Best estimate is that 90% of spam comes from less than 100 individuals. If it wasn't for the fact that they can always find another ISP, taking them out wouldn't be too hard.
How about the third option: In a pulsar / white dwarf binary, the white dwarf's orbit intersects the pulsar's beam. The pulsar has heated the white dwarf. This has had two effects: (1) the hotter white dwarf appears spectroscopically younger; (2) some of the evaporated material (mostly carbon) has recondensed and accreted into a planet-mass body.
This is anathema to email. Email costs almost nothing on a per-email basis, which is why spammers can do what they do. But it also gives email most of its functionality. If a tax were implemented, even a small one, then most mailing lists would have to shut down.
As it stands, if I want to share something with a few hundred people who share a common interest, I can at very little cost. If I had to pay the email tax a few hundred times for every message, being subscribed to the list would quickly become unaffordable.
I fully expect the next generation of email programs to have integrated spam filtration. The latest build of Mozilla already does. Once most people are using these programs, the economics of spam changes substantially.
No, the reason the bill doesn't run afoul of Berne has nothing to do with the tax/registration technicality. It doens't run afoul of Berne because it only applies to works produced in the United States. Berne only requires you to grant the works of foreign authors life+50, no registration requried. It places no restrictions on what copyright term you offer your own authors.
In theory, every copyright protected book and journal has to be lodged with a designated library in each country. How on earth is it possible that Software does not? The principle of copyright was limited protection in return for disclosure (explicitly including the official library copies).
Negative on that. It was once true that a published work had to be registered with the copyright office, and that the registration process involved submitting a number of copies of the work, at least one of which would find their way into the Library of Congress.
However, the Berne Convention, which all but a handful of the world's nations implelement, banned copyright registration for foreign authors so that the author did not have to go through the separate registration processes of hundreds of nations to secure international copyright. Rather, if one had a copyright in one's own signatory nation, one had copyright for at least life+50 years in all the signatories.
Of course, the logical next step is that if foreign author's don't have to register, why should domestics? And this step has been taken. Now, in most Berne nations, copyright is inherent in the work, meaning that it exists automaticaly from the moment of the work's creation, and no action is required to copyright a work.
But even in the early days, registration was only necessary for published works. While published works required registration and had a limited-term copyright, unpublished works automatically had a perpetual copyright (mainly as a protection against unauthorized publication). In fact, the Sonny Bono act can be said to have done one good thing in actually limiting the copyright term on unpublished works.
A possible means of determining whether reality is a simulation.
If we exist in bottom-level reality, we might assume that atoms and stuff obey some laws of physics. But it may be guessed that any simulator, no matter how advanced, may occasionally experience external interference that would produce a "glitch" in its operation.
In bottom-level reality, the impossible should not occur. Granted, to some extent, we don't fully know what is possible and what is not, but a small-but-not-negligible rate of impossible occurences would be strong evidence that this is not the bottom level of reality; and that these occurrences result from either accidental or deliberate tampering with the simulation machinery.
Yes; there is a defense against differential power analysis. You incorporate a capacitor into the card's interface into the power supply, thereby leveling the power drawn.
Let's suppose you've found the sweet spot where increasing price further actually decreases profit because the number of customers willing to pay that price decreases faster than the price increases.
Now, some of your customers decide to obtain your product via other channels. Which way does the sweet spot shift?
One answer is that the customers who obtain the product via other means are the ones who were least willing to pay for it, and so you can get away with charging more because the remaining paying customers are, on average, willing to pay more.
Another answer is that if you lower your price, some of those customers who obtain your product via other means may be willing to buy legitimately at the lower price, and so the number of customers you win back may justify lowering the price.
The actual answer depends on which of these two effects are more important in any given situation. But if the correct answer is to raise prices, it has nothing to do with making up for lost revenues; it just means that you can get away with raising prices because the fraction of the market that pays is the same fraction that is willing to pay more.
Or, think about it this way. The marginal cost is unaffected by black-market product channels. (As opposed to shoplifting, which does increase marginal cost, because you have to produce more than 1 unit to get 1 unit to the customer.) So the price depends on marginal revenue, which is affected by alternate product channels in complex ways.
The black market might indeed make prices rise. But if it does, it's only because the price-conscious segment of the market has withdrawn from the marketplace.
