Even if Moore's law were to continue (which I seriously doubt), the combinatorics of Go is rising drastically faster than doubling transistors/performance every 18 months could hope to cope with.
Calculating the next N possible moves (no matter how smartly you cut-off) is simply not the answer in Go, IMHO. Seeing how ladders and other "inevitable" developments can go on for dozens of moves makes a look-ahead impractical.
I haven't read TFA, but in the long run beating higher dan level players will require recognition of strategic constellations and differentiating them from mere clusters of stones.
It seems as if the geometries are calculated from scratch in real time.
This article is gonna have quite an effect on their servers;)
At first I though: *yuch* this is awful with the geometries being at very low resolution and with strong artifacts. But as the script kept processing it's looking really good by now, except that it's still hour-glassing and I can't zoom in after minutes.
Seeing how well Image Based Rendering works (as for example in this impressive, and already old demo of a 3D morphable face model), many things are now being calculated from a single image or a pair of images.
Object geometries, light sources, occlusions, textures can be determined more and more precisely from simple photos, making it easier to add objects which exhibit the correct shadows and highlights for the surrounding scene.
So my guess would be that confidently identifying fudget images is already near-impossible and will become even more so with more robust image based rendering algorithms
IANANS (I am not a Neuroscientist), but as with other approaches of interfacing the human brain with periphery it seems to work really well to let the brain do the hard interfacing work.
So, as haphazardly as the brain structures, memory storage, sensory input, etc. might have evolved, it might still be flexible enough to figure out a sufficiently simple interface with anything you might connect to it. Given a smart training of finding the newly connected "hardware", it might be possible to interface with some really interesting brain extensions.
The complexity and the abstractness of the extension might be limited by the very pragmatic learning approach of the brain, making it more and more difficult to learn the interface if the learning progress is too abstract/far away for the brain to "stay interested". Though maybe with sufficiently long or "intense" sensory deprivation that could be extended a bit.
My problem with the argument of the "haphazard" structure of the brain is that it could have been used to deny the possibility of artificial limbs or artificial eyes, which both seem to work pretty well. Sure, these make use of already pre-existing interfaces in the brain, but as far as I know (not very far) the brain is incredibly malleable at least during the first 3 years of childhood.
So, as ethically questionable as that may sound to us, it might make sense to implant such extensions in newborn babies and let them interface to them in the same way they learn to use their eyes, coordinate their limbs and acquire language.
The number of $230 million seems a bit high. Certainly a spammer should have to pay for the traffic he cost and I can see that he should pay a multiple of the money he made from the spamming. Even some kind of punitive damage seems in order since he willingly impacted another's business for personal gain.
But $230 million seems completely out of whack and unrelated to the damage inflicted. $300 dollars per spam seems excessive when the average return per spam mail probably lies far below $1. But I guess in times when Facebook is "worth" $15 billion, $230 million is just peanuts.
I think we can all assume that the perpetrators will not be able to pay the $230 million, thus making it partly an empty gesture.
"Practical Electronics for Inventors" is a fabulous book despite its rather dumb title. It gives a very hands-on approach while not shying away from the advanced topics
"The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz is definitely the standard for electronics, but for me it delved too much into the theory. It is extremely thorough, but maybe not geared towards people just wanting to build their own first small circuits.
AFAIK, most songs/albums these days are recorded, edited, mastered and post-processed digitally. Therefore, given a suitably big digital medium there couldn't be "more information" on an analog medium like vinyl than on the digital one.
sorry, couldn't RTFA because the link text was kinda prohibiting.
the poster makes it sound as if the conclusion from the statistic is something like "oh my god, windows users are sooo dumb". but also quoting the percentage of all users using windows would reveal a prior probability of something in the 90s already. so, assuming that the "experiment" has an error greater 0, the deviation between the prior probability and 98% has almost no significance...
well, but nobody said anything about encrypting information twice. if ROT-13 is a DMCA approved encryption algorithm, then encrypting your encrypted content should be well within your possibilities.
this text was encrypted twice (for added security) with ROT-13. by somehow gaining access to the plain text of this message you have twice circumvented a DMCA approved encryption method and are hereby ordered to cease and desist.
If this user downloads pirated material and use this only for his own entertainment [...] he or she can not be prosecuted through the new directive.
For one thing the article just talks about DOWNLOADING, which is only half of any functioning P2P system. Furthermore I'm not quite sure how people are supposed to download content if the P2P systems are banned.
