Irene Pepperberg (the linguist that trained Alex, among others) talks about it extensively, and uses it predominantly. Wikipedia has some articles on it, and The Alex Studies (which is a collection of papers on her parrots, how they were trained, what linguistic skills they demonstrated in particular tests) talks about it in significant detail. It's a great book if you're into that sort of thing...;)
Parrots and other birds are trained very poorly via Pavlovian conditioning. That isn't the only type of training, and Model-Rival training works much more effectively on birds (which isn't to say anything about how it works on other animals).
"Good health care" isn't a boolean value. It's a tradeoff. You can pay for this one extra test, and maybe detect something, maybe not. If the likely-hood & severity & immediate and long term cost all have the "correct" ratio, then it's a good idea to have the test.
With this brave new world, the balance is shifted dramatically, which means usage will increase dramatically, which means costs will skyrocket.
If you're too short sighted to see that - well, you're in the company of a lot of people that are in the process of bankrupting our country....
I agree with your 1 or 2. But the writer's point about vast technological differences is really true, probably more-so than he realizes. And I do agree with the writer that alien contact will be such a HUGE deal to society as a whole, that it very well could be the sort of year 0 thing he suggests.
And I totally agree that they'll know we're sentient, and odds are good they'll be able to have perfect translators pretty damn quickly once they've come into contact with our radio transmissions, if they're able to fly around the galaxy...
That's just ridiculous. Did you even read the summary? This isn't about you installing a trojan on your phone, or about how open the platform is or isn't. It's about it COMING FROM THE CARRIER that way. This could have just as easily happened to an iPhone and had a mac or PC virus on it...
You are correct, there are boom-bust cycles outside of government intervention. But who has more ability to incite them, who has more ability to make them continue.
Even in the article you cite, it questions how big a bubble the "tulip mania" really was. How does any existing government structure limit how much I want my Pokemon, or Care Bear or Cabbage Patch doll, and how much I'm willing to throw at it? Those are speculative bubbles just the same, and some people take a hit from them, and some people don't. Should the government somehow prevent those?
And how long did it take society to recover from the bubbles before the government started intervening? Typically not very long. Do you think tulip mania caused a great depression in Holland?
What does lowering interest rates do? It makes more money available, to be applied to less-valuable or more risky ventures. (i.e. if you only have a small amount of capital, you'll be cautious were you spend it, and you'll spend it where you'll minimize risk and maximize reward. If you have a second small amount of capital, you'll use that on the next best, and so on.) We should be raising interest rates, to reduce the amount of risk we're taking on as a society.
What about subsidies? The government is a giant layer of "management". Any dollar that's funneled through it, gets a large hunk shaved off, before it's spent on anything. And in order to get that dollar, the government either has to take it from someone else who'd be perfectly happy to invest it or spend it, or it needs to take it in the form of a loan. The loan is just taking it from a citizen later on, and with interest. Again someone who'd much rather have that dollar, and spend it or invest it themselves.
Given the recent situation, should the government have let the banks collapse? I don't know. Should the gov't have let the automakers collapse? Absolutely (and helped other companies purchase the assets, smoothly, and helped with retraining).
Be aware, not every economist agrees that _capitalism_ has a natural boom-bust cycle, and I expect few believe a lack of government subsidies _caused_ the Great Depression.... Some economists believe that government intervention in the market (through fiat currencies, through manipulations of the interest rates, through many complex and interacting regulations (with a variety of tax consequences) of commerce that have unpredictable consequences) cause the boom-bust cycles.
Of course costs have something to do with prices, if the costs are in excess of prices (for too long), the company goes under (except for banks, or the US automotive industry, or the airlines, or the rail system, or busses, or primary education or the postal system... ).
Oops, sorry for replying to my own thread, but that's a _linux_ & SDL port that I did, based on the earlier DOS version. Not exactly clean code, but it worked (at least back in 2005) and is GPLed.
