Per that article, the Chinese government has two overriding needs: to keep their tight control over China and to embrace the Internet for economic gain. IMHO, these goals are mutually exclusive.
The idea that economic growth and the Internet will inevitably lead to greater political liberty in China has been bandied around for a long time.
However, if you look at how China has developed since its economic liberalization, this hasn't been the case. Economic conditions in China are improving, people are getting rich, but people are politically apathetic -- and this is probably the worse thing that can happen to democracy in China, because if you're getting rich, why do you care about abstract concepts like democracy?
It's important to distinguish between politcal freedom and personal freedom. People in China have plenty of personal liberty, but it's political liberty that they lack -- and when things are good materially, there's little reason to risk what you have for a political cause. I think it's perfectly possible for China to exploit the internet as an economic tool, but clamp down on any political use of the internet.
Alright, what we need next is support for different file types by Napster. Like.mpegs and.rms. So that er... new music groups can put up their own music videos without having to go through the tyrannical music industry. Yeah, that's right.
Yes, the problem is here much too simple to be interesting, but you can see them groping towards the idea of genetic programming, which is extremely interesting from a philosophical standpoint, and is also a powerful way of automatically evolving computer programs that solve difficult problems. There's a nice article by Salon here on the topic.
It has two methods with which to complete the task and by running a certain amount of games, the computer can work out which is the better method to use.
This is actually the 2 armed bandit problem: you have a 2 armed jack pot machine, and everytime you pull an arm, it gives a certain payoff, but the payoff is probalistic. So do you keep pulling the arm that has the higher average payoff? Or do you try the other arm? It's a tradeoff between exploitation and exploration, and the solution is surprisingly mathematically involved (see Gasoml by Goldberg).
John Holland showed in the 70s that the genetic algorithm is a near optimal solution to this problem. So in a simple way, these students have rediscovered the essential issues of genetic algorithms.
I'm a foreign student studying in America, and the most important thing I've learnt from university education here is freedom, or the right to live your life as you want it.
The freedom to make your own decisions - which must include the freedom to have sex in your dorm room or download porn over the Internet if you want. Letting students make their own choices is the only way they can grow into adults capable of making reasoned decisions. If you want to take children and turn them into capable adults, then you must treat them as such and give them all the rights which adults are entitled to.
The freedom to choose is what separates a university education from high school, a great university from a mediocre one, or even a great and free country from a dictatorship. What she proposes will do the students in Arizona a great disservice.
The March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo actually killed more people than either use of the atomic bomb,
This sounds dubious. I asked a friend, who's a history major specializing in Japanese history, and she says that the figures are controversial, especially if you take into account the subsequent deaths from radiation sickness. Korean slave laborers injured by the A-bomb weren't registered as victims and weren't counted in the death toll either.
In short, the sheer destructiveness of the bomb actually forced even the most militant warmongers of the last fifty-five years to see reason.
Which is the point exactly. The A-bomb was less necessary as a tool to force Japan to surrender, but more necessary as a show of US military might; it marked the beginning of the cold war rather than the end of the war in the Pacific. The Japanese were made an example of, which makes the morality of the A-bomb highly questionable.
It's not at all hard to remember that the US Eastern time zone is GMT -0500. It's one of the two most commonly-used time zones in the world, so you SHOULD know it.
Sure. Then there's the little matter of keeping track of silly things like Daylight saving time, so the rest of the world will have to memorize when the US switches to and from DST (which I have to point out, most americans can't even keep track of).
And it is an art form that the Open Source community excels at.
The Open Source community excels at technical matters, but the open source tradition is a technical one, not an artistic one (yes, programming is an art form to some extent).
I've no doubt some of the most talented programmers in the world are active contributors to various Open Source projects. But we can't similarly claim that we have the best user interface designers in the world.
The situation we have now seems to be similar to the situation in the early days of computer games, where programmers doubled up as artists. If we want good user interfaces, we have to recognize that talent in user interface design is separate from talent in programming -- then find the best people in this area and get them to contribute to open source projects.
