Confusing real legitimate commercial email with SPAM significantly undermines the fight against SPAM. Why fight every single commercial email sender when you really want to fight the SPAMmers?
Yeah, I agree. I wouldn't really mind getting flyers from the grocery store and other local businesses as email instead of dead trees stuffed through my door. The problem with spam is that it's so lame, not just that it's unsolicited and commercial.
I don't want to be bombarded with ads, but I want to find out about new inventions people are selling. The easiest way I see is to get one and only one email. I'd rather have an email than a 30-sec TV commercial.
What is it about humans that cause them to create? Why do they assume anything with human-like intelligence (whether natural or artificial) will have that same attribute?
Good point! Maybe the answer is as simple as this: Those who are intelligent and write stories or other written works have creative drive. It is such a fundamental part of their mind, and what they think of when they think "I am intelligent" that it is very difficult to really imagine intelligence without creativity. It is easy to postulate the possibility, much harder to figure out what it would be like, and write a story about it. The intelligent non-creative folks by definition don't write, so their point of view is not expressed. The non-intelligent only see writing produced with the intelligence implies creativity bias, and it is much easier to revere someone who creates things that you can use than someone who has thoughts you don't understand. Basically, people who aren't creative don't show their intelligence, at least not to as wide an audience. (some creative people are good at designing computer networks, and not many get to see the genius of their plan, but in general, I think there's some truth to my argument.)
> I worry that MS will 'embed' pocketed developers into the OSS movement to 'leak' MS code into core OSS software.
It stops being MS code once it goes into a Free project. Submitting a patch implicitly places your code under the license of the project. e.g. if you code up a new feature for xterm, and submit the code to XFree86, then it becomes part of XFree86, and thus covered by the X license. If the code was originally part of MS software, that doesn't change anything. The copyright owner can give their code to anyone they want, under any license they want. The only way for the code to remain MS proprietary would be if it still include such copyright and license conditions in the submitted code. This would be noticed and rejected.
It's not MS code and copyright one has to worry about, it's patents. If anyone (MS) submitted code that does things covered by patents, and the code makes it into a project, then the patent holders can come after the project. Patents really are that insidious, AFAIK (IANAL).
Testing simple circuits to the same confidence level as complex circuits is cheaper, so it IS a factor, according to what lingqi said. Just not as much of a factor as when you aren't even testing ATA drives to as high a reliability level as SCSI.
Didn't some US leaders claim terrorists were just jealous of the US? Solution: make the US a shit place to live, just like the crappy third world countries terrorists are from. Once the US is as bad as them, the War on Terror will be won. Yay! I wish all you Americans luck in the next election...
I thought it WAS treasonous to try to convince people not to re-elect the govt. Whatever, I'm still not moving to the states until Nader's president and all the dirty laundry is aired out and bullshit stopped.
I don't really think it's fair to mod a post as flamebait just because it's on a topic that always generates flamewars. Sure, flames will result, but it's not the same as a rude or dogmatic post that doesn't say anything interesting.
Some parts of the general public seem to not understand science, and say things like "they told us this, and now they're telling us that, there's no point listening to them". Over-credulous science journalists that seem to be so eager to get the scoop on the next big breakthrough that they make everything sound like said breakthrough, whether there's much evidence for the theories or not, are part of the problem. Maybe it would be good if science stories were more careful about reporting confidence levels in theories. Of course, headlines saying that there's a 51% chance that drinking alcohol is beneficial might not be so exciting. (That's a good thing, IMHO. Every time anyone has anything to say about alcohol, it makes a headline. There seems to be some obsession with wishful thinking about alcohol.)
This cuts both ways, of course. When reading about well established theories with high confidence levels, people would learn which theories are very well-trusted, and which aren't. Some people like to argue "they were wrong about that, so they're probably wrong about this, too". If people knew that most of the incorrect theories were just speculation, and that the one being argued against is very solid, they would not be swayed by bullshit as easily. Evolution is extremely plausible. If it isn't true, then the most likely alternative is that either the Universe was just created just now, with everything in the state it's currently in. There's no way to distinguish that from time moving normally, so it's really a philosophical point. Otherwise, whatever created the universe and/or the Earth planted fossils to deceive us. Those are both pretty far-fetched compared to mutation and natural selection. The big bang seems to be pretty well established, or at least widely accepted, but not much after that is really settled. Expansion seems to be accelerating, so there's something going on besides strong and weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitational forces combined with the kinds of matter we know about. We don't know about early inflation, or what the heck is going on. The evidence for pre-history on earth is much more solid (literally:). We understand radioactivity, and potassium-argon dating has shown pockets of gas in rocks to be millions of years old. Last time I looked at this stuff, it sounded good to me, and I'm not going to go research it again this late at night. Sorry for the hand-waving, but there you go.
