Yes! Right from the start they lost me with this one. The only thing that it means is that they're upset about that money not going to them. Honestly though, PirateBay offers a service that people want, and the recording industry is not efficiently providing that service right now. I don't think it's such a shock that other organizations are stepping up—even illegally—to the plate to take over, and making money from that decision.
4) Very few people care about the label behind their music, pirated or not.
I do, but not in that same way. I'm much more likely to try out an artist if they're on a label that I really like. I've discovered a lot of new bands that way just by seeing what my favourite labels are up to.
5) So the labels can't afford small artists - Good thing they don't actually need labels anymore!
Yeah, ummm, I really don't think it's illegal file sharing that's causing the labels to support American Idol contestants and whatnot. I think it's more about economics. They have their economics, and the small indie labels have theirs. With the way things are now, exchanging music as a physical medium is making less and less sense, and the little guys are taking advantage of it.
7) Boo-hoo, I don't generate tax revenue. Hear the violins?
This one's my favourite, because it's absolutely right, of course, but it's an argument that I couldn't possibly imagine anyone who wasn't an economist caring about. This is like how my grandparents buy a new car every three years because they were alive in the 50s when people did that to keep the American economy going. I sincerely doubt that adjusting the velocity of the money supply is something that most people consciously think about in their purchasing decisions.
10) I've discovered over half of the artists currently on my playlist via questionably-legal means.
I think the argument is right, again, but I think what's going on is most people on Slashdot aren't gonna be downloading that new Ashley Simpson album.
For a while, I was discovering my music by questionable means. By now it's that I can sample and peruse at my leisure online, and I can find all kinds of new things every day just by listening. If I like it, I'll buy it. If I don't I don't have to. It's a pretty rockin' good time, and like I said before it's a lot easier for new artists to get exposure.
I dunno who would've modded me "flamebait" just then.... Really what I mean to say is that lawyers don't have to go through with lawsuits that they can clearly see are frivolous or liable to get them into trouble further down the line just because their client wants them to. Mind you I didn't say anything about the morality of a law suit.
If a client proposes a law suit like this one, it's the lawyer's job to tell their client they can't risk it backfiring.
I'm not a lawyer. I'm a graphic designer whose sister is a lawyer.
You're right, sort of. What really needs to happen here is that Atlantic Records needs to get taken to the cleaners on penalties, they must reimburse the defendant appropriately, and just as importantly their lawyers must be held accountable for bringing this case to court. Filing a lawsuit on false grounds and wasting two years of these people's and the court's time is grounds for disbarment.
I think one of the possible uses for an 80-core CPU that nobody's really talked about is multiple redundancy. If one core should somehow get fried, you have 79 left.
"Bob" doesn't care because he is the type who only cares that it works (or possibly not), and doesn't care if there is a mess because "I know the code; if I leave, it's not my problem anymore."
In the biz, we call that the "job protection" coding paradigm.
This is actually one of those topics I've written a lot about various places (think there's an ancient blog of mine somewhere with a pretty extensive discussion of the future of AI). There's a couple of things going on here. The first is that "artificial intelligence" really isn't a good name for it because it gives people unreasonable expectations of human-like behaviour. Think about it. If gnuchess were truly artificially intelligent, wouldn't it make more realistic mistakes?
I think people hear "AI" and they're expecting something that learns and behaves a certain way, but there's a few things wrong with that. First of all, an untrained neural network doesn't even have the pattern recognition skills of a three-year-old. Sometimes they're adorable and they come out with pretty interesting results if you let them churn for a while. Sometimes they're frustrating because they've trained themselves to a local minimum of their error function. Sometimes even that's adorable though, depending on the learning algorithm (a neural network, for instance, will react much better to this situation than a version spaces rule set will).
Instead of that, what we have right now is NPCs in games that have hardwired behaviours, like the ghosts in a Ms. Pacman game. Sometimes they "cheat" by either having complete knowledge of the positions of all the characters (a la Pacman) or by using some pretty intense trigonometry to aim their guns (like in Quake). For the most part, this provides an adequate challenge for all but the most discerning players.
Another thing that's going on here is that game systems are only now getting enough processor power for intense AI routines in games. The focus has just always been graphics, because that's what people see first, but I think I see a growing demand for better AI to which game designers are responding. It'll just take time, and it needs to become something that more people can appreciate before it becomes more commonplace.
