Having many-eyeballs thing could improve ranking algorithms. However, the more people know about the algorithm, the more complex the algorithm is going to have to be to defeat cheaters. It's a catch-22. Eventually the algorithms would be so complex that they'd have to render the page to determine the relevance of different elements and parse out sentences to determine if they're gibberish or not.
So what we need is to work on developing an open, complex, and nigh-uncheatable algorithm while search engines continue to use their own closed methods.
It's just that story-driven games are enjoyed on a different time-scale than shooters. A person might relish the mayhem of a shooter for anything from a few days to a few months. So there *have* to be more of them on the market for shooter-fans to enjoy. But adventure games you can savor for much longer. Why, I'd imagine you could dwell on the notion of a syrup and cat hair mustache for a few weeks alone...
Nobody needs an admission from Jobs to know that Apple doesn't do market testing -- the iMac's mouse already told us that.
Once upon a time Apple tried to make products that the public would find easy to use. Now...I get the impression they're more about making products that are pretty than making products that are easy to use.
Ok, I could imagine a disasterous end for humanity if, through genetically engineering, we managed to foolishly remove most of the genetic diversity in our species. (Genetic diversity is a vital component to evolution, and evolution is important for adapting to a changing environment.)
But, does that really seem at all likely? I mean, really, think about how many people in the world live without much in the way of even plumbing. How plausible do you think it is that we'll get to a day when all of humanity is genetically engineered to be "perfect"? At the very least, we'll probably always have genetic diversity in the Third World.
Those are interesting questions. I think many of the variables don't have any sort of "agreed upon" values. For example, fl, the fraction of Earth-like planets where life actually develops. We only know of one. Some people would tell you that all "Earth-like" planets will evolve life, but that's highly debatable.
As for our chances of visiting a civilization once we detected it, it may well be that by the time we would hear signals from a civilization, they'd already be long dead.
The good news today is that this discovery (of simple sugars) seems to indicate that ne (the number of Earth-like planets) is higher than it might be otherwise. That is, there may be more planets out there with sugars like these than we previously thought.
When speaking about how likely there are to be intelligent civilizations, people often refer to the Drake Equation. Carl Sagan thought that the equation showed that there should be a significant number of civilizations. Although a recent book, Rare Earth has called into question how probable civilizations are.
This is good news, though, adding a bit to the likelihood of their being other civilizations out there somewhere.
Statements like your, "Free Speech is not absolute," always bug me. Another one I hear a lot (usually from Republic politicians) is something about people "abusing" their freedom of speech.
The way I figure it, the U.S. has that first amendment there for a reason -- to guarantee people freedom of speech. If U.S. laws can still deny people freedom of speech without a Constitutional amendment, then I really wonder why we have that amendment there in the first place...
First, it will give us a web device to transmit smell, then it will give us an e-nose, so we don't have to smell our own peripheral!
What could be more convenient then smelling the roses from the convenience of your own desk? Having the computer smell the e-roses for you. Once we perfect the e-toilet, you'll never have to leave your cubicle again.
Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but I happen to think that majority stock holders should be able to decide what a company does and doesn't do.
Hey, Carmack has power in the company, it's just a different sort of power. Kevin and Adrian may have a majority of share of id, but as you point out, here we are talking about things from Carmack's point of view... He's popular, and that means he can be both an asset and a liability to them. I don't see anything wrong with him telling the world his side of things.
If companies took Open Source and made it less open, then I doubt they'd get many developers. And if they took Open Source and exploited the free software without doing a lot of the development themselves, then, hey, what's wrong with that? Isn't that sort of what companies that distribute Linux do?
...a capitalist country, and America is definitely that...
Awww, come on. We're getting more and more socialist all the time. Still capitalist, yes. But we're capitalists with welfare, social security, a graduated income tax, unemployment benefits, and plenty of government subsidies.
Some cases may not be so clear, but there's some spam out there that's definitely criminal. I wouldn't have anything against a law that encourages people to turn in those who are committing outright fraud.
Well....good to see my sloppy thinking doesn't go unchallenged -- 4 responses putting me in my place already.
Of course, I was incorrect: since GA/GP use pseudo-random numbers, they are, of course, predictable, inasmuch as you can step through the program. Just to pick a nit, though, it would be incorrect to say that they're "just a random walk in some problem space."
GAs are often referred to as stochastic -- that is, they involve randomness. But that doesn't mean that they are merely random themselves. They're self-directing.
So, yes, if you know all the inputs, you can work through the logic and see just how the program got to its solution. Whether this is the case or not with the human brain as well, AFAIK, remains to be seen.
Computers are just simple turing machines. This means that everything they do is utterly predictable.
That statement can't be proven, because it's false. To site just the example I'm most familiar with, genetic algorithms and genetic programming have produced results that are unpredictable, surprising, and we would call them "creative" if a human had come up with them.
A quick search on Google turned up this article which talks about how genetic algorithms have been used to come up with some interesting designs. I'm sure there are some other great articles out there, but I don't have to time to search for them at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see . . . Michael Eilers writes that Mat Soell claimed that some Microsoft employees weren't happy they were using Linux.
Whoa. Where'd that come from? Never would have expected such a thing.
Where's the newsflash about scientists claiming the moon isn't really made of cheese?
