English language has different word order than most other languages.
This doesn't really address the topic, but... English word order (SVO) is the most common system in human languages, tied with SOV. All of the other possibilities are practically non-existant.
What if the Justice Department had saddled Microsoft with similar constraints? Standardize the document and spreadsheet formats, so that any word processor or spreadsheet application can read, edit and save documents.
So, how much time in prison do I get for using a non-government-approved file format?
I'm not really in the mood to write a proper rant about this, but I'll just say briefly: By turning the dispute about MS's business practices into a holy-war, the anti-MS zealots have destroyed their followers' senses of perspective. If our problem is that we have too little choice in the products that we use, how would removing our freedom to choose completely help? Answer: It wouldn't. But it would make life a lot easier for the rich and powerful, by freeing them from the need to please their "customers".
I would love to see somebody point that out to Milberg et al. Preferably the trademark holder himself.
I don't know anything about the merits of this case, but their redefinition of the word "linux," and the ignorance that that mistake demonstrates, really bugged me.
That bugged me too. It was the only part that I couldn't easily figure out, although I did realize that the inner numbers were an exponent.
It's particularly frustrating when you consider that the whole point of "universal language" communications like these is to take advantage of features of our universe that any alien species would necessarily share with us. That's what the primes are for... any species with enough technology to recieve the message would recognize the significance of those numbers. But what does 2^3021377 - 1 mean to an alien species? Absolutely nothing.
For example, the Love Bug was a widespread virus sent via e-mail. But it was dumb -- it had no way to tell if the machine it sent itself to would be a good target for infection. It just crossed its viral fingers and sent itself along. Some computers fell for it; others didn't. Whether a computer got infected or not depended on the configuration of that machine.
A virus that used the Web bug technique could essentially conduct a poll of potential victims to determine whether or not they would be good targets.
Wow, which API call tells viruses if the user is an idiot? As far as I know, that was the Love Bug's only significant system requirement.
(No matter how good your security is, you can't stop users from hurting themselves by running untrusted code. Scare tactics stories "virus threats" only make the problem worse.)
I won't address the larger issue of freedom in the U.S. (It's absurd to suggest that any other major country is more free than us as a whole.) But I want to clear up one common misconception:
Whenever there's a story about some abuse of the DMCA, or some other oppressive U.S. law, all the foreign readers make snide comments about how their country is freer than ours. Guess what? Your country also has a DMCA. (Worse yet, they use MS Word 97.) They may call it something different, but for practical purposes it's the same all over the western world.
Almost all major infringements on our freedoms are accomplished through treaties these days. I'm drawing a blank on other examples, but there are many. I suspect that they make bigger news in the U.S. because of our greater freedom as a whole, which makes them stand out more. In most other countries, restrictions on speech and personal freedom are not that unusual to begin with.
Though a 9cm x 4cm x 1cm monolith might be slightly less impressive.
Yes, but imagine a 9m x 4m x 1m one.
The fact remains, though, that the monolith is nine feet tall. If we assume that (within the silly little universe of my comment) the monolith builders actually did use metric, that would mean that the architect actually said, "Okay, let's make this side exactly 2.7431999818948802 meters long..." Seems pretty unlikely. It's safe to conclude that whoever built this monolith was not thinking in metric.
(In Clarke and Kubrick's films, as well as Clarke's books, the monoliths' measurements were in the ratio of 1 : 4 : 9, the squares of the first three positive integers, presumably as a sign that the creator was aware of the universality of mathematics as a way of communicating between evolved species.)
Then again, wouldn't an evolved species use metric?
See the source code on this page Someone seem to have commented it out but my source cut and paste go it.
Perhaps they commented it out because it's old news. I don't care what Stephen Gould and Arthur C. Clarke say, but in my book, 31-12-1999 was more than a year ago.
Feel free to include these in any FAQ, documentation, or whatever, with or without attribution or editing.
Erm, okay, maybe "copyright violation" was too strong a term. And I see that Maldivian posted the link himself before my post... FWIW, it wasn't on the un-refreshed version of the page that I was reading when I posted.
Sorry, it was a knee-jerk reaction. Still bugs me, though.
In case anyone is keeping score, Maldivian's latest copyright violation is from here: http://www.best.com/~cphoenix/winvunix.html It's amazing how he managed to copy the entire page, except those three words at the top: "by Chris Phoenix".
(I don't mean to seem like I'm stalking Maldivian, but someone has to give credit where credit is due.)
You can't assume he's monogamous, either, so I guess you'd have to say "significant other or others." And he could be hermaphroditic, so you'd have to include "significant other or others or yourself". Then again, we can't leave out the people who prefer inanimate objects.