As kind of a final note, I think it's really important to say that computers and humans necessarily approach problems very differently. Humans are so adept at filtering information, plucking the one or two pieces they need from a constant torrent of sensory data. Computers are not at all good at this, at all; they're terrible. That's why a human can always smoke a computer at Go. It's a game that naturally plays into our greatest cognitive strengths, and it exploits the worst weaknesses of computers. Chess on the other hand, I would say, is a tie. Humans and computers approach the game very differently, and both approaches seem about as effective. Humans tend to look at the board as a whole then narrow their focus, recognizing patterns and then trying to anticipate their opponent's moves. Computer programs, with the exception of Morph, arrange all the possible moves—including the very bad ones—into a minimax search tree. The problem with this is that it's hard for the computer to assign payoff values to the leaf nodes of the tree (although it's provable that your chances of winning are greater even if you randomize these values). So you get situations like when gnuchess doesn't understand that if it gives up one pawn it can break through that diagonal of pawns you've used to confuse it.
So . . . I dunno that was probably a lot more than anyone cared to read, but whatever. Long story short, don't go welcoming our new, artificially intelligent overlords just yet.
You'd think so, but I think there are enough examples out there to show that there are a lot of people out there writing sub-standard code and thinking there's nothing at all wrong with it. There have been a lot of times when I was tutoring computer science in college where I'd ask a student, "Just what in the hell were you doing here?" and point to some ridiculous incantation in their code.
In particular I think people ignore that last two when they're in school, because everybody wants to look impressive and figure out the "best" way to approach the problem at hand. What takes maturity and experience to realize, though, is that elegant simplicity will always win above arcane obfuscation.
I'm not defending bad code here. I'm just saying it happens so often it's hard to really hard to criticize so much.
I was going to suggest Powerpoint but then . . . does anybody still remember HyperCard??? That program was amazing! I don't think you could write Myst in Powerpoint.
For the youngins out there, HyperCard was a presentation app like Powerpoint but it allowed scripting in much the same way that Flash does nowadays. Myst was made by adding extensions to HyperCard, written in Pascal (which was another of its tricks). Yay HyperCard, boo Pascal!
My favourite was when I was talking to some Southern Baptists in Georgia (where I used to live) about creationism and I brought up an argument very similar to yours. I wanted to know what was up with radiocarbon dating and all these dinosaur fossils we keep finding everywhere.
Apparently, God put all those there, meticulously altering their Carbon-14 content in an elaborate ruse, trying to pull the proverbial wool over our eyes.
It's not really stupidity. It's faith. Once you have enough faith in the omnipotence of a higher being, there isn't a thing in this world you cannot attribute to their intelligent hands. I, like you, find that very impossible, but I know how it works from seeing it happen with other people.
I love the idea that the Universe is random, because I love the idea that God may, in fact, play at dice. You have to be aware of the possibility that what we're perceiving as "randomness" is really just the incompleteness of our models of the Universe. The Universe itself isn't infinite, why should its complexity be?
Anonymous cowards don't need karma, and first posts don't need high visibility. I see it more as a mod point that got wasted for no good reason than an opportunity to reward someone for posting goatse.
That's a pretty good reason to keep your land line. IMO it's also a pretty good reason to get a ham radio license. The basic (read: without morse code bands) license is pretty easy to get and you get access to the 70cm and 2m bands (~440MHz and ~144MHz, respectively) that both have pretty good range. If there's an emergency situation like a flood, other hams typically have their receivers on and are listening.
If you live in a city with poor radio reception (the higher frequencies don't like corners), though, you'd probably do better with a megaphone and a pair of semaphore flags.
What happens if you are not included in a distribution
So you're sore about not being included in a distro's repository and needing to figure out for yourself how to package your stuff? And you wrote a package manager of some sort?
I'm sorry and this is total flamebait . . . but come on man! Your post might've been valid like ten years ago when even installing packages that came with your distro was, shall we say, a funky adventure. But today? In 2007? Nah I don't buy it at all. Just offer.deb files for direct download. Those're insanely easy to manage in Ubuntu.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes! Right from the start they lost me with this one. The only thing that it means is that they're upset about that money not going to them. Honestly though, PirateBay offers a service that people want, and the recording industry is not efficiently providing that service right now. I don't think it's such a shock that other organizations are stepping up—even illegally—to the plate to take over, and making money from that decision.
