I can hear the "human life begins at conception" crowd exploiting this just now.
As opposed to what other crowd? Who's making the arguement that a growing embryo isn't alive? Certainly not any biologist or person with medical training. Who's making the arguement that that it's not human? What is it then, a monkey? Can I claim teenagers as hyenas? Are we just randomly lobbing people out of the human race now?
It's not like he was an immediate threat, and they might've learned something from the presentation.
...and then by the time they call him back to the stage recieve first prize for his presentation, he'll have snuck off to a convent, and then across the mountains to Switzerland, and freedom!...Dude! Snap out of it! You're having another one of your bad Sound of Music trips!
Just to play Devil's Advocate here, but why SHOULD they facilitate the use of other OS'es? Look at the customers who make up 99% of their base:
In logical terms this is a fallacy known as an Appeal to Common Practice.
If Linux distros can do it then Windows should be able to do it and should actually do it.
That's hillarious. You mislabel the argument you're responding to as "Appeal to Common Practice", and then you put forth your own arguement, which IS the fallacy of "Appeal to Common Practice"!
frankly im waiting for someone to give me the ability to "Alt Tab" between OSs. i'd love to run linux primary and just alt tab to windows when i need to do MS shit.
It already exists, and it's only about ten thousand times easier than configuring a system for dual-boot. Go to vmware.com, and download the free "player" for your native OS, then download one of the many free pre-configured OS's or apps to run.
When is the last time you saw a snake eat a monkey? If anything drove primate adaptation, wouldn't have been, I don't know... the ability to avoid bears or lions, or other primates? Personally, I think color vision came about so that we'd better know when to flip the mammoth meat. Either that, or to better appreciate feminine beauty. Seriously, though, if you want to figure out what drove an adaptation, shouldn't you look at what the adaptation is subsequently mostly used for?
What?? Illiterate people are of a different species than literate people? Does that mean it's ok for us to go capture people from an illiterate country and keep them as pets? Do I have to be good at spelling to be in your species, Mr. Futurist? Or since I'm better at programming than spelling, am I already a post-human? In that case would it be acceptable for me to cook you and eat you, or is post-human morality still pretty much up in the air?
There is no "artificial intelligence". All intelligence that is called artificial intelligence is genuine.
There is no artificial intelligence, because what is called "artificial intelligence" is actually just algorithms. The only intelligence involved is in the designing of them by humans. These "futurists" (science fiction writers) have been saying, "strong AI is right around the corner" for at least four decades now. As someone who designs neural networks and keeps up the latest research, I can assure you that we are no closer to "strong AI" than we were in the stone age. An artificial neural network is no more likely to aquire intelligence than a clay head with magic words spoken to it. I'm not knocking either idea...just putting it perspective.
We currently have a pretty good understanding of the usefulness of neural networks. And no surprise, things like sensory input and motor control are things that neural networks are highly suited for. And that's obviously what they do in the brain. But why do we insist on assuming that neural networks also have this other magical property of producing consciousness? They don't! It doesn't even make sense!
the tremendous success that is evolution on this planet has overshadowed its enherent weaknesses - that it is a greedy, local optimizer which cannot reach a large amount of the possible biological search space due to being stuck in local optima, and the added constraint that everything must be constructed out of self-replicating units (these two factors are why something useful, like, say, a Colt 45, will never emerge without the pre-existence of an intelligence).
While a Colt 45 is not self-replicating, those constraints wouldn't preclude the evolution of a non-intelligent self-replicating organism that could excrete Colt 45s. And what evidence is there that evolution is a greedy local optimizer? It seems like in terms of reproduction rate, reproduction success, and survivability, you can't get more optimal than bacteria. Yet here we are.
If you write out one instruction in a high-level language that does the same thing, the compiler can decide how best to get that result...
Yes, but if the "high-level compiler" has a single instruction to do the thing you want to do, then is a programmer really needed?
The more abstract a language is, the better a compiler can understand what you are doing.
