This. The fact that the paper doesn't even mention the "Scientific Classification" path to Linnaeus is kind of ridiculous. I mean, sure, you can argue whether or not it's valid to include that or not, but the fact that it's systematic means it's at least important to point out.
As The boojum said, you can theoretically solve a cube in any configuration in 20 moves, but it might take a long time to find that optimal solution. Computers can quickly find a just-over-20-move not-quite-optimal solution, though.
Human-friendly algorithms generally take over 50 moves, with the absolute best solves still taking more than 40.
I stepped through this video frame by frame. They rotate the cube 5 times to inspect each face first (I guess they only have one camera), paused about 0.2 seconds (presumably to calculate a solution) and then they made 21 moves plus 4 rotations to solve it. (The rotations were necessary because it only has 4 arms and can't spin the top and bottom layers.)
So yeah, looks like they computed a nearly-optimal solution, and I imagine they can probably get a just-over-20-move solution every time.
2.5" Hard Drives have been stagnant though. While SSDs have been steadily improving, the biggest 2.5" HDD you could get a few years ago was 750 GB, and now it's still just 1 TB.
If it makes you feel any better, I work for a software company, and what you describe is exactly how I conduct interviews. I ask candidates to code, but I don't actually care that much if their program is bug-free. I care about how they go about doing it, and how they figure out solutions as I point out problems. I care more about the work they show than whether they happen to get this instance exactly right.
When I was growing up, my dad told me that none of the facts I learned all the way through high school mattered that much in the end, but what mattered is that going through it taught me HOW to learn.
I've also thought about how I have some friends who don't know any of my other friends. If either of us died, there would normally be no way for the other to find out about it through the grapevine. But now with Facebook, we would probably find out by seeing other people's wall posts. I think that's actually a valuable service.
I remember seeing an episode of The Office (US) do something similar, where they decide to have a meeting at Chili's because that's the cool place to go these days. Sort of gentle ribbing about the product placement while still doing the placement.
Sorry, to clarify, I'm not saying I believe that races inherently make people different in any biological way, which I don't, but rather that people are in practice biased and racist in our society today, and so your race has an effect on your life because these perceptions affect how people act toward you. (And, for that matter, your own perception of your own race probably affects how you act as well.)
So you would make it that aid to help people escape poverty should be targeted by skin colour, rather than need? Come on, poor is poor - when you're broke, hungry, and homeless, your skin colour doesn't make your stomach growl any less.
I would say that the relevance depends on the cause of the poverty. In the United States, I imagine there are many cases of poverty where the at least one of the root causes is related to race, either because of discrimination, or culture, or other reasons, and combating these root causes may well require taking race into account. Poor may be poor, and the color of your skin doesn't make your stomach growl any less, but it may have had a role in your becoming poor in the first place. More importantly, the color of your skin may have a role in what remedies will work.
As one of the other repliers said, the effective solutions may lie not in just opening soup kitchens, but in effecting wider behavioral change.
The "race doesn't matter" argument reminds me of Stephen Colbert's gimmick, where, whenever he has a black guest, he says, "People tell me you're black, but I wouldn't be able to see that myself, because I'm blind to color." It's funny because we all know that we're not blind to race, and so pretending that we are isn't always the right solution.
I'm assuming he means that if you put, say, your Documents folders in the Dock, and you open it in column view, you can't scroll left to its parent. The Documents folder becomes the "root" of the column view, forcing you to find your home directory somewhere else if you want to get to something else in your home directory.
And I admit to taking a glance at my recently discovered notebook with 6502 instructions in hex. They were notes I jotted down in 5th grade when I was playing around with machine code on my Apple ][+. Why is it that now, some 20 years later, I feel stupider than I did in 5th grade? High-level languages have taken all the fun out of programming.:P
I'm so sad that I only started going to college (and thus having a fast Internet connection) in 1996, when Bolo was already dying. I managed to play a few games online in my first few weeks of college. Other than that, I only managed to play against my friends via LAN. That was such an amazing game.
If something is presented as factual then it is considered factual as far as copyright law is concerned.
There. I just restated Dusty's "fact" without permission. Let's see if I get sued. If Dusty's right, then I can't be sued, and if Dusty's wrong, I can. Either way, Dusty's not gonna sue me.:)
The article itself mentions that it's a robot "suitor". Further, if you look at the screenshot, the column of victims is titled, "The nickname or name of the lured female".
I think the submitter just made some assumptions and stated them as fact....
