For colliding with a stationary object, the mass of your car is not important, as you've said.
I'd like to point out though that if you collide with something mobile, your mass determines how much the collision makes your velocity change versus their velocity. Massive objects can hit light objects and just bull on through, so passengers would be subjected to much less stress than passengers in the light object. In the massive vehicle, your velocity might change from 50 mph forward to 30 mph forward, whereas in the light vehicle it might change from moving 50 miles an hour forward to 30 miles an hour backward (an eighty mile per hour change in velocity).
That said, I hate SUVs and I think we should tax the crap out of them for the damage they do in increased pollution and risk to other people on the road.
Many programs don't run properly after you move them, or copy themselves back into their original location. After many programs started showing up in two places rather than one, leading to a much more cluttered window rather than less, I gave up on it and now I just have a mish-mash.
I would love to find out I've been doing something idiotic and there's a simple solution, but I don't really understand how I could be screwing up the process of creating a folder called 'Media' and dragging my media players into it.
Quantum entanglement provides a way to distribute the pad from A to B that is not cleartext. Well, technically it provides a way to generate the same OTP at A and B at the same time while guaranteeing no one else intercepted it, but it's effectively the same.
But, I think the example of the box falling off the truck is an example of where the US is not a free market. It is the force of the US government that coerces companies to pay up when sued. And I agree, it's the government that sets the value of a life - not the free market.
I agree with you regarding the result of a completely free market.
Crap. Excellent point. What I was going for was the difference between unrestricted & regulated access, but I chose a really, really bad reference regarding the reasoning.
I guess some much better examples are police forces and honesty & disclosure requirements on products.
In theory, if people were perfectly smart then the only downside to free market is that it includes no value on human life. However, people aren't perfectly smart, and human life does have value even if the human in question has no money.
Of course, many examples where people talk about "the free market" totally ignore hidden costs, but that's beside the point.
Thanks for pointing out what was a really dumbshit error without being an ass about it:-)
but I do NOT want government involved in deciding who gets to write what software for pay. The free market is better.
This is something you hear a lot. It is often wrong. Read about the Tragedy of the Commons.
The free market will not solve everything. Some things require everyone to agree on the best way, then enforce it from a central authority.
Now, using the free market as a tool to figure out which Free projects should get how much money is great... maybe by giving people chits to spend on Free projects. I don't know the right answer, but I do know that requiring that the right answer be "the free market" is sometimes wrong.
and I can't find a single instance of people standing on each other's shoulders
Uh, say what?!? What about Linux (based on Stallman's work), mplayer (based on libavcodec, which uses X264), and basically every other GPLed software in existence? Looking at popular packages, it's hard to find GPL'd work that *isn't* standing on some other GPL'd product's shoulders!
More examples: CVS (based on VCS), SVN (based on CVS), Gimp (based on tons of image processing libraries, e.g. libpng)
It's possible that there is no CVS code in SVN (although I'd be surprised), but I would be astonished if the SVN developers weren't reading CVS code for ideas.
Re:Java's regexp support is yucky
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 1
I actually don't use regular expressions in Java very much - I don't do very much screenscraping or arbitrary text file processing work in Java. However, snide comments aside, I think even you might agree that the perl syntax for regular expressions is a little more user friendly (assuming you know regular expression syntax) than Java.
Java's regexp support is yucky
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Compared to perl's regexp support, in which regular expressions are first class language features on the same level as strings, integers, arrays, etc., Java's regexp support is laughable.
I only use Perl for quick scripts, but compare the following:
It is telling that I had to go look up the Java interface (I am a professional Java developer and have been for 8 years), while the Perl came naturally (I am pretty good with Perl, but I only use it for scripting support).
Java does NOT have built-in regular expression support, at least not at all in the same way that Perl does.
In the United States, you have every right to get together with friends and make copies of music on analog tape, or digital copies of music on digital audio recording equipment. This is per the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992.
