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  1. Re:Every country, and a lot of corps could do this on Stuxnet Was Designed To Subtly Interfere With Uranium Enrichment · · Score: 1

    Actually, no, it doesn't depend on the leadership :

    http://www.philth.ie/images/how-many-nukes-will-destroy-the-world.gif

    And this graph is still overly pessimistic. You'll need at least 3 *big* nukes in the same location to totally obliterate a single block of a modern city. Sure, one will cause massive damage too, but it probably won't even collapse the neighborhood. If the neighborhood's skyskrapers remains standing, that means there will be a great many places where humans will survive.

    When looking at pictures of Hiroshima, one would do well to remember that those were exclusively paper and wood buildings (and the pictures of the last great fires in that city look similar to the damage from the bomb). A bomb does not have the same effect on reinforced concrete, the material all non-Japanese cities are built up with.

    The "destroy the world" nuclear arsenal is maybe capable of wiping ONE large city off the map, scaremongering aside. It is not possible to hit even a tiny country like Switzerland in a way that it won't be able to respond, even if you had all the bombs in the world at your disposal.

    Nukes are horrible weapons. But they can't destroy the world.

    What *can* destroy the world ? In the few times historically people did manage to completely obliterate another country or people, like when the turks exterminated the armenians because of their religion, they did it with a lot of soldiers, and knives. Blunt knives. You see, bullets are way too expensive for this.

  2. Re:Every country, and a lot of corps could do this on Stuxnet Was Designed To Subtly Interfere With Uranium Enrichment · · Score: 1

    Feverish and fanatical beliefs follow from a personality, comparable to addiction.

    Not such a great explanation, after all so does webbrowsing.

    The difference, of course, is that nobody intentionally kills thousands of people because he's addicted to webbrowsing.

    Neither does Christianity
    Neither does Democratic ideology
    Neither does Republican ideology
    Neither does Judaism
    Neither does ...

    The problem is not that people get addicted, at least that's not the cause of terrorism. The problem is what they get addicted to.

    And we all know what does do this ... and it's sad, but it's also a simple truth : islam.

    When you're in an uneducated, third-world country that the developed world has ignored, the narrative works.

    Ah the old "everything is our fault" narrative. It's not. These countries had the same chances every country has had, and they did not develop. That's nature (and after all, isn't the narrative that everything natural is good ? Survival of the fittest is the basic principle on which nature is built. Nothing could possibly be more natural). That's not our fault, in fact America is one of the first nations in history that actually did something to help other countries develop (as opposed to militarily occupying them and bleeding them dry, like e.g. muslims have always done).

    Besides, terrorists aren't poor third-worlders. They're rich, ideologically obsessed muslim first-worlders, generally with at the very least some higher degree, and university graduates are much better represented amongst terrorists than amongst the general population. I wonder how these problems of poor people you allude to affect them in any way at all. Bin laden got 3 mercedesses when he was a kid as a "we passed by the garage anyway" present. Tell me, how do poor people's problems affect him ?

    Besides, dumb, poor, uneducated people can't make bombs. I assume it does not require an explanation as to why not.

    (unless they affect them like the problems of the working man "affected" Marx, who has never done an honest day's work in his life, mooching off his family instead).

  3. Re:Every country, and a lot of corps could do this on Stuxnet Was Designed To Subtly Interfere With Uranium Enrichment · · Score: 0, Troll

    You'll have to explain, of course, why the paedophile prophet *did* "convert" at swordpoint.

    And of course, there is "abrogation" (you see, in islam god is always right the first time, you know, except when he changes his mind, meaning rationally allah is always wrong). The verse about compulsion, you see, wasn't correct. It has therefore been "abrogated" (changed) into these :

    O Prophet! Strive against the disbelievers and the hypocrites! Be harsh with them.... (9:73)

    O ye who believe! Fight those of the disbelievers who are near to you, and let them find harshness in you.... (9:123)

    Say unto those of the wondering Arabs who were left behind: Ye will be called against a folk of mighty prowess to fight them until they surrender.... (48:16)

    But if you have any knowledge of islam, you would know this. So why bother arguing ? You're simply lying.

