Interestingly, I find my cacti (grown in a UK heated greenhouse) respond by far the best by growing the most on rainy days, even if I've not watered inside the greenhouse itself meaning it's not simply because that's when they're getting water. Also, by far the best days are when you get thunder and lightning, you can see the growth difference by the end of the day on these what are otherwise often very slow growing plants.
I'd love to know the reasons because if I could replicate them then it would rapidly increase growth, both helping me grow faster the ones I sell, and helping me grow faster the ones I grow for conservation schemes.
But it's not simple, I have measured the humidity outside on rainy days and replicated the greenhouse, I have tried decrease light levels to those outside when growth is best and so on. I believe the reason is likely down to the composition of the air when it rains, as I understand it lightning increases the level of nitrogen oxides in the air and so I can only assume it's something to do with this sort of thing.
So in other words I agree with what you're saying, there are a lot of other hard to measure effects that do have a clear effect on plant growth, and professional botanists and plant biology experts I've spoken to seem to be unsure what precisely causes this increased growth of cacti when the sky is grey, and the rain is falling- even if the plants are sheltered and the rain isn't falling on them. I think it's naive to believe we know everything about plants and plant growth, clearly there's a lot more that can effect it than we fully understand just yet.
Blue wavelength light encourages vegetative growth, whilst Red wavelength encourages flowering.
You'll need both because your peppers come post-flowering, but you could use more blue when the plants are young, and switch to more red when you want to start getting peppers off of them to get the best combination of large healthy plants with plenty of peppers on.
Personally I just use fluorescent tubes though because they're so cheap and easy to get hold of when they need replacing, and cheap to run too. Also anything of higher light intensity output risks killing off the seedlings anyway.
It's cacti that I grow, living in the UK though, for me, the cost of heating the greenhouse is far bigger an issue than the cost of lighting the growing area.
Even Steam's DRM causes problems, it seems silly to give it a free pass just because the concept and execution of Steam's store is pretty damn good.
All DRM is bad, the only question is whether it's negative side has effected you yet, I'm glad to hear it sounds like it hasn't, but it almost certainly will eventually.
DRM is still entirely stupid because all it does is cause problems for legitimate customers, whilst having no effect on piracy because pirate copies strip DRM. DRM exists entirely to remove legitimate rights, such as your right to resell products you have purchased.
When the only purpose of DRM is to try and squeeze more sales out of already legitimate customers by prevent their ability to sell second hand, or preventing their ability to move between platforms (in the case of music/movies) how can DRM ever be done right from a consumer perspective?
At the end of the day DRM was produced, not to stop piracy, but to try and milk additional cash out of customers who already pay, because that's the only situation in which DRM actually has any effect- the official line that it stops piracy makes no sense at all because, well, if anything, piracy has rocketed since DRM's inception.
There shouldn't be any situation where DRM is seen as good or acceptable to the consumer no matter how loved the company implementing it is by some people (i.e. Valve, Apple) because ultimately it exists purely to screw the consumer over, even if they don't realise it. Giving acceptance to DRM is just shooting yourself in the foot.
A good start would be looking towards Nigeria, where foreign oil companies (including Exxon) have been leaking at very least an Exxon Valdez (the new official unit of measurement for oil spills;)) each year for about 50 years.
I'd imagine the level of toxicity there would give you a good starting point, although of course it's a different dynamic, because it's multiple smaller leaks over a long time, rather than a single big leak over a relatively short time.
I'm not sure if there are increased levels of cancer for the locals there or anything, but as I say, it'd certainly be a good starting point.
Sure the Lib Dems have given way to Tory policy on Education and the Economy, but the civil liberties section of the coalition agreement is almost entirely Lib Dem fed. Also, the Lib Dems have achieved a referendum on at least partial electoral reform.
So, you can really say what you want about Clegg, but it doesn't change the cold hard reality- Clegg's manage to gain far more for the Lib Dems in this coalition than any other Lib Dem leader has in decades upon decades.
The Tories were going to keep the NIR but scrap ID cards, yet the NIR is going thanks to the Lib Dems, we've got our electoral reform referendum, plenty of other civil liberties infringements are going that the Tories had not planned to dispose of.
What would your solution for Clegg have been? Labour was willing to give even less than the Tories- Labour said they wouldn't even scrap ID cards at all. What was the alternative, no coalition at all? Continue to be the 3rd party with no influence whatsoever?
No, Clegg absolutely did the right thing- enter a coalition squeezing as many concessions as possible out of the other party and he managed that, he got countless concessions and sure, he didn't get the big one we all hoped for- proportional representation, but he got much of the rest of it. We're still far better placed with Clegg's deal than we would have been under any of the alternative scenarios in that we at least have a decent amount of Lib Dem policies going through, which is a lot better than hardly any as would be the case with a Labour coalition, or none at all as would be the case as the third party.
It's also worth pointing out what Clegg has achieved with the coalition not in pushing through Lib Dem policies, but toning down Tory policies. The Tories have been forced to be far more reasonable and pragmatic over Europe for example, rather than acting as the largely xenophobic bunch they were before the election.
I could understand your point if you were coming from a purely economic standpoint but you seem to be talking in general, and so your viewpoint becomes absolutely absurd, because the Lib Dems really have got their own way in some important and major areas- i.e. civil liberties, it's all there in plain sight in the coalition agreement- compare the civil liberties section with the Lib Dem election manifesto.
For getting 23% of popular vote, it's hard to see how they haven't got more than their fair influence in the running of the country for the first time in over 50 years, and Clegg is largely to thank for that.
