Same attitude prevails in Australia and the UK, high ranking politicians are regularly brought down on corruption charges for relatively minor misdemeanours. There are aspects of the Westminster system that in my opinion are better at dealing with corruption and wasteful pork than the US system. Even the politicians I despise in my own country seem to genuinely believe in the system and generally abide by it's rules. I'm sure there are plenty of examples that demonstrate how wrong I am but for the most part, when push turns to shove most Aussie politicians abide by the spirit of democracy.
I am also not an absolutist on the free speech issue, in my opinion Fred Phelps and his crew have a right to their opinion but should not have the right to harass mourners at a funeral. Voicing one's opinion in public is not the same thing as shoving it down the throat of a grieving parent who is burying their child, this is why in London the nutters are asked to stand on a soap box in Hyde park, they get their message out to a large audience from around the globe who turn up daily to listen, laugh, argue, heckle, and take photos.
The world's a messy place, and (unlike Charlie Sheen) you're not going to win every hand you're dealt. People (particularly young men) need a way to vent these frustrations without unduly pissing off the rest of us, Hyde Park is the grandaddy of free speech venues where anyone and everyone can "vent", the invention of the internet has rendered it somewhat redundant but no less important.
They are peacekeeping troops, they are outsiders for a reason. Fighting "rebels" in their own country is not peacekeeping. As for why the Nepalese would send them, there are plenty of political and practical reasons, pride in "doing their bit", skills transfer, etc. Sadly this appears to be a case of good intentions leading directly to hell. I strongly agree that the UN should have the balls to acknowledge facts, mind you, I'm not sure what the facts are.
Back in the 60's large storm water grates in my little part of Oz were not padlocked, as kids we used to ride our bikes through miles of roughly 6' diameter bone dry storm drains, it was great fun to us at the time and a cool place to escape the summer heat. I shudder to think what would have happened if a summer storm had sprung up on the nearby mountains while we were underground. Padlocks did appear a couple of years after the drain was installed and killed off our new summer sport. Not sure what prompted the locks, I didn't read much news as a 8yo:) Maybe some kid was not as lucky as my friends and I, or maybe it was just an inquisitive parent with half a brain?.
The Queen [has] a delegate who [has] no power what-so-ever...
So how does the Canadian system handle a double dissolution? - Not saying you're wrong, I'm genuinely interested because here in Oz it's the job of the Queen (as represented by the GG) to force a new general election should one be required to break a budgetary deadlock. Surely you don't use the idiotic government IOU's the US uses to work around the occasional budgetary deadlocks brought on by zealous ideologues staring each other down in the house and senate?
Note that the Aussie GG is appointed by the Aussie parliament and rubber-stamped by the Queen. The prime-minister has the (on paper) power to sack him/her without notice or reason, so the power is not solely invested in either the GG or the PM. However it is virtually a political impossibility for a PM to sack the GG in a double dissolution situation and then fail to immediately call a general election. The accepted protocol for a double dissolution is to give the PM ample opportunity to call an election before contemplating sacking him and installing a caretaker government. Any PM willing to go as far as sacking the GG to hold onto power would almost certainly lose their job in a no-confidence vote, either in their own caucus, in the house of reps, or in the next election.
At the end of the day the Queen is a ceremonial head of state in Australia, she has one very specific political duty of any consequence, the role of a non-partisan "umpire" in the rare cases where the senate has rejected the government's budget at least twice in a row (aka: "blocked supply").
More than a few of our mates in the US cannot wrap their head around the 'ceremonial' qualifier but most of the commonwealth can see the difference and actually strongly prefer it to a US style republic. Thing is, US politics is so ubiquitous in the mass media that until the recent round of revolving PM's in Australia, many Aussies firmly believed they voted for a PM in the same way that the US votes for a president, in fact I'm sure there's more than a handful of Aussies that still hold that misconception.
US security agencies originally set up by UK security agencies during WWII
Not really, the brits had spies in the Nazi party that were planted as teenagers from Cambridge decades earlier. Also google the history of "Betchly Park", it's very closely related to early computers and played a pivotal (and until fairly recently, top secret) role in the outcome of WW2. Betchly was the granddaddy of the modern UK/US secret service. The UK agencies taught the US agencies how to decode German messages, together they used this knowledge to sink the German submarine fleet, later the same methods were used to crack Japanese codes and (for example) set up the naval ambush at the battle of midway. After the war the two nations managed to keep their code breaking secrets to themselves until the 60's when allies and enemies alike realised they had been getting dressed in front of an open window.