As for science, religion, and God, read Calculating God by Robert Sawyer. He writes science fiction novels packed full of ideas. Calculating God is a good one: Aliens land on earth, and it turns out that three worlds where civilization evolved had mass-extinction events (like the one that killed the dinosaurs) at similar times. Therefore, God exists, and sometimes throws hissy fits. The characters sometimes talk about their ideas about God, for example: There's no reason to assume God is omnipotent. Any sort of life form that figured out how to survive a big crunch followed by a big bang, and that could influence the physical constants which have to have just the right values for life to exist in the new universe, would be the creator. A non-omnipotent being seems more plausible. (In fact, there's no reason to assume God is benevolent or that we should worship him/her/it, other than setting up the universe so that life could evolve, but Sawyer doesn't touch on that.)
Contact, by Carl Sagan, is another great one. (Sawyer acknowleges Sagan, and others, in Calculating God:). The book is much deeper than the movie. The movie leaves out all the interesting ideas, and leaving just the action, drama, and weird trip. Read the book if you like to think about things.
Intel has links to elilo and stuff on one of their pages. Good to see Intel is taking care of the Free software people as well as MS, with this as well as ACPI.
It's not like people posting to the pre-interview story were just asking Dave their question directly. They had to post something that would get modded up, and Dave Barry references/dumb jokes have a way of doing that, just like HHGTG refs in any other story. People get into a Dave Barry kind of mood and it seems natural to make posts like that. It's like when you're talking to your friends and somebody mentions something from Monty Python, and soon you're all calling each other Bruce and demanding shrubberies.
> I don't understand why people are not grasping the distinction.
I guess you missed the last sentence of the paragraph of mine that you quoted from:
I suppose it's possible that the existence of such an algorithm could be proven without actually discovering such an algorithm. AFAIK, this has not been done.
How about full, free disclosure on anyone (including celebrities and politicians, and people who don't want disclosure), and logs of who requests the data?
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, but I didn't think that meant you'd have to spend all your time reading logs of information requests! Besides, what are you going to do if you find that people are requesting lists of everything you've bought in the past month. Do you want to be the target of a smear campaign because some people think pr0n is bad, but you don't? Full disclosure doesn't work for "famous" people because people don't take the time to find out all the facts before forming opinions. Since you can't fairly do it for everyone, you shouldn't do it at all.
If you were just talking about fixed things like names and addresses and numbers, not purchase records, salary, or bank account balance, then that's a bit more reasonable. Still, I don't want to spend all my time reading request logs. Also, it would be very easy for info brokers to request the info and re-sell it without telling you about it. I'm sure they'd find a way to get the info in the first place without producing a "1984, Inc." entry in your request logs. The issue of what to do about people that get info you don't want them to have still remains. Prank phone calls alone are enough to make this unworkable. Unlisted phone numbers for movie stars are a much better solution to the problem than a War on Pranks (mandatory minimum jail time, and shit like that. c.f. Wars on Drugs and Terror).
Full disclosure is an interesting idea, but it seems to me that it wouldn't really work out very well, all things considered.
If it costs more to collect information with spyware (because of the overhead of acting illegally), they'll have to sell it for more to make it economically feasible to continue in the business. The market for such information at a higher price might be _much_ less, esp. if companies decide to do some research to see if all this spy crap is helping them, and find out they'd do better by spending their money making better products and bragging about that than by making a version a darkenite-colour version if they find that goths are big fans of their product. (The last bit is what I hope most will decide about buying information databases:), but it is only possible if the information collectors are hit in the pocketbook hard enough to make them raise prices significantly, to a new point on the supply-demand plot.
Temporarily encrypting everything was too difficult? Well I guess I can't argue with people who'd rather spend money than take time fiddling with computers, but I would've done tar | gpg > backup.tar, (nice innocuous name, no way anyone would get suspicious unless they actively suspected me of something, rather than just doing fascist inspections.)
Have you guys forgotten what you were arguing about? You're just attacking the fine details of each other's last post.
However, I won't let that stop me from doing the same. A 3x4 board with only one type of token can only have a finite number of states, and your rules didn't mention anything about move history. Thus, there is a finite number of possible moves, since repeated positions don't count as new moves.
As for white wins in chess, if it was known how to force a win for white, nobody would play against computers. You'd just give the computer the algorithm for responding to any defence played by black, and it would always win. (You can't limit black's choices to a single move right from the start, so there would not be a single sequence of moves you could memorize. The so-called fool's mate and scholar's mate sequences require worst play by the opponent, not best play!) I suppose it's possible that the existence of such an algorithm could be proven without actually discovering such an algorithm. AFAIK, this has not been done.
