What, pray tell, are patents good for other than restricting your competitors from doing what you have patented? What value does a patent have if there is no threat of a lawsuit? Maybe if you had said "only defensive lawsuits" I would've agreed with you. As it is, I can't distinguish your statement from a hypothetical one like "It's not the sun that's the problem; it's that giant celestial body we orbit around that's the problem."
Even investors, who are overvaluing everything in sight these days, wouldn't touch you on this one.
Godel proved that you have to pick one: either a mathematical system is inconsistent or incomplete. That is, either you can prove false things to be true (obviously a bad thing) or there are statements that can't be proved to be true even if they are true (which is the world we're stuck with).
What was particularly important about Godel's proof was that it was about arithmetic itself. Since all of our mathematical systems incorporate arithmetic in some fashion, all of our mathematical systems suffer from this problem.
Godel essentially proved that there are infinitely many unsolvable mathematical problems. Tie this in with Turing's proof that there are infinitely more uncomputable problems than computable ones, and it doesn't look too good for the home team.
That is, Carmack doesn't want to have to maintain the Q1 code. He released the code, and he's nominally interested in whatever happens to it, but to ask him to stick around and bless any modifications that others make is asking too much of him. Maybe you can set up an international standards body to perform that function, but it's an uphill battle.
As others have illustrated, it's not the open-source model but rather this particular client-server model that's at fault. Let's see what we can salvage out of the existing model:
Ideally, the server would check all of the client's requests to see whether they comply with the laws of physics, but that is unfortunately unworkable with today's hardware and bandwidth. It is possible to go half-way on this one, though.
If the server simply audits the client's behavior, that is, verifies the client's requests at random intervals, fair play can be insured. Remember: all it takes is one bad request for the client to be banned as a cheater. If the auditing is done at random intervals, then the client can't adapt by spacing its valid requests with the correct interval.
All that's left is for someone to code a server to do this, and then for people to play on only trusted servers. The need for trust can't be eliminated, but it can be lodged solely in the server, where it belongs.
Unless the cheater is distributing his modified client to others, the GPL does not require him to release the source code to anyone. The distribute-the-source requirement isn't tied to the act of source modification -- it's tied to the act of distribution.
Except that it tends to break down within schwartzchild singularities, and that problem's being worked on by people much smarter than I. My previous comment was much more facetious than others seem to recognize.
You're forgetting that "Einstein" is still a popular surname. If you search altavista for +eins tein -albert, you'll come up with 134,250 pages found. Albeit, plenty of people refer to Einstein by just his surname, but plenty of those 134k pages have nothing to do with our dear Albert.
Now if I could just figure out why/. munged "+einstein" by inserting a space in the middle.
A man who had more than 20 children from the same wife.
From where I sit, that speaks much more to his wife's ability not to die in childbirth than to anything on his part. Maybe she deserves some credit for her achievement.;)
If yours is the solution, then it's because the English language is ambiguous when it comes to the word "with": either it means "by means of" (in which case your solution fails) or it means "accompanied by" (in which case your solution succeeds, although perhaps comment #145 is better in that the knight-takes-rook move also occurs during the 5th move).
I suspect it's not supposed to be a word-play like that, though, because there are several possible solutions that make use of that trick, and this puzzle probably only has one brilliant solution. But maybe I have too much faith in John Nunn.
For the queen to get involved it takes 2 extraneous moves if you're black, which you just don't have to spend if you're getting the knight over there to claim the rook.
If you're white, then you can do an uncovered mate in 6 like this, but that doesn't solve the puzzle: (white) | (black) 1. e2-e4 | g7-g5 2. d1-h5 | a7-a6 3. g1-f3 | b7-b6 4. f3-e5 | c7-c6 5. e5xf7 | c6-c5 6. f7xh8++
The king is on e1, so there's no way in heck he can get over to g1. As for e2, that's covered by the bishop on a6. He is truly checkmated, for all the good it does in this contest.
Now if only the moderators were as willing to see the light and erase that "overrated" moderation.:) C'mon people: even if you don't like the substance of what I have to say, you have to reward the posters who actually take the time to string together a complicated assortment of syllables with correct spelling and without the aid of a thesaurus, right?
Forget an aibo. All I want at this time of year is massive moderation reform.
Third-person perspective narrated in a first-person format for the purpose of understated satire. Naturally, I don't myself believe any of it -- Of people I know, I'm the least enamored with mystical thinking. But I guess it goes over some people's heads sometimes.
I can see a large market for hand-writing recognition among certain segments of the online population who use their computers for certain activities that use a certain other hand....
Plenty of people out there would cheer this breakthrough, not for its obvious worth as a furthering of scientific thought, but as a further entrenchment of quantum physics as a dominant theory for the mechanations of the universe, because frankly, it suits their personal philosophies of how the universe should remain somehow mystical.
