It seems obvious. The original Adventure had a limit of 4 characters for each word parsed, so "through" and "throw" were the same thing. It's just a retro-encoded posting, nothing to be alarmed about.
Everybody in Britain is paying for this content. The license fee payers pay some, but the license fee doesn't cover all of the cost so all taxpayers make up the rest of the cost. (Those who pay the license fee and taxes therefore pay the bulk of the costs.)
The BBC is not regulated by the Government at all - one of its strongest points - but it IS subject to its charter. The charter is The Strong Arm Of The Law, as far as the BBC is concerned. The charter exists for so many years and is then re-negotiated. The charter also protects the BBC - it can be made to do nothing, by the Government or the populace, that violates the charter.
If the DRM, the agreement with Microsoft, or the restriction to a Windows player, is in violation of the charter, the BBC could be hung, drawn and quartered by the courts. If all three are acceptable - or even required - by the charter, then the BBC's legally guaranteed independence and freedom mean there is nothing anybody can do. Anybody. The Prime Minister could beg on his knees or order in the tanks, and it wouldn't do any good.
FTP isn't really the problem, as it's the login part and not the data that needs authenticating usually. Using S/Key or Kerberos to secure the password would be perfectly acceptable in most cases. If you do want to encrypt everything, then what's so wrong with an on-the-fly IPSec session? Tunnel everything over an opportunistic IPSec connection and attackers won't even know what sort of connection you're running, and you still get all of the benefits of classic protocols such as FTP, FSP or rsync. (What? Never used FSP? How dare you call yourself a geek!) In short, there are plenty of ways of getting the same flexibility and power without compromising on security. Problems usually only happen when people assume they must suffer with a high level of risk in order to do what they want. There are always better answers - it only takes better questioners to find them.
EAMON's parser looks a lot like the one used in Essex MUD (MUD1), which was vastly superior to the parsers used in the majority of single-user and multi-user text adventures written after that time. In fact, most of the experimental systems (AberMUD had graphics, Level 9 had an ingenious room-expander system, Infocom had some very reasonable NPC AI code) have either not been used again or been used eventually in MMORGS. It's like the gaming industry look a 10-year snooze, then made all the same features available at a massively greater cost to everyone.
If you can hear the mosquito ring-tone clearly and distinctly, -and- if you turn up the x-bass on the Dr Who 25 years CD and hear the ultra-low frequency bass-line, then you have hearing that is probably more than capable of telling the difference between an MP3 and a CD. A surprising number of people fit in that category. If you don't, well that's hardly my problem.
But range isn't everything. Volume is important. If the music is loud enough, nobody can hear the flaws. Turn the music down to the quietest you can still hear the full range of sounds at. The volume control may not be sensitive enough to go to such a low setting, so you may need to play with the graphic equalizer. (Turning the volume down also eliminates much of the noise generated by the amplifier, and should also cut down on the distortion within the loudspeaker or earpiece.)
Now, one final step. Use a 5.1 soundcard and a 5.1 speaker set, arranged sufficiently close that you can still hear the extremely faint sounds.
At this point, you do the double-blind test. My guess is that you'll be able to very easily spot not only which is the MP3, but be able to identify other types of lossy compression with a high degree of reliability. "But that's not how you listen to music!" Speak for yourself. My hearing doesn't need these high volume settings and I'd rather hear the WHOLE song. If other people want to just hear the magnet rattling around, that's their concern, but I don't see why I should have to suffer poorer music just because they don't want to listen to theirs.
Even if we could grow 12' wafers that were pure enough to be used as single, gigantic wafer-scape processors, you'll never get Vista to work well. Besides, if Microsoft charged per core, you'd be bankrupt.
When you rotate something, provided it remains intact, you are changing the direction of all the particles constantly. This can be a good thing - you can create "artificial gravity" by spinning things up by using this method. Because more massive particles will have more inertia than lighter particles, it can also be used to separate things that are mixed together. This is how plasma is extracted from the other components in blood, for example. When things are loosely connected, there is also usually some dragging going on, which is why rapidly-spinning galaxies have a spiral shape. The extra distance the outside needs to travel is so great and the connection so weak that the arms are smeared backwards. For more tightly-connected things, there's usually some strain built up. Your computer's hard drive is probably spinning at 7200 revolutions per minute, which is equal to 120 times a second. The center of the spindle has a speed of zero feet per second. The outside of the drive is traveling at around 157 feet per second. That's not insignificant, although drives are built to easily withstand such stresses. I've seen many a hard drive fail due to head crashes and bearing failures, never deformed surfaces.
This is not to say that spinning couldn't be used to prepare certain materials under certain conditions. As I said, separation is a major use for spinning, and artificial gravity is another. Don't ever be put off by people saying that something can't be used for X because the odds are that it IS used for Y and will be used for Z once someone figures out what Z is. Asking questions like this is important, because that's when intuition usually gets converted into inspiration.
It won't work for all types of crystal, only those with specific magnetic properties. Proteins are fine, but semiconductors - where defects in the tens of nanometers are highly significant - won't be growable this way. Of course, there's nothing to stop you launching a vaccuum flask-like container into space and have crystals grow in true microgravity conditions at a very very slow pace. Sadly, there isn't a market for million-dollar CPU cores.
