The fact of the matter is that open source software will do very little to help the issue of the untrustworthiness of electronic voting.
Simply put, being able to read the source code does you no good if you can't be sure that the binary that the voting machine is running was compiled from that code.
With a Linux distro, if I for some reason suspect Red Hat may be compiling back doors into xdm or login, I can go somewhere else. If I don't trust anybody, I can compile the damn thing myself and put it on my computer.
These machines, open source or not, are going to be provided by a company like Diebold. Do you trust them, even if they have to give you a copy of some source code which may or may not be the source code that they used in their voting machines? Are you going to be able to browse the source code on the very voting machine you're using? Are you going to be given the compiler flags used to create the binary so you can re-create it yourself, and access to the voting machine's disk so you can compare them?
It is necessary that any electronic voting system be open source, as a matter of duty to the public. It is not, however, sufficient.
Second paragraph: It's OK not to agree, but you'd be wrong.:-) Information has a definition that is not the same as the definition of "datum". One is a physical/mathematical thing with real existence and a property called entropy, and another one called energy, and some other properties too, no doubt. The other (datum) is what you described.
As Data the Sailor Droid once said: "Fas-kinatin'!"
Okay, so I believed this. And now that I think about it more, I feel pretty dumb.
It's obviously not about detecting the heat. The thing that makes me and the frog jump out of boiling water no mater how slowly you heat it is our pain receptors. So no matter what, once it starts to hurt we're going to try to get out.
Okay, I'll admit information theory isn't my strong suit.
But I can't say I can agree that the "actual computation" is consuming energy beyond what is converted into heat by the resistive load. The computation is currents passing through loads. The only reason it's a "computation" is because we find meaning in the output.
I thought that the theoretical minimal energy of computation was based on quantum physics and the minimum energy to induce a state change in something. "Information" isn't a medium unto itself; it is carried by physical mediums, and those mediums have a minumum energy to change. Granted, I could be quite wrong.
The energy reclamation part is interesting, but really has nothing to do with reversible computing as far as I can tell. A power supply that can recycle any energy fed back into it may be necessary for reversible computing, but is a pretty great idea regardless.
Furthermore, with reversible gates, you can perform any computation with an arbitrarily small amount of energy; the catch is that you need more time (see adiabatic circuits, Carnot engines).
Hey, thanks for the keywords. Google turned up lots of nice stuff.
Though that catch is rather a big one. According to the links, as E->0, T->infinity, which I don't like one bit. Arbitrarily low power, but arbitrarily lengthy computation.
So I've now got my own low-power logic idea. I call it the "apathetic circuit", and it works by not doing the computation at all. Same zero energy/infinite time tradeoff, but with the advantage that the basic "meh" gate can be arbitrarily small even to the point of zero area!:)
Thanks. You helped make some sense of the article.
Now, when a bit changes from 1->0, the voltage (accumulated charge) is simply shorted to ground (via resistive path that dissipates heat). That energy is lost. In a reversible computer, that charge would be stored, in the electrical equivalent of a spring or flywheel in a mechanical system. So, next time it needs to go 0->1, the energy is sitting there, ready to be re-used(stored in the spring's compression or flywheel's rotation).
So it is a capacitor, basically. Instead of using the power and ground rails to drive a signal, you either sink the stored charge of the wire onto a big capacitor for the 1->0 transition, and you use that stored charge to drive the next 0->1 transition. Of course it still needs an active power source, since capacitors leak and wires have resistance. I'm starting to see how it could save power, though.
If all transistor's storage were common, the heat loss (and time delay) to get the energy back to where it's needed would defeat the entire purpose.
Well, plus you have the problem that not every circuit is going to be making the same transition. So you'd pretty much need one per signal.
In the article, they mention that current prototypes use oscillators to store the energy
Perhaps you know more of analog circuitry than I (not a tall feat), but I can't fathom what this could be that would make sense. The very concept of "oscilation" implies "movement" which when applied to charge means current and thus power loss. So unless the "oscilation" is just the charge going from the wire to the storage unit and back, it doesn't make sense to me. That's why I guessed capacitors.:)
how much bigger will dice need to be to use this system
Well, just take any design and replace every Vdd/Gnd connection in your CMOS gates with a big capacitor or oscillator or whatever. Yeah, I think you have reason for concern.
The bit doesn't help your computation in the sense of the answer you are looking for, but it can make things more energy efficient at the gate level.
If you know how it is more energy efficient, please share. The article doesn't contain anything that actually suggests "power savings" to me.
So you have a reversible OR gate. So then you can make an Un-OR gate. Okay, so you can recover what you had before the OR. Big deal. How have you saved power? You've just done another computation through a gate that uses power.
This line from the article: "For example, when a computer 'erases' something, what it does physically is ground one part of a circuit that holds a charge, in effect converting the stored energy -- and the information it represents -- into heat, Frank said." is a red herring. Every CMOS combinational logic circuit involves shorting its output to one of the voltage rails. You're always "erasing", by forcing the voltage of a wire to a certain level.
The heat that a computer generates comes from current passing through resistive loads. If you "undo" an operation, and the voltage level of the undo result is different than the existing voltage on the wire, then you have current and thus power consumed.
So there really isn't anything to be gained just by having reversible gates. Okay, I can imagine some microarchitecture which had some power advantage due to being able to reverse some things, but that's not exactly revolutionary.
They hint in the article, however, at something more than just reversible logic. Something about "oscilators" which are "spring-like" which says to me "capacitor". But they claim to be able to capture the energy consumed in an operation and re-use it. I don't know why you'd call that "reversible" computing; sounds like "recyclable" computing to me. Still, there's basically no detail at all on what that even would mean. Are they claiming to be able to capture the heat dissipated? Or just re-use the charge stored on one wire to compute another? That's just pass gate logic. Woopdy-doo.
I'll just say I'm skeptical. Especially when I read this: "Reversible computing is absolutely the only possible way to beat this limit," he said.
Uh-huh. That doesn't sound like a scientist. That sounds like a scientist fishing for grant money.
If you've got more information, I'm interested. This article, though, convinced me not at all.
