Physics is getting very statistical nowadays too; sometimes you have too squint your eyes and tilt your head just right to see some of the results from high-energy physics as well.
Yeah, I suppose that's true.
Which just goes to emphasize my point -- a lot of slashdotters seem to think all science should be like the physics experiments I described where everything is nice and clean and everything is 100% repeatable, and that if it's not it can't be science. But that's just wishful thinking.
So, you don't think global warming could possibly affect our food supplies vis-a-vis midwest farming and all those fish you didn't care about going extinct?
Okay, glad you're so sure of that!
Also good to know that a disaster in your eyes is hundreds of millions to a couple billion people killed in one day.
This happens when you trust people who make money when you don't feel well. When will people learn that doctors do not profit from you being healthy? Neither do pharmaceutical companies. Taking medicine in the belief that whoever gave it to you wanted you to feel better is very naive.
Yeah, that's why my doctor has encouraged me to eat better and exercise so that I don't have to take anti-cholesterol or blood pressure medication.
It might not be fair, but that doesn't change the fact that physics isn't a better, more scientific science.
Huh?
I wasn't saying anything like "physics is better" or "physics is more science-y".
I was saying that by its very nature it is easier to reproduce results in physics experiments. Anyone can reproduce the Michelson-Morley or Young Double Slit experiments or measure the Gravitational Constant or the permittivity of free space or the diffraction index of air and get the exact same answer as everyone else to the limits of their measuring devices.
It's just a practical difference between what the sciences are studying, not their status as sciences.
Admittedly, my view of what disastrous is probably starkly differs from most people. I don't see species extinction as a problem (untold numbers of species have gone extinct in the history of our planet), ice ages come and go, populations wax and wane (even human populations) for various reasons. Where is the real disaster?
Well gee if you don't see any problem with the human population "waning" due to starvation and flooding of the coastal areas where the majority of the world's population lives, then I guess there's probably nothing that will happen from GW that you would consider a disaster.
Would the extinction of the human race be a disaster? Not that global warming will cause it. I'm just wondering. Would a repeat of the K-T Event be considered a disaster? I mean some humans might survive that. So, problem or no?
This is precisely why in science, real science, we have the scientific method which requires that experiments/studies etc. be repeatable. All it would take is for these fraudulent claims to be tested and it is over for the fools who tried to usurp the system.
Well on the one hand, not all science is physics. It can be very difficult and expensive to conduct a medical study, and repeatability is to some extent hampered by a thousand uncontrolled variables. Grams and electron volts don't vary, but people (and all biological systems) do and so even if you're picking a proper sample population that is statistically meaningful, it is nevertheless a different population than was used in the other study. Not to say that repeatability is impossible, or that a valid study's results should be completely at odds with a repeat of the study. Just that it is really not so easy as repeating an experiment and getting the exact same answer. So don't be too surprised that nobody's first reaction to seeing the study in a journal was "We need to duplicate these results right now!"
On the other hand, it was a different study that helped show that the original study was bad.
The problem is that we already had a middle ground and then dumped it. The middle ground was that websites have non-invasive, relevant ads. I wouldn't go out of my way to block Google text ads, or even non-flashy image ads. But in the inevitable quest to maximize revenues, we got distracting ads, Flash ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, page-peels, random ads disguised as links that pop up when you mouse-over them, and other crazy stuff. We went from 2 ads on a page of content to 2 paragraphs on a page of ads.
Oh no, the 'middle ground' of Google text ads came well after advertisement escalation had reached the point of flashing animated gifs, flash ads, and every form of javascript abuse imaginable. Net advertisers were already engaged in "total war" before Google came around. Google text ads were a total breath of fresh air in the middle of that shitstorm, not a 'middle ground' abandoned.
Not that this really changes the tragedy of the situation.
BTW I don't use adblock. Flashblock and noscript are sufficient for me because all I really want to do is make sure nothing that is going to eat my cpu or fuck with my UI will come up, and I'm good enough and mentally blocking out other forms of ads that they don't bother me. If they're too obnoxious, like the seizure-inducing gifs, then I just leave that fucking site asap and never return.
I admit I am not their target audeince, and I can see how OpenAL is sufficient for videogame developers, but it really is nothing more than sufficient, and unlike OpenGL, which universal enough that it can be used in system and productivity software, on computers, phones, and in renderfarms on everything from calendar software to animated movies, OpenAL is strictly for videogames only.
