If you see only one episode of DS9, I suggest watching the TOS Tribble episode followed immediately by DS9 Trials and Tribble-ations. You can add ENT Affliction and Divergence afterwards to explain Worf's comment in Trials. I love that four episode "arc".
Well, AI's get created all the time on the show: Professor Moriarty (and later his woman); the Enterprise-D becomes sentient once; Vger in TMP; the M5 in TOS;.... I agree that Wesley creating one accidentally is implausible, but I think the more implausible proposition is the difficulty of creating a true AI--it seems to happen all the time on accident, so how could it possibly be so difficult? One can get around the contradiction by saying that creating a *positronic* AI was the hard part for Dr. Soong. Maybe it was really hard to miniaturize everything enough to fit in a human-size frame for Data (and Lore, and their mom).
The addition of Latinum (money) starting in DS9 illustrates your point wonderfully. Kirk specifically said money didn't exist (in the Federation) in the 4th movie, but two series later that little optimistic conceit was replaced by a gambling hall. Don't get me wrong--I love DS9. If they do make another series, though, they should think hard about returning to the optimistic future that started it all and, I think, got most fans hooked in the first place.
My guide to the six Star Trek series is below. If you've ever wanted to watch a few episodes of a series and stop there, pick some from the relevant "best of show" list. They're all independent episodes that require essentially no back story, unless otherwise noted. The NxM numbers indicate season and episode.
The Animated Series (TAS): terrible for adults; decent for kids (or maybe nostalgia if you saw it as a kid). One real season.
* Best of show: 1x02 Yesteryear.
* Worst of show: 1x05 More Tribbles, More Troubles.
* Most surreal moment in all of Star Trek: Midway through 1x04 The Lorelei Signal, Scotty sings Welsh ballads while the Enterprise slowly orbits. The scene drags on for 37 seconds.
Voyager (VOY): seasons 1 and 2 are terrible. Again it slowly amps up until 6 and 7 are pretty universally good. Lots of good 2-parters. Fun fact: Captain Janeway dies on camera
There were some episodes with Wesley that many fans accept. I never saw "The First Duty" but I heard good things about it, for example.
Maybe that was because in that episode Wesley is part of a cover-up to hide his involvement in the death of a cadet. Now I wonder, were the bad Wesley-heavy episodes bad just because Wesley was being an annoying know-it-all whiz kid? Let's see!
* The Naked Now [S1E03]: terrible. Characters thrown in ridiculous situations before they were developed enough for us to care (eg. Data and Tasha getting it on). Wesley saves the ship via magic ("It would take weeks of laying out new circuits!" -- "Why not just see it in your head?").
* Where No One Has Gone Before [1x06]: at best decent, at worst terrible. Wesley again saves the ship via magic (The Traveler compares him to Mozart in "time energy and propulsion").
* Justice [1x08]: at best decent. Slow; Picard tramples on the Prime Directive. Wesley's not terribly annoying, though maybe that's because he's under a death sentence the entire episode.
* When the Bough Breaks [1x17]: reasonably good. Wesley's super-human abilities aren't brought up, though his "perfect little man" qualities are annoying.
* Coming of Age [1x19]: reasonably good. Wesley actually loses in a test of technical and other skill. The second plot is Picard-heavy, so that brings the whole episode up a notch.
* The Dauphin [2x10]: at best decent. Wesley is awkward in his teenage romance; it's odd to make an episode revolve around such a poor plot device.
* Peak Performance [2x21]: good. Wesley is paired with La Forge to do super human feats of engineering, which makes him less annoying than if he were doing it all alone.
* Evolution [3x01]: good. Wesley screws up an experiment and creates a new artificial intelligence.
* Remember Me [4x05]: good. Wesley again screws up an experiment, this time almost killing Crusher. He has to work magic with the traveler to save her.
* Final Mission [4x09]: good. Picard-heavy; Wesley's just sort of there most of the time.
* The Game [5x06]: decent. Wesley saves the ship (yet again), but only with Data's help.
* Journey's End [7x20]: decent. The plot was heavy-handed and Wesley was again described as Mozart. He was also an annoying snot for the first half of the episode, though Wheaton pulls that off extremely well.
