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Comment Fundamental Question (Score 1) 630

Are humans deterministic, or non-deterministic? Machines are deterministic, and always will be (unless some weird quantum-like processes are brought to bear that I'm not aware of) because even random number generators generate psuedo-random numbers.

So, the fundamental question is this: If the state of a human could somehow be replicated completely, down to the very molecules and their positions, and you made two identical copies of someone -- would those two copies act exactly the same? (obviously up until the point that the were influenced differently by their environment) If the answer to this is yes, than machines will someday have just as much of a 'soul' as humans. If the answer is no, than somehow a person's soul gives them non-deterministic properties which could be the basis of religious beliefs of how humans are different from non-sentient life.
Announcements

Submission + - Spam King Dead in Apparent Murder Suicide. (infoworld.com)

Sniper606 writes: Fugitive spam king dead in apparent murder-suicide
Convicted penny-stock spammer Eddie Davidson earned millions of dollars through an e-mail spamming operation

By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service

July 24, 2008

Convicted penny-stock spammer Eddie Davidson has died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, apparently after killing his wife and three year-old daughter in his home town of Bennet, Colorado, the U.S. Department of Justice said Thursday.

Davidson had been a fugitive from the law since walking away from a federal minimum-security prison camp in Florence, Colorado, on Sunday. He had been serving a 21-month sentence after pleading guilty to criminal spam charges late last year.

[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

Another person, a teenaged girl according to local reports, was shot, but survived the incident. Authorities also found an infant, unharmed, at the scene of the shooting.

Davidson's wife had been in the car with him when he left the Florence prison, about 45 miles south of Colorado Springs, on Sunday. He had last been seen in Lakewood, Colorado, where he got a change of clothes and cash, according to the Department of Justice.

Known as the Colorado "Spam King," Davidson earned millions of dollars between 2003 and 2006 by operating a spamming operation, called Power Promoters, out of his home. He would change the header information in his messages to make it appear as if they had come from legitimate companies such as AOL and then send them out to hundreds of thousands of addresses.

Davidson sent the messages on behalf of an unnamed Houston company, court filings state. He was asked to promote about 19 penny-stock companies, including one called Advanced Power Line Technologies in 2006 and 2007. He would earn fees based on the trading volume of the stocks he was promoting.

The business was lucrative: The Houston company paid Davidson about $1.4 million for his services, court documents state.

Between 2003 and 2006, when his primary source of income was spam, bank account deposits into Davidson's account totalled about $3.5 million.

"What a nightmare, and such a coward," said U.S. Attorney Troy Eid in an e-mailed statement. "Davidson imposed the 'death penalty' on family members for his own crime."

The Internet

Submission + - UK p2p users' internet to be "curbed" and (boingboing.net)

plasmacutter writes: Cory Doctorow is spreading the word about a disturbing but not unexpected development in Britain

Parents whose children download music and films illegally will be blacklisted and have their internet access curbed under government reforms to fight online piracy.
Households that ignore warnings will be subjected to online surveillance and their internet speeds will be reduced, making it very difficult for them to download large files.

The measures, the first of their kind in the world, will be announced today by Baroness Vadera, who brokered the deal between internet service providers and Ofcom, the telecoms body.

They claim this is a "moderation" of their proposal to disconnect users, but I doubt anyone would call the reduction of their lines to 56k dialup speeds "internet connectivity" anymore than someone would call a car lacking the horsepower necessary to carry large loads of groceries home "transportation".

Maybe they should put spy cameras inside their homes too, surely they're ripping and burning their friends' CDs as well if they're engaging in such "deviant" everyday activity on the internet.

Feed Engadget: Networks of carbon nanotubes find use in flexible displays (engadget.com)

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Carbon nanotubes may very well kill you (okay, so that's very much a stretch), but you'll have a hard time convincing the dutiful scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to stop their promising research. Put simply (or as simply as possible), said researchers have discovered that "networks of single-walled carbon nanotubes printed onto bendable plastic perform well as semiconductors in integrated circuits." So well, in fact, that the nanotube networks could one day "replace organic semiconductors in applications such as flexible displays." Granted, there is still much to do before these networks are ready for product integration, but you can bet these folks aren't hitting the brakes after coming this far.Read|Permalink|Email this|Comments


Comment Re:Problems... (Score 3, Informative) 165

Stop it. This is a total troll and is 100% FUD. Fedora isn't a "trial" version at all -- it's a bleeding edge distro made for people who don't need commercial-grade support for their distro, but they want a Red Hat based system. Plus, Fedora isn't just "usable," it's awesome. Far from being a collection of bits and pieces, it's a coherent, organized collection of software -- in short, it's everything you expect a distro to be. You should check out: This and this.
Businesses

Submission + - How do you ask for an Ergonomic Assessment?

