Yes and no. There were several aspects of the some of the emerging quantum theories that Einstein argued against, but that's actually a significant part of how he contributed to the development of quantum mechanics; and really all of the founders of quantum mechanics did the same thing: when Bohr, Heisenberg and Pauli first proposed the Copenhagen interpretation (as of 1997 the most widely-accepted interpretation of quantum mechanics), Einstein didn't approve of it - but neither did Planck or Schrödinger. And there were several theories that form the basis of quantum mechanics that Einstein developed. So just because he argued against aspects of quantum theory that are now generally accepted, does not mean that he wasn't a significant contributor to its development.
It says "a founder", not "the founder". Einstein and Planck can both be considered joint founders of quantum theory, along with Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and others.
You get all the features you want on your media player. Want to have support for Ogg, FLAC, Theora, etc.? The Neuros 442 will have it - and if it doesn't, and you want it, you can give it support. It's what the Open Source community gets out of all Open Source projects.
> I think they generally stay on the planet/moon they started out on to provide a food source for the settlers
The planet they started on is Earth. Once Humans start colonizing other planets/moons, if they want cattle, they're going to have to haul the cattle there. What's the problem here?
Mostly I'd agree with you there, but I wouldn't say the crew of the Serenity are Saints by any means. They lie, cheat, steal, and murder, whatever they have to do to survive. They're much more good than evil, as they commit their criminal activities primarily due to their situation in life, but they're nowhere near perfect. As for seeing the Alliance side of the story, I'd agree that we don't get to see much of it, but Shepherd Bok and the Tams (clearly "good guys") were very solid Alliance supporters to start with. So while there really is no explanation why the Alliance forced the war, it's easy to see that (as with all groups of people) the Alliance includes "good guys" as well as "bad guys".
Fox Networks screwed the show over pretty badly. The episodes have a pretty strong sequential order, and Fox aired them completely out of order: for example, the first episode that introduces the Captain & the ship was the last to be aired. The TV network just really mishandled the show, and then when (due to their mishandling) it didn't have a very high rating, they cancelled it before the season was even finished.
Anyway, even if you didn't catch any of the TV show, I'd still recommend seeing the movie: it doesn't require that you have seen any of the TV show to follow the plot, and is an excellent movie. If you like it, pick up the TV show's DVD box set.
Heh. I had a history teacher once who called the History Channel "All Hitler, All the time." I found it particularly amusing when I happened to be watching the History Channel one night when they were showing a documentary on the building of roads and highways, and at one point discussed Hitler's contributions to the German autobahnen. I laughed my head off.
I can see two things that might be "solutions" to this. One that I think is far, far better than the other, and one that I think is (sadly) far, far more likely.
The better solution I see is to make more "niche" movies. Movies that have a strong appeal, if only to a smaller portion of the population. The more likely solution I see is to make fewer movies, that try and appeal to everyone. The thing is, it's much easier to make a good movie that appeals to very specific tastes than to make a good movie that appeals to everyone's taste. And if you make a GOOD movie, then that's the biggest thing that will draw audiences.
There's basically four types of movies:
1. Good movies that target a large portion of the population.
2. Good movies that target a small portion of the population.
3. Bad movies that target a small portion of the population.
4. Bad movies that target a large portion of the population.
Number 1 there is obviously the best type of movie, as far as the production studios are concerned. But it's also by far the most difficult to make. Number 2 is almost as good, but is MUCH easier to accomplish. Number 3 isn't so good, but is better than number 4.
Consider: you have your own specific tastes in movies. Which movie are you more likely to want to go see: a good movie, even though it isn't targetted specifically to your taste, or a bad movie that was meant to appeal to you? Personally, I'd take the good movie over the bad movie. And since I think it's likely much easier to produce good movies with a smaller target audience than good movies with a larger target audience, if I were a movie producer, I'd go for the smaller target audience.
"He asked IBM to deprecate its open-source license and instead put it under the General Public License, the most popular license for free software that gives users the freedom run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to modify and improve it and distribute copies. In contrast, an open-source license, like IBM's, is copyrighted.
Licensing something with the GPL does NOT remove copyright protection; quite the opposite, if it was not for copyright protection, the GPL could not make the restrictions it does: derivitive works must also be licensed with the GPL, etc. If a work is placed in the Public Domain (where it has no copyright), then anyone can do anything they want with it, with no restrictions whatsoever.
