The Jedi in the prequels aren't supposed to be perfect great sages. They are fallible, and they make many mistakes throughout the prequels. For example, not detecting the Sith Lord when he is standing right next to them is their biggest mistake. Misinterpreting the prophecy is another. Lucas is telling us that misunderstanding human emotion and passion (simply forbidding them outright) is one of their biggest mistakes. Failing to kill Palpatine is not the only mistake that Yoda is lamenting during the end of the movie.
I didn't believe in the fall of Darth Vader at all. When he went to the dark side, it was way too abrupt. One minute he's practically quoting the Jedi code and the next minute he's slaughtering children by the roomful at the request of a guy he knows is evil (and who he wanted to kill a few short minutes earlier, or so he said), all for the hope of this mysterious power over death that was so obviously a complete lie? It didn't seem like his hunger for power even influenced his decision to follow Palpatine. Throughout the prequels he's been set up to have this character flaw that wants absolute power, and it was totally ignored during the time when he was presented with the most tempting power, in favor of this romantic "I might possibly save Padme by slaugtering the Jedi" thing. (the hunger for power did surface later, but it seemed secondary.) The fact that the romantic chemistry between Portman and Christensen has been terrible just made it worse.
If Palpatine had been shown winning Anakin's friendship, then started training him in secret, harmless stuff at first, but giving him a taste of the dark side, and Anakin had slowly been twisted over by his anger and lust for power, helped along by the deception that he would be bringing peace to the galaxy and saving Padme from certain death... That would have been much more believable. As it is, I have a hard time believing that anybody would slice through a roomful of children only for a romance as cold as the one between Padme and Anakin.
You mean this crap isn't spam? And this and this? Those and many, many more fill the first page of results in the search I did just now after reading your post. Technorati's results change by the minute, but they are still full of thousands of spam posts like these.
The only reason they are still useful is that spammers haven't found them yet. When they start spamming in earnest, you can bet that del.icio.us will rapidly become next to useless for many things. Look what's happened to Technorati.
...and yet nobody has won. Methinks you underestimate the difficulty of this task a tiny bit (all too common in computer vision and AI). If more than two or three of this year's teams succeed, I will agree with you in saying it was too easy. But nobody says the challenge must end after somebody wins; DARPA will likely increase the difficulty and hold it again. After all, their goal is a useful combat vehicle and even the winner of this contest would still be a long way away.
The first time you run Azureus it will indeed need some sort of seed node. However, subsequent times it can use cached peer data from the last time it was connected (assuming that at least a few peers stay connected a significant percentage of the time, which is usually true even on public P2P networks with a lot of churn). Furthermore, the original seed node could be any node on the network; it doesn't have to be a special node. So unless you DOS every network node, people can continue to join the network by simply obtaining the address of any other node.
Apparently Azureus forms one single giant P2P network to share tracking duties for all files. So in fact the original torrent does not need to specify a seed node; the P2P network is searched to locate the tracking data. This allows Azureus clients to continue cooperating in a distributed manner if a tracked torrent loses its tracker, and even begin downloading a previously tracked torrent after the tracker is gone, as long as Azureus users are seeding.
It is not clear whether the official BT client works in the same way or whether it is compatible with Azureus.
Actually, it should eliminate the scaling problems that BitTorrent currently has. Popular trackers require large amounts of bandwidth and also large amounts of RAM and processing power. BitTorrent could theoretically scale infinitely, but trackers hold it back. Trackerless BitTorrent could completely eliminate this serious problem. Now hosting a BitTorrent download is just as simple as hosting an HTTP one, and it could likely scale to millions of simultaneous downloaders (far more than possible with a tracker) with *zero* consequences for the file's original host.
OTOH, the lack of centralized control means that trackerless BT will likely be vulnerable to a new class of attacks that could make it possible to disrupt the download of a file you don't like. So, ironically, warez groups might stick to running trackers for attack resistance and Linux providers might move to trackerless for the scalability. It all depends on how scalable and attack-resistant trackerless downloads turn out to be.
I see a lot of problems with diamond chips. For one thing, AFAIK nobody has a process for actually etching the nanoscopic transistors into diamonds, laying interconnects, etc. That's definitely a requirement.
Another thing, the diameter of many silicon chip wafers is a foot or more; these diamonds still have a long, long way to go before they get that big. Sustaining the required diamond-forming conditions in a container that large might prove very difficult.
