Each bot had an initial built-in attraction to a “food” object, aversion to a “poison” object, and a randomly-generated set of parameters –- their “genomes” –- to define the way they move, process sensory information, and flash their blue lights.
The "food" is just something that they're supposed to move towards. I have heard of similar (hobbyist) setups where it's actually a charging station so the "food" aspect is more literal, but all that's necessary is that something keeps score to see which bots found it (and should be used for the next round) and which ones didn't (and should be discarded).
The "genomes" are something like config files for their programming.
To create a next generation bot, traits were combined and randomized to mimic biological mating and mutation.
New bots got config files made from random (well, probably pseudorandom, but that's just as good in this context) sections taken out of the config files of earlier bots, probably with some small bits completely randomized.
(Note that "config file" here is based on the reporter calling it a set of parameters. I'd imagine it could be anything from a normal config file to a script in some appropriate high-level language.)
There's what seems like a decent overview of how these things work in general over here.
If you had read the article closely you would understand that the bug is not in ldd, it is in the dynamic loader.
The bug is that ldd executes the dynamic loader, which is specified by the executable being inspected. So if the executable claims to use ~/bin/evil.so as a loader instead of the standard/lib/ld-linux.so, then ldd will execute ~/bin/evil.so.
Hmm. I have both "Block reported attack sites" and "Block reported web forgeries" checked, and don't get that message, but if I go directly to the stopbadware site and look it up it comes back as suspicious. I've sent the site owner a note, thanks.
The only difference between macro- and micro- evolution is the time-line.
The way I heard, the difference is one is rearranging what's already there (allele frequencies changing), and the other is actual new stuff (like these particular e coli being able to eat citric acid).
From looking at that link it looks like this actually is one of the ways those terms are really used, although they're quite fuzzy and don't always mean the same thing.
It sounds like he is selling the project, not himself. In my experience, you don't say what the project did, you say the technologies it uses and what YOU did.
From what little I've seen, depressingly many do in fact just say what the project did, or copy/paste the job description (sometimes even forgetting to change some of the instances of "candidate will..." to "I did..."). Of course these all go to the bottom of the pile, so maybe there's just so many because those people each have to apply for several times as many jobs before someone takes them...
It originally came about because of the reverse-engineering of IBM BIOS.
And now we have PCIe, SATA, USB, DDR3, etc. All of which post-date that, and all of which are standards rather than proprietary. Attempts to take things proprietary have failed, for instance various proprietary ISA replacements before PCI standardized them out of existence or Firewire with its licensing fees.
What has changed now is that devices are built to exercise strong DRM on digital media, and DMCA includes tremendous fines for circumvention of copyright-management systems, including the copyright of the device itself and its installed software.
Some are, but some new ones are also moving towards more openness. If we get net neutrality for wireless and handset unbundling (both of which I believe are currently being considered), then this will turn into a massive movement towards openness in cellphones/pdas.
The easiest way for us to be locked out would be if significant sites started to require TPM and a properly-signed OS for web access.
Somehow, I think that would go over about as well as the PentiumIII PSN. It will also be prevented if a significant fraction of the userbase is always on non-signable platforms, and I suspect it would interact poorly with search engines.
They do want to protect their content from the evil "view source" button, etc.
I find your paranoia... distrubing.
Aren't Apple and Amazon offering no-DRM music downloads now? Google has a kinda-open phone platform, Nokia is starting to like openness, vendors are shipping computers with Linux instead of Windows or as an embedded dual-boot environment. There are actual investigations/inqueries into anti-customer behavior, even beyond monopoly anti-trust stuff. Microsoft is going from "pure evil" to "split personality". I think things are actually looking up a bit.
You say that now, because you have motherboards available to you that don't even come with an operating system and are publicly documented so that you can run the OS you like. But your access to such things is by no means guaranteed.
How did this get to be the case? What has changed, that it won't remain the case?
Consider a future in which embedded devices like phones are the way we use computers. Sometime in the future there could be no mass-market hardware that would allow Free Software to run.
Taking your ball and going home might make you feel better, but it won't actually help in this situation. What will help is making sure that enough of the market is known to value tweakability, or legislation barring that kind of anti-customer behavior.
By the way, we only get away with manufacturing hardware that runs Free Software for software-defined radio today because it's "test equipment". FCC has no intention of allowing open hardware for radio applications to reach the mass market.
