...I'd have more respect for this guy if he had actually *seen* the new movie before making comments like "It's all CGI, it's got no heart."
There are plenty of things about the new movie to attack (I like his comment about the cake-frosting suit), but making a critical judgement about the overall quality of a movie "based on stills, trailers, and interviews" is just stupid.
I thought part of the point of reading/. was to be ahead of pop culture in items of geek interest. But the past few days, it seems like every article is just a link to a CNN or NYTimes or Wired article.
I love it when slashdot points out gems in smaller media that I might have missed, but just linking to CNN articles that are about FT articles doesn't really count as ahead of the times in my book.
Why not add another slashbox with "In other news...", and when people submit links to major media news stories, stick 'em in there?
Someone else said more or less the same thing. You might look here.
In short, yes, there are legit adult sites, just like there are honest politicians or generous lawyers. We may be in the minority, but that's largely becasue peoples' expectations are so low, it seems almost pointless to have integrity (if people are going to accuse you of all sorts of nasty things, you might as well reap the benefit of doing them, right?).
Um, no. Ever heard of Nerve.com? Janesguide.com? Suicidegirls.com? (I'm not affiliated with any of those)
While the bulk of adult sites are get-rich-quick operations that either send spam or operate affiliate programs that encourage *other* people to send spam on their behalf, there are decent sites that have good reputations, at least among people who don't substitute stereotypes for individual opinions.
Try operating a legit, non-spamming adult site that's worked hard for years to get a decent reputation, only to have klez emails that appear to come from your customer support email address.
People are going to believe a priest when it's explained that it was a virus; nobody is going to believe a legit company that's operating in an industry where so much spam originates.
I think the confusion here is that I made the assumption that the original poster was talking about an entire game of chess, not taking it up from an arbitrary downstream position (which could indeed include a move or moves that would guarantee victory regardless of what the opponent does).
I should have been more clear and specified that assumption. To sum up my point, early on in the game there is no one move that will always lead to victory, regardless of the opponent's moves. Hence, the original idea of pre-calculating a decision tree for the entire game and then only picking moves that result in a win simply cannot work.
This argument would work only if you also knew every move the opponent was going to make. As long as the opponent is not completely predictable, this approach fails.
Let's get back to your decision tree: at any given moment, the trees branching off from each possible move probably contain *both* winning *and* losing outcomes. You can't "eliminate every move which doesn't lead to my victory", because there is no immediate next move which *always* leads to victory.
Ok, so you minimize the risk. Say, you count how many of the possible outcomes are losses and how many are wins for any particular move, and then you go with the move with the highest probability of winning.
Still doesn't work. A clever human may maneuver the game to one of the very rare losing outcomes for your hypothetical program.
That's part of the beauty of chess: there is nothing that one player can do to ensure victory. It all depends on the interaction between the two players, and that's what's been the hardest thing for computers / software / programmers to master.
Actually, the point was NOT to destroy the adaware . This is almost impossible. BUT TO SHOW WHAT COULD HAPPEN IF THE PROGRAMS START UNINSTALLING EACHOTHER
Isn't this like punching a complete stranger to demonstrate the evils of random violence?
...any operator of a commercial Internet web site or online service that has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors...
In addition to being laughably vague, it's also unenforceable. It's clear that they wanted to avoid the whole community standards issue by using the language "is harmful to minors". However, they've put prosecutors in the position of having to prove that any given material is harmful to minors.
On the one hand, this could make all sorts of "normal" speech illegal: tobacco ads, discriptions of drunken nights at bars, encouragement to drop out of school, you name it. On the other hand, it doesn't necessarily cover anything in particular, so even the most hardcore porn could argue that it isn't "harmful to minors." Since there's no objective description included in the law, it will be up to prosecutors and juries to decide what constitutes "harmful," and that will lead to an uneven application of the law, which in turn will make it subject to invalidation by the courts.
My guess is that the law was never intended to be enforced. It's just asking to be struck down by the courts, but the congresspeople who vote for it can wave their little "Morally upright" flag come the next election.
So your complaint is that it's not a perfect solution?
Me, if my car were stolen, I wouldn't care much about whether it was a "dumbass" or a well-organized ring. I'm not sure what the dumbass-to-organized percentage is for car theft, but if it's like most crime, there are far more dumbasses out there than organized groups.
So what if this bait car only catches stupid people? Less stupid people stealing cars = less stolen cars = good, at least the way I look at it.
Given a situation where there isn't necessarily a win-win situation, Amazon's loyalty should be to authors and publishers, not their customers?
