I realize this transition was annoying for many people. I live in a smaller community in upstate NY, and there were some regressions relative to Google Maps. I know that there were whole countries that disappeared from the map, however.
From my position of not being terribly affected, I see this as an attempt by Apple to blame a scapegoat rather than owning up to what HAD to be a decision approved at the top.
What many people don't realize is that it took Google Maps a LONG time to get as good as they are, and I still often go to MapQuest because of deficiencies in Google Maps. Who thought Apple was going to be perfect from day one? Because of Apple's contract with Google expiring in a year and their failure to get Google to add turn-by-turn and voice features, Apple was basically forced to do this to keep competitive. If Apple had waited a year, would it be better? Marginally. Not nearly as much better as it will be after being LIVE for that whole time. Maybe Apple could have done better by having an extended beta program for the app, but then many people would have two map apps to confuse them. (Apple is sensible in avoiding duplication of core functionality, because some people think that somehow the whole internet is inside their smartphone.)
But Apple has a history of not wanting to admit mistakes. So to shed themselves of the blame for this, they pick on the one manager in charge of the development and fire him so as to remove the blemish completely. Meanwhile, it's not like they're going to switch back to Google Maps or anything. Because it wasn't really this guy's final decision or his fault.
Yes, and you're the sort of person who's ready to donate money to every open hardware project that comes along so they don't have to have copyright assignment and can still manage to fund fabrication?
There's a lot of cognitive science I could ramble on about here, but the fact is that the conclusion stated in the summary is obvious to anyone who has studied brain function in detail.
Putting aside the debate over whether or not consciousness is an epiphenomenon, just about the only part of thought that we are consciously aware of is information that takes a trip through short-term memory. Everything else is in dedicated (innate or due to learning) circuitry that just computes what we've learned and either spoon-feeds our consciousness with the results or directly interacts with the sensory and motor systems. (In other words, we are only consciously aware of punctuations in multi-step processes.)
Consider when you first learn a new skill. At that time, it's entirely conscious, because we have to pay special attention to every step. Like when we're new to cooking and baking some new recipe, we consciously reason over each step in preparation. But when we've gotten really expert at something ("unconsciously competent"), most of it goes on automatic. We don't think so much about the steps; we just execute them, and our conscious mind can wander off on something else. By that point, many of us have forgotten what we went through when learning and generally have a challenge explaining how we're doing what we're doing.
Other examples: Playing an instrument -- really experienced players practice so much that the motor system is completely on automatic, while the conscious mind is (often to a very limited extent) focusing on the sheet music and timing reference (conductor or percussion). Reading radiology images -- an experienced doctor can show you a lesion they've observed, and after it's pointed out, you can sorta see it, but finding it in the first place is a well-honed skill that can be very difficult to explain; how do you tell that that one extremely vague splotch is a lesion while one nearby is normal?
The really interesting bit is this: Most people can explain more or less how they do something. But none of that is from direct access to how we ACTUALLY process the information. Rather, our explanation about how we THINK we do something is based on conscious theories we construct to explain behaviors we've observed in others and ourselves. In other words, our "skills" and our "'mental models' of our skills" are stored in entirely different parts of our memory.
It's also interesting to study teachers. Really good teachers (particularly on subjects more abstract than what you get in grade school, which are mostly rote learning from books) are people who have some combination of a good memory about how they learned something and a really good takent for self-observation when they perform a skill (i.e. a good conscious mental model of their otherwise unconscious skill).
The next level up is teachers who are good at teaching how to teach.:)
So, to address the article here: Our unconscious minds can read and do math, because the unconscious mind is what already does those things anyway. (Once you're past elementary school.)
I and an employer put a ton of code out under GPL. We had an arrangement, like TrollTech and MySQL, that contributors could only get their contributions into our trunk if they gave us copyright. (Otherwise, the licencing terms clearly stated, they could strip off our licensing terms, fork, and put out a derivative strictly under GPL that we wouldn't touch.) This was plainly stated, contributors agreed to it, and most certainly, all of our code and that of our contributors has always been made available under GPL in addition to our ownership of the original copyright. It was even clearly stated on our wiki and in our source files how this works and that we might license the code commercially. One day, some dude comes along and contributes like a single line of code. Unless he was blind, he read the licensing and contribution terms. Then years later he "discovers" that that very same employer put out a commercial product based on this code that we had original copyright for. As if a company that developed a bunch of IP wasn't going to use it in their products? But he claims they're violating the GPL, makes a big stink about it, and then he brings up again a few more years later, and someone on one of the tech news sites picks it up, and it gets worse from there.
I'm a huge fan of the GPL, but I'm sick of these dipwads who can't distinguish between a version licensed under GPL and the original work that's derived from. Meanwhile, they brainwash a bunch of other losers into thinking we're doing something wrong, while the whole time, we've worked carefully to ensure that we've been 100% precise and explicit and open about our intentions and careful attention to the terms of the GPL. (And BTW, I'm married to a lawyer, so I have extra help being ultra-precise about the GPL and copyright law.) To those people, the GPL is a religion, and anything not under GPL is evil. Moreover, anything related to a GPL'd work MUST be a derivative of the GPL'd work (not the other way around), because no commercial company is ever capable of producing anything that good, and when they release works under GPL, they must have hidden motives.
In our case, the only reason we bothered to retain original copyright was because we were making open source HARDWARE and hoped to be able to fund development by commercially licensing our IP, which we did, which was the main reason we were able to build real hardware in the first place, which everyone knew we were going to have to do, which is why we added those licensing terms in the first place. Hardware is expensive to manufacture. Because of this (and plenty of other contributors and some donations), we were successful at producing 100% open source hardware.
