Slashdot Mirror

Obligatory

No, I didn't miss it, and I think the bond is potentially a good idea, but the problem isn't just turning it around to provide an incentive for examiners to reject bad patents - it's also figuring out a way to penalise the outright patent trolls and/or submitters of overly broad patents without placing an unfair burden on either lone inventors or the larger corporations/universities that produce genuine patent candidates in bulk. That's not entirely clear cut either, because for every pure patent troll, you've also got companies that apply for a mix of worthy and frivolous patents, and for many of those the cost of a bond (even one of $50k) is potentially just the cost of doing business. A company could afford to write off a lot of $50k bonds on rejected frivolous patents if they can get just one of them through and leverage it into settlements totalling ten of millions, or more, and that's the more fundamental issue with the system; the entire thing is too easily gamed by the big patent mills and the trolls.

The way to address that, and improve the signal to noise ratio across the board, is to increase the fees and/or bond for every rejected patent. e.g. say $5k for the first patent application, but if that gets rejected after any appeals then subsequent applications cost $10k, and it keeps going up, and up, and up, with each failed application and either doesn't come back down for quite some time, or maybe ever. That's necessary to prevent XKCD's bobcat scenario; large companies need to be prevented from gaming the system by trying to slip an overly broad patent through every now and then, then bringing the fees back down through more legitimate applications. Buying a patent portfolio? Congrats, you also bought their patent filing reputation and any increased fees that result from it. I'm still missing a way to deter patent trolls from filing each application as a new inventor or shell company to help keep their fees down, then transferring any successful applications to their patent pool though... Some kind of corporate registration and tax filings that could be cross-checked with other government agencies, perhaps?

Is there any promising theories how a neural network could produce consciousness? Is it gradual or does consciousness rise all of a sudden after a certain threshold is exceeded? Like, with x billion neurons and y billion connections you are not conscious but having (x+1) billion neurons you suddenly are conscious. If it is gradual then what does is mean to be less conscious or more conscious? There's many unknowns and I haven't seen any convincing ideas how NN could explain anything related to consciousness.

I have certainly experienced what I would consider to be partially conscious states, so yes, I would say that it is likely gradual and that things can be conscious to different and varying degrees. As to simply counting connections, I would guess that particular types of organization and weighting would also be required. (We aren't quite just a big pile of linear algebra.)

There are people doing actual research in this area. For example, some researchers have tried monitoring brain activity while a patient goes under anesthesia. Some anesthetics cause neuron firing rates across the brain to drop dramatically; everything sort of turns off. For other drugs, firing rates stay similar, but activity ceases to be correlated between normally related regions (sensory and motor, for example). Fascinating stuff, and I look forward to future results in this area.

Obligatory XKCD

https://xkcd.com/505/

Conway's Game of Life is indeed Turing Complete (see also: A New Kind of Science) and this is indeed pretty awesome that they were able to do this...

Obligatory slashdot xkcd post. I'm sure Larry had it on his wall.

https://xkcd.com/10/

also, https://xkcd.com/1013/

A lot of it comes down to arrogance, competitiveness, and aggression, as well as a a certain level of intelligence, and low aversion to risk.

I see countless numbers of people who have all of the same characteristics at the local homeless shelter too. (Believe me, the majority aren't stupid, lazy, passive. Most drug abuse starts from a low aversion to risk, for that matter.)

A low aversion to risk nearly always goes very badly unless -- like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerburg, or Richard Branson, you come from a family wealthy enough and forgiving enough to absorb the losses from your risk taking.

The guys at the homeless shelter, on the other hand, are the guys who took a chance and didn't have anything to fall back on -- and lost everything.

The survivorship bias perpetuates the myth - it's far less glamorous to learn from the mistakes of "loser's" than it is to idolize the "winners".

(See also 'sheeple')

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/610/

https://xkcd.com/1827/

totes relevant XKCD

We have chips with billions of transistors clocked at several GHz and that consume less than 10W, so I'd say that on the hardware side we are on the same level with our current technology.
The trick is in the software. Imagine a team of the worst programmers in the world, working on a project for a billion years by patching things randomly until it works, that's how the code in the human brain is written. It also weights at least a few GB and you don't have the source code. Try to understand that. Also https://xkcd.com/1605/

Relevant XKCD.

Without having read the article, I can tell you that someone's definitely going to name their kid Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;-- or similar if this goes anywhere.

And when that happens, we'll all be here to laugh at their dumb asses for riding the blockchain bandwagon.
IMO blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.

You forgot to include the relevant xkcd reference.

I'm guessing https://xkcd.com/605/

There have been some suggestions that Southpark is making fun of anyone who bought an echo. And maybe they are, Southpark will make fun of anything. But I think the real weak link here is Amazon, or anyone who puts out a such a device with such an easy exploit path. XKCD already had a comic about messing with these ( https://xkcd.com/1807/ ). Clearly these need to have an option to rename the personality anything you choose, like your wireless network. Not that people wouldn't leave it at the default, but then you could at least call the user out for being lazy.

Oh, wait.
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/am...

Sorry. Carry on.

Obligatory XKCD. There really is one for everything.

