Re:One question...
on
Flying By Brain
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Well I took a course about artificial neural net (not the biological ones like here). But we learn that biologocal neurons learn by repetition and correlation. When a neuron sees a pattern it tries to repeat it. They probably ran the simulator under different conditions. While giving input to the neurons they forced the output signals. (with simple voltages) The neurons learned these output signals. Afterwards, they just had to give the inputs signals and the neural net would automatically give the output signals it got used to.
basically the net learns an unlinear function or the inputs. outputi = fi(input1,input2,input3,input4...) and these are all voltage pulses (caused by chemical reactions and input signal from the computer)in the neural net.
"I don't think it's fair to hide behind his identity as a comic"
I think it is totally fair. Either CNN should stop to prioritize entertainment value over journalistic integrity or it should admit that their shows are not more serious or reasonable than say... a fake news show on a comedy channel.
It is no coincidence that a lot of people have started listening to The Daily Show instead of allegedly "real news". They don't listen to John Stewart because The Daily Show is a good source of news but rather because the sources that describe themselves as serious aren't. The Daily Show is as good as CNN but that's CNN's fault. Except that CNN is lying about it. That these news channels hide the fact that they only care for ratings and refuse to admit that journalistic integrity is not a concern for them (as long as they look good) is deception to the public. It is an outright lie. They have to either raise the integrity bar or admit that they are only there for entertainment not unlike a comedy oriented news show.
The legal system can't do anything about these kinds of lies and false advertisement because they are so hard to prove. I guess the only solution here would be publicly funded organisations.
Its usefull for all kinds of things. Robotics for example. Anything that has real time behaviour. Lets say you want to build your own segway that runs on Linux, you will need the motors of the segways to react immediately to inputs from sensors and user otherwise you risk crashing. I have worked on robotics projects where we where controling a robots arm with a PC. The fact that it wasn't real time was a real anoyance. We couldn't garanty that the robot would be able to hit a moving ball for example. I once wrote a program that generated music in real time from input from a sensor array. Again the fact that the PC wasn't real time was an anoyance. You could never implement a keyboard with a PC that doesn't have at least near real time characteristics. Otherwise you would get audible delays.
Actually in Canada, cigarettes packs are required to have picture-based health warnings
on cigarette packs that depict the devastating effects of tobacco. One of the picture is a lung tumor. This colorfull warning takes about a quarter of the pack. One of these picure appear on every pack.
OK but saying "I don't believe god exists" instead of saying "I don't believe god exists more than I believe those pink flying elephants exist" is just pragmatics. If I say humans have two legs and two arms it can be considered true winthin context even if amputees exists. You can always find an exeptional case. (And yes my always has exeptions)
Similar thing happended to my mother once. The gaz pedal got stuck. She could use the break to slow down a little but as soon as she stoped using them the car would accelerate back. Putting it on neutral only reved the engine _really_ high. After 30 minutes she tought about shutting down the engine. (normal car with key) It happened to me too with the same car but I just put my foot behind the pedal and pull. I guess I should have warned her that my car occasionaly did that. (old VW Jetta)
What I mean is that you probably didn't work 5 times harder or had 5 times the skills than the guy who earns 200 000 a year. You probably just found a good market or had good contacts. Basicely just luck.
Im not saying you shouldn't be able to keep a good share of the 800 000 more you earn. We do need financial incentive and economical motivators to make people more productive in society. Just that it is logical that the rich be taxed more.
Social services have been shown to increase the flow of money because people in good health are more productive. There are all kinds of psychological and physical advantages to having these programs. Why do you think that even the most money driven corporations usually force their employees at taking a huge part of their salary in benefices? It is because they know those healthy employees are productive employees. If the government provided a greater part of these things to its citizens it would increase productivity and quality of life in general. You have to increase taxes so that it is viable but the tax increase to corporations isn't as high as it looks. It won't drive companies away because they also save a lot. They don't need to provide as much benefices to their employees since the government provides it instead. The companies benefit from workers that have profited from social services all their life and are therefore more qualified, more psychologically balanced and are able to compete better in the global economy. Therefore, the number of jobs increases, specially the good ones that need higher education and that have good pay.
