Maybe the simulation operates at a very low level, at the level of particles and quantum physics. That's where all the bugs were, but they were found and fixed. And when they do occur, they don't make black cats appear, they make galaxies disappear without a trace.
Bugs in simulators are like bugs in a compiler. Once the thing runs for a large family of programs, then subtle bugs observable as faulty logic in a given program are unlikely.
And people like you who shout Stupid and turn discussions into personal quarrels are the solution...
If you had bothered reading the thread, you would find: 1) In my original post I distanced myself from the idea that gender makes people 'inherently' different. 2) In a follow up post, I did so more verbosely in response to a more constructive version of your message (yes, everything you said is redundant, given precedent in this thread).
Except for your comment on approximations for NP-hard problems, which is... funny....
You are right, it is a well-settled matter that being a woman does not make a person a less capable technologist. And persuading girls that they are 'meant' to do one thing, not another is just plain wrong. But whether we like it or not - people have been doing it - conditioning boys and girls with those stereotypes for centuries, and in practice the effect of that conditioning cannot be undone.
I thought the above statement in my post expressed the nature of difference to clearly not be biological, but apparently not.
You are right, it is a well-settled matter that being a woman does not make a person a less capable technologist. And persuading girls that they are 'meant' to do one thing, not another is just plain wrong. But whether we like it or not - people have been doing it - conditioning boys and girls with those stereotypes for centuries, and in practice the effect of that conditioning cannot be undone. When you read a little girl an Enid Blyton book, or when she watches a disney princess cartoon, these stereotypes are automatically relayed to her. Some children's books are probably best avoided, for instance, Eloise Wilkins has a series about a families in which the daddies clearly go to work and mothers stays at home to cook and clean, but while you can avoid them at home, you cannot dictate what teachers read to children in pre-school or in day care.
Why does society feel compelled to force the population of a profession to have 50-50 split, or generally a 1/n * n split with n groups involved. From an algorithmic standpoint, having such equitable fits across a large number of professions is extremely improbably, and the effort required for society to do so correspondingly large. It is comparable to the class of hardest problems out there.
The intuition here is this - imagine that you need to come up with multiple parallel activities to engage a group of children. It's easy when you give the children the option of which activity to join. Now imagine if you had to make sure that every single activity had an equal split of boys and girls. It might be ok to come up with the first few - you would attract relatively open-minded boys and girls. The problem becomes harder as you fill activities, to the point that after going through enough activities, differences in tastes have grown so much that it is nearly impossible to fit people from both groups into the same activity.
Women and men are epistemologically different. This doesn't mean that women can't do tech - the most capable person in tech I know - my role model - is a lady, and there are a good number amongst the best people I have encountered. Correspondingly it doesn't mean that men can't be good grade school teachers, because they make up the smaller fraction. It's just the way it is, and from a statistical and social standpoint, it is unsurprising.
Nintendo should make an Android powered smartphone focused on gaming, meaning with controls for gaming. Who wants to carry an extra gaming device when your smartphone gives you access to millions of great games.
A surgeon charges for his services. What makes selling organs disgusting is the idea of treating the human body as hunks of meat that are priced based on their quality. From a philosophical standpoint it is dehumanizing. From a religious standpoint it is offensive (I'm an atheist though, so maybe I should have skipped this point). From a social standpoint it can be devastating - imagine people starting selling parts of themselves if they need, or just want the cash.
From a pragmatic standpoint it's alarming to think that a mugger now has a financial incentive to butcher me, rather than just taking my wallet and moving on.
"lousy with left-wing sycophants" - This gives away your position on the spectrum of politics and insolence, rather than saying something about the people you refer to. "inflated salaries are supported by government interference in the student loan market" - Nearly every academic I know takes at least a 25% salary cut by not being in the industry but being in academia. Good academic hires in the industry are prized and usually lofted to high positions. Academic positions prerequisite a PhD, for which in the US the drop out rate is 50% on an average.
