The history of SMS is a little more complicated. SMS was originally an afterthought of the GMS standard, they had a few extra bytes left over so someone said, "Hey let's use them for a low bandwidth text message channel!". The original standard and implementations didn't provide for ANY way to track charges for these messages, and at first they were free. But, once the companies saw how popular it had become they decided to make some money on it and revised the standard and their software. I don't know what Adam Smith's theory was about free services that get charges added to them!
You are correct. Hiring people these daze means rummaging through dozens of identical resumes with 2-year Java courses written on them. The programmers barely know Java, forget about asking them what is paged memory.
What's not trivial is what algorithms will be used to curse the other drivers, and how will they make the obscene hand signals necessary to navigate traffic in much of the world? Will these cars have an artificial arm dangling from their side? Or perhaps the cars will curse each other silently in BlueTooth!
They are also suing Israel in international court for all the gold they took out of Egypt during the Exodus. Israel has yet to counter-sue for back wages for slave-labor on the pyramids. I guess this is part of a general strategy by the Egyptian government to insure their revenue stream w/o engaging in productive activity. They learned from SCM and Apple Core.
I'm not so sure, you could consider "hacking" just "part of the game" like it is in real life. How realistic do you want the game to be? I game that was totally "safe" wouldn't be much of a game. In the end I think it's an aesthetic question of playability and game boundaries, the users and creators have to decide what they want.
that give linux a bad name. Even if there were a "perfect" distro for naive users. A normal user (unaware that there are many "distros" of linux), would see this as the "Linux" he'd been reading about and reject it out-of-hand. Perhaps another reason why linux is so slow taking desktop market-share.
I think the appropriate response would be to supply our troops with portable fabs which would let them build their own weapons and give them greater autonomy to determine their own tactics. Of course, the overall strategy would have to be better defined, but that's true in conventional warfare as well. I'm sure we could provide them with more and better raw building materials than what the jihadists have access too, and they aren't any dumber!
My daughter treats her non-robotic dolls the same. What is this supposed to prove? That humans are robots? That robots are human? That we've passed the turing test? As far as my daughter is concerned Barbie passed the turing test last year!
Thanks for the correction. If the author of the article chooses not to be notified it's his problem. Of course, arguably there should not be an "invisible updates" option, but nobody expects MS to be in the vanguard of UI.
OSX automatic updating, always asks permission before downloading, specifying what the downloads are for and allowing you to choose only a selection of them. Security related downloads are in separate packages and clearly marked. At any rate no installation can take place without the user giving the root password. This is far from being a bother to me, it raises my trust in the updates and allows me to forgo updates I really don't want, which are never the security updates. A blogger who worked on the vista GUI said they had an OS box on their table throughout the process of designing the vista GUI, why didn't they learn from it?
It's hard to believe people are still in the "wow" Jetsons phase of computer technology. AI has been very successful in demonstrating what intelligence isn't. The Turing test is entirely dependent on bandwidth. It's true I can't tell the difference between a computer and a person over a noisy text line and the person is psychotic. But raise the bandwidth a bit, let's say to a clear text line with any subject open to conversations and well, there are lots of conversation bots out there to try this on. Human sex, particularly sex with someone you love is extrememly high bandwidth communication, involving ALL the senses as well as lot's of sub-concious communications via pherenemes and who knows what else! I'm pretty tired of these stupid intelligent computers next year article.
Researchers failed to repeat the "God Helmet" experiment. It is therefore pseudo-science, even though it may agree with your prejudices. It's funny how people only see what they want to see...
Re:%75 as effective as a prescription 3% the price
on
Science vs. Homeopathy
·
· Score: 1
For sure I believe we should use the science. My point was that lack of science, or scientific evidence, doesn't necessarily mean the cure doesn't "work". For sure we should reject the attempts of alternative practitioners to promote their products through pseudo-science, but we also must be careful about hubris, particularly when dealing with the human body and the difficulties of carrying out the kind of controlled studies needed to determine if something works or doesn't. I recommend the following article, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16epidemiology-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin on the difficulties of epidemiological studies.