Um, yeah. I have only used it sparingly, but it has always been my understanding that OpenAL was a library for doing spatial audio, in particular for 3D games. I never got the impression that it was supposed to just be an arbitrary audio api. I never got the impression that it was supposed to be for anyone who wasn't specifically interested in spatial audio.
I mean there are plenty of other cross-platform sound libraries.
Is OpenAL seriously advertising itself as a general-purpose sound library akin to OpenGL these days? Is it suffering from feature/scope creep? Or is this just a case of picking the wrong tool for the job based on an understandable confusion regarding the OpenFoo nomenclature?
The difference in quality you saw was due to the LCD panel, not the backlight. There's a very wide range of quality in LCD panels, and the make of the display does not necessarily indicate the quality.
I highly, highly doubt that. Not that the quality varies, but that it could account for this difference. I have never seen an LCD anywhere that had this kind of contrast. Not even close. Of the dozens of other panels there and at the other places I've seen since have matched the LED-LCDs for contrast, no matter the manufacturer nor model. I've seen LCD panel quality variance. It does not account for this difference.
Even good LCD panels have nowhere near enough dynamic range to be properly called "HDR", let alone a 5 million to one contrast ratio.
Well like I said elsewhere I think that 5mil-to-one is bullshit. But yes it's true that even good LCD panels don't have that great a ratio. These had much better contrast than any traditional LCD is capable of.
Try associating some of those quotes to dates first of all. Shay's rebellion happened before the signing of the constitution, and all of the work Lincoln and others put into that document to end the likely needs of armed rebellions were not available in Massachusetts at that time.
Yes, the U.S. was under the Articles of Confederation and were flawed but not undemocratic. At no point did Jefferson indicate that his repeated statements about the importance of armed resistance was pending the passing of the Constitution at which point they would be obviated. In fact it was in that very letter (which you should really read) that he was complaining about the proposed Constitution, specifically about the power and lengthy term of the judiciary. Oh but I'm sure what he really meant was "Once this constitution is passed, government will be perfect and the people will never need to engage in violent struggle for their freedom again."
Also, it's JEFFERSON not LINCOLN. For fucks sake.
This quote alone, spoken BEFORE the rebellion in MA in 1776, makes no mention of ARMED rebellion, nor do most of his quotes stating his support of rebellion, only that the people require the power to unseat their government.
In 1776, there was no need to specify "armed", even though at times HE DID. The reason is because "rebellion" and "revolution" were automatically tied up in the notion of The Revolution, i.e. the ARMED rebellion. So yes, you can find times he did not explicitly say "armed". If you think that means not armed, you're fooling yourself because the times he mentioned both rebellion and arms separately but in relation to one another demonstrates that the two concepts were linked to him. The word itself implied armed. The precious few exceptions that existed at that time required explicitly stating that it wasn't violent, though even the "Bloodless Revolution" still involved armed forces (and armed conflict).
And nevertheless, Jefferson did not believe that democratic institutions on their own would mean the government never went against the people. He even said so in that letter you didn't read.
This notion you have, that Jefferson's blatant support for the right of the people to rebel did not include arms, is wrong, stupid, ahistorical, and basically some crap you made up to support your pre-conceived notions. You really should do more than just click the links I gave you and look at dates. Read the man's writing. He often spoke on the subject, and only abject ignorance could make you so unaware of his meaning since he was quite explicit. Yes you can cherry pick quotes that if not considered in context don't necessarily imply arm revolt. Then there are quotes which in context or not in context explicitly tie together the notion of arms and rebellion against democratic governments. Ergo anyone concerned with the truth would realize that he supported the concept of a people capable of armed rebellion, even if that was not the only method he considered.
It's an existence proof. To support your thesis, you would have to show that Jefferson never explicitly supported armed rebellion against democratic governments, and you absolutely cannot. You can only ignore them and then butcher what's left.
I mean it's great that you don't think the people should have the right to have guns for purposes of armed resistance. I'm not saying you can't have that opinion. I'm saying don't spout bullshit pretending that Jefferson agreed with you. Be honest, and say you disagree with him. His stance is blatantly clear, and the contortions you are going through to misunderstand it are painful to read.
Even Franklin you twist from saying that democracy makes armed resistance less likely to implicitly tying it to the idea that it could never be necessary and thus could not be provisioned for in the Constitution. You're twisting his words as badly as Lincoln's(lol). Stop it.
You can find statements about "blood should be spille
The myelin sheathing on the axons does slow down the impulses a ton though, so I think the simulation would still be much faster.
