It seems such a waste of space if we're alone... even more so if you're semi-religious as I am (I believe that science can explain most of the universe around us, but it was probaly the "great arcitect" that set it up to begin with). As we learn more about the universe and life, we may understand where and how to look for life out there.
Life is one thing, intelligence is different. Before we all get worked up over SETI@home, why not take a look at STI@home - the search for terrestial intelligence?
LOX (Liquid OXygen) is used because it is both cheap, freely avilable and less dangerous than most other oxidisers. For more info on propelants in general, see here. For LOX + kerosene in particular, the link is here. Off course, if you want to get away from the nasty cryogenic oxidicers, you could always go for hydrogenperoxside and kerosene (se data here). Off course, H2O2 is more expencive and way more poisonous than LOX, but it's give and take... In large quantities, 95 per cent hydrogen peroxide then cost approximately $1.00 per kg - LOX on the other hand cost about 0.08$ per kg. Or you could get exotic and use Liquid Fluorine and Kerosene wich gives a Isp: 322.00 sl. compared to a Isp: 300.00 sl. for LOX/Kerosene (se data here) - but then LF was kosting 6.00$ in 1959, and I don't think the price has dropped.
So in short, LOX has a few drawbacks, but the benefits of using it outweights them. Oh, and Encyclopedia
Astronautica is a good place to find this sort of info.
Burn me at the stake if you wish, but much of what he describes as improvements on the Finder (which I recon is akin to the Explorer in Windows - I've used some Macs in the past but not picked up the lingo) are already present in the OS we all love to hate; Windows. Been there from 9x too - along with what he seems to dislike; pathnames. Whats so wrong about knowing where you put your file?
I guess much or most of what he yearns for are present in the various flavours of Linux / FreeBDS / other open operatingsystem of choice (I'll admidt it, I don't have that much experience in those either) as well. maybe the Mac isn't as great as the Mac-fanatics tries to make us believe?
Prosecutors in January lodged an appeal, objecting to the application of the law and the presentation of evidence. '
If they object to the law, shouldn't that be debated by government reps? I don't think a judge has the authority to ignore the law
Read your own quote. They arn't objecting to the law, which would make it a case for the 'wegian parliment, but they are objecting to the application of it. And as norwegian judges are tasked with applying the law, not interprenting it (well, there is a subtle difference), their objection makes sence weither you agree with it or not. I think a suitable analogy would be along this line; "You sell tobaco, knowing it can cause cancer. Someone dies of lungcancer. You're charged with first degree murder." As you can see, this is misapplying the law, and the wrong law to boot.
It's not a 'new trial', but a 'retrial'. Just as the defendant can appeal to a higher court, so can the prosecutors. Mind you, had the defendant appealed, it would have been more or less automaticly accepted, the prosecution must prove that something was wrong with the forst trial; that the judge used the law wrong, that evidence was overlooked or that there was some technicaly that wasn't right.
Erm.. no. DVD-Jon was charged for what amounts to 'breaking and entering' into somewhere he wasn't allowed to go; to be more spesific, the encryptioncodes. The prosecution realised that since they couldn't by a long shoot prove that he wrote to program (if he indeed did) to allow illegal copying of movies, they didn't dare charge him with it. In short, despite the hype, they plastered much the same charge on him as they would have dine if he had broken into his neighbours home and had a look around.
"I'll give you this barometer if you tell me how tall your building is."
Someone has been reading Strata...
Re:ask the designers -
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 1
While Douglas Adams - of Hitchhicker fame - may not be the sci-fi writer who has studied this in most detail, he does infact touch upon this very idea in his book 'Mostly
Harmless'. Instead of giving a robot a spesific piece of programming on what to do in every concivable circumstance, a simple chip (well, I think it'll be a darn complex chip, but still) determines weither or not a certain condition has been meet or not. If it has, the robot is happy - if it hasn't, the robot tries to become happy.
