Yes, I think it's actually illegal, but for different reasons. From what I can tell this is exactly why the UK is facing legal procedings from the EU over Phorm.
It's effectively a breach of the European Declaration of Human Rights which we are signatories to, specifically it is a clear breach of the right to privacy.
I think realistically this will end up in European courts. It wont end up in British courts or be looked into by the police here because they are merely puppets of the Labour government here which supports this as demonstrated by the new supreme court refusing to hear McKinnon, the refusal of investigations into Phorm even though it was blatantly illegal and so on.
Nowadays in Britain we have to rely on the European courts for any semblance of justice on these sorts of things, but on the upside they do generally rule in favour of the citizen on things like this where it is a clear breach of law. God knows where we as citizens of Britain would be if it weren't for Europe, I'd imagine it would resemble something like Germany circa 1937. In fact, there's a certain irony in that whole sentence, how times change eh?
I think the reason Australia/NZ and also Canada see much less of this is for another reason- the governments of these countries are much more easily toppled by the political system.
The problem we have in the US and UK is that they are two party states, and whilst Canada also uses first past the post, the layout of voting areas is less of a problem right now.
In the UK and the US the two major parties are extremely similar, the first past the post system exist right now in such a way that it's absolute majority, and that in the UK a third party holding balance of power is not common enough.
The fact is in the US/UK it's just too hard to topple the leading regimes, and they're too similar for a change between the two to matter. This means they can do whatever they want to the voterbase with no real repercussions.
Canada has a minority government and New Zealand and Australia have much better spread of votes between different parties such that a change in leadership (both in name and policy, rather than just in name as in the US/UK) is much more feasible.
Countries where there is actually something for leading political parties to lose by screwing the citizen are generally more liberal because if a party in the UK wants to lead it has to get the citizens on board.
To be fair, this is actually why in the UK, Labour now basically has no chance of winning the next election and why the Conservatives are pretty much guaranteed a win, because even under our system the Conservatives realise reversal of the mass rape of civil liberties by Labour is a good selling point for their party that will gain them millions of votes.
So in other words, it's bad that I don't treat the races differently, and like you I should continue to uphold the prejudices towards different races and should continue to treat them differently?
I know it's hard for some people to think about such a thing on a different philosophical level than just ranting base on pure ignorant emotion, but please, at least try.
Think about it for a moment, you may realise that you're part the reason racism is a problem, because you inadvertently uphold the idea of having to treat different races in different manners.
Until we drive away this idea that different races have to be treated differently, which amongst true racists just breeds further resentment towards the other race, and amongst the non-racist politically correct crowd like yourself just drives this idea that behaving differently is the right thing to do then we'll continue to see racism remain a major problem.
I suppose you're one of those who thinks that companies should have employment quotas to ensure people of certain backgrounds are equally represented throughout a company. Even if this means giving the job to someone less qualified because of their racial or sexual profile, and even though this serves to do nothing more than breed resentment amongst those who would have preferred the best person for the job whatever their their race, sex, sexual preference or political orientation?
Some of us don't accept a difference not because we're racist, but beause we realise that the only way to do away with racial prejudice and segregation is to not segregate people who are different in some way and because we prefer to see equal treatment throughout. So in fact, people like me know exactly what races and stereotypes are, the difference is that unlike people like you, we simply prefer not to reinforce those differences and stereotypes by supporting their existence.
"If you make the assumption that this data would have gotten leaked eventually - then I can almost see your point. But there are terabytes of data that do not get leaked every day and in all probability never will."
Yes, that was the assumption I'm making. I think you'd be suprised how much data actually does leak once outside of the most strictly controlled environments. This data will almost without a doubt have been outside of a strictly controlled environment hence why it leaked in the first place. Data generally only gets leaked when it's not in such an environment because it means so many people have access it would be impossible to trace the leaker, but similarly data in such an environment generally also gets out anyway.
I've had my credit card details used for fraud, despite never using it for cash or in store purchases, and only using it for online purchases. I know my network is secure as anything, and so the reality is my details could only have got out from either my bank or a major online retailer like Amazon, fortunately for me, the bank covers it being a credit card, but the point is that data leaks all the time- even data like this that should be extremely sensitive. Similarly I've had the odd phone call from advertising companies even though my phone is on the UK's do not call list and I've never published it publicly or accepted contact by ticking or not ticking such boxes on forms- in fact, I don't even give the number on the form. In one particular incident it was a call from some no win, no fee scum after someone crashed into me offering their services- either my insurance company or the other guys insurance company clearly had an employee leak the data because they couldn't legally sell the data on under the UK's data protection act, and no one else could have known about the guy going into the back of me at the time.
I think it's wrong to assume that if some data isn't in a high security environment and has some value, that it wont leak. Even some data in high security environments will leak.
Did you actually bother to read my post? You're basically just spouting the same thing the person I was responding to said.
The problem is that you're falsely assuming it's all political because you're taking it as an attack on your own political beliefs rather than seeing it for what it is- these images have no political relevance, they are effectively a visual commentary of the person underneath. They get attacked and defended by the media based on who they are, not what their policies are- do you think people made charactures of George Bush as a monkey because he went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan or because he was very prone to comical blunders? If you really believe it's the former then you're still failing to separate your own political bias from the problem and that's your own issue to deal with.
