I prefer eating fruit and vegetables (and I love grains and nuts of all kinds) but to manage my weight I find I have to eat a bunch of meat (more meat than I want). My brothers have found the same thing - as we've all got into our late 30s, we've had to switch to eating more meat (I eat mostly slow-cooker chicken) to keep from ballooning up in weight. But I also have to have carbs in the morning or else I under-perform at work. Anywho, your vague "natural"/"grandma-recognizable" stuff is completely useless for me: as a younger man I had no problem gaining weight on whole wheat bread (my mom ground the flour herself!) and home-grown potatos.
So what is it then? Maybe I ate too much? Well, you could say that for anything. Later in life, my mom lost a bunch of weight on some quack "HCG" diet (which is obvious nonsense, and yet it worked because it restricted calories). If you only ate things that being with the letter P on Mondays, you'd probably lose weight, at least for a while.. but it's hard to think of that as an effective meal-plan; it's effectively just "eat less".
"Don't eat too much" is an easy catchall, but is often completely unhelpful in terms of helping people make decisions that will make healthy living easier. And, for me, avoiding meats is advice that would make healthy living much harder. I've found a balance of stuff that's working for me (when other stuff didn't), and I'm mostly happy with my health/diet situation, but I've never seen some overarching theory that really fits my experience of health and nutrition. I imagine what you've presented is working for you, but it's not some universal home run - and I think a good chunk of it is baseless bollocks (or is correct by coincidence).
The very idea that there's a simple formula for how to do this is a big part of what's screwing people over; people glom onto some theory, and when they find it isn't working they blame themselves or give up. In the 80s, it was super simple: just eat less fat and you'll be less fat. That kind of sounds intuitive (man, people are eating a lot of fat these days, and fat is so calorie-dense!), and cutting fat worked for some people. Yet for many people, trying to cut fat was just going to make their life harder.
My sister-in-law is overweight and eats a bunch of nuts because it fits some Venn diagram of the 3 kinds of BS she's swallowed (and it would fit your plan too). But she's not losing weight. I think the nuts are making it harder. None of the people telling her things (and that's everyone; everyone is telling you something when you're an overweight female) are making things easier for her, and most of the sources she hears from in society pretty much actively shame her; they're saying "it's your fault for not eating more natural, for eating too much meat or gluten or dairy or whatever". Everyone has an idea, most of them backstopped by "well, if you're doing that stuff and still not losing weight, then you must be eating too much" and, again, the general notion "your lack of willpower is the core problem".
I don't think the answer IS simple. I think to help her, you'd need to sit down and look at all the things she eats and how much. You'd need to look at what she's doing, how she feels during the day, and what are the situations where she ends up really going off the rails and overeating. You'd need to try a few things, experiment through a few failures, and approach the problem from a few angles. "Her": the specifics of her body, her mind, and her life, would need to be part of the plan - such that if the plan fails, we don't say this external thing like "your willpower" failed, we say "we need a better plan".
Some people may just need a simple answer. For other people, I think "seeking the simple answer" is preventing them from building out the more complex answer they need.
If I was designing a setup to teach kids programming, it'd be an IDE centered around creating - for example - a 2d game. Have easy, integrated ways to edit art assets and associate them with scripts and inputs. Have easily accessible commands to make sounds, move stuff around, and navigate between "levels". Kids like doing this; when I was a Cub Scout leader, the boys really enjoyed drawing pictures and bringing them to life and figuring out what would happen - but there's no way they would have been able to chain things together (in Haxe, since at the time a Flash game was the most accessible target for the kids to be able to play the final game at home) without me helping.
There's lots of languages that would be suitable for this, and I don't think that's necessarily the important part. The problem with just picking up, say, Java and writing a game is that there's a lot of ducks you have to have lined up before you can get an interesting result. There's a lot of unintuitive steps. When I learned Commodore 64 basic as a kid, I pushed through those challenges because that was the only way I could play a new game. Most kids now won't have that problem of "there's nothing to do on the computer".
I mostly agree with your sentiment here - but ideally a new system would be able to address both needs (ie. it could pinpoint a shack amid a bunch of others, but could also identify an apartment in New York).
Regardless of that, I'm skeptical how well this system would work overall for many of the target populations for some of their applications (most importantly, delivery). How stable are these populations and their structures? How secure are they? I mean, in the developed world, if someone answers the door at your house, it's reasonably secure to hand them the package. Does that hold for many/all of the targets here, or would you get some kids go stand in Bob's place if it looked like someone was delivering a cellphone.
