Exactly. People overvalue the concept of "idea" and undervalue the concept of aggressive business positioning,
If there are so many good ideas already, why do they never make it into products? Or is there a secret plot to keep all the good ideas in the company and only sell the most boring, obvious stuff with the worst design? Because that's how it looks when I go to shopping centers with the firm intention to buy something just to find out that I don't need any of the things being sold. I know very well what I would like to have, it's just not there.
That doesn't mean that I disagree with the OP, though, and to show my good will, I'll give away a great business opportunity for free. What you make of it is just a matter of agressive business positioning and marketing. Here it is: sell bronze monkey busts with personalized name tags
So the sender generates a key, encrypts the message, spreads the key across some number of key-value pairs on random Vuze clients, sends a message telling what key-value pairs in Vuze contain the crypto key, and deletes the local copy of the key. The receiver gets the message, looks up the key-value pairs specified in the Vuze hash, reconstructs the key, decrypts the message, displays it, and deletes the local copy of the key. The receiving client has to do this every time the message is viewed.
Uh...unless the client just saves the plaintext message, of course. So the attacker has to intercept the message within approx. eight hours in order to retrieve the message and then store it forever. There may be scenarios where this can be useful, although I can't come up with one right now.
I agree with you and also would like to see more games with automatically created and evolving content. Unfortunately, game studios still seem to shy away from dynamic content because the behavior of dynamic systems is generally hard to predict. Some might fear that the game world suddenly becomes unstable and drops into chaos. But the game studios could hire more people with a strong physics/dynamic systems modeling background to deal with these problems.
Another problem is that games with good dynamic content have a very high replay value, whereas it seems that most game studios would prefer people to buy a new game or expansion pack right after they have finished the old one---or even earlier, as one might infer from the sloppiness with which later levels are often designed in comparison to the first few levels.
We were talking about students of Physics, Chemistry and Engineering, which is where Fortran is still widely in use. Since it doesn't matter which programming language you teach, because as you say the students need to learn the principles and concepts of programming and data structures, it doesn't harm to teach them whatever they encounter later. CS is a different pairs of shoes. In CS languages like Scheme should be taught because you can express all existing programming concepts and paradigms in it. (BTW, Scheme is my personal language of choice for many mundane tasks, too...talking about personal advocacy, hehehe.)
BTW, what you say about OOP and Python is not really true. Python's object system is a nasty hack, you can get the job done with it but it violates many rules of sound OOP. For example, Python's idea of data encapsulation is that of a sort of gentlemen's agreement, which does not scale well to large systems with many programmers working on them.
Mod parent up. Students should learn to choose the right tool for the right purpose and not be drawn into stupid "my language is best" discussions. Python is too slow for serious number crunching and Fortran is widely in use for exactly this purpose. Python is suitable for many other tasks, though. To give another example, if somebody studies astronomy and will have to work with old legacy Forth code, he should better be taught to program in Forth at university. And somebody who needs to quench maximum speed out of hardware or wants to implement compilers should better learn assembler. I've studied linguistics and learned to program in Prolog and Common Lisp at University, now what's wrong with that? Both are still widely in use in NLP and you need to no the basics of them when you're working in that domain even if you don't use them.
In my experience the majority of people that think that advertise one programming language above all others tend to have no clue about programming languages in general and what other languages exist apart from mainstream languages like C/C++ or Ruby, and I'm afraid this holds particularly for Python and Java enthusiasts---both of which are relatively mediocre and outdated languages in terms of their general features and usefulness, although they can of course be the right choice for many tasks.
Humans aren't actually better at it than robots; humans are notoriously bad at estimating conditional probabilities.
That's not quite true. Computers cannot estimate conditional probabilities at all, all they currently do is calculate probabilities based on already known probabilities. It's true that humans are bad at this, but that is not what "estimating probabilities" means. If you have a complete and accurate model including all the random variables relevant to a given problem and the initial probability distribution, then of course you can feed a computer with this and let it calculate---but even this is of much too high complexity for a computer, so highly simplifying and often incorrect assumptions have to be made, e.g. that the random variables are independent from each other.
