Basically think: you want new shoes. So I send you my permit to raise your own pig, slaughter it yourself, tan its skin, and make your own gloves. Only now you have to pay me for the gloves.
You're right. If I wanted shoes and someone forced me to make gloves, instead, I'd be totally pissed.
You'll also stop using lower rate credit cards issued out of Delaware in favor of higher rate ones from your own state? Actually, my understanding is that credit card companies actually incorporate in Delaware in order to take advantage of the higher interest rates allowed by that state.
I'm sorry, this is just ignorant. "Anything that is radioactive" cannot be used as a power source for a nuclear reactor. You can't just throw a radioactive hammer into a reactor core and have it function as fuel.
The summary is incorrect -- I don't blame the submitter, because the CNN article is not very clear about what's going on either. If you happen to read German, here is a reasonably good article on the issue.
To summarize: In Germany, this sort of exclusive contract does not exist -- you can get certain deals that are bound to your keeping a phone with a particular carrier (eg, a 200 phone for 15 if you keep a particular plan for two years, if you terminate the contract before then you have to pay the rebate back), but there's no such thing here as a phone that won't work on a competitor's network. Vodafone is asking a judge in Hamburg to rule on the legality of the exclusive service contract, but they are not preventing the sale of the device itself.
Actually, the Japanese were already offering almost unconditional surrender prior to Hiroshima. They only wanted to be able to retain the emperor. Following Hiroshima the evidence very strongly indicates that the Japanese would have surrendered unconditionally -- if I recall correctly, the decision had already been made at that point -- and so there's not a lot of justification for the Nagasaki bomb.
Ultimately, based on expert analysis of Japanese culture (especially by Ruth Benedict, who summed up her findings in the classic "The Chrysanthemum & the Sword"), the decision was made to let the emperor remain, though he was of course stripped of his power and even of his Japanese nationality under the new constitution. So ultimately the bomb was dropped to force a concession that was later decided to be unnecessary. Ironic, no?
(IAA Japanologist)
Re:Yeah, because the old way just wasn't effective
on
Live to be 1000 Years Old?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
60 or 70 years of income gives a pretty sound basis for a 900 year retirement just as much so as for a 20 year retirement.
If that were true, you'd only ever have to make enough money to pay back taxes on what you got from your parents when they died. Let's say you make $100,000/year for 60 years. That's $6,000,000. Let's say that you save enough and get a high enough return on investments that you retire with about 20% of that value saved. $1,200,000 is your retirement nest egg. That is not enough to live on indefinately. And this was ignoring all the taxes you'd have to pay, etc.
Second problem, and probably the bigger one (since at some point you really can save up enough money to live on interest payments). Wealth cannot be represented by dollars alone. If everyone retires at age 150 and lives to age 1500, then 90% of the population won't be working. That means that 10% of the population has to generate goods and services sufficient to provide the wealth necessary to support and entertain the rest. This might be possible with technology improving worker efficiency, but it doesn't seem terribly likely.
This is slightly off topic, but what the hey, karma is for burning.
I'm a college undergraduate with about $16,000 a year disposable income, including what I pay for my education. And I do feel rich. I just got back from three weeks in Kyoto, and I'm spending December in Germany. I love what I study (computer science and the languages of the above-mentioned nations), I have friends all over the planet, and the work that I do (programming, and webpage translation for Japanese companies) is rewarding to me.
If I can feel rich, as well as travel to exotic places, living below the poverty line, and you can't feel the same way about your own life when you're clearly making a couple hundred k, I really think you might take another look at your priorities. Because I'll probably never make even a small fraction of your income, but I already feel wealthy compared to you.
Then while you have a theory that has not been disproved, Ockhams Razor advises us to use the simplest one that explains all the data, and that's not yours.
You make an excellent point here, but not the one you think you do. Ockham's Razor, as you point out, advises us. It says that the least complicated explanation for observed behaviour is probably the correct one. It does not say that it is definately correct. It simply allows us to predict which of several explanations is most likely to be correct based on our past experience that things are usually simpler rather than more complicated. Ockham's Razor, four thousand years ago, would have had us believe that the stars were little point-sources of light floating just above the clouds. Certainly that was a more simple explanation of our observations than the idea that they were huge self-sustaining fusion reactions happening thousands of light-years across a limitless universe.