On the protein side, this will be interesting, though. As the article states, growing highly precise protein structures is a Big Deal and very very hard. The potential benefits to the medical industry are hard to predict, but will be significant. This isn't merely a fun exercise, this could have some very substantial benefits. Not sure if it could be used to amplify prions, but if it could, that would make studying the B**** so much easier.
That's an excellent question. In Classical and Renaissance times, many hundreds of times as many people did. What made Mozart different from his peers is that he had the system used to construct music at that time down pat at the age of five. After that, he had time to burn on refining it. All the other composers of the time eventually got to the same point and would - if they'd lived long enough - have eventually made the same refinements. If they'd had a cheat sheet, they would have covered the same ground that much faster.
Absurd. I believe Kurt Godel's work refutes that position. Check out his Incompleteness Theorem.
The Incompleteness Theorum only means you cannot prove that the system is complete, provided it is. It does not require the system to be incomplete, in and of itself. Turing's work on Computability is sufficient to know that all computable devices, given sufficient memory, can perform exactly the same set of tasks in finite (but very much unknown) time. Provided the brain solves computable problems, anything the brain can do a rulebook can do - albeit slower. All evidence points to the brain being equivalent to a Turing Machine and therefore merely a device for solving computable problems.
But you don't have to take my word on things. There are plenty of studies on how the brain changes in structure and nature according to what it learns and what requirements are placed on it, and there are plenty of studies on how people leverage what they are good at to solve problems in areas they are bad at.
You say you were a teacher? Hmmm. Both of my sisters teach - at University level - as did my father and grandfather. I only taught at schools for the gifted (IQ in excess of 150) until I switched to full-time software engineering. If I can teach kids who were classed as "troublemakers" not only mathematics but the rudiments of astrophysics and architecture in the process, I think I have a better claim to understanding what kids can and cannot do.
Hell, why just make claims? Find me a person who can't do maths beyond the basics. Any person will do. The only requirement is that they've got to be willing to see what they can learn. Oh, and they have to tell me one thing they ARE good at, and be honest about it. You can access my e-mail from my Slashdot account. I'll teach them one area of maths that you and they have figured out that they simply cannot learn. They may need crib notes to do anything with that skill, but they WILL have the skill. I said nothing about memorizing the ability, being able to apply it automagically or being able to pass a closed-book exam in it. However, they will understand and they will be able to apply. That's all I've been talking about and that's all I'm guaranteeing.
I don't - they keep getting elected. What we don't need right now is more crazies in power. What we need is someone so totally and utterly insane, they'll spend two or three trillion dollars a year on getting a full-scale fusion reactor built and operational before they get kicked out of office or shot. Yes, there are many unsolved problems, but we're running a little low on time and researchers are too busy on corner cases that might never happen in a real reactor under normal conditions. Building a live system and requiring the scientists to live within blast radius would likely get faster results and just as much reliability.
Running and bench-pressing require physical characteristics that may or may not exist on a given human frame. Those examples are therefore almost entirely irrelevant. Almost? Well, the speeds achievable by sprinters in the para-Olympics are now comparable to those achieved by regular sprinters. It is a total folly to assume that "comparable" means the same as "equal" means the same as "identical". I reject utterly that any two people have identical abilities or are mentally equal, but I also reject the idea that inability renders a person incapable of reaching a comparable status.
Compose music with the skill of Mozart? Yeah - any kid can do that. They might be a little slower, but there is nothing inherently non-computable in composition and therefore any computer - and therefore any brain - can perform exactly the same processes. Write plays with the skill of Shakespeare? Again, yes. It's not that hard. Slow, but not hard.
Huh? But those were geniuses! How dare you?
Those familiar with the book "The Emperor's New Mind" will be familiar with the Chinese Room. In this room, there is a person who has a very, very large set of rules for translating symbols. They get a set of symbols, apply the rules and return a different set of symbols. By doing this, they can perform translations, conversations, just about anything that requires "thought" but without actually applying any. Roger Penrose uses this example to attack the idea of AI, but I'm going to use it to attack the idea of the unique mind.
Each mind may will some special abilities. I don't question that, as should have been obvious. But ANY mind can be supplemented with its own Chinese Room, set up to perform whatever task that the mind is not inherently tuned to. This is inevitably going to be extremely slow, in comparison to using either the conscious, subconscious or unconscious layers of the brain. However, it will work. It will always work. There is no mental process - including creative thought - that cannot be entirely replicated using simple rule lists alone.
So a student doesn't do well at maths, normally. This is a problem how? My scheme allows for up to three shifts from normal, so if a shift slows down by a half, the third shift is working at one-eighth normal pace and is working with a rulebook that provides the other seven-eighths of the ability they need. They'll be slow, they'll never win on a mathematics-themed TV game show, but the tasks they can complete will be no different from those of anyone else.
A person wants to write as well as Shakespeare? This isn't hard. They write a story, then they apply recursively a series of rules - maybe for days, maybe for decades - that refine the grammar, improve the nuances, correct the spelling, enhance the imagery and expand the seeds of ideas into a full-grown garden of wonder. For some people, all the rules needed may be in their head and little or no revision is necessary. For others, they might need an entire row of storage units to hold all of the rulebooks they need to polish their work until it gleams. Why should it matter which they do? So long as they know what to do to get to where they are going, why should they care about the individual steps needed?
