How complex would a system need to be to detect, record and validate not just every UK number plate, but every other international plate too? Or are tourists supposed to be able to travel around the UK on a single tank of fuel? What about vehicles that have no number plates?
I'll take your word for it as I'm just talking from second hand knowledge, but not that complex really.
The system wouldn't need to validate number plates- only validate that it could see one, recognise letters, and make a database entry. No need for it to check against any databases, or discriminate against foreign plate systems. Ditto with faces- it's relatively easy for software to recognise a clear shot of a human face now (most fancy digital cameras have this as standard)- it doesn't need to translate that picture into anything, just recognise that it has a clear picture of one recorded. And my guess would have been that whenever the system raises a red flag, it forces the operator behind the till to make a judgement on whether to turn on the pump (i.e., is it a man with a jerry can). Therefore someone with fancy IR-reflective paint on their number plates would raise alarm bells with the operator as soon as he glanced at the image.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is this not a function of multiple-values-of-infinite, as like Hilbert's Hotel?
Infinite number of worlds, only (lets say) 1 in 1 million are inhabited. So inhabited worlds = infinity/1,000,000, which is still an infinite number. So there are an infinite number of inhabited worlds (A), and an infinite number of worlds period (W), but W is 1 million times larger than A.
Which I think is basically what you said, but I disagree with your conclusion- W/N=A is not "very close to zero", as it's still an infinitely large result (and infinitely large numbers are not very close to zero, by any normal metric).
Just curious, but in this day and age (with ubiquitous mobile broadband, satellite internet, and uncountable wifi hotspots) why would it not be networked?
In the UK, when you fill up with petrol a camera will read and record your number plates. If it can't get a clear shot of both your number plate and your face, the pump won't activate. It's to deter petrol thievery (which is a very common crime at self service petrol stations). So said paint wouldn't be a goer for your average driver.
I know the UK is about 20 miles further down the Orwellian road than the US, but just thought it was worth mentioning.
My fiancée has worked in many state schools- some have been hell, some have been tolerable, some have been fantastic experiences. Just like different workplaces in other professions, for that matter. Writing off the whole profession because of one bad employer seems premature.
But then YMMV- we live in the UK, where teachers represent the upper quartile of graduates, while the asker seems to be in the US, where teachers are generally from the lower quartile of graduates. It may be that there is no such thing as a tolerably run school in the US state education sector...
Unless you charge a lot for tutoring, or have a very full list of clients, you will struggle to make a decent full-time salary out of tutoring. As most of your clients will be school children, it will also mean quiet days and busy evenings/weekends- which is quite antisocial for a young person with a husband/friends on a normal daytime working pattern.
Most tutors are teachers who do it for extra pocket money or as an alternative to full-time work (e.g., while raising children or towards retirement). Those who do it as a high-flying and fulfilling stand-alone career might be less common.
(I'm happy to be corrected if you are in fact a full-time tutor yourself; I'm talking from my experience of my fiancée being a teacher-cum-tutor)
If the browser accepts cookies, so does the user and the government sees the problem solved.
This wouldn't fly because it misses the point of the directive. The point of it is to separate out "necessary cookies" from cookies that are there solely to track you, target ads at you, etc. The problem with browser settings is that there is no fine grained control- you can either "consent to cookies", and get everything a website designer can throw at you, or you can disable cookies and find key features of all sort of websites become unusable (everything from internet banking to e-shopping).
I believe the acceptable compromise in the UK is that the website must link you to a page telling you about all the cookies that the website uses. If you continue to use the site after being presented with this info, that will be considered informed consent. That is how most major sites I've seen have tackled it (including my company's one).
It already is in the OED, although that isn't what it means. It means someone who is able to read and write perfectly well, but chooses not to do so. Essentially a synonym of "book shy".
Regulators want you to show that the software you're using is robust and safe. If it were developed by many people (as in open source), they might expect to see some robust quality control, system testing, penetration testing and so forth.
If a bank's IT systems were entirely designed and built by a single 17 year old with no qualifications and no external testing, I'd expect the regulators to slap them back to the stone age.
What large organisation buys hardware (or software) without defining their requirements first? Is NASA comprised entirely of marketing executives?
Usual rule of business is- if you're the one paying, you're the one who gets to decide what you end up with. I'd be shocked and stunned if, when NASA tendered for the huge contracts and subsidies they're offering, they didn't list in no uncertain terms what they expect the contract winner's product to be able to do.
