Singularity, sure, but I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about current technology. How about giving homeland security blanket permission to track the location of everybody you don't like. Easily done using their phones.... You're a muslim/communist/dissenter and you choose not to carry your phone around? What do you have to hide? Also, how did you get on the shit list in the first place; you must have done SOMETHING...
If more than 3 of them end up in the same location, maybe send the FBI (or what the hell, the CIA) to "respectfully" check in on them... or hey, just record the conversation, while you already have access to their phones.
This is just one example, and no new tech is needed to implement it. Only an executive order, a friendly court, and some people willing to set it up.
I'm not saying this is what's going to happen; I'm just saying that in the worst case, everybody who knows how to do this will need to make a choice to either enable it or not. Sitting on the sidelines building cool shit and pretending it's both more important and irrelevant to current affairs is just not an option.
...I buy that this is how silicon valley will think about this whole clusterfuck... helped by the fact that hey, WE all have health insurance, and nobody HERE voted for that clown, and also [insert location] has a long history of basically being its own thing.
Which, if I'm honest, is exactly how I've been coping with W in power, and with half of my roommates having no insurance, etc. etc.
Also, don't blame ME, I'm not even eligible to vote! Blah-di-blah.
But what ppl forget when they say "don't distract us, we're transforming the world here, motherfucker" is that we have the technology to turn the entire world into something worse than 1984... And if the answer to the question "why shouldn't we" is too subtle to penetrate 50.1% of skulls, then suddenly the fact that we can do these things becomes part of the problem. Yay.
I'm looking forward to the way the shareholders will deal with the ethical dilemma of being paid to dismantle a free society.
The only thing that could have made your reaction more comical would have been if it came from the guy who makes the xkcd comics. His name is Randall. God you made me explain a joke. Please go away now.
In my vieuw (and I have trained a dog to stay inside my parent's garden) this can't be a good thing: the dog gets punished without a clear reason (lazy people didn't take the time to make it clear to the dog it can't go into their flowerbeds). This can wreak havoc on the dog's simple "psyche": I'd expect some to grow fearfull of everything, some to grow extremely viscious and some to go completely beserk.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I'm not a fan of invisible fences (or any training based on punishment), but some dogs are just naturally runners, and it's very hard to train it out of them because they escape during the one minute you're not watching them, and you can't punish them for coming back.
Invisible fences use simple operand conditioning; It doesn't matter if you know the "reason" or not as long as the stimulus is consistent. If you think dogs need explanations to not get screwed up, you're misapplying a piece of folk psychology that isn't even accurate for humans.
Many people lock their dogs up inside the house to prevent them from running away or messing up their garden. In my view that's much more cruel than making them learn that straying too far from the house is bad. Plus dogs are pretty smart, they get it very fast. I'm sure if you could ask them they'd prefer this to being locked in permanently or to being run over by a garbage truck.
A more fun question to ask is how long they'll be able to feign ignorance calling VP8 patent-free--analysis of it has shown that it shares a lot of the same algorithms with H.264.
If VP8 ever gets widely used, I suspect we'll find out very fast...
True, except there is no indication that they did this. On the contrary:
They selected 1,000,000 random pics from the web, without any selection for compression quality. And srsly, are they trying to tell me that *google* doesn't have access to a sufficient number of raw images?
They compared the algorithms at PSNR around 40, which is not that highly compressed.
They make a big deal out of the fact that the advantage of using their algorithm is greater for small (low-res) pics... I would assume (without any data to back me up) that low-res pics on the web tend to be more highly compressed to begin with. I'm assuming this because small pics would tend to not be photographs, and because if you use low resolution, you're probably trying to save bandwidth and web space, so compressing more would be logical.
And anyway, these are by no means the only problems with what they're doing.
As others have pointed out, where are the standard pictures everybody uses to compare compression quality?
Why did they arbitrarily compare the algorithms at PSNR=40?
Comparing with jpeg at this point is like kicking a puppy. The comparisons with j2k is meaningless (see above).
If they're just trying to create a better alternative to jpeg without the patent hassle, they should say so. But in that case, what's wrong with promoting any of the existing algorithms?
The main problem with jpeg is that it's used blindly for all kinds of images, and it was simply not designed for that. Suggesting that one new algorithm should take over everything that jpeg does right now is idiotic. The right replacement at this point depends on what the image is you're trying to compress. E.g. j2k is good for large photographs at relatively high bit rates. Png is actually very good at things like line drawings. Etc...
