I know that it would take a lot of energy and currently most energy sources add to the pollution problem, but still, is it even possible to somehow filter the crap from the atmosphere?
It's not "crap", it's CO2. It's not pollution, it's a natural and necessary component of our atmosphere. The issue is about the balance.
What would it entail?
More plants. Probably the most efficient way, as they do it without being plugged into a generator.
Other reports claim that sea levels in some areas would actually drop.
Curious. Is this the "sea levels" that includes inland seas and lakes; or the ocean levels, which is usually what they're talking about in the context of global warming? If the latter, it'd be interesting to hear by what mechanism the earth's oceans would be higher in some places, but lower in others.
Just so we're clear, it was not the federal DHS, but the Lousiana State DHS that did it.
From the Red Cross web site: (emphasis mine)
The
state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.
Direct angry calls about FEMA bumbling to the White House, c/o Prez "Mumbler" Bush, and calls about the Red Cross being blocked to the LA Gov Mansion, c/o Gov "Crybaby" Blanco.
I love how the White House and its supporters speak out of both sides of their mouth.
Don't play the blame game, but it's all the state and local governments' fault.
What? Nobody's absolving the Feds. There's plenty of blame for everyone. It just seems that in some people's rush to skewer our favorite mumblemouth whipping boy, they're holding up the state and local officials as a bunch of innocent victims. Problem is, they're as much a knot of corrupt, inept fucktards as the feds and they ought to be skewered also. Sure, FEMA's the easy target because they stood around saying "what do we do?" when their only job is to know what to do in an emergency-- but between the city just leaving a bunch of buses to wash away and not bothering to stockpile any supplies for refugees, and the Louisiana State Department of Homeland Security (a STATE agency, not federal) telling the Red Cross they couldn't take their convoy of food, water, blankets, and porta potties to the Super Dome because "we don't want people to stay there"; well, I say burn the lot of 'em. Government is full of shitheads at all levels, and I think there's enough to get angry about here to drag all of them out and tar and feather them for their gross incompetence.
Might be forbidden by Godwin, but the Nazis were an authoritarian government that never turned into communism.
Nah, you're OK under Godwin. Godwin's Law is actually just a curb on the unwarranted use of Nazis in an argument. In this case, it is the ideal counterpoint, as Nazis were definitelyauthoritarian, and definitely anti-communist. A violation of Godwin is more along the lines of:
Argument: "keeping some people alive on in a vegetative state is probably not warranted"
Godwin-violating counter argument:
"Yeah, well there was another group that wanted all the less healthy to die-- THE NAZIS!"
Shell in Nigeria in the 90s, where companies hire government troops or mercenaries to kill off inconvenient peasants demand substantive action. Tobacco companies still kill a third of their customers, and they do it with impunity in most of the world. If the Reynold's family name were a death sentence, that would change quickly.
Please. Selling cigarettes is hardly the same as hiring death squads. Last I checked, smoking was entirely voluntary.
Ah, another victim of our modern education system!
Canute, a Dane who conquered England and ruled from 1016 to 1035. The legend of Canute and the sea: (from Wikipedia)
He is perhaps best remembered for the legend of how he commanded the waves to go back. According to the legend, he grew tired of flattery from his courtiers. When one such flatterer gushed that the king could even command the obedience of the sea, Canute proved him wrong by practical demonstration at Southampton, his point being that even a king's powers have limits. Unfortunately, this legend is sometimes misunderstood to mean that he believed himself so powerful that the natural elements would obey him, and that his failure to command the tides only made him look foolish. It is quite possible that the legend is simply pro-Canute propaganda.
Well actually we would have to score the ability to detect the computer like we would score the ability to detect a tone, or a frequency of light at a given amplitude. In neurology the standard for "thresholds of perception" are usually the point at which 50% of people can detect the sensation and 50% of people cannot.
In this case, a computer will have passed the Turing test if it can fool at least 50% of the people who interrogate it.