True, there are cheaters in the system. And there are probably lots of them. But I believe you should not go out of your way to punish them, that's just punishing yourself. You should try to do everything you can that dissuade the cheating by tailoring the system so that it is not advantageous to cheat, but only if it doesn't impair your lifestyle to do so. Cutting social services impairs your lifestyle and raises the cost of living. I know humans have an instinct against freeloaders, there's a bell that rings in our head at the thought of the possibility of being exploited. Basic instincts can help us lots of times, but we have the advantage over animals that we are intellectual beings. Don't let that basic instinct get to you when your intellect can tell you that you are better off if you just ignore the freeloaders sometimes. Be proud of your legacy to society and to America. Don't be scared it will just benefit the freeloaders. Be glad that you made a better place to live for the other hard workers which are doing the same for you. Yes if you look at it directly I can see how it can seem to benefit mostly others, but it is as much for your benefit, the benefit of the economy and of corporations. You have to look at the big picture. It will be very beneficial for you that everyone around you is competent and sane. There are high costs associated with the opposite situation. You're right taking your hard earned money and forcing you to give it to others for no reason is bad. But this is for your benefit. It also acts as a kind of insurance to you. If ever you or a member of your family gets really sick or you loose your house and everything you own in a disaster, you will have government help to fall on.
I firmly believe capitalism (or profit maximization) is the only way for countries to work well. It is a form of economic survival of the fittest where the better, easier, cheaper alternative is the one that thrives. It is the most natural way to efficient life. But I still think you have to be intelligent about it and not view only the direct obvious causality link (my money goes to the poor), but the big picture where the sum of all direct and indirect advantages are accounted for.
One argument towards taxing the rich is that, you can rarely "hard work" your way into making a salary of $1000000 a year. If you do make that salary it's probably that you inherited money, you manipulated the market (possibly illegally), or you were just plain lucky (you put your money at the right place at the right time). You may have worked hard. But the hard work usually doesn't account for that high a salary. I think people who have acquired their wealth through, manipulation, luck, or inheritance, should be the first ones to be taxed a lot because they haven't worked for their money.
Also assuming we keep the incentive to be productive constant, there is a fixed amou
You're trolling right? You do realise that the earth is not a closed system and that it will take billions of years before the entropy of the universe gets too high. Stopping oil consumption will not make a significant difference in the entropy of the earth. The sun inputs much more energy in the earth atmosphere than the burning of fossil fuels. The greehouse gases are the problem here.
Thats true. It is an underestimated problem. People assume that we can recognise a word by using just the sound of it. That is simply not true. When speaking at a reasonable speed humans do not utter words clearly. This is not a problem to us because we can guess the words by using context and semantics.
In order to have a good speech recognition system, the computer would have to actually understand the meaning of the sentences and put it in context. There are different levels of analysis necessary to do this. The system has to analyse sound, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Each level contains ambiguity but when two levels are combined together some ambiguity is resolved and you get another piece of the puzzle. When everything is combined the ambiguous parts all converge towards the right meaning, the right syntax, the right morphology and in the case of speech to text, the right choice of word and spelling.
Now to do all that you ideally need sophisticated knowledge representation based on cognitive science and the way we think. Although, there exists tricks and shortcuts that can mimic the important parts of the cognitive system, there isn't any complete system that integrate everything well.
Anyways if you want a summary of the field read the textbook: "SPEECH AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING" from Daniel Jurafsky & James H. Martin
And search on google for "computational linguistics" "word grammar" "open mind common sense" "cyc" "Ray Jackendoff"
SheetRock, Where did you take your writing style BTW??? I had to dig trough a bunch of scientific articles to get good examples to write that bullshit.
Before believing our word, consider using Google to search for "chopstick history". You will discover evidence that leads to the predominant view that chopsticks were in fact invented in China about five thousands years ago.
Having briefly discussed the reliability of the author's facts, let us also comment on matters with regard to the style of the text. There is a natural objection to individuals using grammatical form rather than substance in an attempt to manipulate the reader in perceiving his word as judicious.