But the models are made by humans, ideally by statisticians together with domain-sepcific experts. Try to let the computer make the model, and you'll get huge Bayesian networks that spit out tons of garbage....
The problem is not the making of the ethical decision itself. Computers are much better than humans in making rational decisions based on probability and decision theory and some preference relations.
The problem is the assessment of the situation / building an appropriate model as an input to such a decision component. Robots are not just bad at that, they are outright incapable at the present time to perceive, evaluate, and assess situations in a way that would allow them to obtain the abstract representations necessary for ethical decisions. Robots can't even decide friend from foe, not to speak of the more complicated forms of human interaction.
I agree with the title of your post but not with the rest of it.:-P
At least where I live and have lived within Europe so far (3 different countries), the papers that lie the most sell the most...e.g. yellow press tabloids like the German Bild Zeitung.
My personal, selfish advice to the publishing companies: If you make a newspaper with one half of the traditional political news of a contemporary good newspaper and another half with news about science, the Internet, software & hardware (including games), reviews & tests of new products, and write all of this in a way that doesn't assume that the reader is an idiot, people will buy it. Of course, I'm speaking in favor of my own interests here, but I'm pretty sure that plenty of other people think the same way.
While I generally like 9.04, this statement is not quite true. At least on my machines, there is a lot of tearing and flickering when you move a window no matter whether desktop effects are switched on or off.
Just a minor quirk, but annoying. I experience no such flickering in windows XP or OS X. (I'm customarily using all 3 OSes, Ubuntu for work, OS X for home, and XP for gaming.)
Who would have doubted anyway that the FBI has and uses this technology. For educational purposes, I'd like to see the source code or some nice reverse engineering study of this trojan--that would be more interesting news!
Sorry, Kant was never a python programmer. Impossible. My personal guess is that Kant was programming in Modula, but it could also have been Brainf**ck. Any other suggestions by people who have actually read Cunt?
Nope, it doesn't. It's a well-known fact that humans often don't act fully rationally. For example, in classical decision theory the preference relation is transitive (obviously, since a relation that isn't an ordering relation can hardly be called a 'preference'), but in experiments humans often make choices based on intransitive preferences. Many people also believe in contradictions without knowing so---especially mathematicians, of course.
Sorry, I know that some people think you shouldn't criticize any free open source software, but this is really not impressing. It's kind of weird that with all the freedom they had the developers of this game only came up with a generic Quake Arena clone. If that's typical for open source games, then No, thanks.
What a stupid question. Of course I'd be willing to pay multitudes more to get this people better working conditions. If you aren't willing to do that, something is seriously wrong with you. A more intelligent question is, however, where to buy tech equipment that was produced under fair conditions. I don't know where.:(
If triple-A titles would cost $20, then kids would buy one about every week as opposed to buying one every 2 months and beeing disappointed about it. If game companies would actually do some market research, they would see that their products are overpriced.
Ordinary kids simply cannot afford the current prices, they do not have the money in comparison to the demand created by the advertisments of game companies to buy all this boring and mentally retarded monster shooting/killing/torturing/burning other people alive game shit.
There is no cyberwar. What you and the arrticle describe is just SIGINT. What do you think the NSA is doing all the time?
If there was a real cyberwar, basically all private and most company computers would be wiped out and rendered unoperational within just a few days. Off the shelf PCs are very insecure (drivers, BIOS, processor firmware, etc.) no matter which OS you run on them.
I don't think that's a good advice. If they forget to give you a contract with a copyright transfer agreement, do by all means not remind them of it. Unless you sign a written copyright transfer agreement, the copyright will be yours no matter what they think and what is common practise. Sign nothing and your work belongs to you.
Exactly, and usually there is not much to negotiate unless you're already a star. I'm employed as a full-time researcher and my contract says that the copyright of all my works belongs to the University. At least where I live currently, contracts like this are very common. They are rarely enforced, but if you invent something really useful some people in the administration will likely remember that clause in the contract.
