Here's the discussion about it on debian-legal. The new debian package for Sun's Java(tm) is intended to go into non-free, indicating they don't think it's really open source. Furthermore, it seems the debian-legal people were not consulted first, and they are not happy with the license even for a non-free package.
The mutations are random, but the selection process is not. Since only the beneficial mutations are "selected" by improving the survival probability of the mutated offspring, the end product of the mutations is most definitely not random.
I see, so probability isn't random?
To summarize, mutations are random; evolution is not.
A highly biased random distribution, is still a random distribution. It's just not uniformly random. A coin that lands on heads 999 times out of 1000 flips is still random.
Evolution is essentially a stochastic search, since the most fit individual doesn't always survive. The vast majority of mutations are likely to have only a very small effect on the survival probability, making it quite random indeed. If you play roulette, probability says you will eventually lose. However if play a limited number of games, many outcomes are possible, they just aren't all equally likely.
They could, but then others will ask for additional keywords blocked, and it will go on and on. The search quality will eventually be affected. Then when the government asks for keywords blocked, and Google will no longer be able to say they don't block things.
In other words, if they do this, they are admitting they are responsible for the content, and opening themselves up to a lot more lawsuits in the future.
It's not unlike people saying "Can't there be a law to stop X?" After 50 years of that, the books are full, the law is incomprehensible to a normal citizen, and a lot of legitimate freedoms have been eroded.
I agree with most of what you said, but don't understand why the point of adding the bardcode bit at the end was for.
With barcodes, you can scale up your system with a tape storage robot. The barcode is mostly there for error checking to make sure a tape is in the correct spot. When I worked at the PSC, they had two fairly large tape robots. I had to rewrite the barcode generator program, so that it no longer depended on a library with a strict beerware license (No, I did not make this up).
Sounds like sour grapes to me...=) I've never met anyone that *didn't* want to run OS X.
I've never been able to stand using an Apple OS for more than brief periods. It's simply not configurable enough, and tries to push every user into its own model of how things should work. I've used Linux exclusively now for 6 years, and I enjoy telling my computer what to do, rather than it telling me what it wants to do.
Yes but you see, the ISPs cannot make such a huge investment given the current stifling situation they find themselves in. Now if they could just have some help in the form of new laws, and the ability to charge content providers for this otherwise unnecessary upgrade, things would be fine. If they just got these two changes, then they can roll out the multicast in, oh, about two years.
Media programs regularly spend >90% of their time in a small fraction (<10%) of the code. It would not require a complete rewrite, but instead a redesign of the most computationally demanding parts of the code. Of course it wouldn't be an easy recompile, but its certainly a lot more managable than it might at first seem.
I have old games I wouldn't mind porting if the console has decent GL support. Typical of one-developer games, they aren't exactly demanding of the system, so I wouldn't even need to use any SPEs.
You forget that in both of those cases, the "end user" winds up paying more for the use of certain infrastructure, like transoceanic cables, satellite time, or airmail.
No I did not forget. In fact, the price paid was exactly my point. If an ISP wanted to start charging more for longer distance bandwidth, then it would be a similar situation, and one I'd be willing to accept. However that's not what the telcos are asking for at all. They want to tax profitable companies that use their service, and NOT do it through negotiation with the hosting ISP of said company.
If I call Bulgaria, it may cost more, but I still get a bill from AT&T, not from a Bulgarian company. I certainly don't get a bill from "FranceTelecom", or some other intermediary who happened to carry the call. The reason for this is that those companies have worked out profitable peering agreements between themselves. I also do not get charged extra if my call happened to earn me money because it was for business purposes.
How about another analogy: I buy a truck from a car salesman (as an individual). Then I use said truck as part of my contracting business, which turns out to be profitable. Then the car salesman comes back and tells me I owe him more for the truck, as additional fees apply when I make a profit with the truck he sold me. Nothing stating this is in the original sales agreement.
This is exactly what the telcos are now doing. They want to charge extra for bandwidth that is already being paid for, simply for the fact that companies are making a profit off the bandwidth they paid for. If level3 wants more money, they should take it up with their peering ISPs, not the customers. The Entire Cost Should be in the Original Price Paid.
P.S. Large sites already do pay a price based on bandwidth used. It is usually some combination of peak usage and total GB transferred. Individuals are paying mainly for overhead and the last mile infrastructure, which is where most of the investment is anyway (hence the flat fees for most home ISPs).
Well, the back story is that various internet companies have to eventually transfer data that didn't come from their associate ISP. Since these companies have been unable to work our peering agreements where they pay each other for bandwidth, they've decided to go after the (richest) end users.
