The change in average height is not necessarily evolution, it is far better explained by better nourishing of children (or simply the absence of malnourishing). You point out that we are taller than the 1950s generation, which pretty much excludes evolution as a cause.
The evolution that brought us big heads and helpless infants is the same that brought us lifelong learning ability. Where other mammals learn things as young and then become adult, we keep some of the youthful traits (like hairlessnes and increased learning ability). The more a child can do at birth, the less they can learn. By being an unwritten paper, humans have achieved greater adaptability than any other higher lifeform.
That is what they would want you to think.
The reason for regions is not so much to prevent movies originating in the USA from reaching foreign viewers on DVD before the movies get there as much as prevent the foreigners from buing the US version much cheaper than the blatant overpriced region n+1 version (or is it the other way around? DVDs sold in countires with lower personal income must be sold cheaper, so the americans could reimport them cheaper?).
That is, it is a marketing ploy to AVOID a global market.
> Reverse engineering protects OpenCores.org from
> being accused of corporate espionage, by proving
> that they legally obtained the information
> necessary to copy the core, but their posting of
> patented information to their website is what is
> being argued against.
There are NO rules against posting patented information. In fact, patenting REQUIRES full disclosure. Patents are NOT copyrights!
> Reverse engineering is nothing more than a
> legitimate way for engineers to steal the
> intellectual property of competitors and gain an
> unfair business advantage.
Using "legitimate" and "steal" in the same sentence just goes to prove that you have not understood the point of reverse engineerin, or
of patents for that matter.
You don't need to prevent reverse engineering if you are protected by a patent. A patent prohibits competitors from creating the same product, even if they reverse engineer it (which should not be necessary anyway, since the information is in the patent application anyway).
> ARM has invested millions of dollars and
> countless hours into developing their processor
> core, and they are completely justified in
> defending what is rightfully theirs against so-
> called "reverse engineering" patent theft.
Patents are not made to reward investment, but to reward products. It doesn't matter if you spent a billion on finding the result or it came to you in a dream.
> I'm pretty sure that without too much effort, I
> could figure out how that was made without
> looking at any of it's inventors design specs.
> Do I legally have a right to sell my own
> "reverse engineered" version of someone elses
> invention? I should think not!
And you would be right. That would be infringing on their patent. Now, if you found a radically different way to fry bacon in a microwave (more elaborate than putting it on paper tissue while cooking, which has lots of prior art), then you would not infrige on the patent, and would maybe even be eligable for your own patent.
Another Slashdot post calls him the "Father of Computer Science". That's going a bit far, but CompSci does owe him a lot. And he probably rates as the first computer geek.
Turing is, if not the father of computer science, then at least one of them, and while he might have been a geek, it is his theoretical work that he is most remembered for.
His "halting problem" is as important a result as Gödel's incompletenes theorem and Russel's paradox. It puts a hard limit on the theoretical capabilities of computers that impacts most branches of computer science, e.g. any optimizing compiler is affected since the enabling analyses are necessarily limited.
The turing machine itself, as a model of computation, has become the standard measure in complexity theory.
The most prestigious award in computer science is the Turing Award (like for mathematics, there is no Nobel price:).
Turing gave us one of the foundations of modern computer science, and I'm sure his name will be remembered long after everybody have forgotten who Bill Gates was... so I don't think it is wrong
to call him a father of computer science.
The question is what rights the lawyers have
under German law. If they can in fact require
the destruction of the project (yeah, right,
the source is "out there" under the GPL so that won't work), naming the users (how the BLOODY BLOODY HELL is one supposed to know that!?!?!), and require him to pay them (what? BEFORE being convicted of anything? unlikely!), then I guess he will have to comply.
Otherwise, I guess he can just change the name, thus ending the infringement, and the
lawyers can just sit back and moan that there
is no longer anything to complain about.
Ofcourse, IANAL. Anyobody know the German law on this?/L
Killustrator IS competition to Illustrator. Why?
Because if someone out there suddently decided that he needed to do illustrations, he would be
free to acqure either. You are assuming that people are locked to one operating system. They are not. Some switch, some run both, and some don't even have a computer to begin with and let the operating system be decided by what program they want to run.
It just goes to show that your analogy was bad
to begin with.
Killustrator and Adobe Illustrator are competitors. They can solve the same problem,
so someone might pick (Linux and) Killustrator over (Windows and) Illustrator to fill their need
for a vector based drawing program. The operating system is not a given to people in need of a solution to a specific drawing problem, and they can in fact choose freely between Killustrator and Illustrator.