Re:%75 as effective as a prescription 3% the price
on
Science vs. Homeopathy
·
· Score: 1
The rejection of Homeopathies pretense to be a "Science" is correct. That all the theories Homeopathists have proposed for why there cures "work" are provably incorrect is probably also true. But this doesn't mean that Homeopathy doesn't work! Can anybody point out to me double-blind studies of Homeopathies actual effect on known diseases? Could it be something that works without us knowing why? After all, the stars and the planets continued around their orbits for billions of years even when the scientific explanations (Aristotle ect.) for why they did were wrong. I also want to point out the difficulty of statistical methods in determining the efficacy of a particular "cure". Let's say a study of a cancer drug showed that 5% of the people improved. The placebo group also showed %5 improvement. Clearly the drug would be rejected. But, it could be that there was something unique in the genetic/environment of those 5% that made for them the drug a 100% cure! I'm not saying such tests are meaningless, just that we need to know the limits of our knowledge and not to reject methods that could help us, just because the practitioners are not "scientific". There is a field called Ethno-pharmicology which searches tradition cures for substances that could be of use in modern medicine. The "practitioners" of folk remedies certainly could not give a "scientific" explanation for why they work, but nevertheless, many of them do.
I designed an embedded computer system with integrated browsing specifically for the senior market. This was 8 years ago. I didn't succeed in raising capital. It is an idea whose time will come...
There is a company here that sells childrens records with the lyrics customized for the name of your child. Naturally they have a database of songs with common names. My daughters name is unusual so they needed a week to fill the order. But she loves it (5 years old), there is something about having your name said repeatedly on the recording that really gets her.
It's also conceivable that life is "universal", that is, it did not evolve on the earth but migrated here. In which case aliens could be our distant cousins.
...first, and if we can make this planet a better place to live, I'd say we're qualified to go on to another one. Other than the fantasy/fun value of this idea, it's pretty worthless to dream about screwing up another planet just the same way we screwed up this one.
I don't mean to be a party pooper but Stallmans suggestion to "release a program under "GPL version 3 or any later version".", sounds precisely like "changing one master for another", what freedom is there in turning your software over to a license that you've never read and which you won't be involved in creating? Other than that I applaud the intention though I'm incompetent to judge the implementation.
"Incredibly Well"? A function which holds state between calls cannot be instantiated across multiple processes and run in parallel. That is OO programing works against data-level parallelism. Control level parallelism works just fine, but is generally not as useful in situations where optimization is desperately needed. Functional languages work better with data parallelism. Nor do current OO languages allow you to control the two most important factors in parallelization, data and functional granularity.
It seems that always these scientific studies of the biological roots of "moral" decisions, which are intended to show that "morality", "free-will" and "cconsciousness" are illusions (don't ask who it's fooling), invariably end with the researcher losing his "objectivity" and making moral decisions about the research!
"Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable."
Huh? I see that the experiment wonderfully showed how the brain responds to moral decision making and where those decisions take place, but where (and how) were they able to show that "altruism was not a superior moral faculty"? To do so would require a scientific definition of "superior moral faculty" and then an experiment designed to prove it wasn't that.
"The reason people are slow to answer such an awful question, the study indicated, is that emotion-linked circuits automatically signaling that killing a baby is wrong clash with areas of the brain that involve cooler aspects of cognition. One brain region activated when people process such difficult choices is the inferior parietal lobe, which has been shown to be active in more impersonal decision-making. This part of the brain, in essence, was "arguing" with brain networks that reacted with visceral horror."
Must be amazing to watch these debates being played out on the screen of the brain, but this also just sounds like the old "good vs. bad conscience" scenario, with the pro-anti antagonisms played out by the brain.
"U.S. law, for example, distinguishes between a physician who removes a feeding tube from a terminally ill patient and a physician who administers a drug to kill the patient. Hauser said the only difference is that the second scenario is more emotionally charged -- and therefore feels like a different moral problem, when it really is not: "In the end, the doctor's intent is to reduce suffering, and that is as true in active as in passive euthanasia, and either way the patient is dead."
