I'm not positive about this, but I think the risk may be larger than just autorun. Isn't there also the "installing drivers" bit that Windows does for some hardware? I get the impression that USB devices are to some extent able to contain their own drivers that Windows will install. IIRC, users are asked for confirmation by a tooltip-bubble from the system tray, but this may not be under all versions of Windows (yes under Vista, no under XP?). I do not know how this is implemented; I'm hoping that someone who has looked more closely at this will respond...
Actually I regard it as a value having a strong family in society - one of western societies greatest illnesses is the alienation to the concept of family resulting in climbing numbers of depression and behavioural disorders.
I'd go a step further and say that there is variation among European cultures in the emphasis placed on family, and that those European immigrant groups who placed more such emphasis ended up doing better, and ending up in higher positions in American society.
I am reminded of the episode of The Big Bang Theory in which Leonard discovers that his ex-girlfriend, one 'Joyce Kim,' is in fact a North Korean spy who'd just been dating him for information about his rocket fuel research.
Can't we just go back to a time when things were simpler and it was just hot Russian spies that we had to contend with?
Its annoying to know that you read the word and treat it as a commonly used standard archetype, yet never bothered to learn what it meant.
But I did! What I hadn't done was watch Fox News, so I didn't understand what you were reacting against. A later post by tehcyder explains well though, and now I do. You're right in that "majoritarian" does not mean "populist" (a point also made in this post by ComputerGeek01). This said, it seems to me that the difference is really more of connotations than of denotations; "majoritarian" is more value-neutral with quantitative connotations, but really "rule by the numerical majority" and "rule by the populace [of ordinary people]" don't mean terribly different things by themselves. Come to think of it, was "populist" always a dirty word itself? I'm not sure it was.
As a quick aside, please don't use these ridiculous news channel fear mongering fake words, they just make you sound stupid.
You mean "majoritarian?" It's a standard word used in political science discourse. I remember reading papers in college that discussed the pros and cons of "majoritarian" vs. "proportional" electoral systems, for instance.
The motors are supposed to be there, and are an integral part of the design. That's no con; that's totally out in the open.
If you're going to criticize the device, you can say "it's just a planetary gearbox like we've had forever, and it's basically the same as the transmission used in Toyota's Prius;" that might be true. But it's not a scam.
Oh! Heh.:-) Didn't realize that was what I sounded like! You're preaching to the choir, AC (well, in my case anyway. You're sure to get plenty of arguing replies from people with "Who is John Galt?" bumperstickers though. Alas.)
this website isn't the only one that offers pubic lice for revenge. There's also revengecrabs.com, which says "watching them itch and burn is half the fun."
So there are multiple websites dedicated to selling pubic lice.
I'm normally a laissez-faire kind of guy, but seriously... what do we need to do to get this shit shut down?
"Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre, the more a general contributes in manoeuvre the less he demands in slaughter" - Winston Churchill.
A very apt quote! Lanchester's Laws do indeed put the emphasis pretty squarely on slaughter. I think there are a few different, maybe reasonable, interpretations of this:
1 - the Law describes a condition in which equally-matched generals face one another on open terrain, so that the 'tactics' variable has been eliminated
2 - Tactics simply increase killing efficiency, and can be included in the model as such. This would tell you that a force half the size of another must have tactics that make it four times more efficient at killing. One issue with this, however, is that the ability of a force to execute efficient guerrilla tactics seems to be inversely proportional to its size, and this is not modeled in any way. Another is that "tactics" are hard to measure, so this may just result in a meaningless tautology in which the effectiveness of tactics are computed after-the-fact to make the model fit.
3 - The Laws model a particular mode of combat which both sides -- especially the smaller one -- seeks to avoid.