I'm not sure what this means about copying a CD someone else bought to a tape, but copying a CD for a friend using digital audio equipment and audio cds is perfectly legal, and copying an audio tape to another audio tape is also legal. We pay a "tax" to the RIAA on every piece of digital audio equipment, audio CD, and audio tape to allow this.
What they're proposing is just doing the same thing for file sharing. My fear with it is the same as the issue with the AHRA: the music industry will then promptly work to hide the fact that this behavior is legal from the American public, and the law will become useless as technology changes. (e.g., the way computers are used to copy audio CDs, which is not protected by the AHRA even if you buy audio CDs). So we will end up paying taxes to the RIAA for our internet connections, and getting no new legal rights in the bargain.
The only reference I can find to multiple grand juries is in the Wikipedia entry on Tom DeLay. There it says there were three grand juries - the first, which indicted. Then Tom moves to dismiss the indictment, and Earle asks a second grand jury to indict. They refuse. Then Earle asks a third grand jury to indict, which they do.
I don't know the legality of all of this... I'm not sure why you would get a second grand jury before the motion to dismiss has been accepted, or whether it's OK to get a third GJ if the second one doesn't do what you want (when the first did). But at least according to Wikipedia (the only resource I can find with any details), your facts are dead wrong. There were three grand juries, two of which indicted.
What I found was interesting is that it appears the only reason DeLay is prosecutable is that he waived his right to be excused due to the statute of limitations. I don't know if that applies to all charges or just some subset.
Oh yeah, and I wasn't entirely accurate above... I did see one quote about there being four grand juries, from one of DeLay's spokesman. The spokesman did *not* say that three of them failed to indict. He just left you to assume that.
"A World Out of Time" by Larry Niven. For the people around here who, say, actually read the sci-fi by the masters, it's an amusing reference. An in-joke for the geeky thinker.
That sounds like a lot of work for not much return. Why not use instant runoff voting?
To vote, just list the candidates on the ballot in order of your preference.
To count votes, count the #1 candidate on all ballots. If (s)he has a majority, (s)he's elected. Otherwise, remove the candidate with the fewest votes from all ballots, and recount the votes. Repeat until someone has a majority.
It is the equivalent of voting, then if no one has a majority dropping the candidate with the least support and voting again, until you get a majority. It sounds pretty much ideal to me, and a much better way of getting out of the two party system for unitary posts in government (e.g. the Presidency).
Well, the site does support free items, and in fact I point out that it's always going to be free to give things away on Frimp. My plan was to create pages that were oriented towards Freecycle in language that was clearly in sync with the freecycle philosophy.
Obviously, though, I have a marketing problem in that it wasn't obvious that Frimp will always be free to give things away... I will likely create a link from the front page to a blurb about giving things away on Frimp.
I'm not sure about Freecycle's organization... my contact with them was via the whois information for freecycle.org, I think. I have been thinking about sending a brief email about Frimp to each of the freecycle lists, but I don't want to spam. Sometimes it's hard to see the line between telling people about something that they want to know about and annoying spam.
I started a localized sale and give-away site. All of the functionality is there - list items, post pictures, print a flier, search by zipcode & range, get automatic emails when new items matching a search appear, etc.
I emailed the owners of Freecycle looking for a partnership, and got no response. My guess is that they thought a site that allowed local search would steal their thunder, and didn't want to pitch it to their users, but I think their ability for people to give people a local community of like-minded people would go great with my ability to let people search by range instead of grouping with an arbitrary boundary.
OK, I just read wikipedia's entry about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso, to correct any misconceptions I had about him. Thank you for wasting 5 minutes of my life:-(
Picasso had no talents I can see besides a profound talent at painting, avoiding fighting during wartime, and screwing around. He certainly did *not* have any experience with computers, at least per Wikipedia.
To toot my own horn, I am a National Merit Scholar, have a BS in Mathematics and Physics, and I have been writing software professionally for ten+ years. I think I just might have a little more insight into computing than Picasso.