    Again, to Christians, or any rational human being this looks beyond absurd. An all-knowing God changing his opinion ? That's just stupid. After all, God knows the future, so why doesn't he know his future opinions ? And it is beyond stupid. This is BECAUSE Jesus Christ never changed his opinion on any matter (yes, there are a few times when he came close, but you won't find any contradiction in the new testament, and you won't find direct contradictions between the new and old testaments either)

    The quran is full of contradictions. When someone asked the paedophile "prophet" about the open contradictions (e.g. initially the paedophile prophet forbade stoning), "allah" said this :

    "some of our revelations do We abrogate or cause to be forgotten, but We substitute something better or similar: Knowest thou not that Allah Hath power over all things?"

    (when reading the stories about the paedophile there are absurdly many "convenient" revelations, to the point of ridicule).

    Abrogation, like forceful conversion, is also part of just about all religions, except Christianity. The bible is a paragon of consistency, and so western people simply cannot fathom how anyone could accept the blatant inconsistencies that a 2 year old can easily find in other religions. The bible goes to absurd lengths to both be consistent, and goes to even more absurd lengths to explain how there can not be any inconsistency.

    In islam it is in fact so very bad, that there are almost no muslims alive today whose ancestors haven't been genocidally conquered by muslims. The paeophile prophet himself claims to have started 13 wars, and to have executed at least 13000 people.

    The worst accomplishment of islam : there were barely any arabs in the middle east in 600. From Egypt to Morocco there were only black people (and the indigenous tribes that still live there are still black, e.g. the Touareg), and from Saudi Arabia over Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, ... lived Hindus, now only found in India.

    You might think they were converted. Well, no. As anyone knows perfectly well, muslims have exterminated every last man, woman and child of northern africa and replaced them. The same goes for the Hindus. The *LOW* estimates of casualties of islam are 700 million people dead. Mostly Hindus from India.

    Christianity did not even have the option of converting people at swordpoint the first 400 or-so years of it's existence. In fact the meeting the swordpoint was often the cost of converting *to* Christianity. Unless you liked being eaten by starved lions.

    Just about all religions except Christianity started with armies forcibly converting people. Judaism, hinduism, buddhism, ... all started with an invasion army. But none started with a genocidal maniak that compares to the paedophile "prophet" that started islam. The fact that Christianity grew without forcible conversions is a unique event in history, it hasn't happened before, nor since (and of course, Christianity hasn't remained all that peaceful. Even if the worst periods of Christianity were a lot more tolerant than even the "most tolerant"

  4. Every country, and a lot of corps could do this on Stuxnet Was Designed To Subtly Interfere With Uranium Enrichment · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The sad thing is just about every country has the resources to do this. Siemens is based in Belgium too, so why couldn't it be Belgium ? I wonder what kinds of problems even a country like Luxenbourg would encounter in doing this. All it takes is budget, hiring a few capable Siemens engineers and throwing a few millions at it. Hell, a lot of publicly traded companies could do this by themselves.

    So at the very least, every single country could do it. It would probably be the easiest to do for Iran itself, having obviously maximum access to the systems to be sabotaged, and then they'd blame the enemy "du jour", mostly America, protestors, or Israel, or women, gays (I forgot: gays don't exist in Iran, except of course on pictures of their execution), or ...

    At the very least, add it to your list of likely candidates : America, Israel, Iran, and all other nations permanently on the security council : China, Russia, France, UK. These countries all have policy that military intervention (even if very low-level at the moment) is justified to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And Iran itself, is genocidally insane and obsessed with their, equally genocidal, religion. Additionally Iran's government is very, very afraid of losing power. So afraid, that they marched several hundred thousand children into minefields to prevent it (google "plastic key to heaven"), just 20 years ago.

    Frankly, more people should sabotage countries like Iran, or all muslim countries in general, for the simple reason that their handling of minorities can only be described as "genocidal". If we are to have any pretense of actually opposing racism, attacking countries with racist laws, and even attacking religions with racist laws, should be standard policy. Of course, for American politicians "racism" is just a meaningless 6-letter word that you shout at whatever political opponents you have to get special treatment for "special" racial groups.

    Say, special treatment depending on race, wasn't that the definition of racism just 10 years back ? It still is, of course, the definition of racism, but now democrats and republicans claim words have no meaning and we should help the "poor victims". Apparently, we should help "them" through becoming more racist.

