The ones they speak to will have been bred in captivity, and know nothing of the ocean (like the lost tribes of ulan-baata believe the world ends at the edge of the forest).
However, if the language can be taught to some dolphins, AND if they prove capable of teaching it to their children (like some gorillas have), AND if the dolphins are released AND if we manage to find an n-th generation dolphin that still speaks a comprehensible dialect (you have to imagine that our choice of words to include in the language and our tenses and sentence structure are hardly going to be spot-on for life at sea) THEN we may learn something about dolphin culture.
Hey, we could actually learn alot from how the language has evolved, even if it is no longer comprehensible. But in until then, insights into thought processes are "all" (pretty amazing even that, IMHO) we can hope for.
Hard coded? What do you mean by that? That you can add code snippets to Widgets? This would allow you to code much more complicated effects than the simple pixmap switching that most skins allow you.
I think that sawfish has some of that ability (being a dialect of lisp it is turing complete, but you know what I mean), with some themes generating all their images on the fly (gotta use those cycles for SOMETHING).
Anyways, I wanted to steer the discussion back towards code; display postscript -- as used in (NeXT? NeWS? I forget) -- was massively powerful for this reason; its UI was driven by a [restricted?] postscript dialect. This allowed you to basically push alot of nift into the display logic. Now this would all be of historical interest only if it were not for the fact that PDF is a restricted form of Postscript, and apple's display technology is based on PDF.
the only caveat is that AFAIK, pdf is so restricted that it is back to being a file format and no longer a turing complete programmign language.
I couldn't follow his logic there. I couldn't follow why ports would lead to a hardware war -- quite the opposite I'd think, and then he says [correctly] that systems are secondary, and games primary.
If games are primary isn't it best if they are ported to all platforms to defray production costs?
I've always been fascinated by codecs that allow you to trade CPU time for compression efficiency.
An example of this was Iterated System's fractal codec, where you could spend literally days of 33 Mhz i486 CPU time searching for a better compression, or be satisfied with the compression you got from a few minute's search.
Are there any modern codecs like that? So that a powerful machine can really crank the compression up, but a slower machine had better have a fat pipe, 'cause it isn't going to have time to get much compression done.
I guess it'd have to be a codec whose compressed representation was almost turing complete (I guess we could just send a program, but the halting problem seems intractable.)
erm. that comment about my math skills and not being able to evaluate... should have pointed out that I was interested in methods other than straight out plug-in-the-numbers-and-see-how-they-fall.
yes. Hence my argument that the Torah seekers always find what they are looking for, because they are searching for short strings.
however, in general, using an alphabet with X characters, to find a specific string of length M in a [random] string of length N+M is of likelyhood
P = 1 - (1 - X^(-M))^N
(that was much prettier before the lameness filter kicked in. Does anyone think that the lameness filter does more good than harm? I doubt this)
Is that right? Now, my math skill are kinda stuck.
I don't know how to evaluate the likelyhood of finding, say, 10^6 specific binary numbers (to represent a circle a-la Sagan) in a string 10^12 bits long.
You are right tho, that since pi is irrational, all strings of finite length MUST exist somewhere in its representation, so for Sagan to use this as a means of easter-egging, you'd have to encounter the message at a meaningful index. Then you'd have to calculate the probability of this happening randomly.
The human genome is finite, so eggs could be alot smaller and still be statistically significant.
What is the state of Occam? I recall wanting a bunch of T9000s (or am I mixing up the name with the terminator?) because my amiga 500 blew at 3d rendering.
But that was a long time ago. Still, it woudl be cool to revive these old computers. Can anyone confirm or deny the rumor that Yale sold a CM-1 a few years back for $500, becaues they needed the floor space and it was a hassle getting parts?
Carl Sagan's book (not the movie, which IMHO blew) "Contact" ends with the protagonist searching for 'numinous' evidence; the aliens have hinted that encoded in the deep structure of the universe there are hints that it has been created artificially.
IIRC she finds that if you search out in the trillions of decimal places of pi, all of a sudden the seemingly psuedorandom numbers stop and a sequence of ones and zeros starts, which when lined up in a square, paint a rasterised circle. That's a pretty neat idea of an easter egg.
Of course, now that you've given them the idea, all those people who like to search for clues in the Torah will start searching DNA for hidden messages from god. Most of them will find what they're looking for because statistically all short strings will exist in a much longer one.
