It is the mirror that attracted my attention. Someone who cannot keep his attention on the road while he is driving shouldn't be driving, let alone raising kids.
It is far from clear that studying the arts in college will improve your creativity, let alone whether it will do so to a greater extent than some other field. On the other hand, studying can definitely expand your knowledge, and the right sort of knowledge will allow you to apply your creativity. For example, an understanding of technology will not necessarily guarantee a lifetime job in engineering, but if we assume that technology will be important in the foreseeable future, then that knowledge will, in general (and other things being equal), put you in a better position than someone whose education consisted of watching and discussing old movies.
Two rules of thumb (and nothing more): study things that are important, and not too narrowly (at least to start with.)
The apparent discrepancy of the total volume of large boulders being greater than that of the visible craters they have supposedly come from is not resolved by the BNE. In the paper, this paradox is only mentioned in passing, and no definite resolution is offered. No-one seems to have ruled out the possibility that there are additional craters beneath the rubble, or that the excess includes remnants of the impactors. Perhaps there is an assumption that, absent the BNE, the boulders formed by early impacts should now be buried.
I believe the tradeoff of CLI is between working more efficiently (by typing commands and not having to use your mouse too often to interrupt your flow) and a steeper learning curve (learn commands and their params, config file locations and their syntax etc.).
For me, the primary benefit of a CLI, when presented by a decent shell, is the flexibility and power of being able to write and run tiny programs whenever it helps.
A CLI not backed by a decent shell is miserable, as was demonstrated by ms-dos.
See, this is what I thought as well. The Higgs was well predicted and made sense in the standard model, and our measurements at the LHC seem to back up what physicists were speculating. On the other hand, BICEP2 is a much newer result and there's considerable controversy about whether it's a real result or a mistake.
So why would you automatically jump to the conclusion that the HIGGS was the problem?
The last paragraph of the Royal Astronomical Society press release seems to be agreeing with you, suggesting that an error in the BICEP2 result (or, rather, its interpretation) is the most likely explanation:
"If BICEP2 is shown to be correct, it tells us that there has to be interesting new particle physics beyond the standard model" Hogan said.
IIRC, the BICEP2 result, if interpreted as resulting from inflation, indicates a surprisingly strong inflation event. The above quote suggests that inflation with the strength suggested by other measurements (e.g. the level of inhomogeneity in the CMB?) would not create this problem.
"The most ambitious aim of the project is to create a feature that would efficiently highlight the most relevant and pertinent reader comments on an article, perhaps through word-recognition software."
The object of the game is to get a complete load of bollocks accepted as the most relevant and pertinent reader comment on as many articles as possible. Extra points for the front page and headline articles.
Web browser maker decides to create a disqus competitor, instead of working on their web browser.
It probably has something to do with the money:
"The two-year development project will be funded by a $3.89 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Miami-based philanthropic organization that specializes in media and the arts."
First, that the "natural language" requirement was gamed. It deliberately simulated someone for whom English is not their first language, in order to cover its inability to actually hold a good English conversation. Fail.
Agreed. It is easier to trick someone when he wants to believe, and the organizer of this event comes across as a gullible media whore in his eagerness to claim that the Turing test had been passed.
Second, that we have learned over time that the Turing test doesn't really mean much of anything. We are capable of creating a machine that holds its own in limited conversation, but in the process we have learned that it has little to do with "AI".
For its time, it was a pretty good stab at the issue, and one that implicitly recognized that intelligence is a generalized skill. It is a better measure than using chess-playing or mathematical theorem-generating. The fundamental problem with these alternative measures, and others like them, is that they are based on the fallacy that just because humans use their intelligence to perform them, they necessarily require intelligence.
As there was nothing remotely resembling AI when Turing formulated the test, it is not surprising that he overlooked the degree to which ordinary conversation can be manipulated, and also the amount of effort people would put into doing so. I imagine he thought of his test as a scientific experiment, not a competition.
While I share your view that expecting the mind to be explained as a single neural network (in the Comp. Sci. sense) is probably simplistic, I don't think modeling it as multiple neural nets and a voter fixes the problem. I am not quite sure about this, but isn't a collection of neural nets and a voter equivalent to a single neural net? Or, to put it a slightly different way, for any model that consists of multiple neural nets and a voter, there is a single neural net that is functionally identical? I am assuming the voter is there to pick the most common classification by the component networks.
Konrad Zuse, who also built the first Turing-complete computer, designed the first high-level computer language, Plankalkul, in 1945 (though no compiler was implemented until 1998.)
