Also, did you notice the part where the governments of not one, but four poor nations are buying the computers? That would seem to indicate somebody thinks they will be useful.
I'm sure they will be useful - for resale on the grey market.
Their post was practically off-topic, actually - we're talking about local police doing things they shouldn't be doing, with no direction given to them on the subject except that of their fellow officers. The president doesn't enter into it.
There are some cases where it makes delivery of dynamic content a bit easier by offloading some of the processing to the client, but I'm convinced that a large part of the reason some sites use Javascript is to make it harder to deeplink their site. Sort of like the old disabling-context-menus trick, which, by the way, I'm really glad doesn't work in Firefox (the dialog box saying it's disabled still pops up, but you also still get the context menu).
SG-1 is on Season 10 right now (this weekend was the second ep of the season). I agree completely that the sunset of RDA's tenure was painful - he simply didn't take his character seriously enough most of the time, which is unfortunate because even during the start of his decline (season six), he had some stellar performances in episodes like Abyss (where he was captured by Baal) and The Changeling (although Chris Judge was really the star of that episode). RDA achieved balance during the earlier seasons, combining a great sense of humor with a knack for powerful performance, and it was a shame to see him tarnish that legacy with so many mediocre appearances just before he left.
Michael Shanks is their anchor now, and he still has the balance between humor and drama that he honed working with RDA in the earlier seasons. Of course, now he's stuck playing that balance off of Claudia Black, who, while she can give a great performance, often doesn't get the chance because her character is two steps away from comic relief. Amanda Tapping and Chris Judge are also very talented, but for some reason they don't get nearly enough chances these days to go beyond their caricatured roles of nerdy physicist and stoic warrior.
Atlantis, on the other hand, lacks plot direction. It amounts to "flail blindly against the ravages of the Wraith", without any sort of clue as to what the team's plan is or where they're going. I think this is partly due to the Wraith being a faceless horde of nobodies, while the enemies with real personality never seem to pose more than a transient threat. The acting is good (David Hewlett shows the most potential, in my opinion, but any growth his character shows always seems to disappear by the next episode), the directing is good, and the design and effects are top-notch. The writers just need to figure out where this boat is going and clue us in the tiniest bit.
Admittedly, I haven't been to Radio Shack in a few years, but they most definitely were collecting that information with even the tiniest purchase the last time I went there. I have about as much of a clue what I'm talking about as you do, so you can take your hard-earned flamebait point and shove it directly up your ass.
Signing off on blueprints that you know contain design flaws that could possibly be dangerous is quite possibly the most stupid thing a professional engineer can do (with sleeping with the boss's daughter running a close second). Not only is it unethical, but it could land one's ass in jail and one's bank account in the hands of the victims' lawyers if something goes horribly wrong.
For that matter, not blowing the whistle when such designs get approved by other less scrupulous engineers is also unethical. We're talking about people's lives, and that's far more important than keeping a crappy job at a design firm where this sort of thing will happen over and over until a tragedy finally occurs.
From what I've seen in the past (and admittedly, my experience in the matter isn't great), usually when something goes wrong, either the engineer made an honest mistake (however unfortunate the outcome) that slipped through whatever vetting process the design firm used, or the contractor decided to make some last-minute unapproved changes to save time or materials when implementing the design.
a small piece of our nails might be a universe too...
Farnsworth 420: Dig it! All of you fitting in this box is, like, seriously freaked up! Farnsworth 1: Nonsense! Why, there's a whole universe in there. Farnsworth 420: Dude, there's a universe in all of us. Amy 420:(puts her arms around Farnsworth 420) Right on, Professor Freaksworth! Farnsworth 420 offers Farnsworth A a flower. Farnsworth A: Get a job!
Actually, I wasn't being serious. I just couldn't pass up a chance to make a dig at Radio Shack's policy of collecting ridiculous amounts of personally identifiable information even when you buy something as small and inexpensive as a battery.
and wanted to buy an AA battery for my alarm clock. I was out in the suburbs and the only shop I could find selling batteries was an electronics shop specialising in larger items, like stereos et al. So to buy my AA battery I had to fill in two forms, give address and phone number, etc etc...
Let me guess: the small, poor country you were in was the United States, and the store you went to was the local Radio Shack.
I think a more appropriate quote would be, "They who don't pay attention to what their kids do on the Internet, deserve neither kids nor the Internet."
