True, though it's a different challenge. Diablo is real-time, so there's more twitch involved. Nethack is a straight strategy game, and the question is how much you want to gamble.
Damned if this story doesn't make me feel like some Angband-style goodness, though (never was a NetHack fan). I believe I'll fire up Tales of Middle Earth (the most complex and my favorite Angband variant) and have some fun.
Actually, this isn't a great idea anyway, but there are all *kinds* of things that have soft real time requirements on IP networks (granted, probably shouldn't be, but are).
Actually, I can think of a couple of reasons this is still an issue. What if it isn't on the Internet...does the connection just get dropped?
Does this device send out DNS queries to determine where to redirect stuff to?
What happens if you have a test suite for a web-based application and IT just added a Belkin piece-of-junk router? Bam, mysterious failures. You could spend a week trying to figure out what the sporadic errors you're getting are from.
What if you're using SOAP or similar software, and the software you're using doesn't deal well with mysterious crap coming back from the server?
Belkin is a piss-poor company that sells lousy hardware and overpriced cables.
They aren't on my "buy" list anymore, either (and I *have* purchased Belkin products in the past).
You're thinking of old decisions from lower courts. The final ruling on this is from last year from the Supreme Court of Canada -- which ruled that it was illegal.
Under international copyright law, a publisher is not required to make content available for sale in a country for that content to be protected by copyright law. This is why fansubs (while generally winked at by anime publishers) are illegal. You won't find Apple providing Quicktime downloads of fansubs any time soon.
As a matter of fact, this particular point was *exactly* what drove the introduction of international copyright law and Mark Twain's involvement in its introduction -- before this, someone publishing a book in the United States might have it immediately reproduced en masse in Europe. To keep a book from being pirated, you had to have the resources and be willing to gamble that it would do well, and publish (depending upon law, individually applying for copyright) in all countries simultaneously.
How is it piracy when the signal isn't commercially available in Canada?
Piracy is the colloquial term for copyright infringement. Canada recognizes international copyright law and the fact that the content is copyrighted and not being legally obtained.
What's your point? That just because we don't know for absolute certain that something is impossible must make it possible by default?
No, of course not. That just because we think something will happen doesn't make it impossible for something else to happen.
No, we do know. We were able to show that the sun uses nuclear fusion to produce its energy, and we understand how this process works. You're equating scientific theories with educated guesses, which tells me that you know precisely dick about how science works.
Except for the fact that our theory of star lifecycle falls apart for known cases, which is why I mentioned quasars. You're taking the currently best-accepted model and asserting that we understand completely how it works and that it's true, which we clearly don't and it isn't.
Whether or not a law is statistical in nature does not have any bearing on whether it is statistical in application.
This is ridiculous. We predict that most of the time that a given thing will happen...and it does. We also predict that very rarely, that given thing will not happen. You said that it was *impossible* for it to happen.
The AI can also observe an interact with Bob. We cannot observe or interact with God. Your analogy is flawed.
That certainly isn't necessarily the case. Bob finishes his AI and dies, the AI grows up, and can find no traces of Bob other than his magnum opus -- it.
Having another tube for eating eliminates a fatal flaw and adds robustness.
You ignored my counterargument -- that you have no grounds for claiming that the drawbacks of such a design change do not outweigh the benefits.
Oh please. Engineers follow universal principles of design robustness and stability. Did you know that we would be much faster and more efficient with our movement if we had treads, or more than two legs? So why don't we have 4 legs? Because our evolutionary ancestors did not. Now I'll patiently wait for you to trip all over yourself trying to reconcile this simple oversight with intelligent design.
If we had treads, we'd be pretty poor at clambering over rocks, and if we had four legs, we'd lack the fine dexterity that allows us to work with tools.
Furthermore, evolution is not mutually exclusive with intelligent design -- evolution is a mechanism, intelligent design a source. If I write an AI and use some datafiles, and the AI discovers those datafiles and thinks to itself "Ah, clearly I come from datafiles, rather than from some form of intelligent design", it would be making an incorrect assumption.
Speaking of reproduction, it takes millions of sperm to fertilize one egg. That's an unacceptable level of efficiency.
Why? I have plenty of sperm. To make an egg more easily be reached by foreign material would more easily expose the reproductive mechanism to parasites or viruses.
Aside from that, without modern medicine, most infants wouldn't live past 2 years old. This is not an intelligent or robust design by any standard.
Again, I ask -- why do you consider it necessary to consider the human being without his brain?
And yet you can easily replace a CPU. That's called modularity. You cannot do this with a brain because the human body is not very modular.
Well, I guess it all depends on what you consider "good", but I'm not sure that I'd *want* to have someone else's brain transplanted into my head. So far, you've generally been using a God concept that a traditional Christian would buy into -- one who seems to be interested in improving the lot of each individual (where "individual" is considered in the classic sense -- the mind is a more important portion of "self" than the body). Your concept is going to undergo a drastic mutation if you now move to a mechanism where brain transplant is considered a good thing.
Another strike against intelligent design, unless you want to arg
Well, I have to say that this is more slanted towards trying to produce a system that exactly emulates the Mac's bullet points than is practical, but okay. The Mac is only 25% more expensive than the PC for such a Mac-favoring situation.
Dimension 2400, $1049.
* Digital flat panel display--i.e. DVI connected, not just VGA.
15"
* 802.11g, 100 baseT, combo drive
Yup. Topped the combo drive -- got a DVD drive *and* a CD-RW drive, letting you easily copy CDs.
* A UNIX flavored OS.
[Shrug] Not going to be doable unless you want to allow Cygwin or going with a boxed copy Linux (which would drastically cut the cost of the whole system, but isn't what most people want). This is a "vendors don't offer exactly the same thing" point.
* Movie editing software.
Microsoft Plus Digital Media Edition.
* Some spreadsheet, word processor, database, vector graphics, bitmap graphics and presentation software.
Urgh...damned few people using low-end vector graphics packages on Windows, and Dell doesn't offer one in-box. Best I can do with their bundle is Office and Money, which covers all the other points.
* Network aware multi-user calendar.
