Phone minutes are practically a commodity. None of the carriers have any real advantage, and there's no way they can really cut costs. The only way for them to make more money is by screwing customers. If you unlock your phone, it can help you avoid getting screwed.
If it weren't for "screw the customer" penalties, they'd all have a simple transparent plan. And you could figure out which phone was the cheapest, so you'd shop for a good deal (driving down profits).
Also, there's IP issues. China is pretty keen on their home-grown CPUs. Their MIPS-based processors (with x86 emulation) are 10 years behind what Intel can do, but they are keen to catch up.
Yes I know China's not a monolithic entity, and the Chinese government rarely does more than turn a blind eye on the theft of foreign IP, but still...
My point is, *he* wouldn't be communicating. The AI (which he is a physical part of) would be. He isn't the mind, he's simply part of the brain. A mind is the sum of its components and its state. Simply being part of a mind doesn't mean you can understand everything the mind does. Your individual neurons don't understand much, but putting them all together and you create a mind.
The real problem is, can a stupid AI trick a human into thinking it's smart? Obviously it can - people often think ELIZA is much smarter than it really is. But we are imagining some ideal Turing Test, in which the tester can't be fooled by cheap tricks (diversions like "why do you ask that question?", or cute anthropomorphic things - "Don't you love kittens?"). But the Turning Test itself was intended to be a thought experiment. Turing predicted that cheap tricks could be used to fool most people. His original point was that any system capable of acting like a mind is itself a mind.
Webcams are often pretty poor quality. The main factor in cameras is the sensor size (not MP, but physical size - a big sensor captures more light). But a good sensor is more expensive, and heavy. And it's not fun trying to figure out webcam specs, as they are often simply not well publicised.
The first step - get good lighting. A bad camera with good lighting is better than a good camera with bad lighting. Unless you have something as powerful as a high-end DSLR, you simply need good lighting.
If you have good lighting, you can shoot at a lower ISO, which means less noise. You can shoot at a higher speed, which means a faster refresh (unless there's a bottleneck somewhere else - probably USB speed) and less blur. You can get a higher depth of field, even up close, so you don't have to focus. There's a reason why professional photographers, working with the best cameras money can buy, spend so much time setting up lots of lighting - most cameras are simply not at their best in low light.
> I also read commentaries of it, explaining the context. Which is, as any sane person should know, essential to understand the meaning.
The problem with religious texts is, not every reader is sane. And not every reader wants to know the context. It's the word of God, so why should context matter? You just have to twist his words till they mean what you know they *should* mean. It's an exercise in double-think.
The Koran is more internally consistent, having a single author and single editor, and is read in its original language. The Bible tends to be all over the place. Different authors, different translations. It's a mess.
But with both texts, different readings are still possible, if you have your own agenda.
By design, Postgresql is simply not as good a key-value store as MySQL / MariaDB. Innodb stores the data along with the primary index (technically cluster index), so it's fast to look up data by the primary key. Postgres is a better database, though.
The argument is - you write a program which can pass a Turing test, in Chinese. You can, in theory, execute that program by hand. But the program isn't a "mind", because you don't speak Chinese.
It's rubbish. The guy in the "Chinese Room" isn't the "mind", he's part of the brain. Your neurons aren't a mind. The CPU isn't a mind. But a CPU executing a Turing-test-beating AI program is a mind. A mind is not a piece of hardware, it's an abstract way to describe hardware and software.
Nonono. Kids need abstract, flexible thinking. They need to be able to write an essay with 5 paragraphs (an introduction, which outlines their 3 arguments, 3 paragraphs explaining why their arguments feel right, and one which concludes they might be wrong but probably aren't). Then they need to learn a larger, more fractal kind of essay (with 3 main sections, each consisting of 5 paragraphs).
And they need to learn how to say "we didn't learn what to think, but how to think". Because thinking consists of lining up a bunch of arguments (like little soliders), and sending they off to fight a straw man.
