I'd have to say if the sound fidelity is any good, they already would have one, assuming two things:
They knew where on your head they were hitting you
They had a decent surround sound processor
It'd work the same way surround sound ear buds work: by tricking your brain using echo timing into believing the sound is arriving at your ears from a particular angle.
I'd actually call that insightful. Good technical writers are very hard to find. Seldom should you let one of your programmers write documentation destined for users, even if they're ordinarily good at using the documentation.
An outsider who has to learn to operate the program will not only write better documentation (at least when they work with the developers) but they'll probably also find some important bugs before release time.
The problem with programmers as sysadmins is that we tend to want to solve problems creatively... Meaning we can't quit "fixing" things that work fine.
Leaving stuff alone (when it actually works, that is) is a virtue in system administration - you stay out of the way of the people trying to get their work done, they love you for it, and you put out fires when and if they crop up, fixing or replacing stuff in stealth after hours if necessary.
How often are you called upon in your daily work to write code without the benefit of a compiler to remind you you've screwed up?
I'd say most people who haven't worked with C in a while would miss some of these "practical" test questions, especially ones related to memory management.
That doesn't indicate that A) they don't know what they're doing, or B) they wouldn't remember rapidly everything they'd "forgotten" the moment the compiler started spitting out errors at them.
I did not actually specify that an organism be consistently able to do all of the above, only that it be able, a significant percentage of the time, to do most of the things listed above.
Being capable of doing something and actually doing it are two different things.
Rather than introspection, which we can't actually prove other animals don't have, a better metric would be the NUMBER of qualities which produce behavior consistent with what we call "intelligent."
Some corvids have developed tool use and live in strongly hierarchical societies. They also build things, and are roughly as parasitic as humans are. Further, they thrive wherever humans do and are adept at problem solving. Some corvids can actually mimic human speech, and have been shown to use that mimicry to communicate. Crows have been known to mourn their dead.
From a human viewpoint, that's pretty intelligent.
The prime components of intelligence, as I view them, are:
The ability to recognize "problems" and address them systematically until solved.
The ability to adapt the organism's environment to suit the organism.
The ability to recognize similar situations and apply previously learned solutions to those situations.
The ability to learn solutions to problems by observing another organism solving a similar problem.
The ability to communicate complex information (by any means) to another organism of its own species.
The ability of the organism to communicate complex information to another organism of another species.
The ability to cooperate in groups, given the right circumstances.
The ability of an organism to distinguish itself from all others of its species
You show me an animal who can do all that, I'll show you an animal who's intelligent.
A machine which can do all of that, I'm willing to call it AI.
Machine learning is a vital prerequisite of a useful human-like AI.
If at some point in the future somebody develops a fuzzy system which is capable of processing information in a similar way to a human mind, you still need a way to automatically train that system, and the most logical way is by utilizing a learning system as a preprocessor.
Your work in your field directly contributes to the likelihood of the second field ever getting anywhere.
I agree. The problem with AI is that it was thought up in an era when constructivism and the tabula rasa were the predominant theories for intellectual development.
This however completely ignored the fact that the brain is structurally predisposed to working in a certain fashion - like a pre-trained neural network. It's pre-trained by millions of years of evolution, and a lot of the skills we assume are human-exclusive features are built on those of creatures that have been around millions of years before us.
The assumption was that we could build a simple light framework which was capable of accepting new data, comparing it against the old data, hook it up to a system which fed it all the random garbage it absorbed, throw a shitload of computing power at it, and voila, intelligence, just like a real boy.
AI is a thoroughly possible technology, it's just unreasonable to expect it without enormous improvements in the understanding of how a brain, and not not necessarily a human brain, works before it begins accepting input from the outside world.
Yeah I'm not comfortable paying $80 to the scumbags who pass for local cable around here just to get quality which is actually WORSE than broadcast due to the ridiculous compression they use.
They're actually an atrocious business notorious for screwing its customers locally and it'll be a cold day in hell before I support that sort of operation.
As far as a great deal, it's got a better picture quality than any computer monitor I've ever owned with better color (great for photo editing), and the best competing plasma model is going for $1800 with a worse picture quality and three times the energy consumption. True geeks don't listen to salesmen, they do their own research.
I watch a total of 2 TV shows (other than NOVA and other PBS programming which I'm now getting in high def for free) which aren't available on the internet (legally), and I use my TV as a 40" widescreen computer monitor (at 1920x1080) as well. At the end of the night I've got less eyestrain than working with a smaller or dimmer monitor, which matters when you spend an average of 18-24 hours of coding a week.
A decent 22" LCD with the same resolution capabilities costs at minimum about $250 with worse contrast.