Such a view seems to have compelled us to verify the essence of the passage and infer a meagre value of content. Upon such information we reckon that it is in fact predominantly canine excrement.
YADIYADAYADIYADA...
yeah really I can't believe that none of the posts complaining about sexism didn't notice that the text implied women's arent (or maybe even shouldn't be) engineers.
I as a Canadian in the IT field hope the US regulates outsourcing. Because US companies will become less competitive. The Canadian companies will thrive. Jobs that would have been in the US will move to Canada and other countries. (Where we use outsourcing) That means more job for me. (Hey not all the jobs will be outsourced)
The US had too great a share of the IT world anyways. Go Kerry!
I as a canadian in the IT field hope that the US regulates outsourcing. Because the US companies won't be as competitive anymore, the canadian companies wich will be able to use outsourcing, will thrive. US companies will die. Jobs that would have been in the US will move here. That means more work for me. (Hey not all the employees will be outsourced)
It would be impractical the same way paying more for local labor is impracticle. I was not discussing wheter the US had the right to do it. They do have the right. But is it really advantagous??? Probably not more advantagous than forbiding the use of technology. Yes it would make more jobs, but it would make life harder for anyone.
So do you think we should stop companies from using new technology, computers, robotics, and other machines that replace workers? I mean, jobs are not just outsourced to other countries. They are outsourced to machines. Maybe we should go back to living on the farm and working the land by hand. There would be more equaly payed jobs for everyone.
This is very true. With all the very low cost open source software available I can now develop new commercial products on top of the free software that would be too costly to develop otherwise. This new or cheaper product can also fuel the development of yet even more new and cheaper products all while creating new jobs. The free software becomes a resource that is ready to be exploited. It is the same but to a lesser extent with outsourcing. Since the cost of outsourced software goes down it opens a whole new field of commercial possibilities, thus fuelling the economy.
However there are some issues. First there is the issue of greediness on the national level. This comes with the advent of globalisation and the internet. The internet makes things like open source software and outsourcing an international thing. There is no way to exploit these so that it benefits mostly the US. Now since the US usually relies on having an economical advantage it doesn't view a technology that makes every country more equal as a good thing. The US resistance against the internet (and globalisation) is somewhat understandable.
Second there is an issue in distribution of wealth. This is an issue that affects any really profitable resource. US companies have been leaders in information technology and have concentrated a lot of wealth in a few rich people. (e.g. B. Gates) Now, Gates is a bad example for me because he seems to have been a good citizen and redistributed his money himself under his foundation. But most concentration of money like that leads to corruption. Look at the petroleum industry (the Saudi's, Iraq) and the diamond industry. These are sources of easy money that tend to not distribute very well to the people. These industries end up being full of corruption unless they are regulated by a government (that isn't too corrupted itself). The US courts have said that even Microsoft was operating outside the law regarding competition. I believe it is important that governments keep an eye on concentration of money as it often leads to corruption and human exploitation.
When you see someone making two million dollar per year salary, common sense tells you that this is bad distribution. He most likely hasn't worked 10 times as much as someone who makes two hundred thousands every year. He probably isn't 10 times smarter or ten times more educated. He probably just had a lot of luck. Now the distribution should be (to a certain degree) corrected by the government trough taxes. Again we have to take into account competition between countries to keep the rich there (don't want rich people leaving to a lesser taxed region).
Okay, but as long as your measurment has some significant corelation with what you are trying to predict, it brings you information and it is usefull. Not to say that there can't be a better measurment but it could be too costly or you just havent discovered it yet.
The reason you can't measure the quality of Beethoven's Fifth is because it is so hard to define the concept of musical quality. You could always rate music according to a definition that you made. Consider something like:"I make a random group of people rate music on a scale of 1 to 10 and I define the quality of music by the score it gets." You could make a group of people rate some music and analyse what parameters, (Amount of harmony, complexity, randomness, tonal range, anything else you can think of..., etc, etc...) are correlated with the ratings. Then you could try to predict weather a piece of music is good by applying your model on it. Probabilisticly, if you have a large enough sample, your model would predict better than a random flip of a coin to rate music. Therefore, your model would be usefull. Your model wouldn't always get it right. That is unless you accounted for all the possible variables that make music good and all the interactions between the variables. But you would still have usefull information.
