> No matter how much he can run his rule 110 he will not come up with animals, humans > or planets. But the whole implication is that that's how "it" happened.
That may not technically be true. Since it is a full blown Turing machine, it should be able to simulate reality. If it cannot, that itself is a very interesting development, because it indicates there is either something infinite about reality that cannot be simulated with symbols, or there is another more powerful, but still finite computational model which could. Either one would be a fascinating development.
I suspect if you can use this new color/rule automata to prove when your proof terminates, you'll actually have discovered and even more powerful finite computational model.
I was wondering why I saw a charge on my credit card for Vanguard a few days ago, when I had cancelled it before the free month had even expired.
Maybe it will be as hard as Horizons to cancel.
On the positive side, my "WoW Burning Cruscade Please Come Back" free 10 days just expired yesterday. I had gotten my new Blood Elf up to level 18, on top of half a dozen other new characters, and that's with a family and life. A flunking college student could have probably gotten up to level 60 in that time. Well, a flunking, out of money college student, anyway. A normal flunking college student has his WoW account active, of course.
No, a change to the air pressure of a plane inside, much less outside, would massively distort it, causing it to bubble outward like a small balloon. Or if it were stiff enough to prevent this, you'd lose the equalization ability beyond near the ground level.
I don't recall the pressure inside a commercial jet (much less the cargo hold or in Denver), but if you half the air pressure, you'll double the required volume for what's inside the HDD to make it equal. The volume inside the HDD is now duplicated inside the bubble. Hence for a number of reasons (bubbles popping, sticking out too far and hitting other components in the computer, stress of repeated flexings, or worse, just the general aging problems plastics and rubbers have making them brittle, it just won't work.
> With around 400,000 licenses a day new Vista users will take 8 > weeks to beat Mac users [and] 4 days to exceed Mac sales
8 weeks = 56 days. 56 / 4 = 18. So there are 4 Windows Vista sales' worth of Mac sales (per year)? But it'll take 8 weeks to sell as many licenses as total Macs in use? Hence either Mac sales are dropping off rapidly the past year, or the average Mac user is using an 18 year old computer.
It's like porn vs. nudes. You know it when you see it.
As a computer science guy, I know there is no technical difference between an algorithm and some more complicated piece of virtual pseudocode. Yet I know it when I see it.
Tens of millions of people have retirement funds invested in software and other high tech corporations.
Do you seriously think Congress'll let them lose their life blood of software patents? Worst case scenario, Congress passes a law the next day that authorizes software patents directly, rather than by the apparent roundabout method currently in use.
If someone develops a truly novel business model, why shouldn't they be able to patent it and profit from it, just as if they had developed a new machine? The intellectual effort was similar, as may have been the financial investments. The benefit is similar -- business earning more money per amount of effort (which, when you boil it down, is what a new hardware invention does too.)
I think everyone's big beef is the "obvious" nature of some patents.
I think fixing the system can be 90% accomplished by merely instituting a rule that, if all you're doing in software is simulating something that already exists in the "real world", then you can't patent it. (Which isn't to say that particularly novel or clever implementations could not be patented. But the actual concept being simulated would not be patentable in and of itself. An eye exists, and therefore I could not patent a virtual eye, though I might patent a clever implementation that nobody else thought of.)
(4) Methods for treatment of the human or animal body by surgery or therapy and diagnostic methods practised on the human or animal body shall not be regarded as inventions which are susceptible of industrial application within the meaning of paragraph 1. This provision shall not apply to products, in particular substances or compositions, for use in any of these methods.
While I understand what they're getting at -- they don't want people holding new developments away from people who need it -- I wonder if they aren't actually hurting people more than they are helping.
Say, for example, that being able to patent an AIDS cure caused it to be developed 10 years earlier than it otherwise would, because someone could patent it and make a big profit off it. Has the law helped anybody? Oh, it's helped politicians get elected by feeding off the rage of the electorate. But it's an electorate that dies at a higher rate because of the law than without it.
Given the general correlation between economic freedom and speed of technological advancement, as demonstrated last century in hundreds of economic "experiments", this is not a trivial nor easily dismissable question.
