I thought chess fans might be interested in Tim Krabbé's site, in which he talks about things like chess playing programs taking part in tournaments and chess players having to pee into a cup in order to be considered sportsmen worthy of participation in the olympic games. Most importantly in the context of this dicussion, he talks about computers playing bad chess in Defending Humanity's Honor. I wonder if it's time to add that "Nemeth Gambit" to our repertoire.
Grandmasters can in fact tell whether their oponent is a computer, sometimes even after playing just a single game, and certainly by the end of a match. In fact, I believe Kasparov lost to Deep Blue precisely because he counted on the computeresque behavior of his opponent when designing his strategy. If you read the article, you will learn that Kramnik can tell computer programs apart by their style, and that he thinks Fritz is becoming more human-like in its behavior, from which I infer that he can still identify its style as computeresque on some level.
So, the test you propose has already been carried out, and the machines "failed". This may have more to do with the fact that the people who write chess playing programs are more concerned with the programs' ability to win than they are with the programs' ability to emulate the playing style of humans. If humans could calculate better [Note: "calculate" has a precise technical meaning in chess] or chess playing computer programs were slower and considerably more stateful, their respective styles might be much more similar and your test, therefore, be met.
My own belief is that the ability to play chess well, let alone the ability to play chess in the style of a particular grandmaster, is not an accurate or even adequate measure of intelligence, so I will not be particularly hurt when the day comes on which computers at last surpass our chess playing skills, just as they have surpassed our (numerical) computational skills.
What Apple is really saying is that MacOS gives you the ability to run Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) on top of a UNIX core environment. But, is that a good thing? The answer is easy enough to obtain if we ask ourselves, with due humility, What ld Jesus Do? Oops, sorry -- wrong church. I mean, what would our leaders have to say about it? Well, my prayers to the Gods of Freenix were answered and what follows are (approximately) the words I heard in the vision with which I was rewarded for my Faith:
RMS:
It is far better to use available Free Software whenever possible. We do not need Word, as we have Emacs PSGML; we do not need Excel, as we have Emacs Calc; and we do not need Powerpoint, as Emacs AUC TeX supports SliTeX.
WRS:
I use a combination of vi, bc, and the -m packages. Whenever I have needed something that these tools did't provide, it has always been simple enough to write an awk script to process the data or a short C program to drive the underlying ex, dc, and troff directly.
ESR:
A couple of years ago, I was worried about it. Today, however, Microsoft must learn to coexist with open source systems or risk going the way of the dinosaurs. I believe that it is only a matter of time before Microsoft releases the Office application suite under an OSI-approved license. In fact, as soon as I get a hold of Neal to arrange the next junket at Bill's, I'll be able to give you a more precise date.
CmdrTaco:
As everyone knows, Vim is the best (only?) text editor. And KDE supplies everything else 'cause, as everyone knows, KDE is the best (only?) desktop system. Heh.
[Yeah, I know WRS is dead, but this was a vision, see?]
The Microsoft Press has been a publisher of a series of chess books (which I have read and liked) by international grandmaster Seirawan (coincidentally, a Seattle resident, I think) since the eighties, when MS was not the giant it is today. I believe that the name "C#" is a direct "chessical" reference, rather than a musical reference; furthermore, it is a reference the meaning of which will not surprise anyone here. Let me explain.
In chess, when the king is on a square to which an opposing piece could make a legal move if only the king were not there (as, legally, the king cannot be captured) the king is said to be in check; in most chess notation systems, this condition is notated by appending a plus sign, "+", to the move that sets up the position. When the king is on a square to which either of two opposing pieces could make a legal move if only the king were not there, the king is said to be in "double-check"; this condition is expressed using two plus signs, as in "++". Now, when no legal move can relieve the king of a "check", the king is said to be "check-mated"; this condition is notated by appending the octothorpe, "#", to the move that sets up the "check-mate".
In other words, if you were to read "C++" (which, incidentally, is incorrect chess notation because C is neither a piece name nor a board location) as "C double-check", then you would read "C#" as "C check-mate", which could be interpreted to mean "a move by a pawn onto a hypothetical square C (or perhaps by a hypothetical piece C?) which sets up a condition of imminent capture of the opposing king (not legally realizable, as I said) from which there is no relief and which, therefore, wins the game. See? By delivering the C# language (i.e., delivering checkmate) Microsoft expects to win the game (i.e., move the match to the Windows arena, which it controls) and, thereby, win the match. In fact, in the language of chess, one might say (quite idiomatically but with humorous overstatement) "C# Wins".
Sustained exposure to trauma can atrophy brain
on
Rejection Makes You Dumb
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Pardon the vague and slightly inaccurate subject line; let me explain. I had not heard of this study on "rejection", but (according to a documentary I saw on the BBC) it has been found that sustained terror can result in atrophy of the hippocampus, a part of your brain that is essential to memory formation.
A neurologist had remarked that some Vietnam veterans could remember the war as vividly as if it had just happened and yet they could not tell you what they had for breakfast, so it occurred to him to perform a scan of such a man's brain -- which revealed the aforementioned atrophy. The mechanism associating trauma and atrophy is complex, and I am not a medical doctor, but I'll do my best to give a fair account.
