This was really informative and good. If I were protecting valuable data, I'd use WPA and a 10-character pass and I'd be protected against hackers with today's leetest gear for the rest of the existence of the universe. That's actually a pretty amazing statistic given just how hackable everything else is these days. Well done, designers of WPA!
So follow me here: Assume (fairly, I think) that MS would pay a lot more than Google is paying now for Mozilla search results. They might make an offer to Firefox to make Bing their default search, offering them substantial money for this. But now it gets interesting: If Firefox takes that big pile of money, they will use it to improve Firefox, which will make IE's work harder. But: MS also knows that if it made any offer to the Mozilla foundation to change the defaults, Google would match that in an effort to keep from Bing gaining a foothold. In fact, Google can pay more for this than MS could. The result of this bidding war would be that Google stays the default and adds a lot of extra resources to keep Firefox going strong. That is more harmful to MS than the way things are now. So somehow how I expect that this renewal will happen without any noticeable fanfare.
Yeah, that's the first thing I thought. The article seems to assume that every Firefox user is some kind of grandparent that's won't change any defaults without the supervision of their grandchildren. I would assume the opposite - that if the default search box engine changed, 70% of Firefox users would devote their first two clicks to changing it back. Many of the rest would change it after realizing "hey, this isn't Google!" Although I noticed that Bing is working pretty hard to deliver search results without doing much to alert the user that they're not on Google.
I personally tend to agree with this cautious endorsement, but because I live right on top of the Marcellus shale, my otherwise sane friends are freaking about about hydrofracking. I'd love to have an independent and evidence-based source to help me make sense of this. Don't tell me about Gasland and other anecdotal accounts. I'm finding that even I and other educated people don't have much of an idea just how typical Gasland-style anecdotes are, how much gas is won for each such case of methane leakage, and just how bad it is to get methane in your well water? Is this the sort of thing for which we have a filter?
I don't want to dispute anything you said. I basically agree. For the youngest Slashdot readers who can't imagine how we solved all these problems before Google, the answer is that we were forced to ask real people face to face questions. It's funny how this is not really considered as a socially thinkable option anymore - like it's low-class to ask a person instead of your smarphone.
This is not a bad point, and I can sort of relate to what you mean. But still, I find that truly being lost is itself the best discovery tool. You really start paying attention to details when you have that "holy shit, how do I get home from here?" feeling. I've often said to friends that mine is the last generation of humans that will know what it feels like to be lost. That might sound like a good thing, but the human brain has lots of gears in it that are designed for dealing with being lost. I think it's a bit of a shame that we're going to stop using this capacity that we have.
Wow, this must be the first time that some content only works in a proper subset of modern browsers and is broken in the others. Until now, browsers have stuck to strict standards, so that developers wouldn't have to rewrite their code for the quirks of each browser. But I guess that's all over now. What a shame!
I think that reality itself is a part of the problem. Why aren't there actual floating respawning medpacks in the real world? Scientists - get on this! It would do a lot for public health!
Yup, you guys are right. It really is a glider! Stupid me for RTFAing (and not following up). But I still hope that a part of the point of this research is to help design the space plane with a scramjet engine.
[A]n Air Force Minotaur IV rocket which delivers the Falcon to a starting point high in the atmosphere where its engine ignites and if all goes well it will blast through the air for about a half hour, DARPA says.
Did you notice the thing about how it does have an engine? This is not a balistics test. It's a test of what I assume is a fairly mature version of the scamjet, though I wish TFA would have used that word if it indeed is a scramjet engine. But unambiguously, it's some kind of engine that's presumably not a rocket.
It's a part of the space plane project. The future of war (and hopefully lots of peaceful activities as well) is space, and DARPA wants a cheap and reliable way of getting things there. The space shuttle sucked ass. This is a test of an engine that's intended to propel a space plane to near-escape velocity while using an air-breathing engine. If it works, it will be a revolution. By mass, most of the fuel in the main space shuttle fuel tank was oxygen. If you don't need to cart all that weight, imagine all the other stuff you could take up with you!
That kind of money could buy how many new seasons of Firefly? Wow, what a thought! And more seriously, I don't think it would be a bad idea for rich sheiks who don't know what to do with their money to invest in something cultural and immortal like a smart scifi show. It would generate a whole lot of good will and visibility than some vanity theme park or a sign visible from space.
