Maybe I missed the species of flower, but I’d like to know what this flower looks like when grown on earth and how being on 0-g has affected its appearance.
You make a really good point. During interviews, I don’t have the same quick response to some things that companies like Google would expect. However, give me some time, and I’ll come up with better answers than other people would because they would just move on, while I would chew on it and come up with something more comprehensive.
You do have to accept that over-compensation will happen. White men used to dominate authority in the US. Actually, they still do, even if we’ve developed the maturity to accept a president with brown skin. Given the stranglehold white men have had and the efforts that everyone else have had to go through to break that down, we’re naturally going to go through a period where they get a lot of backlash. Some of that is deserved on the basis of them not relinquishing control earlier than they did. If that kind of overcompensation continues, then it’ll develop into a serious problem. But right now, CEO positions in America, for instance, are dominated by men. Why aren’t there more women in these positions? It’s most likely because we have conditioned them to not seek positions like that and conditioned everyone else to dislike women who behave “unladylike,” which means whatever we want it to mean when finding a reason to dislike women acting outside of the box they’ve been put in. At some point, we’ll produe a generation of women who have finally managed to escape that social conditioning, and that will come when society as a whole accepts their equality. Then there will no longer be any back-lash against men anymore either.
We still live in a society that needs to be *reminded* that race and gender are socially worthless predictors of one’s abilities. In the 1960’s, people could be openly bigoted and sexist. Today, they’ve all just moved into the closet. Moreover, there are some bigoted and sexist ideas that are so deeply embedded in our culture that people aren’t even aware of it. Personally, when I was in the 7th grade and was bussed to a school in the middle of the ghetto, I developed a very negative impression of black people. I have to remind myself that if I’d gone to the 7th grade in a school that was in the middle of a trailor park, that I would have an equally bad impression of white people. Technically, people should be free to harbor bigoted thoughts, but as a society, we have to make it clear that *acting* on those feelings is as criminal as discrimination on the basis of *any* superficial characteristic.
Africans are widely accepted to have superior social ability. That is a form of intelligence not accounted for by IQ. Your implication that Africans are dumber on the basis of IQ conveniently ignores that fact. But then, bigots and creationists are really good at paying attention only to whatever skewed interpretation of the facts supports their case, ignoring all of the other “inconvenient” facts.
Every person has things they’re good and bad at, and race is not going to be a predictor of one person’s mathematical ability.
Also, “African American” may seem like a silly term. But it’s a term that Americans of African decent decided to call themselves, and it’s their freedom to call themselves by that term. It’s no sillier than calling food grown a certain way “Organic.” Does that imply that we can buy inorganic food? Well, we can — salt and other minerals, but we don’t call them that, and the term “organic” is being used here in an entirely different sense with a new meaning that gets a new dictionary entry. “Organic” after all is just a string of phonemes with arbitrary meaning.
If only we as a society can now stop thinking of these people as abberations just on the basis of gender and other genetic factors. Geniuses in general are rare, so if you’re looking for them, the last thing you want to do is summarily exclude any segment of any population, simply because YOU believe some of their characteristics correlate less with genius.
I was reading a journal paper from the 1970’s or something that presented average IQs for different genetic groups. They found the average Asian IQ to be higher tna the average Caucasian IQ, which was higher than the average African IQ. However, in every case, the standard deviation was very high. This guarantees that geniuses would be found in large populations. (Of course, none of this accounts for aspects of intelligence not considered by IQ, like social ability.)
Of course, racism isn’t really about IQ. IQ is sometimes used as an *excuse* for racism, but if that were not a factor, racists would find another excuse. Bigotry in general is about deciding that someone is incompetent or inferior on the basis of superficial traits. It becomes *criminal* when you actively interfere with someone’s life on the basis of a prejudgement like this.
I’m hoping that highlighting women and other marginalized groups and their contributions to science and society as a whole will gradually enlighten the human race.
CS is a subject that can be taught as well any other subject. We don’t expect everyone to become an expert in biology, but they should be familiar with the basics. So we can apply this to CS.
Because divergent thinking might make people ponder something different than a literal interpretation of the Bible. This is why procrastination is OF THE DEVIL.
What you’re describing is doing an upgrade, which is something that people are trying to avoid. That being said, Windows 10 is spyware, which is why people are so keen on avoiding it. However, I’ve had my fair share of Ubuntu upgrades go horribly wrong, so Linux upgrades aren’t exactly rainbows and unicorns.
