I didn't work for cancer treatment but for XRay imagery used in cardiac and vascular surgery. They perfectly knew (and so did our FDA contacts) how much radiation the patients will receive and that it will harm or kill a minor percentage of them (there are studies that show a proportional link between small dose radiation exposure and the statistical increase in cancer risk), but for each victim of the exposure, there were hundreds more people surviving the surgery than with open chest version (and those survivors also have on average a better quality of life), so it's a known but perfectly accepted drawback. (Of course, being healthy workers and not people dying of a heart failure, we had strong safety measures to prevent accidental exposure to the radiations).
Being accidentally declared dead is one thing, but if any official proof that you ever existed was erased, getting away from the situation might be verry interesting.
No, in Gattaca, they still had a choice, albeit more or less limited by their genetic potential. The guy from whom the hero took the gentic material to become an astronaut wasn't one himself, he was a professional athlete. I think a better reference would be "Brave New World", in which each class has its own differentiated education and leisures designed to match their designated work.
Except it wasn't exactly a scientific discussion, it was a semantic one, with political and ego background. In a way, it's exactly as if in a Mensa meeting, they were discussing at which IQ someone can be called a genius, someone with a 180 IQ will vote for a high threshold, and someone with a 130 IQ for a much lower one, but either vote outcome won't change anything to how intelligent they are or how much we understand how our brain works.
Re:We keep talking about artificial intelligence..
on
Gmail CAPTCHA Cracked
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· Score: 1
50 years ago, the human level IA was 10 years away, so I won't worry too much. Of course, any current captchas could eventually be broken by the right algorithm and enough brute force so stupidly copying a word would no longer be a proof of intelligence.
I don't know if you try to be serious or funny, but I don't think your're either in that case. Basically, depression is a condition in which your mind tries to kill you, not just a bad mood.
I know a few pot smokers and they all are apathic, but not depressed, and I think you don't need to be a MD to notice the difference (the first one is that I never left any of them wondering if they will attempt suicide).
I once saw a drawing of dolphins placed in a way they outline the shape of two people having sex. The mail was explaining that the time you take need to go from the obvious dolphins to the more subtle intercourse representation tells how naughty your mind is. It took me over a minute to see the dolphins, even with the help of a coworker who eventually had to mask most of the image with his hands to break up the other shape. As they say, things you can't have own you.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307197/ (american title: Murder on a Sunday Morning) is a documentary made by a french filmmaker on the US judciary system. He picked a murder trial almost at random and filmed it from the start. This should have been an easy trial, the guy was arrested 100m away from the murder, was recognized by the victim husband and signed a detailed confession, until the judge understood that the guy could not be guilty and the police poorly made up the evidences to charge a randomly picked death row candidate.
A few years ago, I read an article about commercial pilot trainning, and in particular landing. In simulator exercises where they put an obstacle (an other plane stopped in the middle of the runway), a large number of trainees simply did not see the obstacle and crashed into it because they were too busy handling the landing to notice something they weren't expecting.
I would have liked to be told that he is long dead and his last one and a half year videos were a Primeval spinoff (after all, in a way he's a dinosaur).
"Dinosaurs survived very well until Meteorus Impactus said hello. So within the Earth ecosystem, Dino ruled. Within a wider ecosystem, they fail. So where in that wider picture is "natural selection" exactly?"
Dinosaurs ruled for a very long period (over 100 million years) because their strategy of growing as big as possible was a winning one at a time when vegetation was overabundant, at the same time, the small mamals were mostly concerned by not being eated by almost any predator and the ones with the more advanced brain had a clear headstart at that game. The meteor impact changed the context by throwing a lot of dust in the upper athmosphere, rapidly killing most of the plants by depriving them of the solar energy and indirectly, killing the larger animals (including most of the dinosaurs, but not all of them) that could not fit in a scarce resource environment nor, of course, evolve to face such a fast change.
"More pertinently, there's global climate change. If "natural selection" took us from humus to human, only to be wiped out by a change in the weather, then at the very least I'd say "natural selection" doesn't mean what we think it means."
First, even the worst climate change scenarios do not imply the end of mankind, only that our current population and lifestyle could not be sustained, mostly because of a reduction of available arable lands. Then I don't know what you think "natural selection" means to you, but to scientists, it does not mean existing forever or being able to face any drastic environmental change, only that nature is harsh and tends to kill young the individuals or species that do not fit to the environment in which they try to live.
No, things do not tend to be automatically improved, the key part is feedback and corrective action. When there is no incentive for improvement, it doesn't appear. Western modern societies might be a "good" example of this trend on many aspects.
