It's their building, but you own the bag, the receipt, and everything you just paid for. They can certainly ask to see your stuff, but you can tell them "no". Their asking places no obligation on you.
If they refuse to let you leave without seeing it they are kidnapping you, or at least committing false imprisonment, and probably opening themselves to some severe civil liability.
As the theory is stated in DaVinci Code, the Magdalene hypothesis requires that Jesus live substantially beyond the resurrection and father a family with Magdalene.
So, then, you obviously haven't read the book, because it "requires" nothing of the sort; the statement in the book is that MM was already pregnant at the time of the crucifixion, and fled the holy land afterward, accompanied by Jesus' uncle. It's heart-warming to see that your academic credentials enable you to critique a book you've never picked up. I hope your history department holds you to a higher standard for your thesis, though.
The sad thing is, it would really easy to get census data into a format where a couple easy rules would create good geographical regions. For instance: 1) all districts must have X (X is state population/#districts) voters, +-5% (or some number, this rule actually already is used). 2) Divide the state into 1 mile by 1 mile squares, each district consists of neighboring squares, and the total boundary between all the districts must be as short as possible while fulfilling 1.
You'd probably end up with a bunch of basically square or circular districts.
Re:If this shipped with Lindows instead...
on
AOL's $299 PC
·
· Score: 1
They've been working on it for years. There was work on a linux client for AOL back when I was at compuserve in, oh, 99-2000. The plan was to sell a computer that was basically a thin-client into AOL for people that don't want to deal with the complexity of a real PC, but just want email, web, chat, IM, that kind of thing.
Hence, they acquired netscape, and set about trying to free themselves from microsoft reliance. Put quite a bit of work into making sure the new netscape worked across many platforms. It was going to be the default browser in AOL clients. Work on the linux client was going, I knew of some people that tested it.
Problem is, they have a huge installed user base that uses Windows, which they still have to support, and then they'd be trying to switch people over to these linux-AOL boxes, which they would have to provide lots of support for. Too much complexity. They apparently realized this, so then a couple years ago they made a deal with MS that they'd keep using IE as their browser, and the linux thing never happened. That was after I left the company, I think, and they may still be sitting on some version of a linux client, but it's not happening soon, I'd wager. They probably cut a good deal with MS for OEM prices on windows anyway, so why not use it and let MS do the OS support instead of AOL?
You know, I hear that if you cross the International Date Line thrice, backwards, at the equator, and then find the proper site in Taiwan, you can get a copy of Episode 3 before Lucas has a chance to mess it up...
A physical business fax-spammed you? That's great! Write them a polite note, explaining that sending bulk faxes is wrong. Attach a copy of their spam to it, with all identifying marks removed of course. Go to their office, tie it to a brick, and toss it through their damn window.
What's a plate glass window run, $100-200 dollars? If you do it in the winter, even better, no heat for the bastards when they come into work the next morning. Too many expensive lessons like that, and they'll quit.
Unfortunately, it's a lot harder to track email spammers. I usually try to have their accounts cancelled, but that's about it. Then a couple of weeks ago, some dumbass sent me one of those chain-letter "Buy Reports on Internet Marketing" pyramid scheme things. The one where you expect people to send you a five dollar bill in the mail. That's right, the moron attached his REAL ADDRESS. It's two hours from where I live, even better. Not worth a trip by itself, but if I ever happen to be in the area, I'll stop by. Saved the address.
As I've often seen proclaimed on the internet, unsolicited faxes are illegal and can earn you some cash. Might be worth looking into.
Re:Slashdot search index - fencepost error
on
Swaying CPU Fans
·
· Score: 2
It's been a while since I pondered the intricacies of slashcode, but they could probably filter it so that it caught TLAs which were uppercased (well, any three-letter word which was uppercased, it wouldn't know it was an acronym). This would catch stuff like IBM and CSS, since those are the kinds of things people would like to be able to search on.