The superiority of the metric system has always been a little dubious to me too.
A foot is a division of a Greek-derived measure related to the size of the earth.
The originators devised, or perhaps borrowed from Egypt, the degree of longitude, divided the circumference of the earth into 360 degrees, and subdivided the degree for shorter distances. One degree of longitude comprised 600 stadia. One stadion was divided into 600 feet. Thus the degree of longitude measured 360,000 feet. One mile was 10 stadia or 6000 feet. This is essentially the same mile that was (or still is) used in the Western hemisphere, but the modern foot is longer than the original.
A meter is the distance travelled by light in absolute vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second, but originally:
Historically, the metre was defined by the French Academy of Sciences as the length between two marks on a platinum-iridium bar, which was designed to represent 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the north pole through Paris.
Which system is archaic and arbitrary?
Probably both, but any system of measure is an arbitrary choice of reference scale, even one derived from universal constants. After all, which universal constant are you going to choose?
For the record, as a child growing up in the US, I always wished they taught metric measures in school so that I'd more easily understand NOVA.
Or perhaps you just haven't reached the stage in your life yet where you're paying your own bills, in which case, go ahead and enjoy all that disposable income while you still can. Meanwhile, those of us in the real world have other things to spend our money on: food, rent, gas, and so on. You'll learn about that stuff soon enough.
Does being condescending usually work for you when attempting to persuade somebody of a point?
Clearly HDTV is a sore point with you.
I have a half-time state government job and pay all of my own bills (including student loan interest), and yet somehow I can afford this rare and crazy pie-in-the-sky magic technology called television. It cost $1400 and I got it on sale, paid for with cash.
Interesting what you can accomplish simply by saving a little money up here and there, isn't it?
If you want to be an early adopter, you've got to recognize that what you're paying for is having it first. Not for quality or reliability, and certainly not for value.
Really? I bought my television because I got a great deal on it, it improved visibility of television programs in my rather large living room, gives me a much prettier signal for OTA programming (I live near 5 HD stations, no fuzzy signal unlike SD), and it makes my PS3 look shit hot.
Funny, no one complained about TV being "fuzzy" or "myopic" until the HDTV manufacturers and retailers launched a campaign to convince them that it was.
I did, and always have. Television quality has never been even remotely approaching film quality - at least not until recently. Try watching BBC's fabulous Planet Earth documentaries on Blu-Ray on a decent set (none of this overpriced plasma garbage), then watch it on your $300 TV.
I paid for more quality because I am capable of discerning the difference between two signals.
Chances are that's why thousands of other people have made the switch - not to mention that in 2009, everybody will be using an HD signal if they use an antenna to pick up broadcast television. You'll just be downgrading it with your $40 signal converter.
Not everybody appreciates the same old fuzzy myopic picture that grandpappy watches.
Just because a person isn't a penny pinching luddite doesn't mean they are foolish. Early adopters are the ones who funded the development of the technology you use daily.
If it hadn't been for the HiFi freaks, you wouldn't listen to stereo headphones. If it hadn't been for the early color adopters, we might still be watching stuff in high definition black and white.
And if it hadn't been for the people who made the leap and got home computers, you'd probably not be talking to Slashdot right now.
Comcast and Time Warner will not allow residential customers to control RDNS. They want you to fork out the bill for their small business accounts, even if your IP is fixed and you're paying extra for a fixed IP.
A lot of these GeoLocation services buy IP/zipcode data from companies.
You go to, say, "gimmemyweather.tk" and type in your zipcode, they map your IP as an occurrence of a certain IP to that zipcode.
You type in a zipcode into a "store locator" and that data might be sold too.
That's really the only way to get correct information of that kind - through user input, if the ISP doesn't make data available.
Verizon in Eastern Washington allocates addresses from the Seattle and Coeur d'Alene areas (about a 300 mile spread), so the geoip data for those IP addresses are all over the place.
I'd imagine great work could be done by examining light intensity and coloration (atmospheric red shift) vs date stamp on the image (working from RAW with some camera data), they could guess the latitude fairly accurately. By similar methods you could figure out pollution levels, thus narrowing the sample range further.
Additionally comparing geometry could help factor out region with plant recognition fairly well also. You're not going to see a saguaro in Kentucky unless you're in a botanical garden. They've got a rather distinctive shape, and somewhat unique coloration.
Then you've got horizon lines - they're going to be ragged everywhere.
City skylines can be fairly easily identified the same way barcodes can be recognized, and mountain ridgelines are equally useful. The real trick would be telling a place in western Montana in mid-spring vs a place in western Kansas in early fall.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd have to say if the sound fidelity is any good, they already would have one, assuming two things:
It'd work the same way surround sound ear buds work: by tricking your brain using echo timing into believing the sound is arriving at your ears from a particular angle.
