"I think 99.99 percent of Americans will want these ID cards," Ellison said. "Wouldn't you feel better if everyone who walked into an airport showed their ID card and put their thumb in the scanner and you knew they were who they said they were?"
No. I would feel exactly the same. How is knowing the true identity of a person going to guarantee you that they're not a suicide terrorist? It doesn't. I don't really appreciate it when a multi-billionaire with vested interests tries to guess what me, Mr. Joe Schmoe, wants. Hell, if Ellison manufactured door locks, he'd probably lobby to get door locks for all the cockpits. That I might support.
"There has to be some ID," Feinstein said. "We have had a major catastrophe. This is a very serious time. The country is at war. The purpose here is to protect ourselves."
I don't know if Swine-stein could have made any less sense. How does being at war, seriousness of the times, or need for protection equal a need for identification? One, we aren't at war. Two, today is no less/more serious than two years ago. Three, who needs protection, Members of Congress? I don't feel any need to be protected.
Maybe we should lock all members of Congress into an air tight room for their safety. When they start kicking off, we would hold elections. You solve a lot of problems that way. You get term limits, you ensure that only the most dedicated people run, and you don't have goofballs like Swine-stein making assinine proposals because she's scared of the bogeyman.
Rotenberg and other opponents, including the American Civil Liberties Union, worry it could be required to board buses, apply for jobs, or even enter cities facing terrorist threats.
But supporters say those concerns are overblown.
Yes. Corporations and the government have never abused the power that we relinquished to them. Never ever.
"I've had a military ID card since I was a cadet at West Point and I haven't lost any freedom," [Schwarzkopf] told a cheering crowd.
Right. And I suppose being in the military wasn't a restriction of freedom. You're the property of the United States, and you get to be an unwitting guinea pig for exciting new drugs like LSD and who knows what else. And of course people cheered. Who could boo the Gerber baby?
"Four Arab-looking guys reading the Koran are much less suspicious if they have the cards and can just slash them through card readers," [Dershowitz] said.
Four arab-looking guys reading the Koran are much less suspicious if you get your head out of your ass and realize that the arab-terrorist to arab-non-terrorist ratio is extremely low. If the average American would talk to more than the 3 people he sees at the water cooler everyday, he might realize that there's a whole world of non-threatening people out there.
Ellison said that if he does donate the software, maintenance and upgrades won't be free.
I'll give you some crack, but I won't support your habit. Thanks. Now I don't have to buy anything from Oracle anymore. Makes my life simpler.
In vaguely related news , don't bother mailing your Congressman about this as he's not going to open it anyway. He'll either get 'Net-savvy or just ignore his constituents (as usual).
"But what if you need something that the website provides?"
I've never, ever needed anything provided by a website.
What I would do is pretty much the same as how I act now with cookies. I normally browse the web w/ cookies filtered through Junkbuster, but if I'm shopping, I'll switch to a non-filtered browser. Big deal. It just means that the sites that force me to look at their adds will have to be that much more entertaining to justify opening another program.
http://www.drudgereport.com/id.htm at The DrudgeReport says that the Whitehouse is reluctant to make such a move, although the Brits are all for Blair's voluntary (read compulsory) cards.
If I could get rid of my SS card, Passport, Driver's License, Birth Certificate, Student ID, etc. and only need 1 card w/ no thumbprint and no DNA, then I suppose it's alright.;-) Actually, sounds a bit like that Biblical "Mark of the Beast" if you look at Blair's plans. I guess we might as well give fundy Xians something to get huffy about as well.
Oh well. As far as Ellison's concerned, I know what company I won't be buying from. Hell, I won't even work for a company that uses Oracle software...if I can find one.
It is taken out of context. The term "the Software" is defined to refer specifically to the MSN/MSNBC components named in a previous sentence. It does not refer to FrontPage
I played AO for a few days. I didn't really mind the bugs and noticed that the number of disconnects decreased after about a week. It was apparant to me that the folks at Funcom were trying to fix the product. Unfortunately, I wasn't too thrilled with the game anyway, and I cancelled my account.