"I took a brief look at "Bring Back the Death Sentence" on the suggestions website, and the majority of comments indicate either complete or conditional support for the death penalty."
Huh? Look again please, there's a very very low number of people supporting that viewpoint, the overwhelming majority posting are disagreeing with the death penalty. What's more, of those agreeing many posts are from the same authors. Similarly, it only has an average score of 1.7 out of 5 (keep in mind 1 is the lowest, not 0) out of 829 votes. There certainly doesn't seem to be more than a handful of nutjobs supporting it on there.
Certainly if this poll is anything to go by the death penalty definitely does not have much support in the UK.
I've no idea where you go the impression to the counter from, perhaps you've stumbled across some agenda based poll or something?
When exactly was that written and received? It sounds like you got it before the Tories were forced to compromise into a coalition government and compromise they must to keep it afloat.
It's a different game now, the Tories didn't get the majority they wanted, they don't have sole control of the countries law books, they have to accept the Lib Dems viewpoint too.
So the real question isn't whether the Tories will keep the DEA- we know they would have, it's whether the coalition government which is a very different beast will. The answer to that is we simply don't know. The Lib Dems have let the Tories have their way on economic, education and military policy whilst the Lib Dems have had their way on civil liberties, as the DEA is largely a civil liberties issue there's still a reasonable chance the Lib Dem viewpoint will win through.
Hmm, I fully support the coalition government, but I do not believe for a second that things like this are down to Cameron.
Sites like the new Your Freedom website stem largely from the Liberal Democrats, whilst there are some who respect civil liberties to this degree in the Conservatives, such as David Davis, Cameron is not one of them beyond the absolutel minimum that pretty much all of Labour's opposition support- i.e. getting rid of ID cards.
Many in Cameron's government are very problematic still, Jeremy Hunt (Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport) for example is deeply in the pocket of the music industry for example. Similarly Daniel Hannan seems to have more in common with the far right such as UKIP than he does with Cameron's government as he has a staunchly xenophobic, verging on outright fascist viewpoint.
But, despite all that, at the end of the day, we're still in a better position now than we were with the old government who were vastly more totalitarian in nature. The very nature of this being a coalition government too also appears to be reigning in the more extreme views that would otherwise eminate from the Tories (anti-gay and anti-Europe policy) and the Lib Dems (anti-Nuclear policy), so in all, it seems to be working quite well now- just don't get too excited, there's still almost another 5 years for the likes of Jeremy Hunt, Daniel Hannan and their supporters in the Tories to cause some major problems.
I agree with you for the most part, I'm a real big fan of Java, however it's worth pointing out that multimedia can be problematic- when you start working with audio and graphics dependency on the JNI increases, and that's when you start to run into problems.
For apps that don't need this stuff like most business apps, most back end apps and so forth, there's no question, Java portability just works, and it's far and away the best language for the job. It's performance nowadays is excellent too.
Regarding C#/.NET, if you're doing Windows only stuff is certainly is much nicer than Java, but that's because of the additional features it offers - things like Linq, operator overloading, Lambda expressions, extension methods, delegates, properties and such. Importantly though also is Visual Studio, it's still the best development environment out there IMO. The issue is of course, to learn/make use of all C#/.NET and Visual Studio's features you tend to have to use it a fair bit, so unless you do and as such if you only do a little bit of work in it and don't have the time to invest in learning all C#'s features then as you say, you're best off just sticking with Java as it's a fine language. If you ever end up having to do a sizeable amount of Windows only work though in C#/.NET then I'd say it's well worth learning those extra features and you'll rapidly begin to appreciate why C# does so well in the Windows world nowadays.
I don't think there's ever been too many, but I think there's still probably more but there now than there ever has been. He did a great job, but is by no means unique, although certainly the way he has responded to his achievements is fairly unique in modern times.
Don't forget that people like Andrew Wiles are still alive and kicking, who proved Fermat's Last Theorem in 1995 to give one example.
I think the real problem is that mathematical and scientific achievements are just going ever more unnoticed amongst the latest big titted blonde who got rich and famous simply by being dumb, or the currnet expert at kicking a ball around a field, or the latest celebrity to retardedly kill themselves with a drug overdose or whatever.
But isn't that all part of the same thing? Companies are unlikely to up the cost or decrease the reliability of their products over something so trivial. Part of the trick in getting mainstream acceptance in the first place is going to have to be ensuring it is reliable and cheap.
Yes, but unfortunately Slashdot has still mostly jumped on it as an opportunity to slag off Microsoft.
Sure this may not be ground breaking, but if Microsoft can take it mainstream then why slag them off for it? as simple as it may be, the fact remains that no one else has bothered to take it mainstream yet.
It's not just about the ingenuity or difficulty of inventing a device, but in taking it to the greater market, there's no point inventing the most complex amazing thing ever if no one actually ever gets chance to make use of it. So this is where the real test is- whether Microsoft manage to take it mainstream and hence whether we all do get to benefit from it in the long run.
A good example I can think of is fireworks night here in the UK.
For those that don't know, it's a celebration of the failure of the gun powder plot which was an attempt to blow up parliament by a guy called Guy Fawkes.
We basically build a massive bonfire, not unusual for it to be around 20 ft high, and we place an effigy of Guy Fawkes on top, then we burn it all and during which usually set off shit loads of fireworks.
It's a normal celebration here and most people partake in it, but I caught myself wondering last year how this must look to people from a different culture. I mean, if they see us all burning effigys on top of massive fires, whilst exploding shit loads of fireworks in the sky we must all look quite fucking insane.