I've never used such a thing, but I believe that Outlook (part of Office) can do this.
* DVD player software.
Yup.
* Personal finance software.
Microsoft Money
On the side of the Dell, the system runs a 2.2Ghz P4 instead of a 1Ghz G4.
There were some variations (Dell doesn't offer a vector graphics software or set of POSIX utilities, a la Apple), but this is pretty damned close.
They do, just not as well. Red Hat was one of the main backers saying that the Qt license was unacceptable and that a fully free desktop was necessary. They funded a lot of GNOME development. As a result, they picked up a lot of GNOME developers, so their engineering folks have a decided GNOME preference.
Gnome was an alternative, many of us like it, but desktop success in Europe of Linux is because of KDE as the default in any distro despite RedHat.
This is a reasonable question, but remember that (a) Trolltech is a Norwegian company, (b) SuSE is bigger in Europe than the rest of the world (and SuSE leans towards KDE). It may be some degree of a regional preference.
And yes, Gnome is not mature yet.
Now *that* I don't buy into. GNOME will never be "as mature" as KDE, simply because it's younger. A bunch of KDE folks pointed out that, well, the GNOME 1.0 release was rather flaky. GNOME these days, though, is tough to call immature. Each desktop has strong and weak points. GNOME's stronger when it comes to productivity apps (Sodipodi and GIMP). KDE's stronger when it comes to a web browser (Konqueror).
DTV is now fucked in Canada pretty much across the board thanks to the FCC being the MPAA's bitch.
Quite how this can be seen as a "step forward" for consumers is beyond me.
You know...really, I don't give a damn about TV most of the time. I don't watch it, aside from the occasional walking in and seeing someone else watching it. Too much phenomenally stupid content.
However, I have to point out that Canadians have a long and rich history of pirating US-based TV content. I'm not sure that US consumers will be terribly put out by at least this particular aspect (Canada getting screwed over).
...Hypocrit....I think he's bucking for a job at MS as a backup for when Princeton "lets him go."
[laughs hysterically]
At some point, I blinked and the open soruce social revolution happened.
Remember the phrase "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft"?
When this poor dumb schmuck comes back from his vacation, completely oblivious that his flames got leaked to a more prominent forum (and knowing Slashdot, probably rapidly spread across weblogs, IRC channels, USENET forums, tech newsletters and websites, and tech chats), he's going to be in for a surprise. Slashdot, an internationally-read technology forum, has alone around a thousand messages, most of which are harshly condemning him. These range from a medical doctor in Australia to graduate students at Princeton to CS PhDs and high-ranking software developers. There will be emails to both him and his superiors. There will be complaints in the school newspaper. There will be irritation from Princeton faculty, many of whom are very active and visible members of the open source community, at the personal insults aimed at them. There will be disapproving comments on the fact that he used his title and the university image to promote his views. I doubt he'll be fired over one incident, but he will almost certainly be talking with his superior (especially if enough of these complaints reach university administration).
Because I thought it was the latest version of OS X and I wasn't caring, but now I do....wasn't caring...
Okay, I have a low opinion of Slashdotters that insist that software release announcements should stay on Freshmeat. I want to *know* when the next Linux kernel release and the next minor release of GNOME is, and it's big, discussable news.
However, this is a bugfix release of an obscure package. I realize that the editor was probably feeling more than a little whimsical, but dammit..can't Slashdot have an "Oddball" category? Stuff that the editor can dump things into if he sees something that whets his fancy, but is wildly unfit to go into the "News for Nerds" section? Things like "Lindows CEO Claims Microsoft CEO Porks His Sister" or "Random Extremely Obscure Package 10.4.6 Released" could go? It'd be a great grabbag for April 1.
The sun simply defying every known law of physics and continuing to burn after it has expended all its fuel is impossible.
Like sailing around the flat world is impossible, or warping time is impossible?
For that matter, you have no idea whether the Sun has expended all its fuel. You have a suspicion -- there's a lot of energy hitting us, and people theorize that the Sun has N units of energy left and that it will stop at some point, but we certainly don't know. There are a lot of people wondering how quasars keep blasting out energy after they really shouldn't based on our assumptions. Maybe you're right about the Sun, and maybe not.
In an infinite universe, anything that can happen will happen, somewhere. Does this mean that my chair could possibly convert all of its thermal energy into kinetic energy and go flying around my apartment? No. That's a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
The second law of thermodynamics is a purely statistical law. We have a model of particle motion that says it's pretty unlikely, but certainly possible for the second law of thermodynamics to not occur for a given situation. This is *exactly* the sort of thing that we would predict would fail given an infinite set of attempts at breaking it.
Bullshit. Intelligent design has very specific implications, meaning that we should hold the human body accountable to the same (or higher, if the designer is omniscient) standards that we hold any modern piece of technology to.
I've already said that I'm not arguing in favor of intelligent design or creationism. I *do* like arguing against claims that I feel are definitely too strong. As for your ID claim, that's clearly false -- here's a counterexample. Bob makes an AI (I'll assume that you don't have any problem with him doing that, and that we can treat this as a reasonable working assumption). The AI grows and designs and builds a new computer system beyond Bob's ability to (directly) produce. The AI would be incorrect to believe that it is therefore not the product of intelligent design.
We generally consider a lack of robustness and the possibility of complete destruction when performing a routine task (humans can die from eating because we use the same pipe for breathing as ingesting solid food) to be indicative of total incompetence.
That is one interpretation. However, people rarely simply up and choke to death -- we have pretty hardwired systems to avoid choking to death, including the gag and choke reflexes. There is the problem that growing an extra eating aparatus produces another system that must be cared for, carried around, fed and maintained, and is vulnerable to damage. Who's to say that it's a good decision to avoid using the same orifice to eat and breathe?
Why is this "intelligent designer" held to lower standards than modern-day mechanical and electrical engineers, even though the "intelligent designer" is supposed to be a code-word for God?
When a mechanical or electrical engineer churns out a specimen of homo sapiens, you can then use this argument with justification.
