A judge rendering judgement as a "creative act" as you put it, would in more common parlance be derided as "legislating from the bench," or more mildly as judicial activism. This is something frowned upon in most places where government has the concept of separation of powers, because it is not the place for the judiciary to be creating law: that is a job for the legislative branch. This is a touchy issue for Supreme Courts everywhere, because it's they that most often have to tread that fine line. Judges should be deciding cases based on what the law says, not what they would prefer it said.
You're right. On a closer reading, it seems that the article doesn't quite say that archaea need to have used enzymes made up of right-handed proteins in order to generate the right-handed glycerol groups which make up part of their cell walls. Then again, the biology of archaea is still poorly understood. Nevertheless, their use of such a right-handed organic molecule in their cell membranes, where everywhere else in life on earth similar molecules are left-handed, is one example of the case I describe. If we had a planet where the dominant life forms were archaea (right-handed glycerol groups in cell walls) and bacteria (left-handed glycerol groups) in more or less equal numbers, might not the detection method fail to find any chirality bias in the light from the planet? This may have been case in the young earth when life first began to evolve.
I suppose that if you were to detect chirality bias in the light coming from a particular planet, that would probably be sufficient to conclude that there might be some form of life on that planet that was causing that particular bias. However, it doesn't seem that it's a necessary condition, i.e. not detecting chiral bias might mean that there might after all be some very strange life form on the planet whose chemistry made use of both left and right handed molecules. In fact, there are some strange life forms on Earth, notably archaea, that actually use right-handed proteins in some aspects of their biochemistry, quite unlike all other life forms found on earth, which use left-handed proteins exclusively.
And the the assembly code needs to be written only once for a million and one script kiddies to use it. It isn't harder, or at any rate, it soon won't be. Everyone seems to forget that software has the important property of being able to encapsulate skill. If you already have root on any system, all bets are off.
Hmm... Francis Cianfrocca... Now where have I heard that name before...? Oh yes, a Francis Cianfrocca was the original author of the EventMachine library for Ruby, a reactor pattern library similar to Python's Twisted. The library is seeing wider and wider use in the Ruby community, given that it's fast, efficient, and has a well-designed API. Any relation, or is such a name rather more common than I expect? Or could he even be the same guy?
Not that there were no aliens, or super-secret spyplanes,
Wel, indeed there were no aliens, but the place was apparently full of super-secret spy planes, among other cutting-edge military and espionage aircraft. All the R&D that went into the U-2 and the A-12 OXCART (which eventually became the SR-71 Blackbird as others here have noted), was done at Area 51, as was that for the F-117. That seems to have been the whole raison d'être for the facility's existence, and for the obsessive (and rather pointless) secrecy surrounding it. If they really wanted to keep the goings-on there secret from everyone, they would have done better to paint the place as boring as possible, to deflect interest from the public, and from foreign governments as well.
The fiasco that was Ultima IX: Ascension had so many bugs on its release in 1999 it's not even funny. Or is it?. Someone actually played the game in such a twisted way taking advantage of these bugs to hilarious effect.
Well, there could be trace amounts of uranium, thorium, or some other alpha emitting radioisotope in the materials making up the RAM itself or some nearby circuitry, and those could choose some inconvenient moment to decay and emit an alpha. Not all alpha particles originate outside your computer case.
There, it's the girls who give the boys they like chocolates on Valentine's day. A month later, on March 14, the boys respond with chocolates to the girls they like. If this becomes Pi day, well, maybe they'll be giving the girls round pies instead of chocolates...;)
I doubt that'll ever happen. Microsoft is a large, publicly traded company, and what you want to see is a nearly 180-degree shift in the character of the company that would entail a lot of risk. Any moves to this effect will most likely be opposed by many members of the board of directors tooth and nail. They have all of the resources necessary to become a force to be reckoned with once again, a massive war chest that dwarfs the resources available to some small sovereign countries, a research arm that employs the best computer scientists in the world, all they lack is the balls to do it. Investing in bringing their innovations to market rather than depending on their old standbys of Windows and Office for revenue entails a lot of risk, and I doubt their board of directors has the balls to make it happen. Being a convicted monopolist also means that they may need to tread carefully if they tried to make such fundamental changes, but admittedly the payoff could be huge. It could actually bring them back into serious relevance again, and turn them into a company more resembling, um, Google...
This is more spot-on than the joker seems to realize. According to Bruce Schneier:
I have long argued that the entertainment industry doesn't want people to have computers. Computers give users too much capability, too much flexibility, too much freedom. The entertainment industry wants users to sit back and consume things. They are trying to turn a computer into an Internet Entertainment Platform, along the lines of a television or VCR.
I don't mean that in a "kill all gays way" but if no one was attracted to members of the same sex anymore, how does that hurt humanity?
