Unless of course civilization is destroyed first)
I don't believe so. Unless some way of circumventing the laws of thermodynamics is found, there is a theoretical limit on the maximum amount of information that can be processed within our universe, which has been calculated to a figure not entirely dissimilar to the order of the tree of all possible chess games.
This calculation makes a few assumptions that seem likely to hold out. The only way around it would be a quantum solution, and chess doesn't seem like the kind of problem that quantum computers can solve.
Brute forcing does not work with go, you have on the order of 381 possibilities each move. 381^x gets very big very quickly.
That was the same argument used with chess. There are on average about 30 possible moves in a chess position. 30^x gets big quickly enough that you can't just build the tree and hope. You have to build it selectively and use heuristics to decide what's worth investigating and what isn't.
If go is to fall, similar (but more effective) heuristics will need to be found for it. I'm not familiar enough with the game to know how easy this will be.
Neither here nor there. Unless it is your claim that DNA machines which ingest oreos and reproduce can be conscious but silicon chips encased in a cuboidal box cannot.
That's not necessary: all that is necessary is to claim that this particular computer is not. And as the algorithms it uses to play chess are all known and understood by its engineers, it is likely they would know if it was conscious, and that being such a great achievement, would have announced it by now.;)
Go is not practically solvable by throwing computing power at it, mainly because there aren't atoms enough in the observable universe to construct the computers to do the job.
The same is true for chess, which has about 10^40 possible positions, which is I believe beyond the theoretical limit of calculability which has been posted on slashdot before.
A technique that can help a player to beat these engines is to play with a strategy that keeps the most pieces on the board, reducing the depth to which that search will reach.
I also believe that playing with reduced time limits also favours human players, as it increases the amount of intuition involved in assessing situations.
if most or all of the grandmasters belive that the outcome is a draw then I'd believe that they are probably right
The community is split. The fashion of the mid-late 20th century was to think that it was a draw. Opinion is now swinging towards the "perfect game" being a win for white.
Unfortunately, it's likely that no definitive proof will ever be produced, as the problem space is simply too large to be calculated effectively, and no provably correct shortcut has yet been found (despite much effort).
Tell that to my bosses. Except for one server which we don't even own, all of our servers (about 10) are RAID "backed up". One of these days is gonna be really fun.
Yep. I've had a RAID array die because I lost a second disk before I had a chance to swap the first one out.
If you must use RAID as a replacement for backups, make sure your discs are from different manufacturers. Then you aren't prey to manufacturing defects.
Do you have evidence that backs that up, or is it just a "that's the way it ought to work" assertion?/me is currently using DVD-R for long term archival and DVD+RW for short term incremental backups!:)
On the other hand, long term storage of tape is quite tricky. It needs to be kept in carefully arranged conditions, and has a limited shelf life that you need to keep an eye on and make a copy when it is approaching.
It's not a lot different from optical discs in this regard.
The same's true of hard disks, as well. I've had disks fail after not using them for a while; ten years seems to be about average. Even in a RAID setup if you don't notice the disks failing you'll probably have a few of them fail before you put in replacements, at which point you might have lost your data.
Look up the NIST study about it. Interesting reading.
If you're talking about the one that was linked in the summary, it specifically notes that it's talking about media that are exposed to bad storage conditions: specifically fluctuating temperatures and substantial UV exposure.
Keep your discs in a light-proof metal box in a place with a reasonably steady temperature and they'll last a *lot* longer.
It seems to me that an HD sitting on a shelf would probably last longer than a DVD or CD,
I think you're wrong. My experience has been that the average HDD lasts about 10 years. Now, I didn't have a CD writer in 1995, but I did in 97, and *all* of the discs that I wrote back then are still readable (except a few I've scratch through misuse).
My suspicion is that the reported shelf life of CDR/DVDR of about 50-100 years isn't reliably achievable, but I'm pretty confident 20-30 is, if you look after the discs.
It's a sentence fragment. Put into a complete sentence, it would read "[Another company doing this was] Mercedes-Benz before [they], fielding complaints, put on the brakes."
I agree it's badly written, but it does just about make sense if you look at it hard enough.:)
Read the comment again: it isn't his subcontractors that are the problem, it's Commission Junctions. It's *their* responsibility to ensure that *their* subcontractors are following the rules that are laid down is his company's contract with them. Chances are, he doesn't even have access to find out who the subcontractors are, so couldn't find out what they're doing even if he wanted to. Which also prevents this from being willful ignorance, I believe (in response to another poster).
You also seem to have little experience of the advertising industry. Advertising is a seller's market: buyers (other than the few who are really powerful) cannot dictate conditions on the sellers, because there are no sellers with good enough placements who are willing to budge on their own conditions.
