It seems to me that a rocket's heat signature would be so different, qualitatively and quantitatively, from any other infrared signal, that sensors optimized to detect missile launches wouldn't be much use for any other kind of spying.
In the very near term, maybe. To me, what makes this much more interesting is the ability to have a display that's just about any size you want. Fold it up and stick it in your pocket; when you just want to make a phone call, you leave it as-is, but if you want something larger, you just unfold it. I agree that the prototype's not much, but I can easily envision something the size of a large desktop display that you can fold up to phone size, 5-10 years down the road.
They all start from the wholly unproven principle that the only thing stopping them from being masters of innovation is that the law prevents them from copying the works of others
Whereas you appear to be starting from the wholly unproven principle that "[t]hey all start from..." etc. In other words, a classic straw man argument. In order to back up your argument, you would have to show that every single Slashdot post on every patent-related story, including the one you just made, argues from the principle you claim is the basis of all such posts. Good luck with that.
Actually, I doubt that you can find any posts that argue from this principle explicitly, and very very few which any reasonable person would agree argue from it implicitly. Saying "software patents stifle innovation" is not the same thing at all as saying "software patents keep me personally from being the most innovative coder EVAR111," as much as you might wish it to be so. The first is an entirely reasonable statement for which there exists a massive and ever-growing body of evidence; the second is, as I said, an absurd straw man which exists only in your mass of whatever tissue trolls use for brains.
AFAIK Doggerland was mostly just submerged by rising sea levels at the start of the current interglacial period; the remaining bits of it may have been washed away by a tsunami, but most of it was already underwater. I'm not arguing with your contention that a North Sea tsunami would be devastating, just pointing out that describing Doggerland as "an area about the size of Ireland or Colorado that was washed away in the last known tsunami" is a bit of an exaggeration.
No. AT&T is Southwest Bell with lipstick. They are an amalgamation of Ameritech, PacBell, and assets they picked up on the way. But at the core, they are a "Baby Bell" monopoly. It's the management of SW Bell in their "take over the world" phase.
IOW, the original AT&T monopoly reassembling itself, exactly like GPP said. The fact that the company which kept the AT&T name was swallowed by one of its children, rather than the reverse, is really irrelevant -- the point is that it was all Ma Bell originally, and it keeps coming back to that, the monster that just won't die.
When space travel become cheap and safe enough, they will be seen as collectible items, and will be recovered.
I kind of have my doubts that it's ever going to be cheap to get out to where they are. Even if we reach the point (and I sincerely hope we do) where we're zipping around the inner planets the way we currently fly around the world, catching up with the Voyagers would be on a whole different order of difficulty. And the longer it takes us to to develop the technology, the farther away they get...
Chinese culture doesn't understand guilt the way Westerners do, and it produces engineers that will often cut corners to help out the bottom line. The attitude of the Chinese I work with is really one of arrogance, much like Americans used to be. They assume they are taking over the world, and I think it may be creating a sense apathy towards the low quality of their output.
The second and third sentences there make a lot more sense than the first. The idea that Asians don't "understand guilt the way Westerners do" is an ancient line of crap that smells strongly of racism. Guilt is a universal human emotion. OTOH, so is greed, and it's entirely true that people in countries which perceive themselves as being on the way up are often willing to pass off shoddy work in the (unfortunately, often justified) belief that their customers won't care. During the 19th century, Americans did this too -- there was a stereotype, with some basis in fact, that if you wanted high-quality products you bought European-made, but if you just wanted something cheap you bought American-made. The economic explanation is entirely sufficient.
China first launched an astronaut in orbit eight years ago.
Seven years after the US launched its first astronaut in orbit, they had sent people to the moon.
And seven years after that, we were stuck back in low Earth orbit, where we've been ever since. Actually we're about to lose that capability too. I have the strong feeling that when China does eventually get to the Moon, they'll do so in way that won't leave them unable to return seven (or forty-two!) years later.
