I'm not sure why this was modded insightful. Any freshman in computer science knows that replicating even "mundane" human visual capabilities would be an enormous step forwards in robotics and artificial intelligence.
They've created something that works and works well (I've been using a simple version of their model in my own work), it's too bad it doesn't involve "imagination" or some kind of next step. Most of us are quite happy with a system that can categorize novel, natural scenes.
Meaning, the girl was a direct descendant of that woman who lived around 2,000 years ago.
I'm confused by the emphasis on the word direct here. How could you be an indirect descendent of someone? Either you can trace a lineage path back to them or not.
It's surprising that prominent genetic features like hair colour could survive so many generations of interbreeding with non blondes but I guess if that person was promiscuous enough, they started a broad enough tree that chance allowed the blonde gene to survive.
Well, many companies will control what can be published from the research they pay for, but when it comes to the government, that is not the case at all. They give you money to do research in a particular area. They do not give you money to reach particular conclusions. If they knew the conclusions you were going to reach, they wouldn't be funding you. Now do you see the difference?
As someone in the process of writing for, and competeing for government grants, I can tell you that the difference is not as clear cut as you make it out to be.
Grant review committees often have a biased agenda, and if your theories and results don't line up with that bias, you have a much harder job of convincing them that you should be funding. Within any field there is a "flavor of the month" favoring particular ideas and methodologies. Playing to those biases gets you funding far more easily than disputing or ignoring them.
I'm not in the climate business, but it would surprise me if the same underlying tendency for group thinking didn't apply in those grant review boards. In fact, it's likely that climate science suffers from this to an even greater degree because of the politization that has created strong and emotional opinions.
So I think the GGGP's in this thread have a valid point: there's an induced bias from wherever you get the money, be it Exxonmobile or the government. It's not fair to write off research just because you don't agree with the bias of that particular funding agency, as it surely exists on the other side too.
Perhaps Apple's marketing consultants need to go on a quick computer course
I think they deserve a raise. Maintaining the hardware distinction between PC's and Mac's is critical to Apple's business model. The look and feel of Apple hardware is as important as the look and feel of OS X.
Keeping this distinction in the mind of the consumer is doubly important now that OSX can run on PC's and Windows can run on Mac's.
Pity for all the fish that used to travel up and down your stream.
If we all started putting waterwheels in our 1m wide streams, not only are we removing energy from the water (each wheel is like brake), but each is interrupting the eco system.
Having to skip over DRM articles on your daily scroll through the slashdot headlines is a very small price to pay for keeping a spotlight on the issue.
The problem is more that they went out of their way to not find out if Columbia was OK.
What if they had? What if some grainy picture suggested that there might be something like a hole that could cause problems... they still couldn't do anything about it. If true, they made a managerial decision and quite probably the right one.
At best it could only cause worry and doubt in a crew powerless to do anything about it, which is a potentially fatal combination even in the absence of a real physical problem (maybe it's a real hole, maybe it's a piece of dust in the camera lens).
Engineers are smart, but their perspective is one of solving mechanical problems, not mental ones. The managers, in this case, had to also worry about the mental state of the crew on the ground and in the orbiter. In arguing for taking pictures, they had nothing to gain and everything to lose.
That said, those of my friends who have died in Iraq did not do so in vain. My friends who died thought what they were doing was right, and my friends who are still there think the same.
This is called the sunk-cost fallacy, it is a common contributor to a wide range of irrational (meaning flawed in this context) decision making, especially gambling.
That adds up to fewer "collateral" losses of innocents and more flexibility for our troops. Whatever your human rights concerns, aren't the consequences of not having such a system worse?
Not necessarily. The subtext behind the development of nonlethal weaponry includes a weapon that the military can use on its own civilians without crossing a certain line. At the moment, existing non lethal weapons are lethal enough that they tend to cause a death or two in a big mob (witness the Boston Red Sox winning the Pennant, a girl caught a rubber bullet in the face and died).
The ability to forcefully disperse mobs without causing media-sensation deaths takes us one tiny step closer to a very... gradual.....police state.
$150,000 is probably the most damage I could make with a single bullet
Not true, I would guess that in cash value, a single soldier is probably worth far more than $150k when you consider training, deployment, funeral and family recompense expenses.
And there's an unquantifiable emotional impact as well.
You're missing out on the key point that is alluded to in the summary.
They've finally developed a flightless robot.
Flightless! It does not fly, AT ALL. Mankind has been dreaming of this since the dawn of science fiction... robots that don't go flying all over the place. awesome.
Not to worry, in 10 years we'll be here on slashdot (with it's fancy IPv6 address, hopefully) and reading an article about some hot new technique to safely crack open old nuclear waste facilities to get at the valuable fuel inside.
People think of federal grant agencies as being unbiased but that's absolutely untrue. Even outside of political hot-button issues (e.g. my field, psychology) one has to write grants that toe the popular line a little bit. WITHIN such issues, such as global warming, the pressure to explore certain viewpoints at the expense of others must be immense.
