Wow! That is a very great idea. Why does it only have certain cities though? They should tie in MLS listings and let you search by any city.
The hack uses Craigslist for its real estate data. I would bet that Craigslist is much more open.
Just like middle-men of all kinds, the reality industry is feeling a little threatened by people bypassing them via the internet and not paying the associated high commissions. It wouldn't surprise me if they're touchy about how you access MLS.
She learned via touch, which is a rather rich interface. Consider how many bits it would take to encode all the touch information going into your brain every second.
Touch is something we still can't do very well in robots, either.
But you just confused two issues: saving users two mouse clicks has nothing to do with CPU usage.
And while I agree that saving users a few seconds can matter a lot, I challenge you to find a typical enterprise app where the CPU has to sit and run for seconds at a time.
We're talking about the difference between an app that responds in microseconds vs milliseconds. It doesn't matter.
It is a cute scripting language. No more and no less.
The idea of a "scripting language" is a holdover from the bad old days when you had to choose between a painfully low level system language and a painfully slow but powerful language.
Today hardware is fast enough that you can do away with the low level languages entirely, for the vast majority of applications.
A language is a way of thinking, and most people are not willing to change their way of thinking once they're comfortable. Dynamic typing, for example, fills the typical C++ or Java programmer with fear. But in practice it provides far more benefit than cost. If you don't believe me, you'll just have to try it. I can't prove it to someone who's use to thinking in Java.
DRM is stupid simply because it's impossible to make it work.
Even if you have DRM-enabled hardware, there's always the "analog hole". And all it takes is one person with some decent analog equipment to recapture the data, and begin distributing digital copies.
If bandwidth keeps getting cheaper, things like Freenet will probably get fast enough to spread digital media. At which point there's no stopping it, short of a full-blown 1984 scenario.
The prisoners held in Guantanamo are mostly "enemy combantants", and no "prisoners of war."
That's just silly. A "prisoner of war" is simply an "enemy combatant" you've captured and taken out of action. Go read the UCMJ, or the Geneva convention on which it is based.
Guantanamo does not fall under US jurisdiction.
This is a tired and dumb line of argument. If a US solidier at Guantanamo disobeys orders, he can be tried under the UCMJ (uniform code of military justice). The UCMJ applies to soliders no matter where they go: that's the whole point of the military having its own justice system.
Unlike many other markets the real estate market is directly on the number of people living in an area. The U.S. population is growing quickly. For that reason alone, real estate is a safe investment.
Here in Massachusetts, the population has actually been decreasing, yet house prices are way way up. Population is only one factor going into demand. Another is the price of capital - if interest rates go up, fewer people can afford morgages, and fewer houses will get sold.
Real short-term interest rates are still somewhere near zero. The Fed has pumped a massive amount of credit into the system to try to get the economy booming again. The money supply has expanded by about 20% since 2001.
The long term result is always the same: price inflation. It doesn't hit every industry at the same time or by the same amount, but all that credit goes somewhere. Right now it's going into real estate. We're also seeing major price inflation in energy, healthcare, and education.
The price of your house might double, but when the price of everything else you buy doubles too, you're back where you started.
I'm not so brave/foolhardy as to make specific market predictions. But I do know that millions of people have been screwed by "safe investments" throughout history. And fiat currency is usually involved, but that's another story...
Save for a minor dip in the 90's housing prices have never fallen in 22 years.
That's precisely the kind of thinking that makes crashes possible. When everyone believes something is a safe bet, they discount risk more and more. Market phenomena often work themselves out over decades, which is beyond most people's attention span.
Take stocks for example. From 1980 to 2001, stocks were the right place to be. When a trend lasts that long, it changes people's attitudes. In 1980, most people were very nervous about stocks, because they had spent the previous couple decades sucking.
If you bought the Dow Jones in 1929, you had to wait until 1956 just to break even. And this isn't such a rare outlier. If you bought in 1966, you didn't break even until 1983. Once you include taxes and fees, it was more like the early 90s.
It takes a while for attitudes to shift. Despite the bubble popping, lots of people still believe that their 401k is going to grow at 7-10% per year. That's not necessarily true anymore.
America's economic fundamentals are troubling. We actually spend 5% more than we make. With no domestic savings to fund future growth (or even service our existing debts), we're dependent on foreign investors. And the foreign investors are getting very nervous as the dollar continues to slide.
