Also, Alice in Wonderland and Clash of the Titans were shot in 2D and then post processed to give them the illusion of being in 3d...and the effect is shit.
Yeah, I've been enjoying all the talk about 3D being the future default in which all movies will be filmed. We all saw a $300 million movie implement it very well now I want to see the one hundred $3 million movies implement it at appropriate budget cost before I make my decision. I also learned that my local theater has taken to increased prices for 3D movies... after inquiring as to why this is they couldn't really produce a good explanation. I offered to bring my own glasses... I pointed out that it took the same amount of energy for them to display either mode. And Alice was filmed in 2D and just post processed... so why do I have to pay 60% more for my ticket?
If that's the way things are going, I predict the death of 3D.
"Valis", "Radio Free Albemuth", and "Flow My Tears the Policeman Said" Purchased by independent producer John Alan Simon
properties under option: "Adjustment Team" - Short Story, "Ubik" - Novel, "King of the Elves - Short Story
After reading more than a few of PKD's books and short stories really I'm surprised that Hollywood isn't more obsessed with PKD than they are now. In my opinion, the Science Fiction genre is tired and overdone in very predictable ways. PKD's works are often further out there. I realize that A Scanner Darkly was probably not the most well received movie but I would predict that Dick's use of a sort of confusion/resolution while tackling the standard moral/ethical dilemmas that are the hallmark of SciFi would be an easy option to keep movies "fresh." Of course, I've been wondering the same thing about Stanislaw Lem for quite some time. Aside from Solaris he seems to be relegated to fringe movies like Ari Folman's adaptation of Lem'sThe Futurological Congress.
Recently I finished Chuck Palahniuk's Rant and went searching online for more details as I was generally confused about who was a Historian and who was not at the end of the novel. What I found was that he's making it into a trilogy and that the rights to his books as movies are generally bought right after he finishes a book. He says:
We’ve had a bunch of negotiations for Rant. It’s going to be the first of three books on the same sort of theme and the movie production people want to see at least outlines on the next two books in the series because nobody wants to buy the rights of the first of three and not be able to control the rights to the second and third books. So I really have to sell Rant as a three-book package. So once I’m able to present those people with a product outline for the next two books, then we’ll sell.
So I'm guessing that Fight Club was such a huge money maker and gained mainstream respect that some of his more gritty novels are now premium movie material? Or perhaps he's not too picky on the size of the sum when his story is about to made into a movie?
There's not a lot of data out there on how much these rights sell for I guess so you can't say whether or not PKD's Trust is just underrating them as pulp scifi and selling them low cost. Combine that possibility with the fact that he's had some huge movies come from his books and I think Hollywood is finally beginning to understand. With Dick you finally have the technology to represent his dreams on screen along with a dearth of stories along with a public tired of your predictable plots along with the possibility that PKD's trust wants PKD to be appreciated on the silver screen. Lord knows that if I was a member of PKD's family I would love to see the young people of today enjoy his works as much as the young people of yesterday did.
A chip costing less than a dollar is embedded in a cell phone and programmed to either alert the cell phone carrier to the presence of toxic chemicals in the air...
Well look on the bright side, the Chinese worker who makes the chip only has to step outside of the factory and turn it on to see if it works on a wide spectrum. Of course who would be foolish enough to risk their job, life, liberty and pursuit of happiness with a complaint about a local government official being bribed into letting your employer pollute to its heart's content?
One might be a false positive. Hundreds might indicate the need for evacuation.
So how is that person holding the false positive going to react? Maybe they're the first phone to realize it? Maybe they don't understand what 'false positive' means?
For personal safety issues such as a chlorine gas leak, a warning is sounded; the user can choose a vibration, noise, text message or phone call.
I'd be concerned those false positives might not be warmly received. Especially if someone in a crowded Starbucks has a phone that starts to alarm and says "Oh my god, there's chlorine gas in here!" You might be hit with some lawsuits after a few people are injured in a stampede. Contrived scenario? Maybe. But people are less than rational beings when their lives are perceived to be at stake. While academia is right on board some of the larger cities have been a little resistant toward citizen operated detectors.
Steve Wozniak has said that he pre-ordered three iPads, two for himself and one for a friend. This is a testament to his incredible good nature and his loyalty both to the firm that marginalized him in the 1980s and to a friend, Jobs, who refused to write a foreword for his memoirs. Yet somewhere, deep inside, Wozniak must realize what the release of the iPad signifies: The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists.
That last sentence is really the core problem here. We were used to Steve Wozniak's Apple and we were in love with that Apple. Now the only Apple left is Steve Job's Apple. Times have changed but before we cast acerbic words at Jobs you must acknowledge he has led the company in a very profitable direction. Could he have done that while adhering to Wozniak's "open" idealism? That's the real debate here.
Tetris, to me, is the ultimate video game. It can be played by anyone ranging from someone who doesn't even know what a video game is all the way to competitive level hardcore pros.
No other video game in history has that kind of audience..
Wrong. The concept of a game being easy to begin playing but difficult to master dates back to Chess and even Go. As far as modern day video games are concerned there are a lot that actually fall into this category. I believe the phrase was first coined by Nolan Bushnell but I could be wrong.
You are free to say that in your opinion of "easy to learn, difficult to master" video games, Tetris is the ultimate. But even video games like Donkey Kong or Pac Man have the same simple laws that a novice understands which gradually become more and more restrictive until the true "mastery" title is nearly impossible to attain -- kill screen, anyone?
If you're designing a new video game, that seems to be one of the fundamental requirements so that you aren't too off-putting to new players. You can play World of Warcraft at your own pace and although the UI and input is infinitely more complex than Tetris, it exhibits this basic rule of thumb for game design -- quite successfully. That's why it enjoys a worldwide audience of 10+ million.
Tetris is legendary and fun but modern day video games (like the popular flash puzzle games) are building past Tetris while trying to maintain the principles that made it successful. I predict you're going to be upset that I might have just compared Tetris to Bejeweled but lets face it: they're both simple insanely popular video games that have a large swath of difficulties that seem to algorithmically scale in later levels.
As an avid Tetris player, I must inquire when it is that one is given the "competitive level hardcore pro" title in Tetris?
"The Most Dangerous Game hunt down" or the boring old e-mail notification? Because if it's the former, I might start seeding large sets of prime numbers labeled as "Natalie Portman sex tape" through my noisy neighbor's unsecured wifi network connected to his Verizon FIOS.
Christ, I don't think I've ever even heard of these guys. They should have took the money & ran.
Agreed. With that kind of money you could almost afford your own US Senator... or US Representative at the least. With one of those they could start pushing their pro-Square agenda. For far too long the Mods and the Rockers have enjoyed an unquestioned two party system...
... and use of gestapo intimidation tactics on the wikileaks staff.
If you are comparing those intimidation tactics with that of Geheime Staatspolizei then you should read some more books on World War II. If the Geheime Staatspolizei had paid Mr. Assange or any Wikileaks staff a visit, they would be rotting in a ditch by now. And their family members would be too afraid to ask any questions. That is the definition of 'gestapo.' It is obvious that the Wikileaks staff were non-compliant. That's not something the gestapo would just walk away from. You should spend the time to appreciate the people who actually suffered through that shit. Or even those repressed under the secret police in East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell. It appears that someone put a tail on the staff and then detained him and repeatedly asked him not to release the video. This is laughable (Hello Kitty's Rent-A-Cop laughable) compared to the gestapo. Your local police may do worse to you in the United States and detain you for a full 24 hours without pressing charges. And trust me when I say that in that 24 hours you will spend time with less than reputable people -- listening to them complain and watching them utilize toiletries in front of you.