Sometimes, I feel like some of these people actually know they're being idiots. They're trolling, and they're doing it in an intentional attempt to derail an open source project. Like they're bribed by Microsoft, there to stir up trouble for FOSS projects by making political waves. But someone will come along and point out that if you have to choose between malice and stupidity, stupidity is the more probable option.
Personally, my motivation is to make things that work and contribute to the global mindshare. It's not so much source code that I want to share. Source code is only one form of expression. It's KNOWLEDGE that I want to share. And I enjoy creating new knowledge. Now, we always have to consider the ethical consequences of what we do in science. We do science to improve the world, so if there's some way we might harm it instead, we have to find alternatives. But I'm tired of these jerks whose sole purpose in life seems to be to confuse people and make life all-around more difficult for everyone. This is just as bad as people who try to legislate creationism into the science class. (But you know what, they do this because they're jobless losers with too much time on their hands; the rest of us actually have useful work to do.)
If there is one, I don't know what it is. Alchohol makes me feel generally lousy. Tobacco can be fun at a party but fuzzes my brain for anything requiring concentration. I'm addicted to caffeine, but if I get the level wrong, it fuzzes my brain. BTW, I have CFIDS, so I'm not exactly starting out in a good place, and basically everything makes me worse. Even too much sugar! Energy drinks fall flat for me because the sugar cancels out the other effects. Especially when it's HFCS, which makes me really tired; cane sugar causes me less trouble. Taurine and B vitamine are fine, but carnitine gives me headaches.
I have these multivitamins that are high in B's, particularly niacin, and those are the only things I've tried that have a clear short-term positive effect on my concentration.
They talk about making petrol, which means hydrocarbons with 8 carbons, give or take. Is there another hydrocarbon that they could produce that has better conversion efficiency both in production and when in use in the auto? Sure, if it turns out to be methane, then we need to adapt cars to take natural gas and have pressurized tanks, which is inconvenient, but it may be worth it.
Now, this conversion efficiency may be a matter of production rate more than anything else. We "waste" massive amounts of solar energy anyway -- who cares if there's a 10% conversion from solar energy to petrol energy or a 5% conversion. But one hydrocarbon (or other fuel) may be quicker to produce, making it a better replacement for natural petroleum. We have to optimize for the size and expense of the conversion facility, the energy density of the fuel, storage requirements for the fuel, the efficiency of conversion to mechanical energy, and the peak power we can get out of it for a given engine displacement.
To me, that we evolved from earlier life forms is a straightforward conclusion. We have mountains of evidence, and current theories are sound given that data. But I'm not a biologist, so I find it a challenge to get access to much of that data. I'm looking for a single coherent tome (or maybe multivolume set) of biological data used to develop specific theories of evolution of many ancient and modern family trees. I don't want mere drawings of fossils in sequence like in a high school textbook. I would like to see photographs of the original fossils, along with data about geologic strata, measurements of numerous morphological features, and explanations of the lines of reasoning that lead to particular conclusions. Sections on DNA analysis would be great too, along with any other interesting lines of evidence. The conclusions that scientists draw are fascinating, and I'd like to dig deeper into the data they started from. Would you be able to point out a top example of such a resource?
I'll agree that maybe (under many circumstances), it isn't RIGHT to blaspheme someone else's religion. However, there's no way in hell it should ever be made illegal. No one is being physically harmed, and no individual person is being defamed.
The fact is, all organizations need to be able to handle criticism. And blasphemy is a form of criticism. Some people need to thicken their skin and do some self-examination as to why this "blasphemy" might be going on on such a scale. Hmmm Maybe some people are doing some bad things, and this is how others criticize them for it.
If your God has been blasphemed, you may be able to make a CIVIL case, IF you can demonstrate that you've been emotionally harmed by someone who specifically targeted you with the intent of causing you emotional duress. But this should NEVER be a criminal matter. Any time a criminal court would get involved, some other tangible harm must have been caused, and blashphemy would only be used as an indicator of intent, not as a criminal charge in and of itself.
An analogous situation I can think of is a case where a teen committed suicide over the treatment she got after "sexting." Ultimately, she couldn't handle the ridicule from her peers and killed herself. This is very sad, and I think that the other students who tormented her should be punished. If those other kids are to be put up on criminal charges, then it would have to be for specific things that are illegal, so that's a separate matter. However, I do think that this is a clear-cut civil case, where it can be shown that harm was intended and harm was caused, and damages should be sought. Plus, the burden of proof in a civil case is not as rigorous as in criminal cases. (BTW, I think that most copyright violation cases should be civil too. Law enforcement should only get involved if the violation is on a massive scale AND profit is being made.)
The UN can take their anti-blasphemy laws and shove it where their gods are afraid to look. I'm not going to have my freedoms abridged just to mollify some religious nut who tries to claim they've been harmed just because someone made an insensitive statement. First it's anti-religion statements, then it's 100 other things. Just wait until it becomes illegal to criticize politicians! You think the US Congress is corrupt NOW? Slippery slope.
It seems more likely that the meta-universe's simulaition of our universe employs some simplifications. Therefore we cannot apply what we believe to be limits about computers to their simulator. For instance, we use binary, and we approximate real numbers using floating point. This gives us limited range and precision. But what's to say that in the meta-universe, they haven't found ways to represent numbers with infinite precision and range (at least in relation to our perspective on math).
Any argument you can make, I can come up with a counter-argument based on conjecture about how the meta universe physics might differ from ours. (I'm practiced at this because I used to be a Creationist.;) )
I'm not sure that the summary's defintion of half-life is correct. It says that after 521 years, half of the bonds would be gone. If you took out half of the bonds, all you'd have is pairs of nucleotides, which would mean all of the DNA is basically destroyed as far as genetic sequences are concerned. Typically, half-life means "the time after which half remains."
