After seeing it, I just have a couple of concerns:
1) Nobody's eyes are anywhere near big enough. An anime character's eyes should occupy at least half of the surface area of their face, and quiver dramatically in moments of tension.
2) Will there be enough tendrils? It doesn't count as anime unless something (preferably an entire city) gets consumed by a pulsating mass of tendrils.
They did institute a new rule that the Simpsons, or any other non-news show on Fox, could not use an onscreen information scroll lest the audience become confused and think it was actual news.
Aren't they afraid that the Fox news ticker itself might cause confusion and be mistaken for actual news?
Given the "estimate" pricing (whatever that means, in the context of eBay) of US$1500-2500, that had better include Erin Gray herself, or a close look-alike.
The main issue isn't (or shouldn't be) about classifying this guy's thesis. The issue is why all this imformation was so freely availble in the first place and whether power companies, telecoms, etc. should look at restricting access to certain types of data.
Amen, brother! (Never thought I'd say that to someone called "SirWhoopass".) The funniest thing in the article was this line:
And when they presented them at a forum of chief information officers of the country's largest financial services companies -- clicking on a single cable running into a Manhattan office, for example, and revealing the names of 25 telecommunications providers -- the executives suggested that Gorman and Schintler not be allowed to leave the building with the laptop.
Right, because there's no way that information could survive the confiscation of his laptop, is there? Did these guys have pointy hair, by any chance?
Oh, they mean electronic soft walls. I was all geared up to read about giant foam walls waiting to be set up around American cities. "Of course they're hack-proof," I thought, "why wouldn't they be? Who can hack foam?"
If you look carefully, you'll note that they use inches and millimeters that are specifically optimized for the Iwill, thus making it appear smaller and lighter than it really is. When will the manufacturers learn that this kind of "cheating" in mass and volume benchmarks isn't really fooling anyone.
Please read this article which clarifies many of the misconceptions about the RIAA's position on fair usage. I think some of you will be very surprised (I know I was).
I agree that there's often too much hysteria and name-calling (in both directions), but you gotta admit, the RIAA can be pretty nutty at times. From the first paragraph of that article you cited:
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued four students on April 3 for allegedly operating music-sharing Web sites, accusing them of enabling large-scale copyright theft. Although the RIAA initially asked for $98 billion in damages, it settled the case on May 1, with the four students paying fines ranging from $12,000 to $17,500.
$98 billion?! I thought that must be a misprint, but this article says:
The RIAA is seeking damages of $150,000 per song traded on the networks. While it is impossible to accurately quantify how many songs are swapped among users, the RIAA's lawyers are expected to argue that millions of copyrighted songs have been downloaded and shared on the offending networks.
So maybe that wasn't a misprint, after all: Millions of songs times $150K each = hundreds of billions of dollars. Jeez. Whatever their stance on fair use, their impression of the damage caused by file copying is insane.
It then taps the brake and tightens the seatbelt...If the driver fails to respond, the system kicks in and brakes more while also tightening the seat belt. Unfortunately, Japanese regulations don't allow for the system to fully stop the vehicle."
But fortunately there is a loophole in the regulations, allowing them to gradually strangle the driver with his seatbelt until he stops the vehicle on his own.
OK, please ignore my post in the main story thread. The above is the correct joke. Hats off to PseudoThink!
Not to sound like a nihilistic hedonist, but... there is no lasting value in life. In due time, we will all die. The only lasting value in life is the joy we derive from life; our only real duty in life is to increase the amount of joy experienced by others.
Wow, what would you have written if you did want to sound like a nihilistic hedonist?
"Are there theoretical, political or economic reasons it couldn't work?"
Uhhhh, as long as the equipment to transmit wirelessly and the electricity to power out isn't free (not counting the multitude of people to roll it out and support it), you're always going to be paying something. Hard to believe that a question devoid of basic Economics 101 would appear on Slashdot.
I'm not sure eraserwind is suggesting that it be free, just subscriptionless. The line "Remember there is no subscriptions, so don't expect to piggy-back on someone's paid for DSL bandwidth," grammatical issues aside, implies that he/she is thinking of a model whereby you'd pay for bandwidth used. Or something. I think.
"It surprises the hell out of me that he's married."
Most anyone who's been married for more than 5 years wouldn't be that surprised.
Touche'. I guess I was just thinking that his wife would have to be crazy to hook up with someone with this lifestyle, but you're quite right that they may have met long before all this. Love, loyalty . . . Maybe she's a saint. Maybe money's not important to them. Maybe it's none of my business.
How are we to make a distinction between a hardcore gamer, and an addict? It seems to be a pretty fine line.
