I understood that Pre-Crime unit of Minority Report was offensive because it locked up people who hadn't committed a crime; this punishment was justified by the premise that they were certainly going to commit a crime, but this premise was challenged and eventually proved false by the events in the movie. In the end, the movie supported the idea of "retributive justice" that is the foundation for western justice systems: the idea that the law should impose a punishment that fits the crime which has been committed.
Other ideas of justice are becoming more popular of late, such as "rehabilitative justice" (where the focus is on rehabilitating rather than punishing the criminal), or even preventative justice where action is taken against potential criminals. I feel that both of these ideas are flawed because they can result in a sentence being passed on an individual which does not fit what they have actually done. What determines the end of a sentence? Do we keep someone locked up until it is determined that their rehabilitation is complete, or that they are no longer a risk to society? Under such a regime, even minor crimes (or no crime) could result in indefinitely long sentences.
Are these people are being publicly humiliated because they have committed a crime, or because they might commit a crime in the future? The fact that sex offenders are singled out seems to suggest the latter. This is a disturbing movement towards alternative philosophies of justice. Even the idea behind the "pre-crime" unit in Minority Report is less repulsive, as there seemed to be a greater probability of the anticipated crime actually taking place in that movie.
Give me a team of 10 people (5 programmers, 5 artists) and I'll give you a Warcraft III clone in 18 months that has better graphics. Warcraft III, of course, didn't have all the advantages that came into being with the more recent DirectX's so it's not that we're smarter, it's that it's gotten easier.
The writer of this article doesn't appreciate that Warcraft III's strength is not in its graphics. I'd be surprised if his hypothetical team of 5 programmers could match its carefully balanced and varied gameplay or even its AI.
Sure, cool graphics rocks... but I wish more game producers would realise that good games are more than just cool graphics.
Well if any children would benefit from becoming hardened to the sight of blood and gore, perhaps they would be seriously injured children in hospital. It might help them to better cope with their own injuries with less shock/panic/revulsion.
Three Rings for the Dark Jedi Kings up in the stars Seven for the Alien in its ships of steel Nine for Agent Smith doomed to die One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne In the Land of Cinema where the Shadows lie. One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the ratings bind them In the Land of Cinema where the Shadows lie.
According to an estimate several billion feet of abandoned cable lies unused in the plenum spaces of buildings that allow air to circulate creating a fire hazard.
Several billion feet? That's not long enough to reach Mars even when it came really close recently: it was still over 180 billion feet away.
Nevertheless, there is plenty of cable for making a link to the moon, which is merely about 1.3 billion feet from Earth. Of course, one may need quite a few bridges along the way to keep the signal alive and deal with the variety of recycled cable types:-) Also, the cable may need to be attached to one of the earth's poles to avoid getting wrapped around the earth by the moon's rotation.
Wow, a cable to the moon would be quite an amazing feat of engineering. Do you think it may be remotely possible?
Re:slashdot readers?
on
Superball!
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· Score: 5, Interesting
If they were slashdot readers why would they intentionally slashdot themselves?
Imagine the statistics that one could gather about the slashdot readership simply by processing the access log from a slashdotted site. One could answer questions like "how many Microsoft employees read slashdot from work?" or "how many people read slashdot from China?".
How much is "not too much"? Any modification may be enough to break an existing X application. So what will it break?
Thankfully most of my favourite X applications are open source and actively maintained, so if this takes off I suppose they will be fixed if necessary (or at least fixable). An exception to this would be the old Loki games, which are neither open source nor maintained. I suppose this demonstrates one reason why closed source is bad...
Early ME.
colur, later colour, color, a. OF. color, culur, colur, later colour, coulour (retained in AFr.), couleur (= Pr., Sp. color, It. colore):L. color-em. Latin long o passed in OF. into a very close sound intermediate between o and u, both of which letters, and subsequently the digraph ou, were used to express it; in an accented syllable the sound at length changed to written eu, whence mod.F. couleur. The OE. word was hw, HUE. Colour, corresponding to the late AFr., has been the normal spelling in Eng. from 14th c.; but color has been used occasionally, chiefly under L. influence, from 15th c., and is now the prevalent spelling in U.S.
Wow the website has been slashdotted already. Come on, Alex, just because ApachePDA can run on your new Treo 600, you shouldn't have thrown away your server just yet...
Apple has made many claims to be the first, fastest and only 64-bit processor for the desktop and workstation market, but (not mentioning the fact that Opteron beat the G5 to market by over 4 months)
Fair go! Apple's claims were about personal computers, not servers or workstations. The Opteron is not intended to be a personal computer processor; that's what the Athlon 64 is for.
