I am supporting Ron Paul.
Out of ALL the candidates (democratic and republican) he is the only one saying what he honestly believes. I do NOT agree with all his positions- but at least I know what his positions are.
Listen bud... You do not get to the point of running for President of the United States by telling the truth. Fuck, you can't even make VP in a reasonably small corporation by telling the truth. This guy, like everybody else, is telling you what you want to hear. That may or may not correlate with what he thinks. You have no way of knowing that. Having a good feeling about somebody is not enough. A lot of my friends had a "good feeling" about Bush when they voted for him in 2000. Guess what those people think now?
I wish we had a candidate who was physiologically incapable of lying. A dog, maybe. I'd vote for that.
These benchmarks are interesting, but are they relevant to real life? There are too many factors to say.
Consider a 20 watt CPU which sits idle 99% of the time. Then imagine a 40 watt CPU which is loaded to 100% all the time. Which is "worse?" I'd say the 20 watt CPU is worse, because it's 20 watts of completely USELESS power.
Or imagine that a corporation has a cash-cow application. They can make $10 million per year if they run it on server X which draws 2000 watts. Or, they could make $5 million if they run it on server Y which draws 1000 watts. Is server Y really "better" than server X just because it draws less power? The company would need two Y boxes to get the same performance, and then they'd be back up to 2000 watts again.
Measuring things like "cycles per watt-hour" or even just pure power usage don't really say anything about whether a CPU is preferable in any particular circumstance. Let's invent a unit called the "benefiton," which is a single unit of "benefit to humanity." We really want to optimize "benefitons per watt-hour," not cycles per watt-hour, dollars per watt-hour, or anything else. But defining what a benefiton really is is almost impossible.
Just measuring which processors consume certain amounts of power isn't going to help us optimize our usage of energy on this planet.
1. "Stupidly" give sensitive data to intern, knowing he'll take it somewhere in his car.
2. Steal tape from car, since you know precisely where it is.
3. Sell data for PROFIT!!!!!
4. Get docked a week's vacation, but who cares, you just got rich!
Re:Because humans and computers are different
on
Cracking Go
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· Score: 1
Thus a similar thing probably would work well for Go, especially if you can do an exhaustive search and go to literally ALL endpoints for every move.
Except you can't. Go has such a large branching factor that you really can't get more than a few ply at the beginning of the game, even with the dumbest possible evaluation function (counting your material advantage). We can't even solve chess this way, and it has a starting branching factor of 20 as opposed to Go's 361.
Many good human players work off of psychological aspects of the game. Kasparov, for example, was known for "throwing lightning bolts" at the game board, doing things other people couldn't cope with. That doesn't work for a system that just analyzes the current position and where it can go from here. There's no way to confuse something like that, no way to play to a mental state.
It is in fact possible to "confuse" a tree-search game player. Because there is no possible way to search all the way to the end-game, evaluation has to stop at a certain depth. An evaluation function is applied which basically assigns a value indicating how likely it is that this position will ultimately lead to a win. If you can get the computer into a position which looks awesome (according to its evaluation function) but is actually a loss, you've just "confused" it. Until the search starts hitting the end-game, this is always a possibility.
Re:Read an article to this effect....
on
Cracking Go
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Meanwhile, the exhaustive search is really the least interesting way you could possibly do it, and won't likely provide you with much insight on Go, or related matters. *yawn*
Exhaustive search may be boring, but it is also the only theoretically sound method. Aggressive forward pruning of game trees always has a danger factor (you might prune a move that looks bad at depth 5 but is actually a win at depth 10), and this danger is massively increased in games with large branching factors like Go. Basically you are greatly amplifying the horizon effect.
Methods such as Prob-Cut and Multi-Prob-Cut have proven useful in games with extremely high branching factors where the evaluation function has strong correlations between depths (games like Amazons, which has an initial branching factor of 2176, far larger than Go's 361). However there is always risk associated with statistical pruning methods.
Really, the only theoretically sound method of forward pruning is to define a specific evaluation function and then produce proofs that certain board configurations cannot cause an increase in the evaluation. But these proofs are hard or impossible to construct and often they only apply in positions which are already clearly bad.
In my opinion, it's not that computers are terribly bad at Go. It's that humans are unusually good at it. I am regularly whomped by my own Amazons-playing program and that program can't even look to ply 2 at the opening of the game. On the other hand, I destroy most of the simpler Go programs, even though I absolutely suck at Go.
The logic is: Math is part of most physical theories. Therefore Math is physical.