I personally did a port (download here) of an earlier rewrite (though the site I got it from is gone) back in 2005. It's a pretty decent version, as far as I can tell, though honestly I didn't play the original hardly at all. The main drawback is local multiplayer only...
Fine, I won't argue the specifics of that case, but the point is, which I think still stands, is that you don't know whether or not there are more details without investigation. If there are none, then of course one can come to a simple conclusion because there isn't anything else to consider, but if a judge spends time on it... maybe there is more to it that they are at least considering.
Sometimes the simplest path happens to be correct, but it's more coincidence than good practice...
You are being simplistic. Just because you don't understand any of the details behind a case, doesn't mean the case is really "obvious".
It's easy to only have a couple of details of a case, and come to a snap decision, and claim that it's "obvious" and groan about how if only someone would apply "common sense"...
Reality is often more complicated. Case in point. Woman burns herself with coffee from McD. If you only have that information, maybe you blame the woman, but it turns out there are more details that escape the 7 word summary. Turns out the coffee was kept near boiling, turns out McD corporate policy was to keep it much cooler (but still hot), turns out they had multiple complaints regarding the temperature but ignored them... To be fair, I haven't looked into that case in detail, but it should be clear that it's possible that there is more to the case than the summary.
And there are plenty of situations where, once the judge hears a complaint, he tells one of the parties to "get lost". If they don't, then perhaps there is something more to it... Oh, and it seems like the judge did exactly that in this case.
While that is some excellent technology, they are just a _display technology company_. They don't make computers. And a good chunk of the discussion by Mary Lou is about wanting to be a _drop in replacement_ for the existing screen technology...
So I don't see how this is a wrench at all, if anything, it'll be a big wrench in the works of e-ink readers, such as, say, the Kindle... that's their big selling point, the image quality (and battery life) and if the Pixel Qi screens can be run without a backlight (which they talk about in the first part of the interview), that'll increase the runtime dramatically.
Handwriting recognition is actually pretty good. I've got a MotionComputing LE1700 with Vista Business, and use it exclusively with a pen. I use Onenote, and push todo items to RTM via a custom add-in that I wrote.
Now, it's by no-means perfect, but it is generally pretty good. It could be significantly better if it gave me an easier way of helping teach it my writing style, adding new vocabulary, that sort of thing, but I think the tech has gotten to the point of being generally usable.
Also, to see some good development MS is able to apply to a product, Onenote is actually quite good (and looking around at forums you'll see lots of comments to the effect "I hate most MS products, but LOVE Onenote...") And the prototype they did with InkSeine was quite a break from traditional UI design...
So, I personally think we are at a point where tablets with useable handwriting rec are here, and are more a matter of refinement.
I might be pissed, but I certainly wouldn't try to claim that they are violating my copyright, or claim that they are violating the DMCA (Ya know, there is that checksum digit in there...) or some other non-sense.
I might make the claim (rightly) that they are attempting to commit fraud or identity theft, or facilitating such... but that isn't quite the same thing, now is it?
So in your opinion, rote memorization is what intelligence is all about? Not problem solving, not creativity, not being able to come up with better generalizations, or whatever? Rote memorizing? Really?
And asking if humans and dinosaurs coexisted is an opinion question, not a question about science. It's entirely possible for someone to believe, for religious reasons, that humans and dinosaurs lived together but to also understand the science.
This is incorrect. We have no evidence that they lived together. Individuals may choose to ignore the _scientific_ facts, but that isn't science. So, #fail!
By your reasoning, if someone was asked: "Is the world round or flat?" and they answered "flat" based on whatever whacko system of beliefs they might have, it suddenly becomes a question of "opinion"? Certainly not.
Why an individual chooses to ignore certain areas of scientific understanding are irrelevant, unless it's done on a scientific basis.
As I said, we are running our own name servers, they just happen to be hosted within the frontier network. They are also our backup DNS, but somehow they were still redirecting people.
Honestly, all colos/providers I've dealt with have sucked, it's just the degree to which they suck that varies.
