Is that alpha, beta or gamma radiation? Is the radiation source ingestible? Is it breathable? Radiation from rocks generally isn't as harmful as dust from nuclear facilities, as the particles once ingested can stay in the same place, causing continuous, repeated, long-term harm to the same area.
The harm is all in surveillance data. If you blind the drone's camera, or knock the drone out of the air, no surveillance data is obtained, and no harm done.
The terrorist-turned-politician thing is pretty hard to swallow, but the alternative is leaving people caught in the "terrorist trap". Most people who join radical groups are young and angry. Within the group, this anger is supported, maintained and channelled into direct action. If you can't forgive and forget this sort of stuff, you offer no alternative "adult" life to people who have gone through direct action, and they are basically left with the choice of seeing their actions as legitimate or seeing themselves as illegitimate. Political disenfranchisement of activists and terrorists leads them to continue to proselatise and recruit for the extreme group.
So it's a bitter pill, but political inclusion is the only way to undermine radicalism.
Why do people mod this racist rubbish as "funny"? France surrendered in WWII... yes. Because their towns were being obliterated by the Nazi war machine and they didn't have the strength to fight back, as the Allies had been forced to withdraw their ground troops via Dunkirk to prevent complete and unequivocal defeat. They didn't surrender without a fight.
The Mac mini is supposed to be the entry-level Mac. By using a desktop CPU instead of a more expensive, low-voltage and slower laptop CPU, the Mac mini would have been cheaper and more powerful.
The Mac mini line was introduced to target the "living room PC" market that Cube etc opened up a decade ago, hence needed to be near-silent. If the same line can satisfy style-conscious* entry-level desktop users, all the better.
( * Whether you or I agree with their sense of style is irrelevant, Apple is often a style choice. )
The bankers were just trying to make as much profit as possible, in order to win bigger bonuses at the end of the year. "Jewish banker" conspiracy theories went a lot further than that, with them controlling the entire world. The World Bank neo-liberal agenda is admittedly worryingly close to the old paranoia (but without any particular racial or religious grouping behind it).
Apple hardware is over-priced, but then again you get the OS and the office suite for free with the system and free upgrades later, so it's kind of cheaper in the long run.
Ah well, the buyer of this Apple is going to be mightily disappointed when he tries to download the latest OS and office suite onto his Apple, isn't he?
Well, there was the C-One a decade ago, but it wasn't a business as much as a hobby -- I doubt the designers got much back for their time. Or at least not until they were hired to make a modified version for the home nostalgia market, but although they shifted half a million units then, it's likely that any reissue would use software emulation on ARM, as cost/performance ratios would be in their favour now, and it would be competing against software emulation on smartphones (a fair few retrogames are in the iTunes App Store and Google Play already).
Yes, but it's a lot easier to keep control of your own massive landmass and population if you keep yourself to yourself (and the people you've already subjugated).
If you're going to go all language police on me, at least remember to include your indefinite article. Muphry's law strikes again.
Anyhow, I don't care what the dictionary says. Some schoolmaster at some point in history decided he didn't like the repetition of S... why should any of us be bound by someone else's subjective judgements? Why is my subjective judgement that the missing plural ending makes it sound bad any less pertinent that someone else's opinion that adding the plural ending sounds bad?
. Note that the article also suggests that not all neanderthals were white, either. Note also that other traits often erroneously claimed to be neanderthal (blond hair, red hair, blue eyes) have again been shown not to be part of the neanderthal genome.
You can grant every reasonably well-off person in a country a device that gives them access to all scientific and engineering knowledge and a vast communications network - and half of them will use it to publish rambling arguments that the moon landing was fake, fossils are a hoax scientists made up to disprove the bible, autism is caused by vaccines and Obama is secretly a Kenyan Muslim Communist Atheist Black-Supremecist who hates America.
It wasn't until this message that I noticed something: I haven't heard a conspiracy theory involving "Jewish bankers" for years. Why have the conspiracy theorists dropped them from their theories? There is only one possible explanation: a plot... by the Jewish bankers.
