The thing is that people who take the most carefully lit, composed and focussed images (which is what the computer is using as it's metric) are professional photographers. They use models who are generally considered "beautiful". So unless you're very careful about your initial data set, you're going to come to some very bad conclusions...and that's what seems to have happened here.
Don't get me wrong, I love Dilbert and Scott did an amazing job with that cartoon series. But his science credentials are really, really bad. His book, "God's Debris" is full to the brim with nonsense wrapped up as science.
So he's simply not someone I can trust with scientific claims. I honestly don't think anyone should care what he says in this regard...just because he draws fantastic cartoons doesn't give him any special platform for saying this kind of stuff.
So it looks like these things are basically zinc-lined tubes...no sensors, no guidance, no controls, no electronics, no communications or intelligence of any kind.
How is that a "bot"?
The gizmag report (second link in the story here) has a very beautiful picture of something which looks like a proper robot...but the other two links show simple cylinders.
I could imagine it being a motor for a bot...but it's nowhere *REMOTELY* near being an actual robot, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Look...this is an impressive achievement, it's very clever and I'm sure it has some very neat applications - but let's not over-sell it?
Einstein and Feynman were both nobel prize winners and Hawkins has Sir Isaac Newton's mathematics chair - we probably shouldn't downplay their achievements!
Carl Sagan was on the slippery slope. He certainly did some good science - but he's hardly up there with the previous three. Tyson has a few decent papers to his name, and his career isn't over yet - but I don't think he's coming close to the others in terms of science achievements.
Einstein was the world's worst communicator. Feynman and Hawkins are better - Sagan was astounding and Tyson may be yet better.
I suppose we might be concerned that there is a pattern here. We're taking people who are better communicators in preference to those who really know their stuff.
But honestly, does it matter? The presenter of a show reads from a script - (s)he is basically an actor. If the author of the script sticks to an accurate portrayal of what's written by the hard-core scientists - then why not pick an engaging personality to present it to us?
The critical part of the cycle is the person who decides WHICH science gets discussed. De Grasse Tyson is often talking about tacheons, wormholes and white holes and other claptrap that's horribly speculative, wildly unusupported, and very probably untrue. As an astrophysicist, he should know better - but as a TV presenter, he does a reasonable job of reading the script.
I'd prefer to have a complete non-scientist who is a supreme communicator be given a script written by good script writers from material handed to them by the hard core scientists behind the scenes - than to rely on a lower-tier scientist (or a high-tier scientist with poor communications skills) to do the entire job.
You have that a little wrong. God *can* (in principle) be proven. If the sky breaks open, choirs of angels break forth, a 10km-long arm reaches down from the skies and an 8km golden-haired, bearded face looks down upon humanity and utters words of unshakable truth...then God is proven.
God cannot, however, be DISproven. It's an unfalsifiable hypothesis. So, you're right, science cannot ever say, definitively, that god doesn't exist. It also can't disprove the hypothesis that the universe was created by an invisible pink unicorn...or any other random idea that humans might come up with that entails a literally omnipotent/omniscient being.
But that COMPLETELY misses what this is all about. The original WSJ article is a non-scientist claiming that science has indeed proven the existence of god. That's quite clearly incorrect...and I think you'd have to look very hard to find a competent scientist in the fields involved who'd agree with that claim. So WSJ (essentially) published something that's completely untrue, incorrect, misleading - just plain *WRONG*...and journalistic integrity says that they should now be working very hard to fix that...not rejecting a perfectly sensible response from someone who knows exactly what he's talking about.
So bad on WSJ...and at least we can make that badness clear by discussing it here.
When you publish something controversial (which the original article most certainly was) and take the word of someone who is self-evidently not an expert in the field about which he's writing - you really have to do one of two things:
a) Do careful fact-checking on the article and publish it as 'The Truth'...or... b) Publish it as an op-ed piece - essentially saying "This is just the opinion of this guy".
This clearly wasn't (a) - so WSJ doesn't have to admit error or look bad in the eyes of the public. However, when accepting op-ed pieces, they need to be acutely aware of bias - and when a well-written response is provided - especially by an expert in the field - it deserves equal coverage...and that's where they failed.
I can actually understand them not wanting to publish this response as a "letter to the editor" kind of thing - but they really *should* commission an author with scientific credentials to write an opposing-view op-ed piece of more substantial weight.
People don't listen to that preflight announcement stuff because they've heard it a hundred times before. People who've flown even a couple of times before don't need to listen. People who are on their first flight, where it's all new and exciting are paying attention.