Finally, the advantages of diamond chips seem mostly to be in tolerating more heat. Which means that diamond chips will run *extremely* hot. They would give a whole new meaning to the term "internet toaster". After using a diamond-chip laptop, you'd probably be infertile for life.
Apple drops unencrypted music onto CDs when it's easily retrievable. It's a black box that strips DRM. I have no idea how they convinced the music execs, but somehow they did. And they have not killed iTunes even though FairPlay is completely cracked and programs exist that will batch-convert your entire music collection, no hoop-jumping required.
Apple's iPod software doesn't allow getting songs back out of the iPod. If Yahoo's software supported iPods, it could just transfer unencrypted AAC to the iPod, and its DRM would still be just as effective as iTunes's DRM. (Yes, I know you *can* get songs out of the iPod with special software; you can also rip CDs with special software, and iTunes still allows you to burn CDs).
In short, all these services whining about not being able to support the iPod are retarded. They're just not willing to make the slightest compromise in their precious DRM, completely ignoring the fact that iTunes has been getting away with a giant gaping hole in their DRM for over a year now. Not to mention the Hymn iTunes DRM remover, which has been freely available for some time. (Also, the technical knowledge contained in Hymn would likely also allow people to *encrypt* songs to the iPod's satisfaction, allowing anybody to technically, if not legally, support the iPod's DRM. Too bad these music services are hobbled by their own intellectual property laws, eh?)
Contrary to that article, many Piquepaille stories are not accepted.
All his stories now contain links to primary sources as their first and most prominent links, and his blog only as a secondary link.
Some Piquepaille stories are interesting and informative. Though I readily admit that some are inane and shouldn't have been posted.
The ads are quite small and unobtrusive. As I type this, one of them is for an algorithmic music composing program, which I think is cool. You don't see ads for algorithmic music composing programs just anywhere.
The amount of money Roland makes is immaterial. It's not like it comes out of your pocket. He doesn't run flashing "punch the monkey" ads. Nothing is stopping you from getting a piece of the action by posting your own articles, either. All that matters here is the quality of his posted articles.
Finally, and most importantly, what Roland Piquepaille does is nearly identical to what Slashdot does, in every way! Let me describe his process: he looks for articles in mainstream news sources, writes a little summary, cites a paragraph or two, and posts it. That's actually better than Slashdot; here the paragraphs are usually plagarized, and yet somehow misspelled and filled with grammar errors. Slashdot runs ads too, you know. Slashdot is also making money off of your eyeballs by basically copying article text from primary news sources. They don't even do the research themselves, they rely on other people to plagarize the articles for them! Many Slashdot articles are of an even lower quality than Piquepaille's worst.
I completely fail to understand the animosity that Slashdot readers have toward Roland Piquepaille. Is it because he seems to be French? Or what?
That's not at all related to Google being down. It's not an indication of hacking of any sort, it's just a strange use of subdomains. Nothing is stopping gulli.com from naming one of their subdomains anything.anythingelse.gulli.com, so they could name one google.com.gulli.com, or GOOGLE.COM.SUCKS.FIND.CRACKZ.WITH.SEARCH.GULLI.COM , as they appear to have done. It may cause confusing output from whois, but it's hardly a hack, and it won't affect anybody's normal access to google.com (or yahoo, or microsoft). It's basically just spam in the whois system. You'll notice that google.com is still in the whois output, as it should be.
True. And though it is open source, it uses DirectX instead of OpenGL which means that it likely won't be ported to Linux anytime soon. It might or might not run under WineX.
Landsat images infrared bands as well, not just visible ones. In fact World Wind includes a false-color global mosaic which I suspect uses the Landsat infrared bands.
I think I have figured out what they mean, though. They claim the sharpest ever *map*, not image. I guess that means they are going to be creating a map of the globe with zones classified into different land cover types, something like this, not necessarily a global image. However the line between a "map" and a "false color image" is being blurred here. That makes their press release rather misleading; far higher resolution global image data already exists and can be downloaded for free.
The image data for World Wind is based on a publicly-available global 30 meter resolution mosaic made from Landsat imagery. This satellite making this map is said to have 300 meter resolution. Wouldn't that make it much worse?
(BTW, I *highly* recommend checking out World Wind if you haven't seen it. It is one of the most awesome programs ever to exist, bar none.)
