The point is that by not paying for something just because it isn't a material good, doesn't make it any less of a crime, and doesn't mean that there isn't financial impact. People seem to think that if it isn't a physical stolen piece of property that nobody is hurt, but it isn't true.
Ehh, just raise taxes. (it's worked before, right?!)
You've got the wrong image, there. You need footage of a teenager actually getting to meet his all-time favorite talent. You know, right there in the green room, for a one-on-one with, say... I don't know, Green Day or Avril Lavigne. The teenager says to Green Day, "Dudes! You guys totally rock. You're like the soundtrack of my life - I listen to you all the time, and I really can't wait for that next CD you're working on. I know you've been working on it all year and everything, but you won't mind if I just rip my copy off, right? I mean, I love you guys, just not enough to actually pay you what you're asking for your work. You know, a buck a song is totally unfair to me, personally, even though I want you to entertain me even more in the future, cuz you guys just totally kill with your songs about The Man and everything. Hey, are you going to eat that extra back-stage food? One of those club sandwiches would go great with my $3.75 half-caffe-double-shot-no-whip-skinny-iced-latte."
How about a record executive eating dinner at a fancy restaraunt with a call girl when a band in raggedy clothes comes in to pay their monthly RIAA loan payment, which consists of their royalty check and whatever change they could scrounge up. Take your pick of which popular indentured servant^W^W RIAA sponsored band to portray.
I mean that we are missing the transitional creatures.
Like archyoptrix, and the new species found in China recently? Like thousands of other fossil finds that fit in between existing species? You do realize that hundreds of billions of animals have lived and died, and that if each intermediate fossil for each transition was still in the earth, there would be nothing but fossils for miles deep, right? The alternative is that there were thousands of times more species during creation than there are now, as evidenced by the fossil record, since they couldn't go changing into each other and all. Where did they all fit? What sort of ecosystem would have supported such a variety of animals, many of which overlap ecological niches? At some point you can say that everything magically happened perfectly, but that won't further your argument without a concrete example of how it would have worked.
I just took a look at/usr/bin on one of my linux machines. On that particular machine there are 1877 programs that all are linked to libc.so.6 (there are 2088 file in/usr/bin), now does that mean that each of these programs evolved from/usr/bin/bash, which is also linked to libc.so.6? Well, certainly not, it means that the programmers that created to 1877 programs used a common building block to start working. Why would God be any different? If you were going to create a universe and everything in it, wouldn't you reuse certain building blocks?
Great example. If you download the source for those programs, and look in the changelog, you will see evolution in progress. Each version of the program is a slight modification of a previous version, more fit to survive in its environment. Do you run apache 1.0? Why not? It had to change because of the selective pressure of higher loads, buffer overflows, and any number of other factors. If you want to write a new utility, do you start from scratch each time or do you find a similar utility and modify it to suit the new purpose? Do you ever reuse code or simply put two tools together with a couple scripts to perform a brand new function (mitochondria in animal cells)? Don't forget that evolution doesn't stop just because intelligent decisions can influence changes; selection pressure is always there. The key is that randomness can drive evolution just as well as intellignce, only slower. As I said before, energy and entropy are not a problem because the Earth lives on a steep thermodynamic slope from the sun with plenty of energy to fuel random and organized processes alike. Since you mentioned Linux, I'll assume you are also familiar with general problem solving algorithms like hill climbing and breadth or depth first tree search. The whole point of natural evolution is that the energy from the sun provides the selection function for a very large hill climbing algorithm. Things that can use the excess energy to reproduce themselves continue to do so, and random changes to those things eventually results in slightly better designs. There are enough random changes and enough energy that less efficient designs can survive long enough to move across lower valleys to higher hills. When you think of it in computational terms, it's quite obvious why evolution happens and that it's a natural result of a chaotic, energetic environment.