During a recent trip to China, I noticed that IE-only site are extremely popular in China. Lots of official and common sites (since as for banking) often rely on Active-X widgets and other IE-only features. Here in the US, people complain when, every once in a while, we encounter a corporate or government website with IE-only features. In China, it is the norm... This also affects Mac adoption there, though I imagine the lack of cheap clones is the bigger factor there.
It certainly will be interesting to see what happens if and when Linux becomes more popular. That's the only thing I can imagine detroning the huge Microsoft monopoly in China, because the Linux solutions will include a lot of home-grown stuff, and that will be seen as a big plus. I think Linux will still have a long way to go though. (My guess is that they will clone Active-X or something, assuming that hasn't already happened...)
I agree that you can't halt innovation, but you can choose which innovations you want to invest in. I think we need to find some way to better reward innovation in fields that don't bring in as much money. Whether you're a defense contractor or a University, military hardware research comes with huge grants, and so there's a lot of incentive to go after such things.
Sociological and cultural research doesn't pay as well, and so there aren't as many people to lobby the gov't about it. We need find ways of counteracting that imbalance.
Even when it comes to military hardware, sometimes all you need is to slant the bottoms of the vehicles to deflect IED blasts or whatnot, and the latest vehicles being deployed to Iraq finally have that. But I imagine the gov't spend a lot of money on solutions involving lots of computers first, because that's cooler..
This doesn't just affect the military. I remember reading about some innovating refridgeration technology that basically involves clay pots one inside of the other, molded in a certain way. That's the sort of thing that can have big positive effects on large groups of people, but you couldn't make much money doing it, and so we don't focus on it as much. I dunno, I think that if we're gonna live in a capitalistic society, then maybe we need to fund more initiatives like these, maybe with bounties or whatnot.
So it's not a matter of halting innovation. It's a matter of where the innovation is. There's plenty of innovation in computer and vehicle technology, but there's not enough innovation in many other areas of life that aren't as "sexy". That's what I think the problem is.
I wanted to add something to my last reply. I've noticed that, because I'm a programmer and whatnot, I tend to geek out about cool tech. I think the gov't does, too, and so it's easy to sell everyone, from higher-ups to civilians, on cool fast jets and all that stuff. And of course there are plenty of companies and college students with interests and incentives to research all that stuff.
There's less incentive to attempt social "weapons", and it's much less glamorous. As that recent Wired article pointed out, a few people trained in local customs having a cup of tea and properly negotiating and deploying propaganda can have a much bigger effect than high tech weapons. The problem is, most people, including people on Slashdot, including myself, would much rather read about cool new unmanned attack vehicles than about some dude having tea.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with geeking out about cool new tech, but I just think we need to actively keep that excitement in perspective, and to remember all the other potentially less deadly but more effective tools we have at our disposable that would could be spending our resources on.
All that said, I can totally understand an Army medic wanting to reduce soldier casualties any way possible. And I know it's easy for me to sit here in my swivel chair pontificating philosophically about all this without every having to see someone with a bullet wound.:\
I think what will be really interesting is the secondary effects of this stuff. Traditionally, the human cost has put a check on war-waging. Already, things like Predators and all our other high-tech warfare gadgets have imbalanced the soldier casualties when we wage war against a third world opponent. And they've responded by changing the rules of the game, mixing in with civilian populations, and making extensive use of roadside IEDs. (Now that I think about it, roadside IEDs are kind of like unmanned suicide bombers, turning the tables...)
I fear that all these technologies that take soldiers away from the battlefield, in combination with bringing the battlefield into cities, will result in lower barriers to entry for starting wars (because the military probably worries more about protecting its own than they do about collateral damage), but also higher (and underreported) civilian casualties. I worry that by distancing our soldiers from the battlefield, by making them safer, we might actually increase the human toll.
The Apple mouse was ranked 6th while Vista was 10, but the article has a pro-Apple stance. I just wanted to point that out. I mean, I'm a Mac fan, and I know Vista is the more current topic, but still, kinda unfair....
So a kite that provides most of the ship's power can only afford a 50% reduction in fuel consumption?
I'm more confused by how there's a 50% reduction in fuel consumption, but only 10-20% reduction in greenhouse gases. This articles sounds like it needs to cite some verifiable sources.:P
Slashdot Mirror
This. The fact that the paper doesn't even mention the "Scientific Classification" path to Linnaeus is kind of ridiculous. I mean, sure, you can argue whether or not it's valid to include that or not, but the fact that it's systematic means it's at least important to point out.
