just type "man command", that will teach you fairly quickly what a command does.
I've worked on UNIX systems for something like 10 years, and I can say that "man" is frequently my last resort. Usenet/Google Groups, normal Google searches, freindly UNIX admins, some bookmarked web pages and books are all things I try before using man.
Maybe man on Linux is much more useful than the AIX system we use, but frequently I find it far too cyptic to be of use. The sort of man pages I see are only going to scare a relative newbie, not help.
Yep. The signal going into the human brain not only is upsidedown, but has a blindspot, and an uneven distribution of rods and cones. IIRC the centre of your field vision is much better at colour sense, and the edge at light/darkness sense.
The brain does loads of processing on the image before the concious part of the brain 'sees' it.
I don't believe this robot is a sufficient reason to go around intentially killing flies.
Most (the vast majority) people will happily swat and insect for just bothering them a bit and fly near them. The standard of "sufficiant reason" to kill a fly seems very, very low.
Studies have shown that insects do have a negative reponse to stimuli such as electric shocks and that the experience appears to be stored in memory and the experience avoided in the future.
Yep, stimulus-response is one of the basics of living creatures.
This seems to suggest that insects may feel pain.
Here is where it gets tricky, as pain is a subjective thing. Humans interpret certain stimulus as pain, but this happens inside the brain, as it interprets the signals from the nerves. We then react to that pain, both on and imediate, instinctive level, and on a longer term, using our intelligence to avoid it level.
What we have no idea is how the (comparatively) primative insect brain interperts a stimulus we convert to pain. Pain in and of itself is not an evolutionary advantage, it is a means to an end of avoiding physical damage, which is the advantage.
Even if a fly brain recieves a the input from something that does damage and avoids it in the future, it doesn't mean it feels pain. We relate pain to concepts like discomfort and distress. Can an insect feel such things? Do they feel nothing, or somthing so different we cannot identify it?
The problem is, we can't actually empathise with animals. We may feel sympathy for them, but we can't feel empathy for them, because we cannot actually know what they think, what it is like to be them. We can manage a sort of pseudo-empathy by projecting human emotions onto them, and end up empathising with what a human in that situation might feel.
For higher mammals this isn't to bad, we do have some things still in commmon, we can recognise some responses (like pain) as being close to ours, and assume that something kinda similar is going on in their heads. Its good enough "fake empathy" to lets us domesticate, train and live with them. We never really know what goes on in their heads, but it's good enough to work with.
Things like insects though are just too alien, I doubt we will ever know what they feel or think. Is it twitching in pain, or just twitching?
Do you possess empathy for humans? Do you have a reason for that empathy?
Empathy is an evolved survival trait. For communal animals like humans, the ability to empathise helps you predict what other humans are going to do increasing your chance of survival. You can both cooperate and compete better.
We often think of empathy as somthing warm and fuzzy, but the reason for it is it is just another leg up in passing on our DNA.
Well, that was a long post that wasn't really agreeing or disagreeing with you. Personally, I'm more than happy that powering a robot is sufficient justifaction for killing flies.
Wow, I can't beleive such tripe got modded as insightful.
Just because some animals are too weak to defend themselves, doesn't give us the right to kill them.
I don't know what planet you have been living on, but that is pretty much how nature works around here. Animals eat other animals, unless the intended prey can defend itself, run away, or evolve into something not good to eat (e.g. poisonus).
Lets face it, removing a few flies won't endanger the species, so do you really care about the "right" to life of a few flies? Do you go around scolding spiders? If in insect lands on you and start sucking you blood, would you leave it?
Nor does it give us the right to build a robot that kills them. It's not like that robot couldn't be powered by other means.
It could, but if you are worried about the environment, flies are a renewable energy source and probably better for it than charging up from the mains that ultimately comes from oil, coal or nuclear power. Only solar would be a better option, and that isn't always viable.
"Rights" are arbitary ideas humans beings have come up with on how we treat each other, and sometimes other creatures, and how we think the would should be. I never heard any serious argument or seen it comonly held as a view humans don't have the right to kill insects when it suits us. Sure, not pull wings off flies for fun, but look at the amount of stuff sold to kill of bugs that bother us. Some people may worry about the larger effects of losing a whole insect species, but nobody (apart from you) cares about a few bugs.
So then we can knock a few breeds of bird off the non-extinct list who find their daily quota of dragon-like flies diminishing. And then of course the algaes around lakes grow out of control killing off the fish.