I think your analogy is good, but going in the wrong direction.
Rather, people should recognize that software is instructions running on real hardware, with real electrons bouncing around real circuits. As such, it's just another real, physical part of a real machine.
And to say there isn't intensive labor to develop new software "machines" deserving of protection for exactly the same reason as "hardware" machines is equivocation. That the product can be easily copied, as opposed to hardware (which would need some kind of teleporter/copier to do "easily") doesn't alter this problem.
I think many people see patents getting in the way of easy copies, and thus learn to disparage them, then go looking for arguments to support this, rather than simply recognizing the need for protection of valid entrepeneurial efforts. (Which isn't to say any particular patent might be a good or bad one.)
And as for this "1-click" patent, the patent was [i]not[/i] obvious. I was a programmer before, during, and still am well after this was developed. Programmers just didn't do anything significant without asking for confirmation from the user. Period. End of Story. The Amazon guy repeatedly tells how he had to keep telling the programmers to [i]not[/i] ask a confirmation -- just add it to the bundle to be auto-charged and shipped later in the day. Indeed, go to Amazon and search for "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum", which gives a pretty good description about how programmers didn't (and in many cases still don't) "get it" with respect to a decent UI and behavior.
User generating content: Did I mention the armor causes so much damage in the attacker, that, if they die, it actually resurrects them and kills them again, multiple times if necessary?
User generating content: Don't waste your time with that one. Here, try my new gun!
Other User: Sweet! What does it do?
User generating content: It shoots 256 bullets a second for 65535 damage each!
Other User: Awesome! Have any armor?
User generating content: Sure! Here's this c00lio armor, same look as the armor the big boss wears, only it is AC 256, and blocks 256% of incoming attacks!
Other User: WOWWWWWWEEEEE! This game roxxxxxx0rzzz!
Sweet. The thought of minimaxing the tech development and customization of the blinking light ghost trap (as opposed to the positron collider* backpacks) such that, by the endgame, I can open one trap and suck down the nimble mynx in a 1-shot, makes me drool more than discovering a home video of Jessica Simpson and Shakira drinking a little too much, if you know what I mean.
* I know nobody has actually collided two positrons yet, with physicists thinking electrons may be a fundamental dimensionless point particle more akin to a quark than a composite particle like protons and neutrons. That's just our little nerd humor** regarding the device from the movie, heh heh.
** Like knowing the incorrect answer to "Yeoman Rand's cabin number" is Y390.
Don't like it? Stop buying the stuff. It's because you, the common yokel, buy these flashy things rather than the dull ones that people build to that sensibility.
You are also aware that fans, car blowers, and the like, are needlessly and deliberatly noisy because you, the common yokel, think that quiet fans and blowers aren't working very well, and gravitate to the noisy obnoxious ones, right?
And we won't even get into the bastardization of vacuum cleaners the past 8 years or so, other than to say, "Lookee! It has a tornado inside I can see! It must clean better!"
Of course, the parent to your post realizes I am trying to modify the attitude on this subject. The "proportional font" argument is specious -- the same rationale that applies to mono fonts (it makes breaks between sentences easier to spot, and thus easier on the eye and reading) also applies to proportional fonts.
That reason did not evaporate with the proportional font. Want to prove it to yourself? Look in newspapers -- they have proportional fonts, yet use a bigger whitespace between sentences. Web browser renderers do not do this! Hence they are faulty in my eyes, and I aim to get it changed.
It's a web browser issue -- jump on the bandwagon, lads! We can do it!
Ouch! Using some AMD monitoring software, we noted idle temperatures of between 65 - 70-degrees Celsius from the core die and that is just sitting in Windows. At full load halfway through a 3DMark06 benchmark run, we noted a maximum temperature of 84-degrees Celsius from the core die - in other words, very hot!
I have a now ancient (3+ year old) Radeon 9800 XT, which is still more than decent for graphics. However, I have to have the case open with a Honeywell tornado fan blowing on the card to keep it from locking up in newer games like Vanguard and LotRO. Even venerable City of Heroes and WoW won't last 20 minutes before lockup -- the video card's temp climbs up into the mid 90s Celsius, and that's all she wrote.
