A distributed chess engine would probably be too slow for a real chess game, but it could be used to do something even more ambitious: solve chess.
There are an astronomical number of possible board configurations in chess, but they are finite. A distributed system could play every possible chess game, attempting every possible move and every possible countermove, and find out what lines result in white win, black win, or draw. By building that sort of database, a computer would be able to play by rote memory to the best possible outcome.
Once that was done, chess would be as "boring" to computers as tic-tac-toe is to adults, and for the same reasons.
IANAL.
That out of the way, the line for parody is that it must use only as much of the original to be readily recognizable.
I suggest that a good parody that knew how to stay on the line was Spaceballs. They could even gat away with Dark Helmet's...er...helmet, plus the Alien re-enactment in the diner. Mad Magazine also knows its way around how far it can go and come in under the parody clause.
Thank you. I agree with all of this. Capitalism is built around capital because it was put together for industrial purposes. It makes it easy to put together a factory to make material goods. It works very well for that.
But now, much of the economy is going to a data/info economy. Big Oil and Big Steel is getting replaced by Big Software and Big Media. This can't be done with the capitalist/industrial model of expensive machines and cheap, unskilled labor; your capital is now mostly expert labor.
Capitalism doesn't handle this natively. We have the kludges of IP law in place for that. This worked well enough when IP was a minor part of the gross product, when copyrights were applied to books and patents to motors. However, the economy is resting more and more on these kludges, and the theories of capitalism are going right out the window.
So where do we go from here? Capitalism is becoming obsolete, but what better thing is there to replace it with? I have yet to see successful results with any flavor of communism on a national scale, but that's the only other well-known modern system out there.
I don't suggest this as a solution, but a springboard to think about further solutions. Look here for a discussion of something called the Stone Society. Enjoy!
This design couldn't fit the DARPA spec. It sounds like the compressor is not onboard, or if it is, it's AC powered and plugs into a wall. The DARPA unit has to be self-contained, and able to withstand the muddy conditions of the battlefield. The nurse suit works in one of the cleanest environments humans normally habitate, with ready access to external power or even external pressurized air.
That being said, I know exactly where the military could use this. Hand these to aircraft carrier redshirts (ordinance men). See just how fast they can mount a 500-lb bomb on an F-14. The Navy should love this one.
The simple solution to this problem is compatible with both conservative ("the good old days did it right!") and liberal ("give us our civil rights!") political philosophies: restore copyright terms to sane periods, so these problems don't need to come up, ever. Let them enter the public domain just a few decades after they're copyrighted, the way they were supposed to.
The problem is that the solution is incompatible with Republicans (sucking up to Big Media and Big Media Money) and Democrats (sucking up to Big Media Money and Big Media).
Big Media is even harder to fight than Big Oil. Big Oil is just money (which every politician needs). Big Media is money and influence over voters (which every politician needs more). Get AOL/Time-Warner pissed off at you and see if you can run a decent campaign.
IMHO, the prequel Enterprise does look more primitive.
The TOS ship will always look too primitive, because the model was primitive. It will always look like a model hanging from strings. The prequel ship will be a CGI model.
However, look at the construction of the vessels. The TOS ship is smooth, almost aerodynamic--it looks like it was built in Seattle by an aerospace firm. The TNG and Voyager vessels are built like luxury liners. The prequel ship looks like its hull is solid steel--no transparent aluminum here. It looks like it was built in Detroit. It looks like it outweighs NCC-1701 by a factor of two, which it should.
Look again at the picture. The prequel ship is missing the entire engineering section--no cylinder at the bottom. It's not grand and beautiful--it's hard and functional. It looks more complicated because it should, and because the TOS ship is so simple due to the series budget.
One thing that viewers are going to have to deal with is that, while the technology of the stories is backwards, the technology of the actual production is much better than the TOS. A good way to think of it is that our views of the TOS episodes is "low res", but in the prequel we will have a high-res view of a low-tech universe.
The TV Guide article notes that the Universal Translator exists, but is pretty unreliable. The communications officer of the [em]Enterprise[/em], however, is a linguist.
Yeah, you could do some neat things if you made a rocket that used fissionable materials as a fuel. But if you're going to go that far and invest that sort of engineering resources, why not get to the heart of the problem?
Rockets are the only to get around in deep space, without an atmosphere. And perhaps the energy/weight ratio of a fission rocket is very useful once you've gotten into orbit--it would allow interplanetary travel at higher speeds, for instance. However, it sounds like the problem they're talking about here is going from ground to orbit.
Frankly, rockets are a horrible way to go from ground to orbit. They require you to carry all your reaction mass with you when you have a ready source of both reaction mass and oxygen--that being the air around you.
