> Seriously, after that sawing off a live man's head, I have NO problem with blowing these assholes away.
If a video of a man's head being sawed off makes you frightened and impairs your judgement, then you are just playing into their hand. It's a shame the word 'terrorism' has shifted away from its original meaning of "The use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims", because it's such a great word, and it applies amazingly well here. An act of terror doesn't have to be crashing a plane into a building. Sawing off a man's head then posting the video on the internet is, in fact, an act of terror. It is designed to inspire fear. They've figured out what the Mafia, the Viet Cong, the Mongols, and countless other groups throughout history have found out: Making yourself look like an inhuman monster is actually a good survival strategy when your enemies are stronger and more numerous. This fictional quote, while it's from a movie, it's particularly relevant: "It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies."
Goes for a lot of other fields of study too. Doing mathematics (not CS) I remember my freshman "logic and set theory" course, which was assigned the largest auditorium. The courses after that didn't need lecture rooms nearly as large...
Right, but that's miles away from saying "there is never going to be an effective treatment." If anything, having a set of well-defined and known pathways should make it EASIER to fight cancer than if cancer were just the result of random mutations that could arise anywhere on the genome at any time.
The article never says that cancer is a 'side effect' of being alive. Instead it says that there are certain deep evolutionary pathways that, when triggered at the inappropriate time, cause cancer. Thus we might never be able to 'cure' ourselves of it (at least the same way we can cure ourselves of infectious disease). But that doesn't mean cancer would be impossible to treat or. It means the opposite: if all cancer cells go through similar mechanisms, fighting cancer would simply be a matter of weeding out those cells that show the characteristic, shared, telltale cancer signs and killing them early on (Of course we don't have the technology yet to do this but research like this offers a pathway towards building such tech).
Curiosity is not spirit or opportunity. This is a much heavier rover. Plus, it consumes way more power and moves faster. The forces on the wheel are much much rougher than on the MER rovers.
The problem is that you can really only come up with a finite number of these, and once an attacker has a large enough sample of them (say, 10%), he can simply write a bit of code to 'solve' each one.
The thing about CAPTCHAs that makes them great is that you can randomly generate a huge bunch of them.
Anyway, the headline so completely misrepresents this research that it basically says the opposite of what the researchers are saying. The researchers, in fact, created an automated system to solve DCGs! Their contribution was a system that detects 'crowd-sourcing' attacks - attacks where shady companies pay volunteers pennies to solve CAPTCHAs by hand. The researchers said they are going to work on improved DCGs that can't be solved automatically, but nothing of the sort is being unveiled here.
Most conversion of CO2 to O2 is done by algae and other marine life (93% iirc). Trees only contribute a very small percentage. You can increase algae to absorb CO2, but having more algae is not a good thing - it creates toxic environments that kill other types of life: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
By the way this is what a lot of people get wrong when they say 'CO2 is plant food!!'
The CO2 problem is a huge problem we've created that both environmentalists and anti-environmentalists usually vastly underestimate.
Adding to this, a number of existing altcoins do, in fact, attempt to address bitcoin's weaknesses. Litecoin attempts to resist customized hardware mining and also make the blockchain update faster. Primecoin solves a somewhat useful mathematical problem instead of completely wasting computer cycles like Bitcoin does. There are other examples.
Anyway, it only seems natural that as time goes on, better and better cryptocurrencies will be incrementally developed. To ask everyone to use ONLY what's the first iteration of this tech would be silly.
Of course, there are "me-too!" cryptocurrencies as well, typically with only minor 'improvements' and designed to make the creators rich. I'm all for educating people about how they could be taken advantage of. But boycotting? Come on.
Landauer's principle is about erasing bits (or, more generally, changing the information contained in a bit). In other words, irreversible operations. It does not apply to logically reversible operations (the simplest of which is flipping bits, but you can represent a surprising amount of computation in reversible terms).
