Check out the whiskers on this horse. Click "all sizes" above the sample image, then "Original", let it load, and look at the pixel level detail on his chin, for instance.
Being cynical and all pompous is really fun, and I feel you there, but the objective facts don't support your position. 15 mp is perfectly usable.
No, I don't. Just a happy customer. I own Olympus, Canon and Nikon DSLR bodies. Overall, I lean towards Canon and have the most Canon lenses. Canon's progress here is relevant both because of where they're at WRT megapixels, and because the article specified SLR (and I presume they're implying DSLR.)
Just as a tip, I have found that the 50D's noise drops *dramatically* if you expose for +1 Ev (RAW) and then in post, pull back -1 to -1.5 Ev. There are lots more bits of resolution available in the stops as you move to the right (each stop has twice as many levels as the darker one to its left), and this gives the camera a one stop noise advantage over the way Canon hands it to us.
Canon seems to think we need a full stop of headroom in dynamic range over the brightest spot in the image being taken... that's simply not the case unless you're going to be compositing something brighter into the image. Seriously, try it. That +1 Ev will push noise down to an amazing degree, especially at ISO 3200 and below, where the 50D's banding issues don't rear their ugly little heads.
Of course, you can do the same with your 40D, and get even better results there, too.:)
This picture was shot at +1 Ev, ISO 100, with the 50D, and then recovered by pulling -1 Ev, effectively using the sensor 1 stop to the right. Check out the original size version ("All Sizes" button over the sample image) and look for noise in the shadows, or the sky (both the 40D and 50D are notorious for noise in blue skies... blue channel in the sensor is a weak link.)
Just be careful with your metering. If the camera isn't allowed to meter the brightest object in the portion of the scene you want to capture, you're going to clip the highlights and they will be unrecoverable.
The statement that 12 mega pixels is enough for general use has an information theoretic interpretation. namely for the standard lens fields of view and typical range of distance to target that there is no added information in having finer resolution. Or at least the amount of information useful to humans is diminshing.
But we're not even close to such a thing. Not by orders of magnitude. Information useful to humans extends down to the limits resolvable by light and beyond into x-rays and so on. Also, as far as "color" goes, into infrared and ultraviolet. That's why whole classes of microscopes and telescopes and long lenses and macro lenses exist; that information is useful and interesting. And there's no reason whatsoever to limit a camera to see what the unaided human eye could see -- that's just silly.
Look at the macro lens market; a good macro lens and a high resolution camera and you pretty much have a microscope, albeit only a moderate one. Check out this little bugger from my salt aquarium, he's only about 50 thousandths of an inch across. The reason we can see him so well is because of the sensor resolution being high and the lens being nothing at all like the "normal" human FOV/resolution.
You need to print pretty large or crop pretty aggressively to get a significant benefit from extra pixels.
Sometimes, yes, you do. But there's no problem or waste associated with this, and the extra magnification you get with small sensels and good enough glass to resolve to them results in a perfectly usable and quantifiable benefit; resolution. The term "pixel peeper" is a silly one coined by people who can only imagine using the full result of the camera. There's nothing wrong with using the full result, but there's nothing wrong with using a cropped region, either.
For instance, this image of the Orion nebula of mine, taken with a 50D, is a crop that you can't really get much past; I took it at f/2.8 and 200mm, using ISO 6400 and multiple stacked exposures of one second duration. It is only 416 pixels square -- not large at all -- and a lower resolution sensor than the 15mp one in the 50D would have resulted in an even smaller usable crop.
Getting closer - that is, using a longer lens - is problematic, for several reasons. First, as lenses get longer in the same approximate price range, they get slower, so I'd lose my f/2.8 option pretty quickly, or else end up spending a *lot* more for the lens. Secondly, exposure time is limited, as the stars move, or else again, I end up spending more money on a tracking mount (or time building a barnyard door or other homebrew tracker.)
As it stands, the 15 mp of the 50D is directly useful to me in that it gets me a more detailed, closer, image than I would get with, for instance, the 40D, which is 10 mp. I like that.
Basically, any situation where you can't really get any closer to the thing you want to shoot, and you're not filling the frame with the subject, higher resolution sensors help by giving you more detail; you can either use that detail directly, as I do for the nebula shot I linked above, or you can opt to average regions and reduce the noise if the number of pixels really seems to be too many to you, or the noise level seems to demand such treatment.
As with most photography issues, for every person you can find who uses a camera one way, there's someone else who uses it another. Various kinds of noise, spatial resolution, color depth, speed... these are all trade offs with any given sensor technology, and I honestly think there's plenty of room left for manufacturers to push any one at the expense of the others. Olympus wants to go for low noise, I'm all for it -- there's going to be a lot of people who want that above all - but I'm not giving up my 50D's resolution (or my investment in Canon mount lenses) to get it. Plus, it's always entertaining to see what comes next in any one camera's product line. I don't think Canon, the manufacturer of my camera, is likely to be out of places to go quite yet. I'm hoping for a "60D" model that is still 15mp, but lower noise and/or goes beyond the current pushed ISO 12800 limit. If they pull that off, I'll buy.