But from the measly article it's hard to glean any kind of information about any of this;(
How long will it be until thoughtcrime becomes a punishable offense?
Excepting end-users doesn't alleviate this at all, especially since almost all end-users also upload copyrighted material in todays P2P networks (hence the acronym).
Since anyone can write a simple P2P system in a few hours and using just a few hundred lines of code, and since such a client could be applied for all kinds of legal and sensible uses like distributing patches, podcasts, etc, I find it a horrible idea to potentially send people to prison for writing such a system.
I agree that copyright infringement should be punished, but in light of the high usage of P2P systems no government acting in the interest of its people should criminalize such huge percentage of the people it represents. There has to be a real compromise between the content creators/owners and the end-users in whose interest governments should ultimately act. And sending people to prison or fining them many thousands of euros for illegally downloading digital content just doesn't seem that interest-protecting for the people to me!
Take the example of Esperanto - a constructed language. Although most of its words and grammar come from other international languages, building a correct sentence in it will require you to adhere to its rules. If Esperanto were a patented/IP'd concept, would any company willing to deal in it be forced to pay licensing fees to its creator?
Or take sign language as another example. Would it be OK to ask people for a fee to use sign language, even though nobody told them about this when they learned it?
It comes down to the same problems as with software patents. Simplistic, long-running pattents hurt society and making universal human communication tools like languages patentable/IP'able would cause FAR more harms than good.
I don't want to find the quote, but what I remember is that he said that people might lead a "wrong" life and accept him sincerely at the very last moment would be treated as equals to those who had accepted him all life long.
On the other hand it's implied (if not said somewhere) that chosing Jesus as a means to avoid hell would not work, as it would not be a wholehearted decision and trust in him.
And hell is certainly mentioned nowhere in the New Testament (except some drug induced grueling accounts in the Apocalypse) and AFAIK not even in the Old Testament (although I'm not sure about that one). Hell is mainly an invention of the Church to make their "sheep" more docile.
At least this puts the arguments over "freedom of speech" into perspective.
If a company were to break a law simply by using a (albeit rare) language in their product than we know that something just isn't right with how patents, intellectual property and free speech are handled.
Not that we'd need this trial to confirm this hunch.
i can't believe that an enterprise like microsoft has gotten away with employees having admin rights all these years. how did they prevent all those worms, viruses and trojans from infecting their pcs? i assume that at microsoft people mainly use IE and outlook; and this in conjunction with admin rights all around should really spell disaster.
in a sense, it's nice for those working there because i've seen myself how limited one can get in certain situations without some non-standard rights, but from the IT department's point of view, ubiquituous amateur administrators are a real nightmare.
Jeezus, people, get over this self-righteous trip about source code. As an SE, I appreciate having source code available, but will in general just run what works.
as stallman has stated again and again, free software is not about superior functionality but about a vibrant community. many non-democratic forms of government "work", but most people would (hopefully) choose a democracy over them, for it better ensures their involvement in future developments. the "just run what works" attitude lures people into vendor lockins and might well lead into a situation where the users are robbed of most of their short-time options.
obviously, java is not a prime example of this, but "just run what works" is generally a dangerous prerogative.
I do understand the importance of FOSS. But the zealots pushing so hard for its ubiquity will only end up killing it without at least a little compromise.
freedom/democracy are not necessarily a good place to start compromising. on some issues there just have to be firm principles. of course sun has every right to license their sources any which way, but i am proud and relieved that distributions like debian and gentoo voice their concerns loudly.
Keep in mind that "we" count as an extremely small minority. The vast majority don't even know the issue exists! And of those who do, the vast majority just want free software and don't even have the ability to compile their own, much less make modifications to the source code.
i have no idea what your point is. being a minoriy has absolutely no bearings about whether a position is right or wrong. free software is not about HAVING to obtain/compile/alter/distribute sources; it's about having the option to do so. in some countries a minority of eligible people go voting, that does not mean that this minority is wrong in doing so.
XP is very easy to install and configure, and doesn't take more than a few hours including patches and service packs on a newer machine
sic! i'm pretty sure that in a few hours (which BTW are preceded by many more hours learning what to do and how to do it) you could get an appropriate user-friendly linux distro to fix many issues of the article.