However, it would be literaly mind blowing if something unmistakable, like a straight forward representation of the equations that solve the grand unified field problem were found nestled amongst the junk DNA I'm carrying around.
well, the whole thing about copyright is that it prohibits me from making derivative works. So if the licence is simply copyrighted, then I am unable to change it to suit and give it a different name. Additionally, it prohibits me from using the text of the GPL but under a different name -- say LPG.
It'd be different if the licence had a licence that explicitly allowed me to make derivative works.
Both of these cases are different issues than the innapropriate use of the GPL name, which I imagine is covered under sepate provisions.
Erm. It just occurred to me that licences perhaps are not copyrightable. Doesn't that apply only to creative works? Can it be argued that a licence isn't creative, as it is merely procriptive (I'm sure there's a legal term that is more accurate)?
I thought c-- was pointer artithmetic-less, which would make it impossible to write self modifying code? Unless you're suggesting some staged programming techniques?
Is there even a compiler for c-- yet? I was under the impression that it was still at the proposal stage.
I have to admit that I've not followed the link, so apologies if I am making incorrect or redundant statements here.
I suspect that a human's insight might be mainly which parts are worth optimising.
Given the devlish difficulty in hand scheduling and hinting assembly code for modern processors, I wonder if the proper thing isn't to write a superoptimiser. Optimal register allocation and instruction choice is NP complete, so the only way to solve it in some cases is exhaustive search.
I'm envisaging a system where human input is basically which code blocks to superoptimize and leave the computer to chug away at it overnight. Perhaps genetic algorithms (with test data to check for valid executions) would work?
Reminds me when BayBank and BankBoston merged. It seemed only fair to take the first part of one name and second part of the other, so I thought it should either be called BayBoston, or my favorite: BankBank.
Correspondingly, TurboCare or LinuxLinux are the only options here.
Let me see if I have you right: the "difficulty" in this cipher is storing the right sequence of digits. As evesdroppers we either have to
1) break the symmetric cipher used to send the offset/length estimate of the pad to be used (est difficulty 128 bits)
2) or store all the random numbers from the time of reception + decoding (since no numbers before that time can be assumed to be in the possession of the recipient) until the message has been sent.
Now, the problem is that the bitrate of the broadcast OTP is limited by what can reliably be recieved -- say 100Mb/s -- and the sender and reciever want to send the message soonish. If I have a terabyte disk array, then I can store 80,000 seconds (~ 24 hrs) worth. That is only a keyspace of 40 bits.
The longer you delay sending the message, the better, but if the attacker can influence the situation by selectively disrupting the reception of the OTP, they can make it become abritrarily unreliable to send a message of either significant length or security. As soon as either sender or recipient is jammed during key recording, they have to start over.
Of course, Alice and Bob can start sending spurious (start/length,keyid) messages (and then select one of these keys at random) to make Eve's recording needs all the more difficult, but the fundamental problem is that Alice and Bob have to outwait my storage ability to be sure of message security. And then I can start storing snippets of the OPT randomly, so that I can probablistically try to decode partial messages.
Note that once I've managed to decode part of a message, I also have a plaintext/ciphertext pair to use to try to crack the symmetric encryption of the initial start message.
Erm. I've been seeing this alot, lately. Memepool had it, as did the acme heartmaker linked off that page (cute!).
Can anyone explain why this phrase in broken english is gaining popularity? Are the elite doods getting as sick and tired of their numerals as the rest of us? Is it a reference to something beyond my ken, or just something someone made up?
I'm actually really suprised that Microsoft would be clueless enough to invoke the specter of McCarthyism and UnAmerican activities.
I mean, MS do tend to be a bit arrogant, but that sort of quote is just designed to blow up in their collective face.
of course, that wasn't an offical MS press release, but rather a personal statement. MS execs do have a great track record for the old open-mouth-insert-foot routine.
My science teacher in highschool drove us mad with his hairbrained insistence that kilograms were measures of mass, not weight. But they're the same thing! It wasn't until several weeks later that we finally grasped the difference.
I don't know about pounds tho. The use of the unit foot-pound for a measure of torque and the use of pounds of thrust to measure jet engines implies that pounds is a measure of force, which is weight, not mass.
Good point. A brief web search turned up arguments both ways. You are clearly correct about the timing; it was a trademark before WWI, and they lost a lawsuit attempting to protect it in 1921.
It appears that it was more of a strange patent ruling than a trademark dispute; the patent the drug ran out in 1917, and with it -- the court ruled -- did the trademark. This ruling confuses me, but I guess we can excuse it because it is old.