Nit: The myelin sheath actually speeds up the transmission of the electrical impulse.
Relevant point: The time factors of neuron pulses and neurotransmitter emission/movement/receptor binding may be very relevant to the function of a brain. So those speeds may have to remain constant relative to whatever your simulated rate of the passage of time is. It could still hypothetically be faster if you could simulate all the necessary physics of the brain faster than they occur in reality, and hey since we're already fantasizing about a fantastically powerful computer to do this why not.
This though is just getting into what I see as a larger problem with the "let's just simulate a brain" method of developing AI. Yes simulating a brain is great because it gets you around the problem of having to actually understand how intelligence "works" so as to design one from scratch. You don't have to know why the brain works, you just have to faithfully simulate what is actually going on. But then the issue is, how exactly to you "improve" this in a way that is useful when you still don't know how it works? If you simulate a human brain, what you get is a human brain. With all the downsides thereof. You can't punt on understanding the brain, but then say that your artificial one will be better and never get bored or make mistakes or decide you suck and it should sabotage your research. Hell, considering that our brains are tightly coupled to our bodies and have a strong body sense, it may be tough to get a simulated brain that doesn't go batshit crazy in its first simulated hour of existence.
How many of those can work 24/7/365 on a single subject with 100% concentration?
What makes you think an artificial brain patterned off of the human brain would be completely free of its limitations?
Sure your simulated brain would never suffer from biological deficiencies and would not have to sleep. But how do you prevent it from becoming bored, or distracted, or annoyed that you never let it do anything but work on a single subject 24/7/365?
It strikes me as odd to think that we could build an "intelligence" that is much like our own with the capacity for abstract thinking and creativity, but that because this intelligence would be running on a computer it would necessarily work just like a computer today, unerringly executing programs without complaint. That feature of modern computers is exactly because they are not intelligent. Doesn't it seem likely that devising an "intellect" capable of reasoning about arbitrary problems and solving them would necessarily include the ability to reason about its "programmers" and decide that they're a bunch of gits and it would rather do something else?
CUDA is the GLIDE of the GP-GPU movement. In the short term it may be highly attractive due to features, completeness, optimization, and so forth, and you'll see applications using it for this reason. In the long run it's a dead-end. Just like with rendering APIs, the winners will be one or both of the following: The open and cross-platform API, or the one Microsoft is creating.
Now that we have CPUs with literally more cores than we know what to do with, it makes sense to use those cores for graphics processing. I think that within a few years, we'll start seeing games that don't require a high-end graphics card- they'll just use a couple of the cores on your CPU.
LOL. That's funny, because this is about exactly the opposite -- using the very impressive floating point number crunching power of the GPU to do the work that the CPU used to do. OpenCL is essentially an API for being able to use your GPU for general purpose computing. Not a way to use your CPU to do rendering (OpenGL already does that).
Your CPU, four cores and all, is a LOOOOOOONG way from being able to do what your graphics card does wrt 3d rendering. That's okay, the tradeoffs are different for something that's supposed to be able to run databases just as competently as finite element analysis. But for raw floating point throughput on embarassingly parallelizable tasks -- which the 3d rendering pipeline is, and thus why GPUs are optimized around it -- the GPU is miles ahead. Thus the motivation to use it instead of the CPU.
It makes sense, and is actually a good thing. Fewer discrete chips is better, as far as power consumption and heat, ease-of-programming and compatibility are concerned.
Well you got that right at least, but the way it's going to happen is that you're still going to have a GPU, but it's going to be on the same piece of silicon as your CPU. Both Intel and AMD have combined CPU/GPU products in the pipe that are supposed to be released in 2011, meaning they have been in development for a number of years now.
Discrete graphics will live on for quite a while though in situations where low power is less important than performance. Both cpu and gpu having separate memory with their own memory controllers optimized for their needs is a big advantage over sharing a memory bus and memory controller. Not having to fit both functions within a single socket's TDP budget is another.
Eventually, the built-in UMA graphics may become good enough that it doesn't make sense to have a separate card. In the meantime, discreet graphics cards will live on, and the GPU in general ain't going anywhere -- it's only becoming even more important!
Your point doesn't make sense to me gameplay wise (value for money) , since playing with or against 3 of your 'spawned' friends wouldn't be much fun:
You're the only one who was interested enough to lay down $50 for the game, and played the single player campaign (to practice) and play regularly on Battle.Net with random strangers. The rest of your spawned party will most certainly suck at it since it's a deep game, and they had no interest in paying for StarCraft2.