Once again researchers have a head up their ass by looking for correlations while ignoring causation, and then presenting the correlation in the wrong order. Don't they know that people never see the distinction and assume that the correlation translates to causation as presented?
Please point to the causative claims made in TFA. Note that saying "members of group X are more likely to be in group Y" does not constitute a claim of causation.
It would have been more appropriate to state that of the 308000 people polled, 44% were liberal and 56% were conservative. Of the liberals, 58% used a PC, 42% used a Mac. Of the conservatives, 75% used a PC, 25% used a Mac. A much more informative correlation, don't you think?
Actually, the most informative thing to post would be the "crosstabs" as pollsters call them, a.k.a. a contingency table -- the number of respondents falling into each of the possible categories (Mac/liberal, Mac/conservative, PC/liberal, PC/conservative.) That allows you to estimate the joint distribution of political views and operating system choice, from which you can then model the conditional distribution to answer any question you want ("How likely are Mac users are to be liberal?", "How likely are conservatives to use PCs?" etc.) But pollsters rarely do that, either because they're trying to answer a specific question, or because they think most of their audience won't understand the data if it's presented that way. And based on your post, they may well be right.
What is even more distasteful is that somehow some political views are viewed automagically as "bad". Having different options should be a GOOD thing.
Some political views are bad. There's no way around this. There are policies which are generally good for people, and supporting these policies is good; there are policies which are generally bad for people, and supporting these policies is bad. Holding different political positions is not akin to liking different flavors of ice cream.
Your.sig illustrates this nicely. I'm guessing that you, like I and (I'm going to go out on a limb here) the majority of/.ers, understand that the PATRIOT act is a bad thing, a policy which hurts a lot more than it helps. Supporting it is therefore also bad. Anyone who supports it, no matter how good they may be in other ways, is to a certain measurable degree lowering themselves down the moral scale. They have the right to their opinion, to be sure -- and the rest of us have the right to criticize them for it.
One of the criticisms the literary-fiction crowd often levels at SF, and other genre-fiction-called-genre-fiction, is that it's too formulaic. Now you're saying that following a rigid set of rules is what makes literary fiction literary? Um... okay, have fun with that.
F is a snobbish crowd every bit as much as mainstream, and attempts by more mainstream authors to "dabble" in SF are generally scorned in SF circles.
Because it's usually lousy SF, clearly written by people who have no knowledge of or respect for the genre. I've lost count of the number of major literary fiction authors I've seen lauded for writing Bold! Daring! Innovative! works of science fiction -- except it's not marketed as science fiction, the authors and publishers will vehemently deny that it's scieince fiction, and if it had been written and marketed as science fiction it would have been old hat fifty years ago. If a Margaret Atwood or a Cormac McCarthy wants to write SF, that's fine, but they should be honest about what they're doing, and try to familiarize themselves at least a little bit with the history of the genre so they don't make obvious beginner's mistakes.
To be fair, they eventually realized that Star Trek was worth a hell of a lot -- IMO none of the later series ever came anywhere close to the first one, but you can't accuse the networks of not supporting them.
... "It won't make any difference." The literary establishment has not only decided that anything but "serious," contemporary*, mainstream fiction isn't Literature, and any protest from authors in other** genres will not only not change their minds, but will in fact solidify their position. They'll see it as further proof of the inherent immaturity of those who write (and, by extension, those who read) "genre fiction," and be further reassured in their smugness.
* Exceptions may be made for historical fiction, as long as the history in question is within the last century or so.
** Literary fiction is a genre of its own, with rules far more rigid than those of SF and fantasy and at least as rigid as those of horror, romance and Westerns, but you'll never get them to admit it.
Good point. There's nothing about red, green, and blue that says they have to be the primary colors of visible light; the fact that we perceive them that way is a function of the way our cone cells work. IIRC, there are birds that can see four primary colors, while various mammals (e.g. dogs) are not actually "colorblind" but only see two primary colors, which makes their range of color perception more limited than ours. On a world with two suns having different spectra, you'd expect animals to evolve eyes capable of seeing more than any animal on Earth.
