No. The optimum ration can be as low a 5:1 depending on the class, but there need to be more students than teachers. And for most adult classes the optimum is probably around 10:1.
That said, 1:1 is a lot better than 20:1...for most classes. Exceptions exist. Imagine, e.g., football being taught 1:1. You couldn't put together even one team, much less two to compete. Sometimes classes need for groups to work together. But always students are inspired by other students working on the same problems. (OTOH, disruptive students REALLY interfere with the process.)
OTOH, if you have a good communication link, the stationary computer can operate the telefactor. This gives you a robot with a fairly large range, and power sources limit the range of robots anyway.
That said, this year, and probably the next couple of years, AI intelligence is severely limited compared to human intelligence. Probably compared to dog intelligence, too, but they have certain areas where they are better (than either).
The question is, "How fast are they going to improve?", and current evidence says "A lot faster than most people believe, but not as fast as those who fear them or lust after them hope.". My guess is that it will be a decade before they really appear to be human equivalents (on the average...with areas where they are lots better, and other areas where they are lots weaker). But it's worth noting that a decade isn't a very long time.
My prediction for the Singularity remains at 2030, though there's be recent pressure to guess that it will be sooner. OTOH, a while back the pressure was to make it later. Progress isn't even.
P.S.: You shouldn't hope for the singularity unless you have given up all hope in humans running their own societies. It's and incredibly dangerous point in time. OTOH, we've already come within seconds of destroying all civilization through nuclear war, so if we can get through the narrow passage our odds appear to improve remarkably.
Sounds like the log is a bit incomplete. It should record why it felt it was "summoned".
It matters. I don't think it's really important, but it matters. What's more important is that the sensors didn't keep it from driving into an overhang. But the user manual said you need to keep the car under control when you summon it, so it matters whether it malfunctioned or not. (And it would anyway. I wouldn't want a car that could decide on its own that it had been summoned. That's something that needs to be rather fail-safe. It should require a line of sight to the summoner as well as a call beacon. Pulse-coded infra-red should work fine for the line of sight signal.)
The claim was parse, not make sense of. And it's not clear that it can parse all sentences. Some sentences can't be unambiguously parsed even when you know the context and each included word.
Ok. That's a good reason for making it illegal. Copy protected media SHOULD be too inconvenient to use.
Well, OK, that was a bit of a snark. But I refuse to buy any copy protected CD, DVD, or BluRay because I insist on backups and I prefer to obey the law. So if I can't get a version that isn't copy protected, I won't buy it. I've found that I haven't missed anything important.
You left out that because of removing all those things, the drone is a lot smaller and lighter, and therefore less of a danger to others.
I am a bit worried about how the radio spectrum is going to be divided up when there are thousands of remote control drones. Perhaps it may soon be NECESSARY to have fully automated drones, because the spectrum is full.
Actually, most poets I've met do something else for a living. They aren't starving. I can think of a couple that might be if they didn't have family money...but that, also, is just like 100 years ago.
The problem is, the jobs they are doing not to be starving will be among those automated out of existence...so the ones without family money *will* either be starving, or on governmental support.
You are interpreting the metaphor of the singularity too literally, but, yes, it's what the singularity predicts. But nobody really believes the predictions. They *can't*. People are linear predictors. The ones best at predictions don't predict "the future will be just like today", but that's the naive way for people to predict. And it's not a smooth function. It the mesh of numerous trends that each go exponential for a short period of time, and then smooth out. Computer CPUs has an extremely long exponential segment, but I think we're past that now, and it's entering the section of progress where it's approaching an optimum at a logarithmic rate. Of course, multi-processing is just starting up the exponential segment.
But things interact, so you get biotechnology being driven by computers, and drones, etc. Drones will probably have a short exponential segment, but there will be other things. Things which we currently have no expectation of. And THAT's why people can't believe in the singularity. Because that can't foresee the interactions of the various trends to product new trends. But to model it as a smooth equation is to oversimplify, and thus to misunderstand.
