>>The point is China doesn't gain anything from this trade, except for US dollars - which it is becoming pretty obvious are worthless IOUs from a country on a downward spiral.
>>America doesn't have any capital - the savings rate is negative.
Okay, that's a fairly ridiculous statement. You're probably talking about the personal savings rate.
Factories are built by companies, and they have capital. Ford and General Motors, both of which has lost 75% of the value of their stock in the last year or so, are still both sitting on 20 billion dollars. If they needed to, they could probably get Detroit working again within the year, but it's not economical for them to do so, since unions force their production costs to run sky-high.
>>Do you really want a guy that is so greedy that he would forget all his co-workers and probably move his family just so they could live in a $20 million dollar house (as opposed to a $10 million dollar house)?
What you don't understand is that CEO salary pricing follows the superstar effect. Essentially, when there's a limited pool that people bid money on, the top end of that pool gets exponentially greater amounts of money. This is true for sports, musicians, CEOs, etc.
Besides, if a CEO can turn General Motors around (down 75% in the last couple years and in danger of being delisted from the Dow), isn't that worth $20M a year? Don't you want to hire the best guy possible with the greatest chance of achieving such a turnaround?
The problem is, Ford might want to hire the same guy, so his salary increases faster than what m naive people would expect.
>>What would the difference be if instead of shipping those goods to the US, China instead dumped them in the ocean?
The Chinese market would implode and the country's newly revived economy would go into the shitter. I think you underestimate how important America is to China.
>>Anyone can buy and watch a TV, it takes actual industry to be able to make one.
And capital to build the factory, and engineering to design the plants and items.
If it became cheaper in the future to build TVs in America, then we could build factories here in a relatively short period of time.
It's mainly American and Japanese engineering and capital.
Re:Sorry, Loebner Has Done Nothing for AI
on
Loebner Talks AI
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· Score: 1
>>IMO neural nets seem like the way to go. if we can mimic the intelligence of a cockroach
But neural nets don't actually mimic the way that the brain works. They're statistical engines which are called neural nets because they are kind of hooked up in a kinda-sorta way that kinda-sorta looks like neurons if you don't study it too hard. Really, all they are are classifiers that carve up an N-dimensional space into different regions, like spam and not-spam, or missile and not-missile.
Actual neurons function totally differently. I know; I've written both.
Re:Sorry, Loebner Has Done Nothing for AI
on
Loebner Talks AI
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· Score: 2, Insightful
>>Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is what psychologists define it to be
No, it's not. Or it least it shouldn't be, given how psychology is a soft science, where you can basically write any thesis you want (rage is caused by turning off video games!), give it a window dressing of stats (you know, to try to borrow some of the credibility of real sciences), and then send it off to be published.
Given how much blatantly wrong stuff is found in psychology, like Skinner's claim that a person can only be intelligent when reacting to outside stimulus (really? I can't think while I'm by myself?), I'd try and steer far away from giving psychologists the ability to define what intelligence is.
>>he lack of a well-designed, intuitive multi-threaded debugger -- with how difficult multithreaded processes are to write, I can imagine this would be a very difficult task
Yeah, the development environment, debugging, and language support for threads is kind of primitive. I've always just debugged my software using printfs - I've used various debuggers in the past, but I'm usually much faster at finding bugs by just printf-ing.
>>Is multicore really the same as multithreading?
Cores function like additional SMP processors. If you can write code for one, you can write code for the other. You have a lot less inter-processor latency than when writing grid or cluster apps. While there are times when you want to multithread on a single processor (UIs are a classic example of this), that's mainly just window dressing.
>>The lack of having them as first-class citizens in the O/S
Which threads are you talking about? Pthreads in Linux are treated like processes.
My Master's Degree was in High Performance Computing from UC San Diego, and I taught parallel processing.
