Ignorance is simply lack of knowledge; I think what you are griping about is stupidity; which is something people have to learn first. Look at children - nobody is more honestly ignorant than a young child; and what is it children are more than anything else? No, the answer is NOT "tender and tasty when cooked well"; they are curious. Stupidity is what you get when you believe that "curiosity killed the cat" and that sort of nonsense.
That old guy you know, he has kept his curiosity alive; and research has shown time and again that when you keep challenging your brain, it becomes more resistant to the deterioriation that so often hits you in old age. So, if you end up one day thinking that it has become simple and easy, it is probably time to go and learn something entirely new, like Chinese or playing renaissance lute.
I could indeed, and perhaps I should; but as I believe I said, in my experience it would hardly be worth the effort - the ability of the/. editing team to communicate the essence of valid research results is not very high, even in the few cases where they research they refer to is not frivolous nonsense.
That aside, I still think my main point is valid: that there is far too much trumpeting of "research shows..." with no founding in reality. People drone on about how research and education are underfunded and how that is the reason why Americans are increasingly anti-intellectual. Perhaps this kind of frivolous attitude to serious science contributes to the problem?
Philosophers have long wondered at the profound link between mathematics and physics
I would have thought it obvious. All we know about physics is seen through the glasses of mathematics; all theories are expressed in terms of maths, all experimental results are interpreted with the use of maths. How would it be possible to NOT find that physics is intimately connected with maths?
Hundreds of hours? What does that translate to in number of players, distributed on age-groups and types of games? I could of course read the article, but experience makes me suspect it is unlikely to tell me. Even if is only about one type of game, or simply one game, full stop, "hundreds of hours" doesn't seem like much of a sample in statistical terms, which would make their results seem a bit dubious.
What I feel is the problem here is that there are far too many reports of results that have little weight on their own. This doesn't make the individual pieces of research invalid, but it does mean that we can't really conclude much from the results until enough projects have been conducted and somebody has done the proper "meta-research" on the combined dataset.
Interesting concept. Here is another one: You are the president of a Global Superpower, you mission is to bring peace to the world, but you are surrounded by pathological liars, mindless drones and lobbyists, and you have the handicap that everything you say or do gets mangled and often comes out as the opposite of what you intended.
Are we talking code reviews here, or checks and controls in general? Code reviews can be very helpful, if the objective is solely to educate and learn, rather than finding excuses for why you haven't performed well enough next time you have a salary review. It could be run in confidence by a group that is independent of management, eg. and external company.
It should be obvious that too little or too much in the way of controlling people is bad, and not just in programming. Social security in many countries is like that, especially in Scandinavia; there are so many checks in place to prevent benefits fraud and ensure that society only spends money on people who actually need it, that not only does it cost far more than what is potentially saved, but it also means that helping those that actually need it most takes very long. And to top it off, it doesn't prevent benefits fraud at all.
In my view, it should be simple and to the point - it shouldn't be possible to simply go and claim unemployment benefits if you are well off and have a good job, but it is a lot more efficient to simply trust most people to be honest and then let the police catch the cheats. Same with tax - make it a fixed percentage, with no loopholes for anybody to wriggle out of it.
In development the same principles apply: the basic assumption must be that people are honest and want to get the job done. In some environments it can be useful to have an "Issue Tracking System", so you don't loose track of what you are doing, code reviews can be helpful too; but only if they are used as tools, not weapons.
Centimillionaires? Let me see, a centimeter is 1/100 of a meter, so a centimillionaire is a guy who own 1/100 of a million = 10,000. Stands to reason, I'd say. BTW, it is nice to see you guys in America finally making use of the metric system;-)
Yes, I know, the title is not fair to most Americans - it is meant as a provocation, of course.
But sadly it isn't far off the mark when it comes to the kind of responses I see on/. that are modded +5 "Insightful" or "Interesting". They seem to range from the dowright disgusting "Who fscking cares about some 13year old brat killing herself" to the rather lame "Lori Drew did something wrong, but 'free speech' is much more important" - and that is at the kind and warm-hearted end of the spectrum.
Freedom is important, oh yes. It is also mostly fictitious, at least in the absolute, quasi-religious sense people on/. seem to think. Everything, from quantum-mechanics up, should tell you that there is no such thing as complete, perfect indepedence; the only real freedom is sufficient freedom to live a worthy and fulfilling life at peace with your neighbors. With freedom comes responsibility, because with action comes consequences.
One can but wonder how it came to that in America, it is certainly not the prevailing viewpoint in the parts of Europe I know of. This is where people usually start pointing to History and Founding Fathers, but I just can't see what that has to do with anything; the freedom of speech should be seen in light of that time, as a reaction to specific oppression of political and religious dissent, and it is clear that it is about the right to practise your faith and express your political views; both of which make a lot of sense. But this idea about "freedom to do and say anything at all with no restrictions or consequences" is simply nonsense - to me it seems to have arisen in the 60es, a time when we also saw some talk about psychopathy as an ideal for mankind, exactly because psychopaths are so void of the moral inhibitions of normal society. Go and look it up if you don't believe me.