It doesn't matter what you learn. Education isn't about learning facts. Education is about learning how to kiss your boss's ass, and work the system. If a high wordcount in an essay (not original ideas - because student's ideas suck) is the only thing the teacher (your boss) wants, then that's what you give them. If you can't do that, you won't be able to get a shiny job in government or a big corporation.
Then they'll complain about how Asians are doing this, and getting the best marks, and decry the lack of creativity in these robo-students. They somehow aren't called racist as long as they don't say the Jews doing it too.
It's probably true the girls often are told: "You're not talented, you won't really learn anything, so just make the teacher happy". And so they may tend to focus on grades more than boys. And it's to the detriment of everyone, including the students who are trying to do what the system asks them to do.
Australia will soon be $100 / month to get 10mb upload, 100mb download, pretty much anywhere that there's more people than kangaroos. Thanks to our socialist National Broadband Scheme (fibre to the node). It turns out, governments are pretty dumb but managing a fibre rollout just isn't possible to screw up.
HR are the modern-day equivalent of the secretary who is there to save the ass of her completely incompetent boss, simply by virtue of the fact that she knows how to keep a todo list and just gets her job done without thinking too much.
Look at China. No religion saved 100s of millions. Look at a log plot of GDP, or a plot of life expectancy in China, South Korea, India, and Japan; and tell me that Mao made any mistakes. If you want to see a fucked up country, look at development in the Philippines. Those Catholic despots have killed an insane number of people, but it's OK because their cock-ups have been in the name of religion, not economic theory. Over Mao's reign, life expectancy went from worse than India (really bad) to better than South Korea (not bad). GDP didn't grow so miraculously, but it wasn't bad either. The Philippines barely keeps pace with Kazakhstan. And let's not even talk about safe sex, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Mao could have done better. He did have bad intentions in the Cultural Revolution, but that didn't actually cause anywhere near as many deaths as most people think - the Great Leap did the real damage (the Cultural Revolution was worse for intellectuals... less than 1% of the population).
You have to consider the good and the bad that the enlightenment has done. Sure, there've been a few screw-ups - Hitler, Stalin (who to his credit took out Hitler), Mao (at times). There's also been things like modern medicine and agriculture. A hugely disproportionate number of influential people are atheists, and most of them do good things. The world is a much nicer place than it was 100 years ago thanks to all those (disproportionately atheist) doctors and scientists. For every Marx, there's an Adam Smith, a Keynes, and a Friedman (all of whom were probably atheists or agnostics).
North Korea is a liability to China, and China knows it. But a new Korean war would send possibly millions of North Korean refugees into China, and they simply don't want to deal with that. They just don't openly say it, because they'd rather North Korea's artillery was pointed the other way.
> They have to pay for hosting, bandwidth, marketing, sales processing, manhours involved in all of this, etc., etc., etc.
The one thing Apple does which is really valuable is payment processing. They have the customer's CC number, so there's a lot less steps to purchase. There's also a lot more trust, as you know Apple isn't likely to sell your CC.
That's it. Everything else is a bonus.
But having the customer's CC in the system is worth at least 30%.
> Unfortunately, I think China would make pretty much the same calculation now they did sixty years ago: they may not give a damn about North Korea as such, but they won't tolerate having the US Army camped out on the Yalu.
The difference is, there's no way in hell the US will actually threaten China, like they did in the Korean war. General MacArthur genuinely thought they could invade China next. They would have probably won, too.
Now, China will hope the US downgrades its presence in South Korea and Japan. If North Korea goes, so do a lot of US soldiers, which makes it easier for China to throw its weight around the region.
People have to understand the cycle of game genres.
1) When a new platform comes out, the early games take advantage of the new platform. They are cheap to make, and there are a few runaway hits.
2) After there's a few runaway hits, the big players copy those hits, and flesh them out a bit (with better stories, graphics, and artwork).