Here he takes upon himself to make a "moral" decision based upon his own interpretation of what is "right" and "wrong", what possible scientific basis can this statement have? For example, his analyses assumes that the only important factor is the final result of the physical system (patient dead), without any regard for the state of the brain of the physician and relatives involved in making the decision. It is rather odd for a brain researcher to analyze a system and ignore the state of the brain! While the patient is dead in both cases the resulting state of the brain of all involved could be very different!
The strongest evidence offered here against free will was the case of patients who had damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Oddly, the article emphasized that they did not make "immoral" decisions, but rather made difficult decisions without anguish. What would be good evidence against "free-will" would be damage (or a drug) that would take away all sense of morality or restore it (in the case of psychopaths), or even increase/decrease the amount of empathy a person has (empathy drugs in the water supply anyone?)
In conclusion, In defense of free-will, I would find it surprising indeed if decision-making did not cause brain activity and am rather surprised that every time this brain-activity is observed it's assumed to "prove" somehow that free-will doesn't exist. Again, to disprove something scientifically you first need a working definition of what it is!
The basic problem is one of optimization. THERE WOULD BE ABSOLUTELY NO REASON TO EVER PROGRAM IN PARALLEL IF COMPUTERS WERE FAST ENOUGH. This means that there needs to be a separation of concerns between the algorithm expressed serially and it's parallel optimization. So far, automatic parallelization has had only limited sucess and there is no reason to believe this will change in the near future. This suggests a three-fold architecture. 1) A parallelizable (but not parallel) serial language for "every" programmer to write in. 2) A specialized "mapping" meta-language for optimization experts, that would parallelize expressions in the serial language in an optimal way for the target hardware. 3) The resulting machine code.
NOBODY SEEMS TO BE WORKING ON THIS APPROACH. In fact object-oriented programming with it's state (object) based approach works dead against parallel programming. The parallizable/serial language would probably have to be functional.
It doesn't perform very well on data intensive applications. It seems like the front end bus is locking and performance drops after the fourth thread gets running. On computational intensive calculations I get the performance I would expect.
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The history of SMS is a little more complicated. SMS was originally an afterthought of the GMS standard, they had a few extra bytes left over so someone said, "Hey let's use them for a low bandwidth text message channel!". The original standard and implementations didn't provide for ANY way to track charges for these messages, and at first they were free. But, once the companies saw how popular it had become they decided to make some money on it and revised the standard and their software. I don't know what Adam Smith's theory was about free services that get charges added to them!
You are correct. Hiring people these daze means rummaging through dozens of identical resumes with 2-year Java courses written on them. The programmers barely know Java, forget about asking them what is paged memory.
What's not trivial is what algorithms will be used to curse the other drivers, and how will they make the obscene hand signals necessary to navigate traffic in much of the world? Will these cars have an artificial arm dangling from their side? Or perhaps the cars will curse each other silently in BlueTooth!
They are also suing Israel in international court for all the gold they took out of Egypt during the Exodus. Israel has yet to counter-sue for back wages for slave-labor on the pyramids. I guess this is part of a general strategy by the Egyptian government to insure their revenue stream w/o engaging in productive activity. They learned from SCM and Apple Core.
I'm not so sure, you could consider "hacking" just "part of the game" like it is in real life. How realistic do you want the game to be? I game that was totally "safe" wouldn't be much of a game. In the end I think it's an aesthetic question of playability and game boundaries, the users and creators have to decide what they want.
that give linux a bad name. Even if there were a "perfect" distro for naive users. A normal user (unaware that there are many "distros" of linux), would see this as the "Linux" he'd been reading about and reject it out-of-hand. Perhaps another reason why linux is so slow taking desktop market-share.
I think the appropriate response would be to supply our troops with portable fabs which would let them build their own weapons and give them greater autonomy to determine their own tactics. Of course, the overall strategy would have to be better defined, but that's true in conventional warfare as well. I'm sure we could provide them with more and better raw building materials than what the jihadists have access too, and they aren't any dumber!
My daughter treats her non-robotic dolls the same. What is this supposed to prove? That humans are robots? That robots are human? That we've passed the turing test? As far as my daughter is concerned Barbie passed the turing test last year!
