Then you should read "Up the Line" by Robert Silverberg. That's exactly the subject matter -- guy goes back in time and does a maternal ancestor. Repeatedly and in a manner you'll probably sympathize with. Quite entertaining and very, very well done as you would expect of Silverberg.
Why should I have to tell people whether I am a lawyer or not?
...so we know if we're supposed to run you over on sight, that's why. It's also mandatory to disclose if you're a politician, same reason, but without the Bard's seal of approval.
My 3 GHz P4 runs ray traces in half the time as compared to my 1.42 GHz G4 based mini. Same ray tracer -- I wrote every line of it -- and the same C compiler (GCC) used to create the executable.
That performance is about what I'd expect from a 1.42 GHz P4.
These processors are very close in clock-for-clock performance. Modern CPUs try really hard to get things done as fast as they can, and mostly, they do well at it.
There's nothing wrong with the PPC other than it costs too much, makes too much heat, and can't seem to be clocked much faster than 3 GHz under the best of circumstances. *cough*
surely Apple will be purchasing a much smaller percentage of Intel's output...
Yes, surely. However, the key issue is that Intel won't have to make anything for them... Intel already makes high speed, require-liquid-metal-and-a-refrigerator chips and low voltage, run cool and sleep nice or take a quick run and then back to sleep chips for laptops, and all manner of stuff in between.
Apple can leverage off the zillions of laptops and desktops made for Windows using the same CPUs and perhaps even the same CPU support chips.
So I don't think the fact that Apple will be buying small percentages is a point that affects the quality or service Apple will get from Intel. And remember, IBM's inability to deliver a fast laptop-capable G5 isn't a problem that Intel has -- they have reasonably fast laptop chips -- so there is no similar issue to compare Apples to Apples, as it were.
If a shuttle vehicle (not "the" shuttle, "a" shuttle) is 500 km up, then it can sit on a tail of fire, pick your butt up, and leave. No magic about it, and 500 km of lift won't have to be expended to get it there repeatedly; just enough to back off orbital velocity and the drop down, then up, then regain that orbital speed.
Yes, you need thrust. No, you don't need the same energy budget as you would to lift you off the ground.
No. The end of the cable has to be in GSO, but your destination doesn't. You could go part way up, debark, transfer to a low-G shuttle and go visit something that is in LEO. There is no reason to be in GSO unless the station / satellite / destination has to hang over one point on earth all the time (and it'd be considerably less boring if a "space hotel" wasn't in GSO anyway.)
Certainly the end of the cable has to be in GSO, but really, other than communications and weather/observation satellites, what else does?
It'd still take a lot less energy budget to get you to one of those from a space elevator stop than it would by ground-based rocket.
Personally, I'd opt to listen to Joe Satriani or Tony McAlpine; most lyrics bore me before I even hear them.
The US government can only do what is expressly provided for in the consitution. Everything else is essentially a rights violation of some sort (and unconstitutional).
You are being naive. The government can do whatever they want. And they do. The higher you go (city, state, federal), the more freedom they have.
The government shot some kids at Kent State. Murdered them in cold blood, from quite a distance, using high-powered rifles. The government was not punished, neither at the shooter level or at any other level. Was this a rights violation? Assuredly. Can the gov't do this anyway? Assuredly. How? because they not only make the rules, they enforce the rules. Or not.
The government invaded a sovereign country that had not attacked them, namely Iraq. This is illegal, but they managed to pull it off. No one's been punished yet (except people who refused to go, or to otherwise participate.) You think anyone's going to be punished? We know the government flat out lied to the public to get support for the invasion; we know the Shrub was absolutely complicit in this lie, we know he spearheaded the whole thing, either on his own or as a figurehead for people in the shadows, do you think he, or anyone else in the government will ever be punished for this? Or are you still laboring under the illusion that we should be in Iraq for some reason? (other than greed for oil, I mean.)
The government can register a criminal for life, after conviction, even though this is absolutely forbidden by the constitution in the double jeopardy clause. In this example, the government took a little time to invent the idea that holding an individual up to the public on a list of miscreants is magically not punishment, although 200 years of prior law and legal thinking disagrees uniformly with that notion. You might think this is a state issue, and it would be, except that the Supreme court heard the issue after it crawled its way up the court system and said, "sure, that's fine" which makes this particular constitutional violation fed all the way.
The government can tell you what you can drink (prohibition) or otherwise ingest for recreational purposes (current set of drug laws) although there is absolutely no constitutional basis for this. They can't be stopped, punished, or otherwise bludgeoned by constitutional means. You can vote 'em out, some of them anyway, but it takes many years to kill stupidities such as these -- again, prohibition being a good example and pot being even better, as we're still waiting for the pendulum to swing away from that particular set of clueless lies. Mind you, I'm not a drug or alchohol user -- I don't consider either a sensible use of my time -- but clearly, if I wanted to, there is no constitutional basis for stopping me from smoking pot.
