Social networking sites, e.g. FaceBook, LinkedIn, etc, provide at least a partial solution to the problem: you only receive messages from friends, friends of friends (or bussiness connections). Confidence in the authenticity of a person can be gained because you can see their profile, follow their conversations with other people you know. And you can shut them out of your network if they are spamming.
Still, a solution is needed for more incidental communications, e.g. when ordering something on-line or when dealing with a company that you have not dealt with before. Maybe a quota system, where you will agree to accept a limited number of messages from a specific source?
Is their any good reason for copyrights to be transferable? Other than that it's a great way for record companies to extort artists and the public and get fucking rich and powerful?
I think the first copyright reform should be that copyright be made non-transferable.
Then, we should get rid of copyrights and patents altogether, because ideas, information, in any medium, is inherently copyable and restricting peoples right to do so is nonsensical and unenforceable.
How should artists make money? Some other way. But not this way. Its just wrong.
It measures light to a precision of one part in 2,000
So that's 11 bits of intensity information? Most professional camera CCD's are 12 bits per color. Some are 14 bits per color. Doesn't sound very impressive. And with multiple exposures, it should be possible to get a much higher resolution.
The photometric precision is three to four times higher than that of typical CCDs and two to three times higher than the best CCDs, and comparable to the most recent results from the Hubble Space Telescope for stars of the same brightness.
Hmmm, still doesn't sound too impressive. What do they mean by 'typical CCD' anyway?
In any case, it's not more sensitive than the Hubble apparently, so it's probably not going to make any breakthrough discoveries.
You console's energy use IS part of the problem. If you want too save energy, save wherever you can. Little bits do help, especially if you have lots of little bits to save, and much easier than saving on big things. Turning off your console when your not playing is easy and saves energy. No need to throw your toaster away.
You can write your content generator in Brainfuck for all I care, but it probably won't be any good, and nobody is going to think its a good idea. Of course programming languages and tools matter, why the hell do you think people bother with them?
For example, as remarked earlier in this thread, good special purpose languages for texture generation are functional languages.
So algorithmic content creation would be a better term than procedural content generation. But unfortunately, we're stuck with it, like I'm stuck with you.
Parent misunderstood the use of the term, or assumed that "procedural" has a fixed meaning outside of the software engineering community, which it doesn't
As in: the procedure we usually follow is that we get a graphics designer to make some sketches on paper, and if we like them, we give them to the 3D modelling people?
Not off-topic. The way that you program these content generators can have a great impact on how good your content is, and therefore this is relevant for 'The Importance of Procedural Content Generation in Games'.
By the way, i'm not talking about mere programming styles, but programming paradigms [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_paradigm]
That's what I said. It done by procedural programming = writing procedures. Point that the parent was making is that it doesn't have to be procedural; there are other ways of specifying algorithms for generating content.
I guess its because the most used technique for these purposes is procedural programming, and perhaps some OOP, but that doesn't really help with writing algorithms.
It would be a good thing if other techniques, like functional and constrained-based programming were used more. But alas, most programmers will stick to what they know.
Its only matter of time before someone thinks up a way to manipulate an image such that it appears to be made with some camera and lens, and then this technology may be used to frame (haha) innocent people.
But how can we ever show anything to be true other than by experimenting and doing statistics? We can apply logic to prove things, but not the assumptions about how nature works.
I imagine, some day, just knowing what a resistor is and understanding how to connect LEDs to a battery, can get you arrested. If you understand things that the lawmakers do not, then you are dangerous, and potentially a terrorist or a criminal, and that is enough to put you away.
Of course, doing a study like this, the researchers must have had one or the other causality in mind. Who funded them could be a factor in that. In any case, the media is going to spice it up, and people will hear what they want to hear. It going to be used with political intentions, etc. That's the problem with correlation studies.
By the way, correlation is a good way to show causality (fundamentally the only way to show causality) but only if a very high correlation is found and deviations from 100% can be explained from impure data.
Then again, maybe stoned people aren't really happy. Just stoned. Maybe watching TV and being stoned are symptoms of the same affliction, being unhappy. Nothing wrong with either activity though, just if you do it too much, you should start thinking why?
My favorite SF comic writer tells the story of a several billion year old computer that designed and created a small device that looks exactly like a cricket ball, activated on impact with a cricket bat, that will in fact connect the centers of all major stars through hyperspace, turning the whole universe into one big massive black hole. It is about to be flung from the hand of unsuspecting anti-hero Arthur Dent, when....
I'm not sure what the device was called. It is possible that it doesn't even have a name.
