But they also can't be sued for transmitting child porn and such because they claim to be "common carriers" like you can't sue the phone company for allowing people to talk about terrorism on the phone. Once they filter traffic, they might be on the hook when people do illegal things over their networks.
If you can get rid of all old players/recorders then I think you can do it. I would play sounds/light outside of human perceptive range in certain patterns and make sure the recorders can pick up on it and ignore the entire signal if this particular pattern appeared. It makes things more expensive to store and play and record, but at least they might be able to close the anal hole this way.
Ah I see someone below has the correct answer for this one. You start with larger gapsizes and decrease them. That works better when you do know the upper limit on the height of the building.
With the first marble, drop it from floor one, then ascend, doubling the floor each time. When it breaks (unless it's the first floor or the top floor), start with the second marble, working up sequentially from the last known good floor. Is that an elevator sort, or something?
I like this question. A lot of these "thinky" interview questions are bad, but this one has a subtle point that I like since it's about doing a complexity analysis on your algorithm.
The idea is you want to use the first marble to skip floors till you get above the breaking point, then go up floors 1 by 1 with the second marble from the last safe floor until you find where it breaks. Let B denote the breaking floor.
It's a "computer problem". What do you do with computer problems when you have to skip numbers? You take powers of 2. So you do this taking powers of 2 and then you find the breaking point with the first marble. Then you start going up 1 by 1 with the second marble, right?
BUT. How many floors are between 2^(N-1) and 2^M? 2^(N-1). This means the 1 by 1 test from the second marble is O(B), which is no better than the naive algorithm of just going up 1 floor at a time with the first marble. The subtle point is that you have to do a complexity analysis on your solution to realize that there's a tradeoff between the number of drops with the first marble and the number of drops with the second marble. This means that we need to shrink the gap size from the first marble so that the number of 1 by 1 drops with the second marble.
The next obvious choice is to take N^2 instead of 2^N. And what we find here is that the first marble will break just at or above B, which means you've used O(sqrt(B)) drops to get to that point. (So if B=50, you drop at 49 and it's ok, so you drop at 64 and it breaks, but you've only done 8 drops...1,4,9,16,25,36,49,64.)
Then, what is the difference between (N-1)^2 and N^2? It's 2N-1. That means if the marble broke on floor N^2, you need to do at most O(N) 1 by 1 drops to get to the breaking floor. But remember that N is O(sqrt(B)) so your whole algorithm is O(sqrt(B))+O(sqrt(B)) drops which is O(sqrt(B)). And I guess you could play with constants to get a better result, but changing the squares formula won't matter because there's a tradeoff between the complexity of the two halves of the problem, so if you decrease one, you will have to increase the other.
Isn't it ironic that Diebold wants to investigate the paper trail for how certain goverments did things? Wouldn't it be great if having paper trails was the standard for all things governmental, including voting, so that people could check voting machines' accuracy after an election. And isn't is cool how Diebold opposes those paper trails for their voting machines? Maybe the good peeople of the Commonwealth can just go up to the judge and say their internal procedures were followed correctly, and Diebold doesn't need to see any evidence other than the word of the officials? What do you think that chances of that are?
The reason software is hard is because coming up with new math is hard.
If you've seen the problem before, even in some other context, it's not too bad to apply it again to a new context. If you've never seen the problem before, it can be quite difficult. Ask yourself this:
What's harder:
1. Using the Pythagorean Thm once you've been taught it.
2. Deriving it because you needed to use it in a real world problem, but without being given any hints about how to do it.
That's why software is hard. Problem 1 is a joke compared to problem 2. Software will never be easy because it's math and coming up with new math is hard. Software engineering makes it so once problems are in category 1, they can be more easily solved again, but it won't help with problems in category 2.
Bluetooth is a protocol it doesn't describe the hardware implementation. The said patent seems to be hardware related
But isn't the old pro-software patent argument that hardware=software? So once you've described it in any way, that would count as prior art for hardware or software or anything in between?
And you wanted a "content appliance" to go with it that let you download things off the 'net and even let you do some things like web browsing and email and such on it.
Nintendo is making a game console (I think) but the PS3 and XBOX 360 are heading toward becoming "content appliances" like I've described. I don't think it's a stupid gamble on the part of MS and Sony. They care about the games, but they care more about people downloading movies and music and such (for a fee) from the MS and Sony networks.
When writing a math proof you are using abstract ideas or concepts with certain properties, and you then instantate those concepts in the proof then work with the things you've instantiated. You have to take math classes about 2-3 years beyond calculus to start seeing this since before that you're not doing hard enough proofs.
