You missed my real point - what I'm trying to say is that even if a computer is the world's best chess player (which it may or may not be), it doesn't mean that a competition between the world's best human chess players is uninteresting.
Personally, I consider it irrelevant who wins the world championship since chess became short work for a machine. I mean, why bother spending a lifetime learning the damn game only to have a computer program wipe the board with you? Its a solved problem, time to move on.
Personally, I can't see the point of athletics. Cars have been able to outperform humans almost since cars were invented!
However, you do have somewhat of a point. Is there any room left for innovation in chess, assuming the rules stay static? Have all the openings, combinations, and endgame strategies possible been explored?
In regards to the computer comments, I don't think it's a big deal that he was beaten by a computer; it's just a matter of raw computational power, like being beaten in the 100 meter dash by a car.
Well said. While people regard chess as one of the best challenges of intelligence and mental agility, it turns out that brute force and a few *relatively* simple heuristics are all that's needed to play at world-class standard. More to the point, the techniques that are used for computers to play chess well have been of little use for other artificial-intelligence problems.
Firstly, I was talking hypothetically. I know no more about the details of the case than from the ACLU report. I suspect the ACLU is probably right, but that's just a guess. Therefore, I was trying to do a "what if" scenario.
If she "cursed" the teacher, then any punishment she received should be in line with the sort of punishment a student would receive for swearing at a teacher in a more typical fashion.
Fine.
If she threatened the teacher with physical harm in any normally understandable mundane sense, that should be dealt with appropriately. (Note, I don't say in a normal fashion... schools tend to overreact in some instances to "threats" that are meaningless.)
Depends. If the victim of the threats seriously thought they were real, that's serious enough to deserve some action (not necessarily punishment per se) from the staff. Students have a right to feel safe at school.
If she threatened the teacher with metaphysical harm and she received the sort of punishment usually associated with threats of physical harm, then whoever decided her punishment is (it could be logically concluded) expressing belief that she can DO whatever it is she said she could do.
Well,like I said, if the individual casting the hex seriously intended to do harm, that's pretty serious in my book, even if it doesn't actually work. To use a extreme but I think appropriate analogy, if I put what I believe to be poison in your food, does it make it less of a crime if the "poison" turns out of be harmless?
Additionally, you're ignoring the possibility that the victim might take the hex seriously. There are mature adults out there that do, you know. I think it's crazy, but like I said, from my perspective it's no crazier than believing that Jesus Christ walked on water. Additionally, you haven't considered the hypothetical scenario I raised where the victim was another student who believed in witchcraft.
Like I said, I suspect that this *is* another case of officialdom picking on anyone who is "different". What I was trying to raise in some "what if" scenarios was that there could be legitimate reasons for suspending a student involved in Wicca, if that student attempted to use their supposed "powers" to do antisocial things like hurt people.
That's right, she was kicked out of school for WITCHCRAFT!?!?
OK, assume for one moment a hypothetical student was suspended because she cast a hex on a teacher (and not for merely being a pracising Wiccan).
As an atheist, I find the supernatural tenets of Wicca as laughable as any other religion, and would have fully expected the teacher to laugh the hex off. But the fact would remain that the student tried to cause harm to that teacher. Doesn't that deserve punishment? Additionally, what say the teacher honestly believed in the power of witchcraft and was genuinely distressed by the incident - maybe they willed themselves into getting sick over the whole incident. Should the student be punished then?
Better still, let's imagine the victim of the hex was a fellow student. You could well imagine that at such a delicate, uncomfortable age, such an event could cause serious harm to the victim.
So, while I accept that students should be free to practise whatever nonsense that passes for religion (or none at all like any sensible person would;) ), you can't allow students to do things that hurt other people.
Hmmm. You're calling cricket bizarre, and you're (presumably) from the land of the game where a bunch of 500 pound guys pile on top of each other, for ten seconds, and then everything stops for five minutes where the captain, the coaches, the umpires, the crowd, the commentators, a bunch of drunks in a sports bar, and the computers at the Pentagon analyse the play.