Exactly, most of what people do is pointless anyways when you look at it from the right angle. Sports is a good example. Most sports involve putting some randomly defined object in some randomly defined locations, removing it, then, trying to do it all over again. Sounds pointless doesn't it?
What do you mean by stability. Isn't stability lack of growth? Microsoft used to be able to spend all its extra cash on growing its value, now it has accumulated much cash because it can't find good ways to spend the money to grow efficiently like it used to be able to. I'm not saying MS is going to go bankrupt. I'm just saying MS seems to realize it has reached the top and it can't go much higher anymore it can only stay even or go down.(with enough competition) MS realises its time to share the profit, make a steady flow of income to the shareholders. It realizes that spending the money is a waste unlike in the past when their value could go up in the result of their spending. It realizes its P/E ratio is going to go down soon to a more reasonable stable level. And I think I am justified in thinking that this might be a sign that they are starting to be over the hill.
I think this means microsoft has realized it doesn't have much place to grow anymore. In fact it might have realized that its going to lose market in the future and its time to cash out before the money is wasted in failed attempts to gain or keep market. In a way, this is microsoft bowing down to its competition (open source maybe??)
No its a one cylinder four cycle lawn mower engine. I've participated at this competition. These cars are usally made of a bunch of bicycle parts put togeter combined with the (possibly modified) lawnmower engine. Bicycle wheels are pretty efficient so everyone use the following tactic: accellerate for 20-30 seconds until you reach 55-60 km/hour then coast until your speed drops to 30 then accelarate again. It helps to have low air drag.
I just looked at the scientific article and the average date for all its reference is: 1969. Wich shows that this is old news. The reference list contains a reference to a MIDI manual(!). And the author refers to Jackendoff as Jackendorf. This is not a typo its at multiple places in the article. The guy must not have read Jackendoff and probably just added him to get credebility.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I took a course about artificial neural net (not the biological ones like here). But we learn that biologocal neurons learn by repetition and correlation. When a neuron sees a pattern it tries to repeat it. They probably ran the simulator under different conditions. While giving input to the neurons they forced the output signals. (with simple voltages) The neurons learned these output signals. Afterwards, they just had to give the inputs signals and the neural net would automatically give the output signals it got used to.
...) and these are all voltage pulses (caused by chemical reactions and input signal from the computer)in the neural net.
basically the net learns an unlinear function or the inputs. outputi = fi(input1,input2,input3,input4
"I don't think it's fair to hide behind his identity as a comic"
... a fake news show on a comedy channel.
I think it is totally fair. Either CNN should stop to prioritize entertainment value over journalistic integrity or it should admit that their shows are not more serious or reasonable than say
It is no coincidence that a lot of people have started listening to The Daily Show instead of allegedly "real news". They don't listen to John Stewart because The Daily Show is a good source of news but rather because the sources that describe themselves as serious aren't. The Daily Show is as good as CNN but that's CNN's fault. Except that CNN is lying about it. That these news channels hide the fact that they only care for ratings and refuse to admit that journalistic integrity is not a concern for them (as long as they look good) is deception to the public. It is an outright lie. They have to either raise the integrity bar or admit that they are only there for entertainment not unlike a comedy oriented news show.
The legal system can't do anything about these kinds of lies and false advertisement because they are so hard to prove. I guess the only solution here would be publicly funded organisations.
Its usefull for all kinds of things. Robotics for example. Anything that has real time behaviour. Lets say you want to build your own segway that runs on Linux, you will need the motors of the segways to react immediately to inputs from sensors and user otherwise you risk crashing. I have worked on robotics projects where we where controling a robots arm with a PC. The fact that it wasn't real time was a real anoyance. We couldn't garanty that the robot would be able to hit a moving ball for example. I once wrote a program that generated music in real time from input from a sensor array. Again the fact that the PC wasn't real time was an anoyance. You could never implement a keyboard with a PC that doesn't have at least near real time characteristics. Otherwise you would get audible delays.