Now, in the context that I would imagine Picasso meant his quote, I think it was insightful. If he was telling us that our sense of wonder and our ability to give meaning to things is what makes life worth living, not cold facts and mechanical answers, I agree. However, the fact remains that cold facts and mechanical answers can emulate any physical process we've discovered to date, and any that we know how to formally describe.
No, it will be exactly what we call a computer, it will just be running software that we don't understand now.
The point of a computer is that it can emulate *anything* that we can model. There are a number of things that we don't know how to model, the human brain being among them, but no one has found anything that we can't model.
So, unless you're trying to argue that a human brain can't be modeled, then a computer can emulate it. Which means that except for the way it interacts with the world (cameras vs eyes, robots vs muscle) it is, in every meaningful way, a human.
If you're trying to argue that a human brain can't be modeled, then you're talking about the supernatural, and I'm not interested in talking about religion in this kind of discussion.
Ask the computer "what do you wonder about?", "what keeps you up at night?". Then ask it to try to answer the questions that "keep it up at night".
And, frankly, to live up to the Turing Test, the computer would have to spontaneously talk to you sometimes - it's not very believable that there's a real person on the other end if they never have an unsolicited opinion.
Furthermore, what the hell did Pablo Picasso know about computers? Often a computer can suggest new questions to ask, and in a time when computers could pass the Turing Test, they could definitely make suggestions about significant new questions to ask.
You might as well quote Donald Knuth about painting.
I guess I don't understand where you're going with this. My claim is that we will figure out the mechanics and chemistry of how the brain works long before we will have a general theory of intelligence. We have a long history with and are very good at mechanics and chemistry. We have no idea of how intelligence or consciousness works.
Right now, we build computers that do serial processing because we have no good way of programming massively parallel processing computers. We are, however, very good at manufacturing massively parallel things - assembly lines and cookie-cutter manufacturing plants are built around the notion of building a small part, repeatedly, cheaply.
So, what is it again that would keep us from simulating a brain, human or otherwise, before we have a theory of intelligence?
I agree that it would be ideal to have some theory that explained "intelligence", but I don't see that we're anywhere near that.
The only way I can see that we will get to human level AI any time in the reasonably near future (say, within 15 or 20 years) is to just emulate a human brain. I see no reason why we couldn't reverse engineer the human brain to the point that we could simulate one, given a sufficiently fast computer. Then we can experiment from there.
Of course, that opens a whole host of ethical dilemmas and security concerns. Is it ethical to "play" with activating and deactivating various areas of a simulated human brain? How about changing how individual parts work? Or simulating parts of a brain to fulfill simpler functions, essentially intentionally creating a retarded person?
On the security concerns - humans have proven themselves to be irrational and self-serving. Do we really want to create a human who can't relate to the outside world, and who perhaps has a perfect memory, the ability to drug himself at will, and who thinks 1000 times as fast as normal people?
Maybe you could actually address the real point of this post?
He said: You could certainly argue that this law in particular perhaps goes too far, but you're almost saying it's OK to harass people, until some company invents technology that you can purchase to stop harassment. That is just plain silly.
You said:
Fine. I'll pay $6 for a caller ID box and $24 a year for piece of mind. You want to pay for bureaucracy and red tape and non-effective unconstitutional legislation? You should pay your share of what you use, I'd like to bow out of it.
What does your response have to do with his comment? He is saying that your philosophy, as you phrased it, implies that you don't believe we should be protected from harassment unless there is a non-governmental way of doing it. You are not addressing his point that it is "just plain silly" to argue that the only allowed way to protect from harassment is through the market.
Now, it so happens that I agree with you that the DoJ has gone way beyond what the constitution allows, and that too many powers have bubbled up to the federal level. I even agree with you that the market is likely a better solution to harassing phone calls than legislation, although I think it is worth debating.
I do not agree that "the market" is the way to solve every problem, or even the problem of harassment in general.
Slashdot Mirror
For colliding with a stationary object, the mass of your car is not important, as you've said.