The real hypocrisy is that the attitude of "oh it's all the left's fault" is really no different to the attitude used by racists to justify their hatred of people of a different colour.
It's Fox news, if it's really leftist propaganda then why the fuck is the most right wing news station in the US putting the exact same slant on it? Do you think Fox has been taken over by the left too now or something?
I've never trusted them to be honest for this reason. The fact is reviews are just a form of protection racket.
I've played plenty of low rated games that were far better than high rated games with many of the high rated games being awful.
It basically comes down to whichever publishers/developers have sent across their protection racket money to all the reviewers, those that haven't get shit reviews and shit numbers on their site, those who pay up or send the required sweeteners beforehand are guaranteed an 80%+ or 90%+.
Either way, review scores whichever metric you use have absolutely nothing to do with how good or bad a game actually is, or isn't.
Hypocrisy is using something like this, which is really bipartisan in treatment and trying to blame it on a particular political movement and then inferring from that that they are somehow the hypocrits.
The reason there was no uproar when it was done to Bush and Rice is because they were almost universally hated by the majority of the media at that point, whilst Michelle Obama has managed to maintain her place as a media darling just as many others have before her for some time.
Really, the reason people like Michelle Obama become media sweathearts nearly always has fuck all to do with her political stance and more to do with how she's been growing lettuce in the Whitehouse garden and what dresses she wears and other dumb shit like that.
I agree it stinks, why is it racist when they turn Michell Obama into a monkey and not George Bush? But blame media idiocy for creating Saint Michelle, partisan politics frankly has fuck all to do with it. It's little different to the media creating Saint Dianna after Princess Dianna died in a car crash despite the fact for months prior she'd been pointed out as a slut who had literally sworn at small children who ran up to her to get the chance to meet a real princess. If the media brings politics into it to defend their latest Saint then realise it for what it is- the media just using whatever it can to defend said Saint because it sells, don't stoop to their level of idiocy though and blame that whole political wing else you become the hypocrit.
To put it in another, more simplistic way, if this had been about a black actress, would you still have brought political leaning into it?
That's pretty much the point though. The fact is if you store this information it will almost inevitably get out eventually, in fact, the fact it got into the hands of someone willing to release it to Wikileaks suggests it already had leaked into the wrong hands for data that should be handled in a sensitive manner to start with.
Whether it's wikileaks or the data being burnt to CD and lost by a government as it was with 25million people in the UK this data gets out some way or another. The simple solution is, don't store what's necessary, put more effort into keeping it secure.
Blaming Wikileaks is pointless, even if they stopped leaking data like this so as to be "ethical", it wouldn't stop all the other companies, individuals and government departments leaking data they probably shouldn't have.
It's best this way, that it's leaked in a loud and public manner, because then people are more aware of the problem than the pathetic coverups you get when government and industry do it. Sucks for the people involved, but it sucked for them anyway, the difference is, they just didn't know it had happened to them before. Can you be sure it hadn't already been leaked to others previously and wasn't in scammers hands already? Can you be sure it wouldn't ever have been?
Individual ants aren't intelligent and we can simulate them perfectly well.
Groups of ants are capable of seemingly intelligent action however, such as the creation of ants nests, searching for food and so on. We are also able to simulate these things perfectly well, in fact, the latter has been used for various real life purposes that could benefit from the emergent patterns of multiple ants working together. See ant colony optimization if you are interested further.
There is no problem simulating individual ants, or groups of ants. They are not however particularly relevant to this discussion for the above mentioned reason that they are not really, as individuals, intelligent as such. It's a different problem to something as complex as the brain of a mammal, which is largely why the swarm intelligence of many insects groups has been solved separately. See here for further information:
Revolutions don't occur in societies such as those in the US because at the end of the day no matter how bad the president is you'll still be able to go home from work and play XBox on your big screen TV.
The issues just don't effect enough people's day to day lives to cause such an event right now. You need mass unemployment or some other big issue that effects a massive amount of the population to be able to expect any such event to occur.
Well he reversed the Stem cell funding ban and such, but I agree it's hardly meaningful when compared to the things he hasn't sorted out.
I particularly understand your point on the wars, because we here in Europe are over there with you and it's not really even our war, as much as we're told it is. It adds particular insult then when he continues to delay and delay over his Afghan strategy because what we do depends on his decisions. There's something particularly insulting about our soldiers dying for a war that isn't even ours run by a president who can't even figure out himself what he wants to do over there. We don't mind helping out, we agree it'd be nice to have a stable Afghanistan but if Obama can't run the show properly he should at least admit it and let us go home in an organised manner rather than the unorganised shit storm of unorganised, uncoordinated pull outs that will follow if he continues to delay and delay and delay on producing a plan.
It doesn't help that he's threatened to cease intelligence sharing with Britain if we dare expose CIA torture practices performed on a British citizen if we dare use the CIA originated evidence we have of the torture in question in court. This suggests strongly he supports torture in it's fullest, and most certainly doesn't support justice against torture as he originally claimed.
Similarly from our point of view it's really hard to hate the guy though when compared to the last guy and even worse, when compared to the possibility of Palin getting any amount of power, let alone the potential that she could have, and could still become president.
