The only why he can even think about a machine having a "sole" is to re-define "sole" to be something a machine could have. Then well "duh", isn't the answer easy.
"sole" is used, I think to talk about something that could continue to exist after the physical body is gone. We can't even know if humans have soles of this kind. Who could we know about machines.
Self awareness, yes. I think a machne could have that. But AIs as they are designed today, no not even ifyou scaled them up. But an AI built "from the bottom up" conestionist style could be a little bit like us and think that it was self aware. But are we even self aware? We think we are so that is enough. I think the best we can say is that "A machine could be like us" But do we have "soles"? no one has ever been able to answer that.
"Source code audits with automated scripts that attack every port and every program checking for buffer overflows or other avenues of attack. It would require a lot of work"
So much in the the sun would burn out before you coulld finish. Do the math and any non-triveal program. I just looked at one of mine and there are over 2,000 branches. How many possible paths are there? Let's just say "more then you can test in a few billion years"
But we don't have to test. Remember the theorem about triangles a^2 + b^2 = c^2. How do we know it is true for all right triangles. Did some one actually check EVERY triangle or even 0.001% of them. No they used a mathematical proof so we know with certainty. One can apply the same methods to software. But it is very hard and very slow. But even so much faster then exhaustive testing.
There are other ways to do the same thing. Rather then switching in and out coils another approach is to switch the coils on and off. In light winds the cils are only in use 10% of the time andthen when the wind is blowing the coils are on full time. You switch them rapidly, several times per second. houshold dimmer switches for lights and many motor controlser work this way.
I think what these guys have found is the "coils are cheap". so they use way more coils than are needed but the contoller then becomes much simpler.
For billions of years water has run down rivers to the ocean and then evaporated into the air and rained down onto land and run back in the ocean in rivers. We all drink re-claimed sea water.
"you just can't know what is a distortion from the lens and what is part of the scene. Unless, like, the scene happened to be a highly accurate checkerboard pattern."
It need not be a checker board. ANy straight lines will do. For example if the horizon is in the frame or (better) parts of buildings. Whaen I correct out geometric distortion I never use a lens profile. I only correct out what I see.
In the motion picture industry "4K" means there are 4,000 pixels across the long edge of the frame. Consumer cameras are advertised by the total number of pixels in the frame. Typically measured in "mega pixels"
But as it turns out resolution is proportional to the number of pixels across the long edge of the frame. Note that movie cameras are marketed to profesionals who understand this while consumer cameras are marketed to "the masses" who just want a big number of "whatevers"
">>>modeling space combat tactics after WWII.......the part about the crew having to remain silent so the Kilrathi couldn't hear them, presumably on space sonar.:)"
I've read in a few places the reason they try and model space whats after WWII aircraft carrier battles is because people need to be able to understand the battle and what's happening. If you take a big leap you loose the viewers
Oh and about the sonar: If you bounce a laser of a window any singal you put on the beam will be dopper modulated by the vibrations on the glass. You can listen to sounds inside from miles away. This would actually work better in space then in air and it's not "science fiction" Microwaves work too. there have been cases where this was done 20+ years ago.
The ONLY "ID card" that simply can't be faked is the person himself. In other words you don't issue ID cards at all. When the cop on the street wants to know who you are he takes some measurement of you, such as say a photo of your face and or asks you speak out loud into a microphone, to get a voice sample. Then this info gets compared to a database. Any other system can be faked.
If you think about it, this is how "ID" used to work centuries ago. People would just know you on sight. Very few people ever travelled far from home so they always lived with people who knew them. Technology could bring back such a system.
"Finally, the statistics that say a college degree will allow you to make twice as much money over your lifetime."
Of course there are many exceptions. But it mostly does not pay to plan your life thinking that you are the exception. Odds are that you will be wrong.
Will "everyone" get a degree and therefore dilute the advantage of having one? NO. Have you seen the drop out rates in community colleges? the MAJORITY of those going with intent to transfer to a four yar school don't. Of those who do half never graduate from the four year school. Of the one who do graduate many of those had to switch majors into easier subjects, say from engineering or biology to education or business.