Can anyone walk to the south pole? Probably not. Can anyone get to the south pole? Certainly - just pick a mode of transport, which may be by foot, that works best. The over-specified can be impossible, but if the requirements alone can be met by one, they can be met by all.
You're assuming that intuition actually exists as an independent thing. I would argue that intuition does not exist at all, that what is called intuition is merely a very effective computation process performed by the brain at a low enough level that there is minimal or no conscious involvement. You've seen martial arts experts - do you think they consciously think about their every move? No, of course not! But did they need to learn those moves consciously and understand the mechanisms involved? Yes, very much so.
The same is true of catching a ball. Anyone can catch a ball without thinking, some of the time. Anyone can practice, consciously, to catch a ball and improve their success rate considerably. Anyone can learn the principles of dynamics so deeply and so thoroughly that it becomes what is called "second nature" or "intuition" even though it's nothing of the sort. It is merely exactly the same process as doing the whole calculation with pen and paper, but using extremely fast, dedicated circuitry deep within the brain.
"Intuition" is the word of mystics to describe a brain that is nothing more than a fancy protein-based computer because they cannot and will not accept the fact that the brain can do precisely nothing that a computer cannot.
At the moment, students are graded in absolute terms at the end of the year, which means schools who bring in only people who are superb already at the subjects will get good grades. Schools working with less-able students can do a brilliant job but get lower grades than the lazy schools who merely tread water. So, how would you test this?
The expected change in ability will roughly follow an S-curve. Those who know very little will need to learn a lot to advance just a little. Those who know a lot must learn a lot more for it to make any difference. Those in the middle have the tools to learn rapidly and will do so.
All you need to do is have a test at the start of the year, extrapolate from prior years the constants needed to define the curve, then use that to determine where the student can be expected to be at the end of the year. The end of year exam is then normalized the same way. Your actual grade would then be equal to ((normalized end of year) - (normalized start of year) + (mid-point score)) * (multiplier needed to stretch/shrink scores over traditional range).
If you do this, any student who works consistently will score consistently. Any student who achieves better than they could have been expected to will always score well, no matter what their abilities are like compared to others of their own age. Likewise, someone who learned a lot once upon a time and is now sleeping through lessons will automatically fail, no matter how good their knowledge.
To make this system fair and easy to apply, you've also got to stream classes. Mixed-ability classes would not work well with a relativistic rating system. Ideally, each subject would be broken into 5 or 7 streams, giving you 2 or 3 subdivisions from neurotypical ability on either side of the bell curve. For large enough schools, I'd expect such a system to use standard deviations from average. With smaller numbers, you'd need to narrow the bands more. You'd also have multiple classes of the same ability, as needed. You need an age-appropriate number of instructors per student in each class, but no class of any age should exceed about 15-18 students.
The multiple classes would allow you to cover different styles and methods of covering the same material, so students who did poorly with one style/method could find one that worked better for them, as learning - not ability - is the part that is truly individual. Ability places demands on learning, but has no direct impact at all.
That's not entirely true. Recent studies show that taking maths in high school is worth a twenty percent increase in ANY science-based subject at University, whereas taking one science at school and another at University conveys no benefit whatsoever. In fact, Classical Education demonstrates that learning maths well enables you to learn many subjects that appear totally unrelated to a degree unparalleled by modern schools.
(Also note that 99.9% of the time, if someone is "bad" at maths, it's because the instructor is incapable of teaching them, it has almost nothing to do with actual ability at all. A different instructor, working at a different pace, can turn a person with consistent scores of zero into a mega-star grade-A+ student - or turn a grade-A+ student into one with a score of zero.)
Then you get into the "real world". Those involved in computing do an extraordinary amount of maths - whether for 3D graphics, figuring out how to optimize the normalization of the databases, maximizing network performance, or performing non-trivial QA functions. Those in any research field also use extensive amounts of maths. Geological work? Maths - and bloody complicated wave functions through multiple boundary layers it is, too. This isn't the stuff of amateurs, this is seriously hard work.
What else. Engineering. Those who lack maths are doomed to rebuild roughly 14,000 incompetently-designed, incompetently-maintained bridges because those before them never applied the maths to spot design defects or prevent potentially catastrophic deterioration. Those who have maths are likely the ones to actually do the architectural redesigns and make bucketloads of money. Those who lack maths might weld, glue or rivet bits of aircraft together, but the designers - the ones doing the real work - are the ones with top-notch maths. Which is just as well, because those are the people who matter. The person gluing could be replaced by a robot - if they haven't been already - and you'd never notice or care.
Even at the cash register, you can spot the ones with strong maths skills. They're the ones telling you the total BEFORE the machine, who can get the change right by touch alone, who can process more customers than the rest of the lines put together. Yes, I've seen plenty of people that good, and I've seen plenty of morons who can add and subtract but that's it.
What about salespeople, cable runners and other high-travel folk? If you don't understand optimization, you will never minimize travel times. There is no computable solution, so you have to do the maths in real-time in your head.
Manufacturing? There's no high school I know of that teaches Operational Research and SIMPLEX. There's also not the remotest possibility of maintaining high profits and high quality without such techniques.
Journalism! Journalism can't need maths, can it? It's just writing skills. Uh, no. Packing the maximum number of key points into the least space is the packing problem. Anyone can write, anyone can (with practice) write something readable. But only those with a good understanding of the packing problem can write efficiently and effectively. That is why so few journalists are truly excellent and why so many are merely OK.