Not to say 'I told you so..' but I remember glancing at the OS X screenshots and thinking "Glitzy. Alpha Channeled. Can't be that hard." And Miguel has proven me right.
It's never hard to copy someone else's design -- nothing to be proud of. Designing the system in the first place so that it looks appealing and works well for the user is the part that's difficult.
I don't know how well the Mac Aqua interface achieves these goals, but jumping up and down and saying 'Look, we can do this too!' is like copying a painting and saying gleefully 'Look, I can paint this too!'
On the topic of machines taking care of the elderly in Japan, there's a very interesting Japanese movie/satire on this issue, "Roujin Z" (with script written by Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira fame).
For the longest time, I've wondered where national news services get there anecdotal reports from. Case in point:
They call up their friends, and they ask their friends to ask their friends till they find someone with the story to support the article they want to write. It's called truth in reporting.
Most likely this is a separate bug due to an incompatibility in AOL's custom TCP/IP stack .... but still tries to lump it in within an article about AOL taking over the Internet services of the entire computer
Isn't AOL's installation of a custom TCP/IP stack part and parcel of the process of taking over the Internet services of the computer?
No, this is pure fudging. Think about it mathematically. This is just a shift of origin without any real effect except to decrease the range of possible moderation scores (0 to 5 instead of -1 to 5), which in turn has the direct effect of decreasing the resolution of moderation system.
There's also the little problem of disagreements by moderators on the scoring of the posts: if someone gives the poster too high a score, you can't moderate him down again.
It makes you wonder what will happen when DVD writers finally become commonplace: under fair use doctrine, it's ok to duplicate your media to guard against unintended distruction (ie backups). Just copy the self-destructing DVD to a normal DVD disc, and you're all set
I think it doesn't really matter. The point of these self-destructing discs is to save the lazy the trouble of returning rented discs. Most people won't be interested in duplicating the discs - they just want to watch it once and forget it, and not have to return it. Going into the trouble of duplicating the discs sort of defeats the purpose (which is laziness)
The advantage of coding for consoles is that the platform is fixed, so that you can and should optimize your game for the platform - with the result that console games generally run much better on consoles than on equivalent PC hardware.
I think popularity is intrinsically valuable. Just like an author wants to be read, a software developer wants his product to be used - at least this is my feeling on the matter.
It may not sound nice, but however you look at it, a stunt like linuxdemo is marketing, and a big reason why Linux is more popular than BSD is because Linux advocates have been better at marketing.
In response to a reader's essay comparing Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems and RSA (near the bottom of the newsletter), Bruce Schneier writes: "((This is a good essay, but remember the author's bias. He works for Certicom, and it is in his financial interest for you to believe in elliptic curves. --Bruce))"
This is just lame. If there're problems with the essay, point them out. Otherwise shut up.
Re:Design of Mozilla must address fears of busines
on
Mozilla Status Update
·
· Score: 2
With the advent of Mozilla and its inevitable widespread usage, fears of dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of different "flavours" of Mozilla, with unknown problems (potentially) with JavaScript or perhaps other features that could cause support nightmares abound.
Very true. I've had the dubious pleasure of working with Javascript recently, and writing cross-browser (NS and IE), cross-platform (NS on different platforms) Javascript is a nightmare. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that every implementation of Javascript has its own idiosyncrasies/bugs that make it necessary to test the JS on every platform you can get your hands on just to be sure that everything works, and then work around problems that arise if necessary.
With the open-sourcing of Mozilla, the problem has the potential to become exponentially worse if different companies/organizations release slightly different variants of Mozilla that break in slightly different ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Per that article, the Chinese government has two overriding needs: to keep their tight control over China and to embrace the Internet for economic gain. IMHO, these goals are mutually exclusive.
The idea that economic growth and the Internet will inevitably lead to greater political liberty in China has been bandied around for a long time.