Far be it from me to dictate what Americans should think or believe, but before people start idolising what can in many ways be regarded as "the essence of evil", they would be well adviced to at least have thought it through.
Since, there are lots of people who have the degree, I think that you will be in bad shape to compete against them.
I'm not sure about that, though. Times have changed since I started 25 years ago, but on the other hand, I have lived through at least 2 since then. The tendency has always been that in times of crisis the old, established companies take a hit, and are to some extent replaced by new startups with fresh ideas - and, I suppose, with less debt. Didn't companies like Apple and Microsoft start up exactly in times of crisis? And newly established companies will often be less inclined to look at education and more on what you can actually do; degrees cost money.
In my experience it is often a matter of personality; especially for a small company. As I said, I have worked in the industry for >25 years now; I have often lost my job (not always my fault, I might add), but I have always got a new one with better salary within a month, crisis or not. I have a degree in maths (algebra, geometry, physics) - about as far from relevant as it gets for computing. I think where it gets difficult is when you want to start in or advance to a more leading role - a degree can give you more easy access to that kind of roles; without it you have to work harder to prove yourself.
May I apologise in advance for the state of the London 2012 Olympics? I have absolutely no faith in the Government bringing this in on time, or on budget.
You certainly may - apology accepted.
In other new, one of the first Olympic venues for 2012 games opens today, ahead of schedule and under budget:
I think one of the reasons why it gets like that is that nobody with a real life is willing to give their own time to community projects like that; thus it ends up in the hands of small-minded bullies. It works like that on all levels - just see how the political agenda is constantly taken over by the worst elements in society, simply because the good, honest, ordinary people don't make the necessary effort.
She now faces up to 3 years in jail and $300,000 in fines -- a troubling precedent for anyone who has ever registered with a website under a pseudonym
Here we have some person who has mercilessly bullied a vulnerable child to suicide, and she is let off as easily as this. On the other hand, if a loving spouse helps their helpless, hopelessly ill other half end their suffering at their own request, the starting point for prosecution is a charge of murder. It seems to me that there is something desperately wrong with our society and laws, if you are a murderer for doing something good out of love, but it is only a misdemeanor when you cause the death of a child because you are a vicious bitch.
It seems to me that you completely and utterly miss the point here. The jury and the prossecution didn't have the tools needed to punish what was clearly an evil person committing callous acts of cruelty resulting in the death of a child; so they try to hit as hard as possible wherever possible. The problem here is not that you can now end up in jail for giving a false name on the web, but that the law is inadequate.
They kept this pretty quiet up to now, not the kind of information policy I would expect from CERN
I think the explanation is straightforward: this is a very complex system, not only to build and run, but also to figure out why things went wrong. The modern day public are used to a media circus, where we follow events as closely as possible - but heavily edited for whatever pseudo-drama can be wrung out of it, to make it look like a soap-opera or a "reality" tv show. One can't blame them for not buying into that - they just want to figure out what went wrong, repair things and get on with research; they are scientists, not media whores or celebrities (but I repeat myself).
Once you start living life on the front pages, your every action gets scrutinised by journalists and the public, none of whom know anything about the matter at hand, and they all have their opinions that they insist to bother you and everybody else with. All this does is take your attention away from repairing things and getting back to doing important research. I have no doubt that the managers in charge have all been thoroughly informed and that they have decided not to go public until they have discovered all the facts.
And so, yes, you're right, autonomous technology will lead to more war. Not by the US, but mainly by its enemies.
Not by the US - that's something you know, is it? It must be one hell of a convincing source of information you've got, because the Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars do seem to point in another direction. But I have an open mind to this - please tell us all what convinced you.
This is not "the evil America" that I am talking about, but the twisted, little minds who live and breath in a fantasy world of "military strategy" and "security", where the reality of these things is far away. Producing a swarm of murder machines depersonalises it just one more degree so these "good patriots" can imagine that they are good Christians and not selfish little psychos with blood on their hands. I don't think any American living in the real world would approve of this kind of thing; I hope I'm not being naive here.
To me this sounds a lot like the way certain Christians argue that being filthy rich is Gods reward to you for being such a good little person - despite what Jesus had to say about the subject.
So it is "ethical" to make a killing automaton, is it? Just like waterboarding isn't torture, it's just "being persuasive". The real rationale behind this is not that it is "ethical", but that it is politically less costly at home to send a battalion of machines out than it is to see your young sons and daughters come home as stiffs.
