I have to enter into the transaction. Because my taxes are used to bail out the victims (companies) of these trades, and I work for one of the victims as well.
These trades are not made on the basis of the shareholder value delivered, they are based on scams; insider information, market manipulation, rumours, momentum trading, chartists.
This is done to move money about; to move it from the old lady down the street to the bastard in a shiny suit. This is not a moving about done on the basis of high intelligence and hard work - it is a moving about done with trickery and force majeure, her money is in the bank or a pension fund; until it isn't and she has to live off foodstamps and cat food. Great reward for a life of hard work.
Be careful with your statement "ALWAYS risen". It can be a long time (20 years after the last depression) before the rise happens, and when it happens it happens according to a stock market index; the assets in that index can be and are completely different from the assets that started off in it. How long do companies last? 80 years is very unusual.
So - by the time the "market" rises; the stock you bought is worthless, a world war has happened and all your assets are now priced in rembi and... oh - you are dead from effects of the market driven healthcare system that you insisted on.
It's all about Balls - risk taking, competition, innovation.
The computer is a new and novel device. It is probably more important than the wheel, perhaps less important than fire (with all the chat about cooking being a primary driver for evolutionary change in humans). Your view of the correct set up and instruction set for computing may be correct, but surely you would be the first to admit that if it is then you have been strikingly prescient. In my view the use cases for computers are far from decided, and while it is true that complete equivalence of all Turing complete instruction sets would enable any language to be used to do what any other language does I think that we want tools that are convenient and efficient for a particular task.
So, 70, 80, 100 years of diversity and then convergence; at least! The more that the energy of change is put into the system the more diversity in the ecosystem. Eventually it will settle down and a standard set of tools will emerge, but not yet.
Reading the original article, I notice a complete lack of facts. Were there any statistics about relative declines in gut flora in various populations? Or particular flora that are disappearing.
I find the hypothesis pretty unlikely to be honest, but that can be a good thing in hypothesis... if someone can start presenting some facts to back it up.
People have posted about immigration below, but forgive me, I must point out that one of the greatest genocides in history took place to clear North and South America for colonization just 400 years ago.
The populations there are very largely non native; I would speculate that less than 10% of those liveing there would have had a single ancestor living there 500 years ago.
Allow users to build scripts to do stuff and share them with one another
http://btrules.com
We wrote zeus agents (http://sourceforge.net/projects/zeusagent) ) years ago, concluded that what ever we did with inference the main problem would be knowledge acquision... hence..
Deduction is the drawing of conclusions from evidence and rules of reasoning. This is trivial to implement in most cases on paper, but falls down when the encoding of rules and evidence is difficult, for example when dealing with ideas such as taste or colour or texture.
Induction is the discovery of new rules of reasoning. This was and is a bit trickier than deduction for machines, and was seen as the great savior of the expert systems movement by people like dear old Don Michie. However, it turned out that the fundamental difficulties of machine deduction continued to be a problem and it also turned out that the old problem of separating noise from signal buggered everything up too.
Still, SVNs, Nets and other structures that can encode complex decision surfaces can be induced from data in efficient ways if the data is clean and has a good clear signal in it.
Abduction which is the creation of new systems of classification and reasoning lies well outside current state of the art AI, as does anological reasoning. Deontics and social reasoning, such as argumentation and normative logic are currently hot topics.
The advances in dealing with real world data are startling - see the Darpa challenges for a great example of what can be done now. However these are generally due to the sudden availability of massive processing resources and high quality sensors. The outcome will be approximately as "clever" as what you see operating in video games at the moment, where AI's can jump around, hide, shoot targets and run to where they should go.
What is beyond the current state of the art are entities that can understand that the salt in the salt cellar is like the sand on the beach, and that a new bolt for the gate could be fashioned from the old nail in the post, and that if they talked more openly to your brother they could learn why your sister cried all the time. The research programs that will help us to do this are at about the same point in development as the Greeks were before Pythagorus with arithmetic.
In this sense AI is both way ahead of what most people think, and no where at all.
It's another extension of the logo idea, actually it is based on the ideas in Scratch from the same group at MIT, but it's web based and enables customization and mash ups of web properties like Google Apps and Twitter
This thing about "hellish alliance" vs. actual customers.. You know, the top 100 CIO's are probably MS's best customers. I mean, I work for a $40billion revenue company - I think we are in the top 30 tech companies in the world, and we have 100k desktop licenses from them.
I think that qualifies as a "customer"
Microsoft spend a huge effort on finding out what corporate customers want. They then deliver it.
