By the way, one of the contestants for the 2002 Loebner competition is Anna, written in AIML and based on ALICE. You can download a JAVA-based version (see the bundled version on the above linked page), and the project is imho coming along nicely, though not yet complete.
How about disabled people? Or security?
on
Greenbacks No More
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· Score: 2
Apparently, with both size and color the same, foreigners have a hard time differenciating between the bills.
Hmm, the foreigners are not really the problem. Ask blind people, they're the ones who have trouble with the bills. The European Central Bank had the Euro bills and coins designed in a way that makes them usable for the visually impaired as well (different sizes, contrasting colors, relief printing, different coin edges).
Most definitely, it's time for the US to do something about those lousy bank notes (yes I know, most tender is plastic cards anyway). Maybe taking a look overseas could occasionally help (considering that, for example, Germany had most of those features for almost ten years)...
Actually, I had no trouble deleting the GME.exe and CMEII.exe stuff from my registry and hard drive, so at least they don't make it too hard for you to create your own Lite version...
True, but frankly, I don't think an audiophile person would ever be as stupid as to make copies from copies from copies... if you're so overly concerned with the quality of the CD pits that you would spend 1000s of bucks on gold media and burners, you should probably know about the copying process and make your copies properly.
No. At least according to the docs at serialata.org, you just need a simple adapter to connect old hard drives. I mean, it's still ATA, and of course downward-compatible. I'm really thinking about waiting for the standard to establish before buying a new PC. The star topology and the thin wires (no more 40-pin wide cables that clutter your PC case) make it worth it for me. Somewhere on the serialata.org website, there is a PDF presentation of the standard, with some pics on how the cables will look. I think it's about time for a standard like that.
...it seems to me that the record industry is actually very lucky considering that, in spite of the gigantic p2p boom, their sales have only gone down that little.
So who says this unproportionally small loss of profits is in any way even related to p2p?
Maybe even, record sales increased in the past two years just because of Napster? I mean, where are the statistics that give us proof that p2p is actually really endangering the record business??
From what I read in Simon Singh's "Code Book" (which I really recommend), James Ellis and Clifford Cocks discovered the math that permitted RSA-like cryptography, but did not yet have the computing power for a practically working system. Malcolm Williamson contributed by discovering the key exchange mechanism that Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman discovered at about the same time.
Since they worked for the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), they were confined into silence about their achievements.
You can expect that organisations such as the NSA are far ahead from the public when it comes to cryptography and things like factoring, for they too will obviously rather die than reveal their discoveries to the public. That's why I am not really surprised about 2048-bit keys being insecure. Heck, if public science is on its way to developing usable quantum computers, who says the NSA isn't yet cracking RSA keys with a far more advanced one?
besides which, I'd give all that up to get a decent printout...
So true. Maybe they should just take a look at Konqueror, apparently the only web browser out there that produces a perfect printout. With every new Mozilla build I first try to print the/. page to see if anything has improved (only konq does it perfectly). And with every new Mozilla build I've been disappointed... this is not meant as a flame, I use Moz almost exclusively and I'm very happy with it, but can it be that hard to render the same html properly to PostScript?
While I don't agree that Evolution has stopped for us, it has certainly slowed down. But it might be rather interesting to see what happens if, one day, Humanity starts leaving Earth and inhabiting other planets. Only then might evolution return in a bigger style, since then human beings will be more or less separated into different groups again and have to live under rather different circumstances. (kinda reminds me of White Mars by Brian Aldiss)
Note that you need the latest Ogg release (RC3, download here) to play the streams; older versions didn't work for me. They seem to be using some features of Vorbis not available previously (e.g., the web page says, "I've decided to drop Radio 4 to a 32kHz samplerate and use the RC3 'quality' settings instead of enforcing an upper bitrate").
With RC3, things are working beautifully. Good to see such support for an open, free standard.
What kind of worries me much more is not the possibility of Big Brother like control, but rather that at some point in the future we might forget to provide 'fallbacks'. While an all-electronic card is nice, we would end up helpless in case of failure if there is no good old non-digital infrastructure.
Sometimes we can already notice such effects; recently, an ATM kept my mother's card because the software crashed and the ATM rebooted. The bank did not have technical service available to take care of that and could not give out money verifying the ID card only. Also, the bank employee did not know how to instruct the computer system to deal with good old paper withdrawal slips.
