. If you write crap code and people crack your software (I don't mean warez), you should get better programmers.
If the encrypted list can be used by the software, the software must contain the means by which the list can be decrypted i.e. the decryption key. Which implies that the software must be crackable, however good your programmers were.
If the parents really cared they would be in the room with the kids while they were browsing the net.
So parents shouldn't allow kids to browse the net unattended?
ICQ has a better community type presence (IMO), but how many ICQ users are going to know about the Webby awards? I think/. will win due to the high volume of active users.
All ICQ has to do is to put up a notice on their web page asking users to vote for ICQ, and if even 1% of their users vote, ICQ will win.
I don't think the intent is to grade and sort out students. The format seems more colloquim style, like a public lecture series, similar to the free Engelbart web cast offered by Stanford sometime ago. I think this will work very well as a supplement for mature and interested students, but I don't it will replace the undergraduate or graduate experience where interaction is crucial.
There's a book called the "History of Pi" by Peter Beckmann. Click here to find out more, if you're not boycotting Amazon or something like that. It's a fascinating read, not at all dull, and highly opinionated - he doesn't hesistate to dismiss groups of people as morons, like the Romans.
Sensitive, intelligent, good-looking M/F seeks sensitive, intelligent, good-looking F/M. Doesn't smoke or drink, no vices whatsoever. Enjoys the outdoors as well as quiet, intellectual moments.
If you look at some of the GA derived programs for simple problems like an ant colony collecting food, they suck. Full of dead code (like "if (next to water) then if (not next to water) then 100-lines-of-never-reached-code-here"). But they work. At least for the sample problem set, and problems that are similar.
Imo, this is a strong piece of evidence that natural life did evolve (rather than get created). Because in natural organisms, like in GPs, there is a lot of redundancy, or dead code so to speak, in the DNA (and no doubt in our brains as well).
Yes, neural nets don't have to be explicitly designed at a low level. But that doesn't mean that you can just throw one together, throw data at it, and get it to work. First, you've got to design your network, then you've got to figure out how to train it.
Neural nets can be evolved through Genetic Programs. You basically have a genetic program that decribes how to grow the neural net (I don't have a reference handy at the moment unfortunately). So it's not necessary to design it.
One thing we do know about the brain is it is not just a bundle of neurons. Those neurons have an organization that is genetically programmed.
Well then evolve the organization through genetic programming!
Proof that all statements can and likely will be misinterpreted. The point I was trying to make wasn't that anyone necessarily enjoys or wants a totalitarian state, but that some may find it a lesser evil than anarchy. I don't. If you don't, great. But many people do, and there are strong reasons to believe that one's opinion on this matter, like any other, is heavily influenced by culture and heritage.
Show me someone who prefers anarchy to government and I will show you someone who leads a comfortable, middle-class and well-fed existence, who has never seen real strife in his life.
If people fear anarchy, this fear is a universal one. Not a cultural, ethnic one as you claim it is.
The Chinese people have been prepared in the past to undergo anarchy to bring about change, in the ancient past (the overthrow of dynasties during dynastic successions), in the recent past (during the overthrow of the Qing dynasty), and during modern times (Tianmen). Your claim that the Chinese people, as an ethnic group, are somehow meek and prefer totalitarianism (i.e. dynasties and communism in your original post) to necessary revolution ("the Chinese, at least traditionally, fear anarchy above all else" and "It is quite clear historically that most Chinese do not feel that it is") is incredibly offensive and displays a thorough ignorance of history.
People get the government they deserve
Yours is an idea of "fit" -- that the government people have is the ones that they deserve. I can't even begin to describe how wrong headed this idea is. The fact is that people do not always have a choice in the matter - the force of arms, information control and propaganda, often take this choice away. You may even have heard of people in N. Korea thinking that theirs is the best country in the world - because they know no better. I recently read an article in National geographic where an Albanian peasant commented that during the time of totalitarian rule in his country, he believed that his was the best country in Europe. A people cannot rebel when they know no better, and they lack the means to do so, and sometimes people deserve more than what they have.