I've read them, and I wasn't making a Chinese room argument. I was pointing out that even though these guys expect it to develop like a child, there's no reason it has to go through the developmental stages of a person at the same rate a person does. Why talk to it about juice at all, it doesn't need nourishment, only reward, punishment, and more syllables coming at it. I think it would be interesting to give someone else, who wasn't fixated on childhood neuro-linguistics, a crack at a raw version, and see what they ended up with.
These researchers are getting back from the program exactly what they put in. At one point in your link, I read:
(person) where is daddy?
(ai) daddy gone
(person) daddy is at work
(ai) daddy gone bye bye ...
(person) wait hal, we need to take something to eat
(ai) banana
(person) ok we can take some bananas
(ai) monkeys eat bananas
(person) you're so smart hal. do you want to take a book?
(ai) juice mommmy
(person) sure we'll take some juice as well
The researcher elsewhere claims that the AI's words "relate to its well-being". This is utter projection- the only reason the AI is stuck on concepts of mommy, daddy, monkey, and juice is because this is the inane crap they insist on talking to it about!
Notice also that they claim the AI is tracking almost exactly with a child its same age. Seem strange? Wouldn't you expect a little deflection over 15 months? Shouldn't the thing be a little smarter or a little dumber than a normal child- just statistically speaking, how likely is it they happened to program one that advances/exactly/ as quickly as a normal human infant?
The paper talks a lot about feedback loops. I've got a huge one for them, but it isn't the AI caught in it, it's the researchers. By expecting the thing to react at a child-level, they're talking to it that way, rewarding it that way, and making it that way. If they started talking to it about quantum mechanics tomorrow, it would bd confused as hell for about a month, but I bet it would pick up real fast after it absorbed the new vocabulary. They claim it cares about monkies and juice?! Those are just words to it, you could just as easily raise it on gluons and dark matter, and I don't think it would notice a difference.
OK, not strictly sci fi, but this is the best-written show, ever. It does occur in an alternate universe where the president is a different person, so that might sneak it in to the very border of SciFi-ness. Ok, probably not, but don't limit yourself to scifi, there is some excellent television floating around. Not much, but it's there.
Most days of the week SciFi does several hours of 'scifi-world, ____ land", like fantasy land or horror land or whatever, they'll show 4 hours of a particular series from about noon to 4 or 1 to 5, I forget. I just happened to catch S:A&B on wednesday of this week (I think), but the schedule appears to be random, on thursday they showed Fantasy Island. An excellent show, I agree, and I watched it when it was first on several years ago.
Yes, I was taught exponents. I converted it to Gigabytes, and you didn't check the figures before you flamed me.
Yes, 2^133 ~= 10^40. It is also:
2^133 = 2^100 * 2^33;
2^33 bits is 1 gigabyte.
2^100 is about 10^30th.
As I said. My numbers weren't off. And I cited a source elsewhere in this discussion which puts the number of atoms in the universe at about 10^75. The number of atoms in the earth is around 10^51, IIRC, so 10^40th is plenty small, on a sufficiently large scale:) Definitely not more than the number of atoms in the universe.
Besides, if we use up all the atoms in this universe, we can just use a quantum computer, and do our computing with atoms from other universes which aren't putting them to good use. --
That site is discussing the game tree, that is, the possible sequence of moves. An average branch factor in a chess search tree is 35, and games might go to 50 moves each, so 35^100 is another number I've heard, that's about 10^155 possible nodes in a game.