Wesley was at his worst in The Naked Now and generally when he was being superhumanly brilliant. All three of the episodes based around his mistakes were good (I'm not counting Justice here, since he hardly made a real mistake). He was also pretty good when paired with La Forge. And as usual, Picard has the ability to bring up the quality of an entire episode just by having a plot line. Episode quality generally increases with season number.
The more processors you ahve, the more complex scheduling your apps needs to perform to actually work faster.
Well, sort of. All you need to do is make sure you run each process long enough between breaks so that the ratio of scheduler time to actual processing time is small (fractions of a percent, say). You need a scheduler even on a single core to get multitasking to work anyway. Getting coders to take advantage of multiple cores is the actual problem here since writing bug-free parallel code is often very hard.
It's better to hav ea single core that is twice as fast, than two cores running in parallel.
Again, sort of. For tasks that do not parallelize well, obviously a single 2x-speed core is better than two 1x-speed cores. Power usage increases non-linearly with clock speed, though, so those two slow cores will use significantly less power than the single fast core, all else being equal. On a mobile device that savings might be worth the performance hit.
That said, four cores seems excessive on a tablet. When are you ever running four different CPU-bottlenecked processes/threads? A few games?
That is the beauty of physics--getting hard-to-obtain experimental evidence that agrees with theory, vindicating the theory enough in similar situations to trust theoretical calculations in lieu of performing difficult experiments. Bonus points if the theory is mathematically beautiful (as quantum mechanics is; go ahead, try and tell me the spectral theorem's characterization of Hermitian operators in Hilbert space isn't astonishingly pretty when interpreted physically!). Even more points for awesome pictures.
"Copper telephone" means a telephone made out of copper. "Copper telephone lines" is what the headline of course meant. I came here thinking the story would actually be interesting--why in the world would a company want customers to use copper telephones? Why a company might want customers to use copper telephone lines is pretty obvious: you can charge more for two services than for one. Nothing interesting to see here (though I hope for Australian's sake the situation changes); move along.
That page also lists "pre-EMAIL innovators" including, eg. "1971 Ray Tomlinson - Message transaction, multi-user, multi-computer"; it certainly doesn't deny various electronic communication methods existed before his 1978 system. The existence of similar prior similar systems also doesn't require the idea of electronic mail to be old, so long as they didn't have very high penetration. It probably was very new in his social circles.
I was going to bring up Shor's algorithm (oh look I did anyway!), but it was formulated in 1994. (It breaks RSA given a quantum computer of sufficient power.) Let's see... ooh, the AKS primality test was published in 2002, leading to the utterly mind-blowing and deeply revolutionary result that testing if a number is prime can be done in polynomial time! Yeah, nope, there hasn't been anything you'd call "real progress" in computer science concepts and algorithms--just a lot of the usual steady improvement.
Of course, revolutions typically come from questioning long-held beliefs (examples: non-Euclidean geometries in the 1800's questioned the parallel postulate; relativity and quantum mechanics in the 1900's questioned Newton's view of the universe; civil rights in the 20th and 21st centuries question the traditional role of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality). What long-held beliefs are left to question in computer science? The Church-Turing Thesis, maybe? Von Neumann architecture (and friends)? The importance and definition of complexity classes? The usefulness of abstraction or mainstream interface design? Certainly these have all been investigated, but apparently nothing important has come up so far. It's hard to revolutionize something.
I'm sorry; you seem to have missed or ignored my point. The blame may be on the journalists and not the professor. The person I quoted referred to the professor's claims, and I haven't seen any questionable ones from him. The WaPo headline is certainly misleading, but he may not have had any control over it. Vilifying the professor without solid evidence is about as dishonest as what he's accused of, yet that's what everyone here is doing. Perhaps everyone just read the summary (which gave him an assertion not supported by the articles: he "convinced no less august pubs than Time Magazine and The Washington Post that he invented email") and not the articles; that's extremely common and might result in the present situation.
I can both understand you and disagree with you. I simply believe you are incorrect. As I said, you are using a non-standard definition of the term "rights". I quoted a standard one and discussed the implications of a more general definition, the most pertinent being that the use of the term in this case is actually justified. Sorry; I don't know how to be any clearer.