Actually in Canada, cigarettes packs are required to have picture-based health warnings on cigarette packs that depict the devastating effects of tobacco. One of the picture is a lung tumor. This colorfull warning takes about a quarter of the pack. One of these picure appear on every pack.
OK but saying "I don't believe god exists" instead of saying "I don't believe god exists more than I believe those pink flying elephants exist" is just pragmatics. If I say humans have two legs and two arms it can be considered true winthin context even if amputees exists. You can always find an exeptional case. (And yes my always has exeptions)
Similar thing happended to my mother once. The gaz pedal got stuck. She could use the break to slow down a little but as soon as she stoped using them the car would accelerate back. Putting it on neutral only reved the engine _really_ high. After 30 minutes she tought about shutting down the engine. (normal car with key) It happened to me too with the same car but I just put my foot behind the pedal and pull. I guess I should have warned her that my car occasionaly did that. (old VW Jetta)
What I mean is that you probably didn't work 5 times harder or had 5 times the skills than the guy who earns 200 000 a year. You probably just found a good market or had good contacts. Basicely just luck.
Im not saying you shouldn't be able to keep a good share of the 800 000 more you earn. We do need financial incentive and economical motivators to make people more productive in society. Just that it is logical that the rich be taxed more.
Social services have been shown to increase the flow of money because people in good health are more productive. There are all kinds of psychological and physical advantages to having these programs. Why do you think that even the most money driven corporations usually force their employees at taking a huge part of their salary in benefices? It is because they know those healthy employees are productive employees. If the government provided a greater part of these things to its citizens it would increase productivity and quality of life in general. You have to increase taxes so that it is viable but the tax increase to corporations isn't as high as it looks. It won't drive companies away because they also save a lot. They don't need to provide as much benefices to their employees since the government provides it instead. The companies benefit from workers that have profited from social services all their life and are therefore more qualified, more psychologically balanced and are able to compete better in the global economy. Therefore, the number of jobs increases, specially the good ones that need higher education and that have good pay.
True, there are cheaters in the system. And there are probably lots of them. But I believe you should not go out of your way to punish them, that's just punishing yourself. You should try to do everything you can that dissuade the cheating by tailoring the system so that it is not advantageous to cheat, but only if it doesn't impair your lifestyle to do so. Cutting social services impairs your lifestyle and raises the cost of living. I know humans have an instinct against freeloaders, there's a bell that rings in our head at the thought of the possibility of being exploited. Basic instincts can help us lots of times, but we have the advantage over animals that we are intellectual beings. Don't let that basic instinct get to you when your intellect can tell you that you are better off if you just ignore the freeloaders sometimes. Be proud of your legacy to society and to America. Don't be scared it will just benefit the freeloaders. Be glad that you made a better place to live for the other hard workers which are doing the same for you. Yes if you look at it directly I can see how it can seem to benefit mostly others, but it is as much for your benefit, the benefit of the economy and of corporations. You have to look at the big picture. It will be very beneficial for you that everyone around you is competent and sane. There are high costs associated with the opposite situation. You're right taking your hard earned money and forcing you to give it to others for no reason is bad. But this is for your benefit. It also acts as a kind of insurance to you. If ever you or a member of your family gets really sick or you loose your house and everything you own in a disaster, you will have government help to fall on.
I firmly believe capitalism (or profit maximization) is the only way for countries to work well. It is a form of economic survival of the fittest where the better, easier, cheaper alternative is the one that thrives. It is the most natural way to efficient life. But I still think you have to be intelligent about it and not view only the direct obvious causality link (my money goes to the poor), but the big picture where the sum of all direct and indirect advantages are accounted for.
One argument towards taxing the rich is that, you can rarely "hard work" your way into making a salary of $1000000 a year. If you do make that salary it's probably that you inherited money, you manipulated the market (possibly illegally), or you were just plain lucky (you put your money at the right place at the right time). You may have worked hard. But the hard work usually doesn't account for that high a salary. I think people who have acquired their wealth through, manipulation, luck, or inheritance, should be the first ones to be taxed a lot because they haven't worked for their money.
