Gravel roads are cheap to build, cheap to maintain, and represent an extremely sensible kind of cut that does not have a major quality of life impact. Arguably they also have a rustic beauty, and look much nicer than a pot-holed, badly deteriorated paved road.
True that. Hopefully the rest of the western world will take its decline this gracefully.
A Finite State Machine is not at all Turing-complete (if I understand your response correctly). Here's some Wikipedia-age. I'm still trying to sort it all out, but be careful with this article, you may end up switching majors.
Every time any story mentions them, their potential applications are reduced to the staggeringly, criminally mundane "could lead to faster computer memory". Standard von Neumann computer memory. A shame.
The brain is not a sequential Turing machine. Has any form of finite connectionism even been proven Turing-complete?
That (if I understand this story correctly) they here have been able to do what they have using components suited for our "traditional" computing architecture rather than the raw connectionist architecture of the brain is wonderful. It sounds like they're emulating synapses and plasticity/learning.
But the right memristors wouldn't be an emulation -- I'm not sure if they've actually made memristors with memristance profiles specifically for mimicking biological synapses, but THIS is their utility and the future.... I'm not quite sure how this article tripped this indignant rant. I suppose I always figured I'd see this story using memristors first, but I guess that's just the next step.
Great point. Following from that and off-topic, it just made me think: in English, I guess the definite article is implicit.
So how would languages without an indefinite article make this same suggestion/distinction? It seems kind of important to distinguish "Comrade Stalin made top general disappear" -- "Stalin made a top general disappear" vs "Stalin made the top general disappear"
All of this was done very extensively within concentrated groups of use-map-settings Starcraft map makers. There was one calc map capable of simple math and even algebra. There were also chess, custom user built skill sets and spells that were tagged to your controllable character. this was in no way part of the original game. There was one which my friend made that you could paint pictures, make animated minimap clips, stage firework displays, and even play short movies drawn with sprites and explosions set together pixle by pixle.
All these things were controlled by simple move, kill, spawn, and count triggers which were all linked to areas the player would position a controlable unit to start whatever programed trigger set was needed. we had hidden computation areas of the maps where creatures would spawn and die and move to work the trigger math out. we used a simple center view trigger to prevent these from being viewable(lagged like nuts with thousands of creatures spawning and being moved etc.
The meteorite is the source of the light And the meteor's just what we see And the meteoroid is a stone that's devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee
And the meteorite's just what causes the light And the meteor's how it's perceived And the meteoroid's a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee
The summary seems to equate e-mail with interpersonal communication on the internet. But now that I think about it, all I regularly do with my email account is report spam, confirm registrations and receive receipts.
95% of my textual communications with my friends and family is through SMS, MSN/AIM/Gtalk and Facebook. The other 5% is post-its on the fridge and ransom notes scrawled in blood.
And my generation (I'm 21) is a few years behind behind the people who grew up always having a readily usable web -- I can only assume it's even more pervasive for anyone born after the mid 90s. E-mail for the current generation is probably approaching some arcane, meaningless legacy step between them and their MySpace registration.
If anything, e-mail for non-business-related reasons has become elevated/deprecated to sentimentality, an intermediary step in remote intimacy between a private message and a handwritten letter. If I send an e-mail to someone instead of Facebooking them, it's going to be longer than 255 characters and probably mean something.
But cut the luddite bullshit. I posit here that/you/ perhaps are the luddite, but even if I'm wrong you're being a cock.
Something I wrote way back when I'd first finished reading it:
'The Diamond Age' is Neal Stephenson's best ending. Anyone who says he can't write endings should be immediately pointed in this direction. Of course, this ending is probably detractors' biggest criticism, but I don't think any further denoument was necessary, and would probably have even greatly detracted from the emotional and powerful ending there was.
Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash could have used some [denoument], to the point where their endings even gave a bit of an impression of a "fuck it" or a deadline rush, so abruptly departing from the wonderful depth of the preceeding several hundred pages of those books. But the abrupt end here was utterly perfect and perfectly excecuted, and left me euphorically dazed for hours after reading it. I haven't been brought so close to tears by literature since Of Mice And Men, or maybe Charlotte's Web. This ending, in my opinion, truly solidified Neal Stephenson as a great Author of Literature, and not just brilliant, witty Geek.
