It just goes to show, all these people who advocate complete capitalism or complete socialism don't know what they're talking about. A great society uses a balance of public services, publically funded research, and so on, while exploiting capitalist industry for the "heavy lifting", so to speak. Not unlike what you are doing -- the public funds research on the smallpox vaccine, and then big pharmaceutical companies handle the business of trying to produce the stuff cost-effectively.
I've got a brother working on research on hemhoragic fevers as we speak. Well, not literally "as we speak", since I expect even researchers are home by 8pm Saturday (and we're not really speaking). And that's at the Canadian National Center for Infectious Disease (analagous to the CDC in the US). That's where a lot of our serious research into basic cures comes from.
Incidentally, he says it's just about the most interesting job in the world, and he's just a lab tech! It's good to be doing what you love.
There was the switch from XFree86 to xorg, the switch to the 2.6 kernel, the switch from the old-school/dev system to DevFSD and then to UDEV, and the introduction of the hotplug system. CUPS has been evolving quite a bit, with huge numbers of new drivers and graphical interfaces to support desktop use. Xorg has changed a lot even over the relatively short period since its inception; in the first few months there were dozens of major patches introducing new modules. The X font system has changed substantially (I think the font system has been replaced twice now, but I wouldn't swear to it). Fedora had it's VERY painful transition to SELinux, although I think they've worked through the problems (I'm a Mandrake man myself, so I'm only peripherally aware of Fedora's evolution). A lot of software had to changed to support Alsa instead of OSS. The GStreamer framework was introduced, and many media-streaming applications migrated it.
Plus of course, all the normal evolutionary stuff, like new versions of Gnome and KDE, more internationalization, more graphical utilities.
Most importantly, many major applications like Xine and Quake2 were ported to AALib, allowing them to enjoyed on God's chosen peripheral, the ASCII terminal.
Do these people ever consider the idea that maybe... just maybe... books don't translate well into movies? It's not exactly a strange idea. Look at how badly music translates into movies, or how poorly a sculpture translates into a song. I say let books stay books. Just come up with new ideas for movies.
Hmmm. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm going to start a project to convert Dali's "The Persistence of Memory" into a television series.
Well, I'm using the word hicks in the general sense. North America was founded by hicks, be it greasy-fur-trapper hicks in Canada or religious-schizo hicks in the US. We's all hicks in this great land. I say embrace it, crack a beer, and stroke your shotgun lovingly.
Where've you been? Around that time, most distros were having some growing pains. There have been some major architectural changes in how a Gnu/Linux desktop box works. Mandrake and Fedora, being among the most progressive distros, went through a lot of difficult changes.
Yeah, because a bunch of hicks with hunting rifles are a real threat to the government. The right to bear arms is meaningless in this age of tanks, attack helipcopters, and night-vision-equipped infantry wearing body armour. If the second amendment granted any genuine power, it would have been scrapped decades ago.
And what would you have people do? Lots of us DO email, write, and telephone our representatives. But no letter, phonecall, or email has even a fraction of the power that a $10,000 "campaign contribution" does.
Campaign contributions mean that political representation goes to those with the most money to donate. Democracy died long ago.
This is cool and all, but I think Folding@home is more relevant and important. It's an amazing perversity that we know less about how the components of our bodies work than about how stars and black holes work.
Still, the more people are donating their spare cycles to worthy concepts, the better. If this draws more attention to the whole @home concept, and lets some physicists do their research on the cheap, so much the better.
How about a move away from censorship? I stopped going to Blockbuster and Rogers Video after I found out that they perform their own censoring and scene-removal on films.
It's bad enough that the movie industry waters everything down into mindless pap without the video store trying to decide what I should and shouldn't view.
It's especially nasty when you're practically guaranteed to get wormed without a firewall.
When working on my Mom's computer, I forgot that she doesn't have a hardware firewall like I do; so in the time between booting up Windows for the first time and downloading Zonealarm, the system had already been wormed.
It's not a coincidence that every other computer I administrate runs GNU/Linux.
