While its true the Knuth seems to stay true to his intention of discussing his views on god (or rather on Christianity), the title of lecture series "God and Computers" is a little misleading in this respect. I was expecting some sort of tie in between his experiences with working with controlled, deterministic computers, and his views of the universe, meaning, and god as a whole.
Not an approach for random study of the Christian bible...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
There is MPEG1. A 320*200 16 fps (I believe, its something like that anyways, video quality when encoded well) stream requires 1 Mbit/s for streaming. If you want less bandwitdth, you are going to have to compromise quality.
The people who claim you can get any quality out of compression are just lying to you.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
I never really understood the nature of this xenophobism that Americans are the greatest masters of. We damn foreigners are here on Slashdot talking to you everyday, are we so weird? Are we always out to get you? Are we so much worse people?
Personally, I worry about whether the people on ICANN are good people for their imporant job. Not about where they come from. I'm willing to bet their is nobody on the committee from Sweden. Does that mean I (and my nationals) are not represented? Of course not, as long as there are people on the commitee who are willing to work hard for a functioning Names & Numbers system, then we are all represented.
And if there does happen to be someone from my country in ICANN, he/she may very well be much worse at representing my opinions then someone from America, Germany, Uganda, or Japan. Its a global society: I share my opinions with a cross-section of the world, not with the people who happen to inhabit the same plot of land as I do.
Outside of America most people are not always out to advance there own countries at the cost of others. You are not underrepresanted: you are human beings, and the entire commitee is made of you.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Maybe they should take a hint from the failure of that NetAid nonsense. Not the part about generation Y not giving less about charity, but that any high profile webcast is doomed to fail.
I mean, Real player? Who wants to watch something made by Spielberg on a 100*100 dot updated at about 5 fps. And while you and I know that this is because our Internet connections suck and might try to have patience, 99% of the viewers just get pissed off.
Until enough people have serious broadband capability and ip multicasting takes off, the Web is a lousy medium for film. Which is ok. It doesn't have to be everything. So if only Spielberg would let the hype be and go do what he is good at for a medium that deserves it instead...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Someone wrote in an earlier discussion (I won't take credit for it) that their ought to be a server that mimiced doubleclicks url interface, so that we could simply point doubleclick.net at that server in our hosts files. Maybe the server could sell adds and give the money to charity (and not tracks users, and carry only 2 kB static gifs).
I wonder if they would sue for that...
Most important: please don't start advocating laws for to solve things like this. Informing about it is good (this was a great article) but enforcing by violence, and our laws are based on violence, that which can be solved by intellect (a simple hack that keeps doubleclick and co out of your cookies file) is ALWAYS BAD.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Don't put to much trust in those Quake3 numbers. In true Tom fassion, he was dumb enough to use a geometry accelerated graphics card when testing processors. He is testing the card (and how well it happens to work with the processor) tenfold more than the actual processor.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
One would think that cryptographers, who study the mathematical means for controling information (not just secrecy, but also signatures, zero knowledge proofs etc) would be the least inclined to support the articial limits to information set up by our legal system, and yet the field is littered with patents (probably more so than any other field of mathematics).
You, on the other hand, have been very generous with your algorithms and cryptos. Is there a political, ideological, or practical reason behind this?
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
regardless of what it looks like, it's a computer. who really cares what the fuck their computer "looks" like?
Which, of course, happens to be a much better argument for NOT buying an iMac than that which you replied too. I mean, something that is ugly still has novelty value (or. at least that is what I try to convince women).
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Finally, Rob must have known with reasonable certainty that he'd get flamed royally for daring to speak about some of these things, but he went ahead with it anyway. I respect him for that, and I think there should be more of it: We should be able to be honest in public instead of ducking away from very important truths simply because we know some people with a political axe to grind won't like it. Your original comment about how Katz would be proud a forum like slashdot exists is no doubt true, but I suspect the comments of some of the readers following the article would detract somewhat from the gloss. One of the great losses our society has suffered throughout the 90's is that people have become afraid to talk about what they really think, because there are so many little groups who make a professional point of attacking opinions; My hope for the next decade is that the Internet can help us get back to reality by providing forums for people to be honest about what they think about homosexual Mozambiquian llamas without having to put up with public denigration and hate-crime lawsuits from "The Peoples' Front In Support of Reinforcement of the Sexual Self-Determination of Mozambiquian Llamas".
I am a big supporter (as I think I have proved with abundance here on/. ) of being allowed to say things that piss people off. But if you say things publically that piss people off, you have to have thick skin for the reply.
