The only way for this to work is if the machine is connected to the Internet and the user has to respond to the ad in some way(i.e. clicking a particular button) to confirm the user is actually viewing the ad, and this is reported to a server. Otherwise you can just recompile...
But the whole idea is a bit silly. It certainly doesn't go against the philosophy, but what's wrong with using tech support as a business model for Linux distros?
I hate to repeat myself...but a website is very different from a billboard. No one is forcing people to look at the web site. And no one is forcing people to read the letters.
Billboards are different. I agree that special laws should apply to large fixed structures which people have no choice but to look at. The same should go for air writing, blimps and any large signage.
But they are all special cases, and irrelevant to this particular scenario (web sites). The rest of the time people have a choice at what they read/view, and so if they are offended by something it is their own fault, nobody forced them to look at it. They chose to of their own volition.
I find a lot of Catholic belief particularly offensive, such as their medieval attitudes towards science, their anti-contraceptive stance and their denial of female reproductive rights. But I wouldn't ever want to censor them. Voltaire always sez it best...
"I might not agree with what you say, but I'll die defending your right to say it."
The procedure (injecting the heart with alcohol) is interesting but also interesting is that it will be performed in front of 3000 delegates of the European Society of Cardiology conference who will "ask questions and offer advice".
If only computer trade shows were this exciting...
Hey, don't knock her; she seems quite
techno-literate:
"We'll turn into Microsoft if we're not careful, insisting that any household wanting a copy for the car, or the kids, or the portable CD player, has to go out and "license" multiple copies."
I just hope she doesn't give the record companies ideas.
And David Bowie had some pretty good stuff to say, too.
Just a thought, but it would be great if more stars of the 60s spoke out against the record companies on this one. Those decrepit baby boomers owe it to us later generations...
Lobby your favorite aging rocker. I bet their back catalogues make up a sizeable portion of record company revenue, and the've already made a fortune so they have less to risk by speaking out. And once we get Ozzy Osbourne et al on the case...
My mistake, should have replied to the original post...all these Re:s get a bit confusing...
I assumed (incorrectly) that the original poster was talking about a magnet that was randomly cleaning up space. My thinking was that if you are going to go to the trouble of getting to exactly the right orbit and slowly braking why bother to use a magnet at all? Any kind of containment device would probably work...
Anyway I think people are underestimating how difficult it would be to get on course with the debris, as lots of this debris is moving in very fast elliptical orbits and much of it is too small to be tracked.
Consider this: The defense department has found it incredibly difficult and expensive ($billions) to build a NMD system which will (sometimes) hit targets (missiles) which are moving slower than the most of the debris, are larger (easier to hit) and are much closer to the surface of the Earth (much cheaper per hit).
Based on that, I estimate it will cost upwards of a trillion dollars if we want to clean up this debris. Perhaps any organisation who adds to or has added to this debris should be charged for cleaning it up... NASA and TsAGI acould be facing huge bills in the future.
Lots of other posts have said it's a small chance anyhow (i.e. dont worry), but if IIRC the original post was about launching a large (100m+) space telescope, so the chances of being hit are greatly multiplied.
So what? All it takes is one lucky hit to destroy billions of $ of equipment. That is much more money than most lotteries. And anyway it happens much more frequently than you imply. From this useful site:
"For example, NASA frequently replaces space shuttle orbiter windows because they are significantly damaged by objects as small as a flake of paint."
We really need to clean up earth orbits before we start putting more stuff up there.
But how do we do that? These things are moving pretty fast. For a low Earth orbit, the speeds is about 10 km/sec (36,000 km/h), while a geosynchronous orbit (higher up) is only about 200 m/sec.
How can you clean something up which is moving that fast?
Its mohole, as assron already has a meaning: a corporate officer who gets their million dolar bonuses whilst their company, a blue chip stock invested in heavily by pension funds, slides into bankruptcy due to their fiscal mismanagement and deception.
