Re:Arrogance more powerful than its technology?
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 2
According to the product specs it can handle people up to 250 pounds.
Re:Arrogance more powerful than its technology?
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 2
Writing as someone who recently learned how to
rollerblade, and is still unsteady: I would not like to deal with a sidewalk full of rollerbladers...
Re:cry me a river you CRIMINAL
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You don't get it. Any copyrighted material enters the public domain after a while - in the US the constitution specifically grants congress only the right to pass law that grant copyright for a limited time. So if you buy a DVD today, the contents of that DVD will enter the public domain at some time.
However, if that DVD uses CSS, and it is the only source you can get the content from, you're stuck. Even though the work is in the public domain, and you can legally copy it, under the DMCA you can't legally obtain the tools for breaking the encryption used.
Thus, copy protection via encryption can be used artifically extend your copyright protection, since you can go after anyone that copies the work even after it has entered the public domain, and get them thrown in jail for violating the DMCA. Even the threat of that will be a major protection for the movie studios and others.
As I see it, the DMCA is in part a way for the US government to work around the restrictions placed on it by the US constitution.
There's many places in Europe, companies - especially courier services etc. - use either wireless LAN enabled credit card machines, or GSM based ones, depending on the range they need to cover. It's been quite common for several years.
You obviously don't realize how difficult it is to get an entire country to change behaviour. ANY country.
Do you realize the cost of giving enough information to a population the size of Brazils that is thorough enough that people will change their behaviour?
Can you show me any country that has managed to get rid of HIV and AIDS by getting people to change behaviour? Let alone any country as poor as Brazil.
And I've already replied to the bullshit about "breaking" a patent before, and your lies about Brazil not paying.
Further, even if you do use protection, you don't have 100% protection against HIV. And even if you stick with only one partner, you have no guarantee that your partner does the same.
The signature can be made from the text of the document with whitespace removed. It can trivially be entered back into a computer and verified.
Obviously this wouldn't work anywhere where you would need to have a picture, or a representation of a handwritten signature. In that case you would need to be able to present a digital version of the document.
This is bullshit. Brazils laws allow the government to use compulsory licensing in the face of a medical emergency. Notice: Compulsory licensing, not "breaking" the patent. What this means is that they can force the manufcaturer to license a product at a reasonable price if they refuse to do so by their own choice in the case where the country faces a medical emergency.
This is legal in Brazil, and a part of the terms you enter into when applying for a patent.
A patent isn't some god-given right, but a privilege granted by a country for a limited period of time, provided that you fulfill whatever restrictions the particular country has placed on patents. In this case: They have to be prepared to accept compulsory licensing.
Now, perhaps you believe that hundreds of thousands of people dying of AIDS doesn't constitute a medical emergency... In that case I'll just think you're an asshole.
Either way, you are wrong that Brazil won't pay for the drugs - under the terms of their compulsory licensing law still pay licensing fees.
No, he wants them to opt out of searches that they know have no relevance to the content, and where they know that they users who get there will just get annoyed and go somewhere else anyway. For people trying to make money on the web, this is a way to reduce bandwidth costs, and to be able to better target people actually interested in what they provide (and thus more willing to pay or click on ads).
The suggestion was intended to tell the search engines what words on your site aren't relevant for search purposes. So a site primarily about Toyota Celicas, but that mention Supra a couple of places might want add Supra to their "nonwords" entry, to avoid confusing people looking for info about Supras.
So if the suggestion were in use by most people, you might not have to add "-celica" to your search, as it would be easier for the search engine to exclude pages that contain the word "Supra" but that isn't relevant for your search.
It's in no way a perfect idea. But if enough people use it it may have some value.
That's not required. One way of training GP and
GA systems without inflicting it on other people,
would be to run the system alongside a real DJ:
Each of the GAs could get to choose a few tracks, and the DJ chooses a few tracks. After a few tracks, the GAs are assigned fitness values based on whether they match the DJs choice, choose a track from the same album, same artist or same genre (or any other criteria you think are relevant). Then you generate a new generation of
GAs, and repeat.
