That's not what the uncanny valley is. Yes, they look more human, everyone agrees with that. However, they look creepy as opposed to the ones that look less human. You look at a cartoon, and the characters look cute. You look at clu from Tron Legacy and you're simultaneously impressed and creeped out.
Those extra three seconds during my monthly reboot are really going to add up!
That's what I was thinking. If the only advantage of switching from GDM to LightDM is that they can book 3 seconds faster, it's not worth it. Going from 15 seconds to 12 seconds is not significant at all.
In fact, here's a simpler rule. If you need to use your stopwatch to determine whether the boot sequence got faster or not, then it's not significant.
A link would be fine, giving a preview or storing cached content would not be.
Have you ever used a search engine? Links are accompanied by a small portion of content that relates to the search term you placed. If they weren't, it wouldn't be useful. How would you know which of the thousands of results to click on? Or even if you limited yourself to the first 2 or 3 pages, how would know which of those to actually click on?
This isn't limited to google. All search engines do this because a search engine simply isn't useful without this cached content.
You're a moron. It means that developers need to grow up. The only reason to use names like this is for the shock value due to their offensiveness. I think it should go without saying that we need to stop demeaning women for lulz.
Do you remember when you were a child in school? There were kids who liked to pick on others, call them names, do everything possible to humiliate them in front of the others. Part of growing up is no longer feeling the need to be the center of attention by trying to hurt people you perceive cannot hurt you back. It's cruel, it's childish, and it's sad when someone reaches adulthood without learning enough to no longer get any pleasure from that activity.
You remember the kids who were the subject of the above insults? Some would cry, some would retreat and try to avoid crossing paths with the bullies at all costs, others would put on a brave face, but would still be bothered by it. Another part of growing up is learning to not give a shit when an immature bully tries to hurt you. Turns out that words can't hurt you if you don't let them. It's sad when people reach adulthood without learning that lesson.
Lol, just watched the video montage he did of the stunt. Some minutes into the video, after showing a couple of hundred faces, he ponders "Would people look different if I showed them how the computer sees them?" - or in other words "Would people react differently if I showed them I was taking pictures of them?"
Yeah, he seemed to imply that the way people "stare at their computers" is an unnatural thing, and that showing to them what they were doing would wake them up to the fact that they were zombie-staring at a computer and cause them to change their ways. His interpretation of people hitting escape is that they were mindless automatons who were not enlightened by his demonstration.
Sometimes the artistic types over-think things and don't realize reality is far simpler. If you take the actions of somebody driving a car without considering the actual car movement, it looks stupid. They're holding a wheel, staring to the front of them, sometimes turning their heads, sometimes turning the wheel, sometimes pressing a pedal. It's only when you associate the actions with the results of the action that it all makes sense. They're looking at traffic, they're turning the car, they're accelerating or braking. To look at someone staring at a computer or a book without also showing what they're looking at is an incomplete picture and offers no insights.
I do think that if the people understood E-bay, they would understand that their original bid should be their entire valuation and then they would not make the second bid.
Well, you're absolutely right. I was just trying to point out that they also need to understand the emotional component that makes them want to bid irrationally. I think it's the same thing that happens in poker. You put a large amount in the pot, and you feel like you're invested in that hand. if you're a smart player and you notice the odds are against you making that hand, you know that the money in the pot is already gone. Beginners will completely ignore pot odds once they're emotionally attached to that hand. Hell, experts will sometimes do it.
The thing is that what you say would be correct in the ideal world where everybody understood E-bay.
It's not that people don't understand e-bay, it's that people aren't rational and what they are willing to pay changes depending on the current valuation of the item. If they see something on ebay that's currently going for $1.50, they might say, "I'm willing to pay up to $10 on that." Once they get outbid and the price climbs to $11, they become emotionally invested and adjust their maximum. They start thinking, "well, maybe I can go up to $20," even though they would have never agreed to go up that high before. It's the reason why sometimes you see things selling on ebay for more than the retail price...some bidders got too invested in winning the bid.
Sniping is effective in that it forces everyone to stick to their original valuations. Good for buyers, bad for sellers.
I mean, a blow to the head will also cause us to lose consciousness. But it won't help us understand what makes us conscious.
Actually, it does. It tells us that the organ responsible for consciousness resides in the head. Similarly, we've discovered a lot about what different regions of the brain are responsible for by looking at people who received brain damage to different areas and looking at what they were now unable to do as a result. You know the brain is responsible for consciousness, this can help narrow down what brain activity is involved by looking at what activity is inhibited when you're unconscious.
Conversely, why the hell we think only land life would be sentient and capable of technology is beyond me
Building advanced tools requires forging, which is not possible while submerged in water. Intelligence may arise in water-based species, but advanced civilizations may not.
