There was a joke in the Soviet Union that a shaving machine was displayed in a technology fair. All the man had to do was to insert his head in the machine and press a button, and the machine did the rest.
-"How amazing!", a bystander said. "Just think about this, every face has a different shape!"
-"Not after going through this machine!", the inventor replied.
Or it could also be the exact opposite, perhaps it will give us the benefits of exercise without the downsides, such as the increased wear and tear in the body that exercise causes.
Working towards social equality causes starvation because Stalin and Mao (and probably Pol Pot)?
Yes, when you aim for too much social equality, the end result is what Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot did.
Social equality should mean equality of opportunities, not necessarily equality of results. For instance, everyone should have access to an education, but if your ghetto culture makes your school a gang war zone, that's not a problem caused by the elite.
The problems caused by Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot came from them trying to exterminate the people who had better living standards than others because they were more honest and worked harder.
Clicking one of these links, stepping through that sub-process, then hitting the 'return to last position' shortcut is far faster than flicking through a printed manual.
How is clicking a menu to add a bookmark easier or faster than inserting anything that's at hand in the page?
If I want a more permanent bookmark there are a variety of stickers that I can use, using different colors or making annotations if necessary.
When I'm holding a book and need to follow two different parts at once, the best procedure is often to hold a finger in each page and alternate between them by twisting my wrist, how could any clicking be faster than that?
I need to move the mouse to a precise position, aim the pointer and click. In a tablet or similar it's even worse. I usually need to use both hands, sometimes magnifying the screen to be able to tap the exact position.
Replace "structure" with "object" and you'll see why most programmers think in terms of arrays of structures and not structures of arrays.
Anyhow, for me that shows an intrinsic limitation of object oriented languages and why C still rules strong. When you run into the limitations of the hardware, you get to a point where object oriented languages are a limiting factor in optimization.
When I started learning how to program neural networks in the 1980s, I realized that by turning object oriented programs inside out one could get orders of magnitude better performance. That's where the power of C with its flexibility in handling pointers come into play.
Instead of declaring neurons as objects containing inputs, weights, and activation values, I declared arrays of weights, inputs, and activations. That way, calculating the activation of a neuron became a dot product of an array of inputs with an array of weights. The dot product is a common operation that is well optimized in any CPU.
The concert was completely ruined for the orchestra and the entire audience -- the profound effect of the music was lost.
That guy should face civil and criminal responsibility for his acts. You can't just go and ruin a concert that cost thousands of dollars to enact.
Considering that people had been preparing and expecting that experience for a long time, it wouldn't be too much to make him pay, let's say, $5,000 to each person in the audience plus $100,000 to the production.
So nothing is stopping you, except billions of dollars of capital you don't have.
And this is where the idea of intellectual property makes sense. If someone invested billions in creating something, he's entitled to profit from that.
It's not like those billions were lying around. People worked to save money and invested it in shares of those companies, that's where the billions came from.
with the specifications I write there is no excuse for not testing their code.
In every engineering project I've ever worked on, the specifications included acceptance tests. Obviously, his specifications aren't good enough.
He should detail with his customers the functional specifications of the product and generate a set of acceptance tests. The end product of this would be a test procedure, which both the customer and the contractors have previously agreed upon.
There is no excuse for a contractor to blame the programmers who did not conduct testing, if the way the testing should be done has not been previously detailed. The formal test procedure is what separated bugs from features.
The reason why they recommend lower and lower alcohol contents has more to do with the way they collect statistics than with any real effect.
If any of the drivers involved in an accident has any alcohol blood content at all, it is recorded as an "alcohol related accident", NO MATTER WHO CAUSED THE ACCIDENT.
This is bias in the worst sense of the word, it's political propaganda at its worst.
Suppose you drank one beer and is stopped at a red light. Then a madd bitch rear ends you. It will be an "alcohol related" accident, pointing to the "need for stricter drunken driving laws", even though the madd bitch caused it.
The top systems today are approximately at the same capacity as a human brain.
Brain neurons perform an operation that's similar to a dot product. Their operation can be simulated by a weight for each dendrite that's multiplied by that dendrite's input.
