So he'll have a classroom full of 4th graders laughing at him for saying that he's a little girl at his job? THAT sounds like a sure way to hold their respect.
You know what's REALLY frightening? 4 weeks ago, AIG senior leadership saw that Lehman's collapse was imminent.
They saw it coming, told employees that the next large financial institution to fall had the initials "LB" and that we could take that to the bank. Even with that kind of foresight, an insurance company whose sole raison d'etre was risk management decided to wait until the last minute to even begin liquidation.
I can't begin to tell you how poorly that reflects on the recently ousted leadership. There's no guarantee that they could have raised enough capital, but I guarantee you they could have raised more than the ZERO that they did, and that may have saved the American taxpayer an $85 billion bailout.
The kicker is that right now, they're floating safely to earth on their golden parachutes, victims of "unprecedented market forces" and "unforeseeable circumstances". Sickening.
But of course, the number of digits used to represent said prime number is completely dependent on the base you're working in. In a hypothetical "base-infinity" numbering system, for example, every number is exactly 1 digit long and thus the test above is trivial (either the list is empty or contains every prime number depending on how we're treating 1).
Damn straight! No more of this lollygagging around, burning barrels of crude in our spare time! What we need is a disciplined, goal-oriented approach to our oil consumption!
So, if the Casimir effect is a resonant phenomenon, is TFA simply talking about disrupting that resonance by altering the topology of the plates with their nano-corrugations?
I'm not sure I agree with you completely. Yeah, C has its rough edges and pitfalls, but those difficulties aren't exactly specific to C - they're part of the wider problem domain of getting a machine to do things safely and predictably. It may not make sense for most application programmers to manage memory directly, and so they might use Java for its garbage collector and the "safety" that comes with it. However, going with a "safer" language is a form of passing the buck - memory management, pointers and the like haven't disappeared, someone else has just handled them for us. What if there's a serious problem with the garbage collector, in some corner case that's exercised extremely rarely? That may very well cost billions of dollars if it brings down a B-2. $JAVA_USING_ORGANIZATION can't exactly audit Sun and demand explanations or fixes - so, wherever possible, they roll their own to maintain strict accountability and to reduce the "black box" factor to an absolute, singular minimum.
There's got to be more to this analysis than TFA leads on. I mean, identifying turbulence as a problem is hardly a feat of aeronautical engineering. We've been flying aircraft of many varieties for a long time, and it's not as if we don't have strategies in place to deal with turbulence or any of the other weather conditions that exist (which TFA seems to confuse with turbulence). Problems with aerodynamic control are hardly showstoppers either. If worse comes to worse, put a tail-rotor on the thing just like a helicopter, or use counter-rotating props. As for the third problem (the high price of helium) - that's hardly a "technical challenge". If companies feel this new design opens some profitable avenues, they'll find a way to fund it - otherwise, it will remain a prototype. I'd like to hear what this engineer ACTUALLY had to say, since the folks at xconomy.com seem to have left nearly all the meat out of his critique.
Well, he was caught and spent some time in prison. Now he doesn't really fit in with society any more and spends time in and out of prison. Does he really fit in there?
Not to get all postmodern, but what do you mean by "optimal" and "intelligent" in the latter part of your post? Those are very important terms to throw around without clear definitions. We're talking about intelligence, an incredibly ill-specified topic, and I suspect that this "optimal intelligence" approach is, at best, a misrepresentation of current AI research (probably on the authors' part). Optimal is in the eye of the beholder, and I see no reason to suspect that there is anything out there "better" than the "best" human mind. However, the firmware in my printer may very well disagree, and mock me in ways far too subtle for my feeble, meat-based mind to comprehend.
Without a clear definition of optimal - something you could express algorithmically and plug into a fitness function of some sort - it seems it would be very difficult to show real results in A.I. I agree that an evolutionary approach is probably the best way to build up true intelligence, since there's just too much information to synthesize in the short term. Think about the AI in A Mind Forever Voyaging, for example - maybe simulations like that are the best way to build an A.I. we can relate to as something other than a tool.
A hardware-based security module may have implications for game authentication. Whoopee. Not only is this nearly devoid of content, but the content that's there is essentially bullshit. The TPM is gaining a userbase, this is true - but they are FAR from ubiquitous. This isn't something you can easily install yourself either - to implement something like this would be a pretty impressive hardware hack (it's not just a chip you solder on). Making this a requirement for a PC game is just asking for failure. Either you're going to limit your market share to that of the TPM, or you're going to have to allow a workaround for the majority of PC's which will get cracked and circumvent the whole idea. Neither of these bodes well for this guy's point.
Slashdot Mirror
It's Abraham Lincoln with indigestion.
Does it make more sense to call it a dupe or a counterfeit?
So he'll have a classroom full of 4th graders laughing at him for saying that he's a little girl at his job? THAT sounds like a sure way to hold their respect.
Flamebait? Where's your sense of humor, mods?