It's debatable whether passing the Turing Test is a measure of anything other than the ability to pass the Turing Test. Whether it has any relation to the "strength" of an AI is tenuous at best.
Take HAL 9000, seeing as TFS talks about it. HAL 9000 would not have passed the Turing Test- it was obvious by the way it spoke, the way it responded to questions, etc. that it was a computer (and was that way for fictional reasons- to make it more atmospheric and tense to the viewer/reader). But HAL was undoubtedly intelligent- far more so than any computer systems we have in reality.
And on the flipside, a Chinese speaker with only a tenuous grasp of English would be likely to fail a Turing Test administered by an English speaking native. Not because they're less human, but because there's liable to be misunderstandings, incorrectly-parsed sentences, etc. All you're testing with a Turing Test is the ability of the subject to hold a convincing conversation with a judge- nothing more.
Re:It's not just specialization, there is also fea
on
Where's HAL 9000?
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· Score: 1
Scientific evidence that we evolved? Scientific evidence that our distant ancestors were simple multi-celled organisms that we would consider to be "mindless" in every sense of the word (and which themselves came from single-celled organisms)? Evidence that we're made of billions of single cells which interact with each other purely through chemical, electrical, or other simple physical means?
If you need evidence for any of those, then this discussion is irrelevant to you- we'd need to be discussing a whole other branch of science entirely before we could move on to this...
Nonsense. I would say that "well paying" means earning a living wage- which in most countries is defined as considerably lower than the local average. In the UK, the "living wage" is defined as about £13,000 a year for a full time worker, while the average wage for a full time worker is usually cited as being around £30,000. The legal minimum wage for a full time worker is only £11,000.
So to say that everyone should be entitled to a well paying job implies that a couple of grand a year above the legally defined minimum, for the whole population, is not an unreasonable wish.
Seeing as they'll be paying for the call, you might as well let them waste their money. That or tell them that you're "tracking their call"; 5p says that they're mostly not bright enough to know with any certainty that you're talking rubbish.
A fun fact extension is that the cover price for printed newspapers generally doesn't even cover the price of physically printing the ink on the paper and shipping it to the newsagent. The advertising pays not only for the journalists and offices and whatnot, but even covers a part of the cost of the printed medium.
When the news content is served over the internet, which has a vastly lower cost to run than the cost of the physical newspapers, and considering that internet advertising is if anything more useful and flexible than the static kind (where click-throughs are an impossibility), where is the justification for charging a cover price for the internet content? The advertising revenues should more than cover it off.
Charging for website access reeks of double-dipping.
When the Evening Standard was sold for a price, it was a failing paper and was loss-making. Now it is a free-sheet (and under new ownership) it is popular and profitable.
I don't read the Standard as I don't live in London, but it's owned by the same proprietor as The Independent- one of the few genuinely quality daily nationals.
I couldn't agree with you more. I have a smartphone with a smaller screen than most (an X10 Mini Pro), which I like as it needs to dwell in my pocket all day (plus it has a physical keyboard, which is wonderful for me). But for doing actual work, even the 15" screen on my company-issue laptop is unbearably small. The 3" screen on my phone is fine for the odd Google search and checking BBC News, even Sat Nav; but for anything more than that I'd want to slit my wrists. My 15" screen does my head in even for using spreadsheets and Word; the thought of trying to use a 3" screen for anything serious is absurd.
Google is a slightly different beast, because it isn't a one product company. Facebook has only one product- the Facebook network. If that goes belly up (in the way that the MySpace or AOL networks did), then that's the Facebook Corporation finished.
If Gmail goes belly up, Google won't be dead in the water. If Android went extinct it would hurt for Google, but again- that's not even the major part of their business.
That's not to say Google won't die one day too, but their death will follow a different model. More like the deaths of Kodak, Sun, Acorn, Motorola or (if and when) Yahoo. And it probably wouldn't be total death- either mini-companies will remain (like with Eastman Chemicals from Kodak or ARM from Acorn), or someone will buy them out (as with Motorola Mobility).
Or maybe the facebook guys did a really good job of getting the maximum value for their previous investors.