Yes, neutrinos have been proven to have mass. So what the hell are they talking about in this story??? From the article:
"There's a lot of hints and clues (that neutrinos have mass), but we can't find the body yet," Marshak explained. "It's possible to convict someone of murder without a body, but it's a lot easier with it."
Other experiments have already produced some evidence of neutrino oscillation, but so far there has been no firm demonstration of the phenomenon.
How about this...the superintelligent robots who managed to build a vast and realistic simulation of 21st century Earth finally get around to adding a login?
Neo: It's asking for my password now...what do I do now morpheus??? Morpheus:
Don't get me wrong...I loved the Matrix, just why with these $100m movies dont they bother to pass the script to some experts (or anyone with a BSc) who can say if it is believable or not....i mean humans as efficient batteries, who would believe that?...
And its not like you there is some physical law that a plot cant be both believable and fun...I can suspend my disbelief as good as anyone but sometimes its nice not to have to.
Perhaps it won't happen. Perhaps the idea is just yet another diabolical plan for world domination that popped into William H. Gates III's twisted imagination. But we must not be complacent unless we want to live in a world where Free Software is a crime.
We need to think about Palladium like we think about asteroids colliding with earth. The risk is small (maybe even tiny) but the possible consequences are catastrophic. Our actions should be made accordingly.
Of course Palladium won't mean the end of the world. But it will mean that Microsoft will finally become completely entrenched into global civilisation, a scourge which will be impossible to remove. It will make it only a matter of degrees for Free Software to be outlawed. And it will tether our technological society to outdated ideas from the 19th century.
At a time like this nothing is more dangerous than complacency.
Clearly, Budget should and will most likely put a 3 sentences in their contract saying they can monitor their car with GPS, but its not going to change anything in the long run.
Imagine how much business Budget is getting from it's competitors that it wouldn't if there was full disclosure of the GPS policy. THEY are the ones who should be suing, for deceptive trade practices.
Market forces should be allowed to decided whether people want to be GPS tracked or not.
Because this stuff isn't in grains, it would seem to be particular expansive, rather than dense (does anyone know a good antonym of "dense" other than expansive?). Perhaps it is explosively compressed before firing. But exactly why is it a good replacement for DU?
You're right; the main reason they use DU is it's density. But the pyrophoric nature of it makes it particularly nasty when it pierces the armour of the tank, and also keeps it "sharp". A non-pyrophorical metal of comparable density, tungsten, quickly becomes blunt as it pierces the armour.
Depleted uranium shells are responsible for environmental damage and health problems for soldiers. Replacing uranium with Liquid Metal would be a very good use for it, and would justify he hype somewhat.
I assume the reason why liquid metal would be a good replacement for depleted Uranium is that because it has no grains, it is particularly pyrophoric, i.e. will spontaneously burn when exposed to air.
I believe that AI is not being crippled by the inherent difficulty of the problem, but rather by economic inertia and the fact there are no real-world problems which require AI instead of human (natural) intelligence. Making AIs which emulate humans has no clear economic purpose, after all we've got 6 billion human who can do the task at very little cost.
We could create a human-level (or greater) AI to solve any given problem, but the initial cost of creating it would be far greater than employing an organic brain (i.e. a human) to do the same work.
But once you have a certain critical number of AIs the costs will drop dramatically, and AI use will probably snowball. A big advantage in AI is that unlike organic brains, artificial brains will be capable of direct loading and reading of data. For example, humans must spend 4 years at university to get a degree, and learn a known body of knowledge. The information could just be directly loaded into an an artificial brain in a matter of hours. And AIs can be forced to complete tasks without regard to their rights (AIs dont have any, yet).
A big problem I see with AI is copyright. Every commerical AI creator has to reinvent the wheel (although there is some freeware AI software). A project like Cyc, which contains large amounts of basic information even 10-year olds know, should ideally be in the public domain or GPL licensed (It isn't).