In rough order of magnitude, a human brain has a hundred billion neurons, or 1e11 in standard computer language notation. Each neuron has an average of one thousand inputs, 1e3, and performs a hundred operations per second. That is 1e11 * 1e3 * 1e2 = 1e16 flops, or 10,000 teraflops.
According to Top500, the highest powered computer system in November 2012 had a capacity of 17,590 teraflops.
This doesn't mean it has the same ability as a human brain, because there's also the software involved. There is a project, sponsored by Google, that tries to implement a computer system operating close to what the human brain does.
When they tested that system presenting to it one million random screenshots from Youtube videos, the system learned all by itself to recognize objects that appeared on those videos, like human faces and cats.
There's a good technical tutorial on this system at the Stanford university site, and a more basic explanation can be found in several popular articles if you google for "deep learning".
TFA says the waste has settled into layers, solids at the bottom, and the system they have will mix it all and pump out the sludge.
Wouldn't it be smarter to pump the liquids out first, and worry about the solid part later? They say the most urgent problem is that some tanks are leaking, and solids don't leak.
The "rape" he is being accused of is a radical feminist definition. He is a male being prosecuted by a society where males are subject to discrimination. Not fair.
He is in a similar situation to a black man accused of rape in Alabama during the 1920s.
Labour had policies based upon raising the income tax without any regard for cutting government expenses. They claimed government spending and inflation are good for the economy. Sound familiar?
It seems that these days IP legislation tries to swallow everything. Nothing is safe from IP laws.
It's time to reverse that trend, most of the DMCA should be considered unconstitutional anyhow. If someone sold me a device, why can't I tear it apart to see how it was built?
Patents and copyrights exist for making sure no one needs to keep trade secrets. The intent of those laws is to let people learn about the technical details behind the technology.
Having laws that restricts the liberty of learning goes against every principle of a civilized society.
Consoles are anachronistic by now. They are remnants of an age when there was a TV set in the living room and the family gathered there to watch. Back in those old days, a color monitor was an expensive item, so much that it made sense to use the family TV as a monitor.
Today, when people carry in their pockets a device with a screen that offers much better resolution than the TV screen did, consoles make no sense at all, at least not for the consumer.
There is only one group that benefits from the console system today, the game publishers. Consoles are what enables them to save money in development, because the range of hardware that they must support is limited, while at the same time allowing them to pump the prices up, by using DRM.
Let me godwin that for you: Hitler was elected by proportional voting. Nazis rose to power in Germany in one of those convoluted negotiations that countries with proportional voting do all the time.
An extremist has little chance of being elected when candidates are chosen to represent a district. In any given geographical area, there are different sorts of people, therefore moderates are much more likely to get elected.
Under a proportional system, things are different. It's easy to find enough supporters for any extremist view, if you count votes all over the country. And when you try to make a coalition with extremists, who do you think will end with all the power?
A coalition government often has 45% of moderate politicians for one side, 45% of moderates for the other side, and the power ends in the hand of the 10% of extremists who can choose to support one or the other side.
Slashdot Mirror
Volvos will use Apple maps?
I have a bad feeling about this. I don't think the Apple maps for the Swiss capital, Gothenburg, are up to date.
The most powerful chips out there are still far below the capacity of a human brain.
I don't want just to play games, I want to retire and leave my computer to do my work for me.
At this point, we already have better software models for the brain than hardware to run it.
Your other choices?
It's not only that the game should not be played, the whole game need not exist anymore.
The only reason why nuclear missiles are still around is to justify the salaries and profits of the people and contractors who maintain them.
This price is too high, we could just retire all those people and let them sleep as much as they wish, at their own homes.
There was a joke in the Soviet Union that a shaving machine was displayed in a technology fair. All the man had to do was to insert his head in the machine and press a button, and the machine did the rest.
-"How amazing!", a bystander said. "Just think about this, every face has a different shape!"
-"Not after going through this machine!", the inventor replied.
Or it could also be the exact opposite, perhaps it will give us the benefits of exercise without the downsides, such as the increased wear and tear in the body that exercise causes.
