Dark Angel. No, not because Jessica Alba is a hottie. It has wonderful continuity, good interplay between the major characters, a truly despicable villain who nonetheless isn't just a one-dimensional cliche
Hey, the good guys in Dark Angel aren't one-dimensional either. That's one of the things that I have loved about Farscape. I had the advantage of coming into it late and catching up on two seasons in a few weeks from a friend's tapes. I got to watch Crais evolve as his anger cooled. The principal villains are as much characters as the protagonists. Oh, and of course the protagonists come to blows, shoot at each other, betray each other, and have unpleasantly complicated sex lives that are at least more believable than your average prime time soap opera.
My VCR current records Farscape, Andromeda, Witchblade, and West Wing. As I have said in other comments, I really like good characters. The characters on West Wing are some of the best I've ever seen. At their high points, all of the best SF series hit the intensity and wit that these guys hit nearly every week.
I don't watch or read much fiction other than SF. There's so much good SF, and so little time. But there are exceptions. ER and West Wing jump to mind immediately. I wouldn't call, West Wing SF, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.
As a science fiction snob, I should never ever watch this show, let alone admit it, but the only episodic television show I watch is Andromeda. Even worse, it's pretty much just because Lexa Doig is so hot. (For those who don't know, she plays the avatar of a massively powerful warship, so she's not even playing someone real, and yet that's part of the appeal. Psychoanalyze me now!)
I really like the show. Lexa's character is great, not just because Lexa is gorgeous. But in spite of some initial misgivings, the character I enjoy the most these days is Tyr. At first, the Nietzscheans just looked like a strawman for bashing several facets of individualism. Yet, I have watched Tyr's opinion of the Commonwealth change, while Tyr himself has changed little. His motivations and his identity have not altered. Sometimes the best perspective from which to understand a thing is that of someone to whom it is either completely foreign or totally anathema. SF as a genre is one of the best for doing this.
As for the psychoanalysis, I have two thoughts. First, when my computer develops a personality, Romy is a pretty good one. Second, after years of being the voice of Star Trek's computers, Majel Roddenberry has stepped aside. The torch has been passed to Lexa Doig. I don't believe that Majel had any hand in the casting herself, but she is the show's executive producer. Arranging an indisputably competent successor is itself an act of considerable competence.
I'm going to science fiction hell for sure.
Not even close. Science fiction hell would be all of the best series of the past few decades with an endless stream of new episodes written by incompetent hacks. It would be abandoning all continuity. It would be lines spoken by the wrong characters.
Good SF requires all of the same things that all good fiction requires. The mix is different, and the science has to be right. But bad characters and sloppy writing ruin anything.
> But I think that spammers should stop spamming
> the USENET for a day in memory of such a great
> man.
If the spammers understood Usenet for what it is they wouldn't be spamming it. They don't know that he died. They don't know that he ever lived. The average spammer probably thinks that newsgroups were invented by either Microsoft or AOL, and that they've been around since about 1995. He probably never reads them.
At the next Usenet Olympiad, let there be a moment of silence in his memory before the traditional lighting of the flame thrower. All in favor, follow-up to alt.test with ME TOO!!! All opposed, spelling flame.
Yes, I offered this with tongue in cheek. But in all honesty, we all owe him a debt of gratitude. The net would not be what it is today without his creation. I have nothing more appropriate to say than "thank you".
I do not have the knowledge of Asian languages necessary to evaluate the arguments on each side. However, even if Unicode were entirely inadequate for Asian languages it has already started to solve a very real problem. Unicode font sets representing the European characters encoded by it are now available on a variety of platforms. This makes possible a single character set with which the speakers of a number of languages can exchange information. Tools can support Unicode rather than lots of character sets. If you speak a language that isn't a common target for localization of software, this makes a wider range of tools available to you for processing date in your own language.
Perhaps The Ridgefield Press should sue for all of the profits from those movies. It is clear that they could not possibly have been/be as successful without the use of the paper's good name.
