All this study shows is that marriage is associated with a decline in scientific productivity, not that it's the cause. The causation could easily work the other way: once scientists are done making their major contributions, they're more likely to settle down, get married, and focus on family life.
Some people I have spoken with few days ago about this research told me they are worried that if the intelligence is too high this AI could refuse to risk its money gambling... I am not quite sure if they were serious though.
What a strange game... the only way to win is not to play.
What if the court stated some metric? Like "must be at least 50% less than the original"... how about cutting the image in halves. Then posting both halves on your site such that they appear as one? Neither half violates individually?
Just to be safe, I cut the picture up into individual pixels and then reassemble them into a single new image. And you can't own a single pixel... why, that would be tantamount to owning a color. And what kind of twisted company would try to trademark a color?
True, Bill Gates will make $1 a share in dividends... however, the dividend will also drop the stock price by $1 as soon as it is paid. Why? Because if a stock pays me a $1 dividend tomorrow, I'll pay $X for it today -- but if it paid the dividend yesterday, I'll only pay $X-1, because I don't get the extra $1. Therefore, Bill's gain on the dividend is offset by his loss on the stock. If he were really doing this for the cash, he could get the same result by selling some of his stock. (Of course, this doesn't take into account the difference between taxes on dividends and taxes on capital gains, but IANATL [I am not a tax lawyer].)
This should make common sense... I can't "make" a million dollars by writing myself a million dollar check. What goes in one way must come out the other.
I keep reading posts on this being a bad idea because it goes against a free market. Or that it prevents competition. OPEN STANDARDS help keep competition. Microsoft has been killing competition by closing formats and such. This will simply cause companies like Microsoft to pay for their anti-competitive practices. Thus, it will increase open standards in government and create more competition.
The idea that markets are made "freer" the more the government interferes is perverse. Your post reminds me of the following quote: "A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be forced to compete. Therefore, we must control men in order to force them to be free." (from Atlas Shrugged).
It simply isn't possible to nail down all of the variables in advance, or even as events occur. Either economics or chaos theory will demonstrate that pretty clearly.
In nonlinear/chaotic systems, errors in the initial conditions quickly expand, causing huge deviations on a macro scale. This is why long-term weather prediction is impossible. James Gleick mentions in his excellent book Chaos that a lattice of weather sensors, spaced just one foot apart all over the surface of the earth and up through the entire atmosphere, would still give seriously wrong weather predictions after only a month or so.
If you can't predict the weather in the long-term, then you can't predict human history either. Wars can be won or lost because of weather. Civilizations can starve or prosper. Economies can boom or bust. Maybe it's a beautiful day, so the future leader of the free world decides to walk instead of driving and gets hit by a bus.
Human behavior is a reaction to our surroundings -- and if it's impossible to predict our surroundings on a long timeline, then the same goes for human behavior.
The galaxy is a large, circular object with a hole in the middle. Very much like those things you find at a Krispy Kreme shop, but with a lot less frosting...
Does this mean that the voice we will hear at The End of Time will be saying "OOOhhh... donuts..."
Stephen Hawking: "I am intrigued by your theory of a donut-shaped universe, Homer. I may have to steal it."
If they have no resale value, they you could buy a used diamond very cheaply and get a jeweler to put it in a new setting for you, and that would kill the market for new diamonds. They don't wear out, of course. "Diamonds are forever" and all that.
The used diamond market isn't like the used car market, where the resale value drops as soon as you drive your shiny new Mustang off the lot. That is, it's not that market prices are low -- it's that there is no market. Because De Beers has created the impression that diamonds are priceless (if not in monetary value, then in sentimental value), almost no one sells their used diamonds. And because no one sells them, no one expects to buy them either. This has completely eliminated the secondary market for diamonds -- outside of shady outfits like pawn shops, which can hardly be considered bastions of "fair market value".
The total lack of liquidity in the used diamond market means that De Beers can continue to have complete control over prices. Why is stifling liquidity just as important as stifling competition? Look at what happened to hardware companies like Cisco when the Internet bubble burst. As if it weren't bad enough that Cisco lost customers, they found that prospective customers were buying cheap, lightly used hardware off the dot-bombs at fire sale prices instead of from Cisco. This is even more important for De Beers, since a diamond has a considerably longer usable life than a router. The moral of the story: if you want to sell your product to everyone at ridiculous prices, without screwing yourself in the future by saturating the market with resalable goods, then do exactly what De Beers has done.
