God forbid someone sent a book every year to every person in the US with the home addresses and phone numbers of everyone in their areas. Society would itself collapse. Oh wait.
If you think street view makes you more vulnerable to anything than you're delusional and paranoid.
Answer: Because there is more to education than the measures used to tell us that Japan and England keep kicking our butts. The reality is that there is education for education's sake and there is education for the real world. And Japan and England are failing miserably at the latter.
Real answer: Because Nobel prizes are given for past achievements and the median age of laureates is very high (over 60 I believe and rising). In other words you can have the shittiest K-12 education system in the world but if 50 years ago you had a monopoly on higher education (like say if the rest of the world was still rebuilding from having most of it's cities razed to the ground) than you'll still be getting a lot of nobel prizes.
Ionizing radiation doesn't give you headaches and inability to concentrate that goes away on weekends. Exposure to RF at microwave oven, heating-up-your-brain levels could do so a lot more plausibly than ionizing radiation.
Or, I know it's an amazing concept, kids don't like school, get bored by it easily and are stressed when there. What an amazing possibility.
Of course then parents couldn't find a magical solution to make their kids into the obedient robots they want so magical radio waves it is. I guess the local pharmacies have run out of Ritalin or something.
It's called trojans and to a seller extent fake websites (you seriously think most people check for ssl?). It doesn't matter what the encryption in the middle is if someone controls the end point you're using.
The only secure approaches involve bypassing the whole internet part for authentication and verification. RSA tokens, one time password pads and so on only minimize the problem since a Trojan can still hijack your session. Pretty much need interactive tokens that generate verification hashes on a per transaction basis (ie: you enter the amount, etc.) to be remotely secure.
It doesn't generally matter mind you. Your house isn't secure either. Your wallet isn't secure. Paper elections aren't secure. Shit happens and it gets cleaned up later.
Electronic election is different because the value is likely much higher and the damage much worse than in any other case. It's also inherently harder to undo damage, there's no equivalent to checking your bank account and telling the bank something is up. People have nothing invested so they won't be on their guard. Likewise knowing that 10million people will use one website and one form of authentication on a given day can let you tailor your trojans so much better. In the long run, undermining the very foundation of our society would tend to do bad things in the long run.
Not sure what US kids you're talking about, given that most couldn't find the US on a map asking them anything about school is rather stupid.
I went to public school in the US and was taught about the Japanese camps in multiple classes. One of my English classes even included a fictional book in that time period involving Japanese protagonists with a very realistic account of the camps. There were also some interesting debates about the bombing of Dresden and the dropping of atomic bombs. I was also taught about the lovely crap the US did during the cold war among other things. Then there's the whole genocide against the Native Americans and it's various incidents.
However as other have said the camps while not a good thing weren't atrocious either. Wars are ugly period so it's stupid to think otherwise and things do need to be taken in perspective. Frankly, the single worst thing the US probably did was pardoning the Japanese who ran their camps in exchange for their research notes.
If you smoke cigarettes try using e-cigs then ramp down the nicotine. I know multiple people who quit thanks to them sometimes after decades of failed previous efforts.
They let you fulfill your need to smoke while letting you quit nicotine. As I understand it smokers are crave the act of smoking almost as much as they do nicotine since like Pavlov's dogs your mind has linked the two feelings.
if the 'bad guy' can't be caught using above-board means, maybe you need to try harder?
So you want to live in a society run by organized crime and corrupt corporations? How do you prove bribery without wiretaps or other similar methods? You allow a power vacuum and someone will fill it in, the government is usually the lesser of many evils.
Take something like "select stddev(column) from table" - there's no way to get an incremental update on that expression given the original data state and a point mutation to one of the entries for the column. Any change cascades globally, and is hard to recompute on the fly without scanning all the values again.
Stddev is trivial to recompute on the fly and I'd be surprised if any decent sql engine didn't compute it one row at a time. Store mean(column) and mean(column^2). SD = sqrt(mean(c^2)-mean(c)^2) not considering the unbiasing stuff. Add new row value deltas to both, do some simple math and you're done.
Now medians and quantiles are a bitch.
Frankly complex data mining of large data is a pain in the ass on hadoop as much as anywhere else. You can't do anything too global with hadoop because then you'd need to send all your data to one box anyway. You need specialized complex algorithms since you can only keep a fraction of your data in memory at a time. Simple regression? Have fun.
That said if you're already using hadoop it's quite possible you're using some sort of online learning algorithm anyway for just that reason so converting it to real time updating would be easy.
The minimum proper security required for home computer use is something like an RSA key. An even more secure method has each action validated by the card (ie: for a bank, enter transaction amount on card's keypad, enter confirmation number in webpage.).