Once again, math isn't part of the theory. It is the method by which the theory is specified. Physics still exists without math. The same can't be said of time. But you're boring, so I won't respond to any further bullshit.
Who said anything about getting him home ? I'd just be pissed the asshole didn't return my car when he was told to. The kid gets what he deserves. Shut off the car and call a tow truck giving them the GPS coordinates. Strand the kid and maybe some gang will beat some sense into him. Bet he'll not make that mistake ever again.
You are a moron as well as an asshole. Why have children if you are just going to be sadistic with them? I can't seriously believe any parent would want their kid beat up by a gang because he was a few minutes past his curfew. You are one sick fuck.
Parents are far too lenient with their kids these days. Especially considering the kids have the upper hand with technology (usually). It's time for us to take it back and show the kids who's boss.
How about not letting the kid take the car again and docking him one month's car payment? Too obvious? Not cruel enough? I'm sure you were a perfect fucking angel as a child.
I have a sneaking suspicion I'm being trolled, though.
If OnStar can turn the car off, they can also provide the GPS location to the parent in realtime, perhaps thourgh a web interface (updating every X seconds with latest position) for a nominal fee.
So you'll only strand your kid in "safe" locations? I had no idea you could determine the safety of a location based on its GPS coordinates. Do you have some kind of formula that does this?
Also, how is disabling you kid's vehicle going to get him home on time?
That's why you use the GPS function first. Plus they arent stranded, just slow as sin..
Calling him on the phone isn't an option? By stranding him what are you accomplishing? You want him home so... You make it impossible for him to get home?
I imagine some parents would be thrilled about installing something like this in the car of their teenagers. "Come back by 10 pm or I'll shut off the car."
Yeah, brilliant fucking plan there, Einstein. You DON'T KNOW WHERE YOUR CHILD IS. He could be on his way home on the freeway when his car suddenly shuts off, he collides with something and dies. Or he could be in the worst part of town, and you've just STRANDED him there. God, I hope you don't have kids.
You could make the argument that this is a violation of certain rights (although I'm not sure which rights those would be). But PRIVACY? What the hell does the functional status of your motor vehicle have to do with your privacy?
You missed the sarcasm and the point. The logic is flawed and the conclusion incorrect. Try again.
The logic is: Time is a part of most physical theories. Therefore time is physical. If this is flawed, I'd appreciate an explanation rather than a "You're wrong, fool."
This phrasing suggests that Math is not a physical thing. Given that Math occurs in practically all dynamic equations of physics, I'd have to disagree with the assertion that Math isn't physical.
No. Math is a tool for formulating the theory. Time is not a "tool," but an intrinsic PART of the theory. "Try again."
So? The victims in these cases are children. You just tell them who to say did the deed. No "deed" ever need be committed in the first place. A picture of a naked child is not child porn in and of itself. You could take some innocent bath-tub image, 'shop a Supreme Court Justice into the picture, then tell the kid you'll give him/her 500 pounds of chocolate if they say "Mr. Thomas did it."
Or you could tell them that mommy and daddy are going to go away forever if he/she doesn't say what you want them to say. There are a million ways to pull it off when kids are involved.
Also interesting is the fact that a pixel-based device can only represent a FINITE number of images. At, say, 24-bit color with a resolution of 1280x1024, there are 2^24^1280^1024 possible images. That's an enormous number, but it's FINITE.
What does it mean though? Are there an infinite number of images out there that we can never see, due to the limited ability of our display devices? In actuality the human eye is limited in its ability to distinguish color and spatial variation, and so even our finite screens are probably sufficient to display anything we might ever be interested in looking at.
Your "cue" has brought precisely zero people out of the woodwork. The technological aspect of this story is far more interesting that the legal aspect -- I think we can all agree that sexual predation on children is horrific. Nice try. Actually, I take that back. Pathetic try.
How do they know it's the guy and not some random someone-else?
You'd have to be pretty dumb to use your own picture...oh wait, he's an idiot anyway.
Nice circular argument there. "Only an idiot would place his own face in the picture. There is a face in the picture. It must be his, because he's an idiot."
Wouldn't it be funny if they did the unscrambling and some well-known political figure's face emerged?
I believe that if the government is going to use software that may have a negative impact on a person's life (not saying this guy is innocent, just in general) then the source needs to be freely available for peer review so that the margin for error can be out in the open and the quality of the code verified.
Are you seriously suggesting that a bug in the code could cause the software to reproduce some INNOCENT person's face instead of the real face?