4) Very few people care about the label behind their music, pirated or not.I do, but not in that same way. I'm much more likely to try out an artist if they're on a label that I really like. I've discovered a lot of new bands that way just by seeing what my favourite labels are up to.
5) So the labels can't afford small artists - Good thing they don't actually need labels anymore!Yeah, ummm, I really don't think it's illegal file sharing that's causing the labels to support American Idol contestants and whatnot. I think it's more about economics. They have their economics, and the small indie labels have theirs. With the way things are now, exchanging music as a physical medium is making less and less sense, and the little guys are taking advantage of it.
7) Boo-hoo, I don't generate tax revenue. Hear the violins?This one's my favourite, because it's absolutely right, of course, but it's an argument that I couldn't possibly imagine anyone who wasn't an economist caring about. This is like how my grandparents buy a new car every three years because they were alive in the 50s when people did that to keep the American economy going. I sincerely doubt that adjusting the velocity of the money supply is something that most people consciously think about in their purchasing decisions.
10) I've discovered over half of the artists currently on my playlist via questionably-legal means.I think the argument is right, again, but I think what's going on is most people on Slashdot aren't gonna be downloading that new Ashley Simpson album.
For a while, I was discovering my music by questionable means. By now it's that I can sample and peruse at my leisure online, and I can find all kinds of new things every day just by listening. If I like it, I'll buy it. If I don't I don't have to. It's a pretty rockin' good time, and like I said before it's a lot easier for new artists to get exposure.
I dunno who would've modded me "flamebait" just then.... Really what I mean to say is that lawyers don't have to go through with lawsuits that they can clearly see are frivolous or liable to get them into trouble further down the line just because their client wants them to. Mind you I didn't say anything about the morality of a law suit.
If a client proposes a law suit like this one, it's the lawyer's job to tell their client they can't risk it backfiring.
I'm not a lawyer. I'm a graphic designer whose sister is a lawyer.
You're right, sort of. What really needs to happen here is that Atlantic Records needs to get taken to the cleaners on penalties, they must reimburse the defendant appropriately, and just as importantly their lawyers must be held accountable for bringing this case to court. Filing a lawsuit on false grounds and wasting two years of these people's and the court's time is grounds for disbarment.
Isn't that why we've got that first amendment there?
Most people say it stands for "fine" in polite discourse.
perl -e 'fork while 1;'
There ya go. Think of it as a benchmark. How long can the 80-core processor run that without dying?
I think one of the possible uses for an 80-core CPU that nobody's really talked about is multiple redundancy. If one core should somehow get fried, you have 79 left.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these?
In the biz, we call that the "job protection" coding paradigm.
This is actually one of those topics I've written a lot about various places (think there's an ancient blog of mine somewhere with a pretty extensive discussion of the future of AI). There's a couple of things going on here. The first is that "artificial intelligence" really isn't a good name for it because it gives people unreasonable expectations of human-like behaviour. Think about it. If gnuchess were truly artificially intelligent, wouldn't it make more realistic mistakes?
I think people hear "AI" and they're expecting something that learns and behaves a certain way, but there's a few things wrong with that. First of all, an untrained neural network doesn't even have the pattern recognition skills of a three-year-old. Sometimes they're adorable and they come out with pretty interesting results if you let them churn for a while. Sometimes they're frustrating because they've trained themselves to a local minimum of their error function. Sometimes even that's adorable though, depending on the learning algorithm (a neural network, for instance, will react much better to this situation than a version spaces rule set will).
Instead of that, what we have right now is NPCs in games that have hardwired behaviours, like the ghosts in a Ms. Pacman game. Sometimes they "cheat" by either having complete knowledge of the positions of all the characters (a la Pacman) or by using some pretty intense trigonometry to aim their guns (like in Quake). For the most part, this provides an adequate challenge for all but the most discerning players.
Another thing that's going on here is that game systems are only now getting enough processor power for intense AI routines in games. The focus has just always been graphics, because that's what people see first, but I think I see a growing demand for better AI to which game designers are responding. It'll just take time, and it needs to become something that more people can appreciate before it becomes more commonplace.