Most chess players prefer white, and presumably grand masters win more often when playing white than black. There does seem to be some advantage to moving first, at least with currently known strategy and tactics. Part of this is that most players have favourite opennings and defences, and are better at some than others.
Thank you. It surprised me how many people misunderstood the article _and_ got modded way up. It's not usually that bad.
I doubt that a linear or quadratic latency vs. traffic volume relationship is anywhere near accurate. Queuing theory says it's more like Q/(1-Q), where Q = arrival rate / processing rate. See this web site. I'd be surprised if their linear or quadratic models give very useful results. If they're running a computer simulation anyway, why not get it right and use a reasonable queuing theory result? Hmm, I'm sure it's easier to model links with infinite capacity that just get slower and slower than it is to write a model that deals with dropping packets.
The problem is that routers don't update often enough to notice when one route is getting congested. They will keep using the LA -> NY route even if it is so congested that LA->Chicago->NY would be faster. Ideally, you'd load-balance the routes based on how much traffic you were sending over them.
Even worse, the network to your north might hand it back to you a bit farther east, and the taken path might go NE,SE,NE,SE,etc. (Could this really happen with BGP? Or is it uncommon to have multiple connections to the same AS at different points in your AS? I don't know the details of BGP...)
They also modelled links as having latency linearly proportional to traffic volume. They didn't say anything about having hard limits on traffic volume for any links, which seems odd. They later tried using a quadratic relationship between time and traffic volume, but that doesn't jibe with results from queuing theory (latency ~ exp(max - current), IIRC).
At least they admit they have no idea whether their mathematical models mirror real life!
No, it doesn't matter how it's used. The only way what you describe would be right is if the DB driver was covered by the lesser GPL, like glibc, not the full GPL, like libreadline.
What is the point of releasing GPL drivers at all? To encourage _everything_ else to be GPL. Other than that, not much. The lesser GPL is more apropriate for code that does the same thing as some non-Free code (like glibc), rather than something new (like libreadline).
Is there any reason to think apple would use Power5 for anything? Even though they should, so that they can make a nice fast desktop computer...
There has been speculation about apple using the PPC970, though. I guess it depends on whether Power5 is at all suitable for a desktop machine (i.e. power and bus requirements).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I agree. I wouldn't really mind getting flyers from the grocery store and other local businesses as email instead of dead trees stuffed through my door. The problem with spam is that it's so lame, not just that it's unsolicited and commercial.
I don't want to be bombarded with ads, but I want to find out about new inventions people are selling. The easiest way I see is to get one and only one email. I'd rather have an email than a 30-sec TV commercial.
+1 funny
Yeah, I remember reading that one, but I don't remember the title. Good story :)
Good point! Maybe the answer is as simple as this: Those who are intelligent and write stories or other written works have creative drive. It is such a fundamental part of their mind, and what they think of when they think "I am intelligent" that it is very difficult to really imagine intelligence without creativity. It is easy to postulate the possibility, much harder to figure out what it would be like, and write a story about it. The intelligent non-creative folks by definition don't write, so their point of view is not expressed. The non-intelligent only see writing produced with the intelligence implies creativity bias, and it is much easier to revere someone who creates things that you can use than someone who has thoughts you don't understand. Basically, people who aren't creative don't show their intelligence, at least not to as wide an audience. (some creative people are good at designing computer networks, and not many get to see the genius of their plan, but in general, I think there's some truth to my argument.)
> I worry that MS will 'embed' pocketed developers into the OSS movement to 'leak' MS code into core OSS software.
It stops being MS code once it goes into a Free project. Submitting a patch implicitly places your code under the license of the project. e.g. if you code up a new feature for xterm, and submit the code to XFree86, then it becomes part of XFree86, and thus covered by the X license. If the code was originally part of MS software, that doesn't change anything. The copyright owner can give their code to anyone they want, under any license they want. The only way for the code to remain MS proprietary would be if it still include such copyright and license conditions in the submitted code. This would be noticed and rejected.
It's not MS code and copyright one has to worry about, it's patents. If anyone (MS) submitted code that does things covered by patents, and the code makes it into a project, then the patent holders can come after the project. Patents really are that insidious, AFAIK (IANAL).
Go read this article about commercialization of everything. It's good.
Testing simple circuits to the same confidence level as complex circuits is cheaper, so it IS a factor, according to what lingqi said. Just not as much of a factor as when you aren't even testing ATA drives to as high a reliability level as SCSI.