Of course, in other technologies such as telephone and physical mail, companies have shown that's its possible to establish international peering agreements where all the parties get paid their share. Amazingly, all the cost shows up in the end-user price, just like what us "Net Neutrality" people are asking for.
I wonder if mail-order businesses such as NewEgg should pay extra for all that shipping "bandwidth" they are using.
Unfortunately, (at least in the US) Hollywood's view of robots is far more prevalent Asimov's. I work with robotics, and during any of our demos, it usually takes a minute or two before someone mentions either (1) "The Terminator" or (2) Battlebots/RobotWars. Most of our robots play soccer, along with other non-violent activities.
The only explanation I can think of is the bias from exposure to the "robots want to kill humans" view popular in movies. When one views human athletes, you normally don't ask if they are assasins or say "wouldn't it be cool if they fought to the death?"
Yeah, there's a lot of nanotech in my apartment on the furniture that I haven't used in a while. My apartment is constantly producing and inventing new types of particles in between dustings.
Just a hint: The delta vee to take off from earth, land on the moon, take off from the moon, and go elsewhere in the solar system is rather higher than the delta vee to just take off from earth and go elsewhere in the solar system.
Who said the OP was talking about multiple launches to mars? They only claimed that one flight from the moon could support multiple flights (of some type) from the moon. It is just as reasonable to assume they were talking about orbital flights from the respective bodies.
Given that, the formulation you hint at neglects the reusability of a moon-based spacecraft. That's a big issue on the moon, as the ratio of the mass of the spacecraft to the mass of fuel required to reach orbit is vastly different from earth (I'm sure you know this, but others may need to be reminded).
So, assuming a long-term reusable spacecraft has been landed on the moon (we'd only need to do that once), you're betting that launching the equivalent weight in fuel and landing it on the moon is not enough to reach lunar orbit more than once. If you had enough fuel to do any more than that, say 1.1 launches, then the OP is correct.
Now, I don't know the actual answer, but I bet its a lot closer than if you simply treat the moon as one-time detour for a spacecraft on its way somewhere else. If you aren't returning to the moon, it obviously doesn't make sense to stop there as you point out.
Until there's spacefaring industry on the moon itself (working with indigenous resources), the moon is not a useful space base.
Until we build a base there, we can't put a spacefaring industry there. That's why its so important to look for ways to use the moon's resources, and put it to the test with a "useless" (for now anyway) moon base.
There's also the issue of figuring out how to live in space for long periods. A 2-year mars mission would be suicide unless we'd built up and tested our systems on an easier problem (a moon base would be perfect for this). After all, there's a reason we had the Mercury and Gemini programs before Apollo. We didn't just build the moon mission from scratch.
Well I think I'd notice. CNN's website just went from their vertical section interface to a horizontal one, and I noticed it immediately. Strange that they would do this just while google dabbles with the opposite. Coincidence?
Exactly, which is why DRM is becoming much more restrictive to protect the rights of content creators from getting shit on by idealistic freeloaders who think they deserve to download anything and everything.
Did you even read the parent post? DRM won't stop thieves. It only gets in the way of legitimate consumers. One thief will find a way around the DRM, and then all the thieves can share it. In fact, DRM will encourage thieves, since Joe User will not be able to play a movie he owns on his laptop unless he steals it. This is not morality; It's economics. The tighter the DRM restriction, the less the value of the DRM'ed media that is being rented (can't buy it since you can't own it), while the pirated copy is still the same value as before.
Copy protection is becoming much more sophisticated, which should help artists to actually get paid for their hard work.
DRM fundamentally revolves around the idea of maintaining a shared secret. That has never worked in the realm of security, and never will. Just because something is seen as morally right doesn't make it possible or practical. I think it would be great if it was impossible to for one person to murder another, but there's no practical way to enforce that without totally ruining the lives of non-criminals. Moral!=Practical
You and others have yet to explain why pirates have the right to be doing this in the first place.
The parent didn't claim there was a right, nor do I. There is no right, just the simple fact that it will happen. Nobody has a right to exceed the speed limit, yet lots of people do. At least that can be enforced however, if we were willing to pay for total enforcement. DRM however, falls into the area of fundamental unenforcability. You can not stop everyone in the world from breaking it; If one person breaks it it's broken for good. Thus it simply won't work for its intended purpose.
iTunes took a more effective approach. They made it much easier to not break the law, and the convenience of it pulled many people away from who would otherwise be pirates. I think moving away from downsampling will have a similar effect. People will not have to break any laws to play HD content on their existing HD sets, which is as it should be.