If the DJ has a clear style, and you do your programming right, the GAs should converge on choosing music relatively close to what the DJ
would choose in the same circumstances, and their
fitness would increase.
Obviously, if used alongside a crappy DJ, this would generate GAs that would make equally crappy choices.
And this precludes leading the audience exactly how? After all, if you want that, all you have to do is modify the fitness function according to how you want to lead people.
If you think the idea of a good night is to have everyone collapsing after hours and hours of insane heart activity, then maximizing heart rythm would be a good fitness function. If you want to vary the speed and peoples response, then you have the fitness function vary over the course of the night.
As simple as that.
It seems as if everyone here assumes that biofeedback absolutely has to be used to have the system maximizing heart rate continuously.
Re:Defn: recession of nationalism, tribalism, cont
on
Defining Globalism
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· Score: 2
Uhm. While some groups that are placing themselves on the political left may be quite totalitarian (the same is true for the right), many of them are also extremely anti-totalitarian. Some to the extent where they see the nation state as too oppressive, and want to abolish it, to give one example.
The "left" isn't one cohesive group. On the contrary, the political left is extremely incoherent, because so many of the groups on the left consists of people that are extremely antiautoritarian and extreme individualists - it's
hard for people to build cohesive movements from
people like that. And you'll find that a lot of these groups will have dramatically divergent views on what globalization is and why you should be for or against it - just like in the rest of society.
I completely agree, and this also to some extent explains why so many extremely disparate groups almost all contain movements that are both for and against globalization.
Katz mentions the political left, for instance, but at the same time as the political left is relatively united against globalization in the form the fear it will have when led by WTO, IMF and the G7 powers, the very same political left contains a lot of groups that have been postulating a different form of globalization as critical for the emancipation and liberation of the working classes all the way back to Marx.
In many ways, people that are against globalization will be against it in the form or shape envisioned by some group they fear or loathe.
Many of the same radical groups that oppose globalization as envisioned by most Western governments embrace Marxist-Leninist concepts such as the abolition of the nation state, binding
world-wide treaties on protection of the environment and human rights, or support wider
flow of information about other cultures or
languages, all of which in some form could easily
be said to have something to do with globalization.
In the same way, while many muslim groups may oppose globalization as envisioned by Western politicians, the same groups would in many cases be happy to embrace concepts of globalization based on Islamic law, culture and religion.
This is a classic struggle for control over the
meaning of a word, and what globalization will
depend on who does the best job at "marketing" their ideas.
Re:I've thought about it, and I have one question.
on
Slovenian e-Government
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· Score: 2
You're partly wrong:
"Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian , language belonging to the South Slavic group of the Slavic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Slavic languages ). Although it is actually one language, Serbo-Croatian is designated as Serbian when spoken by Serbs (mostly belonging to the Orthodox Eastern Church) and written in a form of the Cyrillic alphabet, but as Croatian when spoken by Croats (mostly Roman Catholics) and written in a modified version of the Roman alphabet."
(From Lycos Reference)
First, lots of people have already pointed out that you're talking about the wrong country. Secondly, you are making the assumption that spending money on internet projects is a pure cost for the government, without justifying it in any way.
Spending money on getting the government online can have many positive effects, among them cutting costs in printing and distributing material, cutting travel costs, reducing time spent distributing material, and so on.
And even if you discount positive effects from using the net itself, just using the net will translate to increased revenues for local companies and increased employment.
I have no idea whether those two in total add up
to enough that they make Slovenias e-government
project worth it, but discounting it outright without evaluating the above just because a relatively poor country is using money on internet related projects is shortsighted at best.
Compaq recently announced that they are working on
Single System Image clustering for Linux, which does make several boxes look like one - same PID space, shared IP addresses, shared memory, shared devices and filesystem etc.
That argument doesn't hold. Tiled windows work just as well with "how our brains work". As do full screen presentation. As do three dimensional user interfaces.