I wouldn't say Slashdot has a system that works necessarily, the quality of comments that gets modded up now is far worse than years ago, that or many smart people really have left the site. The kind of discussion in science articles for example is nowadays mostly just opinion, rather than facts by people who know the subject which never used to be the case, and was in fact what drew me to the site originally. Even people who do know the subject and comment are often bombarded by comments from people who clearly don't know the subject but put their opinion over and above that of others.
There is a lot of tactical moderation too, the fact that mods like overrated never got meta-moderated was always stupid as it was just a free tool to silence people the moderators disagree with. I find that the time an article is posted makes a difference in the quality of comment too. Post an article about the EU doing something to a US company such as over the Oracle deal or the Microsoft anti-trust stuff at a time when Europe is asleep and it's evening in the US and us Euros will come back in the morning to face a flurry of "America, fuck yeah!" trash being moderated up but often not moderated down by the euros because by that point people feel moderating a +5 down where it goes to +4 or sometimes it even just stays at +5 is a waste of mod points. Of course it works both ways, this is just an example, but there are many flaws in the system, personally I just moderate whatever I can be objective about and don't moderate in threads I have a strong opinion on, I also don't moderate based on the existing moderation giving to a post, which I believe is the best way to moderate, but judging by moderations I've seen an discussion elsewhere, very few people moderate that way and the vast majority just try to silence people who they disagree with.
So I wouldn't say Slashdot's moderation system works as such as I think it has turned away a lot of good people, but it's the best of a bad bunch at least and has certainly delayed a mass outflux of people capable of intelligent debate and respect for other viewpoints such that it's been a multi-year trickle rather than something which happens overnight on the likes of YouTube and Digg.
No, that's simply not the case because it takes more than an individual neuron to produce intelligence but instead it is the emergent patterns amongst many neurons that matters. It doesn't matter if we haven't precisely managed to mimic the neuron or the layout of the brain, what matters is whether we can create a system that will allow for those same emergent patterns in response to actions. It's nothing like wiring up 42M transistors at random because there is no logic behind those transistors, whilst neural networks do have a logical design to them which allows for the emergent patterns to arise.
The question is to what extent those algorithms allow emergent patterns to arise- certainly they are successful at pattern recognition in that we can use neural networks to recognise patterns amongst noise, just as the human mind must recognise things via the bodies senses. For what it's worth I'm in the camp that ANNs aren't sufficient for anything particularly complex, but as this isn't proven it's false to outright claim that they are not sufficient.
We keep hearing these stories, and the reason is that the Cell processor is awesome for this type of work.
Are we still at the point where we can't get hold of Cell processors for machines specifically designed for this sort of task? Isn't the PS3 a rather inefficient way of doing this rather than a purpose built system or grid of systems, or does it come down to cost in that a purpose built system would just cost far more than a bunch of PS3s? 2200 PS3s is still going to cost, what, half a million?
Presumably it's not because they use the GPU as well because AFAIK Linux on the PS3 doesn't allow access to use the graphics card, or are they getting custom PS3s?
There does certainly seem a big market for Cell systems so the future of Cell certainly seems promising in this respect.
No, it's not that simple. ANNs have been evolving even in recent years, so to suggest the early paper based models have any relevance to what ANNs are doing now is wrong.
Being able to simulate enough here is a big deal too and can't simply be dismissed as an excuse. The brain works as a combination of billions of relatively simple neurons, and the fact the brain works is a result of emergent processes. As you require at least millions of these neurons for even the most simple patterns to be able to emerge then it's very much a case of being able to simulate on a massive scale.
The issue is what are the limits of emergence in an artificial neural network, and the answer is that we simply do not know- there's a good chance we can't do full brain simulation because artificial neurons are over-simplified, but it may be able to provide some properties of intelligent beings which is still an important step which will give enormous clues on the best way forward. A lack of computing power cannot simply be dismissed as an excuse in this case, because brains are effectively massively complex computing devices.
Or alternatively you could go to the East coast mainline site and get tickets within the bounds of prices I state without having to travel at rediculous times:
I've made the journey many a time, the most I ever need to pay is £23 and that's for first class travel, I usually only book a couple of days before.
Walk up fares are high though, you're right about that at least. Still if you're on holiday then planning a couple of days to go North a few days ahead of time is hardly much of a problem. Looks like the lowest price is £11 now too not £10, but I just tried a few journeys over the next few weeks upto and beyond xmas and there's plenty of tickets for £11, £13 and such. Try it, you might be suprised by how decent the east coast main line actually is. You even get free Wifi all the way.
Yes it can have amendments added, but can it have parts removed? What happens if you have contradictory amendments, which takes precedent? What about the difficulty in passing with amendments?
If it's really so flexible, then what's the point in it at all when it is no different to general law?
"The purpose of a Constitution is to stop the government in D.C. from turning into a dictatorial (or oligarchical) throne of power as happened in the Roman Republic 2100 years ago. It is the Supreme Law of the Land and needs to be followed, else the government shall be restrained by no law whatsoever. We will have chaos."
Yes, I can imagine the chaos now, it'd be absolutely horrific having no constitution, I mean, your country would be in chaos like New Zealand and Great Britain... wait, what?
