I haven't seen anything that directly contradicted the "interstellar hydrogen is mostly antimatter" idea.
Presumably you mean aside from the fact that we haven't seen any sign of the high energy signatures that would surely happen from annihilation collisions when the solar wind meets this interstellar anti-matter.
And yet he cared enough to post. So if you're right then the conclusion would be that he's an ignorant lazy narcissistic smartass. Yeah, those guys need defending.
I appreciate the confirmation. However, at the risk of sounding like a Monty Python skit, if you're going to argue with me, you need to find points of disagreement.
Political speech may be protected, but it doesn't prevent you from being searched, wiretapped, or charged if you are involved in the breaking of another law. Otherwise Bradley Manning would have used that as a defense and would be running around free. Hence an organization that calls itself a news organization but in fact only engages in politcal propaganda should not expect the additional protections traditionally afforded to news organizations.
Sorry, I'm not a US citizen, let alone a constitutional scholar, but there's a few parts to the First Amendment and one clause specifically regarding the press:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
My understanding is that that explicit press clause has been used in traditional case law to strongly defend the confidentiality of the operations of US news reporting organizations, and that they are thereby provided additional protections from search that are less available to individuals, due to their "impartial" role in keeping the government accountable to the people. It's those specific traditional protections that I was referring to, not freedom of speech in general. It's arguable that an organization that engages primarily in propaganda shouldn't be the benefactor of freedom from search if its propaganda often fails to be consistent with verifiable facts.
People aren't up in arms because the DoJ tried to stop the news organizations from publishing the stories (freedom of speech), they're up in arms because the DoJ obtained and executed specific types of search warrants against news organizations to try to track down sources of information leaks.
This is Fox News though. A lot of the left hates them enough to not mind if the administration they worship pisses all over the First Amendment.
Well, that's because the First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press (generally considered to apply to an independent investigation and reporting organization), but the left typically considers Fox News to be a propaganda arm of the Republican Party, and partisan propaganda purveyors shouldn't qualify for 1st Amendment rights (although individuals from those organizations would still qualify for the other amendments in the Bill of Rights where appropriate). The left's opinion of Fox News is mostly accurate, but there is unfortunately just enough journalism occasionally done at Fox that they should continue to be afforded 1st Amendment rights.
The other news [entertainment] organizations are smart enough to not want Fox News to set a bad precedent and for them to have to defend their qualifications for a 1st Amendment defense after the fact. The latter would have a huge chilling effect on their sources and their ability to collect information.
For the sort of capabilities that people are posting about here, such as self-directed AI, it would appear that what we need is a sentience that includes Artificial Consciousness. We currently have only one model that demonstrates that: the human brain (and to a lesser extent that of other primates). And while we are slowly making headway on understanding the low-level processes involved and how they scale up, they involve simulating analog processes. Classical "digital" AI researchers seem to be no closer to reproducing consciousness now than 50 years ago. So it's not clear to me that AI researchers understand consciousness significantly better than Freeman Dyson.
And the energy from all this is going to come from?
Hopefully a big chunk will come from fusion. As Germany has shown, you can get a lot of power from solar or wind, but not enough to replace hydrocarbon fuels. And we're unlikely to be able to do the same as Germany for the populations of South East Asia. If we don't break through on fusion soon to cut back on CO2 generation, we're quickly going to have big resource problems with or without widespread robot deployment.
To be fair, Blade Runner was a science fiction movie where they had flying cars. Deckard didn't just blow up a small part of the picture, he actually blew up something that was hidden from the standard point of view. The only way that made any sense was if it was some kind of 3D interference hologram that somehow didn't come across in the 2D movie projection. i.e. it's not a photograph as we know it Jim, not as we know it.
Actually, it is Florida so chances are good that the ADA is Republican. If so it's quite possible the ADA decided not to prosecute the boy with the rifle to avoid annoying the NRA by providing a case regarding gun control at a time when the NRA are particularly touchy (gun-shy?) on the subject. The NRA (and their gun manufacturer donors) likes kids being indoctrinated young and doesn't like the risks publicized to its "responsible gun owner" members and the public at large.
In theory, the centralized routing agent, by having a global view of the network, can both optimize load across links and adjust to congestion patterns better than a distributed network infrastructure can. So for telcos and other colos, that can mean better uptime and more efficient use of expensive high-end infrastructure. Just as a centralized traffic light control system for a city can identify congestion hot spots and adjust light timing to reduce congestion better than isolated traffic lights can.