I do not suspect many people would think that burning an effigy on a massive fire is the sort of thing you expect to see in any modern Western culture, yet we do it, each year, en-masse, and without fail.
"You claim the.pst format is open and documented? I'd very much like to see the method (from Microsoft, no reverse engineered solution allowed) to get your emails out of.pst and into another format."
What you mean like the file format specification here?:
GP is right, contrary to popular belief Microsoft have just as many "open" formats as Apple, if not more. The problem isn't the formats being "open" for interoperability purposes though, it's the ones that aren't open at all, or the license restrictions / patents attached to usage of the formats, and this includes many of Apple's formats that you listed.
It's clear you're incapable of coping with the given question, so I'll try a different tact. I'm intrigued:
- Do you disagree with the accepted answer to the Monty Hall problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_Problem) too?
- How do you justify to yourself that you are right about this when your viewpoint is in conflict with some of the greatest living mathematical minds today? Do you believe you're perhaps the greatest living mathematical mind today and the others are simply wrong and don't understand the thinking and math behind the 13/27 solution?
You're absolutely right, but to be fair, most companies give you much better terms than that in the UK. So although the GP was wrong to assert that the legal baseline in the UK is 6 months full pay, that is a pretty common amount to be granted by companies here in the UK. This is probably largely driven by the fact we have such a large public sector, and in most parts of public sector such as councils you tend to get something like 6 months full pay, and upto 6 more months half pay, and private sector has to compete with that so often gives similar levels of benefits.
For comparison, I don't know if Google's maternity leave is particularly unusual in the US, or if it's pretty much run of the mill too. Any idea?
I'm not sure of any that really cover the brain as well as neural nets, but a book with decent neural net coverage, and an excellent overview of machine learning is this one:
Depending on how far you wish to study the subject, the next stop is somewhere like the Cambridge university bookstore- I'm not sure if you live in the UK but if you do and are ever near Cambridge it's worth a look- their books can of course be ordered online, but in store they offer catalogs with upcoming books which always worth a peruse through too as it tends to cover books that are really cutting edge on the topics in question.
In fact, I just did a search on their site and found this, I've never read it but it may be exactly what you're looking for:
Some of the examples are good as illustrations of how it's easy to feed the brain with certain stimuli that can make it come to the wrong conclusion, one example that comes to mind in that book is the listing of various words related to some topic I think their example was sleeping or something, and then asking someone to recall those words, people will almost always come up with a common word despite that word having never been in the list. I think their example was words related to sleeping like 'pillow', 'tired', 'yawn', 'night' and a bunch more yet they omit 'bed' or something like that, ask someone to do the activity and they will nearly always falsely conclude 'bed' was one of the words- effectively bed is a 'false' attractor in this case. It effectively illustrates that whilst the brain may come up with most of the correct words, it can come up with incorrect but related words too, for some problems this may be acceptable, for others not so.
"One of the promises is the re-introduction of the sus law."
I can find no evidence of this in the coalition manifesto. That said, there is admittedly nothing yet in their manifesto about getting rid of the stop and search powers that Labour brought in. So no it wouldn't be an erosion, it would at worst be a continuation of Labour's policies in that area, whilst still continuing to improve civil liberties elsewhere, and that's assuming they do keep section 44 of course, they may not.
You seem to be very narrow minded in missing that this isn't a Tory government either, it's a coalition Lib Dem/Labour government, and most of the civil liberties side of things the Lib Dems- the most civil liberties minded mainstream party the UK has seen in the last 100 years, has got their way. The Tories have had their way on economic / defence policy in compromise. Further, the Tories now are not the Tories of the 80s, just as Labour isn't much less right wing than the Tories nowadays, but is much more right wing than the Lib Dems.
I should point out that I'm not basing on speculation as to how the brain works, we know for sure that it works based on positive feedback cycles, resulting from stimuli, and so the point is that the brain always has to go through this process to find something, sometimes the wrong attractors are the ones that benefit from the feedback loops and that is why you don't get what you intend, and why the human brain does not consistently find the same solution.
So (at least to the degree we have reliable hardware) what I'm saying is we can store a set of instructions and data in memory and be sure that if we store that address, we know we're always going to get the same result. In a brain like system we provide the stimuli which effectively act as seeds, but depending on other, non-deterministic events we can't guarantee that it will be the same.
So you see, I'm not speculating in my points- your theory that brains can and will evolve to be the same isn't true, or at least, wont be within a reasonable time frame (likely millions of years) because they are simply just different systems.
You're not wrong in drawing parallels between the brain and the computer, and you're not wrong in drawing on the adaptability of the brain. You're also not wrong in that they can simulate each other to a certain degree, but where you are going wrong is in missing the point that they aren't the same, they absolutely do work differently. It's like the difference between a mountain bike and a road car- both let you travel along the ground faster than walking, and whilst your road car can go off road, it's going to be much worse at it than the bike, and just as the bike can go on the road it's not as good at it as the car- both cross over in their roles, but each is better at specific tasks. So whilst you may be right that in millions of years the brain can do what the computer can, the point would be that the brain can only do what the computer can now, whilst the computer in millions of years will likely do things the brain can't and vice versa. They'll still ultimately have their differences and their different suitabilities in different circumstances.
Things like neural networks will take you partial way to understanding the way the processing in the brain works and how we can simulate that on computer, so if you're interested then they're well worth looking into and playing around with. It's quite a good exercise because you can see how emergent models like that have their benefits and weaknesses, and although you're limited by the fact you are working on classic computer hardware, as I say, it demonstrates some of the fundamental ideas.
