Developers don't like having a lot of different versions of their software out in the world because it means they have to maintain those versions. Adding some sort of default rollback ability implies that devs will have to continue to support those old versions. That's not going to be very popular.
I don't want them to maintain the old version, I just want to get it back! The very reason I want this is that I know the developers are not reponsive. If the developers were responsive, they'd fix the defects, and I would at least be able to work with the next version. But in real life, developers don't care about the problems of one obscure user. That's why I want to go back: the old version worked for me, and the new one doesn't. The developers don't have to do anything further for me, I just want them to not take my working version from me.
Seems to me there was something else I heard about that was anonymous, and can be traded for all kinds of illegal things.
Oh, yeah. I remember now: cash.
Which is why cash is being so aggressively deprecated in all of its roles (anti-laundering laws, bonuses for loyalty cards, new methods of mobile payment every week...). It's always about control, and politicians love control.
Regardless of which side of the warming debate you're on, hearing reports that a climate projection was off by half doesn't instill confidence that scientists really understand what's going on.
An order of magnitude error is a factor of 10. This was a factor of 0.5.
When I was in grad school, studying linguistics, computational linguistics, and automatic speech recognition, I recall it mentioned more than once the idea of using latent semantic analysis and such to do this kind of translation. So am I correct in assuming that this hasn't been done well in the past, and Google finally made it work well because they have larger corpora of translated texts?
You are utterly correct. The idea of machine translation by looking up each word in a dictionary and shuffle the result around was big in the 1950s, but hasn't been since then. It became all too clear very early that this isn't the way to produce texts that a native speaker would ever say (or even comprehend). The barrier to doing this kind of context-dependent analysis was that the hardware wasn't there for a long time, and later the huge parallel corpora that are needed to make it work were missing. (Just think how many millions of words a child hears until it learns to speak fluently and effortlessly!) Now that both are there, of course Google is among the most successful implementors.
In other words, patent trolls will now expend more effort on attacking the rest of us who are not phenomenally wealthy. Certainly Martha Stewart has every right to defend herself, and I'l probably cheer when she wins - but the outcome isn't really one we can be glad about.
You now have a number that is divisible by none of the primes, which therefore must be a prime number.
Or the number is divisible by a prime that wasn't in you initial set.
No, the assumption was that you have all prime numbers. You're not allowed to violate assumptions within a formal proof, you're only allowed to point out self-contradictions.
Security cameras in casinos are able to resolve the cards that poker players hold in their hands? That sounds like an incredibly obvious attack vector - I'm surprised this hasn't happened previously. (Of course, casino management isn't exactly known for transparency, so probably it has.)
That is completely true, but beside the point. Yes, there are many different kinds of intelligence, you need different sets of skills to succeed, your competence in one set doesn't predict competence in another set, intelligence isn't one-dimensional, etc. All true.
But IQ tests are supposed to test precisely only one of these sets: analytical problem-solving intelligence, and they do exactly that. And they have been doing this and ignoring shelter-building or emotional intelligence from the beginning. And still the scores keep going up. So we would like to find a reason why even this limited, narrow slice of intelligence in the population seems to change.
As much as I like languages like Perl and Java, where memory is managed for you (kind of), there will always be a great need for languages that brings programmers as close as necessary to the workings of the machine itself.
Yes, mostly for writing kernels and virtual machines.
You can't brute force a sudoku, it would take about 1450 billion years using a super duper computer using only brute force. But you could use different solving techniques.
It's quite disingenuous to say that brute force doesn't work. It only takes this long if you insist on using the most brain-dead generate-and-test algorithm imaginable (i.e., generate complete 81-tuples and then check whether they happen to be valid). Add the smallest possible amount of cross-checking (i.e. don't extend candidate tuples in a way that violates the constraints), and a simple backtracking algorithm will succeed near-instantaneously. In fact, it will start spewing out solutions immediately even if you start it with a completely empty board.
No, all countries that use the Euro have the same set of coins - including 1, 2, and 5 cent coins. IIRC, only the Netherlands and Finland have abandoned the smallest coins in practice. They mint only token amounts, but they still mint them.
Ten years of counter-terrorism and nation building in Afghanistan, and targeted assassinations in the region around it. And U.S. officials are *still* unable to make visits there unless they are unannounced... for security reasons. Is that really what near victory looks like?
From my experience, pirates tend to be broken up into these main categories:
- People who pirate because they can't afford to be legit (at least not on everything), or simply think the prices are too high and refuse to pay the price being asked.