I read of a theoretical method, but it requires a long object and some spin, both of which are at least fifty years off if not more.
If you're being sarcastic, you're remarkably subtle for Slashdot. Last I checked, ropes and a rocket to start the spin were pretty much known technologies . . .
It's going to be a lot easier to find security holes in Windows if you've got the source code. Of course, in Linux this cuts both ways because the good guys can find and fix them much more easily too, but Microsoft aren't likely to be taking patches any time soon:)
Having the source code would make figuring things out for interoperability purposes much easier for projects like Samba and WINE. Of course, neither of the above projects would use knowledge obtained from the crack (if the crackers actually downloaded any code worth looking at) - the legal risk is simply not worth taking.
Finally, the Windows source code could get audited for code that really shouldn't be in there, such as unacknowledged BSD code, or any GPL'd code. I very much doubt that it actually contains any, but . ..
So, yes, it *does* matter, but not in the ways the general media think.
Yeah, I emailed Andrew Leonard about his article. One point that his article really didn't get across is the number of projects that would directly benefit much from the Microsoft source code being available - there's not that many. Samba, Samba/TNG, Wine, perhaps plex86. It would be mildly interesting to many other projects, but there wouldn't be much code that could be used directly.
What you perhaps don't appreciate is just how small New Zealand is.
With the exception of Auckland, the one decent-sized city, the rest of New Zealand's population centers really rate as large towns rather than real cities, and as anyone who lives in a town knows, there is no such thing as anonymity in one. This makes it *extremely* difficult to do anything covertly - for both sides of the law-enforcement and intelligence fence. Additionally, the antipodean intelligence services have been a bit of a disaster area lately, according to the news media. This *might* be a propaganda screen to hide their real effectiveness, but I don't think so - they have to fight for funds just like everyone else and bad publicity doesn't help.
No it doesn't. SPEC is a very poor indicator of whether an office suite in runs well.
The only benchmarks worth the paper they are printed on is:
Performance under the workload the machine is purchased for - try it yourself with your own data.
If such a benchmark is not feasible, a standard benchmark that closely approximates the workload the machine will be used for is a half-decent substitute, but the details of your workload can still lead to massive discrepencies between the benchmark and reality.
Beyond that, you may as well base your purchase decisions on bogomips or the tacky little 8-segment mhz displays that PC clones used to have.
So the Government wants to have access to whatever "bad elements" send over the network. But will they ever be able to do it? This isn't voice we're talking about, this is data. Any "bad element" can encrypt it and make it unreadable by Govt officials in any useful timeframe.
Ever heard of traffic analysis? You can extract plenty of useful information out of monitoring encrypted messages.
This is extremely dangerous. With the low (almost nil) gravity on Eros, an alien lifeform can easily knock down our probe with nothing more than a well-aimed rock. I consider it a serious lapse of judgement in our elected officials to allow NASA to spend billions on such a risky endeavour.
How could any right-thinking red-blooded American like yourself just lie down and accept the threat from these alien sons of bitches? Surely you're not going to let this threaten democracy and our way of life? Show some true Yankee grit and tell NASA and the Air Force to put a nuke right up their ugly green ass:)
Every time you deal with somebody in an IT-related area, drop the fact that you're looking for guest speakers at a LUG. They might not be suitable (they might be on another continent), but they might know somebody that is suitable and available. Repeat until suitable speakers are found.
If any of the Melbourne, Australia LUGs want somebody to speak on GnuCash, I'm available:)
And who's to say that "US English" and "British English" are really all that different?
Written English is pretty similar across most of the native-English-speaking world. Spoken English varies considerably more. However, it's the cultural assumptions, more than the language itself, that can hamper communication between speakers of various Englishes (and even more so between native speakers and non-native speakers).