I wonder if any signatory countries to the Hague Convention allow that and would be willing to offer me a fair price for that service. I might be interested. I'd be happy to license it for a reasonable price, along with an editorial veto if I don't like the context, say in a mailing list. Of course, my license would not include any right to rent it or resell it.
Imagine playing music listeners want to hear
on
Launchcast Sued
·
· Score: 2
Imagine - playing the music listeners want to hear instead of the tripe the Record Giants have preselected for everyone!
Imagine that. No, wait. I know a radio station that does just that. I can't stand at least a third of the stuff they play. Of course that still makes them at least twice as good as most stations. But I have heard dozens of excellent bands on their station months or years before anyone else played them. Oh, and they're on the Web.
Maybe they'd be willing to negotiate trip in exchange for a couple of live reports about it on Geeks In Space. Yeah, they'd probably still want a few buck, but it might bring the price down to the budget of geeks. And of course, without a doubt, Slashdot would get slashdotted.
These concepts are all hold-overs from an era where the people designing software were the only users of the software. If I'm a programmer, of course I'm going to design my shell so I can write shell scripts. Of course I'm going to give myself the ability to create complicated hierarchies -- that's how I think!
I discussed this issue at some length in a class I took a year or two ago on user interface design. We were taught the value of interfaces built around the idea of discovery of features rather than remembering commands. However, I pointed out an important fact of life in software. The value of software is in large part a result of what we can automate. Any task that requires that I click, even once, each time I perform it because some portion of it can't be scripted sets an upper limit on the productivity I can achieve.
I don't mean in any way to criticize the usefulness of a GUI. GUIs are excellent for first time or infrequent tasks. They are also good for tasks where there are a number of parameters which will be different each time the task is performed. The common factor in each of these cases is that a significant amount of user thought is dedicated to the task in each case. Making the interface obvious and eliminating the need for the user to think about the interface is useful.
Now take the other end of the spectrum. A good example is a nightly backup. My thoughts about the task once it is set up should be minimal. I want it foolproof and quick to execute. I want to put in the tape and run a single, simple command (a script without parameters or a single button click). Better still, I want to change the tape each morning and have it run automatically overnight.
The bottom line on this comes down to the whole reason that users (the "my grandmother" model) don't write applications as a rule. To completely automate something requires an analysis of all of the different execution paths and either automating them or bailing out with decent messages so that you can reconstruct what happened.
What I am talking about is the difference between a user interface and an API. To the typical user, APIs are not important. Most people do not automate any portion of the production of the annual holiday letter to friends and family, and if they do, they want to do it using a mail merge feature with a user interface. Users want applications and are concerned with the interface. Programmers want to create applications, often custom one-offs to save ourselves time and want a good API.
Much of the tension in discussions of user interfaces arises when someone doesn't understand or forgets this distinction, or decides that one is unimportant. How many Slashdot users have grumbled about losing a Unix (substitute your favorite flavor) workstation in favor of a Windows box because somebody made a blanket statement that users' productivity is better under Windows. Hey, it's no secret. For users, people who never code, never even script, ubiquitous GUIs improve productivity. Is my mother going to remember commands for a CLI? Only under duress. But anything that comes without an API hampers programmers in exactly what we do. I'm not interested in pointing and clicking to produce a bug report for my boss each week. I want to write a script that queries the database, generates and formats the report and e-mails it to all the interested parties. If I can get it to query our source control to find out the state of the tracks we are using for the fixes to those bugs, so much the better. I want to embed my knowledge of how to solve that problem into a script and not think about it any more.
The real question is who's productivity you are measuring and on what kind of tasks. GUIs bring up the low end and the average users' productivity. Lest we ever forget, that is a good thing. And they improve productivity on large numbers of infrequently and irregularly executed tasks. That too is a good thing. But they are not the most efficient means of doing everything.
