Forget voting. During my lifetime (i.e. since the Nixon administration) there has never been a candidate for President who was actually qualified for the job.
Instead of voting, there should just be a lottery in which, every four years, a special 1040 form would be printed with the words "INSTANT WINNER" printed on it. (Everybody else's 1040 would say "SORRY--PLEASE TRY AGAIN".) Alternatively, we could go to a randomly-selected lifetime monarch, based on scratch-off birth certificates.
Is this sarcasm? Maybe. But is our current system really any better?
Try dselect. It's significantly easier than any Windows install. You don't even need to go out and buy the software. No pesky cardboard boxes to throw away!
I, for one, refuse to provide any kind of physical armament to my video games. It's bad enough when your spaceship gets hit by an asteroid on screen. Now your computer can give you realistic puncture wounds to simulate micrometeroid damage.
It's worse than that: if the Russians don't keep making payments to the Inertial Bank, Isaac Newton is going to foreclose on Mir's kinetic energy, and then he's going to use its potential energy to pay off all of the other investors.
Once upon a time, there really was an online community. Of course, this was before graphical tools like web browsers existed, back when there was a significant barrier to entry to the Internet. When tools for accessing Internet fora such as Usenet required people to use their BRAINS, even if only to remember the keystrokes to make a new posting, the set of people who would ever participate in a "virtual community" was limited to the people who would most benefit from it.
Of course, now that Aunt Edna is online, the Internet has, for the most part, devolved into a giant engine for selling worthless stock in worthless companies making worthless (or no) products to worthless investors.
OK, I have a complaint against both Gnome and KDE.
I'm tired of having to download PIECES of either
one. I want something like the xemacs "sumo"
package archive, so I can just grab it and know
that I've got everything. Sure, leave the little
tarballs for folks running over a 2400 baud
connection, but I WANT IT ALL!!!
Damn, I knew it was too good to be true. All these years of offering sacrifices in the temple of Nylon, only to discover that he's a counterfeit Olympic god. I'll bet Zeus is pissed.
Somewhat on-topic: is it common for Australian parents to not name children they believe will grow up to be athletes?
WANTED: Novice C++ programmer to participate in human sexuality research with Pamela Anderson. We can only pay 50 cents an hour, but stock options are available to qualified applicants.
You could make an intelligent Slashdot-posting agent. It would require only a limited vocabulary, like "Microsoft sucks", "Natalie Portman", "hot grits", etc.
Possibly a better (and more lucrative) idea would be to write an intelligent computer-industry rumor generator. The great thing about this is that it would require virtually no input to generate an infinite amount of output.
"I'm pretty bright, therefore anything I don't understand must be God."
"I don't understand how quantum effects affect the synapses in the human brain."
"Therefore, God is the quantum effects affecting the synapses in the human brain."
Here are a few arguments against this kind of tripe:
1. The "observer" discussed in quantum physics is really shorthand for "something that is affected by the outcome of a certain event".* An observer may be something as simple as an atom of U-235, which may split if a nearby atom undergoes radioactive decay. If an atomic bomb is detonated and nobody is watching, does it make a sound?
2. What, in particular, makes the brain qualitatively different from a computer? Look at an individual neuron. A neuron has certain input ports, and certain output ports. It also has some amount of internal state. A particular output port will fire if a given combination of inputs and internal state is satisfied. This is no more mystical than your average Intel product.
3. The fact that Einstein believed something does not make it true. The same goes for Plato, Aristotle, and me.
The estimate I've heard is that the sun will go red giant in 5*10^9 years. That's quite a while. I suspect that 5 billion years is long enough to think of something more elegant than a "simple" solution. In fact, there will have to be a better solution, since the real bottleneck in evacuating people from Earth would be in getting them to orbit in the first place.
In my AI course in college, we spend a godawful amount of time working on different ways of programming a simple automatic vacuum cleaner to learn the best way to clean a room.