Military funding in particular is a lot easier to get when you have connections. Many of the grant solicitations they release are written by people interested in R&D being done at a specific institution. While they keep the actual proposal process impartial in terms of determining the awardees (no, most of the military doesn't play the Halliburton game), it's a good feeling to read a solicitation and see that it cites a bunch of papers you wrote the year before.
I wonder if the same people, seeing the incredible gap between their own income and that of high-level players like Donald Trump and Bill Gates, are considering quitting the game called Real Life(tm) as well.
At one of our local grocery stores, the self-checkout lines include full-fledged conveyors, and items are validated as they move along the conveyor toward the bagging area. The only time you have to tear yourself away from the excitement of scanning your own items is when your twelve cereal boxes have all fallen over on the conveyor and stacked themselves in a nice lengthwise fashion all the way back to the item validating widget. With this setup I can buy a full complement of groceries with few, if any, problems.
In terms of the technological singularity, there's a big difference between brute-force search over a finite-but-large space and the sort of reasoning that humans do. Simply put, we haven't figured out how to get computers to do the sort of creative reasoning that is probably necessary for a computer to improve its own design in a way substantial enough to cause the technological singularity.
On the chess problem alone and Hofstadter's prediction, what really happened was a duel between Hofstadter and Moore, in a sense. Eventually, the raw computing power available for looking ahead through chess's ginormous FSM became large enough that having access to the lookahead information proved more useful than the abstract reasoning skills of the chess grandmasters. That was really a theoretical inevitability once the algorithm for performing that lookahead was devised (decades ago, though the more recent programs now use heuristics to prune away large parts of the search tree's breadth). In fact, at that point, the only thing not inevitable was actually fairly unrelated to actually playing chess: the continuing improvement in generic computing hardware, semiconductors, etc.
But even if computing hardware continues to improve, there's no guarantee that we'll ever come up with the algorithm necessary for allowing computers to cause the technological singularity. That's the difference between this and chess, because with chess, the algorithm was known, and it was just a matter of giving computers enough time to chug away. The technological singularity may be impossible, for all we know right now. However, even Hofstadter agrees that it's probably an eventuality, though he's orders of magnitude less optimistic about it happening "soon" than Kurzweil is.
There's also a difference between technology making something possible and something happening naturally without the assistance of technology, so I would say the extrapolation you're making isn't valid.
Douglas Hofstadter, a Pulitzer prize winning author with a Ph.D. in physics and an appointment in Cognitive Science at Indiana University, talked about Ray Kurzweil's predictions of the oncoming technological singularity at the Artificial Life X conference this year. An audio-only webcast of his talk is available.
There's a big difference between someone that's brain dead and someone that's still a developing embryo. As long as exigent circumstances don't affect the embryo (toxins, trauma, etc.), that embryo will usually develop into a birth-viable fetus. A brain dead adult, barring those same exigent circumstances (excepting, of course, the circumstances that caused brain death in the first place) will not repair its brain or otherwise progress in any way.
I hope this happens. In particular, I've been hoping that JIT publishing and community-generated textbooks would revolutionize the public school system, saving huge amounts of money while reducing the politics and misinformation that have crept into textbooks.
Unfortunately, even though the technology is advancing to the point of feasibility, we're still missing the community-generated textbooks. In the meantime, the for-profit publishers won't bother passing along their savings to their customers.
If part of the assignment requirement is that, upon being run, your program should produce a specific output, I don't see where there's a difference between having a human run the program and determine whether the output is correct, and having a script do the same thing.
Sadly, automating any part of the grading process means you end up giving a lot less feedback to the students concerning their errors, but that's the prerogative of the instructor and assistants. In some classes, however, the student-to-TA ratio is so large that it would be impossible to grade every homework manually.
Also keep in mind that some TAs don't actually get paid for their efforts - and those who do usually make peanuts. At some schools, and in some academic programs, being a TA is a required part of your graduate degree. And since they're working on their own degree, the TAs actually have a lot of their own work to do in addition to grading hundreds of homeworks every week.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want subtle acting and believable characterization, you can go watch Meryl Streep.
Okay, but is there any way I can make her invisible but her clothes visible? You know, just in case?
Captain Murphy: Come on, come on, what are you waiting for?! Daddy needs his medicine.