P.S.: I can't believe in the Singularity either. I know that it's real, but that doesn't let me believe in it, not even when I understand how and why it works. And there's clearly a limit to it somewhere. I don't believe that real singularities exist in the universe....of course, I also don't believe in a continuous real number line. Or, for that matter, and real number at all. Or in perfect circles. Or straight lines. I believe that space-time itself is quantized, so straight lines are impossible, as is continuity.
That's not clear. There is a reasonable suggestion that pollution is making the population less fertile. OTOH, some studies have suggested that the fastest way to reduce population growth is to introduce TV. (Well, that was back in the 1950's. I expect computer games are even more effective.) Other studies have indicated that people are quite willing to have fewer kids if they don't depend on their kids for support when elderly. Other studies have shown that people will forgo kids to buy flashy gadgets.
Please note that none of these studies disproves any of the others. The rich have traditionally had small families (with exceptions). There have been lots of proposed reasons, but no proof. And it's worth noting that while the rich are noticed, it's also true that the poor who live in cities have also generally had a reproductive rate below the replacement rate. So perhaps it's living in cities that reduces the population growth rate. Perhaps. Experiments with rats seemed to show that it worked that way with rats. (I think there were later experiments that refined that result, but I don't remember them.)
But what I'm really saying is that causes of population growth or shrinkage are uncertain and complex. And your initial presumption that purely cutting the work week would cause a rise had not been shown to be correct. In prior times any such effect in the reduction of the work week from "from 60 to 80 hours/week" to 40 hours/week was lost in the noise.
The isn't enough land on the planet to support the current population at subsistence farming. It's much less productive/acre than is industrial farming, even industrial organic farming. E.g., irrigation makes so much difference you wouldn't believe it, but most areas cannot be irrigated except via industrial farming methods. Otherwise you need to be right beside a river or persistent creek.
Even Babylon couldn't have been developed without primitive industrial farming methods. They've got two rivers there, and at times the entire land was flooded, but they've also got dry seasons. Ishtar descended into the underworld every year to rescue Tammuz.
There's being optimistic, and there's being both stupid and ignorant of history. There were massive deaths as a result of the enclosure acts. The luddites weren't against the industrial mills because they didn't like machinery, it was because they didn't want to starve to death. I expect the same is true of the sabot-eurs, who threw their wooden shoes (sabots) into the machinery.
Just because the official histories whitewash the events doesn't mean you can't find out what happened if you look. Check out "the sheep are eating the men".
Also, isn't there a log? This kind of thing should be in a log file, so one would KNOW what had happened rather than just arguing about it.
P.S.: My first though was he hadn't curbed the wheels on a hill, and it had gone downhill with everything off. But this doesn't mesh well with "summon mode".
Who said anything about a "multi-year contract"? It wasn't me, and that's not what I was talking about. The excuse was "on-going financial relationship", not a term contract. You are in danger of this whenever you allow automatic payment of a monthly bill. You can get out of it by canceling the credit card, because you don't really owe any money. But the bank just wouldn't stop paying just because you told them to, and the service wouldn't allow you to unsubscribe.
As I said, I don't know how common this is, but it has happened.
It not just putting a name to an idea, it's also assuming that because you have a name for it it's real. This is a common problem that people have when they give names to things that aren't sensible, i.e., able to be seen, touched, tasted,...i.e., sensed.
To do an infinite number of iterations, if you assume infinity as actual, requires either an iteration that takes 0 time, including setup, or an infinite amount of time, which is also impossible, as the universe won't last that long.
So you're proposing something that cannot be done, and isn't real.
To do that to a defined degree of precision, however, is quite plausible. And produces a finite sequence of terms.
Saying " it's important to ensure [arbitration] is fair, " doesn't change the existing situation. I can, in principle, understand that it could, if properly done, be a superior system to the court system. But currently it's only being properly done if you're the person/group choosing the arbitrator. And that doesn't describe the customer of a corporation.
