The difference is that the Altix is a shared memory machine and Blue Gene/L is a cluster with distributed memory. You can always make bigger and bigger clusters (although it is quite a technical trick to make them as large as BG/L), but shared memory machines like the Altix are are a different ball of wax. The difference is that an Altix 4000 can be called *a* computer more readily because it actually runs *one* instance of the OS across 512 processors.
I don't recall who posted it, but I think that the best reponse I've seen to garbage like that is [paraphrasing]: "Oh! I see where the confusion is coming from! You seem to be referring to Darwin's lesser known work, The Origin of Spacetime."
I wonder, I have eyes that used to change color about every three weeks. It would go between shades of green to blues. Now it takes longer to notice a change but it still does it every so often. Now, If the colors are included in the scan, I could be locked out but what if something happens and the lens above the eye becomes scratched, wouldn't that give false reading too? I'm not talking anything extravigant either, get some dust in your eye and the first rection is to rub it, you could possibly scratch it without knowing.
None of those would be a serious problem. The color of the eye isn't really an issue. The scanning system typically works in the near infrared spectrum and is basically analzying texture. There is some difference between darker and lighter eyes, but that has more to do with how much texture is easily extracted, not the actual values extracted. As for scratches, the algorithms most commonly use gabor wavelets, which wouldn't really have significant responses to minor scratches.
Is eye scanning recognition that advanced so it could account for stuff like this on a regular basis? And would this some what allow false psoitives in some other cases?
Definitely. It should also be noted that "false positives" (as opposed to the more common failure to match) are vanishingly rare with iris recognition. So rare that even if it were widely adopted, most people would never see it actually occur.
As a means to clarify the continuation of dialog, are you going to start word-parsing, or are you going to respond to the substance of my previous post, which was on the basis for right and wrong in a Darwinian world? I'm really interested in your thoughts on that. It seems pretty common that people really start to shy away from the dialog at this point, or start throwing stones, because the ramifications of such a foundation (or lack thereof) of right and wrong aren't pretty or pleasant.
I'll bite. The ramifications are no different from those felt by a person who opts to believe in Newtonian mechanics, electromagnetic theory, or that the speed of light is a constant. That is, there's nothing about an understanding of the physical world that confers or destroys any morality. The question you're probably driving at is, where does morality come from, if not from divine fiat? That one is more interesting.
Personally, I don't see a reason why there has to be absolute right and wrong, but even if there is, I don't particularly see a reason why it has to be divinely inspired. For instance, I don't murder my fellow human beings because I feel a sense of empathy toward them and I would not want to be murdered myself. It's all good and fine if one has a diety spelling that out clearly, but my experience is that the obvious and sensible rules that dieties lay out often come attached to bizarre and illogical ones like what we should eat and what we should do on particular days of the week. Anyway, I would turn the question in the opposite direction and ask, is the only reason a religious person doesn't murder me and take my stuff fear of divine punishment or desire for divine reward? If so, is that really a moral system to be crowing about?
Re:If giving credit, give credit accurately
on
Charles Darwin Online
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· Score: 2, Insightful
As for the rest of your post, I agree with your point that "feelings" aren't a reason for anything. In fact, I wasn't arguing truth or untruth of Darwinism at all, either based on feelings or otherwise. I was saying that for those who have already accepted Darwinism, then they ought to examine the consequences of those beliefs and their contemporaries, and that is that regardless of their perceived (or hoped for) differences, Darwinianism puts them in the same philosophical category as those who committed those atrocities.
Exactly how is it that evolutionary theory is required to carry morality with it any more than the germ theory of disease or the theory of relativity? Isn't it possible that a basic statement of fact about the world doesn't necessarily have any bearing on morality and how we should treat one another?
My purpose wasn't a historical account of Hitler and Stalin's professed statements on the matter -- if that was my concern, I'd start with Darwin's own doubts and skepticism of the possibility that the theory of evolution had any merit, and his own confession of motives of his theories were to escape responsibility to a God.
