More independent voters are better, on average, even if they're not very good decision makers. (By independent I mean not influencing each other.)
Consider a situation where a voter makes a choice, A or B. We'll assert that one choice is correct. Say each voter has a 60% chance of choosing right.
Now consider three voters, x, y, z.
Ms. Rosen argued: "Farmers can leave their property to their children; why shouldn't songwriters be able to leave their songs to their children?"
There's at least one difference; when I die, my heirs must pay considerable inheritance taxes. Do there exist inheritance taxes on ownership of copyright? If it's to be considered a kind of property, such taxes should exist (or they shouldn't on real property; personally I believe that each person should do their best on their own, i.e. inheritance should be forbidden, but I don't know how to implement this without massive corruption).
I recommend Lessig's book, Free Culture for a great deal of discussion on copyright and related issues. The FSF sent its members a copy recently; you should join --- everybody else is doing it.
It has nothing to do with protecting anybody, but only encouraging progress. See Article I, section 8, clause 8 of the US constitution:
Congress has the power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
The heat dissipated by a heat sink (with a fan or not) is a linear function of the temperature of the surface of the heat sink.
So if I have a CPU which puts out, say, 100W of heat, and I have a particular size of heatsink, the temperature of the heat sink will rise until the dissipation of the sink is 100W (or the chip melts). Say my heatsink dissipates 100W at 100C. (All numbers are made up.) Let it conduct perfectly, too, to simplify the discussion. If I put out more than 100W, the temperature of the heat sink will rise a little.
If my CPU is directly connected to the heat sink, its surface will be at 100C.
If I have a Peltier that is configured to be 20 cooler on the cold side, then the CPU surface would be only 80C (assuming the Peltier consumes no power). So if my CPU is designed to run at 80C, the Peltier is fine; alternatively, I could get a bigger heat sink or a CPU fan.
So you could use the Peltier for overclocking, to reduce the needed size of the heatsink, or to remove the need for a fan. A given heatsink will be able to dissipate more heat for a given CPU temperature (since the CPU is cooler than the heatsink).
Re:Something is wrong here
on
Flying By Brain
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Look, we simulate populations of neurons all the time. Sometimes they are extremely realistic on an individual scale. A colleague of mine at a has funding to build a Beowulf cluster, simulating IIRC around 40,000 neurons, bigger than this collection of rat neurons. See Chris Eliasmith's work here.
Do you shed elephant tears for the numbers floating around in our computers? Or do you think there is something magic about cells?
Most gas furnaces require power to drive the fan, and a little power to turn on the valve for the gas (controlled by the thermostat).
During the prolonged power outage during the ice storm of 1998 in eastern Canada, we fixed up a workable solution. Roughly 24V DC from sealed lead-acid batteries was enough to switch the valve, and the hooked the fan up to a bicycle. A few minutes of peddling on the bike would heat the house several degrees, and the peddler similarly. A bit more detail is contained in one of the articles in Stories from the Ice Storm.
That being said, this may not be possible with modern furnaces. Also, your house, unless very poorly insulated, will stay warm enough to live for 8 hours. (Then again, my "very poorly insulated" might be your "adequately insulated".)
If every email you received from your bank had a big happy green bar at the top saying "this email appears to be valid", and one day you received one without it, you might be suspicious. Even if it merely reduces the occurence of such fraud, it's an improvement.
One nice thing about this is that it benefits the bank to use the system, even if only a few customers use it, it benefits the customer to use it, even if others don't, and it doesn't break the use of customers who can't read signed mail. (Unless your mailreader is rather screwed up. Maybe it could be a settable option.)
For those of you worried that Novell would only use this to protect their own customers, the GNU GPL states:
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
for one thing, although it is done by a private corporation, it is funded by the government.
It would be more accurate to say that it's funded by the Democratic and Republican parties. Do you remember when the debates were sponsored by the League of Women Voters (or the Simpsons episode where a debate was sponsored by the League of Uninformed Voters)? Eventually the two parties started making demands to weaken the debate process, and the League decided it could no longer support the process. So a "private corporation" was formed to oversee the debates, and ensure they run by the rules desired by the two parties. They exclude other parties when they see fit, and include them likewise.
There is a difference in the sound; in particular, the tubes always introduce distortion.
With a transistor amplifier, the signal will be essentially distortion-free until it saturates, at which point it will "flat-cap", transforming a very high amplitude sine wave into something resembling a square wave. A tube amp will distort a little at any amplitude above zero, and the distortion will increase at higher amplitudes. So a very high input signal will not generate a square wave, the corners will be "rounded".
