Monsanto more or less single-handedly gave bio-engineering (in the widest sense, including genetic engineering / modification, molecular biology, agro sience) a bad name (they and the possibility to patent genes, I think). As a former bio-chemistry undergrad I'm far from a techno-phobe, I know where genetic engineering is used, what it can do (producing human insuline for example). But I know, the way Monsanto does / did genetic engineering, it brings farmer into their dependency. It's a total vendor lock-in.
As a German, I'm greatly dissappointed, Bayer bought into this totally evil brand (no, no quotes to make that adjective softer). Removing the old name will not help, the portfolio (and the methods) remain the same.
The idea of rejuvenating the airship business isn't exactly new. In 1996 company Cargolifter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter) was founded with exactly the same idea: built large airships for cargo delivery, preferably to remote locations with no other means of transportation. It didn't work out. Lack of interest and orders forced Cargolifter to go into banktruptcy in 2002. Only their humungous hangar survived and is now refurbished as tourist attraction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort).
Maybe our favorite internet billionaire has more luck, but I doubt it.
This project has ambitious goals: integrated database for all things neuroscience, testbed and virtual lab for neuron simulation, brain-inspired new hardware ("neuromorphic computing", possible required to achieve the exascale hardware to create the simulation), new insight into neurological diseases and finally the simulation of a human brain and therefore the human mind.
Even if it achieves only 1/3 of its goals it would be already a success. This project has its share of naysayers and distractors though, who all know beforehand it won't work. I think, the majority of them are other neuroscientist who fear, they won't get any funding in the future.
If it works however, it will provide major scientific breakthroughs. I'm all for it. One fear is laughable: that this will become something like an all-seeing, all-knowing skynet. If at all, it will just simulate an average human brain with all its weaknessess and irrationalities. The FutureICT project (didn't win) deems me much more dangerous in this regard. It was planned as a simulation of all human activity on a global scale.
A recent study of the "Freie Universität Berlin" of trends in US charts suggests, that pop songs got slower over the last 50 years and use more minor chords. Doesn't mean that society got sadder, the study explains, it only shows that we listen to more ambivalent stuff and are able to enjoy even sad emotions.
When I was a kid 30 years ago, Edison was still the undisputed old god of engineering. It only was later, that he became villified as the suppressor of Tesla and AC. I think, it has todo with Edison's viewpoint towards intellectual property. He and his colleagues at Menlo Park invented mainly and did not produce anything, so he relied on patent fees. He procescuted anyone who produced stuff that violtated one of his many patents including early movie technology. This forced movie people from the east coast to the west. The rest is history.
Tesla was clearly the far better, more visionary scientist. Edison remains the more important inventor and engineer (lightbulb, phonograph, movie technology).
The arm itself was developed by the robotics and mechatronics department of German Aerospace Center (DLR) as explained by this article. The extremtech article fails to mention that.
When I was studying chemistry (I'm a software consultant now for 10+ years), there was a special "poison cabinet" in our University library containing "dangerous books". One of them was a book from GDR (former German Democratic Republic, a.k.a East Germany) containing recipes for warface agents, bombs and guerilla warfare. The book wasn't freely available to everyone (you were asked why you wanted to know all that stuff), but it was available. No one was asked afterwards by the police for renting it or BS like that.
I wonder if this has changed after 9/11 ?!?
What the article fails to mention is what exactly the difference is between the arcs created by (smaller) tesla coils now and natural lightning. Is it that natural lightning needs lower voltage to travel longer distances through air than teslas? This would explain, why they need to built giant tesla coils in the first place.
not a physicist here, but i think it is a pretty big difference, whether you treat something as a real physical object, whose existence and relationship with everything else you can and must explore or simply as a mathematical convenience to label it as an object without really believing it is one for the sake of simplifying calculations.
i think this has happend with electro-magnetic fields.
This would be a reason to drop Skype. I know many people, who don't use Skype because their protocol isn't open, they are not opensource or not SIP based. No reasons for me not to use it, it just works very well, even on Linux.
But being forced to open a FB account? Do not want... I abhorr FB and it's poor privacy policies and conduct.
There are some theories out there, which explain things like the galaxy rotation problem, but none is so prominent as Modified Newtonian Dynamics. They do so without the need for Dark Matter. DM is still not a proven thing after all.
The problem with Dell is, that they were never big into R&D. Dells business consisted always of providing quality PCs with reasonable prices through direct (online) distribution. Not much invention here. It doesn't surprise me, that they lack the vision to invent something (r)evolutionary to differentiate them from competitors. IBM (Lenovo), HP, Apple, Asus, they all tried to diversify lately.