(I shall point out my sarcasm now, before anyone jumps on me!!!!;-)
I... I think he was being satirical. People can't seriously consider having such a minor ancestral connection to a different sapient mammal along our evolutionary journey to actually have any significant effect on their modern existence, when put into perspective with all of the other influences (e.g. societal, economic, etc), can they?
You're being very optimistic there -- satirical comments are not usually made by anonymous cowards, and comments all in lower-case containing the "n" word are a bit of a staple on/., but they typically get modded down before you see them.
I actually once had a conversation with a guy who genuinely believed that Africa profited from colonialism, because despite all the war, slavery etc etc, the introduction of our "advantageous" neaderthal genes would benefit the continent in the long run....
If you want to know the state of the art in visual recognition, you should look at military applications: robot soldiers and autonomous drones. For applications of big data (especially its usefulness in widespread blackmailing activities) then, in spite of some initial missteps, look at the pervasive collection of data by the world's "intelligence agencies".
And yet, one of the most important tools in the visual recognition toolbox for military intelligence purposes is... the human.
Seriously, as computers cannot yet tell the difference between various naturally-occurring geographical features and a human building, when the US military were looking for potential Taliban complexes in the Afghan deserts, they used people to identify as part of their image recognition path.
The solution was pretty elegant, actually. First, the computer would process the satellite images, and would select candidate images that it thought might contain a man-made structure (but containing a heck of a lot of false positives). These images were then flashed up at a speed of about one a second in front of a human operator wearing a cheap "brain-scanning" hat (I can't remember if it was ECG or MCG) and the human brain would register an "attention spike" if there was something that looked genuinely significant in view. Basically, if there's something unusual in the picture, the brain goes "hang on, I want to look at that", and there's a measurable jump in brain activity. The system didn't let the operator look at it then and there, and continued flashing up image after image. All the images that triggered an attention spike would later be passed on to trained operatives for inspection and identification.
So machine vision techniques did a lot of work (filtering out unambiguously uninteresting pictures), but they did not of the difficult work.
That's selective quoting taken to the extreme. The GP was talking about the applications he'd be interested in. Do you know what he's interested in? I don't. But I do have a friend who escapes the Scottish winter every year to go searching for undiscovered orchid specieses in a Vietnamese rainforest. Now call me a pessimist, but I doubt he's going to get a 3G signal out there. What if he wants to check if a flower is a known species? He can do that within his area (the orchids) but he can't be expected to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all extant plant-life. Wouldn't it be nice if his mobile phone could flag up a potentially unknown species that he stumbles across, giving him to opportunity to take a sample back for analysis?
Or a less extreme example -- if I'm travelling, I want my translation app to work even when I can't get an internet connection.
But more to the point, your message takes for granted the problem that TFA alludes to: when you say any even moderately heavy compute job is shipped off to the cloud it accepts AI-type tasks as being computationally complex, but that is due to the lack of progress within the field. We're still effectively "brute-forcing" the problem in many ways, and instead of looking for better algorithms to handle the process, we're just scaling up the same process, running it on "big iron" and calling it progress because we can handle fancier-looking pictures.
The Cro-Magnon sub-species disappeared, too, and modern human Caucasian and Asian sub-species are the results of that mixing.
Modern thinking suggests there was no Cro-Magnon subspecies, and that scientists of the time were actively looking for differences, hence ignored that the dimensions of the cro-magnon specimens were within the variation found within modern humans. Remember, prior to World War II, "racism" was more or less considered a branch of science. In Frank Herbert's Dune, there is an obsession with finding "humans" and separating them from "animals" by breeding, and while it's easy to rationalise that away as a Nazi reference, but that's just choosing to ignore that a lot of people felt that way elsewhere. While most of the world abandoned eugenics after the war, there are some who lament the Nazis giving a "bad name" to it. Eugenics even continued in parts of the US, through mandatory sterilisation of the mentally disabled, which was extended to African Americans with poor school records. There was a continuing assumption among many that black Africans were an "inferior race" and therefore just pollution to the genestock. Elsewhere, the colonial powers justified their continued occupation of their remaining territories through the condescension that these foreign types just weren't capable of ruling their own countries, and so we were doing them a favour by lending them our superiority. For all this time, scientists were looking for individual homonid species/subspecies as ancestors of the "races" that we had invented in modern populations based on little more than melatonin levels and eye shape.
