"Intractable" is the better usage here. Unsolvable is sometimes used to describe languages (problems) that are not recursively enumerable, whereas intractable has a very precise meaning (e.g. any decidable problem that cannot be solved in polynomial time is intractable -ref:Hopcroft, Motwani, Ullman). Very clear and concise.
Last night I bought two CFLs advertised as full spectrum. Both packages claimed that they were "natural light". One was a 5700k bulb that put off an extremely harsh blue tint, and the other was a 2500K bulb that came close to the incandescent on the lamp next to it, but still looked harsh and unnatural. Do the comparisons. CFLs look like crap next to incandescents every time.
"The Department of Administration blocks all new websites shortly after they are created, until they go through a software approval program that unblocks them," Werwie said. "Within 30 minutes of being notified this website was blocked, DOA circumvented the software and immediately made the website accessible."
"Libraries, however, do not acquire Internet terminals in order to "create a public forum for Web publishers to express themselves, any more than it collects books in order to provide a public forum for the authors of books to speak." The Court explained that the Internet is simply "another method for making information available in a school or library . . . [and is] no more than a technological extension of the book stack."
The principle that a library has no obligation to provide universal coverage of all constitutionally protected speech applies to Internet access just as it does to the printed word in books, periodicals, and other material physically collected and made available to patrons. “The Internet is simply another method for making information available in a . . . library’” and “is ‘no more than a technological extension of the book stack.’” A.L.A., 539 U.S. at 207 (quoting S. Rep. No. 106-141, at 7 (1999)). Just as it is entitled to exercise its acknowledged discretion in amassing a collection of printed materials physically placed on the shelves in order to carry out its mission, it is entitled to exercise discretion when it comes to Internet access involving its facilities and equipment.
The discretion that public libraries enjoy in selecting materials for their collections is not merely a function of what a library can afford in terms of costs and space . . . . [R]egardless of its resources a library need not place pornographic materials on its shelves, although such materials are constitutionally protected. It need not place children’s comic books on its shelves, although these, too, are constitutionally protected. As another example, if a private collector offered a library a collection of books at an attractive set price for the entire collection and the library purchased the collection, it would not have to include all of the books in its own collection and would not have to make them all available to its patrons.
I stand by my statement that this is not a FA issue, and the free Wifi at the government building is not obligated to provide full access to its users. The only exception to this rule would be if the state government blocked specific sites based solely on content. In other words, if the state narrowly targets a single website they disagree with, then it would be a violation, but since none of the facts in this case support that claim, and the state is blocking all new sites until they are reviewed, then this is legal.
That actually makes sense. If I think I need access to a site, but can't tell until I go there, it would be nice to allow it once so I can make sure that's what I actually need before going through the process of requesting that it be whitelisted.
If it's the only site they're blocking (or one of a small handful of sites they're blocking), then it is most definitely a First Amendment ("FA") violation. The federal or a state government can only block sites in certain ways.
>
No, it's not a FA violation. The government is under no obligation to provide you access to news, other people's speech, porn, or whatever else you want to get to on the internet. They aren't blocking the protesters from using their cell phones, air cards, or whatever other access they can provide for themselves. You are arguing that the constitution requires the government to provide unfettered internet access to its citizens. That is simply wrong. The government can't restrict access by, say taking down a legal web site (something the current President seems to have no problem doing BTW), but they sure as hell can block access to whatever they want on their own networks. If you want to go surf porn, get your own damn connection.
Let's take another example. The DoD at one time mandated that all TVs in public waiting areas be playing CNN. Is that a violation of the FA? What about those people who want to watch MSNBC while waiting? Is that government censorship too? By your argument, it appears to be since the government is providing for information dissemination while disallowing other information sources.
I call BS on your BS. I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 at work and haven't gotten the Xerox multifunction printer to work properly yet. Half the features are unavailable, and the vendor support is non-existent. They provide a Linux print package that consists of their own printing functionality, but then leave out the actual drivers. I hacked a PPD file to at least be able to do some of the work, but every print job results in an "Out of Paper" error followed by a "Job Successfully Completed" message. I never know if I'm going to get my printout or not. Consequently, it's about a 100m walk to the printer up some stairs. I don't mind the exercise, but when a PDF fails to print, I lose a lot of time walking back and forth trying to fix the problem. That's not a business environment conducive to efficiency.