How's the Venezuelan constitution doing by the way now that Chavez has silenced the opposition and changed it so he can remain in power indefinitely? What about the Russian constitution where Putin can just swap between PM and President back and forth to maintain a stranglehold on power, again whilst subduing the opposition? Really, you think a constitution is a magical cloak of protection against chaos, dictatorship, corruption when places like Russia and Venezuela have one? You really think countries with no formal constitution like New Zealand are corrupt and undemocratic when New Zealand is actually rated as the least corrupt country on Earth? Really?
"This is no different from the Treaty of Lisbon, which defines what powers the EU government may exercise, and reserves all other powers to the Member States."
Except countries can individiually renegotiate parts of the Lisbon treaty with things such as opt-outs, drop out altogether, alter it and so on. The whole reason Lisbon succeded is because it is NOT a constitution, feel free to look up what an utter fail the European constitution was for exactly the reasons I state, and why they went with a treaty instead.
It basically just seem to be a case of the same old AI arguments we've always heard even since Turing's days.
The problem is, we don't actually know what the limits of ANNs are, there is no proof that suggests that they can't, given ever greater amounts of computing power allow for the emergence of (at least seemingly) truly intelligent response to an event.
So on one hand we have the IBM guys overstating what they've achieved, and on the other we have a guy spouting out a view of the limits of ANNs without actually putting any effort into providing evidence for their limitations.
I don't know why but the AI field has always been horifically polarised, the kind of arguments you get in that field are just so immature it's beyond belief. You have people in the AI field following their viewpoint religiously, completely unwilling to consider the other viewpoint. To see what I mean just look up some of the discussions on Searle's chinese room argument.
If AI scientists spent as much time on research as they did bitching at each others experiments and theories we'd have a walking talking robo-jesus by now that could build worlds.
Why do we need single neuron level imaging? The activity of a single neuron really tells us very little. The emergent patterns in the form of brain activity of multiple neurons are what matters. The question is whether we are getting the right responses in this respect from the right set of neurons in reaction to the corresponding trigger.
Kew Gardens too. I've always really liked going to Kew, some of the plants they have there are incredible. Walking in the canopy of the massive palm trees and seeing how the leaves just dwarf you in comparison is amazing. Their desert, temperate and prehistoric houses are all worth a look in fact.
Oh, and as he's American, I'd suggest a trip to a British supermarket because our confectionary isles are fucking awesome compared to theirs;)
The UK has a good London - North train network. For about £10 - £15 you can get a ticket from London to Leeds and vice versa, and it only takes 2hrs. If you stay there for a day you've got the Royal Armouries and then you can go to York for a day which is also full of stuff to do.
The Royal Armouries is a nice addition to doing the imperial war museum because it covers the areas the war museum doesn't having everything from stone age weaponry to samurai weaponry and armour to modern day sniper rifles.
If you like military history then the two complement each other amazingly well!
The great thing about travel in the UK is it's so small, if you go to London then you're at most only about 5 hrs from the furthest reaches of the country by train.
Yeah, most modern power supplies in Europe are rated 110v - 240v, I'd imagine US ones are exactly the same component so all that should be needed is the adapter. I'm not sure about changing the wireless region code he mentions too- I've never had to do that, when I travel from the UK to the US all I've ever needed to do is use the plug adapter!
I'd imagine more people would be happy being geographers, it's just not necessarily their first choice.
I always absolutely loved geography, it was by far one of my strongest subjects, and I use my knowledge of the world, demographics and so forth regularly, but it's far from my profession, nor it is my primary target of study nowadays. Maths and Computing are my focus, but I notice a lot of people make the mistake of assuming because such a subject isn't their primary job, that that subject was useless to them. Many people forget where they learnt how to read a map, where they got an understanding of what causes earthquakes and tsunamis when they see them on the news and so on, they fail to realise that in fact, geography class was more useful to them than they realise. The same goes for all subjects, how many people question what use pythagoras and trigonometry was to them, but then go on to do some DIY at some point in their life measuring out a piece of wood need to be cut at an angle?
I don't pretend it's necessarily even easy to engage kids, I think the usual maths curriculum is horifically dull and un-engaging for example, but similarly I have to accept it's no easy job to produce an engaging maths curriculum that also covers all that needs to be covered.
Effectively I think a lot of what we're seeing is that to engage kids in a subject requires more time than to blast the topic out to them and hope they take it in so we have this clash of time vs. quality. Do we teach a smaller range of a topic and increase quality or teach a wider range and decrease quality?
At school there was a heavy focus on algebra, calculus and so forth in math class and I really hated it, but nowadays I love math and it's because I discovered pure math such as number theory. If we'd been given a wider range of teaching in school I'd have found an area of math I liked, but flunked the subject as a whole, if we'd been given an even smaller range I may have find it more dull and boring and not even had the intrigue to go and discover the likes of number theory later on as I did.
You're certainly right, parents should at least stress the importance of why their kids are going to school even if they don't encourage home studying of the topics rather than use it as a babysitting service.
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Yes, I think it's actually illegal, but for different reasons. From what I can tell this is exactly why the UK is facing legal procedings from the EU over Phorm.