Upon detecting an environmental stimulus for which the autonomic nervous system "knows" a response, the pertinent series of chemical changes is unleashed immediately; after your brain deciphers the stimulus/stimuli and associates it/them with an event (or fails to do so) further changes in your body chemistry may be unleashed which (depending on the case) either enhance or inhibit the already deployed response of the autonomic nervous system.
If you were hiding in the thickets and you heard shots being fired nearby, your so-called limbic system would (correctly) identify an imminent threat and tell the autonomic nervous system to put you in a "fight or flight" physiological state, which might make you breath more heavily or even want to start running; because the behaviours that might follow naturally from this physiological state would further endanger your life, the prefrontal cortex (the cognitive/executive part of your brain) will cause the glands under its control to exert the physiological equivalent of an "equal and opposite force" as quickly as possible.
When the alternative is death, that kind of internal struggle can be good for you -- but the repeated incidence of this physiological tug of war on glands and, ultimately, your brain, can cause structural damage that could be permanent. This is especially true if the brain is still in a stage of rapid development, as in the case of a child, or if the (mature) individual is experiencing a physiological state that makes him especially vulnerable.
Given that an agile and robust memory is an important asset in problem solving, that memory formation is a physiological phenomenon, and that the faculty of memory is therefore vulnerable to prolonged psychological trauma, I am not surprised to learn (as this latest study seems to claim) that an unabatable feeling of being rejected by important elements in our social context may have the unfortunate neurophysiological impact of diminishing our mental faculties.
You may be interested in the following snippet from Europe's Mystery People: Did the Basques Beat Columbus? by Evan Hadingham, in World Monitor, Spetember 1992, p34-42 (p37), where the boldface is courtesy of yours truly:
Recently, historian Robert Delort, of Switzerland's University of Geneva, discovered remarkable evidence implying that the New World fur trade may go back long before the whaling expeditions and, for that matter, Columbus. Delort has unearthed British customs records indicating that Basque traders landed a heavy volume of beaver pelts at English ports from
1380 to 1433. Since north European beaver population were already nearly extinct by that time, Delort speculates the source is more likely to have been the New World (the pelts were delivered in rolls -- the way Quebec Indians stored them). Delort emphasizes, however, that his conclusion is preliminary. Certainly the idea is not far-fetched. An Icelandic chronicle from 1412 mentions the presence of Basque whalers in Iceland, a testimony backed up by two contemporary maps depicting Basque whaling ships there.
That would mean that the Basques beat the Chinese by at least 40 years.
Now, it probably never occurred to the Basque, who have themselves endured being misrepresented as savages by so-called great civilizations throughout history, that they should be educating or saving or conquering the native North Americans or any other trading partner, so the dubious honor of "discovering America" (i.e., sacking the nations of America) was consequently left to groups willing to accept the inevitable collateral damage (i.e., willing perpetrate the necessary atrocities) that follows in the wake of their universalist aspirations. It's interesting to note that the native Basques are now not much better off than the native North Americans: the Basque of today are excluded from the mainstream of our consumer-oriented urban society by their own so-called political and intellectual elite, and are preserved by this manner of isolation as a valuable ethnic relic. "Oh, you can't put a road there -- it'd spoil the {beautiful|sacred} landscape; just use a mule, like you always have, OK?" There is even a new, "unified" Basque language, complete with (unnecessary) latin-derived neologisms, designed to turn the average Castillian-speaking city-dweller of the Basque provinces (a lot of whom are actually Spaniards) into a sort of "next-generation" Basque citizen. I wonder how long it will be before a big fence goes up around the Goiherri and they nail a "Reservation" sign on it. Or would that be "erreserba"?:-> But, then, I suppose one could argue that it is the (decidedly pan-European) Basque city dwellers who are the true heirs of the Basque to whom the navigational feats in question are attributable -- you know, the same bastards who sold out (Republican) Bilbao during the Spanish Civil War.
Anyway.
The Basques were probably trading in America by 1380AD. Whether this constitutes "discovery" is "left to the reader", etc.
Goodness gracious! It's a Monty Python reference gone unnoticed (and, apparently, unmoderated) -- on Slashdot! Where is the Slashdot I once knew? The clue train must have left while I wasn't looking -- about par for me, actually.
I would speculate that the low comment count to which you allude is due to two things:
this story did not appear on the default home page (the one pople get when they are not logged in); and
most user's settings and behavior are such that they will never see this.
You and I saw this discussion either because we used the search facility, or because we selected the section to which this article belongs (either explicitly or implicitly by "collapsing sections") in our home page settings.
The last time I brought up this problem, somebody cussed me out hard (expletives included) for not understanding how sections work (ironic, to say the least) and called me a jackass. My own view is that all stories should be on the default home page and that filtering stories (by section or otherwise) should be the privilege of registered users.
Lastly, I suspect that OpenGL may indeed be losing the PR battle to DirectX, just as (I think) you are insinuating.
I don't know if you'll see this, AC, but here it goes anyway. You said:
Thanks for making me laugh!!!