So, no - I know how to wear a seatbelt and that my seat cushion can be used as a floatation device and to check where the nearest exit row is...yadda yadda yadda. I can stick my nose into my phone and I won't miss anything important.
What's needed is either to make those instructions INTERESTING (like the Southwest Airlines people often do) - or to only give the routine instructions to people who need it. That way, when something truly important comes up, people will pay attention.
I ran Minix for a year or more on my Atari ST - having a UNIX-like operating system on a machine I could have at home was a truly awesome thing. Tanenbaum's work is fascinating, useful and will be around for a good while...which is more or less the definition of "successful" in academic circles.
The debates with Linus were interesting - but I always felt that they were arguing at cross-purposes. Linus wanted a quick implementation of something indistinguishable from "real UNIX" - Tanenbaum wanted something beautiful and elegant. Both got what they wanted - there was (and continues to be) no reason why they can't both continue to exist and be useful.
Tanenbaum's statement that the computer would mostly be running one program at a time was clearly unreasonable for a PC - but think about phones or embedded controllers like BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi? Perhaps Minix is a better solution in those kinds of applications?
I think that to pass the Turing test, you have to tell the judges that the entity they are about to talk to *might* be a computer program. Eliza worked because people had never encountered a computer that even tried to be remotely human - so the assumption was that this was a real person from the outset. Also Eliza is a psychologist - so she gets to ask all the questions and steer the conversation into territory she can actually handle. Responses to things she can't parse are things like "So how does that make YOU feel?" - which work in that situation.
In a real turing test, the questions are completely open and the judge is initially highly sceptical that this is a real human.
Judges in these contests always seem to low-ball the questions. Ask "How would Santa Claus fend off a horde of attacking Ninjas?"
Those are insanely difficult questions for an AI to get right without some neutral "I don't feel like answering that right now" kind of response. A 13 year old kid would leap in and start wondering whether Santa could fly away in his sleigh and drop presents on them...or set the elves loose on them...or ask another question in return, like "Can the reindeer help out?"
Something that requires creativity - not just knowledge (which Watson could pull off) or a decent use of the English language (which Eliza could manage to some degree).
Who cares? I mean - really - you can get a fake degree based on "Your life-experience" or any number of junk bits of paper.
The fact is that when you go for a job someplace waving your Ph.D in Creationism - the people offering the job are going to have a really good laugh at your expense. The only job you're going to be able to get will be working for the Creation Research center.
Think of this as "educational Darwinism" - those with degrees in junk subjects will be rapidly eliminated from the business gene-pool.
C is a mere subset of C++. So you might as well cross C off the list.
Fortran is hopelessly obsolete - although it's certainly still used in a few niches.
You'd be certifiably crazy not to pick either C++ or Java.
Frankly - if you can get your head around C++, Java is a snap because it's little more than a C++ subset too.
The other thing you perhaps don't realise is that a halfway decent programmer can pick up a new language in a weekend - and be 100% comfortable in it in a month. I've totally lost count of how many languages I know...but a quick count says it's at least 30.
C++ or Java - you choose...but forget C and Fortran.
Back when we had a bunch of big SGI graphics machines we decided that they were basically cold heartless bastards with no love of humankind - so we named them after mass-murderers: Hinkley, Lechter, Sutcliffe, etc. This was considered to many to be kinda tasteless - but hey - we're geeks.
When we started to transition over to using Linux PC's for doing our graphics, they seemed like little toys - so we had all sorts of toy names, stuff like Crayola, Etchasketch, etc - but as we learned to network a bunch of them to do the same work, they earned names like Lego, Duplo, Erectorset, etc.
When I named my machines at home, my son was going through a 'batman' phase - so we had Batcave, Waynemanor, Batmobile (a laptop), Alfred, etc. Later the craze was The Matrix - and we used the names of the hover-craft. The machine I'm using now is still called Gnosis for that reason.
"...publishes orally or in writing, exhibits, or otherwise makes available anything obscene to any a group or individual;"...so exhibiting anything obscene to any individual...is illegal? Doesn't that mean that I can't get naked with my g/f?
For RAM - there is really no problem - just use error checking. It's got to be easier to add an extra couple of bits to the width of your RAM to permit error-correction than to have a cosmic ray detector for every single bit.
The tricky problem isn't RAM - it's computational elements. There is no single way to error-correct computational elements because they are so diverse. A multiplier would need different protection to an adder which is different from a shift-register. Hence, the idea of rolling back (say) the last instruction executed and having a "do-over".