I have a better suggestion: Send all these "brilliant military thinkers" out on the battlefields in Afghanistan dressed up as Uncle Sam and carrying banners saying "We hate muslims". That would be much more ethical, because if they got killed we could say "Look, no blood on my hands, it was the others that did it, you know what they are like". In my opinion, if you have the taste for war, you've got to have the guts to go out there, take the risks and do the killing yourself; otherwise you are little better than a coward hiding behind others.
I'm sure it can:-) I can't watch the thing you point me to on YouTube - I don't use Flash or whatever, sorry about that.
My problem is not just with big band music, I can't abide any big ensemble, be it a symphony orchestra or a choir. I tend to follow every instrument or voice, and after only a few, less than 10, I can't keep it up, and it becomes noise. And there is also something about the quality of the music - when you play or compose for a single instrument, you either produce very good quality or it sounds shallow and dull; but some composers compensate for their lack of originality or whatever by sloshing on more instruments. This seems to be more pronounced in the kind of genre that Frank Sinatra represented; he had a good singing voice, but the texts were shallow and the music so-so - and it didn't make it better that they tried to drown it in a million violins.
I actually liked the clip I heard of this computer jazz - it reminded me of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, which is one album I find incredibly funny, not least because it is so absurd. It is hard to fathom just how stoned he must have been to not only record it, but get an actual record company to produce it.
The thing about sawing a donkey in two - I've just been reading Terry Pratchett's "The last continent", where he uses that expression.
This is a rather ambiguous question, isn't it? It could mean "Would it be ethically right to do?" - which was what I read it as first, but it could also mean "Is this something we ought to do when there are so many other things that seem more necessary?" And then, of course there are all the variants of "Wouldn't it be cool if...".
So, should we do that kind of things when there is [your choice of current crisis]? Well, yes, I think, within limits. The thing is, in times of crisis, what we need is to think out of the box, so we can find a way out of our problems. Apparently a lot of the biggest and most successful companies were founded exactly in times of crisis - Microsoft being one example. Maybe cloning neandertals (note the lack of "h" - Neandertal is a placename in Germany; the Neander Valley, and it is spelled that way) is a bit out of reach, but we should certainly not cut back on basic research in a crisis.
The ethics thing, then? Would it be right to do it, if we could? Well, according to whose views are we talking here? I'm not sure there is a right or wrong answer here - very often all we have is the choice and the consequences. Now, don't start pulling out religion - it simply hasn't got the answer however much you try to twist it. Even if I believed in a god, I don't think he/she/it would have gone to the extreme lengths of equipping people with the ability to reason and make informed choices only to tell them in minute detail all they have to think or do - we have our brains so we should use to the best of our ability. All we are required to is make our choices and live with the consequences.
So, while I can't tell what is the ethically right thing to do, I can tell what I would choose: I would do it. I would love to know another intelligent species than our own; one that might be our intellectual equals.
The short answer: Yes. It is a "race to 0" if you will.
The longer version is that there has always been something suspect in property rights, at least as implemented in modern society. Yes, yes, bloody communism, I know; let's get past that one, OK? I'm not saying that we shouldn't be able to own our own houses or cars or whatever, or benefit from our own efforts - that is and has always been the pipe dreams of people with too much time on their hands. Communism, in the essence, has always been about finding a fair balance between the amount of work you put in and the benefit you get out. If you would care to check it, it is all there, even in Marx' works - he talks about the means of production, in a context where a tiny upper class of people who had mostly inherited their wealth, lived as parasites on the ever more extreme exploitation of a working class. Who knows what he would have come up with in this day and age? But he would probably have approved of the open source idea.
The brilliance of OSS stems from the fact that it builds on the same principles as scientific research and publication: the free exchange of ideas amongst peers, which allows everybody to make improvements. The only criterium for success is whether it is received well and gets used by the community. The absurdity of property rights is never more obvious than when it comes to the concept of intellectual property; we have seen over and over how new ideas come, not from one unique person, but from many sources at once. Take the theory of evolution - Darwin got his name on it because he managed to publish it first in the place where it mattered at the time, but he wasn't the only one who has that idea; it had been bubbling in the scientific community for years - if he or Wallace hadn't come up with it, somebody else would soon after.
Software is just another example of ideas written down - you can of course refuse to let others see how you did it and treat it as your property, but as OSS shows, it is never that difficult to come up with that very same idea - and the cooperation of OSS means that it will eventually become better than the closed source version. So, how to make money from your work? Well, how does any craftsman make money? By making a product and selling it. But once it's been sold he has to make another. When you make a living from your ideas, you are in the same boat as scientists and artists - those that do it only for the money are at best mediocre and most of them only just scrape along, which I think is fair enough. If you do it because you really love doing it, you are either good enough that you can make a living, or you have a day job that gives you enough to finance your real interest.
That's the way it is, and the way it should be. Don't whine about it, or it will be my turn to call you names.