If clicking widgets were the most efficient interface around, why would anyone have keyboards anymore? As I finish this comment, the thought has occured to me that my mental state is different when I am typing the text than when I am dealing with the other issues involved in submitting it. As I type the words, I am thinking only of my words. As a touch-typist, the interface of the keyboard has disappeared from my conscious awareness through years of practice. I have never achieved that state of direct interaction through a pure GUI.
Since we must obey the law, it should be accessible to us. Copyrighted material must either lose its copyright when used as the text of laws, or governments must be prohibited from using copyrighted laws.
As for NSA Linux, the NSA would have to violate the terms of the GPL to release their changes in the public domain. You can argue that they should not have been allowed to publish except in the public domain, but it is hard to argue that they should have been allowed to violate the copyright on the various code they modified.
The biggest difference here is that no one is compelled to use Linux. Obedience of the law is not similarly voluntary.
The Open Source Intellectual Property Project
on
Is Law Copyrighted?
·
· Score: 2
Announcing the Open Source Intellectual Property Project. This project intends to copyright everything said, written or done by all of its members. All intellectual property of the project will be licensed under the GPL. We will be particularly strict about enforcing the application of the GPL to all derivative works.
Copyright (C) 2001 The Open Source Intellectual Property Project. This work may be copied and distributed under the conditions of the Gnu Public License.
(Yes, that means everyone you know should be running linux as well.)
I thought I had made peace with the FreeBSD users' group after all these years. Now you tell me that I have to start the flame war anew. You must be one of those twisted vi and tcsh users!
Of course my face, although not my hat, is red. The word simultaneously does appear in the rules to describe how the guesses must happen. This solution only works if the guesses are sequential. It is interesting only in that it demonstrates that as long as the only communication is a choice of guessing or passing there will always be at least one losing case.
I think your solution generalizes to any number of players.
Player 1 guesses Red only if he sees all Blue hats. This strategy is only triggered in two cases regardless of the number of players. It will always be wrong in half of those two cases, and it is the only guess that ever takes place.
Each subsequent player ignores the colors of the hats of the players who preceded him. He is only concerned with the colors of the hats of the player who will follow. If he sees only Blue hats among them, he states that his own hat is Red.
This strategy works because if the first player passed, the rest of the players know that he saw at least one Red hat. If a player sees no Red hats among the players that follow him, and he is not the first player, then he knows that the players who passed to him saw the Red hat on his head.
Since there must be a single guess to differentiate between two cases to start the inference, there is one losing case. We can't improve the odds to a sure thing. However, we have just reduced them to one losing case regardless of the number of players. Therefore, the best strategy loses still loses 1 time in 2^n cases.
If the players believe that the contest is rigged, Player 1 can randomly select the color of his guess. This brings the worst case in a rigged contest from 0% back up to 50%. I don't think there is a way to improve on that.
Most of us reading this could lead a very comfortable life. We all have extensive knowledge that could make us useful advisors to somebody's court. I'm not talking about foreknowledge of events. How about a good knowledge of geography? Or enough math to be able to do polyalphabetic encryption in a world without good secure communications. Just having the concept of certain kinds of bows before they were developed could provide an edge in warfare.
Add language to open source licenses specifically prohibiting the use of any software, hardware or legal tactics to hinder redistribution. Specifically state that that particular clause applies not just to people who use the software, but to anyone who stores or transmits it. The value of open source is in the free distribution that allows collaborative communities to form. Any action that hinders that harms every user of open source. Use those licenses vigorously on any code or writing you produce. Make the web a minefield of intellectual property for them.
Copyright (c) 2001 by dsplat.
This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).
I am not a great fan of Microsoft or its products, but I am not, nor have I ever been an implacable enemy of them. I'm sure there are people at MS who read Slashdot, especially when the articles are about them, and it is to them that I write this, although it applies to a boarder audience.
To put my point bluntly, Microsoft was the target of antitrust prosecution precisely because it was an enormously successful company. Regardless of whether you agree with MS's tactics, it has bought out or buried an impressive list of rivals over the past two decades.