Wrongly jailing people is always a potential problem but it certainly does not detract my lack of feeling bad for the vast majority of people who are in prison.
Yes, the institutionalized rape of innocent people is a "potential problem". So is the rape of people who are not innocent but committed a crime for which not even you could justify rape as punishment. Too bad the prison rapists don't ask everyone "are you innocent?" first.
But apparently you think rape is the correct punishment for the vast majority of people in prison. So having a bag of dope is worth repeated ass rape?
I dunno, I'm no doctor but I'm willing to bet that being violently raped a few times in prison would certainly help reverse some of that irreversible brain chemistry.
Easy to bet on something you know nothing about when it isn't your ass, isn't it? I'm willing to bet that you getting gang-raped day after day for a month would change your mind about whether this is something we should be allowing to happen in our prisons, but I'm not going advocate it.
If for nothing else I am certain that it would make some of these rapists think twice about what they're doing. Yes they have these urges but after being the victim of their own crime they very well might decide to try harder to resist the urges.
Why are ignorance and certainty found together so often? As the post you replied to already pointed out -- many already are victims. Being victims is why they become perpetrators, but genius tzanger wants to do this to more people. Like bombing a civilian populace to get rid of terrorists; how well do you really think this is going to work? But if you're so keen on it, why wait until prison? Why not rape them when they show up in the juvenile home after Daddy gets sent up the river so you can "fix" them before they commit any crime? Half the time they end up in prison from there anyway. You can call it "early prevention".
I tend to agree but as I get older and see more and more bullshit babying and coddling of the convicted and worrying more about them than their victims I tend to start thinking that these people deserve some of their own medicine.
Oh, right. "Hey, they get cable TV! The only way to balance out this amazing luxury is with repeated anal rape!"
But frankly, with people like you advocating sexual torture as a deterrent, I think the worrying about the convicted is justified.
While a murderer is certainly not a rapist is certainly not an arms trafficker, prison rape is brutal enough to sway people's consciences and not normally deadly.
Because brutalizing people always make them become nicer, happier people. But you're right! I can't see how being violated and then having the authorities do nothing about it and an apathetic populace say "you deserved it" would not change one's conscience. It's just not going to change in the way you think.
Yes, I am an asshole.
No you're not. "Asshole" is the guy who takes up three spots at Java Noodles at lunch with his Ford Excursion. You, my friend, are a sick fuck.
The answers to the big questions that you're left with after the 2nd movie are glossed over in literally one or two sentences. "oh ummm there's some magic mumbo jumbo 802.11b wireless brain chip or something, and the French guy has some magic subway train. There's your explanation, on to the hour-long action sequence!!"
Oh, and the hour-long action sequence we got!
That had to be the absolute worst battle sequence I've seen in those movies my brain has allowed me to remember.
And if you don't want more spoilers than that, don't read on. But if you don't want spoilers and are reading this on/. you aren't very smart.
The entire horrible problem with that insipid scene can be summed up thusly: There were too fucking many squids and the humans didn't die.
Of course I'm long winded and irritated at the recent pain.
The scene should have been at most a minute long. Drill drops through. Squids come through, and are temporarily held back by the concentrated gunfire of the defenses. Some eventually break through forcing the humans to spread their fire, allowing more to come through. Eventually there's a massive swarm, an opaque cloud streaming from the hole and gathering around the ceiling. This all takes about 50 seconds.
Now, in the good version of the movie -- this titanic swarm in which you can barely distinguish individual squids -- spreads out, swoops down, and fucking envelopes the human army. Within moments, every last defender in the docks has been disemboweled. Giving the humans the benefit of the doubt, this takes about ten seconds.
Geek note: You can see the squids fighting this way in Second Renaissance in the Animatrix, and it looks viciously effective against infantry. It takes them a bit longer to cut through actual armor like the humans had in the short, but is still deadly. So in the good version of the movie, give the humans thirty seconds.
But instead the squids start flying around in tightly packed tubules of squids, like gigantic robotic recreations of The Abyss. And I mean flying aroundnotattacking. I just feel I should emphasize that. Because they're flying in huge thick clouds, they're impossible to miss. So they're taking gigantic losses while just flitting around, and this is what they spend most of the godly interminable scene doing. Eventually the squid in the front of this tremendous mass will see a human looking at him funny, and will attack head-on bringing all ten thousand of his buddies behind him. The human will fire at the front of the squid-stream with their high-velocity high-rpm weaponry that goes right through the squids killing masses until one chickens out and pulls off. Repeat for way too god damn long.
Sometimes a squid will break off and flit about on its own. These are the only ones that manage to kill anyone, mostly from surprise. But even they mostly just fly around. Even when the big drill got a leg blown up, only a squid or two decides to notice that someone is firing rockets at it.
Which reminds me: Before the battle, the commander guy keeps talking about how important it is to target the bores so they can't dig through into the city. So when the tip of the drill emerges through the roof of the dock, I'm loudly thinking That's the bore's bit! That's what you want to destroy! Shoot it! But the humans just sit there until squids start pouring out.
So at least partially due to their own stupidity, the humans lose anyway. There's just too many squids. Which is the problem. Whether for rendering reasons or because it was the only way to make the scene longer than two seconds the result is the same: The squids end up with AI that is a cross between Galaga and Centipede, only not as smart.
Cut down the squids a lot. They said two hundred thousand or whatever, but it's okay to lie when you only bother to put in twenty humans. Make them (sq
The AotC bashing is more recent. Seems like everyone simultaneously changed their opinions from "much better than PM" to "just as bad as PM", with no explaination.
No, everyone still thinks it's much better than PM. They've just realized that still isn't very good.
Good point. I had trouble googling for historical life expectancies, so I didn't find a good source, but I did find one that mentioned the high infant mortality rate.. that should have raised a red flag for me.
In the 1800's, life expectancy was around 45; now it is about 74. There were no old goats back in John Adams' day.
"Expectancy" is the same as "average". In the 1800s the infant mortality rate was much, much higher than today, and this drags the average down. There were plenty of old goats in John Adams day. John Adams himself lived to be 81!
