"Better yet, you idealists should all just die now. The world has no room for people who strive to make it a better place."
No thanks. At the end of my life, I'd like to not be remembered as a back-stabbing cheat, but as someone who strove to make the world better. And today you're in luck: I can take your ridicule. My heart is full of love.
It's nice that work along these lines continues. The connectionists have had a philosophical "war" with the symbolists over the proper representation for cognition since, I believe, the early 1990's.
What is tricky, in my view, is that we're arguing over the correct form of something we do not yet understand. Some argue that a theory of mind is as hard to grasp as a theory of Tennessee.
I've become addicted to BZFlag. I log on in the evenings and take part in a capture-the-flag tank battle involving 30 players. The interface to the game is simple, and the learning curve to obtain basic skills is not steep, yet the skills required for mastery requires lots of practice.
In order to win, it's important to play as a team. There's a sense of accomplishment when you work well together with your teammates.
I find older games, where the game is essentially a finite state machine you're interacting with, become too predictable in comparison.
I'd like to know if the NEROs can evolve more advanced tactics such as: (list of ideas)
From my reading of their research paper, many of these are not possible because the robots do not "know" their health levels. Their paper shows a neural network where the variable inputs to the network are
In principle, adding a "health" input is completely straightforward. However, imagine how much longer you may have to train your robots as you add more inputs. Basically, if you wanted the robot to learn to IGNORE its health in performing some strategy, it would have to be exposed to training runs with health at different levels.
And the problem compounds quickly as you consider adding more and more input variables. If you add K new input variables to your network, you've increased the dimensionality of your input space by K dimensions. In the worst case, the "density' of training examples drops exponentially as a function of the number of input variables added.
This is one of the central problems of machine learning: limiting input variables to a small collection (in practice, usually under 20), in order to avoid it taking a geologic age for it to learn something interesting.
For the record, the outputs of the network are "forward/backward", "Left/Right", and "Fire".
I agree. I scanned to the bottom of the article, and I noticed that the author works for a company that stands to gain from states buying lots of "fraud prevention" software.
So I'm going to be a cynic and believe, until I see some empirical evidence to the contrary, that the article was targeted at making money for his company.
He writes interesting and scandalous things (from a journalist point of view) and sometimes he actually get it right.
Being loud and obnoxious is fairly easy. Now that I see he can combine that with an astounding lack of evidence, I'm not going to waste my time with him.
It would help if Slashdot had a "ME ME OVER HERE pundit" section, so I could filter stuff like this automatically.
D(v)or(a)k strikes me as a snake oil salesman. His main evidence that Microsoft is behind all of this? One person named Chris Boyd. No information on who this person is, or whether they are a Microsoft employee. Could a little research be too much to ask for a national columnist?
D(v)or(a)k calls Chris Boyd a "Microsoft MVP". Most Valuable Player? WTH? It numbs my brain to think that someone on the national scene has trouble with the concept of clear evidence as part of their argument.
Isn't the "friend/foe" system in effect a user-specific blacklist?
You're right in principle, but I don't know anyone who has hundreds on either list. If you think about the number of accounts, plus the ease of creating new accounts, it's hard to see the friend/foe system as a solution by itself.
Personally, I'm enjoying slashdot a great deal more now that the trolls are somewhat under control. They're ultimately incredibly boring.
The factor that makes people like google is that they do still provide services people want, not just find new ways to scam people out of more money.
Also, smart geeks like to work on interesting projects. Google is working on things that geeks find interesting. And amazingly, management is smart enough to let its employees create, as opposed to following manager's orders.
Hey! I'm glad I caught you posting on slashdot. This is your boss. I noticed on that last report you submitted, you used the wrong cover sheet. Did you get the memo? I'll send you copy, don't worry about that.
If you could use the right cover sheet next time, That'd be Greeeat. Thanks. Oh, and back to work.
"Linux has a much wider audience, in many ways. That ranges from supporting much wider hardware (both in the driver sense and in the architecture sense) to actual uses."
Sorry, NetBSD runs on more hardware that linux does..
I'd like to see a Venn diagram of the hardware supported by just BSD, just linux, and both. I imagine that if you gave each piece of hardware a weight by the number of people using that hardware, most of the weight would be in the middle of the diagram (i.e. both linux and BSD support it).
Also note that in the same setence, he was comparing the variety of applications supported by BSD vs. linux.
Really? Because to be perfectly honest I think you're talking completely out your ass as an uninformed and fearmongering fool.
I was trying to summarize the argument put forth in the article for the many slashdot readers who do not read the article. That was apparent to most people. If I believe anything, it's that nobody really knows the effects of the many chemicals accumulating in human bodies as a result of being at the top of the food chain. If you are a scientist, then surely you understand the benefits of unbiased thinking.
So why aren't they getting naked against Teflon instead of getting naked against nano-tech?