I'm not sure if I'd buy to go past 15 mp... I've got some good lenses, and 15 mp is really quite a challenge to use well. Plus diffraction blurring affects higher density sensors ability to achieve per pixel sharpness; 15 mp already strongly compromises (via diffraction effects) shots taken at f/11, going past 15 mp is just going to make deeper DOF shots less able to take advantage of the higher densities.
The megapixel wars may be drawing to a close, but they sure aren't doing it at 12 mp. Canon's 50D prvides 15mp in an APS-C sensor size, which is pretty tight, but users are achieving excellent results at that density... it just takes decent lenses, of which there are plenty in the Canon line.
15mp in APS-C format is a square sensel of about 4.6 m.
Canon's 5DmkII, on the other hand, is a full frame sensor, and it sports a whopping 21 mp... and does so by only going to 6.4 m, so there's quite a bit of room left there.
The 50D's got some noise issues, but the 5DmkII is a quiet design and they've clearly got some room to go.
So I think Olympus is actually saying that they can't, or don't want to, compete in the remaining space in the megapixel wars; withdrawal, if you will, rather than an actual end.
But that's precisely the kind of answer you get from this type of engine (or at least, the ones I've written.) You get the info about classification, characteristics, etc., all arranged by relationship(s). The trick is knowing when to cut off the flow of data, because if you don't, eventually you end up with descriptions of molecules, chemicals, and so forth. Generally, it's easy to do - about three levels deep as a default tends to give more information than you need by a bit, and two levels doesn't seem to give enough. Again, that's with engines of my design which attempt to use strictly human classifiers. What Wolfram has done remains to be seen.
Personally, I use a search engine to get concrete answers, more often than not. Real answers would be very much preferred to a flow of opinion and incorrect info. Of course, the engine has to meet such a standard, or its usefulness is compromised, possibly terminally.
Also - just FYI - Zebras are mammals, and it has nothing at all to do with context.:o)
Tom, your concept requires that a process thought up and used in the mind be defined as intelligence, whereas if thought up in the mind and used in a machine, it's not. You need to resolve that conflict before your statement can become meaningful as an arbiter of what is, and what isn't, intelligence.
I maintain that most human action is the product of recall, not original thought. Most of the time, we react to common stimuli with sequences of actions pulled from memory; have a cheeseburger? Bite it, chew it, swallow. It's what you do. You don't think about it, you just do it. In fact, you're probably thinking about something else anyway. Learning was long ago, you're just following a program now, variations minor as per local stimuli. Nothing too exciting. Same for walking, riding a bicycle, driving a car, having sex, kissing, fighting, washing, pretty much you name it, those action sequences, mental and physical, that define most people's days are hardly evidence of current induction or reason.
Solving a new problem engages much more of what we like to think of as intelligence, but even then, much of problem solving can be reduced to associative tricks and heuristics. Only intuition really remains, and I *suspect* that is just more associative action on levels where we can't get directly at the information driving the conclusion. A machine could, so "hunches" aren't a likely consequence of a machine intelligence.
I really don't think there's any good reason to think "intelligence" is anything *other* than machine-like activity. Wetware, sure enough, but a machine nonetheless.
In fact, presuming otherwise smacks of superstition. There is no precedent in objective fact for such a presumption.
The very act of searching through the moves and evaluating them implies (correctly) an excellent understanding of chess. It's not the same as human understanding, but it is an understanding nonetheless. Furthermore, it is superior to most human understanding of the game in that the computer will kick your ass if you attempt a chess contest with it.
Likewise, if you ask a question of the form, "ARE zebras mammals?", in order to retrieve the answer, an algorithm that precisely represents an implementation of "Is this proposed assertion true" in the context of the specific data encoding must be run. For each type of question "HOW MANY...", "DOES...", "CAN thing PERFORM action", specific implementations of those understandings, as well as encoded information marked as to satisfy those understandings, represent AI fragments that taken together, produce a query engine that is progressively more useful as further understandings, relationships and data are added.
Eventually, such aggregates will incorporate enough data and informational encodings / relationships such that interacting with them will be very similar to formal human interaction where one is looking for an answer that may be known to the asked party, but is not known to the asking party.
You can (and I have) write software with a capability to do this in just a few hundred lines, adding code and data complexity with each type of understanding you want the software to have (What is, How many, Are, etc.)