Hmm
50*12/18 ~ 33, so it should double approximatly 33 times.
2^33 ~ 8*10^9
Even if there is only one person now who declares Moores law dead, we would still have to breed a few billion more people for your proposed law to hold for 50 years. It would probably be completely impossible if there is more than one person now:)
One word:
End to end cryptography.
I expect that the next few years will see
an increase in virtual networks, possibly
gnutella style, possible IP-Sec style,
but in any case a network that is not
part of the rest of the web/world unless
you know an access point.
Preferably this will include serious end
to end cryptography, so whoever wants to
share somebody elses intellectual property
can do so only with like-minded people.
The short summary would be: You can't block
it at the ISP, you have to get it before it
leaves the computer.
/RS
> If Napster is somehow at fault for facilitating
> the sharing of copyrighted music, shouldn't Dell
> also bear some responsibility for manufacturing
> the computer I use to download?
No, since illegally copying music is not a primary
use for Dell's computers.
> Shouldn't Microsoft bear some responsibility for
> providing the operating system I use to
> download?
No, since illegally copying music is not a primary use for Microsoft's OS.
> Shouldn't all the people that download the
> music bear some responsibility?
Absolutely. They are knowingly performing an
illegal action.
> Shouldn't all the people that actually SHARE
> their music bear some sponsibility?
Absolutely, they are (perhaps knowingly)
performing an illegal action.
> We can go forever.
Not really. Using a computer is not illegal, using
a computer to do something illegal is illegal. The
computer is not even important in this, except
for making it easier. The illegality starts at
the level of the Napster protocol.
Napster's service was based on helping people
do something illegal, at least according to
the courts. Courts are, luckily, not that easy
to cheat by semantic tricks, they can see through
flimsy excuses.
All this is based on Danish law ofcourse, but I'm
fairly sure distributing copyrighted materials
are not legal in most other places.
GNUtella may be an interesting idea, but it's nothing more than a hack. Splitting into subnetworks is both infeasible and undesirable.
I have to disagree. I think a split would be the best thing that could happen, because then I might search for things that interest me and not be bothered by all those.mp3 files. Sure, the idea of Gnutella is that everyone shares, but a topic-division would be for the better of everybody. There are clients out there already that allows you to change the protocol-strings to effectively get a private network. Each topic-net would need a centralized access mechanism, but that's not a new problem, Gnutella already have this. Just go to the proper webpage and find the newest IP or IP list.
The problem isn't that parents are not attentive enough (they might not be, but some are). The problem is that someone ELSE decides for them what they should deem 'bad'. If responsible and attentive parents do not find violent games 'bad', then they shouldn't need to accompagny the child when he/she plays them. Suddently the law decides what is good parenting and not the parents. That is 'bad'!
Re:This is an incorrect definition of NP
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 1
NP is defined as the class of decission problems that can be verified by a TM in polynomial time (or defined in other ways that are equivalent).
Factoring is not a decission problem, so it is not immediately in NP. Some non-decission problems
can be rewritten as one by testing against a result (is there a solution for the traveling salesman with a total length of less than K, for any constant K). If solutions are integral then having this allow binary search for the real answer:).
Factoring is not a decission problem. The corresponding decission problem is whether a number is a composite, and it is in NP since a proof consisting of the proposed factors could be checked in polynomial time. The opposite problem, whether a numer is prime, is in co-NP (the complement of NP... the problems where a counterexample can be checked in polynomial time).
Oddly, Primality is also in NP. It's a very ingenious trick that allows you to have a proof of primality that can be checked in polynomial time.
That means that Compositenes is also in co-NP.
IF compositeness or Primality were known to be
NP-hard, then we would know that NP=co-NP, which we don't.
> I've also always wondered why other countries > give their companies and citizens the.xx country > domain to use while we here in the good 'ol US > can't register one without an act of God, > especially for personal use. I mean how fair is it > that the only TLDs we in America have to choose > from are also the most popular globally?
You mean the.us domain? Or are you suffering from the delusion that.com is an american and not an international domain? If you want to be more precise, there are also.<stateabbreviation>.us. Why not use those? Because then you won't be found.