Even though when I log in and attempt to cancel my account, I am told that I no longer have an active account, I find that it is still possible to log in and play the game. I don't, but there is nothing other than disinterest stopping me.
This concerns me. Client validation should have been tested and fixed before release. Frankly, in a game like this, it should be a first-class issue. When something this simple and fundamental slipped through the cracks I have to wonder what is going on inside the rest of the code.
Maybe I'm overly pessimistic. I would love to see AO succeed, but I'm starting to doubt whether the product can be salvaged before the fanbase is alienated.
It's not clear to me from reading the articles whether the data will be logged or recorded. If a person records all of my phone calls, I might get a little aggravated, but there's a difference between knowing what I said, and knowing that I called "the puddin' pop help-line."
As for logging phone calls, I think that long distance companies in America do this already. Does this bother anyone? Local phone companies probably also do this to a certain extent.
I was under the assumption that the enforcement of copyright law is okay. If you didn't buy the game, then you have no rights to play that game. We live in a capitalist society, not some sort of utopic, world-property community.
Don't get me wrong. I support the idea of shortening copyrights on computer software. I would even suggest 5 to 10 year limits, but I don't think that people should complain when the current law is being enforced. You should instead try to change the offending legislation. You should draft a bill and send it to your Congressman. You should contact your representatives and tell them how you feel.
If enough people care, maybe Slashdot could be used as a forum for drafting pro-freedom legislation. Think of it as community-developed (cleverly avoiding the typical buzzword) government.
After reading the article, I was amazed by how much RMS did not know. If he isn't aware of Microsoft's licensing strategies, how can he attack them effectively? It's difficult to wage a war _for_ something w/o also waging that war _against_ something, especially when you are fighting over ideals.
Maybe that's why Stallman never really appealed to me. Without focusing on what is really happening in the industry, you end up just spouting the same argument year after year. Your views don't evolve, and you basically come down to a "It's a rock because I say it's a rock" mentality.
Free software is what RMS describes as free software. It appears that if you ask for his opinion on whether something actually _is_ free, he can't really pin it down. He never once said, "Yes, the LGPL would apply to your case," "No, the LGPL will not apply to your case," or "Although the LGPL will apply to your case, I would suggest that you don't use it as that would corrupt the Free Software Movement's philosophy." It's his license. If he is so adamant about what is denoted as "Free," then he should do a bit more than say, "Well, what do you think?" It reminds me of George Bush's answer, "If Affirmative Action means quotas, then I'm against it." That's nice, but all that says is that you're against quotas. It's the answer with the minimal amount of information possible.
Of course, it also bothers me that Stallman wasn't familiar with the game console market...does he own a TV? Is he on the Internet? I also realize that this is a petty pet-peeve of mine, so save your angry retorts.
If I were ever to consider "cube war" fun, I would be incredibly depressed.
Maybe the 1 of 10 is the guy who is creative and intelligent enough to grok how bad his job sucks. I'm guessing that an infinite barrage of cup-cozies helps to spur on that realization.
Of course it's slower than the P4 at the same frequency. The chip was designed with a longer pipeline, which has allowed Intel to up the clock rate by doing less per tick. This was no surprise as people have been discussing it since the architecture was announced.
That said, they did design the ALU to work on both up and down swings of the clock, which means that integer operations could run up to twice the speed of the rest of the CPU.
As for the power consumption, etc. If people are willing to plug their video card into a wall socket for a few more frames/sec in Quake 3, then I don't suppose power consumption is that big of an issue. I guess you could mount two 250 watts in your case if you were really worried about it.
That's a good point, but I see the situation as a failure of the professor. The ideas of source file, compilation, etc. should be explained in a beginning level course.
Even if that isn't the case, the concept isn't a difficult one to grasp, at least not compared to learning C++ and the basics of programming logic.
