Hmmm...I'd think that researchers would be looking for economically viable and environmentally friendly ways of getting hydrogen from a very abundant source on this planet. Or maybe I'm just crazy.
Water is the easy part -- to make hydrogen from water, you also need to add large amounts of energy. That's the hard part.
I know it's the in thing now to bag on "those French cowards"
Indeed, this despite the increasingly obvious fact that the French were right. But hey, if we make enough clever anti-French jokes, maybe we won't have to face up to how idiotic we look now.
What I find seriously funny is the fact that while drug use is seriously shunned around most of the so-called "developed" world, there will be no such outcry over such mental manipulation utilizing this method. So it isn't the end we're concerned about, it's the vehicle.
Drug-war hysteria (pro and con) aside, most mind-altering drugs are made illegal because they are seen (or at least imagined) to have deleterious effects on the people who use them, and (just as important) on the society that supports those people. For example, someone starts using drugs, and they stop doing their job well, start stealing from their parents to buy more of the drug, withdraw from their personal relationships, etc. It is that sort of thing that makes societies try to get rid of drugs, and you can bet that if this machine has any of those same effects on people, it will be made illegal very quickly.
I imagine it will be quite popular at raves, though, illegal or not.:^)
If everyone was smart, the smart would loose their advantage. The same goes for knowledge.
Who cares if the smart lose their advantage? Given the opportunity to make everyone smarter, would we deny the less-smart people this benefit just because the "naturally smart" people somehow deserve to be smart more than anyone else does?
Even if the elitism of that idea doesn't bother, you, consider that smart people often spend a large portion of their time and energy trying to convince dumb people that their good ideas are in fact good ideas, or trying to explain their ideas to dumb people so that the dumb people can use them effectively. Being surrounded by smart people would make you (as a smart person) much more effective than trying to get your work done with the help of dumb people.
If there was a really easy way of absorbing knowledge, where would the power and fun of knowledge be?
Knowledge's main use isn't to be fun or make you powerful, it's to help get things done. And in any case, I suspect most people find the skillful application of knowledge much more rewarding then the tedious and difficult process of gaining that knowledge.
If I ever decide to buy an eBook, I will need it to do two things: (1) cache and display any HTML I choose, and (2) cache and display any PDF I choose. Without these two features, no amount of other features is sufficient; with these two features, no other features are necessary.
Re:Permanent eyesores & small impact
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
The only downside to Nukes is a Chernobyl-like operating mess. But that has proved extremely rare
Of course, back then you didn't have quite so many people trying to blow them up...
In summary, I think that bayesian classifiers, as Paul Graham proposes them, are just too naive. The addition of a few heuristics could make a big difference.
I disagree -- the heuristics you mention are much more naive than the Bayesian filter. For example, what if someone doesn't quote your signature in their reply? What if their mailer doesn't include the Message ID? What if the email isn't a reply to something you wrote, but a spontaneous email?
Even if the heuristics did work well (and in my experience they don't), there is still the time factor -- I don't want to spend all of my free time coming up with and implementing new heuristic rules. I want my computer to do the scut work for me. Bayesian does that.
True, that mostly works... but it doesn't handle the possibility of my friend sending me an email where the spam-keywords overwhelm the "goodness" of his non-spammy email address. I like to know for certain that no matter what my friends send me, it will get to me (of course, if they send me too much crap, they'll lose their "friend" status...;^))
I've found that if you add a small tweak to the Bayesian Filter, it becomes even more useful. The tweak is this: Any time you tell the Bayesian filter that an email is "non-spam", it auto-adds the From address of that email to a white-list, so that from then on any emails from that address are automatically marked as "non-spam" by the filter, no matter what they contain. (conversely, any time you mark an email as "spam", the source address of that email is removed from the white-list, if it is present)
This allows your single spam/non-spam feedback to the system to do double duty, so that once the program knows that you consider an email source to be "trusted", it will allow even spammy-looking stuff (read: mailing list digests, plane schedules, bank statements, etc) through to your non-spam folder.
