Oh, and another solution: Mark updates with an expiration date such that the unit will refuse to run if its firmware is too stale.
If they ever do that, I will have to kill somebody. Besides the obvious reason, I have a driving wheel that won't work unless the system date is set before 12-22-08. The bug has been there for well over a year and there's no sign its getting fixed.
Consider that the one and only reason I bought a PS3 over a 360 is to play GT5. See how well that decision worked for me?
There's a key difference between Malthus and Neo-Malthus thought. The original idea, as you state, is indeed bunk. Malthus didn't have the foresight to see that a well-educated populace (particularly a well-educated female populace) would slow its birthrates down and halt geometric growth.
Noe-Malthusian theory is a little different. They don't focus on just birthrates, but also on how much each person consumes. That very much does remain a problem in well-developed countries.
It would probably result in some sub-sub-sub-department of the Russian military slashing an item off its budget. My working theory is that whatever purpose the thing originally had, it was probably lost around the time the USSR broke up. New operations groups get rotated in on standing orders because the General that originally ordered it forgot all about it.
He does in fact have exceptional hearing (is an expert taster), but if in blind tests he is unable to repeatedly rank the cables, then the testing is meaningless.
It's not meaningless, because it wasn't for testing hearing/palate. It's a test of the qualities cables/wines. There are other ways to test hearing ("raise your arm on the side you hear the sound"), just as there are other ways to test someone's palate ("tell me what kind of barrels this wine was aged in"). This wasn't a test for that.
If the audiophiles couldn't consistently rank the difference between cables, then we conclude the cables make no difference. If wine tasters can't consistently rate French wines to the top, then we conclude that other countries can be equal or superior.
I am the parent, so I think I know what my point was. That wine tasting test was to show if French wines were clearly superior. If they were, they should consistently be at the top. The case of either US wines at the top or random rankings shows the opposite.
I agree that the sample size is small, but this wasn't the only test done along these lines since 1976, either.
Or illegal, if they're making false marketing claims.
I'm going to build myself a RepRap and have it turn out little clamps to go around cables. I'll bring in some audiophiles from the local area, tell them it's made of advanced Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene, and that they will be going on sale for $2k a pop, but for being here, they'll be able to buy them for the low price of only $500. Then we'll listen to a bunch of music with the clamps on and off (and hey, it can work on power cables, too!). Inevitably, they'll think the music with the clamps has "improved reflex response" or somesuch. A few of them will buy right then and there, and I'll advertise on the Internet that x many audiophiles thought the system was greatly improved.
I'm also convinced that if I later turn around and straight-up say that I'm a big fraud, and that they just paid me for some worthless plastic clamps, none of them will believe me.
That's part of the point, though. If the results of New World vs. Old World testing was essentially random, then there was no point in looking down on California grapes anymore.
There are quite clearly people in the wine world who are good enough to pick out fine details of a wine. These people have been trained through blind tests to consistently pick out those details. There aren't very many of them, and even the sommeliers of most restaurants and wine magazines wouldn't qualify. But they do exist.
"Sommelier" is a job description that technically anyone can take. "Certified Sommelier" is something else entirely, and is The Court of Master Sommeliers. Even their Level I test requires a blind test, and the Level II test requires filling out a tasting grid that includes things like acidity, country, and vintage.
There aren't very many people who have passed the Master level--170 ever, by current count.
I'm sure there are some clearly degenerate choices for barrels, but otherwise it's a matter of taste.
I took a tour of the Wollersheim Winery in Wisconsin a few months ago with a tasting. Their Domaine du Sac is advertised as being aged in oak barrels, and has won its share of awards. I hated it. It's smells like oak (which is nice), but also tastes like oak (which isn't). Clearly, some people would do like that, but it's not for me.
Best video ever on debunking audiophile crap: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYTlN6wjcvQ. Including showing how music played backwards can sound like a Satanic message when a Satanic message is suggested to you.
Wine snobs usually have their opinions backed up by double-blind tests. The taste buds of good sommelier really can tell the type, vintage, and what kind of wood was used in the barrel that aged the wine. It was a blind test that proved that France wasn't the best in the world after all.
