If only we could harness the power of these cool (and working!) distributed systems to provide efficient peer to peer content distribution or an actual legitimate email system of some sort...
Yeah, we do use it for an "efficient" peer to peer network. Try Kazaa who, in addition to the banner ads and countless pop-ups you see, reserves the right to use your extra cycles and bandwidth for its own devices in exchange for the content you are downloading (and the service it provides). One guess what the extra CPU/bandwidth is being used for.
Yes, I live in San Francisco, in a relatively busy area, but just off the main road so my street can be pretty quiet (think residential streets in NYC).
It seems that some of the noisiest drivers, the motorcyclists, choose to take my street, even though it likely isn't altogether necessary or even really easy (since I live on a pretty steep hill. You'd think that a big hill would deter motorcyclists, but they seem to enjoy taking that hill and gunning the engine like nothing else right outside my apartment.
Other than that, most of my traffic is emergency vehicles likely trying to avoid traffic, or taxi drivers (who take my street for some reason or another).
It seems like any efforts to divert traffic mightn't work because those that want a sensible route likely already take such routes. Those that want to drive through neighborhoods... well, nothing's stopping them, especially since they'd likely kick a fuss over not being able to use public roads.
The solution isn't trying to change behavior (a hard thing to do, especially since people are accustomed to, and like, their routes), it's employing methods that reduce noise no matter what the behavior (better roads, engines, stricter laws, etc.). At least San Francisco has electric buses, which run very quietly, otherwise, I'd have gone made long ago.
And AudioGalaxy would be the sultry love interest that you were just getting to love before the British Captain kills her (think: Wallace's honey in Braveheart). She was sort of crude and a pirate (and hence technically bad), but lovable despite her bouts of bitchiness.
Her death is what really incites the viciousness and malice of Sharman.
Hey, I thought that's what primaries. Okay, while the primaries don't quite fix the whole two-party thing (really on the two parties have primaries), but had Nader had the cojones to enter as a Dem and see how well he could carry the party (and what sort of support he really had) he could have ran, perhaps beat out Gore and won (perhaps, mind you) without competing with Gore (taking many of Gore's votes in the process). But instead he missed his "two-stage" chance stole crucial votes (those in Florida, at least) and now Iraq is a Halliburton-project, and Alaska is a Halliburton project, and...
Perhaps you fail to realize that brute-force and enumerating every possible circumstance is a proof. I think that whatever he did sufficiently proved whatever it is that he was trying to prove (from the website, they can't even seem to agree on what a "magic tour" is). However, you are correct that it wasn't particularly graceful or impressive.
Don't worry, though, he'll probably reverse-engineer a tidy proof within two months or so. Sometimes it only requires the answer to figure out the solution.
So the grammar problems are not restriced exclusively to slashdot.
"It's not suddenly going to get very dark, but it's been getting dimmer over the last few thousand million years and that will continue."
Yeah, I've noticed this.
Really, the guy's name is Alan Heavens? Is this for real? Seriously, I hate to get religous and epistemological but it does kind of make me wonder about how everything got started (I am not a creationist). We figure the universe is 14 billion years old, but that's only what we can measure, right? Isn't it entirely possible that when everything becomes completely entropic and the universe is simply a void of equally distributed matter the same circumstances that initially created our universe would act again?
I think that when they predict "dead stars and black holes" it's neglecting the (admittedly special) circumstances that created everything. We may not be the first universe, and we may not be the last.
As for me, I think I need to drop some acid right now.
OpenSource OS kernel: $0
IBM developed (jointly?) processor: $800
Stylish 1-button mouse (no mouse wheel): $1199
Knowing you can run benchmarks under special conditions and configurations faster than Dell customers: priceless
Actually, my roommate last year got a G4 and I must admit that it was a beautiful machine. I was impressed, and I'm sure that the G5 is even better.
However, the manner in which his buying an Apple (he previously used PCs) turned him into a self-righteous dickhead was not at all impressive. Yet another Apple zealot to deal with.
And anyway, I'm a little suspicious of anything that Steve Jobs tells me to lick.
_________________________________________________
I'm thinking of starting a video arcade called "My Girlfriend's Place" so when I say I'm at My Girlfriend's Place I won't by lying anymore.
Stojanovic has lost to MAYA more than a 100 times.
Yes, I suspect that Stojanovic might be throwing games to make the computer seem "smarter" than it may actually be. Manipulating results, I understand, is something that many scientists have become guilty of.