I cannot search for text with the Firefox' find dialog. But they say, that their documents are now fully part of the HTML infrastructure, so they should be searchable, no? Try their self-introduction for HTML 5 and see, whether you can search for "Highlight me!", which is in the middle of the document.
I guess, I'm not very social, I kept my MySpace site for only some month. I'm in keeping my mostly inactive LinkedIn account alive strictly for business networking.
But even I have to chat, when email is overhead or not possible! I knew instant messaging back at univeristy since 1994 by virtue of IRC and the chat facility of ICS (internet chess, does it still exist btw?). I think joined ICQ somewhere in 1998 or 1999 because "everyone did it", but had not much use for it. The ICQ client then was quite decent.
In 2000 I found work at a software company as a consultant. Two years later, a colleague suggested using IM for fast communication within the company and our development partners. I installed IM again and was shocked that it had turned into an unusable mess of bloatware so quickly. It rivalled the Realplayer, which was quite a feat! My colleague said, I should install Miranda. I realized, that IM clients can be substituted as long as the protocol is implemented and the network allows it (AIM vs Trillian, anyone?).
I later used Miranda to also connect to AIM, Yahoo!Messenger and - urgh! - MSN Messenger. Nowadays I use Skype to chat, never used GTalk despite being an early user of GMail, so no experience with XMPP protocol and clients.
As the article says, you can be a valuable developer without being exposed to or needing much math but you will be confined to certain areas. Normal developer work is mostly applied mathematical logic, but advanced math is normally not needed.
I think I belong to this group. I'm a chemist turned programmer/consultant and I now mostly work as a consultant for a company providing UML tools. I had my fair share of advanced math in school and during my chemistry studies, but those courses don't compare in any way to the math lectures provided in computer science. This were (introductory) courses in linear algebra and analysis and they were "pure math". Hard proofs and all instead of calculating or solving equations.
I'm nevertheless thankful for these lessons. They taught me consistent and recursive thinking as much or more so as real programming did.
I used to print out HUGE amounts of paper for reference manuals, emails, technical documentation, meeting notes and proceedings etc., etc. Not so anyymore. I do not exactly know why, but somehow I'm now totally content with reading things on the screen. Probably has to do with wider screens or better tools for annotation and sharing. Or my job has somewhat changed and the need of having several pages side by side has dimished. I honestly do not know.
Did not read TFA, but some years ago there was astory about the smallest possible ELF program, which sounded very similar or the same as the summary of TFA: a tiny program, that doesn't output anything, but doesn't need any libraries either nor does make any sxstem calls. So, it's probably a dupe!
Wired recently had this article on Google's search algorithm, which mentioned how far ahead it was in parsing language for things like bi-grams to figure out what the meaning of the search was by "figuring out" the relationships between related words in a very human-like way. They have also built an impressive synonym system. These technologies, developed for search, strike me as really critical for good translation.
OK, so they introduced contextual knowledge (or "world knowledge" or "semantics" if you will) when they saw, that page rank and keyword based search didn't cut it for many search queries? Shouldn't that have come not as an afterthought but long before? I mean, how can anyone expect, that search would never involve some contextual knowledge to be succesful?
My guess is, that Google of course knows this. What they do is to build up contextual knowledge through their own search engine, how people relate words to each other and not by imposing a predefined rule set or ontolgy beforehand like cyc
Sorry, but that means exactly the opposite to me: Google Translation very well understood, that one sentence on every page is in a different language and "reversed" that sentence as well. Wouldn't have been possible, if Google Translate would "understand" exactly nothing about language.
Your statements are wrong on so many levels, that it's hard to even begin with. First, if someone says "X is a mere Y" or "X is nothing more than a clever combination of Ys" than you should be very cautious of this reductionism. Of course humans are biological machines, but we are also much more than that. It shouldn't be too hard to grasp, that knowledge and culture and language brings a whole new quality to this whole realm of biological machines. We really stand somewhat outside of normal evolution.
And you also describe the work of geniuses as mix of well known things, only . Music for example is based on rules, patterns and it can be expressed or represented in mathematical algorithms. But what composers do is much more. They have musical ideas, they reflect on them, they have a story. And they mix their ideas in unexpected ways (you can analyze this after the fact, but you cannot guess them beforehand). The whole is really more than the sum of it's parts, we need an holistic approach, not a reductionist one
It doesn't surprise me that this example of reductionism is not only accepted, but also lauded here in/. No one likes the unexplainable, unexpected genius, only "hard work" is accepted. And only here can truly soulless music can be appreciated because "the concept of a soul is imaginary anyway". You dehumanized yourself here.
