Did it ever occur to you that drive manufacturers and researchers work on all of those things, but don't magically make breakthroughs in a given area simply because a bunch of jackasses on slashdot want them to?
Actually, they do. No through magic, but because they are cunning businessmen who have had the divinely inspired realization that if they direct their research towards producing what their customers - such as the jackasses on Slashdot - want, they might make more sales. Yes, I know, I didn't believe it either at first, but it really works!
I guess that's why they're manufacturers and you're an Anonymous Coward. And congrats to whoever modded you Insightful, too.
Australia is a penal colony the British Empire shipped its worst troublemakers to - you know, the people who even the American Puritans refused to take. When a maximum security prison is run by the inmates, what do you expect - justice?
Australian Government - By the Criminals, For the Criminals!
Despite being completely ignored by most people he lives in this world in his head where the current president would subject himself to a dark and moldy basement in order to get a half-assed hologram taken.
Um, what are you trying to say here? That your president is afraid of the dark?
Besides, getting my holograph taken would be the first thing in my list of things to do if I ever took over the world^W^W^W^W became the president.
Instead of a candle, shouldn't Doctor Laser hold, I dunno, a laser?
It's a laser candle, duh! Instead of candlelight, it sends beams of laser light at random directions, burning everything in their path like a Death Blossom.
The only thing worse than a laser candle is a laser bonfire with sharks dancing around it.
I'm fairly certain you were being sarcastic in your post but relativity doesn't invalidate Newtonian physics.
Yes, it does. Newtonian physics assumes that information propagates at infinite speed, relativity assumes it propagates at the speed of light. Newtonian and Einsteinian physics simply can't both be correct in the same universe, and this universe obeys Einstein. I'm not sure any imaginable universe could obey Newton, since the infinite speed of propagation of information is quite a large requirement.
Newtonian physics is still correct, it's just less accurate than relativity and quantum mechanics.
"Less accurate" means "not correct". It's a good approximation in some cirucmstances, nothing more.
Escorting people out of the building and revoking their access privileges the second they get fired is actually warranted?
No, because nothing stops them from stealing data prior to that, and knowing they're going ot be treated in such a way is not going to create any loyalty or goodwill that might stop them.
Treat people like shit under your heel and you shouldn't be surprised that they'll return the favour. Corporate America only has itself to blame for the lack of loyalty of its peons. I guess said serfs really internalized the "greed is good" mantra they've been hearing for years.
For example, is a bug that corrupts one's filesystem less critical than a bug that allows unauthorized access?
More importantly, is there a difference? Red Hat 9 had - and perhaps distros still have - this nice system where cron would, once a day, run programs dropped into a directory in/etc with root privileges. Very useful for various packages that required periodical maintenance; but if a filesystem corruption bug would allow one to link an arbitrary file to those directories...
A bug means that a system behaves in a way it shouldn't. There's always the chance that such unplanned behaviour can be used by an attacker to do nasty things. There is no difference between security critical and other bugs, there's only bugs with known exploits and bugs without. Every bug is a chink in the armor, and every kernel bug should be considered security-critical.
Is that the only thing still running in userspace? I was under the impression that you still need device-specific drivers in the X server. Or are we finally approaching the point where the kernel exposes a framebuffer console with standard accelerated features (OpenGL, preferably), and X or any other program can simply run on top of that?
Get with the times. Red Scare is over, it's muslim terrorists you should use in right-wing propaganda nowadays. Or are you afraid that people might start questioning the wisdom of the Invisible Hand in the light of the financial crisis, Gulf oil spill, and other recent screwups of free market and its prophets and disciples?
Oh, sorry, I forgot: whenever free market screws up, it's actually the fault of the sheep population who didn't have sufficient faith in the Invisible Hand, and instead seeked shelter from the Satan Government.
I thought nationalized health care was supposed to eliminate greedy doctors working for profit? How can this be true?
Nationalized health care is supposed to eliminate greedy insurance companies who profit from people as long as they're okay and then drop them when they become ill. Doctors, just like everyone else, work for a wage. I'm not sure where you got your ridiculous strawman from.