The students who do well are just the ones you'd expect to. They were the ones making top grades in high school they head right over to the university and continue. The majority of those taking to detour never finish. (of course there are exceptions.)
Seriouly like anything else you have to look at the return on investment. for 90% of kids the best value will be the local state university. Most of them charge "only" about as much as you'd spend on a new car.
That said, years ago (well decades ago) I was taking my own advice and going to UCLA. But then I found some one who'd pay 100% tuition to "any school I could get admitted into". I transferred to a much more expensive school. So I've seen both. A top-end public university and a $200K small private school. One is not really "better" they are just much different. I preferred having small classes with under 20 students, access to the professors who would know me by first name and having a large dose of liberal arts with my engineering. But really I would have gotten a good education at UCLA too. Had it been on my dime I'd have stayed.
Star Office is built from Open Office but because it is a paid for product you get support from Sun and small set of features that can't be done with free software do to patents or something like that.
TIME Magazine's job is to report the NEWS. This "new guy" is news. News is stuff we don't know that matters. Obama fits that definition. McCain was hardly news, he's een around for years.
TIME Magazine's job really is to sell magazines and they design the cover for that reason. Some one figured out what people wanted to read and printed that. Not many potential readers were thinging "Who is this McCain guy? I'd better read up on him." Time was simply giving the public what it wanted
Yes, Apple has already done it. Their new notebook, in stores now, has the integrated GPU with the bigger there if require too. Kind of the same thing but on a nicer aluminum uni-body and glass package.
The purpose of stretching is to prevent injury. Also the type of activity one would do after stretching (distance running,...) typically would not require maximum strength. I think the science was dead-on stretch to prevent injury. if you want to maximize performance then just to a worm up to get the blood circulating
What kinds of rates to expect. It depends a lot. You can find kids who will work for peanuts but then you want profesional quality well documented work that is well tested. You will have to hire some real software engineers, some real quality control peopel and some real technical writers and editers and graphic design people. I've worked in the software business for 25+years and I'll tell you that it is expensive. You'd be shocked at how little a million dollars will buy. For example I live in So. California and have a wife and two kids. How much money would I need to support a middle class lifestyle? Then figure in typical levels of productivity. In my area, embedded systems used by military equipment we are lucky to see 200 lines of code per month per engineer. But that is fully debugged and tested and we have very, very strict quality controls. If you are writing for the web then you can be almost 100 times more productive because crashes and failure is tolerated because people don't die when a web page fails. Productivity is also a matter of luck. Studies have shown that in any group of 6 engineers there will be a 2:1 ratio of productivly between members of the group.
"Lines of code" is a horrible mearse of a program's size but is as good as anything else we have. Typical LOC counts are about 5,000 for a simple but non-triveal program that one or two people might write. The Postgresql database system has nearly 500K lines and the Linux itself has about 10M line.
So take the productivity numbers, your line of code estimates and an assumed salery plus overhead, payroll taxes, worker's comp insurance, social security and so on. Pick 100K per year for young people and double that for those with 10+ years full time experience. Run the numbers with low, average and high estimeats and you will get the range of costs. And yes you might be able to pullit off using all low estimates if yuo hire students who work at home and alrady have a solid understanding of the science and math.
The worst case would be back when I worked on a radar system. In industry, radar is hard. Just over half the projects fail for technical grounds and this is even for organizations like Raytheon. We blew through millions and had nothing to show for it. But then producing maps in real time in the cockpit as a supersonic aircraft flies over the ground is not easy. But on the other hand if you are only creating forms on a web page, some kid will do it for you in a few hours. Cost depends very strongly on the problem domain AND the experiance of the enginers in that feild. In our radar case no one had yet solved this specific problem so going in we know we had a high risk.