This slim volume is by far the most readable and practical introduction to formal verification that I have seen.
Don't be put off by its somewhat overstated title.
I believe it is important for every professional programmer to have some understanding of how to construct a proof of correctness of code, even if they never use it professionally, as it will expand their understanding of programming. In my case, knowing what it would take to prove a program correct has changed the way I program, in ways that I hope improves the reliability of what I write.
Have you heard of an old cliche that goes "learn from your mistakes". By your logic, no errors can ever be made and learned from.
What we have here is a failure to learn from previous mistakes - this bug violates a number of basic principles in the development of secure software, and most of those principles were derived from hard experience.
I will agree that there is one thing to be learned here: The phrase "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" is simplistic wishful thinking, and potentially dangerous if mistaken for a realistic verification policy.
So, the "with many eyes all bugs are shallow" notion fails. There were not enough eyes on the OpenSSL library, which is why nobody discovered the bug.
Except that someone did discover the bug...
The 'many eyes' principle (aka Linus' Law) states "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow". This claims a good deal more than simply that bugs are likely to be found eventually. Given the seriousness of this bug and the length of time taken to expose it, any claim that 'many eyes' worked in this case depends on a useless definition of 'worked'.
Maybe the similar errors would and are being missed in the Windows and Mac implementations.
That is quite likely, but irrelevant. This severity and duration of the OpenSSL bug are not mitigated by the hypothetical (or even real) failings of closed-source vendors.
The open source community should move beyond this self-serving aphorism and adopt a more engineering-like approach to the correctness of critical software. Fortunately, I think the people actually doing the development are well aware of this.
According to this sort of argument, nothing bad ever happens. The Air France 447 crash will improve pilot training, the Boston Marathon bombing will improve race security...
This point of view gives us no insight in to how to improve things. It belongs in the 'not even wrong' category.
The phrase "tech job" is often used without distinguishing between engineering-like jobs and technicians' jobs. This study goes further still, including "jobs supported by technology" - given how technological out society has become, that could be a very broad group.
Agreed, and furthermore, even if he 'merely' spooked the runner to the point where she fell, then he was operating the drone irresponsibly.
This jerk needs to man-up and learn to take responsibility for his own actions. Until then, he shouldn't be operating a drone - or a car, for that matter.
That is what I thought of too, but in this case neuroscientists agree with him...
There's a huge difference between identifying a principe behind some low-level aspect of neural activity, and explaining how the brain works. This sort of article (and other pronouncements of Dr. Bak, apparently) gives reductionism a bad name. Only if he could show how consciousness arises directly from neural self-organized criticality would the absurd hyperbole of the first paragraph be justified.
'Outing' has a connotation of a) the public identification of an individual, b) the disclosure of private information about that individual, and c) being against the (not necessarily explicitly stated) wishes of the individual. Neither a) nor b) occurred, which also means c) is moot.
Why do you say "whined"? It sounds like several people probably had valid cause for complain. I certainly don't want random assholes buzzing me with their drones or RC aircraft, or getting in the way of manned aircraft.
Exactly. If he was operating as alleged, he has made things more difficult for responsible operators, because this will expedite regulation.
The issue here is evolution. Any version of creationism that denies evolution is incompatible with science.
It's not really incompatible... I imagine they have different beliefs about how the solar system formed, spanning from the YECs belief that a god placed the planets where they are today, th[r]ough the people that think a god just kicked off the Big Bang and nudged a few cosmological constants around...
My comment was two simple sentences, yet you managed to miss the point. It takes no position on people who accept the facts of evolution.
I suppose I have to point out that accepting the facts of evolution means all of those facts, not some bowdlerized version that denies the random aspects of evolution, or claims that evolution is responsible for small changes only, or excludes the descent of Man.
And I guess I also have to point out that my statement does not imply that a version of creationism that accepts the facts of evolution is necessarily compatible with science. It could be incompatible in other ways, which is highly likely when you introduce hypotheses lacking any evidence in support. As I wrote in the first third of my original response, the issue here is evolution, specifically.
With regard to your last paragraph, the route by which someone arrived at a belief is immaterial to the question of whether that belief is consistent with science.
Slashdot Mirror
It is the mirror that attracted my attention. Someone who cannot keep his attention on the road while he is driving shouldn't be driving, let alone raising kids.
It is far from clear that studying the arts in college will improve your creativity, let alone whether it will do so to a greater extent than some other field. On the other hand, studying can definitely expand your knowledge, and the right sort of knowledge will allow you to apply your creativity. For example, an understanding of technology will not necessarily guarantee a lifetime job in engineering, but if we assume that technology will be important in the foreseeable future, then that knowledge will, in general (and other things being equal), put you in a better position than someone whose education consisted of watching and discussing old movies.
