Except that the JVM isn't really a stack machine. It looks like one, but the verification requirements in the JVM mean that each stack operation can be analyzed statically and replaced with a register operation. That's why Android is able to translate most JVM class files (at least those generated from Java sources) into its Dalvik VM.
JVM JIT compilers do the same analysis, so there's practically never a need for an actual instruction stack. It's all register-colored and optimized before it's translated into native code and kicked off. Only a very naive JVM implementation would actually manifest the stack as a stack.
As I understand it, we put more effort into refineries, and apparently it's cheaper for some countries to let us import it, process it, and ship it. I'm not sure why more countries don't build their own refineries. Expertise? Pollution controls? Other needed raw materials?
It's what happens when a web site by geeks, for geeks, inexplicably manages to fail to support a character encoding standard that every other web site has handled for a decade.
At the time of the Iraq war, Fox News and the government were inextricably linked. The head of Fox News was formerly an employee of Republican Presidents, and all down the chain from there the employees have personal links to Bush administration officials. The right wing has switched from political power to media power only because they lost the Presidency. When they regain the Presidency, Fox News and the politically bully pulpit will again be on the same page and working from the same playbook.
It'll be a bit different next time (in 2016 or 2020 or 2024 or whenever it is), since they appear to have created a monster they can't control. They spent so much time demonizing Democrats that a big chunk of the party thinks of it as the only thing they do, undermining their ability to cut even business-friendly deals, and cutting off their noses to spite their faces in trying to put ideologically-pure candidates in the top spot. Demographics, and the bloom fading from their rose (which was more a matter of being in the right place at the right time, rather than any actual penetration of their ideology), will gradually undercut that. So the next time there's a Republican President, Fox News will be helping them crank out whatever message they want. And it will probably continue to exemplify the "paranoid style".
Because legislators are experts in environmental chemistry, remediation, epidemiology, etc? Senators have time to run around inspecting power plants and measuring effluent levels?
Even if you abolished the EPA and turned it over to the legislative branch, they'd still need some body of experts and technicians to actually make the determinations and do the work.
Whenever the legislature does get its hands dirty in writing concrete regulations, it usually does so for the constituency that is able to afford to get their ear, i.e. the industries themselves, via their lobbyists. They themselves know essentially nothing about it, and generally don't even understand the legislation they're passing.
The design of the system as we have it is deliberate: the found agencies in the executive branch, who hire employees who make a career out of understanding the industries being regulated. Their job is to take both the industry's desire to do things cheaply, and the public's desire to be healthy. They're largely removed from the politics of it; they continue the same jobs through changes of administration and the upper levels of management make it their job to insulate the actual regulators from the vicissitudes of the political appointees.
There are downsides to this system, but they won't be fixed by handing the job to a bunch of legislators who are already pure regulatory capture: they owe their jobs to their largest donors, and to constituents who see their economies as trumping all, even their health and that of their neighbors. They're also spectacularly incapable of passing any legislation, due to the very high bar we've set (218 representatives PLUS 60 Senators PLUS the President; if any of them are opposed, nothing gets done). They're only barely capable of setting broad national policy (not even that, any more) and utterly incapable of handling the nuts and bolts of thousands of individual industries.
We're talking about Lamar Smith here. He's a climate denialist and Christian Scientist. It's hard to imagine him suddenly having a change of heart on what scientists think is relevant.
The fact that we've got a political system that puts anti-intellectuals in charge of the science committee means we've already destroyed the nation's ability to compete intellectually in the next century. This is just watching that play out.
God forbid, I actually read TFA, and I still don't get it.
As far as I can tell, it's some sort of planning exercise, an important if well-worn area of robotics. They're adding feedback, in the form of "No, this trajectory sucks". It's got nothing to do with either knives or humans, but just a "Go back and re-plan with this additional constraint".
But I can't figure out just how far it's generalizing. The trivial lesson would be "avoid this point", which is just another obstacle. I gather that it's more than that, since it took multiple trials to learn, but I can't figure out what. The human was in the same place in every trial, so it wasn't learning anything about "avoid humans". It didn't seem to be told that it couldn't go through that space with a knife but could have with, say, a dust mop.
