To be fair, at the time he was right about encryption. Now there are other forms that do not depend on factorization, though - namely elliptic curve cryptography.
Disclaimer: This is not my area of expertise. I would not be too surprised to find out that elliptic curve cryptography existed in 1995. I am, nonetheless, fairly confident that there were no readily available implementations for non cryptographers.
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. Until there is a high quality source of information for these people, the internet will not provide them what they need or want. Perhaps the solution is to let them build it, though. Provide the infrastructure, wiki style, and let them teach each other. Other experts from developed nations could provide additional input.
I'm not sure where you heard that "20nm is the first process node which will be more expensive than the preceding one". I'm curious how that could be argued. Nearly every tool has grown near exponentially in price. Perhaps by scaling up production they've been able to keep reducing cost, though.
For the case of comparing GPU and CPU, that's a pretty good assumption, because they are both digital logic dominated. Once you start mixing in other functions, things can change dramatically.
And yet the channel width is ~8 nm, which is ~64 atomic layers. How many times do you think they can cut that in half? And does it really matter when the source and drain contacts are 10x the size of the channel itself?
I'm not sure why you received a troll mod, but this is one of those rare cases where Facts != Truth. You absolutely stated facts, but your statements are an incomplete picture which misportrays the truth. The democrats did not have a filibuster-proof 2/3 majority which means they wanted a bill that at least a fraction of the Republicans would support. They thought that by taking Romney's Massachusetts health care plan and using it as the base for a national plan, they would win over Republican support. Of course that was short sighted, because to a politician the politics are far more important than the project. But the point is the ACA was not what the majority of the Democrats wanted - it's simply what they (at least the majority) were willing to compromise for.
I agree in principle, but in practice most ideas are not particularly useful until fully formed and vetted during the development process. Since a key point of the patent system is supposed to be that you are trading a short term monopoly for publication, it seems reasonable to expect the patent to provide a reference implementation. For physical objects a drawing has historically sufficed. For software, no such correlate exists. I think this is one of the biggest problems with software patents; the same concept can be covered by both patent and copyright, effectively giving the holder a monopoly over the concept in return for nothing to society.
You've got the basic idea. It's a little more complex than simple cavitation, though, because the cavitation actually causes a runaway chemical reaction. So instead of getting short lives bubbles too small to see, the bubbles expand rapidly due to liberation of CO2 from carbonic acid, which in turn causes a pressure wave, which feeds back and causes more cavitation, etc.
Whoops, accidentally hit submit. I hate typing on a phone. Let's try that again:
Of course. A lie told a thousand times, and all that. That's how the human mind works, and that's why group isolation leads to polarization. The only workable solution is to integrate and expose people to alternate views - get them to question what they take for granted. Unfortunately, even that doesn't work on most people because questioning oneself is very uncomfortable, and we tend to avoid it as much as possible.
Q1: Am I a decider? Q2: Do I make my decisions using recursive reasoning (ie using a process that can be simulated on a digital computer)? Q3: Can I model and simulate—at least partially—my own behaviour and that of other deciders? Q4: Can I predict my own decisions beforehand?
“If you answered Yes to questions 1 to 3, and you answer Yes to question 4, then you are lying. If you answer Yes to questions 1,2,3, and No to question 4, then you are likely to believe that you have free will,” says Lloyd.
Answering those questions myself, I consider myself to be a decider (as in, I make decisions), I can model/simulate my and others' actions (I pride myself on it), and I can predict my own decisions (because I can model/simulate them). So I'm lying. But where is the lie? Am I misinterpreting the term "decider"?
No, you're misinterpreting their usage of "predict". They were careful to use model and simulate in Q3 but predict in Q4. The point is that you cannot "predict" your decision, you can only make your decision. If you could build a computer system capable of predicting your decision before you made it, you would quickly realize you do not have free will, because every decision you make would have been predicted by your computer system.
And then there's the question of having free will. I have the freedom to modify my thinking processes at any time should I not like a decision I have arrived at. Thus I have free will - at least I consider it to be - yet I would answer "yes" to all four questions.
The point is that if you answered yes to the first three questions, then you only perceive yourself as having the freedom to modify your thinking process at any time (i.e. free will).