Does "door-to-door" service really make sense, or would these people be better served by a community mailbox and some sort of low-cost method for establishing identity at pickup? (I obviously think the latter makes more sense).
I think RIM could have succeeded in becoming a successful Android phone vendor, but they tried it much too late. I mean, it was mostly too late by the time the Playbook came out - and when it didn't have support at launch (which many were expecting it to), that was kind of the end of their chance.
I don't think "going with Android" would have been a bad strategy for either RIM or MS, but neither of them did it at a time when it made sense; instead, in both cases, it comes off as a desperation play that's way too late.
That said, I think MS could still have a bit of an out if they REALLY committed to making something like Xamarin work well. If Xamarin was the easiest way to develop iOS and Android apps (which could, as a side effect, also work on desktop Windows and MS phones) MS could tag along and get some applications flowing. MS can actually build good dev tools when they focus on that. But I don't trust their leadership to make reasonable decisions at this point.
This isn't like "oh, I can eventually break this lock by smashing it", it's "this lock opens if you tap it in the right place". It takes seconds, and requires nothing in the way of fancy technique or specialized tools.
Yes, we all get it, any lock can be defeated - but this isn't the right story to use that stock comment on. This isn't someone smashing a small lock with a big hammer - this is someone demonstrating how defective a particular lock is, and it makes for an entertaining little video.
Yeah... I really don't understand a lot of robotics research. They seem to be forever chasing these awkward "proof-of-concept" implementations of concepts that are completely uninteresting. This is a perfect example: obviously you could make some robots that could do this, but it's really unclear what you'd learn by doing so, and the result is useless.
I mean, if they actually wanted this behavior for some purpose, and this was a reasonable way to approach that practical purpose? Sure, do it. Of course. If there was some question whether this was possible (which obviously there wasn't, at least not serious), then sure, prove it's possible. If there was some question we'd be answering (about biology, maybe?) or some challenge that would be interesting to overcome, then, uh, maybe. But it seems much more likely that such questions could be answered easier by a simulation.
As it stands, it seems like we've got a HUGE surplus of research on, to pick a random example, how to have robots all go somewhere without bumping into each other - most of it saddled with arbitrary restrictions that are also completely uninteresting. Can the swarming robots co-ordinate without any predetermined communication protocol? Yes, obviously, and we can prove that in simulation. But that's not good enough for some reason, have to actually build some crappy robots to mong into each other while we re-solve a bunch of boring practical problems with batteries and light sensors.
If you just want to have a challenge, or get some practice building robots that have to deal with the real world, why not build them to at least attempt something interesting or useful, or at least entertaining?
I mean, this is like the core principle of homeopathy. You make permanent holes in the water, and the holes are just the right size for the class of toxins you're dealing with. Then if you want more holes, you dilute the water to make the holes split (obviously you want to be careful with this in practice).
I thought everyone knew this? How did you guys all think homeopathy worked? Magic?
Sure this is a problem, but not an unsolveable one.
As long as only a small percentage of measurements fall into ambiguous bands, you can solve this in practice by simply jittering any of the measurements that were very close. IE, if you have 9 measurements that are clearly in a band, and one that's right on the edge, you can just try both the nearby values for the tenth and see if either matches the hash. If you have too many measurements that are equivocal, then your system has failed as you couldn't (and wouldn't want to) be jittering everything... but overall, this is a design challenge, not an absolute showstopper or something.
Wow, that was a stupid, bizarrely aggressive post. What's extra bonkers is that it seems like you agree with me.
No I'm not an expert on fingerprints (or security or cryptography in general), but that doesn't mean I can't clarify a pretty simple misunderstanding. In this case, my point was that building a hashing system suitable for fingerprint authentication may have challenges, but is not inherently impossible (as the original article implies).
Everything you said agrees with that determination (challenging practically, but no reason to think it's actually impossible). I didn't think this would be a controversial stance at all really, and I certainly didn't expect to induce hilarious rage-posts like yours here.
I'm not suggesting hashing the image, I'm suggesting hashing a stable digital digest, the contents of which might be determinations like "are there significantly more of feature X than Y" that were repeatable. I thought that was clear?
