It may sound funny, but in fact it is the perfect way to browse the WWW without subjecting yourself to stupid privacy-offending beacons used by ad networks etc.
Swarm intelligence is what I research. PSO is not really an algorithm, it is a metaheuristic. Of course when I talk with non-engineers I might also use the terms algorithm or recipe, but I would expect correct terminology on a site whose readership contains a large percentage of CS/EE degree holders.
Some people believe that they should be totally invisible, always using pseudonyms, but this can be against them: as eponymous blogs and webpages become more common, employers and potential business partners will start being extremely distrustful towards people who maintain no online presence under their real name.
and had posters of Mao along with his poetry all over
I have seen that Chinese students, once away from the evil communist terrorist machine that dominates their country, easily admit that Mao was a madman and that their government makes dissidents feel uncomfortable. They all understand under what dictatorship they live in, but they have no power to do anything.
Engineers who feel superior or all-powerful aren't good engineers: the first principle of engineering is to understand your limitations, the limitations of funding, and the limitations of your equipment etc, then to design around these limitations as to achieve your goal in a near-optimum manner. You must be mindful of the limitations around you to be a good engineer.
Except if we say that engineers may merely feel superior to sociologists, in which case I would tend to agree, as sociologists, although they study some of the most complex phenomena, tend not to use the right tools to analyse and operationalise these phenomena, ending up writing huge documents with little meaning (an equation can say as much as a hundred pages of text, but we see so few equations in social research that makes us wonder whether sociologists keep writing so much just for the sake of writing or whether they are paid by the word).
Everything with terrorism in its title attracts grant money from clueless administrators these days. Add to the mix the classic everything but harmonious relationship between sociology and engineering, and professionally-looking academic flaming between warring disciplines and academics who don't understand each other* is what you get.
* sociologists have no idea what an engineer is, but in a similar way engineers also don't understand sociologists. I have studied both (but if I had to keep just one discipline, that would be engineering/science!) and I can see this misunderstanding from both sides every day.
I opened the paper intending to read it, but the moment I saw that they quote an evil terrorist and FBI most wanted listee in such a way as to make a negative comment on the engineering mindset, I decided it isn't worth spending my time reading their paper. Quoting a terrorist adds no academic value, and papers are not supposed to create an atmosphere like cinema movies do. It really looks very irresponsible to me to see a terrorist being quoted in a paper which could very well be archived in journals for many years to come. We don't want future archaeologists to think that the terrorists were considered important or respectful figures in our society. We don't want the names of terrorists to remain for years in print, except for court records and criminal proceedings. Nevertheless, I skimmed the paper's figures and section titles and it sounds interesting, but the way they seem to present their study and the subconscious connotations that seem to propagate through the paper (through the terrorist quote and other choices of words etc) make me not wanting to read it.
I think we need a way to respond to papers just like we can post video replies on YouTube. My response to them would be a paper analysing the general intelligence of graduates correlated with their degree. Anyone wanting to bet who (engineers or sociologists) would score higher? Tip: The paper itself contains a table suggesting that Arts graduates are more likely to be deeply religious, while natural sciences graduates are more likely to oppose religion.
The public has the right to know what they are breathing. This law would deny them this right. If I want to move into a new neighbourhood, I have the right to know about the quality of the air there and other environmental measures. Merely taking a meter and reading the screen does nothing bad.
If a government tells people not to have Geiger counters, then I believe it is reasonable to expect the government to use the populace as lab mice by throwing them radiation without them knowing, or put nuclear waste on their backyard, or transport nuclear warheads through public roads. I'm not saying that any current government wants to do this stuff, but I feel highly suspicious.
I don't see much difference between robots and humans, we are just made of protein instead of metal and we are programmed with DNA instead of code. Perhaps anything which is sufficiently complex is alive, so if this hypothesis is true then we can have self-aware mathematical formulas (so think twice before erasing these equations from the blackboard!), self-aware collections of carbons and sugars (animals and plants), and yes, self-aware robots as well. Maybe self-awareness and "life" are nothing else than emergent phenomena of complex adaptive systems on the edge of chaos. If that's true, then robots will at some point become complex enough to warrant having legal rights and citizenship. While I don't believe we will ever be able to build a self-aware robot from ground up, I do believe that existing fields such as alife and the new science of plectics will enable us to understand the dynamics that can lead to intelligence through emergence and therefore will give us the tools to build a simple robot which will evolve to full intelligence by itself and become comparable or even superior to humans. The moment this happens, the military ethicists will have much to discuss for years. What their conclusion will be, I don't know, but probably they will move on an axis defined by the two positions that it is either bad to kill anything which is self-aware (robots or humans), which is also my preference, or that since humans are robots as well then it is ok to kill anything since anything is a kind of robot, after all.
