the point of genetic evolution is for there to be progressive enhancements. it's not just randomly throwing the dice over and over again. you have to retain the positive enhancements of past iterations for it to "evolve."
Not entirely true. Let's get back to basics, and hill-climbing algorithms.
You have a robot and a hill, and you program the robot to always take the steepest uphill slope possible. That's progressive enhancement -- it's always getting "better" (higher).
Except for one type of thing: local maxima.
You see, most hills have more than one summit.
So if the robot ends up on a lower, secondary summit, it will refuse to go down, as it must get better/higher with each step.
But logically, to get from a lower peak to a higher one, you have to descent a short distance and then start ascending the true summit.
Any search strategy has to account for local maxima and other dead ends, and in GA and other evolutionary algorithms, these means introducing the possibility that children are less optimal than their parent iterations.
Birth control means that being succesfully sexually doesn't necessitate being successfully reproductively.
But that doesn't change the evolutionary effect, it's just another environmental factor. After all, mules can be "successful" sexually but not reproductively. It's just part of the evolutionary equation, not an evolution-killer.
His point is valid. For a start, mules are rare to the point of never having been observed in nature, so are hardly an example of the natural world without human intervention.
One of the key points of natural selection is that attractive and/or successful individuals will get more, and by getting more will produce more off-spring. Nowadays successful individuals get more, but beget less. Large families are now almost exclusive preserve of the working class and developing nations -- ie the less successful sectors of the population. This was noted a century ago and we got the quite repulsive idea of manipulating the human genestock (or eugenics, as we know it).
Patagonia is more like Sweden than Brazil. There's a reason we don't talk about a Swedish rainforest -- the near-polar climate can't provide the required rainfall.
"I'm highly suspicious of atheists that claim that icky theists aren't qualified to enter their sacred tree-fort of rationality."
"Gee, that's so much more rational than, I dunno, taking them at their word"
So you're suspicious of atheists but you take Christians at their word. Got it. Any other flagrant bias you'd like to display?
Erm... what?!?
The only guys who know for sure why they refused it are the guys who refused it. Are you suggesting it is biased to believe these people over a few paranoid bloggers who have no first hand knowledge of the situation?
Web 2.0 democratic knowledge groupthink theory really has gone mad: the testimony of the guy who was there is now no longer considered of more worth than the guy who read about it several days later and hundreds of miles away.
Translation: "We can't take your money because we have an image to maintain!"
Yes. Their image gets them donations. If they don't protect their image, they might not get donations. They are not saying that this event damages their image, they are saying that they need to check it's not going to do so in advance. In advance is no longer possible.
Don't mistake charities for beggars -- beggars can't be choosers, but charities can and are.
No, they refused it when they found out that their name was being bandied about in a commercial context without their prior permission. The charity auction forms part of the convention "experience", and the convention is ticketed.
Charity auctions may raise a lot of money but they are, for the most part, a spectator sport. I don't reckon I've ever been at a charity auction where more than a quarter or a third of attendees are bidding. Most people just gasp and applaud other people's generosity.
Yet the mere fact that there was an auction makes everyone feel good, because they were "involved" in charity, even though they didn't give a penny.
Many charities and non-profits are genuinely concerned about making sure that they are the major beneficiary of any funding drive, and that it is not simply a cheap way for the promoters and donors to promote themselves to the public.
Meanwhile, there's a portion of the public who seem to believe that charities should be happy with any money whatsoever, regardless of where it comes from. People who don't accept that the culture of high-rollers waving wads of cash to demonstrate how "generous" they are distracts from and debases the core principles of charity.
The children in the study became more agressive over time.
Kids in both the U.S. and Japan who reported playing lots of violent video games had more aggressive behavior months later than their peers who did not, according to the study, which appears in the November issue of the journal Pediatrics.
Some of the conclusion is straightforward social psychology. FTFA:
"It doesn't necessarily mean that because a kid plays a violent video game they're immediately going to go out and beat somebody up," Walsh says. "The real impact is in shaping norms, shaping attitude. As those gradually shift, the differences start to show up in behavior."
It is well known that kids develop their idea of what is normal behaviour from what they see adults around them do.
