As a reference for the masses, Wikipedia works. It's accessible, if inaccurate. As a reference for Scholars, Britannica works. It's accurate, if inacessable.
No scholar would use Britannica or any encyclopedia as a reference for their field of study.
Also, a study showed that WP and Britannica had similar levels of error. A million monkeys make a lot of mistakes, but they can fix them too. The few editors of Britannica may be more dedicated and rigorous, but they are still few and fallible. It's only perception and reputation that lead people to believe Britannica is more accurate. That, and there being forum around to point out the errors.
Encyclopedias have always been "for the masses", as in those desiring general info on a field that is not their area of expertise. For that purpose, WP is vastly superior.
You're getting your news from a comedy show and you're concerned about Murdoch's grip on reality?
Heh. There have been quite a few occasions where a guest on the Daily Show, an expert in some field or other, told Jon that some recent segment they'd done on a related topic was the best the expert had seen. Jon's reaction is always incredulous, "Stop saying that! You're scaring me." and similar. He was on Crossfire once where he was nailing them for the partisanship that defined much of "balanced" media, where an unwavering conservative and an unwavering liberal would do nothing more than reinforce the rift between them, and when asking him about his show's journalistic integrity, he was again incredulous that they were seriously using as a metric to compare their own serious shows to, a show that was "followed by prank calling puppets".
And yet, it's true. Sad as it is, The Daily Show has been some of the best news coverage of the last decade. It's not right, as Jon clearly states, his shows is about comedy. And yet it's still doing the job better than many of the 'serious' outlets.
Some of the same things can be said of the New York Times. And if you've read the WSJ lately, it has been diluted with entertainment news, sports news(this is not to denigrate sports, just to show that the WSJ is becoming just like other papers), and all the other things that make it par for the course for a Murdoch publication.
Except it's not any of those things (the sports and entertainment) that people are paying for. If they were, they'd get it for free instead. They are paying for the unique qualities of the WSJ.
No, something else besides level of technicality needs to explain why people are willing to pay for the WSJ.
Not at all, because that's exactly what WSJ has that free online papers don't. Take the WSJ, subtract what every other paper has, and you get what people are buying WSJ for.
For even more context, look at the patch. The "negative impact" is a couple extra microseconds of cpu time to memset 20 bytes instead of 3. I guess 32-bit x86 ought to be enough for anyone.
Really? Since that's a single cache line in either case, the difference is actually going to be more like maybe a dozen nanoseconds on a modern x86 (when it was going to take around 100ns in the base case assuming a cold cache miss).
Yes, but 20 years ago a computer network was not a hypothetical then-impossible idea. Before the first computer network existed, people understood what technological barriers they would have to overcome to create one, and they already knew how to split a task into multiple parts on separate processing units. It was an engineering problem. It was the engineering problem that your professor was stuck on. Call me when the major obstacle to any of these Futurist predictions is the amount of effort required, not that we fundamentally have no idea how to accomplish the task.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Well I'm not one to say something is impossible, and I am one to listen to an elderly scientist stating that something is possible when they have a scientific reason to think that particular thing is possible. On the other hand, I am also one to scoff dismissively when a Futurist says that something we currently don't have any clue how to do will surely happen because things are happening faster and faster. That's not a scientific reason. Some previously impossible things are now possible. That does not mean that Arbitrary Impossible Thing X will become possible.
Actually, I'm pretty sure with time travel I could fairly trivially build about the strongest AI possible. When you can perform an infinite number of operations in an arbitrarily short amount of time, quite a stupid algorithm can produce some pretty smart results.
Tell me what this algorithm is, and then I'll believe it's merely a matter of having arbitrary computational power.
Until then, this is the "and then a miracle occurs" step that marks all such futurist predictions. "advancements are happening faster and faster, therefore we'll figure out how to do something we have no idea how to do."
Hell, you might as well say that given an AI, you could invent time travel.
