Re:Do you also own a cat with a diamond collar?
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Failing Our Geniuses
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· Score: 1
Nonetheless, you are here as a result of your education and your own additional work. No point still being bitter, yes? To be honest, I doubt many of us are here as a result of our institutional educations. My high school wasn't too bad, thanks to some good teachers, but my university course was horribly insipid compared to the knowledge needed for later work. I won every job I've had on strength of my prior experience or hobby work, not my coursework.
The vast majority of time spent in primary school and early high school, from what I can see, is basically busywork to keep children occupied so that their parents can return to the workforce earlier. You can't tell me it should take a child 9 YEARS to learn reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic.
Re:Do you also own a cat with a diamond collar?
on
Failing Our Geniuses
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· Score: 1
But by instituting a tenet that "There are no losers" so let's give everyone an award - we're raising a generation that thinks mediocrity is ok. It's not ok, and the failure to nurture gifted children is ensuring our future demise. Well, yes and no. The vast majority of the human race is destined for mediocrity by definition. Half of all people are of less than average intelligence, and all that, you know? That's the 'no' bit - people don't HAVE to be special and gifted to be 'OK'.
The 'yes' bit is that yes, they're spending far more effort making sure that little Johnny Two-21st-Chromosomes is able to read "spot can run" than they are on making sure that Johnny's neighbour, little Timmy, is taught differential equations once he can solve x + 3 = 5 for x. I fully agree that it's not OK. Who knows how much potential is being wasted because smart kids are bored out of their skulls and stop paying attention?
...hawking cheap kitchen "aids"... Great, first we have AIDS for talking to hospitalised people, now cheap AIDS in kitchens? Where will the madness stop?!
I remember ads for plans for that in the back of Popular Science back in the day, next to all the plans for home built helicopters and hovercraft and so forth. Back then it seemed so cool... although now, I don't see how a 5hp lawnmower motor could power a car at highway speed. A normal car needs around 15kW to cruise at highway speeds. An efficient alternator will run at 75% efficiency or so, good engine controls are, say, 85% efficient, and a DC motor is again around 80%. All up, you would need around 40 BHP to cruise at highway speed in a series hybrid powered solely by the fuel engine.
Of course, series hybrids excel at stop-go traffic, and the 5hp generator is probably perfect for rush hour driving. But still, it wouldn't do much at all to extend the battery range when cruising. In terms of efficiency, you're much better having the engine directly connected to the wheels, for example see the Insight (an efficient ICE with electric boost). The Prius's swanky Synergy drive system allows direct drive by the ICE via a CVT, too. You can even do away with the hybrid aspect altogether and just use a small, efficient ICE, as the Lupo, which uses around 3 liters per 100km. Obviously, though, it's unsuitable for US consumption because it's not big, loud, or fast enough.
Finally, I'll be able to get into a real vehicle and press '[' or ']'to redirect my power between lasers, shields, or engines! Of course I'll probably just constantly drain the laser banks into shields...
That was always my take on the Chinese Room. The guy inside following the script isn't being intelligent, the script isn't intelligent, but as you said, the whole room + cards + rules is intelligent. I mean, so often the question comes up as to how you know whether a computer 'understands' something. This sounds like a reasonable question until you start asking yourself how well you 'understand' abstract concepts like, well, take 'understanding' itself as an example. It's kinda like 'knowing things about', and kinda like 'being able to model in your mind', but neither of those things are really 'understanding'. It's just a token defined by the tokens around it. So many of the symbols we shuffle around our own minds are like this, they're only defined in circular chains of reference.
