there’s no way to turn off some of the telemetry data Windows 10 collects about your system and beams back to the mothership. Microsoft executives don’t consider this a privacy issue. If you do, Windows 10 isn’t for you.
Now let's put this on 1.1 million military systems.
But now that Angolans are causing headaches for Wikipedia editors and the Wikimedia Foundation, no one is sure what to do about it.
Crazy thought but how about limiting uploads to, say, 2MB?
Second crazy thought, how about scanning the files they already have uploaded, identifying the ones that are way too big for what they are (say, over 2MB) and checking each one manually?
Crazy thought: isn't there a way to, I don't know, break up a big file into lots of little files, in a way that's easy to reassemble the little files into the big file?
There's no problem at all with being a mathematician or a philosopher of science. I'm a physicist, and I don't think any of my colleagues would argue that these fields should go away or that physicists shouldn't work in them. Emmy Noether is a great example of how people outside physics can help develop new physics.
But... relativity wasn't accepted until it was tested. Neither should any other theory coming out of advanced mathematics. Simply being around for a long time is not enough to move a set of math from clever speculation into physics. We've been down this path before. Allowing foundational theories to be integrated into the rest of physics without verification might end up fine, or it might waste the careers of a generation of physicists. Today, that also might mean many billions of dollars of funding and significant public trust.
You say this like there's some cabal deciding on 'allowing foundational theories into the rest of physics without verification'.
If you look at the Dec. 2014 Nature article that sparked the NYTimes article, you'd see that the concern there isn't even about the conduct of science itself -- it's about the worry that apparent dissent among scientists will fuel anti-scientism. So we'd better work out these 'what's experimentally verifiable' questions far away from the inquiring public.
There's no real worry that somehow the world's best and brightest physicists have forgotten about falsifiability.
If we find any more Emmy Noethers, and they happen to be housed in physics departments, I say we continue their funding. Of course, it's always hard to judge which will be the more long lasting contributions, but if it weren't, it wouldn't be "research".
I swear, funding of basic research has enough enemies in this world -- it hurts to see it all over slashdot.
Who says the only useful/productive mathematical and scientific activities are hypothesis generation?
When Emmy Noether develops algebraic invariant theory, does she know that some physicists are going to call her up for help with general relativity?
After enough of these cases, physicists are trying to develop their own interesting, novel mathematical contributions. Who knows, maybe some of them will have applications.
The most outrage I can muster here is that some of these researchers are housed in the wrong departments. The horror.
I wonder why Oracle's own page describing the Ask.com toolbar doesn't describe a single benefit -- that is, unless the end user already thinks that "[searching] the Web using the Ask.com search engine directly from the browser" is a benefit.
Nope. She is a "visiting assistant professor", which is code for exactly the type of jobs listed in the description. Non-tenured track, low pay, no perks/office, higher teaching workload than the the tenure track/tenured.
The reason we invented www.netclick.me is precisely because Professors won't use a new technology for teaching unless it is extremely easy, doesn't require new preparation, and actually benefits students.
That is to say, the Republicans have a majority in the House. So the only way they could have rendered Tea Party congressmen irrelevant was with the cooperation of non-Tea Party Republicans. But any Republicans who defected from Tea Party positions would be "primaried". So none of the non-Tea Party congressmen (House members) were willing to defect.
So, why blame Democrats?
Folks, the Adobe DRM for eBooks is laughably easy to break. Please, guys, keep all this quiet. Adobe DRMed books can be easily turned into non-DRMed ePubs that are reflowable, portable, and in OPEN STANDARDS format.
Please, don't make too much noise that might change my favorite ebook store's (shortcovers) mind about using a DRM format that's easy to break into something nice.
If you have x third party pieces of software, how many configurations must you test to find 1 piece of software causing crashes?
If you have x third party pieces of software, how many configurations must you test to find 2 pieces of software causing crashes?
Yeah, WinMo 6.1 is it for me. No more.
Let's all be honest: the only reason people have ever used WinMo at all is a lack of choice.
In fact, right now I'm using a WinMo 6.1 gadget, but instead of syncing my desktop Outlook appointments with it using Activesync, I let Google be the middleman.
After how many years, and Activesync is still unstable requiring weekly reinstalls? Changing timezone still turns whole day appointments into monstrosities that are time sensitive and cross multiple days? Duplicates still randomly pop up?
Hi, I'm one of the professors who fails* students for using Wikipedia as a cited source.
The reason I do so is in the second paragraph of your own post. It's not a good primary source (i.e. something that can legitimately appear in a bibliography), but a great place to start from to look for primary sources.
In fact, I encourage my students to use wikipedia -- when starting their papers. But I explain to them that they can't finish their research there.
All that said, I'd love to see universities get involved in some sort of distributed funding mechanism for Wikipedia.
*that is, I fail them on the portion of the assignment where they had to do some research. Asterisks seem very popular on slashdot today.
Any time you hear a headline of the form "Supercomputer x has simulated brain portion y", reinterpret as "theory of brain function y has tractable simulation level of x".
