We do know that ash particles in high concentration can case jet engines to fail very quickly.
However, we do not know where the threshold for criticality is, because we have next to no experience with such incidents, and the manufacturers don't know either.
We also do not know very well how high the concentration is at any given point, because radar is useless for measuring it, and satellites are next to useless.
Definitely true. I've used Wikipedia many times to get a heads-up on the topic and learn what sources are good for further reading. I would never cite Wikipedia itself; it's a bit too unreliable and, more importantly, changeable to use directly as a source
Regarding the obvious issue of genetic privacy, Seringhaus makes this argument: "Your sensitive genetic information would be safe. A DNA profile distills a person’s complex genomic information down to a set of 26 numerical values, each characterizing the length of a certain repeated sequence of 'junk' DNA that differs from person to person. Although these genetic differences are biologically meaningless — they don’t correlate with any observable characteristics
The possibility of extra-terrestrials intercepting our signals, being
interested in them, replying before humanity has run its course, and
something good coming of it, are so remote that it's not worth
constantly wasting energy for the purpose. If you look at Earth from
space you realize what a tiny, limited, fragile place it is and how
important it is that we do all we can to make us "live long and
prosper". Hoping that aliens are going to help us in any way is
counter-productive.
Sam Seaborn: There are a lot of hungry people in the world, Mal, and none of them are hungry 'cause we went to the moon. None of them are colder and certainly none of them are dumber 'cause we went to the moon.
Mallory O'Brian: And we went to the moon. Do we really have to go to Mars?
Sam Seaborn: Yes.
Mallory O'Brian: Why?
Sam Seaborn: 'Cause it's next. 'Cause we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what's next.
- West Wing
Of course, in-series, Sam is the most gifted speech writer in the entire country. You really think we should do something because rhetorics tells you so?
He's not the guy to blame for people's misconceptions regarding computers. He's just doing his job and making stuff look pretty. Blaming him would be like blaming some make up guy for making Hollywood starlets set an impossibly high bar for beauty. Or script writers for giving people misconceptions about how life works.
The pwn2own contest would say otherwise. Mac is usually the first to go down.
Because for pwn2own you need a zero-day exploit - how high are the chances to find a 0day for Windows and nobody else having it out in the wild until that one day in the year of pwn2own? OTOH, Charlie Miller was sitting on his last winner for over a year, and nobody else found that exploit during that year.
Ridiculous nonsense. If present-day legislation had been active then, the very first thing that Paul would have done is to attach a the local equivalent of a creative commons license to his epistles. "Evangelizing" means "getting the good news out", after all. Give people some credit for brains!
There a lots and lots of smart arguments against the current mess. Don't use stupid ones.
This is not in any way similar to how humans process speech
How do humans do it?
Well, nobody knows exactly, but we are quite sure that it works
very differently.
Brains are massively parallel computers, but they have
ridiculously low clock speed compared to DSP chips. It is physically
impossible that the brain works with the same algorithms that speech
recognizers use.
There is tons of evidence that people perceive way more than they
are aware of. Nuances that we couldn't reliably diagnose if we were
asked about them are actually crucial to understanding.
Language understanding is a multi-modal. Even if you think you can't lip-read,
your understanding of someone in a noisy environment goes way up when
you can see their face while listening. And half of the time, we know what
someone said more because we already expected them to do so than
because we decoded their sounds.
Human Language understanding defies all the abstractions that
linguists and AI boffins have invented. We emphatically do not
first perceive a stream of sound, then segment it into consonants and vowels,
then assemble them into words, then parse them for the syntax, then
extract the meaning from it. Rather, the expectations that we have
about someone talking strongly influence what sounds we perceive in
the first place.
Hardly any of these peoperties have been duplicated in algorithms yet,
and it's not even certain that that would be a good idea. My point is,
yeah, the process is quite mysterious, but that doesn't mean we know
nothing about it.
I mean, if Google Translate cannot do a good translation WITHOUT having to interpret sounds to words, then this tech will hardly be any better.
The device receives verbal cues that are missing from translating text to another language. In fact, there is far more information available, and perhaps it is possible to get clues about which version of a word is desired (or which of several similar-sounding words) from tone shift.
In theory, yes. (That's why our brains get more info from a spoken sentence than a written one.)
In practice, not a chance in hell. Not until the state of the art advances by several breakthroughs.
Driving while distracted is already illegal. Telling us exactly how to do everything is not making people any more responsible. Solve the problem by applying existing law using common sense instead of making new laws that are easier to apply.
