Who the hell takes 7 seconds to decide left or right? You do. That's the entire point of the study. The people thought they were taking a second at most to make the decision, but there was precursor activity in the brain which accurately predicted the final choice well before conscious deliberation on that choice occurred.
In programming terms, it's exactly that difference. However, the person thinks their conscious decision is 1 second before the press. Consider that an I/O interrupt request after the output has been generated but before it can be displayed. The conscious mind (the OS in the metaphor) thinks it is making the decision to output something specific, but that decision was made by the subroutine well before the OS got involved. In flow chart terms...
(unconscious decision is made in background processes) -> (person thinks they make a conscious decision using their own Free Will) -> (action occurs which matches the unconscious decision)
Under that model, Free Will is "eliminated" because the final result matches activity that occurs before they consciously deliberate on it and can utilize conscious Free Will. Essentially, Free Will becomes an unconscious process of some sort.
No, I think he means exactly what he said -- games. Standard (non-video) games have been used for years to help teach physics and geometry, among other things. With games that can simplify physics to eliminate certain aspects, you can have a basic no-fancy-spin billiards that teaches angles and collision physics. Various puzzle games (e.g. Castle of Dr. Brain) teach logic and critical analysis skills. A trivia-style game could be used on almost any subject to make learning it more enjoyable than dry textbook reading or standard lectures. Carmen Sandiego games taught me a wide variety of (useless) facts on various subjects. Crisis in the Kremlin taught me about the Soviet Union, economics, unintended consequences, and history.
Sure, some simulations would be great, but game elements can be pretty easily added on top of the simulation to increase the amount of attention paid. So no -- the word is not just simulations, but games.
Technically, digit would imply base-8, base-10, or base-20, being based off the original meaning of finger or toe. You got me when I used numbers in the first part, though.
Whippersnappers, with their new-fangled math, counting on things that aren't fingers or toes...
Back in my day, Slashdot IDs only had 5 numbers, and that was good enough for us! You young whippersnappers, with your 6-digit IDs... And those durn kids still won't get off my lawn!
AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy and so on all were originally time-limited services. You got X hours a month based on your plan, and then paid heavily for any time over that limit on a per-minute basis. DSL and Cable Modems were always-on services, rather than dial-in modem banks, so they were "unlimited" in terms of time up. They remain unlimited in that sense, but need to restructure their bandwidth costs.
Ummmm.... This was a test, not a lesson. A good test is designed to evaluate something, not to educate or to scare. Now, the Army knows at what rate people can be scammed. This data will either be used to judge the effectiveness of their previous training (if there has been any), or as a baseline to judge effectiveness of future training. You cannot teach during a test without destroying the statistical validity of the results. But you can teach after a test to explain what was done wrong and how to improve upon it in the future. Which is where the scare part comes in -- after the test has been administered and the reason for it is revealed, it should scare those who fell for it that they could have just as easily been putting in their information for someone running an real scam.
Way to ignore the summary and fail to RTFA. The USGS system uses the existing seismograph network to track earthquakes. This one would serve double duty, both analyzing earthquake data in a distributed fashion, and acting as an ad-hoc seismograph network. In theory, it should catch additional information the existing system would miss, and aid in tracking the effects of the various rock strata in different regions on the seismic waves.
To be fair, a lot of adults have the same perception of death with a much longer time frame involved, and a very old book as the basis. Maybe if children weren't brought up with magical tales about death leading to a better place or resurrection being told to them, they wouldn't believe in them.
For some systems, yes, accepting the bottleneck is ok -- the system can be made parallel, but the overhead cost is too high. Which cedes the point that it could, in theory, be done. And with better tools in place to reduce the overhead of creating those systems, the cost to parallelize may come down to the point where it makes more sense to switch over. Given your description, though, at some future point the number of incoming bids may easily exceed your capacity at all times, and you'll just slowly fall further and further behind. We'll eventually hit some fairly hard physical limits as to what sorts of direct speed-up we can manage. At which point the only option is to move to a parallel system of execution.
You'll likely end up looking at a distributed data structure (rather than a single monolithic database table, you have threads working on subtables passing messages back and forth as needed), and hope your already-optimized critical sections where data locks are necessary are small enough. And yes, the backtracking can be expensive, but if it only occurs infrequently, and the gains made outside of those events are large enough, you have a net gain on the speed of execution. And if every message in the queue is for the exact same thing or requires the previous message be processed first (percentage-based changes, for example), there's a chance you can't get out of serial execution.
So I'll agree that there will exist some specific limited scenarios where parallelism is impossible -- but in most cases right now it's not impossible, just harder to implement than it is worth, which is distinctly different from being actually impossible.