I'm not sure if they've stopped, but it was a fucking disaster for us. My company's sites and our self-hosted DNS are colo-ed with frontier, and they had a network failure not too long ago. When people tried to get to our sites, they were redirected to their crap search page. Seriously, EPIC FAIL! That wasn't acceptable at all.
This sort of behavior just isn't okay anywhere... some business people really should be bonked on the head for implementing this anywhere.
To rephrase, "Encyclopedias document knowledge that other people (e.g. historians, research scientists, that sort of thing) have acquired (through original research) and published elsewhere (e.g. in books, journals, etc.)." Therefore the original comment that wikipedia isn't as good as other encyclopedias because "it is never a primary source, at best a secondary source" isn't a valid criticism, since the same criticism could be made against all other encyclopedias.
Re-reading, perhaps the original poster really meant that wikipedia is never a secondary source and at best a tertiary source.....
"it is never a primary source, at best a secondary source, and most often a tertiary source"...
Well, this is true of all or nearly all encyclopedias, isn't it? They aren't doing original research
themselves, right? They are documenting the state of knowledge that other's acquire.
I am unconvinced. The "end of the dark ages" was characterized by a rediscovery of the Greek and Roman classics which were ignored or destroyed as pagan for an extended period of time in Europe. Where were they rediscovered? In the islamic world, where period intellectuals had translated many of the early works, and had done their own reinterpretation of the Greek and Roman philosophies.
This, in turn, lead to a re-awakening of reason as a way of thinking about the world.
I certainly wouldn't argue that NOTHING happened in the dark ages, but I believe that Stark is exaggerating. But I do agree with Stark that Augustine was a great intellect, a great philosopher and proponent of reason.
It is certainly neat that he built a physical body for them.... And presumably this could be scaled up, but there is clearly a lot of less-interesting stuff needed to do it physically. Quite a bit of overhead.
Now, if he had built something that could put together lego structures
automatically, that would be something!
Slashdot Mirror
Irene Pepperberg (the linguist that trained Alex, among others) talks about it extensively, and uses it predominantly. Wikipedia has some articles on it, and The Alex Studies (which is a collection of papers on her parrots, how they were trained, what linguistic skills they demonstrated in particular tests) talks about it in significant detail. It's a great book if you're into that sort of thing... ;)
Parrots and other birds are trained very poorly via Pavlovian conditioning. That isn't the only type of training, and Model-Rival training works much more effectively on birds (which isn't to say anything about how it works on other animals).
"Good health care" isn't a boolean value. It's a tradeoff. You can pay for this one extra test, and maybe detect something, maybe not. If the likely-hood & severity & immediate and long term cost all have the "correct" ratio, then it's a good idea to have the test.
With this brave new world, the balance is shifted dramatically, which means usage will increase dramatically, which means costs will skyrocket.
If you're too short sighted to see that - well, you're in the company of a lot of people that are in the process of bankrupting our country....
I agree with your 1 or 2. But the writer's point about vast technological differences is really true, probably more-so than he realizes. And I do agree with the writer that alien contact will be such a HUGE deal to society as a whole, that it very well could be the sort of year 0 thing he suggests.
And I totally agree that they'll know we're sentient, and odds are good they'll be able to have perfect translators pretty damn quickly once they've come into contact with our radio transmissions, if they're able to fly around the galaxy...
Just in case you, or someone you know turns out to be the first, everyone should read this
It's not exactly rigorous, but it gets the main points across.
Touche'. I don't have an iPhone, but I'm surprised it doesn't... How the heck do you get data on or off the damn thing??
That's just ridiculous. Did you even read the summary? This isn't about you installing a trojan on your phone, or about how open the platform is or isn't. It's about it COMING FROM THE CARRIER that way. This could have just as easily happened to an iPhone and had a mac or PC virus on it...
Even in the article you cite, it questions how big a bubble the "tulip mania" really was. How does any existing government structure limit how much I want my Pokemon, or Care Bear or Cabbage Patch doll, and how much I'm willing to throw at it? Those are speculative bubbles just the same, and some people take a hit from them, and some people don't. Should the government somehow prevent those?