If you guess the value of a company as 110 billion dollars, and it turns out it's actually 95 that's a lot closer to reality than if you guess 20 and find out it's really 160. If you look at google, that opened at around 90 immediately jumped to 110 ish, then dropped to 100 not too long after, the next major local minimum is 243, which comes 3 years later, and it's now around 600. Feel free to pick your own preference for what counts as the 'correct' value of google stock, but pretty clearly the answer has been a hell of a lot more than 100 dollars a share for the last 7 years.
It's important to remember that whenever someone wins on the stock market, someone else loses. It's a zero sum game; if somebody makes money, somebody must have lost money. An IPO is essentially a competition between the company and the investors; the company wants to extract as much money out of the investors as possible for the amount of ownership they're giving up, while investors want to extract as much company ownership as they can for as little money as possible.
Facebook appear to have had "a very successful IPO" in that they seem to have sold a share of their company for far more than it was worth, meaning maximum money for them. Facebook should be happy with that. But the investors should not be; they have every right to feel that they were burned; that they were sold a lemon.
So how you look at IPO depends on which perspective you're looking at it from. 99% of us are more likely to be investors (if only through our pension funds and whatnot) than a Facebook company executive, so 99% of us will probably prefer to see this as a bad event, in contrast to the good event of the Google flotation (where investors got very good value for money).
Nope, you can still choose your GUI at login. You have to install the GUI you want to use, and it doesn't ship with GNOME out of the box any more- but you can download all the major desktop environments for free in the Ubuntu Software Centre.
I imagine it has something to do with it being a user with a brand new account (first post was 3 days ago), who has posted overwhelmingly pro-MS, anti-Google posts, who posted a lengthy and well-formatted reply to this story the exact same minute as the original story was posted.
There has been a lot of this nonsense recently. I think most moderators have got into the habit of down-modding these just automatically.
Yes. It's called the Square Kilometre Array because all of its receivers add up to 1km^2 surface area if they were all put side by side. Resolution is all to do with how much light(/IR) you can absorb, and that's directly related to how big your surface area is.
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How complex would a system need to be to detect, record and validate not just every UK number plate, but every other international plate too? Or are tourists supposed to be able to travel around the UK on a single tank of fuel? What about vehicles that have no number plates?
I'll take your word for it as I'm just talking from second hand knowledge, but not that complex really.
The system wouldn't need to validate number plates- only validate that it could see one, recognise letters, and make a database entry. No need for it to check against any databases, or discriminate against foreign plate systems. Ditto with faces- it's relatively easy for software to recognise a clear shot of a human face now (most fancy digital cameras have this as standard)- it doesn't need to translate that picture into anything, just recognise that it has a clear picture of one recorded. And my guess would have been that whenever the system raises a red flag, it forces the operator behind the till to make a judgement on whether to turn on the pump (i.e., is it a man with a jerry can). Therefore someone with fancy IR-reflective paint on their number plates would raise alarm bells with the operator as soon as he glanced at the image.
But again, conjecture and hearsay.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is this not a function of multiple-values-of-infinite, as like Hilbert's Hotel?
Infinite number of worlds, only (lets say) 1 in 1 million are inhabited. So inhabited worlds = infinity/1,000,000, which is still an infinite number. So there are an infinite number of inhabited worlds (A), and an infinite number of worlds period (W), but W is 1 million times larger than A.
Which I think is basically what you said, but I disagree with your conclusion- W/N=A is not "very close to zero", as it's still an infinitely large result (and infinitely large numbers are not very close to zero, by any normal metric).
Just curious, but in this day and age (with ubiquitous mobile broadband, satellite internet, and uncountable wifi hotspots) why would it not be networked?
In the UK, when you fill up with petrol a camera will read and record your number plates. If it can't get a clear shot of both your number plate and your face, the pump won't activate. It's to deter petrol thievery (which is a very common crime at self service petrol stations). So said paint wouldn't be a goer for your average driver.
I know the UK is about 20 miles further down the Orwellian road than the US, but just thought it was worth mentioning.
My fiancée has worked in many state schools- some have been hell, some have been tolerable, some have been fantastic experiences. Just like different workplaces in other professions, for that matter. Writing off the whole profession because of one bad employer seems premature.
But then YMMV- we live in the UK, where teachers represent the upper quartile of graduates, while the asker seems to be in the US, where teachers are generally from the lower quartile of graduates. It may be that there is no such thing as a tolerably run school in the US state education sector...