The problem with averages is that few understand them. As evidenced by the joke you may have heard: "Oh no! It says here that 50% of Americans are below average!" If you think the humor is that someone would exclaim that rather than that the author thought the exclamation would be funny, then I'm talking about you.
The law was passed in 1997. The first list was made in 1998. The second list, the one created by DBT and completely unverified, was delivered in 1999 and 2000. While Kathleen was in office.
And it was Kathleen's office that told DBT not to conduct the phone screens that were a part of its unprecidented multi-million dollar contract. It was her office that decided this was "not needed".
I'd spend a lot more time going into the ways in which Kathleen and her office was specifically involved in the fraud, but most of that is in the.pdf you read the first page of.
Sorry, but the blame falls on her. And others, since it's not like she was alone. But blaming her predecesor is not going to work.
On the other hand, the voter also has a responsibility to make sure that the card is punched to the best of their ability. If your choice isn't legible and it's by no fault of the machine (noted by the individual at that moment) that vote should be discounted.
Why should the vote be discounted? We have a machine right there that can read the vote and determine if it is valid. If it isn't valid, you don't eat the vote, you tell the voter "Hey, you fucked up your vote, try again!"
It's simple, it's obvious, and it's exactly what the Diebold Accuvote machines already do. Except for when they're told not to. You flip a switch, and the voting machine will either accept bad ballots or not. The counties with high error rates in 2000 using these machines (not the infamous butterfly) all had this feature off, as should be obvious from the error rate being so high. Although we were lead to believe something else was the cause, like voter stupidity.
They aren't chaotic. They're very cyclical, following a four-year pattern, allowing you to predict when the next population rise or drop will be. That's the opposite of chaotic.
Re:Well, since the conclusion of his last book
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Which is clinically impossible because it makes you uncomfortable. Yes, I see...
Said the blind man. Sorry, but I'm not going to entertain a notion just because a study which turns out to be complete shit says it's true. If that makes you think I'd never accept the conclusion, that's your problem.
What makes me uncomfortable is how ready people are to believe this. How ready to say "well, just because this data turned out to not support the conclusion at all, we should still give it serious consideration! After all, blacks are clearly inferior, we just haven't found the hard data to prove it yet!"
I'm curious what POSSIBLE data could be collected that you wouldn't refute for some reason or another.
Data which is irrefutable. Duh.
Which as you may have guessed isn't going to be easy to find. This isn't, as you might assume, because I'm completely unreasonable. It's because proving something like "blacks are genetically inferior" is going to be damn tough. Start with the fact that "race" is more or less an invention of our superior white/western culture. There is little science to back up a genetic distinction between races, and virtually no genetic trait is isolated in what we would call a "race". So based on the similarity of people's -skin-, a vastly simpler trait than whatever genetic magic goes on in the development of the brain, you want to try to find evidence
Then you take the fact that we have no way of reliably distinguishing from "innate" intelligence and "environmental" intelligence, mostly because we can't even define "intelligence", and yes, it's going to be hard to find a test that proves what you want it to.
Test scores? Oh, we all know test scores are biased. Economic performance? We all know that the white man keeps the black man down.
Are we even talking about the Bell Curve and inherited intelligence anymore? Economic status was one of the things the Bell Curve was trying to remove as a variable. Not even Murray would suggest that economic performance was a reliable indicator of hereditary intelligence.
IMO with a statistical sample of 1 particular experiment, clearly white/western cultures dominate right now. We're having this conversation in English, right?
Because we're both Americans, right? If/. was a Korean site, we'd probably be writting in Korean, no? That's just weak, man.
I'm not sure what you're talking about with the "statistical sample of 1 particular experiment", but I worry that it is somehowe related to the sentence after it.
And like you said yourself: we're dominant right now. How you could conceive that genetics was a factor, I can't imagine. Did white Europeans
Whether this dominance is the result of biology, psychology, culture, climate, or luck of geography, etc. is rather hard to discern. But I'd say between Amerindian and SS African cultures it's roughly a tie for the bottom rung of the "impact on humanity" ladder - semitic, asian, and latinate cultures have all had a turn, but it frankly doesn't look like we're going to see a "Pax Namibica" anytime soon.
I guess we aren't talking about the Bell Curve anymore. It sounds more like you're discussing some generic "whites are better than blacks and indians" philosophy, not even bothering to narrow it down to any particular trait other than being "dominant", based on us having an empire and them not.
Though before you get too hot on how great we are, let me point out that you don't know anything about African history. Don't worry I'm not knocking you for that, since we're both Americans and can hopefully mutually agree that education about Africa is pure shit. The Euro-centric nature of education would be a plausible explanation of why you believe Europeans are so much more important. But I would have hoped that before you concluded that Africans were the least significant culture and a "Pax Namibi
Re:Well, since the conclusion of his last book
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The fact that the bell curve for blacks is shifted to the left is just that, a statistical fact. It's not a conclusion.
No. The fact is that on tests which supposedly measure intelligence the bell curve for African Americans is shifted to the left. The conclusion is that this demonstrates an actual shift in intelligence.
Subtle difference, but one I find important. IQ != I, and that's controversy point (0).
It appears on all valid IQ tests.
I'll admit that I'm not aware of the definition of a "valid" IQ test. In general, I had thought that the problem of accurately defining intelligence, and thus obviously measuring it, was still out of reach. I would have thought that was the kind of discovery I would have heard about, at least through the AI community.
The biggest problem as far as I can tell with IQ tests is the desire to measure "innate" intelligence versus "learned" intelligence or knowledge that would be environmental and not genetic. But again, as far as I know, we haven't come up with a test that you can't improve your score on through preparation. So I was and am doubtful about the g-factor and its correlation to what we actually want to measure.
If we have found such a test, I would desperately hope that it would be in line to replace the SAT (Scholastic Ability-to-pay-for-prep-courses Test:) in college admissions real quick-like.
If you learn anything about psychometrics, it's that it is difficult for any test not to be an IQ test.
What I learned from years of taking tests is that most tests are measures of test-taking ability as much as anything else.
Re:Well, since the conclusion of his last book
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Yes. Yes I did. Sorry about that.