But for large arrays of homogeneous circuitry - like RAM - this doesn't seem worth the effort.
The underlying problem for the NFL is that these churches display their own messages during advertising breaks and in place of the halftime show. This upsets the advertisers who are paying vast sums to get their messages across. Sports bars don't do that, parties people throw for friends don't do that - the halftime show and the super-expensive one-time-only adverts are typically shown without change.
Besides that, I think it's rather unreasonable that the religious nuts think that somehow they can hijack someone else's media content in order to push their own insidious messages. Yeah - ban them from using any copyrighted material...whatever it takes.
My PC has a 500 Watt power supply. I work 8 hours per day - so the machine is wasting up power for the 16 hours per day that I'm not there. That's 8 kilowatt/hours. Price of electricity in the majority of the USA is between 5 and 10c per kW/hr - so the cost to my employer to leave my PC on overnight is between 40c and 80c...let's round it up to $1 for the sake of round numbers.
I'm paid about $50 per hour - but the cost to the company of employing me is much more than that because I consume space, human-resources, IT and management, I get retirement benefits and healthcare - my cost to the company is at least $150 per hour according to our internal accounting. Let's round down to $2 per minute for the sake of easy numbers.
So if it takes me more than about 30 seconds per day to turn the PC off and on again - then it's more cost-efficient for the company that I leave it on than wait for it to reboot every morning.
The machine takes about 4 minutes to go from power-off to running applications - and about a minute and a half to shut down cleanly. So it costs the company $10.50 for me to shutdown and restart each day - for a potential saving of $1 per day. Hence I should logically turn off the monitors (which takes just seconds of my time) - but leave the PC running. Even over the weekend, it consumes only $3 - so it's not worth the time to turn it off and on again unless I plan to be out of the office for at least a week.
Well...that's what I OUGHT to do if the company came first...in practice - I turn it off because I'm trying to save the planet and because it can be rebooting while I'm getting coffee.
Temperature is basically the average kinetic energy of the particles, and kinetic energy is half the mass times velocity squared, when things start to get very hot, the particles would eventually start getting up to relativistic speeds.
This has lead some people to suggest that the cosmic speed limit (the speed of light) imposes a cosmic temperature limit - but that's NOT the case.
As things start to move closer and closer to the speed of light, relativity says that their mass increases (as seen from the perspective of an outside observer). Whilst there is a cosmic speed limit - as you approach it, your mass increases without limit. Since unlimited mass and finite velocity means unlimited kinetic energy, relativity does not impose a cosmic temperature limit.
If there is a cosmic temperature limit, it's caused by something else.
Mr Dvorak has obviously never heard the expression "teach a man to fish".
Sure, you can spend $200 and get a short-term benefit for a bunch of people. But when they've finished eating that truckload - what happens next? You have to buy them another truckload then another and another.
What's needed is a way to let these people become self-sufficient.
I imagine a small African village containing 20 teenagers who speak good enlish, are kick-ass programmers with knowledge of the way the outside world works - and web access. I think they can find enough out-sourced work to earn enough for a $200 truck of rice every once in a while.
I imagine a village with land enough to grow coffee - and the net-savvy ability to sell the stuff directly to gormet coffee drinkers at $10 a pound rather than to big business at $0.10 per pound (I bet it's less than that). Their money accumulates in a PayPal account that they use to buy their rice. Sure they have some bad years when the coffee harvest fails - but they have enough cash banked to tide themselves over - and enough basic math and statistics and weather data from the Web to allow them to analyse how often this is going to happen and therefore the amount of storage they need to store their product and keep running the operation over the rough times.
Tribal rug makers can sell their rugs on eBay for hundreds of dollars - they can use the computer to allow customers to upload designs like CafePress does - they can go into the custom rug making business.
Actually - the main thing they can do is to tell me (by replying to this post) exactly why all of my ideas are stupid and how they have much better ones of their own.
This is a MUCH more fulfilling life than sitting out there hoping that Mr Dvorak will send them a truckload of rice sometime in the next month. The OLPC group are attempting a long term fix - the short term problems will still be short term problem for a long way to come - but if just one generation of decently educated, net-savvy kids can emerge from this - the impact will be stunning.
So - you can give a man a fish and he eats for a day - or you can teach a man to fish and he eats forever. But, if he doesn't understand the basics of fish ecology, he probably destroys his local fishery by overfishing it. So if you teach a man to get gainful employment on the world stage, he can buy all the goddamn fish he needs just like you or I do.
Googles images arent realtime. Their photos may have been taken YEARS ago. The ones on Mechanical Turk have been taken since the crash. Forget what you find on Google - it's a waste of effort.