For instance, if nets A, B, and C are linked in a loop for redundancy, spikes of traffic between A and C could be load balanced by shifting certain source-destination pairs over the link to B to avoid congestion, even though it would normally be faster to go over the A-C link and that's what an OSPF router would do. Alternatively, in the longer term, a telco could make more effective use of fibre if it could temporarily re-allocate fiber currently not used for voice to deal with a spike in data traffic.
From what I read of SDN, the idea is to have centralized routing (presumably for use within a data centre, telco, or high-performance campus network) instead of decentralized routing. Instead of having each individual node recalculate routes using tree-based routing algorithms like OSPF, a central node with a holistic view of the network recalculates and redistributes routes using algorithms that allow more fine grained slicing of packet flows for closer to optimal load balancing and congestion management.Unless you're a telco, a co-lo, or have a datacentre with >5 racks steadily generating >50Gb/s of network I/O per rack and needing high availability, it's doubtful that you need to pay the premium for it.
Nope. You probably just have a very strong need to identify with a group. When you decided the group you had identified with had disappointed you somehow (not hard with the current crop of Republicans if you haven't completely closed your mind to inconvenient facts) you switched to the only other available option. If you're not in the USA, well, the Repulicans aren't the only hypocritical right wing party that is fanning and exploiting fear, greed, and jealousy to gain power.
P.S. In the open plan offices I've been in, there are often people talking loudly on the phone, managing projects and talking to prospective clients. If you needed to talk to yourself a bit to work through a problem, it would just be one more voice that everybody else tunes out. You'll be allowed a music player and headphones if that helps you concentrate and solve hard problems. If you need absolute silence to work out a problem like you have during an examination, then you're going to have a problem in an open plan office.
Seriously, if you need to have some privacy to solve a tough math problem in the course of a professional career, there will be ways for that to happen. Cubicles do afford a lot more space and privacy than the tiny cramped desks and chairs used in mass examinations for starters. Even if you're in an open plan office, you can probably book a small meeting room to work through the tougher parts of the problem and do the rest at your desk. If your work space gives you flashbacks to your math 100 final exam, you need to quit and find an employer who values their employees more and understands human psychology better.
In the real working world you won't get fired (the equivalent of having your paper taken away and being thrown out of the examination) if you mumble to yourself if working on a real tough problem. Really. You see they won't be worried that you're cheating. If you're really spending that much of your time solving really hard math problems, you probably won't be in a room with 50-150 people or expected to keep silent, you'll probably be solving a lot of other people's hard problems and they won't care as much that you're not perfectly silent. You may even have a semi-private shared room. If you're actually in an open plan office, then they'll put up with the occasional mumbling as you work through a problem few others in the office can manage. Also in the real working world (i.e. outside of academia), only a very small fraction of computer-science positions, even software development positions, actually involve single variable calculus, let alone differential equations or complex calculus. There is admittedly more use for linear algebra though even that is relatively tiny outside of games development studios.
You misunderstood. To demonstrate competence they had to solve problems. Correctly. It's just that they could do it in person, but couldn't do it in the "sit your butt here and you have 1.5 hours to put your answers on this piece of paper without making any noise" conditions typical of written mass exams. Maybe they needed to think out loud about the problem? Or maybe those conditions heightened anxiety? I don't know because we never went that deeply into it. They knew the stuff and they could do it correctly. They just couldn't do it correctly while being quiet at a small desk in a room with 50 or 150 other people.
Odds are also very good that both of them are smarter than you, BTW.
I have at least two friends who told me that they had incredible difficulty with written standardized math tests (which limited their academic careers), but who could demonstrate competence in the subject matter in an in-person oral exam.
P.S. The real risk of segregated classes is of course that the segregation can be used to provide more resources and advantage to one of the segregated groups over another. That can happen either deliberately (i.e. the boys' football team gets wads of cash/booster support and all the other teams struggle with bake sales and car washes to raise funds) or subconsciously. That is why class segregation, whether by gender or race or something else, is normally discouraged. Historically, it has frequently wound up exploited to provide a tilted playing field in favour of the established powers. But pedagogically, you can make a pretty good case for sexual segregation of classrooms for some subjects and pupil age ranges.
No you would probably use co-ed classes where it's a definite benefit in terms of viewpoints. You don't need that in English while you're teaching grammar, although you could make an argument for it when you cover literature in higher grades. Social Studies and Arts (Fine Arts, Music, Drama), if you are lucky enough to have a school that offers art classes, would be other subjects where a greater diversity of viewpoints would add to the lesson. But for deterministic subjects like math and sciences, the co-ed mix doesn't add anything except distraction.