What about creative writing? That's an even clearer one. Look at the ground-breaking writers - Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, JRR Tolkien, C. S. Lewis. What do they have in common? They're ALL scientists, which means they're ALL maths-oriented. There's no point trying to say that the Lord of the Rings is science fiction and therefore needs science skills, because it isn't. It needs science skills because coherent, structured, self-consistent, efficient, disciplined stories cannot be written by anyone other than someone with a mathematical mind. It can't be done. Those who try will almost invariably be sloppier, produce formulaic work (or steal it outright), be inconsistent and/or be wholly lazy about the whole thing. It may be perfect by English class standards, it may eve
Trademarks must be actively defended, and the Red Cross has been placing its symbol on medical-related goods for decades. Variants of the red cross symbol are used on military ambulances, first-aid stations, emergency medical supplies and other similar contexts. By now, the trademark must surely be considered so diluted as to be considered generic. This happens with words a lot, and the companies really don't lose by it, although to hear them bitch and moan they do. If this symbol has now entered the realm of common usage, I think it might be the first to do so, which would be interesting.
Much more appropriate, as that was the Royal legal system at the time the cross was in use. It also has the advantage of being portable, making covert renditions unnecessary. You can convene the court at the victi^H^H^H^H^Hsuspect's house, if you want. Use of the rack during cross-examination is not advised, though, as the neighbors may complain about the noise.
First, the article makes it clear that the two hominids didn't compete. They operated in different environments and ate different food. Even when primates do operate in similar realms, they can coexist for millions of years - as humans have with chimps and gorillas. The relatively peaceful coexistence of humans and Neanderthals is also well documented. They simply ignored each other. It is also suspected - but unproven - in the case of Homo Florensis. Besides which, even when replacement occurs, it's going to occur slowly. Populations grow exponentially, but only over a vast timeframe. It isn't overnight. The multiple migration theory also suggests that multiple hominid types co-existed, or there wouldn't be distinct populations migrating. (In fact, the mere existence of the theory shows some paleontologists have always believed in multiple co-existing branches.)
In general, diversity has gone through boom/bust cycles. The entire human population was reduced to 15,000 individuals due to a dry spell in Africa wiping out all food and water for hundreds of miles. Indeed, the miochondrial DNA of all living humans can be traced to a single African female. However, after such bottlenecks, there has generally been an explosion in diversity. This isn't remotely unusual - each of the mass extinction events on Earth has been followed by such an increase in overall diversity - and isn't unexpected, as the reduced competition allows far greater room for diversity than would otherwise be supported.
The problem here is that this collapse in diversity has NOT been followed by an increase. The earlier Slashdot story on the Industrial Revolution was interesting in that it SHOULD have heralded the next boom cycle. It did not. The collapse is continuing.
Cultural diversity is interesting, but not really a primary issue. It is also very difficult, as so little was ever documented. If there is nothing to compare against, you can't know what the rate of loss is, although we can measure what we do know to have been lost. It is also impossible to know how much of that loss has led to a corresponding increase in diversity elsewhere in society, for much the same reason - almost nothing ever gets documented until it's far too late to identify the place, time, nature or cause of the origin.
The US and UK Governments invest heavily on intelligence infrastructure, particularly as part of the SIGINT system which includes Australia, New Zealand and Canada. If they cut back now, they lose that investment and potentially lose that knowledge base.
On the flip-side, Microsoft is hardly an expert on security and the last thing they need is for customers to require it. It would totally devastate their market.
So although both sides make good points, neither side can afford to let people weigh them.
"Should" and "Is" are often quite different. For example, no programmer of the 8086 would be caught dead using the instruction to roll left or right a given number of times. Nononono. It was far, far faster to have one operation for each roll. Division and multiplication on the 8087 was so slow that people even tried developing workarounds in software to get better performance! Multiplying by an integer amount was generally stupid - you were often much better off loading the value into two stack locations then adding repeatedly.
CISC eventually collapsed precisely because of this. RISC was faster - far faster - without the composite instructions. Hybrids, like the Pentium series, have since developed, where the underlying architecture is RISC and the composite instructions are emulated by being split into much simpler ones. So far, so good, so what? You still have a translation layer. You still have that decomposition. That's not free, you know. It takes time.
So why do this at all, and not have a pure RISC system? Well, many CPU manufacturers asked the same question. And decided to do exactly that. Have a pure RISC architecture. They generally do the same amount of real work with a fifth of the clockspeed of a CISC/RISC hybrid - so they run cooler and you can pack more into less space.
Why don't Intel and AMD do this? Oh, they'd love to! The Itanic proved many things, though, one of which is that the 8086-style CISC layer has to remain. The customers have too much legacy software now. Not only are consumers locked into Intel's architecture, so is Intel! There's nothing they can do to escape, unless they make a chip that has some cores on the old design and some on a new one. But who is going to buy a processor that costs more and does less (for now)? Nobody. Thank you.
This should be the lesson that companies learn from the IT industry (but won't): Too much lock-in locks the company in as well, making necessary changes and corrections impossible. Given enough time and enough failures to change, the company will destroy itself.