When the shuttle takes off from the launch pad, it uses solid fuel boosters and main engines, powered by liquid fuel from the Big Honkin' Tank. Liquid fuel is nothing more than hydrogen and oxygen. And to burn a pound of hydrogen, you need about eight pounds of oxygen. Since the system is built as a rocket, it never takes in an ounce of oxygen from the atmosphere--it schlepps all that oxygen around with it.
One simple way to reduce launch weight is simply to burn atmospheric oxygen until your altitude is too high. We call this an [em]airplane[/em].
IMHO, building a hybrid airplane/spaceship is a lot simpler than putting a reactor on a rocket.
Another possibility is that Microsoft is trying to convince the government, and the public, that they are Too Big To Stop. That is, any attempt to remove Microsoft from its monopolistic position will irrevocably damage the economy and/or the software and internet industries. Face it, President Bush runs the DOJ, and he doesn't want to be known as the one who threw us all into a tailspin by breaking up All Holy Microsoft.
This is why it is also going into the Xbox,.Net, all sorts of technologies. The more pies it has its fingers in, the more it will hurt all of us if we stop them.
Back during the original trial, some Slashdotters suggested this as a viable Microsoft strategy--lose so badly that Jackson would throw the book at them, then win on appeal because Jackson was "biased".
Of course, last time I checked, it is the duty of a judge to allow his or herself to be biased by the evidence.
As far as the bogus demos go, I suggest that Jackson perhaps should have persued seperate perjury actions against the witnesses involved. Corporations cannot commit perjury, since they cannot be witnesses. But every time Gates was caught in a bald-faced lie, he should have personally been charged and prosecuted. Ninety days in the federal pen can change your attitude rather quickly.
Doubly so if your name is Bill Gates and your cellmate is Ted Kaczynski.
The problem is that to a corporate entity it dosn't matter if they are tried, it dosn't matter if they are found guilty, it dosn't matter even if a sentence is passed. The only thing which matters is for any sentence to be carried out.
Criminal law is one thing which makes a nonsense of the idea of corporates as "people". A real person would await trial either or in prison or subject to bail, they would have to bring their entirity to court too.
But for a large corporation they can just carry on as usual. A real person couldn't do this, even a moderatly sized business...
So what is the solution; strip corporates of "person status"; halt their operations and freeze their assets as soon as charges are filed; charge Microsoft instead under RICO; etc?
I wouldn't go that far.
We bring the whole person into trial for practical, not punitive reasons; if you bring a partial person to the courthouse, said person isn't likely to be in any shape to testify.
The idea of shutting down a corporation because charges are brought against them is incredibly dangerous. This means that almost anybody with a good lawyer could bring a company to a screeching halt.
Once a corporation is convicted, however, the story changes. I suggest that we have a corporate death penalty (though I oppose the human death penalty); when a corporation is behaving in a sufficiently criminal manner, courts should be able to shut the company down, selling off its assets to pay back the stockholders.
What ever happend to the old UNIX adage that every program should do one thing and it should interact with everything else?
What happened was the other UNIX adage, "Everything should use similar input". That's why shells now accept "vi" editing commands, and why csh and tcsh are often frowned upon (quite powerful, but breaks the Bourne Shell standard).
Personally, I think that we will end up with two dozen different handheld input methods until one gains clearcut approval (or Microsoft makes one proprietary, whichever comes first). This will be nasty.
Killing people might actually have a useful purpose once in a while. But I still like the idea of keeping it illegal.
The fact that the act can be committed from overseas doesn't mean that it shouldn't be a crime. Nor does criminalization mean that you shouldn't defend against port scanners. It is illegal to steal a car; every car sold still has locks and a keyed ignition.
You can't count on the law to find and prosecute the one who attacks you; that's not a complaint about the law, just the fact that they are only human. So you defend yourself with firewalls, burglar alarms, and pepper spray, cooperate with the law when you are attacked, and let the law simply reduce the number of jerks willing to attack you.
Yes, but if all the big businesses keep suing each other, that leaves fewer lawyers available to sue us.
The unfortunate flipside to this is that this creates a lawyer deficit, kids will go into law school because of the extra mad money to be made in the field, and when everybody gets their heads out of their exhaust pipes, we'll have more lawyers than before. And they'll be looking at us.
At that point, you could get sued by somebody you never met for strangermony.
My wife reminds me often of a law of relationships : you can't steal someone else's lover, since they go of their own accord or not at all.
Whether Japan or the US, the same thing happens in corporate life. You cannot steal an employee, you can only convince them to get up and walk of their own accord.
Linux is a cancer to M$, because it puts code out of M$'s reach and requires (certain, obviously not all) additional code to do the same.
A cancer is a malformation of growing cells within a body. If it is its own organism, it isn't a cancer; at worst it's probably blue-green algae.
So if Linux is a cancer, what is the body?