Still, it would be an interesting interview question. Arguably even if you weren't formally taught the concept of a source file in class, you should pick it up over 4 years of CS training. I wonder how many applicants would stumble.
Reading through the comments, it's fairly easy to separate those people who have been TA's from those that have only been students. To say that requiring a single development environment is the result of a professor's ignorance or the desire to make a student's life hard is ridiculous. It's not about you. It never was about you. You don't particularly matter that much.
I don't know that Code Warrior is the best learning environment, but reasons to standardize on something, and typically something GUI include...
1. Grading ease
2. Availability of the program on campus
3. Cost of the program
4. Ability of most students to run the program on a home computer
5. Ease of interface (why spend time trying to teach kids to use a command-line debugger, a command-line compiler, and vi or emacs--none of which _directly_ contributes to your ability to produce C++ code--when it's easier to spend a day showing people the "new file" and "compile" buttons)
6. Ease of support (if you leave the option of the environment open, it's likely that someone will use a system that you are unfamiliar with, be it gcc&emacs, Visual Studio, Watcom, etc. To help the most students, you'll need to be able to do it quickly, which is not possible if you have to learn the environment, or several environments, first)
Now, to answer "Sadistic Yoda," you should develop in whatever environment you like, but make sure to save at least a day to compile and run your software on the recommended system. You may learn more about the language this way, as different compilers will support different options, and you may be able to detect more bugs, since different debuggers might find different errors.
At any rate, it shouldn't take that long to test w/ Code Warrior as long as you know and use the intersection of C++ that it and gcc support.
"People can't go around doing things just because their right." -- Officer O'Clancey "Toxic Avenger"
When this happens to me, it's usually because I don't really understand the problem. To combat this, I typically take a break for a couple of days, wander around a bit, and think about what doesn't make sense to me.
It usually comes down to one of two things, I read the specification incorrectly, or the customer was too ambiguous in their description. The first problem can be corrected by really thinking about the problem and not coding for a few days. Eventually things may straighten out in your head. The second problem is solved the same way as the first, but you may realize that what is being requested is ridiculous.
At any rate, that's what I've found w/ my limited experience. Hell, 2 lines of code a day is fine...a professor once told me that it's typical to spit out only 5 lines of usable code per day over the span of an entire project.
Of course, Sun's control of Java isn't inherently any better than MS's control of their poorly named language. Frankly, no matter which language you choose of the two, you're in bed w/ a corporation that couldn't care less about your rights and privileges.
Of course, if you're comparing Pokeman attacks, I would have to go with C#. It's name alone is enough to stun the most stalwart programmer, and I have a funny feeling that its API will deliver the killing blow.
I will buy newspapers when a) I can receive the information daily on a handheld device via radio waves...with option to print.
b) the reporting is a bit more responsible. Stop misquoting people and check your references before you run the story.
c) I am able to influence what stories have follow-ups. I don't know how many times I've read the paper, found something interesting, and then "poof" it became non-news the next day.
d) the quality of writing improves. Stop gearing the articles to people with a 6th-grade reading ability.
Those are the only things keeping me from subscribing to a newspaper. Albeit, I still pick one up occasionally (once every 2 or 3 months) for the crossword, for the movie listings, or just to see if things have gotten any better since last I checked.
The statements are in descending order of importance.
What ever happened to those surveillance systems that could detect and display what's on your monitor from a distance. I don't think that the short wire from a person's video card to their display is what we need to worry about.
Can't find the source, but I remember reading that at least one of the members of the cast was hopped up on coke when the Xmas special was filmed. Anyone got a "line" on some evidence?
It was obviously overshadowed in the article, but what's this mess about Mills' proprietary research in AI? Brain Child Systems doesn't seem to be anywhere on the 'net...at least it isn't available from Altavista.
Maybe it's because I'm a CS guy, but I think that this conscious AI stuff is a bit more radical than the physics bit. It would be a big enough revelation that we could have some sort of reasoning machine able to drive a car +unassisted+, let alone a "space ship." If there is consciousness to boot, then we may have a miraculous occurance!