I think I may just be misunderstanding the context of the problem. The machine has a lot of joints and there are many different plans it could use; there's an optimization problem in an enormous space. They wanted to show some kind of algorithm that could be adapted over time with user feedback, but honestly I would have assumed that was a solved problem.
So does somebody with a better understanding of actual robotics problems (as opposed to fictional ones) know what's going on here?
Yeah, that's what I came here to say. I liked the look of the plasma considerably better, and I'm very happy with my Viera. Brightness has never been an issue. I did have to fiddle with the out-of-the-box settings to remove some misfeatures and get the colors right, and its Internet features are slow and clunky, but it does almost exactly what I want.
I hope that by the time it finally dies, they've fixed all the fails with LCDs (motion artifacts, poor contrast, mediocre color.)
I find it somewhat closer to the original sense of "hacker": he hacked some code together to get something done. I'd kinda like to see that sense return, but I'm afraid that ship has sailed.
One of the many things I miss about my old "feature phone": an external B&W LCD display with a reflective background, so that I could read the time without having to push a button (at least in daylight or lit rooms). A small thing, of course, but it meant not having to locate the button, and it didn't consume any power.
The smart phone is a massive win in so many other ways, but that was a feature I miss.
The Honda Insight is a much nicer car than a Ford Fiesta. That's how the economics are working now: the electric batteries add to the price, so they only put it in cars that are already expensive. Partly the proportion disguises the additional cost, especially to people who have money to spend and want to get a jump on new tech.
Cars in that price range aren't optimized for gas consumption, the way a Fiesta is. They're optimized for comfort, which costs mileage by adding weight. If your goal is cost, you get a Fiesta, and you're happy about it, but other people have are other concerns. (Like the fact that electrics have bat-out-of-hell acceleration.)
They do not in themselves represent any kind of energy-crisis solution. They represent a step towards it. Gas engines have a century of optimization and economy of scale. The hope is that a decade or so of work on electrics will bring the prices closer to line. (Plus the more global issues with gasoline: increasing global demand, reliance on foreign production, climate, etc.)
Also, hybrids aren't really the issue here, since they quick-charge with gasoline. This is about all-electrics, which suffer from "range anxiety", since they charge more slowly as well as being pricier.
I think that one of the things that is enabling people to move away from MS Word to cloud-type office work is a willingness to ditch a lot of the formatting. That's nearly always what makes people pick Word: they want to be able to exchange documents with complex formatting and not lose the formatting. If you radically lower your expectations about what kinds of formatting are worth doing, you can get away with the kind of software that can pragmatically be implemented in Javascript and delivered along with your document every time you bring it up.
For documents that actually need non-trivial formatting, you're always going to need an office product, and that complex formatting is never going to transition well from one product to another. There are just too many options: each user only wants a tiny subset of them but many users want many different options.
MS Word gets to rule because it has always ruled: a lot of professionals are used to Word's bugs and misfeatures, and the equivalent bugs and misfeatures of Open/LibreOffice are harder simply because they're unfamiliar.
I do think there's a nice little side benefit to getting people to stop worrying quite so much about formatting. Some of it is of course important, but in many cases it's a distraction from working on content. The online office suites often (but not always) do something that's attractive enough to function. They aren't great by any means, and it would be nice to see them get better, but it will come at a cost of a loss of interoperability.
This is a problem that has been decades in the making. The Teapers and Bush II were the pointy end of a very, very long needle that goes all the way back to the founding of the country.
The problem is that Americans don't trust each other, and they never have. The battle lines here aren't all that different from the ones over which we fought a civil war. It was only an act of tremendous courage and foresight that let us even be a single country in the first place; the first draft essentially left us as a collection of weak, separate countries less closely bound than the EU.
America managed to prosper despite the fact that the country folk and the city folk seem to despise each other. They achieved it largely by ignoring each other, going on about their business and doing it very well, selecting their friends and associates. But as a world leader, we're required to work together, and our self-reliance turns into a weakness: we can't even be civil with each other.