It's a good thing you didn't, because you make reference to intellectual honesty later in your post. Can you point us to some evidence that Darwin's goal was to escape responsibility to a God? I've never seen any such statements in his work. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you heard this from an unreliable source rather than just making it up. Of course, I could be totally wrong, but I definitely won't believe it without a solid reference.
he had no knowledge of genetics or the mechanism of inheritance, and was most certainly not aware of anything such as DNA. ----- Which is why he couldn't have foreseen the fact that evolution in single steps can not happen on a cellular level--- one of the theory's largest roadblocks. But whatever:-P
Personally, I'd be really interested in knowing exactly what it is about DNA that prevents "single steps on the cellular level" from happening. I'd also be interested in a definition for "single steps on the cellular level." The Nobel committe might be interested the next time around as well.
There is considerable debate about any so-called transitional forms being found. It is by no means unanimous by all scientists.
I suppose that depends on whether you ask a scientist who specializes in biology or a scientist who specializes in... well... things not relevant to evolutionary theory. If you pare it down to the people who actually study the bones rather than those who have looked at a few pictures on the Internet, you'll find the breakdown is strongly in favor of one side over the other.
Anyone know the name of the renowned lifelong evolutionist who some 8 months ago at the age of 76 declared the evolutionary theory to be worthless? He still didn't want to believe in God, but now says evolution is impossible because of the lastest advances in microbiology. He spent his whole life teaching and proclaiming evolution as the only way and wrote dozens of books. I wished I had bookmarked the newspaper article as I cannot find it. I had assumed much more would be said about him but that one article is the only thing I've seen.
Are you sure it was in a newspaper and not a creationist rumor mill site? The "X recanted his belief in evolution, so evolution isn't true!" is not only logically uninteresting, but I've found that it almost always turns out to be a fabrication for any significant value of X.
A more extreme version of this technique would be to shut down the entire internet everytime anyone sent a spam message on the theory that eventually the spammers will quit because they derive no benefit from an otherwise nonexistent internet. What you are describing only differs in degree, but it essentially the same disfunctional approach to the problem.
How is that a meaningful argument at all? Burning jaywalkers at the steak differs from ticketing them only in degree, but that doesn't mean that ticketing them is a disfunctional approach to the problem. The more important question is, is the degree of difference meaningful? There is a meaningful difference between bringing the Internet to a halt and blocking email from an IP range.
Anyway, how is this different from organized boycotting of companies whose business practices you want to change? I won't buy your tuna because you're killing dolphins when you fish. You want to sell me tuna, and I want to eat tuna, so it hurts both of us, but does that make it a disfunctional solution if it works?
Companies don't want to give away trade secrets by releasing the sources to their drivers, and they don't want to release binary drivers that will suck.
That's not an unreasonable position for a 3D graphics card company whose drivers contain loads and loads of licensed IP and trade secrets. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense for people making network hardware, scanners, printers, and piles of other basic stuff whose drivers simply provide a way to interact with the hardware. I'm still amazed that makers of network cards think that driver source (or even just hadrware interfaces!) will give the world some devastating insight into their brilliant trade secrets. There's clearly another reason in most cases. Unless you're the 1% of HW manufacturers that's actually protecting something clever that you've done, you're either hiding the fact that stuff that should be done in hardware is done in software (Winmodems, anybody?) or you're too lazy to go to the minimal extra cost of putting out enough information for alternate OS users to support your hardware.
When you think about it, it's seriously a good deal. For negligable cost, you can get a group of people to expand the user base of your hardware without you having to do anything. Just release some unsupported driver code or hardware interface specs and watch your user base grow. I blame this problem less on rational behavior on the part of hardware makers than on simple corporate inertia and an old fashioned attitude among the executives that anything the company produces is intellectual property that must be protected at all costs. They can't get it into their heads that once you've made as much money as you can off of your work, you might as well let some other people make money for you on your behalf, even if it does mean loosening up on precious "trade secrets" and work products.