Let's say I'm writing a proof and I know I will need a polynomial with real coefficients that's of odd degree. I know that this type of polynomial has certain properties such as a real root and smoothness, so when I want to write a proof and use this concept in it, I can create an instance of the concept and then use the properties of the concept on the instance in the proof.
So, I start with the concept of this polynomial, and in the proof I write "Let f be a polynomial of odd degree with real coefficients." This creates an explicit polynomial with certain properties.
During the proof, when I need a real root of the polynomial, I can say "Let r be a real root of f."
I can also talk about the derivative, "Let f' be the derivative of f.", and f' will be another polynomial (of even degree) and it exists because f is smooth.
This feels the same to me as defining a class or struct or other variables and then instantiating objects from that class and using things like inheritance to write code.
Using the example above again but now for programming, we could define a Polynomial class, and then subclass into RealPolynomials or OddDegreePolynomials and we can define certain methods like Derivative and RealRoot depending on the type of polynomial.
The major difference I've found between math and programming is that math is exact and glosses over computation and programming is approximate and can't gloss over computation. So, a real root of a mathematical polynomial is a precise real number that can instantly be found, but the RealRoot of an OddDegreePolynomial will end up being something close to a real root of the underlying real mathematical polynomial (which is approximated again because the real coefficients aren't even totally correct), and it will cost some computation to find.
The specific concepts you're using are different, and the kinds of logical things you do with them are different, but the skills transfer. I guess the way I look at it is that in mathematics the beauty is in the proof, and in computer science, the beauty is in the computation that occurs when you execute the code.
Another thing they could do is make BG's give exp, or stop giving rewards after N runs at a certain level. One of the reasons that lower level items are so expensive is that people get their character to 19, 29, 39...and sit in a BG twinked out with the best loot out there at their level. If they couldn't sit in a BG forever, or if they were limited somehow then there would be less of an incentive.
There is no difference between software patents and a patent for a new kind of toaster.
Let's say someone patents a new machine that makes some cool sounds. Their patent a machine and use of the machine (method and apparatus seems to be the term people use here) that produces a specific set of sounds. The purpose of the patent is to protect the process of using the machine for making those sounds. Then I legally buy the machine and can legally use it and I record the machine's output onto CD's and sell them on Ebay. Have I violated their patent on that machine that produces that specific set of sounds?
I was assuming that you bought tbe music box from the inventor and was allowed to play it. That wasn't the issue. The issue is the whole hardware=software thing.
I realize that there is a big difference between patent law and copyright law, and my example was intentionally stupid and making an obvious mistake according to my understanding of patents and copyright. I admit that. The reason I made the ridiculous example is that one of the major reasons people use to justify software patents is that hardware patents are ok (which I agree with) and that software and hardware are interchangeable so therefore software patents are ok and should be treated the same as hardware under patent law.
What I was talking about here is making a software implementation of a piece of patented hardware, which by the rules of those who like software patents (assuming they're being consistent in what I would consider a reasonable manner), the recording should be treated the same as a piece of software that was written that did something similar to what a patented piece of hardware did.
Now maybe there's a technical lawyerly reason why the analogy doesn't work...and it wouldn't surprise me, but code=data and hardware and software implementations of process don't do things in the same way, so that's one of the main reasons why so many programmers think software patents are stupid. You would never get sued for patent infringment for selling a CD of music (assuming that the process of selling music isn't why they sue you:P). It just doesn't happen, but somehow amazingly when you sell a CD of software, you might just get sued under patent law. Even though in both cases the CD contains a string of bits that gets used by a general-purpose machine as a set of instructions to carry out a process that could have been carried out by a special-purpose machine that could have been patented. So I guess I figure that in order to be consistent, either don't allow patents on software, or allow patents on music, movies and books.
More concrete example, there are patents on music boxes. If someone patents a music box and I place a microphone next to it and record the output and sell CD's on Ebay, have I violated the patent on the music box?
Question: If someone invents a machine that produces a new sound by carrying out some process with its internal components and I come along and record the machine and then sell copies of the recording on the Ebay, would you say that I am infringing the patent?
I still find it hard to characaterize him as "in gaming".
It might help if we look at "gaming" as a metaphorical person. If "gaming" is viewed in this way, then Jack Thompson would be trying to ram his flaccid cock into gaming's ass while screaming "WHOSYERDADDY!!!!" and "IMAGUNASUEYOU!!!!!" over and over. From that perspective, I think we could characterize him as "in gaming".