Regardless, at least they're not in now, and wont be for at very least a good few years, which is more than can be said if Labour had maintained power. At the end of the day we're still far better off under this government right now and for the forseeable future and that's fine with me, I'll be ready to join the fight again next time someone tries to introduce them.
If there was a way to get these sorts of things banished forever then I'd gladly jump on the bandwagon, but the world isn't that perfect so for now it's really just a case of being happy with the best we've got and right now that's this government- the Lib Dems are against them as a core principal so any attempts to introduce them via a back door would bring down the coalition government. Even a few years with no ID cards is better than them already having been introduced and due to be made mandatory.
...and you don't think moving special branch into a counter terrorism unit and still using that unit to carry out arrest of politicians is a bad idea? Seriously?
It doesn't matter how you cut it, use of a counter terrorism unit to arrest MPs is heavy handed and a bad idea, just as using anti-terrorism laws to freeze the assets of a foreign sovereign nation (Iceland) was a bad idea.
I'm not sure why you're jumping to accusations of spying now, because that's even more obscure. Certainly there was no suggestion of that even from the likes of Jacqui Smith or the police force themselves so I've no idea where you cracked that conspiracy theory up from.
At the end of the day it simply was what it was- an opposition MP leaking details of plans that were against public interest and getting away with it for precisely that reason, and again, this isn't a rule specific to MPs as mentioned in my previous response to you and the example cited.
There was no spying, there was no conspiracy amongst MPs, there was no special privileges for MPs.
The very fact it was against public interest is demonstrated by the events that occured since:
- The ditching of Jacqui Smith who was responsible for much of the policy that ran against public interest after numerous similar embarassments, culminated by her expenses fuck ups coupled with a much less authoritarian viewpoint by Labour heading up to the elections
- The fact Labour got absolutely slaughtered in the elections for pushing the kind of policies that were being leaked
I can see you seem to hate the Tories and I'd never vote for them myself either, but really, that doesn't change the fact this was a clear cut public interest case just as the expenses scandal was, and a heavy handed use of a counter-terrorism unit.
Now, back to The Tuesday Birthday Problem the fundamental point is that the day of the week does matter, this is precisely the point of the argument. The most correct interpretation of the sentence when you chisel away at the ambiguities of it is that it is part of the problem, which is precisely why it's a problem involving both days of the week AND gender.
Throw away your preconceptions of whether or not time effects gender and so forth because they're causing you to make assumptions that lead to false conclusions about the problem, look at the problem in isolation taking into account what you've just said to me, and what I've said in the paragraph above.
"I disagree. How can we learn to throw a basketball into a tiny hoop from far away without having very accurate estimates?"
That was precisely my point, they're still estimates. The human brain can judge based on experience how to throw the ball to get it through a hoop, but can it calculate the distance well enough, and consistently enough to calculated the angle from the feet of the thrower upto the net to perform some action such as a precise manufacturing task?
These are two very different things, and are useful for two very different purposes. Being able to throw a ball right some, or even most of the time may be fine for a game of basketball, but is this ability good enough to calculate the values for some complex and precise engineering application? Absolutely not.
"The information is never "lost" it's just unavailable for a time. If it was lost you wouldn't have the "oh yeah" moments when you remember it or look it up again. You recognize it because you already knew it."
Absolutely, it's not lost, the issue is that the brain depends on emergence, and emergent systems can be quite vulnerable to minor variations in the initial conditions. In this case the initial conditions for the moment in question will often be set by the senses, but could also occur as a result of the happenings in the brain at a prior moment, or could be caused by some chemical imbalance (i.e. taking drugs). The problem is that although the information isn't lost as such, it's just hard for the brain to track it down again when it doesn't have the conditions required to get back to that information, again, hence why it can take a while to remember what you were going to say again- it's not easy for the brain to get back to the state required, or a near enough state such that it can get the information it needs. In contrast, it's quite easy in computers, because we have explicit memory addresses and so forth to work with and that can be persisted and referred to- or to put it rather simplistically (and far from perfectly) we don't need to rely on running the execution process again to find the data if we've done things right.
"While I agree the brain isn't as effective at large scale number crunching I do believe it's something the brain can be trained to do. There are plenty of people out there who can do insanely complex arithmetic in their heads. I suspect the reason we all don't have such skills is because we don't need them."
Again, absolutely I agree, but the issue is consistently, you may be able to train it but when it's so vulnerable to minor changes in the way it works, can it do it consistently?
"So those resources in the brain were put to use on other tasks like accurately processing visual and audio data. I can hear or spot a predator very quickly and accurately in all types of environments and lighting conditions. If we use a computer to perform these tasks we realize just how much computation is required."
That's again really the key- the brain is brilliant for some things, so much so that a current style of computer just isn't really fit for the job. It's not so much that a lot of computation is required, it's just that the type of computation we do now is quite different from the type of computation a brain does and this is what TFA is getting at- to solve these sorts of problems we need a different paradigm. What I disagree with though is that we need a different paradigm in general- I don't believe we do because the paradigm being suggested isn't ideal for the things current computers are good at.
As with almost everything, I suspect it's a case of six of one, and half a dozen of the other- there isn't one perfect solution, we ultimately need both solutions for different types of problem, but shouldn't completely write one off at the expense of the other.
To cut a long story short, the fundamental difference is that current computers are largely predictable and formally provable. Brain style computing is chatotic and complex, we know it'll come up with a solution
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Interestingly, I find my cacti (grown in a UK heated greenhouse) respond by far the best by growing the most on rainy days, even if I've not watered inside the greenhouse itself meaning it's not simply because that's when they're getting water. Also, by far the best days are when you get thunder and lightning, you can see the growth difference by the end of the day on these what are otherwise often very slow growing plants.
