Wow. I have to say, I have never seen a cooler desktop. Plus, it runs bind9, has all of the crypto stuff that was added back in Red Hat 7.0 and a ton of other stuff that makes this the way to go for anyone who wants to get their feet wet with Linux or the long-time hacker.
Not to belittle everything else. Mandrake, Debian, etc are all good distributions and I applaud their efforts and those who use them, but Red Hat has been focusing right where I want a distribution to focus: latest and greatest tempered by usability and stability. I've always found that, eg, Debian does not make this trade-off where I want. Unstable is just a little too unstable and stable is just a little bit too old. I want a middle-ground, and Red Hat seems to walk that tightrope well, making the occasional gaff, but fixing them fairly fast with their updates.
But it was clear. The contest was in terms of total file size of the compressed output and decompressor program.
The proviso given (which should not have been) was that the compressed file could be provided in multiple parts. What he forgot is that an ordered sequence of files has more information than just the sum of their contents. Ooops.
This is not a wording problem, but one of a poorly thought out bet. This guy gave 1:50 odds that no one could compress truely random data. He chose to allow conditions that made the bet doable, and then did not want to pay up when the bet was won.
Actually, even without using multiple files, I think the bet's doable for any single given data file (though you cannot write a generalized compressor for all truely random data). I should come up with the submission to solve for this guy's challenge.
I think that a person's stance on this issue, of who was right and who was wrong, will indicate that same person's approval of lawyers and much of the practice of the law today.
Data point: The corolation for me is: modern US law as practiced is harmful, and anti-productive; this contest was clearly stated, and clearly won. Mike should pay up.
According to a friend who just got back from Europe, Belgium had just removed all laws pertaining to less than a certain (relatively large for personal use) ammount of the plant-based "soft drugs" (marajuanna and psychoactive mushrooms). It's still not legal to sell it or use it publicly, true, but there are nearby countries where these things are easy enough to get. Please correct me if he is wrong.
My point was that if the US would do 3 things, we'd see a dramatic drop in violence related to drugs:
1. Remove all laws pertaining to possesion of less than "commercial quantities" (e.g. enough for 1 month of moderate usage for 2 people).
2. Free everyone in prison who has committed no other crime (before or during prison) than the possesion of scheduled drugs.
3. Place restrictions on drug sales such that licensing and taxation were possible (taxation to go to important things like FDA funding and medical/psycological application testing). Things high on my list of limitations: age restrictions, large volumes, no sales to DUI convicts.
Imagine a world were no one overdoses because their strung-out dealer thought grams were milligrams. Imagine a world were we did not train the next generation of criminals by putting drug users in prison with violent criminals. Imagine a world where people on chemotherapy would not be thrown in jail for growing herbal remedies that work better than any available medication (nothing calms nausea, increases appetite and dulls pain like marajuanna without serious side effects). Imagine a world with truely renewable sources of paper and particle-board that did not require deforestation.
All the cries of "but, our children" won't help either. Children have easy access to illegal drugs (even more so than alcohol in my high school days) because there's a thriving black-market. We will never be able to stop a determined child from getting access to these chemicals. However, we can do a much better job of controling access by regulating, not eliminating, recreational access for responsible adults.
Regulation is the key. You don't dam a river by stopping the water flow. You control the water flow. Same thing with the drug trade.
Alcohol has several problems as a recreational drug that make users (or those who do not use it) want to seek other vehicles: 1) it tends to promote violent behavior 2) in large doses, it induces vomiting 3) it supresses the ability to self-judge (you may have heard "pot heads" use the phrase "but, I *know* I'm **cked up").
Yes, we have the one "grandfathered" recreational drug (not counting nicotine because, while it's addictive as all get-out, the "recreational" part is almost unnoticable). We allow its use, and note that the one time we did not was the origin of organized crime in the US.
I suppose I should change my sig, since enough people have gotten it.
2173541 = 1307 x 1663
2173709 = 1021 x 2129
2173793 = 953 x 2281
2174069 = 971 x 2239
2174087 = 1409 x 1543
2174239 = 1151 x 1889
2174329 = 1439 x 1511
2174363 = 1091 x 1993
Each number is equal to p1*p2 where p1 and p2 are both prime and abs(p1-p2)<sqrt(p1*p2)
Yes, the War on Drugs is expensive, but that's because drugs are so addictive that people can't seem to stop taking them.
The only danger is sending out the wrong message. Drugs kill, and anyone advocating their use is little better than a killer.
Let's just get this clear: drugs kill. Drugs like alcohol kill every day. We don't make alcohol illegal (thus forcing the creation of a shadowy underworld and black market), we punish those who use it irresponsibly. Is alcohol addictive? Oh yeah! Just ask anyone who's gone through alcohol DTs....
Now, what would happen if we implemented restrictions on drugs (turning your back and saying, "you can never do this" is hardly an effective restriction)? Well, look at the Netherlands. Look at Belgium.
These are countries with a crime rate that make most 4-person midwest towns seem like downtown L.A. Why? Are these deeply moral people who cannot be tempted by the evils of marajuana and psychadelic mushrooms? Nope. They are simply, creating a legal vehicle for recreational drug use. What a shock. It turns out that the Netherlands (which has allowed Marajuana in "coffee shops" since the 70s) actually has a lower cocain and heroin addiction rate than the rest of Europe as well. After all, if you can get some recreational drugs legally, why would you go off and use something that makes you a criminal?