The issue isn't which method is easily understood, but whether there are other easily understood mechanisms for presenting data on screen that are more convenient to operate.
Actually, you can buy a 20MHz 16 bit drop
in replacement for the old 6510 CPU in the C64,
and you can also use up to 16MB of RAM with it,
1 GB HD, etc. Take a look here, and
be very, very afraid:-)
In other words: Some diehard fans actually found it worth it...
While the C64 and Amiga scenes may be mere shadows
of what they were in the past, they still exists.
And the next time you change the internal
structure of your CPU, everyone with binaries
optimized for the older structure are screwed
unless they recompile...
Civ and Civ2 maybe, but with SMAC I've found both
Ascent to Transcendence and Diplomatic victory (being elected supreme leader) is quite possible even at the higher difficulty levels without extensive war. Sure, you may have skirmishes here and there - but realistically, which civilization haven't been involved in extensive wars over it's lifetime?
Both of the above mentioned alternatives can be achieved mostly by diplomacy, and by choosing your alliances carefully.
Also in SMAC the "corner the global energy market" (Economic victory) option should also be quite doable without war. Actually, if you want to save up the energy amounts needed, I'd preferrably try spending only whatever I need to defend my borders on military. Gotta try that next weekend:)
The judges are prepared to look for a computer. People on ICQ or IRC are not...
I did some experiments with this some years ago, and my first try just returned the same line over and over again. At least one person spent about half an hour getting more and more agitated trying to communicate with the bot, and complaining abouts it's incessant repeating, asking it to stop (it always responded once to each message, so of course each time he asked it to stop he'd get another one)...
A followed up with one that chose between 4 messages at random. A lot of people talked to that one.
The last one I bothered testing with triggered on about ten keywords, each of them starting a specific sequence of 4 messages that were used for responses to subsequent messages from whoever it "talked" to, until it reached the end of them, or it found one of the other keywords in a response. If it reached the last message without finding a new keyword it would just choose a message on random until it got a keyword again.
That was enough to keep people occupied for a long period of time. A few people even gave it their phone number or asked for the bots phone number:)
And keep in mind that this was with fixed messages. Not a single word of the messages where ever changed to adapt to what people told it.
It scared the shit out of me that people are so gullible...
The idea that sparked it off was to write a bot that would talk to women, getting them to tell
a bit about themselves and get them to give out
an e-mail address or their phone number, based
on the experience that finding dates on IRC is
ridiculously easy, but tedious, as you can essentially follow a simple "script" and get
people to warm up to you.
I scrapped the idea after the experiments mentioned above, - dating anyone stupid enough to be fooled by a bot that simple wouldn't be my idea of fun...:)
In itself raised prices isn't a proof. But when production costs doesn't increase at the same rate as the prices, and the company in question has margins above practically anyone else in the industry, it's a pretty damn good proof that they are using their monopoly to milk consumers.
If you can find any company with any real competition that manage to get margins anywhere near Microsoft, then I'd like to hear about it...
Slashdot Mirror
According to the product specs it can handle people up to 250 pounds.
Writing as someone who recently learned how to
rollerblade, and is still unsteady: I would not like to deal with a sidewalk full of rollerbladers...
However, if that DVD uses CSS, and it is the only source you can get the content from, you're stuck. Even though the work is in the public domain, and you can legally copy it, under the DMCA you can't legally obtain the tools for breaking the encryption used.
Thus, copy protection via encryption can be used artifically extend your copyright protection, since you can go after anyone that copies the work even after it has entered the public domain, and get them thrown in jail for violating the DMCA. Even the threat of that will be a major protection for the movie studios and others.
As I see it, the DMCA is in part a way for the US government to work around the restrictions placed on it by the US constitution.
There's many places in Europe, companies - especially courier services etc. - use either wireless LAN enabled credit card machines, or GSM based ones, depending on the range they need to cover. It's been quite common for several years.