Sure it leaves open ends (Hackworth, especially), but even with, perhaps even partially because of, that, it works. People hate it because it breaks the traditional form -- doesn't tie up every little loose, nitpicky plot end -- but seem to overlook the fact that, in this case, it was far more literarily effective than structural orthodoxy. It has/character/. A lot of people, many Geeks especially, don't seem to understand that novels, as art and beauty, are not a perfect and coherent system. Sometimes it's more meaningful and important to make that master stroke than fill in all the details.
I'll also go out on a limb and say The Diamond Age was not about Hackworth, at any point. It was about Neal's intricate thematic and philosophic exploration on Confucianism and Victorianism, and it was also a mother-daughter story about Nell and Miranda. Hackworth moved these things along, but to close his personal story neatly would have felt tacked on and barely emotionally or thematically relevant, and probably/ruined/ the ending.
Of course, Neal Stephenson reads Slashdot, and will definately read a story about his own work, and he'd probably be insulted by my dumb interpretation, so please mod me into unread oblivion.
/Neal Stephenson has been my absolute, uncontested favourite fiction (and among my favourite nonfiction) author in the world since the first chapter of Cryptonomicon. Which I picked up after hearing endless praise about it, mostly on Slashdot.
I also have no fucking clue why he's disowned The Big U, which was a wonderful novel.
The biggest limitation of our space program, and, with it, our species' current potenatial access to space, is not how we power disposable rovers on another planet: our biggest limitation is the incredible resource expense of having nothing better chemical rockets. Or maybe I've been reading too much Asimov.
A good idea? Are they even necessary?! As we've been so excitingly reminded, today, two solar-powered rovers are at almost %1000 of their predicted operational lifetime, an utter engineering miracle. But the fact that this is the most weight we can send up without blowing earths' budget, Contact-style, suggests that there's no way we can put enough machinery up there to require that kind of energy.
My god. That's the most awesome thing I've ever seen. I'm not sure what's nerdier: that you took the time to transcribe it, or that I recognize it from memory as exactly accurate. Unless you transcribed it from memory. Then I might as well just cut out my nerd gland, because I don't stand a fucking chance.
This AOL search log leak, as experienced by me through some cynical-mindedness and xGryph's simple search tool, is fucking Poetry. The best Found Art in history. There's nothing that bares the soul of modern man more honestly than search logs.
At least, before this leak -- as beautiful as it is, this might finally be the tipping point in getting Joe Average AOLer to understand the gravity of the drastic erosions of privacy the Western world has experienced since 9/11, and stop trusting the unencrypted text submission these logs prove we often so completely and utterly, soul-baringly do. And no one acts anywhere near the same when they have even the slightest feeling they're being watched (and, more importantly, judged). In a world where Diaries are implicitly public, who have you ever trusted more than your search bar?
Especially as, judging by these search logs, Joe Blow has a lot more to hide than even my cynical ass ever imagined. Might make some people realize the terr'rists aren't the only ones who'll be caught, charged, sentenced and executed for having something to hide.
And this leak has finally given credence to the long-cynically-mocked, longer-held Sci-Fi ideal that, in teh big, unknowable futar, all Art will be on, be of, Technology. And this horrific breach of privacy is also the greatest set of Artistic and statistical data to have ever been released to the public. I would say, since it's raw data and not just a single interpretation, it's more important than the Kinsey Report. Which is tragic, because it can never be allowed to happen again, if we want any semblance of a feeling of privacy and freedom in our civilization. It's becoming unexpectedly apparent that this will be the form of major (mainstream, big-A-)Art of the future.
Don't believe me? Read 'The Search Engine Confessions of AOL User 23187425' and tell me it expresses any smaller torrent of hte raw, beautiful essense of what it is to be human than any Keats or Basho;. And that's only one piece among the very many a quick search can reveal. Many more at SomethingAwful's special edition of the Weekend Web, one of the primary progenitors, whether it was intended to be or not, of this kind of art.
Turing Zombie barely supressing groans of "Brains" as, picked up from along a dead stretch of road in the middle of New Mexico, he grunts in the direction of New England right as part of his right cheek falls off.
But opinions can be properly cited -- from another biased or explicitly opinionated book, article, or goddamned geocities website. Bias and subjectivity are the real problems of Wikipedia -- dead tree encyclopedias have been valuable as much as trusted neutral arbiters as for being information sources/aggregators.
And bias can be more subtle than a cable-newsian "Some say..." cheat. And some articles, such as for artists and musicians, would be just about worthless is they stuck to some platonic ideal of objectivity, where every work is equal to every other.