Is his hand broken beyond repair? Is his family disowning him? Has he lost his job and any work prospects? Has he been blacklisted? Are his contacts monitored? The real gestapo controlled the populace through fear. If your mother found you with data like this in World War II Berlin, she'd bring you to the concentration camp herself out of fear that you both might go if she doesn't. I'm not afraid after reading about what happened to the Wikileaks staff -- especially considering this video most likely is classified information. You might consider what they did to the staff unfair until you realize that it's totally legal if law enforcement is doing it and considering the material they had it was probably just a reminder that they would face legal issues if they hosted it. It was a gamble for Wikileaks and it paid off big time. At this point, it's so newsworthy and the public viewership so great that I doubt the US Government dares try to prosecute. It's been up for a day after all...
Re:They also left out a good deal of context
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How Did Wikileaks Do It?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
What disturbs me is how quickly people judge a video when they were two airships meaning you're only seeing one view from one of the apaches. Other people are calling in RPGs and AK47s... and those that were pulling the triggers were acting on that information. Personally, from watching the video, I saw very unfortunate movement by a photographer with a very large camera (405-415 on the wikileaks site) that at first looks exactly like an insurgent with an RPG trying to get an unseen angle on a gunship. Only after I was told that they were photographers was my imagination allowed to see that as a very large lens camera (and you conveniently can't see those frames where the RPG looks more like a camera at the site you linked to). And even then, with the low resolution Youtube footage, who's to say what it looked like to those there? Missing something like that could cost not only your life but also the lives of people flying with you.
I'm not trying to excuse what happened but I am saying that a series of mistakes were most likely made in those videos that lead to the unfortunate deaths of at least a couple innocent people.
And this is war.
If you're a United States citizen, you paid for that gunship. You paid for that scenario. Don't get me wrong, you also paid for the scenario when real insurgents trying to kill innocent people were stopped. That scenario just isn't interesting to us though. You see it as a byline on a newspaper but those stories are just something to yawn at these days. I was for the war in Afghanistan and I knew that things like this video would happen. I was not for the Iraq war because these scenarios were not worth ousting Saddam. Friendly fire happened in Desert Storm and probably every large scale conflict before that as long as guns have been involved. Do you think a reporter was never killed accidentally by United States forces in Vietnam or even World War II (commonly viewed as one of the few 'justified' war)?
I'm glad everyone got to see one of the faces of war. I'm sad that these people wrongfully died but I'm glad that this rightful outrage might cause us to really reconsider what half or more of us had decided when our elected Commander in Chief brought us into both these wars. I don't get it. I was ~20 years old during our invasion of Afghanistan and people just seemed humdrum "Hey, let's go to war, I won't be dying in it" and I'm still a little bit confused about that sentiment. How many of these conflicts must we have before we realize that declaring war means that civilians -- not just soldiers but women and children -- will die as some direct result of this war?
War is war. At some point the US populace just decided that war is different today. And then once we started two wars, we forgot about them. Just declared victory and tucked them away. Our soldiers are still dying, this is still happening. Wake up.
And lastly, I would like to point out that like soldiers, these reporters did know what they were entering when they entered a war zone. Again, not to absolve the Coalition forces but to quote Reuter's official word on the footage:
There is no better evidence of the dangers each and every journalist in a war zone faces at any time.
IBM is on to something big here, folks. Now just try to wrap your mind around this idea: we somehow enable this optimization on... multiple levels! Stay with me, stay with me, I know this seems like a crazy idea right now. But I imagine a future where just adding something as simple as -02 or -03 to your compile commands will increase the level of optimization at an expense of compilation time!
Did you get all that? Because I think I just made history.
*grabs his head* Oh Jesus, oh sweet Jesus, another one's coming to me. It's gonna be big! What if... what if you didn't have to type out each of your compile statements when you're compiling hundreds of files? What if, and this is totally futuristic possibility here, we introduce a build tool of some sort to the whole process? Let's call it Mack... no, wait, Make!
From the official site there's an announcement from April 5th. Probably not a late April Fools joke.
After Robot Chicken and Family Guy's parodies of Star Wars, I guess Lucas knows what the fans want: humor. And let's face it, they were funny. At least for me anyway. Star Wars used to be a religion to me until Phantom Menace. I distanced myself and have since had plenty of time to recover. Even though I had read all the expanded universe material in my youth and could recite from memory more about an Aqualish than even Wikipedia would tolerate (hooray for retroactive continuity!), I found Robot Chicken's sketch of Ponda Baba's Bad Day hilarious. Laugh for ten minutes hilarious. Re-enact for my friends hilarious.
And it saddens me that all he has left is humor. I mean, I'd rather see both serious material and humor. Futurama had a great way of making fun of itself but also baking in really serious themes that made me love it. I hope Star Wars manages to maintain some sort of integrity through all this. I agree with what the quotes said about this being a large intricate universe with a lot to work with. And I had always been hoping for a TV show similar to the Tales from... series in both short story and comic book form. I mean, you have a whole invented universe just sitting there waiting for writers to discover new intricacies with it. And, aside from the expanded universe, all we've gotten in approved cannon is three really bad movies and some decent kids shows. Where are the Grand Admiral Thrawns and Admiral Daalas? Where is the fleshing out of a background story for each of the aliens you see in Mos Eisley and Jabba's Palace? Confined to books I guess. I just don't understand why TV writers haven't been solicited to explore the Star Wars universe in the same way the expanded universe books have. Sure some have been trash (Barbara Hambly's Children of the Jedi) but you'd think someone could write a really neat story line with new villains, new force sensitives and new characters that are distantly related to the movies.
An unshaven sun-reddened face focuses all its concentration on a cigarette protruding directly in front of his nose. His lips are pursed as if to indicate that connecting the tip of that cigarette with that flame requires all of his concentration. If his eyes weren't hidden to prevent us from identifying him (or to keep us from identifying with the subject) we might see them as cross-eyed staring down his nose intent to satiate his addiction. His shirt (which is plain white) and knuckles are smeared haphazardly with grease and his skin glistens with a workingman's sweat. Whatever iconography that hangs from his neck (Isreali dog tags? a Star of David?) can only afford a cheap black cord. The subject is off center to the right with the background as a pitch black. Nothing but a single source of light coming from the left.
It amuses me that the site employs such a suggestive picture of smoking so that it almost screams to be a blue collar, unintelligent, near evil addiction. I understand this image adds to the effect of the article but if ever there was anti-marketing for smoking here it is at a site that claims to be objective in its name. Movies of yore portrayed the beautiful, the rich and the strong smoking. I can walk outside my office building and see well paid people smoking. It's disingenuous to portray it as only a blue collar problem no matter what statistics about IQ say. This only tells me that, on average, low IQs are more likely to succumb to well funded advertising or lack information about smoking. Not that they are any less powerful at breaking an addiction.
I find smoking abhorrent and disgusting but I also think that it detracts from your goals to say that smoking destroys your beauty when young people can see beautiful celebrities smoking. And I also think that a "Science" site shouldn't have such goals or propaganda baked into its articles (one way or the other).
I don't know how bad you want this but I can tell you that nothing feels better than finishing something you started even if it comes two decades later.
What you're mostly going to find in these replies are codices. Not teaching. Not knowledge. You're going to get information sources. What you do with those sources, that will be the teaching, the learning and the progress. No one's going to help you get your math back but you. You're going to get static nonliving information and it's going to be up to you to bring that alive. Frankly, on your part it's going to require the will of a volcano otherwise I suggest a tutor or precalculus class.
This material could conceivably be studied by a student on his or her own, but this seldom works out. Students tend to get stuck on something, and, having no goad to keep them going, they try to get past it with decreasing energy, and ultimately develop mental blocks against going on. Having an organized course prevents this by forcing them to face obstacles like exams and assignments.
If you attempt this and get stuck, as is almost inevitable, you could try emailing us and we can try to unstick you.
