It's not just about 'consumer' protection. China operates massive spy operations. The boatloads of Chinese phones that arrive to the US translates to a national security concern.
The issue of how much math is needed for various branches of programming, and the issue of learning via Google searches or other means, are independent concerns. There is of course the correlation that anyone with a math background is more likely to be more systematic about learning to program than to do web searches all the time, but again, these are orthogonal issues.
There are actual people who learned programming without a lot of math background way before Goolge or even Altavista or the internet existed. When I started coding at ten, my math must have been inferior to that of most non-programming graduates of today, yet I could learn stuff just by doing and reading.
Having said that, and my coding benefitting from various areas of mathematics now, there is a lot of value in being able to quickly type in a search query that leads to relevant hits, for any type of UI work, where the IE browser incompatibilities are more of a trial and error than logic. Also, a color name to hex lookup via Google is just a superior alternative to the older method, which was, open the index pages of a book, find the page and go there.
> Web coding just requires enough arithmetic to do the layout,
Yes, most layouts are pretty trivial. Also, there are solutions for layout that are a good mathematical programming exercise at the library level, and require some understanding of linear systems: e.g. cassowary. Also, web site transitions, particles, physics engines all involve some level of math.
> and most business programming doesn't even need that
Yeah, most of it is just the four basic operations, but there are an increasing number of more mathematical areas, such as logistics optimization, option pricing or Monte Carlo methods. Even a histogram requires some understanding of math.
> The best thing that could happen is for countries that mainly depend on the sale of oil to gradually reform their economy and wean themselves off their oil income
Over-engineering isn't even the right term. It's certainly underdesigned, and as part of it, it was probably under-prototyped and under-tested. Engineering is good, so over-engineering isn't the issue.
Unfortunately Samsung just churns out stuff while other makers (Apple, and some pockets in HTC) design stuff.
I don't think it was meant as a placeholder of a 2nd rate country. I think it was meant as a leading country of the World, which Portugal was when the New World was discovered. So it was actually a compliment. So your defensive response was a kind of Woosh and you still don't understand. I agree it's not about Portugal but it doesn't mean you interpreted the root post correctly.
I think that despite my and some other responses, you still misunderstand what turkeydance above you probably meant. IMO he clearly referred to Portugal's former glory, because of the temporal reference to the 'race to the New World'. So it's not that anybody 'needs to relax'; it's you who need to understand that there exists another interpretation of what turkeydance wrote, and it'll give you a whole different perspective.
You and those who upvoted you are the ones who 'need to relax', because you interpreted the comparison to Portugal as if it was compared to Romania or something, meaning the US is backwards. But again, I don't think it's the correct interpretation.
A modern computer language should have a unique name. On this basis I predict that Clojure will prevail, and Go and Dart will fade into obscurity. ECMAScript will be fine too, though when I search for Javascript, I always get hits for this weird language called jQuery and Google Search, as it is getting worse and worse, no longer recognizes the dash as an 'exclude' filter.
SpaceX is a company, not a country; also, the USA, even with its flagging space ambition and reduced budget, was home country to the Opportunity rover on the Mars, the New Horizon that gave Pluto a selfie, and private space initiatives, of which, of course, SpaceX is most accomplished. Also, a lot of the fundamental or applied research that space exploration benefits from is coming out of the USA.
Why be defensive when it's not even appropriate? The New World wasn't explored by today's PIIGS Portugal; it was explored by Portugal, the ambitious, sea-faring, colonizing superpower.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your overall point, just took issue with what you said earlier: 'nobody knows how neurons work' as it vacates the meaning of 'know'. Using your term, we didn't 'know' how gravity worked even after Newton's and Kepler's work, still we were able to construct accurate ballistics, because we still knew something. So your use of 'know' just represents some possibly unattainable level of knowledge in natural sciences, and with that definition, this word would be meaningless, since we could say 'we don't know how X works' no matter what X is.
Whereas with the more customary meaning of 'know', which I'm also using, we can safely say, that we know to some extent how the neuron works; researchers and medical professionals possess an awful lot of knowledge about how the neuron works. Of course, without picking some metric, we don't know how complete our understanding is when it comes to gravity or other physical phenomena, and similarly we don't know how complete our understanding of a neuron is, and we can safely say our understanding of gravity is very useful for the things we currently envision we can use the gravity model for, while we're not there at all when it comes to neurons.
But we can definitely say that our current knowledge (model) of neurons is useful for a lot of things, i.e. we can't meaningfully say 'we don't know how neurons work'. Maybe you wanted to say, 'we don't know enough about how neurons work to serve the purpose of the goals described in TFA'.