That's thanks almost 100% in part to modern medication, which a good chunk of the world does not have. Without it, we'd be fucked. Without modern medicine, we can die from a common cold.
Yes, and it's also damned unlikely to happen. By avoiding having to attempt to attack the common cold, we retain an extremely effective level of generic ability to fight disease, can reproduce when transferring a smaller set of undamaged DNA (you don't need this "anti-cold code"), and for that matter, are equipped with a brain capable of *producing* said medicines. I mean, I have a good friend that makes robots that explore mines autonomously. It maps them out. The robot's reasonably robust (well, for a modern day robot), since it goes through some pretty unpleasant environments and has some pretty expensive hardware...and if it gets stuck, you can
I just tried to build comparable systems to compare, the TiBook was $2,198.00 and the Dell was $2,041, that's not what I would call a huge difference. The Dell has a faster processor, the Apple has twice the storage (60gb vs 30,) both with 512mb Ram installed (in real life I'd buy a SIMM a lot cheaper than Apple will sell it, but for this I took their price,) both have 15" display, CD-RW DVD-ROM drives, and wireless cards. The Dell does come with 6 months of earthlink dialup, but I don't exactly consider that a selling point.
Hmm. My results for the Mac agree with you. However, on Dell's site, I just took an Inspiron 8500. Same 15" display, same CD-RW/DVD-ROM, and wireless cards. The video chipset may differ -- Apple doesn't offer details on what they're bundling. 512MB memory (ironically enough, given Apple's history, a winning point -- Dell charged more). 60GB hard drive on each. The Dell includes Internet access and a software bundle -- I agree with you that they're pretty pointless. The Dell had a faster processor -- a 2.6 GHz Mobile P4, rather than a 1Ghz G4. The Dell came up at $1,722. Neither vendor mentioned Firewire/IEEE 1394/i.Link support, but I'd be willing to assume that Apple includes Firewire support and Dell includes only USB 2.0 support. Admittedly, this was closer than I expected, but still a not-insignificant ~$500 difference.
A study I read on msn.com said that colon cancer is not a concern in 3rd world countries, while in the united states it is one of the biggest killers. Maybe it's because we have the technology to detect colon cancer, while people of 3rd world countries would just die of "natural causes" if it was colon cancer.
Maybe it's because you're unlikely to get machine-gunned to death in a US suburban neighborhood.
Of course, one of those people might actually *have* a tumor and get surgery earlier because of the post.
That being said, the idea of a doctor cutting into a testacle definitely does not not appeal -- it's the same sort of thing as envisioning one of your limbs going into hyperextension or getting hit from behind in the small of the back.
The golden ideal of research, which is people throwing out amazing new discoveries that help humanity by huge amounts just plain isn't reality in corporate research.
I could see nationalizing research being an interesting and viable social experiment, though it wouldn't be a great idea for most other fields. Research to advance humanity isn't necessarily in the short-term interest of a typical corporation. It decidedly *is* in the interest of the people of a nation as a whole.
I don't think that Red Hat's recent moves, especially of withdrawing from releasing a freely downloadable version of Linux under the Red Hat name will do the company good.
It probably is a bad move on their part -- but that's also entirely marketing. The important thing, the engineering side, is that they expanded their package offerings for actual users and still offer everything they did before, with a non-awful (up2date) package downloading client. So Red Hat users win, RH may be making a stupid marketing move, and a couple of PHBs may spend more or less.
Yes, there are things that need work--in part at least thanks to manufacturers who refuse to provide the info needed to write drivers and the like, and partly thanks to network effects that keep many app writers targeting Windows--but I'm not going back to Windows.
Speaking of which, let's not forget to thank the manufacturers that *do* extend a hand to the Linux world. Matrox gave out enough information to let two 3d drivers, an xv driver and two drivers used in mplayer (for direct video access in X and in console) to be written for my G450.
Smackies to SmartHome, which hasn't provided the Wish project with enough information to write a driver for their USB X10 controller that I own.
Neutral to Creative, which spent an awfully long time not supporting Linux but eventually put some money into development (*after* Linux folks reverse-engineered enough to produce free drivers).
A 1ghz G4 is roughly comparable to a P4 at over 2ghz performance wise
[snort] I know Apple did a lot of ridiculous performance comparisons (nothing *false*, just designed to let you draw incorrect conclusions, like benchmarking a Photoshop plugin designed for PowerPC SIMD against a raw port to x86), but even they didn't go above the 2:1 claims.
From what I've seen by way of honest claims (NASA evaluating different platforms for doing computing), something in the neighborhood of having to increase your clock speed by 30% to get an equivalent P4 speed is more in line with reality. Obviously it's going to depend on the task at hand -- though given that more software's been written and optimized for the x86 over the years, that's probably not a good point to argue the PowerPC's merits on.
and is easier on the battery.
Now, *this* is a very good and often ignored point. G4s and G3s aren't anywhere near as power-efficient as the PPC 603 was, but the P4 consumes power like there's no tomorrow. A desktop P4 running at full speed can get up in the 100 watt range.
And no, they aren't, as a rule, cheaper. But they're about the same price, that's enough.
Macs are not about the same price. If you make a system at the online Apple Store and then post the price here, I'll happily cruise over to the Dell online store and build a (roughly -- the two vendors may not supply exactly the same part) system and we can compare. Apple has *fat* profit margins.
Perhaps I was just unfamiliar with it back then, but while I had a blast with Linux on *my* desktop five years ago, it really wasn't appropriate for even a typical Windows power user at that time.
It still isn't appropriate for a Joe User. On the other hand, it's software developer nirvana...
Okay. I'm responding to both the parent and grandparent poster....which company was it that has decided to focus on the enterprise market?
If you're talking about the Fedora-RH thing, that was an *expansion* of RH's packages for the typical user. A very good thing for RH users who were tired of having to get packages from RH+Fedora+dag+freshrpms+blahblahblah. The person who submitted the Slashdot article painted a very, very negative picture.
With it's new found direction, RedHat seems to have lost its honour.
What, officially bundling community-packaged software along with RH-packaged software? You must *hate* Debian -- they package *everything* in the community.
