Sure we might have a little nasty nuclear war but we'll survive (especially if we've developed effective missile defenses) and believe me you won't survive OUR attack. Remember, we have lots of cannon fodder, I mean conscripts who we can make die, I mean are willing to die for our country!
A little, nasty nuclear war and if we've developed effective missile defenses? Go easy on the fantasy, chief.
First of all, you're implying that Russia wouldn't have effective missile defense. Considering that current Chinese technology (especially military) is based on Russian design it's highly unlikely. Second, practical, meaningful anti-ballistic missile defense is most probably impossible.
But the most important thing, unless the Chinese people's bodies and their infrastructure are resistant to several thousand degrees of temperature, radiation and mechanical shock produced by thermonuclear weapons, they would NOT survive a nuclear attack Russia is capable of in any meaningful way. Amount of cannon fodder is irrelevant. If anything it would make China more vulnerable -- imagine 1 billion people in chaos after total nuclear devastation. Are you even aware what Russia (or the US) is able to unleash on a potential attacker if they see they have no other choice. Many countries are "nuclear forces" but Russia and US are in a completely different league. Sure, Russia would be in serious shit too, but in that situation they would be the ones that have nothing to lose.
And it's not like Russia isn't planning for such scenarios. Since the 50's or 60's they have a whole bunch of launchers dedicated just for China.
Here in Serbia, quite literally, I can't even take a walk in the park anymore without a cop stopping me and asking for ID...
Doesn't happen to me that often, but when it does it's quite annoying -- you have to stand there wasting your time (and saying "I'm in a hurry" doesn't help) sometimes as much as five minutes while the cop is writing down your personal data checking them against the police records. I've figured out they have a daily quota of how much ID checks each patrolling cop has to make. Sometimes the cops are annoyed by this too, which leads to comical situations like asking if you have been convicted of something before, and if the answer is "yes" they won't check your ID because then the procedure takes even longer.
I'm not a US citizen and I don't live in the US. I live in a European country where national ID, issued by the ministry of interior, i.e. police, has "always" existed, and it's considered normal (as is the case with many other European or other states in the world). I always considered people in UK, US and other states without a national ID card to be privileged in this regard.
Why on earth would the government need to have my fingerprints, photo or residence on a file in a central database? To fight crime? It seems to me that states without this kind of record are managing just fine with capturing criminals. There is simply no legitimate (from the freedom perspective) reason for these kind of records to exist.
There are many situations (some not so far-fetched) where this can be abused by the state. In "democracies" you may not feel immediately any consequences, but good luck when your democratic government decides it will not cooperate with your "freedoms" anymore. Weimar Republic was also a democracy, look how well that worked out.
If you value administrative convenience over denying the government one more opportunity for potential abuse, I think you should give China or Russia a try (out of many other possible choices). There, the government has easy access to all your administrative information, and will usually not bother you if you are a good citizen.
... but the US have forced the European countries to have Passports with biometric features a couple of years ago if they want to travel to the US.
Not quite. EU passports are required to have machine readable data (I'm not sure how it's called, it's that three lines of characters at the bottom of the first page) to be able to enter US without a visa. The old ones without that (I'm not sure if anyone even has them anymore) are fine too, you just need to be issued a visa at a US embassy or consulate.
That said, EU is phasing in newer, shiny biometric passports (photo, fingerprint... varies from country to country) with RFID. *makes a tinfoil passport wrapper*
Well, yes it's 150 on "our" scale. Which makes this article
even more dumb. In what decade of the 20th century are
these "neuroscientists" living in?
IQ scale was originally (in 1905) designed to measure
children's' intelligence like so: ("mental age" [months] /
calendar age [months]) x 100. It is called the Binet-Simon scale,
and it's still used to measure cognitive development of
preschool children.
