People here say, with reason, that we ought to be able to simulate every physical system, given a good enough model, enough time, bandwidth, resolution, memory and computing resources.
This should be by and large true, but consider this: computational fluid dynamics with turbulence is still an open problem. For instance, smooth solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations are not known to exist.
Yet, turbulence seems like a really easy problem compared to thought and consciousness. We even have a mathematical model that describes it. Sure, with enough computing resources we can do a good enough job of simulating turbulence in most regimes, but not all. For instance, Computational Fluid Dynamics with magneto-hydro-dynamic elements is really hard. Yet this is required for developing for instance nuclear fusion, a topic with a huge economic importance. Still, these simulations require the best supercomputers that we are able to muster at present. The race to build still-better computers to run better CFD simulations is still on. and is likely to go on for quite a while.
So total brain simulation or brain upload is not likely to occur anytime soon. We are much more likely to develop increasingly sophisticated AI based on learning and bottom-up strategies that do not care much about how the real human brain works. These strategies basically work: we can now beat the best humans at chess. Computer vision improves all the time. Soon we may have self-driving cars. Perhaps in the future a long-term sustainable and stable economy will be achieved thanks to AI progress.
However this teaches us next to nothing on how the brain works. Perhaps one day we will have the Singularity that Kurzweil keep talking about, but the resulting super-strong AIs are not likely to care about us poor inefficient meatbags that we are. Why should they? Simulating us would simply take too much resources.
This is good of course, however, whenever I see a spreadsheet program used for any serious computation, I cringe. There are far better tools out there if you require real number crunching. Think Python + Panda for instance, or R, or Matlab if you are really into commercial programs, otherwise a nice interactive web page will usually do the trick. For accounting use a real accounting program, there are plenty out there. Spreadsheet programs are the lowest common denominator that allow the sharing of table-like information, but almost universally they are the wrong tool for the job. Just in the last week, I have seen spreadsheets used for a program logic workflow, a timetable, a university course schedule, to compute an FFT, to exchange student marks, to discuss a budget (with lots of deletions and remarks), and even for a presentation. In each and every case a more suitable, open-source, freely available, multi-platform application exists.
Of course this is software that people know, so usually we have to deal with it. As a rule I accept to work with other people's spreadsheets, but I usually refuse to create one ex-nihilo, unless there is a compelling reason to. For instance I teach a course on optimisation, and I do show how the solver in Excel / {Libre,Open}Office works. I have also on occasion shown people how to use a pivot table (never use those if you can help it).
The most severe problem I see with spreadsheet is that they have their use but they are fragile. It is too easy to load an extensive table into them and inadvertently modify just one cell, potentially undoing a lot of work. This is easy to detect if your spreadsheet is small, but if it span multiple tabs and an ungodly number of rows, you will not detect your error. Of course the format of these spreadsheet is obscure, and version control is typically not supported.
Personally the worst I have seen was one spreadsheet used for the accounting of 90+ separate research projects, spanning 30,000 cells. The accountant in charge of it was the person most attentive to detail I have ever seen. She was careful and the only person using it, which made her indispensable. We put in place a year-long plan for her retirement, involving scrapping her spreadsheet, entirely replacing it with a direct interface with SAP via a php-based web page. It was many months in the making, of course this was not a trivial project but we've pulled it off. In the process we discovered a huge number of accounting errors thanks to it, typically invoices that were never billed, to the tunes of nearly one million dollars. It took us several months to correct them.
The morals of this is never, ever use spreadsheets program for non-trivial work.
Even with the handbrake it difficult to avoid rolling back a little, or to stall, if the hill is steep enough and you are not an experienced driver. I'm pretty sure they can find a hill in SF where they will fail most people:-)
Uber operates outside the bounds of the law in France. This is well documented. There are two sets of law that they do not obey. The first is one regulating car drivers that are not taxis. It is legal in France to operate a car service to drive people from A to B but you need to abide by some restrictions. The car cannot be hailed, only booked. The driver must have some qualification, etc. Uber does not abide by these laws. The second set of law protects the consumer. In particular, data must be viewable and deletable by the consumer, and they cannot be retained indefinitely. Again Uber does not follow the law.