The world can't rely on us, not as we are now. We've had better periods, when we established programs to look after each other, while keeping each other at arm's length by doing it through the federal government. These programs are the ones most under attack: national-scale programs are expensive and cause the deepest resentment. We end up fighting about them and hating each other all the more for it.
I don't know if any country can replace us. Our individualism has crafted the innovations that put us in this position. A de-Americanized world would advance a lot more slowly unless other countries can figure out how to do what we've done. But they may find that it comes at the same cost we pay of self-reliance becoming self-centeredness.
I've been hearing this since practically the day the term "teabagger" was coined: they were co-opted so fast that they hardly had a moment to define themselves at all.
Being opposed to "money wasting" and "wealth redistribution" is easy. Deciding what programs you want to keep and which ones are actually harmful or insufficiently beneficial is far, far harder. Nobody likes wasting money, and opposing "wealth redistribution" frequently means "opposing the programs that distribute money away from me while supporting the ones that distribute it to me".
The Tea Party demographic is old enough that many get Social Security and Medicare, and I've seen very few people (none, really) declare "Please take away my Medicare so that we can balance the budget". Instead, they talk about how that program is beneficial and it's funded differently, so it's really the other programs (i.e. the programs they're not using) that are wasting all that money. The closest I've ever heard anybody talk about is "means testing", though I suspect that you'll find most of those want to set a bar that (coincidentally) sets the limit just above their present income.
I don't mean to claim that the outrage isn't real, only that it was poorly thought out even by the supposed "true" Tea Party. And whatever that was, it disappeared so fast that only the fake, coopted Tea Party is all I've ever really noticed.
Most major publishers want to format it themselves. They've got professionals for that, and software designed for page layout. (NOT Microsoft Word.)
The effort you put into formatting it is a waste. Let the pros do what they do best. You do what you do best, generate the content.
The real issue here isn't the publishers, but businesses of all sorts, wherever documents are passed around for editing by multiple people. It would be great if those processes could avoid formatting issues, at least until the content is set, but they rarely do. So they need a format that everybody can mess with. Right now, that pretty much universally means Word. PDF won't cut it, since you can't edit it. ODF and other formats are just as good (i.e. pretty crappy, actually) but MS has pride of place: everybody else is using it and changing to a different standard is a huge hassle.
That might improve their individual willingness to compromise, but not necessarily. Many of them are convinced that if they compromise, they'd lose their seats. Besides, since all of the other guys have been given an incentive to compromise, it means that maybe you can get away without changing anything. Prisoner's dilemma.
And if they did play chicken with it and lose, the newly-elected House would be essentially identical to the old one. Republicans would be replaced with more Republicans, and Democrats with more Democrats. A few marginal seats would switch both ways but it wouldn't really shift any of the battle lines.
It's the job of an intelligent citizen to figure out which is which, not to cynically demonize government and shut it all down.
When you find some of those, let's start a country together. Meanwhile, I'm stuck in this one with a vast number of people who have absolutely no conception of what government does and very firm opinions about how it should do it.
Even if we had that here, it wouldn't help. 90% or more of the seats are completely safe: if we had a new election we'd just send back most of the same people. If you forbid the individuals from being reelected, somebody from the same party holding the same position would be elected instead.
The Congress as a whole has a very high disapproval, but most people have a high (or at least, high-enough) approval of their own individual Congressman. The problem is all those other unreasonable people; we must stand firm against them by never compromising.
Slashdot closes comments on old stories. So you could make it a thing to try to get your last post in under the wire...
Not that anybody would care. A first post at least potentially has some visibility (though it's usually downvoted to the point of invisibility for most people). Nobody is ever likely to notice your "last post" and become envious; it's not much of a game.
What does the verb "snap" mean in this context? "Any application can be snapped to a game"? It makes it sound as if something is being done to it, but I get the impression that it's just being passed through (and so the only thing being "snapped" is the video sockets being snapped together).
Is there some technical or colloquial definition that I'm missing here?
Slashdot Mirror
Except that the JVM isn't really a stack machine. It looks like one, but the verification requirements in the JVM mean that each stack operation can be analyzed statically and replaced with a register operation. That's why Android is able to translate most JVM class files (at least those generated from Java sources) into its Dalvik VM.