The government can engage in blackmail. For instance, if a state doesn't toe the line on some particular issue, the feds withhold highway funds from that state. The constitution forbids the feds from making state laws, so they turned to blackmail. Do you see any feds being prosecuted for blackmail? No? I didn't think so. Me either.
The government can declare you something awful (terrorist, for instance) and not give you the right to counsel, or a phone call, or anything else. It is unconstitutional as hell, illegal as hell, and they do it anyway. No one gets punished; in fact, typically, no one manages to reverse such a thing, not that you could ever recover the lost time, of course.
The feds put Christian symbols and statements all over everything from money to buildings to sessions of congress and the senate, though they are explicitly by letter and obvious intent of the founding paperwork not to favor any religion. Anyone getting punished? Hell no, instead, we get Christian frosting added to the pledge of allegiance.
These are the same feds that told teenagers in the 60's that they couldn't vote, they couldn't drink, but the
There are other issues as well. Intelligence is almost certainly not memory. Yet a very large amount of our "grey matter" is consumed with issues directly related to memory. 2d memory, 3d memory, smell and other non-visual memory... an interesting question is, how much of the remaining brain matter is involved in "processing"?
We know how to store memories; we've got multiple paradigms for just about anything you can think of. Some of them probably have no analog in the human brain. We know how to sense things -- we've got everything from cameras to sonar to magnetic field sensors -- so finding input is not a problem. We're capable of building huge storage systems, though no one has really sat down and given that a shot (lots of expense, here, though less all the time.) It's certainly in no way outside our technological capability.
Now, consider... for a while, it was deemed a "very, very difficult problem" to get a robot chassis to walk up stairs. All manner of research teams were working on it. It was eventually solved by a one guy with a z80, which isn't exactly the peak of modern computing ability. Turns out that the key (as usual) was an adequate methodology, not huge amounts of computing power trying to solve calculus on the fly.
This last bit offers quite a bit of hope for AI as an emergent quality of a better approach. There is no validity at all to any line of thought that says every possible approach to emergent AI has been tried. In reality, only a few methods have been given a serious try.
I think there is a huge flaw in the idea that "X teraflops" will be required before we can have AI; that's a complete and utter mis-statement of the problem, and I think I can show you why to just about anyone's satisfaction:
Intelligence isn't about speed; it is about results. Given enough memory to store and retrieve information, and enough sensors to obtain that information, and a software methodology to process that information, if it takes said software a week, or a month, or a year, to formulate and present an answer that we might come up with for any general question -- even though we humans might arrive at the answer it in seconds -- then I think what you have is in every way is an intelligence that is working on a different time scale. It's not less intelligent, it's just not as fast. That will change its utility to us, certainly, but it won't change the fact of its intelligence. And the day someone comes up with the software methodology is the day prior to the day that engineers begin to create hardware optimized for that methodology, and software engineers begin to optimize the methodology itself. The fact that a slower intelligence could outlast us in terms of years available to think is interesting as well; an interstellar space probe might make very good use of "slow" intelligence, for instance, given that as far as we can tell at this point, interstellar means tens of years just to get started.
My instincts and my money are on the position above; I don't think AI will be nearly as complex or resource-intensive as academics and pundits are making it out to be, and furthermore, once we figure it out, we can expect to see it explode in a way that makes the current technological revolution look like molasses in January. Making a new AI will be doable in the time it takes to copy bits from here to there. Seconds, or a fraction of a second. If the most advanced researcher in the world comes up with one, there is no particular reason that the lamest hacker can't have one five minutes later.
It's always good to keep in mind that folks like Minsky at MIT have been completely, utterly wrong about the simplest, most peripheral AI issues, for instance neural nets, wrong to a degree that has actually retarded progress, and have been found out later (though you don't hear much about it.) The conventional wisdom, even amongst the "AI community", is only as valid as it is, not as valid as the level of respect or reputat
It was not my intent to mis-state how the issue was involved; my lack of familiarity with terminology failed me here. It shouldn't have been even mentioned, is what I'm trying to say.
The only valid issue should be, child porn, or no child porn. Not encryption. Did the defendant have some, or not? Did they produce some, or not? Did they distribute some, or not? If you have to point to the fact that the defendant has a means to hide information in the course of trying to villify them for creating, possession, or distribution of child porn, then you and your case suck, just as bad as the laws that allow you to bring such complete and utter irrelevancy into the courtroom do. Hopefully that was clear enough, precise legal terminology aside.
The reason that smart people are upset about this is that encryption technology stands a risk of being tarred by the same brush that society is using to paint your basic perv, and that brush is already dangerously out of hand.
Next, we'll have the Librarian's law, where owners of bookshelves are registered for life on state websites. Oh, wait, we'll need a federal registry, too.
If the state can't prove this fellow had or produced child porn without referring to the simple fact that he has encryption software, the state has no business bothering him, in my estimation.
Encryption tools shouldn't be admitted as evidence of intent to commit a crime in any way, shape or form. Any more than owning fast shoes (sneakers) is a crime, even though you were walking in sneakers when you held up the bank.
