> I think you have your cause and effect backwards. The reality is that producers push for releases of oscar-capable movies closer to the time for nominations.
And they do that because...?
The poster's thesis is correct: Hollywood and the movie-watching public have short memories.
My boss gave me the assignment to find the best religion. Some requirements that he gave me are:
Should keep one from everlasting suffering and torment in next life
Should help one eventually pass to nirvana-like existence, eternal increase and well-being, perhaps even an all-powerful/omniscient state
Should help one to acheive balance, peace of mind, and a strong feeling of being alive within this imperfect world
Should enable the occasional performance of miracles when called for
Should improve behavior of followers (make them charitable and courteous but zealous in good causes), and help them improve the world
Should have limited numbers of flawed adherents
Should have a consitent theology that makes total sense to rational minds and mystics alike, yet is accesable to the common man
Should provide insurance against armageddon-like scenarios
Should have a finite (yea, even small) set of clear, detailed, and consistent directions for acheiving all positive results (Goedel's theorem notwithstanding). Not to mention avoiding bad results.
Should be in line with the will of the universe's most powerful entity.
I've looked at Christianity (Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Melkite, Coptic, Protestants of several stripes), Islam, Buddhism, Hindu-ish faiths, and primitive animism, Kibology, Shirley Maclain, Scientology, Wiccan groups, secular humanism, and both U.S. political parties, but they all seem to be missing something. Can you point me in the right direction?
Except for the bit about improving the behavior of its followers, your requirements are best satisfied by worshiping... money!
> Simplified GUI - there's a variety of bindings to various APIs, from X-windows to SWING to W32.
Increasingly popular for Ada is GtkAda, a thick, well-documented, OO binding for Gtk+. It is portable between *n*x and Windows.
> Garbage Collection... When you want dynamic allocation, you can choose to rely on the compiler's garbage collection, if it exists, but you're also given tools for explicit disposal of garbage.
IIRC, the language spec makes garbage collection optional, and almost no one implements it.
> So why isn't Ada-95 used by anyone? Because... it's designed by a committee (like Linux - one really good designer Jean Ichbiah, then peer review)...
"Designed by committed" is the sort of argument prejudice evokes when there aren't any real arguments. People use stuff designed by committee all the time withoug whingeing about it. The argument ought to be about the design, not about the designer(s).
> When things other than strings and vectors are used, the standard C++ operators are just not enough. For example, we can have > for streams just because we have such built-in (and entirely irrelevent) operators *by sheer luck*.
Not everybody is talking about C++.
> Things are even worse for mathematical stuff. There are much more math ops than C++ ops. That's where extensible syntax like the ability of defining new operators are needed. Then overloading will no longer be a half-formed feature.
That's an argument for more operators, not an argument against allowing overloading of what we've got.
Whenever ambient noise starts getting on my nerves I put on The Who's Live at Leeds and listen to it at a naturalistic 130 db. By the time it's over, the background noise has faded almost to inaudibility. Just a bit of a ringing sensation, and that's about it. Like, you can hardly even hear the landlord pounding on the door.
> When did the whole notion of buying software die, makeing licensing become necessary?
I think "leasing" the license has long been the norm in non-PC markets. For instance, over a decade ago a shop I was associated with was leasing the OS and all the third-party software for their minicomputers. Most had rates that went up for faster machinces and/or more concurrent users.
The current trend isn't new in an absolute sense, but it may qualify as "strategic bait and switch". I wonder how successful PCs would have been if they had been introduced with for-lease software?
> All those features used together is going to make a big mess, IMHO. I think your boss needs some education in computer science.
Mark me -1, Redundant on the many comments already posted about the symptoms of PHB syndrome.
> Operator overloading is not a good idea I think.
IMO, operator overloading is wonderful: define a type for vectors, matrices, etc., and overload the arithmetic operators for them. I've even done it for (simulated) robot sensor scans, and for the ">" sign in a system that uses simulated annealing.
Overloading can make your code much more mathematically intuitive, and hence easier to read.
> It was a great idea, but failed to turn around with interesting biodiversity. You'd create creatures, they'd optimize themselves, some variants and parasites would evolve, but then things would simmer down within a few hours and you'd be in a steady state for ever.
I have read that people who experiment with evolutionary arms races (head-to-head competition between independently evolving systems) occasionally get punctuated equilibrium, i.e. the system will converge as you describe -- often on brittle, overspecialized adaptations to the competitors -- but after a number of generations something will drift enough to break the equilibrium and the "species" will start changing again.
FWIW, evolutionary arms races in GA is a very open area of research, so if you're interested in this kind of thing there's a niche for you in a grad school somewhere (where you can play games and call it research).
