You're wrong on that. The Great Wall was designed for two purposes: 1. Keep HORSES out of China. China had a capable military but also a vast border. The more nomadic horse riding people up north were able to make raids into China and be gone before the Chinese army could respond. The Europeans had the same issue with the Vikings. While people can scale walls, horses can't. Cavalry without horses is useless. The point of the Great Wall is to make such raids very difficult. 2. Signal the Chinese army when there is an invasion. There was a system of smoke signals used by the Chinese army (a lot like the signal of fires used by Gondor to signal Rohan in LoTR) that was much, much faster than any means of communication at the time. That way the Chinese army can respond in time to prevent raids into China.
China had very little need to keep its people in when its country was so much more prosperous than its northern neighbors. It's much easier going into Mexico than returning to the US for the exact same reason.
Sanctity of technology? I'm a software engineer. I help created technology but I don't worship it. I love when my code is nice and elegant but I also make trade-offs when needed because what I make has to work in the real world. Sanctity? What is this guy trying to sell? Only fanboys and snake oil salesman talk about technology as some Platonic ideal or traded as an object of worship.
Where has this guy been? Did he JUST now noticed the RIAA, MPAA, and corrupt lawmakers trying to subvert the spirit of intellectual rights and freedom? This didn't just happen over night. The DMCA was passed when Clinton was president.
Lastly, at the end of the rant, he has a call to action. What does he want us to do? Give us a plan. A rant without a plan is just a rant. Unite and rise up? Seriously man. We're not some Bolsheviks trying to overthrow the tzar. Get a sense of reality. The entire "article" is a bunch of hyperbole, obvious statements, and a total lack of any actionable items.
Give me a break. It's an insult to our intelligence.
And his sidekick is WikiMan, disseminating forbidden knowledge everywhere for... free! Everyone knows that knowledge is power and by giving knowledge to everyone WikiMan is giving everyone power, thus destroying the foundation of capitalistic society and opening the doors to... Communism! Oh no, the Cold War is back!
How is this different from the "protection money" Big Fat Paulie wants me to pay in return for not lighting my shop on fire? I get free music in return? Well Paulie said that I'm protected from the other criminals in return.
When I stupidly signed up with Sprint again after a few years of using Cingular, I had trouble activating my phone. I call customer service and the lady asked me for my password. I was initially very hesitant about it. I couldn't believe that she had my password in plaintext in front of her. She couldn't reset the password or anything like that, instead she just have it in front of her screen. After going through a few non-financially related password (weaker passwords), I decided to give up and told her I couldn't think of it. At that point, she tried to verify me through my mailing address. I tried it a few but that didn't work until I tried my parent's address. It turns out that when I gave her my social security number initially (stupid me, I know), she pulled up my old account from 8 years ago before I switched to Cingular. Since both the new and old accounts were keyed by my SSN, she got my old account, along with my parent's address, and my old password. How insane is that? Sprint kept all my information for 8 years along with the password in plaintext.
I'm not saying that the guy is biased but let's just think about this for a second. Anyone who've agreed to be bought by Microsoft has already found Microsoft to be a good match. In other words, if Microsoft wasn't a good match, the deal would have never gone through and we wouldn't have this article. It's kind of like asking a bunch of BMW owners what they think of BMWs. Most of them would have positive things to say, especially the new owners (which is similar in this case). To get an accurate picture we need to ask those who turned down Microsoft why did they turn them down as well as those who accepted the offer.
To be fair, many of my coworkers are former Microsoft employees and most of them did have positive things to say about the work environment. Obviously, it wasn't the end all and be all of places since they did leave after all.
Curiously, the bots pretend to read the help information while breaking the CAPTCHA, probably to prevent Google from giving them a timeout message."
That's why you tell the bots not to lie. As we all know from Star Trek, any logical being, which includes computers and Vulcans, is incapable of lying.
She said the concept of evolution is essential to understanding 21st century biology and that, in her opinion, "people who have never been taught evolution in the first place don't understand that it doesn't really undermine religion."
"I'm a lifelong Methodist and I find no conflict between my spiritual life and my rational, scientific self," she said.
Walker isn't alone.
The Clergy Letter Project, a Butler University initiative that works to dispel the notion that religion and science are at odds, has garnered 11,183 signatures from clergy members who say teaching evolution does not undermine religion.
"Aaronson contends that any method for solving NP-complete problems in polynomial time may violate the laws of physics and that this may be a fundamental limitation on technology no different than the second law of thermodynamics or the impossibility of faster-than-light communication."
