She might win the nomination... there's certainly a good chance. But she's hardly a shoe-in.
Everyone just kinda assumed she win the nom 8 years ago, and that didn't really pan out for her, did it? And she hadn't even committed any felonies then.
If you're good at remembering things, let your mind wander back to the summer of 2008.
Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were both strong candidates with roughly equal support.
Hillary and Barack had a meeting, and soon after Hillary withdrew from the campaign. The Wikipedia article states that she won the popular vote but lost the nomination, but I seem to remember that her campaign lost a lot of steam after that meeting, and before the nomination.
The subtext that I read into that meeting was that the Dems felt that she was splitting the vote, and in return for her withdrawing gracefully and throwing support for Barack she would be the presumptive next nominee.
Then President Obama appointed her Secretary of State, which was also probably a result of that meeting. She got a high-prestige and highly visible position, and gets to practice being president for 8 years. (A good plan, really, and I don't begrudge that sort of deal making - it's how politics is done in this country.)
And now we're in the new cycle, and she's calling in that promise.
The problem is, she was a lackluster Secretary of State. If you assume that the E-mail and the Benghazi thing is unimportant, there's nothing that really stands out in her career.
With respect to Democrat readers, your only viable candidate on that side (Hillary Clinton) is a weak contender, while the Republican side appears to have both Trump and Carson as strong candidates.
Don't count out the Bern yet. He's already tracking better than Obama was 8 years ago (compared to Hillary)
And while Hillary is definitely a career politico, she's never actually won an election for anything in her life.
I stay away from the "the other side will do *this* when elected" rhetoric, and try to confine myself to analysis of present situation and past performance. Please bear that in mind when replying - I'm not being a partisan echo chamber.
Money is a pretty good indicator of who will win an election in this country. With a 95% success rate, it's a pretty-good rule of thumb to use.
Bernie doesn't have his own money, so he has to rely on donations. Donations come from moneyed interests in return for political favors, and Bernie won't sell himself that way, so he won't get a lot of money.
He also says things which are easy to (unfairly) attack, such as sticking with the term "Democratic Socialism". Socialism is closely aligned in the public's mind with Communism, the USSR and cold war, and to a lesser extend the Fascism of WWII Italy.
While you and I can sort through the actual meanings, the public will only see what the pundits say. They will see Bernie as wanting to implement a completely non-democratic political system (Socialism!), and without the money to make his voice known it's unlikely that he'll get very far.
Yes, I agree with his position and rationale, but as the saying goes: it's not enough to be right, you have to be effective.
The actual vote tally shows that both Democrats and Republicans voted for the bill (74 for, 21 against, 5 abstain).
If anyone believes that voting for R (or D) is worse than the other side, or how it's the "lessor of two evils", feel free to explain this.
There are a finite number of votes in any term. When our representatives vote against the interests of the people in all votes, there is no more damage that they can do. There can be no "lesser" evil - they're both at "maximum evil".
I took a look at the text of the recent Iowa poll, the one that puts Carson ahead of Trump that everyone is talking about. I couldn't see any obvious bias (a good thing), but this question stood out:
Which do you think is the bigger risk for the future of the country?
74 To elect a president who has not held office so does not know the processes and procedures of governing
101 To elect the same sort of person who has served as president for many decades who will likely continue to do things the way they have been done with the same effect
25 Not sure
The numbers are total Dem+Rep respondents in the poll.
This is interesting because it shows that Americans (in Iowa, at least) are waking up to the realization that electing career politicians is not in their best interests.
With respect to Democrat readers, your only viable candidate on that side (Hillary Clinton) is a weak contender, while the Republican side appears to have both Trump and Carson as strong candidates.
With respect to the Republican readers, neither of your strong candidates is a career politican. One doesn't need to sell his influence to moneyed interests.
This may be the beginning of the end for career politicians and national parties.
Since wer're posting anecdotes and vague "feelings", here's what I've noticed.
I've lived in my neighborhood for decades, and haven't had any problem with police... except this year, in which I was stopped and questioned three times. Make that "stopped, handcuffed, searched, ID'd, and questioned" three times. One time I had a prescription in my jacket pocket (antibiotic), and the officer jotted down the drug, my name, and the prescription number in his notebook.
We're supposed to be free to go about our business, and we're not required to interact with police when they call out to us. Police can walk up to someone and try to start a conversation, but I've always been told that they are like any citizen, and you can choose not to interact with them.
In all three cases I *could not* avoid interacting with the police despite trying, and all three situations ended in a confrontation. The officer *began* the encounter visibly irate, and escalated to *enraged* when I wouldn't interact. (Yes, I'm aware of my state's "must identify" law. I don't/didn't lie to them, but I don't show ID when asked.)
