When will politicans realize we cannot have an Orwellian government AND an informed and educated population AND a market economy at the same time? IDIOTS!
I don't disagree with your conclusions (IDIOTS), but how does a market economy come into this?
It is certainly the case that Orwellian government and an informed & educated populace cannot co-exist in the long-term.
Fortunately, recent history suggests that a better-informed populace can bring about the downfall of an Orwellian government, but that an Orwellian government cannot permanently keep a population ill-informed and ill-educated.
A market economy is possible with or without any of the above.
My point is that there has been FOUR changes instead of what could have been one if someone had had a bit or foresight.
You still haven't substantiated this. Given the requirement that both the old and new numbers are usuable over a transition period, it is impossible to generate the extra numbers required without more than one change. Have you actually thought of a way it could have been done with fewer than four changes?
I suggest you get a clue - the whole sequence of changes was planned from the outset. If you had paid attention you would have known it was going 01 -> 071 -> 0171 -> 020 7 (not 0207 incidentally).
If you had a better suggestion as to how to reform the phone number system to get the necessary extra numbers, you could have made it then.
Although this is in industries close to Slashdotters' hearts, there is nothing particularly new here. The textiles industry, which was one of the very first high-tech industries, largely left the developed world a long time ago.
Other industries will follow as the necessary skills and infrastructure become more wide-spread.
The rich world will continue to specialise in those industries which require the latest cutting edge infrastructure and skills, and slowly discard the rest.
I actually voted for them at the last election to make sure that the Conservatives were kicked out
You obviously didn't realise that Labour had been in power for five years at the last general election. I admit, not noticing that the we no longer had a Tory government is very excusable.
I think record companies know that anti-piracy measures won't themselves stop piracy. But, if the publisher makes an attempt to prevent copying (however half-assed) then circumventing that copy-protection becomes an offence under the DMCA, even if it would *otherwise* be considered fair use.
So, by having this copy-protection measure in place, they can prove that any MP3 of that track must be illegal. That makes it a lot easier to go after 'pirates' than if they had to prove intent to redistribute in every case.
Eventually a court case will come up in some major venue (the US, or a major eurpoean country I'd guess) that will be promptly ignored by the party involved because they don't operate under that country's jurisdiction. Then who knows what will happen.
What will happen is that ISPs in that country will be forced to block access to the offending web site. This has already happened in some minor venues, such as Saudi Arabia. There have also been failed attempts in France.
Another non-deterministic thing is optimising for a particular processore. It's still the case that packages distributed as binaries typically use the 'lowest common denominator' instruction set common to all modern i86 processors. If you compile your own, it can be optimised for whatever processors you have, both in terms of using the new instructions, and optimal instruction ordering.
McVoy is hardly anti-free-software. The very fact that he gives away *anything* for free symbolizes that. (He doesn't have to give anything away.) He makes the simple requirement that the free users use the newest versions for bug reporting reasons. Not a bad idea IMO.
So the fact that Microsoft give away Internet Explorer for free means that they're not anti-free software either?
Firstly the cryptanalyst may well have more luck breaking the combined layered cipher than trying to break both individually The layered cipher may well be weaker!
So, if I'm trying to decipher something, I might well find it easier if I ran it through DES with an unknown key first? Why have I never seen that it any code-breakers handbook? (Of course, if the keys are non-indpendent, extra encrpytion may reduce security.)
This can't be right - if Apple were found liable to pay damages relating to code contributed by an individual, it is highly unlikely that they could reclaim significant compensation from any coder; a minor is not much different in this case from a 19 year old college student.
What next - proof of $500,000 in liquid assets before you can contribute code?
Re:Chinese Rooms and Software Guys
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 1
It's always seemed funny to me how the technologists take this field, which is tied irrevocably to philosophy, and ignore everything the philosophers say about it. For example, has there ever been a good refutation of Searle's Chinese Room argument?
Yes, plenty. Principally, Searle assumes that an emergent property of a system must also be present in the main active part of a system. This is plainly false.
Another of Searle's arguments is pretty damning as well; those that pursue strong AI are, in fact, favoring a form of dualism. For them the mind is completely separate from the brain, an idea that has been pretty much discarded by the thinking public. Why is it, when computers are concerned, that the mind is no longer a product of a brain?
I don't buy this either. Physically very different brains (organic or computational) may give rise to very similar minds. Where is the dualism in that?
you can get "free energy" out of an expanding universe with relative ease: just tie a string to two masses and wind it around an axle, place the masses many megaparsecs apart, and let the expansion of the universe pull them apart and consequentially spin the axle.
Nah, this won't work, because the string and axle will expand too - you just get the same stationary system, but a bit bigger.
The 'windowless vehicle' analogy only applies to a uniform gravitational field. Your thought experiment has your feet in a stronger gravitational field than your head (i.e. being ripped away from you).
