That's why they take the guns FIRST.. to reduce the chances of having an effective uprising. And that's why registration, or the lack thereof, is important -- it's led to confiscation before, both in this country and in others.
Knives can be used silently. Convenient for whacking people that trust you...
Incidentally, the two largest single-perp mass murders in the country were, if memory serves, the OK City bomb and the Happy Land Social Club murders. The former used fertilizer; the latter used a match and gasoline. Better ban 'em all, eh?
a) And you don't think that they'd notice a lot of.zip.'s showing up in filenames, and handle that?
b) Fingerprinting doesn't need to be done crypto-style ala MD5, where a single bit change can change the whole print. Simply running the relevant parts through a DFT or DWT might yield interesting results for a similarity search.
...which means that they need to force even current users to upgrade.
And even when they do, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that somebody deduces the protocol, and either re-implements it or figures out how to interpose a proxy to send back randomly-generated fake fingerprints. No need to modify the.MP3 files themselves.
Unless, of course, Napster figures it's got the bandwidth to be man-in-the-middle and temporarily store the.MP3 files themselves, and calculate fingerprints while doing so... but that model doesn't exactly scale as well.
Well, presumably ISPs keep billing and access records, so in theory one can be tracked -- with a series of court orders and a sheaf of logs for evidence -- backwards to a modem or other terminal. It's a valid question as to what the legal standard should be, 'tho; because if they're trivially granted, then a company -- or person -- could simply use the judicial system to get a name and address for revenge for even a contentious post that gives offense.
Your incoherence is perhaps only matched by your lack of perspective.
People rise; people fall. Many a powerful corporation was but minor or even non-existent a century ago; and many that were mighty once upon a time, have withered away. Power goes to those who are willing to strive for it, and to maintain it -- the present is littered with the remains of the past.
When was the last time AT&T was considered dominant? Or Montgomery Ward? Or Woolworths? Or Lucent? Or Xerox? Or Kodak? Or the Carnegies? Or the Vanderbilts? Or the Rockefellers?...
But perhaps you'd rather enjoy waving a sign and screaming irrationally.
No. Because some very specific charges -- violates of EULA/breach of contract could be directed at you to justify the revealing of identity.
In this case, the judge labelled the company's case as mere innuendo -- the viewpoint being that there IS a standard which justifies removing anonymity, and they hadn't met it.
It cheats too, I believe -- if memory serves, its fleets suffers no attrition. Obviously, this gives it a MASSIVE advantage in, oh, exploring the New World -- a human-controlled Colombus might easily vaporize before his explorations up and down the North American coast reveal a single province, whereas an AI explorer can simply wander around until all the terra incognito coast is revealed.
There is also a slight suspicion that it may cheat in diplomacy or money.
A neural net is just a function fitter. It won't help you decide what functions to fit or how to use them. That's a long way off from planning...
And real-time games such as FPS games, in particular, might be REALLY nasty; what constitutes a training instance, and where does feedback come from? If one picks up armor and then gets immediately fragged, how does one make sure that "picking up armor" -- if that's allowed in the input space -- doesn't get associated with negative consequences? And so forth.
Different problem. DirectX/OpenGL provide well-known APIs with well-known oft-repeated tasks to implement.
For AI...
a) Human factors are currently important. Deciding how to structure a neural net, for instance, is a bit of a black art. Ditto for a GA/GP. A card probably isn't going to help this *very* critical stage.
b) Another limiting factor is feedback -- for supervised learning. That generally only is available through actual games... preferably with people, since a strategy that does well against a badly-coded AI could get trounced by a person. Adding a card isn't going to significantly speed up the number of games a person is willing or able to play to provide more training data.
c) Sheer problems of scale. There's a LOT of bits to choose. For instance, try computing the number of valid Bayes net structures for, say, even 100 variables. It's not tractable to apply, oh, a distributed.net-style approach.