Get a grip on what? The plain fact of the matter is that the capability described by TFA is one that has been around since the beginning of computer vision research and is not worthy of the awe, wonder, and excitement espoused in other responses. It is a simple algorithm, and can run quickly on commodity hardware, but I guess since it says "UAV" in the title, everyone wants to salivate and clap and otherwise act like fools over old table scraps. THERE'S NOTHING NEW HERE/.!
They can scan full motion video, in real time, looking for objects that are made up of a highly contrasting color? Isn't this just an HSV partitioning? My iPhone can do that in real time (actually, it's a 3G, so it can't do anything at all, thanks for the upgrades Steve).
It appears from your posts that your school experience consisted entirely of memorizing facts and regurgitating them rather than actually learning the "how" and "why". If simply memorizing a bunch of things passes as education then that is truly a sad waste of time and a mark of an abysmal education. While you do have to memorize important names, facts, figures, equations,etc, education should mostly be focused on how those memorized items are used, and why they are important. It is these how and whys that allow you to apply a broad foundation to problem solving and make you a far better (and more employable) person.
The view of the world you posit above could be made far simpler. Just don't go to school at all until you know what you are going to do. Once you have that figured out, then you can only learn the things important to your chosen profession. Of course, that would mean most people would just not go to school out of laziness, end up unemployable, and then expect welfare to help them get on their feet. It is a recipe for disaster and you are advocating laziness or lunacy - your pick.
It's not about "too much learning," but more about wasting time on irrelevant subjects. Should we force everyone to learn about every profession in existence based on the slim chance that they would want it?
It's called a "classical education". It used to be called a liberal arts education before the progressives co-opted the phrase to describe an unfocused, imprecise, do what feels right philosophy of education. The point is that a broad education provides a foundation for confronting new ideas, and new concepts.
Based on your statements, am I right to say that you think students should only be exposed to those things that will be "useful" to them? Who gets to judge what will be useful? Is a 15 year old capable of knowing which skills they will need over the next two or three decades? For that matter, do most high schoolers know exactly what they are going to do for a living?
If you were to say that we teach too much detail, or that three years of history (American, World, and typically State History) is too much, then I can agree with you. I think the curriculum is too broad and unfocused. That commonality aside, I would prefer making room for Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Math, English, and Social Studies. While that is not an exhaustive list, the subjects that form the foundation of all modern knowledge should be given the most emphasis. I never thought I would use Chemistry in the Computer Science field, but then I started working on protein folding prediction and I was suddenly happy to have had it.
My wife used to work for William Sonoma. One of the employee metrics they track is how many addresses you entered that day. It's an incentive to get as many as possible. They are also told customers have the right to refuse to give a zip code or address. It is clearly for marketing information and nothing more. The customer is in no way obliged to provide that information, and the employees are only encouraged to ask for it, not to push the customer to provide it against their will.
So the question comes up: why does someone not have the RIGHT to ask you a question when the provided answer is not necessary to the transaction? There is no corporate requirement that the question be answered. It is like saying that I can't ask if you're Buddhist during a conversation because I might violate your rights at some time down the road based on that information. How is this not a free speech violation against the business?
I know many of you are going to come back and talk about how corporations are not people, etc., but that ship has sailed, so let's talk about the consequences instead, shall we? If you accept, against every fiber of your being, that Williams Sonoma is an individual entity endowed with the same rights as anyone else, is there any way to say that asking a question, the answer to which has no bearing on the interaction, is a violation of the subject's rights such that the speech of the questioner should be abridged?
Normally I'd add something like "some code based on tutorial code at: http....." and never once did a professor so much a blink.
As a college professor, I welcome attributed sources as part of a turn-in. It tells me what the student did himself, and which part of the assignment I can disregard while grading. It is the non-attributed work that gets students in trouble. If I catch it, they get a zero because I can no longer trust that any of the work in the assignment was theirs. If I don't catch it, then the student gets a grade for work they may or may not have done. It hurts the student, and is unfair to those would did the assignment on their own.