This is not human intelligence. But it is intelligence: a compounding of general knowledge, relationships between that knowledge, and the ability to transform an inquiry into an answer.
Honestly, I think that when an OS manufacturer forgets that current users don't run OS's, they run applications and they use hardware attached to the computer (scanners, cameras, drum machines, etc.).. they've fallen off the rails. I would *never* consider upgrading to Vista or Win7. I keep XP in a sandbox on my Mac and there it will stay, unable to talk to MS (no network connection provided in the sandbox), able to be restored from an image in seconds, and basically 100% functional with all my goodies.
I really can't imagine what they're thinking. If it isn't 99.99% compatible, it isn't getting on my machine. Whatever machine that might be.
As far as I'm concerned with the current crop of DSLRs, we've entered a pretty darned fabulous era of shooting at night in general and the night sky in particular. It's getting to the point where they're trying to squish just the faintest remaining noise in the row/column amps and leakage from the sensels. It's already in the blinking amazing zone, but Canon seems to think they've got another full stop of noise reduction up their sleeve; all the online tech folk are doubtful, but me, I'll wait on the engineers, and will be ready to pony up for any such performance gain in the APS-C size sensors. Could already get it in an FF sensor, but Canon's not built the right balance of features to lure me there. Yet.:)
Liberties which are certainly impinged upon by child abuse. Childhood sexual abuse, even that which never involves force or the threat of force, can render an individual incapable of exercising their right to the pursuit of happiness.
Look here; no one, least of all me, is arguing for child abuse. You're putting up a strawman and beating the heck out of it. I presume you needed the exercise. Means nothing except it serves as a red flag showing you fail to address actual the issues at hand.
Also, honestly, it's nice that you think safety isn't a valid function of government, but according to that logic, we shouldn't have a military. Also, fraud shouldn't be punished; it's a damages issue, not a liberties issue.
So, you don't think an invading force would impinge on your liberties? Want to share what you're smoking? WRT fraud, fair exchange is one of the most important liberties in any free society; fraud trashes that, and so should be punished harshly. Your idea of "liberty" appears to be seriously deficient.
But imposing laws that say "You can't sell rat poison and label it sugar!" or "You can't fuck that 12 year old boy!" don't destroy liberties, and guarantee (or at least improve the odds) of citizens being able to enjoy the liberties they possess.
That's pretty much on target (though not because the boy was 12, rather because at 12, he could never *possibly* pass even a nominal test for informed consent. Though he should certainly be allowed to try.)
But that's not what we're talking about here. In many cases, we're talking about "you, an 18-yo, can't have sex with that 16...17-yo." Right here in my little town, we had a young man sentenced to 12 years suspended (that's a felony conviction) with registration on the sexual offenders list for life, wherever he goes. Because he had sex with his long-term, but a bit younger girlfriend; he broke up with her, and momma promptly went after him. There's that stupid fragging age line again, ruining lives to absolutely no purpose whatsoever.
The only even fractionally rational defense you've put up is a complaint that test for the ability to give informed consent is "too hard" (I'm paraphrasing, but that's precisely what your argument boils down to.)
Somehow, the government finds time to check each and every gun owner, every time they want to buy a gun. Somehow, the government finds time to check each and every driver, repeatedly, until they can pass the driver's test. Somehow, they find time to check each and every passenger against a no-fly list, every time they wish to fly.
Your "it's too hard" argument falls flat on its face in light of the objective facts. In point of fact, once a test was established, it would be a doddle to implement. Certainly no more difficult than driver's licenses, and actually much easier, because these wouldn't need renewal, wouldn't need special bed police, wouldn't need new laws, and would clear the courts of MANY cases that would otherwise come before them.
The only real problem here are the people who think they know that a "certain age" in the mid-teens is some kind of magic line because they've been socialized into thinking so by a perverse and anti-liberty status quo.
To answer the original thrust of your question, if laws aren't for the wellbeing of the citizens, what are they for?
Laws -in the US - were meant to protect the liberties of the citizens. When one citizen impinges on the liberties of another, that's where a law, and intervention, becomes appropriate.
As soon as you decide that the primary role of government is assuring safety, you're into one (of many) entirely distasteful forms of mommying the population. And as you say, this is indeed the position of the majority today. Very sad.
But how is the current place where the age-line is set (in most places 18, with a 16-21 law in place) "completely arbitrary?"
It is arbitrary by its very nature. On the one hand because there are many young people who are informed and able to give intelligent, sensible consent to various types of sexual activity. On the other hand, it is arbitrary because there are many people in their twenties and older who are uninformed, irresponsible, and literally, in the very most precise and intended sense of the term, utterly unable to give informed, reasonable consent. But they're over that ridiculous age line, aren't they?