Nobody likes paying taxes. But if you don't you end up with anarchy. If you are really serious about opposing all taxation, go move to Somalia, there is no taxes, and no central government either. It's a Libertarian Utopia!
You're missing the difference between the state and civil society, and giving the state way more credit than it deserves. The level of security and propserity in any place has more to do with the norms of civil society than the impositions of government.
Civil society in Somalia, and most of Africa, was effectively destroyed by State interventions.
Realistically, how successful do you think the government would be at producing security if we were all psychopaths? You can't build a peaceful society solely by force. Which is why Iraq is doomed for the forseable future.
People do need order. But the record of human history shows that families, communities, and the whole of voluntary society do a better job of ordering things than a state.
I have no illusions about violence disappearing from human relations. But I know that giving a monopoly on violence to a single entity creates a huge moral hazard. See, for example, the 20th century.
Before you call a theory crackpot, you'd better at least check out their best arguments. I believe socialism is dumb because I've read both Marx and his detractors, and Keynesian economics is dumb because I've read the arguments for and against.
Have you ever read anything by Murray Rothbard? Ludvig von Mises? Herman Hoppe? No? Then shut up and start learning.
A true democracy would give every person the right to vote as to how their money would be spent. Of course, then everyone would have to come out and vote on everything that currently comes before their local, county, state, and national governments.
Yup. In any body larger than a small town, democracy is silly.
Voters hire someone to represent them, this person is supposed to know how to spend these peoples' money, in theory, better than they do.
Ah, you've hit upon the central contradiction of democracy. Most of the activities of our government rest on the assumption that the people are not qualified to run their own lives. And yet the whole system rests on the ability of people to judge the qualifications of candidates to perform a job that's much harder - running everyone's lives.
There's a not-so-implicit elitism in your post that says "I know how to spend his money better than he does." But once you legitimize that principle (and unfortunately, we have), it will be turned around to bite you.
This is especially true in a democracy, where special interests wield huge clout. Each of those special interests knows how to spend *your* money better than you do, in ways that benefit them.
I'm as big a fan of space exploration as anyone, but I'm not willing to fund it by threatening people with violence if they won't cough up the dough. If you're wondering where the "violence" comes in, just ponder the nature of taxation for a minute.
1. The state government, who gets a new source of revenue.
2. The certified "training" providers.
3. Any large businesses who were feeling threatened by Ebay-based upstarts. For them, $50k is peanuts, but for the little guy, it can make the whole business infeasible.
A perfect example of how regulations always benefit a select group, and that group always seems to include the politically connected.
Yes, XP Embedded didn't meet our needs. For one thing, we wanted to do development directly on the robots. On Linux we could SSH into the robot and change things on the fly, including code editing and recompiling. We tried the same with Cygwin, but it's just not as useful.
We also encountered several maddening bugs that we couldn't fix. Ah, the pain of closed source.
The Maslab Robotics Contest evaluated both Linux and Windows for our robots, and working with Windows was a real pain. Windows Embedded lacked the configurability and features we wanted, and full-blown XP was way too bloated and GUI-dependent.
We stuck with Linux even though it meant passing up potentially lucrative sponsorship.
Republicans essentially stand for lowering taxes, decreasing the size/amount of government and government regulation, etc, etc.
It's been a very long time since the Republicans have done any of those things in earnest. Even Bush's allegedly tight budget proposal this year is actually 7% higher than last year's.
Neither major party is interested in shrinking the government. They are the government. And therein lies the problem.
History is propaganda, the type of propaganda is determained by who is writing the history.
But if you make an effort to read and compare a wide enough range of historians and primary sources, you can sort out a much better approximation for the truth. My own efforts on this front have completely changed my understanding of politics and economics.
This is not how schools teach history, unfortunately. What you learn in school is indeed saturated with propganda.
If you look at history, I think this would be topped only by Hitler.
If you look at history, you sound confused.
20th Century Civilians Killed: Stalin=4x10^7 Mao=3.5x10^7 Hitler=1.2x10^7 Ot toman Empire(Armenian Genocide)=2x10^6 Pol Pot=1x10^6 Saddam=6x10^5 Hutu-Tutsi Rivalry=5x10^5
As you can see, Hitler's not even close to first, and Saddam is way down at the bottom. Educate yourself on history. It's the only antidote to propaganda.