From article:
According to the backgrounder, Nano-Tex's proprietary technology was developed for commercial use in 2000. Its technology allows coatings to adhere to fabrics at the sub-micron level, reducing the amount of chemicals required to treat materials, and transferring properties such as stain resistance onto each individual fiber. Nano-Tex said more than 80 textile mills around the world use its technology in products sold under dozens of major clothing and some furniture brands, including Eddie Bauer, The Gap, Old Navy, Lee, Nike, Nordstrom, Brooks Brothers, Champion, Levi, Simmons and Serta.
And, interestingly:
In an e-mail, Nano-Tex challenged negative claims made in the Eddie Bauer protest regarding its products, and reiterated the claims in its backgrounder. But it declined to make a representative available to answer questions for this article, and did not answer specific questions sent in an e-mail.
But most toxins have a threshold dose below which they don't do much of anything.
I wonder if the makers of these pants determined the rate of absorption of teflon when wearing them, especially as they deteriorate. Somehow I doubt it.
But it's probably OK. In the meantime, I'll let Eddie Bauer shoppers be the test subjects and get my stain-free paints in a couple of decades, after the effects are better understood.
They claim that the pants contain teflon, which is in a family of chemicals that can be absorbed through the skin. It is known that this same family of chemicals accumulates in the body, that most Americans have some level of this in their bodies, and that there is research to show that it damages immune systems in other animals.
Laser range finders are used in many robots, and the people working on them do not wear protective eyegear. I don't believe they are hazardous to eyes. For one thing, the laser is scanning extremely fast, a bit like a CRT gun, in order to get a 2D "map" of distance measurments.
I sense a song helped inspire that one. I could be wrong; it may be a popular phrase in some other part of the world. But Underworld is a band that wrote a song with this phrase, and it wouldn't surprise me if I'm not the only computer nerd who knows that.:)
Nice post; I couldn't agree more, except that I'm wishfully hoping for a PAID FOSS programming position that will allow me and my wife & kids to move to a country with an educated population. I'm not sure how Europe stands in relation to the US in these terms.
Anyone know what the job market for non-citizen programmers is like in Europe/Australia/NZ?
I'm wondering if most corporate bloggers are up-front about the corporation that pays them, or ideally the corporation that funds the corporation that pays them. A hypothetical example: Laura Didio == Yankee Group == Microsoft.
The potential for abuse of this "buy-a-blogger" system is huge.
I know "shill" is an inflammatory word to some, but that's what I equate with blogging for money. It is a natural consequence of tying salary to writing.
Slashdot Mirror
"Better yet, you idealists should all just die now. The world has no room for people who strive to make it a better place."
No thanks. At the end of my life, I'd like to not be remembered as a back-stabbing cheat, but as someone who strove to make the world better. And today you're in luck: I can take your ridicule. My heart is full of love.
Do a search in Google Groups using the first line of the troll as text. You'll see that this is a simple copy/paste. In other words, a troll.
It's nice that work along these lines continues. The connectionists have had a philosophical "war" with the symbolists over the proper representation for cognition since, I believe, the early 1990's.
What is tricky, in my view, is that we're arguing over the correct form of something we do not yet understand. Some argue that a theory of mind is as hard to grasp as a theory of Tennessee.
I've become addicted to BZFlag. I log on in the evenings and take part in a capture-the-flag tank battle involving 30 players. The interface to the game is simple, and the learning curve to obtain basic skills is not steep, yet the skills required for mastery requires lots of practice.
In order to win, it's important to play as a team. There's a sense of accomplishment when you work well together with your teammates.
I find older games, where the game is essentially a finite state machine you're interacting with, become too predictable in comparison.
I'd like to know if the NEROs can evolve more advanced tactics such as: (list of ideas)
From my reading of their research paper, many of these are not possible because the robots do not "know" their health levels. Their paper shows a neural network where the variable inputs to the network are
1. Enemy radars (5 variables)
2. On target (1 variable)
3. Object rangefinders (5 variables)
4. Enemy LOF sensors (2 variables)
In principle, adding a "health" input is completely straightforward. However, imagine how much longer you may have to train your robots as you add more inputs. Basically, if you wanted the robot to learn to IGNORE its health in performing some strategy, it would have to be exposed to training runs with health at different levels.
And the problem compounds quickly as you consider adding more and more input variables. If you add K new input variables to your network, you've increased the dimensionality of your input space by K dimensions. In the worst case, the "density' of training examples drops exponentially as a function of the number of input variables added.
This is one of the central problems of machine learning: limiting input variables to a small collection (in practice, usually under 20), in order to avoid it taking a geologic age for it to learn something interesting.
For the record, the outputs of the network are "forward/backward", "Left/Right", and "Fire".
that the article is full of FUD
I agree. I scanned to the bottom of the article, and I noticed that the author works for a company that stands to gain from states buying lots of "fraud prevention" software.
So I'm going to be a cynic and believe, until I see some empirical evidence to the contrary, that the article was targeted at making money for his company.