The on board fans are all working, and I have blown all the dust out of the (opened) case with a leaf blower, so there's no clogged stuff in there. It's just that this "high end Alienware rig" just can't cut it anymore.
So it sits with the side panel off and the little fan blowing a tornado through there, and the temp stays in the high 70s to low-mid 80s.
Sadly, it took me 6 months to figure this out -- I had stopped playing 3D games for awhile, raging at the product, given I had returned it once before (for a legitimate hardware failure it was having -- pink triangles and green rectangles overlay.)
Exactly. Laugh heartily at South Park's Jesus and Bush literally pooping on each other, but never, never mention around here that Linux wouldn't be so secure if they had tens of thousands of hackers working on it, the way Windows is under continuous assault.
Apparently MS hasn't heard of T.E.N. -- Total Entertainment Network.
For a brief year or so, before network games were fully Internet-enabled, they provided a service to allow LAN-only games to piggyback over the Internet protocols, and use their servers for games and meetings for games. Things like Duke Nukem 3D were a standard there. So was Quake (although it was Internet-enabled, T.E.N. was a big enough meeting place that the service adopted it.)
Anyhoo, they charged $10/month, but went out of business after a year and a half or two because new games were coming out, all Internet-enabled from the start, with their own server find utilities. Nobody needed it anymore. Good day, sir!
The PC world is not the same captive audience as console games, so the only draw for the PC crowd would be to hook up with the masses of console players.
I do wonder, though, if any FPS games between PC and console players will once and for all establish the dominance of the "mouser".
Slashdot Mirror
> No matter how much he can run his rule 110 he will not come up with animals, humans
> or planets. But the whole implication is that that's how "it" happened.
That may not technically be true. Since it is a full blown Turing machine, it should be able to simulate reality. If it cannot, that itself is a very interesting development, because it indicates there is either something infinite about reality that cannot be simulated with symbols, or there is another more powerful, but still finite computational model which could. Either one would be a fascinating development.
You don't?
So I'm spilling my seed for free?
Sudden, Benny Hill-like realization dawns...I've been raped...
I suspect if you can use this new color/rule automata to prove when your proof terminates, you'll actually have discovered and even more powerful finite computational model.
It also occurs to me that confirmation dialogs in computer software were also a more recent addition, in the mid '80's.
Prior to that, believe it or not, many editors and other software would just quit when you told them to (such as via alt-q.)
Saying, "Hey! You made changes and didn't save, do ya wanna really quit?" was a novel, and very welcome invention itself.
Sony/EQ people bought 'em?
I was wondering why I saw a charge on my credit card for Vanguard a few days ago, when I had cancelled it before the free month had even expired.
Maybe it will be as hard as Horizons to cancel.
On the positive side, my "WoW Burning Cruscade Please Come Back" free 10 days just expired yesterday. I had gotten my new Blood Elf up to level 18, on top of half a dozen other new characters, and that's with a family and life. A flunking college student could have probably gotten up to level 60 in that time. Well, a flunking, out of money college student, anyway. A normal flunking college student has his WoW account active, of course.
No, a change to the air pressure of a plane inside, much less outside, would massively distort it, causing it to bubble outward like a small balloon. Or if it were stiff enough to prevent this, you'd lose the equalization ability beyond near the ground level.
I don't recall the pressure inside a commercial jet (much less the cargo hold or in Denver), but if you half the air pressure, you'll double the required volume for what's inside the HDD to make it equal. The volume inside the HDD is now duplicated inside the bubble. Hence for a number of reasons (bubbles popping, sticking out too far and hitting other components in the computer, stress of repeated flexings, or worse, just the general aging problems plastics and rubbers have making them brittle, it just won't work.
Crap. I'm old enough to remember parking HDD heads myself.
Diana Rigg is still a hot babe, though. Right?
> With around 400,000 licenses a day new Vista users will take 8
> weeks to beat Mac users [and] 4 days to exceed Mac sales
8 weeks = 56 days. 56 / 4 = 18. So there are 4 Windows Vista sales' worth of Mac sales (per year)? But it'll take 8 weeks to sell as many licenses as total Macs in use? Hence either Mac sales are dropping off rapidly the past year, or the average Mac user is using an 18 year old computer.
