Maybe he can't - I can use databases, but I don't KNOW databases, and to be honest, I probably should. I don't know where the trade-offs lie in design and configuration, or even what I can really accomplish by tweaking them. If I had a million-row table, I'd just be concerned that, while it works right now, it may break due to a lack of foresight on my part, which is never a comfortable place to be in.
Science makes no claims towards what it is not. Science comes with error bars. Science tells us, "This is exactly how wrong I am." Science takes your pet theory, that really elegant one that you WANT to believe is Truth, and tells you, no, there's no strong correlation. That is the morality of science. When you do an experiment, and determine that your hypothesis is unsupported, you pick a different hypothesis, not a different experiment.
Yes, sometimes scientists seem like they are stumbling about in the dark. They might pick the wrong conclusion. But science is based around revisiting prior assumptions and refining them as you gather more data. What religion has such a mechanism built in? What religion describes how to amend its holy books in the event that they are demonstrated incorrect?
You're right that science takes away beliefs. But it can only harm false beliefs. How could you use science to demonstrate something incorrect? That is the strength of explaining everything from the ground up. There is a strong foundation, not based on strength of faith, but rather on a series of repeatable experiments. If you take issue with how an experiment was done, do it yourself. If you get different results, publish them. The scientific community thrives on that. If you get the same results, know that the truth of the matter has nothing to do with how willing you are to stomach it.
The one thing I will grant you is that the media does a very poor job of representing the scientific process. These scientists did not prove that there is no heaven; they did not set out to, and their experiment is not set up in a way to demonstrate that fact one way or another. What they can demonstrate is that a chemical released by the brain under extreme duress can produce strong hallucinations accompanied by a feeling of the numinous. That's not terribly exciting in and of itself, so the press fancies it up, makes the bold claims that science cannot, and releases it in comprehensible chunks to the public.They have a difficult job, trying to represent incredibly technical work to a public without the background to understand it, and often having to make it entertaining as well. Much is lost in the translation.
You may joke, but facebook is a data-mining goldmine. Never before have advertisers had such free access to the personal lives of the very people they hope to sell their products to.
You're absolutely correct: the retraction doesn't prove anything. However, decades of attempts to reproduce the study, none of them reaching the same conclusion, does prove an error in the initial study. It turn out that the act of publishing doesn't actually have an effect on the underlying science, while the repeatability does.
Bingo. Intelligence is one of those corporate feelgood words, like state-of-the-art, or user-friendly. They are completely impossible to quantify.
Human-like is a decent standard to measure intelligence by, as we'd like to fashion humanity to be more intelligent, than, say, an earthworm, but it's damned near impossible to point out what makes us intelligent. Is it rationality? Computers already have us beat there. I'd wager that humanity's pattern-recognition and fuzzy categorization skills are what we're often looking for in artificial intelligence - our ability to infer things that aren't explicitly stated. Again, this is impossible to measure. I've heard it proposed that we should score computer systems on whether they make the same types of mistakes that people make - this seems particularly idiotic. Ideally, I'd like to be shooting for a system that doesn't make mistakes - one that is smarter than us.
By the by, we've already got a word for "ability to survive" - fitness. Redefining a popular word that to mean something we've already got a perfectly good word for seems to be a hallmark of "revolutionary" authors, regardless of field.
Exactly. They don't need a bill to prohibit p2p on government/contractor networks, they just need a policy. I'm certainly not allowed to use LimeWire at work.
The pictures aren't OF ice, ice just happens to be in them. The pictures are OF boats/subs/etc. The idea is that they're old enough that no one cares that we knew where that cruiser was 10 years ago.
My guess is that, no matter how neat of a collaborative program you introduce to your students, they're going to give up on it after a couple of minutes, and decide to just meet in the lab on Thursday, at like 5 or something. A good deal of your students live on campus, and the rest of them are there most of the time anyway. Meeting in person is the quick-and-easy solution.
Sorta if you will, like saying that you need a whole 0.45% alcohol in your blood to have a 50-50 chance of death. Yeah, but much smaller doses, if done often enough, can kill you just the same.
But not "just the same." At 0.45, your brain is flooded with alcohol, and your NMDA receptors stop working. Which means that you go braindead, and your body follows. Long-term use of lower concentrations, on the other hand, play hell on your liver, pancreas, gall-bladder, and metabolism in general. So, in the long-term abuse case, your body craps out, and can no longer support your brain. Sure, you still die, but you die in a different manner.