And had the crown and Parliament respected the common-law rights of Englishmen in their dealings with the colonies, history might have been much different. As it was, beginning in 1763, the British government began passing colonial legislation in stark violation of the 1689 Bill of Rights and several colonial charters.
It is telling that the revolution began in Massachusetts, where Gov. Hutchison had treated his royal appointment as a more or less a license for dictatorial rule, revolving around themes such as seizure of property without due process and imprisonment without trial, both of which are quite unlawful under the common law.
So saying that it was unnecessary to kill or die for these things because Englishment already had these rights is bunk. Just because the law says you have a right doesn't mean any particular instance of government will respect its laws.
A society overly concerned with enforcing laws - especially laws which serve business but not human interests - is violating the fundamental right of humans to live a good life as they see fit. Policing, in itself, is not a virtue, and is a value only to dictators
I think this states the case too strongly. Enforcement of the law is in and of itself a virtue, because the lack of law enforcement leads to contempt for the law, which is problematic because much of the law is good.
I think the problem is the combination of passing laws that at least a significant minority of the population fully intends to break, together with the lack of willingness to deal with the consequences of actually enforcing the law, which an even larger segment of the population would deem as too harsh. The result is what we have now -- an unenforced law, which is good for no one.
Re:Does anybody take Andreessen seriously?
on
Forget Moore's Law?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I lived in the apartment building he lived in college, albeit after he left. When I was leaving the building, I asked the landlord what their guidelines on how clean "clean" was for purposes of getting a damage deposit back. She told me her two largest damage deposit deduction stories.
In the largest, a bunch of guys, the day before reporting to duty for boot camp, held a very wild party. It involved using a sofa as a battering ram. There was a stove-sized hole in one wall. There was a refrigerator-sized one in the other.
Andreessen was the second largest. No major damage, but he just left EVERYTHING. Clothes, furniture, papers, food, everything. They had to clean out a man's entire life. She guessed he left town with a backpack, a change of clothes, and his portable.
When he started Netscape, he saw the niche, left town, and dumped everything on it NOW. Maybe that's luck, but maybe it's being insightful enough to know what risks are worth leaving everything for. I'd give someone who showed that kind of insight a fair shake, if they had something else to say.
Every time I see an article about these conductive ink on paper circuitries, I get to wondering how feasible it would be to get a pack of these inks for an inkjet printer and print your own simple integrated circuits. How large a piece of paper would you need to print an 8086 clone (and would it burst into flame from the heat released)? If hardware becomes trusted against its user, could we print a useful (if slow) processor using this technology?
While this is disappointing news (but let's be realistic, Eldred was always a long shot), one of the footnotes of the court's opinion provides another angle to go for if no copyrights have expired by 2021.
In reference to an argument that the CTEA's terms are so long that they are effectively a perpetuity, the footnote refers to the common standard in property law that a 99-year term is the longest possible term that is not (effectively) in perpetuity, and then stating that the CTEA's terms are (generally) within this bound.
But, if the 1922 copyrights are still active in 2021, then the case might reasonably be taken to the court that Congress has created a perpetual copyright by creating one that has lasted longer than 99 years.
This seems about as implausible as the "Good News" virus. Essentially the claim is that for several major media players, they have found a way to run code via sending maliciously formatted media to the media player. How is this any different from the "virus warnings" that floated around a while back that claimed your computer could be infected by opening a malicious text file.
The idea of an mp3 hacking the computer through the player is only slightly more credible than that of a txt hacking the computer through the text editor.
Alchol taxes?
In the US, the alchol excise tax only applies to alcohol that is produced for beverage purposes. Alcohol produced for fuel purposes is not only exempt from the excise tax, but is actually subsidized.
Aditionally, someone correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the moon supposed to leave our orbit in the next 60 thousand years? It's orbit is degenerating at a certain rate, meaning it will eventually leave us altogether. What impact will this have on life here? The moon is responsible for the tides correct?
No. The moon IS moving away from us, but the energy to push it away comes from a slowing down of the earth's rotation via tides. As it gets further away, the tidal force it exerts shrinks, and shrinks faster than it retreats from the earth, so that even though the moon is moving away, the rate at which it is moving away is constantly decreasing. It will never escape Earth orbit.