It is odd, bearing in mind that they purposefully crippled KDE on their distro.
First, RH was trying to provide visual integration KDE and GNOME. They ended up using KDE art and software, but a larger set of GNOME. This is not surprising, as RH has funded plenty of GNOME development (starting in the Bad Old Days when KDE wasn't fully free due to it being tied to Qt). The main person complaining was the extremely vocal Mosfet, as well as a couple of other very vocal KDE folks. They made a phenomenal stink about KDE and GNOME being blended. The fact that Konqueror wasn't included was a big chunk of it. There was a stir on the GNOME boards as well, but it died down after a bit.
Keep in mind that a year ago, one of the biggest complaints on Slashdot was that "KDE and GNOME needed to be merged" and that the "inconsistent UI was one of Linux's biggest problems". Red Hat runs out and does what folks have been asking it to do...and gets hammered for it.
Finally, Red Hat has been one of the largest people helping Linux get to the desktop. They've put a huge amount of money and effort into GNOME, and had a whole project (Red Hat Advanced Desktop) aimed at trying to produce a better desktop. The guy saying that Linux isn't ready for the desktop, but hopes it will be in a couple of years, is saying that because he doesn't want companies to run out, put Linux on their desktop, get burned because it isn't up to par with a Windows desktop environment for Joe User yet, and then refuse to look at Linux again for a decade.
Aside from Debian, Red Hat is one of the most influential pushers trying to keep Linux quite free and open. SuSE hangs about on handing out free ISOs of new distros, other folks backed Qt when it wasn't as Free as the GNU folks felt it should be, and still other folks wanted to hang on to Netscape Navigator -- RH dropped it like a hot potato for Mozilla (to be honest, before Mozilla was really ready). It's really disappointing to see so many people on Slashdot bashing them after one pretty distorted story earlier today after the years of work and current work they're putting in.
I tend to agree that you're right -- about the ten years from now bit. However, the picture today is much different from the picture in ten years...plus, the phone industry is currently pricy and service-oriented instead of product-oriented. Phones aren't going to take over like that.
In Japan, your comments may be more spot-on, where portable devices for mass transit use are more popular.
I am the CEO of a game house
Not to knock you, but...position means very little on Slashdot. You may have set up your own company, but most folks aren't going to care much about titles unless they can be tied to past solid work. Linus Torvalds' name commands respect because of the work he's done. Being CFO of some company does not.
And in the gaming industry, which is rapidly shifting and *full* of bad predictions, this is doubly so. John Romero makes a nice example.
Also, I think more laptop-style functionality will merge with phone form factors well before phones catch on in the gaming market, and that hasn't happened. 802.11b and big screens currently overcome communicate-anywhere and light weight.
Remember satellite phones. They were truly communicate anywhere, but they had other drawbacks, and died. Phones may or may not come out on top. I agree that a small form factor is likely to win, a carry-everywhere style is likely to win, and that such a device will likely have voice communication features. On the other hand, a better input mechanism than a phone keypad is also probably necessary, a bigger viewing system (or goggles) is probably necessary, and more computing power is probably necessary. Rather than saying "phones will win eventually", it's probably more meaningful to say "convergence will win eventually".
No, it means in a sufficiently large universe, you won't be surprised if this happens *sometimes*, not all the time. You shouldn't make fun of mathematics when you don't even understand it.
Oh, I see. So this should happen sometimes, eh? Perhaps I misunderstood your comment. What we currently call the universe is not "infinite" in size. It's bounded (really, really freaking big, and been expanding since the Big Bang, but still finite) I figured you were talking about inifinite complexity. Is the universe not a continuum, filled with infinite complexity? Why is it that, somewhere in there, we don't see a spark that starts the entire thing blazing? Inifinite possibilities for it to happen, as there are an infinite number of positions for a particle to happen, infinite configurations of the system.
Actually, we don't handle it that well. That's why we keep getting skin cancer the moment the ozone layer weakens even a little. We live in a pressurized, temperature-regulated, magnetically shielded biosphere. We're not particularly hardy.
Well, I suppose it's all relative. It's like arguing whether something is "big" or not. Not much point. My original point was that we frequently overlook how robust we are, and that when you suddenly realize it, it's pretty impressive. I don't think you can argue on absolute terms at all one way or the other.
They are living things, and have weaknesses just like us. No surprise we can defend ourselves against other cells. Not to mention sometimes the bacteria win.
The fact that you're alive says that you're winning a lot more than you're losing.
Actually, the human body is pretty bad at this. Many organisms can regrow limbs, or just have so many limbs regrowth is never necesary.
As I said, it's all relative. I'd have a hard time designing such a robust system.:-)
Get your brain hemispheres separated and then come back and tell me you're "functioning." It's not fun, and causes very strange disorders.
Slice your P4 in half and then talk about "strange disorders".:-)
We do have a spare kidney, but not a spare heart. How come when we have redundant parts, it proves ID, but when we lack them, it doesn't disprove it? You can't walk up to a glass, say it's half full, and then use that as proof of your pet theory about supernatural glass-fillers.
Huh? No, I don't give a damn one way or the other about the existence of God or creationism or all that. I think it's pretty established that you aren't going to know one way or the other, and that arguing about it is a pretty moot point, and that it's a pretty good guess that the best way to function is to assume that things are pretty much as we see them.
I'm not arguing in favor of creationism. I'm just pointing out that you were trivializing the human body.
As far as I can tell, you simply don't want creationists to "win" an argument. A suggestion. Not all arguments that sway one away from your viewpoint and toward creationism are wrong. The only arguments you should be rabidly sticking to your guns on is whether we have any justification for believing that we were intentionally designed. You can't disprove creationism, but you can point out that using generally-accepted reasoning principles, we "should" function as if we weren't intentionally created.
Slashdot Mirror
True, though it's a different challenge. Diablo is real-time, so there's more twitch involved. Nethack is a straight strategy game, and the question is how much you want to gamble.
Damned if this story doesn't make me feel like some Angband-style goodness, though (never was a NetHack fan). I believe I'll fire up Tales of Middle Earth (the most complex and my favorite Angband variant) and have some fun.