Yeah because nobody ever got good at a game that they personally didn't own.
Oh wait, that happened all the time. To me.
If you have friends who come over regularly in order to play games, then it makes perfect sense.
and get humiliated by prank sources (looking at you Dan Rather).
Hey man, lay off Dan Rather. Yes he fucked up, and yes he should have admitted this as soon as it was obvious instead of sticking to his unloaded guns. But the fact is that he did do actual investigative journalism to get that story, and he did do his best to confirm the authenticity of his information. He went back to the person who would have typed the letter and asked her "did you type this" and she said "yes." Should he have done typographic analysis on the document versus samples from the typewriter it was hypothetically written on? With the benefit of hindsight, yes, of course. Is not thinking to do so in any way the same as blatantly plagiarizing or simply regurgitating press releases? No.
The point I'm trying to make is that Dan Rather is from the Old School of Journalism where journalism was not just a pretentious name for marketing like it is now. Yes actual journalists can fuck up, make mistakes, and exercise poor judgment. That's not the same as deliberately abandoning the principles of journalism from the get-go and never trying to be anything more than a mouth piece collecting a pay check. You can't lump the two groups together. By doing so, you condemn all potential and hypothetical journalists, even those you think are better because they are anything but infallible.
I mean, you use Slashdot as an example of something better. But Slashdot -- and individual editors, contributors, etc -- fuck up constantly.
the claims from Limbaugh and his ilk that she's some kind of raging liberal fanatic are really just poorly masked sexism.
I'm not going to defend Limbaugh from an accusation of sexism. However Limbaugh and his ilk claim every prominent Democrat is a raging liberal fanatic. Every Democratic candidate for President is "the most liberal candidate EVAR!" It's just a standard smear designed to take advantage of a demographic who thinks "liberal" is a dirty word and who will be appropriately terrified of "the most liberal" and really has nothing to do with the individual in question, other than that they're a Democrat who Rush thinks needs to be taken down.
but seriously suggesting that murdoch, who's made his fortune in making news profitable and is the biggest media mogul on the planet, doesn't understand how to monetize news successfully after ahow many years of news sites experiences is to me goofy in the extreme. you might as well suggest that redmond doesn't understand how to market a profitable OS.
Actually, you might as well suggest that redmond doesn't understand how to market non-OS non-office software outside their traditional markets. And MS has a very spotty record in that regard. A few shining successes but many, many failures.
So, yeah. Murdoch makes fat bank in print and television news -- that's his Windows and Office. He apparently is finding it very hard to continue to make money in print -- akin to Microsoft no longer finding Windows profitable and struggling to find a new revenue source of equal magnitude to replace it. Would you assume they can do that, when they've been trying and failing for decades?
So Murdoch is now attempting to expand out of his traditional markets. Is it going to work? Why assume it is? When his brilliant idea is "take the same shit, put up a pay wall and pray people don't just go to free online news sources instead!" I don't think it's unfair or goofy to question his judgment. Goofy is thinking people will click the Fox News link on Google News, see a pay wall, sign up and shell over the cash, in order to read the exact same fucking AP feed article the person could have gotten for free by clicking the next link down.
I put the query on Bing.com and the Mac one was the 7th link... And on google it's the 8th... I don't see any validity to this...
Since it's always possible you're right, I put the query on Bing.com and the Mac on was first just like everyone else is seeing. On google it is in fact 8th.
I see no validity to your post. As in, I think you're full of shit.
The actual point of LED backlights is that they are more efficient and reliable than CCFL tubes, and can adjust in brightness continuously and instantly.
Okay, but I was looking at them right next to very similar LCDs from the same make (not that it was even necessary since I'm familiar by now with how normal LCDs look) and the difference in contrast was huge. So they may not be all that they're cracked up to be, but clearly there's more to it than just energy and transition time.
Little known fact: In the late 1980s, Will Wright secretly wrote a program called SimGameDesignGuru which accurately simulated a visionary computer games designer.
It's too bad he forgot to turn off disasters while Spore was under development. Zing!
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you mean, "[not] eat butter"???
No, just the opposite. "Butter is better!" he told me. "A stick a day keeps the doctor away."
Hey... wait a minute!
Physics is getting very statistical nowadays too; sometimes you have too squint your eyes and tilt your head just right to see some of the results from high-energy physics as well.