Not clicking on them doesn't mean you're not interacting with them. Here's an example: there's a bunch of/. articles where I just read the summary of the article on the front page, without clicking through to read the comments.
Does that mean I want slashdot to stop showing me story summaries in the genres I'm not actively clicking on? No, absolutely not.
Are you sure? That depends on how sophisticated the algorithm is. After all, you did say the front page. Why aren't you browsing the firehose? Because the info you receive is already plenty filtered, it just so happens that it's not filtered in a personalized fashion. For all you know, a personalized front page would mean that a whole lot more articles interesting to you would show up that were submitted to the firehose but never would have made it to the front page under the current system.
Generally speaking, a balance is going to be kept between increasing the signal to noise ratio and filtering out too much information. If a website filters out too much information, then you start to feel like your news website isn't reporting on all news, and you start visiting other websites to complement or even completely replace the original site (and every website wants to avoid that, so generally they err on allowing some stories through that you're really almost never interested in). It's also important to note that the information isn't being kept from you, it's just that there's some much information available that technology is trying to do a better job of prioritizing it for you. If you have 2000 friends on facebook and you never click on Bob's links, then facebook stops showing you links from Bob. However, you can always wonder, "what is Bob up to?" and go to his wall. Same thing with Google. If you search Egypt and no information about the conflict shows up, then it means that generally speaking you're not a reader of current events. If you were, however, interested in finding information about Egypt and current events, you'd do your search on news.google.com, and I guarantee you that the information would be there.
Would it exacerbate the problem, or merely hide it? Discarding information that contradicts currently held beliefs is natural enough that most people aren't aware of it, even without personalized search algorithms. I think the bigger issue is the ready availability of like-minded communities that will reinforce your beliefes, no matter how outrageous and outlandish they are.
In his presentation he gave an interesting example. He says he leans liberal, but has conservative friends in facebook, because he's interested in their viewpoint. Then he started noticing that he stopped seeing news links from his conservative friends because the facebook algorithm noticed he didn't click on them. Basically, despite saying that he's interested in the opposing viewpoint, he actually isn't, and was filtering the information himself. The algorithm merely made it transparent and more convenient. Nothing actually changed about the information he was consuming.
It is a problem that people tend to ignore information when it goes against their preconceived notions, but it's not a problem that technology does what we want it to do. If a website kept bombarding me with stories that I didn't want to see, I'd stop visiting it, I wouldn't suddenly start reading those stories.
On second thought, I'm reminded of every April 1st on slashdot, and how every story is bombarded by comments from idiots saying how much they hate slashdot on April Fools' day, and yet they don't seem to leave even for that one day. They keep reading every story and then talking about how much they hate it. Maybe you can make people read what they don't want to read after all...
[why is it] that i can never tell the difference between cosmology and the ramblings of a stoner?
Because you haven't studied the field, so all you get are explanations meant for the layman?
Seriously, if someone were to have shown you a page with differential equations back when the math you knew was limited to arithmetic would you be able to distinguish it from a page containing random symbols that looked math-like? Would you be able to tell which one represented something real and which one was BS? Well, the stoner ramblings is like the random page, and someone trained in physics and astronomy can tell the difference easily (although maybe not by the media summary, they often mangle things pretty badly).
I don't think we disagree that much to be honest - just over the Nomad, which yes was bigger capacity but no wasn't pocket-sized. Pocket-sized was the key.
Yeah, I guess I didn't understand what you meant when you said no other portable players were available. You mean the other large capacity devices were not portable enough and the iPod was more convenient in that class. I can see that. That's also the type of thing the geek demographic tends to gloss over and dismiss as nice, but not as important, only to see everybody else hail it as the best thing since sliced bread. Which is exactly what happened with the iPod.
'Only' 5Gb? Unheard of in a portable player at that time.
Dude, the very CmdrTaco quote the grandparent is defending lists a player that had more than 5Gb at the time, the Nomad. So no, definitely not "unheard of in a portable player at that time."
Required a Firewire port and 'only' for the Mac? Yes, because they literally couldn't make them fast enough and sold each and every one of 'em that rolled out of the manufacturing plant. It also acted as a gateway drug that helped Mac sales along their merry way.
Neither of you provides any citations to go with your observations, there. I don't have any numbers either, other than to point out that macs are still not a majority in the market, and that's after they grew tremendously in popularity since those days (the iPod popularity helped drive the macbook's popularity). That said, I'd still guess that today, the vast majority of people that own ipods use them with windows (and no, I don't feel like getting numbers to back me up either, so we'll all just say what we think without settling the issue).
He might also want to have a word with his old buddy Steve Jobs too. Apple has been getting meaningless patents left and right, just like MS and all these other corps. And at least Allen and Gates are using some of their ridiculous money for charity. What exactly has Jobs been doing to innovate, or contribute to the world?