Actually, this isn't a great idea anyway, but there are all *kinds* of things that have soft real time requirements on IP networks (granted, probably shouldn't be, but are).
Actually, I can think of a couple of reasons this is still an issue. What if it isn't on the Internet...does the connection just get dropped?
Does this device send out DNS queries to determine where to redirect stuff to?
What happens if you have a test suite for a web-based application and IT just added a Belkin piece-of-junk router? Bam, mysterious failures. You could spend a week trying to figure out what the sporadic errors you're getting are from.
What if you're using SOAP or similar software, and the software you're using doesn't deal well with mysterious crap coming back from the server?
Belkin is a piss-poor company that sells lousy hardware and overpriced cables.
They aren't on my "buy" list anymore, either (and I *have* purchased Belkin products in the past).
You're thinking of old decisions from lower courts. The final ruling on this is from last year from the Supreme Court of Canada -- which ruled that it was illegal.
Under international copyright law, a publisher is not required to make content available for sale in a country for that content to be protected by copyright law. This is why fansubs (while generally winked at by anime publishers) are illegal. You won't find Apple providing Quicktime downloads of fansubs any time soon.
As a matter of fact, this particular point was *exactly* what drove the introduction of international copyright law and Mark Twain's involvement in its introduction -- before this, someone publishing a book in the United States might have it immediately reproduced en masse in Europe. To keep a book from being pirated, you had to have the resources and be willing to gamble that it would do well, and publish (depending upon law, individually applying for copyright) in all countries simultaneously.
How is it piracy when the signal isn't commercially available in Canada?
Piracy is the colloquial term for copyright infringement. Canada recognizes international copyright law and the fact that the content is copyrighted and not being legally obtained.
Your argument is an ethical one, not a legal one.
What's your point? That just because we don't know for absolute certain that something is impossible must make it possible by default?
No, of course not. That just because we think something will happen doesn't make it impossible for something else to happen.
No, we do know. We were able to show that the sun uses nuclear fusion to produce its energy, and we understand how this process works. You're equating scientific theories with educated guesses, which tells me that you know precisely dick about how science works.
Except for the fact that our theory of star lifecycle falls apart for known cases, which is why I mentioned quasars. You're taking the currently best-accepted model and asserting that we understand completely how it works and that it's true, which we clearly don't and it isn't.
Whether or not a law is statistical in nature does not have any bearing on whether it is statistical in application.
This is ridiculous. We predict that most of the time that a given thing will happen...and it does. We also predict that very rarely, that given thing will not happen. You said that it was *impossible* for it to happen.
The AI can also observe an interact with Bob. We cannot observe or interact with God. Your analogy is flawed.
That certainly isn't necessarily the case. Bob finishes his AI and dies, the AI grows up, and can find no traces of Bob other than his magnum opus -- it.
Having another tube for eating eliminates a fatal flaw and adds robustness.
You ignored my counterargument -- that you have no grounds for claiming that the drawbacks of such a design change do not outweigh the benefits.
Oh please. Engineers follow universal principles of design robustness and stability. Did you know that we would be much faster and more efficient with our movement if we had treads, or more than two legs? So why don't we have 4 legs? Because our evolutionary ancestors did not. Now I'll patiently wait for you to trip all over yourself trying to reconcile this simple oversight with intelligent design.
If we had treads, we'd be pretty poor at clambering over rocks, and if we had four legs, we'd lack the fine dexterity that allows us to work with tools.
Furthermore, evolution is not mutually exclusive with intelligent design -- evolution is a mechanism, intelligent design a source. If I write an AI and use some datafiles, and the AI discovers those datafiles and thinks to itself "Ah, clearly I come from datafiles, rather than from some form of intelligent design", it would be making an incorrect assumption.
Speaking of reproduction, it takes millions of sperm to fertilize one egg. That's an unacceptable level of efficiency.
Why? I have plenty of sperm. To make an egg more easily be reached by foreign material would more easily expose the reproductive mechanism to parasites or viruses.
Aside from that, without modern medicine, most infants wouldn't live past 2 years old. This is not an intelligent or robust design by any standard.
Again, I ask -- why do you consider it necessary to consider the human being without his brain?
And yet you can easily replace a CPU. That's called modularity. You cannot do this with a brain because the human body is not very modular.
Well, I guess it all depends on what you consider "good", but I'm not sure that I'd *want* to have someone else's brain transplanted into my head. So far, you've generally been using a God concept that a traditional Christian would buy into -- one who seems to be interested in improving the lot of each individual (where "individual" is considered in the classic sense -- the mind is a more important portion of "self" than the body). Your concept is going to undergo a drastic mutation if you now move to a mechanism where brain transplant is considered a good thing.
Another strike against intelligent design, unless you want to arg
Well, I have to say that this is more slanted towards trying to produce a system that exactly emulates the Mac's bullet points than is practical, but okay. The Mac is only 25% more expensive than the PC for such a Mac-favoring situation.
Dimension 2400, $1049.
* Digital flat panel display--i.e. DVI connected, not just VGA.
15"
* 802.11g, 100 baseT, combo drive
Yup. Topped the combo drive -- got a DVD drive *and* a CD-RW drive, letting you easily copy CDs.
* A UNIX flavored OS.
[Shrug] Not going to be doable unless you want to allow Cygwin or going with a boxed copy Linux (which would drastically cut the cost of the whole system, but isn't what most people want). This is a "vendors don't offer exactly the same thing" point.
* Movie editing software.
Microsoft Plus Digital Media Edition.
* Some spreadsheet, word processor, database, vector graphics, bitmap graphics and presentation software.
Urgh...damned few people using low-end vector graphics packages on Windows, and Dell doesn't offer one in-box. Best I can do with their bundle is Office and Money, which covers all the other points.
* Network aware multi-user calendar.
I've never used such a thing, but I believe that Outlook (part of Office) can do this.
* DVD player software.
Yup.
* Personal finance software.
Microsoft Money
On the side of the Dell, the system runs a 2.2Ghz P4 instead of a 1Ghz G4.
