One problem with the .name TLD is...
on
.NAME at a Crossroads
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
..that it contains 4 letters instead of 3 or less for the other common TLDs. I have had my.name email address refused by several on-line purchasing systems, because some dumb programmers decided that an email address that had more than 3 characters after the last dot was invalid. So I have had to get an alternate address to be able to access these sites.
The major issue with copyright is that instead of defining a principle (an author has the exclusive artistical and revenue rights from the produced works) it just edicts one possible *technical* (hence the word "copy" in "copyright") way to enforce the intents.
And that technical solution is flawed in several ways: - It is legal to prevent an auhor form getting revenue as long as no copies are made (by lending or reselling a book) - It is illegal to make copies even if it does not hurt the author revenues (out of print works).
The notions of copies and public performance have greatly evolved during the last decade and the copyright laws are innapropriate.
These flaws were less apparent when copy and distribution were restricted to publishing companies, but now that Internet gives these possibilities to individuals, these flaws are becoming more and more evident.
Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited
on
Behind Deep Blue
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· Score: 1
It really depends on what is meant by AI. The trend in the past has been to qualify as AI any task that what not possible for computers, but then, as soon as computers were able to perform them, to not consider them of an "intelligent" nature anymore. It is a kind of perpetually moving goal.
For instance, being able to perform complicated calculations, like extracting a square root, used to be considered as a sign a great intelligence. Now that computers can do this much faster and more exactly, it is considered as the dumb execution of a predefined algorithm.
We see the same attitude here : chess used to be considered as an ultimate sign of human intelligence, because it seemed to require a sense of strategy that can not be formalized and transformed into an algorithm. However, we have seen that enough brute force and cleverly tuned algorithms can compensate that lack of "vision".
So we now have to find another task that will (again) be the ultimate proof that computer can/not be considered as intelligent.
Well, if the French distributor can sell at a lower price than the German one even by operating outside its own borders, it means that something is screwed with the German one. Free competition means that either Nintendo should fix what is wrong with its German distributor or let the French one have the German market. (French and German are used here as examples...)
A. Mac loses:
- "It did not use the latest/forthcoming OS version that would have won hands down !"
- "Benchmarker does not know how to configure the Mac OS !"
- "Benchmark was paid by Microsoft/Intel/Linus !"
- "The same benchmark was performed by the completely impartial site www.MacXyz.com and the Mac won hands down !"
- "Performance is not important, ease of use is !"
- "Ease of use is not important on a server, performance is !"
B. Mac wins:
- "Told you so, every benchmark shows that the Mac is the best !"
Switzerland has similar laws that make public "incitation to racism or negation of crimes against Humanity" an offense. These laws have been challenged in a popular votation and the majority of the voters decided to validate them. I voted against them, but being a democratic person, have to accept what the majority decided. Of course this votation took place at the time of highest wave of political correctness and no opinion leader dared publicly express a negative position, for fear of being labelled as a nazi supporter.
Most of the works concerned be the recent copyright extension have no commercial value. Their copyright owners would lose money if they wanted to publish and distribute them. But as there is no cost incurred by keeping the copyright and not releasing these works to the public domain, they prefer keeping it in the hypothetical case it would regain value in the future (like for instance Hollywood producing a movie based on an obscure pulp hero of the 30's).
So basically, the copyright extension gives no incentive to the owner either to publish or to release these works in the public domain, having the net effect of depriving the public access to the vast majority of the works concerned by the extension. IMHO, this has the exact contrary effect of what the Constitution expected. It locks the vast majority of work from the public to protect the revenue of the fews that are commercially viable.
A fair law would allow such an extension, but it would also force the copyright owners to periodically publish and distribute their works. Failure to do so would automatically put the works in the public domain.
This would benefit the public by making these works available, either through the usual commercial channels or from the public domain, while the copyright owner would still be able to get revenue from the works that are still commercially viable.
I was not there to witness /.'s birth
on
Slashdot Turns 5
·
· Score: 1
> Yes, if you are going per Mhz this is true, but > once again Intel is a CISC chip with plenty of > legacy components and the PowerPC is a RISC > chip, with plenty fewer transistors.
This is exactly what the Apple marketing wants you to believe.
The reality is that the differences between RISC and CISC have mostly vanished in modern microprocessors. Intel chips have a "RISC" core that efficiently interprets the "CISC" instruction set, while the PowerPC have and instruction set that is much more "complexer" than a pure RISC implementation.
The RISC concept was initially designed to allow HIGHER clock rates than what was possible with the too complex CISC architectures. Intel's "RISC" core has overcome that limitation and we have the reverse situation where the "CISC" chips have higher clock rates than the "RISC" ones.
/. publishes a story with a non US country in its title......Expect half of the replies to be irrelevant to the issue but full of clichés on that non US country.