If his claims are accurately reported, and if they are true, then I would have to say that he is the most vile person on the face of the Earth for not releasing the research to the public.
You speak as if there has always been sales tax, or tax of any sort. Read http://www.ianr.unl.edu/pubs/generalag/g733.htm# hp
If you think that this is the case.
Here is the part of interest: "Mississippi was the first state to enact a general sales and use tax. It did so in 1932 as a depression-era response to declining revenue from other sources, especially property taxes. Six years later, half the states had followed Mississippi's lead.
Although early sales tax enactments were intended to be temporary, they later became permanent as demands for public services increased and public officials faced the political difficulty of raising property taxes by amounts large enough to pay for such services."
We are far from a depression era economy. There is little reason for states to tax individual sales when they could make more cash in the stock market.
I can see it now...we're taxed on all the items we buy on the net by the state that we live in. We're taxed by the state that we buy from. We're taxed by the government for using the 'net to make purchases. By the time everyone is done taking their slice, We'll be paying twice as much for those German Scheisse films we all know and love.
(Yeah, it's a slippery slope, but look at the state of the union and tell me it's not frighteningly possible)
Looks like I might have to gas up the ol' mule and start leaving the house again.
It makes no sense to me. I could buy a mini-disc player before that allowed me to record 74 minutes of audio. Now I can spend more money and still only record 74 minutes of audio?
I think a better idea would be to store and read mp3's directly. Then you might have an interesting product. With 160 MB of data storage, you're talking about roughly 40 songs worth of good quality mp3s. 74 minutes is barely an album.
Are there any entrepreneur's out there that want to make such a beast? It doesn't seem too difficult. We already have MP3 players, they just need to read and write to minidiscs instead of from flash memory or a hard drive.
On another note, I was looking at the Personal JukeBox that's to be released soon, and was wondering who would really want to flip through 100 cd's worth of songs w/ 6 buttons? It better have a damn fine GUI or at least some sort of ability to organize which songs are placed close to eachother.
It's difficult to evaluate this system given the sparse amount of information available. I, for one, am incredibly skeptical at this point.
a) There is no statement of the train/test procedure for the neural net. It's fairly easy to get good performance if you're training your system on the same dataset that you test. Without this information, you cannot make a reasonable judgement.
b) If you listen to the audio samples in the video at http://www.usc.edu/ext-relations/news_service/re al/real_video.html
You can notice a significant difference in the times of the samples (e.g. "stop" is shorter than "yes"). A fairly unsophisticated NN can pick up on the length of a sound sample and generalize from there. I didn't hear any statement saying that in the official training and testing all sound samples were of the same length.
It's really a mess. If someone has a journal article or other piece of reliable information on this research, a pointer would be appreciated. Until then, I'll be feeding Clever Hans.
Don't automatically rule out MIT, CMU or others. If you're going to be spending about 400 bucks on applications, you might as well try for a couple 1st tier schools.
If you're a "good" undergraduate student, there's no reason why you wouldn't be accepted in schools ranked from 50 down to 20...you have a slightly better shot if you're going for a Ph.D. and you're in a better position to get funded.
Don't be fooled by prestige, however. Try to find a school that excels in your interest area. For example, Purdue is number one in security (or was when I visited), but has virtually nothing in AI. Even among subfields, such as AI, you have to look for schools that have specifically what you want, such as natural language processing, robotics, etc.
If you're not sure what you want to do, then by all means, take geography into account. If you like living in a large city, then it doesn't really matter if you're in a great program if you're surrounded by cow pastures (ahem Purdue). Also consider the requirements for the program, especially qualifiers. Find out how many you have to pass, and how many opportunities you have.
Remember, once you get into grad school, you can always transfer, and if your grades are good enough, you may be able to get into a better school (if you don't start out in one already).
Slashdot Mirror
"I think 99.99 percent of Americans will want these ID cards," Ellison said. "Wouldn't you feel better if everyone who walked into an airport showed their ID card and put their thumb in the scanner and you knew they were who they said they were?"