Did you catch that last part? You're going to need help. Whether it's bribing your nerdy friends with cases of beer or Star Wars Galaxy Series Five collectible card packs (*cough* *cough*) you are going to need guidance at certain points in time. Don't be afraid to ask those around you or -- and I recommend this only in dire cases -- dressing up like a student and rolling into your local university asking to see the precalc professor for help.
Your codex might be Wikipedia. Your codex might be Wolfram's MathWorld. My codex sits three feet in front of my face as I type this. My codex (and this is purely personal) Bronshtein et al's Handbook of Mathematics. The binding is acceptable. The paper is not the greatest. The content is priceless. This is not a teaching device. This is my starting point. If I were you my ending point would be at my college's library pouring over all calculus textbooks. The great thing about this starting point is that I like how it lays out all the starting points leading up to that starting point in case I need to start backwards. Another great thing about this particular resource is that it has nearly everything imaginable and is well organized. The bad thing is that it costs $71.97. I think I paid $60 for mine but either way it's not free like Wikipedia.
I don't know where you are comfortable starting from but if I were you I would simply research what your learning institutions pre requisites are and spend your free time now acquiring their books and notes in order to make sure you have them covered. All of my old University of Minnesota syllabuses are online although I cannot find the Math department equivalent (aside from the registration listings).
If you could name your courses, I'd suggest books like The Annotated Turing which has been a page turner for me and actually starts with basic set theory to work up to automata. I'm guessing you're aiming for more Multivariable and Diff Eq type stuff. Let us know what the courses are and perhaps more human readable works can be suggested that aren't as laboriously mind numbing as reading a codex would be.
What about if some people just want to get a paper version of those?
Those what? Wikipedia articles? Someone is but it's only the top 400 articles I think. Anyway, once you print wikipedia it's not wikipedia anymore. Wikis are living documents. It's some sort of Snapshot of a Wiki.
I'm not sure if Wikipedia currently offers such, but if I wanted to get encyclopedia on my bookshelf I would want it to be Wikipedia and all of its contents.
Get a printer and get ready to spend lots of money. There are resources out there to help you format wikipedia. But seriously if you want Wikipedia on your bookshelf, burn a snapshot cd (newest ones are torrented) of the HTML and put that in a jewel case and put that on your bookshelf and update it yearly... for free. Yes, you can't just flip pages but you have it "on your shelf." Although it's cheating, that's your best bet.
I would buy a book that is based on for example all of the gaming articles on Wikipedia. Maybe it's not up to date, but so ain't any other encyclopedia, and Wikipedia has a lot of content that isn't found on others.
What follows is my opinion. Books tend to fail when they set grandiose objectives. "All of gaming" is setting up an author to fail. Seriously. Hard. Embarrassingly so. That's why we get books limited to dates and ranges and specialties. It's possible. Sometimes you get great books written by groups like the gang of four and they complement each other. Sometimes you get complete trash that is badly titled and that's what's happening in this article.
My advice is not to look for one be-all-end-all book on gaming but instead to seek out the gems that cover your most interested specialties and then augment them with online works. Yes, you have to do work. Like a lot of things there's no silver bullet for something so large. I'm a nerd, such research is fun.
If you don't like that, then don't write to a site that releases your content under that license. Simple as that.
You're confused about where the complaint is originating from. Honestly I'd be flattered to buy my words from Amazon.com in a printed format. I've never been published nor produced anything worth publishing. Sure I might be annoyed money went to a shady company but "Look, ma, it's me!"
The complaints are coming from the people buying this tripe--and rightfully so. You used to be able to acquire a book and know that since it was a book the author(s) had done their homework. It was hard for idiots to get publishing deals because the publishers would actually read their work. Sure, you'd have small publishing houses printing "work" on things like free energy or whatever might sell to a niche market. But you'd never have a publisher capable of VDM's feat because of the print-on-demand requirement.
So now we're in this transition period where a few folks know everything about Multigrid GPUs and notice a new book has come on sale and they must have it to complete their library. Well, it's pure unadulterated shit. But VDM Verlag gets that $60 on a couple sales for college libraries or well paid GPU engineers. And it takes a while for word to get out that VDM is what it is. VDM is capitalizing off of this transition period of consumer trust in books to consumer awareness about print-on-demand. VDM is making a boatload of money but I can't think of a good way to fix the system and, like you said, there's nothing technically illegal about their strategy.
Sadly instead of empowering books and their content, the advent of print-on-demand will cause people to doubt the once rigid standards books held. And rightfully so with entrepreneurs like VDM waltzing around. Don't think this won't spread or VDM won't set up fronts to publish under to avoid their known muckraked name.
Now before you fall all over yourself to point in horror at the infected zombie Abe Books lumbering your way, lets engage in a simple mental exercise. We hate expensive books. Online retailers know this and they cater to us by giving us near wholesale prices. Good. Now, they shave a little bit off but in their strive to be number one, they rely on large volumes of sales with razor thin profits on each sale. This means that its in the company's (and your) best interest for them to automate book sales for publishers and remove the human element. But also remove the overhead cost that comes with it. And maybe even encourage several thousand books so their marketplace looks vibrant and full of sellers selling anything imaginable.
Enter VDM Verlag. All too happy to profit off of the above situation. They have freely available material to publish and they have end users ready to pay.
I'm not an expert in any of this but my gut tells me that this is what is going on. Go to Borders and note their 4 VDM "books". Now, if the lack of titles was a matter of principle and ethics, there would be zero titles. If they had a difficult to use process to register book sales with them then you would have few books (likely case) and if you were streamlined like Amazon, Abe Books or Blackwell then you hit the hilarious numbers. Everybody hates the big guy but in this case the One-Click-Demon is not really the culprit nor are they the lone retailer.
There's really no way to fix this except consumer awareness. Be aware that your paying an exorbitant fee for something that is just a few keystrokes away and a bit of link clicking.
Can someone help me out with an example of how they came to an author for each particular "book"? I'm having a hard time tracing these people. Some of them appear to be legit authors published through other publishers like (random example) Michael Sage. Other people appear to
Watch them, it's worth it. I think I see pudge playing guitar, Rob Malda playing guitar singing about short shorts. Crazy dog lady (pretty much straight out of Best in Show) actually a lot of dog related videos. Funny notebook writings like "If you click next, I root your computer" *flip* "Don't make your computer sad." Or "If you turn your head, I win!" A pan of a desk with the nerdiest things you can conjure and then a note that says "Proud to be a nerd." There's a recurring bass player that likes to read you books and sneeze. There's a lot of older folks and women in here... they probably got their wives and parents to make short videos so it "seemed" like a random demographic.
Sound seems broken on half of them though.
Well played, Slashdot, but the quality of these videos are too high and entertaining for this to be a real chat roulette:-)
See the difference? The program wasn't ruled illegal. That would be huge. It's the fact that these people are American citizens and there was no court order to wiretap them and they found out about it. For most of us it's just the first two. And from the article:
The overhauled law, however, still requires the government to obtain a warrant if it is focusing on an American citizen or an organization inside the United States. The surveillance of Al Haramain would still be unlawful today if no court had approved it, current and former Justice Department officials said.
But since Mr. Obama took office, the N.S.A. has sometimes violated the limits imposed on spying on Americans by the new FISA law. The administration has acknowledged the lapses but said they had been corrected.
So this isn't the great news with a big change that you were hoping for. It just means that if you can prove you were wrongfully wiretapped then you get restitution. Problem is that you have no proof. So you can either lay a trap for the NSA (not smart) or complain to your representative or do nothing.
No, I heard the researcher on the radio yesterday; the toads unexpectedly left the area for a few days & whilst they were gone, the quake hit; the toads returned after the quake, she had a couple of hypotheses about how the toads could detect the coming quake, but freely admitted she had no strong evidence for them.