They're comparing webP to jpeg by testing how well both algorithms can recompress (a set of almost entirely) jpeg images? Really? Really???
More to the point, jpeg compression artifacts (discontinuities) are a *nightmare* for wavelet coders, so this is in no way fair to jpeg2k.
Also, from TFA:
Predictive coding uses the values in neighboring blocks of pixels to predict the values in a block, and then encodes only the difference (residual) between the actual values and the prediction. The residuals typically contain many zero values, which can be compressed much more effectively.
WTF, this is exactly what a wavelet coder like jpeg2k does, only in a much more sophisticated way.
This whole thing is so far below any accepted standard of image compression research, it should just be silently ignored.
(1) I know how to patch a Linux kernel and I own/want an iPad
(2) I know how to patch a Linux kernel and I don't want an iPad
(3) I don't know how to patch a Linux kernel and I own/want an iPad
(4) I don't know how to patch a Linux kernel and I don't want an iPad
(5) I'll buy one right after Cowboy Neal
I'm pretty sure some people here would be surprised...
Not the 'cultural sensitivity police' just proving a point, proven further by the fact that you didn't know who al-Majali
is. Rather than dismissing it as someone I made up, a simple search would have educated you. Yet you expect Jordanian's to know not only who Orson Welles was, but what similar historical prank that he was involved in well over 70 years ago. Meaningless to many contemporary Americans, let alone Jordanians.
I don't see how that proves any kind of point whatsoever. First, the reference to Orson Welles was not there so Jordanians should get it, it was there for the/. crowd. (not that there's no intersection). Second, the implication that Jordanians should know about the War of the Worlds scare was clearly a joke -- but wouldn't it have been useful if they had? Third, again, how are you not comparing apples and oranges? Give me the name of a Jordanian film director who was involved in a prank that, if known in the US would have been highly useful in avoiding an embarrasing similar occurrence there. Then we'll talk.
Not exactly a nobody, but *you* didn't know who he was, did you?
No, I didn't know who he was. Yes, I did look him up, as you might see from the fact that I referred to him as a political figure, not, say, a member of a Jordanian boy band. And no, I wasn't serious when I said you made the name up. There should really be an irony tag.
Ah, the cultural sensitivity police. Where would we be without you guys.
And you're right, referencing a highly similar and relevant story that happened in the US is just the same as arrogantly assuming that everyone everywhere needs to know obscure political figures with funny names that, frankly, I think you made up.
Not to mention that he can't grasp the awesome power of 300 APIs (sorry, "technologies") each with three letter abbreviation names starting with J that make up the resume of a typical Java programmer.
Agreed, but the problem is that most of those "technologies" are bloated, designed by committee, buzzword-loaded crap. The problem is *not* that we have found better ways to share code than we used to.
I mean, I'm all for crafting beautiful, optimally efficient snippets of code that do one thing perfectly. But have you ever noticed that you can do things in a couple of hours now that 10 years ago would have taken weeks?
Being able to cobble together a prototype fast is *hugely* useful and important. Now who was it again who said that premature optimization is the root of all evil? Hmmm...
31,000 euro for a _kernel_ developer?? Probably closer to 3 times that. I know it's an average, but do you really think the maintainer of a memory system, or the scsi stack, etc are worth less than 6 figures?
Keep in mind that that kernel developer would be working on the scsi stack of a commie plot...
You're confusing Shannon entropy and true randomness. If you have a string of bits that are created by a process that is truly random but has a bias, it's easy to transform it into an unbiased (but shorter) string.
The problem with pseudo-random generators is that they're really not random at all: They're determinstic functions that map a seed onto a sequence of random bits. If you know the function and the seed, you can predict all of it, which leads to potential vulnerabilityies. The point of truly random numbers is that there's no possible information you could have that would enable you to predict it.
...everybody's got one, but sometimes you've got to wonder why:p
Seriously, where are all these strong points of view coming from? We haven't even decided what the goal is. What precisely does it mean to be intelligent? Sentient? Conscious? As long as it's ok to keep moving the goal posts, yes, it'll always be 20 years. But how come everyone falls so decisively into the "no way" and "ya-way" camps? At this point, the only valid "expert" opinion is "How the hell should I know?". Of course if you want to be considered an expert, you can't say that. Especially if your arch-nemesis expert is not willing to admit that he doesn't have a clue either...