I don't know much about Quantum Computing and it's been a while since I've studied algorithms and computability. However, NP-complete is an algorithm and complexity question, not necessarily one of speed and computation time. Even if your hardware is different, it doesn't mean you can solve the problem the polynomial time, unless your hardware can scale the same way as the problem itself. Can quantum computers just scale like that? Just because a problem is NP-complete doesn't mean it's unsolvable or can't be solved in a reasonable amount of time. If the dataset is small enough, they can be solved quite quickly. The problem is one of scaling and unless a quantum computer can scale the same way a NP-complete problem can scale in complexity, it won't solve them in polynomial time.
Take this as a question, not as a statement. Maybe someone can enlighten me on on this.
Re:Copyright or corruption as his platform?
on
Lessig For Congress?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Unreasonable copyright and denial of intellectual freedom for the sake of corporate profit is a form of corruption in my book.
Good luck using the Internet and its vast store of information without Google or Yahoo! or any decent search engine. What are we going to do instead? Use Gopher? Google is what makes the Internet accessible to people. There's a TON of value in that alone. I realized the other day that instead of buying a book, doing traditional research, etc. I usually just Google for an answer when I have a technical problem. Do you realize the immense value in that? If Google suddenly started charging for search, I would pay for it. The search engine is a vital part of the Internet or any vast collection of information.
Any tech company can be called a "house of cards". After all, what real assets do they own other than some buildings and equipment? The value of a tech company isn't measure that way. The foundation is the people they have and the talent pool they can draw from. Google has an immense talent pool that has shown itself being capable of solving many, many problems that bring value to people's lives. Advertising is just one avenue they use to monetize that value.
Fully agreed. People don't understand that one thing doesn't exclude the other. Just because they're given technology it doesn't mean that they won't have food. Believe it or not, people in other parts of the world also want things other than food. Everyone outside of the G8 aren't starving either.
Furthermore, the role of technology is misunderstood by people who say these things. Technology might not directly feed your family but it is a force multiplier and a time saver. There is a reason why most of the people in the country or any industrialized country aren't farmers. There's no need for that because one farmer can do the job of many before him/her. I don't know how better communications will help in this specific case but that's just the way it is with technology. Few people can accurately foresee the use of technology but ultimately the users will find a way when they have a need and how they use it will not be close to what any of the inventors have imagined. This is a reason why I'm excited about the OLPC. We'll see in the years to come what those laptops will do for the countries getting them and it will surprise most of us.
It's simple: We feel what we don't understand or know. Slashdot is a tech nerd crowd. We don't feel technology but there're few doctors or medical researchers among us so hence the fear. Not saying it's justified but simply that we're all human after all. We're only smarter than the masses in one area, not all areas as we like to think.
I know but we shouldn't use one bad example to justify another. Interestingly enough, the airlines industry is also one of the least liked industries. We also subsidized AT&T and the telecoms by giving them free access to public land to laid their lines. Noticing a pattern here? Companies that need help from the government don't seem to do well with their customers.
You really lost me there. I don't even see how our two posts are connected. I'm arguing against the use of the Federal government and funding for higher education to deal with a problem that really impacts one group of companies. I'm neither arguing for the elimination of copyrights nor supporting piracy. If the **AAs have a problem with piracy, then they should go and sue the pirate. We have courts for that reason and copyright infringement is something that is commonly dealt with in the courts. I don't see a reason for the **AAs to get special aid from our Federal government. More importantly, I don't see the need to sacrifice our collective good for their sake.
Using the Federal government's power to force universities into compliance with **AA demands is the equivalent of using our collective resources to help/save a company/industry's problems. If we extend the **AA's analogy and reasoning, we might as well go around the world attacking countries that compete with us commercially. GM losing market shares to Toyota? Bomb Japan! Oracle losing to SAP? Bomb Germany! Windows losing to Linux and OSS? Assassinate Linus and arrest Stallman!
Copyright violations is a problem that affects a group of companies and an industry. Why should we be forced to collectively pay for their outdated business model/practices? How does this benefit the rest of us? If you don't think we'll end up paying for this, imagine what happens when universities don't get their Federal funding and our students don't get their education. Higher education is an absolute necessity for a productive country.
IANAL but trying to weasel your way out of a law usually doesn't work in the court system. American laws follow the tradition of "spirit of the law" rather than "letter of the law". This is why we have judges and why jurists argue over the intent and motivation behind a law. For example, the first amendment's guarantee on freedom of speech and press would not extend to digital formats if not for this tradition since digital formats can include neither speech nor printing presses.
Slashdot Mirror
You're wrong on that. The Great Wall was designed for two purposes:
1. Keep HORSES out of China. China had a capable military but also a vast border. The more nomadic horse riding people up north were able to make raids into China and be gone before the Chinese army could respond. The Europeans had the same issue with the Vikings. While people can scale walls, horses can't. Cavalry without horses is useless. The point of the Great Wall is to make such raids very difficult.