So just because they are angry with some persons who share music and they can't find exactly who they are, they want to make the whole society pay for them. This is a form of evil communism, which denies the right of every person to be an individual and considers everyone to be the property of the state or society. The idea is: You, although you have not done anything wrong, belong to the society, and some other members of the society have done something we don't like, therefore since you are also a member of the society and we cannot catch the person who did what we don't like, you will also have to pay a portion of the price. In a free society, individuals have their own rights and responsibilities as individuals, and people should not be held responsible for what their neighbour does. A society adopts a communist mindset the moment it starts holding you responsible because your neighbour did something illegal. It is the most extreme offence against individualism and the greatest minority: the individual.
The cost of a domain is really so insignificant that I still see no legitimate reason in tasting domains. Even the toilet paper a company buys costs more than a domain!
Although I don't host any questionable content, I moved my server from the US to Denmark, and I think it was a very good decision. The Danish business culture is very ethical and even if the ISP runs on a budget and cannot keep 100% uptime, or even if they suck it up on network engineering, they *will* always send you reports detailing why your server went offline last time. Interestingly this is something I have also read in academic research regarding the Danish culture, they have no problem to be open about their failures, which is something I admire greatly.
It is a logical fallacy to think that people will be unethical by default if given freedom. Ethics emerge out of the blue in free societies, because they are in high demand, and unethical companies lose their clients.
We have so many instructors that are worried about protecting their "intellectual property," as if it was academic gold. I tell them make you stuff open, share it with the public. Who cares if somebody at some other college uses our stuff?
True educators want to share their material as much as they can. Unfortunately many universities are still operating with a guild mentality. Free academic communities, such as the one I am trying to bootstrap (CosmosWiki), and free learning communities, such as Wikiversity (from Wikimedia that also hosts Wikipedia) can help to change this mentality and promote a more open approach to academia, including research and education.
In fact I myself avoid sites with generic names, as this is a good sign for me that the site is maintained by non-nerds or is full of flashy ads, so possibly there is nothing of interest there.
Venter says that they will need something similar to high level programming tools in order to accomplish useful modifications.
A low-level language acts as an effective gatekeeper against those who don't understand the underlying science. I'm not sure what would happen if script kiddies and self-appointed "experts" had access to a high-level language.
Do you what distinguishes good managers from bad managers? entrepreneurship. You need to demonstrate some self-start ability. Of course you need some experience in managing in order to demonstrate such an ability at a level admissible into a hiring interview. The worst way to get it is to ask a company CEO who doesn't know you trust you (ie to risk a few millions) in their organisational chart. The best way is to create your own experience. How? It's easier than it sounds:
Get into a not-for-profit or become a volunteer and help NGOs in managing
Get into a professional association (like CMI, Chartered Management Institute where I am a student member, or IEEE, ACM, IET etc where I am also a member) and participate in the elections and serve in a committee or something
Serve in the student government (if you are doing an MSc in Management like me or something)
Get into consulting
Start your own small business
Get into open source or similar communities (eg become a project manager, admin, or something like that and then try to collect evidence that you can help and inspire people do their work etc)
Read some management books and become a management guru: write a newsletter about management, write a few books, etc!
I have came to the conclusion that the modern academia, including universities and non-open-access journals, but also the wider education community (including high school etc) is not what it ought to be. In many ways I see modern universities as echoes of the old guilds and monasteries. They evolved through them, but unfortunately the academic community has failed to get rid of many of the social outlooks and conventions of the dark age.
For me the only solution is to make it free, in the open-source way. Wikipedia opened the way for a better encyclopedia. Open access journals and some future free academic community will soon do the same for academic research and education. I am actually trying to bootstrap such a community, if you search a bit you can find it. Wikimedia also has a similar project.