Having said that, there has been huge progress in the last decades, both in understanding how the brain works and in real-world AI applications. Part of the problem is that, as soon as something begins to be useful, it ceases to be considered AI... Remember when your computer couldn't find the best route from your home to Disneyland in a split second? Remember when netflix couldn't predict (or try to predict) what movied you'd like? Remember when airplanes had to be aerodynamically stable because someone would actually have to fly them? Remember when you couldn't take a class on partial differential equations and have your computer do most of your homework? The algorithms used for those things were all considered AI once, folks...
I was a TA for a class that used Alice a while back ("Computer Literacy" -- intro to computing for non-majors). My impression based on teaching 3 labs a weak is, and I really can't put this strongly enough: Alice is misguided, it's counterproductive, and it's lame. Alice sucks.
Alice is a very snazzy graphical system that seems to try as hard as possible to keep people from learning anything whatsoever about what programming is, how it's done, and most of all what it's good for and why it's fun.
One underlying principle of Alice seems to be that, instead of exposing people to important concepts directly, we should make it all easier by sugar-coating everything with an elaborate GUI that lets you do everything by pointing and clicking and picking options from convenient pull-down menus. "Look mom, I created my very own virtual method by dragging the gum drop onto the candy cane!" Ok, I made that part up, but it definitely feels like that.
In the end, the reality is that coding is hard, and some concepts you just have to wrap your head around. Alice doesn't help with that; it tries to make things easier and ends up teaching nothing at all.
A good introduction to programming should not pretend that programming is easy. It should show students that it's hard but it's not magic. It's hard, but it's not so hard that everyone can't learn it. Most of all, it's hard but it's worth it, so students need to see real and useful and cool things you can do -- and this is, I think, the most important way in which Alice fails.
With Alice, instead of doing something that could conceivably have any connection at all to real problem solving, students learn how to manipulate graphics objects in a virtual world. So basically, after the first class, they'll be able to make a badly rendered turtle spin around three times and then suddenly get very big, or something. Whee.
Sure it's done using OOP concepts, but how is anybody supposed to understand what's useful about them by manipulating turtles? Also, do you expect students to get excited about that and stay after class to keep playing?
So please, for the love of God, stay away from Alice. Python is simple and elegant, it doesn't force you to use advanced concepts early on (but they're there if you want them later), and you can do really cool things with a few lines of code. Perfect.
Java is probably ok too -- although, do you really want the first line of code you ever see to be "public static void main(String[] args)"?
Slashdot Mirror
Singularity, sure, but I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about current technology. How about giving homeland security blanket permission to track the location of everybody you don't like. Easily done using their phones.... You're a muslim/communist/dissenter and you choose not to carry your phone around? What do you have to hide? Also, how did you get on the shit list in the first place; you must have done SOMETHING...
If more than 3 of them end up in the same location, maybe send the FBI (or what the hell, the CIA) to "respectfully" check in on them... or hey, just record the conversation, while you already have access to their phones.
This is just one example, and no new tech is needed to implement it. Only an executive order, a friendly court, and some people willing to set it up.
I'm not saying this is what's going to happen; I'm just saying that in the worst case, everybody who knows how to do this will need to make a choice to either enable it or not. Sitting on the sidelines building cool shit and pretending it's both more important and irrelevant to current affairs is just not an option.
Which, if I'm honest, is exactly how I've been coping with W in power, and with half of my roommates having no insurance, etc. etc.
Also, don't blame ME, I'm not even eligible to vote! Blah-di-blah.
But what ppl forget when they say "don't distract us, we're transforming the world here, motherfucker" is that we have the technology to turn the entire world into something worse than 1984... And if the answer to the question "why shouldn't we" is too subtle to penetrate 50.1% of skulls, then suddenly the fact that we can do these things becomes part of the problem. Yay.
I'm looking forward to the way the shareholders will deal with the ethical dilemma of being paid to dismantle a free society.
Worst. Name. Ever.
At least since Apple decided not to go with "Liger"
The only thing that could have made your reaction more comical would have been if it came from the guy who makes the xkcd comics. His name is Randall. God you made me explain a joke. Please go away now.
Randall, is that you?
Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/538/
Dear God, you think THAT was a point worth making? That's depressing.
... are we maybe taking this "news for nerds" thing just a little too far?