Correction: NASA got XXXkg to the moon AND BACK for $YYY USING SAFETY STANDARDS AS REQUIRED FOR HUMAN CREW...it is vastly cheaper to only go one-way - and even cheaper still if you can take more risks with the payload.
However, my suspeicions are always aroused when roboticists start talking about walking (especially bipedal) robots. The technical problems are immense compared to wheeled/tracked robots and given the success of Spirit/Opportunity - the Indian team would be well advised to consider that kind of approach for the Lunar mission.
You're right - it's not hard - but that doesn't mean that everybody does it.
I don't own a Mac - (until very recently I didn't own a Windows machine either) - so even though I work hard to write portable code, I can't compile or test it on the Mac - so I can't provide an executable for people to download and run. Sure I can (and do) hand out source code - but most Mac users don't know how to use a compiler and most Windows users don't own a compiler.
So this has some merit...but it has some severe problems too.
My concerns about viewing it as a Java replacement is that it's totally unsecure. Linux users point at 'ActiveX' and laugh at the ludicrously huge security hole it creates. The advice that everyone gives to Windows users is to disable ActiveX...but this is just as bad...worse in fact because the same binary can infect three different OS architectures and there is no concept of signing binaries!
I'd also be surprised if things like OpenGL graphics run efficiently through this emulation layer - actually, I'd be fairly surprised if they ran at all. There is also no avoiding the problem of Linux binaries that dynamically link to libraries that may not be installed on the target machine - so they'll have to limit you to whatever subset of libraries you can rely on being installed on every LINA system.
> "Dear user: Insert the CD. Type make all; make install. Press return and go for coffee."
Hmmm - You havn't met my Mom have you?
Insert the CD...OK - that's reasonable - she knows where the eject button is - she knows to take out any CD that's already in there - she knows how to close the CD door.
Type something. Well, you didn't say anything about logging in, opening a shell window, being in the correct directory, or that the period in 'make install.' was not supposed to be typed in - and those are only the things that I can imagine that my mom wouldn't be able to do. The number of things that she could misunderstand or misinterpret are far beyond what I can imagine.
Blender isn't well thought out - it's evolved. The user interface is still pretty terrible. Python scripting totally sucks - the interfaces change with every release (often in ways that break existing script), are very poorly documented and yet never seem to keep up with the functionality in the core package. The code base is a terrible mess. People I know who have wished to write significant additions to blender's core have found their work rejected.
But the problem is that it's just barely good enough - such that developers simply don't feel it worth the (not inconsiderable) effort to do something truly world-class to replace it. Artists eventually learn it's weirdnesses.
If blender mysteriously vanished overnight, we'd be in a terrible state for the next year - but what would emerge as a result would be a hundred times better.
People forget why we do education. It's not to have kids write good, well referenced essays - it's to teach them HOW to write good, well referenced essays. Without doubt, Wikipedia is an insanely valuable resource - but you have to know how to use it.
So let's train our children to live in a world where the sum total of human knowledge is available from a single site on the web - but you can't 100% trust what it says. Merely blocking access to it does nothing - worse than nothing in fact because just as soon as they get out into the real world where Wikipedia ISN'T blocked - they'll use it uncritically because they've never been taught to use it right.
For things that don't matter much - just use it - and 99 times out of 100 it's right. For things that DO matter - by all means read Wikipedia - but use it to find the primary references that you CAN trust. Then look those up and reference them. But that's what you've got to do with any encyclopedia - there are just as many (arguably more) errors in Encyclopedia Britannica - and I don't think that's been banned yet.
This is no different from the technological challenges of earlier generations. When I was a kid in the early '70s, the pocket calculator was just starting to take over from the slide rule. The school found that the lack of the need to figure out where to put the decimal point (which a calculator does automatically - but the slide rule does not), we were not estimating the value of the result in our heads - so if we made a keying mistake on the calculator, we could easily be miles from the correct answer and not know it. Nowadays, all kids use calculators and slide rules are pretty much museum pieces - we got over this 'problem' with calculators and taught people to realise the possibility of a keying error.
The same needs to happen for the ENTIRE Internet - not just Wikipedia. It's ludicrous to block Wikipedia - and not block any of a gazillion other information-providing sites. Most of those are created by a single individual who could just as easily be wrong as Wikipedia. We need to train kids to recognise what web-based information can be trusted and what must be double-checked before we can trust it.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is that people who take the most carefully lit, composed and focussed images (which is what the computer is using as it's metric) are professional photographers. They use models who are generally considered "beautiful". So unless you're very careful about your initial data set, you're going to come to some very bad conclusions...and that's what seems to have happened here.