Now, apart from obvious problem of defining what exactly is
this "mental age" and what kind of cognitive tasks are appropriate
for any given calendar age, there is a problem with applying IQ
logic to adults. Cognitive development most likely peaks at the
age of 14 -- 15 (that is when we stop developing new cognitive
abilities, although further improvement is possible through
learning and optimisation). But of course, calendar age keeps on
going up. So how can you then apply IQ scale to adults? You
can't, and it's well known in psychometrics. And even when
dealing with children IQ is a statistically defective score. Long
story short -- even if it sound intuitively good to measure
intelligence in IQ, such a "score" actually means absolutely
nothing.
Serious (psychometrically speaking) intelligence (or more
precisely, cognitive abilities) tests use deviation scores
which are percentile and standard deviation based scores. And,
more importantly, they usually give different scores for
different abilities (spacial, verbal, etc.). These tests
explicitly acknowledge the fact that it is meaningless to compare
scores obtained from different populations and scales are
standardised for any given demographic population.
The irony with this objective (actually absolute) vs. relative
scale debate here is that IQ was designed to be an absolute
measurement of intelligence, that was it's whole purpose! But
yeah, when it was realised how dumb that was they started to warp
it in "standardisation" and made it look like a relative measure,
but that's just putting lipstick on a pig.
Nowadays, IQ is mostly used by MENSA types to show how fucking
smart Madonna is, or, as we see, "neuroscientists" claiming to have
discovered extinct uber-geek monkeys.
And how fucking dare anyone out there make fun of
Miguel after all he has been through!
He never received a degree, he was dissed by Microsoft. He
founded at least two fucked-up projects, his hero turned out to
be ***gulp*** a user, a cheater, and now he's going through a
license change battle. All you people care about is ***ew, ugh***
freedom and not making money off of software. HE'S A HUMAN!
What you don't realize is that Miguel is making you all so
much more interoperable and all you do is write a bunch of crap
about him.
He hasn't blogged how awesome Microsoft is in days. His project
was called Gnome for a reason because all you people
want is GNU GNU GNU GNU GNU!! LEAVE HIM ALONE...
You're lucky he even coded for you BASTARDS! LEAVE MIGUEL
ALONE!... Please.
***wipes tears***
Richard Stallman talked about freedom and said software should
be free no matter what. ***gulp*** Speaking of freedom, when is
it freedom-loving to publicly bash (no pun intended) someone who
is going through a hard time. LEAVE MIGUEL ALOHONE!
PUHlehase...
Leave Miguel de Icaza alone right NOW! I mean it! Anyone who
has a problem with him, you deal with Balmer, because he's not
well right now.
Good question. A thing that is well known in neurophysiology and neuropsychology is that forgetting is (almost) as important as learning (and remembering). Optimal forgetting is behaviorally beneficial (without forgetting, and thus making room for new associations you would soon be stuck with very rigid behavioral patterns). It is thought that one of the main functions of sleep is to erase some of associations made through the day. There is a saying in neurophysiology/psychology: the problem is not how to remember and learn but how to forget.
Obviously, the only way to know for sure what effect these functionally local enhancements might have globally is to have good long term studies, not just on organisms like mice but on humans.
We measured something no one really thought could be measured, and got a striking and beautiful result.
A bit on a sensationalistic side, as people working in the field of quantitative and experimental psycholinguistics have been working on measuring various aspects of language for some time now.
The real problem in this field is not measuring itself, but getting good material to make measures on and a proper theoretical framework (i.e. you need to figure out what kind of quantity is relevant).
It is now possible to predict reaction times on certain grammar forms with ~99% precision based on frequency of those forms in language (I'm to lazy to give links, google it if you are interested, the research was mostly done by Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics). The problem was finding a relevant way of grounding grammar into information theory framework—once that was solved mathematics was trivial.
The value of the Harvard research is that it is probably the first to give some exact measurments on phenomena that has been, so far, only qualitatively noted in the historical perspective of language development. Good work.