The "advocating their use is little better than a killer" line is just a little too over-the-top. Advocating the use of ANY substance without appropriate warnings is irresponsible, but certainly not "little better than a killer".
A friend of mine once suggested (not offered) that I try raw opium. He told me the risks, and I opted out. I think he's a heck of a lot better than a killer.
I just want to quickly point out that when I responded to it, this was moderated up, not as funny, but as insightful. The fact that it is now moderated as funny makes me re-think. There was no indication that the original was intended to be funny, but if it was, I applaud the dry and deceptively sly humor of it, and appologize for not "getting it". Perhaps in the future a couple of smileys would go a long way.....
However, few can argue that the startling Japanese portrayal of the Trade Federation
The accent seemed vaguely asian (Japanese, I don't think so, I'd say Korean or Vietnamese). Certainly the behavior was a mix of cartoony cowardice and a sort of European attitude (German, Itallian, perhaps Portugese) toward imperialism. The ships were very odd, probably something I'd expect to see come out of South America, if anywhere. Not exactly the "startling Japanese portrayal" that you saw. I guess you just walked into it with some baggage....
or the Black Face commedy that characterized Jar Jar
Jar Jar was a ploy to draw kids by having someone speak "funny". I never saw anything particularly "black" about him. I suppose every culture will see the class that has traditionally had the most fun made of them.
Many of us have preexisting notions of what a ruthless capitalist empire should look and act like. Many who remember the booming Japanese economy of the 1980s equate the Japenese with this.
Hence the baggage comment. I don't think anything in that movie was so clearly hurtful or pointed as to be called racism. If you see a butterfly in the Rorshach, cool.
Similarly, slapstick commedy has its roots in the racist black face commedy of the old south.
So, all slapstick is racist? I'm missing something.
Jar Jar's bizarre accent sounds just southern enough to make his strange humor seem racist.
Funny, I've heard him refered to as "Carribian" and "South American", but never "Southern". Ok, glad to hear that they did such a good job of creating a new accent that it can't be classified.
Did Lucas intend it? I doubt it... nonetheless, the message is there.
So, whose message is it? Personally, I think it's yours. Look for racism where people deny basic human rights and freedoms based on race. Look for racism where race is portrayed unevenly. Don't look for racism in a popular movie because it's popular.
Since it's the same number of keystrokes, I didn't bother to introduce scalar context to the Slashdot masses, many of whom are python programmers and would not be comfortable with such flexibility;-)
Actually, the fun part is using strftime to pull out all sorts of details like:
Let's overlook the racism and the poor acting, for a moment.
Let's not. What racism and poor acting? Granted, I will never claim that ANH, TESB, RotJ or TPM have the best acting that hollywood has ever seen, but TESB was, IMHO, one of Ford's best roles. TPM featured some excellent acting on the parts of McGregor (who, I will readily concede has done even more accomplished work elsewhere) and many others. I'm not going to go into child actors like Portman or the boy, because they're children. They were both better than Shirley temple, but you just don't expect an adult's range of skill from a child.
As for racism, I think you're grasping for straws. There are racial stereotypes certainly, but it's hard to establish a never before heard of race and not stereotype it as "agressive" or "funny" or "ill tempered". It's one of the limitations of the medium. However, in order to classify as "racism", I think you would have to actually introduce an *existing* racial stereotype or clearly attempt to sway the audience to hatred on the basis of race alone. SW never does this, AFAICR.
StarWars portrays space as a site of warfare between different species and even between rival human factions.
Please cite a period of human history that suggests that warfare is likely to ever stop being a part of our lives. Once you come up with that example, you can tell me why we should portray it, the exception, instead of the other 99.9999999 percent of human history as the rule.
Of course, we're not talking about humans here (it being a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away), but I'll give you that much as a rhertorical point of common ground.
George Lucas, I think I can speak for everyone here on slashdot, and indeed with the entire breath of humanity: you should be ashamed of yourself for what you have wrought.
Don't go speaking for me. I'm not just a fan of the Star Wars movies (though, I am that), I'm a fan of the genre made up of hero-epic stories. Joseph Campbell has it right, we tell stories in order to explore our nature, and the hero quest is the aspect of our nature which we portray the most universally (though, you could argue that it's a particularly male point of view). Star Wars helps a new generation of viewers to explore that story in a time when Beowulf, Greek myth, Exodus, Robin Hood and the other classic Hero tales are considered pase. I applaud George Lucas and all of the others who have helped to bring Star Wars to fruition, and deeply urge anyone with the talent to try to further the quest in new stories about humanity's quest for enlightenment.
Disgraceful.
No, what's disgraceful is that such a poorly thought out post would be moderated up to a 5 just because it was cranked out before there was much to moderate.
How, I have to wonder, do we define cyborg. The traditional SF term, which means a melding of man (woman?) and machine is satisfied in the abstract by people who walk down the street yammering at the air because they have a hands-free cell phone.
In the more concrete, Christopher Reeves is clearly part machine (without artificial respiration, he would die, though he's gotten better at breathing on his own for short periods). So, we have to ask ourselves, at what point does medical assistance create a cyborg? Is it only when the result is, in some way, fast, stronger or "better" than an average human, or is it when the human and the machine rely on eachother to exist?