So, this is bogus science...badly done.
-- Steve
Don't get me wrong, I love Dilbert and Scott did an amazing job with that cartoon series. But his science credentials are really, really bad. His book, "God's Debris" is full to the brim with nonsense wrapped up as science.
So he's simply not someone I can trust with scientific claims. I honestly don't think anyone should care what he says in this regard...just because he draws fantastic cartoons doesn't give him any special platform for saying this kind of stuff.
-- Steve
So it looks like these things are basically zinc-lined tubes...no sensors, no guidance, no controls, no electronics, no communications or intelligence of any kind.
How is that a "bot"?
The gizmag report (second link in the story here) has a very beautiful picture of something which looks like a proper robot...but the other two links show simple cylinders.
I could imagine it being a motor for a bot...but it's nowhere *REMOTELY* near being an actual robot, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Look...this is an impressive achievement, it's very clever and I'm sure it has some very neat applications - but let's not over-sell it?
Argh!
Einstein and Feynman were both nobel prize winners and Hawkins has Sir Isaac Newton's mathematics chair - we probably shouldn't downplay their achievements!
Carl Sagan was on the slippery slope. He certainly did some good science - but he's hardly up there with the previous three. Tyson has a few decent papers to his name, and his career isn't over yet - but I don't think he's coming close to the others in terms of science achievements.
Einstein was the world's worst communicator. Feynman and Hawkins are better - Sagan was astounding and Tyson may be yet better.
I suppose we might be concerned that there is a pattern here. We're taking people who are better communicators in preference to those who really know their stuff.
But honestly, does it matter? The presenter of a show reads from a script - (s)he is basically an actor. If the author of the script sticks to an accurate portrayal of what's written by the hard-core scientists - then why not pick an engaging personality to present it to us?
The critical part of the cycle is the person who decides WHICH science gets discussed. De Grasse Tyson is often talking about tacheons, wormholes and white holes and other claptrap that's horribly speculative, wildly unusupported, and very probably untrue. As an astrophysicist, he should know better - but as a TV presenter, he does a reasonable job of reading the script.
I'd prefer to have a complete non-scientist who is a supreme communicator be given a script written by good script writers from material handed to them by the hard core scientists behind the scenes - than to rely on a lower-tier scientist (or a high-tier scientist with poor communications skills) to do the entire job.
-- Steve
You have that a little wrong. God *can* (in principle) be proven. If the sky breaks open, choirs of angels break forth, a 10km-long arm reaches down from the skies and an 8km golden-haired, bearded face looks down upon humanity and utters words of unshakable truth...then God is proven.
God cannot, however, be DISproven. It's an unfalsifiable hypothesis. So, you're right, science cannot ever say, definitively, that god doesn't exist. It also can't disprove the hypothesis that the universe was created by an invisible pink unicorn...or any other random idea that humans might come up with that entails a literally omnipotent/omniscient being.
But that COMPLETELY misses what this is all about. The original WSJ article is a non-scientist claiming that science has indeed proven the existence of god. That's quite clearly incorrect...and I think you'd have to look very hard to find a competent scientist in the fields involved who'd agree with that claim. So WSJ (essentially) published something that's completely untrue, incorrect, misleading - just plain *WRONG*...and journalistic integrity says that they should now be working very hard to fix that...not rejecting a perfectly sensible response from someone who knows exactly what he's talking about.
So bad on WSJ...and at least we can make that badness clear by discussing it here.
When you publish something controversial (which the original article most certainly was) and take the word of someone who is self-evidently not an expert in the field about which he's writing - you really have to do one of two things:
a) Do careful fact-checking on the article and publish it as 'The Truth'...or...
b) Publish it as an op-ed piece - essentially saying "This is just the opinion of this guy".
This clearly wasn't (a) - so WSJ doesn't have to admit error or look bad in the eyes of the public. However, when accepting op-ed pieces, they need to be acutely aware of bias - and when a well-written response is provided - especially by an expert in the field - it deserves equal coverage...and that's where they failed.
I can actually understand them not wanting to publish this response as a "letter to the editor" kind of thing - but they really *should* commission an author with scientific credentials to write an opposing-view op-ed piece of more substantial weight.
Yeah - but a net twerk ?
People don't listen to that preflight announcement stuff because they've heard it a hundred times before. People who've flown even a couple of times before don't need to listen. People who are on their first flight, where it's all new and exciting are paying attention.