Here's the thing you're missing. Paying attention and focusing on the subject are key to learning and retention. So even if the boys are smarter (a bald assertion for which you offer no proof), if they don't remember half the things they are taught and need to know by the time they leave school and the woman does, which do you think is really going to do better in the workplace (not to mention actually have practice at being focused and productive)?
A couple of years ago I was talking to a guy who coached junior hockey. He observed that the guys who did well and went on to higher leagues weren't always the guys with the basic raw talent, they were the guys with the work ethic to put in the time and effort to get better. I doubt very much that only applies to hockey, oh smarter chump.
I think you're thinking of Robert Heinlein's Beyond this Horizon. I thought there were interesting parts in that book. For example it was one of my first exposures to the ethics of controls in experimentation (I was in my mid teens when I read it). There was the idea that you could apply the scientific method to investigate life after death. But the "armed society is a polite society"? Look at US politics, the Tea Party, road rage shootings, Trayvon Martin, and countless other situations, and tell me that the USA isn't a counter-example to Heinlein's assertion.
Too many people get a feeling of power from wielding a gun, and let it get to their heads. As an armed society, the US is a trigger happy society. First competent person to escalate and draw wins ("You're dissing me man!" over a small disagreement). When people in the US are polite, it's more likely a question of golden-rule upbringing and self-discipline than a respect of possible weapons at disposal.
The US is one of the most armed societies among developed nations. As far as I can tell from watching American politics, talk shows, and reading/listening to people talk about their pet peeves, it ranks very low on politeness compared to other societies. In fact I think you can pretty well point to modern US society as a clear counter-example of Heinlein's claim.
That average life expectancy was heavily pulled down by high infant mortality, lack of antibiotics to treat nasty bacterial infections like pneumonia, and agrarian lifestyles that were both harder on the body than modern white collar work and more dangerous (scythes, angry/in-pain animals, predators, sun exposure, etc.) . If you control for those differences, what do you get? Well, we don't know because they didn't realize 250 years ago that we would find useful background histories to supplement what little mortality/morbidity statistics they did collect.
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Do you know many landlords who take debit or Visa? Or do they instead insist on paying cash so the money doesn't get reported as income?
And yet he cared enough to post. So if you're right then the conclusion would be that he's an ignorant lazy narcissistic smartass. Yeah, those guys need defending.
I appreciate the confirmation. However, at the risk of sounding like a Monty Python skit, if you're going to argue with me, you need to find points of disagreement.
Political speech may be protected, but it doesn't prevent you from being searched, wiretapped, or charged if you are involved in the breaking of another law. Otherwise Bradley Manning would have used that as a defense and would be running around free. Hence an organization that calls itself a news organization but in fact only engages in politcal propaganda should not expect the additional protections traditionally afforded to news organizations.
Sorry, I'm not a US citizen, let alone a constitutional scholar, but there's a few parts to the First Amendment and one clause specifically regarding the press:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
My understanding is that that explicit press clause has been used in traditional case law to strongly defend the confidentiality of the operations of US news reporting organizations, and that they are thereby provided additional protections from search that are less available to individuals, due to their "impartial" role in keeping the government accountable to the people. It's those specific traditional protections that I was referring to, not freedom of speech in general. It's arguable that an organization that engages primarily in propaganda shouldn't be the benefactor of freedom from search if its propaganda often fails to be consistent with verifiable facts.
People aren't up in arms because the DoJ tried to stop the news organizations from publishing the stories (freedom of speech), they're up in arms because the DoJ obtained and executed specific types of search warrants against news organizations to try to track down sources of information leaks.
Well, that's because the First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press (generally considered to apply to an independent investigation and reporting organization), but the left typically considers Fox News to be a propaganda arm of the Republican Party, and partisan propaganda purveyors shouldn't qualify for 1st Amendment rights (although individuals from those organizations would still qualify for the other amendments in the Bill of Rights where appropriate). The left's opinion of Fox News is mostly accurate, but there is unfortunately just enough journalism occasionally done at Fox that they should continue to be afforded 1st Amendment rights.
The other news [entertainment] organizations are smart enough to not want Fox News to set a bad precedent and for them to have to defend their qualifications for a 1st Amendment defense after the fact. The latter would have a huge chilling effect on their sources and their ability to collect information.