Thanks for the correction. If the author of the article chooses not to be notified it's his problem. Of course, arguably there should not be an "invisible updates" option, but nobody expects MS to be in the vanguard of UI.
OSX automatic updating, always asks permission before downloading, specifying what the downloads are for and allowing you to choose only a selection of them. Security related downloads are in separate packages and clearly marked. At any rate no installation can take place without the user giving the root password. This is far from being a bother to me, it raises my trust in the updates and allows me to forgo updates I really don't want, which are never the security updates. A blogger who worked on the vista GUI said they had an OS box on their table throughout the process of designing the vista GUI, why didn't they learn from it?
It's hard to believe people are still in the "wow" Jetsons phase of computer technology. AI has been very successful in demonstrating what intelligence isn't. The Turing test is entirely dependent on bandwidth. It's true I can't tell the difference between a computer and a person over a noisy text line and the person is psychotic. But raise the bandwidth a bit, let's say to a clear text line with any subject open to conversations and well, there are lots of conversation bots out there to try this on. Human sex, particularly sex with someone you love is extrememly high bandwidth communication, involving ALL the senses as well as lot's of sub-concious communications via pherenemes and who knows what else! I'm pretty tired of these stupid intelligent computers next year article.
Researchers failed to repeat the "God Helmet" experiment. It is therefore pseudo-science, even though it may agree with your prejudices. It's funny how people only see what they want to see...
For sure I believe we should use the science. My point was that lack of science, or scientific evidence, doesn't necessarily mean the cure doesn't "work". For sure we should reject the attempts of alternative practitioners to promote their products through pseudo-science, but we also must be careful about hubris, particularly when dealing with the human body and the difficulties of carrying out the kind of controlled studies needed to determine if something works or doesn't. I recommend the following article, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16epidemiology-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
on the difficulties of epidemiological studies.
The rejection of Homeopathies pretense to be a "Science" is correct. That all the theories Homeopathists have proposed for why there cures "work" are provably incorrect is probably also true. But this doesn't mean that Homeopathy doesn't work! Can anybody point out to me double-blind studies of Homeopathies actual effect on known diseases? Could it be something that works without us knowing why? After all, the stars and the planets continued around their orbits for billions of years even when the scientific explanations (Aristotle ect.) for why they did were wrong. I also want to point out the difficulty of statistical methods in determining the efficacy of a particular "cure". Let's say a study of a cancer drug showed that 5% of the people improved. The placebo group also showed %5 improvement. Clearly the drug would be rejected. But, it could be that there was something unique in the genetic/environment of those 5% that made for them the drug a 100% cure! I'm not saying such tests are meaningless, just that we need to know the limits of our knowledge and not to reject methods that could help us, just because the practitioners are not "scientific". There is a field called Ethno-pharmicology which searches tradition cures for substances that could be of use in modern medicine. The "practitioners" of folk remedies certainly could not give a "scientific" explanation for why they work, but nevertheless, many of them do.
I designed an embedded computer system with integrated browsing specifically for the senior market. This was 8 years ago. I didn't succeed in raising capital. It is an idea whose time will come...
There is a company here that sells childrens records with the lyrics customized for the name of your child. Naturally they have a database of songs with common names. My daughters name is unusual so they needed a week to fill the order. But she loves it (5 years old), there is something about having your name said repeatedly on the recording that really gets her.
It's also conceivable that life is "universal", that is, it did not evolve on the earth but migrated here. In which case aliens could be our distant cousins.
Transplanting a genome is a great feat but hardly "synthetic life". I suggest toning down the National Enquirer style headlines.
...first, and if we can make this planet a better place to live, I'd say we're qualified to go on to another one. Other than the fantasy/fun value of this idea, it's pretty worthless to dream about screwing up another planet just the same way we screwed up this one.
I don't mean to be a party pooper but Stallmans suggestion to "release a program under "GPL version 3 or any later version".", sounds precisely like "changing one master for another", what freedom is there in turning your software over to a license that you've never read and which you won't be involved in creating? Other than that I applaud the intention though I'm incompetent to judge the implementation.
