It's possible that, for the brain to work properly, you would also need to replicate...
Anything is possible, but there is no rational reason to believe this is true. We have a basic idea of how individual neurons work. We also have a basic understanding of how their synapses work. Where we have replicated that functionality, such as edge-detection in the optic system, it has worked the same in both wetware and silicon. The human brain is complex, but there is no evidence, none whatsoever, that it is magical.
I suspect it takes a lot more than US$50K to start up.
Government grants/loans should not cover 100% of the cost of a venture. They should only be used to "top up" private investors for projects that have beneficial externalities. The private investment serves to validate the project as economically valid, since people are much more careful when investing their own money.
Anyway, I think "urban farming" is silly. If you grow food in the city, you avoid hauling that food into the city one time. But if you use the same space to house an urban worker that currently lives in the suburbs, you avoid 400 commutes (twice a day for 200 working days per year).
Change in attitudes can happen very quickly. A decade ago, a strong majority of Americans was opposed to gay marriage. Today, it is the law of the land, and even the most ardent opponents have mostly given up any hope of reversing it.
If my neighbor wants to marry his Roomba, I will not object.
No one knows how complex robot brains will be IF they gain consciousness
There is no rational reason to believe that a machine is incapable of consciousness and human-level intelligence. Since the same laws of physics apply to both computers and biological brains, believing otherwise is tantamount to believing in magic, or believing that human consciousness resides in the soul.
You misjudge what is happening in Turkey. Erdogan has openly expressed an explicit goal of creating an Islamic state, and dismantling democracy. That is what he was elected to do. His actions have been broadly popular, and the current crackdown has broad support.
If you know any Turks, you might be surprised that they could support this. But the Turks that you know are likely urban, cosmopolitan people from Istanbul or Thrace. Erdogan's base is in rural Anatolia, where people are less educated and far less tolerant. They hate Christians (especially Armenians) even though they have likely never met one. They hate Shiites. They hate and fear the Kurds even more. And they are sick of the Istanbul elites treating their culture and their religion with perceived contempt. Erdogan is their champion.
That is the point. In the "Five Eyes" (US, UK, Canada, Australia, NZ), data is being collected, and it is possible that maybe someday that data could be used to roundup and arrest dissidents or people that question authority.
In Turkey, that worst case scenario is happening now. 70,000 people have been arrested. Hundreds of thousands more have lost their jobs. Erdogan's has openly expressed contempt for democracy. He once said "Democracy is like a train. You get off once you reach your destination."
For those of us who believe in open societies, with free movement of people, goods and ideas, 2016 has been a annus horribilis. I never expected to see so much regression in so many places.
Why exactly would this discriminator be more authoritative than the original neural net?
It would be better by including human labeled data in the training set and the test set. The labeled images would be either "real" (photos of the real world) or fake (computer generated). Train the net until it can accurately tell them apart. Then start feeding in the images generated by the adversarial net. The generative net will get better and better at making fake images look real, while the analyzing net gets better and better at discriminating between fake and real.
If a single seed blows over from another field and sprouts in your field, this company can (and does) sue the farmer down to his toenail lint.
Not true. This accusation has been made many times and in many places. It is a myth, and has been repeatedly debunked. Monsanto has never sued anyone for unintentional cross fertilization. The myth first started with the wildly inaccurate "documentary" David vs Monsanto.
Monsanto has sued for deliberate and repeated cross fertilization. The most famous defendant was Percy Schmeiser. He was warned several times, and openly admitted that he had isolated, copied, and benefited from the patented Monsanto gene, but claimed he had a right to do so. Several of his co-workers and neighbors testified against him.
The value of the stock is based on the expected return. Whether that return changes because of reduced profits or increased taxes makes NO DIFFERENCE.
That all corporate taxes are passed on to customers, shareholders or employers.
If a dollar goes to the government, that dollar has to come from somewhere. If it doesn't come from customers, employees, or shareholders, then where, pray tell, does it come from? The tooth fairy?
As long as you have the slightest competition, that simply is not true.
The competitors also pay taxes. If taxes go up for one, they go up for the others as well. So if Apple can raise prices to cover the cost of taxes, because Samsung has to do the same.