You are most welcome. And thank you for having a healthy sense of humor. I am honestly a little surprised by the replies I got in which the author took (or maybe pretended to take) my comment much too seriously.
IT -- the new darling of injury lawyers everywhere
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 3, Funny
You said:
If the Segway is allowed on sidewalks, there would be instant competition in the form of conventional electric scooters.
Actually, if the Segway IT were allowed on sidewalks, there would be instant lawsuits, courtesy of conventional injury lawyers. Forget about skateboarders running into old ladies -- IT is gonna be great! "Call 1-800-ITHURTS!":->
IT -- successor of the banana peel
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 2, Funny
Apparently, balance is attained with the help of sensors and logic boards and powerful electric motors. I think it'll be fun to watch an IT malfunction (perhaps as a result of a bug in the firmware) or run out of juice while someone is riding it. Will she fall forwards or backwards? In any case, I am sure it will be a very characteristic and, after a while, instantly recognizable motion. IT will be the high-tech version of the banana peel -- instant laugh for everybody who's watching at that fateful moment.
I don't know if such a thing could come to pass just as you describe, but I think I get the gist of what you're telling me, and it seems to me that your objections could be addressed by the following two implementation details:
Remove the comment but keep the post; that is, replace the comment's content with a tracer (marker) indicating that the original content has been removed. This would hopefully reduce confusion in, and discourage the opportunist trolling of, threads arising from cancelled posts.
Associate a (negative) karma hit with the cancellation of a post. This would penalize people who, for example, speak too soon (only to regret it later) or who would take advantage of post cancellation as a trolling aid.
In such a system, all users are able to regret their unfortunate words, but those with especially bad karma must first show compunction and make some worthy posts first in order to earn the karma that will, so to say, persuade the community to forget -- just like in Real Life.
Now, I am not claiming that artificially raising the activation energy of the rehabilitation process is a good strategy for any given community. But it seems to be the Slashdot way to make redemption expensive, when not impossible, and that's why I was proposing the above implementation details. I believe that, if were to agree that users should be able to cancel their own posts, then it would just be a matter of finding a way to make it all work as smoothly as possible. Of course, I am sure that some people are opposed to the very idea of post cancellation, and will raise objections to the implementation details ad infinitum for their aesthetic prejudice to hide behind -- but that sort of device would be apparent, and people would see through it.
[At this point I wish to acknowledge the origin of the karma penalty idea: I learned of this from a private communication with the sometimes dogmatic, but always keen, yerricde.]
I've occasionally wished that I could rewrite some of the hasty stuff I've written. Of course, I can also see where editing after the fact could change the nature of any thread that follows.
*
This is why I believe it should be possible for a user to retract his comment - not edit, retract - just as it is possible to cancel a Usenet post. People may have seen the post, quoted it in their replies, and perhaps even archived it, but the post will no longer be available on the newsgroup itself. In fact, the unavailability of a post at the top of a thread is a common phenomenon on Usenet, where posts simply expire without the intervention of the author, so this feature needn't be shocking to Slashdot users if ever it were implemented.
This is a lot like what happens in Real Life (I choose that phrase because Taco likes to use it when defending his site policies) where you can't unsay what you said, and some people may never let you live it down as long as their memory serves them -- but you can certainly stop saying it and, if you're humble enough, you can take it back. Now, you might say that, in real life, one takes something back by saying something else, and that's true enough; however, in real life, one has the option of no longer saying something, whereas, in Slashdot, whatever you say is repeated everytime a request for the page containing your comment is served, even if you later change your mind. I think the ability to take something back (post cancellation/removal) would compensate for the inability to change one's position (post editing) as clearly as in Real Life.
Now, it seems to me that if Slashdot were to honor the poster's copyright, as the notice at the bottom of each Slashdot page claims it does, then it would have to comply with a user's request to remove a comment of which she herself was both the author and the copyright owner. In light of that consideration, would it not be simplest for this functionality (removal of a post by its author) to be available on the board so that administrator intervention is not required? Given that, in the recent Slashdot review of a book on the design of community websites, defined by the author as websites where users interact with one another directly, our very own CmdrTaco is interviewed as an expert, I think it's safe to assume that he's already thinking about this sort of stuff.;-)
Now, I can't know how easy or how difficult it would be to add post removal functionality to Slashdot because I've never looked at the code, but I think this would be a welcome Slashdot feature -- one that would make this community seem more like the ones in so-called Real Life, and indeed more like others on the Internet itself.
Apple may have intended for people without MacOS X to be able to make a full installation with this update CD, in which case it would have "cease-and-dessisted" the people who provided the "circumvention device" (the file deletion instructions that it may have provided in the form of "leaked" information) in order to bring this "feature" of the update CD to the attention of the MacOS 9-using public.
This type of manoeuvre is not without precedent: IIRC, the French monarchy popularized the potato in their domains by planting it in a royal garden, citing the beauty of its flowers as the reason, and then forbidding the ownership of potatoes to the unwashed masses. Predictably, soon after, everybody in France was eating potatoes. I may be wrong about the details of the story, but I'm sure you get the idea anyway.