The crime here is (should be) abusing the trust and/or corpus of an individual the state asserts is unable to manage their own sexuality (and the state should probably have to prove that, too.)
Anything beyond that is legal sophistry at best, and clueless babbling of a legal system completely out of control at worst.
Just because it is law, doesn't mean it isn't stupid. Quite the contrary.
Ok. Perv has bookshelves. Hides said photos in between the books. The brilliant, insightful courts:
"We find that evidence of appellant's bookshelf use and the existence of books in his house was at least somewhat relevant to the state's case against him"
If there is anything more ridiculous than blaming the weapon for the act of the person, I'm sure I can't think of it offhand.
The perv did the act, and the perv should get the attention. What he or she did it with has absolutely no bearing on the case -- but you can bet dollars to donuts that some moron is going to be all about banning PGP now because it "contributes to the child porn/perv problem."
I can see the actual state of affairs, instead of just what Apple's marketing wants me to see. Rest assured, I'd let you point the current state of affairs out if you knew what it was. Since you clearly don't, however:
If the GPU doesn't have enough oomph to do something, then by all means, load the CPU with the task. Don't just make it unavailable to Mini users. I'm speaking here of some of the effects like "ripple" that, if I understand correctly, are not available on the Mini. I am most certainly not "confusing hardware support with what the hardware can support." If the mini requires the hardware of the CPU to be used for some things where the hardware of the GPU is used in other machines, fine -- then I'm looking for that specific support. Especially from a company you want to characterize as a hardware company (a characterization that I most profoundly disagree with, more on that in a bit.)
If you have to go to a "linux like" level and configure Apache, for instance, then the support for Mac users is considerably different, now isn't it? On the other hand, under Linux, you're going to have GUI configuration tools and no one is going to be saying you can't use them because you didn't buy this or that. Which is where the advantage comes in. With linux, you get the goodies, all of them, whatever they are. And that's no small thing. With the Mac, you get a crippled system or a system with everything, depending on what you pay. Which is certainly not consumer friendly, re your #5. As far as my comfort level goes, I'm awesomely comfortable, thanks for your concern. I'm not talking about me here, I'm speaking of Apple's general market, which isn't me -- it's people who need GUI based tools, and for them, linux is going to do a better job because those tools are becoming more sophisticated every day (I'm alpha testing a GUI/wizard based Apache configurator right now that is just awesome, in fact -- it even handles SSL certs and configuration, a sore spot for Apache.) Linux isn't just about the command line anymore, and it hasn't been since about... red hat 9 or so. Perhaps earlier. RH9 is the earliest server system I've got around here that can be managed entirely via GUI, anyway.
OS X is not Linux. OS X is derived from something else. It's important to keep that in mind, as there are consequences. You will run into many, many things that OS X will not do out of the box, or easily even if you grab a project, such as compile something like Midnight Commander because, as it isn't linux and (apparently, correct me if I'm wrong, of course) as it has GPL-related licensing conflicts, the requisite environment isn't there though it is there on just about any linux distribution you can imagine.
Apple is not a hardware company. If they were, they'd be dead. That's because they have, since time immemorial, sold inferior hardware. Right on back to the Apple II, when they used a crappy 6502 instead of (for instance) a 6800 or a z80, or later a 6809, which was an awesome 8-bit MPU, probably the best ever made. Apple's PPC designs have been (a lot) slower than x86 based hardware since they saw the light of day and still are to this day, even with the dual G5 at the latest and greatest MHz. And don't even start with "MHz != MHz", because that's a load of FUD itself. For instance, my 3 GHz x86 linux machine runs ray traces -- regardless of the scene being modeled -- in just the appropriate bit less than half the time that my 1.42 GHz Mini does. Compiled from source, using GCC. I wrote the ray tracer from scratch; I know it's a pretty decent computing task mix. That clock-speed/time-taken relationship stays the same no matter if I do an integer ray trace or a float or a double, too. When software==software, MHz==MHz, pretty much.
Then we can look at other Apple hardware for examples of what a bad hardware company they make. Consider one of the newest Apple mouse efforts. One button, as per usual and still clueless as ever.
I think it'll just be a matter of time before the Mini's particular combination of wifi, bluetooth, video hardware and superdrive are all well supported 100% by the more active linux distributions.
It takes time. Even Apple hasn't 100% supported the hardware yet; for instance, some of the new Tiger desktop effects don't run on a mini, because the Mini's video chipset hasn't been worked into Tiger's new vector processing engine.
As someone else here pointed out, Apple has made an artificial distinction (as has Microsoft) between machines that can be servers and machines that cannot; linux doesn't suffer under this "milk the consumer for compiled-out-options" mentality, and that's one very good reason to consider linux if you would like to run the machine as a server. The Mini's two PPC variations both have plenty of horsepower for normal server activity; I've got linux servers running on far less impressive x86 hardware and they run very well indeed. Linux can allow you to run the Mac OS on top of it, but you can't do it the other way around... that's another good reason.
