For the record, you will find that God hates homosexuality but loves the people
According to whom? Certainly not according to the Bible. According to Proverbs 6:16-19, there are six things God hates, and homosexuality is not one of them:
There are six things the LORD hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a man who stirs up dissension among brothers.
That's a really good list.
I tend to think that Leviticus shouldn't be included in Christian canon as it's largely concerned with the Jewish concept of ritual purity which is discarded in Christianity. I went to a good church as a child (although I didn't really believe back then) where the focus was on love and forgiveness and I don't think anyone ever read from Leviticus. In general, I think the idea of pinning down religion to a matter of ritual and binary compliance with a set of procedures is a bad idea and I see Jesus's teachings as railing against that view within the community of his time.
It's nice to see people around here talking about this civilly.
The primary market for the Wall Street Journal is for people who need fodder for business related small talk. It's basically socially entrenched. People read it because people they have business relationships with read it and it's a source of material to talk about.
These people tend to have more money than free-time so plenty of them are willing to pay for easy access from their desktop and Blackberries.
Makes me wonder if youthful rebellion manifests itself in a society like that.
When it does, the Chinese government simply machine guns the trouble makers and the rest fall into line. After all, they have millions of other youths (life is cheap in China) who will tow the party line; especially after the trouble makers, who conveniently gathered themselves together at the same place and time for a protest, are shot.
I agree although I had meant to make a slightly different point. In the US, young people get angry and they tend to express it mostly with things like petty vandalism. It's a nuisance, but it isn't a huge problem. In China, there's this huge social pressure to not step out of line like that, so I'm wondering if ordinary youthful anger gets channeled into the more socially accepted statism. They feel the need to be aggressive toward something so they accuse their state of being too soft and lash out at countries they view as enemies.
What determines the price of a scale is not just its equipment or accuracy.. but also the insurance the manufacturer has to carry in case something goes wrong. That's why medical devices are more expensive... you're also paying for the liability of somebody being misdiagnosed by a technical malfunction. Highly unlikely, but the money that has to be paid when that happens and gets proven is huge.
The ideal solution to that would be for a company to get a special development license where they agree to indemnify Nintendo against medical liability for the use of the device and they write the software while making use of Nintendo's hardware.
The software would likely still carry a heavy price tag for the testing and insurance cost, but it would be much cheaper than the $18,000 which includes likely includes large fixed development costs spread over a smaller number of units.
In general I find that the quality of a data set tends to be determined by the number (and quality) of man hours that go into maintaining it. Every database accumulates spurious entries and if they aren't removed the data loses it's integrity.
I'm very skeptical of the idea that this thing is going to keep taking input forever and accumulate a usable data set unless an army of student labor is press-ganged to prune it.
However, you are correct that the problem was that EVERYBODY was acting stupid.
Fundamentally, the Fed was forcing everybody to act stupid. Central banking works by artificially changing rates outside actual market rate. That the function by which the Fed can dictate that, either you "invest" (speculate), or your money gets eaten by inflation (the actual which has little to do with normally reported numbers).
The thing is, it's not that investors are insulated from investment decisions, it's that they have no control over the game either way. They, or their representatives, do what they're told, invest in whatever bubble the Fed blows, or they get reamed anyway by funding the bill for the crash. There may not be an educated choice to make, everyone may know that it's a bubble that's gonna crash, but either you're in on it, or your money gets depreciated anyway.
Credit rating agencies used models which did not take into account the possibility of a collapse in housing prices and assigned subprime CDOs AAA ratings based on these models.
Banks, insurance companies, pension funds, and other institutional investors took notice that these CDOs were having higher return than other AAA rated securities. Many of these institutions have investment policies requiring them to keep a certain percentage of their portfolio invested in AAA rated securities, so these CDOs were incredibly tempting because they could make a higher return on what would have otherwise been for the most part parked money.