I love Woz, but if he's going to criticize, he needs to include his old friends and not just his old enemies.
Woz does criticize Apple when he thinks they have done something wrong. Sometimes he goes as far as donating money to the legal defense of people apple sues.
Yes, the origin of Superman is very important to the character and the movie. Superman Returns didn't need to cover it, though, because EVERYONE KNOWS IT.
And if you're not going to add a new angle to it that people haven't seen, you shouldn't be making a Superman movie at all.
Disagreed. Why doesn't every movie begin with the birth of the protagonist? Because it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Motivations can be gleaned before or during or way after the event that transforms Peter Parker into Spiderman.
Ah, but almost every movie does begin with the "birth" of the protagonist. Not the physical birth, but the first events that make him who he is. John McClane was a nobody until the events of the Nakatomi tower. That was the birth of the hero, not the day in the hospital when he was born. Similarly, I don't care about the day Peter Parker was literally born, but Spiderman was born when the radioactive spider bit him. You can't skip that. It's like skipping to Die Hard II. You see the reporters trying to interview McClane about his actions in the Nakatomi tower, and if you hadn't seen the first movie, you'd be asking yourself, "that story sounds cool, why didn't they show THAT? They keep telling me this McClane dude is a badass, but they didn't show it to me."
Superman Returns sucked because the story is Clark Kent. Who gives a shit that this dude is picking up planes and islands. The important part is that this guy has all this power, but doesn't completely end crime by killing everyone he doesn't like. He was raised like a human being by people that instilled him with certain moral values, he's alone, the only surviving member of his race, trying to fit in but not quite fitting in. That's the story. And before you point out Smallville, the problem there was exactly that instead of focusing on the character they focused on kryptonite-based villain of the week.
If everyone knows the origin story, I tend to have more respect for the films that just gloss over the origin and move on the the main plot. Both The Incredible Hulk and Superman Returns did this fairly well; they just accepted that these characters were known and understood by audiences as part of western culture.
I disagree. The origin is where the motivation behind the character lies. In fact, Superman Returns being the worst superhero movie since Ang Lee's Hulk proves that point. The only reason it wasn't worse is that it was kind of a sequel to Superman II, so you could take that same world story as the background. I'll agree with you that the latest Hulk was actually pretty good, but I did feel like we lost out on character development.
Now, if your whole goal is to reset and alter/update the origin, such as was done with the Batman reboot or the Spiderman franchise, then sure, go do your storytelling best.
Well, if you're not doing that, why bother telling a story at all? In that case, I'd just as soon they don't do the movie.
Each time somebody tries a new take on a superhero, the worst mistake they can make is skipping the origin story. Unless it's a direct sequel to a previous movie, the script writers and directors undoubtedly have new directions to take a character in and it's impossible to do so without establishing the setting. The Dark Knight is a much better movie than Batman Begins, but it could not exist without Batman Begins. That movie set up what Christopher Nolan's version of Batman was, as opposed to Tim Burton's.
The images shows only a star that for some reason explodes and disappears in a giant gamma ray burst. This is not a proof about the existence of black holes. I still have to see a convincing experimental proof that they do actually exist.
Then check out this video of stars orbiting a black hole.
If I catch a burglar in my house, I will shoot to kill. I'd much rather pay a crime scene cleanup crew to get some dirtbag's blood off of my floor than to have him sue me later for only wounding him. Our courts are fscked, and sadly frontier justice seems to be the only justice left most of the time.
Why are you assuming the burglar's family won't sue you?
I feel that no matter how well the prediction based on previous algorithms, if chosen randomly with no thought to what you will be picking, this should be the outcome every time. It assumes you will pick something based upon your previous choice. Obviously, this is an easy system to beat once you figured it out, but I was just clicking randomly. Against random, you'll see nice, even numbers. Or odds, depending on when you want to show your score.
Randomless allows you to tie it over the long run, because it won't be able to find a pattern in what you do. However, the "veteran" mode is highly predictable, at least in the beginning. The first attempt will be random. If you manage to win that one, it will assume you will try the same option next turn. Then you can beat it again. Now it will assume you will try to beat it using the same strategy. You can beat it again. Pretty much every time I play the thing, I'm guaranteed to start off with a score of at least 4 wins over the first five. I've gotten to 10-2-2, and the pattern it's using then becomes a bit harder to discern. But either way, if you have a winning strategy for the beginning of the game, you can then switch to randomness later, and you'll remain ahead, statistically speaking.
Don't you see any problems with that? Like, say, chilling effects?