They might be snobs, but they do have some Scientific backing behind them. Audiophiles, not so much.
No, it wasn't. As noted in TFA, certain genes only get expressed under specific environmental conditions, so the genes alone don't contain enough information to build a human or just part of a human.
That's not really how Kurzweil is arguing. He's looking at the genome, then saying you can build a working brain from that info alone. It may be theoretically possible, but it's so difficult that we shouldn't even bother trying. It's akin to trying to understand the behavior of a volume of a gas by looking at how just two molecules bounce off each other; it looks very straightforward, but you're actually missing some hugely complicated behavior going on.
A prediction of my own: if the brain is ever simulated by a program, the program itself will be very simple--perhaps a few thousand lines, or even a few hundred. However, that program will be self-organizing in a way that's equivalent to a program trillions of lines long, and the creators won't be able to comprehend the end result.
No, you are, but only because this has been an issue for a long time--it's not limited to this generation.
A math curriculum that actually taught math would be so unlike the existing one that most parents would question its educational value. This is because those parents are products of the same broken system. A few of those parents would send angry emails to the school board, and then it'd all be back to the way things were.
The rule shouldn't be some arbitrary limit. Rather, if you can hold everything you're buying one of those small baskets or half-sized carts plus your free hand, then you can use the express lane.
Seems to me that if one were to literally interpret the Constitution, then Senators are to represent the whole country, not their individual states.
The trouble with "literal" interpretations of anything is that nobody can quite agree on just how literal they should be.
In a republic, the people must have some kind of hold over the representative or else that rep will do whatever they please, which is more or less how the Roman Republic worked out. In America, representatives are ultimately accountable to voters. Even lobbyists can only go so far in controlling politicians; that money must somehow be turned into votes in order to be reelected.
Since Minnesotans don't vote for Alaska's Senator, Stevens never had any direct accountability to Minnesota or any other state that isn't Alaska.
Congress may represent the whole country, but that doesn't mean its individual components do.
Thing is, Stevens was probably as in-tune to the people of Alaska as he needed to be. Even with a heap of scandals, he lost only by slim margins. The Bridge to Nowhere would have been a boon to the local contractors, and that's just one in a list of pork projects Stevens funneled in (usually with more success).
Senators supposedly represent just one state, not the whole country.
The "Series of Tubes" is a short, succinct, catchy statement to encapsulate what he said. It might not be any more fair than Al "Invented the Internet" Gore, but nobody is going to get very far debating against it.
Re:What would the impacts of this be for cryptogra
on
Claimed Proof That P != NP
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Practically, not much. It means we can breathe easy that a lot of crypto out there is now provably secure. It's been long considered likely that P != NP, because a lot of NP-complete problems are very old and nobody has gotten very far in solving them, and the extra focus in the last 40 years in breaking public key crypto hasn't produced much more progress on the problem. It was just the nagging issue of nailing down a proof.
A proof that P = NP would have resulted in a lot of cryptographers committing Seppuku. The contrary proof doesn't have many huge implications, though.
Inventions of necessity, and then only for certain civilizations. Human civs that weren't able to develop it went into decline like so many other species at the time.
Picking out the few things that went right in the Younger Dryas is like saying the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was successful in being a bridge for about 120 days.
Why is it, when this topic comes up, so many people that are on the side that says human centric global warming is a fact; tend to use the argument that anyone who does not agree with them is a right-wing gun toting SUV driving mentally crippled slack jawed idiot?
Tribalism, mostly. People naturally divide the world into us vs. them on any given subject. While I feel that AGW is the only scientific explanation, most of its supporters are not scientists, much less climate scientists, and many of them jump into fanciful imaginings and impractical plans, doing their cause a great disservice.
During the Younger Dryas, there were large amounts of extinctions throughout N. America, and forests in Scandinavia were replaced with glaciers.
Yes, there have been periods of abrupt climate change in Earth's history that have happened without human involvement. Regardless of cause, they are invariably followed by a large list of bad things happening, with very few good things.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and another solution: Mark updates with an expiration date such that the unit will refuse to run if its firmware is too stale.