BUT what Meyers (and, apparently, you) are saying is that ANY sufficiently good description of the brain has to include the entire Universe with all its possibilities because that's what the genome does, to what I say: quite not!
Sorry for any confusing, I very much don't mean that. My argument is simply that the genome does not provide an upper bound on the effort needed to make a human. The effort in this case includes building that higher level language which in worst case is the universe. So as you said it provides something closer to a lower bound although people would argue about that as well. In reality the complexity would be somewhere in between of course. However we don't offhand know where in between or what parts we need to deal with.
So the real point being that you cannot use the size of the genome as an argument to sidestep the large amount of effort needed to actually understand what is happening. You still either need to study the much more complex higher level brain/neuron functions or the much more complex lower level protein interactions. Slow and tedious either way.
We'll get there within some small number of decades but it won't be a stone's throw away by some magic shortcut. There may be a magic shortcut but I'd bet good money the genome has little to do with that shortcut.
Sure we do, it's why biological experiments are possible but they're rather cumbersome and slow. You can try filling a bug ticket with god to let us use a proper debugger toolset but he's a paranoid loon so that's not likely to go over well.
Most computer hardware on the other hand doesn't allow direct access to the underlying physical layer.
You seem to disagree, by your logic it's the gun manufacturer who has the most liability. After all, if they didn't make guns people wouldn't be addicted to having them around and wouldn't be inclined to shoot someone, right?
If a crazy guy jumps onto the highway and I run him over I'm not liable. Same thing here.
Or how about this, I find the color green to cause me great psychological harm culminating in a mental breakdown. If I see you wearing a green hat should I be able to sue you for causing me harm?
Using the genome does not address the code issues that's the whole bloody point that anyone who knows molecular biology sees (including Myers).
The genome is a SUBSET of the code used to describe a human brain. The real code is in the universe. Physics, biology and so on. The computer the genome is run on. It's using a 10 million line library to create a jpeg and then saying that making a jpeg is only a single line of code because the call to the library was 1 line. Utter idiocy.
The code stored in DNA runs on the hardware we call the universe. In other words physics, quantum mechanics, chemistry and so on. Stuff we don't really understand that well once you get down to it. DNA has full access to this hardware so it takes advantage of every odd quirk that we don't normally care about or possibly even know the existence of.
Emulating reality all the way down to the lowest possible level is hard. We can't do it. Slowly or quickly. Doing so on hardware that itself runs on reality will needless to say be damn slow period. No, we don't need most of that to run DNA but since we don't know what we need the only way to be have a chance of it running is to model everything.
Let's put it this way. We're right now able to very very slowly model one protein folding using a super computer. We'll hit the singularity long before we have enough computing power to emulate a full person that way.
The alternative is to simplify the model to only what is needed. That means we need to actually understand DNA, proteins, protein interactions and so on which biologists have said, rightfully, is going to take a long ass time.
If you can program with any programming language without understanding every sublayer beneath it, I don't see why you couldn't do the same with DNA without understanding all the physics and chemistry that makes it work.
God, do you even understand computer science much less biology? You can code in a programming language because someone else has created the interface between the high level language and the low level hardware. Without that interface you would need to understand all the layers.
In the case of the brain, the hardware is chemistry and biology and physics (quantum mechanism included). Note that we do not understand physics perfectly. DNA is like assembly code written by a crazy russian who was drunk, stoned and on five different hallucinogenics while he wrote it.
So yes, to run code in DNA we do either need to use the same hardware (ie: make a flesh and blood creature) or emulate the hardware (ie: understand the chemistry and physics). Since we don't understand the chemistry and physics involved the later is very very difficult. Even if we did understand it we're running an emulator (of the physical world) on top of an emulator (computer that runs on top of the physical world) so it's going to be slow. Note that biologists are trying to emulate cell biology in computer hardware which is why they can tell you exactly how bloody hard it is.
That's not to say you can't emulate a human brain in hardware but that doing it based on DNA is probably the stupidest possible way of doing it. By the time we have the computing power and understanding to do that we'll likely understand enough of the brain to do it in 50 more elegant ways. And none of that is going to happen soon.
Pretty much any road can be unsafe to stop on quite often. You think they'll avoid them or they'll risk everyoen else's lives? What does their past history tell you?
In other words he can choose being put in jail for a DUI (which he didn't commit) or risking a horrid accident. Something tells me the later is actually less likely to lead to jail time.
Slashdot Mirror
God forbid someone sent a book every year to every person in the US with the home addresses and phone numbers of everyone in their areas. Society would itself collapse. Oh wait.
If you think street view makes you more vulnerable to anything than you're delusional and paranoid.
Answer: Because there is more to education than the measures used to tell us that Japan and England keep kicking our butts. The reality is that there is education for education's sake and there is education for the real world. And Japan and England are failing miserably at the latter.