Roblimo's public statement that I as a geek should be looking for a woman who is most likely to want to do my bidding is insulting to me. And while he is in his right in insulting me, he will then have to stand for my insulting, equal public, reply that I consider such a relationship nothing more than emotions for sale.
obviously it is unfortunate if his wife (who is no-doubt a nice person) should read this and be upset. But he dragged her into this public discussion, not I.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Of all things I have been accused of, politically correct hurts most. In retrospect I guess the quoted comment was a little hyperbolic and populistic. I repent.
The point is this: the article makes it very clear that what he is primarily looking for in a partner is what it does for him. Whether she will be there for him, have time for him, whatever. I find that disturbing, since (and, like about a lot things, maybe I'm just not disillusioned enough) love should be based on a desire to do things for the other. What they do for you is secondary.
If one sees a relationship primarily as a source of affection for oneself (and I realize that a lot of people, men and women, do this) then it IS a lot closer to prostitution than love.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
I hate to me-too this post, but I couldn't agree more. This article has to be the biggest load of shit I have ever seen on Slashdot, or in any other publication I have respect for.
Roblimo may want a wife as a long term prostitute, but hopefully most of us are looking for a real soulmate. I don't want a woman to be "there for me" whenever I want her, I want to be there for her just as much. Obviously the interests don't have to be the same, but I sure as hell want a woman who I feel is my intellectual equal, and that probably means geeky.
If anything this article agrees with one of my long time cynisisms: the best way to get women is to be a complete asshole.
I think Jon Katz should be proud that Slashdot is around to publish this shit, because it would be censored in just about any real world media.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Construx was very limited compared to Legos. Sure, you could build bigger things much faster, so it had the gratitude factor, but at the cost of 90% of the freedom and challenge that Lego's offered.
If Lego's are C, then Construx is Visual Basic.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
I find it strangely telling that when IBM set out to defeat Kasparov, they did so by building the fastest computer that ever played chess, and succeeded, while Micrsoft set out to do so with a lot of hype, media attention, and flashy web pages, and lost...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
It's not enough just to let this guy in because he had a company, money, and some press contacts to help him. The next 17 year old they won't let in could be an open source developer without a company to his name but a damn bit more important to the computer industry.
Comdex should probably get over it's illusions that the only things that matter to the industry are men in suits.
That said I can't see what a seventeen year old is doing running a company. In ten years he'll regret not getting laid, drunk, and high like his peers.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
The saying is that no matter how much intelligence you have working for you, 99% of the intelligence is still working somewhere else. Luckily, that goes for the NSA too.
The good thing about factoring is that it is an old, well understood field, known to anyone who studies number theory. Unlike say symmetric cryptoanalysis, where the NSA might arguably have more competence within their walls than exists outside, it is unlikely that they do in factoring. If you look at the complexity of some of the latest factoring methods (and the proofs behind them) you realize that if the NSA could factor in polynomial time they would be ahead of the rest of the world not only in this, but in mathematics in general.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
When the Japanese started producing compact, cheap, smart cars, it shook the automotive industry. But can I get a large station wagon today if I want one? Can I get a pickup? Can I get an insanely illogically overpowered car like the Viper? Can I get an ATR, an SUV, a motorcycle, or a bicycle?
Yes, I think there is a market for Sun's new ideas. My parents would do well with something like the Ray, as would many of my non-techy friends and coworkers. But would I? Never. I love my PC, I love the freedom it gives me, I love the fact that I 500 mhz to my own disposal. I have filled my twenty gigabytes of harddisk space, flooded the 128 megs of memory, abused the hell out of my (overclocked) processor, and I shall do the same to my next, three times as powerful, PC.
Whether Microsoft will go away in the PC space is a question (after all, I and most people like me, use Linux) but the PC will NEVER die. The computer market is to big for there to be even a need for one dominant solution. Freedom is good.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
No again. Strong crypto can't even be deciphered by the NSA, so if they can't analyse it to be a weak crypto, they won't even bother.
Best would be to use DES on everything. If they don't have a backdoor (which is highly unlikely), it is estimated that cracking DES still takes the NSA several minutes. IE, possible enough to try, but still takes a lot of power.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
That which is MEANT to be inside our boundaries SHOULD stay inside our boundaries. Like the blood within us, not everything is healthy to let out.
That which is meant to stay within your boundaries WILL stay within your boundaries. Your thoughts for example.