  5. Re:Really? on Which Language To Learn? · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Warning : puncturing the reality bubble of slashdotters can lead to severe loss of "karma". And, let's face it, if you care about slashdot karma, you probably don't have a girlfriend.

    Besides, if slashdotters want to abandon .NET ... let them ! Law of supply and demand ... blahblahblah ... more money for us !

  6. Re:Really? on Which Language To Learn? · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Have you ever seen an organic farming class ? At least here they use some sort of fertilizer that clearly did not come from animals (don't know what it *is* though). When asked, this was because the real thing smells and makes your hands dirty ...

    They also don't ever work a patch bigger than a few square meters, hard labour is definitely not part of the training.

    Look, you can always count on a "small liberal arts college", esp. a progressively slanted one, to cheat and give a "fake" education. I cannot imagine these kids being ready to become farmers. I doubt they could do it, even if they wanted. "Organic farming", at least here, is a fraud. These kids can maybe grow a garden to produce 10% of their own needs (and yes, more people should do that, but it can't replace farming). They can't do more than that.

  7. Re:This was not a deaththreat from a politician ?? on UK Politician Arrested Over Twitter 'Stoning Joke' · · Score: 1

    The fact that what Mohammed did was somewhat normal at the time does not excuse it IMHO.

    And needless to say, it does not change the obvious fact that his followers in the present day are moral abominations.

  8. Re:This was not a deaththreat from a politician ?? on UK Politician Arrested Over Twitter 'Stoning Joke' · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    The fact that you have to lie to get even this small smear going, speaks volumes.

    Christians are forbidden to own slaves. Kidnapping free people into slavery, like the paeophile mohamed did, that's not just "forbidden", that's punishable by death in canon law (which is why e.g. the slaves of america were kidnapped by muslims (ottomans specifically), then sold to protestant christians. Executing slaves for fun, again an islamic practice is murder and will get you incarcerated for life or executed even today.

    And rightly so.

  9. Re:This was not a deaththreat from a politician ?? on UK Politician Arrested Over Twitter 'Stoning Joke' · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Okay, so "socialism is genocidal" is technically incorrect. Every socialist in power has, of course, comitted genocide. So you know, "socialism isn't genocidal", that's right up there with "the holocaust is not part of nazism".

    Strictly speaking, both statements are accurate.

  10. Re:I hope you like your change. on White House Edited Oil Drilling Safety Report · · Score: 0, Troll

    There are 2 reasons one might get cancer :

    1) bad genes (bad in the sense that they gave you cancer, although no matter how good your genes, eventually you'll get cancer. I believe that there are theoretical calculations that seem to indicate that if humans ever were to become 152 year old, cancer prevalence would be 100%)
    2) bad behavior (with smoking as number 1 cause)
    3) someone else's fault (employer buying building that's insulated with asbestos)

    Clearly in the case of 2) people should pay for it themselves. That's only fair (of course, not a part of Obama's plan at all). In the case of 3) there's a case of civil liability, and the responsible party should pay. I don't think there's any argument about these cases.

    In the first case there are 2 actions one might do. You could fix it (but not the genes themselves) at great cost, and continuous cost. Now obviously I'm 100% in favor of insurance companies, or private persons doing this. And dead against the government doing it. Why ?

    Because of what darwinism states will happen if we expend public resources to attempt to equalize genes. It's not just, unfortunately, that the group with defective genes will grow. Unfortunately it's worse. If you were to succeed at saving these people, it would no longer matter if someone was born with good or bad genes. That disables natural selection, and the consequence of this is that genetic information of the entire population will be erased (randomized to be exact).

    Now obviously leaving everyone to their fate is not a good solution either. But there must be balance. So why not simply use the capitalist solution : IF someone, even with partially defective genes (we all have defective genes, just defective in different ways. Some defects turn out to be godsends, that's how evolution works) manages to bring more benefit to society than it costs to fix him/her, the of course that's fine.

    Of course, that's exactly how the OLD system worked before Obama. IF you can pay for the treatment you should be treated.