Newtonian physics and its euclidean geometries is far too cold, too exact, too exacting. Bring on the theories that tell us we live in worlds of probabilities: I want to win the lottery, dammit. My ancestors read the tea leaves before me, and soon I'll have a nice quantum computer in a cup of coffee. How much can anyone truly know for sure? Certainly I don't know much, so give me a theory that says no one else can be much more certain. Now that appeals to my insecurities and warms my cockles.
It's quite fitting that such breakthroughs be made on the threshhold of a new era of unprecedented cultural return to mysticism. I'm still betting in science's corner, myself.
If you want to see some bad moderation, check out my post over here. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, but even incremental power corrupts at least incrementally. For some reason, people like to confuse "troll" and "flamebait" with "I don't agree with his political views so I'm going to whack him anonymously instead of responding to his post (which would prevent me from moderating other posts on this article)".
What is the proper measure of whether something is easy?: is it its (lack of) complexity, or is it its (presence of) consistency? I argue the latter.
Windows is perceived as easy, because it is perceived as not terribly complex, which it isn't if all you do is run minesweeper and sol.exe. But, if you get under the hood, or even if you do any mucking around in the passenger seat, you'll find it terribly inconsistent. From the UI to the interminable crashes, Windows just doesn't behave the way it is supposed to (or ought to).
Linux, on the other hand, is perceived as complex, and frankly it is: there are many options presented to the user, and having to choose among many options is something that requires prescience or at least forethought. Linux, however, is also incredibly consistent: things don't crash when they're not supposed to (I'll leave it to the reader as an exercise to figure out when it is ever the proper time for something to crash). Programs, when they do exist, do their thing and nothing more. To me, that is much easier than is windows -- if I spend some time investigating an issue under Linux, I'm certain to be rewarded with some insight to bring to the table in the future if the circumstances arise again. Under Windows, I just have to hope that whatever happened before won't happen again, and if it does, that some magical combination of reformats and reinstalls will keep it at bay for a while.
I tend to correlate ease with the absence of frustration more than the absence of complexity. Unfortunately, others don't seem to think that way.
I'm going to sue these folks next. I mean, just look at them. They provide a service for converting word processing files between formats. Without regard for the copyrights held on the content of those files. What fiends!
I figure that'll be a much easier suit to win than trying to sue every person who ever listens to a realaudio file, since he is obviously involved in an international conspiracy to convert digital audio files on his computer to an analog format (his thoughts) suitable for unlimited future playback (his memory). Never a clearer case of crimethink can be imagined.
We're quite selective (read: hypocritical) about what rights/responsibilities we accord minors. For example, it's unconstitutional to execute a 15-year-old offender (Thompson v. Oklahoma) but it's perfectly constitutional to execute a 16-year-old (Stanford v. Kentucky). But is either allowed to get an abortion without mommy's permission? (No: Planned Parenthood v. Casey).
If a person can be old enough to make rational decisions about murder and be held responsible for them, and yet simultaneously not be old enough to make personal decisions regarding bodily integrity, then we must have an inconsistent system. Surprise: We Do! Hooray!
Legislative action: the corporation has the money to bribe better politicians.
Executive-agency action: police are perpetually more interested in helping corporate monied interests than in helping the little guy.
Gladiator contest: the corporation has the money to hire better gladiators than does the artist.
Ordeals: the corporation has the money to get the priests on its side and rig the ordeals in favor of the corp. And that's not assuming the corporation is given an ordeal like "swallow this glass of wine without choking" while the artist is given an ordeal like "carry this hot coal from here to there without burning yourself".
Arbitration: maybe the artist will come away with something, but again because of money, it will be less than what ought to be.
Our legal system has (more or less) successfully given the state a monopoly on violence. But, it has a long way to go before it can achieve any manner of institutional justice.
Homonyms have the same spelling but different meaning/origin. Homophones have the same pronunciation but different spelling/meaning/origin. The distinction between the two has been blurred of late, but that doesn't give even a mad scientist the right to help it blur further.
Your retort doesn't apply to patents concerning business models, because the method employed is transparent to everyone -- humanity doesn't need anyone to spell it out on paper, because anyone in the business knows what business model the patent-holder is using. All these patents do is give the patent-holder an exclusive right to that model. It's rather one-sided.
And the USPTO isn't about to stop giving out trivial patents, because every patent issued by the USPTO to an American company/citizen is one fewer international patent that can be handed out to a foreign company/citizen. Nevermind that Americans suffer from this practice just as much as the rest of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
What, pray tell, are patents good for other than restricting your competitors from doing what you have patented? What value does a patent have if there is no threat of a lawsuit? Maybe if you had said "only defensive lawsuits" I would've agreed with you. As it is, I can't distinguish your statement from a hypothetical one like "It's not the sun that's the problem; it's that giant celestial body we orbit around that's the problem."