The issue here - and this is something we've verified experimentally as a dev studio - is that 90%+ of the people downloading apps don't read the text about it. They do look at the screenshots. Especially the first two, I guess the disclaimer could go there, but even then it's not guaranteed.
I don't know how you do tests in America, but here the idea of most tests is that the majority of the test-takers (even Americans) won't ace it. If everyone aces the test, that means it wasn't planned well enough (as it usually means you gained much less useful data than you could've). Ideally, the test results should fit in a normal curve (that is, very few people score terribly badly, very few incredibly well, relative to their peers). But yeah, it was quite insensitive of the researchers to publish the results, they should've told everyone that they aced the test and are a genius in everything.
By 'Americans acing the test' I meant the average of the sample being high, relative to the average of the rest of the world. I don't understand why you would see that as implying that every single person gets a high score, but I do see the incentive of misinterpreting statements for cheap laughs.
You are right - ideally (naively) a test's outcome should roughly look like a Gaussian distribution that's not too narrow and not too wide. But that pertains to the design of a single test. I was referring to the universe of tests you could construct to evaluate the varied skills and abilities that people in a society have, with the contention that in the US a majority of them would have the nice bell-shaped gaussian that you talked about, because of the uniform distribution of people's backgrounds across the worldwide range of such backgrounds, and the conditioning and abilities that ensued from those backgrounds. In countries in which people's conditioning falls into a narrower spectrum, the results are likely to be more lopsided - a large subset of sets with very narrow clustering around the mean - and a large subset with very wide distributions.
As expected, the US average is close to the average for the rest of the world. It's because American society has representation from all around the world, unlike Finland or Sweden which have a very narrow spectrum of ethnic histories.
Before you interpret that statement as (perversely) trying to correlate basic aptitude with ancestry... read on...
I wish people would stop evaluating each other as if they were commodities on a 'human stock exchange.' Taking tests should be a guideline for matching people to problems and to jobs, not to quantify their worth. There exists a test for every person out there that that person would excel at and be better off than everybody else. There are people who are conditioned to be deeply analytical, and those who are conditioned to passionately address audiences and captivate them. Just because you are in one group and lack in skills that characterize people in another does not mean you are worth less - as these tests try to portray.
Because America is an amalgam of societies from around the world, we have the benefit of a large and diverse set of these groups - the Nobel-winning physicists, the carefree musicians, the shrewd small business owners, you name it... It is *very* hard to construct a test that an average sample of Americans would ace - because of the certainty of finding people who suck at the test in that sample. But on the flip side - it is also very hard to construct a test that such a sample would faire miserably at - because of the certainty of finding a handful of people who are among the best in the world.
If Bill has his focus sharply fixed on the foundation, and that is where he directs all of his energy, then isn't it fair that he not have strong influence on day to day activity in the company.
"Bill, we need to make a call on Skype. 16 Billion dollar's at stake" "Not now, I'm on a bullock cart touring an Indian Village." "But Bill, you're the chairman." "Ah, yes. Let me think about it. Well, I've thought about it. Buy Skype, but then make sure you follow up by buying Nokia." "Got it Bill. You're the boss." *click*
It's not cool, but sort of expected. In order to get enough information that can be pieced together conclusively, the members of the panel probably need the highest levels of security clearance. There probably aren't that many people who qualify for that job.
Do you foresee such courses to be conducted primarily in English? In the long run, how do you see them being made accessible to speakers of other languages? One possibility is to get them dubbed by translators, but then there is the inevitable loss in translation. Can one imagine setting up a network around the world and get the best professors record lectures in their native language.
So what happens when a nuclear plant runs into financial difficulty? You cut your reactor monitoring staff? Drop to the cheap disaster management plan? Postpone the upgrade of the creaky boilers?
Pornographic images seem easy to recognize not because they can be defined unambiguously, but that they are a visual pattern matching problem, which humans are good at. Conversely, identifying pirated files seems hard because the process cannot be mapped to such an intuitive task, but using the same logic detecting spam seemed hard many years ago, and after the Machine Learning community dealt with it formally, it is a solved problem.