Google being a common resource, people will get more and more used to do background checks on the people they have to deal with. But I believe they will also notice that what is found must be put in a proper context (what type of site it was found on, what was the age or the situation of the person at that time).
I feel sometimes ashamed at my newbieness when I look back at my 7 years old Usenet posting, but on the other, that was the best I could give at that time, and one should not judge them with regard to the actual context.
I know I will give a dfinitive sentencing to a job applicant on a bad joke or a tasteless remark made years ago on the Internet. I will rather noticed that she/he already had a Net presence at that time and might have some clues. I believe that mentalities will change and such google checks will be used just as another information source to be used within its proper context, rather than as an authoritative way to judge somebody.
Being european, I am always shocked when I watch US TV to have every show interruped each 30 min by commercial breaks. The US audience seems to have been get used to it, so it is only a matter of time until they accept even more invasive ads.
From an US point of view, the Metric System would have the following advantages:
- compatibility with the rest of the World - easier mental calculations
and disadvantages:
- financial costs of conversion - political costs of conversion.
The USA would have to bear all the conversion costs, lowering its products competitivity in regard to foreign products. The advantages would be minimal, because if the compatibility would increase the competitivity of US products on foreign markets, it would also increase the competitivity of foreign products on US markets. With the current balance, it would more of a disadvantage. The advantage of easier mental calculations would only take effect on the long term and would be dwarfed by the difficulties of changing the preceptions of units in the short term. Politicians thinking more in the shorter than longer term, it would not politically sane to promote it. Hence, I do not see a sufficient drive that would push for the conversion in the short term.
If you look at the list of URLs submitted to Google by the church of $cientology, you'll notice that the first one is the root "www.xenu.net", which somehow condemns the whole site.
AFAIK the playback of movies for PAL TV does not use interpolation, but simply displays 25 frames from the 24fps movie per second, actually speeding the whole movie by a factor of 1/24 or approximatively 4%, sound included.
So it looks like european TVs are already benefiting from that extra commercial time slot....
Connect :
"This author really doesn't know what he's talking about"
and :
"so an operation on a PC might take it 3 instructions, while on a Mac it only takes one"
and you get the thread title
"Ignorance is bliss".
Krouic
Slashdot Mirror
..that it contains 4 letters instead of 3 or less for the other common TLDs. .name email address refused by several on-line purchasing systems, because some dumb programmers decided that an email address that had more than 3 characters after the last dot was invalid. So I have had to get an alternate address to be able to access these sites.
I have had my
The major issue with copyright is that instead of defining a principle (an author has the exclusive artistical and revenue rights from the produced works) it just edicts one possible *technical* (hence the word "copy" in "copyright") way to enforce the intents.
:
And that technical solution is flawed in several ways
- It is legal to prevent an auhor form getting revenue as long as no copies are made (by lending or reselling a book)
- It is illegal to make copies even if it does not hurt the author revenues (out of print works).
The notions of copies and public performance have greatly evolved during the last decade and the copyright laws are innapropriate.
These flaws were less apparent when copy and distribution were restricted to publishing companies, but now that Internet gives these possibilities to individuals, these flaws are becoming more and more evident.
It really depends on what is meant by AI. The trend in the past has been to qualify as AI any task that what not possible for computers, but then, as soon as computers were able to perform them, to not consider them of an "intelligent" nature anymore. It is a kind of perpetually moving goal.
For instance, being able to perform complicated calculations, like extracting a square root, used to be considered as a sign a great intelligence. Now that computers can do this much faster and more exactly, it is considered as the dumb execution of a predefined algorithm.
We see the same attitude here : chess used to be considered as an ultimate sign of human intelligence, because it seemed to require a sense of strategy that can not be formalized and transformed into an algorithm. However, we have seen that enough brute force and cleverly tuned algorithms can compensate that lack of "vision".
So we now have to find another task that will (again) be the ultimate proof that computer can/not be considered as intelligent.
Use the email form from the posted URL (for instance http://www.bmg-copycontrol.info/uk-ireland/index.h tml) to let BMG know what you think about it.
Well, if the French distributor can sell at a lower price than the German one even by operating outside its own borders, it means that something is screwed with the German one. Free competition means that either Nintendo should fix what is wrong with its German distributor or let the French one have the German market.
(French and German are used here as examples...)
A. Mac loses :
:
- "It did not use the latest/forthcoming OS version that would have won hands down !"
- "Benchmarker does not know how to configure the Mac OS !"
- "Benchmark was paid by Microsoft/Intel/Linus !"
- "The same benchmark was performed by the completely impartial site www.MacXyz.com and the Mac won hands down !"
- "Performance is not important, ease of use is !"
- "Ease of use is not important on a server, performance is !"
B. Mac wins
- "Told you so, every benchmark shows that the Mac is the best !"
Switzerland has similar laws that make public "incitation to racism or negation of crimes against Humanity" an offense. These laws have been challenged in a popular votation and the majority of the voters decided to validate them.