The technique was fairly simple: give the robot a certain number of points for changing a grid square from dirty to clean, and subtract a certain number of points for every unit of energy expended. After each run, the robot changes its algorithm and tries again. Eventually, you end up with a robot that will clean up the maximum amount of dirt with the minimum amount of energy.
(Forgive me if the details are fuzzy--too much LDS in the '60s...)
To implement this in a real system, it seems like you could even dispense with the sensor, and just weigh the vacuum bag at the beginning and the end of each cycle. You just have to make sure the robot doesn't cheat by going outside to vacuum up all of the dirt in the garden...
"After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter." Mary Shelley, _Frankenstein_
The same reason why there's no hydrogen on Mercury, or much on Earth or Venus (at least in comparison to other elements). When the solar system was forming, the force of the solar wind was enough to drive lighter elements far away from the sun (this is why Jupiter et al have so much hydrogen, and it is also the origin of the Oort cloud of comets), but heavier elements stayed in the inner solar system.
I knew all those geology classes would come in handy someday.
In this case, the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere does not indicate the presence of life. In fact, given the two other elements detected (silicon and magnesium), it indicates a climate that is singularly inhospitable to any biology at all.
The atmosphere is vaporized rock. Now that's hot.
Rocks, at least the crustal rocks on Earth, consist mainly of oxygen, silicon, and magnesium, with a few trace elements to make things interesting.
Given that this planet is so close to its star, it's not surprising that the surface tempurature is hot enough to boil rocks.
We already know that a distributed computing project can exhaust the keyspace for 56-bit keys in a reasonably short time. Regardless of the encryption algorithm, a 56 bit key can be broken. So why bother with this particular algorithm?
This is all just a publicity stunt by CS. Their description of the "CS-Ciper Challenge" states that the purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate that brute force is the only possible attack against their algorithm, which is absurd. Either the message will be decrypted by brute force, which just proves the obvious fact that brute force attacks are possible, or it will be decrypted by finding a cleaver attack on the algorithm. If no attacks are found, that only means that no attacks were found, not that there are no possible attacks against this algorithm.
Sheesh. Maybe I'll start a contest to prove some other negative.
This encryption scheme sounds pretty good for direct connections, but it is totally useless for Internet communication. The whole idea behind IP is that packets are transmitted, received, and retransmitted from host to host until they reach their destination (hopefully). The problem is that this type of quantum encryption only works if the actual photons that were emitted by the sender are detected by the recipient.
Of course, if every pair of hosts create a one-time pad in this manner for each IP packet that they exchange, it could work, but that would really suck up bandwidth since you need one bit of key for every bit of data. I suppose we could string fiber between all possible pairs of computers on the planet, or maybe just broadcast neutrinos directly. Not this month, though.
Let's not quit working on mathematical encryption algorithms just yet.
I don't get it. What's a catpital. Is this some play on the word "caterpillar"? That's gotta be it. Virginia is the caterpillar of the Internet, chewing up the pesky milkweed pods that cause packet loss, data corruption, and dandruff.
Eventually, Virginia will pupate and finally become an adult butterfly, fluttering across a green meadow, chased by a cat... Hey, cats, CATpital... obviously, I'm on the right track.
"All of those *.FF and *.00 addresses are wasted! Let's assign them to hosts! This won't break anything! I can prove it mathematically! It's all because nobody realizes that binary numbers are magical!"
In other words, the whole paper is essentially garbage.
Interestingly enough, the author mentions that all of this incoherent rambling is the result of studying for a Cisco Certification examination. Someone should contact Cisco, and inform them that the brain-eating forces of Yog-Sothoth have taken over their textbook editing department.
Slashdot Mirror
Orbital MIND CONTROL Lasers! Now you too can turn the Boy Sprouts into a Weird group!
Forget voting. During my lifetime (i.e. since the Nixon administration) there has never been a candidate for President who was actually qualified for the job.
Instead of voting, there should just be a lottery in which, every four years, a special 1040 form would be printed with the words "INSTANT WINNER" printed on it. (Everybody else's 1040 would say "SORRY--PLEASE TRY AGAIN".) Alternatively, we could go to a randomly-selected lifetime monarch, based on scratch-off birth certificates.