When I read the interview, they imply that the body is corporate software companies, specifically what we often call "closed source".
We don't think that Linux is in that body.
My guess is that M$'s problem is that Linux is eating at the body of possible code to write. That noosphere of possible code looks limitless to some; to Microsoft, it looks quite limited. And they want to own nothing less than the entire noosphere. Other companies are writing code; that's alright, M$ will buy them out sooner or later. When the faceless horde of OSS makes software, they are the cancer that eats away at the limited noosphere. OSS is stealing code and locking it away from Microsoft, who has manifest destiny over the entire noosphere.
Here's the plan. Find the actual holders of Kafka's copyrights on his works, then get them to hold a patent on screwing the government by copyrighting their laws (he shows prior art, no?). Then we can use Kafka's patent against the stupid law-copyright!
Slashdot Mirror
There are an astronomical number of possible board configurations in chess, but they are finite. A distributed system could play every possible chess game, attempting every possible move and every possible countermove, and find out what lines result in white win, black win, or draw. By building that sort of database, a computer would be able to play by rote memory to the best possible outcome.
Once that was done, chess would be as "boring" to computers as tic-tac-toe is to adults, and for the same reasons.
IANAL. That out of the way, the line for parody is that it must use only as much of the original to be readily recognizable. I suggest that a good parody that knew how to stay on the line was Spaceballs. They could even gat away with Dark Helmet's...er...helmet, plus the Alien re-enactment in the diner. Mad Magazine also knows its way around how far it can go and come in under the parody clause.
I don't suggest this as a solution, but a springboard to think about further solutions. Look here for a discussion of something called the Stone Society. Enjoy!
This design couldn't fit the DARPA spec. It sounds like the compressor is not onboard, or if it is, it's AC powered and plugs into a wall. The DARPA unit has to be self-contained, and able to withstand the muddy conditions of the battlefield. The nurse suit works in one of the cleanest environments humans normally habitate, with ready access to external power or even external pressurized air. That being said, I know exactly where the military could use this. Hand these to aircraft carrier redshirts (ordinance men). See just how fast they can mount a 500-lb bomb on an F-14. The Navy should love this one.
The problem is that the solution is incompatible with Republicans (sucking up to Big Media and Big Media Money) and Democrats (sucking up to Big Media Money and Big Media).
Big Media is even harder to fight than Big Oil. Big Oil is just money (which every politician needs). Big Media is money and influence over voters (which every politician needs more). Get AOL/Time-Warner pissed off at you and see if you can run a decent campaign.
Scared yet?
Don't say that...Jon Katz reads this!
Oh, they've got that. That is a 4GB quad-CPU machine running IIS over Windows NT over quad fast ethernet serving static pages...
Amusingly, any ROT-13 encryptor is an effective ROT-13 decryptor. And Adobe obviously has a ROT-13 encryptor hanging around.
This means that somebody at Adobe is guilty of exactly the same crime...
The TOS ship will always look too primitive, because the model was primitive. It will always look like a model hanging from strings. The prequel ship will be a CGI model.
However, look at the construction of the vessels. The TOS ship is smooth, almost aerodynamic--it looks like it was built in Seattle by an aerospace firm. The TNG and Voyager vessels are built like luxury liners. The prequel ship looks like its hull is solid steel--no transparent aluminum here. It looks like it was built in Detroit. It looks like it outweighs NCC-1701 by a factor of two, which it should.
Look again at the picture. The prequel ship is missing the entire engineering section--no cylinder at the bottom. It's not grand and beautiful--it's hard and functional. It looks more complicated because it should, and because the TOS ship is so simple due to the series budget.
One thing that viewers are going to have to deal with is that, while the technology of the stories is backwards, the technology of the actual production is much better than the TOS. A good way to think of it is that our views of the TOS episodes is "low res", but in the prequel we will have a high-res view of a low-tech universe.
The TV Guide article notes that the Universal Translator exists, but is pretty unreliable. The communications officer of the [em]Enterprise[/em], however, is a linguist.
Rockets are the only to get around in deep space, without an atmosphere. And perhaps the energy/weight ratio of a fission rocket is very useful once you've gotten into orbit--it would allow interplanetary travel at higher speeds, for instance. However, it sounds like the problem they're talking about here is going from ground to orbit.
Frankly, rockets are a horrible way to go from ground to orbit. They require you to carry all your reaction mass with you when you have a ready source of both reaction mass and oxygen--that being the air around you.
When the shuttle takes off from the launch pad, it uses solid fuel boosters and main engines, powered by liquid fuel from the Big Honkin' Tank. Liquid fuel is nothing more than hydrogen and oxygen. And to burn a pound of hydrogen, you need about eight pounds of oxygen. Since the system is built as a rocket, it never takes in an ounce of oxygen from the atmosphere--it schlepps all that oxygen around with it.