One told me he was going to taser me if I didn't show ID, one actually arrested me for not having ID (while hiking on a public trail), but then changed the charge at the last minute. On that last one, the officer stated that not carrying an ID was illegal.
I'm white, elderly, and live in a low-crime bedroom community, and I can't take a walk at night without fear of being randomly intimidated by an angry cop.
A neighboring town had a pumpkin festival last year, and the police had snipers out during the event.
I don't know what it is with America these days, but we're definitely seeing more angry police, and this is reflected in the public's perception.
I think it's counter productive. I won't have anything to do with the police now, and I don't know anyone on my block who will. If they come door-to-door asking if we witnessed some crime, they get nothing from me.
The chance of abuse is too high for me to have any interaction with them. If they come door-to-door, I didn't see anything.
I wouldn't copy Canada. I personally know someone that was killed by the Canadian system.
It's a fair point.
I'm not wedded to the Canadian system per-se, only pointing out that copying any of a dozen systems would put us much further ahead than we are now. By a wide margin.
Not sure where you're getting your information, but there is absolutely consensus on what machine learning is.
Hey! You should go edit the Wikipedia page then! Here's what it says about machine learning:
Machine learning explores the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data.
That's the 2nd sentence on that page. The first reads:
Machine learning is a subfield of computer science that evolved from the study of pattern recognition and computational learning theory in artificial intelligence.
So machine learning "explores the study" of algorithms?
The pro-ACA people don't care about screening out fake applicants. They think any person getting another government handout is a good thing, regardless of circumstance.
It's interesting that you describe health care as a "handout", and bolster the metaphor with "regardless of circumstances".
There are perhaps three dozen examples of government-funded health care in the world that we can look to as examples. The US health care ranks worse than all of the top 10 countries.
Framing it as "it's a government handout" implies the subtext "(that you do not deserve)", and is a bit of a misnomer. Our system is horribly broken, we pay 6x as much as other countries and for that price get substandard care.
In short, many *many* people suffer needlessly because our health care system isn't a government handout.
So... I don't see a problem here. We do in fact deserve better health care. We're the US, we *were* the best.
Would you care to explain why a government handout is bad, in this specific instance?
(And before someone asks "well, how do you propose we fix it?", let me just say that we could find a system we like and copy it wholesale. For example, the Canadian system is better than the US system overall, and we could simply copy their procedures and implement them. If we did that, 80% of the money we now spend on health care would be available to stimulate the economy.)
Yeah, but there is nothing there to tell us wtf he's actually talking about.
Don't worry, in this field *no one* knows what they are talking about.
Machine learning is a part of AI, neither of which have good definitions. In textbooks you find things like "AI is the study of machines that think" and similar tautologies.
What is the definition of "machine learning"?
If you check a configuration box in Mozilla, the machine has "learned" your preference for something. Is that machine learning?
If you tell Siri "Siri, call me David", and Siri then addresses you by that name, is *that* machine learning?
If you tell a coder "this is a bubble sort", then the coder can check the "bubble sort" definition against the code, and see if it corresponds. The coder can then say yes or no, and if not, can identify attributes that the code is missing and how to bring it into compliance with the definition.
For "Machine learning"... not so much.
Since the definition isn't clear, the field of AI and machine learning are free to incorporate all sorts of ideas and theories and algorithms under the umbrella term "machine learning". This is good because you can get grant proposals passed by using the term, but it's bad because you can extend the definition to include things that seem to have nothing to do with the common-sense definition.
There are schools of thought, of course. Lots of people will try to clarify the issue by saying "I think...". Post replies here if you know what machine learning actually is, in a way that can be used to classify existing algorithms in a concrete manner.
But there's no real consensus; and as a result, research in machine learning runs all over the conceptual map.
Really? They expect Google to sell YouTube Red as the ad-free* version of YouTube only to have paying subscribers find that their favorite channel opted out?
Um... I think he meant that paying subscribers would see no ads, but non-payers would see the ads as normal.
I can tolerate ads on YouTube because I can ignore them, but it's never been worth that much to me.
The signal to noise ratio is very low, and on top of that you will have to deal with Google's tracking and harvesting your information.
Yes I think the medical device market is retarded in their regulations... but they were originally put there for a reason
The problem with this position is that it's not very efficient.
The regulations have grown to mean "safety at any cost", which means that in many cases effective care has become a lower priority than perfect safety.
Many examples abound. I chatted with a researcher at Berman Gund who said that he had a cure for a specific genetic disease that affects about 250 people in America (and proportionally the rest of the world). He said that many researchers have promising treatments for these less common ailments, but that it's impossible to navigate the FDA regulations due to cost.