"We could have programmed it to lose sometimes, to make humans happy,"
And this seems like it might be their rationalizing the deficiencies of their technology. Sort of like when I tell my girlfriend, "I could have gotten the Porsche, but I thought it'd be more practical to get the Escort." Right. If these guys really cared about the discovery and te impressiveness of the accomplishment, I'd think they'd make it as damn good as possible, not program it to lose occasionally. For all I know, it could be operating randomly, or they might not even have control over its operation.
While I don't doubt that DNA and biological computers are going to be phenomenal and essential in the future, I suspect that this computer may not actually be all it seems to be at this point. There is a certain amount of ambiguity in the article.
A movie like the one posted in the micro-tetris article would have done a lot, obviously, to illustrate how impressive (or not) this computer may be.
_______________________________________________
I crochet because I'm lonely; I'm lonely because I crochet.
My company used all MicroCrash Windows machines and servers and everything. Then I sent out a memo recommending Linux for our workplace and, barring that, perhaps G4s with OSX (though I am not necessarily an Apple fan).
I promptly lost got a memo saying that I was fired. It was from some guy named Ballmer.
Yeah, it's a bargain until the hostiles discover this device and then use it on us. Wait, maybe the DoD's secret is that it requires a particular sort of battery. Or maybe these countries presumably wouldn't have the technology to missile it into our territory.
Or maybe, as a previous post said, there must be some manner in which the DoD can combat this, as they have released the specs for it.
Could it be that the DoD has an entirely new form of communication that is (presently) immune to the jamming techniques that this thing uses? Is the DoD going back to using smoke signals?
Along these lines, I'm also not entirely sure that this is what people want. Just as people get frustrated and upset with these heuristics that are supposed to "help" people (the text selection pisses me off also, as well as auto-correcting some words), people would feel similarly with a system such as this.
There's a reason why many many programmers like to use development environments that aren't especially overbearing, but rather customizable, such as emacs or vi.
The key isn't developing a massively scaled Clippy, but I think it is rather developing more sophisticated and simply executed customizations. So the software should say, "You seem to like selecting single characters rather than entire words, I will disable the auto-text-select" rather than merely assuming that this text selection "feature" is an across the board benefit.
People want to do things how they want to do them, don't force them into any particular framework.
Of course it isn't a good idea. Inventing new ways to kill others (and therefore to be killed, yourself) has always been a human fallacy. Scientists always do such research and make such discoveries strictly in the name of science. Those guys in Texas (who observed this effect) were likely not trying to pioneer new warfare (they were working towards super-batteries), but the militant and the paranoid ones immediately took over.
The thing that needs to happen (in order for the human race to become truly enlightened) is for science to exist apart from military and warfare. If we can use science to better our lives, and solve our disputes like the animals do (butting heads, or with tooth and nail) then I think we'd get along better. Oh, and get rid of all the lawyers, too. But that's obviously an over-idealized world.
It is true, and frightening, that such a discovery (and the very limited distribution of the technology) could put pressure on less-developed countries to get nuclear weapons (and other lethal alternatives) as a threat against our Gamma weapons. We wouldn't want every country without Gamma weapons to turn into an Iraq, now would we?
1) Claim you own copyrights to undeclared code 2) Note that somebody else owns copyrights to all the supplemental code that you use and sell, thus violating the copyright law you are attempting to enforce 3) Get sued, while you get laughed at when trying to sue 4) ??? 5) And, of course, PROFIT!!! (Their stock went UP after this?)
Like the article states, this just illustrates the flimsiness of SCO's position (and how they know it!). SCO is abandoning the defense of their own rights to this illusory "Intellectual Property" and attacking the rights that were entailed in the GPL.
So it's not any more "this code really belongs to us" it's become "this code is theirs, but they're allowing us all to have it."
So what if the GPL is invalid? That doesn't mean at all that SCO has any rights to any of the code that was covered by the GPL. All it indicates is that those who wrote the code simply haven't been enforcing the copyrights on their IP. A forgivable offense.
This is only a silly tactic in which SCO is trying to divert the attention from their own mishandling of their own "copyrights" by pointing out how those who created the GPL mishandled their own "copyrights". The point of the whole case is not whether the GPL is valid or not (and whether Linus is entitled to huge settlements), it's whether SCO's licenses are valid. SCO is just blowing smoke by even *mentioning* the GPL.
Okay, so those who wrote the code and penned the GPL should get right on it and sue SCO (and the rest of the damn software industry) for violating this copyright that was forced on them. Is SCO *trying* to get themselves even deeper in the hole?