... because what constitutes a "stable" orbit is a matter of some debate.
You only need to play around with an orbital mechanics simulator like the one here a little bit to convince yourself that the long-term stability of an orbital system with more than 2 elements is a rather chaotic matter.
So I'm curious how long they deemed an orbit had to stay within what boundaries to deem it "stable." For example, for our own system, it appears that most of the planets are likely to remain close to their present orbits until the Sun goes red giant, but Pluto's orbit is difficult to predict past about 3 billion years or so, according to some simulations.
This would make sense in cases where there is continuity between the party that incurred the debts and the party obligated to pay them in any sense but name. In many cases, there is not even that.
What you are saying is very much equivalent to saying that if a parent dies in debt, and even after the estate is liquidated there is not enough money to cover the obligations, the children should still be forced to pay off the debts.
There is enough inequity in the world that stems from one generation being forced to pay for previous generations' fsck-ups, and a lot of it is pretty much inevitable. But we need not explicitly introduce more.
That's a curious number. Because it's about the amount of memory needed to perform the matrix operation involved in using the Number Field Sieve to factor a 1024-bit number. It would still take a (long) while to do, but given enough time, this machine could do it.
Kurzweil figures we'll have strong AI by 2029 and be able to copy a human mind about a decade after that.
It seems to me that the ability to copy a human mind is almost prerequisite to strong AI. Sure, the "great AI winter" is at least partially due to the crash government funding the field enjoyed in the late 80's / early 90's drying up as suddenly as it emerged, but AI has always been a field prone to too-early predictions. It seems that with each new metaphor we invent for describing the human brain, we also convince ourselves that our minds really are as simple as our metaphors suggest. But Turing thought that human-level mimicry would be possible by 1990 (while at the same time vastly underestimating the quality of hardware that would be available in 1990).
There's a real possibility that we just aren't smart enough to figure out how we work, and so the only route to strong AI is to make monkey-see, monkey-do copies. And while procreation is a time-honored method of doing that, the structure of the brain suggests that serialized output was not high on God's list of priorities, and the biological format rather resists studies. So, I often think that we might have to be able to emulate the brain in silico or some other more easily-studied medium before we have a chance of understanding what makes that brain tick.
It's obvious that the heckling story is a joke. Look at the photographs of Kramnick surrounded by speakers. Where did the speakers come from? You will not find them in any other stories covering any other of the games in the match.
I'm amazed how many people are thinking this is real.
While the base idea is interesting (add instructions that support using the multimedia registers as GP registers), I suspect that actually implementing the functionality of the GP registers in the multimedia ones could result in a prohibitively expensive CPU.
Anyone who's ever tried to use the MMX or XMMX registers for non-multimedia applications knows what I'm talking about. The instruction sets for them are nicely tweaked to let you do "sloppy" parallel operations on large blocks of data, and not really suited for general computing. You can't move data into them the way you would like to. You can't perform the operations you would like to. You can't extract data from them the way you would like you. They were meant to be good at one thing, and they are.
I once tried to use the multimedia registers to speed up my implementation of a cryptographic hash function whose evaluation required more intermediate data than could nicely fit in GP registers, and had enough parallelism that I thought it might benefit from the multimedia instructions. No such luck. The effort involved in packing and unpacking the multimedia registers undid any gains in actually performing the computation faster -- and the computation itself wasn't that much faster. I was using an Athlon at the time, and AMD has so optimized the function of the GP registers and ALU that most common GP operations execute in a single clock if they don't have to access memory, while all the multimedia instructions (including the multiple move instructions to load the registers) require at least 3 clocks apiece.
Now this leads me to suspect that the multimedia registers have limited functionality and slow response for a single reason: economics. The lack of instructions useful for non-multimedia applications could be explained via history, but what chip manufacturer wouldn't want to boast of the superior speed of their multimedia instructions? And yet they remain slower than the GP part of the chip.
So I conclude that merely making a faster MMX X/MMX processor is prohibitively expensive in today's market. And this proposal would definitely require that, even if actually adding the additional wiring to support the GP instructions for these registers was feasible. Because what would be the point of using these registers for GP instructions if they executed them slower than the same instructions actually executed on GP registers?