To take a simple example, Americans, and particularly Californians, don't get deadpan humor - the art of saying obviously false, highly exaggerated, or outrageous things with a straight face. British humor is laden with it.
When you say Chinese - are you speaking of Mandarin or Cantonese (i would assume Mandarin)?
One point to keep in mind with Chinese is that Mandarian and Cantonese (as well as the other Chinese dialects) share a common written form. However, Taiwan uses the traditional Chinese characters, while mainland China uses a simplified version, and people familiar with only one cannot read the other, IIRC.
It's been well-covered in this thread and elsewhere that bazaar-style development makes absolutely no sense for safety-critical embedded software such as the kind that runs on medical radiation machines, because a) relying on the possibility that somebody *might* check the code ain't good enough, and b) the development and test environment ain't exactly widely availble. However, one thing that open source does make possible, and projects like OpenBSD demonstrate the value of, is external auditing of code. Presumably writers of safety-critical systems like these are subject to extensive auditing.
What kind of auditing procedures is this software (or, really, the entire system) put through?
Australia is passing laws that force consumers to use censorware.
While the laws still exist, they have been *totally* ignored - the one exception being porn sites are no longer hosted in Australia. The regulatory body responsible, and the government itself, have absolutely no interest in the matter.
This probably has to do with the fact that the vote of the bible-bashing independent senator the government was chasing at the time is no longer crucial.
And let's face it: for flight to become that commonplace, the very same idiots that drive on the roads today would be flying in the air, making decisions as poorly up there as they do down here.
And let's face it, you probably drive a car, ride a bicycle, or take a bus and thus share the road with those idiots every single day. The difference is that I can put *considerably* more space between myself and them in an aircraft than I can in a car.
Additionally, licensing would probably inherit the primary-safety-first attitude of the aircraft administration powers-that-be rather than the "let any moron loose in a lethal weapon" attitude that persists in some (not all, try getting a car license in most of Europe) countries with regards to cars. Hopefully, therefore, many of the morons would either have it educated out of them or wouldn't get a license.
And don't even bother talking about the idea of automatic, computer-controlled flyways and such nonsense. You may love your OS, but you would not actually risk your life on it. It only takes a drop of about 20 to 30 feet to kill you.
I rely on somebody's programming every time I hop in a commercial airliner. I haven't yet depended on medical electronics not to kill me, but that will probably happen somewhere in the future too. It's difficult, slow, and costly, but you can build software for safety-critical systems.
First, I have to remind ignorant Americans that Hong Kong (two words, not one) is under the control of China, but it is governed as a Special Administrative Region. That means we have our own government, we vote for our own politicians, we don't have a large controlling communistic party, and we have a freedom to
travel as much as when Hong Kong was still a British colony.
From what I saw when I was over there, on the day-to-day level HK is still mostly free. The police keep a low profile (except on a Friday night in the red-light district, when they're everywhere, which is very nice), the courts are independent, Internet access is unfiltered, and HK citizens are free to travel overseas if they want. Human rights groups can and do operate from HK,, and keep a close eye on mainland China from there, as I understand it.
However, the local legislature is not really democratically elected - some of the seats are, but most are elected by special "constituencies", such as "business associations" and the like, guaranteeing that China gets a majority of the people it wants on the legislature. The "Chief Executive" is selected by the legislature, so he is the guy Beijing wants.
The one area that is a little disconcerting is the mainstream media. They are a cheer squad for Beijing, mostly, and their coverage of domestic (HK) politics is timid in the extreme. The economy, by their own high standards, was performing very badly while I was there. In most countries, if this is the case, the incumbent government gets heavily criticized. I didn't see a peep of any of media directly criticizing the government. Instead, the major political angle they covered was the large number of stray dogs! The South China Morning Post is particularly bad - I gave up reading it after a few days. The Standard, the other English-language daily, is slightly better, but still not great. I'm told that the Chinese-language papers are mostly considerably worse. However, dissenting voices do exist, and the authorities seem to leave them alone. One of the local street newspapers (well, actually, it was a street magazine) rather brutally satirized the Chinese government as their editorial column.