I can see where you're coming from, but learning the commands isn't about doing the basic stuff. It's about doing all the other stuff that's only done easily with those esoteric commands.
By this logic, isn't it better to capitulate to terrorist demands so they won't kill us anymore? Any time a terrorist threatens to hurt us if we don't do X, we just do X to make them happy, and then we're safe. Sure, we give up a little right to self determination and the ability to act in our interest, but dead is dead, man.
Catching terrorists after they succeed doesn't protect Americans. It's the government's duty to protect the USA from these attacks by preventing them. Some people don't want that though.
Bull. EVERYBODY wants that. From the craziest conservative to the looniest liberal, nobody in our government wants to see the wholesale slaughter of our citizens by terrorists. Anybody who says otherwise is playing sleazy political games and appealing to emotion over thought. Some people just don't agree with the assertion that there is no cost too high to pay for an incremental increase in security.
As with any policy, empty statements like "I'm against crime!" and "I'm in favor of education!" is meaningless. The only disagreements are on implementation.
Problem: My police forces can only perform limited surveillance and detention of my citizens due to legal and constitutional restrictions.
Solution: Loose the military and spy agencies on them.
Problem: That's not allowed.
Solution: Call what I'm doing a "war" without actually formally declaring a war on a particular entity. Ensure that the war is open-ended and I can arbitrarily decide who is and is not a combatant. Ensure that the war is not limited to a specific conflict, battlefield, or region. Assert war powers.
War on Terror. War on drugs. War on Marklar. Isn't anything a criminal matter any more?
How would you defeat said terrorists then? Insight us and then bring it up to the government with your brilliant ideas for winning the war against terrorism.
If the only way of defeating them is wholesale wiretapping of everybody in the country, you don't defeat them. It's as simple as that. The problem can't be solved within the framework of a free soceity, so you can just add it to the price we pay to live in a free society.
The problem here is that the scenario you're proposing is the exception, not the rule. I would guess that the number of terrorists who can only be thwarted by the complete loss of private telephone communications is small enough that the point is moot. Anybody who thinks that the ends justify the means is either trying to sell you something or has such a poor cost / benefit calculus that they'd stop eating and starve to death in order to avoid the possibility of fatal food poisoning.
Sorry, but I sympathize with many others who are just so godamnned sick and tired of politics invading every last nook and cranny of the life, both online and off. It's really getting old- older than Acasta gneiss. [wikipedia.org]
Recommendation: To avoid the "politics" articles on Slashdot, don't read the "politics" articles on Slashdot. It won't invade your life that way. I also recommend avoiding talk.politics. You may find politics invading that venue as well.
I would put it to you that it's the rising cost of gasoline which is selling the Prius more than fears of a God smiting us with floods and typhoons as vengeance for our evil energy consumption.
Agreed. Although, I would guess that the greater concern is that if Americans start taking global warming seriously enough, it will lead to government regulation and all sorts of fallout that really would cramp their style. The reality is, there is no practical way to replace our oil powered cars with something not oil powered, so any serious regulation is going to have the effect of reducing consumption rather than replacing it with something "green." It is decidedly in the best interest of the oil companies to keep public opinion at bay so as not to create an environment favorable to extra regulation. Lobbying congress and buying politicians works wonders until public opinion sways too far against you. A successful manipulator of public policy has to fight both fronts.
I agree that the energy companies are not as evil as they're made out to be, but we should also remember an important fact: Companies that make products that are dangerous or detrimental to the environment have a very near 100% record of trying to cover up those details and or sway public opinion about them. I can think of no reason to believe that energy companies will be any different from tobacco, drug, chemical processing, agricultural, or any number of other industries in the same boat. It is not surprising to see them flock together. They're not evil incarnate, but they are emotionless, profit driven organizations that do not feel externalities and cannot be counted on to produce information that is not in their best interest. As with all information, consider the source.