People are complaining that Microsoft isn’t going to support Windows 7 and 8 on newer processors. This is mostly artificial. New drivers ARE needed, but Microsoft could write those without TOO much trouble and make it part of the update process to install them. It’s unlikely that Windows’ installer would totally be unable to run on these newer systems. That being said, Linux deprecates hardware (new software not compatible with old hardware) and fails to back-port (old software not compatible with new hardware) all the time. An effort is required and Microsoft doesn’t want to make that effort. Moreover, as they push people away from Windows 7 and 8 into running Windows 10, the costs to support those older OS’s decline (not just drivers and bug fixes but also customer service and tech support).
Personally, I only run Windows in VMs, and I have a Windows 7 installation in VMware that I use strictly for development. Everything else is on Mac and Linux for me. This isn’t a hard choice FOR ME because I don’t run any of the major game titles that require Windows. Also I own a PS3, but not a PS4. If you are willing to sacrifice a few things, it’s possible to almost completely move away from Windows. The people who care are tech savvy enough to do this. The people who DON’T care don’t give a crap if they’re running Windows 10 or not, so the whole point is moot.
Microsoft is making a selfish business decision that is affecting some people, but most of those people shouldn’t have been using Windows to begin with. So accept the fact that if you’re going to use Windows, you’re GOING to get jerked around by a company that cares very little about software freedom (and only to the extent that it benefits themselves). This is a fact of reality, and the only way to really prevent this from happening is to stop using Windows.
Google’s interview questions center around algorithms with lip service to computational complexity. They do not care about how performance may be affected by processor architecture, and they don’t care about operating systems, compilers, or networking either. My specialization is in architecture, and I also do digital circuit design. Google engineers had no interest in asking me questions in areas where I’d *shine*, so although I did okay at their questions. Their feedback on why they declined to make me an offer said that they (a) didn’t fit in with the culture (b) were not able to read a resume properly (they said I “jumped around too much,” but those extra jobs were college internships). Basically, they were fishing for some lame but acceptable excuse to turn me down. Some people have suggested that they thought I was too old. Also, I didn’t want to work in NYC; the first recruiter told me that I could interview at one office but go to work at another, which was contradicted by the recruiter I dealt with in NYC.
So look, I’ve been working as a software and chip design engineer since 1996. Every time you fly, you’re at the mercy of one of my chips (a graphics accelerator for ATC systems). That was from before I went to grad school. I also have a PhD from Ohio State in computer engineering, with studies in Computer Architecture, AI, Linguistics, Cognitive Engineering, and Cognitive Science. Currently (and at the time I interviewed even) I work as a professor of computer science at a major public university in upstate New York. I’m *pretty sure* I’m not deficient when it comes to engineering skills or problem solving. So what went wrong?
As another commenter mentioned, Google’s interview process identifies people who are good at solving problems but ignores those who are good at figuring out what problems to solve. My whole career has centered around the latter, especially my current one where I sink or swim on the basis of finding research problems others haven’t solved before.
Google recruiters keep calling me even now. Interestingly, one just told me that they avoid recruiting professors now. Hmmm.
Oh well. I’d rather work at Tesla or SpaceX anyhow.:)
I’m an American, but I watch a lot of Top Gear, which is where I get all of my scientific knowledge. And according to them, Americans are all lazy, fat, slow, stupid, and have the total inability to design a car that can go around a corner. So clearly there must be some flaw in this discussion that seems to assume that Americans work too much. Perhaps we spend more wall-clock time working, compared to people in other countries, to make up for the fact that we’re inefficient and incompetent. Also, as an American, I was too lazy to read the article.
I know exactly what would happen if I sent this link to my father, who is a creationist. He would tell me that it doesn’t prove anything. When I was a kid (and didn’t know enough to see through his poor logic), he addressed the issue of “what if scientists created new life in a lab.” He explained that having intelligent people spend millions of dollars to design a new life form is not the same as it happening by accident in nature. Of course he’s right, technically. We still don’t know how life originally arose, but what this does do is lower the bar for how complex something needs to be so that it can be considered the first or simplest living organism.
As I get older, I feel more and more like it’s silly to even have the debate. The only reason we’re even having this argument is because some ancient people wrote a book that we now consider to be sacred text, and lots of people have been taught to interpret it to mean that the earth can’t be very old.
