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User: 0olong

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Comments · 85

  1. World peace could be a nightmare on Nukes Are "The Only Peacekeeping Weapons the World Has Ever Known," Says Waltz · · Score: 1

    Let's assume for argument's sake that nukes really do give these assurances, then not only would they prevent war between nation states, they'd likewise within those nations protect the powerful few and their military from ever being truly accountable to their own populace. All hail our permanent overlords.

  2. Re:Hysterical hyperbole. on Japanese Parliament: Fukushima a Man-Made Disaster · · Score: 0

    If you're going to call a parliamentary inquiry hyperbole, you better have something to back that bold statement up with. Yet all you come up with is grandiose value judgments containing no facts, no numbers, no sources, and nothing of substance whatsoever. Hold a mirror up in front of you, and maybe --in a hysterical feat of irony-- you will find where the origin of said hyperbole really lies. Pompous windbags like you, "beautiful mind", are why I dislike Slashdot more and more these days. For shame.

  3. Re:Available Already... on Ford Predicts Self-Driving, Traffic-Reducing Cars By 2017 · · Score: 2

    Machine learning systems are way better at that kind of stuff than humans. Don't believe me? Well, that's because apparently you are completely ignorant of the state of the art. Here's an example: autonomous helicopters. These things can fly upside down in formation, in a way no human helicopter pilot has ever managed to do. How do you think these machines manage to pull such feats off? Are they programmed to deal with every possible state of flight out there? No, they learn to do it themselves. Reinforcement learning. And guess what? Varying road conditions are a perfect domain for machine learning, although very much on the easier side of the spectrum.

  4. Please. on Why Intel Needs Smartphones More Than They Need Intel · · Score: 1

    > The smartphone market is so large now that they need a piece of the pie

    Does this count for logic these days? By that same brilliant logic diaper manufacturers need a piece of the smart phone pie too!

  5. Re:So for all us Titanic haters... on James Cameron Begins His Deep-Sea Dive · · Score: 4, Funny

    You've got to admit, this guy knows how to sink to new levels.

  6. Re:Millisecond trading on $1.5 Billion: the Cost of Cutting London-Tokyo Latency By 60ms · · Score: 1

    What you propose is irrelevant. The stock markets are operated by the same people that benefit from HFT. They have no incentive to change. If you don't like that, make your own market place. Of course, to do so requires a lot of money and power, which you probably don't have unless you're one of said people to begin with.

  7. Vending machines in Japan on Free Wi-Fi Coming To Japanese Vending Machines · · Score: 3, Informative

    The significance of this development is probably not obvious unless you have ever been to Japan. Vending machines there are absolutely everywhere. Whether you're in the city, some suburb outskirt, a picturesque country side village, or even halfway up some random mountain, the nearest roadside vending machine is rarely more than a few stone throws away.

    Since Asahi is one of the big players in the market, this could be made into a huge WiFi mesh.

  8. *YOU* can fight this. on Global Internet Governance Fight Looms · · Score: 1

    1) Deprecate SSL in favor of a web of trust; a decentralized pool of user verifiable certifiers as mentioned before on this site.
    2) Use the above to encrypt all your web sites.
    3) Watch as the concept spreads and a significant percentage of personal content on the web is encrypted as such, after which businesses and browser makers follow through by popular demand.
    4) See the old status quo become deprecated. Meanwhile, all countries filtering this "illegal technology" see their internet go stale, and eventually give in to an increasingly discontent populace.

    Of the above (1) and especially (2) face the worst odds, but they're also the points where you, Slashdot nerds, have the greatest power to make a difference.

  9. Why does X let my entire OS crash? on X.Org Server 1.11 Released · · Score: 0, Troll

    Whether it's the flash player doing something silly or mplayer going or leaving full screen, occasionally the proprietary nvidia driver crashes, and I don't understand why X then lets my entire system crash with it. Nothing responds (except sometimes my mouse movements). That should not be possible. It's 2011, dammit, modular coding practices should be in place by now. [/rant]

  10. Re:Then on Asia Runs Out of IPv4 Addresses · · Score: 1

    He might be Dutch. They always make this mistake when writing in English, because in Dutch both 'then' and 'than' is written as 'dan' (i.e. in Dutch there's no syntactical distinction between the two). I bet they make this mistake so often on the internets that they're increasingly confusing native English speakers.

  11. Crysta on Journey To the Mantle of the Earth By 2020 · · Score: 1

    Finally I can look forward to returning to my hometown...

  12. Re:Nokia has amazing hardware, but not software on Nokia Has a Billion Reasons To Love WP7 · · Score: 2

    Yeah... he really gave it away by jamming "best possible tools" and "Silverlight" into the same sentence, didn't he?

  13. Re:SSL is the key on China Pledges To Step Up Internet Administration · · Score: 2

    Uh, no. The Chinese government will just block everything but their own mandated and back-doored encryption alternative to SSL?