No. I would feel exactly the same. How is knowing the true identity of a person going to guarantee you that they're not a suicide terrorist? It doesn't. I don't really appreciate it when a multi-billionaire with vested interests tries to guess what me, Mr. Joe Schmoe, wants. Hell, if Ellison manufactured door locks, he'd probably lobby to get door locks for all the cockpits. That I might support.
"There has to be some ID," Feinstein said. "We have had a major catastrophe. This is a very serious time. The country is at war. The purpose here is to protect ourselves."
I don't know if Swine-stein could have made any less sense. How does being at war, seriousness of the times, or need for protection equal a need for identification? One, we aren't at war. Two, today is no less/more serious than two years ago. Three, who needs protection, Members of Congress? I don't feel any need to be protected.
Maybe we should lock all members of Congress into an air tight room for their safety. When they start kicking off, we would hold elections. You solve a lot of problems that way. You get term limits, you ensure that only the most dedicated people run, and you don't have goofballs like Swine-stein making assinine proposals because she's scared of the bogeyman.
Rotenberg and other opponents, including the American Civil Liberties Union, worry it could be required to board buses, apply for jobs, or even enter cities facing terrorist threats.
But supporters say those concerns are overblown.
Yes. Corporations and the government have never abused the power that we relinquished to them. Never ever.
"I've had a military ID card since I was a cadet at West Point and I haven't lost any freedom," [Schwarzkopf] told a cheering crowd.
Right. And I suppose being in the military wasn't a restriction of freedom. You're the property of the United States, and you get to be an unwitting guinea pig for exciting new drugs like LSD and who knows what else. And of course people cheered. Who could boo the Gerber baby?
"Four Arab-looking guys reading the Koran are much less suspicious if they have the cards and can just slash them through card readers," [Dershowitz] said.
Four arab-looking guys reading the Koran are much less suspicious if you get your head out of your ass and realize that the arab-terrorist to arab-non-terrorist ratio is extremely low. If the average American would talk to more than the 3 people he sees at the water cooler everyday, he might realize that there's a whole world of non-threatening people out there.
Ellison said that if he does donate the software, maintenance and upgrades won't be free.
I'll give you some crack, but I won't support your habit. Thanks. Now I don't have to buy anything from Oracle anymore. Makes my life simpler.
In vaguely related news , don't bother mailing your Congressman about this as he's not going to open it anyway. He'll either get 'Net-savvy or just ignore his constituents (as usual).
Ack! Thppt!
"But what if you need something that the website provides?"
I've never, ever needed anything provided by a website.
What I would do is pretty much the same as how I act now with cookies. I normally browse the web w/ cookies filtered through Junkbuster, but if I'm shopping, I'll switch to a non-filtered browser. Big deal. It just means that the sites that force me to look at their adds will have to be that much more entertaining to justify opening another program.
http://www.drudgereport.com/id.htm at The DrudgeReport says that the Whitehouse is reluctant to make such a move, although the Brits are all for Blair's voluntary (read compulsory) cards.
If I could get rid of my SS card, Passport, Driver's License, Birth Certificate, Student ID, etc. and only need 1 card w/ no thumbprint and no DNA, then I suppose it's alright.
Oh well. As far as Ellison's concerned, I know what company I won't be buying from. Hell, I won't even work for a company that uses Oracle software...if I can find one.
It is taken out of context. The term "the Software" is defined to refer specifically to the MSN/MSNBC components named in a previous sentence. It does not refer to FrontPage
I played AO for a few days. I didn't really mind the bugs and noticed that the number of disconnects decreased after about a week. It was apparant to me that the folks at Funcom were trying to fix the product. Unfortunately, I wasn't too thrilled with the game anyway, and I cancelled my account.
Even though when I log in and attempt to cancel my account, I am told that I no longer have an active account, I find that it is still possible to log in and play the game. I don't, but there is nothing other than disinterest stopping me.