I hate to be a stickler, but there's nothing you could put after "two cat's" that would make sense. Posessive plural gets the apostrophe after the "s".
It is so lucky for Sun that Slashdot exists to bring together ignorant people from all over the world to tell them what their professional engineers have been unable to figure out. I'll bet no one down there had considered the fact that wireless transmission is different than wire-based transition. Hopefully some of their people are reading this, and the R&D department can get right on with dismantling the project.
Seriously, I keep clicking the 'read comments' button hoping to read something interesting. Instead, I see a dozen posts by people who read the headline, think 'well that won't work!', and post about it. If you came up with it in half a second, do you think you're the first person to have that very original thought? Come on.
"They think airplanes will be faster? Ha. They've completely forgotten to take headwinds into account. "
I hereby award you the Golden Slash and Dot for being the first reader to not only fail to read the article, but failing to read the post you are responding to!! Three cheers for our hero, scout of deeper depths of silliness than we have ever delved before!
And your grammar is atrocious. "A totally ignorant and bastardized of the use"?
Can you literally run something on a shoe-string budget? What, exactly, can you get in exchange for a shoestring? Or did you mean a budget literally equal to the value of a shoestring?
Drives me nuts every time someone says 'literally' to modify a phrase that it is literally impossible to construe in any way but figuratively.
~Sub
-1 Troll -1 Flamebait +1 Linguistic Merit +1 Crankiness
A ten percent increase in fines revenue is not going to cover the expense of sending DNA to the lab for every arrest in the state. We're not talking about an extra fifty bucks an arrest here; sending DNA in to a lab costs between a thousand and two thousand dollars! This is an excellent example of why initiatives are a bad idea; the public gets a hair up its ass, and makes a huge change that has not been properly thought out. If the state gets the responsibilty of enforcing this policy, CA voters had better realize that they're going to be footing a pretty hefty bill.
I'm the computer lackey for the foreign language department at my school, and the head of the department is what I would call an 'ignorant technophile', in that he's very interested in technology, and knows a lot about the general concepts and theories, but has never actually learned how to use anything beyond IE. About a week ago, he told me he wanted to actually go 'behind the curtain' a bit on a project I was working on but that he didn't have a lot of time , and he told me I could have about two hours on the clock to create a tutorial for him. I decided to show him just the basics of html, since I was doing web stuff that week, and spent fifteen minutes putting together a page with a picture, some text in different formats, a hotlink, and a table. Then I sat him down with the page open in Dreamweaver, and made him flip back and forth between the code and design views while I showed him what each tag did. I had a set of about fifteen simple tasks for him to perform (turn the first word bold, make the picture a hotlink to Google, etc). At the end of it, he had a basic understanding of how HTML works.
While that's not the most complex 'computer language' in the world, it's within the grasp of a moderately intelligent person with no understanding of computers and a little time on their hands, and thus makes a great starter for someone who may end up going into it more seriously as a hobby. My professor is now fooling around with HTML in his spare time, making his own webpage. And it doesn't even suck:).
The complexity of the problem that you can train a neural network to do has a lot to do with the complexity of the network; a single neuron is basically only good for either-or classification of linearly-separable input categories. A larger group can perform much more complex functions; my current project (IAAUSRNNPT*), combined with a nifty look-up table, is getting close to being able to read any kanji character in the Japanese alphabet (IAAAAL**). To get remotely close to the complexity of the human brain, it seems reasonable to suspect we'll need a network on the order of 10^11 neurons (appx. how many you and I come with).
The problem you're talking about with training networks and inadvertantly training them to recognize the wrong patterns, though, is inherently a problem of neural networks in general, and not artifical neural networks in particular. The neural networks of drug-sniffing dogs, for example, if trained on drugs wrapped in gauze, will inadvertantly be trained to hone in on the scent of the gauze wrapping.