There were some variations (Dell doesn't offer a vector graphics software or set of POSIX utilities, a la Apple), but this is pretty damned close.
Yes, why don't they support KDE?
They do, just not as well. Red Hat was one of the main backers saying that the Qt license was unacceptable and that a fully free desktop was necessary. They funded a lot of GNOME development. As a result, they picked up a lot of GNOME developers, so their engineering folks have a decided GNOME preference.
Gnome was an alternative, many of us like it, but desktop success in Europe of Linux is because of KDE as the default in any distro despite RedHat.
This is a reasonable question, but remember that (a) Trolltech is a Norwegian company, (b) SuSE is bigger in Europe than the rest of the world (and SuSE leans towards KDE). It may be some degree of a regional preference.
And yes, Gnome is not mature yet.
Now *that* I don't buy into. GNOME will never be "as mature" as KDE, simply because it's younger. A bunch of KDE folks pointed out that, well, the GNOME 1.0 release was rather flaky. GNOME these days, though, is tough to call immature. Each desktop has strong and weak points. GNOME's stronger when it comes to productivity apps (Sodipodi and GIMP). KDE's stronger when it comes to a web browser (Konqueror).
DTV is now fucked in Canada pretty much across the board thanks to the FCC being the MPAA's bitch.
Quite how this can be seen as a "step forward" for consumers is beyond me.
You know...really, I don't give a damn about TV most of the time. I don't watch it, aside from the occasional walking in and seeing someone else watching it. Too much phenomenally stupid content.
However, I have to point out that Canadians have a long and rich history of pirating US-based TV content. I'm not sure that US consumers will be terribly put out by at least this particular aspect (Canada getting screwed over).
...Hypocrit....I think he's bucking for a job at MS as a backup for when Princeton "lets him go."
[laughs hysterically]
At some point, I blinked and the open soruce social revolution happened.
Remember the phrase "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft"?
When this poor dumb schmuck comes back from his vacation, completely oblivious that his flames got leaked to a more prominent forum (and knowing Slashdot, probably rapidly spread across weblogs, IRC channels, USENET forums, tech newsletters and websites, and tech chats), he's going to be in for a surprise. Slashdot, an internationally-read technology forum, has alone around a thousand messages, most of which are harshly condemning him. These range from a medical doctor in Australia to graduate students at Princeton to CS PhDs and high-ranking software developers. There will be emails to both him and his superiors. There will be complaints in the school newspaper. There will be irritation from Princeton faculty, many of whom are very active and visible members of the open source community, at the personal insults aimed at them. There will be disapproving comments on the fact that he used his title and the university image to promote his views. I doubt he'll be fired over one incident, but he will almost certainly be talking with his superior (especially if enough of these complaints reach university administration).
The world certainly has changed.
Because I thought it was the latest version of OS X and I wasn't caring, but now I do. ...wasn't caring...
Okay, I have a low opinion of Slashdotters that insist that software release announcements should stay on Freshmeat. I want to *know* when the next Linux kernel release and the next minor release of GNOME is, and it's big, discussable news.
However, this is a bugfix release of an obscure package. I realize that the editor was probably feeling more than a little whimsical, but dammit..can't Slashdot have an "Oddball" category? Stuff that the editor can dump things into if he sees something that whets his fancy, but is wildly unfit to go into the "News for Nerds" section? Things like "Lindows CEO Claims Microsoft CEO Porks His Sister" or "Random Extremely Obscure Package 10.4.6 Released" could go? It'd be a great grabbag for April 1.
The sun simply defying every known law of physics and continuing to burn after it has expended all its fuel is impossible.
Like sailing around the flat world is impossible, or warping time is impossible?
For that matter, you have no idea whether the Sun has expended all its fuel. You have a suspicion -- there's a lot of energy hitting us, and people theorize that the Sun has N units of energy left and that it will stop at some point, but we certainly don't know. There are a lot of people wondering how quasars keep blasting out energy after they really shouldn't based on our assumptions. Maybe you're right about the Sun, and maybe not.
In an infinite universe, anything that can happen will happen, somewhere. Does this mean that my chair could possibly convert all of its thermal energy into kinetic energy and go flying around my apartment? No. That's a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
The second law of thermodynamics is a purely statistical law. We have a model of particle motion that says it's pretty unlikely, but certainly possible for the second law of thermodynamics to not occur for a given situation. This is *exactly* the sort of thing that we would predict would fail given an infinite set of attempts at breaking it.
Bullshit. Intelligent design has very specific implications, meaning that we should hold the human body accountable to the same (or higher, if the designer is omniscient) standards that we hold any modern piece of technology to.
I've already said that I'm not arguing in favor of intelligent design or creationism. I *do* like arguing against claims that I feel are definitely too strong. As for your ID claim, that's clearly false -- here's a counterexample. Bob makes an AI (I'll assume that you don't have any problem with him doing that, and that we can treat this as a reasonable working assumption). The AI grows and designs and builds a new computer system beyond Bob's ability to (directly) produce. The AI would be incorrect to believe that it is therefore not the product of intelligent design.
We generally consider a lack of robustness and the possibility of complete destruction when performing a routine task (humans can die from eating because we use the same pipe for breathing as ingesting solid food) to be indicative of total incompetence.
That is one interpretation. However, people rarely simply up and choke to death -- we have pretty hardwired systems to avoid choking to death, including the gag and choke reflexes. There is the problem that growing an extra eating aparatus produces another system that must be cared for, carried around, fed and maintained, and is vulnerable to damage. Who's to say that it's a good decision to avoid using the same orifice to eat and breathe?
Why is this "intelligent designer" held to lower standards than modern-day mechanical and electrical engineers, even though the "intelligent designer" is supposed to be a code-word for God?
When a mechanical or electrical engineer churns out a specimen of homo sapiens, you can then use this argument with justification.
That's thanks almost 100% in part to modern medication, which a good chunk of the world does not have. Without it, we'd be fucked. Without modern medicine, we can die from a common cold.