Anyway, your naivete is sort of amusing. If the government says "Yeah, we're using software X, here's the source code for you to look over," are you actually going to believe they are really using that code?
A blur on the other hand, especially a gaussian blur, will mix pixels together in such a way that any recovered image will be one of many possible outcomes.
This statement is false. A convolution is a linear option which maps N degrees of freedom to N degrees of freedom, and is perfectly reversible (in theory). In practice, the quantization of pixel values makes it somewhat lossy, but still reversible, although not perfectly.
Even if you used an infinite blur (IIR gaussian or something), most of the relevant information remains in the image. Blur is easily reversed.
As a physical analogy, imagine projecting an image through a lens which blurs the image at a certain focal distance. This blur can easily be corrected simply by using a second lens. Information is not lost in the blurring process, it is just spread around somewhat.
Interesting idea. I have a few digital cameras, at least one of them has a couple of "dead pixels" on the CCD. These pixels appear pink on the raw images. However, the effect cannot be seen if the camera is not in raw mode.
I assume the camera firmware corrects for dead pixels (probably substitutes an average of the neighboring pixels for the value of the dead pixel) so you don't see them normally. When the camera is manufactured they can test where the dead pixels are and program those locations into the firmware. But try flipping your camera to raw mode and see what you get. A particular pattern of dead pixels COULD be very strong evidence, although you still have to prove who was operating the camera when the image was taken.
In theory all convolutions are completely reversible, including FIR blur, even very extreme blur. In practice, though, the pixels of an image have finite depth of color and information is lost during convolution. If there was such a thing as "Infinite-bit color" (as opposed to say, 24 bit color), then it could be reversed perfectly, no matter how blurred it was.
For IIR blur, where the kernel is basically infinitely large, it is no longer possible to exactly reverse the blur, because the result is infinitely large (thus the first "I" in "IIR"). Since all real images are finite, this means a lot of necessary information is cropped away and the blur cannot be reversed.
Isn't "time" only subtlety different from a physical dimension?
This phrasing suggests that time is not a physical thing. Given that the variable "t" occurs in practically all dynamic equations of physics, I'd have to disagree with the assertion that time isn't physical.
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I am supporting Ron Paul. Out of ALL the candidates (democratic and republican) he is the only one saying what he honestly believes. I do NOT agree with all his positions- but at least I know what his positions are.
Listen bud... You do not get to the point of running for President of the United States by telling the truth. Fuck, you can't even make VP in a reasonably small corporation by telling the truth. This guy, like everybody else, is telling you what you want to hear. That may or may not correlate with what he thinks. You have no way of knowing that. Having a good feeling about somebody is not enough. A lot of my friends had a "good feeling" about Bush when they voted for him in 2000. Guess what those people think now?
I wish we had a candidate who was physiologically incapable of lying. A dog, maybe. I'd vote for that.
These benchmarks are interesting, but are they relevant to real life? There are too many factors to say.
Consider a 20 watt CPU which sits idle 99% of the time. Then imagine a 40 watt CPU which is loaded to 100% all the time. Which is "worse?" I'd say the 20 watt CPU is worse, because it's 20 watts of completely USELESS power.
Or imagine that a corporation has a cash-cow application. They can make $10 million per year if they run it on server X which draws 2000 watts. Or, they could make $5 million if they run it on server Y which draws 1000 watts. Is server Y really "better" than server X just because it draws less power? The company would need two Y boxes to get the same performance, and then they'd be back up to 2000 watts again.
Measuring things like "cycles per watt-hour" or even just pure power usage don't really say anything about whether a CPU is preferable in any particular circumstance. Let's invent a unit called the "benefiton," which is a single unit of "benefit to humanity." We really want to optimize "benefitons per watt-hour," not cycles per watt-hour, dollars per watt-hour, or anything else. But defining what a benefiton really is is almost impossible.
Just measuring which processors consume certain amounts of power isn't going to help us optimize our usage of energy on this planet.
1. "Stupidly" give sensitive data to intern, knowing he'll take it somewhere in his car.
2. Steal tape from car, since you know precisely where it is.
3. Sell data for PROFIT!!!!!
4. Get docked a week's vacation, but who cares, you just got rich!
Thus a similar thing probably would work well for Go, especially if you can do an exhaustive search and go to literally ALL endpoints for every move.
Except you can't. Go has such a large branching factor that you really can't get more than a few ply at the beginning of the game, even with the dumbest possible evaluation function (counting your material advantage). We can't even solve chess this way, and it has a starting branching factor of 20 as opposed to Go's 361.