But the managment is well aware and making an effort. But it's an inherent weakness of information by the people, instead of by professionals -- Britannica was the Swiss in the global infomation war.
And, for the record, I'm a Wikipedia junkie, and fucking love it, faults included*. I can link-surf [or whatever you'd call reading an article, tabbing out every link that catches your eye as you go (growing exponentially); I'm having a bit of a brain fart on that] for days on end. For example, two weekends ago, I link-surfed to read every article I could find on the first and second world wars. I estimate that, in my stupor, I got through about 350 articles, for 3 to 4 Silmarillions' worth of raw text (and probably retained 0.01% of it).
Shit, I once, drunk, silly and reckless, tried to vandalize a page with a little personal (and unbelievably racist and offensive) jab against a friend, and quickly save and revert, as a dumb little joke. Even shitfaced, though, I remained a prudent little nerd and hit preview to review my handiwork, first. Five seconds later, I hit submit, and there to greet me was a message from an admin telling me, effectively, to fuck off. It was impressive -- it was the middle of the night, in most of the English-speaking world, an unposted preview was intercepted in seconds -- and sort of scary.
*For Reference with bias and faults explicitly, I mourn the effective demise of E2 -- I spent a good part of my earlier adolescece mindlessly link-surfing it, and I'd call its collected angst a major influence on my development. Large parts of it were sort of like a collective blog sorted by subject. And, aside from that, its much more entertaining than Wikipedia. And, sometimes, learning can benefit from some bias.
I have an Antec TX640B -- I bought it wanting something other than a beige box as an appropriate embellishment of my first new computer since I've become a full-fledged nerd, and I also wanted something (purportedly) quieter, as I was planning on leaving it on at nights. Of course, that night it became instantly apparent that there were other issues I hadn't considered -- the blue LEDs on the front were blidingly bright. Yeah, they did make the case look marginally cool, but what a fucking stupid design feature. And I mean blindingly -- if you look straight at them, you get spots in your vision. It's like staring at the sun. And even indirectly, the power light alone lit up my bedroom brighter than my bedside lamp. And god forbid there was hard drive activity.
So what I did: I just put two pieces of electrical tape, black vinyl, over the power light, completely blocking it, and one piece over the HD light -- I can still faintly see if there is activity (a disappointingly relevant practice) by looking straight at it.
At best, incompetent engineering, perhaps even criminally negligent, given the importance of the application. And definately criminal of whatever mechanism of government which continues to contract this company as a solution.
At worst, an attempt to overthrow the legitimate US government, and treason.
Slashdot Mirror
Gravel roads are cheap to build, cheap to maintain, and represent an extremely sensible kind of cut that does not have a major quality of life impact. Arguably they also have a rustic beauty, and look much nicer than a pot-holed, badly deteriorated paved road.
True that. Hopefully the rest of the western world will take its decline this gracefully.
A Finite State Machine is not at all Turing-complete (if I understand your response correctly). Here's some Wikipedia-age. I'm still trying to sort it all out, but be careful with this article, you may end up switching majors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
Every time any story mentions them, their potential applications are reduced to the staggeringly, criminally mundane "could lead to faster computer memory". Standard von Neumann computer memory. A shame.
The brain is not a sequential Turing machine. Has any form of finite connectionism even been proven Turing-complete?
That (if I understand this story correctly) they here have been able to do what they have using components suited for our "traditional" computing architecture rather than the raw connectionist architecture of the brain is wonderful. It sounds like they're emulating synapses and plasticity/learning.
But the right memristors wouldn't be an emulation -- I'm not sure if they've actually made memristors with memristance profiles specifically for mimicking biological synapses, but THIS is their utility and the future. ... I'm not quite sure how this article tripped this indignant rant. I suppose I always figured I'd see this story using memristors first, but I guess that's just the next step.
If you're pulled over and suspected of DUI, then don't take the damn test
In many states, refusal to take a breathalyzer test is legally presumed an admission of guilt.
Good luck with that.
Either I misunderstand the 5th Amendment or you're full of shit. Either way, that's terrifying.
Great point. Following from that and off-topic, it just made me think: in English, I guess the definite article is implicit.
So how would languages without an indefinite article make this same suggestion/distinction? It seems kind of important to distinguish "Comrade Stalin made top general disappear" -- "Stalin made a top general disappear" vs "Stalin made the top general disappear"
Linguists/Rooskies?