'change', in this context, is different from flipping a bit. It refers to erasing a bit, as mentioned, in fact, in just the preceding paragraph:
'It holds that "any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths, must be accompanied by a corresponding entropy increase in non-information bearing degrees of freedom of the information processing apparatus or its environment". (Bennett 2003)'
Read my other reply about the difference between erasure and flipping.
We're eventually going to hit limits, but there's no reason to think that that limit is a logic gate a few atoms wide. There's isentropic computing, spintronics, neuromorphic computing, and further down the road, stuff like quantum computing.
It takes zero energy to flip a bit. What does take energy is erasing bits, and as it turns out, that does not seem to be fundamental to the idea of computation. The limits of computation have nothing to do with energy per se. Rather, they are about entropy.
Much of the internet is also openly hostile to men. In fact much of the internet is openly hostile to everybody. Have you ever even seen 4chan?
4chan has trolled, among others, religious sites, atheist sites, men's sites, women's sites, and pretty much any site of decent user-base size (and a lot of sites without even that). I don't understand how you can take this story and spin it into 'omg women are treated much worse than men on the internet!' story. Does not compute.
Take your pseudo-political bs elsewhere, I am not talking about being 'interchangeable cogs' at all. Sure, not everyone has the smarts to be a coder. That's painfully obvious. But if someone has the smarts to be able to write code that works - even if it is sloppy, horrible, and badly-designed (what you would typically describe as 'bad coding'), then they can be trained to write better code.
If someone sucks at the absolute basics and can't even write a loop without help, then you should obviously kick them out.
> Are these what the kids call programming languages these days?
Yup. A lot of 'programmers' don't even know non-web languages exist. I wish I was kidding. And a lot of employers don't know either. The whole thing is just really sad.
Yup, that's correct. The best way to combat bugs is to write modular systems comprised of parts that can be designed and tested independently. OO was a failed attempt at doing this. But instead of moving on to better systems (like systems that have actual algebraic type systems), programming culture is still pretty much stuck on OO and languages that use it (like Java or C++).
There is no such thing as an inherently 'bad coder', only someone who has not yet learned how to code properly. I really think there's a huge cultural problem in programming. People view things like functional languages as 'academic' and 'too hard', but if you consider the amount of effort saved in debugging and maintaining code, they are very much labor-saving devices. And I am by no means a functional programming fanatic; I program in both conventional and functional languages each day. But people need to be constantly drilled that copy-pasting code is bad, that shotgun debugging is bad, that using higher-level languages has nothing to do with trading off 'speed vs. programmer productivity', but is fundamentally about writing correct programs instead of programs that arrive at the wrong answer quickly. There is no better way to do this than to force them to think deeply about problems.
There are actually a lot of places around the world where summer vacation is 3 months long. Some of these countries actually rank pretty high in terms of education quality.
PS, I want to add that the IAU doesn't care what the average Joe calls them. Their definitions are for their own internal scientific usage. You can call them whatever you want. But if you want the proper term that actual astronomers use, it's "dwarf planet."
They are dwarf planets. Not good enough for you? Do you have to lump every single non-asteroid object in the solar system in the same category?
The purpose of language is to communicate ideas in an efficient way. There's a reason, for instance, that the most commonly-used words are the shortest ones, and that things that are semantically different are given different words.
When using the word 'planet', it is far more likely that you have the 8 actual planets in mind, not Makemake or Haumea. So it makes sense to call the former ones 'planets' and the latter ones 'dwarf planets'. Plus, 'dwarf planet' has an additional benefit that it gives you a mental idea of being small (relatively speaking).
But think about what would happen if they were all just called 'planets'. Inevitably people would come up with ad-hoc terms like 'main planets' or 'large planets' to refer to the 8 planets. It would be extremely confusing. That's another thing about language - it evolves largely on its own. We can't 100% influence it; we can only take steps to try to steer its evolution in a slightly better way.
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> Seriously, after that sawing off a live man's head, I have NO problem with blowing these assholes away.