If the ships used are registered in some nation's maritime registry, then that nation's laws still apply onboard, so why not just do it ashore in that nation? If the ships used AREN'T registered, then they have no legal protection against the coast guards or navies of _any_ nation that cares to harass them.
It made a lot more sense back in the 1950's and 60's when Norweigian oil platforms in the North Sea installed some truly overpowered AM rigs and broadcasted music the BBC wouldn't play into the UK. (Paid for by the record companies who wanted the advertising.) Then, they were doing something that was legal in Norway, but not in the UK, and benefitted from being close to the UK, so a Norweigian maritime installation made perfect sense.
Here, the pirates are doing something that doesn't benefit from being done at sea, so why bother?
The quip is that the perfect chessplayer opens like a book, plays like a genius, and closes like a machine.
The question that I'd like answered (and the Fritz team probably won't tell because telling would compromise their machine's strategies) is how deep is Fritz's opening book, and to what extent is it weighted to play into enormously complicated positions where the human is more likely to screw up and the machine's inherent stupidity is less of a handicap (more of the lines are plausible, so the machine's difficulty in distinguishing between plausible and implausible lines is less important than its ability to quickly look through a broad game tree.
I don't expect much scientific detail from the BBC, but this was a new low. They say something rather non-intuitive, like scientists expect liquid water on Pluto, and then go on for the rest of the page to babble about what this means for life without ever mentioning the faintest thing about why these particular scientists expect to find liquid water on Pluto (when the surface is at least partially N2 ice).
Slashdot Mirror
Best estimate is that 90% of spam comes from less than 100 individuals. If it wasn't for the fact that they can always find another ISP, taking them out wouldn't be too hard.
How about the third option: In a pulsar / white dwarf binary, the white dwarf's orbit intersects the pulsar's beam. The pulsar has heated the white dwarf. This has had two effects: (1) the hotter white dwarf appears spectroscopically younger; (2) some of the evaporated material (mostly carbon) has recondensed and accreted into a planet-mass body.
This is anathema to email. Email costs almost nothing on a per-email basis, which is why spammers can do what they do. But it also gives email most of its functionality. If a tax were implemented, even a small one, then most mailing lists would have to shut down.
As it stands, if I want to share something with a few hundred people who share a common interest, I can at very little cost. If I had to pay the email tax a few hundred times for every message, being subscribed to the list would quickly become unaffordable.
I fully expect the next generation of email programs to have integrated spam filtration. The latest build of Mozilla already does. Once most people are using these programs, the economics of spam changes substantially.
No, the reason the bill doesn't run afoul of Berne has nothing to do with the tax/registration technicality. It doens't run afoul of Berne because it only applies to works produced in the United States. Berne only requires you to grant the works of foreign authors life+50, no registration requried. It places no restrictions on what copyright term you offer your own authors.
Negative on that. It was once true that a published work had to be registered with the copyright office, and that the registration process involved submitting a number of copies of the work, at least one of which would find their way into the Library of Congress.
However, the Berne Convention, which all but a handful of the world's nations implelement, banned copyright registration for foreign authors so that the author did not have to go through the separate registration processes of hundreds of nations to secure international copyright. Rather, if one had a copyright in one's own signatory nation, one had copyright for at least life+50 years in all the signatories.
Of course, the logical next step is that if foreign author's don't have to register, why should domestics? And this step has been taken. Now, in most Berne nations, copyright is inherent in the work, meaning that it exists automaticaly from the moment of the work's creation, and no action is required to copyright a work.
But even in the early days, registration was only necessary for published works. While published works required registration and had a limited-term copyright, unpublished works automatically had a perpetual copyright (mainly as a protection against unauthorized publication). In fact, the Sonny Bono act can be said to have done one good thing in actually limiting the copyright term on unpublished works.
A possible means of determining whether reality is a simulation.
If we exist in bottom-level reality, we might assume that atoms and stuff obey some laws of physics. But it may be guessed that any simulator, no matter how advanced, may occasionally experience external interference that would produce a "glitch" in its operation.
In bottom-level reality, the impossible should not occur. Granted, to some extent, we don't fully know what is possible and what is not, but a small-but-not-negligible rate of impossible occurences would be strong evidence that this is not the bottom level of reality; and that these occurrences result from either accidental or deliberate tampering with the simulation machinery.
