What you are saying is inherently racist. I read an article on Yahoo a few months back along similar lines: "them asians are too good at math and number crunching, but don't worry, us Americans are still inherently superior because while they produce better grunt engineers, we produce entrepreneurs and artists like Madonna and Michael Jackson! We need to be focused on creativity rather than brute force and logic so we can make the big bucks while China gets stuck with the boring mediocre-paid, long-houred engineering jobs!"
The quote is paraphrased but that was roughly what the article was saying. This argument is racist on so many levels..and pathetic too. Implying that somehow caucasians, and even more specifically, white Americans (since eastern european are also good at math and programming and they're technically white too), are somehow inherently more creatively than the rest of the world is completely nonsense. Your whole "device driver" vs "itune" analogy precisely shows my point; you do realize that Google's success is based on its innovative page ranking algorithm right? The minimalist interface is secondary....else Microsoft could search their whole search-engine dilemma real easily...cut off all javascript and images except for the search engine. Microsoft's problem isn't with interface, it's the fact that its search engines are shit and gives random marketing product links.
You see this way too often from over zealous parents.
I took a ton of community college courses while in high school (in the mornings) from the best ranked community college in California and let me tell you, the standards and depth of material as well as overall peer competition is so low that I am absolutely certain I could have graduated from a community college in 11 with a C or B- average. This kid is definitely extremely bright to manage a perfect GPA even in "East Los Angeles Community College" and to know what he wants to do so early, and not want to be a...neurosurgeon unlike all those National Spelling Bee champions.
Basically, the scheme is this
1)Bug teachers like crazy until they relent and let your kid take some easy standardized test to skip 2-3 grades in the period of 60 minutes.
2)Bug some poor, no-name community college administrator like crazy (hours on the phone, personal meetings) until they let your kid start taking a few classes.
3)Once your kid actually passes those classes, bug the administrator some more until he decides to let your kid enroll full time.
4)After your kid graduate from community college, tell local media who loves this kind of sensation stories, and also tell local media your kid is the next einstein with plans to save the world from AIDS, the energy crisis, and Microsoft (okay, that's a joke).
5)Use the media frenzy as bargaining chip for elite private (Ivy league) colleges who loves to have media attention and national spot light and are more than willing to accomodate this little genius to promote themselves all over the country ("we enroll geniuses: future astrophysicists AND brain surgeons!!!")...
10)New houses for son and parents.
Of course, between steps 1-5, I'm not sure the kid gets much input except in terms of what color laptop he'll get for college. These parents here are at least considerate in not forcing their kid to be another brain surgeon. For the Chinese mother, I congratulate her for letting her mathematically-gifted son to pursue a field which actually uses math.
The target application is busting through mass censorship by government entities. Even the equivalent throughput of a 300baud modem is better than no connectivity at all. Heck, I bet most of the/. readers over the age of 35 spent a goodly portion of their youth msging each other on local BBs at 1200baud or less --> and we thought it was lightning speed (compared to pen n'paper over snail mail).
Yeah, but dude, most people get around firewalls to watch porn. You can't expect them to stream porn at 10 kb/s! (OK, maybe specially encoded ASCII porn) What would you propose next? Give those hungry people muffins without muffin tops? EH?
Do these polish people understand the definition of steganography? If you reveal how you're secretly embedding information in this communication system, then your secret is out and the whole method is useless. This is why you can [should] publish [good] cryptographic systems but you don't go on the web and blare to everyone how you're hidding messages in the TCP/IP protocol. Let's hope those authoritarian censor state's IT people don't read slashdot...
From what I've seen people do primarily play Tetris to decompress and reduce stress. No won says Tetris is super fun or exciting. It's just something to absorb your attention after a hard day. I don't know if the effect it has on traumatic stress is an extension of that, but I tend to think it is.
So when my CS friends tell me the computer is some kind of stochastic state machine and that the CPU is never truly idle, it's really playing Tetris when I'm not using it?