So if applied in the sense, I'd expect half-life to mean "the time after which half of the DNA is properly intact." In other words, after 521 years, on average, all of your chromosomes would be broken in half.
But that doesn't seem right either. I'd expect it to decay must faster.
You now have a new fan. I wish more people thought like you and considered what they SHOULD do, ethically, in priority of what's merely LEGAL (or not legal as the case may be). If more people thought like you, then we'd have fewer stupid laws restricting everyone's freedoms on the basis of the selfishness of a few. Thank you for existing and having the willingness to point out that just because something's allowed doesn't mean it's right or doesn't have consequences for other people.
I'm not sure if you're trying to correct me or not. I assumed that the ISA would be published, along with lots of architectural details. I'm just saying that they HAVE to be published or else the CPU is worthless, so by saying that they're published, Adeptiva isn't doing anything special.
The Open Graphics Project's original goal was to develop an open source graphics card. Although they did produce hardware, they were not successful at anything sustainable, due to a lack of cash-flow. As a result, they've recently shifted their focus to the more acadeic and mostly software pursuit of developing the first fully open-architecture GPU (http://sourceforge.net/projects/openshader/), with simulation/compiler infrastructure and reference hardware design in Verilog. Do you think that grass-roots efforts like this will ever succeed at freeing Linux users from buggy binary drivers, or will there always be insufficient community cohesion, puting us forever at the mercy of companies like nVidia that will never support open source drivers?
The thing about CPUs that makes Adeptiva's statement not particularly impressive is that in almost all cases, the ISA of a CPU _must_ be published, otherwise you can't get developers to write code for it. But an ISA is just a language, not an implementation. A CPU that is not "open" by their definition is completely worthless.
GPUs are much worse because they've always been peripherals, hidden behind a driver, which is responsible for generating rendering commands from OpenGL and JIT-compiling virtual instruction sets like PTX.
A few commenters have pointed out some other things that "should be banned" because they're unhealthy. We've seen studies finding things like high-fructose corn syrup and and excessive fat consumption can be unhealthy for you. We've known for a long time about mercury content in tuna, and now we've just learned about arsenic in rice. Maybe those should be banned. At the same time, phthalates in PVC-based flooring are okay, despite the fact that they're correlated with autism and infertility. And why can you still buy plastic food containers made with BPA?
The cigarette I'd have once a year at a party isn't going to do me a damn bit of harm. Yet if my employer instituted this policy, and I just happened to have smoked my yearly cigarette before a random test, I'd be fired. (Of course, I haven't smoked anything in years, since having kids, but that's for their sake, not mine.) The thing is, a majority of people who get into tobacco quickly develop an addiction. Or so we're told. I'm betting the odds are high, but not like 90%. The dilemma we have to face is whether or not we want to limit tobacco use for everyone on the basis of a significant number of people who will develop an unhealthy dependence that costs tax-payer money (inevitably). But this is how a lot of laws come into being. Some moron blasts his fingers off playing with model rockets, and all of a sudden, the rest of us face mountains of paperwork to engage in a hobby that we'd already been doing safely. (Putting aside the fact that anyone getting into model rocketry right now is likely to be labeled as a terrorist.)
My view is this: The US government is already not very good at "protecting" us from all sorts of contaminants that find their way into our food, water, and air. They're probably better than many other governments, but the fact that florination is still in many water supplies, water bottles can still be made with BPA, and you can still buy home building materials that are known to cause developmental problems in children all mean that our wanna-be nanny government is lying own on the job. Oh, and let's not forget the carbon monoxide and benzine from exhaust you love to enhale at every bus depot and airport.
So before any laws are passed to limit the use of chemicals we can choose to ingest or not, we should first address the contaminants that are being hidden from us by unscrupulous suppliers.
I worked for many years as an engineer, then I went back and got a PhD, which I finished at 38 years of age. Now I'm an assistant professor at a university. Although I've taken a pay cut (for now), I love this job, because I decide what I want to work on, as long as it leads to tangible results. That doesn't scare me, because I've always been goal-oriented, and the university provides good guidelines and support.
Here's what you have to ask yourself: Why haven't you moved up in the ranks where you already are? I worked for a small company, so there was literally no room for me to be given a management position until after I'd already left, but meanwhile I ended up being one of the major decision-makers, controlled what projects I worked on and was put unofficially in charge of several junior engineers. My engineering and leadership skills were critical in my success in grad school and will be critical in my success as a professional researcher. Do you have skills analogous to this?
The point is, AGE IS NOT A FACTOR. It comes down to your personality, persistence, stress-tolerance, drive, dedication, creativity, and intelligence. That is something that you don't really lose with age, although it does evolve with experience. Just never lose the youthful drive to do the "impossible." As you get older and learn more, the "impossible," which most of the time is really just "impractical," may guide what you do when you have to make locally optimal decisions, but you can see this as opportunity to out-clever those who came before. As long as you see the "impossible" as an annoyance and a hurdle to overcome, then you'll never lose your youthful flexibility. Warp drive is "impossible," but we never stop dreaming about how we might discover how we're wrong about relativity and develop FTL space flight. In my work, I find things all the time that have never been done before because people didn't see it as worth their time, not because they were truly impossible; if you can manage your time and resources properly, you can take advantage of those opportunities.
A lot of people seem to associate coffee and caffeine, but all around the world, people get caffeine from other sources. Tea, chocolate, guarana, etc. Caffeine is not the only ingredient in these things that might affect you. For instance, the primary stimulant in cocoa is actually Theobromine.