I have a friend who went to Belgrade recently, and he commented that the people there do not realize the harm that their government has done in Kosovo. You greatly underestimate the ability of governments to control and deceive.
Neither approach properly respects national or individual soverignty and both are flat out wrong.
The appeal to soveriegnity is the means by which many governments claim the authority to carry out their atrocities, and which other governments use to justify non-intervention.
From your post, I would gather that you would be opposed to all sorts of military intervention. I would suggest to you that the issue is much more complex than that. The have been many bad interventions in the past, but they have also been many interventions that came too late (the Rwandan genocide would be an example). What we need are moral interventions.
What you will ask next is "morality, by who's standards?". Yes, the issue is a difficult one that has to be grappled with, but your philosophy of "fit" is incredibly simplistic and harmful. I would suggest that you read the classic work "Just and unjust wars" by Michael Walzer on the topic of interventions.
But that does not imply that my observations are the result of bigotry.
I correct myself. Your observations are due to ignorance.
P.S. I do not think that democracy in China is inevitable, or that the US should forcibly impose its democratic values on other countries.
True, but no one was saying that, only that chinese people liked 'anything but anarchy'. Democracy is certanly that.
Read this post. Anarchy is a universally feared condition.
Well, I hope so, but then, I'm not chinese. The thing is, most of the non-PRC people I know don't really care at all. I've talked with people from both HK and taiwant, and none of them seem to care at all.
I'm Chinese (non-American, but currently in America). I assue you that the Taiwanese do care about their freedom - that's why they have compulsory national service (a very big sacrifice for young Taiwanese males), and that's why they continue fighting even in face of force by China.
We can thus harly expect that it will be familiar, or desired by most people, and anyone who thinks that democracy is some sort of inevitable future for all the world's people is smoking dope.
A little reality check is called for here. Try reading some real polictial science rather than simplistic wishful thinking from the mainstream media.
I don't recall saying that I think democracy in China will be inevitable. In fact, I've written in the past on Slashdot that I think this is anything but inevitable.
Try reading and thinking a little more carefully before jumping to conclusions about what I think.
I hate to burst your buble, but Taiwan has only been a democracy for four years 2000 will only be there second presidential election. There isn't a lot of precedent there.
But it completely refutes the claim of cultural affinity for totalitarian rule.
Also, a lot of the major candidates in that race are talking about a 'reunification' china of some sort.
You've being naive. Talk of reunification is intended to placate China, which is currently making beligerent noises. The Taiwanese people elected the independent minded Lee Teng Hui, and even his simple statment that relations with China would be on a "state to state" basis outraged China.
It's a cultural thing.... The Chinese people have never been governed by anything even resembling democracy. Never.
You're an idiot and a bigot hiding under the guise of an elightened speaker. It's not a cultural thing.
There exist strong Chinese democracies - i.e. Taiwan. The fact the Communists currently rule China is an outcome of history rather than any cultural affinity for totalitarianism - the Communists were most succesful at organizing the people and repelling the Japanese invaders during the war, and they naturally assumed leadership after the war.
China has had a long history of good government - the dynastic system persisted for so long because it was highly successful; China was one of the cultural capitals of the world before civilisation even arose in many parts of the West, and was intellectually freer than most of the world. Success led to stagnation of the system perhaps, but the long run of the dynasties was due to its success, not because the Chinese people have no love of freedom.
When watching the TV news from a Hong Kong station (in English before the handover) they used a test pattern to block stories that they did not like.
When I was in rural China (somewhere in Guangzhou) some 6 years ago, what the local TV stations would do was to rebroadcast (i.e. bootleg) the HK stations. I didn't notice that they bothered to censor stories - what they did was to overlay the HK commercials with local (usually crudely made) commercials, which would frequently overrun the alloted time slots.
