I said essentially the same thing about massively parallel computers further up the page. However, I still think solving NP-complete problems in polynomial time might be a game-changer. Combinatorial optimization would be a solved problem, just try everything! Writing software is, itself, a combinatorial optimzation problem (setting the bits in a.exe. file). We solve it with heuristics (like programming languages) because it's infeasible to do otherwise. I think it would take a while to grasp the ramifications of that.
Parallel programs are no more computationally powerful than sequential ones, they just execute more quickly. It's not as if we have implemented HAL but he runs at 1/1000th of real-time, the problem is nobody knows how to write such a program.
Re:WHAT COMPUTERS STILL CAN'T DO
on
Marvin Minsky On AI
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Notice that this doesn't mean he argues that it is impossible that machines could think or that robot doppelgangers couldn't be built---just that the mainstream approaches won't work.
I don't even think propositional logic is a mainstream approach any more. You'd be hard-pressed to publish a paper on decision tree algorithms these days. People have moved on to machine-learning algorithms which estimate patterns and distributions of data instead of trying to find nice clean rules for everything.
I do think powered treadmills are a little odd. I use a cheap nordic-track knockoff which has friction instead of a motor. It seems to do a fine job. The only downside I see is that it can't make you run at a pre-set speed. Is that why treadmills have motors?
Outside of the fantasy land of the naîve peter pan type, most "volunteering" is corporate base.
That is your assumption. The idea that people are motivated exclusively by selfish motives (whether turning a buck, going to heaven, or feeling warm and fuzzy inside) is difficult to disprove, but equally difficult to prove.
You are right. I don't think "volunteer" army is a represantive use of the term. It has taken on special meaning in that case because it is common for soldiers to be not only paid, but compelled to fight. The only difference between a volunteer army and an army of mercenaries is what's in their hearts:) When you get right down to it, most of the demonization of the "other guys" who don't fight fair, fight for money, use fragmentation (i.e. shrapnel) weapons, etc etc doesn't add up to much but propaganda because it applies to everybody. I do, however, think there's a substantive difference between the amount of indiscriminate killing (prisoners and civillians) that different armies use. (At least if you can draw a line between the Rape of Nanking and the firebombing of Dresden).
Oh good, you've reminded me to reiterate my annual grumble about the federal government's refusal to post an official tax filing website. It's the exact same problem: it would save both the government and taxpayers tons of money. But since companies like TurboTax thrive in the niche created by wasteful paper filing, these companies have thwarted every attempt to solve the problem. As a result, I file federal taxes via paper (it's not much trouble anyways). Even though I live in about the most backwards state in the nation, I can do my state taxes at an official online site because I guess we're too small for TurboTax to care about.
It is true that the current system of evaluating research quality is based on paper counts and citation counts, rather than any real measure of quality (of which there aren't any, at least none that a bean counter could grok).
I think citation counts are actually the best system available. Look at it this way, the WWW is under intense pressure from web spammers, and the best known way to select usable information is google's Page Rank, which is basically citations. Heh, maybe sometime soon researchers will be evaluated by their online publications' PageRank, just like web spammers are. "I'm the number one hit for post-arthroscopy subcutaneous emphysema! Tenure is mine!!!"
Apple is willing to ditch it wholesale (i.e., isn't interested in iTunes/iPod "lock-in").
Could you further explain that? I would think millions of people's music locked exclusively to Apple hardware would be enough to make Jobs swoon.
In any case, sure is nice to be an onlooker as music execs "feel the burn" of DRM, isn't it? Kinda sucks when everything is locked to somebody else's best interests without regard to you, doesn't it?
Not being informed on Canadian politics, I find your comment very confusing. (What does it mean to "bring up" the minority government?)
"You can't close your eyes and pretend that bad people don't exist." By that you mean terrorists? Canada has made several major terrorist busts over the last few years, more than the US it seems to me. The US has suffered tens of thousands of casualties in the war on terror (or at least in the name of the war on terror), while Canada has had virtually none. That statistic counts for a lot in my book. I don't see why a Canadian would be so eager to step into the ring and take up the fight when there is nothing to win but peace, which you already have.
Computers never make errors.
Humans do, at least in designing, manufacturing and sizing computer systems.
OK, but everybody knows that. Do you think the people behind the NYSE computers are getting off the hook by saying "it's not our fault, blame our computers!" I've never seen it work that way. When a system fails, the blame always falls on people.
Shipping costs negate the whole buying direct thing. Who wants to spend $3 on shipping for a $5 cable?
If I'm not in a rush, I'll take that bargain every time. Even assuming the item is just as cheap the store, what are your shipping costs for driving your personal car there (30-40 cents per mile), and the 40 minutes of labor that takes?
And I agree that if the parental controls are in place, this group should certainly spread that information, and not just paranoia. Information is far more useful than blanket accusations of stupidity, which is what I was responding to.
That's what passes for "+5 insightful" on slashdot now? An smear with precisely zero rationale given to support it?
Never mind that their assertion is correct - you can use the wii to pull down anything and everything from the 'net.
