What is the real use of getting a man to Mars or another planet other thean bragging about it for the next 70 years? Somehow, some people are in favor of a manned space program. The question is, what is the tangible benifit of sending people to the moon/Mars/Jupiter/Proxima Centauri?
"Sending people to the moon" had a lot of prerequisites. These prerequisites include:
Developed by NASA
memory foam (used in your mattresses)
home insulation (not exactly invented by NASA, but they changed it from adhoc hacks into an actual science and engineering discipline)
Your eyes can only pickup 80fps anyway; you wouldn't know if it was 100 or 10,000 fps unless the fps counter didn't say.
It doesn't matter what your eyes can see. It's about responsiveness. Faster rendering makes the game more responsive. See, we live in an analog world which has essentially infinite FPS. The closer a game gets to that then the better it feels because it will respond at the exact microsecond you do something. It does make a very real difference.
Not really. It's very common to design your game loop so that the code which updates the screen is modularly-separated from the code which does game-state updating and input reading.
Thus you could build your game engine to render 30 frames per second, but do 10'000 game-state updates per second and 10'000 input (from keyboard, mouse, joystick, etc.) per second.
If you ever see the term "frame skipping" in an option menu somewhere, the engine's FPS and "game-state-updates-per-second" are probably not in perfect sync.
There are many accomplished IT admins who use their CS knowledge on a daily basis, I am one of them.
Out of curiosity, what CS knowledge do you use on a daily basis as an IT admin? I'm a programmer with a CS degree, so I only have a vague idea of what IT admins do. The only stuff I can come up with in what I imagine an IT admin job is like are:
Theory of computation (i.e. deterministic finite automatons, turing machine, context free grammars, etc.) -- to determine what is and is not possible to accomplish via shell scripts and regular expressions (so you don't waste time attempting thei mpossible).
Divide and Conquer/Boolean search (i.e. very generic debugging skills) -- to quickly isolate a problematic piece of hardware, or software configuration.
The other stuff I learned (compiler theory, multithreading, data structures, big O notation, design patterns, etc.) all seem inapplicable to what I imagine a typical IT admin job is like.
It is -- and should be IMO -- illegal to portray children having sex.
A lot of people feel the novel "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov is a pretty important work of art. If it were illegal to portray children having sex, Nabokov might never have written that novel.
Plus as some cartoons are over the age over 18 like the Simpsons for example. They're 20 years old as a point of fact.
It's been over 20 years since the characters of Bart and Lisa Simpson were conceived, yes, but the characters are still canonically depicted to be ages 10 and 8, respectively.
Heck, Nabokov wrote Lolita over 50 years ago. Does that mean that fans of "lolita" erotica are now into "mature" women? No, because the titular character remains perenially twelve.
They made a movie of Lolita, and they used an actress who was an adult to play Lolita. The actress was an adult, but she played the role of someone who was a child. Does that mean the movie is illegal? Should we decide legality based on the age of the role played, or based on the age of the person playing the role?
The question is rhetorical, as I hope everyone agrees that we should decide legality based on the age of the person playing the role. The actress was an adult, and thus Lolita is legal.
As I've said in another comment, I think it's ridiculous to treat cartoon characters the same as real people, but if the lawmakers want to go down that path, they have to be self-consistent: The characters were conceived approximately 20 years ago, and so they should be treated the same as 20 year old actors, regardless of the age of the characters they play.
No, but the idea of sex with children turns him on. That makes him a dangerous, very potential child predator
Not really. Lots of people enjoy playing violent videogames, and that doesn't make them "a dangerous, very potential" violent person.
A lot of people can and do enjoy illegal (the Grand Theft Auto videogame, the Count of Monte Cristo book), immoral (the Goodfellas movie) and just generally unadvised (the Jackass movie) acts in fictional contexts, without having any serious amount of temptation of committing those acts in real life.
Plus as some cartoons are over the age over 18 like the Simpsons for example. They're 20 years old as a point of fact.
So I can legally masturbate furiously to a video of a 10-year old being having sex with her father that was filmed eight years ago? Awesome! No seriously, there might be a logical fallacy in what you said.
Is there any significance to your choosing "10" and "8" (perhaps because 10 + 8 = 18?) in your example? I suspect what the OP was getting at is that the cartoon has been around for 20 years (Acccording to Wikipedia, the Simpsons started on December 17th, 1989 -- so actually it's 19 years).