Those good reasons will probably drive further efforts to put linux on the Mini hardware, and it seems to me that this can only be a good thing.
One can even hope that wider availability of linux will be seen by Apple as competition and drive them to roll back some of the licensing issues.
I am really a fan of my Mac, like most Mac owners, but I sure would like to see Apple become more consumer-friendly. Not that I have a lot of hope, mind you.:-)
Stories like this would never get posted there specifically because the stories are voted upon with considerable vigor. On the other hand, you wouldn't have the fun of thrashing the author for as long (stories vanish when they are voted down.)
Slashdot's story selection process is a mystery, at best. You like mysteries, don't you?
Another thing -- network based "radio" with our current networks could never compete in steady reliability... I can't tell you how many times the feed has stuttered, dropped in fidelity, or just plain dropped out of site with "Internet radio"... my XM just keeps playing at pretty darned good fidelity, 24/7/52.
If you're in a car, there can be interruptions... but if you're in a car, you're not too bloodly likely to be satisfied with your network connection, either.:-)
Personally, I think that satisfactory Interrnet streaming will have to wait until the network infrastructure gets a significant upgrade. And I don't see that coming, frankly.
I don't know enough about Oracle to tell you what you can, or can't, do there, but if it is transactions you are concerned with, I use PostgreSQL which allows rollback/commit of blocks of transactions -- and Python connects just fine with PostgreSQL.
Since Oracle is your target, you should probably be asking this question of the Oracle developer.
I have used Python for small things, and I have used it for very large things, and parts of very large things. I've never run into any issues with the language other than speed, and frankly I've not really run into that either, because if I think it might be an issue, I work in C. I certainly don't have any impression that Java is better for larger jobs in any way, shape or form by virtue of the language itself. Familiarity with the language and availability of tools and familiarity with those tools could make either Java or Python a better choice at any particular point... the message I was responding to was talking about availability/default installation of Java being spotty, and since Python is almost everywhere these days, and a lot more pleasant to write in for me, I spoke up about it.
I love Python. I left Java by the wayside when I found Python. I love the sparse look and feel, I love the strength of the language, I love the fact that I don't have to deal with 1000 different indentation styles when I read other people's code, I hugely appreciate all the python modules people have written that implement everything from databases to graphing packages.
And Python is all over the place, installed and ready to run. My old RH9 system has Python; my Mac has Python; my Windows box has Python.
Python. C when you have to have the performance, certainly. Python otherwise.:-)
Then, you try to use the truly backwoods-ignorant approach that bible-stories mention real things, therefore, the bible itself is true. In order that you not much too much more of a fool of yourself along this line of "thinking", let me point out that Tom Clancy's novels mention real places, people, agencies, countries and warships -- in far more detail than the bible does -- yet they are fiction through-and-through. An embedded historical context does not imbue a story with truth, and in fact, is one very common mark of many excellent writers of fiction.
I can only conclude, beginning with taking you at your word as far as your occupation goes, that you are an illiterate, incompetent scientist, and that as a mathemetician, your education did not include statistics beyond the 8th grade level, which I find fascinating.
Personally, I'm all for punishment. Making it fit the crime, too. My concern is for the erosion of the underlying principles our society has been based upon. Personally, I'm more inclined to put my faith with the writers of the bill of rights than I am with "Megan's mom", no matter how justified her angst.
You know, tolerance for the sake of tolerance alone isn't a good thing. It is just politically correct stupidity.
Reasonable, non-interfering Christians earn tolerance by understanding that their rights end where other people's rights begin.
Ignorant fundimentalists who wish to bring nonsensical tripe like ID into the classroom as "theory" have not earned tolerance. They have earned dissent, resistance, and infamy.
Tolerance is just like respect. No one owes it to anyone else. It is something to be earned. People who claim tolerance as a right don't even understand what it is.
Personally, I would no more tolerate one who claimed ID is on equal footing with any scientific theory than I would someone who claimed that Hitler was on an equal moral footing with Ghandi. The assertion is ridiculous. In fact -- it's intolerable.
Now, what you need to do is go back to that page and actually read it.
The first thing you'll notice is that the dates show clearly that none of those accounts were made by those who would have been the contemporaries of jesus.
The second thing you should notice is that the accounts that are worth anything at all (meaning, those in the first century, at the very minimum) depend at the first level on reports made by Christians, and which are in many of the examples at the second level causing considerable irritation to the Romans and to the Greeks.
The conclusion one can draw is that Christians say that Christ existed (what, are they going to say he didn't exist?) and that the authorities of the day werre well and truly vexed by the activities of the Christians.
There are no accounts that say "Christus paid for 20 chickens today", or "We crucified Christus today" or "Christus the Carpenter delivered unto me a fabulous wood chair and door today."
Christ may indeed have existed. But nothing on that page in any way provides solid support for the idea.
