Amongst other things, the article looked at how Darth Vader, despite ordering the deaths of billions of people, is completely forgiven and welcomed into Jedi heaven because -- wait for it -- he saved the life of his son Luke S.
I am reminded of that old proverb "Tis better to be a fool and remain silent than to speak and remove any doubt"
Whenever I hear that, I always think of another proverb -- "He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes. He who remains silent is a fool forever.".
How many scientific advancements would we lose if people with ideas preferred to remain silent, rather than speaking up and risk being thought a fool?
I haven't been able to track down the source of this statement (possibly docs attached to the kernel, possibly somewhere else...), but I recall once reading a statement by Linus basically saying: "If the community thinks the FSF or some other body would be better off in charge, then I will relinquish control to them."
I would even be happy if they just made it 100% legal to de-region players in NZ.
When we bought a DVD player a little while ago, at the same time as buying it, we paid a small extra fee (NZ$20 or so) for the shop (or possibly Sony) to modify it to be regionless. (and it works, too)
IANAL etc, but I guess that suggests it is quite legal:-)
Brief summary for the unwary: The core, as all know, is the memory. You write little programs in a dialect of assembler which try to kill each other by overwriting critical sections of the enemy's code.
...if your program can find it. Since all you really know is that the other warriors are lurking in the core, somewhere...
because humans can generally discard moves which are irrelevant out of hand;
They did an experiment, once: Take a chess board, show it to a novice and to a master for 5 seconds, and then ask the players to reconstruct it on a blank board.
The novice got it mostly right, but with some pieces translated a few squares. Whereas the master tended to translate groups of pieces, to produce a game that looked quite different, but was tactically extremely similar.
(it seems you're right about the narrow tree, too... For a good player, bad moves simply don't exist: They don't get considered and discarded, rather, they are never even considered)
(information comes from Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. If you haven't, read this book:-)
The only way to preserve the value of things like cash is to make sure that no one can duplicate it.
I've never handled foreign paper money, so I don't know what it's like, but...
Here in NZ, we've recently changed our paper money. Formerly, it was paper, although different from ordinary printer paper, and there was a metal "thread" through it, and a watermark of the Queen. Counterfeit notes that preserved both these were pretty rare.
The new stuff is some kind of weird plastic paper, to make it more durable. It has a transparent window in one corner, and doubtless other anti-counterfeitting devices I haven't noticed. (I don't have any on me at the moment..)
The combination of materials and (probably specialised) printing technology probably makes counterfeitting quite difficult, especially once all the old notes are out of the system.
(does this mean that we're using closed-source non-free technologies in our money making to achieve security through obscurity?)
Another book to look at is Axiomatic, by Greg Egan. In particular, the story The Hundred-Light-Year Diary.
[minor spoilers ahead -- just tech, no plot]
Egan considers someone finding a reverse-time Galaxy. If you point a light detector at it, it should lose charge, not gain it. Now consider the effect of blocking the LOS between the detector and the galaxy. (Egan explains this a lot better than I do) Because of the measurable time it takes light to get from the galaxy to the block, or from the block to the detector, and because of the time direction differences, it becomes possible to send information back in time..
Of course, the article doesn't raise the possibility of us receiving light from time-reversed stars.
(cool author, BTW, if you like hard science in your science fiction)
GauteL said: Because, everything _could_ hva just been created, complete with your memory, All of our science and all of our knowledge, _could_ have been created with the world.
Suppose I have a computer with a memory that doesn't forget things. I'm running this computer, and then I pull the plug. Cut the power. Later, I reinstate the power. The memory didn't forget anything, so (ignoring complications present in modern PCs) the computer continues along as though nothing had changed (my HP48 does this, to an extent).
Now suppose that I got this computer new-minted from the plant, and I go and set every bit in the memory myself, to make it resemble the system above. When I turn it on, it seems to be in the middle of a program, and no tool available within the computer could tell me that it had been first powered up only minutes ago.
Too right. It's time the Real Programmers reclaimed UN*X from the quiche eaters. Recently, the trend has been to make UN*X easy to use. The 'people' behind this abomination seem not to realise: if we do this, people will use it!
It is clear that steps must be taken. In addition to rewriting UN*X in FORTRAN, I propose additional measures:
All UN*X program names to be shortened to 6 characters or less, by arbitrary removal of letters. Obscurity is a plus.
