This argument presumes that a computer intelligence is necessarily a theorem-prover that tries to tackle the complexities of problem solving by deduction towards a fixed set of axioms. Your argument on Godel's theorem merely shows that a computer intelligence is not going to be a deduction machine.
Theorem-proving is about proving truth, optimality. Intelligence is usually about getting something good enough, on time. Completely different beasts, even though much of AI still fails to see this.
And seeing that strictly speaking, 'consciousness' is merely a label, and not a scientific term, nor an observed fact, it is not even clear that it exists, let alone that it as a separate entity that can be studied.
Suddenly there were new arguments to make in seeking new patents. There were also new arguments to make in invalidating old patents. Lots and lots of work.
My suggestion would be to make 'legal arguments' patentable, and let the lawyers find out for themselves what's it like.
You're sure that you won't be depending on medicine, surgery and care for the latter part of your life? You're planning to kill yourself before you reach forty or something? You don't have much say in how your life will end. It can be your 8th heart attack, cancer, Alzheimer, Parkinson, or a car accident tomorrow. Many people depend on medicine for decades of fairly healthy life. At 10 bucks a week, this adds up. What do you suggest: don't let otherwise healthy old people use medicine?
The point I was trying to make is: if you live healthy, you've got a longer expected life span, and thus a higher chance of being dependent on medicine for a longer time. If you live unhealthy, you die sooner, and might also incur a medical bill underway. But on the other hand, the heavy drinker and smoker who never sees the doctor and dies of his first heart attack at the age of 55 is the absolute perfect citizen economically. No medical bill, no pension to pay out, long working live for paying taxes + the additional taxes for his vices. What is cheaper for the health-care system is not an open-and-shut case, quite a bit of study needs to be done to establish if overall healthy living is cheaper. The one study I'm aware of says it's not.
Nobody has ever died from good health, and most people do hit the health-circus at some point in their lives.
Okay. You've got an application on your hands that won't fit into memory. How do you go about calculating the size of your data structures. How big is an Integer in java? How big is an an int in Java? Why is a List of a million members a bad idea? How much does an object actually cost? Why is a List of a million members not that hot either? How expensive is a java HashMap? Do it just by reading the code? And if the objects are Serializable? If you've got some exposure to the bare metal, these are questions you will already have considered, or you might have a way of finding out. If all you ever done is Java, you will probably say: I dunno, we might need to move to a 64 bit JVM?
Answer for those who care: Integer = 20 bytes (yes. 8 bytes for it being an Object, 8 more bytes for it being serializable, and 4 bytes for the actual data. Any reference to it will take another 4 bytes for the referral. This is for a JVM from a while ago, maybe they cleaned it up, but I doubt it.). An int is just 4 bytes. Given all the cache effects that these issues bring make Java a very efficient language only if you restrict yourself to that subset that it has in common with C. With no library support for resizable arrays of primitive types, this is a pain.
Ah okay, I misunderstood what you meant, sorry. But I don't think that equating "socialized health care" with government run medicine only really covers the debate. In that sense, the existence of public hospitals in the US makes it "partly socialized", while privately run general practitioners in Europe, make that system "partly private". Then, I think there's no controversy, and thus no issue. Health care is a mixed system in the Western world. Where the real differences are is in access to this health care, and that is where the differences are really stark. Privately controlled access (US) or publicly controlled access (the rest) are the issue, and this is what the "socialized medicine" debate is focussing on. Technically it's incorrect as you state, but this is the argument. Nobody really cares who runs the hospital, as long as they can get access to it and don't go bankrupt in the process.
And again, we hear stories about people dying, bankrupt, because private insurers decided that the tiniest gap in the insurance record was sufficient for the "pre-existing condition" clause to kick in. That is criminal, not just inefficient or incompetent. Ask your Canadian friends if they would like to risk moving over to your side of the border with even the smallest hint that they may have an illness in the first three years they are there.