    Now there's the idiotic illusion that Obama's system is somehow better. And for a remarkably short period of time it will be better. But fraud will increase, followed remarkably close by a large increase in the permanently ill population (just look to European countries). After that, it will be much worse, because Obama will have to cut corners to control costs (you should visit a public hospital in Brussels and talk to the staff, and there will be little doubt as to why/how this is happening). Eventually (after 100 years or so) the entire treatment system will collapse (in brussels it's already largely collapsed. Docter's are forbidden from spending more than 10 minutes to diagnose a patient. Needless to say, this leads to mistakes. Quite a few mistakes in fact). In Holland, the essential (and cheap) treatment of dialysis is denied to the eldery, for cost cutting reasons. If you need dialysis, for obvious reasons, you'll die in months.

    The sad fact is that the holocaust, when it started, was directed against those that were overloading the healthcare system. Did you know the first victims of the holocaust ? It was permanently ill mental patients, whom nobody visited anymore. Then permanently ill normal patients (for instance, these cancer patients). Then it was expanded to anyone needing permanent medical care (ie. the handicapped). Then to undesirables (meaning POW's first, later it meant Jews, why ? Essentially because the nazi state promised absurd social services, and rather than cutting the social services, they "reduced the pool of the needy" shall we say). As the nazi state collapsed further it was extended and extended, and before long Germans understood that hospitals under the care of nazis were deathtraps (Russians found out the same about socialist hospitals a mere decade later). Eventually, the state collapsed to the point where water, food, and shelter were denied to most people.

  11. Re:This was not a deaththreat from a politician ?? on UK Politician Arrested Over Twitter 'Stoning Joke' · · Score: 0, Troll

    Jeuj another lie to excuse islam. I wonder, do you do the same for nazism ? Or socialism ? Or any other genocidal ideology ?

    Even if this were true, does it somehow excuse islam's slavery practices ? It's genocides ? It's massive numbers of dead bodies, even today ? Does it excuse 9/11 ? Does it excuse ANYTHING ? Yes muslims are not, strictly speaking, the only moral abominations on the planet. That does not excuse their moral abominations in ANY way.

    And Jesus did not, when ordered by a judge, and threatened by a mob of angry idiots, stone a woman. He also forbade anyone else from doing it. Is that somehow not clear enough for you ? Or are you simply lying ? Yes, Jesus still considers adultery a crime. Good thing, too, as it is a most grievous breach of trust.

  12. This was not a deaththreat from a politician ??? on UK Politician Arrested Over Twitter 'Stoning Joke' · · Score: -1, Troll

    Why is this applicable ? This wasn't a politician threatening someone with death, this was a politician joking.

    The fact is simple : islam means stoning people (among other things, like slavery, and eternal war, and non-secularism). Muslims believe god speaks through the paedophile rapist mohamed, and he was directly asked that question, according to muslim sources, "should muslims stone women ?", and you know what "god" answered ? He answered "yes". He was also asked whether one could kidnap people into slavery, again the answer was a yes (with a few addendums, but it was yes). He was directly asked if paedophilia was okay. Again the answer was yes. He was asked whether war would be eternal, and he answered that there would be war until allah kills all the unbelievers or changes them into pigs. Obviously, there can be no higher authority than the paedophile "allah-spokesman" rapist on islam.

    Not even the torah is half as clear about stoning as islam. And before the idiotic argument is raised that Christians should do this too, Jesus was asked, very directly, the very same question, and his answer everyone knows. Obviously there is no higher authority on the subject.

    How then, is it wrong to joke about stoning muslim women ? How can there be anything wrong with stating that muslims, all muslims, male or female, want to stone women ? That statement is about as controversial, given the facts, as "the sky is blue". Or is about as controversial as "aids spreads more rapidly amongst gay men, due to their unnatural way of having sex, which leads to damage, which leads to bleeding in both partners, which leads to blood mixing, which leads to infection".

    These are simple, straight facts, and anyone who takes the least bit of offense to them, frankly, should be known as a pre-enlightenment savage. As to gay men, they should take this into account and, like anyone getting in a car, or lighting a cigarette, decide if the risk is worth it. Pr

    Can we please stop the hypocrisy ?

  13. Re:Now That's Bizarre on Man Loses Millions In Bizarre Virus-Protection Scam · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    We now decide on whether or not someone gets to keep their money on the basis of how hard he / she worked to earn it?? What subcommittee, from the dark nether regions of Cthulu's domain, decided this stellar policy in my absence?