Heh yeah after I posted that I thought that to the extent that homeopathy is really just taking advantage of the Placebo Effect, wishful thinking is the only thing for which homeopathy works exactly as advertised.:)
The difference between the idea of the religious and the techo-rapture is that the means of making it happen lie within our grasp... We have the technology, we have the knowledge, what we lack is the wisdom.
No, they aren't in our grasp, they aren't even close to being in our grasp. They're no more in our grasp than transmutation of lead into gold was within the grasp of alchemists -- we can describe conceptually what we would like to happen (we mix chemicals, lead turns to gold; we download our minds into a machine, get rid of our bodies), but can't say how it actually would work. Forget the technological problems involved, even if we could solve every technological hurdle instantly we still couldn't do it because we can't even say what it is we need because we don't even know what it is that makes a mind a mind. Forget wisdom, we aren't even close to having either the knowledge.
The poster who compares it with 1950's futurist utopianism is exactly right. We could have had the future depicted in 2001, we could have an end to world hunger, an end to disease, and if not an end to death then a comfortably long delay in its arrival. The problem is that we're still very human at heart and humans are not that far removed from the trees. We are selfish, grasping, petty animals and those few acts of sublime virtue from the best of us simply serve to make the rest of us look all the worse.
We could end world hunger, because we produce enough food to feed everyone, and in that case the issues are merely political. There's no mystery, no hypothetical unnamed technological advance needed. Just the ability to get the food over here to the hungry person over there.
We have conquered many, many diseases, and have what anyone from more than a century ago would call a comfortably long delay in death's arrival. But on the other hand, this is mostly in pushing up the average, not extending the maximum. Whatever it is that is necessary to get humans to reliably live to 120 or more, we simply don't know yet.
We could have some aspects of the world of 2001, like a manned mission to Jupiter's moons if we really wanted to, but not others, like HAL. Why? Because despite many, many people working on the problem we still have no idea how to make HAL. It's not a matter of lacking the technology, we lack the conceptual understanding of what we're trying to accomplish. And throwing more people at the task wouldn't necessarily solve that. There's lots of interesting work in the Strong AI field, and maybe we'll make the necessary unknown breakthrough. Maybe we won't.
So yeah, it's exactly like 1950s futurist utopianism in that it is highly speculative, and makes wild guesses about what unknown and unknowable advances will be made, some of which will end up coming to pass, others will end up being complete wishful thinking, and others will end up somewhere in between.
Look, I get Kurzweil's basic idea. Major paradigm-shifting advances, things the people beforehand couldn't have even conceived of, keep coming faster and faster. If this trend continues... aaaayyyyy!
That's all well and good, but the thing about these advances the people beforehand couldn't have even conceived of is that you don't get to pick which ones are feasible and will happen. That's kinda the nature of the inconceivable. Whatever the future brings, it could be completely different than what you think, and it could end up that what you wish for the future is impossible, but other things beyond your imagination come to pass.
Look at the alchemists again. It turns out, thanks to advances they could not have conceived of, that transmutation of lead into gold is possible, just so ridiculously infeasible you'd never actually do it. But would that hypothetical, unknowable future have justified an Ancient Greek alchemist saying that transmutation was "in his grasp"? Not even. And on the other hand, alchemists were also looking for the Elixer
For example: All the wishful thinking in the world won't make homeopathy work.
Of course not! All you need is a trace amount of wishful thinking, which you can then dilute indefinitely until there's no actual wishful thinking left, but the solution still has the effect of the original wishful thinking.
And the developer has every right to make that call
Who said or implied otherwise in any way shape or form? Seriously.
Getting in a pissing match over support for an irrelevant feature doesn't inspire me with confidence in Debian's leaders.
But ARM is a supported architecture, used enough at least that they found the bug, and the bug was in glibc and thus affects all distributions that use glibc. What would make me lose confidence in Debian's leaders is if they agreed that because it's an "irrelevant" architecture that it shouldn't be fixed.