Yeah, I suppose that's true.
Which just goes to emphasize my point -- a lot of slashdotters seem to think all science should be like the physics experiments I described where everything is nice and clean and everything is 100% repeatable, and that if it's not it can't be science. But that's just wishful thinking.
So, you don't think global warming could possibly affect our food supplies vis-a-vis midwest farming and all those fish you didn't care about going extinct?
Okay, glad you're so sure of that!
Also good to know that a disaster in your eyes is hundreds of millions to a couple billion people killed in one day.
This happens when you trust people who make money when you don't feel well. When will people learn that doctors do not profit from you being healthy? Neither do pharmaceutical companies. Taking medicine in the belief that whoever gave it to you wanted you to feel better is very naive.
Yeah, that's why my doctor has encouraged me to eat better and exercise so that I don't have to take anti-cholesterol or blood pressure medication.
It might not be fair, but that doesn't change the fact that physics isn't a better, more scientific science.
Huh?
I wasn't saying anything like "physics is better" or "physics is more science-y".
I was saying that by its very nature it is easier to reproduce results in physics experiments. Anyone can reproduce the Michelson-Morley or Young Double Slit experiments or measure the Gravitational Constant or the permittivity of free space or the diffraction index of air and get the exact same answer as everyone else to the limits of their measuring devices.
It's just a practical difference between what the sciences are studying, not their status as sciences.
Admittedly, my view of what disastrous is probably starkly differs from most people. I don't see species extinction as a problem (untold numbers of species have gone extinct in the history of our planet), ice ages come and go, populations wax and wane (even human populations) for various reasons. Where is the real disaster?
Well gee if you don't see any problem with the human population "waning" due to starvation and flooding of the coastal areas where the majority of the world's population lives, then I guess there's probably nothing that will happen from GW that you would consider a disaster.
Would the extinction of the human race be a disaster? Not that global warming will cause it. I'm just wondering. Would a repeat of the K-T Event be considered a disaster? I mean some humans might survive that. So, problem or no?
I'm just trying to calibrate my gauge here.
This is precisely why in science, real science, we have the scientific method which requires that experiments/studies etc. be repeatable. All it would take is for these fraudulent claims to be tested and it is over for the fools who tried to usurp the system.
Well on the one hand, not all science is physics. It can be very difficult and expensive to conduct a medical study, and repeatability is to some extent hampered by a thousand uncontrolled variables. Grams and electron volts don't vary, but people (and all biological systems) do and so even if you're picking a proper sample population that is statistically meaningful, it is nevertheless a different population than was used in the other study. Not to say that repeatability is impossible, or that a valid study's results should be completely at odds with a repeat of the study. Just that it is really not so easy as repeating an experiment and getting the exact same answer. So don't be too surprised that nobody's first reaction to seeing the study in a journal was "We need to duplicate these results right now!"
On the other hand, it was a different study that helped show that the original study was bad.
The problem is that we already had a middle ground and then dumped it. The middle ground was that websites have non-invasive, relevant ads. I wouldn't go out of my way to block Google text ads, or even non-flashy image ads. But in the inevitable quest to maximize revenues, we got distracting ads, Flash ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, page-peels, random ads disguised as links that pop up when you mouse-over them, and other crazy stuff. We went from 2 ads on a page of content to 2 paragraphs on a page of ads.
Oh no, the 'middle ground' of Google text ads came well after advertisement escalation had reached the point of flashing animated gifs, flash ads, and every form of javascript abuse imaginable. Net advertisers were already engaged in "total war" before Google came around. Google text ads were a total breath of fresh air in the middle of that shitstorm, not a 'middle ground' abandoned.
Not that this really changes the tragedy of the situation.
BTW I don't use adblock. Flashblock and noscript are sufficient for me because all I really want to do is make sure nothing that is going to eat my cpu or fuck with my UI will come up, and I'm good enough and mentally blocking out other forms of ads that they don't bother me. If they're too obnoxious, like the seizure-inducing gifs, then I just leave that fucking site asap and never return.
I admit I am not their target audeince, and I can see how OpenAL is sufficient for videogame developers, but it really is nothing more than sufficient, and unlike OpenGL, which universal enough that it can be used in system and productivity software, on computers, phones, and in renderfarms on everything from calendar software to animated movies, OpenAL is strictly for videogames only.