(Score: -1, Redundant)
Having many-eyeballs thing could improve ranking algorithms. However, the more people know about the algorithm, the more complex the algorithm is going to have to be to defeat cheaters. It's a catch-22. Eventually the algorithms would be so complex that they'd have to render the page to determine the relevance of different elements and parse out sentences to determine if they're gibberish or not.
So what we need is to work on developing an open, complex, and nigh-uncheatable algorithm while search engines continue to use their own closed methods.
It's just that story-driven games are enjoyed on a different time-scale than shooters. A person might relish the mayhem of a shooter for anything from a few days to a few months. So there *have* to be more of them on the market for shooter-fans to enjoy. But adventure games you can savor for much longer. Why, I'd imagine you could dwell on the notion of a syrup and cat hair mustache for a few weeks alone...
Nobody needs an admission from Jobs to know that Apple doesn't do market testing -- the iMac's mouse already told us that.
Once upon a time Apple tried to make products that the public would find easy to use. Now...I get the impression they're more about making products that are pretty than making products that are easy to use.
Ok, I could imagine a disasterous end for humanity if, through genetically engineering, we managed to foolishly remove most of the genetic diversity in our species. (Genetic diversity is a vital component to evolution, and evolution is important for adapting to a changing environment.)
But, does that really seem at all likely? I mean, really, think about how many people in the world live without much in the way of even plumbing. How plausible do you think it is that we'll get to a day when all of humanity is genetically engineered to be "perfect"? At the very least, we'll probably always have genetic diversity in the Third World.
Those are interesting questions. I think many of the variables don't have any sort of "agreed upon" values. For example, fl, the fraction of Earth-like planets where life actually develops. We only know of one. Some people would tell you that all "Earth-like" planets will evolve life, but that's highly debatable.
As for our chances of visiting a civilization once we detected it, it may well be that by the time we would hear signals from a civilization, they'd already be long dead.
The good news today is that this discovery (of simple sugars) seems to indicate that ne (the number of Earth-like planets) is higher than it might be otherwise. That is, there may be more planets out there with sugars like these than we previously thought.
When speaking about how likely there are to be intelligent civilizations, people often refer to the Drake Equation. Carl Sagan thought that the equation showed that there should be a significant number of civilizations. Although a recent book, Rare Earth has called into question how probable civilizations are.
This is good news, though, adding a bit to the likelihood of their being other civilizations out there somewhere.
Statements like your, "Free Speech is not absolute," always bug me. Another one I hear a lot (usually from Republic politicians) is something about people "abusing" their freedom of speech.
The way I figure it, the U.S. has that first amendment there for a reason -- to guarantee people freedom of speech. If U.S. laws can still deny people freedom of speech without a Constitutional amendment, then I really wonder why we have that amendment there in the first place...
First, it will give us a web device to transmit smell, then it will give us an e-nose, so we don't have to smell our own peripheral!
What could be more convenient then smelling the roses from the convenience of your own desk? Having the computer smell the e-roses for you. Once we perfect the e-toilet, you'll never have to leave your cubicle again.
...is that it shows people how screwed up Scientology makes you. How messed up does Travolta have to be for using his star power to make this film?
That's an important lesson. Don't join a cult, kiddies, or you'll humiliate yourself on the silver screen
Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but I happen to think that majority stock holders should be able to decide what a company does and doesn't do.
Hey, Carmack has power in the company, it's just a different sort of power. Kevin and Adrian may have a majority of share of id, but as you point out, here we are talking about things from Carmack's point of view... He's popular, and that means he can be both an asset and a liability to them. I don't see anything wrong with him telling the world his side of things.
Oh, come on now. It only took me five minutes telneting to wearables.stanford.edu to get to the login prompt. That's about normal, eh?
If companies took Open Source and made it less open, then I doubt they'd get many developers. And if they took Open Source and exploited the free software without doing a lot of the development themselves, then, hey, what's wrong with that? Isn't that sort of what companies that distribute Linux do?
...a capitalist country, and America is definitely that...
Awww, come on. We're getting more and more socialist all the time. Still capitalist, yes. But we're capitalists with welfare, social security, a graduated income tax, unemployment benefits, and plenty of government subsidies.
Some cases may not be so clear, but there's some spam out there that's definitely criminal. I wouldn't have anything against a law that encourages people to turn in those who are committing outright fraud.
Well....good to see my sloppy thinking doesn't go unchallenged -- 4 responses putting me in my place already.
Of course, I was incorrect: since GA/GP use pseudo-random numbers, they are, of course, predictable, inasmuch as you can step through the program. Just to pick a nit, though, it would be incorrect to say that they're "just a random walk in some problem space."
GAs are often referred to as stochastic -- that is, they involve randomness. But that doesn't mean that they are merely random themselves. They're self-directing.
So, yes, if you know all the inputs, you can work through the logic and see just how the program got to its solution. Whether this is the case or not with the human brain as well, AFAIK, remains to be seen.
Computers are just simple turing machines. This means that everything they do is utterly predictable.
That statement can't be proven, because it's false. To site just the example I'm most familiar with, genetic algorithms and genetic programming have produced results that are unpredictable, surprising, and we would call them "creative" if a human had come up with them.
A quick search on Google turned up this article which talks about how genetic algorithms have been used to come up with some interesting designs. I'm sure there are some other great articles out there, but I don't have to time to search for them at the moment.