The two spy agencies shared the talent of men like Turing to defeat a common enemy. Signals intelligence was born and they have been tucked up in bed together ever since. Over the last few decades they have expanded their club to include rock solid allies such as Australia and Canada.
Believe it not the US drought was in the news quite a bit over here in Oz, as was the one in Russia. Food security is essential and developed countries do it well, but sometimes at the expense of everyone else. An increased occurrence of drought will have a sever effect on food security, poor harvests lead to high food prices and food riots, anarchy, mass migration and famine pretty much follow in that order. People may not have fled Georgia in large numbers due to the support of the other states in the union, but I doubt that S America has that level of food security and there are a hell of lot more people in S America that there are in Georgia.
Forensic examinations of human skeletons throughout time reveal that humans live together in relative peace when resources abound (eg: bronze age UK). The more we are forced to compete for the resources the more brutal the competition becomes. However as a grandfather of three I am also keenly aware that the right to breed is one of the most basic human rights (and instincts) we have, following that path we will forever survive on the limits. Sure it makes sense to use our technology to extend our limits and generate buffers to avoid wild fluctuations in supply, but it's just not in our collective nature to do so on empty stomachs.
It's been shown time and again that essentially two fairly simple things first world nations take almost for granted are required to halt global population growth, security in retirement, and empowering women to take the central role in family planning via cheap and effective contraception.
Your friends working on the actual AI problem over here in Linguistics and Psychology find it awfully amusing that you're trying to program a concept before we even know what that concept is.
No, you're just seeing the "problem" from a different angle, much of the modern world around us began by copying from nature, the actual concepts came later and became more refined with time. Humans use things that appear to work, Skinner showed decades ago how random ritual's were spontaneously created by pigeons to handle randomness in their food supply, The ritual dance the pigeon creates has no effect on the food supply, however the length of time it takes to perform the ritual converges a value slightly above the mean interval between pellet drops. Statistically the ritual will "work" the first time, if not a second performance will "work", the need for a third performance would be rare.
When something "works" that good, it's near impossible to convince a human that he's wasting his time. Humans may have more complex rituals but for the most part we just follow them like a pigeon does and judge them by their perceived utility. To do otherwise would result in death via decision paralysis. I see absolutely no reason to believe that doing a human "pigeon dance" of copying and modelling the nature of neural networks could not lead to the emergence of an artificial mind by sheer persistence and attention to detail.
Watson is a the current product of that sort of persistence, and IMHO it's an "AI" achievement that is seriously underestimated by people like yourself. It has shown that machines can outperform the best humans in the realm of general human knowledge and has done so just as convincingly as Deep Blue beat the best human chess players a couple of decades ago. The software for the two systems use entirely different architectures and algorithms, the reason for that is the difference in the problems they are attempting to solve.
I haven't RTFA but I strongly agree with the notion that the vast majority of people have a very narrow definition of AI. In a very real sense we already have lots of different versions of AI in existence that can outperform humans in a wide range of restricted problem spaces. Now if we look at nature, we can se that she has done the same thing. A human mind, an octopus mind, and a hive mind (ants nest/bee hive), are all undeniably intelligent and yet they are all undeniably alien to one another because they evolved different solutions to different problem spaces. Even the hardware of the "brain" behind those example minds is very different.
As a degree qualified Computer scientist since 1991 with a armchair interest in the subject for about 30yrs. It's my opinion that we are already surrounded by AI, what people are actually looking for when they say "AI" is an artificial human (eg: blade runner). The Turing test does not meet those expectations, nor was it ever intended to. What is does is tells you whether a computer can perform as well in a human in the restricted problem space of a remote conversation. The problem space it tests is very broad, general knowledge, metaphor, humour, etc. Turing basically came up with the first testable definition of AI, the fact that people have since offered alternative definitions and tests is irrelevant to the utility of the test to those who accept the definition.