I've talked over that very subject with several friends, and it appears to be true. As one of them said, "When I was 20, I looked back on what I had believed when I was 15, and it was stupid. When I was 25, I looked back on what I had believed when I had been 15 and when I had been 20. Same thing. When I was 30, I had changed some more, and I looked back on what I had believed when I had been 15, 20, and 25, and it was all crap. When I was 35, I looked back on what I believed when I was 30, and I still pretty much agreed with it." That's funny. I'm 25, and when I look back on what I believed when I was 15, and when I was 20, I don't think I was stupid then and I'm magically smarter now. Most of it, I still agree with - the important bits, anyway, the principles. Where I was wrong, it was due to incomplete or incorrect information (inexperience, naivety are both just lack of data). I don't doubt that when I'm 30 I'll have further refined my world view and I'll disagree with some points I currently believe, but I'll still know how I came to those conclusions, and agree that in the same situation I'd do the same again. Maybe I was exceptionally mature at 15 (I always got on better with adults than with the half-formed animals that called themselves my peers) or maybe I'm exceptionally immature now (as I've been told plenty of times by bland grey people who honestly believe that 'having fun' is 'something that only kids do').
Personally I can't understand people who think they're fundamentally different people than they were when they were younger. Give me the same ethical question now and when I was 15, and I'm likely to answer the same - are you saying you wouldn't? That you've become a hugely better person in that time? That you've become smarter? Obviously you'd know more, but knowledge is not wisdom.
Of course, that's assuming that they meant 1000 pulses of 100 femtoseconds each, per second. If they meant one pulse of unknown duration every 100 femtoseconds, then they don't give enough info to calculate the power drain.
I always wanted to make one of these! Passive sonar to locate the bug, and then a laser tracking system to set the little bugger on fire.:) Never got past the safety aspect though - I mean, we're talking about using a laser strong enough to punch a hole in a mozzie, being aimed around the room and fired by a system that could well just decide based on a strange echo to pop you in the eye. I'll take itchy over permanent blindness, tyvm.:/
Other ideas were the same tracking system attached to a nerf gun, an automated micro-water-jet system (think an archer fish), or even something funky with focussed sound waves and constructive interference.;)
First of all, none of what you refer to (subjugation of women, stoning, beating etc) are the result of "Muslim" governments, they are the result of puppet governments propped up by those whose interests they serve. So it's just a curious coincidence that these things all occur regularly in countries governed by Sharia law? Lose the righteous indignation and re-read my post, and you'll see I make a clear distinction between 'militant Islam' and the larger Islam community. Regardless, the countries with militant Islamic governments are the countries where the abuses I mentioned are most prevalent, and the atrocities are perpetrated by the people, not the government. Coincidence?
If you knew any Muslims, you'd know this. Your ad-hominem fails. An old workmate is an Iranian Muslim who left Iran with his family and moved to Australia due to the social conditions in Iran. One of my highschool friends is a Persian Baha'i whose family left Iran due to religious persecution. A uni mate and drinking buddy, and his ex-girlfriend, are both Muslim. All of these are peaceful Muslims with somewhat 'westernised' values, at least to the point where they don't believe in amputation or stoning, but none of them have ever argued that Sharia-governed countries in the Middle East are not Islamic countries.
You talk about tinfoil hats and ridicule the possibility that Western media is engaged in a misinformation campaign, yet you seem to have no problem believing there is an organized group of people out there plotting to kill you and your nation just because they object to your freedom. So not only are U.S. copyright laws the main objection of militant Islamists, but "the Western media" actually IS engaged in a global smear campaign to convince the world that Islamic extremists have a vendetta against Western values? Please.
The U.S. government may be taking U.S. citizens' rights away, but those rights are still lightyears better than in Sharia-governed countries. A tiny minority (percentage-wise) of Muslim extremists have convinced themselves that Westerners' values are sinful, thus demonising all Westerners, and that Allah wants them to spread Islam to the world, by force if necessary. The U.S. isn't interested in creating some kind of empire in the middle east. It's simply keeping its presence there as a target dummy, allowing the comparatively-local extremists a little piece of USA to strike at, distracting them from causing more problems on U.S. soil.
The rest use cheap little MP3-decoding chips that get fed a compressed stream and output an uncompressed one, and that's all they can do. Pardon my ignorance (I've only done a few, fairly minor digital circuit designs, and none of those were power-sensitive) but wouldn't they all use the cheap little MP3-decoding chips purely on basis of power consumption? I can't imagine a general purpose CPU running a software MP3 decoder using less power than a custom, optimised-out-the-ass hardware solution, as you'd expect any common chip to be these days. On the contrary, I'd be amazed if the special purpose chip used more than 1/10th of the power a full CPU would.