That's the usual problem with DNS. It's not built to scale. People want to have an easily memorable DNS name, but there simply aren't enough to go around. Someone wrote that NSI thinks of domain names as telephone numbers, and in the end, that will probably be just what they will be. You will need a dictionary to look them up. What we need then is a good, easily accessible dictionary. Something like DNS, except you search by keywords...
then the.sex domains will start putting six pages of frequently used keywords in the dictionary, and we're back where we started.:P /L
That's because lawyers are hired guns. You pay them money, they sue somebody for you. Aim your ire at the people who's name is on the suit, not the lawyers who did the gruntwork.
Sorry, doesn't work that way. I find assassins just as guilty as the people who hire them. Same thing for a frivolous lawsuit. "Just doing my job" might be a legal defence, but it's never a moral defence. Ofcourse you are right that we should blame the people behind he lawsuit too.
I actually tried the thingie a few months back (it was released in Denmark at least half a year ago).
It felt nice in the hand, not so slim it strained your hand to hold it, and the buttons were in the right position, but... I was completely incabable of drawing a straight line with it.
It had to be trained to your hand, but still I seem to change the angle I draw at depending on the position. Trying to go left always became slightly up or down too etc. I had trouble hitting an icon on the desktop. This was never a problem with a mouse, where you can feel the angle, but the pen is round, still doesn't allow you to rotate it in your hand.
Also, I tend to have a fairly low angle when I write, lower than what the pen would accept (there's a reason ball pointed pens are *pointed*).
All in all, I couldn't use it even if I tried. Some of it might be a question of practice, but I would prefer the equipment to adapt to me, not the other way around:P.
By weaning people on Python or any single language, many people will only use Python for the rest of their lives. Python is a good language, of course, but has its limitations. Also, these people will only be able to modify other Python programs to their needs, and would just shrug their shoulders at the vast majority of code written in C, C++, Perl, and other languages
If this was the case, how come there are so many people out there who knows more than one language? I agree that for some it might be that way, but then they will probably never do that much programming anyway.
Perhaps the problem is the distinciton between learning to program *in* Python and learning to program, using Python. If you are taught well enough, then you learn both, and you will be able to use your ability to program with other languages too. If you only learn to program in Python, then that's all you know, but the choice of language is not what makes the difference. It's the choice of teacher.
History: When I started studying Computer Science we were taught programming using a small language designed by one of the local professors. It was small, but well designed, and had all the features you would need to teach imperative programming (OO programming was on second year then), including pointers. Because the language was so small and easily learned, with no idiosynchrasies, we could concentrate on learning the concepts of programming.
I guess I think Python would be a good idea, if what is being said about it is true. Another question, perhaps, is whether the first language should be object oriented or not.
Slashdot Mirror
The change in average height is not necessarily evolution, it is far better explained by better nourishing of children (or simply the absence of malnourishing). You point out that we are taller than the 1950s generation, which pretty much excludes evolution as a cause.
The evolution that brought us big heads and helpless infants is the same that brought us lifelong learning ability. Where other mammals learn things as young and then become adult, we keep some of the youthful traits (like hairlessnes and increased learning ability). The more a child can do at birth, the less they can learn. By being an unwritten paper, humans have achieved greater adaptability than any other higher lifeform.
And congratualtions!
/RS
That is what they would want you to think.
The reason for regions is not so much to prevent movies originating in the USA from reaching foreign viewers on DVD before the movies get there as much as prevent the foreigners from buing the US version much cheaper than the blatant overpriced region n+1 version (or is it the other way around? DVDs sold in countires with lower personal income must be sold cheaper, so the americans could reimport them cheaper?).
That is, it is a marketing ploy to AVOID a global market.
/RS
> Reverse engineering protects OpenCores.org from
> being accused of corporate espionage, by proving
> that they legally obtained the information
> necessary to copy the core, but their posting of
> patented information to their website is what is
> being argued against.
There are NO rules against posting patented information. In fact, patenting REQUIRES full disclosure. Patents are NOT copyrights!
> Reverse engineering is nothing more than a
> legitimate way for engineers to steal the
> intellectual property of competitors and gain an
> unfair business advantage.
Using "legitimate" and "steal" in the same sentence just goes to prove that you have not understood the point of reverse engineerin, or
of patents for that matter.
You don't need to prevent reverse engineering if you are protected by a patent. A patent prohibits competitors from creating the same product, even if they reverse engineer it (which should not be necessary anyway, since the information is in the patent application anyway).
> ARM has invested millions of dollars and
> countless hours into developing their processor
> core, and they are completely justified in
> defending what is rightfully theirs against so-
> called "reverse engineering" patent theft.
