It is the biweekly OS updates since this problem, each with an EULA warning, which may are may not be different from the original one (and if it is the same is a complete waste of time to read again)
I diff EULAs upon upgrading various software for that reason. You can probably find the latest text on Sony's website.
I read more of the ensuing conversation and heard that they admitted in their EULA to using GPLed code. This company doesn't come across as being as innocent as my hypothetical organization.
Back to a hypothetical - If you have tens of millions of dollars invested in a software application and it turns out that you're legally obligated to give that application away due to the inclusion of GPLed code by a freelance consultant then there is generally no way that by suing the consultant you're going to get back anything close to what was spent on development, and that's not considering the lost profits, market share, etc. I understand your position. By the letter of the law you may be correct in many cases (I'd say not necessarily all cases because you may still end up with a scenario where a project includes code under the GPL and other proprietary code that you're not legally allowed to release and then it's not clear cut since there is no solution that satisfies all licenses). I'm not suggesting that you're wrong by the letter, but rather the spirit of "sue them to oblivion" is a little harsh if applied broadly to all GPL violations. But I suppose that you were speaking specifically to this theft, and I can understand the outrage.
I doubt, however, that suing them into oblivion has any reasonable chance of success, as I also read that they're a Russian company.
It is of course true that if GPL code was used then the resultant product must be GPLed itself. I have no contention with you there. But as far as hoping that the company gets sued into oblivion, your indignation may be overzealous. The situation is not necessarily that simple. Imagine that you own a company. Maybe it's a large company or maybe it's a startup. You hire some developers to build a project for you. You invest in development, marketing, legal, production, etc. You may have put thousands of your own hours into meticulously guiding your beloved dream idea. Everyone does their job adequately except for one or two rogue developers who steal GPL code. Maybe your developers are incompetent and they steal to give the illusion of competence. Maybe they are ignorant about the terms of the GPL and they aren't ethical enough to bounce it off of the legal department before they take the code. In any case on a team of ten, dozens, or maybe hundreds a couple of guys download some code. Nobody knows about it. They project reaches prime-time. The owners of the copyright notice some similarities and investigate it. Now you, the owner of the company who has tried to do everything by-the-book, are suddenly accused of stealing code, you're flamed on the internet, you're under legal threat, and you're told that the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars that you've invested are now potentially wasted because you need to give your software away for free. This could force you to breach other contracts and so it may not even be possible to legally satisfy everyone.
I haven't read the article. I know nothing of this product or of this company. In any case, I think that the anger may be a little exaggerated because the owners of this company could be victims along with the owners of the GPLed code. It could come down to a couple of unethical and/or ignorant developers.
This. The problem here is that the suggestion should not be expected to simply attract people who make the game more enjoyable, but rather the expected effect is that people try to become that more enjoyable person. The pricing algorithm actually changes people's behavior. You could end up with a lot of fairly shallow people.
At the risk of starting a videogames are/aren't the reason for social ills thread I'll say that the reward given for this shallowness could potentially be carried beyond the game and what started as an idea to pull in a fun community could damage the community in the game and society outside of the game. I doubt that the learned behavior of forced friendliness will be easily turned off in a real world setting. In some ways we do well at compartmentalizing things but I think that our social behaviors can't be easily isolated in the absence of a force that pressures them to be. For example, if I'm in the military I will learn to modify how I interact socially because there are consequences to not doing so. In this case there is a reward for being friendly, whether sincerely or artificially, in the game and no pressure in real life to turn that off.
I'm not a psychologist and the above is off the top of my head, but I think that it may be a good theory.
In my mind it seems like a failure in security to have this quantity of personal information on a laptop. If someone needs quick access to it then it should be in a database back in home base with some canned queries for whatever functions are typically needed. This approach should be sufficient anywhere that an internet connection exists. I've never used one myself but my understanding is that these days you can purchase USB sticks that connect to the internet from anywhere in reach of a cell tower and so it should be an especial rarity for a business such as BP to find themselves hindered by a lack of connectivity.