Erm, is that RGB or BGR? Is your machine little-endian or big-endian? Under various permutations, that could be red, green OR blue. Or was that your point?
Thirty two years ago your home computer would have been purchased as a set of circuit boards, with some soldering required, that *may* work if you correctly toggle in your programs with flip switches. Its 8-bit Intel 8080 cost $360 ($75 for factory seconds), and ran at 2MHz. Now, for much less, you can get a computer with gigabytes of RAM, a 2+GHz multi-core processor, graphic capabilities galore etc. that will perform reliably for years unless you mistreat it severely, and will be usable by 'average joe' and not just hardware hackers.
Twenty years before you were born, to carry 4 gigabytes of information (ye average RAM-based MP3 player), you would have needed a truck full of reels of magnetic tape. And before that, a library's worth of paper archives. You couldn't really practically carry data around with you. Now you can stick an insane amount into your pocket on something the size of a cigarette lighter.
You're making the mistake of comparing this year's model with last year's model. Think slightly longer term and you'll see how much of what we take for granted, and complain about because it's not progressing fast enough, is actually new and miraculous.
I'm thinking the billions spent to combat terrorism could be much better used and I am willing to give up a little "security" for that. You're willing to give up a little temporary security in order to regain essential liberty? I don't doubt, sir, that Benjamin Franklin would say you deserve both!
What, you think they envy living in a society with more cameras trained on the public, a morally indefensible penal code that sends copyright violators to jail for longer than rapists and allows the government to render anyone they want to Gitmo on a whim? You think the problem militant Islam has with the US is to do with COPYRIGHT LAW? "Oh I'm Muslim, just so's you know" isn't a license to print stupid, and comes across as pretty insipid when you say it directly after referring to Muslims en masse as "them".
I'd prefer to live in a country where my girlfriend isn't going to be beaten or stoned to death for being in a de-facto partnership, where she will be treated as a human being rather than as a chattel, and where neither of us will be discriminated against for not being Muslim.
Islam is expansionist and dictates a unification of church and state. The problem is when militants take the "expand Islam" directive and tack "by force" onto the end. Certainly not all Muslims, in fact very few by proportion, are militant or tended towards violence. In today's world, however (barring a media coverup the likes of which would require all the tinfoil in Alabama), most sectarian violence is perpetrated by militant Islamic groups.
Back when I played Warcraft 3, this one time I saw a burrowed crypt fiend on the freeway. Even changed lanes to avoid running it over... two seconds later I was like WTF. O_o
Another time more recently I found myself trying to polymorph a cop off his bike, but just couldn't quite find my mental hotkey. And god knows how many times I've tried to counterspell one of those boring people who just. wouldn't. shut. up. I guess it's lucky I wasn't too social while I was spending a lot of time playing my warrior in WoW - it's easier to cross 'hit guy with sharpened +8 sword' over into reality than 'PoM+Pyro'.;)
FTFA:
FLAC: This codec, favored by Grateful Dead tape traders, stands for Free Lossless Audio Code. It reduces storage space by 30 percent to 50 percent, but without compression. A full audio CD can be burned from the file, unlike from MP3s. So let's get this straight - FLAC reduces storage space by 30-50%, losslessly, without compression?. I would like to subscribe to their newsletter.
This is different to googling for the song snippet then searching youtube for video clip to said song? In degree, maybe, but not in kind. Or how about TrackID, the system that lets you phone a service that 'listens' to a sound byte and then tells you the track name, band, and album?
Or those damn end-of-reel markers? It's about as stupid having those in modern movies as it would be to have a gramophone-needle-touches-record sound effect at the start of every mp3.
But what happens when that little machine becomes the newest novelty bar game? I blew a 0.26 on one of these once. I dunno how accurate it was, but I was pretty pi-eyed at the time...:P And obviously caught a taxi home.