Ford hauled it quickly towards him and pinned it down to the ground. It was beginning to whine pitifully. With one swift and practised movement, Ford reached under the towel with his No.3 gauge prising tool and flipped off the small plastic panel on top of the robot which gave access to its logic circuits.
Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks.
Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else which thinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it the same stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a loop. This was best demonstrated by the famous Herring Sandwich experiments conducted millennia ago at MISPWOSO (The MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious).
A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches. This was actually the most difficult part of the whole experiment. Once the robot had been programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring sandwich was placed in front of it. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, "Ah! A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches."
It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich in its herring sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again. Unfortunately for the robot, it was fashioned in such a way that the action of straightening up caused the herring sandwich to slip straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall on to the floor in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, "Ah! A herring sandwich..., etc., and repeated the same action over and over and over again. The only thing that prevented the herring sandwich from getting bored with the whole damn business and crawling off in search of other ways of passing the time was that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of dead fish between a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to what was going on than was the robot.
The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving force behind all change, development and innovation in life, which was this: herring sandwiches. They published a paper to this effect, which was widely criticised as being extremely stupid. They checked their figures and realised that what they had actually discovered was "boredom", or rather, the practical function of boredom. In a fever of excitement they then went on to discover other emotions, Like "irritability", "depression", "reluctance", "ickiness" and so on. The next big breakthrough came when they stopped using herring sandwiches, whereupon a whole welter of new emotions became suddenly available to them for study, such as "relief", "joy", "friskiness", "appetite", "satisfaction", and most important of all, the desire for "happiness'.
This was the biggest breakthrough of all.
Vast wodges of complex computer code governing robot behaviour in all possible contingencies could be replaced very simply. All that robots needed was the capacity to be either bored or happy, and a few conditions that needed to be satisfied in order to bring those states about. They would then work the rest out for themselves.
The robot which Ford had got trapped under his towel was not, at the moment a happy robot. It was happy when it could move about. It was happy when it could see other things. It was particularly happy when it could see other things moving about, particularly if th
Like that is different from working in any other kind of helpdesk!
It's not different from not not working in any helpdesk either, but being the one most your colleguas call because the helpdesk "refuse" to help them... like if I can help them recover they didn't save before shutting down the day before by pulling out the powercord.
That aside, I think there would be a lot less stress overall for the people working for any sort of helpdesk if we users remembered to be polite, and that in turn would mean better service in return (less stressed out helpdesk-staffers would be more willing to give us good service).
...the US has lost 24 soldiers and has gained a large portion of Iraqi territory...
Seems like the Iraqy has taken a leaf out of the russian bok - trading land for time until they engage in a decicive battle and / or can attack the lines of supply. I fear that the war will be longer and bloodier than the REMF's in Pentagon cared to believe before they started.
In other news, US troops have seized an airfield in norther Iraq, presumable to open a second front. This may serve to shorten the war considerably, but it may also trigger Saddam and his chums to deploy chemical weapons sooner than they would otherwise have done.
There was - in the early, mid eighties - a british company decided to make a computer that wasn't built 'to standards'. They went forward to sell heaps of them, and made quite a bit of money too...
...which may eternal lie.. or something like that. I don't have the excat qoute from Lovecraft, but I'm sure someone here may deliver it.
Turning to the subject however, I would say that it is pretty clear that shareware isn't dead, allthought it can be considered to be in a less than perfect state of health. These days, we get programs that are crippled (my least favorite one was a image-editor which shall remain nameless; everything worked... apart from the ability to save your work), timebombs (are you listening Cerious Software? I loved your earlier version of ThumbPlus; but when I upgraded, you demanded I reregitered, deleted my old files and then simply refused to work)... spyware and other crap.
I used to register quite a few programs; both games and utilities. The last couple of years thought... all I've registerd was my copy of Opera - mostly because it's a great little browser, partly because I'm moraly obliged to support a norwegian softwarecompany.