True, but that doesn't rule out the eventual utility of simulations in understanding automobile accidents. After all, cars are already designed using simulations to understand their behaviour during crashes and other undesirable situations. The technology may not be ready for use as evidence (as the article indicates), but that doesn't mean it wont be ready someday.
I hope this court decision doesn't have a dampening effect on automobile-accident-simulation research. It would be a shame to lose such a potentially useful tool. Too many times we've seen technology fail just because people tried to roll it out too soon, before it was truly ready.
Fair enough. There's no denying that you get bogged down in a quagmire of semantics when you try to compare a theoretical construct to a real-world thingy.
But we can make more hard drives. It just takes time. And we can make more ticker tape, etc. The machine can just pause until more storage is provided. We have an unbounded amount of time to execute in. The algorithm could simply pause until whatever arbitrary amount of storage is necessary is available.
You're missing the point here -- a modern computer is not a closed device. Its ability to interact with the outside world via I/O of various kinds gives it the full range of a TM's power. A computer is not just its RAM and CPU and hard drive.
1.) The universe is not a closed system though; some research indicates that matter and energy are routinely created as the universe expands. Therefore the amount of matter in the universe is potentially unbounded.
2.) An individual particle may be able to store arbitrarily complex information, by encoding that information as a real number equal to its position in space (which can be determined with arbitrary precision if you accept that its intertia becomes undetermined). I'm not aware of any scientific result saying that the number of possible particle positions is finite. If a particle's position in space is allowed to assume any value in the continuum, then even a single particle can encode a Turing Machine's tape. We don't even need to be able to determine the particle's position exactly; we just need the ability to determine its position to any arbitrary precision.
So there's more than enough infinity in the universe to permit unbounded automata.
First, let's be clear: you mean a "finite state automaton". Even a TM is an automaton, it's the unbounded state that sets it apart.
The classic problem not solvable by a DFA is recognizing {0^n 1^n : n in N}. A PC can solve this by writing its output to tertiary storage via an output port, and as soon as it reads the first 1, it begins reading back what it wrote to the output port, comparing that to its input. Tertiary storage isn't bounded in size, because it can be freely modified during execution. An example would be a ticker-tape writer that has additional tape added by a person whenever the roll runs out.
It means that it can solve any problem that a FSM or CFG can solve, and many more. The set of problems that it can solve is a strict superset of the problems that can be solved using a Finite State Machine or Context Free Grammar.
Linear-bounded automata are not as powerful as Turing Machines, but are still quite powerful.
Incorrect. Most computers can function as a linear-bounded Turing Machine with In-Out, on account of the fact that they have input and output ports. That makes them substantially more powerful than a finite state machines and context-free grammars.
The entire world is now stupider for having shared a planet with this foolishness.
In a sense, this is a good thing, because it turns more people against the modern bastardization of copyright law. A few more incidents like this and America will be ready for serious reforms to copyright law.
Yeah, and a small amount of it will evaporate, and then be stripped off the planet by radiation. Whatever is left will cool, and precipitate onto the dye, covering it. Billions of dollars will have been spent to place some dye UNDER the Martian ice caps and to increase the amount of carbon dioxide in space.
This is the stupidest thing I've heard. And from a NASA scientist no less.
Where the hell are we supposed to get that much of ANY gas?
How are we supposed to get it to stay there on Mars? If Mars could successfully hold an atmosphere, wouldn't it still have one? I was under the impression that Mars' low gravity and weak magnetic field allowed radiation to strip away any gases on Mars' surface.
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It just goes to show, all these people who advocate complete capitalism or complete socialism don't know what they're talking about. A great society uses a balance of public services, publically funded research, and so on, while exploiting capitalist industry for the "heavy lifting", so to speak. Not unlike what you are doing -- the public funds research on the smallpox vaccine, and then big pharmaceutical companies handle the business of trying to produce the stuff cost-effectively.
Incidentally, he says it's just about the most interesting job in the world, and he's just a lab tech! It's good to be doing what you love.
C'mon, it's not like advertisers are human. :P
Plus of course, all the normal evolutionary stuff, like new versions of Gnome and KDE, more internationalization, more graphical utilities.
