What is this, Latin Lovers day? Who the hell studies Latin anymore? It's a dead language! Why does anyone care?
I've studied Latin for about 6 years. I know several other people who have done the same.
Latin was used for a lot of medieval writings so alot of the works by many important and influential people were written in Latin. Descartes, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, church records all come to mind. Basically any work of scholarship or official document from Europe that is older than about 3 centuries is probably written in Latin. And then there are all the roman writers and philosophers.
Even in the US a lot of people won't have DSL/cable modems. Consider the people in say rural Arkansas who may not even have a local ISP, much less high speed connectivity. Most of the fast connections will be in high population/high income areas leaving a lot of people out of the loop.
It would be really fun, and good from the standpoint of the people running the transmitters, but really bad for the listeners. There just aren't, and can't ever be, enough broadcast frequencies for this scheme to be pulled off without a lot of stations interfering with each other.
I'm not sure about this point. Assuming that the FCC establishes a reasonable licensing procedure, only the people who really want to broadcast will get the licence. In addition, not many people will get a licence and broadcast due to the cost of the equipment and technical expertise required. A one watt kit costs about 200 and comes as a breadboard, a bunch of chips, and a wiring diagram.
Given this I believe that inteference will not be a major concern since incident power goes as a function of 1/r^2. So if you're receiving a 1 W/m^2 at the source, 10 meters away you're receiving.01 W/m^2.
This is the wave of the future. In 10 years or so we will all have 5 Megabit-per-second fiber-optic feeds that cost the same as cable-tv+telephone today. We will choose what we want to see in our homes, and when we want to see it.
This maybe true in middle class homes in the suburbs but may segments of the population will not have this type of connectivity. Many people do not have a computer now and a significant fraction will probably still not have one 10 years from now. In addition, telcos and cable services will probably not spend the money required to wire areas that won't give a good return(inner cities, rural areas, areas with low income, etc). For example, the only reason Hyde Park in Chicago is getting DSL service is because the University of Chicago is pulling some strings to get Ameritech to wire the entire neighborhood. Without the U of C's influence, I'm sure that Ameritech wouldn't consider adding DSL at all since it's a "low income area."
do NOT believe it is the government's responsibility to take care or illegal aliens within the country, or the citizens of other countries.
However if the government interferes with other foreign governments to the extent that people are forced to become refugees, I do think the government has a responsibility to take care of these refugees.
The US government has done this in several countries(Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, etc.). So in large part, I think the government is responsible for the immigrants from these countries that were affected by government actions.
till, we have an amazing capacity for upwards mobility in this country. If you apply yourself you can succeed.
Although that's the image that many people have of US society, that's really not the case. A lot of books have documented how US society is pretty stratified with significant barriers to movement between classes. Otherwise why do so many lower class people remain in the same class for their entire lives? Please don't tell me that they're so lazy that they want to live without basic utilities. Some of them work 10+ hours a day for 6 days a week but get paid very little. I wouldn't conisder that lazy at all.
I swear to you that if you are 16+ you can find a job. It might be 20 hours a week at McDonalds, but that will buy you a workable computer after a month or two.
I think you fail to realize that a lot of the poor are working more than 20 hours a week to pay for necessities. Yeah, a 16 year old can probably scrap together money for a computer but when the choice is between the computer and food/rent/clothes I think the choice is pretty obvious.
Despite what you may believe where you are and how much you earn is primarily a function of who your parents are. People born in a middle class family tend to grow up and become middle class, likewise people born in lower class families tend to remain in lower classes.
Racism is dead. The only thing keeping it alive is government programs to keep people aware of Race.
That really isn't the case at all. If it were, then people don't be asked to pay for their food at Denny's before they get it, people wouldn't be dragged on a chain attached to a truck because of their skin color, and people wouldn't be the targets of drivebys because they were black. We should all be given an equal CHANCE.
