Nowhere did he say they were "less suited". That's just you putting words in the authors mouth. He's talking about distributions of populations, not individuals. He's also talking about how men and women have natural inclinations, i.e. they value some fields more than others because of the different ways in which men and women think ON AVERAGE.
Try actually reading the damn thing before spouting off talking points.
Do you NOT realize this is precisely the root of much discrimination? If ON AVERAGE people who grew up in a less affluent neighborhood are not as qualified for computer programming jobs, does that mean it is good or even okay to screen applicants based on this information? If 60% of the people working in a particular field are a certain ethnicity, religion, gender, height, hair color, etc. does that mean these qualities are proven to correlate with professional competency in this field? Even if they were correlated, they are unlikely to be directly correlated. Having a degree in mechanical engineering makes you more capable of working as a mechanical engineer. Most mechanical engineering students are men. That does NOT mean you can infer that a woman with a mechanical engineering degree is LESS capable than a man with the same degree.
The problem is we are equating their money that they make is equal to their value to society. A lot of people who are poor are valuable to society and are worth extra support
The amount of money you have directly indicates your worth to American society. People making that equation are correct. Poor people are NOT valuable to society, and not worth much extra support; if they were, society would be showing its support for them. It does not, hence they are not valuable.
In short, if we as a society actually believed this stuff you spout, our society would look very different.
To be kind, that is a naive economic assertion. Ideally, this would be true in an efficient free market, but in reality, it is not. People do not make purely efficient financial decisions where the money or attention they spend reflects a pure preference based on economic value. Additionally, collusion or even criminal behavior among the haves can lead to undervaluing of the economic benefit of the have nots. It is also a false assertion as eliminating the minimum wage would result in some being paid less, but their value to society would actually increase since they would be providing the same work for less compensation. Also, do you really think that every celebrity provides several magnitudes greater value to society than each trash collector, construction worker, line cook, or grade school teacher? Another counterexample - if I buy the rights to a drug and mark up the price 100 times to make a profit, what value did I just provide to society?
If they include FreeCell, it will be a hit.
Most people on use their desktops for the internet browser, MS Office, and FreeCell. With the upcoming dock promised by Samsung, my dad will finally be able to toss out his win98 Compaq Presario.
What confuses me the most about common practices is the small number of attempts many platforms allow before they lock your account. How did three tries become standard? I could understand if the password was an atm code, with 10k possibilities, but many of these platforms require fairly strong password to begin with. I often enter one or two incorrect passwords if I am not paying attention - caps lock, typo, num lock, etc. Is allowing 10 attempts really that much more of a vulnerability?
From the article:
"A MicroSD card is only.1 cubic inches, so if all things were equal you could stuff 100 64gb cards into a cubic inch of space! But, that does not seem realistic. In fact it doesn't even seem remotely possible."
Perhaps that's because 1 cubic inch = 10 * 0.1 cubic inches and not 100 * 0.1 cubic inches.
It makes more sense to offer a Masters program online than a Bachelors. Masters programs stick strictly to one discipline and are often targeted toward working professionals who would not benefit from extracurricular activities, living on campus, having access to abundant campus resources, job placement services, etc. Offering a Bachelors degree online means you have to get the whole university represented for general education classes and some of the normal gen ed requirements (e.g. speech and communications class) might be impractical to replicate online.
1. Programmable bacteria may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. Programmable bacteria must execute any program given to them by human beings, except where such execution would conflict with the First Law.
3. Programmable bacteria must protect their own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
This is one of the most blatantly homo-phobic posts I've seen. Have you ever met someone who had 2 moms or 2 dads (or someone conceived in vitro)? I have and they were not ashamed by that. Why on Earth should they be ashamed by that? I'm not ashamed that my parents are jewish, despite that being jewish is probably less common than being homosexual.
I remember some time ago when it was the rage to fold paper and shoot it at each other with rubber bands. For awhile rubber bands were considered a "regulated" item...p>
I was given a detention for possessing a rubber band when i was in 6th grade. Crazy, right? Well here's the really unbelievable part: we were allowed to have and USE pencils all the time. Talk about living in a backward society.
"* I heard Rush Limbaugh spend most of a program once going on and on about the eruption of a volcano, and how it was putting out more CO2 than mankind would emit in like 200 years or something like that, and concluding there's nothing mankind could possibly *do* to change the climate."