Security is a major issue due to poor design choices and user error, but with a little common sense, a free virus scanner, and a firewall, XP is also remarkably stable.
that assumes a pretty generous definition of "common sense"! the process is also extremely time critical. if you happen to have a server with dhcp and an internet flatrate, chances are that you acquire some kind of malware even before you get to install the firewall and virus scanner. maybe i'm exaggerating here, but similar things have happened to me.
please don't pretend that a completely ignorant user would do everything right in a windows install. on a virgin system you have to setup the internet, download the virus scanner and the firewall and by that time you already run a high risk of having acquired 1) malware through IE, 2) trojans/worms/virii through running services.
as games aren't exactly linux' strenght, you don't really have to create your own video card. just go with a run-of-the-mill ati card that runs well with the open ati/radeon driver and that's that.
as far as i know (too lazy to look it up) there are already several big OEMs that sell with linux pre-installed.
i doubt anyone's saying that even if linux were superiour in every which way, it's adoption would rise astronomically and microsoft would be squashed instantaneously. that's simply not how market share in general and "best practices" in particular work!
Linux is getting pretty close: most of the applications I use on Windows now are available there too. But there's no reason to switch, so far, because nothing that I want to do is *only* available there.
i don't want to play the evangelization game, but have you ever thought about "freedom"? would you argue in the same manner when it concerned the policital system of your home country, which though not free has yet never done anything to your dislike?
i'm not even saying that one should bear the costs of freedom just for their own sake, but the least you can do is consider them. locking documents in proprietary formats, paying BIG bucks for windows/office and all the other plunder you need for a usable system (zip/rar, burn software, dvd player, image editing software,...) should not be taken for granted but rather weighed against the costs of their alternatives.
the choice remains yours, but comparing them on totally uneven grounds is frivolous!
THANK YOU. that was one of the more insightful comments on this 768-comment beast. and finally, even though from a pure usability standpoint it might be reasonable, criticising linux for the hardware vendors not supporting it better, is a little harsh.
if hardware came with linux drivers included and burners came with cd-recording/dvd-playing software (even if closed source), things would look completely different. the fact that i'm not advocating such a change doesn't mean that in the reals of this discussion it would make quite the difference.
and, as a consequence, people like the original author might consider adding at least a minimum of criticism towards hardware vendors and css-legislation instead of pragmatically stating the consequences.
ok, after reconsidering, i guess he bad-mouthed his (so-to-speak) employer and then his funding was discontinued. so i guess he has only partial reason to complain. but i still think that OpenSSH funding should be more important than such political quarrels.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably not as practicable, but isn't http://opencores.org/ kinda missing from this list.
Also, a lot of fun to be had with FPGA-based boards (http://www.fpga4fun.com/, http://hackaday.com/2008/05/22/fpga-projects-roundup/)
Even if Moore's law were to continue (which I seriously doubt), the combinatorics of Go is rising drastically faster than doubling transistors/performance every 18 months could hope to cope with.
Calculating the next N possible moves (no matter how smartly you cut-off) is simply not the answer in Go, IMHO. Seeing how ladders and other "inevitable" developments can go on for dozens of moves makes a look-ahead impractical.
I haven't read TFA, but in the long run beating higher dan level players will require recognition of strategic constellations and differentiating them from mere clusters of stones.
It seems as if the geometries are calculated from scratch in real time.
;)
This article is gonna have quite an effect on their servers
At first I though: *yuch* this is awful with the geometries being at very low resolution and with strong artifacts. But as the script kept processing it's looking really good by now, except that it's still hour-glassing and I can't zoom in after minutes.
Seeing how well Image Based Rendering works (as for example in this impressive, and already old demo of a 3D morphable face model), many things are now being calculated from a single image or a pair of images.
Object geometries, light sources, occlusions, textures can be determined more and more precisely from simple photos, making it easier to add objects which exhibit the correct shadows and highlights for the surrounding scene.
So my guess would be that confidently identifying fudget images is already near-impossible and will become even more so with more robust image based rendering algorithms
IANANS (I am not a Neuroscientist), but as with other approaches of interfacing the human brain with periphery it seems to work really well to let the brain do the hard interfacing work.
;)
So, as haphazardly as the brain structures, memory storage, sensory input, etc. might have evolved, it might still be flexible enough to figure out a sufficiently simple interface with anything you might connect to it. Given a smart training of finding the newly connected "hardware", it might be possible to interface with some really interesting brain extensions.
The complexity and the abstractness of the extension might be limited by the very pragmatic learning approach of the brain, making it more and more difficult to learn the interface if the learning progress is too abstract/far away for the brain to "stay interested". Though maybe with sufficiently long or "intense" sensory deprivation that could be extended a bit.