Re:Well, since the conclusion of his last book
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What's sad is that you can probably never recognize the hypocracy of this statement. Drop dead, racist.
How do you get racism from my statement? Unless you're disagreeing that there exist racist white folk who would like to have their racism justified by science either bad or good, then I'm going to have to ask you to shut the fuck up. Acknowledging the existence of racism isn't racist, you ass gobbler.
Oh, and your opinon on The Bell Curve is the ypical ignorance expressed by people who only know about its contents by reading reviews written by ideological noodniks.
Partially true! I haven't read the book. I've read exerpts and I've read both the criticism of the book and the rebuttles to the criticism. I'm not sure how the criticism could be called the work of ideological noodniks. Unless the rebuttles written by Murray do not actually reflect the content of the book, then I'm still going to go with my opinion. He explained what his book meant and why his results are valid, and detractors explained why they aren't. I find the detractors arguments compelling and his not.
Feel free to explain why you think I am mischaracterizing the book, but I doubt you'd be able to add anything that Murray hasn't already himself.
Re:Well, since the conclusion of his last book
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That's not what he concluded, now was it.
It was that as a race blacks have lower average intelligence and a much lower chance of producing a geniuses. The Bell Curve for blacks is shifted to the left. So yes, that is pretty much what he concluded: blacks are dumber than other races.
Just because GWC was a genius does not mean every other Black person will be or can be.
What's your point? That applies to everyone. I wasn't saying GWC proves all blacks are geniuses, I was questioning whether Carver was considered "significant" by Murray.
The conclusion of The Bell Curve was that you can find IQ trends amongst races, and if you recall correctly, Asians had the highest rate of geniuses. Murray is White, so where is his bias?
What, because he didn't put Whites at the top of the I.Q. Totem Pole that means he didn't have a bias? That's ridiculous. Particularly if his "bias" was against certain races less than for others. And "Asians are smart" is simply the parallel stereotype to "Blacks are dumb". Neither one was a new idea to the crowd the Bell Curve was written for, he was just providing them "proof".
I always find it astounding how people will readily admit that certain breeds of dogs have undeniable traits (Jack Russel Terriers are smart, Bloodhounds have highly sensitive noses, etc.) but then look at humans and refuse to admit any bio-level distinctions might be there.
I'm not denying the possibility of differences between races -- there are, obviously. I'm denying that his book was anything but overhyped shit designed to appeal to what rich white fucks already thought with sloppy science.
I guess that's why 75+% of the NBA is Black - because Asians and Whites are every bit as athletic, right?
I guess that's why 90+% of the NFL is White - because Asians and Blacks are every bit as athletic, right?
But that's the Bell Curve way, isn't it? Find the metric that tells you what you want to hear, then use that and ignore all other factors.
If you ask the question, "Are there really differences between races?" and eliminate "Yes" as a possible answer, you aren't being intellectually honest.
True. But if you cherry pick your data and measuring methods (one military aptitude test that was never even intended to measure "intelligence", number of paper references, percentage of one race playing a particular sport) to get the answer you have already assumed is true, then that's intellectually dishonest as well.
I found this last part the most intriguing, and it is something that I have suspected for a long time.
Don't let the fact that he's telling you what you already believed cause you to not investigate the claims. He's measuring his decline based on the number of "significant" individuals. That "significant" is defined by how much they are talked about, and that achievments by groups of non-famous people are ignored, should show that even if the claim of a decline is true, he isn't conclusively proving it.
When you consider that in ancient times it took 9 out of every 10 people just to produce enough food to feed everyone, it makes the accomplishments and inventions of those times even more astounding.
But it makes his method for picking achievment even more obviously crap. Only a small portion of the population had the ability to pursue science, so those who did have a much higher chance of standing out. That's why you've heard of Newton, but not any of the people who discovered and then demonstrated how to teleport photons instantaneously. There will be no Principia of our day, because the scientific advancements were written about by thousands of individuals.
So while our technology seems to be advancing at an incredible rate, this does not mean that we as a people have improved in our mental capacity.
I'd say that would be a highly unlikely occurance anyway. Until we start mucking about with our own genes or a few million years pass, there isn't much that's going to happen on the "capacity" front. The best we can do is to better realize and utilize that capacity.
And everyone has built their technology on the backs of their ancestors. Newton understood this, and said so. This does nothing to diminish the accomplishments of Newton or of modern day scientists who are too freaking numerous to mention or remember.
I guess what I'm saying is: You may be right and there -is- a decline, but this guy isn't proving it other than by being an example.
Well, since the conclusion of his last book
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was that blacks are inherently stupid, I'm not surprised that he comes to the conclusion in this book that Westerners do all the great work. Does George Washington Carver (presumeably an outlier on the Bell Curve) make the list?
Are there a dozen Shakespeares? Maybe! How would you know? There are dozens of great playwrights in the world today, and dozens of authors, etc. Which are today's Shakespeare? Ask me in three hundred years when can see which authors are still talked about and studied in school. Was Shakespeare hailed as "the Homer of today" at the time? No!
"Significant" figures in science are decreasing? Maybe it's because more science is being done by groups of scientists collaborating. If a dozen papers come out of one university research group, but each has a different author's name on the top, then is that less accomplishment than six papers with one author? I guess the accomplishments of groups of scientists working together isn't significant.
Frankly, I think the absence of "significant" figures is a sign of progress. It shows that our scientific base is widening, so that contributions come from a greater number of individuals. Contrast for example Galileo, one of the only people doing astrological work at the time. Whereas now there are observatories around the world with thousands upon thousands of individuals studying the stars, each making their own contributions.
This book sounds like crap, which I base half on the review and half on my opinion that the Bell Curve was crap. Knowing the way he covers his crap assumptions and the resulting crap conclusions with statistics and charts that seem reasonable at first, I'm seeing heavy potential for the same kind of thing here. Starting with taking whatever statistical feature he's actually looking at and calling it "Achievment", a mirror of taking scores from a military aptitude test and calling that "Intelligence".
But he'll probably get a lot of book sales from people who want to hear about how white folk from the west are the producers of all human achievment.
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There's a point to be made here.