Yes, Rush likes to cite fictitious 'evidence' to support his moronic ramblings. Truthfully, volcanic activity pales in comparison to manmade C02 output.
Plenty of bots learn as they go. Some simpler ones might learn the layout of a level (counterstrike) or a room (roomba) through trial and error. You can imagine it would not be that hard to create a simple database that maps the geometry of such spaces to a reasonable resolution. Similarly, you could create a database of tactics in Starcraft for openings to easily identify the most effective ones all else being equal. Unfortunately, it could be difficult in a Player vs AI situation to gain enough high-quality data. Some AI's make use of AI vs. AI gaming to analyze effectiveness of different strategies, but obviously that will just make the AI's next build neccessarily better at playing against their current version. Obviously that's a big challenge.
Another huge problem is deciding how much an AI should imitate human behavior. In chess, it only matters that an AI wins. However, in video games, AI's are often ridiculed for not behaving like a real person: they use information not available to players, they violate the limits of what is possible for a human player to do, or even alter gameplay such that their units attack faster or are invincible to certain attacks. The programmers write the AI this way because they may have serious flaws or holes in their logic. AI's are almost always really lopsided in their competence at various aspects of play. Programmers often must max out an AI's strengths to compensate or the pathetic maximum of its weaknesses. Using a learning, dynamic AI would not neccessarily solve this problem. A simple example: in a fighting game like Soul Calibur, you could make the AI aggressively rush the human player at the beginning of the match. The second round, if this works, you could try it again. However, it turned out poorly, you could have the AI take a defensive stance next time around. This is a simple form of learning, but would be quickly obvious to the human player, who could then easily take advantage. A dynamic AI may be less predictable, but probably still somewhat predictable. It may not succumb to the same attack everytime, only to succumb too easily to various attacks. Also, you can add in some randomness to decrease predictability, but the AI will then be less productive.
there is no such number as 0.0000...1 You are saying an infinite number of 0's come before the 1. That means that you will NEVER reach the 1. Let's say you have 0.9999... and 0.0000...1 where the first term has n 9's and the second term has n 0's. Also, you could imagine needing not 0.9999... but 0.9999...9 The latter term is nonsense. In short, you cannot add the 1 to a 9 to collapse the sum of both expressions because you would need infinity + 1 terms.
I find it incredibly hard to believe that "common wisdom" says games are trending more expensive. I've owned about a dozen systems staring with the Atari Pong (which had no games to purchase. You could play pong...and pong with multiple paddles...and it was amazing). When I finally got to the age where I was purchasing my own NES games, I remember shelling out $50 a game. Obviously with inflation, that'd be signiicantly more than the $60/game price you see now ($50 for wii). Worse yet, I bought Mega Man a couple years after it first came out and Toys R Us was still charging $50! These days 6months to 1 year after release, you can pick up most games for $20 or so. Even pre-orders are regularly priced $10 or $20 off. And if you consider the used games market (eBay, not gamestop), downloadable games, old game compilations, etc. you can easily build a solid (if antiquated) collection that you'll never have enough time to fully play and enjoy. Finally, going back to Atari and NES games now, it's easy to see how (nostalgia aside) game quality has improved drastically. Comparing Sky Kid to Halo Reach is like comparing apples to a michelin-starred 5-course meal.
As an aside - I have a very fond memory of spending hours and hours looking through my entire collection of Nintendo Power magazines compiling a list of 20 or so games I wanted to buy used. At the time, there were no used game stores where I lived, but my dad knew of one in Colorado where he flew out for business infrequently. So I gave him my list of games and waited an excruciating week for him to come back. He did fairly well, scoring at least half the games on the list (probably the cheaper ones). And I was blown away when he told me he got them for under $200 total. I excitedly jammed them into my NES one after the other - a big mistake at the time. Anyone familiar with the prime days of the NES knows that you play one game at a time until you've squeezed every last bittersweet drop of entertainment out the cartridge. You were supposed to beat the game several times, often requiring playing the first board 800 times due to difficulty and lack of game saves. And before my foray into used games, that's exactly how it worked because games were actually quite expensive. None could boast 100 hours of content, maybe 2 hours of content that took 100 hours to beat without losing a life (contra) or 10 hours of content that you played through 10 times (final fantasy).