Technically evolution only has to deal with things that already reproduce, but it should be obvious if you've ever played the game of life that it doesn't take complex rules to allow objects to reproduce themselves. If you set a game of life up with a random field or even randomly flip cells every so often, eventually you will get a reproducing pattern. It's a mathematical certainty, because the probability of a reproducing pattern appearing is simply the ratio of reproducing patterns possible in a given area small enough to contain its first generation to all the patterns that don't reproduce. Since there are reproducing patterns in the game of life, for a given ar
The basement-dwelling machine-code-writing ubergeek of the 80's really
existed, but only due to social factors; had he left his basement and
gotten a girlfreind, he would have become more productive, not less.
As the proud spouse of a former girlfriend, I can safely say that productivity does not increase when romance, housework, and child-rearing duties are added to the daily schedule. Sure, at work I might be just as productive or more as without a spouse, but at home I no longer have the time to do as much learning as I used to. I used to know assembly language for pentium class processors inside and out, but I have trouble optimizing things now due to the changes that I haven't kept up with. There are RFCs I haven't read, mathematical papers I don't have enough time to comprehend, and books I'd still like to read. All those things I used to do while off work would probably offset any productivity gains at the office that basement dwellers (theoretically) don't have.
Clearly, these are some weird, specific BIOS-drivers-OS interaction issues. IMHO, nothing should be able to shutdown the computer in an instant (just like pulling the cord). At least give me a BSOD, damnit...
Sounds like a flaky power supply more than anything else...
However, there is no evidence of one species becoming another and that is what would have to happen for a lower form to evolve into a human.
I'd say that's naive, at best. By "no evidence" you mean what exactly? No movies of an animal changing into another? Just look at the fossil record at 30 FPS, and it becomes a movie of species change. That's not even the best evidence. The best evidence is testable, and right here in the present; DNA. Every human and animal and plant on earth shares DNA exactly the same chemical structure of DNA, and many cellular features as well. We're all built out of the same stuff, and the differences lie only in a few percent of the DNA base pairs. There are two possibilities: God had a funny sense of humor and built every living thing out of the exact same stuff to nearly identical specifications, or evolution used the same blueprint for everything. It can even be argued that god would have used evolution as a handy tool to create everything. After all, why do more work than necessary? That hardly seems perfect or wise. How do you explain mules or other cross-bred species?
As to evolution, what you are talking about with the evolution of bird flu and the evolution of lower species to human are two different things.
Different only in magnitude. Viruses reproduce much more rapidly, and the changes to make a virus cross hosts are less than the changes to differentiate a species. I am especially astonished that creationists don't realize the implication of cross-host diseases. It directly implies that animal and human biology is so similar that evolution has been proven to work for viruses. It means that the virus has literally evolved from one animal into another. How much harder could it be for those two animals to simply have a common ancestor minus the changes that kept the virus specific to one species?
Why can't you accept the fact that there is a being greater than man? A being that has the power to create the universe in which we live. A being that set up the rules that we discover via science. That being is God, and he is the one that is responsible for us being here today.
Why can't you accept the fact that the universe exists on its own? Both questions are simply philosophical positions, and I have no trouble holding either belief. However, the evidence I've found so far points to at best an autonomous universe that obeys its own laws, all of which have nothing to do with humans specifically. Essentially, the reason I can't believe in your god is that he would have to behave inconsistantly. For example, god is assumed to be omniscient, but humans are supposed to have free will. Obviously, one of the two is false because if god knows what we will do before we do it, we had no choice in the matter, and moreover god created the universe realizing all the horrible things that would happen in it, and still called it good. Sending over 90% of the human population to hell for eternity is a piss-poor design plan that god actively chose, if you assume him to be omniscient.
I don't reject the idea of some person creating a universe just to see what happens, but by my definition that person would not be a god, but instead just someone with a lot of computational resources. In fact, the simulation hypothesis derives a high probability that most conscious minds are actually living in a simulation, assuming the standard laws of physics that allow increasing computer power. Basically, the argument is that since we will eventually have vast computation resources, we will probably be able to simulate the entire earth, and since we're morbidly self-fascinated, we will probably attempt at some point to simulate our past history, e.g. now. The alternatives are that the species dies out completely, or computational resources are fundamentally limited to something less than what can be used to simulate the earth (or at least the surface of the earth). The former is a possibility, and n
A judge however doesn't understand that a model-view-controller approach is somewhat common sense and that model/view/controller aren't literal objects that are composed of proprietary algorithms but rather organization of common concepts (accessing, manipulating and displaying data). As far as patents in general, I don't see pharmaceutical companies profitting as a bad thing. Its what drives research.