The computer designed it in first place because its owners asked it too, then they decided they didn't want to destroy the universe after all, and instead pulverized the computer. But that didn't completely disable it, and it felt a bit cross because of it, so it decided to destroy the universe anyway, by starting the Cricket War.
he can't even make us all believe that he exists:-)
Seriously, nobody can prove the existence of God (or ones own existence, or anything else), without first very clearly defining what it means 'to exist' and what 'God' is exactly. And then only if other people accept your definitions, that is, if they find them believable, can you prove anything to them. So proving is a matter of believing after all, only after applying rigorous logic. If I don't want to believe in God, you can never prove his existence to me, because I will not accept your definitions. Vice versa, If someone wants to believe in God, they can always find definitions that will make it logically true.
So, if God were to appear in front of me saying, "I am God, I exist" I could simply say, "No you don't, you're a figment of my imagination." or "No you're not, you're just someone pretending to be God". And then he'd smite me to hell, of course.
I am not a physicist, but it seems to me the proposed invisibility 'cloak' is just a mathematical trick, and its not clear to me that the mathematical model actually corresponds with the real physics of light/electromagnetic waves. And even if the model is sound, I don't believe materials with the desired properties can actually be made. Also, it seems, the method only works when the background light is uniform, i.e. monochromatic background light, i.e. no other objects are allowed anywhere in view, besides the cloak and the disappeared object.
Ugh, I hate that over-used thick-skulled response. It true, but irrelevant. First of all, statistics, when used properly, is one of the best indicators of causal relations in the natural world, if not the only one. More importantly, we don't need to prove causation to be warned.
We blame ourselves for everything, when in fact there's no evidence that, if we all vanished tomorrow, animals wouldn't continue to die out as they always have.
Who else can we blame? We are the only ones who can make a difference (unless you believe in a god). We don't need evidence so we can blame someone (although I think there is enough evidence, and some people perhaps deserve more blame than others). The important thing is to determine:
a) whether we can slow down, halt or reverse global warming b) whether it is desirable to do so
Most evidence points to a) yes, we can slow down global warming, possible reverse it, and b) it it desirable to do so, because climate change seems to negatively affect biodiversity (e.g. TFA) and other aspects of our environment, and this will probably negatively influence our lives, and possibly our survival.
However, the cost of a) will be extremely high. We are going to have to give up some luxury. Is it worth it? How big is the risk? Potentially, global warming can destroy us. We don't know for sure, but I'm willing to reduce my consumption to save our future. Furthermore, I believe life in itself is worthwhile to preserve. Without life, our planet, the universe, would be very dull.
Remember, taking no action to prevent global warming is not a neutral option. Its is a choice, for which we must also bear the consequences, even if the current global warming is 'natural'. We may still want to slow it down, for our own sake. Do we really want 'nature' to destroy or make us, if we can help it?
Bah. The apocalypse was announced today in national news papers and many tv news programs today. Here in Holland anyway, and I'm sure all over the western(!) world.
What a stupid random media hype. There is no news at all. This is not the big moment of the LHC. No collisions have taken place today and none will until mid October, when the first collision is scheduled.
Typical of the journalism of today, this is pure sensationalism. Any journalist that had bothered to do one femtosecond of research should at least know that the world is not going to end today and perhaps think about doing a piece a month from now, on how the world has not ended, and science and common sense have triumphed again.
Re:More than scientific learning
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 1
no, no, by definition, the doomsayers WERE always wrong.
Re:Ignorance vs. the Unknown
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 1
I don't think you can translate the energy of the particles in the beam directly to the magnitude of the supposed catastrophe. First of all, there is a very large number of particles in the beam. Second, we don't known how much damage a black hole, formed using a certain amount of energy, can cause.
Still, it makes sense that a black hole created with a relatively small amount of energy would exist for a very short time and is not very powerful. Very much unlike the black holes formed by large supernovae, some of the most energetic events in the universe. And very much like the theorized(!) black holes formed by cosmic radiation.
Seems the challanger has been reading Slashdot. From their web-site:
"Because of recent suggestions, as of September 6th, 2008, we are raising the prize to $500.00 USD (if the challenge is won) and only allowing professional, established data recovery companies to take the challenge. The deposit fee has been waived. The drive does not have to be returned. Since there is only one hard drive, only one company may take the challenge. We encourage others (perhaps more well-known and more reputable than us) to offer more drives in similar challenges. Help us carry on "The Great Zero Challenge" and put an end to random multiple-overwrite nonsense!"
Slashdot Mirror
Social networking sites, e.g. FaceBook, LinkedIn, etc, provide at least a partial solution to the problem: you only receive messages from friends, friends of friends (or bussiness connections). Confidence in the authenticity of a person can be gained because you can see their profile, follow their conversations with other people you know. And you can shut them out of your network if they are spamming.