So as far as I'm concerned, fair's fair. If the top down pressure from the grant agencies (which are not strongly under Bush's control, there are many intervening layers of bureacracy) is pushing one side, it's better to have the oil companies funding research which explores alternatives.
The climate is incredibly complicated and there is no way that scientists should have reached consensus on something as complicated as the anthropogenic cause of Global Warming. The fact that there is consensus is a glaring indication that the scientific process is not functioning properly on this issue. That is how science works best, by challenging ideas, not by agreeing with them.
No, the war would have ended at about the same time, except that the Soviets would have occupied all of Germany instead of half of it.
At that point the situation was so badly deteriorated that it was largely a question of how long it took the soviets to physically move their tanks there.
Why in the world would I use *my* upload bandwidth to help the bloated Hollywood junkies make $$$, AND PAY THEM FOR IT ON TOP OF IT?? Do they really think that...
The average user won't know or care about seeding or upstream bandwidth. As long as the program is set up properly to avoid hammering the connection unnecessarily, it will work just fine, despite your screaming rants to the contrary.
It doesn't come with an install CD. You make one after you get the machine running by doing a "backup". I'm sure the backup would carry the Norton Malware with it.
The new security threat is from Symantec products!
It's preloaded on new computers and there's nothing you can do to prevent it. Once you get the computer, it begs you to install it, if you do, god help you. If you change your mind about using norton, well... you've got a long night ahead of you, crack open a bottle of wine and fire up regedit.
And if you don't uninstall it, and let it lapse, it'll be peppering you with "renew norton!" for the next thousand years. Ditto with McAffee.
These cures are worse than the disease. At least a zombied computer isn't spitting up "Renew NOW" dialog boxes.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure why this was modded insightful. Any freshman in computer science knows that replicating even "mundane" human visual capabilities would be an enormous step forwards in robotics and artificial intelligence.
They've created something that works and works well (I've been using a simple version of their model in my own work), it's too bad it doesn't involve "imagination" or some kind of next step. Most of us are quite happy with a system that can categorize novel, natural scenes.
It's also possible he was thinking of leaving anyway and Boston handed him a wonderful excuse to go out with glory... sort of.
Or Tranzor Z as many of us know him/it.
Meaning, the girl was a direct descendant of that woman who lived around 2,000 years ago.
I'm confused by the emphasis on the word direct here. How could you be an indirect descendent of someone? Either you can trace a lineage path back to them or not.
It's surprising that prominent genetic features like hair colour could survive so many generations of interbreeding with non blondes but I guess if that person was promiscuous enough, they started a broad enough tree that chance allowed the blonde gene to survive.
Well, many companies will control what can be published from the research they pay for, but when it comes to the government, that is not the case at all. They give you money to do research in a particular area. They do not give you money to reach particular conclusions. If they knew the conclusions you were going to reach, they wouldn't be funding you. Now do you see the difference?
As someone in the process of writing for, and competeing for government grants, I can tell you that the difference is not as clear cut as you make it out to be.
Grant review committees often have a biased agenda, and if your theories and results don't line up with that bias, you have a much harder job of convincing them that you should be funding. Within any field there is a "flavor of the month" favoring particular ideas and methodologies. Playing to those biases gets you funding far more easily than disputing or ignoring them.
I'm not in the climate business, but it would surprise me if the same underlying tendency for group thinking didn't apply in those grant review boards. In fact, it's likely that climate science suffers from this to an even greater degree because of the politization that has created strong and emotional opinions.
So I think the GGGP's in this thread have a valid point: there's an induced bias from wherever you get the money, be it Exxonmobile or the government. It's not fair to write off research just because you don't agree with the bias of that particular funding agency, as it surely exists on the other side too.
Perhaps Apple's marketing consultants need to go on a quick computer course
I think they deserve a raise. Maintaining the hardware distinction between PC's and Mac's is critical to Apple's business model. The look and feel of Apple hardware is as important as the look and feel of OS X.
Keeping this distinction in the mind of the consumer is doubly important now that OSX can run on PC's and Windows can run on Mac's.
Kudos to a brilliant marketing strategy.
Nuclear is still using "stored" power, thus can still have a net add to planetary heat.
Radioactive ore is constantly releasing heat just sitting in the ground.
Pity for all the fish that used to travel up and down your stream.
If we all started putting waterwheels in our 1m wide streams, not only are we removing energy from the water (each wheel is like brake), but each is interrupting the eco system.
Having to skip over DRM articles on your daily scroll through the slashdot headlines is a very small price to pay for keeping a spotlight on the issue.
The problem is more that they went out of their way to not find out if Columbia was OK.
What if they had? What if some grainy picture suggested that there might be something like a hole that could cause problems... they still couldn't do anything about it. If true, they made a managerial decision and quite probably the right one.
At best it could only cause worry and doubt in a crew powerless to do anything about it, which is a potentially fatal combination even in the absence of a real physical problem (maybe it's a real hole, maybe it's a piece of dust in the camera lens).