More anecdotes if you want them. I was on Grand Cayman a week after Haiti was struck with an earthquake. Anyway, offshore a large earthquake happened. Coincidentally I was at the turtle farm (a massive sea turtle farm on the island). Now, all we felt was a bit of a brief shaking but the sea turtles were flipping out during it and for about ten minutes afterward. They were trying to crawl out of their cement tanks and looked like they didn't care what was getting scratched up, they just wanted up and out. I asked one of the workers what was going on with the turtles and he said he'd never seen it. Then we were told that an earthquake had just hit offshore (I was extremely intoxicated on some variant of rum so I 'missed' the earthquake).
I'm not saying they predicted it but they sure exhibited a crazy amount of sensitivity and acted like it was the end of the world when it happened. More so than my drunk ass could conjure anyway. I remember hearing that animals left for higher ground during tsunamis but never gave it much credibility but who knows? Sounds far fetched but it's a difficult if not impossible thing to prove or disprove I suppose.
RTFA, it does find that they had a keen interest in stonewalling critics.
Right but there is a point at which any person just gives up on his critics. Whether it be one persistent critic or an internet full of critics, you just get sick of it and concentrate on what actually matters: your work. And then when this happens suddenly you're "stonewalling." Or "unable to defend your statements." I don't know all the details and I'm not going to get into my own anecdotal stories but at some point you just don't care what they think and you get tired of having to engage in rebuttals and 'discussions' if they are inane or offtrack.
For what it's worth (not to defend this), the above phenomenon can also lead you to opt not to release your data because your critics can either pour over it to find more ammunition or use it for their own devices. Thankfully the House of Commons called for the release of all data and all source code and hopefully soon we'll be pointed into a better direction about who is the most correct in their analysis.
that the bullshit noise that fox news and deniers spread around got quashed by some actual investigation.
Certainly is annoying although I'm sympathetic. A hundred gabillion trillion dollars and the future of the human race are at stake here. So a lot of people's gut reaction is "not possible" for the sake of not having to deal with such moral predicaments. I'm American. I buy crap made in China. I know how we like to sweep moral predicaments under the rug instead of facing them head on.
Luckily (as mentioned in the article) this whole media charade may result in something positive:
The committee said that climate scientists had to be much more open in future — for example by publishing all their data, including raw data and the software programs used to interpret them, to the Internet. Willis said there was far too much money at stake not to be completely transparent.
"Governments across the world are spending trillions of pounds, or trillions of dollars, on mitigating climate change. The science has got to be irreproachable," he said.
So, this is the part where I predict the future. They're going to open up all the data by force or by free will and then all the code slowly after. A lot of people are going to become armchair statisticians (good thing) and draw their own conclusions by manipulating the data in bizarre ways (bad thing). Then a decade down the road it'll come to light that the climate is very probably changing too fast for it to be a naturally occurring cycle. And you'll win a few more people over to accept the idea that we need to slowly adapt to the new problem. But you're still going to have something like half your opposition claiming the data itself is now flawed in how it was collected. If it's not one thing, they'll drum up another. Why? Because a hundred gabillion trillion dollars and the future of the human race are at stake here and they don't want to face up to either. So they'll take the convenient route and continue to hold on by their fingertips to whatever they can to justify a splurging lifestyle.
That's a prediction on my part, not necessarily 100% true.
My point was that he gave an example and the system conveniently already knew that when you assign something a weight of 200 lbs then it should reduce your assumption that it flies. He didn't say by how much or how this information was ever gleaned, just that it was conveniently there and adjusted the answer in the right direction!
A cassowary is a thing and an animal and a bird. Sometimes people call airplanes 'birds.' So if you learned blindly from literature, you could run into all sorts of problems. It's a danger you run if you learn and adjust these variables while following an ontology.
The fact is that if I thought up something, you would come up with the common sense logic to solve it and then wave your hand that it was already in the repository of knowledge (rule or probability or what have you) to solve the problem.
What I'm trying to tell you is that I've studied predicate calculus and prolog and various methods to achieve this. The problem isn't the system, the problem is replicating a human life (or even 18 years) of knowledge into whatever form is machine interpretable and this solution falls prey to these problems.
This is very promising.
Are you working in this field? This language has been around since 2008. How prevalent is it? Even the professor doing the research notes its pitfalls and expensive computations!
OR robotic systems used in manufacturing able to adjust the process as it goes. Using inputs to determine better ways to do a job.
Dangerous simplistic thinking. Adjusting a processing real time is never done. It's simulated in software first. You are being a science fiction author.
It looks like this system can change as it is used, effectivly creating a 'lifetime' experience.
If it's that easy, then do it. You will be the richest man alive before you die. That is, if you complete your project before you die:)
Everyone is exhibiting the very thing I was talking about. Which is they have a more complete rule base so they get to come up with great seemingly "common logic" defenses for the AI.
In an example, we're told the cassowary is a bird. Then we're told it can weigh almost 200 lbs. Okay. Now you're telling me that it might revise its guess as to whether or not it can fly? Come on! Am I the only person that can see that you've just given me an example where the program magically drums up the rule or probability based rule that "if something weighs almost 200 lbs it probably cannot fly"? Does that rule apply to birds or some things? Does the probability get affected by the thing being a bird, plane or piece of granite? Each of those needs to be defined either through observation or axiom!
If you were unfamiliar with the concept of ships or planes, and someone told you that a 50,000 ton vessel could float, would you really believe that without seeing it? Or that a 150 ton contraption could fly?
Hey, I'm not saying I or the AI would believe that one way or the other. All I'm saying is that you have to explicitly code or develop a way so that it can give you an answer one way or the other. I don't care if it's a stated rule, an a priori probability or a little of both! It still needs to be developed!
To ask an AI modeled after a human mind to intuitively understand the intricacies of bouyancy is asking too much.
Well then you've already set your sites far below the Turing Test.
But from 2008. In addition to that, it faces some similar problems to the other two models. Their example:
Told that the cassowary is a bird, a program written in Church might conclude that cassowaries can probably fly. But if the program was then told that cassowaries can weigh almost 200 pounds, it might revise its initial probability estimate, concluding that, actually, cassowaries probably can’t fly.
But you just induced a bunch of rules I didn't know were in your system. That things over 200 lbs are unlikely to fly. But wait, 747s are heavier than that. Oh, we need to know that animals over 200 lbs rarely have the ability of flight. Unless the cassowary is an extinct dinosaur in which case there might have been one... again, creativity and human analysis present quite the barrier to AI.
Chater cautions that, while Church programs perform well on such targeted tasks, they’re currently too computationally intensive to serve as general-purpose mind simulators. “It’s a serious issue if you’re going to wheel it out to solve every problem under the sun,” Chater says. “But it’s just been built, and these things are always very poorly optimized when they’ve just been built.” And Chater emphasizes that getting the system to work at all is an achievement in itself: “It’s the kind of thing that somebody might produce as a theoretical suggestion, and you’d think, ‘Wow, that’s fantastically clever, but I’m sure you’ll never make it run, really.’ And the miracle is that it does run, and it works.”
That sounds familiar... in both the rule based and probabilistic based AI, they say that you need a large rule corpus or many probabilities accurately computed ahead of time to make the system work. Problem is that you never scratch the surface of a human mind's lifetime experience though. And Chater's method, I suspect, is similarly stunted.
I have learned today that putting 'grand' and 'unified' at the title of an idea in science is very powerful for marketing.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, Alice in Wonderland and Clash of the Titans were shot in 2D and then post processed to give them the illusion of being in 3d...and the effect is shit.