Additionally, one could argue that the court system would be far superior if it were properly done. And that is also true. But currently the courts are less biased against the customers than are the (selected by the company) arbitrators. Even so, except for small claims court they are biased against the customer, because the corporation maintains lawyers on retainer, and the customer can't afford top quality and experienced lawyers.
I've run across reports of instances where the company wouldn't let you drop the service, and the bank went along with them. I don't know how common that is, but the only way to find out is something I don't want to experience.
I don't think capricious and arbitrary mean what you think they mean. Arbitration is not capricious and arbitrary, it is heavily slanted in favor of the organizations that choose the arbitrator. That's predictable and planned, nearly the opposite of capricious and arbitrary.
When I was growing up the elementary school that I went to had a full time nurse. I don't know what she did when she wasn't caring for students, but she wasn't idle. And kids were constantly needing care for one thing or another. Not usually much worse than a skinned knee, but sometimes quite a bit worse. She also did some lecturing on health, but I don't remember what she said...which doesn't mean I didn't incorporate it in my life, it just means the way she said it was unmemorable...and useful is often unmemorable in the sense that you don't remember where you learned to do something, that just "that's the way things are done".
The last step of your logic is fallacious. You have defined a procedure that produces rational numbers. And it will produce as many as you bother to produce. It won't produce an unending number, because that's impossible. But it will get as close to that as you care to take the time and effort to. But just defining a lazy procedure doesn't produce the entire sequence. It only produces the values that it is used to produce.
If the concept of lazy evaluation had existed back when the calculus was being developed, we would never have made this misconception. But once people were coerced into swallowing the belief in infinitesimals (it took a lot of work, read about it) then it became the "standard theory". And I'll agree that it works quite well, because the fine structure of the universe is a lot finer than we can measure, and the large structure is a lot larger than we can comprehend. So in almost all cases you calculate the same answer.
Slashdot Mirror
HEY! That's marvelous. They're going to create a human without original sin! And therefore no need for salvation.
No. The optimum ration can be as low a 5:1 depending on the class, but there need to be more students than teachers. And for most adult classes the optimum is probably around 10:1.
That said, 1:1 is a lot better than 20:1...for most classes. Exceptions exist. Imagine, e.g., football being taught 1:1. You couldn't put together even one team, much less two to compete. Sometimes classes need for groups to work together. But always students are inspired by other students working on the same problems. (OTOH, disruptive students REALLY interfere with the process.)
To be fair, it used to nearly be true before computers became cheap.
"This, too, shall pass."
OTOH, if you have a good communication link, the stationary computer can operate the telefactor. This gives you a robot with a fairly large range, and power sources limit the range of robots anyway.
That said, this year, and probably the next couple of years, AI intelligence is severely limited compared to human intelligence. Probably compared to dog intelligence, too, but they have certain areas where they are better (than either).
The question is, "How fast are they going to improve?", and current evidence says "A lot faster than most people believe, but not as fast as those who fear them or lust after them hope.". My guess is that it will be a decade before they really appear to be human equivalents (on the average...with areas where they are lots better, and other areas where they are lots weaker). But it's worth noting that a decade isn't a very long time.
My prediction for the Singularity remains at 2030, though there's be recent pressure to guess that it will be sooner. OTOH, a while back the pressure was to make it later. Progress isn't even.
P.S.: You shouldn't hope for the singularity unless you have given up all hope in humans running their own societies. It's and incredibly dangerous point in time. OTOH, we've already come within seconds of destroying all civilization through nuclear war, so if we can get through the narrow passage our odds appear to improve remarkably.
Sounds like the log is a bit incomplete. It should record why it felt it was "summoned".
It matters. I don't think it's really important, but it matters. What's more important is that the sensors didn't keep it from driving into an overhang. But the user manual said you need to keep the car under control when you summon it, so it matters whether it malfunctioned or not. (And it would anyway. I wouldn't want a car that could decide on its own that it had been summoned. That's something that needs to be rather fail-safe. It should require a line of sight to the summoner as well as a call beacon. Pulse-coded infra-red should work fine for the line of sight signal.)