I'd love to know the reasons because if I could replicate them then it would rapidly increase growth, both helping me grow faster the ones I sell, and helping me grow faster the ones I grow for conservation schemes.
But it's not simple, I have measured the humidity outside on rainy days and replicated the greenhouse, I have tried decrease light levels to those outside when growth is best and so on. I believe the reason is likely down to the composition of the air when it rains, as I understand it lightning increases the level of nitrogen oxides in the air and so I can only assume it's something to do with this sort of thing.
So in other words I agree with what you're saying, there are a lot of other hard to measure effects that do have a clear effect on plant growth, and professional botanists and plant biology experts I've spoken to seem to be unsure what precisely causes this increased growth of cacti when the sky is grey, and the rain is falling- even if the plants are sheltered and the rain isn't falling on them. I think it's naive to believe we know everything about plants and plant growth, clearly there's a lot more that can effect it than we fully understand just yet.
Blue wavelength light encourages vegetative growth, whilst Red wavelength encourages flowering.
You'll need both because your peppers come post-flowering, but you could use more blue when the plants are young, and switch to more red when you want to start getting peppers off of them to get the best combination of large healthy plants with plenty of peppers on.
Personally I just use fluorescent tubes though because they're so cheap and easy to get hold of when they need replacing, and cheap to run too. Also anything of higher light intensity output risks killing off the seedlings anyway.
It's cacti that I grow, living in the UK though, for me, the cost of heating the greenhouse is far bigger an issue than the cost of lighting the growing area.
There's no such thing as DRM done right.
Even Steam's DRM causes problems, it seems silly to give it a free pass just because the concept and execution of Steam's store is pretty damn good.
All DRM is bad, the only question is whether it's negative side has effected you yet, I'm glad to hear it sounds like it hasn't, but it almost certainly will eventually.
DRM is still entirely stupid because all it does is cause problems for legitimate customers, whilst having no effect on piracy because pirate copies strip DRM. DRM exists entirely to remove legitimate rights, such as your right to resell products you have purchased.
When the only purpose of DRM is to try and squeeze more sales out of already legitimate customers by prevent their ability to sell second hand, or preventing their ability to move between platforms (in the case of music/movies) how can DRM ever be done right from a consumer perspective?
At the end of the day DRM was produced, not to stop piracy, but to try and milk additional cash out of customers who already pay, because that's the only situation in which DRM actually has any effect- the official line that it stops piracy makes no sense at all because, well, if anything, piracy has rocketed since DRM's inception.
There shouldn't be any situation where DRM is seen as good or acceptable to the consumer no matter how loved the company implementing it is by some people (i.e. Valve, Apple) because ultimately it exists purely to screw the consumer over, even if they don't realise it. Giving acceptance to DRM is just shooting yourself in the foot.
A good start would be looking towards Nigeria, where foreign oil companies (including Exxon) have been leaking at very least an Exxon Valdez (the new official unit of measurement for oil spills ;)) each year for about 50 years.
I'd imagine the level of toxicity there would give you a good starting point, although of course it's a different dynamic, because it's multiple smaller leaks over a long time, rather than a single big leak over a relatively short time.
I'm not sure if there are increased levels of cancer for the locals there or anything, but as I say, it'd certainly be a good starting point.
It's scotsmen, and within York's city walls. Besides, you're assuming us English will support it's repeal ;)
What are you on about?
Sure the Lib Dems have given way to Tory policy on Education and the Economy, but the civil liberties section of the coalition agreement is almost entirely Lib Dem fed. Also, the Lib Dems have achieved a referendum on at least partial electoral reform.
So, you can really say what you want about Clegg, but it doesn't change the cold hard reality- Clegg's manage to gain far more for the Lib Dems in this coalition than any other Lib Dem leader has in decades upon decades.
The Tories were going to keep the NIR but scrap ID cards, yet the NIR is going thanks to the Lib Dems, we've got our electoral reform referendum, plenty of other civil liberties infringements are going that the Tories had not planned to dispose of.
What would your solution for Clegg have been? Labour was willing to give even less than the Tories- Labour said they wouldn't even scrap ID cards at all. What was the alternative, no coalition at all? Continue to be the 3rd party with no influence whatsoever?
No, Clegg absolutely did the right thing- enter a coalition squeezing as many concessions as possible out of the other party and he managed that, he got countless concessions and sure, he didn't get the big one we all hoped for- proportional representation, but he got much of the rest of it. We're still far better placed with Clegg's deal than we would have been under any of the alternative scenarios in that we at least have a decent amount of Lib Dem policies going through, which is a lot better than hardly any as would be the case with a Labour coalition, or none at all as would be the case as the third party.
It's also worth pointing out what Clegg has achieved with the coalition not in pushing through Lib Dem policies, but toning down Tory policies. The Tories have been forced to be far more reasonable and pragmatic over Europe for example, rather than acting as the largely xenophobic bunch they were before the election.
I could understand your point if you were coming from a purely economic standpoint but you seem to be talking in general, and so your viewpoint becomes absolutely absurd, because the Lib Dems really have got their own way in some important and major areas- i.e. civil liberties, it's all there in plain sight in the coalition agreement- compare the civil liberties section with the Lib Dem election manifesto.
For getting 23% of popular vote, it's hard to see how they haven't got more than their fair influence in the running of the country for the first time in over 50 years, and Clegg is largely to thank for that.
"I took a brief look at "Bring Back the Death Sentence" on the suggestions website, and the majority of comments indicate either complete or conditional support for the death penalty."