When a company stops trying to beat its rivals in the marketplace and seeks legal protection, that is the beginning of the end. Perhaps legislating away competition can protect it in a few markets. But laws are either meaningless, or they limit our freedom, as individuals or corporations. Outlawing open source when so many people are already writing it and using it would clearly fall into the category of limiting freedom. The competition will move out of the jurisdictions in which it is outlawed, but it will not die. And the protected company will grow complacent and weak.
I use both open source and Microsoft products in different settings. I think that at this point in the game both sides are strengthened by the challenge of competition. Each side has an incentive to try to hone its strengths to stave off attacks and to attempt to best the strengths of the other side.
The customer is not just a dumb lump that needs to get out of your way. they are what makes your software viable. with out them, your just a lone hacker hiding in your room, writing stuff noone will ever use.
Even if every free software developer wanted to limit the scope of our market to other free software developers, there is the issue that each of us has a finite amount of time. I use more software than I will ever have the time to actually work on. Even rebuilding everything against each new release of glibc and gcc that I install takes time. Being able to install binary distributions of large amounts of free software saves me time to work on the projects I'm involved with.
There is an important point to be made here. If something is technically possible and profitable, someone is going to want to do it. It is profitable to use the legislation to restrict other people's freedom in ways that allow you to sell more.
I don't begrudge authors and publishers a living. I actively support it by buying an enormous number of books, including printed books of material that I can get online.
The publishers are feeling threatened by technology. Sharing of books online is easy and cheap. It takes less time than buying a physical copy and costs less. Electronic copies of texts allow you to cut and paste what you want to quote with ease. If they are on the Web, they permit hyperlinking to the full version.
The problem here is that we don't have an acceptable model for how content is to be sold online. Subscriptions and broadcasting offer excellent models for information that is time-critical such as news,weather, stock quotes, even video feeds of live sports. Neither model is good for books.
We have grown used to buying a copy. When I purchase a book, I don't own the rights to the words, but that single physical copy is mine. I can read it, sell it, give it away, loan it to a friend, mark up the pages with notes, or destroy it. I have the right to read it today, next week, next year, or on my death bed 500 years from now when nanotechnology can no longer rebuild my failing body. My right to read it does not require paying an ongoing license fee, and is not subject to the continued availability of special hardware or software to make the pages readable.
Who would want to give up that flexibility and receive nothing in return?
The musicians who can get a recording contract with a big label will be protected from piracy. But will this increase the cost of talented amateurs producing their own tapes? I know dozens of people who fit into the later category. I have piles of tapes and CDs from them. It's a wonderful antidote to the prepackaged sameness of most radio stations these days.
This would mean that musicians would have to have a license to put on their music so that the media could grant that license to the user. I don't think for a minute that those licenses would be freely available to every content provider.
If that example doesn't hit close enough to home, imagine not being able to videotape your child's first words.
If and when these are available, I will buy one if I can get a guarantee in writing that it will never interfere with my ability to play back my own recordings of my family and friends or any legally acquired amateur media. I'd love to be a party to the class action lawsuit over it when that guarantee isn't met.
If people are no longer exercising their memories at all because they can rely on PDAs and other tools, certainly their memories will atrophy. However, I know a significant number of people who use various tools to keep track of large bodies of information that has no intrinsic significance in order to free themselves to learn things that are useful to them.
As an example, I stopped trying to remember my parents' phone number the first time they moved after I left home. The only importance that sequence of digits has is a way to reach them. But I still take the time to remember the names of their friends and neighbors at each new home. I've met several of them. They are important. I don't bother remembering things that I can look up when I need them, but I give more attention to things I may need to know when I can't consult my secondary storage.
If you intend to be connected to the net and have patient records online, be sure to have a solid firewall. Also, with computers in every room, there are going to be unattended computers some of the time. Run an OS with decent security and auditing to protect patient confidentiality.
