I think about it like this: What are some computational problems which today justify a home user in buying an expensive machine rather than a cheap one? Not browsing or productivity or whatever else my mom does. It's media encoding, media processing, rendering and gaming. All of these could be radically sped up when programs effectively make use of the GPU as a supercharged vector unit extension of the CPU. Then there are computer functions like web hosting and compiling that won't benefit from this, but not that many computers do this. So this sort of thing will make a real difference to many real users.
Wow, I've seen some shitty spellers on slashdot, but "want's" deserves some sort of anti-prize. Do you just put an apostrophe in front of every "s" you write? It hurts my eyes when people fuck up plurals, by writing things like "plural's". But you manage to stick an apostrophe into a regular fucking verb? That's a whole other level!
I agree that we could probably pull it off, but I think it's pretty well an irrelevant thought experiment, because within 100 years, I expect global population to start falling. As with everything else, Europe got there first. They are not reproducing at replacement rate and rely on immigration to keep their economy running. When the rest of the world reaches Europe's levels of prosperity, gender equality and education, its fertility rates will match Europe - that is to say, they will be below the replacement value.
Hey, did you consider that even hypocrites are right sometimes? If you want to evaluate whether he's saying the truth, look at what he actually said. It's totally irrelevant that he can't take his own advice.
In a world that's drowning in CO2, it's incredibly stupid to exit nuclear power. I'd love us to see double down on nuclear. But what Merkel said about replacing the nuclear power with non-polluting alternatives is a bald-faced, very public lie. Look for example at this blurb from Scientific American. The gist is that the Germans, because of this move, will be adding 40 million extra tons of CO2 to the atmosphere every year because some hippies wanted to win a fight they started in the 70's - back when we were thinking the world might be cooling. The world thanks you, Germany, you jerks!
But even if you do pull it off, and really can build all that renewable energy capacity that fast. It's still totally irresponsible to shut down nuclear power plants and keep their coal plants running. Those actually kill people... like, many, every year!
Why do I keep getting the same inane message from "Natalia", posted from various temporary accounts? I've blocked every account it's come from; I'm sure many have. Is Skype really too slow to get the hint? Jesus, make the spammers work a bit to change a word here and there! It's shocking to me how little Skype cares about spam and phishing in their network. My point is, you can do all the spam and phishing you want with the native client, because Skype apparently does nothing to stop even the clumsiest of spammers who know how to solve a capcha. So their alleged interest to protect their users was conveniently discovered when the possibility of competition suddenly arose.
No, Firefox is the least bad of the browsers that has a feature that I can't live without. But it pains me to see Chrome all "serious" about UI customizability but then it refuses to customize tabs. I want to use Chrome, or at least try using it and see how it stacks up. But for now, I think a very strange design decision is keeping me from it. I'm not saying that Google has an obligation to do this. I'm saying that if Google wants an extra set of users - which it does - this would be a simple way of doing it. There's a lot more demand for that than... hiding the URL bar! OK? So that's my previous post, interpreted for the feebleminded.
When will I be able to set Chrome so that it doesn't use tabs and opens new windows instead? Firefox has always been able to do this. Why is Chrome forcing me to use tabs when I already have a perfectly nice window manager?
It would be a pretty strange place, given that there would be no day or night. One face of the planet would have permanent day, while the other side would have permanent darkness. That would be very weird for us humans. However, we might be able to extract a lot of "free" energy from tapping into that heat differential. Can you imagine the weather in a place like that? Is it possible that the atmosphere on the dark side actually liquifies in the extreme cold?
The reaction to Khan and his incredible resources is universal: People applaud and cheerfully encourage him to "keep going"
Now imagine if the reaction to Linus Torvalds had been the same in 1993. "Neato, Linus! More please! You're really awesome to have done all this yourself!"
Luckily for the world, that was not the reaction to the release of the Linux source code back then. People were like "Yeah, this is a great start, now let me add something to this so that we can build this into a fully functioning system." To be fair, Linus openly encouraged this and provided a framework for volunteer contributions. Khan doesn't do that, but does nothing to discourage it.
Yeah, his lessons are the work of one man, but already, they contain like 5% of a full curriculum of education. With 19 other Khans working in their spare time, we could finish the job and release "curriculum 1.0". Then, hopefully, many other Khans would work on augmenting and improving it. But it's almost shocking to me that something this important and easy is not being done. There might even be money in it for a company that releases free/openly licensed teaching material and then administers for-pay achievement tests or certification tests. If this were done right, it would be the obviously right path for gifted students, homeschoolers, and people who lack access to good traditional schools. They could go through the material at their own pace and take certification tests as quickly as they work through the material. Wise governments would even offer them a refund for the cost of tests they passed. It's much cheaper than the same government paying to "school" them.