I'm confident (but haven't checked) that Maggie appeared in the very first Simpsons episode. Therefore, Maggie was conceived on or before December 17th, 1989, making her at least 19 years old. She happens to portray a 2 year old in the fictional world presented by the show, but she herself is 19.
Personally, I find the notion of "treating cartoon people as real people" to be literally ridiculous (i.e. enticing ridicule), but if the lawmakers choose to go down this path, then I think a logically and legally consistent conclusion would be to treat Maggie as a 19-year old playing a 2 year old character on TV, just as most actors playing teenagers on TV sitcoms are much older than the characters they play as.
This would put Maggie into the the crosshair of a different law (not sure where the law has jurisdiction, is it still the US?) which says that even if everyone involved is an adult, if they are portraying children, then it's still illegal. IMHO, this latter law should definitely be abolished, because often there is not enough evidence within the fiction itself to say with absolute legal certainty whether a given story is portraying children or not, and thus there is too much subjectivity.
Yes, that's called a worm or trojan etc, which is different from virus.
To get infected with a worm or trojan user must download it, give it permissions to run and execute it. (So it usually requires some social engineering to get someone to do all this for you if you are malware writer).
Virus, on the other hand usually means user does not have to do anything but use computer normally to get infected.
Actually, the term "virus" refers to code which lies inside another executable, but which cannot exist on its own. Computer viruses are so named because of the analogy to the biological virus.
Because a virus must be attached to some other executable, it usually DOES require "user cooperation", in the form of executing the infected executable.
You actually seemed to have gotten the concept of a worm and a virus reversed. See Wikipedia
A computer worm is a self-replicating computer program. It uses a network to send copies of itself to other nodes (computer terminals on the network) and it may do so without any user intervention. Unlike a virus, it does not need to attach itself to an existing program. Worms almost always cause harm to the network, if only by consuming bandwidth, whereas viruses almost always corrupt or modify files on a targeted computer.
Recall that viruses existed way back in the 1980s, and possibly earlier. They were transmitted via floppy diskettes back then. So viruses certainly do not require "unsecure ports" or anything like that to transfer themselves without user interaction. That's a worm.
I've never understood the reason for anti-virus software in general. If there's an exploit, then just fix the security hole. Apple does this with their security updates.
The only capability a platform needs to provide for viruses to be possible on that platform is the ability for users to write to executable files. If your platform is programmable -- in other words, if it is possible to be a hobbyist programmer, and to write your own programs on the platform -- then your platform is vulnerable to viruses.
This has nothing to do with "security holes". When you download a random program off of the internet, run it, and it tries to modify another program, there is no way for the OS to know whether that thing you downloaded is (A) a virus or (B) a legitimate patch, such as security update to one of your existing programs.
People have been saying the same damn thing for 8 years. "Just wait, one day OS X will get a virus. You'll see."
Ok, well, after hearing this for almost a decade I'm kinda starting to get skeptical.
I don't know about the people you've been hearing it from, but I am fairly confident that when/if OS X has a majority market share as a consumer OS, it will have viruses and other forms of malware. From a utilitarian point of view, if you're trying to create a botnet, it makes most sense to have your botnet target the most prevalent platform run by home users on the internet. In particular, you don't want to target the most prevalent platform run by system administrators, because they probably know how to take care of their machines.
If the OS allows users to write to the harddisk, and to communicate over the internet, (and I can't imagine a useful consumer desktop OS that wouldn't allow these) then it contains everything necessary for malware to exist on that platform. If the OS allows user-written files to be executable (a very important feature if you want users to have hobbyist programmers on your platform), then the platform contains everything necessary for viruses to exist.
If slashdot doesn't want to create an official category for stories hyping technologies that seem somehow always to be that elusive 10-20 years away (eg robust A.I., fusion power, widespread adoption of fuel cells, anything Ray Kurzweil ever says not involving synthesizers)
I might be wrong but isn't the temperature of space absolut zero. How can you get colder than absolut zero? Can someone with knowledge of the subject matter be so kind to explain?
Joke answer: absolute zero divided by one hundred still equals absolute zero.
More serious answer: The temperature is actually around 3 Kelvin, so I guess they got the temperature down to about 0.03K.