I'd like to point out though that if you collide with something mobile, your mass determines how much the collision makes your velocity change versus their velocity. Massive objects can hit light objects and just bull on through, so passengers would be subjected to much less stress than passengers in the light object. In the massive vehicle, your velocity might change from 50 mph forward to 30 mph forward, whereas in the light vehicle it might change from moving 50 miles an hour forward to 30 miles an hour backward (an eighty mile per hour change in velocity).
That said, I hate SUVs and I think we should tax the crap out of them for the damage they do in increased pollution and risk to other people on the road.
Regarding your sig... "Apple and Google provide Iran with nukes"
Are you really asserting that, or are you just bitching that people here tend to like Apple and Google, and hate MS?
'Cause if you're asserting that, I'd like to see a reference.
Thanks!
Many programs don't run properly after you move them, or copy themselves back into their original location. After many programs started showing up in two places rather than one, leading to a much more cluttered window rather than less, I gave up on it and now I just have a mish-mash.
I would love to find out I've been doing something idiotic and there's a simple solution, but I don't really understand how I could be screwing up the process of creating a folder called 'Media' and dragging my media players into it.
Do not associate 'secret sauce' with 'porn'. I had a Big Mac for lunch, and it brings, er, unsettling images to mind.
Quantum entanglement provides a way to distribute the pad from A to B that is not cleartext. Well, technically it provides a way to generate the same OTP at A and B at the same time while guaranteeing no one else intercepted it, but it's effectively the same.
But, I think the example of the box falling off the truck is an example of where the US is not a free market. It is the force of the US government that coerces companies to pay up when sued. And I agree, it's the government that sets the value of a life - not the free market.
I agree with you regarding the result of a completely free market.
Crap. Excellent point. What I was going for was the difference between unrestricted & regulated access, but I chose a really, really bad reference regarding the reasoning.
:-)
I guess some much better examples are police forces and honesty & disclosure requirements on products.
In theory, if people were perfectly smart then the only downside to free market is that it includes no value on human life. However, people aren't perfectly smart, and human life does have value even if the human in question has no money.
Of course, many examples where people talk about "the free market" totally ignore hidden costs, but that's beside the point.
Thanks for pointing out what was a really dumbshit error without being an ass about it
This is something you hear a lot. It is often wrong. Read about the Tragedy of the Commons.
The free market will not solve everything. Some things require everyone to agree on the best way, then enforce it from a central authority.
Now, using the free market as a tool to figure out which Free projects should get how much money is great... maybe by giving people chits to spend on Free projects. I don't know the right answer, but I do know that requiring that the right answer be "the free market" is sometimes wrong.
and *not* hackable!
It's always hackable. Your grandma can hack caller id on a regular phone. Your standards are higher for the brand new technology?
and I can't find a single instance of people standing on each other's shoulders
Uh, say what?!? What about Linux (based on Stallman's work), mplayer (based on libavcodec, which uses X264), and basically every other GPLed software in existence? Looking at popular packages, it's hard to find GPL'd work that *isn't* standing on some other GPL'd product's shoulders!
More examples: CVS (based on VCS), SVN (based on CVS), Gimp (based on tons of image processing libraries, e.g. libpng)
It's possible that there is no CVS code in SVN (although I'd be surprised), but I would be astonished if the SVN developers weren't reading CVS code for ideas.
I actually don't use regular expressions in Java very much - I don't do very much screenscraping or arbitrary text file processing work in Java. However, snide comments aside, I think even you might agree that the perl syntax for regular expressions is a little more user friendly (assuming you know regular expression syntax) than Java.
I only use Perl for quick scripts, but compare the following:
Perl:
Java:
It is telling that I had to go look up the Java interface (I am a professional Java developer and have been for 8 years), while the Perl came naturally (I am pretty good with Perl, but I only use it for scripting support).
Java does NOT have built-in regular expression support, at least not at all in the same way that Perl does.
Repeating myself (http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=96729&cid =8272631)
In the United States, you have every right to get together with friends and make copies of music on analog tape, or digital copies of music on digital audio recording equipment. This is per the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992.