What we need then is a way to check when we have reached human intelligence. I agree that turing test its not a very good test, in the sense that is a sufficient test but not a necesary one. If a machine can pass turing test, well, then probably we could say that it has a similar level of intelligence to that of a human.
A friend of mine was one of the first to write an IRC bot. He just took the Eliza engine from EMACS and tied it into the IRC API.
Oddly enough there were dozens of people who got into far-flung arguments with it. In this respect Eliza passed the Turing Test.
Then again, in MMORPGs, I've been accused of being a computer program....
The Turing Test relies on one assumption, which I think is invalid, that human intelligence knows how to identify human intelligence. It's a nice thought excercise, but it does not work very well.
You can emulate non-boolean logic with standard computers, and probably it will be necesary to use non boolean logic (e.g. fuzzy logic) to create an AI.
Ok, now you're just pulling buzz-phrases out of your hat. Fuzzy Logic is the study of case statements with (or sometimes without) knowledge of one or more previous cases. This is not a new kind of logic, much though some would want us to think so. When I refer to non-traditional computing, I am refering to computing where, for example, associations build inference, from which comes reason without logic. This can be simulated on traditional hardware (in a way, that's what most neural nets are), but it's klunky because it uses a computer in the least efficient ways (makeing little or no use of registers, not pipelining well, etc).
Hopefully the future will see machines that do this sort of thing better, but I would not count on it being in the next 10 years.
For me its a problem of processing power.
That, I suspect, is becuase you have not spent the last 30 years in the AI field like, say, Minsky. Go ask him if AI is a matter of brute force processing power, I think you'll get a resoundingly negative response.
If you're going to report on technical matters, you should have a technical review.
They actually don't know why the alcatel modems would ship without firewalling for non-home users.
Of course, you can imagine how happy your average network admin would be if his/her shiny new 6Mb/s DSL line was filtering packets without any input from them;-)
No, they are doing the right thing for the various markets. I would argue that a detailed discussion of the security risks involved should also be shipped to their corporate customers, but that would be a bit more faith in customer cluefullness than any hardware vendor has.
you also have the technology called "intrusive/non-intrusive brain scanning", which, according to ray, would allow us to "download" our brain structure into computers. Yeah, I considered the idea a bit weird too when i read it.
It's not that it's a weird technology, it's that it doesn't make any sense. Imagine if I told you that I was going to build a company that would be just like Microsoft by building the same sorts of buildings that Microsoft has and populating them with the same height/weight people. You'd laugh at me, and with good reason.
We have yet to define where the line between intelligence and sentience is.
You dont have to define the line to cross it.
I disagree. You have to know where you're going, when you're alone in a vast desert looking for the one oasis. You have a small chance of stumbling on it, but I would not bet on it.
if you take a look at some of the existing robots
Let's ignore the idea of a Turing Test for dogs for a moment (given how many holes there are in the idea of a Turing Test for human intelligence). If you look at any of the hard research in AI, you will find that the brick wall is feedback and stability. If you build a machine capable of handling the gigantic feedback loops that make up intelligence, you build something which is very nearly guaranteed to be unstable.
How do you solve this? Well, some think that genetic algorithms are the solution, and I tend to agree, but that leads to another problem....
If you are going to create an intelligence out of a self-evolving simulation, you need many, many generations of simulated life and death with carefully controlled conditions. This means that you either need thousnands of years or computers that are orders of magnitude faster than you will eventually need to run the final proogram. So, while we might have the technology to run an AI in 20 years, we may have to wait another 50 for the technology to create one....
Again, we could be 2 years from "eureka!", but I don't see signs that that is the case.
It's quite possible that sentience requires a very different kind of computer than we have (e.g. non-Von Neuman architectures).
This could be true, but quantum computers are on the way
I'll just assume you were kidding, since every use of quantum computing I've ever seen is a simulation of a set standard parallel computers. I was talking about an actual paradigm shift in the way computation occurs (e.g. a move away from math/boolean logic as the basis for computing). I don't know if that will be neccessary, I was just pointing out that we don't know what will be neccessary yet.
Re:Advertising gone too far
on
AI Movie Promo
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· Score: 2
I think that the idea in Hollywood right now (based on BWP and Godzilla among many others) is that a good movie, under-advertised will make less money than a mediocre movie over-hyped. So, when you have a winner on your hands (and certianly A.I. has at least the breeding papers of a winner), you sink at least 5-10% of what you expect it's box-office sales to be into the advertising.
This makes sound business sense. For all of the Iron Giants and Fight Clubs that you fail to advertise correctly or to the correct audience, you get a handful of Jurasic Parks, Titanics and Matricies which blow the doors off of your profit margins and convince your stock holders that you are doing the right thing by them.
I'm not saying it's the best system, just that it makes sense.
While I've been a fan of this idea for quite some time, here are the factors that I think limit your hypothesis:
1. Creating a machine with the "prcessing power of the human brain" (whatever that is) does not imply that it will be intelligent.
2. We have yet to define where the line between intelligence and sentience is.
3. We don't yet know how to produce even intelligence (say, on the order of a cat).
4. It's quite possible that sentience requires a very different kind of computer than we have (e.g. non-Von Neuman architectures). Perhaps one that is based on thousands of very simple associative nodes rather than one big logic-engine. It's possible that we already have computers that equal human processing power, but we're trying to simulate a foriegn architecture in them and losing massive amounts of efficiency.