UN*X shell to be rewritten: Shell programming is now done in INTERCAL. (it goes without saying that we rm -rf the entire X source tree)
The only editor available will be TECO (although I suppose ed may be appropriate also).
It is only through measures such as these that UN*X can return to its glory days.
Fight the good fight, gentlemen.
Remeber: If you can't do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing.
Ok, so there's a trademark problem, and so they have to change the archive. What about the original e-mails, which could be sitting on people's computers still? OK, the lawyers probably don't know of their existance, but is it legally different? (or, if the lawyers did know about the e-mails, would their response be to e-mail the users and ask them to change the subject lines of the stored e-mails?)
One wonders what would have happened if this had happened in Usenet, and they had, say, come across it in Dejanews. Could Dejanews be required to change their archives? Could the original poster be required to send out a cancel (bearing in mind that not all newsservers honour cancels)?
Bill Clinton, speaking at APEC, mentioned (it wasn't anything like the main thrust of his speech) that governments should not put a tax on e-commerce. I quote: There should be "no tolls on the information superhighway".
You can view a video of the speech from this site (in RealPlayer format), but my rudimentary search didn't show up a transcript.
I don't recall which computer was being discussed...But one of my lecturers made the comment that if you wanted to write a program with a loop for this computer...
...you joined the ends of the tape together, making a loop:-)
The PDP-10 was pretty nice. Pity they aren't common any more. [Ok. Still haven't got the exact year they stopped being made, but there IS a company that makes clones; Check out http://locke.ccil.org/retro/retromuseum. html for an emulator.]
Slashdot Mirror
David Brin wrote a very good article for Salon.
Amongst other things, the article looked at how Darth Vader, despite ordering the deaths of billions of people, is completely forgiven and welcomed into Jedi heaven because -- wait for it -- he saved the life of his son Luke S.
--
Repton.
--
Repton.
I am reminded of that old proverb "Tis better to be a fool and remain silent than to speak and remove any doubt"
Whenever I hear that, I always think of another proverb -- "He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes. He who remains silent is a fool forever.".
How many scientific advancements would we lose if people with ideas preferred to remain silent, rather than speaking up and risk being thought a fool?
--
Repton.
I haven't been able to track down the source of this statement (possibly docs attached to the kernel, possibly somewhere else...), but I recall once reading a statement by Linus basically saying: "If the community thinks the FSF or some other body would be better off in charge, then I will relinquish control to them."
--
Repton.
I would even be happy if they just made it 100% legal to de-region players in NZ.
When we bought a DVD player a little while ago, at the same time as buying it, we paid a small extra fee (NZ$20 or so) for the shop (or possibly Sony) to modify it to be regionless. (and it works, too)
IANAL etc, but I guess that suggests it is quite legal :-)
--
Repton.
Best game for programmers?
Anyone for Core War?
Brief summary for the unwary: The core, as all know, is the memory. You write little programs in a dialect of assembler which try to kill each other by overwriting critical sections of the enemy's code.
...if your program can find it. Since all you really know is that the other warriors are lurking in the core, somewhere...
--
Repton.
--
Repton.
I recall installing one program -- I think it may have been ZOC, a comms program for OS/2 -- with one of those "click to accept" license agreements.
So I did the usual...
Up pops a window, saying (something like): You only spent 13 seconds reading that. Are you sure that was long enough to read and understand it?
Well, I was amused...
--
Repton.
One wonders what effect this technology would have on the retina scan identification tech being developed elsewhere...
--
Repton.
If we had an enumeration of strings in English, each Monkey i could type out works (i-1)*1000+1 through i*1000.
Still an infinite number of monkeys, but they each have to type out 1000 works, instead of 1...
(although I'm not sure how we swing it if they're typing randomly...)
--
Repton.
There doesn't seem to be anything in the NTBugtraq or NTSecurity archives on it either (search for dvwssr.dll turned up nothing).
OTOH, people here have run strings on the file and it has turned up the phrase... so...?
--
Repton.
They did an experiment, once: Take a chess board, show it to a novice and to a master for 5 seconds, and then ask the players to reconstruct it on a blank board.
The novice got it mostly right, but with some pieces translated a few squares. Whereas the master tended to translate groups of pieces, to produce a game that looked quite different, but was tactically extremely similar.
(it seems you're right about the narrow tree, too... For a good player, bad moves simply don't exist: They don't get considered and discarded, rather, they are never even considered)
(information comes from Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. If you haven't, read this book :-)
--
Repton.
