Yes he did, I'm pretty sure he's that one troll that has been going around spilling his bile at every "oblig xkcd" post the last couple of days, and is now trying to supply justification for his strange obsession.
Isn't something FUCKED UP here? Here's a suggestion -- if you want students to be original in their essays, then don't reward them based on how many catch phrases about "diversity", "community service", and all that bullshit. Reward essays that 1) tell you something good about the student, and 2) tell you SOMETHING about the student other than their ability to understand and replicate what ridiculous pseudopolitical buzzword gibberish you happen to be enamored with due to some passing fad.
I think there's a glaring hole in your argument -- you're assuming that the only stimuli that can be unpleasant in this sense are immediate auditory/visual ones of someone else suffering. If you expand that to include the knowledge that suffering is taking place as a sort of stimulus, then your argument seems to no longer hold.
Exactly, but it can be stated more generally. GP said that the military's role is "accessing new threats", but a large part of that is acquiring intelligence/knowledge of potential strategic importance, preferably before anyone else does. Even though hundreds of light years away, the actual discovery of technologically advanced extra-solar life would most definitely be of very high strategic importance, even if only just for the reason you gave.
Maybe true, I have no idea. Even so, I think it's hard to deny that in every case, the same actor under the same director will put out a better performance the more immersed they are in the target environment.
Maybe they're just trying to make a point? They don't seem to say that nothing should ever be done in CGI, I think they're just saying that it has its place. Sure, some things, even goodthings, are entirely in CGI (well, actually, a lot of those "completely CGI" films use motion capture, so they're not really completely CGI; with exceptions, e.g. Ratatouille), but who among us would disagree that a bit less CGI would have made the acting in the Star Wars prequels less, let's say, plastic?
Well, there are certainly degrees to it. A script kiddie probably couldn't have pulled off stuxnet, because he wouldn't have intel about how Iran't enrichment program is run and such.
Am I the only one who is kind of worried about the whole stuxnet/duqu thing? We've been hearing/hypothesizing about the dangers of "cyber-warfare" (as much as I hate the term) for a while, pretty much since the beginning of Internet malware, but it seems as though recently shit has finally started to hit the fan, first with increasingly worrying allegations about Chinese hackers and such, and now with this (which seems to be the doing of the US/Israel, at least a lot of people think it is).
If things continue along this trend, one could expect a really bleak future for the Internet where major world governments and other well-financed organizations have virtually unlimited power to do what they like with any computerized system, and continually carry out covert attacks against each other. It seems the only thing that could prevent that from realizing would be some major game-changing advances in computer security, but I'm not seeing any indication that that's likely to happen...
Uhh OK, thanks for the info, like I said I don't know anything on the subject, I was just going by what the paper said. Don't know why you're so angry, though...
Yes, I discovered that after looking at the full paper (assuming that correction is done continuously of course, not as a single calibration stage in the beginning). Unless you were able to somehow get a correlation between the bits so that the mean was still 0.5, but there were some correlations or other dependencies you could take advantage of. Though that seems harder.
The full paper (link by "Vario" above) seems to indicate that they get random bits, i.e. coin tosses, and claim that they can get a uniform distribution (i.e. 0.5). They also say that "Any possible bias in the phase measurement is removed by post-processing using a fair bit extractor algorithm", citing two papers* (i.e. that though their measurements could lead to a slightly different distribution, they can correct for that). I'm not familiar with the technique, but I guess it's well established. They also show results and say that they did something called the "DIEHARD statistical test suite" (which is apparently a set of tests designed exactly for this problem, i.e. random number generation), and "confirm[ed] that the measured optical phase is a suitable source of random numbers", though I'll have to take them at their word because I'm not familiar with the theory behind this.
*
First:
J. von Neumann, “Various techniques used in connection with random digits,” Nat. Bur. Stand., Appl. Math Ser. 12, 36–38 (1951).
Second:
A. Juels, M. Jakobsson, E. Shriver, and B. Hillyer, “How to turn loaded dice into fair coins,” IEEE Trans. Inf.
Theory 46, 911 –921 (2000).)
Absolutely true -- if you replace the diamond with one that produces numbers following some other distribution than the original, even if it's slightly different, that could introduce a massive vulnerability for a dedicated attacker to exploit. The same holds without the attacker needing to replace anything, if he has a slightly better estimate of the distribution that the random number generator follows than the creator of the system (e.g. if the person using it thinks they're getting 0/1 with exactly 0.5 probability, but the attacker knows it's actually closer to 0.5000001).
Doesn't apply; in measure theory "almost sure" means "holds except for a measurable set of measure zero". The sequence "9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9", even repeated infinitely, has exactly the same measure as, say, any other sequence of numbers 1-100 generated i.i.d. uniformly (roughly speaking -- the infinite sequences all have measure zero, so the statement must either be made "in the limit", or some other way).
Why does the US have a system where illegal is the norm? It makes no sense! Naturalize them, bring them into the system, and have them pay their share of the taxes. Having so many people in this grey area is ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes he did, I'm pretty sure he's that one troll that has been going around spilling his bile at every "oblig xkcd" post the last couple of days, and is now trying to supply justification for his strange obsession.
Isn't something FUCKED UP here? Here's a suggestion -- if you want students to be original in their essays, then don't reward them based on how many catch phrases about "diversity", "community service", and all that bullshit. Reward essays that 1) tell you something good about the student, and 2) tell you SOMETHING about the student other than their ability to understand and replicate what ridiculous pseudopolitical buzzword gibberish you happen to be enamored with due to some passing fad.