ANOTHER damn thing called a "kernel". Cause that wasn't overloaded enough yet.
In my vieuw (and I have trained a dog to stay inside my parent's garden) this can't be a good thing: the dog gets punished without a clear reason (lazy people didn't take the time to make it clear to the dog it can't go into their flowerbeds). This can wreak havoc on the dog's simple "psyche": I'd expect some to grow fearfull of everything, some to grow extremely viscious and some to go completely beserk.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I'm not a fan of invisible fences (or any training based on punishment), but some dogs are just naturally runners, and it's very hard to train it out of them because they escape during the one minute you're not watching them, and you can't punish them for coming back.
Invisible fences use simple operand conditioning; It doesn't matter if you know the "reason" or not as long as the stimulus is consistent. If you think dogs need explanations to not get screwed up, you're misapplying a piece of folk psychology that isn't even accurate for humans.
Many people lock their dogs up inside the house to prevent them from running away or messing up their garden. In my view that's much more cruel than making them learn that straying too far from the house is bad. Plus dogs are pretty smart, they get it very fast. I'm sure if you could ask them they'd prefer this to being locked in permanently or to being run over by a garbage truck.
Wow, sounds almost as bad as piracy... If they really think PG is doing a "tremendous service" then what's the deal with the loaded language?
A more fun question to ask is how long they'll be able to feign ignorance calling VP8 patent-free--analysis of it has shown that it shares a lot of the same algorithms with H.264.
If VP8 ever gets widely used, I suspect we'll find out very fast...
And anyway, these are by no means the only problems with what they're doing.
They're comparing webP to jpeg by testing how well both algorithms can recompress (a set of almost entirely) jpeg images? Really? Really???
More to the point, jpeg compression artifacts (discontinuities) are a *nightmare* for wavelet coders, so this is in no way fair to jpeg2k.
Also, from TFA:
Predictive coding uses the values in neighboring blocks of pixels to predict the values in a block, and then encodes only the difference (residual) between the actual values and the prediction. The residuals typically contain many zero values, which can be compressed much more effectively.
WTF, this is exactly what a wavelet coder like jpeg2k does, only in a much more sophisticated way.
This whole thing is so far below any accepted standard of image compression research, it should just be silently ignored.
Do those offer route planning at all, let alone taking things like hills or noise levels into account?
Yes, I'm sure they take every single hill in holland into account :p
There is a too low price level. I bought a hdmi cable of ebay for $3 including shipping. Surprisingly enough they didn't work at all.
And the part of the cable that was malfunctioning was the price?
(1) I know how to patch a Linux kernel and I own/want an iPad
(2) I know how to patch a Linux kernel and I don't want an iPad
(3) I don't know how to patch a Linux kernel and I own/want an iPad
(4) I don't know how to patch a Linux kernel and I don't want an iPad
(5) I'll buy one right after Cowboy Neal
I'm pretty sure some people here would be surprised...
Not the 'cultural sensitivity police' just proving a point, proven further by the fact that you didn't know who al-Majali is. Rather than dismissing it as someone I made up, a simple search would have educated you. Yet you expect Jordanian's to know not only who Orson Welles was, but what similar historical prank that he was involved in well over 70 years ago. Meaningless to many contemporary Americans, let alone Jordanians.
I don't see how that proves any kind of point whatsoever. First, the reference to Orson Welles was not there so Jordanians should get it, it was there for the /. crowd. (not that there's no intersection). Second, the implication that Jordanians should know about the War of the Worlds scare was clearly a joke -- but wouldn't it have been useful if they had? Third, again, how are you not comparing apples and oranges? Give me the name of a Jordanian film director who was involved in a prank that, if known in the US would have been highly useful in avoiding an embarrasing similar occurrence there. Then we'll talk.
Not exactly a nobody, but *you* didn't know who he was, did you?
No, I didn't know who he was. Yes, I did look him up, as you might see from the fact that I referred to him as a political figure, not, say, a member of a Jordanian boy band. And no, I wasn't serious when I said you made the name up. There should really be an irony tag.
Wow, how culturally sensitive of you.
Ah, the cultural sensitivity police. Where would we be without you guys.
And you're right, referencing a highly similar and relevant story that happened in the US is just the same as arrogantly assuming that everyone everywhere needs to know obscure political figures with funny names that, frankly, I think you made up.