Didn't some US leaders claim terrorists were just jealous of the US? Solution: make the US a shit place to live, just like the crappy third world countries terrorists are from. Once the US is as bad as them, the War on Terror will be won. Yay! I wish all you Americans luck in the next election...
I thought it WAS treasonous to try to convince people not to re-elect the govt. Whatever, I'm still not moving to the states until Nader's president and all the dirty laundry is aired out and bullshit stopped.
I don't really think it's fair to mod a post as flamebait just because it's on a topic that always generates flamewars. Sure, flames will result, but it's not the same as a rude or dogmatic post that doesn't say anything interesting.
:). We understand radioactivity, and potassium-argon dating has shown pockets of gas in rocks to be millions of years old. Last time I looked at this stuff, it sounded good to me, and I'm not going to go research it again this late at night. Sorry for the hand-waving, but there you go.
:). The book is much deeper than the movie. The movie leaves out all the interesting ideas, and leaving just the action, drama, and weird trip. Read the book if you like to think about things.
Some parts of the general public seem to not understand science, and say things like "they told us this, and now they're telling us that, there's no point listening to them". Over-credulous science journalists that seem to be so eager to get the scoop on the next big breakthrough that they make everything sound like said breakthrough, whether there's much evidence for the theories or not, are part of the problem. Maybe it would be good if science stories were more careful about reporting confidence levels in theories. Of course, headlines saying that there's a 51% chance that drinking alcohol is beneficial might not be so exciting. (That's a good thing, IMHO. Every time anyone has anything to say about alcohol, it makes a headline. There seems to be some obsession with wishful thinking about alcohol.)
This cuts both ways, of course. When reading about well established theories with high confidence levels, people would learn which theories are very well-trusted, and which aren't. Some people like to argue "they were wrong about that, so they're probably wrong about this, too". If people knew that most of the incorrect theories were just speculation, and that the one being argued against is very solid, they would not be swayed by bullshit as easily.
Evolution is extremely plausible. If it isn't true, then the most likely alternative is that either the Universe was just created just now, with everything in the state it's currently in. There's no way to distinguish that from time moving normally, so it's really a philosophical point. Otherwise, whatever created the universe and/or the Earth planted fossils to deceive us. Those are both pretty far-fetched compared to mutation and natural selection. The big bang seems to be pretty well established, or at least widely accepted, but not much after that is really settled. Expansion seems to be accelerating, so there's something going on besides strong and weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitational forces combined with the kinds of matter we know about. We don't know about early inflation, or what the heck is going on. The evidence for pre-history on earth is much more solid (literally
As for science, religion, and God, read Calculating God by Robert Sawyer. He writes science fiction novels packed full of ideas. Calculating God is a good one: Aliens land on earth, and it turns out that three worlds where civilization evolved had mass-extinction events (like the one that killed the dinosaurs) at similar times. Therefore, God exists, and sometimes throws hissy fits. The characters sometimes talk about their ideas about God, for example: There's no reason to assume God is omnipotent. Any sort of life form that figured out how to survive a big crunch followed by a big bang, and that could influence the physical constants which have to have just the right values for life to exist in the new universe, would be the creator. A non-omnipotent being seems more plausible. (In fact, there's no reason to assume God is benevolent or that we should worship him/her/it, other than setting up the universe so that life could evolve, but Sawyer doesn't touch on that.)
Contact, by Carl Sagan, is another great one. (Sawyer acknowleges Sagan, and others, in Calculating God
Intel has links to elilo and stuff on one of their pages. Good to see Intel is taking care of the Free software people as well as MS, with this as well as ACPI.
It's not like people posting to the pre-interview story were just asking Dave their question directly. They had to post something that would get modded up, and Dave Barry references/dumb jokes have a way of doing that, just like HHGTG refs in any other story. People get into a Dave Barry kind of mood and it seems natural to make posts like that. It's like when you're talking to your friends and somebody mentions something from Monty Python, and soon you're all calling each other Bruce and demanding shrubberies.
I guess you missed the last sentence of the paragraph of mine that you quoted from:
Anyway, thanks for the rec.games.chess link.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, but I didn't think that meant you'd have to spend all your time reading logs of information requests! Besides, what are you going to do if you find that people are requesting lists of everything you've bought in the past month. Do you want to be the target of a smear campaign because some people think pr0n is bad, but you don't? Full disclosure doesn't work for "famous" people because people don't take the time to find out all the facts before forming opinions. Since you can't fairly do it for everyone, you shouldn't do it at all.