There's tons of articles on Wikipedia that are "abandoned" (not brought up-to-date in a very long time) that contain statements like "X intends toY in 2011"...
My 1975 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica has the same problem.
I've heard many complain that they were never going to bother editing a Wikipedia page again, because it was like writing on the wind.
That's me. I contributed quite a bit in the early days of Wikipedia. I also donated money. But I had too much of my work deleted by some teenage admin with a Napoleon complex. I haven't contributed or donated in years, and I won't ever again until the deletionism stops. Wikipedia is not printed on paper, so there is no inherent practical limit to how much information it can contain. Every article matters to the people that wrote it, and to the people that seek it out and read it. Nobody else will see it. So why delete it? "Noteworthiness" should not be a binary "in or out". It should be a continuum so more noteworthy articles appear higher in the search list, but should not be used to justify deletion of more obscure information.
Should there be a Wiki page for every Pokemon character? If someone wants to write the pages, and people are interested in reading about them, then of course they should each have a page.
Disclaimer: The pages I edited were not about Pokemon. I just used Pokemon as an example, because the Pokemon pages and the community involved in them, were indeed attacked and destroyed by the deletionists.
So, it sounds like you're saying that money really doesn't belong to me
No. That is the exact opposite of what I said. Ownership does not imply the instant ability to liquefy into cash. I own my house. If I want to extract that value, I can sell it, or I can borrow against it. I can do those exact same things with stock. But I cannot demand that my house write me a check, and the house's refusal to do that doesn't mean I don't own it.
corporate taxes really don't affect share price.
Share price represents the current value of the company's expected future profit stream. If that goes down, because of tax or anything else, it will absolutely affect the share price.
I wonder if Microsoft will get a bailout like GM did?
GM got the bailout because they employed a lot of people, and paid "defined benefit" pensions to even more people. Microsoft employs far fewer, and has no DB pension program. Also, nearly half of Microsoft's employees are not Americans.
I think most people would say over the past 10 years Microsoft has lost their position as the market leader.
Valuation is based on expected future profits, not market dominance. Anyway, Microsoft is clearly the market leader in desktop and laptop OSes, and office productivity tools. They don't do well in phones and tablets, but that is a different market.
I've been an Apple shareholder. If I called them up and asked them to send me my portion of that $200 billion, you think they'd send me a check?
Yes. You would, of course, either have to get a majority of the other shareholders to agree to the distribution, or you would need to give them back a portion of your shares in proportion to the equity you were cashing out.
And that stock price is controlled by the market, not by the level of taxation in a given country.
That market price is very much determined by how much cash Apple has. If tax laws changed in a way that would increase or decrease their cash pile, I absolutely guarantee you that you would see that reflected in the stock price.
Yes, right, so all those productivity increases over the last few decades didn't just go to the already wealthy and those at the top...
The raises went to the better off, because that is where the productivity increases occurred. A ditch digger or tomato picker is no more productive today than they were 30 years ago. But because of faster computers and better software tools, programmers are worth far more today, as are accountants, engineers, bankers, and hedge fund managers.
Taxes on corporations don't make any sense anyway. The tax can only come from three places: shareholders, employees, or customers. So you can get the same result by directly taxing some combination of dividends, capital gains, wages, and sales. But direct taxes can be fine tuned, so dividends paid into a pension can pay a different rate than dividends paid into, say, a trust fund. You can't make that distinction when the corporation pays the tax.
Many people falsely believe that corporate taxes fall on on fat cats. Actually, corporate income taxes tend to be regressive, since the main results are lower wages and higher prices.
It wouldn't. Nagle's algorithm doesn't cause congestion, it reduces it.
"Solving" a problem by going back to a probably worse one isn't really "solving it"
The first step in "solving" a problem is verifying that it is actually a problem. I am not convinced that "bufferbloat" (whatever that means) is a problem. Buffering can reduce latency, especially under heavy load, by better bandwidth utilization, and allowing faster retransmission of dropped packets. If it is slowing things down, then you should fix the buffering rather than eliminating it.
... and yes, I read TFA. It is a bunch of poorly labeled graphics that didn't make any sense to me, and seem to be designed to obfuscate rather than enlighten, although that may just be a result of Hanlon's Razor.