History will record (and accurately so) that the Heaven's Gate cult were so convinced that aliens were talking to them (as in right now, as in personally, as in real) that they committed mass suicide. People 2000 years from now who take this to mean that aliens did talk to them would be mistaken. However, they'll have a 2000-year thick veil to peer through, and they may not get it right. Or, for reasons of their own, much like those Christans hold dear, they may not be interested in getting it right.
Another important perspective on this is to consider a Tom Clancy novel. In a Tom Clancy novel, you'll find the CIA (real), Russia, England, USA, China and the old Soviet Union, (all real) President Reagan (real), various ships of war (almost all real) and various interesting personalities that interact with all this bona-fide historical stuff.
2000 years from now, will they believe that John Patrick Ryan was a CIA agent? Will they believe that John Clark was a CIA asassin? Will they believe that the Red October was a Soviet ship of war?
Here we have a book with myriad verifiable historical facts scattered about; in no way, we know today, do they make the other characters and the situations in the book actually real, but they do make them feel more real. That's why authors use real situations and characters; it sets the stage and makes suspension of disbelief easier.
Look at the bible. Look at it hard. It was put (vaguely and inconsistantly) together hundreds of years after the alleged fact, and after a considerable amount of tussling amongst the Christians. The KJV only emerged after the Great Bible, the Geneva bible and the Bishop's bible. One thousand and six hundred years after the events reported in the collection. Even then, after the KJV was moving into prominence, Hugh Broughon (1549-1612, English theologian and Hebrew scholar, born in Owlbury) wrote: "Tell his majesty (meaning King James I) that I had rather be rent in pieces with wild horses, than any such translation by my consent be urged on poor churches."
The NT certainly contains historical references. It contains references to people we're pretty sure were real because we have contemporary accounts of their existance (Roman emperors, for instance.) It also contains accounts of people we can't find anywhere else, other than as after-the-fact mentions that we can't be certain didn't arise from the description in the various codexes that were called upon to create the various bibles. Codexes, by the way, that do not always agree with each other, and which were definitely "cherry picked" to create the work we see today, the KJV. There are over five thousand historical manuscript copies of the NT. But only three are generally used as a source:
Education is the process of inculcating knowledge. Therefore, he wasn't referring to religion, which is the wrapper for inculcating supernatural supposition.
A "flawed educational system" is one that mixes the supernatural with the natural, and/or fails to draw the line despite it being clear as crystal to intelligent folks on both sides of the debate, all obfuscation and misdirection aside. You know, an educational system like the one Kansas is trying so desparately to create.
It is worth pointing out that evolution does not imply we are "random." Evolution is a process that produces continuous refinement in a fairly orderly fashion.
You could reasonably describe this as we started from a somewhat random pool of material and evolution took it from there -- the process is essentially anti-entropic in that it imposes order upon disorderly collections of material.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you should read "Up the Line" by Robert Silverberg. That's exactly the subject matter -- guy goes back in time and does a maternal ancestor. Repeatedly and in a manner you'll probably sympathize with. Quite entertaining and very, very well done as you would expect of Silverberg.
That performance is about what I'd expect from a 1.42 GHz P4.
These processors are very close in clock-for-clock performance. Modern CPUs try really hard to get things done as fast as they can, and mostly, they do well at it.
There's nothing wrong with the PPC other than it costs too much, makes too much heat, and can't seem to be clocked much faster than 3 GHz under the best of circumstances. *cough*
Yes, surely. However, the key issue is that Intel won't have to make anything for them... Intel already makes high speed, require-liquid-metal-and-a-refrigerator chips and low voltage, run cool and sleep nice or take a quick run and then back to sleep chips for laptops, and all manner of stuff in between.
Apple can leverage off the zillions of laptops and desktops made for Windows using the same CPUs and perhaps even the same CPU support chips.
So I don't think the fact that Apple will be buying small percentages is a point that affects the quality or service Apple will get from Intel. And remember, IBM's inability to deliver a fast laptop-capable G5 isn't a problem that Intel has -- they have reasonably fast laptop chips -- so there is no similar issue to compare Apples to Apples, as it were.
If a shuttle vehicle (not "the" shuttle, "a" shuttle) is 500 km up, then it can sit on a tail of fire, pick your butt up, and leave. No magic about it, and 500 km of lift won't have to be expended to get it there repeatedly; just enough to back off orbital velocity and the drop down, then up, then regain that orbital speed.
Yes, you need thrust. No, you don't need the same energy budget as you would to lift you off the ground.
Regardless, you can still stop anywhere along the cable. :-)
Certainly the end of the cable has to be in GSO, but really, other than communications and weather/observation satellites, what else does?
It'd still take a lot less energy budget to get you to one of those from a space elevator stop than it would by ground-based rocket.
Personally, I'd opt to listen to Joe Satriani or Tony McAlpine; most lyrics bore me before I even hear them.
You are being naive. The government can do whatever they want. And they do. The higher you go (city, state, federal), the more freedom they have.