All of this was done very extensively within concentrated groups of use-map-settings Starcraft map makers. There was one calc map capable of simple math and even algebra. There were also chess, custom user built skill sets and spells that were tagged to your controllable character. this was in no way part of the original game. There was one which my friend made that you could paint pictures, make animated minimap clips, stage firework displays, and even play short movies drawn with sprites and explosions set together pixle by pixle.
All these things were controlled by simple move, kill, spawn, and count triggers which were all linked to areas the player would position a controlable unit to start whatever programed trigger set was needed. we had hidden computation areas of the maps where creatures would spawn and die and move to work the trigger math out. we used a simple center view trigger to prevent these from being viewable(lagged like nuts with thousands of creatures spawning and being moved etc.
this is cool and all but its not really NEW news.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis
The meteorite is the source of the light
And the meteor's just what we see
And the meteoroid is a stone that's devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee
And the meteorite's just what causes the light
And the meteor's how it's perceived
And the meteoroid's a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee
-- Joanna Newsom, 'Emily'
95% of my textual communications with my friends and family is through SMS, MSN/AIM/Gtalk and Facebook. The other 5% is post-its on the fridge and ransom notes scrawled in blood.
And my generation (I'm 21) is a few years behind behind the people who grew up always having a readily usable web -- I can only assume it's even more pervasive for anyone born after the mid 90s. E-mail for the current generation is probably approaching some arcane, meaningless legacy step between them and their MySpace registration.
If anything, e-mail for non-business-related reasons has become elevated/deprecated to sentimentality, an intermediary step in remote intimacy between a private message and a handwritten letter. If I send an e-mail to someone instead of Facebooking them, it's going to be longer than 255 characters and probably mean something.
But cut the luddite bullshit. I posit here that /you/ perhaps are the luddite, but even if I'm wrong you're being a cock.
'The Diamond Age' is Neal Stephenson's best ending. Anyone who says he can't write endings should be immediately pointed in this direction. Of course, this ending is probably detractors' biggest criticism, but I don't think any further denoument was necessary, and would probably have even greatly detracted from the emotional and powerful ending there was.
Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash could have used some [denoument], to the point where their endings even gave a bit of an impression of a "fuck it" or a deadline rush, so abruptly departing from the wonderful depth of the preceeding several hundred pages of those books. But the abrupt end here was utterly perfect and perfectly excecuted, and left me euphorically dazed for hours after reading it. I haven't been brought so close to tears by literature since Of Mice And Men, or maybe Charlotte's Web. This ending, in my opinion, truly solidified Neal Stephenson as a great Author of Literature, and not just brilliant, witty Geek.
Sure it leaves open ends (Hackworth, especially), but even with, perhaps even partially because of, that, it works. People hate it because it breaks the traditional form -- doesn't tie up every little loose, nitpicky plot end -- but seem to overlook the fact that, in this case, it was far more literarily effective than structural orthodoxy. It has /character/. A lot of people, many Geeks especially, don't seem to understand that novels, as art and beauty, are not a perfect and coherent system. Sometimes it's more meaningful and important to make that master stroke than fill in all the details.
I'll also go out on a limb and say The Diamond Age was not about Hackworth, at any point. It was about Neal's intricate thematic and philosophic exploration on Confucianism and Victorianism, and it was also a mother-daughter story about Nell and Miranda. Hackworth moved these things along, but to close his personal story neatly would have felt tacked on and barely emotionally or thematically relevant, and probably /ruined/ the ending.
Of course, Neal Stephenson reads Slashdot, and will definately read a story about his own work, and he'd probably be insulted by my dumb interpretation, so please mod me into unread oblivion.
I also have no fucking clue why he's disowned The Big U, which was a wonderful novel.
It's not the drugs that "give" someone a bad trip. Good call on quitting, though.
The biggest limitation of our space program, and, with it, our species' current potenatial access to space, is not how we power disposable rovers on another planet: our biggest limitation is the incredible resource expense of having nothing better chemical rockets. Or maybe I've been reading too much Asimov.
A good idea? Are they even necessary?! As we've been so excitingly reminded, today, two solar-powered rovers are at almost %1000 of their predicted operational lifetime, an utter engineering miracle. But the fact that this is the most weight we can send up without blowing earths' budget, Contact-style, suggests that there's no way we can put enough machinery up there to require that kind of energy.