So, no - I know how to wear a seatbelt and that my seat cushion can be used as a floatation device and to check where the nearest exit row is...yadda yadda yadda. I can stick my nose into my phone and I won't miss anything important.
What's needed is either to make those instructions INTERESTING (like the Southwest Airlines people often do) - or to only give the routine instructions to people who need it. That way, when something truly important comes up, people will pay attention.
I ran Minix for a year or more on my Atari ST - having a UNIX-like operating system on a machine I could have at home was a truly awesome thing. Tanenbaum's work is fascinating, useful and will be around for a good while...which is more or less the definition of "successful" in academic circles.
The debates with Linus were interesting - but I always felt that they were arguing at cross-purposes. Linus wanted a quick implementation of something indistinguishable from "real UNIX" - Tanenbaum wanted something beautiful and elegant. Both got what they wanted - there was (and continues to be) no reason why they can't both continue to exist and be useful.
Tanenbaum's statement that the computer would mostly be running one program at a time was clearly unreasonable for a PC - but think about phones or embedded controllers like BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi? Perhaps Minix is a better solution in those kinds of applications?
I think that to pass the Turing test, you have to tell the judges that the entity they are about to talk to *might* be a computer program. Eliza worked because people had never encountered a computer that even tried to be remotely human - so the assumption was that this was a real person from the outset. Also Eliza is a psychologist - so she gets to ask all the questions and steer the conversation into territory she can actually handle. Responses to things she can't parse are things like "So how does that make YOU feel?" - which work in that situation.
In a real turing test, the questions are completely open and the judge is initially highly sceptical that this is a real human.
Judges in these contests always seem to low-ball the questions. Ask "How would Santa Claus fend off a horde of attacking Ninjas?"
Those are insanely difficult questions for an AI to get right without some neutral "I don't feel like answering that right now" kind of response. A 13 year old kid would leap in and start wondering whether Santa could fly away in his sleigh and drop presents on them...or set the elves loose on them...or ask another question in return, like "Can the reindeer help out?"
Something that requires creativity - not just knowledge (which Watson could pull off) or a decent use of the English language (which Eliza could manage to some degree).
Who cares? I mean - really - you can get a fake degree based on "Your life-experience" or any number of junk bits of paper.
The fact is that when you go for a job someplace waving your Ph.D in Creationism - the people offering the job are going to have a really good laugh at your expense. The only job you're going to be able to get will be working for the Creation Research center.
Think of this as "educational Darwinism" - those with degrees in junk subjects will be rapidly eliminated from the business gene-pool.
Meh.
C is a mere subset of C++. So you might as well cross C off the list.
Fortran is hopelessly obsolete - although it's certainly still used in a few niches.
You'd be certifiably crazy not to pick either C++ or Java.
Frankly - if you can get your head around C++, Java is a snap because it's little more than a C++ subset too.
The other thing you perhaps don't realise is that a halfway decent programmer can pick up a new language in a weekend - and be 100% comfortable in it in a month. I've totally lost count of how many languages I know...but a quick count says it's at least 30.
C++ or Java - you choose...but forget C and Fortran.
Back when we had a bunch of big SGI graphics machines we decided that they were basically cold heartless bastards with no love of humankind - so we named them after mass-murderers: Hinkley, Lechter, Sutcliffe, etc. This was considered to many to be kinda tasteless - but hey - we're geeks.
When we started to transition over to using Linux PC's for doing our graphics, they seemed like little toys - so we had all sorts of toy names, stuff like Crayola, Etchasketch, etc - but as we learned to network a bunch of them to do the same work, they earned names like Lego, Duplo, Erectorset, etc.
When I named my machines at home, my son was going through a 'batman' phase - so we had Batcave, Waynemanor, Batmobile (a laptop), Alfred, etc. Later the craze was The Matrix - and we used the names of the hover-craft. The machine I'm using now is still called Gnosis for that reason.
Wait - it's MUCH worse than that:
"...publishes orally or in writing, exhibits, or otherwise makes available anything obscene to any a group or individual;" ...so exhibiting anything obscene to any individual...is illegal? Doesn't that mean that I can't get naked with my g/f?
For RAM - there is really no problem - just use error checking. It's got to be easier to add an extra couple of bits to the width of your RAM to permit error-correction than to have a cosmic ray detector for every single bit.
The tricky problem isn't RAM - it's computational elements. There is no single way to error-correct computational elements because they are so diverse. A multiplier would need different protection to an adder which is different from a shift-register. Hence, the idea of rolling back (say) the last instruction executed and having a "do-over".