Unless you charge a lot for tutoring, or have a very full list of clients, you will struggle to make a decent full-time salary out of tutoring. As most of your clients will be school children, it will also mean quiet days and busy evenings/weekends- which is quite antisocial for a young person with a husband/friends on a normal daytime working pattern.
Most tutors are teachers who do it for extra pocket money or as an alternative to full-time work (e.g., while raising children or towards retirement). Those who do it as a high-flying and fulfilling stand-alone career might be less common.
(I'm happy to be corrected if you are in fact a full-time tutor yourself; I'm talking from my experience of my fiancée being a teacher-cum-tutor)
If the browser accepts cookies, so does the user and the government sees the problem solved.
This wouldn't fly because it misses the point of the directive. The point of it is to separate out "necessary cookies" from cookies that are there solely to track you, target ads at you, etc. The problem with browser settings is that there is no fine grained control- you can either "consent to cookies", and get everything a website designer can throw at you, or you can disable cookies and find key features of all sort of websites become unusable (everything from internet banking to e-shopping).
I believe the acceptable compromise in the UK is that the website must link you to a page telling you about all the cookies that the website uses. If you continue to use the site after being presented with this info, that will be considered informed consent. That is how most major sites I've seen have tackled it (including my company's one).
It already is in the OED, although that isn't what it means. It means someone who is able to read and write perfectly well, but chooses not to do so. Essentially a synonym of "book shy".
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/aliterate
Even with these weapons the US could still take out the entire countries infrastructure in about 3 - 5 days.
Because we enjoyed Afghanistan and Iraq just so darned much over the last decade, we can't wait for another?
3-5 days is about enough time to rough the place up and make some pretty craters. You'd be lucky if the full war were less than 3-5 years.
Regulators want you to show that the software you're using is robust and safe. If it were developed by many people (as in open source), they might expect to see some robust quality control, system testing, penetration testing and so forth.
If a bank's IT systems were entirely designed and built by a single 17 year old with no qualifications and no external testing, I'd expect the regulators to slap them back to the stone age.
What large organisation buys hardware (or software) without defining their requirements first? Is NASA comprised entirely of marketing executives?
Usual rule of business is- if you're the one paying, you're the one who gets to decide what you end up with. I'd be shocked and stunned if, when NASA tendered for the huge contracts and subsidies they're offering, they didn't list in no uncertain terms what they expect the contract winner's product to be able to do.
The day Canada was part of the continent of North America?
Is that a trick question?
It's debatable whether passing the Turing Test is a measure of anything other than the ability to pass the Turing Test. Whether it has any relation to the "strength" of an AI is tenuous at best.
Take HAL 9000, seeing as TFS talks about it. HAL 9000 would not have passed the Turing Test- it was obvious by the way it spoke, the way it responded to questions, etc. that it was a computer (and was that way for fictional reasons- to make it more atmospheric and tense to the viewer/reader). But HAL was undoubtedly intelligent- far more so than any computer systems we have in reality.
And on the flipside, a Chinese speaker with only a tenuous grasp of English would be likely to fail a Turing Test administered by an English speaking native. Not because they're less human, but because there's liable to be misunderstandings, incorrectly-parsed sentences, etc. All you're testing with a Turing Test is the ability of the subject to hold a convincing conversation with a judge- nothing more.
Scientific evidence that we evolved? Scientific evidence that our distant ancestors were simple multi-celled organisms that we would consider to be "mindless" in every sense of the word (and which themselves came from single-celled organisms)? Evidence that we're made of billions of single cells which interact with each other purely through chemical, electrical, or other simple physical means?
If you need evidence for any of those, then this discussion is irrelevant to you- we'd need to be discussing a whole other branch of science entirely before we could move on to this...
Well the man in question did come from a sport who's "World Series" is played exclusively by American teams. Maybe he genuinely didn't realise?
Nonsense. I would say that "well paying" means earning a living wage- which in most countries is defined as considerably lower than the local average. In the UK, the "living wage" is defined as about £13,000 a year for a full time worker, while the average wage for a full time worker is usually cited as being around £30,000. The legal minimum wage for a full time worker is only £11,000.
So to say that everyone should be entitled to a well paying job implies that a couple of grand a year above the legally defined minimum, for the whole population, is not an unreasonable wish.