Anyway. I am posting this on Mozilla for MacOS X 10.0.4 running on a 400MHz G3, and I can understand why users of low-end Apple hardware aren't eager to upgrade to any version of MacOS X: mine runs like molasses going uphill in a bad Michigan winter. Maybe this (the "forbidden fruit" approach) was the only way to get the other G3 users to upgrade. Or perhaps the plan is even more sinister... nah, I don't want to think about that.
I can see that your post is deliberately inflamatory, but I want to explain what my question meant, in case somebody else can answer it, so I will reply anyway.
You said:
Linking to previous discussion: retarded.
I didn't link to a previous discussion -- I linked to a post in a previous dicussion; that is neither retarded nor without precedent. Moreover, that post (not mine, if you care to know) was funny and relevant. Some of us don't mind laughing at ourselves, you know.
You said:
Not knowing about how sections work in slashcode: priceless.
I do realize that there are sections in Slashdot, and that one can choose not to see certain sections or authors or whatnot when logged in, but I did not realize that any stories were excluded from the default home page -- the one people get when they visit Slashdot without a coughing up the Slashdot user cookie. That's what I would have understood default home page to mean if someone else had used the phrase. Oh, and you didn't need to curse at me that harshly in the part of the post I didn't quote. [Aside: You didn't write that, did you, Rob? I hope not.]
Now, can someone tell me whether it is true that some stories are never on the default home page and why? I thought filtering was the privilege of registered users.
In my view, the proper order of things is to look at the licenses first and the products second; that is, if the terms of a particular license are unacceptable to you or to those who depend on you to make the decision, you ought not to be looking at the software products covered by said license. Your company ought to have a strategic policy statement regarding acceptable licensing terms; this would give you a framework within which to evaluate the suitability of a particular license and spare you the agony of second-guessing everybody else who might depend on your decision. Assuming I have understood you correctly, the real problem you are (hypothetically) facing is that your company does not have an adequate strategic policy statement concerning licensing terms for outsourced products; once your company has addressed that issue, whether or not to incorporate a GPL product into an internal effort is either a non-issue (i.e., the GPL just doesn't mix well with your company's strategic policy) or decidable based on the particular product's technical merit alone.
Hadn't thought of that option before. Of course, I will now. Probably not get any sleep for a few days, too.
Well, you can rest easy: everybody knows the really dangerous people are running Linux boxen with encrypted ReiserFS partitions and communicating with each other using PGP and GPG. It's those evil bastards that they're really after, you know. I mean, the Chinese are using Linux, for Chrissakes. Why, with the help of their star agent, the infamous Richard Stallman, them commies have been attempting to subvert the national computing infrastructure for years! Where's senator McCarthy when you need him? Raaaaaah!
Oh, wait -- wrong decade. Well, never mind, then.
Really, though, this is great: if the FBI wants to toss some more users in our general direction, that's OK with me.:-)
I agree with the parent, which I would moderate as insightful if I could. I, too, have often suspected that the ample resources available in a modern computing environment make it feasible to violate the spirit of the GPL, if not the letter, by writing a message-passing interface to the desired functionality into the GPL'd code and then implementing the corresponding client as closed-source. Perhaps it is time for something like a "Greater" GPL that would address these issues and thereby satisfy the more aggressively militant free software advocates.
The fact that you can do something doesn't mean that you should, and I think (I hope?) most companies know better than to do something that would almost certainly unleash the ire of the free software troopers and perhaps even the fearsome wrath of those notoriously villainous Slashdot users (amongst whom I may be counted, I suppose) whose ferocious Web activity is feared by site administrators the world over!
Please, forgive my having referred to FLAC as a GPL'd product although it is LGPL'd; I did so out of conversational habit rather than rhetorical malice -- honestly, I did.
Also, I wish to commend FLAC's maintainer for seeking the opinion of his community before making a decision; regardless of his final decision, praise is due to him for his having made this consultation in good faith and in a public forum. I hope other maintainers, too, will meet this standard when faced with similar situations.
Please, pardon me if I have misunderstood that part of your statement, but I just have to put in my 0,02 Euros. You said:
[...] the more business friendly BSD license
Think for a moment about the motivation of a business for asking the developer of a GPL'd software product to change the license. The reason traditional businesses (like Apple and Microsoft) encourage independent developers to choose the BSD license is that traditional businesses (like Apple and Microsoft) can then integrate the independent developer's code into a closed-source commercial product without paying a licensing fee or even contributing to the free source code base in good faith.
If companies were willing to release the source code of the software system into which the GPL'd code was integrated, no separate licensing arrangement would be necessary and no licensing fee would be due. So, you see, for companies that support free software, the GPL is at least as "business friendly" as the BSD license; in fact, for those companies, the GPL is more business-friendly than the BSD license because it (theoretically) prevents unscrupulous competitors from appropriating the software product it protects.
The authors of the GPL sought to increase the quantity and quality of GPL'd software, as well as to guarantee the continued availability of source code for a particular software product -- and this seems to be what FLAC's author wants, too. I think tswinzing's post offers excellent advice: charge closed-source shops for their closed-source licenses. A switch to a BSD license would take away the competitive advantage that those companies who may already be willing to release the rest of the system under a GPL-compatible license now enjoy. When seen in that light, changing the license to BSD would subvert the author's goal of contributing to increasing the availability of free software and to the free software community's long-term goal of making all hardware interfaces open.