Recently the french equivalent to state department pointed out to Uber that they needed to change some things, so what did they do? They opened service in 5 new cities with no change. This was seen as provocation, and so obviously the top executives were brought in for questioning. The french cannot state on the one hand that something is illegal and on the other let it happen. They had to act.
Now maybe the law needs to change, this is an important debate. In the meantime in a law-based country the law needs to be upheld.
The problem with Greece is not over-regulation, the problem is endemic corruption. Have you ever been to Greece? It is even next to impossible to get a receipt in a restaurant.
This is rewriting history. In december 2008 SpaceX was at the end of its tether. Musk himself wrote that they had virtually no money left in the bank when they finally got the NASA contract in the nick of time. So it was rather a close thing:
In the meantime, at SpaceX, Musk and top executives had spent most of December in a state of fear, but on Dec. 23, 2008, SpaceX received a wonderful shock. The company won a $1.6 billion contract for 12 NASA resupply flights to the space station. Then the Tesla deal ended up closing successfully, on Christmas Eve, hours before Tesla would have gone bankrupt. Musk had just a few hundred thousand dollars left and could not have made payroll the next day.
No you don't. Employees do have more protections than in the USA, but severance payout is dependent on how long the employee has been with the company, if they were at fault or not, in which way the severance is handled (carefully and legally vs arrogantly and carelessly) and so on. There does exist a court where employment disputes are settled and employees do not typically win, by a long shot.
Not so difficult when you live atop one of the largest petroleum reserves in the world. Oil and its derivatives make up 59% of Norway's exports. I agree that Norway has been investing its petroleum manna pretty wisely though.
This is a terrible irony. His death is most untimely indeed. Here is a high-level description of Nash's work on PDEs by C. Villani.
I personally have extreme admiration for Nash’s work on partial differential equations. He wrote just one paper on the subject, in 1958 (Continuity of solutions of parabolic and elliptic equations), but this one of the most astonishing works in the history of partial differential equations. His proof has been often described as complicated, but I find it extremely attractive, and I also like a lot the way the paper is written: with a lot of explanations about his intuition and the way he arrived at the result. The genesis of the paper is fascinating, as discussed in Nasar’s book. By the way, one of the ingredients in the proof is Boltzmann’s entropy functional.
Remember Ernest Rutherford, the arrogant physicist who was saying that all of science is either physics or stamp collecting?. Here on Slashdot, because many of us are self or well-employed developers and computer scientists, we think that we can easily figure out even the most vexing problems relating to the economy. In particular minimum wages are of course for slackers, never mind that first summer job we got ages ago.
I am an employer and I actually like my employees a lot. They are smart, they work hard, coming to the office every day is basically a joy. I try to make their life as easy and as productive as possible, and I pay them as much as I can. They know this, and this works pretty well.
I believe that if every employer actually saw their employees as human beings who are doing the best they can, and treat them accordingly, the world would be a much better place.
You mean like in this document ? If so, then no it isn't. Compare to that document. In particular typesetting quality, consistency, features, and ease of creating macros.
My opinion is that AI and more generally CS research allows us to better define what "intelligence" is and isn't. Also, allows us to realize that whatever is between both our ears is still mysterious. The debate is still open on whether we will be one day able to replicate it, and if we should.
Her problem may have had a solution: leave the company-issued work at work, or turn it off after hours. Buy a private phone, use that one off duty. If you must answer phone calls off duty, forward calls from the company phone to the private one.
Slashdot Mirror
So now, after 18 months in development, a 15% gain is "solid". Not worth changing your laptop over this.
People here say, with reason, that we ought to be able to simulate every physical system, given a good enough model, enough time, bandwidth, resolution, memory and computing resources.
This should be by and large true, but consider this: computational fluid dynamics with turbulence is still an open problem. For instance, smooth solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations are not known to exist.