Do some research. There is no reason that wireless cannot transmit sound as well or better than wires.
Especially since he's presumably going to transfer the music digitally. The music is probably already stored digitally, so as long as the wireless network is fast enough to handle it, you incur no loss of quality at all.
Actually, the poster pointed out quite accurately that big companies manage to screw people by virtue of their influence, legal and otherwise, on government.
The problem here isn't the companies. They're playing within the system we've created. The problem is the system. Any government as powerful as the one we have is virtually guaranteed to be corrupt.
Whether clustering constitutes "artificial intelligence" is a rather philosophical point.
The amount of "intelligence" most people perceive in a system is inversely proportional to how well they understand its inner workings.
It's natural to say "oh, all it's doing is running this algorithm. I don't see any intelligence there." But you're missing the point. What will you conclude if/when we discover the particular algorithms running in the human brain?
For all we know, humans use the K-means algorithm too in order to identity the genre of a song...
I personally never understand this reasoning. If you own the original CD then you're not locking yourself into anything. If I wanted to rip my music to a different format I'd use the source material, not my MP3's. To use FLAC to store all your CD's on your hard drive just seems like a waste of space to me... after all, you've already paid for your own "master" of sorts, why make your own?
I have two reasons. First, I've had my physical CD collection stolen, which sucks. I wish I had lossless rips of all those disks. Consider it a backup.
Second, reripping the whole collection is a major pain. Popping disks in is annoying, but the worst part is going through the effort to make all the tags useful and consistent. CDDB is pretty hit or miss, especially for the labelling of classical albums. So it needs supervision.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow! That is a very great idea. Why does it only have certain cities though? They should tie in MLS listings and let you search by any city.
The hack uses Craigslist for its real estate data. I would bet that Craigslist is much more open.
Just like middle-men of all kinds, the reality industry is feeling a little threatened by people bypassing them via the internet and not paying the associated high commissions. It wouldn't surprise me if they're touchy about how you access MLS.
This is typical: threaten an agency's budget and they'll respond by threatening to cut their most valuable services first.
Bureaucracies are inherently dumb. But don't take my word for it - read "Bureaucracy" by Ludvig von Mises.
She learned via touch, which is a rather rich interface. Consider how many bits it would take to encode all the touch information going into your brain every second.
Touch is something we still can't do very well in robots, either.
If you want a machine that learns like a human, it may very well need the same kind of extremely rich interface with its environment that a human has.
Some researchers now believe that "the intelligence is in the IO". See for example the human intelligence enterprise.
But you just confused two issues: saving users two mouse clicks has nothing to do with CPU usage.
And while I agree that saving users a few seconds can matter a lot, I challenge you to find a typical enterprise app where the CPU has to sit and run for seconds at a time.
We're talking about the difference between an app that responds in microseconds vs milliseconds. It doesn't matter.
It is a cute scripting language. No more and no less.
The idea of a "scripting language" is a holdover from the bad old days when you had to choose between a painfully low level system language and a painfully slow but powerful language.
Today hardware is fast enough that you can do away with the low level languages entirely, for the vast majority of applications.
A language is a way of thinking, and most people are not willing to change their way of thinking once they're comfortable. Dynamic typing, for example, fills the typical C++ or Java programmer with fear. But in practice it provides far more benefit than cost. If you don't believe me, you'll just have to try it. I can't prove it to someone who's use to thinking in Java.
Also, check this out:
http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
Computers are cheap.
People are expensive.
Writing in powerful languages like Python makes your people more effective. And most enterprise apps are not CPU limited anyway.
DRM is stupid simply because it's impossible to make it work.
Even if you have DRM-enabled hardware, there's always the "analog hole". And all it takes is one person with some decent analog equipment to recapture the data, and begin distributing digital copies.
If bandwidth keeps getting cheaper, things like Freenet will probably get fast enough to spread digital media. At which point there's no stopping it, short of a full-blown 1984 scenario.
The PATRIOT Act should be limited to use only in anti-terrorism prosecutions.
Yes, but who gets to decide what constitutes an anti-terrorism prosecution? The government. And there's no route for the accused to appeal.
This is a mockery of due process.
The prisoners held in Guantanamo are mostly "enemy combantants", and no "prisoners of war."