Many good human players work off of psychological aspects of the game. Kasparov, for example, was known for "throwing lightning bolts" at the game board, doing things other people couldn't cope with. That doesn't work for a system that just analyzes the current position and where it can go from here. There's no way to confuse something like that, no way to play to a mental state.
It is in fact possible to "confuse" a tree-search game player. Because there is no possible way to search all the way to the end-game, evaluation has to stop at a certain depth. An evaluation function is applied which basically assigns a value indicating how likely it is that this position will ultimately lead to a win. If you can get the computer into a position which looks awesome (according to its evaluation function) but is actually a loss, you've just "confused" it. Until the search starts hitting the end-game, this is always a possibility.
Meanwhile, the exhaustive search is really the least interesting way you could possibly do it, and won't likely provide you with much insight on Go, or related matters. *yawn*
Exhaustive search may be boring, but it is also the only theoretically sound method. Aggressive forward pruning of game trees always has a danger factor (you might prune a move that looks bad at depth 5 but is actually a win at depth 10), and this danger is massively increased in games with large branching factors like Go. Basically you are greatly amplifying the horizon effect.
Methods such as Prob-Cut and Multi-Prob-Cut have proven useful in games with extremely high branching factors where the evaluation function has strong correlations between depths (games like Amazons, which has an initial branching factor of 2176, far larger than Go's 361). However there is always risk associated with statistical pruning methods.
Really, the only theoretically sound method of forward pruning is to define a specific evaluation function and then produce proofs that certain board configurations cannot cause an increase in the evaluation. But these proofs are hard or impossible to construct and often they only apply in positions which are already clearly bad.
In my opinion, it's not that computers are terribly bad at Go. It's that humans are unusually good at it. I am regularly whomped by my own Amazons-playing program and that program can't even look to ply 2 at the opening of the game. On the other hand, I destroy most of the simpler Go programs, even though I absolutely suck at Go.
The logic is: Math is part of most physical theories. Therefore Math is physical.
Once again, math isn't part of the theory. It is the method by which the theory is specified. Physics still exists without math. The same can't be said of time. But you're boring, so I won't respond to any further bullshit.
Her defense sucked... Apparently, so did the jury...
Right then. Let's abolish juries and let everything be decided by a dictator. The jury's decision is what it is -- that's the whole point.
Who said anything about getting him home ? I'd just be pissed the asshole didn't return my car when he was told to. The kid gets what he deserves. Shut off the car and call a tow truck giving them the GPS coordinates. Strand the kid and maybe some gang will beat some sense into him. Bet he'll not make that mistake ever again.
You are a moron as well as an asshole. Why have children if you are just going to be sadistic with them? I can't seriously believe any parent would want their kid beat up by a gang because he was a few minutes past his curfew. You are one sick fuck.
Parents are far too lenient with their kids these days. Especially considering the kids have the upper hand with technology (usually). It's time for us to take it back and show the kids who's boss.
How about not letting the kid take the car again and docking him one month's car payment? Too obvious? Not cruel enough? I'm sure you were a perfect fucking angel as a child.
I have a sneaking suspicion I'm being trolled, though.
If OnStar can turn the car off, they can also provide the GPS location to the parent in realtime, perhaps thourgh a web interface (updating every X seconds with latest position) for a nominal fee.
So you'll only strand your kid in "safe" locations? I had no idea you could determine the safety of a location based on its GPS coordinates. Do you have some kind of formula that does this?
Also, how is disabling you kid's vehicle going to get him home on time?
That's why you use the GPS function first. Plus they arent stranded, just slow as sin..
Calling him on the phone isn't an option? By stranding him what are you accomplishing? You want him home so... You make it impossible for him to get home?
I imagine some parents would be thrilled about installing something like this in the car of their teenagers. "Come back by 10 pm or I'll shut off the car."
Yeah, brilliant fucking plan there, Einstein. You DON'T KNOW WHERE YOUR CHILD IS. He could be on his way home on the freeway when his car suddenly shuts off, he collides with something and dies. Or he could be in the worst part of town, and you've just STRANDED him there. God, I hope you don't have kids.
You could make the argument that this is a violation of certain rights (although I'm not sure which rights those would be). But PRIVACY? What the hell does the functional status of your motor vehicle have to do with your privacy?
You missed the sarcasm and the point. The logic is flawed and the conclusion incorrect. Try again.
The logic is: Time is a part of most physical theories. Therefore time is physical. If this is flawed, I'd appreciate an explanation rather than a "You're wrong, fool."