However, that decision tree you linked to doesn't differentiate between identical positions arrived at by different routes. There are only 10^40 or so different positions on the board, and since we were postulating that from each one there is one perfect move, you just have to know it for each of them. No move would matter besides the current one. --
According to this, there are ~3*10^78 atoms in the universe.
http://itss.raytheon.com/cafe/qadir/q1797.html
There are "only" (hah) 10^40 or so legal chess positions, so your statement above is not quite true. Gathering enough of them up to make memory might be hard, though. There are about 3*10^51 atoms in the earth, and 10^57 atoms laying around doing nothing useful in our sun, so scrape off some of those and we've got plenty. Or we could use some replicator tech to turn some small, useless planets directly into RAM... --
According to my AI textbook, the number of possible legal chess positions is about 10^40. Assuming 1 "best" move for each position, you could store each move with, um, 4 bits to indicate piece to move, and 3 for each axis, 10 bits- 10^41 bits total. High end systems now have what, 4 GB of RAM? That's 2^35 bits, about 10^10. To store all the moves, you'd need ~2^133 bits, that's 1.24*10^30 Gigabytes.
And that's just the table. You'd need a pretty spiffy lookup function and table organization to find the entry you want in reasonable time. Though, now that I think about it, since you could track from the beginning of the game, you'd only need about 35 subtrees to every position based on what your opponent does, so that isn't as difficult as the raw memory required.
Chess is not near to being solved, I would say. Searching functions are a much better way to use the memory we have.
And even when we do solve chess (if memory doubles every year or two, that figure I gave above [2^130] could be feasible in a century or two), there's always Go, which has a branching factor of about 360, as compared to chess's measly 35:) --
It's nice to have a judge see our side of it, though. (Slightly surprising, from David Sentelle--he's reputed to be quite right-wing, and I would have expected him to side with big business; I apologize to him for misjudging him so.)
Right wing, especially among judges, often means favoring a more literal, limited interpretation of the Constitution. Among Congresscritters and others that face election often, this isn't the case nearly as often, but it seems that the proviso giving judges lifetime service worked mostly as intended, and gives them a unique perspective on judging law and cases.
No it's not. It's not punishment at all, it's the direct result of their idiotic business plan. They have not yet been punished for going after an independant website which posed no threat to them, was not in their field (so trademark dilution wouldn't apply), on an illegitimate trademark claim anyway, and blatently for only the Christmas season (both to get publicity, and try to shut down misdirection over the holidays, their biggest sales season in theory). They probably never will be punished. So pardon me if I don't think they've caught enough crap. Corporate officers and shareholders should be held liable for this sort of thing. When they cause financial harm to innocent people, they should be punished.
Having learned enough C, C++, and perl to at least read most code (and thus be dangerous), I went through the software I was actually using, and whose code looked comprehendable to me. Psh for one, Xfce for another. Signed up for the dev lists, looked at what they were working on. Downloaded the source to xfce, fiddled with it, broke it, downloaded it again & backed it up this time, messed with some of the smaller features until I found one I thought I could improve. Emailed the project guy, who was very nice, and told me how to get code to him. Borrowed my roommate's GTK book, hacked on it until it worked, and sent the modified source in. My name is in the changelog now:)
So basically, look at the stuff you use, on your system, and see which parts you might want to change. Then do it, and if your changes work out, see if the maintainers are interested in them. My change was probably under 50 lines of code, and there was a bug in it when I submitted it, but it's how you get started. --
In Austin, Texas, where I live, the technical-support ratio in the local school district is about 2,500 computers per tech-support person. The district's ratio means a majority of its computers get no attention at all. One local high school has computers still sitting in boxes, months after their purchase, because no one available knows how to set them up.
Yeah, because there aren't three dozen geeks at that school that wouldn't rather set up the boxes for free than do super-easy high school assignments. When we got computers at my old school, our physics teacher wanted to actually use his, so he had a couple of us set it up surreptitiously (students weren't allowed to touch them). Before long, there was this underground network of teachers saying "psst, could you guys set this up for me?", and when the official guy came around to finally do it, he poked around, shrugged, and told the teachers everything was great. --
Slashdot Mirror
It's their building, but you own the bag, the receipt, and everything you just paid for. They can certainly ask to see your stuff, but you can tell them "no". Their asking places no obligation on you.