Cite a case where this happens, and you've got a point. Until then, nothing.
TFA is an example, but I guess you didn't bother to learn about it. Lots of deviced that claim to be HD compliant do not support the keys necessary for HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback. This includes many HD sets sold up to this point. More than an HDMI connecter is needed, as there are license fees that have to be paid to get the needed keys. Manufacturers have been very quiet in many cases, improperly letting people assume that things would work. Look at the recent ATI/NVidia fiasco (the expensive cards had HDMI connectors, but would not actually output the next generation DVD content).
I'm sure you'll find something wrong with this example though, since you seem to have a good ability to ignore reality. The world doesn't always work the way we wish it would.
The halting problem is not the same thing as self awareness, unless you have a very strange definition of "self aware". So if you, as a human, can't answer whether the Collatz function terminates on an arbitrary finite integer, does that mean that you are not self aware? Do you think a Chimpanzee is self-aware? How many theorems have they proved?
This is exactly why Turing proposed the Turing test. It's the only objective way to gauge human-like intelligence proposed thus far. You have to bypass a human's bias about our uniqueness.
There are a lot of "Cocaine biosensors" you could hire off the street for a few dollars ah hour. They will react quite strongly when they find the compound in question (i.e. the "good stuff").
With a name like GnomeMeeting they could get sued by Microsoft. Remember Lindows? It's about as similar. Of course they shouldn't use the name by itself whenever possible, and should refer to it as "Ekiga Web Meeting Software".
Re:ANYTHING has to be better...
on
Ekiga 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Funny
With that kind of "lateral thinking", it's obvious that Ekiga stands for "telekinesis gathering".
Or maybe both names suck. I doubt the average office worker would pick up on the "cel" thing, especially since a cel is something completely different than a cell. Maybe Excel is an animation package? Why didn't they call it Excell to be more clear? Of course given how bad spelling is nowadays, maybe nobody would notice.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the discussion about it on debian-legal. The new debian package for Sun's Java(tm) is intended to go into non-free, indicating they don't think it's really open source. Furthermore, it seems the debian-legal people were not consulted first, and they are not happy with the license even for a non-free package.
The mutations are random, but the selection process is not. Since only the beneficial mutations are "selected" by improving the survival probability of the mutated offspring, the end product of the mutations is most definitely not random.
I see, so probability isn't random?
To summarize, mutations are random; evolution is not.
A highly biased random distribution, is still a random distribution. It's just not uniformly random. A coin that lands on heads 999 times out of 1000 flips is still random.
Evolution is essentially a stochastic search, since the most fit individual doesn't always survive. The vast majority of mutations are likely to have only a very small effect on the survival probability, making it quite random indeed. If you play roulette, probability says you will eventually lose. However if play a limited number of games, many outcomes are possible, they just aren't all equally likely.
Exactly, although to be fair to the GP, optical storage robots did exist for a while (maybe cheap RAID arrays killed them for the most part?)
They could, but then others will ask for additional keywords blocked, and it will go on and on. The search quality will eventually be affected. Then when the government asks for keywords blocked, and Google will no longer be able to say they don't block things.
In other words, if they do this, they are admitting they are responsible for the content, and opening themselves up to a lot more lawsuits in the future.
It's not unlike people saying "Can't there be a law to stop X?" After 50 years of that, the books are full, the law is incomprehensible to a normal citizen, and a lot of legitimate freedoms have been eroded.
I agree with most of what you said, but don't understand why the point of adding the bardcode bit at the end was for.
With barcodes, you can scale up your system with a tape storage robot. The barcode is mostly there for error checking to make sure a tape is in the correct spot. When I worked at the PSC, they had two fairly large tape robots. I had to rewrite the barcode generator program, so that it no longer depended on a library with a strict beerware license (No, I did not make this up).
Evolution is a process with a lot of randomness. So I'd instead ask the question: Why would you exepct them to be the same?
Sounds like sour grapes to me...=) I've never met anyone that *didn't* want to run OS X.
I've never been able to stand using an Apple OS for more than brief periods. It's simply not configurable enough, and tries to push every user into its own model of how things should work. I've used Linux exclusively now for 6 years, and I enjoy telling my computer what to do, rather than it telling me what it wants to do.
Yes but you see, the ISPs cannot make such a huge investment given the current stifling situation they find themselves in. Now if they could just have some help in the form of new laws, and the ability to charge content providers for this otherwise unnecessary upgrade, things would be fine. If they just got these two changes, then they can roll out the multicast in, oh, about two years.