Patents are not made to reward investment, but to reward products. It doesn't matter if you spent a billion on finding the result or it came to you in a dream.
> I'm pretty sure that without too much effort, I
> could figure out how that was made without
> looking at any of it's inventors design specs.
> Do I legally have a right to sell my own
> "reverse engineered" version of someone elses
> invention? I should think not!
And you would be right. That would be infringing on their patent. Now, if you found a radically different way to fry bacon in a microwave (more elaborate than putting it on paper tissue while cooking, which has lots of prior art), then you would not infrige on the patent, and would maybe even be eligable for your own patent.
/RS
Turing is, if not the father of computer science, then at least one of them, and while he might have been a geek, it is his theoretical work that he is most remembered for.
His "halting problem" is as important a result as Gödel's incompletenes theorem and Russel's paradox. It puts a hard limit on the theoretical capabilities of computers that impacts most branches of computer science, e.g. any optimizing compiler is affected since the enabling analyses are necessarily limited.
The turing machine itself, as a model of computation, has become the standard measure in complexity theory.
The most prestigious award in computer science is the Turing Award (like for mathematics, there is no Nobel price
Turing gave us one of the foundations of modern computer science, and I'm sure his name will be remembered long after everybody have forgotten who Bill Gates was... so I don't think it is wrong
to call him a father of computer science.
/RS - theoretical computer scientist
The question is what rights the lawyers have under German law. If they can in fact require the destruction of the project (yeah, right, the source is "out there" under the GPL so that won't work), naming the users (how the BLOODY BLOODY HELL is one supposed to know that!?!?!), and require him to pay them (what? BEFORE being convicted of anything? unlikely!), then I guess he will have to comply. Otherwise, I guess he can just change the name, thus ending the infringement, and the lawyers can just sit back and moan that there is no longer anything to complain about. Ofcourse, IANAL. Anyobody know the German law on this? /L
Killustrator IS competition to Illustrator. Why?
Because if someone out there suddently decided that he needed to do illustrations, he would be
free to acqure either. You are assuming that people are locked to one operating system. They are not. Some switch, some run both, and some don't even have a computer to begin with and let the operating system be decided by what program they want to run.
It just goes to show that your analogy was bad
to begin with.
Killustrator and Adobe Illustrator are competitors. They can solve the same problem,
so someone might pick (Linux and) Killustrator over (Windows and) Illustrator to fill their need
for a vector based drawing program. The operating system is not a given to people in need of a solution to a specific drawing problem, and they can in fact choose freely between Killustrator and Illustrator.
Hmm :)
50*12/18 ~ 33, so it should double approximatly 33 times.
2^33 ~ 8*10^9
Even if there is only one person now who declares Moores law dead, we would still have to breed a few billion more people for your proposed law to hold for 50 years. It would probably be completely impossible if there is more than one person now
/RS - Nitpicker extraordinaire.
One word:
End to end cryptography.
I expect that the next few years will see
an increase in virtual networks, possibly
gnutella style, possible IP-Sec style,
but in any case a network that is not
part of the rest of the web/world unless
you know an access point.
Preferably this will include serious end
to end cryptography, so whoever wants to
share somebody elses intellectual property
can do so only with like-minded people.
The short summary would be: You can't block
it at the ISP, you have to get it before it
leaves the computer.
/RS
> If Napster is somehow at fault for facilitating
> the sharing of copyrighted music, shouldn't Dell
> also bear some responsibility for manufacturing
> the computer I use to download?
No, since illegally copying music is not a primary
use for Dell's computers.
> Shouldn't Microsoft bear some responsibility for
> providing the operating system I use to
> download?
No, since illegally copying music is not a primary use for Microsoft's OS.
> Shouldn't all the people that download the
> music bear some responsibility?
Absolutely. They are knowingly performing an
illegal action.
> Shouldn't all the people that actually SHARE
> their music bear some sponsibility?
Absolutely, they are (perhaps knowingly)
performing an illegal action.
> We can go forever.
Not really. Using a computer is not illegal, using
a computer to do something illegal is illegal. The
computer is not even important in this, except
for making it easier. The illegality starts at
the level of the Napster protocol.
Napster's service was based on helping people
do something illegal, at least according to
the courts. Courts are, luckily, not that easy
to cheat by semantic tricks, they can see through
flimsy excuses.
All this is based on Danish law ofcourse, but I'm
fairly sure distributing copyrighted materials
are not legal in most other places.