Your next point is a reasonable possible problem with practicality - if your "stable digest" is too small then it obviously won't work. But there's no reason this digest couldn't be usably large with a scan of appropriate quality; to be clear, I'm taking issue with the idea that hashing a fingerprint is impossible in principle, I'm not saying it would practically work right now in realistic scenarios.
And I would say fingerprints are secrets to some extent. If someone were able to harvest a ton of identified fingerprint images from a database breach, I think that would be a significant negative. Being able to hash is a positive for an authentication system.
My whole point is that you don't have to compare image to image. I'm saying that you could take a fingerprint image and digest it into a set of boolean qualities that are stable for various images of that fingerprint (ie. this one has significantly more dipsees than doodads, so that can be a bit in our stable digest). Then you hash that digest and store it. For a new authentication attempt, you do the similar digest and hash, and the two hashes have to match (like a normal password check).
Finally, to repeat from my previous, I grant that this might be difficult in practice, but it is not impossible (and thus this is not some intrinsic limit to using fingerprints for authentication).
It's more awkward to hash a fingerprint than a password, sure, but it's certainly not impossible. An image of a fingerprint is mutable and "analog" feeling, but you could, instead, base your fingerprint comparison on a more "digital" digest of information from that fingerprint (eg. you boil image data down to bits that are repeatable in the face of repeated scans, like you check whether feature X is significantly more prevalent than feature Y in this print).
It'd be tricky, sure, and potentially impractical given current scan quality - but non-hashability is not some inherent limitation of fingerprints or biometrics in general.
This actually doesn't hold as well for humans as it does for mice - overall, humans tend to live longer if they're moderately overweight. This - http://healthland.time.com/201... - is kind of a fluffy article, but it's a good summary of the research.
Nothing in diet/health is simple (despite 95% of the comments in this thread saying that "it's obviously X").
So you simulate it at a lower level for a while to figure out the probability/frequency of that observable macro-level behavior, then just have it happen (on an observable scale) at an appropriate set of times. The whole observable world has to be at least somewhat consistent with the lowest level behavior, but that doesn't mean you have to simulate all those particles all the time.
The idea of the (reasonable) simulation argument is that not everything would be calculated out to the particle level all the time - the simulator would only figure that stuff out if there was some reason to. I mean, you can simulate the observable, macro-scale behavior of the sun without actually figuring out the position of every quark inside it.
But sometimes, like if some scientist is looking very close, you really do have to figure out exactly where every particle is in order to render that scientist's experience - and once you've done some of the particles, you have to store the value for the other ones too. Once they quit looking too closely, you just simulate the aggregate results. It's a tidy explanation of dual-slit type results and entanglement.
It's not, like, strong evidence or something, but it makes sense. And, while I can't think of a test, that doesn't mean a simulation hypothesis isn't testable. Under this view, these sorts of quantum effects are effectively simulation artifacts - and perhaps there's more dramatic artifacts that can be induced that would be more clear.
My kids are all young, and they play Mario 3D World, Mario Kart, and some of the Nintendoland games. Overall, it's a better fit than the 360 for now; the only thing they were playing on 360 much was Skylanders and Happy Action Theater (which I do miss; not a lot of games can handle a room full of 5 year olds). Some of my oldest kid's friends are starting on Minecraft, but we can do that on PC.
At some point I'm sure I'll end up getting another console - but hopefully I can skip this generation, or at least get a good discount.
A few months back I was picking a new console to replace my 360. XBox One would have been a slam dunk if it would have kept playing all the kids' games. Instead, we traded them all in and bought a Wii U.
Backwards compatibility is a huge feature for building up a user base across generations... but introducing it years after console launch, after pretty much saying they wouldn't, after a good percentage of your users have already switched to something, seems really uh... non-optimal.
I don't know why I'm continuing this, but if you're going to just reflexively gainsay, you might at least say why the experiments I linked to don't prove what scientists say they do. Bell's work was a long time ago, and while it's still not 1000% nailed down it's very solid. The experiments are all on that side - the only thing on the "alternative" side is vague "I don't think the universe would work that way" crap that has to be very convoluted to match up with experimental reality.
Yeah - this is certainly my impression from looking at Google. I've seen a lot of quality programmers who started out there and then left as they got older (and were greatly helped in cashing in by having cool sounding Google experience on their resume).
For me, I went to their offices for a bit (they gave us a tour during Google Code Jam), and while the general idea sounds fun I quickly soured on the prospect of actually working there. I don't care about free cereal or the game console in the break room or whatever. At this point in my career I want an office (rather than a cubicle space 3 feet down from the next guy and backing onto a high-traffic hallway), and I want to go home sometimes.