Of these, I think the first and particularly the third are complementary and most reasonable, and in this light the Laws are useful not as predictive rules -- like the laws of physics -- but rather as a sort of mathematical fable or parable. What's more, it does at least something to explain some classical strategies -- like "divide & conquer" and "defeat in detail," as well as many uses of terrain (e.g., "chokepoints" as at Thermopylae), which negate an opponent's square advantage by forcing him to engage in smaller groups. The fact that a "mind-sized" mathematical model has something to say about this is intriguing.
Overall, I of course recognize that it's a gross, gross simplification. For instance, some of Sun Tzu's main concerns -- morale and deception -- are ultimately to do with manipulating the human mind. And this of course is something that mathematicians model at their peril!
There's simply no way one F-22 can replace 4 F-15's in the real world, no matter what Lockheed's marketing department says.
You raise an extremely good point, and Lanchester's Square Law agrees with you. Basically, in order for a military force to beat an opponent twice its size, its weapons need to be four times as effective. In other words, numbers trump technology.
This only goes so far of course. It's based on a model in which both armies are engaged for the entire duration of the fight. If technology allows one army to strike the other from a distance with impunity, then the model does break.
So basically you're proposing a model in which there is selection and crossover but no mutation.
In this case, the total diversity in any population (including "the total of all animals on earth") can only go down. Right?
So then why do there appear to be species around now that were not around, say, during the time of the dinosaurs (because they do not seem to appear in the fossil record). How can new things be created after the Creation, without mutation? Or is the Genesis account of Creation to be understood in a metaphorical sense, and is it still ongoing? If so, is mutation a reasonable way to explain the mechanism by which this occurs? Or is this straying too far from a literal interpretation of scripture (and do we need a literal interpretation?)?
Presumably it's not so much an analysis of the strike as an analysis of the shape of the drumhead; you're measuring its impulse response. Unfortunately(?), one still cannot hear its shape.;-)
I was aware of the using-diffraction-to-compute-Fourier-transforms idea; in fact, I was under the impression that it was somewhat popular before the advent of digital computers. A really good comparison.
Still, I think that maybe "cheating" is exactly what we should be doing more of. We can use obscenely-sophisticated multigrid PDE solvers to solve Navier Stokes... or we can build a wind tunnel and instrument it with sensors. What I'm wondering is whether there are other physical processes that are good analogues for different important problems.
One which is particularly important is the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation -- the PDE whose solution is essentially the holy grail in Optimal Control. If we had hardware to solve that quickly, it'd really do wonderful things for robotics and AI. One can even imagine solving it in 2d by varying the index of refraction in a material. However, in 2d it's not that hard to solve on digital computers either. The problem is that the complexity of solving it grows exponentially with the dimensionality of the state space (Bellman's "curse of dimensionality"), and I think it's very non-obvious how one might go about building an analog computer to solve it in dimensions higher than three.
Another (which is often a "good enough" approximation to HJB) is Laplace's equation. Physical analogues for that are extremely common... RC networks, thermal systems, global illumination... so this could be a good way to e.g. generate robot navigation functions (see e.g. [1]). IIRC there are even people building analog circuits to do exactly this; I find that rather cool (anybody know who it is that's doing this?).
A third example -- this one an ODE rather than a PDE -- which is quite cool (though it doesn't seem super useful) is [2], which can among other things sort lists (for this purpose a bitonic comparator network seems more practical though). Still, very cool.
Of course, you also get all the problems that go along with analog computation: component drift, noise, etc. I wonder if these can be alleviated by (1) controlling the environment (e.g., temperature control), and (2) using some slower digital systems in adaptive control loops to counteract drift. I'm sure that the analog electronics guys have considered both of these ideas, and there are probably papers on them! (I'm aware of e.g. transistor matching, which is standard practice...)
I guess my basic point is just that I think it might be fruitful to continue looking to the physical world for systems that naturally do the computations we care about. It might not be as general-purpose as a Turing Machine, but if it's a problem that matters enough it can become a coprocessor.
[1] C.I Connolly, J. B. Burns, and R. Weiss. Path Planning Using Laplace's Equation. ICRA, 1990. (PDF.)