Hang on, how did you get from birds to algae going out of control? Do those birds also eat the algae? Do the dragonflies? Does nothing else exist in that environment that eats the algae?
The circle of life is all very warm and fuzzy, but animal become extinct all the time, and others move into their niche. If it wouldn't cause some major disturbance, I'd happily loose dragonflies and some birds if it meant the end of mosquitoes.
You never, ever use a racial slur, even just to repeat the words of others.
You may never, but the rest of the world is generally aware of something called "context". If the poster was using it as an insult, it would be bad. They weren't though.
Tell me, do you get offended when one black person calls another "nigger" not as an insult? Or even themselves? Or if someone repeated such a conversation to you? It is quite common for minority groups to take insulting terms and reclaim them.
The poster could have used asterisks or put N-word, but it was horrible to use the word itself!
Surely it is the concept of slavery and discrimination that is horrible, not the word in a context of a non-insult? If someone wrote "n****r", from context your brain is just going to subsitiute "nigger" anyway. Asteriks and euphamisms are pointless, either you completely obscure what you are trying to say, so why say it, or everyone know what you are saying, so why hide it?
If you are really that easily offended (and not just trolling as I suspect) then I suggest you avoid Slashdot, and webforums in general, and definately stay clear of usenet.
Uses a raial slur towards people of African-American descent. Very offensive.
That is what the group is called. It isn't the parent posters fault they called themselves that. They (the parent poster) aren't trolling, just warning users.
The writer clearly doesn't have a clue about evolution. Evolution is about successfully passing on your DNA. Until women can do it without men, one half of the species can't be "left behind". Genetic traits of succesful women are (mostly) passed to male and female offspring.
What is more, there isn't any suggestion this is due to evolutionary changes in humans, it is a social change.
Rather than code for each anti-virus program that exists, Microsoft introduced a way for AV programs to register themselves with the OS. So, you need to update you AVs before SP2 will know about them.
I'm running Norton, and quick auto-update and SP2 recognised it just fine.
Normally I don't let the ultra Star Wars Dork side of me out,
It shows, becuase boy are you wrong. Watch as I out dork you:)
Anakin brought balance alright, He became Darth Vader, the most powerful jedi ever, In fact - He, with the help of Bohba Fett, killed Jedi by the thousands.
We haven't seen episode 3 yet, but nothing suggests he becomes the most powerful Jedi ever. Maybe he would have been, but he falls in the lava, becomes half machine and turns Sith (maybe not in that order). While he is a Jedi he isn't more powerful than, say, Yoda, and Obi Wan beats him, although when we see the fight that be partly through luck.
While the Empire crushes the Jedi, it isn't like Darth Vader goes around and kills them all personally, or anything suggests Boba Fett helps. Based on what we have seen of Fetts vs Jedi, I can't see him as much use.
He killed everyone but Obi wan and Yoda, Leaving 2 Jedi and 2 Sith. There can never be more than 2 of each now, This is why ObiWan died, And why Yoda died; To keep the balance. Master and Apprentice.
OK, the last is just complete bunk. At the end of Jedi, there are no Sith at all, and 1 Jedi. Nothing suggests Luke can't find and train a bunch of people to be Jedi. Nothing at all suggests only two ever.
That we are paid in the real world for performing the same real activities as imagined activities makes those activities the provenance of work, even if all we are paid in is satisfaction of a job well done. We wish to have fun and at great expense we pay others to give us fun.
The example in the parent post was about growing carrots. Now, I don't know anyone who grows carrots for a living, who gets paid for it. However, I do know people who garden and grow carrots, and other veg, as a hobby. Not for pay, but for fun, and food, although it's not as if they can't afford to buy food.
My flatmate is a MMORPG addict, he sits their and grinds through creating stuff to sell, it's boring, and he complains how it is borning, but his character needs the money, and considers it the price for playing the bits he enjoy. He only does it becuase he is (virtually) paid for it.
So, interesting as the point about being paid is, I'm not sure it is valid for a lot of MMORPG activities. Some of them are pretty analogous to work in the real word, can be fun or tedious but largely done just for the money, and some close to non-paid activites, done for the fun.
I guess there are a lot of other factors, it's much less effort to make stuff in a game than in real life, you can do it from the confort of sitting in front of your computer and so on. It isn't like making virtual carrots is really anything like the real thing anyway, in terms of experience or reward, so I can't see one as a substitiue for the other.