I guarantee that all the mechanical patents are simply an organization of simple concepts like the wheel and inclined plane. I guarantee that all the chemical patents are simply a method for applying the relatively simple rules of chemistry to create a certain arrangement of atoms. That's all. Generally, anyone with a college education in the field can understand the process. What patents imply is that even though there are hundreds of thousands of people who can understand and probably independantly derive a soluton to a problem, they are barred from using that solution simply because some lawyers signed some paperwork and sent it to a government office. It's a denial of service attack on science.
While I do still prefer the structure and stability of Slackware, I do think it's time to make certain changes. I'm not saying it's time to jump on the "Latest and Greatest Everything" bandwagon. I think it's time for the distro to be re-focused. Possibly into a pure Server OS, with a strong focus on commercial grade clustering & virtualization.
With a properly configured *nix system, you don't *need* virtualization.
This is not newsworthy. This is computer science 101.
This is slashdot, not CS101. There are plenty of people who haven't touched CS courses writing software that may use floating point numbers. I'd rather they knew about the potential pitfalls of floating point numbers, since I'll probably end up using their software sometime. Consider it in your best interest to educate non-CS coders.
My guess is that Hyperactive Bob is orders of magnitude faster than humans at solving hard scheduling problems, essentially the NP-hard types of problems that people are slow at or have to make guesses about. Most NP-hard problems can be approximated quickly to within a reasonable percentage of the optimal solution, especially for special problem domains (e.g. traveling salesman on euclidean graphs). Food production is a very simple problem to model, although I don't know how complex the solutions are. There are a given number of customers who order a statistical distribution of finished food products that have a cost weighted dependancy graph on staffing, equipment, and raw supplies. The statistics are probably well studied and adaptive models can predict several minutes or hours into the future based on daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly cycles. Basically, the computer can have as much (or more) knowledge as a seasoned manager, and far more processing power.
I'm not arguing in favor of the windows registry, but I really don't config files in a hodge-podge of different formats helps anyone.
I wonder why you'd want inetd.conf to look anything like ntp.conf or zoned.conf. All three configuration files do very different things, and the configuration files are tailored for each application. Configuration files that just need name-value pairs like ntp.conf or most other configuration files do just that with no added bloat. Programs that need tables, like inetd.conf, use them. Programs that need heirarchial structures, like DNS, use them. Some people have recommended using XML or some other formal format for all configuration files, but the problem is that there are still semantic rules for all configuration files that vastly outweigh the syntactic rules. It doesn't matter if you specify your zones in zoned.conf or some XML database, if you don't put the right data in them it just won't work. In my opinion, it's better to keep configuration files simple and very human readable, not to mention backward compatible, simply because the hard part is configuring it right, not just making it parse without errors. The more working examples a system administrator has to go on, the easier his or her job is.
Nothing wrong with people installing Claria or spyware either, as long as they understand they're giving up their privacy. The difference is just in how much their privacy is worth to them. Some people's privacy is worth the ability to quickly search all their documents, other people's is worth a couple pretty screensavers. In that sense, it's good that Google will at least make people aware of any possible privacy/security issues.
I think most people would be up in arms about someone getting fired for expressing their opinion. Bosses who have to fire people who don't like them are really, really ineffective.
Do YOU trust your congressman to not just create a huge beauracracy, with new laws being stuck on whenever they want to "protect the children/fight terrorism".
With the quality Congress-persons we have, it's only a matter of time until a law is proposed to protect terrorism and fight children, and THEN we'll all be living in Soviet Russia.