>...which makes this pretty stupid. The whole idea of evolution is built upon "selection" i.e. the robot that does best has most offspring. Just looking at survival rate is a measure for measuring fitness, but it's too crude a method for improving ones genes. Besides that now every surviving bot has the same amount of fitness (offspring). That seems to be some binary kind of selection which I at least have never come across in real life. Randomly mixing genes is therefore 'not' a good method to mimick nature.
I can't see his site, but it may be the case that he's not trying to mimic nature. What you describe above is very conventional in the field of genetic algorithms, and it works very well for many types of problems; it's inspired by biological evolution, but it's not a model of biological evolution.
Back to a couple of your specific comments:
> Just looking at survival rate is a measure for measuring fitness, but it's too crude a method for improving ones genes.
No, it works quite well for very many problems. You should be able to find a simulator you can download from the internet to demonstrate this.
> Besides that now every surviving bot has the same amount of fitness (offspring).
For genetic algorithms, 'fitness' is rarely measured by the number of offspring. For evolving agents it is usually measured by the score at performing some task, or sometimes by bare survival in some environment. And letting them all have the same amount of children is no problem, because it maintains some diversity in the genome.
Sometimes experimenters do let the highest scorers make more babies, but that is not necessary to a GA. I usually keep the best 10% of the population (or 50%, if resource limitations make me use a small population), and I let each of the keepers make an equal amount of babies with randomly selected partners until the population is filled out again. This works, in practice.
[And thank you oh-so-much for bringing this topic up, because while writing the paragraph above I think a bug in my latest simulator occured to me!]
> It seems that these types of experiments would be much better suited to software than hardware. Building the robots, configuring them, etc, is time consuming and expensive. You can do simulations with software that can be exponentially larger (more robots) and much cheaper and faster to build and make changes later.
PR. Who ever heard of a press release about a simulated robot? We've got a planet full of AI researchers doing cool stuff with simulators, but you hardly ever hear about it.
The show-and-tell aspect probably helps land funding, too.
> I disagree. The Supreme Court decided that expediency outweighed the need for correctness. That, I feel, is where the proverbial fuck occurred.
Thank you for demonstrating that at least one person on Slashdot is literate enough to read my.sig and understand what it is saying.
(Though in fact I suspect that the many people who misinterpret it and feel compelled to comment on it suffer less from illiteracy than from politically-induced tunnel vision.)
Also notice the implications of the "ruled it legal" phrase. What kind of precedent have they set? Suppose some state's corrupt administration (not necessarily Republican!) deliberately signs off on a deliberately erroneous count, and then runs out the clock on attempts to correct it? Is the Sacred Deadline still going to be more important than correctness? That's what the court's ruling says.
No broadcast flame intended, but IMO those who can't see any more in this than an argument over who 'won' should consider putting a bit more thought into their civic views.
And one last thought for the partisan die-hards... I didn't vote for Gore: not in my state's primaries, not in the general election. My.sig isn't a statement about which creep 'should' be in the White House.
Now, hopefully, back to our regularly scheduled topic...
> Yah, we're talking a very, very small fraction of a percent uphill, and the rest downhill. Uphill is waaaaaaay outvoted.
If you're geek enough to read Slashdot, hopefully you're geek enough to hack together a genetic algorithm (or download one off the 'net) and see by experiment that your logic isn't sound.
[re acquired antibiotic resistance]
> No, that gene was borrowed... and the bacteria are designed to do that.
Actually, modern gene sequencing techniques often allow us to demonstrate that the acquired traits are the result of mutations rather than borrowing.
> True, but it's even more true (if that's possible) the the organism has to survive with the part-features; even more so, in order to survive for very long, the part-features have to avoid burdening the creature until enough miracles happen that the part-feature becomes whole (else the creatures without the part-feature will out evolve it).
No one claims that every adaptation is going to be successful over the long run. Look at how many species are extinct.
Basically you're asking us to prefer the conclusions of your thought experiments rather the conclusions based on the evidence. That's why creationists never get any respect in the scientific community: they never base their claims on actual evidence. (They can't, because the evidence simply doesn't support them.)
Raises Costs: Sounds like they view easy profits as an entitlement, and expect the state to pass corporate welfare legislation rather than consumer protection legislation.
Hurts Consumers: Mebe we should ask the consumers about this instead? (Why the heck do they suppose the legislature passed the law in the first place?)
> I'm not trying to be an ass...I really want to know. Could you give me a starting point? The topic of how the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire seems to be a rather harsh starting point. Is there any particular name or subject I could search for?