Racism is learned. As is sectarianism. Daddy says all whites/blacks/protestants/catholics/muslims/jews/hindus/buddhists/bahai'ists/neo-pagans/etc etc ad nauseum are bad, so the kid takes that as a social norm.
Before World War I, warfare was almost universally glorified and kids all wanted to be soldiers. The social norm was that war was big, clever and brave; it was observed from proud officers with their medals from the colonial campaigns. After the two world wars though, the adults stopped presenting such a rosy image and the majority of people in the UK would now run a mile from a call-up note. The social norm is inherited from shell-shocked grandparents, pictures of dead uncles and the odd amputee.
As we develop more and more realistic simulations, it becomes harder to claim that a computer game does not present a social norm for the developing child.
Me, I'm a bit different. Another thing from the article:
children who watch violence in the media can internalize the message that the world is a hostile place, he explains, and that acting aggressively is an OK way to deal with it.
What I learned from games is that anything that moves wants to hurt me. I tended to play computer games in the "avoiding" style rather than "kill everything" style when I was younger. I still try to avoid everything that moves.
Agreed. I used to be surly, irritable and aggressive. Thankfully my parents are both teachers, so we'd go on 6 week long summer holidays in a caravan without a computer.
I remember being restless and agitated for the first couple of weeks of the holiday and then when the brain fog cleared I realised that computer games were doing something weird to my head. It wasn't necessarily about the level of violence in the games themselves, but maybe more something to do with the mental processes involved.
But would such a game encourage this? It may seem to, but if you can't get past the first level due to overexertion, you'll learn to pace yourself, surely?
No it doesn't. Dance Dance Revolution is nothing like what we're talking about here. A better comparison is Prop Cycle. What? Exactly.
DDR is sold and bought as a dance game. It is not marketed as an "exercise" game. It does not present a rigourous workout regime. It is not designed to focus effort on core muscle groups. It has an incidental cardio-vascular effect, and the resulting endorphins add significantly to the fun factor of the game.
It's slightly different, then, to go to a specific piece of exercise equipment such as a bike or treadmill, which is designed with a primary goal of a particular type of exercise and wire a game into it. Your design constraints are too rigid.
A) I'm not arguing with you. I never was. Check the message chain and you'll see I've not been involved in your arguments.
B) It's not nit-picking words. Many people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland feel as offended by people calling the UK "England" as most Thai people would if you called their king a . We were talking about cultural sensitivities after all.
C) I said it because you were accusing someone else of displaying his ignorance, and it's a bit rich to display ignorance when criticising someone else for it. To turn round and dismiss this as "nit-picking" is the height of hypocrisy.
2) Just because things are structured the same doesn't make things the same situation. You think the Thai government is like the English government either it's a bad joke are you're so ignorant that it's pathetic.
Yeah, but you're showing your ignorance now. There is no English government. Can I suggest you look up "United Kingdom" on that "lame source of information"?
There is no such thing as a synonym, because there's no way two words of identical meaning would survive -- they're not both needed. Revering is about being in awe of someone and having massive respect for them. You only worship people or deities you respect and are in awe of, so anyone you worship must be revered. The converse does not hold: not all reverence is worship.
Just like all internet trolls are rude people, but not all rude people are internet trolls.
Go to a friend's house. One with kids. Take your kids with you, with sleeping bags and roll-mats or camp-beds.
Let the kids stay up a bit later than usual eating popcorn and drinking soda. Cheer, whoop, holler. Hang a banner for your favorite candidate.
Make election night into a party -- kids should be encouraged to see the democratic process as something of value and of interest, rather than boring old fogey stuff.
Since the internet moved in the direction it did, I've since said that eventually standalone apps will just be web services, and the OS will do little else than connect you to those services,
Naw. Maybe for *some* apps, but there are some things that are just more efficient running client-side.
Consider Google Earth/Maps. These are ideal web-apps because of the sheer volume of data. But if you live in the UK, the maps you need most can fit easily on your computer, so the Ordnance Survey map application is quicker to use if you install the data on your hard-drive.
I'd say it's a threat to the ongoing development of open source. "If I write this now, then no-one will ever pay me for it. If I don't write it, someone will pay me to write it for them."