And just because the bug in question may be "irrelevant" for Debian, the real issue they're getting in a pissing match over is an obstinant maintainer of one of the most important pieces of software in any linux distro. Switching to a libc with a friendlier upstream maintainer over an irrelevant bug makes a hell of a lot more sense than waiting until it's a critically important bug that the current guy decides he won't fix for some stupid reason, now doesn't it?
Don't they have parks in your city? The drivers would probably start passing the pedestrian along, like a game of vehicular hackey sack, towards the city park. Bonus points if they land in the fountain!
I say we mount spikes on the grills of our vehicles, so pedestrians will know to get the hell out of our way! Like most attempts to coddle the clueless, won't widespread adoption of this just result in even more careless pedestrians?
Agreed. Why not let evolution take care of this? By making cars more deadly, eventually humans will evolve to be impervious to cars crashing into them (and by extension, impervious to crashing while riding in cars). The problem will solve itself!
Actually, it pales in comparison to the #1 advance for "pedestrian protection", DON'T F-ING HIT THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE!
Sorry, but the idea that ricocheting a pedestrian from my hood into something else (presumably something without an airbag) seems absurd.
And I find your suggestion to not plow into pedestrians equally absurd. How else am I going to rack up combo bonus points?
Also, obviously the goal is to have as many cars as possible with these air bags on them, so the pedestrian won't just bounce off my car into another air-bagless car and die, but instead will be bounced again and again from car to car until harmlessly tossed onto the grass, where they will doubtless jump up and shout in child-like glee "Again! Again!" And I'll get like 10,000 points for a 40-bounce combo. Looks like a win-win scenario to me. Why Luddites like you are against using technology to make life more awesome, I'll never know.
Hey man, let's see you design an air bag that isn't actually a spinning axe wheel of death or a mountain lion and see if you think it's that easy. And if you do, then let me know what I'm doing wrong?!
"When fitted to a demonstrator vehicle not originally designed with pedestrian protection in mind, the results were well inside all current legal criteria for pedestrian protection currently in force in Europe"
Okay, so this airbag was sufficient to meet with pedestrian protection laws... Uh, assuming most cars on the road are compliant with the law, I'm wondering exactly how much protection those laws call for. I'd think pretty much anything that didn't attempt to increase pedestrian danger would be fine. So no spiked grills, buzz saws, axe wheels, reactive armor, pumapults and the like. Since an airbag isn't any of those things (or at least isn't if designed correctly), add one to a car that is street legal and -- ta-da! -- it's still street legal! Woo!
Considering that their result is better than condoms (1% vs 2% if always used and used correctly which the evidence suggests isn't as easy as it sounds), and that it would be a contraceptive controlled by the male, then I would think this would be worth trusting at least as much as a condom. Even if you assume the statistics make it a wash, this is still better than a condom, because as you note the semen in a condom is still potent and can be retrieved (or spill etc), while the whole point of this pill is that it stops sperm production so the male's ejaculate is incapable of getting a woman pregnant. So if you're worried about some psycho bitch fishing your condom out of the dumpster, then the male contraceptive pill is for you.
However just like the female contraceptive pill, it is ludicrous to use either (and not a condom) unless you're in a committed monogamous relationship with the person.
Yeah, I bet this philosophy goes right out the window when "time's arrow" brings you arthritis and other chronic pain, cancer, heart disease, brittle bones, or any of a hundred other things that are just one of life's stages. Hell I bet once you're in your fifties, even a lack of boners is going to seem like an issue where it's worth going against the "natural progression".
Maybe the article writer is a fundamentalist Christian that believes all children are gifts from God and, thus, not a serious side effect.
Yeah, I learned the hard way to be very suspicious of contraceptive studies conducted by a Catholic hospital. "Every couple in the trial group became pregnant." "Success!"
Slashdot Mirror
2 Girls 1 Grail!
As a reference for the masses, Wikipedia works. It's accessible, if inaccurate.
As a reference for Scholars, Britannica works. It's accurate, if inacessable.
No scholar would use Britannica or any encyclopedia as a reference for their field of study.