My problem with the argument of the "haphazard" structure of the brain is that it could have been used to deny the possibility of artificial limbs or artificial eyes, which both seem to work pretty well. Sure, these make use of already pre-existing interfaces in the brain, but as far as I know (not very far) the brain is incredibly malleable at least during the first 3 years of childhood.
So, as ethically questionable as that may sound to us, it might make sense to implant such extensions in newborn babies and let them interface to them in the same way they learn to use their eyes, coordinate their limbs and acquire language.
Good times
99.99% of Chinese people agree that polls and elections should be manipulated for the greater good.
The number of $230 million seems a bit high.
Certainly a spammer should have to pay for the traffic he cost and I can see that he should pay a multiple of the money he made from the spamming.
Even some kind of punitive damage seems in order since he willingly impacted another's business for personal gain.
But $230 million seems completely out of whack and unrelated to the damage inflicted. $300 dollars per spam seems excessive when the average return per spam mail probably lies far below $1.
But I guess in times when Facebook is "worth" $15 billion, $230 million is just peanuts.
I think we can all assume that the perpetrators will not be able to pay the $230 million, thus making it partly an empty gesture.
"Practical Electronics for Inventors" is a fabulous book despite its rather dumb title. It gives a very hands-on approach while not shying away from the advanced topics
"The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz is definitely the standard for electronics, but for me it delved too much into the theory. It is extremely thorough, but maybe not geared towards people just wanting to build their own first small circuits.
AFAIK, most songs/albums these days are recorded, edited, mastered and post-processed digitally. Therefore, given a suitably big digital medium there couldn't be "more information" on an analog medium like vinyl than on the digital one.
Am I right or am I right?
sorry, couldn't RTFA because the link text was kinda prohibiting.
the poster makes it sound as if the conclusion from the statistic is something like "oh my god, windows users are sooo dumb". but also quoting the percentage of all users using windows would reveal a prior probability of something in the 90s already. so, assuming that the "experiment" has an error greater 0, the deviation between the prior probability and 98% has almost no significance...
well, but nobody said anything about encrypting information twice. if ROT-13 is a DMCA approved encryption algorithm, then encrypting your encrypted content should be well within your possibilities.
this text was encrypted twice (for added security) with ROT-13. by somehow gaining access to the plain text of this message you have twice circumvented a DMCA approved encryption method and are hereby ordered to cease and desist.
If this user downloads pirated material and use this only for his own entertainment [...] he or she can not be prosecuted through the new directive. For one thing the article just talks about DOWNLOADING, which is only half of any functioning P2P system. Furthermore I'm not quite sure how people are supposed to download content if the P2P systems are banned. But from the measly article it's hard to glean any kind of information about any of this ;(
How long will it be until thoughtcrime becomes a punishable offense?
Excepting end-users doesn't alleviate this at all, especially since almost all end-users also upload copyrighted material in todays P2P networks (hence the acronym).
Since anyone can write a simple P2P system in a few hours and using just a few hundred lines of code, and since such a client could be applied for all kinds of legal and sensible uses like distributing patches, podcasts, etc, I find it a horrible idea to potentially send people to prison for writing such a system.
I agree that copyright infringement should be punished, but in light of the high usage of P2P systems no government acting in the interest of its people should criminalize such huge percentage of the people it represents. There has to be a real compromise between the content creators/owners and the end-users in whose interest governments should ultimately act. And sending people to prison or fining them many thousands of euros for illegally downloading digital content just doesn't seem that interest-protecting for the people to me!
Take the example of Esperanto - a constructed language. Although most of its words and grammar come from other international languages, building a correct sentence in it will require you to adhere to its rules. If Esperanto were a patented/IP'd concept, would any company willing to deal in it be forced to pay licensing fees to its creator?
Or take sign language as another example. Would it be OK to ask people for a fee to use sign language, even though nobody told them about this when they learned it?
It comes down to the same problems as with software patents. Simplistic, long-running pattents hurt society and making universal human communication tools like languages patentable/IP'able would cause FAR more harms than good.
I don't want to find the quote, but what I remember is that he said that people might lead a "wrong" life and accept him sincerely at the very last moment would be treated as equals to those who had accepted him all life long.
On the other hand it's implied (if not said somewhere) that chosing Jesus as a means to avoid hell would not work, as it would not be a wholehearted decision and trust in him.
