Now that I've had a chance to sit down and read through both the study and a few other things... you're correct, but it's not completely clear-cut, at least in my opinion, that the changes under consideration actually relate to reward-seeking, addict-like behaviour and aren't simply, say, a lack of sexual development due to being single.
They found a variety of different features in their test subjects (actual anatomical differences, differences in activity level within the caudate, differences in interconnectedness between pudamen and caudate...) and saw these were strongly correlated with level of pornography use, on the basis of addiction. However, there were some people in the study who used alcohol in a mildly problematic way. They showed only a r = ~0.25 (weak positive correlation) with porn usage. That strikes me as pretty inconsistent—if these are pathways strongly implicated in addictive behaviour, why didn't the drunks line up more neatly with their data? They don't mention alcoholism again in the discussion, except to draw parallels between porn usage and various forms of drug usage, and to suggest psychiatrists should ask about porn usage.
Don't assume it means anything—the striatum's primary function is coordinating motor control. If there is a meaningful causal link and this study is not just a p-value fishing expedition, it is so convoluted as to be incomprehensible.
And it's even been used for transit—Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood has cyborgized humans using the growth of new bodies as a substitute for light-speed travel.
I guess you missed this article from two days ago, then? (The classic "mystery" in neural nets is how they distribute weights during learning, the answer to which is "rarely better than a human would, and according to the algorithm they train by.") I know you saw this one; you commented on it. Or perhaps you were talking about computer-automated proofs? Those aren't sophisticated, merely long-winded; the result of applying simple propositional logic over and over again.
If we had algorithms that were actually capable of exceeding human comprehension in a meaningful way—and not just outpacing or outlasting us at regression and tree search—the world would be a much different and more exciting place. It is very unlikely we will have AGI until the human brain is almost fully understood, simply because we don't know what direction we really need to be pushing in. Given that there's now evidence that the brain's neurons could be DNA computers, that definitely has a long way to go.
Most WoW private servers use a copy of the entities database which is created by ripping the game data from the official servers using a special add-on. It was this copyright infringement in particular that I was thinking of.
Now that's just plainly overly generalized; "theft of services" is an entirely real thing and may not involve anything tangible; the most obvious business example is refusing to pay a consultant. In the case of private MMO servers, this isn't happening: the client, protocol, and server content are already paid for, after all, so what is done is definitely infringement, but there are definitely still kinds of intangible theft.
Easy: a computer scientist who would like to create a smarter parser to distinguish "then" from "than," but doesn't code, and so writes a spec outline instead. (Presumably in Word.)
To be honest I've been trying to move to SoylentNews, but I can't quite stomach the blast from the past—the comments are few, the SlashCode is yesteryear's, and the stories tend to be a day or so behind. (I am glad, however, to see that Beta is more or less sleeping in R'lyeh.)
1. Children's hospitals receive donations and nail research grants with an alarming deftness. Boston Children's Hospital is, according to their own architecture, the best. There's no shortage of money. They did have some layoffs a couple of years ago, but with a ridiculous savings ratio (255 jobs, costing 89.5 million annually, constituting somewhere in the neighbourhood of 3% of their budget.)
2. Their primary website is located at 134.174.13.251 (childrenshospital.org). Patient info retrieval is hosted on 134.174.13.5 (apps.childrenshospital.org). There is a booking form located on the main site, but at any rate it's working just fine now.
On top of that, they're taking comments until 2015 and didn't even realise this would be such a big deal, so in all likelihood the exemption will get preserved. (Particularly since congresspeople are now speaking out about it.) It's practically accidental.
Well, here's the tl;dr of TFA: Social media is the starting point. Hence the Arab Spring—you use Facebook or Twitter or whatever to spread your message and/or propaganda, and then accrue those with personal willingness to march and coordinate action through the net. Five dictators have been overthrown in the Middle East since December 2010 (as well as uprisings and protests in more than a dozen other countries) following social media germination, so clearly it's viable for that. Unfortunately this means it's also a single point of failure, as shown in Egypt when they depeered from the rest of the network in early 2011, easy to infiltrate and possible to manipulate.
I was actually thinking of large platform developers such as Zynga. The fee and labour cost is potentially significantly higher, which makes it only attractive to a smaller number of companies prepared to do the work of scraping information itself, but the opportunity for information transfer still exists, doesn't it?
I believe you when you say the company's trying to improve its image in this regard, but, well, when you have a history of putting things like "Facebook does not screen or approve Platform Developers and cannot control how such Platform Developers use any personal information" in your privacy policy, that sours users' perception of your brand. It shouldn't really come as a surprise that people assume such things continue.
I've gotten quite a few random spam messages from Chinese industry, despite being a software engineer at an academic institution with absolutely nothing to do with any product development or manufacturing whatsoever. I've gotten offers for piping, ceramics, and a wide variety of plastics. At this very moment, I am reading a spam message from Kevin, who informs me he represents "one of the best digital images retouching/editing professionals located in China."