One thing I find particularly amusing is where Ken Ham gets his “deal breaker” from regarding evolution. He points out that the concept of “original sin” precludes death prior to the first sin, since evolution implies death occurred before the first humans. Now, the thing is, a lot of the vehement creationists I have known are various kinds of protestant fundamentalists who are also rather anti-catholic. But it turns out that the doctrine of original sin is a extra-biblical catholic tradition.
I know that some people throw around the term “terrorism” too much. But this is a sad and increasing element of our modern society. When setting off bombs, the terrorists have to go through huge efforts to go to the target and plant bombs without getting caught. You know you’re killing humans. The terrible thing about cyberterrorism is that it’s too much like Ender’s game. From the comfort of their homes, they can take out infrastructures 1000s of miles away, and the people they’re affecting are dehumanized, because the terrorists never have to face their victims in any way. Hahaha, we took out the electrical grid, but we’re conveniently blind to the fact that we’re shutting down hospitals longer than their backup generators can handle.
I really wish I knew more about cybersecurity, because I would love to get involved in the defense against this kind of terrorism and wanton destruction. I want to protect against attacks and also develop ways of identifying the attackers so they can be arrested and stopped before they can do any damage.
I don’t care if someone hates me for being part of the “Christian West” or whatever. They can argue with me and call me all sorts of offensive things, and I think that is their right to have an opinion. I mean, I think sexist, racist, and homophoic remarks are terribly distasteful, but I think that people should have the right to have a distasteful opinion. It’s only when you injure someone or directly interfere in their lives does something become criminal. These terrorists are criminals, and everyone else needs to work very hard to stop the spread of this kind of behavior.
Yes, cutting edge PCIe-based SSDs do not look like SATA devices. They look more like a NIC or GPU or other PCIe peripheral in that there is some physical address space mapped to the device. We access that address space to initiate data transfers between DRAM and the SSD storage, all of which is done via DMA.
Your idea basically requires that we map the whole disk to physical address space. When you mmap a file, it kinda emulates what you're describing, albeit through software. Now, we could in fact do what you're describing. But keep in mind that although 64 bits seems to be very large, we want to future-proof secondary storage to support much larger address spaces still, like using 128-bit addressing. Moreover, because of the way disks are organized, we want to access them in BLOCKS, not individual words. If you were to map the disk to physical memory so that you could just directly reference bytes on disk, performance would suck. Read performance would suck because it would be (likely) uncached and require PIO accesses over PCIe. DMA is much faster because it's a bulk operation and can be done in parallel to computation. PIO results in massive waste of CPU cycles while the processor stalls waiting on the very long latency to access the peripheral, and it's also tied up during that time rather than available for other useful computation. For writes, performance would also suffer, because SSDs are block-oriented, requiring buffering and read-modify-write operations on the underlying storage. This would also massively increase wear on flash cells.
So, in short, mapping anything like current secondary storage to physical memory is a bad idea. That being said, work on STT-RAM and other newer RAM technologies has the promise to be faster than DRAM and lower power than DRAM while also being non-volatile. In that case, if we integrated, say, a first level of secondary storage near the CPU, your idea could really work well.
As fast as we think SSDs are, they’re still way slower than DRAM. Also, no system is architected with the ability to map disk blocks to address space transparently. Virtual memory systems do map disk blocks to virtual memory addresses, but via the OS where the disk block is “cached” in DRAM.
Hell, my iPhone 6+ came with iOS 8, and it’s been getting slower and slower, and I think iOS 9 is part of the problem. Basically, iOS is just bloated and slow?
I don’t joke about harming people. It’s stupid and rude. Hell, I don’t joke about harming terrorists. I just make statements about how they need to be stopped. And there are a few cases that I believe are criminal, like threatening to kill the US president. Anyone who threatens to commit voilence or even jokes about it deserves to be smacked around (but in a figurative sense, of course).
That being said, I think that explicitly prohibiting statements like this is a can of worms that you don’t want to deal with.
Actually, twitter prohibiting this kind of speech is totally legal, because it’s a private business.
But what I’m concerned about is any time a stupid joke can be taken too seriously by humorless people in authority, and some kid’s life gets ruined because they had a moron moment.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I believe that, with the exception of a few very rare cases, all speech should be protected, no matter how stupid it is.
And don’t get me started on this “safe zone” bullshit that’s been popping up at universities.
In all seriousness, texting while doing something else has become a conspicuous problem. Probably not worse than all of the other “problems” that have occurred throughout history whenever a new technology arose, but nevertheless something we’re going to have to adapt to. Texting while driving seems insane, and speech-to-text doesn’t help a whole hell of a lot. Then again, some people seem to have trouble adjusting their radio settings without crashing.
