You would be much better off focusing your energy on the more salient dangers of nanotechnology, namely the grey goo scenario where an uncontrolled nano-replication accidently turns all of the Earth into copies of itself.
Is this still considered a threat, or has it been debunked?
To me it seems rather like a "worst case scenario" by SF writers. From what I've read on nanotech (Which admittedly is not much but articles.) it seems like building generic little machines is very hard. Sure, you might be able to make a self-replicating machine which can reduce a block of an alloy into a lot of copies of itslef. (No not today.) But unleash it on a lump of dirt and it won't do anything. It can't just magically transform everything into copies of itself. Only the few structures that are suitable for the task.
Yeah, because shooting big blocks of pixels are a lot more fun than shooting great looking 3d models.
There were some really good games "back then" but a lot of it was junk. And today even poor games generally have pretty pictures to look at at least.;-)
Where your analogy falls apart is that your little bro didn't spend hours slaving over the idea to come up with it -- he probably found it by accident.
And how this is different from most software patents?
Seriously, a hard real-time system is one in/on which you can guarantee that your programs will have time to run. This means that the scheduler must be deterministic (On this most user OS's fail since they are more tweaked to making the computer seem fast.) and that it is possible to calculate execution times and maximum time a thread can be put on hold.
Naturally it also, just like a normal real-time system, should have primitives for locking and algorithms for avoiding dead-locks.
The biggest benefit with Ogg being open is that manufacturers don't have to pay any royalities for products sold which use Ogg codecs.
This means that a lot of mp3 playing devices can add Ogg support "for free". (Not counting hardware / memory foot print.) This alone can be a good reason for companies to do so.
Furthermore it can be freely used in other technologies, like webstreams and such. And converting to other devices is easier since the source is freely available.
I searched around on the linked pages to no avail, does anyone know if there are video-feeds from the competitions? I'd be particularly interested in the legged competitions, but any at all would be nice.
Actually/listening/ to two conversations isn't that hard. The trick is to switch quite often, you get the gist of the dialogue and then switch. Naturally you can't give a word for word summary of what they were saying, but that is hardly useful anyways.
Most conversations are not that interesting to listen into anyways. Which I guess is a good way to practice this skill. (Fancy dinner parties and similar places, where people talk a lot without actually saying anything, are excellent training grounds. Just try to find an interesting conversation to participate in and you'll be listening in on several before you know it.;-)
Doing it consiously is a lot harder though. It works best (for me at least) if I don't try to do it. (That is, when I'm drunk.;-)
According to the BBC article (In a thread above.) one of the researchers (I think) mentioned that you more or less "had" to turn towards it.
They had used it next to video cameras and if a thief hears the noise then he/she turns towards the camera. Even if he doesn't want to.
Now they did say that the sound "may not work on radio" (it was an.ra stream) and it sure as hell didn't work on me. But it may be because it was 28k so a lot of subliminal details may have been lost.
Still doesn't sound (har har) like a good idea to use on mobile phones then.
AFAIK it was only ever banned in France and Switzerland. In France because wine producers were pissed that people no longer drank wine and lobbied the government. In Switzerland due to anti-alcohol propaganda. (They claimed that a man brutally murdered his family while "high" on Absinthe. They failed to mention that he also was a nut case.)
Apparently the propaganda worked though, because a lot of people I know still think it's illegal.
Secondly, me being from the US and all, I feel that democracy is a pretty fair system. Therefore, largest market and average IQ can very well correlate to the subjective notion of "better".
If you hadn't been asleep during your Government classes you would know that democracy (And BTW you live in a democratic republic, you would know that as well.) is far from the best form of government. I prefer a benovelent dictator to a corrupt democracy, as the saying goes.
But I'm wandering further from the topic. Just because you have a lot of stupid people doing something doesn't mean that some "law of the many" makes it a smart thing. If a lot of people do something stupid, it is still a stupid thing to do.
On to the interesting part:
I'm not saying computers should 8 mb of ram, I'm saying you should be able to configure and maintain you computer on very little memory.