I believe that what AI desperately needs is a situation where only AI can be used and NI (natural intelligence) can't.
Space exploration, in particular possible Mars missions, offers a great opportunity for AI. Robots don't require life support and are generally far more economic for interplanetary travel. Mars can be up to 16 light minutes away from Earth, so exploratory robots should be given a degree of free thought and action to maximise the use of their time on Mars (waiting 16 minutes per command from NASA would be wasteful).
Hazardous situations (radioactive, volcanic or toxic environments) are another situation AI could be used for. But in general these are few and far between, and their exploration has little economic value.
...is a cruel bitch. There are many natural substances out there which are bad for you.
Artifical != bad && natural != good
Consider this: Many plants don't actual like being eaten. So they evolve to be toxic. Many animals don't like being eaten either. So they evolve to be toxic. At least this sweetener hasn't been evolved for millions of years to be bad for you.
So humans evolved to eat fruit. But recently (20,000 years ago) we adapted to eat grains, something we had never ever done before. And we did it, no sweat.
We are opportunistic omnivores (like bears) that are meant to eat whatever we can - vegetable, animal, mineral. Our systems have evolved to be robust in dealing with toxins. Don't underestimate the body's natural anti-toxin systems: some coyotes simply CANNOT be poisoned... they must be baited with meat with a autofiring projectile syringe in it. (They vomit any poison).
And in all these lab tests they give rats relatively huge quantities of the given drug....but just imagine the rats they tested this on..."God please, just give us something SAVOURY!!!"
Slashdot Mirror
...im no longer confused. Thanks.
The only way for this to work is if the machine is connected to the Internet and the user has to respond to the ad in some way(i.e. clicking a particular button) to confirm the user is actually viewing the ad, and this is reported to a server. Otherwise you can just recompile...
Or if you wanted to be clever, do what KT did and put it in GCC...
But the whole idea is a bit silly. It certainly doesn't go against the philosophy, but what's wrong with using tech support as a business model for Linux distros?
Fair enough...
RAND = Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory Licensing.
This is what RMS thinks about it.
W3C = World Wide Web Consortium.
I hate to repeat myself...but a website is very different from a billboard. No one is forcing people to look at the web site. And no one is forcing people to read the letters.
Billboards are different. I agree that special laws should apply to large fixed structures which people have no choice but to look at. The same should go for air writing, blimps and any large signage.
But they are all special cases, and irrelevant to this particular scenario (web sites). The rest of the time people have a choice at what they read/view, and so if they are offended by something it is their own fault, nobody forced them to look at it. They chose to of their own volition.
1. website != billboard.
2. offensive to you == interesting to me
I find a lot of Catholic belief particularly offensive, such as their medieval attitudes towards science, their anti-contraceptive stance and their denial of female reproductive rights. But I wouldn't ever want to censor them. Voltaire always sez it best...
"I might not agree with what you say, but I'll die defending your right to say it."
The relevant people to have on the ARB would not be kernel developers or vendors but MESA developers.
Interestingly, the open source keiretsu (VA Linux) is a non-voting member of the ARB...
why doesn't Linux?
The procedure (injecting the heart with alcohol) is interesting but also interesting is that it will be performed in front of 3000 delegates of the European Society of Cardiology conference who will "ask questions and offer advice".
If only computer trade shows were this exciting...
I was poking around Knuth's site, looking at the instruction set for MMIX , when I came across this instruction (SR, SRU added for comparison):
3C SR shift right (1) rA
3D SRI Stanford Research Institute (2) rA
3E SRU shift right unsigned (1)
What's that do then?
Hey, don't knock her; she seems quite techno-literate:
"We'll turn into Microsoft if we're not careful, insisting that any household wanting a copy for the car, or the kids, or the portable CD player, has to go out and "license" multiple copies."
I just hope she doesn't give the record companies ideas.
And David Bowie had some pretty good stuff to say, too.