I think the problem we have here is the definition of "passing" the Turing Test. Turing himself used the term very specifically, as in "passing = fooling the interogator", but he never really went into what constitutes an adequate interrogator! The purpose of the Test in the first place was really only to bring the debate around the question of "can machines think" down out of the realm of theology and make it testable. It seems that he probably had other scientists in mind for interrogators, as that was with whom the debate was. What portion of the population would be fooled is a metric somewhat separate from the test itself, but using that, fooling half the people in a random sample seems like too low a threshold. 100% is probably too high. Turing himself only briefly hinted at this once, saying that it'd take at least 50 years before a machine could pass 70% of the time, and 100 or more years before it could fool anyone.
I've already done a whole disertation about it in another answer, so I won't repeat it here. But let's just say: please go and read that question again.
It's not "what music do you like?", it's the monumental stupidity of "why do you like music?" Listing the bands you like would _not_ answer that question. (In fact, if anyone answered that one with the list of their favourite bands, _then_ I'd suspect they might be a bot that just triggered on the word "music" and spewed the completely wong answer.)
The problem is, a stupid question like that doesn't require a stupid answer, like he gave. It's a perfect opportunity to give an intelligent answer. Bots don't know a stupid question from an intelligent one. Even an answer like "What kind of dumb question is that? Might as well ask why jokes are funny." would be better than his stupid handwave of an answer.
On the contrary, the Turning test is exactly about fooling some people. That's the whole point or more precisly, to come up with an effective imitation of intellegent behaviour such that it is indistinguishable from a human intellegence.
If the computer must be indistinguishable from a human intelligence, then it's not about fooling some of the people, it's about fooling all of the people. Not just those of average intelligence, but anyone and everyone they stick in front of the keyboard.
If it has to pass all tests, there's no rational scientific reason to test it against anything but your strongest subjects. If you're designing (say) a door that has to withstand a blow from a 10lb sledge hammer, there's absolutely no point in hitting it with any hammer smaller than a 10 pounder.
Well, you see, the non-scientific web poll is basically an anecdote, one person's perspective of what they think or what they've done. And the plural of anecdote is, of course, data. Therefore, if your sample size is large enough, your non-scientific web poll can generate a large set of data that you can describe in scientific terms.
Yeah, and if you do a survey of the most popular pastimes, but only surveyed the activities of dead people, the results would be "relaxing in an urn" - 4%, "lying underground" - 95%, "other" - 1%. Certain sample selections force certain results, and there's simply no way to extrapolate that data beyond it's initial small set.
I want to see someone quantify how many wasted hours CEOs create with about-face decisions, late decisions, and "make work" plans. I want to see a study of how many wasted hours are the product of incompetent people being placed into management positions. I want to see how many wasted hours are created through mid-level manager infighting.
Absolutely goddamn right. I want to know where they get off fretting over how much "lost productivity" there is from Joe Schmoe spending 10 minutes reading the paper in the toilet twice a week, when a single asinine decision by a jackass manager (I want daily progress reports on why this project is late!) can piss away hundreds of hours of productivity with a single memo that took 5 minutes to write. Honestly, this sounds like the kind of crap cooked up by the tentacled monsters in Human Resources. "The hoo-mans are talking about the recent victory of the local sports collective again! They're stealing productivity from the company!"
Heh. Not sure what composre and decorm mean*, but I think "having some digity" means to posess a plurality of fingers.
* they sound like they might be UNIX utilities. e.g. "run 'composre -w -all' to flush the/dev/null cache", and "decorm functions just like rm, only with a 1930's architechtural flair"....
Not enough responsibility? You're entrusted to teach young people. I've never heard a teacher complain about lack of responsibility.
You'd be surprised by how restrictive teaching can be. My mother teaches algebra to 13 year olds (talk about thankless tasks). At one point the district decided math scores were too low. Their solution? They created a mandated lesson plan, with a specific timeline; i.e. "you will teach lesson X for Y number of days, then give the test. You will then teach lesson X+1...". The teachers were essentially reduced to robots executing software. Students didn't understand Lesson 5 after the 3 days alotted? Tough nuts, man. On to Lesson 6. As a result, test scores got even worse. Who'd they blame? Why, the teachers of course! They obviously weren't following the lesson plans properly. So they instituted mandatory "teacher education" classes where some jackass bureaucrat from the district basically chided them about following the asinine lesson plans more closely. The district superintendant who instituted the plan in the first place fortunately left at the end of the year so the bullshit ended, but only after basically pissing away a year's worth of math education from a heck of a lot of kids. Yeah, teachers have a responsibility to teach children, but responsibility is a direct function of power. If you have no power, yuo have no responsibility.
MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging mission.
Why do government agencies feel the need to "retronym" every project name into an acronym? The name is obviously derived from its association with the mythological Mercury, messenger of the gods. Then, probably some mid level management PHB comes along and says "let's put a team together to turn that into an acronym". Apollo didn't need to be an acronym. Nor Voyager. Nor Pioneer. These childish acronyms are ridiculous. Have some digity!
The reflection is in the wrong place to be the sun - look, the earth is less than half full, which means that the sun is on the other side of the earth from the sun. My guess is that it's a reflection of the moon; looking at Celestia, I think the angle's right. Anyone who knows what they're talking about care to correct this?
The very fact that you can see an illuminated portion of a sphere indicates that, if the sphere is sufficiently reflective, you will see a reflection of the light source. The only way you wouldn't would be if the light source were behind the sphere, fully eclipsed.
That's the problem with using codenames for products, especially in these circumstances. The codenames often become far more widely known and used than the product name.
I'm sure they'd love to use the eventual product name as the codename, but you can't rush marketing. The marketing people require full technical specifications, comprehensive feature lists, and functional demos before they can even BEGIN the hard work of naming. They need to go over all the possible synergies with parallel products, and consider the possibilities of sequelization (Win XP 2? XP II? hmmm). Then, only after all this has been carefully mulled over and scrutinized, the VP of marketing will pick a name at random and decree that it shall be thencforth "Windows Vista".
Well, there was the serial port and a Hayes Modem. A popular communications app was a shareware one: ProComm. Email was available via Compuserve, a BBS, perhaps a university, and later AOL.
So the PC could send and receive email. It just wasn't a straightforward thing to set up, at least for the business types.
Ehhh.....I'd say it's a wee bit of a stretch calling terminal emulation capability "email". I used to send and receive email on an XT PC via a Hayes 1200, but before that I used an ADDS Regent 15" print terminal with an acoustic coupler to use the very same NCSS mainframe. The email app isn't on the terminal. Besides, terminal emulation didn't launch the PC into the limelight-- hardly a "killer app".
Battlestar Galactica is a WW2 soap opera pretending to be sci-fi, and is one of the best shows to come out in years.
WW2? Nah, more like a thinly veneered biblical theme with a smattering of greek mythology thrown in. Commander Adama? Leading a sort of Exodus of the last remaining tribe of humans into the wasteland of space; pursued by blatantly Roman-esque oppressors? Humanity destroyed by a "flood" of robot killers, a handful of survivors escaping by ship? Totally biblical, man.
my girlfriend and i used all our savings to get here to where the cost of living was cheaper.
One of the dirty little secrets of places where the cost of living is lower is that wages are also lower.
my girlfriend has a four year degree in telivision and film
Wow. Possibly the only degree more worthless than my incomplete english degree.
i am a tech worker who's job has been outsourced.
So? Find something else. Load boxes on trucks for UPS. Become a plumber.
we moved from los angeles looking for more opportunity because of the hellish conditions of paying 1175 for a 650 square foot apartment.
You think that's "hellish"? Bah! Try NY or San Francisco. I have, at various times in my life, ended up having to put up to 75% of my income into rent. It ain't easy, but it also ain't hell. If you anf your GF can't net 250 bucks a week each, that's pretty lame. You may not be able to do that in the field of your choosing, but there ain't no right to a life of fulfilling employment. Face it: IT guys are a dime a dozen, and "TV and film" are only reasonably good employment for a very lucky (that's "lucky" as in well connected) few.
there are many people like me discovering this right now. working hard will get you nowhere these days, only backstabbing will which is something i refuse to do because of my morals.