That was the kernel of what Genoaschild said. And it makes a lot sense. Furthermore it's the reason my Pentium 200 running Linux is faster than my friend's P2 350 running 2000 Server. Having a fancy GUI on something not even hooked up to a monitor doesn't seem very productive to me. Instead of commenting on this however you chose the ad homenim route.
I don't even know what the hell this means. Evidently, your "genius" has come full-circle to babbling idiocy, because you seem to have forgotten half the words in these incoherent ramblings. Unfortunately, they seem to be the most important part. I tried running it through BabelFish, but it abended.
It is a rather good attempt at a flame, I'll give you that. However you failed to attack his, his parents', sibling's or pet's sexuality so you won't get even close to a highscore. The Babelfish bit was pretty funny though. And from what I've heard they are now upgrading it to translate to ignoramous so you'll get more use out of it then.
I think that Minky's point was that a normal GA don't remember what it has done. There is nothing stopping it from evaluating the same point in the search space a million times. Because it has no way of remembering that it has been there before.
If I interpret you correctly you are suggesting that by having "activation genes" you can close off large areas of search space in one gene. It's an interesting idea, I wonder how hard it would be to actually implement however. The benefit "meat space genetics" has is that it is actually capable of adapting. I mean adapting by adding new "rules" like these activbation genes.
Once GA can do that, then we'd have real evolutionary programs. The current method is mainly (as I in my naive view see it) an semi-random walk through a search space. It works though (for some things) so it's apparently a good idea.
Re:Bring back the 48-star nation
on
American Gods
·
· Score: 2
When I was in the states I took the opportunity to look through American History books. For instance the chapter on WWII. Basically was page after page of "...and then America..." or "...and then Americans..." etc.
Not to be rude but what is tought in US High Schools really is/American/ History, you should't begin to believe anything else. If for no other reason you should consider that the European parts of the Alliance had been directly attacked during the war. Economic crisis my ass, when half of your country is either bombed or taken over by the enemy THEN you can start talking about having a friggin crisis.
And it/is/ true that all countries have rather nationalistic views on history. I doubt that most Europeans history books have the same views on Swedish counqourers in Europe for instance. We do however study other countries as well though. (Mainly Europe and the US.) Sadly nothing about Asia. (Or rather, nothing before Europeans began trading there.)
Yeah, stackable / expandable computers are a neat idea. But since the added power your would get would be quite small for consumer applications I'd doubt it's something we'll see any time soon.
Even when you have SMP and the processors are close to each other and share memory you don't get much more than what, 40% boost average. (Not talking about programs designed for SMP, but more those that have been "ported" to it.)
Naturally with something like Linux NOW it could change the picture. But normal OS's and applications are not able to use this. (No, beowulf clusters are not "normal";-)
Exacty what is it that is "non obvious" about encoding a TV signal to MPEG and striping it to disk so you can play it back while it records? (Sure you have to use buffers, but still.)
It's not new technology, it's not new ideas. Putting it in a box with a remote may be a new idea but that doesn't mean it's a very hard idea to come up with.
Here in Sweden you can both buy players that are region free to begin with (I believe at least Panasonic has a model like that.) or get it "decoded" for $50.
Sure, $50 is quite a lot of money for puching a few buttons on the remote. (Alternatively swapping flash chip.) But it works.
If the MPAA believe that region coding works they are only fooling themselves. It was a stupid idea to begin with and doomed to fail. (Sure they can try to sue everyone, but the courts in Europe seems to have a disposition to swatting the fingers of big American companies that tell them what to do.)
Agreed, IF (and only if) you actually pay for the data transfered to/from you. Personally I'm hooked up with a permanent connection right now, and since I pay a flat fee for this I have no problem sharing files with other people. At least as long as it doesn't hog capacity which I want to do something else with.
There are some places where you generally have to pay for the data you send and receive though, and I agree that Swarmcast is then not all that nice. But at least I think that this is a temporary "solution" for teleco's and ISP's. When we all have broadband [sic] connections then utilities like Swarmcast will be the only realistic way of distributing data across the network.