If someone takes the website I'm working on now for a client, and replaces the business name and some of the text, they are using my work (time) without my permission. It's not right.
I don't disagree, and never said otherwise. I was just pointing out that the word "cost" has a generally agreed upon meaning, and if you use that word to refer to someone else, you'll merely innocently confuse them a best, or maliciously mislead them at worst.
If you want to argue about the morality of someone taking advantage of someone else's work without permission, just say it's not right to take advantage of someone else's work without permission. No need to muddy the waters by using inappropriate terms like "cost".
I dunno, it works out if you do consumer OSs:
Win 3
There were two versions of Windows before Windows 3, that's why they called it Windows 3. And Windows 3 wasn't an OS, it was a shell that ran on top of DOS.
Notice, though, that the guy from the summary doesn't say that this is the 7th OS made by Microsoft, but rather than this is the 7th release of Windows. Thus it's somewhat irrelevant whether or not Windows 3 is an OS or not.
What wiki? So you are saying that it goes:
Win 1
Win 2
Win 3
Win 4 (95, 98, ME)
Win 5 (NT 3, NT 4, 2000, XP)
Win 6 (Vista)
Win 7
That's plausible except for grouping the entire history of NT up until Vista as one big version. Then again, it also fits into what I was saying if they only count consumer OSs and XP is the only version of NT that "counts" prior to Vista.
No, it goes:
Windows 1.0 to 3.0
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows ME
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Re-read the summary. He said "the seventh release of Windows" (emphasis added), not the 7th version of windows. 95, 98 and ME are essentially the same version (as you noted in your breakdown) from a technology perspective, but they are different releases from a marketting perspectives.
Well, if people use software MS would have otherwise been paid for, they are costing Microsoft money.
No, there's a difference between costing someone money, and not giving them the profit they would have made had you given them money.
Your argument only holds provided people don't actually use software they didn't purchase.
Not sure what "your argument" refers to (maybe you should quote the argument?). I just wanted to elaborate on your point: If you use Microsoft software, you may be costing them money, in that your software probably uses up resource (CPU time, bandwidth) from their Windows Update server.
In other words, downloading a copy of Windows XP from a torrent doesn't automatically/immediately cost Microsoft any money, but everyone who is using Microsoft software is (probably) costing Microsoft money.
How about putting two pictures of animals next to each other and writing "Which animal in real life is larger?"
This reduces to traditional Captchas pretty easily. Instead of two pictures of animals, imagine two pictures of letters, with the question "Which letter occurs first in the traditional ordering of the English alphabet?" As soon as you can recognize the two letters, you can trivially determine which comes first because the computer probably has a "database" of all english letters, and their ordering in the alphabet.
So to solve, you would nearly need a database of all animals appearing in your captcha test, and their ordering in size.
Note also that the summary mentioned that "picture captchas", e.g. recognizing what a picture represents ("is that a dog or a cat?") has already been "solved".
If humans cannot design a CAPTCHA that computers can't break, but it's trivial to design a CAPTCHA that's easy for computers but impossible for humans to do in the time limit (simple arithmetic with really big numbers), then surely computers are smarter than humans, right?
Notice that computers cannot design anything at all, not without a human guiding the whole design process in the first place. Perhaps humans are smarter than computers?
How many liters of water fit into a five-liter bottle?
The answer is 5.
Hmm... That depends. How much water is in the five liter bottle to start with?
Irrelevant. If there were already, say, 3 liters in the five liter bottle, the answer is still "5". The question isn't asking how much more water might fit, or how much additional water you could pour into the bottle.
Is there anything else in the bottle?
Non sequitur. You are talking about "the bottle", implying a specific bottle. The question is asking about "a bottle", implying a platonic ideal.
Does it have to be a whole number of litres?
No.
Assuming an empty bottle, and integral numbers of litres, the following can fit: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
The answer is "5". You might argue that "3 liters of water fit in a five-liter bottle" is a true statement. So what? "I like chocolate ice cream" is also a true statement, but it doesn't answer the question, the question being "How many liters of water fit into a five-liter bottle?".
Of course CAPTCHAs are a security feature. Unless you have some irrational hatred of robots that inspires you to bar them from your websites, you're trying to keep them out for security reasons.