Slashdot Mirror
It may sound funny, but in fact it is the perfect way to browse the WWW without subjecting yourself to stupid privacy-offending beacons used by ad networks etc.
If people had brains they would vote for Dr Ron Paul.
Swarm intelligence is what I research. PSO is not really an algorithm, it is a metaheuristic. Of course when I talk with non-engineers I might also use the terms algorithm or recipe, but I would expect correct terminology on a site whose readership contains a large percentage of CS/EE degree holders.
Some people believe that they should be totally invisible, always using pseudonyms, but this can be against them: as eponymous blogs and webpages become more common, employers and potential business partners will start being extremely distrustful towards people who maintain no online presence under their real name.
I have seen that Chinese students, once away from the evil communist terrorist machine that dominates their country, easily admit that Mao was a madman and that their government makes dissidents feel uncomfortable. They all understand under what dictatorship they live in, but they have no power to do anything.
Engineers who feel superior or all-powerful aren't good engineers: the first principle of engineering is to understand your limitations, the limitations of funding, and the limitations of your equipment etc, then to design around these limitations as to achieve your goal in a near-optimum manner. You must be mindful of the limitations around you to be a good engineer.
Except if we say that engineers may merely feel superior to sociologists, in which case I would tend to agree, as sociologists, although they study some of the most complex phenomena, tend not to use the right tools to analyse and operationalise these phenomena, ending up writing huge documents with little meaning (an equation can say as much as a hundred pages of text, but we see so few equations in social research that makes us wonder whether sociologists keep writing so much just for the sake of writing or whether they are paid by the word).
Everything with terrorism in its title attracts grant money from clueless administrators these days. Add to the mix the classic everything but harmonious relationship between sociology and engineering, and professionally-looking academic flaming between warring disciplines and academics who don't understand each other* is what you get.
* sociologists have no idea what an engineer is, but in a similar way engineers also don't understand sociologists. I have studied both (but if I had to keep just one discipline, that would be engineering/science!) and I can see this misunderstanding from both sides every day.
I opened the paper intending to read it, but the moment I saw that they quote an evil terrorist and FBI most wanted listee in such a way as to make a negative comment on the engineering mindset, I decided it isn't worth spending my time reading their paper. Quoting a terrorist adds no academic value, and papers are not supposed to create an atmosphere like cinema movies do. It really looks very irresponsible to me to see a terrorist being quoted in a paper which could very well be archived in journals for many years to come. We don't want future archaeologists to think that the terrorists were considered important or respectful figures in our society. We don't want the names of terrorists to remain for years in print, except for court records and criminal proceedings. Nevertheless, I skimmed the paper's figures and section titles and it sounds interesting, but the way they seem to present their study and the subconscious connotations that seem to propagate through the paper (through the terrorist quote and other choices of words etc) make me not wanting to read it.
I think we need a way to respond to papers just like we can post video replies on YouTube. My response to them would be a paper analysing the general intelligence of graduates correlated with their degree. Anyone wanting to bet who (engineers or sociologists) would score higher? Tip: The paper itself contains a table suggesting that Arts graduates are more likely to be deeply religious, while natural sciences graduates are more likely to oppose religion.
The public has the right to know what they are breathing. This law would deny them this right. If I want to move into a new neighbourhood, I have the right to know about the quality of the air there and other environmental measures. Merely taking a meter and reading the screen does nothing bad.
I was really surprised by that. Am I the only one who finds the price terribly cheap?
If a government tells people not to have Geiger counters, then I believe it is reasonable to expect the government to use the populace as lab mice by throwing them radiation without them knowing, or put nuclear waste on their backyard, or transport nuclear warheads through public roads. I'm not saying that any current government wants to do this stuff, but I feel highly suspicious.