Blizzard sort of did this with Diablo 1. They allowed people load characters from their home computers to play against each other online. I don't recall if there were any issues with exploits or cheats, however.
Isn't Google's master plan to take over the world dependent upon people using AJAX? If IE has a critical flaw using javascript, and everyone has to turn it off, then nobody will be able to use Google's new products and... Hey wait a minute.
The real quote is "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, we won't get fooled again."
(I've often wondered if this means that you can't fool us twice, or that you can fool us twice but there's no shame on anyone, and we'll be careful not to get fooled a third time. This must keep philosophers up at night.)
I don't like using a lot of prefixing, but I've found that using the "m" in front of data members like mFoo, mName, mThis, mThat is REALLY nice since then you can pass in parameters to methods like foo, name, this, that and you can easily tell what belongs to *this and what came from someplace else.
Medicine is applied evolution and one of the big things that these people are pushing these days is letting workers refuse to service others if it goes against their personal beliefs (like pharmacists refusing to give out birth control/morning after pills). So I propose that we get every doctor in the country to force patients to sign something saying that they know evolution is a fact. If they refuse, then the doctor should refuse to help them since the patient obviously doesn't believe in medicine, and that goes against the doctor's "deeply held values and beliefs" to help someone who rejects the very thing the doctor is trying to do for them.
Now you might be saying this is too extreme and that doctors have an obligation to help people, but let's assume that these ID people get the educational system changed over time so that science is subordinate to the correct religious beliefs. (Don't think this will stop at evolution, it will carry over to all areas of science that contradict their interpretation of the Bible.) Over time, it is likely that fewer medical advances will happen which means that more people will die sooner and live less healthy in the future when they could have been saved had medicine progressed more. That means the ID people are murdering future people. So, to lessen the power of these people who are trying to kill off people in the future, you let them die off faster today.
Or, we could just lock them all in a big room with the Al Qaeda people and a lot of guns and see whose side God is really on.:P
Slashdot Mirror
But they also can't be sued for transmitting child porn and such because they claim to be "common carriers" like you can't sue the phone company for allowing people to talk about terrorism on the phone. Once they filter traffic, they might be on the hook when people do illegal things over their networks.
If you can get rid of all old players/recorders then I think you can do it. I would play sounds/light outside of human perceptive range in certain patterns and make sure the recorders can pick up on it and ignore the entire signal if this particular pattern appeared. It makes things more expensive to store and play and record, but at least they might be able to close the anal hole this way.
Ah I see someone below has the correct answer for this one. You start with larger gapsizes and decrease them. That works better when you do know the upper limit on the height of the building.
With the first marble, drop it from floor one, then ascend, doubling the floor each time. When it breaks (unless it's the first floor or the top floor), start with the second marble, working up sequentially from the last known good floor. Is that an elevator sort, or something?
I like this question. A lot of these "thinky" interview questions are bad, but this one has a subtle point that I like since it's about doing a complexity analysis on your algorithm.
The idea is you want to use the first marble to skip floors till you get above the breaking point, then go up floors 1 by 1 with the second marble from the last safe floor until you find where it breaks. Let B denote the breaking floor.
It's a "computer problem". What do you do with computer problems when you have to skip numbers? You take powers of 2. So you do this taking powers of 2 and then you find the breaking point with the first marble. Then you start going up 1 by 1 with the second marble, right?
BUT. How many floors are between 2^(N-1) and 2^M? 2^(N-1). This means the 1 by 1 test from the second marble is O(B), which is no better than the naive algorithm of just going up 1 floor at a time with the first marble. The subtle point is that you have to do a complexity analysis on your solution to realize that there's a tradeoff between the number of drops with the first marble and the number of drops with the second marble. This means that we need to shrink the gap size from the first marble so that the number of 1 by 1 drops with the second marble.
The next obvious choice is to take N^2 instead of 2^N. And what we find here is that the first marble will break just at or above B, which means you've used O(sqrt(B)) drops to get to that point. (So if B=50, you drop at 49 and it's ok, so you drop at 64 and it breaks, but you've only done 8 drops...1,4,9,16,25,36,49,64.)
Then, what is the difference between (N-1)^2 and N^2? It's 2N-1. That means if the marble broke on floor N^2, you need to do at most O(N) 1 by 1 drops to get to the breaking floor. But remember that N is O(sqrt(B)) so your whole algorithm is O(sqrt(B))+O(sqrt(B)) drops which is O(sqrt(B)). And I guess you could play with constants to get a better result, but changing the squares formula won't matter because there's a tradeoff between the complexity of the two halves of the problem, so if you decrease one, you will have to increase the other.