[2] R. W. Brockett. Dynamical systems that sort lists, diagonalize matrices, and solve linear programming problems. Linear Algebra and its Applications, 1991. (PDF.)
Instead, what always turns out to be the case is that a minority of a population has a trait that better enables them to survive whatever pressure is being exerted on them. The majority population diminishes and the minority flourishes.
Where did the minority get that trait from? The answer seems to be "mutation." And mutation+natural selection is all you need for evolution. You can program that on a computer and watch it work. (Granted, it's a grossly simplified model, but the point is that it's sufficient.)
Is it acceptable to kill 90% of all humans alive so that the remainder could be slightly healther (live 5 years longer) ?
Almost.
It is unacceptable to kill humans. It is however acceptable to reduce our birth rate to beneath our death rate -- something which has already occurred in industrialized nations. This admittedly has the unfortunate side effect of burdening the young with a disproportionate number of old people to care for, but in the long run I think it's the route to the highest average happiness.
For the alternative -- a steady increase in population -- look what happens in societies where the number of people vastly outstrips the availability of resources and jobs (e.g., India). The result is a kind of hypercompetition that drives many people to emigrate to places with lower population densities and more jobs (e.g. the US, wealthy middle-eastern states, Europe). What happens when there's nowhere to emigrate to?
If we don't reduce our population, your children will be fighting other peoples' children tooth and nail for their entire frantic lives.
Sometimes, on Slashdot, it's hard to tell: "Crazy libertarian with a persecution complex" actually describes some posters. Sorry I pegged you for one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not positive about this, but I think the risk may be larger than just autorun. Isn't there also the "installing drivers" bit that Windows does for some hardware? I get the impression that USB devices are to some extent able to contain their own drivers that Windows will install. IIRC, users are asked for confirmation by a tooltip-bubble from the system tray, but this may not be under all versions of Windows (yes under Vista, no under XP?). I do not know how this is implemented; I'm hoping that someone who has looked more closely at this will respond...
...and was expecting a guy with a cello.
born with an innate sense of fairness.
More on this: The Moral Life of Babies.
The bagels themselves contain the data! Why else would people bother securing them with lox?
Actually I regard it as a value having a strong family in society - one of western societies greatest illnesses is the alienation to the concept of family resulting in climbing numbers of depression and behavioural disorders.
I'd go a step further and say that there is variation among European cultures in the emphasis placed on family, and that those European immigrant groups who placed more such emphasis ended up doing better, and ending up in higher positions in American society.
I am reminded of the episode of The Big Bang Theory in which Leonard discovers that his ex-girlfriend, one 'Joyce Kim,' is in fact a North Korean spy who'd just been dating him for information about his rocket fuel research.
Can't we just go back to a time when things were simpler and it was just hot Russian spies that we had to contend with?
It's 1K alright.. but the source code is also unreadable
Was the source released for this?
Its annoying to know that you read the word and treat it as a commonly used standard archetype, yet never bothered to learn what it meant.
But I did! What I hadn't done was watch Fox News, so I didn't understand what you were reacting against. A later post by tehcyder explains well though, and now I do. You're right in that "majoritarian" does not mean "populist" (a point also made in this post by ComputerGeek01). This said, it seems to me that the difference is really more of connotations than of denotations; "majoritarian" is more value-neutral with quantitative connotations, but really "rule by the numerical majority" and "rule by the populace [of ordinary people]" don't mean terribly different things by themselves. Come to think of it, was "populist" always a dirty word itself? I'm not sure it was.
As a quick aside, please don't use these ridiculous news channel fear mongering fake words, they just make you sound stupid.
You mean "majoritarian?" It's a standard word used in political science discourse. I remember reading papers in college that discussed the pros and cons of "majoritarian" vs. "proportional" electoral systems, for instance.
The motors are supposed to be there, and are an integral part of the design. That's no con; that's totally out in the open.
