The fact that graphics cards use lower-precision floating-point representations reflects the fact that not all applications need double precision. Single precision is obviously no good for something highly nonlinear and iterative (like CFD), but it's enough for the modeling behind 3D graphics; that's why these single-precision monsters are scaling out (volume of production) so rapidly, right?
Maybe we can agree on "native precision". I'm not sure ASCI White would have gone much faster if you threw it a problem that required only single precision calculations...?
In 2000, the fastest supercomputer in the world was IBM's ASCI White, with a peak performance of 7.226 TFLOPS. Its theoretical maximum performance was 12.3 TFLOPS. It weighed over 100 tons, and drew 3MW of power, plus another 3MW for cooling.
Please fill us in on the algorithm you're using to distinguish hostile and non-hostile pedestrians.
I guess I see your point -- if it's known that autonomous cars will always stop for a pedestrian, there will be some people who decide to take advantage of that behavior. They'll realize that if they step in front of this car, it will stop. It will also alert other cars in the vicinity (so they don't have to stop as abruptly for the destination), it'll probably alert law enforcement (because a pedestrian is illegally interfering with traffic), and it'll doubtless log video of the car's immediate surroundings during the incident. But, then again, robbers and carjackers aren't normally known for their strategic brilliance, are they?
Until autonomous cars are closer to deployment, though, I hope you're continuing to push for the abolition of seat belts. After all, they could prevent you from being thrown to safety in a fiery crash!
When you define any extramarital intimacy as "cheating", you've already cut off the debate paths that the victims from the summary illustrate. Not, mind you, that AM's marketing did much to discourage that definition.
But, hey, enjoy your puritanical two-minute hate, and don't worry about collateral damage.
(Posting as AC, even though I've never gone near the site, because I'm stuck with this country's puritanical environment and the consequences it imposes for even talking about ethical decisions that don't fit the standard mold. And, yeah, I guess I'm a bit of a coward.)
Sounds to me like an attempt to couch the entire argument in terms of a universal preferred frame of reference, which is the foundation for many, many fallacious arguments relating to relativity.
They don't detect photons as particles, instead antennae detect the electricity induced by changing electromagnetic field. Anyway, you can check these thermal cameras, they all have a small Peltier cooler.
Nope. As far as I know, none of the sensors that are marketed at sub-five-figure (USD) price points are actively cooled.
Here's a video showing a teardown of the SeeK Thermal unit. Look, Ma -- no cooler!
Untrue. All cheap contemporary thermal sensors are uncooled, and can measure temperatures well below their own operating temperature.
Think of it this way: each imaging element is exposed to thermal radiation from one small rectangle (pixel) of the overall scene. If the temperature of that part of the scene is higher than the imaging element's temperature, the element will gain energy; if the temperature of that part of the scene is lower than the imaging element's temperature, the element will lose energy, by radiating it toward the scene.
You're confusing near infrared (700-900nm) with thermal infrared (5000-15000nm). The only way conventional cameras can detect thermal radiation is if the subject is hot enough to glow.
Radio Shack used to sell little cards with a phosphor that, once "charged" with blue light, would fluoresce visibly when it was hit with near-infrared. You could use a glass lens to focus and see a near-infrared image on the card. I was able to adjust the current through a heating element so that it wasn't visibly glowing, but could be seen on the card -- but it was still at a temperature of several hundred degrees C.
To see thermal radiation from something near room or body temperature, you need an entirely different type of sensor. The cheap imagers use "microbolometer arrays", essentially an array of little thermometers with extremely low thermal mass.
It's in a superposition of edited and non-edited states. If anyone had bothered to read it before posting it through to the main page, it would have collapsed.
Well, I believe that consciousness can't exist without a "non-self" to differentiate one's "self" from, and I'm at a loss to imagine how that can be conceived without sensory input and experience. I acknowledge that this is only a belief; I have no idea how one would go about proving or disproving it.
Just try to define consciousness without referring to "awareness", or "subjective experience", or "understanding". It's all begging the question -- in this case, "defining" a concept by equating it to other concepts, and pretending those concepts are already understood, when in reality they're aspects of the same mystery.
Yes, I know most people who mention "begging the question" mean something else entirely. Not this time. Feel free to shoot down an argument I'm not making, but don't ascribe that argument to me.
The same way we know that anything else is conscious or unconscious. There's a standard technique. I believe the formal term for it is "begging the question".