Understand that most of this boils down to: we don't know what success is, so we can't measure how far away from it we are. One solid "eureka" may put us 2 years from a true A.I.
On the other hand we might be as far from that goal as Gallileo was from space-flight.
Here's a scenario. It's the late 1950s and all of your biochemist friends are raving about this new chemical that has been going around. You call up a supply house and order some. Your package of LSD arrives the next week and you use it. Two years later, it's illegal and people who are known to have used it are considered "dangerous" and an "employment risk".
Do you think that, today, companies would not be searching credit card records for such purchases?
Also, as a criteria for employment at most financial companies (anyone bound by the SEC, basically) you have to be bonded. This means that an insurance company does a background check and decides how likely they are to lose money on you.
Do you think that your milk purchases are innocent? You do know that people who buy "too much" milk just happen to be insurance risks, right? Oh, probably not for any reason that would affect you, but Prudental doesn't know that, you see. They're just doing actuarial math, and you lose.
Now, let's think about what this information will lead to in the hands of the FBI... profiling based on... let's say, type of reading material? Software choices (people who buy Red Hat are national security risks, FreeBSD users are terrrorists and BeOS users are drug smugglers, right), it just goes on and on. How many years do you think it will be before the FBI can issue a search warrant based on a 99% corolation with a criminal profile? If you said, "that would never happen," then in the words of the West Wing, I want you to write down the exact date and time that you said that....
If we had something like the AMA, I would find another profession.
Take as one example (not to takes sides on this, but just to point out the kinds of things that would certainly happen in our industry), the 60 minutes story of one doctor who was removed from medical practice by the AMA....
His patients were the sort who suffered chronic, debilitating pain the likes of which you and I are not likely to be able to empathize with. He found that perscribing large doses of narcotics (e.g. opiates and the like) helped these people live normal lives, and according to his results and all of the research available, such patients were seemingly immune to the addictive properties that the recreational users of these drugs were subject to. Apparently, the feedback loop that causes addiction is somehow interfered with by the using the drugs to relieve chronic pain. Who knew.
Instead of holding this man on a pedistal for finding a way to let his patients live relatively normal lives, the doctor had his license revoked and at least one of his patients, unable to face the debilitating pain again, killed themselves.
No, paperwork standardization is one thing, but I don't want or need ethical oversight.
The referenced article (despite it's cookie sillyness) is a very good evaluation of the dangers of the situation. I'm pleased to see lawyers taking some responsibility for the ethical well-being of thier country.
Here's one bit that both terrifies me and makes me mad:
The Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation are using a foreign forum to create an international law-enforcement regime that favors the interests of the feds over those of ordinary citizens and businesses. Their goal is to make it easier to get evidence from abroad and to extradite and prosecute foreign nationals for certain kinds of crimes.
Also, the report cites supporters, MPAA and RIAA because they're trying to use INTERNATIONAL LAW to force the US to make copying their material a criminal, not civil offense. Cool shit.:-(
On the GNOME side, Eazel and Ximian are doing lots of work - if Eazel and Ximian will go south, GNOME will continue to be developed, but with much slower pace until they'll get new volunteers to help.
Keep in mind that Miguel was running Gnome development long before he created Ximian/Helix. If Ximian was to go under today, I doubt that he (or many of the other fine folk there) would stop working on Gnome.
All of the working going into open source desktops these days really makes me proud to be a part of this community. I have a preference for Gnome, but I'd buy any KDE developer a beer if I ran into them at a conference!
After The Great Renaming (which was just before I came into the picture), it became rec.humor.
rec.humor was unmoderated, and as such had as much noise as any unmoderated group.
rec.humor.funny was a moderated forum where jokes were reviewed, catagorized, and some were approved for posting.
The nice thing was that it was all pretty even handed. There were such catagories as "smirk", "chuckle", "sick" and so on. If you sent in something, and it wasn't just dumb, there was a good chance it would show up.
The idea that 'all those concepts' can be applied to C is simply stupid.
Ah, the depth of the argument becomes clear;-)
Gtk has no table widget, no Unicode support, and no rich text widget yet.
Table widgets are kept in Gnome. You can use just the table widget if you wish, without having to use Gnome's overall session managment, etc.
Unicode support is handled by pango, which while still under development, is definitely ready for developers to start designing their projects against. Pango is much richer Unicode support than most toolkits (including Win32) offer.
Define rich, when you're refering to text widgets.
* The win32 api and Tk are the most obvious examples. I'm surprised that you don't know about them.
Don't be rude just to prove you can. Of course, I've heard of them. I gave a couple of examples, not a comprehensive list. Win32 is the worlds most comprehensive abomination ever written down, so I don't use it as an example of much. Tk is just too limited for most use. Why is Tk one of the "most obvious examples"? No one really uses it anymore (even Python is moving to Gtk+).
Of course Solaris could use Qt, thousands of people use Qt on Solaris.
Yes, of course they do. But, Sun cannot ship Qt becuase they would have to decide which C++ to support. There's Sun's C++ and GCC. They do not interoperate becuase C++ is not as portable as it should be. So, Sun would have to ship two sets of libraries and let you guess which ones to install.
Gtk+ did not require Solaris to choose. C is portable.
Slashdot Mirror
Just grabbed Red Hat 7.1 + Ximian 1.4.