You cannot parallelize an order matching algorithm for instance. Every order has to be processed in a fixed sequence. If I have a book of bids and asks and you come in with an order, it is a REGULATORY REQUIREMENT that I have to process it in the order it came into the system.
You can absolutely parallelize that without violating the spirit of the regulations (which may not be good enough for a given law, presently, but the problem itself minus the outdated interpretation of the regulation can be handled). The entire concept of a branch of parallel computing involves allowing out-of-order computation to occur for events that are usually unrelated. If you process bids where the majority don't conflict with each other (either sufficient quantities of the requested item that they can be allocated to all orders, or bids for different objects), then they can be processed in parallel up until the last element of a given supply runs out. At that point you need to reverse things a bit (designing a reversible algorithm isn't necessarily easy, but is usually possible) to ensure the bids requesting it are processed in the proper order (not a problem with time-stamps attached to each request showing when an out-of-order exceptional case has occurred). So even if the bids are, in the system, processed out of order in parallel, the final result matches identically to one where they are processed serially.
Because a lot of shitty programmers have written their programs to work only with administrative access. It's like re-writing pine or emacs to only work when logged in as root. There's no good reason for it, but it makes locking the system down difficult unless you're willing to spend the time to find properly written programs or write them up yourself. So it often isn't a practical thng to do for IT unless they also get to make the decisions on which software packages to use. All of that is because a lot of programmers are either lazy or ignorant of what they're doing, which makes it annoying to lock down the system, but the OS itself is not as fundamentally unsecured as most comments here state or imply.
Seriously, take a look at the system - you can set it up such that a user can do nothing except run a specific set of programs. No Start menu, no window-key macros, no task bar, no access to any folders or files that aren't explicitly approved for use. The tools for that are all there, and they aren't even hard to use.
Just because you're foolish enough to run your Windows as an admin doesn't mean it is necessary to do so. Windows can be locked up in exactly the same way that other OSes can be, with heavy access restrictions on various directories, inability to install or access protected files, and so on. You can also run *nix as root at the time. It's just most people using those systems know better.
Macs in my experience are for certain types of professionals (generally artists of various sorts) who should know better, and people who know less about computers and software than your average Windows user. That latter class would be incredibly vulnerable, and might well be running in a privileged mode that could compromise the entire system, or enough of it that it makes little difference that some tiny bit is locked off.
The security differences between *nix and Windows are largely in the user base, and in the total number of users than can propogate an issue, not in the code itself.
Learn your grammar. The homeless are being confused with with folks who prey on them, not confuse by those people. The point being made is that the homeless and the drug dealers and the prostitutes are all being lumped together into a single group. I don't know why that was being pointed out, since I thought part of the purpose was to remove the homeless from the region as well, since they urinate and defecate on the premises, but apparently the person being quoted there is ok with the homeless being in the area (presumably due to the proximity to the homeless shelter).
The energy comes from the black hole because the mass comes from the black hole.
The easiest way to conceive of it, in very basic terms, is that the Electron/Positron pair spontaneously converts to mass from the energy surrounding the black hole. The positron falls into the hole, and annihilates with an electron's worth of mass already in the singularity. The electron from the initial pair escapes. The black hole has been reduced in mass/energy by the amount of one electron.
If the electron, instead, falls into the hole, the positron escaping will annihilate with an electron being pulled toward the hole (probably) and release a burst of energy, leaving a net gain of no mass for the black hole as a particle that would have added to it no longer reaches that point.
"Complicating matters in Matt's case is that there's no federal law against pretext phone calls. So in court filings in related cases, the feds have invented a novel legal theory just for the blind hacker. Matt, they argue, violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by persuading phone company workers to access their computers on his behalf. He hacked by proxy, using his voice instead of a computer."
Google is playing by China's rules by adhering to their laws (even if it isn't necessarily moral). The Telecoms colluded with government officials to break the law (which wasn't necessarily immoral). The difference here is that what Google is doing in China is legal (since China has made the law such that it can be) and what the Telecoms did was illegal.
There is, in fact, additional content for 20-60. New quest givers have been added to every quest hub to give quests on the behalf of the two new races.
You weren't given a specific quest. You were told to go get the item of whatsis from the forest of evil, and had to kill 500 wolves in random encounters on the way there and the way back. "Leveling without noticing" as you put it. It is, in fact, something you go and "do". It's no longer to the degree of the original Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior where you literally went out and killed random monsters long enough to gain a level, but it amounts to the same thing even when there's a quest objective at the end.