And that's exactly what affirmative action programs tried to do. Whether they succeeded or achieved it is a subject of debate however. However, it is hard to argue that minorities and minority women in particular earn significantly less than white men or women in equivalent positions.
Re:Unionization is the only way to get ahead.
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Home Sweet Sweatshop
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· Score: 1
If your choice of employer doesn't fit your chosen lifestyle, its your choice of employer that's the problem, not the employer's way of doing business. This isn't the same as being a assembly line worker in a one-industry town where you have no choices.
Unfortunately thats not the case. If virtually every company in the industry requires 60+ hours a week than you have no choice but to work those hours (changing careers to another field often isn't a choice). Although working for 12 hours straight has an heroic aspect to it, the simple fact is that when companies had their workers work less than 40 hours a week, the increase in productivity more than made up for the fewer working hours. I think that would probably be the case in tech fields.
In a lot of cases unions are effective and do perform useful actions. Without unions to provide a check on employers, companies can often force their employees to accept conditions that they don't wish becuase of the power disparity between the two.
This isn't anything new. Julie Schor documents this in her book The Overworked American and the book came out in 1988. Basically she found that American's on averaged worked 163 hours per year more in 1988 than in 1965. That's about a month longer!
The really scary part is that this is a modern American occurance. European workers have something like 4-6 weeks paid vacation. If we compare the hours worked to those of people in the past like serfs or hunter/gathers they worked even less than we did(something like 130 days/year for serfs and 18-24 hours a week for hunter/gathers).
This presents excellent possibilities. Imagine a distributed.net client, or a game executed on such a machine.
Unfortunately I don't believe that these computers will be any better to these types of problems than regular computers. Although quantum computers are several orders of magnitude faster than regular computers for factoring and similar problems, I haven't seen any algorithms that let them say render a scene.
In some sense quantum computing attacks a fundamentally different problem then regular computers and using quantum computers to solve problems that regular computers do well may be just as inefficient as using regular computers to factor large numbers.
I have a problem with morons like this shouting to the mountains how much they dislike (hate/rancor) Star Wars. Why? because it was a big part of my childhood. I grew up with this stuff. It's like they're saying "your childhood was full of shit." That's insulting, and wrong.
I don't see why it's wrong. It may be painful to have your childhood beliefs and ideals criticized but that doesn't may the criticism invalid. By your argument, no one should criticize apartheid or segregation because for some people deeply believed those priniciples as children.
BTW, if you can rip Brin's arguments without trying, do so instead of engaging in ad hominem attacks on his character.
Oh, and Luke *did* matter in ROTJ; without his Force skills, the Ewoks would never have attacked the Stormtroopers
The ewoks already thought that C3PO was a god. Luke just convinced the ewoks to further believe that. Without Luke, C3PO could probably have convinced the ewoks, it just would have taken longer.
Look how long it's taking for Unicode to be adopted... will IPv6 be any faster?
When people start getting denied access to the internet because there aren't enough ip addresses, I'm sure the collective screaming will be enough to make sure the transition happens relatively quickly.
Right now I'm working with some people on the superk project and I wonder how useful the code I'm writing is to others. A lot of times the code written in High energy physics is used to interface with custom electronics. As such the code probably isn't very useful to others not working on the same project. For example, I'm writing is used to interface with either an $8k or $22k oscilliscope attached to some custom electronics. I'm not sure how useful the code would be to others without the same setup.
You really believe that anyone can actually come up with computer AI that will match human inteligence? There has been only one instance in which I can recall an intellgent human being beaten by a computer. BigBlue winning a few games of chess. The only way the computer won was because it could calculate a huge multitude of possibilties at once.
Computers can play a prefect game in tic-tac-toe and come damn close in checkers as someone has pointed out. Bayesian networks have been able to diagnose certain diseases as well as or better than pathologists(check out the literature on PATHFINDER I-IV, MUNIN, etc.). And I'm sure Chessmaster 5000 or gnuchess can beat the average person in chess.