Yeah, I've been enjoying all the talk about 3D being the future default in which all movies will be filmed. We all saw a $300 million movie implement it very well now I want to see the one hundred $3 million movies implement it at appropriate budget cost before I make my decision. I also learned that my local theater has taken to increased prices for 3D movies ... after inquiring as to why this is they couldn't really produce a good explanation. I offered to bring my own glasses ... I pointed out that it took the same amount of energy for them to display either mode. And Alice was filmed in 2D and just post processed ... so why do I have to pay 60% more for my ticket?
If that's the way things are going, I predict the death of 3D.
"Time Out of Joint" Purchased by Warner Bros.
"Valis", "Radio Free Albemuth", and "Flow My Tears the Policeman Said" Purchased by independent producer John Alan Simon
properties under option: "Adjustment Team" - Short Story, "Ubik" - Novel, "King of the Elves - Short Story
After reading more than a few of PKD's books and short stories really I'm surprised that Hollywood isn't more obsessed with PKD than they are now. In my opinion, the Science Fiction genre is tired and overdone in very predictable ways. PKD's works are often further out there. I realize that A Scanner Darkly was probably not the most well received movie but I would predict that Dick's use of a sort of confusion/resolution while tackling the standard moral/ethical dilemmas that are the hallmark of SciFi would be an easy option to keep movies "fresh." Of course, I've been wondering the same thing about Stanislaw Lem for quite some time. Aside from Solaris he seems to be relegated to fringe movies like Ari Folman's adaptation of Lem's The Futurological Congress .
Recently I finished Chuck Palahniuk's Rant and went searching online for more details as I was generally confused about who was a Historian and who was not at the end of the novel. What I found was that he's making it into a trilogy and that the rights to his books as movies are generally bought right after he finishes a book. He says:
We’ve had a bunch of negotiations for Rant. It’s going to be the first of three books on the same sort of theme and the movie production people want to see at least outlines on the next two books in the series because nobody wants to buy the rights of the first of three and not be able to control the rights to the second and third books. So I really have to sell Rant as a three-book package. So once I’m able to present those people with a product outline for the next two books, then we’ll sell.
So I'm guessing that Fight Club was such a huge money maker and gained mainstream respect that some of his more gritty novels are now premium movie material? Or perhaps he's not too picky on the size of the sum when his story is about to made into a movie?
There's not a lot of data out there on how much these rights sell for I guess so you can't say whether or not PKD's Trust is just underrating them as pulp scifi and selling them low cost. Combine that possibility with the fact that he's had some huge movies come from his books and I think Hollywood is finally beginning to understand. With Dick you finally have the technology to represent his dreams on screen along with a dearth of stories along with a public tired of your predictable plots along with the possibility that PKD's trust wants PKD to be appreciated on the silver screen. Lord knows that if I was a member of PKD's family I would love to see the young people of today enjoy his works as much as the young people of yesterday did.
A chip costing less than a dollar is embedded in a cell phone and programmed to either alert the cell phone carrier to the presence of toxic chemicals in the air ...
Well look on the bright side, the Chinese worker who makes the chip only has to step outside of the factory and turn it on to see if it works on a wide spectrum. Of course who would be foolish enough to risk their job, life, liberty and pursuit of happiness with a complaint about a local government official being bribed into letting your employer pollute to its heart's content?
One might be a false positive. Hundreds might indicate the need for evacuation.
So how is that person holding the false positive going to react? Maybe they're the first phone to realize it? Maybe they don't understand what 'false positive' means?
For personal safety issues such as a chlorine gas leak, a warning is sounded; the user can choose a vibration, noise, text message or phone call.
I'd be concerned those false positives might not be warmly received. Especially if someone in a crowded Starbucks has a phone that starts to alarm and says "Oh my god, there's chlorine gas in here!" You might be hit with some lawsuits after a few people are injured in a stampede. Contrived scenario? Maybe. But people are less than rational beings when their lives are perceived to be at stake. While academia is right on board some of the larger cities have been a little resistant toward citizen operated detectors.
Yeah, I read the book and I saw the commercial. Ironic.
This week, Slashdot featured a really good article form Slate that ended with this quote:
Steve Wozniak has said that he pre-ordered three iPads, two for himself and one for a friend. This is a testament to his incredible good nature and his loyalty both to the firm that marginalized him in the 1980s and to a friend, Jobs, who refused to write a foreword for his memoirs. Yet somewhere, deep inside, Wozniak must realize what the release of the iPad signifies: The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists.
That last sentence is really the core problem here. We were used to Steve Wozniak's Apple and we were in love with that Apple. Now the only Apple left is Steve Job's Apple. Times have changed but before we cast acerbic words at Jobs you must acknowledge he has led the company in a very profitable direction. Could he have done that while adhering to Wozniak's "open" idealism? That's the real debate here.
Tetris, to me, is the ultimate video game. It can be played by anyone ranging from someone who doesn't even know what a video game is all the way to competitive level hardcore pros.
No other video game in history has that kind of audience..
Wrong. The concept of a game being easy to begin playing but difficult to master dates back to Chess and even Go. As far as modern day video games are concerned there are a lot that actually fall into this category. I believe the phrase was first coined by Nolan Bushnell but I could be wrong.
You are free to say that in your opinion of "easy to learn, difficult to master" video games, Tetris is the ultimate. But even video games like Donkey Kong or Pac Man have the same simple laws that a novice understands which gradually become more and more restrictive until the true "mastery" title is nearly impossible to attain -- kill screen, anyone?
If you're designing a new video game, that seems to be one of the fundamental requirements so that you aren't too off-putting to new players. You can play World of Warcraft at your own pace and although the UI and input is infinitely more complex than Tetris, it exhibits this basic rule of thumb for game design -- quite successfully. That's why it enjoys a worldwide audience of 10+ million.
Tetris is legendary and fun but modern day video games (like the popular flash puzzle games) are building past Tetris while trying to maintain the principles that made it successful. I predict you're going to be upset that I might have just compared Tetris to Bejeweled but lets face it: they're both simple insanely popular video games that have a large swath of difficulties that seem to algorithmically scale in later levels.
As an avid Tetris player, I must inquire when it is that one is given the "competitive level hardcore pro" title in Tetris?
Verizon will soon hunt down
"The Most Dangerous Game hunt down" or the boring old e-mail notification? Because if it's the former, I might start seeding large sets of prime numbers labeled as "Natalie Portman sex tape" through my noisy neighbor's unsecured wifi network connected to his Verizon FIOS.
Christ, I don't think I've ever even heard of these guys. They should have took the money & ran.
Agreed. With that kind of money you could almost afford your own US Senator ... or US Representative at the least. With one of those they could start pushing their pro-Square agenda. For far too long the Mods and the Rockers have enjoyed an unquestioned two party system ...
If you are comparing those intimidation tactics with that of Geheime Staatspolizei then you should read some more books on World War II. If the Geheime Staatspolizei had paid Mr. Assange or any Wikileaks staff a visit, they would be rotting in a ditch by now. And their family members would be too afraid to ask any questions. That is the definition of 'gestapo.' It is obvious that the Wikileaks staff were non-compliant. That's not something the gestapo would just walk away from. You should spend the time to appreciate the people who actually suffered through that shit. Or even those repressed under the secret police in East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell. It appears that someone put a tail on the staff and then detained him and repeatedly asked him not to release the video. This is laughable (Hello Kitty's Rent-A-Cop laughable) compared to the gestapo. Your local police may do worse to you in the United States and detain you for a full 24 hours without pressing charges. And trust me when I say that in that 24 hours you will spend time with less than reputable people -- listening to them complain and watching them utilize toiletries in front of you.
...