If one were to use a large data set (e.g. Google Search) to curate features that collectively act as markers of pirated content, like with spam, through data sets such as Gmail, then it is not unrealistic to expect that it would lead to the development of a good classifier for pirated files.
Child abuse and piracy are not comparable. Child abuse is human depravity pushed to such an extreme that is justifiable to use it as a reason to defy common sense. Piracy is simply deviation from the rule of law - it does not warrant ubiquitous censorship of the kind that is being proposed.
First, most iOS apps tend not to have requirements that would make them rely on word sizes, and ones that do (say ones that transform image data as RGBA buffers) can usually be written in an architecture independent way by using fixed-width type primitives. So the idea that you would write an app that only works with 64bit words doesn't seem sound. All you have to do to run an existing app on the new 64bit iOS simulator is to recompile it and in most cases it will run just fine.
Secondly, when the iPad was first released, developers were given a big, fat warning "this is not a big iPhone, it's a completely different UI paradigm, enough to make you want to rethink your design." This in spite of the iPad being a mobile device with a touch interface, like the iPhone. Desktops and Laptops are far off from this UI paradigm and it's hard to imagine Apple wanting to run iOS apps on Mac OS more or less unmodified.
This is a valid point, but it should be noted that:
1) The have had cheap versions for a long time. When Jobs announced the iPhone 4, the 3GS was priced at $99. 2) They still have an expensive, top-of-the-line phone with an unapologetic price tag. That's what they expect customers to pay a premium price for.
If they did enough to make the cheap version look and feel cheaper, then they might be killing two birds with one stone: injecting a low-priced disruptive player in the market while simultaneously making the point that you get what you pay for.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the simulation operates at a very low level, at the level of particles and quantum physics. That's where all the bugs were, but they were found and fixed. And when they do occur, they don't make black cats appear, they make galaxies disappear without a trace.
Bugs in simulators are like bugs in a compiler. Once the thing runs for a large family of programs, then subtle bugs observable as faulty logic in a given program are unlikely.
Yes, yes, people like me are the problem.
And people like you who shout Stupid and turn discussions into personal quarrels are the solution...
If you had bothered reading the thread, you would find:
1) In my original post I distanced myself from the idea that gender makes people 'inherently' different.
2) In a follow up post, I did so more verbosely in response to a more constructive version of your message (yes, everything you said is redundant, given precedent in this thread).
Except for your comment on approximations for NP-hard problems, which is... funny....
You are right, it is a well-settled matter that being a woman does not make a person a less capable technologist. And persuading girls that they are 'meant' to do one thing, not another is just plain wrong. But whether we like it or not - people have been doing it - conditioning boys and girls with those stereotypes for centuries, and in practice the effect of that conditioning cannot be undone.
Doesn't tie in with the 0.5.
Women and men are epistemologically different
I thought the above statement in my post expressed the nature of difference to clearly not be biological, but apparently not.
You are right, it is a well-settled matter that being a woman does not make a person a less capable technologist. And persuading girls that they are 'meant' to do one thing, not another is just plain wrong. But whether we like it or not - people have been doing it - conditioning boys and girls with those stereotypes for centuries, and in practice the effect of that conditioning cannot be undone. When you read a little girl an Enid Blyton book, or when she watches a disney princess cartoon, these stereotypes are automatically relayed to her. Some children's books are probably best avoided, for instance, Eloise Wilkins has a series about a families in which the daddies clearly go to work and mothers stays at home to cook and clean, but while you can avoid them at home, you cannot dictate what teachers read to children in pre-school or in day care.
Why does society feel compelled to force the population of a profession to have 50-50 split, or generally a 1/n * n split with n groups involved. From an algorithmic standpoint, having such equitable fits across a large number of professions is extremely improbably, and the effort required for society to do so correspondingly large. It is comparable to the class of hardest problems out there.
