I'll be impressed when it sounds better than a mediocre high-school orchestra player. I was actually surprised at how poor of a performance it gave--the idea is neat, but I expected them to have something more polished before putting it in front of an audience.
If a trade can complete in milliseconds, then why not do it?
For the same reason that we don't always drive as fast as our cars can go. The functional market is guided by human action, and the pace of transactions should be kept at a speed that humans can intelligently react to. It's a system that historically relied and to some extent still relies on a mass of people shouting on a trade floor, and they all rely on orders coming from people with information and insight, hopefully reliable and true. It's an organic process, really, and injecting speedy, stupid silicon into its heart is bound to screw things up.
It's not the millisecond trade that is the problem, the advent of fast networking has actually opened up the markets to anyone who wants to invest; it's the automated systems that follow their pre-programmed routines faster than we can keep up with them. These tend to shift the focus away from reacting to the actions of a company and our predictions of how that will affect its worth, toward a simple numbers game, which is after all the only thing computers are really good at: if sharePrice minPrice then buy standardAmount.
It's entirely possible that the stock market will evolve to be an AI battleground as you suggest, but I don't think that's a good thing--again, because ideally the market runs on information, which computers are notoriously bad at interpreting. I'd rather not have my finances wiped out by a bad program.
Anything but subtle, a commercial paid for by America Future Fund, a Des Moines, Iowa-based organization, strongly suggests that Republican senatorial front-runner Rand Paul is crazy.
Methinks you weren't reading that bit carefully, since it's the only reference to Paul in that article.
Is that the cause of the flash? Thank you, I had been wondering about that--my bedside lamp does the same thing, and although it's a flourescent it too has a plastic casing. Here I was starting to think I was some kind of synaesthete.
or someone with many years of education, who tries to rely on handed down wisdom from people much smarter than him?
This would be preferable to the former. Unfortunately, in reality it usually denotes someone who receives all of his "wisdom" from a filtered academic environment that is more concerned with making reality fit a particular system than handling it as-is, in all of its shifting complexity. Remember, just about everybody involved in the financial meltdown was college-educated--their models told them there would be no crash.
I don't want either one of those types in charge of things. What happened to the well-rounded individual who used to reside between the extremes and could think for himself?
Gold never went over $500 an ounce in 1982. That's $1096 today, and gold's current price is $1202. That's almost a 10% gain.
The equivalent of $2000 in today's dollars in 1982, the price you claim gold reached, was $911.59, a much higher figure than what the data shows. This can be verified by looking at current and historical gold prices and using an inflation calculator, which is exactly what I did.
They also have (had? haven't tried it recently) a great physical CD swapping service which probably factors into Apple's decision to shut them down. Basically, you could list all the CDs you own, and all the CDs you wanted. You'd get requests to send out (using provided envelopes) ones that you own with no penalty for denying in case it's one you wanted to keep. Any time you received a CD, you were charged around $1.50, which covered postage and a small fee to keep Lala running.
Although I didn't make much use of it when I had the chance, it seemed a great way to get rid of unwanted CDs, provided some idiot out there actually listens to that crap, and VERY cheaply collect new ones. I got a few CDs there that I would have had to pay over $20 to import otherwise. It was a great idea; it's a shame they never got the exposure they needed to become a big player.
There is of course much truth to that. Yet I hear many smokers say "I don't even enjoy it anymore, I just feel shitty without it." That's not me. In fact I've gone on week-long trips where I could not smoke and had no problem doing so, no cravings or anything. Perhaps I'm just not to that point yet, or perhaps the nicotine affects different people differently.
As someone who got hooked on ciggies about six years ago and actually enjoys the habit, news like this is promising to me. I hope the science behind this vaccine can be generalized to other forms of cancer, including lung cancer. I understand the reasons for banning smoking all over the place for reasons other than health, but it would be great to have advances in health technology to negate the effects of smoking. Since I have yet to quit and am not motivated to try again, I'm kind of banking on it.