To a certain extent I have to agree with you. It is typically American to either never learn a second language or make only a half-hearted attempt at it. Even those of us who make the attempt have difficulty maintaining fluency. At one time I had learned enough French and German to ask direction on the street and order a meal. I haven't used either in years and couldn't manage now. I learned even more Spanish, but I haven't spoken that in over a decade and have lost most of it.
Where monolingualism crosses the line into arrogance is when it includes the expectation that the world will come to us linguistically. Not bothering to learn other languages to speak to foreigners visiting your homeland is simply a choice. Going abroad and relying on short English words spoken loudly is arrogance.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, the good guys in Dark Angel aren't one-dimensional either. That's one of the things that I have loved about Farscape. I had the advantage of coming into it late and catching up on two seasons in a few weeks from a friend's tapes. I got to watch Crais evolve as his anger cooled. The principal villains are as much characters as the protagonists. Oh, and of course the protagonists come to blows, shoot at each other, betray each other, and have unpleasantly complicated sex lives that are at least more believable than your average prime time soap opera.
My VCR current records Farscape, Andromeda, Witchblade, and West Wing. As I have said in other comments, I really like good characters. The characters on West Wing are some of the best I've ever seen. At their high points, all of the best SF series hit the intensity and wit that these guys hit nearly every week.
I don't watch or read much fiction other than SF. There's so much good SF, and so little time. But there are exceptions. ER and West Wing jump to mind immediately. I wouldn't call, West Wing SF, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.
I really like the show. Lexa's character is great, not just because Lexa is gorgeous. But in spite of some initial misgivings, the character I enjoy the most these days is Tyr. At first, the Nietzscheans just looked like a strawman for bashing several facets of individualism. Yet, I have watched Tyr's opinion of the Commonwealth change, while Tyr himself has changed little. His motivations and his identity have not altered. Sometimes the best perspective from which to understand a thing is that of someone to whom it is either completely foreign or totally anathema. SF as a genre is one of the best for doing this.
As for the psychoanalysis, I have two thoughts. First, when my computer develops a personality, Romy is a pretty good one. Second, after years of being the voice of Star Trek's computers, Majel Roddenberry has stepped aside. The torch has been passed to Lexa Doig. I don't believe that Majel had any hand in the casting herself, but she is the show's executive producer. Arranging an indisputably competent successor is itself an act of considerable competence.
Not even close. Science fiction hell would be all of the best series of the past few decades with an endless stream of new episodes written by incompetent hacks. It would be abandoning all continuity. It would be lines spoken by the wrong characters.
Good SF requires all of the same things that all good fiction requires. The mix is different, and the science has to be right. But bad characters and sloppy writing ruin anything.
LittleStone wrote:
.sig seems particularly apt today.
> But I think that spammers should stop spamming
> the USENET for a day in memory of such a great
> man.
If the spammers understood Usenet for what it is they wouldn't be spamming it. They don't know that he died. They don't know that he ever lived. The average spammer probably thinks that newsgroups were invented by either Microsoft or AOL, and that they've been around since about 1995. He probably never reads them.
Somehow, my
At the next Usenet Olympiad, let there be a moment of silence in his memory before the traditional lighting of the flame thrower. All in favor, follow-up to alt.test with ME TOO!!! All opposed, spelling flame.
Yes, I offered this with tongue in cheek. But in all honesty, we all owe him a debt of gratitude. The net would not be what it is today without his creation. I have nothing more appropriate to say than "thank you".
I do not have the knowledge of Asian languages necessary to evaluate the arguments on each side. However, even if Unicode were entirely inadequate for Asian languages it has already started to solve a very real problem. Unicode font sets representing the European characters encoded by it are now available on a variety of platforms. This makes possible a single character set with which the speakers of a number of languages can exchange information. Tools can support Unicode rather than lots of character sets. If you speak a language that isn't a common target for localization of software, this makes a wider range of tools available to you for processing date in your own language.