Then you end up with someone who would have probably been drinking and driving anyway, but they have now consumed much more than they may have planned, in a much shorted timeframe. That's just asking for problems, and it is actually viewed as a liability by a lot of bars. That argument is nearly as silly as the one stating that teaching advanced driving techniques is a bad thing because it'll make people overconfident and prone to accidents (contrary to the well demonstrated Dunning-Kruger effect). If someone's going to deliberately drive drunk they'll do it regardless. At least now they'll KNOW how smashed they are and hopefully have second thoughts.
My network programming lecturer had a physical network simulator package that we used, that would preprocess our C code and emit compile errors if we had certain misspellings in comments. That was awesome.:P
On the other hand, our first year Java lecturer insisted that K&R was the One and Only Correct Brace Placement Style and marked us down if we used ANSI C++ style brace placement instead of K&R. 'Tard.
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The vast majority of time spent in primary school and early high school, from what I can see, is basically busywork to keep children occupied so that their parents can return to the workforce earlier. You can't tell me it should take a child 9 YEARS to learn reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic.
Probably an aftereffect of the Vicodin? :P
The 'yes' bit is that yes, they're spending far more effort making sure that little Johnny Two-21st-Chromosomes is able to read "spot can run" than they are on making sure that Johnny's neighbour, little Timmy, is taught differential equations once he can solve x + 3 = 5 for x. I fully agree that it's not OK. Who knows how much potential is being wasted because smart kids are bored out of their skulls and stop paying attention?
...hawking cheap kitchen "aids"... Great, first we have AIDS for talking to hospitalised people, now cheap AIDS in kitchens? Where will the madness stop?!Hell, while we're at it, the U.S. != America.
I remember ads for plans for that in the back of Popular Science back in the day, next to all the plans for home built helicopters and hovercraft and so forth. Back then it seemed so cool... although now, I don't see how a 5hp lawnmower motor could power a car at highway speed. A normal car needs around 15kW to cruise at highway speeds. An efficient alternator will run at 75% efficiency or so, good engine controls are, say, 85% efficient, and a DC motor is again around 80%. All up, you would need around 40 BHP to cruise at highway speed in a series hybrid powered solely by the fuel engine.
Of course, series hybrids excel at stop-go traffic, and the 5hp generator is probably perfect for rush hour driving. But still, it wouldn't do much at all to extend the battery range when cruising. In terms of efficiency, you're much better having the engine directly connected to the wheels, for example see the Insight (an efficient ICE with electric boost). The Prius's swanky Synergy drive system allows direct drive by the ICE via a CVT, too. You can even do away with the hybrid aspect altogether and just use a small, efficient ICE, as the Lupo, which uses around 3 liters per 100km. Obviously, though, it's unsuitable for US consumption because it's not big, loud, or fast enough.
Finally, I'll be able to get into a real vehicle and press '[' or ']'to redirect my power between lasers, shields, or engines! Of course I'll probably just constantly drain the laser banks into shields...
That was always my take on the Chinese Room. The guy inside following the script isn't being intelligent, the script isn't intelligent, but as you said, the whole room + cards + rules is intelligent. I mean, so often the question comes up as to how you know whether a computer 'understands' something. This sounds like a reasonable question until you start asking yourself how well you 'understand' abstract concepts like, well, take 'understanding' itself as an example. It's kinda like 'knowing things about', and kinda like 'being able to model in your mind', but neither of those things are really 'understanding'. It's just a token defined by the tokens around it. So many of the symbols we shuffle around our own minds are like this, they're only defined in circular chains of reference.
Personally I can't understand people who think they're fundamentally different people than they were when they were younger. Give me the same ethical question now and when I was 15, and I'm likely to answer the same - are you saying you wouldn't? That you've become a hugely better person in that time? That you've become smarter? Obviously you'd know more, but knowledge is not wisdom.
Anyone who realises that the bulletproof, indestructible, fast-talking, ultra-smart car that wins the race and gets the girl is ALSO an American car.
- 100 billion watts of laser power
- 100 femtosecond pulse length
- 1000 pulses a second
The overall output power is 10 Watts.Of course, that's assuming that they meant 1000 pulses of 100 femtoseconds each, per second. If they meant one pulse of unknown duration every 100 femtoseconds, then they don't give enough info to calculate the power drain.