It takes $2.5 billion to bring a drug to market, and no company would pay that expense to cure 250 people.
I remember reading an announcement for a migraine cure using magnetic fields (TMS). It was a sort of curved wand, like the end of a hockey stick. You place the bent end against the back of your head and press a button to give a burst of magnetic field and your migraine stops. The researchers stated that they were throwing the research to the public because they couldn't afford to bring the device to market due to FDA regulations.
I also remember during the height of the AIDS thing where people who had a demonstrably fatal disease couldn't choose alternative therapies which had yet to be deemed "safe".
You can't get out of the system, even with informed consent.
So the result is that very few people get harmed by medical devices (and procedures), but a very large proportion of sick people get harmed by not having access to slightly less safe devices.
We've missed having a balance, and as a result medical technology has pretty-much stagnated.
Is there any reason at all for this to be on Slashdot, except to push a general political agenda?
It's worse than you might think.
By associating toddlers with gun shootings they're making an emotional argument against gun ownership.
In short, we need to clamp down on gun ownership because we've now inflated the likelihood of a tragic incident in the minds of the reader. We do this by showing the enormous, large number without context, and by making it seem continuous and ever present.
Consider what your teenage daughter might think on reading the headline: One child a week gets shot! OMG!
This is just another non-evidence-based appeal for gun control, brought to light because the democrats are using the issue to help get elected.
And then, of course, they'll do nothing. Again.
Think it through. What contextual information might put the "one toddler a week" meme into perspective, and make it seem less important?
So is your thinking that when facing the persistent long term threat of violent extremists Islamists (which are pretty much exclusively Muslim) dedicated to the overthrow of Western civilization that the proper course of action is to search for violent Buddhists, Lutherans, and atheists? Because, Diversity!??
I kinda' want to get back to the mode where the crime comes before the investigation, you know?
Crime's been going down, we're currently at the lowest point it's been for decades.
We're starting to get a handle on what causes crime, and it turns out to be completely unrelated to policing or enforcement or longer jail sentences or anything like that: it's things like tetra-ethyl-lead wearing out of the environment, access to abortions for unwanted pregnancies 20 years ago, economic security, and things like that.
The police seem to think it's their job to prevent crime from happening, and they're bored because they have nothing else to do, and so they take great pains to try to predict who will commit a crime and take action before it happens.
We're seeing this already in things like parallel construction, seeing which crimes can be extended to cover an action they don't like, and arresting people for "planning" to join ISIS.
On that last one: people aren't attacking America, didn't join a group that attacks America, didn't go to the country where they *could* have joined the group that attacks America, and didn't have a *plane ticket* to go to the country where they *could* have joined the group that attacks America...
and yet, posting "I'm going to join ISIS" on your facebook page is enough to get you thrown in jail in this country. It's "pre-crime" prosecution.
I kinda' want to get back to the mode where the crime comes before the investigation, you know?
Your vehicle was damaged in the course of committing criminal trespass and vehicular assault? Count your blessings that you aren't being charged with attempted murder.
I dunno, depends on circumstance. If the employee broke the driver side window and tried to wrestle the driver out by cutting the seat belt, then a reasonable driver might fear for his life.
I'm going to wait a day or two and see if more facts come to light, before I make any judgements.
(Of course, *you* are welcome to make judgements any time.)
Yeah I'm sure the world will be a safer place when NK gets their hands on real nukes.
And Iran would still have it's democratically elected leader instead of enduring the Shah for 38 years.
I'm not sure which is worse. You only have 1 example (NK) to show, but the US has toppled more than one leader and supported more than one brutal regime.
It's a sort of "risk/reward" equation. How does one balance years of tyranny under a brutal regime against the bad actors?
Also, NK might already have one, or likely they are on the verge of having one, which 'kinda makes your argument irrelevant.
Why is it a bad thing to *limit* the number of countries which have the ability to cause such destruction? Especially in the case where the major countries that *have* such weapons have shown great restraint for nearly as long as the weapons have existed.
When a country has nuclear weapons, the US stops meddling in its internal affairs and begins to treat it as an equal.
The entire concept of uploading/duplicating is based on a deterministic view of the universe - one without quantum mechanics.
We don't understand quantum mechanics, and we also don't understand how the brain works...however, that doesn't mean that the brain is quantum mechanical.
Two things that have similar characteristics sometimes turn out to be quite different, and relying on "we don't understand this" as the similar characteristic that makes two things equivalent is dubious at best.
Suppose you have a stroke, and it damages a small section of your brain.