I've understood you since your original post. You don't seem to understand me, since you keep repeating the same points over and over while ignoring what I've said. I don't see the point in continuing this conversation, though thank you for trying.
I'm no lawyer, but the Wikipedia article says, "In the United States, the Federal Rules of Evidence do not recognize doctor-patient privilege", and various states offer varying levels of recognition. One could also simply make it illegal for a doctor to perform an abortion and sidestep the confidentiality issue that way. (I don't advocate this; I just find privacy hard to swallow here.)
How this 1978 guy's claim has any legs I don't get.
What precisely is his claim? The Washington Post article gives no objectionable direct quotes. The internet evolution article quotes him as saying, "I did not claim that I created electronic communications". Shiva's web site says, "he was offered a position [...] to develop the world's first EMAIL System". It doesn't say electronic communication system, and it uses all caps to indicate the name of his program. Perhaps the Washington Post and Times journalists were sloppy and just used sensationalist headlines.
Certainly birth control is an issue related to women that is sometimes the subject of government regulation. I don't see a privacy (= "The state of being free from public attention") issue there, though.
Your definition of rights as things telling the government what it can't do to the people is interesting, though not standard. The first definition I found, "That which is morally correct, just, or honorable," is decidedly different. This would seem to be the definition used in "The Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights". That the actual Bill of Rights can be interpreted as limiting government power is immaterial. Rights in general, operationally at least, limit the power of some group or people, not necessarily just the government. This document tries to limit corporate powers; it doesn't seem like an abuse of the term, which seemed to be your point. (Since you didn't address it, my own point was that the term "rights" is ultimately just a rhetorical device, so devoid of any real meaning.)
My final sentence was about the wording of the amendment. Clearly it implicitly restricts the actions of the government; it's just not explicit about those restrictions (eg. it doesn't say, "The government shall not arrest someone and then not try them for years."). Giving people rights and restricting government actions are slightly different, though perhaps operationally they're equivalent. I did preface this quibble with "strictly speaking".
Wow, that's rather tortured reasoning. I hate to think I agree with the dissenting opinion on Roe v. Wade, but finding a right to privacy in the 14th Amendment at all, let alone calling abortion a privacy issue, seems ridiculous to my novice ears. In any case, thanks for bringing it up.
"Rights" are a rhetorical device. I can more easily convince you that my policy should be followed if I appeal to some mystical authority by talking about rights. I don't mind this conceit as a rule. My point is it's a bit silly to define rights as restrictions on the government's power when the term has no real meaning. Obama('s underlings) seem to be using it precisely as rhetoric here.
Strictly speaking, your assertion
All the rights in the bill of rights are negative rights. They don't tell people they can do stuff they say the government can't stop them doing it.
isn't true. For instance,
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial...
This gives a right to accused persons. It does not say the government can't stop people from doing something.
Here's the actual document. Appendix A contains the "Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights". (There's a link in TFA, but for those who want to skip to the source, here you go.)
Sure. The numbers are very hard to nail down precisely since many more people have some sexual encounters with their same gender than self-identify as gay or bisexual. The phrase "men who have sex with men" conveniently dodges the issue. Perhaps someday society won't care about minority sexual behaviors and our terminology can be simplified:).
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno man. With a name that's suspiciously close to combining "taste" and "testicles", you might have to replace "Angelina Jolie" with "Brad Pitt" ;)
If you see only one episode of DS9, I suggest watching the TOS Tribble episode followed immediately by DS9 Trials and Tribble-ations. You can add ENT Affliction and Divergence afterwards to explain Worf's comment in Trials. I love that four episode "arc".
Well, AI's get created all the time on the show: Professor Moriarty (and later his woman); the Enterprise-D becomes sentient once; Vger in TMP; the M5 in TOS; .... I agree that Wesley creating one accidentally is implausible, but I think the more implausible proposition is the difficulty of creating a true AI--it seems to happen all the time on accident, so how could it possibly be so difficult? One can get around the contradiction by saying that creating a *positronic* AI was the hard part for Dr. Soong. Maybe it was really hard to miniaturize everything enough to fit in a human-size frame for Data (and Lore, and their mom).