Unfortunately I've seen too much of this. One of the nice things about slashdot is actually the fact that the readers are not segregated politically. It's clearly not a typical political cross-section, but it's diverse enough where it's possible to politely disagree - or defend yourself with hot grits.
I absolutely agree with you. I think that a part of the problem is a lack of demand - or a perceived lack of demand. People who buy monitors seem to be looking at diagonal size, not resolution. I'm sure they tell focus groups that this is what they care about. And there are monitors out there that go to 2560x1600, but they are marketed at "professionals" and are absurdly expensive. What's worse, they seem to be immune to whatever force that's rapidly driving down the prices of the 1080p monitors. Some manufacturer needs to take the plunge and produce these in mass quantities, so they can charge a slightly lower price. I'd become interested once this started to approach $700. Maybe in two years? For now I'm getting by OK with 1920x1200 - a nice monitor resolution that also seems to have gone extinct.
A clever idea. Now when I communicate with all my terrorist buddies, the subject will always be something about V1agra and in the body there will be a GIF of something about "Online pharmacy". Then any gibberish text is bound to fly under every radar.
Or, if not - if the CIA really does have to hire some dweebs to sort through all gibberish spam - that's sure to hasten the inevitable death to America. [BTW, if this is being monitored, I should make clear that my "cell" confines its terrorist activities to our AD&D campaign. This is slashdot, after all.]
It would be a lot easier to wardrive around and log into open wireless access points, or hack into weakly secured ones. Internet cafes in Pakistan could easily have CIA cameras, or at minimum witnesses who could identify you in a photo lineup. I'm pretty sure that the CIA is working with Microsoft to take a closer look at low-usage or short-lived Hotmail accounts opened from Pakistani, Afghani and Yemeni internet cafe IP addresses. That wouldn't even be such a hard thing to do.
For the melting, why not make the submarine a sealed fission reactor and have it slowly melt its way through the ice with just heat and gravity. If the Fukushima reactor can melt its way through a concrete floor, I don't see why ice would be a problem. All that power would be useful for powering giant floodlights under the ice. And for the communication, you'd obviously want a relay station on the surface and another one in orbit around Europa. The latter might an earlier reconnaissance probe that's repurposed for that end. I don't pretend that this would be a simple mission, but I don't think the melting and the radio transmission would be the primary problems.
If we flew over hundreds of miles of Pakistani airspace with freaking Chinooks, why did we bother with stealth helicopters in the first place? Was it just to reduce the noise of inserting the commandos? Chinooks are possibly the least stealthy and most obvious aircraft that the Navy operates. SAM technology from the 50's could take them down. If we were using Chinooks, it's 100% clear that we had the full cooperation of Pakistani air defenses.
I don't care how "stealhy" those helicopters are. Even a primitive country would have been able to fire on a formation of stupid helicopters that crossed hundreds of miles of their airspace and landed within two blocks of their elite military academy. Pakistan is not a primitive country. Why can't we admit that we communicated with them before the mission and asked them not to shoot? Maybe this whole charade is designed to leave the impression that Pakistan has no responsibility for killing Bin Laden, but the story just doesn't add up. They're just throwing up their hands and saying "But those Americans used stealth helicopter technology - we just didn't see them, they were so stealthy!" That's pathetic. If that really were true, India would be laughing their asses off, but nobody with any sense would believe it.
It's attitudes like this that makes companies give up on releasing things to the open source community. In the case of ATI, we've been begging for years, and when we finally got what we want, we're like... "sure, you gave us lots of toilet paper, but our asses are still not wiped, so get on it!"
Well, who's being hurt? Also you could anonymize the pictures and release those versions. The point is that uncensored pictures of people's little kids are floating around right now. If the government stepped in and legalized the ownership of old images while offering protection - and then focused on violators - there would be less of every associated badness. This visceral reaction to the suggestion is making me think that we don't really care about the well-being of children as much as we say we do.
Yeah, maybe they'd have to disguise them enough to be unidentifiable. I thought of this when I wrote the post above but didn't want to make it any longer.
Ever since that stupid book "The Bell Curve", talking about IQ has been considered to be in bad taste, because to many it sounds like a step away from outright racism. And in general, society doesn't feel comfortable with discriminating between people based simply on native intelligence.