The CDOs are structured so that when a lender sells a mortgage to a CDO, they retain a portion of the monthly payments to cover administrative expenses such as monthly billing. As a result, for each loan they make they get money up front, a monthly revenue stream, and no risk. This creates an overwhelming incentive to make more loans.
A lot of people who wanted to believe they could own a home met up with a lot of lenders who did not care if they could or not.
None of these screwups are the Fed's fault. Now that doesn't mean the Fed is blameless, but I have to think that if the rating's agencies didn't rumberstamp a AAA on this shit, or if the CDOs were structured so that the issuing lender was responsible for some portion of the shortfall between foreclosure auction price and the original price of the loan, we wouldn't be in this mess.
That limit ignores all practical computational concerns.
For example, a machine with a high level of computation density will be highly susceptible to outside interference. The slightest molestation of a single molecule will alter the results.
As such, to get close to that limit you would have to spend a vast amount of energy protecting and repairing the structure of your computer.
I'll admit that your point has made me think a bit more about what I've said and so I'll rephrase it. I think that the human brain is cost-effective in terms of providing a robust computation infrastructure with a system for self-maintenance for a reasonable energy cost. In general, the more sophisticated you become, the more you have to spend on maintenance and organizational problems.
I'm very skeptical that there's going to be an AI singularity at all.
There are physical constraints on computation density. There's going to be an upper limit on how much computation you can do within a given volume within a given amount of time without it's own waste heat destroying it.
And just increasing the volume doesn't fix everything. Just as the ratio of surface area to volume makes very large single celled organisms less efficient, I/O is limited by the same relationship.
Furthermore, there's no evidence that an artificial genius will be any less temperamental than a human genius. The price of leaps of insight is the possibility of false inferences and even very intelligent people can find ways to continue to believe in mistaken ideas.
And I don't think you can sidestep the problems with human intelligence by just making machines that think in a different way. The problems with human intelligence result from the inherent difficulty in predicting future events based on historical data. Essentially, there are a lot of problem types which you can only ever estimate answers for and the inherent trade offs between, for example, computation time and the level of accuracy of the solution are inescapable.
I don't think that we should sell short the value of human ingenuity in general purpose problem solving. I think that the human brain may be closer to the limits of having to make those difficult inherent trade offs between accuracy and computation time than we might hope.
I will say that there is some hope for enhanced progress through machine-human integration. Our strength in general purpose computation can definitely be supplemented by the computer's more narrow skills in number crunching and communications. I know that at my job that I spend most of my day dicking around with spreadsheets and a calculator and a neural interface to those things could greatly enhance my performance.
"Nineteen year old Dmitriy Guzner, Anonymous member and Scientology DDoS attacker, received one year and one day in jail for his admitted crime. His sentence could have been a maximum ten years. According to the Church of Scientology, Anonymous has harassed and attacked them with '8,139 threatening phone calls, 3.6 million e-mails, 141 million hits on its website, ten acts of vandalism against its property, 22 bomb threats, and eight death threats against Church leaders.'"
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. --Friedrich Nietzsche
My great grandfather was a heavy industrial plumber (doing plumbing work on large building construction) and he was said to have been able to intuitively understand every detail of a building plan despite having a third grade education.
However, there was a rational explanation for this. He could "just work out in his head how it had to be laid out." I'm guessing that basically that meant that most of the minutia of a building plan follow logically from the general layout.
I'd say a reasonable explanation for your grandfather's ability to find pipes is that he was able to subconsciously understand the patterns in the building layouts even if he couldn't rationally account for how he found the pipes.
The discussion at hand has been going back and forth between people saying not to underestimate the value of something that already works and people providing examples of hobbyists putting together things that work fairly well on their own.
My intention was to show that the example of Linux really supports the former camp. By building Linux on top of an established system, Linus was able to avoid the trouble (or rather, postpone the trouble) of designing his kernel's various interfaces to hardware and other software and focus on the more manageable problem of implementing that interface.