Personally, I don't see why a homosexual would be offended when confronted by the fact that men generally prefer women as sexual partners. But that's just me.
Perhaps a more reasonable remedy would be to require representatives to reimburse taxpayers for any government money (wages, travel expenses, etc.) that is spent while writing and/or lobbying for a bill that is later deemed unconstitutional.
Informative material is informative. If he'd lay off the plagiarism, I wouldn't begrudge him his karma.
Oh, I agree. I'd have nothing to complain about if he cited the authors of "his" material. But I was just particularly peeved about this, because he has literally posted nothing but ripped off material and apologies for ripping off material (which also get modded up, of course.) I can only guess at what he's planning to do when he gets his +1 bonus and a healthy padding of karma to burn.
I don't mean to distract you all from your ranting, but has anyone noticed that this Google toolbar is really, really cool? It's not just another obnoxious way to make sure you get funneled towards their site (i.e. both IE's and Netscape's "search features".)
Among other things, it can highlight instances of your search terms on a page, instantly transfer you to Google's cached copy of your current page, and search for pages on the same site as the one you're viewing. It also adds an "up one level" button (the web equivalent of "../").
The only feature that has privacy issues is the "PageRank" display, which tells you how "important" the current page is. It's not very useful, and it's easily disabled.
Google also gets points for using all of IE's advanced features properly. Those of you who frequently claim that ActiveX is only useful for trojans should try installing this toolbar, as it's an excellent counter-example.
In the book and the original movie. He understood that the Baron was probably lying, but he held out for the remote chance that the Baron was telling the truth. Hence the play on "be reunited", etc.
Right, but in the miniseries, didn't it seem like he never even considers the possibility that the Baron might be lying? Whereas in the movie, he is shocked when the Baron briefly implies that his wife is alive. ("She lives?!")
It seems to me that it's a lot easier to sympathize with Dr. Yueh in the movie, since he is clearly a broken man. In the miniseries, he's just selfish.
Everybody here is tearing the miniseries apart pretty well, and I agree with almost all of the criticisms. Just to provide a little variety, though, I thought I'd mention the things that I liked about the miniseries, in comparison to Lynch's movie. (Incidentally, they really invited comparisons, didn't they? With so much material to work with, I thought that the miniseries would be very different from the movie, but at times it seems like a shot-by-shot remake... which just highlights its inferiority. The "worm vs. harvester" scene is an excellent example.)
Anyway, things I liked:
The interstellar spacecraft (what do they call it, a "highliner"?) was incredible. It was among the best CGI I've ever seen, and it had the right look, too. (Immense, alien, chaotic, etc.) They also get a consolation prize for the Guild Navigator, who was excellent, but not quite as good as Lynch's.
I like this Baron Harkonnen. The Baron in the movie was too over-the-top; I have a pretty strong stomach, but I still tend to fast-forward through most of his scenes on Giedi Prime. In Sci Fi's version, the gratuitous neck-breaking was sufficient to establish the Baron's evilness, and they wisely left it at that. I'm sure people will disagree with me on that point, though.
The sets were nice. They weren't as interesting as Lynch's sets, but at least I could tell them apart (unlike the characters). They just looked a whole lot better, even if they didn't fit the film as well.
And... that's it. It was pretty bad. I wonder what Lynch could have done with Dune if he had had access to the sort of technology that today's directors take for granted?
Paul and Jessica are somehow magically transported to the desert and found by Fremen (with Duncan and Thufir!) during the Harkonnen attack (instead of overcoming their captors with the Voice and crashing in the desert).
This bugged me too. They also seem to have omitted the fact that Dr. Uweh engineered their escape.
Another thing that bothered me was that they changed Dr. Uweh's motivation from interestly tragic (avenging the death of his wife) to cliched and obvious (ransoming his wife).
Characterization: shallow. I don't think I could tell you from pictures which characters were which among Pieter, Thufir, Duncan, or Doctor Uweh.
You can tell them apart by their hats, though. That's what they're there for.
Seriously though, was Dr. Uweh introduced at all before he poisoned the Duke? If so, he blended into the background so well that I missed it completely. (Despite the fact that they revealed his betrayal 45 minutes in advance.)
Music: there was music? Nearly unnoticed, unlike the movie, which had a theme that has stuck with me since the first time I watched it.
This would probably be enough to ruin it for me even if the rest was perfect. Music is important. As a matter of fact, I think sound in general is what makes Lynch's Dune what it is; they could have left out the picture entirely, and it would still be an impressive movie.
