The Thompson coupling was invented not long ago, and I remember being amazed that there was anything new to be done in the area of mechanical power transmission. And now this. Are we all done now, or is there more still?
Having the researchers pay for publication is not such an outlandish idea. I've heard it promoted on NPR's Science Friday. The argument is that publishing is part of the research effort and funding for both should go together.
This is a worst case solution since it would imply that the brain is not understood yet.
That's not too bad. When we build one of those, we can afford it with a probe facility that it can use to observe and manipulate its own brain or clones thereof. It can then find out how its brain works and tell us, or code up a minimal AI if we want that.
"Something you know" isn't what counts when it comes to protecting you from self incrimination; it is whether the "something you know" is incriminating you.
This leads to an interesting idea. Claim that you passphrase is a confession. If you plan ahead, you can even make that claim true. Encrypt your plan to assassinate the president with "I plan to assassinate the president OV:}A7MC".
I think what the AC is getting at is that if you torture an innocent man and he makes a false confession to make the pain stop, you're done. You throw the guy in jail. If the guy gives up a false passphrase, you're back to square one.
This is a genuine distinction between passphrases and other information they might want you to reveal.
This is not a distinction that should ever come into play however. Punishing a person for not doing something that might be completely impossible for them to do is wrong.
I like my desktop black. So... now people who see my desktop are going to think I have an illegitimate copy of XP? That sucks. It's the first time in years I'm running legit Windows:)
That's how you wind up with mixing engineers chopping up their perfectly fine $500 Sennheiser cans, to solder a $1500 headphone cable right onto the speaker leads.
Are we talking about headphones like my HD600's? With separate left/right plugs and two little prongs on each connector?
The thing is, these headphones are not "perfectly fine". They have a stupid design flaw that's been bothering me more and more. The cable connection is finicky. You may put the headphones on and get no sound on one side. Fiddle with the connector on that side and after a while, and a lot of crackling, maybe you get a solid connection. Replacing the cable seems to fix it for a while, but the problem always comes back.
These things are wonderful when the cable connection is good, so fixing that permanently by soldering sounds pretty good to me.
Many of the comments are focusing on the outside temperature in Iceland and linking that to decreased cost of cooling. That may be relevant, but it's not the point. The point is that power is cheap and plentiful here (mostly hydro, some geothermal).
Iceland doesn't have much in the way of natural resources but it has all that power. The way to export that power so far has been to import alumina and export aluminum. The conversion takes a lot of energy. Server farms are another way of exporting power.
The problem is that no-one in their right mind would house their servers here. We have no real redundancy in connectivity. One cable breaks and we suffer increased latency and reduced throughput. This happens more often than most data center clients could tolerate. The good news is that this problem can be solved with more cables. They're not cheap, but neither is building aluminum smelters. Once there are at least two cables going west and two going east, each with sufficient capacity to carry the whole load, then Iceland will be a very nice place for servers.
Haven't you ever tried to fill your tank with gas and had the thing click every few seconds, thinking your tank is full?
Oh yeah. What's worse it that it happened the first three times I filled up after a long period of not driving. Had me wondering: "What the hell? Do I seriously not know how to pump gas?"
I figured out a workaround though. Rotating the handle by 30 degrees or so around the nozzle axis improves the flow to near-normal levels, at least for this particular tank/pump type combo.
I've sometimes joked that if we just had a button that made our computers feel pain, a lot of bugs would get sorted out real quick:-)
But joking aside, maybe the first true AI will have emotions regardless of whether we want them. Understanding the human brain is very hard. Understanding the the stuff it's made of is certainly easier. It could be that the first AI is a simulation of a real individual's brain (scanned with technology we don't have yet, obviously). This would be the brute force method, and the force might well become available earlier than the knowledge we need to do it more elegantly.
The Bora was especially ill-named for the Icelandic market, where "bora" means asshole. There was remarkably little snickering over that, actually. It helps that the English pronunciation is different, and it's more of a cutesy nickname than something you'd yell at, well, an asshole.
Re:I ponder
on
Flying Humans
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I don't think point one really applies to code. Lines of prose look alike. It's all one big rectangle of text. Code is sparse by comparison and the indentation and wildly varying line lengths give it a definite shape that helps you see where you are. Syntax highlighting helps too.
As an outsider, I'm curious about all these Americans who hate America. We don't have a lot of Icelanders who hate Iceland.
Or maybe it's just that "anti-Icelandism" hasn't been invented as a convenient term to put down anyone an Icelander doesn't agree with.
Another difference between us is that when we try to figure out whether an aspect of our society sucks (education maybe, press freedom, poverty, jail sentences, GDP), we compare ours with that of similar countries such as Denmark, or the average across the Nordic countries or the OECD members. You jump directly to "nations without civil liberties", like North Korea. You know, like the USA, Iceland fucking rocks compared with North Korea. But this may be the first time anyone's pointed that out, because it's just not relevant to where we are or where we want to be.
Why does this kind of argument even get raised in the US?
Usually when a program is broken, it's because someone made a mistake. There'a a proper way to do something, and they didn't do it that way. The fix is to move to doing things the proper way, which by virtue of being the proper way has plenty of prior art.
So, no problems arise with patches that involve making sure buffers don't overflow, tempfiles are opened without a race condition occurring, input passed on to command interpreters doesn't contain escapes, and so on.
Then there's the rarer situation where a system needs a novel idea to function securely. The implementor creates the system without any awareness of the need for new security mechanisms and writes an insecure system. I'd say that in this case, the person who finds the flaw and the fix actually deserves compensation. Actually, forget the fix. They've made a contribution to the field just by understanding the flaw.
Still, making it harder or more expensive for companies to fix their broken software? That's something I just can't get behind.