Perhaps The Ridgefield Press should sue for all of the profits from those movies. It is clear that they could not possibly have been/be as successful without the use of the paper's good name.
I wonder if any signatory countries to the Hague Convention allow that and would be willing to offer me a fair price for that service. I might be interested. I'd be happy to license it for a reasonable price, along with an editorial veto if I don't like the context, say in a mailing list. Of course, my license would not include any right to rent it or resell it.
Imagine that. No, wait. I know a radio station that does just that. I can't stand at least a third of the stuff they play. Of course that still makes them at least twice as good as most stations. But I have heard dozens of excellent bands on their station months or years before anyone else played them. Oh, and they're on the Web.
Maybe they'd be willing to negotiate trip in exchange for a couple of live reports about it on Geeks In Space. Yeah, they'd probably still want a few buck, but it might bring the price down to the budget of geeks. And of course, without a doubt, Slashdot would get slashdotted.
I discussed this issue at some length in a class I took a year or two ago on user interface design. We were taught the value of interfaces built around the idea of discovery of features rather than remembering commands. However, I pointed out an important fact of life in software. The value of software is in large part a result of what we can automate. Any task that requires that I click, even once, each time I perform it because some portion of it can't be scripted sets an upper limit on the productivity I can achieve.
I don't mean in any way to criticize the usefulness of a GUI. GUIs are excellent for first time or infrequent tasks. They are also good for tasks where there are a number of parameters which will be different each time the task is performed. The common factor in each of these cases is that a significant amount of user thought is dedicated to the task in each case. Making the interface obvious and eliminating the need for the user to think about the interface is useful.
Now take the other end of the spectrum. A good example is a nightly backup. My thoughts about the task once it is set up should be minimal. I want it foolproof and quick to execute. I want to put in the tape and run a single, simple command (a script without parameters or a single button click). Better still, I want to change the tape each morning and have it run automatically overnight.
The bottom line on this comes down to the whole reason that users (the "my grandmother" model) don't write applications as a rule. To completely automate something requires an analysis of all of the different execution paths and either automating them or bailing out with decent messages so that you can reconstruct what happened.
What I am talking about is the difference between a user interface and an API. To the typical user, APIs are not important. Most people do not automate any portion of the production of the annual holiday letter to friends and family, and if they do, they want to do it using a mail merge feature with a user interface. Users want applications and are concerned with the interface. Programmers want to create applications, often custom one-offs to save ourselves time and want a good API.
Much of the tension in discussions of user interfaces arises when someone doesn't understand or forgets this distinction, or decides that one is unimportant. How many Slashdot users have grumbled about losing a Unix (substitute your favorite flavor) workstation in favor of a Windows box because somebody made a blanket statement that users' productivity is better under Windows. Hey, it's no secret. For users, people who never code, never even script, ubiquitous GUIs improve productivity. Is my mother going to remember commands for a CLI? Only under duress. But anything that comes without an API hampers programmers in exactly what we do. I'm not interested in pointing and clicking to produce a bug report for my boss each week. I want to write a script that queries the database, generates and formats the report and e-mails it to all the interested parties. If I can get it to query our source control to find out the state of the tracks we are using for the fixes to those bugs, so much the better. I want to embed my knowledge of how to solve that problem into a script and not think about it any more.
The real question is who's productivity you are measuring and on what kind of tasks. GUIs bring up the low end and the average users' productivity. Lest we ever forget, that is a good thing. And they improve productivity on large numbers of infrequently and irregularly executed tasks. That too is a good thing. But they are not the most efficient means of doing everything.
If clicking widgets were the most efficient interface around, why would anyone have keyboards anymore? As I finish this comment, the thought has occured to me that my mental state is different when I am typing the text than when I am dealing with the other issues involved in submitting it. As I type the words, I am thinking only of my words. As a touch-typist, the interface of the keyboard has disappeared from my conscious awareness through years of practice. I have never achieved that state of direct interaction through a pure GUI.
