If one has an opinion, especially if it is backed by facts, that goes against mainstream or even what is politically correct, then that is a different story.

And yet, quite routinely, I have seen people getting flagged as trolls right here on slashdot, myself included, for doing no less and no more than precisely what you are describing here.

Unfortunately all too often on social media sites, expressing one's own opinion can get you ganged up upon and removed.

Clearly what matters is not so much what actually makes one a troll as much as whether other people, particularly people with power, inflluence, or control actually *believe* a person is a troll... Any non-trollish intent of the poster is entirely irrelevant.

If you saw a red light as green, then the speed you must have been approaching it at to induce an effective doppler shift from what was about 680 nm wavelength photons which are normally seen as red, to about 540 nm, or the green portion of the visible spectrum would suggest that you were speeding by no small margin.

Tetrachromatic vision doesn't quite fit the bill for "normal". It's common, sure... but still quite far from typical. As a trichromat, you are visually disadvantaged to, at the most, perhaps as much as 30% of the human race.

.. almost as long ago as when biittorrent was invented, as a means to abate so-called

flash crowds

on the internet... more colloquially known in these parts as the slashdot effect... If everyone visiting a web page with a large quantity of multimedia content helped to distribute the data that would otherwise have to be supplied by the website, the web server would be generally able to tolerate larger numbers of people simultaneously accessing it.

Except the EFF isn't arguing that.... nice strawman you did there.

The EFF is only arguing that the DMCA should not apply.... ordinary copyright law is still entirely applicable. If somebody else makes a server for your software by reverse engineering the protocol so that that the game could connect to it, then they haven't necessarily actually copied any of your work at all, but the DMCA would still apply. All the EFF suggests with their proposal is that after such a game has been abandoned because the copyright holder is no longer hosting said server, the DMCA would not apply to such activities. Conventional copyright law would still disallow actions that otherwise infringe on copyright, such as either making unauthorized copies of said work or creating derivative works.

The linked article says that "a user cannot hack the server-based authentication and âoematchmakingâ access controls for console-based video games without also hacking the video game console access controls", and then applies the "wolf in sheep's clothing" metaphor to it. I won't argue that this might be a concern for the ESA, and if the concern were a legitimate one, I can even potentially see how it could be a problem with respect to software that hasn't been abandoned, but does anyone have any further details about how they actually came to that conclusion? Bearing in mind that even if such "hacking" were done for genuinely nefarious purposes with respect to inrfringing on the copyright of software that was current and hadn't been abandoned, the EFF isn't suggesting that copyright law have any less claim over such matters, and action could still be taken against such criminals anyways under ordinary copyright law, I just want to understand what kind of point the ESA believed that they had that would ever give them a justification to disallow what is by their own admission a superficially reasonable activity, to use their own metaphor's words, "in sheep's clothing", under the allegation that it could somehow actually be utilized in much more nefarious ways, or any alleged such connection only exists in their own imagination, and from what I can find on the matter, this is the conclusion I am inclined to come to. If the latter is genuinely applicable, then the ESA is basing their entire objection upon a concern that doesn't have any bearing on reality (as I suspect they may be),. and is doing nothing more or less with this objection than making a strawman argument, and should be called on that.

The halting problem illustrates the underlying principle that is generalized by the thought experiment. If the universe were genuinely deterministic, then its current state is sufficient to predict a future state... except the thought experiment shows that the current state cannot ever be sufficient to predict a future state where any possible alleged-future state that might be predicted from the current state will always be wrong. Even if the predictor it were wrapped up in a neat little magical black box that didn't really care what was being done with its information, but simply blindly presented a prediction that was supposedly accurate based on the universe's current state, there is no possibility that it could ever be correct if it were ever utilized in this fashion, and since insufficient information exists to predict a future in this scenario, the universe apparently cannot be deterministic.

The GPL is just the terms and conditions that you have to agree to in order to have permission to copy the work, and in particular, to create derivative works from it. The GPL can do this because stuff put under it is copyrighted, and you need the copyright holder's permission to make copies of copyrighted works outside of what would have ordinarily been considered fair use in the first place.... all the GPL does is outline the terms you have to agree to in order to receive such permission. If you don't want to comply, there's no permission given in the first place, so there's actually no unwanted viral aspect to it at all. If the terms are simply disagreeable to you, you may, at your option, try and contact the copyright holder to obtain alternate licensing arrangements for your special case, but the copyright holder is no more obligated to give anyone such permission than Paramount is obligated to give anyone permission to make their own for-profit Star Trek film.

You did preemptive multitasking on the Apple //? Way cool.... mine was strictly a cooperative multitasker, although it considered waiting for input (either from a remote connection or the keyboard) to be indicative that it was safe for the task requesting input to yield control. I had no hardware clock in my apple, so I could not do full-preemptive multitasking. As I said, when I was writing it I didn't even know the word 'multitasking' would describe what I was doing... I always described the mechanism as having "swappable stacks and I/O" so that it was easy to write in basic, for example, a multi-user bulletin board where the main program didn't have to concern itself with coordinating input and output for all other users (this was actually the specific purpose for which it was designed). With my OS extension taking care of which thread was talking to which I/O system (which modem, or the keyboard/screen) it actually was pretty cool.

And I know full well that prodos's basic.system is not a language, it was the part of the OS that was loaded into regular ram and interfaced with applesoft basic, understanding such things as ctrl-d on output being a DOS request. the mechanism I used replaced the basic.system file entirely. At the time, it was the largest assembly project I had ever tackled, clocking in at about 6.5K after it was assembled and linked, and sat at the top of ram, where basic.system ordinarily resided.