Or, indeed, how are we to distinguish between a hardcore gamer and a dropout? Because that's what the article says to me about this guy: he just wants to drop out of society. In another decade, he might have moved to a commune and taken a lot of drugs. Instead, he spends all of his time in a simulated world, with much the same effect: he's effectively withdrawn from society. Fair enough, but we should bear in mind that this is not representative of the vast majority of gamers, in terms of either their behaviour or their motivations for playing games.
It surprises the hell out of me that he's married.
The series was shit. Tacky, dated, sci-fi at its' worst - with the opening premise ripped off from Clarke's "Childhood's End", and everything going downhill from there. "Original" only to people who can't read.
Ah, but it featured alien babes in tight costumes, and many of us were 13-year-old boys at the time. Sure, snug alien costume technology wasn't as advanced then as it has since become (Seven of Nine, anyone?), but Wonder Woman had gone off the air years before and we were grateful for what we could get.
We needed something to take our minds off walking to school barefoot through the snow, uphill both ways. To echo many other posters: Thank you, Slashdot, for making me feel like I'm one short step away from senility.
IMHO, both good penmanship and the ability to tie a bow knot are destined for obsolescence. They're simply not needed by the majority of our society any more. This isn't necessarily a bad thing! How many of you can churn butter? Tie knots other than bow knots, and know which to use when? Whittle? Perform basic carpentry, or masonry? Care for and ride a horse? Tan leather?
Tons of skills which used to be part of everyday life have fallen into disuse, simply because most people don't need to do them any more. And tons of new skills are aquired to fit the new needs. It's called progress.
I am sometimes worried by the fragility implied by the fact that almost nobody in modern Western civilization knows how to do anything with actual material objects. In the event of some catastrophe, we're going to have a hell of a time recovering. Actually, there are those who have speculated that we may reach (or perhaps have already reached) a point at which it would be impossible to recover a modern industrial civilization if ever we were to lose it. The argument is that all the easily accessible fuels, metals, etc. are gone (or will be), so that getting more of such things requires industrial machinery.
I don't know if this is true, but I've always found it interesting. However, the collapse of civilization will not be brought about by bad penmanship in our youth, so at least we can relax on that front.
The fact that most kids can't do division or multiplication without a calculator, on the other hand, is definitely one of the signs of the end . ..
Snicker all you want, bittorrent kicks the/. effect on its head. I just grabbed the whole file in under 15 minutes, dl rates (on cable modem) peaked around 160kb. It blows my mind how good of an idea Bt is.
Hey, this wouldn't be a legitimate use of file sharing, would it? Gee, I thought file sharing was only used for criminal and piratical purposes. At least, that's what the various *AAs say, and why would they lie?
Seriously, this sort of thing is going to be great for distributing films/music/software that people want to get out there quickly. I just hope the whole idea isn't legislated into oblivion because you might use it to transfer copyrighted material.
C'mon, he must be right, he's got equations and everything.
Oh, but wait . . . The quantities in the equations are completely made up and meaningless. So, let me rephrase my earlier assessment: This is complete hookum. Because the number of hypothetical "ancestor simulations" is large compared to the number of actual developing civilizations, we are "almost certain" to be in a simulation rather than real? Huh?
Let me present an alternative, equally plausible hypothesis: The entire universe is being run by tiny, invisible pixies, who implement all the laws of physics by grabbing things and moving them around in exactly the right way when we perturb our environment. (Why they do this is unknown.) Unfortunately, there is no empirical test that can distinguish between this situation and one in which the laws of physics arise just because of the way real particles interact.
Let's all just agree to pretend that we're not living in pixie-world or The Matrix, OK? It makes no difference, anyway, and it's a whole lot simpler. And if you want to kill your neighbour or your boss, you can't console yourself that they were just simulated anyway.
A human player has to anticipate the shot, because their reaction time is limited. The robot's reaction time is only limited by the technology used. If 50fps isn't fast enough, optimize your code, get faster hardware, and bump it up to 100fps.
I really hope "fps" means "fooses per second", here. If not, it really should.
(Please, for the love of Buddha, do not respond telling me what "fps" actually stands for. Go lie down until the impulse goes away.)
Supervised learning basically works like this. Feed the engine with multiple examples (in this case, e-mails) with labels (in this case, "spam" or "not spam"). The training usually takes thousands of examples to get good enough accuracy. And take note that we need both "spam" and "not spam" examples to enable the learning engine to distinguish them.
Thank you for the additional detail! What I wonder is this: would it be useful for people to be able to somehow pool their examples? The number of spam messages I receive is relatively small, so it presumably will take a while for Mozilla (my favourite Bayesian-filtering mail client) to learn to filter them, but I could share the learning process with friends, perhaps we could eliminate all of the classes of spam that any of us had received.