Of course, if spammers start constructing google-style databases of who your friends are and impersonating their accounts, then this won't work anymore... but if they start that, all hell is going to break loose anyway.
The ultimate solution to the problem is to let computers write the software themselves. Give them a goal, set up evolutionary and genetic algorithms, and let them go at it on a supercomputer cluster for a few months.
That only works if you can write a fiteness algorithm that can tell whether the program did the correct thing or not -- otherwise, you have no way to decide what to "breed" and what to throw away. And for many types of program, that fitness algorithm would be more difficult to write than the program you are trying to auto-generate...
Of course, you'd need to make sure the algorithms that humans wrote aren't flawed themselves, but once you got that pinned down, you would be more or less home-free.
All you've done is replace a hard problem ("write a program that does X") with a harder problem ("write a program that teaches a computer to write a program that does X"). No dice.
Even if you didn't take this drastic a step, another solution would be computer-aided software burn-in. Let the computer test the software for bugs. A super-QA Analysis if you will. Log complete program traces for every trial run, and let the machine put the software through every input/output possiblity.
For most modern programs, there isn't nearly enough time left before the heat-death of the universe to do this. Hell, for programs other than simple batch-processors, the number of possible input and outputs is infinite (since the program can do an arbitrary number of actions before the user quits it)
It might fix 95% of crashes, but it would do nothing to fix other logic bugs (e.g. "When Word saves my document, it forgets to save the page numbers and so I have to re-enter them every time I re-load the document", etc)
I've found in my years of repairing pc's that the majority of software problems have their root cause in hardware.
Wow, your experiences are much different from mine, then. I'd say 95%+ of my computer problems are caused by software bugs.
Software errors are repeatable. The exact same situation should produce the exact same error.
For a significant percentage of software errors, that statement is false (at least misleading), because it's nearly impossible to reproduce "the exact same situation". For example, take any multithreaded program with a race condition bug -- the chances of the two threads getting the exact same time-slices on two different executions of the program are approximately zero. The result: a crash that happens only sometimes, at random, even given the exact same starting conditions.
It's the need for new features. Every feature that gets added to a piece of software is a chance for a bug to creep in.
Worse, as the number of features (and hence the amount of code and number of possible execution paths) increases, the ability of the programmer(s) to completely understand how the code works decreases -- so the chances of bugs being introduced doesn't just rise with each feature, it accelerates.
The moral is: You can have a powerful system, a bug-free system, or an on-time system -- pick any two (at best).
Well without seeing exactly what pictures these techs saw, one can't say for sure, but I think 99% of 'kiddie porn' accusations are nonsense.
While I agree that making the possession of information a crime itself is rather Orwellian, I should point out that in the US, sex with someone under the age of 18 is considered rape, regardless of whether they consented or not. So pictures of children having sex are definitely evidence of a crime, even if you don't think the pictures themselves are a crime.
And there is porn featuring sex with infants, toddlers, 8 years olds, etc. There's no "you can't prove they were really underage" defense for that stuff.
I think it could be done safely if you followed the match.com style model, where non-anonymous contact information is only provided after both parties agree to do so -- before that, it would be anonymous messaging only. (or something like that)
Since it was happening anyways, rather than making criminals out of everyone, including most politicians no doubt, the practice was formally legalized.
I suspect that the same thing will happen for p2p sharing in time.
If it takes you over a hundred lines of java code to check for a web page modifiation then you shouldn't be writing java or any other language for that matter.
If you're that bad at Java, then you should absolutely be writing Java code. That's how you get better at it.
(Writing articles about computer languages on the other hand... maybe not)
The sooner we stop playing around with wasteful, unreliable rocketry, the sooner we can start work on the Space Elevator.
That's the best way to convert space exploration from an impractical national-pride toy-symbol into something that significant numbers of people can actually benefit from.
You see this in software too. People think if they just "start over", everything will be okay. Wrong! You just get a new set of problems.
True, but sometimes it is still worth it, especially if your new set of problems (e.g. getting people to use the new protocol) is solvable given enough time and effort, and the old set (e.g. SMTP being insecure and spam-friendly) was not.