Well, while it is a niche market, there are many industries that use some embedded developers. I've personnaly worked in that field for mobile phones, medical imagery equipments and police equipment, and I never had any difficulties finding a job. I also know people doing embedded dev for cars, commercial and military planes, trains, highway toll booths, Visa card readers or home appliance.
So I would say that there are a lot of niche markets, but it usually requires a different mindset than the regular CS job (we usually work on much smaller modules but need to understand the tiniest details of its implementation), and a fairly different list of competences (I only write very simple C/C++, never use libraries or framework, don't know any protocol but I can tell you how much CPU and stack any of my functions will use on my chip as I write them and if you can call them from an interrupt).
Except that we are talking about embedded here, the kind of environment where the closest thing to a framework is called the BSP (board support package, basically a set of drivers), which is specific to each variant of chip/board you might encounter. Anyway, most of the times, the requirements are also so specific/tight you end up rewriting your most critical parts over and over anyway.
Embedded is not the kind of environment where you seek rapid development, it's more the old school mentality of spending weeks to gain a few microseconds. As a seasonned embedded developer, I fully understand it is only appealing to a small fraction of the coders (actually, myself and most of my coworkers are EE doing SW rather than CS).
There is also the cost of kicking hundreds of landowners out. American ones have rights and can usualy get a fairly reasonable price for their land, chinese ones can just shut up.
The submarine New Orlean is a rather extreme example but it is so romantic I might adhere to it (I don't pay taxes in the US, so maybe this helps), but for most other cities, domes will probably be counter-productive because modern large cities are a major source of pollution that you don't really want to let accumulate where millions of people live and work. So we will first have to create and deploy the technologies that would bring a far less pollutiong urban lifestyle, then imagine what kind of environment could justify building the domes. Except for WWIII nuclear fallouts, I fail to see any.
Of course, even the bad scenarii are not doomsday ones, life will not disapear, neither will mankind. However, the worst scenarii mean that the changes will happen in a very short duration, far too short for an evolutionary adaptation. Some species could move to more suited areas, but there is a risk many other would face the fate of the mamooth and suffer extinction. Of course, people could move around crops to match the new climate, but there will still be a risk of losing a lot of biodiversity.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely.
I didn't work for cancer treatment but for XRay imagery used in cardiac and vascular surgery. They perfectly knew (and so did our FDA contacts) how much radiation the patients will receive and that it will harm or kill a minor percentage of them (there are studies that show a proportional link between small dose radiation exposure and the statistical increase in cancer risk), but for each victim of the exposure, there were hundreds more people surviving the surgery than with open chest version (and those survivors also have on average a better quality of life), so it's a known but perfectly accepted drawback. (Of course, being healthy workers and not people dying of a heart failure, we had strong safety measures to prevent accidental exposure to the radiations).
Being accidentally declared dead is one thing, but if any official proof that you ever existed was erased, getting away from the situation might be verry interesting.
So, does that word also covers your prisons? Many of your teenagers or young adults get a degree there.
No, in Gattaca, they still had a choice, albeit more or less limited by their genetic potential. The guy from whom the hero took the gentic material to become an astronaut wasn't one himself, he was a professional athlete. I think a better reference would be "Brave New World", in which each class has its own differentiated education and leisures designed to match their designated work.
Except it wasn't exactly a scientific discussion, it was a semantic one, with political and ego background.
In a way, it's exactly as if in a Mensa meeting, they were discussing at which IQ someone can be called a genius, someone with a 180 IQ will vote for a high threshold, and someone with a 130 IQ for a much lower one, but either vote outcome won't change anything to how intelligent they are or how much we understand how our brain works.
The asteroid could be full of highly toxic fuel.
50 years ago, the human level IA was 10 years away, so I won't worry too much.
Of course, any current captchas could eventually be broken by the right algorithm and enough brute force so stupidly copying a word would no longer be a proof of intelligence.
I don't know if you try to be serious or funny, but I don't think your're either in that case. Basically, depression is a condition in which your mind tries to kill you, not just a bad mood.
It can make sense, dehydratation is a major cause of headhache.
I know a few pot smokers and they all are apathic, but not depressed, and I think you don't need to be a MD to notice the difference (the first one is that I never left any of them wondering if they will attempt suicide).
There is an easy solution: simply live in France. Most of the expensive restaurants we have here are 80% empty on rush hour.
"All power corrupts, absolute power ...is even more fun" -- Simon Travaglia (BOFH)
I once saw a drawing of dolphins placed in a way they outline the shape of two people having sex. The mail was explaining that the time you take need to go from the obvious dolphins to the more subtle intercourse representation tells how naughty your mind is.