Now that banner ads have been demostrated to not work perhaps this (or a future Freenet version) will replace it. What other method is there to stop "slashdotting" from being the norm rather than exception?
Seems to be hogging ports or something.
on
Swarmcast GPLed
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· Score: 1
I don't know if anyone else had this problem; but I'll shoot it out anyways.
After downloading the demo file I let the program run along in the taskbar. However as I tried to reload and post stuff to/. I continously got "Connection refused" answers. I didn't try any other servers before shutting down the program and retrying though. (After that post and such went fine again.)
Anyone else experienced this? I'm using Mozilla.9 BTW.
Thing is, I don't see why anyone would use this. In reality, the transfer rates aren't as good as a single fast dedicated server (I can easily get 75-80KB/sec on this line), so there's really no gain on the client end from using this.
You have an account on/. and don't see the benefit of distributing downloading of large files? When was the last time a big file got posted here and the server didn't bog down, no matter how big pipe they had? Only with a big mirror network would you have similar redundancy.
For the record, my download began at 100k or so and then worked it's way up to a bit over 200k. I live in Sweden and it's not uncommon that downloads from across the "pond" max out at 50k. Only when downloading from servers in Sweden or nearby do I get over 500k. So I could definitely use this.;-)
Personally I thought the install procedure went very nicely. Simple click-click-click things that even "Joe Sixpack" could handle. I would agree that downloading an extra 6 Mb might seem odd to the casual surfer though.
And although I'm currently letting it run along serving people (14 currently it seems like) and I don't have any problem with this it would be nice to have more data in the form of in/out trafic and such. And naturally, although the FAQ claim that "the participants IP's are not shown" it shouldn't be much problem "correcting" that for someone that is inquisitive as the source is available. Or by using a sniffer or just a personal firewall.
And sure, it still won't be used all that much until newer versions are available. (The GUI was a tad buggy on my machine.) But the concept is great and obviously it works. The next goal would be to get it into Protozilla or so, neh?;-)
It's used for ratingings (as previously stated) it doesn't record voices, it just identifies what channel you are listening to.
And second IT'S A WRIGGIN WATCH! Why on earth would you have a bulky watch on your arm when you're having sex? When you go on a top secret meeting you leave it OUTSIDE. I wouldn't trust things to be shut off just becuase they claim to be off. (You can use cell phones as spy devices like this.)
Slashdot Mirror
Is this still considered a threat, or has it been debunked?
To me it seems rather like a "worst case scenario" by SF writers. From what I've read on nanotech (Which admittedly is not much but articles.) it seems like building generic little machines is very hard. Sure, you might be able to make a self-replicating machine which can reduce a block of an alloy into a lot of copies of itslef. (No not today.) But unleash it on a lump of dirt and it won't do anything. It can't just magically transform everything into copies of itself. Only the few structures that are suitable for the task.
How nice of you to share this with us all. Your mother must be very proud of you.
;-)
Yeah, because shooting big blocks of pixels are a lot more fun than shooting great looking 3d models.
;-)
There were some really good games "back then" but a lot of it was junk. And today even poor games generally have pretty pictures to look at at least.
And how this is different from most software patents?
Difficult is basically the gist of it. ;-)
Seriously, a hard real-time system is one in/on which you can guarantee that your programs will have time to run. This means that the scheduler must be deterministic (On this most user OS's fail since they are more tweaked to making the computer seem fast.) and that it is possible to calculate execution times and maximum time a thread can be put on hold.
Naturally it also, just like a normal real-time system, should have primitives for locking and algorithms for avoiding dead-locks.
The biggest benefit with Ogg being open is that manufacturers don't have to pay any royalities for products sold which use Ogg codecs.
This means that a lot of mp3 playing devices can add Ogg support "for free". (Not counting hardware / memory foot print.) This alone can be a good reason for companies to do so.
Furthermore it can be freely used in other technologies, like webstreams and such. And converting to other devices is easier since the source is freely available.
I searched around on the linked pages to no avail, does anyone know if there are video-feeds from the competitions? I'd be particularly interested in the legged competitions, but any at all would be nice.