Is his hand broken beyond repair? Is his family disowning him? Has he lost his job and any work prospects? Has he been blacklisted? Are his contacts monitored? The real gestapo controlled the populace through fear. If your mother found you with data like this in World War II Berlin, she'd bring you to the concentration camp herself out of fear that you both might go if she doesn't. I'm not afraid after reading about what happened to the Wikileaks staff -- especially considering this video most likely is classified information. You might consider what they did to the staff unfair until you realize that it's totally legal if law enforcement is doing it and considering the material they had it was probably just a reminder that they would face legal issues if they hosted it. It was a gamble for Wikileaks and it paid off big time. At this point, it's so newsworthy and the public viewership so great that I doubt the US Government dares try to prosecute. It's been up for a day after all
such as, the FACT that the "civilians" were actually enemy combatants. For more details: http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/201878.php
What disturbs me is how quickly people judge a video when they were two airships meaning you're only seeing one view from one of the apaches. Other people are calling in RPGs and AK47s ... and those that were pulling the triggers were acting on that information. Personally, from watching the video, I saw very unfortunate movement by a photographer with a very large camera (405-415 on the wikileaks site) that at first looks exactly like an insurgent with an RPG trying to get an unseen angle on a gunship. Only after I was told that they were photographers was my imagination allowed to see that as a very large lens camera (and you conveniently can't see those frames where the RPG looks more like a camera at the site you linked to). And even then, with the low resolution Youtube footage, who's to say what it looked like to those there? Missing something like that could cost not only your life but also the lives of people flying with you.
I'm not trying to excuse what happened but I am saying that a series of mistakes were most likely made in those videos that lead to the unfortunate deaths of at least a couple innocent people.
And this is war.
If you're a United States citizen, you paid for that gunship. You paid for that scenario. Don't get me wrong, you also paid for the scenario when real insurgents trying to kill innocent people were stopped. That scenario just isn't interesting to us though. You see it as a byline on a newspaper but those stories are just something to yawn at these days. I was for the war in Afghanistan and I knew that things like this video would happen. I was not for the Iraq war because these scenarios were not worth ousting Saddam. Friendly fire happened in Desert Storm and probably every large scale conflict before that as long as guns have been involved. Do you think a reporter was never killed accidentally by United States forces in Vietnam or even World War II (commonly viewed as one of the few 'justified' war)?
I'm glad everyone got to see one of the faces of war. I'm sad that these people wrongfully died but I'm glad that this rightful outrage might cause us to really reconsider what half or more of us had decided when our elected Commander in Chief brought us into both these wars. I don't get it. I was ~20 years old during our invasion of Afghanistan and people just seemed humdrum "Hey, let's go to war, I won't be dying in it" and I'm still a little bit confused about that sentiment. How many of these conflicts must we have before we realize that declaring war means that civilians -- not just soldiers but women and children -- will die as some direct result of this war?
War is war. At some point the US populace just decided that war is different today. And then once we started two wars, we forgot about them. Just declared victory and tucked them away. Our soldiers are still dying, this is still happening. Wake up.
And lastly, I would like to point out that like soldiers, these reporters did know what they were entering when they entered a war zone. Again, not to absolve the Coalition forces but to quote Reuter's official word on the footage:
There is no better evidence of the dangers each and every journalist in a war zone faces at any time.
And as Newsweek added:
These newsmen knew what they were getting into; it's the public watching the video now that has been caught unawares.
IBM is on to something big here, folks. Now just try to wrap your mind around this idea: we somehow enable this optimization on ... multiple levels! Stay with me, stay with me, I know this seems like a crazy idea right now. But I imagine a future where just adding something as simple as -02 or -03 to your compile commands will increase the level of optimization at an expense of compilation time!
... what if you didn't have to type out each of your compile statements when you're compiling hundreds of files? What if, and this is totally futuristic possibility here, we introduce a build tool of some sort to the whole process? Let's call it Mack ... no, wait, Make!
Did you get all that? Because I think I just made history.
*grabs his head* Oh Jesus, oh sweet Jesus, another one's coming to me. It's gonna be big! What if
Elvis MF Christ I am going to be a rich man.
From the official site there's an announcement from April 5th. Probably not a late April Fools joke.
... series in both short story and comic book form. I mean, you have a whole invented universe just sitting there waiting for writers to discover new intricacies with it. And, aside from the expanded universe, all we've gotten in approved cannon is three really bad movies and some decent kids shows. Where are the Grand Admiral Thrawns and Admiral Daalas? Where is the fleshing out of a background story for each of the aliens you see in Mos Eisley and Jabba's Palace? Confined to books I guess. I just don't understand why TV writers haven't been solicited to explore the Star Wars universe in the same way the expanded universe books have. Sure some have been trash (Barbara Hambly's Children of the Jedi) but you'd think someone could write a really neat story line with new villains, new force sensitives and new characters that are distantly related to the movies.
After Robot Chicken and Family Guy's parodies of Star Wars, I guess Lucas knows what the fans want: humor. And let's face it, they were funny. At least for me anyway. Star Wars used to be a religion to me until Phantom Menace. I distanced myself and have since had plenty of time to recover. Even though I had read all the expanded universe material in my youth and could recite from memory more about an Aqualish than even Wikipedia would tolerate (hooray for retroactive continuity!), I found Robot Chicken's sketch of Ponda Baba's Bad Day hilarious. Laugh for ten minutes hilarious. Re-enact for my friends hilarious.
And it saddens me that all he has left is humor. I mean, I'd rather see both serious material and humor. Futurama had a great way of making fun of itself but also baking in really serious themes that made me love it. I hope Star Wars manages to maintain some sort of integrity through all this. I agree with what the quotes said about this being a large intricate universe with a lot to work with. And I had always been hoping for a TV show similar to the Tales from
A bit offtopic but I enjoyed the overtly blue-collar ill lit picture that a site called Science Daily employed.
An unshaven sun-reddened face focuses all its concentration on a cigarette protruding directly in front of his nose. His lips are pursed as if to indicate that connecting the tip of that cigarette with that flame requires all of his concentration. If his eyes weren't hidden to prevent us from identifying him (or to keep us from identifying with the subject) we might see them as cross-eyed staring down his nose intent to satiate his addiction. His shirt (which is plain white) and knuckles are smeared haphazardly with grease and his skin glistens with a workingman's sweat. Whatever iconography that hangs from his neck (Isreali dog tags? a Star of David?) can only afford a cheap black cord. The subject is off center to the right with the background as a pitch black. Nothing but a single source of light coming from the left.
It amuses me that the site employs such a suggestive picture of smoking so that it almost screams to be a blue collar, unintelligent, near evil addiction. I understand this image adds to the effect of the article but if ever there was anti-marketing for smoking here it is at a site that claims to be objective in its name. Movies of yore portrayed the beautiful, the rich and the strong smoking. I can walk outside my office building and see well paid people smoking. It's disingenuous to portray it as only a blue collar problem no matter what statistics about IQ say. This only tells me that, on average, low IQs are more likely to succumb to well funded advertising or lack information about smoking. Not that they are any less powerful at breaking an addiction.
I find smoking abhorrent and disgusting but I also think that it detracts from your goals to say that smoking destroys your beauty when young people can see beautiful celebrities smoking. And I also think that a "Science" site shouldn't have such goals or propaganda baked into its articles (one way or the other).
What you're mostly going to find in these replies are codices. Not teaching. Not knowledge. You're going to get information sources. What you do with those sources, that will be the teaching, the learning and the progress. No one's going to help you get your math back but you. You're going to get static nonliving information and it's going to be up to you to bring that alive. Frankly, on your part it's going to require the will of a volcano otherwise I suggest a tutor or precalculus class.
The course I can refer you to echos my sentiments:
This material could conceivably be studied by a student on his or her own, but this seldom works out. Students tend to get stuck on something, and, having no goad to keep them going, they try to get past it with decreasing energy, and ultimately develop mental blocks against going on. Having an organized course prevents this by forcing them to face obstacles like exams and assignments.