Although it's possible to parse some meaning from your post, your incoherent sentence structure and gratuitous use of quotation marks makes your criticism of others' ability to think an object lesson in glass houses and throwing stones.
It wasn't compulsory. My grades in other subjects improved dramatically as a result.... Really glad this is happening. (emphasis mine)
I have no doubt that chess is a very useful, as well as enjoyable, intellectual activity for students who enjoy it, but I strongly suspect that the main effect of making it compulsory for all students will be to create a generation who mostly regard it as "one of those boring things we had to do in school" and won't get any real value from it.
Grrr. That should be "... cannot possess" rather than "cannot assess" above, of course. Perhaps judicious use of typos is the key to passing the Turing Test.
Moreover, human languages cannot be entirely translated by just symbol manipulation. Context plays an important role in ironing out all the ambiguities inherent in our languages. So does knowing how to take a colloquialism in one language and express that meaning in another. Or stating that there is no real equivalent.
And if you create a piece of software which can do all those things, what basis do you have for saying that it doesn't understand the language? The answer, of course, comes back to the assertion "computers cannot understand," or equivalently, "understanding is a quality computers cannot assess." Pretty much every defense of the Chinese Room, and more-or-less equivalent arguments like TFA, consist of this kind of raw assertion followed by endless circular elaboration.
What people who do this are really saying is "computers do not have souls, for only man is made in the image of God," but they lack the courage to state it in such plain terms.
Furthermore, the emotion we identify as "regret" seems to me to line up neatly with the economic definition. I defy anyone to prove that when we feel regret, our brains are doing anything other than comparing the reward we received for a particular action with the maximum reward we think we could have received for a different action. TFA is more or less playing the Chinese Room game: "I assert that computers can't do X, because computers can't do X, because I assert that computers can't do X."
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me that a rocket's heat signature would be so different, qualitatively and quantitatively, from any other infrared signal, that sensors optimized to detect missile launches wouldn't be much use for any other kind of spying.
My God, a bin-Laden-related conspiracy theory I can believe in!
In the very near term, maybe. To me, what makes this much more interesting is the ability to have a display that's just about any size you want. Fold it up and stick it in your pocket; when you just want to make a phone call, you leave it as-is, but if you want something larger, you just unfold it. I agree that the prototype's not much, but I can easily envision something the size of a large desktop display that you can fold up to phone size, 5-10 years down the road.
They all start from the wholly unproven principle that the only thing stopping them from being masters of innovation is that the law prevents them from copying the works of others
Whereas you appear to be starting from the wholly unproven principle that "[t]hey all start from ..." etc. In other words, a classic straw man argument. In order to back up your argument, you would have to show that every single Slashdot post on every patent-related story, including the one you just made, argues from the principle you claim is the basis of all such posts. Good luck with that.
Actually, I doubt that you can find any posts that argue from this principle explicitly, and very very few which any reasonable person would agree argue from it implicitly. Saying "software patents stifle innovation" is not the same thing at all as saying "software patents keep me personally from being the most innovative coder EVAR111," as much as you might wish it to be so. The first is an entirely reasonable statement for which there exists a massive and ever-growing body of evidence; the second is, as I said, an absurd straw man which exists only in your mass of whatever tissue trolls use for brains.
True. I didn't think that through before I posted. [hangs head]
And since they're calculating pi^2, it's actually 100. Oh, well.
AFAIK Doggerland was mostly just submerged by rising sea levels at the start of the current interglacial period; the remaining bits of it may have been washed away by a tsunami, but most of it was already underwater. I'm not arguing with your contention that a North Sea tsunami would be devastating, just pointing out that describing Doggerland as "an area about the size of Ireland or Colorado that was washed away in the last known tsunami" is a bit of an exaggeration.
1, in base pi.
No. AT&T is Southwest Bell with lipstick. They are an amalgamation of Ameritech, PacBell, and assets they picked up on the way. But at the core, they are a "Baby Bell" monopoly. It's the management of SW Bell in their "take over the world" phase.
