Question: What role do people who think that AI research is dangerous hold in the field of AI research?
Answer: None...because regardless of their qualifications, they wouldn't further the progress of something they think is a very, very bad idea.
Asking AI experts whether or not they think AI research is a bad idea subjects your responses to a massive selection bias.
Yes. Nobody who worked in the Manhattan Project had any reservations whatsoever about building the atomic bomb, right?
Experts work in fields they're not 100% comfortable with all the time. The actual physicists that worked on the bomb understood exactly what the dangers were. The people looking at it from the outside are the ones coming up with the bogus dangers. You hear things like, "the scientists in the Manhattan project were so irresponsible they thought the first bomb test could ignite the atmosphere, but went ahead with it anyway." No, the scientists working on it thought of that possibility, performed calculations the definitely proved it wasn't anywhere near a possibility and then moved on with it. People outside the field are the ones that go, "The LHC could create a black hole that will destroy us all!" The scientists working on know the Earth is struck with more powerful cosmic rays than the LHC can produce regularly, so there's no danger.
It's just that they don't work in the field of AI, so therefore they must not have any inkling whatsoever as to what they're talking about.
Which is a 100% true statement. They're very smart people, but they don't know what they're talking about in regards to AI research, and are coming up with bogus threats that most AI experts agree aren't actually a possibility.
The aol.com address most certainly is irrelevant to everything else you said. You haven't needed to have AOL as your ISP in order to have an aol.com e-mail address for over a decade. You're the guy that points to every German he meets screaming, "Nazi! Nazi!" World War II is over, and so are the days that you used to spend an usenet dreading that aol.com post that signaled a member of the masses just got access to the net. The masses are now the majority of the net, and they use gmail too.
What do you think of people who use Facebook as their primary online contact?
I don't really give a shit. I don't personally use Facebook, but I'm the weird one, not them. I recognize that I make people's lives more difficult when they ask me to get in touch with them via Facebook, because it really is the default these days, and I apologize while asking for a secondary contact option.
Nothing on the internet says 'I'm a blithering idiot, please abuse me.' as quickly and concisely as @aol.com.
I consider judging people based on irrelevant categories to be far more damning.
Shortly after gmail came out, every other free webmail provider upped their storage amount in order to compete, including aol. Gmail at the time didn't provide imap access. You could access your mail via the web interface or pop. Aol, on the other hand, did provide imap, along with a ton of storage space, which allowed me to check my personal e-mail via my PDA's email client (remember those?), instead of its horrible browser.
I had a perfectly technical reason to switch to an aol address while everybody was switching to gmail.
Unless, of course, we're all free to say we believe in any random thing as our religion and are therefore entitled to tax-free status.
Well, that's my point. That is the case. Anything else in unfairly promoting specific religions, which is constitutionally prohibited.
So, either prevent all religions from having tax exempt status, or accept that anything can be a religion and grant any organization (as long as it is a non-profit organization), tax-exempt status. I don't care which one you pick, but I think only those two options can be fair.
Sorry, but it's awfully hard to take it seriously as a religion... it has about as much credibility as being a Jedi or a Pastafarian.
Which is the same amount of credibility any religion has, considering what makes something a religion is the taking of certain axiomatic principles on faith rather than evidence.
Which I don't have any problem whatsoever with, mind you. I just don't like people using age of a religion as a way to discriminate against others. "My religion says the reason humans die is because they allowed themselves to be fooled by a talking snake" sounds exactly as weird to me as, "My religion says we were brought here from intergalactic worlds on DC-10's and were trapped in volcanoes where they set off atomic bombs." You want to believe either of those, I'm going to defend your right to do it.
Now, I know Scientology has done some pretty illegal stuff, and I'm fine with us going after them for that. I don't like that anyone would want to define what gets to be an acceptable religion and what doesn't though. I'm sure plenty of people really and truly believe in the Scientology stuff, and as far as I'm concerned they have the right to do so. I will, in fact, defend their right to do so, even though I don't believe any of it. Same as I would defend the right of anyone to be a Christian even though I'm not one.
People who want cross-platform on iOS and Android have had it since day 1. Write your logic in C or C++. Its how cross-platform has been done for decades. Then write a wrapper in whatever language the platform uses for the UI.
The problem is that most phone applications are typically 95%+ UI code. If you do that, you're not exactly going to save much time and effort.
That's how they got cross platform for iOS and Android.