But I'm sure the drug companies have done longitudinal studies as to what dosing kids with meth for 20 years will do to them. Right?
I'd imagine it would make them addicted to and dependent on meth. Which, of course, is not exactly bad for a meth-producing corporation's bottom line. Yay capitalism!
torpedoed....more like nuke Sweden out from orbit...just to be sure!
You know, Sweden used to be a mighty and warlike empire who dominated Northern Europe for centuries, and that's after they retired from being professional looters known as vikings. Don't underestimate the Swedish; the reason they don't practice the arts of war anymore is that they are so very good at them.
Why do you think even Hitler didn't invade Sweden? And Stalin specifically told his troops to be careful to not violate the Swedish border when he tried to conquer Finland. They were crazy megalomaniacs, but not that crazy. So forget orbital nukes and simply accept that as long as it's in Sweden, Wikileaks could as well be in Mordor - nah, the very Angband itself. And King Gustaf might look like a frail old man, but if you invade Sweden he will pull the Hammer of the Underworld and a horde of dragons from somewhere and go Morgoth on your ass.
For one thing, to get a brain thinking, there's a whole lot of the brain you don't need. You don't need heartbeat and breathing regulation; you don't need vision, hearing, touch, etc.; you don't need blood vessels, you don't need carefully constructed layers of fluids...
The brain does need an I/O system. Simply removing sensory input and motory output will result in a brain that fires randomly, since there's no external reality to provide feedback. Also, based on people raised in isolation, it seems that social interaction is also crucial to brain's development - you need an environment where you have to think in order to learn to do so.
Besides, if you are building a model of a human brain, and suspect that this model will be functional - that is, it can think - then crippling it would be no less cruel than crippling any other human.
If we can get there, then we will finally know how much computing power we can get away with for AI. Because if the problem can be reduced to algorithms, then memory requirements will finally be known; CPU power is relevant only in that the more there is, the faster it'll go... technically speaking, it's still AI even if it doesn't answer you for a thousand years, as long as it eventually cooks up the correct response(s.)
If it doesn't answer me for a thousand years, it never will, since I'll be long dead by then. Similarly, if it takes more than a small fraction of a second to decide where to put it's robot body's foot, it can't walk, but will fall on its face. The right answer too late is usually of no value whatsoever.
Real world works in realtime. One important feature of an AI is that it must be able to prioritize its tasks by urgency. This, in itself, requires intelligence and processing power. It also means that the more CPU power the AI has available, the more it can devout to things like pondering abstract mathematical problems, rather than simply not falling down. A human has a somewhat easier time here, since you have dedicated brain centers for things like keeping your balance; but that also means that when you're laying in bed, those centers are idle, rather than searching for a solution to world hunger or whatever.
And don't think that you can get around this problem by making the thing immobile. If anything, that makes the problem worse, since it now needs to interact with very complex human beings rather than relatively simple physics for all its needs. An AI in a humanoid body could simply work for a living (energy, maintenance, etc.), while an immobile supercomputer would pretty much have to maintain its own profitable corporation to ensure its survival.
Speed is just an engineering problem, as long as we can determine it's working. So we need to find out what the memory requirements are, and what speed will get us an adequate response rate is a problem we can hand to Intel, etc.:)
There's also the issue of scalability. Your brainpower is limited by what can fit inside your skull, while a computer doesn't have that problem. Neural networks are also embarassingly parallel - all your neurons are working in parallel - so you could, in theory, simply keep on adding memory and processors to simulate more and more neurons. If you do, how far does human-based architechture scale? At which point would it require extensive restructuring to keep on growing? And lets not forget that humans have very limited and volatile working memory, not to mention permanent memory; a computer-based mind should eventually be modified to take advantage of the superior capacity of microchips in this area. And, once you have enough processing power to, say, engage in multiple simultaneous conversations at once, how should context-dependent things like emotional state behave?
Make no mistake: even if AI starts as a simulated human, we're talking about the birth of a new and alien species.
I'd assume that you don't make it to "CEO" without learning that, while the rules usually don't apply to you, they can suddenly apply good and hard if, for other reasons entirely, you are no longer considered to be desirable...