For those of you wondering about the implications for cryptography, this does not imply that composite numbers can be factored in polynomial time. This algorithm is simply a primality test -- that is, it tells you whether or not a number has any proper divisors (in polynomial time), but it doesn't tell you what these divisors actually are. Determining whether a number is prime has always been considerably easier than finding the prime factorization.
In fact, for schemes like RSA -- where the key is the product of two large primes -- we already know that the number is composite, by definition, so a more efficient primality test doesn't give us any new information.
It seems backwards to say that biology is copying the methodology of open-source. If anything, I thought that the open-source/free software movement was created to bring the openness of scientific research communities (in academia, at least) to computer programming.
I'd be interested to see if there's a difference not just between gamers and non-gamers, but between people who play video games and other types of games. Does a pencil-and-paper RPG like AD&D have the same effect as a computer RPG like Neverwinter Nights? How does a "twitch" game like a first-person shooter compare to a real-life game that requires fast reflexes, such as ping pong? What about chess, or crossword puzzles, or Scrabble?
The main question that this study leaves unanswered is the cause of these effects. Is it the content of the games? Or is there something special, from a neurological standpoint, about playing games on a TV or computer screen as opposed to in real life?
Could someone please come up with a reasonable theory on what the hell the dolphin-with-pick-ax logo [coolchips.com] is supposed to be before my head explodes?
As telco's around the world move from government hands to private investors the incentive for them to create compeition at the wholesale DSL level drops dramatically.
This is simply false. Legally enforced government monopolies have zero incentive to compete. The whole point of privatization is to increase competition (assuming it is done correctly, i.e. no market-splitting or corruption, which I believe was a major problem in the former USSR). Private investors and consumers create competition because, unlike taxpayers, they can take their money elsewhere. This type of economic illiteracy is bad enough coming from a normal poster, but even worse coming from the author of the article (who is also the submitter, coincidentally enough).
What I'm wondering is why no one has attempted to regenerate that heat back into usable energy. Sure, there will be significant losses, but if you end up with a net energy profit, it is probably worth it.
Net energy profit? Young lady, in this house we obey the laws of THERMODYNAMICS!!!
To me, the whole problem starts with "Santa Clara vs. Southern Pacific Railroad," in which the (US) Supreme Court ruled that a corporation is a natural person for the purposes of constitutional rights protections. Which I think is a crock. A corporation shouldn't be entitled to free speech under Article I because it's not a person. It's a legal abstraction.
Then I suppose you think corporations (including non-profit corporations, of course) should be denied:
the right to be free of religious persecution -- the government can freely discriminate against Jewish, or Muslim, or atheist corporations (1st amendment).
the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure -- Uncle Sam can just walk into your small business without a warrant and take your stuff. (4th amendment)
the right to due process (5th) and speedy and public jury trials for criminal offenses (6th) -- the government can shut your business down without reason and without telling you what you've been charged with, and give you a secret trial or delay the trial indefinitely.
It's easy to bash corporations (and good for a few karma points), but try to imagine a free society where the above situations are possible. Imagine what would happen not just to our economy, but to our society -- many charities and universities are non-profit corporations -- if these rights didn't exist.
Remember, the Bill of Rights doesn't "give" rights to anyone -- it only prevents the government from taking them away.
will it mean the end of OpenSource applications because *you* can remove the DRM components?
This is actually an interesting paradox. The whole philosophy of DRM, digital watermarks, etc. is to make it not just illegal to circumvent copyright, but impossible.
By this logic, the source code itself would need a watermark to prevent the removal of the DRM components -- but this would be no good if you could just strip it out before compiling, so the compilers would have to be rigged only to allow watermarked source code. Of course, then you'd have to make sure that people weren't running binaries made with the old compiler... and you'd have to follow this chain of logic all the way down to the lowest level of computation, down to the electronic circuits etched on the chips.
Like a virus, mandatory DRM legislation would infect everything it touches. It might start with something seemingly innocuous, like music and movies -- but it would eventually consume software, hardware, and the very act of computation itself. I agree with the author that the DRM legislation being pushed by the "content" industry (and certain of our esteemed elected officials) would effectively destroy the digital computer as we know it.
This comment really hits the nail on the head. You shouldn't be so surprised that J. Random Support-Tech is a bit clueless. If he knew so much about how to keep your systems running, he'd probably have your job instead of working in some godforsaken cubicle farm call center.