Huh? Look again please, there's a very very low number of people supporting that viewpoint, the overwhelming majority posting are disagreeing with the death penalty. What's more, of those agreeing many posts are from the same authors. Similarly, it only has an average score of 1.7 out of 5 (keep in mind 1 is the lowest, not 0) out of 829 votes. There certainly doesn't seem to be more than a handful of nutjobs supporting it on there.
Certainly if this poll is anything to go by the death penalty definitely does not have much support in the UK.
I've no idea where you go the impression to the counter from, perhaps you've stumbled across some agenda based poll or something?
When exactly was that written and received? It sounds like you got it before the Tories were forced to compromise into a coalition government and compromise they must to keep it afloat.
It's a different game now, the Tories didn't get the majority they wanted, they don't have sole control of the countries law books, they have to accept the Lib Dems viewpoint too.
So the real question isn't whether the Tories will keep the DEA- we know they would have, it's whether the coalition government which is a very different beast will. The answer to that is we simply don't know. The Lib Dems have let the Tories have their way on economic, education and military policy whilst the Lib Dems have had their way on civil liberties, as the DEA is largely a civil liberties issue there's still a reasonable chance the Lib Dem viewpoint will win through.
Hmm, I fully support the coalition government, but I do not believe for a second that things like this are down to Cameron.
Sites like the new Your Freedom website stem largely from the Liberal Democrats, whilst there are some who respect civil liberties to this degree in the Conservatives, such as David Davis, Cameron is not one of them beyond the absolutel minimum that pretty much all of Labour's opposition support- i.e. getting rid of ID cards.
Many in Cameron's government are very problematic still, Jeremy Hunt (Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport) for example is deeply in the pocket of the music industry for example. Similarly Daniel Hannan seems to have more in common with the far right such as UKIP than he does with Cameron's government as he has a staunchly xenophobic, verging on outright fascist viewpoint.
But, despite all that, at the end of the day, we're still in a better position now than we were with the old government who were vastly more totalitarian in nature. The very nature of this being a coalition government too also appears to be reigning in the more extreme views that would otherwise eminate from the Tories (anti-gay and anti-Europe policy) and the Lib Dems (anti-Nuclear policy), so in all, it seems to be working quite well now- just don't get too excited, there's still almost another 5 years for the likes of Jeremy Hunt, Daniel Hannan and their supporters in the Tories to cause some major problems.
I agree with you for the most part, I'm a real big fan of Java, however it's worth pointing out that multimedia can be problematic- when you start working with audio and graphics dependency on the JNI increases, and that's when you start to run into problems.
For apps that don't need this stuff like most business apps, most back end apps and so forth, there's no question, Java portability just works, and it's far and away the best language for the job. It's performance nowadays is excellent too.
Regarding C#/.NET, if you're doing Windows only stuff is certainly is much nicer than Java, but that's because of the additional features it offers - things like Linq, operator overloading, Lambda expressions, extension methods, delegates, properties and such. Importantly though also is Visual Studio, it's still the best development environment out there IMO. The issue is of course, to learn/make use of all C#/.NET and Visual Studio's features you tend to have to use it a fair bit, so unless you do and as such if you only do a little bit of work in it and don't have the time to invest in learning all C#'s features then as you say, you're best off just sticking with Java as it's a fine language. If you ever end up having to do a sizeable amount of Windows only work though in C#/.NET then I'd say it's well worth learning those extra features and you'll rapidly begin to appreciate why C# does so well in the Windows world nowadays.
I don't think there's ever been too many, but I think there's still probably more but there now than there ever has been. He did a great job, but is by no means unique, although certainly the way he has responded to his achievements is fairly unique in modern times.
Don't forget that people like Andrew Wiles are still alive and kicking, who proved Fermat's Last Theorem in 1995 to give one example.
I think the real problem is that mathematical and scientific achievements are just going ever more unnoticed amongst the latest big titted blonde who got rich and famous simply by being dumb, or the currnet expert at kicking a ball around a field, or the latest celebrity to retardedly kill themselves with a drug overdose or whatever.
But isn't that all part of the same thing? Companies are unlikely to up the cost or decrease the reliability of their products over something so trivial. Part of the trick in getting mainstream acceptance in the first place is going to have to be ensuring it is reliable and cheap.
Yes, but unfortunately Slashdot has still mostly jumped on it as an opportunity to slag off Microsoft.
Sure this may not be ground breaking, but if Microsoft can take it mainstream then why slag them off for it? as simple as it may be, the fact remains that no one else has bothered to take it mainstream yet.
It's not just about the ingenuity or difficulty of inventing a device, but in taking it to the greater market, there's no point inventing the most complex amazing thing ever if no one actually ever gets chance to make use of it. So this is where the real test is- whether Microsoft manage to take it mainstream and hence whether we all do get to benefit from it in the long run.
A good example I can think of is fireworks night here in the UK.
For those that don't know, it's a celebration of the failure of the gun powder plot which was an attempt to blow up parliament by a guy called Guy Fawkes.
We basically build a massive bonfire, not unusual for it to be around 20 ft high, and we place an effigy of Guy Fawkes on top, then we burn it all and during which usually set off shit loads of fireworks.
It's a normal celebration here and most people partake in it, but I caught myself wondering last year how this must look to people from a different culture. I mean, if they see us all burning effigys on top of massive fires, whilst exploding shit loads of fireworks in the sky we must all look quite fucking insane.
I do not suspect many people would think that burning an effigy on a massive fire is the sort of thing you expect to see in any modern Western culture, yet we do it, each year, en-masse, and without fail.