wisenboi writes: So for the last several months I've been working at a company here, doing technical support (thankfully not at a local/major ISP *shudder*). As of late given that we're now in 12 hour rotational shifts, we're spending lengthy periods of time in our chairs. As such, your back, neck and/or shoulders start to complain. I've been attempting to keep as ergonomic a setup with my chair as posture as I can, but the nature of the job and frustrations along with the time period aren't helping. An ergonomic assessment is in order but how do I go about this?
My Team Lead will more than likely laugh and comment at the lack of likely action the company will take to resolve it (this company is 50/50 on this; some business aspects they're good, others...well, I'm happy I'm in tech support). So, /. ,should I bother asking my Team Leads and HR, or should there be a certain order between who to contact and how? We are getting a new manager in the dept. next week officially (the previous one mysteriously and suddenly "quitting") who is pretty good so far from his unofficial supporting us and my Team Lead may or may not side with me on getting an assessment done.
Has anyone done something like this already and if so, what've been the results? As much as I love my chiropractor, going on a weekly basis isn't something financially feasible.
Displays

Microsoft Engineers Invent Displays That Top LCDs For Efficiency 283

MechEMark writes with this excerpt from a hope-inspiring article at the IEEE Spectrum, which says "Researchers from Microsoft say they've built a prototype of a display screen using a technology that essentially mimics the optics in a telescope but at the scale of individual display pixels. The result is a display that is faster and more energy efficient than a liquid crystal display, or LCD, according to research reported yesterday in Nature Photonics ... The design greatly increases the amount of backlight that reaches the screen. The researchers were able to get about 36 percent of the backlight out of a pixel, more than three times as much light as an LCD can deliver. But Microsoft senior research engineer Michael Sinclair says that through design improvements, he expects that number to go up — theoretically, as high as 75 percent."
Software

Submission + - Programmer's File Editor with Change-tracking? 1

passionfingers writes: "My business users regularly have to tweak large (>32MB text) data files manually. Overlords charged with verifying the aforementioned changes have requested that the little people be provided with a new file editor that will track changes made to a file (a la a word processor). I have scouted around online for such an animal, but to no avail, with the even the likes of commercial offerrings like UltraEdit32 not offering such a feature. Likewise on the OSS side of the fence, where I expected a Notepad++ plugin or the like, it appears that the requirements to a) open a file containing a large volume of text data and b) track changes to the data, are mutually exclusive.

Does anyone in the Slashdot community already have such a beast in their menagerie? Perhaps there is there a commercial offerring I've missed, or could someone possibly point me to their favourite (stable) OSS project that might measure up?"
Earth

Spelunkers Explore Crystalline Cave In New Mexico 99

onehitwonder writes "New Mexico cavers have set foot — for the first time ever — on a 'river' of tiny, white calcite crystals covering a four-mile stretch of the floor of the Fort Stanton Cave in New Mexico. The privileged few spelunkers who have explored the 'Snowy River' formation say they've seen nothing like it. Not only is Snowy River exquisite, it is also home to some three dozen species of microbes previously unknown to man."
Earth

Robocars As the Best Way Geeks Can Save the Planet 394

Brad Templeton writes "I (whom you may know as EFF Chairman, founder of early dot-com Clari.Net and rec.humor.funny) have just released a new series of futurist essays on the amazing future of robot cars, coming to us thanks to the DARPA Grand Challenges. The computer driver is just the beginning — the essays detail how robocars can enable the cheap electric car, save millions of lives and trillions of dollars, and are the most compelling thing computer geeks can work on to save the planet. Because robocars can refuel, park and deliver themselves, and not simply be chauffeurs, they end up changing not just cars but cities, industries, energy, and — by removing dependence on foreign oil — even wars. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords." (More below.)
Linux Business

Critiquing Claims of an Open Source Jobs Boom 134

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Bill Snyder examines what appears to be an open source job market boom, as evidenced by a recent O'Reilly Report. According to the study, 5 to 15 percent of all IT openings call for open source software skills, and with overall IT job cuts expected for 2009, 'the recession may be pushing budget-strapped IT execs to examine low-cost alternatives to commercial software,' Snyder writes. But are enterprises truly shifting to open source, or are they simply seeking to augment the work of staff already steeped in proprietary software? The study's methodology leaves too much room for interpretation, Savio Rodrigues retorts. 'That's why the 5% to 15% really doesn't sit well with me,' Rodrigues writes. 'I suspect that larger companies are looking for developers with a mix of experience with proprietary and open source products, tools and frameworks,' as opposed to those who would work with open source for 90 percent of the work day."
Cellphones

Pittsburgh Cancer Center Warns of Cell Phone Risks 555

RevWaldo contributes a link to an AP story carried by Google, according to which "The head of a prominent cancer research institute issued an unprecedented warning to his faculty and staff Wednesday: Limit cell phone use because of the possible risk of cancer. The warning from Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is contrary to numerous studies that don't find a link between cancer and cell phone use, and a public lack of worry by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration." RevWaldo continues: "One possible solution offered? 'Use a wireless headset.' No risk of EM exposure from one of them, no sirree!"
Education

Online Colleges Could Spy On Students – By Law 307

skeazer writes "Tucked away in a 1,200-page bill now in Congress is a small paragraph that could lead distance-education institutions to require spy cameras in their students' homes. It sounds Orwellian, but the paragraph — part of legislation renewing the Higher Education Act — is all but assured of becoming law by the fall. No one in Congress objects to it."

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