The government shot some kids at Kent State. Murdered them in cold blood, from quite a distance, using high-powered rifles. The government was not punished, neither at the shooter level or at any other level. Was this a rights violation? Assuredly. Can the gov't do this anyway? Assuredly. How? because they not only make the rules, they enforce the rules. Or not.
The government invaded a sovereign country that had not attacked them, namely Iraq. This is illegal, but they managed to pull it off. No one's been punished yet (except people who refused to go, or to otherwise participate.) You think anyone's going to be punished? We know the government flat out lied to the public to get support for the invasion; we know the Shrub was absolutely complicit in this lie, we know he spearheaded the whole thing, either on his own or as a figurehead for people in the shadows, do you think he, or anyone else in the government will ever be punished for this? Or are you still laboring under the illusion that we should be in Iraq for some reason? (other than greed for oil, I mean.)
The government can register a criminal for life, after conviction, even though this is absolutely forbidden by the constitution in the double jeopardy clause. In this example, the government took a little time to invent the idea that holding an individual up to the public on a list of miscreants is magically not punishment, although 200 years of prior law and legal thinking disagrees uniformly with that notion. You might think this is a state issue, and it would be, except that the Supreme court heard the issue after it crawled its way up the court system and said, "sure, that's fine" which makes this particular constitutional violation fed all the way.
The government can tell you what you can drink (prohibition) or otherwise ingest for recreational purposes (current set of drug laws) although there is absolutely no constitutional basis for this. They can't be stopped, punished, or otherwise bludgeoned by constitutional means. You can vote 'em out, some of them anyway, but it takes many years to kill stupidities such as these -- again, prohibition being a good example and pot being even better, as we're still waiting for the pendulum to swing away from that particular set of clueless lies. Mind you, I'm not a drug or alchohol user -- I don't consider either a sensible use of my time -- but clearly, if I wanted to, there is no constitutional basis for stopping me from smoking pot.
The government can engage in blackmail. For instance, if a state doesn't toe the line on some particular issue, the feds withhold highway funds from that state. The constitution forbids the feds from making state laws, so they turned to blackmail. Do you see any feds being prosecuted for blackmail? No? I didn't think so. Me either.
The government can declare you something awful (terrorist, for instance) and not give you the right to counsel, or a phone call, or anything else. It is unconstitutional as hell, illegal as hell, and they do it anyway. No one gets punished; in fact, typically, no one manages to reverse such a thing, not that you could ever recover the lost time, of course.
The feds put Christian symbols and statements all over everything from money to buildings to sessions of congress and the senate, though they are explicitly by letter and obvious intent of the founding paperwork not to favor any religion. Anyone getting punished? Hell no, instead, we get Christian frosting added to the pledge of allegiance.
These are the same feds that told teenagers in the 60's that they couldn't vote, they couldn't drink, but the
We know how to store memories; we've got multiple paradigms for just about anything you can think of. Some of them probably have no analog in the human brain. We know how to sense things -- we've got everything from cameras to sonar to magnetic field sensors -- so finding input is not a problem. We're capable of building huge storage systems, though no one has really sat down and given that a shot (lots of expense, here, though less all the time.) It's certainly in no way outside our technological capability.
Now, consider... for a while, it was deemed a "very, very difficult problem" to get a robot chassis to walk up stairs. All manner of research teams were working on it. It was eventually solved by a one guy with a z80, which isn't exactly the peak of modern computing ability. Turns out that the key (as usual) was an adequate methodology, not huge amounts of computing power trying to solve calculus on the fly.
This last bit offers quite a bit of hope for AI as an emergent quality of a better approach. There is no validity at all to any line of thought that says every possible approach to emergent AI has been tried. In reality, only a few methods have been given a serious try.
I think there is a huge flaw in the idea that "X teraflops" will be required before we can have AI; that's a complete and utter mis-statement of the problem, and I think I can show you why to just about anyone's satisfaction:
Intelligence isn't about speed; it is about results. Given enough memory to store and retrieve information, and enough sensors to obtain that information, and a software methodology to process that information, if it takes said software a week, or a month, or a year, to formulate and present an answer that we might come up with for any general question -- even though we humans might arrive at the answer it in seconds -- then I think what you have is in every way is an intelligence that is working on a different time scale. It's not less intelligent, it's just not as fast. That will change its utility to us, certainly, but it won't change the fact of its intelligence. And the day someone comes up with the software methodology is the day prior to the day that engineers begin to create hardware optimized for that methodology, and software engineers begin to optimize the methodology itself. The fact that a slower intelligence could outlast us in terms of years available to think is interesting as well; an interstellar space probe might make very good use of "slow" intelligence, for instance, given that as far as we can tell at this point, interstellar means tens of years just to get started.
My instincts and my money are on the position above; I don't think AI will be nearly as complex or resource-intensive as academics and pundits are making it out to be, and furthermore, once we figure it out, we can expect to see it explode in a way that makes the current technological revolution look like molasses in January. Making a new AI will be doable in the time it takes to copy bits from here to there. Seconds, or a fraction of a second. If the most advanced researcher in the world comes up with one, there is no particular reason that the lamest hacker can't have one five minutes later.