I just love to hear all the childless slashdotters speculate wildly about parenting. It's a good reminder of how easy it is to imagine solutions to problems you've never addressed yourselves. Hint: not even the best parents can make kids start out with good judgement. The age at which a kid is ready for Mario Kart is not the same age at which he is ready to avoid goatse.
I think what to include or not include in a study like this is the key. Apparently it's focused on mouse accuracy and menu clicking latency. If I had my druthers on how to improve my chosen OS (Linux), it would be nothing like that. Rather, it would focus on the number of minutes or hours (not milliseconds) required to perform tasks that still fill me with dread, such as network printing, or power management, or burning a video file to a DVD that a standalone player can read. Granted it's much harder to make meaningful measurements of such things, but I still think they're more important that mousing.
To somebody who believes pre-marital sex is wrong, it's like giving your kid a bullet proof vest for his birthday and saying "you know I don't want you to mug people, but if you do mug people, please wear it."
However, we routinely produce complicated systems that have excellant reliability. For example, glass displays on aircraft - which are quite common in commercial jets.
Compared to something routine like PowerPoint, avionics instruments are actually extremely simple. The number of flight-critical LOC on the Space Shuttle is like 5% of a modern OS. There has never, ever been any piece of highly reliable software the size of a modern OS or an office suite.
What we have is mostly socialized anyway - through unfunded mandates to health care providers and employers
Exactly! What we have now is a massively wasteful system where people without money or insurance wait to seek care until it's an emergency. Then they go to the emergency room, resulting in the highest possible cost of care. Funding comes through inflated rates for everybody else. It's both wasteful and unfair.
But I'm telling you, the free market will not solve this problem. The free market outcome you advocate would result in streets lined with poor people dying of curable ailments. I would not consider this a "solution" to the problem. Perhaps you would, since it's the natural outcome of the free market, but the fact is most people will not accept that situation so it's not a feasible option.
I say the best solution is a tax. That way everybody pays, and at least we can debate who pays how much. And overall costs would be reduced because poor people could get care sooner before it becomes an expensive crisis. Sure it stinks having to pay a tax, but in this case it's a direct implication of the fact that anybody can get sick and require health care. It would be nicer if the universe didn't impose ill health on us, wouldn't it? Maybe it's not "fair" having to deal with that because you didn't choose to be born, or to get sick. But it's a fact of life. Refusing to acknowledge it and plan for the costs is a poor option. I also don't think somebody afflicted with poor health should be further punished by poverty due to medical expenses, that's even more unfair than healthy people having to pay a health care tax.
Does your workplace have a "computer lab" where you can go to access a computer for 40 minutes per day? Mine either. The computer is so integral to real workflow, I think it's suspicious that schools aren't that way at all.
First, haven't we all experienced the frustration of all class members being forced to move at the same pace? It's bad if you're bored, and bad if you're falling behind. At work I have an email inbox and an Outlook task list. I take one task, do it (usually resulting in more tasks for the future), and move on to the next. School should be more self-paced, and software is a huge tool in doing that.
Second, how many hours of teachers' time is spent correcting answers that are simply right or wrong? What a waste of salaried labor. Computers are better and faster at checking hundreds of answers quickly, allowing the teacher to spend more time with students.
Third, the new model for most work is accessing vast quantities of information and integrating it together to build a case or develop a solution. Reading a chapter from a textbook, then finding answers to a list of questions from that chapter, does not fit that model - that's more like an easter egg hunt. Computers provide access to the information to fuel this process.
Fourth and lastly, thinking back it amazes me how little of my schoolwork focused on the main task of my job - communication, teamwork, technical and persuasive (not creative) writing. Students don't get enough feedback by handing in a paper and getting it back with a few markings from the teacher. They need practice, not just "texting" friends, but convincing and negotiating with indifferent or hostile readers. At work this is done by exchanging documents (including email). Schools need to create that environment too.
Gas-guzzling rocket motors are part of our American Way of Life. If efficiency concerns force us to change how we launch our payloads, the terrorists have won!
Slashdot Mirror
I said essentially the same thing about massively parallel computers further up the page. However, I still think solving NP-complete problems in polynomial time might be a game-changer. Combinatorial optimization would be a solved problem, just try everything! Writing software is, itself, a combinatorial optimzation problem (setting the bits in a .exe. file). We solve it with heuristics (like programming languages) because it's infeasible to do otherwise. I think it would take a while to grasp the ramifications of that.
Parallel programs are no more computationally powerful than sequential ones, they just execute more quickly. It's not as if we have implemented HAL but he runs at 1/1000th of real-time, the problem is nobody knows how to write such a program.
I do think powered treadmills are a little odd. I use a cheap nordic-track knockoff which has friction instead of a motor. It seems to do a fine job. The only downside I see is that it can't make you run at a pre-set speed. Is that why treadmills have motors?
I'm not an MD, but apparently emphysema is a little broader than we laymen think.