It's effectively a breach of the European Declaration of Human Rights which we are signatories to, specifically it is a clear breach of the right to privacy.
I think realistically this will end up in European courts. It wont end up in British courts or be looked into by the police here because they are merely puppets of the Labour government here which supports this as demonstrated by the new supreme court refusing to hear McKinnon, the refusal of investigations into Phorm even though it was blatantly illegal and so on.
Nowadays in Britain we have to rely on the European courts for any semblance of justice on these sorts of things, but on the upside they do generally rule in favour of the citizen on things like this where it is a clear breach of law. God knows where we as citizens of Britain would be if it weren't for Europe, I'd imagine it would resemble something like Germany circa 1937. In fact, there's a certain irony in that whole sentence, how times change eh?
I think the reason Australia/NZ and also Canada see much less of this is for another reason- the governments of these countries are much more easily toppled by the political system.
The problem we have in the US and UK is that they are two party states, and whilst Canada also uses first past the post, the layout of voting areas is less of a problem right now.
In the UK and the US the two major parties are extremely similar, the first past the post system exist right now in such a way that it's absolute majority, and that in the UK a third party holding balance of power is not common enough.
The fact is in the US/UK it's just too hard to topple the leading regimes, and they're too similar for a change between the two to matter. This means they can do whatever they want to the voterbase with no real repercussions.
Canada has a minority government and New Zealand and Australia have much better spread of votes between different parties such that a change in leadership (both in name and policy, rather than just in name as in the US/UK) is much more feasible.
Countries where there is actually something for leading political parties to lose by screwing the citizen are generally more liberal because if a party in the UK wants to lead it has to get the citizens on board.
To be fair, this is actually why in the UK, Labour now basically has no chance of winning the next election and why the Conservatives are pretty much guaranteed a win, because even under our system the Conservatives realise reversal of the mass rape of civil liberties by Labour is a good selling point for their party that will gain them millions of votes.
So in other words, it's bad that I don't treat the races differently, and like you I should continue to uphold the prejudices towards different races and should continue to treat them differently?
I know it's hard for some people to think about such a thing on a different philosophical level than just ranting base on pure ignorant emotion, but please, at least try.
Think about it for a moment, you may realise that you're part the reason racism is a problem, because you inadvertently uphold the idea of having to treat different races in different manners.
Until we drive away this idea that different races have to be treated differently, which amongst true racists just breeds further resentment towards the other race, and amongst the non-racist politically correct crowd like yourself just drives this idea that behaving differently is the right thing to do then we'll continue to see racism remain a major problem.
I suppose you're one of those who thinks that companies should have employment quotas to ensure people of certain backgrounds are equally represented throughout a company. Even if this means giving the job to someone less qualified because of their racial or sexual profile, and even though this serves to do nothing more than breed resentment amongst those who would have preferred the best person for the job whatever their their race, sex, sexual preference or political orientation?
Some of us don't accept a difference not because we're racist, but beause we realise that the only way to do away with racial prejudice and segregation is to not segregate people who are different in some way and because we prefer to see equal treatment throughout. So in fact, people like me know exactly what races and stereotypes are, the difference is that unlike people like you, we simply prefer not to reinforce those differences and stereotypes by supporting their existence.
"If you make the assumption that this data would have gotten leaked eventually - then I can almost see your point. But there are terabytes of data that do not get leaked every day and in all probability never will."
Yes, that was the assumption I'm making. I think you'd be suprised how much data actually does leak once outside of the most strictly controlled environments. This data will almost without a doubt have been outside of a strictly controlled environment hence why it leaked in the first place. Data generally only gets leaked when it's not in such an environment because it means so many people have access it would be impossible to trace the leaker, but similarly data in such an environment generally also gets out anyway.
I've had my credit card details used for fraud, despite never using it for cash or in store purchases, and only using it for online purchases. I know my network is secure as anything, and so the reality is my details could only have got out from either my bank or a major online retailer like Amazon, fortunately for me, the bank covers it being a credit card, but the point is that data leaks all the time- even data like this that should be extremely sensitive. Similarly I've had the odd phone call from advertising companies even though my phone is on the UK's do not call list and I've never published it publicly or accepted contact by ticking or not ticking such boxes on forms- in fact, I don't even give the number on the form. In one particular incident it was a call from some no win, no fee scum after someone crashed into me offering their services- either my insurance company or the other guys insurance company clearly had an employee leak the data because they couldn't legally sell the data on under the UK's data protection act, and no one else could have known about the guy going into the back of me at the time.
I think it's wrong to assume that if some data isn't in a high security environment and has some value, that it wont leak. Even some data in high security environments will leak.
Did you actually bother to read my post? You're basically just spouting the same thing the person I was responding to said.
The problem is that you're falsely assuming it's all political because you're taking it as an attack on your own political beliefs rather than seeing it for what it is- these images have no political relevance, they are effectively a visual commentary of the person underneath. They get attacked and defended by the media based on who they are, not what their policies are- do you think people made charactures of George Bush as a monkey because he went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan or because he was very prone to comical blunders? If you really believe it's the former then you're still failing to separate your own political bias from the problem and that's your own issue to deal with.