Anyway, HK still remains a largely free country. It's a heck of a lot better than what goes on in China proper.
OH god, i've been programming all night long. I can't think strait. All I can think while typing this is how to getc and ungetc all these characters and how to write them to a file.
Now is probably *not* a good time, but if you're having to deal with complex input, you might want to consider lex(1) and yacc(1), or their free and superior equivalents flex and bison.
Actually, the problem is different from just "multiple universes". The term Universe is used to encompass _everything_. If there are multiple universes and they have any kind of interaction with our universe, then they're all just part of the same Universe.
My personal (and admittedly laypersons) definition of the universe was "I can get there in a spaceship that moves in 3 dimensions" (ignoring time concerns). If there's another splotch of "the cosmos" that I can't get to in this manner, I'll happily concede it to be in another universe. We currently don't know of any other "splotches of cosmos" besides the universe we currently know, and evidence that they exist would significantly alter our view of things.
Bills could be presented on TV and voted on by the people every evening.
Do you have the time or inclination to understand, in detail, every piece of IT-related legislation that goes before the legislature of the various jurisdictions you live in? I doubt it - and that's in an area of policy where you presumably have some interest and expertise.
Now, consider the thousands of other pieces of legislation that pass before those bodies in the course of a year. Can you be expected to understand, even cursorily, more than a few of them without devoting your life to the job?
While direct democracy sounds appealing, it just wouldn't work. Citizen-initiated referenda, like that used in California, might be a reasonable compromise between your desire to directly influence policy and the impracticality of directly voting on *every* issue to come before a legislature.
Would some Californians care to comment on how well the citizen-initiated referenda have worked there? Has it produced better government? Has it resulted in stupid pieces of populism getting approved? Have Californians voted simultaneously for lower taxes, higher expenditure, and disallowing the government from borrowing money or other such idiocies?
Slashdot Mirror
You missed my real point - what I'm trying to say is that even if a computer is the world's best chess player (which it may or may not be), it doesn't mean that a competition between the world's best human chess players is uninteresting.
Personally, I can't see the point of athletics. Cars have been able to outperform humans almost since cars were invented! However, you do have somewhat of a point. Is there any room left for innovation in chess, assuming the rules stay static? Have all the openings, combinations, and endgame strategies possible been explored?
Well said. While people regard chess as one of the best challenges of intelligence and mental agility, it turns out that brute force and a few *relatively* simple heuristics are all that's needed to play at world-class standard. More to the point, the techniques that are used for computers to play chess well have been of little use for other artificial-intelligence problems.
Of course, I think we've got think is a case of *far* too much time on our hands if you pardon the appalling pun :)
Fine.
Depends. If the victim of the threats seriously thought they were real, that's serious enough to deserve some action (not necessarily punishment per se) from the staff. Students have a right to feel safe at school.
Well,like I said, if the individual casting the hex seriously intended to do harm, that's pretty serious in my book, even if it doesn't actually work. To use a extreme but I think appropriate analogy, if I put what I believe to be poison in your food, does it make it less of a crime if the "poison" turns out of be harmless? Additionally, you're ignoring the possibility that the victim might take the hex seriously. There are mature adults out there that do, you know. I think it's crazy, but like I said, from my perspective it's no crazier than believing that Jesus Christ walked on water. Additionally, you haven't considered the hypothetical scenario I raised where the victim was another student who believed in witchcraft.
Like I said, I suspect that this *is* another case of officialdom picking on anyone who is "different". What I was trying to raise in some "what if" scenarios was that there could be legitimate reasons for suspending a student involved in Wicca, if that student attempted to use their supposed "powers" to do antisocial things like hurt people.