Generally, you have a library of routines tuned to different ranges of conditions, optimized by actually running them at different settings. ATLAS does this, for example, as do a number of other optimized libraries. However, you're absolutely right that modern cores are very sensitive to a range of conditions. Lookup/interpolation units are obviously not going to respond in a fixed interval, it will depend on what point you hit. Does the FPU have enough internal memory to avoid swapping in and out of core during calculations? If you re-order operations, can you squeeze better performance out of the L1 and L2 caches? Is a composite instruction faster or slower than executing the individual opcodes that would produce the same result?
I don't know of anyone who has gone to the gate level to tune software - I've never found it necessary to go beyond a high-level definition of the processor, the sizes/speeds of the caches, the lanes between the segments, the length of each pipeline segment and other such information that can be basically listed. However, such information will not reveal unintended features (distinguished from bugs by being useful) and won't expose every possible shortcut.
HPC is fun, though I agree that modern processors are counter-intuitive. They can do some seriously weird things at times, which is why CPUburn is such an interesting program. If only the developers still maintained it.:( A CPU that can self-destruct performing legal, documented operations is a buggy CPU. That goes for any other hardware, too.
High blood pressure can be hereditary and can be caused by really unhealthy eating. I'd be OK with penalizing the people who were self-inflicted with high blood pressure, if there was a way to distinguish. I'm not sure there is, though. Mass to height ratios are another issue - if you replace the same mass of fat with muscle, you've a healthier person... unless there's too much muscle. I totally agree with the idea (which may now cause half of Slashdot to decide against it...) but I cannot think of a fair, honest and constructive way to do this across the board. There's only a few things I can see that they can genuinely test for and be 100% sure that it's harmful, not helpful. Even then, there may be exceptions.
However, many unhealthy behaviours are caused by psychological issues, stress and other such factors. Yes, many others are caused by the person being stupid or self-destructive for no other reason than to be. Penalizing both the same way by the same amount doesn't encourage either group to change. You've gotta distinguish before you can decide the correct course of action, although ultimately penalizing and firing are the last two options.
Back to penalizing people for their genetics. That is a VERY VERY bad idea, and you're right that that is a frictionless slope. I would be very disturbed if any employer started such a practice. And not just because I'm descended from a Scottish clan that got banned in the 1600s on pain of death. Fortunately, the edict was lifted on the McGregors a hundred years later, so there's no point trying to claim it now. However, I could easily see racists and nationalists craving a way to legally punish people of the "wrong" genetic pool, and other fringe extremists using the opportunity to punish hereditary conditions that had no impact on work and perhaps had no visible or measurable impact of any kind at all.
If you want anything remotely approaching fairness in the workplace, you need to tackle such issues with a careful eye on what you are doing, not what you are intending.
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...of the demonstrated warped sense of humor, I hereby propose that all Linux Kernel Mailing List flamewars are now referred to as cloudy.
It seems obvious. The original Adventure had a limit of 4 characters for each word parsed, so "through" and "throw" were the same thing. It's just a retro-encoded posting, nothing to be alarmed about.
If the DRM, the agreement with Microsoft, or the restriction to a Windows player, is in violation of the charter, the BBC could be hung, drawn and quartered by the courts. If all three are acceptable - or even required - by the charter, then the BBC's legally guaranteed independence and freedom mean there is nothing anybody can do. Anybody. The Prime Minister could beg on his knees or order in the tanks, and it wouldn't do any good.
FTP isn't really the problem, as it's the login part and not the data that needs authenticating usually. Using S/Key or Kerberos to secure the password would be perfectly acceptable in most cases. If you do want to encrypt everything, then what's so wrong with an on-the-fly IPSec session? Tunnel everything over an opportunistic IPSec connection and attackers won't even know what sort of connection you're running, and you still get all of the benefits of classic protocols such as FTP, FSP or rsync. (What? Never used FSP? How dare you call yourself a geek!) In short, there are plenty of ways of getting the same flexibility and power without compromising on security. Problems usually only happen when people assume they must suffer with a high level of risk in order to do what they want. There are always better answers - it only takes better questioners to find them.
Odd. I got the image of a factory putting the tumors into jelly molds and producing politicians, lawyers and civil servants.
EAMON's parser looks a lot like the one used in Essex MUD (MUD1), which was vastly superior to the parsers used in the majority of single-user and multi-user text adventures written after that time. In fact, most of the experimental systems (AberMUD had graphics, Level 9 had an ingenious room-expander system, Infocom had some very reasonable NPC AI code) have either not been used again or been used eventually in MMORGS. It's like the gaming industry look a 10-year snooze, then made all the same features available at a massively greater cost to everyone.
But range isn't everything. Volume is important. If the music is loud enough, nobody can hear the flaws. Turn the music down to the quietest you can still hear the full range of sounds at. The volume control may not be sensitive enough to go to such a low setting, so you may need to play with the graphic equalizer. (Turning the volume down also eliminates much of the noise generated by the amplifier, and should also cut down on the distortion within the loudspeaker or earpiece.)
Now, one final step. Use a 5.1 soundcard and a 5.1 speaker set, arranged sufficiently close that you can still hear the extremely faint sounds.
At this point, you do the double-blind test. My guess is that you'll be able to very easily spot not only which is the MP3, but be able to identify other types of lossy compression with a high degree of reliability. "But that's not how you listen to music!" Speak for yourself. My hearing doesn't need these high volume settings and I'd rather hear the WHOLE song. If other people want to just hear the magnet rattling around, that's their concern, but I don't see why I should have to suffer poorer music just because they don't want to listen to theirs.