Lunar mining could change orbits and weather!
on
Mining On The Moon
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· Score: 1
Even if these idiots didn't accidentally deorbit the Moon after an overambitious blast, wouldn't the cumulative effect of gradual removal of mass from the moon (over time) end up affecting the Moon's orbit and the Earth's weather?
Indeed the equations of classical dynamics, worked out by physicists quite a while back, predict that reallocating mass from the Moon to the Earth would change their motion, both with respect to each other and with respect to the Sun. A reallocation of mass between these two bodies would affect things like the tides, wind patterns, and our climate in general -- probably unpredictably and potentially unfavorably.
Given that the so-called Laws of Physics could not be rewritten by even the most pro-corporate US government, doesn't this projected mining of the Moon sound like a terribly bad idea?
Slashdot Mirror
I thought chess fans might be interested in Tim Krabbé's site, in which he talks about things like chess playing programs taking part in tournaments and chess players having to pee into a cup in order to be considered sportsmen worthy of participation in the olympic games. Most importantly in the context of this dicussion, he talks about computers playing bad chess in Defending Humanity's Honor . I wonder if it's time to add that "Nemeth Gambit" to our repertoire.
Grandmasters can in fact tell whether their oponent is a computer, sometimes even after playing just a single game, and certainly by the end of a match. In fact, I believe Kasparov lost to Deep Blue precisely because he counted on the computeresque behavior of his opponent when designing his strategy. If you read the article, you will learn that Kramnik can tell computer programs apart by their style, and that he thinks Fritz is becoming more human-like in its behavior, from which I infer that he can still identify its style as computeresque on some level.
So, the test you propose has already been carried out, and the machines "failed". This may have more to do with the fact that the people who write chess playing programs are more concerned with the programs' ability to win than they are with the programs' ability to emulate the playing style of humans. If humans could calculate better [Note: "calculate" has a precise technical meaning in chess] or chess playing computer programs were slower and considerably more stateful, their respective styles might be much more similar and your test, therefore, be met.
My own belief is that the ability to play chess well, let alone the ability to play chess in the style of a particular grandmaster, is not an accurate or even adequate measure of intelligence, so I will not be particularly hurt when the day comes on which computers at last surpass our chess playing skills, just as they have surpassed our (numerical) computational skills.
What Apple is really saying is that MacOS gives you the ability to run Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) on top of a UNIX core environment. But, is that a good thing? The answer is easy enough to obtain if we ask ourselves, with due humility, What ld Jesus Do? Oops, sorry -- wrong church. I mean, what would our leaders have to say about it? Well, my prayers to the Gods of Freenix were answered and what follows are (approximately) the words I heard in the vision with which I was rewarded for my Faith:
RMS:
WRS:
ESR:
CmdrTaco:
[Yeah, I know WRS is dead, but this was a vision, see?]
The Microsoft Press has been a publisher of a series of chess books (which I have read and liked) by international grandmaster Seirawan (coincidentally, a Seattle resident, I think) since the eighties, when MS was not the giant it is today. I believe that the name "C#" is a direct "chessical" reference, rather than a musical reference; furthermore, it is a reference the meaning of which will not surprise anyone here. Let me explain.
In chess, when the king is on a square to which an opposing piece could make a legal move if only the king were not there (as, legally, the king cannot be captured) the king is said to be in check; in most chess notation systems, this condition is notated by appending a plus sign, "+", to the move that sets up the position. When the king is on a square to which either of two opposing pieces could make a legal move if only the king were not there, the king is said to be in "double-check"; this condition is expressed using two plus signs, as in "++". Now, when no legal move can relieve the king of a "check", the king is said to be "check-mated"; this condition is notated by appending the octothorpe, "#", to the move that sets up the "check-mate".
In other words, if you were to read "C++" (which, incidentally, is incorrect chess notation because C is neither a piece name nor a board location) as "C double-check", then you would read "C#" as "C check-mate", which could be interpreted to mean "a move by a pawn onto a hypothetical square C (or perhaps by a hypothetical piece C?) which sets up a condition of imminent capture of the opposing king (not legally realizable, as I said) from which there is no relief and which, therefore, wins the game. See? By delivering the C# language (i.e., delivering checkmate) Microsoft expects to win the game (i.e., move the match to the Windows arena, which it controls) and, thereby, win the match. In fact, in the language of chess, one might say (quite idiomatically but with humorous overstatement) "C# Wins".
Pardon the vague and slightly inaccurate subject line; let me explain. I had not heard of this study on "rejection", but (according to a documentary I saw on the BBC) it has been found that sustained terror can result in atrophy of the hippocampus, a part of your brain that is essential to memory formation.
A neurologist had remarked that some Vietnam veterans could remember the war as vividly as if it had just happened and yet they could not tell you what they had for breakfast, so it occurred to him to perform a scan of such a man's brain -- which revealed the aforementioned atrophy. The mechanism associating trauma and atrophy is complex, and I am not a medical doctor, but I'll do my best to give a fair account.