If we do accept a definition of consciousness that includes an eraser-sized homunculus brain, though, we're probably already morally and ethically bankrupt, based on how we treat animals with much more sophisticated cognitive capabilities. Unless, of course, you believe one aspect of "consciousness" is that it can only arise in things made of human cells.
There is a lot of lab work that makes me squeamish. Come to think of it, there's even more stuff that happens outside a lab that makes me squeamish, but still produces important benefits for my life and many others.
I have kids myself, and I understand how having them can make you empathetic in new ways. This certainly isn't a bad thing.
But suppose your baby were diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease. Would you still reject research that relied on techniques like those described here? Would you reject a treatment or cure, with proven efficacy, because its development had relied on this sort of model? Would you subject your child to experimental therapies that had some chance of success, but some chance of horrible, painful failure, if you instead had the option of trying them first on a model like this grown from your own child's skin cells?
Like I said, some lab work makes me squeamish. I respect the importance of Institutional Review Boards to keep abuses in check. But, on balance, I'm glad that researchers continue to push into new avenues like this, and I expect that the research will eventually prevent a great deal of human suffering.
You can't call them "flash drives" if it isn't flash memory, can you? We need a name that conveys the increased speed, and that maybe plays up the 3D aspect, where capacity can grow by expansion along the Z axis as well as the traditional X and Y dimensions.
I'm betting the only conclusion we can really draw is that the vendor for these systems stopped making their regularly-scheduled payments to the appropriate campaign organizations.
I just wish Weather Underground hadn't been taken over by The Weather Channel and, more to the point, their Web dev team. WU was an outstanding source for quick, concise reports on current weather, weather history, and news. Apparently they still post interesting content from time to time, but it just isn't worth my while to go slogging through the "new, improved UI" to get to it.
I still do pull it up for local conditions and radar; if I'm not in a hurry, it gives me the info I need, at least when I'm on my home 30/5 TWC connection. I had the misfortune of trying to use it through a throttled Hughes satellite connection the other weekend, and I finally gave up; there's so much AJAX crap going on that it took over a minute to load even part of the local conditions page, and the radar page simply wouldn't ever load. And this is with ads disabled.
I haven't been running public-facing Web projects lately, but if I go back to it, I'll insist that we test on something other than a fast LAN connection and giant screen. The current team at WU obviously doesn't do that.
Not really interesting until the grandchildren.
on
Evolutionary Robotics
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This doesn't seem especially interesting if the "child" robots can't in turn produce and select their own children.
At that point, I guess it gets even less interesting, because the most "successful" mutation will be a simple one that causes the mother to select all her offspring.
Funny thing -- along about age 40 or so, that vergence-focus mismatch goes away all on its own, as your eye loses the ability to change focus. Not that there are that many advantages to aging, but this is definitely one.
You should consider the possibility that electrical engineers who regularly use the term "ground loop" just might understand the concept better than you do.
Run two identical wires down to your "green wire buried in the dirt".
Run some current along one of the wires.
Observe the voltages at the near end of each line. You'll find that the line carrying current is no longer at "zero volts" relative to the line not carrying current. That's because those ground lines are not perfect conductors.
I'm sort of holding out for the inevitable cataract surgery as an upgrade.
I don't have significant cataracts yet, but I have no reason to expect that I won't. And when I do, and get replacement lenses, I expect better visual acuity than I have now, and hopefully better focal accommodation. There are already various replacement-lens products that offer accommodation; ten or twenty years down the road, I hope much better products will be available.
I briefly considered laser surgery to correct my vision when I was in my late 30s, but I was satisfied with contact lenses. Eventually, as I lost accommodation, I gave them up in favor of bifocal glasses (which serve as trifocals for me -- top for distance, bottom for reading, peer under the lenses or take them off for close-up examination). If I had laser surgery, I'd need to carry reading glasses all the time, probably in more than one strength. What would be the point?
Ah, but if I can regain accommodation -- that changes everything. And, yes, I'd consider invasive surgery to gain that benefit.
Psst, hey, editors -- it's always a good idea to spell out acronyms when they're first used if they're unfamiliar to those outside the article's specialty.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that graphics cards use lower-precision floating-point representations reflects the fact that not all applications need double precision. Single precision is obviously no good for something highly nonlinear and iterative (like CFD), but it's enough for the modeling behind 3D graphics; that's why these single-precision monsters are scaling out (volume of production) so rapidly, right?