You're comparing the abilities of a computer player to that of the best human in the world in chess. That's not a really fair comparision since the average person is no where near that good.
However, the best AIs can't deal mundane stuff that 99% of the population can handle such as recognizing faces or understanding language so AIs still have a really long way to go.
The most efficient movement of troops can be done without any AI at all. It just takes a nice deterministic algorithm. They just haven't bothered to figure out a good one.
Finding a paths between places is ai. Deterministic algorithims can't deal with unexpected things such as a enemy suddenly appearing on the path or if the route between two points is unknown (due to fog of war or something like that).
There is a very simple way to insert DNA into (all) cells of a mature human beeing: a virus.
That's not actually true. Only retroviruses actually insert stuff into the host's geonome. Something like influenza doesn't do this, it just takes over the cellular machinery.
Even with retroviruses it's a bit difficult to get the virus to inject itself into the geonome. For example, the lambda phage lyses the host E. coli cell most of the time and integrates itself rarely. By fiddling around with the lab conditions, you can encouragely integration but its still difficult. The preferred vectors are stuff like an F element(E. Coli) or artificial chromosomes(S. Cerevisiae) due to size considerations.
For humans, you would need to limit the size of the message due to the size limitations of the vector. Plus, with current technology you would have to wait a generation or two to get a person who had the genetic code in every cell.
I sure hope none of the goverment branches will use this for espionage... somehow the idea of tempering with human DNA seems a bit spooky to me
The human DNA is removed a person and mixed with the coded DNA just to present background nooise. The DNA isn't biologically active and in fact would get chewed up by polymerases within biological organisms.
Check out comp.ai for more information on the satelite. Some of the people working on the project having been posting updates and would probably be willing to answer questions.
This project also had ion engines as a propulusion unit. In fact, their was a software error that messed up the timing of the ion engine components so it would shut off during this flight. The software was able to work around it automatically though.
Microsoft actually did something good for once
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NASA and AI Testing
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From the comments on the rax page it seems like they're using a Bayesian network to diagnose errors and identifying the causes of the errors. If so we should thank Microsoft in part for hiring some of their researchers.
It's surprising but Microsoft Research has a bunch of researchers that have done a lot of important research in Bayesian networks and AI. For example, David Heckerman developed PATHFINDER for his Ph.D. thesis. (PATHFINDER is a program that helps to diagnose lymph node diseases, the last version PATHFINDER IV was just as good or better than most pathologists). In fact, I think one of them wrote a paper on diagnosing and troubleshooting PC problems which may have helped the people at JPL write the MIR software.
I didn't notice anything mentioning the use of lisp either, though I suspect the original author was rather referring to lisp because it is commonly used to write AI type things. (That and scheme....*shudder*)
Actually I think LISP and PROLOG are the big AI languages. Scheme is pretty much a subset of LISP so US researchers tend to use LISP more. Europeans tend to use PROLOG.
This isn't censorship since the government is not restricting access to the show. Rather WB is delaying the broadcast of its own material. I don't see how this can even be considered censorship since it seems like they will broadcast the episode just at a later date. I guess an analogy to this would be linus writing a new kernel patch (say 2.2.10) and then just distributing the patch to a small group of people before releasing it in public a few weeks latter.
I don't see why WB should deserve the all the flak its getting. They seem to be trying to be sensitive to the stuff at Littleton. I can see how scenes with high school students running around the school and getting attacked would seem inappropriate.
It seems like there's a double standard operating here. We complain about coporations trying to exploit the event when they release things like this about events that we care about. But if the event in question doesn't resonate much with us, everyone starts shouting censorship, calls for booycotts, and adovocates pirating the show. Would we have done the same if George Lucas decided to delay the release of star wars for a few weeks?
BTW, I think Katz is really reaching when he makes the analogy between the people being persecuted at school and the show having demons running around the high school.