I don't have a good single-book reference on hand, but if you can find a history book that covers the period 133 BCE (the Gracchi brothers) to 31 BCE (Augustus), that should cover it. If you are going to google for it, try "struggle of the orders", "Gracchi", "Sulla", and "Marius". Also very relevant would be "Caesar" and "Civil Wars", but those would give too many hits that weren't very focused.
Here is a timeline that will tell you the when and the names of the key players, though it is woefully short on detail.
IMO it's a really interesting story in its own right, even if you don't try to map it onto the current situation in the USA.
> With all different flavours of God(s) and Goddesses available to stick into your gap it could get rather crowded...
Heh. I read something a while back about how funny it was that the formerly "omnipresent" god was being compressed into smaller and smaller gaps as our knowledge of the universe grows, and that it must really peeve an "omniscient" god to have believers who only see him in the gaps where ignorance reigns, and that his foreknowledge of all this is probably why he tried to keep Adam & Eve from eating from the tree of knowledge in the first place.
> Behe gives exceedingly detailed examples of bio-molecular structures that fit his notion of being irreducibly complex. That is his evidence. His hypothesis is falsifiable if anyone can give a plausible sequence of mutations that conform to natural selection and can result in these structures.... No one has done that.
Sorry, but you have been misinformed. A readily accessible reference is here.
Several times Behe has staked a claim, had it refuted, and responded with "No? Well, how about this one?" The result has been an (apparently) infinite postponement of the evidence.
So again I say: his claims are not derived from evidence; he made his claim and is offering a series of guesses as 'evidence'. He is not even meeting the scientist's responsibility to scrutinize his own evidence carefully before running to the press with it. Meanwhile, he has not retracted his claim; he feels entitled to an infinite number of tries.
That's pseudoscience. Real science works forward from the evidence to the theory. Behe can't very well do that, since he never had any evidence to work from, just some lame claims that were only good enough to mislead the uninformed.
> However, it's ironic that you still have this in your sig:
The court ruled it legal to fuck the voters by running out the clock, and demonstrated how to do it.
A rigorous analysis has shown that in some ways of counting votes, Bush won. In some ways ofcounting votes, Gore won.
A rigorous analysis would show that my.sig doesn't say who did or didn't win, or who should have. Rather, it is a comment on the procedures followed and the terrifying precedent that was established.
Your failure to understand that renders the rest of your scolding meaningless.
> I always wondered why Creationism isn't viewed as the ultimate expression of Occam's Razor....
Indeed: one Swiss Army Entity that explains everything would seem to be the ultimate in economy.
However, the theory of evolution does not AFAIK invoke any processes, laws, etc. that we do not already know to exist. Therefore the ToE does not require multiplying entities needlessly, while creation requires the addition of one rather potent entity. The ToE wins on Occam's Razor, not to mention on the evidence.
> What an excellent use of the word! I propose we lobby the OED to include "enron" as a new verb in the next edition:-)
Notice that that was an example of the intransitive use. The transitive use has a slightly different meaning: I enroned my employees, you enroned your employees, he/she/they enroned their employees, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
> I think you have your cause and effect backwards. The reality is that producers push for releases of oscar-capable movies closer to the time for nominations.
And they do that because...?
The poster's thesis is correct: Hollywood and the movie-watching public have short memories.
> You want a very expressive object system? Great, but you don't get static type checking anymore.
You do with Ada95.
> You want overloading? Great, but type inference goes out the window.
Not with Ada95.
> Simplified GUI - there's a variety of bindings to various APIs, from X-windows to SWING to W32.
Increasingly popular for Ada is GtkAda, a thick, well-documented, OO binding for Gtk+. It is portable between *n*x and Windows.
> Garbage Collection
IIRC, the language spec makes garbage collection optional, and almost no one implements it.
> So why isn't Ada-95 used by anyone? Because
"Designed by committed" is the sort of argument prejudice evokes when there aren't any real arguments. People use stuff designed by committee all the time withoug whingeing about it. The argument ought to be about the design, not about the designer(s).
> Of Course, if you actually use Ada 95, you probably need your head examined...
I resemble that remark.
Is there any reasoning to back up your statement?
> When things other than strings and vectors are used, the standard C++ operators are just not enough. For example, we can have > for streams just because we have such built-in (and entirely irrelevent) operators *by sheer luck*.
Not everybody is talking about C++.
> Things are even worse for mathematical stuff. There are much more math ops than C++ ops. That's where extensible syntax like the ability of defining new operators are needed. Then overloading will no longer be a half-formed feature.
That's an argument for more operators, not an argument against allowing overloading of what we've got.