While the world has become a much smaller place thanks to technology, that does not mean some future person won't attempt (and succeed) in utilizing that technology.
Not only that, but there is also a very real possibility that our tech will decline some time in the future. We might hit a rough patch in the next 40 years as oil runs out--it's not only important as a fuel source but in making plastics and paving roads. Any number of disasters could wipe out large swathes of humanity and some amount of practical knowledge will be taken with them.
Who knows what things will look like 10,000 or even 1,000 years from now? I would be willing to believe that another Alexander is not only possible but pretty likely given a long enough time frame.
No, the point of this competition is to try to get an AI to make decent levels. IEEE is not Nintendo, and nobody is saying or believes that the winner of this contest is going to be the source of the next Mario game. Don't worry! I'm sure they chose Mario only because they can reasonably expect lots of people to expect good levels, so they'll get a lot of good feedback.
Yeah, that was Bionic Commando for the NES. This is the first time I've seen that game disparaged, though. I know it was one of my favorites, and it's in a lot of people's Top 10 lists. It was a pretty long game given the lack of saves or passwords, but it could be beaten in under 4 hours. The only limitation on movement was that you couldn't jump, and given that jumping in platformers means a 14-foot leap, it seemed pretty realistic to me. The levels were masterfully designed, and once you get proficient with the grappling hook the gameplay really opens up.
Not every game is for everyone, naturally, but I recommend giving that one another spin on an emulator, which will let you save and play in bite-size chunks. An FAQ can be helpful too, since the one really annoying thing about the game is not knowing what communicator to bring to which level, resulting in "GA GA GA..." instead of the intel you need.
Plus, you fight a Hitler lookalike and his head asplodes. Hard to beat that.
In reality, the bunker scene depicts Hitler reacting furiously to the news that the war is lost as Soviet troops close in on Berlin. The internet parody leaves the video and audio intact, but replaces the subtitles with Hitler reacting to ridiculous every day events, like having his xBox live account canceled, or finding out that Michael Jackson died.
I don't see how this qualifies as parody when the only thing changed is the subtitle text. The clips are humorous when done well, and an argument might be made for fair use, but this is not parody. Parody requires imitation, whereas this is closer to annotation.
Could we please have three fewer iPad stories per day? It's new and shiny, I get it, but there's really only so much you can write about it. Maybe once some great apps come out it'll be worth mentioning, but until then can you refrain from rehashing all the Apple fluff? I'm more interested in how their gear works than the "philosophy" behind the business, and while I love OS X the iPad and iPhone OS has left me underwhelmed. I must not be the only one since it's the least talked-about part of the package.
He's a chess fan and mentions chess in the article, stating that it is not art.
Santiago concedes that chess, football, baseball and even mah jong cannot be art, however elegant their rules. I agree. But of course that depends on the definition of art. She says the most articulate definition of art she's found is the one in Wikipedia: "Art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions." This is an intriguing definition, although as a chess player I might argue that my game fits the definition.
Which is interesting. Someone else wrote that a run through a FarCry level could qualify as a performance art, and if pressed he might have to agree--given that definition, which is so abstract as to be meaningless. Might my bedroom furniture arrangement, deliberately arranged to appeal to the senses, qualify for placement in MOMA?
Slashdot Mirror
I'll be impressed when it sounds better than a mediocre high-school orchestra player. I was actually surprised at how poor of a performance it gave--the idea is neat, but I expected them to have something more polished before putting it in front of an audience.
theodp in this post quotes from a book entitled "The Dumbing-Down of Programming."
Not content with infantilizing the end user, the purveyors of point-and-click seem determined to infantilize the programmer as well.
Judging by this story submission, it turns out he's for it.
If a trade can complete in milliseconds, then why not do it?
