This to me sounds strangely like religion. Somewhere along the line you have to place trust or belief in something. Nothing is empirical when you're trusting an "authority" on a subject.
The difference is that I can interrogate a scientist and demand his evidence for his beliefs, then draw my own conclusions. When God allows me to interrogate him to prove his existence, then God will be on the same level of trust as scientists.
What wouldn't you give for a laptop that starts instantly, weighs 3 pounds and gets 20 hours of battery life?
I'd give a lot for that, but this wasn't it. This is more accurately described as a PDA that fits on your lap. What it did, it did well (for the time), but it was very limited. And modern PDAs get a lot more than 20 hours of battery life.
In other words, if you want a modern Model 100, get a PDA with one of those fold-up keyboards and go to town. Instant-on, long battery life, and destroys the Model 100 in usefulness.
All this might conspire to make the iPhone too much of a luxury for many people, even those gainfully employed.
There is never a time, even in a period of robust growth, where the iPhone isn't too much of a luxury for "many" people. So 19% of people can afford it, instead of the 20% last year (pick your number). Big deal. Things just aren't that different than they were a year ago. Some things are a little worse, but it's hardly going to cause an inventory glut of iPhones.
Maybe you're in a recession there, but I'm not in a recession here. I'm doing great, thanks for asking.
Sheesh, just because a very small additional number of people are having more trouble recently doesn't mean we're in economic meltdown where no one can afford a cell phone. The unemployment rate is 5%, by the way. Good God! That's food lines in the streets!
Anyway, if you would bother to look at the numbers, we are not in a recession (a recession is negative growth). Very low growth, granted, but not a recession.
But don't let facts get in the way of your gloom and doom! Everybody loves a good pity party!
So is everything when a voltage spike hits your computer while you're burning your TB-BR. No medium will protect you from a voltage spike that occurs during backup.
During backup, that's true. But if you walk away from your computer after starting the backup at night (as is typical), it will still be okay if the strike happens after backup completion. The hard drive gets fried all night long. I would also say that it's more typical for people to leave their backup drive attached to their computers, rather than remove it as is typical for optical media.
I should've also mentioned that a voltage spike (e.g., lightning) can fry your entire computer, including the backup drive, should it be attached at the time. Poof! Everything's gone.
And what advantage would this offer over a hard drive? Cost? I seriously doubt a writer and the disk could be procured for less than the cost of 1TB HDD...
Media cost, diversity and archival. A hard drive gives you only a single backup, and is unlikely to get stored off-site. (Relatively) cheap media allows for many backups over time, and allows you to easily store them permanently off-site. You can also archive off old crap that you don't want sitting on your active media.
Is that fast enough for most backup applications? I mean, obviously it would be fine for archival purposes, but it doesn't seem practical for daily backups.
For home or office use, it'd be great. Do you use your computer 24 hours a day? Three hours is fine. Pop a disk in before you go to bed (or leave the office) and let it go to town.
"I don't like them pawing through my database" makes me think that you're embarrassed by the database structure, and don't want people to see how screwed up it is. If that's the reason, then maybe it's time to fix things.
If it's just some weird possessiveness thing, then get over it. It's not your data. It belongs to your company. It's their servers, their programs and their data. If they want to give access, it's their decision, not yours.
Otherwise, a good reason not to allow direct access is performance. Amateurs doing queries against the "real" database can kill the server if they're not doing it correctly. My recommendation is to provision an entirely separate database server with a regularly-updated version of the data (perhaps even a "fixed" version if my first point is in play) and let them go wild on that.
I agree that Penrose's argument wasn't very impressive, but since when is quantum physics supernatural?
Since people like him started using the words "Quantum Physics" to be synonymous with "magic" as an explanation for anything that's not completely understood.
Odd, since we really don't understand gravity, nor does the Newtonian style theory work universally, which is why we have so many different theories; Newton's, general relativity, quantum.
