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User: dinfinity

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  1. Re:Not an analouge to reality on Games That Make Players Act Like Psychopaths · · Score: 2

    They cease to exist, but they don't lose their stuff?

  2. Re:What kind of dating approach on The Internet Is Now Part of the Crime Scene · · Score: 1

    I guess that really depends on what the root is for his antipathy towards women/people/mankind.

    In this case, I believe his social isolation was the root and getting him out of that with proper training and real-world exercise would have turned him into one of the many quite normal socially slightly challenged people in our society. If, however, some traumatic experience were the cause, then one would expect the result to indeed be a charming and doubly dangerous psychopath.

    I think this whole episode yet again underlines that loneliness and social isolation can drive people to do terrible things.
    From Mark's Daily Apple:
    "As I’ve suggested before, there’s something to the ancestral context – the genetically wired, “expected” conditions that characterized our evolutionary history. Extended isolation meant almost sure death in our ancestors’ days." ( http://www.marksdailyapple.com... )

  3. Re:What kind of dating approach on The Internet Is Now Part of the Crime Scene · · Score: 2

    Have you heard him talk?

    This guy pretty much defines 'utterly creepy psycho'. Just watch some of the video's discussed in TFA.

  4. Re:It's the fundamentally wrong approach on Why Not Every New "Like the Brain" System Will Prove Important · · Score: 1

    The problem is that I don't believe pattern matching is an effective or intuitive means for specialized or generalized intelligence processing. It's good for simulations of the brain, but a simulation is not going to automagically develop intelligence. There is far too much of a learning and training process involved from birth to death of a human in the development of their intelligence and knowledge, so a generalized intelligence based on pattern matching is going to be implicitly at the mercy of the quality of it's education.

    Sure, but let's be honest here: whatever we're going to engineer will have a huge potential to acquire intelligence much faster than we have attained it. I really feel that the notion of human exceptionalism when it comes to intelligence is 99% wishful thinking. We collectively want to believe that we are somehow special and that our level of cognitive processing is somehow practically unattainable for artificial systems, but the reality is that our cognitive capabilities are the result of a longterm process of trial and error. It strikes me as arrogant to hold the position that an informed and highly goal-driven approach towards creating systems with similar capabilities would prove to be in vain.

    Looking at the success in and speed with which we have recreated a lot of the other naturally evolved capabilities artificially (cameras, auditory sensing, etc.), I believe that recreating our cognitive capabilities is a matter of decades rather than one of hundreds or even thousands of years.

    The multitude of paths that we can and will take to attain said cognitive capabilities will obviously not all lead to the general intelligence you speak of, but I'm convinced that some of them will. And quite soon, on an evolutionary scale.

  5. Re:Derp on Four Weeks Without Soap Or Shampoo · · Score: 2

    Most people have known this for some time.

    Yeah, the soap and shampoo industry is really suffering.

  6. Re:1 TRILLION pieces of plastic!!! on Trillions of Plastic Pieces May Be Trapped In Arctic Ice · · Score: 2

    Yes, and even though I'm speculating here, I'd say that it is also quite likely that the particles would simply be excreted by us and our food. In fact, if that were the case, one would expect the particles to become less prevalent as you move higher up the food chain and even then mostly in the contents of the digestive tract of the animals (which most people avoid eating. I know I do).

    I'm not saying that the particles couldn't be dangerous at all, or that dumping plastics into the ocean isn't terrible, just that when it comes to 'small stuff that could be bad for your health' there is a difference between sand, heavy metal ions, asbestos and algae. Alarmist 'plastic is bad, mmkay' isn't going to do us a service.

    Related subject matter:
    http://www.nature.com/news/201...

  7. 1 TRILLION pieces of plastic!!! on Trillions of Plastic Pieces May Be Trapped In Arctic Ice · · Score: 5, Interesting

    nearly 300 million tons of plastic in 2012 [...] reaching 288 million tonnes in 2012

    http://bash.org/?2999

    Estimates of how much of that production has been trapped in Arctic ice provided in the article:
    - "[some of] much of [the total amount of plastic produced]"
    - "more than 1 trillion pieces of plastic"
    - "abundances of hundreds of ['fragments less than 5 millimeters long' selected using a microscope] per cubic meter"

    Would have really hurt to estimate the weight of those fragments? One plastic bag could easily end up as a million pieces of plastic. About one plastic bag or 10 grams of plastic per 10.000 cubic meters sounds a lot less dramatic, I guess.