Similarly, it matters what kills you from complete sleep deprivation, as opposed to a long term sleep deficit. We're pretty clear that not getting enough sleep isn't good for you, and we even have a basic understanding of what goes wrong. However, we don't have any recorded cases of a human flat out dying from complete sleep deprivation. It's important to know what goes wrong in that case, so we can ensure that those functions stay right.
You know, I'm all for renewable power, but, aren't there a whole lot of starving people that this money could be feeding? Diseases to cure? Good to do? I kinda thought that churches operated under the do good platform...
Learning how to program, from a book, without access to a computer, will be near impossible for most people. If they're looking to build useful skills, a beginner's book for A+ certification would be an excellent place to start.
I'd hope they also modified it to... you know... act as a convincing human. The grammar is too good for the person on the other end not to understand how one can go into business.
You're looking far too much at the short-term. Evolution doesn't happen at a rate that's visible in the history books - it takes millions of years.
In first world nations (like where you and I live), sure, we're not seeing many people die off due to a lack of resources. However, we're still seeing certain people reproducing at a higher rate than others. If there is any genetic predisposition for this, than that is an evolutionary advantage, and will be propagated over the millions of years.
Evolution doesn't mean "everyone who isn't best dies, right now." Were that the case, you wouldn't have a population large enough to reproduce within. Evolution doesn't even mean "the best live longer." Evolution means, "those who reproduce more will reproduce more." This usually ends up producing organisms fit to survive in their environment. If you stick those organisms in an environment changing as rapidly as a human city, it gives you organisms fit to survive in a "meta-environment" - adapted to the things that invariably stay constant. If you want to say that the human race will always have enough to support it's most feeble of members, so be it. We're evolving towards a race of moochers. Your judgment of "better" and the evolutionary judgment of "better" don't need to have anything in common.
It's not like evolution just stops because of technological advances. We're just evolving within a different environment, with different selective pressures. Remember, evolution isn't driving us towards a "best," it's driving us towards a "works for now."
Besides, society and technology have only been around for a few thousand years. If you're an optimist, the future of the human race looks really hot, and is fairly promiscuous. If you're a pessimist, society collapses, and we're back to the good ol' fashioned try-not-to-die for a while.
Psychic, not pre-cogniscient. Psychics, at least the ones relevant to this issue, can read minds, not predict the future. Unless you figure that the convenience store clerk selling you the ticket already knows the winning numbers...
This is actually interesting. I mean, Google obviously won't include it as a default feature, but do you think they'll make any efforts to block an "AdBlock" add-on equivalent, which would cut directly into their advertising revenue?
I think the idea behind this is that it's a cool technology for presentations, not a replacement for your monitor and keyboard/mouse. You certainly COULD replace your current setup with a high-end projector and one of those motion-capture laser-pointer mice, but you wouldn't, because it's damned expensive, and not nearly as efficient as what you're using right now.
This isn't quite the same a sticking a pedophile in a daycare. Nobody's going to be asking him to be their network admin and trusting him with their employee records; that would be a stupendous waste of talent, in the first place. The police, or a private company, is going to hire him to do the exact same thing that he's been doing - figure out how to get into unauthorized systems. Then he gets to explain to all the peons just how goddamned clever he is, and they get to patch their systems.
To be fair, there have been steps taken since the 2003 blackout to make the power system more reliable. With the Energy Policy Act of 2005, membership in the North American Reliability Council (NERC) has gone from completely voluntary to federally mandated. Failure to adhere to industry standards can carry a fine of up to $1 million per day. The CIP- standards all deal with cyber-security, and the EOP- standards specify what happens in an emergency situation - for example, a big node goes down, and initiates a cascading failure. Automated systems are required to be in place that will cut the power in such situations, leaving some people in the dark, but protecting the grid as a whole.
Is the system perfect? No, probably not. A good social engineer could probably still weasel his way into a system. But steps have been taken to minimize damage in such a situation.
Anyone else notice that Microsoft chose to represent internet advertising as a series of tubes? Apparently, this market isn't something you can just dump something on...
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe he can't - I can use databases, but I don't KNOW databases, and to be honest, I probably should. I don't know where the trade-offs lie in design and configuration, or even what I can really accomplish by tweaking them. If I had a million-row table, I'd just be concerned that, while it works right now, it may break due to a lack of foresight on my part, which is never a comfortable place to be in.