Even investors, who are overvaluing everything in sight these days, wouldn't touch you on this one.
Godel proved that you have to pick one: either a mathematical system is inconsistent or incomplete. That is, either you can prove false things to be true (obviously a bad thing) or there are statements that can't be proved to be true even if they are true (which is the world we're stuck with).
What was particularly important about Godel's proof was that it was about arithmetic itself. Since all of our mathematical systems incorporate arithmetic in some fashion, all of our mathematical systems suffer from this problem.
Godel essentially proved that there are infinitely many unsolvable mathematical problems. Tie this in with Turing's proof that there are infinitely more uncomputable problems than computable ones, and it doesn't look too good for the home team.
That is, Carmack doesn't want to have to maintain the Q1 code. He released the code, and he's nominally interested in whatever happens to it, but to ask him to stick around and bless any modifications that others make is asking too much of him. Maybe you can set up an international standards body to perform that function, but it's an uphill battle.
As others have illustrated, it's not the open-source model but rather this particular client-server model that's at fault. Let's see what we can salvage out of the existing model:
Ideally, the server would check all of the client's requests to see whether they comply with the laws of physics, but that is unfortunately unworkable with today's hardware and bandwidth. It is possible to go half-way on this one, though.
If the server simply audits the client's behavior, that is, verifies the client's requests at random intervals, fair play can be insured. Remember: all it takes is one bad request for the client to be banned as a cheater. If the auditing is done at random intervals, then the client can't adapt by spacing its valid requests with the correct interval.
All that's left is for someone to code a server to do this, and then for people to play on only trusted servers. The need for trust can't be eliminated, but it can be lodged solely in the server, where it belongs.
Unless the cheater is distributing his modified client to others, the GPL does not require him to release the source code to anyone. The distribute-the-source requirement isn't tied to the act of source modification -- it's tied to the act of distribution.
Except that it tends to break down within schwartzchild singularities, and that problem's being worked on by people much smarter than I. My previous comment was much more facetious than others seem to recognize.
You're forgetting that "Einstein" is still a popular surname. If you search altavista for +eins tein -albert, you'll come up with 134,250 pages found. Albeit, plenty of people refer to Einstein by just his surname, but plenty of those 134k pages have nothing to do with our dear Albert.
/. munged "+einstein" by inserting a space in the middle.
Now if I could just figure out why
A man who had more than 20 children from the same wife.
;)
From where I sit, that speaks much more to his wife's ability not to die in childbirth than to anything on his part. Maybe she deserves some credit for her achievement.
The rest of your post is spot on, though.
If yours is the solution, then it's because the English language is ambiguous when it comes to the word "with": either it means "by means of" (in which case your solution fails) or it means "accompanied by" (in which case your solution succeeds, although perhaps comment #145 is better in that the knight-takes-rook move also occurs during the 5th move).
I suspect it's not supposed to be a word-play like that, though, because there are several possible solutions that make use of that trick, and this puzzle probably only has one brilliant solution. But maybe I have too much faith in John Nunn.
Look at all the pieces on the board. For there to be a stalemate, all of one player's pieces can't move. It just can't happen after 5 moves.
For the queen to get involved it takes 2 extraneous moves if you're black, which you just don't have to spend if you're getting the knight over there to claim the rook.
If you're white, then you can do an uncovered mate in 6 like this, but that doesn't solve the puzzle:
(white) | (black)
1. e2-e4 | g7-g5
2. d1-h5 | a7-a6
3. g1-f3 | b7-b6
4. f3-e5 | c7-c6
5. e5xf7 | c6-c5
6. f7xh8++
The king is on e1, so there's no way in heck he can get over to g1. As for e2, that's covered by the bishop on a6. He is truly checkmated, for all the good it does in this contest.
Here, assuming you only speak English.
1. e2-e4 | b7-b6
2. f1-a6 | c8xa6
3. g1-f3 | g8-f6
4. g2-g3 | f6-d5
5. h1-g1 | d5-e3
6. g1-g2 | e3xg2++
It's whittling it down to just 5 that's tough.
Now if only the moderators were as willing to see the light and erase that "overrated" moderation. :) C'mon people: even if you don't like the substance of what I have to say, you have to reward the posters who actually take the time to string together a complicated assortment of syllables with correct spelling and without the aid of a thesaurus, right?
Forget an aibo. All I want at this time of year is massive moderation reform.
Third-person perspective narrated in a first-person format for the purpose of understated satire. Naturally, I don't myself believe any of it -- Of people I know, I'm the least enamored with mystical thinking. But I guess it goes over some people's heads sometimes.
handwriting is a one-handed activity
I can see a large market for hand-writing recognition among certain segments of the online population who use their computers for certain activities that use a certain other hand....