As long as I'm posting -- is this Ted Stevens "tubes" stuff not becoming as annoying as flying spaghetti and chair throwing references? It's not like more than a handful of those smarmy dweebs could actually explain to you how IP or Ethernet really does work.
The more public derision heaped upon ignorant public "leaders", the better. If the chairman of the committee dealing directly with technical communication issues can't even conjure forth a proper metaphor, he desires all the insults he gets. Personally, I emailed my unfortunate senator to explain how the Internet actually works, but of course I didn't get a reply... Probably because everything he said was such an obvious double-faced lie that he doesn't dare to respond directly to either side. He claimed that "commercial interests" were ruining the Internet while being obviously beholden to numerous commercial interests himself.
Just blackmail the teacher into buying a legitimate copy of Windows for them! After all, after you've committed the dread act of piracy, what's a little extortion and blackmail? Just ask yourself: What Would Jack Sparrow Do?
I think that RMS is also watching what IBM does with trusted computing. Don't forget that IBM is probably the largest company that makes money from Linux, and definitely the largest company that also supports DRM and trusted computing. As far as I can tell, RMS wants to make sure IBM (or anyone else) doesn't effectively close Linux by releasing a precompiled distro that is the only one accepted by their trusted computing chips. Of course, IBM has now dumped its consumer PC business on Lenovo, but I doubt that they have dropped their trusted computing initiative.
Besides, when a java applet pops up and asks for permission to elevate its privileges, how come that's good and holy, yet when an ActiveX control does the same that's so disgusting?
Two words: Priviledge escalation. Running executable code from the Internet as a Windows process, even as a non-administrative user, is just asking for trouble. At least Java is relatively sandboxed.
Additionally, there are a lot of people who don't like extensions and plugins for what I think are very valid reasons: Plugins and extensions are rarely standardized, therefore it's difficult to use them on FOSS platforms, or embedded platforms, and there's usually some non-standard way of managing or operating them. Not only that, but with Ajax and Java (and even Flash...), what need is there for additional plugins? It doesn't help that *most* plugins are just adware/spyware/malware. We use a few ActiveX components where I work for useful things, but many of them should be actual software packages instead. Often, ActiveX is used as a sorry replacement for a proper software installer. "We don't need to ship them an installer, just make it an ActiveX component and make them download it off our website every time they want to use it!"
There is something about the gaze of an intelligent person that can't be replicated. I'm wondering if this might have some subconscious effect on the students. I'm sure it would be alot harder to keep eye contact with a creation like this. And from there who knows what the complications would be.
The only thing necessary to fix the "gaze" is object tracking, especially tracking other eyes. The most telling sign of intelligence is in eyes that look into your own. We recognize it in our fellow humans as well as animals. The only other good fake for intelligence is to make the eyes respond to quick movements and loud noises, and tracking new objects as they enter the line of sight for a short period, then returning to the object of interest. Probably looking at someone speaking to the android would be the most appropriate response. To avoid staring people down, it just needs a politeness filter. Make eye contact for 2.3 seconds, avert eyes to another object for 4 seconds, return gaze to eyes for.7 seconds, avert, etc. There are all sorts of non-eye enhancements to be made concerning involuntary muscle movements and slight body adjustments. Making the android keep its own balance while sitting and moving its arms around would probably fix that problem, instead of rigidly mounting the android to a base.
America's government is notorious for economic espionage and many of its corporations, probably most, are controlled/owned by military officers or the military as an organization. The fears about America are grounded in reality.
Oh, wait, did I copy that wrong? I was just thining about all the silly IP laws the USA tries to export and companies like Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Diebold, Blackwater, Haliburton...
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that by not paying for something just because it isn't a material good, doesn't make it any less of a crime, and doesn't mean that there isn't financial impact. People seem to think that if it isn't a physical stolen piece of property that nobody is hurt, but it isn't true.
Ehh, just raise taxes. (it's worked before, right?!)