We would only know that I think if we gave it a try. IBM's octopiler project http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_proje cts.nsf/pages/cellcompiler.index.html is probably the closest I've seen. But it's insistence on trying to use c++ is probably going to kill it in the end.
"Incredibly Well"? A function which holds state between calls cannot be instantiated across multiple processes and run in parallel. That is OO programing works against data-level parallelism. Control level parallelism works just fine, but is generally not as useful in situations where optimization is desperately needed. Functional languages work better with data parallelism. Nor do current OO languages allow you to control the two most important factors in parallelization, data and functional granularity.
It seems that always these scientific studies of the biological roots of "moral" decisions, which are intended to show that "morality", "free-will" and "cconsciousness" are illusions (don't ask who it's fooling), invariably end with the researcher losing his "objectivity" and making moral decisions about the research!
"Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable."
Huh? I see that the experiment wonderfully showed how the brain responds to moral decision making and where those decisions take place, but where (and how) were they able to show that "altruism was not a superior moral faculty"? To do so would require a scientific definition of "superior moral faculty" and then an experiment designed to prove it wasn't that.
"The reason people are slow to answer such an awful question, the study indicated, is that emotion-linked circuits automatically signaling that killing a baby is wrong clash with areas of the brain that involve cooler aspects of cognition. One brain region activated when people process such difficult choices is the inferior parietal lobe, which has been shown to be active in more impersonal decision-making. This part of the brain, in essence, was "arguing" with brain networks that reacted with visceral horror."
Must be amazing to watch these debates being played out on the screen of the brain, but this also just sounds like the old "good vs. bad conscience" scenario, with the pro-anti antagonisms played out by the brain.
"U.S. law, for example, distinguishes between a physician who removes a feeding tube from a terminally ill patient and a physician who administers a drug to kill the patient.
Hauser said the only difference is that the second scenario is more emotionally charged -- and therefore feels like a different moral problem, when it really is not: "In the end, the doctor's intent is to reduce suffering, and that is as true in active as in passive euthanasia, and either way the patient is dead."
Here he takes upon himself to make a "moral" decision based upon his own interpretation of what is "right" and "wrong", what possible scientific basis can this statement have? For example, his analyses assumes that the only important factor is the final result of the physical system (patient dead), without any regard for the state of the brain of the physician and relatives involved in making the decision. It is rather odd for a brain researcher to analyze a system and ignore the state of the brain! While the patient is dead in both cases the resulting state of the brain of all involved could be very different!
The strongest evidence offered here against free will was the case of patients who had damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Oddly, the article emphasized that they did not make "immoral" decisions, but rather made difficult decisions without anguish. What would be good evidence against "free-will" would be damage (or a drug) that would take away all sense of morality or restore it (in the case of psychopaths), or even increase/decrease the amount of empathy a person has (empathy drugs in the water supply anyone?)
In conclusion, In defense of free-will, I would find it surprising indeed if decision-making did not cause brain activity and am rather surprised that every time this brain-activity is observed it's assumed to "prove" somehow that free-will doesn't exist. Again, to disprove something scientifically you first need a working definition of what it is!
The basic problem is one of optimization. THERE WOULD BE ABSOLUTELY NO REASON TO EVER PROGRAM IN PARALLEL IF COMPUTERS WERE FAST ENOUGH. This means that there needs to be a separation of concerns between the algorithm expressed serially and it's parallel optimization. So far, automatic parallelization has had only limited sucess and there is no reason to believe this will change in the near future. This suggests a three-fold architecture.
1) A parallelizable (but not parallel) serial language for "every" programmer to write in.
2) A specialized "mapping" meta-language for optimization experts, that would parallelize expressions in the serial language in an optimal way for the target hardware.
3) The resulting machine code.
NOBODY SEEMS TO BE WORKING ON THIS APPROACH. In fact object-oriented programming with it's state (object) based approach works dead against parallel programming. The parallizable/serial language would probably have to be functional.
It doesn't perform very well on data intensive applications. It seems like the front end bus is locking and performance drops after the fourth thread gets running. On computational intensive calculations I get the performance I would expect.