>The universe is still young by cosmological scales. Why do they assume that extraterrestrial life has to be zipping around the universe building Dyson spheres and shit? How do they know that there isn't life elsewhere that is less advanced than us, as advanced as us or more advanced but not starfaring?
Because our sun is pretty young by the standards of similarly metal-rich stars, and life appears to have started on this planet pretty much as soon as liquid water was able to exist on the surface, suggesting that the odds of life forming are very high. Unless we assume there was something very special about the inert rocks here (and it's generally considered poor science to assume we're in an unusual part of the universe), that in turn suggests that a similar process probably occurred around many other similarly metal-rich stars a billion of years before our planet existed. Even assuming life started on one of the other planets and migrated here via early-system impacts doesn't extend the timeline much (and if life migrated here from another star then it boosts the odds that the same thing happened to other stars as well)
And, given a billion-year head start, even one expansive space-faring species has had enough time to colonize the entire galaxy several times over by now. The fact that we see no evidence of that suggests that either we don't know how to look, or that in all that time not one species has arisen that is at all inclined to leave its home planet. Because once a species is firmly established in space, and thus has all the technology necessary for (slow) interstellar travel, and the proven inclination to expand beyond their world into artificial environments, it seems almost inevitable that some group will eventually head for another star - either for the uncontested riches waiting there, or to get away from a stellar civilization they find unpleasant, or even just out of curiosity.
In nutritional science pork, like wild board, is a red meat - something about being richer in myoglobin than white meat in poultry or fish. Maybe related? But why would primates be different? I've heard we're very biochemically similar to pigs.
At any rate there's obviously only one solution - bushmeat being as difficult to get as it is, your friend will ultimately have no choice but to turn to cannibalism. My condolences to your family.
You've cracked it, right there. There is no "lone star tick induced meat allergy" - it's just a convenient cover story to allow people to survive being vegetarian in Texas.:-D
>Not sure I know enough about how that works to understand why less data would mean more false positives. More training data means it needs to learn to recognize more subtle distinctions to be able to correctly identify an image. Without that subtly it will tend to overlook the differences and misidentify images.
It's actually very similar to the "X all look alike to me" effect. Let's take an extreme example: Imagine you live somewhere where pretty much everyone is white. You've only ever seen a handful of black people in your life, and Fred is the only black guy you personally know. Cool guy - you like him, grab beers after work, etc. And since we identify people by recognizing the differences between them and everyone else, "dark skin", "wide nose", "full lips", etc. are some of the big features you use to identify Fred. And why not? Nobody else you encounter has those features, so they really stand out to identify him from everyone else you see.
Then one day you're walking down the hall and see a black guy coming your way - similar build to Fred, with the same dark skin, wide nose, full lips, etc. And so you identify him as Fred, ask him how his project is going, and if he wants to grab a beer after work. And a totally confused Steve tries to figure out why the hell some complete stranger is acting like an old friend. Then Fred walks up, and seeing them stand side by side you start noticing the differences you didn't see initially - Fred has way more wrinkles around his eyes, Steve's cheeks are considerably rounder, etc. And, with a bit of practice you get good at telling them apart. Then you go to a conference where almost everyone is black - and once again you keep losing track of Fred, because there's a sea of faces around you, all bearing features superficially similar to Fred's, and you've really only learned to identify the small subset of obvious differences between Fred and Steve. You'll get better at it eventually, but in the meantime you just haven't yet recognized enough of the normal range of variance to make a clear distinction even between not-all-that-similar-looking people that share the same obvious features.
>So I can wipe someone's phone without their consent? Is this a feature or a bug? A feature, obviously. That's what lets you repair a hopelessly borked device.
Physical access to the device voids virtually all security on any electronic device - the best you can hope for is to keep the new owner from accessing existing data on the device (which Apple does fairly well). Guess what - anyone with physical access to your laptop, desktop, flash drive, phone, tablet, etc. can do the exact same thing, and do so far more quickly and easily than by attempting to log in with an invalid password several times over the course of a few hours.