What he did was a great achievement for a CS undergrad, but it's not on the same scale as writing an OS from scratch.
So returning to the original topic, even if all of the knowledge needed to design a guided missile is public knowledge, it takes a great deal of planning to actually consolidate that knowledge into a design. That design work is greatly reduced when you can work by making modifications to an established design.
I used to think of humanity as starting with the cultures that left written records and monuments. But all of these records are filled with references to things that are far older.
You have to think that in the span between Australopithecus and the advent of permanent records, an awful lot of interesting things must have happened and there's no way of knowing exactly how much of it was preserved.
Since the two populations remained distinct, I agree that it's unlikely that they could generally reproduce with each other. My understanding is that speciation occurs when there's enough genetic distance between two populations that they generally can't reproduce with each other and as such, cannot recombine into a single population. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that there can't occasionally be pairs of individuals between the two populations that can produce offspring that are viable to breed in one of the populations.
All it would take would be one fertile sapienderthal to pass on a few of the other populations' genes. I'd imagine that most of the superficial genes would be bred out within a few generations, but any useful ones might stick around.
Couldn't disagree more. Unfortunately, enforcing training and reading manuals would probably have little effect. In my 10+ years doing usability for missile systems, you have to build in the mechanisms to keep the users from doing bad things. Even if you force the user to read the *entire manual* before each use, people still have bad days, hangovers, fights with significant others. It has to be designed in.
The story behind Murphy's Law is pretty interesting and it ties in with this design philosophy.
Basically the story is that a technician incorrectly installed force sensors and in response, Murphy got pissed off and said "If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will."
However, other people adapted that statement into "If anything can go wrong, it will," expressing the idea that if a system does not mechanically exclude the possibility of human error, human error can be expected to occur. This makes accounting for human error a design constraint.
they did eventually return the money, minus a fine.
YOU HAVE PAID TOO MUCH MONEY. YOU ARE NOW ASSESSED A $500 FINE.
Alternatively:
Pay too much money? That's a paddlin'.
I can actually see the justification in that. You've got to figure that some desk jockey is going to have to spend some time investigating your claim that you've mistakenly paid taxes and then at least two higher tier desk jockeys will have to sign off on it. If they didn't fine you for wasting their time then the extra personnel costs for investigating one-off cases would fall on their own tax payers.
Well there are ways to deal with that as well. Tomorrow, my office is being, "peer reviewed". Or rather, it's being audited by people from another office. And if the audit finds bad things, people in my office get a smaller portion of the profit sharing funds.
Needless to say, we've made sure we have our shit together.
The "we can't show a budget surplus or they'll cut our budget for next year" problem turns up everywhere to some extent.
I'd imagine that you could reduce that problem if you allowed some portion of the surplus to be converted to pay for the employees. In order to make these problems go away, you have to create some sort of system where everyone has a vested interest in the well-being of the organization as a whole.
I agree with that and I was considering stretching it back that far in my post. But I think that may be stretching the scope of the class a bit too far. I wavered a bit in whether or not to go back as far as Don Quixote.
I think you can draw the line at Swift and Voltaire for the point where the idea of using a fictional society as a vehicle of contemporary social criticism began. There are of course many examples of earlier texts describing societies that never existed, but these were presented as legends. They were things purported to have at least some grain of historicity to them (even if they really were completely fabricated).
From that perspective I think you can tie the development of sci-fi and fantasy as we know them to the development of the modern novel (which is why I ended up mentioning Don Quixote as well).
Students will survey the histories of these genres and recognize how world events have been reflected onto other worlds. From the early formation of the genre, with Verne, and the classics of Clarke, Tolkien, Bradbury, and LeGuin, to the contemporary works of Card, Jordan, and Vinge, the genres have been about portraying humanity in possible scenarios.
There's also Swift's Gulliver's Travels which has sci-fi/fantasy elements to it.