Is this sarcasm? Maybe. But is our current system really any better?
Try dselect. It's significantly easier than any Windows install. You don't even need to go out and buy the software. No pesky cardboard boxes to throw away!
I, for one, refuse to provide any kind of physical armament to my video games. It's bad enough when your spaceship gets hit by an asteroid on screen. Now your computer can give you realistic puncture wounds to simulate micrometeroid damage.
And I still fear the ferocious Furby...
It's worse than that: if the Russians don't keep making payments to the Inertial Bank, Isaac Newton is going to foreclose on Mir's kinetic energy, and then he's going to use its potential energy to pay off all of the other investors.
Once upon a time, there really was an online community. Of course, this was before graphical tools like web browsers existed, back when there was a significant barrier to entry to the Internet. When tools for accessing Internet fora such as Usenet required people to use their BRAINS, even if only to remember the keystrokes to make a new posting, the set of people who would ever participate in a "virtual community" was limited to the people who would most benefit from it.
Of course, now that Aunt Edna is online, the Internet has, for the most part, devolved into a giant engine for selling worthless stock in worthless companies making worthless (or no) products to worthless investors.
OK, I have a complaint against both Gnome and KDE.
I'm tired of having to download PIECES of either
one. I want something like the xemacs "sumo"
package archive, so I can just grab it and know
that I've got everything. Sure, leave the little
tarballs for folks running over a 2400 baud
connection, but I WANT IT ALL!!!
Damn, I knew it was too good to be true. All these years of offering sacrifices in the temple of Nylon, only to discover that he's a counterfeit Olympic god. I'll bet Zeus is pissed.
Somewhat on-topic: is it common for Australian parents to not name children they believe will grow up to be athletes?
# = "hash"
Therefore, the language is called "C-hash", or, perhaps more appropriately, "CASH". As in, "This is a stick-up. Gimme your CASH."
WANTED: Novice C++ programmer to participate in
human sexuality research with Pamela Anderson.
We can only pay 50 cents an hour, but stock
options are available to qualified applicants.
I applaud the helpful reviews of this movie, which aided me in saving $15 this summer.
You could make an intelligent Slashdot-posting agent. It would require only a limited vocabulary, like "Microsoft sucks", "Natalie Portman", "hot grits", etc.
Possibly a better (and more lucrative) idea would be to write an intelligent computer-industry rumor generator. The great thing about this is that it would require virtually no input to generate an infinite amount of output.
Dramite ships attacking!
"I'm pretty bright, therefore anything I don't understand must be God."
"I don't understand how quantum effects affect the synapses in the human brain."
"Therefore, God is the quantum effects affecting the synapses in the human brain."
Here are a few arguments against this kind of tripe:
1. The "observer" discussed in quantum physics is really shorthand for "something that is affected by the outcome of a certain event".* An observer may be something as simple as an atom of U-235, which may split if a nearby atom undergoes radioactive decay. If an atomic bomb is detonated and nobody is watching, does it make a sound?
2. What, in particular, makes the brain qualitatively different from a computer? Look at an individual neuron. A neuron has certain input ports, and certain output ports. It also has some amount of internal state. A particular output port will fire if a given combination of inputs and internal state is satisfied. This is no more mystical than your average Intel product.
3. The fact that Einstein believed something does not make it true. The same goes for Plato, Aristotle, and me.
The estimate I've heard is that the sun will go red giant in 5*10^9 years. That's quite a while. I suspect that 5 billion years is long enough to think of something more elegant than a "simple" solution. In fact, there will have to be a better solution, since the real bottleneck in evacuating people from Earth would be in getting them to orbit in the first place.
In my AI course in college, we spend a godawful amount of time working on different ways of programming a simple automatic vacuum cleaner to learn the best way to clean a room.