Neuroscience and it's related biological and philological fields have a lot to offer in the quest to understand and model how mind emerges from matter (warning: great talk, irritating voice). Having said that, neuroscience is no more or less skewed in it's approach than the engineering POV. When people inevitably ask me about AI, I find I get into much more interesting conversations by responding with another question - what do you mean by the word 'intelligence'? I find more than a few people from th
Agree that flying to the moon was an inspiration to millions of 10yo boys like me who watched it live, it' undoubtedly THE most significant histrorical event in my lifetime (so far). But lets not forget it was funded for it's warboner appeal, not it's nerd appeal. Also a modern jet fighter is a testimony to mankind's ingenuity, not his wisdom.
Damm, where are my mod points. The reason the ocean around the Galloglass islands is so rich in sea life is because of one such upwelling. The power in those upwelling's is several orders of magnitude higher than our global energy needs and natural fish stocks are very high where they occur naturally. The waters around natural upwelling's is so productive they could be used to map the global southern ocean fishing fleet.
A population crash is not the same as extinction. For an example of how such a crash may start look no further than Syria. The 2007-09 drought was one of the worst in the history of mankind's oldest breadbasket. It caused food riots across the ME and N. Africa. Ten precent of of Syria's total population abandoned the rural area and migrated to the cities with empty hands and stomachs. The top US diplomat wrote before the war that the internal migration was causing a lot of tension in the cities and things were turning ugly, he even gave a special mention to the city where the civil war started. The 'Arab spring' was indeed a "call for democracy", however an astonishing number of people are that poorly informed they can't join the headlines up and realise that the call was largely inspired by a sharp deterioration in the standard of living brought on by drought and food prices.
Humans are territorial mammals, they were fighting and killing each other over access to resources long before Homo Sapiens arrived ~200ky ago, I see no signs of that behaviour changing but I do see signs of dwindling resources, in particular the most essential resource of all - water. Princes and priests don't normally cause' wars they simply rationalise them for the rest of their tribe. The instinctive 'mob' behaviour is obvious and easy to spot from a safe distance, but knowing the cause won't help you much when you're standing in a bread line.
But, as I said, if dreaming of global doom gets you off, keep at it
If pretending the likelihood of a self-induced population crash is zero makes you comfortable, keep at it. Fortunately for the rest of us, the pentagon considers climate related mass migration as the #1 long term threat to global security, and has held that opinion since the mid-naughties.
In shorter words, the life support system on this spaceship is broken but operable, we need a major upgrade just to keep the population we have. Taking on extra crew is not advisable at this time, we should be encouraging (as opposed to demanding) an overall reduction in numbers through natural attrition.
Yes, I think it's safe to assume that most wood enters the ocean via rivers, I would expect the vast majority of it is consumed by hungry critters before it gets of the river's underwater delta. From personal experience I worked on a fishing trawler in the Southern Ocean many years ago, even back in the 80's the ship pretty much drove itself but there had to be someone on watch at all times to avoid hazards (identified on the radar). Floating trees were the main worry but I only saw one or two when out at sea, which seems to agree with what your saying. The vast majority of the hazards turned out to be either floating beer cans, or sun-baking seals. Yes, they were Aussie seals, but I still haven't figured out how they managed the ring-pull with those flippers.:)
Any reputable climatologist will tell you the resolution on ancient climate reconstructions is nowhere near fine enough to pin things down to decades. The ancient climate is reconstructed by interpolating samples taken centuries apart. This article is a good example, past studies indicated the south lagged the north by 2kyr. That didn't make sense from a physical POV but that's what the sum of the evidence was telling the researchers. To say more than what the evidence is telling you is speculation, not science. This new study appears to have found evidence that there was no lag, meaning the discrepancy between theory and observation raised by the previous study is likely just a side-effect of the limited resolution of the previously available evidence..
Your claim suffers from the same limited resolution as the previous studies, neither you nor the GP can credibly claim the current change is more/less rapid than ancient changes seen in geological layers. Having said that and also acknowledging interpolation has a smoothing effect on the curve, I would be very surprised to find a 50yr spike like that of the last 50yrs in the geological record. Beside the lack of hard evidence, the basic problem I have accepting your speculation that the such spikes exist in the record is that, apart from space rock impacts, I can't think of any other natural process that would have such a rapid global effect.
Guess it was a slow news day on the "bitching about non-problems" desk at the LA times.
Yes. The first thing I thought of was the sawmill bus that used to take me to and from work at the mill (circa 1980). there's a "bubble" alright and the journalist is totally unaware he's looking out rather than in.
Burning the place to the ground and starting over would be cheaper.