I'd actually call that insightful. Good technical writers are very hard to find. Seldom should you let one of your programmers write documentation destined for users, even if they're ordinarily good at using the documentation.
An outsider who has to learn to operate the program will not only write better documentation (at least when they work with the developers) but they'll probably also find some important bugs before release time.
The problem with programmers as sysadmins is that we tend to want to solve problems creatively... Meaning we can't quit "fixing" things that work fine.
Leaving stuff alone (when it actually works, that is) is a virtue in system administration - you stay out of the way of the people trying to get their work done, they love you for it, and you put out fires when and if they crop up, fixing or replacing stuff in stealth after hours if necessary.
And that policeman is Constable Nicholas Angel.
How often are you called upon in your daily work to write code without the benefit of a compiler to remind you you've screwed up?
I'd say most people who haven't worked with C in a while would miss some of these "practical" test questions, especially ones related to memory management.
That doesn't indicate that A) they don't know what they're doing, or B) they wouldn't remember rapidly everything they'd "forgotten" the moment the compiler started spitting out errors at them.
Actually, we had hand-written panic-mode program design tests where we were asked to write somewhat esoteric structures on most of my CS tests.
If the answer is illegible, you don't get a grade.
You'd be surprised just how legible the handwriting of even the worst scrawler becomes when it's a pass/fail situation hinging on their penmanship.
I did not actually specify that an organism be consistently able to do all of the above, only that it be able, a significant percentage of the time, to do most of the things listed above.
Being capable of doing something and actually doing it are two different things.
Rather than introspection, which we can't actually prove other animals don't have, a better metric would be the NUMBER of qualities which produce behavior consistent with what we call "intelligent."
Some corvids have developed tool use and live in strongly hierarchical societies. They also build things, and are roughly as parasitic as humans are. Further, they thrive wherever humans do and are adept at problem solving. Some corvids can actually mimic human speech, and have been shown to use that mimicry to communicate. Crows have been known to mourn their dead.
From a human viewpoint, that's pretty intelligent.
The prime components of intelligence, as I view them, are:
You show me an animal who can do all that, I'll show you an animal who's intelligent.
A machine which can do all of that, I'm willing to call it AI.
Machine learning is a vital prerequisite of a useful human-like AI.
If at some point in the future somebody develops a fuzzy system which is capable of processing information in a similar way to a human mind, you still need a way to automatically train that system, and the most logical way is by utilizing a learning system as a preprocessor.
Your work in your field directly contributes to the likelihood of the second field ever getting anywhere.
I agree. The problem with AI is that it was thought up in an era when constructivism and the tabula rasa were the predominant theories for intellectual development.
This however completely ignored the fact that the brain is structurally predisposed to working in a certain fashion - like a pre-trained neural network. It's pre-trained by millions of years of evolution, and a lot of the skills we assume are human-exclusive features are built on those of creatures that have been around millions of years before us.
The assumption was that we could build a simple light framework which was capable of accepting new data, comparing it against the old data, hook it up to a system which fed it all the random garbage it absorbed, throw a shitload of computing power at it, and voila, intelligence, just like a real boy.
AI is a thoroughly possible technology, it's just unreasonable to expect it without enormous improvements in the understanding of how a brain, and not not necessarily a human brain, works before it begins accepting input from the outside world.
Yeah I'm not comfortable paying $80 to the scumbags who pass for local cable around here just to get quality which is actually WORSE than broadcast due to the ridiculous compression they use.
They're actually an atrocious business notorious for screwing its customers locally and it'll be a cold day in hell before I support that sort of operation.
As far as a great deal, it's got a better picture quality than any computer monitor I've ever owned with better color (great for photo editing), and the best competing plasma model is going for $1800 with a worse picture quality and three times the energy consumption. True geeks don't listen to salesmen, they do their own research.
I watch a total of 2 TV shows (other than NOVA and other PBS programming which I'm now getting in high def for free) which aren't available on the internet (legally), and I use my TV as a 40" widescreen computer monitor (at 1920x1080) as well. At the end of the night I've got less eyestrain than working with a smaller or dimmer monitor, which matters when you spend an average of 18-24 hours of coding a week.
A decent 22" LCD with the same resolution capabilities costs at minimum about $250 with worse contrast.
So yeah, I'm happy with my purchase.
Clearly you aren't. Fortunately, I don't care.
The superiority of the metric system has always been a little dubious to me too.
A foot is a division of a Greek-derived measure related to the size of the earth.