Both of these stories are heirs to the tradition started by Don Quixote, which really planted the seed of exploring characters and society under abnormal pretenses, which is the heart of sci-fi and fantasy.
Slashdot Mirror
For the record, you will find that God hates homosexuality but loves the people
According to whom? Certainly not according to the Bible. According to Proverbs 6:16-19, there are six things God hates, and homosexuality is not one of them:
There are six things the LORD hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a man who stirs up dissension among brothers.
That's a really good list.
I tend to think that Leviticus shouldn't be included in Christian canon as it's largely concerned with the Jewish concept of ritual purity which is discarded in Christianity. I went to a good church as a child (although I didn't really believe back then) where the focus was on love and forgiveness and I don't think anyone ever read from Leviticus. In general, I think the idea of pinning down religion to a matter of ritual and binary compliance with a set of procedures is a bad idea and I see Jesus's teachings as railing against that view within the community of his time.
It's nice to see people around here talking about this civilly.
The primary market for the Wall Street Journal is for people who need fodder for business related small talk. It's basically socially entrenched. People read it because people they have business relationships with read it and it's a source of material to talk about.
These people tend to have more money than free-time so plenty of them are willing to pay for easy access from their desktop and Blackberries.
Makes me wonder if youthful rebellion manifests itself in a society like that.
When it does, the Chinese government simply machine guns the trouble makers and the rest fall into line. After all, they have millions of other youths (life is cheap in China) who will tow the party line; especially after the trouble makers, who conveniently gathered themselves together at the same place and time for a protest, are shot.
I agree although I had meant to make a slightly different point. In the US, young people get angry and they tend to express it mostly with things like petty vandalism. It's a nuisance, but it isn't a huge problem. In China, there's this huge social pressure to not step out of line like that, so I'm wondering if ordinary youthful anger gets channeled into the more socially accepted statism. They feel the need to be aggressive toward something so they accuse their state of being too soft and lash out at countries they view as enemies.
What determines the price of a scale is not just its equipment or accuracy.. but also the insurance the manufacturer has to carry in case something goes wrong. That's why medical devices are more expensive... you're also paying for the liability of somebody being misdiagnosed by a technical malfunction. Highly unlikely, but the money that has to be paid when that happens and gets proven is huge.
The ideal solution to that would be for a company to get a special development license where they agree to indemnify Nintendo against medical liability for the use of the device and they write the software while making use of Nintendo's hardware.
The software would likely still carry a heavy price tag for the testing and insurance cost, but it would be much cheaper than the $18,000 which includes likely includes large fixed development costs spread over a smaller number of units.
It's probably these guys.
Kind of a weird phenomenon. Makes me wonder if youthful rebellion manifests itself oddly in a society like that.
oops
It's probably these guys.
Kind of a weird phenomenon. Makes me wonder if youthful rebellion manifests itself in a society like that.
In general I find that the quality of a data set tends to be determined by the number (and quality) of man hours that go into maintaining it. Every database accumulates spurious entries and if they aren't removed the data loses it's integrity.
I'm very skeptical of the idea that this thing is going to keep taking input forever and accumulate a usable data set unless an army of student labor is press-ganged to prune it.
What the crap, man?
However, you are correct that the problem was that EVERYBODY was acting stupid.
Fundamentally, the Fed was forcing everybody to act stupid. Central banking works by artificially changing rates outside actual market rate. That the function by which the Fed can dictate that, either you "invest" (speculate), or your money gets eaten by inflation (the actual which has little to do with normally reported numbers).
The thing is, it's not that investors are insulated from investment decisions, it's that they have no control over the game either way. They, or their representatives, do what they're told, invest in whatever bubble the Fed blows, or they get reamed anyway by funding the bill for the crash. There may not be an educated choice to make, everyone may know that it's a bubble that's gonna crash, but either you're in on it, or your money gets depreciated anyway.