Still, a solution is needed for more incidental communications, e.g. when ordering something on-line or when dealing with a company that you have not dealt with before. Maybe a quota system, where you will agree to accept a limited number of messages from a specific source?
Is their any good reason for copyrights to be transferable? Other than that it's a great way for record companies to extort artists and the public and get fucking rich and powerful?
I think the first copyright reform should be that copyright be made non-transferable.
Then, we should get rid of copyrights and patents altogether, because ideas, information, in any medium, is inherently copyable and restricting peoples right to do so is nonsensical and unenforceable.
How should artists make money? Some other way. But not this way. Its just wrong.
It measures light to a precision of one part in 2,000
So that's 11 bits of intensity information? Most professional camera CCD's are 12 bits per color. Some are 14 bits per color. Doesn't sound very impressive. And with multiple exposures, it should be possible to get a much higher resolution.
The photometric precision is three to four times higher than that of typical CCDs and two to three times higher than the best CCDs, and comparable to the most recent results from the Hubble Space Telescope for stars of the same brightness.
Hmmm, still doesn't sound too impressive. What do they mean by 'typical CCD' anyway?
In any case, it's not more sensitive than the Hubble apparently, so it's probably not going to make any breakthrough discoveries.
Nice, but not news.
sure it is:
tele = far
scope = see
it detects (sees) events taking place far away.
Although Wikipedia defines a telescope as:
"an instrument designed for the observation of remote objects by the collection of electromagnetic radiation"
I suppose neutrinos are not technically electromagnetic radiation.
You console's energy use IS part of the problem. If you want too save energy, save wherever you can. Little bits do help, especially if you have lots of little bits to save, and much easier than saving on big things. Turning off your console when your not playing is easy and saves energy. No need to throw your toaster away.
I'm waiting for you to get the clue and drop it.
You can write your content generator in Brainfuck for all I care, but it probably won't be any good, and nobody is going to think its a good idea. Of course programming languages and tools matter, why the hell do you think people bother with them?
For example, as remarked earlier in this thread, good special purpose languages for texture generation are functional languages.
So algorithmic content creation would be a better term than procedural content generation. But unfortunately, we're stuck with it, like I'm stuck with you.
Parent misunderstood the use of the term, or assumed that "procedural" has a fixed meaning outside of the software engineering community, which it doesn't
As in: the procedure we usually follow is that we get a graphics designer to make some sketches on paper, and if we like them, we give them to the 3D modelling people?
Algorithmic is a much better term, I think.
Not off-topic. The way that you program these content generators can have a great impact on how good your content is, and therefore this is relevant for 'The Importance of Procedural Content Generation in Games'.
By the way, i'm not talking about mere programming styles, but programming paradigms
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_paradigm]
That's what I said. It done by procedural programming = writing procedures. Point that the parent was making is that it doesn't have to be procedural; there are other ways of specifying algorithms for generating content.
I guess its because the most used technique for these purposes is procedural programming, and perhaps some OOP, but that doesn't really help with writing algorithms.
It would be a good thing if other techniques, like functional and constrained-based programming were used more. But alas, most programmers will stick to what they know.
You could likely be physically standing right in front of the thing, in the middle of the spray of particles, and not notice anything.
Except you'd also be standing in front of the frickin' laser...
For n=10.5 light years, this gives 4.9 years.
eh? speed of light? Relativity? Anyone?
Its only matter of time before someone thinks up a way to manipulate an image such that it appears to be made with some camera and lens, and then this technology may be used to frame (haha) innocent people.
But how can we ever show anything to be true other than by experimenting and doing statistics? We can apply logic to prove things, but not the assumptions about how nature works.
I imagine, some day, just knowing what a resistor is and understanding how to connect LEDs to a battery, can get you arrested. If you understand things that the lawmakers do not, then you are dangerous, and potentially a terrorist or a criminal, and that is enough to put you away.
Of course, doing a study like this, the researchers must have had one or the other causality in mind. Who funded them could be a factor in that. In any case, the media is going to spice it up, and people will hear what they want to hear. It going to be used with political intentions, etc. That's the problem with correlation studies.
By the way, correlation is a good way to show causality (fundamentally the only way to show causality) but only if a very high correlation is found and deviations from 100% can be explained from impure data.
Then again, maybe stoned people aren't really happy. Just stoned. Maybe watching TV and being stoned are symptoms of the same affliction, being unhappy.
Nothing wrong with either activity though, just if you do it too much, you should start thinking why?
My favorite SF comic writer tells the story of a several billion year old computer that designed and created a small device that looks exactly like a cricket ball, activated on impact with a cricket bat, that will in fact connect the centers of all major stars through hyperspace, turning the whole universe into one big massive black hole. It is about to be flung from the hand of unsuspecting anti-hero Arthur Dent, when....