Hmm, this is, um,... interesting... um... I listened to the first one I found, which sounded a bit like a donkey being sawn in half, apparently recorded in a gannetry. So this is jazz, is it? I'll have to find some of my Loius Armstrong et al. I sincerely hope this was computer generated, I don't think a human voice should sound like that; I'm pretty sure Ella Fitzgerals didn't sing that way, but it's been a while, of course, and people change, don't they? You've got to keep an open mind.
At least it isn't Big Band; it seems in the US artists start out like brilliant, shooting stars, have a golden year or two, and then end up with Big Band Music, presumably because they have given up on real music, but still want to make money from the talent they somehow lost. It's very sad, really. I've seen it happen with B.B.King and Elvis, and then I just tuned out. At least this one seems to be some way away from that fate.
And yet... I got ~78% correct, about 1% more than the average (of those that took the online test, I assume), despite the fact that I'm not an American citizen and all I had to go on was general knowledge picked up from the news. I didn't cheat by using Wikipedia (otherwise it would have been 100%) and in school history was my weakest subject; and I don't propose that I am of more than average intelligence. Politically I disagree with many of the "correct" answers. All I had to go on was reading and understanding the questions and answers before choosing.
To me it seemed that most of the answers could be inferred from the questions, if you understood the concepts used - like:
5) The United States Electoral College: A. trains those aspiring for higher political office B. was established to supervise the first televised presidential debates C. is otherwise known as the U.S. Congress D. is a constitutionally mandated assembly that elects the president E. was ruled undemocratic by the Supreme Court
How could that be anything other than D? And it was all over the news when Bush was elected, anyway. So, while personal bias is a large part of the explanation, I think another large part is that people often do not read and/or understand the options before they decide. Which is hardly surprising in an anti-intellectual climate, where "gut-instinct" rules over actual knowledge. I mean, what the gut actually tell you? "I need to eat/crap" is just about it, really.
I don't quite understand why it is that people seem to roll out "Minority Report" as the ultimate in cool and useful computer interfaces.
First the coolness: the book may or may not be good; I haven't read it, but it is story from 1956, and thus likely to be a long way off the mark anyway. Entertaining? Probably, knowing Philip K. Dick. But, having seen that smarmy git, Tom Cruise, in the movie, totally and utterly turned me off; there are very few actors in the world less convincing. Coolness simply doesn't come anywhere near to it. For coolness give me a direct brain link or something a bit clunky and charming like the voice interface in Star Trek.
Then the usefulness of it; how can it be considered useful that your data is spread out over what seems to be a holographic curtain from floor to ceiling? Where you have to gingerly touch something mysterious and cryptic flickering away in mid-air? Apart from the gorilla arm aspect of it, that is just about as far from useful as you can get; the size and amount of detail (as shown in the movie) makes it impossible to take in and aving to interact by waving your fingers around in thin air requires keen eyesight and good hand-eye coordination, and the lack of tactile feed-back means that you will have to rely on your eyes only, which slows you down. It would be more efficient to use clay-tablets and an abacus.
So please stop rolling out "Minority Report" to describe every innovation in the area of holography; it simply detracts from the significance of the news.
I don't think so. It is quite handy for what it does, I suppose, like a pocket calculator, but it's hardly a tool for the mathematical researcher. I've never used it myself, I have to admit - it has always seemed to me that you would use it if you need to manipulate some mathematics that is slightly beyond you; or for routine tasks that you know you could do, but which are time consuming. Yes, a pocket ccalculator, in a way. I think a far better tool for a theoretical mathematician is GAP.
Older people have been doing things for longer - so they are probably good at it by now; otherwise they wouldn't have stayed in computing. The question is what they have been doing for all those years, and that may be more difficult to ascertain, because some of the important things are less often mentioned in a CV. That will in areas like adaptability, taking responsibility, creativity and a lot of other soft qualities. A person who has been through a lot of changes in his career will have developed his ability to adapt, for example.
I think there is a certain point after which a person's general experience begins to weigh more than their technical knowledge; you discover that all programming languages are basically the same etc, and you develop a sort "meta-knowledge" about things that allows you to understand problems on a deeper level. Ideally, that is; quite often people simply grow crusty and less willing to go out of their way to do something. When you get old, you either become wise or silly, and it can e quite hard to tell the two apart.
The thing is we have _no_ skeletons that show death by weapons, until the discovery of bows and arrows. I don't know why.
Perhaps bows and arrows were the first conflict weapons, then? Or maybe more likely, the invention of long range weapons gave humans a big increase in their ability to hunt, giving rise to population growth, making conflicts more likely as well as increasing the sheer number of human remains that might be preserved as fossils.