Also assuming we keep the incentive to be productive constant, there is a fixed amou
You're trolling right? You do realise that the earth is not a closed system and that it will take billions of years before the entropy of the universe gets too high. Stopping oil consumption will not make a significant difference in the entropy of the earth. The sun inputs much more energy in the earth atmosphere than the burning of fossil fuels. The greehouse gases are the problem here.
Its a new way of doing something that has been done well since forever but now in XML. So that means it is better and will change the world.
Thats true. It is an underestimated problem. People assume that we can recognise a word by using just the sound of it. That is simply not true. When speaking at a reasonable speed humans do not utter words clearly. This is not a problem to us because we can guess the words by using context and semantics.
In order to have a good speech recognition system, the computer would have to actually understand the meaning of the sentences and put it in context. There are different levels of analysis necessary to do this. The system has to analyse sound, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Each level contains ambiguity but when two levels are combined together some ambiguity is resolved and you get another piece of the puzzle. When everything is combined the ambiguous parts all converge towards the right meaning, the right syntax, the right morphology and in the case of speech to text, the right choice of word and spelling.
Now to do all that you ideally need sophisticated knowledge representation based on cognitive science and the way we think. Although, there exists tricks and shortcuts that can mimic the important parts of the cognitive system, there isn't any complete system that integrate everything well.
Anyways if you want a summary of the field read the textbook: "SPEECH AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING" from Daniel Jurafsky & James H. Martin
And search on google for "computational linguistics" "word grammar" "open mind common sense" "cyc" "Ray Jackendoff"
SheetRock, Where did you take your writing style BTW??? I had to dig trough a bunch of scientific articles to get good examples to write that bullshit.
I agree. Totally.
Before believing our word, consider using Google to search for "chopstick history". You will discover evidence that leads to the predominant view that chopsticks were in fact invented in China about five thousands years ago.
Having briefly discussed the reliability of the author's facts, let us also comment on matters with regard to the style of the text. There is a natural objection to individuals using grammatical form rather than substance in an attempt to manipulate the reader in perceiving his word as judicious.
Such a view seems to have compelled us to verify the essence of the passage and infer a meagre value of content. Upon such information we reckon that it is in fact predominantly canine excrement.
YADIYADAYADIYADA...
yeah really I can't believe that none of the posts complaining about sexism didn't notice that the text implied women's arent (or maybe even shouldn't be) engineers.
I as a Canadian in the IT field hope the US regulates outsourcing. Because US companies will become less competitive. The Canadian companies will thrive. Jobs that would have been in the US will move to Canada and other countries. (Where we use outsourcing) That means more job for me. (Hey not all the jobs will be outsourced)
The US had too great a share of the IT world anyways. Go Kerry!
I as a canadian in the IT field hope that the US regulates outsourcing. Because the US companies won't be as competitive anymore, the canadian companies wich will be able to use outsourcing, will thrive. US companies will die. Jobs that would have been in the US will move here. That means more work for me. (Hey not all the employees will be outsourced)
It would be impractical the same way paying more for local labor is impracticle. I was not discussing wheter the US had the right to do it. They do have the right. But is it really advantagous??? Probably not more advantagous than forbiding the use of technology. Yes it would make more jobs, but it would make life harder for anyone.
So do you think we should stop companies from using new technology, computers, robotics, and other machines that replace workers? I mean, jobs are not just outsourced to other countries. They are outsourced to machines. Maybe we should go back to living on the farm and working the land by hand. There would be more equaly payed jobs for everyone.
This is very true. With all the very low cost open source software available I can now develop new commercial products on top of the free software that would be too costly to develop otherwise. This new or cheaper product can also fuel the development of yet even more new and cheaper products all while creating new jobs. The free software becomes a resource that is ready to be exploited. It is the same but to a lesser extent with outsourcing. Since the cost of outsourced software goes down it opens a whole new field of commercial possibilities, thus fuelling the economy.
