"Open Source" does not just mean "free to read the source". Most people use it to mean "distributed under an OSI-approved license". OSI approval is granted on whether the license meets their "open source definition" - which is actually all but identical to the Debian project's definition of "Free Software" and very similar to the GNU project's definition of free software.
Though the philosophies behind "open source" and "free software" are divergent, a piece of software that is open source is almost always free software (the only difference is on the margins, where OSI accepts a couple of more onerous licenses than RMS is prepared to).
Materials haven't been demonstrated yet
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The fact is, nobody has yet demonstrated a nanotube composite strong enough to build a space elevator out of. There are, however, lots of applications for carbon nanotube composites which should be *quite* sufficient to pay for the R&D. If that R&D effort succeeds, then and only then do we need to consider the space elevator.
Better still, don't bother with encryption at the hardware or driver level at all - do it at the application level where the algorithm can be changed without too much hassle if it is discovered to be insecure.
The article was vague. Maybe he made a mistake and gave the investigators something that identified him. Equally likely, maybe the infosec guys decided the payoff for letting him continue hacking for a while (firm up the evidence for a conviction, be able to convict him for more serious offences, and most importantly figure out what his motives and techniques were) was more important than having him arrested immediately.
Monkeys have good color vision. The great apes have good color vision. Humans have good color vision. From all reports, there's not that much difference in the visual systems of all three. Given all of that, it seems to be on fairly safe ground to assume that Australopithecus had good color vision.
More generally, you are IMHO correct in that TV paleontology doesn't make the point that "a lot of this is guesswork backed by varying degrees of evidence" well enough. However, you can't expect them to stop every 30 seconds and say "well, we're fairly sure this is true, but this is a guess, whilst this fact is a definite maybe....".
Let's wait and see what they *actually* end up proposing before going off half-cocked. For one thing, the High Court, in a famous case about a decade ago, found the Australian constitution gave an implied right of free political speech. Any attempt to censor what is clearly political speech might well be challengable on this basis.
Frankly, I'm muchmore concerned about the defamation laws, which are already some of the most restrictive in the Western world. Defamation laws should be *loosened* in this country, not further tightened.
Is a council of the relevant cabinet members in the six state governments (and the two territories), and the federal government, to coordinate their reponse to the "monstrous threat of E-crime".
State Opposition Justice spokesman Lawrence Springborg
Is the opposition Party's spokesperson on justice matters. Yes, he's in the shadow cabinet.
WTF is a police minister?
The minister responsible for the oversight of police. Each of the six state governments has one. Yes it's a little strange, but law and order is one of the state government's major responsibilities. They aren't a chief of police, they are politicians (but here the chief of police isn't an elected position so the political element of a US police chief's role is handled by the minister).
I thought you had a parliament? Why is a Senator handing out new police powers, anyway?
Either this is something that can be done by regulation (ministerial decree, essentially) or the legislation will get through Parliament without much debate (which seems likely if all the States have agreed to it as well, as every single state and territory government is run by the party in opposition federally at the moment).
Whilst I would deeply like to agree with those who think hate speech laws are counterproductive, consider the fight against Al-Queda (for example).
In essence, what "we" are trying to win is a battle for the hearts and minds of Islamic peoples the world over, more than anything else. Those clerics who spread hatred of non-Muslims seem to be to be a major part of the root cause of the problem, even if they don't personally get their hands dirty with actual terrorism.
If the battle of ideas can be won without resorting to active suppression of opposing viewpoints, all well and good. But what happens if that doesn't work?
NASA has been expert at PR since Apollo. In fact, PR was really the whole point of Apollo. Some great science and engineering undoubtedly got done in the process, but the whole point was bragging rights for the US.
Caches have been used in mainframes and minis since 1969, when the IBM 360/85 used it for exactly the same reason as modern CPUs need cache - the low-cost memory technology of the time (magnetic cores, IIRC) were much slower than the CPU, and memory that was fast enough was expensive.
This is obviously a troll, but seeing it's been moderated up I should warn the kiddies out there that this is a *bad idea*...
Self-modifying code makes pipelining, branch prediction, instruction cacheing (particularly on SMP systems) and a bunch of other things dangerous, and just slows down the processor as it checks for and deals with it. IIRC some architectures don't even explicitly check for it anymore and die horribly if you try it.
Aside from the fact that trying to debug self-modifying code is just asking for fscking trouble....
Dad used to make Super 8 movies of us as children. They were jerky as hell.