Well of course, they don't want to make it too easy for some nitwit to patch it to violate the regulations. So you get things like OpenMoko locking down that one little part so it always follows the rules, while still providing an open platform with wireless connectivity.
We could get into a similar situation with other open hardware.
I don't consider it reasonable though for me to complain to people who are blessing me with their generosity and sense of community and tell them that their efforts aren't good enough because I dislike what they do with their creations.
It has nothing to do with the license being "good enough". It has to do with it not being what they say it is. My complaint is not with the license taken by itself, so much as the hypocrisy/heresy/false advertising that comes with it.
Nope. Copyright law has never been about restricting what you can do with a work.
I wish you could convince the US Congress of that, so that they'd overturn the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which is about restricting what you can do with a work.
GPL explicitly states that FOSS doesn't constitute an "effective prevention measure", so what Congress said in DMCA is irrelevant.
How do we know that that has any more effect that if it explicitly stated that the Sun is Blue?
It wouldn't be the first time I have seen that definition of "extremist" or "nut" that means "a person who takes a reasonable, legally and morally justifiable action that you happen not to like."
I'm not saying that I don't like the anti-Tivo stuff. I'm saying that it is not reasonable, to the point that it can be taken as a bit hypocritical. I'd be perfectly OK with it if it wasn't presented with the "Free Software" rhetoric and as being in the same spirit as GPLv2.
It's an absurdly broad extension of freedom 1, saying not only that you can change the code, but that everything you receive surrounding the code has to support this as shipped. This is first of all (at least as implemented, but I think this is inherent) morally the same as a "field of endeavor" restriction, saying "you can't do things I don't like with this code", and also comes as the expense of the other listed freedoms as you are now limited in your ability to give out copies (with or without modifications). This is why I call it extremism, taking one tenet and elevating it to extremes at the expense of the others. I think it actually might qualify as a heresy.
It's also a case of trying to use control of one thing (copyright on some software) to exert control over something else (misfeatures on a particular class of hardware). This is the same kind of thing that monopolies get in trouble for, and merely being legal when you're not a monopoly still doesn't make it permissible.
I think it's also a technically incorrect solution for what it's trying to accomplish, the correct solution being something along the lines of cablecard.
The one issue I've always disagreed with the GPL folks on, for instance, is code that links to GPL libraries. I know the LGPL was created to allow code to link to libraries without being GPL itself, but what if I distribute, say, a dynamic linking executable which links to GPL code, but I don't distribute the GPL libraries themselves, instead directing users to download them elsewhere. Does my code have to be licensed under the GPL? I believe the intention of the GPL is that it would, but does that have a legal basis?
I think it's something along the lines of "probably not, but the litigation costs to verify this probably wouldn't be worth it".
I'm wondering if this isn't just FUD to try to get people to switch to v3. Which is icky, but it did occur to me.
I doubt it, the crappy language choice in v2 was one of the reasons for writing v3 in the first place (other reasons being that they wanted explicit anti-patent language, that Tivo had pissed off all the extremist nuts, and maybe a few others I don't recall offhand).
Sometimes good enough is just that. People are used to restarting their computers and getting random blue screens. If a restart fixes it, they generally don't care. And that's fine by me.
I see it more as a problem that needs to be fixed, because even if most people use their computer for mostly entertainment they still use it for actual productive stuff at least occasionally.
I don't use my machine for super-high precision work where a few bits flipped will cause massively different results. Nor do 99% of people. Why pay the extra 10% more when less than 1% actually might have a use for it?
Because that "10% more" is going to be maybe $20 if you have unusually large amounts of RAM, and more like $5 for a $500 BudgetBox system that only has 2GB? That's probably worth it even for gaming (I'd imagine a bluescreen in the middle of an important raid or something could be rather annoying), let alone using TurboTax or doing office stuff for your small business (I seem to recall hearing that this includes a double-digit percent of the workforce?) or doing your homework at the last minute (I'm pretty sure almost all college kids do this).
I haven't seen a desktop in a long time that had ECC RAM, or even support for it.