Wow. I have to say, I have never seen a cooler desktop. Plus, it runs bind9, has all of the crypto stuff that was added back in Red Hat 7.0 and a ton of other stuff that makes this the way to go for anyone who wants to get their feet wet with Linux or the long-time hacker.
Not to belittle everything else. Mandrake, Debian, etc are all good distributions and I applaud their efforts and those who use them, but Red Hat has been focusing right where I want a distribution to focus: latest and greatest tempered by usability and stability. I've always found that, eg, Debian does not make this trade-off where I want. Unstable is just a little too unstable and stable is just a little bit too old. I want a middle-ground, and Red Hat seems to walk that tightrope well, making the occasional gaff, but fixing them fairly fast with their updates.
But it was clear. The contest was in terms of total file size of the compressed output and decompressor program.
The proviso given (which should not have been) was that the compressed file could be provided in multiple parts. What he forgot is that an ordered sequence of files has more information than just the sum of their contents. Ooops.
This is not a wording problem, but one of a poorly thought out bet. This guy gave 1:50 odds that no one could compress truely random data. He chose to allow conditions that made the bet doable, and then did not want to pay up when the bet was won.
Actually, even without using multiple files, I think the bet's doable for any single given data file (though you cannot write a generalized compressor for all truely random data). I should come up with the submission to solve for this guy's challenge.
Graphical update fails to find the mirror list, so those of useing Ximian already are temporarily SOL (unless we want to download it all over again).
Did anything not change? Is there any reason to not just get it all again?
I think that a person's stance on this issue, of who was right and who was wrong, will indicate that same person's approval of lawyers and much of the practice of the law today.
Data point: The corolation for me is: modern US law as practiced is harmful, and anti-productive; this contest was clearly stated, and clearly won. Mike should pay up.
According to a friend who just got back from Europe, Belgium had just removed all laws pertaining to less than a certain (relatively large for personal use) ammount of the plant-based "soft drugs" (marajuanna and psychoactive mushrooms). It's still not legal to sell it or use it publicly, true, but there are nearby countries where these things are easy enough to get. Please correct me if he is wrong.
My point was that if the US would do 3 things, we'd see a dramatic drop in violence related to drugs:
1. Remove all laws pertaining to possesion of less than "commercial quantities" (e.g. enough for 1 month of moderate usage for 2 people).
2. Free everyone in prison who has committed no other crime (before or during prison) than the possesion of scheduled drugs.
3. Place restrictions on drug sales such that licensing and taxation were possible (taxation to go to important things like FDA funding and medical/psycological application testing). Things high on my list of limitations: age restrictions, large volumes, no sales to DUI convicts.
Imagine a world were no one overdoses because their strung-out dealer thought grams were milligrams. Imagine a world were we did not train the next generation of criminals by putting drug users in prison with violent criminals. Imagine a world where people on chemotherapy would not be thrown in jail for growing herbal remedies that work better than any available medication (nothing calms nausea, increases appetite and dulls pain like marajuanna without serious side effects). Imagine a world with truely renewable sources of paper and particle-board that did not require deforestation.
All the cries of "but, our children" won't help either. Children have easy access to illegal drugs (even more so than alcohol in my high school days) because there's a thriving black-market. We will never be able to stop a determined child from getting access to these chemicals. However, we can do a much better job of controling access by regulating, not eliminating, recreational access for responsible adults.
Regulation is the key. You don't dam a river by stopping the water flow. You control the water flow. Same thing with the drug trade.
Alcohol has several problems as a recreational drug that make users (or those who do not use it) want to seek other vehicles: 1) it tends to promote violent behavior 2) in large doses, it induces vomiting 3) it supresses the ability to self-judge (you may have heard "pot heads" use the phrase "but, I *know* I'm **cked up").
Yes, we have the one "grandfathered" recreational drug (not counting nicotine because, while it's addictive as all get-out, the "recreational" part is almost unnoticable). We allow its use, and note that the one time we did not was the origin of organized crime in the US.
I suppose I should change my sig, since enough people have gotten it.
Each number is equal to p1*p2 where p1 and p2 are both prime and abs(p1-p2)<sqrt(p1*p2)Yes, the War on Drugs is expensive, but that's because drugs are so addictive that people can't seem to stop taking them.
The only danger is sending out the wrong message. Drugs kill, and anyone advocating their use is little better than a killer.
Let's just get this clear: drugs kill. Drugs like alcohol kill every day. We don't make alcohol illegal (thus forcing the creation of a shadowy underworld and black market), we punish those who use it irresponsibly. Is alcohol addictive? Oh yeah! Just ask anyone who's gone through alcohol DTs....
Now, what would happen if we implemented restrictions on drugs (turning your back and saying, "you can never do this" is hardly an effective restriction)? Well, look at the Netherlands. Look at Belgium.
These are countries with a crime rate that make most 4-person midwest towns seem like downtown L.A. Why? Are these deeply moral people who cannot be tempted by the evils of marajuana and psychadelic mushrooms? Nope. They are simply, creating a legal vehicle for recreational drug use. What a shock. It turns out that the Netherlands (which has allowed Marajuana in "coffee shops" since the 70s) actually has a lower cocain and heroin addiction rate than the rest of Europe as well. After all, if you can get some recreational drugs legally, why would you go off and use something that makes you a criminal?