JVM JIT compilers do the same analysis, so there's practically never a need for an actual instruction stack. It's all register-colored and optimized before it's translated into native code and kicked off. Only a very naive JVM implementation would actually manifest the stack as a stack.
Crowdfunding a $5 billion project, fifty bucks at a time, would require a third of the United States, or 3% of the entire planet.
That's correct. But remarkably, we are (recently) a net exporter of oil products:
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203441704577068670488306242
As I understand it, we put more effort into refineries, and apparently it's cheaper for some countries to let us import it, process it, and ship it. I'm not sure why more countries don't build their own refineries. Expertise? Pollution controls? Other needed raw materials?
It's what happens when a web site by geeks, for geeks, inexplicably manages to fail to support a character encoding standard that every other web site has handled for a decade.
Yet you posted something that is contradicted by it. Nor did your reply address the contradiction.
At the time of the Iraq war, Fox News and the government were inextricably linked. The head of Fox News was formerly an employee of Republican Presidents, and all down the chain from there the employees have personal links to Bush administration officials. The right wing has switched from political power to media power only because they lost the Presidency. When they regain the Presidency, Fox News and the politically bully pulpit will again be on the same page and working from the same playbook.
It'll be a bit different next time (in 2016 or 2020 or 2024 or whenever it is), since they appear to have created a monster they can't control. They spent so much time demonizing Democrats that a big chunk of the party thinks of it as the only thing they do, undermining their ability to cut even business-friendly deals, and cutting off their noses to spite their faces in trying to put ideologically-pure candidates in the top spot. Demographics, and the bloom fading from their rose (which was more a matter of being in the right place at the right time, rather than any actual penetration of their ideology), will gradually undercut that. So the next time there's a Republican President, Fox News will be helping them crank out whatever message they want. And it will probably continue to exemplify the "paranoid style".
Because legislators are experts in environmental chemistry, remediation, epidemiology, etc? Senators have time to run around inspecting power plants and measuring effluent levels?
Even if you abolished the EPA and turned it over to the legislative branch, they'd still need some body of experts and technicians to actually make the determinations and do the work.
Whenever the legislature does get its hands dirty in writing concrete regulations, it usually does so for the constituency that is able to afford to get their ear, i.e. the industries themselves, via their lobbyists. They themselves know essentially nothing about it, and generally don't even understand the legislation they're passing.
The design of the system as we have it is deliberate: the found agencies in the executive branch, who hire employees who make a career out of understanding the industries being regulated. Their job is to take both the industry's desire to do things cheaply, and the public's desire to be healthy. They're largely removed from the politics of it; they continue the same jobs through changes of administration and the upper levels of management make it their job to insulate the actual regulators from the vicissitudes of the political appointees.
There are downsides to this system, but they won't be fixed by handing the job to a bunch of legislators who are already pure regulatory capture: they owe their jobs to their largest donors, and to constituents who see their economies as trumping all, even their health and that of their neighbors. They're also spectacularly incapable of passing any legislation, due to the very high bar we've set (218 representatives PLUS 60 Senators PLUS the President; if any of them are opposed, nothing gets done). They're only barely capable of setting broad national policy (not even that, any more) and utterly incapable of handling the nuts and bolts of thousands of individual industries.
They replaced trans fats in Oreos nearly a decade ago.
We're talking about Lamar Smith here. He's a climate denialist and Christian Scientist. It's hard to imagine him suddenly having a change of heart on what scientists think is relevant.
The fact that we've got a political system that puts anti-intellectuals in charge of the science committee means we've already destroyed the nation's ability to compete intellectually in the next century. This is just watching that play out.
God forbid, I actually read TFA, and I still don't get it.
As far as I can tell, it's some sort of planning exercise, an important if well-worn area of robotics. They're adding feedback, in the form of "No, this trajectory sucks". It's got nothing to do with either knives or humans, but just a "Go back and re-plan with this additional constraint".
But I can't figure out just how far it's generalizing. The trivial lesson would be "avoid this point", which is just another obstacle. I gather that it's more than that, since it took multiple trials to learn, but I can't figure out what. The human was in the same place in every trial, so it wasn't learning anything about "avoid humans". It didn't seem to be told that it couldn't go through that space with a knife but could have with, say, a dust mop.