Or maybe it's that Amazon should dumb down their UI to trick their customers into buying new books when it's perfectly legal (and cheaper) to buy used ones, just "as a courtesy" to publishers / authors?
Either way, I'm not sure I can agree with that one. Amazon is offering a valuable customer service, and if their priorities shift to ensuring maximum profitability for publishers and authors, I'm finding another bookstore.
If it looks like every house is going to get at least one fiber connection, there are any number of integrated multimedia delivery systems. The problem isn't how to use fiber; the problem is how to use the copper we already have. Or, how to get fiber to 150,000,000 endpoints in the US alone.
But I'm not here to correct spelling. I just want to point out that this conversion of hardware to software is perfectly normal, and is / has been / will be going on in everything from routers to modems to RAID to supermarket checkout scanners.
The reason is simple: when a technology is new, hardware designs are cheaper and faster. As the technology matures, Moore's law (as you note) says that computing power is 2x, 4x, 8x, etc, faster than it was when that hardware spec was designed.
So, unless you need Moore's law to help accelerate the underlying technology (3D graphics, multitrack recording, etc), it makes sense that the CPU should take over more of the burden as time goes on.
MS's anticompetitive exclusive licensing agreements notwithstanding, this is a perfectly normal, even good, thing.
You mean that the RIAA is using unethical practices to squeeze cash out of their customers because it's easier to sue your customers for a dollar today than it is to wait ten years for them to pay you five dollars?
I'd have more sympathy a few years ago. Today, it's clear that any artist of even remote merit should have no truck with the RIAA or the legal imbroglio they embody. Anyone with any integrity at all is playing the MP3 game, not the "forcing anal sex upon the consumer will make them buy more music" game.
I'm a huge fan of capitalism, but this is a clear case of short term profits at the expense of long term customer relationships. Er, in laymans terms, that's "cooking the goose that lays the golden egg."
Of course, these days, it's all about the goose meat. They have no respect for their customer, and it's only a matter of time before their customer has no respect for them.
...and then I'll reverse engineer the code and made sure it always returns results like "I would like to fondle your buttocks" or "I will not buy this tobacconist, it is scratched."
The idea here is that local broadcasters are highly regulated by the FCC, and allowing competitors to carry the same network material would alter the balance severely enough that the entire local bandwidth / ownership / affiliation regulations would have to be overhauled.
So, in typical government fashion, they decided that that would be quite a bit of work, and there's always some chance that the clock could roll back fifty years, so better to make something illegal than deal with its repurcussions in a modern, thoughtfull way.
Or, at least, that's the way I see it.
Me, I hate network TV. My first choice for a Supreme Court verdict would be "Not only is it illegal for EchoStar to broadcast this crap, it's illegal for local stations or cable companies, too." Failing that, I'd settle for "The networks own the content, and if they license it to EchoStar, it's between them and their local affiliates who they're screwing."
I can barely write my name. I get one of these, I'd better be coding in a language made up entirely of _ - \ and/.
Ugh. Bad idea.
-b
Re:What we need is a universal preprocess API
on
Can GnuPG Deliver?
·
· Score: 1
Hey, I said API, not pipe. If it's part of the kernel or a kernel module, then if it's compromised, you have much bigger concerns.
Cheers -b
What we need is a universal preprocess API
on
Can GnuPG Deliver?
·
· Score: 1
It's simply not feasible to expect every encryption / logging / whatever product to hook into every application.
What we need is some kind of cross platform API for data transformation that would allow products ranging from ICQ to Sendmail to seamlessly transform data for purposes of encryption, filtering, you name it.
As a middleware layer, of course it won't be as robust as dedicated implementations, but it could still be pretty strong. The API calls could include data about whether the information is being sent to another local application, via LAN, or via WAN/internet.
Think of it as SDML for data handling applications. 99% of the time, most users might not have it do anything. But if/when the requirement arises, existing apps would be automatically part of the picture.
"It is really devastating for us when people write about our work and they don't call it by our name, and we get forgotten."
Am I the only one who got all teary-eyed reading that? I mean, we get wrapped up in September 11, the Israel / Palestine thing, AIDS, and all our own personal tragedies. And we forget that somewhere, there are forgotten developers toiling away, emotionally devastated and relegated to obscurity because people unfairly call their work by the wrong name.
Slashdot Mirror
...I'd have more respect for this guy if he had actually *seen* the new movie before making comments like "It's all CGI, it's got no heart."
There are plenty of things about the new movie to attack (I like his comment about the cake-frosting suit), but making a critical judgement about the overall quality of a movie "based on stills, trailers, and interviews" is just stupid.