The (cerebral cortex surface) brain is made up of a repeating pattern of cortical columns, which is a structure that connects vertically among it's 6 layers, but not laterally beyond the column boundary. There are connections out the top to the higher order layers in the brain, and connections into the bottom from lower layers, but it's an independent function(*).
As far as anyone can tell, the cerebral cortex is composed of a repeating array of these columns.
Suppose you have a synthetic "plug" that can take the place of a number of cortical columns. You remove the damaged part of the brain and replace it with the synthetic plug.
The plug contains processing units which then learn from the existing connections. The human helps to train the connections by giving feedback: as the plug tries out the connections and actions, the human can tell whether the output is right or wrong, and act accordingly.
For example, if the plug was within the speech centers, the human would have to relearn that part of speech which was damaged, but he would have all the rest of his experiences and knowledge as a basis. His environment and other humans (family, friends) would also help support the learning process.
Eventually, the plug would learn the correct responses to any of the inputs, and it would be a replacement for the damaged part.
Now suppose you have another stroke, and it damages another part of the brain.
Continue the process to its logical conclusion, and you migrate the essence of the person from the biological into the synthetic. This is possible because the information in the brain is not stored in one place, but distributed over many areas. If you lose one area, the information can still be reconstructed from information in other areas.
I can well imagine when the technology gets advanced enough, that rich people might be able to get "stroke plugs" implanted, and over time completely replace the biological portions of their brain.
Is this not a sufficient definition for uploading?
I've often wondered how much our media actually sways public perception.
To take an example, consider the TV series "West Wing", which ran from from 2000 - 2007. This was during most of the Bush administration.
In the series, the president (played by Martin Sheen) was powerful, smart, compassionate, and likeable. The character was a Nobel Prize laureate in economics(*), and pretty-much the pinnacle of personal achievement.
For comparison, note that Dennis Kucinich brought 35 articles of impeachment against Bush at the end of his term, including taking the country into war for no just cause.
(I don't bring this up to cast aspersions on the man or party, only to show that there was widespread disapproval with some justification at the time.)
I can't help but wonder if peoples' perception of the president's actions were somehow biased because of the "West Wing" series. It was highly popular, and the character of the president (in the series) was one who garnered a lot of respect.
Would the public have been less tolerant of Bush without "West Wing" running concurrently with his term?
I wonder what other effects that TV and entertainment might have on the population. Does everyone's view of police stem from CSI, Hawaii 5-0, and Hill Street Blues? We see all the time how police risk their lives to protect the innocent, for example... on TV. Do people use their TV viewing as the basis for their assessment of reality?
(*) And in one particular moment during the show, someone asked the president about NAFTA and whether opening up free trade would hurt America, and Martin Sheen (as the president) stated something like "every economist thinks it would be to our benefit".
I just finished this series of videos from SRI that gives a good overview of current(-ish) research in cold fusion. It's an easy set of videos to watch, and highly informative.
To summarize, SRI and others have gotten cold fusion to happen, with byproducts one would expect from a nuclear reaction. Their experiments generate excess energy under well-measured experimental conditions, as well as nuclear byproducts such as tritium and Helium-4.
They've also identified the experimental regime that is needed to reproduce these results, and can point to exactly why previous attempts to reproduce the phenomenon have failed. Basically, the experimental conditions are specific and lots of things will stop the reaction. You can only use certain materials to construct the reactor vessel (because anything else will poison the reaction), the hydrogen loading has to be more than 87%, and so on and so on. Just throwing things together and trying it won't work.
They also have aspects that they haven't figured out yet: the reaction seems to oscillate, and the Palladium has to undergo some sort of initiation (an internal rearrangement of some type) that can sometimes take weeks to saturate.
SRI is not a crank institute, so it would seem that there is some interesting physics going on, and (if you believe them) that cold fusion is real.
Slashdot Mirror
She might win the nomination... there's certainly a good chance. But she's hardly a shoe-in.
Everyone just kinda assumed she win the nom 8 years ago, and that didn't really pan out for her, did it? And she hadn't even committed any felonies then.
If you're good at remembering things, let your mind wander back to the summer of 2008.
Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were both strong candidates with roughly equal support.
Hillary and Barack had a meeting, and soon after Hillary withdrew from the campaign. The Wikipedia article states that she won the popular vote but lost the nomination, but I seem to remember that her campaign lost a lot of steam after that meeting, and before the nomination.
The subtext that I read into that meeting was that the Dems felt that she was splitting the vote, and in return for her withdrawing gracefully and throwing support for Barack she would be the presumptive next nominee.
Then President Obama appointed her Secretary of State, which was also probably a result of that meeting. She got a high-prestige and highly visible position, and gets to practice being president for 8 years. (A good plan, really, and I don't begrudge that sort of deal making - it's how politics is done in this country.)