Depends on the attitude of the officer. The grandparent mentioned they should go out of their way to be polite, and they should move on if nothing is wrong. As long as the person is allowed to continue on doing their legal activity, I don't see anything wrong with a police officer approaching and asking a few questions.
If people do something that is within their legal rights and get approached by a police officer, they may think about whether they'll do that again next time...Your argument seems to be that while carrying a gun and camcorder in public is not illegal, it is still somehow wrong...
Well, and this is why I said, "it depends on the attitude of the officer." Because the police tend to act like jerks who like to make threats to people they approach doing unconventional things, society tends to view an officer approaching and talking to you as, "he must think I'm doing something wrong." Really, this is part of the reason why the police needs to learn to be more friendly, and needs to stop arresting people as a show of force. Every time one power-tripping officer goes out of his way to intimidate someone, he's ruining the reputation of the entire profession, and it's making people uneasy around officers.
In an ideal world, there would be absolutely no bad feelings on your part about seeing a police officer approach. In an ideal world, they'd be friendly and talk to people who are doing nothing wrong all the time. They see a guy standing in one place looking around, they could ask him, "anything I can do for you?" The person in question would respond, "yeah, I'm looking for such and such building, which I've been told was in this corner" and the police officer would kindly give him proper directions. This would be a common interaction, one which would happen far more often than an adversarial one. In such a world, the police asking a guy with a gun and a camcorder about his intentions, the guy trying to egg the officer on would say, "none of your fucking business," and the officer would answer, "sorry to bother you, just asking" as he walks away and keeps a close eye on the dude. The dude is acting suspiciously, and most certainly shouldn't be arrested, but it is the police's duty to protect people...angry dude with a gun in a crowded place doing nothing illegal doesn't deserve to be arrested, but he's got no expectation of privacy in a public place, and being in a position where he could hurt people, is in a position where he should be watched. Similarly, if the man gives the officer a polite explanation of what he's doing that seems reasonable, the officer can again say, "sorry to bother you," they can have a laugh about it, and the officer, if satisfied the man is not a threat, can move on to other business. That is not harassment, it's just interaction with the public.
Yeah, but I wonder what the current MTBF is. When you talk about an automated car, you're talking about something that's a lot more complex than either a computer OR a car. I'd expect a lot of failures during the first few iterations after it goes public. And I'm not even considering software problem, just hardware.
Yeah, I'm not saying it's not a complex problem. That said, I doubt that it would go public as the full package anyway. Small pieces go in, such that the driver is still fully responsible. Like what we saw with automatic parallel parking. I think we'd see, "if there's an obstacle in your path, and the car detects you're not braking, or not braking fast enough, it'll initiate the braking for you." type things. Slowly helpful features get added, and once all of the individual pieces are deemed reliable, then we'll go fully autonomous.
am thinking about every unforseen situation that car drivers encounter, that could never possibly be predicted. then i am trying to imagine a robot taking over those decisions. it doesn't work.
Humans suck. We really, really do. When most of the circumstances you've just described happen right now, we don't avoid accidents because we're so awesome at making decisions. We get into horrible accidents that kill people. This is what I don't understand about people who are against self-driving cars because "they couldn't make the decisions humans do." We don't have a good track record!
Individually, you might be a fantastic driver, who not only knows what to do when the unexpected happens, but keeps a cool enough head to actually do it in the heat of the moment. Let's say that you are that good. Do you think the average driver is that good? Because in order to cut down on accidents, an AI driver doesn't need to be better than the best human drivers, it just needs to be as good or better than the average driver. And based on what I've seen, I'd say the burden of proof should rest on you to prove that it's not already, as is, better than the best human drivers, both in normal and unexpected circumstances. Humans really, really, suck, but we are arrogant bastards who tend to think we are better at things than we actually are, which causes us to take risks the AI wouldn't.
Not only that, but every single accident that the AI has would result in an investigation, followed by updated software that would help lower the chances for that particular type of accident. In essence, every car would learn from the mistakes other cars make. You can think of it as a hive intelligence that gives them an advantage beyond what humans are physically capable of. Speaking of physical capabilities, the car's response time alone would prevent tons of accidents. Need to brake right now? Well, no mental hesitation. No delay that it takes from removing your foot from the acceleration pedal, moving your leg to the side, and then hitting the brake pedal. While you're hyper-braking, is that car behind you going to brake in time? Is a swerve a better option? Is there a car, or worse, a person, to the side, can I safely swerve? You've got two eyes, sir. To make these decisions, you have to stop looking forward to look at the mirrors. You have to turn your head to look at the side of your car. The computer can have all this information simultaneously in real-time.