Cheers
-b
I thought part of the point of reading /. was to be ahead of pop culture in items of geek interest. But the past few days, it seems like every article is just a link to a CNN or NYTimes or Wired article.
I love it when slashdot points out gems in smaller media that I might have missed, but just linking to CNN articles that are about FT articles doesn't really count as ahead of the times in my book.
Why not add another slashbox with "In other news...", and when people submit links to major media news stories, stick 'em in there?
Cheers
-b
Someone else said more or less the same thing. You might look here.
In short, yes, there are legit adult sites, just like there are honest politicians or generous lawyers. We may be in the minority, but that's largely becasue peoples' expectations are so low, it seems almost pointless to have integrity (if people are going to accuse you of all sorts of nasty things, you might as well reap the benefit of doing them, right?).
Cheers
-b
Um, no. Ever heard of Nerve.com? Janesguide.com? Suicidegirls.com? (I'm not affiliated with any of those)
While the bulk of adult sites are get-rich-quick operations that either send spam or operate affiliate programs that encourage *other* people to send spam on their behalf, there are decent sites that have good reputations, at least among people who don't substitute stereotypes for individual opinions.
Cheers
-b
Try operating a legit, non-spamming adult site that's worked hard for years to get a decent reputation, only to have klez emails that appear to come from your customer support email address.
People are going to believe a priest when it's explained that it was a virus; nobody is going to believe a legit company that's operating in an industry where so much spam originates.
Argh.
-b
I think the confusion here is that I made the assumption that the original poster was talking about an entire game of chess, not taking it up from an arbitrary downstream position (which could indeed include a move or moves that would guarantee victory regardless of what the opponent does).
I should have been more clear and specified that assumption. To sum up my point, early on in the game there is no one move that will always lead to victory, regardless of the opponent's moves. Hence, the original idea of pre-calculating a decision tree for the entire game and then only picking moves that result in a win simply cannot work.
Cheers
-b
A clever argument, but completely wrong.
This argument would work only if you also knew every move the opponent was going to make. As long as the opponent is not completely predictable, this approach fails.
Let's get back to your decision tree: at any given moment, the trees branching off from each possible move probably contain *both* winning *and* losing outcomes. You can't "eliminate every move which doesn't lead to my victory", because there is no immediate next move which *always* leads to victory.
Ok, so you minimize the risk. Say, you count how many of the possible outcomes are losses and how many are wins for any particular move, and then you go with the move with the highest probability of winning.
Still doesn't work. A clever human may maneuver the game to one of the very rare losing outcomes for your hypothetical program.
That's part of the beauty of chess: there is nothing that one player can do to ensure victory. It all depends on the interaction between the two players, and that's what's been the hardest thing for computers / software / programmers to master.
Cheers
-b
Isn't this like punching a complete stranger to demonstrate the evils of random violence?
Cheers
-b
X is the best thing around that meets the exact specifications that X does.
Heck of a job, that.
-b
In addition to being laughably vague, it's also unenforceable. It's clear that they wanted to avoid the whole community standards issue by using the language "is harmful to minors". However, they've put prosecutors in the position of having to prove that any given material is harmful to minors.
On the one hand, this could make all sorts of "normal" speech illegal: tobacco ads, discriptions of drunken nights at bars, encouragement to drop out of school, you name it. On the other hand, it doesn't necessarily cover anything in particular, so even the most hardcore porn could argue that it isn't "harmful to minors." Since there's no objective description included in the law, it will be up to prosecutors and juries to decide what constitutes "harmful," and that will lead to an uneven application of the law, which in turn will make it subject to invalidation by the courts.
My guess is that the law was never intended to be enforced. It's just asking to be struck down by the courts, but the congresspeople who vote for it can wave their little "Morally upright" flag come the next election.
Cheers
-b
So if you have a USR Courier on both ends, you get better transfer speeds?
Let me guess -- they'll offer server-side at a steep discound if you can demonstrate that you run a BBS.
Oops. Wrong decade. Same marketing ploy, though.
Cheers
-b
They chose the slashdot blackout to post several new april fools stories. Kinda amusing, but it does get old, doesn't it?
Cheers
-b
So your complaint is that it's not a perfect solution?
Me, if my car were stolen, I wouldn't care much about whether it was a "dumbass" or a well-organized ring. I'm not sure what the dumbass-to-organized percentage is for car theft, but if it's like most crime, there are far more dumbasses out there than organized groups.
So what if this bait car only catches stupid people? Less stupid people stealing cars = less stolen cars = good, at least the way I look at it.
Cheers
-b
It's also still in testing so it'll probably make you grow horns or something
So I can get more work done in a day, and grow horns? I want in on the clinical trial!
