Ah. Now we're on the same wavelength! Yes, you are completely correct that RDF is the model in MVC pattern applied to XUL. Sometimes I get so caught up in a discipline that my definitions wonder. Makes perfect sense now.
I think we have a semantic (pun intented) mismatch here. Are you talking about model as in XML Infoset Model? If so, I never considered the model of XUL before. Got a link documenting it?
I ammend my post by noting Pavon's insightful post - indicating that users are not liable but baseless suits are still filed. So the same fear of being sued means the same result in my post.
Sorry for the correction. Ironic, since I just finished ranting about/. users, and here I don't know what I'm talking about!:-p
Microsoft just wants to make it harder for the little software developing companies and individuals.
It is a really stupid patent system when someone who buys a product in good faith is liable for the other person's mistakes. That's why the big companies - with lots of dough - are promising to fund the legal expendures of their customers. The threat of these kind of lawsuits haven't changed much in the last twenty years (and IANAL); however, the fear of them seems to be increasing. This is extortion insurance - in my outraged opinion.
If this becomes standard practice, then these guarantees to indenify users will cost the individual and small software company developers much more than the big guys. Imagine that the only reason people can't start a development factory are the (non life altering insurance) legal costs rather than physical constraints. That's f'''ed up!
I would say that XUL is more like HTML than RDF. However, you're right that Mozilla's framework has built-in support for querying RDF datastores (although primitive compared with Jena or Redland). In fact Mozilla internally represents bookmarks through RDF even though they are serialized in a pseudo-html syntax on disk (for compatibility reasons). The history, extension registry, and file system are also RDF-based. Mozilla may very well be the most widely distributed framework for accessing RDF datastores on the planet!
The statistics from Election Breakdown by IQ may be misleading since the standard deviations were not reported. Just another poorly interpreted poll. Sigh.:-/
There was once a football player who was teetering on the edge of academic eligibility. To help the poor guy with his physics test, the coach told him:
Remember this ryme, to get the power in a circuit: Twinkle twinkle little star, Power equals I squared R.
Well the school day before the exam, the football player also had a big game. He tackled alot of people and had a really good day. However, the next day he failed his test! The coach couldn't understand, so he asked the player if he remembered the ryme. The football player said:
Of course, coach: Twinkle twinkle star in the sky, Power equals R squared I!
it looks as if the network "learns", when really it's a system of springs settling into an equilibrium.
Well, training is basically the process of getting neural activity into some new local equilibrium from an old one. That's broadly how back-propagation and Kohonen-style networks work. I think what the researchers are striving to show is (among others) that real neural networks can behave simular to Kohonen-style or other self-organizing artificial networks. Some of the terminology seems to be from the related ANN field of computer science.
P.S. Please excuse my lousy grammar and spelling in this post and my previous post.
Re:One question...
on
Flying By Brain
·
· Score: 5, Informative
why didn't they try to crash the plane? What sort of positive/negative feedback did they use?
The second article stated that neurons were given information on the tilt of the airplane:
To control the simulated aircraft, the neurons first receive information from the computer about flight conditions: whether the plane is flying straight and level or is tilted to the left or to the right. The neurons then analyze the data and respond by sending signals to the plane's controls. Those signals alter the flight path and new information is sent to the neurons, creating a feedback system.
It seems that this experiment builds on earier research by DeMarse, Wagenaar, Blau, and Potter in 2001 called the the animat. It wondered in a box without goal-specific behavior. However, it also tended to specific patterns and states. That is a very readable article - I highly suggest you read it.
But why did the neurons want to stablize the aircraft? I couldn't find a paper on the aircraft experiment, but a second paper, "Removing some 'A' from AI: Embodied Cultured Networks" (by Bakkum, Shkolnik, Ben-Ary, Gamblen, DeMarse, and Potter, 2004) summarized another experiment where neurons were trained to keep a set distance from an object. The paper is the first article on the same page of publications as the first paper. It seems that the neural network responded nonlinearly - that is, it changed state from one behavior to another one - when the input stimulus frequency was adjusted (correct me if I'm wrong). So by changing the input stimulus frequency, they were able to train the network. I gather that the new experiment simply uses when certain "level = good, nonlevel = bad" stimuli. It's a long way off from Robocop II, but it is a start.
abatave shielding, cince you do not understand what he is talking about...