Yes, I've gone off at a tangent. A very long tangent. My point is that in matters of human evolution, generations of science were led by the nose in order to rationalise the prejudices of the privileged few. Modern science, thankfully, has proper data to work with -- DNA. Neanderthal DNA has been sequenced from Neanderthal fossils, and it differs from Modern Human DNA in ways that are measurable and quantifiable. It denies the old claim that white man was neanderthal and therefore a distinct race from Africans, or that Basques are Cro-Magnon and a different species from everyone else in Europe.
Neanderthaler was different enough to be of note and is extinct. A few genetic markers remain, but most of the unique DNA is lost.
But humans aren't like this. Even if we do generally prefer mates in our own subspecies, most of us do find many members of other subspecies physically attractive, and we'll mate with them given the opportunity. This means that we really are all the same species. We now have good evidence that the Neandertals were merely another subspecies, because when they had the opportunity, they did interbreed with those slender, dark-skinned folks who migrated into their territory. They did so often enough to produce a new subspecies that's physically distinct from either of the earlier two (or three or more).
I find your use of human subspecies troubling -- it harks back to the institutional racism of pre-genomic science (there was a point to my earlier rambling after all). Neanderthal may have been a subspecies rather than a fully-fledged species (debating that would be irrelevant here) and that definition would be based on marked genetic differences and rare interbreeding with early modern human populations. But the genetic differences between human racial groups is not on the same level as subspecies -- in fact, as I understand it, it's less than between different breeds of domestic dog, and all domestic dogs are lumped under one single subspecies: canis lupus familiaris.
Even though you didn't intend to, your argument implies that the difference between Neanderthaler and Modern Human is on the same order of magnitude as the difference between black African and white European. That's not a road we want to start back down.
"AI" is just fine. Its misuse is not. And I should have said "I am extremely tired of a certain type of person working in that field".
Are you a computer? Do I need to be extra carefully specific in order to avoid compile time errors? What is your preferred replacement for the term AI for referring to the wide field which you think using AI for is an abuse of the term?
Mine certainly does, but I think yours was deprived of it at some point.
So an acetylene-torch is an AI device?
Building strawmen with oxy-acetylene blowtorches is a fire risk. Does the oxy-acetylene blowtorch attempt to model the operation of a human brain and provide a mechanism to examine, prove and/or disprove theories about the operation of the brain? No.
Visual processing is a subproblem of human cognition. Your complaint is akin to moaning to someone studying human anatomy trying to work out how the left ventricle works, on the grounds that "the left ventricle is a human being".
Remember that "Artificial intelligence" is the name of the research field, and it doesn't imply that an individual research outcome is "intelligent".
Now, if you were there at the start and you are disappointed in the progress in the field, you clearly had been reading too much science fiction.
I'm interested in how many people say they would not hire someone with patents because they worried they had a hidden agenda or were more motivated to leave the company, and it's also relieving to see the number of people who recommend complete up-front disclosure.
Someone who would not hire someone because they hold patents is clearly an idiot, because it is a sign of having achieved something (assuming it's not an assinine patent). Unfortunately there are lots of idiots in management. Fortunately, you have a way to help filter out the idiots that you'd really be better off not working for.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that alpha, beta or gamma radiation? Is the radiation source ingestible? Is it breathable? Radiation from rocks generally isn't as harmful as dust from nuclear facilities, as the particles once ingested can stay in the same place, causing continuous, repeated, long-term harm to the same area.
The harm is all in surveillance data. If you blind the drone's camera, or knock the drone out of the air, no surveillance data is obtained, and no harm done.
