I prefer a much stronger, purely logical proof that Santa exists, which I read in a respected mathematical journal a few years ago. We will prove that Santa exists by proving a stronger statement, namely that an existing Santa exists. Clearly, exactly one of the following holds true:
a) Existing Santa exists.
b) Existing Santa does not exist.
Consider b. It is a contradiction, so it is false. Then a) must be true, therefore existing Santa exists, therefore Santa exists. QED.
"I know Zhang is only suggesting that it's possible, not necessarily a good idea, but don't give the ISPs any stupid ideas."
Unfortunately:
He and colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley have founded a startup, Rinera, to develop software that will give service providers such control.
Seems that Slashdot is not only giving ISPs the stupid ideas but also giving free publicity to a company that implements them:-(
Or, another way to look at it: "Does XXX have the potential to do better than RPM?". If not, then they should die--people responsible for packaging apps will have one less format to take care of.
That would be the case if RPM was the top one ahead in at least one of {popularity, quality}. This is not the case.
While I do not disagree with you, there's still an important question, namely: "Why do we need RPM for?" and once you answer that, there's a tougher one: "Does RPM have the potential to do it better than the existing solution(s)?". If not, then it should die - people responsible for packaging apps will have one less format to take care of.
But what they do here is exactly what marketing is about today. Creating a hype. Making the product cool and thus making people want it.
Yeah... except the whole affair is not about creating hype. Creating hype is fair game. Creating a fake fan site and fake fan videos is not. There is a line between a 15-year old actor saying he "luvs psp" in an ad on tv (in most civilized countries ads must be clearly flagged as such in newspapers and TV) and a 30+ marketeer pretending he is an actual 15-year old who created a fan site.
"If you can read the chip, then you can clone it," he says.
Don't see how you can... but anyway an exploit would be a problem with the reading software, not with the passports.
The "read -> clone" implication might be a bit of an overstatement, but if the chip identifies itself (and the passport) to the reader by revealing _all_ of its contents, then the only barrier to cloning is the availability of programmable RFID chips. Cryptographically speaking (*), they could have done better. There exists something called zero knowledge protocols which makes it possible to identify a party without revealing the secret information used for identification, i.e. without helping the potential cloner.
(*)I don't know whether RFID chips are capable of implementing zero knowledge protocols (they require some computing power), but if they can handle 3DES, then the answer is probably yes.
Also, because of the huge amount of data involved, unexpected things will happen. For example, our system tried to crawl an online game. This resulted in lots of garbage messages in the middle of their game! It turns out this was an easy problem to fix.
Unfortunately, many web developers still ignore the inevitable, leaving their sites vulnerable to the dreaded Googlebot "attack". While most of the spider developer manuals (TFA included) stress the importance of being polite (respect robots.txt & friends), most of the "become teh Web Master in x days" books don't even mention robots.txt. Go figure.
The contest would be far more interesting if it added a reasonable time/RAM restriction (e.g. 10 minutes and 500MB of RAM).
Maybe it would be more interesting, but it would also be a totally different contest. It isn't a contest for generic file compressors, goddamit! It's supposed to drive research in the field of knowledge representation, based on the supposition that in order to compress knowledge well, you have to find good representation for it. The compression factor is supposed to be a kind of benchmark for knowledge representation and the other characteristics useful in a generic file compressor (memory and cpu use) are irrelevant in this case.
All in all, an investment in a diamond mine or even in a diamond ring may be a very bad investment.
"Investment" in a diamond ring has never been any good and hats off to De Beers for convincing the general public otherwise. Here's a link to an article about it:Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?
It should be obvious that you need a computer to run the software. And not unreasonable to assume that you need both audio input and output devices.
Yes, but not just any input/output devices. For noise cancelling to work, you need the microphone and the speakers in specific positions and they have to meet some rather strict bandwidth and phase requirements. Randomly picked mic and speakers just won't do.
What IBM should really do is formally offer SCO a settlement of One US Dollar. It would be One US Dollar more than SCO could ever hope to win with their baseless and time consuming lawsuit.
Nope. IBM don't just want to fend off SCO. They want to crush them, and the future of Linux might not even be their #1 motivation. The fate of SCO will be like a giant poster: "That's what happens to you if you're dumb enough to mess with IBM". Such a chilling effect on future baseless lawsuits against IBM is something they just can't miss.
Adding an animated cartoon is supposed to be the 'next generation AI'? So, stickers with flames are 'the next generation in automotive industry'? Jeeeez...