And now we're in the new cycle, and she's calling in that promise.
The problem is, she was a lackluster Secretary of State. If you assume that the E-mail and the Benghazi thing is unimportant, there's nothing that really stands out in her career.
She's a lukewarm candidate.
With respect to Democrat readers, your only viable candidate on that side (Hillary Clinton) is a weak contender, while the Republican side appears to have both Trump and Carson as strong candidates.
Don't count out the Bern yet. He's already tracking better than Obama was 8 years ago (compared to Hillary)
And while Hillary is definitely a career politico, she's never actually won an election for anything in her life.
I stay away from the "the other side will do *this* when elected" rhetoric, and try to confine myself to analysis of present situation and past performance. Please bear that in mind when replying - I'm not being a partisan echo chamber.
Money is a pretty good indicator of who will win an election in this country. With a 95% success rate, it's a pretty-good rule of thumb to use.
Bernie doesn't have his own money, so he has to rely on donations. Donations come from moneyed interests in return for political favors, and Bernie won't sell himself that way, so he won't get a lot of money.
He also says things which are easy to (unfairly) attack, such as sticking with the term "Democratic Socialism". Socialism is closely aligned in the public's mind with Communism, the USSR and cold war, and to a lesser extend the Fascism of WWII Italy.
While you and I can sort through the actual meanings, the public will only see what the pundits say. They will see Bernie as wanting to implement a completely non-democratic political system (Socialism!), and without the money to make his voice known it's unlikely that he'll get very far.
Yes, I agree with his position and rationale, but as the saying goes: it's not enough to be right, you have to be effective.
The actual vote tally shows that both Democrats and Republicans voted for the bill (74 for, 21 against, 5 abstain).
If anyone believes that voting for R (or D) is worse than the other side, or how it's the "lessor of two evils", feel free to explain this.
There are a finite number of votes in any term. When our representatives vote against the interests of the people in all votes, there is no more damage that they can do. There can be no "lesser" evil - they're both at "maximum evil".
I took a look at the text of the recent Iowa poll, the one that puts Carson ahead of Trump that everyone is talking about. I couldn't see any obvious bias (a good thing), but this question stood out:
Which do you think is the bigger risk for the future of the country?
74 To elect a president who has not held office so does not know the processes and procedures of governing
101 To elect the same sort of person who has served as president for many decades who will likely continue to do things the way they have been done with the same effect
25 Not sure
The numbers are total Dem+Rep respondents in the poll.
This is interesting because it shows that Americans (in Iowa, at least) are waking up to the realization that electing career politicians is not in their best interests.
With respect to Democrat readers, your only viable candidate on that side (Hillary Clinton) is a weak contender, while the Republican side appears to have both Trump and Carson as strong candidates.
With respect to the Republican readers, neither of your strong candidates is a career politican. One doesn't need to sell his influence to moneyed interests.
This may be the beginning of the end for career politicians and national parties.
Since wer're posting anecdotes and vague "feelings", here's what I've noticed.
I've lived in my neighborhood for decades, and haven't had any problem with police... except this year, in which I was stopped and questioned three times. Make that "stopped, handcuffed, searched, ID'd, and questioned" three times. One time I had a prescription in my jacket pocket (antibiotic), and the officer jotted down the drug, my name, and the prescription number in his notebook.
We're supposed to be free to go about our business, and we're not required to interact with police when they call out to us. Police can walk up to someone and try to start a conversation, but I've always been told that they are like any citizen, and you can choose not to interact with them.
In all three cases I *could not* avoid interacting with the police despite trying, and all three situations ended in a confrontation. The officer *began* the encounter visibly irate, and escalated to *enraged* when I wouldn't interact. (Yes, I'm aware of my state's "must identify" law. I don't/didn't lie to them, but I don't show ID when asked.)
One told me he was going to taser me if I didn't show ID, one actually arrested me for not having ID (while hiking on a public trail), but then changed the charge at the last minute. On that last one, the officer stated that not carrying an ID was illegal.
I'm white, elderly, and live in a low-crime bedroom community, and I can't take a walk at night without fear of being randomly intimidated by an angry cop.
A neighboring town had a pumpkin festival last year, and the police had snipers out during the event.
I don't know what it is with America these days, but we're definitely seeing more angry police, and this is reflected in the public's perception.
I think it's counter productive. I won't have anything to do with the police now, and I don't know anyone on my block who will. If they come door-to-door asking if we witnessed some crime, they get nothing from me.
The chance of abuse is too high for me to have any interaction with them. If they come door-to-door, I didn't see anything.
