It always feels like the issue here is that everyone wants to take sides and polarize the issue to the point that arguing about it is absurd.
How about looking at some of the gray levels here, because there are plenty of them.
IP was originally useful when data transferral was significantly slower, when the industries involved did not evolve beyond recognition in 5 years, and when the people granting patents and the like were somewhat knowledgeable of their field.
The usual statement is that IP law is to protect the people who paid for the research to allow them to recover what went into it. This is STILL APPLICABLE. I completely agree with the parent in this regard. The problem people have with patent law is that it no longer seems applicable. A patent lasts for too long for the amount of innovation involved in the tech industry.
Three words: One Click Patent
Because the balance is off in the tech sector, the benefits are being trumped. Patent law should exist. It needs to adapt to changing times. It isn't, so people who don't reap the benefits of it want to see it go away.
Evolution is not the process of becoming 'better,' 'stronger,' or more able. It's the process of being more likely to reproduce in the current environment and is dictated by randomness. Any changes that have no effect on an entity's ability to reproduce (especially indirectly) may or may not survive. Truly junk DNA will change in a completely arbitrary fashion until it generates a phenotype that actually does matter to whether a creature can reproduce (or in other means ensure the propagation of their genes).
It's important to realize that almost ANYTHING can contribute to the fitness function that determines whether something's genes will propagate. If people think having four fingers is gross, people with four fingers will have a disadvantage and be less likely to reproduce. No offense to people with four fingers. It's just an example. The same would apply to any trait. For the same reason, if an ability was useful at one point, and it no longer affects the fitness function for reproducability any more, it may evolve out. It may only evolve out of some of the species.
I hear this and I have to wonder, what if someone wiped the headers as you mention, and then boot something like matlab up. I imagine a heavy program like that would immediately make data resident in 2GB of memory moot.
I also don't see why they don't open the challenge up to individuals who are published in the field of data recovery. If it costs over $500 bucks to recover the data, there will be no commercial takers, but opening to the research community might turn the tables on this a bit. The competition starts looking more like grant money...
A friend of mine is actually a firefighter who works with these types of fires. They do controlled burns to reduce the fuel sources and help promote the natural life cycles. I've worked on hardware designed to help monitor some of the burns to make for better predictions of the actual behavior of a fire. Very cool stuff. You should look into the stuff they do in Colorado and California to deal with forest fires if you're interested. This might be a good place to start http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drip_torch
It's fine if you drive on the right side of the road. In countries where you drive on the left, it's good to look right and then left! More friends of mine have had close calls on the return trip from Japan than you can imagine. It's very easy to overlook.
Oh, but I have... Not one of them was devoid of dry fuels.
My favorite are the pine barrens on the East coast, which, are short, develop a VERY thick underbrush, burn every 30 years, or every 5 in the case of the dwarf pines. You'll see a lot of tall grasses, which dries well and burns easily. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_barrens
Dry needles and leaves can provide plenty of fuel for a good burn. Why is the bark of a Redwood tree fire resistant? If they weren't prepared for natural forest fires, I don't expect they would be able to live NEARLY as long as they do. And their forest typically DOES have underbrush, although not nearly as much as the shorter forests. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Del_Norte_Titan_230.jpg
The most significant thing is the fact some plants require a burn in order to reproduce. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Pine "It is fire-adapted to stand-replacing fires, with the cones remaining closed for many years, until a natural forest fire kills the mature trees and opens the cones. These then reseed the burnt ground."
And, while yes, there are forests that Don't have fires like this, ALL of the ones I've really been through do. Even the VERY mature ones. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_fire
Duck and Cover, and you too will be able to survive a nuclear blast... with heavy radiation poisoning...
Smoky the Bear says you can stop forest fires, which is good, because many plants and animals living in areas with forest fires actually depend on the fires for their natural life cycles at this point. We can't have that. Also, stopping forest fires causes a buildup of underbrush, which means that when lighting strikes in a forest, and something sparks naturally (because that can happen), or when it's just hot enough, the fires are bigger and less controllable than the little ones.