Crazy, eh? It's almost like the information security director wasn't doing a good job. I'm guessing you could find a number of non-optimal things in the setup, given that the person in charge of security was probably not terribly interested in catching himself.
None of them are phrased or set the way a real story would be, and none of them have a clever or entertaining premise; a reference is not a joke. These are sad every year, but this crop seems especially pathetic.
I mean, The Onion is almost never funny, but looking at this crap makes you appreciate the tiny amount of work and thought they put in; there's usually at least an attempted joke there.
Well... I think what they'll probably do is continue testing - and they probably won't be widely deployed until they're as safe as human drivers (on average, they'll probably be safer in some ways and less safe in others). Soon after that, they'll be safer than humans (because they can share knowledge, are easy to upgrade, and once there's lots of them they'll be able to communicate in ways humans can't).. well, that is, if we keep going.
I say "if", because the more likely problem is Luddites who will want them banned after the first death, even if their overall safety record is better than humans. An enormous number of extra people will die because of how slowly we'll adopt self-driving cars. This is because people are dumb and ruled by emotional reactions: when people cause collisions (which they do thousands of times a day) it's just an accident, but the first time a self-driving car runs over a kid it's going to be pandemonium - and a good percentage of people will want to go back to the old higher death rates.
As to your argument, it's difficult to compare a computer to an ant or a person on some single scale of intelligence. An ant is very good at some things, but completely incapable at most everything else. Computers exceed humans at many tasks, while lagging behind in others. No computer today could learn how to drive well by itself, or have much conception of what driving is - but we've demonstrated that computers, designed and refined over time by people, can get very good at complex tasks. I think we're still a ways off from having safe computer drivers, but it's not in any way impossible or far distant; computers are already much closer to "humans" than "ants" on the "ability to drive" standard, and there's no reason they couldn't be better than humans at driving within the next 10-20 years.
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I prefer eating fruit and vegetables (and I love grains and nuts of all kinds) but to manage my weight I find I have to eat a bunch of meat (more meat than I want). My brothers have found the same thing - as we've all got into our late 30s, we've had to switch to eating more meat (I eat mostly slow-cooker chicken) to keep from ballooning up in weight. But I also have to have carbs in the morning or else I under-perform at work. Anywho, your vague "natural"/"grandma-recognizable" stuff is completely useless for me: as a younger man I had no problem gaining weight on whole wheat bread (my mom ground the flour herself!) and home-grown potatos.
So what is it then? Maybe I ate too much? Well, you could say that for anything. Later in life, my mom lost a bunch of weight on some quack "HCG" diet (which is obvious nonsense, and yet it worked because it restricted calories). If you only ate things that being with the letter P on Mondays, you'd probably lose weight, at least for a while.. but it's hard to think of that as an effective meal-plan; it's effectively just "eat less".
"Don't eat too much" is an easy catchall, but is often completely unhelpful in terms of helping people make decisions that will make healthy living easier. And, for me, avoiding meats is advice that would make healthy living much harder. I've found a balance of stuff that's working for me (when other stuff didn't), and I'm mostly happy with my health/diet situation, but I've never seen some overarching theory that really fits my experience of health and nutrition. I imagine what you've presented is working for you, but it's not some universal home run - and I think a good chunk of it is baseless bollocks (or is correct by coincidence).
The very idea that there's a simple formula for how to do this is a big part of what's screwing people over; people glom onto some theory, and when they find it isn't working they blame themselves or give up. In the 80s, it was super simple: just eat less fat and you'll be less fat. That kind of sounds intuitive (man, people are eating a lot of fat these days, and fat is so calorie-dense!), and cutting fat worked for some people. Yet for many people, trying to cut fat was just going to make their life harder.
My sister-in-law is overweight and eats a bunch of nuts because it fits some Venn diagram of the 3 kinds of BS she's swallowed (and it would fit your plan too). But she's not losing weight. I think the nuts are making it harder. None of the people telling her things (and that's everyone; everyone is telling you something when you're an overweight female) are making things easier for her, and most of the sources she hears from in society pretty much actively shame her; they're saying "it's your fault for not eating more natural, for eating too much meat or gluten or dairy or whatever". Everyone has an idea, most of them backstopped by "well, if you're doing that stuff and still not losing weight, then you must be eating too much" and, again, the general notion "your lack of willpower is the core problem".