Risk is I think a worse problem than cost. Most software managers try very hard to reduce risk and make of a plan A, B and C. at least. It is worth paying double to reduce risk by half. Your best risk reduction technique is to find engineers with the relevant experience. Who understand both the science and the programming environment. On a large project yuo simply can't find enough of these people unless your project is very generis (like an on-line store)
An easy way to test your theory that if is just compiler switches would be to re-compile __everything__. Back in the old days of Linux I usd to ony install from source code and costom compile my Kernal with a minimum driver set. Now days I find the CPU is never the bottle neck and I don't care.
But a simple re-compile could test your theory. Anyone want to try it?
I've given up on optical discs except for short term backup. Now I use hard drives. The last one I bought was a 1TB drive for $150.
You can't expect anythig to last a long time. If you use optical media you have to re-burn your data periodically and make a whole new set. Then you store maybe the last 4 of 5 sets and toss out the oldest set.
With a hard drive I can periodically connect the drive and "sync" it to my files. Only what has changed from the last sync is written out to the disk so it goes fast. The "sync" operation is also a test of the hard drive to see that it still works. One day I'll plug it in and it will be dead, I'm sure this will happen. But no big deal. I'll trash (no re-cycle) the drive, then connect another backup and sync that, then open up a new drive nd sync that one. I rotate three backup drives keeping one in my office, one in a fire safe ad one near the computer.
In importent part of this process is actually trashing drives. They fail and they get replaced. Some time I don't wait for failure, they just get to small or to old or have the "wrong" interface so I recycle them to some other use and buy a big, fast new drive. This keeps my set of backup drive new
Of course he will not fix everything. He can't because the definition of "fix" means different things to different people.
But even if he fixes nothing all he has to do to make me happy is just end the rampant destruction of the current administration. The current administration has the worst record on civil rights, the environment and foreign policy. Just doing no harm will be such an improvment
I do suspect he will get more done then bush did simply because he will not have to fight with congress as much
TV is actually an adition like alcohol. Try taking away the bottle from an alcoholic watch his reaction. irst he becomes combative "who the hell, give my that back". Hell do anything to get more. Same happens with TV. Try turning it off and the TV watchers first reaxtive is to be combative, then they try to turn the TV back on. TV adicts will pay anything, even $100+ a month just to watch
I figure there must be some built-in "feature" in the huiman brain that makes us like TV. It is the same with food, there is a built-in "feature" that makes us over eat. A million years of evolution made us so that we like to store ecces calories as fat so we can survive periods of sparce food. Something like this must be the cause of TV addiction, there must be some biological reason why we prefer a zombie-like state of stupidity. Perhaps it is as simple as calories burning, switch the brain off and we burn less. The human brain uses a lot of energy. Perhaps the ability to become a zombie helped our ancestors to survive.
When something is so universal and appeals to all cultures I always suspect a biological root cause. There must be a biological reason we like TV.
If you want to do something for the environment, recharging a cell phone with a soloar cell may not be the best use of your funds. It is likely counter productive when you figure in the cost to make the system and that it is heading to a land fill in a few years. The power "saved" is triveal.
For better to put your money into something like compact fliourecent bulbs or turnning down the temperure on the water heaters or using solor heated water. Think in terms of "bang per buck"
You cell phone uses only a few amphours per week. Even with expensive power at $0.25/kwh the cell phone 'burns' less than a tenth of a penny per week. Save more power by turnning your TV off when you leave the room
"wasteful packaging that we didn't ask for, which doesn't serve any direct purpose to us, and we should pay a tax on it to boot?"
Yes, that would be a good idea. If there were two items one with horible packing and the tax and the other with no tax, people would buy the lower price item forcing the company that continues to use that hardplasic clam shell to go broke.
I'd go for a $50 per package tax on those hard shells, they'd be gone overnight.
Slashdot Mirror
The only why he can even think about a machine having a "sole" is to re-define "sole" to be something a machine could have. Then well "duh", isn't the answer easy.
"sole" is used, I think to talk about something that could continue to exist after the physical body is gone. We can't even know if humans have soles of this kind. Who could we know about machines.