Maybe we can agree on "native precision". I'm not sure ASCI White would have gone much faster if you threw it a problem that required only single precision calculations...?
In 2000, the fastest supercomputer in the world was IBM's ASCI White, with a peak performance of 7.226 TFLOPS. Its theoretical maximum performance was 12.3 TFLOPS. It weighed over 100 tons, and drew 3MW of power, plus another 3MW for cooling.
One. Six. Inch. Card.
Please fill us in on the algorithm you're using to distinguish hostile and non-hostile pedestrians.
I guess I see your point -- if it's known that autonomous cars will always stop for a pedestrian, there will be some people who decide to take advantage of that behavior. They'll realize that if they step in front of this car, it will stop. It will also alert other cars in the vicinity (so they don't have to stop as abruptly for the destination), it'll probably alert law enforcement (because a pedestrian is illegally interfering with traffic), and it'll doubtless log video of the car's immediate surroundings during the incident. But, then again, robbers and carjackers aren't normally known for their strategic brilliance, are they?
Until autonomous cars are closer to deployment, though, I hope you're continuing to push for the abolition of seat belts. After all, they could prevent you from being thrown to safety in a fiery crash!
I'm a life-long learner. I can't get enough of learning. I have three college degrees...
Yes, I believe you've mentioned that previously. Verbatim, in fact.
LOL. I'm not even very good at being a coward, apparently.
When you define any extramarital intimacy as "cheating", you've already cut off the debate paths that the victims from the summary illustrate. Not, mind you, that AM's marketing did much to discourage that definition.
But, hey, enjoy your puritanical two-minute hate, and don't worry about collateral damage.
(Posting as AC, even though I've never gone near the site, because I'm stuck with this country's puritanical environment and the consequences it imposes for even talking about ethical decisions that don't fit the standard mold. And, yeah, I guess I'm a bit of a coward.)
The AC trolls get younger every year.
How your grandpa learned to master hardware and low-level software
Sounds to me like an attempt to couch the entire argument in terms of a universal preferred frame of reference, which is the foundation for many, many fallacious arguments relating to relativity.
They don't detect photons as particles, instead antennae detect the electricity induced by changing electromagnetic field. Anyway, you can check these thermal cameras, they all have a small Peltier cooler.
Nope. As far as I know, none of the sensors that are marketed at sub-five-figure (USD) price points are actively cooled.
Here's a video showing a teardown of the SeeK Thermal unit. Look, Ma -- no cooler!
Untrue. All cheap contemporary thermal sensors are uncooled, and can measure temperatures well below their own operating temperature.
Think of it this way: each imaging element is exposed to thermal radiation from one small rectangle (pixel) of the overall scene. If the temperature of that part of the scene is higher than the imaging element's temperature, the element will gain energy; if the temperature of that part of the scene is lower than the imaging element's temperature, the element will lose energy, by radiating it toward the scene.
You're confusing near infrared (700-900nm) with thermal infrared (5000-15000nm). The only way conventional cameras can detect thermal radiation is if the subject is hot enough to glow.
Radio Shack used to sell little cards with a phosphor that, once "charged" with blue light, would fluoresce visibly when it was hit with near-infrared. You could use a glass lens to focus and see a near-infrared image on the card. I was able to adjust the current through a heating element so that it wasn't visibly glowing, but could be seen on the card -- but it was still at a temperature of several hundred degrees C.
To see thermal radiation from something near room or body temperature, you need an entirely different type of sensor. The cheap imagers use "microbolometer arrays", essentially an array of little thermometers with extremely low thermal mass.
No, I don't.
It's in a superposition of edited and non-edited states. If anyone had bothered to read it before posting it through to the main page, it would have collapsed.
Well, I believe that consciousness can't exist without a "non-self" to differentiate one's "self" from, and I'm at a loss to imagine how that can be conceived without sensory input and experience. I acknowledge that this is only a belief; I have no idea how one would go about proving or disproving it.
I meant exactly what I said.
Just try to define consciousness without referring to "awareness", or "subjective experience", or "understanding". It's all begging the question -- in this case, "defining" a concept by equating it to other concepts, and pretending those concepts are already understood, when in reality they're aspects of the same mystery.