Yes, you're right that most new programmers out of college will screw up (and screw up badly) if they try to write a multithreaded application. Learning to write parallel applications requires more mind-bending mental gymnastics than, say, when you first learned to write recursive applications. That said, once you get a solid understanding of how safe parallel code should look like, and how it should work, it's fairly trivial to write code that works, and doesn't deadlock. From my experience, it takes about 3 to 6 months of pounding on parallel code to reach that state.
While it's not a trivial amount of time, given the importance parallel code has (and will increasingly have in the future), I don't think it's too great a hurdle to ask for people to learn this stuff. All talk about multi-core programming always boils down to "Well, we'll never find enough programmers who are able to write multi-threaded apps." Well... why?
I think it would be in the best interests of Intel and AMD to sponsor online college classes teaching how to do parallel coding. People aren't buying the new chips since code can't take advantage of it -- if they flip it around and make every program able to multithread (that could benefit from multithreading, as you point out, Amdahl's Law) then demand for their chips would surge, and they'd make the money back in billions.
>>But our debt will hang around our neck like a lead weight. Future generations will have to dig themselves out from under it before investing in the important things, or they will continue to let it balloon as my generation has.
Uh, we were much more massively in debt by the end of WWII than we are now.
>>This case is direct evidence for Chomskian media theory. (As if there wasn't enough already -- Chomsky has compiled literally thousands of incidents)
The problem with Chomsky is that he has close to zero credibility among anyone with any degree of common sense. Maybe his theory on media is right, but I won't bother to read it, because he's been such a colossal nutcase on so many other issues, that it's just not worth my time.
He's the guy, remember, who said that Cambodia was better off under Pol Pot, or that compared with the horrible nightmare that is America, Eastern Europe under the USSR was a "paradise". There's just no dealing with someone who is so fucking deluded as to make a statement like that.
>>Their agreement may not exclude selling the widget in part, or in whole on the domestic market, so the brands are in fact a complete myth.
It also assumes they hold up their end of an agreement, which is laughable. After Qualcomm got a bunch of Chinese factories up and running with their Q-phone, China Telecom started selling their C-phone, which was an exact duplicate of the Q-phone, made by the same people that Qualcomm had trained in making their phones. They're so dishonest, it's fucking scary that so much of our technical manufacturing is being done over there - we're paying for their postgraduate education, and giving them free blueprints to rip us off with.
Heh, I've been having fun playing through Zelda 2 (which got stolen by a neighborhood kid while I was on the last level) on the Wii.
But when you put the same game side by side on two systems... well, it was impossible to buy the Wii version. Part of the enjoyment of the game is indeed in the graphics.
>>So what did you play all those years before HD came around? Everything must have been far too ugly for you to even look at.
When Force Unleashed came out both for the Wii and the PS3, I looked at the graphics for both, and not even the motion sensing lightsaber thing was enough to overlook the massive difference in graphics. I bought the PS3 version, which made me die a little on the inside.
Re:Let me guess...
on
HD Wii By 2011?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
My vote is for the Nintendo "About Fucking Time".
Seriously, the Wii is only good for party games; the graphics are so ugly that I can't bring myself to buy anything for it that isn't for 4 people.
>>They could well have returned the computer within 48 hours - we really don't have enough information to be passing judgement about this.
A friend of mine tipped off police about a hack he knew (that some other people did) into some government computers. Trying to be a good citizen and such.
They raided his apartment, SWAT style, held him at gunpoint, and confiscated all three of his computers.
Sure, they never charged him with anything, and he did get his computers back. Three years later.
He was *so* thrilled to have his expensive, top of the line, Quake 1 gaming computer back... in 1999. And no, they never compensated him for it.
If the police want people to try to be good citizens and help catch criminals, IMO, they shouldn't treat good citizens just like the criminals.
>>How you can get "Show me one Christian that's open to believe that I won't be judged because I don't believe." to mean "asked about Christians and whether belief in God is necessary for salvation" is beyond my comprehension.
Mm, two different meanings of judge. One is eternal judgment, which is what I was speaking of, the other a sort of social criticism of others.
