I don't know where you live but if you live in the U.S. or U.K. then part of your tax money is being used by the government to pay to someone to read your slashdot post.
Why do you assume the target kids don't have that already? There are lots of comments about this in the previous/. stories regarding OLPC, so I won't repeat all of that here...
Or even better, just ditch electronic voting machines until they can be proved as safe as paper voting in all ways (which might never happen in my opinion). Yes, I'm a geek. Yes I like computers. No, I don't like using computers for voting.
The two other replies to your post have already done a good job at proving you're wrong, so I'll just add that if pi is proved random it will most likely not by a test of its digits, but by a more abstract proof, since it has an infinite number of digits.
The study, which is bound to provoke controversy, showed that the women who were directly exposed to semen were less depressed. The researchers think this is because mood-altering hormones in semen are absorbed through the vagina. They say they have ruled out other explanations.
I guess the scientists needed a definitive way of convincing their wives...
At a time there was a bot that beat all the other bots. Well, an analysis of the.class file turned out that it was actually loading the other bots'.class files and simulating them.:-)
... unknowingly, two such bots had been made and entered an infinite loop. That would teach their authors;)
Have you actually read the links I sent you? There's a mathematical proof that compressing natural language text implies being able to pass the Turing test, which is commonly thought to be an AI breakthrough AI when it happens. While that may not imply "intelligence" for all its definitions, it's surely something worthy of note, which your original comment doesn't seem to acknowledge.
Finally, a real challenge would be the self-inventing compression method, not the self-extracting algorithm.
So you're saying that making a computer pass a Turing test is not a real challenge? Do it then!
We can't know that until the algorithms are invented. And I guess the important thing here is not the algorithms, but the theories behind them (which hopefully will be possible to apply in a general way to all the languages).
For all the people laughing at this contest: Read this and this before making any more posts about how ridiculous this contest seems, how stupid it is to compress wikipedia, how compression is such a dumb process, and how bad the compressor was for taking a lot of time to process the text.
Just check if IE7 connects to MS when surfing Google.
Yes, but make sure to check at the router level - who knows if IE7 patches the OS so that you can't find out if it's connecting to the phishing filtering server.
Better yet, check at the molecular level, you never know if MS might have a partnership with all the router manufacturers...
There aren't many women related things I don't know about (I have a girlfriend, I've had sex, my mother and my sisters are all women), and this is the first time I've ever heard of the "women's olympic weighlifting" contest. I think it's fair to say it's been relatively low-profile.
Slashdot Mirror
References please?
And even better, it seems that the guy who was complaining didn't...
After years of hard work with many specialists trying to answer your fascinating question, I have arrived at the following answer:
They wanted to know more than what's enough to ensure it could only replicate once.
I ask again (in a different form, reflecting your post):
Why do you assume the laptops are only going to be distributed to places such as the one you described? Go and search for it.
All of them except goatse (since it's not even worthy for its creator I guess).
Why do you assume the target kids don't have that already? There are lots of comments about this in the previous /. stories regarding OLPC, so I won't repeat all of that here...
This was not an official initiative from the OLPC makers.
So when Ford has 90% of the market, they shouldn't be allowed to fix their brakes?
Can't one do a similar thing with regular voting? X-rays or whatever...
Or even better, just ditch electronic voting machines until they can be proved as safe as paper voting in all ways (which might never happen in my opinion). Yes, I'm a geek. Yes I like computers. No, I don't like using computers for voting.
Read this.
The two other replies to your post have already done a good job at proving you're wrong, so I'll just add that if pi is proved random it will most likely not by a test of its digits, but by a more abstract proof, since it has an infinite number of digits.
But this is not a wikipedia event! It's just an event which uses wikipedia data...
If I decide to throw a Mercedes off a cliff, is it a Mercedes event? Are Mercedes executives supposed to know about it?
That's because your ID is a special case...
I guess the scientists needed a definitive way of convincing their wives...
So you're saying that making a computer pass a Turing test is not a real challenge? Do it then!
We can't know that until the algorithms are invented. And I guess the important thing here is not the algorithms, but the theories behind them (which hopefully will be possible to apply in a general way to all the languages).
I recommend that you read this before making any further irrelevant comments.
For all the people laughing at this contest: Read this and this before making any more posts about how ridiculous this contest seems, how stupid it is to compress wikipedia, how compression is such a dumb process, and how bad the compressor was for taking a lot of time to process the text.
Yes, but make sure to check at the router level - who knows if IE7 patches the OS so that you can't find out if it's connecting to the phishing filtering server.
Better yet, check at the molecular level, you never know if MS might have a partnership with all the router manufacturers...
True, just look at this...
There aren't many women related things I don't know about (I have a girlfriend, I've had sex, my mother and my sisters are all women), and this is the first time I've ever heard of the "women's olympic weighlifting" contest. I think it's fair to say it's been relatively low-profile.
More importantly: why not use wikipedia? Read their FAQ before making irrelevant comments and questions here...
Well, you could always turn on the firewall before connecting to the internet, and then get the updates...