    One does wonder ... does Obama secretly slashdot ?

  14. Cloud computing takes away freedom on Rackspace vs. Amazon — the Cloud Wars · · Score: 1

    You know this is another complaint people had with the old mainframe software. All "power" is in the hands of the cloud provider, and you get what they choose to give, and not a bit more. The power of lots of corporations tends to get concentrated into a single huge entity like this. The mainframe "providers" maintained such an extreme lock-in that most banks are still locked in to the system, TODAY.

    Why in the name of all that is good and holy do we want to return to that ? This is why GNU brought us out of "cloud computing" (then called (networked) mainframe computing) 20 years ago (and why microsoft brought the rest of the world out of it 5 years later).

    Well, those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it.

    Cloud computing must fail. Not because of lack of technical merit, but because we'll see "incidents" with google and amazon cloud computing, just like there were unisys incidents 20 years ago. And the sad fact is that Stallman, in his usual way-over-the-top manner, has a point : the cloud takes away freedom.

  15. Re:Colocation? on Rackspace vs. Amazon — the Cloud Wars · · Score: 1

    Except, of course, in order to do that you'll need to write your application in a certain way. You'd have to implement all sorts of things (like tunnels into amazon, but that's the very least of your worries). An application basically has to be written for the amazon cloud in order to function on top of it. Very different costs from having

    So there are lots of extremely non-trivial costs associated with doing what you say. Lots of hoops to jump through, all of them cost money (even if your time is free, they'll still cost money).

  16. Re:cloud vs VM on Rackspace vs. Amazon — the Cloud Wars · · Score: 1

    Amazon's "HPC" capabilities don't measure up to even a small university compute cluster. You can get 64 cores - no more (tiny ISP's have more - out of necessity).

    How much can it really scale up ?

    Now instead of having a cluster that takes weeks to give you results, takes lots of man-hours to build and maintain, and spends only part of it's time being used...you can spin up (in minutes) a cluster that can do the work, then you can release the nodes and you're no longer paying.

    Except a compute cluster that beats the crap out of the amazon cluster nodes (due to gpu performance) costs about $1500 per node. So every company with a need for these things can easily get a 10 or 20 node cluster going. You'd have much more bandwith to the local cluster than you'd have to the amazon cloud as a bonus.

    And, again, the maximum cluster you'll spin up "in minutes" is 64 cores, no more. That's pathetic.

    How much cluster instance time can you get for $1500 ? About 800 hours ... just a little over a month. And keep in mind that for most calculating jobs, the GPU will beat the crap out of even an 8-core xeon, meaning 1 local node will replace 2 or 3 amazon cluster instances in raw power.

    And, given that compute-intensive jobs are generally longer-running types of things (weeks at the very least), you'd run a huge profit over amazon with your local cluster pretty fast.

    (and IBM's solution is a lot better for computing. At least that solution beats a small cluster. Additionally, IBM delivers consultancy that most people will need to figure out how to write efficient parallel computing programs in the first place.

  17. Re:cloud vs VM on Rackspace vs. Amazon — the Cloud Wars · · Score: 1

    Sorry about replying to my own post, but unless I'm mistaken the main reason GNU was started was to get away from these big (networked) mainframe installations and the hyper-clunky and hyper-propriatary nature of their available tools. Certainly today's cloud systems have the same problem.

    Apparently they had the same downsides as today's cloud services. Data goes in fine - but it doesn't come out again.

  18. Re:cloud vs VM on Rackspace vs. Amazon — the Cloud Wars · · Score: 1

    In the case of GAE "the server" is thousands upon thousands of small servers, not a giant mainframe that rests in a single

    By the middle of the mainframe era the same could be said about mainframes. You even had worldwide-distributed mainframes.

    One thing though : their database features blew what GAE provides out of the water in terms of consistency guarantees (even if not in speed. Then again, that was 20 years ago).

    If I wanted to run weather simulations, perhaps even serious number crunching on my Facebook data, etc. etc. I might rent space out of the cloud instead of provisioning physical servers in my network. If you're doing anything at the scale

    I seriously doubt things like Amazon or GAE will beat even small compute clusters available at universities, both in max. capacity and (especially) price, you know, the data crunchers specially designed for the task. Especially when considering price, amazon really charges boatloads of cash for relatively trivial resources.