IOW, the original AT&T monopoly reassembling itself, exactly like GPP said. The fact that the company which kept the AT&T name was swallowed by one of its children, rather than the reverse, is really irrelevant -- the point is that it was all Ma Bell originally, and it keeps coming back to that, the monster that just won't die.
When space travel become cheap and safe enough, they will be seen as collectible items, and will be recovered.
I kind of have my doubts that it's ever going to be cheap to get out to where they are. Even if we reach the point (and I sincerely hope we do) where we're zipping around the inner planets the way we currently fly around the world, catching up with the Voyagers would be on a whole different order of difficulty. And the longer it takes us to to develop the technology, the farther away they get ...
we entered our code changes by tapping out ones and zeros under a microscope (optical, of course, you insensitive clod!) using a cat's whisker
You had cats?
Chinese culture doesn't understand guilt the way Westerners do, and it produces engineers that will often cut corners to help out the bottom line. The attitude of the Chinese I work with is really one of arrogance, much like Americans used to be. They assume they are taking over the world, and I think it may be creating a sense apathy towards the low quality of their output.
The second and third sentences there make a lot more sense than the first. The idea that Asians don't "understand guilt the way Westerners do" is an ancient line of crap that smells strongly of racism. Guilt is a universal human emotion. OTOH, so is greed, and it's entirely true that people in countries which perceive themselves as being on the way up are often willing to pass off shoddy work in the (unfortunately, often justified) belief that their customers won't care. During the 19th century, Americans did this too -- there was a stereotype, with some basis in fact, that if you wanted high-quality products you bought European-made, but if you just wanted something cheap you bought American-made. The economic explanation is entirely sufficient.
China first launched an astronaut in orbit eight years ago.
Seven years after the US launched its first astronaut in orbit, they had sent people to the moon.
And seven years after that, we were stuck back in low Earth orbit, where we've been ever since. Actually we're about to lose that capability too. I have the strong feeling that when China does eventually get to the Moon, they'll do so in way that won't leave them unable to return seven (or forty-two!) years later.
Once again researchers have a head up their ass by looking for correlations while ignoring causation, and then presenting the correlation in the wrong order. Don't they know that people never see the distinction and assume that the correlation translates to causation as presented?
Please point to the causative claims made in TFA. Note that saying "members of group X are more likely to be in group Y" does not constitute a claim of causation.
It would have been more appropriate to state that of the 308000 people polled, 44% were liberal and 56% were conservative. Of the liberals, 58% used a PC, 42% used a Mac. Of the conservatives, 75% used a PC, 25% used a Mac. A much more informative correlation, don't you think?
Actually, the most informative thing to post would be the "crosstabs" as pollsters call them, a.k.a. a contingency table -- the number of respondents falling into each of the possible categories (Mac/liberal, Mac/conservative, PC/liberal, PC/conservative.) That allows you to estimate the joint distribution of political views and operating system choice, from which you can then model the conditional distribution to answer any question you want ("How likely are Mac users are to be liberal?", "How likely are conservatives to use PCs?" etc.) But pollsters rarely do that, either because they're trying to answer a specific question, or because they think most of their audience won't understand the data if it's presented that way. And based on your post, they may well be right.
What is even more distasteful is that somehow some political views are viewed automagically as "bad". Having different options should be a GOOD thing.
Some political views are bad. There's no way around this. There are policies which are generally good for people, and supporting these policies is good; there are policies which are generally bad for people, and supporting these policies is bad. Holding different political positions is not akin to liking different flavors of ice cream.
Your .sig illustrates this nicely. I'm guessing that you, like I and (I'm going to go out on a limb here) the majority of /.ers, understand that the PATRIOT act is a bad thing, a policy which hurts a lot more than it helps. Supporting it is therefore also bad. Anyone who supports it, no matter how good they may be in other ways, is to a certain measurable degree lowering themselves down the moral scale. They have the right to their opinion, to be sure -- and the rest of us have the right to criticize them for it.