Yes, everyone knows in their heart that texting at the wheel is irresponsible and dangerous. But without the law explicitly citing it as distracting by definition, every single asshole who caused an accident will have his lawyer fight tooth and nail to contend that he was not distracted because there were special circumstances, or because he is so much more intelligent than the average guy, etc. It costs time and money all around and may even get him off and back on the road, endangering others again. Sometimes it makes sense to state the obvious if it saves you a potentially expensive but utterly useless code path, even if it is logically redundant. Think of it as a performance optimization if that makes you feel better about it.
seems to me like any survival advantage offered by this would be completely wiped out by the fact that depressed people kill themselves hell of a lot more than non-depressed people.
It is only a disadvantage if they kill themselves before reproducing. If the suicides tend to occur after the maximum fertile age, it might even be some kind of advantage - more resources left over for your offspring, etc. Remember, evolution doesn't give a damn about the messenger, just about the message.
No, but they knew they were being analyzed and for what. It's trivial to change my style (well, maybe not in English, I don't tend to have the word pool to draw from) and become someone else. If I know in advance that my writing would be used to find me.
You can, probably, given time and persistance, sift through the thousands and millions of board messages posted everywhere on the internet and find out who I am in other boards. I didn't try to hide my identity against comparison of writing styles.
I could see this working if applied to notes and texts written by someone who didn't have any reason to assume it would become the subject of an investigation. I'd deem it utterly worthless, though, when applied to ransom notes and the like.
That's what I meant, sorry: even a computer program could outwit such analyses. Given the current state of automatic language analysis (Disclaimer: IAA computational linguist), I consider it obvious that a determined person can fool the discriminators enough to appear as someone else.
If the methods a stylometry analysis uses are known (and they couldn't very well be a secret to hold up in court), of course you can game them. As long as the algorithm outputs "no" for any reformulation of your message, you can easily find it, by generate-and-test if necessary. The only question is, how fast can you generate a text that (a) says what you intend and (b) does not point to you? Very fast, I'd wager.
Interestingly, their homepage does not tout execution speed as a motivation: "Menuet has no roots within UNIX or the POSIX standards, nor is it based on any operating system. The design goal has been to remove the extra layers between different parts of an OS, which normally complicate programming and create bugs."
Layers complicate programming and create bugs? Really? As in, "the whole modular programming thing is just a fad"? If these guys can actually honestly claim that they program better in the big ball of mud paradigm, they must be super-geniuses, and trying to collaborate would be impossible for the normal geek anyway.
That's unfair. I'm all about unit tests and they do help find bugs, but a unit test isn't going to find a precisely-crafted piece of malicious input.
No, probably not. The formal verification would have done that. And yes, I do think code that has the potential to introduce undefined behaviour into high-profile libraries must be verified before you may loose it on the world, why do you ask?
With the massive amount of acronyms we have, especially short ones, a lot of them have multiple meanings. While it is relatively easy to understand these ones in this context, I fully support people adding an additional word to tell which meaning of some acronym is meant in a given situation. At least once in an article. There has been too many times I've seen some acronym, tried to google it, found a dozen different meanings and have had no idea of which it refers to.
If you believe that words with several meanings - particularly something as common as "PIN" - require disambiguating extra words to understand, you know very little about language. There are actually far more ambiguous than unambiguous words, but we manage fine.
Agreed, but I was wondering when the quantity of "could's" in a summary turns it from a "report" into a "work of fiction"?
When assessing your adversaries, you always assess capability,
not probability or even intention. "Can't possibly" is acceptable, but
improvable. "Might" raises serious concern. "Could" is reason for
all-out batshit-crazy paranoia.
And I like that things are that way. At least, y'know, when dealing
with unauthorized nuclear launches.
...a person editing a Wikipedia.... allowing her to search for video...
Strange, apparently a "person" can only be female.
I know, I know, if it said "he" no one would notice, but obviously this person was going out of their way to say "her", so why not just go with "they"? I know it's not grammatically correct (according to an English teacher I had) but at least it works, and it should be correct.
Anyway, it just annoys me when someone goes out of their way to try to end the male gender bias only to throw in female gender bias instead of making it gender neutral.
-Taylor
Where have you lived the last ten years? This style has been
established in technical writing long ago. An increasing number of
people agree that it's silly to presume universal masculinity, so the
gender of pronouns becomes available as an additional discourse
marker.