The "advocating their use is little better than a killer" line is just a little too over-the-top. Advocating the use of ANY substance without appropriate warnings is irresponsible, but certainly not "little better than a killer".
A friend of mine once suggested (not offered) that I try raw opium. He told me the risks, and I opted out. I think he's a heck of a lot better than a killer.
I just want to quickly point out that when I responded to it, this was moderated up, not as funny, but as insightful. The fact that it is now moderated as funny makes me re-think. There was no indication that the original was intended to be funny, but if it was, I applaud the dry and deceptively sly humor of it, and appologize for not "getting it". Perhaps in the future a couple of smileys would go a long way.....
However, few can argue that the startling Japanese portrayal of the Trade Federation
The accent seemed vaguely asian (Japanese, I don't think so, I'd say Korean or Vietnamese). Certainly the behavior was a mix of cartoony cowardice and a sort of European attitude (German, Itallian, perhaps Portugese) toward imperialism. The ships were very odd, probably something I'd expect to see come out of South America, if anywhere. Not exactly the "startling Japanese portrayal" that you saw. I guess you just walked into it with some baggage....
or the Black Face commedy that characterized Jar Jar
Jar Jar was a ploy to draw kids by having someone speak "funny". I never saw anything particularly "black" about him. I suppose every culture will see the class that has traditionally had the most fun made of them.
Many of us have preexisting notions of what a ruthless capitalist empire should look and act like. Many who remember the booming Japanese economy of the 1980s equate the Japenese with this.
Hence the baggage comment. I don't think anything in that movie was so clearly hurtful or pointed as to be called racism. If you see a butterfly in the Rorshach, cool.
Similarly, slapstick commedy has its roots in the racist black face commedy of the old south.
So, all slapstick is racist? I'm missing something.
Jar Jar's bizarre accent sounds just southern enough to make his strange humor seem racist.
Funny, I've heard him refered to as "Carribian" and "South American", but never "Southern". Ok, glad to hear that they did such a good job of creating a new accent that it can't be classified.
Did Lucas intend it? I doubt it... nonetheless, the message is there.
So, whose message is it? Personally, I think it's yours. Look for racism where people deny basic human rights and freedoms based on race. Look for racism where race is portrayed unevenly. Don't look for racism in a popular movie because it's popular.
Since it's the same number of keystrokes, I didn't bother to introduce scalar context to the Slashdot masses, many of whom are python programmers and would not be comfortable with such flexibility ;-)
Actually, the fun part is using strftime to pull out all sorts of details like:
perl -MPOSIX -le 'print strftime("24HR time: %H%M",localtime 999999999)'
or
perl -MPOSIX -le 'print strftime("It is on a %A", localtime 999999999)'
Fun stuff. Perl is your friend.
(and yes, the Python snipe was humor. I have a deep respect for Python even if ESR is a dink about the "recovered Perl programmer" thing...)
Let's overlook the racism and the poor acting, for a moment.
Let's not. What racism and poor acting? Granted, I will never claim that ANH, TESB, RotJ or TPM have the best acting that hollywood has ever seen, but TESB was, IMHO, one of Ford's best roles. TPM featured some excellent acting on the parts of McGregor (who, I will readily concede has done even more accomplished work elsewhere) and many others. I'm not going to go into child actors like Portman or the boy, because they're children. They were both better than Shirley temple, but you just don't expect an adult's range of skill from a child.
As for racism, I think you're grasping for straws. There are racial stereotypes certainly, but it's hard to establish a never before heard of race and not stereotype it as "agressive" or "funny" or "ill tempered". It's one of the limitations of the medium. However, in order to classify as "racism", I think you would have to actually introduce an *existing* racial stereotype or clearly attempt to sway the audience to hatred on the basis of race alone. SW never does this, AFAICR.
StarWars portrays space as a site of warfare between different species and even between rival human factions.
Please cite a period of human history that suggests that warfare is likely to ever stop being a part of our lives. Once you come up with that example, you can tell me why we should portray it, the exception, instead of the other 99.9999999 percent of human history as the rule.
Of course, we're not talking about humans here (it being a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away), but I'll give you that much as a rhertorical point of common ground.
George Lucas, I think I can speak for everyone here on slashdot, and indeed with the entire breath of humanity: you should be ashamed of yourself for what you have wrought.
Don't go speaking for me. I'm not just a fan of the Star Wars movies (though, I am that), I'm a fan of the genre made up of hero-epic stories. Joseph Campbell has it right, we tell stories in order to explore our nature, and the hero quest is the aspect of our nature which we portray the most universally (though, you could argue that it's a particularly male point of view). Star Wars helps a new generation of viewers to explore that story in a time when Beowulf, Greek myth, Exodus, Robin Hood and the other classic Hero tales are considered pase. I applaud George Lucas and all of the others who have helped to bring Star Wars to fruition, and deeply urge anyone with the talent to try to further the quest in new stories about humanity's quest for enlightenment.
Disgraceful.
No, what's disgraceful is that such a poorly thought out post would be moderated up to a 5 just because it was cranked out before there was much to moderate.
So, you have a UNIX timestamp you want to check out? Try Perl on the command-line:
perl -MPOSIX -le 'print ctime(999999999)'
perl -MPOSIX -le 'print ctime(987654321)'
For another timezone, you can just set the TZ environment variable. On the command-line, or in the code:
perl -MPOSIX -le '$ENV{TZ}="CST";print ctime(200)'
Actually, because there are historical reasons for ctime supplying a newline, you can drop the "l" from "-le".