If you don't drive your transistor system to saturation, the output will be undistorted. If you do saturate it, the distortion will be considerable.
It probably would not be too tricky to make a transistor filter to emulate a tube system; perhaps you could write a plug-in for XMMS to accomplish this.:)
In my opinion (I'm a grad student in cognitive science, but by bachelor's degree is in Mechanical Engineering, of all things) a significant fraction of CS and Engineering students don't belong in a university. University is supposed to be about making a well rounded problem-solving person, but it doesn't seem to work for technical subjects (was any of your coursework useful for this?), but it also evidently isn't too important in industry, since the students get by fine.
I think that there is a purpose for some people to study "Computer Science", but as a branch of mathematics. The rest, who apparently want to become code monkeys, don't need a university education.
The problem is that modern society considers a university degree to be such a mark of prestige that one can get little respect without one, so employers require it, even if what is taught is no more useful than could be provided by a community college.
Good code monkeys are necessary, but I put them in the same class as good plumbers and electricians. Very important work, well paid, but no university education required.
Every time this issue comes up, someone points out that the Canadian system works perfectly (Elections Canada runs elections in many foreign countries which lack the infrastructure). Then someone claims that it won't scale. Ridiculous.
There are a bunch of polling stations for each riding. After the polls close, people at each polling station manually count the collected paper slips. These small numbers are then sent to a central point, summed, and the winner is determined.
It's distributed. If a riding had ten times as many voters, it would have ten times as many polling stations, and ten times as many people counting votes. It scales perfectly. As long as X% of the population is involved in ballot counting, the size of the population is irrelevant.
It seems to me that one should need only one stamp generator. I receive a payment request containing a message encrypted with a short private key, and as "postage" I need to decrypt the message and return it. As computers get faster, the key length used to encrypt the message gets longer. The receiver can thus decide how much postage is required.
This way the stamp generator doesn't need to have any secret component, and could be written in any language. It could be part of the mail client.
I made a simulated prototype of a fast/simple algorithm, which was 100x (IIRC) faster than random wandering in my tests. A bit of information is here.
It requires that the robot know its position rather accurately, but if it's a hobby you could use differential GPS (which would add too much to the cost of a low-end commercial robot). You might look into localisation via wifi.
My writing style is somewhat peculiar, though I can't exactly say how (or even approximately how). Partially as a result of this, my marks in English class over the years of high school ranged from C to A, depending not on me, but on who the teacher was. If the teacher happened to like my style, I got a good mark.
This is annoying, but at least each year there was a different teacher, who may like my style. If the marking is computerised, it will not change; if your writing doesn't fit what the computer likes, you're screwed; likewise, if it does like it, you might never learn to express yourself more creatively (ie you'll be punished for trying to write in a manner different from what you usually do).
There are possibilities in this technology, but I suspect that it will be a long while before the eccentric aren't labeled as poor writers.
Some parts of government use free software. Departments which needsupercomputers often have Crays and high end HPs or Suns, but some bored co-op will have been assigned the task of build a Beowulf cluster, and it'll be used too.
The government is hardly a monolithic organisation; it's not that small. Some departments will use more free software than others. I suggest you not make such widespread assertions based on limited knowledge.
Even if adopted, this won't be fatal to free software. It would cripple the US economy, but free software would continue to be developed elsewhere. Eventually, once the US was driven back into a depression, other interests would win out, and the law would be overturned.
Admittedly, not a pleasant prospect, especially in the short term.
Wal-Mart tried to make a presence in Germany. In fact, they sell Linux brand detergent. But their deployment was hardly a stellar success, primarily due to nationalistic feelings. It can be done, but this one may not be a battle worth fighting.
Slashdot Mirror
More independent voters are better, on average, even if they're not very good decision makers. (By independent I mean not influencing each other.)
Consider a situation where a voter makes a choice, A or B. We'll assert that one choice is correct. Say each voter has a 60% chance of choosing right. Now consider three voters, x, y, z.
Sum up the probabilities of the correct choices. Notice that they add up to 0.648, which exceeds 0.6.
More independent voters will, on average, make better decisions.
Independence is necessary. If voters can influence each other (via ads or arguments on strange websites), this falls apart.
Ms. Rosen argued: "Farmers can leave their property to their children; why shouldn't songwriters be able to leave their songs to their children?"