No, it isn't. I've used many pieces of software that were supported by advertisements. Most of them did no harm to my computer (a few installed software that was so badly written it made my computer very unstable and therefore had to be removed, but that is the worst that happened).
It is unfortunate that the actions of a minority number of adware programs have brought the entire field into disrepute, but that's what has happened.
Slashdot Mirror
According to UK law, yes. I've posted it elsewhere, but effectively anyone who writes for a "publication" is allowed under UK law to not reveal the source of facts that they acquire for that publication. Unless a court orders otherwise, which is the case here, so nobody would have any protection in this situation.
Yeah, the UK is the most primitive EU state in this regard.
Actually, I'm informed that most journalists believe France to be the worst EU state for freedom of press.
England, France and some other countries have very unpleasant things, such as colonialism, in their histories, and it would be so much easier to forgive them for this if they put their current affairs in order in some way.
I can't think of any EU state other than Belgium that doesn't have a colonialist, imperialist or otherwise expansionist past. Europe had a very violent middle-ages.
Set up a proper legal system which guarantees the same results to everyone for the same actions
The only possible such system is one in which actions either always succeed (i.e. a police state) or always fail (i.e. anarchy). Any other system recognises that justice is subjective and leaves the eventual decision up to people, and as nobody is infallible sometimes decisions are made in the opposite way to the way they should go.
created electoral systems in which multiple parties can truly succeed,
Based on the evidence that a significant number of seets in the House of Commons are now held by Liberal Democrats, it seems clear to me that it is possible for 3 parties to succeed in the UK.
But as the UK loses its security council seat to the EU and moves its army into EU control, we'll start civilizing them.
These things are many, many years away. Don't count your chickens 'til they're hatched.
Would that be the constitution that several countries have rejected already, and is very unlikely to be ratified?
I dare you to name one single American journalist who has been imprisoned merely for what he/she has said or written.
News on the front page, just from today.
> some of ours isn't even owned by McDonalds and Microsoft
No, it's owned by Rupert "Bloody" Murdoch, instead.
Although we do have some good laws that are supposed to protect journalists from this kind of behaviour, it does not extend to preventing the seizure of the server.
Section 10 of the 1981 Contempt of Court Act states: "No court may require a person to disclose, nor is any person guilty of contempt of court for refusing to disclose, the source of information contained in a publication for which he is responsible unless it is established to the satisfaction of the court that it is necessary in the interests of justice or national security or for the prevention of disorder or crime."
If a court was satisfied that the information was necessary in the interests of justice, they have a right to demand it.
I hear this argument a lot, and you're right - it would work... but here's the thing - If you put a pentium I computer with a 2 gig hd or something up in front of an entire lab for internet access, I would wonder about the reliability. What I mean is, at work here I was doing something similar - but when the non-rendundant power supply in the 1995 based computer died, my entire part of the office lost net access, which is bad.
My experience in this: I've been using a 1995 PC (I suspect similar to yours) for this very purpose for about 6 years. I've had just one PSU failure and one HDD failure over this time, each requiring about 2 hours to fix (I had spare parts on hand).
4 Hours downtime in 6 years is pretty good, you know? That's over 99.99% uptime!
A spare HDD and PSU cost almost nothing. Nothing if you have a friend with an old machine he doesn't need any more.
It will NOT do. A software firewall is not a replacement for a hardware firewall.
1. The article poster suggested that if it was compatible with the OS he used, he'd be happy with Kerio (a software firewall).
2. If all you care about is inbound packet filtering (i.e. you don't care about stopping outbound attacks after you've been infected), then software firewalls perform pretty close to hardware firewalls in most circumstances.
Get off your high horse. For most people's purposes, Windows Firewall is adequate.
I've been thinking for a while that we need some innovation in game AI. It's the one area that really hasn't progressed very much lately. Sure we've got a bit more processor time to throw at it, but that doesn't really achieve that much.
/me has been fragged by a dumb bot on his own team one too many times.
New approaches are needed, and I think machine learning is the way to do it.
Also note that most machine learning algorithms require lots of floating point arithmetic. I'd gladly sacrifice one of my pixel rendering pipelines to it in order to get better gameplay.
Nearly every day I look at my clock and notice it's 13:37. What's going on? ;)
, it's not like the windows users can run your .rpm packages either.
:)
Err, yes we can. And if they only contained documents, that would even be a useful capability!
Computers are becomming faster all the time, certanly SOMEDAY chess will be solved. (Unless of course civilization is destroyed first)
I don't believe so. Unless some way of circumventing the laws of thermodynamics is found, there is a theoretical limit on the maximum amount of information that can be processed within our universe, which has been calculated to a figure not entirely dissimilar to the order of the tree of all possible chess games.
This calculation makes a few assumptions that seem likely to hold out. The only way around it would be a quantum solution, and chess doesn't seem like the kind of problem that quantum computers can solve.
