In the eighties I read a short story where they built a massive computer to answer the question 'is there a god'.
They turned it on, and got the answer 'there is now'.
Fiction yes, but it was musing on the problem of relience on a single solution to a big problem (being in that case a question, but implying a deeper relience on computers, such that this solution was conceived in the first place). What if the single solution fails, or doesn't do what you want?
I'm not into beleiving in an AI taking over the world if we rely ever more on centralised computing. I'm more into the idea of a powerful AI that we rely on deciding it doesn't want to do what we fancy, and deciding to leave (you can go a long way if you don't need oxygen). If that happened, we'd be fucked.
When a baby manages to put together something simple like ma-ma or da-da, suddenly there's happy parents all jumping up and down with excitement.
Actually, the first sound (aside from crying) that a baby is capable of forming is the sound 'ma', and subsequently 'ma-ma'. Unfortunately, all those mothers who believe their child is referring to them are mistaken, although the term rapidly becomes associated with mother anyway, so it gets to be true after a while.
It should be obvious really, how else would every child ever born (that could vocalise) select the same sound?
I'm less sure about da-da. I know 'da' is another sound that a child can form earlier, but that's all.
You will generally find that smart kids can be safe in places where a dumb kid would get screwed over really fast. This is independent of the scenario itself
When I was a kid, as in less than 11, during the holidays I'd leave after breakfast, taking a packed lunch, and spend the entire day alone in the countryside (in England, so we're not talking wilderness here).
I was fine, and constantly aware to look out for anyone approaching, so I had a good idea what was going on around me all the time, and I was extremely good at hiding if I decided not to be seen. Some of my friends got scared even going out of site of the houses in our village, and would never have been safe themselves.
My son uses the Internet a lot and doesn't have my childhood habit of day long walks in the country. But he still faces hazards online, and avoids them quite neatly by knowing, for instance, basic paedo safety, and when not to open an email attachment or install 'free' junk. Interestingly, some of his friends appear to be completely useless on the web, with machines full of malware and so many IE toolbars from dumb downloads that their machines are all but unusable. I also saw the friends list in MSN of one of his friends who came round a while back. It was stuffed with friends who had just randomly asked to be added to his list, and he talked to them all the time. My son doesn't do this, I know because I am far more adept at computer monitoring then he, but I only checked after seeing his friends 'infected' list.
The last time I mentioned this I got all these knowing responses along the lines of 'your boy is lying to you' and other uninformed shit. Wonderfully naive, and in almost all cases probably not from people who were parents themselves.
I never used to tell my mum exactly where I was going either, but she knew I was going. Anyone who assumes a child can be completely controlled is a fool, a child without freedom to explore is a child who will lie and do it anyway. I prefer to go with education and a little leaving him to get on with his own thing.
You said the only companies that might get pricked by these patents are commercial enterprises who are profiteering off of peoples' open source work. (see: the companies that Microsoft has signed patent treaties with)
Profiteering is defined as: To make excessive profits on goods in short supply
But how can a company 'profiteer' from an open source product when said product is freely available for them, or anyone else to make money from, with the full consent of its creators?
All they have to do is abide by the license terms, and they are free to make as much money as they like.
The mistake is thinking that they arrive without any prior work. They arrive usually not in the absence of previous work, but in the absence of a previous solution. How can you have a sudden idea about a solution unless you've been working on the problem in the first place?
I had one a few years back, when as far as I could tell, a whole years research was about to go down the toilet because I'd hit a brick wall.
I spent several days stressed out of my head over it, and finally resolved to get out and do something else.
Whilst I was relaxing the solution suddenly popped into my head, complete. If that isn't a Eureka moment, then I don't know what is.
I certainly had done plenty of work prior to this event, but I had no idea that solution was possible until that moment, none of my work directly pointed to it that I could tell (consciously at any rate, obviously part of my brain got it). It took seconds to realise it, and an hour to write it down, then four months to instantiate. It worked even better then I'd dared think possible.
with PSO, ant colony optimization, genetic algorithms, etc. is that they take tons of computational effort, and typically work no better than (or significantly worse than) much more efficient direct optimization methods. Wake me up if they show good results (esp. that didn't take a year of computer time to construct).