- People who pirate because they are digital hoarders, and they wouldn't care what the price is. They just collect data for bragging rights, to explore all the data that's out there, for trading, or 'just in case' they need or want it one day (or in case someone else might want or need it.) Or maybe it's just to be rebellious.
- People who pirate for trial purposes, to help them in making a buying decisions. Despite skepticism to the contrary, some of these actually buy.
- People who pirate in order to avoid the bad user experiences that are often associated with buying legitimately these days, and who might actually be legit if there were less hassle involved.
You forgot a sizable number: people who don't live in the U.S.A., and would like to watch their favorite content now rather than one year later. I think those outnumber categories three and four.
There needs to be a 'never show me results from this domain' button to blacklist this garbage and keep people from gaming the system.
You mean there is absolutely no way to have a personal domain blacklist for searches?
Wow, that is near-unbelievable. I would have thought that was the very first thing to be implemented on a per-user basis. I mean, what's the point on having a personalized identity for Google? (For me, I mean. I'm aware that they make money from generating targeted ads for me. But why should I play that game when there's nothing in it for me?)
Although this idea can work, it just starts an escalation. Assume Firefox is updated to do this. Firefox has to track the information about addons it knows about so that it can detect the new one. The slimeballs that are doing this eventually figure out how the tracking works and set it to approved. Then Mozilla makes an update to encrypt the store of known addons. It stops the slimeballs for awhile. Eventually, they figure out how to copy an encrypted data blob that has several known addons already allowed - including theirs. Mozilla makes another update - this time to use some LUID type information as part of the encryption so that the files can't be copied. Another escalation. Unfortunately it is hard to stop bad behavior with technical solutions.
Of course it's hard, that's why we wish the developers would do it instead of us less-able users. And of course it won't work perfectly all the time, but it's still way better than what we have now: slimeballs have unlimited access to your install, all the effing time! Oh, and once we get to the encryption/verification stage, what they do might actually become illegal in some jurisdictions, because it's access control circumvention. So, yeah, it's not perfect, but there are good reasons to take up the fight instead of taking it all lying down.
In all other experiments, our understanding of Gravity works just fine. In this one situation however, it does not. Someone proposes the idea of Dark Matter - which fits the bill almost perfectly, as it accounts for what we've seen.
Alternatively, our understanding is wrong. We don't know how its wrong, or why its wrong, it's just not working. When we look at hundreds of other examples, it works. When we look at this one, it doesn't.
Is it more plausible to discount our theory based on the 1 case where it doesn't hold up, or assume there is something special about that one case that seperates it from the others.
Isn't that exactly the same situation as with classical mechanics? It worked really, really well in each every case, except you observed utterly insane speed values. It turned out that it was wrong and you had to include a factor for speed, which happened to be neglegible in all other cases. Now, as fas as I understand it, we have another theory that works really, really, well except when observing astronomical masses and distances. Why shouldn't that require another modification to the formula itself? (I've always had the suspicion that physicists are so keen on detecting new elementary particles to explain gaps in our explanations because you can at least experiment with them, just by upping the energy involved... whereas you can't do experiments on distant galaxies at all, you can just observe them.)
There NEEDS to be a financial incentive for a publisher to publish books. And there NEEDS to be a financial incentive for an author to write a book. If you take away their ability to make money on their works, you will effectively kill the majority of new materials. No new novels, no new poems, no new articles, etc.
Wrong. There needs to be a financial incentive for authoring and publishing for a caste of professional writers and publishing specialists to be viable. It has not been established yet whether this, in turn, is in fact necessary for an adequate supply of literature to be available to society, or whether masterpieces will be produced anyway and their authors sustained by means other than per-printing fees (like Shakespeare's plays). Many, many outcomes are possible and most haven't even been tried yet; but insisting on a model based on a scarcity of physical objects that has become completely pointless, just because it's what you know and what you currently do, is as disingenuous as subsidizing buggy-whips.
The federal ID card is not "mandatory" in any sense except that you may have to show it for certain very fundamental occasions, notably voting. (May have to show, I should add - the last two federal elections I wasn't even asked for the ID card, just for my voter's notification.) You have to actively go out, apply for an ID card and pay the fee to get one. You can live a long and productive live and never use your ID at all, unless you're a lawyer by profession or get arrested a lot... Also, the new chip ID will be issued starting in September - it will be a long time until even a majority has one. I got an old-style ID in July, so I'm good until 2020, and even then I won't give my fingerprint for it, that's an optional feature (it's only required for international passports).