Seriously, how does this selling of kids even work? Is there a section for that on Chinese eBay? Is this just a payment for the permission to adopt, paid by infertile parents? Do adoption agencies bid on them, hoping to "remarket" them with a profit?
I think you have a pretty warped view of what is AI, or maybe I just have a fairly modest view. The programs that separate out my spam emails are AI. And absolutely, we can write a program that can diagnose minus sign blindness and many other common algebra mistakes. These would be much simpler than modern spam blockers. Microsoft Clippy could probably even do it, but don't pretend that we can't do better. That's AI. It's not artificial consciousness or whatever, but it good enough for education.
It's true. If $5B went into developing a full and open instructional curriculum online, we'd be done by now and the whole world would be a better place. I'm not saying that this would fix all of our problems in education, but at least it would give kids who are ready and able to learn the access to an education. Most money in our educational system goes to kids who are either not ready or not able to learn. It's no wonder that with them, progress will be hard to see. I'd much rather see more money spent on educating girls in the third world, or at least those who are motivated to learn. I think they are much more important to the future of our planet than the unmotivated children of US rednecks and methheads.
To be honest, I prefer Obama's "let the private sector do it" approach to manned space travel than the Texas Republican's "only big government can do it" manifesto. (I hope the irony is not lost on anyone.) In general, we need do de-emphasize human missions. These are largely vanity projects and don't generate anywhere near as much science as things like Wmap and the Mars rovers. The first question that any NASA proposal should begin with is: What do we want to learn about space? And what's the safest and most cost-effective way to learn it? These guys are still stuck in the old "wouldn't it be cool if we launched a guy to...?"
It's silly to talk about this as a mechanism for a singularity take-off, but at least somebody is talking about educational AI. Now if anyone would actually try to... you know, write it! As far as I know, there aren't even attempts! Today's AI could easily be "looking over the shoulder" of a student who is stuck while working on an algebra problem and suggest something helpful and context relevant. And there's no doubt that a "primmer" of this sort would be an incredibly useful thing for the world if it were widely available. A year-long course like algebra could be finished in weeks by a talented kid who's working with a competent AI.
Other educational AI functions would depend heavily on natural language processing. Here we're making great strides, but not great enough to for an AI to competently grade an essay and make nuanced suggestions for improvement. Essays on the SAT are already computer-graded, and it's been shown that computer evaluations are as accurate as competent humans, insofar as the computers agree with the humans to the same degree that humans agree with each other. This grading software, if released, would already make an excellent practice tool for all adolescent writers, and it would get a lot more useful once this software was able to say something about why it's giving an essay a B. Obviously, this usefulness would come in degrees, improving in the future, but already its value to education would be substantial. But here too, we're not even trying to use these tools in teaching. So the first obstacle to overcome isn't technological but social. Any country that navigates through the maze of teacher fears and IP laws to produce an open, extensible cutting-edge educational AI - and uses it - will have made a giant investment in its social and economic future.
How about letting those same people immigrate to a country that has plenty of food, like (probably) yours and mine? Is it better to let them starve? It's not like there's some divine law that if you were born in some specific deprived country, you have to stay there. Your lack of imagination is a little sickening.
Because nobody has ever invaded a country with nuclear-tipped ICBMs. They're eager to join the "don't fuck with" club, and this is a big part of the membership qualifications. Now they just need to test a warhead - but unlike the ICBM, there's no way to do this "innocently".
This sounds all scientific and stuff, but basically the sending of larger mammals (plus life support gear) into space also indicates that you can send a nuclear warhead to any place on Earth. The Soviets first did this with Laika aboard Sputnik II, and this basically started a new phase of the cold war.
This security hole and related stealing is definitely a problem, but it's not a problem for Bitcoin. I give it a week before somebody releases a beta version of a simple bitcoin management application that encrypts, backs up and hides the relevant.dat file, as well as providing other functionality for managing your account and maybe even mining. Ideally, this would be a program that you compile yourself, so that you know there's nothing shady in it. I don't see anything in Bitcoin itself which makes it inherently vulnerable to this sort of stealing. A good application for this could make bitcoins at least as safe as your password for online banking.
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This was really informative and good. If I were protecting valuable data, I'd use WPA and a 10-character pass and I'd be protected against hackers with today's leetest gear for the rest of the existence of the universe. That's actually a pretty amazing statistic given just how hackable everything else is these days. Well done, designers of WPA!