Except that calling, say iOS sales 'generated overseas' when the software was written in the US, using US infrastructure, etc.
That makes no sense. Plenty of non-American companies develop software in America. Yet only if they are incorporated in America do they pay income tax on their overseas earnings, and it is irrelevant where their engineering and development was done. It has nothing whatsoever to do with "using infrastructure". It is just an extraterritorial money grab that is almost certainly counterproductive since it incentivizes American companies to invest and create jobs overseas.
The justification for leniency makes no sense to me. If a criminal is driven by impulse and lack of emotional control, shouldn't he (and it is usually a "he") get a longer sentence, since he is a greater danger to other people?
It is equally infuriating to me when American companies use loopholes in our ridiculously complicated tax code to shelter revenues in foreign tax shelters to avoid paying taxes
So who are you infuriated at? The companies that take advantage of those loopholes, or the politicians that put them there? Fury doesn't help unless it is properly directed. Does your fury influence who you vote for?
... while at the same time benefiting from our infrastructure, emergency services, military, etc.
No. Taxes are only sheltered on income generated overseas, using overseas infrastructure, emergency services, etc. I am baffled why Americans believe they have a "right" to tax the sale of a product made in China and sold in France.
Wasn't there a study that found people intrinsically trust robots and automatons more than actual people?
That seems reasonable. I certainly trust an ATM more than I trust the cashier at the grocery store. If ATMs miscounted money, I would have heard about the problem, so I rarely bother to double check. Human cashiers miscount all the time, although mostly out of carelessness rather than dishonesty.
Slashdot Mirror
It's possible that, for the brain to work properly, you would also need to replicate ...
Anything is possible, but there is no rational reason to believe this is true. We have a basic idea of how individual neurons work. We also have a basic understanding of how their synapses work. Where we have replicated that functionality, such as edge-detection in the optic system, it has worked the same in both wetware and silicon. The human brain is complex, but there is no evidence, none whatsoever, that it is magical.
A Roomba is not A) consenting, B) adult, or C) a citizen all of which are required to enter a legally binding contract.
1. Every state in America allows minors to marry.
2. There is no requirement to be a citizen to either marry or sign a contract. My wife is not an American citizen.
3. I have a Roomba. I just reread the user manual, and it says nothing about not consenting to marriage.
I suspect it takes a lot more than US$50K to start up.
Government grants/loans should not cover 100% of the cost of a venture. They should only be used to "top up" private investors for projects that have beneficial externalities. The private investment serves to validate the project as economically valid, since people are much more careful when investing their own money.
Anyway, I think "urban farming" is silly. If you grow food in the city, you avoid hauling that food into the city one time. But if you use the same space to house an urban worker that currently lives in the suburbs, you avoid 400 commutes (twice a day for 200 working days per year).
Change in attitudes can happen very quickly. A decade ago, a strong majority of Americans was opposed to gay marriage. Today, it is the law of the land, and even the most ardent opponents have mostly given up any hope of reversing it.
If my neighbor wants to marry his Roomba, I will not object.
No one knows how complex robot brains will be IF they gain consciousness
There is no rational reason to believe that a machine is incapable of consciousness and human-level intelligence. Since the same laws of physics apply to both computers and biological brains, believing otherwise is tantamount to believing in magic, or believing that human consciousness resides in the soul.
You misjudge what is happening in Turkey. Erdogan has openly expressed an explicit goal of creating an Islamic state, and dismantling democracy. That is what he was elected to do. His actions have been broadly popular, and the current crackdown has broad support.
If you know any Turks, you might be surprised that they could support this. But the Turks that you know are likely urban, cosmopolitan people from Istanbul or Thrace. Erdogan's base is in rural Anatolia, where people are less educated and far less tolerant. They hate Christians (especially Armenians) even though they have likely never met one. They hate Shiites. They hate and fear the Kurds even more. And they are sick of the Istanbul elites treating their culture and their religion with perceived contempt. Erdogan is their champion.
Yet.
That is the point. In the "Five Eyes" (US, UK, Canada, Australia, NZ), data is being collected, and it is possible that maybe someday that data could be used to roundup and arrest dissidents or people that question authority.