I know what ablative shielding is. Every space capsule used it. Tanks use it. I mentioned DS9 since the terms, "ablative armor" and "micrometeoroids," are common in Trek.
if the space ship can not take machine gun fire at it without damage, then it has no chance in interplanetary travel where you have to cross an asteroid belt
Didn't all of the probes and satellites sent beyond Mars travel through the astroid belt (and are still traveling through the Ort cloud)? They didn't seem to be damaged much.
Besides, I'd think that there would be more dust and other micrometeoroids around planets and in Lagrange points than in the interplantary regions of space. I am skeptical of this risk without evidence.
because you cant say "oops, got a problem, can you help?" nope.. one problem and you are 100% toasted.
Well, that argument applies to everything, really. One blown tire on the highway, and your car rolls or bike crashes. One mistake crossing the street and I'm roadkill. The best you can do is calculate the risks and prepare for the most likely senerios, but I am skeptical that the micrometeoroid density between the planets is risky.
Perhaps I am being a hostile student, but I ask for some studies or evidence before I accept your conclusion.
What are they looking at in creating particle or at least micrometeorite ablative shielding that can handle the increased velocity these hazards will bring with the increased speeds?
Life isn't like DS9 (ablative shielding? micrometeoroid impacts?). I wouldn't say spaceships need to be 100 times stronger - where did you get that number? I believe that scientists have a pretty good idea what kind of hazards are out there, although more work still needs to be done.
The first thing I'd do with a working model is launch a satallite toward mars with this engine. The amount and rate of dust impacts can be measured along radiation intensity and other hazard checks.
Insightful! I modified the (old) DataOwnership page on the Portland Pattern Repository's Wiki to include those other names. Could you read the changes, i.e. the first sentence, and make sure it is right (or correct it if wrong). Thanks in advance.
Let me explain again; I was a little unclear in my previous post. Don't get so upset!
Section 5 indicates that you can't redistribute derivative works based on the origional work because no law allows it. However, if some types of derivative are allowed to be redistribution are allowed by law for certain fair uses, then section 5 can't apply to those types of works.
In other words, the scope of the GPL applies to redistribution not explicitly allowed by law. When I said:
outside of "fair" uses allowed by law
I was referring to that scope, nothing more. How else can that section be interpreted?
Please don't assume that the GPL is written for US use only...
I didn't in my origional post; however, I did use US law as a specific example in my second post in this thread. I am sorry. This post corrects that error for any country with fair-use laws. In either case, it isn't a big deal. Don't get so excited!
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License.
This is partially incorrect. US law grants modification or distribution under fair use rights. It may be pedantic, but it is allowed.
You see, the program "spins" until CheckOKtoProceed() returns true. The alternative is a call to a Yield(), Wait() or Sleep() function that 1) blocks execution until some condition is satisfied, and 2) tries to yield control to some other pending process while that is happening.
Doh! That makes a lot of sense, as I used that patten (spinlocks, now in my vocabulary) alot for some small single-threaded applications. I try not to program that way now, for the reasons you listed. That's what I get for majoring in engineering-physics instead of computer science.
A mutex is a kind of lock that by agreement of its use allows only one such process to proceed.
So a mutex only allows one process to access its data and prevents access to other processes (or pauses their execution), right?
Your explanations were really concise and easy to follow. Thanks!:-)
Aren't they just being good citizens by offering up their patches for inclusion? You know, like that GPL thing says they should?
That's not what the GPL says they should do. The GPL specifies that, if they redistribute a program, or any other work, based on the source code of Linux outside of "fair" uses allowed by law, then that program or work must be licensed under the terms of the GPL as well. MontaVista could fork the kernel and provide their version of Linux as Montix under the GPL. Nothing says they have to cooperate with Linus Torvalds.