The intuition here is this - imagine that you need to come up with multiple parallel activities to engage a group of children. It's easy when you give the children the option of which activity to join. Now imagine if you had to make sure that every single activity had an equal split of boys and girls. It might be ok to come up with the first few - you would attract relatively open-minded boys and girls. The problem becomes harder as you fill activities, to the point that after going through enough activities, differences in tastes have grown so much that it is nearly impossible to fit people from both groups into the same activity.
Women and men are epistemologically different. This doesn't mean that women can't do tech - the most capable person in tech I know - my role model - is a lady, and there are a good number amongst the best people I have encountered. Correspondingly it doesn't mean that men can't be good grade school teachers, because they make up the smaller fraction. It's just the way it is, and from a statistical and social standpoint, it is unsurprising.
Nintendo should make an Android powered smartphone focused on gaming, meaning with controls for gaming. Who wants to carry an extra gaming device when your smartphone gives you access to millions of great games.
A surgeon charges for his services. What makes selling organs disgusting is the idea of treating the human body as hunks of meat that are priced based on their quality. From a philosophical standpoint it is dehumanizing. From a religious standpoint it is offensive (I'm an atheist though, so maybe I should have skipped this point). From a social standpoint it can be devastating - imagine people starting selling parts of themselves if they need, or just want the cash.
From a pragmatic standpoint it's alarming to think that a mugger now has a financial incentive to butcher me, rather than just taking my wallet and moving on.
For messing with us in the opening scene of The Social Network.
what you meant is stay hungry, stay foolish...
"lousy with left-wing sycophants" - This gives away your position on the spectrum of politics and insolence, rather than saying something about the people you refer to.
"inflated salaries are supported by government interference in the student loan market" - Nearly every academic I know takes at least a 25% salary cut by not being in the industry but being in academia. Good academic hires in the industry are prized and usually lofted to high positions. Academic positions prerequisite a PhD, for which in the US the drop out rate is 50% on an average.
The issue here - and this is something we've verified experimentally as a dev studio - is that 90%+ of the people downloading apps don't read the text about it. They do look at the screenshots. Especially the first two, I guess the disclaimer could go there, but even then it's not guaranteed.
Math
I don't know how you do tests in America, but here the idea of most tests is that the majority of the test-takers (even Americans) won't ace it. If everyone aces the test, that means it wasn't planned well enough (as it usually means you gained much less useful data than you could've). Ideally, the test results should fit in a normal curve (that is, very few people score terribly badly, very few incredibly well, relative to their peers).
But yeah, it was quite insensitive of the researchers to publish the results, they should've told everyone that they aced the test and are a genius in everything.
By 'Americans acing the test' I meant the average of the sample being high, relative to the average of the rest of the world. I don't understand why you would see that as implying that every single person gets a high score, but I do see the incentive of misinterpreting statements for cheap laughs.
You are right - ideally (naively) a test's outcome should roughly look like a Gaussian distribution that's not too narrow and not too wide. But that pertains to the design of a single test. I was referring to the universe of tests you could construct to evaluate the varied skills and abilities that people in a society have, with the contention that in the US a majority of them would have the nice bell-shaped gaussian that you talked about, because of the uniform distribution of people's backgrounds across the worldwide range of such backgrounds, and the conditioning and abilities that ensued from those backgrounds. In countries in which people's conditioning falls into a narrower spectrum, the results are likely to be more lopsided - a large subset of sets with very narrow clustering around the mean - and a large subset with very wide distributions.
As expected, the US average is close to the average for the rest of the world. It's because American society has representation from all around the world, unlike Finland or Sweden which have a very narrow spectrum of ethnic histories.
Before you interpret that statement as (perversely) trying to correlate basic aptitude with ancestry... read on...
I wish people would stop evaluating each other as if they were commodities on a 'human stock exchange.' Taking tests should be a guideline for matching people to problems and to jobs, not to quantify their worth. There exists a test for every person out there that that person would excel at and be better off than everybody else. There are people who are conditioned to be deeply analytical, and those who are conditioned to passionately address audiences and captivate them. Just because you are in one group and lack in skills that characterize people in another does not mean you are worth less - as these tests try to portray.