Having watched a couple of freinds have their lives swallowed by MMORPGs my feelings for them is a degree of pity. There isn't anything wrong with choosing a virtual life over a real one someof the time (most entertainment has a degree of escapism), it is when it eclipses the real world it is a problem. At that point it is easy to get frustrated with people and wish they would go interact with the real world, although clearly many online gamers are not in this category.
If Harmony makes a track bought from the Real store look just like a track bought currently from iTunes, how does Apple break compatability with with the Real tracks without breaking compatability with everything bought so far on iTunes?
Even if it puts some auto update into iTunes to change the version of old tracks to be compatible, won't it just upgrade the Real tracks as well?
I guess it depends if there is any way of telling a convert track from an original.
I beleive a lot of files have been re-compiled to prevent buffer overflows and take advanateg of the NX flag on processors that support them. Many of these programs don't have a 'bug' as such, but are being made more secure.
It is a bit scary watching the install and seeing all these things being replaced.
Also the ~250MB is the admin version, that has every update. The version for home users will only have the necessary ones they need, and should be quite a bit smaller if the machine is reasonably up to date.
Probably still the biggest SP for windows ever though.
Your computer becomes a spam zombie within minutes of being connected to the Internet.
Yep, that's the firewall and security changes. Unless you open infected mail, which is harder but still possible, and always will be, unless you prevent the user from ever running a suspect program even if they choose to.
Outlook Express has no junk mail filtering.
Sadly, no.
Your screen becomes deluged with popup windows with no escape because closing one opens about ten others.
Yes, IE now has a pop-up blocker.
Many of the bugs describe stuff that's just broken full stop and should really have been removed before XP was released, ie: You cannot preview a fax in the Fax Console.. Others sound like simple program logic errors, which shold never have happenned in the first place. I particularly liked: Windows XP stops responding (hangs) when you log off the computer if more than one user is logged on. WTF?
Go read the knowledge base articles. These bugs don't mean these things always happen, only that they happen under certain conditions. Bugs, yes, but harldy "broken full stop".
Unfortunately there isn't any good way to profile terrorists to anything like the degree that would be useful. What is 'a likely terrorist'? Anyone Islamic? Anyone of Middle Eastern origin?
As long as the terrorists have people who have no criminal record, reasonably well educated, and not known to intelligence services, how do you profile for them? They may even have been born, and carry a passport, from a non-Middle East country, and never have traveled to 'suspicious' places like Afghanistan.
And you trust law enforcement to only ever invade the privacy of those they suspect of doing something illegal? And not, say, people whose politics those in power don't like such as civil rights activists, as they have historically done?
I do not know what kind of surgery these people performed to fix these machines,
From the article:
Windows couldn't boot up properly while a certain Norton program file was active, but the Norton firewall couldn't operate without its being active. Glenn spent hours taking that file -- SYMTDI.VXD -- on and off the computer, each time having to reboot. Eventually he installed more memory -- triple what we had -- because our limited supply made the reboots ungodly long.
If you read the article the tech spent ages rebooting trying to get Norton Firewall and AV to install, but they wouldn't work together becuase of a bug.
I hope she'll realize that she has these problems because she chooses to use Microsoft products.
No, she has these problems becuase she didn't know about computer security. I've had my XP box for a couple of years, and had no problems. Norton AV, Windows Update and Windows Firewall have been just fine.
I'm no great fan of MS business practices, or some of their software, but you can run Windows quite stably and securely without much effort. Choosing to use MS is not the problem.
I'd much rather see this money go to feeding a starving child or even going to help rebuild a war torn country to sustain itself than freaking chess.
Seems more likely to me it isn't about Chess as about tourism. It is an investment which will bring money into the country and create jobs. How equatably that wealth gets spread is a different issue.
You can argue that any governemnt spending that isn't feeding starving people or healthcare could be better spent, but then you would have nothing spent on art, science (like space travel), economic development or anything. If citizens of a coutnry are starving, suffering from an epidemic or whatever, then of course it should be the governments top priority. If it doesn't have such problems though, why not invest in tourism and the economy? If the investment pans out it will be good for the coutry.
Now the (french?) trolls can bash me and call american's evil war mongers, but how much have other countries spent to help people in poor nations?
The following is from the book "Why do people hate America?", turned up through Google. Note, I don't hate America (I used to work there), but it may be instructive. OECD has a website you can vist.