Upon detecting an environmental stimulus for which the autonomic nervous system "knows" a response, the pertinent series of chemical changes is unleashed immediately; after your brain deciphers the stimulus/stimuli and associates it/them with an event (or fails to do so) further changes in your body chemistry may be unleashed which (depending on the case) either enhance or inhibit the already deployed response of the autonomic nervous system.
If you were hiding in the thickets and you heard shots being fired nearby, your so-called limbic system would (correctly) identify an imminent threat and tell the autonomic nervous system to put you in a "fight or flight" physiological state, which might make you breath more heavily or even want to start running; because the behaviours that might follow naturally from this physiological state would further endanger your life, the prefrontal cortex (the cognitive/executive part of your brain) will cause the glands under its control to exert the physiological equivalent of an "equal and opposite force" as quickly as possible.
When the alternative is death, that kind of internal struggle can be good for you -- but the repeated incidence of this physiological tug of war on glands and, ultimately, your brain, can cause structural damage that could be permanent. This is especially true if the brain is still in a stage of rapid development, as in the case of a child, or if the (mature) individual is experiencing a physiological state that makes him especially vulnerable.
Given that an agile and robust memory is an important asset in problem solving, that memory formation is a physiological phenomenon, and that the faculty of memory is therefore vulnerable to prolonged psychological trauma, I am not surprised to learn (as this latest study seems to claim) that an unabatable feeling of being rejected by important elements in our social context may have the unfortunate neurophysiological impact of diminishing our mental faculties.
You may be interested in the following snippet from Europe's Mystery People: Did the Basques Beat Columbus? by Evan Hadingham, in World Monitor, Spetember 1992, p34-42 (p37), where the boldface is courtesy of yours truly:
That would mean that the Basques beat the Chinese by at least 40 years.
Now, it probably never occurred to the Basque, who have themselves endured being misrepresented as savages by so-called great civilizations throughout history, that they should be educating or saving or conquering the native North Americans or any other trading partner, so the dubious honor of "discovering America" (i.e., sacking the nations of America) was consequently left to groups willing to accept the inevitable collateral damage (i.e., willing perpetrate the necessary atrocities) that follows in the wake of their universalist aspirations. It's interesting to note that the native Basques are now not much better off than the native North Americans: the Basque of today are excluded from the mainstream of our consumer-oriented urban society by their own so-called political and intellectual elite, and are preserved by this manner of isolation as a valuable ethnic relic. "Oh, you can't put a road there -- it'd spoil the {beautiful|sacred} landscape; just use a mule, like you always have, OK?" There is even a new, "unified" Basque language, complete with (unnecessary) latin-derived neologisms, designed to turn the average Castillian-speaking city-dweller of the Basque provinces (a lot of whom are actually Spaniards) into a sort of "next-generation" Basque citizen. I wonder how long it will be before a big fence goes up around the Goiherri and they nail a "Reservation" sign on it. Or would that be "erreserba"? :-> But, then, I suppose one could argue that it is the (decidedly pan-European) Basque city dwellers who are the true heirs of the Basque to whom the navigational feats in question are attributable -- you know, the same bastards who sold out (Republican) Bilbao during the Spanish Civil War.
Anyway.
The Basques were probably trading in America by 1380AD. Whether this constitutes "discovery" is "left to the reader", etc.
Goodness gracious! It's a Monty Python reference gone unnoticed (and, apparently, unmoderated) -- on Slashdot! Where is the Slashdot I once knew? The clue train must have left while I wasn't looking -- about par for me, actually.
I would speculate that the low comment count to which you allude is due to two things:
You and I saw this discussion either because we used the search facility, or because we selected the section to which this article belongs (either explicitly or implicitly by "collapsing sections") in our home page settings.
The last time I brought up this problem, somebody cussed me out hard (expletives included) for not understanding how sections work (ironic, to say the least) and called me a jackass. My own view is that all stories should be on the default home page and that filtering stories (by section or otherwise) should be the privilege of registered users.
Lastly, I suspect that OpenGL may indeed be losing the PR battle to DirectX, just as (I think) you are insinuating.
I don't know if you'll see this, AC, but here it goes anyway. You said:
You are most welcome. And thank you for having a healthy sense of humor. I am honestly a little surprised by the replies I got in which the author took (or maybe pretended to take) my comment much too seriously.
You said:
Actually, if the Segway IT were allowed on sidewalks, there would be instant lawsuits, courtesy of conventional injury lawyers. Forget about skateboarders running into old ladies -- IT is gonna be great! "Call 1-800-ITHURTS!" :->
Apparently, balance is attained with the help of sensors and logic boards and powerful electric motors. I think it'll be fun to watch an IT malfunction (perhaps as a result of a bug in the firmware) or run out of juice while someone is riding it. Will she fall forwards or backwards? In any case, I am sure it will be a very characteristic and, after a while, instantly recognizable motion. IT will be the high-tech version of the banana peel -- instant laugh for everybody who's watching at that fateful moment.