Someone with a medical problem would better rely on the person whose knowledge about neurons, synapses, neurotransmitter reuptake or beta amyloid plaques is infinite relative to that of a cabbie, unless of course he needs to get to the hospital first:-)
This would just rob the verb 'know' from its meaning for everything other than pockets of mathematics. For it is the case that even physics isn't fully figured out, what with reconciling general relativity and quantum mechanics, to name one gap, let alone chemistry, which sits atop of physics, not to mention biology, which sits atop of both.
There is a huge difference between a taxi driver not knowing how the neurons work, and a neuroscientist not knowing how the neurons work. The difference isn't only in some abstract sense; neuroscience actually generates a stream of useful results, e.g. in healthcare.
I'd also guess that when it comes to our lack of understanding about how the brain works, or how consciousness arises, it's more to do with how the neurons are arranged into a network (in terms of structure and plasticity) as opposed to being limited by the knowledge of individual neurons. It would surprise me tremendously if a perfect neuron model led to the understanding of the brain, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if, once the brain's working is better understood, it turned out that a lot of detail about how individual neurons work are inconsequential or somewhat accidental, with much of neuron level complexity simply resulting from the fact that the neuron is of a complex, very large 3D shape with general chemical, electrical and molecular processes, which makes it inherently intractable. Let's not forget that tasks as simple as the three-body movement or laminar flow are still just crudely approximated in software; a single protein folding itself is complex; yet we understand how muscles move etc.
We don't have to know _everything_ in order to know _an awful lot_.
Your point doesn't follow. Nobody said anything negative about the utility of the social aspect, yet you draw conclusions about others. The AC might have the type of background you highlight, but if someone studies the 10th programming language for fun or work, he mostly needs technical concepts and exercises. Good forums are useful but not all courses need a lot of social interaction; also, good forums don't guarantee appropriate social interaction where it's crucial.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just about 'consumer' protection. China operates massive spy operations. The boatloads of Chinese phones that arrive to the US translates to a national security concern.
> if the coated mesh gets contaminated with oil
If I filter oil, the mesh gets oily. What's the reason for the 'if'?
Irrespective of this:
The issue of how much math is needed for various branches of programming, and the issue of learning via Google searches or other means, are independent concerns. There is of course the correlation that anyone with a math background is more likely to be more systematic about learning to program than to do web searches all the time, but again, these are orthogonal issues.
There are actual people who learned programming without a lot of math background way before Goolge or even Altavista or the internet existed. When I started coding at ten, my math must have been inferior to that of most non-programming graduates of today, yet I could learn stuff just by doing and reading.
Having said that, and my coding benefitting from various areas of mathematics now, there is a lot of value in being able to quickly type in a search query that leads to relevant hits, for any type of UI work, where the IE browser incompatibilities are more of a trial and error than logic. Also, a color name to hex lookup via Google is just a superior alternative to the older method, which was, open the index pages of a book, find the page and go there.
> Web coding just requires enough arithmetic to do the layout,
Yes, most layouts are pretty trivial. Also, there are solutions for layout that are a good mathematical programming exercise at the library level, and require some understanding of linear systems: e.g. cassowary. Also, web site transitions, particles, physics engines all involve some level of math.
> and most business programming doesn't even need that
Yeah, most of it is just the four basic operations, but there are an increasing number of more mathematical areas, such as logistics optimization, option pricing or Monte Carlo methods. Even a histogram requires some understanding of math.
You can zoom and crop like this and your prints will still be fine.
Kdb/Q, K, and while at it, J and APL. Cool stuff.
ABAP/4 of SAP is the modern day COBOL, even uglier and backwards.
How about FP and FFP, created by Backus, after realising the imperative mess that his FORTRAN unleashed on the World?
How ironic
Maybe the guy is an IS supporter.
> The best thing that could happen is for countries that mainly depend on the sale of oil to gradually reform their economy and wean themselves off their oil income
This is hilarious :-)
> It's southernmost city (Munich) has the lattitude
its southernmost city(Freiburg im Breisgau) has the latitude
ftfy
Over-engineering isn't even the right term. It's certainly underdesigned, and as part of it, it was probably under-prototyped and under-tested. Engineering is good, so over-engineering isn't the issue.
Unfortunately Samsung just churns out stuff while other makers (Apple, and some pockets in HTC) design stuff.
I don't think it was meant as a placeholder of a 2nd rate country. I think it was meant as a leading country of the World, which Portugal was when the New World was discovered. So it was actually a compliment. So your defensive response was a kind of Woosh and you still don't understand. I agree it's not about Portugal but it doesn't mean you interpreted the root post correctly.
I think that despite my and some other responses, you still misunderstand what turkeydance above you probably meant. IMO he clearly referred to Portugal's former glory, because of the temporal reference to the 'race to the New World'. So it's not that anybody 'needs to relax'; it's you who need to understand that there exists another interpretation of what turkeydance wrote, and it'll give you a whole different perspective.