It took me over a minute to see the dolphins, even with the help of a coworker who eventually had to mask most of the image with his hands to break up the other shape. As they say, things you can't have own you.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307197/ (american title: Murder on a Sunday Morning) is a documentary made by a french filmmaker on the US judciary system. He picked a murder trial almost at random and filmed it from the start. This should have been an easy trial, the guy was arrested 100m away from the murder, was recognized by the victim husband and signed a detailed confession, until the judge understood that the guy could not be guilty and the police poorly made up the evidences to charge a randomly picked death row candidate.
A few years ago, I read an article about commercial pilot trainning, and in particular landing. In simulator exercises where they put an obstacle (an other plane stopped in the middle of the runway), a large number of trainees simply did not see the obstacle and crashed into it because they were too busy handling the landing to notice something they weren't expecting.
I would have liked to be told that he is long dead and his last one and a half year videos were a Primeval spinoff (after all, in a way he's a dinosaur).
"Dinosaurs survived very well until Meteorus Impactus said hello. So within the Earth ecosystem, Dino ruled. Within a wider ecosystem, they fail. So where in that wider picture is "natural selection" exactly?"
Dinosaurs ruled for a very long period (over 100 million years) because their strategy of growing as big as possible was a winning one at a time when vegetation was overabundant, at the same time, the small mamals were mostly concerned by not being eated by almost any predator and the ones with the more advanced brain had a clear headstart at that game.
The meteor impact changed the context by throwing a lot of dust in the upper athmosphere, rapidly killing most of the plants by depriving them of the solar energy and indirectly, killing the larger animals (including most of the dinosaurs, but not all of them) that could not fit in a scarce resource environment nor, of course, evolve to face such a fast change.
"More pertinently, there's global climate change. If "natural selection" took us from humus to human, only to be wiped out by a change in the weather, then at the very least I'd say "natural selection" doesn't mean what we think it means."
First, even the worst climate change scenarios do not imply the end of mankind, only that our current population and lifestyle could not be sustained, mostly because of a reduction of available arable lands. Then I don't know what you think "natural selection" means to you, but to scientists, it does not mean existing forever or being able to face any drastic environmental change, only that nature is harsh and tends to kill young the individuals or species that do not fit to the environment in which they try to live.
No, things do not tend to be automatically improved, the key part is feedback and corrective action. When there is no incentive for improvement, it doesn't appear.
Western modern societies might be a "good" example of this trend on many aspects.
Children? I think it's even worse. Influent geeks are contaminated too.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/11/21
Well, while it is a niche market, there are many industries that use some embedded developers. I've personnaly worked in that field for mobile phones, medical imagery equipments and police equipment, and I never had any difficulties finding a job. I also know people doing embedded dev for cars, commercial and military planes, trains, highway toll booths, Visa card readers or home appliance.
So I would say that there are a lot of niche markets, but it usually requires a different mindset than the regular CS job (we usually work on much smaller modules but need to understand the tiniest details of its implementation), and a fairly different list of competences (I only write very simple C/C++, never use libraries or framework, don't know any protocol but I can tell you how much CPU and stack any of my functions will use on my chip as I write them and if you can call them from an interrupt).
Except that we are talking about embedded here, the kind of environment where the closest thing to a framework is called the BSP (board support package, basically a set of drivers), which is specific to each variant of chip/board you might encounter. Anyway, most of the times, the requirements are also so specific/tight you end up rewriting your most critical parts over and over anyway.
Embedded is not the kind of environment where you seek rapid development, it's more the old school mentality of spending weeks to gain a few microseconds. As a seasonned embedded developer, I fully understand it is only appealing to a small fraction of the coders (actually, myself and most of my coworkers are EE doing SW rather than CS).
There is also the cost of kicking hundreds of landowners out. American ones have rights and can usualy get a fairly reasonable price for their land, chinese ones can just shut up.
The submarine New Orlean is a rather extreme example but it is so romantic I might adhere to it (I don't pay taxes in the US, so maybe this helps), but for most other cities, domes will probably be counter-productive because modern large cities are a major source of pollution that you don't really want to let accumulate where millions of people live and work.
So we will first have to create and deploy the technologies that would bring a far less pollutiong urban lifestyle, then imagine what kind of environment could justify building the domes. Except for WWIII nuclear fallouts, I fail to see any.
This is not that simple.
Of course, even the bad scenarii are not doomsday ones, life will not disapear, neither will mankind.
However, the worst scenarii mean that the changes will happen in a very short duration, far too short for an evolutionary adaptation. Some species could move to more suited areas, but there is a risk many other would face the fate of the mamooth and suffer extinction. Of course, people could move around crops to match the new climate, but there will still be a risk of losing a lot of biodiversity.
How could they believe such a thing when Hitler believed the earth to be hollow and we lived on the inside part?