The failure of your link to show anything useful is due less to obfuscation on the part of Google, and more to the fact that the White House isn't located at 1 Pennsylvania Avenue, but at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Maps are only helpful if you know which address you're looking for.
heh heh... I always wished someone would release a compilation album called "Son of Moog," perhaps with a cheesy subtitle like "Restoring the Family Honor of Electro-Funk." If ST:TNG had come out in the late '70s or early '80s, I'm sure it would have happened.
Thanks for the link to the "argument" against gay marriage. I teach an introductory logic course, and that's one of the best examples of the slippery slope fallacy I've ever seen.
WTF, have you ever watched the show? Jesus Christ, she's from a completely different fucking planet! BETAZED! It's why she's a goddamned EMPATH! HELLO! She's not from Greece! She's NOT EVEN HUMAN!
Well, if you had watched the show, you'd know that she's half Betazoid, and half human. That why she's an empath and not a full telepath. And while I don't recall it ever being made explicit that her human father was Greek, I don't see why that would be outside the range of possibility.
The only fault in that very clever episode was the fact that to simulate time stopping, they either used manequins or had actors attempt to stand very still.
Yeah, that, and its complete ignorance of all known laws of physics. Case in point: Picard reaches for the bowl of rotten fruit, not knowing that it is inside a bubble of "accelerated time." His fingernails grow like two inches in a matter of seconds. How, if the rest of his body-- including his circulatory system-- is moving at normal time? Shouldn't his fingers have turned black and rotted off instead?
Or how about the fact that they can see the Enterprise frozen in time? Light takes time to get from one place to another. If time itself is stopped, or slowed, the light from the Enterprise would never reach their eyes.
Even if you're willing to ignore all of the scientific problems, there's the simple fact that at the end we find out all these problems were caused by... an alien race who like to lay their eggs in black holes, and mistook the Romulans' engines for one. They actually paid someone to come up with that?
In other words, Star Trek's special effects get an upgrade.
Maybe you meant that sarcastically, but I've always wondered why people just have to use CGI over models for space shows. Isn't it just possible that a metal and plastic model looks a lot more like a metal and plastic spaceship than something you cooked up with Lightwave? To me, Babylon 5, Voyager, and all the other crappy CGI shows looked even more ridiculous than the original Trek.
professional musicians (and yes, professional music sales executives) have a right to charge for their work by whatever means they consider to best suit them.
Except that under the terms of most major record labels, the musicians-- you know, those people who actually write and perform the songs-- don't have that right. The masters are owned and controlled by the record labels, and the profits go directly to the record label execs. The band are essentially contracted employees who get loaned money to record an album (an advance), and who don't see any money until that loan is paid off. As a result, most bands see only a negligible amount of money from record sales.
As the leader of a small-time garage band, I would LOVE to have a label come along and "exploit" us with a five-year, multi-million dollar record contract, even if it meant seeing every (crappy) song I ever wrote locked down by eeeeeevil DRM layers.
How much would you LOVE being exploited if, after that five-year contract is up, you still haven't made any money off of your record sales, and you can't switch to another label because they own all your masters?
There's no way schmucks like you are ever going to hear my music unless I "sell my soul" to the record industry, because I don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on marketing and promotion.
That's simply not true anymore. All you need is a web host with decent bandwidth and "schmucks like us" all over the world can hear anything you choose to make available to us. Plus, there are any number of online resources for making, selling, and distributing CDs. As for ensuring that you have enough name recognition that people actually bother to buy your CDs, well, that's something not even the major record labels can guarantee you. Even on a major label, for every big-name act, there are a dozen performers you've never heard of, won't hear on the radio, and who simply aren't being promoted.
Yes, from the Arabs who blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, to the Arabs who plant all the car bombs in Belfast, to the many Arab revolutionary movements in South America, to the Arabs who bomb abortion clinics, to the Arabs who spray Sarin gas in Japanese subways. Nothin' but freakin' a-rabs.
Re:AI community convenes, stale ideas emerge
on
Of Ants and Robots
·
· Score: 1
Unless it can predict the stock market and prevent traffic jams; not really.
"Predicting the stock market" is to economics what astrology is to astronomy. And genetic algorithms-- a classic example of emergent behavior-- have been used to control traffic flow.
Which is orthogonal to emergent behavior as such.
Exactly what does qualify as emergent behavior in your mind, then?
There is nothing emergent about a handful of purposefully crafted packets travelling over a purposefully built network arriving at their intended destination.