Check it out yourself at
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/d om ain/tmcases/bayer.htm
or just a quote:
The most striking part of the label read, 'Bayer-- Tablets of Aspirin.' While this did not show any abandonment of the name, which there has never been, it did show how the plaintiff itself recognized the meaning which the word had acquired, because the phrase most properly means that these tablets were Bayer's make of the drug known as 'Aspirin.' It presupposes that the persons reached were using the word to denote a kind of product. Were it not so, why the addition of 'Bayer,' and especially why the significant word 'of'?
So I fess up. I was talking outta my ass again. You were right in questioning me.
I can see the 3d placement along the 2d camera path -- basically, you are deriving how the virtual camera should move and then blue screening that onto the real footage.
But: are you able to deduce accurate environment maps? Occulusion of the 3d virutal elements by real world items? This would seem to require true scene intepretation, while just deducing a virtual camera path from the real world footage sounds much more doable. Do you also deal with zooming and depth of field?
I can't agree with that. while the Campanile film is stunning, it seems to require a handcrafted 3d model onto which to wrap the multiple images.
This article seems to be a technique to recover 3d information from a large number of slightly offset pictures.
The paper shows an illustration in which the camera lens is covered by a large number of circular/fish-eyeish lenses in a grid pattern.
By integrating the slightly different view points of each one, the 3d information of the scene can be recovered. The Japanese researchers (and this is where I started skimming...) seem to have several heuristics for performing this transformation in realtime. The application is that HDTV sets equipped with appropriate decoding circutry could allow the user to rotate the scene very slightly at will. Of course, this comes at a significant resolution cost... almost so much so that I wonder if it wouldn't be more efficient to send 9 or so exponentially placed pictures in one (reducing resolution by 3) and using simple morphing to simulate free movement between them.
"aspirin" is one of the watershed cases in trademark law: Bayer failed to adequately protect its trademark on the name "aspirin", so the name stopped being their property and became public property.
That is why trademark holders HAVE to be pricks about people using their name; if you let people get away with using it long enough, you no longer have a right to it.
Any thoughts about what G forces the drive would be under? You gotta figure that the case is going to absorb a lot of the initial shock. I guess the impulse would be quite high, but IIRC some drives can withstand 60 odd G while reading and I don't even want to think about what they'd withstand while parked. I f my math is right, it takes 2.5 odd seconds to fall 30 meters, so the drives would be unpowered at least that long -- plenty of time to park the heads.
Slashdot Mirror
nah.
The ones they speak to will have been bred in captivity, and know nothing of the ocean (like the lost tribes of ulan-baata believe the world ends at the edge of the forest).
However, if the language can be taught to some dolphins, AND if they prove capable of teaching it to their children (like some gorillas have), AND if the dolphins are released AND if we manage to find an n-th generation dolphin that still speaks a comprehensible dialect (you have to imagine that our choice of words to include in the language and our tenses and sentence structure are hardly going to be spot-on for life at sea) THEN we may learn something about dolphin culture.
Hey, we could actually learn alot from how the language has evolved, even if it is no longer comprehensible. But in until then, insights into thought processes are "all" (pretty amazing even that, IMHO) we can hope for.
Hard coded? What do you mean by that? That you can add code snippets to Widgets? This would allow you to code much more complicated effects than the simple pixmap switching that most skins allow you.
I think that sawfish has some of that ability (being a dialect of lisp it is turing complete, but you know what I mean), with some themes generating all their images on the fly (gotta use those cycles for SOMETHING).
Anyways, I wanted to steer the discussion back towards code; display postscript -- as used in (NeXT? NeWS? I forget) -- was massively powerful for this reason; its UI was driven by a [restricted?] postscript dialect. This allowed you to basically push alot of nift into the display logic. Now this would all be of historical interest only if it were not for the fact that PDF is a restricted form of Postscript, and apple's display technology is based on PDF.
the only caveat is that AFAIK, pdf is so restricted that it is back to being a file format and no longer a turing complete programmign language.
I couldn't follow his logic there. I couldn't follow why ports would lead to a hardware war -- quite the opposite I'd think, and then he says [correctly] that systems are secondary, and games primary.
If games are primary isn't it best if they are ported to all platforms to defray production costs?
I've always been fascinated by codecs that allow you to trade CPU time for compression efficiency.
An example of this was Iterated System's fractal codec, where you could spend literally days of 33 Mhz i486 CPU time searching for a better compression, or be satisfied with the compression you got from a few minute's search.
Are there any modern codecs like that? So that a powerful machine can really crank the compression up, but a slower machine had better have a fat pipe, 'cause it isn't going to have time to get much compression done.