Slashdot Mirror
Monsanto more or less single-handedly gave bio-engineering (in the widest sense, including genetic engineering / modification, molecular biology, agro sience) a bad name (they and the possibility to patent genes, I think). As a former bio-chemistry undergrad I'm far from a techno-phobe, I know where genetic engineering is used, what it can do (producing human insuline for example). But I know, the way Monsanto does / did genetic engineering, it brings farmer into their dependency. It's a total vendor lock-in.
As a German, I'm greatly dissappointed, Bayer bought into this totally evil brand (no, no quotes to make that adjective softer). Removing the old name will not help, the portfolio (and the methods) remain the same.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The idea of rejuvenating the airship business isn't exactly new. In 1996 company Cargolifter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter) was founded with exactly the same idea: built large airships for cargo delivery, preferably to remote locations with no other means of transportation. It didn't work out. Lack of interest and orders forced Cargolifter to go into banktruptcy in 2002. Only their humungous hangar survived and is now refurbished as tourist attraction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort).
Maybe our favorite internet billionaire has more luck, but I doubt it.
A 3D printer is certainly good for prototyping. For actually production? Not so much.
This project has ambitious goals: integrated database for all things neuroscience, testbed and virtual lab for neuron simulation, brain-inspired new hardware ("neuromorphic computing", possible required to achieve the exascale hardware to create the simulation), new insight into neurological diseases and finally the simulation of a human brain and therefore the human mind.
Even if it achieves only 1/3 of its goals it would be already a success. This project has its share of naysayers and distractors though, who all know beforehand it won't work. I think, the majority of them are other neuroscientist who fear, they won't get any funding in the future.
If it works however, it will provide major scientific breakthroughs. I'm all for it. One fear is laughable: that this will become something like an all-seeing, all-knowing skynet. If at all, it will just simulate an average human brain with all its weaknessess and irrationalities. The FutureICT project (didn't win) deems me much more dangerous in this regard. It was planned as a simulation of all human activity on a global scale.
A recent study of the "Freie Universität Berlin" of trends in US charts suggests, that pop songs got slower over the last 50 years and use more minor chords. Doesn't mean that society got sadder, the study explains, it only shows that we listen to more ambivalent stuff and are able to enjoy even sad emotions.
When I was a kid 30 years ago, Edison was still the undisputed old god of engineering. It only was later, that he became villified as the suppressor of Tesla and AC. I think, it has todo with Edison's viewpoint towards intellectual property. He and his colleagues at Menlo Park invented mainly and did not produce anything, so he relied on patent fees. He procescuted anyone who produced stuff that violtated one of his many patents including early movie technology. This forced movie people from the east coast to the west. The rest is history. Tesla was clearly the far better, more visionary scientist. Edison remains the more important inventor and engineer (lightbulb, phonograph, movie technology).
The arm itself was developed by the robotics and mechatronics department of German Aerospace Center (DLR) as explained by this article. The extremtech article fails to mention that.
When I was studying chemistry (I'm a software consultant now for 10+ years), there was a special "poison cabinet" in our University library containing "dangerous books". One of them was a book from GDR (former German Democratic Republic, a.k.a East Germany) containing recipes for warface agents, bombs and guerilla warfare. The book wasn't freely available to everyone (you were asked why you wanted to know all that stuff), but it was available. No one was asked afterwards by the police for renting it or BS like that. I wonder if this has changed after 9/11 ?!?
What the article fails to mention is what exactly the difference is between the arcs created by (smaller) tesla coils now and natural lightning. Is it that natural lightning needs lower voltage to travel longer distances through air than teslas? This would explain, why they need to built giant tesla coils in the first place.
not a physicist here, but i think it is a pretty big difference, whether you treat something as a real physical object, whose existence and relationship with everything else you can and must explore or simply as a mathematical convenience to label it as an object without really believing it is one for the sake of simplifying calculations.
i think this has happend with electro-magnetic fields.
This will only lead to better impersonations skills
This would be a reason to drop Skype. I know many people, who don't use Skype because their protocol isn't open, they are not opensource or not SIP based. No reasons for me not to use it, it just works very well, even on Linux. But being forced to open a FB account? Do not want... I abhorr FB and it's poor privacy policies and conduct.
There are some theories out there, which explain things like the galaxy rotation problem, but none is so prominent as Modified Newtonian Dynamics. They do so without the need for Dark Matter. DM is still not a proven thing after all.
What did YOU think, again?
The problem with Dell is, that they were never big into R&D. Dells business consisted always of providing quality PCs with reasonable prices through direct (online) distribution. Not much invention here. It doesn't surprise me, that they lack the vision to invent something (r)evolutionary to differentiate them from competitors. IBM (Lenovo), HP, Apple, Asus, they all tried to diversify lately.
"Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win."