Attribution in your work should never be viewed negatively by a professor. I have had students hand me an assignment that is 95% someone else's work, but fully attributed. I graded according to the part the student had done. He got a 'D' since he failed to accomplish most of the tasks of the assignment on his own, but that was the end of it. Another student who did essentially the same thing without attribution got an 'F' and was later dis-enrolled from the school for violating the honor code.
I'm replying to the parent because all of the children who replied to this have said basically the same thing and it needs to be addressed.
It appears that the slashdot crowd has no need for a liberal arts (in the classical sense) education. They only want job training instead. This is the problem with our current concept of college. Instead of going to get a well-rounded education that makes us better thinkers, more able to understand and inquire about the world around us, and generally improve our ability to be inquisitive successfully, college in America (and some other countries) is viewed as a way of gaining specialized job skills.
The school I attended had a very broad curriculum. I majored in Computer Science, minored in Math, but also took a year of Chemistry, Physics, History, English Lit, EE, Foreign Language, Biology and a semester of Aero, Astro, Civil Engineering, and Psychology (not an exhaustive list, just the ones I remember off the top of my head). I haven't used the majority of those subjects in my current job. In fact, I haven't even committed any Computer Science for most of my career. Does that mean my entire education was a waste? I certainly don't think so. I've been in situations where my Civil Engineering class actually proved useful to me. My wife loves to talk with me about history, and I draw heavily from my world history classes in those discussions. When studying genetic algorithms, my biology class came in rather handy, and I was grateful for that foreign language class when vacationing in Germany.
In short, my college education has enriched my life, made me a better person, and provided a broad foundation from which to launch new inquiries when I'm feeling curious. I humbly suggest that those who view college as only vocational training take a look at their local community college. There are many degrees offered there that don't require a liberal arts education, don't put you in a position that you feel you have to sacrifice your honor just to get a grade in a class you do not care about, and cost dramatically less than a college where you basically paid for the privilege of cheating your way through the classes you didn't find "useful" to your career choice.
There are some major hurdles to making this work as you've described above. Here are a few things to think about:
Data formats. There are currently no standardized formats or protocols for the storage and/or distribution of probability maps. While this could be easily addressed, it does not help in terms of data attribution (wrong phrase, but I can't remember the proper one at the moment....). If robot A "sees" a tree and uses it as a feature in its SLAM implementation, robot B must be able to match its sensor data to the same tree. In outdoor environments with GPS, this can be accomplished with some accuracy (maybe), but for indoor environments you would be hard pressed to get one robot to navigate from the coefficient matrix of another robot.
Visual object recognition takes on the form of everything from boosted feature detection, to Lucas-Kanade features, to Markov Random Fields, etc, etc. There is no one best algorithm for feature detection, nor is there an emergent method in the research for storing and transmitting those features. One algorithm isn't going to work with the data of another algorithm. Statistical data is highly dependent on the model used. Two robots using markov chains for instance could end up with very different joint distributions after several iterations. There's no way to take the joint distribution from one and hand it to the other in a context that makes sense unless you store the entire chain, thus killing the useful memory efficiencies of using the markov assumption in the first place.
From everything I can see, TFA is describing a search capability for trained models. In other words, machine A spends lots of time crunching through a data set and building probabilities/features/neural pathways/what-have-you and machine B then downloads the trained up system and uses it. That works great so long as machine B is in an environment reasonably represented by the data set used for the training, is operating under the exact same set of assumptions as the original training used, and is running the same algorithm with the same same motion model, sensors, etc. In other words, this amounts to a software update mechanism for all machines built by the same manufacturer and that's about it.
Forcing gas companies to hire employees to pump gas for you provides jobs for those pumping the gas, but that also means gas costs more in Oregon than other places, and money spent on gas in money not spent on other commercial pursuits. Granted, since it is next to California, Oregon gas prices don't look that bad, but California is a distorted comparison in this case. You'll note that Oregon has the 10th most expensive gas in the nation. I'm sure plenty of people will attempt to rebut this, and a quick look around google/bing (they're the same now, right?) didn't turn up much regarding a linkage between full service and gas prices.