Isn't it ironic that Diebold wants to investigate the paper trail for how certain goverments did things? Wouldn't it be great if having paper trails was the standard for all things governmental, including voting, so that people could check voting machines' accuracy after an election. And isn't is cool how Diebold opposes those paper trails for their voting machines? Maybe the good peeople of the Commonwealth can just go up to the judge and say their internal procedures were followed correctly, and Diebold doesn't need to see any evidence other than the word of the officials? What do you think that chances of that are?
Yup, it's math.
The reason software is hard is because coming up with new math is hard.
If you've seen the problem before, even in some other context, it's not too bad to apply it again to a new context. If you've never seen the problem before, it can be quite difficult. Ask yourself this:
What's harder:
1. Using the Pythagorean Thm once you've been taught it.
2. Deriving it because you needed to use it in a real world problem, but without being given any hints about how to do it.
That's why software is hard. Problem 1 is a joke compared to problem 2. Software will never be easy because it's math and coming up with new math is hard. Software engineering makes it so once problems are in category 1, they can be more easily solved again, but it won't help with problems in category 2.
Bluetooth is a protocol it doesn't describe the hardware implementation.
The said patent seems to be hardware related
But isn't the old pro-software patent argument that hardware=software? So once you've described it in any way, that would count as prior art for hardware or software or anything in between?
Sad movie.
Every time I say the word "Linux" it gets typed out as "Windows". Go figure.
And you wanted a "content appliance" to go with it that let you download things off the 'net and even let you do some things like web browsing and email and such on it.
Nintendo is making a game console (I think) but the PS3 and XBOX 360 are heading toward becoming "content appliances" like I've described. I don't think it's a stupid gamble on the part of MS and Sony. They care about the games, but they care more about people downloading movies and music and such (for a fee) from the MS and Sony networks.
When writing a math proof you are using abstract ideas or concepts with certain properties, and you then instantate those concepts in the proof then work with the things you've instantiated. You have to take math classes about 2-3 years beyond calculus to start seeing this since before that you're not doing hard enough proofs.
Let's say I'm writing a proof and I know I will need a polynomial with real coefficients that's of odd degree. I know that this type of polynomial has certain properties such as a real root and smoothness, so when I want to write a proof and use this concept in it, I can create an instance of the concept and then use the properties of the concept on the instance in the proof.
So, I start with the concept of this polynomial, and in the proof I write "Let f be a polynomial of odd degree with real coefficients." This creates an explicit polynomial with certain properties.
During the proof, when I need a real root of the polynomial, I can say "Let r be a real root of f."
I can also talk about the derivative, "Let f' be the derivative of f.", and f' will be another polynomial (of even degree) and it exists because f is smooth.
This feels the same to me as defining a class or struct or other variables and then instantiating objects from that class and using things like inheritance to write code.
Using the example above again but now for programming, we could define a Polynomial class, and then subclass into RealPolynomials or OddDegreePolynomials and we can define certain methods like Derivative and RealRoot depending on the type of polynomial.
The major difference I've found between math and programming is that math is exact and glosses over computation and programming is approximate and can't gloss over computation. So, a real root of a mathematical polynomial is a precise real number that can instantly be found, but the RealRoot of an OddDegreePolynomial will end up being something close to a real root of the underlying real mathematical polynomial (which is approximated again because the real coefficients aren't even totally correct), and it will cost some computation to find.
The specific concepts you're using are different, and the kinds of logical things you do with them are different, but the skills transfer. I guess the way I look at it is that in mathematics the beauty is in the proof, and in computer science, the beauty is in the computation that occurs when you execute the code.
Another thing they could do is make BG's give exp, or stop giving rewards after N runs at a certain level. One of the reasons that lower level items are so expensive is that people get their character to 19, 29, 39...and sit in a BG twinked out with the best loot out there at their level. If they couldn't sit in a BG forever, or if they were limited somehow then there would be less of an incentive.
There is no difference between software patents and a patent for a new kind of toaster.
Let's say someone patents a new machine that makes some cool sounds. Their patent a machine and use of the machine (method and apparatus seems to be the term people use here) that produces a specific set of sounds. The purpose of the patent is to protect the process of using the machine for making those sounds. Then I legally buy the machine and can legally use it and I record the machine's output onto CD's and sell them on Ebay. Have I violated their patent on that machine that produces that specific set of sounds?