Science makes no claims towards what it is not. Science comes with error bars. Science tells us, "This is exactly how wrong I am." Science takes your pet theory, that really elegant one that you WANT to believe is Truth, and tells you, no, there's no strong correlation. That is the morality of science. When you do an experiment, and determine that your hypothesis is unsupported, you pick a different hypothesis, not a different experiment.
Yes, sometimes scientists seem like they are stumbling about in the dark. They might pick the wrong conclusion. But science is based around revisiting prior assumptions and refining them as you gather more data. What religion has such a mechanism built in? What religion describes how to amend its holy books in the event that they are demonstrated incorrect?
You're right that science takes away beliefs. But it can only harm false beliefs. How could you use science to demonstrate something incorrect? That is the strength of explaining everything from the ground up. There is a strong foundation, not based on strength of faith, but rather on a series of repeatable experiments. If you take issue with how an experiment was done, do it yourself. If you get different results, publish them. The scientific community thrives on that. If you get the same results, know that the truth of the matter has nothing to do with how willing you are to stomach it.
The one thing I will grant you is that the media does a very poor job of representing the scientific process. These scientists did not prove that there is no heaven; they did not set out to, and their experiment is not set up in a way to demonstrate that fact one way or another. What they can demonstrate is that a chemical released by the brain under extreme duress can produce strong hallucinations accompanied by a feeling of the numinous. That's not terribly exciting in and of itself, so the press fancies it up, makes the bold claims that science cannot, and releases it in comprehensible chunks to the public.They have a difficult job, trying to represent incredibly technical work to a public without the background to understand it, and often having to make it entertaining as well. Much is lost in the translation.
I'm looking forward to better electricity prices in the future.
Regarding pumped hydro? Sorry, this isn't a "future" thing. This is a "we're already doing it, and have in fact exhausted our capacity" thing.
You may joke, but facebook is a data-mining goldmine. Never before have advertisers had such free access to the personal lives of the very people they hope to sell their products to.
You're absolutely correct: the retraction doesn't prove anything. However, decades of attempts to reproduce the study, none of them reaching the same conclusion, does prove an error in the initial study. It turn out that the act of publishing doesn't actually have an effect on the underlying science, while the repeatability does.
Bingo. Intelligence is one of those corporate feelgood words, like state-of-the-art, or user-friendly. They are completely impossible to quantify.
Human-like is a decent standard to measure intelligence by, as we'd like to fashion humanity to be more intelligent, than, say, an earthworm, but it's damned near impossible to point out what makes us intelligent. Is it rationality? Computers already have us beat there. I'd wager that humanity's pattern-recognition and fuzzy categorization skills are what we're often looking for in artificial intelligence - our ability to infer things that aren't explicitly stated. Again, this is impossible to measure. I've heard it proposed that we should score computer systems on whether they make the same types of mistakes that people make - this seems particularly idiotic. Ideally, I'd like to be shooting for a system that doesn't make mistakes - one that is smarter than us.
By the by, we've already got a word for "ability to survive" - fitness. Redefining a popular word that to mean something we've already got a perfectly good word for seems to be a hallmark of "revolutionary" authors, regardless of field.
Exactly. They don't need a bill to prohibit p2p on government/contractor networks, they just need a policy. I'm certainly not allowed to use LimeWire at work.
The pictures aren't OF ice, ice just happens to be in them. The pictures are OF boats/subs/etc. The idea is that they're old enough that no one cares that we knew where that cruiser was 10 years ago.
My guess is that, no matter how neat of a collaborative program you introduce to your students, they're going to give up on it after a couple of minutes, and decide to just meet in the lab on Thursday, at like 5 or something. A good deal of your students live on campus, and the rest of them are there most of the time anyway. Meeting in person is the quick-and-easy solution.
Sorta if you will, like saying that you need a whole 0.45% alcohol in your blood to have a 50-50 chance of death. Yeah, but much smaller doses, if done often enough, can kill you just the same.
But not "just the same." At 0.45, your brain is flooded with alcohol, and your NMDA receptors stop working. Which means that you go braindead, and your body follows. Long-term use of lower concentrations, on the other hand, play hell on your liver, pancreas, gall-bladder, and metabolism in general. So, in the long-term abuse case, your body craps out, and can no longer support your brain. Sure, you still die, but you die in a different manner.