I guess it'd have to be a codec whose compressed representation was almost turing complete (I guess we could just send a program, but the halting problem seems intractable.)
erm. that comment about my math skills and not being able to evaluate... should have pointed out that I was interested in methods other than straight out plug-in-the-numbers-and-see-how-they-fall.
yes. Hence my argument that the Torah seekers always find what they are looking for, because they are searching for short strings.
however, in general, using an alphabet with X characters, to find a specific string of length M in a [random] string of length N+M is of likelyhood
P = 1 - (1 - X^(-M))^N
(that was much prettier before the lameness filter kicked in. Does anyone think that the lameness filter does more good than harm? I doubt this)
Is that right? Now, my math skill are kinda stuck.
I don't know how to evaluate the likelyhood of finding, say, 10^6 specific binary numbers (to represent a circle a-la Sagan) in a string 10^12 bits long.
You are right tho, that since pi is irrational, all strings of finite length MUST exist somewhere in its representation, so for Sagan to use this as a means of easter-egging, you'd have to encounter the message at a meaningful index. Then you'd have to calculate the probability of this happening randomly.
The human genome is finite, so eggs could be alot smaller and still be statistically significant.
What is the state of Occam? I recall wanting a bunch of T9000s (or am I mixing up the name with the terminator?) because my amiga 500 blew at 3d rendering.
But that was a long time ago. Still, it woudl be cool to revive these old computers. Can anyone confirm or deny the rumor that Yale sold a CM-1 a few years back for $500, becaues they needed the floor space and it was a hassle getting parts?
Carl Sagan's book (not the movie, which IMHO blew) "Contact" ends with the protagonist searching for 'numinous' evidence; the aliens have hinted that encoded in the deep structure of the universe there are hints that it has been created artificially.
IIRC she finds that if you search out in the trillions of decimal places of pi, all of a sudden the seemingly psuedorandom numbers stop and a sequence of ones and zeros starts, which when lined up in a square, paint a rasterised circle. That's a pretty neat idea of an easter egg.
Of course, now that you've given them the idea, all those people who like to search for clues in the Torah will start searching DNA for hidden messages from god. Most of them will find what they're looking for because statistically all short strings will exist in a much longer one.
However, it would be literaly mind blowing if something unmistakable, like a straight forward representation of the equations that solve the grand unified field problem were found nestled amongst the junk DNA I'm carrying around.
That would settle the issue rather decisively.
Because it is a metacircular statement. It recursively defines the terms it applies to itself. How is that not neat?
Furthermore, the licence is meta information. It never occurred to me that that information ASLO could have meta information.
But then I enjoyed GEB, so that sort of thing tickles by funny bone. YMMV
well, the whole thing about copyright is that it prohibits me from making derivative works. So if the licence is simply copyrighted, then I am unable to change it to suit and give it a different name. Additionally, it prohibits me from using the text of the GPL but under a different name -- say LPG.
It'd be different if the licence had a licence that explicitly allowed me to make derivative works.
Both of these cases are different issues than the innapropriate use of the GPL name, which I imagine is covered under sepate provisions.
Erm. It just occurred to me that licences perhaps are not copyrightable. Doesn't that apply only to creative works? Can it be argued that a licence isn't creative, as it is merely procriptive (I'm sure there's a legal term that is more accurate)?
I take it back. Of course you'd need pointer arithmetic. Sometimes, I astound myself with the statements I make.
I thought c-- was pointer artithmetic-less, which would make it impossible to write self modifying code? Unless you're suggesting some staged programming techniques?
Is there even a compiler for c-- yet? I was under the impression that it was still at the proposal stage.
I have to admit that I've not followed the link, so apologies if I am making incorrect or redundant statements here.
I suspect that a human's insight might be mainly which parts are worth optimising.
Given the devlish difficulty in hand scheduling and hinting assembly code for modern processors, I wonder if the proper thing isn't to write a superoptimiser. Optimal register allocation and instruction choice is NP complete, so the only way to solve it in some cases is exhaustive search.
I'm envisaging a system where human input is basically which code blocks to superoptimize and leave the computer to chug away at it overnight. Perhaps genetic algorithms (with test data to check for valid executions) would work?
Has this ever been attempted?
they've copyrighted the licence!?!
That's rich. That just made my day. Thank you RMS!
Reminds me when BayBank and BankBoston merged. It seemed only fair to take the first part of one name and second part of the other, so I thought it should either be called BayBoston, or my favorite: BankBank.
Correspondingly, TurboCare or LinuxLinux are the only options here.