So, overall - yeah, this is a deal, but it's a lot less big a deal than the summary makes it sound like.
A program capable of "making informed guesses based on context" seems perfectly plausible, though that's not part of speech recognition per se.
If you believe that, you don't know much about speech recognition.
Seriously, the language model in modern dictation systems is THE most important part. The computer gets much more relevant information from a-priori probabilities of words and sounds than from recognizing them directly, because most of the time the sounds that our brain thinks it hears are objectively not there at all. Read up on NLP some time; it is a totally fascinating (if somewhat depressing) field of research.
That's not really true. String theory makes a great many testable predictions, in that it devolves down to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. Every test of quantum mechanics tests part of string theory, and those tests pass with flying colors.
That's a really disingenious line of reasoning. If ST is an extension of QM, but the only testable parts are those that were already in QM, then it is effectively completely untestable. You are arguing as if the flying spaghetti monster were somehow more plausible because of the well-tested predictions of standard biology about cats and microbes.
If you modify the Monty Hall problem, such that he opens a random door *which might actually expose the car*, then when he opens the door and you see a goat, it doesn't matter whether you switch or not.)
Unfortunately, almost no retelling of the Monty Hall problem makes this clear. On the contrary, most of them strongly imply that the opened door was really a random door, which makes the whole controversy pretty much moot.
A justification that I see fairly often is that if someone couldn't possibly buy a product then piracy of that product is ethically neutral because you can't be causing a loss of sales. I disagree with that because it is still a violation of the right that the copyright owner has to control the distribution of copies; however, I think that that argument is much less central to the issue of piracy than the perceived "right to consume" that does not exist.
I know that much of Slashdot thinks that such a right should exist and I ask of you: why should such a right exist?
The right to listen to music, read texts etc. already existed from the time music/writing was invented. Don't want anyone to hear you? Don't perform in public. The right to control distribution of expressions of ideas was artificially introduced, specifically so that originators can use it to profit from selling them for a while, with the explicit goal of increasing the amount of ideas and expressions available to society. Using copyright to prevent any distribution completely undermines that purpose, so it makes no sense at all to allow such an abuse.
You know, those features almost perfectly describe the task of software development. That didn't stop the crowd-sourced, honor-motivated, freely-shared approach from suddenly becoming an overwhelming success story. So while that sounds convincing at first, the true reason must be something entirely different - I'm not saying I know what it is, but this ain't it.
Slashdot Mirror
Developers don't like having a lot of different versions of their software out in the world because it means they have to maintain those versions. Adding some sort of default rollback ability implies that devs will have to continue to support those old versions. That's not going to be very popular.
I don't want them to maintain the old version, I just want to get it back! The very reason I want this is that I know the developers are not reponsive. If the developers were responsive, they'd fix the defects, and I would at least be able to work with the next version. But in real life, developers don't care about the problems of one obscure user. That's why I want to go back: the old version worked for me, and the new one doesn't. The developers don't have to do anything further for me, I just want them to not take my working version from me.
Seems to me there was something else I heard about that was anonymous, and can be traded for all kinds of illegal things. Oh, yeah. I remember now: cash.
Which is why cash is being so aggressively deprecated in all of its roles (anti-laundering laws, bonuses for loyalty cards, new methods of mobile payment every week...). It's always about control, and politicians love control.
Regardless of which side of the warming debate you're on, hearing reports that a climate projection was off by half doesn't instill confidence that scientists really understand what's going on.
An order of magnitude error is a factor of 10. This was a factor of 0.5.
Slashdot's biggest redesign effort ever is now in beta
Why?
When I was in grad school, studying linguistics, computational linguistics, and automatic speech recognition, I recall it mentioned more than once the idea of using latent semantic analysis and such to do this kind of translation. So am I correct in assuming that this hasn't been done well in the past, and Google finally made it work well because they have larger corpora of translated texts?
You are utterly correct. The idea of machine translation by looking up each word in a dictionary and shuffle the result around was big in the 1950s, but hasn't been since then. It became all too clear very early that this isn't the way to produce texts that a native speaker would ever say (or even comprehend). The barrier to doing this kind of context-dependent analysis was that the hardware wasn't there for a long time, and later the huge parallel corpora that are needed to make it work were missing. (Just think how many millions of words a child hears until it learns to speak fluently and effortlessly!) Now that both are there, of course Google is among the most successful implementors.