However, if you look at how China has developed since its economic liberalization, this hasn't been the case. Economic conditions in China are improving, people are getting rich, but people are politically apathetic -- and this is probably the worse thing that can happen to democracy in China, because if you're getting rich, why do you care about abstract concepts like democracy?
It's important to distinguish between politcal freedom and personal freedom. People in China have plenty of personal liberty, but it's political liberty that they lack -- and when things are good materially, there's little reason to risk what you have for a political cause. I think it's perfectly possible for China to exploit the internet as an economic tool, but clamp down on any political use of the internet.
Alright, what we need next is support for different file types by Napster. Like .mpegs and .rms. So that er... new music groups can put up their own music videos without having to go through the tyrannical music industry. Yeah, that's right.
Yes, the problem is here much too simple to be interesting, but you can see them groping towards the idea of genetic programming, which is extremely interesting from a philosophical standpoint, and is also a powerful way of automatically evolving computer programs that solve difficult problems. There's a nice article by Salon here on the topic.
It has two methods with which to complete the task and by running a certain amount of games, the computer can work out which is the better method to use.
This is actually the 2 armed bandit problem: you have a 2 armed jack pot machine, and everytime you pull an arm, it gives a certain payoff, but the payoff is probalistic. So do you keep pulling the arm that has the higher average payoff? Or do you try the other arm? It's a tradeoff between exploitation and exploration, and the solution is surprisingly mathematically involved (see Gasoml by Goldberg).
John Holland showed in the 70s that the genetic algorithm is a near optimal solution to this problem. So in a simple way, these students have rediscovered the essential issues of genetic algorithms.
What is a "Chris"? what is a "christine"? I have never heard of such things
I'm a foreign student studying in America, and the most important thing I've learnt from university education here is freedom, or the right to live your life as you want it.
The freedom to make your own decisions - which must include the freedom to have sex in your dorm room or download porn over the Internet if you want. Letting students make their own choices is the only way they can grow into adults capable of making reasoned decisions. If you want to take children and turn them into capable adults, then you must treat them as such and give them all the rights which adults are entitled to.
The freedom to choose is what separates a university education from high school, a great university from a mediocre one, or even a great and free country from a dictatorship. What she proposes will do the students in Arizona a great disservice.
The March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo actually killed more people than either use of the atomic bomb,
This sounds dubious. I asked a friend, who's a history major specializing in Japanese history, and she says that the figures are controversial, especially if you take into account the subsequent deaths from radiation sickness. Korean slave laborers injured by the A-bomb weren't registered as victims and weren't counted in the death toll either.
In short, the sheer destructiveness of the bomb actually forced even the most militant warmongers of the last fifty-five years to see reason.
Which is the point exactly. The A-bomb was less necessary as a tool to force Japan to surrender, but more necessary as a show of US military might; it marked the beginning of the cold war rather than the end of the war in the Pacific. The Japanese were made an example of, which makes the morality of the A-bomb highly questionable.
It's not at all hard to remember that the US Eastern time zone is GMT -0500. It's one of the two most commonly-used time zones in the world, so you SHOULD know it.
Sure. Then there's the little matter of keeping track of silly things like Daylight saving time, so the rest of the world will have to memorize when the US switches to and from DST (which I have to point out, most americans can't even keep track of).
And it is an art form that the Open Source community excels at.
The Open Source community excels at technical matters, but the open source tradition is a technical one, not an artistic one (yes, programming is an art form to some extent).
I've no doubt some of the most talented programmers in the world are active contributors to various Open Source projects. But we can't similarly claim that we have the best user interface designers in the world.
The situation we have now seems to be similar to the situation in the early days of computer games, where programmers doubled up as artists. If we want good user interfaces, we have to recognize that talent in user interface design is separate from talent in programming -- then find the best people in this area and get them to contribute to open source projects.
Not to say 'I told you so..' but I remember glancing at the OS X screenshots and thinking "Glitzy. Alpha Channeled. Can't be that hard." And Miguel has proven me right.
