I'm sure Douglas Lenat would disagree that AI is dead. There's even an open source version of his Cyc program to play with, if you want a shot at creating your own robotic overlord. Of course the resulting bogon flux from large scale use might be more dangerous to the Earth than the LHC.
My question has always been what is to stop the government (or anyone else for that matter) from going to the public key server and getting your key to decrypt your email?
Two reasons:
You can't decrypt anything with any public key. You only use it to encrypt email to the key owner.
Possession of the public key provides absolutely no clue to the private key.
I think this is a big part of the problem. When you have that kind of time line, the project loses focus. Remember all of the things that were supposed to be in Vista but were dropped along the way? There never seemed to be a clear vision of what it was supposed to be. It doesn't have to be that way. NASA certainly has shown that long term projects can have spectacular results.
In English beer measure, which I learned is different from English ale measure (op. cit.), somewhere between a butt (1296 pints) and a tun (2268 pints).
>0.50 liter = 1.06 US pints = 0.88 Imperial pints.
[Smacks forehead] My bad. US pint, Imperial pint, Scottish pint, US dry pint, (argh) troy ounce, avoirdupois ounce, apothecaries ounce, Maria Theresa ounce. God, I used to know all this stuff. Thankfully beer helps one forget.:-)
Leaving out the obvious fact that English pubs still serve beer in pints, 0.50 liter = 1.06 pints. This should be blindingly obvious from the rather well-known fact that a liter is larger than a quart. But, given your rather beerish handle, I figure you already know all this.:-)
I recommend the Humanscale Freedom Chair with Headrest. I ahve used one for eight years following back surgery, and I love it. I prefer it to the Aeron. It comes in lots of color/fabric choices and is virtually indestructible. The only drawback is price. List is about $1,000, but you can find it for $150-200 less on the net. It also looks cool.
Good points. I had somehow not internalized in reading that this guy is the presiding judge of the Ninth Circuit. Is it usual for these guys to sit as trial court judges? Even though he is probably pretty immune from any other consequences, I'm guessing he has blown any chance of an appointment to the Big Bench with this unless Larry Flint gets elected President.
I would have to say that the defendant's attorney definitely got his client into the right court. Sadly for said defendant, the judge will have to recuse himself now. Unless,the judge rules that it is not pornography, and then everybody goes home happy; except the prosecutors, of course.
And in the taxonomy of taxonomists, we find that taxonomists can be sorted into "lumpers" and "splitters". There tend to be more splitters, because it is easier to write papers arguing for splitting an existing taxon than it is to write papers arguing for combining two or more existing taxa, particularly if the original namers are still alive (and possibly the dean of your department.)
It gets complicated when nature doesn't cooperate by forming things in easily sorted groups. Then you get long, ongoing arguments about whether to lump or split; where do you draw the line, or should you draw a line at all. Perhaps astronomers should take a page from the biologists and create some infraspecific taxa (e.g. subspecies, varieties). Then you could call anything that is large enough to pull itself into a roughly spherical shape a planet, while distinguishing rocky, inner planets, gas giant planets, and icy, outer planets.
Even a ruthless rat-bastard like Nixon knew he could never pull this off. An insecure coward like Bush would never have the balls to even think about it.
I do agree that this is a waste of time. He'll be gone before anything could really happen. It's more important for Congress to deal with some of the real problems. Unfortunately, in an election yearr that's not going to happen.
Here's a press release about his affiliation with his son's company. Here is a speaker bio of Steven Richter, and here is the Wikipedia entry confirming the statements in the GP post. While I agree that it is nice to document one's assertions, it is pretty easy to fact check stuff like this.
>When astronomers make some new discovery about the cosmos do they tack on the end - "there that will show them astrologers up!"
No, they don't. But then again, the astrologers aren't trying to put the astronomers out of business. You almost never hear an astrologer compare an astronomer to Satan and Hitler, something that is an everyday occurrence on the creationist/biologist front. Creationism is a religion, and creationists see evolutionary biologists as heretics that need to be burned at the stake.
This is nothing new. Church leaders have been building bonfires of whatever was deemed ungodly for centuries. Girolamo Savonarola was spectacularly successful with his Bonfires of the Vanities in 1490's Florence. It all came to a bad end, at least from the viewpoint of Savonarola and the conservatives.
>JonKatz hasn't been here for so long that I figured none of the (relative) newbies would get it.
For those needing an explanation of JonKatz, the slashdot controversy is discussed in the Wikipedia article. Short version: author pretends to technical expertise he obviously lacks... gets roasted... stupidly persists... etc.
Why shouldn't WoW or SL be able to integrate directly with Skype, AIM, email, Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter?
Oh Dear God, No! The very last thing I want is a phone call from a character in WoW. Besides, imagine trying to sneak by some sleeping horror when you Cell Phone of Aetheric Communication goes off with a nice Hendrix ringtone.
Dr. Dyer: Base...We've arrived at the camp. All of the men and dogs have been slaughtered. We have discovered a number of star-shaped mounds that Prof. Lake has begun to investigate. There appear to be strange beings buried under each one. Danforth and I are taking the airplane to scout over the mountains. Something seems to have gone that way. We'll be back soon. No worries.
Slashdot Mirror
>you could see the buildings of LA on the horizon
So it was a clear day then?
I'm sure Douglas Lenat would disagree that AI is dead. There's even an open source version of his Cyc program to play with, if you want a shot at creating your own robotic overlord. Of course the resulting bogon flux from large scale use might be more dangerous to the Earth than the LHC.
>USENET doesn't have a 160 character limit.
