To nitpick, by taking your second option and leaving the trees in the ground instead of burning them, you would theoretically have a higher rate of CO2 uptake, which would make a difference.
Seriously, did you never hang out at an arcade growing up? Even if you grew up before video arcades, you'd have found someone who was king of the local pinball tables. People like showing off their skills, and people like watching a skilled performance. Public displays of personal skill have a long, deep-seated tradition in many, many cultures, and are a driving force in many non-team sports, and even some team ones such as the pick-up basketball games played in inner cities. It's really not that strange.
you will perform your duty and call your representatives to support it won't you?
I could be wrong, but based on what I read above, this doesn't sound like a plan that needs legislative support in any way, shape or form. A candidate is going to need legislative backing for tax breaks, or health care, or even funding for new programs, but the President actually has significant authority when it comes to deciding how the executive branch runs on a day to day basis.
To be linguistically fair, there are a number of situations where "submission" is used where oppression is not part of the picture, and as far as I can tell they are mostly derived from the use of the word to indicate humility. As an example readily at hand, there's a very good reason why the button you clicked when you posted your comment was labeled "Submit" instead of "Be Oppressed".
The bus company here uses the time from WWVB; it's the time posted in their offices, the time their drivers are required to keep while on-route, and the time displayed by the radio-controlled clock on many of their busses.
The Chicago bus system is reliable to within a minute of posted times? How do they compensate for changes in traffic? I can recall the days not long ago when DC's rail was that precise, but now they're delayed as often as not, and with the buses you're looking at a 10-15 minute window even on the reliable routes.
I'll grant you many of the episodes were really corny, and some were poorly done, but honestly I found "Objects in Space" to be one of the most well-written pieces of television I'd seen in years. Jubal made a fantastic counterpoint to River in that show, which itself was an exploration of the way in which we bring meaning to ourselves and the people and things we interact with -- as well as the ways in which that existentialism can be twisted when applied towards an end. The bounty hunter, in his attempts to purge meaning from his own life as a way of abdicating responsibility for his actions, ends up more accurately than most characters mirroring his own desires in the way he interprets the world around him. The idea of being a lion fits with his desire to put a sheen of honor over the killing he enjoys, and so that desire determines the meaning with which he imbues Simon's words.
Honestly, I don't think they _need_ computers, and if your goal is to provide children with the minimum functional education, then you can quite easily do that without computers.
If, on the other hand, your goal is to expose children to a wide range of subjects and systems of thought, so that as a foundation for the rest of their education and life they learn how to take in, deal with, reason about, and critically compare new and different ideas, then you could do far worse than making sure everyone has access to wikipedia, interactive science and art demonstrations, political analysis, and a wide variety of news sources. The best way I know of to give someone all that information is to hand them a computer with an internet connection.
Anecdotal evidence is meaningless. People need to stop mentioning it on Slashdot.
Anecdotal evidence isn't necessarily meaningless. People just need to be careful what conclusions they draw from it. Assuming that the GP is telling the truth (and with broken 360s, there is probably material evidence that could be checked if needed), then this evidence demonstrates that it is possible for one Slashdot user to know a group of 360 owners who have all had at least one 360 fail on them. It would, in fact, be very useful in disproving any claims to the contrary. So long as nobody interprets this single bit of information as being a statistical study of representative data, then we're all good.
Anyone know what I would need to learn and do in order to get involved on a theoretical or practical level?
The first thing I'd do is get a feel for the field. MIT's OpenCourseWare has some interesting stuff like Intro to Robotics. I've actually also found wikipedia to be helpful in determining the areas of specialization within a field, and some of the basic jargon that has developed. There will be certain levels of math, programming, and possibly physics or electrical engineering knowledge that you'll need to have, and I've found one of the best ways to get a feel for those is to go to a local university library and pull some papers/conference proceedings on the subject. Read a few of them (from different people, and preferably different conferences/journals) that have titles which interest you, and take note of things like the level of mathematics or engineering knowledge being applied. If you don't understand it, don't be discouraged...it's just a technical language used in papers, and it's not terribly hard to learn, especially when you're learning it within a directly applied framework. It's worth it too, being able to quickly and easily read the papers being published lets you benefit from a huge realm of work that other people are already doing.
