I didn't dig completely into your site, but was just wondering if groups are doing work on speech recognition algorithms on your compressed bitstream? Is this an active area of research?
Of course, individuals from crowds can make false and erroneous claims. However, the beauty of crowdsourcing is that if a claim is indeed true, a large number of people would repeat and validate it, which would give the claim prominence and credibility. Social news sites like Digg, with their “up-vote” and “down-vote” system, use a similar concept.
Not to stroke Slashdot's ego, but I think a meta-moderation system is a better model. A financial institution may remain honest but piss off a lot of vindictive people who can click "Digg this". Whereas a small set of competent savvy number-crunchers may dispassionately find the clues needed to identify a fraud, with far more reliability. I believe they may underestimate the amount of noise that will come from investors who lose a lot of money from a perfectly honest, if incompetent, financial advisor.
There's also no mention in the article of financial compensation models for the crowd - except for the word "volunteer" halfway down the article. I'm not sure if this system would be better with cash rewards or not.
Paper currency is easily manufactured, but the guy who makes it isn't guaranteed to win anymore than everybody else is guaranteed to lose.
Really? Perhaps in a perfect world where the government prints money and circulates it to small businesses via noble banks, you might be correct.
Except you probably wouldn't be. The government does whatever it can to maximise unofficial inflation at the expense of official inflation. This allows them to pay off their debts while so-called "inflation-indexed" social security obligations are reduced. It's a zero-sum game, where the rich stock-invested people gain at the benefit of the poorer fixed-income people, such as the elderly.
So, no, inflation doesn't "lose" value...it transfers it from the poor to the rich.
And that's still in the "perfect world" scenario of printing money. In reality, what's happening today is that the Federal Reserve is printing large sums of money, loaning it to banks at 0% interest, who turn around and buy Treasuries with a 3% risk, and pocket the profits from the difference. They're not investing in "businesses" - that would be (gasp!) risky! This is why Goldman Sachs just had three whole months without a single day of trading losses. So this money is explicitly going into investment bankers' bonuses, Warren Buffett's 10% yield bonds, and other Goldman investors. This isn't a conspiracy theory - it's in the press releases!
So, yes, those of us who see the value of the gold standard don't necessarily do so to reduce volatility - we do so to reduce the bias towards the transfer of wealth to the rich and the well-connected.
They use their new wealth to buy political power and advocate even lower taxes and less regulation.
Right...so the answer is to reduce political power. By smaller government. Less spending. Less taxes. You can complain all you want about the venality of politicians, but it's been a problem since Greek democracy and it's not changing now. All you can do is reduce their influence, and their ability to cause trouble and reroute public funds to their friends.
And in a true free market system, the banks would have failed. But they wouldn't, really. Because they knew there would be no bailout backstop, so they wouldn't have taken their stupid risks to begin with.
The free market hasn't failed. It hasn't even been tried.
WANG was a brand that stood out proudly in the face of stiff competition.
Unfortunately, after a long period of thrusting its way into new markets, it sadly shrivelled into a limp entity that was incapable of further market penetration.
Actually, Antarctica would be a pretty dangerous place to put it - particularly west Antarctica, where the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is very unstable and could collapse, causing the ocean to rise 4-20 m and flood all the coastal cities.
If you could aim it towards eastern Antarctica, that might be ok - but I'd rather you didn't, as I'm currently living there!
The article doesn't mention a major advantage of "legacy" e-mail - it's a standard that isn't tied to any particular company.
Facebook, Google, Twitter, whatever, are "single-source vendors" of their particular products, and they can be subject to any kind of financial, moral, political, or technological problems.
E-mail has no such dependencies. The only way to take it down is to take down the Internet in general. (Spam overloading aside.)
Your link is talking about sea ice. Sea ice changes year over year according to local weather trends, and is just frozen sea water. Hamish's research is regarding ice sheets. The amount of ice we're talking about is a few scales of magnitude bigger, indicating more profound trends, and can affect sea level. Sea ice doesn't.
The scientists cloned tiny DNA snippets representing the common variants at each spot, creating a library of such snippets. To prepare a phony DNA sample matching any profile, they just mixed the proper snippets together.
Really? It's that easy? God, I'm an idiot. After I cloned the tiny snippets of the common variants, creating my library, I just sat there staring at them and thinking "What the hell do I do now?"