I'm not sure what this means about copying a CD someone else bought to a tape, but copying a CD for a friend using digital audio equipment and audio cds is perfectly legal, and copying an audio tape to another audio tape is also legal. We pay a "tax" to the RIAA on every piece of digital audio equipment, audio CD, and audio tape to allow this.
What they're proposing is just doing the same thing for file sharing. My fear with it is the same as the issue with the AHRA: the music industry will then promptly work to hide the fact that this behavior is legal from the American public, and the law will become useless as technology changes. (e.g., the way computers are used to copy audio CDs, which is not protected by the AHRA even if you buy audio CDs). So we will end up paying taxes to the RIAA for our internet connections, and getting no new legal rights in the bargain.
The only reference I can find to multiple grand juries is in the Wikipedia entry on Tom DeLay. There it says there were three grand juries - the first, which indicted. Then Tom moves to dismiss the indictment, and Earle asks a second grand jury to indict. They refuse. Then Earle asks a third grand jury to indict, which they do.
I don't know the legality of all of this... I'm not sure why you would get a second grand jury before the motion to dismiss has been accepted, or whether it's OK to get a third GJ if the second one doesn't do what you want (when the first did). But at least according to Wikipedia (the only resource I can find with any details), your facts are dead wrong. There were three grand juries, two of which indicted.
What I found was interesting is that it appears the only reason DeLay is prosecutable is that he waived his right to be excused due to the statute of limitations. I don't know if that applies to all charges or just some subset.
Oh yeah, and I wasn't entirely accurate above... I did see one quote about there being four grand juries, from one of DeLay's spokesman. The spokesman did *not* say that three of them failed to indict. He just left you to assume that.
"A World Out of Time" by Larry Niven. For the people around here who, say, actually read the sci-fi by the masters, it's an amusing reference. An in-joke for the geeky thinker.
It's totally meaningless to you, I'm sure.
That sounds like a lot of work for not much return. Why not use instant runoff voting?
To vote, just list the candidates on the ballot in order of your preference.
To count votes, count the #1 candidate on all ballots. If (s)he has a majority, (s)he's elected. Otherwise, remove the candidate with the fewest votes from all ballots, and recount the votes. Repeat until someone has a majority.
It is the equivalent of voting, then if no one has a majority dropping the candidate with the least support and voting again, until you get a majority. It sounds pretty much ideal to me, and a much better way of getting out of the two party system for unitary posts in government (e.g. the Presidency).
That's a great idea! Thanks for the insight into the freecycle culture.
Well, the site does support free items, and in fact I point out that it's always going to be free to give things away on Frimp. My plan was to create pages that were oriented towards Freecycle in language that was clearly in sync with the freecycle philosophy.
Obviously, though, I have a marketing problem in that it wasn't obvious that Frimp will always be free to give things away... I will likely create a link from the front page to a blurb about giving things away on Frimp.
I'm not sure about Freecycle's organization... my contact with them was via the whois information for freecycle.org, I think. I have been thinking about sending a brief email about Frimp to each of the freecycle lists, but I don't want to spam. Sometimes it's hard to see the line between telling people about something that they want to know about and annoying spam.
I started a localized sale and give-away site. All of the functionality is there - list items, post pictures, print a flier, search by zipcode & range, get automatic emails when new items matching a search appear, etc.
I emailed the owners of Freecycle looking for a partnership, and got no response. My guess is that they thought a site that allowed local search would steal their thunder, and didn't want to pitch it to their users, but I think their ability for people to give people a local community of like-minded people would go great with my ability to let people search by range instead of grouping with an arbitrary boundary.
OK, I just read wikipedia's entry about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso, to correct any misconceptions I had about him. Thank you for wasting 5 minutes of my life :-(
Picasso had no talents I can see besides a profound talent at painting, avoiding fighting during wartime, and screwing around. He certainly did *not* have any experience with computers, at least per Wikipedia.
To toot my own horn, I am a National Merit Scholar, have a BS in Mathematics and Physics, and I have been writing software professionally for ten+ years. I think I just might have a little more insight into computing than Picasso.