When you design a neural network's training data set, you account for things like that by randomizing the data to the best of your ability (in the case of graphics, you apply static, stretching, shifting, fading, scattering effects, etc), preventing the network from focusing on some trivial detail.
My point is, as tasks become more and more complex, the training of the networks does, as you say, become more complex as well. But that's not a fault of the neural network in general; it's a fault of the complexity of properly presenting data in a learnable fashion. Have faith; we'll get there.
On the contrary, it's people who take sci-fi as more than mere entertainment who give the genre it's amazing power. Consider those dreamers, many obsessed in their adolescence with worlds beyond any possibility, who thirty years later orchestrated the landing of a human being on the surface of the Moon. True fans of science fiction, who see the futures portrayed therein as possibilities waiting to be unlocked rather than foolhardy dreams, are our pilgrims into the future. As odd as they might seem, they are an incredibly valuable portion of our species.
...we may find ourselves in a world where, if you want to get an idea into circulation, you're better off publishing a PDF file on the Web than landing a book deal.
I don't understand, Mr. MSN Man! That sounds awesome! I dunno about you, but I have a damned hard time landing book deals!
Although the average slashgeek likes to jump down Microsoft's throat over everything they do, isn't this sort of move exactly what should happen? Aren't things like lowering prices and opening source code some of the long-argued benefits of Linux competing with Microsoft?
Hey moron, if you'd RTFA you'd know that the prison sentence isn't mandatory. They'll just charge everyone ten grand and walk with millions. Jeeze, don't you even think before you post this garbage?:)
I just had the greatest idea. The law states that you get up to nine months in prison for violation, right?
Okay, everyone in Germany needs to turn themselves in for... oh, say, copying a CD that had some sort of protection on it. I can't wait to see the innovations they come up with for storing five million new pale and obese felons.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically think: you want new shoes. So I send you my permit to raise your own pig, slaughter it yourself, tan its skin, and make your own gloves. Only now you have to pay me for the gloves.
You're right. If I wanted shoes and someone forced me to make gloves, instead, I'd be totally pissed.
I'm sorry, this is just ignorant. "Anything that is radioactive" cannot be used as a power source for a nuclear reactor. You can't just throw a radioactive hammer into a reactor core and have it function as fuel.
The summary is incorrect -- I don't blame the submitter, because the CNN article is not very clear about what's going on either. If you happen to read German, here is a reasonably good article on the issue. To summarize: In Germany, this sort of exclusive contract does not exist -- you can get certain deals that are bound to your keeping a phone with a particular carrier (eg, a 200 phone for 15 if you keep a particular plan for two years, if you terminate the contract before then you have to pay the rebate back), but there's no such thing here as a phone that won't work on a competitor's network. Vodafone is asking a judge in Hamburg to rule on the legality of the exclusive service contract, but they are not preventing the sale of the device itself.
Cows don't vacuum (more the other way around)
No, my vacuum doesn't cow either.
Actually, the Japanese were already offering almost unconditional surrender prior to Hiroshima. They only wanted to be able to retain the emperor. Following Hiroshima the evidence very strongly indicates that the Japanese would have surrendered unconditionally -- if I recall correctly, the decision had already been made at that point -- and so there's not a lot of justification for the Nagasaki bomb.
Ultimately, based on expert analysis of Japanese culture (especially by Ruth Benedict, who summed up her findings in the classic "The Chrysanthemum & the Sword"), the decision was made to let the emperor remain, though he was of course stripped of his power and even of his Japanese nationality under the new constitution. So ultimately the bomb was dropped to force a concession that was later decided to be unnecessary. Ironic, no?
(IAA Japanologist)
60 or 70 years of income gives a pretty sound basis for a 900 year retirement just as much so as for a 20 year retirement.
If that were true, you'd only ever have to make enough money to pay back taxes on what you got from your parents when they died. Let's say you make $100,000/year for 60 years. That's $6,000,000. Let's say that you save enough and get a high enough return on investments that you retire with about 20% of that value saved. $1,200,000 is your retirement nest egg. That is not enough to live on indefinately. And this was ignoring all the taxes you'd have to pay, etc.