The interesting thing about texting while walking is that making a law about it also seems absurd. You’re not operating heavy equipment, just mostly putting yourself at risk of tripping. And if you injure someone else, then there are already laws that address the liability there. A huge factor here comes down to the individual’s talents at multitasking and using peripheral vision. I know that I can text while walking because long before cell phones, I’d already developed good use of both multitasking and peripheral vision, so like many others I have observed, I can walk and text and manage to not trip on unexpected obstacles, bump into other people, walk in front of cars, etc.
However, lots of people are not good at this yet insist on doing it anyway. That being said, this isn’t a lot different from many other risky activities people engage in that we can’t and shouldn’t try to regulate, like excessive alcohol, weed, unprotected sex, and driving while stupid. We can only address the after-effects when people harm others as a result of acting irresponsibly.
Believe it or not, there are LOTS of Russians interested in doing some real science. So I don’t know maybe some people working there will do other useful research with the budget they have? Just a wild thought.
That being said, they don’t have the same freedoms there as we have in other major European nations, North America, etc. There may a culture of keeping your head down so you don’t get into trouble. It’s not as bad as during the Soviet era, but it’s not awesome either. The oppression is likely to interfere with the science that some are willing to dabble in.
I have seen many sloppy people attribute the idea of the Technological Singularity to you. In their description, they say that you believe that the moment there exists a single computer with enough compute power to equal the human brain, it will somehow magically develop AI. This is obviously not true, and we're a long way off from anything that could loosely be described as strong AI. Indeed, the developments of strong AI and advancements in high performance computing are largely disconnected from each other. Would you care to clarify your beliefs about the future developments of AI and necessary compute resources?
1000 years ago, Christians were roaming the world, killing non-believers. How is this a whole lot different? Christopher Hitchens (may he rest in peace) would go on and on about the evils of religion. But the truth is that religion only dictates the form of the assholery. If people didn’t have the religion, they’d find some other ideoligical reason to go around killing people they disagree with.
I’m not an expert in Islam. People tell me that there are lots of “kill the infidel” parts, and they’re later in the Qur’an, so they supercede peaceful stuff towards the beginning. You can find lots of violence in the Hebrew bible too. In all cases, I think it’s a matter of people cherry-picking the parts of their religious texts that support their idiosyncrasies and using that as justification. So you’re an asshole because God said to be? No. You’re an asshole. And you use your God to justify the shit you want to do.
There aren’t more assholes in the middle east, though. Most people there are relatively poor. However, there are oil barrons who want to control economies, and they find their religion as a convenient vehicle. MAYBE it’s easier to recruit and rile up your troops if you play on their religion, and MAYBE if you didn’t have that religion, it might be harder to do this. But the fact is, millions of people want to leave Syria to get away from ISIS. Those people are primarily Muslim too, but they just want to live in peace.
We taught to think of Hinduism as one of those inherently non-violent religions. But did you know that there are Hindu fundamentalists who feel inclined to resort to voilence over their beliefs? There are. Were some people so inclined, I’m sure they could twist Hinduism around to motivate people into violence.
The main reason that Christians and Jews and many other religious people are no longer violent (en masse anyhow) is because the violence we’re seeing now with Islam already happened with those other religions. The maintream groups have been there and done that and have matured past it. Perhaps in another 500 years, Islam will mature (perhaps through a lot of natural selection) to the point where it becomes an inherently peaceful religion.
We already have Islamic countries that have developed some maturity. Jordan is a great example. Their law is inherently Shari’a, which I wouldn’t want to live under, but it is tempered. For instance, sodomy was made legal in 1951. They don’t embrace it, but it’s not illegal, so you can’t be jailed for it. Basically private consential sex acts are not under the jurisdiction of the government. Moreover, if a family kills one of their kin for “shaming” them in this way or other, that death is considered murder and will be prosecuted like any other. There is maturity in separating the “moral” from the “legal” where they consider something to be immoral but do not take it upon themselves to punish all whom they consider sinners. I’m not saying this is perfect or anything, but Jordan is one of the safest countries to visit in the middle east, yet it is a solidly Islamic country. Why? Because their government is comprised of people who aren’t assholes (irrespective of their religious beliefs).
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I missed the species of flower, but I’d like to know what this flower looks like when grown on earth and how being on 0-g has affected its appearance.