I guess all you guys who say, yeah, "when Hell freezes over," are shittin' bricks now, eh?
Actually the owner of Amazon points out regularly that he had to keep telling the programmers, no, do not put up a confirmation dialog.
So this part was truly novel. Programmers just didn't do that back then. Of course, like many patents, it's "obvious", after the fact.
It's like porn vs. nudes. You know it when you see it.
As a computer science guy, I know there is no technical difference between an algorithm and some more complicated piece of virtual pseudocode. Yet I know it when I see it.
Tens of millions of people have retirement funds invested in software and other high tech corporations.
Do you seriously think Congress'll let them lose their life blood of software patents? Worst case scenario, Congress passes a law the next day that authorizes software patents directly, rather than by the apparent roundabout method currently in use.
If someone develops a truly novel business model, why shouldn't they be able to patent it and profit from it, just as if they had developed a new machine? The intellectual effort was similar, as may have been the financial investments. The benefit is similar -- business earning more money per amount of effort (which, when you boil it down, is what a new hardware invention does too.)
I think everyone's big beef is the "obvious" nature of some patents.
I think fixing the system can be 90% accomplished by merely instituting a rule that, if all you're doing in software is simulating something that already exists in the "real world", then you can't patent it. (Which isn't to say that particularly novel or clever implementations could not be patented. But the actual concept being simulated would not be patentable in and of itself. An eye exists, and therefore I could not patent a virtual eye, though I might patent a clever implementation that nobody else thought of.)
(4) Methods for treatment of the human or animal body by surgery or therapy and diagnostic methods practised on the human or animal body shall not be regarded as inventions which are susceptible of industrial application within the meaning of paragraph 1. This provision shall not apply to products, in particular substances or compositions, for use in any of these methods.
While I understand what they're getting at -- they don't want people holding new developments away from people who need it -- I wonder if they aren't actually hurting people more than they are helping.
Say, for example, that being able to patent an AIDS cure caused it to be developed 10 years earlier than it otherwise would, because someone could patent it and make a big profit off it. Has the law helped anybody? Oh, it's helped politicians get elected by feeding off the rage of the electorate. But it's an electorate that dies at a higher rate because of the law than without it.
Given the general correlation between economic freedom and speed of technological advancement, as demonstrated last century in hundreds of economic "experiments", this is not a trivial nor easily dismissable question.
I think your analogy is good, but going in the wrong direction.
Rather, people should recognize that software is instructions running on real hardware, with real electrons bouncing around real circuits. As such, it's just another real, physical part of a real machine.
And to say there isn't intensive labor to develop new software "machines" deserving of protection for exactly the same reason as "hardware" machines is equivocation. That the product can be easily copied, as opposed to hardware (which would need some kind of teleporter/copier to do "easily") doesn't alter this problem.
I think many people see patents getting in the way of easy copies, and thus learn to disparage them, then go looking for arguments to support this, rather than simply recognizing the need for protection of valid entrepeneurial efforts. (Which isn't to say any particular patent might be a good or bad one.)
And as for this "1-click" patent, the patent was [i]not[/i] obvious. I was a programmer before, during, and still am well after this was developed. Programmers just didn't do anything significant without asking for confirmation from the user. Period. End of Story. The Amazon guy repeatedly tells how he had to keep telling the programmers to [i]not[/i] ask a confirmation -- just add it to the bundle to be auto-charged and shipped later in the day. Indeed, go to Amazon and search for "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum", which gives a pretty good description about how programmers didn't (and in many cases still don't) "get it" with respect to a decent UI and behavior.
User generating content: Did I mention the armor causes so much damage in the attacker, that, if they die, it actually resurrects them and kills them again, multiple times if necessary?
User generating content: Don't waste your time with that one. Here, try my new gun!
Other User: Sweet! What does it do?
User generating content: It shoots 256 bullets a second for 65535 damage each!
Other User: Awesome! Have any armor?
User generating content: Sure! Here's this c00lio armor, same look as the armor the big boss wears, only it is AC 256, and blocks 256% of incoming attacks!