That it's not a complete description has nothing to do with my analogy. It was still the fundamental breakthrough that allowed us to make predictions about the behavior of the universe. We do not have anything close to an analogous Newtonian-level theory.
Similarly we are beginning to model what the brain does, by mimicking neuron's responses with computer algorithms.
Yes. We're beginning to "mimic" (versus "understand") a single neuron -- key word being "beginning". We haven't even done that yet, much less understand the interactions of large groups of them, much less understand how neurons decide to physically grow new connections, much less understand how cognition arises out of all this, much less how consciousness arises.
As they say, the proof is in the pudding. To use another analogy, right now they think they're pretty sure carbon is in the pudding, but they don't even know about the other elements, much less the proteins, sugars, water content, etc. They simply have nothing on the table right now except some toys.
Personally, I am impressed by the arguments advanced by the likes of Penrose and Hameroff, that "intelligence" (in the sense that we use the term wrt. humans) is a quantum phenomena.
Eh, that's just a "God in the gaps" argument. We don't know how it works, therefore, it must require something supernatural to make it work. The physicality of the brain has more than enough "throw your hands up in despair" complexity to explain intelligence.
That depends on what you mean by AI, we have a lot of algorithms that do interesting things.
What I mean by AI is Artificial *Intelligence*.
I can for example code a program that will beat almost any human in Othello or Checkers while using up a fraction of the computing power.
It's always been wrong to consider a game a demonstration of intelligence. It's the ability to *learn* any game that is a sign of intelligence. When they make a machine that I can feed in the rules, and by simple practice it can learn the game as well as a human, then we'll be on to something. See: the game 'Go' (which we still haven't solved use a classical algorithmic approach).
Human brains have the computing power of a modern supercomputer and possibly a lot more of it, optimized for some specific applications such as data parsing/pattern matching.
Know what it is and know how it does it are two different things. We all know brains are pattern matching engines. But that doesn't help that much.
Uhh, 1940 and no progress? Are you nuts? Cognitive scientists didn't theorize basic semantic networks until 1966, let alone artificial neurons. And no, that isn't just more brute forcing, yeah it is a *lot* more computation, but it's a completely different angle of attack than parsing sentence structure and swapping out words.
Yes, we've gone from banging stones together to theorizing that the world consists of four elements. It's progress in the sense that we have some ideas that we know are totally wrong and incomplete, but at least we have ideas on the table. We simply don't have a Newtonian-style theory that explains how a brain really does what it does.
You're requirement of strong AI essentially boils down to "I think, therefore I am intelligent; thus anything that is intelligent must think like me."
Not at all. In fact, I'm convinced that we will never have an intelligent machine exactly like a human, just because humans have too many evolutionary weird input (e.g., hormones). But we have *nothing* even approaching any sort of intelligence.
yet you can probably give no definition other than anecdotal that "information" can be "understood." At best, you're description will come to something like "I can come up with alternate definitions and wave my hands until someone else goes 'Oh.'"
Well, yeah. If could define what "understanding information" really meant, then they'd invent a new Nobel prize for information science just for me. However, like porn, I know intelligence when I see it. I don't need to strictly define it. For now, the Turing test will have to suffice.
Also, considering that most of the advances in AI occurred in the 80's tells me that you're slinging BS from the hip, anyways.
What advances? We have various feedback algorithmic toys. We have nothing that demonstrates that we understand what is really going on inside a brain.
I don't know yet what Search 3.0 will be, but we're still a long way from getting Search 2.0 to work right. But we're still making progress.
Actually, we aren't making progress -- *at all*. What these guys are trying to do is a subset of artificial intelligence. A subject people have banging their heads against since the 1940s, and we've made *zero* progress since then. We simply don't know how humans process information. We don't even have reasonable theories. We're at the equivalent of the "four elements make up the world" version of physics.