Actually, they've been pushing Cordova. Xamarin is an option, but the free starter edition that will work with the Community Edition of visual studio still looks far too limited for seriously development, while the business edition is unreasonably expensive.
The visual studio 2015 preview includes cordova projects targeting android, though.
If you buy an expensive watch you're buying the skill and craftsmanship of the watchmaker.
Except that modern manufacturing process can beat a skilled craftman any day. People buy expensive watches because they're expensive. It's a status symbol. They have something that other people can't afford.
For that reason, the $10k edition of the apple watch will sell plenty. Like the old "I Am Rich" app
And back in 2007 you'd be telling us the iPhone would present no threat to BlackBerry.
No, personally I always thought that the BlackBerry sucked so much that any alternative at all that would let people have mobile e-mail would instantly replace it, no matter how much it sucked. BlackBerry was the phone you went, "goddamnit, I need to replace my nokia or motoralla with this shit, because of my need to send and receive e-mail anywhere!"
And before that you'd have told us that the iPod would pose no threat to other mp3 players.
That one I'll cop to. In fact, I still don't understand it. The ipod is the worst music player I've ever seen. Back when it came out, I had a Windows PDA, and I thought that worked better.
Actually, no. Satire can use humor, but it's not a requirement. It can use any other tools available, as long it is used to criticize a topic:
Satire: the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
In a reddit AMA, Khan explained what he wanted to show was the nature of how society finds violence acceptable in a kids show versus what they consider adult themed. He said the major difference between his short and the original power rangers cartoon was that when characters get shot, red liquid spurts out. Plus he showed titties. Other than that, it's the same type of fighting, with people hurting or killing others. But one is a kid's show and the other is "gritty".
It absolutely fits as satire and valid commentary.
Isaac Asimov's books and stories were about why his laws were bad. The three laws are bad, wrong, and do not work. As illustrated by the man himself.
You don't know much about Isaac Asimov. He has stated in several occasions and at the foreword of many of his books that he created the three laws as a response to all the evil robots of science fiction. That it is insane to assume they would turn against us, that we'd have safeguards which would keep us safe, and that we should absolutely build artificially intelligence once we had the technology to do so. Here's one quote on the subject: "One of the stock plots of science fiction was that of the invention of a robot--usually pictured as a creature of metal without soul or emotion. Under the influence of the well-known deeds and ultimate fate of Frankenstein and Rossum, there seemed only one change to be rung on this plot.--Robots were created and destroyed their creator; robots were created and destroyed their creator: robots were created and destroyed their creator-- In the 1930's I became a science-fiction reader and I quickly grew tired of this dull hundred-times-told tale. As a person interested in science, I resented the purely faustian interpretation of science."
The three laws were written with ambiguity not because he wanted to show rules didn't work and our ego of thinking that we could create such rules would be our downfall (the Faustian interpretation he decried above), but because he wanted to make sure there would be some sort of conflict for his stories. However, the rules worked. Most of the time the conflict was a result of the imperfection of humanity: the robots were doing the right things, but we wanted to do something stupid/selfish/prejudiced.
At no point were robots meant to be feared. When their three laws appeared to fail, the moral of the story was always that they hadn't and were working perfectly well. That there was method behind the apparent madness. When a robot appear to lie, despite being ordered to tell the truth (thus apparently disobeying the second law), it lied because it determined the truth would be emotionally harmful to you, and it couldn't disobey the first law.
I know quite a few people who have started using GPG via the Enigmail plug-in for Thunderbird lately. The length of the man page is irrelevant and they never publish their keys so are effectively invisible to the statistics. That doesn't mean that it isn't an extremely useful, valuable piece of software though.
Now more than ever we need GPG, and I bet adoption has gone up a lot in the last year.
Why use gpg instead of s/mime, which has native support in most e-mail programs, with no need for plugins? Thunderbird included.
Not this time, the new guy has decided that selling Windows is no longer the lock-in platform that makes us all buy Microsoft stuff.
Now, the Microsoft stuff they want use to all buy is services, and that means they have to supply said services across every platform possible.
So, open source.NET in the hope that it'll be cheaper to port it (ie you'll do it for them) and then all those lovely.NET apps that use things like Azure and Microsoft Ads will be ported to Linux and Mac and Microsoft can reap the revenue from more people consuming their services.
Its the same story really, only this time the lock-in has shifted slightly away from Windows.