The analogy to the Great Wall of China is ridiculous. The great wall wasn't built to "keep the world out". It was built to keep the Northern invaders out, and as a grandiose monument for the Qin emperor. It in fact served as protection for travelers to the West
It seems very dubious. Perhaps their parallel system will allow tracking to be done more cheaply and quickly than existing systems, but tracking and vision in general are still, at a fundamental level, very much unsolved problems.
The human visual system uses countless contextual, knowledge based cues to make sense of the world (e.g. take a look at some optical illusions); even a simple task like tracking requires a lot of background knowledge. To claim that their mimics the human visual system is, frankly, unbelievable.
Do the PCs belong to the employees, or to Intel? If Intel still owns the PCs, in the event of a dispute between the employee and Intel, Intel can repossess the PC and look at what the employee has been doing on it (on the grounds that the computer is Intel property).
I've a friend who went for some job interviews with VMWare, and believe it or not, VMWare is actually making a profit, a rare accomplishment in this dot-com world.
The one that affected me when I was in Computer Science was the total lack of Female bodies in my classes. This can only get worse in a degree program that focuses on gaming
On the contrary, this program is trying to be interdisciplinary and should attract more people from different majors than a traditional CS type program. I can easily see English majors or Film majors taking a course or two in game design, direction or writing, and we should see good things come out of this. And there'll be more girls.
Linux is ugly. I'm not just talking about the prettiness of the GUI, but the general ugliness of the fonts and text.
I've already copied and installed the true type fonts from Windows (following the font deuglification faq), and now it's merely ugly - a step up from hideous I guess. But text still turns out uglier and more unreadable than in Windows, and it makes long term use a strain on the eyes. The system fonts used in KDE and Gnome also tend to be extremely ugly - they should note that good, readable text != fonts made out of thin straight lines.
Slashdot Mirror
. If you write crap code and people crack your software (I don't mean warez), you should get better programmers.
If the encrypted list can be used by the software, the software must contain the means by which the list can be decrypted i.e. the decryption key. Which implies that the software must be crackable, however good your programmers were.
If the parents really cared they would be in the room with the kids while they were browsing the net.
So parents shouldn't allow kids to browse the net unattended?
ICQ has a better community type presence (IMO), but how many ICQ users are going to know about the Webby awards? I think /. will win due to the high volume of active users.
All ICQ has to do is to put up a notice on their web page asking users to vote for ICQ, and if even 1% of their users vote, ICQ will win.
I don't think the intent is to grade and sort out students. The format seems more colloquim style, like a public lecture series, similar to the free Engelbart web cast offered by Stanford sometime ago. I think this will work very well as a supplement for mature and interested students, but I don't it will replace the undergraduate or graduate experience where interaction is crucial.
It's G.H Hardy, not Thomas Hardy. Thomas Hardy was a writer of books.
There's a book called the "History of Pi" by Peter Beckmann. Click here to find out more, if you're not boycotting Amazon or something like that. It's a fascinating read, not at all dull, and highly opinionated - he doesn't hesistate to dismiss groups of people as morons, like the Romans.
Let me guess what everyone would program this to:
Sensitive, intelligent, good-looking M/F seeks sensitive, intelligent, good-looking F/M. Doesn't smoke or drink, no vices whatsoever. Enjoys the outdoors as well as quiet, intellectual moments.
If you look at some of the GA derived programs for simple problems like an ant colony collecting food, they suck. Full of dead code (like "if (next to water) then if (not next to water) then 100-lines-of-never-reached-code-here"). But they work. At least for the sample problem set, and problems that are similar.
Imo, this is a strong piece of evidence that natural life did evolve (rather than get created). Because in natural organisms, like in GPs, there is a lot of redundancy, or dead code so to speak, in the DNA (and no doubt in our brains as well).
Yes, neural nets don't have to be explicitly designed at a low level. But that doesn't mean that you can just throw one together, throw data at it, and get it to work. First, you've got to design your network, then you've got to figure out how to train it.
Neural nets can be evolved through Genetic Programs. You basically have a genetic program that decribes how to grow the neural net (I don't have a reference handy at the moment unfortunately). So it's not necessary to design it.