Real answer: Because Nobel prizes are given for past achievements and the median age of laureates is very high (over 60 I believe and rising). In other words you can have the shittiest K-12 education system in the world but if 50 years ago you had a monopoly on higher education (like say if the rest of the world was still rebuilding from having most of it's cities razed to the ground) than you'll still be getting a lot of nobel prizes.
Ionizing radiation doesn't give you headaches and inability to concentrate that goes away on weekends. Exposure to RF at microwave oven, heating-up-your-brain levels could do so a lot more plausibly than ionizing radiation.
Or, I know it's an amazing concept, kids don't like school, get bored by it easily and are stressed when there. What an amazing possibility.
Of course then parents couldn't find a magical solution to make their kids into the obedient robots they want so magical radio waves it is. I guess the local pharmacies have run out of Ritalin or something.
It'd be like a cartoon, except instead of singing in chorus all the animals would be telling you to buy viagra.
It's called trojans and to a seller extent fake websites (you seriously think most people check for ssl?). It doesn't matter what the encryption in the middle is if someone controls the end point you're using.
The only secure approaches involve bypassing the whole internet part for authentication and verification. RSA tokens, one time password pads and so on only minimize the problem since a Trojan can still hijack your session. Pretty much need interactive tokens that generate verification hashes on a per transaction basis (ie: you enter the amount, etc.) to be remotely secure.
It doesn't generally matter mind you. Your house isn't secure either. Your wallet isn't secure. Paper elections aren't secure. Shit happens and it gets cleaned up later.
Electronic election is different because the value is likely much higher and the damage much worse than in any other case. It's also inherently harder to undo damage, there's no equivalent to checking your bank account and telling the bank something is up. People have nothing invested so they won't be on their guard. Likewise knowing that 10million people will use one website and one form of authentication on a given day can let you tailor your trojans so much better. In the long run, undermining the very foundation of our society would tend to do bad things in the long run.
Not sure what US kids you're talking about, given that most couldn't find the US on a map asking them anything about school is rather stupid.
I went to public school in the US and was taught about the Japanese camps in multiple classes. One of my English classes even included a fictional book in that time period involving Japanese protagonists with a very realistic account of the camps. There were also some interesting debates about the bombing of Dresden and the dropping of atomic bombs. I was also taught about the lovely crap the US did during the cold war among other things. Then there's the whole genocide against the Native Americans and it's various incidents.
However as other have said the camps while not a good thing weren't atrocious either. Wars are ugly period so it's stupid to think otherwise and things do need to be taken in perspective. Frankly, the single worst thing the US probably did was pardoning the Japanese who ran their camps in exchange for their research notes.
If you smoke cigarettes try using e-cigs then ramp down the nicotine. I know multiple people who quit thanks to them sometimes after decades of failed previous efforts.
They let you fulfill your need to smoke while letting you quit nicotine. As I understand it smokers are crave the act of smoking almost as much as they do nicotine since like Pavlov's dogs your mind has linked the two feelings.
if the 'bad guy' can't be caught using above-board means, maybe you need to try harder?
So you want to live in a society run by organized crime and corrupt corporations? How do you prove bribery without wiretaps or other similar methods? You allow a power vacuum and someone will fill it in, the government is usually the lesser of many evils.
So when it's 95F you want to be in a nearly airtight transparent plastic bubble? Seriously? Think about it for a minute.
http://xkcd.com/664/
From there, maybe 10K relatively fuel efficient personal vehicles driving to the store is preferable to 10K commercial truck deliveries.
I'd seriously doubt that. Assuming some routing efficiency the trucks will travel only a fraction of the miles the cars do per package.
Take something like "select stddev(column) from table" - there's no way to get an incremental update on that expression given the original data state and a point mutation to one of the entries for the column. Any change cascades globally, and is hard to recompute on the fly without scanning all the values again.
Stddev is trivial to recompute on the fly and I'd be surprised if any decent sql engine didn't compute it one row at a time. Store mean(column) and mean(column^2). SD = sqrt(mean(c^2)-mean(c)^2) not considering the unbiasing stuff. Add new row value deltas to both, do some simple math and you're done.
Now medians and quantiles are a bitch.
Frankly complex data mining of large data is a pain in the ass on hadoop as much as anywhere else. You can't do anything too global with hadoop because then you'd need to send all your data to one box anyway. You need specialized complex algorithms since you can only keep a fraction of your data in memory at a time. Simple regression? Have fun.
That said if you're already using hadoop it's quite possible you're using some sort of online learning algorithm anyway for just that reason so converting it to real time updating would be easy.
Because "another group of Muslims condemns violence" doesn't sell advertisements as well as "Muslims will kill us all, details at 11."
Exactly.