For instance, a text on agile development might say, "When the
on-site customer notices that his account name is being truncated, he
can notify the project manager immediately, and she might either tell
the designer that he should create a larger text field, or ask for a
change to the specification" [example pulled totally out of
nowhere].
That doesn't mean that all users and designers are men and all
managers are women, it just allows you to use fewer repetitions of
noun phrases to say the same thing. I consider that a win. (Other
people use 'they' all the time, which is OK, I guess, but doesn't have
the same built-in reference management.)
An A- is quite distinct from a B+. Neighbouring, but different. An f sharp is quite different from a g flat in function, and only sounds identical if your hearing is mediocre. A supernova and a nova work on quite different lines, and in fact there are several types of each. And please, resist the temptation of tagging this as "mininova"... it's most definitely either a maxinova, or else a mini-supernova.
At one point, serious computers ran Unix. PCs were just toys, not useful for doing real work with.
But Unix fragmented. You had AIX, HPUX, and around a dozen other different kinds. They all behaved differently, stored things in different places in the filesystem, had different desktop environments.
Windows came along with a single environment and suddenly *that* was the attractive place to develop software.
Fast forward a few decades, and to a 0th order approximation, all apps are written for Windows, and Unix derivatives are dead on the desktop. Ok, there are a handful of slashdotters using Linux in their basements, but from a desktop perspective it essentially doesn't exist. And the software people need to run for real productivity purposes - Autocad, Photoshop, things like that - are all for Windows.
The only way Linux can hope to succeed is to present a unified environment to developers *and* users. Period.
I agree with you 100% there.
Yes, that means the over-complex KDE will have to die. Yes, that means binary compatibility must stop being broken from OS update to OS update. Yes, that means supporting DRM so that users can play their streaming videos from Netflix.
It's simply the arrogance of Linux developers that have crippled Linux adoption.
I disagree utterly. Nothing 'has' to change just because you would like it better. The majority of Linux users don't want world
domination badly enough to discard their own pet choices, and so it'll never happen. That is all.
Many people here are (correctly) deriding ADHD as being an ill-defined "disorder" vaguely attributed to recalcitrant students. That seems to be exactly the issue the EEG scans are trying to address.
From TFA: "...hopes will help doctors diagnose attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) more objectively..."
Maybe I'm dense, but how can it become an objective diagnostic, when apparently there is a lack of existing objective measures? What do you calibrate it against? Sure, you can find recurring patterns and decide to call those 'indicators', but who decides which of those cases are positives and which are false positives?
Because multi-threaded programming is really really hard to get right, and because most programs either are not CPU bound, or else have so much inherently non-parallel logic that the benefit would be marginal. Serving multiple independent tabs in a web browser is extremely amenable to parallelization, but almost everything else isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
So that's an easy one: no, it wasn't.
Definitely true. I've used Wikipedia many times to get a heads-up on the topic and learn what sources are good for further reading. I would never cite Wikipedia itself; it's a bit too unreliable and, more importantly, changeable to use directly as a source
That's why you cite not WP:Monkey, but http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Monkey&oldid=345367034, which is guaranteed never to change again.
Regarding the obvious issue of genetic privacy, Seringhaus makes this argument: "Your sensitive genetic information would be safe. A DNA profile distills a person’s complex genomic information down to a set of 26 numerical values, each characterizing the length of a certain repeated sequence of 'junk' DNA that differs from person to person. Although these genetic differences are biologically meaningless — they don’t correlate with any observable characteristics
...as far as we know today.
The possibility of extra-terrestrials intercepting our signals, being interested in them, replying before humanity has run its course, and something good coming of it, are so remote that it's not worth constantly wasting energy for the purpose. If you look at Earth from space you realize what a tiny, limited, fragile place it is and how important it is that we do all we can to make us "live long and prosper". Hoping that aliens are going to help us in any way is counter-productive.
Sam Seaborn: There are a lot of hungry people in the world, Mal, and none of them are hungry 'cause we went to the moon. None of them are colder and certainly none of them are dumber 'cause we went to the moon. Mallory O'Brian: And we went to the moon. Do we really have to go to Mars? Sam Seaborn: Yes. Mallory O'Brian: Why? Sam Seaborn: 'Cause it's next. 'Cause we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what's next.
- West Wing
Of course, in-series, Sam is the most gifted speech writer in the entire country. You really think we should do something because rhetorics tells you so?