That's just silly. A "prisoner of war" is simply an "enemy combatant" you've captured and taken out of action. Go read the UCMJ, or the Geneva convention on which it is based.
Guantanamo does not fall under US jurisdiction.
This is a tired and dumb line of argument. If a US solidier at Guantanamo disobeys orders, he can be tried under the UCMJ (uniform code of military justice). The UCMJ applies to soliders no matter where they go: that's the whole point of the military having its own justice system.
Unlike many other markets the real estate market is directly on the number of people living in an area. The U.S. population is growing quickly. For that reason alone, real estate is a safe investment.
Here in Massachusetts, the population has actually been decreasing, yet house prices are way way up. Population is only one factor going into demand. Another is the price of capital - if interest rates go up, fewer people can afford morgages, and fewer houses will get sold.
Real short-term interest rates are still somewhere near zero. The Fed has pumped a massive amount of credit into the system to try to get the economy booming again. The money supply has expanded by about 20% since 2001.
The long term result is always the same: price inflation. It doesn't hit every industry at the same time or by the same amount, but all that credit goes somewhere. Right now it's going into real estate. We're also seeing major price inflation in energy, healthcare, and education.
The price of your house might double, but when the price of everything else you buy doubles too, you're back where you started.
I'm not so brave/foolhardy as to make specific market predictions. But I do know that millions of people have been screwed by "safe investments" throughout history. And fiat currency is usually involved, but that's another story...
Save for a minor dip in the 90's housing prices have never fallen in 22 years.
That's precisely the kind of thinking that makes crashes possible. When everyone believes something is a safe bet, they discount risk more and more. Market phenomena often work themselves out over decades, which is beyond most people's attention span.
Take stocks for example. From 1980 to 2001, stocks were the right place to be. When a trend lasts that long, it changes people's attitudes. In 1980, most people were very nervous about stocks, because they had spent the previous couple decades sucking.
If you bought the Dow Jones in 1929, you had to wait until 1956 just to break even. And this isn't such a rare outlier. If you bought in 1966, you didn't break even until 1983. Once you include taxes and fees, it was more like the early 90s.
It takes a while for attitudes to shift. Despite the bubble popping, lots of people still believe that their 401k is going to grow at 7-10% per year. That's not necessarily true anymore.
America's economic fundamentals are troubling. We actually spend 5% more than we make. With no domestic savings to fund future growth (or even service our existing debts), we're dependent on foreign investors. And the foreign investors are getting very nervous as the dollar continues to slide.
Nobody likes paying taxes. But if you don't you end up with anarchy. If you are really serious about opposing all taxation, go move to Somalia, there is no taxes, and no central government either. It's a Libertarian Utopia!
You're missing the difference between the state and civil society, and giving the state way more credit than it deserves. The level of security and propserity in any place has more to do with the norms of civil society than the impositions of government.
Civil society in Somalia, and most of Africa, was effectively destroyed by State interventions.
Realistically, how successful do you think the government would be at producing security if we were all psychopaths? You can't build a peaceful society solely by force. Which is why Iraq is doomed for the forseable future.
People do need order. But the record of human history shows that families, communities, and the whole of voluntary society do a better job of ordering things than a state.
I have no illusions about violence disappearing from human relations. But I know that giving a monopoly on violence to a single entity creates a huge moral hazard. See, for example, the 20th century.
Before you call a theory crackpot, you'd better at least check out their best arguments. I believe socialism is dumb because I've read both Marx and his detractors, and Keynesian economics is dumb because I've read the arguments for and against.
Have you ever read anything by Murray Rothbard? Ludvig von Mises? Herman Hoppe? No? Then shut up and start learning.
A true democracy would give every person the right to vote as to how their money would be spent. Of course, then everyone would have to come out and vote on everything that currently comes before their local, county, state, and national governments.
Yup. In any body larger than a small town, democracy is silly.
Voters hire someone to represent them, this person is supposed to know how to spend these peoples' money, in theory, better than they do.
Ah, you've hit upon the central contradiction of democracy. Most of the activities of our government rest on the assumption that the people are not qualified to run their own lives. And yet the whole system rests on the ability of people to judge the qualifications of candidates to perform a job that's much harder - running everyone's lives.