I do think that the quality of Google's coders (and therefore of their code) is much, much higher than average. Also, Google has more resources than any of those other companies. Also, Google has always been upfront about their products, unlike spyware companies. Also, every single one of Google's products to-date have been high-quality and focused on helping the user, whereas spyware companies have a philosophy of "hurt the users to benefit us". Is it really that unreasonable to believe that Google's product will be better?
I didn't forget, that was in my original post, which seems to have been ignored. Anyway, I think that using this data in search rankings would allow a huge improvement in search result quality, at least at first. We could see a return of the Google of old, with great search results on every topic, where popular keywords haven't been spammed to death. But what happens when people start spamming *this* system? Hired armies of surfers in India or China could skew results. Popular sites could employ hidden frames to inflate the hit counts of other sites. Armies of infected zombie PCs could send Google bogus surfing data, rendering this data source as nearly useless as Google's current sources (page content and links). The war against spam will march on.
More aggressive preloading of top search results (made possible because Google is providing the bandwidth, so they're not wasting other people's bandwidth), makes Google search results more responsive => people rely on Google more
In the future, improved google ad relevancy by serving you ads related to your browsing habits (Sign me up! maybe I'd actually get ads that are useful to me instead of the normal crap ones. You can always turn it off when you want privacy, so stop frothing at the mouth already.)
Of course, people are going to be crying "spyware"! But this is different from most spyware. Firstly, it doesn't clog up your Windows installation and slow down or crash your computer; in fact it speeds up your browsing. Secondly, you can turn it off, or uninstall it if you want. Thirdly, you only get it if you explicitly download it. Fourthly, it might actually improve Google's relevancy for search results and ads, which would benefit me directly. And finally, so many people are watching Google right now that the instant they do something evil, everybody on the globe will know about it. If that happens, it's trivial to switch to a competitor. And that's exactly why they *won't* be doing anything evil.
How does this benefit them? The only thing I can think of is data-mining people's surfing habits to improve their web search results. This could easily drastically improve their ranking of results, but couldn't it also be easily spammed? Is there another reason they might want to do this that I'm not seeing? I imagine this will result in an awful lot of extra bandwidth consumption they'll have to pay for, they must have a good reason...
I've noticed that on all the sites that do seller ratings, fly-by-night sites you've never heard of with names like 2buycheepstuff.com almost always have 4-4.5 star ratings with hundreds if not thousands of reviews, while established brick-and-mortar retailers like Circuit City or Target usually have worse ratings and far fewer reviews. I find it very hard to believe that these no-name cheapo sites have more customers and better customer satisfaction rates than the big names. My conclusion is that the shady online-only stores are seriously astroturfing their ratings with paid testimonials, making the ratings basically useless. Does anybody out there have information relating to these sorts of practices?
KSVG works as a browser plugin and so doesn't allow the cool merging of SVG and HTML in the same document, scripted by the same scripts. Also, not all distros have included KSVG by default.
Slashdot Mirror
The Jedi in the prequels aren't supposed to be perfect great sages. They are fallible, and they make many mistakes throughout the prequels. For example, not detecting the Sith Lord when he is standing right next to them is their biggest mistake. Misinterpreting the prophecy is another. Lucas is telling us that misunderstanding human emotion and passion (simply forbidding them outright) is one of their biggest mistakes. Failing to kill Palpatine is not the only mistake that Yoda is lamenting during the end of the movie.
I didn't believe in the fall of Darth Vader at all. When he went to the dark side, it was way too abrupt. One minute he's practically quoting the Jedi code and the next minute he's slaughtering children by the roomful at the request of a guy he knows is evil (and who he wanted to kill a few short minutes earlier, or so he said), all for the hope of this mysterious power over death that was so obviously a complete lie? It didn't seem like his hunger for power even influenced his decision to follow Palpatine. Throughout the prequels he's been set up to have this character flaw that wants absolute power, and it was totally ignored during the time when he was presented with the most tempting power, in favor of this romantic "I might possibly save Padme by slaugtering the Jedi" thing. (the hunger for power did surface later, but it seemed secondary.) The fact that the romantic chemistry between Portman and Christensen has been terrible just made it worse.
If Palpatine had been shown winning Anakin's friendship, then started training him in secret, harmless stuff at first, but giving him a taste of the dark side, and Anakin had slowly been twisted over by his anger and lust for power, helped along by the deception that he would be bringing peace to the galaxy and saving Padme from certain death... That would have been much more believable. As it is, I have a hard time believing that anybody would slice through a roomful of children only for a romance as cold as the one between Padme and Anakin.