>>Do you still not get that it's being judged I have an issue with, not the verdict of the judgment?
All humans criticize people that violate social norms; I'd actually say good Christians are better than most (that crazy "universal love" thing). But sure, most will probably think you sinful for not being Christian, just like how most atheists think Christians are deluded saps who shouldn't be allowed in positions of scientific authority.
>>If there was another ID years ago, that's fine, but what most people seem to mean by ID these days is creationism with the word "god" removed.
Yep, that's basically the long and short of it. The SIO guy was interested in it as a sort of academic exercise to see if they could come up with a way of telling if organisms were designed or not.
Well, it is possible to teach ID in a scientific way. I heard it presented in '93 by a researcher (atheist) from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, who was brought to my AP Bio class by my teacher (also an atheist), and discussed it from a scientific standpoint.
The fact that most people use it as creationism in disguise is, well, actually a contradiction.
"Show me one Christian that's open to believe that I won't be judged because I don't believe."
Perhaps it was a rhetorical question, but from your other statements it does seem like you are unaware that there are different major systems of belief within the Christian thought besides the loud and annoying fundamentalist one.
I'm not arguing with you, just answering specific comments you had about Christians and the various theories on salvation, since you asked about Christians and whether belief in God is necessary for salvation. I don't necessarily believe CS Lewis, but he's an important thinker, and he certainly believed so. Or at least toyed with the notion of believing so.
>>What John Paul II says there is that I'm included and will be judged, whether I want to be or not, confirming my view that Christianity is an intrusive religion.
Meh. Believe it or not, the idea of separation of church and state is a Christian one, stemming from the early days of the Reformation / Protestant Revolution. There's a lot of Christian thought on the matter; Luther thought that a ruler didn't even need to be Christian -- just rational and ethical. He thought that Christianity was not a good foundation for a government, since Christianity is all about forgiveness and salvation, which is to a certain degree incompatible with state justice. You can't really have judges telling murderers, "Go forth and sin no more."
>>I didn't move to your jurisdiction, now get your legislation the hell out of my life.
Do you live in Utah or something? I agree, Utah is especially bad at this, and some other states as well, by and large there's secular reasons for most of the laws you'd probably label Christian. You don't need to be a Christian to be annoyed by the shithole that is Amsterdam. As far as kids seeing breasts and such, I trust Dr. Drew's opinions on the matter: he's fairly negative about the consequences of early sexualization of children. I'd agree with you to a certain extent on the marriage thing, but instead of thinking that gays should be given marriage licenses, I don't think the government should legislate marriage at all. If someone wants to get married, let them get married.
The idea that the government has to give you permission for a marriage license (and I'm getting married in a month or so) really, *really* galls me from a philosophical point of view.
I've driven both. While I agree the Metro felt like you were physically moving it yourself (no power steering) when you drive, the Civic was and is a popular car. The main issue for me is that I'm 6'6", and so there's very few foreign-made cars that fit me. A Prius does, though I dislike the look of the car overall.
Note that these numbers are using their own metric for fuel efficiency which is lower than the official number. The 87 Honda Civic has an official EPA combined mileage of 54MPG.
Slashdot Mirror
>>The point is China doesn't gain anything from this trade, except for US dollars - which it is becoming pretty obvious are worthless IOUs from a country on a downward spiral.
Uh, the dollar is worth more now than it was a year ago. Having large cash reserves (which the Chinese do - something like a trillion dollars) is a good thing right now (measuring it in Euros):
http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?from=EUR&to=USD&amt=1&t=1y
>>America doesn't have any capital - the savings rate is negative.
Okay, that's a fairly ridiculous statement. You're probably talking about the personal savings rate.
Factories are built by companies, and they have capital. Ford and General Motors, both of which has lost 75% of the value of their stock in the last year or so, are still both sitting on 20 billion dollars. If they needed to, they could probably get Detroit working again within the year, but it's not economical for them to do so, since unions force their production costs to run sky-high.