The claim was parse, not make sense of. And it's not clear that it can parse all sentences. Some sentences can't be unambiguously parsed even when you know the context and each included word.
IIUC, China is not a party to the TPP.
Yes, they should. But they helped write the law, so they can't be.
Ok. That's a good reason for making it illegal. Copy protected media SHOULD be too inconvenient to use.
Well, OK, that was a bit of a snark. But I refuse to buy any copy protected CD, DVD, or BluRay because I insist on backups and I prefer to obey the law. So if I can't get a version that isn't copy protected, I won't buy it. I've found that I haven't missed anything important.
Not this August, ...
You have this year to do as you like,
Not next August,
That is still too soon,
That quote isn't precisely on topic, but it's close, close.
See:
http://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/kor...
See also: Hemmingway, "Notes on the next war"
You left out that because of removing all those things, the drone is a lot smaller and lighter, and therefore less of a danger to others.
I am a bit worried about how the radio spectrum is going to be divided up when there are thousands of remote control drones. Perhaps it may soon be NECESSARY to have fully automated drones, because the spectrum is full.
Actually, most poets I've met do something else for a living. They aren't starving. I can think of a couple that might be if they didn't have family money...but that, also, is just like 100 years ago.
The problem is, the jobs they are doing not to be starving will be among those automated out of existence...so the ones without family money *will* either be starving, or on governmental support.
You are interpreting the metaphor of the singularity too literally, but, yes, it's what the singularity predicts. But nobody really believes the predictions. They *can't*. People are linear predictors. The ones best at predictions don't predict "the future will be just like today", but that's the naive way for people to predict. And it's not a smooth function. It the mesh of numerous trends that each go exponential for a short period of time, and then smooth out. Computer CPUs has an extremely long exponential segment, but I think we're past that now, and it's entering the section of progress where it's approaching an optimum at a logarithmic rate. Of course, multi-processing is just starting up the exponential segment.
But things interact, so you get biotechnology being driven by computers, and drones, etc. Drones will probably have a short exponential segment, but there will be other things. Things which we currently have no expectation of. And THAT's why people can't believe in the singularity. Because that can't foresee the interactions of the various trends to product new trends. But to model it as a smooth equation is to oversimplify, and thus to misunderstand.
P.S.: I can't believe in the Singularity either. I know that it's real, but that doesn't let me believe in it, not even when I understand how and why it works. And there's clearly a limit to it somewhere. I don't believe that real singularities exist in the universe....of course, I also don't believe in a continuous real number line. Or, for that matter, and real number at all. Or in perfect circles. Or straight lines. I believe that space-time itself is quantized, so straight lines are impossible, as is continuity.
That's not clear. There is a reasonable suggestion that pollution is making the population less fertile. OTOH, some studies have suggested that the fastest way to reduce population growth is to introduce TV. (Well, that was back in the 1950's. I expect computer games are even more effective.) Other studies have indicated that people are quite willing to have fewer kids if they don't depend on their kids for support when elderly. Other studies have shown that people will forgo kids to buy flashy gadgets.
Please note that none of these studies disproves any of the others. The rich have traditionally had small families (with exceptions). There have been lots of proposed reasons, but no proof. And it's worth noting that while the rich are noticed, it's also true that the poor who live in cities have also generally had a reproductive rate below the replacement rate. So perhaps it's living in cities that reduces the population growth rate. Perhaps. Experiments with rats seemed to show that it worked that way with rats. (I think there were later experiments that refined that result, but I don't remember them.)
But what I'm really saying is that causes of population growth or shrinkage are uncertain and complex. And your initial presumption that purely cutting the work week would cause a rise had not been shown to be correct. In prior times any such effect in the reduction of the work week from "from 60 to 80 hours/week" to 40 hours/week was lost in the noise.
The isn't enough land on the planet to support the current population at subsistence farming. It's much less productive/acre than is industrial farming, even industrial organic farming. E.g., irrigation makes so much difference you wouldn't believe it, but most areas cannot be irrigated except via industrial farming methods. Otherwise you need to be right beside a river or persistent creek.