Odd... I thought the CDDB/FreeDB disc ID was calculated off of the track durations on the CD. So if you burn a CD from FLAC files, as long as the CD is in the CDDB & you burned all the tracks in the same order, it should recognize it.
This is why I rip all my CDs to FLAC. I can then later reencode them to whatever format I want for a specific purpose. MP3 for my ancient cheapo portable MP3 player, Ogg Vorbis for most other things, and I can burn my own standard Red Book audio CDs with no loss.
Whoops, posted too soon. The second potential problem you describe is more in line with how Credence is described to work, but I think it's unlikely to be a very big problem. Yes, the system will probably allow for "mistakes," but it will cull those mistakes out. So if the spammer rates most good files good and bad files bad, but rates their one spam file also good, then it is possible your client will report that spam file as having a high credibility. But, once you (or anyone else) download and find that it is not a good file, you will rate it bad, and as more people rate it bad, its credibility will go down. It's a case of diminishing returns for the spammer.
Except the way it works is that the reputation of a file that you see is based not on the over-all votes of the total population (including spammers). The reputation of a file that you see is only based on the votes of other peers that you have a high correlation with, based on what files you rate as good and bad. So if you have rated 9 files, and I have rated those same 9 files in the same way you did, then Credence would trust my ratings for you.
From the FAQ:
3. How does Credence know who is trustworthy and who is a spammer?
Initially, it doesn't. As you vote for files, it stores your votes and discovers the set of peers with whom your votes are correlated. It also communicates with peers to find out about other peers with whom they in turn are correlated. The outcome of this computation is a numerical value computed for each file appearing in query results that reflects the probability that the given file is trustworthy.
If you vote thumbs-up for good files and thumbs-down for bad files, you will be grouped with the vast majority of people who also vote honestly. You will then compute a high trustworthiness metric for all files that this (potentially very large) group of users has ever voted on. If you vote inaccurately (i.e. you are a spammer), you will compute a low trustworthiness metric for other non-spam files, and honest users will compute a low trustworthiness coefficient for your opinion. It is thus in your best interest to vote honestly. ...
6. I hate the music group X. Should I vote thumbs-down for their songs?
No. See the question above - your votes should simply reflect whether the file's description is accurate and whether its contents are intact. Voting thumbs-down for a perfectly good file may cause your node to be lumped in with spammers and reduce the effectiveness of Credence for you (i.e. you will likely see more spam in your searches).
Heh, I found this link in the/. synopsis very interesting. The Naming of the months is something that has interested me & I've speculated on a bit. I knew that the first months were named for Roman Gods: Janus Februus Mars Aphrodite (actually a Greek goddess, but the Romans identified their gods and the Greek gods together) Maia (another Greek goddess, the Roman name is Bona Dea) Juno
I also knew that July and August were named after Julius & Augustus Caesar. After August, the months are named with their numbers.
September (7)
October (8)
November (9)
December (10)
But wait! Those numbers aren't right! And here began my speculation. I figured the Romans (like most 10-fingered humans) were fond of 10 (X in Roman numerals), so they may have started with 10 months (which actually is the case). I also assumed that August and July were the last months added to the calender, based of their being named after Julius and Augustus Caesar (this assumption turns out to be false; January and February were the last months to be added to the Roman calender: the Romans originally considered winter to be monthless). I found the (incorrect, of course) conclusion of my speculation to be rather humourous: the Roman calender began with ten months, until Julius Caesar came along, and decided he was important enough that he deserved his own month, and so he created July. He wasn't arrogant enough to think he was more important than the gods, but he was more important than just a bunch of numbers, so he sticks July after the months named after the gods, but before the numbered months. That changes the numbering, but the names from the old numbering stuck. Augustus Caesar dittoed Julius Caesar.
Sadly, the explanation based on research rather than speculation that Wikipedia gives for the number mismatch is not so humourous. They simply say that March was originally the first month. But I always thought (incorrectly, it seems) that January was named for Janus, the god of Beginnings and Endings, because it was the first month of the year, that marked the end of the old year and the beginning of the new year. But even when January became the first month, it wasn't because of Janus, but rather because the Roman consuls had a year long term, and took office on the 1st of January.
Whoops, looks like I should have RTFA before posting. They actually have a link to a video of Wes playing The System Admin Song, but (at least, going off the text transcript: my download isn't finished yet), it doesn't have the introduction that the mp3 on ampcast has.
Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie made The System Admin Song. You can get it (and many other funny songs & skits) from their artist page on ampcast.com.
Re:Humanoid vs task-specific robots
on
Humanoid Robot HR-2
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Isaac Asimov made several arguments in favor of humanoid robots over task-specific robots. Your "joke" is actually one of them, a humanoid robot would be more versatile, and capable of performing a wider variety of tasks, than a task-specific robot. In theory, a completely humanoid robot would be capable of doing everything a human can do.
However, while that argument does have merit, by itself I don't think it's enough to mean that humanoid robots should be developed rather than task-specific robots. What I think is more important to consider is the cost to develop and produce humanoid robots versus task-specific robots. Asimov started writing about robots before computers really started taking off, and so the AI for his robots comes from a fictional device called a "positronic brain" (which, by the way, Star Trek borrowed for Data). In Asimov's stories, the positronic brain was the most expensive (and important) part of a robot, and so it was cheaper to install the positronic brain in a humanoid form, where it would be most versatile, than in a form specialized for one task. But that aspect of Asimov's stories may not accurately reflect reality. In reality, computers and software would be the source of a robots AI, and in reality it is much simpler (and therefore cheaper) to develop & produce computers and software that is specialized for one task.
Which really, is what I find most impressive about this HR-2. In the video, they show it imitating human behavior, playing a game where the human holds a block and moves it up and down, and then the robot holds a block and moves it up and down. If the robot was simply programmed to move the block up and down, no big deal, that's not tough to do. But my impression is that it wasn't programmed to do that specific task, but rather it was programmed to be capable of analyzing what the human was doing, and then to imitate that. Which is very impressive to me.
Actually, while I don't think it's the case here, often things that are designed for high speeds have troubles when standing still. Just one example, the SR-71 Blackbird's fuel tanks expand due to the heat produced by air friction when it's in flight. The way they were designed relies on the fuel tanks expanding - when it lands, its fuel tanks contract as they cool, and often have problems leaking fuel, so the fuel has to be drained ASAP after landing, so it isn't wasted.
FireFox has a feature called "Find as you type", which will do this. Hit the / key, type what you want to find, and it will jump you right to it. Want to find it again? Ctrl-g will find the next instance.
I wasn't replying to that. If I need to do that, then I'll stick the site: keyword into my query in the google search. What I was replying to was the OP saying "Something I use a lot is the ability to quickly jump to and highlight the keywords you've just searched for by clicking them in the bar." For that, Find As You Type (and ctrl-g to find again) works great.
How do we know when using an open wireless access point is allowed, and when it is not? I have several friends who have open APs, and don't mind other people using it. They left it open on purpose, to allow others to use it. Also several public libraries in my area run open APs.
The simplest answer is that we should have permission from the owner of the AP that we can use it. But what's tricky, is that the fact that an AP is open can easily be taken as implicit permission - which in the case of this article, it actually was not.
But put it on after you've been out in the sun for a few minutes, rather than before going out into the sun. Your body needs very little time exposed to UV-B light to produce sufficient amounts of Vitamin D. Far less time than it takes to get a tan (or in my case, a burn. I couldn't tan, even if I wanted to).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes and no. There were several aspects of the some of the emerging quantum theories that Einstein argued against, but that's actually a significant part of how he contributed to the development of quantum mechanics; and really all of the founders of quantum mechanics did the same thing: when Bohr, Heisenberg and Pauli first proposed the Copenhagen interpretation (as of 1997 the most widely-accepted interpretation of quantum mechanics), Einstein didn't approve of it - but neither did Planck or Schrödinger. And there were several theories that form the basis of quantum mechanics that Einstein developed. So just because he argued against aspects of quantum theory that are now generally accepted, does not mean that he wasn't a significant contributor to its development.
It says "a founder", not "the founder". Einstein and Planck can both be considered joint founders of quantum theory, along with Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and others.
Site overloaded. Oh. Slashdot. I see. Hello.
You get all the features you want on your media player. Want to have support for Ogg, FLAC, Theora, etc.? The Neuros 442 will have it - and if it doesn't, and you want it, you can give it support. It's what the Open Source community gets out of all Open Source projects.
> I think they generally stay on the planet/moon they started out on to provide a food source for the settlers
The planet they started on is Earth. Once Humans start colonizing other planets/moons, if they want cattle, they're going to have to haul the cattle there. What's the problem here?