When the question comes up, the individuals - not the parents, not the state, not the feds - should be able to settle the issue by demonstrating their informed state (anatomy, contraceptive practices and effectiveness, emotional comprehension, etc.) and their ability to understand consequences of sex itself, records like sound, photos and video. These are some of the things that actually bear upon the idea of informed, intelligent consent. Age does not do so in any dependable manner, and so it is a terrible criteria to use.
But it's placed there, generally, for non-arbitrary reasons, that being that in the large majority of cases, that's the most sensible place to draw the line.
And what this actually does is disenfranchises all the outliers; it is the very definition of tyranny by the majority. Person A at age X may be not be ready for sex. Person B may have been ready for years at the same age X. Person A may be seen as protected, but person B has been, pardon my profanity, fucked.
Furthermore, what's the solution that DOESN'T involve some sort of semi-arbitrary decision? You have to place the age of consent somewhere.
No, you don't have to "place the age of consent" somewhere. Why must you have an age of consent at all?
There are perfectly good and reasonable criteria that will do a much better job. I can easily come up with a basic set: Is the person sexually mature in the physical sense? That's something a physical examination will answer a definitive yea or nay to. Do they understand the relationship between some sexual activities and reproduction? Do they understand what STDs are? Do they understand the role of contraception? Do they understand the financial and social consequences of becoming a parent? Do they understand the social consequences of recorded materials becoming public? Do they understand the role of consent? Do they understand that information in these areas changes constantly?
This is the kind of thing that qualifies or disqualifies someone in a realistic, socially useful and productive manner without pretending that the number of years they have been alive somehow magically imbues them (or not) with the resources they need to be responsible, safe sexual partners who are able to give something we can legitimately call informed consent.
well, how is that going to work? Every time you go down to the high school to pick up some 16 year old tail, are you going to give them a thorough mental competency exam?
Determining that your partner can provide informed consent should certainly be part of any relationship startup, as it were. Even one night stands. It'd be nice if people could take a formal examination and carry a card that says they passed same and simply show you said card, but even today, yes, you bet, it's your responsibility to ensure that any "tail" you go after is emotionally mature. Otherwise, one day, you'll wake up next to someone who asks you some form of "what was that thing you did to me last night?" and the nightmares will begin.
in general, the "lines in the sand" aren't the problem.
No, you're quite wrong. They are the root of the problem, legal
First of all, do you really think that (mis)identification as a "pedophile" will be regarded as "trivial" by a potential employer? I rather doubt it, myself.
More generally, there's no incentive for the alleged pedophile to do anything about this, if that's who posted the blog. On the contrary, the more people's lives the registration system inadvertently damages, the more likely it is that it will be reformed.
As long as it is maintained in such a way as to pillory teenagers, as long as it violates any sensible interpretation of ex post facto, as long as it confounds the identification of actual child molesters with consenting, informed people pursuing normal sexual concourse, as long as it is a manifestation of a line in the sand that consists of nothing but arbitrary age - it really does need to be reformed.
Unfortunately, it is a legislative and voter's freebie, an issue where people think last, if at all, about the broader implications of what they are supporting. The public is very easily manipulated on these issues, and I, for one, can't think of a solution to that which doesn't involve an IQ test, a constitutional comprehension test, and a formal disqualification from voting and serving as a lawmaker or judge if the individuals tested can't meet a reasonable standard of competence.
This is the root problem with most democracies. Any two uninformed twerps can outvote an informed expert on the subject at hand, in an environment where expertise is a rare commodity. It's self-destructive for the host society, visibly and obviously flawed at the most basic level, and yet, the problem is rarely addressed. We don't let unqualified drivers direct a car on our streets or install plumbing, but we let any drooling idiot exert a considerable level of control on everyone else's actions though the mechanism of the law. Pitiful, really.
I'm interested to know if Haiku will run under Parallels system virtualization, which itself runs under OSX. Be great for s/w development, as that's what's on my desk.
I'm curious, too, if it is able to run in a full non-virtual memory, non-swapping configuration for speed and reliability. That'd make it a very interesting OS to me for running on actual hardware of its own. There's nothing like watching linux turn into a total turtle after running for too long and building up lots of cache and swap to sour you on the whole process. For instance, if I let my web servers run for, oh, say, a few weeks, then try to start the Gimp... there's going to be a lot of waiting. But boot the machine fresh, start the webserver, even with a very heavy web load, and Gimp snaps right up there.
I will be *very* happy indeed when and if linux matures to the point where we can control how each app is treated for VM/swap, and file caching. None for this one, some for that one, etc.:o)
Sometimes I read a portion of a book out loud - to myself - in order to slow down my thought processes. It is akin, I think, to taking notes when being lectured. The act of reading out loud alters both the rate and the quality of my understanding of the text.
Which, according to Paul Aiken, means I'm a criminal.