If they refuse to let you leave without seeing it they are kidnapping you, or at least committing false imprisonment, and probably opening themselves to some severe civil liability.
As the theory is stated in DaVinci Code, the Magdalene hypothesis requires that Jesus live substantially beyond the resurrection and father a family with Magdalene.
So, then, you obviously haven't read the book, because it "requires" nothing of the sort; the statement in the book is that MM was already pregnant at the time of the crucifixion, and fled the holy land afterward, accompanied by Jesus' uncle. It's heart-warming to see that your academic credentials enable you to critique a book you've never picked up. I hope your history department holds you to a higher standard for your thesis, though.
The sad thing is, it would really easy to get census data into a format where a couple easy rules would create good geographical regions. For instance:
1) all districts must have X (X is state population/#districts) voters, +-5% (or some number, this rule actually already is used).
2) Divide the state into 1 mile by 1 mile squares, each district consists of neighboring squares, and the total boundary between all the districts must be as short as possible while fulfilling 1.
You'd probably end up with a bunch of basically square or circular districts.
They've been working on it for years. There was work on a linux client for AOL back when I was at compuserve in, oh, 99-2000. The plan was to sell a computer that was basically a thin-client into AOL for people that don't want to deal with the complexity of a real PC, but just want email, web, chat, IM, that kind of thing.
Hence, they acquired netscape, and set about trying to free themselves from microsoft reliance. Put quite a bit of work into making sure the new netscape worked across many platforms. It was going to be the default browser in AOL clients. Work on the linux client was going, I knew of some people that tested it.
Problem is, they have a huge installed user base that uses Windows, which they still have to support, and then they'd be trying to switch people over to these linux-AOL boxes, which they would have to provide lots of support for. Too much complexity. They apparently realized this, so then a couple years ago they made a deal with MS that they'd keep using IE as their browser, and the linux thing never happened. That was after I left the company, I think, and they may still be sitting on some version of a linux client, but it's not happening soon, I'd wager. They probably cut a good deal with MS for OEM prices on windows anyway, so why not use it and let MS do the OS support instead of AOL?
You know, I hear that if you cross the International Date Line thrice, backwards, at the equator, and then find the proper site in Taiwan, you can get a copy of Episode 3 before Lucas has a chance to mess it up...
A physical business fax-spammed you? That's great! Write them a polite note, explaining that sending bulk faxes is wrong. Attach a copy of their spam to it, with all identifying marks removed of course. Go to their office, tie it to a brick, and toss it through their damn window.
What's a plate glass window run, $100-200 dollars? If you do it in the winter, even better, no heat for the bastards when they come into work the next morning. Too many expensive lessons like that, and they'll quit.
Unfortunately, it's a lot harder to track email spammers. I usually try to have their accounts cancelled, but that's about it. Then a couple of weeks ago, some dumbass sent me one of those chain-letter "Buy Reports on Internet Marketing" pyramid scheme things. The one where you expect people to send you a five dollar bill in the mail. That's right, the moron attached his REAL ADDRESS. It's two hours from where I live, even better. Not worth a trip by itself, but if I ever happen to be in the area, I'll stop by. Saved the address.
As I've often seen proclaimed on the internet, unsolicited faxes are illegal and can earn you some cash. Might be worth looking into.
It's been a while since I pondered the intricacies of slashcode, but they could probably filter it so that it caught TLAs which were uppercased (well, any three-letter word which was uppercased, it wouldn't know it was an acronym). This would catch stuff like IBM and CSS, since those are the kinds of things people would like to be able to search on.
I've read them, and I wasn't making a Chinese room argument. I was pointing out that even though these guys expect it to develop like a child, there's no reason it has to go through the developmental stages of a person at the same rate a person does. Why talk to it about juice at all, it doesn't need nourishment, only reward, punishment, and more syllables coming at it. I think it would be interesting to give someone else, who wasn't fixated on childhood neuro-linguistics, a crack at a raw version, and see what they ended up with.