One interesting example is a COFFEE ALLERGY. It doen't occur very often, but it does happen, and more often than with tea, for instance. Caffeine suppresses immune response (i.e. histamine production associated with an IgE reaction) to a limited degree and may therefore mask a mild allergy to other proteins found in the coffee. So you may not have any immediate allergy symptoms. But it does have an effect, and in the long term, it can lead to psychological disorders.
I know you guys are joking (and the jokes are actually funny this time), but not everyone necessarily realizes that the fidelity of the simulation is much too granular for this to be an issue. Simulation atoms (i.e. indivisible units, software objects) will be on the order of galaxies, not planets, and certainly not atoms.
Wow. It would be one thing to ask about something relevant to choosing to install a new distro. But a totally idle question about people's history of distro usage. Who gives a crap that I once used Red Hat 9? This is the sort of question that gets accepted here?
Slashdotters will notice that whenever an article appears on biology or evolution, commenters complain up and down about "those stupid creationists." So I put up an askslashdot, requesting suggestions for a really good textbook on detailed evidence used to construct theories in evolutionary biology. In other words, the evidence that creationists say that doesn't exist, in a form that's easy to read. I thought it would be a good educational opportunity for me and plenty of other people. But that's the sort of question that gets rejected.
I think that slashdot editors are closet creationists who would rather faff on about what Linux distro they used in 1995 than, god forbid, think pedagogically about science. Slashdot isn't news for nerds.
I'm a chip designer too (although probably not as good as you are), and one thing I wanted to mention for the benefit of others is that in today's chips, circuit delays are dominated by wires. It used to be dominated by transistor delays now, but today, a long interconnect in your circuit is something to avoid at all costs. So careful layout of transistors and careful arrangement of interconnects is of paramount importance. Automatic layout tools use AI techniques like simulated annealing to take a poorly laid-out circuit and try to improve it, but they're even now still poor at doing placement while taking into account routing delays. Placement and routing used to be done in two steps, but placement can have a huge effect on possible routing, which dominates circuit delay. Automatic routers try to do their jobs without a whole lot of high-level knowledge about the circuit, while a human can be a lot more intelligent about it, laying out transistors such with a better understanding of the wires that will be required for that gate, along with the wires for gates not let laid out.
Circuit layout is an NP-hard problem, meaning that even if you had the optimal layout, you wouldn't be able to determine that in any simple manner. Computers use AI to solve this problem. There is no direct way for a computer to solve the problem. So until we either find that P=NP or find a way to capture human intelligence in a computer, circuit layout is precisely the sort of thing that humans will be better at than computers.
Compilers for software are a different matter. While some aspects of compiling are NP-complete (e.g. register coloring), many optimizations that a compiler handles better are very localized (like instruction scheduling), making it feasible to consider a few hundred distinct instruction sequences, if that's even necessary. Mostly, where compilers beat humans is when it comes to keeping track of countless details. For instance, with static instruction scheduling, if you know something about the microarchitecture of the CPU that informs you about when instruction results will be available, then you won't schedule instructions to execute before their inputs are available (or else you'll get stalls). This is the sort of mind-numbing stuff that you WANT the computer to take care of for you. Compilers HAVE been getting a lot more sophisticated, offering higher-level optimizations, but in many ways, what the compiler has to work with is very bottom-up. You can get better results if the human programmer organizes his algorithms with knowledge of factors that affect performance (cache sizes, etc.). There is only so much whole-program optimization can do with bad algorithms.
Interestingly, at near-threadhold voltages (an increasingly popular power-saving technique), circuit delay becomes once again dominated by transistors. When lowering supply voltage, signal propagation in wires slows down, but transistors (in static CMOS at least) slow down a hell of a lot more.
The amount of iodine added to table salt is miniscule and certainly not enough if you have a deficiency, which is the case with many Americans, because we have really poor diets.
You bias your description of this arrest to make it sound as though he was arrested for his anti-semitic rants. Is that really true? Or was he arrested for generally disturbing the peace? There's a difference. You don't yell "fire" in a crowded theater, and you don't preach loudly in a library. Those are not protected forms of free speech, because they demonstrably infringe on someone else's rights. If this guy had legally set up a table at a fair, where he distributed leaflets about his views, people would have hated him for it, but it's unlikely that he would have been arrested for it. (There's a slight chance that if it could be shown that his actions specifically incited others to commit criminal acts, then he could be found criminally liable for that. And this walks a fine line, because you generally should not be held responsible for other people's actions that they freely chose, even if you are a lunatic.)
So that when those muslims blaspheme other religions, they too can be put to death.
Oh, but NOOOO. Islam is a SPECIAL religion, so they deserve SPECIAL TREATMENT, because all other religions are FALSE.
Seriously, I think that we should have UN laws that specifically condone all kinds of free speech, ESPECIALLY those that are critical of these crackpot religions. If Christians and Hindus and everyone have to put up with criticism and blasphemy against their gods, then the muslims damn well better accept the same equal and fair treatment.
That being said, it doesn't mean they have to shut up about it. COMPLAINING about blasphemy would ALSO be free speech. (I just don't have to give a crap about listening to it.)
The Japanese eat a heck of a lot of seaweed, which puts an unusually high amount of iodine in their diet, which has some health benefits. The problem for this farmed seaweed is that I can't find any indication that this grower is adding any form of iodine to the under-water soil, let alone a form that is easy to absorb.
I saw a video from one of these "prepper" people who pointed out that you don't need to take multivitamins as long as you eat a balanced diet of vegetables grown in virgin soil. We have to supplement because most farmland is depleated of trace nutrients, and the organics are only marginally better. So maybe his seaweed tastes good, but I doubt it's a good source of iodine.
Slashdot Mirror
I realize this transition was annoying for many people. I live in a smaller community in upstate NY, and there were some regressions relative to Google Maps. I know that there were whole countries that disappeared from the map, however.