You make a really good point. During interviews, I don’t have the same quick response to some things that companies like Google would expect. However, give me some time, and I’ll come up with better answers than other people would because they would just move on, while I would chew on it and come up with something more comprehensive.
You do have to accept that over-compensation will happen. White men used to dominate authority in the US. Actually, they still do, even if we’ve developed the maturity to accept a president with brown skin. Given the stranglehold white men have had and the efforts that everyone else have had to go through to break that down, we’re naturally going to go through a period where they get a lot of backlash. Some of that is deserved on the basis of them not relinquishing control earlier than they did. If that kind of overcompensation continues, then it’ll develop into a serious problem. But right now, CEO positions in America, for instance, are dominated by men. Why aren’t there more women in these positions? It’s most likely because we have conditioned them to not seek positions like that and conditioned everyone else to dislike women who behave “unladylike,” which means whatever we want it to mean when finding a reason to dislike women acting outside of the box they’ve been put in. At some point, we’ll produe a generation of women who have finally managed to escape that social conditioning, and that will come when society as a whole accepts their equality. Then there will no longer be any back-lash against men anymore either.
Agreed. Based on the statistics, you can compute that they are rarer. All that means is that you have to look harder to find them.
In 100 years, you’ll be right.
We still live in a society that needs to be *reminded* that race and gender are socially worthless predictors of one’s abilities. In the 1960’s, people could be openly bigoted and sexist. Today, they’ve all just moved into the closet. Moreover, there are some bigoted and sexist ideas that are so deeply embedded in our culture that people aren’t even aware of it. Personally, when I was in the 7th grade and was bussed to a school in the middle of the ghetto, I developed a very negative impression of black people. I have to remind myself that if I’d gone to the 7th grade in a school that was in the middle of a trailor park, that I would have an equally bad impression of white people. Technically, people should be free to harbor bigoted thoughts, but as a society, we have to make it clear that *acting* on those feelings is as criminal as discrimination on the basis of *any* superficial characteristic.
Africans are widely accepted to have superior social ability. That is a form of intelligence not accounted for by IQ. Your implication that Africans are dumber on the basis of IQ conveniently ignores that fact. But then, bigots and creationists are really good at paying attention only to whatever skewed interpretation of the facts supports their case, ignoring all of the other “inconvenient” facts.
Every person has things they’re good and bad at, and race is not going to be a predictor of one person’s mathematical ability.
Also, “African American” may seem like a silly term. But it’s a term that Americans of African decent decided to call themselves, and it’s their freedom to call themselves by that term. It’s no sillier than calling food grown a certain way “Organic.” Does that imply that we can buy inorganic food? Well, we can — salt and other minerals, but we don’t call them that, and the term “organic” is being used here in an entirely different sense with a new meaning that gets a new dictionary entry. “Organic” after all is just a string of phonemes with arbitrary meaning.
If only we as a society can now stop thinking of these people as abberations just on the basis of gender and other genetic factors. Geniuses in general are rare, so if you’re looking for them, the last thing you want to do is summarily exclude any segment of any population, simply because YOU believe some of their characteristics correlate less with genius.
I was reading a journal paper from the 1970’s or something that presented average IQs for different genetic groups. They found the average Asian IQ to be higher tna the average Caucasian IQ, which was higher than the average African IQ. However, in every case, the standard deviation was very high. This guarantees that geniuses would be found in large populations. (Of course, none of this accounts for aspects of intelligence not considered by IQ, like social ability.)
Of course, racism isn’t really about IQ. IQ is sometimes used as an *excuse* for racism, but if that were not a factor, racists would find another excuse. Bigotry in general is about deciding that someone is incompetent or inferior on the basis of superficial traits. It becomes *criminal* when you actively interfere with someone’s life on the basis of a prejudgement like this.
I’m hoping that highlighting women and other marginalized groups and their contributions to science and society as a whole will gradually enlighten the human race.
CS is a subject that can be taught as well any other subject. We don’t expect everyone to become an expert in biology, but they should be familiar with the basics. So we can apply this to CS.
Because divergent thinking might make people ponder something different than a literal interpretation of the Bible. This is why procrastination is OF THE DEVIL.
What you’re describing is doing an upgrade, which is something that people are trying to avoid. That being said, Windows 10 is spyware, which is why people are so keen on avoiding it. However, I’ve had my fair share of Ubuntu upgrades go horribly wrong, so Linux upgrades aren’t exactly rainbows and unicorns.