These researchers are getting back from the program exactly what they put in. At one point in your link, I read:
(person) where is daddy?
...
(ai) daddy gone
(person) daddy is at work
(ai) daddy gone bye bye
(person) wait hal, we need to take something to eat
(ai) banana
(person) ok we can take some bananas
(ai) monkeys eat bananas
(person) you're so smart hal. do you want to take a book?
(ai) juice mommmy
(person) sure we'll take some juice as well
The researcher elsewhere claims that the AI's words "relate to its well-being". This is utter projection- the only reason the AI is stuck on concepts of mommy, daddy, monkey, and juice is because this is the inane crap they insist on talking to it about!
Notice also that they claim the AI is tracking almost exactly with a child its same age. Seem strange? Wouldn't you expect a little deflection over 15 months? Shouldn't the thing be a little smarter or a little dumber than a normal child- just statistically speaking, how likely is it they happened to program one that advances /exactly/ as quickly as a normal human infant?
The paper talks a lot about feedback loops. I've got a huge one for them, but it isn't the AI caught in it, it's the researchers. By expecting the thing to react at a child-level, they're talking to it that way, rewarding it that way, and making it that way. If they started talking to it about quantum mechanics tomorrow, it would bd confused as hell for about a month, but I bet it would pick up real fast after it absorbed the new vocabulary. They claim it cares about monkies and juice?! Those are just words to it, you could just as easily raise it on gluons and dark matter, and I don't think it would notice a difference.
OK, not strictly sci fi, but this is the best-written show, ever. It does occur in an alternate universe where the president is a different person, so that might sneak it in to the very border of SciFi-ness. Ok, probably not, but don't limit yourself to scifi, there is some excellent television floating around. Not much, but it's there.
Most days of the week SciFi does several hours of 'scifi-world, ____ land", like fantasy land or horror land or whatever, they'll show 4 hours of a particular series from about noon to 4 or 1 to 5, I forget. I just happened to catch S:A&B on wednesday of this week (I think), but the schedule appears to be random, on thursday they showed Fantasy Island. An excellent show, I agree, and I watched it when it was first on several years ago.
Yes, I was taught exponents. I converted it to Gigabytes, and you didn't check the figures before you flamed me.
:) Definitely not more than the number of atoms in the universe.
Yes, 2^133 ~= 10^40. It is also:
2^133 = 2^100 * 2^33;
2^33 bits is 1 gigabyte.
2^100 is about 10^30th.
As I said. My numbers weren't off. And I cited a source elsewhere in this discussion which puts the number of atoms in the universe at about 10^75. The number of atoms in the earth is around 10^51, IIRC, so 10^40th is plenty small, on a sufficiently large scale
Besides, if we use up all the atoms in this universe, we can just use a quantum computer, and do our computing with atoms from other universes which aren't putting them to good use.
--
That site is discussing the game tree, that is, the possible sequence of moves. An average branch factor in a chess search tree is 35, and games might go to 50 moves each, so 35^100 is another number I've heard, that's about 10^155 possible nodes in a game.
However, that decision tree you linked to doesn't differentiate between identical positions arrived at by different routes. There are only 10^40 or so different positions on the board, and since we were postulating that from each one there is one perfect move, you just have to know it for each of them. No move would matter besides the current one.
--
According to this, there are ~3*10^78 atoms in the universe.
http://itss.raytheon.com/cafe/qadir/q1797.html
There are "only" (hah) 10^40 or so legal chess positions, so your statement above is not quite true. Gathering enough of them up to make memory might be hard, though. There are about 3*10^51 atoms in the earth, and 10^57 atoms laying around doing nothing useful in our sun, so scrape off some of those and we've got plenty. Or we could use some replicator tech to turn some small, useless planets directly into RAM...