Also, a study showed that WP and Britannica had similar levels of error. A million monkeys make a lot of mistakes, but they can fix them too. The few editors of Britannica may be more dedicated and rigorous, but they are still few and fallible. It's only perception and reputation that lead people to believe Britannica is more accurate. That, and there being forum around to point out the errors.
Encyclopedias have always been "for the masses", as in those desiring general info on a field that is not their area of expertise. For that purpose, WP is vastly superior.
You're getting your news from a comedy show and you're concerned about Murdoch's grip on reality?
Heh. There have been quite a few occasions where a guest on the Daily Show, an expert in some field or other, told Jon that some recent segment they'd done on a related topic was the best the expert had seen. Jon's reaction is always incredulous, "Stop saying that! You're scaring me." and similar. He was on Crossfire once where he was nailing them for the partisanship that defined much of "balanced" media, where an unwavering conservative and an unwavering liberal would do nothing more than reinforce the rift between them, and when asking him about his show's journalistic integrity, he was again incredulous that they were seriously using as a metric to compare their own serious shows to, a show that was "followed by prank calling puppets".
And yet, it's true. Sad as it is, The Daily Show has been some of the best news coverage of the last decade. It's not right, as Jon clearly states, his shows is about comedy. And yet it's still doing the job better than many of the 'serious' outlets.
Nothing's stranger than reality.
Some of the same things can be said of the New York Times. And if you've read the WSJ lately, it has been diluted with entertainment news, sports news(this is not to denigrate sports, just to show that the WSJ is becoming just like other papers), and all the other things that make it par for the course for a Murdoch publication.
Except it's not any of those things (the sports and entertainment) that people are paying for. If they were, they'd get it for free instead. They are paying for the unique qualities of the WSJ.
No, something else besides level of technicality needs to explain why people are willing to pay for the WSJ.
Not at all, because that's exactly what WSJ has that free online papers don't. Take the WSJ, subtract what every other paper has, and you get what people are buying WSJ for.
For even more context, look at the patch. The "negative impact" is a couple extra microseconds of cpu time to memset 20 bytes instead of 3. I guess 32-bit x86 ought to be enough for anyone.
Really? Since that's a single cache line in either case, the difference is actually going to be more like maybe a dozen nanoseconds on a modern x86 (when it was going to take around 100ns in the base case assuming a cold cache miss).
Fundamentally though, my vision was correct.
Yes, but 20 years ago a computer network was not a hypothetical then-impossible idea. Before the first computer network existed, people understood what technological barriers they would have to overcome to create one, and they already knew how to split a task into multiple parts on separate processing units. It was an engineering problem. It was the engineering problem that your professor was stuck on. Call me when the major obstacle to any of these Futurist predictions is the amount of effort required, not that we fundamentally have no idea how to accomplish the task.
Well I'm not one to say something is impossible, and I am one to listen to an elderly scientist stating that something is possible when they have a scientific reason to think that particular thing is possible. On the other hand, I am also one to scoff dismissively when a Futurist says that something we currently don't have any clue how to do will surely happen because things are happening faster and faster. That's not a scientific reason. Some previously impossible things are now possible. That does not mean that Arbitrary Impossible Thing X will become possible.
Actually, I'm pretty sure with time travel I could fairly trivially build about the strongest AI possible. When you can perform an infinite number of operations in an arbitrarily short amount of time, quite a stupid algorithm can produce some pretty smart results.
Tell me what this algorithm is, and then I'll believe it's merely a matter of having arbitrary computational power.
Until then, this is the "and then a miracle occurs" step that marks all such futurist predictions. "advancements are happening faster and faster, therefore we'll figure out how to do something we have no idea how to do."
Hell, you might as well say that given an AI, you could invent time travel.
Geez, it's just a beta - don't be so picky! That's why we loaded it with phosphorous rounds instead of exploding rounds. For safety.
I hope you meant for awesome, in which case I fully approve. :)
Heh yeah after I posted that I thought that to the extent that homeopathy is really just taking advantage of the Placebo Effect, wishful thinking is the only thing for which homeopathy works exactly as advertised. :)
The difference between the idea of the religious and the techo-rapture is that the means of making it happen lie within our grasp... We have the technology, we have the knowledge, what we lack is the wisdom.