According to the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the US gave between $6 and $15 billion in foreign aid in the period between 1995 and 1999. In absolute terms, Japan gives more than the US, between $9 and $15 billion in the same period. But the absolute figures are less significant than the proportion of gross domestic product (GDP, or national wealth) that a country devotes to foreign aid. On that league table, the US ranks twenty-second of the 22 most developed nations. As former President Jimmy Carter commented: 'We are the stingiest nation of all'. Denmark is top of the table, giving 1.01% of GDP, while the US manages just 0.1%. The United Nations has long established the target of 0.7% GDP for development assistance, although only four countries actually achieve this: Denmark, 1.01%; Norway, 0.91%; the Netherlands, 0.79%; Sweden, 0.7%. Apart from being the least generous nation, the US is highly selective in who receives its aid. Over 50% of its aid budget is spent on middle-income countries in the Middle East, with Israel being the recipient of the largest single share.
Guess what? A neural network is a simple nonlinear function. Period. Training such a thing is nothing more than estimating its parameters by minimizing some (usually quadratic) cost criterion. When you put something in, you merely evaluate a rather simple nonlinear function. There is no intelligence involved!
It's a while since I did neural nets and university, but IIRC a 'nueron' in a nueral net lacks nothing from its biolgical equivlent. Neurons in living creatures either fire or not based on the their imputs, those neurons connecting to them that are firing, and the weight they have.
The problem is in building the networks, biological networks are complex, with mutliple sub-networks parrallel processing, with those sub-networks interacting. Humans can't yet build networks that can do anything like this.
Still, if an artificial neural net is a simple, non-linear function, then all the more complex networks in biology are 'just' collections of such functions. Complex behaviour arriving from lots of simple, but interacting, components.
Slashdot Mirror
just type "man command", that will teach you fairly quickly what a command does.
I've worked on UNIX systems for something like 10 years, and I can say that "man" is frequently my last resort. Usenet/Google Groups, normal Google searches, freindly UNIX admins, some bookmarked web pages and books are all things I try before using man.
Maybe man on Linux is much more useful than the AIX system we use, but frequently I find it far too cyptic to be of use. The sort of man pages I see are only going to scare a relative newbie, not help.
Yep. The signal going into the human brain not only is upsidedown, but has a blindspot, and an uneven distribution of rods and cones. IIRC the centre of your field vision is much better at colour sense, and the edge at light/darkness sense.
The brain does loads of processing on the image before the concious part of the brain 'sees' it.
I don't believe this robot is a sufficient reason to go around intentially killing flies.
Most (the vast majority) people will happily swat and insect for just bothering them a bit and fly near them. The standard of "sufficiant reason" to kill a fly seems very, very low.
Studies have shown that insects do have a negative reponse to stimuli such as electric shocks and that the experience appears to be stored in memory and the experience avoided in the future.
Yep, stimulus-response is one of the basics of living creatures.
This seems to suggest that insects may feel pain.
Here is where it gets tricky, as pain is a subjective thing. Humans interpret certain stimulus as pain, but this happens inside the brain, as it interprets the signals from the nerves. We then react to that pain, both on and imediate, instinctive level, and on a longer term, using our intelligence to avoid it level.
What we have no idea is how the (comparatively) primative insect brain interperts a stimulus we convert to pain. Pain in and of itself is not an evolutionary advantage, it is a means to an end of avoiding physical damage, which is the advantage.
Even if a fly brain recieves a the input from something that does damage and avoids it in the future, it doesn't mean it feels pain. We relate pain to concepts like discomfort and distress. Can an insect feel such things? Do they feel nothing, or somthing so different we cannot identify it?
The problem is, we can't actually empathise with animals. We may feel sympathy for them, but we can't feel empathy for them, because we cannot actually know what they think, what it is like to be them. We can manage a sort of pseudo-empathy by projecting human emotions onto them, and end up empathising with what a human in that situation might feel.
For higher mammals this isn't to bad, we do have some things still in commmon, we can recognise some responses (like pain) as being close to ours, and assume that something kinda similar is going on in their heads. Its good enough "fake empathy" to lets us domesticate, train and live with them. We never really know what goes on in their heads, but it's good enough to work with.
Things like insects though are just too alien, I doubt we will ever know what they feel or think. Is it twitching in pain, or just twitching?
Do you possess empathy for humans? Do you have a reason for that empathy?