Or, alternatively, you could lease the batteries from the manufacturer who will then support the energy distribution retailers (Shell, BP, ect) in swapping them in and out of your car.
So, you roll up, pop your cell out, it validates against your account and is collected in a bin.
A recharged cell is placed near enough to your car for you to connect it, or alternatively it's clipped into your car by machines. I guess that will depend on the weight of the component.
You pay, you drive off.
Your old cell is recharged, if it is near failure it is disposed of and a new one drawn down from stores. If not the recharged cell is (48hrs later?) provisioned to another customer at the "gas station".
Your scoring scheme is very skewed to make Blu-ray come last, this is exactly what Sony had done with the studio's scoring system: provided the points that make HD-DVD come last.
The point you have missed is that movie production and TV series production as well, are fundamentally different from music production (with rare exceptions).
There are particular "bands" such as the cast of Friends, who could defect to a different director, producer and writer team and take the audience with them, although in reality because they don't own the shows the are not able to do so, but most movies and tv series are collaborative undertakings created by (literally) an industry. The creative commons (in contrast to music) is not able to make these things.
Therefore, just as in steel making, the producers will dictate the mechanism of distribution.
I think that the key words here are "you got to" and "I knew that this was exactly how the game would be" you should have added "for me" to the second one.
I occasionally encounter quests in WOW that I don't like, so I ditch them, and go off and do something else!
The standard is 2megs (mine is reading 1.9 at the moment). Many lines are enabled for 8mb now althought the realities of ADSL 2+ mean that it's rare that 8mb is acheived.
24mbit is available in many areas according to some ISP's. However, the reality is again that this is rarely achieved.
Lots of people will now post "I can only get 0.00025 and I hate BT/ISP's" the ones that don't post will be thinking I've got 5mb and that's ok.
Most of the urban areas of the UK have cable as well, this is provided by Virgin Media now, as NTL have just rebranded themselves.
FTTH or FTTC will come eventually, but right now the investment is difficult to justify in capital terms. At some point that will surely change, and the UK will get a fiber network.
Interestingly BT invented PON's.. did you know that? Hmmm
Because the only thing that has kept my interest in WOW is my guild.
Here's my story, and it's a bit different.
I had always felt hostile to Everquest and other MMORPGs for some reason, but a close friend who I admire and respected was playing WOW and loving it, so I thought I'd give it a go. To be honest I was a little ashamed because of the cruel comments that I had made about doing other stuff like "talking to girls" and "going outside" to some of my gamer friends in the past, so I played by myself for a while.
After about lvl 14 I'd more or less given up, but then happend to be at a social where my friend was, and met another mutual friend who was also playing. I discovered that they were in a guild and I found out that the frustrations that had stopped my play were easy to resolve - if you had some friends and asked for a bit of help. So I switched servers and joined up.
I met up with friends who I had not seen in real life since school (12+ years before), friends who I saw once a year, close friends, and new people who became my friends. We have a "must know in real life " & "is not a muppet" rule and consequently everyone rubs along very well. The chat and banter and banter are a real reason to just log in and see who's about, but the game play is definitely enhanced as well - quests are more fun with two or three, instancing is almost always an option - and without the PUG rubbish that can be such a downer. We raid occasionally, but because everyone is older and has wives, girlfriends (I make no personal claim, you understand, but have met women who have claimed to be going out with some of my friends), and children (this would be much harder to fake) - raiding is quite a challenge to organise. PVP was a big fad before the expansion, as we had done as much of the pre 40 man as was possible (my gear was ZG or better, with ToEP and TOA so the GM stuff would have been handy - on the other hand the BC stuff is so superior for everything apart from the trinkets that it's laughable now).
The main thing is that the game is made by the community that I am in while playing it. Without that community the playing experience would have been dramatically different, and this makes shifting to another game almost impossible, because around 50 people would have to agree to come !
Can I just point out that the process of doing this (whatever the hell it is) actually took 2% of the entire duration of operation iraqi freedom.
2% is not "like a nanosecond"
Doing this is a great acheivement, but do not denegrate the efforts of the people who are trying to support the forces who are deployed there via official channels. This is a conflict that is not being lost because of a failure of technology provision, it is being lost because the people who we are trying to free have lost the context into which they could be freed.
Well, also quite a lot of the company is part of BAE Systems...
But you are right, a dumb set of decisions, the end of a great organisation. Personally I blame the bankers for that - the delivery of cash on the basis of a belief in the management team and a business plan based on wishful thinking should have got the people concerned boiled in oil. Instead I'd like to bet it got them BMW 7 series and mansions in Surrey.