I'm reading this article in the middle of my MCB132: Cancer Biology class at Berkeley. Looks like Stanford is getting another bio Nobel prize....oh well, Cal pwns them in Chemistry and Physics prizes.
Isn't the new Canon Eos dSLR capable of producing 22MP pictures? I'm sorry, bu only gigapixels impress me these days.
http://www.gigapxl.org/gallery.htm
After RTFA, I think the included sample conversations are a joke. The computer was obviously conversation 2. The problem is culture. Our conversations are littered with cultural references. Computers can give you clever answers that vaguely answer your question, but you'll notice that they almost never include any kind of cultural reference. If you ask a computer what its favorite food is, the program, if it's well designed, well put out a database of common foods and randomly choose 1 and say something generic like "yes, I've always enjoyed delicious pizza." A real person would have some kind of story, complaint, or commentary on pizza.
The other thing is, you can't even really complain that it's not fair to expect cultural references in the answer. Culture is a huge part of life, society, and communication (both semantics, pragmatics, and syntactics) by definition. Culture would be hard to simulate even if the programmer tried to get clever and built an AI specifically focused on returning cultural references because culture is essentially the next level of complexity up from pure dictionary words. Culture has a lot of interrelated concepts so its hard to use in a correct sense than standard webster dictionary words where you can easily substitute one word for its synonym to avoid sounding robotic (e.g. square dancing is not the same as break dancing and you should be highly suspicious if these two are mentioned in the same conversation). While I'm sure clever AI programs has successfully mastered mimicking the basic semantics of normal dictionary words, cultural references will be another level above that and require exponentially more memory and computation/analysis to properly simulate.
Slashdot Mirror
What you are saying is inherently racist. I read an article on Yahoo a few months back along similar lines: "them asians are too good at math and number crunching, but don't worry, us Americans are still inherently superior because while they produce better grunt engineers, we produce entrepreneurs and artists like Madonna and Michael Jackson! We need to be focused on creativity rather than brute force and logic so we can make the big bucks while China gets stuck with the boring mediocre-paid, long-houred engineering jobs!" The quote is paraphrased but that was roughly what the article was saying. This argument is racist on so many levels..and pathetic too. Implying that somehow caucasians, and even more specifically, white Americans (since eastern european are also good at math and programming and they're technically white too), are somehow inherently more creatively than the rest of the world is completely nonsense. Your whole "device driver" vs "itune" analogy precisely shows my point; you do realize that Google's success is based on its innovative page ranking algorithm right? The minimalist interface is secondary....else Microsoft could search their whole search-engine dilemma real easily...cut off all javascript and images except for the search engine. Microsoft's problem isn't with interface, it's the fact that its search engines are shit and gives random marketing product links.
You see this way too often from over zealous parents. I took a ton of community college courses while in high school (in the mornings) from the best ranked community college in California and let me tell you, the standards and depth of material as well as overall peer competition is so low that I am absolutely certain I could have graduated from a community college in 11 with a C or B- average. This kid is definitely extremely bright to manage a perfect GPA even in "East Los Angeles Community College" and to know what he wants to do so early, and not want to be a ...neurosurgeon unlike all those National Spelling Bee champions.
Basically, the scheme is this
1)Bug teachers like crazy until they relent and let your kid take some easy standardized test to skip 2-3 grades in the period of 60 minutes.
2)Bug some poor, no-name community college administrator like crazy (hours on the phone, personal meetings) until they let your kid start taking a few classes.
3)Once your kid actually passes those classes, bug the administrator some more until he decides to let your kid enroll full time.
4)After your kid graduate from community college, tell local media who loves this kind of sensation stories, and also tell local media your kid is the next einstein with plans to save the world from AIDS, the energy crisis, and Microsoft (okay, that's a joke).
5)Use the media frenzy as bargaining chip for elite private (Ivy league) colleges who loves to have media attention and national spot light and are more than willing to accomodate this little genius to promote themselves all over the country ("we enroll geniuses: future astrophysicists AND brain surgeons!!!") ...