He's not the guy to blame for people's misconceptions regarding computers. He's just doing his job and making stuff look pretty. Blaming him would be like blaming some make up guy for making Hollywood starlets set an impossibly high bar for beauty. Or script writers for giving people misconceptions about how life works.
In other words, it would be quite appropriate.
The pwn2own contest would say otherwise. Mac is usually the first to go down.
Because for pwn2own you need a zero-day exploit - how high are the chances to find a 0day for Windows and nobody else having it out in the wild until that one day in the year of pwn2own? OTOH, Charlie Miller was sitting on his last winner for over a year, and nobody else found that exploit during that year.
...that you know of.
There a lots and lots of smart arguments against the current mess. Don't use stupid ones.
How do humans do it?
Well, nobody knows exactly, but we are quite sure that it works very differently.
Hardly any of these peoperties have been duplicated in algorithms yet, and it's not even certain that that would be a good idea. My point is, yeah, the process is quite mysterious, but that doesn't mean we know nothing about it.
I mean, if Google Translate cannot do a good translation WITHOUT having to interpret sounds to words, then this tech will hardly be any better.
The device receives verbal cues that are missing from translating text to another language. In fact, there is far more information available, and perhaps it is possible to get clues about which version of a word is desired (or which of several similar-sounding words) from tone shift.
In theory, yes. (That's why our brains get more info from a spoken sentence than a written one.) In practice, not a chance in hell. Not until the state of the art advances by several breakthroughs.
Disclaimer: I am a computational linguist.
Driving while distracted is already illegal. Telling us exactly how to do everything is not making people any more responsible. Solve the problem by applying existing law using common sense instead of making new laws that are easier to apply.
Yes, everyone knows in their heart that texting at the wheel is irresponsible and dangerous. But without the law explicitly citing it as distracting by definition, every single asshole who caused an accident will have his lawyer fight tooth and nail to contend that he was not distracted because there were special circumstances, or because he is so much more intelligent than the average guy, etc. It costs time and money all around and may even get him off and back on the road, endangering others again. Sometimes it makes sense to state the obvious if it saves you a potentially expensive but utterly useless code path, even if it is logically redundant. Think of it as a performance optimization if that makes you feel better about it.
seems to me like any survival advantage offered by this would be completely wiped out by the fact that depressed people kill themselves hell of a lot more than non-depressed people.
It is only a disadvantage if they kill themselves before reproducing. If the suicides tend to occur after the maximum fertile age, it might even be some kind of advantage - more resources left over for your offspring, etc. Remember, evolution doesn't give a damn about the messenger, just about the message.
No, but they knew they were being analyzed and for what. It's trivial to change my style (well, maybe not in English, I don't tend to have the word pool to draw from) and become someone else. If I know in advance that my writing would be used to find me.
You can, probably, given time and persistance, sift through the thousands and millions of board messages posted everywhere on the internet and find out who I am in other boards. I didn't try to hide my identity against comparison of writing styles.
I could see this working if applied to notes and texts written by someone who didn't have any reason to assume it would become the subject of an investigation. I'd deem it utterly worthless, though, when applied to ransom notes and the like.
That's what I meant, sorry: even a computer program could outwit such analyses. Given the current state of automatic language analysis (Disclaimer: IAA computational linguist), I consider it obvious that a determined person can fool the discriminators enough to appear as someone else.
If the methods a stylometry analysis uses are known (and they couldn't very well be a secret to hold up in court), of course you can game them. As long as the algorithm outputs "no" for any reformulation of your message, you can easily find it, by generate-and-test if necessary. The only question is, how fast can you generate a text that (a) says what you intend and (b) does not point to you? Very fast, I'd wager.
Interestingly, their homepage does not tout execution speed as a motivation: "Menuet has no roots within UNIX or the POSIX standards, nor is it based on any operating system. The design goal has been to remove the extra layers between different parts of an OS, which normally complicate programming and create bugs."
Layers complicate programming and create bugs? Really? As in, "the whole modular programming thing is just a fad"? If these guys can actually honestly claim that they program better in the big ball of mud paradigm, they must be super-geniuses, and trying to collaborate would be impossible for the normal geek anyway.
That's unfair. I'm all about unit tests and they do help find bugs, but a unit test isn't going to find a precisely-crafted piece of malicious input.
No, probably not. The formal verification would have done that. And yes, I do think code that has the potential to introduce undefined behaviour into high-profile libraries must be verified before you may loose it on the world, why do you ask?