BREAKING NEWS for August 23, 2003: SCO bankrupt after federal judge dismiss SCO lawsuits as frivolous.
Or, they could require that the user input a valid SSN and birth date, which Friendster would cross-reference with a government database to verify identities. Any identity that doesn't match with the SSN's identity could be automatically deleted.
And then we would have a way to ensure that we are meeting real people over the Internet. And, on top of that, corporations and businesses could have a convenient way to access the information of thousands of people accurately!!
It's true that humans are doing a lot to screw our own cities and societies and well being, while the planet will certainly persist (though in a different form).
But the thing that surprises me is how paranoid and fatalistic people can be in the face of their own resilience. Certain disasters have faced humans before, but obviously, as a species, we have survived. Primarily these have been diseases and the like. Granted, global warming is on a much larger scale, and will affect many more people directly (while diseases are more localized), but given the amount of time we have, I feel that the species will persist. Will people get fucked in the process? Yeah, probably so, and that's tragic, but I think humans will survive.
M$ or any corporation complaining about SPAM is like the President or Vice President vowing to respect the environment and avoid unreasonable conflict when they've got huge oil holdings and defense interests. And, oh yes, they use their positions to purely enforce their agendas. It's like a Wall Street analyst to recommend uncertain stocks while he's on the other line dumping the same stocks.
These companies love Spam and the advertising and referrals that they get. Plus, they additionally love the anonymity that these outsourced companies give them. I'd be pissed off if I got spam from Dell.com, but spam from myhotdeals.com selling Dell computers is just spam to me. Of course these major corporations are buying all of this information from everybody and then turning around and telling consumers that there is nothing to worry about and that these business deals have been terminated.
It's what google's been doing. The PR spin tactics and double-standards that politicians and businesspeople use are the same ones that all these corporations are using to please consumers while buying information and referrals from spammers.
Slashdot Mirror
Romeo and Juliet die? Thanks a lot, man.
And also don't be fooled, she's a man.
What won't be a surprise: It will suck. (Is Jar Jar coming back?)
So the computers are patching themselves now, are they?
... where computers patch YOU!
If only we could harness the power of these cool (and working!) distributed systems to provide efficient peer to peer content distribution or an actual legitimate email system of some sort...
Yeah, we do use it for an "efficient" peer to peer network. Try Kazaa who, in addition to the banner ads and countless pop-ups you see, reserves the right to use your extra cycles and bandwidth for its own devices in exchange for the content you are downloading (and the service it provides). One guess what the extra CPU/bandwidth is being used for.
Yes, I live in San Francisco, in a relatively busy area, but just off the main road so my street can be pretty quiet (think residential streets in NYC).
... well, nothing's stopping them, especially since they'd likely kick a fuss over not being able to use public roads.
It seems that some of the noisiest drivers, the motorcyclists, choose to take my street, even though it likely isn't altogether necessary or even really easy (since I live on a pretty steep hill. You'd think that a big hill would deter motorcyclists, but they seem to enjoy taking that hill and gunning the engine like nothing else right outside my apartment.
Other than that, most of my traffic is emergency vehicles likely trying to avoid traffic, or taxi drivers (who take my street for some reason or another).
It seems like any efforts to divert traffic mightn't work because those that want a sensible route likely already take such routes. Those that want to drive through neighborhoods
The solution isn't trying to change behavior (a hard thing to do, especially since people are accustomed to, and like, their routes), it's employing methods that reduce noise no matter what the behavior (better roads, engines, stricter laws, etc.). At least San Francisco has electric buses, which run very quietly, otherwise, I'd have gone made long ago.
And AudioGalaxy would be the sultry love interest that you were just getting to love before the British Captain kills her (think: Wallace's honey in Braveheart). She was sort of crude and a pirate (and hence technically bad), but lovable despite her bouts of bitchiness.
Her death is what really incites the viciousness and malice of Sharman.
Man, I loved AudioGalaxy back in the day.
Not just the porn marathon, but some of the lectures, too:
Beautifully (HU) of balls and impulses
Sounds nasty to me!
Hey, I thought that's what primaries. Okay, while the primaries don't quite fix the whole two-party thing (really on the two parties have primaries), but had Nader had the cojones to enter as a Dem and see how well he could carry the party (and what sort of support he really had) he could have ran, perhaps beat out Gore and won (perhaps, mind you) without competing with Gore (taking many of Gore's votes in the process). But instead he missed his "two-stage" chance stole crucial votes (those in Florida, at least) and now Iraq is a Halliburton-project, and Alaska is a Halliburton project, and ...