This concerns me. Client validation should have been tested and fixed before release. Frankly, in a game like this, it should be a first-class issue. When something this simple and fundamental slipped through the cracks I have to wonder what is going on inside the rest of the code.
Maybe I'm overly pessimistic. I would love to see AO succeed, but I'm starting to doubt whether the product can be salvaged before the fanbase is alienated.
AEH
It's not clear to me from reading the articles whether the data will be logged or recorded. If a person records all of my phone calls, I might get a little aggravated, but there's a difference between knowing what I said, and knowing that I called "the puddin' pop help-line."
As for logging phone calls, I think that long distance companies in America do this already. Does this bother anyone? Local phone companies probably also do this to a certain extent.
Oh, and...
Bugger the Queen.
I was under the assumption that the enforcement of copyright law is okay. If you didn't buy the game, then you have no rights to play that game. We live in a capitalist society, not some sort of utopic, world-property community.
Don't get me wrong. I support the idea of shortening copyrights on computer software. I would even suggest 5 to 10 year limits, but I don't think that people should complain when the current law is being enforced. You should instead try to change the offending legislation. You should draft a bill and send it to your Congressman. You should contact your representatives and tell them how you feel.
If enough people care, maybe Slashdot could be used as a forum for drafting pro-freedom legislation. Think of it as community-developed (cleverly avoiding the typical buzzword) government.
After reading the article, I was amazed by how much RMS did not know. If he isn't aware of Microsoft's licensing strategies, how can he attack them effectively? It's difficult to wage a war _for_ something w/o also waging that war _against_ something, especially when you are fighting over ideals.
Maybe that's why Stallman never really appealed to me. Without focusing on what is really happening in the industry, you end up just spouting the same argument year after year. Your views don't evolve, and you basically come down to a "It's a rock because I say it's a rock" mentality.
Free software is what RMS describes as free software. It appears that if you ask for his opinion on whether something actually _is_ free, he can't really pin it down. He never once said, "Yes, the LGPL would apply to your case," "No, the LGPL will not apply to your case," or "Although the LGPL will apply to your case, I would suggest that you don't use it as that would corrupt the Free Software Movement's philosophy." It's his license. If he is so adamant about what is denoted as "Free," then he should do a bit more than say, "Well, what do you think?" It reminds me of George Bush's answer, "If Affirmative Action means quotas, then I'm against it." That's nice, but all that says is that you're against quotas. It's the answer with the minimal amount of information possible.
Of course, it also bothers me that Stallman wasn't familiar with the game console market...does he own a TV? Is he on the Internet? I also realize that this is a petty pet-peeve of mine, so save your angry retorts.
An El Haqq!
If I were ever to consider "cube war" fun, I would be incredibly depressed.
Maybe the 1 of 10 is the guy who is creative and intelligent enough to grok how bad his job sucks. I'm guessing that an infinite barrage of cup-cozies helps to spur on that realization.
ack...thpppt!
Of course it's slower than the P4 at the same frequency. The chip was designed with a longer pipeline, which has allowed Intel to up the clock rate by doing less per tick. This was no surprise as people have been discussing it since the architecture was announced.
That said, they did design the ALU to work on both up and down swings of the clock, which means that integer operations could run up to twice the speed of the rest of the CPU.
More detailed info can be found in this Anandtech article.
As for the power consumption, etc. If people are willing to plug their video card into a wall socket for a few more frames/sec in Quake 3, then I don't suppose power consumption is that big of an issue. I guess you could mount two 250 watts in your case if you were really worried about it.
That's a good point, but I see the situation as a failure of the professor. The ideas of source file, compilation, etc. should be explained in a beginning level course.
Even if that isn't the case, the concept isn't a difficult one to grasp, at least not compared to learning C++ and the basics of programming logic.
Still, it would be an interesting interview question. Arguably even if you weren't formally taught the concept of a source file in class, you should pick it up over 4 years of CS training. I wonder how many applicants would stumble.
First, an answer to the "Cliff" comment...