I remember reading somewhere about research indicating that the expression of homosexual behavior is a form of population control. Gay people in general have less chances to actually produce children than straight people would, so a homosexual couple would, over the long run, represent two people who did nothing to increase the population directly, so when they died, the population would go down by 2, as opposed to a heterosexual couple who had three children, so when they died, there would be a net increase of 1 in the population. Removing such a gene, if it existed, so that no one would ever develop homosexual tendencies, might well exacerbate overpopulation.
FYI, you can do matrix inversion using either Gauss-Jordan elimination or LU decomposition, and whether you use these algorithms to solve a linear system or to invert a matrix they are both O(n^3), although you are correct that with either algorithm the constant factors involved for solving a linear system are lower than that for inverting the associated matrix of the linear system. You should only calculate the inverse of a matrix A if you expect to solve the linear system Ax = b for many different values for the column vector b, since multiplying a square matrix to a column vector can be done in quadratic time.
The Strassen algorithm for matrix multiplication can also be adapted to do matrix inversion, and it gets O(n^2.808...) running time, but it's not numerically stable and the overhead is high enough that it's not worth doing except for large matrices, and in such cases you may be better off using Gauss-Seidel iteration instead.
However (and purely as an example), Linux's software RAID is faster than many hardware RAID controllers, and a system lacking a dedicated hardware RAID controller very well may use less power than an equivalent system with one.
Speaking from experience, this seems to be true only of the 'fakeraid' setups that you see on cheap RAID controllers, which aren't really hardware RAID at all. They cheat and instead use firmware that executes on the main CPU to do the RAID, making them no better in principle and more often than not worse in performance than the Linux kernel's heavily optimized high-performance software RAID implementation. True dedicated hardware RAID controllers, such as the HP Smartarray, IBM ServeRAID, and the RAID controllers you see on fiberchannel SANs, are actually quite rare except in enterprise setups, and they are in general much faster than the Linux software RAID implementation.
But of course, nothing stops a manufacturer from doing bad engineering and making a product that has a dedicated piece of hardware that actually does the job slower than the main CPU would. And performance is not the only reason to make a dedicated hardware implementation of some bit of functionality. It could be done for "trusted computing" purposes for instance, in which case, it doesn't matter that it's slow, just that it keeps control out of the hands of the main CPU.
Only if your competitors are not perceived as viable. Back in the days of the ME-XP transition, what would have been considered a viable competitor to Microsoft? I used GNU/Linux back in that day too, and I would not have recommended anyone else to use it, and IIRC, at the time OS X was very new and had not yet gained momentum. The situation however, is arguably quite different today. Ubuntu today is light years away from GNU/Linux back then, and the present OS X incarnations are better than ever. I don't think pretending it's still 1999 and there are still no viable contenders to Windows as a desktop OS is a safe strategy for Microsoft to be playing at this point in time.
Well, I have a laptop that has such a card, and well, I found a version of the MadWifi drivers that works well enough on my 64-bit Gentoo. I must admit though that the search was incredibly frustrating, but given the recent news that Atheros has gotten moreopen, the situation can only improve with time.
If there were any, I'm sure that they have a service contract with McColo, which they can bring up in court when a class action lawsuit against them starts. Your service contract states that you will provide my site with connectivity with a certain maximum amount of downtime. Since you've allowed my site to get cut off from the Net at large for so long, you have violated terms of the contract and must pay. Would be irony though, if these same spammers who caused them to get cut off due to their own illegal activities also join in on the class action...
Well, the influence of the Beatles in modern rock music is hard to escape. I would even go so far as to say that almost all modern popular music today has been influenced by the music of the Beatles in one way or the other. Even metal and thrash. Listen to "Helter Skelter" sometime... A serious rock musician would recognize this fact and keep open ears.
I wonder if it's just coincidence that the number of problems they list is the same as the number of problems David Hilbert listed in his famous address in 1900. And well, the Riemann Hypothesis is there too. A hundred years later, and still no resolution.
The Wikipedia article you linked to actually doesn't say it's empty space. It says that the Attractor just happens to be in the zone of avoidance, the region where interstellar dust and stars from our own galaxy greatly obscure any view of the intergalactic space beyond. Could just be a really huge conglomeration of galaxies that we can't see directly, but given that the mass involved is so huge it's likely that it won't look much like anything else we can see.
Interesting that JFS has so many non-code lines in it, relative to the others. It's actually the second smallest, right after Ext3. XFS is the largest codebase of them all, actually.
Given the tenor of Morgan Spurlock's celebrated 2004 documentary movie "Super Size Me", that statement of OLPC "super sizing" itself was most likely not intended as a compliment. More like they're trying to say that the OLPC is getting obese like Morgan Spurlock did after binging on McDonald's for every meal for a month (there is something of the nature of McDonalds food in Microsoft software by the way...). Nevertheless I agree with the main points of your post wholeheartedly.