God damn this is ridiculous...
I think there's a glaring hole in your argument -- you're assuming that the only stimuli that can be unpleasant in this sense are immediate auditory/visual ones of someone else suffering. If you expand that to include the knowledge that suffering is taking place as a sort of stimulus, then your argument seems to no longer hold.
Hey, don't rip on Pittsburghese!
highest ratio of parenthesized text ever! also, i agree completely and have nothing of value to add to the discussion.
Which only makes a constant factor difference (potentially large, but still constant), unless it's using a laser (which it isn't, trust me).
Exactly, but it can be stated more generally. GP said that the military's role is "accessing new threats", but a large part of that is acquiring intelligence/knowledge of potential strategic importance, preferably before anyone else does. Even though hundreds of light years away, the actual discovery of technologically advanced extra-solar life would most definitely be of very high strategic importance, even if only just for the reason you gave.
See, CAMELS: http://tehranlive.org/2011/03/08/camels-in-city/
Wasn't the premise of that movie that some systems are becoming so complex that they are doing things nobody wished for and nobody knows about?
Maybe true, I have no idea. Even so, I think it's hard to deny that in every case, the same actor under the same director will put out a better performance the more immersed they are in the target environment.
Well I was also referring to the excessive green screening, that made a talented actor like Portman look like some B-movie extra.
Maybe they're just trying to make a point? They don't seem to say that nothing should ever be done in CGI, I think they're just saying that it has its place. Sure, some things, even goodthings, are entirely in CGI (well, actually, a lot of those "completely CGI" films use motion capture, so they're not really completely CGI; with exceptions, e.g. Ratatouille), but who among us would disagree that a bit less CGI would have made the acting in the Star Wars prequels less, let's say, plastic?
Goatse alert.
It's the closest thing to it in developed nations (except for sex trafficking, but that's relatively minor, in terms of numbers).
That's extremely interesting, considering that I did in fact read it. You have just proven that common logic is inconsistent, congratulations!
Well, there are certainly degrees to it. A script kiddie probably couldn't have pulled off stuxnet, because he wouldn't have intel about how Iran't enrichment program is run and such.
Didn't the very first link in the summary do that?
Am I the only one who is kind of worried about the whole stuxnet/duqu thing? We've been hearing/hypothesizing about the dangers of "cyber-warfare" (as much as I hate the term) for a while, pretty much since the beginning of Internet malware, but it seems as though recently shit has finally started to hit the fan, first with increasingly worrying allegations about Chinese hackers and such, and now with this (which seems to be the doing of the US/Israel, at least a lot of people think it is).
If things continue along this trend, one could expect a really bleak future for the Internet where major world governments and other well-financed organizations have virtually unlimited power to do what they like with any computerized system, and continually carry out covert attacks against each other. It seems the only thing that could prevent that from realizing would be some major game-changing advances in computer security, but I'm not seeing any indication that that's likely to happen...
Uhh OK, thanks for the info, like I said I don't know anything on the subject, I was just going by what the paper said. Don't know why you're so angry, though...
Yes, I discovered that after looking at the full paper (assuming that correction is done continuously of course, not as a single calibration stage in the beginning). Unless you were able to somehow get a correlation between the bits so that the mean was still 0.5, but there were some correlations or other dependencies you could take advantage of. Though that seems harder.
The full paper (link by "Vario" above) seems to indicate that they get random bits, i.e. coin tosses, and claim that they can get a uniform distribution (i.e. 0.5). They also say that "Any possible bias in the phase measurement is removed by post-processing using a fair bit extractor algorithm", citing two papers* (i.e. that though their measurements could lead to a slightly different distribution, they can correct for that). I'm not familiar with the technique, but I guess it's well established. They also show results and say that they did something called the "DIEHARD statistical test suite" (which is apparently a set of tests designed exactly for this problem, i.e. random number generation), and "confirm[ed] that the measured optical phase is a suitable source of random numbers", though I'll have to take them at their word because I'm not familiar with the theory behind this.
* First:
J. von Neumann, “Various techniques used in connection with random digits,” Nat. Bur. Stand., Appl. Math Ser. 12, 36–38 (1951).
Second:
A. Juels, M. Jakobsson, E. Shriver, and B. Hillyer, “How to turn loaded dice into fair coins,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 46, 911 –921 (2000).)
Absolutely true -- if you replace the diamond with one that produces numbers following some other distribution than the original, even if it's slightly different, that could introduce a massive vulnerability for a dedicated attacker to exploit. The same holds without the attacker needing to replace anything, if he has a slightly better estimate of the distribution that the random number generator follows than the creator of the system (e.g. if the person using it thinks they're getting 0/1 with exactly 0.5 probability, but the attacker knows it's actually closer to 0.5000001).
Doesn't apply; in measure theory "almost sure" means "holds except for a measurable set of measure zero". The sequence "9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9", even repeated infinitely, has exactly the same measure as, say, any other sequence of numbers 1-100 generated i.i.d. uniformly (roughly speaking -- the infinite sequences all have measure zero, so the statement must either be made "in the limit", or some other way).
Why does the US have a system where illegal is the norm? It makes no sense! Naturalize them, bring them into the system, and have them pay their share of the taxes. Having so many people in this grey area is ridiculous.
Because slave labor kicks ass, that's why.
Wait, so heat and wifi actually INCREASE sperm count 10-fold?! The world must know!!! Statistics, motherfucker, do you understand it?