They've leveraged a Facebook game as a way to generate massive data sets for AI to learn about humans in a practical way. That is incredibly brilliant all by itself. Imagine if these techniques were applied to other fields. Architecture, sculpture, furniture design... the possibilities are incredible.
Stable in this context means that you can build your business around custom software that runs on that version of Ubuntu and have that software continue to run properly. For example, if you build an Intranet application that runs on a LTS version of Ubuntu, it doesn't matter if the database you're using goes through significant changes in it's newer versions that would break your application, because you can continue to use the older version for 5 years with support.
It's a GIGO type of situation. If you don't like it, go rape some tall and skinny women into pregnancy, and ensure the children survive to perpetuate the cycle. Otherwise, the tall and skinny mutation will be driven extinct. Go be a sweaty God, till the soil and sow some life.
I call bullshit on this article summary. The legislation specifically targets hand held electronic devices, and specifically excludes devices that are built directly into the vehicle. You are explicitly allowed take your hands off the wheel to adjust your radio, your climate control, your CB radio, etc. You are explicitly allowed to use your GPS if it is attached to your dash. You are allowed to drink a coffee, you are allowed to eat a chocolate bar, you are allowed to smoke a cigarette. Just don't smoke a cigarette with one hand and drink a coffee with the other while driving with your knee.
They've got instructions on how they did it in their own home, step by step, in addition to several other projects.
I'm going to start off with a nutrient film technique and look for plants that are immortal and have edible foliage. We've got a vine here, something from India I think, it kind of tastes like spinach and will grow forever if harsh temperatures don't kill it. I think I might start off with some sort of cheap non edible fish until I know the system is working reliably, then order in my Tilapia and switch over.
You attribute to the fishermen more control than they have. They're not in control of what swims in their nets, it's the very nature of fishing.
There are a growing number of people keeping chickens here in my city. Meanwhile, the legislation is such that they are not permitted to keep any whatsoever, so the cops and municipal workers are harassing people who wish to be more self-sustaining.
Personally, I'm about to start fish farming in my apartment. I've already got over 100 varieties of food bearing plants growing in here, and soon I'll have protein in addition to vegetables. Should remove fertilizer for my plants from the budget too once the kinks are worked out.
My girlfriend and daughter were both interested in getting chickens called Silkies as pets and eating the eggs. Apparently they're attractive enough that people actually enjoy having them around, docile enough to make good pets and lay good sized eggs, just not quite as often as typical bantam chickens.
Most people operate in an environment where other peoples opinions are more important than the facts. So, they make an effort to fit in and not telegraph things that might be controversial. People in IT, engineering, etc... they operate in an environment where the facts are everything, and the more controversial a fact, the more reward to the person who establishes it.
It's easy to fit in, and be normal. You spend a bit of money on clothes, you spend a bit of time learning about things that normal people care about, like sports and dancing, you shut up about things that require specialization in the field to understand, and you're done. Other people aren't psychic... they don't see into your weird little brain. If you spend a little time caring to fit in, you do.
When I turned 30, for a number of personal reasons, I actually made the effort for the first time in my life, and spent years afterwards wondering why I had been unwilling to do so for so long when the effort required was so small and the social rewards were so great. I chalk it up to naivety.
Software developers seem weird because they don't care to seem normal, they overestimate the effort required, and they underestimate the rewards. It's not that most people are genuinely normal and weirdos have to wear camouflage to fake it. It's that most people wear camouflage, and weirdos refuse to do so.
FTA: Going into the review, we desperately wanted to love this phone, but given the combination of a few poor hardware choices and an OS which outclasses the device it runs on, we can only recommend that you enter at your own risk.
That sounds completely different then my definition of lust.
They went into the review drunk on a Friday night. They sent the phone back to the manufacturer in a cab around 4 AM, and they wrote their findings when they woke up on Saturday afternoon. Haven't we all been there?
Isn't anyone bothered by government asking commentators to "sign a non-disclosure agreement" about a proposed law disturbing?
Anyone else suspect that it won't be much longer before we just ignore the dictates that come from central authority utterly? I'm looking forward to it, personally...
You could always offer the author(s) some money, and see if they'd relax the restriction.