Self awareness, yes. I think a machne could have that. But AIs as they are designed today, no not even ifyou scaled them up. But an AI built "from the bottom up" conestionist style could be a little bit like us and think that it was self aware. But are we even self aware? We think we are so that is enough. I think the best we can say is that "A machine could be like us" But do we have "soles"? no one has ever been able to answer that.
"Source code audits with automated scripts that attack every port and every program checking for buffer overflows or other avenues of attack. It would require a lot of work"
So much in the the sun would burn out before you coulld finish. Do the math and any non-triveal program. I just looked at one of mine and there are over 2,000 branches. How many possible paths are there? Let's just say "more then you can test in a few billion years"
But we don't have to test. Remember the theorem about triangles a^2 + b^2 = c^2. How do we know it is true for all right triangles. Did some one actually check EVERY triangle or even 0.001% of them. No they used a mathematical proof so we know with certainty. One can apply the same methods to software. But it is very hard and very slow. But even so much faster then exhaustive testing.
There are other ways to do the same thing. Rather then switching in and out coils another approach is to switch the coils on and off. In light winds the cils are only in use 10% of the time andthen when the wind is blowing the coils are on full time. You switch them rapidly, several times per second. houshold dimmer switches for lights and many motor controlser work this way.
I think what these guys have found is the "coils are cheap". so they use way more coils than are needed but the contoller then becomes much simpler.
For billions of years water has run down rivers to the ocean and then evaporated into the air and rained down onto land and run back in the ocean in rivers. We all drink re-claimed sea water.
"you just can't know what is a distortion from the lens and what is part of the scene. Unless, like, the scene happened to be a highly accurate checkerboard pattern."
It need not be a checker board. ANy straight lines will do. For example if the horizon is in the frame or (better) parts of buildings. Whaen I correct out geometric distortion I never use a lens profile. I only correct out what I see.
In the motion picture industry "4K" means there are 4,000 pixels across the long edge of the frame. Consumer cameras are advertised by the total number of pixels in the frame. Typically measured in "mega pixels"
But as it turns out resolution is proportional to the number of pixels across the long edge of the frame. Note that movie cameras are marketed to profesionals who understand this while consumer cameras are marketed to "the masses" who just want a big number of "whatevers"
">>>modeling space combat tactics after WWII.......the part about the crew having to remain silent so the Kilrathi couldn't hear them, presumably on space sonar. :)"
I've read in a few places the reason they try and model space whats after WWII aircraft carrier battles is because people need to be able to understand the battle and what's happening. If you take a big leap you loose the viewers
Oh and about the sonar: If you bounce a laser of a window any singal you put on the beam will be dopper modulated by the vibrations on the glass. You can listen to sounds inside from miles away. This would actually work better in space then in air and it's not "science fiction" Microwaves work too. there have been cases where this was done 20+ years ago.
"This sort of national irresponsibility needs to stop, right now. ...I realise these events happened a little while ago now but nonetheless"
How can one "stop" doing something that happened in the past?
May I offer a radical or extreme solution?
The ONLY "ID card" that simply can't be faked is the person himself. In other words you don't issue ID cards at all. When the cop on the street wants to know who you are he takes some measurement of you, such as say a photo of your face and or asks you speak out loud into a microphone, to get a voice sample. Then this info gets compared to a database. Any other system can be faked.
If you think about it, this is how "ID" used to work centuries ago. People would just know you on sight. Very few people ever travelled far from home so they always lived with people who knew them. Technology could bring back such a system.
"Finally, the statistics that say a college degree will allow you to make twice as much money over your lifetime."
Of course there are many exceptions. But it mostly does not pay to plan your life thinking that you are the exception. Odds are that you will be wrong.
Will "everyone" get a degree and therefore dilute the advantage of having one? NO. Have you seen the drop out rates in community colleges? the MAJORITY of those going with intent to transfer to a four yar school don't. Of those who do half never graduate from the four year school. Of the one who do graduate many of those had to switch majors into easier subjects, say from engineering or biology to education or business.
The students who do well are just the ones you'd expect to. They were the ones making top grades in high school they head right over to the university and continue. The majority of those taking to detour never finish. (of course there are exceptions.)