Another great British example is of course Rover. A three year chase for a new model to save the company ruined by the production of a series of vanity projects (city rover, street rover, MG super car, MG raceing). The key observation; if the new mid range car had been delivered there might have been a chance to make it, but the successful delivery of the tactical projects had no impact at all in the end.
Of course, the mid range car might have been a dog after all, and the brand issues that Rover had meant it might have been irrelevant even if it was the best thing since sliced bread - but at least it was a sembelance of a strategy.
Funnily enough Rover was at one time part of BAE...
Prolog Miranda/SML/Haskell Java/C++/C#/Smalltalk/any other imperative with OO
Because these show the different choices in representation that programmers essentially have : declarative, functional, imperative (scripts). OO is a useful concept to describe to students because it gets them used to the ideas of abstraction and forces good programming practice like information hiding.
Later on it would be good if Universities taught web development (Php for example) and database development (SQL, possibly microsoft tools).
Interestingly universities do not teach, and I think rightly, the most common activity that CS grads end up doing in the real world, which is installation, integration, customisation and configuration of COTS products like CRM systems.
I have played WOW extensively, and I have done the end game areas, several times.
WOW is my first and so far only MMORPG experience. I have played other video games over the years and I homebrewed a few myself some time ago. I would say that WOW had much less of a grind than a normal game. In fact, knowing what I know now I would say that it is more or less possible to do it with very little or no grind at all.
I guess it all depends what you mean by grind, but for me WOW is more of a social event than anything else, PVP or PVE it's who's in your gang and how much fun they are that counts.
Slashdot Mirror
Booooooooom!
I have to enter into the transaction. Because my taxes are used to bail out the victims (companies) of these trades, and I work for one of the victims as well.
These trades are not made on the basis of the shareholder value delivered, they are based on scams; insider information, market manipulation, rumours, momentum trading, chartists.
This is done to move money about; to move it from the old lady down the street to the bastard in a shiny suit. This is not a moving about done on the basis of high intelligence and hard work - it is a moving about done with trickery and force majeure, her money is in the bank or a pension fund; until it isn't and she has to live off foodstamps and cat food. Great reward for a life of hard work.
This is robbery.
Holy heaven above ! Where has this AC been for the last 3 years?
Various participants are out of money.
The market dried up.
We were all robbed to restart it.
There is more robbing going on.
The next round will *not* be pretty.
Don't think about the 1930's, think about 1789.
Be careful with your statement "ALWAYS risen". It can be a long time (20 years after the last depression) before the rise happens, and when it happens it happens according to a stock market index; the assets in that index can be and are completely different from the assets that started off in it. How long do companies last? 80 years is very unusual.
So - by the time the "market" rises; the stock you bought is worthless, a world war has happened and all your assets are now priced in rembi and... oh - you are dead from effects of the market driven healthcare system that you insisted on.
Wait... wait...
It's all about Balls - risk taking, competition, innovation.
The computer is a new and novel device. It is probably more important than the wheel, perhaps less important than fire (with all the chat about cooking being a primary driver for evolutionary change in humans). Your view of the correct set up and instruction set for computing may be correct, but surely you would be the first to admit that if it is then you have been strikingly prescient. In my view the use cases for computers are far from decided, and while it is true that complete equivalence of all Turing complete instruction sets would enable any language to be used to do what any other language does I think that we want tools that are convenient and efficient for a particular task.
So, 70, 80, 100 years of diversity and then convergence; at least! The more that the energy of change is put into the system the more diversity in the ecosystem. Eventually it will settle down and a standard set of tools will emerge, but not yet.
Reading the original article, I notice a complete lack of facts. Were there any statistics about relative declines in gut flora in various populations? Or particular flora that are disappearing.
I find the hypothesis pretty unlikely to be honest, but that can be a good thing in hypothesis... if someone can start presenting some facts to back it up.
Well on Score 5 to be honest - because I don't read below that unless moderating or following a thread I won't say for sure!
BUT : CELLPHONES
cheap internet clients by the millions, or billions.
There you go. The elephant in every room.
I wish I worked for Vodaphone, there would be nothing to worry about.
Crocs, aligators, snakes... they eat once a week, but are pretty active animals inbetween.
They can do this because they are cold blooded, we run hot, so we can't.
If you want to loose weight fast then wear one less jumper.
Or go outside (if you live somewhere cold) for an extra 20 minutes a day.
And no one has realized that wind farms are static?
1. Detect Tornado
2. If it is at the same place as any windfarm
2a Ignore detection
else
2b Register detection
3 Make money, live free and sing.
I prey for the death of people who come up with such dumb shit every day, but Satan has not yet answered me.