No argument from me on that. That's why I was very careful to limit myself to lung and throat cancers. Thanx for pointing it out.
Obligatory Bill Hicks: "To my delight, I find that there is a different warning on each pack of cigarettes. Mine says: 'Warning: Smoking can cause fetal damage or premature birth'. Fuck it - I've found my brand! 'Yeah, give me a carton of Low Birth Weights.' Just don't get the ones that say lung cancer, you know? Shop around, it is your body."
"Oil" companies are really "energy fuel" companies. They will sell you whatever fuel you want to buy. The debate on global warming is irrelevant to them. In fact, if you switch to more expensive fuels, like hydrogen induction for your car and nuclear for your electricity, their profit margins might actually go up.
Yes, but the one type of energy they'd hate to be selling you is less energy. It's worth noting that the average oil purchaser isn't replacing oil with alternatives. He's buying more fuel efficient vehicles and using less energy overall. When fuel cell cars fueled by water cracked with energy sold by the big energy companies, then they'll be more than willing to decry the evils of oil. As long as consumers are taking the Prius route instead, Exxon and company are hardly neutral on the topic.
No. By it's nature, this limited set of choices will elevate the candidates and ideas that have the broadest support and are the most "mainstream". We are not chosing between two random people- we are chosing between the people that the political parties have advanced because they think have the best chance of winning.
The same could be said of a system with more than two parties. Even in a multi-party system, you're not going to win the runoff if you don't appeal to a broad range of voters. Sure, you'll get your 10 or 20% who really loves you, and that may get you through the first round of cuts, but you'll quickly be run over by candidates who are more palatable to others as a second choice. There's nothing special about a 2 party system other than the fact that the winner is mathematically guaranteed to get a majority.
You might have a point if they primary system actually did elevate candidates with the broadest appeal, but it really doesn't. It elevates the candidates who most closely conform to what their most extreme party constituents like. You end up with an election where your first choice may or may not be all that great (depending on whether you're an extremist primary voter or the average mainstream voter), but the other reasonable option is generally repellant to you either way.
Classic exmple: The Governorship of California. A few years ago, Phil Simon beat Richard Riordan in the Republican primary. He did so by painting Riordan as a flaming liberal when he was a relatively conservative guy with broad appeal on both sides. Riordan had a good chance at taking out Gray Davis. Swing voters in CA tend to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Result: Davis made mincemeat of Simon. Fast forward to the crazy free-for-all that was the California recall election. Even with two Republicans on the ticket, The Terminator, with his fiscally conservative and relatively socially liberal (for a Republican) positions wins out. He never would have made it through a primary against McClintock.
Thats a ridiculous assertion. A 2-party system exerts a moderating force on the outcome of elections. A 1 party system does not. A 2-party system gives the electorate a choice between candidates. A 1 party system does not. In a 2-party system, the candidate with the most support in the electorate wins. The will of the "electorate" is irrelevant in a 1 party system.
You're missing the point. You're trying to paint the "popularity" of the winning candidate in a 2 party system versus a multi-party system as a good thing, when in fact, it's just an artifact of the limited set of choices available to the electorate. That is a ridiculous assertion. Of course somebody gets the popular vote in a two party election. It doesn't happen because that person magically has more broad appeal. It happens because it's a mathematical certainty. As I said before, if all you care about is artifically inflated "popularity", just head to a 1-party system and the winner gets 100% of the vote.
In a multi-party system with instant runoffs, you still have to appeal to a broad range of voters, as your base, no matter how nutty they may be, won't get you the win in the runoff. You need to have a reasonable number of people who love you, and you still need the majority of the electorate to hate you less than the other guy. The major difference is that people actually have more choices with a legitimate chance at winning.
What I am saying is that in a 2-party election, you would never have a run-off vote where the population is forced to chose between two candidates that each only had the support of ~20% of the country. That is what happened in Iran, and that would never happen in the United States because of our 2-party system.