>>Do you really want a guy that is so greedy that he would forget all his co-workers and probably move his family just so they could live in a $20 million dollar house (as opposed to a $10 million dollar house)?
What you don't understand is that CEO salary pricing follows the superstar effect. Essentially, when there's a limited pool that people bid money on, the top end of that pool gets exponentially greater amounts of money. This is true for sports, musicians, CEOs, etc.
Besides, if a CEO can turn General Motors around (down 75% in the last couple years and in danger of being delisted from the Dow), isn't that worth $20M a year? Don't you want to hire the best guy possible with the greatest chance of achieving such a turnaround?
The problem is, Ford might want to hire the same guy, so his salary increases faster than what m naive people would expect.
>>What would the difference be if instead of shipping those goods to the US, China instead dumped them in the ocean?
The Chinese market would implode and the country's newly revived economy would go into the shitter. I think you underestimate how important America is to China.
>>Anyone can buy and watch a TV, it takes actual industry to be able to make one.
And capital to build the factory, and engineering to design the plants and items.
If it became cheaper in the future to build TVs in America, then we could build factories here in a relatively short period of time.
It's mainly American and Japanese engineering and capital.
>>IMO neural nets seem like the way to go. if we can mimic the intelligence of a cockroach
But neural nets don't actually mimic the way that the brain works. They're statistical engines which are called neural nets because they are kind of hooked up in a kinda-sorta way that kinda-sorta looks like neurons if you don't study it too hard. Really, all they are are classifiers that carve up an N-dimensional space into different regions, like spam and not-spam, or missile and not-missile.
Actual neurons function totally differently. I know; I've written both.
>>Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is what psychologists define it to be
No, it's not. Or it least it shouldn't be, given how psychology is a soft science, where you can basically write any thesis you want (rage is caused by turning off video games!), give it a window dressing of stats (you know, to try to borrow some of the credibility of real sciences), and then send it off to be published.
Given how much blatantly wrong stuff is found in psychology, like Skinner's claim that a person can only be intelligent when reacting to outside stimulus (really? I can't think while I'm by myself?), I'd try and steer far away from giving psychologists the ability to define what intelligence is.
>>he lack of a well-designed, intuitive multi-threaded debugger -- with how difficult multithreaded processes are to write, I can imagine this would be a very difficult task
Yeah, the development environment, debugging, and language support for threads is kind of primitive. I've always just debugged my software using printfs - I've used various debuggers in the past, but I'm usually much faster at finding bugs by just printf-ing.
>>Is multicore really the same as multithreading?
Cores function like additional SMP processors. If you can write code for one, you can write code for the other. You have a lot less inter-processor latency than when writing grid or cluster apps. While there are times when you want to multithread on a single processor (UIs are a classic example of this), that's mainly just window dressing.
>>The lack of having them as first-class citizens in the O/S
Which threads are you talking about? Pthreads in Linux are treated like processes.
>>In reality, deadlocks are always a huge concern if you have any locks at all.
It depends how you structure your code. I wrote HPC code for four years without deadlocks or race conditions. Really, it's not that hard.
My Master's Degree was in High Performance Computing from UC San Diego, and I taught parallel processing.
Yes, you're right that most new programmers out of college will screw up (and screw up badly) if they try to write a multithreaded application. Learning to write parallel applications requires more mind-bending mental gymnastics than, say, when you first learned to write recursive applications. That said, once you get a solid understanding of how safe parallel code should look like, and how it should work, it's fairly trivial to write code that works, and doesn't deadlock. From my experience, it takes about 3 to 6 months of pounding on parallel code to reach that state.
While it's not a trivial amount of time, given the importance parallel code has (and will increasingly have in the future), I don't think it's too great a hurdle to ask for people to learn this stuff. All talk about multi-core programming always boils down to "Well, we'll never find enough programmers who are able to write multi-threaded apps." Well... why?