The minimum proper security required for home computer use is something like an RSA key. An even more secure method has each action validated by the card (ie: for a bank, enter transaction amount on card's keypad, enter confirmation number in webpage.).
Yeah, because games sure do great in a VM.
Last I checked burning oil didn't require energy.
BUT what Meyers (and, apparently, you) are saying is that ANY sufficiently good description of the brain has to include the entire Universe with all its possibilities because that's what the genome does, to what I say: quite not!
Sorry for any confusing, I very much don't mean that. My argument is simply that the genome does not provide an upper bound on the effort needed to make a human. The effort in this case includes building that higher level language which in worst case is the universe. So as you said it provides something closer to a lower bound although people would argue about that as well. In reality the complexity would be somewhere in between of course. However we don't offhand know where in between or what parts we need to deal with.
So the real point being that you cannot use the size of the genome as an argument to sidestep the large amount of effort needed to actually understand what is happening. You still either need to study the much more complex higher level brain/neuron functions or the much more complex lower level protein interactions. Slow and tedious either way.
We'll get there within some small number of decades but it won't be a stone's throw away by some magic shortcut. There may be a magic shortcut but I'd bet good money the genome has little to do with that shortcut.
Sure we do, it's why biological experiments are possible but they're rather cumbersome and slow. You can try filling a bug ticket with god to let us use a proper debugger toolset but he's a paranoid loon so that's not likely to go over well.
Most computer hardware on the other hand doesn't allow direct access to the underlying physical layer.
It's a flat panel technology like everything else that's being worked on.
you're 100% liable for what happens.
You seem to disagree, by your logic it's the gun manufacturer who has the most liability. After all, if they didn't make guns people wouldn't be addicted to having them around and wouldn't be inclined to shoot someone, right?
If a crazy guy jumps onto the highway and I run him over I'm not liable. Same thing here.
Or how about this, I find the color green to cause me great psychological harm culminating in a mental breakdown. If I see you wearing a green hat should I be able to sue you for causing me harm?
Using the genome does not address the code issues that's the whole bloody point that anyone who knows molecular biology sees (including Myers).
The genome is a SUBSET of the code used to describe a human brain. The real code is in the universe. Physics, biology and so on. The computer the genome is run on. It's using a 10 million line library to create a jpeg and then saying that making a jpeg is only a single line of code because the call to the library was 1 line. Utter idiocy.
The code stored in DNA runs on the hardware we call the universe. In other words physics, quantum mechanics, chemistry and so on. Stuff we don't really understand that well once you get down to it. DNA has full access to this hardware so it takes advantage of every odd quirk that we don't normally care about or possibly even know the existence of.
Emulating reality all the way down to the lowest possible level is hard. We can't do it. Slowly or quickly. Doing so on hardware that itself runs on reality will needless to say be damn slow period. No, we don't need most of that to run DNA but since we don't know what we need the only way to be have a chance of it running is to model everything.
Let's put it this way. We're right now able to very very slowly model one protein folding using a super computer. We'll hit the singularity long before we have enough computing power to emulate a full person that way.
The alternative is to simplify the model to only what is needed. That means we need to actually understand DNA, proteins, protein interactions and so on which biologists have said, rightfully, is going to take a long ass time.
If you can program with any programming language without understanding every sublayer beneath it, I don't see why you couldn't do the same with DNA without understanding all the physics and chemistry that makes it work.
God, do you even understand computer science much less biology? You can code in a programming language because someone else has created the interface between the high level language and the low level hardware. Without that interface you would need to understand all the layers.
In the case of the brain, the hardware is chemistry and biology and physics (quantum mechanism included). Note that we do not understand physics perfectly. DNA is like assembly code written by a crazy russian who was drunk, stoned and on five different hallucinogenics while he wrote it.
So yes, to run code in DNA we do either need to use the same hardware (ie: make a flesh and blood creature) or emulate the hardware (ie: understand the chemistry and physics). Since we don't understand the chemistry and physics involved the later is very very difficult. Even if we did understand it we're running an emulator (of the physical world) on top of an emulator (computer that runs on top of the physical world) so it's going to be slow. Note that biologists are trying to emulate cell biology in computer hardware which is why they can tell you exactly how bloody hard it is.
That's not to say you can't emulate a human brain in hardware but that doing it based on DNA is probably the stupidest possible way of doing it. By the time we have the computing power and understanding to do that we'll likely understand enough of the brain to do it in 50 more elegant ways. And none of that is going to happen soon.
Pretty much any road can be unsafe to stop on quite often. You think they'll avoid them or they'll risk everyoen else's lives? What does their past history tell you?
In other words he can choose being put in jail for a DUI (which he didn't commit) or risking a horrid accident. Something tells me the later is actually less likely to lead to jail time.
Real great safety feature right there isn't it?