Empathy is an evolved survival trait. For communal animals like humans, the ability to empathise helps you predict what other humans are going to do increasing your chance of survival. You can both cooperate and compete better.
We often think of empathy as somthing warm and fuzzy, but the reason for it is it is just another leg up in passing on our DNA.
Well, that was a long post that wasn't really agreeing or disagreeing with you. Personally, I'm more than happy that powering a robot is sufficient justifaction for killing flies.
Except most of the shares are in the hands of the poeple who always used to run the complany, particualry the voting shares.
I don't think being publicly traded will make much difference until a much larger percentage of the shares are held outside the company.
Wow, I can't beleive such tripe got modded as insightful.
Just because some animals are too weak to defend themselves, doesn't give us the right to kill them.
I don't know what planet you have been living on, but that is pretty much how nature works around here. Animals eat other animals, unless the intended prey can defend itself, run away, or evolve into something not good to eat (e.g. poisonus).
Lets face it, removing a few flies won't endanger the species, so do you really care about the "right" to life of a few flies? Do you go around scolding spiders? If in insect lands on you and start sucking you blood, would you leave it?
Nor does it give us the right to build a robot that kills them. It's not like that robot couldn't be powered by other means.
It could, but if you are worried about the environment, flies are a renewable energy source and probably better for it than charging up from the mains that ultimately comes from oil, coal or nuclear power. Only solar would be a better option, and that isn't always viable.
"Rights" are arbitary ideas humans beings have come up with on how we treat each other, and sometimes other creatures, and how we think the would should be. I never heard any serious argument or seen it comonly held as a view humans don't have the right to kill insects when it suits us. Sure, not pull wings off flies for fun, but look at the amount of stuff sold to kill of bugs that bother us. Some people may worry about the larger effects of losing a whole insect species, but nobody (apart from you) cares about a few bugs.
So then we can knock a few breeds of bird off the non-extinct list who find their daily quota of dragon-like flies diminishing. And then of course the algaes around lakes grow out of control killing off the fish.
Hang on, how did you get from birds to algae going out of control? Do those birds also eat the algae? Do the dragonflies? Does nothing else exist in that environment that eats the algae?
The circle of life is all very warm and fuzzy, but animal become extinct all the time, and others move into their niche. If it wouldn't cause some major disturbance, I'd happily loose dragonflies and some birds if it meant the end of mosquitoes.
This is something like the third article where someone has posted that link, then it has been modded up as informative.
Maybe a lot of Slashdotters don't pay attention when they Mod, but it smells to me of some organised trolling.
I think warning people about these sort of links may be offtopic, but is a service to fellow slashdotters.
You are probably just annoyed because it stops people clicking on the link you posted. As if that link was on topic.
Getting way off topic here but...
You never, ever use a racial slur, even just to repeat the words of others.
You may never, but the rest of the world is generally aware of something called "context". If the poster was using it as an insult, it would be bad. They weren't though.
Tell me, do you get offended when one black person calls another "nigger" not as an insult? Or even themselves? Or if someone repeated such a conversation to you? It is quite common for minority groups to take insulting terms and reclaim them.
The poster could have used asterisks or put N-word, but it was horrible to use the word itself!
Surely it is the concept of slavery and discrimination that is horrible, not the word in a context of a non-insult? If someone wrote "n****r", from context your brain is just going to subsitiute "nigger" anyway. Asteriks and euphamisms are pointless, either you completely obscure what you are trying to say, so why say it, or everyone know what you are saying, so why hide it?
If you are really that easily offended (and not just trolling as I suspect) then I suggest you avoid Slashdot, and webforums in general, and definately stay clear of usenet.
Uses a raial slur towards people of African-American descent. Very offensive.
That is what the group is called. It isn't the parent posters fault they called themselves that. They (the parent poster) aren't trolling, just warning users.
Try this Wikipedia link explaining it.
Evolution is leaving men behind.
The writer clearly doesn't have a clue about evolution. Evolution is about successfully passing on your DNA. Until women can do it without men, one half of the species can't be "left behind". Genetic traits of succesful women are (mostly) passed to male and female offspring.
What is more, there isn't any suggestion this is due to evolutionary changes in humans, it is a social change.
Rather than code for each anti-virus program that exists, Microsoft introduced a way for AV programs to register themselves with the OS. So, you need to update you AVs before SP2 will know about them.
I'm running Norton, and quick auto-update and SP2 recognised it just fine.