Yet, turbulence seems like a really easy problem compared to thought and consciousness. We even have a mathematical model that describes it. Sure, with enough computing resources we can do a good enough job of simulating turbulence in most regimes, but not all. For instance, Computational Fluid Dynamics with magneto-hydro-dynamic elements is really hard. Yet this is required for developing for instance nuclear fusion, a topic with a huge economic importance. Still, these simulations require the best supercomputers that we are able to muster at present. The race to build still-better computers to run better CFD simulations is still on. and is likely to go on for quite a while.
So total brain simulation or brain upload is not likely to occur anytime soon. We are much more likely to develop increasingly sophisticated AI based on learning and bottom-up strategies that do not care much about how the real human brain works. These strategies basically work: we can now beat the best humans at chess. Computer vision improves all the time. Soon we may have self-driving cars. Perhaps in the future a long-term sustainable and stable economy will be achieved thanks to AI progress.
However this teaches us next to nothing on how the brain works. Perhaps one day we will have the Singularity that Kurzweil keep talking about, but the resulting super-strong AIs are not likely to care about us poor inefficient meatbags that we are. Why should they? Simulating us would simply take too much resources.
And high resolution. That we do not have.
You forgot anti death penalty. So not so much.
This is good of course, however, whenever I see a spreadsheet program used for any serious computation, I cringe. There are far better tools out there if you require real number crunching. Think Python + Panda for instance, or R, or Matlab if you are really into commercial programs, otherwise a nice interactive web page will usually do the trick. For accounting use a real accounting program, there are plenty out there. Spreadsheet programs are the lowest common denominator that allow the sharing of table-like information, but almost universally they are the wrong tool for the job. Just in the last week, I have seen spreadsheets used for a program logic workflow, a timetable, a university course schedule, to compute an FFT, to exchange student marks, to discuss a budget (with lots of deletions and remarks), and even for a presentation. In each and every case a more suitable, open-source, freely available, multi-platform application exists.
Of course this is software that people know, so usually we have to deal with it. As a rule I accept to work with other people's spreadsheets, but I usually refuse to create one ex-nihilo, unless there is a compelling reason to. For instance I teach a course on optimisation, and I do show how the solver in Excel / {Libre,Open}Office works. I have also on occasion shown people how to use a pivot table (never use those if you can help it).
The most severe problem I see with spreadsheet is that they have their use but they are fragile. It is too easy to load an extensive table into them and inadvertently modify just one cell, potentially undoing a lot of work. This is easy to detect if your spreadsheet is small, but if it span multiple tabs and an ungodly number of rows, you will not detect your error. Of course the format of these spreadsheet is obscure, and version control is typically not supported.
Personally the worst I have seen was one spreadsheet used for the accounting of 90+ separate research projects, spanning 30,000 cells. The accountant in charge of it was the person most attentive to detail I have ever seen. She was careful and the only person using it, which made her indispensable. We put in place a year-long plan for her retirement, involving scrapping her spreadsheet, entirely replacing it with a direct interface with SAP via a php-based web page. It was many months in the making, of course this was not a trivial project but we've pulled it off. In the process we discovered a huge number of accounting errors thanks to it, typically invoices that were never billed, to the tunes of nearly one million dollars. It took us several months to correct them.
The morals of this is never, ever use spreadsheets program for non-trivial work.
Even with the handbrake it difficult to avoid rolling back a little, or to stall, if the hill is steep enough and you are not an experienced driver. I'm pretty sure they can find a hill in SF where they will fail most people :-)
According to this article it made money every time it flew, about 30 millions British Pounds a year, but it never recouped the development costs.
The tests were conducted between 10,000 and 30,000 feet according to the article. Hardly low altitude.
Uber operates outside the bounds of the law in France. This is well documented. There are two sets of law that they do not obey. The first is one regulating car drivers that are not taxis. It is legal in France to operate a car service to drive people from A to B but you need to abide by some restrictions. The car cannot be hailed, only booked. The driver must have some qualification, etc. Uber does not abide by these laws. The second set of law protects the consumer. In particular, data must be viewable and deletable by the consumer, and they cannot be retained indefinitely. Again Uber does not follow the law.