But for large arrays of homogeneous circuitry - like RAM - this doesn't seem worth the effort.
The underlying problem for the NFL is that these churches display their own messages during advertising breaks and in place of the halftime show. This upsets the advertisers who are paying vast sums to get their messages across. Sports bars don't do that, parties people throw for friends don't do that - the halftime show and the super-expensive one-time-only adverts are typically shown without change.
Besides that, I think it's rather unreasonable that the religious nuts think that somehow they can hijack someone else's media content in order to push their own insidious messages. Yeah - ban them from using any copyrighted material...whatever it takes.
My PC has a 500 Watt power supply. I work 8 hours per day - so the machine is wasting up power for the 16 hours per day that I'm not there. That's 8 kilowatt/hours. Price of electricity in the majority of the USA is between 5 and 10c per kW/hr - so the cost to my employer to leave my PC on overnight is between 40c and 80c...let's round it up to $1 for the sake of round numbers.
I'm paid about $50 per hour - but the cost to the company of employing me is much more than that because I consume space, human-resources, IT and management, I get retirement benefits and healthcare - my cost to the company is at least $150 per hour according to our internal accounting. Let's round down to $2 per minute for the sake of easy numbers.
So if it takes me more than about 30 seconds per day to turn the PC off and on again - then it's more cost-efficient for the company that I leave it on than wait for it to reboot every morning.
The machine takes about 4 minutes to go from power-off to running applications - and about a minute and a half to shut down cleanly. So it costs the company $10.50 for me to shutdown and restart each day - for a potential saving of $1 per day. Hence I should logically turn off the monitors (which takes just seconds of my time) - but leave the PC running. Even over the weekend, it consumes only $3 - so it's not worth the time to turn it off and on again unless I plan to be out of the office for at least a week.
Well...that's what I OUGHT to do if the company came first...in practice - I turn it off because I'm trying to save the planet and because it can be rebooting while I'm getting coffee.
Temperature is basically the average kinetic energy of the particles, and kinetic energy is half the mass times velocity squared, when things start to get very hot, the particles would eventually start getting up to relativistic speeds.
This has lead some people to suggest that the cosmic speed limit (the speed of light) imposes a cosmic temperature limit - but that's NOT the case.
As things start to move closer and closer to the speed of light, relativity says that their mass increases (as seen from the perspective of an outside observer). Whilst there is a cosmic speed limit - as you approach it, your mass increases without limit. Since unlimited mass and finite velocity means unlimited kinetic energy, relativity does not impose a cosmic temperature limit.
If there is a cosmic temperature limit, it's caused by something else.
Mr Dvorak has obviously never heard the expression "teach a man to fish".
Sure, you can spend $200 and get a short-term benefit for a bunch of people. But when they've finished eating that truckload - what happens next? You have to buy them another truckload then another and another.
What's needed is a way to let these people become self-sufficient.
I imagine a small African village containing 20 teenagers who speak good enlish, are kick-ass programmers with knowledge of the way the outside world works - and web access. I think they can find enough out-sourced work to earn enough for a $200 truck of rice every once in a while.
I imagine a village with land enough to grow coffee - and the net-savvy ability to sell the stuff directly to gormet coffee drinkers at $10 a pound rather than to big business at $0.10 per pound (I bet it's less than that). Their money accumulates in a PayPal account that they use to buy their rice. Sure they have some bad years when the coffee harvest fails - but they have enough cash banked to tide themselves over - and enough basic math and statistics and weather data from the Web to allow them to analyse how often this is going to happen and therefore the amount of storage they need to store their product and keep running the operation over the rough times.
Tribal rug makers can sell their rugs on eBay for hundreds of dollars - they can use the computer to allow customers to upload designs like CafePress does - they can go into the custom rug making business.
Actually - the main thing they can do is to tell me (by replying to this post) exactly why all of my ideas are stupid and how they have much better ones of their own.
This is a MUCH more fulfilling life than sitting out there hoping that Mr Dvorak will send them a truckload of rice sometime in the next month. The OLPC group are attempting a long term fix - the short term problems will still be short term problem for a long way to come - but if just one generation of decently educated, net-savvy kids can emerge from this - the impact will be stunning.
So - you can give a man a fish and he eats for a day - or you can teach a man to fish and he eats forever. But, if he doesn't understand the basics of fish ecology, he probably destroys his local fishery by overfishing it. So if you teach a man to get gainful employment on the world stage, he can buy all the goddamn fish he needs just like you or I do.