I'm not saying that information strives for a spread out, ordered existance. There ARE attractors, there are secrets (and cryptography makes secrets completely feasable), but you cannot protect your privacy beyond your own ability to keep it private just because you proclaim it a right.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
The implementation is buggier than Windows 2000. Privacy SHOULD be a right, not a concession. Not just to kids, but every single person.
I couldn't agree less to this statement. If we want our rights, laws, and freedoms to work, they have to be in line with nature, not against it (think of the Tao fable about the butcher who never had to sharpen his knife).
And nature, in the case of information, is mathematics. Mathematics dictates that information wants to be free. That is a sound right: all information is free.
But nature makes no exceptions on this topic: not for information to be under the control of its originator like we try to enforce with patent and copyright law, and not for information to be under the control of its subject, like in privacy.
Rights are granted to us by God. And I don't mean like in the bible (I have it on pretty good ground that the bible was written by man), but as in the world around us, the code that is not read from between two covers but deciphered through the understanding of our very existance.
Trying to guarantee rights beyond that is difficult but possible: trying to guarantee rights that go straight against that is not only difficult, in vain, but also dangerous.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Your post is interesting, but I really think you could get the point across just as well without using that whole bold thing.
Many of us actually find it quite annoying, and will skip posts like this. Maybe you have been designing sites for semi-literate children to long.
As to your dilema. What a joke. If you and your employers had any ethics you would not be collecting the data in the first place. If you decide to be evil, don't go around lamenting about it.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Also - after reading this article I have no sympathy for cDc getting the shaft by several anti-virus makers - when your image includes swear words and thinly-veiled slams on serious questions about your group - it's very difficult to take you guys seriously.
No, the cDc should be applauded for being intelligent and competent without trying to be conformist or "serious" in the eyes of management, bankers and other hellspawn. Any idiot PHB can clean up his act and his language, and because of that the rest of the world are hostages to these ridiculous customs. Fuck em.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Slashdot Mirror
While its true the Knuth seems to stay true to his intention of discussing his views on god (or rather on Christianity), the title of lecture series "God and Computers" is a little misleading in this respect. I was expecting some sort of tie in between his experiences with working with controlled, deterministic computers, and his views of the universe, meaning, and god as a whole.
Not an approach for random study of the Christian bible...
-
I think the moderators just felt sorry for you and thought you needed that extra bit of karma.
Which begs the question, did you just become to the first user to pass 200?
... and now I will be moderated down for offtopic.
-
There is MPEG1. A 320*200 16 fps (I believe, its something like that anyways, video quality when encoded well) stream requires 1 Mbit/s for streaming. If you want less bandwitdth, you are going to have to compromise quality.
The people who claim you can get any quality out of compression are just lying to you.
-
I never really understood the nature of this xenophobism that Americans are the greatest masters of. We damn foreigners are here on Slashdot talking to you everyday, are we so weird? Are we always out to get you? Are we so much worse people?
Personally, I worry about whether the people on ICANN are good people for their imporant job. Not about where they come from. I'm willing to bet their is nobody on the committee from Sweden. Does that mean I (and my nationals) are not represented? Of course not, as long as there are people on the commitee who are willing to work hard for a functioning Names & Numbers system, then we are all represented.
And if there does happen to be someone from my country in ICANN, he/she may very well be much worse at representing my opinions then someone from America, Germany, Uganda, or Japan. Its a global society: I share my opinions with a cross-section of the world, not with the people who happen to inhabit the same plot of land as I do.
Outside of America most people are not always out to advance there own countries at the cost of others. You are not underrepresanted: you are human beings, and the entire commitee is made of you.
-
Maybe they should take a hint from the failure of that NetAid nonsense. Not the part about generation Y not giving less about charity, but that any high profile webcast is doomed to fail.
I mean, Real player? Who wants to watch something made by Spielberg on a 100*100 dot updated at about 5 fps. And while you and I know that this is because our Internet connections suck and might try to have patience, 99% of the viewers just get pissed off.
Until enough people have serious broadband capability and ip multicasting takes off, the Web is a lousy medium for film. Which is ok. It doesn't have to be everything. So if only Spielberg would let the hype be and go do what he is good at for a medium that deserves it instead...
-
When CD-R was new, blank cds costed like $10, which made copying music CDs a rather pointless excersice. Obviously, that is no longer the case.
And besides, it won't be long until storing a library of 4 gig movies on your HD is no big deal.