I don't see much difference between robots and humans, we are just made of protein instead of metal and we are programmed with DNA instead of code. Perhaps anything which is sufficiently complex is alive, so if this hypothesis is true then we can have self-aware mathematical formulas (so think twice before erasing these equations from the blackboard!), self-aware collections of carbons and sugars (animals and plants), and yes, self-aware robots as well. Maybe self-awareness and "life" are nothing else than emergent phenomena of complex adaptive systems on the edge of chaos. If that's true, then robots will at some point become complex enough to warrant having legal rights and citizenship. While I don't believe we will ever be able to build a self-aware robot from ground up, I do believe that existing fields such as alife and the new science of plectics will enable us to understand the dynamics that can lead to intelligence through emergence and therefore will give us the tools to build a simple robot which will evolve to full intelligence by itself and become comparable or even superior to humans. The moment this happens, the military ethicists will have much to discuss for years. What their conclusion will be, I don't know, but probably they will move on an axis defined by the two positions that it is either bad to kill anything which is self-aware (robots or humans), which is also my preference, or that since humans are robots as well then it is ok to kill anything since anything is a kind of robot, after all.
So just because they are angry with some persons who share music and they can't find exactly who they are, they want to make the whole society pay for them. This is a form of evil communism, which denies the right of every person to be an individual and considers everyone to be the property of the state or society. The idea is: You, although you have not done anything wrong, belong to the society, and some other members of the society have done something we don't like, therefore since you are also a member of the society and we cannot catch the person who did what we don't like, you will also have to pay a portion of the price. In a free society, individuals have their own rights and responsibilities as individuals, and people should not be held responsible for what their neighbour does. A society adopts a communist mindset the moment it starts holding you responsible because your neighbour did something illegal. It is the most extreme offence against individualism and the greatest minority: the individual.
So if I am the only smart person on a planet full of mentally retarded monkeys I should try to emulate them just to look normal?
The cost of a domain is really so insignificant that I still see no legitimate reason in tasting domains. Even the toilet paper a company buys costs more than a domain!
Although I don't host any questionable content, I moved my server from the US to Denmark, and I think it was a very good decision. The Danish business culture is very ethical and even if the ISP runs on a budget and cannot keep 100% uptime, or even if they suck it up on network engineering, they *will* always send you reports detailing why your server went offline last time. Interestingly this is something I have also read in academic research regarding the Danish culture, they have no problem to be open about their failures, which is something I admire greatly.
It is a logical fallacy to think that people will be unethical by default if given freedom. Ethics emerge out of the blue in free societies, because they are in high demand, and unethical companies lose their clients.
How about a much better solution: refuse reading anything from any site which divides the content into multiple pages.
There are amateurs who like to play with legal radioactive materials. How will the nuclear terrorism paranoia will affect them?
True educators want to share their material as much as they can. Unfortunately many universities are still operating with a guild mentality. Free academic communities, such as the one I am trying to bootstrap (CosmosWiki), and free learning communities, such as Wikiversity (from Wikimedia that also hosts Wikipedia) can help to change this mentality and promote a more open approach to academia, including research and education.
In fact I myself avoid sites with generic names, as this is a good sign for me that the site is maintained by non-nerds or is full of flashy ads, so possibly there is nothing of interest there.
A low-level language acts as an effective gatekeeper against those who don't understand the underlying science. I'm not sure what would happen if script kiddies and self-appointed "experts" had access to a high-level language.
That's just very bad: HTML5 has no place in the XHTML Web. I am not going, ever, to put HTML5 crap on any of my sites.
Do you what distinguishes good managers from bad managers? entrepreneurship. You need to demonstrate some self-start ability. Of course you need some experience in managing in order to demonstrate such an ability at a level admissible into a hiring interview. The worst way to get it is to ask a company CEO who doesn't know you trust you (ie to risk a few millions) in their organisational chart. The best way is to create your own experience. How? It's easier than it sounds:
I have came to the conclusion that the modern academia, including universities and non-open-access journals, but also the wider education community (including high school etc) is not what it ought to be. In many ways I see modern universities as echoes of the old guilds and monasteries. They evolved through them, but unfortunately the academic community has failed to get rid of many of the social outlooks and conventions of the dark age.
For me the only solution is to make it free, in the open-source way. Wikipedia opened the way for a better encyclopedia. Open access journals and some future free academic community will soon do the same for academic research and education. I am actually trying to bootstrap such a community, if you search a bit you can find it. Wikimedia also has a similar project.
You probably have not understood your problem and what DRM does. I fail to see why you would need DRM when you can have GPG or similar crypto.