Hopefully the drive on the laptop was encrypted but even if it was the wrong way to handle this sort of data. Haven't these people been through enough from BP already?
I like to believe that personhood transcends legality, but given that we're in a discussion of law the law does need to distinguish between persons and things. I'd say that there is currently a huge amount of disagreement surrounding this topic.
It most often comes up in discussion of human biology with lesser mental faculties. Basically that includes coma patients, brain-dead humans, and humans who have not yet been born. I'm in favor of giving personhood to all humans at the point of conception with maybe a few caveats for humans that are so genetically damaged that they could never under any circumstances develop a brain. Brain dysfunction later in life probably needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. If a person is injured but could maybe possibly theoretically be restored if everything goes perfectly and we develop a super brain reconstructor then they still have a shot at life and should still be treated as a person. If a person cannot be restored to consciousness even under that aforementioned one in a bazillion condition then they're dead and cease to be a person.
That's my thinking. It obviously leaves a lot of detail unaddressed. In any case personhood isn't universally agreed upon. We probably need a constitutional definition for it.
What the great-grandparent is getting at is that though the thing may give output similar to the output of a human being it lacks the experience that comes from being human, and particularly in this case daydreaming. It has no qualia. To the machine everything that is input into it is simply a value to be shunted through its algorithms. Nothing has been programmed to actually cause the experience of qualia or true appreciation. Great-grandparent is using an the idea of an image sitting in RAM to represent the qualia of the heads-up-display that we experience with our vision. I'd say that this image would still fail to actually cause the experience of qualia because it's just an image in RAM, there is still no mechanism in the software to sense qualia.
Even if a robot looks and behaves exactly like me in every circumstance then that doesn't mean that it actually has qualia like I do.
1) My wife, a statistician, gets irritated when studies say that they have proven things. When trying to draw conclusions from data you always run the risk that your data is not indicative of reality. You get around this with large sample sizes and by receiving data that points to the same trends on repeated studies. This study has a small sample size, 26 people total, and has no mention of repeated results.
2) The friendly article claims that the study has "proven" that action games train people to respond quickly and accurately. The article is overstepping the study in that the conclusion of the study was that people who play action games had the same level of accuracy as those who played The Sims II. The article should have said "quickly without losing accuracy".
3) The author of the study claimed that "People who play these action games make informed, better decisions than those who don't". The study only compared people playing two FPSs to people playing The Sims II. There is no mention of a control group that did not play any video game. The conclusion needs to be a bit more humble and only make statements between people who play FPSs and people who play... whatever narrow genre The Sims II falls into.
I frequently enjoy Alien Swarm. I played Portal and my wife and I are slowly meandering our way through Uru. I used to be hooked on Starcraft, Myth II, Myth, Master of Orion II, and others. I believe that these games have shaped my neurological development and given me advantages in problem solving, strategy, coping with unexpected setbacks, and more. I also believe that they've cost me in self-discipline, my attention span, humanity (desensitization to violence and beyond that enjoyment of violence). My point is that I want the conclusions of this study to be true to give some legitimacy to what is otherwise an unproductive diversion but the study feels a little shoddy.
Rather than having all developers at a round table facing toward each other I would surround them with desks and have them facing out from each other. That way collaboration is as easy as scooting your chair to an adjacent developer but you're looking away from each other when you're each trying to concentrate on your own thing. A few weeks ago I spent some time in a workroom with a couple other developers and hated it. For some people that might help but to me it was distracting.
The question at hand cannot be "how do we compromise in such a way that everyone is satisfied". If there are such a things as "right" and "wrong" and if they are immutable and not decided by the current whims of society then killing in the first trimester is either wrong or it is not. I say that it is because I believe that a viable zygote is a being with a soul from the point of conception.