Yes, and it's also damned unlikely to happen. By avoiding having to attempt to attack the common cold, we retain an extremely effective level of generic ability to fight disease, can reproduce when transferring a smaller set of undamaged DNA (you don't need this "anti-cold code"), and for that matter, are equipped with a brain capable of *producing* said medicines. I mean, I have a good friend that makes robots that explore mines autonomously. It maps them out. The robot's reasonably robust (well, for a modern day robot), since it goes through some pretty unpleasant environments and has some pretty expensive hardware...and if it gets stuck, you can
I just tried to build comparable systems to compare, the TiBook was $2,198.00 and the Dell was $2,041, that's not what I would call a huge difference. The Dell has a faster processor, the Apple has twice the storage (60gb vs 30,) both with 512mb Ram installed (in real life I'd buy a SIMM a lot cheaper than Apple will sell it, but for this I took their price,) both have 15" display, CD-RW DVD-ROM drives, and wireless cards. The Dell does come with 6 months of earthlink dialup, but I don't exactly consider that a selling point.
Hmm. My results for the Mac agree with you. However, on Dell's site, I just took an Inspiron 8500. Same 15" display, same CD-RW/DVD-ROM, and wireless cards. The video chipset may differ -- Apple doesn't offer details on what they're bundling. 512MB memory (ironically enough, given Apple's history, a winning point -- Dell charged more). 60GB hard drive on each. The Dell includes Internet access and a software bundle -- I agree with you that they're pretty pointless. The Dell had a faster processor -- a 2.6 GHz Mobile P4, rather than a 1Ghz G4. The Dell came up at $1,722. Neither vendor mentioned Firewire/IEEE 1394/i.Link support, but I'd be willing to assume that Apple includes Firewire support and Dell includes only USB 2.0 support. Admittedly, this was closer than I expected, but still a not-insignificant ~$500 difference.
A study I read on msn.com said that colon cancer is not a concern in 3rd world countries, while in the united states it is one of the biggest killers. Maybe it's because we have the technology to detect colon cancer, while people of 3rd world countries would just die of "natural causes" if it was colon cancer.
Maybe it's because you're unlikely to get machine-gunned to death in a US suburban neighborhood.
Of course, one of those people might actually *have* a tumor and get surgery earlier because of the post.
That being said, the idea of a doctor cutting into a testacle definitely does not not appeal -- it's the same sort of thing as envisioning one of your limbs going into hyperextension or getting hit from behind in the small of the back.
I don't know anyone that I know has HIV, though I do know an 18-year-old that's survived leukemia.
Of course, I suspect people tend to be a bit more close-mouthed about HIV.
I'll second this all the way.
The golden ideal of research, which is people throwing out amazing new discoveries that help humanity by huge amounts just plain isn't reality in corporate research.
I could see nationalizing research being an interesting and viable social experiment, though it wouldn't be a great idea for most other fields. Research to advance humanity isn't necessarily in the short-term interest of a typical corporation. It decidedly *is* in the interest of the people of a nation as a whole.
I don't think that Red Hat's recent moves, especially of withdrawing from releasing a freely downloadable version of Linux under the Red Hat name will do the company good.
It probably is a bad move on their part -- but that's also entirely marketing. The important thing, the engineering side, is that they expanded their package offerings for actual users and still offer everything they did before, with a non-awful (up2date) package downloading client. So Red Hat users win, RH may be making a stupid marketing move, and a couple of PHBs may spend more or less.
I love Slashdot.
It's 2003, and "Adolph Hitler" is exposing the conspiracies between Linux, SCO, and Microsoft.
After a long, gloomy day, Slashdot beats the snot out of a sitcom.
Yes, there are things that need work--in part at least thanks to manufacturers who refuse to provide the info needed to write drivers and the like, and partly thanks to network effects that keep many app writers targeting Windows--but I'm not going back to Windows.
Speaking of which, let's not forget to thank the manufacturers that *do* extend a hand to the Linux world. Matrox gave out enough information to let two 3d drivers, an xv driver and two drivers used in mplayer (for direct video access in X and in console) to be written for my G450.
Smackies to SmartHome, which hasn't provided the Wish project with enough information to write a driver for their USB X10 controller that I own.
Neutral to Creative, which spent an awfully long time not supporting Linux but eventually put some money into development (*after* Linux folks reverse-engineered enough to produce free drivers).
A 1ghz G4 is roughly comparable to a P4 at over 2ghz performance wise
[snort] I know Apple did a lot of ridiculous performance comparisons (nothing *false*, just designed to let you draw incorrect conclusions, like benchmarking a Photoshop plugin designed for PowerPC SIMD against a raw port to x86), but even they didn't go above the 2:1 claims.
From what I've seen by way of honest claims (NASA evaluating different platforms for doing computing), something in the neighborhood of having to increase your clock speed by 30% to get an equivalent P4 speed is more in line with reality. Obviously it's going to depend on the task at hand -- though given that more software's been written and optimized for the x86 over the years, that's probably not a good point to argue the PowerPC's merits on.
and is easier on the battery.
Now, *this* is a very good and often ignored point. G4s and G3s aren't anywhere near as power-efficient as the PPC 603 was, but the P4 consumes power like there's no tomorrow. A desktop P4 running at full speed can get up in the 100 watt range.
And no, they aren't, as a rule, cheaper. But they're about the same price, that's enough.
Macs are not about the same price. If you make a system at the online Apple Store and then post the price here, I'll happily cruise over to the Dell online store and build a (roughly -- the two vendors may not supply exactly the same part) system and we can compare. Apple has *fat* profit margins.
Perhaps I was just unfamiliar with it back then, but while I had a blast with Linux on *my* desktop five years ago, it really wasn't appropriate for even a typical Windows power user at that time.
It still isn't appropriate for a Joe User. On the other hand, it's software developer nirvana...
This was quite funny the first time I read it on Slashdot, but it's getting old.
Okay. I'm responding to both the parent and grandparent poster. ...which company was it that has decided to focus on the enterprise market?