#ifdef SLIGHTLY_OFFTOPIC
However, super 8 at least allowed you to edit your films.
20 years later, it seems we're finally getting back the ability to easily edit film/video footage again at a reasonable cost. Why did 8mm film die when consumer video cameras had this horrible flaw? Pr0n (the home-made stuff) striking again?
I'd say this effect looks really cool in games where you view the action from a floating third-person perspective, and especially for games where the graphics closely mimic TV coverage of the "event". It looks cool in auto racing games, for instance.
However, lens flare would look horribly out of place in a first-person shooter, IMHO.
Bear in mind that sending humans *anywhere* costs at least 20 times what a probe with comparable scientific capabilities costs.
I mostly agree, but there are plenty of things that humans can do that it's not practical or efficient for robots to do. Humans don't need a 20-minute (or longer) timelag to make the simplest decisions, are much better able to adapt tools in novel ways, and so should be able to get a hell of a lot more work done in certain sorts of investigation than robotic systems can. For that reason, I think manned Mars missions, provided they can be done at non-suicidal risk and affordable cost, are justifiable.
I'm unsurprised by this. It's kind of like the difference between film reviews and the public perception, which quite often diverge radically. Anyway, I think there's a couple of reasons why it occurs:
Firstly, game journalists are mostly adult males in their 20s (or even older these days). They probably get to see real women's breasts every so often (and if not, can download all the porn they want without Mom finding out) and are thus being slightly less impressed with Lara Croft's than your average teenage boy. Being required to be at least semi-literate, they may have even read the odd book and seen one or two movies and grown to appreciate a little bit of intelligent plotting and stuff. (Yes, this is a gross generalization).
More importantly, though, these guys (and they are mostly guys) play a *lot* of games. They all tend to blur into one another, so any innovation would tend to stick out like a sore thumb and be rewarded, whereas for the more casual gamer innovation might not be as important as it's all new to them anyway.
Frankly, in the cases where I've played games that reviewers have liked but the market hasn't, I've agreed with the reviewers nine times out of ten.
Call me a dreamer, but wouldn't it be nice if money didn't talk so loud in your politics?
I'm not naive enough to believe that money doesn't talk loudly in other countries' political systems, but, really, the roar seems to be deafening in the states. Even The Economist thinks so, and its editors are well-known fans of America's free enterprise.
In Australia, there are two different odds systems for racing (thoroughbred, trots, greyhound):
One, which is the one you get by default if you bet with the off-track betting agencies, is the one described where the odds change *after* you have placed the bet. The agency takes their cut, and the rest is distributed to people who placed winning bets in proportion to the amount they bet. An Australian developed an early analog computer, the totalizer, to automate this process in the 1920s(?), thus continuing Australia's long history of being a world leader in gambling technology;)
Bookmakers at the track instead offer fixed-odds betting - any individual bet is at known odds, though they can and do adjust them nearly continuously.
As to your question as to how bookmakers offering fixed-odds bets know how to judge the odds, they follow the patterns of bets very closely (nowdays often with the aid of computers) and keep track of information about the horses they are offering bets on. However, bookmakers can and do lose money on a race. Some very rich men (notably a guy called Kerry Packer) make a habit of screwing bookmakers each year at Melbourne Cup day.
Intergraph also provides equipment and services for emergency dispatch - in essence, allocating resources to 911 calls.
They got a contract from a previous state government here in Victoria (Australia) to do this for the ambulance service. It was a massive screwup, with buggy software, inexperienced staff, people at the top of the ambulance department mysteriously going to work for Intergraph after signing the contract with them, and opposition from the ambulance drivers' union, and eventually the contract had to be cancelled amidst political scandal.
You make some good points. BillG's choice of charities seems to be reasonably enlightened, and he gives away a lot of money in absolute terms every year. However, that doesn't mean that Bill and MS don't deserve criticism on their ethical grounds. Firstly, one possible criticism is that Billg's personal wealth is so enormous that in relative terms his generosity is not that high - and even if he gave away 99% of his wealth, he would still be an incredibly wealthy man. Therefore, by keeping much more of his wealth than he could conceivably use, he is still greedy. Secondly, it is argued that he gained his wealth by unethical and sometimes illegal means, hoovering up excess profits from business and individuals around the world by illegally leveraging its monopoly in some areas to bully competitors in others.
The second criticism applies most directly to Microsoft the company, and I personally think pretty indisputable.