Seriouly like anything else you have to look at the return on investment. for 90% of kids the best value will be the local state university. Most of them charge "only" about as much as you'd spend on a new car.
That said, years ago (well decades ago) I was taking my own advice and going to UCLA. But then I found some one who'd pay 100% tuition to "any school I could get admitted into". I transferred to a much more expensive school. So I've seen both. A top-end public university and a $200K small private school. One is not really "better" they are just much different. I preferred having small classes with under 20 students, access to the professors who would know me by first name and having a large dose of liberal arts with my engineering. But really I would have gotten a good education at UCLA too. Had it been on my dime I'd have stayed.
I think the bottom line is that there are simply way to many retail stores. If 1/3rd of them closed I'd never notice and would not care.
Retail adds zero value so no one cares other then location and price.
Star Office is built from Open Office but because it is a paid for product you get support from Sun and small set of features that can't be done with free software do to patents or something like that.
TIME Magazine's job is to report the NEWS. This "new guy" is news. News is stuff we don't know that matters. Obama fits that definition. McCain was hardly news, he's een around for years.
TIME Magazine's job really is to sell magazines and they design the cover for that reason. Some one figured out what people wanted to read and printed that. Not many potential readers were thinging "Who is this McCain guy? I'd better read up on him." Time was simply giving the public what it wanted
Yes, Apple has already done it. Their new notebook, in stores now, has the integrated GPU with the bigger there if require too. Kind of the same thing but on a nicer aluminum uni-body and glass package.
The purpose of stretching is to prevent injury. Also the type of activity one would do after stretching (distance running,...) typically would not require maximum strength. I think the science was dead-on stretch to prevent injury. if you want to maximize performance then just to a worm up to get the blood circulating
What kinds of rates to expect. It depends a lot. You can find kids who will work for peanuts but then you want profesional quality well documented work that is well tested. You will have to hire some real software engineers, some real quality control peopel and some real technical writers and editers and graphic design people. I've worked in the software business for 25+years and I'll tell you that it is expensive. You'd be shocked at how little a million dollars will buy. For example I live in So. California and have a wife and two kids. How much money would I need to support a middle class lifestyle? Then figure in typical levels of productivity. In my area, embedded systems used by military equipment we are lucky to see 200 lines of code per month per engineer. But that is fully debugged and tested and we have very, very strict quality controls. If you are writing for the web then you can be almost 100 times more productive because crashes and failure is tolerated because people don't die when a web page fails. Productivity is also a matter of luck. Studies have shown that in any group of 6 engineers there will be a 2:1 ratio of productivly between members of the group.
"Lines of code" is a horrible mearse of a program's size but is as good as anything else we have. Typical LOC counts are about 5,000 for a simple but non-triveal program that one or two people might write. The Postgresql database system has nearly 500K lines and the Linux itself has about 10M line.
So take the productivity numbers, your line of code estimates and an assumed salery plus overhead, payroll taxes, worker's comp insurance, social security and so on. Pick 100K per year for young people and double that for those with 10+ years full time experience. Run the numbers with low, average and high estimeats and you will get the range of costs. And yes you might be able to pullit off using all low estimates if yuo hire students who work at home and alrady have a solid understanding of the science and math.
The worst case would be back when I worked on a radar system. In industry, radar is hard. Just over half the projects fail for technical grounds and this is even for organizations like Raytheon. We blew through millions and had nothing to show for it. But then producing maps in real time in the cockpit as a supersonic aircraft flies over the ground is not easy. But on the other hand if you are only creating forms on a web page, some kid will do it for you in a few hours. Cost depends very strongly on the problem domain AND the experiance of the enginers in that feild. In our radar case no one had yet solved this specific problem so going in we know we had a high risk.
Risk is I think a worse problem than cost. Most software managers try very hard to reduce risk and make of a plan A, B and C. at least. It is worth paying double to reduce risk by half. Your best risk reduction technique is to find engineers with the relevant experience. Who understand both the science and the programming environment. On a large project yuo simply can't find enough of these people unless your project is very generis (like an on-line store)
Good Luck.....