I think I may just be misunderstanding the context of the problem. The machine has a lot of joints and there are many different plans it could use; there's an optimization problem in an enormous space. They wanted to show some kind of algorithm that could be adapted over time with user feedback, but honestly I would have assumed that was a solved problem.
So does somebody with a better understanding of actual robotics problems (as opposed to fictional ones) know what's going on here?
You just know that it would get higher TV ratings than the present Olympics do. Lifting 200 kg? Dull. Lifting 20 metric tons, on the other hand...
Yeah, that's what I came here to say. I liked the look of the plasma considerably better, and I'm very happy with my Viera. Brightness has never been an issue. I did have to fiddle with the out-of-the-box settings to remove some misfeatures and get the colors right, and its Internet features are slow and clunky, but it does almost exactly what I want.
I hope that by the time it finally dies, they've fixed all the fails with LCDs (motion artifacts, poor contrast, mediocre color.)
I find it somewhat closer to the original sense of "hacker": he hacked some code together to get something done. I'd kinda like to see that sense return, but I'm afraid that ship has sailed.
One of the many things I miss about my old "feature phone": an external B&W LCD display with a reflective background, so that I could read the time without having to push a button (at least in daylight or lit rooms). A small thing, of course, but it meant not having to locate the button, and it didn't consume any power.
The smart phone is a massive win in so many other ways, but that was a feature I miss.
The Honda Insight is a much nicer car than a Ford Fiesta. That's how the economics are working now: the electric batteries add to the price, so they only put it in cars that are already expensive. Partly the proportion disguises the additional cost, especially to people who have money to spend and want to get a jump on new tech.
Cars in that price range aren't optimized for gas consumption, the way a Fiesta is. They're optimized for comfort, which costs mileage by adding weight. If your goal is cost, you get a Fiesta, and you're happy about it, but other people have are other concerns. (Like the fact that electrics have bat-out-of-hell acceleration.)
They do not in themselves represent any kind of energy-crisis solution. They represent a step towards it. Gas engines have a century of optimization and economy of scale. The hope is that a decade or so of work on electrics will bring the prices closer to line. (Plus the more global issues with gasoline: increasing global demand, reliance on foreign production, climate, etc.)
Also, hybrids aren't really the issue here, since they quick-charge with gasoline. This is about all-electrics, which suffer from "range anxiety", since they charge more slowly as well as being pricier.
I think that one of the things that is enabling people to move away from MS Word to cloud-type office work is a willingness to ditch a lot of the formatting. That's nearly always what makes people pick Word: they want to be able to exchange documents with complex formatting and not lose the formatting. If you radically lower your expectations about what kinds of formatting are worth doing, you can get away with the kind of software that can pragmatically be implemented in Javascript and delivered along with your document every time you bring it up.
For documents that actually need non-trivial formatting, you're always going to need an office product, and that complex formatting is never going to transition well from one product to another. There are just too many options: each user only wants a tiny subset of them but many users want many different options.
MS Word gets to rule because it has always ruled: a lot of professionals are used to Word's bugs and misfeatures, and the equivalent bugs and misfeatures of Open/LibreOffice are harder simply because they're unfamiliar.
I do think there's a nice little side benefit to getting people to stop worrying quite so much about formatting. Some of it is of course important, but in many cases it's a distraction from working on content. The online office suites often (but not always) do something that's attractive enough to function. They aren't great by any means, and it would be nice to see them get better, but it will come at a cost of a loss of interoperability.
This is a problem that has been decades in the making. The Teapers and Bush II were the pointy end of a very, very long needle that goes all the way back to the founding of the country.
The problem is that Americans don't trust each other, and they never have. The battle lines here aren't all that different from the ones over which we fought a civil war. It was only an act of tremendous courage and foresight that let us even be a single country in the first place; the first draft essentially left us as a collection of weak, separate countries less closely bound than the EU.
America managed to prosper despite the fact that the country folk and the city folk seem to despise each other. They achieved it largely by ignoring each other, going on about their business and doing it very well, selecting their friends and associates. But as a world leader, we're required to work together, and our self-reliance turns into a weakness: we can't even be civil with each other.