You and those who upvoted you are the ones who 'need to relax', because you interpreted the comparison to Portugal as if it was compared to Romania or something, meaning the US is backwards. But again, I don't think it's the correct interpretation.
> Labour is, typically, a zero sum game. Pay less and the quality of work goes down in one (or more) of many fashions.
IOW it's not a zero-sum game.
Yea, that's almost 2000 persons per letter of the Alphabet.
A modern computer language should have a unique name. On this basis I predict that Clojure will prevail, and Go and Dart will fade into obscurity. ECMAScript will be fine too, though when I search for Javascript, I always get hits for this weird language called jQuery and Google Search, as it is getting worse and worse, no longer recognizes the dash as an 'exclude' filter.
SpaceX is a company, not a country; also, the USA, even with its flagging space ambition and reduced budget, was home country to the Opportunity rover on the Mars, the New Horizon that gave Pluto a selfie, and private space initiatives, of which, of course, SpaceX is most accomplished. Also, a lot of the fundamental or applied research that space exploration benefits from is coming out of the USA.
Why be defensive when it's not even appropriate? The New World wasn't explored by today's PIIGS Portugal; it was explored by Portugal, the ambitious, sea-faring, colonizing superpower.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your overall point, just took issue with what you said earlier: 'nobody knows how neurons work' as it vacates the meaning of 'know'. Using your term, we didn't 'know' how gravity worked even after Newton's and Kepler's work, still we were able to construct accurate ballistics, because we still knew something. So your use of 'know' just represents some possibly unattainable level of knowledge in natural sciences, and with that definition, this word would be meaningless, since we could say 'we don't know how X works' no matter what X is.
Whereas with the more customary meaning of 'know', which I'm also using, we can safely say, that we know to some extent how the neuron works; researchers and medical professionals possess an awful lot of knowledge about how the neuron works. Of course, without picking some metric, we don't know how complete our understanding is when it comes to gravity or other physical phenomena, and similarly we don't know how complete our understanding of a neuron is, and we can safely say our understanding of gravity is very useful for the things we currently envision we can use the gravity model for, while we're not there at all when it comes to neurons.
But we can definitely say that our current knowledge (model) of neurons is useful for a lot of things, i.e. we can't meaningfully say 'we don't know how neurons work'. Maybe you wanted to say, 'we don't know enough about how neurons work to serve the purpose of the goals described in TFA'.
Someone with a medical problem would better rely on the person whose knowledge about neurons, synapses, neurotransmitter reuptake or beta amyloid plaques is infinite relative to that of a cabbie, unless of course he needs to get to the hospital first :-)
For the record, you originally said: 'They're not even simulating neurons, since nobody knows how neurons work.'
> since nobody knows how neurons work
This would just rob the verb 'know' from its meaning for everything other than pockets of mathematics. For it is the case that even physics isn't fully figured out, what with reconciling general relativity and quantum mechanics, to name one gap, let alone chemistry, which sits atop of physics, not to mention biology, which sits atop of both.
There is a huge difference between a taxi driver not knowing how the neurons work, and a neuroscientist not knowing how the neurons work. The difference isn't only in some abstract sense; neuroscience actually generates a stream of useful results, e.g. in healthcare.
I'd also guess that when it comes to our lack of understanding about how the brain works, or how consciousness arises, it's more to do with how the neurons are arranged into a network (in terms of structure and plasticity) as opposed to being limited by the knowledge of individual neurons. It would surprise me tremendously if a perfect neuron model led to the understanding of the brain, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if, once the brain's working is better understood, it turned out that a lot of detail about how individual neurons work are inconsequential or somewhat accidental, with much of neuron level complexity simply resulting from the fact that the neuron is of a complex, very large 3D shape with general chemical, electrical and molecular processes, which makes it inherently intractable. Let's not forget that tasks as simple as the three-body movement or laminar flow are still just crudely approximated in software; a single protein folding itself is complex; yet we understand how muscles move etc.
We don't have to know _everything_ in order to know _an awful lot_.
Evidence for the singularity! By the time I get to read all comments about new tech, the transistor count doubles!
> there is currently only one game for instance that uses the write function of each figure's NFC chip, rather than simply reading it.
I guess it means:
There's only one game that stores data in the doll, the rest just read from it.
Your point doesn't follow. Nobody said anything negative about the utility of the social aspect, yet you draw conclusions about others. The AC might have the type of background you highlight, but if someone studies the 10th programming language for fun or work, he mostly needs technical concepts and exercises. Good forums are useful but not all courses need a lot of social interaction; also, good forums don't guarantee appropriate social interaction where it's crucial.