3) Eventually, the genre matures. You need AAA graphics. However, the hardcore players won't touch the game if it's too easy, and casual gamers won't play a game that's too hard, so the audience is fractured. There's money to be made, but it's no longer a gold rush.
Nintendo likes to get in early. They control the platform, so they have a good chance of having a few early hits. Then they can leverage their franchises (Mario, Zelda) to win as the genre matures. Finally, they can focus on the next generation, while other big studios worry about keeping hardcore gamers happy.
It's alike an OSX 10.3 (or later) Mac - you don't have to shut it down. Just let it sleep. It'll run rock solid for months. A restart is an advanced trouble-shooting technique.
A Linux VM can be a wonderful dev "box". Lots of tools just an apt-get away. But yes, it can be torture trying to get it to on (say) an old Atom netbook with Intel graphics. For some reason, I couldn't get it to recognise the graphics chip as legit:/
I guess you are referring to the Mac OS X 10.5 requirement, or the need for x86?
Roughly 10% of Macs run Tiger, or a previous OS. Leopard has ~20%, SL 50%, and the Lions 20% (rough figures). Many of those Leopards are PPC. I'd guess at most 30% of Macs (which are actually in use - not old TAMs or Classics, if there's even a significant number of those) can't run Firefox.
> Doesn't apply here, as there is no definition of a 'true' Scotsman. There *is* a defintion of a Christian
No, there's not. Christians *believe* that there's a definition of a Christian. All Christians should be essentially the same, because being a Christian should mean something. It doesn't, which is why different self-declared Christians can believe very different things, despite thinking they are true Christians.
I think the "no nips" rule came out of wrangling between film makers (who wanted to show breasts) and censors. A simple rule meant they wouldn't have to argue so much over it.
Slashdot Mirror
Phone minutes are practically a commodity. None of the carriers have any real advantage, and there's no way they can really cut costs. The only way for them to make more money is by screwing customers. If you unlock your phone, it can help you avoid getting screwed.
If it weren't for "screw the customer" penalties, they'd all have a simple transparent plan. And you could figure out which phone was the cheapest, so you'd shop for a good deal (driving down profits).
Also, there's IP issues. China is pretty keen on their home-grown CPUs. Their MIPS-based processors (with x86 emulation) are 10 years behind what Intel can do, but they are keen to catch up.
Yes I know China's not a monolithic entity, and the Chinese government rarely does more than turn a blind eye on the theft of foreign IP, but still ...
I play dwarf fortress. I find it's the opposite. My GPU is fine, and no CPU in the next 10 years will be fast enough. :/
My point is, *he* wouldn't be communicating. The AI (which he is a physical part of) would be. He isn't the mind, he's simply part of the brain. A mind is the sum of its components and its state. Simply being part of a mind doesn't mean you can understand everything the mind does. Your individual neurons don't understand much, but putting them all together and you create a mind.
The real problem is, can a stupid AI trick a human into thinking it's smart? Obviously it can - people often think ELIZA is much smarter than it really is. But we are imagining some ideal Turing Test, in which the tester can't be fooled by cheap tricks (diversions like "why do you ask that question?", or cute anthropomorphic things - "Don't you love kittens?"). But the Turning Test itself was intended to be a thought experiment. Turing predicted that cheap tricks could be used to fool most people. His original point was that any system capable of acting like a mind is itself a mind.
Webcams are often pretty poor quality. The main factor in cameras is the sensor size (not MP, but physical size - a big sensor captures more light). But a good sensor is more expensive, and heavy. And it's not fun trying to figure out webcam specs, as they are often simply not well publicised.
The first step - get good lighting. A bad camera with good lighting is better than a good camera with bad lighting. Unless you have something as powerful as a high-end DSLR, you simply need good lighting.