I don't think the answer IS simple. I think to help her, you'd need to sit down and look at all the things she eats and how much. You'd need to look at what she's doing, how she feels during the day, and what are the situations where she ends up really going off the rails and overeating. You'd need to try a few things, experiment through a few failures, and approach the problem from a few angles. "Her": the specifics of her body, her mind, and her life, would need to be part of the plan - such that if the plan fails, we don't say this external thing like "your willpower" failed, we say "we need a better plan".
Some people may just need a simple answer. For other people, I think "seeking the simple answer" is preventing them from building out the more complex answer they need.
If I was designing a setup to teach kids programming, it'd be an IDE centered around creating - for example - a 2d game. Have easy, integrated ways to edit art assets and associate them with scripts and inputs. Have easily accessible commands to make sounds, move stuff around, and navigate between "levels". Kids like doing this; when I was a Cub Scout leader, the boys really enjoyed drawing pictures and bringing them to life and figuring out what would happen - but there's no way they would have been able to chain things together (in Haxe, since at the time a Flash game was the most accessible target for the kids to be able to play the final game at home) without me helping.
There's lots of languages that would be suitable for this, and I don't think that's necessarily the important part. The problem with just picking up, say, Java and writing a game is that there's a lot of ducks you have to have lined up before you can get an interesting result. There's a lot of unintuitive steps. When I learned Commodore 64 basic as a kid, I pushed through those challenges because that was the only way I could play a new game. Most kids now won't have that problem of "there's nothing to do on the computer".
I mostly agree with your sentiment here - but ideally a new system would be able to address both needs (ie. it could pinpoint a shack amid a bunch of others, but could also identify an apartment in New York).
Regardless of that, I'm skeptical how well this system would work overall for many of the target populations for some of their applications (most importantly, delivery). How stable are these populations and their structures? How secure are they? I mean, in the developed world, if someone answers the door at your house, it's reasonably secure to hand them the package. Does that hold for many/all of the targets here, or would you get some kids go stand in Bob's place if it looked like someone was delivering a cellphone.
Does "door-to-door" service really make sense, or would these people be better served by a community mailbox and some sort of low-cost method for establishing identity at pickup? (I obviously think the latter makes more sense).
I think RIM could have succeeded in becoming a successful Android phone vendor, but they tried it much too late. I mean, it was mostly too late by the time the Playbook came out - and when it didn't have support at launch (which many were expecting it to), that was kind of the end of their chance.
I don't think "going with Android" would have been a bad strategy for either RIM or MS, but neither of them did it at a time when it made sense; instead, in both cases, it comes off as a desperation play that's way too late.
That said, I think MS could still have a bit of an out if they REALLY committed to making something like Xamarin work well. If Xamarin was the easiest way to develop iOS and Android apps (which could, as a side effect, also work on desktop Windows and MS phones) MS could tag along and get some applications flowing. MS can actually build good dev tools when they focus on that. But I don't trust their leadership to make reasonable decisions at this point.
This isn't like "oh, I can eventually break this lock by smashing it", it's "this lock opens if you tap it in the right place". It takes seconds, and requires nothing in the way of fancy technique or specialized tools.
Yes, we all get it, any lock can be defeated - but this isn't the right story to use that stock comment on. This isn't someone smashing a small lock with a big hammer - this is someone demonstrating how defective a particular lock is, and it makes for an entertaining little video.
Yeah... I really don't understand a lot of robotics research. They seem to be forever chasing these awkward "proof-of-concept" implementations of concepts that are completely uninteresting. This is a perfect example: obviously you could make some robots that could do this, but it's really unclear what you'd learn by doing so, and the result is useless.
I mean, if they actually wanted this behavior for some purpose, and this was a reasonable way to approach that practical purpose? Sure, do it. Of course. If there was some question whether this was possible (which obviously there wasn't, at least not serious), then sure, prove it's possible. If there was some question we'd be answering (about biology, maybe?) or some challenge that would be interesting to overcome, then, uh, maybe. But it seems much more likely that such questions could be answered easier by a simulation.
As it stands, it seems like we've got a HUGE surplus of research on, to pick a random example, how to have robots all go somewhere without bumping into each other - most of it saddled with arbitrary restrictions that are also completely uninteresting. Can the swarming robots co-ordinate without any predetermined communication protocol? Yes, obviously, and we can prove that in simulation. But that's not good enough for some reason, have to actually build some crappy robots to mong into each other while we re-solve a bunch of boring practical problems with batteries and light sensors.