That's not lock in. You described a company doing what it takes to extend the market in which they can compete in. That's fantastic. Of course they have a plan to make money out of this move, but that's a perfectly legitimate and ethical way of doing so.
No, no, no, a thousand times no, don't use DOSbox. DOSbox is for games and games alone. Don't believe me? The developers say it themselves:
Well, they don't want to support it, and I don't blame them. Plus some idiot is going to try running mission critical software on it.
The truth of the matter is that if it runs games, it runs other things. I run Windows 3.11 on it. I run several applications both DOS and 16-bit Windows on it. Works great for me.
That said, don't take that as me disagreeing with you. I also often find things that catastrophically don't work. As in, they can corrupt the files they're opening/saving to. If you can't afford trying stuff out (and keeping backups of anything your software will interact with), then don't. If you can, it's worth a shot. Just don't go crying to the developers if something goes wrong, and all is good.
boot a native MS-DOS 6.22 image (forget DOSBOX, if you want DOS functionality use fucking DOS!).
Well, depends on the use case. If you want to ensure your software will run on real DOS, you're right. However, in many cases, DOSBox will work better than native DOS. Run on DOSBox and never worry about not having enough conventional memory!
DOSBox will even let me install Win 3.11 drivers.
boot a native Win32 image with complete Win16 compatibility - just like you got in Win9x. Oh hell, I use win9x when I want that kind of functionality. Virtualbox lets me do that.
That's a good example of lagging development, actually. I have that need, but VirtualBox doesn't have Guest OS Additions for Win9x, which means incredibly slow and awkward performance. VMWare does have guest additions for Win9x, so I tend to use VMWare Player for that use.
do the above headless and feed a thin client or six, simultaneously, off a commodity desktop system.
Yeah, I suppose that's pretty nice. I can't vouch for it, because I haven't used that feature, but it sounds great.
let you export a disk image to a partition mounted via the host and thereafter, boot said exported image on a completely different piece of hardware with no further hacking required. I'm looking at you, DOSBOX.
Huh? DOSBox uses a folder on your box as it's C drive. Just copy that folder over to the new box, and you're done. No need to export or import anything. It's not like DOS has a registry to figure out what's installed, it just has config.sys and autoexec.bat, and whatever folders you installed things at. All of the DOSBox specific settings are really only about what hardware the DOS software sees, it has nothing to do with the host hardware (especially since the settings file now detects the CPU type you have and there's an auto setting for throttling cycles that works reasonably well). So you can copy the DOSBox settings file as well. If you use one of the many frontends, you can have a different configuration file for each game, which is another advantage over native DOS. I remember having an actual DOS Machine with a Turbo button because old games relied on clock cycles for their timing.
let you merge snapshots from specified thin clients into the service image while the image is in use.
Again, sounds impressive.
connect one remote session to another remote session from another server and directly collaborate between the two, migrating clipboard and keyboard events as you go, seamlessly between two completely different desktop environments as if you were hosting them both on the local system. Comes in handy on the odd occasion I'm moving bits of user data (eg user lists) between WAMP stacks that for some reason *have* to reside on the system partition and not the segregated data partition.
My philosophy is "when you die, your relatives will throw out 99% of what you own." So throw your stuff out first, live with less and be happy.
That presupposes that what makes me happy depends on how I'll eventually end up once dead, and not on how well I'm doing while alive.
When I die, I won't be alive to care about what my relatives do what the stuff I own. While I'm living, I most certainly care about my stuff, and I live happier with it than without it. The goal is to maximize happiness while you're alive, and if having material stuff does that for you, go nuts. If it brings you more pain than happiness, then learn to find happiness elsewhere. What happens when you die has exactly zero relevance.
So what if you execute out of turn and update your temperature field before a -.001C change comes in from a neighboring node? You're going to be close anyway? The next few iterations will smooth out those errors
Unless you're dealing with a stiff system and that small error just caused you your iterations to start going divergent.
I mean, not to dismiss the approach, because I agree with you there are certainly lots of situations where it'll be fine. However, it's also one of those things that aren't going to replace current paradigms either. We're not going to go all lock free. We're going to add lock-free programming to the toolset.
Entropy requires time in which to move to a more disordered state.
Time exists because entropy becomes more disordered.
Hmm. Spot the logical flaw there.