No, they aren't in our grasp, they aren't even close to being in our grasp. They're no more in our grasp than transmutation of lead into gold was within the grasp of alchemists -- we can describe conceptually what we would like to happen (we mix chemicals, lead turns to gold; we download our minds into a machine, get rid of our bodies), but can't say how it actually would work. Forget the technological problems involved, even if we could solve every technological hurdle instantly we still couldn't do it because we can't even say what it is we need because we don't even know what it is that makes a mind a mind. Forget wisdom, we aren't even close to having either the knowledge.
The poster who compares it with 1950's futurist utopianism is exactly right. We could have had the future depicted in 2001, we could have an end to world hunger, an end to disease, and if not an end to death then a comfortably long delay in its arrival. The problem is that we're still very human at heart and humans are not that far removed from the trees. We are selfish, grasping, petty animals and those few acts of sublime virtue from the best of us simply serve to make the rest of us look all the worse.
We could end world hunger, because we produce enough food to feed everyone, and in that case the issues are merely political. There's no mystery, no hypothetical unnamed technological advance needed. Just the ability to get the food over here to the hungry person over there.
We have conquered many, many diseases, and have what anyone from more than a century ago would call a comfortably long delay in death's arrival. But on the other hand, this is mostly in pushing up the average, not extending the maximum. Whatever it is that is necessary to get humans to reliably live to 120 or more, we simply don't know yet.
We could have some aspects of the world of 2001, like a manned mission to Jupiter's moons if we really wanted to, but not others, like HAL. Why? Because despite many, many people working on the problem we still have no idea how to make HAL. It's not a matter of lacking the technology, we lack the conceptual understanding of what we're trying to accomplish. And throwing more people at the task wouldn't necessarily solve that. There's lots of interesting work in the Strong AI field, and maybe we'll make the necessary unknown breakthrough. Maybe we won't.
So yeah, it's exactly like 1950s futurist utopianism in that it is highly speculative, and makes wild guesses about what unknown and unknowable advances will be made, some of which will end up coming to pass, others will end up being complete wishful thinking, and others will end up somewhere in between.
Look, I get Kurzweil's basic idea. Major paradigm-shifting advances, things the people beforehand couldn't have even conceived of, keep coming faster and faster. If this trend continues... aaaayyyyy!
That's all well and good, but the thing about these advances the people beforehand couldn't have even conceived of is that you don't get to pick which ones are feasible and will happen. That's kinda the nature of the inconceivable. Whatever the future brings, it could be completely different than what you think, and it could end up that what you wish for the future is impossible, but other things beyond your imagination come to pass.
Look at the alchemists again. It turns out, thanks to advances they could not have conceived of, that transmutation of lead into gold is possible, just so ridiculously infeasible you'd never actually do it. But would that hypothetical, unknowable future have justified an Ancient Greek alchemist saying that transmutation was "in his grasp"? Not even. And on the other hand, alchemists were also looking for the Elixer
For example: All the wishful thinking in the world won't make homeopathy work.
Of course not! All you need is a trace amount of wishful thinking, which you can then dilute indefinitely until there's no actual wishful thinking left, but the solution still has the effect of the original wishful thinking.
And the developer has every right to make that call
Who said or implied otherwise in any way shape or form? Seriously.
Getting in a pissing match over support for an irrelevant feature doesn't inspire me with confidence in Debian's leaders.
But ARM is a supported architecture, used enough at least that they found the bug, and the bug was in glibc and thus affects all distributions that use glibc. What would make me lose confidence in Debian's leaders is if they agreed that because it's an "irrelevant" architecture that it shouldn't be fixed.
And just because the bug in question may be "irrelevant" for Debian, the real issue they're getting in a pissing match over is an obstinant maintainer of one of the most important pieces of software in any linux distro. Switching to a libc with a friendlier upstream maintainer over an irrelevant bug makes a hell of a lot more sense than waiting until it's a critically important bug that the current guy decides he won't fix for some stupid reason, now doesn't it?