If you just want to have a challenge, or get some practice building robots that have to deal with the real world, why not build them to at least attempt something interesting or useful, or at least entertaining?
I mean, this is like the core principle of homeopathy. You make permanent holes in the water, and the holes are just the right size for the class of toxins you're dealing with. Then if you want more holes, you dilute the water to make the holes split (obviously you want to be careful with this in practice).
I thought everyone knew this? How did you guys all think homeopathy worked? Magic?
Sure this is a problem, but not an unsolveable one.
As long as only a small percentage of measurements fall into ambiguous bands, you can solve this in practice by simply jittering any of the measurements that were very close. IE, if you have 9 measurements that are clearly in a band, and one that's right on the edge, you can just try both the nearby values for the tenth and see if either matches the hash. If you have too many measurements that are equivocal, then your system has failed as you couldn't (and wouldn't want to) be jittering everything... but overall, this is a design challenge, not an absolute showstopper or something.
Wow, that was a stupid, bizarrely aggressive post. What's extra bonkers is that it seems like you agree with me.
No I'm not an expert on fingerprints (or security or cryptography in general), but that doesn't mean I can't clarify a pretty simple misunderstanding. In this case, my point was that building a hashing system suitable for fingerprint authentication may have challenges, but is not inherently impossible (as the original article implies).
Everything you said agrees with that determination (challenging practically, but no reason to think it's actually impossible). I didn't think this would be a controversial stance at all really, and I certainly didn't expect to induce hilarious rage-posts like yours here.
I'm not suggesting hashing the image, I'm suggesting hashing a stable digital digest, the contents of which might be determinations like "are there significantly more of feature X than Y" that were repeatable. I thought that was clear?
Your next point is a reasonable possible problem with practicality - if your "stable digest" is too small then it obviously won't work. But there's no reason this digest couldn't be usably large with a scan of appropriate quality; to be clear, I'm taking issue with the idea that hashing a fingerprint is impossible in principle, I'm not saying it would practically work right now in realistic scenarios.
And I would say fingerprints are secrets to some extent. If someone were able to harvest a ton of identified fingerprint images from a database breach, I think that would be a significant negative. Being able to hash is a positive for an authentication system.
I don't think you read my post?
My whole point is that you don't have to compare image to image. I'm saying that you could take a fingerprint image and digest it into a set of boolean qualities that are stable for various images of that fingerprint (ie. this one has significantly more dipsees than doodads, so that can be a bit in our stable digest). Then you hash that digest and store it. For a new authentication attempt, you do the similar digest and hash, and the two hashes have to match (like a normal password check).
Finally, to repeat from my previous, I grant that this might be difficult in practice, but it is not impossible (and thus this is not some intrinsic limit to using fingerprints for authentication).
It's more awkward to hash a fingerprint than a password, sure, but it's certainly not impossible. An image of a fingerprint is mutable and "analog" feeling, but you could, instead, base your fingerprint comparison on a more "digital" digest of information from that fingerprint (eg. you boil image data down to bits that are repeatable in the face of repeated scans, like you check whether feature X is significantly more prevalent than feature Y in this print).
It'd be tricky, sure, and potentially impractical given current scan quality - but non-hashability is not some inherent limitation of fingerprints or biometrics in general.
This actually doesn't hold as well for humans as it does for mice - overall, humans tend to live longer if they're moderately overweight. This - http://healthland.time.com/201... - is kind of a fluffy article, but it's a good summary of the research.
Nothing in diet/health is simple (despite 95% of the comments in this thread saying that "it's obviously X").
No, you're wrong. Defcon 1 is "most ready", Defcon 5 is "least ready". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So you simulate it at a lower level for a while to figure out the probability/frequency of that observable macro-level behavior, then just have it happen (on an observable scale) at an appropriate set of times. The whole observable world has to be at least somewhat consistent with the lowest level behavior, but that doesn't mean you have to simulate all those particles all the time.
The idea of the (reasonable) simulation argument is that not everything would be calculated out to the particle level all the time - the simulator would only figure that stuff out if there was some reason to. I mean, you can simulate the observable, macro-scale behavior of the sun without actually figuring out the position of every quark inside it.
