If I went back in time and killed myself (lets face it, I'd never agree to suicide, so I'd have to actually kill myself), then that would just create a new branch of reality seperate from the one that I came from. So I would still exist, and the future that I came from would still exist, but I wouldn't be able to get to it, because I'd be in a new branch of reality. Then, if I tried to go back to the future, all I'd see is how the world would have looked like if I had died at the age of 12.
In other words, everything that can have more than one outcome forks the entire universe into enough new branches to house every outcome. In theory, you could go back in time to before a given event takes place, change it, and then go into the future to see what that branch of reality is like. Unfortunately, there's no way for communication to happen between these branches, so it's rather impossible to test this theory without a time machine...;)
I won't buy a Music CD that won't work in my computer. But if the restricted CD were say $5 less, well then I'd consider it.
I wouldn't by a broken CD at any price. I don't have a CD player, I have a computer. And if the CD doesn't work in my computer, then it is a coaster, and should be marketed as such.
I find it sad that you felt the need to post that, gribbly.
I would say "If you were too lazy to read the article, don't fucking post your half-baked opinion on it," but I guess I'd just be asking too much of the Slashdot readership.
Other than that, I thought it was a great article, and I agreed with most of it.
To really demonstrate a machine that has something of the sort that could be truely called AI it will have to compete with a human player on at least a near even level at a complex and *unsolvable* game.
Yeah, forget Chess. We should get some computer to play Kasparov at Tetris! It is, after all, NP-hard.;)
There would be a tremendously large problem with encrypting the message to all of it's recipients...
See, when you PGP encrypt some text, it is only possible to encrypt it to one person (one public key). That's just how it works, it's inherent in the encryption methods used; however, PGP and GPG get around this by duplicating the entire message for each public key that it is encrypted to.
My point is that if you had a mailing list with 1000 subscribers, and you wanted to encrypt it, you'd basically be increasing the size of the encrypted message 1000-fold, because you need 1000 copies of the message, each encrypted to a given recipient. Obviously, this isn't feasable...
What they could do, though, is sign the messages. I know SpamAssassin, at least, reduces a message's spam score if there is a PGP signature attached to it.
However, if you were just trying to obscure the contents of the mail from the spam filter but not the user, you could just gzip the message and make it an attachment. I don't know how well that would go over with the spam filter, but at least it wouldn't find your m/blow.*job/s in the message;)
The sad thing is that ipv6 actually does provide you with enough address space to do that, and then some...
IPv6 has a 128 bit address space, meaning that there are 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,45 6 possible addresses (at least I think so... correct me if I'm wrong).
Now, according to this there are 50 trillion cells in the human body. When you do the math (2^128/50e12) we find that the IPv6 address space is enough for all the cells in 6,805,647,338,418,769,269,267,492 people.
Since the count of 50 trillion is basically a WAG according to that website, I'll calculate something else, as well.
One mole is defined here as the number of molecules in 0.012 kilograms of carbon-12, which is 6.022*10^23 molecules (Avogadro's number). Therefore, if you gave one IPv6 address to every molecule in a given substance, it would take 565,065,371,838,157 moles of that substance to exhaust the address space.
This means it would take 6,780,784,462,057.88 kilograms (or 6,780 teragrams) of carbon-12 to exhaust the IPv6 address space!
Now, maybe I calculated something wrong, but that just seems like a freaking lot of IP addresses...
Charge them more money, and "support costs". Don't forget the BOFH-style torment.
Then put a firewall between your little network, and their little network (which I'm assuming is one windows box), so that their kazaa worms can only harass your one firewall, not your whole network.
As somebody else already mentioned, the best solution is probably PGP.
Ideally, all real people would use PGP, you could then reduce all spamfilters to "message not signed? throw it in the trash. otherwise, it goes in the inbox".
After a while, spammers might catch on and start PGP signing their emails. At that point, just maintain a whitelist of PGP keys that are from people you trust; have the spamfilters delete unsigned mail, and mail from untrusted keys.
Too bad Outlook (and thus 90% of people using email) have no real way of doing PGP, or even reading PGP signed email.
My first reaction to this was "Whoa, no paper money?!", but then it occurred to me that I've had a debit card since I was a little kid.
With annual fees, 0.9% "tax" per transaction, and a $107 limit (ooooh, I read the article!), I don't think it's any surprize why it hasn't caught on outside France...