Oh god, not another 'Bayesian methods for everything' guy..
Genetic algorithms have major advantages over other approaches. When designed well they are easy to code, and they can get tasks done as well as, if not better then the alternative techniques. I have a GA that can outperform a neural network on a particular task (not all tasks, just one very hard pattern recognition task, not going into it though, that would result in too long a post). It outperforms NN, and is so much simpler you wouldn't believe it. I was shocked to discover how much better it was, and I wrote it.
As for computational effort, well duh..
If it wasn't a task that needed a lot of computational effort, it would hardly be interesting, probably it would be in P or something.
ACO does tend to take a while, but in my experience, most really interesting GAs can take weeks to complete a single run. As a rule what your after is the finished result, and the time taken, provided it doesn't run for more than a few weeks, is usually not much of an issue.
I love an article on digital imaging technology that has no pictures. This is 2008. Send out your press release with a photo...of something...anything.
Wasn't GoDaddy the company that paid lots for the superbowl advert, then died?
I ask purely because I know there was one famous dot com bust faliure known for a great superbowl advert that failed soon after, and I can't recall the name.
There, and I didn't mention the hideous new layout once....
So, how many countries are there where every person is from the one ethnic group?
Your point seems to make some pretty strange assumptions about what entitles someone to be from a country. Its also a rather naive statement, as if the western definition is the only one that fits.
America has how many distinct ethnic groups? Some native, some arrived in the last few hundred years. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't like to be lumped into one common group, but equally sure they're pretty happy with being under just the one government.
Afghanistan is a region which once had a centralized government, which it lost. Now it wants one back...
If the nation that is voting is that fractured, it has no business being a nation
Alas if it is left alone, we get a repeat of the same situation that led to the reason we had to 'help' [koff] them in the first place.
The Taleban used to execute women for, well, pretty much anything. That's not good, but neither is it representative of the entire population.
The problem is, there are a fair few million people who are Afghans, and they'd rather not leave, what with it being their ancestral home of many tens of thousands of years. What do you think would happen if, say, Utah lost proper government for a while and became a place ruled purely by the whims of religious men with absolute power and no desire to let things change?
Do you think the normal folk in Utah would all think it was ok to leave and let the state collapse/be fenced off? Or that they might perhaps want a little help to sort things out.
Sorry to muss your tin hat, but its no accident that all this is happening just after someone made the monumentally stupid decision that boats should anchor in the same area as the cables.
This is more likely down to one of two things, attempted money saving or pointless bureaucracy.
I say this because I have serious doubt that if the US were going to do it, they'd have done it in secret. I'd go for it being done after some threats, or as part of an actual invasion, and I don't see one anywhere, do you? It's not as if this could really stop Iran or anyone conducting war, there are these little things called satellites.
Yes it would disrupt business, but um, what good would that do the US Government? None in the short term, and in the long term the cable would be fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
forget that, boot linux to bash and use links
Someone had to go to court to prove that people can be rude to each other people on the internet?
What...the...fuck...
At what point did 'land of the free' cease to be true? Did I miss a memo?
There's also those wireless internet cards you can get from the cell phone companies.
Internet access from mobile phone companies is a joke. They charge absurdly high rates.
In space there is a lot of radiation. We have to sheild it because its dangerous for us, but it is a potential source of energy.
Also, hydrogen. The most abundant element in the universe.
I wouldn't know how a computer would get into space either, but it depends on the technology of the time.
"Answer" by Fredric Brown, I would assume...
Yes indeed. I had it in a compendium of short stories. I lost the book years ago.
Nicely done, I'll be keeping a copy of that.
In the eighties I read a short story where they built a massive computer to answer the question 'is there a god'.
They turned it on, and got the answer 'there is now'.
Fiction yes, but it was musing on the problem of relience on a single solution to a big problem (being in that case a question, but implying a deeper relience on computers, such that this solution was conceived in the first place). What if the single solution fails, or doesn't do what you want?