Googles images arent realtime. Their photos may have been taken YEARS ago. The ones on Mechanical Turk have been taken since the crash. Forget what you find on Google - it's a waste of effort.
Correction: NASA got XXXkg to the moon AND BACK for $YYY USING SAFETY STANDARDS AS REQUIRED FOR HUMAN CREW...it is vastly cheaper to only go one-way - and even cheaper still if you can take more risks with the payload.
However, my suspeicions are always aroused when roboticists start talking about walking (especially bipedal) robots. The technical problems are immense compared to wheeled/tracked robots and given the success of Spirit/Opportunity - the Indian team would be well advised to consider that kind of approach for the Lunar mission.
You're right - it's not hard - but that doesn't mean that everybody does it.
I don't own a Mac - (until very recently I didn't own a Windows machine either) - so even though I work hard to write portable code, I can't compile or test it on the Mac - so I can't provide an executable for people to download and run. Sure I can (and do) hand out source code - but most Mac users don't know how to use a compiler and most Windows users don't own a compiler.
So this has some merit...but it has some severe problems too.
My concerns about viewing it as a Java replacement is that it's totally unsecure. Linux users point at 'ActiveX' and laugh at the ludicrously huge security hole it creates. The advice that everyone gives to Windows users is to disable ActiveX...but this is just as bad...worse in fact because the same binary can infect three different OS architectures and there is no concept of signing binaries!
I'd also be surprised if things like OpenGL graphics run efficiently through this emulation layer - actually, I'd be fairly surprised if they ran at all. There is also no avoiding the problem of Linux binaries that dynamically link to libraries that may not be installed on the target machine - so they'll have to limit you to whatever subset of libraries you can rely on being installed on every LINA system.
> "Dear user: Insert the CD. Type make all; make install. Press return and go for coffee."
Hmmm - You havn't met my Mom have you?
Insert the CD...OK - that's reasonable - she knows where the eject button is - she knows to take out any CD that's already in there - she knows how to close the CD door.
Type something. Well, you didn't say anything about logging in, opening a shell window, being in the correct directory, or that the period in 'make install.' was not supposed to be typed in - and those are only the things that I can imagine that my mom wouldn't be able to do. The number of things that she could misunderstand or misinterpret are far beyond what I can imagine.
Blender isn't well thought out - it's evolved. The user interface is still pretty terrible. Python scripting totally sucks - the interfaces change with every release (often in ways that break existing script), are very poorly documented and yet never seem to keep up with the functionality in the core package. The code base is a terrible mess. People I know who have wished to write significant additions to blender's core have found their work rejected.
But the problem is that it's just barely good enough - such that developers simply don't feel it worth the (not inconsiderable) effort to do something truly world-class to replace it. Artists eventually learn it's weirdnesses.
If blender mysteriously vanished overnight, we'd be in a terrible state for the next year - but what would emerge as a result would be a hundred times better.
Tricky.
People forget why we do education. It's not to have kids write good, well referenced essays - it's to teach them HOW to write good, well referenced essays. Without doubt, Wikipedia is an insanely valuable resource - but you have to know how to use it.
So let's train our children to live in a world where the sum total of human knowledge is available from a single site on the web - but you can't 100% trust what it says. Merely blocking access to it does nothing - worse than nothing in fact because just as soon as they get out into the real world where Wikipedia ISN'T blocked - they'll use it uncritically because they've never been taught to use it right.
For things that don't matter much - just use it - and 99 times out of 100 it's right. For things that DO matter - by all means read Wikipedia - but use it to find the primary references that you CAN trust. Then look those up and reference them. But that's what you've got to do with any encyclopedia - there are just as many (arguably more) errors in Encyclopedia Britannica - and I don't think that's been banned yet.
This is no different from the technological challenges of earlier generations. When I was a kid in the early '70s, the pocket calculator was just starting to take over from the slide rule. The school found that the lack of the need to figure out where to put the decimal point (which a calculator does automatically - but the slide rule does not), we were not estimating the value of the result in our heads - so if we made a keying mistake on the calculator, we could easily be miles from the correct answer and not know it. Nowadays, all kids use calculators and slide rules are pretty much museum pieces - we got over this 'problem' with calculators and taught people to realise the possibility of a keying error.
The same needs to happen for the ENTIRE Internet - not just Wikipedia. It's ludicrous to block Wikipedia - and not block any of a gazillion other information-providing sites. Most of those are created by a single individual who could just as easily be wrong as Wikipedia. We need to train kids to recognise what web-based information can be trusted and what must be double-checked before we can trust it.