The technique was fairly simple: give the robot a certain number of points for changing a grid square from dirty to clean, and subtract a certain number of points for every unit of energy expended. After each run, the robot changes its algorithm and tries again. Eventually, you end up with a robot that will clean up the maximum amount of dirt with the minimum amount of energy.
(Forgive me if the details are fuzzy--too much LDS in the '60s...)
To implement this in a real system, it seems like you could even dispense with the sensor, and just weigh the vacuum bag at the beginning and the end of each cycle. You just have to make sure the robot doesn't cheat by going outside to vacuum up all of the dirt in the garden...
Impala: a large brownish African antelope. Compare to gnu--a different species of large brownish African antelope.
Paladin: champion of a cause; trusted military leader.
Hence, Impaladin: Impala Paladin, GNU Leader.
Not bad.
"After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter."
Mary Shelley, _Frankenstein_
The same reason why there's no hydrogen on Mercury, or much on Earth or Venus (at least in comparison to other elements). When the solar system was forming, the force of the solar wind was enough to drive lighter elements far away from the sun (this is why Jupiter et al have so much hydrogen, and it is also the origin of the Oort cloud of comets), but heavier elements stayed in the inner solar system.
I knew all those geology classes would come in handy someday.
An atmosphere that contains silicon in vapor form indicates that it's too hot for silicon to combine with oxygen.
At these temperatures, there is zero possibility of silicon-based life--the molecules wouldn't stay together!
In this case, the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere does not indicate the presence of life. In fact, given the two other elements detected (silicon and magnesium), it indicates a climate that is singularly inhospitable to any biology at all.
The atmosphere is vaporized rock. Now that's hot.
Rocks, at least the crustal rocks on Earth, consist mainly of oxygen, silicon, and magnesium, with a few trace elements to make things interesting.
Given that this planet is so close to its star, it's not surprising that the surface tempurature is hot enough to boil rocks.
We already know that a distributed computing project can exhaust the keyspace for 56-bit keys in a reasonably short time. Regardless of the encryption algorithm, a 56 bit key can be broken. So why bother with this particular algorithm?
This is all just a publicity stunt by CS. Their description of the "CS-Ciper Challenge" states that the purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate that brute force is the only possible attack against their algorithm, which is absurd. Either the message will be decrypted by brute force, which just proves the obvious fact that brute force attacks are possible, or it will be decrypted by finding a cleaver attack on the algorithm. If no attacks are found, that only means that no attacks were found, not that there are no possible attacks against this algorithm.
Sheesh. Maybe I'll start a contest to prove some other negative.
This encryption scheme sounds pretty good for direct connections, but it is totally useless for Internet communication. The whole idea behind IP is that packets are transmitted, received, and retransmitted from host to host until they reach their destination (hopefully). The problem is that this type of quantum encryption only works if the actual photons that were emitted by the sender are detected by the recipient.
Of course, if every pair of hosts create a one-time pad in this manner for each IP packet that they exchange, it could work, but that would really suck up bandwidth since you need one bit of key for every bit of data. I suppose we could string fiber between all possible pairs of computers on the planet, or maybe just broadcast neutrinos directly. Not this month, though.
Let's not quit working on mathematical encryption algorithms just yet.
I don't get it. What's a catpital. Is this some play on the word "caterpillar"? That's gotta be it. Virginia is the caterpillar of the Internet, chewing up the pesky milkweed pods that cause packet loss, data corruption, and dandruff.
Eventually, Virginia will pupate and finally become an adult butterfly, fluttering across a green meadow, chased by a cat... Hey, cats, CATpital... obviously, I'm on the right track.
Here it is:
"All of those *.FF and *.00 addresses are wasted! Let's assign them to hosts! This won't break anything! I can prove it mathematically! It's all because nobody realizes that binary numbers are magical!"
In other words, the whole paper is essentially garbage.
Interestingly enough, the author mentions that all of this incoherent rambling is the result of studying for a Cisco Certification examination. Someone should contact Cisco, and inform them that the brain-eating forces of Yog-Sothoth have taken over their textbook editing department.