Whenever ambient noise starts getting on my nerves I put on The Who's Live at Leeds and listen to it at a naturalistic 130 db. By the time it's over, the background noise has faded almost to inaudibility. Just a bit of a ringing sensation, and that's about it. Like, you can hardly even hear the landlord pounding on the door.
> When did the whole notion of buying software die, makeing licensing become necessary?
I think "leasing" the license has long been the norm in non-PC markets. For instance, over a decade ago a shop I was associated with was leasing the OS and all the third-party software for their minicomputers. Most had rates that went up for faster machinces and/or more concurrent users.
The current trend isn't new in an absolute sense, but it may qualify as "strategic bait and switch". I wonder how successful PCs would have been if they had been introduced with for-lease software?
> All those features used together is going to make a big mess, IMHO. I think your boss needs some education in computer science.
Mark me -1, Redundant on the many comments already posted about the symptoms of PHB syndrome.
> Operator overloading is not a good idea I think.
IMO, operator overloading is wonderful: define a type for vectors, matrices, etc., and overload the arithmetic operators for them. I've even done it for (simulated) robot sensor scans, and for the ">" sign in a system that uses simulated annealing.
Overloading can make your code much more mathematically intuitive, and hence easier to read.
If the users want it, why is it in the EULA instead of the television commercials?
>
Viruses usually work as intended.
> It was a great idea, but failed to turn around with interesting biodiversity. You'd create creatures, they'd optimize themselves, some variants and parasites would evolve, but then things would simmer down within a few hours and you'd be in a steady state for ever.
I have read that people who experiment with evolutionary arms races (head-to-head competition between independently evolving systems) occasionally get punctuated equilibrium, i.e. the system will converge as you describe -- often on brittle, overspecialized adaptations to the competitors -- but after a number of generations something will drift enough to break the equilibrium and the "species" will start changing again.
FWIW, evolutionary arms races in GA is a very open area of research, so if you're interested in this kind of thing there's a niche for you in a grad school somewhere (where you can play games and call it research).
>
I can't see his site, but it may be the case that he's not trying to mimic nature. What you describe above is very conventional in the field of genetic algorithms, and it works very well for many types of problems; it's inspired by biological evolution, but it's not a model of biological evolution.
Back to a couple of your specific comments:
> Just looking at survival rate is a measure for measuring fitness, but it's too crude a method for improving ones genes.
No, it works quite well for very many problems. You should be able to find a simulator you can download from the internet to demonstrate this.
> Besides that now every surviving bot has the same amount of fitness (offspring).
For genetic algorithms, 'fitness' is rarely measured by the number of offspring. For evolving agents it is usually measured by the score at performing some task, or sometimes by bare survival in some environment. And letting them all have the same amount of children is no problem, because it maintains some diversity in the genome.
Sometimes experimenters do let the highest scorers make more babies, but that is not necessary to a GA. I usually keep the best 10% of the population (or 50%, if resource limitations make me use a small population), and I let each of the keepers make an equal amount of babies with randomly selected partners until the population is filled out again. This works, in practice.
[And thank you oh-so-much for bringing this topic up, because while writing the paragraph above I think a bug in my latest simulator occured to me!]
> It seems that these types of experiments would be much better suited to software than hardware. Building the robots, configuring them, etc, is time consuming and expensive. You can do simulations with software that can be exponentially larger (more robots) and much cheaper and faster to build and make changes later.
PR. Who ever heard of a press release about a simulated robot? We've got a planet full of AI researchers doing cool stuff with simulators, but you hardly ever hear about it.
The show-and-tell aspect probably helps land funding, too.
> I like the way this guy thinks
<AOL>meetoo!</AOL>
Or, to save yourself a bit of effort and still cost them the postage, just immediately seal the empty envelope and drop it in your 'out' pile.
> I disagree. The Supreme Court decided that expediency outweighed the need for correctness. That, I feel, is where the proverbial fuck occurred.
Thank you for demonstrating that at least one person on Slashdot is literate enough to read my
(Though in fact I suspect that the many people who misinterpret it and feel compelled to comment on it suffer less from illiteracy than from politically-induced tunnel vision.)
Also notice the implications of the "ruled it legal" phrase. What kind of precedent have they set? Suppose some state's corrupt administration (not necessarily Republican!) deliberately signs off on a deliberately erroneous count, and then runs out the clock on attempts to correct it? Is the Sacred Deadline still going to be more important than correctness? That's what the court's ruling says.
No broadcast flame intended, but IMO those who can't see any more in this than an argument over who 'won' should consider putting a bit more thought into their civic views.