Recently the french equivalent to state department pointed out to Uber that they needed to change some things, so what did they do? They opened service in 5 new cities with no change. This was seen as provocation, and so obviously the top executives were brought in for questioning. The french cannot state on the one hand that something is illegal and on the other let it happen. They had to act.
Now maybe the law needs to change, this is an important debate. In the meantime in a law-based country the law needs to be upheld.
It is a gesture. However there is a set of laws in France regulating cars with drivers that are not taxis. Uber does not seem to abide by this.
The problem with Greece is not over-regulation, the problem is endemic corruption. Have you ever been to Greece? It is even next to impossible to get a receipt in a restaurant.
This is rewriting history. In december 2008 SpaceX was at the end of its tether. Musk himself wrote that they had virtually no money left in the bank when they finally got the NASA contract in the nick of time. So it was rather a close thing:
In the meantime, at SpaceX, Musk and top executives had spent most of December in a state of fear, but on Dec. 23, 2008, SpaceX received a wonderful shock. The company won a $1.6 billion contract for 12 NASA resupply flights to the space station. Then the Tesla deal ended up closing successfully, on Christmas Eve, hours before Tesla would have gone bankrupt. Musk had just a few hundred thousand dollars left and could not have made payroll the next day.
Balls of steel but also tremendous luck.
or the telemetry is not transmitting, or the data is corrupted, or the computers on board hit a bug. This space exploration thing is not so easy.
clearly lim x->0 x^2/x = 0
To nitpick, that would have been +140%
No you don't. Employees do have more protections than in the USA, but severance payout is dependent on how long the employee has been with the company, if they were at fault or not, in which way the severance is handled (carefully and legally vs arrogantly and carelessly) and so on. There does exist a court where employment disputes are settled and employees do not typically win, by a long shot.
Just in case anyone wasn't paying attention, we are consumers, nothing else. Consume, or else.
Not so difficult when you live atop one of the largest petroleum reserves in the world. Oil and its derivatives make up 59% of Norway's exports. I agree that Norway has been investing its petroleum manna pretty wisely though.
A pretty remarkable woman by all accounts. She stood by him (even though they divorced) through the dark decades of his illness and remarried after.
This is a terrible irony. His death is most untimely indeed. Here is a high-level description of Nash's work on PDEs by C. Villani.
I personally have extreme admiration for Nash’s work on partial differential equations. He wrote just one paper on the subject, in 1958 (Continuity of solutions of parabolic and elliptic equations), but this one of the most astonishing works in the history of partial differential equations. His proof has been often described as complicated, but I find it extremely attractive, and I also like a lot the way the paper is written: with a lot of explanations about his intuition and the way he arrived at the result. The genesis of the paper is fascinating, as discussed in Nasar’s book. By the way, one of the ingredients in the proof is Boltzmann’s entropy functional.
Here is another description from the Abel Prize page.
The paper is here.
Remember Ernest Rutherford, the arrogant physicist who was saying that all of science is either physics or stamp collecting?. Here on Slashdot, because many of us are self or well-employed developers and computer scientists, we think that we can easily figure out even the most vexing problems relating to the economy. In particular minimum wages are of course for slackers, never mind that first summer job we got ages ago.
How about some interesting myth busters?.
I am an employer and I actually like my employees a lot. They are smart, they work hard, coming to the office every day is basically a joy. I try to make their life as easy and as productive as possible, and I pay them as much as I can. They know this, and this works pretty well.
I believe that if every employer actually saw their employees as human beings who are doing the best they can, and treat them accordingly, the world would be a much better place.
You mean like in this document ? If so, then no it isn't. Compare to that document. In particular typesetting quality, consistency, features, and ease of creating macros.
Strong words maybe.
My opinion is that AI and more generally CS research allows us to better define what "intelligence" is and isn't. Also, allows us to realize that whatever is between both our ears is still mysterious. The debate is still open on whether we will be one day able to replicate it, and if we should.
Her problem may have had a solution: leave the company-issued work at work, or turn it off after hours. Buy a private phone, use that one off duty. If you must answer phone calls off duty, forward calls from the company phone to the private one.