And there are probably more people who can write little bits of code than can intelligently plan complicated recurrent neural networks, say.
Right. The pattern matching and unit coordination might be tricky. The AI might be able to judge that _overall_ its military is stronger, but that doesn't easily lead to figuring out the where, who, when and how.
Taking the example of _Xconq_, for instance. In the standard game, one can use amphibious assaults; one could start with coastal bombardment of port cities via BBs; one could use bombers to parachute infantry into a nearby island to set up bases, and then send in air support to cover an eventual amphibious (or paradropped) invasion (a favorite of mine -- I've won games against the AIs, heh, without using ships at all...); one could use carrier-based air instead... and it all has to be coordinated well, because a transport or two of armor can be vaporized pretty easily. And amphibious assaults without air support are just asking for trouble...
...and flexible game design itself. In particular, some games are highly configurable -- Space Empires IV, for instance, lets you redo the entire technology tree and a rather large number of other settings; even without that customizability, it would still be a highly complicated game. As a consequence, the number of variables that would be needed for, say, even non-completely-scripted ship design would be rather extreme.
Perhaps 'completely reconfigurable' versus 'highly competitive AI' is a fundamental choice, and it's implausible to have both with current limitations?
The devil's in the details. A fairly big problem is situational awareness; with a random-map game like SMAC, the choice of starting strategy should be heavily influenced by your surroundings and your neighbors. Heck, strategies even need to work around the amount of fungus near you... The variability in SMAC is further exacerbated by, say, Unity pods -- I don't recall if the AI ever goes for them, but the result can make a very, very big difference (good or bad).
Maybe if it had, say, a LISP or Perl interpreter so people could easily try out even different functions and algorithms, let alone tweak parameters.
C4.5, if memory serves, includes a pretty good example of a decision tree algorithm. Briefly, it's a tree in which each node queries one discrete attribute, and based on the value determinstically either provides a discrete output (a classification), or selects one of the child nodes for another query and decision.
A common criteria for deciding which attribute to use for any given node is information gain ala Shannon -- the most informative attribute being selected.
There are other foo, such as how you decide when to _stop_ splitting (overfitting is a problem if you let outliers and noise produce lots of spurious leaves -- and with noise you may not get a 'perfect' fit, anyway), how to prune the tree and so forth. You could perhaps modify the tree based on feedback -- or even maintain multiple trees using different criteria and weight them accordingly. Heck, one could probably encode a decision tree for a genetic program and use the player's input as part of fitness. *shrug*
I suspect that it's similar in spirit to regression trees, but I've not used the latter.
As for perceptrons, I'd be surprised if he *really* means classic perceptrons -- since those are linear combinations with the linear separability requirement and all -- instead of, say, multilayer neural networks of some form or another.
* How many novices even know what USENET *is*, let alone use it?...versus how many have heard about Napster, Gnutella and their ilk? How many know how to search USENET amidst all the spam?
* Many news servers don't propagate binaries groups anyways, I suspect.
* It's impossible to determine who is downloading off of USENET, because that's handled locally -- a user subscribes to a group and reads posts off his local server (usually).
* It's sometimes difficult to do anything to the originating server, because they may not care a bit about US law.
If you aren't willing to pay, don't play. It is perfectly possible to get by without a single music CD, tape cassette, record, downloaded music file, or anything like that at all. Try it.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah. You want to go after Pacman? Find morbidly obese people and encourage *them* to sue; it encouraged gluttony, after all.
That's why they take the guns FIRST.. to reduce the chances of having an effective uprising. And that's why registration, or the lack thereof, is important -- it's led to confiscation before, both in this country and in others.
...which were illegal anyway. The minors possessing handguns, anyway -- that's why they didn't buy them directly.
Not all fights can be won with nonaggression, either.
*shrug*
;-) And, depending on whom you believe, he has ultimate responsibility anyway.
Sue God. He made people *enjoy* these games, after all.