Any moderately recent AMD CPU will support ECC, and it's not hard to find a mainboard that does as well (for example I believe any ASUS mainboard for AMD will support ECC, I know the one I checked a couple days ago does (cheapest ASUS AM3 mainboard on Newegg then, probably still is, only like $5 more than the cheapest other AM3 board)).
In the Core 2 era of chips desktop use normal unbuffered DDR2 or DDR3 DIMMs.
Buffered/unbuffered is separate from ECC/non-ECC. For example I know the AMD desktop chips support unbuffered ECC memory.
Desktop stuff is not ECC because it is cheaper.
Maybe 10% cheaper. And of course it's easy to make things cheaper if they don't have to work correctly.
This is probably good. If we had a reliable FTL signal link we could pretty trivially (using special relativity and things moving moderately fast) turn it into a future-to-past communication link and blow the hell out of causality.
Doesn't this really just mean that FTL is only possible if there's a preferred frame of reference?
And the only solution here is the old one: if you want something done properly, you will have to do it yourself. If your data, documents or whatever are in any way important to you, you should not be relying on anyone else to keep them safe. Simple as that, and no excuses.
So do you also make your own condoms, or replace the airbags in your car with ones you made yourself?
> No, "high temperature" superconductors cannot be used in magnets.
[citation needed]
Hmm, after looking it up, I apparently misremembered slightly. Materials with higher critical temperatures do tend to have higher critical fields, so you would want to use the high-temperature materials to make magnets. But, you can have either high temperatures or strong magnetic fields, but not both.
So you can use "high temperature" superconductors to make magnets, but the mangnets will still only work at low temperatures.
Face it, if I were to join a group that's 98.5% women and demonstrate that I share an interest with all of them then I strongly suspect I'd get asked out too.
No, you wouldn't.
Slashdot Mirror
The "food" is just something that they're supposed to move towards. I have heard of similar (hobbyist) setups where it's actually a charging station so the "food" aspect is more literal, but all that's necessary is that something keeps score to see which bots found it (and should be used for the next round) and which ones didn't (and should be discarded).
The "genomes" are something like config files for their programming.
New bots got config files made from random (well, probably pseudorandom, but that's just as good in this context) sections taken out of the config files of earlier bots, probably with some small bits completely randomized.
(Note that "config file" here is based on the reporter calling it a set of parameters. I'd imagine it could be anything from a normal config file to a script in some appropriate high-level language.)
There's what seems like a decent overview of how these things work in general over here.
conspicuously absent is any explanation of what is meant by "learned" in this context or how the algorithms "evolved"
Um, it's in the first couple paragraphs of the article. You did read that, yes?
If you had read the article closely you would understand that the bug is not in ldd, it is in the dynamic loader.
The bug is that ldd executes the dynamic loader, which is specified by the executable being inspected. So if the executable claims to use ~/bin/evil.so as a loader instead of the standard /lib/ld-linux.so, then ldd will execute ~/bin/evil.so.
Also, how do you produce "hard evidence that there were no competition problems"?
Point out the existence of Postgres?
Suck it, transitive property.
Hmm. I have both "Block reported attack sites" and "Block reported web forgeries" checked, and don't get that message, but if I go directly to the stopbadware site and look it up it comes back as suspicious. I've sent the site owner a note, thanks.
No such thing? Are you retarded or willfully ignorant: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/macroevolution.html
The only difference between macro- and micro- evolution is the time-line.
The way I heard, the difference is one is rearranging what's already there (allele frequencies changing), and the other is actual new stuff (like these particular e coli being able to eat citric acid).
From looking at that link it looks like this actually is one of the ways those terms are really used, although they're quite fuzzy and don't always mean the same thing.
It sounds like he is selling the project, not himself. In my experience, you don't say what the project did, you say the technologies it uses and what YOU did.
From what little I've seen, depressingly many do in fact just say what the project did, or copy/paste the job description (sometimes even forgetting to change some of the instances of "candidate will..." to "I did..."). Of course these all go to the bottom of the pile, so maybe there's just so many because those people each have to apply for several times as many jobs before someone takes them...
14 lines of code that thousands of people use regularly is more valuable than something big noone ever heard of.
How "valuable" it is is not relevant. What is relevant, is what it implies about your ability to do the job well.
hehe did someone mention microsoft and security in the same sentence?
"And now for tonight's top story, another 31 Microsoft security flaws fixed in an emergency off-cycle patch"...
