There are two reasons why I remain firmly skeptical until I see some real evidence:
1) Scientists and environmentalists make their money by predicting doomsday. No global warming == no grant money to fund study after study.
2) Most of the evidence is manufactured by people with an interest in the outcome. This IMO worthless evidence is known as "computer climate studies". Trying to understand climates with our level of technology is like a caveman trying to understand nuclear physics.
But the stakes are so high, even if there's only a 1 in 1000 chance that global warming is likely, then it's a risk that should not be taken.
And what about the next 1 in a 1000 "catastrophe" that gets predicted? And the next? And the next? And the next? You seem to think there is no impact to these doomsday stories. If you accept every theory that comes down the pike, you run your economies into the ground.
The real point, of course, is that those who oppose the global warming theory usually have economic interests that would be hurt by the development of alternative energy sources. As usual, follow the money!
Indeed. And if you follow the money in this case, guess where it leads? Back to the "scientists and "environmentalists" who make their money by predicting doomsday. Guess what happens if global warming was disproven? They are out of a job. They depend on fear and anxiety to raise grant money for study after study.
That's the biggest reason I keep my doubts firmly in place, along with the fact that they manufacture their own evidence (also known as computer climate studies).
I had a discussion of this way back when with an otherwise very bright computer guy, who just couldn't understand that laserdiscs (pre-DVD; the big ones that movies came on) were NOT digitally encoded. He thought that the discrete nature of the encoding (pits and valleys) meant it must be.
Thinking about this, I'm not sure if you or your friend is right. Do the distances between pits and valleys encode information, or are the distances fixed? If the distances are fixed, then you are getting a series of ones and zeroes that are D-to-A'd into a signal. If the distances encode information (and thus is a continuous signal), then it is truly analog.
Or to put it another way, a phonograph record is a series of "mountains and valleys", but what encodes the signal is the height of the mountain and the distance between the mountains.
I'll go one step further and say that even if there are discrete levels, it is still not necessarily digital. Digital implies processing as digits (usually groups of discrete levels), but discrete levels, or modulated square wave frequencies, etc. are all analog by default.
That's like saying that a CPU chip is not really digital because it uses analog signalling. If I designed a CPU that encoded bytes as a series of time-based pulses (say, 256 different valid time intervals), it would still be digital. Or as perhaps a simpler example, let's say I designed my chip with 4 different voltage levels to encode information rather than 2. This actually brings to mind the wacky "trinary" architectures that come up now and then, where data is encoded as negative, zero and positive voltage.
Bottom line, what makes something digital is the nature of the data (discrete values), not the encoding of the data.
For example, there is no such thing as a "strong" vs. a "weak" pulse in a nervous system - it's an on-or-off thing, a 1 or a zero. A "stronger" message is sent by firing along the nerve more frequently.
That's an analog signal that happens to be encoded using time. Put it his way: if there were discrete levels that the pulse frequency could run at, it would be digital (digit-al). Since there isn't, and it's a continuous function, it's analog.
Is an $8000 Segway really that much better than an $80 3-wheeled bike?
Well, first, I don't they're going to be $8000 in quantity.
But beyond that, yes, it would be worth $8000 if you can save someone time. The thing goes 17 mph, and doesn't use up any of the workman's energy. If the guy is peddling all over hell, he's not going to get as much work done.
I think the great example is postmen. I could see this cutting in half the number of postmen you need to cover an area.
I find it very interesting that they are willing to put their name on their comments, but you right wing nuts who label anyone who disagrees with you a "liberal" must hide behind the AC. Seems dishonest to me.
LOL! Don't you find it a little ironic to post something like this with a nick of "e40" and no identifying information? Got news for you: You are just as anonymous as the AC. The only difference is that we can tie together your anonymous posts.
My.sig before I changed it was asking the question, "Why don't people pick 1,2,3,4,5,6 as lottery numbers". I've gotten a number of replies that those are by far the most popular numbers, which ironically makes them the worst numbers (if you happen to win).
This timeline has to be a joke with regard to Artifial Intelligence. Common sense inference by 2005? Artificial life by 2006?