AI researchers always get defensive when I say this, but it's simply true. All we have are better brute-force algorithms that sort-of simulate some of the things that humans do (i.e., voice recognition, character recognition, and other yawner tricks). There is no science of AI. Any sort of human-level understanding of information is far, far away in the future.
What a marketing pile-of-poop. All it does is pull out phrases from Wikipedia; there is no attempt to understand the information at all. When I can type in a yes/no question ("Did they have looms in the 1400s?"), I'll be impressed. When it can make calculation ("How old was columbus when the first colony was founded?"), I'll be impressed. When it can make comparisons ("when did the earth's population match the current population of the united states?"), I'll be impressed.
In other words, when it even attempts to answer a question that isn't already in Wikipedia as a phrase, I'll be impressed.
Well, I guess it describes a class of people you had an experience with.
I certainly realize there *are* people who'll fight for stupid reasons, but that doesn't mean they have self-confidence. Self confidence is when you don't give a damn what people say, because you know they're beneath you, and you lower yourself to even acknowledge them.
Or to put it still another way, if the President of the US (pick your favorite president) was at a rally and some idiot shouted that his mother was a slut, should he get down off the podium and start beating the guy? Are you going to think, "Boy, the President sure is a confident guy!" Or would you expect the POTUS to not even deign to give the idiot his valuable attention?
I suppose it depends on what sort of person you want to be. Do you want the confidence of knowing idiots fear you so much such that they won't say anything, or do you want the confidence of being of a class so above the riff-raff that idiots are completely irrelevant? Personally, I'd rather be the latter.
Actually, in my experience, Mormons seem to have the best sense of humor about everything, including atheists (who might actually go near the bottom, since many have absolutely no sense of humor about religion). I've seriously never met a mormon I didn't like. They seem to be the most dedicated to actually living their religion and striving to be genuinely nice people. If I had to pick a religion, I'd seriously consider being a Mormon, just because of the people.
Would you really say that in the second situation the son lacks self-confidence?
Actually, yes. I would think the guy that fights was really sensitive to the issue, and there is apparently something true with his mother.
Or to put it another way, if you're 6' 6" tall, and I call you "shorty" (or some more offensive insult), are you going to get angry? No, because it's absurd. But if you're 5' tall and I make fun of you, then you're much more likely to get pissed off.
I don't know how Islam got so protected and the Muslims so protective. It would almost seem like lack of self-confidence.
The reason they are so protective of Islam is because that's all the have. Their entire lives are surrounded with inferiority to the rest of the world, economic, technological, etc. The one thing they have that they can latch onto to feel like they have some sort of dignity is their religion. and their "leaders" constantly pound this into their heads that they are superior because they know what's "really" true and wise.
So yes choosing somebody from the Slashdot crowd would be appropriate.
Well, with the difference being that MacGyver was knowledgeable and intelligent. The typical Slashdotter only thinks they're knowledgeable and intelligent.
Anyone know how I might get a small amount of financing to get a project going?
SBA loan.
That said, here's a piece of advice: don't sit around waiting for someone to dump money on you. There are very few businesses that *really* require a lot of money to start. The best way to build a business is nearly always to start small, work your ass off (possibly while keeping another job), and gradually build it up *by yourself*. Don't get partners unless you absolutely have to.
Do something *tangible* EVERY DAY toward your goal. And tangible means not writing down some plan you won't follow anyway. Tangible means, say, writing a hundred lines of code (if you're a programmer), even if you're dog-ass tired. Make 20 cold calls to drum up business. Live as sparsely and cheaply as possible and sock away every penny toward your dream. This can't be emphasized enough: STOP TALKING AND START DOING. Be bold. Be brave.
Many want to have their own business. Few are willing to do the work or make the sacrifices in their lifestyle. Hard Work + Sacrifice == success.
Slashdot Mirror
This to me sounds strangely like religion. Somewhere along the line you have to place trust or belief in something. Nothing is empirical when you're trusting an "authority" on a subject.