I suppose I'll flirt with Godwin's law and make a skirting comparison to Nazis: What if we could have satisfied Hitler by killing one Jewish man and by doing so have saved millions? For the sake of argument we'll say that this man is very much opposed to the idea - he's not as willing to lay his life down to save many as Jesus (John 10:18). Would it be right to do? Do the ends justify the means? I could not kill the man because even though the benefit to society would be enormous his life is not mine to take. Likewise I can't relegate that which I believe to be murder to those within the first trimester.
A human can be a human without a name. I'm having trouble finding an example but I believe that some cultures wait a period of time before naming infants.
A date of birth does not define humanity. Consider a woman two weeks past due. Her baby is fully developed, feeling, thinking, dreaming, moving. The fact that that baby has not yet been physically separated from its mother is irrelevant to its humanity.
Some human beings are born without eyes.
You argue that having a brain to feel with is a requisite for humanity. I disagree. Consider a man in a coma. If I kill him then it is wrong because he may have come out of his coma at some point in time. The fact that at that point in time he appeared to have no thoughts, sensory input, or motor output, does not stop me from being a murderer. At this point I see several options: One can concede that I am correct and that not yet having developed a nervous system does not preclude humanity. One can argue that it is not murder to kill the comatose man. One can argue that my example is inappropriate. I'll skip the first two possibilities and focus on the third.
One could say that the comatose man is distinguished from the zygote in that the comatose man is not brain dead and presumably has some neural activity. Granted. I chose a comatose man because it fits our current level of technology. If that comparison causes quibbling then I'll change my comatose man into a cryogenically frozen normal man. He's at absolute zero - there are no chemical reactions occurring within him. He can be safely thawed out with nanotechnology to repair his shattered cell membranes. He is just as unthinking as the zygote. If it is wrong to destroy him then I'd say that the zygote being unthinking has no relevance on the morality of destroying it. An interesting side-note is that the zygote is arguably more alive than my ice-man.
Alternatively one could argue that my coma patient is distinguished from my zygote in that he was once thinking while the zygote has not yet progressed to such a level. The entirety of this debate could be brought to a discussion of the metaphysical since "human" is a definition that we've come up with and not something truly innate to nature but particularly an attempt to distinguish between two equally unthinking things based on the fact that one once thought seems to step outside of what the situation is and looks to a level outside of nature. It may hinge on the idea that humanity is gained at a certain point of intellect and not lost until death. If we go the route of the metaphysical then I'd say we need to define the criteria for what metaphysical aspect makes a human a human (personally I'd say ensoulment). Moreover you'd have to choose a point in time that this trait was gained. I can understand arguments that demand a higher level of thinking than what is possessed by a zygote but I think that it is quite difficult to nail down a point where humanity would be gained when one considers the span of human intelligence and, in particular, the limitations that some human beings live with. If a certain manner of thinking or awareness is required then we'd have to be open to the idea that some among us don't possess it.
The comparison to a parasite is not helpful. I acknowledge that there is a similarity to parasitism in that a developing child normally puts an increased burden on the mother to supply resources. The similarities end there. I am not a doctor but my understanding is that having children increases the life expectancy of a woman. I am not a biologist but I've never heard anyone talk about parasitism in regard to parent/child relationships (except in other abortion discussions). I believe that parent/child relationships are generally excluded from the classification of parisitism. Beyond the biological aspect of your statement you seem to be undermining the idea of a zygote being human by comparing it to a parasite. Even if it were a parasite then that would not preclude humanity.
The chosen terminology by each group is pro-life and pro-choice. Respect it.
The aborted don't get a choice. The term pro-choice therefore seems misleading. I would also note the lack of choice for a male who has no say in the life of his child but that one is less direct since he isn't physically involved at that point.
I wrote a program in Java that used an artificial neural network to play Warning Forever. I took an evolutionary approach to training the networks because it was an unsupervised task. The program started with a pool of random networks, determined fitness by whatever criteria I used on a given run, and bred the networks together to make a new generation.
My program had no capacity to play the game with a different interface than a human. It actually read the values of the pixels on the monitor, processed them through its network, and yielded keystrokes.