None of these screwups are the Fed's fault. Now that doesn't mean the Fed is blameless, but I have to think that if the rating's agencies didn't rumberstamp a AAA on this shit, or if the CDOs were structured so that the issuing lender was responsible for some portion of the shortfall between foreclosure auction price and the original price of the loan, we wouldn't be in this mess.
Each bacterium in the colony communicates via chemical messages and performs a sophisticated decision making process...
I'm sorry, but that stretches the meaning of "sophisticated" and "decision" beyond all reason.
One might just as well argue that water flowing down hill has made a sophisticated decision.
In the same sense that a neuron in your brain isn't "thinking" when it does or doesn't fire.
That limit ignores all practical computational concerns.
For example, a machine with a high level of computation density will be highly susceptible to outside interference. The slightest molestation of a single molecule will alter the results.
As such, to get close to that limit you would have to spend a vast amount of energy protecting and repairing the structure of your computer.
I'll admit that your point has made me think a bit more about what I've said and so I'll rephrase it. I think that the human brain is cost-effective in terms of providing a robust computation infrastructure with a system for self-maintenance for a reasonable energy cost. In general, the more sophisticated you become, the more you have to spend on maintenance and organizational problems.
I'm very skeptical that there's going to be an AI singularity at all.
There are physical constraints on computation density. There's going to be an upper limit on how much computation you can do within a given volume within a given amount of time without it's own waste heat destroying it.
And just increasing the volume doesn't fix everything. Just as the ratio of surface area to volume makes very large single celled organisms less efficient, I/O is limited by the same relationship.
Furthermore, there's no evidence that an artificial genius will be any less temperamental than a human genius. The price of leaps of insight is the possibility of false inferences and even very intelligent people can find ways to continue to believe in mistaken ideas.
And I don't think you can sidestep the problems with human intelligence by just making machines that think in a different way. The problems with human intelligence result from the inherent difficulty in predicting future events based on historical data. Essentially, there are a lot of problem types which you can only ever estimate answers for and the inherent trade offs between, for example, computation time and the level of accuracy of the solution are inescapable.
I don't think that we should sell short the value of human ingenuity in general purpose problem solving. I think that the human brain may be closer to the limits of having to make those difficult inherent trade offs between accuracy and computation time than we might hope.
I will say that there is some hope for enhanced progress through machine-human integration. Our strength in general purpose computation can definitely be supplemented by the computer's more narrow skills in number crunching and communications. I know that at my job that I spend most of my day dicking around with spreadsheets and a calculator and a neural interface to those things could greatly enhance my performance.
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.
--Friedrich Nietzsche
My great grandfather was a heavy industrial plumber (doing plumbing work on large building construction) and he was said to have been able to intuitively understand every detail of a building plan despite having a third grade education.
However, there was a rational explanation for this. He could "just work out in his head how it had to be laid out." I'm guessing that basically that meant that most of the minutia of a building plan follow logically from the general layout.
I'd say a reasonable explanation for your grandfather's ability to find pipes is that he was able to subconsciously understand the patterns in the building layouts even if he couldn't rationally account for how he found the pipes.
If the power grid isn't sophisticated enough to detect that I've modified my power meter then modifying my power meter isn't fraud.
The discussion at hand has been going back and forth between people saying not to underestimate the value of something that already works and people providing examples of hobbyists putting together things that work fairly well on their own.
My intention was to show that the example of Linux really supports the former camp. By building Linux on top of an established system, Linus was able to avoid the trouble (or rather, postpone the trouble) of designing his kernel's various interfaces to hardware and other software and focus on the more manageable problem of implementing that interface.
What he did was a great achievement for a CS undergrad, but it's not on the same scale as writing an OS from scratch.
So returning to the original topic, even if all of the knowledge needed to design a guided missile is public knowledge, it takes a great deal of planning to actually consolidate that knowledge into a design. That design work is greatly reduced when you can work by making modifications to an established design.
