The classic Turing Test is not so good because it focuses on the appearance of intelligence rather than the mechanism for it. People design systems to do well at the test, thus evolving current AI work towards mimicking human conversation (including potential thought involved) rather than actually creating new thoughts.
I think a much harder test for machine intelligence would be passed when the *machine* cannot reliably tell itself from a human!
You realize there are minors in South Carolina reading slashdot, right? Which makes this a public forum in South Carolina....
Aw FUCK!
But if minors are reading a story about profanity (it didn't just pop up when they were searching for spongebob squarepants or whatever), shouldn't they expect to maybe come across some of it? What's the point of reading about something while making sure that everything is sanitized to the point that we can pretend that thing doesn't exist? Minors are allowed in libaries; does that mean libaries should be cleaned up like a G-rated movie?
My PC's breath just reeks of porn. Sometimes I'll come home and find it passed out on the couch in sleep mode, after downloading gigs and gigs of hot amateur girl-on-girl. Yeah, so... I *definitely* don't want it driving.
Bush: I was already an E-President. At least that, maybe a D-President. I made full use of more than one Internets, like the time I checked my e-mail on the one in my office, or that time Dick was showing me the google.
1 error in 1000 means like 300,000 potential votes taken from one candidate and given to another, for a total discrepancy of 600,000 votes. (Granted, that assumes everyone including children vote, and that every error sides one way -- which is likely since it's a conspiracy -- but I'm just being dramatic.)
Anything works flawlessly if you ignore the cases where it doesn't.
I forecast that the transition to a new joke could happen by 2015. By then, with all this nano stuff, computers could have more transistors than a dress has Clinton DNA and be smaller than Roseanne Barr's butt.
The first Project Gotham 3 review begins with a diatribe all about the reviewer and not at all about the game. Why must writers make all their work about themselves? It's like the writer thinks we want to hear about him, and he must segue into a discussion of the game itself only by explaining how the game is directly relative to the main topic: himself.
Does this help us? Can we relate to the author in a way that tells us we'll have a similar game experience? Or are these boring "making the game personal" descriptions just an indication of how much the review, when he gets to it, will be biased?
I lost interest after reading too much about the author. I preferred to complain about it rather than continue bothering to read. I suppose this is because I have some sort of attention deficit. Ever since I was in fourth grade, when... (me me me, etc)
This is such a good idea. My mp3 player has features disabled in some of its firmware versions (like high bitrate recording) and I've often wished I could mess with the source.
I've also often wished I could modify source for my satellite receiver to try to add features not everyone would need.
More open source firmware should lead to more general purpose hardware, which can be programmed to implement specific devices. There are a lot of creative people out there, and even if the hardware manufactures had all the creativity, some unique hardware applications are not markettable enough to be worth producing. But people will, if they are given the chance.
In an ideal future, all our devices will have the software features we want, will behave the way we want, and will interact with the other devices we have (not just one brand or OS). If there is some software feature we dislike, we should be able to get on the internet and download a modification, or make one ourselves if no one else has. Open source firmware is one piece of this ideal future.
I was so surprised to see that explanation, that I looked up how lightning works to reassure myself that that isn't the standard explanation.
It isn't, but the explanation I found still says " the method of cloud charging still remains elusive" (http://science.howstuffworks.com/lightning.htm), and goes on to talk about a charge between cloud and earth, and "break down" of the air. They don't mention rain and they seem less convinced of their explanation than I do about mine so here it is:
How I thought lightning works: Falling water droplets tend to lose electrons (this is why waterfalls produce the same euphoric feeling that negative ion generators do, according to their manuals), leaving negatively charged air above the rain. The falling positively charged droplets can then provide a path for the negative charge, so that rather than making a huge jump through the air, the charge "leaders" make a large number of very short jumps.
I probably shouldn't base my scientific knowledge on negative ion generator manuals, but when other sources say "actually we don't really know...", I tend to trust my own ideas. I probably also shouldn't use slashdot to field those ideas...
The results seem logical. People in stereotypically male professions tend probably to be male, and those in stereotypically female professions tend more likely to be female. So sex is probably somewhat hereditary: Male people are more likely to have male children, and female more likely to have female children.
That being said, one should not take this as a Commandment and associate fast code with "evil", refusing to even consider speed in design. You can write fast code in general without optimizing it, and without sacrificing readablility. I'm talking general best-practices for fast code, I'm not talking about using tricks and shortcuts.
If this is not done, if say you have a team of programmers who think fast code is evil, you may find yourself with a ton of slow code. Maybe only 2% of the code contributes to 70% of the runtime (I dunno actual stats), but you may have 50 poorly designed bits of slow code contributing to that 2%, and then when you optimize all of those, the other 98% of the code that used to take 30% time may now take 80% time, all of it slow code.