The world can't rely on us, not as we are now. We've had better periods, when we established programs to look after each other, while keeping each other at arm's length by doing it through the federal government. These programs are the ones most under attack: national-scale programs are expensive and cause the deepest resentment. We end up fighting about them and hating each other all the more for it.
I don't know if any country can replace us. Our individualism has crafted the innovations that put us in this position. A de-Americanized world would advance a lot more slowly unless other countries can figure out how to do what we've done. But they may find that it comes at the same cost we pay of self-reliance becoming self-centeredness.
I've been hearing this since practically the day the term "teabagger" was coined: they were co-opted so fast that they hardly had a moment to define themselves at all.
Being opposed to "money wasting" and "wealth redistribution" is easy. Deciding what programs you want to keep and which ones are actually harmful or insufficiently beneficial is far, far harder. Nobody likes wasting money, and opposing "wealth redistribution" frequently means "opposing the programs that distribute money away from me while supporting the ones that distribute it to me".
The Tea Party demographic is old enough that many get Social Security and Medicare, and I've seen very few people (none, really) declare "Please take away my Medicare so that we can balance the budget". Instead, they talk about how that program is beneficial and it's funded differently, so it's really the other programs (i.e. the programs they're not using) that are wasting all that money. The closest I've ever heard anybody talk about is "means testing", though I suspect that you'll find most of those want to set a bar that (coincidentally) sets the limit just above their present income.
I don't mean to claim that the outrage isn't real, only that it was poorly thought out even by the supposed "true" Tea Party. And whatever that was, it disappeared so fast that only the fake, coopted Tea Party is all I've ever really noticed.
Most major publishers want to format it themselves. They've got professionals for that, and software designed for page layout. (NOT Microsoft Word.)
The effort you put into formatting it is a waste. Let the pros do what they do best. You do what you do best, generate the content.
The real issue here isn't the publishers, but businesses of all sorts, wherever documents are passed around for editing by multiple people. It would be great if those processes could avoid formatting issues, at least until the content is set, but they rarely do. So they need a format that everybody can mess with. Right now, that pretty much universally means Word. PDF won't cut it, since you can't edit it. ODF and other formats are just as good (i.e. pretty crappy, actually) but MS has pride of place: everybody else is using it and changing to a different standard is a huge hassle.
That might improve their individual willingness to compromise, but not necessarily. Many of them are convinced that if they compromise, they'd lose their seats. Besides, since all of the other guys have been given an incentive to compromise, it means that maybe you can get away without changing anything. Prisoner's dilemma.
And if they did play chicken with it and lose, the newly-elected House would be essentially identical to the old one. Republicans would be replaced with more Republicans, and Democrats with more Democrats. A few marginal seats would switch both ways but it wouldn't really shift any of the battle lines.
It's the job of an intelligent citizen to figure out which is which, not to cynically demonize government and shut it all down.
When you find some of those, let's start a country together. Meanwhile, I'm stuck in this one with a vast number of people who have absolutely no conception of what government does and very firm opinions about how it should do it.
Even if we had that here, it wouldn't help. 90% or more of the seats are completely safe: if we had a new election we'd just send back most of the same people. If you forbid the individuals from being reelected, somebody from the same party holding the same position would be elected instead.
The Congress as a whole has a very high disapproval, but most people have a high (or at least, high-enough) approval of their own individual Congressman. The problem is all those other unreasonable people; we must stand firm against them by never compromising.
Slashdot closes comments on old stories. So you could make it a thing to try to get your last post in under the wire...
Not that anybody would care. A first post at least potentially has some visibility (though it's usually downvoted to the point of invisibility for most people). Nobody is ever likely to notice your "last post" and become envious; it's not much of a game.
What does the verb "snap" mean in this context? "Any application can be snapped to a game"? It makes it sound as if something is being done to it, but I get the impression that it's just being passed through (and so the only thing being "snapped" is the video sockets being snapped together).
Is there some technical or colloquial definition that I'm missing here?
What would you use this for?
Getting on Slashdot.