It never got very good and eventually I got bored and moved on. I have some ideas for yielding better results that I want to try someday. Here's what happened:
1) Playing on lives didn't work because eventually a network would destroy the boss' offensive capabilities and hide in a corner. The game would never progress.
2) When I tried playing the game on a timer and ranking networks by what level they got to it ended up not moving at all and just shooting forward to destroy some bosses.
3) When I tried ranking by time survived the network would again just destroy the boss' offensive capability and hide.
1 is technically a perfect solution for the fitness criteria that I supplied. 2 and 3 are both examples of local minima where the networks found an early solution that dominated the competition (other networks, not the boss) and thus the gene pool.
He wasn't arguing that imaging the laptop would somehow grant the ability to decrypt the data. He was arguing that imaging the laptop would make it pointless for the suspect to cause the destruction of the data on the original machine.
If he enjoys such things then he's an evil man. That said, was he informed of his Miranda rights before he showed them that? Perhaps a reminder of his right to plead the 5th would've kept him from incriminating himself.
An incriminating statement by a suspect will not constitute admissible evidence unless the suspect was advised of his or her "Miranda rights" and made a knowing, intelligent, and voluntary waiver of those rights
- Wikipedia
I am not a lawyer, but perhaps the same inability to use self-incriminating statements could be applied here.
I would say that if the police really want to catch him then what they should do is image 64 laptops from his and play the guessing game on all of them simultaneously until they crack his key. He could be free during this period and even receive his laptop back.
I suspect that when that time comes around someone will implement a JVM with a larger primitive than Java's long (think 64 bit int), but in the meantime use this:
Slashdot Mirror
It is the biweekly OS updates since this problem, each with an EULA warning, which may are may not be different from the original one (and if it is the same is a complete waste of time to read again)
I diff EULAs upon upgrading various software for that reason. You can probably find the latest text on Sony's website.
I read more of the ensuing conversation and heard that they admitted in their EULA to using GPLed code. This company doesn't come across as being as innocent as my hypothetical organization.
Back to a hypothetical - If you have tens of millions of dollars invested in a software application and it turns out that you're legally obligated to give that application away due to the inclusion of GPLed code by a freelance consultant then there is generally no way that by suing the consultant you're going to get back anything close to what was spent on development, and that's not considering the lost profits, market share, etc. I understand your position. By the letter of the law you may be correct in many cases (I'd say not necessarily all cases because you may still end up with a scenario where a project includes code under the GPL and other proprietary code that you're not legally allowed to release and then it's not clear cut since there is no solution that satisfies all licenses). I'm not suggesting that you're wrong by the letter, but rather the spirit of "sue them to oblivion" is a little harsh if applied broadly to all GPL violations. But I suppose that you were speaking specifically to this theft, and I can understand the outrage.
I doubt, however, that suing them into oblivion has any reasonable chance of success, as I also read that they're a Russian company.
It is of course true that if GPL code was used then the resultant product must be GPLed itself. I have no contention with you there. But as far as hoping that the company gets sued into oblivion, your indignation may be overzealous. The situation is not necessarily that simple. Imagine that you own a company. Maybe it's a large company or maybe it's a startup. You hire some developers to build a project for you. You invest in development, marketing, legal, production, etc. You may have put thousands of your own hours into meticulously guiding your beloved dream idea. Everyone does their job adequately except for one or two rogue developers who steal GPL code. Maybe your developers are incompetent and they steal to give the illusion of competence. Maybe they are ignorant about the terms of the GPL and they aren't ethical enough to bounce it off of the legal department before they take the code. In any case on a team of ten, dozens, or maybe hundreds a couple of guys download some code. Nobody knows about it. They project reaches prime-time. The owners of the copyright notice some similarities and investigate it. Now you, the owner of the company who has tried to do everything by-the-book, are suddenly accused of stealing code, you're flamed on the internet, you're under legal threat, and you're told that the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars that you've invested are now potentially wasted because you need to give your software away for free. This could force you to breach other contracts and so it may not even be possible to legally satisfy everyone.