However, we are perfectly comfortable with rewarding people for effort, motivation and concentration. So if this is what IQ tests largely measure, it becomes politically OK for, say, an employer to use an IQ test as a part of an application screening. Pretty understandably, every employer will prefer employees capable of higher levels of effort, motivation and concentration (for a fixed reward).
So let's get away from thinking of the IQ test as an intelligence test and start thinking of it as a motivation/concentration test. That will make its relevance much broader.
I think that's pretty insightful, and it's great to get your perspective. You know, in the USA there once was a time when the government just made research jobs for scientists. Now that generally happens only if your research can kill people somehow. In medical research there is still a lot of private money, I hear. I think that US-Americans would be intimidated to go compete for research positions in Germany partly because Germans themselves educate a lot of scientists, but your "more money than jobs" comment made me wonder. BTW, I think you mean "institutions" instead of "assassinations" - but hey, that's a pretty good post for what must be your third language!
That may be, but please don't suggest that Americans don't cheat. The problem isn't the country of origin. The problem is that US university professors are not very interested in catching cheaters. In the few exceptions to this rule, they manage to catch huge numbers, and the cheaters are surprised exactly because they had been using those same transparent tricks for years. There is cheating everywhere in professional programs, because ultimately, universities are not interested in expelling students who are paying their incredibly inflated tuitions.
The whole point of child porn laws is to prevent children from being sexually exploited. I'm 100% behind that. But all those pictures and videos that the police take down were taken a long time ago. You don't protect any children by keeping that stuff off the internet. If anything, by taking down the old stuff, you encourage perverts to make new stuff - to hurt more children.
A more enlightened country would release all the child porn they have ever seized to registered perverts. So if you're willing to register as a pedophile, you can get access to the government's entire stash (maybe not all at once, but gradually). Registration would require a fee and mandatory counseling, and all materials would be watermarked specifically for you so that you wouldn't share them. But if you abided by all this, could do your pedophilia legally. I have a feeling that this would satiate the porn needs of most pedophiles.
The police could then focus on the real source of harm: The people who take sexual advantage of children. The whole point of the scheme would be to destroy the demand for more child victims. If law enforcement worked with the pedophiles a little, I'm sure that the people who are victimizing children now would also be easier to catch. There might be special rewards for snitches whose tips lead to arrest.
I think that with the sheer grossness of the crime of pedophilia, we lose track of what would be the most effective way of dealing with it. Kicking down doors and throwing innocent people down their own stairways is not it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think about it like this: What are some computational problems which today justify a home user in buying an expensive machine rather than a cheap one? Not browsing or productivity or whatever else my mom does. It's media encoding, media processing, rendering and gaming. All of these could be radically sped up when programs effectively make use of the GPU as a supercharged vector unit extension of the CPU. Then there are computer functions like web hosting and compiling that won't benefit from this, but not that many computers do this. So this sort of thing will make a real difference to many real users.
Wow, I've seen some shitty spellers on slashdot, but "want's" deserves some sort of anti-prize. Do you just put an apostrophe in front of every "s" you write? It hurts my eyes when people fuck up plurals, by writing things like "plural's". But you manage to stick an apostrophe into a regular fucking verb? That's a whole other level!
I agree that we could probably pull it off, but I think it's pretty well an irrelevant thought experiment, because within 100 years, I expect global population to start falling. As with everything else, Europe got there first. They are not reproducing at replacement rate and rely on immigration to keep their economy running. When the rest of the world reaches Europe's levels of prosperity, gender equality and education, its fertility rates will match Europe - that is to say, they will be below the replacement value.
Hey, did you consider that even hypocrites are right sometimes? If you want to evaluate whether he's saying the truth, look at what he actually said. It's totally irrelevant that he can't take his own advice.
But even if you do pull it off, and really can build all that renewable energy capacity that fast. It's still totally irresponsible to shut down nuclear power plants and keep their coal plants running. Those actually kill people... like, many, every year!
Why do I keep getting the same inane message from "Natalia", posted from various temporary accounts? I've blocked every account it's come from; I'm sure many have. Is Skype really too slow to get the hint? Jesus, make the spammers work a bit to change a word here and there! It's shocking to me how little Skype cares about spam and phishing in their network. My point is, you can do all the spam and phishing you want with the native client, because Skype apparently does nothing to stop even the clumsiest of spammers who know how to solve a capcha. So their alleged interest to protect their users was conveniently discovered when the possibility of competition suddenly arose.