I don't like having robots participate in the discussion on my website because the discussion they generate is not particularly interesting (e.g. it's usually spam). This has nothing to do with security; nobody's data or identity is compromised if robots log in. We just have a poorer signal-to-noise ratio if we let bots in. But if/when bots pass the Turing test and make interesting contributions to the discussion, I would gladly have robots in on my website.
So yeah, CAPTCHAs are not a security feature, at least not on the sites I run.
You're dividing both sides by zero, which is not allowed in standard algebra. If you do allow it, you can prove things such as 1 = 2:
Let A and B be arbitrary non-zero values such that A = B.
A = B
AA = BA (multiply both sides by A)
AA - BB = BA - BB (Subtract BB from both sides)
(A-B)(A+B) = B(A-B) (factor both sides)
A+B = B (divide both sides by A-B)
B + B = B (observing that A = B)
2B = B (Combine terms on the left)
2 = 1 (divide by B)
The error in the proof lies in the step where we divide both sides by A - B, namely where we divide both sides by zero.
Encourage asking questions...you'd be surprised at how many people are afraid of asking questions because they feel they will sound stupid (at least in high school).
I don't know if the OP would be surprised, but I just thought I'd mention that people are still afraid of asking questions because they feel they will sound stupid at the university level. And in fact, even in the workplace, some adults still feel afraid to ask questions.
(In response to a "I've never had to use Calculus in programming" comment:)
Considering I'm almost 40, I program computers for a living and have to use it all the time, I am thinking you are a some kind of web developer.
I don't know if that's supposed to be some sort of dig at web developers, implying that calculus is needed for "serious" programming, and web developers are not "real" programmers. I write compilers for a living. Never had to use calculus for that.
Slashdot Mirror
What is the real use of getting a man to Mars or another planet other thean bragging about it for the next 70 years? Somehow, some people are in favor of a manned space program. The question is, what is the tangible benifit of sending people to the moon/Mars/Jupiter/Proxima Centauri?
"Sending people to the moon" had a lot of prerequisites. These prerequisites include:
And many, many more (see http://techtran.msfc.nasa.gov/at_home.html, http://spaceplace.jpl.nasa.gov/en/kids/spinoffs2.shtml, http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/5-8/features/F_Spinoffs_Extra.html etc.)
"Putting a man on mars" is simply an easy-to-define milestone. The real benefits are too long to lists.
Your eyes can only pickup 80fps anyway; you wouldn't know if it was 100 or 10,000 fps unless the fps counter didn't say.
It doesn't matter what your eyes can see. It's about responsiveness. Faster rendering makes the game more responsive. See, we live in an analog world which has essentially infinite FPS. The closer a game gets to that then the better it feels because it will respond at the exact microsecond you do something. It does make a very real difference.
Not really. It's very common to design your game loop so that the code which updates the screen is modularly-separated from the code which does game-state updating and input reading.
Thus you could build your game engine to render 30 frames per second, but do 10'000 game-state updates per second and 10'000 input (from keyboard, mouse, joystick, etc.) per second.
If you ever see the term "frame skipping" in an option menu somewhere, the engine's FPS and "game-state-updates-per-second" are probably not in perfect sync.
Here's a way to root a box:
We now know what the ever-mysterious step 2 (formally known only as "???") is!
There are many accomplished IT admins who use their CS knowledge on a daily basis, I am one of them.
Out of curiosity, what CS knowledge do you use on a daily basis as an IT admin? I'm a programmer with a CS degree, so I only have a vague idea of what IT admins do. The only stuff I can come up with in what I imagine an IT admin job is like are:
The other stuff I learned (compiler theory, multithreading, data structures, big O notation, design patterns, etc.) all seem inapplicable to what I imagine a typical IT admin job is like.
It is -- and should be IMO -- illegal to portray children having sex.
A lot of people feel the novel "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov is a pretty important work of art. If it were illegal to portray children having sex, Nabokov might never have written that novel.
Plus as some cartoons are over the age over 18 like the Simpsons for example. They're 20 years old as a point of fact.
It's been over 20 years since the characters of Bart and Lisa Simpson were conceived, yes, but the characters are still canonically depicted to be ages 10 and 8, respectively.
Heck, Nabokov wrote Lolita over 50 years ago. Does that mean that fans of "lolita" erotica are now into "mature" women? No, because the titular character remains perenially twelve.