The difference is that I can interrogate a scientist and demand his evidence for his beliefs, then draw my own conclusions. When God allows me to interrogate him to prove his existence, then God will be on the same level of trust as scientists.
What wouldn't you give for a laptop that starts instantly, weighs 3 pounds and gets 20 hours of battery life?
I'd give a lot for that, but this wasn't it. This is more accurately described as a PDA that fits on your lap. What it did, it did well (for the time), but it was very limited. And modern PDAs get a lot more than 20 hours of battery life.
In other words, if you want a modern Model 100, get a PDA with one of those fold-up keyboards and go to town. Instant-on, long battery life, and destroys the Model 100 in usefulness.
All this might conspire to make the iPhone too much of a luxury for many people, even those gainfully employed.
There is never a time, even in a period of robust growth, where the iPhone isn't too much of a luxury for "many" people. So 19% of people can afford it, instead of the 20% last year (pick your number). Big deal. Things just aren't that different than they were a year ago. Some things are a little worse, but it's hardly going to cause an inventory glut of iPhones.
Maybe you're in a recession there, but I'm not in a recession here. I'm doing great, thanks for asking.
Sheesh, just because a very small additional number of people are having more trouble recently doesn't mean we're in economic meltdown where no one can afford a cell phone. The unemployment rate is 5%, by the way. Good God! That's food lines in the streets!
Anyway, if you would bother to look at the numbers, we are not in a recession (a recession is negative growth). Very low growth, granted, but not a recession.
But don't let facts get in the way of your gloom and doom! Everybody loves a good pity party!
So is everything when a voltage spike hits your computer while you're burning your TB-BR. No medium will protect you from a voltage spike that occurs during backup.
During backup, that's true. But if you walk away from your computer after starting the backup at night (as is typical), it will still be okay if the strike happens after backup completion. The hard drive gets fried all night long. I would also say that it's more typical for people to leave their backup drive attached to their computers, rather than remove it as is typical for optical media.
I should've also mentioned that a voltage spike (e.g., lightning) can fry your entire computer, including the backup drive, should it be attached at the time. Poof! Everything's gone.
And what advantage would this offer over a hard drive? Cost? I seriously doubt a writer and the disk could be procured for less than the cost of 1TB HDD...
Media cost, diversity and archival. A hard drive gives you only a single backup, and is unlikely to get stored off-site. (Relatively) cheap media allows for many backups over time, and allows you to easily store them permanently off-site. You can also archive off old crap that you don't want sitting on your active media.
Is that fast enough for most backup applications? I mean, obviously it would be fine for archival purposes, but it doesn't seem practical for daily backups.
For home or office use, it'd be great. Do you use your computer 24 hours a day? Three hours is fine. Pop a disk in before you go to bed (or leave the office) and let it go to town.
Really, what happens when you change the schema, or refactor to a multi-DB architecture?
That's what "views" are for.
"I don't like them pawing through my database" makes me think that you're embarrassed by the database structure, and don't want people to see how screwed up it is. If that's the reason, then maybe it's time to fix things.
If it's just some weird possessiveness thing, then get over it. It's not your data. It belongs to your company. It's their servers, their programs and their data. If they want to give access, it's their decision, not yours.
Otherwise, a good reason not to allow direct access is performance. Amateurs doing queries against the "real" database can kill the server if they're not doing it correctly. My recommendation is to provision an entirely separate database server with a regularly-updated version of the data (perhaps even a "fixed" version if my first point is in play) and let them go wild on that.
I agree that Penrose's argument wasn't very impressive, but since when is quantum physics supernatural?
Since people like him started using the words "Quantum Physics" to be synonymous with "magic" as an explanation for anything that's not completely understood.
Odd, since we really don't understand gravity, nor does the Newtonian style theory work universally, which is why we have so many different theories; Newton's, general relativity, quantum.