Update: although the traffic jam caused a significant delay for police, the thieves were later arrested at Grand Central Station after hacking into a Gibson mainframe from a bank of public telephones. The perpetrators, identified as Angelina "Acid Burn" Jolie and Jonny Lee "Crash Override" Miller, were later released and have since gone on to make better movies. Sandra Bullock was unavailable for comment.
There is nothing scary about this; in fact, humans already do it on a regular basis. A department store security guard scopes out a crowd of shoppers for potential shoplifters. An airport security guard scans a terminal for suspicious activity. A cop checks out a crowded street looking for potential muggers and pickpockets.
The trouble is, humans are inefficient and expensive, and their "gut instincts" may be fallible. The mall security guard may be the only guy watching a dozen closed-circuit monitors, and he may even be dozing off from the monotony of his job. The airport guard might be a minimum wage high-school dropout with barely any training. The cop's instincts are pretty good, but as objective as he tries to be, he unconsciously tends to target members of a particular race instead of going by solid scientific indicators.
This technology (if it works) will be a Good Thing because: 1. It improves upon an existing system that helps keep us safe. 2. It could be more effective and consistent. 3. It could apply rules objectively, and could be designed to flag activities that truly are suspicious (e.g. "casing" a department store) rather than those that merely look suspicious to biased humans (e.g. a young black man in a record store). This means that it could help protect our rights more than the current system.
Donald Knuth is well-known to be a religious man (he has even written on the subject) -- which is why everything written in The Art of Computer Programming is false. I have a marvelous proof of this, but unfortunately Knuth wrote TeX as well, so when I tried to typeset my groundbreaking proof the entire thing was erased and replaced with a copy of the King James Bible. Damn that Knuth!
Slashdot Mirror
All this study shows is that marriage is associated with a decline in scientific productivity, not that it's the cause. The causation could easily work the other way: once scientists are done making their major contributions, they're more likely to settle down, get married, and focus on family life.
Cheers,
IT
Some people I have spoken with few days ago about this research told me they are worried that if the intelligence is too high this AI could refuse to risk its money gambling... I am not quite sure if they were serious though.
... the only way to win is not to play.
What a strange game
Cheers,
IT
What if the court stated some metric? Like "must be at least 50% less than the original"... how about cutting the image in halves. Then posting both halves on your site such that they appear as one? Neither half violates individually?
... why, that would be tantamount to owning a color. And what kind of twisted company would try to trademark a color?
Just to be safe, I cut the picture up into individual pixels and then reassemble them into a single new image. And you can't own a single pixel
Cheers,
IT
True, Bill Gates will make $1 a share in dividends ... however, the dividend will also drop the stock price by $1 as soon as it is paid. Why? Because if a stock pays me a $1 dividend tomorrow, I'll pay $X for it today -- but if it paid the dividend yesterday, I'll only pay $X-1, because I don't get the extra $1. Therefore, Bill's gain on the dividend is offset by his loss on the stock. If he were really doing this for the cash, he could get the same result by selling some of his stock. (Of course, this doesn't take into account the difference between taxes on dividends and taxes on capital gains, but IANATL [I am not a tax lawyer].)
... I can't "make" a million dollars by writing myself a million dollar check. What goes in one way must come out the other.
This should make common sense
Cheers,
IT
That certificate is as good as mine: /| |\ \
/__/ | /. | \__\
_____ _____
/ \___/ \
/
| |
| |
| |
|_________|
Beat that! Mess with the best, die like the rest! Sorry folks, contest over, move along...
Cheers,
IT
I keep reading posts on this being a bad idea because it goes against a free market. Or that it prevents competition. OPEN STANDARDS help keep competition. Microsoft has been killing competition by closing formats and such. This will simply cause companies like Microsoft to pay for their anti-competitive practices. Thus, it will increase open standards in government and create more competition.
The idea that markets are made "freer" the more the government interferes is perverse. Your post reminds me of the following quote: "A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be forced to compete. Therefore, we must control men in order to force them to be free." (from Atlas Shrugged).
Cheers,
IT
Whoopie, another story for Power Labs. What's their slogan again ? "We know just enough science to wreck something, then we call it an experiment."
If that's the case, we're doing a damn impressive experiment on their web server. Yee-haw!
Cheers,
IT
It simply isn't possible to nail down all of the variables in advance, or even as events occur. Either economics or chaos theory will demonstrate that pretty clearly.