They seem like very good deals, and I'm almost saddened that I can't take them up on what appear to be very genuine, heartfelt attempts at mass mailing in an age where most unsolicited e-mail is about "your urgent Cooperation in transferring the sum of $11.3million immediately to your private account" and unauthorized activity notifications from Bl1zzard Entertanmnt on my several hundred Batt1e.net accounts.
If you ever figure out what kind of plastic it was, let me know, and I'll check to see if I got the same e-mail!
Facebook's position on providing large amounts of user data to its business partners has been the subject of scrutiny a few times. It remains unclear exactly how much stuff developers like Zynga have been able to access. There was also a series of events a couple of years ago where privacy controls were updated and set to overly permissive defaults—which is either spectacularly bad management (given how much bad PR it generated each and every time) or a bribed enablement of data-scraping.
As for sending email to a Gmail user, that's what I meant by "passive" use of Google's services, although I should note that if your e-mail never gets read, it cannot make Google money, just like a site with Google ads on it that never gets visited. You're really only an incidental bystander in that situation.
Well, there's at least one sentence that's essentially different: "even when you die, Facebook can still make money off you."
Google doesn't (as far as I know) sell user information to advertisers. They exclusively use their own analytics; all an advertiser can do is submit their target demographics and keywords, and let Google do the math. While they're both huge storehouses of personal information, the big G is monolithic and generally non-porous—unless you're a malignant security agency, at least. If you're not using their services (at least passively), you're definitely not making them money.
This doesn't make them Totally Cool Groovy Guys You Should Trust With Anything, but it does make them naive ideologues surfing along the edge of a slippery slope rather than the outright thuggery of Facebook and other traditional advertisers—FB is more like a spam subscription; once you get signed up, you can be certain that your private information will propagate across the cosmos for eternity.
Oh, don't worry, I double-checked Wikipedia too.:) If those were truly multicellular (and the evidence is inconclusive as to whether or not some of them were even cells) then it's very likely they developed it independently. Continuing to quote Wikipedia:
Multicellularity has evolved independently at least 46 times,
...and that's without discussing pluripotency, which is the ability to differentiate various kinds of cells. It's very unlikely that Metazoa separated from Protozoa more than a billion years ago.
The oldest known animals only go back 665 million years. It's relatively unlikely that our cell differentiation mechanisms are much older than that, so "billions" is a bit overambitious.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that I've had a chance to sit down and read through both the study and a few other things... you're correct, but it's not completely clear-cut, at least in my opinion, that the changes under consideration actually relate to reward-seeking, addict-like behaviour and aren't simply, say, a lack of sexual development due to being single.
They found a variety of different features in their test subjects (actual anatomical differences, differences in activity level within the caudate, differences in interconnectedness between pudamen and caudate...) and saw these were strongly correlated with level of pornography use, on the basis of addiction. However, there were some people in the study who used alcohol in a mildly problematic way. They showed only a r = ~0.25 (weak positive correlation) with porn usage. That strikes me as pretty inconsistent—if these are pathways strongly implicated in addictive behaviour, why didn't the drunks line up more neatly with their data? They don't mention alcoholism again in the discussion, except to draw parallels between porn usage and various forms of drug usage, and to suggest psychiatrists should ask about porn usage.
Don't assume it means anything—the striatum's primary function is coordinating motor control. If there is a meaningful causal link and this study is not just a p-value fishing expedition, it is so convoluted as to be incomprehensible.
And it's even been used for transit—Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood has cyborgized humans using the growth of new bodies as a substitute for light-speed travel.
I guess you missed this article from two days ago, then? (The classic "mystery" in neural nets is how they distribute weights during learning, the answer to which is "rarely better than a human would, and according to the algorithm they train by.") I know you saw this one; you commented on it. Or perhaps you were talking about computer-automated proofs? Those aren't sophisticated, merely long-winded; the result of applying simple propositional logic over and over again.
If we had algorithms that were actually capable of exceeding human comprehension in a meaningful way—and not just outpacing or outlasting us at regression and tree search—the world would be a much different and more exciting place. It is very unlikely we will have AGI until the human brain is almost fully understood, simply because we don't know what direction we really need to be pushing in. Given that there's now evidence that the brain's neurons could be DNA computers, that definitely has a long way to go.
As a researcher in machine learning: lol nope.
Most WoW private servers use a copy of the entities database which is created by ripping the game data from the official servers using a special add-on. It was this copyright infringement in particular that I was thinking of.
Now that's just plainly overly generalized; "theft of services" is an entirely real thing and may not involve anything tangible; the most obvious business example is refusing to pay a consultant. In the case of private MMO servers, this isn't happening: the client, protocol, and server content are already paid for, after all, so what is done is definitely infringement, but there are definitely still kinds of intangible theft.
Easy: a computer scientist who would like to create a smarter parser to distinguish "then" from "than," but doesn't code, and so writes a spec outline instead. (Presumably in Word.)
It is a pun on that thing, so no.
To be honest I've been trying to move to SoylentNews, but I can't quite stomach the blast from the past—the comments are few, the SlashCode is yesteryear's, and the stories tend to be a day or so behind. (I am glad, however, to see that Beta is more or less sleeping in R'lyeh.)