Yes, I know most people who mention "begging the question" mean something else entirely. Not this time. Feel free to shoot down an argument I'm not making, but don't ascribe that argument to me.
The same way we know that anything else is conscious or unconscious. There's a standard technique. I believe the formal term for it is "begging the question".
If we do accept a definition of consciousness that includes an eraser-sized homunculus brain, though, we're probably already morally and ethically bankrupt, based on how we treat animals with much more sophisticated cognitive capabilities. Unless, of course, you believe one aspect of "consciousness" is that it can only arise in things made of human cells.
There is a lot of lab work that makes me squeamish. Come to think of it, there's even more stuff that happens outside a lab that makes me squeamish, but still produces important benefits for my life and many others.
I have kids myself, and I understand how having them can make you empathetic in new ways. This certainly isn't a bad thing.
But suppose your baby were diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease. Would you still reject research that relied on techniques like those described here? Would you reject a treatment or cure, with proven efficacy, because its development had relied on this sort of model? Would you subject your child to experimental therapies that had some chance of success, but some chance of horrible, painful failure, if you instead had the option of trying them first on a model like this grown from your own child's skin cells?
Like I said, some lab work makes me squeamish. I respect the importance of Institutional Review Boards to keep abuses in check. But, on balance, I'm glad that researchers continue to push into new avenues like this, and I expect that the research will eventually prevent a great deal of human suffering.
You can't call them "flash drives" if it isn't flash memory, can you? We need a name that conveys the increased speed, and that maybe plays up the 3D aspect, where capacity can grow by expansion along the Z axis as well as the traditional X and Y dimensions.
I know! They can call them "Zip drives"!
I'm betting the only conclusion we can really draw is that the vendor for these systems stopped making their regularly-scheduled payments to the appropriate campaign organizations.
I just wish Weather Underground hadn't been taken over by The Weather Channel and, more to the point, their Web dev team. WU was an outstanding source for quick, concise reports on current weather, weather history, and news. Apparently they still post interesting content from time to time, but it just isn't worth my while to go slogging through the "new, improved UI" to get to it.
I still do pull it up for local conditions and radar; if I'm not in a hurry, it gives me the info I need, at least when I'm on my home 30/5 TWC connection. I had the misfortune of trying to use it through a throttled Hughes satellite connection the other weekend, and I finally gave up; there's so much AJAX crap going on that it took over a minute to load even part of the local conditions page, and the radar page simply wouldn't ever load. And this is with ads disabled.
I haven't been running public-facing Web projects lately, but if I go back to it, I'll insist that we test on something other than a fast LAN connection and giant screen. The current team at WU obviously doesn't do that.
This doesn't seem especially interesting if the "child" robots can't in turn produce and select their own children.
At that point, I guess it gets even less interesting, because the most "successful" mutation will be a simple one that causes the mother to select all her offspring.
Funny thing -- along about age 40 or so, that vergence-focus mismatch goes away all on its own, as your eye loses the ability to change focus. Not that there are that many advantages to aging, but this is definitely one.
You should consider the possibility that electrical engineers who regularly use the term "ground loop" just might understand the concept better than you do.
Run two identical wires down to your "green wire buried in the dirt".
Run some current along one of the wires.
Observe the voltages at the near end of each line. You'll find that the line carrying current is no longer at "zero volts" relative to the line not carrying current. That's because those ground lines are not perfect conductors.
I'm sort of holding out for the inevitable cataract surgery as an upgrade.
I don't have significant cataracts yet, but I have no reason to expect that I won't. And when I do, and get replacement lenses, I expect better visual acuity than I have now, and hopefully better focal accommodation. There are already various replacement-lens products that offer accommodation; ten or twenty years down the road, I hope much better products will be available.
I briefly considered laser surgery to correct my vision when I was in my late 30s, but I was satisfied with contact lenses. Eventually, as I lost accommodation, I gave them up in favor of bifocal glasses (which serve as trifocals for me -- top for distance, bottom for reading, peer under the lenses or take them off for close-up examination). If I had laser surgery, I'd need to carry reading glasses all the time, probably in more than one strength. What would be the point?
Ah, but if I can regain accommodation -- that changes everything. And, yes, I'd consider invasive surgery to gain that benefit.
Psst, hey, editors -- it's always a good idea to spell out acronyms when they're first used if they're unfamiliar to those outside the article's specialty.