Ok. Your logical flaw is a strawman argument. While the article claims entropy is responsible for the arrow of time, i.e., the directionality of it, you pretended it said it's responsible of the existence of time at all. Then you argued against your own statement and pretended that was a valid argument against theirs.
Here's what they're actually saying. Assume time exists. So entropy can either increase or decrease with the passage of time. However, there are many more configurations with increased entropy than decreased entropy, which means a statistically implied direction towards increased entropy.
Again no. A running coming from the other direction would see the doors close in the other order. I think the AC parallel to this post explains it pretty well.
This is a highly misunderstood topic, I'm going to try to clarify it.
You're correct about the concept of simultaneity in relativity. In the barn door example, depending on your frame of reference, the bars could open simultaneously or one after the other.
He's correct about causality in relativity. Causal events are invariant. There is no frame of reference in existence, regardless of your velocity or distance, in which an object shot by a bullet fired from a gun gets hit before the gun is fired. It can't happen. It doesn't happen because with such a causal event, at some point the bullet and the gun were at the same location and the distance between them was 0. Time dilation depends on speed and distance, because time dilation requires an accompanying lorentz contraction. After the bullet is fired, depending on your frame of reference, people can disagree how far the bullet is from the gun, how far the target is from the gun, and therefore how long it took the bullet to travel from the gun to the target. But no frame of reference exists in which people observe the target being hit and then the gun firing the bullet.
Peer review filters out the stuff that is obvious crap, stuff that doesn't even fit the form of a proper scientific article. The purpose is not to say that articles are true, but rather to get rid of articles that are obviously wrong.
If the scientists are lying about their data, it's hard for peer review to catch that. That's why reproducibility is important. If it's a result you care about, you can reproduce it.
Well, reproducibility is part of peer review. If anyone is making decisions based on the results of one paper, they're idiots. Even if the research methodology was flawless, and the researchers are brilliant and honest with all their data, certain results can still come about as a result of chance. Obligatory xkcd
I wish we'd put more emphasis on reproducing published results, though. I've mentioned this before, but I feel like this would be the ideal work for grad students during their first few years, before they're deep in their own research. They need to get papers published, there should be journals devoted to publishing data from reproducing results. Students get experience writing papers and conducting research and everyone gets stronger peer review in their fields.
The problem is that AP classes are, pretty uniformly, badly constructed. Half of the education in AP math and science courses is How to Use the TI-83 Calculator. Half of AP Computer Science is How to Program in Java. The College Board is single-handedly blocking progress in the education of technology in math and science.
Yeah, but they replace the low-level introduction courses in college, not the more advanced ones. 100-level computer science courses in college ARE, "how to program in Java." And, like I said, my Calculus course in High School seemed better than the equivalent in college from what I was seeing.
If anything, those high school courses mean you don't have to take the BS introductory courses in college, and you can go straight to the more interesting / demanding ones during your freshman year.
He may be right about AP Statistics though. Taking statistics in high school means that most people will have forgotten it by the time they get to advanced courses that use statistical methods.
Unless you're an actual statistics major (in which case you'll pick up whatever you missed in subsequent courses anyway), that's going to be true regardless of whether you take statistics in high school or college. I took AP statistics, but my university required me to take "Statistics for Engineers" as an EE major, and wouldn't allow the AP stat course to count towards that. Stats for Engineers was an absolute joke, and the high school class was for more rigorous.
It stands for "Advanced Placement." They're college-level high school courses. At the end of the year, you take the advanced placement exam, and depending on your scores and the college you attend, you can get college credits for them.
I think getting rid of an AP is a stupendously short-sighted idea. Having students take more advanced courses earlier is a great idea. If there's reason to believe the courses aren't actually as demanding as their college equivalent (and I don't think there is, based on my experience taking AP Calculus in high school and looking at what people taking Calculus in college were seeing. We covered the same material, and if anything my high school class covered more), then you can make an argument for the tests more challenging / add to the requirements of those courses. Getting rid of it is just an attempt to waste students' time and extract more money from them by forcing them to take more university courses.
You think its right and normal that the NSA can spy on 7 billion souls? You re ok with that? Disgusting, you really dont belong here.
To be fair, I also think it's right and normal for foreign intelligent agencies to try spying on Americans. It's our counter-intelligence job to prevent it.
The NSA should be sure as hell trying to spy on every single non-American out there. It's their counter-intelligence job to limit it.
Slashdot Mirror
Question: What role do people who think that AI research is dangerous hold in the field of AI research?
