You are trivializing it. It's fairly difficult to make sure with reasonable certainty that workers and people downstream are not harmed. OSHA and EPA are two of the favorite whipping-boys of the business lobby in the US. And we don't go as far as Europe.
Do those alternatives to Flash allow the developer to enable socket functionalities not natively present in current browsers"? That's the sort of open-ended capability that tends to make Flash a security risk in the first place.
FlashBlock works great for me, all the advantages of disabling flash, but it's only a click away when desired.
Counterpoint, I had one of these, and the down tube / head tube joint did crack, in fact it only lasted 3 or 4 years. I would imagine a lot has changed since then though. (Also, Canondale did replace it with a newer model, on warranty).
But this story isn't about throwing computers into the classroom to improve performance in other areas. It's about teaching programming for its own sake, mainly because it's an employable skill.
Computer languages turned out to be one of those things that seem very deep and significant, but actually aren't. FORTRAN and Lisp (and BASIC and C, only somewhat later) made programmers about as productive, within a reasonably small constant factor, as anything since. (And before you hit me with "Citation Needed," remember it cuts both ways!)
So you're sure there are processes which are completely deterministic? If it relied on the interaction of light and matter, then the same random component being used in the current article is still applicable
I would guess there are incredibly small regions of instability in many chaotic processes that can be tipped either way by quantum randomness, but that does not make them useful as sources of randomness. What you want is to prove the outcome of your system is nothing BUT quantum randomness, and thus unbiased. I don't think the 'prior art' cited above proved that it met that standard. This paper claims to have done so within quantifiable bounds:
But Sanguinetti and co calculate that their numbers are pretty close to random. They say that the process would have to be repeated 10^118 times before any deviation from randomness might be observed. "If everybody on earth used such a device constantly at 1Gbps, it would take 10^80 times the age of the universe for one to notice a deviation from a perfectly random bit string," they say.
By way of analogy, rolling dice is a chaotic physical process that does not rely on quantum randomness. Given the starting conditions of a dice roll, the outcome is predictable, at least in theory.
I am not so sure the randomness from that project actually came from the quantum properties of the photons themselves. A saturated CCD may be a chaotic physical process, but (I think) the dynamics of that chaotic process are properties of that CCD, not directly from the actions of individual photons which are known to be "quantum" and truly random.
This thing would only be advantageous if your electric car spent its daylight hours at your house.
No, where it would be advantageous is in parking lots (ideally my employer's parking lot!) All the wasted energy falling on parking lots every day is not only wasted, it is harmful, because it makes urban heat islands - the city is hotter than the climate it's in.
That said, it's foolish to devote the panels on a parking garage to the car that might or might not be there. Feed it into the grid and use it where it is needed. Check out the new solar array on the long-term parking at my local airport. This is how you do it. What was uncovered parking is now covered parking and produces energy too.
" As I understand it, at the moment, you're not paying the companies to store their nuclear waste, you're simply paying for the power they generate."
No, that's not correct. In the US, anyways, nuclear producers pay into a Nuclear Waste Fund (which currently contains $25BN of unspent funds), and a Decomissioning Trust Fund for when the plant is retired.
That said, the system is currently not really working, since (40 years into this arrangement) no agreement where to keep the waste has been reached. It is a serious problem. But compared to the complete collapse of the economy and mass starvation that would result from a hypothetical critical global energy shortage, it is not SO bad.
After making an incorrect claim of uniqueness, the article does come close to admitting the point:
What makes Tononi's ideas different from other theories of consciousness is that it can be modelled mathematically using ideas from physics and information theory. That doesn't mean this theory is correct.
Unfortunately it then continues into la-la land:
But it does mean that, for the first time, neuroscientists, biologists physicists and anybody else can all reason about consciousness using the universal language of science: mathematics.
What a stupid, meaningless statement. I can posit the equation 1+1=2 as a model of consciousness that allows us to reason about it. The claim in the title of the article: "Proves Human Experience Cannot Be Modelled On A Computer" is just sad gibberish.
There at least 3 different levels of problems here:
1) Does this even make sense: No. Autonomy is not well-defined. Does a thermostat make "decisions"? etc.
2) Assuming it makes sense, is it a good idea: No. Firing a cruise missile at a target is better than firing a huge barrage of mortars towards a target, for everybody involved. Any smarter version of a landmine would be better than the current ones that "decide" to blow up whatever touches them 20 years after the war is over.