There's at least one difference; when I die, my heirs must pay considerable inheritance taxes. Do there exist inheritance taxes on ownership of copyright? If it's to be considered a kind of property, such taxes should exist (or they shouldn't on real property; personally I believe that each person should do their best on their own, i.e. inheritance should be forbidden, but I don't know how to implement this without massive corruption).
I recommend Lessig's book, Free Culture for a great deal of discussion on copyright and related issues. The FSF sent its members a copy recently; you should join --- everybody else is doing it.
It has nothing to do with protecting anybody, but only encouraging progress. See Article I, section 8, clause 8 of the US constitution:
Congress has the power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
The heat dissipated by a heat sink (with a fan or not) is a linear function of the temperature of the surface of the heat sink.
So if I have a CPU which puts out, say, 100W of heat, and I have a particular size of heatsink, the temperature of the heat sink will rise until the dissipation of the sink is 100W (or the chip melts). Say my heatsink dissipates 100W at 100C. (All numbers are made up.) Let it conduct perfectly, too, to simplify the discussion. If I put out more than 100W, the temperature of the heat sink will rise a little.
If my CPU is directly connected to the heat sink, its surface will be at 100C. If I have a Peltier that is configured to be 20 cooler on the cold side, then the CPU surface would be only 80C (assuming the Peltier consumes no power). So if my CPU is designed to run at 80C, the Peltier is fine; alternatively, I could get a bigger heat sink or a CPU fan.
So you could use the Peltier for overclocking, to reduce the needed size of the heatsink, or to remove the need for a fan. A given heatsink will be able to dissipate more heat for a given CPU temperature (since the CPU is cooler than the heatsink).
Look, we simulate populations of neurons all the time. Sometimes they are extremely realistic on an individual scale. A colleague of mine at a has funding to build a Beowulf cluster, simulating IIRC around 40,000 neurons, bigger than this collection of rat neurons. See Chris Eliasmith's work here.
Do you shed elephant tears for the numbers floating around in our computers? Or do you think there is something magic about cells?
Most gas furnaces require power to drive the fan, and a little power to turn on the valve for the gas (controlled by the thermostat).
During the prolonged power outage during the ice storm of 1998 in eastern Canada, we fixed up a workable solution. Roughly 24V DC from sealed lead-acid batteries was enough to switch the valve, and the hooked the fan up to a bicycle. A few minutes of peddling on the bike would heat the house several degrees, and the peddler similarly. A bit more detail is contained in one of the articles in Stories from the Ice Storm.
That being said, this may not be possible with modern furnaces. Also, your house, unless very poorly insulated, will stay warm enough to live for 8 hours. (Then again, my "very poorly insulated" might be your "adequately insulated".)
Need I say more?
If every email you received from your bank had a big happy green bar at the top saying "this email appears to be valid", and one day you received one without it, you might be suspicious. Even if it merely reduces the occurence of such fraud, it's an improvement.
One nice thing about this is that it benefits the bank to use the system, even if only a few customers use it, it benefits the customer to use it, even if others don't, and it doesn't break the use of customers who can't read signed mail. (Unless your mailreader is rather screwed up. Maybe it could be a settable option.)
For those of you worried that Novell would only use this to protect their own customers, the GNU GPL states:
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
for one thing, although it is done by a private corporation, it is funded by the government.
It would be more accurate to say that it's funded by the Democratic and Republican parties. Do you remember when the debates were sponsored by the League of Women Voters (or the Simpsons episode where a debate was sponsored by the League of Uninformed Voters)? Eventually the two parties started making demands to weaken the debate process, and the League decided it could no longer support the process. So a "private corporation" was formed to oversee the debates, and ensure they run by the rules desired by the two parties. They exclude other parties when they see fit, and include them likewise.
Lots of details here.
There is a difference in the sound; in particular, the tubes always introduce distortion.
With a transistor amplifier, the signal will be essentially distortion-free until it saturates, at which point it will "flat-cap", transforming a very high amplitude sine wave into something resembling a square wave. A tube amp will distort a little at any amplitude above zero, and the distortion will increase at higher amplitudes. So a very high input signal will not generate a square wave, the corners will be "rounded".
If you don't drive your transistor system to saturation, the output will be undistorted. If you do saturate it, the distortion will be considerable.
It probably would not be too tricky to make a transistor filter to emulate a tube system; perhaps you could write a plug-in for XMMS to accomplish this. :)
Free software for speech recognition.