The EU is already the biggest economy in the world, beating out even the US. I don't think that's their concern.
"You claim the .pst format is open and documented? I'd very much like to see the method (from Microsoft, no reverse engineered solution allowed) to get your emails out of .pst and into another format."
What you mean like the file format specification here?:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff385210.aspx
and the reference implementation here?:
http://pstsdk.codeplex.com/
GP is right, contrary to popular belief Microsoft have just as many "open" formats as Apple, if not more. The problem isn't the formats being "open" for interoperability purposes though, it's the ones that aren't open at all, or the license restrictions / patents attached to usage of the formats, and this includes many of Apple's formats that you listed.
It's clear you're incapable of coping with the given question, so I'll try a different tact. I'm intrigued:
- Do you disagree with the accepted answer to the Monty Hall problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_Problem) too?
- How do you justify to yourself that you are right about this when your viewpoint is in conflict with some of the greatest living mathematical minds today? Do you believe you're perhaps the greatest living mathematical mind today and the others are simply wrong and don't understand the thinking and math behind the 13/27 solution?
You're absolutely right, but to be fair, most companies give you much better terms than that in the UK. So although the GP was wrong to assert that the legal baseline in the UK is 6 months full pay, that is a pretty common amount to be granted by companies here in the UK. This is probably largely driven by the fact we have such a large public sector, and in most parts of public sector such as councils you tend to get something like 6 months full pay, and upto 6 more months half pay, and private sector has to compete with that so often gives similar levels of benefits.
For comparison, I don't know if Google's maternity leave is particularly unusual in the US, or if it's pretty much run of the mill too. Any idea?
I'm not sure of any that really cover the brain as well as neural nets, but a book with decent neural net coverage, and an excellent overview of machine learning is this one:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cmbishop/prml/
Depending on how far you wish to study the subject, the next stop is somewhere like the Cambridge university bookstore- I'm not sure if you live in the UK but if you do and are ever near Cambridge it's worth a look- their books can of course be ordered online, but in store they offer catalogs with upcoming books which always worth a peruse through too as it tends to cover books that are really cutting edge on the topics in question.
In fact, I just did a search on their site and found this, I've never read it but it may be exactly what you're looking for:
http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521421249
A slightly more light hearted, much easier read that helps illustrate some of the quirks in the human mind is the following:
http://www.mindhacks.com/book/
Some of the examples are good as illustrations of how it's easy to feed the brain with certain stimuli that can make it come to the wrong conclusion, one example that comes to mind in that book is the listing of various words related to some topic I think their example was sleeping or something, and then asking someone to recall those words, people will almost always come up with a common word despite that word having never been in the list. I think their example was words related to sleeping like 'pillow', 'tired', 'yawn', 'night' and a bunch more yet they omit 'bed' or something like that, ask someone to do the activity and they will nearly always falsely conclude 'bed' was one of the words- effectively bed is a 'false' attractor in this case. It effectively illustrates that whilst the brain may come up with most of the correct words, it can come up with incorrect but related words too, for some problems this may be acceptable, for others not so.
"One of the promises is the re-introduction of the sus law."
I can find no evidence of this in the coalition manifesto. That said, there is admittedly nothing yet in their manifesto about getting rid of the stop and search powers that Labour brought in. So no it wouldn't be an erosion, it would at worst be a continuation of Labour's policies in that area, whilst still continuing to improve civil liberties elsewhere, and that's assuming they do keep section 44 of course, they may not.
You seem to be very narrow minded in missing that this isn't a Tory government either, it's a coalition Lib Dem/Labour government, and most of the civil liberties side of things the Lib Dems- the most civil liberties minded mainstream party the UK has seen in the last 100 years, has got their way. The Tories have had their way on economic / defence policy in compromise. Further, the Tories now are not the Tories of the 80s, just as Labour isn't much less right wing than the Tories nowadays, but is much more right wing than the Lib Dems.
I should point out that I'm not basing on speculation as to how the brain works, we know for sure that it works based on positive feedback cycles, resulting from stimuli, and so the point is that the brain always has to go through this process to find something, sometimes the wrong attractors are the ones that benefit from the feedback loops and that is why you don't get what you intend, and why the human brain does not consistently find the same solution.
So (at least to the degree we have reliable hardware) what I'm saying is we can store a set of instructions and data in memory and be sure that if we store that address, we know we're always going to get the same result. In a brain like system we provide the stimuli which effectively act as seeds, but depending on other, non-deterministic events we can't guarantee that it will be the same.
So you see, I'm not speculating in my points- your theory that brains can and will evolve to be the same isn't true, or at least, wont be within a reasonable time frame (likely millions of years) because they are simply just different systems.
You're not wrong in drawing parallels between the brain and the computer, and you're not wrong in drawing on the adaptability of the brain. You're also not wrong in that they can simulate each other to a certain degree, but where you are going wrong is in missing the point that they aren't the same, they absolutely do work differently. It's like the difference between a mountain bike and a road car- both let you travel along the ground faster than walking, and whilst your road car can go off road, it's going to be much worse at it than the bike, and just as the bike can go on the road it's not as good at it as the car- both cross over in their roles, but each is better at specific tasks. So whilst you may be right that in millions of years the brain can do what the computer can, the point would be that the brain can only do what the computer can now, whilst the computer in millions of years will likely do things the brain can't and vice versa. They'll still ultimately have their differences and their different suitabilities in different circumstances.
Things like neural networks will take you partial way to understanding the way the processing in the brain works and how we can simulate that on computer, so if you're interested then they're well worth looking into and playing around with. It's quite a good exercise because you can see how emergent models like that have their benefits and weaknesses, and although you're limited by the fact you are working on classic computer hardware, as I say, it demonstrates some of the fundamental ideas.
