I had a little thread going about NLP. Last entry is here. Any additional comments anyone has are welcomed.

This is a letter I'm sending to the authors of the
relevant software:

Dear Devs,

No doubt you've heard of the controversial "rootkit" bundled with
many of Sony's CDs to prevent unauthorized copying. By now I hope
you've been informed that this rootkit contains and uses code from
your Free Software projects. (LAME, id3lib, mpglib, bladenc: see
http://hack.fi/~muzzy/sony-drm/) I write as a concerned member of
the digital community in hopes that you will seek punative damages
against Sony, to ensure that this never happens again.

Statutory damages for copyright infringements go as high as
$150,000 per copy. Given that there are at least 20 cds, selling
hundreds of thousands if not millions of units even a modest
settlement quickly adds up to the largest copyright infringement
lawsuit ever. You all stand to earn tremendous judgements; think
of all the Free Software you could write when independantly
wealthy. But more importantly, this is a chance for the common
person to fight back.

I would urge you not to settle however. For far too long,
mega-corporations have been allowed to buy and sell the law, run
amok, and generally ruin the lives of common people. Until now,
even the largest class action lawsuit could be written off as a
cost of doing business. If we are ever to correct bad behavior
we MUST apply real punishment. A judgement that bankrupted Sony
would be a wakeup call to every corporation in the world, and
I urge you to persue this for the sake of social justice
everywhere.

It's pretty ironic that Sony violated copyright in software
designed to prevent copyright infringement. I like irony, and I'd
also like to see the irony of the media industry being bit by the
very teeth they lobbied into the law in the first place. Thanks
for reading this, and good luck.

Whew, long topic on ID. While reading through it, I was reminded of a passage from an ecology book I once read. I paraphrased it from memory, I hope its relevance to ID is obvious:

Let me tell you a little story about long shots and averages and how not understanding the two lead to an incorrect hypothesis. Some time ago ecologists were interested with the rate that trees would repopulate a volcano after an eruption. They observed the trees, and figured out the average distance that a seed would fall from the tree, and from that they calculated an expected movement of the treeline.

However this was wrong, the trees repopulated much more quickly than expected. While the ecologists had figured out the averages correctly, they failed to realize that a small proportion of seeds would be carried much further than the average. The seeds that came from these trees would have a head start and some small portion of the next generation would be carried even further.

Do you see what I'm getting at here? Are you sure that in your calculations of expected rate of evolutionary change you're not making the same mistake these ecologists did?

ajs, user id 35953, included this though in the comments about hurricane control:

>My rule of thumb is: don't mess with large systems that you depend on for your survival.

He was writing about weather modification but that's also the best one-sentence description I've ever seen of real conservatism. Society is a large system that we depend on for our survival. Actual conservatives are leery of trying to reform it.

What is willful ignorance (Score:5, Insightful)
by vena (318873) Neutral on Sunday September 11, @09:19PM (#13535404) ...if not malice?

On the subject of Mars exploration:

How soon until this happens? (Score:1)
by GWBasic (900357) Neutral on Friday September 09, @06:27PM (#13523851)
( http://www.andrewrondeau.com/ )

How soon until someone proposes that we not worry about the return trip and leave the astronauts there permenently?
[ Reply to This | ]

Re:How soon until this happens? (Score:2)
by Quinn_Inuit (760445) Neutral on Friday September 09, @06:44PM (#13523918)

Heck, if I weren't married, I might take that trip. I don't know. Dying doesn't exactly appeal to me, but I could do a lot of really useful research, set up stuff so future expeditions don't have to be one-way...and see Mars. I'm no astronaut or scientist or millionaire, so I doubt I'll see it any other way in my lifetime.

I know it sounds crazy. But to walk just once under an alien sky...darnit, our children deserve the stars, and someone needs to claim that inheritance for them. IMO, if you've never looked up at the sky and wondered why we're stuck here, well, call God and see if you can get a refund or warranty repair job on your soul.

--

Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.