Reading through the comments, it's fairly easy to separate those people who have been TA's from those that have only been students. To say that requiring a single development environment is the result of a professor's ignorance or the desire to make a student's life hard is ridiculous. It's not about you. It never was about you. You don't particularly matter that much.
I don't know that Code Warrior is the best learning environment, but reasons to standardize on something, and typically something GUI include...
1. Grading ease
2. Availability of the program on campus
3. Cost of the program
4. Ability of most students to run the program on a home computer
5. Ease of interface (why spend time trying to teach kids to use a command-line debugger, a command-line compiler, and vi or emacs--none of which _directly_ contributes to your ability to produce C++ code--when it's easier to spend a day showing people the "new file" and "compile" buttons)
6. Ease of support (if you leave the option of the environment open, it's likely that someone will use a system that you are unfamiliar with, be it gcc&emacs, Visual Studio, Watcom, etc. To help the most students, you'll need to be able to do it quickly, which is not possible if you have to learn the environment, or several environments, first)
Now, to answer "Sadistic Yoda," you should develop in whatever environment you like, but make sure to save at least a day to compile and run your software on the recommended system. You may learn more about the language this way, as different compilers will support different options, and you may be able to detect more bugs, since different debuggers might find different errors.
At any rate, it shouldn't take that long to test w/ Code Warrior as long as you know and use the intersection of C++ that it and gcc support.
"People can't go around doing things just because their right." -- Officer O'Clancey "Toxic Avenger"
When this happens to me, it's usually because I don't really understand the problem. To combat this, I typically take a break for a couple of days, wander around a bit, and think about what doesn't make sense to me.
It usually comes down to one of two things, I read the specification incorrectly, or the customer was too ambiguous in their description. The first problem can be corrected by really thinking about the problem and not coding for a few days. Eventually things may straighten out in your head. The second problem is solved the same way as the first, but you may realize that what is being requested is ridiculous.
At any rate, that's what I've found w/ my limited experience. Hell, 2 lines of code a day is fine...a professor once told me that it's typical to spit out only 5 lines of usable code per day over the span of an entire project.
Of course, Sun's control of Java isn't inherently any better than MS's control of their poorly named language. Frankly, no matter which language you choose of the two, you're in bed w/ a corporation that couldn't care less about your rights and privileges.
Of course, if you're comparing Pokeman attacks, I would have to go with C#. It's name alone is enough to stun the most stalwart programmer, and I have a funny feeling that its API will deliver the killing blow.
Fudge.
I will buy newspapers when
a) I can receive the information daily on a handheld device via radio waves...with option to print.
b) the reporting is a bit more responsible. Stop misquoting people and check your references before you run the story.
c) I am able to influence what stories have follow-ups. I don't know how many times I've read the paper, found something interesting, and then "poof" it became non-news the next day.
d) the quality of writing improves. Stop gearing the articles to people with a 6th-grade reading ability.
Those are the only things keeping me from subscribing to a newspaper. Albeit, I still pick one up occasionally (once every 2 or 3 months) for the crossword, for the movie listings, or just to see if things have gotten any better since last I checked.
The statements are in descending order of importance.
Yours,
AEH
What ever happened to those surveillance systems that could detect and display what's on your monitor from a distance. I don't think that the short wire from a person's video card to their display is what we need to worry about.
Can't find the source, but I remember reading that at least one of the members of the cast was hopped up on coke when the Xmas special was filmed. Anyone got a "line" on some evidence?
It would explain quite a bit.
It was obviously overshadowed in the article, but what's this mess about Mills' proprietary research in AI? Brain Child Systems doesn't seem to be anywhere on the 'net...at least it isn't available from Altavista.
Maybe it's because I'm a CS guy, but I think that this conscious AI stuff is a bit more radical than the physics bit. It would be a big enough revelation that we could have some sort of reasoning machine able to drive a car +unassisted+, let alone a "space ship." If there is consciousness to boot, then we may have a miraculous occurance!