  19. Re:cloud vs VM on Rackspace vs. Amazon — the Cloud Wars · · Score: 1

    Well then "cloud computing" is simply a return to the mainframe world of old and nothing more.

    A few new API's, a bigger network, somewhat better tools (thank God ! All the devils in hell couldn't make tools less useful than the old unisys mainframes - too cruel)

    And of course it retains all the old downsides to mainframe computing - inflexible in the extreme (like GAE) - everything is payable, metered - huge infrastructure costs for everyone involved - totally dependant on access to centralized infrastructure - and your data is basically unsecured outside of your property - and there's no telling when, how or why the central system will go down (remember standing in line at city hall for 6 hours because "the server is down" ?)

    What has changed ?

  20. Re:cloud vs VM on Rackspace vs. Amazon — the Cloud Wars · · Score: 1

    Well, that's great and all, but if that is cloud computing, then why am I supposed to be interested ?

    I want a "server in the cloud", that works preferably just like a server on my desk, except with a faster internet connection and better cooling etc.

    But it still needs to do things like letting me see it's screen, replug, reconfigure the network, add/remove disks, ...

    The advantages of the cloud would be :
    -> ridiculous disk sizes possible (and for-rent - no capital cost)
    -> no capital investment
    -> someone else does hardware repair (and does it promptly)
    -> fast scaling, that means fast access to more & bigger memory, cpu, disk, ...

    How would that not provide the cloud benefits to me ? Perhaps you see the cloud as providing different benefits, but frankly I see little to no advantage to "automatic" scaling (and I have enough experience in the software world to understand that "automatic scaling" is about as accurate as "yes we can")

  21. Re:cloud vs VM on Rackspace vs. Amazon — the Cloud Wars · · Score: 1

    It would be great if there were some cloud provider (or other name if you like), actually providing the services for VMs that we've had for years for physical machines on our desk :

    -> screen access without propietary .exe (and not-windows-only) (why not via pure javascript ?)
    -> a way to unplug-replug-reconfigure network

    I mean even things like terramark don't provide this very basic service. Amazon is cute, if you don't mind rewriting everything in your business from scratch. And google, well Google App Engine makes amazon look flexible : proprietary API (yes - with a compatibility layer), only approved scripting languages ...

  22. Re:Streisand effect? on Strong Contender Already For Adafruit's Kinect Challenge · · Score: 1

    Please, we're talking about a game system. All of the consoles are much tighter locked down than your description of

    a car that has an inaccessible engine, a dealer padlock on the hood? Do they call it “tampering” when I change my own oil?

    And here's the sales numbers for PS3 and XBOX360 :

    http://www.totalvideogames.com/PlayStation-3/news/PS3-Sales-To-Overtake-Xbox-360-In-2011-14421.html

  23. Velocity difference between wind and GROUND on Going Faster Than the Wind In a Wind-Powered Cart · · Score: 2, Informative

    Too bad I haven't got any mod points left. Yours is the best comment in this thread by far, illuminating the essential point :

    harvesting energy from the velocity difference between the wind and the ground, not the velocity difference between the wind and the vehicle

  24. Re:All your base are belong to humans... on Developing StarCraft 2 Build Orders With Genetic Algorithms · · Score: 1

    In fact, in the case of feed-forward neural networks, it's simple to understand them: just look at connection strengths to see what input features each neuron in the first layer sums up, then look at how the neurons connected to them sum up those summaries, and continue all the way to the final decision. Recurrent networks are slightly more complex, since you have to consider how previous states influence decisions, but they're hardly "hopeless".

    That's great and all, but unless we're talking 2, or absolute max 3 layers, you won't be able to make sense of the information. You can only study them like a biologist would : put them in a cage, see what they do, and hope against hope that you haven't missed a special case. And for any marginally interesting neural net, you WILL miss special cases.

    I'm not saying that it's impossible to determine what a recurrent neural network will do for a given input (or even a reasonably sized normal one), but the only way to do it is to follow the normal calculating procedure.

    In other words, if I wanted to predict what you'd do in any non-trivial situation, and I had the full layout of your brain, you might think I could predict what you'd do. That's wrong.