They made a movie of Lolita, and they used an actress who was an adult to play Lolita. The actress was an adult, but she played the role of someone who was a child. Does that mean the movie is illegal? Should we decide legality based on the age of the role played, or based on the age of the person playing the role?
The question is rhetorical, as I hope everyone agrees that we should decide legality based on the age of the person playing the role. The actress was an adult, and thus Lolita is legal.
As I've said in another comment, I think it's ridiculous to treat cartoon characters the same as real people, but if the lawmakers want to go down that path, they have to be self-consistent: The characters were conceived approximately 20 years ago, and so they should be treated the same as 20 year old actors, regardless of the age of the characters they play.
He is not a child predator.
No, but the idea of sex with children turns him on. That makes him a dangerous, very potential child predator
Not really. Lots of people enjoy playing violent videogames, and that doesn't make them "a dangerous, very potential" violent person.
A lot of people can and do enjoy illegal (the Grand Theft Auto videogame, the Count of Monte Cristo book), immoral (the Goodfellas movie) and just generally unadvised (the Jackass movie) acts in fictional contexts, without having any serious amount of temptation of committing those acts in real life.
Plus as some cartoons are over the age over 18 like the Simpsons for example. They're 20 years old as a point of fact.
So I can legally masturbate furiously to a video of a 10-year old being having sex with her father that was filmed eight years ago? Awesome! No seriously, there might be a logical fallacy in what you said.
Is there any significance to your choosing "10" and "8" (perhaps because 10 + 8 = 18?) in your example? I suspect what the OP was getting at is that the cartoon has been around for 20 years (Acccording to Wikipedia, the Simpsons started on December 17th, 1989 -- so actually it's 19 years).
I'm confident (but haven't checked) that Maggie appeared in the very first Simpsons episode. Therefore, Maggie was conceived on or before December 17th, 1989, making her at least 19 years old. She happens to portray a 2 year old in the fictional world presented by the show, but she herself is 19.
Personally, I find the notion of "treating cartoon people as real people" to be literally ridiculous (i.e. enticing ridicule), but if the lawmakers choose to go down this path, then I think a logically and legally consistent conclusion would be to treat Maggie as a 19-year old playing a 2 year old character on TV, just as most actors playing teenagers on TV sitcoms are much older than the characters they play as.
This would put Maggie into the the crosshair of a different law (not sure where the law has jurisdiction, is it still the US?) which says that even if everyone involved is an adult, if they are portraying children, then it's still illegal. IMHO, this latter law should definitely be abolished, because often there is not enough evidence within the fiction itself to say with absolute legal certainty whether a given story is portraying children or not, and thus there is too much subjectivity.
Yes, that's called a worm or trojan etc, which is different from virus.
To get infected with a worm or trojan user must download it, give it permissions to run and execute it. (So it usually requires some social engineering to get someone to do all this for you if you are malware writer).
Virus, on the other hand usually means user does not have to do anything but use computer normally to get infected.
Actually, the term "virus" refers to code which lies inside another executable, but which cannot exist on its own. Computer viruses are so named because of the analogy to the biological virus.
Because a virus must be attached to some other executable, it usually DOES require "user cooperation", in the form of executing the infected executable.
You actually seemed to have gotten the concept of a worm and a virus reversed. See Wikipedia
A computer worm is a self-replicating computer program. It uses a network to send copies of itself to other nodes (computer terminals on the network) and it may do so without any user intervention. Unlike a virus, it does not need to attach itself to an existing program. Worms almost always cause harm to the network, if only by consuming bandwidth, whereas viruses almost always corrupt or modify files on a targeted computer.
Recall that viruses existed way back in the 1980s, and possibly earlier. They were transmitted via floppy diskettes back then. So viruses certainly do not require "unsecure ports" or anything like that to transfer themselves without user interaction. That's a worm.
I've never understood the reason for anti-virus software in general. If there's an exploit, then just fix the security hole. Apple does this with their security updates.
The only capability a platform needs to provide for viruses to be possible on that platform is the ability for users to write to executable files. If your platform is programmable -- in other words, if it is possible to be a hobbyist programmer, and to write your own programs on the platform -- then your platform is vulnerable to viruses.
This has nothing to do with "security holes". When you download a random program off of the internet, run it, and it tries to modify another program, there is no way for the OS to know whether that thing you downloaded is (A) a virus or (B) a legitimate patch, such as security update to one of your existing programs.
