Absolutely not. If it's not for public consumption, then it shouldn't be on the publicly accessible web. If some people care about their privacy, don't want to give any information about themselves to the NYT, and can find a way around the login, good for them.
You can't copyright a method (algorithm), only an implementation of it. You can patent an algorithm (at least in the USA) but I don't think that algorithm is patented. You can also just keep it secret (as they tried to do) but that offers no protection if the secret leaks out (as the MPAA have discovered).
> Because black holes are so massive, they bend the fabric of space time.
Actually, everything bends the fabric of spacetime to some extent. This effect is quite noticable - it's what's keeping you on your seat right now, but with sensitive equipment you can even detect the bending of the fabric of spacetime caused by passing cars outside the physics lab.
Since when did it become hypocritical to like some things that a company does but to hate others? Why does it have to be an "all or nothing" situation?
There's nothing wrong with liking a company's products but bringing it to our attention when they do bad things like stamp on our rights. Slashdot does both, and for both it should be applauded.
What is needed here is not a solution consisting of "crippling" the processor to make it impossible (or more difficult) to overclock, but a clear method of telling if it's overclocked or not.
AMD, how about putting in a microcode program into the processor's initialisation sequence to check if the processor is overclocked and display a big warning (on standard VGA hardware) for a few moments (or until a key is pressed on a standard PC keyboard) if it is?
That would stop the grey-marketeers in their tracks and also give the legitimate overclockers something to point to and say "Look what I did!"
That's not the point. The assembler doesn't do any optimisations at all (well, maybe on a per-instruction level). But if you write code in assembly language you understand the program you're writing far better than any compiler possibly can, and you can make optimisations yourself.
According to one of the books, the question and the answer cannot both exist in the same universe at the same time. Since the answer was found first, that prevents the question from ever being discovered. It works much like the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics.
However, according to recent theories in particle physics, the question may actually be "What is the reciprocal of the coupling constant at the grand unification energy in natural units?"
This is a conspiracy on the part of us Brits to make it impossible for Americans to create any websites, thereby removing the strangehold the USA has on the web.
Just think - if this works, there'll be no more websites that automatically assume their users are in the USA ("Enter your ZIP code here"...)
If I'm eating my lunch, I might be typing with one hand whilst holding a cheese sandwich in the other - substantially changing my typing speed characteristics. If I'm drunk I make many more typos, which I expect would also confound this system.
Rest mass is the mass something would have if it wasn't moving.
Only things which have zero rest mass (such as photons) can travel at the speed of light.
If something which had non-zero rest mass was moving at the speed of light it would have infinite kinetic energy.
The correct equation is E=mc^2/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) where v is the velocity, m is the rest mass and E is the energy (which is the sum of the rest mass energy mc^2 and the kinetic energy).
I don't have a degree in this (yet - although I do have an exam on it tomorrow...) but I think I can explain what they meant when they said this.
Something going faster than light is equivalent to something going backwards in time.
Suppose you have two events A and B (an event is just a point in spacetime). Suppose event A causes a flash of light. If that light doesn't reach the place where B is before B happens, the events are said to be separated by a "spacelike" interval. If the light goes further than B before B happens, the interval is "timelike". If the light from A arrives at B exactly when B happens, the interval is "lightlike".
According to the theory of relativity, the interval changes according to have fast you are moving. However, whether it is timelike, spacelike or lightlike doesn't.
Now, if A and B are such that light would have to travel at 300c to get from A to B, the interval must be spacelike. In some (moving) frame of reference they actually happen at the same time, and in another (also moving) frame of reference B actually happens before A. So if information is travelling from A to B it is effectively going back in time. Faster than light travel and time travel are the same thing, because time and space are the same thing.
Only if A and B are separated by a timelike or lightlike interval can A *cause* B. This is the principal of causality. What the article is saying seems to imply that this isn't always true.