Well, you get the point.
All right, Barlo, be our guest.
...cancer remains uncured.
Perhaps you fail to realize that brute-force and enumerating every possible circumstance is a proof. I think that whatever he did sufficiently proved whatever it is that he was trying to prove (from the website, they can't even seem to agree on what a "magic tour" is). However, you are correct that it wasn't particularly graceful or impressive.
Don't worry, though, he'll probably reverse-engineer a tidy proof within two months or so. Sometimes it only requires the answer to figure out the solution.
the cosmos is simply fading away
So the grammar problems are not restriced exclusively to slashdot.
"It's not suddenly going to get very dark, but it's been getting dimmer over the last few thousand million years and that will continue."
Yeah, I've noticed this.
Really, the guy's name is Alan Heavens? Is this for real? Seriously, I hate to get religous and epistemological but it does kind of make me wonder about how everything got started (I am not a creationist). We figure the universe is 14 billion years old, but that's only what we can measure, right? Isn't it entirely possible that when everything becomes completely entropic and the universe is simply a void of equally distributed matter the same circumstances that initially created our universe would act again?
I think that when they predict "dead stars and black holes" it's neglecting the (admittedly special) circumstances that created everything. We may not be the first universe, and we may not be the last.
As for me, I think I need to drop some acid right now.
OpenSource OS kernel: $0
IBM developed (jointly?) processor: $800
Stylish 1-button mouse (no mouse wheel): $1199
Knowing you can run benchmarks under special conditions and configurations faster than Dell customers: priceless
An apple that can run at the speed of a P4!
Actually, my roommate last year got a G4 and I must admit that it was a beautiful machine. I was impressed, and I'm sure that the G5 is even better.
However, the manner in which his buying an Apple (he previously used PCs) turned him into a self-righteous dickhead was not at all impressive. Yet another Apple zealot to deal with.
And anyway, I'm a little suspicious of anything that Steve Jobs tells me to lick.
_________________________________________________
I'm thinking of starting a video arcade called "My Girlfriend's Place" so when I say I'm at My Girlfriend's Place I won't by lying anymore.
Stojanovic has lost to MAYA more than a 100 times.
Yes, I suspect that Stojanovic might be throwing games to make the computer seem "smarter" than it may actually be. Manipulating results, I understand, is something that many scientists have become guilty of.
"We could have programmed it to lose sometimes, to make humans happy,"
And this seems like it might be their rationalizing the deficiencies of their technology. Sort of like when I tell my girlfriend, "I could have gotten the Porsche, but I thought it'd be more practical to get the Escort." Right. If these guys really cared about the discovery and te impressiveness of the accomplishment, I'd think they'd make it as damn good as possible, not program it to lose occasionally. For all I know, it could be operating randomly, or they might not even have control over its operation.
While I don't doubt that DNA and biological computers are going to be phenomenal and essential in the future, I suspect that this computer may not actually be all it seems to be at this point. There is a certain amount of ambiguity in the article.
A movie like the one posted in the micro-tetris article would have done a lot, obviously, to illustrate how impressive (or not) this computer may be.
_______________________________________________
I crochet because I'm lonely; I'm lonely because I crochet.
My company used all MicroCrash Windows machines and servers and everything. Then I sent out a memo recommending Linux for our workplace and, barring that, perhaps G4s with OSX (though I am not necessarily an Apple fan).
I promptly lost got a memo saying that I was fired. It was from some guy named Ballmer.
Jagoff.
Indeed, tripwire has some posters that reference security holes and what ITs do to protect the network.
Microsoft's strategy, however:
SECURITY EXPLOIT(S): Using a known server name
FIX: Move to different server
Brilliant, Microsoft.
Yeah, it's a bargain until the hostiles discover this device and then use it on us. Wait, maybe the DoD's secret is that it requires a particular sort of battery. Or maybe these countries presumably wouldn't have the technology to missile it into our territory.
Or maybe, as a previous post said, there must be some manner in which the DoD can combat this, as they have released the specs for it.
Could it be that the DoD has an entirely new form of communication that is (presently) immune to the jamming techniques that this thing uses? Is the DoD going back to using smoke signals?
Along these lines, I'm also not entirely sure that this is what people want. Just as people get frustrated and upset with these heuristics that are supposed to "help" people (the text selection pisses me off also, as well as auto-correcting some words), people would feel similarly with a system such as this.
There's a reason why many many programmers like to use development environments that aren't especially overbearing, but rather customizable, such as emacs or vi.