Wah. Working hard will get you anywhere these days. You just have to work hard at the right thing. Indeed, there are some fields where working hard generally won't get you squat. The solution is to choose a different field! You think I started off wanting to be a locksmith? Then a telecommunications tech? Then an electrician? You gotta pick work that you can get paid for.
And why the HELL can a war outside the US affect the STATE'S national guard? Those are supposed to be for the state's defense, not wars in other countries!
You are incorrect. As their rather long motto says in the first line, "I Am the Guard. Civilian in Peace, Soldier in War". The National Guard has essentially been a part of the US military since 1903-- i.e. callable as a military reserve force-- when the state militias were officially nationalized. The difference between the Guard and the actual Reserves is that the Guard can also be called upon by the state authorities. The advantage to the NG over the Reserves is that a Guardsman is less likely to be shipped overseas, as some portion og the Guard must remain behind in case of domestic needs. The NG has been called upon to fight in every single foreign conflict since the spanish-american war. Claims that the guard is being misused are pure ignorance.
Talk about deluting yourself, reason #3 is pure horse shite.
deluting - the act of socking a bard in the eye and taking his instrument because his charisma is so high you (being a fighter) can't get any chicks in the pub.
Luckily, the impending economic collapse of the US a la Argentina in any given decade will spell the end of this silliness.
Unlikely. Argentina was essentially the victim of pump-n'-dump by securities firms. Much like the dot com companies of the same era, the country's financial prospects were terrible; but euphoric cheerleading fueled overinvestment in a system that was already doomed to collapse. Come on, they were engaging in "stupid economist tricks" like tying the Argentine peso to the dollar (1 peso = 1 dollar) to curb inflation! The US doesn't have the same pipe-dream economy Argentina had in the 90's.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not "crap", it's CO2. It's not pollution, it's a natural and necessary component of our atmosphere. The issue is about the balance.
What would it entail?
More plants. Probably the most efficient way, as they do it without being plugged into a generator.
Curious. Is this the "sea levels" that includes inland seas and lakes; or the ocean levels, which is usually what they're talking about in the context of global warming? If the latter, it'd be interesting to hear by what mechanism the earth's oceans would be higher in some places, but lower in others.
From the Red Cross web site: (emphasis mine)
Direct angry calls about FEMA bumbling to the White House, c/o Prez "Mumbler" Bush, and calls about the Red Cross being blocked to the LA Gov Mansion, c/o Gov "Crybaby" Blanco.
What? Nobody's absolving the Feds. There's plenty of blame for everyone. It just seems that in some people's rush to skewer our favorite mumblemouth whipping boy, they're holding up the state and local officials as a bunch of innocent victims. Problem is, they're as much a knot of corrupt, inept fucktards as the feds and they ought to be skewered also. Sure, FEMA's the easy target because they stood around saying "what do we do?" when their only job is to know what to do in an emergency-- but between the city just leaving a bunch of buses to wash away and not bothering to stockpile any supplies for refugees, and the Louisiana State Department of Homeland Security (a STATE agency, not federal) telling the Red Cross they couldn't take their convoy of food, water, blankets, and porta potties to the Super Dome because "we don't want people to stay there"; well, I say burn the lot of 'em. Government is full of shitheads at all levels, and I think there's enough to get angry about here to drag all of them out and tar and feather them for their gross incompetence.
Nah, you're OK under Godwin. Godwin's Law is actually just a curb on the unwarranted use of Nazis in an argument. In this case, it is the ideal counterpoint, as Nazis were definitelyauthoritarian, and definitely anti-communist. A violation of Godwin is more along the lines of:
Argument:
"keeping some people alive on in a vegetative state is probably not warranted"
Godwin-violating counter argument:
"Yeah, well there was another group that wanted all the less healthy to die-- THE NAZIS!"
Please. Selling cigarettes is hardly the same as hiring death squads. Last I checked, smoking was entirely voluntary.
What the fuck are you talking about?
Ah, another victim of our modern education system!