Cheers
-b
Girlfriend sez: "In your case, it would just make the ones you already have visible."
Given a situation where there isn't necessarily a win-win situation, Amazon's loyalty should be to authors and publishers, not their customers?
Or maybe it's that Amazon should dumb down their UI to trick their customers into buying new books when it's perfectly legal (and cheaper) to buy used ones, just "as a courtesy" to publishers / authors?
Either way, I'm not sure I can agree with that one. Amazon is offering a valuable customer service, and if their priorities shift to ensuring maximum profitability for publishers and authors, I'm finding another bookstore.
-b
...which none of us do.
If it looks like every house is going to get at least one fiber connection, there are any number of integrated multimedia delivery systems. The problem isn't how to use fiber; the problem is how to use the copper we already have. Or, how to get fiber to 150,000,000 endpoints in the US alone.
Cheers
-b
Um, that's "revealed".
But I'm not here to correct spelling. I just want to point out that this conversion of hardware to software is perfectly normal, and is / has been / will be going on in everything from routers to modems to RAID to supermarket checkout scanners.
The reason is simple: when a technology is new, hardware designs are cheaper and faster. As the technology matures, Moore's law (as you note) says that computing power is 2x, 4x, 8x, etc, faster than it was when that hardware spec was designed.
So, unless you need Moore's law to help accelerate the underlying technology (3D graphics, multitrack recording, etc), it makes sense that the CPU should take over more of the burden as time goes on.
MS's anticompetitive exclusive licensing agreements notwithstanding, this is a perfectly normal, even good, thing.
Cheers
-b
You mean that the RIAA is using unethical practices to squeeze cash out of their customers because it's easier to sue your customers for a dollar today than it is to wait ten years for them to pay you five dollars?
I'd have more sympathy a few years ago. Today, it's clear that any artist of even remote merit should have no truck with the RIAA or the legal imbroglio they embody. Anyone with any integrity at all is playing the MP3 game, not the "forcing anal sex upon the consumer will make them buy more music" game.
I'm a huge fan of capitalism, but this is a clear case of short term profits at the expense of long term customer relationships. Er, in laymans terms, that's "cooking the goose that lays the golden egg."
Of course, these days, it's all about the goose meat. They have no respect for their customer, and it's only a matter of time before their customer has no respect for them.
Cheers
-b
...and then I'll reverse engineer the code and made sure it always returns results like "I would like to fondle your buttocks" or "I will not buy this tobacconist, it is scratched."
Heh.
-b
The idea here is that local broadcasters are highly regulated by the FCC, and allowing competitors to carry the same network material would alter the balance severely enough that the entire local bandwidth / ownership / affiliation regulations would have to be overhauled.
So, in typical government fashion, they decided that that would be quite a bit of work, and there's always some chance that the clock could roll back fifty years, so better to make something illegal than deal with its repurcussions in a modern, thoughtfull way.
Or, at least, that's the way I see it.
Me, I hate network TV. My first choice for a Supreme Court verdict would be "Not only is it illegal for EchoStar to broadcast this crap, it's illegal for local stations or cable companies, too." Failing that, I'd settle for "The networks own the content, and if they license it to EchoStar, it's between them and their local affiliates who they're screwing."
Cheers
-b
I can barely write my name. I get one of these, I'd better be coding in a language made up entirely of _ - \ and /.
Ugh. Bad idea.
-b
Hey, I said API, not pipe. If it's part of the kernel or a kernel module, then if it's compromised, you have much bigger concerns.
Cheers
-b
It's simply not feasible to expect every encryption / logging / whatever product to hook into every application.
What we need is some kind of cross platform API for data transformation that would allow products ranging from ICQ to Sendmail to seamlessly transform data for purposes of encryption, filtering, you name it.
As a middleware layer, of course it won't be as robust as dedicated implementations, but it could still be pretty strong. The API calls could include data about whether the information is being sent to another local application, via LAN, or via WAN/internet.
Think of it as SDML for data handling applications. 99% of the time, most users might not have it do anything. But if/when the requirement arises, existing apps would be automatically part of the picture.
Cheers
-b
Am I the only one who got all teary-eyed reading that? I mean, we get wrapped up in September 11, the Israel / Palestine thing, AIDS, and all our own personal tragedies. And we forget that somewhere, there are forgotten developers toiling away, emotionally devastated and relegated to obscurity because people unfairly call their work by the wrong name.
Oh, the humanity.
-b
1) Free software will change the world!
2) Hey, brother, can you spare a dime?
3) We would have changed the world! (except nobody was willing to pay for their free software)
Cheers
-b