Since we must obey the law, it should be accessible to us. Copyrighted material must either lose its copyright when used as the text of laws, or governments must be prohibited from using copyrighted laws.
As for NSA Linux, the NSA would have to violate the terms of the GPL to release their changes in the public domain. You can argue that they should not have been allowed to publish except in the public domain, but it is hard to argue that they should have been allowed to violate the copyright on the various code they modified.
The biggest difference here is that no one is compelled to use Linux. Obedience of the law is not similarly voluntary.
Announcing the Open Source Intellectual Property Project. This project intends to copyright everything said, written or done by all of its members. All intellectual property of the project will be licensed under the GPL. We will be particularly strict about enforcing the application of the GPL to all derivative works.
Copyright (C) 2001 The Open Source Intellectual Property Project. This work may be copied and distributed under the conditions of the Gnu Public License.
I thought I had made peace with the FreeBSD users' group after all these years. Now you tell me that I have to start the flame war anew. You must be one of those twisted vi and tcsh users!
Of course my face, although not my hat, is red. The word simultaneously does appear in the rules to describe how the guesses must happen. This solution only works if the guesses are sequential. It is interesting only in that it demonstrates that as long as the only communication is a choice of guessing or passing there will always be at least one losing case.
I think your solution generalizes to any number of players.
Player 1 guesses Red only if he sees all Blue hats. This strategy is only triggered in two cases regardless of the number of players. It will always be wrong in half of those two cases, and it is the only guess that ever takes place.
Each subsequent player ignores the colors of the hats of the players who preceded him. He is only concerned with the colors of the hats of the player who will follow. If he sees only Blue hats among them, he states that his own hat is Red.
This strategy works because if the first player passed, the rest of the players know that he saw at least one Red hat. If a player sees no Red hats among the players that follow him, and he is not the first player, then he knows that the players who passed to him saw the Red hat on his head.
Since there must be a single guess to differentiate between two cases to start the inference, there is one losing case. We can't improve the odds to a sure thing. However, we have just reduced them to one losing case regardless of the number of players. Therefore, the best strategy loses still loses 1 time in 2^n cases.
If the players believe that the contest is rigged, Player 1 can randomly select the color of his guess. This brings the worst case in a rigged contest from 0% back up to 50%. I don't think there is a way to improve on that.
Most of us reading this could lead a very comfortable life. We all have extensive knowledge that could make us useful advisors to somebody's court. I'm not talking about foreknowledge of events. How about a good knowledge of geography? Or enough math to be able to do polyalphabetic encryption in a world without good secure communications. Just having the concept of certain kinds of bows before they were developed could provide an edge in warfare.
Add language to open source licenses specifically prohibiting the use of any software, hardware or legal tactics to hinder redistribution. Specifically state that that particular clause applies not just to people who use the software, but to anyone who stores or transmits it. The value of open source is in the free distribution that allows collaborative communities to form. Any action that hinders that harms every user of open source. Use those licenses vigorously on any code or writing you produce. Make the web a minefield of intellectual property for them.
Copyright (c) 2001 by dsplat.
This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).
I am not a great fan of Microsoft or its products, but I am not, nor have I ever been an implacable enemy of them. I'm sure there are people at MS who read Slashdot, especially when the articles are about them, and it is to them that I write this, although it applies to a boarder audience.
To put my point bluntly, Microsoft was the target of antitrust prosecution precisely because it was an enormously successful company. Regardless of whether you agree with MS's tactics, it has bought out or buried an impressive list of rivals over the past two decades.
When a company stops trying to beat its rivals in the marketplace and seeks legal protection, that is the beginning of the end. Perhaps legislating away competition can protect it in a few markets. But laws are either meaningless, or they limit our freedom, as individuals or corporations. Outlawing open source when so many people are already writing it and using it would clearly fall into the category of limiting freedom. The competition will move out of the jurisdictions in which it is outlawed, but it will not die. And the protected company will grow complacent and weak.