-
Someone wrote in an earlier discussion (I won't take credit for it) that their ought to be a server that mimiced doubleclicks url interface, so that we could simply point doubleclick.net at that server in our hosts files. Maybe the server could sell adds and give the money to charity (and not tracks users, and carry only 2 kB static gifs).
I wonder if they would sue for that...
Most important: please don't start advocating laws for to solve things like this. Informing about it is good (this was a great article) but enforcing by violence, and our laws are based on violence, that which can be solved by intellect (a simple hack that keeps doubleclick and co out of your cookies file) is ALWAYS BAD.
-
Of course, you meant a shell script and a Perl program. Very funny sarcasm there...
-
Don't put to much trust in those Quake3 numbers. In true Tom fassion, he was dumb enough to use a geometry accelerated graphics card when testing processors. He is testing the card (and how well it happens to work with the processor) tenfold more than the actual processor.
-
One would think that cryptographers, who study the mathematical means for controling information (not just secrecy, but also signatures, zero knowledge proofs etc) would be the least inclined to support the articial limits to information set up by our legal system, and yet the field is littered with patents (probably more so than any other field of mathematics).
You, on the other hand, have been very generous with your algorithms and cryptos. Is there a political, ideological, or practical reason behind this?
-
regardless of what it looks like, it's a computer. who really cares what the fuck their computer "looks" like?
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Which, of course, happens to be a much better argument for NOT buying an iMac than that which you replied too. I mean, something that is ugly still has novelty value (or. at least that is what I try to convince women).
-
Finally, Rob must have known with reasonable certainty that he'd get flamed royally for daring to speak about some of these things, but he went ahead with it anyway. I respect him for that, and I think there should be more of it: We should be able to be honest in public instead of ducking away from very important truths simply because we know some people with a political axe to grind won't like it. Your original comment about how Katz would be proud a forum like slashdot exists is no doubt true, but I suspect the comments of some of the readers following the article would detract somewhat from the gloss. One of the great losses our society has suffered throughout the 90's is that people have become afraid to talk about what they really think, because there are so many little groups who make a professional point of attacking opinions; My hope for the next decade is that the Internet can help us get back to reality by providing forums for people to be honest about what they think about homosexual Mozambiquian llamas without having to put up with public denigration and hate-crime lawsuits from "The Peoples' Front In Support of Reinforcement of the Sexual Self-Determination of Mozambiquian Llamas".
/. ) of being allowed to say things that piss people off. But if you say things publically that piss people off, you have to have thick skin for the reply.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
I am a big supporter (as I think I have proved with abundance here on
Roblimo's public statement that I as a geek should be looking for a woman who is most likely to want to do my bidding is insulting to me. And while he is in his right in insulting me, he will then have to stand for my insulting, equal public, reply that I consider such a relationship nothing more than emotions for sale.
obviously it is unfortunate if his wife (who is no-doubt a nice person) should read this and be upset. But he dragged her into this public discussion, not I.
-
Of all things I have been accused of, politically correct hurts most. In retrospect I guess the quoted comment was a little hyperbolic and populistic. I repent.
The point is this: the article makes it very clear that what he is primarily looking for in a partner is what it does for him. Whether she will be there for him, have time for him, whatever. I find that disturbing, since (and, like about a lot things, maybe I'm just not disillusioned enough) love should be based on a desire to do things for the other. What they do for you is secondary.
If one sees a relationship primarily as a source of affection for oneself (and I realize that a lot of people, men and women, do this) then it IS a lot closer to prostitution than love.
-
I hate to me-too this post, but I couldn't agree more. This article has to be the biggest load of shit I have ever seen on Slashdot, or in any other publication I have respect for.
Roblimo may want a wife as a long term prostitute, but hopefully most of us are looking for a real soulmate. I don't want a woman to be "there for me" whenever I want her, I want to be there for her just as much. Obviously the interests don't have to be the same, but I sure as hell want a woman who I feel is my intellectual equal, and that probably means geeky.
If anything this article agrees with one of my long time cynisisms: the best way to get women is to be a complete asshole.
I think Jon Katz should be proud that Slashdot is around to publish this shit, because it would be censored in just about any real world media.
-
Construx was very limited compared to Legos. Sure, you could build bigger things much faster, so it had the gratitude factor, but at the cost of 90% of the freedom and challenge that Lego's offered.
If Lego's are C, then Construx is Visual Basic.
-
I find it strangely telling that when IBM set out to defeat Kasparov, they did so by building the fastest computer that ever played chess, and succeeded, while Micrsoft set out to do so with a lot of hype, media attention, and flashy web pages, and lost...