Can you read the document on the LCD screen without going blind or getting severe eye strain? Good enough, then.
Right... so getting moderate eye strain is "good enough" for you?
Normally I don't let the ultra Star Wars Dork side of me out,
It shows, becuase boy are you wrong. Watch as I out dork you :)
Anakin brought balance alright, He became Darth Vader, the most powerful jedi ever, In fact - He, with the help of Bohba Fett, killed Jedi by the thousands.
We haven't seen episode 3 yet, but nothing suggests he becomes the most powerful Jedi ever. Maybe he would have been, but he falls in the lava, becomes half machine and turns Sith (maybe not in that order). While he is a Jedi he isn't more powerful than, say, Yoda, and Obi Wan beats him, although when we see the fight that be partly through luck.
While the Empire crushes the Jedi, it isn't like Darth Vader goes around and kills them all personally, or anything suggests Boba Fett helps. Based on what we have seen of Fetts vs Jedi, I can't see him as much use.
He killed everyone but Obi wan and Yoda, Leaving 2 Jedi and 2 Sith. There can never be more than 2 of each now, This is why ObiWan died, And why Yoda died; To keep the balance. Master and Apprentice.
OK, the last is just complete bunk. At the end of Jedi, there are no Sith at all, and 1 Jedi. Nothing suggests Luke can't find and train a bunch of people to be Jedi. Nothing at all suggests only two ever.
That we are paid in the real world for performing the same real activities as imagined activities makes those activities the provenance of work, even if all we are paid in is satisfaction of a job well done. We wish to have fun and at great expense we pay others to give us fun.
The example in the parent post was about growing carrots. Now, I don't know anyone who grows carrots for a living, who gets paid for it. However, I do know people who garden and grow carrots, and other veg, as a hobby. Not for pay, but for fun, and food, although it's not as if they can't afford to buy food.
My flatmate is a MMORPG addict, he sits their and grinds through creating stuff to sell, it's boring, and he complains how it is borning, but his character needs the money, and considers it the price for playing the bits he enjoy. He only does it becuase he is (virtually) paid for it.
So, interesting as the point about being paid is, I'm not sure it is valid for a lot of MMORPG activities. Some of them are pretty analogous to work in the real word, can be fun or tedious but largely done just for the money, and some close to non-paid activites, done for the fun.
I guess there are a lot of other factors, it's much less effort to make stuff in a game than in real life, you can do it from the confort of sitting in front of your computer and so on. It isn't like making virtual carrots is really anything like the real thing anyway, in terms of experience or reward, so I can't see one as a substitiue for the other.
Having watched a couple of freinds have their lives swallowed by MMORPGs my feelings for them is a degree of pity. There isn't anything wrong with choosing a virtual life over a real one someof the time (most entertainment has a degree of escapism), it is when it eclipses the real world it is a problem. At that point it is easy to get frustrated with people and wish they would go interact with the real world, although clearly many online gamers are not in this category.
If Harmony makes a track bought from the Real store look just like a track bought currently from iTunes, how does Apple break compatability with with the Real tracks without breaking compatability with everything bought so far on iTunes?
Even if it puts some auto update into iTunes to change the version of old tracks to be compatible, won't it just upgrade the Real tracks as well?
I guess it depends if there is any way of telling a convert track from an original.
I beleive a lot of files have been re-compiled to prevent buffer overflows and take advanateg of the NX flag on processors that support them. Many of these programs don't have a 'bug' as such, but are being made more secure.
It is a bit scary watching the install and seeing all these things being replaced.
Also the ~250MB is the admin version, that has every update. The version for home users will only have the necessary ones they need, and should be quite a bit smaller if the machine is reasonably up to date.
Probably still the biggest SP for windows ever though.
Your computer becomes a spam zombie within minutes of being connected to the Internet.
Yep, that's the firewall and security changes. Unless you open infected mail, which is harder but still possible, and always will be, unless you prevent the user from ever running a suspect program even if they choose to.
Outlook Express has no junk mail filtering.
Sadly, no.
Your screen becomes deluged with popup windows with no escape because closing one opens about ten others.
Yes, IE now has a pop-up blocker.
Many of the bugs describe stuff that's just broken full stop and should really have been removed before XP was released, ie: You cannot preview a fax in the Fax Console.. Others sound like simple program logic errors, which shold never have happenned in the first place. I particularly liked: Windows XP stops responding (hangs) when you log off the computer if more than one user is logged on. WTF?