I haven't read the article. I know nothing of this product or of this company. In any case, I think that the anger may be a little exaggerated because the owners of this company could be victims along with the owners of the GPLed code. It could come down to a couple of unethical and/or ignorant developers.
This. The problem here is that the suggestion should not be expected to simply attract people who make the game more enjoyable, but rather the expected effect is that people try to become that more enjoyable person. The pricing algorithm actually changes people's behavior. You could end up with a lot of fairly shallow people.
At the risk of starting a videogames are/aren't the reason for social ills thread I'll say that the reward given for this shallowness could potentially be carried beyond the game and what started as an idea to pull in a fun community could damage the community in the game and society outside of the game. I doubt that the learned behavior of forced friendliness will be easily turned off in a real world setting. In some ways we do well at compartmentalizing things but I think that our social behaviors can't be easily isolated in the absence of a force that pressures them to be. For example, if I'm in the military I will learn to modify how I interact socially because there are consequences to not doing so. In this case there is a reward for being friendly, whether sincerely or artificially, in the game and no pressure in real life to turn that off.
I'm not a psychologist and the above is off the top of my head, but I think that it may be a good theory.
The phrase "spooky action at a distance" was coined by Einstein for the ability of one particle to instantaneously affect another.
In my mind it seems like a failure in security to have this quantity of personal information on a laptop. If someone needs quick access to it then it should be in a database back in home base with some canned queries for whatever functions are typically needed. This approach should be sufficient anywhere that an internet connection exists. I've never used one myself but my understanding is that these days you can purchase USB sticks that connect to the internet from anywhere in reach of a cell tower and so it should be an especial rarity for a business such as BP to find themselves hindered by a lack of connectivity.
Hopefully the drive on the laptop was encrypted but even if it was the wrong way to handle this sort of data. Haven't these people been through enough from BP already?
I like to believe that personhood transcends legality, but given that we're in a discussion of law the law does need to distinguish between persons and things. I'd say that there is currently a huge amount of disagreement surrounding this topic.
It most often comes up in discussion of human biology with lesser mental faculties. Basically that includes coma patients, brain-dead humans, and humans who have not yet been born. I'm in favor of giving personhood to all humans at the point of conception with maybe a few caveats for humans that are so genetically damaged that they could never under any circumstances develop a brain. Brain dysfunction later in life probably needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. If a person is injured but could maybe possibly theoretically be restored if everything goes perfectly and we develop a super brain reconstructor then they still have a shot at life and should still be treated as a person. If a person cannot be restored to consciousness even under that aforementioned one in a bazillion condition then they're dead and cease to be a person.
That's my thinking. It obviously leaves a lot of detail unaddressed. In any case personhood isn't universally agreed upon. We probably need a constitutional definition for it.
What the great-grandparent is getting at is that though the thing may give output similar to the output of a human being it lacks the experience that comes from being human, and particularly in this case daydreaming. It has no qualia. To the machine everything that is input into it is simply a value to be shunted through its algorithms. Nothing has been programmed to actually cause the experience of qualia or true appreciation. Great-grandparent is using an the idea of an image sitting in RAM to represent the qualia of the heads-up-display that we experience with our vision. I'd say that this image would still fail to actually cause the experience of qualia because it's just an image in RAM, there is still no mechanism in the software to sense qualia.
Even if a robot looks and behaves exactly like me in every circumstance then that doesn't mean that it actually has qualia like I do.
This study seems presumptuous.
... whatever narrow genre The Sims II falls into.
1) My wife, a statistician, gets irritated when studies say that they have proven things. When trying to draw conclusions from data you always run the risk that your data is not indicative of reality. You get around this with large sample sizes and by receiving data that points to the same trends on repeated studies. This study has a small sample size, 26 people total, and has no mention of repeated results.