Advances in artificial intelligence are mostly limited to deduction. Systems like neural networks (which I personally think are a bit bogus), support vector machines, other methods of pattern recognition, are all recent innovations that allow advanced decision making to occur. But, at the end of the day, they're still forms of automated deduction, where humans feed in parameters, and the system analyzes input based on these parameters.
Sentience is all about the induction; forming a new concept from separate disparate observations and basically creating a new idea. We're pretty far away from machine-created ideas. Just ask any computational neuroscientist, probability researcher, or signal processor.
If you want to debate about how much decision-making we delegate to machines, fine; but I wouldn't cloud that rational discussion with words like "religion" and "Rapture".
The original Atari 2600 joystick. Which, I believe, was also the de facto default joystick of the Commodore 64. One button. One stick.
And did anyone else take it apart to press the "left" and "right" contact points simultaneously? Jiggling the joystick back and forth in the track events of Summer Games was for suckers.
Normally, I'd be outraged (okay, maybe just irritated) with patenting something this silly. But if the end result is the prevention of somebody reproducing Boingo's client, we all win.
The Boingo client is just another resident program that adds nothing useful to the desktop environment. It just delays my boot up time, takes up memory, and occasionally crashes or updates itself. If I wanted that, I'd get Adobe Reader, thanks.
When I rush through an airport and want Wifi, I don't want to have to install a client. Windows may not get everything right, but it has a perfectly good wifi selection system that other hotspot providers are okay with. Maybe this patent will prevent OS's from incorporating this marginally useful feature, and that might be a shame (if anyone really cares). But I don't want hotspot-specific software on my computer, doubtlessly pushing advertising and God knows what else upon me.
If these scumbags had their way, all children would be psych-drugged into oblivion, most eventually becoming high school gunmen; vicious de-programmers would constantly be leaping out from shadowy corners; there would be all-night electroshock parlors on the high street of every village, town and city; and anyone who tried to live an ethical life would quickly receive an icepick lobotomy."
...and the icepick lobotomy recipients would then menace human society for ever more by writing and publishing crap like Battlefield Earth.
I'd hate to have my head stolen just to access my bank account.
Yep. Might just want to limit this system to in-store purchases. Then when a would-be thief walks into a Best Buy to get a plasma TV using my card and severed head, the clerk may get suspicious and ask for a second piece of ID.
had to post it AC huh? couldn't actually post it with your username? What do you fear sir? That your asstarded comment might be linked to you in some way in the future?
Actually, I think the main reason that people are so indifferent to the exposure of their credit card details is that companies like Visa are willing to take the hit on fraud, when it happens. You lose your credit card; a bunch of large purchases show up that don't fit your profile; you get refunded. I'm sure it's happened to many of us often; we're still laissez-faire about the way we use our credit cards.
It'll be interesting to see who is willing to take the responsibility for this security system, and who absorbs the fraud. The customer? Doubt it. The wireless carrier? Possibly. The transaction broker? Most likely. It would be the best if it was the carrier, who would have the clout and the motivation to certify the devices, and minimize the risks.
IANA audiophile, but I am a signal processor...or at least, I play one on TV.
Aliasing is reduced by getting rid of the top frequencies before you sample, as it is sampling that causes the damage, so to speak. The intrinsic low-pass filtering that would result from crappy earbuds is after downsampling, compression, and signal reconstruction, long after the damage has been done. That is, the clipped high frequencies have already been moved into the lower spectrum, and can't be removed by post-reconstruction lowpass filtering.
The result is not only "Drunken Swede" - a telecommunications term for an aliased voice - but actually muffled drunken Swede.
(1) Throwing doubles on any of your next three turns. If you succeed in doing this you immediately move forward the number of PageRank ratings shown by your doubles throw.
(2) Using the "Get Out of Google Hell Free Card"
(3) Purchasing the "Get Out of Google Hell Free Card" from another e-business and playing it.
(4) Paying a fine of $50 before you roll the dice on either of your next two turns. If you do not throw doubles by your third turn, you must pay the $50 fine. You then get out of Google Hell and immediately move forward the number of PageRank rankings shown by your throw.
Even though you are in Google Hell, you may buy and sell on e-Bay, buy and sell houses and hotels (in Second Life) and collect revenues.
Unless there's already a rail connection from the proposed Alaskan terminal through Canada, I don't see this as being particularly economically feasible. Certainly the US should insist that Canada kick in a contribution.
The main purpose of the rail connection will be to transport Russian wood, coal, oil, and minerals to the American populace. Presumably to displace the Canadian wood, coal, oil, and minerals that Canada has in abundance, which currently get delivered to the American populace with a significant competitive advantage. Remind me why Canada would want this?