  8. Re:Kudos on Who Helped Kill Patent Troll Reform In the Senate · · Score: 1

    Yes, fight fire with idiocy. Good idea.

  9. Re:It's the fundamentally wrong approach on Why Not Every New "Like the Brain" System Will Prove Important · · Score: 2

    It's just a different (and interesting way) of computing. We already have a number of different specialized processors. The inevitable NeuralPUs will excel in pattern recognition, classifying, decision making, extracting salient patterns from input, etc.

    Like in the cases of other specialized processors, we can already emulate this type of computing (and do so very thankfully in many fields). Having well-designed hardware processors will make this type of computing to be a commodity (as the other specialized processors have done). Currently, our neural processing emulators lose out big time to even the most basic of their dedicated organic counterparts when it comes to performance per watt for certain tasks (the human brain runs in the tens of watts) and performance per volume (a human brain is pretty beefy compared to a consumer CPU, but it's not supercomputer-warehouse big).

    The current search is basically for effective artificial hardware neurons, but more so for the (topological) design of the NeuralPUs. Just slapping a shitload of neurons together and feeding it data is very ineffective. The layered approach of deep learning is a very good step up from the flat networks we're used to employ, but the topology is still ridiculously simple when compared to the complex topologies of subnetworks in the mammalian brain. Combine that with the (in comparison to their organic counterparts) very simplistic learning models for artificial neural networks and the only conclusion can be that there is still a long way to go.

    But we'll get there. Skynet for president 2032!

  10. Re:The real issue is with EULAs in general. on California Bill Would Safeguard Consumers' Rights To Criticize Firms Online · · Score: 1

    The approach I see as most viable is an online service where EULA's (and contracts in general) can be uploaded or constructed and presented to end users in a predictable format.

    General advantages:
    - Changes could be easily highlighted
    - Individual articles could be translated into everyman-speak
    - Reuse of individual articles is possible, allowing compilation of a EULA out of existing (annotated) articles
    - Links to public information concerning the judicial validity of or court cases surrounding certain articles could be included, as well as comments on the articles
    - (Electronic) Signatures could be administrated by this independent party
    - etc.

    For small businesses, the ease of constructing solid EULAs could be a reason to use such a service and larger corporations could use the service as an indication of benevolence and transparency.

    I'm pretty sure end users would love such a service, but I'm less confident that the service providers would like it.

  11. Re:Jurisdiction on US To Charge Chinese Military Employees With Hacking · · Score: -1, Redundant

    I was going to say 'nice try', but your source-free anecdotes are just too underwhelming.

  12. Re:Why are they in the EU again? on UK May Kill the EU's Net Neutrality Law · · Score: 1

    without the legislation on the curvature of bananas

    Nice cherry-picking there. Do you have any idea what the ratio is between sane legislation and inane legislation on the EU-level? Or on the level of the different member states? You seem to be under the impression that such legislation would be absent in the individual member states.

    Also, don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Think about the alternative here: every member state would have different regulations on the curvature of bananas, forcing banana sellers to deal with all of those if he wants to sell his products in the EU. The EU is a pain in the ass target market as it is, with all the required localizations, communication languages, wildly varying business cultures and highly differing member state regulations on a multitude of fronts.

    the lavish subsidies to farms in France and Poland

    If the shit ever hits the fan on a global scale, you will be very thankful that you have at least a chance of food on your plate. If the subsidies vanish, reliance on food sources outside the EU will skyrocket as we simply cannot compete with the low cost food production elsewhere.
    Powerful agricultural lobbies have a lot to do with the subsidies, but there is a very clear strategic reason for the subsidies as well.

    In short, we were happy with the old EEC

    Were you, though? Really? You had no complaints whatsoever about it? Or are you just regurgitating the nonsense that everything was better in the old days?

    The EU can be great and we should focus on how to make it perform well, instead of clinging to our familiar arbitrary little islands in it.

  13. Re:Why do people still pay money for basic softwar on Game of Thrones Author George R R Martin Writes with WordStar on DOS · · Score: 2

    I think people overestimate how well their own office situation extrapolates to the entire world.

  14. Re:It's still debt on The Mifos Project Makes Software To 'Accelerate Microfinance' (Video) · · Score: 1

    The Egyptian empire existed for a couple thousand years without debt

    I'm pretty sure it's not a very good idea to use an economy that relied heavily on slavery as a positive example.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

  15. Re:Gamifying doesn't mean what you think it means. on Norway Is Gamifying Warfare By Driving Tanks With Oculus Rift · · Score: 1

    Thank you.