My reply is thus: You use too many lines breaks.
Media programs regularly spend >90% of their time in a small fraction (<10%) of the code. It would not require a complete rewrite, but instead a redesign of the most computationally demanding parts of the code. Of course it wouldn't be an easy recompile, but its certainly a lot more managable than it might at first seem.
I have old games I wouldn't mind porting if the console has decent GL support. Typical of one-developer games, they aren't exactly demanding of the system, so I wouldn't even need to use any SPEs.
We do if we can turn the SPEs into Synergistic Perl Evaluators.
You forget that in both of those cases, the "end user" winds up paying more for the use of certain infrastructure, like transoceanic cables, satellite time, or airmail.
No I did not forget. In fact, the price paid was exactly my point. If an ISP wanted to start charging more for longer distance bandwidth, then it would be a similar situation, and one I'd be willing to accept. However that's not what the telcos are asking for at all. They want to tax profitable companies that use their service, and NOT do it through negotiation with the hosting ISP of said company.
If I call Bulgaria, it may cost more, but I still get a bill from AT&T, not from a Bulgarian company. I certainly don't get a bill from "FranceTelecom", or some other intermediary who happened to carry the call. The reason for this is that those companies have worked out profitable peering agreements between themselves. I also do not get charged extra if my call happened to earn me money because it was for business purposes.
How about another analogy: I buy a truck from a car salesman (as an individual). Then I use said truck as part of my contracting business, which turns out to be profitable. Then the car salesman comes back and tells me I owe him more for the truck, as additional fees apply when I make a profit with the truck he sold me. Nothing stating this is in the original sales agreement.
This is exactly what the telcos are now doing. They want to charge extra for bandwidth that is already being paid for, simply for the fact that companies are making a profit off the bandwidth they paid for. If level3 wants more money, they should take it up with their peering ISPs, not the customers. The Entire Cost Should be in the Original Price Paid.
P.S. Large sites already do pay a price based on bandwidth used. It is usually some combination of peak usage and total GB transferred. Individuals are paying mainly for overhead and the last mile infrastructure, which is where most of the investment is anyway (hence the flat fees for most home ISPs).
Well, the back story is that various internet companies have to eventually transfer data that didn't come from their associate ISP. Since these companies have been unable to work our peering agreements where they pay each other for bandwidth, they've decided to go after the (richest) end users.
Of course, in other technologies such as telephone and physical mail, companies have shown that's its possible to establish international peering agreements where all the parties get paid their share. Amazingly, all the cost shows up in the end-user price, just like what us "Net Neutrality" people are asking for.
I wonder if mail-order businesses such as NewEgg should pay extra for all that shipping "bandwidth" they are using.
Considering that games spend an insignificant amount of time in the kernel
Yeah, it's not as though games need to send data to the video display driver or anything...
#56 is pretty funny too.
This AC comment deserves to be seen.
Unfortunately, (at least in the US) Hollywood's view of robots is far more prevalent Asimov's. I work with robotics, and during any of our demos, it usually takes a minute or two before someone mentions either (1) "The Terminator" or (2) Battlebots/RobotWars. Most of our robots play soccer, along with other non-violent activities.
The only explanation I can think of is the bias from exposure to the "robots want to kill humans" view popular in movies. When one views human athletes, you normally don't ask if they are assasins or say "wouldn't it be cool if they fought to the death?"
Too bad the US didn't have a verion of Astro-Boy.
Yeah, there's a lot of nanotech in my apartment on the furniture that I haven't used in a while. My apartment is constantly producing and inventing new types of particles in between dustings.
Just a hint: The delta vee to take off from earth, land on the moon, take off from the moon, and go elsewhere in the solar system is rather higher than the delta vee to just take off from earth and go elsewhere in the solar system.
Who said the OP was talking about multiple launches to mars? They only claimed that one flight from the moon could support multiple flights (of some type) from the moon. It is just as reasonable to assume they were talking about orbital flights from the respective bodies.
Given that, the formulation you hint at neglects the reusability of a moon-based spacecraft. That's a big issue on the moon, as the ratio of the mass of the spacecraft to the mass of fuel required to reach orbit is vastly different from earth (I'm sure you know this, but others may need to be reminded).
So, assuming a long-term reusable spacecraft has been landed on the moon (we'd only need to do that once), you're betting that launching the equivalent weight in fuel and landing it on the moon is not enough to reach lunar orbit more than once. If you had enough fuel to do any more than that, say 1.1 launches, then the OP is correct.
