Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Limited applicability, or effortful (Score 1) 123

Seems like a lot of problems would have to be carfully mapped to such a systems... or, basically, you have to ask a crowdsource systems your questions carefully. It might be tempting to think that a crowd acts like a nondeterministic Turing machine, but it really doesn't because the space of possible solutions it might try to verify is bounded by the pool of respondents (not just the size of the pool, but what you might call the "imaginative range" of the pool). Oh, and this really reminds me of Vernor Vinge's book "A Deepness in the Sky", in which a spacefaring civilization that figures prominently in the narrative uses human slave labor given drugs to give them something like autism or OCD as processing power (they're not the good guys...).

Comment Start suggesting phrases now... (Score 1) 316

... to any friends who might work on the content for these systems. Somewhere an irate customer on a support call could be told to "take a stress pill and lie down" during a suppot call. Of course, the customer will be irate because they were just told, over and over, "I'm sorry, , I can't do that." and "I can see your upset, .". The hold music, naturally, will be "Daisy".
Announcements

Submission + - City women have denser breasts. (google.com)

kemosabi writes: Recent research suggests that women living in urban areas tend to have denser breasts, and are thus at greater risk of breast cancer because mammography is less effecive for them. Insert horribly improper remark about squishy-boobed country gals here. I wonder if they checked for implants.
Windows

Submission + - Vista Validation Totally Cracked

Brian Gordon writes: "The Inquirer reports that cracking group PARADOX has cracked Vista's activation model. The new crack results in an installation virtually identical to that of a legitimately activated license key, which means that cracked installs are eligible for Windows Updates and will pass WGA validation.

From the readme: Microsoft allows large hardware manufacturers (e.g. ASUS, HP, Dell) to ship their products containing a Windows Vista installation that does NOT require any kind of product activation as this might be considered an unnecessary inconvenience for the end-user. The basic concept of the tool at hand is to present any given BIOS ACPI_SLIC information to Windows Vista's licensing mechanism by means of a device driver. In combination with a matching product key and OEM certificate this allows for rendering any system practically indistinguishable from a legit pre-activated system shipped by the respective OEM."
Space

Submission + - Revolutionary Robotic Satellite Launches Tonight

airshowfan writes: "When a geosynchronous satellite is launched into space, no human ever gets to touch it again, so other than for minor software issues, there is no way to fix it if it breaks, so it has to work perfectly, almost autonomously, for 20 years non-stop. There is also no way to refuel it once it's out of thruster fuel, the reason why it can't last more than 20 years even if it gets to that mark working very well, with batteries and solar cells still going, which is often the case. If only there were a robotic spacecraft floating around the geostationary ring that could change broken satellite components and refuel those older satellites, then satellites would be a lot less risky and would last a lot longer. Does this robotic satellite mechanic sound like science ficion? It launches tonight."

Slashdot Top Deals

"What man has done, man can aspire to do." -- Jerry Pournelle, about space flight

Working...