2. Signal the Chinese army when there is an invasion. There was a system of smoke signals used by the Chinese army (a lot like the signal of fires used by Gondor to signal Rohan in LoTR) that was much, much faster than any means of communication at the time. That way the Chinese army can respond in time to prevent raids into China.
China had very little need to keep its people in when its country was so much more prosperous than its northern neighbors. It's much easier going into Mexico than returning to the US for the exact same reason.
Seriously man.
Sanctity of technology? I'm a software engineer. I help created technology but I don't worship it. I love when my code is nice and elegant but I also make trade-offs when needed because what I make has to work in the real world. Sanctity? What is this guy trying to sell? Only fanboys and snake oil salesman talk about technology as some Platonic ideal or traded as an object of worship.
Where has this guy been? Did he JUST now noticed the RIAA, MPAA, and corrupt lawmakers trying to subvert the spirit of intellectual rights and freedom? This didn't just happen over night. The DMCA was passed when Clinton was president.
Lastly, at the end of the rant, he has a call to action. What does he want us to do? Give us a plan. A rant without a plan is just a rant. Unite and rise up? Seriously man. We're not some Bolsheviks trying to overthrow the tzar. Get a sense of reality. The entire "article" is a bunch of hyperbole, obvious statements, and a total lack of any actionable items.
Give me a break. It's an insult to our intelligence.
And his sidekick is WikiMan, disseminating forbidden knowledge everywhere for... free! Everyone knows that knowledge is power and by giving knowledge to everyone WikiMan is giving everyone power, thus destroying the foundation of capitalistic society and opening the doors to... Communism! Oh no, the Cold War is back!
Im in ur driveway taking ur pictures.
1. Part of the year in nearly total darkness. Nerds and the daystar don't mix well.
2. Real reason anyone goes to Iceland: Icelandic girls (fast forward to the third minute)
How is this different from the "protection money" Big Fat Paulie wants me to pay in return for not lighting my shop on fire? I get free music in return? Well Paulie said that I'm protected from the other criminals in return.
When I stupidly signed up with Sprint again after a few years of using Cingular, I had trouble activating my phone. I call customer service and the lady asked me for my password. I was initially very hesitant about it. I couldn't believe that she had my password in plaintext in front of her. She couldn't reset the password or anything like that, instead she just have it in front of her screen. After going through a few non-financially related password (weaker passwords), I decided to give up and told her I couldn't think of it. At that point, she tried to verify me through my mailing address. I tried it a few but that didn't work until I tried my parent's address. It turns out that when I gave her my social security number initially (stupid me, I know), she pulled up my old account from 8 years ago before I switched to Cingular. Since both the new and old accounts were keyed by my SSN, she got my old account, along with my parent's address, and my old password. How insane is that? Sprint kept all my information for 8 years along with the password in plaintext.
I'm not saying that the guy is biased but let's just think about this for a second. Anyone who've agreed to be bought by Microsoft has already found Microsoft to be a good match. In other words, if Microsoft wasn't a good match, the deal would have never gone through and we wouldn't have this article. It's kind of like asking a bunch of BMW owners what they think of BMWs. Most of them would have positive things to say, especially the new owners (which is similar in this case). To get an accurate picture we need to ask those who turned down Microsoft why did they turn them down as well as those who accepted the offer.
To be fair, many of my coworkers are former Microsoft employees and most of them did have positive things to say about the work environment. Obviously, it wasn't the end all and be all of places since they did leave after all.
That's why you tell the bots not to lie. As we all know from Star Trek, any logical being, which includes computers and Vulcans, is incapable of lying.
From the article itself:
She said the concept of evolution is essential to understanding 21st century biology and that, in her opinion, "people who have never been taught evolution in the first place don't understand that it doesn't really undermine religion." "I'm a lifelong Methodist and I find no conflict between my spiritual life and my rational, scientific self," she said. Walker isn't alone. The Clergy Letter Project, a Butler University initiative that works to dispel the notion that religion and science are at odds, has garnered 11,183 signatures from clergy members who say teaching evolution does not undermine religion.
From the summary:
"Aaronson contends that any method for solving NP-complete problems in polynomial time may violate the laws of physics and that this may be a fundamental limitation on technology no different than the second law of thermodynamics or the impossibility of faster-than-light communication."
I don't know much about Quantum Computing and it's been a while since I've studied algorithms and computability. However, NP-complete is an algorithm and complexity question, not necessarily one of speed and computation time. Even if your hardware is different, it doesn't mean you can solve the problem the polynomial time, unless your hardware can scale the same way as the problem itself. Can quantum computers just scale like that? Just because a problem is NP-complete doesn't mean it's unsolvable or can't be solved in a reasonable amount of time. If the dataset is small enough, they can be solved quite quickly. The problem is one of scaling and unless a quantum computer can scale the same way a NP-complete problem can scale in complexity, it won't solve them in polynomial time.