People are complaining that Microsoft isn’t going to support Windows 7 and 8 on newer processors. This is mostly artificial. New drivers ARE needed, but Microsoft could write those without TOO much trouble and make it part of the update process to install them. It’s unlikely that Windows’ installer would totally be unable to run on these newer systems. That being said, Linux deprecates hardware (new software not compatible with old hardware) and fails to back-port (old software not compatible with new hardware) all the time. An effort is required and Microsoft doesn’t want to make that effort. Moreover, as they push people away from Windows 7 and 8 into running Windows 10, the costs to support those older OS’s decline (not just drivers and bug fixes but also customer service and tech support).
Personally, I only run Windows in VMs, and I have a Windows 7 installation in VMware that I use strictly for development. Everything else is on Mac and Linux for me. This isn’t a hard choice FOR ME because I don’t run any of the major game titles that require Windows. Also I own a PS3, but not a PS4. If you are willing to sacrifice a few things, it’s possible to almost completely move away from Windows. The people who care are tech savvy enough to do this. The people who DON’T care don’t give a crap if they’re running Windows 10 or not, so the whole point is moot.
Microsoft is making a selfish business decision that is affecting some people, but most of those people shouldn’t have been using Windows to begin with. So accept the fact that if you’re going to use Windows, you’re GOING to get jerked around by a company that cares very little about software freedom (and only to the extent that it benefits themselves). This is a fact of reality, and the only way to really prevent this from happening is to stop using Windows.
Whoops. I wish Slashdot had an edit option. They said I jumped around too much, which suggests they can’t read a resume properly.
Google’s interview questions center around algorithms with lip service to computational complexity. They do not care about how performance may be affected by processor architecture, and they don’t care about operating systems, compilers, or networking either. My specialization is in architecture, and I also do digital circuit design. Google engineers had no interest in asking me questions in areas where I’d *shine*, so although I did okay at their questions. Their feedback on why they declined to make me an offer said that they (a) didn’t fit in with the culture (b) were not able to read a resume properly (they said I “jumped around too much,” but those extra jobs were college internships). Basically, they were fishing for some lame but acceptable excuse to turn me down. Some people have suggested that they thought I was too old. Also, I didn’t want to work in NYC; the first recruiter told me that I could interview at one office but go to work at another, which was contradicted by the recruiter I dealt with in NYC.
So look, I’ve been working as a software and chip design engineer since 1996. Every time you fly, you’re at the mercy of one of my chips (a graphics accelerator for ATC systems). That was from before I went to grad school. I also have a PhD from Ohio State in computer engineering, with studies in Computer Architecture, AI, Linguistics, Cognitive Engineering, and Cognitive Science. Currently (and at the time I interviewed even) I work as a professor of computer science at a major public university in upstate New York. I’m *pretty sure* I’m not deficient when it comes to engineering skills or problem solving. So what went wrong?
As another commenter mentioned, Google’s interview process identifies people who are good at solving problems but ignores those who are good at figuring out what problems to solve. My whole career has centered around the latter, especially my current one where I sink or swim on the basis of finding research problems others haven’t solved before.
Google recruiters keep calling me even now. Interestingly, one just told me that they avoid recruiting professors now. Hmmm.
Oh well. I’d rather work at Tesla or SpaceX anyhow. :)
I’m an American, but I watch a lot of Top Gear, which is where I get all of my scientific knowledge. And according to them, Americans are all lazy, fat, slow, stupid, and have the total inability to design a car that can go around a corner. So clearly there must be some flaw in this discussion that seems to assume that Americans work too much. Perhaps we spend more wall-clock time working, compared to people in other countries, to make up for the fact that we’re inefficient and incompetent. Also, as an American, I was too lazy to read the article.
I know exactly what would happen if I sent this link to my father, who is a creationist. He would tell me that it doesn’t prove anything. When I was a kid (and didn’t know enough to see through his poor logic), he addressed the issue of “what if scientists created new life in a lab.” He explained that having intelligent people spend millions of dollars to design a new life form is not the same as it happening by accident in nature. Of course he’s right, technically. We still don’t know how life originally arose, but what this does do is lower the bar for how complex something needs to be so that it can be considered the first or simplest living organism.
As I get older, I feel more and more like it’s silly to even have the debate. The only reason we’re even having this argument is because some ancient people wrote a book that we now consider to be sacred text, and lots of people have been taught to interpret it to mean that the earth can’t be very old.