As they say in software, "prepare to throw your first attempt away. You'll end up doing that anyway."
SMTP is here to stay. We're going to have to live with it.
For the next 5 years, sure. For the next 10, maybe. But for the next 50 years? The next 100? Surely not (or if so, I'm going to be very depressed!)
SMTP is here to stay and it won't change within any reasonable time period. It's unfortunate that it's so unsecure, but that's just the way it is.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Even if Tripoli isn't adopted for another 30 years, at least if they start working on it now it will become the de facto standard in 2033, instead of never.
If the song is copyrighted, why should little pieces of the song not be? If you can't come up with your own ideas, get out of the music business.
Anyone have a link to the article about the guy who used a computer to generate every possible four-note sequence, and copyrighted all of them? Given those copyrights, it's pretty much impossible to legally create any Western-style music these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Dominic Giampolo? Is that you?
Water is the easy part -- to make hydrogen from water, you also need to add large amounts of energy. That's the hard part.
Indeed, this despite the increasingly obvious fact that the French were right. But hey, if we make enough clever anti-French jokes, maybe we won't have to face up to how idiotic we look now.
there will be no such outcry over such mental manipulation utilizing this method. So it isn't the end we're concerned about, it's the
vehicle.
Drug-war hysteria (pro and con) aside, most mind-altering drugs are made illegal because they are seen (or at least imagined) to have deleterious effects on the people who use them, and (just as important) on the society that supports those people. For example, someone starts using drugs, and they stop doing their job well, start stealing from their parents to buy more of the drug, withdraw from their personal relationships, etc. It is that sort of thing that makes societies try to get rid of drugs, and you can bet that if this machine has any of those same effects on people, it will be made illegal very quickly.
I imagine it will be quite popular at raves, though, illegal or not.
Who cares if the smart lose their advantage? Given the opportunity to make everyone smarter, would we deny the less-smart people this benefit just because the "naturally smart" people somehow deserve to be smart more than anyone else does?
Even if the elitism of that idea doesn't bother, you, consider that smart people often spend a large portion of their time and energy trying to convince dumb people that their good ideas are in fact good ideas, or trying to explain their ideas to dumb people so that the dumb people can use them effectively. Being surrounded by smart people would make you (as a smart person) much more effective than trying to get your work done with the help of dumb people.
If there was a really easy way of absorbing knowledge, where would the power and fun of knowledge be?
Knowledge's main use isn't to be fun or make you powerful, it's to help get things done. And in any case, I suspect most people find the skillful application of knowledge much more rewarding then the tedious and difficult process of gaining that knowledge.
If I ever decide to buy an eBook, I will need it to do two things: (1) cache and display any HTML I choose, and (2) cache and display any PDF I choose. Without these two features, no amount of other features is sufficient; with these two features, no other features are necessary.
Of course, back then you didn't have quite so many people trying to blow them up...
Why should I give a rat's ass how much you spent? Your money doesn't entitle you to anything other than the property that you now own.
heuristics could make a big difference.
I disagree -- the heuristics you mention are much more naive than the Bayesian filter. For example, what if someone doesn't quote your signature in their reply? What if their mailer doesn't include the Message ID? What if the email isn't a reply to something you wrote, but a spontaneous email?
Even if the heuristics did work well (and in my experience they don't), there is still the time factor -- I don't want to spend all of my free time coming up with and implementing new heuristic rules. I want my computer to do the scut work for me. Bayesian does that.
True, that mostly works... but it doesn't handle the possibility of my friend sending me an email where the spam-keywords overwhelm the "goodness" of his non-spammy email address. I like to know for certain that no matter what my friends send me, it will get to me (of course, if they send me too much crap, they'll lose their "friend" status... ;^))
Yes, they do... I probably get 50-60 spams a day
Do people who receive spam purchase things online, or register software and other services with their real names and email ?
I made the mistake of putting my unobfuscated email address on my web page... bad idea
This allows your single spam/non-spam feedback to the system to do double duty, so that once the program knows that you consider an email source to be "trusted", it will allow even spammy-looking stuff (read: mailing list digests, plane schedules, bank statements, etc) through to your non-spam folder.