The test is based on an extension of Turing's halting problem in computer science. This states that there is no general way of knowing how an algorithm will finish, other than to run it.
This is not correct: running the algorithm can show that it will halt if it does within the time you let it run. However, if it does not halt during that time, you still don't know if it will halt - unless you would have infinite time*, which you don't have. So, the "other than to run it" part is false: there is no solution for the halting problem.
* Relativistic computing might provide infinite computing time, but it would involve (for example) moving a black hole near the entrance of a wormhole, and we don't even know if wormholes exist, so this is a purely theoretical possibility.
They're equivalent statements. Yours is more formal, but the other is equally as valid.
"This states that there is no general way of knowing how an algorithm will finish, other than to run it. This means that when a human has to make a decision, there is no way of knowing in advance how it will end up. In other words, the familiar feeling of not knowing the final decision until it is thought through is a necessary feature of the decision-making process and why we have the impression of free will."
The conclusion from the halting problem to human decision making doesn't hold. Even if we allow that human decision making is an algorithmic process (which is a big if)
It's a definite fact for a sufficiently general definition of algorithmic process, and the definition required for the halting problem to apply is quite general.
, it is not logically impossible to run that algorithm before the person in question makes the decision, which means there is a way of knowing in advance how it will end up.
You seem to misunderstand how the halting problem is being applied in this situation. The whole point is that the person or agent cannot (at least with our current technology) predict its own decision by any method faster than going through the decision making process. You are quite right that a sufficiently powerful independent system could predict the agents decision faster than the agent can make the decision. However, since the agent cannot (currently) do so, it perceives itself as possessing free will. If we one day have a computer system powerful enough to predict your decisions before you make them, and you run the experiment enough times to realize it wasn't just a lucky guess, then you might begin to realize you do not have free will.
Secondly, the third quoted sentence is a complete non-sequitur. The preceding sentences do not argue in any way that the phenomenology of decision making is a necessary feature of the decision-making process, which leads me to believe the summarizer may not know what 'in other words' means. TFA may be better, but given what physicists have said about philosophy in the past I feel justified in making an induction-based judgement and not reading it.
Very true. Perhaps it should have simply stated "In other words, the familiar feeling of not knowing the final decision until it is thought through is why we have the impression of free will."
Also, whacking Defense tends to knock pts off the GDP so that will cause the deficit to reappear.
The taxes used to pay for Defense knock off more points of the GDP.
Perhaps, but I'm skeptical, especially when we're no where near the end of the rapids when it comes to recession. Government spending plays an important role in shortening and shallowing economic downturn.
Whacking science similarly except the effect gets greater the farther into the future one looks.
I generally favor federal funding for basic scientific research because I suspect has one of the best ROIs for all federal spending. But even that is merely a guess. Nobody knows whether it actually does.
Too true about nobody knowing. Unfortunately the full impact is immeasurable. Nonetheless, I would bet that even the measurable impact is more than enough to justify the investment.
You seem to have misunderstood the situation. Federal government funded researchers were barred from entering their workplace, regardless of whether or not there was enough money in their accounts to continue operating. In many cases whole buildings were shut down even if they were only partially funded by the federal government. In some cases, entire experiments had to be scrapped at tremendous cost in both time and money, because a physical presence is required to maintain them.
The answer is first SHRINK IT. Then bin the horrible excuse of an income tax and replace it with a national sales tax so everyone pays tax.
Sales tax is unfairly regressive. It hurts the poor far more than the rich.
Look at this list of departments and agencies and tell me you have even a clue at what half of these do for us taxpayers - and how they don't overlap other federal or state agencies. The size of the federal government is obese and needs to be put on a diet. Simply getting rid of departments and agencies that do not have to be at the federal level would be a good starting place (e.g. Dept of Education). Others like pure science, NASA, etc. should remain at the federal level.
There are very strong arguments for why education should be regulated at a national level. Also, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with having overlap between federal and state agencies.
Historically, this is the type of research that has enabled the bulk of our rapid progress in the last couple of centuries.
No, it hasn't. As I've noted many times before, that fundamental research of the past had near future application at the time. This often devolves into a game of people naming research and then I countering with the near future expectations that people doing or funding that research would have had.