You must not be familiar with how waves interact. The light waves and the material's "atom waves" are interacting so that maximum destructive interference is achieved; same frequency but half a wavelength out of phase of each other. The resulting wave of the atoms in the material should then have close to zero energy because other waves in the system may add constructively interfere with the atom waves.
In the context of the parent's post, I believe this description qualifies as "something strange going on".
Where would you be without a nice enemy to complain about daily? It is a sad state your society is in if it promotes such negative behaviour.
KABOOM!
Aw, dammit, my irony detector just overloaded. And it was brand new, too. If the parent post had placed a transition sentence between these two, it may have survived...
Slashdot Mirror
Might I ask your favourite pub in Cambridge and the local area? It doesn't need to still exist.
I didn't dig completely into your site, but was just wondering if groups are doing work on speech recognition algorithms on your compressed bitstream? Is this an active area of research?
Of course, individuals from crowds can make false and erroneous claims. However, the beauty of crowdsourcing is that if a claim is indeed true, a large number of people would repeat and validate it, which would give the claim prominence and credibility. Social news sites like Digg, with their “up-vote” and “down-vote” system, use a similar concept.
Not to stroke Slashdot's ego, but I think a meta-moderation system is a better model. A financial institution may remain honest but piss off a lot of vindictive people who can click "Digg this". Whereas a small set of competent savvy number-crunchers may dispassionately find the clues needed to identify a fraud, with far more reliability. I believe they may underestimate the amount of noise that will come from investors who lose a lot of money from a perfectly honest, if incompetent, financial advisor.
There's also no mention in the article of financial compensation models for the crowd - except for the word "volunteer" halfway down the article. I'm not sure if this system would be better with cash rewards or not.
Paper currency is easily manufactured, but the guy who makes it isn't guaranteed to win anymore than everybody else is guaranteed to lose.
Really? Perhaps in a perfect world where the government prints money and circulates it to small businesses via noble banks, you might be correct.
Except you probably wouldn't be. The government does whatever it can to maximise unofficial inflation at the expense of official inflation. This allows them to pay off their debts while so-called "inflation-indexed" social security obligations are reduced. It's a zero-sum game, where the rich stock-invested people gain at the benefit of the poorer fixed-income people, such as the elderly.
So, no, inflation doesn't "lose" value...it transfers it from the poor to the rich.
And that's still in the "perfect world" scenario of printing money. In reality, what's happening today is that the Federal Reserve is printing large sums of money, loaning it to banks at 0% interest, who turn around and buy Treasuries with a 3% risk, and pocket the profits from the difference. They're not investing in "businesses" - that would be (gasp!) risky! This is why Goldman Sachs just had three whole months without a single day of trading losses. So this money is explicitly going into investment bankers' bonuses, Warren Buffett's 10% yield bonds, and other Goldman investors. This isn't a conspiracy theory - it's in the press releases!
So, yes, those of us who see the value of the gold standard don't necessarily do so to reduce volatility - we do so to reduce the bias towards the transfer of wealth to the rich and the well-connected.
Right...so the answer is to reduce political power. By smaller government. Less spending. Less taxes. You can complain all you want about the venality of politicians, but it's been a problem since Greek democracy and it's not changing now. All you can do is reduce their influence, and their ability to cause trouble and reroute public funds to their friends.
And in a true free market system, the banks would have failed. But they wouldn't, really. Because they knew there would be no bailout backstop, so they wouldn't have taken their stupid risks to begin with.
The free market hasn't failed. It hasn't even been tried.
It's the BIG OL' BAT'RY. You bunch of citified nerds. Have some respect for the Good-Old Boys.
I love diplomacy but it sucks when you know the AI is going to cheat. I hope Civ V will finally have an AI that doesn't cheat.
You want nations that don't cheat on diplomacy?
If we're going to abandon reality, why don't we just add wizard units and inter-dimensional portals too?
Unfortunately, after a long period of thrusting its way into new markets, it sadly shrivelled into a limp entity that was incapable of further market penetration.
If you could aim it towards eastern Antarctica, that might be ok - but I'd rather you didn't, as I'm currently living there!
Facebook, Google, Twitter, whatever, are "single-source vendors" of their particular products, and they can be subject to any kind of financial, moral, political, or technological problems.