This phrasing suggests that Math is not a physical thing. Given that Math occurs in practically all dynamic equations of physics, I'd have to disagree with the assertion that Math isn't physical.
No. Math is a tool for formulating the theory. Time is not a "tool," but an intrinsic PART of the theory. "Try again."
So? The victims in these cases are children. You just tell them who to say did the deed. No "deed" ever need be committed in the first place. A picture of a naked child is not child porn in and of itself. You could take some innocent bath-tub image, 'shop a Supreme Court Justice into the picture, then tell the kid you'll give him/her 500 pounds of chocolate if they say "Mr. Thomas did it."
Or you could tell them that mommy and daddy are going to go away forever if he/she doesn't say what you want them to say. There are a million ways to pull it off when kids are involved.
Also interesting is the fact that a pixel-based device can only represent a FINITE number of images. At, say, 24-bit color with a resolution of 1280x1024, there are 2^24^1280^1024 possible images. That's an enormous number, but it's FINITE.
What does it mean though? Are there an infinite number of images out there that we can never see, due to the limited ability of our display devices? In actuality the human eye is limited in its ability to distinguish color and spatial variation, and so even our finite screens are probably sufficient to display anything we might ever be interested in looking at.
Your "cue" has brought precisely zero people out of the woodwork. The technological aspect of this story is far more interesting that the legal aspect -- I think we can all agree that sexual predation on children is horrific. Nice try. Actually, I take that back. Pathetic try.
How do they know it's the guy and not some random someone-else? You'd have to be pretty dumb to use your own picture...oh wait, he's an idiot anyway.
Nice circular argument there. "Only an idiot would place his own face in the picture. There is a face in the picture. It must be his, because he's an idiot."
Wouldn't it be funny if they did the unscrambling and some well-known political figure's face emerged?
I believe that if the government is going to use software that may have a negative impact on a person's life (not saying this guy is innocent, just in general) then the source needs to be freely available for peer review so that the margin for error can be out in the open and the quality of the code verified.
Are you seriously suggesting that a bug in the code could cause the software to reproduce some INNOCENT person's face instead of the real face?
Anyway, your naivete is sort of amusing. If the government says "Yeah, we're using software X, here's the source code for you to look over," are you actually going to believe they are really using that code?
A blur on the other hand, especially a gaussian blur, will mix pixels together in such a way that any recovered image will be one of many possible outcomes.
This statement is false. A convolution is a linear option which maps N degrees of freedom to N degrees of freedom, and is perfectly reversible (in theory). In practice, the quantization of pixel values makes it somewhat lossy, but still reversible, although not perfectly.
Even if you used an infinite blur (IIR gaussian or something), most of the relevant information remains in the image. Blur is easily reversed.
As a physical analogy, imagine projecting an image through a lens which blurs the image at a certain focal distance. This blur can easily be corrected simply by using a second lens. Information is not lost in the blurring process, it is just spread around somewhat.
I'm fairly certain they did not, given that the twirl effect is not a convolution effect.
Why do you bother? Why not just cover the face with a black rectangle and remove all possibility of ever uncovering it?
Interesting idea. I have a few digital cameras, at least one of them has a couple of "dead pixels" on the CCD. These pixels appear pink on the raw images. However, the effect cannot be seen if the camera is not in raw mode.
I assume the camera firmware corrects for dead pixels (probably substitutes an average of the neighboring pixels for the value of the dead pixel) so you don't see them normally. When the camera is manufactured they can test where the dead pixels are and program those locations into the firmware. But try flipping your camera to raw mode and see what you get. A particular pattern of dead pixels COULD be very strong evidence, although you still have to prove who was operating the camera when the image was taken.
In theory all convolutions are completely reversible, including FIR blur, even very extreme blur. In practice, though, the pixels of an image have finite depth of color and information is lost during convolution. If there was such a thing as "Infinite-bit color" (as opposed to say, 24 bit color), then it could be reversed perfectly, no matter how blurred it was.
For IIR blur, where the kernel is basically infinitely large, it is no longer possible to exactly reverse the blur, because the result is infinitely large (thus the first "I" in "IIR"). Since all real images are finite, this means a lot of necessary information is cropped away and the blur cannot be reversed.
Isn't "time" only subtlety different from a physical dimension?
This phrasing suggests that time is not a physical thing. Given that the variable "t" occurs in practically all dynamic equations of physics, I'd have to disagree with the assertion that time isn't physical.