In nonlinear/chaotic systems, errors in the initial conditions quickly expand, causing huge deviations on a macro scale. This is why long-term weather prediction is impossible. James Gleick mentions in his excellent book Chaos that a lattice of weather sensors, spaced just one foot apart all over the surface of the earth and up through the entire atmosphere, would still give seriously wrong weather predictions after only a month or so.
If you can't predict the weather in the long-term, then you can't predict human history either. Wars can be won or lost because of weather. Civilizations can starve or prosper. Economies can boom or bust. Maybe it's a beautiful day, so the future leader of the free world decides to walk instead of driving and gets hit by a bus.
Human behavior is a reaction to our surroundings -- and if it's impossible to predict our surroundings on a long timeline, then the same goes for human behavior.
QED,
IT
Bill: "Oh yeah, you have an anti-patch patch? Well I have an anti-anti-patch patch!"
Cheers,
IT
The galaxy is a large, circular object with a hole in the middle.
Very much like those things you find at a Krispy Kreme shop, but with a lot less frosting...
Does this mean that the voice we will hear at The End of Time will be saying "OOOhhh... donuts..."
Stephen Hawking: "I am intrigued by your theory of a donut-shaped universe, Homer. I may have to steal it."
Cheers,
IT
If they have no resale value, they you could buy a used diamond very cheaply and get a jeweler to put it in a new setting for you, and that would kill the market for new diamonds. They don't wear out, of course. "Diamonds are forever" and all that.
The used diamond market isn't like the used car market, where the resale value drops as soon as you drive your shiny new Mustang off the lot. That is, it's not that market prices are low -- it's that there is no market. Because De Beers has created the impression that diamonds are priceless (if not in monetary value, then in sentimental value), almost no one sells their used diamonds. And because no one sells them, no one expects to buy them either. This has completely eliminated the secondary market for diamonds -- outside of shady outfits like pawn shops, which can hardly be considered bastions of "fair market value".
The total lack of liquidity in the used diamond market means that De Beers can continue to have complete control over prices. Why is stifling liquidity just as important as stifling competition? Look at what happened to hardware companies like Cisco when the Internet bubble burst. As if it weren't bad enough that Cisco lost customers, they found that prospective customers were buying cheap, lightly used hardware off the dot-bombs at fire sale prices instead of from Cisco. This is even more important for De Beers, since a diamond has a considerably longer usable life than a router. The moral of the story: if you want to sell your product to everyone at ridiculous prices, without screwing yourself in the future by saturating the market with resalable goods, then do exactly what De Beers has done.
Cheers,
IT
For those of you wondering about the implications for cryptography, this does not imply that composite numbers can be factored in polynomial time. This algorithm is simply a primality test -- that is, it tells you whether or not a number has any proper divisors (in polynomial time), but it doesn't tell you what these divisors actually are. Determining whether a number is prime has always been considerably easier than finding the prime factorization.
In fact, for schemes like RSA -- where the key is the product of two large primes -- we already know that the number is composite, by definition, so a more efficient primality test doesn't give us any new information.
Cheers,
IT
- Can be operated as a stand-alone unit (chair goes up! chair goes down! chair goes up!) or in a networked environment (a vigorous game of CHAIRBALL).
- Easily disguised as an "innocent" piece of furniture.
- Unlike a rubber band machine gun, your company will probably pay for you to have one.
- Marginally more comfortable to sit on than a crossbow.
Cheers,IT
It seems backwards to say that biology is copying the methodology of open-source. If anything, I thought that the open-source/free software movement was created to bring the openness of scientific research communities (in academia, at least) to computer programming.
Cheers,
IT
I'd be interested to see if there's a difference not just between gamers and non-gamers, but between people who play video games and other types of games. Does a pencil-and-paper RPG like AD&D have the same effect as a computer RPG like Neverwinter Nights? How does a "twitch" game like a first-person shooter compare to a real-life game that requires fast reflexes, such as ping pong? What about chess, or crossword puzzles, or Scrabble?
The main question that this study leaves unanswered is the cause of these effects. Is it the content of the games? Or is there something special, from a neurological standpoint, about playing games on a TV or computer screen as opposed to in real life?
Cheers,
IT
Could someone please come up with a reasonable theory on what the hell the dolphin-with-pick-ax logo [coolchips.com] is supposed to be before my head explodes?
Maybe it's a hammerhead and a sickle.
Cheers,
IT
As telco's around the world move from government hands to private investors the incentive for them to create compeition at the wholesale DSL level drops dramatically.