Except that uranium has the hardness of tempered steel. Uranium bullets without a soft metal jacket would destroy the barrel in no time.
Working towards social equality causes starvation because Stalin and Mao (and probably Pol Pot)?
Yes, when you aim for too much social equality, the end result is what Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot did.
Social equality should mean equality of opportunities, not necessarily equality of results. For instance, everyone should have access to an education, but if your ghetto culture makes your school a gang war zone, that's not a problem caused by the elite.
The problems caused by Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot came from them trying to exterminate the people who had better living standards than others because they were more honest and worked harder.
Clicking one of these links, stepping through that sub-process, then hitting the 'return to last position' shortcut is far faster than flicking through a printed manual.
How is clicking a menu to add a bookmark easier or faster than inserting anything that's at hand in the page?
If I want a more permanent bookmark there are a variety of stickers that I can use, using different colors or making annotations if necessary.
When I'm holding a book and need to follow two different parts at once, the best procedure is often to hold a finger in each page and alternate between them by twisting my wrist, how could any clicking be faster than that?
I need to move the mouse to a precise position, aim the pointer and click. In a tablet or similar it's even worse. I usually need to use both hands, sometimes magnifying the screen to be able to tap the exact position.
Replace "structure" with "object" and you'll see why most programmers think in terms of arrays of structures and not structures of arrays.
Anyhow, for me that shows an intrinsic limitation of object oriented languages and why C still rules strong. When you run into the limitations of the hardware, you get to a point where object oriented languages are a limiting factor in optimization.
When I started learning how to program neural networks in the 1980s, I realized that by turning object oriented programs inside out one could get orders of magnitude better performance. That's where the power of C with its flexibility in handling pointers come into play.
Instead of declaring neurons as objects containing inputs, weights, and activation values, I declared arrays of weights, inputs, and activations. That way, calculating the activation of a neuron became a dot product of an array of inputs with an array of weights. The dot product is a common operation that is well optimized in any CPU.
The concert was completely ruined for the orchestra and the entire audience -- the profound effect of the music was lost.
That guy should face civil and criminal responsibility for his acts. You can't just go and ruin a concert that cost thousands of dollars to enact.
Considering that people had been preparing and expecting that experience for a long time, it wouldn't be too much to make him pay, let's say, $5,000 to each person in the audience plus $100,000 to the production.
"I love licking a young woman's pussy first thing in the morning" - Thomas Jefferson
"Boobs are awesome" - James Madison
Besides the problem of people picking and choosing quotations, how can you determine if they are authentic or not?
"I hate quotations" - Ralph Waldo Emerson.
When all your in-house innovation leads to outhouse fabrication
How much innovation is needed to fabricate a tiny room?
Buy everyone who innovates and shut out any possible competition
In this case, I believe you mean shit out any possible competition.
So nothing is stopping you, except billions of dollars of capital you don't have.
And this is where the idea of intellectual property makes sense. If someone invested billions in creating something, he's entitled to profit from that.
It's not like those billions were lying around. People worked to save money and invested it in shares of those companies, that's where the billions came from.
For (a trivial) example, suppose I specify that I want a program which takes two numbers, adds them and outputs the result.
If you think that example is trivial, it's obvious you've never heard of Giuseppe Peano.
For acceptance, that program should be tested to see if it implements a correct mathematical induction algorithm for addition.
with the specifications I write there is no excuse for not testing their code.
In every engineering project I've ever worked on, the specifications included acceptance tests. Obviously, his specifications aren't good enough.
He should detail with his customers the functional specifications of the product and generate a set of acceptance tests. The end product of this would be a test procedure, which both the customer and the contractors have previously agreed upon.
There is no excuse for a contractor to blame the programmers who did not conduct testing, if the way the testing should be done has not been previously detailed. The formal test procedure is what separated bugs from features.
Taurus buys a membership for each customer.
Twist:Taurus is a Brazilian company. Several other popular gun manufacturers are also foreign companies, like Glock and SIG Sauer.
Which nation does the "National" in NRA mean?