Interestingly, the Oregon ban on self-serve has been challenged several times - by the gas industry. It seems the gas station owners want to cut the personnel cost and sell more gas by lowering the cost. In Oregon a referendum to do so was voted down. It appears the citizens of that state are happy to pay a little more at the pump to provide jobs that could otherwise be spread out amongst other industries.
There's a major difference between a private employer and a government employer in terms of speech. IANAL, but this guy is:
The First Amendment applies only to government employers, not to private employers. Government employers are prohibited from terminating employees as a result of their speech on matters of public concern, in most circumstances. However, if the employer can show that it was necessary to terminate the employee to preserve some legitimate employer interest, the termination may be upheld. Speech relating to matters that do not fall within the definition of 'public concern' may be used as a basis to terminate employees, even if the speech occurs on the employee's free time.
As in all things, it's not as simple as/.ers think it is.
Clearly a wretched hive of scum and villainy... if you're a conservative.
I see you are a pupil of Mr. Obama. You put words in people's mouths, erect a straw man argument based on your own stereotypes and misconceptions of those who disagree with you, then knock it down and congratulate yourself on your oratory and debate skill. I wonder if such behavior would classify as one who has done "the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses"?
If this were an affordable proposition, you would have already done so. As would your neighbors, friends, local business, etc. Solar panels are not cheap, and they have to be replaced on a 20-30 year time scale. The amount you save is getting better as technology improves, but it's still a long way from being a viable solution.
Children are not good for society. They should be expensive. We need to eliminate the aspects of our economic system which work as a pyramid scheme.
So you're all for stopping social security then? Otherwise, if you dissuade children, you end up in a position where you have to import immigrants to keep a large enough tax base to pay for retirees.
How about universal healthcare? The entire point of this system is that a large number of healthy people support the unhealthy people through taxes. What happens when your population consists of a very large group of older, less healthy citizens, and a much smaller group of healthy citizens? That scheme goes out the window too.
I'm merely guessing you would support SS and healthcare given that most of the posts earlier in this discussion reference the same. I'm not saying you said it anywhere in your post.
more like you can only run Chevy brand gasoline, oil & tires.
Give it time. They are already using more and more specialised tooling to force you to take it to the dealership. I'd be surprised if we made it a decade before GM vehicles go the way of the Apple walled garden and force owners to do everything through the dealer at a (ahem) slight premium.
ILS is only needed for landing. Takeoff relies on eyes, magnetic compass and gyroscopic compass. No radio signals required except for voice which involves a human noise filter. All off during takeoff makes no sense whatsoever. All off 10 minutes before landing is similarly strange since the nav equipment is used continuously throughout the flight and the ILS can be captures sooner than that. Most flights are doing GPS approaches anyway these days.
Not even close. Brute forcing a password of fixed size n will be k^n where k is the number of possible characters. A polynomial increase would be n^k with k being some constant. If brute force search were in P, then all answers would be achievable in polynomial time, to include answers to NP problems (which are verifiable in polynomial time), thus 2*n^k which is still polynomial and would trivially prove P==NP if it were true.
Having worked through Cook's theorem and forced to explain each and every gory detail to my professor during my oral exams, I can assure you that 3SAT is absolutely NP-Complete. What Cook did was prove by Turing reduction that all problems in P can be reduced to 3-SAT in polynomial time. Thus, if 3-SAT can be solved in polynomial time, then anything in P, to include all known NP problems, can be as well. The proof is well published and accessible to anyone with copious amounts of alcohol and pain killers.
Also, a feature of NPC problems is that you can always reduce one to another in polynomial time. Other problems that have been independently shown to be NPC, such as circuit-SAT, Clique, and Vertex Cover, can all be reduced to from 3SAT. So I'm 100% confident (as in the proof covers all possibilities) that 3SAT is NPC.
Good call. You're right. It will be shown to be a false claim. I never intended to imply that the author is intentionally misleading anyone, only that his methods are not rigorous enough to prove his claim.
Slashdot Mirror
Ooops. Should have read further down, others have already covered this ground. Sorry.