I thought I had 30 seconds until it started shooting! Damned lying ED.
You have 30 seconds to comply.
Plenty of time to reach the stairwell!
But then it'd take forever for the robot to get the slippers to you!
Don't they have parks in your city? The drivers would probably start passing the pedestrian along, like a game of vehicular hackey sack, towards the city park. Bonus points if they land in the fountain!
I say we mount spikes on the grills of our vehicles, so pedestrians will know to get the hell out of our way! Like most attempts to coddle the clueless, won't widespread adoption of this just result in even more careless pedestrians?
Agreed. Why not let evolution take care of this? By making cars more deadly, eventually humans will evolve to be impervious to cars crashing into them (and by extension, impervious to crashing while riding in cars). The problem will solve itself!
Okay, so if my car had those pedestrian safety modifications, and a pumapult, would it be compliant? Or are those still not okay?
Actually, it pales in comparison to the #1 advance for "pedestrian protection", DON'T F-ING HIT THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE!
Sorry, but the idea that ricocheting a pedestrian from my hood into something else (presumably something without an airbag) seems absurd.
And I find your suggestion to not plow into pedestrians equally absurd. How else am I going to rack up combo bonus points?
Also, obviously the goal is to have as many cars as possible with these air bags on them, so the pedestrian won't just bounce off my car into another air-bagless car and die, but instead will be bounced again and again from car to car until harmlessly tossed onto the grass, where they will doubtless jump up and shout in child-like glee "Again! Again!" And I'll get like 10,000 points for a 40-bounce combo. Looks like a win-win scenario to me. Why Luddites like you are against using technology to make life more awesome, I'll never know.
Hey man, let's see you design an air bag that isn't actually a spinning axe wheel of death or a mountain lion and see if you think it's that easy. And if you do, then let me know what I'm doing wrong?!
"When fitted to a demonstrator vehicle not originally designed with pedestrian protection in mind, the results were well inside all current legal criteria for pedestrian protection currently in force in Europe"
Okay, so this airbag was sufficient to meet with pedestrian protection laws... Uh, assuming most cars on the road are compliant with the law, I'm wondering exactly how much protection those laws call for. I'd think pretty much anything that didn't attempt to increase pedestrian danger would be fine. So no spiked grills, buzz saws, axe wheels, reactive armor, pumapults and the like. Since an airbag isn't any of those things (or at least isn't if designed correctly), add one to a car that is street legal and -- ta-da! -- it's still street legal! Woo!
Considering that their result is better than condoms (1% vs 2% if always used and used correctly which the evidence suggests isn't as easy as it sounds), and that it would be a contraceptive controlled by the male, then I would think this would be worth trusting at least as much as a condom. Even if you assume the statistics make it a wash, this is still better than a condom, because as you note the semen in a condom is still potent and can be retrieved (or spill etc), while the whole point of this pill is that it stops sperm production so the male's ejaculate is incapable of getting a woman pregnant. So if you're worried about some psycho bitch fishing your condom out of the dumpster, then the male contraceptive pill is for you.
However just like the female contraceptive pill, it is ludicrous to use either (and not a condom) unless you're in a committed monogamous relationship with the person.
Yeah, I bet this philosophy goes right out the window when "time's arrow" brings you arthritis and other chronic pain, cancer, heart disease, brittle bones, or any of a hundred other things that are just one of life's stages. Hell I bet once you're in your fifties, even a lack of boners is going to seem like an issue where it's worth going against the "natural progression".
Maybe the article writer is a fundamentalist Christian that believes all children are gifts from God and, thus, not a serious side effect.
Yeah, I learned the hard way to be very suspicious of contraceptive studies conducted by a Catholic hospital. "Every couple in the trial group became pregnant." "Success!"
Everyone is trying to make a buck. To bad some of us don't need the bucks.
Well you know, it's like they say. To make a buck, you need a buck... and a doe.