On a hobbyist level of involvement, my impression is that's it's far cheaper to get involved with the AI/control side of robotics than it is the hardware design. There are a number of freely/cheeply available robot simulators - some are listed at http://www.robotcafe.com/dir/Software/Simulators/ and http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Robotics/Software/Simulation/. These let you play with the control systems without having to worry about constructing/purchasing the hardware. Alternatively, for less than $1000 US, you can set up a fairly cheap robotics lab with an AIBO, a wireless connection to your computer, and software like Tekkotsu or URBI.
And of course, if some aspect of it really catches your interest and you want to pursue it professionally, your best bet is probably to start looking at studying with the academic departments which have been publishing the papers/materials you've enjoyed the most, or which have strong programs in that area of the field.
This sounds like it has remarkable parallels to Parkinson's, actually. Both conditions are characterized by an difficulty initiating voluntary activity, and seem to be caused in large part by a lack of/inability to process dopamine or equivalent neurotransmitter. I wonder if the section of the roach's brain which is stung serves a function analogous to the basal ganglia in a human?
Some quick poking around shows that P. D. Evans, in OCTOPAMINE DISTRIBUTION IN THE INSECT NERVOUS SYSTEM (1978), demonstrated
that octopamine distribution was highly localized in cockroaches, particularly in the ganglia of the ventral nerve cord. From what I can read, there would have to be some pathway for distribution, most likely to the area which is stung by the wasp. If this area really does act in a similar manner to the basal ganglia in humans, providing inhibition via a feedback loop from the higher control centers of the brain, then it should be broadly connected to the mushroom bodies (if not a part of them itself).
Does anyone here know more about cockroach neuroanatomy?
I totally agree about the power of the PS3. Thanks to Sony's use of open standards, I now have a ps3 in my room running neural networks far faster than any of my desktop boxes. They built an impressive machine (except for the fact that I can't expand the RAM). It makes me happy and I will love them for it while it sits in my bedroom crunching numbers.
That said, when I'm stumped while coding and want to take a break, I'll be in the living room with the Wii.
Or don't shop at sites which are part of the Beacon program. It takes the interaction of two sites to cause this particular issue, and I'd personally find it easier to stop using fandango and epicurious than to drop Facebook.
If you tell these partner sites why they're losing your business, that may be even more effective. With the launch of these services, the partner sites are Facebook's real customers, and they're the people who will put pressure on Facebook to change Beacon if they start losing business because of it.
If they going to be awarded damages, wouldn't the more they have sold, inflate the settlement?
Based on my limited, non-lawerly knowledge, at least in the U.S. the basis for civil suits over patents is that the unlicensed use of the patented invention is causing harm. If you choose to let the infringement continue because it's of greater benefit to you than shutting it down, then you aren't giving a very strong impression that it's harming you. That's why you pretty much have to react when you find out about the infringement, and try to shut down the infringing use. Plus, I get the impression that most C&D orders are used to set a deadline and force the infringing party to negotiate a licensing deal, instead of letting them bog down negotiations in order to continue profiting from an unlicensed copy of your invention. Once the license is in place, there's no longer infringement, and both parties want to sell as many as possible, so the C&D generally goes away.
(People with more knowledge on these things - feel free to correct me)
For what it's worth, I read it more as "Don't tell the teachers how to do their job - they've spent a lot of time on this and have reasons for their preferred solution", rather than "Don't teach anyone anything unless you're a professional educator."
I don't know how the GP meant things, but linguistically the translation of acronyms from english to french does tend to invert them. A massive number of english words are of french/latin origin, meaning that many acronyms will keep all their same first letters. At this point the difference in adjective placement kicks in, and letters that were before the noun end up being abbreviated after it, often in inverse order...so while the underlying reason wasn't mentioned, acronyms in the two languages do have a strong tendency to be inversions of each other.