It's always good to keep in mind that folks like Minsky at MIT have been completely, utterly wrong about the simplest, most peripheral AI issues, for instance neural nets, wrong to a degree that has actually retarded progress, and have been found out later (though you don't hear much about it.) The conventional wisdom, even amongst the "AI community", is only as valid as it is, not as valid as the level of respect or reputat
The only valid issue should be, child porn, or no child porn. Not encryption. Did the defendant have some, or not? Did they produce some, or not? Did they distribute some, or not? If you have to point to the fact that the defendant has a means to hide information in the course of trying to villify them for creating, possession, or distribution of child porn, then you and your case suck, just as bad as the laws that allow you to bring such complete and utter irrelevancy into the courtroom do. Hopefully that was clear enough, precise legal terminology aside.
The reason that smart people are upset about this is that encryption technology stands a risk of being tarred by the same brush that society is using to paint your basic perv, and that brush is already dangerously out of hand.
And they are absolutely right. That could happen.
If the state can't prove this fellow had or produced child porn without referring to the simple fact that he has encryption software, the state has no business bothering him, in my estimation.
Encryption tools shouldn't be admitted as evidence of intent to commit a crime in any way, shape or form. Any more than owning fast shoes (sneakers) is a crime, even though you were walking in sneakers when you held up the bank.
The crime here is (should be) abusing the trust and/or corpus of an individual the state asserts is unable to manage their own sexuality (and the state should probably have to prove that, too.)
Anything beyond that is legal sophistry at best, and clueless babbling of a legal system completely out of control at worst.
Just because it is law, doesn't mean it isn't stupid. Quite the contrary.
"We find that evidence of appellant's bookshelf use and the existence of books in his house was at least somewhat relevant to the state's case against him"
If there is anything more ridiculous than blaming the weapon for the act of the person, I'm sure I can't think of it offhand.
The perv did the act, and the perv should get the attention. What he or she did it with has absolutely no bearing on the case -- but you can bet dollars to donuts that some moron is going to be all about banning PGP now because it "contributes to the child porn/perv problem."
There. Now I've used my brain.
Happy now?
Then we can look at other Apple hardware for examples of what a bad hardware company they make. Consider one of the newest Apple mouse efforts. One button, as per usual and still clueless as ever.
It takes time. Even Apple hasn't 100% supported the hardware yet; for instance, some of the new Tiger desktop effects don't run on a mini, because the Mini's video chipset hasn't been worked into Tiger's new vector processing engine.
As someone else here pointed out, Apple has made an artificial distinction (as has Microsoft) between machines that can be servers and machines that cannot; linux doesn't suffer under this "milk the consumer for compiled-out-options" mentality, and that's one very good reason to consider linux if you would like to run the machine as a server. The Mini's two PPC variations both have plenty of horsepower for normal server activity; I've got linux servers running on far less impressive x86 hardware and they run very well indeed. Linux can allow you to run the Mac OS on top of it, but you can't do it the other way around... that's another good reason.
Those good reasons will probably drive further efforts to put linux on the Mini hardware, and it seems to me that this can only be a good thing.
One can even hope that wider availability of linux will be seen by Apple as competition and drive them to roll back some of the licensing issues.
I am really a fan of my Mac, like most Mac owners, but I sure would like to see Apple become more consumer-friendly. Not that I have a lot of hope, mind you. :-)
You bet. It's called: kuro5hin
Stories like this would never get posted there specifically because the stories are voted upon with considerable vigor. On the other hand, you wouldn't have the fun of thrashing the author for as long (stories vanish when they are voted down.)
Slashdot's story selection process is a mystery, at best. You like mysteries, don't you?
If you're in a car, there can be interruptions... but if you're in a car, you're not too bloodly likely to be satisfied with your network connection, either. :-)
Personally, I think that satisfactory Interrnet streaming will have to wait until the network infrastructure gets a significant upgrade. And I don't see that coming, frankly.
Since Oracle is your target, you should probably be asking this question of the Oracle developer.
I have used Python for small things, and I have used it for very large things, and parts of very large things. I've never run into any issues with the language other than speed, and frankly I've not really run into that either, because if I think it might be an issue, I work in C. I certainly don't have any impression that Java is better for larger jobs in any way, shape or form by virtue of the language itself. Familiarity with the language and availability of tools and familiarity with those tools could make either Java or Python a better choice at any particular point... the message I was responding to was talking about availability/default installation of Java being spotty, and since Python is almost everywhere these days, and a lot more pleasant to write in for me, I spoke up about it.
I love Python. I left Java by the wayside when I found Python. I love the sparse look and feel, I love the strength of the language, I love the fact that I don't have to deal with 1000 different indentation styles when I read other people's code, I hugely appreciate all the python modules people have written that implement everything from databases to graphing packages.