Two rules of thumb (and nothing more): study things that are important, and not too narrowly (at least to start with.)
The apparent discrepancy of the total volume of large boulders being greater than that of the visible craters they have supposedly come from is not resolved by the BNE. In the paper, this paradox is only mentioned in passing, and no definite resolution is offered. No-one seems to have ruled out the possibility that there are additional craters beneath the rubble, or that the excess includes remnants of the impactors. Perhaps there is an assumption that, absent the BNE, the boulders formed by early impacts should now be buried.
I believe the tradeoff of CLI is between working more efficiently (by typing commands and not having to use your mouse too often to interrupt your flow)
and a steeper learning curve (learn commands and their params, config file locations and their syntax etc.).
For me, the primary benefit of a CLI, when presented by a decent shell, is the flexibility and power of being able to write and run tiny programs whenever it helps.
A CLI not backed by a decent shell is miserable, as was demonstrated by ms-dos.
See, this is what I thought as well. The Higgs was well predicted and made sense in the standard model, and our measurements at the LHC seem to back up what physicists were speculating. On the other hand, BICEP2 is a much newer result and there's considerable controversy about whether it's a real result or a mistake.
So why would you automatically jump to the conclusion that the HIGGS was the problem?
The last paragraph of the Royal Astronomical Society press release seems to be agreeing with you, suggesting that an error in the BICEP2 result (or, rather, its interpretation) is the most likely explanation:
"If BICEP2 is shown to be correct, it tells us that there has to be interesting new particle physics beyond the standard model" Hogan said.
IIRC, the BICEP2 result, if interpreted as resulting from inflation, indicates a surprisingly strong inflation event. The above quote suggests that inflation with the strength suggested by other measurements (e.g. the level of inhomogeneity in the CMB?) would not create this problem.
"The most ambitious aim of the project is to create a feature that would efficiently highlight the most relevant and pertinent reader comments on an article, perhaps through word-recognition software."
The object of the game is to get a complete load of bollocks accepted as the most relevant and pertinent reader comment on as many articles as possible. Extra points for the front page and headline articles.
Web browser maker decides to create a disqus competitor, instead of working on their web browser.
It probably has something to do with the money:
"The two-year development project will be funded by a $3.89 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Miami-based philanthropic organization that specializes in media and the arts."
First, that the "natural language" requirement was gamed. It deliberately simulated someone for whom English is not their first language, in order to cover its inability to actually hold a good English conversation. Fail.
Agreed. It is easier to trick someone when he wants to believe, and the organizer of this event comes across as a gullible media whore in his eagerness to claim that the Turing test had been passed.
Second, that we have learned over time that the Turing test doesn't really mean much of anything. We are capable of creating a machine that holds its own in limited conversation, but in the process we have learned that it has little to do with "AI".
For its time, it was a pretty good stab at the issue, and one that implicitly recognized that intelligence is a generalized skill. It is a better measure than using chess-playing or mathematical theorem-generating. The fundamental problem with these alternative measures, and others like them, is that they are based on the fallacy that just because humans use their intelligence to perform them, they necessarily require intelligence.
As there was nothing remotely resembling AI when Turing formulated the test, it is not surprising that he overlooked the degree to which ordinary conversation can be manipulated, and also the amount of effort people would put into doing so. I imagine he thought of his test as a scientific experiment, not a competition.
While I share your view that expecting the mind to be explained as a single neural network (in the Comp. Sci. sense) is probably simplistic, I don't think modeling it as multiple neural nets and a voter fixes the problem. I am not quite sure about this, but isn't a collection of neural nets and a voter equivalent to a single neural net? Or, to put it a slightly different way, for any model that consists of multiple neural nets and a voter, there is a single neural net that is functionally identical? I am assuming the voter is there to pick the most common classification by the component networks.
Konrad Zuse, who also built the first Turing-complete computer, designed the first high-level computer language, Plankalkul, in 1945 (though no compiler was implemented until 1998.)
...and go read a basic grammar text.
Error-Free Software: Know-how and Know-why of Program Correctness by Robert L Baber, published by Wiley, ISBN 0 471 93016 4
http://www.amazon.com/Error-Fr...
This slim volume is by far the most readable and practical introduction to formal verification that I have seen.
Don't be put off by its somewhat overstated title.