3) Assuming it's a good idea, can it be implemented: No. Arms races are often bad for everybody involved. Everybody involved knows this. And yet that universal realization does not provide a way out. Everybody knows if they don't, the other side might well anyways.
Save black-swan technological breakthrough Western Civilization has "best before" date of 2070-2120.
The Silver Bullet has already been discovered, and it is nuclear power. Yes, it has downsides, and I'm becoming more convinced that solar and wind will undercut its price so we never need to fully rely on it. Yet I take quite a bit of comfort that it is there. It is physically possible to sustain our "way of life" while destroying only a little of the environment. The political objections will melt away when, and if, we face a true, long-term, existential energy crisis.
Meanwhile, let's invest in solar and wind as a preferred option!
You are jumping to a lot of conclusions about what this is an example of, and what problems government has created, before getting to the "big if" of whether this system takes off. I don't think it will, and in that case, the conclusion must be the opposite - that government is pricing parking near-enough correctly after all. Of course in that case nobody will be paying attention to the project any more or writing slashdot stories on it.
Wrong, because when your parking space is vacated is under your direct control. So this app creates a new monetary incentive to waste parking space, which is why (if it were ever to take off, which I highly doubt) it should not be allowed.
See, this is why I don't think global warming matters much after all. We're collectively incapable of preventing it because our minds just aren't made to care about long-term issues that can only be understood analytically. But by the same token, when thousands of people die and trillions of dollars are wasted unnecessarily, we also won't care about that, because it will happen over many decades, and we'll never know for sure which individual people died unnecessarily, or by what percentage our bank balances would have been larger without global warming, and anyways the TV reporting will be interesting to watch and we can fly Old Glory over the wreckage and take pictures of stuffed animals in the rubble and so forth. So, it's all good.
Just continue to think of it as global warming if the naming bothers you. That has always been the gist of it and still is. The article is about engineering chickens to withstand hotter temperatures.
The latency from multiplayer over the Internet is still there.
Although if you are a Comcast subscriber, your latency to them is much less than to any single centralized location. If there's anything that ends up making this succeed where others failed, it would be that Comcast has data centers nearby their customers, and can prioritize the traffic.
Probably to avoid paying $600 for a new console and a couple games.
But yeah, it'll never really work for games designed for game consoles, just as new games had to come along for smartphones and facebook instead of just using PC games directly on those platforms. They are vastly inferior to the PC in any way a PC gamer would have thought to measure, yet make big bucks for some companies.
Slashdot Mirror
You are trivializing it. It's fairly difficult to make sure with reasonable certainty that workers and people downstream are not harmed. OSHA and EPA are two of the favorite whipping-boys of the business lobby in the US. And we don't go as far as Europe.
FlashBlock works great for me, all the advantages of disabling flash, but it's only a click away when desired.
Counterpoint, I had one of these, and the down tube / head tube joint did crack, in fact it only lasted 3 or 4 years. I would imagine a lot has changed since then though. (Also, Canondale did replace it with a newer model, on warranty).
Alternate response: they have already received an opening offer of $324M, how 'bout you?
But this story isn't about throwing computers into the classroom to improve performance in other areas. It's about teaching programming for its own sake, mainly because it's an employable skill.
OK, but what is the snake oil?
Yeah, so? Is it your contention that adding programming to the curriculum will lower the quality of instruction for some reason?
Computer languages turned out to be one of those things that seem very deep and significant, but actually aren't. FORTRAN and Lisp (and BASIC and C, only somewhat later) made programmers about as productive, within a reasonably small constant factor, as anything since. (And before you hit me with "Citation Needed," remember it cuts both ways!)
I would guess there are incredibly small regions of instability in many chaotic processes that can be tipped either way by quantum randomness, but that does not make them useful as sources of randomness. What you want is to prove the outcome of your system is nothing BUT quantum randomness, and thus unbiased. I don't think the 'prior art' cited above proved that it met that standard. This paper claims to have done so within quantifiable bounds:
By way of analogy, rolling dice is a chaotic physical process that does not rely on quantum randomness. Given the starting conditions of a dice roll, the outcome is predictable, at least in theory.