Answer: None...because regardless of their qualifications, they wouldn't further the progress of something they think is a very, very bad idea.
Asking AI experts whether or not they think AI research is a bad idea subjects your responses to a massive selection bias.
Yes. Nobody who worked in the Manhattan Project had any reservations whatsoever about building the atomic bomb, right?
Experts work in fields they're not 100% comfortable with all the time. The actual physicists that worked on the bomb understood exactly what the dangers were. The people looking at it from the outside are the ones coming up with the bogus dangers. You hear things like, "the scientists in the Manhattan project were so irresponsible they thought the first bomb test could ignite the atmosphere, but went ahead with it anyway." No, the scientists working on it thought of that possibility, performed calculations the definitely proved it wasn't anywhere near a possibility and then moved on with it. People outside the field are the ones that go, "The LHC could create a black hole that will destroy us all!" The scientists working on know the Earth is struck with more powerful cosmic rays than the LHC can produce regularly, so there's no danger.
It's just that they don't work in the field of AI, so therefore they must not have any inkling whatsoever as to what they're talking about.
Which is a 100% true statement. They're very smart people, but they don't know what they're talking about in regards to AI research, and are coming up with bogus threats that most AI experts agree aren't actually a possibility.
You'd have a point, if AOL was irrelevant.
The aol.com address most certainly is irrelevant to everything else you said. You haven't needed to have AOL as your ISP in order to have an aol.com e-mail address for over a decade. You're the guy that points to every German he meets screaming, "Nazi! Nazi!" World War II is over, and so are the days that you used to spend an usenet dreading that aol.com post that signaled a member of the masses just got access to the net. The masses are now the majority of the net, and they use gmail too.
What do you think of people who use Facebook as their primary online contact?
I don't really give a shit. I don't personally use Facebook, but I'm the weird one, not them. I recognize that I make people's lives more difficult when they ask me to get in touch with them via Facebook, because it really is the default these days, and I apologize while asking for a secondary contact option.
Nothing on the internet says 'I'm a blithering idiot, please abuse me.' as quickly and concisely as @aol.com.
I consider judging people based on irrelevant categories to be far more damning.
Shortly after gmail came out, every other free webmail provider upped their storage amount in order to compete, including aol. Gmail at the time didn't provide imap access. You could access your mail via the web interface or pop. Aol, on the other hand, did provide imap, along with a ton of storage space, which allowed me to check my personal e-mail via my PDA's email client (remember those?), instead of its horrible browser.
I had a perfectly technical reason to switch to an aol address while everybody was switching to gmail.
Unless, of course, we're all free to say we believe in any random thing as our religion and are therefore entitled to tax-free status.
Well, that's my point. That is the case. Anything else in unfairly promoting specific religions, which is constitutionally prohibited.
So, either prevent all religions from having tax exempt status, or accept that anything can be a religion and grant any organization (as long as it is a non-profit organization), tax-exempt status. I don't care which one you pick, but I think only those two options can be fair.
Sorry, but it's awfully hard to take it seriously as a religion ... it has about as much credibility as being a Jedi or a Pastafarian.
Which is the same amount of credibility any religion has, considering what makes something a religion is the taking of certain axiomatic principles on faith rather than evidence.
Which I don't have any problem whatsoever with, mind you. I just don't like people using age of a religion as a way to discriminate against others. "My religion says the reason humans die is because they allowed themselves to be fooled by a talking snake" sounds exactly as weird to me as, "My religion says we were brought here from intergalactic worlds on DC-10's and were trapped in volcanoes where they set off atomic bombs." You want to believe either of those, I'm going to defend your right to do it.
Now, I know Scientology has done some pretty illegal stuff, and I'm fine with us going after them for that. I don't like that anyone would want to define what gets to be an acceptable religion and what doesn't though. I'm sure plenty of people really and truly believe in the Scientology stuff, and as far as I'm concerned they have the right to do so. I will, in fact, defend their right to do so, even though I don't believe any of it. Same as I would defend the right of anyone to be a Christian even though I'm not one.
People who want cross-platform on iOS and Android have had it since day 1. Write your logic in C or C++. Its how cross-platform has been done for decades. Then write a wrapper in whatever language the platform uses for the UI.
The problem is that most phone applications are typically 95%+ UI code. If you do that, you're not exactly going to save much time and effort.
That's how they got cross platform for iOS and Android.