Yawn, yet another ill-informed piece of propaganda, although perhaps slightly less ill-informed than most. There are lots of minor points I could quibble with - I choose this one:
What of the extraordinary gifts of software and whole operating systems of which we sometimes read? They are rare, and sometimes they are loss leaders. Some of the donors may regret their generosity when later they are confronted with their children's college tuition and orthodontic bills,
I know lots you people who read this site have written free software. Do any of you regret it even a tiny bit? Be honest!
> Electrons don't travel at the speed of light, > they have mass and therefore they travel > slightly slower then the speed of light.
But it isn't the speed of the electrons that counts, it's the speed of the electrical signals, which is much faster. It's similar to a wave in a tank of water, which travels faster than any particular little blob of water travels.
The real advantages of optical technology are that they can be made much smaller because photons are bosons and electrons are fermions. Two identical bosons (such as photons) can be in the same place at the same time, but two identical fermions (such as electrons) cannot - this is the known as the Pauli exclusion principle.
Once we've got rid of all those pesky television transmissions clogging up the airwaves we can all have cellular broadband wireless networking - Mmm.... Of course, everything anyone sends will have to be strongly encrypted - there'll be none of this "anyone who uses encryption must have something to hide" rubbish any more. (Call me an optimist if you like...)
And we'll need some sort of ingenious indexing system to find useful stuff amongst all that information. Today's search engines are good, but they still don't quite cut the mustard in all situations.
I just hope that all the protocols are free and open so that nobody's locked out.
Lars said that he would have liked Metallica to have been asked to be included in Napster's lists. What doesn't seem to occur to him is that Napster doesn't work like this. Maybe he's ignorant of the this fact, or maybe he just doesn't have any ideas of how it could be done.
Sure, Napster could have just disallowed sharing of any MP3s which have filenames/ID3 tags mentioning any signed bands/artists, but this wouldn't have helped one bit - people would just rename things until they worked. All this does is make things slightly more inconvient (hands up those many people who have downloaded an MP3 from a website and had to change the extension from ".zip" to ".mp3"? I thought so).
Besides which, why should they? It would be impossible to check that MP3s named as such really were illegal to distribute - perhaps that MP3 is a rare bootleg (which Lars says we can distribute all we want!)
I agree. What's the difference between a link and a URL anyway? Not much. It would be pretty simple to program a web browser which automagically "linkized" anything it found which looked like a URL. Outlook Express does this with emails already!
Anyone who wants quick, easy, portable, non-resource-hungry animations which degrade well to older browsers.
I was forced for a long time to use browsers which lagged a long way behind the state of the art. This made me sympathetic to the needs of other people who are stuck with older technology. There's nothing quite so frustrating as trying to find a piece of information only to continually run into dead ends in the form of messages like "Sorry, you need a frames/javascript capable browser to view this page".
Okay, so many animated GIFs are really unnecessary but sometimes a bit of animation can really make a site. Check out http://www.digger.org for example. When creating this animation, I looked at many ways of doing it and picked the way which would download fastest and work best of the widest range of browsers.
I know many people dislike GIFs for ideological reasons (i.e. the Unisys patent) but for those of us that don't live in the USA - we don't care! Algorithms can't be patented in the UK so I'll use GIFs on my web pages for as long as they can be viewed by the greatest proportion of web users.
For what is being suggested we calculate, we wouldn't need nearly that number of operations. In fact, all we need to know is a very small of information (whether the game is a win for white, a win for black, or a draw) at each of the 2e43 positions. Once we've backtracked far enough to find that information for the initial position, we have solved the game (i.e. we know whether, given perfect play by both players, who would win).
If we wanted to keep the entire tree in memory, as we would need to do to make a machine which could play chess perfectly without doing the entire calculation at each move, that would be rather impractical.
Slashdot Mirror
> Does this piss anyone else off?
Absolutely not. If it's not for public consumption, then it shouldn't be on the publicly accessible web. If some people care about their privacy, don't want to give any information about themselves to the NYT, and can find a way around the login, good for them.