Plenty of people out there would cheer this breakthrough, not for its obvious worth as a furthering of scientific thought, but as a further entrenchment of quantum physics as a dominant theory for the mechanations of the universe, because frankly, it suits their personal philosophies of how the universe should remain somehow mystical.
Newtonian physics and its euclidean geometries is far too cold, too exact, too exacting. Bring on the theories that tell us we live in worlds of probabilities: I want to win the lottery, dammit. My ancestors read the tea leaves before me, and soon I'll have a nice quantum computer in a cup of coffee. How much can anyone truly know for sure? Certainly I don't know much, so give me a theory that says no one else can be much more certain. Now that appeals to my insecurities and warms my cockles.
It's quite fitting that such breakthroughs be made on the threshhold of a new era of unprecedented cultural return to mysticism. I'm still betting in science's corner, myself.
If you want to see some bad moderation, check out my post over here. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, but even incremental power corrupts at least incrementally. For some reason, people like to confuse "troll" and "flamebait" with "I don't agree with his political views so I'm going to whack him anonymously instead of responding to his post (which would prevent me from moderating other posts on this article)".
What is the proper measure of whether something is easy?: is it its (lack of) complexity, or is it its (presence of) consistency? I argue the latter.
Windows is perceived as easy, because it is perceived as not terribly complex, which it isn't if all you do is run minesweeper and sol.exe. But, if you get under the hood, or even if you do any mucking around in the passenger seat, you'll find it terribly inconsistent. From the UI to the interminable crashes, Windows just doesn't behave the way it is supposed to (or ought to).
Linux, on the other hand, is perceived as complex, and frankly it is: there are many options presented to the user, and having to choose among many options is something that requires prescience or at least forethought. Linux, however, is also incredibly consistent: things don't crash when they're not supposed to (I'll leave it to the reader as an exercise to figure out when it is ever the proper time for something to crash). Programs, when they do exist, do their thing and nothing more. To me, that is much easier than is windows -- if I spend some time investigating an issue under Linux, I'm certain to be rewarded with some insight to bring to the table in the future if the circumstances arise again. Under Windows, I just have to hope that whatever happened before won't happen again, and if it does, that some magical combination of reformats and reinstalls will keep it at bay for a while.
I tend to correlate ease with the absence of frustration more than the absence of complexity. Unfortunately, others don't seem to think that way.
I'm going to sue these folks next. I mean, just look at them. They provide a service for converting word processing files between formats. Without regard for the copyrights held on the content of those files. What fiends!
I figure that'll be a much easier suit to win than trying to sue every person who ever listens to a realaudio file, since he is obviously involved in an international conspiracy to convert digital audio files on his computer to an analog format (his thoughts) suitable for unlimited future playback (his memory). Never a clearer case of crimethink can be imagined.
We're quite selective (read: hypocritical) about what rights/responsibilities we accord minors. For example, it's unconstitutional to execute a 15-year-old offender (Thompson v. Oklahoma) but it's perfectly constitutional to execute a 16-year-old (Stanford v. Kentucky). But is either allowed to get an abortion without mommy's permission? (No: Planned Parenthood v. Casey).
If a person can be old enough to make rational decisions about murder and be held responsible for them, and yet simultaneously not be old enough to make personal decisions regarding bodily integrity, then we must have an inconsistent system. Surprise: We Do! Hooray!
Legislative action: the corporation has the money to bribe better politicians.
Executive-agency action: police are perpetually more interested in helping corporate monied interests than in helping the little guy.
Gladiator contest: the corporation has the money to hire better gladiators than does the artist.
Ordeals: the corporation has the money to get the priests on its side and rig the ordeals in favor of the corp. And that's not assuming the corporation is given an ordeal like "swallow this glass of wine without choking" while the artist is given an ordeal like "carry this hot coal from here to there without burning yourself".
Arbitration: maybe the artist will come away with something, but again because of money, it will be less than what ought to be.
Our legal system has (more or less) successfully given the state a monopoly on violence. But, it has a long way to go before it can achieve any manner of institutional justice.
Homonyms have the same spelling but different meaning/origin. Homophones have the same pronunciation but different spelling/meaning/origin. The distinction between the two has been blurred of late, but that doesn't give even a mad scientist the right to help it blur further.
Your retort doesn't apply to patents concerning business models, because the method employed is transparent to everyone -- humanity doesn't need anyone to spell it out on paper, because anyone in the business knows what business model the patent-holder is using. All these patents do is give the patent-holder an exclusive right to that model. It's rather one-sided.
And the USPTO isn't about to stop giving out trivial patents, because every patent issued by the USPTO to an American company/citizen is one fewer international patent that can be handed out to a foreign company/citizen. Nevermind that Americans suffer from this practice just as much as the rest of the world.