I wouldn't copy Canada. I personally know someone that was killed by the Canadian system.
It's a fair point.
I'm not wedded to the Canadian system per-se, only pointing out that copying any of a dozen systems would put us much further ahead than we are now. By a wide margin.
Not sure where you're getting your information, but there is absolutely consensus on what machine learning is.
Hey! You should go edit the Wikipedia page then! Here's what it says about machine learning:
Machine learning explores the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data.
That's the 2nd sentence on that page. The first reads:
Machine learning is a subfield of computer science that evolved from the study of pattern recognition and computational learning theory in artificial intelligence.
So machine learning "explores the study" of algorithms?
Wtf?
The pro-ACA people don't care about screening out fake applicants. They think any person getting another government handout is a good thing, regardless of circumstance.
It's interesting that you describe health care as a "handout", and bolster the metaphor with "regardless of circumstances".
There are perhaps three dozen examples of government-funded health care in the world that we can look to as examples. The US health care ranks worse than all of the top 10 countries.
Framing it as "it's a government handout" implies the subtext "(that you do not deserve)", and is a bit of a misnomer. Our system is horribly broken, we pay 6x as much as other countries and for that price get substandard care.
In short, many *many* people suffer needlessly because our health care system isn't a government handout.
So... I don't see a problem here. We do in fact deserve better health care. We're the US, we *were* the best.
Would you care to explain why a government handout is bad, in this specific instance?
(And before someone asks "well, how do you propose we fix it?", let me just say that we could find a system we like and copy it wholesale. For example, the Canadian system is better than the US system overall, and we could simply copy their procedures and implement them. If we did that, 80% of the money we now spend on health care would be available to stimulate the economy.)
Yeah, but there is nothing there to tell us wtf he's actually talking about.
Don't worry, in this field *no one* knows what they are talking about.
Machine learning is a part of AI, neither of which have good definitions. In textbooks you find things like "AI is the study of machines that think" and similar tautologies.
What is the definition of "machine learning"?
If you check a configuration box in Mozilla, the machine has "learned" your preference for something. Is that machine learning?
If you tell Siri "Siri, call me David", and Siri then addresses you by that name, is *that* machine learning?
If you tell a coder "this is a bubble sort", then the coder can check the "bubble sort" definition against the code, and see if it corresponds. The coder can then say yes or no, and if not, can identify attributes that the code is missing and how to bring it into compliance with the definition.
For "Machine learning"... not so much.
Since the definition isn't clear, the field of AI and machine learning are free to incorporate all sorts of ideas and theories and algorithms under the umbrella term "machine learning". This is good because you can get grant proposals passed by using the term, but it's bad because you can extend the definition to include things that seem to have nothing to do with the common-sense definition.
There are schools of thought, of course. Lots of people will try to clarify the issue by saying "I think...". Post replies here if you know what machine learning actually is, in a way that can be used to classify existing algorithms in a concrete manner.
But there's no real consensus; and as a result, research in machine learning runs all over the conceptual map.
Really? They expect Google to sell YouTube Red as the ad-free* version of YouTube only to have paying subscribers find that their favorite channel opted out?
Um... I think he meant that paying subscribers would see no ads, but non-payers would see the ads as normal.
I can tolerate ads on YouTube because I can ignore them, but it's never been worth that much to me.
The signal to noise ratio is very low, and on top of that you will have to deal with Google's tracking and harvesting your information.
For $10 a month I can do without YouTube.
Yes I think the medical device market is retarded in their regulations ... but they were originally put there for a reason
The problem with this position is that it's not very efficient.
The regulations have grown to mean "safety at any cost", which means that in many cases effective care has become a lower priority than perfect safety.
Many examples abound. I chatted with a researcher at Berman Gund who said that he had a cure for a specific genetic disease that affects about 250 people in America (and proportionally the rest of the world). He said that many researchers have promising treatments for these less common ailments, but that it's impossible to navigate the FDA regulations due to cost.
It takes $2.5 billion to bring a drug to market, and no company would pay that expense to cure 250 people.
I remember reading an announcement for a migraine cure using magnetic fields (TMS). It was a sort of curved wand, like the end of a hockey stick. You place the bent end against the back of your head and press a button to give a burst of magnetic field and your migraine stops. The researchers stated that they were throwing the research to the public because they couldn't afford to bring the device to market due to FDA regulations.
I also remember during the height of the AIDS thing where people who had a demonstrably fatal disease couldn't choose alternative therapies which had yet to be deemed "safe".
You can't get out of the system, even with informed consent.
So the result is that very few people get harmed by medical devices (and procedures), but a very large proportion of sick people get harmed by not having access to slightly less safe devices.