A friend of my gave a presentation of the work he did with Don Lamb's group where they showed that the odds of GRBs being associated with type IIa(?) supernovae was something like 30000 to 1, the odds for other types were better (on the order of 10 to 1) but that was only because they didn't have as much data on these other supernovae(type IIc). So I'm not sure that supernovae are associated with GRBs
There are several problems with the results that I see. Primarily there is no neutron flux that should be produced if fusion is actually happening. Although the researchers claim that there is another mechanism for this, they haven't proposed any mechanisms for this that are credible.
The experimental setup that they use also suggests an alternative possibility. The pallladium electrode has the ability to absorb hydrogen gas within it and then later release it. Suppose the electrode absorbs some of the hydrogen floating around in the water and then when the current's voltage is high enough it starts to release the gas which then ignites. This would give you heat and light without radiation.
I also find th researcher's suggestion about the sun using an alternative method of fusion to be shady. They seem to be suggesting that the sun is also using a mechanism similar to cold fusion. However, palladium is a heavy atom which wouldn't be present in the sun in any sizable quantities (I believe only ~100 kg of palladium is mined every year). In addition the conditions present in the sun would prevent any thing like a electrolytic cell from being present.
Slashdot Mirror
I've studied Latin for about 6 years. I know several other people who have done the same.
Latin was used for a lot of medieval writings so alot of the works by many important and influential people were written in Latin. Descartes, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, church records all come to mind. Basically any work of scholarship or official document from Europe that is older than about 3 centuries is probably written in Latin. And then there are all the roman writers and philosophers.
Even in the US a lot of people won't have DSL/cable modems. Consider the people in say rural Arkansas who may not even have a local ISP, much less high speed connectivity. Most of the fast connections will be in high population/high income areas leaving a lot of people out of the loop.
I'm not sure about this point. Assuming that the FCC establishes a reasonable licensing procedure, only the people who really want to broadcast will get the licence. In addition, not many people will get a licence and broadcast due to the cost of the equipment and technical expertise required. A one watt kit costs about 200 and comes as a breadboard, a bunch of chips, and a wiring diagram.
Given this I believe that inteference will not be a major concern since incident power goes as a function of 1/r^2. So if you're receiving a 1 W/m^2 at the source, 10 meters away you're receiving .01 W/m^2.
This is the wave of the future. In 10 years or so we will all have 5 Megabit-per-second fiber-optic feeds that cost the same as cable-tv+telephone today. We will choose what we want to see in our homes, and when we want to see it.
This maybe true in middle class homes in the suburbs but may segments of the population will not have this type of connectivity. Many people do not have a computer now and a significant fraction will probably still not have one 10 years from now. In addition, telcos and cable services will probably not spend the money required to wire areas that won't give a good return(inner cities, rural areas, areas with low income, etc). For example, the only reason Hyde Park in Chicago is getting DSL service is because the University of Chicago is pulling some strings to get Ameritech to wire the entire neighborhood. Without the U of C's influence, I'm sure that Ameritech wouldn't consider adding DSL at all since it's a "low income area."
Why is a 16 year old working instead of going to school?
I believe after you're 16, you don't need to go to school anymore and some families need the additional income that the teen brings in.
However if the government interferes with other foreign governments to the extent that people are forced to become refugees, I do think the government has a responsibility to take care of these refugees.
The US government has done this in several countries(Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, etc.). So in large part, I think the government is responsible for the immigrants from these countries that were affected by government actions.
till, we have an amazing capacity for upwards mobility in this country. If you apply yourself you can succeed.
Although that's the image that many people have of US society, that's really not the case. A lot of books have documented how US society is pretty stratified with significant barriers to movement between classes. Otherwise why do so many lower class people remain in the same class for their entire lives? Please don't tell me that they're so lazy that they want to live without basic utilities. Some of them work 10+ hours a day for 6 days a week but get paid very little. I wouldn't conisder that lazy at all.
I think you fail to realize that a lot of the poor are working more than 20 hours a week to pay for necessities. Yeah, a 16 year old can probably scrap together money for a computer but when the choice is between the computer and food/rent/clothes I think the choice is pretty obvious.