If you're going to criticize the device, you can say "it's just a planetary gearbox like we've had forever, and it's basically the same as the transmission used in Toyota's Prius;" that might be true. But it's not a scam.
Eco-Necro-Pedo-Copro-Jihadist Tutorial for Total Annihilation!
My only question is: Are they ARM or CORE?
Oh! Heh. :-) Didn't realize that was what I sounded like! You're preaching to the choir, AC (well, in my case anyway. You're sure to get plenty of arguing replies from people with "Who is John Galt?" bumperstickers though. Alas.)
What's scary is the last sentence of TFA:
this website isn't the only one that offers pubic lice for revenge. There's also revengecrabs.com, which says "watching them itch and burn is half the fun."
So there are multiple websites dedicated to selling pubic lice.
I'm normally a laissez-faire kind of guy, but seriously... what do we need to do to get this shit shut down?
"Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre, the more a general contributes in manoeuvre the less he demands in slaughter" - Winston Churchill.
A very apt quote! Lanchester's Laws do indeed put the emphasis pretty squarely on slaughter. I think there are a few different, maybe reasonable, interpretations of this:
1 - the Law describes a condition in which equally-matched generals face one another on open terrain, so that the 'tactics' variable has been eliminated
2 - Tactics simply increase killing efficiency, and can be included in the model as such. This would tell you that a force half the size of another must have tactics that make it four times more efficient at killing. One issue with this, however, is that the ability of a force to execute efficient guerrilla tactics seems to be inversely proportional to its size, and this is not modeled in any way. Another is that "tactics" are hard to measure, so this may just result in a meaningless tautology in which the effectiveness of tactics are computed after-the-fact to make the model fit.
3 - The Laws model a particular mode of combat which both sides -- especially the smaller one -- seeks to avoid.
Of these, I think the first and particularly the third are complementary and most reasonable, and in this light the Laws are useful not as predictive rules -- like the laws of physics -- but rather as a sort of mathematical fable or parable. What's more, it does at least something to explain some classical strategies -- like "divide & conquer" and "defeat in detail," as well as many uses of terrain (e.g., "chokepoints" as at Thermopylae), which negate an opponent's square advantage by forcing him to engage in smaller groups. The fact that a "mind-sized" mathematical model has something to say about this is intriguing.
Overall, I of course recognize that it's a gross, gross simplification. For instance, some of Sun Tzu's main concerns -- morale and deception -- are ultimately to do with manipulating the human mind. And this of course is something that mathematicians model at their peril!
There's simply no way one F-22 can replace 4 F-15's in the real world, no matter what Lockheed's marketing department says.
You raise an extremely good point, and Lanchester's Square Law agrees with you. Basically, in order for a military force to beat an opponent twice its size, its weapons need to be four times as effective. In other words, numbers trump technology.
This only goes so far of course. It's based on a model in which both armies are engaged for the entire duration of the fight. If technology allows one army to strike the other from a distance with impunity, then the model does break.
So basically you're proposing a model in which there is selection and crossover but no mutation.
In this case, the total diversity in any population (including "the total of all animals on earth") can only go down. Right?
So then why do there appear to be species around now that were not around, say, during the time of the dinosaurs (because they do not seem to appear in the fossil record). How can new things be created after the Creation, without mutation? Or is the Genesis account of Creation to be understood in a metaphorical sense, and is it still ongoing? If so, is mutation a reasonable way to explain the mechanism by which this occurs? Or is this straying too far from a literal interpretation of scripture (and do we need a literal interpretation?)?
Well, sperm is basically the biological equivalent of a USB key; it's for moving data around in the form of DNA.... Not sure if that helps you or not!
Presumably it's not so much an analysis of the strike as an analysis of the shape of the drumhead; you're measuring its impulse response. Unfortunately(?), one still cannot hear its shape. ;-)
I was aware of the using-diffraction-to-compute-Fourier-transforms idea; in fact, I was under the impression that it was somewhat popular before the advent of digital computers. A really good comparison.