Slashdot Mirror
Ignorance is simply lack of knowledge; I think what you are griping about is stupidity; which is something people have to learn first. Look at children - nobody is more honestly ignorant than a young child; and what is it children are more than anything else? No, the answer is NOT "tender and tasty when cooked well"; they are curious. Stupidity is what you get when you believe that "curiosity killed the cat" and that sort of nonsense.
That old guy you know, he has kept his curiosity alive; and research has shown time and again that when you keep challenging your brain, it becomes more resistant to the deterioriation that so often hits you in old age. So, if you end up one day thinking that it has become simple and easy, it is probably time to go and learn something entirely new, like Chinese or playing renaissance lute.
Of course, you COULD HAVE set aside 15 minutes
I could indeed, and perhaps I should; but as I believe I said, in my experience it would hardly be worth the effort - the ability of the /. editing team to communicate the essence of valid research results is not very high, even in the few cases where they research they refer to is not frivolous nonsense.
That aside, I still think my main point is valid: that there is far too much trumpeting of "research shows ..." with no founding in reality. People drone on about how research and education are underfunded and how that is the reason why Americans are increasingly anti-intellectual. Perhaps this kind of frivolous attitude to serious science contributes to the problem?
Philosophers have long wondered at the profound link between mathematics and physics
I would have thought it obvious. All we know about physics is seen through the glasses of mathematics; all theories are expressed in terms of maths, all experimental results are interpreted with the use of maths. How would it be possible to NOT find that physics is intimately connected with maths?
Hundreds of hours? What does that translate to in number of players, distributed on age-groups and types of games? I could of course read the article, but experience makes me suspect it is unlikely to tell me. Even if is only about one type of game, or simply one game, full stop, "hundreds of hours" doesn't seem like much of a sample in statistical terms, which would make their results seem a bit dubious.
What I feel is the problem here is that there are far too many reports of results that have little weight on their own. This doesn't make the individual pieces of research invalid, but it does mean that we can't really conclude much from the results until enough projects have been conducted and somebody has done the proper "meta-research" on the combined dataset.
Interesting concept. Here is another one: You are the president of a Global Superpower, you mission is to bring peace to the world, but you are surrounded by pathological liars, mindless drones and lobbyists, and you have the handicap that everything you say or do gets mangled and often comes out as the opposite of what you intended.
Are we talking code reviews here, or checks and controls in general? Code reviews can be very helpful, if the objective is solely to educate and learn, rather than finding excuses for why you haven't performed well enough next time you have a salary review. It could be run in confidence by a group that is independent of management, eg. and external company.
It should be obvious that too little or too much in the way of controlling people is bad, and not just in programming. Social security in many countries is like that, especially in Scandinavia; there are so many checks in place to prevent benefits fraud and ensure that society only spends money on people who actually need it, that not only does it cost far more than what is potentially saved, but it also means that helping those that actually need it most takes very long. And to top it off, it doesn't prevent benefits fraud at all.
In my view, it should be simple and to the point - it shouldn't be possible to simply go and claim unemployment benefits if you are well off and have a good job, but it is a lot more efficient to simply trust most people to be honest and then let the police catch the cheats. Same with tax - make it a fixed percentage, with no loopholes for anybody to wriggle out of it.
In development the same principles apply: the basic assumption must be that people are honest and want to get the job done. In some environments it can be useful to have an "Issue Tracking System", so you don't loose track of what you are doing, code reviews can be helpful too; but only if they are used as tools, not weapons.
Centimillionaires? Let me see, a centimeter is 1/100 of a meter, so a centimillionaire is a guy who own 1/100 of a million = 10,000. Stands to reason, I'd say. BTW, it is nice to see you guys in America finally making use of the metric system ;-)
Yes, I know, the title is not fair to most Americans - it is meant as a provocation, of course.
But sadly it isn't far off the mark when it comes to the kind of responses I see on /. that are modded +5 "Insightful" or "Interesting". They seem to range from the dowright disgusting "Who fscking cares about some 13year old brat killing herself" to the rather lame "Lori Drew did something wrong, but 'free speech' is much more important" - and that is at the kind and warm-hearted end of the spectrum.
Freedom is important, oh yes. It is also mostly fictitious, at least in the absolute, quasi-religious sense people on /. seem to think. Everything, from quantum-mechanics up, should tell you that there is no such thing as complete, perfect indepedence; the only real freedom is sufficient freedom to live a worthy and fulfilling life at peace with your neighbors. With freedom comes responsibility, because with action comes consequences.
One can but wonder how it came to that in America, it is certainly not the prevailing viewpoint in the parts of Europe I know of. This is where people usually start pointing to History and Founding Fathers, but I just can't see what that has to do with anything; the freedom of speech should be seen in light of that time, as a reaction to specific oppression of political and religious dissent, and it is clear that it is about the right to practise your faith and express your political views; both of which make a lot of sense. But this idea about "freedom to do and say anything at all with no restrictions or consequences" is simply nonsense - to me it seems to have arisen in the 60es, a time when we also saw some talk about psychopathy as an ideal for mankind, exactly because psychopaths are so void of the moral inhibitions of normal society. Go and look it up if you don't believe me.