That's an interesting way of saying it. Likewise, we'd have an even more popular leader if we had only a 1 party system and our leaders ran unopposed. Personally, I find choice to be useful, so I don't see the fact that we're only 1 party ahead of China as a particularly good thing.
Yes, there is no cap on what you as a private individual can do (although I think that there's probably some recourse if I poured enough CO2 into my neighborhood to crash the pH of the local stream and asphyxiate the neighbors...). You're also right that there's no cap in the US (as far as I know). However, there are more countries in the world than the US. Over half of the world's greenhouse gasses are produced by countries that signed on to the Kyoto Protocol, and they most certainly do have a cap-and-trade system. By buying a ton of carbon credits from their carbon market and retiring it, you're ratcheting up the price of those credits and generally causing what we talked about in the gp posts and before. Remember, greenhouse gases are worldwide problems, not local ones, so it doesn't mattter all that much where the ton of carbon you've retired comes from. The bottom line is, when you trade carbon credits from those markets, you're actually pulling from a capped pool.
Say what you want about the flaws of Kyoto (and I believe that there are some that are easy to pick at), the general scheme is quite sensible, and has been used successfully in other types of emissions.
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The difference is that the Altix is a shared memory machine and Blue Gene/L is a cluster with distributed memory. You can always make bigger and bigger clusters (although it is quite a technical trick to make them as large as BG/L), but shared memory machines like the Altix are are a different ball of wax. The difference is that an Altix 4000 can be called *a* computer more readily because it actually runs *one* instance of the OS across 512 processors.
Seriously, I believe that the moderation system is abused, but does every thread in every topic need two or three of these posts?
I don't recall who posted it, but I think that the best reponse I've seen to garbage like that is [paraphrasing]: "Oh! I see where the confusion is coming from! You seem to be referring to Darwin's lesser known work, The Origin of Spacetime."
Definitely. It should also be noted that "false positives" (as opposed to the more common failure to match) are vanishingly rare with iris recognition. So rare that even if it were widely adopted, most people would never see it actually occur.
Personally, I don't see a reason why there has to be absolute right and wrong, but even if there is, I don't particularly see a reason why it has to be divinely inspired. For instance, I don't murder my fellow human beings because I feel a sense of empathy toward them and I would not want to be murdered myself. It's all good and fine if one has a diety spelling that out clearly, but my experience is that the obvious and sensible rules that dieties lay out often come attached to bizarre and illogical ones like what we should eat and what we should do on particular days of the week. Anyway, I would turn the question in the opposite direction and ask, is the only reason a religious person doesn't murder me and take my stuff fear of divine punishment or desire for divine reward? If so, is that really a moral system to be crowing about?
It's a good thing you didn't, because you make reference to intellectual honesty later in your post. Can you point us to some evidence that Darwin's goal was to escape responsibility to a God? I've never seen any such statements in his work. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you heard this from an unreliable source rather than just making it up. Of course, I could be totally wrong, but I definitely won't believe it without a solid reference.
Are you sure it was in a newspaper and not a creationist rumor mill site? The "X recanted his belief in evolution, so evolution isn't true!" is not only logically uninteresting, but I've found that it almost always turns out to be a fabrication for any significant value of X.
Anyway, how is this different from organized boycotting of companies whose business practices you want to change? I won't buy your tuna because you're killing dolphins when you fish. You want to sell me tuna, and I want to eat tuna, so it hurts both of us, but does that make it a disfunctional solution if it works?
When you think about it, it's seriously a good deal. For negligable cost, you can get a group of people to expand the user base of your hardware without you having to do anything. Just release some unsupported driver code or hardware interface specs and watch your user base grow. I blame this problem less on rational behavior on the part of hardware makers than on simple corporate inertia and an old fashioned attitude among the executives that anything the company produces is intellectual property that must be protected at all costs. They can't get it into their heads that once you've made as much money as you can off of your work, you might as well let some other people make money for you on your behalf, even if it does mean loosening up on precious "trade secrets" and work products.