I see a grasshopper who prefers the fire to the pan. The (few) systems built in the seventies that are still in use today, are here for one reason only, the stability and predictability imparted by 40yrs of field testing and maintenance, it's the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" rule in action. Different interface standards are not the root problem (middleware exists to solve that maze), the root problem is the difficulty of extracting the currently embedded business rules from the existing code. Why would you need to do that I hear you ask? - Because the customer's first requirement will be that the new system comes up with the "same numbers as the old system" (even if they are wrong).
Having worked on these kind of systems I'm sure the code is a dogs breakfast, but changing financial rules isn't something unexpected, it's practically an everyday occurrence in a large corporation operating across multiple jurisdictions. Two years to debug and fix y2k was reasonable considering most legacy code did not envision operating beyond 1999, and the herculean task of regression testing required for some systems, even though most systems only had a few lines of code changed. Two years to add a fairly straight forward line item to an account sounds like 'top floor' politics to me.
Nobody stole anything, they simply stopped trusting the quality of each other's financial instruments . There is no evil hoard of bankers sitting atop a mountain of cash, the money simply evaporated because without trust, financial instruments are basically worthless.
Mod parent up. Most people enter politics to "make the world a better place", they genuinely want to make a difference. That's a tough job to take on, right from the start you know a lot of people are going to do everything in their power to ensure you fail, up to and including a bullet to the head. If you succeed, you might just find that in the long run your good intentions have done nothing more than pave the way to hell (re: The Arab Spring).
Turns out to be a "fact of life" that people have different ideas of what "a better place" looks like and different ideas of how to achieve it. For example I strongly disagree with how the major parties here in Australia are currently handling the "boat people" issue. It's obvious to any decent person that the system is both inhumane and ludicrously expensive. Having said that, there are 45 million people circling the globe that have no country to call home and few prospects of finding one legally. It is my deep conviction that the way we are treating them now is "evil" but a significant portion of the population have a deep conviction in the opposite direction (ie: the boat people are evil, not us). I don't have a cure for my nation's xenophobic impulses, nor have I ever heard one, to pander to (and rationalise) such public impulses is actually part of a politician's job description.
Having said that, I think that the society I live in now is (on the whole) a much better place than the one I was born into in 1959, but most of the major improvements started before I was 20, some examples of these "improvements" are; the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, women's lib, the end of conscription, and the environmental movement. Now I'm absolutely certain some slashdotter's will see one or more of the things in the list as a step backward, that doesn't necessarily make them evil, it just makes them wrong:)
Ditto, the ads on Slashdot are normally pretty discrete. I've occasionally thrown them a few bucks in subscriptions too. Been hanging around for over a decade, I'd miss it if it went away.The WP crowd have also done a good job keeping ads out and funding it as a charity. Regardless what the ass-hats say about WP it really is a great example of a large group of people coming together and building something useful but it simply wouldn't exists without thousands or ordinary people throwing $10 in the jar every now and then.
I can't be bothered using any kind of ad-block, I just go somewhere else if I find the ads too intrusive. They're tracking my habits anyway so I might as well embed a clue for them.
That the government systematically spies on it's own people and uses the security apparatus for political gain has been going on in the US since at least the 1920's when prohibition and the FBI came together. Hoover, Nixon, McCarthy, do those names ring a bell? It's not a plan, it's a tradition, the only thing that has changed are the tools.
I recall reading about this when it happened. It reminded me of when I was a kid in the 60's I would watch mum heat up the solidified oil in the chip pan (making "fries" if you're American). The solid oil would melt in such a way that a thick flat disc formed across the entire surface (the ice shelf), holes would slowly start to appear in the disc (lakes), then when there were "enough" holes it would suddenly and dramatically break into to small blocks (bergs) which melted very fast. The strange thing was right up until it fell apart the diameter of the disc didn't shrink much at all (ie: it conserved the surface area defined by it's edge). It appears to me that the 200m thick ice shelf had the internal structure of swiss chees and simply collapsed under its own weight, much like the fat floating on top of mum's chip pan. In both cases the trigger is probably the motion of surface waves stressing the entire honeycomb structure and (and in the case of the ice sheet)draining the surface lakes in the early stages of the break up..
Having said that scientists will tell you (with some excitement) that the mechanics of melting ice sheets/shelves is "poorly understood", modelling the behaviour of various slabs of ice is an active research topic but they are a long way from claiming that all ginormous ice blocks melt in a predictable manner, I'd dare say we know even less about modelling small chip pans of melting fat.