Of course, if spammers start constructing google-style databases of who your friends are and impersonating their accounts, then this won't work anymore... but if they start that, all hell is going to break loose anyway.
That only works if you can write a fiteness algorithm that can tell whether the program did the correct thing or not -- otherwise, you have no way to decide what to "breed" and what to throw away. And for many types of program, that fitness algorithm would be more difficult to write than the program you are trying to auto-generate...
Of course, you'd need to make sure the algorithms that humans wrote aren't flawed themselves, but once you got that pinned down, you would be more or less home-free.
All you've done is replace a hard problem ("write a program that does X") with a harder problem ("write a program that teaches a computer to write a program that does X"). No dice.
Even if you didn't take this drastic a step, another solution would be computer-aided software burn-in. Let the computer test the software for bugs. A super-QA Analysis if you will. Log complete program traces for every trial run, and let the machine put the software through every input/output possiblity.
For most modern programs, there isn't nearly enough time left before the heat-death of the universe to do this. Hell, for programs other than simple batch-processors, the number of possible input and outputs is infinite (since the program can do an arbitrary number of actions before the user quits it)
It might fix 95% of crashes, but it would do nothing to fix other logic bugs (e.g. "When Word saves my document, it forgets to save the page numbers and so I have to re-enter them every time I re-load the document", etc)
Wow, your experiences are much different from mine, then. I'd say 95%+ of my computer problems are caused by software bugs.
Software errors are repeatable. The exact same situation should produce the exact same error.
For a significant percentage of software errors, that statement is false (at least misleading), because it's nearly impossible to reproduce "the exact same situation". For example, take any multithreaded program with a race condition bug -- the chances of the two threads getting the exact same time-slices on two different executions of the program are approximately zero. The result: a crash that happens only sometimes, at random, even given the exact same starting conditions.
Worse, as the number of features (and hence the amount of code and number of possible execution paths) increases, the ability of the programmer(s) to completely understand how the code works decreases -- so the chances of bugs being introduced doesn't just rise with each feature, it accelerates.
The moral is: You can have a powerful system, a bug-free system, or an on-time system -- pick any two (at best).
While I agree that making the possession of information a crime itself is rather Orwellian, I should point out that in the US, sex with someone under the age of 18 is considered rape, regardless of whether they consented or not. So pictures of children having sex are definitely evidence of a crime, even if you don't think the pictures themselves are a crime.
And there is porn featuring sex with infants, toddlers, 8 years olds, etc. There's no "you can't prove they were really underage" defense for that stuff.
I think it could be done safely if you followed the match.com style model, where non-anonymous contact information is only provided after both parties agree to do so -- before that, it would be anonymous messaging only. (or something like that)
True, but according to the RIAA, intent isn't what matters, it's ability. The software in this case is not intended to enable piracy, either.
I suspect that the same thing will happen for p2p sharing in time.
If you're that bad at Java, then you should absolutely be writing Java code. That's how you get better at it.
(Writing articles about computer languages on the other hand... maybe not)
That's the best way to convert space exploration from an impractical national-pride toy-symbol into something that significant numbers of people can actually benefit from.
True, but sometimes it is still worth it, especially if your new set of problems (e.g. getting people to use the new protocol) is solvable given enough time and effort, and the old set (e.g. SMTP being insecure and spam-friendly) was not.
As they say in software, "prepare to throw your first attempt away. You'll end up doing that anyway."
SMTP is here to stay. We're going to have to live with it.
For the next 5 years, sure. For the next 10, maybe. But for the next 50 years? The next 100? Surely not (or if so, I'm going to be very depressed!)
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Even if Tripoli isn't adopted for another 30 years, at least if they start working on it now it will become the de facto standard in 2033, instead of never.
Anyone have a link to the article about the guy who used a computer to generate every possible four-note sequence, and copyrighted all of them? Given those copyrights, it's pretty much impossible to legally create any Western-style music these days.