I believe it is important for every professional programmer to have some understanding of how to construct a proof of correctness of code, even if they never use it professionally, as it will expand their understanding of programming. In my case, knowing what it would take to prove a program correct has changed the way I program, in ways that I hope improves the reliability of what I write.
Have you heard of an old cliche that goes "learn from your mistakes". By your logic, no errors can ever be made and learned from.
What we have here is a failure to learn from previous mistakes - this bug violates a number of basic principles in the development of secure software, and most of those principles were derived from hard experience.
I will agree that there is one thing to be learned here: The phrase "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" is simplistic wishful thinking, and potentially dangerous if mistaken for a realistic verification policy.
So, the "with many eyes all bugs are shallow" notion fails. There were not enough eyes on the OpenSSL library, which is why nobody discovered the bug.
Except that someone did discover the bug...
The 'many eyes' principle (aka Linus' Law) states "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow". This claims a good deal more than simply that bugs are likely to be found eventually. Given the seriousness of this bug and the length of time taken to expose it, any claim that 'many eyes' worked in this case depends on a useless definition of 'worked'.
Maybe the similar errors would and are being missed in the Windows and Mac implementations.
That is quite likely, but irrelevant. This severity and duration of the OpenSSL bug are not mitigated by the hypothetical (or even real) failings of closed-source vendors.
The open source community should move beyond this self-serving aphorism and adopt a more engineering-like approach to the correctness of critical software. Fortunately, I think the people actually doing the development are well aware of this.
...Chalk it up to valuable experience...
According to this sort of argument, nothing bad ever happens. The Air France 447 crash will improve pilot training, the Boston Marathon bombing will improve race security...
This point of view gives us no insight in to how to improve things. It belongs in the 'not even wrong' category.
The phrase "tech job" is often used without distinguishing between engineering-like jobs and technicians' jobs. This study goes further still, including "jobs supported by technology" - given how technological out society has become, that could be a very broad group.
Strands vary so much that it is meaningless to consider them as a class for music-quality tests.
They also vary considerably in how much of the original remains.
Pointing out the age of XP merely emphasizes the lack of significant improvement since. When this happens to a technology, it is called maturity.
XP was the first Microsoft PC OS to be what all its predecessors aspired to be.
Agreed, and furthermore, even if he 'merely' spooked the runner to the point where she fell, then he was operating the drone irresponsibly.
This jerk needs to man-up and learn to take responsibility for his own actions. Until then, he shouldn't be operating a drone - or a car, for that matter.
That is what I thought of too, but in this case neuroscientists agree with him...
There's a huge difference between identifying a principe behind some low-level aspect of neural activity, and explaining how the brain works. This sort of article (and other pronouncements of Dr. Bak, apparently) gives reductionism a bad name. Only if he could show how consciousness arises directly from neural self-organized criticality would the absurd hyperbole of the first paragraph be justified.
We can just secure our things the same way that the things currently on the internet - power plants, dams, oil refineries - are secured.
Which could easily be the same thing.
'Outing' has a connotation of a) the public identification of an individual, b) the disclosure of private information about that individual, and c) being against the (not necessarily explicitly stated) wishes of the individual. Neither a) nor b) occurred, which also means c) is moot.
"Outed" an assault rifle owner?
Never trust a /. summary. They confirmed the participant's ownership of a firearm through public sources.
Why do you say "whined"? It sounds like several people probably had valid cause for complain. I certainly don't want random assholes buzzing me with their drones or RC aircraft, or getting in the way of manned aircraft.
Exactly. If he was operating as alleged, he has made things more difficult for responsible operators, because this will expedite regulation.
The issue here is evolution. Any version of creationism that denies evolution is incompatible with science.
It's not really incompatible... I imagine they have different beliefs about how the solar system formed, spanning from the YECs belief that a god placed the planets where they are today, th[r]ough the people that think a god just kicked off the Big Bang and nudged a few cosmological constants around...
My comment was two simple sentences, yet you managed to miss the point. It takes no position on people who accept the facts of evolution.
I suppose I have to point out that accepting the facts of evolution means all of those facts, not some bowdlerized version that denies the random aspects of evolution, or claims that evolution is responsible for small changes only, or excludes the descent of Man.
And I guess I also have to point out that my statement does not imply that a version of creationism that accepts the facts of evolution is necessarily compatible with science. It could be incompatible in other ways, which is highly likely when you introduce hypotheses lacking any evidence in support. As I wrote in the first third of my original response, the issue here is evolution, specifically.
With regard to your last paragraph, the route by which someone arrived at a belief is immaterial to the question of whether that belief is consistent with science.