2) The friendly article claims that the study has "proven" that action games train people to respond quickly and accurately. The article is overstepping the study in that the conclusion of the study was that people who play action games had the same level of accuracy as those who played The Sims II. The article should have said "quickly without losing accuracy".
3) The author of the study claimed that "People who play these action games make informed, better decisions than those who don't". The study only compared people playing two FPSs to people playing The Sims II. There is no mention of a control group that did not play any video game. The conclusion needs to be a bit more humble and only make statements between people who play FPSs and people who play
I frequently enjoy Alien Swarm. I played Portal and my wife and I are slowly meandering our way through Uru. I used to be hooked on Starcraft, Myth II, Myth, Master of Orion II, and others. I believe that these games have shaped my neurological development and given me advantages in problem solving, strategy, coping with unexpected setbacks, and more. I also believe that they've cost me in self-discipline, my attention span, humanity (desensitization to violence and beyond that enjoyment of violence). My point is that I want the conclusions of this study to be true to give some legitimacy to what is otherwise an unproductive diversion but the study feels a little shoddy.
So then does the proof that P!=NP require polynomial time, or non-deterministic polynomial time to trust based on its length?
Rather than having all developers at a round table facing toward each other I would surround them with desks and have them facing out from each other. That way collaboration is as easy as scooting your chair to an adjacent developer but you're looking away from each other when you're each trying to concentrate on your own thing. A few weeks ago I spent some time in a workroom with a couple other developers and hated it. For some people that might help but to me it was distracting.
The question at hand cannot be "how do we compromise in such a way that everyone is satisfied". If there are such a things as "right" and "wrong" and if they are immutable and not decided by the current whims of society then killing in the first trimester is either wrong or it is not. I say that it is because I believe that a viable zygote is a being with a soul from the point of conception.
I suppose I'll flirt with Godwin's law and make a skirting comparison to Nazis: What if we could have satisfied Hitler by killing one Jewish man and by doing so have saved millions? For the sake of argument we'll say that this man is very much opposed to the idea - he's not as willing to lay his life down to save many as Jesus (John 10:18). Would it be right to do? Do the ends justify the means? I could not kill the man because even though the benefit to society would be enormous his life is not mine to take. Likewise I can't relegate that which I believe to be murder to those within the first trimester.
A human can be a human without a name. I'm having trouble finding an example but I believe that some cultures wait a period of time before naming infants.
A date of birth does not define humanity. Consider a woman two weeks past due. Her baby is fully developed, feeling, thinking, dreaming, moving. The fact that that baby has not yet been physically separated from its mother is irrelevant to its humanity.
Some human beings are born without eyes.
You argue that having a brain to feel with is a requisite for humanity. I disagree. Consider a man in a coma. If I kill him then it is wrong because he may have come out of his coma at some point in time. The fact that at that point in time he appeared to have no thoughts, sensory input, or motor output, does not stop me from being a murderer. At this point I see several options: One can concede that I am correct and that not yet having developed a nervous system does not preclude humanity. One can argue that it is not murder to kill the comatose man. One can argue that my example is inappropriate. I'll skip the first two possibilities and focus on the third.
One could say that the comatose man is distinguished from the zygote in that the comatose man is not brain dead and presumably has some neural activity. Granted. I chose a comatose man because it fits our current level of technology. If that comparison causes quibbling then I'll change my comatose man into a cryogenically frozen normal man. He's at absolute zero - there are no chemical reactions occurring within him. He can be safely thawed out with nanotechnology to repair his shattered cell membranes. He is just as unthinking as the zygote. If it is wrong to destroy him then I'd say that the zygote being unthinking has no relevance on the morality of destroying it. An interesting side-note is that the zygote is arguably more alive than my ice-man.