Speaking as the owner of one of the oldest SF-specialized literary agencies in the country, and as someone who is quite interested in protecting author's rights for all the obvious reasons, I think Aiken has fallen off the cognitive cliff, and that he does no one - not authors, not consumers, not publishers - any favors by pushing this over-the-top interpretation of what an "audio performance" is.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it really, O oracle of Photography?
Check out the whiskers on this horse. Click "all sizes" above the sample image, then "Original", let it load, and look at the pixel level detail on his chin, for instance.
Being cynical and all pompous is really fun, and I feel you there, but the objective facts don't support your position. 15 mp is perfectly usable.
No, I don't. Just a happy customer. I own Olympus, Canon and Nikon DSLR bodies. Overall, I lean towards Canon and have the most Canon lenses. Canon's progress here is relevant both because of where they're at WRT megapixels, and because the article specified SLR (and I presume they're implying DSLR.)
Just as a tip, I have found that the 50D's noise drops *dramatically* if you expose for +1 Ev (RAW) and then in post, pull back -1 to -1.5 Ev. There are lots more bits of resolution available in the stops as you move to the right (each stop has twice as many levels as the darker one to its left), and this gives the camera a one stop noise advantage over the way Canon hands it to us.
Canon seems to think we need a full stop of headroom in dynamic range over the brightest spot in the image being taken... that's simply not the case unless you're going to be compositing something brighter into the image. Seriously, try it. That +1 Ev will push noise down to an amazing degree, especially at ISO 3200 and below, where the 50D's banding issues don't rear their ugly little heads.
Of course, you can do the same with your 40D, and get even better results there, too. :)
This picture was shot at +1 Ev, ISO 100, with the 50D, and then recovered by pulling -1 Ev, effectively using the sensor 1 stop to the right. Check out the original size version ("All Sizes" button over the sample image) and look for noise in the shadows, or the sky (both the 40D and 50D are notorious for noise in blue skies... blue channel in the sensor is a weak link.)
Just be careful with your metering. If the camera isn't allowed to meter the brightest object in the portion of the scene you want to capture, you're going to clip the highlights and they will be unrecoverable.
But we're not even close to such a thing. Not by orders of magnitude. Information useful to humans extends down to the limits resolvable by light and beyond into x-rays and so on. Also, as far as "color" goes, into infrared and ultraviolet. That's why whole classes of microscopes and telescopes and long lenses and macro lenses exist; that information is useful and interesting. And there's no reason whatsoever to limit a camera to see what the unaided human eye could see -- that's just silly.
Look at the macro lens market; a good macro lens and a high resolution camera and you pretty much have a microscope, albeit only a moderate one. Check out this little bugger from my salt aquarium, he's only about 50 thousandths of an inch across. The reason we can see him so well is because of the sensor resolution being high and the lens being nothing at all like the "normal" human FOV/resolution.
Sometimes, yes, you do. But there's no problem or waste associated with this, and the extra magnification you get with small sensels and good enough glass to resolve to them results in a perfectly usable and quantifiable benefit; resolution. The term "pixel peeper" is a silly one coined by people who can only imagine using the full result of the camera. There's nothing wrong with using the full result, but there's nothing wrong with using a cropped region, either.
For instance, this image of the Orion nebula of mine, taken with a 50D, is a crop that you can't really get much past; I took it at f/2.8 and 200mm, using ISO 6400 and multiple stacked exposures of one second duration. It is only 416 pixels square -- not large at all -- and a lower resolution sensor than the 15mp one in the 50D would have resulted in an even smaller usable crop.
Getting closer - that is, using a longer lens - is problematic, for several reasons. First, as lenses get longer in the same approximate price range, they get slower, so I'd lose my f/2.8 option pretty quickly, or else end up spending a *lot* more for the lens. Secondly, exposure time is limited, as the stars move, or else again, I end up spending more money on a tracking mount (or time building a barnyard door or other homebrew tracker.)
As it stands, the 15 mp of the 50D is directly useful to me in that it gets me a more detailed, closer, image than I would get with, for instance, the 40D, which is 10 mp. I like that.
Basically, any situation where you can't really get any closer to the thing you want to shoot, and you're not filling the frame with the subject, higher resolution sensors help by giving you more detail; you can either use that detail directly, as I do for the nebula shot I linked above, or you can opt to average regions and reduce the noise if the number of pixels really seems to be too many to you, or the noise level seems to demand such treatment.