Far be it from me to dictate what Americans should think or believe, but before people start idolising what can in many ways be regarded as "the essence of evil", they would be well adviced to at least have thought it through.
Since, there are lots of people who have the degree, I think that you will be in bad shape to compete against them.
I'm not sure about that, though. Times have changed since I started 25 years ago, but on the other hand, I have lived through at least 2 since then. The tendency has always been that in times of crisis the old, established companies take a hit, and are to some extent replaced by new startups with fresh ideas - and, I suppose, with less debt. Didn't companies like Apple and Microsoft start up exactly in times of crisis? And newly established companies will often be less inclined to look at education and more on what you can actually do; degrees cost money.
In my experience it is often a matter of personality; especially for a small company. As I said, I have worked in the industry for >25 years now; I have often lost my job (not always my fault, I might add), but I have always got a new one with better salary within a month, crisis or not. I have a degree in maths (algebra, geometry, physics) - about as far from relevant as it gets for computing. I think where it gets difficult is when you want to start in or advance to a more leading role - a degree can give you more easy access to that kind of roles; without it you have to work harder to prove yourself.
May I apologise in advance for the state of the London 2012 Olympics? I have absolutely no faith in the Government bringing this in on time, or on budget.
You certainly may - apology accepted.
In other new, one of the first Olympic venues for 2012 games opens today, ahead of schedule and under budget:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/7753734.stm
I think one of the reasons why it gets like that is that nobody with a real life is willing to give their own time to community projects like that; thus it ends up in the hands of small-minded bullies. It works like that on all levels - just see how the political agenda is constantly taken over by the worst elements in society, simply because the good, honest, ordinary people don't make the necessary effort.
She now faces up to 3 years in jail and $300,000 in fines -- a troubling precedent for anyone who has ever registered with a website under a pseudonym
Here we have some person who has mercilessly bullied a vulnerable child to suicide, and she is let off as easily as this. On the other hand, if a loving spouse helps their helpless, hopelessly ill other half end their suffering at their own request, the starting point for prosecution is a charge of murder. It seems to me that there is something desperately wrong with our society and laws, if you are a murderer for doing something good out of love, but it is only a misdemeanor when you cause the death of a child because you are a vicious bitch.
It seems to me that you completely and utterly miss the point here. The jury and the prossecution didn't have the tools needed to punish what was clearly an evil person committing callous acts of cruelty resulting in the death of a child; so they try to hit as hard as possible wherever possible. The problem here is not that you can now end up in jail for giving a false name on the web, but that the law is inadequate.
They kept this pretty quiet up to now, not the kind of information policy I would expect from CERN
I think the explanation is straightforward: this is a very complex system, not only to build and run, but also to figure out why things went wrong. The modern day public are used to a media circus, where we follow events as closely as possible - but heavily edited for whatever pseudo-drama can be wrung out of it, to make it look like a soap-opera or a "reality" tv show. One can't blame them for not buying into that - they just want to figure out what went wrong, repair things and get on with research; they are scientists, not media whores or celebrities (but I repeat myself).
Once you start living life on the front pages, your every action gets scrutinised by journalists and the public, none of whom know anything about the matter at hand, and they all have their opinions that they insist to bother you and everybody else with. All this does is take your attention away from repairing things and getting back to doing important research. I have no doubt that the managers in charge have all been thoroughly informed and that they have decided not to go public until they have discovered all the facts.
And so, yes, you're right, autonomous technology will lead to more war. Not by the US, but mainly by its enemies.
Not by the US - that's something you know, is it? It must be one hell of a convincing source of information you've got, because the Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars do seem to point in another direction. But I have an open mind to this - please tell us all what convinced you.
This is not "the evil America" that I am talking about, but the twisted, little minds who live and breath in a fantasy world of "military strategy" and "security", where the reality of these things is far away. Producing a swarm of murder machines depersonalises it just one more degree so these "good patriots" can imagine that they are good Christians and not selfish little psychos with blood on their hands. I don't think any American living in the real world would approve of this kind of thing; I hope I'm not being naive here.
To me this sounds a lot like the way certain Christians argue that being filthy rich is Gods reward to you for being such a good little person - despite what Jesus had to say about the subject.
So it is "ethical" to make a killing automaton, is it? Just like waterboarding isn't torture, it's just "being persuasive". The real rationale behind this is not that it is "ethical", but that it is politically less costly at home to send a battalion of machines out than it is to see your young sons and daughters come home as stiffs.