You are right. I don't think "volunteer" army is a represantive use of the term. It has taken on special meaning in that case because it is common for soldiers to be not only paid, but compelled to fight. The only difference between a volunteer army and an army of mercenaries is what's in their hearts :) When you get right down to it, most of the demonization of the "other guys" who don't fight fair, fight for money, use fragmentation (i.e. shrapnel) weapons, etc etc doesn't add up to much but propaganda because it applies to everybody. I do, however, think there's a substantive difference between the amount of indiscriminate killing (prisoners and civillians) that different armies use. (At least if you can draw a line between the Rape of Nanking and the firebombing of Dresden).
Oh good, you've reminded me to reiterate my annual grumble about the federal government's refusal to post an official tax filing website. It's the exact same problem: it would save both the government and taxpayers tons of money. But since companies like TurboTax thrive in the niche created by wasteful paper filing, these companies have thwarted every attempt to solve the problem. As a result, I file federal taxes via paper (it's not much trouble anyways). Even though I live in about the most backwards state in the nation, I can do my state taxes at an official online site because I guess we're too small for TurboTax to care about.
In any case, sure is nice to be an onlooker as music execs "feel the burn" of DRM, isn't it? Kinda sucks when everything is locked to somebody else's best interests without regard to you, doesn't it?
Wow, silicon will never match that! Now I don't have to work in this darn freon chamber all day.
"You can't close your eyes and pretend that bad people don't exist." By that you mean terrorists? Canada has made several major terrorist busts over the last few years, more than the US it seems to me. The US has suffered tens of thousands of casualties in the war on terror (or at least in the name of the war on terror), while Canada has had virtually none. That statistic counts for a lot in my book. I don't see why a Canadian would be so eager to step into the ring and take up the fight when there is nothing to win but peace, which you already have.
And I agree that if the parental controls are in place, this group should certainly spread that information, and not just paranoia. Information is far more useful than blanket accusations of stupidity, which is what I was responding to.
Never mind that their assertion is correct - you can use the wii to pull down anything and everything from the 'net.
I just love to hear all the childless slashdotters speculate wildly about parenting. It's a good reminder of how easy it is to imagine solutions to problems you've never addressed yourselves. Hint: not even the best parents can make kids start out with good judgement. The age at which a kid is ready for Mario Kart is not the same age at which he is ready to avoid goatse.
I think what to include or not include in a study like this is the key. Apparently it's focused on mouse accuracy and menu clicking latency. If I had my druthers on how to improve my chosen OS (Linux), it would be nothing like that. Rather, it would focus on the number of minutes or hours (not milliseconds) required to perform tasks that still fill me with dread, such as network printing, or power management, or burning a video file to a DVD that a standalone player can read. Granted it's much harder to make meaningful measurements of such things, but I still think they're more important that mousing.
Surely you appreciate the difference between latency and throughput?
Even if they *weren't* researching this for the past 100 years, it sure shows how stagnant a business can be until competition spurs it on.
To somebody who believes pre-marital sex is wrong, it's like giving your kid a bullet proof vest for his birthday and saying "you know I don't want you to mug people, but if you do mug people, please wear it."
But I'm telling you, the free market will not solve this problem. The free market outcome you advocate would result in streets lined with poor people dying of curable ailments. I would not consider this a "solution" to the problem. Perhaps you would, since it's the natural outcome of the free market, but the fact is most people will not accept that situation so it's not a feasible option.
I say the best solution is a tax. That way everybody pays, and at least we can debate who pays how much. And overall costs would be reduced because poor people could get care sooner before it becomes an expensive crisis. Sure it stinks having to pay a tax, but in this case it's a direct implication of the fact that anybody can get sick and require health care. It would be nicer if the universe didn't impose ill health on us, wouldn't it? Maybe it's not "fair" having to deal with that because you didn't choose to be born, or to get sick. But it's a fact of life. Refusing to acknowledge it and plan for the costs is a poor option. I also don't think somebody afflicted with poor health should be further punished by poverty due to medical expenses, that's even more unfair than healthy people having to pay a health care tax.
First, haven't we all experienced the frustration of all class members being forced to move at the same pace? It's bad if you're bored, and bad if you're falling behind. At work I have an email inbox and an Outlook task list. I take one task, do it (usually resulting in more tasks for the future), and move on to the next. School should be more self-paced, and software is a huge tool in doing that.
Second, how many hours of teachers' time is spent correcting answers that are simply right or wrong? What a waste of salaried labor. Computers are better and faster at checking hundreds of answers quickly, allowing the teacher to spend more time with students.
Third, the new model for most work is accessing vast quantities of information and integrating it together to build a case or develop a solution. Reading a chapter from a textbook, then finding answers to a list of questions from that chapter, does not fit that model - that's more like an easter egg hunt. Computers provide access to the information to fuel this process.
Fourth and lastly, thinking back it amazes me how little of my schoolwork focused on the main task of my job - communication, teamwork, technical and persuasive (not creative) writing. Students don't get enough feedback by handing in a paper and getting it back with a few markings from the teacher. They need practice, not just "texting" friends, but convincing and negotiating with indifferent or hostile readers. At work this is done by exchanging documents (including email). Schools need to create that environment too.
Gas-guzzling rocket motors are part of our American Way of Life. If efficiency concerns force us to change how we launch our payloads, the terrorists have won!