I don't know if such a thing could come to pass just as you describe, but I think I get the gist of what you're telling me, and it seems to me that your objections could be addressed by the following two implementation details:
In such a system, all users are able to regret their unfortunate words, but those with especially bad karma must first show compunction and make some worthy posts first in order to earn the karma that will, so to say, persuade the community to forget -- just like in Real Life.
Now, I am not claiming that artificially raising the activation energy of the rehabilitation process is a good strategy for any given community. But it seems to be the Slashdot way to make redemption expensive, when not impossible, and that's why I was proposing the above implementation details. I believe that, if were to agree that users should be able to cancel their own posts, then it would just be a matter of finding a way to make it all work as smoothly as possible. Of course, I am sure that some people are opposed to the very idea of post cancellation, and will raise objections to the implementation details ad infinitum for their aesthetic prejudice to hide behind -- but that sort of device would be apparent, and people would see through it.
[At this point I wish to acknowledge the origin of the karma penalty idea: I learned of this from a private communication with the sometimes dogmatic, but always keen, yerricde.]
You said:
This is why I believe it should be possible for a user to retract his comment - not edit, retract - just as it is possible to cancel a Usenet post. People may have seen the post, quoted it in their replies, and perhaps even archived it, but the post will no longer be available on the newsgroup itself. In fact, the unavailability of a post at the top of a thread is a common phenomenon on Usenet, where posts simply expire without the intervention of the author, so this feature needn't be shocking to Slashdot users if ever it were implemented.
This is a lot like what happens in Real Life (I choose that phrase because Taco likes to use it when defending his site policies) where you can't unsay what you said, and some people may never let you live it down as long as their memory serves them -- but you can certainly stop saying it and, if you're humble enough, you can take it back. Now, you might say that, in real life, one takes something back by saying something else, and that's true enough; however, in real life, one has the option of no longer saying something, whereas, in Slashdot, whatever you say is repeated everytime a request for the page containing your comment is served, even if you later change your mind. I think the ability to take something back (post cancellation/removal) would compensate for the inability to change one's position (post editing) as clearly as in Real Life.
Now, it seems to me that if Slashdot were to honor the poster's copyright, as the notice at the bottom of each Slashdot page claims it does, then it would have to comply with a user's request to remove a comment of which she herself was both the author and the copyright owner. In light of that consideration, would it not be simplest for this functionality (removal of a post by its author) to be available on the board so that administrator intervention is not required? Given that, in the recent Slashdot review of a book on the design of community websites, defined by the author as websites where users interact with one another directly, our very own CmdrTaco is interviewed as an expert, I think it's safe to assume that he's already thinking about this sort of stuff. ;-)
Now, I can't know how easy or how difficult it would be to add post removal functionality to Slashdot because I've never looked at the code, but I think this would be a welcome Slashdot feature -- one that would make this community seem more like the ones in so-called Real Life, and indeed more like others on the Internet itself.
Please, pardon my murder of the English language above. I wrote:
but I should have written something like:
I'm sure Mozilla isn't that picky about the particular version of MacOS X.
Apple may have intended for people without MacOS X to be able to make a full installation with this update CD, in which case it would have "cease-and-dessisted" the people who provided the "circumvention device" (the file deletion instructions that it may have provided in the form of "leaked" information) in order to bring this "feature" of the update CD to the attention of the MacOS 9-using public.
This type of manoeuvre is not without precedent: IIRC, the French monarchy popularized the potato in their domains by planting it in a royal garden, citing the beauty of its flowers as the reason, and then forbidding the ownership of potatoes to the unwashed masses. Predictably, soon after, everybody in France was eating potatoes. I may be wrong about the details of the story, but I'm sure you get the idea anyway.
Anyway. I am posting this on Mozilla for MacOS X 10.0.4 running on a 400MHz G3, and I can understand why users of low-end Apple hardware aren't eager to upgrade to any version of MacOS X: mine runs like molasses going uphill in a bad Michigan winter. Maybe this (the "forbidden fruit" approach) was the only way to get the other G3 users to upgrade. Or perhaps the plan is even more sinister... nah, I don't want to think about that.
I can see that your post is deliberately inflamatory, but I want to explain what my question meant, in case somebody else can answer it, so I will reply anyway.
You said:
I didn't link to a previous discussion -- I linked to a post in a previous dicussion; that is neither retarded nor without precedent. Moreover, that post (not mine, if you care to know) was funny and relevant. Some of us don't mind laughing at ourselves, you know.
You said:
I do realize that there are sections in Slashdot, and that one can choose not to see certain sections or authors or whatnot when logged in, but I did not realize that any stories were excluded from the default home page -- the one people get when they visit Slashdot without a coughing up the Slashdot user cookie. That's what I would have understood default home page to mean if someone else had used the phrase. Oh, and you didn't need to curse at me that harshly in the part of the post I didn't quote. [Aside: You didn't write that, did you, Rob? I hope not.]
Now, can someone tell me whether it is true that some stories are never on the default home page and why? I thought filtering was the privilege of registered users.
And, lastly, you said:
And you, sir, are an Anonymous Coward!