No compiler ever written can understand what you are doing. (Aside, arguably, from the single-instruction example.) The very best a compiler can hypothetically do is modify your instructions into their faster-running logical equivilents. In my experience, the best that can be hoped for from optimization (at any level language) is it that implements your instructions in a way that isn't overtly stupid. When something truely needs to be optimized, (at any level language) it means a programmer needs to optimize it -- which means either rethinking the implementation or dropping down to a lower level. Well, in theory. In real life it very often means discovering the bone-headed way that the compiler (or OS API, etc) implements the instruction you were using and switching to a different instruction.
HAL was compelled to obey the orders he was given, and was given contradictory orders: ensure the success of the mission at all costs, and serve and protect the crew. When it began to appear to HAL that the crew themselves could be a threat to the success of the mission, he had to choose the order that was given higher priority.
Oh, sure, the old "it can only be attributable to human error" defense.;-)
When Arthur C. Clarke imagined that in 2001 we would build an artificial computer intelligence that would turn homicidal in order to wrest control of a spacecraft, and that in 2010 we would land on a moon made entirely of diamond, people thought that sounded plausible and cool.
On the other hand, if someone had proposed at that time that in 2006 a spacecraft would launch from the Ukraine called "Genesis 1", and that mission control in Las Vegas would lose power at the last minute and would have to run an extension cord to the restaurant across the street for power, people would have thought that was the stupidest, most implausible thing they had ever heard.
It seems to me this is really about whether governments have the ability to enforce the laws they create.
Ok then, if the question is if governments have the ability to enforce laws telling foreign-based software companies what features to include in their software, then no, no they don't have that ability. What are they going to do, send the French Foreign Legion to invade Redmond? The worst they can do is start levying tarrifs on Microsoft products coming in to the EU. Fine. Then the Europeans pay for the effects of the laws which presumably came out of their own ideologies, and everybody's happy.
4) Powerless shareholders can divest their MS stock for a company that doesn't flaut the law.
If you're looking to sell, I can give your a reasonable price for your shares. I'm putting together a portfolio comprised solely of companies that piss off Europeans and Mac owners.
Out of curiosity does anyone have a figure for the number of wikipedia pages that have a panel questioning the veracity of the data, or neutrality of the same? It seems to be about one in every 2 or 3 that I visit. I don't know whether this is a quality of submission issue or a overzealotry of moderation issue, or (most likely) a bit of both.
Or maybe that's the proper state for any information coming from a human source. That's the problem with the Old Media that we're in process of the overcoming. That the Encyclopedia tells the world "I'm the Encyclopedia, and everything I say is from a neutral perspective and is completely true," or that CNN news tells the world, "I'm CNN News, and everything I say is from a neutral perspective and is completely true," and the scattered individuals who relize, "wait a minute, that is really biased," or "hey, that is patently untrue," say so in the privacy of their own homes, and no one else benefits from that realization.
I don't find Wikipedia entries to have any more neutrality problems than "real" encyclopedia entries, but when there is a problem, "real" encyclopedias have no good mechanism for finding it, alerting people to it, and fixing it.
It's a statistical analysis of the consistency of the frequency being emitted from the mercury atom. The result of this analysis was that it showed an uncertainty of about 7e-17, meaning that a clock syncronized to it would be accurate to 7e-17 seconds every second, or 7e-17 years (which is 2 nanoseconds) every year, or one second every 1/(7e-17) seconds (which is about 400,000 years).
how long will this continue? Will anyone really want to use a clock that won't lose a second until AFTER the sun has expanded and burnt up the earth (~5 billion years)?
How long a clock like this takes to lose a second is only relevent for the purpose of press releases. Although this new fancy clock doesn't lose a second for 400 million years, it loses a picosecond in just 4 hours.
Or, it is like the appendix, or some othe holdover.
Furthermore, it's not clear that the human appendix is entirely without function; it may contribute to immune system function, at least early in life.
Actually, today the appendix is well-understood to be a fully functional organ of the immune system. It tells lymphocytes where to go to fight infections, and it boosts the large intestine's immunity to various foods and drugs. (But it should still be recognized that our current ignorance of the workings of the immune system makes our current knowledge of it look like a joke.)