Most importantly, many major applications like Xine and Quake2 were ported to AALib, allowing them to enjoyed on God's chosen peripheral, the ASCII terminal.
Hmmm. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm going to start a project to convert Dali's "The Persistence of Memory" into a television series.
Well, I'm using the word hicks in the general sense. North America was founded by hicks, be it greasy-fur-trapper hicks in Canada or religious-schizo hicks in the US. We's all hicks in this great land. I say embrace it, crack a beer, and stroke your shotgun lovingly.
Where've you been? Around that time, most distros were having some growing pains. There have been some major architectural changes in how a Gnu/Linux desktop box works. Mandrake and Fedora, being among the most progressive distros, went through a lot of difficult changes.
Yeah, because a bunch of hicks with hunting rifles are a real threat to the government. The right to bear arms is meaningless in this age of tanks, attack helipcopters, and night-vision-equipped infantry wearing body armour. If the second amendment granted any genuine power, it would have been scrapped decades ago.
Campaign contributions mean that political representation goes to those with the most money to donate. Democracy died long ago.
Still, the more people are donating their spare cycles to worthy concepts, the better. If this draws more attention to the whole @home concept, and lets some physicists do their research on the cheap, so much the better.
It's bad enough that the movie industry waters everything down into mindless pap without the video store trying to decide what I should and shouldn't view.
When working on my Mom's computer, I forgot that she doesn't have a hardware firewall like I do; so in the time between booting up Windows for the first time and downloading Zonealarm, the system had already been wormed.
It's not a coincidence that every other computer I administrate runs GNU/Linux.
I hope this court decision doesn't have a dampening effect on automobile-accident-simulation research. It would be a shame to lose such a potentially useful tool. Too many times we've seen technology fail just because people tried to roll it out too soon, before it was truly ready.
Fair enough. There's no denying that you get bogged down in a quagmire of semantics when you try to compare a theoretical construct to a real-world thingy.
You're missing the point here -- a modern computer is not a closed device. Its ability to interact with the outside world via I/O of various kinds gives it the full range of a TM's power. A computer is not just its RAM and CPU and hard drive.
2.) An individual particle may be able to store arbitrarily complex information, by encoding that information as a real number equal to its position in space (which can be determined with arbitrary precision if you accept that its intertia becomes undetermined). I'm not aware of any scientific result saying that the number of possible particle positions is finite. If a particle's position in space is allowed to assume any value in the continuum, then even a single particle can encode a Turing Machine's tape. We don't even need to be able to determine the particle's position exactly; we just need the ability to determine its position to any arbitrary precision.
So there's more than enough infinity in the universe to permit unbounded automata.
The classic problem not solvable by a DFA is recognizing {0^n 1^n : n in N}. A PC can solve this by writing its output to tertiary storage via an output port, and as soon as it reads the first 1, it begins reading back what it wrote to the output port, comparing that to its input. Tertiary storage isn't bounded in size, because it can be freely modified during execution. An example would be a ticker-tape writer that has additional tape added by a person whenever the roll runs out.
Linear-bounded automata are not as powerful as Turing Machines, but are still quite powerful.
Incorrect. Most computers can function as a linear-bounded Turing Machine with In-Out, on account of the fact that they have input and output ports. That makes them substantially more powerful than a finite state machines and context-free grammars.
I know -- let's start encoding numbers in unary! Unary is highly tolerant to bit errors! Hurray!
In a sense, this is a good thing, because it turns more people against the modern bastardization of copyright law. A few more incidents like this and America will be ready for serious reforms to copyright law.
Good plan.
"Where will we get oil?" "Well, all the elements in oil can be found in grass and other weeds!"
As I said, stupid.
Where the hell are we supposed to get that much of ANY gas?
How are we supposed to get it to stay there on Mars? If Mars could successfully hold an atmosphere, wouldn't it still have one? I was under the impression that Mars' low gravity and weak magnetic field allowed radiation to strip away any gases on Mars' surface.
Saudi Arabia is already a puppet, Nepal is too inconsequential to merit American's attention, and NKorea and China are too strong.