There's a not-so-implicit elitism in your post that says "I know how to spend his money better than he does." But once you legitimize that principle (and unfortunately, we have), it will be turned around to bite you.
This is especially true in a democracy, where special interests wield huge clout. Each of those special interests knows how to spend *your* money better than you do, in ways that benefit them.
I'm as big a fan of space exploration as anyone, but I'm not willing to fund it by threatening people with violence if they won't cough up the dough. If you're wondering where the "violence" comes in, just ponder the nature of taxation for a minute.
Always ask Cui bono? (Who benefits?)
In this case it's pretty obvious:
1. The state government, who gets a new source of revenue.
2. The certified "training" providers.
3. Any large businesses who were feeling threatened by Ebay-based upstarts. For them, $50k is peanuts, but for the little guy, it can make the whole business infeasible.
A perfect example of how regulations always benefit a select group, and that group always seems to include the politically connected.
Yes, XP Embedded didn't meet our needs. For one thing, we wanted to do development directly on the robots. On Linux we could SSH into the robot and change things on the fly, including code editing and recompiling. We tried the same with Cygwin, but it's just not as useful.
We also encountered several maddening bugs that we couldn't fix. Ah, the pain of closed source.
The Maslab Robotics Contest evaluated both Linux and Windows for our robots, and working with Windows was a real pain. Windows Embedded lacked the configurability and features we wanted, and full-blown XP was way too bloated and GUI-dependent.
We stuck with Linux even though it meant passing up potentially lucrative sponsorship.
Republicans essentially stand for lowering taxes, decreasing the size/amount of government and government regulation, etc, etc.
It's been a very long time since the Republicans have done any of those things in earnest. Even Bush's allegedly tight budget proposal this year is actually 7% higher than last year's.
Neither major party is interested in shrinking the government. They are the government. And therein lies the problem.
History is propaganda, the type of propaganda is determained by who is writing the history.
But if you make an effort to read and compare a wide enough range of historians and primary sources, you can sort out a much better approximation for the truth. My own efforts on this front have completely changed my understanding of politics and economics.
This is not how schools teach history, unfortunately. What you learn in school is indeed saturated with propganda.
If you look at history, I think this would be topped only by Hitler.
t toman Empire(Armenian Genocide)=2x10^6
If you look at history, you sound confused.
20th Century Civilians Killed:
Stalin=4x10^7
Mao=3.5x10^7
Hitler=1.2x10^7
O
Pol Pot=1x10^6
Saddam=6x10^5
Hutu-Tutsi Rivalry=5x10^5
As you can see, Hitler's not even close to first, and Saddam is way down at the bottom. Educate yourself on history. It's the only antidote to propaganda.
Sources:
this article
khmer rouge
Saddam
Do some research. There is no reason that wireless cannot transmit sound as well or better than wires.
Especially since he's presumably going to transfer the music digitally. The music is probably already stored digitally, so as long as the wireless network is fast enough to handle it, you incur no loss of quality at all.
why do all companies have to be evil.
Actually, the poster pointed out quite accurately that big companies manage to screw people by virtue of their influence, legal and otherwise, on government.
The problem here isn't the companies. They're playing within the system we've created. The problem is the system. Any government as powerful as the one we have is virtually guaranteed to be corrupt.
Whether clustering constitutes "artificial intelligence" is a rather philosophical point.
The amount of "intelligence" most people perceive in a system is inversely proportional to how well they understand its inner workings.
It's natural to say "oh, all it's doing is running this algorithm. I don't see any intelligence there." But you're missing the point. What will you conclude if/when we discover the particular algorithms running in the human brain?
For all we know, humans use the K-means algorithm too in order to identity the genre of a song...
I personally never understand this reasoning. If you own the original CD then you're not locking yourself into anything. If I wanted to rip my music to a different format I'd use the source material, not my MP3's. To use FLAC to store all your CD's on your hard drive just seems like a waste of space to me... after all, you've already paid for your own "master" of sorts, why make your own?
I have two reasons. First, I've had my physical CD collection stolen, which sucks. I wish I had lossless rips of all those disks. Consider it a backup.
Second, reripping the whole collection is a major pain. Popping disks in is annoying, but the worst part is going through the effort to make all the tags useful and consistent. CDDB is pretty hit or miss, especially for the labelling of classical albums. So it needs supervision.