People have been saying the same damn thing for 8 years. "Just wait, one day OS X will get a virus. You'll see."
Ok, well, after hearing this for almost a decade I'm kinda starting to get skeptical.
I don't know about the people you've been hearing it from, but I am fairly confident that when/if OS X has a majority market share as a consumer OS, it will have viruses and other forms of malware. From a utilitarian point of view, if you're trying to create a botnet, it makes most sense to have your botnet target the most prevalent platform run by home users on the internet. In particular, you don't want to target the most prevalent platform run by system administrators, because they probably know how to take care of their machines.
If the OS allows users to write to the harddisk, and to communicate over the internet, (and I can't imagine a useful consumer desktop OS that wouldn't allow these) then it contains everything necessary for malware to exist on that platform. If the OS allows user-written files to be executable (a very important feature if you want users to have hobbyist programmers on your platform), then the platform contains everything necessary for viruses to exist.
If slashdot doesn't want to create an official category for stories hyping technologies that seem somehow always to be that elusive 10-20 years away (eg robust A.I., fusion power, widespread adoption of fuel cells, anything Ray Kurzweil ever says not involving synthesizers)
Linux on the desktop, etc.
I might be wrong but isn't the temperature of space absolut zero. How can you get colder than absolut zero? Can someone with knowledge of the subject matter be so kind to explain?
Joke answer: absolute zero divided by one hundred still equals absolute zero.
More serious answer: The temperature is actually around 3 Kelvin, so I guess they got the temperature down to about 0.03K.
MS should have $200 more (or whatever price) any way you look at it.
Avoid "should" statements. See the Is-Ought Problem for why.
If someone takes the website I'm working on now for a client, and replaces the business name and some of the text, they are using my work (time) without my permission. It's not right.
I don't disagree, and never said otherwise. I was just pointing out that the word "cost" has a generally agreed upon meaning, and if you use that word to refer to someone else, you'll merely innocently confuse them a best, or maliciously mislead them at worst.
If you want to argue about the morality of someone taking advantage of someone else's work without permission, just say it's not right to take advantage of someone else's work without permission. No need to muddy the waters by using inappropriate terms like "cost".
There were two versions of Windows before Windows 3, that's why they called it Windows 3. And Windows 3 wasn't an OS, it was a shell that ran on top of DOS.
Notice, though, that the guy from the summary doesn't say that this is the 7th OS made by Microsoft, but rather than this is the 7th release of Windows. Thus it's somewhat irrelevant whether or not Windows 3 is an OS or not.
What wiki? So you are saying that it goes:
Win 1
Win 2
Win 3
Win 4 (95, 98, ME)
Win 5 (NT 3, NT 4, 2000, XP)
Win 6 (Vista)
Win 7
That's plausible except for grouping the entire history of NT up until Vista as one big version. Then again, it also fits into what I was saying if they only count consumer OSs and XP is the only version of NT that "counts" prior to Vista.
No, it goes:
Re-read the summary. He said "the seventh release of Windows" (emphasis added), not the 7th version of windows. 95, 98 and ME are essentially the same version (as you noted in your breakdown) from a technology perspective, but they are different releases from a marketting perspectives.
Well, if people use software MS would have otherwise been paid for, they are costing Microsoft money.
No, there's a difference between costing someone money, and not giving them the profit they would have made had you given them money.
Your argument only holds provided people don't actually use software they didn't purchase.
Not sure what "your argument" refers to (maybe you should quote the argument?). I just wanted to elaborate on your point: If you use Microsoft software, you may be costing them money, in that your software probably uses up resource (CPU time, bandwidth) from their Windows Update server.
In other words, downloading a copy of Windows XP from a torrent doesn't automatically/immediately cost Microsoft any money, but everyone who is using Microsoft software is (probably) costing Microsoft money.
How about putting two pictures of animals next to each other and writing "Which animal in real life is larger?"
This reduces to traditional Captchas pretty easily. Instead of two pictures of animals, imagine two pictures of letters, with the question "Which letter occurs first in the traditional ordering of the English alphabet?" As soon as you can recognize the two letters, you can trivially determine which comes first because the computer probably has a "database" of all english letters, and their ordering in the alphabet.
So to solve, you would nearly need a database of all animals appearing in your captcha test, and their ordering in size.