Who will give me justice ?
Jesus?
People have posted about immigration below, but forgive me, I must point out that one of the greatest genocides in history took place to clear North and South America for colonization just 400 years ago.
The populations there are very largely non native; I would speculate that less than 10% of those liveing there would have had a single ancestor living there 500 years ago.
Allow users to build scripts to do stuff and share them with one another
http://btrules.com
We wrote zeus agents (http://sourceforge.net/projects/zeusagent) ) years ago, concluded that what ever we did with inference the main problem would be knowledge acquision... hence..
Actually...
Deduction is the drawing of conclusions from evidence and rules of reasoning. This is trivial to implement in most cases on paper, but falls down when the encoding of rules and evidence is difficult, for example when dealing with ideas such as taste or colour or texture.
Induction is the discovery of new rules of reasoning. This was and is a bit trickier than deduction for machines, and was seen as the great savior of the expert systems movement by people like dear old Don Michie. However, it turned out that the fundamental difficulties of machine deduction continued to be a problem and it also turned out that the old problem of separating noise from signal buggered everything up too.
Still, SVNs, Nets and other structures that can encode complex decision surfaces can be induced from data in efficient ways if the data is clean and has a good clear signal in it.
Abduction which is the creation of new systems of classification and reasoning lies well outside current state of the art AI, as does anological reasoning. Deontics and social reasoning, such as argumentation and normative logic are currently hot topics.
The advances in dealing with real world data are startling - see the Darpa challenges for a great example of what can be done now. However these are generally due to the sudden availability of massive processing resources and high quality sensors. The outcome will be approximately as "clever" as what you see operating in video games at the moment, where AI's can jump around, hide, shoot targets and run to where they should go.
What is beyond the current state of the art are entities that can understand that the salt in the salt cellar is like the sand on the beach, and that a new bolt for the gate could be fashioned from the old nail in the post, and that if they talked more openly to your brother they could learn why your sister cried all the time. The research programs that will help us to do this are at about the same point in development as the Greeks were before Pythagorus with arithmetic.
In this sense AI is both way ahead of what most people think, and no where at all.
We developed http://btrules.com
It's another extension of the logo idea, actually it is based on the ideas in Scratch from the same group at MIT, but it's web based and enables customization and mash ups of web properties like Google Apps and Twitter
This thing about "hellish alliance" vs. actual customers..
You know, the top 100 CIO's are probably MS's best customers. I mean, I work for a $40billion revenue company - I think we are in the top 30 tech companies in the world, and we have 100k desktop licenses from them.
I think that qualifies as a "customer"
Microsoft spend a huge effort on finding out what corporate customers want. They then deliver it.
Or, alternatively, you could lease the batteries from the manufacturer who will then support the energy distribution retailers (Shell, BP, ect) in swapping them in and out of your car.
So, you roll up, pop your cell out, it validates against your account and is collected in a bin.
A recharged cell is placed near enough to your car for you to connect it, or alternatively it's clipped into your car by machines. I guess that will depend on the weight of the component.
You pay, you drive off.
Your old cell is recharged, if it is near failure it is disposed of and a new one drawn down from stores. If not the recharged cell is (48hrs later?) provisioned to another customer at the "gas station".
So... it's not a problem, at all.
"I want HD-DVD to win" is not logic.
Your scoring scheme is very skewed to make Blu-ray come last, this is exactly what Sony had done with the studio's scoring system: provided the points that make HD-DVD come last.
The point you have missed is that movie production and TV series production as well, are fundamentally different from music production (with rare exceptions).
There are particular "bands" such as the cast of Friends, who could defect to a different director, producer and writer team and take the audience with them, although in reality because they don't own the shows the are not able to do so, but most movies and tv series are collaborative undertakings created by (literally) an industry. The creative commons (in contrast to music) is not able to make these things.
Therefore, just as in steel making, the producers will dictate the mechanism of distribution.
I think that the key words here are "you got to" and "I knew that this was exactly how the game would be" you should have added "for me" to the second one.
I occasionally encounter quests in WOW that I don't like, so I ditch them, and go off and do something else!
Sorry - I just re-read the comment and realised that it was quite directed at the OP, apologies.
http://www.ist-bread.org/pdf/only-just-works.pdf (BTTJ 24.3 July 2006)
No, sorry that's rubbish.
The standard is 2megs (mine is reading 1.9 at the moment). Many lines are enabled for 8mb now althought the realities of ADSL 2+ mean that it's rare that 8mb is acheived.
24mbit is available in many areas according to some ISP's. However, the reality is again that this is rarely achieved.