I really anticipate the day that I can do everything with just one card and one secure key, but if we don't keep emergency fallbacks, we might easily lock ourselves out.
Well, one thing that's definitely true is that flawed software and software that's subject to viruses are costing the economy quite a lot of money. In that way you could of course say that Microsoft is hurting the world economy by possibly a couple billion Dollars... of course that may be true for some other software companies as well...
Note that with Kilobytes, a distinction has been made by using a capital 'K'. In SI units, 'kilo' is denoted by a lower-case 'k', thus 1 kB = 1000 bytes, 1 KB = 1024 bytes. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for Mega (since lower-case 'm' means 'milli'=1/1000), and neither for Giga/Tera, since those are defined to be upper-case letters in Si already. Peta/pico, Zetta/zepto, Yotta/yopto fail too. But aside from that, it's no big deal to remember that when used in conjunction with 'bytes', the prefixes K/M/G/T denote 2^10,2^20,2^30,2^40. Only hard drive manufacturers, unfortunately, make the exceptions. They should be forced to write 'million'/'billion' etc. anyway.
Well, while you might be able to get Crusoe Laptops in the US or in Japan, in Europe it's nearly impossible. The only laptop that actually comes close to the requirements I'm looking for (not too small, but equipped with a fast Crusoe, long battery uptime, etc.) seems to be the Fujitsu LifeBook P Series. I asked Fujitsu to find out whether I could get one in Europe.
Fujitsu USA does not ship them to Europe, and currently it is not planned to sell them in Europe, the only way to get them seems to be to try ordering from Japan.
I wonder why so few Crusoes make it to the European market.
We all know Franklin's quote "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."... apparently, while this applies to the US, the Government seemingly cares less in other places.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, one of the contestants for the 2002 Loebner competition is Anna, written in AIML and based on ALICE. You can download a JAVA-based version (see the bundled version on the above linked page), and the project is imho coming along nicely, though not yet complete.
Hmm, the foreigners are not really the problem. Ask blind people, they're the ones who have trouble with the bills. The European Central Bank had the Euro bills and coins designed in a way that makes them usable for the visually impaired as well (different sizes, contrasting colors, relief printing, different coin edges).
Most definitely, it's time for the US to do something about those lousy bank notes (yes I know, most tender is plastic cards anyway). Maybe taking a look overseas could occasionally help (considering that, for example, Germany had most of those features for almost ten years)...
</rant>What's interesting is that guy's name... any relation to Otto Hahn? :)
Actually, I had no trouble deleting the GME.exe and CMEII.exe stuff from my registry and hard drive, so at least they don't make it too hard for you to create your own Lite version...
Actually, if you say minimax, I'll have to say I prefer alpha-beta pruning...
True, but frankly, I don't think an audiophile person would ever be as stupid as to make copies from copies from copies... if you're so overly concerned with the quality of the CD pits that you would spend 1000s of bucks on gold media and burners, you should probably know about the copying process and make your copies properly.
No. At least according to the docs at serialata.org, you just need a simple adapter to connect old hard drives. I mean, it's still ATA, and of course downward-compatible. I'm really thinking about waiting for the standard to establish before buying a new PC. The star topology and the thin wires (no more 40-pin wide cables that clutter your PC case) make it worth it for me. Somewhere on the serialata.org website, there is a PDF presentation of the standard, with some pics on how the cables will look. I think it's about time for a standard like that.
...it seems to me that the record industry is actually very lucky considering that, in spite of the gigantic p2p boom, their sales have only gone down that little.
So who says this unproportionally small loss of profits is in any way even related to p2p?
Maybe even, record sales increased in the past two years just because of Napster? I mean, where are the statistics that give us proof that p2p is actually really endangering the record business??
From what I read in Simon Singh's "Code Book" (which I really recommend), James Ellis and Clifford Cocks discovered the math that permitted RSA-like cryptography, but did not yet have the computing power for a practically working system. Malcolm Williamson contributed by discovering the key exchange mechanism that Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman discovered at about the same time.
Since they worked for the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), they were confined into silence about their achievements.