If you attempt this and get stuck, as is almost inevitable, you could try emailing us and we can try to unstick you.
Did you catch that last part? You're going to need help. Whether it's bribing your nerdy friends with cases of beer or Star Wars Galaxy Series Five collectible card packs (*cough* *cough*) you are going to need guidance at certain points in time. Don't be afraid to ask those around you or -- and I recommend this only in dire cases -- dressing up like a student and rolling into your local university asking to see the precalc professor for help.
Your codex might be Wikipedia. Your codex might be Wolfram's MathWorld. My codex sits three feet in front of my face as I type this. My codex (and this is purely personal) Bronshtein et al's Handbook of Mathematics. The binding is acceptable. The paper is not the greatest. The content is priceless. This is not a teaching device. This is my starting point. If I were you my ending point would be at my college's library pouring over all calculus textbooks. The great thing about this starting point is that I like how it lays out all the starting points leading up to that starting point in case I need to start backwards. Another great thing about this particular resource is that it has nearly everything imaginable and is well organized. The bad thing is that it costs $71.97. I think I paid $60 for mine but either way it's not free like Wikipedia.
I don't know where you are comfortable starting from but if I were you I would simply research what your learning institutions pre requisites are and spend your free time now acquiring their books and notes in order to make sure you have them covered. All of my old University of Minnesota syllabuses are online although I cannot find the Math department equivalent (aside from the registration listings).
If you could name your courses, I'd suggest books like The Annotated Turing which has been a page turner for me and actually starts with basic set theory to work up to automata. I'm guessing you're aiming for more Multivariable and Diff Eq type stuff. Let us know what the courses are and perhaps more human readable works can be suggested that aren't as laboriously mind numbing as reading a codex would be.
What about if some people just want to get a paper version of those?
Those what? Wikipedia articles? Someone is but it's only the top 400 articles I think. Anyway, once you print wikipedia it's not wikipedia anymore. Wikis are living documents. It's some sort of Snapshot of a Wiki.
I'm not sure if Wikipedia currently offers such, but if I wanted to get encyclopedia on my bookshelf I would want it to be Wikipedia and all of its contents.
Get a printer and get ready to spend lots of money. There are resources out there to help you format wikipedia. But seriously if you want Wikipedia on your bookshelf, burn a snapshot cd (newest ones are torrented) of the HTML and put that in a jewel case and put that on your bookshelf and update it yearly ... for free. Yes, you can't just flip pages but you have it "on your shelf." Although it's cheating, that's your best bet.
I would buy a book that is based on for example all of the gaming articles on Wikipedia. Maybe it's not up to date, but so ain't any other encyclopedia, and Wikipedia has a lot of content that isn't found on others.
What follows is my opinion. Books tend to fail when they set grandiose objectives. "All of gaming" is setting up an author to fail. Seriously. Hard. Embarrassingly so. That's why we get books limited to dates and ranges and specialties. It's possible. Sometimes you get great books written by groups like the gang of four and they complement each other. Sometimes you get complete trash that is badly titled and that's what's happening in this article.
My advice is not to look for one be-all-end-all book on gaming but instead to seek out the gems that cover your most interested specialties and then augment them with online works. Yes, you have to do work. Like a lot of things there's no silver bullet for something so large. I'm a nerd, such research is fun.
If you don't like that, then don't write to a site that releases your content under that license. Simple as that.
You're confused about where the complaint is originating from. Honestly I'd be flattered to buy my words from Amazon.com in a printed format. I've never been published nor produced anything worth publishing. Sure I might be annoyed money went to a shady company but "Look, ma, it's me!"
The complaints are coming from the people buying this tripe--and rightfully so. You used to be able to acquire a book and know that since it was a book the author(s) had done their homework. It was hard for idiots to get publishing deals because the publishers would actually read their work. Sure, you'd have small publishing houses printing "work" on things like free energy or whatever might sell to a niche market. But you'd never have a publisher capable of VDM's feat because of the print-on-demand requirement.
So now we're in this transition period where a few folks know everything about Multigrid GPUs and notice a new book has come on sale and they must have it to complete their library. Well, it's pure unadulterated shit. But VDM Verlag gets that $60 on a couple sales for college libraries or well paid GPU engineers. And it takes a while for word to get out that VDM is what it is. VDM is capitalizing off of this transition period of consumer trust in books to consumer awareness about print-on-demand. VDM is making a boatload of money but I can't think of a good way to fix the system and, like you said, there's nothing technically illegal about their strategy.
Sadly instead of empowering books and their content, the advent of print-on-demand will cause people to doubt the once rigid standards books held. And rightfully so with entrepreneurs like VDM waltzing around. Don't think this won't spread or VDM won't set up fronts to publish under to avoid their known muckraked name.
Why are we concentrating on Amazon, Barnes and Nobel lists 12,381 results for VDM Verlag as a publisher. On the US Amazon, I see 25,127 for a similar search. The UK's Blackwell just sets it at an even five thou (but what's the real number?). You want infection, take a gander at Abe Books' hilarious 191,042 results on the same search (even putting it in quotes results in that)!
Now before you fall all over yourself to point in horror at the infected zombie Abe Books lumbering your way, lets engage in a simple mental exercise. We hate expensive books. Online retailers know this and they cater to us by giving us near wholesale prices. Good. Now, they shave a little bit off but in their strive to be number one, they rely on large volumes of sales with razor thin profits on each sale. This means that its in the company's (and your) best interest for them to automate book sales for publishers and remove the human element. But also remove the overhead cost that comes with it. And maybe even encourage several thousand books so their marketplace looks vibrant and full of sellers selling anything imaginable.
Enter VDM Verlag. All too happy to profit off of the above situation. They have freely available material to publish and they have end users ready to pay.
I'm not an expert in any of this but my gut tells me that this is what is going on. Go to Borders and note their 4 VDM "books". Now, if the lack of titles was a matter of principle and ethics, there would be zero titles. If they had a difficult to use process to register book sales with them then you would have few books (likely case) and if you were streamlined like Amazon, Abe Books or Blackwell then you hit the hilarious numbers. Everybody hates the big guy but in this case the One-Click-Demon is not really the culprit nor are they the lone retailer.
There's really no way to fix this except consumer awareness. Be aware that your paying an exorbitant fee for something that is just a few keystrokes away and a bit of link clicking.
Can someone help me out with an example of how they came to an author for each particular "book"? I'm having a hard time tracing these people. Some of them appear to be legit authors published through other publishers like (random example) Michael Sage. Other people appear to
Watch them, it's worth it. I think I see pudge playing guitar, Rob Malda playing guitar singing about short shorts. Crazy dog lady (pretty much straight out of Best in Show) actually a lot of dog related videos. Funny notebook writings like "If you click next, I root your computer" *flip* "Don't make your computer sad." Or "If you turn your head, I win!" A pan of a desk with the nerdiest things you can conjure and then a note that says "Proud to be a nerd." There's a recurring bass player that likes to read you books and sneeze. There's a lot of older folks and women in here ... they probably got their wives and parents to make short videos so it "seemed" like a random demographic.
:-)
Sound seems broken on half of them though.
Well played, Slashdot, but the quality of these videos are too high and entertaining for this to be a real chat roulette
Judge Finds NSA Wiretapping Program Illegal
Versus NYTimes title:
Federal Judge Finds N.S.A. Wiretaps Were Illegal
See the difference? The program wasn't ruled illegal. That would be huge. It's the fact that these people are American citizens and there was no court order to wiretap them and they found out about it. For most of us it's just the first two. And from the article:
The overhauled law, however, still requires the government to obtain a warrant if it is focusing on an American citizen or an organization inside the United States. The surveillance of Al Haramain would still be unlawful today if no court had approved it, current and former Justice Department officials said. But since Mr. Obama took office, the N.S.A. has sometimes violated the limits imposed on spying on Americans by the new FISA law. The administration has acknowledged the lapses but said they had been corrected.