Does the London Tube actually completely lift off from the rails at some point? That seems like it would extremely bad design, and absolutely required to call it "flight", though I suppose any mag-lev train would qualify.
But to honestly call it suborbital flight you need to leave the atmosphere. Though I suppose you could argue that the normal term is suborbital spaceflight, and by using a non-standard term you can define it to mean whatever you want.
More by unwieldy shape, and the fact that they tend to rapidly settle to the very bottom of any pocket or bag, and then remain there until used to open a lock. Unlike phones which tend to be removed every few minutes by many people, and then be re-inserted while sitting down so that they occupy a far more precarious position.
(Whether people who use their phone at the movies deserve to be locked out of their car for their crimes is a separate issue)
Doesn't have to happen regularly to be a problem. Can you honestly tell me that you've NEVER had your phone get lost, broken, or run out of power? I can honestly say I've never lost or broken a key on my keyring.
>2. Err this is a solved problem and has been since the dawn of encryption. Solved yes - whether the solution is actually *used*, or even *known*, by the people rolling their own "super secure digital key" is a completely separate question.
As for 3 and 4, I fail to see how #1 is relevant to either. Sure, there's other ways into the car, but any keyless entry system adds an additional attack surface, one that's notoriously hard to make secure from automated attacks even for groups of digital security experts, experts that are often conspicuously absent from automotive software teams.
Besides which, just because it's (probably) possible to secure your car from digital entry by past owners doesn't mean that the new owner has any idea of how to do that, or even that it's necessary.
Rather difficult to trace the key without having it in your possession, in which case you already HAVE the key, so why are you copying it? (unless some idiot posts a picture of their keys I suppose).
Basically your "friend" sounds like an asshole that abused the trust shown them by people who probably considered them a trustworthy enough friend to lend their keys to. Or maybe just an utterly unscrupulous valet. Either way the only thing the duplicate key grants them is less suspicion for their crimes.
Besides which, keys are almost always only relevant to honest or sneaky people - pretty much everything most people lock includes large openings secured only with a pane of glass. Opening the lock is actually one of the more difficult ways in, just more discrete and less destructive.
Kind of refreshing in a tragic sort of way - the status quo has been upset, and the new path is bad enough that it seems most people can agree that it's even worse. It offers the most realistic possibility of productive change that I've ever seen.
Perhaps because there's a historically unsubtle con man in the White House, and his excess is riling up the populace? He's generating a lot of backlash, in both parties, and politics-as-usual is looking far less reliable than usual in the upcoming elections.
To extend the usefulness of the "training dummy" - how many board meetings, etc. could benefit from a participant with the ability to translate real-time access to the majority of the relevant data into coherent arguments? If you could set the thing in "Devil's Advocate" mode (i.e. argue against anything proposed) you could potentially kill a lot of bad ideas very early in their formation, and steer more plausible ideas past many potential pitfalls. Heck, get two of them arguing against each other in "for and against" mode to potentially cut to the heart of a lot of issues, especially if they can integrate input from human debaters on the fly. Heck, just interjecting "That statement does not appear to have any supporting evidence" would go a long way.
If you're proposing a magical, non-physical component to the human mind, then isn't the the onus on you to provide support for your extraordinary claim?
They also elect congress to do a job - that job being setting the rules of government that the other branches have to obey. With an 85-10 vote we're not talking party politics, we're talking Congress doing it's F'ing job and preventing the president from undermining the rule of law to line his own pockets.
How on Earth do you figure that? You've got he same number of operations per second either way, and a single core is much more versatile - anything you can do on a multi-core processor, you can do sequentially on a single core, and there's a LOT of things that can't be efficiently decomposed into parallel tasks, in which case the single core wins hands down.
The only potential performance advantages for the multi-core are in cache and memory bus size - but you can easily give a single core as much cache as the combined multi-core, and unless things have changed recently the memory itself is usually slower than the bus.