Ah, the cancer survival figures. Wasn't it Guilani that brought this up? That's a thoroughly debunked bit of statistical chicanery. IIIRC, these are prostate cancer figures, and the US 40% plus survival rate as compared to the UK, is based simply on the fact that more people are checked and undergo treatment than in Europe. It turns out that this particular form of cancer can lie dormant for a long time, so long that other diseases take the life before the cancer can. What happened is that in the US many more people, many that would not have died from the cancer, have undergone treatment, and because they weren't going to die from the cancer, they didn't die from it after treatment. Hence the inflated survival statistic. So the alternative way to read this statistic is that the US simply does more preventive surgery than Europe, but doesn't increase survival rates significantly.
If in a private health-care model the insurer can decide who to insure, and cherry pick its portfolio, there's a serious possibility that some people, particularly those that are seriously ill, will be uninsurable. This is what happens in the US, where people can be turned down for "pre-existing conditions".
In such a system, health-care will be non-universal, and this misses the point of health-care, just as much as a police force or fire brigade working non-universally misses the point.
The claim is not that socialized medicine works well, the claim is that it works better than the US system. For evidence, even Canada would do, but also the UK, The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Australia, New Zealand, and frankly, every developed country that isn't the US. There might be waiting lists, but hardly not for life-threatening situations, there are no large groups of people running around uninsured, no people trying to cling to a job while dying because of insurance considerations, and bankruptcy due to health-care bills is unheard of. And it's cheaper.
Ah, the healthy lifestyle argument, or how the world would be a better place if everyone would just live a long and fruitful life of 120 years and then die in their sleep. All this of course without ever incurring a hospital bill.
Fact is, life is a slow form of dying, and regardless of your lifestyle, chances are that you will be dependent on medicine and possibly surgery for the latter part of your life. If you're healthy, you'll be a burden to society for maybe 20 years, as you have enough resistance to cling on to life longer. Smokers and fat people will die off in a year or 5. Who produces the largest bill in their respective longer or shorter lifespans? Not sure, but time is on the side of the unhealthy, so my bet is they cost less.
The only research I'm aware that actually looked at this was some Dutch study about smokers. Their study showed that smokers are quite the money-savers in the healthcare department, simply because they die before they can get truly expensive.
As usual, logically wrong. If you accept micro-evolution, you do not need evidence for macro-evolution. On the contrary, you need evidence for explaining why macro-evolution will not occur. It's very simple: suppose you have a species, that experiences micro-evolution. Now you separate the species geographically, as is bound to occur. There is no inter-breeding possible anymore. These two, initially equal, populations will show micro-evolution, and drift. If there is no mechanism in place to synchronize the changes in these two populations, successive micro-evolution events will lead to an arbitrary distance between the two populations, making it almost certain that they will not be able to interbreed after enough time. This is macro-evolution.
For your position to hold any water, you have to explain this synchronization mechanism. For instance, you have to show that micro-evolution is not drifting, but simply a random variation around some 'prototype' individual that all members encode in their genes. But then explain influenza. Or you have to show that geographical separation is impossible. In all cases, the burden of proof is upon you, as you seem to posit some synchronization force that keeps localized micro-changes from drifting.
Always nice, the second law of thermodynamics, but let me ask you one thing: suppose that the argument is correct, that the second law of thermodynamics precludes the formation of order in an system such as ours through natural means. Thus, the apparent formation of order must be caused by something else. Let's call this something else 'God'. Now we're in the situation that we have order caused by God, which flatly contradicts the second law of thermodynamics. God can do anything, so contradicting the second law of thermodynamics is but one of his lesser feats. However, it does show that there is no factual basis for the second law of thermodynamics. It's a refutation of it, and we should abandon this notion completely, as it is not supported by fact.With the second law of thermodynamics no longer valid, the original argument against evolution doesn't hold, and we're back at square one.
So, purely by reasoning, regardless of the truth of evolution, and regardless of arguing over open or closed systems, the argument from the second law of thermodynamics is self-contradicting, as either our facts are wrong (there is no order), or the SLoT itself is wrong (at least for this part of the universe).
Science is like democracy. It's completely inadequate, but it's by far the best considering the alternatives.