The addition of Latinum (money) starting in DS9 illustrates your point wonderfully. Kirk specifically said money didn't exist (in the Federation) in the 4th movie, but two series later that little optimistic conceit was replaced by a gambling hall. Don't get me wrong--I love DS9. If they do make another series, though, they should think hard about returning to the optimistic future that started it all and, I think, got most fans hooked in the first place.
My guide to the six Star Trek series is below. If you've ever wanted to watch a few episodes of a series and stop there, pick some from the relevant "best of show" list. They're all independent episodes that require essentially no back story, unless otherwise noted. The NxM numbers indicate season and episode.
The Original Series (TOS): quality varied wildly. Season 2 was the best; season 3 was largely weird.
* Best of show: 1x28 The City on the Edge of Forever; 2x05 Amok Time; 2x10 Mirror Mirror; 1x08 Balance of Terror.
* Worst of show: 3x06 Spock's Brain.
The Animated Series (TAS): terrible for adults; decent for kids (or maybe nostalgia if you saw it as a kid). One real season.
* Best of show: 1x02 Yesteryear.
* Worst of show: 1x05 More Tribbles, More Troubles.
* Most surreal moment in all of Star Trek: Midway through 1x04 The Lorelei Signal, Scotty sings Welsh ballads while the Enterprise slowly orbits. The scene drags on for 37 seconds.
The Next Generation (TNG): season 1 is terrible. 2 and 3 are hit-and-miss. 4-7 are quite good, with 6 and 7 being almost universally good.
* Best of show: 5x25 The Inner Light; 2x16 Q Who?; 3x26 The Best of Both Worlds; 6x15 Tapestry; 3x15 Yesterday's Enterprise. The series finale, 7x25 All Good Things..., is also quite good and has no "spoilers".
* Worst of show: 2x22 Shades of Grey (clip show); 2x12 The Royale; Wesley's part in 1x03 The Naked Now (also Wesley's most annoying part period).
Deep Space 9 (DS9): season 1 is terrible with the notable exception of Duet. 2 is a marked improvement (for instance, Siddig learns to act). 3 and 4 are sometimes hit-and-miss. Seasons 5-7 are excellent if you like space opera.
* Best of show: 1x19 Duet; 5x06 Trials and Tribble-ations (excellent if you've seen the TOS episode!); 4x03 The Visitor; 4x08 Little Green Men--these are each essentially independent episodes. 6x19 In The Pale Moonlight, 6x06 Sacrifice of Angels, and the series finale 7x25 What You Leave Behind are all excellent as well, but they're part of the Dominion War story arc and should really be watched starting from, say, 4x26 Broken Link.
* Worst of show: 5x07 Let He Who Is Without Sin....
Voyager (VOY): seasons 1 and 2 are terrible. Again it slowly amps up until 6 and 7 are pretty universally good. Lots of good 2-parters. Fun fact: Captain Janeway dies on camera
There were some episodes with Wesley that many fans accept. I never saw "The First Duty" but I heard good things about it, for example.
Maybe that was because in that episode Wesley is part of a cover-up to hide his involvement in the death of a cadet. Now I wonder, were the bad Wesley-heavy episodes bad just because Wesley was being an annoying know-it-all whiz kid? Let's see!
* The Naked Now [S1E03]: terrible. Characters thrown in ridiculous situations before they were developed enough for us to care (eg. Data and Tasha getting it on). Wesley saves the ship via magic ("It would take weeks of laying out new circuits!" -- "Why not just see it in your head?").
* Where No One Has Gone Before [1x06]: at best decent, at worst terrible. Wesley again saves the ship via magic (The Traveler compares him to Mozart in "time energy and propulsion").
* Justice [1x08]: at best decent. Slow; Picard tramples on the Prime Directive. Wesley's not terribly annoying, though maybe that's because he's under a death sentence the entire episode.
* When the Bough Breaks [1x17]: reasonably good. Wesley's super-human abilities aren't brought up, though his "perfect little man" qualities are annoying.
* Coming of Age [1x19]: reasonably good. Wesley actually loses in a test of technical and other skill. The second plot is Picard-heavy, so that brings the whole episode up a notch.
* The Dauphin [2x10]: at best decent. Wesley is awkward in his teenage romance; it's odd to make an episode revolve around such a poor plot device.
* Peak Performance [2x21]: good. Wesley is paired with La Forge to do super human feats of engineering, which makes him less annoying than if he were doing it all alone.