If a video of a man's head being sawed off makes you frightened and impairs your judgement, then you are just playing into their hand. It's a shame the word 'terrorism' has shifted away from its original meaning of "The use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims", because it's such a great word, and it applies amazingly well here. An act of terror doesn't have to be crashing a plane into a building. Sawing off a man's head then posting the video on the internet is, in fact, an act of terror. It is designed to inspire fear. They've figured out what the Mafia, the Viet Cong, the Mongols, and countless other groups throughout history have found out: Making yourself look like an inhuman monster is actually a good survival strategy when your enemies are stronger and more numerous. This fictional quote, while it's from a movie, it's particularly relevant: "It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies."
'deep evolutionary pathway' as in 'pathway that is based on processes that evolved long ago', not 'deep pathway'.
Goes for a lot of other fields of study too. Doing mathematics (not CS) I remember my freshman "logic and set theory" course, which was assigned the largest auditorium. The courses after that didn't need lecture rooms nearly as large...
Right, but that's miles away from saying "there is never going to be an effective treatment." If anything, having a set of well-defined and known pathways should make it EASIER to fight cancer than if cancer were just the result of random mutations that could arise anywhere on the genome at any time.
The article never says that cancer is a 'side effect' of being alive. Instead it says that there are certain deep evolutionary pathways that, when triggered at the inappropriate time, cause cancer. Thus we might never be able to 'cure' ourselves of it (at least the same way we can cure ourselves of infectious disease). But that doesn't mean cancer would be impossible to treat or. It means the opposite: if all cancer cells go through similar mechanisms, fighting cancer would simply be a matter of weeding out those cells that show the characteristic, shared, telltale cancer signs and killing them early on (Of course we don't have the technology yet to do this but research like this offers a pathway towards building such tech).
Curiosity is not spirit or opportunity. This is a much heavier rover. Plus, it consumes way more power and moves faster. The forces on the wheel are much much rougher than on the MER rovers.
The problem is that you can really only come up with a finite number of these, and once an attacker has a large enough sample of them (say, 10%), he can simply write a bit of code to 'solve' each one.
The thing about CAPTCHAs that makes them great is that you can randomly generate a huge bunch of them.
Anyway, the headline so completely misrepresents this research that it basically says the opposite of what the researchers are saying. The researchers, in fact, created an automated system to solve DCGs! Their contribution was a system that detects 'crowd-sourcing' attacks - attacks where shady companies pay volunteers pennies to solve CAPTCHAs by hand. The researchers said they are going to work on improved DCGs that can't be solved automatically, but nothing of the sort is being unveiled here.
Most conversion of CO2 to O2 is done by algae and other marine life (93% iirc). Trees only contribute a very small percentage. You can increase algae to absorb CO2, but having more algae is not a good thing - it creates toxic environments that kill other types of life: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
By the way this is what a lot of people get wrong when they say 'CO2 is plant food!!'
The CO2 problem is a huge problem we've created that both environmentalists and anti-environmentalists usually vastly underestimate.
Adding to this, a number of existing altcoins do, in fact, attempt to address bitcoin's weaknesses. Litecoin attempts to resist customized hardware mining and also make the blockchain update faster. Primecoin solves a somewhat useful mathematical problem instead of completely wasting computer cycles like Bitcoin does. There are other examples.
Anyway, it only seems natural that as time goes on, better and better cryptocurrencies will be incrementally developed. To ask everyone to use ONLY what's the first iteration of this tech would be silly.
Of course, there are "me-too!" cryptocurrencies as well, typically with only minor 'improvements' and designed to make the creators rich. I'm all for educating people about how they could be taken advantage of. But boycotting? Come on.
No, it requires zero energy.
Landauer's principle is about erasing bits (or, more generally, changing the information contained in a bit). In other words, irreversible operations. It does not apply to logically reversible operations (the simplest of which is flipping bits, but you can represent a surprising amount of computation in reversible terms).
'change', in this context, is different from flipping a bit. It refers to erasing a bit, as mentioned, in fact, in just the preceding paragraph:
'It holds that "any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths, must be accompanied by a corresponding entropy increase in non-information bearing degrees of freedom of the information processing apparatus or its environment". (Bennett 2003)'
Read my other reply about the difference between erasure and flipping.