You know what's REALLY frightening? 4 weeks ago, AIG senior leadership saw that Lehman's collapse was imminent.
They saw it coming, told employees that the next large financial institution to fall had the initials "LB" and that we could take that to the bank. Even with that kind of foresight, an insurance company whose sole raison d'etre was risk management decided to wait until the last minute to even begin liquidation.
I can't begin to tell you how poorly that reflects on the recently ousted leadership. There's no guarantee that they could have raised enough capital, but I guarantee you they could have raised more than the ZERO that they did, and that may have saved the American taxpayer an $85 billion bailout.
The kicker is that right now, they're floating safely to earth on their golden parachutes, victims of "unprecedented market forces" and "unforeseeable circumstances". Sickening.
But of course, the number of digits used to represent said prime number is completely dependent on the base you're working in. In a hypothetical "base-infinity" numbering system, for example, every number is exactly 1 digit long and thus the test above is trivial (either the list is empty or contains every prime number depending on how we're treating 1).
Your sig STRONGLY suggests otherwise ;)
Obviously they extend copyright 4 more years.
Creationists.
Damn straight! No more of this lollygagging around, burning barrels of crude in our spare time! What we need is a disciplined, goal-oriented approach to our oil consumption!
What's hard is converting the "water" into "wine"...
So what you're saying is that Jesus can create electricity directly from heat? I'm confused...
You must be the master programmer this link talks about!
So, if the Casimir effect is a resonant phenomenon, is TFA simply talking about disrupting that resonance by altering the topology of the plates with their nano-corrugations?
I'm not sure I agree with you completely. Yeah, C has its rough edges and pitfalls, but those difficulties aren't exactly specific to C - they're part of the wider problem domain of getting a machine to do things safely and predictably. It may not make sense for most application programmers to manage memory directly, and so they might use Java for its garbage collector and the "safety" that comes with it. However, going with a "safer" language is a form of passing the buck - memory management, pointers and the like haven't disappeared, someone else has just handled them for us. What if there's a serious problem with the garbage collector, in some corner case that's exercised extremely rarely? That may very well cost billions of dollars if it brings down a B-2. $JAVA_USING_ORGANIZATION can't exactly audit Sun and demand explanations or fixes - so, wherever possible, they roll their own to maintain strict accountability and to reduce the "black box" factor to an absolute, singular minimum.
There's got to be more to this analysis than TFA leads on. I mean, identifying turbulence as a problem is hardly a feat of aeronautical engineering. We've been flying aircraft of many varieties for a long time, and it's not as if we don't have strategies in place to deal with turbulence or any of the other weather conditions that exist (which TFA seems to confuse with turbulence). Problems with aerodynamic control are hardly showstoppers either. If worse comes to worse, put a tail-rotor on the thing just like a helicopter, or use counter-rotating props. As for the third problem (the high price of helium) - that's hardly a "technical challenge". If companies feel this new design opens some profitable avenues, they'll find a way to fund it - otherwise, it will remain a prototype. I'd like to hear what this engineer ACTUALLY had to say, since the folks at xconomy.com seem to have left nearly all the meat out of his critique.
I wonder if this could be grounds for a chargeback, if someone used plastic. Anyone have thoughts on how successful that sort of approach might be?
Yes. It's called New Jersey.
She's not really my type.
Or a binary keypad.
Isn't a "used nuclear weapon" a euphemism for "massive fireball hotter than the surface of the sun?" If so, one wonders how the shipping is handled...
Not to get all postmodern, but what do you mean by "optimal" and "intelligent" in the latter part of your post? Those are very important terms to throw around without clear definitions. We're talking about intelligence, an incredibly ill-specified topic, and I suspect that this "optimal intelligence" approach is, at best, a misrepresentation of current AI research (probably on the authors' part). Optimal is in the eye of the beholder, and I see no reason to suspect that there is anything out there "better" than the "best" human mind. However, the firmware in my printer may very well disagree, and mock me in ways far too subtle for my feeble, meat-based mind to comprehend. Without a clear definition of optimal - something you could express algorithmically and plug into a fitness function of some sort - it seems it would be very difficult to show real results in A.I. I agree that an evolutionary approach is probably the best way to build up true intelligence, since there's just too much information to synthesize in the short term. Think about the AI in A Mind Forever Voyaging, for example - maybe simulations like that are the best way to build an A.I. we can relate to as something other than a tool.
Bunny ears?
A hardware-based security module may have implications for game authentication. Whoopee. Not only is this nearly devoid of content, but the content that's there is essentially bullshit. The TPM is gaining a userbase, this is true - but they are FAR from ubiquitous. This isn't something you can easily install yourself either - to implement something like this would be a pretty impressive hardware hack (it's not just a chip you solder on). Making this a requirement for a PC game is just asking for failure. Either you're going to limit your market share to that of the TPM, or you're going to have to allow a workaround for the majority of PC's which will get cracked and circumvent the whole idea. Neither of these bodes well for this guy's point.