But sometimes, like if some scientist is looking very close, you really do have to figure out exactly where every particle is in order to render that scientist's experience - and once you've done some of the particles, you have to store the value for the other ones too. Once they quit looking too closely, you just simulate the aggregate results. It's a tidy explanation of dual-slit type results and entanglement.
It's not, like, strong evidence or something, but it makes sense. And, while I can't think of a test, that doesn't mean a simulation hypothesis isn't testable. Under this view, these sorts of quantum effects are effectively simulation artifacts - and perhaps there's more dramatic artifacts that can be induced that would be more clear.
You realize venerable is a positive word, right? It implies age, sure, but the point of it is "respected" not "decrepit" or "ready to retire".
So far it's done pretty well.
My kids are all young, and they play Mario 3D World, Mario Kart, and some of the Nintendoland games. Overall, it's a better fit than the 360 for now; the only thing they were playing on 360 much was Skylanders and Happy Action Theater (which I do miss; not a lot of games can handle a room full of 5 year olds). Some of my oldest kid's friends are starting on Minecraft, but we can do that on PC.
At some point I'm sure I'll end up getting another console - but hopefully I can skip this generation, or at least get a good discount.
A few months back I was picking a new console to replace my 360. XBox One would have been a slam dunk if it would have kept playing all the kids' games. Instead, we traded them all in and bought a Wii U.
Backwards compatibility is a huge feature for building up a user base across generations... but introducing it years after console launch, after pretty much saying they wouldn't, after a good percentage of your users have already switched to something, seems really uh... non-optimal.
I don't know why I'm continuing this, but if you're going to just reflexively gainsay, you might at least say why the experiments I linked to don't prove what scientists say they do. Bell's work was a long time ago, and while it's still not 1000% nailed down it's very solid. The experiments are all on that side - the only thing on the "alternative" side is vague "I don't think the universe would work that way" crap that has to be very convoluted to match up with experimental reality.
No, they weren't in that state the entire time - the results of real experiments don't correspond with that, or with "hidden variables".
It's complicated, but the Wikipedia article on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... seems like a good place to start.
Yeah - this is certainly my impression from looking at Google. I've seen a lot of quality programmers who started out there and then left as they got older (and were greatly helped in cashing in by having cool sounding Google experience on their resume).
For me, I went to their offices for a bit (they gave us a tour during Google Code Jam), and while the general idea sounds fun I quickly soured on the prospect of actually working there. I don't care about free cereal or the game console in the break room or whatever. At this point in my career I want an office (rather than a cubicle space 3 feet down from the next guy and backing onto a high-traffic hallway), and I want to go home sometimes.
Crazy, eh? It's almost like the information security director wasn't doing a good job. I'm guessing you could find a number of non-optimal things in the setup, given that the person in charge of security was probably not terribly interested in catching himself.
None of them are phrased or set the way a real story would be, and none of them have a clever or entertaining premise; a reference is not a joke. These are sad every year, but this crop seems especially pathetic.
I mean, The Onion is almost never funny, but looking at this crap makes you appreciate the tiny amount of work and thought they put in; there's usually at least an attempted joke there.
Well... I think what they'll probably do is continue testing - and they probably won't be widely deployed until they're as safe as human drivers (on average, they'll probably be safer in some ways and less safe in others). Soon after that, they'll be safer than humans (because they can share knowledge, are easy to upgrade, and once there's lots of them they'll be able to communicate in ways humans can't).. well, that is, if we keep going.
I say "if", because the more likely problem is Luddites who will want them banned after the first death, even if their overall safety record is better than humans. An enormous number of extra people will die because of how slowly we'll adopt self-driving cars. This is because people are dumb and ruled by emotional reactions: when people cause collisions (which they do thousands of times a day) it's just an accident, but the first time a self-driving car runs over a kid it's going to be pandemonium - and a good percentage of people will want to go back to the old higher death rates.
As to your argument, it's difficult to compare a computer to an ant or a person on some single scale of intelligence. An ant is very good at some things, but completely incapable at most everything else. Computers exceed humans at many tasks, while lagging behind in others. No computer today could learn how to drive well by itself, or have much conception of what driving is - but we've demonstrated that computers, designed and refined over time by people, can get very good at complex tasks. I think we're still a ways off from having safe computer drivers, but it's not in any way impossible or far distant; computers are already much closer to "humans" than "ants" on the "ability to drive" standard, and there's no reason they couldn't be better than humans at driving within the next 10-20 years.