Mostly I'd agree with you there, but I wouldn't say the crew of the Serenity are Saints by any means. They lie, cheat, steal, and murder, whatever they have to do to survive. They're much more good than evil, as they commit their criminal activities primarily due to their situation in life, but they're nowhere near perfect. As for seeing the Alliance side of the story, I'd agree that we don't get to see much of it, but Shepherd Bok and the Tams (clearly "good guys") were very solid Alliance supporters to start with. So while there really is no explanation why the Alliance forced the war, it's easy to see that (as with all groups of people) the Alliance includes "good guys" as well as "bad guys".
Fox Networks screwed the show over pretty badly. The episodes have a pretty strong sequential order, and Fox aired them completely out of order: for example, the first episode that introduces the Captain & the ship was the last to be aired. The TV network just really mishandled the show, and then when (due to their mishandling) it didn't have a very high rating, they cancelled it before the season was even finished.
Anyway, even if you didn't catch any of the TV show, I'd still recommend seeing the movie: it doesn't require that you have seen any of the TV show to follow the plot, and is an excellent movie. If you like it, pick up the TV show's DVD box set.
> history channel ... keep showing WWII reruns.
Heh. I had a history teacher once who called the History Channel "All Hitler, All the time." I found it particularly amusing when I happened to be watching the History Channel one night when they were showing a documentary on the building of roads and highways, and at one point discussed Hitler's contributions to the German autobahnen. I laughed my head off.
The better solution I see is to make more "niche" movies. Movies that have a strong appeal, if only to a smaller portion of the population. The more likely solution I see is to make fewer movies, that try and appeal to everyone. The thing is, it's much easier to make a good movie that appeals to very specific tastes than to make a good movie that appeals to everyone's taste. And if you make a GOOD movie, then that's the biggest thing that will draw audiences.
There's basically four types of movies:
1. Good movies that target a large portion of the population.
2. Good movies that target a small portion of the population.
3. Bad movies that target a small portion of the population.
4. Bad movies that target a large portion of the population.
Number 1 there is obviously the best type of movie, as far as the production studios are concerned. But it's also by far the most difficult to make. Number 2 is almost as good, but is MUCH easier to accomplish. Number 3 isn't so good, but is better than number 4.
Consider: you have your own specific tastes in movies. Which movie are you more likely to want to go see: a good movie, even though it isn't targetted specifically to your taste, or a bad movie that was meant to appeal to you? Personally, I'd take the good movie over the bad movie. And since I think it's likely much easier to produce good movies with a smaller target audience than good movies with a larger target audience, if I were a movie producer, I'd go for the smaller target audience.
Odd... I thought the CDDB/FreeDB disc ID was calculated off of the track durations on the CD. So if you burn a CD from FLAC files, as long as the CD is in the CDDB & you burned all the tracks in the same order, it should recognize it.
This is why I rip all my CDs to FLAC. I can then later reencode them to whatever format I want for a specific purpose. MP3 for my ancient cheapo portable MP3 player, Ogg Vorbis for most other things, and I can burn my own standard Red Book audio CDs with no loss.
You've been lucky. Usenet has just as much spam crap as anything else, in my experience.
Whoops, posted too soon. The second potential problem you describe is more in line with how Credence is described to work, but I think it's unlikely to be a very big problem. Yes, the system will probably allow for "mistakes," but it will cull those mistakes out. So if the spammer rates most good files good and bad files bad, but rates their one spam file also good, then it is possible your client will report that spam file as having a high credibility. But, once you (or anyone else) download and find that it is not a good file, you will rate it bad, and as more people rate it bad, its credibility will go down. It's a case of diminishing returns for the spammer.
From the FAQ:
Heh, I found this link in the /. synopsis very interesting. The Naming of the months is something that has interested me & I've speculated on a bit. I knew that the first months were named for Roman Gods:
Janus
Februus
Mars
Aphrodite (actually a Greek goddess, but the Romans identified their gods and the Greek gods together)
Maia (another Greek goddess, the Roman name is Bona Dea)
Juno
I also knew that July and August were named after Julius & Augustus Caesar. After August, the months are named with their numbers.