I'm hoping the new miniseries will provide that missing peice... (yep, I haven't seen it yet. It's sitting on my TiVo waiting to be viewed!)
It's funny you should say that. I don't remember the book too well, but my impression of Paul in the miniseries vs. the movie are identical to your impressions of the movie vs. the book. That probably means that you'll like the miniseries even less.
Sci Fi's Paul Atreides acts like he's already read the whole script, and he's just annoyed that he has to wait four hours before he can become a messiah, instead of getting it over with now.
I hadn't heard that Church and Turing never endorsed the claim in question -- that's an interesting point. However, I never claimed that they did. I was only referring to a thesis that happens carry their name.
Quoting from your link:
The further proposition, very different from Turing's own thesis, that a Turing machine can compute whatever can be computed by any machine working on finite data in accordance with a finite program of instructions is nowadays sometimes referred to as the Church-Turing thesis or as Church's thesis.
I also never claimed that the C-T Thesis has been proven; in fact, I strongly suspect that it is unprovable. Like you said, it's a "rule of thumb," but I am not aware of any violations of it.
There was a story on Slashdot recently about a Turing Machine implementation in Minesweeper. The paper is here (in yucky pdf format).
His proof is very similar to the Life proof -- which makes sense, because when you think about it, Minesweeper is a lot like Life. (That's 'Life' with a capital 'L'... I'm not trying be profound here.)
We used a TM simulator in my "Philosophy and Computers" class. It had an unnecessarily clever name, and an unnecessarily clever interface. It also ran only on MacOS. Anybody know the one I'm talking about? It's right on the tip of my tongue.
Anyway, since I found the above program a little too constraining, I just put one together in MS Access in about fifteen minutes. It's really pretty trivial, especially if you understand the significance of TMs to begin with.
If you're lazy, a simple Google search turns up many other prospects.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not really in the mood to write a proper rant about this, but I'll just say briefly: By turning the dispute about MS's business practices into a holy-war, the anti-MS zealots have destroyed their followers' senses of perspective. If our problem is that we have too little choice in the products that we use, how would removing our freedom to choose completely help? Answer: It wouldn't. But it would make life a lot easier for the rich and powerful, by freeing them from the need to please their "customers".
I would love to see somebody point that out to Milberg et al. Preferably the trademark holder himself.
I don't know anything about the merits of this case, but their redefinition of the word "linux," and the ignorance that that mistake demonstrates, really bugged me.
That bugged me too. It was the only part that I couldn't easily figure out, although I did realize that the inner numbers were an exponent.
It's particularly frustrating when you consider that the whole point of "universal language" communications like these is to take advantage of features of our universe that any alien species would necessarily share with us. That's what the primes are for... any species with enough technology to recieve the message would recognize the significance of those numbers. But what does 2^3021377 - 1 mean to an alien species? Absolutely nothing.
(No matter how good your security is, you can't stop users from hurting themselves by running untrusted code. Scare tactics stories "virus threats" only make the problem worse.)
I won't address the larger issue of freedom in the U.S. (It's absurd to suggest that any other major country is more free than us as a whole.) But I want to clear up one common misconception:
Whenever there's a story about some abuse of the DMCA, or some other oppressive U.S. law, all the foreign readers make snide comments about how their country is freer than ours. Guess what? Your country also has a DMCA. (Worse yet, they use MS Word 97.) They may call it something different, but for practical purposes it's the same all over the western world.
Almost all major infringements on our freedoms are accomplished through treaties these days. I'm drawing a blank on other examples, but there are many. I suspect that they make bigger news in the U.S. because of our greater freedom as a whole, which makes them stand out more. In most other countries, restrictions on speech and personal freedom are not that unusual to begin with.
The fact remains, though, that the monolith is nine feet tall. If we assume that (within the silly little universe of my comment) the monolith builders actually did use metric, that would mean that the architect actually said, "Okay, let's make this side exactly 2.7431999818948802 meters long..." Seems pretty unlikely. It's safe to conclude that whoever built this monolith was not thinking in metric.
Also, it was a joke.
Sorry, it was a knee-jerk reaction. Still bugs me, though.
In case anyone is keeping score, Maldivian's latest copyright violation is from here: http://www.best.com/~cphoenix/winvunix.html It's amazing how he managed to copy the entire page, except those three words at the top: "by Chris Phoenix".
(I don't mean to seem like I'm stalking Maldivian, but someone has to give credit where credit is due.)
Personally, I don't see why a homosexual would be offended when confronted by the fact that men generally prefer women as sexual partners. But that's just me.
Perhaps a more reasonable remedy would be to require representatives to reimburse taxpayers for any government money (wages, travel expenses, etc.) that is spent while writing and/or lobbying for a bill that is later deemed unconstitutional.