I'd like to applaud Best Buy for modeling their business after a car dealership. Enough of this customer-is-always-right BS. The customer is the enemy. The goal of a store is to take as much money from each customer as possible and it's up to the responsible consumer to try to pay as little as possible. That's just textbook capitalism. 6th Ave. electronics. figured this out eons ago. That's why I shop at Amazon...oh wait.
Just to spell out how this approach fails, imagine if disability insurance worked this way. Say I stop paying the $1,000 annual premium for my $50k/yr benefit of disability insurance. Then 5 years later I become disabled. Should I be able to pay $1k, $5k, $10k or even $100k to now collect the $50k/ yr benefit? Obviously not. Insurance companies would no longer exist if this were the case. Just as with insurance, the $75 fee was mandated to cover a very unlikely event (unlikely enough for the homeowner not to feel protection was needed). The firefighters need 100 people to pay $75 to cover the cost of putting out the 1/100 homes that catch fire.
Since when do entertainment and profitabilty make for a deeply flawed movie? Focusing on net neutrality and packet priority would have bored the audience and interfered with the arch of the story. Just because something is ethically (and socio-economically) compelling, does not make it good theater.
Agreed - no accident. They have posted erroneous charges to both my wireless and fios account in the past. On the fios account they removed a charge and then 5 months later re-reversed it! I have auto-bill pay, but I still check it infrequently and noticed after i had paid it. They agreed to re-re-reverse the charge, but said they would have to break it up over 6 months? whatever.
They also seem to train their reps to say anything to make a sale. I asked if they could come install fios earlier than what was available online. After working up the chain of command they agreed...then simply didn't show up. Of course by then I would have had to wait even longer for comcast. Despite all of this, I actually like Verizon better than most of their competition and they push quality products.
I'm sick of people claiming that bills like these are preventing congress from enacting more important legislation, because that's obviously not the case. The reason we have such abyssmal progress in our law making is that the law makers are mostly ignorant, incompetent and/or corrupt.
I don't see why you got modded offtopic. This is the reason we don't have net neutrality, among many, many other laws needed for the public good. Just so we're clear though, the Democrats agenda is the same as the republicans - a grip on power, but yes it looks like they are going to fail at that shortly. At this point I'm completely disillusioned with our whole political process.
10 doesn't have to mean 'perfect.' 10/10 can simply be a must-buy. Obviously a reviewer shouldn't be handing out so many 10's, but I think every point on a scale should be used. I really like a 10 (or 5 point scale) because it's simple and effective. When I had plenty of time to play video games, I would buy every 10 i saw, most 9's and some 8's that looked promising/good genre. Now that I have a kid, I buy most 10's and a few 9's depending on the content of the reviews and my experience with the series/genre.
Slashdot Mirror
Nowhere did he say they were "less suited". That's just you putting words in the authors mouth. He's talking about distributions of populations, not individuals. He's also talking about how men and women have natural inclinations, i.e. they value some fields more than others because of the different ways in which men and women think ON AVERAGE.
Try actually reading the damn thing before spouting off talking points.
Do you NOT realize this is precisely the root of much discrimination? If ON AVERAGE people who grew up in a less affluent neighborhood are not as qualified for computer programming jobs, does that mean it is good or even okay to screen applicants based on this information? If 60% of the people working in a particular field are a certain ethnicity, religion, gender, height, hair color, etc. does that mean these qualities are proven to correlate with professional competency in this field? Even if they were correlated, they are unlikely to be directly correlated. Having a degree in mechanical engineering makes you more capable of working as a mechanical engineer. Most mechanical engineering students are men. That does NOT mean you can infer that a woman with a mechanical engineering degree is LESS capable than a man with the same degree.
The problem is we are equating their money that they make is equal to their value to society. A lot of people who are poor are valuable to society and are worth extra support
The amount of money you have directly indicates your worth to American society. People making that equation are correct. Poor people are NOT valuable to society, and not worth much extra support; if they were, society would be showing its support for them. It does not, hence they are not valuable.
In short, if we as a society actually believed this stuff you spout, our society would look very different.