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A judge rendering judgement as a "creative act" as you put it, would in more common parlance be derided as "legislating from the bench," or more mildly as judicial activism. This is something frowned upon in most places where government has the concept of separation of powers, because it is not the place for the judiciary to be creating law: that is a job for the legislative branch. This is a touchy issue for Supreme Courts everywhere, because it's they that most often have to tread that fine line. Judges should be deciding cases based on what the law says, not what they would prefer it said.
You're right. On a closer reading, it seems that the article doesn't quite say that archaea need to have used enzymes made up of right-handed proteins in order to generate the right-handed glycerol groups which make up part of their cell walls. Then again, the biology of archaea is still poorly understood. Nevertheless, their use of such a right-handed organic molecule in their cell membranes, where everywhere else in life on earth similar molecules are left-handed, is one example of the case I describe. If we had a planet where the dominant life forms were archaea (right-handed glycerol groups in cell walls) and bacteria (left-handed glycerol groups) in more or less equal numbers, might not the detection method fail to find any chirality bias in the light from the planet? This may have been case in the young earth when life first began to evolve.
I suppose that if you were to detect chirality bias in the light coming from a particular planet, that would probably be sufficient to conclude that there might be some form of life on that planet that was causing that particular bias. However, it doesn't seem that it's a necessary condition, i.e. not detecting chiral bias might mean that there might after all be some very strange life form on the planet whose chemistry made use of both left and right handed molecules. In fact, there are some strange life forms on Earth, notably archaea, that actually use right-handed proteins in some aspects of their biochemistry, quite unlike all other life forms found on earth, which use left-handed proteins exclusively.
And the the assembly code needs to be written only once for a million and one script kiddies to use it. It isn't harder, or at any rate, it soon won't be. Everyone seems to forget that software has the important property of being able to encapsulate skill. If you already have root on any system, all bets are off.
Hmm... Francis Cianfrocca... Now where have I heard that name before...? Oh yes, a Francis Cianfrocca was the original author of the EventMachine library for Ruby, a reactor pattern library similar to Python's Twisted. The library is seeing wider and wider use in the Ruby community, given that it's fast, efficient, and has a well-designed API. Any relation, or is such a name rather more common than I expect? Or could he even be the same guy?
Wel, indeed there were no aliens, but the place was apparently full of super-secret spy planes, among other cutting-edge military and espionage aircraft. All the R&D that went into the U-2 and the A-12 OXCART (which eventually became the SR-71 Blackbird as others here have noted), was done at Area 51, as was that for the F-117. That seems to have been the whole raison d'être for the facility's existence, and for the obsessive (and rather pointless) secrecy surrounding it. If they really wanted to keep the goings-on there secret from everyone, they would have done better to paint the place as boring as possible, to deflect interest from the public, and from foreign governments as well.
The fiasco that was Ultima IX: Ascension had so many bugs on its release in 1999 it's not even funny. Or is it?. Someone actually played the game in such a twisted way taking advantage of these bugs to hilarious effect.
Well, there could be trace amounts of uranium, thorium, or some other alpha emitting radioisotope in the materials making up the RAM itself or some nearby circuitry, and those could choose some inconvenient moment to decay and emit an alpha. Not all alpha particles originate outside your computer case.
There, it's the girls who give the boys they like chocolates on Valentine's day. A month later, on March 14, the boys respond with chocolates to the girls they like. If this becomes Pi day, well, maybe they'll be giving the girls round pies instead of chocolates... ;)
I doubt that'll ever happen. Microsoft is a large, publicly traded company, and what you want to see is a nearly 180-degree shift in the character of the company that would entail a lot of risk. Any moves to this effect will most likely be opposed by many members of the board of directors tooth and nail. They have all of the resources necessary to become a force to be reckoned with once again, a massive war chest that dwarfs the resources available to some small sovereign countries, a research arm that employs the best computer scientists in the world, all they lack is the balls to do it. Investing in bringing their innovations to market rather than depending on their old standbys of Windows and Office for revenue entails a lot of risk, and I doubt their board of directors has the balls to make it happen. Being a convicted monopolist also means that they may need to tread carefully if they tried to make such fundamental changes, but admittedly the payoff could be huge. It could actually bring them back into serious relevance again, and turn them into a company more resembling, um, Google...
I'm not holding my breath though.
This is more spot-on than the joker seems to realize. According to Bruce Schneier:
(full article is here) Computers
I remember reading somewhere about research indicating that the expression of homosexual behavior is a form of population control. Gay people in general have less chances to actually produce children than straight people would, so a homosexual couple would, over the long run, represent two people who did nothing to increase the population directly, so when they died, the population would go down by 2, as opposed to a heterosexual couple who had three children, so when they died, there would be a net increase of 1 in the population. Removing such a gene, if it existed, so that no one would ever develop homosexual tendencies, might well exacerbate overpopulation.
