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Domain: anusha.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to anusha.com.

Comments · 6

  1. Re:Attempt to delaying uptake of competing product by stephanruby · · Score: 1 · on GM Criticized Over Chevy Volt's Hybrid Similarities

    Thomas Jefferson did support the abolition of slavery. He felt that it was an institution whose time has served its purpose and that it should happen gradually, over the course of a couple of generations rather than all at once, but that it was important to end the institution at some point in the future. At the time he was alive, it was a dying institution as it was with many slave holders emancipating their slaves... usually at their death. Most of them didn't want their children to continue to be slave holders.

    Yeah, I'm sure that must have been very comforting to the 182 slaves which he didn't even bother to free after his death. He did free five slaves, both before his death and also in his will, but I don't think those really counted since those five slaves were finally proven to be his very own kids.

    If you are trying to be sarcastic, at least try to use a valid analogy or something resembling truth.

    Yeah, the next time you hear a politician say that he supports universal health-care, but only a couple of generations from now, or that he supports green energy, but only a couple of generations from now, that will probably be Steve Colbert saying it -- that's how absurd your statement about Thomas Jefferson being some kind of delayed-abolitionist really sounds to the rest of us (especially, since he didn't even say anything of the sorts one way or another. For all we know, Thomas Jefferson may very well have been a closeted-delayed-abolitionist, but making that claim when there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever -- only shows a very strong bias on your part).

  2. History repeats itself ... again by AJNeufeld · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Indian GPS Cartographers Charged As Terrorists

    This seems awfully similar to the story of Richard Bliss's detention in Russia. He was using GPS to determine the locations to erect cellular base stations, and was charged with spying.

  3. Re:Good post... by MagikSlinger · · Score: 1 · on Globalization Decimating US I.T. Jobs

    I carefully read Osama's list of justifications for attacking America, and economic exploitation was not among them. His principal complaints were American military and political intervention in the Middle East--especially troops in Saudi Arabia, sanctions in Iraq, and occupation in Palestine.

    From an interview with OBL:

    Rather, it already, by the grace of God, exists. As for oil, it is a commodity that will be subject to the price of the market according to supply and demand. We believe that the current prices are not realistic due to the Saudi regime playing the role of a US agent and the pressures exercised by the US on the Saudi regime to increase production and flooding the market that caused a sharp decrease in oil prices.

    I should add OBL has an economics degree.

    Although wealth disparity has been exacerbated within this country, wages in some 3rd-world countries (China for example) have converged somewhat with 1st-world wages, which tends to reduce the disparity

    WaPo's version the AP article
    Freely accessible archive of above

    And I'm not suggesting that the future is bright. I have no idea what the future will bring. Unlike the idiotic devotees of Marxism, I have no preposterous pretenses about laws of historical development which predict everything that will happen. There are no laws of history which we can discern that govern all of historical development. As an example, most of the 20th century was marked with crises and wars that were surprises to almost everyone and that cannot have been predicted by any theory that was then available.

    Actually, I (and other historians and politicians) find it depressingly easily to predict historical development from the past. The most notorious failures are people who insisted "history was over" in one way or the other, and that a given situation cannot possible be compared to other things: a view called exceptionalism. But human drives and emotions have remained unchanged for thousands of years. One can make some good predictions about given situations, and more importantly, history tells us what can work. (P.S., just about every major war in the 20th century was predicted -- ask Winston Churchil about WW2).

    If you notice, in my previous posts, I do believe in free markets. Throughout history, free markets seem to have the least negatives (still negatives, but the lesser of all evils). More importantly, the freedom of individuals to do what they will seem to improve society & prosperity. It's only when one or more individuals decide to curtail other individuals' freedoms that problems arise. Whether they be the robber barons of old or governments of today. And the current version of globalization is, IMHO, a hideous amalgamation of the two. True free trade benefits everyone; social mobility benefits everyone, and seems to result in more peaceful societies. Current globalism is about corporations using governments to co-erce populations into channeling money & productivity to themselves.

    Nevertheless, globalization presents a serious and realistic hope that many people in the world will enjoy a standard of living somewhat above the crushing poverty and desparation that had been the norm for almost everyone until recently. As such I find it amazing that so many people who claim sympathy with the poor would oppose globalization so vociferously. In my opinion, we have an ethical obligation not just to voice sympathy with the poor but to take steps which we have reason to believe could actually ameliorate their plight. As such we have an ethical obligation to be rational and effective, not just sympathetic

  4. Re:Information Retrieval by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait · on NSA Wiretapping Whistleblower
    Seems to me that Bush is wrong no matter what he does. He's in office for less than a year when 9/11 happens, and he's to blame for it, even though the previous administration did nothing about bin laden for 8 years


    Seems to me Bush supporters live in an alternate universe.
    From: http://www.anusha.com/osamasur.htm

    KARACHI: The Thursday on August 20, 1998 must have been the luckiest day in the life of Osama Bin Laden when at the last minute, he dropped the idea of visiting and having dinner at his Harkatul Jihad Al-Islami military training camp in Khost, Afghanistan. If Osama hadn't postponed the last item in his schedule for Thursday, the American Tomahawk missiles would have gotten him and some other key commanders during their post dinner Kahwa (Arabic coffee) in the open skies of Khost, 94 miles southeast of Kabul.