The real hypocrisy is that the attitude of "oh it's all the left's fault" is really no different to the attitude used by racists to justify their hatred of people of a different colour.
Really, just look here:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,576786,00.html
It's Fox news, if it's really leftist propaganda then why the fuck is the most right wing news station in the US putting the exact same slant on it? Do you think Fox has been taken over by the left too now or something?
I've never trusted them to be honest for this reason. The fact is reviews are just a form of protection racket.
I've played plenty of low rated games that were far better than high rated games with many of the high rated games being awful.
It basically comes down to whichever publishers/developers have sent across their protection racket money to all the reviewers, those that haven't get shit reviews and shit numbers on their site, those who pay up or send the required sweeteners beforehand are guaranteed an 80%+ or 90%+.
Either way, review scores whichever metric you use have absolutely nothing to do with how good or bad a game actually is, or isn't.
What has this got to do with the left wing?
Hypocrisy is using something like this, which is really bipartisan in treatment and trying to blame it on a particular political movement and then inferring from that that they are somehow the hypocrits.
The reason there was no uproar when it was done to Bush and Rice is because they were almost universally hated by the majority of the media at that point, whilst Michelle Obama has managed to maintain her place as a media darling just as many others have before her for some time.
Really, the reason people like Michelle Obama become media sweathearts nearly always has fuck all to do with her political stance and more to do with how she's been growing lettuce in the Whitehouse garden and what dresses she wears and other dumb shit like that.
I agree it stinks, why is it racist when they turn Michell Obama into a monkey and not George Bush? But blame media idiocy for creating Saint Michelle, partisan politics frankly has fuck all to do with it. It's little different to the media creating Saint Dianna after Princess Dianna died in a car crash despite the fact for months prior she'd been pointed out as a slut who had literally sworn at small children who ran up to her to get the chance to meet a real princess. If the media brings politics into it to defend their latest Saint then realise it for what it is- the media just using whatever it can to defend said Saint because it sells, don't stoop to their level of idiocy though and blame that whole political wing else you become the hypocrit.
To put it in another, more simplistic way, if this had been about a black actress, would you still have brought political leaning into it?
That's pretty much the point though. The fact is if you store this information it will almost inevitably get out eventually, in fact, the fact it got into the hands of someone willing to release it to Wikileaks suggests it already had leaked into the wrong hands for data that should be handled in a sensitive manner to start with.
Whether it's wikileaks or the data being burnt to CD and lost by a government as it was with 25million people in the UK this data gets out some way or another. The simple solution is, don't store what's necessary, put more effort into keeping it secure.
Blaming Wikileaks is pointless, even if they stopped leaking data like this so as to be "ethical", it wouldn't stop all the other companies, individuals and government departments leaking data they probably shouldn't have.
It's best this way, that it's leaked in a loud and public manner, because then people are more aware of the problem than the pathetic coverups you get when government and industry do it. Sucks for the people involved, but it sucked for them anyway, the difference is, they just didn't know it had happened to them before. Can you be sure it hadn't already been leaked to others previously and wasn't in scammers hands already? Can you be sure it wouldn't ever have been?
Individual ants aren't intelligent and we can simulate them perfectly well.
Groups of ants are capable of seemingly intelligent action however, such as the creation of ants nests, searching for food and so on. We are also able to simulate these things perfectly well, in fact, the latter has been used for various real life purposes that could benefit from the emergent patterns of multiple ants working together. See ant colony optimization if you are interested further.
There is no problem simulating individual ants, or groups of ants. They are not however particularly relevant to this discussion for the above mentioned reason that they are not really, as individuals, intelligent as such. It's a different problem to something as complex as the brain of a mammal, which is largely why the swarm intelligence of many insects groups has been solved separately. See here for further information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_robotics
Revolutions don't occur in societies such as those in the US because at the end of the day no matter how bad the president is you'll still be able to go home from work and play XBox on your big screen TV.
The issues just don't effect enough people's day to day lives to cause such an event right now. You need mass unemployment or some other big issue that effects a massive amount of the population to be able to expect any such event to occur.
Well he reversed the Stem cell funding ban and such, but I agree it's hardly meaningful when compared to the things he hasn't sorted out.
I particularly understand your point on the wars, because we here in Europe are over there with you and it's not really even our war, as much as we're told it is. It adds particular insult then when he continues to delay and delay over his Afghan strategy because what we do depends on his decisions. There's something particularly insulting about our soldiers dying for a war that isn't even ours run by a president who can't even figure out himself what he wants to do over there. We don't mind helping out, we agree it'd be nice to have a stable Afghanistan but if Obama can't run the show properly he should at least admit it and let us go home in an organised manner rather than the unorganised shit storm of unorganised, uncoordinated pull outs that will follow if he continues to delay and delay and delay on producing a plan.
It doesn't help that he's threatened to cease intelligence sharing with Britain if we dare expose CIA torture practices performed on a British citizen if we dare use the CIA originated evidence we have of the torture in question in court. This suggests strongly he supports torture in it's fullest, and most certainly doesn't support justice against torture as he originally claimed.
Similarly from our point of view it's really hard to hate the guy though when compared to the last guy and even worse, when compared to the possibility of Palin getting any amount of power, let alone the potential that she could have, and could still become president.