I think there's a good chance that within your lifetime cars will be driven by AIs. Accidents will drop to negligible amounts as a result. People will wonder why anyone ever argued against making the move, considering how obvious the advantages are.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not what the uncanny valley is. Yes, they look more human, everyone agrees with that. However, they look creepy as opposed to the ones that look less human. You look at a cartoon, and the characters look cute. You look at clu from Tron Legacy and you're simultaneously impressed and creeped out.
Those extra three seconds during my monthly reboot are really going to add up!
That's what I was thinking. If the only advantage of switching from GDM to LightDM is that they can book 3 seconds faster, it's not worth it. Going from 15 seconds to 12 seconds is not significant at all.
In fact, here's a simpler rule. If you need to use your stopwatch to determine whether the boot sequence got faster or not, then it's not significant.
A link would be fine, giving a preview or storing cached content would not be.
Have you ever used a search engine? Links are accompanied by a small portion of content that relates to the search term you placed. If they weren't, it wouldn't be useful. How would you know which of the thousands of results to click on? Or even if you limited yourself to the first 2 or 3 pages, how would know which of those to actually click on?
This isn't limited to google. All search engines do this because a search engine simply isn't useful without this cached content.
You're a moron. It means that developers need to grow up. The only reason to use names like this is for the shock value due to their offensiveness. I think it should go without saying that we need to stop demeaning women for lulz.
Do you remember when you were a child in school? There were kids who liked to pick on others, call them names, do everything possible to humiliate them in front of the others. Part of growing up is no longer feeling the need to be the center of attention by trying to hurt people you perceive cannot hurt you back. It's cruel, it's childish, and it's sad when someone reaches adulthood without learning enough to no longer get any pleasure from that activity.
You remember the kids who were the subject of the above insults? Some would cry, some would retreat and try to avoid crossing paths with the bullies at all costs, others would put on a brave face, but would still be bothered by it. Another part of growing up is learning to not give a shit when an immature bully tries to hurt you. Turns out that words can't hurt you if you don't let them. It's sad when people reach adulthood without learning that lesson.
Lol, just watched the video montage he did of the stunt. Some minutes into the video, after showing a couple of hundred faces, he ponders "Would people look different if I showed them how the computer sees them?" - or in other words "Would people react differently if I showed them I was taking pictures of them?"
Yeah, he seemed to imply that the way people "stare at their computers" is an unnatural thing, and that showing to them what they were doing would wake them up to the fact that they were zombie-staring at a computer and cause them to change their ways. His interpretation of people hitting escape is that they were mindless automatons who were not enlightened by his demonstration.
Sometimes the artistic types over-think things and don't realize reality is far simpler. If you take the actions of somebody driving a car without considering the actual car movement, it looks stupid. They're holding a wheel, staring to the front of them, sometimes turning their heads, sometimes turning the wheel, sometimes pressing a pedal. It's only when you associate the actions with the results of the action that it all makes sense. They're looking at traffic, they're turning the car, they're accelerating or braking. To look at someone staring at a computer or a book without also showing what they're looking at is an incomplete picture and offers no insights.
I do think that if the people understood E-bay, they would understand that their original bid should be their entire valuation and then they would not make the second bid.
Well, you're absolutely right. I was just trying to point out that they also need to understand the emotional component that makes them want to bid irrationally. I think it's the same thing that happens in poker. You put a large amount in the pot, and you feel like you're invested in that hand. if you're a smart player and you notice the odds are against you making that hand, you know that the money in the pot is already gone. Beginners will completely ignore pot odds once they're emotionally attached to that hand. Hell, experts will sometimes do it.
The thing is that what you say would be correct in the ideal world where everybody understood E-bay.
It's not that people don't understand e-bay, it's that people aren't rational and what they are willing to pay changes depending on the current valuation of the item. If they see something on ebay that's currently going for $1.50, they might say, "I'm willing to pay up to $10 on that." Once they get outbid and the price climbs to $11, they become emotionally invested and adjust their maximum. They start thinking, "well, maybe I can go up to $20," even though they would have never agreed to go up that high before. It's the reason why sometimes you see things selling on ebay for more than the retail price...some bidders got too invested in winning the bid.
Sniping is effective in that it forces everyone to stick to their original valuations. Good for buyers, bad for sellers.
I mean, a blow to the head will also cause us to lose consciousness. But it won't help us understand what makes us conscious.
Actually, it does. It tells us that the organ responsible for consciousness resides in the head. Similarly, we've discovered a lot about what different regions of the brain are responsible for by looking at people who received brain damage to different areas and looking at what they were now unable to do as a result. You know the brain is responsible for consciousness, this can help narrow down what brain activity is involved by looking at what activity is inhibited when you're unconscious.
Conversely, why the hell we think only land life would be sentient and capable of technology is beyond me
Building advanced tools requires forging, which is not possible while submerged in water. Intelligence may arise in water-based species, but advanced civilizations may not.