From my position of not being terribly affected, I see this as an attempt by Apple to blame a scapegoat rather than owning up to what HAD to be a decision approved at the top.
What many people don't realize is that it took Google Maps a LONG time to get as good as they are, and I still often go to MapQuest because of deficiencies in Google Maps. Who thought Apple was going to be perfect from day one? Because of Apple's contract with Google expiring in a year and their failure to get Google to add turn-by-turn and voice features, Apple was basically forced to do this to keep competitive. If Apple had waited a year, would it be better? Marginally. Not nearly as much better as it will be after being LIVE for that whole time. Maybe Apple could have done better by having an extended beta program for the app, but then many people would have two map apps to confuse them. (Apple is sensible in avoiding duplication of core functionality, because some people think that somehow the whole internet is inside their smartphone.)
But Apple has a history of not wanting to admit mistakes. So to shed themselves of the blame for this, they pick on the one manager in charge of the development and fire him so as to remove the blemish completely. Meanwhile, it's not like they're going to switch back to Google Maps or anything. Because it wasn't really this guy's final decision or his fault.
Yes, and you're the sort of person who's ready to donate money to every open hardware project that comes along so they don't have to have copyright assignment and can still manage to fund fabrication?
I didn't think so.
There's a lot of cognitive science I could ramble on about here, but the fact is that the conclusion stated in the summary is obvious to anyone who has studied brain function in detail.
Putting aside the debate over whether or not consciousness is an epiphenomenon, just about the only part of thought that we are consciously aware of is information that takes a trip through short-term memory. Everything else is in dedicated (innate or due to learning) circuitry that just computes what we've learned and either spoon-feeds our consciousness with the results or directly interacts with the sensory and motor systems. (In other words, we are only consciously aware of punctuations in multi-step processes.)
Consider when you first learn a new skill. At that time, it's entirely conscious, because we have to pay special attention to every step. Like when we're new to cooking and baking some new recipe, we consciously reason over each step in preparation. But when we've gotten really expert at something ("unconsciously competent"), most of it goes on automatic. We don't think so much about the steps; we just execute them, and our conscious mind can wander off on something else. By that point, many of us have forgotten what we went through when learning and generally have a challenge explaining how we're doing what we're doing.
Other examples: Playing an instrument -- really experienced players practice so much that the motor system is completely on automatic, while the conscious mind is (often to a very limited extent) focusing on the sheet music and timing reference (conductor or percussion). Reading radiology images -- an experienced doctor can show you a lesion they've observed, and after it's pointed out, you can sorta see it, but finding it in the first place is a well-honed skill that can be very difficult to explain; how do you tell that that one extremely vague splotch is a lesion while one nearby is normal?
The really interesting bit is this: Most people can explain more or less how they do something. But none of that is from direct access to how we ACTUALLY process the information. Rather, our explanation about how we THINK we do something is based on conscious theories we construct to explain behaviors we've observed in others and ourselves. In other words, our "skills" and our "'mental models' of our skills" are stored in entirely different parts of our memory.
It's also interesting to study teachers. Really good teachers (particularly on subjects more abstract than what you get in grade school, which are mostly rote learning from books) are people who have some combination of a good memory about how they learned something and a really good takent for self-observation when they perform a skill (i.e. a good conscious mental model of their otherwise unconscious skill).
The next level up is teachers who are good at teaching how to teach. :)
So, to address the article here: Our unconscious minds can read and do math, because the unconscious mind is what already does those things anyway. (Once you're past elementary school.)
I and an employer put a ton of code out under GPL. We had an arrangement, like TrollTech and MySQL, that contributors could only get their contributions into our trunk if they gave us copyright. (Otherwise, the licencing terms clearly stated, they could strip off our licensing terms, fork, and put out a derivative strictly under GPL that we wouldn't touch.) This was plainly stated, contributors agreed to it, and most certainly, all of our code and that of our contributors has always been made available under GPL in addition to our ownership of the original copyright. It was even clearly stated on our wiki and in our source files how this works and that we might license the code commercially. One day, some dude comes along and contributes like a single line of code. Unless he was blind, he read the licensing and contribution terms. Then years later he "discovers" that that very same employer put out a commercial product based on this code that we had original copyright for. As if a company that developed a bunch of IP wasn't going to use it in their products? But he claims they're violating the GPL, makes a big stink about it, and then he brings up again a few more years later, and someone on one of the tech news sites picks it up, and it gets worse from there.
I'm a huge fan of the GPL, but I'm sick of these dipwads who can't distinguish between a version licensed under GPL and the original work that's derived from. Meanwhile, they brainwash a bunch of other losers into thinking we're doing something wrong, while the whole time, we've worked carefully to ensure that we've been 100% precise and explicit and open about our intentions and careful attention to the terms of the GPL. (And BTW, I'm married to a lawyer, so I have extra help being ultra-precise about the GPL and copyright law.) To those people, the GPL is a religion, and anything not under GPL is evil. Moreover, anything related to a GPL'd work MUST be a derivative of the GPL'd work (not the other way around), because no commercial company is ever capable of producing anything that good, and when they release works under GPL, they must have hidden motives.
In our case, the only reason we bothered to retain original copyright was because we were making open source HARDWARE and hoped to be able to fund development by commercially licensing our IP, which we did, which was the main reason we were able to build real hardware in the first place, which everyone knew we were going to have to do, which is why we added those licensing terms in the first place. Hardware is expensive to manufacture. Because of this (and plenty of other contributors and some donations), we were successful at producing 100% open source hardware.