Also, did you notice the part where the governments of not one, but four poor nations are buying the computers? That would seem to indicate somebody thinks they will be useful.
I'm sure they will be useful - for resale on the grey market.
Their post was practically off-topic, actually - we're talking about local police doing things they shouldn't be doing, with no direction given to them on the subject except that of their fellow officers. The president doesn't enter into it.
There are some cases where it makes delivery of dynamic content a bit easier by offloading some of the processing to the client, but I'm convinced that a large part of the reason some sites use Javascript is to make it harder to deeplink their site. Sort of like the old disabling-context-menus trick, which, by the way, I'm really glad doesn't work in Firefox (the dialog box saying it's disabled still pops up, but you also still get the context menu).
Oops! This weekend was the third episode of the season in the US, not the second. Sorry :/
SG-1 is on Season 10 right now (this weekend was the second ep of the season). I agree completely that the sunset of RDA's tenure was painful - he simply didn't take his character seriously enough most of the time, which is unfortunate because even during the start of his decline (season six), he had some stellar performances in episodes like Abyss (where he was captured by Baal) and The Changeling (although Chris Judge was really the star of that episode). RDA achieved balance during the earlier seasons, combining a great sense of humor with a knack for powerful performance, and it was a shame to see him tarnish that legacy with so many mediocre appearances just before he left.
Michael Shanks is their anchor now, and he still has the balance between humor and drama that he honed working with RDA in the earlier seasons. Of course, now he's stuck playing that balance off of Claudia Black, who, while she can give a great performance, often doesn't get the chance because her character is two steps away from comic relief. Amanda Tapping and Chris Judge are also very talented, but for some reason they don't get nearly enough chances these days to go beyond their caricatured roles of nerdy physicist and stoic warrior.
Atlantis, on the other hand, lacks plot direction. It amounts to "flail blindly against the ravages of the Wraith", without any sort of clue as to what the team's plan is or where they're going. I think this is partly due to the Wraith being a faceless horde of nobodies, while the enemies with real personality never seem to pose more than a transient threat. The acting is good (David Hewlett shows the most potential, in my opinion, but any growth his character shows always seems to disappear by the next episode), the directing is good, and the design and effects are top-notch. The writers just need to figure out where this boat is going and clue us in the tiniest bit.
Admittedly, I haven't been to Radio Shack in a few years, but they most definitely were collecting that information with even the tiniest purchase the last time I went there. I have about as much of a clue what I'm talking about as you do, so you can take your hard-earned flamebait point and shove it directly up your ass.
Signing off on blueprints that you know contain design flaws that could possibly be dangerous is quite possibly the most stupid thing a professional engineer can do (with sleeping with the boss's daughter running a close second). Not only is it unethical, but it could land one's ass in jail and one's bank account in the hands of the victims' lawyers if something goes horribly wrong.
For that matter, not blowing the whistle when such designs get approved by other less scrupulous engineers is also unethical. We're talking about people's lives, and that's far more important than keeping a crappy job at a design firm where this sort of thing will happen over and over until a tragedy finally occurs.
From what I've seen in the past (and admittedly, my experience in the matter isn't great), usually when something goes wrong, either the engineer made an honest mistake (however unfortunate the outcome) that slipped through whatever vetting process the design firm used, or the contractor decided to make some last-minute unapproved changes to save time or materials when implementing the design.
a small piece of our nails might be a universe too...
Farnsworth 420: Dig it! All of you fitting in this box is, like, seriously freaked up!
Farnsworth 1: Nonsense! Why, there's a whole universe in there.
Farnsworth 420: Dude, there's a universe in all of us.
Amy 420: (puts her arms around Farnsworth 420) Right on, Professor Freaksworth!
Farnsworth 420 offers Farnsworth A a flower.
Farnsworth A: Get a job!
Actually, I wasn't being serious. I just couldn't pass up a chance to make a dig at Radio Shack's policy of collecting ridiculous amounts of personally identifiable information even when you buy something as small and inexpensive as a battery.
and wanted to buy an AA battery for my alarm clock. I was out in the suburbs and the only shop I could find selling batteries was an electronics shop specialising in larger items, like stereos et al. So to buy my AA battery I had to fill in two forms, give address and phone number, etc etc...
Let me guess: the small, poor country you were in was the United States, and the store you went to was the local Radio Shack.
I think a more appropriate quote would be, "They who don't pay attention to what their kids do on the Internet, deserve neither kids nor the Internet."