I have a better suggestion: Send all these "brilliant military thinkers" out on the battlefields in Afghanistan dressed up as Uncle Sam and carrying banners saying "We hate muslims". That would be much more ethical, because if they got killed we could say "Look, no blood on my hands, it was the others that did it, you know what they are like". In my opinion, if you have the taste for war, you've got to have the guts to go out there, take the risks and do the killing yourself; otherwise you are little better than a coward hiding behind others.
Big band can be 'real music' too
I'm sure it can :-) I can't watch the thing you point me to on YouTube - I don't use Flash or whatever, sorry about that.
My problem is not just with big band music, I can't abide any big ensemble, be it a symphony orchestra or a choir. I tend to follow every instrument or voice, and after only a few, less than 10, I can't keep it up, and it becomes noise. And there is also something about the quality of the music - when you play or compose for a single instrument, you either produce very good quality or it sounds shallow and dull; but some composers compensate for their lack of originality or whatever by sloshing on more instruments. This seems to be more pronounced in the kind of genre that Frank Sinatra represented; he had a good singing voice, but the texts were shallow and the music so-so - and it didn't make it better that they tried to drown it in a million violins.
I actually liked the clip I heard of this computer jazz - it reminded me of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, which is one album I find incredibly funny, not least because it is so absurd. It is hard to fathom just how stoned he must have been to not only record it, but get an actual record company to produce it.
The thing about sawing a donkey in two - I've just been reading Terry Pratchett's "The last continent", where he uses that expression.
It is all the implementations that sucks.
But if we are willing to learn from our mistakes, perhaps we can make it better?
This is a rather ambiguous question, isn't it? It could mean "Would it be ethically right to do?" - which was what I read it as first, but it could also mean "Is this something we ought to do when there are so many other things that seem more necessary?" And then, of course there are all the variants of "Wouldn't it be cool if ...".
So, should we do that kind of things when there is [your choice of current crisis]? Well, yes, I think, within limits. The thing is, in times of crisis, what we need is to think out of the box, so we can find a way out of our problems. Apparently a lot of the biggest and most successful companies were founded exactly in times of crisis - Microsoft being one example. Maybe cloning neandertals (note the lack of "h" - Neandertal is a placename in Germany; the Neander Valley, and it is spelled that way) is a bit out of reach, but we should certainly not cut back on basic research in a crisis.
The ethics thing, then? Would it be right to do it, if we could? Well, according to whose views are we talking here? I'm not sure there is a right or wrong answer here - very often all we have is the choice and the consequences. Now, don't start pulling out religion - it simply hasn't got the answer however much you try to twist it. Even if I believed in a god, I don't think he/she/it would have gone to the extreme lengths of equipping people with the ability to reason and make informed choices only to tell them in minute detail all they have to think or do - we have our brains so we should use to the best of our ability. All we are required to is make our choices and live with the consequences.
So, while I can't tell what is the ethically right thing to do, I can tell what I would choose: I would do it. I would love to know another intelligent species than our own; one that might be our intellectual equals.
The short answer: Yes. It is a "race to 0" if you will.
The longer version is that there has always been something suspect in property rights, at least as implemented in modern society. Yes, yes, bloody communism, I know; let's get past that one, OK? I'm not saying that we shouldn't be able to own our own houses or cars or whatever, or benefit from our own efforts - that is and has always been the pipe dreams of people with too much time on their hands. Communism, in the essence, has always been about finding a fair balance between the amount of work you put in and the benefit you get out. If you would care to check it, it is all there, even in Marx' works - he talks about the means of production, in a context where a tiny upper class of people who had mostly inherited their wealth, lived as parasites on the ever more extreme exploitation of a working class. Who knows what he would have come up with in this day and age? But he would probably have approved of the open source idea.
The brilliance of OSS stems from the fact that it builds on the same principles as scientific research and publication: the free exchange of ideas amongst peers, which allows everybody to make improvements. The only criterium for success is whether it is received well and gets used by the community. The absurdity of property rights is never more obvious than when it comes to the concept of intellectual property; we have seen over and over how new ideas come, not from one unique person, but from many sources at once. Take the theory of evolution - Darwin got his name on it because he managed to publish it first in the place where it mattered at the time, but he wasn't the only one who has that idea; it had been bubbling in the scientific community for years - if he or Wallace hadn't come up with it, somebody else would soon after.
Software is just another example of ideas written down - you can of course refuse to let others see how you did it and treat it as your property, but as OSS shows, it is never that difficult to come up with that very same idea - and the cooperation of OSS means that it will eventually become better than the closed source version. So, how to make money from your work? Well, how does any craftsman make money? By making a product and selling it. But once it's been sold he has to make another. When you make a living from your ideas, you are in the same boat as scientists and artists - those that do it only for the money are at best mediocre and most of them only just scrape along, which I think is fair enough. If you do it because you really love doing it, you are either good enough that you can make a living, or you have a day job that gives you enough to finance your real interest.