This coupled with the fact you can use the 256 bytes of zero page ...

Except for the anoying detail that if you wanted to be interoperable with anything that was written in Applesoft Basic and ProDOS, weren't very many of them to really play around with.. One would usually have to resort to saving most of the entries they wanted to use, and then restoring them upon exit. This works, but I recall it wasn't very amenable to being interrupted with reset. While writing a custom reset handler mitigated some of that, in practice one would always need to reserve at least a couple of zero page memory locations that weren't being used by anyone else to actually have a genuinely robust system that wouldn't ever crash. When I was writing my Applesoft multitasker operating system as a replacement for ProDOS's basic.system back in the mid 1980's (I find it personally amusing when recalling the endeavor that I wrote it before I ever even knew what the word "multitasking" was, actually), I found that I needed to still have a few zero page memory locations that I would have to completely rely on to not get stomped on anything else even when my code was not actually running in order to have a usable system.

[Turing machines] don't figure out what they'd do and then do the opposite, unless you just invert the programming.

Again, there is nothing that the Turing machine would ever need to figure out... it simply needs to just blindly do the opposite of whatever some black box says is supposed to happen... there is no "intelligence" behind this decision, it is simply flawlessly executing the instructions that would have been programmed into it, and the only way the box could ever be correct is if the machine were malfunctioning... a malfunction is not outside of the realm of possibility, but a malfunction is also generally outside of the scope of any thought experiment that involves a Turing machine in the first place. The only "thinking" that might arguably be involved is inside of the black box, which reports whatever it is that is about to happen.. But the only thing the Turing machine does is take the information the bllack box provides as its input and outputs the inverse. So in theory, the Turing machine would simply always do the opposite of whatever the black box said is going to happen happen, and in theory, the black box will always say what is about to happen.

Except of course... the black box *CAN'T* always say what is going to happen... as the thought experiment illustrates. The fact that no such black box could ever be constructed does not change the fact that no possible quantity of information would ever be sufficient to predict a future where information about the future would ever be used to produce its opposite. The universe's current state is insufficient to predict the future and simply cannot be entirely deterministic.

It just means that you can't write down the state of the entire universe using only the matter present inside of it.

Except that's generally understood to be what materialistic determinism *IS*... so I'm not sure if you meant to or not, but you've really just sort of agreed with me there.

But of course...

I have no idea whether the universe is deterministic.

For someone who is professing to have no idea, you seem to be abnormally determined to convince me that my conclusions are invalid... perhaps you should try to figure out why you believe what you do.... or if you don't know what you believe, I might suggest you should stop trying to point out what you think may be wrong with another person's ideas just because you don't happen to agree with their conclusions, because otherwise you just come across as somebody who wants to disagree for the sake of being disagreeable, and not somebody who has actually made any real attempt to rationally think through their beliefs.

And lowering yourself to her level by namecalling accomplishes what, exactly?

Again, it's not being suggested that walking is necessarily the overall most efficient means of unpowered transport, or necessarily anywhere even close... rather, it is being suggested that the way humans do it is about efficient in energy usage as you can physically get and still be able to actually still *call* it walking, and not just simply generalize it as "unpowered locomotion".

Cycling may use the same muscles as what walking does, but cycling isn't walking. You use the same muscles as walking while roller blading, arguably even more similarly to walking than cycling is, but that's not considered walking either.

The question at hand, however, is can *WALKING* be made much more efficient than the way humans do it naturally? This exoskeleton only improved efficiency very nominally... And the fact that there can exist no shortage of ways to get from point A to point B using the exact same muscles as walking far more efficiently than walking, but without walking in the first place, is entirely irrelevant.

Of course there is. If it's less efficient than cycling, then energy is lost somewhere in the system

Its less efficient than cycling, as was pointed out above, but again.... cycling isn't walking. I'm not arguing that there are much more energy efficient means of unpowered locomotion, the article merely suggests that the way that humans have evolved to walk may very well be nearly as efficient as *walking* can physically get.

The fact that there provably exists far more efficient modes of externally unpowered movement that no longer qualify as walking in the first place is entirely beside the point.

Suggesting that walking could be made more efficient simply because cycling happens to more efficient than walking is a complete non-sequitur, at best. It's like suggesting that you should be able to get just as much energy out of a coal furnace as a nuclear one of the same size. You have to completely change the way you are using the energy in the first place to get that much more efficient energy utilization, and after you've done that, you will end up with something that is no longer in the same category of system where you started (coal furnace vs nuclear furnace). Using this exoskeleton to move around is marginally more efficient than walking without it, but I'd suggest that using it still at least qualifies as walking. If you are going to argue that it doesn't, then that's a different matter... but it doesn't defeat the point being made about the way humans walk being very efficient

One might conclude that the only way to make unpowered locomotion much more efficient than how humans walk is to resort to mechanisms that no longer qualify as walking... cycling being just one obvious example.

You're not missing anything... Carly is just utilizing an ad-hominem to stir up people's emotions on the matter, and thereby incite a passionate response... some of that passion will fall in her favor, while most of the passion that happens to fall the other way will tend to get diffused by the people who might have already been opposed to her viewpoints, but already have a mindset that this is yet another example of Carly Fiorina just being her whiny and immature self (which is good... an equally passionate rebuttal would probably end badly for everyone... not just Ms Fiorina). It's nothing more or less than her being a manipulative little bitch. Of course, that's nothing new for Carly anyways.