In other words, patent trolls will now expend more effort on attacking the rest of us who are not phenomenally wealthy. Certainly Martha Stewart has every right to defend herself, and I'l probably cheer when she wins - but the outcome isn't really one we can be glad about.
You now have a number that is divisible by none of the primes, which therefore must be a prime number.
Or the number is divisible by a prime that wasn't in you initial set.
No, the assumption was that you have all prime numbers. You're not allowed to violate assumptions within a formal proof, you're only allowed to point out self-contradictions.
Security cameras in casinos are able to resolve the cards that poker players hold in their hands? That sounds like an incredibly obvious attack vector - I'm surprised this hasn't happened previously. (Of course, casino management isn't exactly known for transparency, so probably it has.)
As opposed to what? "Could actually"?
That is completely true, but beside the point. Yes, there are many different kinds of intelligence, you need different sets of skills to succeed, your competence in one set doesn't predict competence in another set, intelligence isn't one-dimensional, etc. All true. But IQ tests are supposed to test precisely only one of these sets: analytical problem-solving intelligence, and they do exactly that. And they have been doing this and ignoring shelter-building or emotional intelligence from the beginning. And still the scores keep going up. So we would like to find a reason why even this limited, narrow slice of intelligence in the population seems to change.
As much as I like languages like Perl and Java, where memory is managed for you (kind of), there will always be a great need for languages that brings programmers as close as necessary to the workings of the machine itself.
Yes, mostly for writing kernels and virtual machines.
You can't brute force a sudoku, it would take about 1450 billion years using a super duper computer using only brute force. But you could use different solving techniques.
It's quite disingenuous to say that brute force doesn't work. It only takes this long if you insist on using the most brain-dead generate-and-test algorithm imaginable (i.e., generate complete 81-tuples and then check whether they happen to be valid). Add the smallest possible amount of cross-checking (i.e. don't extend candidate tuples in a way that violates the constraints), and a simple backtracking algorithm will succeed near-instantaneously. In fact, it will start spewing out solutions immediately even if you start it with a completely empty board.
No, all countries that use the Euro have the same set of coins - including 1, 2, and 5 cent coins. IIRC, only the Netherlands and Finland have abandoned the smallest coins in practice. They mint only token amounts, but they still mint them.
Ten years of counter-terrorism and nation building in Afghanistan, and targeted assassinations in the region around it. And U.S. officials are *still* unable to make visits there unless they are unannounced... for security reasons. Is that really what near victory looks like?
From my experience, pirates tend to be broken up into these main categories:
- People who pirate because they can't afford to be legit (at least not on everything), or simply think the prices are too high and refuse to pay the price being asked. - People who pirate because they are digital hoarders, and they wouldn't care what the price is. They just collect data for bragging rights, to explore all the data that's out there, for trading, or 'just in case' they need or want it one day (or in case someone else might want or need it.) Or maybe it's just to be rebellious. - People who pirate for trial purposes, to help them in making a buying decisions. Despite skepticism to the contrary, some of these actually buy. - People who pirate in order to avoid the bad user experiences that are often associated with buying legitimately these days, and who might actually be legit if there were less hassle involved.
You forgot a sizable number: people who don't live in the U.S.A., and would like to watch their favorite content now rather than one year later. I think those outnumber categories three and four.
There needs to be a 'never show me results from this domain' button to blacklist this garbage and keep people from gaming the system.
You mean there is absolutely no way to have a personal domain blacklist for searches? Wow, that is near-unbelievable. I would have thought that was the very first thing to be implemented on a per-user basis. I mean, what's the point on having a personalized identity for Google? (For me, I mean. I'm aware that they make money from generating targeted ads for me. But why should I play that game when there's nothing in it for me?)
Although this idea can work, it just starts an escalation. Assume Firefox is updated to do this. Firefox has to track the information about addons it knows about so that it can detect the new one. The slimeballs that are doing this eventually figure out how the tracking works and set it to approved. Then Mozilla makes an update to encrypt the store of known addons. It stops the slimeballs for awhile. Eventually, they figure out how to copy an encrypted data blob that has several known addons already allowed - including theirs. Mozilla makes another update - this time to use some LUID type information as part of the encryption so that the files can't be copied. Another escalation. Unfortunately it is hard to stop bad behavior with technical solutions.