* Evolution [3x01]: good. Wesley screws up an experiment and creates a new artificial intelligence.
* Remember Me [4x05]: good. Wesley again screws up an experiment, this time almost killing Crusher. He has to work magic with the traveler to save her.
* Final Mission [4x09]: good. Picard-heavy; Wesley's just sort of there most of the time.
* The Game [5x06]: decent. Wesley saves the ship (yet again), but only with Data's help.
* Journey's End [7x20]: decent. The plot was heavy-handed and Wesley was again described as Mozart. He was also an annoying snot for the first half of the episode, though Wheaton pulls that off extremely well.
Wesley was at his worst in The Naked Now and generally when he was being superhumanly brilliant. All three of the episodes based around his mistakes were good (I'm not counting Justice here, since he hardly made a real mistake). He was also pretty good when paired with La Forge. And as usual, Picard has the ability to bring up the quality of an entire episode just by having a plot line. Episode quality generally increases with season number.
The more processors you ahve, the more complex scheduling your apps needs to perform to actually work faster.
Well, sort of. All you need to do is make sure you run each process long enough between breaks so that the ratio of scheduler time to actual processing time is small (fractions of a percent, say). You need a scheduler even on a single core to get multitasking to work anyway. Getting coders to take advantage of multiple cores is the actual problem here since writing bug-free parallel code is often very hard.
It's better to hav ea single core that is twice as fast, than two cores running in parallel.
Again, sort of. For tasks that do not parallelize well, obviously a single 2x-speed core is better than two 1x-speed cores. Power usage increases non-linearly with clock speed, though, so those two slow cores will use significantly less power than the single fast core, all else being equal. On a mobile device that savings might be worth the performance hit.
That said, four cores seems excessive on a tablet. When are you ever running four different CPU-bottlenecked processes/threads? A few games?
I'm not sure how much of that is accessible to nonsubscribers...
All of it is accessible.
That is the beauty of physics--getting hard-to-obtain experimental evidence that agrees with theory, vindicating the theory enough in similar situations to trust theoretical calculations in lieu of performing difficult experiments. Bonus points if the theory is mathematically beautiful (as quantum mechanics is; go ahead, try and tell me the spectral theorem's characterization of Hermitian operators in Hilbert space isn't astonishingly pretty when interpreted physically!). Even more points for awesome pictures.
"Copper telephone" means a telephone made out of copper. "Copper telephone lines" is what the headline of course meant. I came here thinking the story would actually be interesting--why in the world would a company want customers to use copper telephones? Why a company might want customers to use copper telephone lines is pretty obvious: you can charge more for two services than for one. Nothing interesting to see here (though I hope for Australian's sake the situation changes); move along.
Giving a new definition to RIM job = +0 unmodded
*RIMshot* = +5 funny
...seems everyone with mod points is straight today ;)
That page also lists "pre-EMAIL innovators" including, eg. "1971 Ray Tomlinson - Message transaction, multi-user, multi-computer"; it certainly doesn't deny various electronic communication methods existed before his 1978 system. The existence of similar prior similar systems also doesn't require the idea of electronic mail to be old, so long as they didn't have very high penetration. It probably was very new in his social circles.
I was going to bring up Shor's algorithm (oh look I did anyway!), but it was formulated in 1994. (It breaks RSA given a quantum computer of sufficient power.) Let's see... ooh, the AKS primality test was published in 2002, leading to the utterly mind-blowing and deeply revolutionary result that testing if a number is prime can be done in polynomial time! Yeah, nope, there hasn't been anything you'd call "real progress" in computer science concepts and algorithms--just a lot of the usual steady improvement.
Of course, revolutions typically come from questioning long-held beliefs (examples: non-Euclidean geometries in the 1800's questioned the parallel postulate; relativity and quantum mechanics in the 1900's questioned Newton's view of the universe; civil rights in the 20th and 21st centuries question the traditional role of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality). What long-held beliefs are left to question in computer science? The Church-Turing Thesis, maybe? Von Neumann architecture (and friends)? The importance and definition of complexity classes? The usefulness of abstraction or mainstream interface design? Certainly these have all been investigated, but apparently nothing important has come up so far. It's hard to revolutionize something.