Now, power consumption may be a legitimate advantage with slower processors, so if you're running a massively parallel task where the performance per watt is more important than the absolute performance of any node, then yes - more boxes with slower, more power-efficient multi-core processors will quite possibly win.
Nope, but it can help you realize that a lot of your bills are the result of chasing things that don't actually improve your life satisfaction in any way. Nice car, big house, fancy clothes, expensive meals - study after study shows that none of that actually has any lasting impact on your happiness. The stress people often inflict on themselves to hold the job to pay for them though - that *does* very often inflict a long-lasting, negative impact on happiness.
Get happy, and you don't have to try to buy happiness. And that frees you to spend your life pursuing things that really do matter to you.
Because there's never actually been an effective meritocratic selection process? Companies would love to hire employees based on merit, but it's difficult, borderline impossible, to effectively judge someone's value to the business via a resume and interview process. Heck, it's extremely difficult to measure even when they've been working for you for years.
And so instead a great deal of intuition and gut reactions goes into the selection process as well - and that almost universally biases everyone towards selecting people who look and act like their internalized ideals - which in the US tends to mean the sort of white men that already dominate the industry and media representation of fictional heroes.
I would think they would support the patentability of Duda's algorithm: if the algorithm isn't patentable, it undermines the patentability of their own application of it. If it is patentable then they need only prove their application is a sufficient modification to be worth patenting in its own right. LOTS of patents rely on other patented inventions - that's only an issue when it comes time to build things. And if it's built on something patentable but in the public domain, then they get the best of both worlds - the groundwork is patentable, but no license is necessary because it's in the public domain.
Slashdot Mirror
>The universe is still young by cosmological scales. Why do they assume that extraterrestrial life has to be zipping around the universe building Dyson spheres and shit? How do they know that there isn't life elsewhere that is less advanced than us, as advanced as us or more advanced but not starfaring?
Because our sun is pretty young by the standards of similarly metal-rich stars, and life appears to have started on this planet pretty much as soon as liquid water was able to exist on the surface, suggesting that the odds of life forming are very high. Unless we assume there was something very special about the inert rocks here (and it's generally considered poor science to assume we're in an unusual part of the universe), that in turn suggests that a similar process probably occurred around many other similarly metal-rich stars a billion of years before our planet existed. Even assuming life started on one of the other planets and migrated here via early-system impacts doesn't extend the timeline much (and if life migrated here from another star then it boosts the odds that the same thing happened to other stars as well)
And, given a billion-year head start, even one expansive space-faring species has had enough time to colonize the entire galaxy several times over by now. The fact that we see no evidence of that suggests that either we don't know how to look, or that in all that time not one species has arisen that is at all inclined to leave its home planet. Because once a species is firmly established in space, and thus has all the technology necessary for (slow) interstellar travel, and the proven inclination to expand beyond their world into artificial environments, it seems almost inevitable that some group will eventually head for another star - either for the uncontested riches waiting there, or to get away from a stellar civilization they find unpleasant, or even just out of curiosity.
In nutritional science pork, like wild board, is a red meat - something about being richer in myoglobin than white meat in poultry or fish. Maybe related? But why would primates be different? I've heard we're very biochemically similar to pigs.
At any rate there's obviously only one solution - bushmeat being as difficult to get as it is, your friend will ultimately have no choice but to turn to cannibalism. My condolences to your family.
>Not you though, vegans. Nobody likes you.
You've cracked it, right there. There is no "lone star tick induced meat allergy" - it's just a convenient cover story to allow people to survive being vegetarian in Texas. :-D
>Not sure I know enough about how that works to understand why less data would mean more false positives.
More training data means it needs to learn to recognize more subtle distinctions to be able to correctly identify an image. Without that subtly it will tend to overlook the differences and misidentify images.