Canute, a Dane who conquered England and ruled from 1016 to 1035. The legend of Canute and the sea: (from Wikipedia)
I think the problem we have here is the definition of "passing" the Turing Test. Turing himself used the term very specifically, as in "passing = fooling the interogator", but he never really went into what constitutes an adequate interrogator! The purpose of the Test in the first place was really only to bring the debate around the question of "can machines think" down out of the realm of theology and make it testable. It seems that he probably had other scientists in mind for interrogators, as that was with whom the debate was. What portion of the population would be fooled is a metric somewhat separate from the test itself, but using that, fooling half the people in a random sample seems like too low a threshold. 100% is probably too high. Turing himself only briefly hinted at this once, saying that it'd take at least 50 years before a machine could pass 70% of the time, and 100 or more years before it could fool anyone.
The problem is, a stupid question like that doesn't require a stupid answer, like he gave. It's a perfect opportunity to give an intelligent answer. Bots don't know a stupid question from an intelligent one. Even an answer like "What kind of dumb question is that? Might as well ask why jokes are funny." would be better than his stupid handwave of an answer.
If the computer must be indistinguishable from a human intelligence, then it's not about fooling some of the people, it's about fooling all of the people. Not just those of average intelligence, but anyone and everyone they stick in front of the keyboard.
If it has to pass all tests, there's no rational scientific reason to test it against anything but your strongest subjects. If you're designing (say) a door that has to withstand a blow from a 10lb sledge hammer, there's absolutely no point in hitting it with any hammer smaller than a 10 pounder.
Yeah, and if you do a survey of the most popular pastimes, but only surveyed the activities of dead people, the results would be "relaxing in an urn" - 4%, "lying underground" - 95%, "other" - 1%. Certain sample selections force certain results, and there's simply no way to extrapolate that data beyond it's initial small set.
Absolutely goddamn right. I want to know where they get off fretting over how much "lost productivity" there is from Joe Schmoe spending 10 minutes reading the paper in the toilet twice a week, when a single asinine decision by a jackass manager (I want daily progress reports on why this project is late!) can piss away hundreds of hours of productivity with a single memo that took 5 minutes to write. Honestly, this sounds like the kind of crap cooked up by the tentacled monsters in Human Resources. "The hoo-mans are talking about the recent victory of the local sports collective again! They're stealing productivity from the company!"
Not to mention composre and decorm! ;)
Heh. Not sure what composre and decorm mean*, but I think "having some digity" means to posess a plurality of fingers.
* they sound like they might be UNIX utilities. e.g. "run 'composre -w -all' to flush the /dev/null cache", and "decorm functions just like rm, only with a 1930's architechtural flair"....
You'd be surprised by how restrictive teaching can be. My mother teaches algebra to 13 year olds (talk about thankless tasks). At one point the district decided math scores were too low. Their solution? They created a mandated lesson plan, with a specific timeline; i.e. "you will teach lesson X for Y number of days, then give the test. You will then teach lesson X+1...". The teachers were essentially reduced to robots executing software. Students didn't understand Lesson 5 after the 3 days alotted? Tough nuts, man. On to Lesson 6. As a result, test scores got even worse. Who'd they blame? Why, the teachers of course! They obviously weren't following the lesson plans properly. So they instituted mandatory "teacher education" classes where some jackass bureaucrat from the district basically chided them about following the asinine lesson plans more closely. The district superintendant who instituted the plan in the first place fortunately left at the end of the year so the bullshit ended, but only after basically pissing away a year's worth of math education from a heck of a lot of kids. Yeah, teachers have a responsibility to teach children, but responsibility is a direct function of power. If you have no power, yuo have no responsibility.
Why do government agencies feel the need to "retronym" every project name into an acronym? The name is obviously derived from its association with the mythological Mercury, messenger of the gods. Then, probably some mid level management PHB comes along and says "let's put a team together to turn that into an acronym". Apollo didn't need to be an acronym. Nor Voyager. Nor Pioneer. These childish acronyms are ridiculous. Have some digity!
The very fact that you can see an illuminated portion of a sphere indicates that, if the sphere is sufficiently reflective, you will see a reflection of the light source. The only way you wouldn't would be if the light source were behind the sphere, fully eclipsed.