Just a thought, but it would be great if more stars of the 60s spoke out against the record companies on this one. Those decrepit baby boomers owe it to us later generations...
Lobby your favorite aging rocker. I bet their back catalogues make up a sizeable portion of record company revenue, and the've already made a fortune so they have less to risk by speaking out. And once we get Ozzy Osbourne et al on the case...
My mistake, should have replied to the original post...all these Re:s get a bit confusing...
I assumed (incorrectly) that the original poster was talking about a magnet that was randomly cleaning up space. My thinking was that if you are going to go to the trouble of getting to exactly the right orbit and slowly braking why bother to use a magnet at all? Any kind of containment device would probably work...
Anyway I think people are underestimating how difficult it would be to get on course with the debris, as lots of this debris is moving in very fast elliptical orbits and much of it is too small to be tracked.
Intelligent post.
Consider this: The defense department has found it incredibly difficult and expensive ($billions) to build a NMD system which will (sometimes) hit targets (missiles) which are moving slower than the most of the debris, are larger (easier to hit) and are much closer to the surface of the Earth (much cheaper per hit).
Based on that, I estimate it will cost upwards of a trillion dollars if we want to clean up this debris. Perhaps any organisation who adds to or has added to this debris should be charged for cleaning it up... NASA and TsAGI acould be facing huge bills in the future.
Lots of other posts have said it's a small chance anyhow (i.e. dont worry), but if IIRC the original post was about launching a large (100m+) space telescope, so the chances of being hit are greatly multiplied.
...and you are assuming that the magnet is powerful enough to deflect objects moving at 10km/s.
So what? All it takes is one lucky hit to destroy billions of $ of equipment. That is much more money than most lotteries. And anyway it happens much more frequently than you imply.
From this useful site:
"For example, NASA frequently replaces space shuttle orbiter windows because they are significantly damaged by objects as small as a flake of paint."
We really need to clean up earth orbits before we start putting more stuff up there.
But how do we do that? These things are moving pretty fast. For a low Earth orbit, the speeds is about 10 km/sec (36,000 km/h), while a geosynchronous orbit (higher up) is only about 200 m/sec.
How can you clean something up which is moving that fast?
Its mohole, as assron already has a meaning: a corporate officer who gets their million dolar bonuses whilst their company, a blue chip stock invested in heavily by pension funds, slides into bankruptcy due to their fiscal mismanagement and deception.
Yes, neutrinos have been proven to have mass. So what the hell are they talking about in this story???
From the article:
"There's a lot of hints and clues (that neutrinos have mass), but we can't find the body yet," Marshak explained. "It's possible to convict someone of murder without a body, but it's a lot easier with it."
Other experiments have already produced some evidence of neutrino oscillation, but so far there has been no firm demonstration of the phenomenon.
So what is this article about? I'm confused...
plot speculation?
The matrix _has_ a plot?
How about this...the superintelligent robots who managed to build a vast and realistic simulation of 21st century Earth finally get around to adding a login?
Neo: It's asking for my password now...what do I do now morpheus???
Morpheus:
Don't get me wrong...I loved the Matrix, just why with these $100m movies dont they bother to pass the script to some experts (or anyone with a BSc) who can say if it is believable or not....i mean humans as efficient batteries, who would believe that?...
And its not like you there is some physical law that a plot cant be both believable and fun...I can suspend my disbelief as good as anyone but sometimes its nice not to have to.
Perhaps it won't happen. Perhaps the idea is just yet another diabolical plan for world domination that popped into William H. Gates III's twisted imagination. But we must not be complacent unless we want to live in a world where Free Software is a crime.
We need to think about Palladium like we think about asteroids colliding with earth. The risk is small (maybe even tiny) but the possible consequences are catastrophic. Our actions should be made accordingly.
Of course Palladium won't mean the end of the world. But it will mean that Microsoft will finally become completely entrenched into global civilisation, a scourge which will be impossible to remove. It will make it only a matter of degrees for Free Software to be outlawed. And it will tether our technological society to outdated ideas from the 19th century.