It's actually very similar to the "X all look alike to me" effect. Let's take an extreme example: Imagine you live somewhere where pretty much everyone is white. You've only ever seen a handful of black people in your life, and Fred is the only black guy you personally know. Cool guy - you like him, grab beers after work, etc. And since we identify people by recognizing the differences between them and everyone else, "dark skin", "wide nose", "full lips", etc. are some of the big features you use to identify Fred. And why not? Nobody else you encounter has those features, so they really stand out to identify him from everyone else you see.
Then one day you're walking down the hall and see a black guy coming your way - similar build to Fred, with the same dark skin, wide nose, full lips, etc. And so you identify him as Fred, ask him how his project is going, and if he wants to grab a beer after work. And a totally confused Steve tries to figure out why the hell some complete stranger is acting like an old friend. Then Fred walks up, and seeing them stand side by side you start noticing the differences you didn't see initially - Fred has way more wrinkles around his eyes, Steve's cheeks are considerably rounder, etc. And, with a bit of practice you get good at telling them apart. Then you go to a conference where almost everyone is black - and once again you keep losing track of Fred, because there's a sea of faces around you, all bearing features superficially similar to Fred's, and you've really only learned to identify the small subset of obvious differences between Fred and Steve. You'll get better at it eventually, but in the meantime you just haven't yet recognized enough of the normal range of variance to make a clear distinction even between not-all-that-similar-looking people that share the same obvious features.
>So I can wipe someone's phone without their consent? Is this a feature or a bug?
A feature, obviously. That's what lets you repair a hopelessly borked device.
Physical access to the device voids virtually all security on any electronic device - the best you can hope for is to keep the new owner from accessing existing data on the device (which Apple does fairly well). Guess what - anyone with physical access to your laptop, desktop, flash drive, phone, tablet, etc. can do the exact same thing, and do so far more quickly and easily than by attempting to log in with an invalid password several times over the course of a few hours.
Does the London Tube actually completely lift off from the rails at some point? That seems like it would extremely bad design, and absolutely required to call it "flight", though I suppose any mag-lev train would qualify.
But to honestly call it suborbital flight you need to leave the atmosphere. Though I suppose you could argue that the normal term is suborbital spaceflight, and by using a non-standard term you can define it to mean whatever you want.
I didn't - in fact if you'll notice I mentioned it right at the end of the first sentence.
More by unwieldy shape, and the fact that they tend to rapidly settle to the very bottom of any pocket or bag, and then remain there until used to open a lock. Unlike phones which tend to be removed every few minutes by many people, and then be re-inserted while sitting down so that they occupy a far more precarious position.
(Whether people who use their phone at the movies deserve to be locked out of their car for their crimes is a separate issue)
Doesn't have to happen regularly to be a problem. Can you honestly tell me that you've NEVER had your phone get lost, broken, or run out of power? I can honestly say I've never lost or broken a key on my keyring.
>2. Err this is a solved problem and has been since the dawn of encryption.
Solved yes - whether the solution is actually *used*, or even *known*, by the people rolling their own "super secure digital key" is a completely separate question.
As for 3 and 4, I fail to see how #1 is relevant to either. Sure, there's other ways into the car, but any keyless entry system adds an additional attack surface, one that's notoriously hard to make secure from automated attacks even for groups of digital security experts, experts that are often conspicuously absent from automotive software teams.
Besides which, just because it's (probably) possible to secure your car from digital entry by past owners doesn't mean that the new owner has any idea of how to do that, or even that it's necessary.
Rather difficult to trace the key without having it in your possession, in which case you already HAVE the key, so why are you copying it? (unless some idiot posts a picture of their keys I suppose).
Basically your "friend" sounds like an asshole that abused the trust shown them by people who probably considered them a trustworthy enough friend to lend their keys to. Or maybe just an utterly unscrupulous valet. Either way the only thing the duplicate key grants them is less suspicion for their crimes.
Besides which, keys are almost always only relevant to honest or sneaky people - pretty much everything most people lock includes large openings secured only with a pane of glass. Opening the lock is actually one of the more difficult ways in, just more discrete and less destructive.