Slashdot Mirror
Same attitude prevails in Australia and the UK, high ranking politicians are regularly brought down on corruption charges for relatively minor misdemeanours. There are aspects of the Westminster system that in my opinion are better at dealing with corruption and wasteful pork than the US system. Even the politicians I despise in my own country seem to genuinely believe in the system and generally abide by it's rules. I'm sure there are plenty of examples that demonstrate how wrong I am but for the most part, when push turns to shove most Aussie politicians abide by the spirit of democracy.
I am also not an absolutist on the free speech issue, in my opinion Fred Phelps and his crew have a right to their opinion but should not have the right to harass mourners at a funeral. Voicing one's opinion in public is not the same thing as shoving it down the throat of a grieving parent who is burying their child, this is why in London the nutters are asked to stand on a soap box in Hyde park, they get their message out to a large audience from around the globe who turn up daily to listen, laugh, argue, heckle, and take photos.
The world's a messy place, and (unlike Charlie Sheen) you're not going to win every hand you're dealt. People (particularly young men) need a way to vent these frustrations without unduly pissing off the rest of us, Hyde Park is the grandaddy of free speech venues where anyone and everyone can "vent", the invention of the internet has rendered it somewhat redundant but no less important.
They are peacekeeping troops, they are outsiders for a reason. Fighting "rebels" in their own country is not peacekeeping. As for why the Nepalese would send them, there are plenty of political and practical reasons, pride in "doing their bit", skills transfer, etc. Sadly this appears to be a case of good intentions leading directly to hell. I strongly agree that the UN should have the balls to acknowledge facts, mind you, I'm not sure what the facts are.
Back in the 60's large storm water grates in my little part of Oz were not padlocked, as kids we used to ride our bikes through miles of roughly 6' diameter bone dry storm drains, it was great fun to us at the time and a cool place to escape the summer heat. I shudder to think what would have happened if a summer storm had sprung up on the nearby mountains while we were underground. Padlocks did appear a couple of years after the drain was installed and killed off our new summer sport. Not sure what prompted the locks, I didn't read much news as a 8yo :) Maybe some kid was not as lucky as my friends and I, or maybe it was just an inquisitive parent with half a brain?.
The Queen [has] a delegate who [has] no power what-so-ever...
So how does the Canadian system handle a double dissolution? - Not saying you're wrong, I'm genuinely interested because here in Oz it's the job of the Queen (as represented by the GG) to force a new general election should one be required to break a budgetary deadlock. Surely you don't use the idiotic government IOU's the US uses to work around the occasional budgetary deadlocks brought on by zealous ideologues staring each other down in the house and senate?
Note that the Aussie GG is appointed by the Aussie parliament and rubber-stamped by the Queen. The prime-minister has the (on paper) power to sack him/her without notice or reason, so the power is not solely invested in either the GG or the PM. However it is virtually a political impossibility for a PM to sack the GG in a double dissolution situation and then fail to immediately call a general election. The accepted protocol for a double dissolution is to give the PM ample opportunity to call an election before contemplating sacking him and installing a caretaker government. Any PM willing to go as far as sacking the GG to hold onto power would almost certainly lose their job in a no-confidence vote, either in their own caucus, in the house of reps, or in the next election.
At the end of the day the Queen is a ceremonial head of state in Australia, she has one very specific political duty of any consequence, the role of a non-partisan "umpire" in the rare cases where the senate has rejected the government's budget at least twice in a row (aka: "blocked supply").
More than a few of our mates in the US cannot wrap their head around the 'ceremonial' qualifier but most of the commonwealth can see the difference and actually strongly prefer it to a US style republic. Thing is, US politics is so ubiquitous in the mass media that until the recent round of revolving PM's in Australia, many Aussies firmly believed they voted for a PM in the same way that the US votes for a president, in fact I'm sure there's more than a handful of Aussies that still hold that misconception.
US security agencies originally set up by UK security agencies during WWII
Not really, the brits had spies in the Nazi party that were planted as teenagers from Cambridge decades earlier. Also google the history of "Betchly Park", it's very closely related to early computers and played a pivotal (and until fairly recently, top secret) role in the outcome of WW2. Betchly was the granddaddy of the modern UK/US secret service. The UK agencies taught the US agencies how to decode German messages, together they used this knowledge to sink the German submarine fleet, later the same methods were used to crack Japanese codes and (for example) set up the naval ambush at the battle of midway. After the war the two nations managed to keep their code breaking secrets to themselves until the 60's when allies and enemies alike realised they had been getting dressed in front of an open window.