It is also another validation of the idea that frequency (amount of information) of a given linguistic entity is the property that is the most relevant (maybe even the only relevant) for the way our brain processes language.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure we might have a little nasty nuclear war but we'll survive (especially if we've developed effective missile defenses) and believe me you won't survive OUR attack. Remember, we have lots of cannon fodder, I mean conscripts who we can make die, I mean are willing to die for our country!
A little, nasty nuclear war and if we've developed effective missile defenses? Go easy on the fantasy, chief.
First of all, you're implying that Russia wouldn't have effective missile defense. Considering that current Chinese technology (especially military) is based on Russian design it's highly unlikely. Second, practical, meaningful anti-ballistic missile defense is most probably impossible.
But the most important thing, unless the Chinese people's bodies and their infrastructure are resistant to several thousand degrees of temperature, radiation and mechanical shock produced by thermonuclear weapons, they would NOT survive a nuclear attack Russia is capable of in any meaningful way. Amount of cannon fodder is irrelevant. If anything it would make China more vulnerable -- imagine 1 billion people in chaos after total nuclear devastation. Are you even aware what Russia (or the US) is able to unleash on a potential attacker if they see they have no other choice. Many countries are "nuclear forces" but Russia and US are in a completely different league. Sure, Russia would be in serious shit too, but in that situation they would be the ones that have nothing to lose.
And it's not like Russia isn't planning for such scenarios. Since the 50's or 60's they have a whole bunch of launchers dedicated just for China.
TL;DR: the Chinese government is not that stupid.
Here in Serbia, quite literally, I can't even take a walk in the park anymore without a cop stopping me and asking for ID...
Doesn't happen to me that often, but when it does it's quite annoying -- you have to stand there wasting your time (and saying "I'm in a hurry" doesn't help) sometimes as much as five minutes while the cop is writing down your personal data checking them against the police records. I've figured out they have a daily quota of how much ID checks each patrolling cop has to make. Sometimes the cops are annoyed by this too, which leads to comical situations like asking if you have been convicted of something before, and if the answer is "yes" they won't check your ID because then the procedure takes even longer.
I'm not a US citizen and I don't live in the US. I live in a European country where national ID, issued by the ministry of interior, i.e. police, has "always" existed, and it's considered normal (as is the case with many other European or other states in the world). I always considered people in UK, US and other states without a national ID card to be privileged in this regard.
Why on earth would the government need to have my fingerprints, photo or residence on a file in a central database? To fight crime? It seems to me that states without this kind of record are managing just fine with capturing criminals. There is simply no legitimate (from the freedom perspective) reason for these kind of records to exist.
There are many situations (some not so far-fetched) where this can be abused by the state. In "democracies" you may not feel immediately any consequences, but good luck when your democratic government decides it will not cooperate with your "freedoms" anymore. Weimar Republic was also a democracy, look how well that worked out.
If you value administrative convenience over denying the government one more opportunity for potential abuse, I think you should give China or Russia a try (out of many other possible choices). There, the government has easy access to all your administrative information, and will usually not bother you if you are a good citizen.
... but the US have forced the European countries to have Passports with biometric features a couple of years ago if they want to travel to the US.
Not quite. EU passports are required to have machine readable data (I'm not sure how it's called, it's that three lines of characters at the bottom of the first page) to be able to enter US without a visa. The old ones without that (I'm not sure if anyone even has them anymore) are fine too, you just need to be issued a visa at a US embassy or consulate.
That said, EU is phasing in newer, shiny biometric passports (photo, fingerprint... varies from country to country) with RFID. *makes a tinfoil passport wrapper*
Well, yes it's 150 on "our" scale. Which makes this article even more dumb. In what decade of the 20th century are these "neuroscientists" living in?
IQ scale was originally (in 1905) designed to measure children's' intelligence like so: ("mental age" [months] / calendar age [months]) x 100. It is called the Binet-Simon scale, and it's still used to measure cognitive development of preschool children.
