Yeah, well with so many throwbacks like you still around, it's no surprise we still don't allow euthanasia.
Some of us realize that long-term suffering is worse than death. Shame you haven't woken up to that one yet. This dogma about life being above all else is over 2,000 years old and it's not getting any more relevant.
I'm surprised you don't see the irony of condoning murder. But your type aren't generally too bright.
Releasing the information about a BIND fault creates a race condition : the sysadmins try to apply the patch before the script kiddies try to gain access.
Now, the funny thing about this race condition, is that it happens regardless of when the information was privately discovered. It depends only on when the information is publically released. However, anyone who knows the knowledge before public release has an advantage - they can patch their systems and never worry about the race condition.
So keeping this information secret neither helps nor hinders the average sysadmin in his security task. The race condition always exists at the moment of public announcement, regardless.
However, buying this information early gives you a distinct advantage - you get a system which is less likely to be attacked.
So let's face facts: this is a ploy to raise capital, based on the unarguable market value of early information. It is not in the interests of the average sysadmin. It is in the interests of the seller and the buyer alone.
*sigh* Regardless of whether factorization is in NP, it is not in NP-Complete.
No-one is going to be misled by my post, because what I say is true.
Everything you say is true, also, but for some reason you seem to think that this is in contradiction with my earlier statement. It isn't. You're confused.
Oh, and *please* look up "troll" in the Jargon File. The meaning of this word is diluted when it is attached to correct and informative, non-troll, posts.
NP-Complete refers to problems for which verifying the solution is in NP.
Travelling Salesman is NP-Complete because given a potential solution it is believed that you still have to check all the others to prove it's optimal.
Factoring is provably not in NP-Complete, because given a potential solution all you have to do is multiply the factors together to check it's correct.
Only that way can we insure that the new generations can learn from my generation's mistakes and fulfill our promises of greatness.
So what are these liberal teaching methods if they're not an attempt of one generation to learn from the previous generation's mistakes?
And if this is truly what you are after, how in hell do you expect to achieve this by drilling kids with all the same knowledge and information that caused you to make those mistakes in the first place?
I can appreciate the sentiment, but I have to disagree.
Firstly, consciousness itself is not necessarily unexplainable. Love and hate are, but this is because they have no meaning outside of our perception. Consciousness (arguably) can be defined in absolute terms of the inputs and outputs of a machine, and can be studied in those terms.
Secondly, you're right that the scientists just move the mystery to another level. No-one knows what an "electric force" is, unless they're a quantum mechanic in which case they don't know what a "photon" is. But I'm reminded of Richard Feynman's remarks that understanding biology does not take away from your appreciation of a flower, but rather adds to it. You can appreciate a deeper mystery. Have you never found anything in science to be beautiful?
Having said that, this announcement sounds to me like someone uncovering a single line of code in the Linux kernel and saying that it's responsible for multithreading.
Unfortunately the confusion here is caused by people's loose use of the term "game".
When you're talking about a zero-sum game, you're necessarily talking about a "game" as defined by Game Theory, since the term "zero-sum game" is also defined by Game Theory. The necessary part of such a game is that rewards are available, and the zero-sum refers to the fact that the sum of rewards to all players is zero. That is, playing poker for money is zero-sum, since every dollar that someone wins is a dollar that someone else looses.
However, and sadly, people here are talking about games in the English sense, which is a broad category of activities defined God-knows-how, with no specific requirement for a "reward" for playing.
Of course, if you define the "reward" to be just the playing of the game, then any game is non-zero-sum;)
This news is amazing. Combine this with the earlier news that the Brazilians are ignoring IP laws to provide AIDS treatment for its people. It might just be coincidence, but it looks like Brazil have got a pretty enlightened government. Did they recently have a change in that area?
All we need to do now is borrow them and put them in Washington;)
Re:Affect hardware sales?
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OS X on x86?
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Oh, it was, wasn't it. OK, it was an ugly biege box;)
Re:Been done here for ages, and it works.
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The Unblinking Eye
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It does in theory, so why do these TV shows exist in the UK? There's one show which is literally nothing more than "candid camera" done through security cameras.
I'm a great believer in this - in fact, I argued against a policeman on this very site 2 weeks ago about exactly the same thing, but this time related to kiddie porn.
But we're not talking about any specific people being treated like criminals - CCTV acts as a deterrent.