Assuming he's talking about human-level artifical intelligence, in my opinion, he's off by 100 to 200 years. First we need a theory on what common sense and intelligence is. Maybe a few decades after that we might have some primitive implementations.
I believe we're at least 50-100 years away from a theory, and probably much longer than that before we get a practical implementation.
So, Mr. Bond. You have tracked me to my SPECTRE gunship. In fact, you are just in time to witness the test of my latest invention: the CHEMICAL OXYGEN IODINE LASER. AHHH HA HA HA! In mere moments, I will have vaporized the whole of France!
[bond thinks for a moment, then walks out of the room]
Four years as a senior software engineer on Apple's OS teams.
Just out of curiosity, why don't we hear more rumblings about OS X running on Intel whole-hog? Not that I'm doubting your posts; they seem to have the ring of truth to them. But you speak about it so matter-of-factly and openly, it seems like if this product existed we would hear far more rumors about it. Maybe not from current engineers who worry about their jobs, but perhaps from other ex-employees or other people who've seen it.
Of course, they kept the new iMac under wraps for the most part, so perhaps the secrecy isn't THAT surprising.
Because the unit cost of an operating system is much less than the cost of a hardware box (say $100 compared with $2000) Apple's revenues would fall precipitously.
Not necessarily. They would sell a lot more operating systems than boxes. Put it this way: it doesn't hurt Microsoft that they only sell software and not hardware.
Hell, I detest Apple as a company, and I would buy a copy.
Can you imagine what would happen to the Apple stock price if they announced this? It simply can't be done.
I'll tell you exactly what would happen: The stock would skyrocket. Do you know why? Everyone perceives Apple as "a great company, but a niche company". This would realign Apple into investors minds as, "a great company, and one that is finally leaving the small pond for the big ocean! I want some of that, baby!"
Now, that might speculative and Apple might not deliver a true competitor to Windows, but I guarantee investors would take notice.
Really! Very interesting. I didn't realize there were so many people who had a clue on the odds. You would think that people who had that much of clue would also have enough of clue not to play at all.:)
... and related technologies. Just out of curiosity, is anyone working on a Display PDF emulator? That's one of the technologies that I've found interesting that Apple embraced in OS X.
I haven't decided if Display PDF is a good idea or not, but it would be interested to play around with it without having to spring for a Mac*.
*I've sworn a sacred oath never to give Apple any of my money until they change their ways (closed systems, stupid lawsuits over "look and feel", high prices, etc).
All that is true. But what does any of that have to do with hyperlinks -- the CONCEPT of hyperlinks, not the implementation. Hyperlinks have nothing to do with in-band data, or out-of-band data. That's all implementation detail.
Hyperlinks as a concept, are innovations build upon actual escape sequences as used previously.
Inspiration is not the same as prior art. Velcro was inspired by thistles in nature, but so what? Velcro was a brilliant invention.
The concept of the hyperlink is irrelevent to the implementation of a hyperlink. They can be implemented totally without any sort of embedded escapes.
Everything we have done since 1957 is based upon the work they did before.
While I believe that there isn't much original in CS since the 60s (and have posted this before), "everything" is an exaggeration. Trivial example: video compression (MPEG4). Sheesh, even Hoare's Quicksort paper was early sixties, I believe. The mouse came in the late sixties.
More recently, there are a slew of "real world" graphics rendering theories that have been done in the last 10 years, particularly in the area of light diffusion.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to follow up on this, I recommend checking out Raymond Scott's site. He's a pretty interesting guy in his own right.
Excellent! I always wondered what that tune was. It was a great background music from something mechanical.
Here's a link to the tune I found on google: here.
This HAS to be one of the most famous tunes that no one has the slightest clue what the name of it is.
There are two reasons why I remain firmly skeptical until I see some real evidence:
1) Scientists and environmentalists make their money by predicting doomsday. No global warming == no grant money to fund study after study.
2) Most of the evidence is manufactured by people with an interest in the outcome. This IMO worthless evidence is known as "computer climate studies". Trying to understand climates with our level of technology is like a caveman trying to understand nuclear physics.