So follow me here: Assume (fairly, I think) that MS would pay a lot more than Google is paying now for Mozilla search results. They might make an offer to Firefox to make Bing their default search, offering them substantial money for this. But now it gets interesting: If Firefox takes that big pile of money, they will use it to improve Firefox, which will make IE's work harder. But: MS also knows that if it made any offer to the Mozilla foundation to change the defaults, Google would match that in an effort to keep from Bing gaining a foothold. In fact, Google can pay more for this than MS could. The result of this bidding war would be that Google stays the default and adds a lot of extra resources to keep Firefox going strong. That is more harmful to MS than the way things are now. So somehow how I expect that this renewal will happen without any noticeable fanfare.
Yeah, that's the first thing I thought. The article seems to assume that every Firefox user is some kind of grandparent that's won't change any defaults without the supervision of their grandchildren. I would assume the opposite - that if the default search box engine changed, 70% of Firefox users would devote their first two clicks to changing it back. Many of the rest would change it after realizing "hey, this isn't Google!" Although I noticed that Bing is working pretty hard to deliver search results without doing much to alert the user that they're not on Google.
I personally tend to agree with this cautious endorsement, but because I live right on top of the Marcellus shale, my otherwise sane friends are freaking about about hydrofracking. I'd love to have an independent and evidence-based source to help me make sense of this. Don't tell me about Gasland and other anecdotal accounts. I'm finding that even I and other educated people don't have much of an idea just how typical Gasland-style anecdotes are, how much gas is won for each such case of methane leakage, and just how bad it is to get methane in your well water? Is this the sort of thing for which we have a filter?
I don't want to dispute anything you said. I basically agree. For the youngest Slashdot readers who can't imagine how we solved all these problems before Google, the answer is that we were forced to ask real people face to face questions. It's funny how this is not really considered as a socially thinkable option anymore - like it's low-class to ask a person instead of your smarphone.
This is not a bad point, and I can sort of relate to what you mean. But still, I find that truly being lost is itself the best discovery tool. You really start paying attention to details when you have that "holy shit, how do I get home from here?" feeling. I've often said to friends that mine is the last generation of humans that will know what it feels like to be lost. That might sound like a good thing, but the human brain has lots of gears in it that are designed for dealing with being lost. I think it's a bit of a shame that we're going to stop using this capacity that we have.
I thought that was part of Obamacare...
Yeah, the original version, but not the compromised second draft.
Wow, this must be the first time that some content only works in a proper subset of modern browsers and is broken in the others. Until now, browsers have stuck to strict standards, so that developers wouldn't have to rewrite their code for the quirks of each browser. But I guess that's all over now. What a shame!
Problems with Michael Bay films only become acute when one actually views them. Otherwise, they don't really bother me.
I think that reality itself is a part of the problem. Why aren't there actual floating respawning medpacks in the real world? Scientists - get on this! It would do a lot for public health!
All you are saving with a ramjet is carrying the oxidizer, with all the downsides you mention.
But isn't that like... most of the mass of that dumb rocket on the launchpad? If you could ditch the oxidizer, you could carry a lot more cargo.
Yup, you guys are right. It really is a glider! Stupid me for RTFAing (and not following up). But I still hope that a part of the point of this research is to help design the space plane with a scramjet engine.
[A]n Air Force Minotaur IV rocket which delivers the Falcon to a starting point high in the atmosphere where its engine ignites and if all goes well it will blast through the air for about a half hour, DARPA says.
Did you notice the thing about how it does have an engine? This is not a balistics test. It's a test of what I assume is a fairly mature version of the scamjet, though I wish TFA would have used that word if it indeed is a scramjet engine. But unambiguously, it's some kind of engine that's presumably not a rocket.
It's a part of the space plane project. The future of war (and hopefully lots of peaceful activities as well) is space, and DARPA wants a cheap and reliable way of getting things there. The space shuttle sucked ass. This is a test of an engine that's intended to propel a space plane to near-escape velocity while using an air-breathing engine. If it works, it will be a revolution. By mass, most of the fuel in the main space shuttle fuel tank was oxygen. If you don't need to cart all that weight, imagine all the other stuff you could take up with you!