Not to mention that he can't grasp the awesome power of 300 APIs (sorry, "technologies") each with three letter abbreviation names starting with J that make up the resume of a typical Java programmer.
Agreed, but the problem is that most of those "technologies" are bloated, designed by committee, buzzword-loaded crap. The problem is *not* that we have found better ways to share code than we used to. I mean, I'm all for crafting beautiful, optimally efficient snippets of code that do one thing perfectly. But have you ever noticed that you can do things in a couple of hours now that 10 years ago would have taken weeks? Being able to cobble together a prototype fast is *hugely* useful and important. Now who was it again who said that premature optimization is the root of all evil? Hmmm...
31,000 euro for a _kernel_ developer?? Probably closer to 3 times that. I know it's an average, but do you really think the maintainer of a memory system, or the scsi stack, etc are worth less than 6 figures?
Keep in mind that that kernel developer would be working on the scsi stack of a commie plot...
You're confusing Shannon entropy and true randomness. If you have a string of bits that are created by a process that is truly random but has a bias, it's easy to transform it into an unbiased (but shorter) string.
The problem with pseudo-random generators is that they're really not random at all: They're determinstic functions that map a seed onto a sequence of random bits. If you know the function and the seed, you can predict all of it, which leads to potential vulnerabilityies. The point of truly random numbers is that there's no possible information you could have that would enable you to predict it.
[...] so it the finger prints probably won't get much further than the database.
Phew, that's a relief
Seriously, where are all these strong points of view coming from? We haven't even decided what the goal is. What precisely does it mean to be intelligent? Sentient? Conscious? As long as it's ok to keep moving the goal posts, yes, it'll always be 20 years. But how come everyone falls so decisively into the "no way" and "ya-way" camps? At this point, the only valid "expert" opinion is "How the hell should I know?". Of course if you want to be considered an expert, you can't say that. Especially if your arch-nemesis expert is not willing to admit that he doesn't have a clue either...
Having said that, there has been huge progress in the last decades, both in understanding how the brain works and in real-world AI applications. Part of the problem is that, as soon as something begins to be useful, it ceases to be considered AI... Remember when your computer couldn't find the best route from your home to Disneyland in a split second? Remember when netflix couldn't predict (or try to predict) what movied you'd like? Remember when airplanes had to be aerodynamically stable because someone would actually have to fly them? Remember when you couldn't take a class on partial differential equations and have your computer do most of your homework? The algorithms used for those things were all considered AI once, folks...
I was a TA for a class that used Alice a while back ("Computer Literacy" -- intro to computing for non-majors). My impression based on teaching 3 labs a weak is, and I really can't put this strongly enough: Alice is misguided, it's counterproductive, and it's lame. Alice sucks.
Alice is a very snazzy graphical system that seems to try as hard as possible to keep people from learning anything whatsoever about what programming is, how it's done, and most of all what it's good for and why it's fun.
One underlying principle of Alice seems to be that, instead of exposing people to important concepts directly, we should make it all easier by sugar-coating everything with an elaborate GUI that lets you do everything by pointing and clicking and picking options from convenient pull-down menus. "Look mom, I created my very own virtual method by dragging the gum drop onto the candy cane!" Ok, I made that part up, but it definitely feels like that.
In the end, the reality is that coding is hard, and some concepts you just have to wrap your head around. Alice doesn't help with that; it tries to make things easier and ends up teaching nothing at all.
A good introduction to programming should not pretend that programming is easy. It should show students that it's hard but it's not magic. It's hard, but it's not so hard that everyone can't learn it. Most of all, it's hard but it's worth it, so students need to see real and useful and cool things you can do -- and this is, I think, the most important way in which Alice fails.
With Alice, instead of doing something that could conceivably have any connection at all to real problem solving, students learn how to manipulate graphics objects in a virtual world. So basically, after the first class, they'll be able to make a badly rendered turtle spin around three times and then suddenly get very big, or something. Whee.
Sure it's done using OOP concepts, but how is anybody supposed to understand what's useful about them by manipulating turtles? Also, do you expect students to get excited about that and stay after class to keep playing?
So please, for the love of God, stay away from Alice. Python is simple and elegant, it doesn't force you to use advanced concepts early on (but they're there if you want them later), and you can do really cool things with a few lines of code. Perfect.
Java is probably ok too -- although, do you really want the first line of code you ever see to be "public static void main(String[] args)"?
Anyway. Thanks, I feel better now :) Good luck!