If you have good lighting, you can shoot at a lower ISO, which means less noise. You can shoot at a higher speed, which means a faster refresh (unless there's a bottleneck somewhere else - probably USB speed) and less blur. You can get a higher depth of field, even up close, so you don't have to focus. There's a reason why professional photographers, working with the best cameras money can buy, spend so much time setting up lots of lighting - most cameras are simply not at their best in low light.
> I also read commentaries of it, explaining the context. Which is, as any sane person should know, essential to understand the meaning.
The problem with religious texts is, not every reader is sane. And not every reader wants to know the context. It's the word of God, so why should context matter? You just have to twist his words till they mean what you know they *should* mean. It's an exercise in double-think.
The Koran is more internally consistent, having a single author and single editor, and is read in its original language. The Bible tends to be all over the place. Different authors, different translations. It's a mess.
But with both texts, different readings are still possible, if you have your own agenda.
By design, Postgresql is simply not as good a key-value store as MySQL / MariaDB. Innodb stores the data along with the primary index (technically cluster index), so it's fast to look up data by the primary key. Postgres is a better database, though.
How is the Chinese Room thing valid?
The argument is - you write a program which can pass a Turing test, in Chinese. You can, in theory, execute that program by hand. But the program isn't a "mind", because you don't speak Chinese.
It's rubbish. The guy in the "Chinese Room" isn't the "mind", he's part of the brain. Your neurons aren't a mind. The CPU isn't a mind. But a CPU executing a Turing-test-beating AI program is a mind. A mind is not a piece of hardware, it's an abstract way to describe hardware and software.
tl;dr: Novels have lots of filler (for arguably good reasons).
Nonono. Kids need abstract, flexible thinking. They need to be able to write an essay with 5 paragraphs (an introduction, which outlines their 3 arguments, 3 paragraphs explaining why their arguments feel right, and one which concludes they might be wrong but probably aren't). Then they need to learn a larger, more fractal kind of essay (with 3 main sections, each consisting of 5 paragraphs).
And they need to learn how to say "we didn't learn what to think, but how to think". Because thinking consists of lining up a bunch of arguments (like little soliders), and sending they off to fight a straw man.
Queue the classic education comment:
It doesn't matter what you learn. Education isn't about learning facts. Education is about learning how to kiss your boss's ass, and work the system. If a high wordcount in an essay (not original ideas - because student's ideas suck) is the only thing the teacher (your boss) wants, then that's what you give them. If you can't do that, you won't be able to get a shiny job in government or a big corporation.
Then they'll complain about how Asians are doing this, and getting the best marks, and decry the lack of creativity in these robo-students. They somehow aren't called racist as long as they don't say the Jews doing it too.
It's probably true the girls often are told: "You're not talented, you won't really learn anything, so just make the teacher happy". And so they may tend to focus on grades more than boys. And it's to the detriment of everyone, including the students who are trying to do what the system asks them to do.
Australia will soon be $100 / month to get 10mb upload, 100mb download, pretty much anywhere that there's more people than kangaroos. Thanks to our socialist National Broadband Scheme (fibre to the node). It turns out, governments are pretty dumb but managing a fibre rollout just isn't possible to screw up.
Maybe, but that's just history.
HR are the modern-day equivalent of the secretary who is there to save the ass of her completely incompetent boss, simply by virtue of the fact that she knows how to keep a todo list and just gets her job done without thinking too much.
Look at China. No religion saved 100s of millions. Look at a log plot of GDP, or a plot of life expectancy in China, South Korea, India, and Japan; and tell me that Mao made any mistakes. If you want to see a fucked up country, look at development in the Philippines. Those Catholic despots have killed an insane number of people, but it's OK because their cock-ups have been in the name of religion, not economic theory. Over Mao's reign, life expectancy went from worse than India (really bad) to better than South Korea (not bad). GDP didn't grow so miraculously, but it wasn't bad either. The Philippines barely keeps pace with Kazakhstan. And let's not even talk about safe sex, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Mao could have done better. He did have bad intentions in the Cultural Revolution, but that didn't actually cause anywhere near as many deaths as most people think - the Great Leap did the real damage (the Cultural Revolution was worse for intellectuals ... less than 1% of the population).