At a time like this nothing is more dangerous than complacency.
Clearly, Budget should and will most likely put a 3 sentences in their contract saying they can monitor their car with GPS, but its not going to change anything in the long run.
Imagine how much business Budget is getting from it's competitors that it wouldn't if there was full disclosure of the GPS policy. THEY are the ones who should be suing, for deceptive trade practices.
Market forces should be allowed to decided whether people want to be GPS tracked or not.
Because this stuff isn't in grains, it would seem to be particular expansive, rather than dense (does anyone know a good antonym of "dense" other than expansive?). Perhaps it is explosively compressed before firing. But exactly why is it a good replacement for DU?
You're right; the main reason they use DU is it's density. But the pyrophoric nature of it makes it
particularly nasty when it pierces the armour of the tank, and also keeps it "sharp". A non-pyrophorical metal of comparable density, tungsten, quickly becomes blunt as it pierces the armour.
Depleted uranium shells are responsible for environmental damage and health problems for soldiers. Replacing uranium with Liquid Metal would be a very good use for it, and would justify he hype somewhat.
I assume the reason why liquid metal would be a good replacement for depleted Uranium is that because it has no grains, it is particularly pyrophoric, i.e. will spontaneously burn when exposed to air.
I believe that AI is not being crippled by the inherent difficulty of the problem, but rather by economic inertia and the fact there are no real-world problems which require AI instead of human (natural) intelligence. Making AIs which emulate humans has no clear economic purpose, after all we've got 6 billion human who can do the task at very little cost.
We could create a human-level (or greater) AI to solve any given problem, but the initial cost of creating it would be far greater than employing an organic brain (i.e. a human) to do the same work.
But once you have a certain critical number of AIs the costs will drop dramatically, and AI use will probably snowball. A big advantage in AI is that unlike organic brains, artificial brains will be capable of direct loading and reading of data. For example, humans must spend 4 years at university to get a degree, and learn a known body of knowledge. The information could just be directly loaded into an an artificial brain in a matter of hours. And AIs can be forced to complete tasks without regard to their rights (AIs dont have any, yet).
A big problem I see with AI is copyright. Every commerical AI creator has to reinvent the wheel (although there is some freeware AI software). A project like Cyc, which contains large amounts of basic information even 10-year olds know, should ideally be in the public domain or GPL licensed (It isn't).
I believe that what AI desperately needs is a situation where only AI can be used and NI (natural intelligence) can't.
Space exploration, in particular possible Mars missions, offers a great opportunity for AI. Robots don't require life support and are generally far more economic for interplanetary travel. Mars can be up to 16 light minutes away from Earth, so exploratory robots should be given a degree of free thought and action to maximise the use of their time on Mars (waiting 16 minutes per command from NASA would be wasteful).
Hazardous situations (radioactive, volcanic or toxic environments) are another situation AI could be used for. But in general these are few and far between, and their exploration has little economic value.
...is a cruel bitch. There are many natural substances out there which are bad for you.
...but just imagine the rats they tested this on..."God please, just give us something SAVOURY!!!"
Artifical != bad && natural != good
Consider this: Many plants don't actual like being eaten. So they evolve to be toxic. Many animals don't like being eaten either. So they evolve to be toxic. At least this sweetener hasn't been evolved for millions of years to be bad for you.
So humans evolved to eat fruit. But recently (20,000 years ago) we adapted to eat grains, something we had never ever done before. And we did it, no sweat.
We are opportunistic omnivores (like bears) that are meant to eat whatever we can - vegetable, animal, mineral. Our systems have evolved to be robust in dealing with toxins. Don't underestimate the body's natural anti-toxin systems: some coyotes simply CANNOT be poisoned... they must be baited with meat with a autofiring projectile syringe in it. (They vomit any poison).
And in all these lab tests they give rats relatively huge quantities of the given drug.