Yes; there is a defense against differential power analysis. You incorporate a capacitor into the card's interface into the power supply, thereby leveling the power drawn.
Let's suppose you've found the sweet spot where increasing price further actually decreases profit because the number of customers willing to pay that price decreases faster than the price increases. Now, some of your customers decide to obtain your product via other channels. Which way does the sweet spot shift? One answer is that the customers who obtain the product via other means are the ones who were least willing to pay for it, and so you can get away with charging more because the remaining paying customers are, on average, willing to pay more. Another answer is that if you lower your price, some of those customers who obtain your product via other means may be willing to buy legitimately at the lower price, and so the number of customers you win back may justify lowering the price. The actual answer depends on which of these two effects are more important in any given situation. But if the correct answer is to raise prices, it has nothing to do with making up for lost revenues; it just means that you can get away with raising prices because the fraction of the market that pays is the same fraction that is willing to pay more. Or, think about it this way. The marginal cost is unaffected by black-market product channels. (As opposed to shoplifting, which does increase marginal cost, because you have to produce more than 1 unit to get 1 unit to the customer.) So the price depends on marginal revenue, which is affected by alternate product channels in complex ways. The black market might indeed make prices rise. But if it does, it's only because the price-conscious segment of the market has withdrawn from the marketplace.
It is telling that the revolution began in Massachusetts, where Gov. Hutchison had treated his royal appointment as a more or less a license for dictatorial rule, revolving around themes such as seizure of property without due process and imprisonment without trial, both of which are quite unlawful under the common law.
So saying that it was unnecessary to kill or die for these things because Englishment already had these rights is bunk. Just because the law says you have a right doesn't mean any particular instance of government will respect its laws.
I think this states the case too strongly. Enforcement of the law is in and of itself a virtue, because the lack of law enforcement leads to contempt for the law, which is problematic because much of the law is good.
I think the problem is the combination of passing laws that at least a significant minority of the population fully intends to break, together with the lack of willingness to deal with the consequences of actually enforcing the law, which an even larger segment of the population would deem as too harsh. The result is what we have now -- an unenforced law, which is good for no one.
In the largest, a bunch of guys, the day before reporting to duty for boot camp, held a very wild party. It involved using a sofa as a battering ram. There was a stove-sized hole in one wall. There was a refrigerator-sized one in the other.
Andreessen was the second largest. No major damage, but he just left EVERYTHING. Clothes, furniture, papers, food, everything. They had to clean out a man's entire life. She guessed he left town with a backpack, a change of clothes, and his portable.
When he started Netscape, he saw the niche, left town, and dumped everything on it NOW. Maybe that's luck, but maybe it's being insightful enough to know what risks are worth leaving everything for. I'd give someone who showed that kind of insight a fair shake, if they had something else to say.
Every time I see an article about these conductive ink on paper circuitries, I get to wondering how feasible it would be to get a pack of these inks for an inkjet printer and print your own simple integrated circuits. How large a piece of paper would you need to print an 8086 clone (and would it burst into flame from the heat released)? If hardware becomes trusted against its user, could we print a useful (if slow) processor using this technology?
In reference to an argument that the CTEA's terms are so long that they are effectively a perpetuity, the footnote refers to the common standard in property law that a 99-year term is the longest possible term that is not (effectively) in perpetuity, and then stating that the CTEA's terms are (generally) within this bound.
But, if the 1922 copyrights are still active in 2021, then the case might reasonably be taken to the court that Congress has created a perpetual copyright by creating one that has lasted longer than 99 years.
The idea of an mp3 hacking the computer through the player is only slightly more credible than that of a txt hacking the computer through the text editor.
Alchol taxes? In the US, the alchol excise tax only applies to alcohol that is produced for beverage purposes. Alcohol produced for fuel purposes is not only exempt from the excise tax, but is actually subsidized.
No. The moon IS moving away from us, but the energy to push it away comes from a slowing down of the earth's rotation via tides. As it gets further away, the tidal force it exerts shrinks, and shrinks faster than it retreats from the earth, so that even though the moon is moving away, the rate at which it is moving away is constantly decreasing. It will never escape Earth orbit.
You only need to play around with an orbital mechanics simulator like the one here a little bit to convince yourself that the long-term stability of an orbital system with more than 2 elements is a rather chaotic matter.