  16. Re:Win-stay lose-switch strategy on Winning Algorithms For Rock, Paper, Scissors · · Score: 1

    Of course it is. That's how a neural network works.
    It's hardly surprising that humans are terrible RNGs. It is, however, a good thing to keep in the back of your mind when in a competitive situation where that is relevant.

  17. Re:Meh on iOS 7 Update Silently Removes Encryption For Email Attachments · · Score: 1

    Almost everybody.

    Sensitive corporate data is not the same as sensitive data in general.

  18. Re:Microsoft Opened Themselves Up for Lawsuits on Why Microsoft Shouldn't Patch the XP Internet Explorer Flaw · · Score: 1

    so that is a little like people suing Ford for no-longer making parts for their Model T

    No, it is not.

    A better car analogy would be if the Ford Model T could be made to brake by a third party tampering with it and Ford refusing to supply all current Model T owners with a part that prevents that possibility.

    In either case, it is ridiculous to put the blame on Ford.

  19. Re:Google getting all the glory? on Volvo Testing Autonomous Cars On Public Roads · · Score: 1

    I'm betting that consumer acceptance will also benefit greatly from the incremental approach: get used to bits of driving getting taken over bit by bit is a lot less daunting than getting into a fully automated car and just pressing go.

    In that sense, the automakers are doing the world of automated driving a bigger service than Google.

  20. Re:You mean Star Trek? on Physics Students Devise Concept For Star Wars-Style Deflector Shields · · Score: 1

    Just modify the phase variance, man!

  21. Although it is indeed impressive and very competitive, the Bay Trail Atom Z3770 it bests is half a year old. One would expect one of the recently announced refresh Intel parts to perform as good as or better than the Z3770 on the CPU limited benchmarks: http://www.cpu-world.com/news_...

    When looking at GPU-dependent benchmarks, Intel is definitely hurting their necks while looking up to their competition and probably will be for some time.

    All in all: This is good news for the consumers.

  22. Re:Also, this means... on Male Scent Molecules May Be Compromising Biomedical Research · · Score: 2

    Citric acid works even better. I can go for two to three days without reapplying my citric acid solution and have done so for the past three years.

    If you search online, you'll encounter all kinds of 'rub lemons under your armpits' and comparable tips. The more scientific approach is of course to just buy a kilo of crystallized citric acid for a few euro's and then mix it with water until you reach a pH-level slightly above 2.0 (buy some cheap indicator paper). Put it in a spray bottle and there you go.

    You won't smell like musk or chocolate or 'ice shock', or whatever the fuck you're supposed to smell like with commercial deodorants nowadays. You'll just smell like (the rest of) yourself.

    If nothing else, you can always use the bag of citric acid to make lemonade (add sugar and water) or as an easy seasoning agent (not surprisingly quite tasty on chicken and fish). It's also a fairly effective cleaning agent, removing oil and fats and also functions as a fabric softener (in the traditional sense of removing soap residues). Did I mention that it has a fungicidal effect (effective against athlete's foot, given diligent use)?

    Disclaimers:
    1. You need to find a pH-level that works and that does not irritate your skin (pH 3.0 will probably not kill all the bacteria and pH 1.0 will probably strip your skin). Whether you decide to go from a very low pH and move up or the other way around is a matter of whether you can afford to stink for a few days.
    2. Water droplets are not aerosols.
    3. The layer of dead skin cells (stratum corneum) is temporarily removed by the citric acid. This means that in the first few hours after applying the solution, your skin will be more sensitive. Under your armpits, that isn't really a problem, but it has been advised against to go sunbathing when having applied citric acid to the skin.

  23. Re:Saw them at the Hollywood Bowl in '80... on Monty Python To Bid Farewell In a Simulcast Show · · Score: 1

    There are multiple seasons. Also, the Holy Grail-movie was very important for their status.
    Although The Flying Circus has a lot of comedy gold in it, few people would idolize Monty Python based on it alone. In fact, you can be fairly sure that a lot of people who haven't seen the Holy Grail-movie think Monty Python-stuff is dreadful.

    BTW, a number of the Python-movies have been released on Bluray. Definitely worth a buy/download and subsequent rewatch.

  24. Re:I never thought I'd live to see the day... on iPad Fever Is Officially Cooling · · Score: 1

    Me too. I was pointing out where the concept of a Personal Digital Assistant differs markedly from that of a Personal Assistant.

  25. Re:I never thought I'd live to see the day... on iPad Fever Is Officially Cooling · · Score: 1

    Wat.