Sometimes, I feel like some of these people actually know they're being idiots. They're trolling, and they're doing it in an intentional attempt to derail an open source project. Like they're bribed by Microsoft, there to stir up trouble for FOSS projects by making political waves. But someone will come along and point out that if you have to choose between malice and stupidity, stupidity is the more probable option.
Personally, my motivation is to make things that work and contribute to the global mindshare. It's not so much source code that I want to share. Source code is only one form of expression. It's KNOWLEDGE that I want to share. And I enjoy creating new knowledge. Now, we always have to consider the ethical consequences of what we do in science. We do science to improve the world, so if there's some way we might harm it instead, we have to find alternatives. But I'm tired of these jerks whose sole purpose in life seems to be to confuse people and make life all-around more difficult for everyone. This is just as bad as people who try to legislate creationism into the science class. (But you know what, they do this because they're jobless losers with too much time on their hands; the rest of us actually have useful work to do.)
If there is one, I don't know what it is. Alchohol makes me feel generally lousy. Tobacco can be fun at a party but fuzzes my brain for anything requiring concentration. I'm addicted to caffeine, but if I get the level wrong, it fuzzes my brain. BTW, I have CFIDS, so I'm not exactly starting out in a good place, and basically everything makes me worse. Even too much sugar! Energy drinks fall flat for me because the sugar cancels out the other effects. Especially when it's HFCS, which makes me really tired; cane sugar causes me less trouble. Taurine and B vitamine are fine, but carnitine gives me headaches.
I have these multivitamins that are high in B's, particularly niacin, and those are the only things I've tried that have a clear short-term positive effect on my concentration.
They talk about making petrol, which means hydrocarbons with 8 carbons, give or take. Is there another hydrocarbon that they could produce that has better conversion efficiency both in production and when in use in the auto? Sure, if it turns out to be methane, then we need to adapt cars to take natural gas and have pressurized tanks, which is inconvenient, but it may be worth it.
Now, this conversion efficiency may be a matter of production rate more than anything else. We "waste" massive amounts of solar energy anyway -- who cares if there's a 10% conversion from solar energy to petrol energy or a 5% conversion. But one hydrocarbon (or other fuel) may be quicker to produce, making it a better replacement for natural petroleum. We have to optimize for the size and expense of the conversion facility, the energy density of the fuel, storage requirements for the fuel, the efficiency of conversion to mechanical energy, and the peak power we can get out of it for a given engine displacement.
To me, that we evolved from earlier life forms is a straightforward conclusion. We have mountains of evidence, and current theories are sound given that data. But I'm not a biologist, so I find it a challenge to get access to much of that data. I'm looking for a single coherent tome (or maybe multivolume set) of biological data used to develop specific theories of evolution of many ancient and modern family trees. I don't want mere drawings of fossils in sequence like in a high school textbook. I would like to see photographs of the original fossils, along with data about geologic strata, measurements of numerous morphological features, and explanations of the lines of reasoning that lead to particular conclusions. Sections on DNA analysis would be great too, along with any other interesting lines of evidence. The conclusions that scientists draw are fascinating, and I'd like to dig deeper into the data they started from. Would you be able to point out a top example of such a resource?
I'll agree that maybe (under many circumstances), it isn't RIGHT to blaspheme someone else's religion. However, there's no way in hell it should ever be made illegal. No one is being physically harmed, and no individual person is being defamed.
The fact is, all organizations need to be able to handle criticism. And blasphemy is a form of criticism. Some people need to thicken their skin and do some self-examination as to why this "blasphemy" might be going on on such a scale. Hmmm Maybe some people are doing some bad things, and this is how others criticize them for it.
If your God has been blasphemed, you may be able to make a CIVIL case, IF you can demonstrate that you've been emotionally harmed by someone who specifically targeted you with the intent of causing you emotional duress. But this should NEVER be a criminal matter. Any time a criminal court would get involved, some other tangible harm must have been caused, and blashphemy would only be used as an indicator of intent, not as a criminal charge in and of itself.
An analogous situation I can think of is a case where a teen committed suicide over the treatment she got after "sexting." Ultimately, she couldn't handle the ridicule from her peers and killed herself. This is very sad, and I think that the other students who tormented her should be punished. If those other kids are to be put up on criminal charges, then it would have to be for specific things that are illegal, so that's a separate matter. However, I do think that this is a clear-cut civil case, where it can be shown that harm was intended and harm was caused, and damages should be sought. Plus, the burden of proof in a civil case is not as rigorous as in criminal cases. (BTW, I think that most copyright violation cases should be civil too. Law enforcement should only get involved if the violation is on a massive scale AND profit is being made.)
The UN can take their anti-blasphemy laws and shove it where their gods are afraid to look. I'm not going to have my freedoms abridged just to mollify some religious nut who tries to claim they've been harmed just because someone made an insensitive statement. First it's anti-religion statements, then it's 100 other things. Just wait until it becomes illegal to criticize politicians! You think the US Congress is corrupt NOW? Slippery slope.
It seems more likely that the meta-universe's simulaition of our universe employs some simplifications. Therefore we cannot apply what we believe to be limits about computers to their simulator. For instance, we use binary, and we approximate real numbers using floating point. This gives us limited range and precision. But what's to say that in the meta-universe, they haven't found ways to represent numbers with infinite precision and range (at least in relation to our perspective on math).
Any argument you can make, I can come up with a counter-argument based on conjecture about how the meta universe physics might differ from ours. (I'm practiced at this because I used to be a Creationist. ;) )
I'm not sure that the summary's defintion of half-life is correct. It says that after 521 years, half of the bonds would be gone. If you took out half of the bonds, all you'd have is pairs of nucleotides, which would mean all of the DNA is basically destroyed as far as genetic sequences are concerned. Typically, half-life means "the time after which half remains."