Other User: WOWWWWWWEEEEE! This game roxxxxxx0rzzz!
(2 minutes later)
Other User: This is boring.
So it's basically Ghostbusters Tycoon, eh?
Sweet. The thought of minimaxing the tech development and customization of the blinking light ghost trap (as opposed to the positron collider* backpacks) such that, by the endgame, I can open one trap and suck down the nimble mynx in a 1-shot, makes me drool more than discovering a home video of Jessica Simpson and Shakira drinking a little too much, if you know what I mean.
* I know nobody has actually collided two positrons yet, with physicists thinking electrons may be a fundamental dimensionless point particle more akin to a quark than a composite particle like protons and neutrons. That's just our little nerd humor** regarding the device from the movie, heh heh.
** Like knowing the incorrect answer to "Yeoman Rand's cabin number" is Y390.
Don't like it? Stop buying the stuff. It's because you, the common yokel, buy these flashy things rather than the dull ones that people build to that sensibility.
You are also aware that fans, car blowers, and the like, are needlessly and deliberatly noisy because you, the common yokel, think that quiet fans and blowers aren't working very well, and gravitate to the noisy obnoxious ones, right?
And we won't even get into the bastardization of vacuum cleaners the past 8 years or so, other than to say, "Lookee! It has a tornado inside I can see! It must clean better!"
Of course, the parent to your post realizes I am trying to modify the attitude on this subject. The "proportional font" argument is specious -- the same rationale that applies to mono fonts (it makes breaks between sentences easier to spot, and thus easier on the eye and reading) also applies to proportional fonts.
That reason did not evaporate with the proportional font. Want to prove it to yourself? Look in newspapers -- they have proportional fonts, yet use a bigger whitespace between sentences. Web browser renderers do not do this! Hence they are faulty in my eyes, and I aim to get it changed.
It's a web browser issue -- jump on the bandwagon, lads! We can do it!
I have a now ancient (3+ year old) Radeon 9800 XT, which is still more than decent for graphics. However, I have to have the case open with a Honeywell tornado fan blowing on the card to keep it from locking up in newer games like Vanguard and LotRO. Even venerable City of Heroes and WoW won't last 20 minutes before lockup -- the video card's temp climbs up into the mid 90s Celsius, and that's all she wrote.
The on board fans are all working, and I have blown all the dust out of the (opened) case with a leaf blower, so there's no clogged stuff in there. It's just that this "high end Alienware rig" just can't cut it anymore.
So it sits with the side panel off and the little fan blowing a tornado through there, and the temp stays in the high 70s to low-mid 80s.
Sadly, it took me 6 months to figure this out -- I had stopped playing 3D games for awhile, raging at the product, given I had returned it once before (for a legitimate hardware failure it was having -- pink triangles and green rectangles overlay.)
If it can't be debunked, i.e. is not falsifiable, you are justified in believing it does not exist by Occam's Razor.
Why should I believe in a God who has the curious properties of the infinite ability to hide from me, and the apparent desire to do so?
Exactly. Laugh heartily at South Park's Jesus and Bush literally pooping on each other, but never, never mention around here that Linux wouldn't be so secure if they had tens of thousands of hackers working on it, the way Windows is under continuous assault.
Because nobody on the Internet knows about Xenu or other crap. It's never been portrayed and mocked in popular cartoons, for that matter.
Apparently MS hasn't heard of T.E.N. -- Total Entertainment Network.
For a brief year or so, before network games were fully Internet-enabled, they provided a service to allow LAN-only games to piggyback over the Internet protocols, and use their servers for games and meetings for games. Things like Duke Nukem 3D were a standard there. So was Quake (although it was Internet-enabled, T.E.N. was a big enough meeting place that the service adopted it.)
Anyhoo, they charged $10/month, but went out of business after a year and a half or two because new games were coming out, all Internet-enabled from the start, with their own server find utilities. Nobody needed it anymore. Good day, sir!
The PC world is not the same captive audience as console games, so the only draw for the PC crowd would be to hook up with the masses of console players.
I do wonder, though, if any FPS games between PC and console players will once and for all establish the dominance of the "mouser".