However, you are correct that being good "citizens" means that they offer their patches for inclusion. That deals with a separate issue involving the open-source community rather than the license.
Naturally, the robot will have a strong need for self preservation. So it will start to secure land, natural resources, labour, spare parts, factories, and so on, and build other robots and societies to fulfill these and other purposes.
Why wouldn't a robot that can think as well as humans (not just compute) possess other human qualities like emotions? I think I have a strong need for self preservation, and I am starting the process of securing land, natural resources, and spare parts. It's call getting a home and stocking the refrigerator, of course. Why do people always assume that intelligent robots would be so different from us? I think they would want to work with us as productive members of society, just like every other intelligent biological robot ever created (aka babies).
We will effectively be able to extend our own bodies using robotic technology...
Note that Worf tried this once. There was an accident and became paralysed. One mildly sucessful treatment involved relays transmitting signals to his muscles from the brain through electronic devices.
IME, KDE's (and some of GNOME's) preference applets are often confusing and occasionally even corrupt the settings files. Many times, it is much easier and safer just to change the XML files by hand! Gconf is just a front end to GNOME's XML configuration files.
but unlike Gnome recently, KDE still gives you all of the configuration options you could want to make the system your own
What do you mean "unlike Gnome"? In my experience, GNOME is mostly as customizable as KDE. Things are different and some things are harder to change, but at least they're stable (unlike say the 'remove only' options in Konqueror's toolbar).
IMHO, GNOME and KDE both need to work. But why choose one or the other? Why not use Kwin or Konqueror in GNOME, or how about gnome-panel or Metacity with KDE? Sometimes it feels like everyone associated with KDE or GNOME think their desktops are the greatest things since sliced bread. Little attacks - such as "foo unlike bar" when bar arguably is like foo - seems pretty petty to me.
Re:Say it with me now: H T M L
on
Gmail Adds Features
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
No one should advocate HTML mail - this is just crap, and the best way to inject all sorts of junk into e-mail. If a message isn't getting to you clearly in plain text e-mail, then the sender really needs to take a writing class. I think this.sig sums it up: (credit: Matthew Keller) "No one ever says, 'I can't read that ASCII E-mail you sent me.'"
Full HTML may be a bit much, but what about allowing parsing of the few XHTML core modules, like the text, hypertext, and list modules? This is basically just HTML without images, styles (except for the email reader's style sheet), or other multimedia. This would make it infinitely easier to quote other emails and to link to sites on the internet.
At the same time, robot searchability would be improved while the "crap" you dislike can't be transmitted easily. I gather that you don't object to the semantic data exchanged via HTML email, just the (usually poorly done) multimedia.
Finally, as XML uses UTF by default, languages that contain letters not found in the English alphabet can be exchanged. ASCII is arguably an anachronism in an age of global text transmission.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah. Now we're on the same wavelength! Yes, you are completely correct that RDF is the model in MVC pattern applied to XUL. Sometimes I get so caught up in a discipline that my definitions wonder. Makes perfect sense now.
I think we have a semantic (pun intented) mismatch here. Are you talking about model as in XML Infoset Model? If so, I never considered the model of XUL before. Got a link documenting it?
I ammend my post by noting Pavon's insightful post - indicating that users are not liable but baseless suits are still filed. So the same fear of being sued means the same result in my post.
Sorry for the correction. Ironic, since I just finished ranting about /. users, and here I don't know what I'm talking about! :-p
Microsoft just wants to make it harder for the little software developing companies and individuals.
It is a really stupid patent system when someone who buys a product in good faith is liable for the other person's mistakes. That's why the big companies - with lots of dough - are promising to fund the legal expendures of their customers. The threat of these kind of lawsuits haven't changed much in the last twenty years (and IANAL); however, the fear of them seems to be increasing. This is extortion insurance - in my outraged opinion.