Re:Normalization has practical limitations
on
Sun Buys MySQL
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· Score: 1
Don't discount this approach as just theory just yet. Column databases, where each table consists of only a single key column and a value column, eliminate the need of NULL alltogether. These are not the best OLTP database, as updates are distributed over many tables, but they are very good in the OLAP space, and ad-hoc querying is competitive with traditional, row-based, databases. It's just a different set of trade-offs, but lack of NULL is a big bonus.
[gasp]. You actually expect that Sun of all companies would be able to put a decent GUI on top of anything? Okay, well, Oracle's got an ever worse track record w.r.t. GUIs, but Sun takes a good second place. Even with a 13 year lead in the managed application space, they are only now taking the Java GUI seriously.
Be realistic. The path MySQL is going down now would involve configuration and editing through countless sets of webservers, various inaptly layers ending on the word 'bean', 200 xml configuration files, a couple of extra layers of abstraction thrown in the API, just because they can, and only with an additional quad core PC with 16 Gigs of RAM you can only work with your one-core 64 Mb instance of MySql.
Not really. The world will be a better place when some particular beliefs are absent. Xenophobia would be a good one to get rid off, but religion might also qualify.
Martyrdom has, for some reason, appealed to many people through the ages. Being a martyr for Santa is just silly, martyrs for Christ/Allah/SFM would get you instant recognition and a place in heaven/noodlespace.
All it shows is that people are very susceptible to recognition. An adult that says he beliefs in Santa will get laughed at, an adult displaying a faith in Jesus will be welcomed in the flock.
With a patent system that would only allow physical inventions, all your examples would be valid patents on the device. However, everybody would be free to implement the algorithm in their own device. As long it is not a replica of your patented device, they don't infringe on your patents. So, yes, feel free to patent your low-pass filter implementation. Feel stupid that it's so easy to circumvent that you won't get any money out of the market.
Particularly where the cleverness is in the logic, not in the device, this would indeed mean that software patents would be abolished, as it is trivial to create a different configuration of gates to implement the software. And that would be a better situation than what we're in now.
Horses have a particularly distinct advantage over humans is that they, over shorter distances, easily outrun humans, and can generally keep up with other animals. No sense in outrunning a bison if you lose sight of him in the first few miles. This is sufficient explanation for the general use of horses, regardless of humans matching their speed on the long haul.
It's actually fairly simple: Wolfram created a table with 256 logical formulae in them that modelled all possible 3 input boolean truth tables. He apparently conjectured that these were the shortest. The article corrects Wolfram in providing, for 44 of these cases, that there exists a shorter formula. Wolfram was apparently not smart enough to simply enumerate all the formulae until he found the shortest. Given the size of the search space this would have taken all of three seconds.
Don't be too hasty with ridiculing the GP. At a clock speed of 10 Ghz, (which we're not going to reach quickly), simply accessing all the addressable memory of a 64bit machine once (around 18 exabyte), assuming that we can access one byte per CPU cycle (we can't), would take 2^64 / 1e10 / 3600 / 24 / 365 = 58.5 years!
So, to actually make use of a full 64 bit address space, assuming that you would want to go through all memory in less than an hour or so (because if you don't why use RAM?), you would need an SMP type architecture with 512K cores working concurrently on this memory. Given that at 10 Ghz, light can only travel an inch or so, the memory banks should be very close to the CPU's.
But then, 2^67 transistors (the memory banks in bytes), at say a 1 nanometer distance between the transistors (we're now at 45 nm), layed out on a single wafer (2D because the heat needs to dissapate), would have a surface area of a little over 94 acres. So there goes the 10 GHz access speed, and far-away bytes cannot be reached fast enough, needing even more cores to read the damn thing, and more space for these cores.
The difference between past predictions and the current situation, is that we're reaching physical limits, and these are unforgiving. Yes, we might find a need for larger addressable spaces, but it's not going to be RAM, and it's not going to be serial CPU's accessing them.