(Though in fact I've been amazed at how quickly Mozilla has become incredibly accurate. They must have fed it a bunch of examples before I started using it, no? The very first time "Farm Girl Sluts" appeared, it correctly marked it as junk.)
Re:This is why Human Interface Design is important
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
There's another problem. Quote from the ScienceNews article:
Assuming that each amount of change between 0 and 499 cents is equally likely, Shallit's calculations show that the average cost of making change would fall from 5.90 to 4.58 coins per transaction with the addition of an 83-cent coin.
That's a pretty big assumption, isn't it? I'd assume that amounts of change would cluster around certain values. That was one thing that caught my interest, so I went to look at the article to find out how they evaluated that effect. Answer: apparently they didn't.
To be fair, it's quite possible -- even probable -- that the original article was a light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek sort of piece, and that the author has been horrified to see it turned into a serious suggestion about actually changing the denominations of coins.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more likely this seems. From TMI's site: "The Mathematical Intelligencer encourages authors to write in a relaxed, expository style and to include pictures and other graphics with articles. Opinion, mathematics, and historical comments can (and often should) be intermingled to make lively reading. Humor and controversy are welcome." So it was probably just a goofy abstract problem, written for entertainment value, not "serious" research. So I take it all back: let's give the guy a break, smile quietly, and move on.
"A scenario could be imagined where an attacker would do this to delay the arrival of an important letter, to wreak havoc on the postal system for political reasons, or even worse, to serve as a diversion for a terrorist act, such as the mailing of a contaminated letter,"
Pure FUD and crap.
Oops, I'm sorry . . . They've invoked the T-word ("terrorist"), so you are no longer allowed to express any doubts, reservations, or hesitation. Your Patriotic Duty(TM) is to wave a flag and go along with whatever they say. If you're not one of Us, you're one of Them.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in the computer chair business, and I predict that computer hardware and software will *both* be free, and the only charge will be for the chairs.
Guys, that's gonna be great . . .
After seeing it, I just have a couple of concerns:
1) Nobody's eyes are anywhere near big enough. An anime character's eyes should occupy at least half of the surface area of their face, and quiver dramatically in moments of tension.
2) Will there be enough tendrils? It doesn't count as anime unless something (preferably an entire city) gets consumed by a pulsating mass of tendrils.
They did institute a new rule that the Simpsons, or any other non-news show on Fox, could not use an onscreen information scroll lest the audience become confused and think it was actual news.
Aren't they afraid that the Fox news ticker itself might cause confusion and be mistaken for actual news?
Surely Slashdot can think up better ways to make use of a multimillion dollar room of fully immersive 3D interaction . . .
I started to reach for the keyboard at this point, but then:
. . . besides FPS games?
D'oh! Well, if you're going to add that little proviso, then no, I can't think of anything . . .
Erin Gray's hot spandex pantsuits from the show?
Given the "estimate" pricing (whatever that means, in the context of eBay) of US$1500-2500, that had better include Erin Gray herself, or a close look-alike.
The main issue isn't (or shouldn't be) about classifying this guy's thesis. The issue is why all this imformation was so freely availble in the first place and whether power companies, telecoms, etc. should look at restricting access to certain types of data.
Amen, brother! (Never thought I'd say that to someone called "SirWhoopass".) The funniest thing in the article was this line:
And when they presented them at a forum of chief information officers of the country's largest financial services companies -- clicking on a single cable running into a Manhattan office, for example, and revealing the names of 25 telecommunications providers -- the executives suggested that Gorman and Schintler not be allowed to leave the building with the laptop.
Right, because there's no way that information could survive the confiscation of his laptop, is there? Did these guys have pointy hair, by any chance?
Oh, they mean electronic soft walls. I was all geared up to read about giant foam walls waiting to be set up around American cities. "Of course they're hack-proof," I thought, "why wouldn't they be? Who can hack foam?"
But no.
inches and millimeters ... smaller and lighter ...
Oops: "inches and pounds" or "millimeters and kilograms". Oh, well.
If you look carefully, you'll note that they use inches and millimeters that are specifically optimized for the Iwill, thus making it appear smaller and lighter than it really is. When will the manufacturers learn that this kind of "cheating" in mass and volume benchmarks isn't really fooling anyone.
Please read this article which clarifies many of the misconceptions about the RIAA's position on fair usage. I think some of you will be very surprised (I know I was).