Also: small, tight, clean code can often be a lot more readable than long, rambly, superfluous code.
And a digression: if "if (!ptr)" is unreadable or confusing, you may have a problem. To me, changing that to "if (ptr==NULL)" would be like changing "if not valid pointer," in commenting to "if validity of pointer is lacking".
You only need to know the first digit (and its place of course) to calculate the first digit of the square root (more than 1M but less than 4M so the root is between 1000 and 2000). You can start calculating immediately without even reading the other digits.
I use sqrt as an example because I don't understand 13th roots so intuitively, however someone else mentioned that there are a lot more tricks with 13th roots than there are with sqrt.
Also note, 1234*1234 = 1,522,756 and 1235*1235 = 1525225... a difference of 1 in the root is a difference of thousands in the square, so if you know it's an integer you don't ever have to bother with more than the first 4 digits.
A 100-digit number will have a 13th root somewhere around 50,000,000. I don't know any tricks or algorithms he might use, but I'd be willing to bet he doesn't have to memorize more than 8 digits.
For example 50,000,000^13 = 1.220703125e+100 50,000,001^13 = 1.2207034423828505859402929688896e+100... which are different on the 8th digit. Knowing more digits than 8 doesn't matter because there are only non-integer roots between those 2 numbers.
I think Microsoft must be looking at Linux wondering when they can take it and make it their own. I won't say that they've probably stolen code already or at least looked at it for ways they can "innovate" on their own. But I think one day Microsoft will suddenly stop trying to convince people that Linux ruins everybody's life in every way possible, and will start convincing everyone that Microsoft software is great because it has the power of Linux behind it. They will embrace it and release their modifications under the GPL, because it can be used to make their software better and to sell billions of dollars worth of it.
Now... to get slightly back on topic... this may never happen because so far admitting that Linux is good is bad for MS marketting. But if it does happen, it will happen when average dum people accept the idea that Linux makes Windows systems better. This might be the start of that. Perhaps Linux won't make Windows irrelevant. Perhaps it will save it from stagnancy. Whatever MS can do to make its software seem the best choice, even if it means eventually riding on the rising general opinion of Linux, they will consider.
I had a cable modem from Shaw a few years back and it often dropped all packets for a few seconds every couple minutes. I tracked it down to some machine on their network and explained to this Guy on the phone that I had ping logs from an external machine that proved the problem was outside of my home. He told me that by pinging so much (every second for many minutes) I was "ping flooding" their server. I wanted to explain that I was sending 32 bytes per second but I was so stupefied all I could do was say "oh" and hang up. Only later I thought of snappy answers ("32 bytes per second is flooding your server? Oh! I think I found the problem! You should upgrade the 300 baud modems you're using!").
Some days later they accepted there was a problem, and changed all the cabling in my house to see if that would fix it.
"Ha! He took the bait! He said his site was worth $10000 to him! Now his ass is ours! Let's eat his soul!"
"Oh wait! The public is actually sympathizing with this monster? Let's give him an xbox! Make sure to get some nice press photos of us and our new best friend."
Why less light doesn't mean cooling down.
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Some of the quotes in the article indicate some pretty narrow thinking.
First, less light == cooling down? "If that was the case then we'd all be freezing to death."
There isn't less radiation coming from the sun, just less reaching the earth's surface ("there has been a general increase in overall solar radiation over the past 150 years"). This means it's probably being absorbed in the atmosphere, probably being converted to heat. By preventing that sunlight from being converted to non-heat energy (photosynthesis, evaporation), this might be heating up the atmosphere even more. I don't know where this heat goes, but it *might* be possible that less surface light means increased global warming. I guess the real questions regarding surface light and temperature is: How does a decrease in surface light affect the amount of energy that escapes the earth?, and Are we storing energy and remaining cool, or letting more energy be converted to heat?
Second, "I don't think that aerosols by themselves would be able to produce this amount of global dimming." Aerosols "by themselves" might not filter that much light, but pollution does lead to "bigger, longer lasting clouds." It sounds like the "global dimming" just means less direct sunlight, not necessarily dimmer direct sunlight.
Slashdot Mirror
The classic Turing Test is not so good because it focuses on the appearance of intelligence rather than the mechanism for it. People design systems to do well at the test, thus evolving current AI work towards mimicking human conversation (including potential thought involved) rather than actually creating new thoughts.
I think a much harder test for machine intelligence would be passed when the *machine* cannot reliably tell itself from a human!
You realize there are minors in South Carolina reading slashdot, right? Which makes this a public forum in South Carolina....
Aw FUCK!