If you're a VB shop, then why not use VB to read the messages and call the COM objects?
There's no need to do any fancy thread-pooling - just write a single-threaded VB app, and get MQSeries to trigger more instances at various queue depths. There's some performance degradation if you're using transactions (and you should) but this should work acceptably.
You're right that triggering a process for each message is wasteful.
Slashdot Mirror
If he wants integration with Visual Studio then he's made his own fucking bed and he can damn well lie in it.
As well as being a great source code control system, ClearCase actually integrates very well with Visual Studio.
I don't disagree with your conclusions (IDIOTS), but how does a market economy come into this?
It is certainly the case that Orwellian government and an informed & educated populace cannot co-exist in the long-term.
Fortunately, recent history suggests that a better-informed populace can bring about the downfall of an Orwellian government, but that an Orwellian government cannot permanently keep a population ill-informed and ill-educated.
A market economy is possible with or without any of the above.
You still haven't substantiated this. Given the requirement that both the old and new numbers are usuable over a transition period, it is impossible to generate the extra numbers required without more than one change. Have you actually thought of a way it could have been done with fewer than four changes?
If you had a better suggestion as to how to reform the phone number system to get the necessary extra numbers, you could have made it then.
Still, I'll settle for hearing it now.
However, not many people do not understand this, and will give their number as 0208 123 4567, and dial the full 11 digits.
It's neither open source of free of charge, but certainly not expensive.
Other industries will follow as the necessary skills and infrastructure become more wide-spread.
The rich world will continue to specialise in those industries which require the latest cutting edge infrastructure and skills, and slowly discard the rest.
US and British pints are different sizes. If we were using 0.47l pints, I'm sure the switch to metric would have occured a long time ago.
Indeed they do - in the UK, a new form of parliamentary procedure was invented just to process the vast quantity of railway-related acts.
You obviously didn't realise that Labour had been in power for five years at the last general election. I admit, not noticing that the we no longer had a Tory government is very excusable.
So, by having this copy-protection measure in place, they can prove that any MP3 of that track must be illegal. That makes it a lot easier to go after 'pirates' than if they had to prove intent to redistribute in every case.
What will happen is that ISPs in that country will be forced to block access to the offending web site. This has already happened in some minor venues, such as Saudi Arabia. There have also been failed attempts in France.
Another non-deterministic thing is optimising for a particular processore. It's still the case that packages distributed as binaries typically use the 'lowest common denominator' instruction set common to all modern i86 processors. If you compile your own, it can be optimised for whatever processors you have, both in terms of using the new instructions, and optimal instruction ordering.
Is the form factor that important if the memory bus speed is increasing? It's going to be incompatible anyway.
So the fact that Microsoft give away Internet Explorer for free means that they're not anti-free software either?
Does that mean I still have the chance to be first with a proof of Pythagoras's theorem?
So, if I'm trying to decipher something, I might well find it easier if I ran it through DES with an unknown key first? Why have I never seen that it any code-breakers handbook? (Of course, if the keys are non-indpendent, extra encrpytion may reduce security.)
This can't be right - if Apple were found liable to pay damages relating to code contributed by an individual, it is highly unlikely that they could reclaim significant compensation from any coder; a minor is not much different in this case from a 19 year old college student.
What next - proof of $500,000 in liquid assets before you can contribute code?
Yes, plenty. Principally, Searle assumes that an emergent property of a system must also be present in the main active part of a system. This is plainly false.
Another of Searle's arguments is pretty damning as well; those that pursue strong AI are, in fact, favoring a form of dualism. For them the mind is completely separate from the brain, an idea that has been pretty much discarded by the thinking public. Why is it, when computers are concerned, that the mind is no longer a product of a brain?
I don't buy this either. Physically very different brains (organic or computational) may give rise to very similar minds. Where is the dualism in that?
you can get "free energy" out of an expanding universe with relative ease: just tie a string to two masses and wind it around an axle, place the masses many megaparsecs apart, and let the expansion of the universe pull them apart and consequentially spin the axle.
Nah, this won't work, because the string and axle will expand too - you just get the same stationary system, but a bit bigger.
The 'windowless vehicle' analogy only applies to a uniform gravitational field. Your thought experiment has your feet in a stronger gravitational field than your head (i.e. being ripped away from you).
These guys have a cunning method to make sure their data can't be read:
"sensitive data is stored on hard disks which are hard-wired to physically self-destruct when tampered with"
If you're lucky it might take out the investigating officer too...
If you're a VB shop, then why not use VB to read the messages and call the COM objects?
There's no need to do any fancy thread-pooling - just write a single-threaded VB app, and get MQSeries to trigger more instances at various queue depths. There's some performance degradation if you're using transactions (and you should) but this should work acceptably.
You're right that triggering a process for each message is wasteful.
>Unfortunately lossy is only relevant for images and sounds.
And press releases?