Actually /listening/ to two conversations isn't that hard. The trick is to switch quite often, you get the gist of the dialogue and then switch. Naturally you can't give a word for word summary of what they were saying, but that is hardly useful anyways.
;-)
;-)
Most conversations are not that interesting to listen into anyways. Which I guess is a good way to practice this skill. (Fancy dinner parties and similar places, where people talk a lot without actually saying anything, are excellent training grounds. Just try to find an interesting conversation to participate in and you'll be listening in on several before you know it.
Doing it consiously is a lot harder though. It works best (for me at least) if I don't try to do it. (That is, when I'm drunk.
According to the BBC article (In a thread above.) one of the researchers (I think) mentioned that you more or less "had" to turn towards it.
.ra stream) and it sure as hell didn't work on me. But it may be because it was 28k so a lot of subliminal details may have been lost.
They had used it next to video cameras and if a thief hears the noise then he/she turns towards the camera. Even if he doesn't want to.
Now they did say that the sound "may not work on radio" (it was an
Still doesn't sound (har har) like a good idea to use on mobile phones then.
Actually: All yuor base are belong to me.
;-)
(Yes, pedant-point to me!
AFAIK it was only ever banned in France and Switzerland. In France because wine producers were pissed that people no longer drank wine and lobbied the government. In Switzerland due to anti-alcohol propaganda. (They claimed that a man brutally murdered his family while "high" on Absinthe. They failed to mention that he also was a nut case.)
Apparently the propaganda worked though, because a lot of people I know still think it's illegal.
If a killbot only does what it's supposed to you don't have a plot. ;-)
If you hadn't been asleep during your Government classes you would know that democracy (And BTW you live in a democratic republic, you would know that as well.) is far from the best form of government. I prefer a benovelent dictator to a corrupt democracy, as the saying goes.
But I'm wandering further from the topic. Just because you have a lot of stupid people doing something doesn't mean that some "law of the many" makes it a smart thing. If a lot of people do something stupid, it is still a stupid thing to do.
On to the interesting part:
That was the kernel of what Genoaschild said. And it makes a lot sense. Furthermore it's the reason my Pentium 200 running Linux is faster than my friend's P2 350 running 2000 Server. Having a fancy GUI on something not even hooked up to a monitor doesn't seem very productive to me. Instead of commenting on this however you chose the ad homenim route.
It is a rather good attempt at a flame, I'll give you that. However you failed to attack his, his parents', sibling's or pet's sexuality so you won't get even close to a highscore. The Babelfish bit was pretty funny though. And from what I've heard they are now upgrading it to translate to ignoramous so you'll get more use out of it then.
I think that Minky's point was that a normal GA don't remember what it has done. There is nothing stopping it from evaluating the same point in the search space a million times. Because it has no way of remembering that it has been there before.
If I interpret you correctly you are suggesting that by having "activation genes" you can close off large areas of search space in one gene. It's an interesting idea, I wonder how hard it would be to actually implement however. The benefit "meat space genetics" has is that it is actually capable of adapting. I mean adapting by adding new "rules" like these activbation genes.
Once GA can do that, then we'd have real evolutionary programs. The current method is mainly (as I in my naive view see it) an semi-random walk through a search space. It works though (for some things) so it's apparently a good idea.
When I was in the states I took the opportunity to look through American History books. For instance the chapter on WWII. Basically was page after page of "...and then America..." or "...and then Americans..." etc.
/American/ History, you should't begin to believe anything else. If for no other reason you should consider that the European parts of the Alliance had been directly attacked during the war. Economic crisis my ass, when half of your country is either bombed or taken over by the enemy THEN you can start talking about having a friggin crisis.
/is/ true that all countries have rather nationalistic views on history. I doubt that most Europeans history books have the same views on Swedish counqourers in Europe for instance. We do however study other countries as well though. (Mainly Europe and the US.) Sadly nothing about Asia. (Or rather, nothing before Europeans began trading there.)