Then they'll happily charge you extra, even if you don't use it!
I'm sure that would fall under the most expensive category, just to be "safe."
1. Children's hospitals receive donations and nail research grants with an alarming deftness. Boston Children's Hospital is, according to their own architecture, the best. There's no shortage of money. They did have some layoffs a couple of years ago, but with a ridiculous savings ratio (255 jobs, costing 89.5 million annually, constituting somewhere in the neighbourhood of 3% of their budget.)
2. Their primary website is located at 134.174.13.251 (childrenshospital.org). Patient info retrieval is hosted on 134.174.13.5 (apps.childrenshospital.org). There is a booking form located on the main site, but at any rate it's working just fine now.
On top of that, they're taking comments until 2015 and didn't even realise this would be such a big deal, so in all likelihood the exemption will get preserved. (Particularly since congresspeople are now speaking out about it.) It's practically accidental.
Well, here's the tl;dr of TFA: Social media is the starting point. Hence the Arab Spring—you use Facebook or Twitter or whatever to spread your message and/or propaganda, and then accrue those with personal willingness to march and coordinate action through the net. Five dictators have been overthrown in the Middle East since December 2010 (as well as uprisings and protests in more than a dozen other countries) following social media germination, so clearly it's viable for that. Unfortunately this means it's also a single point of failure, as shown in Egypt when they depeered from the rest of the network in early 2011, easy to infiltrate and possible to manipulate.
I take it you didn't RTFA, then, which is a summary of the real paper, in which they show that doesn't really work. (And abuse factor analysis.)
TFA:
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charity, and as with everything we make here, all profits are pushed straight back into educating kids in computing.
...so it's a little less direct, but no great loss.
I was actually thinking of large platform developers such as Zynga. The fee and labour cost is potentially significantly higher, which makes it only attractive to a smaller number of companies prepared to do the work of scraping information itself, but the opportunity for information transfer still exists, doesn't it?
I believe you when you say the company's trying to improve its image in this regard, but, well, when you have a history of putting things like "Facebook does not screen or approve Platform Developers and cannot control how such Platform Developers use any personal information" in your privacy policy, that sours users' perception of your brand. It shouldn't really come as a surprise that people assume such things continue.
I've gotten quite a few random spam messages from Chinese industry, despite being a software engineer at an academic institution with absolutely nothing to do with any product development or manufacturing whatsoever. I've gotten offers for piping, ceramics, and a wide variety of plastics. At this very moment, I am reading a spam message from Kevin, who informs me he represents "one of the best digital images retouching/editing professionals located in China."
They seem like very good deals, and I'm almost saddened that I can't take them up on what appear to be very genuine, heartfelt attempts at mass mailing in an age where most unsolicited e-mail is about "your urgent Cooperation in transferring the sum of $11.3million immediately to your private account" and unauthorized activity notifications from Bl1zzard Entertanmnt on my several hundred Batt1e.net accounts.
If you ever figure out what kind of plastic it was, let me know, and I'll check to see if I got the same e-mail!
Facebook's position on providing large amounts of user data to its business partners has been the subject of scrutiny a few times. It remains unclear exactly how much stuff developers like Zynga have been able to access. There was also a series of events a couple of years ago where privacy controls were updated and set to overly permissive defaults—which is either spectacularly bad management (given how much bad PR it generated each and every time) or a bribed enablement of data-scraping.
As for sending email to a Gmail user, that's what I meant by "passive" use of Google's services, although I should note that if your e-mail never gets read, it cannot make Google money, just like a site with Google ads on it that never gets visited. You're really only an incidental bystander in that situation.
Well, there's at least one sentence that's essentially different: "even when you die, Facebook can still make money off you."
Google doesn't (as far as I know) sell user information to advertisers. They exclusively use their own analytics; all an advertiser can do is submit their target demographics and keywords, and let Google do the math. While they're both huge storehouses of personal information, the big G is monolithic and generally non-porous—unless you're a malignant security agency, at least. If you're not using their services (at least passively), you're definitely not making them money.
This doesn't make them Totally Cool Groovy Guys You Should Trust With Anything, but it does make them naive ideologues surfing along the edge of a slippery slope rather than the outright thuggery of Facebook and other traditional advertisers—FB is more like a spam subscription; once you get signed up, you can be certain that your private information will propagate across the cosmos for eternity.
Oh, don't worry, I double-checked Wikipedia too. :) If those were truly multicellular (and the evidence is inconclusive as to whether or not some of them were even cells) then it's very likely they developed it independently. Continuing to quote Wikipedia:
Multicellularity has evolved independently at least 46 times,
...and that's without discussing pluripotency, which is the ability to differentiate various kinds of cells. It's very unlikely that Metazoa separated from Protozoa more than a billion years ago.
(Better luck next round, hero.)
The oldest known animals only go back 665 million years. It's relatively unlikely that our cell differentiation mechanisms are much older than that, so "billions" is a bit overambitious.
...wouldn't those all be out of copyright by now, regardless of country?
He explained that he was a collector, and also owned items that had belonged to Churchill and Stalin.