I don't see how this is any better than a debit card, though. Seems more like a hassle than any benefit. And I doubt this is going to actually replace cash, since it only has that $107 limit.
one would think that since they want people coming to this page and accessing it regularly they would make it easier for them to get here.
The idea here is very simple: "Gee, this opera browser is crap! It can't even display msn.com properly... christ, all the people that told me Opera was good must be smoking something. I guess I'll just have to go back to Internet Explorer. There we go, the site is fine! Don't know why I ever stopped using trusty Internet Explorer in the first place..."
Of course, that's a load of shit, Opera could display the site just fine if they weren't throwing a broken stylesheet at it. But users don't know this, and I hate to think of all the users Opera lost just because of this little stunt that MS pulled.
I think you're interested in Nonsense. Feed it the appropriate template, and it will generate a buttload of vaguely-unique complaint letters for you (or anything else, for that matter... some of the example templates that come with it make up dumb laws, college courses, and slashdot stories;)
It would be fairly trivial to put together a template that would generate a bunch of random sentences in random order that each explain,
Look at the SimDesk website. Those programs look exactly like their Windows counterparts, right down to the widgets. Especially check out SimExplorer, it's the spitting image of Windows Explorer.
Slashdot Mirror
Did I miss something?
... my beleaguered PowerMac ...
From the slashdot article summary:
And besides, someone needs to let Robert Thomson know: when writing a story on how Apple is about to die, you have to call them "beleaguered".
From the Thomson's article:
Did I miss something? It seems to me that the submitter is complaining that Thomson didn't use the word beleaguered, but he obviously did.
No no, you got it all wrong.
;)
If I went back in time and killed myself (lets face it, I'd never agree to suicide, so I'd have to actually kill myself), then that would just create a new branch of reality seperate from the one that I came from. So I would still exist, and the future that I came from would still exist, but I wouldn't be able to get to it, because I'd be in a new branch of reality. Then, if I tried to go back to the future, all I'd see is how the world would have looked like if I had died at the age of 12.
In other words, everything that can have more than one outcome forks the entire universe into enough new branches to house every outcome. In theory, you could go back in time to before a given event takes place, change it, and then go into the future to see what that branch of reality is like. Unfortunately, there's no way for communication to happen between these branches, so it's rather impossible to test this theory without a time machine...
It will allow governments and corporations strong control over who can read electronic versions of documents, preventing information leaks.
Yeah, this is much better than getting government employess to just, you know, use PGP.
I'm too lazy to download them myself. Are there pictures anywere?
the bootup sequence results being SPOKEN out of the onboard sound card!
:(
Yeah, my A7V8X does that, too. It's kinda neat, but the onboard soundcard itself sucks, I'd prefer to use my SBLive. So I don't get to here it
"Computer has finished Power On Self Test. Now booting the Operating System." or something to that effect.
I won't buy a Music CD that won't work in my computer. But if the restricted CD were say $5 less, well then I'd consider it.
I wouldn't by a broken CD at any price. I don't have a CD player, I have a computer. And if the CD doesn't work in my computer, then it is a coaster, and should be marketed as such.
The other great example is Swordfish, when Hugh Jackman hacks into a computer system in 60 seconds, at gunpoint, with a woman giving him head.
;)
What are you talking about "unrealistic"? I do that kind of thing all the time!
I find it sad that you felt the need to post that, gribbly.
I would say "If you were too lazy to read the article, don't fucking post your half-baked opinion on it," but I guess I'd just be asking too much of the Slashdot readership.
Other than that, I thought it was a great article, and I agreed with most of it.
Now, RTFA, you bastards!
It's the continual forced upgrades for no good reason
No good reason? Why, there's a great reason for it! To make Microsoft more money! (augh... another alliteration attack).
To really demonstrate a machine that has something of the sort that could be truely called AI it will have to compete with a human player on at least a near even level at a complex and *unsolvable* game.
;)
Yeah, forget Chess. We should get some computer to play Kasparov at Tetris! It is, after all, NP-hard.
You forgot "Abandoned, you insensitive clod!"
The earth is spinning. At ~100miles, it's moving very, very, very fast. The centriptal force created by that motion will hold it out.
:)
Duh! I mean, the Earth's centripital acceleration has historically be plenty enough to overcome the force of gravity...
There would be a tremendously large problem with encrypting the message to all of it's recipients...
;)
See, when you PGP encrypt some text, it is only possible to encrypt it to one person (one public key). That's just how it works, it's inherent in the encryption methods used; however, PGP and GPG get around this by duplicating the entire message for each public key that it is encrypted to.