But the stakes are so high, even if there's only a 1 in 1000 chance that global warming is likely, then it's a risk that should not be taken.
And what about the next 1 in a 1000 "catastrophe" that gets predicted? And the next? And the next? And the next? You seem to think there is no impact to these doomsday stories. If you accept every theory that comes down the pike, you run your economies into the ground.
The real point, of course, is that those who oppose the global warming theory usually have economic interests that would be hurt by the development of alternative energy sources. As usual, follow the money!
Indeed. And if you follow the money in this case, guess where it leads? Back to the "scientists and "environmentalists" who make their money by predicting doomsday. Guess what happens if global warming was disproven? They are out of a job. They depend on fear and anxiety to raise grant money for study after study.
That's the biggest reason I keep my doubts firmly in place, along with the fact that they manufacture their own evidence (also known as computer climate studies).
I had a discussion of this way back when with an otherwise very bright computer guy, who just couldn't understand that laserdiscs (pre-DVD; the big ones that movies came on) were NOT digitally encoded. He thought that the discrete nature of the encoding (pits and valleys) meant it must be.
Thinking about this, I'm not sure if you or your friend is right. Do the distances between pits and valleys encode information, or are the distances fixed? If the distances are fixed, then you are getting a series of ones and zeroes that are D-to-A'd into a signal. If the distances encode information (and thus is a continuous signal), then it is truly analog.
Or to put it another way, a phonograph record is a series of "mountains and valleys", but what encodes the signal is the height of the mountain and the distance between the mountains.
I'll go one step further and say that even if there are discrete levels, it is still not necessarily digital. Digital implies processing as digits (usually groups of discrete levels), but discrete levels, or modulated square wave frequencies, etc. are all analog by default.
That's like saying that a CPU chip is not really digital because it uses analog signalling. If I designed a CPU that encoded bytes as a series of time-based pulses (say, 256 different valid time intervals), it would still be digital. Or as perhaps a simpler example, let's say I designed my chip with 4 different voltage levels to encode information rather than 2. This actually brings to mind the wacky "trinary" architectures that come up now and then, where data is encoded as negative, zero and positive voltage.
Bottom line, what makes something digital is the nature of the data (discrete values), not the encoding of the data.
For example, there is no such thing as a "strong" vs. a "weak" pulse in a nervous system - it's an on-or-off thing, a 1 or a zero. A "stronger" message is sent by firing along the nerve more frequently.
That's an analog signal that happens to be encoded using time. Put it his way: if there were discrete levels that the pulse frequency could run at, it would be digital (digit-al). Since there isn't, and it's a continuous function, it's analog.
I think you might want to look up the word anonymous in the dictionary. Apparently you don't know what it means.
Um, do you really think a scooter is more expensive than an entire employee?
Is an $8000 Segway really that much better than an $80 3-wheeled bike?
Well, first, I don't they're going to be $8000 in quantity.
But beyond that, yes, it would be worth $8000 if you can save someone time. The thing goes 17 mph, and doesn't use up any of the workman's energy. If the guy is peddling all over hell, he's not going to get as much work done.
I think the great example is postmen. I could see this cutting in half the number of postmen you need to cover an area.
I find it very interesting that they are willing to put their name on their comments, but you right wing nuts who label anyone who disagrees with you a "liberal" must hide behind the AC. Seems dishonest to me.
LOL! Don't you find it a little ironic to post something like this with a nick of "e40" and no identifying information? Got news for you: You are just as anonymous as the AC. The only difference is that we can tie together your anonymous posts.
My .sig before I changed it was asking the question, "Why don't people pick 1,2,3,4,5,6 as lottery numbers". I've gotten a number of replies that those are by far the most popular numbers, which ironically makes them the worst numbers (if you happen to win).
Yeah, apparently this is much more popular than I had figured, judging from the number of people replying to that .sig. I need to find a new one. :)
We've had "humanoid robots" since the 50s. Watch any science fiction movie. :)
It's the brain that's the hard part.