We have deployed a bit over 10% of our fighterstrenght to Kirgisitan to provide aircover for Operation Enduring Freedom. The difference between the operations in Afganistan and the war of agression in Iraq however, as I see it, is that only one can be said to be a responce to a attack on NATO...
Funny.. I saw no one complaining when it was just iraqies who bit the bullet. People die in wars. Mostly, it is not very photogenic deaths. Besides, who's the idiot who thought no one would dare fire back at the coallition forces?
Disclaimer; No, I'm not a peacehippy, I just don't like wars. Thats why I'm an officer of the RNoAF in the first place, to help prevent 'em from happening.
True. I bought a GBA not all that long time ago, spesificly to play Pokemon on (yeah, I know). I could have gotten an ordinary CB Color, and cheaper too, but the GBA simply have better ergonimics.
Totoaly on a sidenote; I recently bought a copy of Doom for my GBA which seems to be a near perfect copy of the original Doom for the PC; anyone knows how to enter the cheatcodes *smiles* ?
Re:I have to wonder...
on
TiVo++ from India
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
As faras I can see, this is but another proof that poor != stupid. If the western civilication won't provide what the third world feels that it needs ata price they can / will pay, they will develop it themselfs.
Still, it sounds like a neat gadget to put next to my TV, and as we here inNorway uses PAL... all I have to do is to convince my cable-provider to support it.
While his choice of words may not be to your liking (or mine), how does this really differ from all the others who have found their mate online, for instance via newsgroups, bbs's, YaPhew Groups or simular?
After all, I am flying to the USA in a little over two month to meet (for the very first time) someone who has quickly turned out to mean a lot to me... I just hope things work out face to face as well as they have via e-mails, IM and the aforementioned YaPhew groups.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't feed the trolls, and they will go away.. or at least be modded down.
It seems such a waste of space if we're alone... even more so if you're semi-religious as I am (I believe that science can explain most of the universe around us, but it was probaly the "great arcitect" that set it up to begin with). As we learn more about the universe and life, we may understand where and how to look for life out there.
Life is one thing, intelligence is different. Before we all get worked up over SETI@home, why not take a look at STI@home - the search for terrestial intelligence?
...now my head is spinning too.
Challenger... I rest my case.
LOX (Liquid OXygen) is used because it is both cheap, freely avilable and less dangerous than most other oxidisers. For more info on propelants in general, see here. For LOX + kerosene in particular, the link is here. Off course, if you want to get away from the nasty cryogenic oxidicers, you could always go for hydrogenperoxside and kerosene (se data here). Off course, H2O2 is more expencive and way more poisonous than LOX, but it's give and take... In large quantities, 95 per cent hydrogen peroxide then cost approximately $1.00 per kg - LOX on the other hand cost about 0.08$ per kg. Or you could get exotic and use Liquid Fluorine and Kerosene wich gives a Isp: 322.00 sl. compared to a Isp: 300.00 sl. for LOX/Kerosene (se data here) - but then LF was kosting 6.00$ in 1959, and I don't think the price has dropped.
So in short, LOX has a few drawbacks, but the benefits of using it outweights them. Oh, and Encyclopedia Astronautica is a good place to find this sort of info.
There is a simple solution; use a bigger hammer.
If it don't fit, force it. If it breaks, it needed repair anyway!
...insert mouth.
Burn me at the stake if you wish, but much of what he describes as improvements on the Finder (which I recon is akin to the Explorer in Windows - I've used some Macs in the past but not picked up the lingo) are already present in the OS we all love to hate; Windows. Been there from 9x too - along with what he seems to dislike; pathnames. Whats so wrong about knowing where you put your file?
I guess much or most of what he yearns for are present in the various flavours of Linux / FreeBDS / other open operatingsystem of choice (I'll admidt it, I don't have that much experience in those either) as well. maybe the Mac isn't as great as the Mac-fanatics tries to make us believe?