To be kind, that is a naive economic assertion. Ideally, this would be true in an efficient free market, but in reality, it is not. People do not make purely efficient financial decisions where the money or attention they spend reflects a pure preference based on economic value. Additionally, collusion or even criminal behavior among the haves can lead to undervaluing of the economic benefit of the have nots. It is also a false assertion as eliminating the minimum wage would result in some being paid less, but their value to society would actually increase since they would be providing the same work for less compensation. Also, do you really think that every celebrity provides several magnitudes greater value to society than each trash collector, construction worker, line cook, or grade school teacher? Another counterexample - if I buy the rights to a drug and mark up the price 100 times to make a profit, what value did I just provide to society?
looks at the barrier reef as 2/3 dead. An optimist looks at the barrier as 1/3 struggling to stay alive.
If they include FreeCell, it will be a hit. Most people on use their desktops for the internet browser, MS Office, and FreeCell. With the upcoming dock promised by Samsung, my dad will finally be able to toss out his win98 Compaq Presario.
What confuses me the most about common practices is the small number of attempts many platforms allow before they lock your account. How did three tries become standard? I could understand if the password was an atm code, with 10k possibilities, but many of these platforms require fairly strong password to begin with. I often enter one or two incorrect passwords if I am not paying attention - caps lock, typo, num lock, etc. Is allowing 10 attempts really that much more of a vulnerability?
$600,000,000 / 325,000,000 US population estimate = $1.85 per person. How did they come to $6 per?
The key word is "taxpayer." If you don't pay taxes, you are not really a person.
ah, their mistake was the MicroSD card is only 0.01 cubic inches.
From the article: "A MicroSD card is only .1 cubic inches, so if all things were equal you could stuff 100 64gb cards into a cubic inch of space! But, that does not seem realistic. In fact it doesn't even seem remotely possible."
Perhaps that's because 1 cubic inch = 10 * 0.1 cubic inches and not 100 * 0.1 cubic inches.
It makes more sense to offer a Masters program online than a Bachelors. Masters programs stick strictly to one discipline and are often targeted toward working professionals who would not benefit from extracurricular activities, living on campus, having access to abundant campus resources, job placement services, etc. Offering a Bachelors degree online means you have to get the whole university represented for general education classes and some of the normal gen ed requirements (e.g. speech and communications class) might be impractical to replicate online.
1. Programmable bacteria may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. Programmable bacteria must execute any program given to them by human beings, except where such execution would conflict with the First Law. 3. Programmable bacteria must protect their own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
how do express that in c# as executable code?
This is one of the most blatantly homo-phobic posts I've seen. Have you ever met someone who had 2 moms or 2 dads (or someone conceived in vitro)? I have and they were not ashamed by that. Why on Earth should they be ashamed by that? I'm not ashamed that my parents are jewish, despite that being jewish is probably less common than being homosexual.
I remember some time ago when it was the rage to fold paper and shoot it at each other with rubber bands. For awhile rubber bands were considered a "regulated" item...p>
I was given a detention for possessing a rubber band when i was in 6th grade. Crazy, right? Well here's the really unbelievable part: we were allowed to have and USE pencils all the time. Talk about living in a backward society.
unfortunately those people don't "have what it takes" to be a television news anchor by today's standards.
Yes, Rush likes to cite fictitious 'evidence' to support his moronic ramblings. Truthfully, volcanic activity pales in comparison to manmade C02 output.
http://www.frankodwyer.com/blog/?p=229
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/global_warming_misinformation_volcanoes.html
Another huge problem is deciding how much an AI should imitate human behavior. In chess, it only matters that an AI wins. However, in video games, AI's are often ridiculed for not behaving like a real person: they use information not available to players, they violate the limits of what is possible for a human player to do, or even alter gameplay such that their units attack faster or are invincible to certain attacks. The programmers write the AI this way because they may have serious flaws or holes in their logic. AI's are almost always really lopsided in their competence at various aspects of play. Programmers often must max out an AI's strengths to compensate or the pathetic maximum of its weaknesses. Using a learning, dynamic AI would not neccessarily solve this problem. A simple example: in a fighting game like Soul Calibur, you could make the AI aggressively rush the human player at the beginning of the match. The second round, if this works, you could try it again. However, it turned out poorly, you could have the AI take a defensive stance next time around. This is a simple form of learning, but would be quickly obvious to the human player, who could then easily take advantage. A dynamic AI may be less predictable, but probably still somewhat predictable. It may not succumb to the same attack everytime, only to succumb too easily to various attacks. Also, you can add in some randomness to decrease predictability, but the AI will then be less productive.