Explain the statistics that show that concealed-carry reduces violent crime. You'll find plenty of them in peer-reviewed research...
Knives can be used silently. Convenient for whacking people that trust you...
Incidentally, the two largest single-perp mass murders in the country were, if memory serves, the OK City bomb and the Happy Land Social Club murders. The former used fertilizer; the latter used a match and gasoline. Better ban 'em all, eh?
...and even if previewing were cleared as fair use, that doesn't mean that unconstrained _sharing_ would be allowed.
a) And you don't think that they'd notice a lot of .zip.'s showing up in filenames, and handle that?
b) Fingerprinting doesn't need to be done crypto-style ala MD5, where a single bit change can change the whole print. Simply running the relevant parts through a DFT or DWT might yield interesting results for a similarity search.
...which means that they need to force even current users to upgrade.
.MP3 files themselves.
.MP3 files themselves, and calculate fingerprints while doing so... but that model doesn't exactly scale as well.
And even when they do, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that somebody deduces the protocol, and either re-implements it or figures out how to interpose a proxy to send back randomly-generated fake fingerprints. No need to modify the
Unless, of course, Napster figures it's got the bandwidth to be man-in-the-middle and temporarily store the
Irrelevant. The DMCA protections only apply for the copyright holder's protection schemes, not to random joes.
*shrug*
Maybe just in case the sysadmins need to block an obnoxious flooder, spammer or other abuser?
Well, presumably ISPs keep billing and access records, so in theory one can be tracked -- with a series of court orders and a sheaf of logs for evidence -- backwards to a modem or other terminal. It's a valid question as to what the legal standard should be, 'tho; because if they're trivially granted, then a company -- or person -- could simply use the judicial system to get a name and address for revenge for even a contentious post that gives offense.
Your incoherence is perhaps only matched by your lack of perspective.
...
People rise; people fall. Many a powerful corporation was but minor or even non-existent a century ago; and many that were mighty once upon a time, have withered away. Power goes to those who are willing to strive for it, and to maintain it -- the present is littered with the remains of the past.
When was the last time AT&T was considered dominant? Or Montgomery Ward? Or Woolworths? Or Lucent? Or Xerox? Or Kodak? Or the Carnegies? Or the Vanderbilts? Or the Rockefellers?
But perhaps you'd rather enjoy waving a sign and screaming irrationally.
No. Because some very specific charges -- violates of EULA/breach of contract could be directed at you to justify the revealing of identity.
In this case, the judge labelled the company's case as mere innuendo -- the viewpoint being that there IS a standard which justifies removing anonymity, and they hadn't met it.
More than one. Tribsoft is another; they're selling JA2 and are working on EU, Majesty and JA2:UB it seems.
ISTR that some bloke actually managed to pull off a dissertation involving a fully autonomous, non-cheating Netrek team. Heh.
It cheats too, I believe -- if memory serves, its fleets suffers no attrition. Obviously, this gives it a MASSIVE advantage in, oh, exploring the New World -- a human-controlled Colombus might easily vaporize before his explorations up and down the North American coast reveal a single province, whereas an AI explorer can simply wander around until all the terra incognito coast is revealed.
There is also a slight suspicion that it may cheat in diplomacy or money.
A neural net is just a function fitter. It won't help you decide what functions to fit or how to use them. That's a long way off from planning...
And real-time games such as FPS games, in particular, might be REALLY nasty; what constitutes a training instance, and where does feedback come from? If one picks up armor and then gets immediately fragged, how does one make sure that "picking up armor" -- if that's allowed in the input space -- doesn't get associated with negative consequences? And so forth.
Different problem. DirectX/OpenGL provide well-known APIs with well-known oft-repeated tasks to implement.