Obligatory car analogy.

It would be much worse for the hospital if they used equipment from a single vendor. That vendor could raise prices without any limit because the cost for the hospital to switch out to something else would be too expensive.

The best is to have open standards, and many vendors.

But they DO tend to use equipment from a single vendor.
All X machines will be GE, all Y machines will be Medtronisys, all machines that go "Ping!" will be Teutonic, etc.
As for open standards , we've all seen this: https://xkcd.com/927/

No more wrenches?

https://xkcd.com/538/

Then again, everything is fair game just not your face I suppose which is a small win I guess.

Obligatory XKCD

Proper Security it tough, if you are going to be 100% secure then chances are you will not be able to perform your business.

There's no such thing as 100% secure, and there never will be.

Even if you use a one time pad for encryption (which if implemented perfectly, is unbreakable from a ciphertext analysis perspective), it can still be broken in a multitude of other ways (flawed/predictable RNG for generating the pad, (accidental) pad reuse, a wrench, etc). Plus, the practicality of actually deploying one time pad encryption properly is so cumbersome that it's pretty much unused.

Perfectly implemented one time pads aside, if you had an infinitely fast computer, you could break every known encryption algorithm and decrypt every encrypted transmission ever sent. While we don't have infinitely fast computers (yet), the performance delta between a computer today and a computer 20 years ago is practically infinite. Similarly, the performance delta between your $300 laptop and a determined state level attacker or large botnet is rapidly approaching infinite.

There's far more to security than just encryption, but the basic tradeoff involved in encryption (how much computing power do I need to spend to make it relatively impractical for an adversary to brute force a decryption within $x timeframe) mirrors most security topics well.

Which brings this to mind.

You did not seem to RTFA and are simply providing routine arguments - routine enough to have an XKCD - https://www.xkcd.com/605/
Neither did I, but at least I glanced at the charts.
The article seemed to take that fallacy into account adequately.
The charts provided are over 5 years. The growth patterns are quite anomalous, especially since Python is quite old now.
If this was about something like say Elm, then your arguments would make sense since it would be starting from nothing.

Not economic until space travel is cheap enough for us to dig and trap a 1/6 G swimming pool there and sell tickets for that. https://what-if.xkcd.com/124/

Here and there.

Here and there.

https://xkcd.com/1827/

Prove the last two, otherwise you don't actually "know" those things, you just have faith in them..

Well... here's the first one.

I get called on from time to time to help non computer illiterate friends and family do things on their computer. For people like this any change is a problem.

It's far past time we allow these people to languish in their refusal to use critical thinking to solve their own problems. Hell, they don't even have to think much, just follow the flowchart! https://xkcd.com/627/

... Listening

[ I hope you all like creamed corn. ]

Back-end commands being absorbed through the front end... again: https://xkcd.com/327/

I *know* I want this one. Especially suited for Emacs!

Shortly... https://xkcd.com/619/

Maybe because of this

As a humor impaired literalist Aspie, that comic doesn't make sense to me. The delta-V need to reach the sun is orders of magnitude higher than what is needed for a sub-orbital attack. You can't just take ICBMs and "launch them into the sun". A sentient AI should know that.

there are some feats forever beyond digital computation; the Turing machine has hard boundary to its subset of solvable problems

https://xkcd.com/1875/

Maybe because of this

or this: What if there was a robot apocalypse? How long would humanity last?

Maybe because of this

or this: What if there was a robot apocalypse? How long would humanity last?

Maybe because of this

I was unsure if the proper reaction that that was "See, homeopathy works!" or "Are you sure you're a doctor?"

I see I have found one of the lucky 10,000 today who has never heard of drawing in a lawn with fertilizer. Get one area to be greener and thicker than the rest, draw what ever you like. In high school we all ways did something obscene on the football field for homecoming because our school sucked and we didn't care. Put the fertilizer down Shawshank Redemption style during gym class.

Maybe you're holding down the space bar too long.

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/566/

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/1807/

Or since you're the only person whose writing in barely or totally incomprehensible gibberish, make you super easy to identify. That's a problem with most anonymization methods: unless everyone else is using those same methods, you actually make yourself stand out.

Relevant XKCD

I wouldn't go through all that trouble in my daily personal e-mail. Only in the anonymous stuff.

Or since you're the only person whose writing in barely or totally incomprehensible gibberish, make you super easy to identify. That's a problem with most anonymization methods: unless everyone else is using those same methods, you actually make yourself stand out.

Relevant XKCD

You're supposed to post the multiple related xkcds. This one, especially the alt-text is also pertinent.

And I suppose it's my turn to be the guy that posts the related xkcd :
https://www.xkcd.com/937/

I always check the bad reviews and only the bad reviews. Good reviews generally aren't helpful, they're either fake and posted by the seller or genuine but not useful. Seeing twenty 5 star reviews that say "it worked great for me" is great, but what I really want to know is how it failed for people and if I care about those failures.

If all the bad reviews are by people who are clearly crazy or doing something stupid, I can be fairly confident in the product. If they instead reveal significant flaws, I may want to reconsider.

As always, XKCD has a relevant cartoon about this.