Gary Lineker
I cannot search for text with the Firefox' find dialog. But they say, that their documents are now fully part of the HTML infrastructure, so they should be searchable, no? Try their self-introduction for HTML 5 and see, whether you can search for "Highlight me!", which is in the middle of the document.
Or I'm doing something wrong here?
I guess, I'm not very social, I kept my MySpace site for only some month. I'm in keeping my mostly inactive LinkedIn account alive strictly for business networking.
But even I have to chat, when email is overhead or not possible! I knew instant messaging back at univeristy since 1994 by virtue of IRC and the chat facility of ICS (internet chess, does it still exist btw?). I think joined ICQ somewhere in 1998 or 1999 because "everyone did it", but had not much use for it. The ICQ client then was quite decent.
In 2000 I found work at a software company as a consultant. Two years later, a colleague suggested using IM for fast communication within the company and our development partners. I installed IM again and was shocked that it had turned into an unusable mess of bloatware so quickly. It rivalled the Realplayer, which was quite a feat! My colleague said, I should install Miranda. I realized, that IM clients can be substituted as long as the protocol is implemented and the network allows it (AIM vs Trillian, anyone?).
I later used Miranda to also connect to AIM, Yahoo!Messenger and - urgh! - MSN Messenger. Nowadays I use Skype to chat, never used GTalk despite being an early user of GMail, so no experience with XMPP protocol and clients.
As the article says, you can be a valuable developer without being exposed to or needing much math but you will be confined to certain areas. Normal developer work is mostly applied mathematical logic, but advanced math is normally not needed.
I think I belong to this group. I'm a chemist turned programmer/consultant and I now mostly work as a consultant for a company providing UML tools. I had my fair share of advanced math in school and during my chemistry studies, but those courses don't compare in any way to the math lectures provided in computer science. This were (introductory) courses in linear algebra and analysis and they were "pure math". Hard proofs and all instead of calculating or solving equations.
I'm nevertheless thankful for these lessons. They taught me consistent and recursive thinking as much or more so as real programming did.
I used to print out HUGE amounts of paper for reference manuals, emails, technical documentation, meeting notes and proceedings etc., etc. Not so anyymore. I do not exactly know why, but somehow I'm now totally content with reading things on the screen. Probably has to do with wider screens or better tools for annotation and sharing. Or my job has somewhat changed and the need of having several pages side by side has dimished. I honestly do not know.
Did not read TFA, but some years ago there was astory about the smallest possible ELF program, which sounded very similar or the same as the summary of TFA: a tiny program, that doesn't output anything, but doesn't need any libraries either nor does make any sxstem calls. So, it's probably a dupe!
Wired recently had this article on Google's search algorithm, which mentioned how far ahead it was in parsing language for things like bi-grams to figure out what the meaning of the search was by "figuring out" the relationships between related words in a very human-like way. They have also built an impressive synonym system. These technologies, developed for search, strike me as really critical for good translation.
OK, so they introduced contextual knowledge (or "world knowledge" or "semantics" if you will) when they saw, that page rank and keyword based search didn't cut it for many search queries? Shouldn't that have come not as an afterthought but long before? I mean, how can anyone expect, that search would never involve some contextual knowledge to be succesful?
My guess is, that Google of course knows this. What they do is to build up contextual knowledge through their own search engine, how people relate words to each other and not by imposing a predefined rule set or ontolgy beforehand like cyc
.
Sorry, but that means exactly the opposite to me: Google Translation very well understood, that one sentence on every page is in a different language and "reversed" that sentence as well. Wouldn't have been possible, if Google Translate would "understand" exactly nothing about language.
Your statements are wrong on so many levels, that it's hard to even begin with. First, if someone says "X is a mere Y" or "X is nothing more than a clever combination of Ys" than you should be very cautious of this reductionism. Of course humans are biological machines, but we are also much more than that. It shouldn't be too hard to grasp, that knowledge and culture and language brings a whole new quality to this whole realm of biological machines. We really stand somewhat outside of normal evolution.
And you also describe the work of geniuses as mix of well known things, only . Music for example is based on rules, patterns and it can be expressed or represented in mathematical algorithms. But what composers do is much more. They have musical ideas, they reflect on them, they have a story. And they mix their ideas in unexpected ways (you can analyze this after the fact, but you cannot guess them beforehand). The whole is really more than the sum of it's parts, we need an holistic approach, not a reductionist one
It doesn't surprise me that this example of reductionism is not only accepted, but also lauded here in /. No one likes the unexplainable, unexpected genius, only "hard work" is accepted. And only here can truly soulless music can be appreciated because "the concept of a soul is imaginary anyway". You dehumanized yourself here.