But thinking about it, I'm not sure how I feel about it, especially [as I noted elswhere] since in the UK at least, CCTV operators are selling their footage to national TV, for the amusement/warning value.
Personally, I don't like the idea of being watched by a dozen CCTV cameras everywhere I go, but if there was at least some control over what happens to the footage then I would probably not be in vocal opposition.
they are so restricted in their movement that they become defensive, organized, and dangerous.
A bit like the Open Source movement, then?;)
Seriously, though, the idea is to prevent criminals from committing crimes. It seems strange to then say that, wait, there will be bad consequences if these criminals aren't allowed to commit their crimes.
Re:Been done here for ages, and it works.
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The Unblinking Eye
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Yeah, and if you're really lucky they sell the CCTV tape to the TV network and the tape of you taking a leak by the railway track gets broadcast nationwide.
I wasn't against CCTV until shows like that started showing up. What gives the police the right to sell the "humorous" excerpts to TV?
Its just a question of trusting the authoriteies. If they abuse this power, unlikely, you can just vote them out. That is what a democracy is for.
On a single-user box this works. On a multiple user box, UNIX does not store the "last accessed" time for each file and for each user [unless someone's written a very different FS for UNIX than I'm used to!] If you wrote to the file things might be easier. But again, if someone wrote to it after you your timestamp is lost. Of course, this is the problem that things like CVS solve - and I'm surprised people don't use CVS for other things than just code. Although CVS still doesn't log browsing information, AFAIK.
Storing files sensibly is a problem for many people;) Anyway, it might not even be a stored file - it might be a file you loaded from an FTP site. I'm always losing pages in my web browser, and when I browse a lot it's a bitch tracking through the history to find the one page I want.
And the problem with a CLI versus a natural-language input is that the CLI forces the person to think like the machine [it's easy for us, we know how the OS *works*] whereas the NL stuff forces the machine to think like the person. In an ideal world, I prefer the latter.
My approach would be to have "3D graphics" index a list of 3D graphics words and if the Word document contained a lot of those words it would guess it was 3D graphics. A neural net could be used to determine categorization with each word's prescence being an input and each output being associated with a category.
The great thing about a truly vocal UI is that if the computer isn't sure (which it never is) it gives you the chance to narrow it down, or correct your input. Full natural language is excellent at this. "No, maybe I read it Thursday."
Oh, I'm not talking about fully-blown programs. Just things like database searches and command invocations. When specified in spoken language, there is definitely an element of ambiguity... but spoken language deals with this by adding more detail when needed. e.g. "find the document I was reading last Thursday lunchtime"... computer displays 3 documents... "ok, yeah, it's the one about 3D graphics"... document opens up.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of us realize that long-term suffering is worse than death. Shame you haven't woken up to that one yet. This dogma about life being above all else is over 2,000 years old and it's not getting any more relevant.
I'm surprised you don't see the irony of condoning murder. But your type aren't generally too bright.
Now, the funny thing about this race condition, is that it happens regardless of when the information was privately discovered. It depends only on when the information is publically released. However, anyone who knows the knowledge before public release has an advantage - they can patch their systems and never worry about the race condition.
So keeping this information secret neither helps nor hinders the average sysadmin in his security task. The race condition always exists at the moment of public announcement, regardless.
However, buying this information early gives you a distinct advantage - you get a system which is less likely to be attacked.
So let's face facts: this is a ploy to raise capital, based on the unarguable market value of early information. It is not in the interests of the average sysadmin. It is in the interests of the seller and the buyer alone.
Ah, fuck off. Go annoy someone else.
Now to find the book I read this in, and throw it away ;)
No-one is going to be misled by my post, because what I say is true.
Everything you say is true, also, but for some reason you seem to think that this is in contradiction with my earlier statement. It isn't. You're confused.
Oh, and *please* look up "troll" in the Jargon File. The meaning of this word is diluted when it is attached to correct and informative, non-troll, posts.
Wanker.
Since when was the word "calendar" a verb anyway?
If you're worried about this, do what I do. Don't own a PDA or a cellphone.
NP-Complete refers to problems for which verifying the solution is in NP.
Travelling Salesman is NP-Complete because given a potential solution it is believed that you still have to check all the others to prove it's optimal.
Factoring is provably not in NP-Complete, because given a potential solution all you have to do is multiply the factors together to check it's correct.