I've never handled foreign paper money, so I don't know what it's like, but...
Here in NZ, we've recently changed our paper money. Formerly, it was paper, although different from ordinary printer paper, and there was a metal "thread" through it, and a watermark of the Queen. Counterfeit notes that preserved both these were pretty rare.
The new stuff is some kind of weird plastic paper, to make it more durable. It has a transparent window in one corner, and doubtless other anti-counterfeitting devices I haven't noticed. (I don't have any on me at the moment..)
The combination of materials and (probably specialised) printing technology probably makes counterfeitting quite difficult, especially once all the old notes are out of the system.
(does this mean that we're using closed-source non-free technologies in our money making to achieve security through obscurity?)
--
Repton.
[mmontour proposed some books...]
Another book to look at is Axiomatic, by Greg Egan. In particular, the story The Hundred-Light-Year Diary.
[minor spoilers ahead -- just tech, no plot]
Egan considers someone finding a reverse-time Galaxy. If you point a light detector at it, it should lose charge, not gain it. Now consider the effect of blocking the LOS between the detector and the galaxy. (Egan explains this a lot better than I do) Because of the measurable time it takes light to get from the galaxy to the block, or from the block to the detector, and because of the time direction differences, it becomes possible to send information back in time..
Of course, the article doesn't raise the possibility of us receiving light from time-reversed stars.
(cool author, BTW, if you like hard science in your science fiction)
--
Repton.
Because, everything _could_ hva just been created, complete with your memory, All of our science and all of our knowledge, _could_ have been created with the world.
Suppose I have a computer with a memory that doesn't forget things. I'm running this computer, and then I pull the plug. Cut the power. Later, I reinstate the power. The memory didn't forget anything, so (ignoring complications present in modern PCs) the computer continues along as though nothing had changed (my HP48 does this, to an extent).
Now suppose that I got this computer new-minted from the plant, and I go and set every bit in the memory myself, to make it resemble the system above. When I turn it on, it seems to be in the middle of a program, and no tool available within the computer could tell me that it had been first powered up only minutes ago.
(alternatively, go read Strata :-) )
--
Repton.
Seems like it. I guess they got tired of saying "x holds for all primes except 1" that they excluded it :-)
The unique factorisation thing is the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic.
--
Repton.
Too right. It's time the Real Programmers reclaimed UN*X from the quiche eaters. Recently, the trend has been to make UN*X easy to use. The 'people' behind this abomination seem not to realise: if we do this, people will use it!
It is clear that steps must be taken. In addition to rewriting UN*X in FORTRAN, I propose additional measures:
It is only through measures such as these that UN*X can return to its glory days.
Fight the good fight, gentlemen.
Remeber: If you can't do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing.
--
Repton.
We have a DVD player bought from Sony... When we bought it, we also got it modified (for about NZ$40) to accept DVDs from any zone.
The modification is Sony approved, and was done by the shop (which was a reputable place).
So much for zone protection...
--
Repton.
Ok, so there's a trademark problem, and so they have to change the archive. What about the original e-mails, which could be sitting on people's computers still? OK, the lawyers probably don't know of their existance, but is it legally different?
(or, if the lawyers did know about the e-mails, would their response be to e-mail the users and ask them to change the subject lines of the stored e-mails?)
One wonders what would have happened if this had happened in Usenet, and they had, say, come across it in Dejanews. Could Dejanews be required to change their archives? Could the original poster be required to send out a cancel (bearing in mind that not all newsservers honour cancels)?
Could get tricky...
(nb: IAdefinatelyNAL)
--
Repton.
Bill Clinton, speaking at APEC, mentioned (it wasn't anything like the main thrust of his speech) that governments should not put a tax on e-commerce. I quote: There should be "no tolls on the information superhighway".
You can view a video of the speech from this site (in RealPlayer format), but my rudimentary search didn't show up a transcript.
--
Repton.
I don't recall which computer was being discussed...But one of my lecturers made the comment that if you wanted to write a program with a loop for this computer ...
...you joined the ends of the tape together, making a loop :-)
--
Repton.
HTH. HAND.
--
Repton.
Remember, a tree is just a graph with no cycles... :-)
--
Repton.
HTH. HAND.
--
Repton.
$ fortune -m cosine
e^U du dx
e^x dx
cosine, secant, tangent, sine
3.14159...
--
Repton.
No it's not, it'll be stone dead in a moment..
--
Repton.
From the FAQ:
--
Repton.