Prosecutors in January lodged an appeal, objecting to the application of the law and the presentation of evidence. '
If they object to the law, shouldn't that be debated by government reps? I don't think a judge has the authority to ignore the law
Read your own quote. They arn't objecting to the law, which would make it a case for the 'wegian parliment, but they are objecting to the application of it. And as norwegian judges are tasked with applying the law, not interprenting it (well, there is a subtle difference), their objection makes sence weither you agree with it or not. I think a suitable analogy would be along this line; "You sell tobaco, knowing it can cause cancer. Someone dies of lungcancer. You're charged with first degree murder." As you can see, this is misapplying the law, and the wrong law to boot.
It's not a 'new trial', but a 'retrial'. Just as the defendant can appeal to a higher court, so can the prosecutors. Mind you, had the defendant appealed, it would have been more or less automaticly accepted, the prosecution must prove that something was wrong with the forst trial; that the judge used the law wrong, that evidence was overlooked or that there was some technicaly that wasn't right.
Erm.. no. DVD-Jon was charged for what amounts to 'breaking and entering' into somewhere he wasn't allowed to go; to be more spesific, the encryptioncodes. The prosecution realised that since they couldn't by a long shoot prove that he wrote to program (if he indeed did) to allow illegal copying of movies, they didn't dare charge him with it. In short, despite the hype, they plastered much the same charge on him as they would have dine if he had broken into his neighbours home and had a look around.
"I'll give you this barometer if you tell me how tall your building is."
Someone has been reading Strata...
While Douglas Adams - of Hitchhicker fame - may not be the sci-fi writer who has studied this in most detail, he does infact touch upon this very idea in his book 'Mostly Harmless'. Instead of giving a robot a spesific piece of programming on what to do in every concivable circumstance, a simple chip (well, I think it'll be a darn complex chip, but still) determines weither or not a certain condition has been meet or not. If it has, the robot is happy - if it hasn't, the robot tries to become happy.
Ford hauled it quickly towards him and pinned it down to the ground. It was beginning to whine pitifully. With one swift and practised movement, Ford reached under the towel with his No.3 gauge prising tool and flipped off the small plastic panel on top of the robot which gave access to its logic circuits.
Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks.
Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else which thinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it the same stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a loop. This was best demonstrated by the famous Herring Sandwich experiments conducted millennia ago at MISPWOSO (The MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious).
A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches. This was actually the most difficult part of the whole experiment. Once the robot had been programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring sandwich was placed in front of it. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, "Ah! A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches."
It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich in its herring sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again. Unfortunately for the robot, it was fashioned in such a way that the action of straightening up caused the herring sandwich to slip straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall on to the floor in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, "Ah! A herring sandwich..., etc., and repeated the same action over and over and over again. The only thing that prevented the herring sandwich from getting bored with the whole damn business and crawling off in search of other ways of passing the time was that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of dead fish between a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to what was going on than was the robot.
The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving force behind all change, development and innovation in life, which was this: herring sandwiches. They published a paper to this effect, which was widely criticised as being extremely stupid. They checked their figures and realised that what they had actually discovered was "boredom", or rather, the practical function of boredom. In a fever of excitement they then went on to discover other emotions, Like "irritability", "depression", "reluctance", "ickiness" and so on. The next big breakthrough came when they stopped using herring sandwiches, whereupon a whole welter of new emotions became suddenly available to them for study, such as "relief", "joy", "friskiness", "appetite", "satisfaction", and most important of all, the desire for "happiness'.
This was the biggest breakthrough of all.
Vast wodges of complex computer code governing robot behaviour in all possible contingencies could be replaced very simply. All that robots needed was the capacity to be either bored or happy, and a few conditions that needed to be satisfied in order to bring those states about. They would then work the rest out for themselves.
The robot which Ford had got trapped under his towel was not, at the moment a happy robot. It was happy when it could move about. It was happy when it could see other things. It was particularly happy when it could see other things moving about, particularly if th
Ah.. you're compenstaing for somthing, right?