"Intractable" is the better usage here. Unsolvable is sometimes used to describe languages (problems) that are not recursively enumerable, whereas intractable has a very precise meaning (e.g. any decidable problem that cannot be solved in polynomial time is intractable -ref:Hopcroft, Motwani, Ullman). Very clear and concise.
Last night I bought two CFLs advertised as full spectrum. Both packages claimed that they were "natural light". One was a 5700k bulb that put off an extremely harsh blue tint, and the other was a 2500K bulb that came close to the incandescent on the lamp next to it, but still looked harsh and unnatural. Do the comparisons. CFLs look like crap next to incandescents every time.
"The Department of Administration blocks all new websites shortly after they are created, until they go through a software approval program that unblocks them," Werwie said. "Within 30 minutes of being notified this website was blocked, DOA circumvented the software and immediately made the website accessible."
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-02-22/us/wisconsin.budget_1_website-unions-access?_s=PM:US
"Libraries, however, do not acquire Internet terminals in order to "create a public forum for Web publishers to express themselves, any more than it collects books in order to provide a public forum for the authors of books to speak." The Court explained that the Internet is simply "another method for making information available in a school or library . . . [and is] no more than a technological extension of the book stack."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._American_Library_Association
The principle that a library has no obligation to provide universal coverage of all constitutionally protected speech applies to Internet access just as it does to the printed word in books, periodicals, and other material physically collected and made available to patrons. “The Internet is simply another method for making information available in a . . . library’” and “is ‘no more than a technological extension of the book stack.’” A.L.A., 539 U.S. at 207 (quoting S. Rep. No. 106-141, at 7 (1999)). Just as it is entitled to exercise its acknowledged discretion in amassing a collection of printed materials physically placed on the shelves in order to carry out its mission, it is entitled to exercise discretion when it comes to Internet access involving its facilities and equipment. The discretion that public libraries enjoy in selecting materials for their collections is not merely a function of what a library can afford in terms of costs and space . . . . [R]egardless of its resources a library need not place pornographic materials on its shelves, although such materials are constitutionally protected. It need not place children’s comic books on its shelves, although these, too, are constitutionally protected. As another example, if a private collector offered a library a collection of books at an attractive set price for the entire collection and the library purchased the collection, it would not have to include all of the books in its own collection and would not have to make them all available to its patrons.
http://www.wasupremecourtblog.com/2010/05/articles/opinions/librarys-internet-filter-does-not-violate-washington-constitution/
I stand by my statement that this is not a FA issue, and the free Wifi at the government building is not obligated to provide full access to its users. The only exception to this rule would be if the state government blocked specific sites based solely on content. In other words, if the state narrowly targets a single website they disagree with, then it would be a violation, but since none of the facts in this case support that claim, and the state is blocking all new sites until they are reviewed, then this is legal.
That actually makes sense. If I think I need access to a site, but can't tell until I go there, it would be nice to allow it once so I can make sure that's what I actually need before going through the process of requesting that it be whitelisted.
If it's the only site they're blocking (or one of a small handful of sites they're blocking), then it is most definitely a First Amendment ("FA") violation. The federal or a state government can only block sites in certain ways.
>
No, it's not a FA violation. The government is under no obligation to provide you access to news, other people's speech, porn, or whatever else you want to get to on the internet. They aren't blocking the protesters from using their cell phones, air cards, or whatever other access they can provide for themselves. You are arguing that the constitution requires the government to provide unfettered internet access to its citizens. That is simply wrong. The government can't restrict access by, say taking down a legal web site (something the current President seems to have no problem doing BTW), but they sure as hell can block access to whatever they want on their own networks. If you want to go surf porn, get your own damn connection.
Let's take another example. The DoD at one time mandated that all TVs in public waiting areas be playing CNN. Is that a violation of the FA? What about those people who want to watch MSNBC while waiting? Is that government censorship too? By your argument, it appears to be since the government is providing for information dissemination while disallowing other information sources.