We've missed having a balance, and as a result medical technology has pretty-much stagnated.
Pay us well and treat us well, and we won't keep job-hopping.
People tend to job-hop when pay is rising the fastest. It is during recessions that they hunker down and stay loyal.
To be fair, it's when pay is rising fastest *in other companies* that that people tend to job-hop, yes?
[...] virtue signaling rituals [...]
What an awesome term!
We should use this more often...
Is there any reason at all for this to be on Slashdot, except to push a general political agenda?
It's worse than you might think.
By associating toddlers with gun shootings they're making an emotional argument against gun ownership.
In short, we need to clamp down on gun ownership because we've now inflated the likelihood of a tragic incident in the minds of the reader. We do this by showing the enormous, large number without context, and by making it seem continuous and ever present.
Consider what your teenage daughter might think on reading the headline: One child a week gets shot! OMG!
This is just another non-evidence-based appeal for gun control, brought to light because the democrats are using the issue to help get elected.
And then, of course, they'll do nothing. Again.
Think it through. What contextual information might put the "one toddler a week" meme into perspective, and make it seem less important?
So is your thinking that when facing the persistent long term threat of violent extremists Islamists (which are pretty much exclusively Muslim) dedicated to the overthrow of Western civilization that the proper course of action is to search for violent Buddhists, Lutherans, and atheists? Because, Diversity!??
I kinda' want to get back to the mode where the crime comes before the investigation, you know?
Crime's been going down, we're currently at the lowest point it's been for decades.
We're starting to get a handle on what causes crime, and it turns out to be completely unrelated to policing or enforcement or longer jail sentences or anything like that: it's things like tetra-ethyl-lead wearing out of the environment, access to abortions for unwanted pregnancies 20 years ago, economic security, and things like that.
The police seem to think it's their job to prevent crime from happening, and they're bored because they have nothing else to do, and so they take great pains to try to predict who will commit a crime and take action before it happens.
We're seeing this already in things like parallel construction, seeing which crimes can be extended to cover an action they don't like, and arresting people for "planning" to join ISIS.
On that last one: people aren't attacking America, didn't join a group that attacks America, didn't go to the country where they *could* have joined the group that attacks America, and didn't have a *plane ticket* to go to the country where they *could* have joined the group that attacks America...
and yet, posting "I'm going to join ISIS" on your facebook page is enough to get you thrown in jail in this country. It's "pre-crime" prosecution.
I kinda' want to get back to the mode where the crime comes before the investigation, you know?
Your vehicle was damaged in the course of committing criminal trespass and vehicular assault? Count your blessings that you aren't being charged with attempted murder.
I dunno, depends on circumstance. If the employee broke the driver side window and tried to wrestle the driver out by cutting the seat belt, then a reasonable driver might fear for his life.
I'm going to wait a day or two and see if more facts come to light, before I make any judgements.
(Of course, *you* are welcome to make judgements any time.)
Yeah I'm sure the world will be a safer place when NK gets their hands on real nukes.
And Iran would still have it's democratically elected leader instead of enduring the Shah for 38 years.
I'm not sure which is worse. You only have 1 example (NK) to show, but the US has toppled more than one leader and supported more than one brutal regime.
It's a sort of "risk/reward" equation. How does one balance years of tyranny under a brutal regime against the bad actors?
Also, NK might already have one, or likely they are on the verge of having one, which 'kinda makes your argument irrelevant.
Why is it a bad thing to *limit* the number of countries which have the ability to cause such destruction? Especially in the case where the major countries that *have* such weapons have shown great restraint for nearly as long as the weapons have existed.
When a country has nuclear weapons, the US stops meddling in its internal affairs and begins to treat it as an equal.
The entire concept of uploading/duplicating is based on a deterministic view of the universe - one without quantum mechanics.
We don't understand quantum mechanics, and we also don't understand how the brain works ...however, that doesn't mean that the brain is quantum mechanical.
Two things that have similar characteristics sometimes turn out to be quite different, and relying on "we don't understand this" as the similar characteristic that makes two things equivalent is dubious at best.
Suppose you have a stroke, and it damages a small section of your brain.
The (cerebral cortex surface) brain is made up of a repeating pattern of cortical columns, which is a structure that connects vertically among it's 6 layers, but not laterally beyond the column boundary. There are connections out the top to the higher order layers in the brain, and connections into the bottom from lower layers, but it's an independent function(*).
As far as anyone can tell, the cerebral cortex is composed of a repeating array of these columns.
Suppose you have a synthetic "plug" that can take the place of a number of cortical columns. You remove the damaged part of the brain and replace it with the synthetic plug.