The two spy agencies shared the talent of men like Turing to defeat a common enemy. Signals intelligence was born and they have been tucked up in bed together ever since. Over the last few decades they have expanded their club to include rock solid allies such as Australia and Canada.
Believe it not the US drought was in the news quite a bit over here in Oz, as was the one in Russia. Food security is essential and developed countries do it well, but sometimes at the expense of everyone else. An increased occurrence of drought will have a sever effect on food security, poor harvests lead to high food prices and food riots, anarchy, mass migration and famine pretty much follow in that order. People may not have fled Georgia in large numbers due to the support of the other states in the union, but I doubt that S America has that level of food security and there are a hell of lot more people in S America that there are in Georgia.
Forensic examinations of human skeletons throughout time reveal that humans live together in relative peace when resources abound (eg: bronze age UK). The more we are forced to compete for the resources the more brutal the competition becomes. However as a grandfather of three I am also keenly aware that the right to breed is one of the most basic human rights (and instincts) we have, following that path we will forever survive on the limits. Sure it makes sense to use our technology to extend our limits and generate buffers to avoid wild fluctuations in supply, but it's just not in our collective nature to do so on empty stomachs.
It's been shown time and again that essentially two fairly simple things first world nations take almost for granted are required to halt global population growth, security in retirement, and empowering women to take the central role in family planning via cheap and effective contraception.
Your friends working on the actual AI problem over here in Linguistics and Psychology find it awfully amusing that you're trying to program a concept before we even know what that concept is.
No, you're just seeing the "problem" from a different angle, much of the modern world around us began by copying from nature, the actual concepts came later and became more refined with time. Humans use things that appear to work, Skinner showed decades ago how random ritual's were spontaneously created by pigeons to handle randomness in their food supply, The ritual dance the pigeon creates has no effect on the food supply, however the length of time it takes to perform the ritual converges a value slightly above the mean interval between pellet drops. Statistically the ritual will "work" the first time, if not a second performance will "work", the need for a third performance would be rare. When something "works" that good, it's near impossible to convince a human that he's wasting his time. Humans may have more complex rituals but for the most part we just follow them like a pigeon does and judge them by their perceived utility. To do otherwise would result in death via decision paralysis. I see absolutely no reason to believe that doing a human "pigeon dance" of copying and modelling the nature of neural networks could not lead to the emergence of an artificial mind by sheer persistence and attention to detail.
Watson is a the current product of that sort of persistence, and IMHO it's an "AI" achievement that is seriously underestimated by people like yourself. It has shown that machines can outperform the best humans in the realm of general human knowledge and has done so just as convincingly as Deep Blue beat the best human chess players a couple of decades ago. The software for the two systems use entirely different architectures and algorithms, the reason for that is the difference in the problems they are attempting to solve.
I haven't RTFA but I strongly agree with the notion that the vast majority of people have a very narrow definition of AI. In a very real sense we already have lots of different versions of AI in existence that can outperform humans in a wide range of restricted problem spaces. Now if we look at nature, we can se that she has done the same thing. A human mind, an octopus mind, and a hive mind (ants nest/bee hive), are all undeniably intelligent and yet they are all undeniably alien to one another because they evolved different solutions to different problem spaces. Even the hardware of the "brain" behind those example minds is very different.
As a degree qualified Computer scientist since 1991 with a armchair interest in the subject for about 30yrs. It's my opinion that we are already surrounded by AI, what people are actually looking for when they say "AI" is an artificial human (eg: blade runner). The Turing test does not meet those expectations, nor was it ever intended to. What is does is tells you whether a computer can perform as well in a human in the restricted problem space of a remote conversation. The problem space it tests is very broad, general knowledge, metaphor, humour, etc. Turing basically came up with the first testable definition of AI, the fact that people have since offered alternative definitions and tests is irrelevant to the utility of the test to those who accept the definition.