I think it would be in the best interests of Intel and AMD to sponsor online college classes teaching how to do parallel coding. People aren't buying the new chips since code can't take advantage of it -- if they flip it around and make every program able to multithread (that could benefit from multithreading, as you point out, Amdahl's Law) then demand for their chips would surge, and they'd make the money back in billions.
>>But our debt will hang around our neck like a lead weight. Future generations will have to dig themselves out from under it before investing in the important things, or they will continue to let it balloon as my generation has.
Uh, we were much more massively in debt by the end of WWII than we are now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt
And we managed to pay it off at a pretty rapid clip during the 50s and 60s.
>>I am truly ashamed that my generation will be the first to leave the country in a worse state than what they received.
We are??? Holy shit.
>>This case is direct evidence for Chomskian media theory. (As if there wasn't enough already -- Chomsky has compiled literally thousands of incidents)
The problem with Chomsky is that he has close to zero credibility among anyone with any degree of common sense. Maybe his theory on media is right, but I won't bother to read it, because he's been such a colossal nutcase on so many other issues, that it's just not worth my time.
He's the guy, remember, who said that Cambodia was better off under Pol Pot, or that compared with the horrible nightmare that is America, Eastern Europe under the USSR was a "paradise". There's just no dealing with someone who is so fucking deluded as to make a statement like that.
http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/200chomskylies.pdf
>>Their agreement may not exclude selling the widget in part, or in whole on the domestic market, so the brands are in fact a complete myth.
It also assumes they hold up their end of an agreement, which is laughable. After Qualcomm got a bunch of Chinese factories up and running with their Q-phone, China Telecom started selling their C-phone, which was an exact duplicate of the Q-phone, made by the same people that Qualcomm had trained in making their phones. They're so dishonest, it's fucking scary that so much of our technical manufacturing is being done over there - we're paying for their postgraduate education, and giving them free blueprints to rip us off with.
Heh, I've been having fun playing through Zelda 2 (which got stolen by a neighborhood kid while I was on the last level) on the Wii.
But when you put the same game side by side on two systems... well, it was impossible to buy the Wii version. Part of the enjoyment of the game is indeed in the graphics.
>>So what did you play all those years before HD came around? Everything must have been far too ugly for you to even look at.
When Force Unleashed came out both for the Wii and the PS3, I looked at the graphics for both, and not even the motion sensing lightsaber thing was enough to overlook the massive difference in graphics. I bought the PS3 version, which made me die a little on the inside.
My vote is for the Nintendo "About Fucking Time".
Seriously, the Wii is only good for party games; the graphics are so ugly that I can't bring myself to buy anything for it that isn't for 4 people.
>>They could well have returned the computer within 48 hours - we really don't have enough information to be passing judgement about this.
A friend of mine tipped off police about a hack he knew (that some other people did) into some government computers. Trying to be a good citizen and such.
They raided his apartment, SWAT style, held him at gunpoint, and confiscated all three of his computers.
Sure, they never charged him with anything, and he did get his computers back. Three years later.
He was *so* thrilled to have his expensive, top of the line, Quake 1 gaming computer back... in 1999. And no, they never compensated him for it.
If the police want people to try to be good citizens and help catch criminals, IMO, they shouldn't treat good citizens just like the criminals.
>>BTW: I find it odd that the psuedo-skeptics have not lept on the missing methane issue as a way to discredit the IPCC
I think the IPCC has done a good enough job discrediting themselves, with their predictions historically overstating global warming:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/001317verification_of_1990.html
>>How you can get "Show me one Christian that's open to believe that I won't be judged because I don't believe." to mean "asked about Christians and whether belief in God is necessary for salvation" is beyond my comprehension.
Mm, two different meanings of judge. One is eternal judgment, which is what I was speaking of, the other a sort of social criticism of others.
>>Do you still not get that it's being judged I have an issue with, not the verdict of the judgment?