No, Firefox is the least bad of the browsers that has a feature that I can't live without. But it pains me to see Chrome all "serious" about UI customizability but then it refuses to customize tabs. I want to use Chrome, or at least try using it and see how it stacks up. But for now, I think a very strange design decision is keeping me from it. I'm not saying that Google has an obligation to do this. I'm saying that if Google wants an extra set of users - which it does - this would be a simple way of doing it. There's a lot more demand for that than ... hiding the URL bar! OK? So that's my previous post, interpreted for the feebleminded.
When will I be able to set Chrome so that it doesn't use tabs and opens new windows instead? Firefox has always been able to do this. Why is Chrome forcing me to use tabs when I already have a perfectly nice window manager?
It would be a pretty strange place, given that there would be no day or night. One face of the planet would have permanent day, while the other side would have permanent darkness. That would be very weird for us humans. However, we might be able to extract a lot of "free" energy from tapping into that heat differential. Can you imagine the weather in a place like that? Is it possible that the atmosphere on the dark side actually liquifies in the extreme cold?
The reaction to Khan and his incredible resources is universal: People applaud and cheerfully encourage him to "keep going"
Now imagine if the reaction to Linus Torvalds had been the same in 1993. "Neato, Linus! More please! You're really awesome to have done all this yourself!"
Luckily for the world, that was not the reaction to the release of the Linux source code back then. People were like "Yeah, this is a great start, now let me add something to this so that we can build this into a fully functioning system." To be fair, Linus openly encouraged this and provided a framework for volunteer contributions. Khan doesn't do that, but does nothing to discourage it.
Yeah, his lessons are the work of one man, but already, they contain like 5% of a full curriculum of education. With 19 other Khans working in their spare time, we could finish the job and release "curriculum 1.0". Then, hopefully, many other Khans would work on augmenting and improving it. But it's almost shocking to me that something this important and easy is not being done. There might even be money in it for a company that releases free/openly licensed teaching material and then administers for-pay achievement tests or certification tests. If this were done right, it would be the obviously right path for gifted students, homeschoolers, and people who lack access to good traditional schools. They could go through the material at their own pace and take certification tests as quickly as they work through the material. Wise governments would even offer them a refund for the cost of tests they passed. It's much cheaper than the same government paying to "school" them.
Unfortunately I've seen too much of this. One of the nice things about slashdot is actually the fact that the readers are not segregated politically. It's clearly not a typical political cross-section, but it's diverse enough where it's possible to politely disagree - or defend yourself with hot grits.
I absolutely agree with you. I think that a part of the problem is a lack of demand - or a perceived lack of demand. People who buy monitors seem to be looking at diagonal size, not resolution. I'm sure they tell focus groups that this is what they care about. And there are monitors out there that go to 2560x1600, but they are marketed at "professionals" and are absurdly expensive. What's worse, they seem to be immune to whatever force that's rapidly driving down the prices of the 1080p monitors. Some manufacturer needs to take the plunge and produce these in mass quantities, so they can charge a slightly lower price. I'd become interested once this started to approach $700. Maybe in two years? For now I'm getting by OK with 1920x1200 - a nice monitor resolution that also seems to have gone extinct.
A clever idea. Now when I communicate with all my terrorist buddies, the subject will always be something about V1agra and in the body there will be a GIF of something about "Online pharmacy". Then any gibberish text is bound to fly under every radar.
Or, if not - if the CIA really does have to hire some dweebs to sort through all gibberish spam - that's sure to hasten the inevitable death to America. [BTW, if this is being monitored, I should make clear that my "cell" confines its terrorist activities to our AD&D campaign. This is slashdot, after all.]
It would be a lot easier to wardrive around and log into open wireless access points, or hack into weakly secured ones. Internet cafes in Pakistan could easily have CIA cameras, or at minimum witnesses who could identify you in a photo lineup. I'm pretty sure that the CIA is working with Microsoft to take a closer look at low-usage or short-lived Hotmail accounts opened from Pakistani, Afghani and Yemeni internet cafe IP addresses. That wouldn't even be such a hard thing to do.
For the melting, why not make the submarine a sealed fission reactor and have it slowly melt its way through the ice with just heat and gravity. If the Fukushima reactor can melt its way through a concrete floor, I don't see why ice would be a problem. All that power would be useful for powering giant floodlights under the ice. And for the communication, you'd obviously want a relay station on the surface and another one in orbit around Europa. The latter might an earlier reconnaissance probe that's repurposed for that end. I don't pretend that this would be a simple mission, but I don't think the melting and the radio transmission would be the primary problems.