I agree that there's often too much hysteria and name-calling (in both directions), but you gotta admit, the RIAA can be pretty nutty at times. From the first paragraph of that article you cited:
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued four students on April 3 for allegedly operating music-sharing Web sites, accusing them of enabling large-scale copyright theft. Although the RIAA initially asked for $98 billion in damages, it settled the case on May 1, with the four students paying fines ranging from $12,000 to $17,500.
$98 billion?! I thought that must be a misprint, but this article says:
The RIAA is seeking damages of $150,000 per song traded on the networks. While it is impossible to accurately quantify how many songs are swapped among users, the RIAA's lawyers are expected to argue that millions of copyrighted songs have been downloaded and shared on the offending networks.
So maybe that wasn't a misprint, after all: Millions of songs times $150K each = hundreds of billions of dollars. Jeez. Whatever their stance on fair use, their impression of the damage caused by file copying is insane.
It then taps the brake and tightens the seatbelt...If the driver fails to respond, the system kicks in and brakes more while also tightening the seat belt. Unfortunately, Japanese regulations don't allow for the system to fully stop the vehicle."
But fortunately there is a loophole in the regulations, allowing them to gradually strangle the driver with his seatbelt until he stops the vehicle on his own.
OK, please ignore my post in the main story thread. The above is the correct joke. Hats off to PseudoThink!
If the driver fails to respond, the system kicks in and brakes more while also tightening the seat belt.
"Seatbelt . . . too tight . . . got to swerve . . . urk." [ slumps unconscious]
Not to sound like a nihilistic hedonist, but... there is no lasting value in life. In due time, we will all die. The only lasting value in life is the joy we derive from life; our only real duty in life is to increase the amount of joy experienced by others.
Wow, what would you have written if you did want to sound like a nihilistic hedonist?
"Are there theoretical, political or economic reasons it couldn't work?"
Uhhhh, as long as the equipment to transmit wirelessly and the electricity to power out isn't free (not counting the multitude of people to roll it out and support it), you're always going to be paying something. Hard to believe that a question devoid of basic Economics 101 would appear on Slashdot.
I'm not sure eraserwind is suggesting that it be free, just subscriptionless. The line "Remember there is no subscriptions, so don't expect to piggy-back on someone's paid for DSL bandwidth," grammatical issues aside, implies that he/she is thinking of a model whereby you'd pay for bandwidth used. Or something. I think.
"It surprises the hell out of me that he's married."
Most anyone who's been married for more than 5 years wouldn't be that surprised.
Touche'. I guess I was just thinking that his wife would have to be crazy to hook up with someone with this lifestyle, but you're quite right that they may have met long before all this. Love, loyalty . . . Maybe she's a saint. Maybe money's not important to them. Maybe it's none of my business.
How are we to make a distinction between a hardcore gamer, and an addict? It seems to be a pretty fine line.
Or, indeed, how are we to distinguish between a hardcore gamer and a dropout? Because that's what the article says to me about this guy: he just wants to drop out of society. In another decade, he might have moved to a commune and taken a lot of drugs. Instead, he spends all of his time in a simulated world, with much the same effect: he's effectively withdrawn from society. Fair enough, but we should bear in mind that this is not representative of the vast majority of gamers, in terms of either their behaviour or their motivations for playing games.
It surprises the hell out of me that he's married.
The series was shit. Tacky, dated, sci-fi at its' worst - with the opening premise ripped off from Clarke's "Childhood's End", and everything going downhill from there. "Original" only to people who can't read.
Ah, but it featured alien babes in tight costumes, and many of us were 13-year-old boys at the time. Sure, snug alien costume technology wasn't as advanced then as it has since become (Seven of Nine, anyone?), but Wonder Woman had gone off the air years before and we were grateful for what we could get.
We needed something to take our minds off walking to school barefoot through the snow, uphill both ways. To echo many other posters: Thank you, Slashdot, for making me feel like I'm one short step away from senility.
IMHO, both good penmanship and the ability to tie a bow knot are destined for obsolescence. They're simply not needed by the majority of our society any more. This isn't necessarily a bad thing! How many of you can churn butter? Tie knots other than bow knots, and know which to use when? Whittle? Perform basic carpentry, or masonry? Care for and ride a horse? Tan leather?
.
Tons of skills which used to be part of everyday life have fallen into disuse, simply because most people don't need to do them any more. And tons of new skills are aquired to fit the new needs. It's called progress.
I am sometimes worried by the fragility implied by the fact that almost nobody in modern Western civilization knows how to do anything with actual material objects. In the event of some catastrophe, we're going to have a hell of a time recovering. Actually, there are those who have speculated that we may reach (or perhaps have already reached) a point at which it would be impossible to recover a modern industrial civilization if ever we were to lose it. The argument is that all the easily accessible fuels, metals, etc. are gone (or will be), so that getting more of such things requires industrial machinery.