Suppose Google were to use Embrace, Extend and Extinguish tactics on PHP by creating GPHP. They add a bunch of extensions to the language, polish it up, and never release it to the public, but they publish and document the specifications, and allow developers to use it in their cloud and they give them some free disc space and bandwidth. Not really that much different from what Microsoft tried to do to Java. Surely, there is a place for a license that meets the needs of those who develop software that operates in this unique sort of situation and prevents this sort of activity, is there not?
If you get a bunch of people together to jam, record everything, then sit around drinking beer and listening to the recording, laughing at the bad parts and gathering up the cool parts so you can polish them into something tight next time, that's just as creative as sitting around writing sheet music alone in a quiet room, if not more so.
Most of my favorite recorded songs have my voice and my harmonica in them. Every time I listen to them, I think of good times and old friends.
It doesn't matter if it goes unread. It should be there. The cover letter should go through the items they asked for one at a time, explaining that you demonstrated this quality while doing job X, leading to increased revenue, and you demonstrated this quality while doing job Y, leading to increased revenue, etc. Then, they can refer to your resume for more information when something stimulates their curiosity. Your resume should have everything in there, well organized enough that someone reading your cover letter can scan through your resume and find a relevant piece of information, then go back to the cover letter, leading to increased revenue. Personally, my resume is 7 pages long, and none of it fluff. Oh, and use the words "leading to increased revenue" or "leading to millions of dollars in won contracts" or "leading to a cost savings of x over a 12 month period", or whatnot in your resume and cover letter. That's what they really care about.
Sifting through that much footage to demonstrate something that such a large number of people had done would be a monumental task.
That presupposes that you need to do it all by yourself.
If you're guilty of rape, and you're trying to track down the 0.01% of the population who also commits rape and get them on your side, you're going to be doing it alone, and none of the other rapists are going to volunteer to help you or stand beside you.
However, if you're guilty of smoking pot, and you're trying to track down the other 40% of the population who also smokes pot and get them on your side, you're most likely not going to be doing it alone.
The reason why is that the other 40% of the population knows that they're caught. They probably looked at the camera footage that demonstrates them doing it and felt nervous about it. They have a substantial motive to help you, and in this hypothetical example, it should be very easy to find a large number of people and point them out.
The reason it should be easy is that we're talking about a crime that people commit all the time and a law that cannot practically be enforced, but exists only for its chilling effect on peoples behavior. Those are the kind of hypocritical laws that should be overturned, after all. The non-hypocritical laws, like murder, people committing those acts will be even more screwed by the circumstances, and that's entirely appropriate.
Now, out of millions of people that are smoking pot, perhaps Mr Pothead can only find a few hundred people with the time he has available. He makes their activities part of his defense, and he makes them aware that they are under the eyes of the law. So, now you've got a few hundred people involved. Those people have a motive to find even more people, so they will have more allies and a greater chance of overturning the law. This would then spiral out in an exponential fashion.
In the end, these people would have no choice but to become organized. So, what happens next?
Nothing. Look at "piracy" just about -everyone- either pirates or does something that ticks off media execs
That's anecdotal. That's not the same as proving it. If you're a pirate who got caught and I'm a pirate who believes I got away with it, I'm not going to go protest the unfairness of your incarceration because it would make me a target too, and there would only be the two of us there. I'd end up being incarcerated by my action. But if I knew I was already a target, I would go protest the unfairness of your incarceration, because it would make me no longer a target. It changes the motives of everyone involved.
Anyone who argues against the "slippery slope" argument for More Cameras == Bad should be shot. Now. So anybody can be challenged for anything now, just because somebody who's trying to win a chunk of money thinks they saw something wrong?
If the cameras were entirely public access and you were able to search the archives, and you got charged for a criminal act, but you were able to demonstrate that more than half the population also committed this criminal act, what would happen next?
You Brits should demand to have unfettered access to these cameras. It might have been possible to claim that this was not technologically feasible before, but not any longer. You paid for those cameras. You paid for that information to be gathered. You should be able to access it.