The plug contains processing units which then learn from the existing connections. The human helps to train the connections by giving feedback: as the plug tries out the connections and actions, the human can tell whether the output is right or wrong, and act accordingly.
For example, if the plug was within the speech centers, the human would have to relearn that part of speech which was damaged, but he would have all the rest of his experiences and knowledge as a basis. His environment and other humans (family, friends) would also help support the learning process.
Eventually, the plug would learn the correct responses to any of the inputs, and it would be a replacement for the damaged part.
Now suppose you have another stroke, and it damages another part of the brain.
Continue the process to its logical conclusion, and you migrate the essence of the person from the biological into the synthetic. This is possible because the information in the brain is not stored in one place, but distributed over many areas. If you lose one area, the information can still be reconstructed from information in other areas.
I can well imagine when the technology gets advanced enough, that rich people might be able to get "stroke plugs" implanted, and over time completely replace the biological portions of their brain.
Is this not a sufficient definition for uploading?
(*) Yes, a glossy, simplistic description.
I agree - great post.
Please continue reading and posting - you are an asset to Slashdot.
I've often wondered how much our media actually sways public perception.
To take an example, consider the TV series "West Wing", which ran from from 2000 - 2007. This was during most of the Bush administration.
In the series, the president (played by Martin Sheen) was powerful, smart, compassionate, and likeable. The character was a Nobel Prize laureate in economics(*), and pretty-much the pinnacle of personal achievement.
For comparison, note that Dennis Kucinich brought 35 articles of impeachment against Bush at the end of his term, including taking the country into war for no just cause.
(I don't bring this up to cast aspersions on the man or party, only to show that there was widespread disapproval with some justification at the time.)
I can't help but wonder if peoples' perception of the president's actions were somehow biased because of the "West Wing" series. It was highly popular, and the character of the president (in the series) was one who garnered a lot of respect.
Would the public have been less tolerant of Bush without "West Wing" running concurrently with his term?
I wonder what other effects that TV and entertainment might have on the population. Does everyone's view of police stem from CSI, Hawaii 5-0, and Hill Street Blues? We see all the time how police risk their lives to protect the innocent, for example... on TV. Do people use their TV viewing as the basis for their assessment of reality?
(*) And in one particular moment during the show, someone asked the president about NAFTA and whether opening up free trade would hurt America, and Martin Sheen (as the president) stated something like "every economist thinks it would be to our benefit".
Now that Verizon has hooked up with AOL to share cookie data and personal information, it sure would be nice if the Verizon stealth cookies could be deletable.
Just a quick question, can the browser insert its own Verizon stealth cookie into the request URL?
And if that can be done, can it be used to poison the data, or even crash the Verizon tracking system?
I just finished this series of videos from SRI that gives a good overview of current(-ish) research in cold fusion. It's an easy set of videos to watch, and highly informative.
To summarize, SRI and others have gotten cold fusion to happen, with byproducts one would expect from a nuclear reaction. Their experiments generate excess energy under well-measured experimental conditions, as well as nuclear byproducts such as tritium and Helium-4.
They've also identified the experimental regime that is needed to reproduce these results, and can point to exactly why previous attempts to reproduce the phenomenon have failed. Basically, the experimental conditions are specific and lots of things will stop the reaction. You can only use certain materials to construct the reactor vessel (because anything else will poison the reaction), the hydrogen loading has to be more than 87%, and so on and so on. Just throwing things together and trying it won't work.
They also have aspects that they haven't figured out yet: the reaction seems to oscillate, and the Palladium has to undergo some sort of initiation (an internal rearrangement of some type) that can sometimes take weeks to saturate.
SRI is not a crank institute, so it would seem that there is some interesting physics going on, and (if you believe them) that cold fusion is real.
The reason for keeping weapons such as knives out of schools (or anywhere else) is to reduce the chance of fights escalating and becoming deadly.
While keeping knives and guns out of schools *might* reduce the chances of fights becoming deadly, it increases the number of fights overall.
Bullying happens. Subject certain kids to constant harassment with no recourse and no way out, and you get Columbine.
What are you proposing, teenager open carry in school to deter bullying?
Obviously, because that's the smart person's conclusion.
I would never consider addressing bullying by other means.
In comparison to letting teens carry weapons, all the other options seem kind of... silly?
(And for the record, why do I have to propose a solution anyway? Don't social scientists and psychologists read this board?)
The reason for keeping weapons such as knives out of schools (or anywhere else) is to reduce the chance of fights escalating and becoming deadly.
While keeping knives and guns out of schools *might* reduce the chances of fights becoming deadly, it increases the number of fights overall.
Bullying happens. Subject certain kids to constant harassment with no recourse and no way out, and you get Columbine.