I'd argue against that. In my lifetime (since the late 1970's) I've seen amazing progress. Cars have started using different engines on a wide scale for the first time since the early 20th century, plausible theories of physics have been advanced to unify quantum mechanics and relativity, and parents walking through the subway have to explain to their young children that all phones used to have cords like the ones on the wall.
The world has been connected in a way never before seen via the internet, and embedded computers are making AI pervasive, easing many day to day tasks, from a car that parks itself to a phone that knows what word I want to type based on past usage patterns, or a camera that can recognize faces. Those that aren't embedded are displaying their imagery on screens which are not only made of an effectively heatless light source, but one which we are now growing organically. Every day I read stories selected automatically from hundreds of newspapers, and for better or worse robots have begun fighting for us in wartime. I walk around with thousands of hours of music in my pocket, and what's playing can be altered at the touch of a button, even automatically selected to suit my mood.
The introduction of the FMRI and MRI have allowed us to safely look inside a persons head without opening it up (which if you think about it is truly amazing), and to see with such detail and precision that we can follow distinct tracts of neural connections (diffusion tensor imaging) or watch the patterns of thought activity play across a living human brain (FMRI). The Poincaré Conjecture was proven after stumping mathematicians for a hundred years, and new construction materials are allowing us to build ever grander and more elaborate buildings, of a scale that dwarf the skyscrapers of the previous century. People can don gloves and climb walls like geckos. We have mapped the human genome and brought cloning from conjecture into reality.
If we go back a bit before my birth, we began to take people's failing organs out and replace them with new ones, or with artificial ones we have made ourselves. Now we can alter blood types and revitalize failing systems with stem cells. If you suffer nerve damage and are rendered blind or deaf, we can wire sensory devices directly into your brain to bypass the affected areas. We have eradicated smallpox and invented plastics, not to mention the introduction of home refrigeration. Containerization revolutionized the shipping industry, allowing me to eat whatever food I want at any time of year, without regard for growing seasons. We understand how continents form, and that the earth moves beneath our feet.
This is an amazing time, and breakthroughs are happening every day. Many of us just don't see them, because of the sheer volume we encounter, and the rate of change we have become accustomed to.
Disclaimer: I haven't seen the show in question, so I may be off here.
A good argument can be made that, while Ralph Baer deserves an absolute mountain of credit, he wasn't the one who invented video games. As part of his dissertation on human-computer interaction, A.S. Douglas created a video game called naughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) in 1952 on the EDSAC computer at Cambridge, producing the earliest video game of which I've been able to find a photograph/working (emulated) model. http://www.pong-story.com/1952.htm
US Patent 2,455,992, however, describes a video game system in which the player adjusts the angle of a missile launcher in an attempt to shoot down targets...an early version of scorched earth, so to speak. It was filed on January 25, 1947 by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Man, making it the earliest video game I've been able to find evidence of. http://www.jmargolin.com/patents/2455992.pdf
Good catch - that'll teach me to post sources without looking at them more carefully.
Since the start of 2006 it looks like that page sums to 14.49 million units sold, but the PSP appears to have been shipping (at least in Asia) since December 2004. That still leaves us with roughly a year unaccounted for, and while it doesn't seem impossible for that year to include ~10.5 million sales, It'd still be cool to find actual numbers.
Speaking of this sort of thing - does anyone know of good microblogging/twitter-equivalent software for corporations? I work in a group of about 40 people spread around the world, and we're looking for a simple tool to just let us all keep up with what everyone else is up to throughout the day (ideally with some support for tagging).
Ease of access and a minimal number of clicks to send a message are far more important than a ton of extra features and the overhead that comes with them, like in Microsoft Groove. We'd just use twitter, but keeping company information on third party servers is somewhat frowned upon.
Slashdot Mirror
To nitpick, by taking your second option and leaving the trees in the ground instead of burning them, you would theoretically have a higher rate of CO2 uptake, which would make a difference.