You're presuming that they want to nurture your potential and help you be all you can be. You're failing to look at things from their perspective, or from the perspective of your employer. You need to understand that they look at you the same way they look at a hammer. You are a tool. You are not the only tool, or the special tool. All the tools there are needed to get the job done, or they would be standing on the unemployment line.
Trivialities, lies and bullshit are the grease that allows all the parts to work in a single-minded fashion together towards an arbitrary goal rather than flying apart due to friction between people who disagree about the issues. If you can't work that way, you're useless as a tool, and therefore get to stand on the unemployment line.
It's pretty cut and dried. It stems from the concept of private property. Property laws are the foundation that gives legitimacy to your disenfranchisement. If that foundation did not exist, there would be no method by which to exclude your involvement. That would shift the focus of our attention. Instead of attempting to address the needs of arbitrary goals that come from owners of property, we would become more driven by real issues. In an issue driven world that doesn't disenfranchise people, there is substantial motive to recognize and nurture potential and help people be all they can be. Even if the best you can be is well enough informed to recognize a good advisor when you see one.
This ordering of ideas to suggest something while later being able to deny it is an elementary trick more worthy of a speed seduction practitioner than a software engineer. It is marketing.
That is a great line. I'm going to use that. Thank you.
They are related but not the same, they are describing different facets of the same issue. "Heat Death" refers to the ultimate state of entropy - that all the energy in the universe had moved from a high concentration to a low concentration, which results in a perfect equilibrium.
"Cold Death" happens long before heat death, it referse to the point when the expansion of the universe spreads the stars so far apart that new stars can not be re-formed from the gasses of dead stars/systems. Once all stars have consumed all their fuel and no new stars can be formed, life in the universe is no longer possible. That is the cold death of the universe.
Basically, heat death will happen hundreds of billions of years after cold death happens - the Universe will have reached a completely uniform 0 degrees kelvin and it will be completely dead.
If time is relative, and there are no stars, how long is a hundred billion years? Is it a long time, or a short time?
The "Heat Death" concept, the concept that the universe is infinite, and infinitely expanding... these just don't make sense. Gravity and Entropy both imply that the universe will not infinitely expand, but will contract back to the singularity and then expand outward again. Other theoreticians have called it "The Big Crunch"
If you think of time as another spatial dimension, matter and energy as being two forms of the same thing and the universe as a 4 dimensional "object" with a shape and a surface, you can envision the universe as a kind of soap bubble that has a surface tension, and the topology of that object implies gravitational forces and entropy. The "singularity" or "black hole" is the lowest common denominator state of the mass/energy of the universe.
Dark matter is also implied by such a model. I suspect dark matter to be other universes, other iterations of the singularity expanding and collapsing, similar to this one and attached to this one.
We are limited by our conception of time... we are stuck in the view that we are 3 dimensional objects that, over time, are transforming and translating within space. But time is an illusion. You, in your previous configuration, are not annihilated and replaced by this new configuration. You continue to exist at the moment of your birth and of your death just as you exist at this moment. This life of yours does not end in the sense that it is gone, but only in the sense that you are "over there". Your birth and death are a part of your surface, just like your skin is.
"God" aka "The Universe" really does not play dice. Causality exists, therefore, the future and the past abide. If the future was not connected to the past, then causality would not exist, and learning of any sort would not be possible. This isn't a new idea... this is what "Faith" was always telling you to recognize... that the universe has a shape, that causality exists, and that learning is possible. Calling the shape of the universe it's "Personality" is just a matter of terminology.
If you find this sort of thing confusing to think about, reading "Flatland" is a good way to jog the mind. Flatland and A Wrinkle in Time were the books I used to introduce these concepts to my daughter so I could explain how I look at the world to her... you can grab a copy of Flatland at Project Gutenberg.
Anything written by Rudy Rucker is good too. His book The Sex Sphere did more to make me interested in theoretical physics than any teacher I ever had.
Slashdot Mirror
They've leveraged a Facebook game as a way to generate massive data sets for AI to learn about humans in a practical way. That is incredibly brilliant all by itself. Imagine if these techniques were applied to other fields. Architecture, sculpture, furniture design... the possibilities are incredible.