You mean this crap isn't spam? And this and this? Those and many, many more fill the first page of results in the search I did just now after reading your post. Technorati's results change by the minute, but they are still full of thousands of spam posts like these.
The only reason they are still useful is that spammers haven't found them yet. When they start spamming in earnest, you can bet that del.icio.us will rapidly become next to useless for many things. Look what's happened to Technorati.
...and yet nobody has won. Methinks you underestimate the difficulty of this task a tiny bit (all too common in computer vision and AI). If more than two or three of this year's teams succeed, I will agree with you in saying it was too easy. But nobody says the challenge must end after somebody wins; DARPA will likely increase the difficulty and hold it again. After all, their goal is a useful combat vehicle and even the winner of this contest would still be a long way away.
The first time you run Azureus it will indeed need some sort of seed node. However, subsequent times it can use cached peer data from the last time it was connected (assuming that at least a few peers stay connected a significant percentage of the time, which is usually true even on public P2P networks with a lot of churn). Furthermore, the original seed node could be any node on the network; it doesn't have to be a special node. So unless you DOS every network node, people can continue to join the network by simply obtaining the address of any other node.
It is not clear whether the official BT client works in the same way or whether it is compatible with Azureus.
OTOH, the lack of centralized control means that trackerless BT will likely be vulnerable to a new class of attacks that could make it possible to disrupt the download of a file you don't like. So, ironically, warez groups might stick to running trackers for attack resistance and Linux providers might move to trackerless for the scalability. It all depends on how scalable and attack-resistant trackerless downloads turn out to be.
Another thing, the diameter of many silicon chip wafers is a foot or more; these diamonds still have a long, long way to go before they get that big. Sustaining the required diamond-forming conditions in a container that large might prove very difficult.
Finally, the advantages of diamond chips seem mostly to be in tolerating more heat. Which means that diamond chips will run *extremely* hot. They would give a whole new meaning to the term "internet toaster". After using a diamond-chip laptop, you'd probably be infertile for life.
Pictures and the press release.
Apple drops unencrypted music onto CDs when it's easily retrievable. It's a black box that strips DRM. I have no idea how they convinced the music execs, but somehow they did. And they have not killed iTunes even though FairPlay is completely cracked and programs exist that will batch-convert your entire music collection, no hoop-jumping required.
In short, all these services whining about not being able to support the iPod are retarded. They're just not willing to make the slightest compromise in their precious DRM, completely ignoring the fact that iTunes has been getting away with a giant gaping hole in their DRM for over a year now. Not to mention the Hymn iTunes DRM remover, which has been freely available for some time. (Also, the technical knowledge contained in Hymn would likely also allow people to *encrypt* songs to the iPod's satisfaction, allowing anybody to technically, if not legally, support the iPod's DRM. Too bad these music services are hobbled by their own intellectual property laws, eh?)
- Contrary to that article, many Piquepaille stories are not accepted.
- All his stories now contain links to primary sources as their first and most prominent links, and his blog only as a secondary link.
- Some Piquepaille stories are interesting and informative. Though I readily admit that some are inane and shouldn't have been posted.
- The ads are quite small and unobtrusive. As I type this, one of them is for an algorithmic music composing program, which I think is cool. You don't see ads for algorithmic music composing programs just anywhere.
- The amount of money Roland makes is immaterial. It's not like it comes out of your pocket. He doesn't run flashing "punch the monkey" ads. Nothing is stopping you from getting a piece of the action by posting your own articles, either. All that matters here is the quality of his posted articles.
- Finally, and most importantly, what Roland Piquepaille does is nearly identical to what Slashdot does, in every way! Let me describe his process: he looks for articles in mainstream news sources, writes a little summary, cites a paragraph or two, and posts it. That's actually better than Slashdot; here the paragraphs are usually plagarized, and yet somehow misspelled and filled with grammar errors. Slashdot runs ads too, you know. Slashdot is also making money off of your eyeballs by basically copying article text from primary news sources. They don't even do the research themselves, they rely on other people to plagarize the articles for them! Many Slashdot articles are of an even lower quality than Piquepaille's worst.