We are very far away from defending any particular theory of brain function as accurate for cognitive function, and don't know whether it will have a tractable simulation level. As you say, though, the best attempts at developing one (IMHO) involve linked and interacting research programs involving modelling and microbiology.
We're probably there on raw compute power, even though we don't know how to use it. Any medium-sized server farm has more storage capacity that the human brain. If we had a clue how to build a brain, the hardware wouldn't be the problem. Oh really? Did I miss the issue of computational neuroscience in which we finally answered all the pesky questions about
What the signal code of neurons is, e.g. local synchrony vs. absolute timing vs. chaotic emergence vs. some/all of the above?
Whether glial cells, greater in mass than neurons, play a significant computational role?
Whether Hodgkin-Huxley equations capture neurons at an appropriate functional/cognitive level of description?
Whether precise molecular nature/positioning of each ion gate on neuronal soma is functionally/cognitive significant?
etc. etc. etc.
We don't know what the storage capacity of the brain is. In part, this is because we don't know what the relevant physical processes are that determine and control information flow in the brain. The neuron doctrine sustained research into brain anatomy and physiology for decades, but has led to more questions than answers.
I recently bought the holiday edition of Half-Life 2, which included the game and episode one
I was so disgusted by the copy protection techniques (e.g., you must connect to our server before you can play, the software will attempt to connect to our server every subsequent time, you can never resell or return the software once you discover this) that I never played it.
Did enough people accept all this that it didn't matter for their sales? Does this mean Episode 2 will have all of the above copy protection techniques? Obviously I won't drop any more money on such software.
Also, believe it or not, there are some models of computation which are universal even though they only use finite resources! Do you understand your own thesis?
First you say that there are models of computation that are
universal, and
use finite resources.
A computer that uses finite resources is one, for example, that only ever uses 47 squares on a tape.
To give me examples, you refer to models of computation that are
not universal, and
use unbounded resources (although only a polynomial of the input).
An infinite tape is still a resource. This is fun and all, but you're equivocating so fast my head is spinning.
The meaning of "given set of resources", in complexity theory, is "growth-bounded time and/or space", neither of which are part of the "resources", now meaning "finite but unbounded time and space", of computability theory.
Also, believe it or not, there are some models of computation which are universal even though they only use finite resources! I have no idea what you're talking about.
why waste my time working on that, when it is all only for the greater glory of Wolfram's world view? More or less. Except for that $25,000... too bad that's what he has to stoop to to get attention these days.
-- with apologies to the great Minsky.
Perhaps because they both have to do with what a machine with a given set of resources can compute? No -- computability theory is concerned with what a machine with unlimited resources can compute.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's latest update for Garageband for iOS has all kinds of substantial features that the desktop version didn't get.
https://www.apple.com/ca/newsroom/2017/11/garageband-brings-new-sound-library-and-classic-beat-sequencer/
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
there’s no way to turn off some of the telemetry data Windows 10 collects about your system and beams back to the mothership. Microsoft executives don’t consider this a privacy issue. If you do, Windows 10 isn’t for you.
Now let's put this on 1.1 million military systems.
Crazy thought but how about limiting uploads to, say, 2MB?
Second crazy thought, how about scanning the files they already have uploaded, identifying the ones that are way too big for what they are (say, over 2MB) and checking each one manually?
Crazy thought: isn't there a way to, I don't know, break up a big file into lots of little files, in a way that's easy to reassemble the little files into the big file?
There's no problem at all with being a mathematician or a philosopher of science. I'm a physicist, and I don't think any of my colleagues would argue that these fields should go away or that physicists shouldn't work in them. Emmy Noether is a great example of how people outside physics can help develop new physics.
But... relativity wasn't accepted until it was tested. Neither should any other theory coming out of advanced mathematics. Simply being around for a long time is not enough to move a set of math from clever speculation into physics. We've been down this path before. Allowing foundational theories to be integrated into the rest of physics without verification might end up fine, or it might waste the careers of a generation of physicists. Today, that also might mean many billions of dollars of funding and significant public trust.
You say this like there's some cabal deciding on 'allowing foundational theories into the rest of physics without verification'.
If you look at the Dec. 2014 Nature article that sparked the NYTimes article, you'd see that the concern there isn't even about the conduct of science itself -- it's about the worry that apparent dissent among scientists will fuel anti-scientism. So we'd better work out these 'what's experimentally verifiable' questions far away from the inquiring public.
There's no real worry that somehow the world's best and brightest physicists have forgotten about falsifiability.
If we find any more Emmy Noethers, and they happen to be housed in physics departments, I say we continue their funding. Of course, it's always hard to judge which will be the more long lasting contributions, but if it weren't, it wouldn't be "research".
I swear, funding of basic research has enough enemies in this world -- it hurts to see it all over slashdot.
Who says the only useful/productive mathematical and scientific activities are hypothesis generation?
When Emmy Noether develops algebraic invariant theory, does she know that some physicists are going to call her up for help with general relativity?
After enough of these cases, physicists are trying to develop their own interesting, novel mathematical contributions. Who knows, maybe some of them will have applications.