Stable in this context means that you can build your business around custom software that runs on that version of Ubuntu and have that software continue to run properly. For example, if you build an Intranet application that runs on a LTS version of Ubuntu, it doesn't matter if the database you're using goes through significant changes in it's newer versions that would break your application, because you can continue to use the older version for 5 years with support.
It's a GIGO type of situation. If you don't like it, go rape some tall and skinny women into pregnancy, and ensure the children survive to perpetuate the cycle. Otherwise, the tall and skinny mutation will be driven extinct. Go be a sweaty God, till the soil and sow some life.
I call bullshit on this article summary. The legislation specifically targets hand held electronic devices, and specifically excludes devices that are built directly into the vehicle. You are explicitly allowed take your hands off the wheel to adjust your radio, your climate control, your CB radio, etc. You are explicitly allowed to use your GPS if it is attached to your dash. You are allowed to drink a coffee, you are allowed to eat a chocolate bar, you are allowed to smoke a cigarette. Just don't smoke a cigarette with one hand and drink a coffee with the other while driving with your knee.
I would suggest you look at the farm fountain project.
http://farmfountain.com/
They've got instructions on how they did it in their own home, step by step, in addition to several other projects.
I'm going to start off with a nutrient film technique and look for plants that are immortal and have edible foliage. We've got a vine here, something from India I think, it kind of tastes like spinach and will grow forever if harsh temperatures don't kill it. I think I might start off with some sort of cheap non edible fish until I know the system is working reliably, then order in my Tilapia and switch over.
You attribute to the fishermen more control than they have. They're not in control of what swims in their nets, it's the very nature of fishing.
There are a growing number of people keeping chickens here in my city. Meanwhile, the legislation is such that they are not permitted to keep any whatsoever, so the cops and municipal workers are harassing people who wish to be more self-sustaining.
Personally, I'm about to start fish farming in my apartment. I've already got over 100 varieties of food bearing plants growing in here, and soon I'll have protein in addition to vegetables. Should remove fertilizer for my plants from the budget too once the kinks are worked out.
My girlfriend and daughter were both interested in getting chickens called Silkies as pets and eating the eggs. Apparently they're attractive enough that people actually enjoy having them around, docile enough to make good pets and lay good sized eggs, just not quite as often as typical bantam chickens.
Most people operate in an environment where other peoples opinions are more important than the facts. So, they make an effort to fit in and not telegraph things that might be controversial. People in IT, engineering, etc... they operate in an environment where the facts are everything, and the more controversial a fact, the more reward to the person who establishes it.
It's easy to fit in, and be normal. You spend a bit of money on clothes, you spend a bit of time learning about things that normal people care about, like sports and dancing, you shut up about things that require specialization in the field to understand, and you're done. Other people aren't psychic... they don't see into your weird little brain. If you spend a little time caring to fit in, you do.
When I turned 30, for a number of personal reasons, I actually made the effort for the first time in my life, and spent years afterwards wondering why I had been unwilling to do so for so long when the effort required was so small and the social rewards were so great. I chalk it up to naivety.
Software developers seem weird because they don't care to seem normal, they overestimate the effort required, and they underestimate the rewards. It's not that most people are genuinely normal and weirdos have to wear camouflage to fake it. It's that most people wear camouflage, and weirdos refuse to do so.
FTA: Going into the review, we desperately wanted to love this phone, but given the combination of a few poor hardware choices and an OS which outclasses the device it runs on, we can only recommend that you enter at your own risk.
That sounds completely different then my definition of lust.
They went into the review drunk on a Friday night. They sent the phone back to the manufacturer in a cab around 4 AM, and they wrote their findings when they woke up on Saturday afternoon. Haven't we all been there?
Sounds to me like they're engaged in crimes against all humanity. What else is new?
Isn't anyone bothered by government asking commentators to "sign a non-disclosure agreement" about a proposed law disturbing?
Anyone else suspect that it won't be much longer before we just ignore the dictates that come from central authority utterly? I'm looking forward to it, personally...
You could always offer the author(s) some money, and see if they'd relax the restriction.