Lots of people will now post "I can only get 0.00025 and I hate BT/ISP's" the ones that don't post will be thinking I've got 5mb and that's ok.
Most of the urban areas of the UK have cable as well, this is provided by Virgin Media now, as NTL have just rebranded themselves.
FTTH or FTTC will come eventually, but right now the investment is difficult to justify in capital terms. At some point that will surely change, and the UK will get a fiber network.
Interestingly BT invented PON's.. did you know that? Hmmm
Because the only thing that has kept my interest in WOW is my guild.
Here's my story, and it's a bit different.
I had always felt hostile to Everquest and other MMORPGs for some reason, but a close friend who I admire and respected was playing WOW and loving it, so I thought I'd give it a go. To be honest I was a little ashamed because of the cruel comments that I had made about doing other stuff like "talking to girls" and "going outside" to some of my gamer friends in the past, so I played by myself for a while.
After about lvl 14 I'd more or less given up, but then happend to be at a social where my friend was, and met another mutual friend who was also playing. I discovered that they were in a guild and I found out that the frustrations that had stopped my play were easy to resolve - if you had some friends and asked for a bit of help. So I switched servers and joined up.
I met up with friends who I had not seen in real life since school (12+ years before), friends who I saw once a year, close friends, and new people who became my friends. We have a "must know in real life " & "is not a muppet" rule and consequently everyone rubs along very well. The chat and banter and banter are a real reason to just log in and see who's about, but the game play is definitely enhanced as well - quests are more fun with two or three, instancing is almost always an option - and without the PUG rubbish that can be such a downer. We raid occasionally, but because everyone is older and has wives, girlfriends (I make no personal claim, you understand, but have met women who have claimed to be going out with some of my friends), and children (this would be much harder to fake) - raiding is quite a challenge to organise. PVP was a big fad before the expansion, as we had done as much of the pre 40 man as was possible (my gear was ZG or better, with ToEP and TOA so the GM stuff would have been handy - on the other hand the BC stuff is so superior for everything apart from the trinkets that it's laughable now).
The main thing is that the game is made by the community that I am in while playing it. Without that community the playing experience would have been dramatically different, and this makes shifting to another game almost impossible, because around 50 people would have to agree to come !
Can I just point out that the process of doing this (whatever the hell it is) actually took 2% of the entire duration of operation iraqi freedom.
2% is not "like a nanosecond"
Doing this is a great acheivement, but do not denegrate the efforts of the people who are trying to support the forces who are deployed there via official channels. This is a conflict that is not being lost because of a failure of technology provision, it is being lost because the people who we are trying to free have lost the context into which they could be freed.
Well, also quite a lot of the company is part of BAE Systems...
But you are right, a dumb set of decisions, the end of a great organisation. Personally I blame the bankers for that - the delivery of cash on the basis of a belief in the management team and a business plan based on wishful thinking should have got the people concerned boiled in oil. Instead I'd like to bet it got them BMW 7 series and mansions in Surrey.
Another great British example is of course Rover. A three year chase for a new model to save the company ruined by the production of a series of vanity projects (city rover, street rover, MG super car, MG raceing). The key observation; if the new mid range car had been delivered there might have been a chance to make it, but the successful delivery of the tactical projects had no impact at all in the end.
Of course, the mid range car might have been a dog after all, and the brand issues that Rover had meant it might have been irrelevant even if it was the best thing since sliced bread - but at least it was a sembelance of a strategy.
Funnily enough Rover was at one time part of BAE...
The languages students need to study are :
Prolog
Miranda/SML/Haskell
Java/C++/C#/Smalltalk/any other imperative with OO
Because these show the different choices in representation that programmers essentially have : declarative, functional, imperative (scripts). OO is a useful concept to describe to students because it gets them used to the ideas of abstraction and forces good programming practice like information hiding.
Later on it would be good if Universities taught web development (Php for example) and database development (SQL, possibly microsoft tools).
Interestingly universities do not teach, and I think rightly, the most common activity that CS grads end up doing in the real world, which is installation, integration, customisation and configuration of COTS products like CRM systems.
I have played WOW extensively, and I have done the end game areas, several times.
WOW is my first and so far only MMORPG experience. I have played other video games over the years and I homebrewed a few myself some time ago. I would say that WOW had much less of a grind than a normal game. In fact, knowing what I know now I would say that it is more or less possible to do it with very little or no grind at all.
I guess it all depends what you mean by grind, but for me WOW is more of a social event than anything else, PVP or PVE it's who's in your gang and how much fun they are that counts.