Talk about being a complete idiot.
You obviously don't realize how difficult it is to get an entire country to change behaviour. ANY country.
Do you realize the cost of giving enough information to a population the size of Brazils that is thorough enough that people will change their behaviour?
Can you show me any country that has managed to get rid of HIV and AIDS by getting people to change behaviour? Let alone any country as poor as Brazil.
And I've already replied to the bullshit about "breaking" a patent before, and your lies about Brazil not paying.
Further, even if you do use protection, you don't have 100% protection against HIV. And even if you stick with only one partner, you have no guarantee that your partner does the same.
Obviously this wouldn't work anywhere where you would need to have a picture, or a representation of a handwritten signature. In that case you would need to be able to present a digital version of the document.
This is legal in Brazil, and a part of the terms you enter into when applying for a patent.
A patent isn't some god-given right, but a privilege granted by a country for a limited period of time, provided that you fulfill whatever restrictions the particular country has placed on patents. In this case: They have to be prepared to accept compulsory licensing.
Now, perhaps you believe that hundreds of thousands of people dying of AIDS doesn't constitute a medical emergency... In that case I'll just think you're an asshole.
Either way, you are wrong that Brazil won't pay for the drugs - under the terms of their compulsory licensing law still pay licensing fees.
No, he wants them to opt out of searches that they know have no relevance to the content, and where they know that they users who get there will just get annoyed and go somewhere else anyway. For people trying to make money on the web, this is a way to reduce bandwidth costs, and to be able to better target people actually interested in what they provide (and thus more willing to pay or click on ads).
The suggestion was intended to tell the search engines what words on your site aren't relevant for search purposes. So a site primarily about Toyota Celicas, but that mention Supra a couple of places might want add Supra to their "nonwords" entry, to avoid confusing people looking for info about Supras.
So if the suggestion were in use by most people, you might not have to add "-celica" to your search, as it would be easier for the search engine to exclude pages that contain the word "Supra" but that isn't relevant for your search.
It's in no way a perfect idea. But if enough people use it it may have some value.
Each of the GAs could get to choose a few tracks, and the DJ chooses a few tracks. After a few tracks, the GAs are assigned fitness values based on whether they match the DJs choice, choose a track from the same album, same artist or same genre (or any other criteria you think are relevant). Then you generate a new generation of GAs, and repeat.
If the DJ has a clear style, and you do your programming right, the GAs should converge on choosing music relatively close to what the DJ would choose in the same circumstances, and their fitness would increase.
Obviously, if used alongside a crappy DJ, this would generate GAs that would make equally crappy choices.
If you think the idea of a good night is to have everyone collapsing after hours and hours of insane heart activity, then maximizing heart rythm would be a good fitness function. If you want to vary the speed and peoples response, then you have the fitness function vary over the course of the night.
As simple as that.
It seems as if everyone here assumes that biofeedback absolutely has to be used to have the system maximizing heart rate continuously.
The "left" isn't one cohesive group. On the contrary, the political left is extremely incoherent, because so many of the groups on the left consists of people that are extremely antiautoritarian and extreme individualists - it's hard for people to build cohesive movements from people like that. And you'll find that a lot of these groups will have dramatically divergent views on what globalization is and why you should be for or against it - just like in the rest of society.
Katz mentions the political left, for instance, but at the same time as the political left is relatively united against globalization in the form the fear it will have when led by WTO, IMF and the G7 powers, the very same political left contains a lot of groups that have been postulating a different form of globalization as critical for the emancipation and liberation of the working classes all the way back to Marx.
In many ways, people that are against globalization will be against it in the form or shape envisioned by some group they fear or loathe.
Many of the same radical groups that oppose globalization as envisioned by most Western governments embrace Marxist-Leninist concepts such as the abolition of the nation state, binding world-wide treaties on protection of the environment and human rights, or support wider flow of information about other cultures or languages, all of which in some form could easily be said to have something to do with globalization.