I partially agree with you, since government funded research basically always has at least one fairly near-term application in mind. However, I think you underestimate how poor we are at predicting how useful basic research will or will not become. There are plenty of examples of fundamental advancements that were offshoots of other projects. Take the laser, as a relatively recent example (50 years); no one understood the full implications of developing the laser, they basically made one because they realized they could. This is an important point because it shows that some of the research that is not funded because there's no obvious applications could actually have been more important than the research that was funded.
Anyone have suggestions on how to improve the funding situation?
Make researchers more accountable for the money they spend. I suggest doing it by eliminating most public funding of science which inherently is unaccountable.
No offense, but you seem to have very little experience with publicly funded research. Even basic research projects are continually held accountable, and funding is cut if results are not produced.
Very true. However, it's nowhere near as bad as the private debt to GDP ratio, and that's bad in all countries (except maybe Japan, which has be deleveraging for 20 years). It also isn't necessarily a Bad Thing, since one of the most important roles of government is to spend in a recession and tax in a boom economy. The problem is the fools who were running a deficit in a boom economy.
At least, not in general. Even the most basic assembly is usually much easier to write/read than machine code, since it takes care of a lot of the drudgery for you. Also, comments and subroutine names can be extremely helpful for understanding assembly code.
The best analogy I've heard is to transportation / shipping. Back when such transport was new, people scoffed at the idea of making money for moving things around. "You aren't producing anything, making anything, it's a complete waste." But today, we can see how moving goods around is actually of extreme importance.
Ahh yes, I remember back 12,000 years ago when the transportation industry was new. To think, people once thought it was a useless pursuit...
That's actually a very interesting solution I hadn't previously considered. The SEC or related entity could implement an automated computer system to act as arbiter for all exchange transactions, thus eliminating all middle men. This would provide any and all benefits that HFT might provide (if any at all), while lowering transactions costs by eliminating the rake that currently goes to HFT firms. Why hasn't this happened yet?
Slashdot Mirror
What could possibly go wrong?!
To be fair, at the time he was right about encryption. Now there are other forms that do not depend on factorization, though - namely elliptic curve cryptography.
Disclaimer: This is not my area of expertise. I would not be too surprised to find out that elliptic curve cryptography existed in 1995. I am, nonetheless, fairly confident that there were no readily available implementations for non cryptographers.
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. Until there is a high quality source of information for these people, the internet will not provide them what they need or want. Perhaps the solution is to let them build it, though. Provide the infrastructure, wiki style, and let them teach each other. Other experts from developed nations could provide additional input.
I'm not sure where you heard that "20nm is the first process node which will be more expensive than the preceding one". I'm curious how that could be argued. Nearly every tool has grown near exponentially in price. Perhaps by scaling up production they've been able to keep reducing cost, though.
For the case of comparing GPU and CPU, that's a pretty good assumption, because they are both digital logic dominated. Once you start mixing in other functions, things can change dramatically.
And yet the channel width is ~8 nm, which is ~64 atomic layers. How many times do you think they can cut that in half? And does it really matter when the source and drain contacts are 10x the size of the channel itself?
Think of all the children that would be saved every year!
Also luckily, nuclear fission reactors cant and dont detonate. Modern designs cant even meltdown.
I'm not sure why you received a troll mod, but this is one of those rare cases where Facts != Truth. You absolutely stated facts, but your statements are an incomplete picture which misportrays the truth. The democrats did not have a filibuster-proof 2/3 majority which means they wanted a bill that at least a fraction of the Republicans would support. They thought that by taking Romney's Massachusetts health care plan and using it as the base for a national plan, they would win over Republican support. Of course that was short sighted, because to a politician the politics are far more important than the project. But the point is the ACA was not what the majority of the Democrats wanted - it's simply what they (at least the majority) were willing to compromise for.
I agree in principle, but in practice most ideas are not particularly useful until fully formed and vetted during the development process. Since a key point of the patent system is supposed to be that you are trading a short term monopoly for publication, it seems reasonable to expect the patent to provide a reference implementation. For physical objects a drawing has historically sufficed. For software, no such correlate exists. I think this is one of the biggest problems with software patents; the same concept can be covered by both patent and copyright, effectively giving the holder a monopoly over the concept in return for nothing to society.