It originally came about because of the reverse-engineering of IBM BIOS.
And now we have PCIe, SATA, USB, DDR3, etc. All of which post-date that, and all of which are standards rather than proprietary. Attempts to take things proprietary have failed, for instance various proprietary ISA replacements before PCI standardized them out of existence or Firewire with its licensing fees.
What has changed now is that devices are built to exercise strong DRM on digital media, and DMCA includes tremendous fines for circumvention of copyright-management systems, including the copyright of the device itself and its installed software.
Some are, but some new ones are also moving towards more openness. If we get net neutrality for wireless and handset unbundling (both of which I believe are currently being considered), then this will turn into a massive movement towards openness in cellphones/pdas.
The easiest way for us to be locked out would be if significant sites started to require TPM and a properly-signed OS for web access.
Somehow, I think that would go over about as well as the PentiumIII PSN. It will also be prevented if a significant fraction of the userbase is always on non-signable platforms, and I suspect it would interact poorly with search engines.
They do want to protect their content from the evil "view source" button, etc.
I find your paranoia... distrubing.
Aren't Apple and Amazon offering no-DRM music downloads now? Google has a kinda-open phone platform, Nokia is starting to like openness, vendors are shipping computers with Linux instead of Windows or as an embedded dual-boot environment. There are actual investigations/inqueries into anti-customer behavior, even beyond monopoly anti-trust stuff. Microsoft is going from "pure evil" to "split personality". I think things are actually looking up a bit.
You say that now, because you have motherboards available to you that don't even come with an operating system and are publicly documented so that you can run the OS you like. But your access to such things is by no means guaranteed.
How did this get to be the case? What has changed, that it won't remain the case?
Consider a future in which embedded devices like phones are the way we use computers. Sometime in the future there could be no mass-market hardware that would allow Free Software to run.
Taking your ball and going home might make you feel better, but it won't actually help in this situation. What will help is making sure that enough of the market is known to value tweakability, or legislation barring that kind of anti-customer behavior.
By the way, we only get away with manufacturing hardware that runs Free Software for software-defined radio today because it's "test equipment". FCC has no intention of allowing open hardware for radio applications to reach the mass market.
Well of course, they don't want to make it too easy for some nitwit to patch it to violate the regulations. So you get things like OpenMoko locking down that one little part so it always follows the rules, while still providing an open platform with wireless connectivity.
We could get into a similar situation with other open hardware.
How, exactly?
I don't consider it reasonable though for me to complain to people who are blessing me with their generosity and sense of community and tell them that their efforts aren't good enough because I dislike what they do with their creations.
It has nothing to do with the license being "good enough". It has to do with it not being what they say it is. My complaint is not with the license taken by itself, so much as the hypocrisy/heresy/false advertising that comes with it.
I wish you could convince the US Congress of that, so that they'd overturn the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which is about restricting what you can do with a work.
GPL explicitly states that FOSS doesn't constitute an "effective prevention measure", so what Congress said in DMCA is irrelevant.
How do we know that that has any more effect that if it explicitly stated that the Sun is Blue?
It wouldn't be the first time I have seen that definition of "extremist" or "nut" that means "a person who takes a reasonable, legally and morally justifiable action that you happen not to like."
I'm not saying that I don't like the anti-Tivo stuff. I'm saying that it is not reasonable, to the point that it can be taken as a bit hypocritical. I'd be perfectly OK with it if it wasn't presented with the "Free Software" rhetoric and as being in the same spirit as GPLv2.
It's an absurdly broad extension of freedom 1, saying not only that you can change the code, but that everything you receive surrounding the code has to support this as shipped. This is first of all (at least as implemented, but I think this is inherent) morally the same as a "field of endeavor" restriction, saying "you can't do things I don't like with this code", and also comes as the expense of the other listed freedoms as you are now limited in your ability to give out copies (with or without modifications). This is why I call it extremism, taking one tenet and elevating it to extremes at the expense of the others. I think it actually might qualify as a heresy.
It's also a case of trying to use control of one thing (copyright on some software) to exert control over something else (misfeatures on a particular class of hardware). This is the same kind of thing that monopolies get in trouble for, and merely being legal when you're not a monopoly still doesn't make it permissible.
I think it's also a technically incorrect solution for what it's trying to accomplish, the correct solution being something along the lines of cablecard.