It's never hard to copy someone else's design -- nothing to be proud of. Designing the system in the first place so that it looks appealing and works well for the user is the part that's difficult.
I don't know how well the Mac Aqua interface achieves these goals, but jumping up and down and saying 'Look, we can do this too!' is like copying a painting and saying gleefully 'Look, I can paint this too!'
On the topic of machines taking care of the elderly in Japan, there's a very interesting Japanese movie/satire on this issue, "Roujin Z" (with script written by Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira fame).
http://www.suntimes.c om/ebert/ebert_reviews/1996/04/0452.html
Is his paper his patent application? No.
For the longest time, I've wondered where national news services get there anecdotal reports from. Case in point:
They call up their friends, and they ask their friends to ask their friends till they find someone with the story to support the article they want to write. It's called truth in reporting.
Most likely this is a separate bug due to an incompatibility in AOL's custom TCP/IP stack
....
but still tries to lump it in within an article about AOL taking over the Internet services of the entire computer
Isn't AOL's installation of a custom TCP/IP stack part and parcel of the process of taking over the Internet services of the computer?
Think about it... sounds good?
No, this is pure fudging. Think about it mathematically. This is just a shift of origin without any real effect except to decrease the range of possible moderation scores (0 to 5 instead of -1 to 5), which in turn has the direct effect of decreasing the resolution of moderation system.
There's also the little problem of disagreements by moderators on the scoring of the posts: if someone gives the poster too high a score, you can't moderate him down again.
Or you can just rent a DVD, DE-CSS it and its yours forever. This changes nothing.
It makes you wonder what will happen when DVD writers finally become commonplace: under fair use doctrine, it's ok to duplicate your media to guard against unintended distruction (ie backups). Just copy the self-destructing DVD to a normal DVD disc, and you're all set
I think it doesn't really matter. The point of these self-destructing discs is to save the lazy the trouble of returning rented discs. Most people won't be interested in duplicating the discs - they just want to watch it once and forget it, and not have to return it. Going into the trouble of duplicating the discs sort of defeats the purpose (which is laziness)
You guess :)
The advantage of coding for consoles is that the platform is fixed, so that you can and should optimize your game for the platform - with the result that console games generally run much better on consoles than on equivalent PC hardware.
I think popularity is intrinsically valuable. Just like an author wants to be read, a software developer wants his product to be used - at least this is my feeling on the matter.
I didn't say that popularity matters. I personally think it does, but that's irrelevant to the point I was making earlier.
It may not sound nice, but however you look at it, a stunt like linuxdemo is marketing, and a big reason why Linux is more popular than BSD is because Linux advocates have been better at marketing.
please note that FreeBSD advocates don't seem to need to resort to such dumb stunts.
Well FreeBSD isn't doing as well as Linux PR wise. Maybe Linux advocates know something about marketing their product that FreeBSD advocates don't.
In response to a reader's essay comparing Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems and RSA (near the bottom of the newsletter), Bruce Schneier writes: "((This is a good essay, but remember the author's bias. He works for Certicom, and it is in his financial interest for you to believe in elliptic curves. --Bruce))"
This is just lame. If there're problems with the essay, point them out. Otherwise shut up.
With the advent of Mozilla and its inevitable widespread usage, fears of dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of different "flavours" of Mozilla, with unknown problems (potentially) with JavaScript or perhaps other features that could cause support nightmares abound.
Very true. I've had the dubious pleasure of working with Javascript recently, and writing cross-browser (NS and IE), cross-platform (NS on different platforms) Javascript is a nightmare. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that every implementation of Javascript has its own idiosyncrasies/bugs that make it necessary to test the JS on every platform you can get your hands on just to be sure that everything works, and then work around problems that arise if necessary.
With the open-sourcing of Mozilla, the problem has the potential to become exponentially worse if different companies/organizations release slightly different variants of Mozilla that break in slightly different ways.
I wasn't. I'm using Windows.