Note also that the summary mentioned that "picture captchas", e.g. recognizing what a picture represents ("is that a dog or a cat?") has already been "solved".
If humans cannot design a CAPTCHA that computers can't break, but it's trivial to design a CAPTCHA that's easy for computers but impossible for humans to do in the time limit (simple arithmetic with really big numbers), then surely computers are smarter than humans, right?
Notice that computers cannot design anything at all, not without a human guiding the whole design process in the first place. Perhaps humans are smarter than computers?
Maybe it depends on your definition of "smarter"?
How many liters of water fit into a five-liter bottle?
The answer is 5.
Hmm... That depends. How much water is in the five liter bottle to start with?
Irrelevant. If there were already, say, 3 liters in the five liter bottle, the answer is still "5". The question isn't asking how much more water might fit, or how much additional water you could pour into the bottle.
Is there anything else in the bottle?
Non sequitur. You are talking about "the bottle", implying a specific bottle. The question is asking about "a bottle", implying a platonic ideal.
Does it have to be a whole number of litres?
No.
Assuming an empty bottle, and integral numbers of litres, the following can fit: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
The answer is "5". You might argue that "3 liters of water fit in a five-liter bottle" is a true statement. So what? "I like chocolate ice cream" is also a true statement, but it doesn't answer the question, the question being "How many liters of water fit into a five-liter bottle?".
If you have three apples and you take one apple away, how many apples do you have?
Correct answer: 1 (The apple you have. The one you took away and therefore 'have')
Correct answer: 2 (The remaining apples viewing the operation as a mathematical subtraction - expected answer from a child)
Correct answer: 3 (You have three apples. Movement does not imply a change of ownership)
Correct answer: 4 (More tenuous, but no assumption should be made that 'one apple' came from the initial set of 'three apples')
Correct answer: x where x >= 1. Who says you didn't already start with some apples before you took that one additional apple as stated in the puzzle?
Correct answer: x where x <= 0. Who says you weren't indebted to the apple mafia?
Correct answer: x where x is in N (natural numbers). The union of the above two answers.
Correct answer: x where x is in R (real numbers). Maybe you partially ate some of the apples?
Correct answer: x where x is in C (complex numbers). Maybe you're trying to be a smart ass and come up with unexpected answers?
Of course CAPTCHAs are a security feature. Unless you have some irrational hatred of robots that inspires you to bar them from your websites, you're trying to keep them out for security reasons.
I don't like having robots participate in the discussion on my website because the discussion they generate is not particularly interesting (e.g. it's usually spam). This has nothing to do with security; nobody's data or identity is compromised if robots log in. We just have a poorer signal-to-noise ratio if we let bots in. But if/when bots pass the Turing test and make interesting contributions to the discussion, I would gladly have robots in on my website.
So yeah, CAPTCHAs are not a security feature, at least not on the sites I run.
x = x + 1
x/x = (x+1)/x
1 = x/x + 1/x
1 = 1 + 1/x
0/1 = 1/x
0*x = 1
x = 1/0 = infinity.
The last step of your proof is invalid:
0*x = 1
x = 1/0
You're dividing both sides by zero, which is not allowed in standard algebra. If you do allow it, you can prove things such as 1 = 2:
Let A and B be arbitrary non-zero values such that A = B.
A = B
AA = BA (multiply both sides by A)
AA - BB = BA - BB (Subtract BB from both sides)
(A-B)(A+B) = B(A-B) (factor both sides)
A+B = B (divide both sides by A-B)
B + B = B (observing that A = B)
2B = B (Combine terms on the left)
2 = 1 (divide by B)
The error in the proof lies in the step where we divide both sides by A - B, namely where we divide both sides by zero.
I'm a high school student [...]
Encourage asking questions...you'd be surprised at how many people are afraid of asking questions because they feel they will sound stupid (at least in high school).
I don't know if the OP would be surprised, but I just thought I'd mention that people are still afraid of asking questions because they feel they will sound stupid at the university level. And in fact, even in the workplace, some adults still feel afraid to ask questions.
Considering I'm almost 40, I program computers for a living and have to use it all the time, I am thinking you are a some kind of web developer.
I don't know if that's supposed to be some sort of dig at web developers, implying that calculus is needed for "serious" programming, and web developers are not "real" programmers. I write compilers for a living. Never had to use calculus for that.