Suppose Google were to use Embrace, Extend and Extinguish tactics on PHP by creating GPHP. They add a bunch of extensions to the language, polish it up, and never release it to the public, but they publish and document the specifications, and allow developers to use it in their cloud and they give them some free disc space and bandwidth. Not really that much different from what Microsoft tried to do to Java. Surely, there is a place for a license that meets the needs of those who develop software that operates in this unique sort of situation and prevents this sort of activity, is there not?
If you get a bunch of people together to jam, record everything, then sit around drinking beer and listening to the recording, laughing at the bad parts and gathering up the cool parts so you can polish them into something tight next time, that's just as creative as sitting around writing sheet music alone in a quiet room, if not more so.
Most of my favorite recorded songs have my voice and my harmonica in them. Every time I listen to them, I think of good times and old friends.
Working in sin industries may affect your ability to be bondable, or to get security clearance. I've turned down a number of offers for that reason...
It doesn't matter if it goes unread. It should be there. The cover letter should go through the items they asked for one at a time, explaining that you demonstrated this quality while doing job X, leading to increased revenue, and you demonstrated this quality while doing job Y, leading to increased revenue, etc. Then, they can refer to your resume for more information when something stimulates their curiosity. Your resume should have everything in there, well organized enough that someone reading your cover letter can scan through your resume and find a relevant piece of information, then go back to the cover letter, leading to increased revenue. Personally, my resume is 7 pages long, and none of it fluff. Oh, and use the words "leading to increased revenue" or "leading to millions of dollars in won contracts" or "leading to a cost savings of x over a 12 month period", or whatnot in your resume and cover letter. That's what they really care about.
How did they win the War on Drugs?
You're confused. But that's to be expected... you're a jock, right?
First, the nerds send a monkey. Then they send a jock. Then they send the nerds after the safety checks have been passed.
They don't send the jock first because he's so highly esteemed. They send the jock for the same reason they send the monkey.
Sifting through that much footage to demonstrate something that such a large number of people had done would be a monumental task.
That presupposes that you need to do it all by yourself.
If you're guilty of rape, and you're trying to track down the 0.01% of the population who also commits rape and get them on your side, you're going to be doing it alone, and none of the other rapists are going to volunteer to help you or stand beside you.
However, if you're guilty of smoking pot, and you're trying to track down the other 40% of the population who also smokes pot and get them on your side, you're most likely not going to be doing it alone.
The reason why is that the other 40% of the population knows that they're caught. They probably looked at the camera footage that demonstrates them doing it and felt nervous about it. They have a substantial motive to help you, and in this hypothetical example, it should be very easy to find a large number of people and point them out.
The reason it should be easy is that we're talking about a crime that people commit all the time and a law that cannot practically be enforced, but exists only for its chilling effect on peoples behavior. Those are the kind of hypocritical laws that should be overturned, after all. The non-hypocritical laws, like murder, people committing those acts will be even more screwed by the circumstances, and that's entirely appropriate.
Now, out of millions of people that are smoking pot, perhaps Mr Pothead can only find a few hundred people with the time he has available. He makes their activities part of his defense, and he makes them aware that they are under the eyes of the law. So, now you've got a few hundred people involved. Those people have a motive to find even more people, so they will have more allies and a greater chance of overturning the law. This would then spiral out in an exponential fashion.
In the end, these people would have no choice but to become organized. So, what happens next?
Nothing. Look at "piracy" just about -everyone- either pirates or does something that ticks off media execs
That's anecdotal. That's not the same as proving it. If you're a pirate who got caught and I'm a pirate who believes I got away with it, I'm not going to go protest the unfairness of your incarceration because it would make me a target too, and there would only be the two of us there. I'd end up being incarcerated by my action. But if I knew I was already a target, I would go protest the unfairness of your incarceration, because it would make me no longer a target. It changes the motives of everyone involved.
Anyone who argues against the "slippery slope" argument for More Cameras == Bad should be shot. Now. So anybody can be challenged for anything now, just because somebody who's trying to win a chunk of money thinks they saw something wrong?
If the cameras were entirely public access and you were able to search the archives, and you got charged for a criminal act, but you were able to demonstrate that more than half the population also committed this criminal act, what would happen next?