You've got the wrong image, there. You need footage of a teenager actually getting to meet his all-time favorite talent. You know, right there in the green room, for a one-on-one with, say... I don't know, Green Day or Avril Lavigne. The teenager says to Green Day, "Dudes! You guys totally rock. You're like the soundtrack of my life - I listen to you all the time, and I really can't wait for that next CD you're working on. I know you've been working on it all year and everything, but you won't mind if I just rip my copy off, right? I mean, I love you guys, just not enough to actually pay you what you're asking for your work. You know, a buck a song is totally unfair to me, personally, even though I want you to entertain me even more in the future, cuz you guys just totally kill with your songs about The Man and everything. Hey, are you going to eat that extra back-stage food? One of those club sandwiches would go great with my $3.75 half-caffe-double-shot-no-whip-skinny-iced-latte."
How about a record executive eating dinner at a fancy restaraunt with a call girl when a band in raggedy clothes comes in to pay their monthly RIAA loan payment, which consists of their royalty check and whatever change they could scrounge up. Take your pick of which popular indentured servant^W^W RIAA sponsored band to portray.
I mean that we are missing the transitional creatures.
/usr/bin on one of my linux machines. On that particular machine there are 1877 programs that all are linked to libc.so.6 (there are 2088 file in /usr/bin), now does that mean that each of these programs evolved from /usr/bin/bash, which is also linked to libc.so.6? Well, certainly not, it means that the programmers that created to 1877 programs used a common building block to start working. Why would God be any different? If you were going to create a universe and everything in it, wouldn't you reuse certain building blocks?
Like archyoptrix, and the new species found in China recently? Like thousands of other fossil finds that fit in between existing species? You do realize that hundreds of billions of animals have lived and died, and that if each intermediate fossil for each transition was still in the earth, there would be nothing but fossils for miles deep, right? The alternative is that there were thousands of times more species during creation than there are now, as evidenced by the fossil record, since they couldn't go changing into each other and all. Where did they all fit? What sort of ecosystem would have supported such a variety of animals, many of which overlap ecological niches? At some point you can say that everything magically happened perfectly, but that won't further your argument without a concrete example of how it would have worked.
I just took a look at
Great example. If you download the source for those programs, and look in the changelog, you will see evolution in progress. Each version of the program is a slight modification of a previous version, more fit to survive in its environment. Do you run apache 1.0? Why not? It had to change because of the selective pressure of higher loads, buffer overflows, and any number of other factors. If you want to write a new utility, do you start from scratch each time or do you find a similar utility and modify it to suit the new purpose? Do you ever reuse code or simply put two tools together with a couple scripts to perform a brand new function (mitochondria in animal cells)? Don't forget that evolution doesn't stop just because intelligent decisions can influence changes; selection pressure is always there. The key is that randomness can drive evolution just as well as intellignce, only slower. As I said before, energy and entropy are not a problem because the Earth lives on a steep thermodynamic slope from the sun with plenty of energy to fuel random and organized processes alike. Since you mentioned Linux, I'll assume you are also familiar with general problem solving algorithms like hill climbing and breadth or depth first tree search. The whole point of natural evolution is that the energy from the sun provides the selection function for a very large hill climbing algorithm. Things that can use the excess energy to reproduce themselves continue to do so, and random changes to those things eventually results in slightly better designs. There are enough random changes and enough energy that less efficient designs can survive long enough to move across lower valleys to higher hills. When you think of it in computational terms, it's quite obvious why evolution happens and that it's a natural result of a chaotic, energetic environment.
Technically evolution only has to deal with things that already reproduce, but it should be obvious if you've ever played the game of life that it doesn't take complex rules to allow objects to reproduce themselves. If you set a game of life up with a random field or even randomly flip cells every so often, eventually you will get a reproducing pattern. It's a mathematical certainty, because the probability of a reproducing pattern appearing is simply the ratio of reproducing patterns possible in a given area small enough to contain its first generation to all the patterns that don't reproduce. Since there are reproducing patterns in the game of life, for a given ar
The basement-dwelling machine-code-writing ubergeek of the 80's really existed, but only due to social factors; had he left his basement and gotten a girlfreind, he would have become more productive, not less.