-
It's not enough just to let this guy in because he had a company, money, and some press contacts to help him. The next 17 year old they won't let in could be an open source developer without a company to his name but a damn bit more important to the computer industry.
Comdex should probably get over it's illusions that the only things that matter to the industry are men in suits.
That said I can't see what a seventeen year old is doing running a company. In ten years he'll regret not getting laid, drunk, and high like his peers.
-
The saying is that no matter how much intelligence you have working for you, 99% of the intelligence is still working somewhere else. Luckily, that goes for the NSA too.
The good thing about factoring is that it is an old, well understood field, known to anyone who studies number theory. Unlike say symmetric cryptoanalysis, where the NSA might arguably have more competence within their walls than exists outside, it is unlikely that they do in factoring. If you look at the complexity of some of the latest factoring methods (and the proofs behind them) you realize that if the NSA could factor in polynomial time they would be ahead of the rest of the world not only in this, but in mathematics in general.
-
People like you just don't seem to get it.
When the Japanese started producing compact, cheap, smart cars, it shook the automotive industry. But can I get a large station wagon today if I want one? Can I get a pickup? Can I get an insanely illogically overpowered car like the Viper? Can I get an ATR, an SUV, a motorcycle, or a bicycle?
Yes, I think there is a market for Sun's new ideas. My parents would do well with something like the Ray, as would many of my non-techy friends and coworkers. But would I? Never. I love my PC, I love the freedom it gives me, I love the fact that I 500 mhz to my own disposal. I have filled my twenty gigabytes of harddisk space, flooded the 128 megs of memory, abused the hell out of my (overclocked) processor, and I shall do the same to my next, three times as powerful, PC.
Whether Microsoft will go away in the PC space is a question (after all, I and most people like me, use Linux) but the PC will NEVER die. The computer market is to big for there to be even a need for one dominant solution. Freedom is good.
-
No again. Strong crypto can't even be deciphered by the NSA, so if they can't analyse it to be a weak crypto, they won't even bother.
Best would be to use DES on everything. If they don't have a backdoor (which is highly unlikely), it is estimated that cracking DES still takes the NSA several minutes. IE, possible enough to try, but still takes a lot of power.
-
That which is MEANT to be inside our boundaries SHOULD stay inside our boundaries. Like the blood within us, not everything is healthy to let out.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
That which is meant to stay within your boundaries WILL stay within your boundaries. Your thoughts for example.
I'm not saying that information strives for a spread out, ordered existance. There ARE attractors, there are secrets (and cryptography makes secrets completely feasable), but you cannot protect your privacy beyond your own ability to keep it private just because you proclaim it a right.
-
I beat you to that one by a full half hour dude...
-
The implementation is buggier than Windows 2000. Privacy SHOULD be a right, not a concession. Not just to kids, but every single person.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
I couldn't agree less to this statement. If we want our rights, laws, and freedoms to work, they have to be in line with nature, not against it (think of the Tao fable about the butcher who never had to sharpen his knife).
And nature, in the case of information, is mathematics. Mathematics dictates that information wants to be free. That is a sound right: all information is free.
But nature makes no exceptions on this topic: not for information to be under the control of its originator like we try to enforce with patent and copyright law, and not for information to be under the control of its subject, like in privacy.
Rights are granted to us by God. And I don't mean like in the bible (I have it on pretty good ground that the bible was written by man), but as in the world around us, the code that is not read from between two covers but deciphered through the understanding of our very existance.
Trying to guarantee rights beyond that is difficult but possible: trying to guarantee rights that go straight against that is not only difficult, in vain, but also dangerous.
-
Your post is interesting, but I really think you could get the point across just as well without using that whole bold thing.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Many of us actually find it quite annoying, and will skip posts like this. Maybe you have been designing sites for semi-literate children to long.
As to your dilema. What a joke. If you and your employers had any ethics you would not be collecting the data in the first place. If you decide to be evil, don't go around lamenting about it.
-
Also - after reading this article I have no sympathy for cDc getting the shaft by several anti-virus makers - when your image includes swear words and thinly-veiled slams on serious questions about your group - it's very difficult to take you guys seriously.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
No, the cDc should be applauded for being intelligent and competent without trying to be conformist or "serious" in the eyes of management, bankers and other hellspawn. Any idiot PHB can clean up his act and his language, and because of that the rest of the world are hostages to these ridiculous customs. Fuck em.
-