Actually, they've been pushing Cordova. Xamarin is an option, but the free starter edition that will work with the Community Edition of visual studio still looks far too limited for seriously development, while the business edition is unreasonably expensive.
The visual studio 2015 preview includes cordova projects targeting android, though.
If you buy an expensive watch you're buying the skill and craftsmanship of the watchmaker.
Except that modern manufacturing process can beat a skilled craftman any day. People buy expensive watches because they're expensive. It's a status symbol. They have something that other people can't afford.
For that reason, the $10k edition of the apple watch will sell plenty. Like the old "I Am Rich" app
And back in 2007 you'd be telling us the iPhone would present no threat to BlackBerry.
No, personally I always thought that the BlackBerry sucked so much that any alternative at all that would let people have mobile e-mail would instantly replace it, no matter how much it sucked. BlackBerry was the phone you went, "goddamnit, I need to replace my nokia or motoralla with this shit, because of my need to send and receive e-mail anywhere!"
And before that you'd have told us that the iPod would pose no threat to other mp3 players.
That one I'll cop to. In fact, I still don't understand it. The ipod is the worst music player I've ever seen. Back when it came out, I had a Windows PDA, and I thought that worked better.
Isn't satire supposed to be funny?
Actually, no. Satire can use humor, but it's not a requirement. It can use any other tools available, as long it is used to criticize a topic:
Satire: the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
"Satire" doesn't mean "Different".
In a reddit AMA, Khan explained what he wanted to show was the nature of how society finds violence acceptable in a kids show versus what they consider adult themed. He said the major difference between his short and the original power rangers cartoon was that when characters get shot, red liquid spurts out. Plus he showed titties. Other than that, it's the same type of fighting, with people hurting or killing others. But one is a kid's show and the other is "gritty".
It absolutely fits as satire and valid commentary.
Isaac Asimov's books and stories were about why his laws were bad. The three laws are bad, wrong, and do not work. As illustrated by the man himself.
You don't know much about Isaac Asimov. He has stated in several occasions and at the foreword of many of his books that he created the three laws as a response to all the evil robots of science fiction. That it is insane to assume they would turn against us, that we'd have safeguards which would keep us safe, and that we should absolutely build artificially intelligence once we had the technology to do so. Here's one quote on the subject: "One of the stock plots of science fiction was that of the invention of a robot--usually pictured as a creature of metal without soul or emotion. Under the influence of the well-known deeds and ultimate fate of Frankenstein and Rossum, there seemed only one change to be rung on this plot.--Robots were created and destroyed their creator; robots were created and destroyed their creator: robots were created and destroyed their creator-- In the 1930's I became a science-fiction reader and I quickly grew tired of this dull hundred-times-told tale. As a person interested in science, I resented the purely faustian interpretation of science."
The three laws were written with ambiguity not because he wanted to show rules didn't work and our ego of thinking that we could create such rules would be our downfall (the Faustian interpretation he decried above), but because he wanted to make sure there would be some sort of conflict for his stories. However, the rules worked. Most of the time the conflict was a result of the imperfection of humanity: the robots were doing the right things, but we wanted to do something stupid/selfish/prejudiced.
At no point were robots meant to be feared. When their three laws appeared to fail, the moral of the story was always that they hadn't and were working perfectly well. That there was method behind the apparent madness. When a robot appear to lie, despite being ordered to tell the truth (thus apparently disobeying the second law), it lied because it determined the truth would be emotionally harmful to you, and it couldn't disobey the first law.
I know quite a few people who have started using GPG via the Enigmail plug-in for Thunderbird lately. The length of the man page is irrelevant and they never publish their keys so are effectively invisible to the statistics. That doesn't mean that it isn't an extremely useful, valuable piece of software though.
Now more than ever we need GPG, and I bet adoption has gone up a lot in the last year.
Why use gpg instead of s/mime, which has native support in most e-mail programs, with no need for plugins? Thunderbird included.
Not this time, the new guy has decided that selling Windows is no longer the lock-in platform that makes us all buy Microsoft stuff.
Now, the Microsoft stuff they want use to all buy is services, and that means they have to supply said services across every platform possible.
So, open source .NET in the hope that it'll be cheaper to port it (ie you'll do it for them) and then all those lovely .NET apps that use things like Azure and Microsoft Ads will be ported to Linux and Mac and Microsoft can reap the revenue from more people consuming their services.