How, I have to wonder, do we define cyborg. The traditional SF term, which means a melding of man (woman?) and machine is satisfied in the abstract by people who walk down the street yammering at the air because they have a hands-free cell phone.
In the more concrete, Christopher Reeves is clearly part machine (without artificial respiration, he would die, though he's gotten better at breathing on his own for short periods). So, we have to ask ourselves, at what point does medical assistance create a cyborg? Is it only when the result is, in some way, fast, stronger or "better" than an average human, or is it when the human and the machine rely on eachother to exist?
What we need then is a way to check when we have reached human intelligence. I agree that turing test its not a very good test, in the sense that is a sufficient test but not a necesary one. If a machine can pass turing test, well, then probably we could say that it has a similar level of intelligence to that of a human.
A friend of mine was one of the first to write an IRC bot. He just took the Eliza engine from EMACS and tied it into the IRC API.
Oddly enough there were dozens of people who got into far-flung arguments with it. In this respect Eliza passed the Turing Test.
Then again, in MMORPGs, I've been accused of being a computer program....
The Turing Test relies on one assumption, which I think is invalid, that human intelligence knows how to identify human intelligence. It's a nice thought excercise, but it does not work very well.
You can emulate non-boolean logic with standard computers, and probably it will be necesary to use non boolean logic (e.g. fuzzy logic) to create an AI.
Ok, now you're just pulling buzz-phrases out of your hat. Fuzzy Logic is the study of case statements with (or sometimes without) knowledge of one or more previous cases. This is not a new kind of logic, much though some would want us to think so. When I refer to non-traditional computing, I am refering to computing where, for example, associations build inference, from which comes reason without logic. This can be simulated on traditional hardware (in a way, that's what most neural nets are), but it's klunky because it uses a computer in the least efficient ways (makeing little or no use of registers, not pipelining well, etc).
Hopefully the future will see machines that do this sort of thing better, but I would not count on it being in the next 10 years.
For me its a problem of processing power.
That, I suspect, is becuase you have not spent the last 30 years in the AI field like, say, Minsky. Go ask him if AI is a matter of brute force processing power, I think you'll get a resoundingly negative response.
If you're going to report on technical matters, you should have a technical review.
;-)
They actually don't know why the alcatel modems would ship without firewalling for non-home users.
Of course, you can imagine how happy your average network admin would be if his/her shiny new 6Mb/s DSL line was filtering packets without any input from them
No, they are doing the right thing for the various markets. I would argue that a detailed discussion of the security risks involved should also be shipped to their corporate customers, but that would be a bit more faith in customer cluefullness than any hardware vendor has.
It's not that it's a weird technology, it's that it doesn't make any sense. Imagine if I told you that I was going to build a company that would be just like Microsoft by building the same sorts of buildings that Microsoft has and populating them with the same height/weight people. You'd laugh at me, and with good reason.
- We have yet to define where the line between intelligence and sentience is.
You dont have to define the line to cross it.I disagree. You have to know where you're going, when you're alone in a vast desert looking for the one oasis. You have a small chance of stumbling on it, but I would not bet on it.
if you take a look at some of the existing robots
Let's ignore the idea of a Turing Test for dogs for a moment (given how many holes there are in the idea of a Turing Test for human intelligence). If you look at any of the hard research in AI, you will find that the brick wall is feedback and stability. If you build a machine capable of handling the gigantic feedback loops that make up intelligence, you build something which is very nearly guaranteed to be unstable.
How do you solve this? Well, some think that genetic algorithms are the solution, and I tend to agree, but that leads to another problem....
If you are going to create an intelligence out of a self-evolving simulation, you need many, many generations of simulated life and death with carefully controlled conditions. This means that you either need thousnands of years or computers that are orders of magnitude faster than you will eventually need to run the final proogram. So, while we might have the technology to run an AI in 20 years, we may have to wait another 50 for the technology to create one....
Again, we could be 2 years from "eureka!", but I don't see signs that that is the case.
This could be true, but quantum computers are on the way
I'll just assume you were kidding, since every use of quantum computing I've ever seen is a simulation of a set standard parallel computers. I was talking about an actual paradigm shift in the way computation occurs (e.g. a move away from math/boolean logic as the basis for computing). I don't know if that will be neccessary, I was just pointing out that we don't know what will be neccessary yet.
I think that the idea in Hollywood right now (based on BWP and Godzilla among many others) is that a good movie, under-advertised will make less money than a mediocre movie over-hyped. So, when you have a winner on your hands (and certianly A.I. has at least the breeding papers of a winner), you sink at least 5-10% of what you expect it's box-office sales to be into the advertising.
This makes sound business sense. For all of the Iron Giants and Fight Clubs that you fail to advertise correctly or to the correct audience, you get a handful of Jurasic Parks, Titanics and Matricies which blow the doors off of your profit margins and convince your stock holders that you are doing the right thing by them.
I'm not saying it's the best system, just that it makes sense.
While I've been a fan of this idea for quite some time, here are the factors that I think limit your hypothesis:
1. Creating a machine with the "prcessing power of the human brain" (whatever that is) does not imply that it will be intelligent.