My point is that if you had a mailing list with 1000 subscribers, and you wanted to encrypt it, you'd basically be increasing the size of the encrypted message 1000-fold, because you need 1000 copies of the message, each encrypted to a given recipient. Obviously, this isn't feasable...
What they could do, though, is sign the messages. I know SpamAssassin, at least, reduces a message's spam score if there is a PGP signature attached to it.
However, if you were just trying to obscure the contents of the mail from the spam filter but not the user, you could just gzip the message and make it an attachment. I don't know how well that would go over with the spam filter, but at least it wouldn't find your m/blow.*job/s in the message
The sad thing is that ipv6 actually does provide you with enough address space to do that, and then some...
5 6 possible addresses (at least I think so... correct me if I'm wrong).
IPv6 has a 128 bit address space, meaning that there are 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,4
Now, according to this there are 50 trillion cells in the human body. When you do the math (2^128/50e12) we find that the IPv6 address space is enough for all the cells in 6,805,647,338,418,769,269,267,492 people.
Since the count of 50 trillion is basically a WAG according to that website, I'll calculate something else, as well.
One mole is defined here as the number of molecules in 0.012 kilograms of carbon-12, which is 6.022*10^23 molecules (Avogadro's number). Therefore, if you gave one IPv6 address to every molecule in a given substance, it would take 565,065,371,838,157 moles of that substance to exhaust the address space.
This means it would take 6,780,784,462,057.88 kilograms (or 6,780 teragrams) of carbon-12 to exhaust the IPv6 address space!
Now, maybe I calculated something wrong, but that just seems like a freaking lot of IP addresses...
You're going to be called until enough people stop saying "sure, I'll take one."
People do that?!?
Charge them more money, and "support costs". Don't forget the BOFH-style torment.
Then put a firewall between your little network, and their little network (which I'm assuming is one windows box), so that their kazaa worms can only harass your one firewall, not your whole network.
As somebody else already mentioned, the best solution is probably PGP.
Ideally, all real people would use PGP, you could then reduce all spamfilters to "message not signed? throw it in the trash. otherwise, it goes in the inbox".
After a while, spammers might catch on and start PGP signing their emails. At that point, just maintain a whitelist of PGP keys that are from people you trust; have the spamfilters delete unsigned mail, and mail from untrusted keys.
Too bad Outlook (and thus 90% of people using email) have no real way of doing PGP, or even reading PGP signed email.
when spamfilters come alive... their prime directive will be "eliminate anything that is worthless"
It wouldn't be all bad; at least we'd be rid of Microsoft once and for all.
How do you feel about TCPA, and what effect do you think it will have for Linux?
My first reaction to this was "Whoa, no paper money?!", but then it occurred to me that I've had a debit card since I was a little kid.
With annual fees, 0.9% "tax" per transaction, and a $107 limit (ooooh, I read the article!), I don't think it's any surprize why it hasn't caught on outside France...
I don't see how this is any better than a debit card, though. Seems more like a hassle than any benefit. And I doubt this is going to actually replace cash, since it only has that $107 limit.
one would think that since they want people coming to this page and accessing it regularly they would make it easier for them to get here.
The idea here is very simple: "Gee, this opera browser is crap! It can't even display msn.com properly... christ, all the people that told me Opera was good must be smoking something. I guess I'll just have to go back to Internet Explorer. There we go, the site is fine! Don't know why I ever stopped using trusty Internet Explorer in the first place..."
Of course, that's a load of shit, Opera could display the site just fine if they weren't throwing a broken stylesheet at it. But users don't know this, and I hate to think of all the users Opera lost just because of this little stunt that MS pulled.
Actually, it looks an awful lot like one edge of that pattern lines up with the track.
Not to mention that they couldn't finish it in one night! What kind of sloppy aliens are they?
VHS IS better than Betamax!
I think you're interested in Nonsense. Feed it the appropriate template, and it will generate a buttload of vaguely-unique complaint letters for you (or anything else, for that matter... some of the example templates that come with it make up dumb laws, college courses, and slashdot stories ;)
It would be fairly trivial to put together a template that would generate a bunch of random sentences in random order that each explain,
Look at the SimDesk website. Those programs look exactly like their Windows counterparts, right down to the widgets. Especially check out SimExplorer, it's the spitting image of Windows Explorer.
Revolutionary? Right...