. Jailbreakers released a fix.
Not clicking on them doesn't mean you're not interacting with them. Here's an example: there's a bunch of /. articles where I just read the summary of the article on the front page, without clicking through to read the comments.
Does that mean I want slashdot to stop showing me story summaries in the genres I'm not actively clicking on? No, absolutely not.
Are you sure? That depends on how sophisticated the algorithm is. After all, you did say the front page. Why aren't you browsing the firehose? Because the info you receive is already plenty filtered, it just so happens that it's not filtered in a personalized fashion. For all you know, a personalized front page would mean that a whole lot more articles interesting to you would show up that were submitted to the firehose but never would have made it to the front page under the current system.
Generally speaking, a balance is going to be kept between increasing the signal to noise ratio and filtering out too much information. If a website filters out too much information, then you start to feel like your news website isn't reporting on all news, and you start visiting other websites to complement or even completely replace the original site (and every website wants to avoid that, so generally they err on allowing some stories through that you're really almost never interested in). It's also important to note that the information isn't being kept from you, it's just that there's some much information available that technology is trying to do a better job of prioritizing it for you. If you have 2000 friends on facebook and you never click on Bob's links, then facebook stops showing you links from Bob. However, you can always wonder, "what is Bob up to?" and go to his wall. Same thing with Google. If you search Egypt and no information about the conflict shows up, then it means that generally speaking you're not a reader of current events. If you were, however, interested in finding information about Egypt and current events, you'd do your search on news.google.com, and I guarantee you that the information would be there.
Would it exacerbate the problem, or merely hide it? Discarding information that contradicts currently held beliefs is natural enough that most people aren't aware of it, even without personalized search algorithms. I think the bigger issue is the ready availability of like-minded communities that will reinforce your beliefes, no matter how outrageous and outlandish they are.
In his presentation he gave an interesting example. He says he leans liberal, but has conservative friends in facebook, because he's interested in their viewpoint. Then he started noticing that he stopped seeing news links from his conservative friends because the facebook algorithm noticed he didn't click on them. Basically, despite saying that he's interested in the opposing viewpoint, he actually isn't, and was filtering the information himself. The algorithm merely made it transparent and more convenient. Nothing actually changed about the information he was consuming.
It is a problem that people tend to ignore information when it goes against their preconceived notions, but it's not a problem that technology does what we want it to do. If a website kept bombarding me with stories that I didn't want to see, I'd stop visiting it, I wouldn't suddenly start reading those stories.
On second thought, I'm reminded of every April 1st on slashdot, and how every story is bombarded by comments from idiots saying how much they hate slashdot on April Fools' day, and yet they don't seem to leave even for that one day. They keep reading every story and then talking about how much they hate it. Maybe you can make people read what they don't want to read after all...
[why is it] that i can never tell the difference between cosmology and the ramblings of a stoner?
Because you haven't studied the field, so all you get are explanations meant for the layman?
Seriously, if someone were to have shown you a page with differential equations back when the math you knew was limited to arithmetic would you be able to distinguish it from a page containing random symbols that looked math-like? Would you be able to tell which one represented something real and which one was BS? Well, the stoner ramblings is like the random page, and someone trained in physics and astronomy can tell the difference easily (although maybe not by the media summary, they often mangle things pretty badly).
I don't think we disagree that much to be honest - just over the Nomad, which yes was bigger capacity but no wasn't pocket-sized. Pocket-sized was the key.
Yeah, I guess I didn't understand what you meant when you said no other portable players were available. You mean the other large capacity devices were not portable enough and the iPod was more convenient in that class. I can see that. That's also the type of thing the geek demographic tends to gloss over and dismiss as nice, but not as important, only to see everybody else hail it as the best thing since sliced bread. Which is exactly what happened with the iPod.
'Only' 5Gb? Unheard of in a portable player at that time.
Dude, the very CmdrTaco quote the grandparent is defending lists a player that had more than 5Gb at the time, the Nomad. So no, definitely not "unheard of in a portable player at that time."
Required a Firewire port and 'only' for the Mac? Yes, because they literally couldn't make them fast enough and sold each and every one of 'em that rolled out of the manufacturing plant. It also acted as a gateway drug that helped Mac sales along their merry way.
Neither of you provides any citations to go with your observations, there. I don't have any numbers either, other than to point out that macs are still not a majority in the market, and that's after they grew tremendously in popularity since those days (the iPod popularity helped drive the macbook's popularity). That said, I'd still guess that today, the vast majority of people that own ipods use them with windows (and no, I don't feel like getting numbers to back me up either, so we'll all just say what we think without settling the issue).