The fact of the matter is that open source software will do very little to help the issue of the untrustworthiness of electronic voting.
Simply put, being able to read the source code does you no good if you can't be sure that the binary that the voting machine is running was compiled from that code.
With a Linux distro, if I for some reason suspect Red Hat may be compiling back doors into xdm or login, I can go somewhere else. If I don't trust anybody, I can compile the damn thing myself and put it on my computer.
These machines, open source or not, are going to be provided by a company like Diebold. Do you trust them, even if they have to give you a copy of some source code which may or may not be the source code that they used in their voting machines? Are you going to be able to browse the source code on the very voting machine you're using? Are you going to be given the compiler flags used to create the binary so you can re-create it yourself, and access to the voting machine's disk so you can compare them?
It is necessary that any electronic voting system be open source, as a matter of duty to the public. It is not, however, sufficient.
Second paragraph: It's OK not to agree, but you'd be wrong. :-) Information has a definition that is not the same as the definition of "datum". One is a physical/mathematical thing with real existence and a property called entropy, and another one called energy, and some other properties too, no doubt. The other (datum) is what you described.
As Data the Sailor Droid once said: "Fas-kinatin'!"
Okay, so I believed this. And now that I think about it more, I feel pretty dumb.
It's obviously not about detecting the heat. The thing that makes me and the frog jump out of boiling water no mater how slowly you heat it is our pain receptors. So no matter what, once it starts to hurt we're going to try to get out.
Okay, I'll admit information theory isn't my strong suit.
But I can't say I can agree that the "actual computation" is consuming energy beyond what is converted into heat by the resistive load. The computation is currents passing through loads. The only reason it's a "computation" is because we find meaning in the output.
I thought that the theoretical minimal energy of computation was based on quantum physics and the minimum energy to induce a state change in something. "Information" isn't a medium unto itself; it is carried by physical mediums, and those mediums have a minumum energy to change. Granted, I could be quite wrong.
The energy reclamation part is interesting, but really has nothing to do with reversible computing as far as I can tell. A power supply that can recycle any energy fed back into it may be necessary for reversible computing, but is a pretty great idea regardless.
Furthermore, with reversible gates, you can perform any computation with an arbitrarily small amount of energy; the catch is that you need more time (see adiabatic circuits, Carnot engines).
:)
Hey, thanks for the keywords. Google turned up lots of nice stuff.
Though that catch is rather a big one. According to the links, as E->0, T->infinity, which I don't like one bit. Arbitrarily low power, but arbitrarily lengthy computation.
So I've now got my own low-power logic idea. I call it the "apathetic circuit", and it works by not doing the computation at all. Same zero energy/infinite time tradeoff, but with the advantage that the basic "meh" gate can be arbitrarily small even to the point of zero area!
Thanks. You helped make some sense of the article.
:)
Now, when a bit changes from 1->0, the voltage (accumulated charge) is simply shorted to ground (via resistive path that dissipates heat). That energy is lost. In a reversible computer, that charge would be stored, in the electrical equivalent of a spring or flywheel in a mechanical system. So, next time it needs to go 0->1, the energy is sitting there, ready to be re-used(stored in the spring's compression or flywheel's rotation).
So it is a capacitor, basically. Instead of using the power and ground rails to drive a signal, you either sink the stored charge of the wire onto a big capacitor for the 1->0 transition, and you use that stored charge to drive the next 0->1 transition. Of course it still needs an active power source, since capacitors leak and wires have resistance. I'm starting to see how it could save power, though.
If all transistor's storage were common, the heat loss (and time delay) to get the energy back to where it's needed would defeat the entire purpose.
Well, plus you have the problem that not every circuit is going to be making the same transition.
So you'd pretty much need one per signal.
In the article, they mention that current prototypes use oscillators to store the energy
Perhaps you know more of analog circuitry than I (not a tall feat), but I can't fathom what this could be that would make sense. The very concept of "oscilation" implies "movement" which when applied to charge means current and thus power loss. So unless the "oscilation" is just the charge going from the wire to the storage unit and back, it doesn't make sense to me. That's why I guessed capacitors.
how much bigger will dice need to be to use this system
Well, just take any design and replace every Vdd/Gnd connection in your CMOS gates with a big capacitor or oscillator or whatever. Yeah, I think you have reason for concern.
The bit doesn't help your computation in the sense of the answer you are looking for, but it can make things more energy efficient at the gate level.
If you know how it is more energy efficient, please share. The article doesn't contain anything that actually suggests "power savings" to me.
So you have a reversible OR gate. So then you can make an Un-OR gate. Okay, so you can recover what you had before the OR. Big deal. How have you saved power? You've just done another computation through a gate that uses power.
This line from the article: "For example, when a computer 'erases' something, what it does physically is ground one part of a circuit that holds a charge, in effect converting the stored energy -- and the information it represents -- into heat, Frank said." is a red herring. Every CMOS combinational logic circuit involves shorting its output to one of the voltage rails. You're always "erasing", by forcing the voltage of a wire to a certain level.
The heat that a computer generates comes from current passing through resistive loads. If you "undo" an operation, and the voltage level of the undo result is different than the existing voltage on the wire, then you have current and thus power consumed.
So there really isn't anything to be gained just by having reversible gates. Okay, I can imagine some microarchitecture which had some power advantage due to being able to reverse some things, but that's not exactly revolutionary.
They hint in the article, however, at something more than just reversible logic. Something about "oscilators" which are "spring-like" which says to me "capacitor". But they claim to be able to capture the energy consumed in an operation and re-use it. I don't know why you'd call that "reversible" computing; sounds like "recyclable" computing to me. Still, there's basically no detail at all on what that even would mean. Are they claiming to be able to capture the heat dissipated? Or just re-use the charge stored on one wire to compute another? That's just pass gate logic. Woopdy-doo.
I'll just say I'm skeptical. Especially when I read this: "Reversible computing is absolutely the only possible way to beat this limit," he said.
Uh-huh. That doesn't sound like a scientist. That sounds like a scientist fishing for grant money.
If you've got more information, I'm interested. This article, though, convinced me not at all.
Wrongly jailing people is always a potential problem but it certainly does not detract my lack of feeling bad for the vast majority of people who are in prison.