I wouldn't say Slashdot has a system that works necessarily, the quality of comments that gets modded up now is far worse than years ago, that or many smart people really have left the site. The kind of discussion in science articles for example is nowadays mostly just opinion, rather than facts by people who know the subject which never used to be the case, and was in fact what drew me to the site originally. Even people who do know the subject and comment are often bombarded by comments from people who clearly don't know the subject but put their opinion over and above that of others.
There is a lot of tactical moderation too, the fact that mods like overrated never got meta-moderated was always stupid as it was just a free tool to silence people the moderators disagree with. I find that the time an article is posted makes a difference in the quality of comment too. Post an article about the EU doing something to a US company such as over the Oracle deal or the Microsoft anti-trust stuff at a time when Europe is asleep and it's evening in the US and us Euros will come back in the morning to face a flurry of "America, fuck yeah!" trash being moderated up but often not moderated down by the euros because by that point people feel moderating a +5 down where it goes to +4 or sometimes it even just stays at +5 is a waste of mod points. Of course it works both ways, this is just an example, but there are many flaws in the system, personally I just moderate whatever I can be objective about and don't moderate in threads I have a strong opinion on, I also don't moderate based on the existing moderation giving to a post, which I believe is the best way to moderate, but judging by moderations I've seen an discussion elsewhere, very few people moderate that way and the vast majority just try to silence people who they disagree with.
So I wouldn't say Slashdot's moderation system works as such as I think it has turned away a lot of good people, but it's the best of a bad bunch at least and has certainly delayed a mass outflux of people capable of intelligent debate and respect for other viewpoints such that it's been a multi-year trickle rather than something which happens overnight on the likes of YouTube and Digg.
No, that's simply not the case because it takes more than an individual neuron to produce intelligence but instead it is the emergent patterns amongst many neurons that matters. It doesn't matter if we haven't precisely managed to mimic the neuron or the layout of the brain, what matters is whether we can create a system that will allow for those same emergent patterns in response to actions. It's nothing like wiring up 42M transistors at random because there is no logic behind those transistors, whilst neural networks do have a logical design to them which allows for the emergent patterns to arise.
The question is to what extent those algorithms allow emergent patterns to arise- certainly they are successful at pattern recognition in that we can use neural networks to recognise patterns amongst noise, just as the human mind must recognise things via the bodies senses. For what it's worth I'm in the camp that ANNs aren't sufficient for anything particularly complex, but as this isn't proven it's false to outright claim that they are not sufficient.
We keep hearing these stories, and the reason is that the Cell processor is awesome for this type of work.
Are we still at the point where we can't get hold of Cell processors for machines specifically designed for this sort of task? Isn't the PS3 a rather inefficient way of doing this rather than a purpose built system or grid of systems, or does it come down to cost in that a purpose built system would just cost far more than a bunch of PS3s? 2200 PS3s is still going to cost, what, half a million?
Presumably it's not because they use the GPU as well because AFAIK Linux on the PS3 doesn't allow access to use the graphics card, or are they getting custom PS3s?
There does certainly seem a big market for Cell systems so the future of Cell certainly seems promising in this respect.
No, it's not that simple. ANNs have been evolving even in recent years, so to suggest the early paper based models have any relevance to what ANNs are doing now is wrong.
Being able to simulate enough here is a big deal too and can't simply be dismissed as an excuse. The brain works as a combination of billions of relatively simple neurons, and the fact the brain works is a result of emergent processes. As you require at least millions of these neurons for even the most simple patterns to be able to emerge then it's very much a case of being able to simulate on a massive scale.
The issue is what are the limits of emergence in an artificial neural network, and the answer is that we simply do not know- there's a good chance we can't do full brain simulation because artificial neurons are over-simplified, but it may be able to provide some properties of intelligent beings which is still an important step which will give enormous clues on the best way forward. A lack of computing power cannot simply be dismissed as an excuse in this case, because brains are effectively massively complex computing devices.
Or alternatively you could go to the East coast mainline site and get tickets within the bounds of prices I state without having to travel at rediculous times:
http://www.eastcoast.co.uk/
I've made the journey many a time, the most I ever need to pay is £23 and that's for first class travel, I usually only book a couple of days before.
Walk up fares are high though, you're right about that at least. Still if you're on holiday then planning a couple of days to go North a few days ahead of time is hardly much of a problem. Looks like the lowest price is £11 now too not £10, but I just tried a few journeys over the next few weeks upto and beyond xmas and there's plenty of tickets for £11, £13 and such. Try it, you might be suprised by how decent the east coast main line actually is. You even get free Wifi all the way.
Yes it can have amendments added, but can it have parts removed? What happens if you have contradictory amendments, which takes precedent? What about the difficulty in passing with amendments?
If it's really so flexible, then what's the point in it at all when it is no different to general law?
"The purpose of a Constitution is to stop the government in D.C. from turning into a dictatorial (or oligarchical) throne of power as happened in the Roman Republic 2100 years ago. It is the Supreme Law of the Land and needs to be followed, else the government shall be restrained by no law whatsoever. We will have chaos."
Yes, I can imagine the chaos now, it'd be absolutely horrific having no constitution, I mean, your country would be in chaos like New Zealand and Great Britain... wait, what?