I'm sorry; you seem to have missed or ignored my point. The blame may be on the journalists and not the professor. The person I quoted referred to the professor's claims, and I haven't seen any questionable ones from him. The WaPo headline is certainly misleading, but he may not have had any control over it. Vilifying the professor without solid evidence is about as dishonest as what he's accused of, yet that's what everyone here is doing. Perhaps everyone just read the summary (which gave him an assertion not supported by the articles: he "convinced no less august pubs than Time Magazine and The Washington Post that he invented email") and not the articles; that's extremely common and might result in the present situation.
I can both understand you and disagree with you. I simply believe you are incorrect. As I said, you are using a non-standard definition of the term "rights". I quoted a standard one and discussed the implications of a more general definition, the most pertinent being that the use of the term in this case is actually justified. Sorry; I don't know how to be any clearer.
I've understood you since your original post. You don't seem to understand me, since you keep repeating the same points over and over while ignoring what I've said. I don't see the point in continuing this conversation, though thank you for trying.
I'm no lawyer, but the Wikipedia article says, "In the United States, the Federal Rules of Evidence do not recognize doctor-patient privilege", and various states offer varying levels of recognition. One could also simply make it illegal for a doctor to perform an abortion and sidestep the confidentiality issue that way. (I don't advocate this; I just find privacy hard to swallow here.)
How this 1978 guy's claim has any legs I don't get.
What precisely is his claim? The Washington Post article gives no objectionable direct quotes. The internet evolution article quotes him as saying, "I did not claim that I created electronic communications". Shiva's web site says, "he was offered a position [...] to develop the world's first EMAIL System". It doesn't say electronic communication system, and it uses all caps to indicate the name of his program. Perhaps the Washington Post and Times journalists were sloppy and just used sensationalist headlines.
Certainly birth control is an issue related to women that is sometimes the subject of government regulation. I don't see a privacy (= "The state of being free from public attention") issue there, though.
Your definition of rights as things telling the government what it can't do to the people is interesting, though not standard. The first definition I found, "That which is morally correct, just, or honorable," is decidedly different. This would seem to be the definition used in "The Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights". That the actual Bill of Rights can be interpreted as limiting government power is immaterial. Rights in general, operationally at least, limit the power of some group or people, not necessarily just the government. This document tries to limit corporate powers; it doesn't seem like an abuse of the term, which seemed to be your point. (Since you didn't address it, my own point was that the term "rights" is ultimately just a rhetorical device, so devoid of any real meaning.)
My final sentence was about the wording of the amendment. Clearly it implicitly restricts the actions of the government; it's just not explicit about those restrictions (eg. it doesn't say, "The government shall not arrest someone and then not try them for years."). Giving people rights and restricting government actions are slightly different, though perhaps operationally they're equivalent. I did preface this quibble with "strictly speaking".
Wow, that's rather tortured reasoning. I hate to think I agree with the dissenting opinion on Roe v. Wade, but finding a right to privacy in the 14th Amendment at all, let alone calling abortion a privacy issue, seems ridiculous to my novice ears. In any case, thanks for bringing it up.
"Rights" are a rhetorical device. I can more easily convince you that my policy should be followed if I appeal to some mystical authority by talking about rights. I don't mind this conceit as a rule. My point is it's a bit silly to define rights as restrictions on the government's power when the term has no real meaning. Obama('s underlings) seem to be using it precisely as rhetoric here.
Strictly speaking, your assertion
All the rights in the bill of rights are negative rights. They don't tell people they can do stuff they say the government can't stop them doing it.
isn't true. For instance,
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial...
This gives a right to accused persons. It does not say the government can't stop people from doing something.
Here's the actual document. Appendix A contains the "Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights". (There's a link in TFA, but for those who want to skip to the source, here you go.)
they have real intrusions to complain about on the privacy front
You've got me curious. Could you name some? Abortion isn't a privacy intrusion and that's all I can think of.
Sure. The numbers are very hard to nail down precisely since many more people have some sexual encounters with their same gender than self-identify as gay or bisexual. The phrase "men who have sex with men" conveniently dodges the issue. Perhaps someday society won't care about minority sexual behaviors and our terminology can be simplified :).