Seeing as they'll be paying for the call, you might as well let them waste their money. That or tell them that you're "tracking their call"; 5p says that they're mostly not bright enough to know with any certainty that you're talking rubbish.
A fun fact extension is that the cover price for printed newspapers generally doesn't even cover the price of physically printing the ink on the paper and shipping it to the newsagent. The advertising pays not only for the journalists and offices and whatnot, but even covers a part of the cost of the printed medium.
When the news content is served over the internet, which has a vastly lower cost to run than the cost of the physical newspapers, and considering that internet advertising is if anything more useful and flexible than the static kind (where click-throughs are an impossibility), where is the justification for charging a cover price for the internet content? The advertising revenues should more than cover it off.
Charging for website access reeks of double-dipping.
When the Evening Standard was sold for a price, it was a failing paper and was loss-making. Now it is a free-sheet (and under new ownership) it is popular and profitable.
I don't read the Standard as I don't live in London, but it's owned by the same proprietor as The Independent- one of the few genuinely quality daily nationals.
I couldn't agree with you more. I have a smartphone with a smaller screen than most (an X10 Mini Pro), which I like as it needs to dwell in my pocket all day (plus it has a physical keyboard, which is wonderful for me). But for doing actual work, even the 15" screen on my company-issue laptop is unbearably small. The 3" screen on my phone is fine for the odd Google search and checking BBC News, even Sat Nav; but for anything more than that I'd want to slit my wrists. My 15" screen does my head in even for using spreadsheets and Word; the thought of trying to use a 3" screen for anything serious is absurd.
Google is a slightly different beast, because it isn't a one product company. Facebook has only one product- the Facebook network. If that goes belly up (in the way that the MySpace or AOL networks did), then that's the Facebook Corporation finished.
If Gmail goes belly up, Google won't be dead in the water. If Android went extinct it would hurt for Google, but again- that's not even the major part of their business.
That's not to say Google won't die one day too, but their death will follow a different model. More like the deaths of Kodak, Sun, Acorn, Motorola or (if and when) Yahoo. And it probably wouldn't be total death- either mini-companies will remain (like with Eastman Chemicals from Kodak or ARM from Acorn), or someone will buy them out (as with Motorola Mobility).
Or maybe the facebook guys did a really good job of getting the maximum value for their previous investors.
If you guess the value of a company as 110 billion dollars, and it turns out it's actually 95 that's a lot closer to reality than if you guess 20 and find out it's really 160. If you look at google, that opened at around 90 immediately jumped to 110 ish, then dropped to 100 not too long after, the next major local minimum is 243, which comes 3 years later, and it's now around 600. Feel free to pick your own preference for what counts as the 'correct' value of google stock, but pretty clearly the answer has been a hell of a lot more than 100 dollars a share for the last 7 years.
It's important to remember that whenever someone wins on the stock market, someone else loses. It's a zero sum game; if somebody makes money, somebody must have lost money. An IPO is essentially a competition between the company and the investors; the company wants to extract as much money out of the investors as possible for the amount of ownership they're giving up, while investors want to extract as much company ownership as they can for as little money as possible.
Facebook appear to have had "a very successful IPO" in that they seem to have sold a share of their company for far more than it was worth, meaning maximum money for them. Facebook should be happy with that. But the investors should not be; they have every right to feel that they were burned; that they were sold a lemon.
So how you look at IPO depends on which perspective you're looking at it from. 99% of us are more likely to be investors (if only through our pension funds and whatnot) than a Facebook company executive, so 99% of us will probably prefer to see this as a bad event, in contrast to the good event of the Google flotation (where investors got very good value for money).
Nope, you can still choose your GUI at login. You have to install the GUI you want to use, and it doesn't ship with GNOME out of the box any more- but you can download all the major desktop environments for free in the Ubuntu Software Centre.
I imagine it has something to do with it being a user with a brand new account (first post was 3 days ago), who has posted overwhelmingly pro-MS, anti-Google posts, who posted a lengthy and well-formatted reply to this story the exact same minute as the original story was posted.
There has been a lot of this nonsense recently. I think most moderators have got into the habit of down-modding these just automatically.
Yes. It's called the Square Kilometre Array because all of its receivers add up to 1km^2 surface area if they were all put side by side. Resolution is all to do with how much light(/IR) you can absorb, and that's directly related to how big your surface area is.
So 1km^2 of telescope means very good resolution.