Of course it's hard, that's why we wish the developers would do it instead of us less-able users. And of course it won't work perfectly all the time, but it's still way better than what we have now: slimeballs have unlimited access to your install, all the effing time! Oh, and once we get to the encryption/verification stage, what they do might actually become illegal in some jurisdictions, because it's access control circumvention. So, yeah, it's not perfect, but there are good reasons to take up the fight instead of taking it all lying down.
Kind of.
In all other experiments, our understanding of Gravity works just fine. In this one situation however, it does not. Someone proposes the idea of Dark Matter - which fits the bill almost perfectly, as it accounts for what we've seen.
Alternatively, our understanding is wrong. We don't know how its wrong, or why its wrong, it's just not working. When we look at hundreds of other examples, it works. When we look at this one, it doesn't.
Is it more plausible to discount our theory based on the 1 case where it doesn't hold up, or assume there is something special about that one case that seperates it from the others.
Isn't that exactly the same situation as with classical mechanics? It worked really, really well in each every case, except you observed utterly insane speed values. It turned out that it was wrong and you had to include a factor for speed, which happened to be neglegible in all other cases. Now, as fas as I understand it, we have another theory that works really, really, well except when observing astronomical masses and distances. Why shouldn't that require another modification to the formula itself? (I've always had the suspicion that physicists are so keen on detecting new elementary particles to explain gaps in our explanations because you can at least experiment with them, just by upping the energy involved... whereas you can't do experiments on distant galaxies at all, you can just observe them.)
Wrong. There needs to be a financial incentive for authoring and publishing for a caste of professional writers and publishing specialists to be viable. It has not been established yet whether this, in turn, is in fact necessary for an adequate supply of literature to be available to society, or whether masterpieces will be produced anyway and their authors sustained by means other than per-printing fees (like Shakespeare's plays). Many, many outcomes are possible and most haven't even been tried yet; but insisting on a model based on a scarcity of physical objects that has become completely pointless, just because it's what you know and what you currently do, is as disingenuous as subsidizing buggy-whips.
So, overall - yeah, this is a deal, but it's a lot less big a deal than the summary makes it sound like.
A program capable of "making informed guesses based on context" seems perfectly plausible, though that's not part of speech recognition per se.
If you believe that, you don't know much about speech recognition.
Seriously, the language model in modern dictation systems is THE most important part. The computer gets much more relevant information from a-priori probabilities of words and sounds than from recognizing them directly, because most of the time the sounds that our brain thinks it hears are objectively not there at all. Read up on NLP some time; it is a totally fascinating (if somewhat depressing) field of research.
That's not really true. String theory makes a great many testable predictions, in that it devolves down to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. Every test of quantum mechanics tests part of string theory, and those tests pass with flying colors.
That's a really disingenious line of reasoning. If ST is an extension of QM, but the only testable parts are those that were already in QM, then it is effectively completely untestable. You are arguing as if the flying spaghetti monster were somehow more plausible because of the well-tested predictions of standard biology about cats and microbes.
If you modify the Monty Hall problem, such that he opens a random door *which might actually expose the car*, then when he opens the door and you see a goat, it doesn't matter whether you switch or not.)
Unfortunately, almost no retelling of the Monty Hall problem makes this clear. On the contrary, most of them strongly imply that the opened door was really a random door, which makes the whole controversy pretty much moot.
A justification that I see fairly often is that if someone couldn't possibly buy a product then piracy of that product is ethically neutral because you can't be causing a loss of sales. I disagree with that because it is still a violation of the right that the copyright owner has to control the distribution of copies; however, I think that that argument is much less central to the issue of piracy than the perceived "right to consume" that does not exist.
I know that much of Slashdot thinks that such a right should exist and I ask of you: why should such a right exist?
The right to listen to music, read texts etc. already existed from the time music/writing was invented. Don't want anyone to hear you? Don't perform in public. The right to control distribution of expressions of ideas was artificially introduced, specifically so that originators can use it to profit from selling them for a while, with the explicit goal of increasing the amount of ideas and expressions available to society. Using copyright to prevent any distribution completely undermines that purpose, so it makes no sense at all to allow such an abuse.
You know, those features almost perfectly describe the task of software development. That didn't stop the crowd-sourced, honor-motivated, freely-shared approach from suddenly becoming an overwhelming success story. So while that sounds convincing at first, the true reason must be something entirely different - I'm not saying I know what it is, but this ain't it.