Regardless, at least they're not in now, and wont be for at very least a good few years, which is more than can be said if Labour had maintained power. At the end of the day we're still far better off under this government right now and for the forseeable future and that's fine with me, I'll be ready to join the fight again next time someone tries to introduce them.
If there was a way to get these sorts of things banished forever then I'd gladly jump on the bandwagon, but the world isn't that perfect so for now it's really just a case of being happy with the best we've got and right now that's this government- the Lib Dems are against them as a core principal so any attempts to introduce them via a back door would bring down the coalition government. Even a few years with no ID cards is better than them already having been introduced and due to be made mandatory.
...and you don't think moving special branch into a counter terrorism unit and still using that unit to carry out arrest of politicians is a bad idea? Seriously?
It doesn't matter how you cut it, use of a counter terrorism unit to arrest MPs is heavy handed and a bad idea, just as using anti-terrorism laws to freeze the assets of a foreign sovereign nation (Iceland) was a bad idea.
I'm not sure why you're jumping to accusations of spying now, because that's even more obscure. Certainly there was no suggestion of that even from the likes of Jacqui Smith or the police force themselves so I've no idea where you cracked that conspiracy theory up from.
At the end of the day it simply was what it was- an opposition MP leaking details of plans that were against public interest and getting away with it for precisely that reason, and again, this isn't a rule specific to MPs as mentioned in my previous response to you and the example cited.
There was no spying, there was no conspiracy amongst MPs, there was no special privileges for MPs.
The very fact it was against public interest is demonstrated by the events that occured since:
- The ditching of Jacqui Smith who was responsible for much of the policy that ran against public interest after numerous similar embarassments, culminated by her expenses fuck ups coupled with a much less authoritarian viewpoint by Labour heading up to the elections
- The fact Labour got absolutely slaughtered in the elections for pushing the kind of policies that were being leaked
I can see you seem to hate the Tories and I'd never vote for them myself either, but really, that doesn't change the fact this was a clear cut public interest case just as the expenses scandal was, and a heavy handed use of a counter-terrorism unit.
Okay good, so you grasp that.
Now, back to The Tuesday Birthday Problem the fundamental point is that the day of the week does matter, this is precisely the point of the argument. The most correct interpretation of the sentence when you chisel away at the ambiguities of it is that it is part of the problem, which is precisely why it's a problem involving both days of the week AND gender.
Throw away your preconceptions of whether or not time effects gender and so forth because they're causing you to make assumptions that lead to false conclusions about the problem, look at the problem in isolation taking into account what you've just said to me, and what I've said in the paragraph above.
Do you get it now?
"I disagree. How can we learn to throw a basketball into a tiny hoop from far away without having very accurate estimates?"
That was precisely my point, they're still estimates. The human brain can judge based on experience how to throw the ball to get it through a hoop, but can it calculate the distance well enough, and consistently enough to calculated the angle from the feet of the thrower upto the net to perform some action such as a precise manufacturing task?
These are two very different things, and are useful for two very different purposes. Being able to throw a ball right some, or even most of the time may be fine for a game of basketball, but is this ability good enough to calculate the values for some complex and precise engineering application? Absolutely not.
"The information is never "lost" it's just unavailable for a time. If it was lost you wouldn't have the "oh yeah" moments when you remember it or look it up again. You recognize it because you already knew it."
Absolutely, it's not lost, the issue is that the brain depends on emergence, and emergent systems can be quite vulnerable to minor variations in the initial conditions. In this case the initial conditions for the moment in question will often be set by the senses, but could also occur as a result of the happenings in the brain at a prior moment, or could be caused by some chemical imbalance (i.e. taking drugs). The problem is that although the information isn't lost as such, it's just hard for the brain to track it down again when it doesn't have the conditions required to get back to that information, again, hence why it can take a while to remember what you were going to say again- it's not easy for the brain to get back to the state required, or a near enough state such that it can get the information it needs. In contrast, it's quite easy in computers, because we have explicit memory addresses and so forth to work with and that can be persisted and referred to- or to put it rather simplistically (and far from perfectly) we don't need to rely on running the execution process again to find the data if we've done things right.
"While I agree the brain isn't as effective at large scale number crunching I do believe it's something the brain can be trained to do. There are plenty of people out there who can do insanely complex arithmetic in their heads. I suspect the reason we all don't have such skills is because we don't need them."
Again, absolutely I agree, but the issue is consistently, you may be able to train it but when it's so vulnerable to minor changes in the way it works, can it do it consistently?
"So those resources in the brain were put to use on other tasks like accurately processing visual and audio data. I can hear or spot a predator very quickly and accurately in all types of environments and lighting conditions. If we use a computer to perform these tasks we realize just how much computation is required."
That's again really the key- the brain is brilliant for some things, so much so that a current style of computer just isn't really fit for the job. It's not so much that a lot of computation is required, it's just that the type of computation we do now is quite different from the type of computation a brain does and this is what TFA is getting at- to solve these sorts of problems we need a different paradigm. What I disagree with though is that we need a different paradigm in general- I don't believe we do because the paradigm being suggested isn't ideal for the things current computers are good at.
As with almost everything, I suspect it's a case of six of one, and half a dozen of the other- there isn't one perfect solution, we ultimately need both solutions for different types of problem, but shouldn't completely write one off at the expense of the other.
To cut a long story short, the fundamental difference is that current computers are largely predictable and formally provable. Brain style computing is chatotic and complex, we know it'll come up with a solution