Yeah, but the combination of
- Thin air that doesn't carry conversation all that well, and
- The sonic boom obliterating any noise that does carry
I don't think she's going to be talking much.I could be wrong - I'm neither a skydiver nor an expert in the upper atmosphere :)
OK, assume for one moment a hypothetical student was suspended because she cast a hex on a teacher (and not for merely being a pracising Wiccan).
As an atheist, I find the supernatural tenets of Wicca as laughable as any other religion, and would have fully expected the teacher to laugh the hex off. But the fact would remain that the student tried to cause harm to that teacher. Doesn't that deserve punishment? Additionally, what say the teacher honestly believed in the power of witchcraft and was genuinely distressed by the incident - maybe they willed themselves into getting sick over the whole incident. Should the student be punished then? Better still, let's imagine the victim of the hex was a fellow student. You could well imagine that at such a delicate, uncomfortable age, such an event could cause serious harm to the victim.
So, while I accept that students should be free to practise whatever nonsense that passes for religion (or none at all like any sensible person would ;) ), you can't allow students to do things that hurt other people.
Like I said - hmmm.
If you're being sarcastic, you're remarkably subtle for Slashdot. Last I checked, ropes and a rocket to start the spin were pretty much known technologies . . .
- It's going to be a lot easier to find security holes in Windows if you've got the source code. Of course, in Linux this cuts both ways because the good guys can find and fix them much more easily too, but Microsoft aren't likely to be taking patches any time soon
:)
- Having the source code would make figuring things out for interoperability purposes much easier for projects like Samba and WINE. Of course, neither of the above projects would use knowledge obtained from the crack (if the crackers actually downloaded any code worth looking at) - the legal risk is simply not worth taking.
- Finally, the Windows source code could get audited for code that really shouldn't be in there, such as unacknowledged BSD code, or any GPL'd code. I very much doubt that it actually contains any, but . .
.
So, yes, it *does* matter, but not in the ways the general media think.Yeah, I emailed Andrew Leonard about his article. One point that his article really didn't get across is the number of projects that would directly benefit much from the Microsoft source code being available - there's not that many. Samba, Samba/TNG, Wine, perhaps plex86. It would be mildly interesting to many other projects, but there wouldn't be much code that could be used directly.
With the exception of Auckland, the one decent-sized city, the rest of New Zealand's population centers really rate as large towns rather than real cities, and as anyone who lives in a town knows, there is no such thing as anonymity in one. This makes it *extremely* difficult to do anything covertly - for both sides of the law-enforcement and intelligence fence. Additionally, the antipodean intelligence services have been a bit of a disaster area lately, according to the news media. This *might* be a propaganda screen to hide their real effectiveness, but I don't think so - they have to fight for funds just like everyone else and bad publicity doesn't help.
Ever heard of traffic analysis? You can extract plenty of useful information out of monitoring encrypted messages.
How could any right-thinking red-blooded American like yourself just lie down and accept the threat from these alien sons of bitches? Surely you're not going to let this threaten democracy and our way of life? Show some true Yankee grit and tell NASA and the Air Force to put a nuke right up their ugly green ass :)
If any of the Melbourne, Australia LUGs want somebody to speak on GnuCash, I'm available :)
Written English is pretty similar across most of the native-English-speaking world. Spoken English varies considerably more. However, it's the cultural assumptions, more than the language itself, that can hamper communication between speakers of various Englishes (and even more so between native speakers and non-native speakers). To take a simple example, Americans, and particularly Californians, don't get deadpan humor - the art of saying obviously false, highly exaggerated, or outrageous things with a straight face. British humor is laden with it.
One point to keep in mind with Chinese is that Mandarian and Cantonese (as well as the other Chinese dialects) share a common written form. However, Taiwan uses the traditional Chinese characters, while mainland China uses a simplified version, and people familiar with only one cannot read the other, IIRC.
What kind of auditing procedures is this software (or, really, the entire system) put through?