With the massive amount of acronyms we have, especially short ones, a lot of them have multiple meanings. While it is relatively easy to understand these ones in this context, I fully support people adding an additional word to tell which meaning of some acronym is meant in a given situation. At least once in an article. There has been too many times I've seen some acronym, tried to google it, found a dozen different meanings and have had no idea of which it refers to.
If you believe that words with several meanings - particularly something as common as "PIN" - require disambiguating extra words to understand, you know very little about language. There are actually far more ambiguous than unambiguous words, but we manage fine.
Agreed, but I was wondering when the quantity of "could's" in a summary turns it from a "report" into a "work of fiction"?
When assessing your adversaries, you always assess capability, not probability or even intention. "Can't possibly" is acceptable, but improvable. "Might" raises serious concern. "Could" is reason for all-out batshit-crazy paranoia.
And I like that things are that way. At least, y'know, when dealing with unauthorized nuclear launches.
"Now, the purpose of this year's expedition is to see if we can find any traces of the last one."
Strange, apparently a "person" can only be female.
I know, I know, if it said "he" no one would notice, but obviously this person was going out of their way to say "her", so why not just go with "they"? I know it's not grammatically correct (according to an English teacher I had) but at least it works, and it should be correct.
Anyway, it just annoys me when someone goes out of their way to try to end the male gender bias only to throw in female gender bias instead of making it gender neutral. -Taylor
Where have you lived the last ten years? This style has been established in technical writing long ago. An increasing number of people agree that it's silly to presume universal masculinity, so the gender of pronouns becomes available as an additional discourse marker.
For instance, a text on agile development might say, "When the on-site customer notices that his account name is being truncated, he can notify the project manager immediately, and she might either tell the designer that he should create a larger text field, or ask for a change to the specification" [example pulled totally out of nowhere].
That doesn't mean that all users and designers are men and all managers are women, it just allows you to use fewer repetitions of noun phrases to say the same thing. I consider that a win. (Other people use 'they' all the time, which is OK, I guess, but doesn't have the same built-in reference management.)
An A- is quite distinct from a B+. Neighbouring, but different. An f sharp is quite different from a g flat in function, and only sounds identical if your hearing is mediocre. A supernova and a nova work on quite different lines, and in fact there are several types of each. And please, resist the temptation of tagging this as "mininova"... it's most definitely either a maxinova, or else a mini-supernova.
[obligatory lawn reference]
At one point, serious computers ran Unix. PCs were just toys, not useful for doing real work with.
But Unix fragmented. You had AIX, HPUX, and around a dozen other different kinds. They all behaved differently, stored things in different places in the filesystem, had different desktop environments.
Windows came along with a single environment and suddenly *that* was the attractive place to develop software.
Fast forward a few decades, and to a 0th order approximation, all apps are written for Windows, and Unix derivatives are dead on the desktop. Ok, there are a handful of slashdotters using Linux in their basements, but from a desktop perspective it essentially doesn't exist. And the software people need to run for real productivity purposes - Autocad, Photoshop, things like that - are all for Windows.
The only way Linux can hope to succeed is to present a unified environment to developers *and* users. Period.
I agree with you 100% there.
Yes, that means the over-complex KDE will have to die. Yes, that means binary compatibility must stop being broken from OS update to OS update. Yes, that means supporting DRM so that users can play their streaming videos from Netflix.
It's simply the arrogance of Linux developers that have crippled Linux adoption.
I disagree utterly. Nothing 'has' to change just because you would like it better. The majority of Linux users don't want world domination badly enough to discard their own pet choices, and so it'll never happen. That is all.
Many people here are (correctly) deriding ADHD as being an ill-defined "disorder" vaguely attributed to recalcitrant students. That seems to be exactly the issue the EEG scans are trying to address.
From TFA: "...hopes will help doctors diagnose attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) more objectively..."
Maybe I'm dense, but how can it become an objective diagnostic, when apparently there is a lack of existing objective measures? What do you calibrate it against? Sure, you can find recurring patterns and decide to call those 'indicators', but who decides which of those cases are positives and which are false positives?
Why isn't everyone doing this?
Because multi-threaded programming is really really hard to get right, and because most programs either are not CPU bound, or else have so much inherently non-parallel logic that the benefit would be marginal. Serving multiple independent tabs in a web browser is extremely amenable to parallelization, but almost everything else isn't.
So really, this is just the same: if you have an internet connection, you have the ability to tune in.
Except for one massive difference: watching TV is NOT the primary use of broadband.
It isn't? Then what would you say is?