Brute forcing does not work with go, you have on the order of 381 possibilities each move. 381^x gets very big very quickly.
That was the same argument used with chess. There are on average about 30 possible moves in a chess position. 30^x gets big quickly enough that you can't just build the tree and hope. You have to build it selectively and use heuristics to decide what's worth investigating and what isn't.
If go is to fall, similar (but more effective) heuristics will need to be found for it. I'm not familiar enough with the game to know how easy this will be.
Neither here nor there. Unless it is your claim that DNA machines which ingest oreos and reproduce can be conscious but silicon chips encased in a cuboidal box cannot.
;)
That's not necessary: all that is necessary is to claim that this particular computer is not. And as the algorithms it uses to play chess are all known and understood by its engineers, it is likely they would know if it was conscious, and that being such a great achievement, would have announced it by now.
Go is not practically solvable by throwing computing power at it, mainly because there aren't atoms enough in the observable universe to construct the computers to do the job.
The same is true for chess, which has about 10^40 possible positions, which is I believe beyond the theoretical limit of calculability which has been posted on slashdot before.
A technique that can help a player to beat these engines is to play with a strategy that keeps the most pieces on the board, reducing the depth to which that search will reach.
I also believe that playing with reduced time limits also favours human players, as it increases the amount of intuition involved in assessing situations.
if most or all of the grandmasters belive that the outcome is a draw then I'd believe that they are probably right
The community is split. The fashion of the mid-late 20th century was to think that it was a draw. Opinion is now swinging towards the "perfect game" being a win for white.
Unfortunately, it's likely that no definitive proof will ever be produced, as the problem space is simply too large to be calculated effectively, and no provably correct shortcut has yet been found (despite much effort).
Tell that to my bosses.
Except for one server which we don't even own, all of our servers (about 10) are RAID "backed up".
One of these days is gonna be really fun.
Yep. I've had a RAID array die because I lost a second disk before I had a chance to swap the first one out.
If you must use RAID as a replacement for backups, make sure your discs are from different manufacturers. Then you aren't prey to manufacturing defects.
Do you have evidence that backs that up, or is it just a "that's the way it ought to work" assertion? /me is currently using DVD-R for long term archival and DVD+RW for short term incremental backups! :)
On the other hand, long term storage of tape is quite tricky. It needs to be kept in carefully arranged conditions, and has a limited shelf life that you need to keep an eye on and make a copy when it is approaching.
It's not a lot different from optical discs in this regard.
The same's true of hard disks, as well. I've had disks fail after not using them for a while; ten years seems to be about average. Even in a RAID setup if you don't notice the disks failing you'll probably have a few of them fail before you put in replacements, at which point you might have lost your data.
Look up the NIST study about it. Interesting reading.
If you're talking about the one that was linked in the summary, it specifically notes that it's talking about media that are exposed to bad storage conditions: specifically fluctuating temperatures and substantial UV exposure.
Keep your discs in a light-proof metal box in a place with a reasonably steady temperature and they'll last a *lot* longer.
It seems to me that an HD sitting on a shelf would probably last longer than a DVD or CD,
I think you're wrong. My experience has been that the average HDD lasts about 10 years. Now, I didn't have a CD writer in 1995, but I did in 97, and *all* of the discs that I wrote back then are still readable (except a few I've scratch through misuse).
My suspicion is that the reported shelf life of CDR/DVDR of about 50-100 years isn't reliably achievable, but I'm pretty confident 20-30 is, if you look after the discs.
It's a sentence fragment. Put into a complete sentence, it would read "[Another company doing this was] Mercedes-Benz before [they], fielding complaints, put on the brakes."
:)
I agree it's badly written, but it does just about make sense if you look at it hard enough.
Read the comment again: it isn't his subcontractors that are the problem, it's Commission Junctions. It's *their* responsibility to ensure that *their* subcontractors are following the rules that are laid down is his company's contract with them. Chances are, he doesn't even have access to find out who the subcontractors are, so couldn't find out what they're doing even if he wanted to. Which also prevents this from being willful ignorance, I believe (in response to another poster).
You also seem to have little experience of the advertising industry. Advertising is a seller's market: buyers (other than the few who are really powerful) cannot dictate conditions on the sellers, because there are no sellers with good enough placements who are willing to budge on their own conditions.
That is the exception that proves the rule.
No, it isn't. I've used many pieces of software that were supported by advertisements. Most of them did no harm to my computer (a few installed software that was so badly written it made my computer very unstable and therefore had to be removed, but that is the worst that happened).
It is unfortunate that the actions of a minority number of adware programs have brought the entire field into disrepute, but that's what has happened.
Is Rupert Murdoch on some sort of anti-SF crusdae?
Wait... does this mean Fox is owned by News International (or one of Murdoch's other holding cos)? That explains a _lot_.