But if someone more powerful than you wants you gone, it doesn't matter what you've done; you're still screwed. So I guess this CEO figured he could as well indulge himself, since not having done anything wrong wouldn't save him any more than it would save anyone else if someone powerful wanted him gone, and wouldn't harm him otherwise.
I think the problem goes deeper than notation. From what I can see, students are too reliant on blind procedure to get the "answer". They often lack logical skill at the most basic level, missing concepts such as argument, truth, and falsity.
They are elementary school students. Applying concepts such as argument, truth and falsify in class will lead to detention. You are supposed to guess what your teacher means, then avoid contradicting it in any way. And that's a good thing, since it prepares them for the career skill of stroking the ego of their employer, if they happen to be lucky enough to get a job.
( ) has no value, but can contain one. Logic would denote that to balance the equation, one would add some value somewhere. That somewhere is obviously within the brackets that currently have no value.
Unfortunately, brackets already have a meaning in the context of equations. Reusing a symbol with a different meaning in the same context is pretty much asking for trouble. Furthermore, the bracket notation makes it difficult to refer to the unknown value by name, which is important when solving almost all equations. Things get completely impossible if you have multiple unknowns.
Basically, this notation is confusing and gets in the way of building skills on top of basic equations. But then again, I've noticed that that's a common disease nowadays - attempts to make abstract concepts "concrete" usually just make them horribly confusing.
For example, I love duck typing. I can write a class that implements read() and pass it to almost any function that expects to receive a file-type object as an argument.
Can those functions declare that their argument must implement read()? Can you declare that an object assigned to a particular variable must implement read() and write()? Because if you could, it seems to me that most arguments against duck typing would evaporate.
If you've passed in, say, a file handle and a PDF, then the "+" operation will fail, but every sane case will actually work as you'd expect.
What happens if you've acquired those items a while earlier? It seems to me that it might be difficult to track down the original cause of the bug, a bit like a program silently corrupting its memory rather than segfaulting instantly.
And the correct thing is obviously to write the PDF to the end of the file, or add the contents of the file to the PDF, depending on the order:).
Okay, so how does one do it right? Because I remember having the same problem in Python, and suspect it haunts all the dynamic languages - after all, the type is still there, even if the language pretends otherwise.
What I've never understood is why "duct typed" languages can't be static - if an object assigned to a given variable must support some operation, why isn't it possible to express this in code and have the compiler check it?
Value types, these are structs that are not wrapped in an object
Is that a strange name for a tuple?
Support for dynamic code generation through the Reflection.Emit API.
Technically speaking, you can create new Java classes at runtime by defining them in a byte array, there's just no API for creating those byte arrays from a parse tree.
At the extreme, maybe it might be time for a new CPU architecture? Intel has been doing so much stuff behind the scenes to keep the x86 architecture going, that it may be time to just bite the bullet and move to something that doesn't require as much translation?
No, because then the new architecture will become obsolete in a few years, which is too little time for OS and programs to catch on. Meanwhile you have a huge amount of legacy software that needs to be emulated, and the emulation needs help from hardware to be fast enough, so you can as well keep the whole thing x86/x64 compatible.
Besides, the real problem is not the x86 architecture, but the Von Neuman architecture that's already causing a huge bottleneck and will only get worse as the number of cores grows. Eventually, we have to let it go and move to some more scalable one; what that might be I have no idea.
Actually, it's pretty common practice to put spare arrays and spare cells in the design that aren't connected in the metal layers. When a chip is found defective, the upper metal layers can be cut and fused to form new connections and use the spare cells/arrays instead of the ones that failed by use of a focused ion beam.
Am I the only one who finds it pretty awesome that we're actually using focused ion beams in the manufacture of everyday items?
Only AFTER someone has been convicted in the court of law should their names be released. Release their names, photos who cares.
I remember there were some people up in arms that Spain refused to release the names of the guys that were accused of running a bot net. I'd love to see a sane law in the United States, but I'm not going to wait on it.