Second problem, and probably the bigger one (since at some point you really can save up enough money to live on interest payments). Wealth cannot be represented by dollars alone. If everyone retires at age 150 and lives to age 1500, then 90% of the population won't be working. That means that 10% of the population has to generate goods and services sufficient to provide the wealth necessary to support and entertain the rest. This might be possible with technology improving worker efficiency, but it doesn't seem terribly likely.
This is slightly off topic, but what the hey, karma is for burning.
I'm a college undergraduate with about $16,000 a year disposable income, including what I pay for my education. And I do feel rich. I just got back from three weeks in Kyoto, and I'm spending December in Germany. I love what I study (computer science and the languages of the above-mentioned nations), I have friends all over the planet, and the work that I do (programming, and webpage translation for Japanese companies) is rewarding to me.
If I can feel rich, as well as travel to exotic places, living below the poverty line, and you can't feel the same way about your own life when you're clearly making a couple hundred k, I really think you might take another look at your priorities. Because I'll probably never make even a small fraction of your income, but I already feel wealthy compared to you.
~Me
Then while you have a theory that has not been disproved, Ockhams Razor advises us to use the simplest one that explains all the data, and that's not yours.
You make an excellent point here, but not the one you think you do. Ockham's Razor, as you point out, advises us. It says that the least complicated explanation for observed behaviour is probably the correct one. It does not say that it is definately correct. It simply allows us to predict which of several explanations is most likely to be correct based on our past experience that things are usually simpler rather than more complicated. Ockham's Razor, four thousand years ago, would have had us believe that the stars were little point-sources of light floating just above the clouds. Certainly that was a more simple explanation of our observations than the idea that they were huge self-sustaining fusion reactions happening thousands of light-years across a limitless universe.
~Benjamin
"You have two cat's...what? Two cat's ears?")
I hate to be a stickler, but there's nothing you could put after "two cat's" that would make sense. Posessive plural gets the apostrophe after the "s".
So you have two cats'... pajamas, perhaps?
Benjamin
It is so lucky for Sun that Slashdot exists to bring together ignorant people from all over the world to tell them what their professional engineers have been unable to figure out. I'll bet no one down there had considered the fact that wireless transmission is different than wire-based transition. Hopefully some of their people are reading this, and the R&D department can get right on with dismantling the project.
Seriously, I keep clicking the 'read comments' button hoping to read something interesting. Instead, I see a dozen posts by people who read the headline, think 'well that won't work!', and post about it. If you came up with it in half a second, do you think you're the first person to have that very original thought? Come on.
"They think airplanes will be faster? Ha. They've completely forgotten to take headwinds into account. "
I hereby award you the Golden Slash and Dot for being the first reader to not only fail to read the article, but failing to read the post you are responding to!! Three cheers for our hero, scout of deeper depths of silliness than we have ever delved before!
And your grammar is atrocious. "A totally ignorant and bastardized of the use"?
Can you literally run something on a shoe-string budget? What, exactly, can you get in exchange for a shoestring? Or did you mean a budget literally equal to the value of a shoestring?
Drives me nuts every time someone says 'literally' to modify a phrase that it is literally impossible to construe in any way but figuratively.
~Sub
-1 Troll
-1 Flamebait
+1 Linguistic Merit
+1 Crankiness
A ten percent increase in fines revenue is not going to cover the expense of sending DNA to the lab for every arrest in the state. We're not talking about an extra fifty bucks an arrest here; sending DNA in to a lab costs between a thousand and two thousand dollars! This is an excellent example of why initiatives are a bad idea; the public gets a hair up its ass, and makes a huge change that has not been properly thought out. If the state gets the responsibilty of enforcing this policy, CA voters had better realize that they're going to be footing a pretty hefty bill.