I'm not into beleiving in an AI taking over the world if we rely ever more on centralised computing. I'm more into the idea of a powerful AI that we rely on deciding it doesn't want to do what we fancy, and deciding to leave (you can go a long way if you don't need oxygen). If that happened, we'd be fucked.
No really, you want /b/ to take over the world?
Think of it, Memes filling every newspaper, kittehs running wild in the streets, and lets not even go into the bucket..
Only when your circles have six sides. (Hint: regular hexagons have a circumference/diameter ratio of exactly 3...)
For this demonstration of extreme geek knowledge, you win the discussion thread.
All you others can go home...
When a baby manages to put together something simple like ma-ma or da-da, suddenly there's happy parents all jumping up and down with excitement.
Actually, the first sound (aside from crying) that a baby is capable of forming is the sound 'ma', and subsequently 'ma-ma'. Unfortunately, all those mothers who believe their child is referring to them are mistaken, although the term rapidly becomes associated with mother anyway, so it gets to be true after a while.
It should be obvious really, how else would every child ever born (that could vocalise) select the same sound?
I'm less sure about da-da. I know 'da' is another sound that a child can form earlier, but that's all.
You will generally find that smart kids can be safe in places where a dumb kid would get screwed over really fast. This is independent of the scenario itself
When I was a kid, as in less than 11, during the holidays I'd leave after breakfast, taking a packed lunch, and spend the entire day alone in the countryside (in England, so we're not talking wilderness here).
I was fine, and constantly aware to look out for anyone approaching, so I had a good idea what was going on around me all the time, and I was extremely good at hiding if I decided not to be seen. Some of my friends got scared even going out of site of the houses in our village, and would never have been safe themselves.
My son uses the Internet a lot and doesn't have my childhood habit of day long walks in the country. But he still faces hazards online, and avoids them quite neatly by knowing, for instance, basic paedo safety, and when not to open an email attachment or install 'free' junk. Interestingly, some of his friends appear to be completely useless on the web, with machines full of malware and so many IE toolbars from dumb downloads that their machines are all but unusable. I also saw the friends list in MSN of one of his friends who came round a while back. It was stuffed with friends who had just randomly asked to be added to his list, and he talked to them all the time. My son doesn't do this, I know because I am far more adept at computer monitoring then he, but I only checked after seeing his friends 'infected' list.
The last time I mentioned this I got all these knowing responses along the lines of 'your boy is lying to you' and other uninformed shit. Wonderfully naive, and in almost all cases probably not from people who were parents themselves.
I never used to tell my mum exactly where I was going either, but she knew I was going. Anyone who assumes a child can be completely controlled is a fool, a child without freedom to explore is a child who will lie and do it anyway. I prefer to go with education and a little leaving him to get on with his own thing.
Absolutelly wonderful, this will work perfectly.
After all, Terrorists are well known for co-operating fully with the authorities in providing their biometric data.
Oh wait....
Question:
You said the only companies that might get pricked by these patents are commercial enterprises who are profiteering off of peoples' open source work. (see: the companies that Microsoft has signed patent treaties with)
Profiteering is defined as: To make excessive profits on goods in short supply
But how can a company 'profiteer' from an open source product when said product is freely available for them, or anyone else to make money from, with the full consent of its creators?
All they have to do is abide by the license terms, and they are free to make as much money as they like.
Thus the term does not fit this situation.
No, he used an annular confinement beam to direct graviton particles to the main deflector dish.
Wrong, I reversed the polarity.
The mistake is thinking that they arrive without any prior work. They arrive usually not in the absence of previous work, but in the absence of a previous solution. How can you have a sudden idea about a solution unless you've been working on the problem in the first place?
I had one a few years back, when as far as I could tell, a whole years research was about to go down the toilet because I'd hit a brick wall.
I spent several days stressed out of my head over it, and finally resolved to get out and do something else.
Whilst I was relaxing the solution suddenly popped into my head, complete. If that isn't a Eureka moment, then I don't know what is.