2. We have yet to define where the line between intelligence and sentience is.
3. We don't yet know how to produce even intelligence (say, on the order of a cat).
4. It's quite possible that sentience requires a very different kind of computer than we have (e.g. non-Von Neuman architectures). Perhaps one that is based on thousands of very simple associative nodes rather than one big logic-engine. It's possible that we already have computers that equal human processing power, but we're trying to simulate a foriegn architecture in them and losing massive amounts of efficiency.
Understand that most of this boils down to: we don't know what success is, so we can't measure how far away from it we are. One solid "eureka" may put us 2 years from a true A.I.
On the other hand we might be as far from that goal as Gallileo was from space-flight.
Here's a scenario. It's the late 1950s and all of your biochemist friends are raving about this new chemical that has been going around. You call up a supply house and order some. Your package of LSD arrives the next week and you use it. Two years later, it's illegal and people who are known to have used it are considered "dangerous" and an "employment risk".
Do you think that, today, companies would not be searching credit card records for such purchases?
Also, as a criteria for employment at most financial companies (anyone bound by the SEC, basically) you have to be bonded. This means that an insurance company does a background check and decides how likely they are to lose money on you.
Do you think that your milk purchases are innocent? You do know that people who buy "too much" milk just happen to be insurance risks, right? Oh, probably not for any reason that would affect you, but Prudental doesn't know that, you see. They're just doing actuarial math, and you lose.
Now, let's think about what this information will lead to in the hands of the FBI... profiling based on... let's say, type of reading material? Software choices (people who buy Red Hat are national security risks, FreeBSD users are terrrorists and BeOS users are drug smugglers, right), it just goes on and on. How many years do you think it will be before the FBI can issue a search warrant based on a 99% corolation with a criminal profile? If you said, "that would never happen," then in the words of the West Wing, I want you to write down the exact date and time that you said that....
If we had something like the AMA, I would find another profession.
Take as one example (not to takes sides on this, but just to point out the kinds of things that would certainly happen in our industry), the 60 minutes story of one doctor who was removed from medical practice by the AMA....
His patients were the sort who suffered chronic, debilitating pain the likes of which you and I are not likely to be able to empathize with. He found that perscribing large doses of narcotics (e.g. opiates and the like) helped these people live normal lives, and according to his results and all of the research available, such patients were seemingly immune to the addictive properties that the recreational users of these drugs were subject to. Apparently, the feedback loop that causes addiction is somehow interfered with by the using the drugs to relieve chronic pain. Who knew.
Instead of holding this man on a pedistal for finding a way to let his patients live relatively normal lives, the doctor had his license revoked and at least one of his patients, unable to face the debilitating pain again, killed themselves.
No, paperwork standardization is one thing, but I don't want or need ethical oversight.
Here's one bit that both terrifies me and makes me mad:Also, the report cites supporters, MPAA and RIAA because they're trying to use INTERNATIONAL LAW to force the US to make copying their material a criminal, not civil offense. Cool shit.
Be afraid.
Good points, just one thing to note:
On the GNOME side, Eazel and Ximian are doing lots of work - if Eazel and Ximian will go south, GNOME will continue to be developed, but with much slower pace until they'll get new volunteers to help.
Keep in mind that Miguel was running Gnome development long before he created Ximian/Helix. If Ximian was to go under today, I doubt that he (or many of the other fine folk there) would stop working on Gnome.
All of the working going into open source desktops these days really makes me proud to be a part of this community. I have a preference for Gnome, but I'd buy any KDE developer a beer if I ran into them at a conference!
Back in the day, there was net.funny.
After The Great Renaming (which was just before I came into the picture), it became rec.humor.
rec.humor was unmoderated, and as such had as much noise as any unmoderated group.
rec.humor.funny was a moderated forum where jokes were reviewed, catagorized, and some were approved for posting.
The nice thing was that it was all pretty even handed. There were such catagories as "smirk", "chuckle", "sick" and so on. If you sent in something, and it wasn't just dumb, there was a good chance it would show up.
Ah, for the yesterdays of Usenet....
The idea that 'all those concepts' can be applied to C is simply stupid.
;-)
Ah, the depth of the argument becomes clear
Gtk has no table widget, no Unicode support, and no rich text widget yet.
Table widgets are kept in Gnome. You can use just the table widget if you wish, without having to use Gnome's overall session managment, etc.
Unicode support is handled by pango, which while still under development, is definitely ready for developers to start designing their projects against. Pango is much richer Unicode support than most toolkits (including Win32) offer.
Define rich, when you're refering to text widgets.
* The win32 api and Tk are the most obvious examples. I'm surprised that you don't know about them.
Don't be rude just to prove you can. Of course, I've heard of them. I gave a couple of examples, not a comprehensive list. Win32 is the worlds most comprehensive abomination ever written down, so I don't use it as an example of much. Tk is just too limited for most use. Why is Tk one of the "most obvious examples"? No one really uses it anymore (even Python is moving to Gtk+).
Of course Solaris could use Qt, thousands of people use Qt on Solaris.
Yes, of course they do. But, Sun cannot ship Qt becuase they would have to decide which C++ to support. There's Sun's C++ and GCC. They do not interoperate becuase C++ is not as portable as it should be. So, Sun would have to ship two sets of libraries and let you guess which ones to install.
Gtk+ did not require Solaris to choose. C is portable.