He is actually talking about non-free open source. That's why he mentions "back-end" profits: anyone can redistribute software released under any of the popular licenses -- Red Hat, for example, relies on the "back end" of support, manuals, training etc. Without this, they wouldn't be able to do the rigourous (commercial) packaging, dev work and testing that goes into making a new build.
His argument is a bit confused, in that respect: if he is correct in saying that people will move to using OSS without paying a support organisation, doesn't it follow that they're likely to move to using OSS without paying, rather than commercial?
No, the hungry and cold unemployed IT guys will invest their time into open source projects, because it 's a good way to keep their curriculum in shape.
INTERVIEW ROOM
Interviewer: So what did you do while you were unemployed?
Interviewee: I upgraded the GUI for the GIMP until it was easier to use than Photoshop. I've had emails from over a thousand graphic design houses thanking me for saving them the exorbitant licensing costs of commercial software.
Interviewer: Adobe does not want to take your application further at this time.
OK, so I was being a bit facetious, but speaking as devil's advocate, free stuff in a recession could theoretically damage the profitability of software houses, meaning that there aren't as many jobs for programmers.
Consider, for example, that your supplier goes bust (due to the recession). Do you migrate to another closed system, or to an open one? Do you risk your next supplier folding and you having to move again?
But most people won't realise the threat this poses....
Slashdot Mirror
They had a choice: package it up as it is for the PC or sell it to Nintendo to be branded as Mario's Magic Microphone for Wii.
Surely they should have seen that the Wii's the market for this?
HAL.
From the photo in TFA it looks like polarised lenses, meaning a fancy new expensive screen....
the point of genetic evolution is for there to be progressive enhancements. it's not just randomly throwing the dice over and over again. you have to retain the positive enhancements of past iterations for it to "evolve."
Not entirely true. Let's get back to basics, and hill-climbing algorithms.
You have a robot and a hill, and you program the robot to always take the steepest uphill slope possible. That's progressive enhancement -- it's always getting "better" (higher).
Except for one type of thing: local maxima.
You see, most hills have more than one summit.
So if the robot ends up on a lower, secondary summit, it will refuse to go down, as it must get better/higher with each step.
But logically, to get from a lower peak to a higher one, you have to descent a short distance and then start ascending the true summit.
Any search strategy has to account for local maxima and other dead ends, and in GA and other evolutionary algorithms, these means introducing the possibility that children are less optimal than their parent iterations.
HAL.
Birth control means that being succesfully sexually doesn't necessitate being successfully reproductively.
But that doesn't change the evolutionary effect, it's just another environmental factor. After all, mules can be "successful" sexually but not reproductively. It's just part of the evolutionary equation, not an evolution-killer.
His point is valid. For a start, mules are rare to the point of never having been observed in nature, so are hardly an example of the natural world without human intervention.
One of the key points of natural selection is that attractive and/or successful individuals will get more, and by getting more will produce more off-spring. Nowadays successful individuals get more, but beget less. Large families are now almost exclusive preserve of the working class and developing nations -- ie the less successful sectors of the population. This was noted a century ago and we got the quite repulsive idea of manipulating the human genestock (or eugenics, as we know it).
HAL.
How do I get tested for immunity, and how many thousands of pounds can I charge for my marrow if I'm immune?
Long live capitalism!
Or, you know, compost?
I think it would be easier to come up with a culture system to feed non-foodstock plant material into bacteria engineered to digest the cellulose.
"Non-foodstock plant material". Hmm... this sounds like something. Oh yes, it's the source matter for compost.
So we could take the plant matter and use it to produce more plants, or we could turn it into diesel.
Congratulations, we have found a sure-fire way to turn plants into a non-renewable resource!
HAL.
Patagonia is more like Sweden than Brazil. There's a reason we don't talk about a Swedish rainforest -- the near-polar climate can't provide the required rainfall.
There is no rainforest in Patagonia.
HAL.
"I'm highly suspicious of atheists that claim that icky theists aren't qualified to enter their sacred tree-fort of rationality."
"Gee, that's so much more rational than, I dunno, taking them at their word"
So you're suspicious of atheists but you take Christians at their word. Got it. Any other flagrant bias you'd like to display?