For the sort of capabilities that people are posting about here, such as self-directed AI, it would appear that what we need is a sentience that includes Artificial Consciousness. We currently have only one model that demonstrates that: the human brain (and to a lesser extent that of other primates). And while we are slowly making headway on understanding the low-level processes involved and how they scale up, they involve simulating analog processes. Classical "digital" AI researchers seem to be no closer to reproducing consciousness now than 50 years ago. So it's not clear to me that AI researchers understand consciousness significantly better than Freeman Dyson.
Hopefully a big chunk will come from fusion. As Germany has shown, you can get a lot of power from solar or wind, but not enough to replace hydrocarbon fuels. And we're unlikely to be able to do the same as Germany for the populations of South East Asia. If we don't break through on fusion soon to cut back on CO2 generation, we're quickly going to have big resource problems with or without widespread robot deployment.
That would have been idiotic, if it were true. However there is no Java in Mozilla Firefox or Seamonkey.
To be fair, Blade Runner was a science fiction movie where they had flying cars. Deckard didn't just blow up a small part of the picture, he actually blew up something that was hidden from the standard point of view. The only way that made any sense was if it was some kind of 3D interference hologram that somehow didn't come across in the 2D movie projection. i.e. it's not a photograph as we know it Jim, not as we know it.
Actually, it is Florida so chances are good that the ADA is Republican. If so it's quite possible the ADA decided not to prosecute the boy with the rifle to avoid annoying the NRA by providing a case regarding gun control at a time when the NRA are particularly touchy (gun-shy?) on the subject. The NRA (and their gun manufacturer donors) likes kids being indoctrinated young and doesn't like the risks publicized to its "responsible gun owner" members and the public at large.
In theory, the centralized routing agent, by having a global view of the network, can both optimize load across links and adjust to congestion patterns better than a distributed network infrastructure can. So for telcos and other colos, that can mean better uptime and more efficient use of expensive high-end infrastructure. Just as a centralized traffic light control system for a city can identify congestion hot spots and adjust light timing to reduce congestion better than isolated traffic lights can.
For instance, if nets A, B, and C are linked in a loop for redundancy, spikes of traffic between A and C could be load balanced by shifting certain source-destination pairs over the link to B to avoid congestion, even though it would normally be faster to go over the A-C link and that's what an OSPF router would do. Alternatively, in the longer term, a telco could make more effective use of fibre if it could temporarily re-allocate fiber currently not used for voice to deal with a spike in data traffic.
From what I read of SDN, the idea is to have centralized routing (presumably for use within a data centre, telco, or high-performance campus network) instead of decentralized routing. Instead of having each individual node recalculate routes using tree-based routing algorithms like OSPF, a central node with a holistic view of the network recalculates and redistributes routes using algorithms that allow more fine grained slicing of packet flows for closer to optimal load balancing and congestion management.Unless you're a telco, a co-lo, or have a datacentre with >5 racks steadily generating >50Gb/s of network I/O per rack and needing high availability, it's doubtful that you need to pay the premium for it.
I think you'd want to use the hand for other things for quite a while to make sure it never misconstrued signals and started squeezing very hard.
Nope. You probably just have a very strong need to identify with a group. When you decided the group you had identified with had disappointed you somehow (not hard with the current crop of Republicans if you haven't completely closed your mind to inconvenient facts) you switched to the only other available option. If you're not in the USA, well, the Repulicans aren't the only hypocritical right wing party that is fanning and exploiting fear, greed, and jealousy to gain power.
P.S. In the open plan offices I've been in, there are often people talking loudly on the phone, managing projects and talking to prospective clients. If you needed to talk to yourself a bit to work through a problem, it would just be one more voice that everybody else tunes out. You'll be allowed a music player and headphones if that helps you concentrate and solve hard problems. If you need absolute silence to work out a problem like you have during an examination, then you're going to have a problem in an open plan office.
Seriously, if you need to have some privacy to solve a tough math problem in the course of a professional career, there will be ways for that to happen. Cubicles do afford a lot more space and privacy than the tiny cramped desks and chairs used in mass examinations for starters. Even if you're in an open plan office, you can probably book a small meeting room to work through the tougher parts of the problem and do the rest at your desk. If your work space gives you flashbacks to your math 100 final exam, you need to quit and find an employer who values their employees more and understands human psychology better.