You aren't going to get sane laws in the US, ever. The reason is the first paragraph of the quotation: once they're convicted, who cares what happens to them? Let's make it really easy to vigilantes to go give some extralegal punishment, and they're criminals so let's keep them from ever getting employed again - that's true justice, right? You wouldn't want to be soft on crime, now would you?
Only it turns out that this kind of attitude has consequences. Bloodthirst is never sated, those who succumb to it are always looking for more targets. It's not enough to punish just criminals, you must also punish those who have been arrested, because you just know they must be guilty, right? And since we're going for zero tolerance, let's make the bar to arrest someone really low too.
Who cares? The the people of Spain do, and they get sane laws. The people of America don't, and they get the kind of laws a bloodthirsty lynch mob deserves. But hey, at least your criminals get their faces shown on the Web to ensure their eternal punishment, so it's worth it, right?
Enjoy watching people get torn apart in Circus Maximus if you will, but don't complain, then, when it's your turn to face the lions.
What this means is if you have a switch full of people on gig, and you want them to see that gig a reasonable amount of time, you need to go 10gig for the uplink from that switch. Then that switch with all the 10gig ports is going to have to have something bigger up the chain, and currently there isn't anything on the ethernet standard.
A possible solution is to not have "upstream", but use half the ports on a switch connect to people and the other half connect to other switches - in other words, have a mesh network rather than a backbone-based one. Or, if you want to think of it another way, make a gigabit backbone network and simply connect people to it with full-speed links.
It's because they are all educated evil. They are paid to teach a propaganda book - not Cube Truth - for which they would be fired. Evil teachers betray students, as ONE is a Death Value.
Not that it helped, since Mr. Ray has published his four-cornered day theory.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they do. No through magic, but because they are cunning businessmen who have had the divinely inspired realization that if they direct their research towards producing what their customers - such as the jackasses on Slashdot - want, they might make more sales. Yes, I know, I didn't believe it either at first, but it really works!
I guess that's why they're manufacturers and you're an Anonymous Coward. And congrats to whoever modded you Insightful, too.
Australia is a penal colony the British Empire shipped its worst troublemakers to - you know, the people who even the American Puritans refused to take. When a maximum security prison is run by the inmates, what do you expect - justice?
Australian Government - By the Criminals, For the Criminals!
So, what you're saying is that about half of the human population are schizophrenic zombies?
Actually, that explains a lot.
Um, what are you trying to say here? That your president is afraid of the dark?
Besides, getting my holograph taken would be the first thing in my list of things to do if I ever took over the world^W^W^W^W became the president.
It's a laser candle, duh! Instead of candlelight, it sends beams of laser light at random directions, burning everything in their path like a Death Blossom.
The only thing worse than a laser candle is a laser bonfire with sharks dancing around it.
Yes, it does. Newtonian physics assumes that information propagates at infinite speed, relativity assumes it propagates at the speed of light. Newtonian and Einsteinian physics simply can't both be correct in the same universe, and this universe obeys Einstein. I'm not sure any imaginable universe could obey Newton, since the infinite speed of propagation of information is quite a large requirement.
"Less accurate" means "not correct". It's a good approximation in some cirucmstances, nothing more.
No, because nothing stops them from stealing data prior to that, and knowing they're going ot be treated in such a way is not going to create any loyalty or goodwill that might stop them.
Treat people like shit under your heel and you shouldn't be surprised that they'll return the favour. Corporate America only has itself to blame for the lack of loyalty of its peons. I guess said serfs really internalized the "greed is good" mantra they've been hearing for years.
More importantly, is there a difference? Red Hat 9 had - and perhaps distros still have - this nice system where cron would, once a day, run programs dropped into a directory in /etc with root privileges. Very useful for various packages that required periodical maintenance; but if a filesystem corruption bug would allow one to link an arbitrary file to those directories...
A bug means that a system behaves in a way it shouldn't. There's always the chance that such unplanned behaviour can be used by an attacker to do nasty things. There is no difference between security critical and other bugs, there's only bugs with known exploits and bugs without. Every bug is a chink in the armor, and every kernel bug should be considered security-critical.