Engineers are smart, but their perspective is one of solving mechanical problems, not mental ones. The managers, in this case, had to also worry about the mental state of the crew on the ground and in the orbiter. In arguing for taking pictures, they had nothing to gain and everything to lose.
We learned in elementary school that you aren't supposed to use an encyclopedia as a source! Especially one freely editable.
How exactly do you think a conventional encyclopedia is written?
(hint: it's similar, but edited by a smaller group of people)
That said, those of my friends who have died in Iraq did not do so in vain. My friends who died thought what they were doing was right, and my friends who are still there think the same.
This is called the sunk-cost fallacy, it is a common contributor to a wide range of irrational (meaning flawed in this context) decision making, especially gambling.
That adds up to fewer "collateral" losses of innocents and more flexibility for our troops. Whatever your human rights concerns, aren't the consequences of not having such a system worse?
Not necessarily. The subtext behind the development of nonlethal weaponry includes a weapon that the military can use on its own civilians without crossing a certain line. At the moment, existing non lethal weapons are lethal enough that they tend to cause a death or two in a big mob (witness the Boston Red Sox winning the Pennant, a girl caught a rubber bullet in the face and died).
The ability to forcefully disperse mobs without causing media-sensation deaths takes us one tiny step closer to a very... gradual.....police state.
$150,000 is probably the most damage I could make with a single bullet
Not true, I would guess that in cash value, a single soldier is probably worth far more than $150k when you consider training, deployment, funeral and family recompense expenses.
And there's an unquantifiable emotional impact as well.
If you would RTFA, or for that matter RTFSummary, you'd notice that they aren't painting for air strikes
In just glancing at TFA, there are 4 apache gunships in the accompanying picture. I don't think they're armed with care bear stares.
You're missing out on the key point that is alluded to in the summary.
They've finally developed a flightless robot.
Flightless! It does not fly, AT ALL. Mankind has been dreaming of this since the dawn of science fiction... robots that don't go flying all over the place. awesome.
Not to worry, in 10 years we'll be here on slashdot (with it's fancy IPv6 address, hopefully) and reading an article about some hot new technique to safely crack open old nuclear waste facilities to get at the valuable fuel inside.
And Duke Nuke'em Forever will be out.
ha ha, no
Just because they're being funded by the oil companies doesn't mean they're not scientists.
4 6768
Recently it has become difficult for scientists who don't support the AGW theory to get funding, and they've had to go elsewhere.
(see http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220 for one article to this effect).
People think of federal grant agencies as being unbiased but that's absolutely untrue. Even outside of political hot-button issues (e.g. my field, psychology) one has to write grants that toe the popular line a little bit. WITHIN such issues, such as global warming, the pressure to explore certain viewpoints at the expense of others must be immense.
So as far as I'm concerned, fair's fair. If the top down pressure from the grant agencies (which are not strongly under Bush's control, there are many intervening layers of bureacracy) is pushing one side, it's better to have the oil companies funding research which explores alternatives.
The climate is incredibly complicated and there is no way that scientists should have reached consensus on something as complicated as the anthropogenic cause of Global Warming. The fact that there is consensus is a glaring indication that the scientific process is not functioning properly on this issue. That is how science works best, by challenging ideas, not by agreeing with them.
Another interesting link
http://epw.senate.gov/hearing_statements.cfm?id=2
No, the war would have ended at about the same time, except that the Soviets would have occupied all of Germany instead of half of it.
At that point the situation was so badly deteriorated that it was largely a question of how long it took the soviets to physically move their tanks there.
I'm rightfully skeptical of cutting edge neuroscience published in IEEE, Antenna's & Propagation.
You'll have to do better than that.
The British have been better caretakers of historical treasures than any other country in the world.
What other country's capital hasn't been invaded for nearly 1000 years?
Why in the world would I use *my* upload bandwidth to help the bloated Hollywood junkies make $$$, AND PAY THEM FOR IT ON TOP OF IT?? Do they really think that...
The average user won't know or care about seeding or upstream bandwidth. As long as the program is set up properly to avoid hammering the connection unnecessarily, it will work just fine, despite your screaming rants to the contrary.
It doesn't come with an install CD. You make one after you get the machine running by doing a "backup". I'm sure the backup would carry the Norton Malware with it.
These people are crooks.
The new security threat is from Symantec products!
It's preloaded on new computers and there's nothing you can do to prevent it. Once you get the computer, it begs you to install it, if you do, god help you. If you change your mind about using norton, well... you've got a long night ahead of you, crack open a bottle of wine and fire up regedit.
And if you don't uninstall it, and let it lapse, it'll be peppering you with "renew norton!" for the next thousand years. Ditto with McAffee.
These cures are worse than the disease. At least a zombied computer isn't spitting up "Renew NOW" dialog boxes.
So, then..... why'd you leave, if America's such a great place to live? (Which I happen to think it is, myself, BTW.)
I wanted to see if the grass is greener. It isn't, it's just different. I'd be happy to move back if that's where my career takes me.