The reason why they recommend lower and lower alcohol contents has more to do with the way they collect statistics than with any real effect.
If any of the drivers involved in an accident has any alcohol blood content at all, it is recorded as an "alcohol related accident", NO MATTER WHO CAUSED THE ACCIDENT.
This is bias in the worst sense of the word, it's political propaganda at its worst.
Suppose you drank one beer and is stopped at a red light. Then a madd bitch rear ends you. It will be an "alcohol related" accident, pointing to the "need for stricter drunken driving laws", even though the madd bitch caused it.
The top systems today are approximately at the same capacity as a human brain.
Brain neurons perform an operation that's similar to a dot product. Their operation can be simulated by a weight for each dendrite that's multiplied by that dendrite's input.
In rough order of magnitude, a human brain has a hundred billion neurons, or 1e11 in standard computer language notation. Each neuron has an average of one thousand inputs, 1e3, and performs a hundred operations per second. That is 1e11 * 1e3 * 1e2 = 1e16 flops, or 10,000 teraflops.
According to Top500, the highest powered computer system in November 2012 had a capacity of 17,590 teraflops.
This doesn't mean it has the same ability as a human brain, because there's also the software involved. There is a project, sponsored by Google, that tries to implement a computer system operating close to what the human brain does.
When they tested that system presenting to it one million random screenshots from Youtube videos, the system learned all by itself to recognize objects that appeared on those videos, like human faces and cats.
There's a good technical tutorial on this system at the Stanford university site, and a more basic explanation can be found in several popular articles if you google for "deep learning".
TFA says the waste has settled into layers, solids at the bottom, and the system they have will mix it all and pump out the sludge.
Wouldn't it be smarter to pump the liquids out first, and worry about the solid part later? They say the most urgent problem is that some tanks are leaking, and solids don't leak.
The "rape" he is being accused of is a radical feminist definition. He is a male being prosecuted by a society where males are subject to discrimination. Not fair.
He is in a similar situation to a black man accused of rape in Alabama during the 1920s.
Developers who want to be paid really well should do what I did, go where the money is.
First step, learn the ropes.
Second step, use your knowledge of software to program your way to riches.
She was a terrible Prime Minister and caused untold suffering and misery.
The British people who elected her obviously disagree with you.
She was elected after the policies of the Labour party dumped the country in the worst economic crisis in UK history
Labour had policies based upon raising the income tax without any regard for cutting government expenses. They claimed government spending and inflation are good for the economy. Sound familiar?
It seems that these days IP legislation tries to swallow everything. Nothing is safe from IP laws.
It's time to reverse that trend, most of the DMCA should be considered unconstitutional anyhow. If someone sold me a device, why can't I tear it apart to see how it was built?
Patents and copyrights exist for making sure no one needs to keep trade secrets. The intent of those laws is to let people learn about the technical details behind the technology.
Having laws that restricts the liberty of learning goes against every principle of a civilized society.
consoles are NOT a good buy
Consoles are anachronistic by now. They are remnants of an age when there was a TV set in the living room and the family gathered there to watch. Back in those old days, a color monitor was an expensive item, so much that it made sense to use the family TV as a monitor.
Today, when people carry in their pockets a device with a screen that offers much better resolution than the TV screen did, consoles make no sense at all, at least not for the consumer.
There is only one group that benefits from the console system today, the game publishers. Consoles are what enables them to save money in development, because the range of hardware that they must support is limited, while at the same time allowing them to pump the prices up, by using DRM.
Let me godwin that for you: Hitler was elected by proportional voting. Nazis rose to power in Germany in one of those convoluted negotiations that countries with proportional voting do all the time.
An extremist has little chance of being elected when candidates are chosen to represent a district. In any given geographical area, there are different sorts of people, therefore moderates are much more likely to get elected.
Under a proportional system, things are different. It's easy to find enough supporters for any extremist view, if you count votes all over the country. And when you try to make a coalition with extremists, who do you think will end with all the power?
A coalition government often has 45% of moderate politicians for one side, 45% of moderates for the other side, and the power ends in the hand of the 10% of extremists who can choose to support one or the other side.