As the proud spouse of a former girlfriend, I can safely say that productivity does not increase when romance, housework, and child-rearing duties are added to the daily schedule. Sure, at work I might be just as productive or more as without a spouse, but at home I no longer have the time to do as much learning as I used to. I used to know assembly language for pentium class processors inside and out, but I have trouble optimizing things now due to the changes that I haven't kept up with. There are RFCs I haven't read, mathematical papers I don't have enough time to comprehend, and books I'd still like to read. All those things I used to do while off work would probably offset any productivity gains at the office that basement dwellers (theoretically) don't have.
Clearly, these are some weird, specific BIOS-drivers-OS interaction issues. IMHO, nothing should be able to shutdown the computer in an instant (just like pulling the cord). At least give me a BSOD, damnit...
Sounds like a flaky power supply more than anything else...
My god is the philosophy of epistemology -- the study of what, if anything, we can know.
SPOILERS BELOW!!!
We can know nothing, but fudge it good enough to have the impression that we do. After that it's just details.
However, there is no evidence of one species becoming another and that is what would have to happen for a lower form to evolve into a human.
I'd say that's naive, at best. By "no evidence" you mean what exactly? No movies of an animal changing into another? Just look at the fossil record at 30 FPS, and it becomes a movie of species change. That's not even the best evidence. The best evidence is testable, and right here in the present; DNA. Every human and animal and plant on earth shares DNA exactly the same chemical structure of DNA, and many cellular features as well. We're all built out of the same stuff, and the differences lie only in a few percent of the DNA base pairs. There are two possibilities: God had a funny sense of humor and built every living thing out of the exact same stuff to nearly identical specifications, or evolution used the same blueprint for everything. It can even be argued that god would have used evolution as a handy tool to create everything. After all, why do more work than necessary? That hardly seems perfect or wise. How do you explain mules or other cross-bred species?
As to evolution, what you are talking about with the evolution of bird flu and the evolution of lower species to human are two different things.
Different only in magnitude. Viruses reproduce much more rapidly, and the changes to make a virus cross hosts are less than the changes to differentiate a species. I am especially astonished that creationists don't realize the implication of cross-host diseases. It directly implies that animal and human biology is so similar that evolution has been proven to work for viruses. It means that the virus has literally evolved from one animal into another. How much harder could it be for those two animals to simply have a common ancestor minus the changes that kept the virus specific to one species?
Why can't you accept the fact that there is a being greater than man? A being that has the power to create the universe in which we live. A being that set up the rules that we discover via science. That being is God, and he is the one that is responsible for us being here today.
Why can't you accept the fact that the universe exists on its own? Both questions are simply philosophical positions, and I have no trouble holding either belief. However, the evidence I've found so far points to at best an autonomous universe that obeys its own laws, all of which have nothing to do with humans specifically. Essentially, the reason I can't believe in your god is that he would have to behave inconsistantly. For example, god is assumed to be omniscient, but humans are supposed to have free will. Obviously, one of the two is false because if god knows what we will do before we do it, we had no choice in the matter, and moreover god created the universe realizing all the horrible things that would happen in it, and still called it good. Sending over 90% of the human population to hell for eternity is a piss-poor design plan that god actively chose, if you assume him to be omniscient.
I don't reject the idea of some person creating a universe just to see what happens, but by my definition that person would not be a god, but instead just someone with a lot of computational resources. In fact, the simulation hypothesis derives a high probability that most conscious minds are actually living in a simulation, assuming the standard laws of physics that allow increasing computer power. Basically, the argument is that since we will eventually have vast computation resources, we will probably be able to simulate the entire earth, and since we're morbidly self-fascinated, we will probably attempt at some point to simulate our past history, e.g. now. The alternatives are that the species dies out completely, or computational resources are fundamentally limited to something less than what can be used to simulate the earth (or at least the surface of the earth). The former is a possibility, and n
A judge however doesn't understand that a model-view-controller approach is somewhat common sense and that model/view/controller aren't literal objects that are composed of proprietary algorithms but rather organization of common concepts (accessing, manipulating and displaying data). As far as patents in general, I don't see pharmaceutical companies profitting as a bad thing. Its what drives research.