How's the Venezuelan constitution doing by the way now that Chavez has silenced the opposition and changed it so he can remain in power indefinitely? What about the Russian constitution where Putin can just swap between PM and President back and forth to maintain a stranglehold on power, again whilst subduing the opposition? Really, you think a constitution is a magical cloak of protection against chaos, dictatorship, corruption when places like Russia and Venezuela have one? You really think countries with no formal constitution like New Zealand are corrupt and undemocratic when New Zealand is actually rated as the least corrupt country on Earth? Really?
"This is no different from the Treaty of Lisbon, which defines what powers the EU government may exercise, and reserves all other powers to the Member States."
Except countries can individiually renegotiate parts of the Lisbon treaty with things such as opt-outs, drop out altogether, alter it and so on. The whole reason Lisbon succeded is because it is NOT a constitution, feel free to look up what an utter fail the European constitution was for exactly the reasons I state, and why they went with a treaty instead.
It basically just seem to be a case of the same old AI arguments we've always heard even since Turing's days.
The problem is, we don't actually know what the limits of ANNs are, there is no proof that suggests that they can't, given ever greater amounts of computing power allow for the emergence of (at least seemingly) truly intelligent response to an event.
So on one hand we have the IBM guys overstating what they've achieved, and on the other we have a guy spouting out a view of the limits of ANNs without actually putting any effort into providing evidence for their limitations.
I don't know why but the AI field has always been horifically polarised, the kind of arguments you get in that field are just so immature it's beyond belief. You have people in the AI field following their viewpoint religiously, completely unwilling to consider the other viewpoint. To see what I mean just look up some of the discussions on Searle's chinese room argument.
If AI scientists spent as much time on research as they did bitching at each others experiments and theories we'd have a walking talking robo-jesus by now that could build worlds.
Why do we need single neuron level imaging? The activity of a single neuron really tells us very little. The emergent patterns in the form of brain activity of multiple neurons are what matters. The question is whether we are getting the right responses in this respect from the right set of neurons in reaction to the corresponding trigger.
Damn, if only we could find such a great source of power!
Kew Gardens too. I've always really liked going to Kew, some of the plants they have there are incredible. Walking in the canopy of the massive palm trees and seeing how the leaves just dwarf you in comparison is amazing. Their desert, temperate and prehistoric houses are all worth a look in fact.
Oh, and as he's American, I'd suggest a trip to a British supermarket because our confectionary isles are fucking awesome compared to theirs ;)
The UK has a good London - North train network. For about £10 - £15 you can get a ticket from London to Leeds and vice versa, and it only takes 2hrs. If you stay there for a day you've got the Royal Armouries and then you can go to York for a day which is also full of stuff to do.
The Royal Armouries is a nice addition to doing the imperial war museum because it covers the areas the war museum doesn't having everything from stone age weaponry to samurai weaponry and armour to modern day sniper rifles.
If you like military history then the two complement each other amazingly well!
The great thing about travel in the UK is it's so small, if you go to London then you're at most only about 5 hrs from the furthest reaches of the country by train.
Yeah, most modern power supplies in Europe are rated 110v - 240v, I'd imagine US ones are exactly the same component so all that should be needed is the adapter. I'm not sure about changing the wireless region code he mentions too- I've never had to do that, when I travel from the UK to the US all I've ever needed to do is use the plug adapter!
Well neither did I until I read everyone elses responses which made me second guess my judgement!
I'd imagine more people would be happy being geographers, it's just not necessarily their first choice.
I always absolutely loved geography, it was by far one of my strongest subjects, and I use my knowledge of the world, demographics and so forth regularly, but it's far from my profession, nor it is my primary target of study nowadays. Maths and Computing are my focus, but I notice a lot of people make the mistake of assuming because such a subject isn't their primary job, that that subject was useless to them. Many people forget where they learnt how to read a map, where they got an understanding of what causes earthquakes and tsunamis when they see them on the news and so on, they fail to realise that in fact, geography class was more useful to them than they realise. The same goes for all subjects, how many people question what use pythagoras and trigonometry was to them, but then go on to do some DIY at some point in their life measuring out a piece of wood need to be cut at an angle?
I don't pretend it's necessarily even easy to engage kids, I think the usual maths curriculum is horifically dull and un-engaging for example, but similarly I have to accept it's no easy job to produce an engaging maths curriculum that also covers all that needs to be covered.
Effectively I think a lot of what we're seeing is that to engage kids in a subject requires more time than to blast the topic out to them and hope they take it in so we have this clash of time vs. quality. Do we teach a smaller range of a topic and increase quality or teach a wider range and decrease quality?
At school there was a heavy focus on algebra, calculus and so forth in math class and I really hated it, but nowadays I love math and it's because I discovered pure math such as number theory. If we'd been given a wider range of teaching in school I'd have found an area of math I liked, but flunked the subject as a whole, if we'd been given an even smaller range I may have find it more dull and boring and not even had the intrigue to go and discover the likes of number theory later on as I did.
You're certainly right, parents should at least stress the importance of why their kids are going to school even if they don't encourage home studying of the topics rather than use it as a babysitting service.