For a guidebook on what privacy concerns might end up being in the future, look at the game paranoia. Laughing is not mandatory, but is highly recommended!
It's like IBM stopping all work with Java or Starbucks announcing it will no longer sell baked goods at its stores. Who even comes up with this stuff? On your mark, get set, castrate the company of your choice...
Gravity wells. The main ones that they have to deal with are stellar, not planetary, and that can theoretically be handled by solar sails. The ship can be built in orbit, so half the challenge of leaving a planet is gone. Solar sails are also nice in the sense that they provide 'free' propulsion. They suck at 'getting out of the way.' They also wouldn't necessarily have to or want to land an interstellar craft planet-side. Why waste that kind of energy?
Second, if we're having such a hard time finding aliens as a species, then they're not too densely packed among the stars and planets. Who's to say that a craft approaching our world is coming with the expectation of running into any life forms nearly as complex (socially, technologically, etc).
Speed really depends on what we're using and what they're using for propulsion. A weapon system has one solid advantage over a craft carrying life forms. We can harden a circuit so it takes a significantly higher stress from thrust than human beings are capable of handling. Lifeforms have their limits, and it's not impossible to build weapons with higher limits. If we can accelerate faster, it may be enough. If we can maintain a minimum thrust sooner and longer, that may be enough.
It also might not matter. Since my first post everyone's been asking how we can shoot down something that we don't know about yet. It's a valid train of thought, but it's a powerful proof of point.
1. There's a lot less to crash into during space travel than when you're at or near a planet. We did a lot more crashing of probes into Mars than in the space between here and Mars.
2. The mutilated cattle and anal probes are probably being done by people and being blamed on aliens. That never had to be UFOs, and it can still be someone covering up for their sick relatives.
3. Why not land in the middle of the superbowl? What if they deemed our civilization was not secure enough for open contact. What are the odds that enough scared people with the means of launching a missle would be interested in doing so out of fear. Pre-emptive strike ring any bells? From that perspective, landing in desolate areas makes logical sense. Although it would probably make more sense for a water landing if possible. Easier to hide.
4. We need more gratuitous references to our typical/. memes
There are other architectures available. If someone wanted a fresh start at programming and was interested in an introduction to assembly language, it might make sense to pick up a PIC or ATMEL programming board, a half dozen chips for 20 bucks, some crystals, and have the kid play with some embedded apps.
I do agree, however, that assembly is a rough first language, and I get the sense that starting with a highly structured language like c, c++ or java can actually hurt a programmer's ability to comprehend what's going on in an assembly environment. Picking up a curly-brace language as a second language is probably advantageous in this regard. Object oriented thinking can simplify programming, but doesn't stretch a person's ability to interpret new paradigms very much.
It's amazing to see how many people responding to my earlier post opened up with "I started with basic on the..." That's some quality nostalgia baby.
I can't vouch for python because I haven't learned it yet, but the gist of the parent is dead on. Show him a prototyping language. Something he can dev in quickly before diving into the deep and mucky bowels of pointers, references, mixed languages, and memory management. These things are not obvious to a novice programmer, and program flow is far more important to pick up early on than that.
I KNOW I'm going to get flack for this, but many people I know who are excellent programmers cut their teeth on QBasic. This language was simple enough to pick up that you could really get coding some complex stuff in under an hour. I would recommend text parsing stuff as a first thing. "Can you pull the hours out of the time?" or "Can you print in words what the date is from the seconds since...". This can be extended to stuff like "calculate Fibonacci numbers" and then teaching how to clean that code up. This is a good time to teach stuff like "code first, optimize second" and how to time code for optimization.
It's also a good time to get him into commenting the code. The way I usually get newbies started on that is to have them write pseudo code or explanatory text before coding, using the comments as a guideline to keep them on task.