And one last thought for the partisan die-hards... I didn't vote for Gore: not in my state's primaries, not in the general election. My
Now, hopefully, back to our regularly scheduled topic...
> Yah, we're talking a very, very small fraction of a percent uphill, and the rest downhill. Uphill is waaaaaaay outvoted.
If you're geek enough to read Slashdot, hopefully you're geek enough to hack together a genetic algorithm (or download one off the 'net) and see by experiment that your logic isn't sound.
[re acquired antibiotic resistance]
> No, that gene was borrowed... and the bacteria are designed to do that.
Actually, modern gene sequencing techniques often allow us to demonstrate that the acquired traits are the result of mutations rather than borrowing.
> True, but it's even more true (if that's possible) the the organism has to survive with the part-features; even more so, in order to survive for very long, the part-features have to avoid burdening the creature until enough miracles happen that the part-feature becomes whole (else the creatures without the part-feature will out evolve it).
No one claims that every adaptation is going to be successful over the long run. Look at how many species are extinct.
Basically you're asking us to prefer the conclusions of your thought experiments rather the conclusions based on the evidence. That's why creationists never get any respect in the scientific community: they never base their claims on actual evidence. (They can't, because the evidence simply doesn't support them.)
Raises Costs: Sounds like they view easy profits as an entitlement, and expect the state to pass corporate welfare legislation rather than consumer protection legislation.
Hurts Consumers: Mebe we should ask the consumers about this instead? (Why the heck do they suppose the legislature passed the law in the first place?)
> I'm not trying to be an ass...I really want to know. Could you give me a starting point? The topic of how the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire seems to be a rather harsh starting point. Is there any particular name or subject I could search for?
I don't have a good single-book reference on hand, but if you can find a history book that covers the period 133 BCE (the Gracchi brothers) to 31 BCE (Augustus), that should cover it. If you are going to google for it, try "struggle of the orders", "Gracchi", "Sulla", and "Marius". Also very relevant would be "Caesar" and "Civil Wars", but those would give too many hits that weren't very focused.
Here is a timeline that will tell you the when and the names of the key players, though it is woefully short on detail.
IMO it's a really interesting story in its own right, even if you don't try to map it onto the current situation in the USA.
> With all different flavours of God(s) and Goddesses available to stick into your gap it could get rather crowded...
Heh. I read something a while back about how funny it was that the formerly "omnipresent" god was being compressed into smaller and smaller gaps as our knowledge of the universe grows, and that it must really peeve an "omniscient" god to have believers who only see him in the gaps where ignorance reigns, and that his foreknowledge of all this is probably why he tried to keep Adam & Eve from eating from the tree of knowledge in the first place.
> Behe gives exceedingly detailed examples of bio-molecular structures that fit his notion of being irreducibly complex. That is his evidence. His hypothesis is falsifiable if anyone can give a plausible sequence of mutations that conform to natural selection and can result in these structures.
Sorry, but you have been misinformed. A readily accessible reference is here.
Several times Behe has staked a claim, had it refuted, and responded with "No? Well, how about this one?" The result has been an (apparently) infinite postponement of the evidence.
So again I say: his claims are not derived from evidence; he made his claim and is offering a series of guesses as 'evidence'. He is not even meeting the scientist's responsibility to scrutinize his own evidence carefully before running to the press with it. Meanwhile, he has not retracted his claim; he feels entitled to an infinite number of tries.
That's pseudoscience. Real science works forward from the evidence to the theory. Behe can't very well do that, since he never had any evidence to work from, just some lame claims that were only good enough to mislead the uninformed.
A rigorous analysis has shown that in some ways of counting votes, Bush won. In some ways ofcounting votes, Gore won.> However, it's ironic that you still have this in your sig:
A rigorous analysis would show that my
Your failure to understand that renders the rest of your scolding meaningless.
> Where else could you write code that deploys missiles, cracks encryption, and spies on people and not get arrested?
Write Outlook viruses?
> I always wondered why Creationism isn't viewed as the ultimate expression of Occam's Razor....
Indeed: one Swiss Army Entity that explains everything would seem to be the ultimate in economy.
However, the theory of evolution does not AFAIK invoke any processes, laws, etc. that we do not already know to exist. Therefore the ToE does not require multiplying entities needlessly, while creation requires the addition of one rather potent entity. The ToE wins on Occam's Razor, not to mention on the evidence.
> What an excellent use of the word! I propose we lobby the OED to include "enron" as a new verb in the next edition
Notice that that was an example of the intransitive use. The transitive use has a slightly different meaning: I enroned my employees, you enroned your employees, he/she/they enroned their employees, etc.