I guarantee that all the mechanical patents are simply an organization of simple concepts like the wheel and inclined plane. I guarantee that all the chemical patents are simply a method for applying the relatively simple rules of chemistry to create a certain arrangement of atoms. That's all. Generally, anyone with a college education in the field can understand the process. What patents imply is that even though there are hundreds of thousands of people who can understand and probably independantly derive a soluton to a problem, they are barred from using that solution simply because some lawyers signed some paperwork and sent it to a government office. It's a denial of service attack on science.
While I do still prefer the structure and stability of Slackware, I do think it's time to make certain changes. I'm not saying it's time to jump on the "Latest and Greatest Everything" bandwagon. I think it's time for the distro to be re-focused. Possibly into a pure Server OS, with a strong focus on commercial grade clustering & virtualization.
With a properly configured *nix system, you don't *need* virtualization.
Will Slack 11 include the CIFS patch in the 2.4 kernel? I need CIFS at work to talk to the Windoze boxes at work :-(
You use Slack and don't compile your own kernel? My God man!
- happy Slack user
This is not newsworthy. This is computer science 101.
This is slashdot, not CS101. There are plenty of people who haven't touched CS courses writing software that may use floating point numbers. I'd rather they knew about the potential pitfalls of floating point numbers, since I'll probably end up using their software sometime. Consider it in your best interest to educate non-CS coders.
My guess is that Hyperactive Bob is orders of magnitude faster than humans at solving hard scheduling problems, essentially the NP-hard types of problems that people are slow at or have to make guesses about. Most NP-hard problems can be approximated quickly to within a reasonable percentage of the optimal solution, especially for special problem domains (e.g. traveling salesman on euclidean graphs). Food production is a very simple problem to model, although I don't know how complex the solutions are. There are a given number of customers who order a statistical distribution of finished food products that have a cost weighted dependancy graph on staffing, equipment, and raw supplies. The statistics are probably well studied and adaptive models can predict several minutes or hours into the future based on daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly cycles. Basically, the computer can have as much (or more) knowledge as a seasoned manager, and far more processing power.
Who the hell would ever do business with a company that can't even seem to spell properly?
I think the answer is obvious: People who can't spell (or think) very well to begin with.
I'm not arguing in favor of the windows registry, but I really don't config files in a hodge-podge of different formats helps anyone.
I wonder why you'd want inetd.conf to look anything like ntp.conf or zoned.conf. All three configuration files do very different things, and the configuration files are tailored for each application. Configuration files that just need name-value pairs like ntp.conf or most other configuration files do just that with no added bloat. Programs that need tables, like inetd.conf, use them. Programs that need heirarchial structures, like DNS, use them. Some people have recommended using XML or some other formal format for all configuration files, but the problem is that there are still semantic rules for all configuration files that vastly outweigh the syntactic rules. It doesn't matter if you specify your zones in zoned.conf or some XML database, if you don't put the right data in them it just won't work. In my opinion, it's better to keep configuration files simple and very human readable, not to mention backward compatible, simply because the hard part is configuring it right, not just making it parse without errors. The more working examples a system administrator has to go on, the easier his or her job is.
Nothing wrong with people installing Claria or spyware either, as long as they understand they're giving up their privacy. The difference is just in how much their privacy is worth to them. Some people's privacy is worth the ability to quickly search all their documents, other people's is worth a couple pretty screensavers. In that sense, it's good that Google will at least make people aware of any possible privacy/security issues.
I think most people would be up in arms about someone getting fired for expressing their opinion. Bosses who have to fire people who don't like them are really, really ineffective.
Do YOU trust your congressman to not just create a huge beauracracy, with new laws being stuck on whenever they want to "protect the children/fight terrorism".
With the quality Congress-persons we have, it's only a matter of time until a law is proposed to protect terrorism and fight children, and THEN we'll all be living in Soviet Russia.