Oh man, don't ever mention Marijuana on Slashdot! It seems the moderators are prudish to the extreme.
So what are these liberal teaching methods if they're not an attempt of one generation to learn from the previous generation's mistakes?
And if this is truly what you are after, how in hell do you expect to achieve this by drilling kids with all the same knowledge and information that caused you to make those mistakes in the first place?
Firstly, consciousness itself is not necessarily unexplainable. Love and hate are, but this is because they have no meaning outside of our perception. Consciousness (arguably) can be defined in absolute terms of the inputs and outputs of a machine, and can be studied in those terms.
Secondly, you're right that the scientists just move the mystery to another level. No-one knows what an "electric force" is, unless they're a quantum mechanic in which case they don't know what a "photon" is. But I'm reminded of Richard Feynman's remarks that understanding biology does not take away from your appreciation of a flower, but rather adds to it. You can appreciate a deeper mystery. Have you never found anything in science to be beautiful?
Having said that, this announcement sounds to me like someone uncovering a single line of code in the Linux kernel and saying that it's responsible for multithreading.
Actually it's infinitely easier than finding the highest prime number ... that problem is known to be impossible ;)
When you're talking about a zero-sum game, you're necessarily talking about a "game" as defined by Game Theory, since the term "zero-sum game" is also defined by Game Theory. The necessary part of such a game is that rewards are available, and the zero-sum refers to the fact that the sum of rewards to all players is zero. That is, playing poker for money is zero-sum, since every dollar that someone wins is a dollar that someone else looses.
However, and sadly, people here are talking about games in the English sense, which is a broad category of activities defined God-knows-how, with no specific requirement for a "reward" for playing.
Of course, if you define the "reward" to be just the playing of the game, then any game is non-zero-sum ;)
All we need to do now is borrow them and put them in Washington ;)
Oh, it was, wasn't it. OK, it was an ugly biege box ;)
It does in theory, so why do these TV shows exist in the UK? There's one show which is literally nothing more than "candid camera" done through security cameras.
But we're not talking about any specific people being treated like criminals - CCTV acts as a deterrent.
But thinking about it, I'm not sure how I feel about it, especially [as I noted elswhere] since in the UK at least, CCTV operators are selling their footage to national TV, for the amusement/warning value.
Personally, I don't like the idea of being watched by a dozen CCTV cameras everywhere I go, but if there was at least some control over what happens to the footage then I would probably not be in vocal opposition.
A bit like the Open Source movement, then? ;)
Seriously, though, the idea is to prevent criminals from committing crimes. It seems strange to then say that, wait, there will be bad consequences if these criminals aren't allowed to commit their crimes.
But you do have a point.
What about owls?
I wasn't against CCTV until shows like that started showing up. What gives the police the right to sell the "humorous" excerpts to TV?
Its just a question of trusting the authoriteies. If they abuse this power, unlikely, you can just vote them out. That is what a democracy is for.
Yeah, right ...
But that's another thread.
Storing files sensibly is a problem for many people ;) Anyway, it might not even be a stored file - it might be a file you loaded from an FTP site. I'm always losing pages in my web browser, and when I browse a lot it's a bitch tracking through the history to find the one page I want.
And the problem with a CLI versus a natural-language input is that the CLI forces the person to think like the machine [it's easy for us, we know how the OS *works*] whereas the NL stuff forces the machine to think like the person. In an ideal world, I prefer the latter.
That makes me laugh ;)
I'm talking about an ideal world here ;)
My approach would be to have "3D graphics" index a list of 3D graphics words and if the Word document contained a lot of those words it would guess it was 3D graphics. A neural net could be used to determine categorization with each word's prescence being an input and each output being associated with a category.
The great thing about a truly vocal UI is that if the computer isn't sure (which it never is) it gives you the chance to narrow it down, or correct your input. Full natural language is excellent at this. "No, maybe I read it Thursday."
Anyway, this is all fantasy for now ;)
Oh, I'm not talking about fully-blown programs. Just things like database searches and command invocations. When specified in spoken language, there is definitely an element of ambiguity ... but spoken language deals with this by adding more detail when needed. e.g. "find the document I was reading last Thursday lunchtime" ... computer displays 3 documents ... "ok, yeah, it's the one about 3D graphics" ... document opens up.