Is that the only thing still running in userspace? I was under the impression that you still need device-specific drivers in the X server. Or are we finally approaching the point where the kernel exposes a framebuffer console with standard accelerated features (OpenGL, preferably), and X or any other program can simply run on top of that?
Get with the times. Red Scare is over, it's muslim terrorists you should use in right-wing propaganda nowadays. Or are you afraid that people might start questioning the wisdom of the Invisible Hand in the light of the financial crisis, Gulf oil spill, and other recent screwups of free market and its prophets and disciples?
Oh, sorry, I forgot: whenever free market screws up, it's actually the fault of the sheep population who didn't have sufficient faith in the Invisible Hand, and instead seeked shelter from the Satan Government.
Nationalized health care is supposed to eliminate greedy insurance companies who profit from people as long as they're okay and then drop them when they become ill. Doctors, just like everyone else, work for a wage. I'm not sure where you got your ridiculous strawman from.
I'd imagine it would make them addicted to and dependent on meth. Which, of course, is not exactly bad for a meth-producing corporation's bottom line. Yay capitalism!
You know, Sweden used to be a mighty and warlike empire who dominated Northern Europe for centuries, and that's after they retired from being professional looters known as vikings. Don't underestimate the Swedish; the reason they don't practice the arts of war anymore is that they are so very good at them.
Why do you think even Hitler didn't invade Sweden? And Stalin specifically told his troops to be careful to not violate the Swedish border when he tried to conquer Finland. They were crazy megalomaniacs, but not that crazy. So forget orbital nukes and simply accept that as long as it's in Sweden, Wikileaks could as well be in Mordor - nah, the very Angband itself. And King Gustaf might look like a frail old man, but if you invade Sweden he will pull the Hammer of the Underworld and a horde of dragons from somewhere and go Morgoth on your ass.
Don't mess with Sweden. You have been warned.
The brain does need an I/O system. Simply removing sensory input and motory output will result in a brain that fires randomly, since there's no external reality to provide feedback. Also, based on people raised in isolation, it seems that social interaction is also crucial to brain's development - you need an environment where you have to think in order to learn to do so.
Besides, if you are building a model of a human brain, and suspect that this model will be functional - that is, it can think - then crippling it would be no less cruel than crippling any other human.
If it doesn't answer me for a thousand years, it never will, since I'll be long dead by then. Similarly, if it takes more than a small fraction of a second to decide where to put it's robot body's foot, it can't walk, but will fall on its face. The right answer too late is usually of no value whatsoever.
Real world works in realtime. One important feature of an AI is that it must be able to prioritize its tasks by urgency. This, in itself, requires intelligence and processing power. It also means that the more CPU power the AI has available, the more it can devout to things like pondering abstract mathematical problems, rather than simply not falling down. A human has a somewhat easier time here, since you have dedicated brain centers for things like keeping your balance; but that also means that when you're laying in bed, those centers are idle, rather than searching for a solution to world hunger or whatever.
And don't think that you can get around this problem by making the thing immobile. If anything, that makes the problem worse, since it now needs to interact with very complex human beings rather than relatively simple physics for all its needs. An AI in a humanoid body could simply work for a living (energy, maintenance, etc.), while an immobile supercomputer would pretty much have to maintain its own profitable corporation to ensure its survival.
There's also the issue of scalability. Your brainpower is limited by what can fit inside your skull, while a computer doesn't have that problem. Neural networks are also embarassingly parallel - all your neurons are working in parallel - so you could, in theory, simply keep on adding memory and processors to simulate more and more neurons. If you do, how far does human-based architechture scale? At which point would it require extensive restructuring to keep on growing? And lets not forget that humans have very limited and volatile working memory, not to mention permanent memory; a computer-based mind should eventually be modified to take advantage of the superior capacity of microchips in this area. And, once you have enough processing power to, say, engage in multiple simultaneous conversations at once, how should context-dependent things like emotional state behave?
Make no mistake: even if AI starts as a simulated human, we're talking about the birth of a new and alien species.