You've got the basic idea. It's a little more complex than simple cavitation, though, because the cavitation actually causes a runaway chemical reaction. So instead of getting short lives bubbles too small to see, the bubbles expand rapidly due to liberation of CO2 from carbonic acid, which in turn causes a pressure wave, which feeds back and causes more cavitation, etc.
Whoops, accidentally hit submit. I hate typing on a phone. Let's try that again:
Of course. A lie told a thousand times, and all that. That's how the human mind works, and that's why group isolation leads to polarization. The only workable solution is to integrate and expose people to alternate views - get them to question what they take for granted. Unfortunately, even that doesn't work on most people because questioning oneself is very uncomfortable, and we tend to avoid it as much as possible.
Q1: Am I a decider?
Q2: Do I make my decisions using recursive reasoning (ie using a process that can be simulated on a digital computer)?
Q3: Can I model and simulate—at least partially—my own behaviour and that of other deciders?
Q4: Can I predict my own decisions beforehand?
“If you answered Yes to questions 1 to 3, and you answer Yes to question 4, then you are lying. If you answer Yes to questions 1,2,3, and No to question 4, then you are likely to believe that you have free will,” says Lloyd.
Answering those questions myself, I consider myself to be a decider (as in, I make decisions), I can model/simulate my and others' actions (I pride myself on it), and I can predict my own decisions (because I can model/simulate them). So I'm lying. But where is the lie? Am I misinterpreting the term "decider"?
No, you're misinterpreting their usage of "predict". They were careful to use model and simulate in Q3 but predict in Q4. The point is that you cannot "predict" your decision, you can only make your decision. If you could build a computer system capable of predicting your decision before you made it, you would quickly realize you do not have free will, because every decision you make would have been predicted by your computer system.
And then there's the question of having free will. I have the freedom to modify my thinking processes at any time should I not like a decision I have arrived at. Thus I have free will - at least I consider it to be - yet I would answer "yes" to all four questions.
The point is that if you answered yes to the first three questions, then you only perceive yourself as having the freedom to modify your thinking process at any time (i.e. free will).
FTFA:
The test is based on an extension of Turing's halting problem in computer science. This states that there is no general way of knowing how an algorithm will finish, other than to run it.
This is not correct: running the algorithm can show that it will halt if it does within the time you let it run. However, if it does not halt during that time, you still don't know if it will halt - unless you would have infinite time*, which you don't have. So, the "other than to run it" part is false: there is no solution for the halting problem.
* Relativistic computing might provide infinite computing time, but it would involve (for example) moving a black hole near the entrance of a wormhole, and we don't even know if wormholes exist, so this is a purely theoretical possibility.
They're equivalent statements. Yours is more formal, but the other is equally as valid.
Quantum mechanics is not a prerequisite for entropy. Entropy is simply an emergent property of sufficiently complex systems.
"This states that there is no general way of knowing how an algorithm will finish, other than to run it. This means that when a human has to make a decision, there is no way of knowing in advance how it will end up. In other words, the familiar feeling of not knowing the final decision until it is thought through is a necessary feature of the decision-making process and why we have the impression of free will."
The conclusion from the halting problem to human decision making doesn't hold. Even if we allow that human decision making is an algorithmic process (which is a big if)
It's a definite fact for a sufficiently general definition of algorithmic process, and the definition required for the halting problem to apply is quite general.
, it is not logically impossible to run that algorithm before the person in question makes the decision, which means there is a way of knowing in advance how it will end up.
You seem to misunderstand how the halting problem is being applied in this situation. The whole point is that the person or agent cannot (at least with our current technology) predict its own decision by any method faster than going through the decision making process. You are quite right that a sufficiently powerful independent system could predict the agents decision faster than the agent can make the decision. However, since the agent cannot (currently) do so, it perceives itself as possessing free will. If we one day have a computer system powerful enough to predict your decisions before you make them, and you run the experiment enough times to realize it wasn't just a lucky guess, then you might begin to realize you do not have free will.
Secondly, the third quoted sentence is a complete non-sequitur. The preceding sentences do not argue in any way that the phenomenology of decision making is a necessary feature of the decision-making process, which leads me to believe the summarizer may not know what 'in other words' means. TFA may be better, but given what physicists have said about philosophy in the past I feel justified in making an induction-based judgement and not reading it.