If I were to suggest an order of action, try variables & output, input, conditionals, loops, complex conditionals (switch/select statements), objects, collections (sorting searching and maybe memory management here). It's hard to do GUI stuff off the bat because for c/c++ there are so many different flavors available that you can't say "This is how this is done" and be done with it. What might be a good approach is to have him build a game. Start with a MUX and evolve it to a side scrolling platformer, and then to one with 3D graphics (can still be side scrolling, but this way it at least gets flashy).
It's really important to show how to make a responsive program early on. It's a lot more interesting to work with something that can give you feedback in some way. Even a lexical parser could be fun. Find the verb in the input sentence.
When you've done all that, try implementing low level c/c++ code like the String class or Vector class.
Python might be a good way to go, if it really is just print "Hello World" and you're done.
If ISPs were smart, and honestly interested in reducing bandwidth consumption and therefore their own overhead costs, they'd be helping users utilize p2p in an effort to effectively mirror popular sites and information locally. Does anyone else see the potential there? Imagine if trying to grab the static majority of pages involved pulling info from your neighbors and comparing hashes against a database, rather than sucking the full site down from the source. The whole system could be managed by stating the TTL of a site to determine the likelihood of it being static.
Granted, MD5 won't work, and collisions are a problem, but is there not a value to this?
Get past the verizon servers and pipe in the usenet stuff from other providers. If the input is distributed enough, you should be able to get the message across without severely irritating the groups you're tapping out of.
This means they're likely to be able to vaporize water, many organic compounds, but not silicon dioxide (sand/glass), and not most metals. It would be interesting to know what they hope to detect at that temperature...
What I'm sure the 'grandparent' article is referring to as a false negative is that if there were water (ice) in the original sample when it was taken, there's a risk that several days vibrating it in under low atmospheric pressure may cause it to evaporate. If it's a small enough sample, or the pressure is low enough, it could sublime, converting directly from ice into steam.
This would result in a false negative if the original sample did, in fact, contain water, because spending that much time between gathering a sample and analyzing it invalidated the test results. This of course, assumes that the first paragraph is true.
The reason for sifting it is probably because anything too large could damage their 'oven.'
Instead of opening with insults, it's usually safe to assume for a minute that I made that statement for a reason. By actually trying to rationalize my comment, you might find something you overlooked. I am aware of the nature of memory allocation in an OS.
If you don't need to reboot the full OS when the system is shutdown because the previous memory state is persistent, you don't necessarily need to wipe the memory clean, nor do you need to rebuild the allocation tables. This is the advantage of this type of memory. No more waiting for hard drive accesses or table construction on boot. They even mention this as an advantage of persistent memories above.
If the memory is persistent, then it requires a forced wipe to clear memory. Yes it can merely be stated free, but when a system crashes (windows and linux have both done this from time to time) and the memory is not cleaned up, then without an explicit reconstruction of the tables used to store memory allocation per program, the system may not be able to recover the memory. It is a statement about a consideration that should not be ignored, because this sort of thing is often overlooked. For example, think about how long power modes other than on or off have been available on computers. How many things still exist which suffer from going into and out of hibernation. The sound card on my laptop will produce weird distortion when recovered from hibernation. I know other examples exist.
With persistent memory, it is more likely a typical shutdown will behave more like a hibernate. Memory state remains once rebooted.
Slashdot Mirror
It always feels like the issue here is that everyone wants to take sides and polarize the issue to the point that arguing about it is absurd.
How about looking at some of the gray levels here, because there are plenty of them.
IP was originally useful when data transferral was significantly slower, when the industries involved did not evolve beyond recognition in 5 years, and when the people granting patents and the like were somewhat knowledgeable of their field.
The usual statement is that IP law is to protect the people who paid for the research to allow them to recover what went into it. This is STILL APPLICABLE. I completely agree with the parent in this regard. The problem people have with patent law is that it no longer seems applicable. A patent lasts for too long for the amount of innovation involved in the tech industry.
Three words:
One Click Patent
Because the balance is off in the tech sector, the benefits are being trumped. Patent law should exist. It needs to adapt to changing times. It isn't, so people who don't reap the benefits of it want to see it go away.