I don't know if this is true, but I've always found it interesting. However, the collapse of civilization will not be brought about by bad penmanship in our youth, so at least we can relax on that front.
The fact that most kids can't do division or multiplication without a calculator, on the other hand, is definitely one of the signs of the end . .
Snicker all you want, bittorrent kicks the /. effect on its head. I just grabbed the whole file in under 15 minutes, dl rates (on cable modem) peaked around 160kb. It blows my mind how good of an idea Bt is.
Hey, this wouldn't be a legitimate use of file sharing, would it? Gee, I thought file sharing was only used for criminal and piratical purposes. At least, that's what the various *AAs say, and why would they lie?
Seriously, this sort of thing is going to be great for distributing films/music/software that people want to get out there quickly. I just hope the whole idea isn't legislated into oblivion because you might use it to transfer copyrighted material.
C'mon, he must be right, he's got equations and everything.
Oh, but wait . . . The quantities in the equations are completely made up and meaningless. So, let me rephrase my earlier assessment: This is complete hookum. Because the number of hypothetical "ancestor simulations" is large compared to the number of actual developing civilizations, we are "almost certain" to be in a simulation rather than real? Huh?
Let me present an alternative, equally plausible hypothesis: The entire universe is being run by tiny, invisible pixies, who implement all the laws of physics by grabbing things and moving them around in exactly the right way when we perturb our environment. (Why they do this is unknown.) Unfortunately, there is no empirical test that can distinguish between this situation and one in which the laws of physics arise just because of the way real particles interact.
Let's all just agree to pretend that we're not living in pixie-world or The Matrix, OK? It makes no difference, anyway, and it's a whole lot simpler. And if you want to kill your neighbour or your boss, you can't console yourself that they were just simulated anyway.
A human player has to anticipate the shot, because their reaction time is limited. The robot's reaction time is only limited by the technology used. If 50fps isn't fast enough, optimize your code, get faster hardware, and bump it up to 100fps.
I really hope "fps" means "fooses per second", here. If not, it really should.
(Please, for the love of Buddha, do not respond telling me what "fps" actually stands for. Go lie down until the impulse goes away.)
Supervised learning basically works like this. Feed the engine with multiple examples (in this case, e-mails) with labels (in this case, "spam" or "not spam"). The training usually takes thousands of examples to get good enough accuracy. And take note that we need both "spam" and "not spam" examples to enable the learning engine to distinguish them.
Thank you for the additional detail! What I wonder is this: would it be useful for people to be able to somehow pool their examples? The number of spam messages I receive is relatively small, so it presumably will take a while for Mozilla (my favourite Bayesian-filtering mail client) to learn to filter them, but I could share the learning process with friends, perhaps we could eliminate all of the classes of spam that any of us had received.
(Though in fact I've been amazed at how quickly Mozilla has become incredibly accurate. They must have fed it a bunch of examples before I started using it, no? The very first time "Farm Girl Sluts" appeared, it correctly marked it as junk.)
There's another problem. Quote from the ScienceNews article:
Assuming that each amount of change between 0 and 499 cents is equally likely, Shallit's calculations show that the average cost of making change would fall from 5.90 to 4.58 coins per transaction with the addition of an 83-cent coin.
That's a pretty big assumption, isn't it? I'd assume that amounts of change would cluster around certain values. That was one thing that caught my interest, so I went to look at the article to find out how they evaluated that effect. Answer: apparently they didn't.
To be fair, it's quite possible -- even probable -- that the original article was a light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek sort of piece, and that the author has been horrified to see it turned into a serious suggestion about actually changing the denominations of coins.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more likely this seems. From TMI's site: "The Mathematical Intelligencer encourages authors to write in a relaxed, expository style and to include pictures and other graphics with articles. Opinion, mathematics, and historical comments can (and often should) be intermingled to make lively reading. Humor and controversy are welcome." So it was probably just a goofy abstract problem, written for entertainment value, not "serious" research. So I take it all back: let's give the guy a break, smile quietly, and move on.
"A scenario could be imagined where an attacker would do this to delay the arrival of an important letter, to wreak havoc on the postal system for political reasons, or even worse, to serve as a diversion for a terrorist act, such as the mailing of a contaminated letter,"
Pure FUD and crap.
Oops, I'm sorry . . . They've invoked the T-word ("terrorist"), so you are no longer allowed to express any doubts, reservations, or hesitation. Your Patriotic Duty(TM) is to wave a flag and go along with whatever they say. If you're not one of Us, you're one of Them.
Is it April 1 again already?