That it's not a complete description has nothing to do with my analogy. It was still the fundamental breakthrough that allowed us to make predictions about the behavior of the universe. We do not have anything close to an analogous Newtonian-level theory.
Similarly we are beginning to model what the brain does, by mimicking neuron's responses with computer algorithms.
Yes. We're beginning to "mimic" (versus "understand") a single neuron -- key word being "beginning". We haven't even done that yet, much less understand the interactions of large groups of them, much less understand how neurons decide to physically grow new connections, much less understand how cognition arises out of all this, much less how consciousness arises.
As they say, the proof is in the pudding. To use another analogy, right now they think they're pretty sure carbon is in the pudding, but they don't even know about the other elements, much less the proteins, sugars, water content, etc. They simply have nothing on the table right now except some toys.
Personally, I am impressed by the arguments advanced by the likes of Penrose and Hameroff, that "intelligence" (in the sense that we use the term wrt. humans) is a quantum phenomena.
Eh, that's just a "God in the gaps" argument. We don't know how it works, therefore, it must require something supernatural to make it work. The physicality of the brain has more than enough "throw your hands up in despair" complexity to explain intelligence.
That depends on what you mean by AI, we have a lot of algorithms that do interesting things.
What I mean by AI is Artificial *Intelligence*.
I can for example code a program that will beat almost any human in Othello or Checkers while using up a fraction of the computing power.
It's always been wrong to consider a game a demonstration of intelligence. It's the ability to *learn* any game that is a sign of intelligence. When they make a machine that I can feed in the rules, and by simple practice it can learn the game as well as a human, then we'll be on to something. See: the game 'Go' (which we still haven't solved use a classical algorithmic approach).
Human brains have the computing power of a modern supercomputer and possibly a lot more of it, optimized for some specific applications such as data parsing/pattern matching.
Know what it is and know how it does it are two different things. We all know brains are pattern matching engines. But that doesn't help that much.
Uhh, 1940 and no progress? Are you nuts? Cognitive scientists didn't theorize basic semantic networks until 1966, let alone artificial neurons. And no, that isn't just more brute forcing, yeah it is a *lot* more computation, but it's a completely different angle of attack than parsing sentence structure and swapping out words.
Yes, we've gone from banging stones together to theorizing that the world consists of four elements. It's progress in the sense that we have some ideas that we know are totally wrong and incomplete, but at least we have ideas on the table. We simply don't have a Newtonian-style theory that explains how a brain really does what it does.
You're requirement of strong AI essentially boils down to "I think, therefore I am intelligent; thus anything that is intelligent must think like me."
Not at all. In fact, I'm convinced that we will never have an intelligent machine exactly like a human, just because humans have too many evolutionary weird input (e.g., hormones). But we have *nothing* even approaching any sort of intelligence.
yet you can probably give no definition other than anecdotal that "information" can be "understood." At best, you're description will come to something like "I can come up with alternate definitions and wave my hands until someone else goes 'Oh.'"
Well, yeah. If could define what "understanding information" really meant, then they'd invent a new Nobel prize for information science just for me. However, like porn, I know intelligence when I see it. I don't need to strictly define it. For now, the Turing test will have to suffice.
Also, considering that most of the advances in AI occurred in the 80's tells me that you're slinging BS from the hip, anyways.
What advances? We have various feedback algorithmic toys. We have nothing that demonstrates that we understand what is really going on inside a brain.
I don't know yet what Search 3.0 will be, but we're still a long way from getting Search 2.0 to work right. But we're still making progress.
Actually, we aren't making progress -- *at all*. What these guys are trying to do is a subset of artificial intelligence. A subject people have banging their heads against since the 1940s, and we've made *zero* progress since then. We simply don't know how humans process information. We don't even have reasonable theories. We're at the equivalent of the "four elements make up the world" version of physics.