10)New houses for son and parents.
Of course, between steps 1-5, I'm not sure the kid gets much input except in terms of what color laptop he'll get for college. These parents here are at least considerate in not forcing their kid to be another brain surgeon. For the Chinese mother, I congratulate her for letting her mathematically-gifted son to pursue a field which actually uses math.
>> you'd get an insanely poor data rate
The target application is busting through mass censorship by government entities. Even the equivalent throughput of a 300baud modem is better than no connectivity at all. Heck, I bet most of the /. readers over the age of 35 spent a goodly portion of their youth msging each other on local BBs at 1200baud or less --> and we thought it was lightning speed (compared to pen n'paper over snail mail).
Yeah, but dude, most people get around firewalls to watch porn. You can't expect them to stream porn at 10 kb/s! (OK, maybe specially encoded ASCII porn) What would you propose next? Give those hungry people muffins without muffin tops? EH?
Do these polish people understand the definition of steganography? If you reveal how you're secretly embedding information in this communication system, then your secret is out and the whole method is useless. This is why you can [should] publish [good] cryptographic systems but you don't go on the web and blare to everyone how you're hidding messages in the TCP/IP protocol. Let's hope those authoritarian censor state's IT people don't read slashdot...
And I have the SSNs to prove it!
...We need MORE POWER to the REALITY DISTORTION FIELD, now!
From what I've seen people do primarily play Tetris to decompress and reduce stress. No won says Tetris is super fun or exciting. It's just something to absorb your attention after a hard day. I don't know if the effect it has on traumatic stress is an extension of that, but I tend to think it is.
So when my CS friends tell me the computer is some kind of stochastic state machine and that the CPU is never truly idle, it's really playing Tetris when I'm not using it?
"Windows 7, now with more ways to invoke BSOD on demand!" Someone else please bring in the Hammer time jokes.
I'm reading this article in the middle of my MCB132: Cancer Biology class at Berkeley. Looks like Stanford is getting another bio Nobel prize....oh well, Cal pwns them in Chemistry and Physics prizes.
Since when is 101,000 'astronomical'? Shoot, I got more neurons than that in my left pinkie.
Skynet approves of this research.
Isn't the new Canon Eos dSLR capable of producing 22MP pictures? I'm sorry, bu only gigapixels impress me these days. http://www.gigapxl.org/gallery.htm
Wars increase economic activity
And why not? It sure worked wonders for Deep Space Nine and Voyager's ratings!
mod +2 Star Trek Reference!
...shit! Trantor is only worth as much as Compton now!
...do I wear my aluminum foil over or under this electrode?
After RTFA, I think the included sample conversations are a joke. The computer was obviously conversation 2. The problem is culture. Our conversations are littered with cultural references. Computers can give you clever answers that vaguely answer your question, but you'll notice that they almost never include any kind of cultural reference. If you ask a computer what its favorite food is, the program, if it's well designed, well put out a database of common foods and randomly choose 1 and say something generic like "yes, I've always enjoyed delicious pizza." A real person would have some kind of story, complaint, or commentary on pizza. The other thing is, you can't even really complain that it's not fair to expect cultural references in the answer. Culture is a huge part of life, society, and communication (both semantics, pragmatics, and syntactics) by definition. Culture would be hard to simulate even if the programmer tried to get clever and built an AI specifically focused on returning cultural references because culture is essentially the next level of complexity up from pure dictionary words. Culture has a lot of interrelated concepts so its hard to use in a correct sense than standard webster dictionary words where you can easily substitute one word for its synonym to avoid sounding robotic (e.g. square dancing is not the same as break dancing and you should be highly suspicious if these two are mentioned in the same conversation). While I'm sure clever AI programs has successfully mastered mimicking the basic semantics of normal dictionary words, cultural references will be another level above that and require exponentially more memory and computation/analysis to properly simulate.