Thoughts?
Good point,
Evolution is not the process of becoming 'better,' 'stronger,' or more able. It's the process of being
more likely to reproduce in the current environment and is dictated by randomness. Any changes that have no
effect on an entity's ability to reproduce (especially indirectly) may or may not survive. Truly junk DNA
will change in a completely arbitrary fashion until it generates a phenotype that actually does matter to
whether a creature can reproduce (or in other means ensure the propagation of their genes).
It's important to realize that almost ANYTHING can contribute to the fitness function that determines whether
something's genes will propagate. If people think having four fingers is gross, people with four fingers will
have a disadvantage and be less likely to reproduce. No offense to people with four fingers. It's just an
example. The same would apply to any trait. For the same reason, if an ability was useful at one point, and
it no longer affects the fitness function for reproducability any more, it may evolve out. It may only evolve
out of some of the species.
I hear this and I have to wonder, what if someone wiped the headers as you mention, and then boot something like matlab up. I imagine a heavy program like that would immediately make data resident in 2GB of memory moot.
I also don't see why they don't open the challenge up to individuals who are published in the field of data recovery. If it costs over $500 bucks to recover the data, there will be no commercial takers, but opening to the research community might turn the tables on this a bit. The competition starts looking more like grant money...
So still better quality than Microsoft Ninjas (TM) Release SP2? (aka, beta)
The same ones that could be considered social...
Not many.
They should have extended off an existing social networking tool.
Try a facebook app or something.
They'd get the infrastructure for free, and be able to just focus on the gaming tools.
I'm sure myspace or something like it would LOVE the extra app. WotC endorsed and everything...
A friend of mine is actually a firefighter who works with these types of fires. They do controlled burns to reduce the fuel sources and help promote the natural life cycles. I've worked on hardware designed to help monitor some of the burns to make for better predictions of the actual behavior of a fire. Very cool stuff. You should look into the stuff they do in Colorado and California to deal with forest fires if you're interested. This might be a good place to start http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drip_torch
It's fine if you drive on the right side of the road. In countries where you drive on the left, it's good to look right and then left! More friends of mine have had close calls on the return trip from Japan than you can imagine. It's very easy to overlook.
Oh, but I have... Not one of them was devoid of dry fuels.
My favorite are the pine barrens on the East coast, which, are short, develop a VERY thick underbrush, burn every 30 years, or every 5 in the case of the dwarf pines. You'll see a lot of tall grasses, which dries well and burns easily.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_barrens
Dry needles and leaves can provide plenty of fuel for a good burn. Why is the bark of a Redwood tree fire resistant? If they weren't prepared for natural forest fires, I don't expect they would be able to live NEARLY as long as they do. And their forest typically DOES have underbrush, although not nearly as much as the shorter forests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Del_Norte_Titan_230.jpg
The most significant thing is the fact some plants require a burn in order to reproduce.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Pine
"It is fire-adapted to stand-replacing fires, with the cones remaining closed for many years, until a natural forest fire kills the mature trees and opens the cones. These then reseed the burnt ground."
And, while yes, there are forests that Don't have fires like this, ALL of the ones I've really been through do. Even the VERY mature ones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_fire
Well, there seems to be a trend going on here.
Duck and Cover, and you too will be able to survive a nuclear blast... with heavy radiation poisoning...
Smoky the Bear says you can stop forest fires, which is good, because many plants and animals living in areas with forest fires actually depend on the fires for their natural life cycles at this point. We can't have that. Also, stopping forest fires causes a buildup of underbrush, which means that when lighting strikes in a forest, and something sparks naturally (because that can happen), or when it's just hot enough, the fires are bigger and less controllable than the little ones.
For a guidebook on what privacy concerns might end up being in the future, look at the game paranoia. Laughing is not mandatory, but is highly recommended!
The odds of a resonance cascade scenario occurring are infinitesimally small, so I wouldn't worry...
Where the hell did this rumor even start?