I call BS on your BS. I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 at work and haven't gotten the Xerox multifunction printer to work properly yet. Half the features are unavailable, and the vendor support is non-existent. They provide a Linux print package that consists of their own printing functionality, but then leave out the actual drivers. I hacked a PPD file to at least be able to do some of the work, but every print job results in an "Out of Paper" error followed by a "Job Successfully Completed" message. I never know if I'm going to get my printout or not. Consequently, it's about a 100m walk to the printer up some stairs. I don't mind the exercise, but when a PDF fails to print, I lose a lot of time walking back and forth trying to fix the problem. That's not a business environment conducive to efficiency.
Get a grip on what? The plain fact of the matter is that the capability described by TFA is one that has been around since the beginning of computer vision research and is not worthy of the awe, wonder, and excitement espoused in other responses. It is a simple algorithm, and can run quickly on commodity hardware, but I guess since it says "UAV" in the title, everyone wants to salivate and clap and otherwise act like fools over old table scraps. THERE'S NOTHING NEW HERE /.!
Get a grip indeed.
They can scan full motion video, in real time, looking for objects that are made up of a highly contrasting color? Isn't this just an HSV partitioning? My iPhone can do that in real time (actually, it's a 3G, so it can't do anything at all, thanks for the upgrades Steve).
It appears from your posts that your school experience consisted entirely of memorizing facts and regurgitating them rather than actually learning the "how" and "why". If simply memorizing a bunch of things passes as education then that is truly a sad waste of time and a mark of an abysmal education. While you do have to memorize important names, facts, figures, equations,etc, education should mostly be focused on how those memorized items are used, and why they are important. It is these how and whys that allow you to apply a broad foundation to problem solving and make you a far better (and more employable) person.
The view of the world you posit above could be made far simpler. Just don't go to school at all until you know what you are going to do. Once you have that figured out, then you can only learn the things important to your chosen profession. Of course, that would mean most people would just not go to school out of laziness, end up unemployable, and then expect welfare to help them get on their feet. It is a recipe for disaster and you are advocating laziness or lunacy - your pick.
It's not about "too much learning," but more about wasting time on irrelevant subjects. Should we force everyone to learn about every profession in existence based on the slim chance that they would want it?
It's called a "classical education". It used to be called a liberal arts education before the progressives co-opted the phrase to describe an unfocused, imprecise, do what feels right philosophy of education. The point is that a broad education provides a foundation for confronting new ideas, and new concepts.
Based on your statements, am I right to say that you think students should only be exposed to those things that will be "useful" to them? Who gets to judge what will be useful? Is a 15 year old capable of knowing which skills they will need over the next two or three decades? For that matter, do most high schoolers know exactly what they are going to do for a living?
If you were to say that we teach too much detail, or that three years of history (American, World, and typically State History) is too much, then I can agree with you. I think the curriculum is too broad and unfocused. That commonality aside, I would prefer making room for Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Math, English, and Social Studies. While that is not an exhaustive list, the subjects that form the foundation of all modern knowledge should be given the most emphasis. I never thought I would use Chemistry in the Computer Science field, but then I started working on protein folding prediction and I was suddenly happy to have had it.
My wife used to work for William Sonoma. One of the employee metrics they track is how many addresses you entered that day. It's an incentive to get as many as possible. They are also told customers have the right to refuse to give a zip code or address. It is clearly for marketing information and nothing more. The customer is in no way obliged to provide that information, and the employees are only encouraged to ask for it, not to push the customer to provide it against their will.
So the question comes up: why does someone not have the RIGHT to ask you a question when the provided answer is not necessary to the transaction? There is no corporate requirement that the question be answered. It is like saying that I can't ask if you're Buddhist during a conversation because I might violate your rights at some time down the road based on that information. How is this not a free speech violation against the business?
I know many of you are going to come back and talk about how corporations are not people, etc., but that ship has sailed, so let's talk about the consequences instead, shall we? If you accept, against every fiber of your being, that Williams Sonoma is an individual entity endowed with the same rights as anyone else, is there any way to say that asking a question, the answer to which has no bearing on the interaction, is a violation of the subject's rights such that the speech of the questioner should be abridged?
Normally I'd add something like "some code based on tutorial code at: http....." and never once did a professor so much a blink.
As a college professor, I welcome attributed sources as part of a turn-in. It tells me what the student did himself, and which part of the assignment I can disregard while grading. It is the non-attributed work that gets students in trouble. If I catch it, they get a zero because I can no longer trust that any of the work in the assignment was theirs. If I don't catch it, then the student gets a grade for work they may or may not have done. It hurts the student, and is unfair to those would did the assignment on their own.