In the real working world you won't get fired (the equivalent of having your paper taken away and being thrown out of the examination) if you mumble to yourself if working on a real tough problem. Really. You see they won't be worried that you're cheating. If you're really spending that much of your time solving really hard math problems, you probably won't be in a room with 50-150 people or expected to keep silent, you'll probably be solving a lot of other people's hard problems and they won't care as much that you're not perfectly silent. You may even have a semi-private shared room. If you're actually in an open plan office, then they'll put up with the occasional mumbling as you work through a problem few others in the office can manage. Also in the real working world (i.e. outside of academia), only a very small fraction of computer-science positions, even software development positions, actually involve single variable calculus, let alone differential equations or complex calculus. There is admittedly more use for linear algebra though even that is relatively tiny outside of games development studios.
You misunderstood. To demonstrate competence they had to solve problems. Correctly. It's just that they could do it in person, but couldn't do it in the "sit your butt here and you have 1.5 hours to put your answers on this piece of paper without making any noise" conditions typical of written mass exams. Maybe they needed to think out loud about the problem? Or maybe those conditions heightened anxiety? I don't know because we never went that deeply into it. They knew the stuff and they could do it correctly. They just couldn't do it correctly while being quiet at a small desk in a room with 50 or 150 other people.
Odds are also very good that both of them are smarter than you, BTW.
I have at least two friends who told me that they had incredible difficulty with written standardized math tests (which limited their academic careers), but who could demonstrate competence in the subject matter in an in-person oral exam.
P.S. The real risk of segregated classes is of course that the segregation can be used to provide more resources and advantage to one of the segregated groups over another. That can happen either deliberately (i.e. the boys' football team gets wads of cash/booster support and all the other teams struggle with bake sales and car washes to raise funds) or subconsciously. That is why class segregation, whether by gender or race or something else, is normally discouraged. Historically, it has frequently wound up exploited to provide a tilted playing field in favour of the established powers. But pedagogically, you can make a pretty good case for sexual segregation of classrooms for some subjects and pupil age ranges.
No you would probably use co-ed classes where it's a definite benefit in terms of viewpoints. You don't need that in English while you're teaching grammar, although you could make an argument for it when you cover literature in higher grades. Social Studies and Arts (Fine Arts, Music, Drama), if you are lucky enough to have a school that offers art classes, would be other subjects where a greater diversity of viewpoints would add to the lesson. But for deterministic subjects like math and sciences, the co-ed mix doesn't add anything except distraction.
Here's the thing you're missing. Paying attention and focusing on the subject are key to learning and retention. So even if the boys are smarter (a bald assertion for which you offer no proof), if they don't remember half the things they are taught and need to know by the time they leave school and the woman does, which do you think is really going to do better in the workplace (not to mention actually have practice at being focused and productive)?
A couple of years ago I was talking to a guy who coached junior hockey. He observed that the guys who did well and went on to higher leagues weren't always the guys with the basic raw talent, they were the guys with the work ethic to put in the time and effort to get better. I doubt very much that only applies to hockey, oh smarter chump.
I think you're thinking of Robert Heinlein's Beyond this Horizon. I thought there were interesting parts in that book. For example it was one of my first exposures to the ethics of controls in experimentation (I was in my mid teens when I read it). There was the idea that you could apply the scientific method to investigate life after death. But the "armed society is a polite society"? Look at US politics, the Tea Party, road rage shootings, Trayvon Martin, and countless other situations, and tell me that the USA isn't a counter-example to Heinlein's assertion.
Too many people get a feeling of power from wielding a gun, and let it get to their heads. As an armed society, the US is a trigger happy society. First competent person to escalate and draw wins ("You're dissing me man!" over a small disagreement). When people in the US are polite, it's more likely a question of golden-rule upbringing and self-discipline than a respect of possible weapons at disposal.
The US is one of the most armed societies among developed nations. As far as I can tell from watching American politics, talk shows, and reading/listening to people talk about their pet peeves, it ranks very low on politeness compared to other societies. In fact I think you can pretty well point to modern US society as a clear counter-example of Heinlein's claim.
That average life expectancy was heavily pulled down by high infant mortality, lack of antibiotics to treat nasty bacterial infections like pneumonia, and agrarian lifestyles that were both harder on the body than modern white collar work and more dangerous (scythes, angry/in-pain animals, predators, sun exposure, etc.) . If you control for those differences, what do you get? Well, we don't know because they didn't realize 250 years ago that we would find useful background histories to supplement what little mortality/morbidity statistics they did collect.