But if minors are reading a story about profanity (it didn't just pop up when they were searching for spongebob squarepants or whatever), shouldn't they expect to maybe come across some of it? What's the point of reading about something while making sure that everything is sanitized to the point that we can pretend that thing doesn't exist? Minors are allowed in libaries; does that mean libaries should be cleaned up like a G-rated movie?
What do you think this is, 1999? We got rid of all that long ago.
"I'm Leenoos"
FAKE!!!!
This is an obvious photoshop job. You can tell its fake because the shadow's are all wrong.
This is from a scene in the movie Never Back Down where the prez calls to give props to Max and Baja.
My PC's breath just reeks of porn. Sometimes I'll come home and find it passed out on the couch in sleep mode, after downloading gigs and gigs of hot amateur girl-on-girl. Yeah, so... I *definitely* don't want it driving.
Bush: I was already an E-President. At least that, maybe a D-President. I made full use of more than one Internets, like the time I checked my e-mail on the one in my office, or that time Dick was showing me the google.
1 error in 1000 means like 300,000 potential votes taken from one candidate and given to another, for a total discrepancy of 600,000 votes. (Granted, that assumes everyone including children vote, and that every error sides one way -- which is likely since it's a conspiracy -- but I'm just being dramatic.)
Anything works flawlessly if you ignore the cases where it doesn't.
there are plenty of adversaries that wouldn't hesitate to (meteorically) walk up to us and shoot us
Or shoot at the drones!
They're lawyers and their names are Criminal and Divorce?! Now *that's* ironic! (Score: 5, Funny)
I forecast that the transition to a new joke could happen by 2015. By then, with all this nano stuff, computers could have more transistors than a dress has Clinton DNA and be smaller than Roseanne Barr's butt.
Reviewing the review...
The first Project Gotham 3 review begins with a diatribe all about the reviewer and not at all about the game. Why must writers make all their work about themselves? It's like the writer thinks we want to hear about him, and he must segue into a discussion of the game itself only by explaining how the game is directly relative to the main topic: himself.
Does this help us? Can we relate to the author in a way that tells us we'll have a similar game experience? Or are these boring "making the game personal" descriptions just an indication of how much the review, when he gets to it, will be biased?
I lost interest after reading too much about the author. I preferred to complain about it rather than continue bothering to read. I suppose this is because I have some sort of attention deficit. Ever since I was in fourth grade, when... (me me me, etc)
This is such a good idea. My mp3 player has features disabled in some of its firmware versions (like high bitrate recording) and I've often wished I could mess with the source.
I've also often wished I could modify source for my satellite receiver to try to add features not everyone would need.
More open source firmware should lead to more general purpose hardware, which can be programmed to implement specific devices. There are a lot of creative people out there, and even if the hardware manufactures had all the creativity, some unique hardware applications are not markettable enough to be worth producing. But people will, if they are given the chance.
In an ideal future, all our devices will have the software features we want, will behave the way we want, and will interact with the other devices we have (not just one brand or OS). If there is some software feature we dislike, we should be able to get on the internet and download a modification, or make one ourselves if no one else has. Open source firmware is one piece of this ideal future.
I was so surprised to see that explanation, that I looked up how lightning works to reassure myself that that isn't the standard explanation.
It isn't, but the explanation I found still says " the method of cloud charging still remains elusive" (http://science.howstuffworks.com/lightning.htm), and goes on to talk about a charge between cloud and earth, and "break down" of the air. They don't mention rain and they seem less convinced of their explanation than I do about mine so here it is:
How I thought lightning works:
Falling water droplets tend to lose electrons (this is why waterfalls produce the same euphoric feeling that negative ion generators do, according to their manuals), leaving negatively charged air above the rain. The falling positively charged droplets can then provide a path for the negative charge, so that rather than making a huge jump through the air, the charge "leaders" make a large number of very short jumps.
I probably shouldn't base my scientific knowledge on negative ion generator manuals, but when other sources say "actually we don't really know...", I tend to trust my own ideas. I probably also shouldn't use slashdot to field those ideas...
The results seem logical. People in stereotypically male professions tend probably to be male, and those in stereotypically female professions tend more likely to be female. So sex is probably somewhat hereditary: Male people are more likely to have male children, and female more likely to have female children.
That being said, one should not take this as a Commandment and associate fast code with "evil", refusing to even consider speed in design. You can write fast code in general without optimizing it, and without sacrificing readablility. I'm talking general best-practices for fast code, I'm not talking about using tricks and shortcuts.
If this is not done, if say you have a team of programmers who think fast code is evil, you may find yourself with a ton of slow code. Maybe only 2% of the code contributes to 70% of the runtime (I dunno actual stats), but you may have 50 poorly designed bits of slow code contributing to that 2%, and then when you optimize all of those, the other 98% of the code that used to take 30% time may now take 80% time, all of it slow code.