Even if we could grow 12' wafers that were pure enough to be used as single, gigantic wafer-scape processors, you'll never get Vista to work well. Besides, if Microsoft charged per core, you'd be bankrupt.
This is not to say that spinning couldn't be used to prepare certain materials under certain conditions. As I said, separation is a major use for spinning, and artificial gravity is another. Don't ever be put off by people saying that something can't be used for X because the odds are that it IS used for Y and will be used for Z once someone figures out what Z is. Asking questions like this is important, because that's when intuition usually gets converted into inspiration.
On the protein side, this will be interesting, though. As the article states, growing highly precise protein structures is a Big Deal and very very hard. The potential benefits to the medical industry are hard to predict, but will be significant. This isn't merely a fun exercise, this could have some very substantial benefits. Not sure if it could be used to amplify prions, but if it could, that would make studying the B**** so much easier.
That's an excellent question. In Classical and Renaissance times, many hundreds of times as many people did. What made Mozart different from his peers is that he had the system used to construct music at that time down pat at the age of five. After that, he had time to burn on refining it. All the other composers of the time eventually got to the same point and would - if they'd lived long enough - have eventually made the same refinements. If they'd had a cheat sheet, they would have covered the same ground that much faster.
Absurd. I believe Kurt Godel's work refutes that position. Check out his Incompleteness Theorem.
The Incompleteness Theorum only means you cannot prove that the system is complete, provided it is. It does not require the system to be incomplete, in and of itself. Turing's work on Computability is sufficient to know that all computable devices, given sufficient memory, can perform exactly the same set of tasks in finite (but very much unknown) time. Provided the brain solves computable problems, anything the brain can do a rulebook can do - albeit slower. All evidence points to the brain being equivalent to a Turing Machine and therefore merely a device for solving computable problems.
But you don't have to take my word on things. There are plenty of studies on how the brain changes in structure and nature according to what it learns and what requirements are placed on it, and there are plenty of studies on how people leverage what they are good at to solve problems in areas they are bad at.
You say you were a teacher? Hmmm. Both of my sisters teach - at University level - as did my father and grandfather. I only taught at schools for the gifted (IQ in excess of 150) until I switched to full-time software engineering. If I can teach kids who were classed as "troublemakers" not only mathematics but the rudiments of astrophysics and architecture in the process, I think I have a better claim to understanding what kids can and cannot do.
Hell, why just make claims? Find me a person who can't do maths beyond the basics. Any person will do. The only requirement is that they've got to be willing to see what they can learn. Oh, and they have to tell me one thing they ARE good at, and be honest about it. You can access my e-mail from my Slashdot account. I'll teach them one area of maths that you and they have figured out that they simply cannot learn. They may need crib notes to do anything with that skill, but they WILL have the skill. I said nothing about memorizing the ability, being able to apply it automagically or being able to pass a closed-book exam in it. However, they will understand and they will be able to apply. That's all I've been talking about and that's all I'm guaranteeing.
You game for it?
I don't - they keep getting elected. What we don't need right now is more crazies in power. What we need is someone so totally and utterly insane, they'll spend two or three trillion dollars a year on getting a full-scale fusion reactor built and operational before they get kicked out of office or shot. Yes, there are many unsolved problems, but we're running a little low on time and researchers are too busy on corner cases that might never happen in a real reactor under normal conditions. Building a live system and requiring the scientists to live within blast radius would likely get faster results and just as much reliability.
Compose music with the skill of Mozart? Yeah - any kid can do that. They might be a little slower, but there is nothing inherently non-computable in composition and therefore any computer - and therefore any brain - can perform exactly the same processes. Write plays with the skill of Shakespeare? Again, yes. It's not that hard. Slow, but not hard.
Huh? But those were geniuses! How dare you?
Those familiar with the book "The Emperor's New Mind" will be familiar with the Chinese Room. In this room, there is a person who has a very, very large set of rules for translating symbols. They get a set of symbols, apply the rules and return a different set of symbols. By doing this, they can perform translations, conversations, just about anything that requires "thought" but without actually applying any. Roger Penrose uses this example to attack the idea of AI, but I'm going to use it to attack the idea of the unique mind.
Each mind may will some special abilities. I don't question that, as should have been obvious. But ANY mind can be supplemented with its own Chinese Room, set up to perform whatever task that the mind is not inherently tuned to. This is inevitably going to be extremely slow, in comparison to using either the conscious, subconscious or unconscious layers of the brain. However, it will work. It will always work. There is no mental process - including creative thought - that cannot be entirely replicated using simple rule lists alone.
So a student doesn't do well at maths, normally. This is a problem how? My scheme allows for up to three shifts from normal, so if a shift slows down by a half, the third shift is working at one-eighth normal pace and is working with a rulebook that provides the other seven-eighths of the ability they need. They'll be slow, they'll never win on a mathematics-themed TV game show, but the tasks they can complete will be no different from those of anyone else.