FYI, you can do matrix inversion using either Gauss-Jordan elimination or LU decomposition, and whether you use these algorithms to solve a linear system or to invert a matrix they are both O(n^3), although you are correct that with either algorithm the constant factors involved for solving a linear system are lower than that for inverting the associated matrix of the linear system. You should only calculate the inverse of a matrix A if you expect to solve the linear system Ax = b for many different values for the column vector b, since multiplying a square matrix to a column vector can be done in quadratic time.
The Strassen algorithm for matrix multiplication can also be adapted to do matrix inversion, and it gets O(n^2.808...) running time, but it's not numerically stable and the overhead is high enough that it's not worth doing except for large matrices, and in such cases you may be better off using Gauss-Seidel iteration instead.
You misspelled Tolkien ring. :p
Apparently that old story just isn't true.
Speaking from experience, this seems to be true only of the 'fakeraid' setups that you see on cheap RAID controllers, which aren't really hardware RAID at all. They cheat and instead use firmware that executes on the main CPU to do the RAID, making them no better in principle and more often than not worse in performance than the Linux kernel's heavily optimized high-performance software RAID implementation. True dedicated hardware RAID controllers, such as the HP Smartarray, IBM ServeRAID, and the RAID controllers you see on fiberchannel SANs, are actually quite rare except in enterprise setups, and they are in general much faster than the Linux software RAID implementation.
But of course, nothing stops a manufacturer from doing bad engineering and making a product that has a dedicated piece of hardware that actually does the job slower than the main CPU would. And performance is not the only reason to make a dedicated hardware implementation of some bit of functionality. It could be done for "trusted computing" purposes for instance, in which case, it doesn't matter that it's slow, just that it keeps control out of the hands of the main CPU.
So in the past it was necessary to have so many members of the priesthood interceding to the Almighty so that plans could be updated more quickly? :)
Only if your competitors are not perceived as viable. Back in the days of the ME-XP transition, what would have been considered a viable competitor to Microsoft? I used GNU/Linux back in that day too, and I would not have recommended anyone else to use it, and IIRC, at the time OS X was very new and had not yet gained momentum. The situation however, is arguably quite different today. Ubuntu today is light years away from GNU/Linux back then, and the present OS X incarnations are better than ever. I don't think pretending it's still 1999 and there are still no viable contenders to Windows as a desktop OS is a safe strategy for Microsoft to be playing at this point in time.
Well, I have a laptop that has such a card, and well, I found a version of the MadWifi drivers that works well enough on my 64-bit Gentoo. I must admit though that the search was incredibly frustrating, but given the recent news that Atheros has gotten more open, the situation can only improve with time.
If there were any, I'm sure that they have a service contract with McColo, which they can bring up in court when a class action lawsuit against them starts. Your service contract states that you will provide my site with connectivity with a certain maximum amount of downtime. Since you've allowed my site to get cut off from the Net at large for so long, you have violated terms of the contract and must pay. Would be irony though, if these same spammers who caused them to get cut off due to their own illegal activities also join in on the class action...
Well, the influence of the Beatles in modern rock music is hard to escape. I would even go so far as to say that almost all modern popular music today has been influenced by the music of the Beatles in one way or the other. Even metal and thrash. Listen to "Helter Skelter" sometime... A serious rock musician would recognize this fact and keep open ears.
I wonder if it's just coincidence that the number of problems they list is the same as the number of problems David Hilbert listed in his famous address in 1900. And well, the Riemann Hypothesis is there too. A hundred years later, and still no resolution.
The Wikipedia article you linked to actually doesn't say it's empty space. It says that the Attractor just happens to be in the zone of avoidance, the region where interstellar dust and stars from our own galaxy greatly obscure any view of the intergalactic space beyond. Could just be a really huge conglomeration of galaxies that we can't see directly, but given that the mass involved is so huge it's likely that it won't look much like anything else we can see.
Dave Wheeler's Sloccount gives the following results on 2.6.25-tuxonice-r5 (Gentoo):
Interesting that JFS has so many non-code lines in it, relative to the others. It's actually the second smallest, right after Ext3. XFS is the largest codebase of them all, actually.
Given the tenor of Morgan Spurlock's celebrated 2004 documentary movie "Super Size Me", that statement of OLPC "super sizing" itself was most likely not intended as a compliment. More like they're trying to say that the OLPC is getting obese like Morgan Spurlock did after binging on McDonald's for every meal for a month (there is something of the nature of McDonalds food in Microsoft software by the way...). Nevertheless I agree with the main points of your post wholeheartedly.