You Brits should demand to have unfettered access to these cameras. It might have been possible to claim that this was not technologically feasible before, but not any longer. You paid for those cameras. You paid for that information to be gathered. You should be able to access it.
This is a good way to conceal the fact that the NASA moon landing was a propaganda piece.
You're presuming that they want to nurture your potential and help you be all you can be. You're failing to look at things from their perspective, or from the perspective of your employer. You need to understand that they look at you the same way they look at a hammer. You are a tool. You are not the only tool, or the special tool. All the tools there are needed to get the job done, or they would be standing on the unemployment line.
Trivialities, lies and bullshit are the grease that allows all the parts to work in a single-minded fashion together towards an arbitrary goal rather than flying apart due to friction between people who disagree about the issues. If you can't work that way, you're useless as a tool, and therefore get to stand on the unemployment line.
It's pretty cut and dried. It stems from the concept of private property. Property laws are the foundation that gives legitimacy to your disenfranchisement. If that foundation did not exist, there would be no method by which to exclude your involvement. That would shift the focus of our attention. Instead of attempting to address the needs of arbitrary goals that come from owners of property, we would become more driven by real issues. In an issue driven world that doesn't disenfranchise people, there is substantial motive to recognize and nurture potential and help people be all they can be. Even if the best you can be is well enough informed to recognize a good advisor when you see one.
This ordering of ideas to suggest something while later being able to deny it is an elementary trick more worthy of a speed seduction practitioner than a software engineer. It is marketing.
That is a great line. I'm going to use that. Thank you.
They are related but not the same, they are describing different facets of the same issue. "Heat Death" refers to the ultimate state of entropy - that all the energy in the universe had moved from a high concentration to a low concentration, which results in a perfect equilibrium.
"Cold Death" happens long before heat death, it referse to the point when the expansion of the universe spreads the stars so far apart that new stars can not be re-formed from the gasses of dead stars/systems. Once all stars have consumed all their fuel and no new stars can be formed, life in the universe is no longer possible. That is the cold death of the universe.
Basically, heat death will happen hundreds of billions of years after cold death happens - the Universe will have reached a completely uniform 0 degrees kelvin and it will be completely dead.
If time is relative, and there are no stars, how long is a hundred billion years? Is it a long time, or a short time?
The "Heat Death" concept, the concept that the universe is infinite, and infinitely expanding... these just don't make sense. Gravity and Entropy both imply that the universe will not infinitely expand, but will contract back to the singularity and then expand outward again. Other theoreticians have called it "The Big Crunch"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Crunch
If you think of time as another spatial dimension, matter and energy as being two forms of the same thing and the universe as a 4 dimensional "object" with a shape and a surface, you can envision the universe as a kind of soap bubble that has a surface tension, and the topology of that object implies gravitational forces and entropy. The "singularity" or "black hole" is the lowest common denominator state of the mass/energy of the universe.
Dark matter is also implied by such a model. I suspect dark matter to be other universes, other iterations of the singularity expanding and collapsing, similar to this one and attached to this one.
We are limited by our conception of time... we are stuck in the view that we are 3 dimensional objects that, over time, are transforming and translating within space. But time is an illusion. You, in your previous configuration, are not annihilated and replaced by this new configuration. You continue to exist at the moment of your birth and of your death just as you exist at this moment. This life of yours does not end in the sense that it is gone, but only in the sense that you are "over there". Your birth and death are a part of your surface, just like your skin is.
"God" aka "The Universe" really does not play dice. Causality exists, therefore, the future and the past abide. If the future was not connected to the past, then causality would not exist, and learning of any sort would not be possible. This isn't a new idea... this is what "Faith" was always telling you to recognize... that the universe has a shape, that causality exists, and that learning is possible. Calling the shape of the universe it's "Personality" is just a matter of terminology.
If you find this sort of thing confusing to think about, reading "Flatland" is a good way to jog the mind. Flatland and A Wrinkle in Time were the books I used to introduce these concepts to my daughter so I could explain how I look at the world to her... you can grab a copy of Flatland at Project Gutenberg.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/97
Anything written by Rudy Rucker is good too. His book The Sex Sphere did more to make me interested in theoretical physics than any teacher I ever had.