Maybe this won't have *any* practical applications. It's pure research. Maybe it'll sit in a journal for 20 years before some young postgrad will read it, realize that because of (insert random other advances here) he or she can use that technology to {control nanobots, build a beowulf cluster on a chip, implant it in people's brains}.
Kind of like when Alexander Fleming wrote up a journal paper back in 1928(?) about how mould killed bacteria, and Walter Florey found it in a literature search a decade later and set his research team to isolate the responsible compound and figure out how to produce it in bulk.
I've had this experience myself. I needed to find an efficient algorithm for a relatively obscure problem. The usual textbooks didn't help, but I finally located a survey paper which finally revealed a 1981 journal article which described exactly the algorithm I was looking for.
In a rare display of unity, the Prime Ministers of Australia and New Zealand issued a joint statement condemning Canada's sole ranking as the world's most inoffensive nation. "What have we ever done to offend anyone? Just because the Indonesians got their knickers in a twist about East Timor a couple of years ago...sheesh.", complained John Howard. New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark added "this is just another example of the rest of the world not giving us the recognition we deserve", as Mr Howard appeared to stifle a yawn.
President of the United States, George W. Bush, when asked about the concerns of the two countries, responded "New Zealand? Isn't that part of Australia anyway?"
In sci-fi novels, the radiation problem is usually solved by a "magnetic shield" which I presume bends the particles around the ship (or at least the inhabited parts).
Maybe the magnetic fields required are too strong to be practical. IANA physicist.
Extremists are very useful when pushing a political cause, because they make others appear reasonable. In what is a game of political good cop, bad cop, RMS makes a very effective bad cop.
This tactic works for all sorts of politics, some good, some bad. It doesn't mean it's ineffective.
Slashdot Mirror
Though the philosophies behind "open source" and "free software" are divergent, a piece of software that is open source is almost always free software (the only difference is on the margins, where OSI accepts a couple of more onerous licenses than RMS is prepared to).
The fact is, nobody has yet demonstrated a nanotube composite strong enough to build a space elevator out of. There are, however, lots of applications for carbon nanotube composites which should be *quite* sufficient to pay for the R&D. If that R&D effort succeeds, then and only then do we need to consider the space elevator.
Better still, don't bother with encryption at the hardware or driver level at all - do it at the application level where the algorithm can be changed without too much hassle if it is discovered to be insecure.
Or at least no more than any observation operation set up by police.
The article was vague. Maybe he made a mistake and gave the investigators something that identified him. Equally likely, maybe the infosec guys decided the payoff for letting him continue hacking for a while (firm up the evidence for a conviction, be able to convict him for more serious offences, and most importantly figure out what his motives and techniques were) was more important than having him arrested immediately.
More generally, you are IMHO correct in that TV paleontology doesn't make the point that "a lot of this is guesswork backed by varying degrees of evidence" well enough. However, you can't expect them to stop every 30 seconds and say "well, we're fairly sure this is true, but this is a guess, whilst this fact is a definite maybe ....".
Frankly, I'm muchmore concerned about the defamation laws, which are already some of the most restrictive in the Western world. Defamation laws should be *loosened* in this country, not further tightened.
Is a council of the relevant cabinet members in the six state governments (and the two territories), and the federal government, to coordinate their reponse to the "monstrous threat of E-crime".
Is the opposition Party's spokesperson on justice matters. Yes, he's in the shadow cabinet.
The minister responsible for the oversight of police. Each of the six state governments has one. Yes it's a little strange, but law and order is one of the state government's major responsibilities. They aren't a chief of police, they are politicians (but here the chief of police isn't an elected position so the political element of a US police chief's role is handled by the minister).
Either this is something that can be done by regulation (ministerial decree, essentially) or the legislation will get through Parliament without much debate (which seems likely if all the States have agreed to it as well, as every single state and territory government is run by the party in opposition federally at the moment).
In essence, what "we" are trying to win is a battle for the hearts and minds of Islamic peoples the world over, more than anything else. Those clerics who spread hatred of non-Muslims seem to be to be a major part of the root cause of the problem, even if they don't personally get their hands dirty with actual terrorism.
If the battle of ideas can be won without resorting to active suppression of opposing viewpoints, all well and good. But what happens if that doesn't work?
NASA has been expert at PR since Apollo. In fact, PR was really the whole point of Apollo. Some great science and engineering undoubtedly got done in the process, but the whole point was bragging rights for the US.