If you were just talking about fixed things like names and addresses and numbers, not purchase records, salary, or bank account balance, then that's a bit more reasonable. Still, I don't want to spend all my time reading request logs. Also, it would be very easy for info brokers to request the info and re-sell it without telling you about it. I'm sure they'd find a way to get the info in the first place without producing a "1984, Inc." entry in your request logs. The issue of what to do about people that get info you don't want them to have still remains. Prank phone calls alone are enough to make this unworkable. Unlisted phone numbers for movie stars are a much better solution to the problem than a War on Pranks (mandatory minimum jail time, and shit like that. c.f. Wars on Drugs and Terror).
Full disclosure is an interesting idea, but it seems to me that it wouldn't really work out very well, all things considered.
If it costs more to collect information with spyware (because of the overhead of acting illegally), they'll have to sell it for more to make it economically feasible to continue in the business. The market for such information at a higher price might be _much_ less, esp. if companies decide to do some research to see if all this spy crap is helping them, and find out they'd do better by spending their money making better products and bragging about that than by making a version a darkenite-colour version if they find that goths are big fans of their product. (The last bit is what I hope most will decide about buying information databases :), but it is only possible if the information collectors are hit in the pocketbook hard enough to make them raise prices significantly, to a new point on the supply-demand plot.
Temporarily encrypting everything was too difficult? Well I guess I can't argue with people who'd rather spend money than take time fiddling with computers, but I would've done tar | gpg > backup.tar, (nice innocuous name, no way anyone would get suspicious unless they actively suspected me of something, rather than just doing fascist inspections.)
Have you guys forgotten what you were arguing about? You're just attacking the fine details of each other's last post.
However, I won't let that stop me from doing the same. A 3x4 board with only one type of token can only have a finite number of states, and your rules didn't mention anything about move history. Thus, there is a finite number of possible moves, since repeated positions don't count as new moves.
As for white wins in chess, if it was known how to force a win for white, nobody would play against computers. You'd just give the computer the algorithm for responding to any defence played by black, and it would always win. (You can't limit black's choices to a single move right from the start, so there would not be a single sequence of moves you could memorize. The so-called fool's mate and scholar's mate sequences require worst play by the opponent, not best play!) I suppose it's possible that the existence of such an algorithm could be proven without actually discovering such an algorithm. AFAIK, this has not been done.
Most chess players prefer white, and presumably grand masters win more often when playing white than black. There does seem to be some advantage to moving first, at least with currently known strategy and tactics. Part of this is that most players have favourite opennings and defences, and are better at some than others.
I had the wrong formula for latency. See my later comment, with links to actual queueing theory results.
Thank you. It surprised me how many people misunderstood the article _and_ got modded way up. It's not usually that bad.
I doubt that a linear or quadratic latency vs. traffic volume relationship is anywhere near accurate. Queuing theory says it's more like Q/(1-Q), where Q = arrival rate / processing rate. See this web site. I'd be surprised if their linear or quadratic models give very useful results. If they're running a computer simulation anyway, why not get it right and use a reasonable queuing theory result? Hmm, I'm sure it's easier to model links with infinite capacity that just get slower and slower than it is to write a model that deals with dropping packets.
The problem is that routers don't update often enough to notice when one route is getting congested. They will keep using the LA -> NY route even if it is so congested that LA->Chicago->NY would be faster. Ideally, you'd load-balance the routes based on how much traffic you were sending over them.
Even worse, the network to your north might hand it back to you a bit farther east, and the taken path might go NE,SE,NE,SE,etc. (Could this really happen with BGP? Or is it uncommon to have multiple connections to the same AS at different points in your AS? I don't know the details of BGP...)
They also modelled links as having latency linearly proportional to traffic volume. They didn't say anything about having hard limits on traffic volume for any links, which seems odd. They later tried using a quadratic relationship between time and traffic volume, but that doesn't jibe with results from queuing theory (latency ~ exp(max - current), IIRC).
At least they admit they have no idea whether their mathematical models mirror real life!
2.4.19 was seriously broken. IPv6 works again in 2.4.20 (as well as in 2.4.18). It is still alpha, though.
No, it doesn't matter how it's used. The only way what you describe would be right is if the DB driver was covered by the lesser GPL, like glibc, not the full GPL, like libreadline.
What is the point of releasing GPL drivers at all? To encourage _everything_ else to be GPL. Other than that, not much. The lesser GPL is more apropriate for code that does the same thing as some non-Free code (like glibc), rather than something new (like libreadline).
She doesn't want it to be copied.
Is there any reason to think apple would use Power5 for anything? Even though they should, so that they can make a nice fast desktop computer...
There has been speculation about apple using the PPC970, though. I guess it depends on whether Power5 is at all suitable for a desktop machine (i.e. power and bus requirements).