  14. SSL is the key on China Pledges To Step Up Internet Administration · · Score: 2

    Wait for the Chinese population to be as economically dependent on e-commerce as we are (which will happen very soon with widespread broadband availability). That will make it seem very unreasonable for the government to outlaw SSL without a major outcry from its populace. After that, the world should gradually move to make http over SSL the norm rather than the exception. Webmasters of the world, I'm looking at you. Let's see if the "great firewall" can handle that proficiently.

  15. Re:Burden of proof. on Running Your Own Ghost Investigation? · · Score: 1

    This. Spend time and energy chasing the fantasies of the gullible, and you'll be seen as lending credence to their beliefs, while you're chances of success are as good as trying to disprove the existence of a god. Zero.

  16. If there were a Mt. Rushmore of computer gaming... on John Carmack Not Enthused About Android Marketplace · · Score: 1

    John Carmack's head would not only be on it, it would have the highest polygon count.

    Umm, what about Shigeru Miyamoto?

    Ahh, wait, no, his head would be built out of sprites.

  17. $1.900.000.000 for a building on Google Buys Manhattan Office/Telecom Hub · · Score: 1

    Haven't heard of real estate prices like this since pre-bubble Tokyo. What's going on here? Are a bunch of fiber cables really that valuable?

  18. A subset of PDF files? on Aussie Government Gives PDF the Thumbs Down · · Score: 1

    Couldn't they have just required that the text portions of a PDF files are actually text?

  19. Re:Chess on Have I Lost My Gaming Mojo? · · Score: 1

    Then it seems to me you have an odd notion of what's primitive. Aren't the most intelligent (and arguably the least primitive) agents those who arrive at optimal decisions through the least amount of work and resources? In other words, adaptable efficient agents that avoid redundant steps. How well then does an agent based on a min/max algorithm fare if it can't even beat a human agent with less computational resources at a game of go?

    Humans would never have evolved into intelligent beings if intelligence involved spending a lot of resources, as they would've been overrun by more energy efficient species.

  20. Re:Chess on Have I Lost My Gaming Mojo? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    In fact, 'go's impermeability to computerized victory is attributed more to a lack of computational power. Make a game small enough and min/max trees will make it impossible to win against the computer.

    Absolutely not. A min/max tree as a primary method of strategy is a primitive brute force hack approach to game theory. We humans don't nearly rely as much on computational brute force because we simply don't have the capacity for it (mostly because our brain's short term memory has a very high write latency). The fact that one trick pony computer programs are quite successful in chess is the exact reason why I find it less stimulating: it mostly just requires a lot of 'looking ahead'. Go, on the other hand, requires a player to combine that skill with keen pattern recognition abilities and showcases how a combination of diverse skills ability enables a very long lurning curve (the difference between a high kyuu and a high dan in Go is truly a marvel). The go tree branches so quickly that no Moore's law in the foreseeable future is going to be of much help, without developing more intelligent AI / game theory, in particular (probabilistic) pattern recognition. So yes, the state of computer theory and the intellectual depth of a game are very much related, I believe.

  21. Re:Chess on Have I Lost My Gaming Mojo? · · Score: 2, Informative

    Oh, I know, but I was trying to be motivational. If I was replying to BadAnalogyGal, I would have said: "Real women play go."

  22. Re:Chess on Have I Lost My Gaming Mojo? · · Score: 1, Informative

    Dude, chess is child's play. Real men play go.

  23. Re:Elephant in the room on Robot Actress Makes Stage Debut In Japan · · Score: 1

    From Japan's point of view, it makes sense to augment society's ability to cope with the increased workload by developing robots capable of doing a lot of the work.

    Capable androids require NLP. Maybe a car analogy might help you: they're trying to invent an automobile by designing windshields and dashboards, instead of developing a working engine.

  24. Elephant in the room on Robot Actress Makes Stage Debut In Japan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't understand why Japan is so obsessed with creating androids, while (arguably) the most essential technology behind enabling interaction with humans; the AI field of Natural Language Processing is being glossed over (or at least not getting the amount of attention it deserves). Not just computers, but humans too (and Japanese people in particular) tend to have great difficulty handling the barriers that foreign languages pose to vast amounts of useful foreign data. A successful grammar independent NLP framework for data representation, now that should be a goal to focus on. Everywhere, but in particular in insular countries like Japan. Sorry for wandering off topic...

  25. Re:In this case I really doubt it on China Now Halting Shipments of Rare Earth Minerals To US · · Score: 1

    And yet, I hear the same comments about China I heard about Japan in the 70s and early 80s: they just copy, they don't innovate, and have a mediocre directed economy. And then they ate our lunch. I expect the same to happen with China. They will eat our lunch, because we're only looking at where they are, not where they're going.

    The Japanese have been doing little lunch eating since their bubble economy burst two decades ago though. Must have ruined their appetite...