Not to be rude but what is tought in US High Schools really is
And it
It's still transmitted in an analogue fasion. Using normal radio tech. (Well not really "normal" but it's not magic. ;-)
Yeah, stackable / expandable computers are a neat idea. But since the added power your would get would be quite small for consumer applications I'd doubt it's something we'll see any time soon.
;-)
Even when you have SMP and the processors are close to each other and share memory you don't get much more than what, 40% boost average. (Not talking about programs designed for SMP, but more those that have been "ported" to it.)
Naturally with something like Linux NOW it could change the picture. But normal OS's and applications are not able to use this. (No, beowulf clusters are not "normal"
Exacty what is it that is "non obvious" about encoding a TV signal to MPEG and striping it to disk so you can play it back while it records? (Sure you have to use buffers, but still.)
It's not new technology, it's not new ideas. Putting it in a box with a remote may be a new idea but that doesn't mean it's a very hard idea to come up with.
You have won the very prestigious
[ Troll Of The Day Award ]
Congratulations, and condolences to your relatives.
Or you can go to DVD Digest's region free guide and see if there is hacked firmware available for it.
Here in Sweden you can both buy players that are region free to begin with (I believe at least Panasonic has a model like that.) or get it "decoded" for $50.
Sure, $50 is quite a lot of money for puching a few buttons on the remote. (Alternatively swapping flash chip.) But it works.
If the MPAA believe that region coding works they are only fooling themselves. It was a stupid idea to begin with and doomed to fail. (Sure they can try to sue everyone, but the courts in Europe seems to have a disposition to swatting the fingers of big American companies that tell them what to do.)
Agreed, IF (and only if) you actually pay for the data transfered to/from you. Personally I'm hooked up with a permanent connection right now, and since I pay a flat fee for this I have no problem sharing files with other people. At least as long as it doesn't hog capacity which I want to do something else with.
There are some places where you generally have to pay for the data you send and receive though, and I agree that Swarmcast is then not all that nice. But at least I think that this is a temporary "solution" for teleco's and ISP's. When we all have broadband [sic] connections then utilities like Swarmcast will be the only realistic way of distributing data across the network.
Now that banner ads have been demostrated to not work perhaps this (or a future Freenet version) will replace it. What other method is there to stop "slashdotting" from being the norm rather than exception?
I don't know if anyone else had this problem; but I'll shoot it out anyways.
/. I continously got "Connection refused" answers. I didn't try any other servers before shutting down the program and retrying though. (After that post and such went fine again.)
.9 BTW.
After downloading the demo file I let the program run along in the taskbar. However as I tried to reload and post stuff to
Anyone else experienced this? I'm using Mozilla
You have an account on /. and don't see the benefit of distributing downloading of large files? When was the last time a big file got posted here and the server didn't bog down, no matter how big pipe they had? Only with a big mirror network would you have similar redundancy.
For the record, my download began at 100k or so and then worked it's way up to a bit over 200k. I live in Sweden and it's not uncommon that downloads from across the "pond" max out at 50k. Only when downloading from servers in Sweden or nearby do I get over 500k. So I could definitely use this. ;-)
Personally I thought the install procedure went very nicely. Simple click-click-click things that even "Joe Sixpack" could handle. I would agree that downloading an extra 6 Mb might seem odd to the casual surfer though.
And although I'm currently letting it run along serving people (14 currently it seems like) and I don't have any problem with this it would be nice to have more data in the form of in/out trafic and such. And naturally, although the FAQ claim that "the participants IP's are not shown" it shouldn't be much problem "correcting" that for someone that is inquisitive as the source is available. Or by using a sniffer or just a personal firewall.
And sure, it still won't be used all that much until newer versions are available. (The GUI was a tad buggy on my machine.) But the concept is great and obviously it works. The next goal would be to get it into Protozilla or so, neh? ;-)
It's used for ratingings (as previously stated) it doesn't record voices, it just identifies what channel you are listening to.
And second IT'S A WRIGGIN WATCH! Why on earth would you have a bulky watch on your arm when you're having sex? When you go on a top secret meeting you leave it OUTSIDE. I wouldn't trust things to be shut off just becuase they claim to be off. (You can use cell phones as spy devices like this.)