For the same reason that we don't always drive as fast as our cars can go. The functional market is guided by human action, and the pace of transactions should be kept at a speed that humans can intelligently react to. It's a system that historically relied and to some extent still relies on a mass of people shouting on a trade floor, and they all rely on orders coming from people with information and insight, hopefully reliable and true. It's an organic process, really, and injecting speedy, stupid silicon into its heart is bound to screw things up.
It's not the millisecond trade that is the problem, the advent of fast networking has actually opened up the markets to anyone who wants to invest; it's the automated systems that follow their pre-programmed routines faster than we can keep up with them. These tend to shift the focus away from reacting to the actions of a company and our predictions of how that will affect its worth, toward a simple numbers game, which is after all the only thing computers are really good at: if sharePrice minPrice then buy standardAmount.
It's entirely possible that the stock market will evolve to be an AI battleground as you suggest, but I don't think that's a good thing--again, because ideally the market runs on information, which computers are notoriously bad at interpreting. I'd rather not have my finances wiped out by a bad program.
Bad form to reply to my own post, but to end all doubt about the context of the commercial in question, here it is.
Anything but subtle, a commercial paid for by America Future Fund, a Des Moines, Iowa-based organization, strongly suggests that Republican senatorial front-runner Rand Paul is crazy.
Methinks you weren't reading that bit carefully, since it's the only reference to Paul in that article.
"But again, we don't do it so well ourselves, do we?"
Hey, are you being sarcastic!?
Maybe he was referring to the researchers at the University of North Carolina?
Is that the cause of the flash? Thank you, I had been wondering about that--my bedside lamp does the same thing, and although it's a flourescent it too has a plastic casing. Here I was starting to think I was some kind of synaesthete.
(Synaesthete...what a funny-tasting word.)
-f
Someone has to balance out the Hallelujah Chorus hearers =)
or someone with many years of education, who tries to rely on handed down wisdom from people much smarter than him?
This would be preferable to the former. Unfortunately, in reality it usually denotes someone who receives all of his "wisdom" from a filtered academic environment that is more concerned with making reality fit a particular system than handling it as-is, in all of its shifting complexity. Remember, just about everybody involved in the financial meltdown was college-educated--their models told them there would be no crash.
I don't want either one of those types in charge of things. What happened to the well-rounded individual who used to reside between the extremes and could think for himself?
Gold never went over $500 an ounce in 1982. That's $1096 today, and gold's current price is $1202. That's almost a 10% gain.
The equivalent of $2000 in today's dollars in 1982, the price you claim gold reached, was $911.59, a much higher figure than what the data shows. This can be verified by looking at current and historical gold prices and using an inflation calculator, which is exactly what I did.
What would prompt you to make up other numbers?
They also have (had? haven't tried it recently) a great physical CD swapping service which probably factors into Apple's decision to shut them down. Basically, you could list all the CDs you own, and all the CDs you wanted. You'd get requests to send out (using provided envelopes) ones that you own with no penalty for denying in case it's one you wanted to keep. Any time you received a CD, you were charged around $1.50, which covered postage and a small fee to keep Lala running.
Although I didn't make much use of it when I had the chance, it seemed a great way to get rid of unwanted CDs, provided some idiot out there actually listens to that crap, and VERY cheaply collect new ones. I got a few CDs there that I would have had to pay over $20 to import otherwise. It was a great idea; it's a shame they never got the exposure they needed to become a big player.
There is of course much truth to that. Yet I hear many smokers say "I don't even enjoy it anymore, I just feel shitty without it." That's not me. In fact I've gone on week-long trips where I could not smoke and had no problem doing so, no cravings or anything. Perhaps I'm just not to that point yet, or perhaps the nicotine affects different people differently.
Enjoy!
Thank you, I will. =)
As someone who got hooked on ciggies about six years ago and actually enjoys the habit, news like this is promising to me. I hope the science behind this vaccine can be generalized to other forms of cancer, including lung cancer. I understand the reasons for banning smoking all over the place for reasons other than health, but it would be great to have advances in health technology to negate the effects of smoking. Since I have yet to quit and am not motivated to try again, I'm kind of banking on it.