More independent voters are better, on average, even if they're not very good decision makers.
Consider a situation where a voter makes a choice, A or B. We'll assert that one choice is correct. Say each voter has a 60% chance of choosing right.
Now consider three voters, x, y, z.
Sum up the probabilities of the correct choices. Notice that they add up to 0.648, which exceeds 0.6.
More independent voters will, on average, make better decisions.
Independence is necessary. If voters can influence each other (via ads or arguments on strange websites), this falls apart.
In my opinion (I'm a grad student in cognitive science, but by bachelor's degree is in Mechanical Engineering, of all things) a significant fraction of CS and Engineering students don't belong in a university. University is supposed to be about making a well rounded problem-solving person, but it doesn't seem to work for technical subjects (was any of your coursework useful for this?), but it also evidently isn't too important in industry, since the students get by fine.
I think that there is a purpose for some people to study "Computer Science", but as a branch of mathematics. The rest, who apparently want to become code monkeys, don't need a university education.
The problem is that modern society considers a university degree to be such a mark of prestige that one can get little respect without one, so employers require it, even if what is taught is no more useful than could be provided by a community college.
Good code monkeys are necessary, but I put them in the same class as good plumbers and electricians. Very important work, well paid, but no university education required.
I'd like to have an object oriented database, like Lambda MOO, but accessible from a multitude of languages, instead of just one.
Every time this issue comes up, someone points out that the Canadian system works perfectly (Elections Canada runs elections in many foreign countries which lack the infrastructure). Then someone claims that it won't scale. Ridiculous.
There are a bunch of polling stations for each riding. After the polls close, people at each polling station manually count the collected paper slips. These small numbers are then sent to a central point, summed, and the winner is determined.
It's distributed. If a riding had ten times as many voters, it would have ten times as many polling stations, and ten times as many people counting votes. It scales perfectly. As long as X% of the population is involved in ballot counting, the size of the population is irrelevant.
It seems to me that one should need only one stamp generator. I receive a payment request containing a message encrypted with a short private key, and as "postage" I need to decrypt the message and return it. As computers get faster, the key length used to encrypt the message gets longer. The receiver can thus decide how much postage is required.
This way the stamp generator doesn't need to have any secret component, and could be written in any language. It could be part of the mail client.
I made a simulated prototype of a fast/simple algorithm, which was 100x (IIRC) faster than random wandering in my tests. A bit of information is here.
It requires that the robot know its position rather accurately, but if it's a hobby you could use differential GPS (which would add too much to the cost of a low-end commercial robot). You might look into localisation via wifi.
How about "Freedom Software"?
Binocular disparity only works out to a few metres distance. Beyond that you use different cues. Consider some papers by my supervisor, for example: A laminar cortical model of monocular and binocular interactions in depth perception, Neural Dynamics Of 3-D Surface Perception: Figure-Ground Separation And Lightness Perception
My writing style is somewhat peculiar, though I can't exactly say how (or even approximately how). Partially as a result of this, my marks in English class over the years of high school ranged from C to A, depending not on me, but on who the teacher was. If the teacher happened to like my style, I got a good mark.
This is annoying, but at least each year there was a different teacher, who may like my style. If the marking is computerised, it will not change; if your writing doesn't fit what the computer likes, you're screwed; likewise, if it does like it, you might never learn to express yourself more creatively (ie you'll be punished for trying to write in a manner different from what you usually do).
There are possibilities in this technology, but I suspect that it will be a long while before the eccentric aren't labeled as poor writers.
It uses funky paper; a digital pen.
Some parts of government use free software. Departments which needsupercomputers often have Crays and high end HPs or Suns, but some bored co-op will have been assigned the task of build a Beowulf cluster, and it'll be used too.
The government is hardly a monolithic organisation; it's not that small. Some departments will use more free software than others. I suggest you not make such widespread assertions based on limited knowledge.
Even if adopted, this won't be fatal to free software. It would cripple the US economy, but free software would continue to be developed elsewhere. Eventually, once the US was driven back into a depression, other interests would win out, and the law would be overturned.
Admittedly, not a pleasant prospect, especially in the short term.
Indeed.
Wal-Mart tried to make a presence in Germany. In fact, they sell Linux brand detergent. But their deployment was hardly a stellar success, primarily due to nationalistic feelings. It can be done, but this one may not be a battle worth fighting.
The university of Waterloo has a fairly new software engineering department. Hopefully it will help keep some of the code monkeys out of CS.