The originators devised, or perhaps borrowed from Egypt, the degree of longitude, divided the circumference of the earth into 360 degrees, and subdivided the degree for shorter distances. One degree of longitude comprised 600 stadia. One stadion was divided into 600 feet. Thus the degree of longitude measured 360,000 feet. One mile was 10 stadia or 6000 feet. This is essentially the same mile that was (or still is) used in the Western hemisphere, but the modern foot is longer than the original.A meter is the distance travelled by light in absolute vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second, but originally:
Historically, the metre was defined by the French Academy of Sciences as the length between two marks on a platinum-iridium bar, which was designed to represent 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the north pole through Paris.Which system is archaic and arbitrary?
Probably both, but any system of measure is an arbitrary choice of reference scale, even one derived from universal constants. After all, which universal constant are you going to choose?
For the record, as a child growing up in the US, I always wished they taught metric measures in school so that I'd more easily understand NOVA.
*Wikipedia for the sources.
Does being condescending usually work for you when attempting to persuade somebody of a point?
Clearly HDTV is a sore point with you.
I have a half-time state government job and pay all of my own bills (including student loan interest), and yet somehow I can afford this rare and crazy pie-in-the-sky magic technology called television. It cost $1400 and I got it on sale, paid for with cash.
Interesting what you can accomplish simply by saving a little money up here and there, isn't it?
If you want to be an early adopter, you've got to recognize that what you're paying for is having it first. Not for quality or reliability, and certainly not for value.Really? I bought my television because I got a great deal on it, it improved visibility of television programs in my rather large living room, gives me a much prettier signal for OTA programming (I live near 5 HD stations, no fuzzy signal unlike SD), and it makes my PS3 look shit hot.
Funny, no one complained about TV being "fuzzy" or "myopic" until the HDTV manufacturers and retailers launched a campaign to convince them that it was.I did, and always have. Television quality has never been even remotely approaching film quality - at least not until recently. Try watching BBC's fabulous Planet Earth documentaries on Blu-Ray on a decent set (none of this overpriced plasma garbage), then watch it on your $300 TV.
I paid for more quality because I am capable of discerning the difference between two signals.
Chances are that's why thousands of other people have made the switch - not to mention that in 2009, everybody will be using an HD signal if they use an antenna to pick up broadcast television. You'll just be downgrading it with your $40 signal converter.
I support having a nuclear plant literally in my actual backyard if I get free electricity and can sell parking to the employees.
Not everybody appreciates the same old fuzzy myopic picture that grandpappy watches.
Just because a person isn't a penny pinching luddite doesn't mean they are foolish. Early adopters are the ones who funded the development of the technology you use daily.
If it hadn't been for the HiFi freaks, you wouldn't listen to stereo headphones. If it hadn't been for the early color adopters, we might still be watching stuff in high definition black and white.
And if it hadn't been for the people who made the leap and got home computers, you'd probably not be talking to Slashdot right now.
What if you don't like stringed instruments?
Comcast and Time Warner will not allow residential customers to control RDNS. They want you to fork out the bill for their small business accounts, even if your IP is fixed and you're paying extra for a fixed IP.
I'd imagine that's what he was referring to.
Sure they can. The response is either "here" or "there."
A lot of these GeoLocation services buy IP/zipcode data from companies.
You go to, say, "gimmemyweather.tk" and type in your zipcode, they map your IP as an occurrence of a certain IP to that zipcode.
You type in a zipcode into a "store locator" and that data might be sold too.
That's really the only way to get correct information of that kind - through user input, if the ISP doesn't make data available.
Verizon in Eastern Washington allocates addresses from the Seattle and Coeur d'Alene areas (about a 300 mile spread), so the geoip data for those IP addresses are all over the place.
Transparent PNG picture of yourself against a green screen, front-lit with as little backscatter from the backdrop as possible.
CSS positioning over a random backdrop image.
The HTML solution.
I'd imagine great work could be done by examining light intensity and coloration (atmospheric red shift) vs date stamp on the image (working from RAW with some camera data), they could guess the latitude fairly accurately. By similar methods you could figure out pollution levels, thus narrowing the sample range further.
Additionally comparing geometry could help factor out region with plant recognition fairly well also. You're not going to see a saguaro in Kentucky unless you're in a botanical garden. They've got a rather distinctive shape, and somewhat unique coloration.
Then you've got horizon lines - they're going to be ragged everywhere.
City skylines can be fairly easily identified the same way barcodes can be recognized, and mountain ridgelines are equally useful. The real trick would be telling a place in western Montana in mid-spring vs a place in western Kansas in early fall.
Additionally, the rock coloration is wrong, so you can tell the composition is off if you know what to look for.
Geology nerd, I know.
So does my compiler.
That, dear poster, is priceless.
Itself. Very meditative.