If this becomes standard practice, then these guarantees to indenify users will cost the individual and small software company developers much more than the big guys. Imagine that the only reason people can't start a development factory are the (non life altering insurance) legal costs rather than physical constraints. That's f'''ed up!
I would say that XUL is more like HTML than RDF. However, you're right that Mozilla's framework has built-in support for querying RDF datastores (although primitive compared with Jena or Redland). In fact Mozilla internally represents bookmarks through RDF even though they are serialized in a pseudo-html syntax on disk (for compatibility reasons). The history, extension registry, and file system are also RDF-based. Mozilla may very well be the most widely distributed framework for accessing RDF datastores on the planet!
Ya, but most of it isn't arriving until next Tuesday. :-P
The statistics from Election Breakdown by IQ may be misleading since the standard deviations were not reported. Just another poorly interpreted poll. Sigh. :-/
Thank you! I should have seen that.
Do you have a reference? I'm not taking anything away from you... I'd just like to see the relevent bug reports.
There was once a football player who was teetering on the edge of academic eligibility. To help the poor guy with his physics test, the coach told him:
Remember this ryme, to get the power in a circuit:
Twinkle twinkle little star,
Power equals I squared R.
Well the school day before the exam, the football player also had a big game. He tackled alot of people and had a really good day. However, the next day he failed his test! The coach couldn't understand, so he asked the player if he remembered the ryme. The football player said:
Of course, coach:
Twinkle twinkle star in the sky,
Power equals R squared I!
There's a moral in there somewhere. :-)
Well, training is basically the process of getting neural activity into some new local equilibrium from an old one. That's broadly how back-propagation and Kohonen-style networks work. I think what the researchers are striving to show is (among others) that real neural networks can behave simular to Kohonen-style or other self-organizing artificial networks. Some of the terminology seems to be from the related ANN field of computer science.
P.S. Please excuse my lousy grammar and spelling in this post and my previous post.
The second article stated that neurons were given information on the tilt of the airplane:
It seems that this experiment builds on earier research by DeMarse, Wagenaar, Blau, and Potter in 2001 called the the animat. It wondered in a box without goal-specific behavior. However, it also tended to specific patterns and states. That is a very readable article - I highly suggest you read it.
But why did the neurons want to stablize the aircraft? I couldn't find a paper on the aircraft experiment, but a second paper, "Removing some 'A' from AI: Embodied Cultured Networks" (by Bakkum, Shkolnik, Ben-Ary, Gamblen, DeMarse, and Potter, 2004) summarized another experiment where neurons were trained to keep a set distance from an object. The paper is the first article on the same page of publications as the first paper. It seems that the neural network responded nonlinearly - that is, it changed state from one behavior to another one - when the input stimulus frequency was adjusted (correct me if I'm wrong). So by changing the input stimulus frequency, they were able to train the network. I gather that the new experiment simply uses when certain "level = good, nonlevel = bad" stimuli. It's a long way off from Robocop II, but it is a start.
Sorry, just having a bad week. I apologize.
I know what ablative shielding is. Every space capsule used it. Tanks use it. I mentioned DS9 since the terms, "ablative armor" and "micrometeoroids," are common in Trek.
Didn't all of the probes and satellites sent beyond Mars travel through the astroid belt (and are still traveling through the Ort cloud)? They didn't seem to be damaged much.
Besides, I'd think that there would be more dust and other micrometeoroids around planets and in Lagrange points than in the interplantary regions of space. I am skeptical of this risk without evidence.
Well, that argument applies to everything, really. One blown tire on the highway, and your car rolls or bike crashes. One mistake crossing the street and I'm roadkill. The best you can do is calculate the risks and prepare for the most likely senerios, but I am skeptical that the micrometeoroid density between the planets is risky.
Perhaps I am being a hostile student, but I ask for some studies or evidence before I accept your conclusion.
Life isn't like DS9 (ablative shielding? micrometeoroid impacts?). I wouldn't say spaceships need to be 100 times stronger - where did you get that number? I believe that scientists have a pretty good idea what kind of hazards are out there, although more work still needs to be done.