Let me see if I have you right: the "difficulty" in this cipher is storing the right sequence of digits. As evesdroppers we either have to
1) break the symmetric cipher used to send the offset/length estimate of the pad to be used (est difficulty 128 bits)
2) or store all the random numbers from the time of reception + decoding (since no numbers before that time can be assumed to be in the possession of the recipient) until the message has been sent.
Now, the problem is that the bitrate of the broadcast OTP is limited by what can reliably be recieved -- say 100Mb/s -- and the sender and reciever want to send the message soonish. If I have a terabyte disk array, then I can store 80,000 seconds (~ 24 hrs) worth. That is only a keyspace of 40 bits.
The longer you delay sending the message, the better, but if the attacker can influence the situation by selectively disrupting the reception of the OTP, they can make it become abritrarily unreliable to send a message of either significant length or security. As soon as either sender or recipient is jammed during key recording, they have to start over.
Of course, Alice and Bob can start sending spurious (start/length,keyid) messages (and then select one of these keys at random) to make Eve's recording needs all the more difficult, but the fundamental problem is that Alice and Bob have to outwait my storage ability to be sure of message security. And then I can start storing snippets of the OPT randomly, so that I can probablistically try to decode partial messages.
Note that once I've managed to decode part of a message, I also have a plaintext/ciphertext pair to use to try to crack the symmetric encryption of the initial start message.
Erm. I've been seeing this alot, lately. Memepool had it, as did the acme heartmaker linked off that page (cute!).
Can anyone explain why this phrase in broken english is gaining popularity? Are the elite doods getting as sick and tired of their numerals as the rest of us? Is it a reference to something beyond my ken, or just something someone made up?
I'm actually really suprised that Microsoft would be clueless enough to invoke the specter of McCarthyism and UnAmerican activities.
I mean, MS do tend to be a bit arrogant, but that sort of quote is just designed to blow up in their collective face.
of course, that wasn't an offical MS press release, but rather a personal statement. MS execs do have a great track record for the old open-mouth-insert-foot routine.
My science teacher in highschool drove us mad with his hairbrained insistence that kilograms were measures of mass, not weight. But they're the same thing! It wasn't until several weeks later that we finally grasped the difference.
I don't know about pounds tho. The use of the unit foot-pound for a measure of torque and the use of pounds of thrust to measure jet engines implies that pounds is a measure of force, which is weight, not mass.
It appears that it was more of a strange patent ruling than a trademark dispute; the patent the drug ran out in 1917, and with it -- the court ruled -- did the trademark. This ruling confuses me, but I guess we can excuse it because it is old.
Check it out yourself at
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/
or just a quote:
So I fess up. I was talking outta my ass again. You were right in questioning me.
Hrm.
I can see the 3d placement along the 2d camera path -- basically, you are deriving how the virtual camera should move and then blue screening that onto the real footage.
But: are you able to deduce accurate environment maps? Occulusion of the 3d virutal elements by real world items? This would seem to require true scene intepretation, while just deducing a virtual camera path from the real world footage sounds much more doable. Do you also deal with zooming and depth of field?
I can't agree with that. while the Campanile film is stunning, it seems to require a handcrafted 3d model onto which to wrap the multiple images.
This article seems to be a technique to recover 3d information from a large number of slightly offset pictures.
The paper shows an illustration in which the camera lens is covered by a large number of circular/fish-eyeish lenses in a grid pattern.
By integrating the slightly different view points of each one, the 3d information of the scene can be recovered. The Japanese researchers (and this is where I started skimming...) seem to have several heuristics for performing this transformation in realtime. The application is that HDTV sets equipped with appropriate decoding circutry could allow the user to rotate the scene very slightly at will. Of course, this comes at a significant resolution cost... almost so much so that I wonder if it wouldn't be more efficient to send 9 or so exponentially placed pictures in one (reducing resolution by 3) and using simple morphing to simulate free movement between them.
Just a thought.
You know this, but others may not:
"aspirin" is one of the watershed cases in trademark law: Bayer failed to adequately protect its trademark on the name "aspirin", so the name stopped being their property and became public property.
That is why trademark holders HAVE to be pricks about people using their name; if you let people get away with using it long enough, you no longer have a right to it.
really?
Any thoughts about what G forces the drive would be under? You gotta figure that the case is going to absorb a lot of the initial shock. I guess the impulse would be quite high, but IIRC some drives can withstand 60 odd G while reading and I don't even want to think about what they'd withstand while parked. I f my math is right, it takes 2.5 odd seconds to fall 30 meters, so the drives would be unpowered at least that long -- plenty of time to park the heads.
erm. I didn't mean depth of the tree, I mean length of the leaf information.