Erm... what?!?
The only guys who know for sure why they refused it are the guys who refused it. Are you suggesting it is biased to believe these people over a few paranoid bloggers who have no first hand knowledge of the situation?
Web 2.0 democratic knowledge groupthink theory really has gone mad: the testimony of the guy who was there is now no longer considered of more worth than the guy who read about it several days later and hundreds of miles away.
HAL.
Translation: "We can't take your money because we have an image to maintain!"
Yes. Their image gets them donations. If they don't protect their image, they might not get donations. They are not saying that this event damages their image, they are saying that they need to check it's not going to do so in advance. In advance is no longer possible.
Don't mistake charities for beggars -- beggars can't be choosers, but charities can and are.
HAL
No, they refused it when they found out that their name was being bandied about in a commercial context without their prior permission. The charity auction forms part of the convention "experience", and the convention is ticketed.
Charity auctions may raise a lot of money but they are, for the most part, a spectator sport. I don't reckon I've ever been at a charity auction where more than a quarter or a third of attendees are bidding. Most people just gasp and applaud other people's generosity.
Yet the mere fact that there was an auction makes everyone feel good, because they were "involved" in charity, even though they didn't give a penny.
Many charities and non-profits are genuinely concerned about making sure that they are the major beneficiary of any funding drive, and that it is not simply a cheap way for the promoters and donors to promote themselves to the public.
Meanwhile, there's a portion of the public who seem to believe that charities should be happy with any money whatsoever, regardless of where it comes from. People who don't accept that the culture of high-rollers waving wads of cash to demonstrate how "generous" they are distracts from and debases the core principles of charity.
HAL.
That old chestnut.
The children in the study became more agressive over time.
Kids in both the U.S. and Japan who reported playing lots of violent video games had more aggressive behavior months later than their peers who did not, according to the study, which appears in the November issue of the journal Pediatrics.
Some of the conclusion is straightforward social psychology. FTFA:
"It doesn't necessarily mean that because a kid plays a violent video game they're immediately going to go out and beat somebody up," Walsh says. "The real impact is in shaping norms, shaping attitude. As those gradually shift, the differences start to show up in behavior."
It is well known that kids develop their idea of what is normal behaviour from what they see adults around them do.
Racism is learned. As is sectarianism. Daddy says all whites/blacks/protestants/catholics/muslims/jews/hindus/buddhists/bahai'ists/neo-pagans/etc etc ad nauseum are bad, so the kid takes that as a social norm.
Before World War I, warfare was almost universally glorified and kids all wanted to be soldiers. The social norm was that war was big, clever and brave; it was observed from proud officers with their medals from the colonial campaigns. After the two world wars though, the adults stopped presenting such a rosy image and the majority of people in the UK would now run a mile from a call-up note. The social norm is inherited from shell-shocked grandparents, pictures of dead uncles and the odd amputee.
As we develop more and more realistic simulations, it becomes harder to claim that a computer game does not present a social norm for the developing child.
Me, I'm a bit different. Another thing from the article:
children who watch violence in the media can internalize the message that the world is a hostile place, he explains, and that acting aggressively is an OK way to deal with it.
What I learned from games is that anything that moves wants to hurt me. I tended to play computer games in the "avoiding" style rather than "kill everything" style when I was younger. I still try to avoid everything that moves.
HAL.
Agreed. I used to be surly, irritable and aggressive. Thankfully my parents are both teachers, so we'd go on 6 week long summer holidays in a caravan without a computer.
I remember being restless and agitated for the first couple of weeks of the holiday and then when the brain fog cleared I realised that computer games were doing something weird to my head. It wasn't necessarily about the level of violence in the games themselves, but maybe more something to do with the mental processes involved.
HAL.
But would such a game encourage this? It may seem to, but if you can't get past the first level due to overexertion, you'll learn to pace yourself, surely?
No it doesn't. Dance Dance Revolution is nothing like what we're talking about here. A better comparison is Prop Cycle. What? Exactly.