One thing we do know about the brain is it is not just a bundle of neurons. Those neurons have an organization that is genetically programmed.
Well then evolve the organization through genetic programming!
Proof that all statements can and likely will be misinterpreted. The point I was trying to make wasn't that anyone necessarily enjoys or wants a totalitarian state, but that some may find it a lesser evil than anarchy. I don't. If you don't, great. But many people do, and there are strong reasons to believe that one's opinion on this matter, like any other, is heavily influenced by culture and heritage.
Show me someone who prefers anarchy to government and I will show you someone who leads a comfortable, middle-class and well-fed existence, who has never seen real strife in his life.
If people fear anarchy, this fear is a universal one. Not a cultural, ethnic one as you claim it is.
The Chinese people have been prepared in the past to undergo anarchy to bring about change, in the ancient past (the overthrow of dynasties during dynastic successions), in the recent past (during the overthrow of the Qing dynasty), and during modern times (Tianmen). Your claim that the Chinese people, as an ethnic group, are somehow meek and prefer totalitarianism (i.e. dynasties and communism in your original post) to necessary revolution ("the Chinese, at least traditionally, fear anarchy above all else" and "It is quite clear historically that most Chinese do not feel that it is") is incredibly offensive and displays a thorough ignorance of history.
People get the government they deserve
Yours is an idea of "fit" -- that the government people have is the ones that they deserve. I can't even begin to describe how wrong headed this idea is. The fact is that people do not always have a choice in the matter - the force of arms, information control and propaganda, often take this choice away. You may even have heard of people in N. Korea thinking that theirs is the best country in the world - because they know no better. I recently read an article in National geographic where an Albanian peasant commented that during the time of totalitarian rule in his country, he believed that his was the best country in Europe. A people cannot rebel when they know no better, and they lack the means to do so, and sometimes people deserve more than what they have.
I have a friend who went to Belgrade recently, and he commented that the people there do not realize the harm that their government has done in Kosovo. You greatly underestimate the ability of governments to control and deceive.
Neither approach properly respects national or individual soverignty and both are flat out wrong.
The appeal to soveriegnity is the means by which many governments claim the authority to carry out their atrocities, and which other governments use to justify non-intervention.
From your post, I would gather that you would be opposed to all sorts of military intervention. I would suggest to you that the issue is much more complex than that. The have been many bad interventions in the past, but they have also been many interventions that came too late (the Rwandan genocide would be an example). What we need are moral interventions.
What you will ask next is "morality, by who's standards?". Yes, the issue is a difficult one that has to be grappled with, but your philosophy of "fit" is incredibly simplistic and harmful. I would suggest that you read the classic work "Just and unjust wars" by Michael Walzer on the topic of interventions.
But that does not imply that my observations are the result of bigotry.
I correct myself. Your observations are due to ignorance.
P.S. I do not think that democracy in China is inevitable, or that the US should forcibly impose its democratic values on other countries.
True, but no one was saying that, only that chinese people liked 'anything but anarchy'. Democracy is certanly that.
Read this post. Anarchy is a universally feared condition.
Well, I hope so, but then, I'm not chinese. The thing is, most of the non-PRC people I know don't really care at all. I've talked with people from both HK and taiwant, and none of them seem to care at all.
I'm Chinese (non-American, but currently in America). I assue you that the Taiwanese do care about their freedom - that's why they have compulsory national service (a very big sacrifice for young Taiwanese males), and that's why they continue fighting even in face of force by China.
Do read the above post.
We can thus harly expect that it will be familiar, or desired by most people, and anyone who thinks that democracy is some sort of inevitable future for all the world's people is smoking dope.
A little reality check is called for here. Try reading some real polictial science rather than simplistic wishful thinking from the mainstream media.
I don't recall saying that I think democracy in China will be inevitable. In fact, I've written in the past on Slashdot that I think this is anything but inevitable.