I voted against them, but being a democratic person, have to accept what the majority decided. Of course this votation took place at the time of highest wave of political correctness and no opinion leader dared publicly express a negative position, for fear of being labelled as a nazi supporter.
Add Victor Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris" to that long list of public domain works used by Disney.
Most of the works concerned be the recent copyright extension have no commercial value. Their copyright owners would lose money if they wanted to publish and distribute them. But as there is no cost incurred by keeping the copyright and not releasing these works to the public domain, they prefer keeping it in the hypothetical case it would regain value in the future (like for instance Hollywood producing a movie based on an obscure pulp hero of the 30's).
So basically, the copyright extension gives no incentive to the owner either to publish or to release these works in the public domain, having the net effect of depriving the public access to the vast majority of the works concerned by the extension. IMHO, this has the exact contrary effect of what the Constitution expected. It locks the vast majority of work from the public to protect the revenue of the fews that are commercially viable.
A fair law would allow such an extension, but it would also force the copyright owners to periodically publish and distribute their works. Failure to do so would automatically put the works in the public domain.
This would benefit the public by making these works available, either through the usual commercial channels or from the public domain, while the copyright owner would still be able to get revenue from the works that are still commercially viable.
Because my son happens to be born that same day.
Happy 5th birthday to Slashdot and Tanguy.
... do they also have a memory architecture to match these insane clock rates ?
> Yes, if you are going per Mhz this is true, but
> once again Intel is a CISC chip with plenty of
> legacy components and the PowerPC is a RISC
> chip, with plenty fewer transistors.
This is exactly what the Apple marketing wants you to believe.
The reality is that the differences between RISC and CISC have mostly vanished in modern microprocessors. Intel chips have a "RISC" core that efficiently interprets the "CISC" instruction set, while the PowerPC have and instruction set that is much more "complexer" than a pure RISC implementation.
The RISC concept was initially designed to allow HIGHER clock rates than what was possible with the too complex CISC architectures. Intel's "RISC" core has overcome that limitation and we have the reverse situation where the "CISC" chips have higher clock rates than the "RISC" ones.
(Krouick)
I guess you did not notice this article was written three years ago.
/. publishes a story with a non US country in its title... ...Expect half of the replies to be irrelevant to the issue but full of clichés on that non US country.
Google being a common resource, people will get more and more used to do background checks on the people they have to deal with. But I believe they will also notice that what is found must be put in a proper context (what type of site it was found on, what was the age or the situation of the person at that time).
I feel sometimes ashamed at my newbieness when I look back at my 7 years old Usenet posting, but on the other, that was the best I could give at that time, and one should not judge them with regard to the actual context.
I know I will give a dfinitive sentencing to a job applicant on a bad joke or a tasteless remark made years ago on the Internet. I will rather noticed that she/he already had a Net presence at that time and might have some clues. I believe that mentalities will change and such google checks will be used just as another information source to be used within its proper context, rather than as an authoritative way to judge somebody.
Being european, I am always shocked when I watch US TV to have every show interruped each 30 min by commercial breaks. The US audience seems to have been get used to it, so it is only a matter of time until they accept even more invasive ads.
From an US point of view, the Metric System would have the following advantages :
:
- compatibility with the rest of the World
- easier mental calculations
and disadvantages
- financial costs of conversion
- political costs of conversion.
The USA would have to bear all the conversion costs, lowering its products competitivity in regard to foreign products.
The advantages would be minimal, because if the compatibility would increase the competitivity of US products on foreign markets, it would also increase the competitivity of foreign products on US markets. With the current balance, it would more of a disadvantage.
The advantage of easier mental calculations would only take effect on the long term and would be dwarfed by the difficulties of changing the preceptions of units in the short term. Politicians thinking more in the shorter than longer term, it would not politically sane to promote it.
Hence, I do not see a sufficient drive that would push for the conversion in the short term.
Where are "Battlefield Earth" and "Plan 9 from outer space" ?
The tune labelled "celine dion - a new day has come.mp3" is shared now by more than 18'000 users on Audiogalaxy.
So much for the efficiency of the copy-protection scheme.
If you look at the list of URLs submitted to Google by the church of $cientology, you'll notice that the first one is the root "www.xenu.net", which somehow condemns the whole site.
Krouic
... dig out those SSS (Scientology Secret Scriptures) out of my archive and web them again.
Krouic
AFAIK the playback of movies for PAL TV does not use interpolation, but simply displays 25 frames from the 24fps movie per second, actually speeding the whole movie by a factor of 1/24 or approximatively 4%, sound included.
So it looks like european TVs are already benefiting from that extra commercial time slot....
Krouic
Connect : "This author really doesn't know what he's talking about" and : "so an operation on a PC might take it 3 instructions, while on a Mac it only takes one" and you get the thread title "Ignorance is bliss". Krouic