So if applied in the sense, I'd expect half-life to mean "the time after which half of the DNA is properly intact." In other words, after 521 years, on average, all of your chromosomes would be broken in half.
But that doesn't seem right either. I'd expect it to decay must faster.
You now have a new fan. I wish more people thought like you and considered what they SHOULD do, ethically, in priority of what's merely LEGAL (or not legal as the case may be). If more people thought like you, then we'd have fewer stupid laws restricting everyone's freedoms on the basis of the selfishness of a few. Thank you for existing and having the willingness to point out that just because something's allowed doesn't mean it's right or doesn't have consequences for other people.
I'm not sure if you're trying to correct me or not. I assumed that the ISA would be published, along with lots of architectural details. I'm just saying that they HAVE to be published or else the CPU is worthless, so by saying that they're published, Adeptiva isn't doing anything special.
Dear Mr. Torvalds,
The Open Graphics Project's original goal was to develop an open source graphics card. Although they did produce hardware, they were not successful at anything sustainable, due to a lack of cash-flow. As a result, they've recently shifted their focus to the more acadeic and mostly software pursuit of developing the first fully open-architecture GPU (http://sourceforge.net/projects/openshader/), with simulation/compiler infrastructure and reference hardware design in Verilog. Do you think that grass-roots efforts like this will ever succeed at freeing Linux users from buggy binary drivers, or will there always be insufficient community cohesion, puting us forever at the mercy of companies like nVidia that will never support open source drivers?
Thank you for your time.
The thing about CPUs that makes Adeptiva's statement not particularly impressive is that in almost all cases, the ISA of a CPU _must_ be published, otherwise you can't get developers to write code for it. But an ISA is just a language, not an implementation. A CPU that is not "open" by their definition is completely worthless.
GPUs are much worse because they've always been peripherals, hidden behind a driver, which is responsible for generating rendering commands from OpenGL and JIT-compiling virtual instruction sets like PTX.
A few commenters have pointed out some other things that "should be banned" because they're unhealthy. We've seen studies finding things like high-fructose corn syrup and and excessive fat consumption can be unhealthy for you. We've known for a long time about mercury content in tuna, and now we've just learned about arsenic in rice. Maybe those should be banned. At the same time, phthalates in PVC-based flooring are okay, despite the fact that they're correlated with autism and infertility. And why can you still buy plastic food containers made with BPA?
The cigarette I'd have once a year at a party isn't going to do me a damn bit of harm. Yet if my employer instituted this policy, and I just happened to have smoked my yearly cigarette before a random test, I'd be fired. (Of course, I haven't smoked anything in years, since having kids, but that's for their sake, not mine.) The thing is, a majority of people who get into tobacco quickly develop an addiction. Or so we're told. I'm betting the odds are high, but not like 90%. The dilemma we have to face is whether or not we want to limit tobacco use for everyone on the basis of a significant number of people who will develop an unhealthy dependence that costs tax-payer money (inevitably). But this is how a lot of laws come into being. Some moron blasts his fingers off playing with model rockets, and all of a sudden, the rest of us face mountains of paperwork to engage in a hobby that we'd already been doing safely. (Putting aside the fact that anyone getting into model rocketry right now is likely to be labeled as a terrorist.)
My view is this: The US government is already not very good at "protecting" us from all sorts of contaminants that find their way into our food, water, and air. They're probably better than many other governments, but the fact that florination is still in many water supplies, water bottles can still be made with BPA, and you can still buy home building materials that are known to cause developmental problems in children all mean that our wanna-be nanny government is lying own on the job. Oh, and let's not forget the carbon monoxide and benzine from exhaust you love to enhale at every bus depot and airport.
So before any laws are passed to limit the use of chemicals we can choose to ingest or not, we should first address the contaminants that are being hidden from us by unscrupulous suppliers.
I worked for many years as an engineer, then I went back and got a PhD, which I finished at 38 years of age. Now I'm an assistant professor at a university. Although I've taken a pay cut (for now), I love this job, because I decide what I want to work on, as long as it leads to tangible results. That doesn't scare me, because I've always been goal-oriented, and the university provides good guidelines and support.
Here's what you have to ask yourself: Why haven't you moved up in the ranks where you already are? I worked for a small company, so there was literally no room for me to be given a management position until after I'd already left, but meanwhile I ended up being one of the major decision-makers, controlled what projects I worked on and was put unofficially in charge of several junior engineers. My engineering and leadership skills were critical in my success in grad school and will be critical in my success as a professional researcher. Do you have skills analogous to this?
The point is, AGE IS NOT A FACTOR. It comes down to your personality, persistence, stress-tolerance, drive, dedication, creativity, and intelligence. That is something that you don't really lose with age, although it does evolve with experience. Just never lose the youthful drive to do the "impossible." As you get older and learn more, the "impossible," which most of the time is really just "impractical," may guide what you do when you have to make locally optimal decisions, but you can see this as opportunity to out-clever those who came before. As long as you see the "impossible" as an annoyance and a hurdle to overcome, then you'll never lose your youthful flexibility. Warp drive is "impossible," but we never stop dreaming about how we might discover how we're wrong about relativity and develop FTL space flight. In my work, I find things all the time that have never been done before because people didn't see it as worth their time, not because they were truly impossible; if you can manage your time and resources properly, you can take advantage of those opportunities.
A lot of people seem to associate coffee and caffeine, but all around the world, people get caffeine from other sources. Tea, chocolate, guarana, etc. Caffeine is not the only ingredient in these things that might affect you. For instance, the primary stimulant in cocoa is actually Theobromine.