AI researchers always get defensive when I say this, but it's simply true. All we have are better brute-force algorithms that sort-of simulate some of the things that humans do (i.e., voice recognition, character recognition, and other yawner tricks). There is no science of AI. Any sort of human-level understanding of information is far, far away in the future.
What a marketing pile-of-poop. All it does is pull out phrases from Wikipedia; there is no attempt to understand the information at all. When I can type in a yes/no question ("Did they have looms in the 1400s?"), I'll be impressed. When it can make calculation ("How old was columbus when the first colony was founded?"), I'll be impressed. When it can make comparisons ("when did the earth's population match the current population of the united states?"), I'll be impressed.
In other words, when it even attempts to answer a question that isn't already in Wikipedia as a phrase, I'll be impressed.
Well, I guess it describes a class of people you had an experience with.
I certainly realize there *are* people who'll fight for stupid reasons, but that doesn't mean they have self-confidence. Self confidence is when you don't give a damn what people say, because you know they're beneath you, and you lower yourself to even acknowledge them.
Or to put it still another way, if the President of the US (pick your favorite president) was at a rally and some idiot shouted that his mother was a slut, should he get down off the podium and start beating the guy? Are you going to think, "Boy, the President sure is a confident guy!" Or would you expect the POTUS to not even deign to give the idiot his valuable attention?
I suppose it depends on what sort of person you want to be. Do you want the confidence of knowing idiots fear you so much such that they won't say anything, or do you want the confidence of being of a class so above the riff-raff that idiots are completely irrelevant? Personally, I'd rather be the latter.
Actually, in my experience, Mormons seem to have the best sense of humor about everything, including atheists (who might actually go near the bottom, since many have absolutely no sense of humor about religion). I've seriously never met a mormon I didn't like. They seem to be the most dedicated to actually living their religion and striving to be genuinely nice people. If I had to pick a religion, I'd seriously consider being a Mormon, just because of the people.
Would you really say that in the second situation the son lacks self-confidence?
Actually, yes. I would think the guy that fights was really sensitive to the issue, and there is apparently something true with his mother.
Or to put it another way, if you're 6' 6" tall, and I call you "shorty" (or some more offensive insult), are you going to get angry? No, because it's absurd. But if you're 5' tall and I make fun of you, then you're much more likely to get pissed off.
I don't know how Islam got so protected and the Muslims so protective. It would almost seem like lack of self-confidence.
The reason they are so protective of Islam is because that's all the have. Their entire lives are surrounded with inferiority to the rest of the world, economic, technological, etc. The one thing they have that they can latch onto to feel like they have some sort of dignity is their religion. and their "leaders" constantly pound this into their heads that they are superior because they know what's "really" true and wise.
The Roaster will have a range of 220 miles per charge and the mileage equivalent of 135 miles per gallon.
The Roaster? I didn't realize they were using Sony batteries! Or are they also taking inspiration from Apple laptops as well as their stores?
So yes choosing somebody from the Slashdot crowd would be appropriate.
Well, with the difference being that MacGyver was knowledgeable and intelligent. The typical Slashdotter only thinks they're knowledgeable and intelligent.
Anyone know how I might get a small amount of financing to get a project going?
SBA loan.
That said, here's a piece of advice: don't sit around waiting for someone to dump money on you. There are very few businesses that *really* require a lot of money to start. The best way to build a business is nearly always to start small, work your ass off (possibly while keeping another job), and gradually build it up *by yourself*. Don't get partners unless you absolutely have to.
Do something *tangible* EVERY DAY toward your goal. And tangible means not writing down some plan you won't follow anyway. Tangible means, say, writing a hundred lines of code (if you're a programmer), even if you're dog-ass tired. Make 20 cold calls to drum up business. Live as sparsely and cheaply as possible and sock away every penny toward your dream. This can't be emphasized enough: STOP TALKING AND START DOING. Be bold. Be brave.
Many want to have their own business. Few are willing to do the work or make the sacrifices in their lifestyle. Hard Work + Sacrifice == success.