As with most photography issues, for every person you can find who uses a camera one way, there's someone else who uses it another. Various kinds of noise, spatial resolution, color depth, speed... these are all trade offs with any given sensor technology, and I honestly think there's plenty of room left for manufacturers to push any one at the expense of the others. Olympus wants to go for low noise, I'm all for it -- there's going to be a lot of people who want that above all - but I'm not giving up my 50D's resolution (or my investment in Canon mount lenses) to get it. Plus, it's always entertaining to see what comes next in any one camera's product line. I don't think Canon, the manufacturer of my camera, is likely to be out of places to go quite yet. I'm hoping for a "60D" model that is still 15mp, but lower noise and/or goes beyond the current pushed ISO 12800 limit. If they pull that off, I'll buy.
I'm not sure if I'd buy to go past 15 mp... I've got some good lenses, and 15 mp is really quite a challenge to use well. Plus diffraction blurring affects higher density sensors ability to achieve per pixel sharpness; 15 mp already strongly compromises (via diffraction effects) shots taken at f/11, going past 15 mp is just going to make deeper DOF shots less able to take advantage of the higher densities.
BTW, that blank before the 'm' after the sensel size was the special 'u' used for microns; Slashdot's lame filtering cut it out. Sorry.
The megapixel wars may be drawing to a close, but they sure aren't doing it at 12 mp. Canon's 50D prvides 15mp in an APS-C sensor size, which is pretty tight, but users are achieving excellent results at that density... it just takes decent lenses, of which there are plenty in the Canon line.
15mp in APS-C format is a square sensel of about 4.6 m.
Canon's 5DmkII, on the other hand, is a full frame sensor, and it sports a whopping 21 mp... and does so by only going to 6.4 m, so there's quite a bit of room left there.
The 50D's got some noise issues, but the 5DmkII is a quiet design and they've clearly got some room to go.
So I think Olympus is actually saying that they can't, or don't want to, compete in the remaining space in the megapixel wars; withdrawal, if you will, rather than an actual end.
But that's precisely the kind of answer you get from this type of engine (or at least, the ones I've written.) You get the info about classification, characteristics, etc., all arranged by relationship(s). The trick is knowing when to cut off the flow of data, because if you don't, eventually you end up with descriptions of molecules, chemicals, and so forth. Generally, it's easy to do - about three levels deep as a default tends to give more information than you need by a bit, and two levels doesn't seem to give enough. Again, that's with engines of my design which attempt to use strictly human classifiers. What Wolfram has done remains to be seen.
Personally, I use a search engine to get concrete answers, more often than not. Real answers would be very much preferred to a flow of opinion and incorrect info. Of course, the engine has to meet such a standard, or its usefulness is compromised, possibly terminally.
Also - just FYI - Zebras are mammals, and it has nothing at all to do with context. :o)
Tom, your concept requires that a process thought up and used in the mind be defined as intelligence, whereas if thought up in the mind and used in a machine, it's not. You need to resolve that conflict before your statement can become meaningful as an arbiter of what is, and what isn't, intelligence.
I maintain that most human action is the product of recall, not original thought. Most of the time, we react to common stimuli with sequences of actions pulled from memory; have a cheeseburger? Bite it, chew it, swallow. It's what you do. You don't think about it, you just do it. In fact, you're probably thinking about something else anyway. Learning was long ago, you're just following a program now, variations minor as per local stimuli. Nothing too exciting. Same for walking, riding a bicycle, driving a car, having sex, kissing, fighting, washing, pretty much you name it, those action sequences, mental and physical, that define most people's days are hardly evidence of current induction or reason.
Solving a new problem engages much more of what we like to think of as intelligence, but even then, much of problem solving can be reduced to associative tricks and heuristics. Only intuition really remains, and I *suspect* that is just more associative action on levels where we can't get directly at the information driving the conclusion. A machine could, so "hunches" aren't a likely consequence of a machine intelligence.
I really don't think there's any good reason to think "intelligence" is anything *other* than machine-like activity. Wetware, sure enough, but a machine nonetheless.
In fact, presuming otherwise smacks of superstition. There is no precedent in objective fact for such a presumption.
The very act of searching through the moves and evaluating them implies (correctly) an excellent understanding of chess. It's not the same as human understanding, but it is an understanding nonetheless. Furthermore, it is superior to most human understanding of the game in that the computer will kick your ass if you attempt a chess contest with it.
Likewise, if you ask a question of the form, "ARE zebras mammals?", in order to retrieve the answer, an algorithm that precisely represents an implementation of "Is this proposed assertion true" in the context of the specific data encoding must be run. For each type of question "HOW MANY...", "DOES...", "CAN thing PERFORM action", specific implementations of those understandings, as well as encoded information marked as to satisfy those understandings, represent AI fragments that taken together, produce a query engine that is progressively more useful as further understandings, relationships and data are added.
Eventually, such aggregates will incorporate enough data and informational encodings / relationships such that interacting with them will be very similar to formal human interaction where one is looking for an answer that may be known to the asked party, but is not known to the asking party.