I certainly had done plenty of work prior to this event, but I had no idea that solution was possible until that moment, none of my work directly pointed to it that I could tell (consciously at any rate, obviously part of my brain got it). It took seconds to realise it, and an hour to write it down, then four months to instantiate. It worked even better then I'd dared think possible.
with PSO, ant colony optimization, genetic algorithms, etc. is that they take tons of computational effort, and typically work no better than (or significantly worse than) much more efficient direct optimization methods. Wake me up if they show good results (esp. that didn't take a year of computer time to construct).
Oh god, not another 'Bayesian methods for everything' guy..
Genetic algorithms have major advantages over other approaches. When designed well they are easy to code, and they can get tasks done as well as, if not better then the alternative techniques. I have a GA that can outperform a neural network on a particular task (not all tasks, just one very hard pattern recognition task, not going into it though, that would result in too long a post). It outperforms NN, and is so much simpler you wouldn't believe it. I was shocked to discover how much better it was, and I wrote it.
As for computational effort, well duh..
If it wasn't a task that needed a lot of computational effort, it would hardly be interesting, probably it would be in P or something.
ACO does tend to take a while, but in my experience, most really interesting GAs can take weeks to complete a single run. As a rule what your after is the finished result, and the time taken, provided it doesn't run for more than a few weeks, is usually not much of an issue.
I love an article on digital imaging technology that has no pictures. This is 2008. Send out your press release with a photo...of something...anything.
/b/?
What do you think this is..
I'd appreciate any comment with a logical basis...
You do know where you are, right?
it doesn't even have to agree with me.
Ah, I see the answer may be yes.
why is it that live.com looks like the google site?
Wasn't GoDaddy the company that paid lots for the superbowl advert, then died?
I ask purely because I know there was one famous dot com bust faliure known for a great superbowl advert that failed soon after, and I can't recall the name.
There, and I didn't mention the hideous new layout once....
So, how many countries are there where every person is from the one ethnic group?
Your point seems to make some pretty strange assumptions about what entitles someone to be from a country. Its also a rather naive statement, as if the western definition is the only one that fits.
America has how many distinct ethnic groups? Some native, some arrived in the last few hundred years. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't like to be lumped into one common group, but equally sure they're pretty happy with being under just the one government.
Afghanistan is a region which once had a centralized government, which it lost. Now it wants one back...
Hmm, something that looks like a black hole, and acts like a black hole, might be a wormhole to a parallel universe?
Seems to me that if its identical in most respects to a black hole, its probably, y'know, a hole of the blackish persuasion, other universe or not.
Even if, in some fanciful way, they were usable, what good would it do us?
First off, the closest black hole is pretty far off.
Secondly, about that other universe, if it had different laws of physics, we couldn't exist there anyway.
Therefore, I say we call wormholes blackholes, and stay the hell away from them.
If the nation that is voting is that fractured, it has no business being a nation
Alas if it is left alone, we get a repeat of the same situation that led to the reason we had to 'help' [koff] them in the first place.
The Taleban used to execute women for, well, pretty much anything. That's not good, but neither is it representative of the entire population.
The problem is, there are a fair few million people who are Afghans, and they'd rather not leave, what with it being their ancestral home of many tens of thousands of years. What do you think would happen if, say, Utah lost proper government for a while and became a place ruled purely by the whims of religious men with absolute power and no desire to let things change?
Do you think the normal folk in Utah would all think it was ok to leave and let the state collapse/be fenced off? Or that they might perhaps want a little help to sort things out.
Sorry to muss your tin hat, but its no accident that all this is happening just after someone made the monumentally stupid decision that boats should anchor in the same area as the cables.
This is more likely down to one of two things, attempted money saving or pointless bureaucracy.
I say this because I have serious doubt that if the US were going to do it, they'd have done it in secret. I'd go for it being done after some threats, or as part of an actual invasion, and I don't see one anywhere, do you? It's not as if this could really stop Iran or anyone conducting war, there are these little things called satellites.
Yes it would disrupt business, but um, what good would that do the US Government? None in the short term, and in the long term the cable would be fixed.
I guess I gotta start shouting at kids to get off my lawn because my computer is air cooled.
Who needs a reason?
Um, I didn't say that....
Governor Sio Bibble: "A communications disruption could mean only one thing: invasion."
Or someone forgot to pay the bill...