I'm sure they'd love to use the eventual product name as the codename, but you can't rush marketing. The marketing people require full technical specifications, comprehensive feature lists, and functional demos before they can even BEGIN the hard work of naming. They need to go over all the possible synergies with parallel products, and consider the possibilities of sequelization (Win XP 2? XP II? hmmm). Then, only after all this has been carefully mulled over and scrutinized, the VP of marketing will pick a name at random and decree that it shall be thencforth "Windows Vista".
Ehhh.....I'd say it's a wee bit of a stretch calling terminal emulation capability "email". I used to send and receive email on an XT PC via a Hayes 1200, but before that I used an ADDS Regent 15" print terminal with an acoustic coupler to use the very same NCSS mainframe. The email app isn't on the terminal. Besides, terminal emulation didn't launch the PC into the limelight-- hardly a "killer app".
WW2? Nah, more like a thinly veneered biblical theme with a smattering of greek mythology thrown in. Commander Adama? Leading a sort of Exodus of the last remaining tribe of humans into the wasteland of space; pursued by blatantly Roman-esque oppressors? Humanity destroyed by a "flood" of robot killers, a handful of survivors escaping by ship? Totally biblical, man.
it's not. AMD Headquarters One AMD Place Sunnyvale, California 94088-3453 (408) 749-4000 They have fabs in Germany, but they're a US company.
Of course not. No one with an IQ over room temperature does. Neither do we say "BUS-TED!", or "PSYCHE!" Those are reserved for annoying children.
One of the dirty little secrets of places where the cost of living is lower is that wages are also lower.
my girlfriend has a four year degree in telivision and film
Wow. Possibly the only degree more worthless than my incomplete english degree.
i am a tech worker who's job has been outsourced.
So? Find something else. Load boxes on trucks for UPS. Become a plumber. we moved from los angeles looking for more opportunity because of the hellish conditions of paying 1175 for a 650 square foot apartment.
You think that's "hellish"? Bah! Try NY or San Francisco. I have, at various times in my life, ended up having to put up to 75% of my income into rent. It ain't easy, but it also ain't hell. If you anf your GF can't net 250 bucks a week each, that's pretty lame. You may not be able to do that in the field of your choosing, but there ain't no right to a life of fulfilling employment. Face it: IT guys are a dime a dozen, and "TV and film" are only reasonably good employment for a very lucky (that's "lucky" as in well connected) few.
there are many people like me discovering this right now. working hard will get you nowhere these days, only backstabbing will which is something i refuse to do because of my morals.
Wah. Working hard will get you anywhere these days. You just have to work hard at the right thing. Indeed, there are some fields where working hard generally won't get you squat. The solution is to choose a different field! You think I started off wanting to be a locksmith? Then a telecommunications tech? Then an electrician? You gotta pick work that you can get paid for.
You are incorrect. As their rather long motto says in the first line, "I Am the Guard. Civilian in Peace, Soldier in War". The National Guard has essentially been a part of the US military since 1903-- i.e. callable as a military reserve force-- when the state militias were officially nationalized. The difference between the Guard and the actual Reserves is that the Guard can also be called upon by the state authorities. The advantage to the NG over the Reserves is that a Guardsman is less likely to be shipped overseas, as some portion og the Guard must remain behind in case of domestic needs. The NG has been called upon to fight in every single foreign conflict since the spanish-american war. Claims that the guard is being misused are pure ignorance.
deluting - the act of socking a bard in the eye and taking his instrument because his charisma is so high you (being a fighter) can't get any chicks in the pub.
Unlikely. Argentina was essentially the victim of pump-n'-dump by securities firms. Much like the dot com companies of the same era, the country's financial prospects were terrible; but euphoric cheerleading fueled overinvestment in a system that was already doomed to collapse. Come on, they were engaging in "stupid economist tricks" like tying the Argentine peso to the dollar (1 peso = 1 dollar) to curb inflation! The US doesn't have the same pipe-dream economy Argentina had in the 90's.