Take this as a question, not as a statement. Maybe someone can enlighten me on on this.
Unreasonable copyright and denial of intellectual freedom for the sake of corporate profit is a form of corruption in my book.
Has RP considered running for the Senate? Individual Senators are more powerful than Representatives.
Good luck using the Internet and its vast store of information without Google or Yahoo! or any decent search engine. What are we going to do instead? Use Gopher? Google is what makes the Internet accessible to people. There's a TON of value in that alone. I realized the other day that instead of buying a book, doing traditional research, etc. I usually just Google for an answer when I have a technical problem. Do you realize the immense value in that? If Google suddenly started charging for search, I would pay for it. The search engine is a vital part of the Internet or any vast collection of information.
Any tech company can be called a "house of cards". After all, what real assets do they own other than some buildings and equipment? The value of a tech company isn't measure that way. The foundation is the people they have and the talent pool they can draw from. Google has an immense talent pool that has shown itself being capable of solving many, many problems that bring value to people's lives. Advertising is just one avenue they use to monetize that value.
"This is the culmination of long-term planning on both sides of the Atlantic"
Uh... I'm fairly sure that India doesn't border the Atlantic. Rather, I'm fairly sure they border another ocean, the Indian ocean perhaps.
Fully agreed. People don't understand that one thing doesn't exclude the other. Just because they're given technology it doesn't mean that they won't have food. Believe it or not, people in other parts of the world also want things other than food. Everyone outside of the G8 aren't starving either.
Furthermore, the role of technology is misunderstood by people who say these things. Technology might not directly feed your family but it is a force multiplier and a time saver. There is a reason why most of the people in the country or any industrialized country aren't farmers. There's no need for that because one farmer can do the job of many before him/her. I don't know how better communications will help in this specific case but that's just the way it is with technology. Few people can accurately foresee the use of technology but ultimately the users will find a way when they have a need and how they use it will not be close to what any of the inventors have imagined. This is a reason why I'm excited about the OLPC. We'll see in the years to come what those laptops will do for the countries getting them and it will surprise most of us.
3. It "upgraded" to Vista.
Wow, talk about bad typos. Feel = fear in the above post. Need more coffee.
It's simple: We feel what we don't understand or know. Slashdot is a tech nerd crowd. We don't feel technology but there're few doctors or medical researchers among us so hence the fear. Not saying it's justified but simply that we're all human after all. We're only smarter than the masses in one area, not all areas as we like to think.
I know but we shouldn't use one bad example to justify another. Interestingly enough, the airlines industry is also one of the least liked industries. We also subsidized AT&T and the telecoms by giving them free access to public land to laid their lines. Noticing a pattern here? Companies that need help from the government don't seem to do well with their customers.
Huh???
You really lost me there. I don't even see how our two posts are connected. I'm arguing against the use of the Federal government and funding for higher education to deal with a problem that really impacts one group of companies. I'm neither arguing for the elimination of copyrights nor supporting piracy. If the **AAs have a problem with piracy, then they should go and sue the pirate. We have courts for that reason and copyright infringement is something that is commonly dealt with in the courts. I don't see a reason for the **AAs to get special aid from our Federal government. More importantly, I don't see the need to sacrifice our collective good for their sake.
Using the Federal government's power to force universities into compliance with **AA demands is the equivalent of using our collective resources to help/save a company/industry's problems. If we extend the **AA's analogy and reasoning, we might as well go around the world attacking countries that compete with us commercially. GM losing market shares to Toyota? Bomb Japan! Oracle losing to SAP? Bomb Germany! Windows losing to Linux and OSS? Assassinate Linus and arrest Stallman!
Copyright violations is a problem that affects a group of companies and an industry. Why should we be forced to collectively pay for their outdated business model/practices? How does this benefit the rest of us? If you don't think we'll end up paying for this, imagine what happens when universities don't get their Federal funding and our students don't get their education. Higher education is an absolute necessity for a productive country.
IANAL but trying to weasel your way out of a law usually doesn't work in the court system. American laws follow the tradition of "spirit of the law" rather than "letter of the law". This is why we have judges and why jurists argue over the intent and motivation behind a law. For example, the first amendment's guarantee on freedom of speech and press would not extend to digital formats if not for this tradition since digital formats can include neither speech nor printing presses.
I even went and implemented it in PHP for Wordpress.
Well that's one advantage printed comics have over online ones: immune to Slashdotting.