Even Babylon couldn't have been developed without primitive industrial farming methods. They've got two rivers there, and at times the entire land was flooded, but they've also got dry seasons. Ishtar descended into the underworld every year to rescue Tammuz.
There's being optimistic, and there's being both stupid and ignorant of history. There were massive deaths as a result of the enclosure acts. The luddites weren't against the industrial mills because they didn't like machinery, it was because they didn't want to starve to death. I expect the same is true of the sabot-eurs, who threw their wooden shoes (sabots) into the machinery.
Just because the official histories whitewash the events doesn't mean you can't find out what happened if you look. Check out "the sheep are eating the men".
Also, isn't there a log? This kind of thing should be in a log file, so one would KNOW what had happened rather than just arguing about it.
P.S.: My first though was he hadn't curbed the wheels on a hill, and it had gone downhill with everything off. But this doesn't mesh well with "summon mode".
Who said anything about a "multi-year contract"? It wasn't me, and that's not what I was talking about. The excuse was "on-going financial relationship", not a term contract. You are in danger of this whenever you allow automatic payment of a monthly bill. You can get out of it by canceling the credit card, because you don't really owe any money. But the bank just wouldn't stop paying just because you told them to, and the service wouldn't allow you to unsubscribe.
As I said, I don't know how common this is, but it has happened.
It not just putting a name to an idea, it's also assuming that because you have a name for it it's real. This is a common problem that people have when they give names to things that aren't sensible, i.e., able to be seen, touched, tasted, ...i.e., sensed.
To do an infinite number of iterations, if you assume infinity as actual, requires either an iteration that takes 0 time, including setup, or an infinite amount of time, which is also impossible, as the universe won't last that long.
So you're proposing something that cannot be done, and isn't real.
To do that to a defined degree of precision, however, is quite plausible. And produces a finite sequence of terms.
Saying " it's important to ensure [arbitration] is fair, " doesn't change the existing situation. I can, in principle, understand that it could, if properly done, be a superior system to the court system. But currently it's only being properly done if you're the person/group choosing the arbitrator. And that doesn't describe the customer of a corporation.
Additionally, one could argue that the court system would be far superior if it were properly done. And that is also true. But currently the courts are less biased against the customers than are the (selected by the company) arbitrators. Even so, except for small claims court they are biased against the customer, because the corporation maintains lawyers on retainer, and the customer can't afford top quality and experienced lawyers.
I've run across reports of instances where the company wouldn't let you drop the service, and the bank went along with them. I don't know how common that is, but the only way to find out is something I don't want to experience.
I don't think capricious and arbitrary mean what you think they mean. Arbitration is not capricious and arbitrary, it is heavily slanted in favor of the organizations that choose the arbitrator. That's predictable and planned, nearly the opposite of capricious and arbitrary.
When I was growing up the elementary school that I went to had a full time nurse. I don't know what she did when she wasn't caring for students, but she wasn't idle. And kids were constantly needing care for one thing or another. Not usually much worse than a skinned knee, but sometimes quite a bit worse. She also did some lecturing on health, but I don't remember what she said...which doesn't mean I didn't incorporate it in my life, it just means the way she said it was unmemorable...and useful is often unmemorable in the sense that you don't remember where you learned to do something, that just "that's the way things are done".
The last step of your logic is fallacious. You have defined a procedure that produces rational numbers. And it will produce as many as you bother to produce. It won't produce an unending number, because that's impossible. But it will get as close to that as you care to take the time and effort to. But just defining a lazy procedure doesn't produce the entire sequence. It only produces the values that it is used to produce.
If the concept of lazy evaluation had existed back when the calculus was being developed, we would never have made this misconception. But once people were coerced into swallowing the belief in infinitesimals (it took a lot of work, read about it) then it became the "standard theory". And I'll agree that it works quite well, because the fine structure of the universe is a lot finer than we can measure, and the large structure is a lot larger than we can comprehend. So in almost all cases you calculate the same answer.