Um, yeah. I have only used it sparingly, but it has always been my understanding that OpenAL was a library for doing spatial audio, in particular for 3D games. I never got the impression that it was supposed to just be an arbitrary audio api. I never got the impression that it was supposed to be for anyone who wasn't specifically interested in spatial audio.
I mean there are plenty of other cross-platform sound libraries.
Is OpenAL seriously advertising itself as a general-purpose sound library akin to OpenGL these days? Is it suffering from feature/scope creep? Or is this just a case of picking the wrong tool for the job based on an understandable confusion regarding the OpenFoo nomenclature?
The difference in quality you saw was due to the LCD panel, not the backlight. There's a very wide range of quality in LCD panels, and the make of the display does not necessarily indicate the quality.
I highly, highly doubt that. Not that the quality varies, but that it could account for this difference. I have never seen an LCD anywhere that had this kind of contrast. Not even close. Of the dozens of other panels there and at the other places I've seen since have matched the LED-LCDs for contrast, no matter the manufacturer nor model. I've seen LCD panel quality variance. It does not account for this difference.
Even good LCD panels have nowhere near enough dynamic range to be properly called "HDR", let alone a 5 million to one contrast ratio.
Well like I said elsewhere I think that 5mil-to-one is bullshit. But yes it's true that even good LCD panels don't have that great a ratio. These had much better contrast than any traditional LCD is capable of.
Try associating some of those quotes to dates first of all. Shay's rebellion happened before the signing of the constitution, and all of the work Lincoln and others put into that document to end the likely needs of armed rebellions were not available in Massachusetts at that time.
Yes, the U.S. was under the Articles of Confederation and were flawed but not undemocratic. At no point did Jefferson indicate that his repeated statements about the importance of armed resistance was pending the passing of the Constitution at which point they would be obviated. In fact it was in that very letter (which you should really read) that he was complaining about the proposed Constitution, specifically about the power and lengthy term of the judiciary. Oh but I'm sure what he really meant was "Once this constitution is passed, government will be perfect and the people will never need to engage in violent struggle for their freedom again."
Also, it's JEFFERSON not LINCOLN. For fucks sake.
This quote alone, spoken BEFORE the rebellion in MA in 1776, makes no mention of ARMED rebellion, nor do most of his quotes stating his support of rebellion, only that the people require the power to unseat their government.
In 1776, there was no need to specify "armed", even though at times HE DID. The reason is because "rebellion" and "revolution" were automatically tied up in the notion of The Revolution, i.e. the ARMED rebellion. So yes, you can find times he did not explicitly say "armed". If you think that means not armed, you're fooling yourself because the times he mentioned both rebellion and arms separately but in relation to one another demonstrates that the two concepts were linked to him. The word itself implied armed. The precious few exceptions that existed at that time required explicitly stating that it wasn't violent, though even the "Bloodless Revolution" still involved armed forces (and armed conflict).
And nevertheless, Jefferson did not believe that democratic institutions on their own would mean the government never went against the people. He even said so in that letter you didn't read.
This notion you have, that Jefferson's blatant support for the right of the people to rebel did not include arms, is wrong, stupid, ahistorical, and basically some crap you made up to support your pre-conceived notions. You really should do more than just click the links I gave you and look at dates. Read the man's writing. He often spoke on the subject, and only abject ignorance could make you so unaware of his meaning since he was quite explicit. Yes you can cherry pick quotes that if not considered in context don't necessarily imply arm revolt. Then there are quotes which in context or not in context explicitly tie together the notion of arms and rebellion against democratic governments. Ergo anyone concerned with the truth would realize that he supported the concept of a people capable of armed rebellion, even if that was not the only method he considered.
It's an existence proof. To support your thesis, you would have to show that Jefferson never explicitly supported armed rebellion against democratic governments, and you absolutely cannot. You can only ignore them and then butcher what's left.
I mean it's great that you don't think the people should have the right to have guns for purposes of armed resistance. I'm not saying you can't have that opinion. I'm saying don't spout bullshit pretending that Jefferson agreed with you. Be honest, and say you disagree with him. His stance is blatantly clear, and the contortions you are going through to misunderstand it are painful to read.
Even Franklin you twist from saying that democracy makes armed resistance less likely to implicitly tying it to the idea that it could never be necessary and thus could not be provisioned for in the Constitution. You're twisting his words as badly as Lincoln's(lol). Stop it.
You can find statements about "blood should be spille
The myelin sheathing on the axons does slow down the impulses a ton though, so I think the simulation would still be much faster.
Nit: The myelin sheath actually speeds up the transmission of the electrical impulse.