A person wants to write as well as Shakespeare? This isn't hard. They write a story, then they apply recursively a series of rules - maybe for days, maybe for decades - that refine the grammar, improve the nuances, correct the spelling, enhance the imagery and expand the seeds of ideas into a full-grown garden of wonder. For some people, all the rules needed may be in their head and little or no revision is necessary. For others, they might need an entire row of storage units to hold all of the rulebooks they need to polish their work until it gleams. Why should it matter which they do? So long as they know what to do to get to where they are going, why should they care about the individual steps needed?
Can anyone walk to the south pole? Probably not. Can anyone get to the south pole? Certainly - just pick a mode of transport, which may be by foot, that works best. The over-specified can be impossible, but if the requirements alone can be met by one, they can be met by all.
The same is true of catching a ball. Anyone can catch a ball without thinking, some of the time. Anyone can practice, consciously, to catch a ball and improve their success rate considerably. Anyone can learn the principles of dynamics so deeply and so thoroughly that it becomes what is called "second nature" or "intuition" even though it's nothing of the sort. It is merely exactly the same process as doing the whole calculation with pen and paper, but using extremely fast, dedicated circuitry deep within the brain.
"Intuition" is the word of mystics to describe a brain that is nothing more than a fancy protein-based computer because they cannot and will not accept the fact that the brain can do precisely nothing that a computer cannot.
...Axl symmetry, they could produce something that was violently unstable but produced vast amounts of marketable energy and money.
The expected change in ability will roughly follow an S-curve. Those who know very little will need to learn a lot to advance just a little. Those who know a lot must learn a lot more for it to make any difference. Those in the middle have the tools to learn rapidly and will do so.
All you need to do is have a test at the start of the year, extrapolate from prior years the constants needed to define the curve, then use that to determine where the student can be expected to be at the end of the year. The end of year exam is then normalized the same way. Your actual grade would then be equal to ((normalized end of year) - (normalized start of year) + (mid-point score)) * (multiplier needed to stretch/shrink scores over traditional range).
If you do this, any student who works consistently will score consistently. Any student who achieves better than they could have been expected to will always score well, no matter what their abilities are like compared to others of their own age. Likewise, someone who learned a lot once upon a time and is now sleeping through lessons will automatically fail, no matter how good their knowledge.
To make this system fair and easy to apply, you've also got to stream classes. Mixed-ability classes would not work well with a relativistic rating system. Ideally, each subject would be broken into 5 or 7 streams, giving you 2 or 3 subdivisions from neurotypical ability on either side of the bell curve. For large enough schools, I'd expect such a system to use standard deviations from average. With smaller numbers, you'd need to narrow the bands more. You'd also have multiple classes of the same ability, as needed. You need an age-appropriate number of instructors per student in each class, but no class of any age should exceed about 15-18 students.
The multiple classes would allow you to cover different styles and methods of covering the same material, so students who did poorly with one style/method could find one that worked better for them, as learning - not ability - is the part that is truly individual. Ability places demands on learning, but has no direct impact at all.
(Also note that 99.9% of the time, if someone is "bad" at maths, it's because the instructor is incapable of teaching them, it has almost nothing to do with actual ability at all. A different instructor, working at a different pace, can turn a person with consistent scores of zero into a mega-star grade-A+ student - or turn a grade-A+ student into one with a score of zero.)
Then you get into the "real world". Those involved in computing do an extraordinary amount of maths - whether for 3D graphics, figuring out how to optimize the normalization of the databases, maximizing network performance, or performing non-trivial QA functions. Those in any research field also use extensive amounts of maths. Geological work? Maths - and bloody complicated wave functions through multiple boundary layers it is, too. This isn't the stuff of amateurs, this is seriously hard work.
What else. Engineering. Those who lack maths are doomed to rebuild roughly 14,000 incompetently-designed, incompetently-maintained bridges because those before them never applied the maths to spot design defects or prevent potentially catastrophic deterioration. Those who have maths are likely the ones to actually do the architectural redesigns and make bucketloads of money. Those who lack maths might weld, glue or rivet bits of aircraft together, but the designers - the ones doing the real work - are the ones with top-notch maths. Which is just as well, because those are the people who matter. The person gluing could be replaced by a robot - if they haven't been already - and you'd never notice or care.
Even at the cash register, you can spot the ones with strong maths skills. They're the ones telling you the total BEFORE the machine, who can get the change right by touch alone, who can process more customers than the rest of the lines put together. Yes, I've seen plenty of people that good, and I've seen plenty of morons who can add and subtract but that's it.
What about salespeople, cable runners and other high-travel folk? If you don't understand optimization, you will never minimize travel times. There is no computable solution, so you have to do the maths in real-time in your head.
Manufacturing? There's no high school I know of that teaches Operational Research and SIMPLEX. There's also not the remotest possibility of maintaining high profits and high quality without such techniques.
Journalism! Journalism can't need maths, can it? It's just writing skills. Uh, no. Packing the maximum number of key points into the least space is the packing problem. Anyone can write, anyone can (with practice) write something readable. But only those with a good understanding of the packing problem can write efficiently and effectively. That is why so few journalists are truly excellent and why so many are merely OK.