Its the same story really, only this time the lock-in has shifted slightly away from Windows.
That's not lock in. You described a company doing what it takes to extend the market in which they can compete in. That's fantastic. Of course they have a plan to make money out of this move, but that's a perfectly legitimate and ethical way of doing so.
No, no, no, a thousand times no, don't use DOSbox. DOSbox is for games and games alone. Don't believe me? The developers say it themselves:
Well, they don't want to support it, and I don't blame them. Plus some idiot is going to try running mission critical software on it.
The truth of the matter is that if it runs games, it runs other things. I run Windows 3.11 on it. I run several applications both DOS and 16-bit Windows on it. Works great for me.
That said, don't take that as me disagreeing with you. I also often find things that catastrophically don't work. As in, they can corrupt the files they're opening/saving to. If you can't afford trying stuff out (and keeping backups of anything your software will interact with), then don't. If you can, it's worth a shot. Just don't go crying to the developers if something goes wrong, and all is good.
boot a native MS-DOS 6.22 image (forget DOSBOX, if you want DOS functionality use fucking DOS!).
Well, depends on the use case. If you want to ensure your software will run on real DOS, you're right. However, in many cases, DOSBox will work better than native DOS. Run on DOSBox and never worry about not having enough conventional memory!
DOSBox will even let me install Win 3.11 drivers.
boot a native Win32 image with complete Win16 compatibility - just like you got in Win9x. Oh hell, I use win9x when I want that kind of functionality. Virtualbox lets me do that.
That's a good example of lagging development, actually. I have that need, but VirtualBox doesn't have Guest OS Additions for Win9x, which means incredibly slow and awkward performance. VMWare does have guest additions for Win9x, so I tend to use VMWare Player for that use.
do the above headless and feed a thin client or six, simultaneously, off a commodity desktop system.
Yeah, I suppose that's pretty nice. I can't vouch for it, because I haven't used that feature, but it sounds great.
let you export a disk image to a partition mounted via the host and thereafter, boot said exported image on a completely different piece of hardware with no further hacking required. I'm looking at you, DOSBOX.
Huh? DOSBox uses a folder on your box as it's C drive. Just copy that folder over to the new box, and you're done. No need to export or import anything. It's not like DOS has a registry to figure out what's installed, it just has config.sys and autoexec.bat, and whatever folders you installed things at. All of the DOSBox specific settings are really only about what hardware the DOS software sees, it has nothing to do with the host hardware (especially since the settings file now detects the CPU type you have and there's an auto setting for throttling cycles that works reasonably well). So you can copy the DOSBox settings file as well. If you use one of the many frontends, you can have a different configuration file for each game, which is another advantage over native DOS. I remember having an actual DOS Machine with a Turbo button because old games relied on clock cycles for their timing.
let you merge snapshots from specified thin clients into the service image while the image is in use.
Again, sounds impressive.
connect one remote session to another remote session from another server and directly collaborate between the two, migrating clipboard and keyboard events as you go, seamlessly between two completely different desktop environments as if you were hosting them both on the local system. Comes in handy on the odd occasion I'm moving bits of user data (eg user lists) between WAMP stacks that for some reason *have* to reside on the system partition and not the segregated data partition.
Can't vouch for it again, but sounds nice.
My philosophy is "when you die, your relatives will throw out 99% of what you own." So throw your stuff out first, live with less and be happy.
That presupposes that what makes me happy depends on how I'll eventually end up once dead, and not on how well I'm doing while alive.
When I die, I won't be alive to care about what my relatives do what the stuff I own. While I'm living, I most certainly care about my stuff, and I live happier with it than without it. The goal is to maximize happiness while you're alive, and if having material stuff does that for you, go nuts. If it brings you more pain than happiness, then learn to find happiness elsewhere. What happens when you die has exactly zero relevance.
So what if you execute out of turn and update your temperature field before a -.001C change comes in from a neighboring node? You're going to be close anyway? The next few iterations will smooth out those errors
Unless you're dealing with a stiff system and that small error just caused you your iterations to start going divergent.
I mean, not to dismiss the approach, because I agree with you there are certainly lots of situations where it'll be fine. However, it's also one of those things that aren't going to replace current paradigms either. We're not going to go all lock free. We're going to add lock-free programming to the toolset.
Entropy requires time in which to move to a more disordered state.
Time exists because entropy becomes more disordered.
Hmm. Spot the logical flaw there.