If they ever do that, I will have to kill somebody. Besides the obvious reason, I have a driving wheel that won't work unless the system date is set before 12-22-08. The bug has been there for well over a year and there's no sign its getting fixed.
Consider that the one and only reason I bought a PS3 over a 360 is to play GT5. See how well that decision worked for me?
False dichotomy. Why can't I also hate Nintendo?
There's a key difference between Malthus and Neo-Malthus thought. The original idea, as you state, is indeed bunk. Malthus didn't have the foresight to see that a well-educated populace (particularly a well-educated female populace) would slow its birthrates down and halt geometric growth.
Noe-Malthusian theory is a little different. They don't focus on just birthrates, but also on how much each person consumes. That very much does remain a problem in well-developed countries.
It would probably result in some sub-sub-sub-department of the Russian military slashing an item off its budget. My working theory is that whatever purpose the thing originally had, it was probably lost around the time the USSR broke up. New operations groups get rotated in on standing orders because the General that originally ordered it forgot all about it.
Sure, the location is easy. Satellite photos are easy to find. But what good does that do you?
He does in fact have exceptional hearing (is an expert taster), but if in blind tests he is unable to repeatedly rank the cables, then the testing is meaningless.
It's not meaningless, because it wasn't for testing hearing/palate. It's a test of the qualities cables/wines. There are other ways to test hearing ("raise your arm on the side you hear the sound"), just as there are other ways to test someone's palate ("tell me what kind of barrels this wine was aged in"). This wasn't a test for that.
If the audiophiles couldn't consistently rank the difference between cables, then we conclude the cables make no difference. If wine tasters can't consistently rate French wines to the top, then we conclude that other countries can be equal or superior.
I am the parent, so I think I know what my point was. That wine tasting test was to show if French wines were clearly superior. If they were, they should consistently be at the top. The case of either US wines at the top or random rankings shows the opposite.
I agree that the sample size is small, but this wasn't the only test done along these lines since 1976, either.
Or illegal, if they're making false marketing claims.
I'm going to build myself a RepRap and have it turn out little clamps to go around cables. I'll bring in some audiophiles from the local area, tell them it's made of advanced Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene, and that they will be going on sale for $2k a pop, but for being here, they'll be able to buy them for the low price of only $500. Then we'll listen to a bunch of music with the clamps on and off (and hey, it can work on power cables, too!). Inevitably, they'll think the music with the clamps has "improved reflex response" or somesuch. A few of them will buy right then and there, and I'll advertise on the Internet that x many audiophiles thought the system was greatly improved.
I'm also convinced that if I later turn around and straight-up say that I'm a big fraud, and that they just paid me for some worthless plastic clamps, none of them will believe me.
That's part of the point, though. If the results of New World vs. Old World testing was essentially random, then there was no point in looking down on California grapes anymore.
There are quite clearly people in the wine world who are good enough to pick out fine details of a wine. These people have been trained through blind tests to consistently pick out those details. There aren't very many of them, and even the sommeliers of most restaurants and wine magazines wouldn't qualify. But they do exist.
"Sommelier" is a job description that technically anyone can take. "Certified Sommelier" is something else entirely, and is The Court of Master Sommeliers. Even their Level I test requires a blind test, and the Level II test requires filling out a tasting grid that includes things like acidity, country, and vintage.
There aren't very many people who have passed the Master level--170 ever, by current count.
I'm sure there are some clearly degenerate choices for barrels, but otherwise it's a matter of taste.
I took a tour of the Wollersheim Winery in Wisconsin a few months ago with a tasting. Their Domaine du Sac is advertised as being aged in oak barrels, and has won its share of awards. I hated it. It's smells like oak (which is nice), but also tastes like oak (which isn't). Clearly, some people would do like that, but it's not for me.
Best video ever on debunking audiophile crap: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYTlN6wjcvQ. Including showing how music played backwards can sound like a Satanic message when a Satanic message is suggested to you.
Wine snobs usually have their opinions backed up by double-blind tests. The taste buds of good sommelier really can tell the type, vintage, and what kind of wood was used in the barrel that aged the wine. It was a blind test that proved that France wasn't the best in the world after all.