This is simply false. Legally enforced government monopolies have zero incentive to compete. The whole point of privatization is to increase competition (assuming it is done correctly, i.e. no market-splitting or corruption, which I believe was a major problem in the former USSR). Private investors and consumers create competition because, unlike taxpayers, they can take their money elsewhere. This type of economic illiteracy is bad enough coming from a normal poster, but even worse coming from the author of the article (who is also the submitter, coincidentally enough).
Cheers,
IT
What I'm wondering is why no one has attempted to regenerate that heat back into usable energy. Sure, there will be significant losses, but if you end up with a net energy profit, it is probably worth it.
Net energy profit? Young lady, in this house we obey the laws of THERMODYNAMICS!!!
Cheers,
IT
Then I suppose you think corporations (including non-profit corporations, of course) should be denied:
It's easy to bash corporations (and good for a few karma points), but try to imagine a free society where the above situations are possible. Imagine what would happen not just to our economy, but to our society -- many charities and universities are non-profit corporations -- if these rights didn't exist.
Remember, the Bill of Rights doesn't "give" rights to anyone -- it only prevents the government from taking them away.
Cheers,
IT
will it mean the end of OpenSource applications because *you* can remove the DRM components?
... and you'd have to follow this chain of logic all the way down to the lowest level of computation, down to the electronic circuits etched on the chips.
This is actually an interesting paradox. The whole philosophy of DRM, digital watermarks, etc. is to make it not just illegal to circumvent copyright, but impossible.
By this logic, the source code itself would need a watermark to prevent the removal of the DRM components -- but this would be no good if you could just strip it out before compiling, so the compilers would have to be rigged only to allow watermarked source code. Of course, then you'd have to make sure that people weren't running binaries made with the old compiler
Like a virus, mandatory DRM legislation would infect everything it touches. It might start with something seemingly innocuous, like music and movies -- but it would eventually consume software, hardware, and the very act of computation itself. I agree with the author that the DRM legislation being pushed by the "content" industry (and certain of our esteemed elected officials) would effectively destroy the digital computer as we know it.
Cheers,
IT
-1: Jon Katz-like title
Those who can, do
Those who almost can, support
This comment really hits the nail on the head. You shouldn't be so surprised that J. Random Support-Tech is a bit clueless. If he knew so much about how to keep your systems running, he'd probably have your job instead of working in some godforsaken cubicle farm call center.
Cheers,
IT
Update: although the traffic jam caused a significant delay for police, the thieves were later arrested at Grand Central Station after hacking into a Gibson mainframe from a bank of public telephones. The perpetrators, identified as Angelina "Acid Burn" Jolie and Jonny Lee "Crash Override" Miller, were later released and have since gone on to make better movies. Sandra Bullock was unavailable for comment.
Cheers,
IT
There is nothing scary about this; in fact, humans already do it on a regular basis. A department store security guard scopes out a crowd of shoppers for potential shoplifters. An airport security guard scans a terminal for suspicious activity. A cop checks out a crowded street looking for potential muggers and pickpockets.
The trouble is, humans are inefficient and expensive, and their "gut instincts" may be fallible. The mall security guard may be the only guy watching a dozen closed-circuit monitors, and he may even be dozing off from the monotony of his job. The airport guard might be a minimum wage high-school dropout with barely any training. The cop's instincts are pretty good, but as objective as he tries to be, he unconsciously tends to target members of a particular race instead of going by solid scientific indicators.
This technology (if it works) will be a Good Thing because:
1. It improves upon an existing system that helps keep us safe.
2. It could be more effective and consistent.
3. It could apply rules objectively, and could be designed to flag activities that truly are suspicious (e.g. "casing" a department store) rather than those that merely look suspicious to biased humans (e.g. a young black man in a record store). This means that it could help protect our rights more than the current system.
Cheers,
IT
Let's see 80 minutes of CD-quality music now uses 700 MB of space. How exactly does 300 minutes of CD-quality music fit on 500 MB?
... maybe they use JPEG compression.
Hmmm
Cheers,
IT
Donald Knuth is well-known to be a religious man (he has even written on the subject) -- which is why everything written in The Art of Computer Programming is false. I have a marvelous proof of this, but unfortunately Knuth wrote TeX as well, so when I tried to typeset my groundbreaking proof the entire thing was erased and replaced with a copy of the King James Bible. Damn that Knuth!
Cheers,
IT