Still, I think that maybe "cheating" is exactly what we should be doing more of. We can use obscenely-sophisticated multigrid PDE solvers to solve Navier Stokes... or we can build a wind tunnel and instrument it with sensors. What I'm wondering is whether there are other physical processes that are good analogues for different important problems.
One which is particularly important is the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation -- the PDE whose solution is essentially the holy grail in Optimal Control. If we had hardware to solve that quickly, it'd really do wonderful things for robotics and AI. One can even imagine solving it in 2d by varying the index of refraction in a material. However, in 2d it's not that hard to solve on digital computers either. The problem is that the complexity of solving it grows exponentially with the dimensionality of the state space (Bellman's "curse of dimensionality"), and I think it's very non-obvious how one might go about building an analog computer to solve it in dimensions higher than three.
Another (which is often a "good enough" approximation to HJB) is Laplace's equation. Physical analogues for that are extremely common... RC networks, thermal systems, global illumination... so this could be a good way to e.g. generate robot navigation functions (see e.g. [1]). IIRC there are even people building analog circuits to do exactly this; I find that rather cool (anybody know who it is that's doing this?).
A third example -- this one an ODE rather than a PDE -- which is quite cool (though it doesn't seem super useful) is [2], which can among other things sort lists (for this purpose a bitonic comparator network seems more practical though). Still, very cool.
Of course, you also get all the problems that go along with analog computation: component drift, noise, etc. I wonder if these can be alleviated by (1) controlling the environment (e.g., temperature control), and (2) using some slower digital systems in adaptive control loops to counteract drift. I'm sure that the analog electronics guys have considered both of these ideas, and there are probably papers on them! (I'm aware of e.g. transistor matching, which is standard practice...)
I guess my basic point is just that I think it might be fruitful to continue looking to the physical world for systems that naturally do the computations we care about. It might not be as general-purpose as a Turing Machine, but if it's a problem that matters enough it can become a coprocessor.
[1] C.I Connolly, J. B. Burns, and R. Weiss. Path Planning Using Laplace's Equation. ICRA, 1990. (PDF.)
[2] R. W. Brockett. Dynamical systems that sort lists, diagonalize matrices, and solve linear programming problems. Linear Algebra and its Applications, 1991. (PDF.)
Instead, what always turns out to be the case is that a minority of a population has a trait that better enables them to survive whatever pressure is being exerted on them. The majority population diminishes and the minority flourishes.
Where did the minority get that trait from? The answer seems to be "mutation." And mutation+natural selection is all you need for evolution. You can program that on a computer and watch it work. (Granted, it's a grossly simplified model, but the point is that it's sufficient.)
I don't believe in evolution but natural selection absolutely.
How are they not the same thing? Isn't evolution just random mutation + sexual/viral crossover + natural selection?
and why exactly should cheaper methods be outlawed
...cus they're giving us all cancer?
Is it acceptable to kill 90% of all humans alive so that the remainder could be slightly healther (live 5 years longer) ?
Almost.
It is unacceptable to kill humans. It is however acceptable to reduce our birth rate to beneath our death rate -- something which has already occurred in industrialized nations. This admittedly has the unfortunate side effect of burdening the young with a disproportionate number of old people to care for, but in the long run I think it's the route to the highest average happiness.
For the alternative -- a steady increase in population -- look what happens in societies where the number of people vastly outstrips the availability of resources and jobs (e.g., India). The result is a kind of hypercompetition that drives many people to emigrate to places with lower population densities and more jobs (e.g. the US, wealthy middle-eastern states, Europe). What happens when there's nowhere to emigrate to?
If we don't reduce our population, your children will be fighting other peoples' children tooth and nail for their entire frantic lives.
Sometimes, on Slashdot, it's hard to tell: "Crazy libertarian with a persecution complex" actually describes some posters. Sorry I pegged you for one of them.
What on earth are you talking about? Nobody is fearmongering about libertarians. Nobody.