The actual author of this post is not Maldivian, but rather... er... well, I don't know, but the original article is here: http://www.dne.bnl.gov/atd-mag/chernobyl.html.
/. karma by lifting other peoples work. See his user info for other examples.
Apparently Maldivian is making a career out of earning
That's really pathetic, man.
I don't mean to distract you all from your ranting, but has anyone noticed that this Google toolbar is really, really cool? It's not just another obnoxious way to make sure you get funneled towards their site (i.e. both IE's and Netscape's "search features".)
Among other things, it can highlight instances of your search terms on a page, instantly transfer you to Google's cached copy of your current page, and search for pages on the same site as the one you're viewing. It also adds an "up one level" button (the web equivalent of "../").
The only feature that has privacy issues is the "PageRank" display, which tells you how "important" the current page is. It's not very useful, and it's easily disabled.
Google also gets points for using all of IE's advanced features properly. Those of you who frequently claim that ActiveX is only useful for trojans should try installing this toolbar, as it's an excellent counter-example.
Nice job, Google people.
It seems to me that it's a lot easier to sympathize with Dr. Yueh in the movie, since he is clearly a broken man. In the miniseries, he's just selfish.
Everybody here is tearing the miniseries apart pretty well, and I agree with almost all of the criticisms. Just to provide a little variety, though, I thought I'd mention the things that I liked about the miniseries, in comparison to Lynch's movie. (Incidentally, they really invited comparisons, didn't they? With so much material to work with, I thought that the miniseries would be very different from the movie, but at times it seems like a shot-by-shot remake... which just highlights its inferiority. The "worm vs. harvester" scene is an excellent example.)
Anyway, things I liked:
The interstellar spacecraft (what do they call it, a "highliner"?) was incredible. It was among the best CGI I've ever seen, and it had the right look, too. (Immense, alien, chaotic, etc.) They also get a consolation prize for the Guild Navigator, who was excellent, but not quite as good as Lynch's.
I like this Baron Harkonnen. The Baron in the movie was too over-the-top; I have a pretty strong stomach, but I still tend to fast-forward through most of his scenes on Giedi Prime. In Sci Fi's version, the gratuitous neck-breaking was sufficient to establish the Baron's evilness, and they wisely left it at that. I'm sure people will disagree with me on that point, though.
The sets were nice. They weren't as interesting as Lynch's sets, but at least I could tell them apart (unlike the characters). They just looked a whole lot better, even if they didn't fit the film as well.
And... that's it. It was pretty bad. I wonder what Lynch could have done with Dune if he had had access to the sort of technology that today's directors take for granted?
Another thing that bothered me was that they changed Dr. Uweh's motivation from interestly tragic (avenging the death of his wife) to cliched and obvious (ransoming his wife).You can tell them apart by their hats, though. That's what they're there for.
Seriously though, was Dr. Uweh introduced at all before he poisoned the Duke? If so, he blended into the background so well that I missed it completely. (Despite the fact that they revealed his betrayal 45 minutes in advance.)This would probably be enough to ruin it for me even if the rest was perfect. Music is important. As a matter of fact, I think sound in general is what makes Lynch's Dune what it is; they could have left out the picture entirely, and it would still be an impressive movie.
Sci Fi's Paul Atreides acts like he's already read the whole script, and he's just annoyed that he has to wait four hours before he can become a messiah, instead of getting it over with now.
That looks an awful lot like a flat display behind a curved plastic shield. Notice that the top part of the display is much deeper than the bottom.
Also suggesting non-vaporousness is this page, which includes a photo of an apparently real person using one.
Quoting from your link:I also never claimed that the C-T Thesis has been proven; in fact, I strongly suspect that it is unprovable. Like you said, it's a "rule of thumb," but I am not aware of any violations of it.
There was a story on Slashdot recently about a Turing Machine implementation in Minesweeper. The paper is here (in yucky pdf format).
His proof is very similar to the Life proof -- which makes sense, because when you think about it, Minesweeper is a lot like Life. (That's 'Life' with a capital 'L'... I'm not trying be profound here.)
We used a TM simulator in my "Philosophy and Computers" class. It had an unnecessarily clever name, and an unnecessarily clever interface. It also ran only on MacOS. Anybody know the one I'm talking about? It's right on the tip of my tongue.
Anyway, since I found the above program a little too constraining, I just put one together in MS Access in about fifteen minutes. It's really pretty trivial, especially if you understand the significance of TMs to begin with.
If you're lazy, a simple Google search turns up many other prospects.