One thing I find particularly amusing is where Ken Ham gets his “deal breaker” from regarding evolution. He points out that the concept of “original sin” precludes death prior to the first sin, since evolution implies death occurred before the first humans. Now, the thing is, a lot of the vehement creationists I have known are various kinds of protestant fundamentalists who are also rather anti-catholic. But it turns out that the doctrine of original sin is a extra-biblical catholic tradition.
I know that some people throw around the term “terrorism” too much. But this is a sad and increasing element of our modern society. When setting off bombs, the terrorists have to go through huge efforts to go to the target and plant bombs without getting caught. You know you’re killing humans. The terrible thing about cyberterrorism is that it’s too much like Ender’s game. From the comfort of their homes, they can take out infrastructures 1000s of miles away, and the people they’re affecting are dehumanized, because the terrorists never have to face their victims in any way. Hahaha, we took out the electrical grid, but we’re conveniently blind to the fact that we’re shutting down hospitals longer than their backup generators can handle.
I really wish I knew more about cybersecurity, because I would love to get involved in the defense against this kind of terrorism and wanton destruction. I want to protect against attacks and also develop ways of identifying the attackers so they can be arrested and stopped before they can do any damage.
I don’t care if someone hates me for being part of the “Christian West” or whatever. They can argue with me and call me all sorts of offensive things, and I think that is their right to have an opinion. I mean, I think sexist, racist, and homophoic remarks are terribly distasteful, but I think that people should have the right to have a distasteful opinion. It’s only when you injure someone or directly interfere in their lives does something become criminal. These terrorists are criminals, and everyone else needs to work very hard to stop the spread of this kind of behavior.
Yes, cutting edge PCIe-based SSDs do not look like SATA devices. They look more like a NIC or GPU or other PCIe peripheral in that there is some physical address space mapped to the device. We access that address space to initiate data transfers between DRAM and the SSD storage, all of which is done via DMA.
Your idea basically requires that we map the whole disk to physical address space. When you mmap a file, it kinda emulates what you're describing, albeit through software. Now, we could in fact do what you're describing. But keep in mind that although 64 bits seems to be very large, we want to future-proof secondary storage to support much larger address spaces still, like using 128-bit addressing. Moreover, because of the way disks are organized, we want to access them in BLOCKS, not individual words. If you were to map the disk to physical memory so that you could just directly reference bytes on disk, performance would suck. Read performance would suck because it would be (likely) uncached and require PIO accesses over PCIe. DMA is much faster because it's a bulk operation and can be done in parallel to computation. PIO results in massive waste of CPU cycles while the processor stalls waiting on the very long latency to access the peripheral, and it's also tied up during that time rather than available for other useful computation. For writes, performance would also suffer, because SSDs are block-oriented, requiring buffering and read-modify-write operations on the underlying storage. This would also massively increase wear on flash cells.
So, in short, mapping anything like current secondary storage to physical memory is a bad idea. That being said, work on STT-RAM and other newer RAM technologies has the promise to be faster than DRAM and lower power than DRAM while also being non-volatile. In that case, if we integrated, say, a first level of secondary storage near the CPU, your idea could really work well.
As fast as we think SSDs are, they’re still way slower than DRAM. Also, no system is architected with the ability to map disk blocks to address space transparently. Virtual memory systems do map disk blocks to virtual memory addresses, but via the OS where the disk block is “cached” in DRAM.
Hell, my iPhone 6+ came with iOS 8, and it’s been getting slower and slower, and I think iOS 9 is part of the problem. Basically, iOS is just bloated and slow?
I don’t joke about harming people. It’s stupid and rude. Hell, I don’t joke about harming terrorists. I just make statements about how they need to be stopped. And there are a few cases that I believe are criminal, like threatening to kill the US president. Anyone who threatens to commit voilence or even jokes about it deserves to be smacked around (but in a figurative sense, of course).
That being said, I think that explicitly prohibiting statements like this is a can of worms that you don’t want to deal with.
Actually, twitter prohibiting this kind of speech is totally legal, because it’s a private business.
But what I’m concerned about is any time a stupid joke can be taken too seriously by humorless people in authority, and some kid’s life gets ruined because they had a moron moment.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I believe that, with the exception of a few very rare cases, all speech should be protected, no matter how stupid it is.
And don’t get me started on this “safe zone” bullshit that’s been popping up at universities.