Now, in the context that I would imagine Picasso meant his quote, I think it was insightful. If he was telling us that our sense of wonder and our ability to give meaning to things is what makes life worth living, not cold facts and mechanical answers, I agree. However, the fact remains that cold facts and mechanical answers can emulate any physical process we've discovered to date, and any that we know how to formally describe.
No, it will be exactly what we call a computer, it will just be running software that we don't understand now.
The point of a computer is that it can emulate *anything* that we can model. There are a number of things that we don't know how to model, the human brain being among them, but no one has found anything that we can't model.
So, unless you're trying to argue that a human brain can't be modeled, then a computer can emulate it. Which means that except for the way it interacts with the world (cameras vs eyes, robots vs muscle) it is, in every meaningful way, a human.
If you're trying to argue that a human brain can't be modeled, then you're talking about the supernatural, and I'm not interested in talking about religion in this kind of discussion.
Ask the computer "what do you wonder about?", "what keeps you up at night?". Then ask it to try to answer the questions that "keep it up at night".
And, frankly, to live up to the Turing Test, the computer would have to spontaneously talk to you sometimes - it's not very believable that there's a real person on the other end if they never have an unsolicited opinion.
Furthermore, what the hell did Pablo Picasso know about computers? Often a computer can suggest new questions to ask, and in a time when computers could pass the Turing Test, they could definitely make suggestions about significant new questions to ask.
You might as well quote Donald Knuth about painting.
I guess I don't understand where you're going with this. My claim is that we will figure out the mechanics and chemistry of how the brain works long before we will have a general theory of intelligence. We have a long history with and are very good at mechanics and chemistry. We have no idea of how intelligence or consciousness works.
Right now, we build computers that do serial processing because we have no good way of programming massively parallel processing computers. We are, however, very good at manufacturing massively parallel things - assembly lines and cookie-cutter manufacturing plants are built around the notion of building a small part, repeatedly, cheaply.
So, what is it again that would keep us from simulating a brain, human or otherwise, before we have a theory of intelligence?
I agree that it would be ideal to have some theory that explained "intelligence", but I don't see that we're anywhere near that.
The only way I can see that we will get to human level AI any time in the reasonably near future (say, within 15 or 20 years) is to just emulate a human brain. I see no reason why we couldn't reverse engineer the human brain to the point that we could simulate one, given a sufficiently fast computer. Then we can experiment from there.
Of course, that opens a whole host of ethical dilemmas and security concerns. Is it ethical to "play" with activating and deactivating various areas of a simulated human brain? How about changing how individual parts work? Or simulating parts of a brain to fulfill simpler functions, essentially intentionally creating a retarded person?
On the security concerns - humans have proven themselves to be irrational and self-serving. Do we really want to create a human who can't relate to the outside world, and who perhaps has a perfect memory, the ability to drug himself at will, and who thinks 1000 times as fast as normal people?
Exciting and scary times are in store...
Maybe you could actually address the real point of this post?
He said:
You could certainly argue that this law in particular perhaps goes too far, but you're almost saying it's OK to harass people, until some company invents technology that you can purchase to stop harassment. That is just plain silly.
You said:
Fine. I'll pay $6 for a caller ID box and $24 a year for piece of mind. You want to pay for bureaucracy and red tape and non-effective unconstitutional legislation? You should pay your share of what you use, I'd like to bow out of it.
What does your response have to do with his comment? He is saying that your philosophy, as you phrased it, implies that you don't believe we should be protected from harassment unless there is a non-governmental way of doing it. You are not addressing his point that it is "just plain silly" to argue that the only allowed way to protect from harassment is through the market.
Now, it so happens that I agree with you that the DoJ has gone way beyond what the constitution allows, and that too many powers have bubbled up to the federal level. I even agree with you that the market is likely a better solution to harassing phone calls than legislation, although I think it is worth debating.
I do not agree that "the market" is the way to solve every problem, or even the problem of harassment in general.