I wonder why these benchmarks contain measurements for an Opteron but not for an Itanium 2 processor? Maybe it's because they're using 32 bit programs for the Athlon64/AthlonXP/Opteron/P4 measurements, which run like a dog on Itanium. Wait a moment, why is an article on 64-bit processors using 32-bit code for its performance measurements? Hmmm...
Why are the MIT sysadmins being so draconian as to require infected computers to be reformatted, without solving the cause of the problem by *requiring* the windows bug to be patched? The article says "Reinfection rates are very high". Unbelievable!
And then what about for example cbs.com and sbc.com?
For a permutation to be understandable, it's important that the first and last letter are in the right place, according to the previous slashdot article. So ssldahot should clash with slashdot, but adhlosst should not clash. Thus cbs and sbc would be allowed to co-exist.
Hinavg jsut raed the shoasdlt srtoy eeilnttd Can You Raed Tihs?, I bigen to wnoder if the sirntg mthicang used by DNS is too sitrct. Sulery a pmueertd nmae culod be rtdcireeed to the ceorrct stie? Aslo, one suhold not be aoellwd to reeisgtr a doamin nmae wihch is a smlipe pimaureottn of an esxiintg dimoan name wtih the smae frist and last leettr.
It might be fun to rename someone's keys as a practical joke, not that I've ever done it to anyone's computer keyboard.
Yeah, similarly I could put the phone's number keys the same way up as the keys on my calculator and the numeric keypad on my computer keyboard, with "7 8 9" up the top instead of "1 2 3" up the top.
Does anyone know why phones' keys are upside down compared to a computer keyboard and a calculator?
Keep the conglomerates and lawyers tied up forever. The rest of us can be free and happy.
Unfortunately the rest of us are financially supporting the conglomerates and lawyers in their litigation (at least indirectly). So who is the free man and who is the slave?
The major changes after 1.4 involve switching to Mozilla Firebird and Thunderbird, and...
So Firebird and Thunderbird are not just alternatives to mozilla, they are the future of mozilla. However it seems that mozilla 1.5 hasn't made much progress towards this switch? I wonder if there will be a long process of morphing mozilla into a less-integrated bird-based suite or whether the switch will be done in an instant, when one day it is declared from on high "Navigator and mozilla mail are no more!"
Indeed, it's been more than a year since the site was ever served from a SCO Unix machine.
Actually the site hasn't been served at all for much of the last few days (although it seems to be up currently). It apparently went down on Friday and stayed down for days.
Does this thing nest?
on
GTK+ TTY Port
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Does this thing nest? Can I run a gnome terminal window inside it, and then run gtk+ in that terminal?
Do you know how much 2^48 bytes is?
Mark my words: No current 64-processors will work with 2^64 bytes of memory..
Sure, none will work with 2^64 bytes of RAM. This is why it doesn't make sense to support a 64-bit physical address space. But a 64-bit virtual address space is more useful, as data in the virtual address space does not need to be all resident in RAM (eg linux swap). Wide virtual address spaces can be used in new and interesting ways. For example, a virtual address can be used to uniquely identify data across a whole cluster. It is not completely unrealistic to imagine exhausting the Opteron's 48-bit virtual address space: a cluster of 128 computers each with 2Tb storage all mapped into the same address space would fill it up.
The Itanium-2 and UltraSparc III are examples of processors which support a true 64-bit virtual address space.
Slashdot Mirror
static int foo = 0;
#define x (foo++)
But why is this article copyrighted in 2002? It certainly sounds older than that. I'm confused.
I understood that Pre-Crime unit of Minority Report was offensive because it locked up people who hadn't committed a crime; this punishment was justified by the premise that they were certainly going to commit a crime, but this premise was challenged and eventually proved false by the events in the movie. In the end, the movie supported the idea of "retributive justice" that is the foundation for western justice systems: the idea that the law should impose a punishment that fits the crime which has been committed.
Other ideas of justice are becoming more popular of late, such as "rehabilitative justice" (where the focus is on rehabilitating rather than punishing the criminal), or even preventative justice where action is taken against potential criminals. I feel that both of these ideas are flawed because they can result in a sentence being passed on an individual which does not fit what they have actually done. What determines the end of a sentence? Do we keep someone locked up until it is determined that their rehabilitation is complete, or that they are no longer a risk to society? Under such a regime, even minor crimes (or no crime) could result in indefinitely long sentences.