And how long did it take society to recover from the bubbles before the government started intervening? Typically not very long. Do you think tulip mania caused a great depression in Holland?
What does lowering interest rates do? It makes more money available, to be applied to less-valuable or more risky ventures. (i.e. if you only have a small amount of capital, you'll be cautious were you spend it, and you'll spend it where you'll minimize risk and maximize reward. If you have a second small amount of capital, you'll use that on the next best, and so on.) We should be raising interest rates, to reduce the amount of risk we're taking on as a society.
What about subsidies? The government is a giant layer of "management". Any dollar that's funneled through it, gets a large hunk shaved off, before it's spent on anything. And in order to get that dollar, the government either has to take it from someone else who'd be perfectly happy to invest it or spend it, or it needs to take it in the form of a loan. The loan is just taking it from a citizen later on, and with interest. Again someone who'd much rather have that dollar, and spend it or invest it themselves.
Given the recent situation, should the government have let the banks collapse? I don't know. Should the gov't have let the automakers collapse? Absolutely (and helped other companies purchase the assets, smoothly, and helped with retraining).
Be aware, not every economist agrees that _capitalism_ has a natural boom-bust cycle, and I expect few believe a lack of government subsidies _caused_ the Great Depression.... Some economists believe that government intervention in the market (through fiat currencies, through manipulations of the interest rates, through many complex and interacting regulations (with a variety of tax consequences) of commerce that have unpredictable consequences) cause the boom-bust cycles.
Of course costs have something to do with prices, if the costs are in excess of prices (for too long), the company goes under (except for banks, or the US automotive industry, or the airlines, or the rail system, or busses, or primary education or the postal system... ).
Oops, sorry for replying to my own thread, but that's a _linux_ & SDL port that I did, based on the earlier DOS version. Not exactly clean code, but it worked (at least back in 2005) and is GPLed.
I personally did a port (download here) of an earlier rewrite (though the site I got it from is gone) back in 2005. It's a pretty decent version, as far as I can tell, though honestly I didn't play the original hardly at all. The main drawback is local multiplayer only...
Fine, I won't argue the specifics of that case, but the point is, which I think still stands, is that you don't know whether or not there are more details without investigation. If there are none, then of course one can come to a simple conclusion because there isn't anything else to consider, but if a judge spends time on it... maybe there is more to it that they are at least considering.
Sometimes the simplest path happens to be correct, but it's more coincidence than good practice...
You are being simplistic. Just because you don't understand any of the details behind a case, doesn't mean the case is really "obvious".
It's easy to only have a couple of details of a case, and come to a snap decision, and claim that it's "obvious" and groan about how if only someone would apply "common sense"...
Reality is often more complicated. Case in point. Woman burns herself with coffee from McD. If you only have that information, maybe you blame the woman, but it turns out there are more details that escape the 7 word summary. Turns out the coffee was kept near boiling, turns out McD corporate policy was to keep it much cooler (but still hot), turns out they had multiple complaints regarding the temperature but ignored them... To be fair, I haven't looked into that case in detail, but it should be clear that it's possible that there is more to the case than the summary.
And there are plenty of situations where, once the judge hears a complaint, he tells one of the parties to "get lost". If they don't, then perhaps there is something more to it... Oh, and it seems like the judge did exactly that in this case.
While that is some excellent technology, they are just a _display technology company_. They don't make computers. And a good chunk of the discussion by Mary Lou is about wanting to be a _drop in replacement_ for the existing screen technology...
So I don't see how this is a wrench at all, if anything, it'll be a big wrench in the works of e-ink readers, such as, say, the Kindle... that's their big selling point, the image quality (and battery life) and if the Pixel Qi screens can be run without a backlight (which they talk about in the first part of the interview), that'll increase the runtime dramatically.