That's the way it is, and the way it should be. Don't whine about it, or it will be my turn to call you names.
Hmm, this is, um, ... interesting ... um ... I listened to the first one I found, which sounded a bit like a donkey being sawn in half, apparently recorded in a gannetry. So this is jazz, is it? I'll have to find some of my Loius Armstrong et al. I sincerely hope this was computer generated, I don't think a human voice should sound like that; I'm pretty sure Ella Fitzgerals didn't sing that way, but it's been a while, of course, and people change, don't they? You've got to keep an open mind.
At least it isn't Big Band; it seems in the US artists start out like brilliant, shooting stars, have a golden year or two, and then end up with Big Band Music, presumably because they have given up on real music, but still want to make money from the talent they somehow lost. It's very sad, really. I've seen it happen with B.B.King and Elvis, and then I just tuned out. At least this one seems to be some way away from that fate.
And yet... I got ~78% correct, about 1% more than the average (of those that took the online test, I assume), despite the fact that I'm not an American citizen and all I had to go on was general knowledge picked up from the news. I didn't cheat by using Wikipedia (otherwise it would have been 100%) and in school history was my weakest subject; and I don't propose that I am of more than average intelligence. Politically I disagree with many of the "correct" answers. All I had to go on was reading and understanding the questions and answers before choosing.
To me it seemed that most of the answers could be inferred from the questions, if you understood the concepts used - like:
5) The United States Electoral College:
A. trains those aspiring for higher political office
B. was established to supervise the first televised presidential debates
C. is otherwise known as the U.S. Congress
D. is a constitutionally mandated assembly that elects the president
E. was ruled undemocratic by the Supreme Court
How could that be anything other than D? And it was all over the news when Bush was elected, anyway. So, while personal bias is a large part of the explanation, I think another large part is that people often do not read and/or understand the options before they decide. Which is hardly surprising in an anti-intellectual climate, where "gut-instinct" rules over actual knowledge. I mean, what the gut actually tell you? "I need to eat/crap" is just about it, really.
I don't quite understand why it is that people seem to roll out "Minority Report" as the ultimate in cool and useful computer interfaces.
First the coolness: the book may or may not be good; I haven't read it, but it is story from 1956, and thus likely to be a long way off the mark anyway. Entertaining? Probably, knowing Philip K. Dick. But, having seen that smarmy git, Tom Cruise, in the movie, totally and utterly turned me off; there are very few actors in the world less convincing. Coolness simply doesn't come anywhere near to it. For coolness give me a direct brain link or something a bit clunky and charming like the voice interface in Star Trek.
Then the usefulness of it; how can it be considered useful that your data is spread out over what seems to be a holographic curtain from floor to ceiling? Where you have to gingerly touch something mysterious and cryptic flickering away in mid-air? Apart from the gorilla arm aspect of it, that is just about as far from useful as you can get; the size and amount of detail (as shown in the movie) makes it impossible to take in and aving to interact by waving your fingers around in thin air requires keen eyesight and good hand-eye coordination, and the lack of tactile feed-back means that you will have to rely on your eyes only, which slows you down. It would be more efficient to use clay-tablets and an abacus.
So please stop rolling out "Minority Report" to describe every innovation in the area of holography; it simply detracts from the significance of the news.
I don't think so. It is quite handy for what it does, I suppose, like a pocket calculator, but it's hardly a tool for the mathematical researcher. I've never used it myself, I have to admit - it has always seemed to me that you would use it if you need to manipulate some mathematics that is slightly beyond you; or for routine tasks that you know you could do, but which are time consuming. Yes, a pocket ccalculator, in a way. I think a far better tool for a theoretical mathematician is GAP.
Older people have been doing things for longer - so they are probably good at it by now; otherwise they wouldn't have stayed in computing. The question is what they have been doing for all those years, and that may be more difficult to ascertain, because some of the important things are less often mentioned in a CV. That will in areas like adaptability, taking responsibility, creativity and a lot of other soft qualities. A person who has been through a lot of changes in his career will have developed his ability to adapt, for example.
I think there is a certain point after which a person's general experience begins to weigh more than their technical knowledge; you discover that all programming languages are basically the same etc, and you develop a sort "meta-knowledge" about things that allows you to understand problems on a deeper level. Ideally, that is; quite often people simply grow crusty and less willing to go out of their way to do something. When you get old, you either become wise or silly, and it can e quite hard to tell the two apart.
The thing is we have _no_ skeletons that show death by weapons, until the discovery of bows and arrows. I don't know why.
Perhaps bows and arrows were the first conflict weapons, then? Or maybe more likely, the invention of long range weapons gave humans a big increase in their ability to hunt, giving rise to population growth, making conflicts more likely as well as increasing the sheer number of human remains that might be preserved as fossils.