Slashdot Mirror
Theorem-proving is about proving truth, optimality. Intelligence is usually about getting something good enough, on time. Completely different beasts, even though much of AI still fails to see this.
And seeing that strictly speaking, 'consciousness' is merely a label, and not a scientific term, nor an observed fact, it is not even clear that it exists, let alone that it as a separate entity that can be studied.
'$ony' is not funny, as it's not a legal identifier in whatever would be the Sony equivalent of Basic.
The point I was trying to make is: if you live healthy, you've got a longer expected life span, and thus a higher chance of being dependent on medicine for a longer time. If you live unhealthy, you die sooner, and might also incur a medical bill underway. But on the other hand, the heavy drinker and smoker who never sees the doctor and dies of his first heart attack at the age of 55 is the absolute perfect citizen economically. No medical bill, no pension to pay out, long working live for paying taxes + the additional taxes for his vices. What is cheaper for the health-care system is not an open-and-shut case, quite a bit of study needs to be done to establish if overall healthy living is cheaper. The one study I'm aware of says it's not.
Nobody has ever died from good health, and most people do hit the health-circus at some point in their lives.
Answer for those who care: Integer = 20 bytes (yes. 8 bytes for it being an Object, 8 more bytes for it being serializable, and 4 bytes for the actual data. Any reference to it will take another 4 bytes for the referral. This is for a JVM from a while ago, maybe they cleaned it up, but I doubt it.). An int is just 4 bytes. Given all the cache effects that these issues bring make Java a very efficient language only if you restrict yourself to that subset that it has in common with C. With no library support for resizable arrays of primitive types, this is a pain.
Ah okay, I misunderstood what you meant, sorry. But I don't think that equating "socialized health care" with government run medicine only really covers the debate. In that sense, the existence of public hospitals in the US makes it "partly socialized", while privately run general practitioners in Europe, make that system "partly private". Then, I think there's no controversy, and thus no issue. Health care is a mixed system in the Western world. Where the real differences are is in access to this health care, and that is where the differences are really stark. Privately controlled access (US) or publicly controlled access (the rest) are the issue, and this is what the "socialized medicine" debate is focussing on. Technically it's incorrect as you state, but this is the argument. Nobody really cares who runs the hospital, as long as they can get access to it and don't go bankrupt in the process.
And again, we hear stories about people dying, bankrupt, because private insurers decided that the tiniest gap in the insurance record was sufficient for the "pre-existing condition" clause to kick in. That is criminal, not just inefficient or incompetent. Ask your Canadian friends if they would like to risk moving over to your side of the border with even the smallest hint that they may have an illness in the first three years they are there.
Ah, the cancer survival figures. Wasn't it Guilani that brought this up? That's a thoroughly debunked bit of statistical chicanery. IIIRC, these are prostate cancer figures, and the US 40% plus survival rate as compared to the UK, is based simply on the fact that more people are checked and undergo treatment than in Europe. It turns out that this particular form of cancer can lie dormant for a long time, so long that other diseases take the life before the cancer can. What happened is that in the US many more people, many that would not have died from the cancer, have undergone treatment, and because they weren't going to die from the cancer, they didn't die from it after treatment. Hence the inflated survival statistic. So the alternative way to read this statistic is that the US simply does more preventive surgery than Europe, but doesn't increase survival rates significantly.
In such a system, health-care will be non-universal, and this misses the point of health-care, just as much as a police force or fire brigade working non-universally misses the point.
The claim is not that socialized medicine works well, the claim is that it works better than the US system. For evidence, even Canada would do, but also the UK, The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Australia, New Zealand, and frankly, every developed country that isn't the US. There might be waiting lists, but hardly not for life-threatening situations, there are no large groups of people running around uninsured, no people trying to cling to a job while dying because of insurance considerations, and bankruptcy due to health-care bills is unheard of. And it's cheaper.