For AI...
a) Human factors are currently important. Deciding how to structure a neural net, for instance, is a bit of a black art. Ditto for a GA/GP. A card probably isn't going to help this *very* critical stage.
b) Another limiting factor is feedback -- for supervised learning. That generally only is available through actual games... preferably with people, since a strategy that does well against a badly-coded AI could get trounced by a person. Adding a card isn't going to significantly speed up the number of games a person is willing or able to play to provide more training data.
c) Sheer problems of scale. There's a LOT of bits to choose. For instance, try computing the number of valid Bayes net structures for, say, even 100 variables. It's not tractable to apply, oh, a distributed.net-style approach.
And there are probably more people who can write little bits of code than can intelligently plan complicated recurrent neural networks, say.
Right. The pattern matching and unit coordination might be tricky. The AI might be able to judge that _overall_ its military is stronger, but that doesn't easily lead to figuring out the where, who, when and how.
Taking the example of _Xconq_, for instance. In the standard game, one can use amphibious assaults; one could start with coastal bombardment of port cities via BBs; one could use bombers to parachute infantry into a nearby island to set up bases, and then send in air support to cover an eventual amphibious (or paradropped) invasion (a favorite of mine -- I've won games against the AIs, heh, without using ships at all...); one could use carrier-based air instead... and it all has to be coordinated well, because a transport or two of armor can be vaporized pretty easily. And amphibious assaults without air support are just asking for trouble...
...and flexible game design itself. In particular, some games are highly configurable -- Space Empires IV, for instance, lets you redo the entire technology tree and a rather large number of other settings; even without that customizability, it would still be a highly complicated game. As a consequence, the number of variables that would be needed for, say, even non-completely-scripted ship design would be rather extreme.
Perhaps 'completely reconfigurable' versus 'highly competitive AI' is a fundamental choice, and it's implausible to have both with current limitations?
The devil's in the details. A fairly big problem is situational awareness; with a random-map game like SMAC, the choice of starting strategy should be heavily influenced by your surroundings and your neighbors. Heck, strategies even need to work around the amount of fungus near you... The variability in SMAC is further exacerbated by, say, Unity pods -- I don't recall if the AI ever goes for them, but the result can make a very, very big difference (good or bad).
Maybe if it had, say, a LISP or Perl interpreter so people could easily try out even different functions and algorithms, let alone tweak parameters.
C4.5, if memory serves, includes a pretty good example of a decision tree algorithm. Briefly, it's a tree in which each node queries one discrete attribute, and based on the value determinstically either provides a discrete output (a classification), or selects one of the child nodes for another query and decision.
A common criteria for deciding which attribute to use for any given node is information gain ala Shannon -- the most informative attribute being selected.
There are other foo, such as how you decide when to _stop_ splitting (overfitting is a problem if you let outliers and noise produce lots of spurious leaves -- and with noise you may not get a 'perfect' fit, anyway), how to prune the tree and so forth. You could perhaps modify the tree based on feedback -- or even maintain multiple trees using different criteria and weight them accordingly. Heck, one could probably encode a decision tree for a genetic program and use the player's input as part of fitness. *shrug*
I suspect that it's similar in spirit to regression trees, but I've not used the latter.
As for perceptrons, I'd be surprised if he *really* means classic perceptrons -- since those are linear combinations with the linear separability requirement and all -- instead of, say, multilayer neural networks of some form or another.
Probably multiple reasons, such as --
...versus how many have heard about Napster, Gnutella and their ilk? How many know how to search USENET amidst all the spam?
* How many novices even know what USENET *is*, let alone use it?
* Many news servers don't propagate binaries groups anyways, I suspect.
* It's impossible to determine who is downloading off of USENET, because that's handled locally -- a user subscribes to a group and reads posts off his local server (usually).
* It's sometimes difficult to do anything to the originating server, because they may not care a bit about US law.
Who forced you to attend the concert?
Who forced you to buy the t-shirt?
Who forced you to listen to their music?
If you aren't willing to pay, don't play. It is perfectly possible to get by without a single music CD, tape cassette, record, downloaded music file, or anything like that at all. Try it.