However there are some issues. First there is the issue of greediness on the national level. This comes with the advent of globalisation and the internet. The internet makes things like open source software and outsourcing an international thing. There is no way to exploit these so that it benefits mostly the US. Now since the US usually relies on having an economical advantage it doesn't view a technology that makes every country more equal as a good thing. The US resistance against the internet (and globalisation) is somewhat understandable.
Second there is an issue in distribution of wealth. This is an issue that affects any really profitable resource. US companies have been leaders in information technology and have concentrated a lot of wealth in a few rich people. (e.g. B. Gates) Now, Gates is a bad example for me because he seems to have been a good citizen and redistributed his money himself under his foundation. But most concentration of money like that leads to corruption. Look at the petroleum industry (the Saudi's, Iraq) and the diamond industry. These are sources of easy money that tend to not distribute very well to the people. These industries end up being full of corruption unless they are regulated by a government (that isn't too corrupted itself). The US courts have said that even Microsoft was operating outside the law regarding competition. I believe it is important that governments keep an eye on concentration of money as it often leads to corruption and human exploitation.
When you see someone making two million dollar per year salary, common sense tells you that this is bad distribution. He most likely hasn't worked 10 times as much as someone who makes two hundred thousands every year. He probably isn't 10 times smarter or ten times more educated. He probably just had a lot of luck. Now the distribution should be (to a certain degree) corrected by the government trough taxes. Again we have to take into account competition between countries to keep the rich there (don't want rich people leaving to a lesser taxed region).
Okay, but as long as your measurment has some significant corelation with what you are trying to predict, it brings you information and it is usefull. Not to say that there can't be a better measurment but it could be too costly or you just havent discovered it yet.
The reason you can't measure the quality of Beethoven's Fifth is because it is so hard to define the concept of musical quality. You could always rate music according to a definition that you made. Consider something like:"I make a random group of people rate music on a scale of 1 to 10 and I define the quality of music by the score it gets." You could make a group of people rate some music and analyse what parameters, (Amount of harmony, complexity, randomness, tonal range, anything else you can think of..., etc, etc...) are correlated with the ratings. Then you could try to predict weather a piece of music is good by applying your model on it. Probabilisticly, if you have a large enough sample, your model would predict better than a random flip of a coin to rate music. Therefore, your model would be usefull. Your model wouldn't always get it right. That is unless you accounted for all the possible variables that make music good and all the interactions between the variables. But you would still have usefull information.
Exactly, most of what people do is pointless anyways when you look at it from the right angle. Sports is a good example. Most sports involve putting some randomly defined object in some randomly defined locations, removing it, then, trying to do it all over again. Sounds pointless doesn't it?
What do you mean by stability. Isn't stability lack of growth? Microsoft used to be able to spend all its extra cash on growing its value, now it has accumulated much cash because it can't find good ways to spend the money to grow efficiently like it used to be able to. I'm not saying MS is going to go bankrupt. I'm just saying MS seems to realize it has reached the top and it can't go much higher anymore it can only stay even or go down.(with enough competition) MS realises its time to share the profit, make a steady flow of income to the shareholders. It realizes that spending the money is a waste unlike in the past when their value could go up in the result of their spending. It realizes its P/E ratio is going to go down soon to a more reasonable stable level. And I think I am justified in thinking that this might be a sign that they are starting to be over the hill.
I think this means microsoft has realized it doesn't have much place to grow anymore. In fact it might have realized that its going to lose market in the future and its time to cash out before the money is wasted in failed attempts to gain or keep market. In a way, this is microsoft bowing down to its competition (open source maybe??)
Just an idea.
No its a one cylinder four cycle lawn mower engine. I've participated at this competition. These cars are usally made of a bunch of bicycle parts put togeter combined with the (possibly modified) lawnmower engine. Bicycle wheels are pretty efficient so everyone use the following tactic: accellerate for 20-30 seconds until you reach 55-60 km/hour then coast until your speed drops to 30 then accelarate again. It helps to have low air drag.
I just looked at the scientific article and the average date for all its reference is: 1969. Wich shows that this is old news. The reference list contains a reference to a MIDI manual(!). And the author refers to Jackendoff as Jackendorf. This is not a typo its at multiple places in the article. The guy must not have read Jackendoff and probably just added him to get credebility.