The one issue I've always disagreed with the GPL folks on, for instance, is code that links to GPL libraries. I know the LGPL was created to allow code to link to libraries without being GPL itself, but what if I distribute, say, a dynamic linking executable which links to GPL code, but I don't distribute the GPL libraries themselves, instead directing users to download them elsewhere. Does my code have to be licensed under the GPL? I believe the intention of the GPL is that it would, but does that have a legal basis?
I think it's something along the lines of "probably not, but the litigation costs to verify this probably wouldn't be worth it".
I'm wondering if this isn't just FUD to try to get people to switch to v3. Which is icky, but it did occur to me.
I doubt it, the crappy language choice in v2 was one of the reasons for writing v3 in the first place (other reasons being that they wanted explicit anti-patent language, that Tivo had pissed off all the extremist nuts, and maybe a few others I don't recall offhand).
more like 50% cheaper http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=23482&vpn=OCZ2G8004GK&manufacture=OCZ%20Technology http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=41650&vpn=KTH-XW4400E6%2F2G&manufacture=KINGSTON%20TECHNOLOGY%20-%20MEMORY
(Those links are $80CAD for 4GB DDR2-800 non-ECC and $80CAD for 2GB DDR2-800 ECC.)
Look over here, I think your example of ECC pricing might not by typical.
Sometimes good enough is just that. People are used to restarting their computers and getting random blue screens. If a restart fixes it, they generally don't care. And that's fine by me.
I see it more as a problem that needs to be fixed, because even if most people use their computer for mostly entertainment they still use it for actual productive stuff at least occasionally.
I don't use my machine for super-high precision work where a few bits flipped will cause massively different results. Nor do 99% of people. Why pay the extra 10% more when less than 1% actually might have a use for it?
Because that "10% more" is going to be maybe $20 if you have unusually large amounts of RAM, and more like $5 for a $500 BudgetBox system that only has 2GB? That's probably worth it even for gaming (I'd imagine a bluescreen in the middle of an important raid or something could be rather annoying), let alone using TurboTax or doing office stuff for your small business (I seem to recall hearing that this includes a double-digit percent of the workforce?) or doing your homework at the last minute (I'm pretty sure almost all college kids do this).
I haven't seen a desktop in a long time that had ECC RAM, or even support for it.
Any moderately recent AMD CPU will support ECC, and it's not hard to find a mainboard that does as well (for example I believe any ASUS mainboard for AMD will support ECC, I know the one I checked a couple days ago does (cheapest ASUS AM3 mainboard on Newegg then, probably still is, only like $5 more than the cheapest other AM3 board)).
In the Core 2 era of chips desktop use normal unbuffered DDR2 or DDR3 DIMMs.
Buffered/unbuffered is separate from ECC/non-ECC. For example I know the AMD desktop chips support unbuffered ECC memory.
Desktop stuff is not ECC because it is cheaper.
Maybe 10% cheaper. And of course it's easy to make things cheaper if they don't have to work correctly.
Given the recent google study and the Folding@Home NVIDIA study, why would you want to run an i5/i7 system (which don't permit ECC)?
This is probably good. If we had a reliable FTL signal link we could pretty trivially (using special relativity and things moving moderately fast) turn it into a future-to-past communication link and blow the hell out of causality.
Doesn't this really just mean that FTL is only possible if there's a preferred frame of reference?
And the only solution here is the old one: if you want something done properly, you will have to do it yourself. If your data, documents or whatever are in any way important to you, you should not be relying on anyone else to keep them safe. Simple as that, and no excuses.
So do you also make your own condoms, or replace the airbags in your car with ones you made yourself?
> No, "high temperature" superconductors cannot be used in magnets.
[citation needed]
Hmm, after looking it up, I apparently misremembered slightly. Materials with higher critical temperatures do tend to have higher critical fields, so you would want to use the high-temperature materials to make magnets. But, you can have either high temperatures or strong magnetic fields, but not both.
So you can use "high temperature" superconductors to make magnets, but the mangnets will still only work at low temperatures.
Face it, if I were to join a group that's 98.5% women and demonstrate that I share an interest with all of them then I strongly suspect I'd get asked out too. No, you wouldn't.
But don't beer goggles affect both sexes equally?