If slashdot is grouped with MySpace does that mean we are also a haven for online sexual predators?
As many times as goatse has been posted around here, I'd say yes.
AMD drank the Kool-Aid some time ago.
Military funding in particular is a lot easier to get when you have connections. Many of the grant solicitations they release are written by people interested in R&D being done at a specific institution. While they keep the actual proposal process impartial in terms of determining the awardees (no, most of the military doesn't play the Halliburton game), it's a good feeling to read a solicitation and see that it cites a bunch of papers you wrote the year before.
I wonder if the same people, seeing the incredible gap between their own income and that of high-level players like Donald Trump and Bill Gates, are considering quitting the game called Real Life(tm) as well.
At one of our local grocery stores, the self-checkout lines include full-fledged conveyors, and items are validated as they move along the conveyor toward the bagging area. The only time you have to tear yourself away from the excitement of scanning your own items is when your twelve cereal boxes have all fallen over on the conveyor and stacked themselves in a nice lengthwise fashion all the way back to the item validating widget. With this setup I can buy a full complement of groceries with few, if any, problems.
On the plus side, no need to worry about patents here due to the decades' worth of prior art.
In terms of the technological singularity, there's a big difference between brute-force search over a finite-but-large space and the sort of reasoning that humans do. Simply put, we haven't figured out how to get computers to do the sort of creative reasoning that is probably necessary for a computer to improve its own design in a way substantial enough to cause the technological singularity.
On the chess problem alone and Hofstadter's prediction, what really happened was a duel between Hofstadter and Moore, in a sense. Eventually, the raw computing power available for looking ahead through chess's ginormous FSM became large enough that having access to the lookahead information proved more useful than the abstract reasoning skills of the chess grandmasters. That was really a theoretical inevitability once the algorithm for performing that lookahead was devised (decades ago, though the more recent programs now use heuristics to prune away large parts of the search tree's breadth). In fact, at that point, the only thing not inevitable was actually fairly unrelated to actually playing chess: the continuing improvement in generic computing hardware, semiconductors, etc.
But even if computing hardware continues to improve, there's no guarantee that we'll ever come up with the algorithm necessary for allowing computers to cause the technological singularity. That's the difference between this and chess, because with chess, the algorithm was known, and it was just a matter of giving computers enough time to chug away. The technological singularity may be impossible, for all we know right now. However, even Hofstadter agrees that it's probably an eventuality, though he's orders of magnitude less optimistic about it happening "soon" than Kurzweil is.
There's also a difference between technology making something possible and something happening naturally without the assistance of technology, so I would say the extrapolation you're making isn't valid.
Douglas Hofstadter, a Pulitzer prize winning author with a Ph.D. in physics and an appointment in Cognitive Science at Indiana University, talked about Ray Kurzweil's predictions of the oncoming technological singularity at the Artificial Life X conference this year. An audio-only webcast of his talk is available.
There's a big difference between someone that's brain dead and someone that's still a developing embryo. As long as exigent circumstances don't affect the embryo (toxins, trauma, etc.), that embryo will usually develop into a birth-viable fetus. A brain dead adult, barring those same exigent circumstances (excepting, of course, the circumstances that caused brain death in the first place) will not repair its brain or otherwise progress in any way.
I hope this happens. In particular, I've been hoping that JIT publishing and community-generated textbooks would revolutionize the public school system, saving huge amounts of money while reducing the politics and misinformation that have crept into textbooks.
Unfortunately, even though the technology is advancing to the point of feasibility, we're still missing the community-generated textbooks. In the meantime, the for-profit publishers won't bother passing along their savings to their customers.
If part of the assignment requirement is that, upon being run, your program should produce a specific output, I don't see where there's a difference between having a human run the program and determine whether the output is correct, and having a script do the same thing.
Sadly, automating any part of the grading process means you end up giving a lot less feedback to the students concerning their errors, but that's the prerogative of the instructor and assistants. In some classes, however, the student-to-TA ratio is so large that it would be impossible to grade every homework manually.
Also keep in mind that some TAs don't actually get paid for their efforts - and those who do usually make peanuts. At some schools, and in some academic programs, being a TA is a required part of your graduate degree. And since they're working on their own degree, the TAs actually have a lot of their own work to do in addition to grading hundreds of homeworks every week.