    It started with Carter - He sent military aid to terrorists in Afganistan to foil the Soviets. Reagan sent anti-aircraft weapons to terrorists in Afganistan to increase their killing efficiency. I blame them. What goes around, comes around. The US will be lucky if the Russians don't start supplying the terrorists with advanced weapons, just like we did.

  5. Re:We can at best hope a tie.. by legLess · · Score: 5, Informative · on Kramnik Ties Fritz; Machines Not Yet Our Masters
    Blockquothe the poster:
    My bet is that [go] will prove to be even easier than chess.
    Yowza. I believe you're sincere, but you should do much more research before spouting off. You're flat-out wrong.
    Go pieces, once placed on the board, cannot move anymore. Chess pieces can still move from one place to the other. This means that as more and more Go pieces are placed on the board, there are less and less positions the computer has to consider.
    Chess has at most 40 legal moves possible for the first move; go has 361. The average chess game has 40 moves; the average go game has 6 to 8 times that.

    So yes, after each move there are fewer go positions, but after 80 stones have been placed (the average number of chess moves), there are still 281 moves possible. You have to play more than 200 moves into a go game before you have as few move possibilities as you do for your first move in chess.
    Go requires the ability to look at patterns rather than combinations.
    If by "combinations" you mean "tacics," you're incorrect. Tactics are crucial in go, and it's only by a solid understanding of tactics that strategic thinking is possible. It's true that the rules of chess tactics are more complex than go, but it's precisely this lack of rules and formulae that make go so hard for computers.

    Go's not nearly as easily quantifiable. You can tell a chess computer that the king is worth 10,000,000 pawns, the queen 9, bishops and knights 3 or 3.5. In go, however, the only thing giving value to a stone is its position on the board and its relation to other stones ... sometimes all the other stones.
    Sure, the Go board is larger and the possible positions are greater but then there are only three possible ``cells'' to consider: the first player's stone, the second player's stone and an empty cell. That should be easier to manage than the job we are asking computer's nowadays to do: recognize people from their faces. I believe computers can match fingerprints easily today. Go should be a walk in the park.
    Um ... this is a sad series of non-sequiturs. Computers are stunningly bad at facial recognition, even in best-case scenarios. Humans, on the other hand, can recognize someone they haven't seen for 20 years based on a casual glance. Being social animals, there's literally nothing humans do better than pattern recognition, and go is all about pattern recognition.

    I think I realize what you're trying to say, though - that there are only three states for one position on a go board, while there are many more for a chess board. This is immaterial to the game. The problem computer programmers have with go is that there's no algorithm that will reliably determine if a group of stones is alive or dead without brute-forcing the entire game. Many groups can be correctly evaluated, and computers are good at scoring finished games, but computers will happily slog ahead (and lose horribly) in games that professionals would resign in disgust.

    Read a few of these pages and then reconsider your viewpoint: Note that I'm not saying go is better than chess. I think such arguments are foolish. But, to quote myself, from a computer's perspective go makes chess look like tic-tac-toe.
  6. Re:Krahulik.. chess etc.. by timster · · Score: 5, Insightful · on Slashback: Dataplay, XviD, PPC

    Not quite right. Even *Deep* Blue couldn't map out an entire game, or even all possibilities in its 25(?) moves ahead. That would constitute perfect play, which is totally beyond the capability of any computer that we could currently conceive of being built. It would stop processing a line of possibility if it looked too bad (like "hmm, if I make this move I lose my queen and two rooks, so let's stop worrying about that one).

    I don't understand what you mean by saying that the hard part is writing a random number generator. Random number generation it itself doesn't have anything to do with much. The question is the algorithms used to find the more likely moves.

    As for Go needing 10 times as much storage, you are so far off that I worry that you don't know the meaning of the number 10! Each chess move gives about 35 legal options. A player in a Go move has about 200 possible moves on average (the number starts at 361 and mostly goes down from there). After five moves from each player there are about 1.8 billion possible positions in chess -- and 64 trillion for Go. That's a factor of 32,000 more positions, and that's only five moves in. Go games usually have more moves than chess games.

    It is really laughable to even suggest that all the possible moves in Go will be stored in a computer within the next 500 years. Though that isn't necessary to beat a human shodan (as I mentioned, chess programs don't evaluate ALL of the possible positions). What's really necessary to beat a human master at Go is to be able to make some judgement on the relative value of different positions. Computers can't currently do that properly, so while a chess computer searches for that perfect move that forces checkmate, the computer playing Go has a hard time understanding what it's supposed to be searching for.

    A good article I found and got some numbers from is http://www.anusha.com/times-go.htm.