In Turkey, that worst case scenario is happening now. 70,000 people have been arrested. Hundreds of thousands more have lost their jobs. Erdogan's has openly expressed contempt for democracy. He once said "Democracy is like a train. You get off once you reach your destination."
For those of us who believe in open societies, with free movement of people, goods and ideas, 2016 has been a annus horribilis. I never expected to see so much regression in so many places.
Why exactly would this discriminator be more authoritative than the original neural net?
It would be better by including human labeled data in the training set and the test set. The labeled images would be either "real" (photos of the real world) or fake (computer generated). Train the net until it can accurately tell them apart. Then start feeding in the images generated by the adversarial net. The generative net will get better and better at making fake images look real, while the analyzing net gets better and better at discriminating between fake and real.
If a single seed blows over from another field and sprouts in your field, this company can (and does) sue the farmer down to his toenail lint.
Not true. This accusation has been made many times and in many places. It is a myth, and has been repeatedly debunked. Monsanto has never sued anyone for unintentional cross fertilization. The myth first started with the wildly inaccurate "documentary" David vs Monsanto.
Monsanto has sued for deliberate and repeated cross fertilization. The most famous defendant was Percy Schmeiser. He was warned several times, and openly admitted that he had isolated, copied, and benefited from the patented Monsanto gene, but claimed he had a right to do so. Several of his co-workers and neighbors testified against him.
Taxes come after profits, not before them.
The value of the stock is based on the expected return. Whether that return changes because of reduced profits or increased taxes makes NO DIFFERENCE.
That all corporate taxes are passed on to customers, shareholders or employers.
If a dollar goes to the government, that dollar has to come from somewhere. If it doesn't come from customers, employees, or shareholders, then where, pray tell, does it come from? The tooth fairy?
As long as you have the slightest competition, that simply is not true.
The competitors also pay taxes. If taxes go up for one, they go up for the others as well. So if Apple can raise prices to cover the cost of taxes, because Samsung has to do the same.
There's tons of articles on Wikipedia that are "abandoned" (not brought up-to-date in a very long time) that contain statements like "X intends toY in 2011"...
My 1975 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica has the same problem.
I've heard many complain that they were never going to bother editing a Wikipedia page again, because it was like writing on the wind.
That's me. I contributed quite a bit in the early days of Wikipedia. I also donated money. But I had too much of my work deleted by some teenage admin with a Napoleon complex. I haven't contributed or donated in years, and I won't ever again until the deletionism stops. Wikipedia is not printed on paper, so there is no inherent practical limit to how much information it can contain. Every article matters to the people that wrote it, and to the people that seek it out and read it. Nobody else will see it. So why delete it? "Noteworthiness" should not be a binary "in or out". It should be a continuum so more noteworthy articles appear higher in the search list, but should not be used to justify deletion of more obscure information.
Should there be a Wiki page for every Pokemon character? If someone wants to write the pages, and people are interested in reading about them, then of course they should each have a page.
Disclaimer: The pages I edited were not about Pokemon. I just used Pokemon as an example, because the Pokemon pages and the community involved in them, were indeed attacked and destroyed by the deletionists.
So, it sounds like you're saying that money really doesn't belong to me
No. That is the exact opposite of what I said. Ownership does not imply the instant ability to liquefy into cash. I own my house. If I want to extract that value, I can sell it, or I can borrow against it. I can do those exact same things with stock. But I cannot demand that my house write me a check, and the house's refusal to do that doesn't mean I don't own it.
corporate taxes really don't affect share price.
Share price represents the current value of the company's expected future profit stream. If that goes down, because of tax or anything else, it will absolutely affect the share price.
I wonder if Microsoft will get a bailout like GM did?
GM got the bailout because they employed a lot of people, and paid "defined benefit" pensions to even more people. Microsoft employs far fewer, and has no DB pension program. Also, nearly half of Microsoft's employees are not Americans.
I think most people would say over the past 10 years Microsoft has lost their position as the market leader.
Valuation is based on expected future profits, not market dominance. Anyway, Microsoft is clearly the market leader in desktop and laptop OSes, and office productivity tools. They don't do well in phones and tablets, but that is a different market.