You can (and I have) write software with a capability to do this in just a few hundred lines, adding code and data complexity with each type of understanding you want the software to have (What is, How many, Are, etc.)
This is not human intelligence. But it is intelligence: a compounding of general knowledge, relationships between that knowledge, and the ability to transform an inquiry into an answer.
Honestly, I think that when an OS manufacturer forgets that current users don't run OS's, they run applications and they use hardware attached to the computer (scanners, cameras, drum machines, etc.).. they've fallen off the rails. I would *never* consider upgrading to Vista or Win7. I keep XP in a sandbox on my Mac and there it will stay, unable to talk to MS (no network connection provided in the sandbox), able to be restored from an image in seconds, and basically 100% functional with all my goodies.
I really can't imagine what they're thinking. If it isn't 99.99% compatible, it isn't getting on my machine. Whatever machine that might be.
As far as I'm concerned with the current crop of DSLRs, we've entered a pretty darned fabulous era of shooting at night in general and the night sky in particular. It's getting to the point where they're trying to squish just the faintest remaining noise in the row/column amps and leakage from the sensels. It's already in the blinking amazing zone, but Canon seems to think they've got another full stop of noise reduction up their sleeve; all the online tech folk are doubtful, but me, I'll wait on the engineers, and will be ready to pony up for any such performance gain in the APS-C size sensors. Could already get it in an FF sensor, but Canon's not built the right balance of features to lure me there. Yet. :)
I use them all the time; just shot comet Lulin, they did a great job of exact location:
They could be 15 and 16, with birthdays ONE day apart, and qualify. The law is stupid. Your defense of it is stupid. Stop it.
Look here; no one, least of all me, is arguing for child abuse. You're putting up a strawman and beating the heck out of it. I presume you needed the exercise. Means nothing except it serves as a red flag showing you fail to address actual the issues at hand.
So, you don't think an invading force would impinge on your liberties? Want to share what you're smoking? WRT fraud, fair exchange is one of the most important liberties in any free society; fraud trashes that, and so should be punished harshly. Your idea of "liberty" appears to be seriously deficient.
That's pretty much on target (though not because the boy was 12, rather because at 12, he could never *possibly* pass even a nominal test for informed consent. Though he should certainly be allowed to try.)
But that's not what we're talking about here. In many cases, we're talking about "you, an 18-yo, can't have sex with that 16...17-yo." Right here in my little town, we had a young man sentenced to 12 years suspended (that's a felony conviction) with registration on the sexual offenders list for life, wherever he goes. Because he had sex with his long-term, but a bit younger girlfriend; he broke up with her, and momma promptly went after him. There's that stupid fragging age line again, ruining lives to absolutely no purpose whatsoever.
The only even fractionally rational defense you've put up is a complaint that test for the ability to give informed consent is "too hard" (I'm paraphrasing, but that's precisely what your argument boils down to.)
Somehow, the government finds time to check each and every gun owner, every time they want to buy a gun. Somehow, the government finds time to check each and every driver, repeatedly, until they can pass the driver's test. Somehow, they find time to check each and every passenger against a no-fly list, every time they wish to fly.
Your "it's too hard" argument falls flat on its face in light of the objective facts. In point of fact, once a test was established, it would be a doddle to implement. Certainly no more difficult than driver's licenses, and actually much easier, because these wouldn't need renewal, wouldn't need special bed police, wouldn't need new laws, and would clear the courts of MANY cases that would otherwise come before them.
The only real problem here are the people who think they know that a "certain age" in the mid-teens is some kind of magic line because they've been socialized into thinking so by a perverse and anti-liberty status quo.
Laws -in the US - were meant to protect the liberties of the citizens. When one citizen impinges on the liberties of another, that's where a law, and intervention, becomes appropriate.
As soon as you decide that the primary role of government is assuring safety, you're into one (of many) entirely distasteful forms of mommying the population. And as you say, this is indeed the position of the majority today. Very sad.
It is arbitrary by its very nature. On the one hand because there are many young people who are informed and able to give intelligent, sensible consent to various types of sexual activity. On the other hand, it is arbitrary because there are many people in their twenties and older who are uninformed, irresponsible, and literally, in the very most precise and intended sense of the term, utterly unable to give informed, reasonable consent. But they're over that ridiculous age line, aren't they?
When the question comes up, the individuals - not the parents, not the state, not the feds - should be able to settle the issue by demonstrating their informed state (anatomy, contraceptive practices and effectiveness, emotional comprehension, etc.) and their ability to understand consequences of sex itself, records like sound, photos and video. These are some of the things that actually bear upon the idea of informed, intelligent consent. Age does not do so in any dependable manner, and so it is a terrible criteria to use.