Neuroscience and it's related biological and philological fields have a lot to offer in the quest to understand and model how mind emerges from matter (warning: great talk, irritating voice). Having said that, neuroscience is no more or less skewed in it's approach than the engineering POV. When people inevitably ask me about AI, I find I get into much more interesting conversations by responding with another question - what do you mean by the word 'intelligence'? I find more than a few people from th
Agree that flying to the moon was an inspiration to millions of 10yo boys like me who watched it live, it' undoubtedly THE most significant histrorical event in my lifetime (so far). But lets not forget it was funded for it's warboner appeal, not it's nerd appeal. Also a modern jet fighter is a testimony to mankind's ingenuity, not his wisdom.
Damm, where are my mod points. The reason the ocean around the Galloglass islands is so rich in sea life is because of one such upwelling. The power in those upwelling's is several orders of magnitude higher than our global energy needs and natural fish stocks are very high where they occur naturally. The waters around natural upwelling's is so productive they could be used to map the global southern ocean fishing fleet.
Humans are territorial mammals, they were fighting and killing each other over access to resources long before Homo Sapiens arrived ~200ky ago, I see no signs of that behaviour changing but I do see signs of dwindling resources, in particular the most essential resource of all - water. Princes and priests don't normally cause' wars they simply rationalise them for the rest of their tribe. The instinctive 'mob' behaviour is obvious and easy to spot from a safe distance, but knowing the cause won't help you much when you're standing in a bread line.
But, as I said, if dreaming of global doom gets you off, keep at it
If pretending the likelihood of a self-induced population crash is zero makes you comfortable, keep at it. Fortunately for the rest of us, the pentagon considers climate related mass migration as the #1 long term threat to global security, and has held that opinion since the mid-naughties.
In shorter words, the life support system on this spaceship is broken but operable, we need a major upgrade just to keep the population we have. Taking on extra crew is not advisable at this time, we should be encouraging (as opposed to demanding) an overall reduction in numbers through natural attrition.
Close but no cigar, it's 451 as in Fahrenheit 451
Yes, I think it's safe to assume that most wood enters the ocean via rivers, I would expect the vast majority of it is consumed by hungry critters before it gets of the river's underwater delta. From personal experience I worked on a fishing trawler in the Southern Ocean many years ago, even back in the 80's the ship pretty much drove itself but there had to be someone on watch at all times to avoid hazards (identified on the radar). Floating trees were the main worry but I only saw one or two when out at sea, which seems to agree with what your saying. The vast majority of the hazards turned out to be either floating beer cans, or sun-baking seals. Yes, they were Aussie seals, but I still haven't figured out how they managed the ring-pull with those flippers. :)
Any reputable climatologist will tell you the resolution on ancient climate reconstructions is nowhere near fine enough to pin things down to decades. The ancient climate is reconstructed by interpolating samples taken centuries apart. This article is a good example, past studies indicated the south lagged the north by 2kyr. That didn't make sense from a physical POV but that's what the sum of the evidence was telling the researchers. To say more than what the evidence is telling you is speculation, not science. This new study appears to have found evidence that there was no lag, meaning the discrepancy between theory and observation raised by the previous study is likely just a side-effect of the limited resolution of the previously available evidence..
Your claim suffers from the same limited resolution as the previous studies, neither you nor the GP can credibly claim the current change is more/less rapid than ancient changes seen in geological layers. Having said that and also acknowledging interpolation has a smoothing effect on the curve, I would be very surprised to find a 50yr spike like that of the last 50yrs in the geological record. Beside the lack of hard evidence, the basic problem I have accepting your speculation that the such spikes exist in the record is that, apart from space rock impacts, I can't think of any other natural process that would have such a rapid global effect.
Guess it was a slow news day on the "bitching about non-problems" desk at the LA times.
Yes. The first thing I thought of was the sawmill bus that used to take me to and from work at the mill (circa 1980). there's a "bubble" alright and the journalist is totally unaware he's looking out rather than in.
Mate, get out of the luxury bus. and take a look at the real world.
Burning the place to the ground and starting over would be cheaper.
I see a grasshopper who prefers the fire to the pan. The (few) systems built in the seventies that are still in use today, are here for one reason only, the stability and predictability imparted by 40yrs of field testing and maintenance, it's the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" rule in action. Different interface standards are not the root problem (middleware exists to solve that maze), the root problem is the difficulty of extracting the currently embedded business rules from the existing code. Why would you need to do that I hear you ask? - Because the customer's first requirement will be that the new system comes up with the "same numbers as the old system" (even if they are wrong).