I can only recommend some literature for the classic AI approach that probably isn't your primary interest, since you've mentioned connectionism. Just in case you aren't familiar with it yet, get up to date in discrete mathematics with a focus on logic and model theory first and learn some abstract algebra and topology. That's for the formal stuff that you will encounter in classic AI. Then take a look at Russell & Norvig for an overview. With your background it will be fairly easy reading and you can skip some of the chapters. If for some reason you happen to become interested in knowledge representation (my domain), I'd recommend Friedman & Halpern's "Reasoning About Knowledge" and Halpern's "Reasoning About Uncertainty". As for connectionism and pattern recognition, I suppose you could jump into the primary literature (articles, etc.) immediately, given your theoretical physics background. But are you sure that, say, string theory isn't more interesting and rewarding than neural network programming in the long run?
I'm not a US citizen, so it doesn't really concern me, but...
scanning through the web site I mostly see a collection of electoral campaign slogans like "Problem: blablabla (Bush evil), Solution: blablabla (make world a better place)". Politician's talk everywhere---did I miss something?
I use Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 daily on my laptops and OS X 10.5.5 on my iMac. In most daily tasks the actual speed is quite irrelevant, what counts is the 'snappiness' of the user interface. From this point of view I must say that OS X fails miserably and I'm seriously considering to install Ubuntu and forgetting about OS X on my iMac.
Fact is, Ubuntu on my old thinkpad T42 with 1GB RAM (already used when bought) feels much faster in daily use than OS X on my iMac 2Ghz Dual Core with 2GB RAM. Cocoa apps in general and particularly Mail.app feel slow and sluggish in comparison to the default Ubuntu apps like Evolution. Sorry Apple, but you've got to try harder if you want to keep your 'power users' in the long run!
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. People overvalue the concept of "idea" and undervalue the concept of aggressive business positioning,
If there are so many good ideas already, why do they never make it into products? Or is there a secret plot to keep all the good ideas in the company and only sell the most boring, obvious stuff with the worst design? Because that's how it looks when I go to shopping centers with the firm intention to buy something just to find out that I don't need any of the things being sold. I know very well what I would like to have, it's just not there.
That doesn't mean that I disagree with the OP, though, and to show my good will, I'll give away a great business opportunity for free. What you make of it is just a matter of agressive business positioning and marketing. Here it is: sell bronze monkey busts with personalized name tags
So the sender generates a key, encrypts the message, spreads the key across some number of key-value pairs on random Vuze clients, sends a message telling what key-value pairs in Vuze contain the crypto key, and deletes the local copy of the key. The receiver gets the message, looks up the key-value pairs specified in the Vuze hash, reconstructs the key, decrypts the message, displays it, and deletes the local copy of the key. The receiving client has to do this every time the message is viewed.
Uh...unless the client just saves the plaintext message, of course. So the attacker has to intercept the message within approx. eight hours in order to retrieve the message and then store it forever. There may be scenarios where this can be useful, although I can't come up with one right now.
I agree with you and also would like to see more games with automatically created and evolving content. Unfortunately, game studios still seem to shy away from dynamic content because the behavior of dynamic systems is generally hard to predict. Some might fear that the game world suddenly becomes unstable and drops into chaos. But the game studios could hire more people with a strong physics/dynamic systems modeling background to deal with these problems.
Another problem is that games with good dynamic content have a very high replay value, whereas it seems that most game studios would prefer people to buy a new game or expansion pack right after they have finished the old one---or even earlier, as one might infer from the sloppiness with which later levels are often designed in comparison to the first few levels.
I knew it...
We were talking about students of Physics, Chemistry and Engineering, which is where Fortran is still widely in use. Since it doesn't matter which programming language you teach, because as you say the students need to learn the principles and concepts of programming and data structures, it doesn't harm to teach them whatever they encounter later. CS is a different pairs of shoes. In CS languages like Scheme should be taught because you can express all existing programming concepts and paradigms in it. (BTW, Scheme is my personal language of choice for many mundane tasks, too...talking about personal advocacy, hehehe.)