I take all my grammar advice from George Carlin and he once said on the subject of prostitution "Selling is legal, fucking is legal, so why isn't selling fucking legal?"
I thought everyone ran away from wavelets because a couple of companies locked up the whole field with broad patents (without ever delivering the technology). Is that just an old myth?
Slashdot Mirror
US patent 7144326 has some diagrams.
The Thompson coupling was invented not long ago, and I remember being amazed that there was anything new to be done in the area of mechanical power transmission. And now this. Are we all done now, or is there more still?
Having the researchers pay for publication is not such an outlandish idea. I've heard it promoted on NPR's Science Friday. The argument is that publishing is part of the research effort and funding for both should go together.
Wouldn't that be "I sure as chkdsk never heard of it"?
...bypassing his DRM featured house...
Wouldn't that be more like ARM-featured house, as in Analog Rights Management?
This is a worst case solution since it would imply that the brain is not understood yet.
That's not too bad. When we build one of those, we can afford it with a probe facility that it can use to observe and manipulate its own brain or clones thereof. It can then find out how its brain works and tell us, or code up a minimal AI if we want that.
"Something you know" isn't what counts when it comes to protecting you from self incrimination; it is whether the "something you know" is incriminating you.
This leads to an interesting idea. Claim that you passphrase is a confession. If you plan ahead, you can even make that claim true. Encrypt your plan to assassinate the president with "I plan to assassinate the president OV:}A7MC".
This is a genuine distinction between passphrases and other information they might want you to reveal.
This is not a distinction that should ever come into play however. Punishing a person for not doing something that might be completely impossible for them to do is wrong.
I like my desktop black. So... now people who see my desktop are going to think I have an illegitimate copy of XP? That sucks. It's the first time in years I'm running legit Windows :)
Are we talking about headphones like my HD600's? With separate left/right plugs and two little prongs on each connector?
The thing is, these headphones are not "perfectly fine". They have a stupid design flaw that's been bothering me more and more. The cable connection is finicky. You may put the headphones on and get no sound on one side. Fiddle with the connector on that side and after a while, and a lot of crackling, maybe you get a solid connection. Replacing the cable seems to fix it for a while, but the problem always comes back.
These things are wonderful when the cable connection is good, so fixing that permanently by soldering sounds pretty good to me.
Iceland doesn't have much in the way of natural resources but it has all that power. The way to export that power so far has been to import alumina and export aluminum. The conversion takes a lot of energy. Server farms are another way of exporting power.
The problem is that no-one in their right mind would house their servers here. We have no real redundancy in connectivity. One cable breaks and we suffer increased latency and reduced throughput. This happens more often than most data center clients could tolerate. The good news is that this problem can be solved with more cables. They're not cheap, but neither is building aluminum smelters. Once there are at least two cables going west and two going east, each with sufficient capacity to carry the whole load, then Iceland will be a very nice place for servers.
The Wikipedia article explains the idea very nicely. Not much there about applications though.
Oh yeah. What's worse it that it happened the first three times I filled up after a long period of not driving. Had me wondering: "What the hell? Do I seriously not know how to pump gas?"
I figured out a workaround though. Rotating the handle by 30 degrees or so around the nozzle axis improves the flow to near-normal levels, at least for this particular tank/pump type combo.
I've sometimes joked that if we just had a button that made our computers feel pain, a lot of bugs would get sorted out real quick :-)
But joking aside, maybe the first true AI will have emotions regardless of whether we want them. Understanding the human brain is very hard. Understanding the the stuff it's made of is certainly easier. It could be that the first AI is a simulation of a real individual's brain (scanned with technology we don't have yet, obviously). This would be the brute force method, and the force might well become available earlier than the knowledge we need to do it more elegantly.
The Bora was especially ill-named for the Icelandic market, where "bora" means asshole. There was remarkably little snickering over that, actually. It helps that the English pronunciation is different, and it's more of a cutesy nickname than something you'd yell at, well, an asshole.
yup
chicken
Fortunately, "it's too light" is generally a very easy problem to solve.
I will never give up my right to give up my rights!
I don't think point one really applies to code. Lines of prose look alike. It's all one big rectangle of text. Code is sparse by comparison and the indentation and wildly varying line lengths give it a definite shape that helps you see where you are. Syntax highlighting helps too.
Or maybe it's just that "anti-Icelandism" hasn't been invented as a convenient term to put down anyone an Icelander doesn't agree with.
Another difference between us is that when we try to figure out whether an aspect of our society sucks (education maybe, press freedom, poverty, jail sentences, GDP), we compare ours with that of similar countries such as Denmark, or the average across the Nordic countries or the OECD members. You jump directly to "nations without civil liberties", like North Korea. You know, like the USA, Iceland fucking rocks compared with North Korea. But this may be the first time anyone's pointed that out, because it's just not relevant to where we are or where we want to be.
Why does this kind of argument even get raised in the US?
So, no problems arise with patches that involve making sure buffers don't overflow, tempfiles are opened without a race condition occurring, input passed on to command interpreters doesn't contain escapes, and so on.
Then there's the rarer situation where a system needs a novel idea to function securely. The implementor creates the system without any awareness of the need for new security mechanisms and writes an insecure system. I'd say that in this case, the person who finds the flaw and the fix actually deserves compensation. Actually, forget the fix. They've made a contribution to the field just by understanding the flaw.
Still, making it harder or more expensive for companies to fix their broken software? That's something I just can't get behind.
Hehe. Boobies have chicks. I guess some guys already saw it that way.
So clearly, two -ings in a row are fine ;-)
I thought everyone ran away from wavelets because a couple of companies locked up the whole field with broad patents (without ever delivering the technology). Is that just an old myth?