I use both open source and Microsoft products in different settings. I think that at this point in the game both sides are strengthened by the challenge of competition. Each side has an incentive to try to hone its strengths to stave off attacks and to attempt to best the strengths of the other side.
Even if every free software developer wanted to limit the scope of our market to other free software developers, there is the issue that each of us has a finite amount of time. I use more software than I will ever have the time to actually work on. Even rebuilding everything against each new release of glibc and gcc that I install takes time. Being able to install binary distributions of large amounts of free software saves me time to work on the projects I'm involved with.
There is an important point to be made here. If something is technically possible and profitable, someone is going to want to do it. It is profitable to use the legislation to restrict other people's freedom in ways that allow you to sell more.
I don't begrudge authors and publishers a living. I actively support it by buying an enormous number of books, including printed books of material that I can get online.
The publishers are feeling threatened by technology. Sharing of books online is easy and cheap. It takes less time than buying a physical copy and costs less. Electronic copies of texts allow you to cut and paste what you want to quote with ease. If they are on the Web, they permit hyperlinking to the full version.
The problem here is that we don't have an acceptable model for how content is to be sold online. Subscriptions and broadcasting offer excellent models for information that is time-critical such as news,weather, stock quotes, even video feeds of live sports. Neither model is good for books.
We have grown used to buying a copy. When I purchase a book, I don't own the rights to the words, but that single physical copy is mine. I can read it, sell it, give it away, loan it to a friend, mark up the pages with notes, or destroy it. I have the right to read it today, next week, next year, or on my death bed 500 years from now when nanotechnology can no longer rebuild my failing body. My right to read it does not require paying an ongoing license fee, and is not subject to the continued availability of special hardware or software to make the pages readable.
Who would want to give up that flexibility and receive nothing in return?
The musicians who can get a recording contract with a big label will be protected from piracy. But will this increase the cost of talented amateurs producing their own tapes? I know dozens of people who fit into the later category. I have piles of tapes and CDs from them. It's a wonderful antidote to the prepackaged sameness of most radio stations these days.
This would mean that musicians would have to have a license to put on their music so that the media could grant that license to the user. I don't think for a minute that those licenses would be freely available to every content provider.
If that example doesn't hit close enough to home, imagine not being able to videotape your child's first words.
If and when these are available, I will buy one if I can get a guarantee in writing that it will never interfere with my ability to play back my own recordings of my family and friends or any legally acquired amateur media. I'd love to be a party to the class action lawsuit over it when that guarantee isn't met.
If people are no longer exercising their memories at all because they can rely on PDAs and other tools, certainly their memories will atrophy. However, I know a significant number of people who use various tools to keep track of large bodies of information that has no intrinsic significance in order to free themselves to learn things that are useful to them.
As an example, I stopped trying to remember my parents' phone number the first time they moved after I left home. The only importance that sequence of digits has is a way to reach them. But I still take the time to remember the names of their friends and neighbors at each new home. I've met several of them. They are important. I don't bother remembering things that I can look up when I need them, but I give more attention to things I may need to know when I can't consult my secondary storage.
If you intend to be connected to the net and have patient records online, be sure to have a solid firewall. Also, with computers in every room, there are going to be unattended computers some of the time. Run an OS with decent security and auditing to protect patient confidentiality.
To a certain extent I have to agree with you. It is typically American to either never learn a second language or make only a half-hearted attempt at it. Even those of us who make the attempt have difficulty maintaining fluency. At one time I had learned enough French and German to ask direction on the street and order a meal. I haven't used either in years and couldn't manage now. I learned even more Spanish, but I haven't spoken that in over a decade and have lost most of it.
Where monolingualism crosses the line into arrogance is when it includes the expectation that the world will come to us linguistically. Not bothering to learn other languages to speak to foreigners visiting your homeland is simply a choice. Going abroad and relying on short English words spoken loudly is arrogance.
Sed mi flue parolas Esperanto, kiel naciulo.