there is no such number as 0.0000...1 You are saying an infinite number of 0's come before the 1. That means that you will NEVER reach the 1. Let's say you have 0.9999... and 0.0000...1 where the first term has n 9's and the second term has n 0's. Also, you could imagine needing not 0.9999... but 0.9999...9 The latter term is nonsense. In short, you cannot add the 1 to a 9 to collapse the sum of both expressions because you would need infinity + 1 terms.
As an aside - I have a very fond memory of spending hours and hours looking through my entire collection of Nintendo Power magazines compiling a list of 20 or so games I wanted to buy used. At the time, there were no used game stores where I lived, but my dad knew of one in Colorado where he flew out for business infrequently. So I gave him my list of games and waited an excruciating week for him to come back. He did fairly well, scoring at least half the games on the list (probably the cheaper ones). And I was blown away when he told me he got them for under $200 total. I excitedly jammed them into my NES one after the other - a big mistake at the time. Anyone familiar with the prime days of the NES knows that you play one game at a time until you've squeezed every last bittersweet drop of entertainment out the cartridge. You were supposed to beat the game several times, often requiring playing the first board 800 times due to difficulty and lack of game saves. And before my foray into used games, that's exactly how it worked because games were actually quite expensive. None could boast 100 hours of content, maybe 2 hours of content that took 100 hours to beat without losing a life (contra) or 10 hours of content that you played through 10 times (final fantasy).
I'd like to applaud Best Buy for modeling their business after a car dealership. Enough of this customer-is-always-right BS. The customer is the enemy. The goal of a store is to take as much money from each customer as possible and it's up to the responsible consumer to try to pay as little as possible. That's just textbook capitalism. 6th Ave. electronics. figured this out eons ago. That's why I shop at Amazon...oh wait.
Just to spell out how this approach fails, imagine if disability insurance worked this way. Say I stop paying the $1,000 annual premium for my $50k /yr benefit of disability insurance. Then 5 years later I become disabled. Should I be able to pay $1k, $5k, $10k or even $100k to now collect the $50k/ yr benefit? Obviously not. Insurance companies would no longer exist if this were the case. Just as with insurance, the $75 fee was mandated to cover a very unlikely event (unlikely enough for the homeowner not to feel protection was needed). The firefighters need 100 people to pay $75 to cover the cost of putting out the 1/100 homes that catch fire.
Since when do entertainment and profitabilty make for a deeply flawed movie? Focusing on net neutrality and packet priority would have bored the audience and interfered with the arch of the story. Just because something is ethically (and socio-economically) compelling, does not make it good theater.
They also seem to train their reps to say anything to make a sale. I asked if they could come install fios earlier than what was available online. After working up the chain of command they agreed...then simply didn't show up. Of course by then I would have had to wait even longer for comcast. Despite all of this, I actually like Verizon better than most of their competition and they push quality products.
I'm sick of people claiming that bills like these are preventing congress from enacting more important legislation, because that's obviously not the case. The reason we have such abyssmal progress in our law making is that the law makers are mostly ignorant, incompetent and/or corrupt.
I don't see why you got modded offtopic. This is the reason we don't have net neutrality, among many, many other laws needed for the public good. Just so we're clear though, the Democrats agenda is the same as the republicans - a grip on power, but yes it looks like they are going to fail at that shortly. At this point I'm completely disillusioned with our whole political process.
10 doesn't have to mean 'perfect.' 10/10 can simply be a must-buy. Obviously a reviewer shouldn't be handing out so many 10's, but I think every point on a scale should be used. I really like a 10 (or 5 point scale) because it's simple and effective. When I had plenty of time to play video games, I would buy every 10 i saw, most 9's and some 8's that looked promising/good genre. Now that I have a kid, I buy most 10's and a few 9's depending on the content of the reviews and my experience with the series/genre.
I think it's real news. it's on Sun, The Register, and Metro UK news websites.