If we flew over hundreds of miles of Pakistani airspace with freaking Chinooks, why did we bother with stealth helicopters in the first place? Was it just to reduce the noise of inserting the commandos? Chinooks are possibly the least stealthy and most obvious aircraft that the Navy operates. SAM technology from the 50's could take them down. If we were using Chinooks, it's 100% clear that we had the full cooperation of Pakistani air defenses.
I don't care how "stealhy" those helicopters are. Even a primitive country would have been able to fire on a formation of stupid helicopters that crossed hundreds of miles of their airspace and landed within two blocks of their elite military academy. Pakistan is not a primitive country. Why can't we admit that we communicated with them before the mission and asked them not to shoot? Maybe this whole charade is designed to leave the impression that Pakistan has no responsibility for killing Bin Laden, but the story just doesn't add up. They're just throwing up their hands and saying "But those Americans used stealth helicopter technology - we just didn't see them, they were so stealthy!" That's pathetic. If that really were true, India would be laughing their asses off, but nobody with any sense would believe it.
It's attitudes like this that makes companies give up on releasing things to the open source community. In the case of ATI, we've been begging for years, and when we finally got what we want, we're like... "sure, you gave us lots of toilet paper, but our asses are still not wiped, so get on it!"
Well, who's being hurt? Also you could anonymize the pictures and release those versions. The point is that uncensored pictures of people's little kids are floating around right now. If the government stepped in and legalized the ownership of old images while offering protection - and then focused on violators - there would be less of every associated badness. This visceral reaction to the suggestion is making me think that we don't really care about the well-being of children as much as we say we do.
Yeah, maybe they'd have to disguise them enough to be unidentifiable. I thought of this when I wrote the post above but didn't want to make it any longer.
Ever since that stupid book "The Bell Curve", talking about IQ has been considered to be in bad taste, because to many it sounds like a step away from outright racism. And in general, society doesn't feel comfortable with discriminating between people based simply on native intelligence.
However, we are perfectly comfortable with rewarding people for effort, motivation and concentration. So if this is what IQ tests largely measure, it becomes politically OK for, say, an employer to use an IQ test as a part of an application screening. Pretty understandably, every employer will prefer employees capable of higher levels of effort, motivation and concentration (for a fixed reward).
So let's get away from thinking of the IQ test as an intelligence test and start thinking of it as a motivation/concentration test. That will make its relevance much broader.
I think that's pretty insightful, and it's great to get your perspective. You know, in the USA there once was a time when the government just made research jobs for scientists. Now that generally happens only if your research can kill people somehow. In medical research there is still a lot of private money, I hear. I think that US-Americans would be intimidated to go compete for research positions in Germany partly because Germans themselves educate a lot of scientists, but your "more money than jobs" comment made me wonder. BTW, I think you mean "institutions" instead of "assassinations" - but hey, that's a pretty good post for what must be your third language!
That may be, but please don't suggest that Americans don't cheat. The problem isn't the country of origin. The problem is that US university professors are not very interested in catching cheaters. In the few exceptions to this rule, they manage to catch huge numbers, and the cheaters are surprised exactly because they had been using those same transparent tricks for years. There is cheating everywhere in professional programs, because ultimately, universities are not interested in expelling students who are paying their incredibly inflated tuitions.
Hillarious!
The whole point of child porn laws is to prevent children from being sexually exploited. I'm 100% behind that. But all those pictures and videos that the police take down were taken a long time ago. You don't protect any children by keeping that stuff off the internet. If anything, by taking down the old stuff, you encourage perverts to make new stuff - to hurt more children.
A more enlightened country would release all the child porn they have ever seized to registered perverts. So if you're willing to register as a pedophile, you can get access to the government's entire stash (maybe not all at once, but gradually). Registration would require a fee and mandatory counseling, and all materials would be watermarked specifically for you so that you wouldn't share them. But if you abided by all this, could do your pedophilia legally. I have a feeling that this would satiate the porn needs of most pedophiles.
The police could then focus on the real source of harm: The people who take sexual advantage of children. The whole point of the scheme would be to destroy the demand for more child victims. If law enforcement worked with the pedophiles a little, I'm sure that the people who are victimizing children now would also be easier to catch. There might be special rewards for snitches whose tips lead to arrest.
I think that with the sheer grossness of the crime of pedophilia, we lose track of what would be the most effective way of dealing with it. Kicking down doors and throwing innocent people down their own stairways is not it.