Just think how much better and more readable some newsgroups would be if it did.Two reasons:
- You can't decrypt anything with any public key. You only use it to encrypt email to the key owner.
- Possession of the public key provides absolutely no clue to the private key.
For a brief explanation of why, read this.True, but from the Swedish speaking minority of Finns.
At the time (autumn 1951), it would have been "God Save the King."
I think this is a big part of the problem. When you have that kind of time line, the project loses focus. Remember all of the things that were supposed to be in Vista but were dropped along the way? There never seemed to be a clear vision of what it was supposed to be. It doesn't have to be that way. NASA certainly has shown that long term projects can have spectacular results.
In English beer measure, which I learned is different from English ale measure (op. cit.), somewhere between a butt (1296 pints) and a tun (2268 pints).
It goes: pint, quart, pottle, gallon, firkin, kilderkin, barrel, hogshead, butt, tun.
>0.50 liter = 1.06 US pints = 0.88 Imperial pints.
[Smacks forehead] My bad. US pint, Imperial pint, Scottish pint, US dry pint, (argh) troy ounce, avoirdupois ounce, apothecaries ounce, Maria Theresa ounce. God, I used to know all this stuff. Thankfully beer helps one forget. :-)
>Half litre is like way less than a pint, man.
Leaving out the obvious fact that English pubs still serve beer in pints, 0.50 liter = 1.06 pints. This should be blindingly obvious from the rather well-known fact that a liter is larger than a quart. But, given your rather beerish handle, I figure you already know all this. :-)
I recommend the Humanscale Freedom Chair with Headrest. I ahve used one for eight years following back surgery, and I love it. I prefer it to the Aeron. It comes in lots of color/fabric choices and is virtually indestructible. The only drawback is price. List is about $1,000, but you can find it for $150-200 less on the net. It also looks cool.
Good points. I had somehow not internalized in reading that this guy is the presiding judge of the Ninth Circuit. Is it usual for these guys to sit as trial court judges? Even though he is probably pretty immune from any other consequences, I'm guessing he has blown any chance of an appointment to the Big Bench with this unless Larry Flint gets elected President.
I would have to say that the defendant's attorney definitely got his client into the right court. Sadly for said defendant, the judge will have to recuse himself now. Unless,the judge rules that it is not pornography, and then everybody goes home happy; except the prosecutors, of course.
And in the taxonomy of taxonomists, we find that taxonomists can be sorted into "lumpers" and "splitters". There tend to be more splitters, because it is easier to write papers arguing for splitting an existing taxon than it is to write papers arguing for combining two or more existing taxa, particularly if the original namers are still alive (and possibly the dean of your department.)
It gets complicated when nature doesn't cooperate by forming things in easily sorted groups. Then you get long, ongoing arguments about whether to lump or split; where do you draw the line, or should you draw a line at all. Perhaps astronomers should take a page from the biologists and create some infraspecific taxa (e.g. subspecies, varieties). Then you could call anything that is large enough to pull itself into a roughly spherical shape a planet, while distinguishing rocky, inner planets, gas giant planets, and icy, outer planets.
Even a ruthless rat-bastard like Nixon knew he could never pull this off. An insecure coward like Bush would never have the balls to even think about it.
I do agree that this is a waste of time. He'll be gone before anything could really happen. It's more important for Congress to deal with some of the real problems. Unfortunately, in an election yearr that's not going to happen.
Here's a press release about his affiliation with his son's company. Here is a speaker bio of Steven Richter, and here is the Wikipedia entry confirming the statements in the GP post. While I agree that it is nice to document one's assertions, it is pretty easy to fact check stuff like this.
>When astronomers make some new discovery about the cosmos do they tack on the end - "there that will show them astrologers up!"
No, they don't. But then again, the astrologers aren't trying to put the astronomers out of business. You almost never hear an astrologer compare an astronomer to Satan and Hitler, something that is an everyday occurrence on the creationist/biologist front. Creationism is a religion, and creationists see evolutionary biologists as heretics that need to be burned at the stake.
>Were Norman's publisations peer-reviewed? (Given their literary qualities I doubt it.)
Of course they were. The problem is that Norman's peers were into Sci-Fi/BDSM with appalling literary qualities.
This is nothing new. Church leaders have been building bonfires of whatever was deemed ungodly for centuries. Girolamo Savonarola was spectacularly successful with his Bonfires of the Vanities in 1490's Florence. It all came to a bad end, at least from the viewpoint of Savonarola and the conservatives.
>JonKatz hasn't been here for so long that I figured none of the (relative) newbies would get it.
For those needing an explanation of JonKatz, the slashdot controversy is discussed in the Wikipedia article. Short version: author pretends to technical expertise he obviously lacks... gets roasted... stupidly persists... etc.
True, but the AT&T contract involves the mortgaging of at least one gonad.
Oh Dear God, No! The very last thing I want is a phone call from a character in WoW. Besides, imagine trying to sneak by some sleeping horror when you Cell Phone of Aetheric Communication goes off with a nice Hendrix ringtone.
Don't lock up the modems. Get them out and make minors use them. No broadband for you. Nothing faster than a Hayes 2400 until you turn 21. :-)
>Like the geek scoring Ally Sheedy.
That's how you know it was a science fiction movie and not a documentary.
Dr. Dyer: Base...We've arrived at the camp. All of the men and dogs have been slaughtered. We have discovered a number of star-shaped mounds that Prof. Lake has begun to investigate. There appear to be strange beings buried under each one. Danforth and I are taking the airplane to scout over the mountains. Something seems to have gone that way. We'll be back soon. No worries.