This makes the nuclear installation sound like the Death Star. Which would make the terrorists Luke Skywalker.
The terrorist-turned-politician thing is pretty hard to swallow, but the alternative is leaving people caught in the "terrorist trap". Most people who join radical groups are young and angry. Within the group, this anger is supported, maintained and channelled into direct action. If you can't forgive and forget this sort of stuff, you offer no alternative "adult" life to people who have gone through direct action, and they are basically left with the choice of seeing their actions as legitimate or seeing themselves as illegitimate. Political disenfranchisement of activists and terrorists leads them to continue to proselatise and recruit for the extreme group.
So it's a bitter pill, but political inclusion is the only way to undermine radicalism.
Why do people mod this racist rubbish as "funny"? France surrendered in WWII... yes. Because their towns were being obliterated by the Nazi war machine and they didn't have the strength to fight back, as the Allies had been forced to withdraw their ground troops via Dunkirk to prevent complete and unequivocal defeat. They didn't surrender without a fight.
Well, Apple know their sales figures, and they've decided to stick with it. Obviously it works for them.
The Mac mini is supposed to be the entry-level Mac. By using a desktop CPU instead of a more expensive, low-voltage and slower laptop CPU, the Mac mini would have been cheaper and more powerful.
The Mac mini line was introduced to target the "living room PC" market that Cube etc opened up a decade ago, hence needed to be near-silent. If the same line can satisfy style-conscious* entry-level desktop users, all the better.
( * Whether you or I agree with their sense of style is irrelevant, Apple is often a style choice. )
The bankers were just trying to make as much profit as possible, in order to win bigger bonuses at the end of the year. "Jewish banker" conspiracy theories went a lot further than that, with them controlling the entire world. The World Bank neo-liberal agenda is admittedly worryingly close to the old paranoia (but without any particular racial or religious grouping behind it).
Apple hardware is over-priced, but then again you get the OS and the office suite for free with the system and free upgrades later, so it's kind of cheaper in the long run.
Ah well, the buyer of this Apple is going to be mightily disappointed when he tries to download the latest OS and office suite onto his Apple, isn't he?
Well, there was the C-One a decade ago, but it wasn't a business as much as a hobby -- I doubt the designers got much back for their time. Or at least not until they were hired to make a modified version for the home nostalgia market, but although they shifted half a million units then, it's likely that any reissue would use software emulation on ARM, as cost/performance ratios would be in their favour now, and it would be competing against software emulation on smartphones (a fair few retrogames are in the iTunes App Store and Google Play already).
Yes, but it's a lot easier to keep control of your own massive landmass and population if you keep yourself to yourself (and the people you've already subjugated).
YMMV, but in my experience, you only need 2 verb tenses ... to be "yourself" in another language...
That would explain why Chinese is so difficult then -- not enough tenses. How can you be yourself in a language that only has one tense?!?
He could still take dictionary.
If you're going to go all language police on me, at least remember to include your indefinite article. Muphry's law strikes again.
Anyhow, I don't care what the dictionary says. Some schoolmaster at some point in history decided he didn't like the repetition of S... why should any of us be bound by someone else's subjective judgements? Why is my subjective judgement that the missing plural ending makes it sound bad any less pertinent that someone else's opinion that adding the plural ending sounds bad?
. Note that the article also suggests that not all neanderthals were white, either. Note also that other traits often erroneously claimed to be neanderthal (blond hair, red hair, blue eyes) have again been shown not to be part of the neanderthal genome.
I think he underestimated the power of stupidity.
You can grant every reasonably well-off person in a country a device that gives them access to all scientific and engineering knowledge and a vast communications network - and half of them will use it to publish rambling arguments that the moon landing was fake, fossils are a hoax scientists made up to disprove the bible, autism is caused by vaccines and Obama is secretly a Kenyan Muslim Communist Atheist Black-Supremecist who hates America.