Try reading and thinking a little more carefully before jumping to conclusions about what I think.
I hate to burst your buble, but Taiwan has only been a democracy for four years 2000 will only be there second presidential election. There isn't a lot of precedent there.
But it completely refutes the claim of cultural affinity for totalitarian rule.
Also, a lot of the major candidates in that race are talking about a 'reunification' china of some sort.
You've being naive. Talk of reunification is intended to placate China, which is currently making beligerent noises. The Taiwanese people elected the independent minded Lee Teng Hui, and even his simple statment that relations with China would be on a "state to state" basis outraged China.
It's a cultural thing.... The Chinese people have never been governed by anything even resembling democracy. Never.
You're an idiot and a bigot hiding under the guise of an elightened speaker. It's not a cultural thing.
There exist strong Chinese democracies - i.e. Taiwan. The fact the Communists currently rule China is an outcome of history rather than any cultural affinity for totalitarianism - the Communists were most succesful at organizing the people and repelling the Japanese invaders during the war, and they naturally assumed leadership after the war.
China has had a long history of good government - the dynastic system persisted for so long because it was highly successful; China was one of the cultural capitals of the world before civilisation even arose in many parts of the West, and was intellectually freer than most of the world. Success led to stagnation of the system perhaps, but the long run of the dynasties was due to its success, not because the Chinese people have no love of freedom.
When watching the TV news from a Hong Kong station (in English before the handover) they used a test pattern to block stories that they did not like.
When I was in rural China (somewhere in Guangzhou) some 6 years ago, what the local TV stations would do was to rebroadcast (i.e. bootleg) the HK stations. I didn't notice that they bothered to censor stories - what they did was to overlay the HK commercials with local (usually crudely made) commercials, which would frequently overrun the alloted time slots.
The analogy to the Great Wall of China is ridiculous. The great wall wasn't built to "keep the world out". It was built to keep the Northern invaders out, and as a grandiose monument for the Qin emperor. It in fact served as protection for travelers to the West
by the time you start adding things up (include your time)... you could have purchased a 400 mhz eMachine.
The emachines don't come with a monitor.
It seems very dubious. Perhaps their parallel system will allow tracking to be done more cheaply and quickly than existing systems, but tracking and vision in general are still, at a fundamental level, very much unsolved problems.
The human visual system uses countless contextual, knowledge based cues to make sense of the world (e.g. take a look at some optical illusions); even a simple task like tracking requires a lot of background knowledge. To claim that their mimics the human visual system is, frankly, unbelievable.
So does the GNU Free documentation license use the GNU Free documentation license? We can have the world's first recursive license.
P.S Ok, apparently it doesn't. bah.
Do the PCs belong to the employees, or to Intel? If Intel still owns the PCs, in the event of a dispute between the employee and Intel, Intel can repossess the PC and look at what the employee has been doing on it (on the grounds that the computer is Intel property).
I've a friend who went for some job interviews with VMWare, and believe it or not, VMWare is actually making a profit, a rare accomplishment in this dot-com world.
The one that affected me when I was in Computer Science was the total lack of Female bodies in my classes.
This can only get worse in a degree program that focuses on gaming
On the contrary, this program is trying to be interdisciplinary and should attract more people from different majors than a traditional CS type program. I can easily see English majors or Film majors taking a course or two in game design, direction or writing, and we should see good things come out of this. And there'll be more girls.
Yes,that's the slimiest thing about Napster.
Moderate the above post up.
Telcos typically charge businesses higher rates, so shed no tears for the Telcos, they can take care of themselves.
Linux is ugly. I'm not just talking about the prettiness of the GUI, but the general ugliness of the fonts and text.
I've already copied and installed the true type fonts from Windows (following the font deuglification faq), and now it's merely ugly - a step up from hideous I guess. But text still turns out uglier and more unreadable than in Windows, and it makes long term use a strain on the eyes. The system fonts used in KDE and Gnome also tend to be extremely ugly - they should note that good, readable text != fonts made out of thin straight lines.