He writes interesting and scandalous things (from a journalist point of view) and sometimes he actually get it right.
Being loud and obnoxious is fairly easy. Now that I see he can combine that with an astounding lack of evidence, I'm not going to waste my time with him.
It would help if Slashdot had a "ME ME OVER HERE pundit" section, so I could filter stuff like this automatically.
D(v)or(a)k strikes me as a snake oil salesman. His main evidence that Microsoft is behind all of this? One person named Chris Boyd. No information on who this person is, or whether they are a Microsoft employee. Could a little research be too much to ask for a national columnist?
D(v)or(a)k calls Chris Boyd a "Microsoft MVP". Most Valuable Player? WTH? It numbs my brain to think that someone on the national scene has trouble with the concept of clear evidence as part of their argument.
Isn't the "friend/foe" system in effect a user-specific blacklist?
You're right in principle, but I don't know anyone who has hundreds on either list. If you think about the number of accounts, plus the ease of creating new accounts, it's hard to see the friend/foe system as a solution by itself.
Personally, I'm enjoying slashdot a great deal more now that the trolls are somewhat under control. They're ultimately incredibly boring.
The factor that makes people like google is that they do still provide services people want, not just find new ways to scam people out of more money.
Also, smart geeks like to work on interesting projects. Google is working on things that geeks find interesting. And amazingly, management is smart enough to let its employees create, as opposed to following manager's orders.
Who doesn't have 4 bosses these days?
Hey! I'm glad I caught you posting on slashdot. This is your boss. I noticed on that last report you submitted, you used the wrong cover sheet. Did you get the memo? I'll send you copy, don't worry about that.
If you could use the right cover sheet next time, That'd be Greeeat. Thanks. Oh, and back to work.
"Linux has a much wider audience, in many ways. That ranges from supporting much wider hardware (both in the driver sense and in the architecture sense) to actual uses."
Sorry, NetBSD runs on more hardware that linux does..
I'd like to see a Venn diagram of the hardware supported by just BSD, just linux, and both. I imagine that if you gave each piece of hardware a weight by the number of people using that hardware, most of the weight would be in the middle of the diagram (i.e. both linux and BSD support it).
Also note that in the same setence, he was comparing the variety of applications supported by BSD vs. linux.
Really? Because to be perfectly honest I think you're talking completely out your ass as an uninformed and fearmongering fool.
I was trying to summarize the argument put forth in the article for the many slashdot readers who do not read the article. That was apparent to most people. If I believe anything, it's that nobody really knows the effects of the many chemicals accumulating in human bodies as a result of being at the top of the food chain. If you are a scientist, then surely you understand the benefits of unbiased thinking.
From article:
And, interestingly:
But most toxins have a threshold dose below which they don't do much of anything.
I wonder if the makers of these pants determined the rate of absorption of teflon when wearing them, especially as they deteriorate. Somehow I doubt it.
But it's probably OK. In the meantime, I'll let Eddie Bauer shoppers be the test subjects and get my stain-free paints in a couple of decades, after the effects are better understood.
They claim that the pants contain teflon, which is in a family of chemicals that can be absorbed through the skin. It is known that this same family of chemicals accumulates in the body, that most Americans have some level of this in their bodies, and that there is research to show that it damages immune systems in other animals.
here is one (possibly NSFW)
So why develop one in the first place? Just use ksh. ... So why develop one in the first place? Just use ksh.
That seems so obvious, it's hard to see why they can't see that.
Oh wait, maybe they see cross-platform compatibility as bad. Don't ask me why, it's just a hunch.
I liked cooks better. Everyone knows all chefs are liberals.
So Bush and Cheney will have to eat Captain Crunch for breakfast after the crash...cool.
Laser range finders are used in many robots, and the people working on them do not wear protective eyegear. I don't believe they are hazardous to eyes. For one thing, the laser is scanning extremely fast, a bit like a CRT gun, in order to get a 2D "map" of distance measurments.
Parent post refers to Stroustrup's book.
TFA is about a book by Scott Meyers.
Doh!
I sense a song helped inspire that one. I could be wrong; it may be a popular phrase in some other part of the world. But Underworld is a band that wrote a song with this phrase, and it wouldn't surprise me if I'm not the only computer nerd who knows that.
Nice post; I couldn't agree more, except that I'm wishfully hoping for a PAID FOSS programming position that will allow me and my wife & kids to move to a country with an educated population. I'm not sure how Europe stands in relation to the US in these terms.
Anyone know what the job market for non-citizen programmers is like in Europe/Australia/NZ?
I'm wondering if most corporate bloggers are up-front about the corporation that pays them, or ideally the corporation that funds the corporation that pays them. A hypothetical example: Laura Didio == Yankee Group == Microsoft.
The potential for abuse of this "buy-a-blogger" system is huge.
I know "shill" is an inflammatory word to some, but that's what I equate with blogging for money. It is a natural consequence of tying salary to writing.