Seriously, did you never hang out at an arcade growing up? Even if you grew up before video arcades, you'd have found someone who was king of the local pinball tables. People like showing off their skills, and people like watching a skilled performance. Public displays of personal skill have a long, deep-seated tradition in many, many cultures, and are a driving force in many non-team sports, and even some team ones such as the pick-up basketball games played in inner cities. It's really not that strange.
To be linguistically fair, there are a number of situations where "submission" is used where oppression is not part of the picture, and as far as I can tell they are mostly derived from the use of the word to indicate humility. As an example readily at hand, there's a very good reason why the button you clicked when you posted your comment was labeled "Submit" instead of "Be Oppressed".
In their defense, 1184 pages _is_ about the same length as one of Jordan's books.
Recursion is a really cool concept, even when you're too young to call it that.
Honestly, I don't think they _need_ computers, and if your goal is to provide children with the minimum functional education, then you can quite easily do that without computers.
If, on the other hand, your goal is to expose children to a wide range of subjects and systems of thought, so that as a foundation for the rest of their education and life they learn how to take in, deal with, reason about, and critically compare new and different ideas, then you could do far worse than making sure everyone has access to wikipedia, interactive science and art demonstrations, political analysis, and a wide variety of news sources. The best way I know of to give someone all that information is to hand them a computer with an internet connection.
CA received a statement from Facebook following their blog entries, which speaks to the use of this data.
On a hobbyist level of involvement, my impression is that's it's far cheaper to get involved with the AI/control side of robotics than it is the hardware design. There are a number of freely/cheeply available robot simulators - some are listed at http://www.robotcafe.com/dir/Software/Simulators/ and http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Robotics/Software/Simulation/. These let you play with the control systems without having to worry about constructing/purchasing the hardware. Alternatively, for less than $1000 US, you can set up a fairly cheap robotics lab with an AIBO, a wireless connection to your computer, and software like Tekkotsu or URBI.
And of course, if some aspect of it really catches your interest and you want to pursue it professionally, your best bet is probably to start looking at studying with the academic departments which have been publishing the papers/materials you've enjoyed the most, or which have strong programs in that area of the field.
This sounds like it has remarkable parallels to Parkinson's, actually. Both conditions are characterized by an difficulty initiating voluntary activity, and seem to be caused in large part by a lack of/inability to process dopamine or equivalent neurotransmitter. I wonder if the section of the roach's brain which is stung serves a function analogous to the basal ganglia in a human?
Some quick poking around shows that P. D. Evans, in OCTOPAMINE DISTRIBUTION IN THE INSECT NERVOUS SYSTEM (1978), demonstrated that octopamine distribution was highly localized in cockroaches, particularly in the ganglia of the ventral nerve cord. From what I can read, there would have to be some pathway for distribution, most likely to the area which is stung by the wasp. If this area really does act in a similar manner to the basal ganglia in humans, providing inhibition via a feedback loop from the higher control centers of the brain, then it should be broadly connected to the mushroom bodies (if not a part of them itself).
Does anyone here know more about cockroach neuroanatomy?
I totally agree about the power of the PS3. Thanks to Sony's use of open standards, I now have a ps3 in my room running neural networks far faster than any of my desktop boxes. They built an impressive machine (except for the fact that I can't expand the RAM). It makes me happy and I will love them for it while it sits in my bedroom crunching numbers.
That said, when I'm stumped while coding and want to take a break, I'll be in the living room with the Wii.
If you tell these partner sites why they're losing your business, that may be even more effective. With the launch of these services, the partner sites are Facebook's real customers, and they're the people who will put pressure on Facebook to change Beacon if they start losing business because of it.
(People with more knowledge on these things - feel free to correct me)
For what it's worth, I read it more as "Don't tell the teachers how to do their job - they've spent a lot of time on this and have reasons for their preferred solution", rather than "Don't teach anyone anything unless you're a professional educator."