BTW, what you say about OOP and Python is not really true. Python's object system is a nasty hack, you can get the job done with it but it violates many rules of sound OOP. For example, Python's idea of data encapsulation is that of a sort of gentlemen's agreement, which does not scale well to large systems with many programmers working on them.
Mod parent up. Students should learn to choose the right tool for the right purpose and not be drawn into stupid "my language is best" discussions. Python is too slow for serious number crunching and Fortran is widely in use for exactly this purpose. Python is suitable for many other tasks, though. To give another example, if somebody studies astronomy and will have to work with old legacy Forth code, he should better be taught to program in Forth at university. And somebody who needs to quench maximum speed out of hardware or wants to implement compilers should better learn assembler. I've studied linguistics and learned to program in Prolog and Common Lisp at University, now what's wrong with that? Both are still widely in use in NLP and you need to no the basics of them when you're working in that domain even if you don't use them.
In my experience the majority of people that think that advertise one programming language above all others tend to have no clue about programming languages in general and what other languages exist apart from mainstream languages like C/C++ or Ruby, and I'm afraid this holds particularly for Python and Java enthusiasts---both of which are relatively mediocre and outdated languages in terms of their general features and usefulness, although they can of course be the right choice for many tasks.
It can delete all of your work and all of the backups of your work (unless the backups are made by another user on your system).
Humans aren't actually better at it than robots; humans are notoriously bad at estimating conditional probabilities.
That's not quite true. Computers cannot estimate conditional probabilities at all, all they currently do is calculate probabilities based on already known probabilities. It's true that humans are bad at this, but that is not what "estimating probabilities" means. If you have a complete and accurate model including all the random variables relevant to a given problem and the initial probability distribution, then of course you can feed a computer with this and let it calculate---but even this is of much too high complexity for a computer, so highly simplifying and often incorrect assumptions have to be made, e.g. that the random variables are independent from each other.
But the models are made by humans, ideally by statisticians together with domain-sepcific experts. Try to let the computer make the model, and you'll get huge Bayesian networks that spit out tons of garbage....
The problem is not the making of the ethical decision itself. Computers are much better than humans in making rational decisions based on probability and decision theory and some preference relations.
The problem is the assessment of the situation / building an appropriate model as an input to such a decision component. Robots are not just bad at that, they are outright incapable at the present time to perceive, evaluate, and assess situations in a way that would allow them to obtain the abstract representations necessary for ethical decisions. Robots can't even decide friend from foe, not to speak of the more complicated forms of human interaction.
To be honest, even though I've heard the name on /. a few times, I don't even know what twitter is. Is it important?
I agree with the title of your post but not with the rest of it. :-P
At least where I live and have lived within Europe so far (3 different countries), the papers that lie the most sell the most...e.g. yellow press tabloids like the German Bild Zeitung.
My personal, selfish advice to the publishing companies: If you make a newspaper with one half of the traditional political news of a contemporary good newspaper and another half with news about science, the Internet, software & hardware (including games), reviews & tests of new products, and write all of this in a way that doesn't assume that the reader is an idiot, people will buy it. Of course, I'm speaking in favor of my own interests here, but I'm pretty sure that plenty of other people think the same way.
At least on ./ hehehe...
It's the result of crappy programming.
windows moving around without jerkiness
While I generally like 9.04, this statement is not quite true. At least on my machines, there is a lot of tearing and flickering when you move a window no matter whether desktop effects are switched on or off.
Just a minor quirk, but annoying. I experience no such flickering in windows XP or OS X. (I'm customarily using all 3 OSes, Ubuntu for work, OS X for home, and XP for gaming.)
Who would have doubted anyway that the FBI has and uses this technology. For educational purposes, I'd like to see the source code or some nice reverse engineering study of this trojan--that would be more interesting news!