In all seriousness, texting while doing something else has become a conspicuous problem. Probably not worse than all of the other “problems” that have occurred throughout history whenever a new technology arose, but nevertheless something we’re going to have to adapt to. Texting while driving seems insane, and speech-to-text doesn’t help a whole hell of a lot. Then again, some people seem to have trouble adjusting their radio settings without crashing.
The interesting thing about texting while walking is that making a law about it also seems absurd. You’re not operating heavy equipment, just mostly putting yourself at risk of tripping. And if you injure someone else, then there are already laws that address the liability there. A huge factor here comes down to the individual’s talents at multitasking and using peripheral vision. I know that I can text while walking because long before cell phones, I’d already developed good use of both multitasking and peripheral vision, so like many others I have observed, I can walk and text and manage to not trip on unexpected obstacles, bump into other people, walk in front of cars, etc.
However, lots of people are not good at this yet insist on doing it anyway. That being said, this isn’t a lot different from many other risky activities people engage in that we can’t and shouldn’t try to regulate, like excessive alcohol, weed, unprotected sex, and driving while stupid. We can only address the after-effects when people harm others as a result of acting irresponsibly.
I win?
Believe it or not, there are LOTS of Russians interested in doing some real science. So I don’t know maybe some people working there will do other useful research with the budget they have? Just a wild thought.
That being said, they don’t have the same freedoms there as we have in other major European nations, North America, etc. There may a culture of keeping your head down so you don’t get into trouble. It’s not as bad as during the Soviet era, but it’s not awesome either. The oppression is likely to interfere with the science that some are willing to dabble in.
I have seen many sloppy people attribute the idea of the Technological Singularity to you. In their description, they say that you believe that the moment there exists a single computer with enough compute power to equal the human brain, it will somehow magically develop AI. This is obviously not true, and we're a long way off from anything that could loosely be described as strong AI. Indeed, the developments of strong AI and advancements in high performance computing are largely disconnected from each other. Would you care to clarify your beliefs about the future developments of AI and necessary compute resources?
1000 years ago, Christians were roaming the world, killing non-believers. How is this a whole lot different? Christopher Hitchens (may he rest in peace) would go on and on about the evils of religion. But the truth is that religion only dictates the form of the assholery. If people didn’t have the religion, they’d find some other ideoligical reason to go around killing people they disagree with.
I’m not an expert in Islam. People tell me that there are lots of “kill the infidel” parts, and they’re later in the Qur’an, so they supercede peaceful stuff towards the beginning. You can find lots of violence in the Hebrew bible too. In all cases, I think it’s a matter of people cherry-picking the parts of their religious texts that support their idiosyncrasies and using that as justification. So you’re an asshole because God said to be? No. You’re an asshole. And you use your God to justify the shit you want to do.
There aren’t more assholes in the middle east, though. Most people there are relatively poor. However, there are oil barrons who want to control economies, and they find their religion as a convenient vehicle. MAYBE it’s easier to recruit and rile up your troops if you play on their religion, and MAYBE if you didn’t have that religion, it might be harder to do this. But the fact is, millions of people want to leave Syria to get away from ISIS. Those people are primarily Muslim too, but they just want to live in peace.
We taught to think of Hinduism as one of those inherently non-violent religions. But did you know that there are Hindu fundamentalists who feel inclined to resort to voilence over their beliefs? There are. Were some people so inclined, I’m sure they could twist Hinduism around to motivate people into violence.
The main reason that Christians and Jews and many other religious people are no longer violent (en masse anyhow) is because the violence we’re seeing now with Islam already happened with those other religions. The maintream groups have been there and done that and have matured past it. Perhaps in another 500 years, Islam will mature (perhaps through a lot of natural selection) to the point where it becomes an inherently peaceful religion.
We already have Islamic countries that have developed some maturity. Jordan is a great example. Their law is inherently Shari’a, which I wouldn’t want to live under, but it is tempered. For instance, sodomy was made legal in 1951. They don’t embrace it, but it’s not illegal, so you can’t be jailed for it. Basically private consential sex acts are not under the jurisdiction of the government. Moreover, if a family kills one of their kin for “shaming” them in this way or other, that death is considered murder and will be prosecuted like any other. There is maturity in separating the “moral” from the “legal” where they consider something to be immoral but do not take it upon themselves to punish all whom they consider sinners. I’m not saying this is perfect or anything, but Jordan is one of the safest countries to visit in the middle east, yet it is a solidly Islamic country. Why? Because their government is comprised of people who aren’t assholes (irrespective of their religious beliefs).