/RS
I have to disagree. I think a split would be the best thing that could happen, because then I might search for things that interest me and not be bothered by all those
/SS
The problem isn't that parents are not attentive enough (they might not be, but some are). The problem is that someone ELSE decides for them what they should deem 'bad'. If responsible and attentive parents do not find violent games 'bad', then they shouldn't need to accompagny the child when he/she plays them. Suddently the law decides what is good parenting and not the parents. That is 'bad'!
NP is defined as the class of decission problems that can be verified by a TM in polynomial time (or defined in other ways that are equivalent).
:).
Factoring is not a decission problem, so it is not immediately in NP. Some non-decission problems
can be rewritten as one by testing against a result (is there a solution for the traveling salesman with a total length of less than K, for any constant K). If solutions are integral then having this allow binary search for the real answer
Factoring is not a decission problem. The corresponding decission problem is whether a number is a composite, and it is in NP since a proof consisting of the proposed factors could be checked in polynomial time. The opposite problem, whether a numer is prime, is in co-NP (the complement of NP... the problems where a counterexample can be checked in polynomial time).
Oddly, Primality is also in NP. It's a very ingenious trick that allows you to have a proof of primality that can be checked in polynomial time.
That means that Compositenes is also in co-NP.
IF compositeness or Primality were known to be
NP-hard, then we would know that NP=co-NP, which we don't.
> I've also always wondered why other countries .xx country
.us domain? Or are you suffering from the delusion that .com is an american and not an international domain? If you want to be more precise, there are also .<stateabbreviation>.us. Why not use those?
.sex domains will start putting six pages of frequently used keywords in the dictionary, and we're back where we started. :P
> give their companies and citizens the
> domain to use while we here in the good 'ol US
> can't register one without an act of God,
> especially for personal use. I mean how fair is it
> that the only TLDs we in America have to choose
> from are also the most popular globally?
You mean the
Because then you won't be found.
That's the usual problem with DNS. It's not built to scale. People want to have an easily memorable DNS name, but there simply aren't enough to go around. Someone wrote that NSI thinks of domain names as telephone numbers, and in the end, that will probably be just what they will be. You will need a dictionary to look them up. What we need then
is a good, easily accessible dictionary. Something like DNS, except you search by keywords...
then the
/L
Sorry, doesn't work that way. I find assassins just as guilty as the people who hire them. Same thing for a frivolous lawsuit. "Just doing my job" might be a legal defence, but it's never a moral defence.
Ofcourse you are right that we should blame the people behind he lawsuit too.
/L
I actually tried the thingie a few months back (it
:P.
was released in Denmark at least half a year ago).
It felt nice in the hand, not so slim it strained
your hand to hold it, and the buttons were in the
right position, but... I was completely incabable
of drawing a straight line with it.
It had to be trained to your hand, but still I
seem to change the angle I draw at depending on
the position. Trying to go left always became
slightly up or down too etc. I had trouble hitting
an icon on the desktop. This was never a problem
with a mouse,
where you can feel the angle, but the pen is
round, still doesn't allow you to rotate it in your hand.
Also, I tend to have a fairly low angle when I
write, lower than what the pen would accept (there's a reason ball pointed pens are
*pointed*).
All in all, I couldn't use it even if I tried.
Some of it might be a question of practice, but
I would prefer the equipment to adapt to me, not
the other way around
Try before you buy!
By weaning people on Python or any single language, many people will only use Python for the rest of their lives. Python is a good language, of course, but has its limitations. Also, these people will only be able to modify other Python programs to their needs, and would just shrug their shoulders at the vast majority of code written in C, C++, Perl, and other languages
If this was the case, how come there are so many people out there who knows more than one language?
I agree that for some it might be that way, but then they will probably never do that much programming anyway.
Perhaps the problem is the distinciton between learning to program *in* Python and learning to program, using Python. If you are taught well enough, then you learn both, and you will be able to use your ability to program with other languages too. If you only learn to program in Python, then that's all you know, but the choice of language is not what makes the difference. It's the choice of teacher.
History: When I started studying Computer Science we were taught programming using a small language designed by one of the local professors. It was small, but well designed, and had all the features you would need to teach imperative programming (OO programming was on second year then), including pointers. Because the language was so small and easily learned, with no idiosynchrasies, we could concentrate on learning the concepts of programming.
I guess I think Python would be a good idea, if what is being said about it is true. Another question, perhaps, is whether the first language should be object oriented or not.