As The boojum said, you can theoretically solve a cube in any configuration in 20 moves, but it might take a long time to find that optimal solution. Computers can quickly find a just-over-20-move not-quite-optimal solution, though.
Human-friendly algorithms generally take over 50 moves, with the absolute best solves still taking more than 40.
I stepped through this video frame by frame. They rotate the cube 5 times to inspect each face first (I guess they only have one camera), paused about 0.2 seconds (presumably to calculate a solution) and then they made 21 moves plus 4 rotations to solve it. (The rotations were necessary because it only has 4 arms and can't spin the top and bottom layers.)
So yeah, looks like they computed a nearly-optimal solution, and I imagine they can probably get a just-over-20-move solution every time.
2.5" Hard Drives have been stagnant though. While SSDs have been steadily improving, the biggest 2.5" HDD you could get a few years ago was 750 GB, and now it's still just 1 TB.
If it makes you feel any better, I work for a software company, and what you describe is exactly how I conduct interviews. I ask candidates to code, but I don't actually care that much if their program is bug-free. I care about how they go about doing it, and how they figure out solutions as I point out problems. I care more about the work they show than whether they happen to get this instance exactly right.
When I was growing up, my dad told me that none of the facts I learned all the way through high school mattered that much in the end, but what mattered is that going through it taught me HOW to learn.
I've also thought about how I have some friends who don't know any of my other friends. If either of us died, there would normally be no way for the other to find out about it through the grapevine. But now with Facebook, we would probably find out by seeing other people's wall posts. I think that's actually a valuable service.
I like what I saw in someone's sig on /. once:
"The trouble with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice, not theory." :P
Thanks for that link! That was awesome! :)
Um, you're assuming that those 8 million people still would've downloaded it if they had to pay $7-9 dollars, which is probably not the case...
Well if you were eaten by a grue, wouldn't you want to be informed of it?
I remember seeing an episode of The Office (US) do something similar, where they decide to have a meeting at Chili's because that's the cool place to go these days. Sort of gentle ribbing about the product placement while still doing the placement.
Sorry, to clarify, I'm not saying I believe that races inherently make people different in any biological way, which I don't, but rather that people are in practice biased and racist in our society today, and so your race has an effect on your life because these perceptions affect how people act toward you. (And, for that matter, your own perception of your own race probably affects how you act as well.)
So you would make it that aid to help people escape poverty should be targeted by skin colour, rather than need? Come on, poor is poor - when you're broke, hungry, and homeless, your skin colour doesn't make your stomach growl any less.
I would say that the relevance depends on the cause of the poverty. In the United States, I imagine there are many cases of poverty where the at least one of the root causes is related to race, either because of discrimination, or culture, or other reasons, and combating these root causes may well require taking race into account. Poor may be poor, and the color of your skin doesn't make your stomach growl any less, but it may have had a role in your becoming poor in the first place. More importantly, the color of your skin may have a role in what remedies will work.
As one of the other repliers said, the effective solutions may lie not in just opening soup kitchens, but in effecting wider behavioral change.
The "race doesn't matter" argument reminds me of Stephen Colbert's gimmick, where, whenever he has a black guest, he says, "People tell me you're black, but I wouldn't be able to see that myself, because I'm blind to color." It's funny because we all know that we're not blind to race, and so pretending that we are isn't always the right solution.
I'm assuming he means that if you put, say, your Documents folders in the Dock, and you open it in column view, you can't scroll left to its parent. The Documents folder becomes the "root" of the column view, forcing you to find your home directory somewhere else if you want to get to something else in your home directory.
And I admit to taking a glance at my recently discovered notebook with 6502 instructions in hex. They were notes I jotted down in 5th grade when I was playing around with machine code on my Apple ][+. Why is it that now, some 20 years later, I feel stupider than I did in 5th grade? High-level languages have taken all the fun out of programming. :P
I'm so sad that I only started going to college (and thus having a fast Internet connection) in 1996, when Bolo was already dying. I managed to play a few games online in my first few weeks of college. Other than that, I only managed to play against my friends via LAN. That was such an amazing game.
A946 9900 00A9 6999 0001 A972 9900 02A9 7399 0003 A974 9900 04A9 2199 0005
:\)
(I think that should print "First!", but my 6502 machine code is rusty.
If something is presented as factual then it is considered factual as far as copyright law is concerned.
:)
There. I just restated Dusty's "fact" without permission. Let's see if I get sued. If Dusty's right, then I can't be sued, and if Dusty's wrong, I can. Either way, Dusty's not gonna sue me.