If you're talking about the Fedora-RH thing, that was an *expansion* of RH's packages for the typical user. A very good thing for RH users who were tired of having to get packages from RH+Fedora+dag+freshrpms+blahblahblah. The person who submitted the Slashdot article painted a very, very negative picture.
With it's new found direction, RedHat seems to have lost its honour.
What, officially bundling community-packaged software along with RH-packaged software? You must *hate* Debian -- they package *everything* in the community.
It is odd, bearing in mind that they purposefully crippled KDE on their distro.
First, RH was trying to provide visual integration KDE and GNOME. They ended up using KDE art and software, but a larger set of GNOME. This is not surprising, as RH has funded plenty of GNOME development (starting in the Bad Old Days when KDE wasn't fully free due to it being tied to Qt). The main person complaining was the extremely vocal Mosfet, as well as a couple of other very vocal KDE folks. They made a phenomenal stink about KDE and GNOME being blended. The fact that Konqueror wasn't included was a big chunk of it. There was a stir on the GNOME boards as well, but it died down after a bit.
Keep in mind that a year ago, one of the biggest complaints on Slashdot was that "KDE and GNOME needed to be merged" and that the "inconsistent UI was one of Linux's biggest problems". Red Hat runs out and does what folks have been asking it to do...and gets hammered for it.
Finally, Red Hat has been one of the largest people helping Linux get to the desktop. They've put a huge amount of money and effort into GNOME, and had a whole project (Red Hat Advanced Desktop) aimed at trying to produce a better desktop. The guy saying that Linux isn't ready for the desktop, but hopes it will be in a couple of years, is saying that because he doesn't want companies to run out, put Linux on their desktop, get burned because it isn't up to par with a Windows desktop environment for Joe User yet, and then refuse to look at Linux again for a decade.
Aside from Debian, Red Hat is one of the most influential pushers trying to keep Linux quite free and open. SuSE hangs about on handing out free ISOs of new distros, other folks backed Qt when it wasn't as Free as the GNU folks felt it should be, and still other folks wanted to hang on to Netscape Navigator -- RH dropped it like a hot potato for Mozilla (to be honest, before Mozilla was really ready). It's really disappointing to see so many people on Slashdot bashing them after one pretty distorted story earlier today after the years of work and current work they're putting in.
I tend to agree that you're right -- about the ten years from now bit. However, the picture today is much different from the picture in ten years...plus, the phone industry is currently pricy and service-oriented instead of product-oriented. Phones aren't going to take over like that.
In Japan, your comments may be more spot-on, where portable devices for mass transit use are more popular.
I am the CEO of a game house
Not to knock you, but...position means very little on Slashdot. You may have set up your own company, but most folks aren't going to care much about titles unless they can be tied to past solid work. Linus Torvalds' name commands respect because of the work he's done. Being CFO of some company does not.
And in the gaming industry, which is rapidly shifting and *full* of bad predictions, this is doubly so. John Romero makes a nice example.
Also, I think more laptop-style functionality will merge with phone form factors well before phones catch on in the gaming market, and that hasn't happened. 802.11b and big screens currently overcome communicate-anywhere and light weight.
Remember satellite phones. They were truly communicate anywhere, but they had other drawbacks, and died. Phones may or may not come out on top. I agree that a small form factor is likely to win, a carry-everywhere style is likely to win, and that such a device will likely have voice communication features. On the other hand, a better input mechanism than a phone keypad is also probably necessary, a bigger viewing system (or goggles) is probably necessary, and more computing power is probably necessary. Rather than saying "phones will win eventually", it's probably more meaningful to say "convergence will win eventually".
No, it means in a sufficiently large universe, you won't be surprised if this happens *sometimes*, not all the time. You shouldn't make fun of mathematics when you don't even understand it.
:-)
:-)
Oh, I see. So this should happen sometimes, eh?
Perhaps I misunderstood your comment. What we currently call the universe is not "infinite" in size. It's bounded (really, really freaking big, and been expanding since the Big Bang, but still finite) I figured you were talking about inifinite complexity. Is the universe not a continuum, filled with infinite complexity? Why is it that, somewhere in there, we don't see a spark that starts the entire thing blazing? Inifinite possibilities for it to happen, as there are an infinite number of positions for a particle to happen, infinite configurations of the system.
Actually, we don't handle it that well. That's why we keep getting skin cancer the moment the ozone layer weakens even a little. We live in a pressurized, temperature-regulated, magnetically shielded biosphere. We're not particularly hardy.
Well, I suppose it's all relative. It's like arguing whether something is "big" or not. Not much point. My original point was that we frequently overlook how robust we are, and that when you suddenly realize it, it's pretty impressive. I don't think you can argue on absolute terms at all one way or the other.
They are living things, and have weaknesses just like us. No surprise we can defend ourselves against other cells. Not to mention sometimes the bacteria win.
The fact that you're alive says that you're winning a lot more than you're losing.
Actually, the human body is pretty bad at this. Many organisms can regrow limbs, or just have so many limbs regrowth is never necesary.
As I said, it's all relative. I'd have a hard time designing such a robust system.
Get your brain hemispheres separated and then come back and tell me you're "functioning." It's not fun, and causes very strange disorders.
Slice your P4 in half and then talk about "strange disorders".
We do have a spare kidney, but not a spare heart. How come when we have redundant parts, it proves ID, but when we lack them, it doesn't disprove it? You can't walk up to a glass, say it's half full, and then use that as proof of your pet theory about supernatural glass-fillers.
Huh? No, I don't give a damn one way or the other about the existence of God or creationism or all that. I think it's pretty established that you aren't going to know one way or the other, and that arguing about it is a pretty moot point, and that it's a pretty good guess that the best way to function is to assume that things are pretty much as we see them.
I'm not arguing in favor of creationism. I'm just pointing out that you were trivializing the human body.
As far as I can tell, you simply don't want creationists to "win" an argument. A suggestion. Not all arguments that sway one away from your viewpoint and toward creationism are wrong. The only arguments you should be rabidly sticking to your guns on is whether we have any justification for believing that we were intentionally designed. You can't disprove creationism, but you can point out that using generally-accepted reasoning principles, we "should" function as if we weren't intentionally created.