Quite some accusations... you got some links to back that up?
Like that is different from working in any other kind of helpdesk!
It's not different from not not working in any helpdesk either, but being the one most your colleguas call because the helpdesk "refuse" to help them... like if I can help them recover they didn't save before shutting down the day before by pulling out the powercord.
That aside, I think there would be a lot less stress overall for the people working for any sort of helpdesk if we users remembered to be polite, and that in turn would mean better service in return (less stressed out helpdesk-staffers would be more willing to give us good service).
Seems like the Iraqy has taken a leaf out of the russian bok - trading land for time until they engage in a decicive battle and / or can attack the lines of supply. I fear that the war will be longer and bloodier than the REMF's in Pentagon cared to believe before they started.
In other news, US troops have seized an airfield in norther Iraq, presumable to open a second front. This may serve to shorten the war considerably, but it may also trigger Saddam and his chums to deploy chemical weapons sooner than they would otherwise have done.
If they write proper HTML, the alt-tag should describe the image; ie the number...
There was - in the early, mid eighties - a british company decided to make a computer that wasn't built 'to standards'. They went forward to sell heaps of them, and made quite a bit of money too...
The machine? The Amstrad PCW. More info here, here and off course here for some circut diagrams.
...which may eternal lie.. or something like that. I don't have the excat qoute from Lovecraft, but I'm sure someone here may deliver it.
Turning to the subject however, I would say that it is pretty clear that shareware isn't dead, allthought it can be considered to be in a less than perfect state of health. These days, we get programs that are crippled (my least favorite one was a image-editor which shall remain nameless; everything worked... apart from the ability to save your work), timebombs (are you listening Cerious Software? I loved your earlier version of ThumbPlus; but when I upgraded, you demanded I reregitered, deleted my old files and then simply refused to work)... spyware and other crap.
I used to register quite a few programs; both games and utilities. The last couple of years thought... all I've registerd was my copy of Opera - mostly because it's a great little browser, partly because I'm moraly obliged to support a norwegian softwarecompany.
...can someone find a mirror? I've tried, but...
We have deployed a bit over 10% of our fighterstrenght to Kirgisitan to provide aircover for Operation Enduring Freedom. The difference between the operations in Afganistan and the war of agression in Iraq however, as I see it, is that only one can be said to be a responce to a attack on NATO...
Funny.. I saw no one complaining when it was just iraqies who bit the bullet. People die in wars. Mostly, it is not very photogenic deaths. Besides, who's the idiot who thought no one would dare fire back at the coallition forces?
Disclaimer; No, I'm not a peacehippy, I just don't like wars. Thats why I'm an officer of the RNoAF in the first place, to help prevent 'em from happening.
True. I bought a GBA not all that long time ago, spesificly to play Pokemon on (yeah, I know). I could have gotten an ordinary CB Color, and cheaper too, but the GBA simply have better ergonimics.
Totoaly on a sidenote; I recently bought a copy of Doom for my GBA which seems to be a near perfect copy of the original Doom for the PC; anyone knows how to enter the cheatcodes *smiles* ?
As faras I can see, this is but another proof that poor != stupid. If the western civilication won't provide what the third world feels that it needs ata price they can / will pay, they will develop it themselfs.
Still, it sounds like a neat gadget to put next to my TV, and as we here inNorway uses PAL... all I have to do is to convince my cable-provider to support it.
I wonder what you must do to get rated +1 Insightful in a world where most games is related to blowing somebodys brains out...
Simple; you must make sure that people can get a full view into the carcass - isn't it what in_sight_full means? ;P
While his choice of words may not be to your liking (or mine), how does this really differ from all the others who have found their mate online, for instance via newsgroups, bbs's, YaPhew Groups or simular?
After all, I am flying to the USA in a little over two month to meet (for the very first time) someone who has quickly turned out to mean a lot to me... I just hope things work out face to face as well as they have via e-mails, IM and the aforementioned YaPhew groups.