From user antifoidulus, id 807088:

"The hardest thing to find in this sea of information is the truth. "

Um, we're getting what we paid for (Score:5, Interesting)
by Colin Smith (2679) Neutral on Monday August 15, @09:43AM (#13322166)
( http://mrprecision.blogspot.com/ )

We're not paying for space travel, or even space exploration. We're paying for programmes. We get a space programme, then another one, then another one.

When we start paying for results, we'll get space travel and space exploration.

Huhu. I can't believe the DS WiFi Bounty that I set up hit slashdot, g4 tech tv, arstechnica, hackaday, gamedev.net, and so on.

I also can't believe it's up to eighteen hundred dollars. Huhu indeed, I say; huhu.

From http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=148578&cid=12451624
by John Sokol:

Has anyone ever stopped to think about how well evolution works? And that it's all encompassing.

It's an inescapable law of nature. Everything from our software and computer designs (meme's) to music, language and DNA based life is affected by evolution.

Not only that, it's impossible to create something not effected by it.
Even our views of God and our religions evolve. (what blasphemy)

After studying evolution for some time, I became a believer in GOD! Because only god could have created something as powerful as evolution.

My argument goes like this. If we are made in Gods image, and we make machines and tools to build more complex things. Then shouldn't God also? If God were to what would that tool look like. EVOLUTION....

So all this arguing over GOD vs. Evolution is totally stupid. No Evil.

I see science as the study of God's creation. It's sort of our responsibility to understand is and in doing this we can come to know God better

This is from user expro at http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=148137&cid=12413978:

"That is why the smartest thing you can do is to figure out how to stay out of court, unless you are evil and rich and like injustice."

DEVELOPER RANT - Version checking. (Score:5, Interesting)
by argent (18001) Neutral on Thursday April 28, @04:27AM (#12369887)
( http://www.scarydevil.com/~peter/ )

DEVELOPER RANT: don't use if (win_version == nt5.1) use if (win_version >= nt51).

DEVELOP RANT: don't use OS version tests if you can use feature tests instead.

Not a comment specifically directed at you, I don't know if you do this, but I keep running into software on all platforms that doesn't run on older versions even when patches, service packs, hotfixes, software updates, backported libraries, or compatibility fixes have removed the dependency on the specific OS version they hardcoded into the application.

One of the nice things about the Amiga is that all the developer documentation showed code checking library versions instead. Not perfect, but much better than OS version checks. Palm provided hooks to do functional checks down to the entry point level, but then spoiled it by shipping example code doing OS version checking.

I agree censorship is a bad idea, but the problem with a pervasive, persuasive and centralized media (e.g. ClearChannel) in a democracy is that without a critically thinking population the system becomes unstable. A functioning democracy is a self correcting system, but a hidden dependancy of that system is that accurate, verifiable information is provided to the people who must make the decisions. I.e., the voters. It's usually AVAILABLE, granted, but if they don't have it and settle for what they are told by an organized media the end result is EXACTLY the same as if they don't have it. If you can get statistically large numbers of them to dance to your tune, you have effectively taken over the country. The key question is, do enough people engage critical thinking to avoid the electorate being systematically manipulated by misinformation?

Guh. My rat bastard NN/GA/MTD(f) templated breeding arena monstrosity is almost done, but it's late at night and I can't focus. I just spent an hour and a half explaining simple C++ concepts to what will almost certainly be an unreceptive crowd (due no doubt in no small part to my obvious hatred of bad advice and novices which don't know that they are novices.)

Stupid fucking C can't return arrays. God damnit. So stupid. What a useless limitation. Yay for writing entire templates just to get around simple crap like that.

Re:Is Windows fit for the internet? (Score:1)
by nytmare (572906) Neutral on Tuesday November 23, @08:00AM (#10898719)
( http://www.nytmare.org/ )

No it isn't. A secure OS would make it easy for normal users to RECOGNIZE and REMOVE any illegitimate software or processes that have managed to wend their way onto their PC. Windows does not. It takes experts to figure out most infestations, often by using third-party apps like Hijack This to analyze the system. It takes third-party anti-virus and anti-spyware apps to remove the problems, and then only on a case-by-case basis. It takes third-party firewalls to control and inform users about internet traffic entering and leaving their own PC.

Hiding information from users is a mantra that directly undermines security.