You have to consider the good and the bad that the enlightenment has done. Sure, there've been a few screw-ups - Hitler, Stalin (who to his credit took out Hitler), Mao (at times). There's also been things like modern medicine and agriculture. A hugely disproportionate number of influential people are atheists, and most of them do good things. The world is a much nicer place than it was 100 years ago thanks to all those (disproportionately atheist) doctors and scientists. For every Marx, there's an Adam Smith, a Keynes, and a Friedman (all of whom were probably atheists or agnostics).
North Korea is a liability to China, and China knows it. But a new Korean war would send possibly millions of North Korean refugees into China, and they simply don't want to deal with that. They just don't openly say it, because they'd rather North Korea's artillery was pointed the other way.
> They have to pay for hosting, bandwidth, marketing, sales processing, manhours involved in all of this, etc., etc., etc.
The one thing Apple does which is really valuable is payment processing. They have the customer's CC number, so there's a lot less steps to purchase. There's also a lot more trust, as you know Apple isn't likely to sell your CC.
That's it. Everything else is a bonus.
But having the customer's CC in the system is worth at least 30%.
> Unfortunately, I think China would make pretty much the same calculation now they did sixty years ago: they may not give a damn about North Korea as such, but they won't tolerate having the US Army camped out on the Yalu.
The difference is, there's no way in hell the US will actually threaten China, like they did in the Korean war. General MacArthur genuinely thought they could invade China next. They would have probably won, too.
Now, China will hope the US downgrades its presence in South Korea and Japan. If North Korea goes, so do a lot of US soldiers, which makes it easier for China to throw its weight around the region.
People have to understand the cycle of game genres.
1) When a new platform comes out, the early games take advantage of the new platform. They are cheap to make, and there are a few runaway hits.
2) After there's a few runaway hits, the big players copy those hits, and flesh them out a bit (with better stories, graphics, and artwork).
3) Eventually, the genre matures. You need AAA graphics. However, the hardcore players won't touch the game if it's too easy, and casual gamers won't play a game that's too hard, so the audience is fractured. There's money to be made, but it's no longer a gold rush.
Nintendo likes to get in early. They control the platform, so they have a good chance of having a few early hits. Then they can leverage their franchises (Mario, Zelda) to win as the genre matures. Finally, they can focus on the next generation, while other big studios worry about keeping hardcore gamers happy.
It's alike an OSX 10.3 (or later) Mac - you don't have to shut it down. Just let it sleep. It'll run rock solid for months. A restart is an advanced trouble-shooting technique.
A Linux VM can be a wonderful dev "box". Lots of tools just an apt-get away. But yes, it can be torture trying to get it to on (say) an old Atom netbook with Intel graphics. For some reason, I couldn't get it to recognise the graphics chip as legit :/
What Moore giveth, HTML5 taketh away.
I guess you are referring to the Mac OS X 10.5 requirement, or the need for x86?
Roughly 10% of Macs run Tiger, or a previous OS. Leopard has ~20%, SL 50%, and the Lions 20% (rough figures). Many of those Leopards are PPC. I'd guess at most 30% of Macs (which are actually in use - not old TAMs or Classics, if there's even a significant number of those) can't run Firefox.
> Doesn't apply here, as there is no definition of a 'true' Scotsman. There *is* a defintion of a Christian
No, there's not. Christians *believe* that there's a definition of a Christian. All Christians should be essentially the same, because being a Christian should mean something. It doesn't, which is why different self-declared Christians can believe very different things, despite thinking they are true Christians.
I think the "no nips" rule came out of wrangling between film makers (who wanted to show breasts) and censors. A simple rule meant they wouldn't have to argue so much over it.