Now, I don't know the actual answer, but I bet its a lot closer than if you simply treat the moon as one-time detour for a spacecraft on its way somewhere else. If you aren't returning to the moon, it obviously doesn't make sense to stop there as you point out.
Until there's spacefaring industry on the moon itself (working with indigenous resources), the moon is not a useful space base.
Until we build a base there, we can't put a spacefaring industry there. That's why its so important to look for ways to use the moon's resources, and put it to the test with a "useless" (for now anyway) moon base.
There's also the issue of figuring out how to live in space for long periods. A 2-year mars mission would be suicide unless we'd built up and tested our systems on an easier problem (a moon base would be perfect for this). After all, there's a reason we had the Mercury and Gemini programs before Apollo. We didn't just build the moon mission from scratch.
Well I think I'd notice. CNN's website just went from their vertical section interface to a horizontal one, and I noticed it immediately. Strange that they would do this just while google dabbles with the opposite. Coincidence?
Exactly, which is why DRM is becoming much more restrictive to protect the rights of content creators from getting shit on by idealistic freeloaders who think they deserve to download anything and everything.
Did you even read the parent post? DRM won't stop thieves. It only gets in the way of legitimate consumers. One thief will find a way around the DRM, and then all the thieves can share it. In fact, DRM will encourage thieves, since Joe User will not be able to play a movie he owns on his laptop unless he steals it. This is not morality; It's economics. The tighter the DRM restriction, the less the value of the DRM'ed media that is being rented (can't buy it since you can't own it), while the pirated copy is still the same value as before.
Copy protection is becoming much more sophisticated, which should help artists to actually get paid for their hard work.
DRM fundamentally revolves around the idea of maintaining a shared secret. That has never worked in the realm of security, and never will. Just because something is seen as morally right doesn't make it possible or practical. I think it would be great if it was impossible to for one person to murder another, but there's no practical way to enforce that without totally ruining the lives of non-criminals. Moral!=Practical
You and others have yet to explain why pirates have the right to be doing this in the first place.
The parent didn't claim there was a right, nor do I. There is no right, just the simple fact that it will happen. Nobody has a right to exceed the speed limit, yet lots of people do. At least that can be enforced however, if we were willing to pay for total enforcement. DRM however, falls into the area of fundamental unenforcability. You can not stop everyone in the world from breaking it; If one person breaks it it's broken for good. Thus it simply won't work for its intended purpose.
iTunes took a more effective approach. They made it much easier to not break the law, and the convenience of it pulled many people away from who would otherwise be pirates. I think moving away from downsampling will have a similar effect. People will not have to break any laws to play HD content on their existing HD sets, which is as it should be.
Cite a case where this happens, and you've got a point. Until then, nothing.
TFA is an example, but I guess you didn't bother to learn about it. Lots of deviced that claim to be HD compliant do not support the keys necessary for HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback. This includes many HD sets sold up to this point. More than an HDMI connecter is needed, as there are license fees that have to be paid to get the needed keys. Manufacturers have been very quiet in many cases, improperly letting people assume that things would work. Look at the recent ATI/NVidia fiasco (the expensive cards had HDMI connectors, but would not actually output the next generation DVD content).
I'm sure you'll find something wrong with this example though, since you seem to have a good ability to ignore reality. The world doesn't always work the way we wish it would.
The halting problem is not the same thing as self awareness, unless you have a very strange definition of "self aware". So if you, as a human, can't answer whether the Collatz function terminates on an arbitrary finite integer, does that mean that you are not self aware? Do you think a Chimpanzee is self-aware? How many theorems have they proved?
This is exactly why Turing proposed the Turing test. It's the only objective way to gauge human-like intelligence proposed thus far. You have to bypass a human's bias about our uniqueness.
There are a lot of "Cocaine biosensors" you could hire off the street for a few dollars ah hour. They will react quite strongly when they find the compound in question (i.e. the "good stuff").
With a name like GnomeMeeting they could get sued by Microsoft. Remember Lindows? It's about as similar. Of course they shouldn't use the name by itself whenever possible, and should refer to it as "Ekiga Web Meeting Software".
With that kind of "lateral thinking", it's obvious that Ekiga stands for "telekinesis gathering".
Or maybe both names suck. I doubt the average office worker would pick up on the "cel" thing, especially since a cel is something completely different than a cell. Maybe Excel is an animation package? Why didn't they call it Excell to be more clear? Of course given how bad spelling is nowadays, maybe nobody would notice.