Also: small, tight, clean code can often be a lot more readable than long, rambly, superfluous code.
And a digression: if "if (!ptr)" is unreadable or confusing, you may have a problem. To me, changing that to "if (ptr==NULL)" would be like changing "if not valid pointer," in commenting to "if validity of pointer is lacking".
What is the square root of 1,522,756?
... which are different on the 8th digit. Knowing more digits than 8 doesn't matter because there are only non-integer roots between those 2 numbers.
You only need to know the first digit (and its place of course) to calculate the first digit of the square root (more than 1M but less than 4M so the root is between 1000 and 2000). You can start calculating immediately without even reading the other digits.
I use sqrt as an example because I don't understand 13th roots so intuitively, however someone else mentioned that there are a lot more tricks with 13th roots than there are with sqrt.
Also note, 1234*1234 = 1,522,756 and 1235*1235 = 1525225... a difference of 1 in the root is a difference of thousands in the square, so if you know it's an integer you don't ever have to bother with more than the first 4 digits.
A 100-digit number will have a 13th root somewhere around 50,000,000. I don't know any tricks or algorithms he might use, but I'd be willing to bet he doesn't have to memorize more than 8 digits.
For example
50,000,000^13 = 1.220703125e+100
50,000,001^13 = 1.2207034423828505859402929688896e+100
I think Microsoft must be looking at Linux wondering when they can take it and make it their own. I won't say that they've probably stolen code already or at least looked at it for ways they can "innovate" on their own. But I think one day Microsoft will suddenly stop trying to convince people that Linux ruins everybody's life in every way possible, and will start convincing everyone that Microsoft software is great because it has the power of Linux behind it. They will embrace it and release their modifications under the GPL, because it can be used to make their software better and to sell billions of dollars worth of it.
Now... to get slightly back on topic... this may never happen because so far admitting that Linux is good is bad for MS marketting. But if it does happen, it will happen when average dum people accept the idea that Linux makes Windows systems better. This might be the start of that. Perhaps Linux won't make Windows irrelevant. Perhaps it will save it from stagnancy. Whatever MS can do to make its software seem the best choice, even if it means eventually riding on the rising general opinion of Linux, they will consider.
I had a cable modem from Shaw a few years back and it often dropped all packets for a few seconds every couple minutes. I tracked it down to some machine on their network and explained to this Guy on the phone that I had ping logs from an external machine that proved the problem was outside of my home. He told me that by pinging so much (every second for many minutes) I was "ping flooding" their server. I wanted to explain that I was sending 32 bytes per second but I was so stupefied all I could do was say "oh" and hang up. Only later I thought of snappy answers ("32 bytes per second is flooding your server? Oh! I think I found the problem! You should upgrade the 300 baud modems you're using!").
Some days later they accepted there was a problem, and changed all the cabling in my house to see if that would fix it.
Idiots.
But but but... a media player is part of the *operating system*
Isn't it?! Isn't that the way it's supposed to be?
The second step is to trademark "x" and force anyone using it or anything that sounds similar to change their name.
Linu-
Mac OS -
-ylophones.com
That should be my .sig. "Aren't you afraid of the oil companies?" It sounds like "Don't you live in fear of God?" Something we believe and accept.
--
Aren't you afraid of the oil companies?
Yeah.
"Ha! He took the bait! He said his site was worth $10000 to him! Now his ass is ours! Let's eat his soul!"
"Oh wait! The public is actually sympathizing with this monster? Let's give him an xbox! Make sure to get some nice press photos of us and our new best friend."
Some of the quotes in the article indicate some pretty narrow thinking.
First, less light == cooling down? "If that was the case then we'd all be freezing to death."
There isn't less radiation coming from the sun, just less reaching the earth's surface ("there has been a general increase in overall solar radiation over the past 150 years"). This means it's probably being absorbed in the atmosphere, probably being converted to heat. By preventing that sunlight from being converted to non-heat energy (photosynthesis, evaporation), this might be heating up the atmosphere even more. I don't know where this heat goes, but it *might* be possible that less surface light means increased global warming. I guess the real questions regarding surface light and temperature is: How does a decrease in surface light affect the amount of energy that escapes the earth?, and Are we storing energy and remaining cool, or letting more energy be converted to heat?
Second, "I don't think that aerosols by themselves would be able to produce this amount of global dimming." Aerosols "by themselves" might not filter that much light, but pollution does lead to "bigger, longer lasting clouds." It sounds like the "global dimming" just means less direct sunlight, not necessarily dimmer direct sunlight.
"... intel diamond wedding processor(tm). A processor is 18 months."
Or maybe the diamond cartel should borrow ideas from the computer industry and try to sell things that won't last long and will need to be replaced.
"Show her you'll love her for the next 18 months."