In my view, the proper order of things is to look at the licenses first and the products second; that is, if the terms of a particular license are unacceptable to you or to those who depend on you to make the decision, you ought not to be looking at the software products covered by said license. Your company ought to have a strategic policy statement regarding acceptable licensing terms; this would give you a framework within which to evaluate the suitability of a particular license and spare you the agony of second-guessing everybody else who might depend on your decision. Assuming I have understood you correctly, the real problem you are (hypothetically) facing is that your company does not have an adequate strategic policy statement concerning licensing terms for outsourced products; once your company has addressed that issue, whether or not to incorporate a GPL product into an internal effort is either a non-issue (i.e., the GPL just doesn't mix well with your company's strategic policy) or decidable based on the particular product's technical merit alone.
Well, you can rest easy: everybody knows the really dangerous people are running Linux boxen with encrypted ReiserFS partitions and communicating with each other using PGP and GPG. It's those evil bastards that they're really after, you know. I mean, the Chinese are using Linux, for Chrissakes. Why, with the help of their star agent, the infamous Richard Stallman, them commies have been attempting to subvert the national computing infrastructure for years! Where's senator McCarthy when you need him? Raaaaaah!
Oh, wait -- wrong decade. Well, never mind, then.
Really, though, this is great: if the FBI wants to toss some more users in our general direction, that's OK with me. :-)
I love these song lyrics from our last old-fart discussion featuring the classic DEC machines.
Incidentally, can someone tell me why this story wasn't on the default home page? I only saw it because I hit "older stuff".
Off-topic: 36-bit DEC machines -- what could be nerdier? :-) Thanks, Ocelot!
On-topic: I suspect somewhere there is still some port of LISP code that was first written on those machines and which remains in use to this day.
I agree with the parent, which I would moderate as insightful if I could. I, too, have often suspected that the ample resources available in a modern computing environment make it feasible to violate the spirit of the GPL, if not the letter, by writing a message-passing interface to the desired functionality into the GPL'd code and then implementing the corresponding client as closed-source. Perhaps it is time for something like a "Greater" GPL that would address these issues and thereby satisfy the more aggressively militant free software advocates.
The fact that you can do something doesn't mean that you should, and I think (I hope?) most companies know better than to do something that would almost certainly unleash the ire of the free software troopers and perhaps even the fearsome wrath of those notoriously villainous Slashdot users (amongst whom I may be counted, I suppose) whose ferocious Web activity is feared by site administrators the world over!
Please, forgive my having referred to FLAC as a GPL'd product although it is LGPL'd; I did so out of conversational habit rather than rhetorical malice -- honestly, I did.
Also, I wish to commend FLAC's maintainer for seeking the opinion of his community before making a decision; regardless of his final decision, praise is due to him for his having made this consultation in good faith and in a public forum. I hope other maintainers, too, will meet this standard when faced with similar situations.
Please, pardon me if I have misunderstood that part of your statement, but I just have to put in my 0,02 Euros. You said:
Think for a moment about the motivation of a business for asking the developer of a GPL'd software product to change the license. The reason traditional businesses (like Apple and Microsoft) encourage independent developers to choose the BSD license is that traditional businesses (like Apple and Microsoft) can then integrate the independent developer's code into a closed-source commercial product without paying a licensing fee or even contributing to the free source code base in good faith.
If companies were willing to release the source code of the software system into which the GPL'd code was integrated, no separate licensing arrangement would be necessary and no licensing fee would be due. So, you see, for companies that support free software, the GPL is at least as "business friendly" as the BSD license; in fact, for those companies, the GPL is more business-friendly than the BSD license because it (theoretically) prevents unscrupulous competitors from appropriating the software product it protects.
The authors of the GPL sought to increase the quantity and quality of GPL'd software, as well as to guarantee the continued availability of source code for a particular software product -- and this seems to be what FLAC's author wants, too. I think tswinzing's post offers excellent advice: charge closed-source shops for their closed-source licenses. A switch to a BSD license would take away the competitive advantage that those companies who may already be willing to release the rest of the system under a GPL-compatible license now enjoy. When seen in that light, changing the license to BSD would subvert the author's goal of contributing to increasing the availability of free software and to the free software community's long-term goal of making all hardware interfaces open.
A very insightful man once warned us of how an unscrupulous company could take advantage of a community of people who believe in sharing by simply asking for a handout. We must remain vigilant, because that danger still exists. I hope, dearly, that the author of FLAC will stick to his guns even in the face of these most persuasive beggars.
Even if these idiots didn't accidentally deorbit the Moon after an overambitious blast, wouldn't the cumulative effect of gradual removal of mass from the moon (over time) end up affecting the Moon's orbit and the Earth's weather?
Indeed the equations of classical dynamics, worked out by physicists quite a while back, predict that reallocating mass from the Moon to the Earth would change their motion, both with respect to each other and with respect to the Sun. A reallocation of mass between these two bodies would affect things like the tides, wind patterns, and our climate in general -- probably unpredictably and potentially unfavorably.
Given that the so-called Laws of Physics could not be rewritten by even the most pro-corporate US government, doesn't this projected mining of the Moon sound like a terribly bad idea?