It's like IBM stopping all work with Java or Starbucks announcing it will no longer sell baked goods at its stores.
Who even comes up with this stuff? On your mark, get set, castrate the company of your choice...
I'll play with this one too:
Gravity wells. The main ones that they have to deal with are stellar, not planetary, and that can theoretically be handled by solar sails. The ship can be built in orbit, so half the challenge of leaving a planet is gone. Solar sails are also nice in the sense that they provide 'free' propulsion. They suck at 'getting out of the way.' They also wouldn't necessarily have to or want to land an interstellar craft planet-side. Why waste that kind of energy?
Second, if we're having such a hard time finding aliens as a species, then they're not too densely packed among the stars and planets. Who's to say that a craft approaching our world is coming with the expectation of running into any life forms nearly as complex (socially, technologically, etc).
Speed really depends on what we're using and what they're using for propulsion. A weapon system has one solid advantage over a craft carrying life forms. We can harden a circuit so it takes a significantly higher stress from thrust than human beings are capable of handling. Lifeforms have their limits, and it's not impossible to build weapons with higher limits. If we can accelerate faster, it may be enough. If we can maintain a minimum thrust sooner and longer, that may be enough.
It also might not matter. Since my first post everyone's been asking how we can shoot down something that we don't know about yet. It's a valid train of thought, but it's a powerful proof of point.
I'd love to play with this a bit:
1. There's a lot less to crash into during space travel than when you're at or near a planet. We did a lot more crashing of probes into Mars than in the space between here and Mars.
2. The mutilated cattle and anal probes are probably being done by people and being blamed on aliens. That never had to be UFOs, and it can still be someone covering up for their sick relatives.
3. Why not land in the middle of the superbowl? What if they deemed our civilization was not secure enough for open contact. What are the odds that enough scared people with the means of launching a missle would be interested in doing so out of fear. Pre-emptive strike ring any bells? From that perspective, landing in desolate areas makes logical sense. Although it would probably make more sense for a water landing if possible. Easier to hide.
4. We need more gratuitous references to our typical /. memes
I for one welcome our alien brethren/overlords
1. mutilate cows
2. anal probe astronauts
3. flashy thing people
4. ???
5. profit!
There are other architectures available. If someone wanted a fresh start at programming and was interested in an introduction to assembly language, it might make sense to pick up a PIC or ATMEL programming board, a half dozen chips for 20 bucks, some crystals, and have the kid play with some embedded apps.
I do agree, however, that assembly is a rough first language, and I get the sense that starting with a highly structured language like c, c++ or java can actually hurt a programmer's ability to comprehend what's going on in an assembly environment. Picking up a curly-brace language as a second language is probably advantageous in this regard. Object oriented thinking can simplify programming, but doesn't stretch a person's ability to interpret new paradigms very much.
It's amazing to see how many people responding to my earlier post opened up with "I started with basic on the..." That's some quality nostalgia baby.
I can't vouch for python because I haven't learned it yet, but the gist of the parent is dead on.
Show him a prototyping language. Something he can dev in quickly before diving into the deep and mucky bowels of pointers, references, mixed languages, and memory management. These things are not obvious to a novice programmer, and program flow is far more important to pick up early on than that.
I KNOW I'm going to get flack for this, but many people I know who are excellent programmers cut their teeth on QBasic. This language was simple enough to pick up that you could really get coding some complex stuff in under an hour. I would recommend text parsing stuff as a first thing. "Can you pull the hours out of the time?" or "Can you print in words what the date is from the seconds since...". This can be extended to stuff like "calculate Fibonacci numbers" and then teaching how to clean that code up. This is a good time to teach stuff like "code first, optimize second" and how to time code for optimization.
It's also a good time to get him into commenting the code. The way I usually get newbies started on that is to have them write pseudo code or explanatory text before coding, using the comments as a guideline to keep them on task.