If his claims are accurately reported, and if they are true, then I would have to say that he is the most vile person on the face of the Earth for not releasing the research to the public.
I don't think that I wrote that. I was just citing when Sales Tax came into existence, as well as the reason given in the linked document.
There was an America without sales tax and income tax. As far as property tax is concerned, I cannot say. Do your own research.
You speak as if there has always been sales tax, or tax of any sort. Read# hp
http://www.ianr.unl.edu/pubs/generalag/g733.htm
If you think that this is the case.
Here is the part of interest:
"Mississippi was the first state to enact a general sales and use tax. It did so in 1932 as a depression-era response to declining revenue from other sources, especially property taxes. Six years later, half the states had followed Mississippi's lead.
Although early sales tax enactments were intended to be temporary, they later became permanent as demands for public services increased and public officials faced the political difficulty of raising property taxes by amounts large enough to pay for such services."
We are far from a depression era economy. There is little reason for states to tax individual sales when they could make more cash in the stock market.
I can see it now...we're taxed on all the items we buy on the net by the state that we live in. We're taxed by the state that we buy from. We're taxed by the government for using the 'net to make purchases. By the time everyone is done taking their slice, We'll be paying twice as much for those German Scheisse films we all know and love.
(Yeah, it's a slippery slope, but look at the state of the union and tell me it's not frighteningly possible)
Looks like I might have to gas up the ol' mule and start leaving the house again.
Egads~
It makes no sense to me. I could buy a mini-disc player before that allowed me to record 74 minutes of audio. Now I can spend more money and still only record 74 minutes of audio?
I think a better idea would be to store and read mp3's directly. Then you might have an interesting product. With 160 MB of data storage, you're talking about roughly 40 songs worth of good quality mp3s. 74 minutes is barely an album.
Are there any entrepreneur's out there that want to make such a beast? It doesn't seem too difficult. We already have MP3 players, they just need to read and write to minidiscs instead of from flash memory or a hard drive.
On another note, I was looking at the Personal JukeBox that's to be released soon, and was wondering who would really want to flip through 100 cd's worth of songs w/ 6 buttons? It better have a damn fine GUI or at least some sort of ability to organize which songs are placed close to eachother.
It's difficult to evaluate this system given the sparse amount of information available. I, for one, am incredibly skeptical at this point.
e al/real_video.html
a) There is no statement of the train/test procedure for the neural net. It's fairly easy to get good performance if you're training your system on the same dataset that you test. Without this information, you cannot make a reasonable judgement.
b) If you listen to the audio samples in the video at
http://www.usc.edu/ext-relations/news_service/r
You can notice a significant difference in the times of the samples (e.g. "stop" is shorter than "yes"). A fairly unsophisticated NN can pick up on the length of a sound sample and generalize from there. I didn't hear any statement saying that in the official training and testing all sound samples were of the same length.
It's really a mess. If someone has a journal article or other piece of reliable information on this research, a pointer would be appreciated. Until then, I'll be feeding Clever Hans.
Don't automatically rule out MIT, CMU or others. If you're going to be spending about 400 bucks on applications, you might as well try for a couple 1st tier schools.
If you're a "good" undergraduate student, there's no reason why you wouldn't be accepted in schools ranked from 50 down to 20...you have a slightly better shot if you're going for a Ph.D. and you're in a better position to get funded.
Don't be fooled by prestige, however. Try to find a school that excels in your interest area. For example, Purdue is number one in security (or was when I visited), but has virtually nothing in AI. Even among subfields, such as AI, you have to look for schools that have specifically what you want, such as natural language processing, robotics, etc.
If you're not sure what you want to do, then by all means, take geography into account. If you like living in a large city, then it doesn't really matter if you're in a great program if you're surrounded by cow pastures (ahem Purdue). Also consider the requirements for the program, especially qualifiers. Find out how many you have to pass, and how many opportunities you have.
Remember, once you get into grad school, you can always transfer, and if your grades are good enough, you may be able to get into a better school (if you don't start out in one already).