Caches have been used in mainframes and minis since 1969, when the IBM 360/85 used it for exactly the same reason as modern CPUs need cache - the low-cost memory technology of the time (magnetic cores, IIRC) were much slower than the CPU, and memory that was fast enough was expensive.
This is obviously a troll, but seeing it's been moderated up I should warn the kiddies out there that this is a *bad idea*...
Self-modifying code makes pipelining, branch prediction, instruction cacheing (particularly on SMP systems) and a bunch of other things dangerous, and just slows down the processor as it checks for and deals with it. IIRC some architectures don't even explicitly check for it anymore and die horribly if you try it.
Aside from the fact that trying to debug self-modifying code is just asking for fscking trouble....
#ifdef SLIGHTLY_OFFTOPIC
However, super 8 at least allowed you to edit your films.
20 years later, it seems we're finally getting back the ability to easily edit film/video footage again at a reasonable cost. Why did 8mm film die when consumer video cameras had this horrible flaw? Pr0n (the home-made stuff) striking again?
#endif
However, lens flare would look horribly out of place in a first-person shooter, IMHO.
I mostly agree, but there are plenty of things that humans can do that it's not practical or efficient for robots to do. Humans don't need a 20-minute (or longer) timelag to make the simplest decisions, are much better able to adapt tools in novel ways, and so should be able to get a hell of a lot more work done in certain sorts of investigation than robotic systems can. For that reason, I think manned Mars missions, provided they can be done at non-suicidal risk and affordable cost, are justifiable.
Firstly, game journalists are mostly adult males in their 20s (or even older these days). They probably get to see real women's breasts every so often (and if not, can download all the porn they want without Mom finding out) and are thus being slightly less impressed with Lara Croft's than your average teenage boy. Being required to be at least semi-literate, they may have even read the odd book and seen one or two movies and grown to appreciate a little bit of intelligent plotting and stuff. (Yes, this is a gross generalization).
More importantly, though, these guys (and they are mostly guys) play a *lot* of games. They all tend to blur into one another, so any innovation would tend to stick out like a sore thumb and be rewarded, whereas for the more casual gamer innovation might not be as important as it's all new to them anyway.
Frankly, in the cases where I've played games that reviewers have liked but the market hasn't, I've agreed with the reviewers nine times out of ten.
I'm not naive enough to believe that money doesn't talk loudly in other countries' political systems, but, really, the roar seems to be deafening in the states. Even The Economist thinks so, and its editors are well-known fans of America's free enterprise.
One, which is the one you get by default if you bet with the off-track betting agencies, is the one described where the odds change *after* you have placed the bet. The agency takes their cut, and the rest is distributed to people who placed winning bets in proportion to the amount they bet. An Australian developed an early analog computer, the totalizer, to automate this process in the 1920s(?), thus continuing Australia's long history of being a world leader in gambling technology ;)
Bookmakers at the track instead offer fixed-odds betting - any individual bet is at known odds, though they can and do adjust them nearly continuously.
As to your question as to how bookmakers offering fixed-odds bets know how to judge the odds, they follow the patterns of bets very closely (nowdays often with the aid of computers) and keep track of information about the horses they are offering bets on. However, bookmakers can and do lose money on a race. Some very rich men (notably a guy called Kerry Packer) make a habit of screwing bookmakers each year at Melbourne Cup day.
They got a contract from a previous state government here in Victoria (Australia) to do this for the ambulance service. It was a massive screwup, with buggy software, inexperienced staff, people at the top of the ambulance department mysteriously going to work for Intergraph after signing the contract with them, and opposition from the ambulance drivers' union, and eventually the contract had to be cancelled amidst political scandal.
The second criticism applies most directly to Microsoft the company, and I personally think pretty indisputable.
Kind of like when Alexander Fleming wrote up a journal paper back in 1928(?) about how mould killed bacteria, and Walter Florey found it in a literature search a decade later and set his research team to isolate the responsible compound and figure out how to produce it in bulk.
I've had this experience myself. I needed to find an efficient algorithm for a relatively obscure problem. The usual textbooks didn't help, but I finally located a survey paper which finally revealed a 1981 journal article which described exactly the algorithm I was looking for.
How do they focus gamma rays in those gamma ray observatories? Could the same methods be used to shield a spacecraft?
President of the United States, George W. Bush, when asked about the concerns of the two countries, responded "New Zealand? Isn't that part of Australia anyway?"
Maybe the magnetic fields required are too strong to be practical. IANA physicist.
This tactic works for all sorts of politics, some good, some bad. It doesn't mean it's ineffective.