Alternatively one could argue that my coma patient is distinguished from my zygote in that he was once thinking while the zygote has not yet progressed to such a level. The entirety of this debate could be brought to a discussion of the metaphysical since "human" is a definition that we've come up with and not something truly innate to nature but particularly an attempt to distinguish between two equally unthinking things based on the fact that one once thought seems to step outside of what the situation is and looks to a level outside of nature. It may hinge on the idea that humanity is gained at a certain point of intellect and not lost until death. If we go the route of the metaphysical then I'd say we need to define the criteria for what metaphysical aspect makes a human a human (personally I'd say ensoulment). Moreover you'd have to choose a point in time that this trait was gained. I can understand arguments that demand a higher level of thinking than what is possessed by a zygote but I think that it is quite difficult to nail down a point where humanity would be gained when one considers the span of human intelligence and, in particular, the limitations that some human beings live with. If a certain manner of thinking or awareness is required then we'd have to be open to the idea that some among us don't possess it.
The comparison to a parasite is not helpful. I acknowledge that there is a similarity to parasitism in that a developing child normally puts an increased burden on the mother to supply resources. The similarities end there. I am not a doctor but my understanding is that having children increases the life expectancy of a woman. I am not a biologist but I've never heard anyone talk about parasitism in regard to parent/child relationships (except in other abortion discussions). I believe that parent/child relationships are generally excluded from the classification of parisitism. Beyond the biological aspect of your statement you seem to be undermining the idea of a zygote being human by comparing it to a parasite. Even if it were a parasite then that would not preclude humanity.
The chosen terminology by each group is pro-life and pro-choice. Respect it.
The aborted don't get a choice. The term pro-choice therefore seems misleading. I would also note the lack of choice for a male who has no say in the life of his child but that one is less direct since he isn't physically involved at that point.
I wrote a program in Java that used an artificial neural network to play Warning Forever. I took an evolutionary approach to training the networks because it was an unsupervised task. The program started with a pool of random networks, determined fitness by whatever criteria I used on a given run, and bred the networks together to make a new generation.
My program had no capacity to play the game with a different interface than a human. It actually read the values of the pixels on the monitor, processed them through its network, and yielded keystrokes.
It never got very good and eventually I got bored and moved on. I have some ideas for yielding better results that I want to try someday. Here's what happened:
1) Playing on lives didn't work because eventually a network would destroy the boss' offensive capabilities and hide in a corner. The game would never progress.
2) When I tried playing the game on a timer and ranking networks by what level they got to it ended up not moving at all and just shooting forward to destroy some bosses.
3) When I tried ranking by time survived the network would again just destroy the boss' offensive capability and hide.
1 is technically a perfect solution for the fitness criteria that I supplied. 2 and 3 are both examples of local minima where the networks found an early solution that dominated the competition (other networks, not the boss) and thus the gene pool.
as one of the three applications that I'll be allowed to run simultaneously?
He wasn't arguing that imaging the laptop would somehow grant the ability to decrypt the data. He was arguing that imaging the laptop would make it pointless for the suspect to cause the destruction of the data on the original machine.
If he enjoys such things then he's an evil man. That said, was he informed of his Miranda rights before he showed them that? Perhaps a reminder of his right to plead the 5th would've kept him from incriminating himself.
An incriminating statement by a suspect will not constitute admissible evidence unless the suspect was advised of his or her "Miranda rights" and made a knowing, intelligent, and voluntary waiver of those rights - Wikipedia
I am not a lawyer, but perhaps the same inability to use self-incriminating statements could be applied here.
I would say that if the police really want to catch him then what they should do is image 64 laptops from his and play the guessing game on all of them simultaneously until they crack his key. He could be free during this period and even receive his laptop back.
I wish I had mod points. +1 Funny.
Doesn't Microsoft hold a patent on this?
I think most kids figure out in about 2 minutes on the internet not to click on random links. The ones that don't, deserve what they get.
Blame the victim.
Don't use keys. Copying and pasting messages, usernames, and passwords from a USB stick would work perfectly well for a terrorist at a cybercafe.
Raytracing with Java - http://www.artofillusion.org/
I suspect that when that time comes around someone will implement a JVM with a larger primitive than Java's long (think 64 bit int), but in the meantime use this:
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/math/BigInteger.html
You might say that I got the lead out.