Having worked on these kind of systems I'm sure the code is a dogs breakfast, but changing financial rules isn't something unexpected, it's practically an everyday occurrence in a large corporation operating across multiple jurisdictions. Two years to debug and fix y2k was reasonable considering most legacy code did not envision operating beyond 1999, and the herculean task of regression testing required for some systems, even though most systems only had a few lines of code changed. Two years to add a fairly straight forward line item to an account sounds like 'top floor' politics to me.
Nobody stole anything, they simply stopped trusting the quality of each other's financial instruments . There is no evil hoard of bankers sitting atop a mountain of cash, the money simply evaporated because without trust, financial instruments are basically worthless.
Mod parent up. Most people enter politics to "make the world a better place", they genuinely want to make a difference. That's a tough job to take on, right from the start you know a lot of people are going to do everything in their power to ensure you fail, up to and including a bullet to the head. If you succeed, you might just find that in the long run your good intentions have done nothing more than pave the way to hell (re: The Arab Spring).
:)
Turns out to be a "fact of life" that people have different ideas of what "a better place" looks like and different ideas of how to achieve it. For example I strongly disagree with how the major parties here in Australia are currently handling the "boat people" issue. It's obvious to any decent person that the system is both inhumane and ludicrously expensive. Having said that, there are 45 million people circling the globe that have no country to call home and few prospects of finding one legally. It is my deep conviction that the way we are treating them now is "evil" but a significant portion of the population have a deep conviction in the opposite direction (ie: the boat people are evil, not us). I don't have a cure for my nation's xenophobic impulses, nor have I ever heard one, to pander to (and rationalise) such public impulses is actually part of a politician's job description.
Having said that, I think that the society I live in now is (on the whole) a much better place than the one I was born into in 1959, but most of the major improvements started before I was 20, some examples of these "improvements" are; the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, women's lib, the end of conscription, and the environmental movement. Now I'm absolutely certain some slashdotter's will see one or more of the things in the list as a step backward, that doesn't necessarily make them evil, it just makes them wrong
I was thinking the same thing, "tailoring" ads to "diversify" your experience sounds like an oxymoron to me.
Ditto, the ads on Slashdot are normally pretty discrete. I've occasionally thrown them a few bucks in subscriptions too. Been hanging around for over a decade, I'd miss it if it went away.The WP crowd have also done a good job keeping ads out and funding it as a charity. Regardless what the ass-hats say about WP it really is a great example of a large group of people coming together and building something useful but it simply wouldn't exists without thousands or ordinary people throwing $10 in the jar every now and then.
I can't be bothered using any kind of ad-block, I just go somewhere else if I find the ads too intrusive. They're tracking my habits anyway so I might as well embed a clue for them.
Germany here: The problem is: Our own BND is just as bad.
Russia here. WTF are you complaining about?
Aussie here, Bruce lost the tapes again, can one of you guys send us the backup?
WhereInTheWorldIsClapper.gov, sounds reasonable to me.
That the government systematically spies on it's own people and uses the security apparatus for political gain has been going on in the US since at least the 1920's when prohibition and the FBI came together. Hoover, Nixon, McCarthy, do those names ring a bell? It's not a plan, it's a tradition, the only thing that has changed are the tools.
I recall reading about this when it happened. It reminded me of when I was a kid in the 60's I would watch mum heat up the solidified oil in the chip pan (making "fries" if you're American). The solid oil would melt in such a way that a thick flat disc formed across the entire surface (the ice shelf), holes would slowly start to appear in the disc (lakes), then when there were "enough" holes it would suddenly and dramatically break into to small blocks (bergs) which melted very fast. The strange thing was right up until it fell apart the diameter of the disc didn't shrink much at all (ie: it conserved the surface area defined by it's edge). It appears to me that the 200m thick ice shelf had the internal structure of swiss chees and simply collapsed under its own weight, much like the fat floating on top of mum's chip pan. In both cases the trigger is probably the motion of surface waves stressing the entire honeycomb structure and (and in the case of the ice sheet)draining the surface lakes in the early stages of the break up..
Having said that scientists will tell you (with some excitement) that the mechanics of melting ice sheets/shelves is "poorly understood", modelling the behaviour of various slabs of ice is an active research topic but they are a long way from claiming that all ginormous ice blocks melt in a predictable manner, I'd dare say we know even less about modelling small chip pans of melting fat.