As long as I'm posting -- is this Ted Stevens "tubes" stuff not becoming as annoying as flying spaghetti and chair throwing references? It's not like more than a handful of those smarmy dweebs could actually explain to you how IP or Ethernet really does work.
The more public derision heaped upon ignorant public "leaders", the better. If the chairman of the committee dealing directly with technical communication issues can't even conjure forth a proper metaphor, he desires all the insults he gets. Personally, I emailed my unfortunate senator to explain how the Internet actually works, but of course I didn't get a reply... Probably because everything he said was such an obvious double-faced lie that he doesn't dare to respond directly to either side. He claimed that "commercial interests" were ruining the Internet while being obviously beholden to numerous commercial interests himself.
Just blackmail the teacher into buying a legitimate copy of Windows for them! After all, after you've committed the dread act of piracy, what's a little extortion and blackmail? Just ask yourself: What Would Jack Sparrow Do?
I think that RMS is also watching what IBM does with trusted computing. Don't forget that IBM is probably the largest company that makes money from Linux, and definitely the largest company that also supports DRM and trusted computing. As far as I can tell, RMS wants to make sure IBM (or anyone else) doesn't effectively close Linux by releasing a precompiled distro that is the only one accepted by their trusted computing chips. Of course, IBM has now dumped its consumer PC business on Lenovo, but I doubt that they have dropped their trusted computing initiative.
Besides, when a java applet pops up and asks for permission to elevate its privileges, how come that's good and holy, yet when an ActiveX control does the same that's so disgusting?
Two words: Priviledge escalation. Running executable code from the Internet as a Windows process, even as a non-administrative user, is just asking for trouble. At least Java is relatively sandboxed.
Additionally, there are a lot of people who don't like extensions and plugins for what I think are very valid reasons: Plugins and extensions are rarely standardized, therefore it's difficult to use them on FOSS platforms, or embedded platforms, and there's usually some non-standard way of managing or operating them. Not only that, but with Ajax and Java (and even Flash...), what need is there for additional plugins? It doesn't help that *most* plugins are just adware/spyware/malware. We use a few ActiveX components where I work for useful things, but many of them should be actual software packages instead. Often, ActiveX is used as a sorry replacement for a proper software installer. "We don't need to ship them an installer, just make it an ActiveX component and make them download it off our website every time they want to use it!"
Heck, he did it with dhcpd, they didn't need to spoof anything, just assign a static address.
Not only that, but they could set up their own proxy to sharpen and unflip the images! The horror!
. The way to fix it is through putting some sort of tax, fee, whatever you might have it, on email getting sent.
You don't have to pay for receiving faxes (unless you own a toll free number), but that didn't stop lawmakers from making fax spam illegal.
Not to mention that an email tax would do nothing to stop IM or blog spam.
There is something about the gaze of an intelligent person that can't be replicated. I'm wondering if this might have some subconscious effect on the students. I'm sure it would be alot harder to keep eye contact with a creation like this. And from there who knows what the complications would be.
.7 seconds, avert, etc. There are all sorts of non-eye enhancements to be made concerning involuntary muscle movements and slight body adjustments. Making the android keep its own balance while sitting and moving its arms around would probably fix that problem, instead of rigidly mounting the android to a base.
The only thing necessary to fix the "gaze" is object tracking, especially tracking other eyes. The most telling sign of intelligence is in eyes that look into your own. We recognize it in our fellow humans as well as animals. The only other good fake for intelligence is to make the eyes respond to quick movements and loud noises, and tracking new objects as they enter the line of sight for a short period, then returning to the object of interest. Probably looking at someone speaking to the android would be the most appropriate response. To avoid staring people down, it just needs a politeness filter. Make eye contact for 2.3 seconds, avert eyes to another object for 4 seconds, return gaze to eyes for
America's government is notorious for economic espionage and many of its corporations, probably most, are controlled/owned by military officers or the military as an organization. The fears about America are grounded in reality.
Oh, wait, did I copy that wrong? I was just thining about all the silly IP laws the USA tries to export and companies like Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Diebold, Blackwater, Haliburton...