They might be snobs, but they do have some Scientific backing behind them. Audiophiles, not so much.
No, it wasn't. As noted in TFA, certain genes only get expressed under specific environmental conditions, so the genes alone don't contain enough information to build a human or just part of a human.
That's not really how Kurzweil is arguing. He's looking at the genome, then saying you can build a working brain from that info alone. It may be theoretically possible, but it's so difficult that we shouldn't even bother trying. It's akin to trying to understand the behavior of a volume of a gas by looking at how just two molecules bounce off each other; it looks very straightforward, but you're actually missing some hugely complicated behavior going on.
A prediction of my own: if the brain is ever simulated by a program, the program itself will be very simple--perhaps a few thousand lines, or even a few hundred. However, that program will be self-organizing in a way that's equivalent to a program trillions of lines long, and the creators won't be able to comprehend the end result.
What do you mean "gotten" so bad? It's been like this as long as I can remember (1999ish).
No, you are, but only because this has been an issue for a long time--it's not limited to this generation.
A math curriculum that actually taught math would be so unlike the existing one that most parents would question its educational value. This is because those parents are products of the same broken system. A few of those parents would send angry emails to the school board, and then it'd all be back to the way things were.
The rule shouldn't be some arbitrary limit. Rather, if you can hold everything you're buying one of those small baskets or half-sized carts plus your free hand, then you can use the express lane.
Seems to me that if one were to literally interpret the Constitution, then Senators are to represent the whole country, not their individual states.
The trouble with "literal" interpretations of anything is that nobody can quite agree on just how literal they should be.
In a republic, the people must have some kind of hold over the representative or else that rep will do whatever they please, which is more or less how the Roman Republic worked out. In America, representatives are ultimately accountable to voters. Even lobbyists can only go so far in controlling politicians; that money must somehow be turned into votes in order to be reelected.
Since Minnesotans don't vote for Alaska's Senator, Stevens never had any direct accountability to Minnesota or any other state that isn't Alaska.
Congress may represent the whole country, but that doesn't mean its individual components do.
Thing is, Stevens was probably as in-tune to the people of Alaska as he needed to be. Even with a heap of scandals, he lost only by slim margins. The Bridge to Nowhere would have been a boon to the local contractors, and that's just one in a list of pork projects Stevens funneled in (usually with more success).
Senators supposedly represent just one state, not the whole country.
The "Series of Tubes" is a short, succinct, catchy statement to encapsulate what he said. It might not be any more fair than Al "Invented the Internet" Gore, but nobody is going to get very far debating against it.
Practically, not much. It means we can breathe easy that a lot of crypto out there is now provably secure. It's been long considered likely that P != NP, because a lot of NP-complete problems are very old and nobody has gotten very far in solving them, and the extra focus in the last 40 years in breaking public key crypto hasn't produced much more progress on the problem. It was just the nagging issue of nailing down a proof.
A proof that P = NP would have resulted in a lot of cryptographers committing Seppuku. The contrary proof doesn't have many huge implications, though.
Inventions of necessity, and then only for certain civilizations. Human civs that weren't able to develop it went into decline like so many other species at the time.
Picking out the few things that went right in the Younger Dryas is like saying the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was successful in being a bridge for about 120 days.
Why is it, when this topic comes up, so many people that are on the side that says human centric global warming is a fact; tend to use the argument that anyone who does not agree with them is a right-wing gun toting SUV driving mentally crippled slack jawed idiot?
Tribalism, mostly. People naturally divide the world into us vs. them on any given subject. While I feel that AGW is the only scientific explanation, most of its supporters are not scientists, much less climate scientists, and many of them jump into fanciful imaginings and impractical plans, doing their cause a great disservice.
During the Younger Dryas, there were large amounts of extinctions throughout N. America, and forests in Scandinavia were replaced with glaciers.
Yes, there have been periods of abrupt climate change in Earth's history that have happened without human involvement. Regardless of cause, they are invariably followed by a large list of bad things happening, with very few good things.