Yes and he wrote Linux by replacing pieces of an already working system (Minix) with his own code.
It's an interesting thought.
I used to think of humanity as starting with the cultures that left written records and monuments. But all of these records are filled with references to things that are far older.
You have to think that in the span between Australopithecus and the advent of permanent records, an awful lot of interesting things must have happened and there's no way of knowing exactly how much of it was preserved.
Since the two populations remained distinct, I agree that it's unlikely that they could generally reproduce with each other. My understanding is that speciation occurs when there's enough genetic distance between two populations that they generally can't reproduce with each other and as such, cannot recombine into a single population. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that there can't occasionally be pairs of individuals between the two populations that can produce offspring that are viable to breed in one of the populations.
All it would take would be one fertile sapienderthal to pass on a few of the other populations' genes. I'd imagine that most of the superficial genes would be bred out within a few generations, but any useful ones might stick around.
Couldn't disagree more. Unfortunately, enforcing training and reading manuals would probably have little effect. In my 10+ years doing usability for missile systems, you have to build in the mechanisms to keep the users from doing bad things. Even if you force the user to read the *entire manual* before each use, people still have bad days, hangovers, fights with significant others. It has to be designed in.
The story behind Murphy's Law is pretty interesting and it ties in with this design philosophy.
Basically the story is that a technician incorrectly installed force sensors and in response, Murphy got pissed off and said "If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will."
However, other people adapted that statement into "If anything can go wrong, it will," expressing the idea that if a system does not mechanically exclude the possibility of human error, human error can be expected to occur. This makes accounting for human error a design constraint.
they did eventually return the money, minus a fine.
YOU HAVE PAID TOO MUCH MONEY.
YOU ARE NOW ASSESSED A $500 FINE.
Alternatively:
Pay too much money?
That's a paddlin'.
I can actually see the justification in that. You've got to figure that some desk jockey is going to have to spend some time investigating your claim that you've mistakenly paid taxes and then at least two higher tier desk jockeys will have to sign off on it. If they didn't fine you for wasting their time then the extra personnel costs for investigating one-off cases would fall on their own tax payers.
Well there are ways to deal with that as well. Tomorrow, my office is being, "peer reviewed". Or rather, it's being audited by people from another office. And if the audit finds bad things, people in my office get a smaller portion of the profit sharing funds.
Needless to say, we've made sure we have our shit together.
The "we can't show a budget surplus or they'll cut our budget for next year" problem turns up everywhere to some extent.
I'd imagine that you could reduce that problem if you allowed some portion of the surplus to be converted to pay for the employees. In order to make these problems go away, you have to create some sort of system where everyone has a vested interest in the well-being of the organization as a whole.
I agree with that and I was considering stretching it back that far in my post. But I think that may be stretching the scope of the class a bit too far. I wavered a bit in whether or not to go back as far as Don Quixote.
I think you can draw the line at Swift and Voltaire for the point where the idea of using a fictional society as a vehicle of contemporary social criticism began. There are of course many examples of earlier texts describing societies that never existed, but these were presented as legends. They were things purported to have at least some grain of historicity to them (even if they really were completely fabricated).
From that perspective I think you can tie the development of sci-fi and fantasy as we know them to the development of the modern novel (which is why I ended up mentioning Don Quixote as well).
The earliest science fiction story I'm aware of is Voltaire's Micromégas. It's a story of a traveler from a planet orbiting Sirius who uses a vessel which uses the attractive and repulsive forces of the universe to sling itself from system to system. He comes to visit Saturn, where the inhabitants are dwarves to him, and then to Earth, where the inhabitants are microscopic to him.
There's also Swift's Gulliver's Travels which has sci-fi/fantasy elements to it.
Both of these stories are heirs to the tradition started by Don Quixote, which really planted the seed of exploring characters and society under abnormal pretenses, which is the heart of sci-fi and fantasy.