There is if the particular route they use to get there hasn't been "purposefully crafted." And the Internet is far from a "purposefully built network." It's a chaotic conglomerate of individual computers which have been connected to other individual computers with no roadmap dictating what goes where. No individual computer or piece of software contains a representation of the network as a whole, and yet packets can get from one place to another based on the simple rules (protocols) implemented on individual machines. Ants following chemical trails is a much better analogy for network traffic than a postman delivering a letter.
Re:AI community convenes, stale ideas emerge
on
Of Ants and Robots
·
· Score: 1
As far as I'm concerned the question as to how ants know how to organize themselves is on the same order as the question, "how does bread know it should fall on the buttered side?", or "how do coin flips know they should be random?"
Lucky for you, the researchers aren't asking that question. It's not "how do they know how to organize themselves?" but rather "how do they manage to organize even though they don't know how?"
And it may be terribly boring to you, but the study of emergent behavior has important practical implications in fields as diverse as economics, city planning, and telecommunications. The infrastructure of the Internet itself depends on decentralized decision-making. Thanks to this "terribly boring" stuff, your message was reliably transported from your computer, to slashdot, to everyone else's computers, without any centralized authority directing traffic.
Chemical trails might explain how ants know where to go, and roughly what they will do when they get there. It doesn't explain their ability to work out the logistics on the fly.
I'm afraid you're unaware of just how much you can accomplish with chemical trails and other simple stimuli. This has been researched extensively. I suggest you read Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems by Eric Bonbeau, Marco Dorigo, and Guy Theraulaz. It gives a very detailed and math-heavy analysis of actual research into ant behavior, as well as examples of practical applications in the field of AI.
Bottom line is that the "logistics" aren't worked out by individual ants. Each ant has a fairly simple set of responses to stimuli, but this allows complex behavior to emerge in the group as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as it's pacifists like Jesus that are dying, not brave insurrectionists like Barabbas, I'm all for the Roman occupation.
The failure of your link to show anything useful is due less to obfuscation on the part of Google, and more to the fact that the White House isn't located at 1 Pennsylvania Avenue, but at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Maps are only helpful if you know which address you're looking for.
heh heh... I always wished someone would release a compilation album called "Son of Moog," perhaps with a cheesy subtitle like "Restoring the Family Honor of Electro-Funk." If ST:TNG had come out in the late '70s or early '80s, I'm sure it would have happened.
Titanic did in fact contain one instance of the F-word...
No it didn't, that was me realizing I'd just paid seven bucks to see it.
Thanks for the link to the "argument" against gay marriage. I teach an introductory logic course, and that's one of the best examples of the slippery slope fallacy I've ever seen.
At the aquarium where I work we have a gay domestic couple of penguins.
Which is the real reason Microsoft withdrew their support for gay rights.
WTF, have you ever watched the show? Jesus Christ, she's from a completely different fucking planet! BETAZED! It's why she's a goddamned EMPATH! HELLO! She's not from Greece! She's NOT EVEN HUMAN!
Well, if you had watched the show, you'd know that she's half Betazoid, and half human. That why she's an empath and not a full telepath. And while I don't recall it ever being made explicit that her human father was Greek, I don't see why that would be outside the range of possibility.
The only fault in that very clever episode was the fact that to simulate time stopping, they either used manequins or had actors attempt to stand very still.
Yeah, that, and its complete ignorance of all known laws of physics. Case in point: Picard reaches for the bowl of rotten fruit, not knowing that it is inside a bubble of "accelerated time." His fingernails grow like two inches in a matter of seconds. How, if the rest of his body-- including his circulatory system-- is moving at normal time? Shouldn't his fingers have turned black and rotted off instead?
Or how about the fact that they can see the Enterprise frozen in time? Light takes time to get from one place to another. If time itself is stopped, or slowed, the light from the Enterprise would never reach their eyes.
Even if you're willing to ignore all of the scientific problems, there's the simple fact that at the end we find out all these problems were caused by... an alien race who like to lay their eggs in black holes, and mistook the Romulans' engines for one. They actually paid someone to come up with that?
In other words, Star Trek's special effects get an upgrade.
Maybe you meant that sarcastically, but I've always wondered why people just have to use CGI over models for space shows. Isn't it just possible that a metal and plastic model looks a lot more like a metal and plastic spaceship than something you cooked up with Lightwave? To me, Babylon 5, Voyager, and all the other crappy CGI shows looked even more ridiculous than the original Trek.
Oh, please. At least link to the right page.
Who would of thought it, a dupe on slashdot!
Who would have thought it, bad grammar on slashdot!
professional musicians (and yes, professional music sales executives) have a right to charge for their work by whatever means they consider to best suit them.