I can see where you're coming from, but learning the commands isn't about doing the basic stuff. It's about doing all the other stuff that's only done easily with those esoteric commands.
As with any policy, empty statements like "I'm against crime!" and "I'm in favor of education!" is meaningless. The only disagreements are on implementation.
Problem: My police forces can only perform limited surveillance and detention of my citizens due to legal and constitutional restrictions.
Solution: Loose the military and spy agencies on them.
Problem: That's not allowed.
Solution: Call what I'm doing a "war" without actually formally declaring a war on a particular entity. Ensure that the war is open-ended and I can arbitrarily decide who is and is not a combatant. Ensure that the war is not limited to a specific conflict, battlefield, or region. Assert war powers.
War on Terror. War on drugs. War on Marklar. Isn't anything a criminal matter any more?
The problem here is that the scenario you're proposing is the exception, not the rule. I would guess that the number of terrorists who can only be thwarted by the complete loss of private telephone communications is small enough that the point is moot. Anybody who thinks that the ends justify the means is either trying to sell you something or has such a poor cost / benefit calculus that they'd stop eating and starve to death in order to avoid the possibility of fatal food poisoning.
I agree that the energy companies are not as evil as they're made out to be, but we should also remember an important fact: Companies that make products that are dangerous or detrimental to the environment have a very near 100% record of trying to cover up those details and or sway public opinion about them. I can think of no reason to believe that energy companies will be any different from tobacco, drug, chemical processing, agricultural, or any number of other industries in the same boat. It is not surprising to see them flock together. They're not evil incarnate, but they are emotionless, profit driven organizations that do not feel externalities and cannot be counted on to produce information that is not in their best interest. As with all information, consider the source.
You might have a point if they primary system actually did elevate candidates with the broadest appeal, but it really doesn't. It elevates the candidates who most closely conform to what their most extreme party constituents like. You end up with an election where your first choice may or may not be all that great (depending on whether you're an extremist primary voter or the average mainstream voter), but the other reasonable option is generally repellant to you either way.
Classic exmple: The Governorship of California. A few years ago, Phil Simon beat Richard Riordan in the Republican primary. He did so by painting Riordan as a flaming liberal when he was a relatively conservative guy with broad appeal on both sides. Riordan had a good chance at taking out Gray Davis. Swing voters in CA tend to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Result: Davis made mincemeat of Simon. Fast forward to the crazy free-for-all that was the California recall election. Even with two Republicans on the ticket, The Terminator, with his fiscally conservative and relatively socially liberal (for a Republican) positions wins out. He never would have made it through a primary against McClintock.
In a multi-party system with instant runoffs, you still have to appeal to a broad range of voters, as your base, no matter how nutty they may be, won't get you the win in the runoff. You need to have a reasonable number of people who love you, and you still need the majority of the electorate to hate you less than the other guy. The major difference is that people actually have more choices with a legitimate chance at winning.
Yes, there is no cap on what you as a private individual can do (although I think that there's probably some recourse if I poured enough CO2 into my neighborhood to crash the pH of the local stream and asphyxiate the neighbors...). You're also right that there's no cap in the US (as far as I know). However, there are more countries in the world than the US. Over half of the world's greenhouse gasses are produced by countries that signed on to the Kyoto Protocol, and they most certainly do have a cap-and-trade system. By buying a ton of carbon credits from their carbon market and retiring it, you're ratcheting up the price of those credits and generally causing what we talked about in the gp posts and before. Remember, greenhouse gases are worldwide problems, not local ones, so it doesn't mattter all that much where the ton of carbon you've retired comes from. The bottom line is, when you trade carbon credits from those markets, you're actually pulling from a capped pool.
Say what you want about the flaws of Kyoto (and I believe that there are some that are easy to pick at), the general scheme is quite sensible, and has been used successfully in other types of emissions.