While the laws still exist, they have been *totally* ignored - the one exception being porn sites are no longer hosted in Australia. The regulatory body responsible, and the government itself, have absolutely no interest in the matter.
This probably has to do with the fact that the vote of the bible-bashing independent senator the government was chasing at the time is no longer crucial.
And let's face it, you probably drive a car, ride a bicycle, or take a bus and thus share the road with those idiots every single day. The difference is that I can put *considerably* more space between myself and them in an aircraft than I can in a car.
Additionally, licensing would probably inherit the primary-safety-first attitude of the aircraft administration powers-that-be rather than the "let any moron loose in a lethal weapon" attitude that persists in some (not all, try getting a car license in most of Europe) countries with regards to cars. Hopefully, therefore, many of the morons would either have it educated out of them or wouldn't get a license.
I rely on somebody's programming every time I hop in a commercial airliner. I haven't yet depended on medical electronics not to kill me, but that will probably happen somewhere in the future too. It's difficult, slow, and costly, but you can build software for safety-critical systems.
From what I saw when I was over there, on the day-to-day level HK is still mostly free. The police keep a low profile (except on a Friday night in the red-light district, when they're everywhere, which is very nice), the courts are independent, Internet access is unfiltered, and HK citizens are free to travel overseas if they want. Human rights groups can and do operate from HK,, and keep a close eye on mainland China from there, as I understand it.
However, the local legislature is not really democratically elected - some of the seats are, but most are elected by special "constituencies", such as "business associations" and the like, guaranteeing that China gets a majority of the people it wants on the legislature. The "Chief Executive" is selected by the legislature, so he is the guy Beijing wants.
The one area that is a little disconcerting is the mainstream media. They are a cheer squad for Beijing, mostly, and their coverage of domestic (HK) politics is timid in the extreme. The economy, by their own high standards, was performing very badly while I was there. In most countries, if this is the case, the incumbent government gets heavily criticized. I didn't see a peep of any of media directly criticizing the government. Instead, the major political angle they covered was the large number of stray dogs! The South China Morning Post is particularly bad - I gave up reading it after a few days. The Standard, the other English-language daily, is slightly better, but still not great. I'm told that the Chinese-language papers are mostly considerably worse. However, dissenting voices do exist, and the authorities seem to leave them alone. One of the local street newspapers (well, actually, it was a street magazine) rather brutally satirized the Chinese government as their editorial column.
Anyway, HK still remains a largely free country. It's a heck of a lot better than what goes on in China proper.
Now is probably *not* a good time, but if you're having to deal with complex input, you might want to consider lex(1) and yacc(1), or their free and superior equivalents flex and bison.
My personal (and admittedly laypersons) definition of the universe was "I can get there in a spaceship that moves in 3 dimensions" (ignoring time concerns). If there's another splotch of "the cosmos" that I can't get to in this manner, I'll happily concede it to be in another universe. We currently don't know of any other "splotches of cosmos" besides the universe we currently know, and evidence that they exist would significantly alter our view of things.
Do you have the time or inclination to understand, in detail, every piece of IT-related legislation that goes before the legislature of the various jurisdictions you live in? I doubt it - and that's in an area of policy where you presumably have some interest and expertise. Now, consider the thousands of other pieces of legislation that pass before those bodies in the course of a year. Can you be expected to understand, even cursorily, more than a few of them without devoting your life to the job?
While direct democracy sounds appealing, it just wouldn't work. Citizen-initiated referenda, like that used in California, might be a reasonable compromise between your desire to directly influence policy and the impracticality of directly voting on *every* issue to come before a legislature.
Would some Californians care to comment on how well the citizen-initiated referenda have worked there? Has it produced better government? Has it resulted in stupid pieces of populism getting approved? Have Californians voted simultaneously for lower taxes, higher expenditure, and disallowing the government from borrowing money or other such idiocies?