I was assuming that you bought tbe music box from the inventor and was allowed to play it. That wasn't the issue. The issue is the whole hardware=software thing.
:P). It just doesn't happen, but somehow amazingly when you sell a CD of software, you might just get sued under patent law. Even though in both cases the CD contains a string of bits that gets used by a general-purpose machine as a set of instructions to carry out a process that could have been carried out by a special-purpose machine that could have been patented. So I guess I figure that in order to be consistent, either don't allow patents on software, or allow patents on music, movies and books.
I realize that there is a big difference between patent law and copyright law, and my example was intentionally stupid and making an obvious mistake according to my understanding of patents and copyright. I admit that. The reason I made the ridiculous example is that one of the major reasons people use to justify software patents is that hardware patents are ok (which I agree with) and that software and hardware are interchangeable so therefore software patents are ok and should be treated the same as hardware under patent law.
What I was talking about here is making a software implementation of a piece of patented hardware, which by the rules of those who like software patents (assuming they're being consistent in what I would consider a reasonable manner), the recording should be treated the same as a piece of software that was written that did something similar to what a patented piece of hardware did.
Now maybe there's a technical lawyerly reason why the analogy doesn't work...and it wouldn't surprise me, but code=data and hardware and software implementations of process don't do things in the same way, so that's one of the main reasons why so many programmers think software patents are stupid. You would never get sued for patent infringment for selling a CD of music (assuming that the process of selling music isn't why they sue you
More concrete example, there are patents on music boxes. If someone patents a music box and I place a microphone next to it and record the output and sell CD's on Ebay, have I violated the patent on the music box?
Question: If someone invents a machine that produces a new sound by carrying out some process with its internal components and I come along and record the machine and then sell copies of the recording on the Ebay, would you say that I am infringing the patent?
I still find it hard to characaterize him as "in gaming".
It might help if we look at "gaming" as a metaphorical person. If "gaming" is viewed in this way, then Jack Thompson would be trying to ram his flaccid cock into gaming's ass while screaming "WHOSYERDADDY!!!!" and "IMAGUNASUEYOU!!!!!" over and over. From that perspective, I think we could characterize him as "in gaming".
Blizzard sort of did this with Diablo 1. They allowed people load characters from their home computers to play against each other online. I don't recall if there were any issues with exploits or cheats, however.
Isn't Google's master plan to take over the world dependent upon people using AJAX? If IE has a critical flaw using javascript, and everyone has to turn it off, then nobody will be able to use Google's new products and... Hey wait a minute.
The real quote is "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, we won't get fooled again."
(I've often wondered if this means that you can't fool us twice, or that you can fool us twice but there's no shame on anyone, and we'll be careful not to get fooled a third time. This must keep philosophers up at night.)
I don't like using a lot of prefixing, but I've found that using the "m" in front of data members like mFoo, mName, mThis, mThat is REALLY nice since then you can pass in parameters to methods like foo, name, this, that and you can easily tell what belongs to *this and what came from someplace else.
Or, as I put it: "Gifts don't come with strings attached."
I was with you up until the last link, which links to one of those "Everytime you masturbate, God kills a kitten" pictures.
That's really scary that you weren't thrown off by the timecube.
Medicine is applied evolution and one of the big things that these people are pushing these days is letting workers refuse to service others if it goes against their personal beliefs (like pharmacists refusing to give out birth control/morning after pills). So I propose that we get every doctor in the country to force patients to sign something saying that they know evolution is a fact. If they refuse, then the doctor should refuse to help them since the patient obviously doesn't believe in medicine, and that goes against the doctor's "deeply held values and beliefs" to help someone who rejects the very thing the doctor is trying to do for them.
:P
Now you might be saying this is too extreme and that doctors have an obligation to help people, but let's assume that these ID people get the educational system changed over time so that science is subordinate to the correct religious beliefs. (Don't think this will stop at evolution, it will carry over to all areas of science that contradict their interpretation of the Bible.) Over time, it is likely that fewer medical advances will happen which means that more people will die sooner and live less healthy in the future when they could have been saved had medicine progressed more. That means the ID people are murdering future people. So, to lessen the power of these people who are trying to kill off people in the future, you let them die off faster today.
Or, we could just lock them all in a big room with the Al Qaeda people and a lot of guns and see whose side God is really on.
Apparently Catholics aren't real Christans anyway... They really aren't.