One simple way to reduce launch weight is simply to burn atmospheric oxygen until your altitude is too high. We call this an [em]airplane[/em].
IMHO, building a hybrid airplane/spaceship is a lot simpler than putting a reactor on a rocket.
This is why it is also going into the Xbox, .Net, all sorts of technologies. The more pies it has its fingers in, the more it will hurt all of us if we stop them.
Among other things, this talks about the Freedom to Innovate Network. They describe this as a non-partisan, grassroots foundation that they started.
Will somebody explain to me how a multi-billion-dollar corporation can form its own grassroots movement?
Of course, last time I checked, it is the duty of a judge to allow his or herself to be biased by the evidence.
As far as the bogus demos go, I suggest that Jackson perhaps should have persued seperate perjury actions against the witnesses involved. Corporations cannot commit perjury, since they cannot be witnesses. But every time Gates was caught in a bald-faced lie, he should have personally been charged and prosecuted. Ninety days in the federal pen can change your attitude rather quickly.
Doubly so if your name is Bill Gates and your cellmate is Ted Kaczynski.
Criminal law is one thing which makes a nonsense of the idea of corporates as "people". A real person would await trial either or in prison or subject to bail, they would have to bring their entirity to court too.
But for a large corporation they can just carry on as usual. A real person couldn't do this, even a moderatly sized business...
So what is the solution; strip corporates of "person status"; halt their operations and freeze their assets as soon as charges are filed; charge Microsoft instead under RICO; etc?
I wouldn't go that far.
We bring the whole person into trial for practical, not punitive reasons; if you bring a partial person to the courthouse, said person isn't likely to be in any shape to testify.
The idea of shutting down a corporation because charges are brought against them is incredibly dangerous. This means that almost anybody with a good lawyer could bring a company to a screeching halt.
Once a corporation is convicted, however, the story changes. I suggest that we have a corporate death penalty (though I oppose the human death penalty); when a corporation is behaving in a sufficiently criminal manner, courts should be able to shut the company down, selling off its assets to pay back the stockholders.
That's alright. Remember when they knew precisely squat about the Internet?
In two to three years, Microsoft will have invented those technologies.
What happened was the other UNIX adage, "Everything should use similar input". That's why shells now accept "vi" editing commands, and why csh and tcsh are often frowned upon (quite powerful, but breaks the Bourne Shell standard).
Personally, I think that we will end up with two dozen different handheld input methods until one gains clearcut approval (or Microsoft makes one proprietary, whichever comes first). This will be nasty.
Killing people might actually have a useful purpose once in a while. But I still like the idea of keeping it illegal. The fact that the act can be committed from overseas doesn't mean that it shouldn't be a crime. Nor does criminalization mean that you shouldn't defend against port scanners. It is illegal to steal a car; every car sold still has locks and a keyed ignition. You can't count on the law to find and prosecute the one who attacks you; that's not a complaint about the law, just the fact that they are only human. So you defend yourself with firewalls, burglar alarms, and pepper spray, cooperate with the law when you are attacked, and let the law simply reduce the number of jerks willing to attack you.
The unfortunate flipside to this is that this creates a lawyer deficit, kids will go into law school because of the extra mad money to be made in the field, and when everybody gets their heads out of their exhaust pipes, we'll have more lawyers than before. And they'll be looking at us.
At that point, you could get sued by somebody you never met for strangermony.
Whether Japan or the US, the same thing happens in corporate life. You cannot steal an employee, you can only convince them to get up and walk of their own accord.
Trust me, if you bought Windows, you already bought tons of incidents. The fact that you have to pay extra for trouble calls is another story...
A cancer is a malformation of growing cells within a body. If it is its own organism, it isn't a cancer; at worst it's probably blue-green algae.
So if Linux is a cancer, what is the body?
When I read the interview, they imply that the body is corporate software companies, specifically what we often call "closed source".
We don't think that Linux is in that body.
My guess is that M$'s problem is that Linux is eating at the body of possible code to write. That noosphere of possible code looks limitless to some; to Microsoft, it looks quite limited. And they want to own nothing less than the entire noosphere. Other companies are writing code; that's alright, M$ will buy them out sooner or later. When the faceless horde of OSS makes software, they are the cancer that eats away at the limited noosphere. OSS is stealing code and locking it away from Microsoft, who has manifest destiny over the entire noosphere.
Heaven help us all.
Or was that Mr. Chekov? I don't remember...
Here's the plan. Find the actual holders of Kafka's copyrights on his works, then get them to hold a patent on screwing the government by copyrighting their laws (he shows prior art, no?). Then we can use Kafka's patent against the stupid law-copyright!
I've run into a place where you were assigned and not rotated. That is, you would be on call for months at a time.
It was generally conceded that this setup blew industrial strength chunks...