One interesting example is a COFFEE ALLERGY. It doen't occur very often, but it does happen, and more often than with tea, for instance. Caffeine suppresses immune response (i.e. histamine production associated with an IgE reaction) to a limited degree and may therefore mask a mild allergy to other proteins found in the coffee. So you may not have any immediate allergy symptoms. But it does have an effect, and in the long term, it can lead to psychological disorders.
I know you guys are joking (and the jokes are actually funny this time), but not everyone necessarily realizes that the fidelity of the simulation is much too granular for this to be an issue. Simulation atoms (i.e. indivisible units, software objects) will be on the order of galaxies, not planets, and certainly not atoms.
Wow. It would be one thing to ask about something relevant to choosing to install a new distro. But a totally idle question about people's history of distro usage. Who gives a crap that I once used Red Hat 9? This is the sort of question that gets accepted here?
Slashdotters will notice that whenever an article appears on biology or evolution, commenters complain up and down about "those stupid creationists." So I put up an askslashdot, requesting suggestions for a really good textbook on detailed evidence used to construct theories in evolutionary biology. In other words, the evidence that creationists say that doesn't exist, in a form that's easy to read. I thought it would be a good educational opportunity for me and plenty of other people. But that's the sort of question that gets rejected.
I think that slashdot editors are closet creationists who would rather faff on about what Linux distro they used in 1995 than, god forbid, think pedagogically about science. Slashdot isn't news for nerds.
I'm a chip designer too (although probably not as good as you are), and one thing I wanted to mention for the benefit of others is that in today's chips, circuit delays are dominated by wires. It used to be dominated by transistor delays now, but today, a long interconnect in your circuit is something to avoid at all costs. So careful layout of transistors and careful arrangement of interconnects is of paramount importance. Automatic layout tools use AI techniques like simulated annealing to take a poorly laid-out circuit and try to improve it, but they're even now still poor at doing placement while taking into account routing delays. Placement and routing used to be done in two steps, but placement can have a huge effect on possible routing, which dominates circuit delay. Automatic routers try to do their jobs without a whole lot of high-level knowledge about the circuit, while a human can be a lot more intelligent about it, laying out transistors such with a better understanding of the wires that will be required for that gate, along with the wires for gates not let laid out.
Circuit layout is an NP-hard problem, meaning that even if you had the optimal layout, you wouldn't be able to determine that in any simple manner. Computers use AI to solve this problem. There is no direct way for a computer to solve the problem. So until we either find that P=NP or find a way to capture human intelligence in a computer, circuit layout is precisely the sort of thing that humans will be better at than computers.
Compilers for software are a different matter. While some aspects of compiling are NP-complete (e.g. register coloring), many optimizations that a compiler handles better are very localized (like instruction scheduling), making it feasible to consider a few hundred distinct instruction sequences, if that's even necessary. Mostly, where compilers beat humans is when it comes to keeping track of countless details. For instance, with static instruction scheduling, if you know something about the microarchitecture of the CPU that informs you about when instruction results will be available, then you won't schedule instructions to execute before their inputs are available (or else you'll get stalls). This is the sort of mind-numbing stuff that you WANT the computer to take care of for you. Compilers HAVE been getting a lot more sophisticated, offering higher-level optimizations, but in many ways, what the compiler has to work with is very bottom-up. You can get better results if the human programmer organizes his algorithms with knowledge of factors that affect performance (cache sizes, etc.). There is only so much whole-program optimization can do with bad algorithms.
Interestingly, at near-threadhold voltages (an increasingly popular power-saving technique), circuit delay becomes once again dominated by transistors. When lowering supply voltage, signal propagation in wires slows down, but transistors (in static CMOS at least) slow down a hell of a lot more.
Great! Now we'll see mercury related illnesses and birth defects skyrocket. Way to go!
And don't tell me to get an LED light. They're too damn expensive and not nearly bright enough.
The amount of iodine added to table salt is miniscule and certainly not enough if you have a deficiency, which is the case with many Americans, because we have really poor diets.
You bias your description of this arrest to make it sound as though he was arrested for his anti-semitic rants. Is that really true? Or was he arrested for generally disturbing the peace? There's a difference. You don't yell "fire" in a crowded theater, and you don't preach loudly in a library. Those are not protected forms of free speech, because they demonstrably infringe on someone else's rights. If this guy had legally set up a table at a fair, where he distributed leaflets about his views, people would have hated him for it, but it's unlikely that he would have been arrested for it. (There's a slight chance that if it could be shown that his actions specifically incited others to commit criminal acts, then he could be found criminally liable for that. And this walks a fine line, because you generally should not be held responsible for other people's actions that they freely chose, even if you are a lunatic.)
So that when those muslims blaspheme other religions, they too can be put to death.
Oh, but NOOOO. Islam is a SPECIAL religion, so they deserve SPECIAL TREATMENT, because all other religions are FALSE.
Seriously, I think that we should have UN laws that specifically condone all kinds of free speech, ESPECIALLY those that are critical of these crackpot religions. If Christians and Hindus and everyone have to put up with criticism and blasphemy against their gods, then the muslims damn well better accept the same equal and fair treatment.
That being said, it doesn't mean they have to shut up about it. COMPLAINING about blasphemy would ALSO be free speech. (I just don't have to give a crap about listening to it.)
The Japanese eat a heck of a lot of seaweed, which puts an unusually high amount of iodine in their diet, which has some health benefits. The problem for this farmed seaweed is that I can't find any indication that this grower is adding any form of iodine to the under-water soil, let alone a form that is easy to absorb.
I saw a video from one of these "prepper" people who pointed out that you don't need to take multivitamins as long as you eat a balanced diet of vegetables grown in virgin soil. We have to supplement because most farmland is depleated of trace nutrients, and the organics are only marginally better. So maybe his seaweed tastes good, but I doubt it's a good source of iodine.
Don't be fooled by imitations.