But if someone more powerful than you wants you gone, it doesn't matter what you've done; you're still screwed. So I guess this CEO figured he could as well indulge himself, since not having done anything wrong wouldn't save him any more than it would save anyone else if someone powerful wanted him gone, and wouldn't harm him otherwise.
They are elementary school students. Applying concepts such as argument, truth and falsify in class will lead to detention. You are supposed to guess what your teacher means, then avoid contradicting it in any way. And that's a good thing, since it prepares them for the career skill of stroking the ego of their employer, if they happen to be lucky enough to get a job.
</cynicism>
Unfortunately, brackets already have a meaning in the context of equations. Reusing a symbol with a different meaning in the same context is pretty much asking for trouble. Furthermore, the bracket notation makes it difficult to refer to the unknown value by name, which is important when solving almost all equations. Things get completely impossible if you have multiple unknowns.
Basically, this notation is confusing and gets in the way of building skills on top of basic equations. But then again, I've noticed that that's a common disease nowadays - attempts to make abstract concepts "concrete" usually just make them horribly confusing.
Can those functions declare that their argument must implement read()? Can you declare that an object assigned to a particular variable must implement read() and write()? Because if you could, it seems to me that most arguments against duck typing would evaporate.
What happens if you've acquired those items a while earlier? It seems to me that it might be difficult to track down the original cause of the bug, a bit like a program silently corrupting its memory rather than segfaulting instantly.
And the correct thing is obviously to write the PDF to the end of the file, or add the contents of the file to the PDF, depending on the order :).
Okay, so how does one do it right? Because I remember having the same problem in Python, and suspect it haunts all the dynamic languages - after all, the type is still there, even if the language pretends otherwise.
What I've never understood is why "duct typed" languages can't be static - if an object assigned to a given variable must support some operation, why isn't it possible to express this in code and have the compiler check it?
Is that a strange name for a tuple?
Technically speaking, you can create new Java classes at runtime by defining them in a byte array, there's just no API for creating those byte arrays from a parse tree.
No, because then the new architecture will become obsolete in a few years, which is too little time for OS and programs to catch on. Meanwhile you have a huge amount of legacy software that needs to be emulated, and the emulation needs help from hardware to be fast enough, so you can as well keep the whole thing x86/x64 compatible.
Besides, the real problem is not the x86 architecture, but the Von Neuman architecture that's already causing a huge bottleneck and will only get worse as the number of cores grows. Eventually, we have to let it go and move to some more scalable one; what that might be I have no idea.
Am I the only one who finds it pretty awesome that we're actually using focused ion beams in the manufacture of everyday items?
You aren't going to get sane laws in the US, ever. The reason is the first paragraph of the quotation: once they're convicted, who cares what happens to them? Let's make it really easy to vigilantes to go give some extralegal punishment, and they're criminals so let's keep them from ever getting employed again - that's true justice, right? You wouldn't want to be soft on crime, now would you?
Only it turns out that this kind of attitude has consequences. Bloodthirst is never sated, those who succumb to it are always looking for more targets. It's not enough to punish just criminals, you must also punish those who have been arrested, because you just know they must be guilty, right? And since we're going for zero tolerance, let's make the bar to arrest someone really low too.
Who cares? The the people of Spain do, and they get sane laws. The people of America don't, and they get the kind of laws a bloodthirsty lynch mob deserves. But hey, at least your criminals get their faces shown on the Web to ensure their eternal punishment, so it's worth it, right?
Enjoy watching people get torn apart in Circus Maximus if you will, but don't complain, then, when it's your turn to face the lions.
Most people just call them all British.
A possible solution is to not have "upstream", but use half the ports on a switch connect to people and the other half connect to other switches - in other words, have a mesh network rather than a backbone-based one. Or, if you want to think of it another way, make a gigabit backbone network and simply connect people to it with full-speed links.
Why not just play Doom itself? The engine has been ported to modern machines.
It's because they are all educated evil. They are paid to teach a propaganda book - not Cube Truth - for which they would be fired. Evil teachers betray students, as ONE is a Death Value.
Not that it helped, since Mr. Ray has published his four-cornered day theory.