I don't know how the GP meant things, but linguistically the translation of acronyms from english to french does tend to invert them. A massive number of english words are of french/latin origin, meaning that many acronyms will keep all their same first letters. At this point the difference in adjective placement kicks in, and letters that were before the noun end up being abbreviated after it, often in inverse order...so while the underlying reason wasn't mentioned, acronyms in the two languages do have a strong tendency to be inversions of each other.
I'd argue against that. In my lifetime (since the late 1970's) I've seen amazing progress. Cars have started using different engines on a wide scale for the first time since the early 20th century, plausible theories of physics have been advanced to unify quantum mechanics and relativity, and parents walking through the subway have to explain to their young children that all phones used to have cords like the ones on the wall.
The world has been connected in a way never before seen via the internet, and embedded computers are making AI pervasive, easing many day to day tasks, from a car that parks itself to a phone that knows what word I want to type based on past usage patterns, or a camera that can recognize faces. Those that aren't embedded are displaying their imagery on screens which are not only made of an effectively heatless light source, but one which we are now growing organically. Every day I read stories selected automatically from hundreds of newspapers, and for better or worse robots have begun fighting for us in wartime. I walk around with thousands of hours of music in my pocket, and what's playing can be altered at the touch of a button, even automatically selected to suit my mood.
The introduction of the FMRI and MRI have allowed us to safely look inside a persons head without opening it up (which if you think about it is truly amazing), and to see with such detail and precision that we can follow distinct tracts of neural connections (diffusion tensor imaging) or watch the patterns of thought activity play across a living human brain (FMRI). The Poincaré Conjecture was proven after stumping mathematicians for a hundred years, and new construction materials are allowing us to build ever grander and more elaborate buildings, of a scale that dwarf the skyscrapers of the previous century. People can don gloves and climb walls like geckos. We have mapped the human genome and brought cloning from conjecture into reality.
If we go back a bit before my birth, we began to take people's failing organs out and replace them with new ones, or with artificial ones we have made ourselves. Now we can alter blood types and revitalize failing systems with stem cells. If you suffer nerve damage and are rendered blind or deaf, we can wire sensory devices directly into your brain to bypass the affected areas. We have eradicated smallpox and invented plastics, not to mention the introduction of home refrigeration. Containerization revolutionized the shipping industry, allowing me to eat whatever food I want at any time of year, without regard for growing seasons. We understand how continents form, and that the earth moves beneath our feet.
This is an amazing time, and breakthroughs are happening every day. Many of us just don't see them, because of the sheer volume we encounter, and the rate of change we have become accustomed to.
Disclaimer: I haven't seen the show in question, so I may be off here.
A good argument can be made that, while Ralph Baer deserves an absolute mountain of credit, he wasn't the one who invented video games. As part of his dissertation on human-computer interaction, A.S. Douglas created a video game called naughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) in 1952 on the EDSAC computer at Cambridge, producing the earliest video game of which I've been able to find a photograph/working (emulated) model. http://www.pong-story.com/1952.htm
US Patent 2,455,992, however, describes a video game system in which the player adjusts the angle of a missile launcher in an attempt to shoot down targets...an early version of scorched earth, so to speak. It was filed on January 25, 1947 by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Man, making it the earliest video game I've been able to find evidence of. http://www.jmargolin.com/patents/2455992.pdf
Good catch - that'll teach me to post sources without looking at them more carefully.
Since the start of 2006 it looks like that page sums to 14.49 million units sold, but the PSP appears to have been shipping (at least in Asia) since December 2004. That still leaves us with roughly a year unaccounted for, and while it doesn't seem impossible for that year to include ~10.5 million sales, It'd still be cool to find actual numbers.
Speaking of this sort of thing - does anyone know of good microblogging/twitter-equivalent software for corporations? I work in a group of about 40 people spread around the world, and we're looking for a simple tool to just let us all keep up with what everyone else is up to throughout the day (ideally with some support for tagging).
Ease of access and a minimal number of clicks to send a message are far more important than a ton of extra features and the overhead that comes with them, like in Microsoft Groove. We'd just use twitter, but keeping company information on third party servers is somewhat frowned upon.