While the world has become a much smaller place thanks to technology, that does not mean some future person won't attempt (and succeed) in utilizing that technology.
Not only that, but there is also a very real possibility that our tech will decline some time in the future. We might hit a rough patch in the next 40 years as oil runs out--it's not only important as a fuel source but in making plastics and paving roads. Any number of disasters could wipe out large swathes of humanity and some amount of practical knowledge will be taken with them.
Who knows what things will look like 10,000 or even 1,000 years from now? I would be willing to believe that another Alexander is not only possible but pretty likely given a long enough time frame.
DK's name comes from a bad translation of "stupid monkey."
No, the point of this competition is to try to get an AI to make decent levels. IEEE is not Nintendo, and nobody is saying or believes that the winner of this contest is going to be the source of the next Mario game. Don't worry! I'm sure they chose Mario only because they can reasonably expect lots of people to expect good levels, so they'll get a lot of good feedback.
So every game should be a twitch game? I reject that hypothesis outright.
Yeah, that was Bionic Commando for the NES. This is the first time I've seen that game disparaged, though. I know it was one of my favorites, and it's in a lot of people's Top 10 lists. It was a pretty long game given the lack of saves or passwords, but it could be beaten in under 4 hours. The only limitation on movement was that you couldn't jump, and given that jumping in platformers means a 14-foot leap, it seemed pretty realistic to me. The levels were masterfully designed, and once you get proficient with the grappling hook the gameplay really opens up.
Not every game is for everyone, naturally, but I recommend giving that one another spin on an emulator, which will let you save and play in bite-size chunks. An FAQ can be helpful too, since the one really annoying thing about the game is not knowing what communicator to bring to which level, resulting in "GA GA GA..." instead of the intel you need.
Plus, you fight a Hitler lookalike and his head asplodes. Hard to beat that.
In reality, the bunker scene depicts Hitler reacting furiously to the news that the war is lost as Soviet troops close in on Berlin. The internet parody leaves the video and audio intact, but replaces the subtitles with Hitler reacting to ridiculous every day events, like having his xBox live account canceled, or finding out that Michael Jackson died.
I don't see how this qualifies as parody when the only thing changed is the subtitle text. The clips are humorous when done well, and an argument might be made for fair use, but this is not parody. Parody requires imitation, whereas this is closer to annotation.
You're right; I recant my statement. I began walking by an Apple store today and saw one in the window. I'm still standing in front of it.
sent from my iPhone
I want to be able to watch in a direction, run in another and shoot in another one.
Well I'm glad to see that there's a push to move away from realism, anyway.
Could we please have three fewer iPad stories per day? It's new and shiny, I get it, but there's really only so much you can write about it. Maybe once some great apps come out it'll be worth mentioning, but until then can you refrain from rehashing all the Apple fluff? I'm more interested in how their gear works than the "philosophy" behind the business, and while I love OS X the iPad and iPhone OS has left me underwhelmed. I must not be the only one since it's the least talked-about part of the package.
He's a chess fan and mentions chess in the article, stating that it is not art.
Santiago concedes that chess, football, baseball and even mah jong cannot be art, however elegant their rules. I agree. But of course that depends on the definition of art. She says the most articulate definition of art she's found is the one in Wikipedia: "Art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions." This is an intriguing definition, although as a chess player I might argue that my game fits the definition.
Which is interesting. Someone else wrote that a run through a FarCry level could qualify as a performance art, and if pressed he might have to agree--given that definition, which is so abstract as to be meaningless. Might my bedroom furniture arrangement, deliberately arranged to appeal to the senses, qualify for placement in MOMA?
If you take that train of thought to its logical destination, everything is art, which makes the term utterly devoid of meaning.