As kind of a final note, I think it's really important to say that computers and humans necessarily approach problems very differently. Humans are so adept at filtering information, plucking the one or two pieces they need from a constant torrent of sensory data. Computers are not at all good at this, at all; they're terrible. That's why a human can always smoke a computer at Go. It's a game that naturally plays into our greatest cognitive strengths, and it exploits the worst weaknesses of computers. Chess on the other hand, I would say, is a tie. Humans and computers approach the game very differently, and both approaches seem about as effective. Humans tend to look at the board as a whole then narrow their focus, recognizing patterns and then trying to anticipate their opponent's moves. Computer programs, with the exception of Morph, arrange all the possible moves—including the very bad ones—into a minimax search tree. The problem with this is that it's hard for the computer to assign payoff values to the leaf nodes of the tree (although it's provable that your chances of winning are greater even if you randomize these values). So you get situations like when gnuchess doesn't understand that if it gives up one pawn it can break through that diagonal of pawns you've used to confuse it.
So . . . I dunno that was probably a lot more than anyone cared to read, but whatever. Long story short, don't go welcoming our new, artificially intelligent overlords just yet.
You'd think so, but I think there are enough examples out there to show that there are a lot of people out there writing sub-standard code and thinking there's nothing at all wrong with it. There have been a lot of times when I was tutoring computer science in college where I'd ask a student, "Just what in the hell were you doing here?" and point to some ridiculous incantation in their code.
In particular I think people ignore that last two when they're in school, because everybody wants to look impressive and figure out the "best" way to approach the problem at hand. What takes maturity and experience to realize, though, is that elegant simplicity will always win above arcane obfuscation.
I'm not defending bad code here. I'm just saying it happens so often it's hard to really hard to criticize so much.
I was going to suggest Powerpoint but then . . . does anybody still remember HyperCard??? That program was amazing! I don't think you could write Myst in Powerpoint.
For the youngins out there, HyperCard was a presentation app like Powerpoint but it allowed scripting in much the same way that Flash does nowadays. Myst was made by adding extensions to HyperCard, written in Pascal (which was another of its tricks). Yay HyperCard, boo Pascal!
I think it's necessary to point out that your web site there has as many colour and format changes in it as the time cube! You might wanna fix that.
My favourite was when I was talking to some Southern Baptists in Georgia (where I used to live) about creationism and I brought up an argument very similar to yours. I wanted to know what was up with radiocarbon dating and all these dinosaur fossils we keep finding everywhere.
Apparently, God put all those there, meticulously altering their Carbon-14 content in an elaborate ruse, trying to pull the proverbial wool over our eyes.
It's not really stupidity. It's faith. Once you have enough faith in the omnipotence of a higher being, there isn't a thing in this world you cannot attribute to their intelligent hands. I, like you, find that very impossible, but I know how it works from seeing it happen with other people.
Yep! That's why there's the Morph project at my alma mater.
Morph plays chess now about as well as I did as a kid.
I love the idea that the Universe is random, because I love the idea that God may, in fact, play at dice. You have to be aware of the possibility that what we're perceiving as "randomness" is really just the incompleteness of our models of the Universe. The Universe itself isn't infinite, why should its complexity be?
Anonymous cowards don't need karma, and first posts don't need high visibility. I see it more as a mod point that got wasted for no good reason than an opportunity to reward someone for posting goatse.
G'ah! I studied computer science, including cellular automata, but I also did so in California. Was so confused....
I don't mean to get all peecee on you, but it's "asians". You'd refer to a rug or a set of fine porcelain dishware as "oriental" but not a person.
Them's fightin' words! *goes to grab pitchfork, torch*
That's a pretty good reason to keep your land line. IMO it's also a pretty good reason to get a ham radio license. The basic (read: without morse code bands) license is pretty easy to get and you get access to the 70cm and 2m bands (~440MHz and ~144MHz, respectively) that both have pretty good range. If there's an emergency situation like a flood, other hams typically have their receivers on and are listening.
If you live in a city with poor radio reception (the higher frequencies don't like corners), though, you'd probably do better with a megaphone and a pair of semaphore flags.
You must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot!
So you're sore about not being included in a distro's repository and needing to figure out for yourself how to package your stuff? And you wrote a package manager of some sort?
I'm sorry and this is total flamebait . . . but come on man! Your post might've been valid like ten years ago when even installing packages that came with your distro was, shall we say, a funky adventure. But today? In 2007? Nah I don't buy it at all. Just offer .deb files for direct download. Those're insanely easy to manage in Ubuntu.
I think you mean censure
I know, I know. I'm newer here than you are but not that new ;). I just sleep better at night knowing my +5 cancels out his +5 somehow.