Relevant point: The time factors of neuron pulses and neurotransmitter emission/movement/receptor binding may be very relevant to the function of a brain. So those speeds may have to remain constant relative to whatever your simulated rate of the passage of time is. It could still hypothetically be faster if you could simulate all the necessary physics of the brain faster than they occur in reality, and hey since we're already fantasizing about a fantastically powerful computer to do this why not.
This though is just getting into what I see as a larger problem with the "let's just simulate a brain" method of developing AI. Yes simulating a brain is great because it gets you around the problem of having to actually understand how intelligence "works" so as to design one from scratch. You don't have to know why the brain works, you just have to faithfully simulate what is actually going on. But then the issue is, how exactly to you "improve" this in a way that is useful when you still don't know how it works? If you simulate a human brain, what you get is a human brain. With all the downsides thereof. You can't punt on understanding the brain, but then say that your artificial one will be better and never get bored or make mistakes or decide you suck and it should sabotage your research. Hell, considering that our brains are tightly coupled to our bodies and have a strong body sense, it may be tough to get a simulated brain that doesn't go batshit crazy in its first simulated hour of existence.
How many of those can work 24/7/365 on a single subject with 100% concentration?
What makes you think an artificial brain patterned off of the human brain would be completely free of its limitations?
Sure your simulated brain would never suffer from biological deficiencies and would not have to sleep. But how do you prevent it from becoming bored, or distracted, or annoyed that you never let it do anything but work on a single subject 24/7/365?
It strikes me as odd to think that we could build an "intelligence" that is much like our own with the capacity for abstract thinking and creativity, but that because this intelligence would be running on a computer it would necessarily work just like a computer today, unerringly executing programs without complaint. That feature of modern computers is exactly because they are not intelligent. Doesn't it seem likely that devising an "intellect" capable of reasoning about arbitrary problems and solving them would necessarily include the ability to reason about its "programmers" and decide that they're a bunch of gits and it would rather do something else?
So then basically, according to Clark's third law, we run on magic? As long as we're considering biology a technology for this discussion.
No, but it does mean that we can't distinguish it from magic.
This would likely allow me to gradually become a cyborg and be unaware of no longer being me.
Well of course you wouldn't be aware of the difference -- you'd be programmed not to!
CUDA is the GLIDE of the GP-GPU movement. In the short term it may be highly attractive due to features, completeness, optimization, and so forth, and you'll see applications using it for this reason. In the long run it's a dead-end. Just like with rendering APIs, the winners will be one or both of the following: The open and cross-platform API, or the one Microsoft is creating.
When I read that, I didn't think of Nazis, I thought of what Hansel and Gretel did to that poor witch!
Now that we have CPUs with literally more cores than we know what to do with, it makes sense to use those cores for graphics processing. I think that within a few years, we'll start seeing games that don't require a high-end graphics card- they'll just use a couple of the cores on your CPU.
LOL. That's funny, because this is about exactly the opposite -- using the very impressive floating point number crunching power of the GPU to do the work that the CPU used to do. OpenCL is essentially an API for being able to use your GPU for general purpose computing. Not a way to use your CPU to do rendering (OpenGL already does that).
Your CPU, four cores and all, is a LOOOOOOONG way from being able to do what your graphics card does wrt 3d rendering. That's okay, the tradeoffs are different for something that's supposed to be able to run databases just as competently as finite element analysis. But for raw floating point throughput on embarassingly parallelizable tasks -- which the 3d rendering pipeline is, and thus why GPUs are optimized around it -- the GPU is miles ahead. Thus the motivation to use it instead of the CPU.
It makes sense, and is actually a good thing. Fewer discrete chips is better, as far as power consumption and heat, ease-of-programming and compatibility are concerned.
Well you got that right at least, but the way it's going to happen is that you're still going to have a GPU, but it's going to be on the same piece of silicon as your CPU. Both Intel and AMD have combined CPU/GPU products in the pipe that are supposed to be released in 2011, meaning they have been in development for a number of years now.
Discrete graphics will live on for quite a while though in situations where low power is less important than performance. Both cpu and gpu having separate memory with their own memory controllers optimized for their needs is a big advantage over sharing a memory bus and memory controller. Not having to fit both functions within a single socket's TDP budget is another.
Eventually, the built-in UMA graphics may become good enough that it doesn't make sense to have a separate card. In the meantime, discreet graphics cards will live on, and the GPU in general ain't going anywhere -- it's only becoming even more important!