And what this actually does is disenfranchises all the outliers; it is the very definition of tyranny by the majority. Person A at age X may be not be ready for sex. Person B may have been ready for years at the same age X. Person A may be seen as protected, but person B has been, pardon my profanity, fucked.
No, you don't have to "place the age of consent" somewhere. Why must you have an age of consent at all?
There are perfectly good and reasonable criteria that will do a much better job. I can easily come up with a basic set: Is the person sexually mature in the physical sense? That's something a physical examination will answer a definitive yea or nay to. Do they understand the relationship between some sexual activities and reproduction? Do they understand what STDs are? Do they understand the role of contraception? Do they understand the financial and social consequences of becoming a parent? Do they understand the social consequences of recorded materials becoming public? Do they understand the role of consent? Do they understand that information in these areas changes constantly?
This is the kind of thing that qualifies or disqualifies someone in a realistic, socially useful and productive manner without pretending that the number of years they have been alive somehow magically imbues them (or not) with the resources they need to be responsible, safe sexual partners who are able to give something we can legitimately call informed consent.
Determining that your partner can provide informed consent should certainly be part of any relationship startup, as it were. Even one night stands. It'd be nice if people could take a formal examination and carry a card that says they passed same and simply show you said card, but even today, yes, you bet, it's your responsibility to ensure that any "tail" you go after is emotionally mature. Otherwise, one day, you'll wake up next to someone who asks you some form of "what was that thing you did to me last night?" and the nightmares will begin.
No, you're quite wrong. They are the root of the problem, legal
Actually, I agree. However, at least there are some performance related criteria. There are none for voters or legislators.
First of all, do you really think that (mis)identification as a "pedophile" will be regarded as "trivial" by a potential employer? I rather doubt it, myself.
More generally, there's no incentive for the alleged pedophile to do anything about this, if that's who posted the blog. On the contrary, the more people's lives the registration system inadvertently damages, the more likely it is that it will be reformed.
As long as it is maintained in such a way as to pillory teenagers, as long as it violates any sensible interpretation of ex post facto, as long as it confounds the identification of actual child molesters with consenting, informed people pursuing normal sexual concourse, as long as it is a manifestation of a line in the sand that consists of nothing but arbitrary age - it really does need to be reformed.
Unfortunately, it is a legislative and voter's freebie, an issue where people think last, if at all, about the broader implications of what they are supporting. The public is very easily manipulated on these issues, and I, for one, can't think of a solution to that which doesn't involve an IQ test, a constitutional comprehension test, and a formal disqualification from voting and serving as a lawmaker or judge if the individuals tested can't meet a reasonable standard of competence.
This is the root problem with most democracies. Any two uninformed twerps can outvote an informed expert on the subject at hand, in an environment where expertise is a rare commodity. It's self-destructive for the host society, visibly and obviously flawed at the most basic level, and yet, the problem is rarely addressed. We don't let unqualified drivers direct a car on our streets or install plumbing, but we let any drooling idiot exert a considerable level of control on everyone else's actions though the mechanism of the law. Pitiful, really.
Wonderful news, thank you. Not the caffeine, the compatibility. Well, I suppose for you, the caffeine... never mind.
I'll look into that -- thank you.
The machine has four gigs. It's a busy webserver, that's all.
I'm interested to know if Haiku will run under Parallels system virtualization, which itself runs under OSX. Be great for s/w development, as that's what's on my desk.
I'm curious, too, if it is able to run in a full non-virtual memory, non-swapping configuration for speed and reliability. That'd make it a very interesting OS to me for running on actual hardware of its own. There's nothing like watching linux turn into a total turtle after running for too long and building up lots of cache and swap to sour you on the whole process. For instance, if I let my web servers run for, oh, say, a few weeks, then try to start the Gimp... there's going to be a lot of waiting. But boot the machine fresh, start the webserver, even with a very heavy web load, and Gimp snaps right up there.
I will be *very* happy indeed when and if linux matures to the point where we can control how each app is treated for VM/swap, and file caching. None for this one, some for that one, etc. :o)
Sometimes I read a portion of a book out loud - to myself - in order to slow down my thought processes. It is akin, I think, to taking notes when being lectured. The act of reading out loud alters both the rate and the quality of my understanding of the text.
Which, according to Paul Aiken, means I'm a criminal.
Speaking as the owner of one of the oldest SF-specialized literary agencies in the country, and as someone who is quite interested in protecting author's rights for all the obvious reasons, I think Aiken has fallen off the cognitive cliff, and that he does no one - not authors, not consumers, not publishers - any favors by pushing this over-the-top interpretation of what an "audio performance" is.
Software licensing (GPL or any other) is DRM; it is attempting to manage the rights of the software creator(s) by threat of legal action.
Having said that, speaking as a developer, if you put too many landmines in the road, then I simply decline to take the road.