~SL
I'm the computer lackey for the foreign language department at my school, and the head of the department is what I would call an 'ignorant technophile', in that he's very interested in technology, and knows a lot about the general concepts and theories, but has never actually learned how to use anything beyond IE. About a week ago, he told me he wanted to actually go 'behind the curtain' a bit on a project I was working on but that he didn't have a lot of time , and he told me I could have about two hours on the clock to create a tutorial for him. I decided to show him just the basics of html, since I was doing web stuff that week, and spent fifteen minutes putting together a page with a picture, some text in different formats, a hotlink, and a table. Then I sat him down with the page open in Dreamweaver, and made him flip back and forth between the code and design views while I showed him what each tag did. I had a set of about fifteen simple tasks for him to perform (turn the first word bold, make the picture a hotlink to Google, etc). At the end of it, he had a basic understanding of how HTML works.
:).
While that's not the most complex 'computer language' in the world, it's within the grasp of a moderately intelligent person with no understanding of computers and a little time on their hands, and thus makes a great starter for someone who may end up going into it more seriously as a hobby. My professor is now fooling around with HTML in his spare time, making his own webpage. And it doesn't even suck
~Benjamin
The complexity of the problem that you can train a neural network to do has a lot to do with the complexity of the network; a single neuron is basically only good for either-or classification of linearly-separable input categories. A larger group can perform much more complex functions; my current project (IAAUSRNNPT*), combined with a nifty look-up table, is getting close to being able to read any kanji character in the Japanese alphabet (IAAAAL**). To get remotely close to the complexity of the human brain, it seems reasonable to suspect we'll need a network on the order of 10^11 neurons (appx. how many you and I come with).
:)
;)
The problem you're talking about with training networks and inadvertantly training them to recognize the wrong patterns, though, is inherently a problem of neural networks in general, and not artifical neural networks in particular. The neural networks of drug-sniffing dogs, for example, if trained on drugs wrapped in gauze, will inadvertantly be trained to hone in on the scent of the gauze wrapping.
When you design a neural network's training data set, you account for things like that by randomizing the data to the best of your ability (in the case of graphics, you apply static, stretching, shifting, fading, scattering effects, etc), preventing the network from focusing on some trivial detail.
My point is, as tasks become more and more complex, the training of the networks does, as you say, become more complex as well. But that's not a fault of the neural network in general; it's a fault of the complexity of properly presenting data in a learnable fashion. Have faith; we'll get there.
*Undergraduate Student Researching Neural Network Programming Techniques
**Also An Asian Linguist
On the contrary, it's people who take sci-fi as more than mere entertainment who give the genre it's amazing power. Consider those dreamers, many obsessed in their adolescence with worlds beyond any possibility, who thirty years later orchestrated the landing of a human being on the surface of the Moon. True fans of science fiction, who see the futures portrayed therein as possibilities waiting to be unlocked rather than foolhardy dreams, are our pilgrims into the future. As odd as they might seem, they are an incredibly valuable portion of our species.
In Soviet Russia, the dead horse beats you.
...we may find ourselves in a world where, if you want to get an idea into circulation, you're better off publishing a PDF file on the Web than landing a book deal.
I don't understand, Mr. MSN Man! That sounds awesome! I dunno about you, but I have a damned hard time landing book deals!
Me.
Although the average slashgeek likes to jump down Microsoft's throat over everything they do, isn't this sort of move exactly what should happen? Aren't things like lowering prices and opening source code some of the long-argued benefits of Linux competing with Microsoft?
Kudos to Linux!
How about this guys. They could glue - are you following me so far? Okay they could glue the paper to (get this, it's brilliant) clear plastic!
How do I come up with these ideas?
Twenty years old. Heard it. Love it. Have it on my box.
:)
D0n7 d35krymn473 0n teh K1DD13z.
Sorry, are you too old to understand that?
Benjamin
Hey moron, if you'd RTFA you'd know that the prison sentence isn't mandatory. They'll just charge everyone ten grand and walk with millions. Jeeze, don't you even think before you post this garbage? :)
I just had the greatest idea. The law states that you get up to nine months in prison for violation, right?
Okay, everyone in Germany needs to turn themselves in for... oh, say, copying a CD that had some sort of protection on it. I can't wait to see the innovations they come up with for storing five million new pale and obese felons.
Amen!