Attribution in your work should never be viewed negatively by a professor. I have had students hand me an assignment that is 95% someone else's work, but fully attributed. I graded according to the part the student had done. He got a 'D' since he failed to accomplish most of the tasks of the assignment on his own, but that was the end of it. Another student who did essentially the same thing without attribution got an 'F' and was later dis-enrolled from the school for violating the honor code.
I'm replying to the parent because all of the children who replied to this have said basically the same thing and it needs to be addressed.
It appears that the slashdot crowd has no need for a liberal arts (in the classical sense) education. They only want job training instead. This is the problem with our current concept of college. Instead of going to get a well-rounded education that makes us better thinkers, more able to understand and inquire about the world around us, and generally improve our ability to be inquisitive successfully, college in America (and some other countries) is viewed as a way of gaining specialized job skills.
The school I attended had a very broad curriculum. I majored in Computer Science, minored in Math, but also took a year of Chemistry, Physics, History, English Lit, EE, Foreign Language, Biology and a semester of Aero, Astro, Civil Engineering, and Psychology (not an exhaustive list, just the ones I remember off the top of my head). I haven't used the majority of those subjects in my current job. In fact, I haven't even committed any Computer Science for most of my career. Does that mean my entire education was a waste? I certainly don't think so. I've been in situations where my Civil Engineering class actually proved useful to me. My wife loves to talk with me about history, and I draw heavily from my world history classes in those discussions. When studying genetic algorithms, my biology class came in rather handy, and I was grateful for that foreign language class when vacationing in Germany.
In short, my college education has enriched my life, made me a better person, and provided a broad foundation from which to launch new inquiries when I'm feeling curious. I humbly suggest that those who view college as only vocational training take a look at their local community college. There are many degrees offered there that don't require a liberal arts education, don't put you in a position that you feel you have to sacrifice your honor just to get a grade in a class you do not care about, and cost dramatically less than a college where you basically paid for the privilege of cheating your way through the classes you didn't find "useful" to your career choice.
There are some major hurdles to making this work as you've described above. Here are a few things to think about:
Data formats. There are currently no standardized formats or protocols for the storage and/or distribution of probability maps. While this could be easily addressed, it does not help in terms of data attribution (wrong phrase, but I can't remember the proper one at the moment....). If robot A "sees" a tree and uses it as a feature in its SLAM implementation, robot B must be able to match its sensor data to the same tree. In outdoor environments with GPS, this can be accomplished with some accuracy (maybe), but for indoor environments you would be hard pressed to get one robot to navigate from the coefficient matrix of another robot.
Visual object recognition takes on the form of everything from boosted feature detection, to Lucas-Kanade features, to Markov Random Fields, etc, etc. There is no one best algorithm for feature detection, nor is there an emergent method in the research for storing and transmitting those features. One algorithm isn't going to work with the data of another algorithm. Statistical data is highly dependent on the model used. Two robots using markov chains for instance could end up with very different joint distributions after several iterations. There's no way to take the joint distribution from one and hand it to the other in a context that makes sense unless you store the entire chain, thus killing the useful memory efficiencies of using the markov assumption in the first place.
From everything I can see, TFA is describing a search capability for trained models. In other words, machine A spends lots of time crunching through a data set and building probabilities/features/neural pathways/what-have-you and machine B then downloads the trained up system and uses it. That works great so long as machine B is in an environment reasonably represented by the data set used for the training, is operating under the exact same set of assumptions as the original training used, and is running the same algorithm with the same same motion model, sensors, etc. In other words, this amounts to a software update mechanism for all machines built by the same manufacturer and that's about it.
Compulsory link to the broken window fallacy
Forcing gas companies to hire employees to pump gas for you provides jobs for those pumping the gas, but that also means gas costs more in Oregon than other places, and money spent on gas in money not spent on other commercial pursuits. Granted, since it is next to California, Oregon gas prices don't look that bad, but California is a distorted comparison in this case. You'll note that Oregon has the 10th most expensive gas in the nation. I'm sure plenty of people will attempt to rebut this, and a quick look around google/bing (they're the same now, right?) didn't turn up much regarding a linkage between full service and gas prices.