Ok. Your logical flaw is a strawman argument. While the article claims entropy is responsible for the arrow of time, i.e., the directionality of it, you pretended it said it's responsible of the existence of time at all. Then you argued against your own statement and pretended that was a valid argument against theirs.
Here's what they're actually saying. Assume time exists. So entropy can either increase or decrease with the passage of time. However, there are many more configurations with increased entropy than decreased entropy, which means a statistically implied direction towards increased entropy.
Again no. A running coming from the other direction would see the doors close in the other order. I think the AC parallel to this post explains it pretty well.
This is a highly misunderstood topic, I'm going to try to clarify it.
You're correct about the concept of simultaneity in relativity. In the barn door example, depending on your frame of reference, the bars could open simultaneously or one after the other.
He's correct about causality in relativity. Causal events are invariant. There is no frame of reference in existence, regardless of your velocity or distance, in which an object shot by a bullet fired from a gun gets hit before the gun is fired. It can't happen. It doesn't happen because with such a causal event, at some point the bullet and the gun were at the same location and the distance between them was 0. Time dilation depends on speed and distance, because time dilation requires an accompanying lorentz contraction. After the bullet is fired, depending on your frame of reference, people can disagree how far the bullet is from the gun, how far the target is from the gun, and therefore how long it took the bullet to travel from the gun to the target. But no frame of reference exists in which people observe the target being hit and then the gun firing the bullet.
Peer review filters out the stuff that is obvious crap, stuff that doesn't even fit the form of a proper scientific article. The purpose is not to say that articles are true, but rather to get rid of articles that are obviously wrong.
If the scientists are lying about their data, it's hard for peer review to catch that. That's why reproducibility is important. If it's a result you care about, you can reproduce it.
Well, reproducibility is part of peer review. If anyone is making decisions based on the results of one paper, they're idiots. Even if the research methodology was flawless, and the researchers are brilliant and honest with all their data, certain results can still come about as a result of chance. Obligatory xkcd
I wish we'd put more emphasis on reproducing published results, though. I've mentioned this before, but I feel like this would be the ideal work for grad students during their first few years, before they're deep in their own research. They need to get papers published, there should be journals devoted to publishing data from reproducing results. Students get experience writing papers and conducting research and everyone gets stronger peer review in their fields.
The problem is that AP classes are, pretty uniformly, badly constructed. Half of the education in AP math and science courses is How to Use the TI-83 Calculator. Half of AP Computer Science is How to Program in Java. The College Board is single-handedly blocking progress in the education of technology in math and science.
Yeah, but they replace the low-level introduction courses in college, not the more advanced ones. 100-level computer science courses in college ARE, "how to program in Java." And, like I said, my Calculus course in High School seemed better than the equivalent in college from what I was seeing.
If anything, those high school courses mean you don't have to take the BS introductory courses in college, and you can go straight to the more interesting / demanding ones during your freshman year.
He may be right about AP Statistics though. Taking statistics in high school means that most people will have forgotten it by the time they get to advanced courses that use statistical methods.
Unless you're an actual statistics major (in which case you'll pick up whatever you missed in subsequent courses anyway), that's going to be true regardless of whether you take statistics in high school or college. I took AP statistics, but my university required me to take "Statistics for Engineers" as an EE major, and wouldn't allow the AP stat course to count towards that. Stats for Engineers was an absolute joke, and the high school class was for more rigorous.
It stands for "Advanced Placement." They're college-level high school courses. At the end of the year, you take the advanced placement exam, and depending on your scores and the college you attend, you can get college credits for them.
I think getting rid of an AP is a stupendously short-sighted idea. Having students take more advanced courses earlier is a great idea. If there's reason to believe the courses aren't actually as demanding as their college equivalent (and I don't think there is, based on my experience taking AP Calculus in high school and looking at what people taking Calculus in college were seeing. We covered the same material, and if anything my high school class covered more), then you can make an argument for the tests more challenging / add to the requirements of those courses. Getting rid of it is just an attempt to waste students' time and extract more money from them by forcing them to take more university courses.
You think its right and normal that the NSA can spy on 7 billion souls? You re ok with that? Disgusting, you really dont belong here.
To be fair, I also think it's right and normal for foreign intelligent agencies to try spying on Americans. It's our counter-intelligence job to prevent it.
The NSA should be sure as hell trying to spy on every single non-American out there. It's their counter-intelligence job to limit it.