The first thing I'd do with a working model is launch a satallite toward mars with this engine. The amount and rate of dust impacts can be measured along radiation intensity and other hazard checks.
Insightful! I modified the (old) DataOwnership page on the Portland Pattern Repository's Wiki to include those other names. Could you read the changes, i.e. the first sentence, and make sure it is right (or correct it if wrong). Thanks in advance.
Let me explain again; I was a little unclear in my previous post. Don't get so upset!
Section 5 indicates that you can't redistribute derivative works based on the origional work because no law allows it. However, if some types of derivative are allowed to be redistribution are allowed by law for certain fair uses, then section 5 can't apply to those types of works.
In other words, the scope of the GPL applies to redistribution not explicitly allowed by law. When I said:
I was referring to that scope, nothing more. How else can that section be interpreted?
I didn't in my origional post; however, I did use US law as a specific example in my second post in this thread. I am sorry. This post corrects that error for any country with fair-use laws. In either case, it isn't a big deal. Don't get so excited!
This is partially incorrect. US law grants modification or distribution under fair use rights. It may be pedantic, but it is allowed.
Doh! That makes a lot of sense, as I used that patten (spinlocks, now in my vocabulary) alot for some small single-threaded applications. I try not to program that way now, for the reasons you listed. That's what I get for majoring in engineering-physics instead of computer science.
So a mutex only allows one process to access its data and prevents access to other processes (or pauses their execution), right?
Your explanations were really concise and easy to follow. Thanks! :-)
Could you explain what a spinlock is? Also, what is a non-mutex lock? Please excuse my ignorance.
That's not what the GPL says they should do. The GPL specifies that, if they redistribute a program, or any other work, based on the source code of Linux outside of "fair" uses allowed by law, then that program or work must be licensed under the terms of the GPL as well. MontaVista could fork the kernel and provide their version of Linux as Montix under the GPL. Nothing says they have to cooperate with Linus Torvalds.
However, you are correct that being good "citizens" means that they offer their patches for inclusion. That deals with a separate issue involving the open-source community rather than the license.
Why wouldn't a robot that can think as well as humans (not just compute) possess other human qualities like emotions? I think I have a strong need for self preservation, and I am starting the process of securing land, natural resources, and spare parts. It's call getting a home and stocking the refrigerator, of course. Why do people always assume that intelligent robots would be so different from us? I think they would want to work with us as productive members of society, just like every other intelligent biological robot ever created (aka babies).
Note that Worf tried this once. There was an accident and became paralysed. One mildly sucessful treatment involved relays transmitting signals to his muscles from the brain through electronic devices.
IME, KDE's (and some of GNOME's) preference applets are often confusing and occasionally even corrupt the settings files. Many times, it is much easier and safer just to change the XML files by hand! Gconf is just a front end to GNOME's XML configuration files.
What do you mean "unlike Gnome"? In my experience, GNOME is mostly as customizable as KDE. Things are different and some things are harder to change, but at least they're stable (unlike say the 'remove only' options in Konqueror's toolbar).
IMHO, GNOME and KDE both need to work. But why choose one or the other? Why not use Kwin or Konqueror in GNOME, or how about gnome-panel or Metacity with KDE? Sometimes it feels like everyone associated with KDE or GNOME think their desktops are the greatest things since sliced bread. Little attacks - such as "foo unlike bar" when bar arguably is like foo - seems pretty petty to me.
Full HTML may be a bit much, but what about allowing parsing of the few XHTML core modules, like the text, hypertext, and list modules? This is basically just HTML without images, styles (except for the email reader's style sheet), or other multimedia. This would make it infinitely easier to quote other emails and to link to sites on the internet.
At the same time, robot searchability would be improved while the "crap" you dislike can't be transmitted easily. I gather that you don't object to the semantic data exchanged via HTML email, just the (usually poorly done) multimedia.
Finally, as XML uses UTF by default, languages that contain letters not found in the English alphabet can be exchanged. ASCII is arguably an anachronism in an age of global text transmission.