And Python is all over the place, installed and ready to run. My old RH9 system has Python; my Mac has Python; my Windows box has Python.
Python. C when you have to have the performance, certainly. Python otherwise. :-)
"As a scientist"
Then you write:
"I use to compromises"
Then you mischaracterize statistics:
"statistically impossible"
Then, you try to use the truly backwoods-ignorant approach that bible-stories mention real things, therefore, the bible itself is true. In order that you not much too much more of a fool of yourself along this line of "thinking", let me point out that Tom Clancy's novels mention real places, people, agencies, countries and warships -- in far more detail than the bible does -- yet they are fiction through-and-through. An embedded historical context does not imbue a story with truth, and in fact, is one very common mark of many excellent writers of fiction.
I can only conclude, beginning with taking you at your word as far as your occupation goes, that you are an illiterate, incompetent scientist, and that as a mathemetician, your education did not include statistics beyond the 8th grade level, which I find fascinating.
But I'm sure you really are a scientist. You bet.
*cough*.
Nice post, BTW. Nice to see someone thinking.
Reasonable, non-interfering Christians earn tolerance by understanding that their rights end where other people's rights begin.
Ignorant fundimentalists who wish to bring nonsensical tripe like ID into the classroom as "theory" have not earned tolerance. They have earned dissent, resistance, and infamy.
Tolerance is just like respect. No one owes it to anyone else. It is something to be earned. People who claim tolerance as a right don't even understand what it is.
Personally, I would no more tolerate one who claimed ID is on equal footing with any scientific theory than I would someone who claimed that Hitler was on an equal moral footing with Ghandi. The assertion is ridiculous. In fact -- it's intolerable.
The first thing you'll notice is that the dates show clearly that none of those accounts were made by those who would have been the contemporaries of jesus.
The second thing you should notice is that the accounts that are worth anything at all (meaning, those in the first century, at the very minimum) depend at the first level on reports made by Christians, and which are in many of the examples at the second level causing considerable irritation to the Romans and to the Greeks.
The conclusion one can draw is that Christians say that Christ existed (what, are they going to say he didn't exist?) and that the authorities of the day werre well and truly vexed by the activities of the Christians.
There are no accounts that say "Christus paid for 20 chickens today", or "We crucified Christus today" or "Christus the Carpenter delivered unto me a fabulous wood chair and door today."
Christ may indeed have existed. But nothing on that page in any way provides solid support for the idea.
History will record (and accurately so) that the Heaven's Gate cult were so convinced that aliens were talking to them (as in right now, as in personally, as in real) that they committed mass suicide. People 2000 years from now who take this to mean that aliens did talk to them would be mistaken. However, they'll have a 2000-year thick veil to peer through, and they may not get it right. Or, for reasons of their own, much like those Christans hold dear, they may not be interested in getting it right.
Another important perspective on this is to consider a Tom Clancy novel. In a Tom Clancy novel, you'll find the CIA (real), Russia, England, USA, China and the old Soviet Union, (all real) President Reagan (real), various ships of war (almost all real) and various interesting personalities that interact with all this bona-fide historical stuff.
2000 years from now, will they believe that John Patrick Ryan was a CIA agent? Will they believe that John Clark was a CIA asassin? Will they believe that the Red October was a Soviet ship of war?
Here we have a book with myriad verifiable historical facts scattered about; in no way, we know today, do they make the other characters and the situations in the book actually real, but they do make them feel more real. That's why authors use real situations and characters; it sets the stage and makes suspension of disbelief easier.
Look at the bible. Look at it hard. It was put (vaguely and inconsistantly) together hundreds of years after the alleged fact, and after a considerable amount of tussling amongst the Christians. The KJV only emerged after the Great Bible, the Geneva bible and the Bishop's bible. One thousand and six hundred years after the events reported in the collection. Even then, after the KJV was moving into prominence, Hugh Broughon (1549-1612, English theologian and Hebrew scholar, born in Owlbury) wrote: "Tell his majesty ( meaning King James I ) that I had rather be rent in pieces with wild horses, than any such translation by my consent be urged on poor churches."
The NT certainly contains historical references. It contains references to people we're pretty sure were real because we have contemporary accounts of their existance (Roman emperors, for instance.) It also contains accounts of people we can't find anywhere else, other than as after-the-fact mentions that we can't be certain didn't arise from the description in the various codexes that were called upon to create the various bibles. Codexes, by the way, that do not always agree with each other, and which were definitely "cherry picked" to create the work we see today, the KJV. There are over five thousand historical manuscript copies of the NT. But only three are generally used as a source:
A "flawed educational system" is one that mixes the supernatural with the natural, and/or fails to draw the line despite it being clear as crystal to intelligent folks on both sides of the debate, all obfuscation and misdirection aside. You know, an educational system like the one Kansas is trying so desparately to create.
You could reasonably describe this as we started from a somewhat random pool of material and evolution took it from there -- the process is essentially anti-entropic in that it imposes order upon disorderly collections of material.