Despite what you may believe where you are and how much you earn is primarily a function of who your parents are. People born in a middle class family tend to grow up and become middle class, likewise people born in lower class families tend to remain in lower classes.
Racism is dead. The only thing keeping it alive is government programs to keep people aware of Race.
That really isn't the case at all. If it were, then people don't be asked to pay for their food at Denny's before they get it, people wouldn't be dragged on a chain attached to a truck because of their skin color, and people wouldn't be the targets of drivebys because they were black.
We should all be given an equal CHANCE.
And that's exactly what affirmative action programs tried to do. Whether they succeeded or achieved it is a subject of debate however. However, it is hard to argue that minorities and minority women in particular earn significantly less than white men or women in equivalent positions.
Unfortunately thats not the case. If virtually every company in the industry requires 60+ hours a week than you have no choice but to work those hours (changing careers to another field often isn't a choice). Although working for 12 hours straight has an heroic aspect to it, the simple fact is that when companies had their workers work less than 40 hours a week, the increase in productivity more than made up for the fewer working hours. I think that would probably be the case in tech fields.
In a lot of cases unions are effective and do perform useful actions. Without unions to provide a check on employers, companies can often force their employees to accept conditions that they don't wish becuase of the power disparity between the two.
The really scary part is that this is a modern American occurance. European workers have something like 4-6 weeks paid vacation. If we compare the hours worked to those of people in the past like serfs or hunter/gathers they worked even less than we did(something like 130 days/year for serfs and 18-24 hours a week for hunter/gathers).
Unfortunately I don't believe that these computers will be any better to these types of problems than regular computers. Although quantum computers are several orders of magnitude faster than regular computers for factoring and similar problems, I haven't seen any algorithms that let them say render a scene.
In some sense quantum computing attacks a fundamentally different problem then regular computers and using quantum computers to solve problems that regular computers do well may be just as inefficient as using regular computers to factor large numbers.
I don't see why it's wrong. It may be painful to have your childhood beliefs and ideals criticized but that doesn't may the criticism invalid. By your argument, no one should criticize apartheid or segregation because for some people deeply believed those priniciples as children.
BTW, if you can rip Brin's arguments without trying, do so instead of engaging in ad hominem attacks on his character.
Oh, and Luke *did* matter in ROTJ; without his Force skills, the Ewoks would never have attacked the Stormtroopers
The ewoks already thought that C3PO was a god. Luke just convinced the ewoks to further believe that. Without Luke, C3PO could probably have convinced the ewoks, it just would have taken longer.
When people start getting denied access to the internet because there aren't enough ip addresses, I'm sure the collective screaming will be enough to make sure the transition happens relatively quickly.
Right now I'm working with some people on the superk project and I wonder how useful the code I'm writing is to others. A lot of times the code written in High energy physics is used to interface with custom electronics. As such the code probably isn't very useful to others not working on the same project. For example, I'm writing is used to interface with either an $8k or $22k oscilliscope attached to some custom electronics. I'm not sure how useful the code would be to others without the same setup.
Computers can play a prefect game in tic-tac-toe and come damn close in checkers as someone has pointed out. Bayesian networks have been able to diagnose certain diseases as well as or better than pathologists(check out the literature on PATHFINDER I-IV, MUNIN, etc.). And I'm sure Chessmaster 5000 or gnuchess can beat the average person in chess.
You're comparing the abilities of a computer player to that of the best human in the world in chess. That's not a really fair comparision since the average person is no where near that good.
However, the best AIs can't deal mundane stuff that 99% of the population can handle such as recognizing faces or understanding language so AIs still have a really long way to go.
The most efficient movement of troops can be done without any AI at all. It just takes a nice deterministic algorithm. They just haven't bothered to figure out a good one.