Are these people are being publicly humiliated because they have committed a crime, or because they might commit a crime in the future? The fact that sex offenders are singled out seems to suggest the latter. This is a disturbing movement towards alternative philosophies of justice. Even the idea behind the "pre-crime" unit in Minority Report is less repulsive, as there seemed to be a greater probability of the anticipated crime actually taking place in that movie.
This is a violation of the 1st Amendment!
It's the Constitution, it's Mabo...it's the vibe!
The writer of this article doesn't appreciate that Warcraft III's strength is not in its graphics. I'd be surprised if his hypothetical team of 5 programmers could match its carefully balanced and varied gameplay or even its AI.
Sure, cool graphics rocks... but I wish more game producers would realise that good games are more than just cool graphics.
Well if any children would benefit from becoming hardened to the sight of blood and gore, perhaps they would be seriously injured children in hospital. It might help them to better cope with their own injuries with less shock/panic/revulsion.
Hmm... I'm still not sure though.
Three Rings for the Dark Jedi Kings up in the stars
Seven for the Alien in its ships of steel
Nine for Agent Smith doomed to die
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Cinema where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the ratings bind them
In the Land of Cinema where the Shadows lie.
How can I use this Rio Karma device to get a +1 bonus for my slashdot posts?
Several billion feet? That's not long enough to reach Mars even when it came really close recently: it was still over 180 billion feet away.
Nevertheless, there is plenty of cable for making a link to the moon, which is merely about 1.3 billion feet from Earth. Of course, one may need quite a few bridges along the way to keep the signal alive and deal with the variety of recycled cable types :-) Also, the cable may need to be attached to one of the earth's poles to avoid getting wrapped around the earth by the moon's rotation.
Wow, a cable to the moon would be quite an amazing feat of engineering. Do you think it may be remotely possible?
Imagine the statistics that one could gather about the slashdot readership simply by processing the access log from a slashdotted site. One could answer questions like "how many Microsoft employees read slashdot from work?" or "how many people read slashdot from China?".
How much is "not too much"? Any modification may be enough to break an existing X application. So what will it break?
Thankfully most of my favourite X applications are open source and actively maintained, so if this takes off I suppose they will be fixed if necessary (or at least fixable). An exception to this would be the old Loki games, which are neither open source nor maintained. I suppose this demonstrates one reason why closed source is bad...
Wow the website has been slashdotted already. Come on, Alex, just because ApachePDA can run on your new Treo 600, you shouldn't have thrown away your server just yet...
Fair go! Apple's claims were about personal computers, not servers or workstations. The Opteron is not intended to be a personal computer processor; that's what the Athlon 64 is for.
I wonder why these benchmarks contain measurements for an Opteron but not for an Itanium 2 processor? Maybe it's because they're using 32 bit programs for the Athlon64/AthlonXP/Opteron/P4 measurements, which run like a dog on Itanium. Wait a moment, why is an article on 64-bit processors using 32-bit code for its performance measurements? Hmmm...
Why are the MIT sysadmins being so draconian as to require infected computers to be reformatted, without solving the cause of the problem by *requiring* the windows bug to be patched? The article says "Reinfection rates are very high". Unbelievable!
Hinavg jsut raed the shoasdlt srtoy eeilnttd Can You Raed Tihs?, I bigen to wnoder if the sirntg mthicang used by DNS is too sitrct. Sulery a pmueertd nmae culod be rtdcireeed to the ceorrct stie? Aslo, one suhold not be aoellwd to reeisgtr a doamin nmae wihch is a smlipe pimaureottn of an esxiintg dimoan name wtih the smae frist and last leettr.
Yeah, similarly I could put the phone's number keys the same way up as the keys on my calculator and the numeric keypad on my computer keyboard, with "7 8 9" up the top instead of "1 2 3" up the top.
Does anyone know why phones' keys are upside down compared to a computer keyboard and a calculator?
Does this thing nest? Can I run a gnome terminal window inside it, and then run gtk+ in that terminal?
Sure, none will work with 2^64 bytes of RAM. This is why it doesn't make sense to support a 64-bit physical address space. But a 64-bit virtual address space is more useful, as data in the virtual address space does not need to be all resident in RAM (eg linux swap). Wide virtual address spaces can be used in new and interesting ways. For example, a virtual address can be used to uniquely identify data across a whole cluster. It is not completely unrealistic to imagine exhausting the Opteron's 48-bit virtual address space: a cluster of 128 computers each with 2Tb storage all mapped into the same address space would fill it up.
The Itanium-2 and UltraSparc III are examples of processors which support a true 64-bit virtual address space.