Similarly, it matters what kills you from complete sleep deprivation, as opposed to a long term sleep deficit. We're pretty clear that not getting enough sleep isn't good for you, and we even have a basic understanding of what goes wrong. However, we don't have any recorded cases of a human flat out dying from complete sleep deprivation. It's important to know what goes wrong in that case, so we can ensure that those functions stay right.
You know, I'm all for renewable power, but, aren't there a whole lot of starving people that this money could be feeding? Diseases to cure? Good to do? I kinda thought that churches operated under the do good platform...
This is what first came to mind for me: point-and-click adventure games tend to be significantly less violent and more story-driven than other genres.
Learning how to program, from a book, without access to a computer, will be near impossible for most people. If they're looking to build useful skills, a beginner's book for A+ certification would be an excellent place to start.
I'd hope they also modified it to... you know... act as a convincing human. The grammar is too good for the person on the other end not to understand how one can go into business.
You're looking far too much at the short-term. Evolution doesn't happen at a rate that's visible in the history books - it takes millions of years.
In first world nations (like where you and I live), sure, we're not seeing many people die off due to a lack of resources. However, we're still seeing certain people reproducing at a higher rate than others. If there is any genetic predisposition for this, than that is an evolutionary advantage, and will be propagated over the millions of years.
Evolution doesn't mean "everyone who isn't best dies, right now." Were that the case, you wouldn't have a population large enough to reproduce within. Evolution doesn't even mean "the best live longer." Evolution means, "those who reproduce more will reproduce more." This usually ends up producing organisms fit to survive in their environment. If you stick those organisms in an environment changing as rapidly as a human city, it gives you organisms fit to survive in a "meta-environment" - adapted to the things that invariably stay constant. If you want to say that the human race will always have enough to support it's most feeble of members, so be it. We're evolving towards a race of moochers. Your judgment of "better" and the evolutionary judgment of "better" don't need to have anything in common.
It's not like evolution just stops because of technological advances. We're just evolving within a different environment, with different selective pressures. Remember, evolution isn't driving us towards a "best," it's driving us towards a "works for now."
Besides, society and technology have only been around for a few thousand years. If you're an optimist, the future of the human race looks really hot, and is fairly promiscuous. If you're a pessimist, society collapses, and we're back to the good ol' fashioned try-not-to-die for a while.
Psychic, not pre-cogniscient. Psychics, at least the ones relevant to this issue, can read minds, not predict the future. Unless you figure that the convenience store clerk selling you the ticket already knows the winning numbers...
This is actually interesting. I mean, Google obviously won't include it as a default feature, but do you think they'll make any efforts to block an "AdBlock" add-on equivalent, which would cut directly into their advertising revenue?
"October" is the month following September. That window is a calendar.
I think the idea behind this is that it's a cool technology for presentations, not a replacement for your monitor and keyboard/mouse. You certainly COULD replace your current setup with a high-end projector and one of those motion-capture laser-pointer mice, but you wouldn't, because it's damned expensive, and not nearly as efficient as what you're using right now.
This isn't quite the same a sticking a pedophile in a daycare. Nobody's going to be asking him to be their network admin and trusting him with their employee records; that would be a stupendous waste of talent, in the first place. The police, or a private company, is going to hire him to do the exact same thing that he's been doing - figure out how to get into unauthorized systems. Then he gets to explain to all the peons just how goddamned clever he is, and they get to patch their systems.
To be fair, there have been steps taken since the 2003 blackout to make the power system more reliable. With the Energy Policy Act of 2005, membership in the North American Reliability Council (NERC) has gone from completely voluntary to federally mandated. Failure to adhere to industry standards can carry a fine of up to $1 million per day. The CIP- standards all deal with cyber-security, and the EOP- standards specify what happens in an emergency situation - for example, a big node goes down, and initiates a cascading failure. Automated systems are required to be in place that will cut the power in such situations, leaving some people in the dark, but protecting the grid as a whole. Is the system perfect? No, probably not. A good social engineer could probably still weasel his way into a system. But steps have been taken to minimize damage in such a situation.
Parent beat me to it. I know that my roommate's been watching South Park online for at least a week now...
That's the same thing that popped into my head.
Anyone else notice that Microsoft chose to represent internet advertising as a series of tubes? Apparently, this market isn't something you can just dump something on...