You can expect that organisations such as the NSA are far ahead from the public when it comes to cryptography and things like factoring, for they too will obviously rather die than reveal their discoveries to the public. That's why I am not really surprised about 2048-bit keys being insecure. Heck, if public science is on its way to developing usable quantum computers, who says the NSA isn't yet cracking RSA keys with a far more advanced one?
Even better: afrodot.org :-)
Actually, I think Db would've been a way cooler name for Ximian to choose instead of mono :)
So true. Maybe they should just take a look at Konqueror, apparently the only web browser out there that produces a perfect printout. With every new Mozilla build I first try to print the /. page to see if anything has improved (only konq does it perfectly). And with every new Mozilla build I've been disappointed... this is not meant as a flame, I use Moz almost exclusively and I'm very happy with it, but can it be that hard to render the same html properly to PostScript?
While I don't agree that Evolution has stopped for us, it has certainly slowed down. But it might be rather interesting to see what happens if, one day, Humanity starts leaving Earth and inhabiting other planets. Only then might evolution return in a bigger style, since then human beings will be more or less separated into different groups again and have to live under rather different circumstances. (kinda reminds me of White Mars by Brian Aldiss)
Well, considering the host of the website is called xxx.lanl.gov, you might not be so wrong there...
Note that you need the latest Ogg release (RC3, download here) to play the streams; older versions didn't work for me. They seem to be using some features of Vorbis not available previously (e.g., the web page says, "I've decided to drop Radio 4 to a 32kHz samplerate and use the RC3 'quality' settings instead of enforcing an upper bitrate").
With RC3, things are working beautifully. Good to see such support for an open, free standard.
'Zero point energy has been proven to exist,' he told Reuters.
Yep, Zero Point is quite good... there's pretty much 'zero point' in his machine anyway...
What kind of worries me much more is not the possibility of Big Brother like control, but rather that at some point in the future we might forget to provide 'fallbacks'. While an all-electronic card is nice, we would end up helpless in case of failure if there is no good old non-digital infrastructure.
Sometimes we can already notice such effects; recently, an ATM kept my mother's card because the software crashed and the ATM rebooted. The bank did not have technical service available to take care of that and could not give out money verifying the ID card only. Also, the bank employee did not know how to instruct the computer system to deal with good old paper withdrawal slips.
I really anticipate the day that I can do everything with just one card and one secure key, but if we don't keep emergency fallbacks, we might easily lock ourselves out.
Well, one thing that's definitely true is that flawed software and software that's subject to viruses are costing the economy quite a lot of money. In that way you could of course say that Microsoft is hurting the world economy by possibly a couple billion Dollars... of course that may be true for some other software companies as well...
> The ./configure script should not be run as root in the first place.
Well, of course not, but that's where the Social Engineering part kicks in (of course this will hardly fool an experienced user).
But also, remember that a "make install" must usually be done as root. A nice Makefile can then also execute practically anything.
An executable named ./configure would probably do the job pretty well...
At least the PAL system (mostly used in Europe), it's 768x576.
Note that with Kilobytes, a distinction has been made by using a capital 'K'. In SI units, 'kilo' is denoted by a lower-case 'k', thus 1 kB = 1000 bytes, 1 KB = 1024 bytes. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for Mega (since lower-case 'm' means 'milli'=1/1000), and neither for Giga/Tera, since those are defined to be upper-case letters in Si already. Peta/pico, Zetta/zepto, Yotta/yopto fail too. But aside from that, it's no big deal to remember that when used in conjunction with 'bytes', the prefixes K/M/G/T denote 2^10,2^20,2^30,2^40. Only hard drive manufacturers, unfortunately, make the exceptions. They should be forced to write 'million'/'billion' etc. anyway.
Well, while you might be able to get Crusoe Laptops in the US or in Japan, in Europe it's nearly impossible. The only laptop that actually comes close to the requirements I'm looking for (not too small, but equipped with a fast Crusoe, long battery uptime, etc.) seems to be the Fujitsu LifeBook P Series. I asked Fujitsu to find out whether I could get one in Europe.
Fujitsu USA does not ship them to Europe, and currently it is not planned to sell them in Europe, the only way to get them seems to be to try ordering from Japan.
I wonder why so few Crusoes make it to the European market.
You might just want to write a sound driver for ALSA... they're about to begin pushing ALSA into 2.5...
We all know Franklin's quote "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."... apparently, while this applies to the US, the Government seemingly cares less in other places.