I've read an article about clams used for the same purpose - they might be even better than fish, because they speak binary (clam open/clam clammed up) and don't move so much, so it's easier to monitor them automatically. The system in question raised alarm if more than a preset percentage of the clams clammed up. I cannot find the original article, but here's a short press note about a similar system that I found:
Delta Consult, a Dutch company, markets a water pollution monitor that uses live zebra mussels as sensors.
The product uses changes in mussels behavior - as determined by monitoring shell movement through electromagnetic induction - to detect water quality changes. The mussels are glued to the device.
Delta Consult reports that the system can detect low concentrations of tributyl-tin oxide, chlorine, crude oil and such heavy metals as copper, cadmium, selenium, zinc and lead.
The best part of the system is that the mussels are replaceable - but you must supply your own.
I'm interested to know what would happen if you 'return' from the ELSE block, but have code in the FINALLY block.
See The return statement
First, the exception passed to 'return' is evaluated (in your example to 42), then the 'finally' block is executed. So, this function prints "a","c","d" and returns 42.
I'm not sure. The guy who hired me to consult explained that that was how he'd originally gone about it. Only after that took forever, did he write a self-join that took six days. But I didn't see his cursor code.
Well, if he just queried the table for each row, then blah. But there is a way to implement a join outside a database without O(n) queries - get both datasets (or, in case of self-join, the same dataset with 2 independent cursors) sorted on the join expression and merge on the fly, scrolling both cursors forward. It is a hack, and it shoud be only useful in special cases - if you are joining on an expression non-obvious to the query optimizer, if your db doesn't support indexes on expressions or if it just plain sucks.
Funny you mentioned eBay, as it also shows the darker side of value through history. Gain reputation, sell some bricks as laptops, profit. And of course get a new login...
... or like the good old generic CPU instructions. Before deciding which ones are 'better' one has too look at Lisp Machines - what were they good for and why they died.
I think it won't repeat the success of 3d acceleration, because AI is quite unlike 3D. The key factor in 3d accelerators' success is IMHO a very good set of primitives. If you are fast at drawing large numbers of textured triangles potentially obscuring each other, then you are there (almost) - you can accelerate practically any 3d game. I don't see anything like this in AI. Well, perhaps a generic depth-first search accelerator for brute force algorithms, but the problem I see with that is that the search spaces will vary from game to game, so you probably won't be faster than your current multi-core generic CPU.
It seems that those guys did what's best under these circumstances - got a specific search space that is common in many games and specialized in that. IMHO, it's not enough to get the snowball rolling, but time will tell.
Slashdot Mirror
I prefer a much stronger, purely logical proof that Santa exists, which I read in a respected mathematical journal a few years ago. We will prove that Santa exists by proving a stronger statement, namely that an existing Santa exists. Clearly, exactly one of the following holds true:
a) Existing Santa exists.
b) Existing Santa does not exist.
Consider b. It is a contradiction, so it is false. Then a) must be true, therefore existing Santa exists, therefore Santa exists. QED.
Obviously, nobody will ever use more then 10% of PS3 brain!
Seems that Slashdot is not only giving ISPs the stupid ideas but also giving free publicity to a company that implements themUnfortunately:
While I do not disagree with you, there's still an important question, namely: "Why do we need RPM for?" and once you answer that, there's a tougher one: "Does RPM have the potential to do it better than the existing solution(s)?". If not, then it should die - people responsible for packaging apps will have one less format to take care of.
Thank you, Scott.
(*)I don't know whether RFID chips are capable of implementing zero knowledge protocols (they require some computing power), but if they can handle 3DES, then the answer is probably yes.
For a good chuckle, see The Spider of Doom on the Daily WTF.
And please use robots.txt.
And go see Google Webmaster tools.
And don't wear socks with sandals. Well, ok, this one is optional.
Do not live in a country ruled by a paranoid dictator?
It should be obvious that you need a computer to run the software. And not unreasonable to assume that you need both audio input and output devices. Yes, but not just any input/output devices. For noise cancelling to work, you need the microphone and the speakers in specific positions and they have to meet some rather strict bandwidth and phase requirements. Randomly picked mic and speakers just won't do.
Adding an animated cartoon is supposed to be the 'next generation AI'? So, stickers with flames are 'the next generation in automotive industry'? Jeeeez...
Funny you mentioned eBay, as it also shows the darker side of value through history. Gain reputation, sell some bricks as laptops, profit. And of course get a new login...
It has an anagram of voyeur in the middle. Hm... I wonder what kind of job would solving this riddle get me :-)
These are not identities, but paid-for logins. Wake me up when you implement a true identity - one login per meat-puppet per lifetime, please.
It seems that those guys did what's best under these circumstances - got a specific search space that is common in many games and specialized in that. IMHO, it's not enough to get the snowball rolling, but time will tell.