Yes, the institutionalized rape of innocent people is a "potential problem". So is the rape of people who are not innocent but committed a crime for which not even you could justify rape as punishment. Too bad the prison rapists don't ask everyone "are you innocent?" first.
But apparently you think rape is the correct punishment for the vast majority of people in prison. So having a bag of dope is worth repeated ass rape?
I dunno, I'm no doctor but I'm willing to bet that being violently raped a few times in prison would certainly help reverse some of that irreversible brain chemistry.
Easy to bet on something you know nothing about when it isn't your ass, isn't it? I'm willing to bet that you getting gang-raped day after day for a month would change your mind about whether this is something we should be allowing to happen in our prisons, but I'm not going advocate it.
If for nothing else I am certain that it would make some of these rapists think twice about what they're doing. Yes they have these urges but after being the victim of their own crime they very well might decide to try harder to resist the urges.
Why are ignorance and certainty found together so often? As the post you replied to already pointed out -- many already are victims. Being victims is why they become perpetrators, but genius tzanger wants to do this to more people. Like bombing a civilian populace to get rid of terrorists; how well do you really think this is going to work? But if you're so keen on it, why wait until prison? Why not rape them when they show up in the juvenile home after Daddy gets sent up the river so you can "fix" them before they commit any crime? Half the time they end up in prison from there anyway. You can call it "early prevention".
I tend to agree but as I get older and see more and more bullshit babying and coddling of the convicted and worrying more about them than their victims I tend to start thinking that these people deserve some of their own medicine.
Oh, right. "Hey, they get cable TV! The only way to balance out this amazing luxury is with repeated anal rape!"
But frankly, with people like you advocating sexual torture as a deterrent, I think the worrying about the convicted is justified.
While a murderer is certainly not a rapist is certainly not an arms trafficker, prison rape is brutal enough to sway people's consciences and not normally deadly.
Because brutalizing people always make them become nicer, happier people. But you're right! I can't see how being violated and then having the authorities do nothing about it and an apathetic populace say "you deserved it" would not change one's conscience. It's just not going to change in the way you think.
Yes, I am an asshole.
No you're not. "Asshole" is the guy who takes up three spots at Java Noodles at lunch with his Ford Excursion. You, my friend, are a sick fuck.
The answers to the big questions that you're left with after the 2nd movie are glossed over in literally one or two sentences. "oh ummm there's some magic mumbo jumbo 802.11b wireless brain chip or something, and the French guy has some magic subway train. There's your explanation, on to the hour-long action sequence!!"
/. you aren't very smart.
Oh, and the hour-long action sequence we got!
That had to be the absolute worst battle sequence I've seen in those movies my brain has allowed me to remember.
And if you don't want more spoilers than that, don't read on. But if you don't want spoilers and are reading this on
The entire horrible problem with that insipid scene can be summed up thusly: There were too fucking many squids and the humans didn't die.
Of course I'm long winded and irritated at the recent pain.
The scene should have been at most a minute long. Drill drops through. Squids come through, and are temporarily held back by the concentrated gunfire of the defenses. Some eventually break through forcing the humans to spread their fire, allowing more to come through. Eventually there's a massive swarm, an opaque cloud streaming from the hole and gathering around the ceiling. This all takes about 50 seconds.
Now, in the good version of the movie -- this titanic swarm in which you can barely distinguish individual squids -- spreads out, swoops down, and fucking envelopes the human army. Within moments, every last defender in the docks has been disemboweled. Giving the humans the benefit of the doubt, this takes about ten seconds.
Geek note: You can see the squids fighting this way in Second Renaissance in the Animatrix, and it looks viciously effective against infantry. It takes them a bit longer to cut through actual armor like the humans had in the short, but is still deadly. So in the good version of the movie, give the humans thirty seconds.
But instead the squids start flying around in tightly packed tubules of squids, like gigantic robotic recreations of The Abyss. And I mean flying around not attacking. I just feel I should emphasize that. Because they're flying in huge thick clouds, they're impossible to miss. So they're taking gigantic losses while just flitting around, and this is what they spend most of the godly interminable scene doing. Eventually the squid in the front of this tremendous mass will see a human looking at him funny, and will attack head-on bringing all ten thousand of his buddies behind him. The human will fire at the front of the squid-stream with their high-velocity high-rpm weaponry that goes right through the squids killing masses until one chickens out and pulls off. Repeat for way too god damn long.
Sometimes a squid will break off and flit about on its own. These are the only ones that manage to kill anyone, mostly from surprise. But even they mostly just fly around. Even when the big drill got a leg blown up, only a squid or two decides to notice that someone is firing rockets at it.
Which reminds me: Before the battle, the commander guy keeps talking about how important it is to target the bores so they can't dig through into the city. So when the tip of the drill emerges through the roof of the dock, I'm loudly thinking That's the bore's bit! That's what you want to destroy! Shoot it! But the humans just sit there until squids start pouring out.
So at least partially due to their own stupidity, the humans lose anyway. There's just too many squids. Which is the problem. Whether for rendering reasons or because it was the only way to make the scene longer than two seconds the result is the same: The squids end up with AI that is a cross between Galaga and Centipede, only not as smart.
Cut down the squids a lot. They said two hundred thousand or whatever, but it's okay to lie when you only bother to put in twenty humans. Make them (sq
I don't think it was mentioned in the last dialog, that only the ones that "want" will be freed, it was simply "all" of them (with no exeptions)
The architect definitely said only the ones that wish to be free.
It hadn't occured to me that he might have meant only the ones that rejected the matrix on an unconscious level.
The AotC bashing is more recent. Seems like everyone simultaneously changed their opinions from "much better than PM" to "just as bad as PM", with no explaination.
No, everyone still thinks it's much better than PM. They've just realized that still isn't very good.
Good point. I had trouble googling for historical life expectancies, so I didn't find a good source, but I did find one that mentioned the high infant mortality rate.. that should have raised a red flag for me.
:)
I did as well, and probably gave up before you.
Not 81. That was John Quincy Adams.
In the 1800's, life expectancy was around 45; now it is about 74. There were no old goats back in John Adams' day.