What about creative writing? That's an even clearer one. Look at the ground-breaking writers - Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, JRR Tolkien, C. S. Lewis. What do they have in common? They're ALL scientists, which means they're ALL maths-oriented. There's no point trying to say that the Lord of the Rings is science fiction and therefore needs science skills, because it isn't. It needs science skills because coherent, structured, self-consistent, efficient, disciplined stories cannot be written by anyone other than someone with a mathematical mind. It can't be done. Those who try will almost invariably be sloppier, produce formulaic work (or steal it outright), be inconsistent and/or be wholly lazy about the whole thing. It may be perfect by English class standards, it may eve
Trademarks must be actively defended, and the Red Cross has been placing its symbol on medical-related goods for decades. Variants of the red cross symbol are used on military ambulances, first-aid stations, emergency medical supplies and other similar contexts. By now, the trademark must surely be considered so diluted as to be considered generic. This happens with words a lot, and the companies really don't lose by it, although to hear them bitch and moan they do. If this symbol has now entered the realm of common usage, I think it might be the first to do so, which would be interesting.
Much more appropriate, as that was the Royal legal system at the time the cross was in use. It also has the advantage of being portable, making covert renditions unnecessary. You can convene the court at the victi^H^H^H^H^Hsuspect's house, if you want. Use of the rack during cross-examination is not advised, though, as the neighbors may complain about the noise.
First, the article makes it clear that the two hominids didn't compete. They operated in different environments and ate different food. Even when primates do operate in similar realms, they can coexist for millions of years - as humans have with chimps and gorillas. The relatively peaceful coexistence of humans and Neanderthals is also well documented. They simply ignored each other. It is also suspected - but unproven - in the case of Homo Florensis. Besides which, even when replacement occurs, it's going to occur slowly. Populations grow exponentially, but only over a vast timeframe. It isn't overnight. The multiple migration theory also suggests that multiple hominid types co-existed, or there wouldn't be distinct populations migrating. (In fact, the mere existence of the theory shows some paleontologists have always believed in multiple co-existing branches.)
The problem here is that this collapse in diversity has NOT been followed by an increase. The earlier Slashdot story on the Industrial Revolution was interesting in that it SHOULD have heralded the next boom cycle. It did not. The collapse is continuing.
Cultural diversity is interesting, but not really a primary issue. It is also very difficult, as so little was ever documented. If there is nothing to compare against, you can't know what the rate of loss is, although we can measure what we do know to have been lost. It is also impossible to know how much of that loss has led to a corresponding increase in diversity elsewhere in society, for much the same reason - almost nothing ever gets documented until it's far too late to identify the place, time, nature or cause of the origin.
On the flip-side, Microsoft is hardly an expert on security and the last thing they need is for customers to require it. It would totally devastate their market.
So although both sides make good points, neither side can afford to let people weigh them.
CISC eventually collapsed precisely because of this. RISC was faster - far faster - without the composite instructions. Hybrids, like the Pentium series, have since developed, where the underlying architecture is RISC and the composite instructions are emulated by being split into much simpler ones. So far, so good, so what? You still have a translation layer. You still have that decomposition. That's not free, you know. It takes time.
So why do this at all, and not have a pure RISC system? Well, many CPU manufacturers asked the same question. And decided to do exactly that. Have a pure RISC architecture. They generally do the same amount of real work with a fifth of the clockspeed of a CISC/RISC hybrid - so they run cooler and you can pack more into less space.
Why don't Intel and AMD do this? Oh, they'd love to! The Itanic proved many things, though, one of which is that the 8086-style CISC layer has to remain. The customers have too much legacy software now. Not only are consumers locked into Intel's architecture, so is Intel! There's nothing they can do to escape, unless they make a chip that has some cores on the old design and some on a new one. But who is going to buy a processor that costs more and does less (for now)? Nobody. Thank you.
This should be the lesson that companies learn from the IT industry (but won't): Too much lock-in locks the company in as well, making necessary changes and corrections impossible. Given enough time and enough failures to change, the company will destroy itself.
I don't know of anyone who has gone to the gate level to tune software - I've never found it necessary to go beyond a high-level definition of the processor, the sizes/speeds of the caches, the lanes between the segments, the length of each pipeline segment and other such information that can be basically listed. However, such information will not reveal unintended features (distinguished from bugs by being useful) and won't expose every possible shortcut.
HPC is fun, though I agree that modern processors are counter-intuitive. They can do some seriously weird things at times, which is why CPUburn is such an interesting program. If only the developers still maintained it. :( A CPU that can self-destruct performing legal, documented operations is a buggy CPU. That goes for any other hardware, too.
However, many unhealthy behaviours are caused by psychological issues, stress and other such factors. Yes, many others are caused by the person being stupid or self-destructive for no other reason than to be. Penalizing both the same way by the same amount doesn't encourage either group to change. You've gotta distinguish before you can decide the correct course of action, although ultimately penalizing and firing are the last two options.
Back to penalizing people for their genetics. That is a VERY VERY bad idea, and you're right that that is a frictionless slope. I would be very disturbed if any employer started such a practice. And not just because I'm descended from a Scottish clan that got banned in the 1600s on pain of death. Fortunately, the edict was lifted on the McGregors a hundred years later, so there's no point trying to claim it now. However, I could easily see racists and nationalists craving a way to legally punish people of the "wrong" genetic pool, and other fringe extremists using the opportunity to punish hereditary conditions that had no impact on work and perhaps had no visible or measurable impact of any kind at all.
If you want anything remotely approaching fairness in the workplace, you need to tackle such issues with a careful eye on what you are doing, not what you are intending.