It wasn't until this message that I noticed something: I haven't heard a conspiracy theory involving "Jewish bankers" for years. Why have the conspiracy theorists dropped them from their theories? There is only one possible explanation: a plot... by the Jewish bankers.
(I shall point out my sarcasm now, before anyone jumps on me!!!! ;-)
I... I think he was being satirical. People can't seriously consider having such a minor ancestral connection to a different sapient mammal along our evolutionary journey to actually have any significant effect on their modern existence, when put into perspective with all of the other influences (e.g. societal, economic, etc), can they?
You're being very optimistic there -- satirical comments are not usually made by anonymous cowards, and comments all in lower-case containing the "n" word are a bit of a staple on /., but they typically get modded down before you see them.
I actually once had a conversation with a guy who genuinely believed that Africa profited from colonialism, because despite all the war, slavery etc etc, the introduction of our "advantageous" neaderthal genes would benefit the continent in the long run....
Except... tigons and ligers.
If you want to know the state of the art in visual recognition, you should look at military applications: robot soldiers and autonomous drones. For applications of big data (especially its usefulness in widespread blackmailing activities) then, in spite of some initial missteps, look at the pervasive collection of data by the world's "intelligence agencies".
And yet, one of the most important tools in the visual recognition toolbox for military intelligence purposes is... the human.
Seriously, as computers cannot yet tell the difference between various naturally-occurring geographical features and a human building, when the US military were looking for potential Taliban complexes in the Afghan deserts, they used people to identify as part of their image recognition path.
The solution was pretty elegant, actually. First, the computer would process the satellite images, and would select candidate images that it thought might contain a man-made structure (but containing a heck of a lot of false positives). These images were then flashed up at a speed of about one a second in front of a human operator wearing a cheap "brain-scanning" hat (I can't remember if it was ECG or MCG) and the human brain would register an "attention spike" if there was something that looked genuinely significant in view. Basically, if there's something unusual in the picture, the brain goes "hang on, I want to look at that", and there's a measurable jump in brain activity. The system didn't let the operator look at it then and there, and continued flashing up image after image. All the images that triggered an attention spike would later be passed on to trained operatives for inspection and identification.
So machine vision techniques did a lot of work (filtering out unambiguously uninteresting pictures), but they did not of the difficult work.
That's selective quoting taken to the extreme. The GP was talking about the applications he'd be interested in. Do you know what he's interested in? I don't. But I do have a friend who escapes the Scottish winter every year to go searching for undiscovered orchid specieses in a Vietnamese rainforest. Now call me a pessimist, but I doubt he's going to get a 3G signal out there. What if he wants to check if a flower is a known species? He can do that within his area (the orchids) but he can't be expected to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all extant plant-life. Wouldn't it be nice if his mobile phone could flag up a potentially unknown species that he stumbles across, giving him to opportunity to take a sample back for analysis?
Or a less extreme example -- if I'm travelling, I want my translation app to work even when I can't get an internet connection.
But more to the point, your message takes for granted the problem that TFA alludes to: when you say any even moderately heavy compute job is shipped off to the cloud it accepts AI-type tasks as being computationally complex, but that is due to the lack of progress within the field. We're still effectively "brute-forcing" the problem in many ways, and instead of looking for better algorithms to handle the process, we're just scaling up the same process, running it on "big iron" and calling it progress because we can handle fancier-looking pictures.
The Cro-Magnon sub-species disappeared, too, and modern human Caucasian and Asian sub-species are the results of that mixing.
Modern thinking suggests there was no Cro-Magnon subspecies, and that scientists of the time were actively looking for differences, hence ignored that the dimensions of the cro-magnon specimens were within the variation found within modern humans. Remember, prior to World War II, "racism" was more or less considered a branch of science. In Frank Herbert's Dune, there is an obsession with finding "humans" and separating them from "animals" by breeding, and while it's easy to rationalise that away as a Nazi reference, but that's just choosing to ignore that a lot of people felt that way elsewhere. While most of the world abandoned eugenics after the war, there are some who lament the Nazis giving a "bad name" to it. Eugenics even continued in parts of the US, through mandatory sterilisation of the mentally disabled, which was extended to African Americans with poor school records. There was a continuing assumption among many that black Africans were an "inferior race" and therefore just pollution to the genestock. Elsewhere, the colonial powers justified their continued occupation of their remaining territories through the condescension that these foreign types just weren't capable of ruling their own countries, and so we were doing them a favour by lending them our superiority. For all this time, scientists were looking for individual homonid species/subspecies as ancestors of the "races" that we had invented in modern populations based on little more than melatonin levels and eye shape.