The article itself mentions that it's a robot "suitor". Further, if you look at the screenshot, the column of victims is titled, "The nickname or name of the lured female".
I think the submitter just made some assumptions and stated them as fact....
During a recent trip to China, I noticed that IE-only site are extremely popular in China. Lots of official and common sites (since as for banking) often rely on Active-X widgets and other IE-only features. Here in the US, people complain when, every once in a while, we encounter a corporate or government website with IE-only features. In China, it is the norm... This also affects Mac adoption there, though I imagine the lack of cheap clones is the bigger factor there.
It certainly will be interesting to see what happens if and when Linux becomes more popular. That's the only thing I can imagine detroning the huge Microsoft monopoly in China, because the Linux solutions will include a lot of home-grown stuff, and that will be seen as a big plus. I think Linux will still have a long way to go though. (My guess is that they will clone Active-X or something, assuming that hasn't already happened...)
I agree that you can't halt innovation, but you can choose which innovations you want to invest in. I think we need to find some way to better reward innovation in fields that don't bring in as much money. Whether you're a defense contractor or a University, military hardware research comes with huge grants, and so there's a lot of incentive to go after such things.
Sociological and cultural research doesn't pay as well, and so there aren't as many people to lobby the gov't about it. We need find ways of counteracting that imbalance.
Even when it comes to military hardware, sometimes all you need is to slant the bottoms of the vehicles to deflect IED blasts or whatnot, and the latest vehicles being deployed to Iraq finally have that. But I imagine the gov't spend a lot of money on solutions involving lots of computers first, because that's cooler..
This doesn't just affect the military. I remember reading about some innovating refridgeration technology that basically involves clay pots one inside of the other, molded in a certain way. That's the sort of thing that can have big positive effects on large groups of people, but you couldn't make much money doing it, and so we don't focus on it as much. I dunno, I think that if we're gonna live in a capitalistic society, then maybe we need to fund more initiatives like these, maybe with bounties or whatnot.
So it's not a matter of halting innovation. It's a matter of where the innovation is. There's plenty of innovation in computer and vehicle technology, but there's not enough innovation in many other areas of life that aren't as "sexy". That's what I think the problem is.
Good point.
I wanted to add something to my last reply. I've noticed that, because I'm a programmer and whatnot, I tend to geek out about cool tech. I think the gov't does, too, and so it's easy to sell everyone, from higher-ups to civilians, on cool fast jets and all that stuff. And of course there are plenty of companies and college students with interests and incentives to research all that stuff.
There's less incentive to attempt social "weapons", and it's much less glamorous. As that recent Wired article pointed out, a few people trained in local customs having a cup of tea and properly negotiating and deploying propaganda can have a much bigger effect than high tech weapons. The problem is, most people, including people on Slashdot, including myself, would much rather read about cool new unmanned attack vehicles than about some dude having tea.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with geeking out about cool new tech, but I just think we need to actively keep that excitement in perspective, and to remember all the other potentially less deadly but more effective tools we have at our disposable that would could be spending our resources on.
All that said, I can totally understand an Army medic wanting to reduce soldier casualties any way possible. And I know it's easy for me to sit here in my swivel chair pontificating philosophically about all this without every having to see someone with a bullet wound. :\
I think what will be really interesting is the secondary effects of this stuff. Traditionally, the human cost has put a check on war-waging. Already, things like Predators and all our other high-tech warfare gadgets have imbalanced the soldier casualties when we wage war against a third world opponent. And they've responded by changing the rules of the game, mixing in with civilian populations, and making extensive use of roadside IEDs. (Now that I think about it, roadside IEDs are kind of like unmanned suicide bombers, turning the tables...)
I fear that all these technologies that take soldiers away from the battlefield, in combination with bringing the battlefield into cities, will result in lower barriers to entry for starting wars (because the military probably worries more about protecting its own than they do about collateral damage), but also higher (and underreported) civilian casualties. I worry that by distancing our soldiers from the battlefield, by making them safer, we might actually increase the human toll.
The Apple mouse was ranked 6th while Vista was 10, but the article has a pro-Apple stance. I just wanted to point that out. I mean, I'm a Mac fan, and I know Vista is the more current topic, but still, kinda unfair....
:P)
(Yes yes, I know, "You must be new here."
I'm more confused by how there's a 50% reduction in fuel consumption, but only 10-20% reduction in greenhouse gases. This articles sounds like it needs to cite some verifiable sources. :P