All humans criticize people that violate social norms; I'd actually say good Christians are better than most (that crazy "universal love" thing). But sure, most will probably think you sinful for not being Christian, just like how most atheists think Christians are deluded saps who shouldn't be allowed in positions of scientific authority.
>>If there was another ID years ago, that's fine, but what most people seem to mean by ID these days is creationism with the word "god" removed.
Yep, that's basically the long and short of it. The SIO guy was interested in it as a sort of academic exercise to see if they could come up with a way of telling if organisms were designed or not.
Well, it is possible to teach ID in a scientific way. I heard it presented in '93 by a researcher (atheist) from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, who was brought to my AP Bio class by my teacher (also an atheist), and discussed it from a scientific standpoint.
The fact that most people use it as creationism in disguise is, well, actually a contradiction.
That said: Ai! Ai! Nuvvuagittuq!
>>I did no such thing.
"Show me one Christian that's open to believe that I won't be judged because I don't believe."
Perhaps it was a rhetorical question, but from your other statements it does seem like you are unaware that there are different major systems of belief within the Christian thought besides the loud and annoying fundamentalist one.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California.
I'm not arguing with you, just answering specific comments you had about Christians and the various theories on salvation, since you asked about Christians and whether belief in God is necessary for salvation. I don't necessarily believe CS Lewis, but he's an important thinker, and he certainly believed so. Or at least toyed with the notion of believing so.
>>What John Paul II says there is that I'm included and will be judged, whether I want to be or not, confirming my view that Christianity is an intrusive religion.
Meh. Believe it or not, the idea of separation of church and state is a Christian one, stemming from the early days of the Reformation / Protestant Revolution. There's a lot of Christian thought on the matter; Luther thought that a ruler didn't even need to be Christian -- just rational and ethical. He thought that Christianity was not a good foundation for a government, since Christianity is all about forgiveness and salvation, which is to a certain degree incompatible with state justice. You can't really have judges telling murderers, "Go forth and sin no more."
>>I didn't move to your jurisdiction, now get your legislation the hell out of my life.
Do you live in Utah or something? I agree, Utah is especially bad at this, and some other states as well, by and large there's secular reasons for most of the laws you'd probably label Christian. You don't need to be a Christian to be annoyed by the shithole that is Amsterdam. As far as kids seeing breasts and such, I trust Dr. Drew's opinions on the matter: he's fairly negative about the consequences of early sexualization of children. I'd agree with you to a certain extent on the marriage thing, but instead of thinking that gays should be given marriage licenses, I don't think the government should legislate marriage at all. If someone wants to get married, let them get married.
The idea that the government has to give you permission for a marriage license (and I'm getting married in a month or so) really, *really* galls me from a philosophical point of view.
I've driven both. While I agree the Metro felt like you were physically moving it yourself (no power steering) when you drive, the Civic was and is a popular car. The main issue for me is that I'm 6'6", and so there's very few foreign-made cars that fit me. A Prius does, though I dislike the look of the car overall.
>>It's not some conspiracy, it's simple physics: it takes less energy to move a smaller mass from one point to another.
I didn't say it was a conspiracy - I'm well aware that mass is the main factor in car efficiency.
The point is that it's not terribly hard to see why fuel efficiency levels dropped - congress stopped holding their feet to the fire.
>>devices that perform sexually acts on you
Meh, Arnold would probably outlaw that too. He's been a total killjoy for auto safety.
>>Without citations, you can say anything and it could just as easily be completely false.
What, I didn't provide enough citations already?
Combined Fuel Efficiency:
Geo Metro (40 MPG): http://www.fueleconomy.gov/FEG/noframes/13347.shtml
Honda Civic (34 MPG): http://www.fueleconomy.gov/FEG/noframes/3033.shtml
Note that these numbers are using their own metric for fuel efficiency which is lower than the official number. The 87 Honda Civic has an official EPA combined mileage of 54MPG.