My god. That's the most awesome thing I've ever seen. I'm not sure what's nerdier: that you took the time to transcribe it, or that I recognize it from memory as exactly accurate. Unless you transcribed it from memory. Then I might as well just cut out my nerd gland, because I don't stand a fucking chance.
At least, before this leak -- as beautiful as it is, this might finally be the tipping point in getting Joe Average AOLer to understand the gravity of the drastic erosions of privacy the Western world has experienced since 9/11, and stop trusting the unencrypted text submission these logs prove we often so completely and utterly, soul-baringly do. And no one acts anywhere near the same when they have even the slightest feeling they're being watched (and, more importantly, judged). In a world where Diaries are implicitly public, who have you ever trusted more than your search bar?
Especially as, judging by these search logs, Joe Blow has a lot more to hide than even my cynical ass ever imagined. Might make some people realize the terr'rists aren't the only ones who'll be caught, charged, sentenced and executed for having something to hide.
And this leak has finally given credence to the long-cynically-mocked, longer-held Sci-Fi ideal that, in teh big, unknowable futar, all Art will be on, be of, Technology. And this horrific breach of privacy is also the greatest set of Artistic and statistical data to have ever been released to the public. I would say, since it's raw data and not just a single interpretation, it's more important than the Kinsey Report. Which is tragic, because it can never be allowed to happen again, if we want any semblance of a feeling of privacy and freedom in our civilization. It's becoming unexpectedly apparent that this will be the form of major (mainstream, big-A-)Art of the future.
Don't believe me? Read 'The Search Engine Confessions of AOL User 23187425' and tell me it expresses any smaller torrent of hte raw, beautiful essense of what it is to be human than any Keats or Basho;. And that's only one piece among the very many a quick search can reveal. Many more at SomethingAwful's special edition of the Weekend Web, one of the primary progenitors, whether it was intended to be or not, of this kind of art.
Turing Zombie barely supressing groans of "Brains" as, picked up from along a dead stretch of road in the middle of New Mexico, he grunts in the direction of New England right as part of his right cheek falls off.
The miserable thing is that I'll never be able to explain to people the genius of my passwords. Well, maybe on my deathbed.
Who runs Bartertown?
And bias can be more subtle than a cable-newsian "Some say..." cheat. And some articles, such as for artists and musicians, would be just about worthless is they stuck to some platonic ideal of objectivity, where every work is equal to every other.
But the managment is well aware and making an effort. But it's an inherent weakness of information by the people, instead of by professionals -- Britannica was the Swiss in the global infomation war.
And, for the record, I'm a Wikipedia junkie, and fucking love it, faults included*. I can link-surf [or whatever you'd call reading an article, tabbing out every link that catches your eye as you go (growing exponentially); I'm having a bit of a brain fart on that] for days on end. For example, two weekends ago, I link-surfed to read every article I could find on the first and second world wars. I estimate that, in my stupor, I got through about 350 articles, for 3 to 4 Silmarillions' worth of raw text (and probably retained 0.01% of it).
Shit, I once, drunk, silly and reckless, tried to vandalize a page with a little personal (and unbelievably racist and offensive) jab against a friend, and quickly save and revert, as a dumb little joke. Even shitfaced, though, I remained a prudent little nerd and hit preview to review my handiwork, first. Five seconds later, I hit submit, and there to greet me was a message from an admin telling me, effectively, to fuck off. It was impressive -- it was the middle of the night, in most of the English-speaking world, an unposted preview was intercepted in seconds -- and sort of scary.
*For Reference with bias and faults explicitly, I mourn the effective demise of E2 -- I spent a good part of my earlier adolescece mindlessly link-surfing it, and I'd call its collected angst a major influence on my development. Large parts of it were sort of like a collective blog sorted by subject. And, aside from that, its much more entertaining than Wikipedia. And, sometimes, learning can benefit from some bias.
Awesome post. In the spirit of an updated Neal Stephenson's classic (and outdated) OS treatise In the Beginning was the Command Line.
So what I did: I just put two pieces of electrical tape, black vinyl, over the power light, completely blocking it, and one piece over the HD light -- I can still faintly see if there is activity (a disappointingly relevant practice) by looking straight at it.
I'm otherwise happy with the case.
At worst, an attempt to overthrow the legitimate US government, and treason.
Bringing back? Have you been high in university, any time recently? Kid Dracula is also pretty sweet.
(Score: -1, Star Trek Obscure)
Come on, you were all thinking it.
kekekekekeke!!1!