Can either of these new music players
(1) connect to the iTunes music store and buy music?
(2) play any music you have that uses Apple's fairplay DRM
(3) See 1 ans 2 above but with video in place of music
These programs can't replace iTunes for most users
An easy way to test your theory that if is just compiler switches would be to re-compile __everything__. Back in the old days of Linux I usd to ony install from source code and costom compile my Kernal with a minimum driver set. Now days I find the CPU is never the bottle neck and I don't care.
But a simple re-compile could test your theory. Anyone want to try it?
I've given up on optical discs except for short term backup. Now I use hard drives. The last one I bought was a 1TB drive for $150.
You can't expect anythig to last a long time. If you use optical media you have to re-burn your data periodically and make a whole new set. Then you store maybe the last 4 of 5 sets and toss out the oldest set.
With a hard drive I can periodically connect the drive and "sync" it to my files. Only what has changed from the last sync is written out to the disk so it goes fast. The "sync" operation is also a test of the hard drive to see that it still works. One day I'll plug it in and it will be dead, I'm sure this will happen. But no big deal. I'll trash (no re-cycle) the drive, then connect another backup and sync that, then open up a new drive nd sync that one. I rotate three backup drives keeping one in my office, one in a fire safe ad one near the computer.
In importent part of this process is actually trashing drives. They fail and they get replaced. Some time I don't wait for failure, they just get to small or to old or have the "wrong" interface so I recycle them to some other use and buy a big, fast new drive. This keeps my set of backup drive new
Of course he will not fix everything. He can't because the definition of "fix" means different things to different people.
But even if he fixes nothing all he has to do to make me happy is just end the rampant destruction of the current administration. The current administration has the worst record on civil rights, the environment and foreign policy. Just doing no harm will be such an improvment
I do suspect he will get more done then bush did simply because he will not have to fight with congress as much
"...and then plants to make the stuff in numerous ways depending on what is most economical in a given region."
The trouble is that always the most economical method is to just pump it out of the ground. Making it from bio sources costs about $5 a gallon.
TV is actually an adition like alcohol. Try taking away the bottle from an alcoholic watch his reaction. irst he becomes combative "who the hell, give my that back". Hell do anything to get more. Same happens with TV. Try turning it off and the TV watchers first reaxtive is to be combative, then they try to turn the TV back on. TV adicts will pay anything, even $100+ a month just to watch
I figure there must be some built-in "feature" in the huiman brain that makes us like TV. It is the same with food, there is a built-in "feature" that makes us over eat. A million years of evolution made us so that we like to store ecces calories as fat so we can survive periods of sparce food. Something like this must be the cause of TV addiction, there must be some biological reason why we prefer a zombie-like state of stupidity. Perhaps it is as simple as calories burning, switch the brain off and we burn less. The human brain uses a lot of energy. Perhaps the ability to become a zombie helped our ancestors to survive.
When something is so universal and appeals to all cultures I always suspect a biological root cause.
There must be a biological reason we like TV.
If you want to do something for the environment, recharging a cell phone with a soloar cell may not be the best use of your funds. It is likely counter productive when you figure in the cost to make the system and that it is heading to a land fill in a few years. The power "saved" is triveal.
For better to put your money into something like compact fliourecent bulbs or turnning down the temperure on the water heaters or using solor heated water. Think in terms of "bang per buck"
You cell phone uses only a few amphours per week. Even with expensive power at $0.25/kwh the cell phone 'burns' less than a tenth of a penny per week. Save more power by turnning your TV off when you leave the room
"wasteful packaging that we didn't ask for, which doesn't serve any direct purpose to us, and we should pay a tax on it to boot?"
Yes, that would be a good idea. If there were two items one with horible packing and the tax and the other with no tax, people would buy the lower price item forcing the company that continues to use that hardplasic clam shell to go broke.
I'd go for a $50 per package tax on those hard shells, they'd be gone overnight.