Yes, I've gone off at a tangent. A very long tangent. My point is that in matters of human evolution, generations of science were led by the nose in order to rationalise the prejudices of the privileged few. Modern science, thankfully, has proper data to work with -- DNA. Neanderthal DNA has been sequenced from Neanderthal fossils, and it differs from Modern Human DNA in ways that are measurable and quantifiable. It denies the old claim that white man was neanderthal and therefore a distinct race from Africans, or that Basques are Cro-Magnon and a different species from everyone else in Europe.
Neanderthaler was different enough to be of note and is extinct. A few genetic markers remain, but most of the unique DNA is lost.
But humans aren't like this. Even if we do generally prefer mates in our own subspecies, most of us do find many members of other subspecies physically attractive, and we'll mate with them given the opportunity. This means that we really are all the same species. We now have good evidence that the Neandertals were merely another subspecies, because when they had the opportunity, they did interbreed with those slender, dark-skinned folks who migrated into their territory. They did so often enough to produce a new subspecies that's physically distinct from either of the earlier two (or three or more).
I find your use of human subspecies troubling -- it harks back to the institutional racism of pre-genomic science (there was a point to my earlier rambling after all). Neanderthal may have been a subspecies rather than a fully-fledged species (debating that would be irrelevant here) and that definition would be based on marked genetic differences and rare interbreeding with early modern human populations. But the genetic differences between human racial groups is not on the same level as subspecies -- in fact, as I understand it, it's less than between different breeds of domestic dog, and all domestic dogs are lumped under one single subspecies: canis lupus familiaris.
Even though you didn't intend to, your argument implies that the difference between Neanderthaler and Modern Human is on the same order of magnitude as the difference between black African and white European. That's not a road we want to start back down.
Oh ye of simple mind.
Oh ye of simpler.
"AI" is just fine. Its misuse is not. And I should have said "I am extremely tired of a certain type of person working in that field".
Are you a computer? Do I need to be extra carefully specific in order to avoid compile time errors? What is your preferred replacement for the term AI for referring to the wide field which you think using AI for is an abuse of the term?
Does the brain consume oxygen? Yes, it does.
Mine certainly does, but I think yours was deprived of it at some point.
So an acetylene-torch is an AI device?
Building strawmen with oxy-acetylene blowtorches is a fire risk. Does the oxy-acetylene blowtorch attempt to model the operation of a human brain and provide a mechanism to examine, prove and/or disprove theories about the operation of the brain? No.
Visual processing is a subproblem of human cognition. Your complaint is akin to moaning to someone studying human anatomy trying to work out how the left ventricle works, on the grounds that "the left ventricle is a human being".
Remember that "Artificial intelligence" is the name of the research field, and it doesn't imply that an individual research outcome is "intelligent".
Now, if you were there at the start and you are disappointed in the progress in the field, you clearly had been reading too much science fiction.
If you're applying for a job, then the recruiter probably doesn't want to hear your invention pitch.
Do you also leave your employment history off, as the recruiter isn't hiring you to do the last job you did?
I'm interested in how many people say they would not hire someone with patents because they worried they had a hidden agenda or were more motivated to leave the company, and it's also relieving to see the number of people who recommend complete up-front disclosure.
Someone who would not hire someone because they hold patents is clearly an idiot, because it is a sign of having achieved something (assuming it's not an assinine patent). Unfortunately there are lots of idiots in management. Fortunately, you have a way to help filter out the idiots that you'd really be better off not working for.