I've been an Apple shareholder. If I called them up and asked them to send me my portion of that $200 billion, you think they'd send me a check?
Yes. You would, of course, either have to get a majority of the other shareholders to agree to the distribution, or you would need to give them back a portion of your shares in proportion to the equity you were cashing out.
And that stock price is controlled by the market, not by the level of taxation in a given country.
That market price is very much determined by how much cash Apple has. If tax laws changed in a way that would increase or decrease their cash pile, I absolutely guarantee you that you would see that reflected in the stock price.
It is not logical as long as new coal power plants are built.
Chinese coal production and consumption both peaked in 2013, and are declining.
Coal in China.
It is only logical if you ignore where the additional power comes from
Net new production is not coming from coal.
or if your place relies on renewable energy.
China is the world leader in both wind and solar.
They have over $200 billion in cash.
If the tax results in a reduction of that cash pile, then obviously it was paid by the shareholders, since that is who the cash belongs too.
Give me a scenario where they're going to pass the bill for their Irish tax dodge on to customers, employees or shareholders.
What? I can't think of a single example of how it could possibly be paid by anyone else. Can you?
Yes, right, so all those productivity increases over the last few decades didn't just go to the already wealthy and those at the top...
The raises went to the better off, because that is where the productivity increases occurred. A ditch digger or tomato picker is no more productive today than they were 30 years ago. But because of faster computers and better software tools, programmers are worth far more today, as are accountants, engineers, bankers, and hedge fund managers.
Taxes on corporations don't make any sense anyway. The tax can only come from three places: shareholders, employees, or customers. So you can get the same result by directly taxing some combination of dividends, capital gains, wages, and sales. But direct taxes can be fine tuned, so dividends paid into a pension can pay a different rate than dividends paid into, say, a trust fund. You can't make that distinction when the corporation pays the tax.
Many people falsely believe that corporate taxes fall on on fat cats. Actually, corporate income taxes tend to be regressive, since the main results are lower wages and higher prices.
And how would that improve things?
It wouldn't. Nagle's algorithm doesn't cause congestion, it reduces it.
"Solving" a problem by going back to a probably worse one isn't really "solving it"
The first step in "solving" a problem is verifying that it is actually a problem. I am not convinced that "bufferbloat" (whatever that means) is a problem. Buffering can reduce latency, especially under heavy load, by better bandwidth utilization, and allowing faster retransmission of dropped packets. If it is slowing things down, then you should fix the buffering rather than eliminating it.
... and yes, I read TFA. It is a bunch of poorly labeled graphics that didn't make any sense to me, and seem to be designed to obfuscate rather than enlighten, although that may just be a result of Hanlon's Razor.
Except that calling, say iOS sales 'generated overseas' when the software was written in the US, using US infrastructure, etc.
That makes no sense. Plenty of non-American companies develop software in America. Yet only if they are incorporated in America do they pay income tax on their overseas earnings, and it is irrelevant where their engineering and development was done. It has nothing whatsoever to do with "using infrastructure". It is just an extraterritorial money grab that is almost certainly counterproductive since it incentivizes American companies to invest and create jobs overseas.
The justification for leniency makes no sense to me. If a criminal is driven by impulse and lack of emotional control, shouldn't he (and it is usually a "he") get a longer sentence, since he is a greater danger to other people?
It is equally infuriating to me when American companies use loopholes in our ridiculously complicated tax code to shelter revenues in foreign tax shelters to avoid paying taxes
So who are you infuriated at? The companies that take advantage of those loopholes, or the politicians that put them there? Fury doesn't help unless it is properly directed. Does your fury influence who you vote for?
... while at the same time benefiting from our infrastructure, emergency services, military, etc.
No. Taxes are only sheltered on income generated overseas, using overseas infrastructure, emergency services, etc. I am baffled why Americans believe they have a "right" to tax the sale of a product made in China and sold in France.
Wasn't there a study that found people intrinsically trust robots and automatons more than actual people?
That seems reasonable. I certainly trust an ATM more than I trust the cashier at the grocery store. If ATMs miscounted money, I would have heard about the problem, so I rarely bother to double check. Human cashiers miscount all the time, although mostly out of carelessness rather than dishonesty.