The most outrage I can muster here is that some of these researchers are housed in the wrong departments. The horror.
-I find redundant sign-offs annoying
I wonder why Oracle's own page describing the Ask.com toolbar doesn't describe a single benefit -- that is, unless the end user already thinks that "[searching] the Web using the Ask.com search engine directly from the browser" is a benefit.
https://www.java.com/en/downlo...
Nope. She is a "visiting assistant professor", which is code for exactly the type of jobs listed in the description. Non-tenured track, low pay, no perks/office, higher teaching workload than the the tenure track/tenured.
The reason we invented www.netclick.me is precisely because Professors won't use a new technology for teaching unless it is extremely easy, doesn't require new preparation, and actually benefits students.
That is to say, the Republicans have a majority in the House. So the only way they could have rendered Tea Party congressmen irrelevant was with the cooperation of non-Tea Party Republicans. But any Republicans who defected from Tea Party positions would be "primaried". So none of the non-Tea Party congressmen (House members) were willing to defect. So, why blame Democrats?
If they were Republicans, then they chose not to out of fear of extremely well funded primary opposition.
me too.
Folks, the Adobe DRM for eBooks is laughably easy to break. Please, guys, keep all this quiet. Adobe DRMed books can be easily turned into non-DRMed ePubs that are reflowable, portable, and in OPEN STANDARDS format.
Please, don't make too much noise that might change my favorite ebook store's (shortcovers) mind about using a DRM format that's easy to break into something nice.
Hey, let's play a game.
If you have x third party pieces of software, how many configurations must you test to find 1 piece of software causing crashes?
If you have x third party pieces of software, how many configurations must you test to find 2 pieces of software causing crashes?
Yeah, WinMo 6.1 is it for me. No more.
Let's all be honest: the only reason people have ever used WinMo at all is a lack of choice.
In fact, right now I'm using a WinMo 6.1 gadget, but instead of syncing my desktop Outlook appointments with it using Activesync, I let Google be the middleman.
After how many years, and Activesync is still unstable requiring weekly reinstalls? Changing timezone still turns whole day appointments into monstrosities that are time sensitive and cross multiple days? Duplicates still randomly pop up?
WinMo is over. The end. Goodbye.
Hi, I'm one of the professors who fails* students for using Wikipedia as a cited source.
The reason I do so is in the second paragraph of your own post. It's not a good primary source (i.e. something that can legitimately appear in a bibliography), but a great place to start from to look for primary sources.
In fact, I encourage my students to use wikipedia -- when starting their papers. But I explain to them that they can't finish their research there.
All that said, I'd love to see universities get involved in some sort of distributed funding mechanism for Wikipedia.
*that is, I fail them on the portion of the assignment where they had to do some research. Asterisks seem very popular on slashdot today.
Any time you hear a headline of the form "Supercomputer x has simulated brain portion y", reinterpret as "theory of brain function y has tractable simulation level of x".
We are very far away from defending any particular theory of brain function as accurate for cognitive function, and don't know whether it will have a tractable simulation level. As you say, though, the best attempts at developing one (IMHO) involve linked and interacting research programs involving modelling and microbiology.
- What the signal code of neurons is, e.g. local synchrony vs. absolute timing vs. chaotic emergence vs. some/all of the above?
- Whether glial cells, greater in mass than neurons, play a significant computational role?
- Whether Hodgkin-Huxley equations capture neurons at an appropriate functional/cognitive level of description?
- Whether precise molecular nature/positioning of each ion gate on neuronal soma is functionally/cognitive significant?
- etc. etc. etc.
We don't know what the storage capacity of the brain is. In part, this is because we don't know what the relevant physical processes are that determine and control information flow in the brain. The neuron doctrine sustained research into brain anatomy and physiology for decades, but has led to more questions than answers.It's not a laptop, but it's a reason to carry an extra charger, in addition to your smartphone's. Don't these product designers every travel?
everyone knows that by creating Orbos, the natives of Mars lost their magnetosphere and ensured their civilization's premature demise.
(fake science makes for fun ingredients for science fiction!)
If you read my post, you would have seen that I never asserted that you needed a connection for playing after the first time.
I recently bought the holiday edition of Half-Life 2, which included the game and episode one
I was so disgusted by the copy protection techniques (e.g., you must connect to our server before you can play, the software will attempt to connect to our server every subsequent time, you can never resell or return the software once you discover this) that I never played it.
Did enough people accept all this that it didn't matter for their sales? Does this mean Episode 2 will have all of the above copy protection techniques? Obviously I won't drop any more money on such software.
First you say that there are models of computation that are
- universal, and
- use finite resources.
A computer that uses finite resources is one, for example, that only ever uses 47 squares on a tape.To give me examples, you refer to models of computation that are
The meaning of "given set of resources", in complexity theory, is "growth-bounded time and/or space", neither of which are part of the "resources", now meaning "finite but unbounded time and space", of computability theory. Also, believe it or not, there are some models of computation which are universal even though they only use finite resources! I have no idea what you're talking about.