Finding a paths between places is ai. Deterministic algorithims can't deal with unexpected things such as a enemy suddenly appearing on the path or if the route between two points is unknown (due to fog of war or something like that).
That's not actually true. Only retroviruses actually insert stuff into the host's geonome. Something like influenza doesn't do this, it just takes over the cellular machinery.
Even with retroviruses it's a bit difficult to get the virus to inject itself into the geonome. For example, the lambda phage lyses the host E. coli cell most of the time and integrates itself rarely. By fiddling around with the lab conditions, you can encouragely integration but its still difficult. The preferred vectors are stuff like an F element(E. Coli) or artificial chromosomes(S. Cerevisiae) due to size considerations.
For humans, you would need to limit the size of the message due to the size limitations of the vector. Plus, with current technology you would have to wait a generation or two to get a person who had the genetic code in every cell.
I sure hope none of the goverment branches will use this for espionage... somehow the idea of tempering with human DNA seems a bit spooky to me
The human DNA is removed a person and mixed with the coded DNA just to present background nooise. The DNA isn't biologically active and in fact would get chewed up by polymerases within biological organisms.
Check out comp.ai for more information on the satelite. Some of the people working on the project having been posting updates and would probably be willing to answer questions.
This project also had ion engines as a propulusion unit. In fact, their was a software error that messed up the timing of the ion engine components so it would shut off during this flight. The software was able to work around it automatically though.
It's surprising but Microsoft Research has a bunch of researchers that have done a lot of important research in Bayesian networks and AI. For example, David Heckerman developed PATHFINDER for his Ph.D. thesis. (PATHFINDER is a program that helps to diagnose lymph node diseases, the last version PATHFINDER IV was just as good or better than most pathologists). In fact, I think one of them wrote a paper on diagnosing and troubleshooting PC problems which may have helped the people at JPL write the MIR software.
I didn't notice anything mentioning the use of lisp either, though I suspect the original author was rather referring to lisp because it is commonly used to write AI type things. (That and scheme....*shudder*)
Actually I think LISP and PROLOG are the big AI languages. Scheme is pretty much a subset of LISP so US researchers tend to use LISP more. Europeans tend to use PROLOG.
I don't see why WB should deserve the all the flak its getting. They seem to be trying to be sensitive to the stuff at Littleton. I can see how scenes with high school students running around the school and getting attacked would seem inappropriate.
It seems like there's a double standard operating here. We complain about coporations trying to exploit the event when they release things like this about events that we care about. But if the event in question doesn't resonate much with us, everyone starts shouting censorship, calls for booycotts, and adovocates pirating the show. Would we have done the same if George Lucas decided to delay the release of star wars for a few weeks?
BTW, I think Katz is really reaching when he makes the analogy between the people being persecuted at school and the show having demons running around the high school.
A friend of my gave a presentation of the work he did with Don Lamb's group where they showed that the odds of GRBs being associated with type IIa(?) supernovae was something like 30000 to 1, the odds for other types were better (on the order of 10 to 1) but that was only because they didn't have as much data on these other supernovae(type IIc). So I'm not sure that supernovae are associated with GRBs
There are several problems with the results that I see. Primarily there is no neutron flux that should be produced if fusion is actually happening. Although the researchers claim that there is another mechanism for this, they haven't proposed any mechanisms for this that are credible.
The experimental setup that they use also suggests an alternative possibility. The pallladium electrode has the ability to absorb hydrogen gas within it and then later release it. Suppose the electrode absorbs some of the hydrogen floating around in the water and then when the current's voltage is high enough it starts to release the gas which then ignites. This would give you heat and light without radiation.
I also find th researcher's suggestion about the sun using an alternative method of fusion to be shady. They seem to be suggesting that the sun is also using a mechanism similar to cold fusion. However, palladium is a heavy atom which wouldn't be present in the sun in any sizable quantities (I believe only ~100 kg of palladium is mined every year). In addition the conditions present in the sun would prevent any thing like a electrolytic cell from being present.