Because America is an amalgam of societies from around the world, we have the benefit of a large and diverse set of these groups - the Nobel-winning physicists, the carefree musicians, the shrewd small business owners, you name it... It is *very* hard to construct a test that an average sample of Americans would ace - because of the certainty of finding people who suck at the test in that sample. But on the flip side - it is also very hard to construct a test that such a sample would faire miserably at - because of the certainty of finding a handful of people who are among the best in the world.
If Bill has his focus sharply fixed on the foundation, and that is where he directs all of his energy, then isn't it fair that he not have strong influence on day to day activity in the company.
"Bill, we need to make a call on Skype. 16 Billion dollar's at stake"
"Not now, I'm on a bullock cart touring an Indian Village."
"But Bill, you're the chairman."
"Ah, yes. Let me think about it. Well, I've thought about it. Buy Skype, but then make sure you follow up by buying Nokia."
"Got it Bill. You're the boss."
*click*
It's not cool, but sort of expected. In order to get enough information that can be pieced together conclusively, the members of the panel probably need the highest levels of security clearance. There probably aren't that many people who qualify for that job.
Do you foresee such courses to be conducted primarily in English? In the long run, how do you see them being made accessible to speakers of other languages?
One possibility is to get them dubbed by translators, but then there is the inevitable loss in translation. Can one imagine setting up a network around the world and get the best professors record lectures in their native language.
So what happens when a nuclear plant runs into financial difficulty? You cut your reactor monitoring staff? Drop to the cheap disaster management plan? Postpone the upgrade of the creaky boilers?
Go Martha go-bble, yum, sorry, can't speak with my mouth full. Mouth watering. Delicious. Wow!
Pornographic images seem easy to recognize not because they can be defined unambiguously, but that they are a visual pattern matching problem, which humans are good at. Conversely, identifying pirated files seems hard because the process cannot be mapped to such an intuitive task, but using the same logic detecting spam seemed hard many years ago, and after the Machine Learning community dealt with it formally, it is a solved problem.
If one were to use a large data set (e.g. Google Search) to curate features that collectively act as markers of pirated content, like with spam, through data sets such as Gmail, then it is not unrealistic to expect that it would lead to the development of a good classifier for pirated files.
Child abuse and piracy are not comparable. Child abuse is human depravity pushed to such an extreme that is justifiable to use it as a reason to defy common sense. Piracy is simply deviation from the rule of law - it does not warrant ubiquitous censorship of the kind that is being proposed.
First, most iOS apps tend not to have requirements that would make them rely on word sizes, and ones that do (say ones that transform image data as RGBA buffers) can usually be written in an architecture independent way by using fixed-width type primitives. So the idea that you would write an app that only works with 64bit words doesn't seem sound. All you have to do to run an existing app on the new 64bit iOS simulator is to recompile it and in most cases it will run just fine.
Secondly, when the iPad was first released, developers were given a big, fat warning "this is not a big iPhone, it's a completely different UI paradigm, enough to make you want to rethink your design." This in spite of the iPad being a mobile device with a touch interface, like the iPhone. Desktops and Laptops are far off from this UI paradigm and it's hard to imagine Apple wanting to run iOS apps on Mac OS more or less unmodified.
Like everything else he delegates backup to the community. He releases everything open source, the community backs it up for him.
This is a valid point, but it should be noted that:
1) The have had cheap versions for a long time. When Jobs announced the iPhone 4, the 3GS was priced at $99.
2) They still have an expensive, top-of-the-line phone with an unapologetic price tag. That's what they expect customers to pay a premium price for.
If they did enough to make the cheap version look and feel cheaper, then they might be killing two birds with one stone: injecting a low-priced disruptive player in the market while simultaneously making the point that you get what you pay for.
What? They're spying on us? Shame on them!