"Expectancy" is the same as "average". In the 1800s the infant mortality rate was much, much higher than today, and this drags the average down. There were plenty of old goats in John Adams day. John Adams himself lived to be 81!
The problem with averages is that few understand them. As evidenced by the joke you may have heard: "Oh no! It says here that 50% of Americans are below average!" If you think the humor is that someone would exclaim that rather than that the author thought the exclamation would be funny, then I'm talking about you.
The law was passed in 1997.
.pdf you read the first page of.
The first list was made in 1998.
The second list, the one created by DBT and completely unverified, was delivered in 1999 and 2000. While Kathleen was in office.
And it was Kathleen's office that told DBT not to conduct the phone screens that were a part of its unprecidented multi-million dollar contract. It was her office that decided this was "not needed".
I'd spend a lot more time going into the ways in which Kathleen and her office was specifically involved in the fraud, but most of that is in the
Sorry, but the blame falls on her. And others, since it's not like she was alone. But blaming her predecesor is not going to work.
On the other hand, the voter also has a responsibility to make sure that the card is punched to the best of their ability. If your choice isn't legible and it's by no fault of the machine (noted by the individual at that moment) that vote should be discounted.
Why should the vote be discounted? We have a machine right there that can read the vote and determine if it is valid. If it isn't valid, you don't eat the vote, you tell the voter "Hey, you fucked up your vote, try again!"
It's simple, it's obvious, and it's exactly what the Diebold Accuvote machines already do. Except for when they're told not to. You flip a switch, and the voting machine will either accept bad ballots or not. The counties with high error rates in 2000 using these machines (not the infamous butterfly) all had this feature off, as should be obvious from the error rate being so high. Although we were lead to believe something else was the cause, like voter stupidity.
They aren't chaotic. They're very cyclical, following a four-year pattern, allowing you to predict when the next population rise or drop will be. That's the opposite of chaotic.
Which is clinically impossible because it makes you uncomfortable. Yes, I see...
/. was a Korean site, we'd probably be writting in Korean, no? That's just weak, man.
Said the blind man. Sorry, but I'm not going to entertain a notion just because a study which turns out to be complete shit says it's true. If that makes you think I'd never accept the conclusion, that's your problem.
What makes me uncomfortable is how ready people are to believe this. How ready to say "well, just because this data turned out to not support the conclusion at all, we should still give it serious consideration! After all, blacks are clearly inferior, we just haven't found the hard data to prove it yet!"
I'm curious what POSSIBLE data could be collected that you wouldn't refute for some reason or another.
Data which is irrefutable. Duh.
Which as you may have guessed isn't going to be easy to find. This isn't, as you might assume, because I'm completely unreasonable. It's because proving something like "blacks are genetically inferior" is going to be damn tough. Start with the fact that "race" is more or less an invention of our superior white/western culture. There is little science to back up a genetic distinction between races, and virtually no genetic trait is isolated in what we would call a "race". So based on the similarity of people's -skin-, a vastly simpler trait than whatever genetic magic goes on in the development of the brain, you want to try to find evidence
Then you take the fact that we have no way of reliably distinguishing from "innate" intelligence and "environmental" intelligence, mostly because we can't even define "intelligence", and yes, it's going to be hard to find a test that proves what you want it to.
Test scores? Oh, we all know test scores are biased. Economic performance? We all know that the white man keeps the black man down.
Are we even talking about the Bell Curve and inherited intelligence anymore? Economic status was one of the things the Bell Curve was trying to remove as a variable. Not even Murray would suggest that economic performance was a reliable indicator of hereditary intelligence.
IMO with a statistical sample of 1 particular experiment, clearly white/western cultures dominate right now. We're having this conversation in English, right?
Because we're both Americans, right? If
I'm not sure what you're talking about with the "statistical sample of 1 particular experiment", but I worry that it is somehowe related to the sentence after it.
And like you said yourself: we're dominant right now. How you could conceive that genetics was a factor, I can't imagine. Did white Europeans
Whether this dominance is the result of biology, psychology, culture, climate, or luck of geography, etc. is rather hard to discern. But I'd say between Amerindian and SS African cultures it's roughly a tie for the bottom rung of the "impact on humanity" ladder - semitic, asian, and latinate cultures have all had a turn, but it frankly doesn't look like we're going to see a "Pax Namibica" anytime soon.
I guess we aren't talking about the Bell Curve anymore. It sounds more like you're discussing some generic "whites are better than blacks and indians" philosophy, not even bothering to narrow it down to any particular trait other than being "dominant", based on us having an empire and them not.
Though before you get too hot on how great we are, let me point out that you don't know anything about African history. Don't worry I'm not knocking you for that, since we're both Americans and can hopefully mutually agree that education about Africa is pure shit. The Euro-centric nature of education would be a plausible explanation of why you believe Europeans are so much more important. But I would have hoped that before you concluded that Africans were the least significant culture and a "Pax Namibi
The fact that the bell curve for blacks is shifted to the left is just that, a statistical fact. It's not a conclusion.
:) in college admissions real quick-like.
No. The fact is that on tests which supposedly measure intelligence the bell curve for African Americans is shifted to the left. The conclusion is that this demonstrates an actual shift in intelligence.
Subtle difference, but one I find important. IQ != I, and that's controversy point (0).
It appears on all valid IQ tests.
I'll admit that I'm not aware of the definition of a "valid" IQ test. In general, I had thought that the problem of accurately defining intelligence, and thus obviously measuring it, was still out of reach. I would have thought that was the kind of discovery I would have heard about, at least through the AI community.
The biggest problem as far as I can tell with IQ tests is the desire to measure "innate" intelligence versus "learned" intelligence or knowledge that would be environmental and not genetic. But again, as far as I know, we haven't come up with a test that you can't improve your score on through preparation. So I was and am doubtful about the g-factor and its correlation to what we actually want to measure.
If we have found such a test, I would desperately hope that it would be in line to replace the SAT (Scholastic Ability-to-pay-for-prep-courses Test
If you learn anything about psychometrics, it's that it is difficult for any test not to be an IQ test.