So I'm curious how long they deemed an orbit had to stay within what boundaries to deem it "stable." For example, for our own system, it appears that most of the planets are likely to remain close to their present orbits until the Sun goes red giant, but Pluto's orbit is difficult to predict past about 3 billion years or so, according to some simulations.
What you are saying is very much equivalent to saying that if a parent dies in debt, and even after the estate is liquidated there is not enough money to cover the obligations, the children should still be forced to pay off the debts.
There is enough inequity in the world that stems from one generation being forced to pay for previous generations' fsck-ups, and a lot of it is pretty much inevitable. But we need not explicitly introduce more.
That's a curious number. Because it's about the amount of memory needed to perform the matrix operation involved in using the Number Field Sieve to factor a 1024-bit number. It would still take a (long) while to do, but given enough time, this machine could do it.
It seems to me that the ability to copy a human mind is almost prerequisite to strong AI. Sure, the "great AI winter" is at least partially due to the crash government funding the field enjoyed in the late 80's / early 90's drying up as suddenly as it emerged, but AI has always been a field prone to too-early predictions. It seems that with each new metaphor we invent for describing the human brain, we also convince ourselves that our minds really are as simple as our metaphors suggest. But Turing thought that human-level mimicry would be possible by 1990 (while at the same time vastly underestimating the quality of hardware that would be available in 1990).
There's a real possibility that we just aren't smart enough to figure out how we work, and so the only route to strong AI is to make monkey-see, monkey-do copies. And while procreation is a time-honored method of doing that, the structure of the brain suggests that serialized output was not high on God's list of priorities, and the biological format rather resists studies. So, I often think that we might have to be able to emulate the brain in silico or some other more easily-studied medium before we have a chance of understanding what makes that brain tick.
I'm amazed how many people are thinking this is real.
Anyone who's ever tried to use the MMX or XMMX registers for non-multimedia applications knows what I'm talking about. The instruction sets for them are nicely tweaked to let you do "sloppy" parallel operations on large blocks of data, and not really suited for general computing. You can't move data into them the way you would like to. You can't perform the operations you would like to. You can't extract data from them the way you would like you. They were meant to be good at one thing, and they are.
I once tried to use the multimedia registers to speed up my implementation of a cryptographic hash function whose evaluation required more intermediate data than could nicely fit in GP registers, and had enough parallelism that I thought it might benefit from the multimedia instructions. No such luck. The effort involved in packing and unpacking the multimedia registers undid any gains in actually performing the computation faster -- and the computation itself wasn't that much faster. I was using an Athlon at the time, and AMD has so optimized the function of the GP registers and ALU that most common GP operations execute in a single clock if they don't have to access memory, while all the multimedia instructions (including the multiple move instructions to load the registers) require at least 3 clocks apiece.
Now this leads me to suspect that the multimedia registers have limited functionality and slow response for a single reason: economics. The lack of instructions useful for non-multimedia applications could be explained via history, but what chip manufacturer wouldn't want to boast of the superior speed of their multimedia instructions? And yet they remain slower than the GP part of the chip.
So I conclude that merely making a faster MMX X/MMX processor is prohibitively expensive in today's market. And this proposal would definitely require that, even if actually adding the additional wiring to support the GP instructions for these registers was feasible. Because what would be the point of using these registers for GP instructions if they executed them slower than the same instructions actually executed on GP registers?
It made a lot more sense back in the 1950's and 60's when Norweigian oil platforms in the North Sea installed some truly overpowered AM rigs and broadcasted music the BBC wouldn't play into the UK. (Paid for by the record companies who wanted the advertising.) Then, they were doing something that was legal in Norway, but not in the UK, and benefitted from being close to the UK, so a Norweigian maritime installation made perfect sense.
Here, the pirates are doing something that doesn't benefit from being done at sea, so why bother?
The question that I'd like answered (and the Fritz team probably won't tell because telling would compromise their machine's strategies) is how deep is Fritz's opening book, and to what extent is it weighted to play into enormously complicated positions where the human is more likely to screw up and the machine's inherent stupidity is less of a handicap (more of the lines are plausible, so the machine's difficulty in distinguishing between plausible and implausible lines is less important than its ability to quickly look through a broad game tree.
Can anyone find a more technical article, please?