I always wanted to make one of these! Passive sonar to locate the bug, and then a laser tracking system to set the little bugger on fire. :) Never got past the safety aspect though - I mean, we're talking about using a laser strong enough to punch a hole in a mozzie, being aimed around the room and fired by a system that could well just decide based on a strange echo to pop you in the eye. I'll take itchy over permanent blindness, tyvm. :/
;)
Other ideas were the same tracking system attached to a nerf gun, an automated micro-water-jet system (think an archer fish), or even something funky with focussed sound waves and constructive interference.
The U.S. government may be taking U.S. citizens' rights away, but those rights are still lightyears better than in Sharia-governed countries. A tiny minority (percentage-wise) of Muslim extremists have convinced themselves that Westerners' values are sinful, thus demonising all Westerners, and that Allah wants them to spread Islam to the world, by force if necessary. The U.S. isn't interested in creating some kind of empire in the middle east. It's simply keeping its presence there as a target dummy, allowing the comparatively-local extremists a little piece of USA to strike at, distracting them from causing more problems on U.S. soil.
Erm, is that RGB or BGR? Is your machine little-endian or big-endian? Under various permutations, that could be red, green OR blue. Or was that your point?
It is neither Degrees Kelvin, nor is it only Kelvin. It is Lord Kelvin!
*mutters something about insolence*
Thirty two years ago your home computer would have been purchased as a set of circuit boards, with some soldering required, that *may* work if you correctly toggle in your programs with flip switches. Its 8-bit Intel 8080 cost $360 ($75 for factory seconds), and ran at 2MHz. Now, for much less, you can get a computer with gigabytes of RAM, a 2+GHz multi-core processor, graphic capabilities galore etc. that will perform reliably for years unless you mistreat it severely, and will be usable by 'average joe' and not just hardware hackers.
Twenty years before you were born, to carry 4 gigabytes of information (ye average RAM-based MP3 player), you would have needed a truck full of reels of magnetic tape. And before that, a library's worth of paper archives. You couldn't really practically carry data around with you. Now you can stick an insane amount into your pocket on something the size of a cigarette lighter.
You're making the mistake of comparing this year's model with last year's model. Think slightly longer term and you'll see how much of what we take for granted, and complain about because it's not progressing fast enough, is actually new and miraculous.
I'd prefer to live in a country where my girlfriend isn't going to be beaten or stoned to death for being in a de-facto partnership, where she will be treated as a human being rather than as a chattel, and where neither of us will be discriminated against for not being Muslim.
Islam is expansionist and dictates a unification of church and state. The problem is when militants take the "expand Islam" directive and tack "by force" onto the end. Certainly not all Muslims, in fact very few by proportion, are militant or tended towards violence. In today's world, however (barring a media coverup the likes of which would require all the tinfoil in Alabama), most sectarian violence is perpetrated by militant Islamic groups.
Back when I played Warcraft 3, this one time I saw a burrowed crypt fiend on the freeway. Even changed lanes to avoid running it over... two seconds later I was like WTF. O_o
;)
Another time more recently I found myself trying to polymorph a cop off his bike, but just couldn't quite find my mental hotkey. And god knows how many times I've tried to counterspell one of those boring people who just. wouldn't. shut. up. I guess it's lucky I wasn't too social while I was spending a lot of time playing my warrior in WoW - it's easier to cross 'hit guy with sharpened +8 sword' over into reality than 'PoM+Pyro'.
This is different to googling for the song snippet then searching youtube for video clip to said song? In degree, maybe, but not in kind. Or how about TrackID, the system that lets you phone a service that 'listens' to a sound byte and then tells you the track name, band, and album?
Or those damn end-of-reel markers? It's about as stupid having those in modern movies as it would be to have a gramophone-needle-touches-record sound effect at the start of every mp3.
My network programming lecturer had a physical network simulator package that we used, that would preprocess our C code and emit compile errors if we had certain misspellings in comments. That was awesome. :P
On the other hand, our first year Java lecturer insisted that K&R was the One and Only Correct Brace Placement Style and marked us down if we used ANSI C++ style brace placement instead of K&R. 'Tard.