Very true. Perhaps it should have simply stated "In other words, the familiar feeling of not knowing the final decision until it is thought through is why we have the impression of free will."
Austerity will not have the effect you think it will.
The taxes used to pay for Defense knock off more points of the GDP.
Perhaps, but I'm skeptical, especially when we're no where near the end of the rapids when it comes to recession. Government spending plays an important role in shortening and shallowing economic downturn.
Whacking science similarly except the effect gets greater the farther into the future one looks.
I generally favor federal funding for basic scientific research because I suspect has one of the best ROIs for all federal spending. But even that is merely a guess. Nobody knows whether it actually does.
Too true about nobody knowing. Unfortunately the full impact is immeasurable. Nonetheless, I would bet that even the measurable impact is more than enough to justify the investment.
You seem to have misunderstood the situation. Federal government funded researchers were barred from entering their workplace, regardless of whether or not there was enough money in their accounts to continue operating. In many cases whole buildings were shut down even if they were only partially funded by the federal government. In some cases, entire experiments had to be scrapped at tremendous cost in both time and money, because a physical presence is required to maintain them.
Exactly.
The answer is first SHRINK IT. Then bin the horrible excuse of an income tax and replace it with a national sales tax so everyone pays tax.
Sales tax is unfairly regressive. It hurts the poor far more than the rich.
Look at this list of departments and agencies and tell me you have even a clue at what half of these do for us taxpayers - and how they don't overlap other federal or state agencies. The size of the federal government is obese and needs to be put on a diet. Simply getting rid of departments and agencies that do not have to be at the federal level would be a good starting place (e.g. Dept of Education). Others like pure science, NASA, etc. should remain at the federal level.
http://www.usa.gov/directory/federal/
There are very strong arguments for why education should be regulated at a national level. Also, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with having overlap between federal and state agencies.
Historically, this is the type of research that has enabled the bulk of our rapid progress in the last couple of centuries.
No, it hasn't. As I've noted many times before, that fundamental research of the past had near future application at the time. This often devolves into a game of people naming research and then I countering with the near future expectations that people doing or funding that research would have had.
I partially agree with you, since government funded research basically always has at least one fairly near-term application in mind. However, I think you underestimate how poor we are at predicting how useful basic research will or will not become. There are plenty of examples of fundamental advancements that were offshoots of other projects. Take the laser, as a relatively recent example (50 years); no one understood the full implications of developing the laser, they basically made one because they realized they could. This is an important point because it shows that some of the research that is not funded because there's no obvious applications could actually have been more important than the research that was funded.
Anyone have suggestions on how to improve the funding situation?
Make researchers more accountable for the money they spend. I suggest doing it by eliminating most public funding of science which inherently is unaccountable.
No offense, but you seem to have very little experience with publicly funded research. Even basic research projects are continually held accountable, and funding is cut if results are not produced.
Very true. However, it's nowhere near as bad as the private debt to GDP ratio, and that's bad in all countries (except maybe Japan, which has be deleveraging for 20 years). It also isn't necessarily a Bad Thing, since one of the most important roles of government is to spend in a recession and tax in a boom economy. The problem is the fools who were running a deficit in a boom economy.
Most importantly, austerity has the opposite of the desired effect on the debt-to-GDP ratio, because it reduces the GDP faster than the debt. It's counter intuitive, but it's an empirical fact.
Assembly != machine code
At least, not in general. Even the most basic assembly is usually much easier to write/read than machine code, since it takes care of a lot of the drudgery for you. Also, comments and subroutine names can be extremely helpful for understanding assembly code.
The best analogy I've heard is to transportation / shipping. Back when such transport was new, people scoffed at the idea of making money for moving things around. "You aren't producing anything, making anything, it's a complete waste." But today, we can see how moving goods around is actually of extreme importance.
Ahh yes, I remember back 12,000 years ago when the transportation industry was new. To think, people once thought it was a useless pursuit...
That's actually a very interesting solution I hadn't previously considered. The SEC or related entity could implement an automated computer system to act as arbiter for all exchange transactions, thus eliminating all middle men. This would provide any and all benefits that HFT might provide (if any at all), while lowering transactions costs by eliminating the rake that currently goes to HFT firms. Why hasn't this happened yet?