Interestingly, the Oregon ban on self-serve has been challenged several times - by the gas industry. It seems the gas station owners want to cut the personnel cost and sell more gas by lowering the cost. In Oregon a referendum to do so was voted down. It appears the citizens of that state are happy to pay a little more at the pump to provide jobs that could otherwise be spread out amongst other industries.
There's a major difference between a private employer and a government employer in terms of speech. IANAL, but this guy is:
The First Amendment applies only to government employers, not to private employers. Government employers are prohibited from terminating employees as a result of their speech on matters of public concern, in most circumstances. However, if the employer can show that it was necessary to terminate the employee to preserve some legitimate employer interest, the termination may be upheld. Speech relating to matters that do not fall within the definition of 'public concern' may be used as a basis to terminate employees, even if the speech occurs on the employee's free time.
As in all things, it's not as simple as /.ers think it is.
Clearly a wretched hive of scum and villainy... if you're a conservative.
I see you are a pupil of Mr. Obama. You put words in people's mouths, erect a straw man argument based on your own stereotypes and misconceptions of those who disagree with you, then knock it down and congratulate yourself on your oratory and debate skill. I wonder if such behavior would classify as one who has done "the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses"?
If this were an affordable proposition, you would have already done so. As would your neighbors, friends, local business, etc. Solar panels are not cheap, and they have to be replaced on a 20-30 year time scale. The amount you save is getting better as technology improves, but it's still a long way from being a viable solution.
Children are not good for society. They should be expensive. We need to eliminate the aspects of our economic system which work as a pyramid scheme.
So you're all for stopping social security then? Otherwise, if you dissuade children, you end up in a position where you have to import immigrants to keep a large enough tax base to pay for retirees.
How about universal healthcare? The entire point of this system is that a large number of healthy people support the unhealthy people through taxes. What happens when your population consists of a very large group of older, less healthy citizens, and a much smaller group of healthy citizens? That scheme goes out the window too.
I'm merely guessing you would support SS and healthcare given that most of the posts earlier in this discussion reference the same. I'm not saying you said it anywhere in your post.
more like you can only run Chevy brand gasoline, oil & tires.
Give it time. They are already using more and more specialised tooling to force you to take it to the dealership. I'd be surprised if we made it a decade before GM vehicles go the way of the Apple walled garden and force owners to do everything through the dealer at a (ahem) slight premium.
ILS is only needed for landing. Takeoff relies on eyes, magnetic compass and gyroscopic compass. No radio signals required except for voice which involves a human noise filter. All off during takeoff makes no sense whatsoever. All off 10 minutes before landing is similarly strange since the nav equipment is used continuously throughout the flight and the ILS can be captures sooner than that. Most flights are doing GPS approaches anyway these days.
Not even close. Brute forcing a password of fixed size n will be k^n where k is the number of possible characters. A polynomial increase would be n^k with k being some constant. If brute force search were in P, then all answers would be achievable in polynomial time, to include answers to NP problems (which are verifiable in polynomial time), thus 2*n^k which is still polynomial and would trivially prove P==NP if it were true.
Having worked through Cook's theorem and forced to explain each and every gory detail to my professor during my oral exams, I can assure you that 3SAT is absolutely NP-Complete. What Cook did was prove by Turing reduction that all problems in P can be reduced to 3-SAT in polynomial time. Thus, if 3-SAT can be solved in polynomial time, then anything in P, to include all known NP problems, can be as well. The proof is well published and accessible to anyone with copious amounts of alcohol and pain killers. Also, a feature of NPC problems is that you can always reduce one to another in polynomial time. Other problems that have been independently shown to be NPC, such as circuit-SAT, Clique, and Vertex Cover, can all be reduced to from 3SAT. So I'm 100% confident (as in the proof covers all possibilities) that 3SAT is NPC.
Good call. You're right. It will be shown to be a false claim. I never intended to imply that the author is intentionally misleading anyone, only that his methods are not rigorous enough to prove his claim.