Go read the knowledge base articles. These bugs don't mean these things always happen, only that they happen under certain conditions. Bugs, yes, but harldy "broken full stop".
Let's complain about legit problems with MS, eh?
Unfortunately there isn't any good way to profile terrorists to anything like the degree that would be useful. What is 'a likely terrorist'? Anyone Islamic? Anyone of Middle Eastern origin?
As long as the terrorists have people who have no criminal record, reasonably well educated, and not known to intelligence services, how do you profile for them? They may even have been born, and carry a passport, from a non-Middle East country, and never have traveled to 'suspicious' places like Afghanistan.
How do you profile such people?
I'm not going to do anything illegal.
And you trust law enforcement to only ever invade the privacy of those they suspect of doing something illegal? And not, say, people whose politics those in power don't like such as civil rights activists, as they have historically done?
I do not know what kind of surgery these people performed to fix these machines,
From the article:
Windows couldn't boot up properly while a certain Norton program file was active, but the Norton firewall couldn't operate without its being active. Glenn spent hours taking that file -- SYMTDI.VXD -- on and off the computer, each time having to reboot. Eventually he installed more memory -- triple what we had -- because our limited supply made the reboots ungodly long.
That's why it took so long.
If you read the article the tech spent ages rebooting trying to get Norton Firewall and AV to install, but they wouldn't work together becuase of a bug.
Restalling 98 wouldn't help
I hope she'll realize that she has these problems because she chooses to use Microsoft products.
No, she has these problems becuase she didn't know about computer security. I've had my XP box for a couple of years, and had no problems. Norton AV, Windows Update and Windows Firewall have been just fine.
I'm no great fan of MS business practices, or some of their software, but you can run Windows quite stably and securely without much effort. Choosing to use MS is not the problem.
I'd much rather see this money go to feeding a starving child or even going to help rebuild a war torn country to sustain itself than freaking chess.
Seems more likely to me it isn't about Chess as about tourism. It is an investment which will bring money into the country and create jobs. How equatably that wealth gets spread is a different issue.
You can argue that any governemnt spending that isn't feeding starving people or healthcare could be better spent, but then you would have nothing spent on art, science (like space travel), economic development or anything. If citizens of a coutnry are starving, suffering from an epidemic or whatever, then of course it should be the governments top priority. If it doesn't have such problems though, why not invest in tourism and the economy? If the investment pans out it will be good for the coutry.
Now the (french?) trolls can bash me and call american's evil war mongers, but how much have other countries spent to help people in poor nations?
The following is from the book "Why do people hate America?", turned up through Google. Note, I don't hate America (I used to work there), but it may be instructive. OECD has a website you can vist.
According to the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the US gave between $6 and $15 billion in foreign aid in the period between 1995 and 1999. In absolute terms, Japan gives more than the US, between $9 and $15 billion in the same period. But the absolute figures are less significant than the proportion of gross domestic product (GDP, or national wealth) that a country devotes to foreign aid. On that league table, the US ranks twenty-second of the 22 most developed nations. As former President Jimmy Carter commented: 'We are the stingiest nation of all'. Denmark is top of the table, giving 1.01% of GDP, while the US manages just 0.1%. The United Nations has long established the target of 0.7% GDP for development assistance, although only four countries actually achieve this: Denmark, 1.01%; Norway, 0.91%; the Netherlands, 0.79%; Sweden, 0.7%. Apart from being the least generous nation, the US is highly selective in who receives its aid. Over 50% of its aid budget is spent on middle-income countries in the Middle East, with Israel being the recipient of the largest single share.
Guess what? A neural network is a simple nonlinear function. Period. Training such a thing is nothing more than estimating its parameters by minimizing some (usually quadratic) cost criterion. When you put something in, you merely evaluate a rather simple nonlinear function. There is no intelligence involved!
It's a while since I did neural nets and university, but IIRC a 'nueron' in a nueral net lacks nothing from its biolgical equivlent. Neurons in living creatures either fire or not based on the their imputs, those neurons connecting to them that are firing, and the weight they have.
The problem is in building the networks, biological networks are complex, with mutliple sub-networks parrallel processing, with those sub-networks interacting. Humans can't yet build networks that can do anything like this.
Still, if an artificial neural net is a simple, non-linear function, then all the more complex networks in biology are 'just' collections of such functions. Complex behaviour arriving from lots of simple, but interacting, components.