What I learned from years of taking tests is that most tests are measures of test-taking ability as much as anything else.
Yes. Yes I did. Sorry about that.
What's sad is that you can probably never recognize the hypocracy of this statement. Drop dead, racist.
How do you get racism from my statement? Unless you're disagreeing that there exist racist white folk who would like to have their racism justified by science either bad or good, then I'm going to have to ask you to shut the fuck up. Acknowledging the existence of racism isn't racist, you ass gobbler.
Oh, and your opinon on The Bell Curve is the ypical ignorance expressed by people who only know about its contents by reading reviews written by ideological noodniks.
Partially true! I haven't read the book. I've read exerpts and I've read both the criticism of the book and the rebuttles to the criticism. I'm not sure how the criticism could be called the work of ideological noodniks. Unless the rebuttles written by Murray do not actually reflect the content of the book, then I'm still going to go with my opinion. He explained what his book meant and why his results are valid, and detractors explained why they aren't. I find the detractors arguments compelling and his not.
Feel free to explain why you think I am mischaracterizing the book, but I doubt you'd be able to add anything that Murray hasn't already himself.
Typo. Woops.
That's not what he concluded, now was it.
It was that as a race blacks have lower average intelligence and a much lower chance of producing a geniuses. The Bell Curve for blacks is shifted to the left. So yes, that is pretty much what he concluded: blacks are dumber than other races.
Just because GWC was a genius does not mean every other Black person will be or can be.
What's your point? That applies to everyone. I wasn't saying GWC proves all blacks are geniuses, I was questioning whether Carver was considered "significant" by Murray.
The conclusion of The Bell Curve was that you can find IQ trends amongst races, and if you recall correctly, Asians had the highest rate of geniuses. Murray is White, so where is his bias?
What, because he didn't put Whites at the top of the I.Q. Totem Pole that means he didn't have a bias? That's ridiculous. Particularly if his "bias" was against certain races less than for others. And "Asians are smart" is simply the parallel stereotype to "Blacks are dumb". Neither one was a new idea to the crowd the Bell Curve was written for, he was just providing them "proof".
I always find it astounding how people will readily admit that certain breeds of dogs have undeniable traits (Jack Russel Terriers are smart, Bloodhounds have highly sensitive noses, etc.) but then look at humans and refuse to admit any bio-level distinctions might be there.
I'm not denying the possibility of differences between races -- there are, obviously. I'm denying that his book was anything but overhyped shit designed to appeal to what rich white fucks already thought with sloppy science.
I guess that's why 75+% of the NBA is Black - because Asians and Whites are every bit as athletic, right?
I guess that's why 90+% of the NFL is White - because Asians and Blacks are every bit as athletic, right?
But that's the Bell Curve way, isn't it? Find the metric that tells you what you want to hear, then use that and ignore all other factors.
If you ask the question, "Are there really differences between races?" and eliminate "Yes" as a possible answer, you aren't being intellectually honest.
True. But if you cherry pick your data and measuring methods (one military aptitude test that was never even intended to measure "intelligence", number of paper references, percentage of one race playing a particular sport) to get the answer you have already assumed is true, then that's intellectually dishonest as well.
I found this last part the most intriguing, and it is something that I have suspected for a long time.
Don't let the fact that he's telling you what you already believed cause you to not investigate the claims. He's measuring his decline based on the number of "significant" individuals. That "significant" is defined by how much they are talked about, and that achievments by groups of non-famous people are ignored, should show that even if the claim of a decline is true, he isn't conclusively proving it.
When you consider that in ancient times it took 9 out of every 10 people just to produce enough food to feed everyone, it makes the accomplishments and inventions of those times even more astounding.
But it makes his method for picking achievment even more obviously crap. Only a small portion of the population had the ability to pursue science, so those who did have a much higher chance of standing out. That's why you've heard of Newton, but not any of the people who discovered and then demonstrated how to teleport photons instantaneously. There will be no Principia of our day, because the scientific advancements were written about by thousands of individuals.
So while our technology seems to be advancing at an incredible rate, this does not mean that we as a people have improved in our mental capacity.
I'd say that would be a highly unlikely occurance anyway. Until we start mucking about with our own genes or a few million years pass, there isn't much that's going to happen on the "capacity" front. The best we can do is to better realize and utilize that capacity.
And everyone has built their technology on the backs of their ancestors. Newton understood this, and said so. This does nothing to diminish the accomplishments of Newton or of modern day scientists who are too freaking numerous to mention or remember.
I guess what I'm saying is: You may be right and there -is- a decline, but this guy isn't proving it other than by being an example.
was that blacks are inherently stupid, I'm not surprised that he comes to the conclusion in this book that Westerners do all the great work. Does George Washington Carver (presumeably an outlier on the Bell Curve) make the list?
Are there a dozen Shakespeares? Maybe! How would you know? There are dozens of great playwrights in the world today, and dozens of authors, etc. Which are today's Shakespeare? Ask me in three hundred years when can see which authors are still talked about and studied in school. Was Shakespeare hailed as "the Homer of today" at the time? No!
"Significant" figures in science are decreasing? Maybe it's because more science is being done by groups of scientists collaborating. If a dozen papers come out of one university research group, but each has a different author's name on the top, then is that less accomplishment than six papers with one author? I guess the accomplishments of groups of scientists working together isn't significant.
Frankly, I think the absence of "significant" figures is a sign of progress. It shows that our scientific base is widening, so that contributions come from a greater number of individuals. Contrast for example Galileo, one of the only people doing astrological work at the time. Whereas now there are observatories around the world with thousands upon thousands of individuals studying the stars, each making their own contributions.
This book sounds like crap, which I base half on the review and half on my opinion that the Bell Curve was crap. Knowing the way he covers his crap assumptions and the resulting crap conclusions with statistics and charts that seem reasonable at first, I'm seeing heavy potential for the same kind of thing here. Starting with taking whatever statistical feature he's actually looking at and calling it "Achievment", a mirror of taking scores from a military aptitude test and calling that "Intelligence".
But he'll probably get a lot of book sales from people who want to hear about how white folk from the west are the producers of all human achievment.