    But the only way to determine that is to create a virtual world, so detailed and accurate that you won't find it in any way strange, then create a virtual body for you in that world, and put your exact brain in it, stimulating it exactly as it would be stimulated in the real world, and then see what happens. The problem is the feasability of actually doing this.

    And the chaotic part is that I cannot see the "components" of your behavior, for there are none. Like the movement of the planets : sure one can predict their movement. There are just 2 "details" :
    1) huge events, like the moon flying away from the earth, at a moment's notice, and we wouldn't see them coming, because we failed to predict a tiny little event today. If a comet, big enough to deflect the moon (plenty of those around), were to smash through the asteroid belt and change course today, we might notice it tomorrow (if we're lucky) and before sunday comes round the damage would be done.
    2) you need to know every last tiny little detail, or your simulation will be so far off it's not even recognizable after ridiculously short amounts of time.

    The same goes for the climate. If I can't predict the exact numbers coming out of the lotto tomorrow, I can't predict how temperature will evolve on earth, even over the course of a few weeks (actually 3 days is usually taken as the "believability limit". Well, unless you mention the words 'climate change', when everyone freezes up, bends his mouth to political acceptability and states that 100 years is no problem anymore, and anyone who claims different is a terrorist planet-killing racist.

    You need every last unimportant and ridiculous detail to predict what a neural network will do. What you're alluding to is that we can construct virtual worlds where "every last unimportant and ridiculous detail" is a tiny little bit of information. But that won't tell you what a neural net will do in the "real world", which is what you really want to know.

    This is what's meant with you can't predict what neural networks will do : you cannot usefully predict what even simple neural nets will do when confronted with a non-trivial world.

    With bayesian networks you have other options, and you can predict what they'll do perfectly well. They will not surprise you, they will not try wildly different options from the ones they saw during training, like (any interesting) neural net will do.

    And your criticism of this, that you can construct worlds that are so extremely uninteresting that you can simply run them accurately in your mind, is of course true. It is, in my opinion, beside the point.

    "You can't capture every last detail if you leave something out" is true for everything from humans to ants to rocks, and not very

  25. Re:All your base are belong to humans... on Developing StarCraft 2 Build Orders With Genetic Algorithms · · Score: 1

    Based on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], Bayesian network seems to be a partially connected neural net that uses slightly different terminology ("output value" rather than "probability of the variable represented by the node") and names its nodes.

    Well a bayesian network can give you a set of events it's seen before and "blame" it's decision on that.

    E.g. if you have a spamfilter (typical bayesian application) and it keeps either flagging something legit as spam, you can ask the network "tell me WHY you're doing this" and it will give you a list, roughly like so :

    The decision is based on :
    0.0292% this mail, classified as not-spam
    0.282% that example mail, classified as spam
    0.7288% another mail, classified as <X>
    73% this mail, classified as spam

    This can then be used to change the offending input (e.g. say "this mail" was incorrectly classified as spam), and the network can be reconstructed, generally for the better.

    (this obviously needs to be implemented, but at least it's theoretically constructible).

    There is no feasible equivalent for neural networks, due to the fact that a neural network generally "lives through" a large set of training examples (this is a strength, as it can for example, adapt itself to new forms of spam without human interference. A neural net AI can adapt to new tactics without anyone teaching it).

    In a sense a bayesian network is like those old classification books. You remember them ?

    IF the flower has red lines near it's roots, GOTO page 128
    IF ...

    You know, the thick volumes. It is possible to "see" what they're doing, even if you'll have to become a monk and retire from the world, studying the subject for years, if dealing with any reasonably-sized bayesian network. But it is possible to see what is happening. (even if looking at it's examples is much easier)

    You have neither options with neural networks (even in general, it's very very hard. For continuous-valued recurrent neural networks it's beyond hopeless. Humans are continuous recurrent neural networks : you can't make a model of a human mind that is simpler than the human mind was in the first place*). They're chaotic. The only way to see what they'd to given some input, is to give that input to them. A human mind is as complex as climate or planetary movements, absolutely impossible to predict except in the most absurd simple cases.

    * this of course means, that if you ask yourself what someone else will do, you can't reliably predict that at all