The point is, there's a lot of "trash", often nonsensical extras that literally are the "random" part of a random encounter, that simply doesn't need to be there. Extra battles that serve no purpose other than to give you money/experience/items so you can go and accomplish the next real objective. Those could be removed, forcing the game dev to actually create 40 meaningful hours of game play, and that would be a lot more enjoyable.
Slashdot Mirror
In programming terms, it's exactly that difference. However, the person thinks their conscious decision is 1 second before the press. Consider that an I/O interrupt request after the output has been generated but before it can be displayed. The conscious mind (the OS in the metaphor) thinks it is making the decision to output something specific, but that decision was made by the subroutine well before the OS got involved. In flow chart terms...
(unconscious decision is made in background processes) -> (person thinks they make a conscious decision using their own Free Will) -> (action occurs which matches the unconscious decision)
Under that model, Free Will is "eliminated" because the final result matches activity that occurs before they consciously deliberate on it and can utilize conscious Free Will. Essentially, Free Will becomes an unconscious process of some sort.
Thanks. I was hoping someone with 4 or 3 (or heaven forbid a 2 or 1) digit ID would show up to call me young. ;)
No, I think he means exactly what he said -- games. Standard (non-video) games have been used for years to help teach physics and geometry, among other things. With games that can simplify physics to eliminate certain aspects, you can have a basic no-fancy-spin billiards that teaches angles and collision physics. Various puzzle games (e.g. Castle of Dr. Brain) teach logic and critical analysis skills. A trivia-style game could be used on almost any subject to make learning it more enjoyable than dry textbook reading or standard lectures. Carmen Sandiego games taught me a wide variety of (useless) facts on various subjects. Crisis in the Kremlin taught me about the Soviet Union, economics, unintended consequences, and history.
Sure, some simulations would be great, but game elements can be pretty easily added on top of the simulation to increase the amount of attention paid. So no -- the word is not just simulations, but games.
Technically, digit would imply base-8, base-10, or base-20, being based off the original meaning of finger or toe. You got me when I used numbers in the first part, though.
Whippersnappers, with their new-fangled math, counting on things that aren't fingers or toes...
Back in my day, Slashdot IDs only had 5 numbers, and that was good enough for us! You young whippersnappers, with your 6-digit IDs... And those durn kids still won't get off my lawn!
AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy and so on all were originally time-limited services. You got X hours a month based on your plan, and then paid heavily for any time over that limit on a per-minute basis. DSL and Cable Modems were always-on services, rather than dial-in modem banks, so they were "unlimited" in terms of time up. They remain unlimited in that sense, but need to restructure their bandwidth costs.
Way to ignore the summary and fail to RTFA. The USGS system uses the existing seismograph network to track earthquakes. This one would serve double duty, both analyzing earthquake data in a distributed fashion, and acting as an ad-hoc seismograph network. In theory, it should catch additional information the existing system would miss, and aid in tracking the effects of the various rock strata in different regions on the seismic waves.
To be fair, a lot of adults have the same perception of death with a much longer time frame involved, and a very old book as the basis. Maybe if children weren't brought up with magical tales about death leading to a better place or resurrection being told to them, they wouldn't believe in them.
For some systems, yes, accepting the bottleneck is ok -- the system can be made parallel, but the overhead cost is too high. Which cedes the point that it could, in theory, be done. And with better tools in place to reduce the overhead of creating those systems, the cost to parallelize may come down to the point where it makes more sense to switch over. Given your description, though, at some future point the number of incoming bids may easily exceed your capacity at all times, and you'll just slowly fall further and further behind. We'll eventually hit some fairly hard physical limits as to what sorts of direct speed-up we can manage. At which point the only option is to move to a parallel system of execution.
You'll likely end up looking at a distributed data structure (rather than a single monolithic database table, you have threads working on subtables passing messages back and forth as needed), and hope your already-optimized critical sections where data locks are necessary are small enough. And yes, the backtracking can be expensive, but if it only occurs infrequently, and the gains made outside of those events are large enough, you have a net gain on the speed of execution. And if every message in the queue is for the exact same thing or requires the previous message be processed first (percentage-based changes, for example), there's a chance you can't get out of serial execution.
So I'll agree that there will exist some specific limited scenarios where parallelism is impossible -- but in most cases right now it's not impossible, just harder to implement than it is worth, which is distinctly different from being actually impossible.
I don't know... Ray Kurzweil has done pretty well with his predictions over the last 40 or so years.