Fact is, life is a slow form of dying, and regardless of your lifestyle, chances are that you will be dependent on medicine and possibly surgery for the latter part of your life. If you're healthy, you'll be a burden to society for maybe 20 years, as you have enough resistance to cling on to life longer. Smokers and fat people will die off in a year or 5. Who produces the largest bill in their respective longer or shorter lifespans? Not sure, but time is on the side of the unhealthy, so my bet is they cost less.
The only research I'm aware that actually looked at this was some Dutch study about smokers. Their study showed that smokers are quite the money-savers in the healthcare department, simply because they die before they can get truly expensive.
For your position to hold any water, you have to explain this synchronization mechanism. For instance, you have to show that micro-evolution is not drifting, but simply a random variation around some 'prototype' individual that all members encode in their genes. But then explain influenza. Or you have to show that geographical separation is impossible. In all cases, the burden of proof is upon you, as you seem to posit some synchronization force that keeps localized micro-changes from drifting.
So, purely by reasoning, regardless of the truth of evolution, and regardless of arguing over open or closed systems, the argument from the second law of thermodynamics is self-contradicting, as either our facts are wrong (there is no order), or the SLoT itself is wrong (at least for this part of the universe).
Then your post makes sense.
Science is like democracy. It's completely inadequate, but it's by far the best considering the alternatives.
Don't discount this approach as just theory just yet. Column databases, where each table consists of only a single key column and a value column, eliminate the need of NULL alltogether. These are not the best OLTP database, as updates are distributed over many tables, but they are very good in the OLAP space, and ad-hoc querying is competitive with traditional, row-based, databases. It's just a different set of trade-offs, but lack of NULL is a big bonus.
Be realistic. The path MySQL is going down now would involve configuration and editing through countless sets of webservers, various inaptly layers ending on the word 'bean', 200 xml configuration files, a couple of extra layers of abstraction thrown in the API, just because they can, and only with an additional quad core PC with 16 Gigs of RAM you can only work with your one-core 64 Mb instance of MySql.
Not really. The world will be a better place when some particular beliefs are absent. Xenophobia would be a good one to get rid off, but religion might also qualify.
Martyrdom has, for some reason, appealed to many people through the ages. Being a martyr for Santa is just silly, martyrs for Christ/Allah/SFM would get you instant recognition and a place in heaven/noodlespace.
All it shows is that people are very susceptible to recognition. An adult that says he beliefs in Santa will get laughed at, an adult displaying a faith in Jesus will be welcomed in the flock.
Particularly where the cleverness is in the logic, not in the device, this would indeed mean that software patents would be abolished, as it is trivial to create a different configuration of gates to implement the software. And that would be a better situation than what we're in now.
Horses have a particularly distinct advantage over humans is that they, over shorter distances, easily outrun humans, and can generally keep up with other animals. No sense in outrunning a bison if you lose sight of him in the first few miles. This is sufficient explanation for the general use of horses, regardless of humans matching their speed on the long haul.
It's actually fairly simple: Wolfram created a table with 256 logical formulae in them that modelled all possible 3 input boolean truth tables. He apparently conjectured that these were the shortest. The article corrects Wolfram in providing, for 44 of these cases, that there exists a shorter formula. Wolfram was apparently not smart enough to simply enumerate all the formulae until he found the shortest. Given the size of the search space this would have taken all of three seconds.
So, to actually make use of a full 64 bit address space, assuming that you would want to go through all memory in less than an hour or so (because if you don't why use RAM?), you would need an SMP type architecture with 512K cores working concurrently on this memory. Given that at 10 Ghz, light can only travel an inch or so, the memory banks should be very close to the CPU's.
But then, 2^67 transistors (the memory banks in bytes), at say a 1 nanometer distance between the transistors (we're now at 45 nm), layed out on a single wafer (2D because the heat needs to dissapate), would have a surface area of a little over 94 acres. So there goes the 10 GHz access speed, and far-away bytes cannot be reached fast enough, needing even more cores to read the damn thing, and more space for these cores.
The difference between past predictions and the current situation, is that we're reaching physical limits, and these are unforgiving. Yes, we might find a need for larger addressable spaces, but it's not going to be RAM, and it's not going to be serial CPU's accessing them.