Now, apart from obvious problem of defining what exactly is this "mental age" and what kind of cognitive tasks are appropriate for any given calendar age, there is a problem with applying IQ logic to adults. Cognitive development most likely peaks at the age of 14 -- 15 (that is when we stop developing new cognitive abilities, although further improvement is possible through learning and optimisation). But of course, calendar age keeps on going up. So how can you then apply IQ scale to adults? You can't, and it's well known in psychometrics. And even when dealing with children IQ is a statistically defective score. Long story short -- even if it sound intuitively good to measure intelligence in IQ, such a "score" actually means absolutely nothing.
Serious (psychometrically speaking) intelligence (or more precisely, cognitive abilities) tests use deviation scores which are percentile and standard deviation based scores. And, more importantly, they usually give different scores for different abilities (spacial, verbal, etc.). These tests explicitly acknowledge the fact that it is meaningless to compare scores obtained from different populations and scales are standardised for any given demographic population.
The irony with this objective (actually absolute) vs. relative scale debate here is that IQ was designed to be an absolute measurement of intelligence, that was it's whole purpose! But yeah, when it was realised how dumb that was they started to warp it in "standardisation" and made it look like a relative measure, but that's just putting lipstick on a pig.
Nowadays, IQ is mostly used by MENSA types to show how fucking smart Madonna is, or, as we see, "neuroscientists" claiming to have discovered extinct uber-geek monkeys.
And how fucking dare anyone out there make fun of Miguel after all he has been through!
He never received a degree, he was dissed by Microsoft. He founded at least two fucked-up projects, his hero turned out to be ***gulp*** a user, a cheater, and now he's going through a license change battle. All you people care about is ***ew, ugh*** freedom and not making money off of software. HE'S A HUMAN!
What you don't realize is that Miguel is making you all so much more interoperable and all you do is write a bunch of crap about him.
He hasn't blogged how awesome Microsoft is in days. His project was called Gnome for a reason because all you people want is GNU GNU GNU GNU GNU!! LEAVE HIM ALONE...
You're lucky he even coded for you BASTARDS! LEAVE MIGUEL ALONE! ... Please.
***wipes tears***
Richard Stallman talked about freedom and said software should be free no matter what. ***gulp*** Speaking of freedom, when is it freedom-loving to publicly bash (no pun intended) someone who is going through a hard time. LEAVE MIGUEL ALOHONE! PUHlehase...
Leave Miguel de Icaza alone right NOW! I mean it! Anyone who has a problem with him, you deal with Balmer, because he's not well right now.
***cries a river*** ***gulp***
Leave him alone...
Good question. A thing that is well known in neurophysiology and neuropsychology is that forgetting is (almost) as important as learning (and remembering). Optimal forgetting is behaviorally beneficial (without forgetting, and thus making room for new associations you would soon be stuck with very rigid behavioral patterns). It is thought that one of the main functions of sleep is to erase some of associations made through the day. There is a saying in neurophysiology/psychology: the problem is not how to remember and learn but how to forget.
Obviously, the only way to know for sure what effect these functionally local enhancements might have globally is to have good long term studies, not just on organisms like mice but on humans.
There are no know viruses currently available for Linux in the wild.
The last one was in 1989.
:)
A bit on a sensationalistic side, as people working in the field of quantitative and experimental psycholinguistics have been working on measuring various aspects of language for some time now.
The real problem in this field is not measuring itself, but getting good material to make measures on and a proper theoretical framework (i.e. you need to figure out what kind of quantity is relevant).
It is now possible to predict reaction times on certain grammar forms with ~99% precision based on frequency of those forms in language (I'm to lazy to give links, google it if you are interested, the research was mostly done by Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics). The problem was finding a relevant way of grounding grammar into information theory framework—once that was solved mathematics was trivial.
The value of the Harvard research is that it is probably the first to give some exact measurments on phenomena that has been, so far, only qualitatively noted in the historical perspective of language development. Good work.
It is also another validation of the idea that frequency (amount of information) of a given linguistic entity is the property that is the most relevant (maybe even the only relevant) for the way our brain processes language.