You can't copyright a method (algorithm), only an implementation of it. You can patent an algorithm (at least in the USA) but I don't think that algorithm is patented. You can also just keep it secret (as they tried to do) but that offers no protection if the secret leaks out (as the MPAA have discovered).
> Because black holes are so massive, they bend the fabric of space time.
Actually, everything bends the fabric of spacetime to some extent. This effect is quite noticable - it's what's keeping you on your seat right now, but with sensitive equipment you can even detect the bending of the fabric of spacetime caused by passing cars outside the physics lab.
Since when did it become hypocritical to like some things that a company does but to hate others? Why does it have to be an "all or nothing" situation?
There's nothing wrong with liking a company's products but bringing it to our attention when they do bad things like stamp on our rights. Slashdot does both, and for both it should be applauded.
What is needed here is not a solution consisting of "crippling" the processor to make it impossible (or more difficult) to overclock, but a clear method of telling if it's overclocked or not.
AMD, how about putting in a microcode program into the processor's initialisation sequence to check if the processor is overclocked and display a big warning (on standard VGA hardware) for a few moments (or until a key is pressed on a standard PC keyboard) if it is?
That would stop the grey-marketeers in their tracks and also give the legitimate overclockers something to point to and say "Look what I did!"
That's not the point. The assembler doesn't do any optimisations at all (well, maybe on a per-instruction level). But if you write code in assembly language you understand the program you're writing far better than any compiler possibly can, and you can make optimisations yourself.
In this marvellous open-source society we have created, when something is broken all the tools are available for you to fix it yourself.
So, create your own news site and publicise what you want to publicise. And may the best, most impartial and most open news sites win.
According to one of the books, the question and the answer cannot both exist in the same universe at the same time. Since the answer was found first, that prevents the question from ever being discovered. It works much like the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics.
However, according to recent theories in particle physics, the question may actually be "What is the reciprocal of the coupling constant at the grand unification energy in natural units?"
Shh! Do you want to give the *entire* game away?
This is a conspiracy on the part of us Brits to make it impossible for Americans to create any websites, thereby removing the strangehold the USA has on the web.
Just think - if this works, there'll be no more websites that automatically assume their users are in the USA ("Enter your ZIP code here"...)
If I'm eating my lunch, I might be typing with one hand whilst holding a cheese sandwich in the other - substantially changing my typing speed characteristics. If I'm drunk I make many more typos, which I expect would also confound this system.
A portable assembler? Isn't that another name for a C compiler?
They were talking about rest mass.
Rest mass is the mass something would have if it wasn't moving.
Only things which have zero rest mass (such as photons) can travel at the speed of light.
If something which had non-zero rest mass was moving at the speed of light it would have infinite kinetic energy.
The correct equation is E=mc^2/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) where v is the velocity, m is the rest mass and E is the energy (which is the sum of the rest mass energy mc^2 and the kinetic energy).
I don't have a degree in this (yet - although I do have an exam on it tomorrow...) but I think I can explain what they meant when they said this.
/. as revision - fancy that!
Something going faster than light is equivalent to something going backwards in time.
Suppose you have two events A and B (an event is just a point in spacetime). Suppose event A causes a flash of light. If that light doesn't reach the place where B is before B happens, the events are said to be separated by a "spacelike" interval. If the light goes further than B before B happens, the interval is "timelike". If the light from A arrives at B exactly when B happens, the interval is "lightlike".
According to the theory of relativity, the interval changes according to have fast you are moving. However, whether it is timelike, spacelike or lightlike doesn't.
Now, if A and B are such that light would have to travel at 300c to get from A to B, the interval must be spacelike. In some (moving) frame of reference they actually happen at the same time, and in another (also moving) frame of reference B actually happens before A. So if information is travelling from A to B it is effectively going back in time. Faster than light travel and time travel are the same thing, because time and space are the same thing.