Except that under the terms of most major record labels, the musicians-- you know, those people who actually write and perform the songs-- don't have that right. The masters are owned and controlled by the record labels, and the profits go directly to the record label execs. The band are essentially contracted employees who get loaned money to record an album (an advance), and who don't see any money until that loan is paid off. As a result, most bands see only a negligible amount of money from record sales.
As the leader of a small-time garage band, I would LOVE to have a label come along and "exploit" us with a five-year, multi-million dollar record contract, even if it meant seeing every (crappy) song I ever wrote locked down by eeeeeevil DRM layers.
How much would you LOVE being exploited if, after that five-year contract is up, you still haven't made any money off of your record sales, and you can't switch to another label because they own all your masters?
There's no way schmucks like you are ever going to hear my music unless I "sell my soul" to the record industry, because I don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on marketing and promotion.
That's simply not true anymore. All you need is a web host with decent bandwidth and "schmucks like us" all over the world can hear anything you choose to make available to us. Plus, there are any number of online resources for making, selling, and distributing CDs. As for ensuring that you have enough name recognition that people actually bother to buy your CDs, well, that's something not even the major record labels can guarantee you. Even on a major label, for every big-name act, there are a dozen performers you've never heard of, won't hear on the radio, and who simply aren't being promoted.
It wasn't religious fundamentalists who protested Mel Gibson's film before they saw it.
No, but it was religious fundamentalists who protested Scorsese's film before they saw it.
Truth: Damn near all terrorists are Arabs.
Yes, from the Arabs who blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, to the Arabs who plant all the car bombs in Belfast, to the many Arab revolutionary movements in South America, to the Arabs who bomb abortion clinics, to the Arabs who spray Sarin gas in Japanese subways. Nothin' but freakin' a-rabs.
Unless it can predict the stock market and prevent traffic jams; not really.
"Predicting the stock market" is to economics what astrology is to astronomy. And genetic algorithms-- a classic example of emergent behavior-- have been used to control traffic flow.
Which is orthogonal to emergent behavior as such.
Exactly what does qualify as emergent behavior in your mind, then?
There is nothing emergent about a handful of purposefully crafted packets travelling over a purposefully built network arriving at their intended destination.
There is if the particular route they use to get there hasn't been "purposefully crafted." And the Internet is far from a "purposefully built network." It's a chaotic conglomerate of individual computers which have been connected to other individual computers with no roadmap dictating what goes where. No individual computer or piece of software contains a representation of the network as a whole, and yet packets can get from one place to another based on the simple rules (protocols) implemented on individual machines. Ants following chemical trails is a much better analogy for network traffic than a postman delivering a letter.
As far as I'm concerned the question as to how ants know how to organize themselves is on the same order as the question, "how does bread know it should fall on the buttered side?", or "how do coin flips know they should be random?"
Lucky for you, the researchers aren't asking that question. It's not "how do they know how to organize themselves?" but rather "how do they manage to organize even though they don't know how?"
And it may be terribly boring to you, but the study of emergent behavior has important practical implications in fields as diverse as economics, city planning, and telecommunications. The infrastructure of the Internet itself depends on decentralized decision-making. Thanks to this "terribly boring" stuff, your message was reliably transported from your computer, to slashdot, to everyone else's computers, without any centralized authority directing traffic.
Hey, isn't the democracy based on the same assumption - if you put together a bunch of dump small things, they will make a good choice?
So, ah, how's that working out for you?
Chemical trails might explain how ants know where to go, and roughly what they will do when they get there. It doesn't explain their ability to work out the logistics on the fly.
I'm afraid you're unaware of just how much you can accomplish with chemical trails and other simple stimuli. This has been researched extensively. I suggest you read Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems by Eric Bonbeau, Marco Dorigo, and Guy Theraulaz. It gives a very detailed and math-heavy analysis of actual research into ant behavior, as well as examples of practical applications in the field of AI.
Bottom line is that the "logistics" aren't worked out by individual ants. Each ant has a fairly simple set of responses to stimuli, but this allows complex behavior to emerge in the group as a whole.
As long as you've got that dictionary out, you might want to look up the difference between adjectives and transitive verbs.
he has done wonderful things through his Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.
Except it's not his Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. It's his father's.
But, this is why (at least here in the US) there are anti-trust laws - to offer a *hope* of a choice...
Yes, but how would anti-trust laws help you against a state-owned communications monopoly?
Well then let me do the honors: "BSD is dying."
If you named all the bases in their own base, they'd all be base-10.
You don't have your own base. All your base are belong to us.
Very clever, except not all numbers of the form 2^n-1 where n is prime are themselves prime.
Perhaps Ipod will predict when Hewy Lewis and the news will make a mainstream comeback?
NASA already has some extremely sophisticated machinery to do just that. That's how they found out that Huey Lewis will save rock 'n' roll.