I am not so sure the randomness from that project actually came from the quantum properties of the photons themselves. A saturated CCD may be a chaotic physical process, but (I think) the dynamics of that chaotic process are properties of that CCD, not directly from the actions of individual photons which are known to be "quantum" and truly random.
No, where it would be advantageous is in parking lots (ideally my employer's parking lot!) All the wasted energy falling on parking lots every day is not only wasted, it is harmful, because it makes urban heat islands - the city is hotter than the climate it's in.
That said, it's foolish to devote the panels on a parking garage to the car that might or might not be there. Feed it into the grid and use it where it is needed. Check out the new solar array on the long-term parking at my local airport. This is how you do it. What was uncovered parking is now covered parking and produces energy too.
No, that's not correct. In the US, anyways, nuclear producers pay into a Nuclear Waste Fund (which currently contains $25BN of unspent funds), and a Decomissioning Trust Fund for when the plant is retired.
That said, the system is currently not really working, since (40 years into this arrangement) no agreement where to keep the waste has been reached. It is a serious problem. But compared to the complete collapse of the economy and mass starvation that would result from a hypothetical critical global energy shortage, it is not SO bad.
Unfortunately it then continues into la-la land:
What a stupid, meaningless statement. I can posit the equation 1+1=2 as a model of consciousness that allows us to reason about it. The claim in the title of the article: "Proves Human Experience Cannot Be Modelled On A Computer" is just sad gibberish.
1) Does this even make sense: No. Autonomy is not well-defined. Does a thermostat make "decisions"? etc.
2) Assuming it makes sense, is it a good idea: No. Firing a cruise missile at a target is better than firing a huge barrage of mortars towards a target, for everybody involved. Any smarter version of a landmine would be better than the current ones that "decide" to blow up whatever touches them 20 years after the war is over.
3) Assuming it's a good idea, can it be implemented: No. Arms races are often bad for everybody involved. Everybody involved knows this. And yet that universal realization does not provide a way out. Everybody knows if they don't, the other side might well anyways.
The Silver Bullet has already been discovered, and it is nuclear power. Yes, it has downsides, and I'm becoming more convinced that solar and wind will undercut its price so we never need to fully rely on it. Yet I take quite a bit of comfort that it is there. It is physically possible to sustain our "way of life" while destroying only a little of the environment. The political objections will melt away when, and if, we face a true, long-term, existential energy crisis.
Meanwhile, let's invest in solar and wind as a preferred option!
That's an interesting spin on the recent spate of oil disasters.
You are jumping to a lot of conclusions about what this is an example of, and what problems government has created, before getting to the "big if" of whether this system takes off. I don't think it will, and in that case, the conclusion must be the opposite - that government is pricing parking near-enough correctly after all. Of course in that case nobody will be paying attention to the project any more or writing slashdot stories on it.
Wrong, because when your parking space is vacated is under your direct control. So this app creates a new monetary incentive to waste parking space, which is why (if it were ever to take off, which I highly doubt) it should not be allowed.
What percent of discussion on slashdot goes down in flames over semantic quibbles having nothing to do with the substance of the issue at hand?
See, this is why I don't think global warming matters much after all. We're collectively incapable of preventing it because our minds just aren't made to care about long-term issues that can only be understood analytically. But by the same token, when thousands of people die and trillions of dollars are wasted unnecessarily, we also won't care about that, because it will happen over many decades, and we'll never know for sure which individual people died unnecessarily, or by what percentage our bank balances would have been larger without global warming, and anyways the TV reporting will be interesting to watch and we can fly Old Glory over the wreckage and take pictures of stuffed animals in the rubble and so forth. So, it's all good.
Sure they want to sell you something in addition to "anti-virus" software with a fresh new name. But host-based security software isn't going away.
Just continue to think of it as global warming if the naming bothers you. That has always been the gist of it and still is. The article is about engineering chickens to withstand hotter temperatures.
Although if you are a Comcast subscriber, your latency to them is much less than to any single centralized location. If there's anything that ends up making this succeed where others failed, it would be that Comcast has data centers nearby their customers, and can prioritize the traffic.
But yeah, it'll never really work for games designed for game consoles, just as new games had to come along for smartphones and facebook instead of just using PC games directly on those platforms. They are vastly inferior to the PC in any way a PC gamer would have thought to measure, yet make big bucks for some companies.