One of the criticisms the literary-fiction crowd often levels at SF, and other genre-fiction-called-genre-fiction, is that it's too formulaic. Now you're saying that following a rigid set of rules is what makes literary fiction literary? Um ... okay, have fun with that.
F is a snobbish crowd every bit as much as mainstream, and attempts by more mainstream authors to "dabble" in SF are generally scorned in SF circles.
Because it's usually lousy SF, clearly written by people who have no knowledge of or respect for the genre. I've lost count of the number of major literary fiction authors I've seen lauded for writing Bold! Daring! Innovative! works of science fiction -- except it's not marketed as science fiction, the authors and publishers will vehemently deny that it's scieince fiction, and if it had been written and marketed as science fiction it would have been old hat fifty years ago. If a Margaret Atwood or a Cormac McCarthy wants to write SF, that's fine, but they should be honest about what they're doing, and try to familiarize themselves at least a little bit with the history of the genre so they don't make obvious beginner's mistakes.
To be fair, they eventually realized that Star Trek was worth a hell of a lot -- IMO none of the later series ever came anywhere close to the first one, but you can't accuse the networks of not supporting them.
Since the stereotype of the Sci-Fi Boys' Club hasn't been accurate for generations, if ever, that's not really the problem.
... "It won't make any difference." The literary establishment has not only decided that anything but "serious," contemporary*, mainstream fiction isn't Literature, and any protest from authors in other** genres will not only not change their minds, but will in fact solidify their position. They'll see it as further proof of the inherent immaturity of those who write (and, by extension, those who read) "genre fiction," and be further reassured in their smugness.
* Exceptions may be made for historical fiction, as long as the history in question is within the last century or so.
** Literary fiction is a genre of its own, with rules far more rigid than those of SF and fantasy and at least as rigid as those of horror, romance and Westerns, but you'll never get them to admit it.
Good point. There's nothing about red, green, and blue that says they have to be the primary colors of visible light; the fact that we perceive them that way is a function of the way our cone cells work. IIRC, there are birds that can see four primary colors, while various mammals (e.g. dogs) are not actually "colorblind" but only see two primary colors, which makes their range of color perception more limited than ours. On a world with two suns having different spectra, you'd expect animals to evolve eyes capable of seeing more than any animal on Earth.
Although it's possible to parse some meaning from your post, your incoherent sentence structure and gratuitous use of quotation marks makes your criticism of others' ability to think an object lesson in glass houses and throwing stones.
It wasn't compulsory. My grades in other subjects improved dramatically as a result. ... Really glad this is happening. (emphasis mine)
I have no doubt that chess is a very useful, as well as enjoyable, intellectual activity for students who enjoy it, but I strongly suspect that the main effect of making it compulsory for all students will be to create a generation who mostly regard it as "one of those boring things we had to do in school" and won't get any real value from it.
Grrr. That should be "... cannot possess" rather than "cannot assess" above, of course. Perhaps judicious use of typos is the key to passing the Turing Test.
Moreover, human languages cannot be entirely translated by just symbol manipulation. Context plays an important role in ironing out all the ambiguities inherent in our languages. So does knowing how to take a colloquialism in one language and express that meaning in another. Or stating that there is no real equivalent.
And if you create a piece of software which can do all those things, what basis do you have for saying that it doesn't understand the language? The answer, of course, comes back to the assertion "computers cannot understand," or equivalently, "understanding is a quality computers cannot assess." Pretty much every defense of the Chinese Room, and more-or-less equivalent arguments like TFA, consist of this kind of raw assertion followed by endless circular elaboration.
What people who do this are really saying is "computers do not have souls, for only man is made in the image of God," but they lack the courage to state it in such plain terms.
Furthermore, the emotion we identify as "regret" seems to me to line up neatly with the economic definition. I defy anyone to prove that when we feel regret, our brains are doing anything other than comparing the reward we received for a particular action with the maximum reward we think we could have received for a different action. TFA is more or less playing the Chinese Room game: "I assert that computers can't do X, because computers can't do X, because I assert that computers can't do X."