Handwriting recognition is actually pretty good. I've got a MotionComputing LE1700 with Vista Business, and use it exclusively with a pen. I use Onenote, and push todo items to RTM via a custom add-in that I wrote. Now, it's by no-means perfect, but it is generally pretty good. It could be significantly better if it gave me an easier way of helping teach it my writing style, adding new vocabulary, that sort of thing, but I think the tech has gotten to the point of being generally usable. Also, to see some good development MS is able to apply to a product, Onenote is actually quite good (and looking around at forums you'll see lots of comments to the effect "I hate most MS products, but LOVE Onenote...") And the prototype they did with InkSeine was quite a break from traditional UI design... So, I personally think we are at a point where tablets with useable handwriting rec are here, and are more a matter of refinement.
I might be pissed, but I certainly wouldn't try to claim that they are violating my copyright, or claim that they are violating the DMCA (Ya know, there is that checksum digit in there...) or some other non-sense. I might make the claim (rightly) that they are attempting to commit fraud or identity theft, or facilitating such... but that isn't quite the same thing, now is it?
So in your opinion, rote memorization is what intelligence is all about? Not problem solving, not creativity, not being able to come up with better generalizations, or whatever? Rote memorizing? Really?
And asking if humans and dinosaurs coexisted is an opinion question, not a question about science. It's entirely possible for someone to believe, for religious reasons, that humans and dinosaurs lived together but to also understand the science.
This is incorrect. We have no evidence that they lived together. Individuals may choose to ignore the _scientific_ facts, but that isn't science. So, #fail! By your reasoning, if someone was asked: "Is the world round or flat?" and they answered "flat" based on whatever whacko system of beliefs they might have, it suddenly becomes a question of "opinion"? Certainly not. Why an individual chooses to ignore certain areas of scientific understanding are irrelevant, unless it's done on a scientific basis.
As I said, we are running our own name servers, they just happen to be hosted within the frontier network. They are also our backup DNS, but somehow they were still redirecting people.
Honestly, all colos/providers I've dealt with have sucked, it's just the degree to which they suck that varies.
I'm not sure if they've stopped, but it was a fucking disaster for us. My company's sites and our self-hosted DNS are colo-ed with frontier, and they had a network failure not too long ago. When people tried to get to our sites, they were redirected to their crap search page. Seriously, EPIC FAIL! That wasn't acceptable at all.
This sort of behavior just isn't okay anywhere... some business people really should be bonked on the head for implementing this anywhere.
To rephrase, "Encyclopedias document knowledge that other people (e.g. historians, research scientists, that sort of thing) have acquired (through original research) and published elsewhere (e.g. in books, journals, etc.)." Therefore the original comment that wikipedia isn't as good as other encyclopedias because "it is never a primary source, at best a secondary source" isn't a valid criticism, since the same criticism could be made against all other encyclopedias.
Re-reading, perhaps the original poster really meant that wikipedia is never a secondary source and at best a tertiary source.....
"it is never a primary source, at best a secondary source, and most often a tertiary source"... Well, this is true of all or nearly all encyclopedias, isn't it? They aren't doing original research themselves, right? They are documenting the state of knowledge that other's acquire.
I am unconvinced. The "end of the dark ages" was characterized by a rediscovery of the Greek and Roman classics which were ignored or destroyed as pagan for an extended period of time in Europe. Where were they rediscovered? In the islamic world, where period intellectuals had translated many of the early works, and had done their own reinterpretation of the Greek and Roman philosophies.
This, in turn, lead to a re-awakening of reason as a way of thinking about the world.
I certainly wouldn't argue that NOTHING happened in the dark ages, but I believe that Stark is exaggerating. But I do agree with Stark that Augustine was a great intellect, a great philosopher and proponent of reason.
It is certainly neat that he built a physical body for them.... And presumably this could be scaled up, but there is clearly a lot of less-interesting stuff needed to do it physically. Quite a bit of overhead.
Now, if he had built something that could put together lego structures automatically, that would be something!