Auto means self. Opsy means sight. The original meaning of autopsy is therefore "seeing for oneself," not "disecting (or looking at) something of the same species as oneself."
Why is n^2 such an unbelievable function? Add n users to a group. How many relationships do you have? n(n-1)/2. As n becomes large, this reduces to n^2/2...
Maybe because as n becomes large, a smaller percentage of those n(n-1)/2 relationships are used in any real-life network. If you were going to start with n^2 there would have to be some inverse component added to the function to account for that.
With n^2, the nth user adds 2n-1 value. That would mean that the next Internet user (the approx 1e9th) will add a million times more value to the Internet than the 1000th user did. That doesn't sound right to me.
Slashdot Mirror
They evolved wings so that they could beat away the SNAKES!
When is the last time you saw a snake eat a monkey? If anything drove primate adaptation, wouldn't have been, I don't know... the ability to avoid bears or lions, or other primates? Personally, I think color vision came about so that we'd better know when to flip the mammoth meat. Either that, or to better appreciate feminine beauty. Seriously, though, if you want to figure out what drove an adaptation, shouldn't you look at what the adaptation is subsequently mostly used for?
What?? Illiterate people are of a different species than literate people? Does that mean it's ok for us to go capture people from an illiterate country and keep them as pets? Do I have to be good at spelling to be in your species, Mr. Futurist? Or since I'm better at programming than spelling, am I already a post-human? In that case would it be acceptable for me to cook you and eat you, or is post-human morality still pretty much up in the air?
We currently have a pretty good understanding of the usefulness of neural networks. And no surprise, things like sensory input and motor control are things that neural networks are highly suited for. And that's obviously what they do in the brain. But why do we insist on assuming that neural networks also have this other magical property of producing consciousness? They don't! It doesn't even make sense!
No compiler ever written can understand what you are doing. (Aside, arguably, from the single-instruction example.) The very best a compiler can hypothetically do is modify your instructions into their faster-running logical equivilents. In my experience, the best that can be hoped for from optimization (at any level language) is it that implements your instructions in a way that isn't overtly stupid. When something truely needs to be optimized, (at any level language) it means a programmer needs to optimize it -- which means either rethinking the implementation or dropping down to a lower level. Well, in theory. In real life it very often means discovering the bone-headed way that the compiler (or OS API, etc) implements the instruction you were using and switching to a different instruction.
When Arthur C. Clarke imagined that in 2001 we would build an artificial computer intelligence that would turn homicidal in order to wrest control of a spacecraft, and that in 2010 we would land on a moon made entirely of diamond, people thought that sounded plausible and cool.
On the other hand, if someone had proposed at that time that in 2006 a spacecraft would launch from the Ukraine called "Genesis 1", and that mission control in Las Vegas would lose power at the last minute and would have to run an extension cord to the restaurant across the street for power, people would have thought that was the stupidest, most implausible thing they had ever heard.
I for one welcome our new gold-crapping microbe overlords.
I don't find Wikipedia entries to have any more neutrality problems than "real" encyclopedia entries, but when there is a problem, "real" encyclopedias have no good mechanism for finding it, alerting people to it, and fixing it.
It's a statistical analysis of the consistency of the frequency being emitted from the mercury atom. The result of this analysis was that it showed an uncertainty of about 7e-17, meaning that a clock syncronized to it would be accurate to 7e-17 seconds every second, or 7e-17 years (which is 2 nanoseconds) every year, or one second every 1/(7e-17) seconds (which is about 400,000 years).
Dude, when it says your hard drive is full, just put it down and walk away.
Auto means self. Opsy means sight. The original meaning of autopsy is therefore "seeing for oneself," not "disecting (or looking at) something of the same species as oneself."
With n^2, the nth user adds 2n-1 value. That would mean that the next Internet user (the approx 1e9th) will add a million times more value to the Internet than the 1000th user did. That doesn't sound right to me.