In the same way, while many muslim groups may oppose globalization as envisioned by Western politicians, the same groups would in many cases be happy to embrace concepts of globalization based on Islamic law, culture and religion.
This is a classic struggle for control over the meaning of a word, and what globalization will depend on who does the best job at "marketing" their ideas.
You're partly wrong: "Serbo-Croatian Serbo-Croatian , language belonging to the South Slavic group of the Slavic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Slavic languages ). Although it is actually one language, Serbo-Croatian is designated as Serbian when spoken by Serbs (mostly belonging to the Orthodox Eastern Church) and written in a form of the Cyrillic alphabet, but as Croatian when spoken by Croats (mostly Roman Catholics) and written in a modified version of the Roman alphabet." (From Lycos Reference)
Spending money on getting the government online can have many positive effects, among them cutting costs in printing and distributing material, cutting travel costs, reducing time spent distributing material, and so on.
And even if you discount positive effects from using the net itself, just using the net will translate to increased revenues for local companies and increased employment.
I have no idea whether those two in total add up to enough that they make Slovenias e-government project worth it, but discounting it outright without evaluating the above just because a relatively poor country is using money on internet related projects is shortsighted at best.
Compaq recently announced that they are working on Single System Image clustering for Linux, which does make several boxes look like one - same PID space, shared IP addresses, shared memory, shared devices and filesystem etc.
The issue isn't which method is easily understood, but whether there are other easily understood mechanisms for presenting data on screen that are more convenient to operate.
per se (adv.) Of, in, or by itself or oneself; intrinsically.
[Latin: per, per + se, itself - per itself]
This matches the use perfectly when read as "I don't agree with you on government being inefficient in itself"
In other words: Some diehard fans actually found it worth it...
While the C64 and Amiga scenes may be mere shadows of what they were in the past, they still exists.
And the next time you change the internal structure of your CPU, everyone with binaries optimized for the older structure are screwed unless they recompile...
Both of the above mentioned alternatives can be achieved mostly by diplomacy, and by choosing your alliances carefully.
Also in SMAC the "corner the global energy market" (Economic victory) option should also be quite doable without war. Actually, if you want to save up the energy amounts needed, I'd preferrably try spending only whatever I need to defend my borders on military. Gotta try that next weekend :)
Saying they contribute nothing is a bit unfair.
Also, AOL has actually released a few other Open Source applications. Take a look at AOLserver for instance.
AOL isn't my favorite company, but they aren't all bad all the time :)
I did some experiments with this some years ago, and my first try just returned the same line over and over again. At least one person spent about half an hour getting more and more agitated trying to communicate with the bot, and complaining abouts it's incessant repeating, asking it to stop (it always responded once to each message, so of course each time he asked it to stop he'd get another one)...
A followed up with one that chose between 4 messages at random. A lot of people talked to that one.
The last one I bothered testing with triggered on about ten keywords, each of them starting a specific sequence of 4 messages that were used for responses to subsequent messages from whoever it "talked" to, until it reached the end of them, or it found one of the other keywords in a response. If it reached the last message without finding a new keyword it would just choose a message on random until it got a keyword again.
That was enough to keep people occupied for a long period of time. A few people even gave it their phone number or asked for the bots phone number :)
And keep in mind that this was with fixed messages. Not a single word of the messages where ever changed to adapt to what people told it.
It scared the shit out of me that people are so gullible...
The idea that sparked it off was to write a bot that would talk to women, getting them to tell a bit about themselves and get them to give out an e-mail address or their phone number, based on the experience that finding dates on IRC is ridiculously easy, but tedious, as you can essentially follow a simple "script" and get people to warm up to you.
I scrapped the idea after the experiments mentioned above, - dating anyone stupid enough to be fooled by a bot that simple wouldn't be my idea of fun... :)
Except that this guy has all the money he needs, and is too old to care much about getting more, and has a great dislike for the combustion engine.
If you can find any company with any real competition that manage to get margins anywhere near Microsoft, then I'd like to hear about it...