September (7)
October (8)
November (9)
December (10)
But wait! Those numbers aren't right! And here began my speculation. I figured the Romans (like most 10-fingered humans) were fond of 10 (X in Roman numerals), so they may have started with 10 months (which actually is the case). I also assumed that August and July were the last months added to the calender, based of their being named after Julius and Augustus Caesar (this assumption turns out to be false; January and February were the last months to be added to the Roman calender: the Romans originally considered winter to be monthless). I found the (incorrect, of course) conclusion of my speculation to be rather humourous: the Roman calender began with ten months, until Julius Caesar came along, and decided he was important enough that he deserved his own month, and so he created July. He wasn't arrogant enough to think he was more important than the gods, but he was more important than just a bunch of numbers, so he sticks July after the months named after the gods, but before the numbered months. That changes the numbering, but the names from the old numbering stuck. Augustus Caesar dittoed Julius Caesar.
Sadly, the explanation based on research rather than speculation that Wikipedia gives for the number mismatch is not so humourous. They simply say that March was originally the first month. But I always thought (incorrectly, it seems) that January was named for Janus, the god of Beginnings and Endings, because it was the first month of the year, that marked the end of the old year and the beginning of the new year. But even when January became the first month, it wasn't because of Janus, but rather because the Roman consuls had a year long term, and took office on the 1st of January.
Whoops, looks like I should have RTFA before posting. They actually have a link to a video of Wes playing The System Admin Song, but (at least, going off the text transcript: my download isn't finished yet), it doesn't have the introduction that the mp3 on ampcast has.
Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie made The System Admin Song. You can get it (and many other funny songs & skits) from their artist page on ampcast.com.
Isaac Asimov made several arguments in favor of humanoid robots over task-specific robots. Your "joke" is actually one of them, a humanoid robot would be more versatile, and capable of performing a wider variety of tasks, than a task-specific robot. In theory, a completely humanoid robot would be capable of doing everything a human can do.
However, while that argument does have merit, by itself I don't think it's enough to mean that humanoid robots should be developed rather than task-specific robots. What I think is more important to consider is the cost to develop and produce humanoid robots versus task-specific robots. Asimov started writing about robots before computers really started taking off, and so the AI for his robots comes from a fictional device called a "positronic brain" (which, by the way, Star Trek borrowed for Data). In Asimov's stories, the positronic brain was the most expensive (and important) part of a robot, and so it was cheaper to install the positronic brain in a humanoid form, where it would be most versatile, than in a form specialized for one task. But that aspect of Asimov's stories may not accurately reflect reality. In reality, computers and software would be the source of a robots AI, and in reality it is much simpler (and therefore cheaper) to develop & produce computers and software that is specialized for one task.
Which really, is what I find most impressive about this HR-2. In the video, they show it imitating human behavior, playing a game where the human holds a block and moves it up and down, and then the robot holds a block and moves it up and down. If the robot was simply programmed to move the block up and down, no big deal, that's not tough to do. But my impression is that it wasn't programmed to do that specific task, but rather it was programmed to be capable of analyzing what the human was doing, and then to imitate that. Which is very impressive to me.
Actually, while I don't think it's the case here, often things that are designed for high speeds have troubles when standing still. Just one example, the SR-71 Blackbird's fuel tanks expand due to the heat produced by air friction when it's in flight. The way they were designed relies on the fuel tanks expanding - when it lands, its fuel tanks contract as they cool, and often have problems leaking fuel, so the fuel has to be drained ASAP after landing, so it isn't wasted.
FireFox has a feature called "Find as you type", which will do this. Hit the / key, type what you want to find, and it will jump you right to it. Want to find it again? Ctrl-g will find the next instance.
I wasn't replying to that. If I need to do that, then I'll stick the site: keyword into my query in the google search. What I was replying to was the OP saying "Something I use a lot is the ability to quickly jump to and highlight the keywords you've just searched for by clicking them in the bar." For that, Find As You Type (and ctrl-g to find again) works great.
Hit the / key. You have just started Find As You Type - type what you you want to find, and it will jump you right to it.
How do we know when using an open wireless access point is allowed, and when it is not? I have several friends who have open APs, and don't mind other people using it. They left it open on purpose, to allow others to use it. Also several public libraries in my area run open APs.
The simplest answer is that we should have permission from the owner of the AP that we can use it. But what's tricky, is that the fact that an AP is open can easily be taken as implicit permission - which in the case of this article, it actually was not.
But put it on after you've been out in the sun for a few minutes, rather than before going out into the sun. Your body needs very little time exposed to UV-B light to produce sufficient amounts of Vitamin D. Far less time than it takes to get a tan (or in my case, a burn. I couldn't tan, even if I wanted to).