So this isn't the great news with a big change that you were hoping for. It just means that if you can prove you were wrongfully wiretapped then you get restitution. Problem is that you have no proof. So you can either lay a trap for the NSA (not smart) or complain to your representative or do nothing.
No, I heard the researcher on the radio yesterday; the toads unexpectedly left the area for a few days & whilst they were gone, the quake hit; the toads returned after the quake, she had a couple of hypotheses about how the toads could detect the coming quake, but freely admitted she had no strong evidence for them.
More anecdotes if you want them. I was on Grand Cayman a week after Haiti was struck with an earthquake. Anyway, offshore a large earthquake happened. Coincidentally I was at the turtle farm (a massive sea turtle farm on the island). Now, all we felt was a bit of a brief shaking but the sea turtles were flipping out during it and for about ten minutes afterward. They were trying to crawl out of their cement tanks and looked like they didn't care what was getting scratched up, they just wanted up and out. I asked one of the workers what was going on with the turtles and he said he'd never seen it. Then we were told that an earthquake had just hit offshore (I was extremely intoxicated on some variant of rum so I 'missed' the earthquake).
I'm not saying they predicted it but they sure exhibited a crazy amount of sensitivity and acted like it was the end of the world when it happened. More so than my drunk ass could conjure anyway. I remember hearing that animals left for higher ground during tsunamis but never gave it much credibility but who knows? Sounds far fetched but it's a difficult if not impossible thing to prove or disprove I suppose.
RTFA, it does find that they had a keen interest in stonewalling critics.
Right but there is a point at which any person just gives up on his critics. Whether it be one persistent critic or an internet full of critics, you just get sick of it and concentrate on what actually matters: your work. And then when this happens suddenly you're "stonewalling." Or "unable to defend your statements." I don't know all the details and I'm not going to get into my own anecdotal stories but at some point you just don't care what they think and you get tired of having to engage in rebuttals and 'discussions' if they are inane or offtrack.
For what it's worth (not to defend this), the above phenomenon can also lead you to opt not to release your data because your critics can either pour over it to find more ammunition or use it for their own devices. Thankfully the House of Commons called for the release of all data and all source code and hopefully soon we'll be pointed into a better direction about who is the most correct in their analysis.
that the bullshit noise that fox news and deniers spread around got quashed by some actual investigation.
Certainly is annoying although I'm sympathetic. A hundred gabillion trillion dollars and the future of the human race are at stake here. So a lot of people's gut reaction is "not possible" for the sake of not having to deal with such moral predicaments. I'm American. I buy crap made in China. I know how we like to sweep moral predicaments under the rug instead of facing them head on.
Luckily (as mentioned in the article) this whole media charade may result in something positive:
The committee said that climate scientists had to be much more open in future — for example by publishing all their data, including raw data and the software programs used to interpret them, to the Internet. Willis said there was far too much money at stake not to be completely transparent. "Governments across the world are spending trillions of pounds, or trillions of dollars, on mitigating climate change. The science has got to be irreproachable," he said.
So, this is the part where I predict the future. They're going to open up all the data by force or by free will and then all the code slowly after. A lot of people are going to become armchair statisticians (good thing) and draw their own conclusions by manipulating the data in bizarre ways (bad thing). Then a decade down the road it'll come to light that the climate is very probably changing too fast for it to be a naturally occurring cycle. And you'll win a few more people over to accept the idea that we need to slowly adapt to the new problem. But you're still going to have something like half your opposition claiming the data itself is now flawed in how it was collected. If it's not one thing, they'll drum up another. Why? Because a hundred gabillion trillion dollars and the future of the human race are at stake here and they don't want to face up to either. So they'll take the convenient route and continue to hold on by their fingertips to whatever they can to justify a splurging lifestyle.
That's a prediction on my part, not necessarily 100% true.
A cassowary is a thing and an animal and a bird. Sometimes people call airplanes 'birds.' So if you learned blindly from literature, you could run into all sorts of problems. It's a danger you run if you learn and adjust these variables while following an ontology.
The fact is that if I thought up something, you would come up with the common sense logic to solve it and then wave your hand that it was already in the repository of knowledge (rule or probability or what have you) to solve the problem.
What I'm trying to tell you is that I've studied predicate calculus and prolog and various methods to achieve this. The problem isn't the system, the problem is replicating a human life (or even 18 years) of knowledge into whatever form is machine interpretable and this solution falls prey to these problems.
This is very promising.
Are you working in this field? This language has been around since 2008. How prevalent is it? Even the professor doing the research notes its pitfalls and expensive computations!
OR robotic systems used in manufacturing able to adjust the process as it goes. Using inputs to determine better ways to do a job.
Dangerous simplistic thinking. Adjusting a processing real time is never done. It's simulated in software first. You are being a science fiction author.
It looks like this system can change as it is used, effectivly creating a 'lifetime' experience.
If it's that easy, then do it. You will be the richest man alive before you die. That is, if you complete your project before you die :)
In an example, we're told the cassowary is a bird. Then we're told it can weigh almost 200 lbs. Okay. Now you're telling me that it might revise its guess as to whether or not it can fly? Come on! Am I the only person that can see that you've just given me an example where the program magically drums up the rule or probability based rule that "if something weighs almost 200 lbs it probably cannot fly"? Does that rule apply to birds or some things? Does the probability get affected by the thing being a bird, plane or piece of granite? Each of those needs to be defined either through observation or axiom!
If you were unfamiliar with the concept of ships or planes, and someone told you that a 50,000 ton vessel could float, would you really believe that without seeing it? Or that a 150 ton contraption could fly?
Hey, I'm not saying I or the AI would believe that one way or the other. All I'm saying is that you have to explicitly code or develop a way so that it can give you an answer one way or the other. I don't care if it's a stated rule, an a priori probability or a little of both! It still needs to be developed!
To ask an AI modeled after a human mind to intuitively understand the intricacies of bouyancy is asking too much.
Well then you've already set your sites far below the Turing Test.
Told that the cassowary is a bird, a program written in Church might conclude that cassowaries can probably fly. But if the program was then told that cassowaries can weigh almost 200 pounds, it might revise its initial probability estimate, concluding that, actually, cassowaries probably can’t fly.
But you just induced a bunch of rules I didn't know were in your system. That things over 200 lbs are unlikely to fly. But wait, 747s are heavier than that. Oh, we need to know that animals over 200 lbs rarely have the ability of flight. Unless the cassowary is an extinct dinosaur in which case there might have been one ... again, creativity and human analysis present quite the barrier to AI.
Chater cautions that, while Church programs perform well on such targeted tasks, they’re currently too computationally intensive to serve as general-purpose mind simulators. “It’s a serious issue if you’re going to wheel it out to solve every problem under the sun,” Chater says. “But it’s just been built, and these things are always very poorly optimized when they’ve just been built.” And Chater emphasizes that getting the system to work at all is an achievement in itself: “It’s the kind of thing that somebody might produce as a theoretical suggestion, and you’d think, ‘Wow, that’s fantastically clever, but I’m sure you’ll never make it run, really.’ And the miracle is that it does run, and it works.”
That sounds familiar ... in both the rule based and probabilistic based AI, they say that you need a large rule corpus or many probabilities accurately computed ahead of time to make the system work. Problem is that you never scratch the surface of a human mind's lifetime experience though. And Chater's method, I suspect, is similarly stunted.
I have learned today that putting 'grand' and 'unified' at the title of an idea in science is very powerful for marketing.