And hell is certainly mentioned nowhere in the New Testament (except some drug induced grueling accounts in the Apocalypse) and AFAIK not even in the Old Testament (although I'm not sure about that one). Hell is mainly an invention of the Church to make their "sheep" more docile.
At least this puts the arguments over "freedom of speech" into perspective.
If a company were to break a law simply by using a (albeit rare) language in their product than we know that something just isn't right with how patents, intellectual property and free speech are handled.
Not that we'd need this trial to confirm this hunch.
sadly power corrupts, that goes for dictators as it goes for big-brother technologies.
in a sense, it's nice for those working there because i've seen myself how limited one can get in certain situations without some non-standard rights, but from the IT department's point of view, ubiquituous amateur administrators are a real nightmare.
as stallman has stated again and again, free software is not about superior functionality but about a vibrant community. many non-democratic forms of government "work", but most people would (hopefully) choose a democracy over them, for it better ensures their involvement in future developments. the "just run what works" attitude lures people into vendor lockins and might well lead into a situation where the users are robbed of most of their short-time options.
obviously, java is not a prime example of this, but "just run what works" is generally a dangerous prerogative.
I do understand the importance of FOSS. But the zealots pushing so hard for its ubiquity will only end up killing it without at least a little compromise.
freedom/democracy are not necessarily a good place to start compromising. on some issues there just have to be firm principles. of course sun has every right to license their sources any which way, but i am proud and relieved that distributions like debian and gentoo voice their concerns loudly.
Keep in mind that "we" count as an extremely small minority. The vast majority don't even know the issue exists! And of those who do, the vast majority just want free software and don't even have the ability to compile their own, much less make modifications to the source code.
i have no idea what your point is. being a minoriy has absolutely no bearings about whether a position is right or wrong. free software is not about HAVING to obtain/compile/alter/distribute sources; it's about having the option to do so. in some countries a minority of eligible people go voting, that does not mean that this minority is wrong in doing so.
sic! i'm pretty sure that in a few hours (which BTW are preceded by many more hours learning what to do and how to do it) you could get an appropriate user-friendly linux distro to fix many issues of the article.
Security is a major issue due to poor design choices and user error, but with a little common sense, a free virus scanner, and a firewall, XP is also remarkably stable.
that assumes a pretty generous definition of "common sense"! the process is also extremely time critical. if you happen to have a server with dhcp and an internet flatrate, chances are that you acquire some kind of malware even before you get to install the firewall and virus scanner. maybe i'm exaggerating here, but similar things have happened to me.
please don't pretend that a completely ignorant user would do everything right in a windows install. on a virgin system you have to setup the internet, download the virus scanner and the firewall and by that time you already run a high risk of having acquired 1) malware through IE, 2) trojans/worms/virii through running services.
as far as i know (too lazy to look it up) there are already several big OEMs that sell with linux pre-installed.
i doubt anyone's saying that even if linux were superiour in every which way, it's adoption would rise astronomically and microsoft would be squashed instantaneously. that's simply not how market share in general and "best practices" in particular work!
i don't want to play the evangelization game, but have you ever thought about "freedom"? would you argue in the same manner when it concerned the policital system of your home country, which though not free has yet never done anything to your dislike?
i'm not even saying that one should bear the costs of freedom just for their own sake, but the least you can do is consider them. locking documents in proprietary formats, paying BIG bucks for windows/office and all the other plunder you need for a usable system (zip/rar, burn software, dvd player, image editing software, ...) should not be taken for granted but rather weighed against the costs of their alternatives.
the choice remains yours, but comparing them on totally uneven grounds is frivolous!
THANK YOU.
that was one of the more insightful comments on this 768-comment beast.
and finally, even though from a pure usability standpoint it might be reasonable, criticising linux for the hardware vendors not supporting it better, is a little harsh.
if hardware came with linux drivers included and burners came with cd-recording/dvd-playing software (even if closed source), things would look completely different. the fact that i'm not advocating such a change doesn't mean that in the reals of this discussion it would make quite the difference.
and, as a consequence, people like the original author might consider adding at least a minimum of criticism towards hardware vendors and css-legislation instead of pragmatically stating the consequences.
what exactly is Microsoft(TM) the microsoft of?
ok, after reconsidering, i guess he bad-mouthed his (so-to-speak) employer and then his funding was discontinued. so i guess he has only partial reason to complain. but i still think that OpenSSH funding should be more important than such political quarrels.