He might also want to have a word with his old buddy Steve Jobs too. Apple has been getting meaningless patents left and right, just like MS and all these other corps. And at least Allen and Gates are using some of their ridiculous money for charity. What exactly has Jobs been doing to innovate, or contribute to the world?
I love Woz, but if he's going to criticize, he needs to include his old friends and not just his old enemies.
Woz does criticize Apple when he thinks they have done something wrong. Sometimes he goes as far as donating money to the legal defense of people apple sues.
Yes, the origin of Superman is very important to the character and the movie. Superman Returns didn't need to cover it, though, because EVERYONE KNOWS IT.
And if you're not going to add a new angle to it that people haven't seen, you shouldn't be making a Superman movie at all.
Disagreed. Why doesn't every movie begin with the birth of the protagonist? Because it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Motivations can be gleaned before or during or way after the event that transforms Peter Parker into Spiderman.
Ah, but almost every movie does begin with the "birth" of the protagonist. Not the physical birth, but the first events that make him who he is. John McClane was a nobody until the events of the Nakatomi tower. That was the birth of the hero, not the day in the hospital when he was born. Similarly, I don't care about the day Peter Parker was literally born, but Spiderman was born when the radioactive spider bit him. You can't skip that. It's like skipping to Die Hard II. You see the reporters trying to interview McClane about his actions in the Nakatomi tower, and if you hadn't seen the first movie, you'd be asking yourself, "that story sounds cool, why didn't they show THAT? They keep telling me this McClane dude is a badass, but they didn't show it to me."
Superman Returns sucked because the story is Clark Kent. Who gives a shit that this dude is picking up planes and islands. The important part is that this guy has all this power, but doesn't completely end crime by killing everyone he doesn't like. He was raised like a human being by people that instilled him with certain moral values, he's alone, the only surviving member of his race, trying to fit in but not quite fitting in. That's the story. And before you point out Smallville, the problem there was exactly that instead of focusing on the character they focused on kryptonite-based villain of the week.
If everyone knows the origin story, I tend to have more respect for the films that just gloss over the origin and move on the the main plot. Both The Incredible Hulk and Superman Returns did this fairly well; they just accepted that these characters were known and understood by audiences as part of western culture.
I disagree. The origin is where the motivation behind the character lies. In fact, Superman Returns being the worst superhero movie since Ang Lee's Hulk proves that point. The only reason it wasn't worse is that it was kind of a sequel to Superman II, so you could take that same world story as the background. I'll agree with you that the latest Hulk was actually pretty good, but I did feel like we lost out on character development.
Now, if your whole goal is to reset and alter/update the origin, such as was done with the Batman reboot or the Spiderman franchise, then sure, go do your storytelling best.
Well, if you're not doing that, why bother telling a story at all? In that case, I'd just as soon they don't do the movie.
Each time somebody tries a new take on a superhero, the worst mistake they can make is skipping the origin story. Unless it's a direct sequel to a previous movie, the script writers and directors undoubtedly have new directions to take a character in and it's impossible to do so without establishing the setting. The Dark Knight is a much better movie than Batman Begins, but it could not exist without Batman Begins. That movie set up what Christopher Nolan's version of Batman was, as opposed to Tim Burton's.
The images shows only a star that for some reason explodes and disappears in a giant gamma ray burst. This is not a proof about the existence of black holes. I still have to see a convincing experimental proof that they do actually exist.
Then check out this video of stars orbiting a black hole.
If I catch a burglar in my house, I will shoot to kill. I'd much rather pay a crime scene cleanup crew to get some dirtbag's blood off of my floor than to have him sue me later for only wounding him. Our courts are fscked, and sadly frontier justice seems to be the only justice left most of the time.
Why are you assuming the burglar's family won't sue you?
I feel that no matter how well the prediction based on previous algorithms, if chosen randomly with no thought to what you will be picking, this should be the outcome every time. It assumes you will pick something based upon your previous choice. Obviously, this is an easy system to beat once you figured it out, but I was just clicking randomly. Against random, you'll see nice, even numbers. Or odds, depending on when you want to show your score.
Randomless allows you to tie it over the long run, because it won't be able to find a pattern in what you do. However, the "veteran" mode is highly predictable, at least in the beginning. The first attempt will be random. If you manage to win that one, it will assume you will try the same option next turn. Then you can beat it again. Now it will assume you will try to beat it using the same strategy. You can beat it again. Pretty much every time I play the thing, I'm guaranteed to start off with a score of at least 4 wins over the first five. I've gotten to 10-2-2, and the pattern it's using then becomes a bit harder to discern. But either way, if you have a winning strategy for the beginning of the game, you can then switch to randomness later, and you'll remain ahead, statistically speaking.
Don't you see any problems with that? Like, say, chilling effects?