Only if A and B are separated by a timelike or lightlike interval can A *cause* B. This is the principal of causality. What the article is saying seems to imply that this isn't always true.
Wow,
What of the extraordinary gifts of software and whole operating systems of which we sometimes read? They are rare, and sometimes they are loss leaders. Some of the donors may regret their generosity when later they are confronted with their children's college tuition and orthodontic bills,
I know lots you people who read this site have written free software. Do any of you regret it even a tiny bit? Be honest!
> Electrons don't travel at the speed of light,
> they have mass and therefore they travel
> slightly slower then the speed of light.
But it isn't the speed of the electrons that counts, it's the speed of the electrical signals, which is much faster. It's similar to a wave in a tank of water, which travels faster than any particular little blob of water travels.
The real advantages of optical technology are that they can be made much smaller because photons are bosons and electrons are fermions. Two identical bosons (such as photons) can be in the same place at the same time, but two identical fermions (such as electrons) cannot - this is the known as the Pauli exclusion principle.
Once we've got rid of all those pesky television transmissions clogging up the airwaves we can all have cellular broadband wireless networking - Mmm.... Of course, everything anyone sends will have to be strongly encrypted - there'll be none of this "anyone who uses encryption must have something to hide" rubbish any more. (Call me an optimist if you like...)
And we'll need some sort of ingenious indexing system to find useful stuff amongst all that information. Today's search engines are good, but they still don't quite cut the mustard in all situations.
I just hope that all the protocols are free and open so that nobody's locked out.
Lars said that he would have liked Metallica to have been asked to be included in Napster's lists. What doesn't seem to occur to him is that Napster doesn't work like this. Maybe he's ignorant of the this fact, or maybe he just doesn't have any ideas of how it could be done.
Sure, Napster could have just disallowed sharing of any MP3s which have filenames/ID3 tags mentioning any signed bands/artists, but this wouldn't have helped one bit - people would just rename things until they worked. All this does is make things slightly more inconvient (hands up those many people who have downloaded an MP3 from a website and had to change the extension from ".zip" to ".mp3"? I thought so).
Besides which, why should they? It would be impossible to check that MP3s named as such really were illegal to distribute - perhaps that MP3 is a rare bootleg (which Lars says we can distribute all we want!)
I agree. What's the difference between a link and a URL anyway? Not much. It would be pretty simple to program a web browser which automagically "linkized" anything it found which looked like a URL. Outlook Express does this with emails already!
http://www.mobygames.com/featu red_article/feature=7/
I was forced for a long time to use browsers which lagged a long way behind the state of the art. This made me sympathetic to the needs of other people who are stuck with older technology. There's nothing quite so frustrating as trying to find a piece of information only to continually run into dead ends in the form of messages like "Sorry, you need a frames/javascript capable browser to view this page".
Okay, so many animated GIFs are really unnecessary but sometimes a bit of animation can really make a site. Check out http://www.digger.org for example. When creating this animation, I looked at many ways of doing it and picked the way which would download fastest and work best of the widest range of browsers.
I know many people dislike GIFs for ideological reasons (i.e. the Unisys patent) but for those of us that don't live in the USA - we don't care! Algorithms can't be patented in the UK so I'll use GIFs on my web pages for as long as they can be viewed by the greatest proportion of web users.
If this is right, it means that there are probably only 4 dimensions to spacetime, not 26 or even 10.
For what is being suggested we calculate, we wouldn't need nearly that number of operations. In fact, all we need to know is a very small of information (whether the game is a win for white, a win for black, or a draw) at each of the 2e43 positions. Once we've backtracked far enough to find that information for the initial position, we have solved the game (i.e. we know whether, given perfect play by both players, who would win).
If we wanted to keep the entire tree in memory, as we would need to do to make a machine which could play chess perfectly without doing the entire calculation at each move, that would be rather impractical.