E-mail has no such dependencies. The only way to take it down is to take down the Internet in general. (Spam overloading aside.)
Your link is talking about sea ice. Sea ice changes year over year according to local weather trends, and is just frozen sea water. Hamish's research is regarding ice sheets. The amount of ice we're talking about is a few scales of magnitude bigger, indicating more profound trends, and can affect sea level. Sea ice doesn't.
Really? It's that easy? God, I'm an idiot. After I cloned the tiny snippets of the common variants, creating my library, I just sat there staring at them and thinking "What the hell do I do now?"
Sentience is all about the induction; forming a new concept from separate disparate observations and basically creating a new idea. We're pretty far away from machine-created ideas. Just ask any computational neuroscientist, probability researcher, or signal processor. If you want to debate about how much decision-making we delegate to machines, fine; but I wouldn't cloud that rational discussion with words like "religion" and "Rapture".
And did anyone else take it apart to press the "left" and "right" contact points simultaneously? Jiggling the joystick back and forth in the track events of Summer Games was for suckers.
Good times.
...I'm okay with this superfluous patent.
Normally, I'd be outraged (okay, maybe just irritated) with patenting something this silly. But if the end result is the prevention of somebody reproducing Boingo's client, we all win.
The Boingo client is just another resident program that adds nothing useful to the desktop environment. It just delays my boot up time, takes up memory, and occasionally crashes or updates itself. If I wanted that, I'd get Adobe Reader, thanks.
When I rush through an airport and want Wifi, I don't want to have to install a client. Windows may not get everything right, but it has a perfectly good wifi selection system that other hotspot providers are okay with. Maybe this patent will prevent OS's from incorporating this marginally useful feature, and that might be a shame (if anyone really cares). But I don't want hotspot-specific software on my computer, doubtlessly pushing advertising and God knows what else upon me.
If these scumbags had their way, all children would be psych-drugged into oblivion, most eventually becoming high school gunmen; vicious de-programmers would constantly be leaping out from shadowy corners; there would be all-night electroshock parlors on the high street of every village, town and city; and anyone who tried to live an ethical life would quickly receive an icepick lobotomy."
...and the icepick lobotomy recipients would then menace human society for ever more by writing and publishing crap like Battlefield Earth.
Yep. Might just want to limit this system to in-store purchases. Then when a would-be thief walks into a Best Buy to get a plasma TV using my card and severed head, the clerk may get suspicious and ask for a second piece of ID.
Maybe it was his iPhone they blended.
It'll be interesting to see who is willing to take the responsibility for this security system, and who absorbs the fraud. The customer? Doubt it. The wireless carrier? Possibly. The transaction broker? Most likely. It would be the best if it was the carrier, who would have the clout and the motivation to certify the devices, and minimize the risks.
Aliasing is reduced by getting rid of the top frequencies before you sample, as it is sampling that causes the damage, so to speak. The intrinsic low-pass filtering that would result from crappy earbuds is after downsampling, compression, and signal reconstruction, long after the damage has been done. That is, the clipped high frequencies have already been moved into the lower spectrum, and can't be removed by post-reconstruction lowpass filtering.
The result is not only "Drunken Swede" - a telecommunications term for an aliased voice - but actually muffled drunken Swede.
A player gets out of Google Hell by...
(1) Throwing doubles on any of your next three turns. If you succeed in doing this you immediately move forward the number of PageRank ratings shown by your doubles throw.
(2) Using the "Get Out of Google Hell Free Card"
(3) Purchasing the "Get Out of Google Hell Free Card" from another e-business and playing it.
(4) Paying a fine of $50 before you roll the dice on either of your next two turns. If you do not throw doubles by your third turn, you must pay the $50 fine. You then get out of Google Hell and immediately move forward the number of PageRank rankings shown by your throw.
Even though you are in Google Hell, you may buy and sell on e-Bay, buy and sell houses and hotels (in Second Life) and collect revenues.
The main purpose of the rail connection will be to transport Russian wood, coal, oil, and minerals to the American populace. Presumably to displace the Canadian wood, coal, oil, and minerals that Canada has in abundance, which currently get delivered to the American populace with a significant competitive advantage. Remind me why Canada would want this?
In the context of the parent's post, I believe this description qualifies as "something strange going on".
KABOOM!
Aw, dammit, my irony detector just overloaded. And it was brand new, too. If the parent post had placed a transition sentence between these two, it may have survived...
I'm not familiar with this comparison. The only trojan I know works very well until you pull it off!