I'm not sure what the device was called. It is possible that it doesn't even have a name.
The computer designed it in first place because its owners asked it too, then they decided they didn't want to destroy the universe after all, and instead pulverized the computer. But that didn't completely disable it, and it felt a bit cross because of it, so it decided to destroy the universe anyway, by starting the Cricket War.
he can't even make us all believe that he exists :-)
Seriously, nobody can prove the existence of God (or ones own existence, or anything else), without first very clearly defining what it means 'to exist' and what 'God' is exactly. And then only if other people accept your definitions, that is, if they find them believable, can you prove anything to them. So proving is a matter of believing after all, only after applying rigorous logic. If I don't want to believe in God, you can never prove his existence to me, because I will not accept your definitions. Vice versa, If someone wants to believe in God, they can always find definitions that will make it logically true.
So, if God were to appear in front of me saying, "I am God, I exist" I could simply say, "No you don't, you're a figment of my imagination." or "No you're not, you're just someone pretending to be God". And then he'd smite me to hell, of course.
I am not a physicist, but it seems to me the proposed invisibility 'cloak' is just a mathematical trick, and its not clear to me that the mathematical model actually corresponds with the real physics of light/electromagnetic waves. And even if the model is sound, I don't believe materials with the desired properties can actually be made. Also, it seems, the method only works when the background light is uniform, i.e. monochromatic background light, i.e. no other objects are allowed anywhere in view, besides the cloak and the disappeared object.
Correlation does not imply causation...
Ugh, I hate that over-used thick-skulled response. It true, but irrelevant. First of all, statistics, when used properly, is one of the best indicators of causal relations in the natural world, if not the only one. More importantly, we don't need to prove causation to be warned.
We blame ourselves for everything, when in fact there's no evidence that, if we all vanished tomorrow, animals wouldn't continue to die out as they always have.
Who else can we blame? We are the only ones who can make a difference (unless you believe in a god). We don't need evidence so we can blame someone (although I think there is enough evidence, and some people perhaps deserve more blame than others). The important thing is to determine:
a) whether we can slow down, halt or reverse global warming
b) whether it is desirable to do so
Most evidence points to a) yes, we can slow down global warming, possible reverse it, and b) it it desirable to do so, because climate change seems to negatively affect biodiversity (e.g. TFA) and other aspects of our environment, and this will probably negatively influence our lives, and possibly our survival.
However, the cost of a) will be extremely high. We are going to have to give up some luxury. Is it worth it? How big is the risk? Potentially, global warming can destroy us. We don't know for sure, but I'm willing to reduce my consumption to save our future. Furthermore, I believe life in itself is worthwhile to preserve. Without life, our planet, the universe, would be very dull.
Remember, taking no action to prevent global warming is not a neutral option. Its is a choice, for which we must also bear the consequences, even if the current global warming is 'natural'. We may still want to slow it down, for our own sake. Do we really want 'nature' to destroy or make us, if we can help it?
Bah. The apocalypse was announced today in national news papers and many tv news programs today. Here in Holland anyway, and I'm sure all over the western(!) world.
What a stupid random media hype. There is no news at all. This is not the big moment of the LHC.
No collisions have taken place today and none will until mid October, when the first collision is scheduled.
Typical of the journalism of today, this is pure sensationalism. Any journalist that had bothered to do one femtosecond of research should at least know that the world is not going to end today and perhaps think about doing a piece a month from now, on how the world has not ended, and science and common sense have triumphed again.
no, no, by definition, the doomsayers WERE always wrong.
I don't think you can translate the energy of the particles in the beam directly to the magnitude of the supposed catastrophe.
First of all, there is a very large number of particles in the beam.
Second, we don't known how much damage a black hole, formed using a certain amount of energy, can cause.
Still, it makes sense that a black hole created with a relatively small amount of energy would exist for a very short time and is not very powerful. Very much unlike the black holes formed by large supernovae, some of the most energetic events in the universe. And very much like the theorized(!) black holes formed by cosmic radiation.
Seems the challanger has been reading Slashdot. From their web-site:
"Because of recent suggestions, as of September 6th, 2008, we are raising the prize to $500.00 USD (if the challenge is won) and only allowing professional, established data recovery companies to take the challenge. The deposit fee has been waived. The drive does not have to be returned. Since there is only one hard drive, only one company may take the challenge. We encourage others (perhaps more well-known and more reputable than us) to offer more drives in similar challenges. Help us carry on "The Great Zero Challenge" and put an end to random multiple-overwrite nonsense!"