If I were to suggest an order of action, try variables & output, input, conditionals, loops, complex conditionals (switch/select statements), objects, collections (sorting searching and maybe memory management here). It's hard to do GUI stuff off the bat because for c/c++ there are so many different flavors available that you can't say "This is how this is done" and be done with it. What might be a good approach is to have him build a game. Start with a MUX and evolve it to a side scrolling platformer, and then to one with 3D graphics (can still be side scrolling, but this way it at least gets flashy).
It's really important to show how to make a responsive program early on. It's a lot more interesting to work with something that can give you feedback in some way. Even a lexical parser could be fun. Find the verb in the input sentence.
When you've done all that, try implementing low level c/c++ code like the String class or Vector class.
Python might be a good way to go, if it really is just print "Hello World" and you're done.
Don't forget:
import antigravity
PLAY
That's not how windows security works. If they doubled it, expect:
An activeX control has been detected on this site. Allow it to run (Yes/No)?
(the close window button is missing, yes and no don't exist)
Are you sure you want to run it?
(They may use both yes and no buttons instead of an OK button here)
If ISPs were smart, and honestly interested in reducing bandwidth consumption and therefore their own overhead costs, they'd be helping users utilize p2p in an effort to effectively mirror popular sites and information locally. Does anyone else see the potential there? Imagine if trying to grab the static majority of pages involved pulling info from your neighbors and comparing hashes against a database, rather than sucking the full site down from the source. The whole system could be managed by stating the TTL of a site to determine the likelihood of it being static.
Granted, MD5 won't work, and collisions are a problem, but is there not a value to this?
Wouldn't hurt to send him a cake...
Since when do trolls smell like hemp granola?
So, why not fight via a proxy?
Get past the verizon servers and pipe in the usenet stuff from other providers. If the input is distributed enough, you should be able to get the message across without severely irritating the groups you're tapping out of.
based on this article: http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/science_tega.php
the TEGA ovens go up to about 1000 degrees C...
This means they're likely to be able to vaporize water, many organic compounds, but not silicon dioxide (sand/glass), and not most metals. It would be interesting to know what they hope to detect at that temperature...
What I'm sure the 'grandparent' article is referring to as a false negative is that if there were water (ice) in the original sample when it was taken, there's a risk that several days vibrating it in under low atmospheric pressure may cause it to evaporate. If it's a small enough sample, or the pressure is low enough, it could sublime, converting directly from ice into steam.
This would result in a false negative if the original sample did, in fact, contain water, because spending that much time between gathering a sample and analyzing it invalidated the test results. This of course, assumes that the first paragraph is true.
The reason for sifting it is probably because anything too large could damage their 'oven.'
Here's a question... do you count playing tetris clones as playing tetris? What would constitute a solitaire clone?
I've spent several times the amount of time I played solitaire playing the original dos netris.
bombs, big bombs, lasers, mashers, and inverters. What a great freaking game!
Instead of opening with insults, it's usually safe to assume for a minute that I made that statement for a reason.
By actually trying to rationalize my comment, you might find something you overlooked.
I am aware of the nature of memory allocation in an OS.
If you don't need to reboot the full OS when the system is shutdown because the previous memory state is persistent, you don't necessarily need to wipe the memory clean, nor do you need to rebuild the allocation tables. This is the advantage of this type of memory. No more waiting for hard drive accesses or table construction on boot. They even mention this as an advantage of persistent memories above.
If the memory is persistent, then it requires a forced wipe to clear memory. Yes it can merely be stated free, but when a system crashes (windows and linux have both done this from time to time) and the memory is not cleaned up, then without an explicit reconstruction of the tables used to store memory allocation per program, the system may not be able to recover the memory. It is a statement about a consideration that should not be ignored, because this sort of thing is often overlooked. For example, think about how long power modes other than on or off have been available on computers. How many things still exist which suffer from going into and out of hibernation. The sound card on my laptop will produce weird distortion when recovered from hibernation. I know other examples exist.
With persistent memory, it is more likely a typical shutdown will behave more like a hibernate. Memory state remains once rebooted.