You can absolutely parallelize that without violating the spirit of the regulations (which may not be good enough for a given law, presently, but the problem itself minus the outdated interpretation of the regulation can be handled). The entire concept of a branch of parallel computing involves allowing out-of-order computation to occur for events that are usually unrelated. If you process bids where the majority don't conflict with each other (either sufficient quantities of the requested item that they can be allocated to all orders, or bids for different objects), then they can be processed in parallel up until the last element of a given supply runs out. At that point you need to reverse things a bit (designing a reversible algorithm isn't necessarily easy, but is usually possible) to ensure the bids requesting it are processed in the proper order (not a problem with time-stamps attached to each request showing when an out-of-order exceptional case has occurred). So even if the bids are, in the system, processed out of order in parallel, the final result matches identically to one where they are processed serially.
Because a lot of shitty programmers have written their programs to work only with administrative access. It's like re-writing pine or emacs to only work when logged in as root. There's no good reason for it, but it makes locking the system down difficult unless you're willing to spend the time to find properly written programs or write them up yourself. So it often isn't a practical thng to do for IT unless they also get to make the decisions on which software packages to use. All of that is because a lot of programmers are either lazy or ignorant of what they're doing, which makes it annoying to lock down the system, but the OS itself is not as fundamentally unsecured as most comments here state or imply.
Seriously, take a look at the system - you can set it up such that a user can do nothing except run a specific set of programs. No Start menu, no window-key macros, no task bar, no access to any folders or files that aren't explicitly approved for use. The tools for that are all there, and they aren't even hard to use.
Bad app. programmers is, again, not a fault of the OS. Properly coded versions of most common programs do exist and can be used.
Just because you're foolish enough to run your Windows as an admin doesn't mean it is necessary to do so. Windows can be locked up in exactly the same way that other OSes can be, with heavy access restrictions on various directories, inability to install or access protected files, and so on. You can also run *nix as root at the time. It's just most people using those systems know better.
Macs in my experience are for certain types of professionals (generally artists of various sorts) who should know better, and people who know less about computers and software than your average Windows user. That latter class would be incredibly vulnerable, and might well be running in a privileged mode that could compromise the entire system, or enough of it that it makes little difference that some tiny bit is locked off.
The security differences between *nix and Windows are largely in the user base, and in the total number of users than can propogate an issue, not in the code itself.
Well, you haven't been in the same place twice, but I never move. The universe clearly revolves around me.
Learn your grammar. The homeless are being confused with with folks who prey on them, not confuse by those people. The point being made is that the homeless and the drug dealers and the prostitutes are all being lumped together into a single group. I don't know why that was being pointed out, since I thought part of the purpose was to remove the homeless from the region as well, since they urinate and defecate on the premises, but apparently the person being quoted there is ok with the homeless being in the area (presumably due to the proximity to the homeless shelter).
In theory, there's no difference between theory and reality.
The energy comes from the black hole because the mass comes from the black hole.
The easiest way to conceive of it, in very basic terms, is that the Electron/Positron pair spontaneously converts to mass from the energy surrounding the black hole. The positron falls into the hole, and annihilates with an electron's worth of mass already in the singularity. The electron from the initial pair escapes. The black hole has been reduced in mass/energy by the amount of one electron.
If the electron, instead, falls into the hole, the positron escaping will annihilate with an electron being pulled toward the hole (probably) and release a burst of energy, leaving a net gain of no mass for the black hole as a particle that would have added to it no longer reaches that point.
From the Article:
"Complicating matters in Matt's case is that there's no federal law against pretext phone calls. So in court filings in related cases, the feds have invented a novel legal theory just for the blind hacker. Matt, they argue, violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by persuading phone company workers to access their computers on his behalf. He hacked by proxy, using his voice instead of a computer."
Google is playing by China's rules by adhering to their laws (even if it isn't necessarily moral). The Telecoms colluded with government officials to break the law (which wasn't necessarily immoral). The difference here is that what Google is doing in China is legal (since China has made the law such that it can be) and what the Telecoms did was illegal.
Or you could, you know, play on a Normal or RP server where you don't need worry about ganking unless you choose to participate in World PvP...
There is, in fact, additional content for 20-60. New quest givers have been added to every quest hub to give quests on the behalf of the two new races.
You weren't given a specific quest. You were told to go get the item of whatsis from the forest of evil, and had to kill 500 wolves in random encounters on the way there and the way back. "Leveling without noticing" as you put it. It is, in fact, something you go and "do". It's no longer to the degree of the original Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior where you literally went out and killed random monsters long enough to gain a level, but it amounts to the same thing even when there's a quest objective at the end.
The point is, there's a lot of "trash", often nonsensical extras that literally are the "random" part of a random encounter, that simply doesn't need to be there. Extra battles that serve no purpose other than to give you money/experience/items so you can go and accomplish the next real objective. Those could be removed, forcing the game dev to actually create 40 meaningful hours of game play, and that would be a lot more enjoyable.