Maybe so. We're living in unsubtle times.
Kind of refreshing in a tragic sort of way - the status quo has been upset, and the new path is bad enough that it seems most people can agree that it's even worse. It offers the most realistic possibility of productive change that I've ever seen.
Perhaps because there's a historically unsubtle con man in the White House, and his excess is riling up the populace? He's generating a lot of backlash, in both parties, and politics-as-usual is looking far less reliable than usual in the upcoming elections.
> fake currencies
+1 redundant. ALL currencies are fake representations of real value.
We'll see. The problem with that strategy is that it reduces the value of future favors, and thus the size of future bribes.
On the other hand, Trump is so erratic that a "one time action" may be the only thing anyone ever bribes him for anyway.
To extend the usefulness of the "training dummy" - how many board meetings, etc. could benefit from a participant with the ability to translate real-time access to the majority of the relevant data into coherent arguments? If you could set the thing in "Devil's Advocate" mode (i.e. argue against anything proposed) you could potentially kill a lot of bad ideas very early in their formation, and steer more plausible ideas past many potential pitfalls. Heck, get two of them arguing against each other in "for and against" mode to potentially cut to the heart of a lot of issues, especially if they can integrate input from human debaters on the fly. Heck, just interjecting "That statement does not appear to have any supporting evidence" would go a long way.
*ZING*
I was waiting for that old chestnut to show up.
If you're proposing a magical, non-physical component to the human mind, then isn't the the onus on you to provide support for your extraordinary claim?
They also elect congress to do a job - that job being setting the rules of government that the other branches have to obey. With an 85-10 vote we're not talking party politics, we're talking Congress doing it's F'ing job and preventing the president from undermining the rule of law to line his own pockets.
How on Earth do you figure that? You've got he same number of operations per second either way, and a single core is much more versatile - anything you can do on a multi-core processor, you can do sequentially on a single core, and there's a LOT of things that can't be efficiently decomposed into parallel tasks, in which case the single core wins hands down.
The only potential performance advantages for the multi-core are in cache and memory bus size - but you can easily give a single core as much cache as the combined multi-core, and unless things have changed recently the memory itself is usually slower than the bus.
Now, power consumption may be a legitimate advantage with slower processors, so if you're running a massively parallel task where the performance per watt is more important than the absolute performance of any node, then yes - more boxes with slower, more power-efficient multi-core processors will quite possibly win.
>Serenity doesn't pay the bills.
Nope, but it can help you realize that a lot of your bills are the result of chasing things that don't actually improve your life satisfaction in any way. Nice car, big house, fancy clothes, expensive meals - study after study shows that none of that actually has any lasting impact on your happiness. The stress people often inflict on themselves to hold the job to pay for them though - that *does* very often inflict a long-lasting, negative impact on happiness.
Get happy, and you don't have to try to buy happiness. And that frees you to spend your life pursuing things that really do matter to you.
How many minutes in an hour again...?
Because there's never actually been an effective meritocratic selection process? Companies would love to hire employees based on merit, but it's difficult, borderline impossible, to effectively judge someone's value to the business via a resume and interview process. Heck, it's extremely difficult to measure even when they've been working for you for years.
And so instead a great deal of intuition and gut reactions goes into the selection process as well - and that almost universally biases everyone towards selecting people who look and act like their internalized ideals - which in the US tends to mean the sort of white men that already dominate the industry and media representation of fictional heroes.
I would think they would support the patentability of Duda's algorithm: if the algorithm isn't patentable, it undermines the patentability of their own application of it. If it is patentable then they need only prove their application is a sufficient modification to be worth patenting in its own right. LOTS of patents rely on other patented inventions - that's only an issue when it comes time to build things. And if it's built on something patentable but in the public domain, then they get the best of both worlds - the groundwork is patentable, but no license is necessary because it's in the public domain.
Google: Do Know Evil.