The key isn't developing a massively scaled Clippy, but I think it is rather developing more sophisticated and simply executed customizations. So the software should say, "You seem to like selecting single characters rather than entire words, I will disable the auto-text-select" rather than merely assuming that this text selection "feature" is an across the board benefit.
People want to do things how they want to do them, don't force them into any particular framework.
Of course it isn't a good idea. Inventing new ways to kill others (and therefore to be killed, yourself) has always been a human fallacy. Scientists always do such research and make such discoveries strictly in the name of science. Those guys in Texas (who observed this effect) were likely not trying to pioneer new warfare (they were working towards super-batteries), but the militant and the paranoid ones immediately took over.
The thing that needs to happen (in order for the human race to become truly enlightened) is for science to exist apart from military and warfare. If we can use science to better our lives, and solve our disputes like the animals do (butting heads, or with tooth and nail) then I think we'd get along better. Oh, and get rid of all the lawyers, too. But that's obviously an over-idealized world.
It is true, and frightening, that such a discovery (and the very limited distribution of the technology) could put pressure on less-developed countries to get nuclear weapons (and other lethal alternatives) as a threat against our Gamma weapons. We wouldn't want every country without Gamma weapons to turn into an Iraq, now would we?
Well, at least we've now got the robot Air Force.
1) Claim you own copyrights to undeclared code
2) Note that somebody else owns copyrights to all the supplemental code that you use and sell, thus violating the copyright law you are attempting to enforce
3) Get sued, while you get laughed at when trying to sue
4) ???
5) And, of course, PROFIT!!! (Their stock went UP after this?)
Sorry, but the post had to be made
Like the article states, this just illustrates the flimsiness of SCO's position (and how they know it!). SCO is abandoning the defense of their own rights to this illusory "Intellectual Property" and attacking the rights that were entailed in the GPL.
So it's not any more "this code really belongs to us" it's become "this code is theirs, but they're allowing us all to have it."
So what if the GPL is invalid? That doesn't mean at all that SCO has any rights to any of the code that was covered by the GPL. All it indicates is that those who wrote the code simply haven't been enforcing the copyrights on their IP. A forgivable offense.
This is only a silly tactic in which SCO is trying to divert the attention from their own mishandling of their own "copyrights" by pointing out how those who created the GPL mishandled their own "copyrights". The point of the whole case is not whether the GPL is valid or not (and whether Linus is entitled to huge settlements), it's whether SCO's licenses are valid. SCO is just blowing smoke by even *mentioning* the GPL.
Okay, so those who wrote the code and penned the GPL should get right on it and sue SCO (and the rest of the damn software industry) for violating this copyright that was forced on them. Is SCO *trying* to get themselves even deeper in the hole?
BREAKING NEWS for August 23, 2003: SCO bankrupt after federal judge dismiss SCO lawsuits as frivolous.
Or, they could require that the user input a valid SSN and birth date, which Friendster would cross-reference with a government database to verify identities. Any identity that doesn't match with the SSN's identity could be automatically deleted.
And then we would have a way to ensure that we are meeting real people over the Internet. And, on top of that, corporations and businesses could have a convenient way to access the information of thousands of people accurately!!
Sign me up!
It's true that humans are doing a lot to screw our own cities and societies and well being, while the planet will certainly persist (though in a different form).
But the thing that surprises me is how paranoid and fatalistic people can be in the face of their own resilience. Certain disasters have faced humans before, but obviously, as a species, we have survived. Primarily these have been diseases and the like. Granted, global warming is on a much larger scale, and will affect many more people directly (while diseases are more localized), but given the amount of time we have, I feel that the species will persist. Will people get fucked in the process? Yeah, probably so, and that's tragic, but I think humans will survive.
M$ or any corporation complaining about SPAM is like the President or Vice President vowing to respect the environment and avoid unreasonable conflict when they've got huge oil holdings and defense interests. And, oh yes, they use their positions to purely enforce their agendas. It's like a Wall Street analyst to recommend uncertain stocks while he's on the other line dumping the same stocks.
These companies love Spam and the advertising and referrals that they get. Plus, they additionally love the anonymity that these outsourced companies give them. I'd be pissed off if I got spam from Dell.com, but spam from myhotdeals.com selling Dell computers is just spam to me. Of course these major corporations are buying all of this information from everybody and then turning around and telling consumers that there is nothing to worry about and that these business deals have been terminated.
It's what google's been doing. The PR spin tactics and double-standards that politicians and businesspeople use are the same ones that all these corporations are using to please consumers while buying information and referrals from spammers.