--
According to my AI textbook, the number of possible legal chess positions is about 10^40. Assuming 1 "best" move for each position, you could store each move with, um, 4 bits to indicate piece to move, and 3 for each axis, 10 bits- 10^41 bits total. High end systems now have what, 4 GB of RAM? That's 2^35 bits, about 10^10. To store all the moves, you'd need ~2^133 bits, that's 1.24*10^30 Gigabytes.
:)
And that's just the table. You'd need a pretty spiffy lookup function and table organization to find the entry you want in reasonable time. Though, now that I think about it, since you could track from the beginning of the game, you'd only need about 35 subtrees to every position based on what your opponent does, so that isn't as difficult as the raw memory required.
Chess is not near to being solved, I would say. Searching functions are a much better way to use the memory we have.
And even when we do solve chess (if memory doubles every year or two, that figure I gave above [2^130] could be feasible in a century or two), there's always Go, which has a branching factor of about 360, as compared to chess's measly 35
--
It's nice to have a judge see our side of it, though. (Slightly surprising, from David Sentelle--he's reputed to be quite right-wing, and I would have expected him to side with big business; I apologize to him for misjudging him so.)
Right wing, especially among judges, often means favoring a more literal, limited interpretation of the Constitution. Among Congresscritters and others that face election often, this isn't the case nearly as often, but it seems that the proviso giving judges lifetime service worked mostly as intended, and gives them a unique perspective on judging law and cases.
--
Their failure is enough punishment.
No it's not. It's not punishment at all, it's the direct result of their idiotic business plan. They have not yet been punished for going after an independant website which posed no threat to them, was not in their field (so trademark dilution wouldn't apply), on an illegitimate trademark claim anyway, and blatently for only the Christmas season (both to get publicity, and try to shut down misdirection over the holidays, their biggest sales season in theory). They probably never will be punished. So pardon me if I don't think they've caught enough crap. Corporate officers and shareholders should be held liable for this sort of thing. When they cause financial harm to innocent people, they should be punished.
--
If he's a slashdot reader, why doesn't he just reply in this article to the questions that he feels like answering?
--
Wasn't it Bertlesmann that was intertwined with Hitler's Nazi government in the 30s? Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
--
I wonder if they'll be selling off any of that sweet equipment, cheap. I could use a "new" box...
--
Oh heck yeah. I spent so much time on that game, but I was little and never really figured out how to beat it. That game taught me how to type, heh.
Hmm, now I have to try these download sites and see if I can get that old game working, and beat it.
--
ESR has announced that december 18th will be Burn All Hyperlinks day, and put up a page about it here... ah, crap
--
Having learned enough C, C++, and perl to at least read most code (and thus be dangerous), I went through the software I was actually using, and whose code looked comprehendable to me. Psh for one, Xfce for another. Signed up for the dev lists, looked at what they were working on. Downloaded the source to xfce, fiddled with it, broke it, downloaded it again & backed it up this time, messed with some of the smaller features until I found one I thought I could improve. Emailed the project guy, who was very nice, and told me how to get code to him. Borrowed my roommate's GTK book, hacked on it until it worked, and sent the modified source in. My name is in the changelog now :)
So basically, look at the stuff you use, on your system, and see which parts you might want to change. Then do it, and if your changes work out, see if the maintainers are interested in them. My change was probably under 50 lines of code, and there was a bug in it when I submitted it, but it's how you get started.
--
In Austin, Texas, where I live, the technical-support ratio in the local school district is about 2,500 computers per tech-support person. The district's ratio means a majority of its computers get no attention at all. One local high school has computers still sitting in boxes, months after their purchase, because no one available knows how to set them up.
Yeah, because there aren't three dozen geeks at that school that wouldn't rather set up the boxes for free than do super-easy high school assignments. When we got computers at my old school, our physics teacher wanted to actually use his, so he had a couple of us set it up surreptitiously (students weren't allowed to touch them). Before long, there was this underground network of teachers saying "psst, could you guys set this up for me?", and when the official guy came around to finally do it, he poked around, shrugged, and told the teachers everything was great.
--