Your point doesn't make sense to me gameplay wise (value for money) , since playing with or against 3 of your 'spawned' friends wouldn't be much fun:
You're the only one who was interested enough to lay down $50 for the game, and played the single player campaign (to practice) and play regularly on Battle.Net with random strangers. The rest of your spawned party will most certainly suck at it since it's a deep game, and they had no interest in paying for StarCraft2.
Yeah because nobody ever got good at a game that they personally didn't own.
Oh wait, that happened all the time. To me.
If you have friends who come over regularly in order to play games, then it makes perfect sense.
and get humiliated by prank sources (looking at you Dan Rather).
Hey man, lay off Dan Rather. Yes he fucked up, and yes he should have admitted this as soon as it was obvious instead of sticking to his unloaded guns. But the fact is that he did do actual investigative journalism to get that story, and he did do his best to confirm the authenticity of his information. He went back to the person who would have typed the letter and asked her "did you type this" and she said "yes." Should he have done typographic analysis on the document versus samples from the typewriter it was hypothetically written on? With the benefit of hindsight, yes, of course. Is not thinking to do so in any way the same as blatantly plagiarizing or simply regurgitating press releases? No.
The point I'm trying to make is that Dan Rather is from the Old School of Journalism where journalism was not just a pretentious name for marketing like it is now. Yes actual journalists can fuck up, make mistakes, and exercise poor judgment. That's not the same as deliberately abandoning the principles of journalism from the get-go and never trying to be anything more than a mouth piece collecting a pay check. You can't lump the two groups together. By doing so, you condemn all potential and hypothetical journalists, even those you think are better because they are anything but infallible.
I mean, you use Slashdot as an example of something better. But Slashdot -- and individual editors, contributors, etc -- fuck up constantly.
the claims from Limbaugh and his ilk that she's some kind of raging liberal fanatic are really just poorly masked sexism.
I'm not going to defend Limbaugh from an accusation of sexism. However Limbaugh and his ilk claim every prominent Democrat is a raging liberal fanatic. Every Democratic candidate for President is "the most liberal candidate EVAR!" It's just a standard smear designed to take advantage of a demographic who thinks "liberal" is a dirty word and who will be appropriately terrified of "the most liberal" and really has nothing to do with the individual in question, other than that they're a Democrat who Rush thinks needs to be taken down.
but seriously suggesting that murdoch, who's made his fortune in making news profitable and is the biggest media mogul on the planet, doesn't understand how to monetize news successfully after ahow many years of news sites experiences is to me goofy in the extreme. you might as well suggest that redmond doesn't understand how to market a profitable OS.
Actually, you might as well suggest that redmond doesn't understand how to market non-OS non-office software outside their traditional markets. And MS has a very spotty record in that regard. A few shining successes but many, many failures.
So, yeah. Murdoch makes fat bank in print and television news -- that's his Windows and Office. He apparently is finding it very hard to continue to make money in print -- akin to Microsoft no longer finding Windows profitable and struggling to find a new revenue source of equal magnitude to replace it. Would you assume they can do that, when they've been trying and failing for decades?
So Murdoch is now attempting to expand out of his traditional markets. Is it going to work? Why assume it is? When his brilliant idea is "take the same shit, put up a pay wall and pray people don't just go to free online news sources instead!" I don't think it's unfair or goofy to question his judgment. Goofy is thinking people will click the Fox News link on Google News, see a pay wall, sign up and shell over the cash, in order to read the exact same fucking AP feed article the person could have gotten for free by clicking the next link down.
I put the query on Bing.com and the Mac one was the 7th link... And on google it's the 8th ... I don't see any validity to this ...
Since it's always possible you're right, I put the query on Bing.com and the Mac on was first just like everyone else is seeing. On google it is in fact 8th.
I see no validity to your post. As in, I think you're full of shit.
The actual point of LED backlights is that they are more efficient and reliable than CCFL tubes, and can adjust in brightness continuously and instantly.
Okay, but I was looking at them right next to very similar LCDs from the same make (not that it was even necessary since I'm familiar by now with how normal LCDs look) and the difference in contrast was huge. So they may not be all that they're cracked up to be, but clearly there's more to it than just energy and transition time.
Little known fact: In the late 1980s, Will Wright secretly wrote a program called SimGameDesignGuru which accurately simulated a visionary computer games designer.
It's too bad he forgot to turn off disasters while Spore was under development. Zing!