I completely fail to understand the animosity that Slashdot readers have toward Roland Piquepaille. Is it because he seems to be French? Or what?That's not at all related to Google being down. It's not an indication of hacking of any sort, it's just a strange use of subdomains. Nothing is stopping gulli.com from naming one of their subdomains anything.anythingelse.gulli.com, so they could name one google.com.gulli.com, or GOOGLE.COM.SUCKS.FIND.CRACKZ.WITH.SEARCH.GULLI.COM , as they appear to have done. It may cause confusing output from whois, but it's hardly a hack, and it won't affect anybody's normal access to google.com (or yahoo, or microsoft). It's basically just spam in the whois system. You'll notice that google.com is still in the whois output, as it should be.
True. And though it is open source, it uses DirectX instead of OpenGL which means that it likely won't be ported to Linux anytime soon. It might or might not run under WineX.
Nope, sorry. World Wind's Landsat data covers the entire globe at 30 meter resolution, not just the US.
I think I have figured out what they mean, though. They claim the sharpest ever *map*, not image. I guess that means they are going to be creating a map of the globe with zones classified into different land cover types, something like this, not necessarily a global image. However the line between a "map" and a "false color image" is being blurred here. That makes their press release rather misleading; far higher resolution global image data already exists and can be downloaded for free.
(BTW, I *highly* recommend checking out World Wind if you haven't seen it. It is one of the most awesome programs ever to exist, bar none.)
True, they should definitely do it. Anything to help slow the tide of spam, even if it only works for a while.
I do think that the quality of Google's coders (and therefore of their code) is much, much higher than average. Also, Google has more resources than any of those other companies. Also, Google has always been upfront about their products, unlike spyware companies. Also, every single one of Google's products to-date have been high-quality and focused on helping the user, whereas spyware companies have a philosophy of "hurt the users to benefit us". Is it really that unreasonable to believe that Google's product will be better?
I didn't forget, that was in my original post, which seems to have been ignored. Anyway, I think that using this data in search rankings would allow a huge improvement in search result quality, at least at first. We could see a return of the Google of old, with great search results on every topic, where popular keywords haven't been spammed to death. But what happens when people start spamming *this* system? Hired armies of surfers in India or China could skew results. Popular sites could employ hidden frames to inflate the hit counts of other sites. Armies of infected zombie PCs could send Google bogus surfing data, rendering this data source as nearly useless as Google's current sources (page content and links). The war against spam will march on.
- More aggressive preloading of top search results (made possible because Google is providing the bandwidth, so they're not wasting other people's bandwidth), makes Google search results more responsive => people rely on Google more
- In the future, improved google ad relevancy by serving you ads related to your browsing habits (Sign me up! maybe I'd actually get ads that are useful to me instead of the normal crap ones. You can always turn it off when you want privacy, so stop frothing at the mouth already.)
Of course, people are going to be crying "spyware"! But this is different from most spyware. Firstly, it doesn't clog up your Windows installation and slow down or crash your computer; in fact it speeds up your browsing. Secondly, you can turn it off, or uninstall it if you want. Thirdly, you only get it if you explicitly download it. Fourthly, it might actually improve Google's relevancy for search results and ads, which would benefit me directly. And finally, so many people are watching Google right now that the instant they do something evil, everybody on the globe will know about it. If that happens, it's trivial to switch to a competitor. And that's exactly why they *won't* be doing anything evil.How does this benefit them? The only thing I can think of is data-mining people's surfing habits to improve their web search results. This could easily drastically improve their ranking of results, but couldn't it also be easily spammed? Is there another reason they might want to do this that I'm not seeing? I imagine this will result in an awful lot of extra bandwidth consumption they'll have to pay for, they must have a good reason...
I've noticed that on all the sites that do seller ratings, fly-by-night sites you've never heard of with names like 2buycheepstuff.com almost always have 4-4.5 star ratings with hundreds if not thousands of reviews, while established brick-and-mortar retailers like Circuit City or Target usually have worse ratings and far fewer reviews. I find it very hard to believe that these no-name cheapo sites have more customers and better customer satisfaction rates than the big names. My conclusion is that the shady online-only stores are seriously astroturfing their ratings with paid testimonials, making the ratings basically useless. Does anybody out there have information relating to these sorts of practices?
KSVG works as a browser plugin and so doesn't allow the cool merging of SVG and HTML in the same document, scripted by the same scripts. Also, not all distros have included KSVG by default.