DDR is sold and bought as a dance game. It is not marketed as an "exercise" game. It does not present a rigourous workout regime. It is not designed to focus effort on core muscle groups. It has an incidental cardio-vascular effect, and the resulting endorphins add significantly to the fun factor of the game.
It's slightly different, then, to go to a specific piece of exercise equipment such as a bike or treadmill, which is designed with a primary goal of a particular type of exercise and wire a game into it. Your design constraints are too rigid.
A) I'm not arguing with you. I never was. Check the message chain and you'll see I've not been involved in your arguments.
B) It's not nit-picking words. Many people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland feel as offended by people calling the UK "England" as most Thai people would if you called their king a . We were talking about cultural sensitivities after all.
C) I said it because you were accusing someone else of displaying his ignorance, and it's a bit rich to display ignorance when criticising someone else for it. To turn round and dismiss this as "nit-picking" is the height of hypocrisy.
HAL.
Whether you agree with the general statement or not, the specific case still stands: all worship is reverence, not all reverence is worship.
Just as all excellence is good, but not all good is excellence.
HAL.
2) Just because things are structured the same doesn't make things the same situation. You think the Thai government is like the English government either it's a bad joke are you're so ignorant that it's pathetic.
Yeah, but you're showing your ignorance now. There is no English government. Can I suggest you look up "United Kingdom" on that "lame source of information"?
HAL.
There is no such thing as a synonym, because there's no way two words of identical meaning would survive -- they're not both needed. Revering is about being in awe of someone and having massive respect for them. You only worship people or deities you respect and are in awe of, so anyone you worship must be revered. The converse does not hold: not all reverence is worship.
Just like all internet trolls are rude people, but not all rude people are internet trolls.
HAL.
Go to a friend's house. One with kids. Take your kids with you, with sleeping bags and roll-mats or camp-beds.
Let the kids stay up a bit later than usual eating popcorn and drinking soda. Cheer, whoop, holler. Hang a banner for your favorite candidate.
Make election night into a party -- kids should be encouraged to see the democratic process as something of value and of interest, rather than boring old fogey stuff.
HAL.
Since the internet moved in the direction it did, I've since said that eventually standalone apps will just be web services, and the OS will do little else than connect you to those services,
Naw. Maybe for *some* apps, but there are some things that are just more efficient running client-side.
Consider Google Earth/Maps. These are ideal web-apps because of the sheer volume of data. But if you live in the UK, the maps you need most can fit easily on your computer, so the Ordnance Survey map application is quicker to use if you install the data on your hard-drive.
Horses for courses, as they say.
HAL.
And civil lawsuits that have been filled on behalf of said "individuals".
felony == breach of criminal law
civil law != criminal law
Your point, caller?
I'd say it's a threat to the ongoing development of open source. "If I write this now, then no-one will ever pay me for it. If I don't write it, someone will pay me to write it for them."
No, no, no, no, no.
He is actually talking about non-free open source. That's why he mentions "back-end" profits: anyone can redistribute software released under any of the popular licenses -- Red Hat, for example, relies on the "back end" of support, manuals, training etc. Without this, they wouldn't be able to do the rigourous (commercial) packaging, dev work and testing that goes into making a new build.
His argument is a bit confused, in that respect: if he is correct in saying that people will move to using OSS without paying a support organisation, doesn't it follow that they're likely to move to using OSS without paying, rather than commercial?
His logic is flawed.
HAL.
No, the hungry and cold unemployed IT guys will invest their time into open source projects, because it 's a good way to keep their curriculum in shape.
INTERVIEW ROOM
Interviewer: So what did you do while you were unemployed?
Interviewee: I upgraded the GUI for the GIMP until it was easier to use than Photoshop. I've had emails from over a thousand graphic design houses thanking me for saving them the exorbitant licensing costs of commercial software.
Interviewer: Adobe does not want to take your application further at this time.
OK, so I was being a bit facetious, but speaking as devil's advocate, free stuff in a recession could theoretically damage the profitability of software houses, meaning that there aren't as many jobs for programmers.
Consider, for example, that your supplier goes bust (due to the recession). Do you migrate to another closed system, or to an open one? Do you risk your next supplier folding and you having to move again?
But most people won't realise the threat this poses....
HAL.