Also, your entire reply is pretty much gibberish.
flipping:
1 -> 0
0 -> 1
erasing:
1 -> 0
0 -> 0
We're eventually going to hit limits, but there's no reason to think that that limit is a logic gate a few atoms wide. There's isentropic computing, spintronics, neuromorphic computing, and further down the road, stuff like quantum computing.
It takes zero energy to flip a bit. What does take energy is erasing bits, and as it turns out, that does not seem to be fundamental to the idea of computation. The limits of computation have nothing to do with energy per se. Rather, they are about entropy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
*facepalm*
I was attempting to use word-play to get the point across that many places on the internet are hostile to everyone regardless of sex.
Much of the internet is also openly hostile to men. In fact much of the internet is openly hostile to everybody. Have you ever even seen 4chan?
4chan has trolled, among others, religious sites, atheist sites, men's sites, women's sites, and pretty much any site of decent user-base size (and a lot of sites without even that). I don't understand how you can take this story and spin it into 'omg women are treated much worse than men on the internet!' story. Does not compute.
Watson did not use Google to win Jeopardy.
Take your pseudo-political bs elsewhere, I am not talking about being 'interchangeable cogs' at all. Sure, not everyone has the smarts to be a coder. That's painfully obvious. But if someone has the smarts to be able to write code that works - even if it is sloppy, horrible, and badly-designed (what you would typically describe as 'bad coding'), then they can be trained to write better code.
If someone sucks at the absolute basics and can't even write a loop without help, then you should obviously kick them out.
It's been slipping away for about a decade. You should be quicker at noticing things :)
But seriously, they have been transitioning to a more service-based company. They're basically pulling an IBM.
> Are these what the kids call programming languages these days?
Yup. A lot of 'programmers' don't even know non-web languages exist. I wish I was kidding. And a lot of employers don't know either. The whole thing is just really sad.
Yup, that's correct. The best way to combat bugs is to write modular systems comprised of parts that can be designed and tested independently. OO was a failed attempt at doing this. But instead of moving on to better systems (like systems that have actual algebraic type systems), programming culture is still pretty much stuck on OO and languages that use it (like Java or C++).
There is no such thing as an inherently 'bad coder', only someone who has not yet learned how to code properly. I really think there's a huge cultural problem in programming. People view things like functional languages as 'academic' and 'too hard', but if you consider the amount of effort saved in debugging and maintaining code, they are very much labor-saving devices. And I am by no means a functional programming fanatic; I program in both conventional and functional languages each day. But people need to be constantly drilled that copy-pasting code is bad, that shotgun debugging is bad, that using higher-level languages has nothing to do with trading off 'speed vs. programmer productivity', but is fundamentally about writing correct programs instead of programs that arrive at the wrong answer quickly. There is no better way to do this than to force them to think deeply about problems.
There are actually a lot of places around the world where summer vacation is 3 months long. Some of these countries actually rank pretty high in terms of education quality.
This entire discussion is bullshit.
PS, I want to add that the IAU doesn't care what the average Joe calls them. Their definitions are for their own internal scientific usage. You can call them whatever you want. But if you want the proper term that actual astronomers use, it's "dwarf planet."
They are dwarf planets. Not good enough for you? Do you have to lump every single non-asteroid object in the solar system in the same category?
The purpose of language is to communicate ideas in an efficient way. There's a reason, for instance, that the most commonly-used words are the shortest ones, and that things that are semantically different are given different words.
When using the word 'planet', it is far more likely that you have the 8 actual planets in mind, not Makemake or Haumea. So it makes sense to call the former ones 'planets' and the latter ones 'dwarf planets'. Plus, 'dwarf planet' has an additional benefit that it gives you a mental idea of being small (relatively speaking).
But think about what would happen if they were all just called 'planets'. Inevitably people would come up with ad-hoc terms like 'main planets' or 'large planets' to refer to the 8 planets. It would be extremely confusing. That's another thing about language - it evolves largely on its own. We can't 100% influence it; we can only take steps to try to steer its evolution in a slightly better way.