That kind of money could buy how many new seasons of Firefly? Wow, what a thought! And more seriously, I don't think it would be a bad idea for rich sheiks who don't know what to do with their money to invest in something cultural and immortal like a smart scifi show. It would generate a whole lot of good will and visibility than some vanity theme park or a sign visible from space.
Sounds right. Good post.
Seriously, how does this selling of kids even work? Is there a section for that on Chinese eBay? Is this just a payment for the permission to adopt, paid by infertile parents? Do adoption agencies bid on them, hoping to "remarket" them with a profit?
I think you have a pretty warped view of what is AI, or maybe I just have a fairly modest view. The programs that separate out my spam emails are AI. And absolutely, we can write a program that can diagnose minus sign blindness and many other common algebra mistakes. These would be much simpler than modern spam blockers. Microsoft Clippy could probably even do it, but don't pretend that we can't do better. That's AI. It's not artificial consciousness or whatever, but it good enough for education.
It's true. If $5B went into developing a full and open instructional curriculum online, we'd be done by now and the whole world would be a better place. I'm not saying that this would fix all of our problems in education, but at least it would give kids who are ready and able to learn the access to an education. Most money in our educational system goes to kids who are either not ready or not able to learn. It's no wonder that with them, progress will be hard to see. I'd much rather see more money spent on educating girls in the third world, or at least those who are motivated to learn. I think they are much more important to the future of our planet than the unmotivated children of US rednecks and methheads.
To be honest, I prefer Obama's "let the private sector do it" approach to manned space travel than the Texas Republican's "only big government can do it" manifesto. (I hope the irony is not lost on anyone.) In general, we need do de-emphasize human missions. These are largely vanity projects and don't generate anywhere near as much science as things like Wmap and the Mars rovers. The first question that any NASA proposal should begin with is: What do we want to learn about space? And what's the safest and most cost-effective way to learn it? These guys are still stuck in the old "wouldn't it be cool if we launched a guy to ...?"
It's silly to talk about this as a mechanism for a singularity take-off, but at least somebody is talking about educational AI. Now if anyone would actually try to ... you know, write it! As far as I know, there aren't even attempts! Today's AI could easily be "looking over the shoulder" of a student who is stuck while working on an algebra problem and suggest something helpful and context relevant. And there's no doubt that a "primmer" of this sort would be an incredibly useful thing for the world if it were widely available. A year-long course like algebra could be finished in weeks by a talented kid who's working with a competent AI.
Other educational AI functions would depend heavily on natural language processing. Here we're making great strides, but not great enough to for an AI to competently grade an essay and make nuanced suggestions for improvement. Essays on the SAT are already computer-graded, and it's been shown that computer evaluations are as accurate as competent humans, insofar as the computers agree with the humans to the same degree that humans agree with each other. This grading software, if released, would already make an excellent practice tool for all adolescent writers, and it would get a lot more useful once this software was able to say something about why it's giving an essay a B. Obviously, this usefulness would come in degrees, improving in the future, but already its value to education would be substantial. But here too, we're not even trying to use these tools in teaching. So the first obstacle to overcome isn't technological but social. Any country that navigates through the maze of teacher fears and IP laws to produce an open, extensible cutting-edge educational AI - and uses it - will have made a giant investment in its social and economic future.
How about letting those same people immigrate to a country that has plenty of food, like (probably) yours and mine? Is it better to let them starve? It's not like there's some divine law that if you were born in some specific deprived country, you have to stay there. Your lack of imagination is a little sickening.
Because nobody has ever invaded a country with nuclear-tipped ICBMs. They're eager to join the "don't fuck with" club, and this is a big part of the membership qualifications. Now they just need to test a warhead - but unlike the ICBM, there's no way to do this "innocently".
This sounds all scientific and stuff, but basically the sending of larger mammals (plus life support gear) into space also indicates that you can send a nuclear warhead to any place on Earth. The Soviets first did this with Laika aboard Sputnik II, and this basically started a new phase of the cold war.
This security hole and related stealing is definitely a problem, but it's not a problem for Bitcoin. I give it a week before somebody releases a beta version of a simple bitcoin management application that encrypts, backs up and hides the relevant .dat file, as well as providing other functionality for managing your account and maybe even mining. Ideally, this would be a program that you compile yourself, so that you know there's nothing shady in it. I don't see anything in Bitcoin itself which makes it inherently vulnerable to this sort of stealing. A good application for this could make bitcoins at least as safe as your password for online banking.