Depends on the attitude of the officer. The grandparent mentioned they should go out of their way to be polite, and they should move on if nothing is wrong. As long as the person is allowed to continue on doing their legal activity, I don't see anything wrong with a police officer approaching and asking a few questions.
If people do something that is within their legal rights and get approached by a police officer, they may think about whether they'll do that again next time...Your argument seems to be that while carrying a gun and camcorder in public is not illegal, it is still somehow wrong...
Well, and this is why I said, "it depends on the attitude of the officer." Because the police tend to act like jerks who like to make threats to people they approach doing unconventional things, society tends to view an officer approaching and talking to you as, "he must think I'm doing something wrong." Really, this is part of the reason why the police needs to learn to be more friendly, and needs to stop arresting people as a show of force. Every time one power-tripping officer goes out of his way to intimidate someone, he's ruining the reputation of the entire profession, and it's making people uneasy around officers.
In an ideal world, there would be absolutely no bad feelings on your part about seeing a police officer approach. In an ideal world, they'd be friendly and talk to people who are doing nothing wrong all the time. They see a guy standing in one place looking around, they could ask him, "anything I can do for you?" The person in question would respond, "yeah, I'm looking for such and such building, which I've been told was in this corner" and the police officer would kindly give him proper directions. This would be a common interaction, one which would happen far more often than an adversarial one. In such a world, the police asking a guy with a gun and a camcorder about his intentions, the guy trying to egg the officer on would say, "none of your fucking business," and the officer would answer, "sorry to bother you, just asking" as he walks away and keeps a close eye on the dude. The dude is acting suspiciously, and most certainly shouldn't be arrested, but it is the police's duty to protect people...angry dude with a gun in a crowded place doing nothing illegal doesn't deserve to be arrested, but he's got no expectation of privacy in a public place, and being in a position where he could hurt people, is in a position where he should be watched. Similarly, if the man gives the officer a polite explanation of what he's doing that seems reasonable, the officer can again say, "sorry to bother you," they can have a laugh about it, and the officer, if satisfied the man is not a threat, can move on to other business. That is not harassment, it's just interaction with the public.
Yeah, but I wonder what the current MTBF is. When you talk about an automated car, you're talking about something that's a lot more complex than either a computer OR a car. I'd expect a lot of failures during the first few iterations after it goes public. And I'm not even considering software problem, just hardware.
Yeah, I'm not saying it's not a complex problem. That said, I doubt that it would go public as the full package anyway. Small pieces go in, such that the driver is still fully responsible. Like what we saw with automatic parallel parking. I think we'd see, "if there's an obstacle in your path, and the car detects you're not braking, or not braking fast enough, it'll initiate the braking for you." type things. Slowly helpful features get added, and once all of the individual pieces are deemed reliable, then we'll go fully autonomous.
am thinking about every unforseen situation that car drivers encounter, that could never possibly be predicted. then i am trying to imagine a robot taking over those decisions. it doesn't work.
Humans suck. We really, really do. When most of the circumstances you've just described happen right now, we don't avoid accidents because we're so awesome at making decisions. We get into horrible accidents that kill people. This is what I don't understand about people who are against self-driving cars because "they couldn't make the decisions humans do." We don't have a good track record!
Individually, you might be a fantastic driver, who not only knows what to do when the unexpected happens, but keeps a cool enough head to actually do it in the heat of the moment. Let's say that you are that good. Do you think the average driver is that good? Because in order to cut down on accidents, an AI driver doesn't need to be better than the best human drivers, it just needs to be as good or better than the average driver. And based on what I've seen, I'd say the burden of proof should rest on you to prove that it's not already, as is, better than the best human drivers, both in normal and unexpected circumstances. Humans really, really, suck, but we are arrogant bastards who tend to think we are better at things than we actually are, which causes us to take risks the AI wouldn't.
Not only that, but every single accident that the AI has would result in an investigation, followed by updated software that would help lower the chances for that particular type of accident. In essence, every car would learn from the mistakes other cars make. You can think of it as a hive intelligence that gives them an advantage beyond what humans are physically capable of. Speaking of physical capabilities, the car's response time alone would prevent tons of accidents. Need to brake right now? Well, no mental hesitation. No delay that it takes from removing your foot from the acceleration pedal, moving your leg to the side, and then hitting the brake pedal. While you're hyper-braking, is that car behind you going to brake in time? Is a swerve a better option? Is there a car, or worse, a person, to the side, can I safely swerve? You've got two eyes, sir. To make these decisions, you have to stop looking forward to look at the mirrors. You have to turn your head to look at the side of your car. The computer can have all this information simultaneously in real-time.
I think there's a good chance that within your lifetime cars will be driven by AIs. Accidents will drop to negligible amounts as a result. People will wonder why anyone ever argued against making the move, considering how obvious the advantages are.