Sorry, Kant was never a python programmer. Impossible. My personal guess is that Kant was programming in Modula, but it could also have been Brainf**ck. Any other suggestions by people who have actually read Cunt?
Nope, it doesn't. It's a well-known fact that humans often don't act fully rationally. For example, in classical decision theory the preference relation is transitive (obviously, since a relation that isn't an ordering relation can hardly be called a 'preference'), but in experiments humans often make choices based on intransitive preferences. Many people also believe in contradictions without knowing so---especially mathematicians, of course.
Sorry, I know that some people think you shouldn't criticize any free open source software, but this is really not impressing. It's kind of weird that with all the freedom they had the developers of this game only came up with a generic Quake Arena clone. If that's typical for open source games, then No, thanks.
What a stupid question. Of course I'd be willing to pay multitudes more to get this people better working conditions. If you aren't willing to do that, something is seriously wrong with you. A more intelligent question is, however, where to buy tech equipment that was produced under fair conditions. I don't know where. :(
If triple-A titles would cost $20, then kids would buy one about every week as opposed to buying one every 2 months and beeing disappointed about it. If game companies would actually do some market research, they would see that their products are overpriced.
Ordinary kids simply cannot afford the current prices, they do not have the money in comparison to the demand created by the advertisments of game companies to buy all this boring and mentally retarded monster shooting/killing/torturing/burning other people alive game shit.
There is no cyberwar. What you and the arrticle describe is just SIGINT. What do you think the NSA is doing all the time?
If there was a real cyberwar, basically all private and most company computers would be wiped out and rendered unoperational within just a few days. Off the shelf PCs are very insecure (drivers, BIOS, processor firmware, etc.) no matter which OS you run on them.
I don't think that's a good advice. If they forget to give you a contract with a copyright transfer agreement, do by all means not remind them of it. Unless you sign a written copyright transfer agreement, the copyright will be yours no matter what they think and what is common practise. Sign nothing and your work belongs to you.
Exactly, and usually there is not much to negotiate unless you're already a star. I'm employed as a full-time researcher and my contract says that the copyright of all my works belongs to the University. At least where I live currently, contracts like this are very common. They are rarely enforced, but if you invent something really useful some people in the administration will likely remember that clause in the contract.
I can only recommend some literature for the classic AI approach that probably isn't your primary interest, since you've mentioned connectionism. Just in case you aren't familiar with it yet, get up to date in discrete mathematics with a focus on logic and model theory first and learn some abstract algebra and topology. That's for the formal stuff that you will encounter in classic AI. Then take a look at Russell & Norvig for an overview. With your background it will be fairly easy reading and you can skip some of the chapters. If for some reason you happen to become interested in knowledge representation (my domain), I'd recommend Friedman & Halpern's "Reasoning About Knowledge" and Halpern's "Reasoning About Uncertainty". As for connectionism and pattern recognition, I suppose you could jump into the primary literature (articles, etc.) immediately, given your theoretical physics background. But are you sure that, say, string theory isn't more interesting and rewarding than neural network programming in the long run?
I'm not a US citizen, so it doesn't really concern me, but...
scanning through the web site I mostly see a collection of electoral campaign slogans like "Problem: blablabla (Bush evil), Solution: blablabla (make world a better place)". Politician's talk everywhere---did I miss something?
I use Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 daily on my laptops and OS X 10.5.5 on my iMac. In most daily tasks the actual speed is quite irrelevant, what counts is the 'snappiness' of the user interface. From this point of view I must say that OS X fails miserably and I'm seriously considering to install Ubuntu and forgetting about OS X on my iMac.
Fact is, Ubuntu on my old thinkpad T42 with 1GB RAM (already used when bought) feels much faster in daily use than OS X on my iMac 2Ghz Dual Core with 2GB RAM. Cocoa apps in general and particularly Mail.app feel slow and sluggish in comparison to the default Ubuntu apps like Evolution. Sorry Apple, but you've got to try harder if you want to keep your 'power users' in the long run!