This timeline has to be a joke with regard to Artifial Intelligence. Common sense inference by 2005? Artificial life by 2006?
Assuming he's talking about human-level artifical intelligence, in my opinion, he's off by 100 to 200 years. First we need a theory on what common sense and intelligence is. Maybe a few decades after that we might have some primitive implementations.
I believe we're at least 50-100 years away from a theory, and probably much longer than that before we get a practical implementation.
I don't know what this guy's smoking.
So, Mr. Bond. You have tracked me to my SPECTRE gunship. In fact, you are just in time to witness the test of my latest invention: the CHEMICAL OXYGEN IODINE LASER. AHHH HA HA HA! In mere moments, I will have vaporized the whole of France!
[bond thinks for a moment, then walks out of the room]
Fire!
Four years as a senior software engineer on Apple's OS teams.
Just out of curiosity, why don't we hear more rumblings about OS X running on Intel whole-hog? Not that I'm doubting your posts; they seem to have the ring of truth to them. But you speak about it so matter-of-factly and openly, it seems like if this product existed we would hear far more rumors about it. Maybe not from current engineers who worry about their jobs, but perhaps from other ex-employees or other people who've seen it.
Of course, they kept the new iMac under wraps for the most part, so perhaps the secrecy isn't THAT surprising.
Because the unit cost of an operating system is much less than the cost of a hardware box (say $100 compared with $2000) Apple's revenues would fall precipitously.
Not necessarily. They would sell a lot more operating systems than boxes. Put it this way: it doesn't hurt Microsoft that they only sell software and not hardware.
Hell, I detest Apple as a company, and I would buy a copy.
Can you imagine what would happen to the Apple stock price if they announced this? It simply can't be done.
I'll tell you exactly what would happen: The stock would skyrocket. Do you know why? Everyone perceives Apple as "a great company, but a niche company". This would realign Apple into investors minds as, "a great company, and one that is finally leaving the small pond for the big ocean! I want some of that, baby!"
Now, that might speculative and Apple might not deliver a true competitor to Windows, but I guarantee investors would take notice.
Is it a risk? Sure it is. But it's a worthy risk.
The natural result was that Apple went away and implemented their own thing, namely a "Display PDF" renderer, called Quartz.
Is that true? There is no standard from Adobe called "Display PDF" and that's totally an Apple thing? I thought it came from Adobe.
Really! Very interesting. I didn't realize there were so many people who had a clue on the odds. You would think that people who had that much of clue would also have enough of clue not to play at all. :)
Display PDF is different from Display Postscript. Display Postscript is an older technology, although I'm not exactly sure of the differences.
... and related technologies. Just out of curiosity, is anyone working on a Display PDF emulator? That's one of the technologies that I've found interesting that Apple embraced in OS X.
I haven't decided if Display PDF is a good idea or not, but it would be interested to play around with it without having to spring for a Mac*.
*I've sworn a sacred oath never to give Apple any of my money until they change their ways (closed systems, stupid lawsuits over "look and feel", high prices, etc).
and half the time the patches suck and are re-exploited in a matter of days.
Forget half the time, please name one time.
All that is true. But what does any of that have to do with hyperlinks -- the CONCEPT of hyperlinks, not the implementation. Hyperlinks have nothing to do with in-band data, or out-of-band data. That's all implementation detail.
Hyperlinks as a concept, are innovations build upon actual escape sequences as used previously.
Inspiration is not the same as prior art. Velcro was inspired by thistles in nature, but so what? Velcro was a brilliant invention.
The concept of the hyperlink is irrelevent to the implementation of a hyperlink. They can be implemented totally without any sort of embedded escapes.
Everything we have done since 1957 is based upon the work they did before.
While I believe that there isn't much original in CS since the 60s (and have posted this before), "everything" is an exaggeration. Trivial example: video compression (MPEG4). Sheesh, even Hoare's Quicksort paper was early sixties, I believe. The mouse came in the late sixties.
More recently, there are a slew of "real world" graphics rendering theories that have been done in the last 10 years, particularly in the area of light diffusion.