You're right. You cannot fight stupidity while keeping on corporate America's side of the fence. But as silly as it may sound, they are actually doing something necessary by offering this. People ARE stupid. They sometimes NEED to be told not to do certain things "on the internet" because their understanding of the internet is that it's some different mysterious place. One would think that they'd be more prudent (xenophobic) online, but kids don't think that way. Sitting at home gives them feelings of safety..etc.
My objection is that this is mandatory. I am in VA right now, and I would rather see this widely advertised but OPTIONAL. If you can't educate your kids, send them to us for a short seminar. Hopefully by the time my age group (20's) reaches the teenage children-raising age, we will be an entirely different demographic of parents, and this will be laughable. There are already parents joining social networking sites. This thing will be scrapped in 10-15 years time.
Yes, humans have actually evolved instincts for this, closely related to emotional relation to parents. It helps get past the grim nature of life and hence allows sentient beings who would otherwise have killed themselves in earlier, less interesting ages, to go on. Read the GP post again and try to see the absurdity of what this supreme being we invented wants us to "believe".
I'd also like to say that the analogy with pagerank is a little off-base. I realize this is a Stanford professor, but trust me neither the machine learning people nor the information retrieval folks know what the other side is talking about at a deep level, mostly because IR is a hack-ish, "sciencified" topic (I'm quoting a very well-known man in the field) while statistical inference is a little more formal. They each have completely different goals and challenges, though they do overlap in places.
Simply put: weighting results from an queried index is one problem, trying to classify a movie rating from a training set is another. And the approach of each regarding heuristics/hacks are similarly worlds apart.
You could also make an elaborate algorithm that uses user age, sex & location That's just more data, IMHO, and nothing to do with the algorithm - you'd just be running the learner over more fields. What is a "better" algorithm? In formal terms, the "better" algorithm will classify with a higher accuracy during performance (the phase after the learner has "learnt") than another one using the same data and in a consistent manner (i.e not for some particular sample).
I am only vaguely familiar with the netflix prize but I think you are asking a rather open-ended question here. Relevant data always improves classifiers, and some classifiers are better than others depending on the domain. Talking in relative terms isn't going to achieve much.
But downright wrong when it enables someone to evade taxation like the rest of us. We all.. evade taxation? Not me you insensitive clod! And what is this slashdot-exclusive tax evasion scheme you are talking about - did I miss an important Ask Slashdot or something? I feel very alienated right now. I want to be with you guys.
Thank you for putting up the numbers, saved me a whole lot of searching as I was infuriated by the GP. 3 Trillion kind of makes a difference.
About the casualties(drifting slightly off-topic) I think the most alarming are the psychological effects. There may be 4000 soldiers dead, but those returning home after an utterly meaningless time spent in a country thousands of miles away, are the ones tearing my heart apart. It is one thing to lose a limb or an eye. That is terrible, but at least you can try to move on with your life. But to have your body whole and yet be wandering like a madman (or literally as a madman) with a gun at night, in the streets of your home town, because some ABSOLUTE MORON decided to send you to war with a secular country that had nothing whatsoever to do with us.. I think that is the saddest thing in the world. My heart goes out to all the people we killed, and all the soldiers we lost, and all the money that could have saved millions and done miracles in supporting science and human welfare. War is such a bitch.
You're right, I be silly for not reading right. One point though: reducing the resolution by a little did not seem to have an effect when I was trying the game out on very high. I never actually played (no time anymore:( ) but I had to see what it was like, and if these cards can survive the beating my machine took, they may be worth their cost in a few months time. The graphics were a feat of engineering.
Yes, the discourse between imaginative minds is an amazing and truly capturing phenomenon whatever the domain of discourse it may be. I would also have liked to be a fly on the wall in Max Born's office when he talked to Heisenberg, or to have listened to the tornados of mathematical rhetoric that went on betwen Feynman and Bohr when they talked over the phone to discuss the things that nobody else in the world could understand, or bear to hear. Maybe that wouldn't have been as entertaining as the distant worlds Clarke would have talked about, but it was still imagination, and imagination is such a darn beautiful thing. It is born of reflection, and reflection is what marks human kind, because it embodies the sentience/self-awareness/abstraction of concepts and physical symbols that makes us so "special". Actually, take away the quotes there. We are very lucky, and very special.
So it is no exaggeration to say that these are the people who have really lived. The least we can do, so that we ourselves can be said to have lived, is read what they wrote down.
In a sci fi book I'm reading, a police AI observes that the purpose of law is to create order and that justice is incidental. There are laws for various types of domain. Preventing chaos/violence/destructive behavior..etc can be described as creating order, while fighting free file-sharing is done on completely different and more abstract grounds (mainly the theory of purported loss of revenue for the artist/originator of the media). In other words the entire basis of this particular legislation is the notion of "justice".
Note also that we have evolved our morals/instinctive reactions to "injustice" (insert definition here involving underdog, undeserved damage/harm... etc) in part because they motivated the individuals who have these feelings to bring order/prevent destructive chaos, hence aiding survival of the group. In other words, the two are related; we don't have our emotions/moral reasoning for no practical reason.
I'd be willing to argue, for at least certain groups/types of laws, that justice is relative depending on your perspective. I agree, and that is exactly the case here. What some lawmakers have seen as just is seen by many people knowledgeable in the domain as unjust and uninformed. There is no chaos being withheld society by having these pathetic laws as they stand, because the NORM is that they are violated anyway, and by (arguably) the same number of people who would violate them if they were not there (I am talking about free sharing of digital info, not commercialized distribution).
Which is why discussions and refutations from us here are a good thing despite the fact that the law is against us in some places. We (the geeks) are hopefully more understanding of what is happening and have a better idea of what *is* just and "orderly" in this domain, so we can hopefully change the reality imposed on us by the current system. It is not just that I buy a piece of digital media with stuff on it and then be told that I can't put that it on another CD, or give it to someone for free at my expense. It is not just that our freedom to do as we please with the things we buy (or are given for free) be violated by corporations for profit. Copyright is, in *some* cases (like the one being discussed today) completely orthogonal to basic human ideals of freedom, particularly that of information (read: free speech).
Technology has moved very fast in the engineering world, but the ethical philosophy has sadly lagged behind, and innocent people have suffered.
I hate to participate in an off-topic discussion, but Israel's treatment of its Arab population (a highly debatable topic with a profound history btw) would be contrary to its own purpose if it is as you say. The whole idea was to establish a "Jewish" nation, so by definition the creation of the state was a very racist mistake indeed. The Arabs living "happily" in Israel are no measure in number to the others whose land is being stolen daily to new settlements being built on it, and who are being mercilessly massacred with their families if they attempt to fight back, where the settlement building is a daily series of facts being created and not something that happened a "long time ago". There are people losing, as we speak, the land that belonged to them for centuries because they do not happen to belong to a particular race. Lasers will not change how utterly disgusting that is, or the those people's efforts to fight back in whatever desperate way they can.
For the record: I do not condone attacks on civilians by either side, and am as disgusted at the Arab militants as I am at the Israelis. It's just that you're making it sound like Arabs are welcome to live in Israel, whereas this is obviously not true "by definition". Indeed, that's what the whole right-of-return issue with the Palestinian Arabs is all about.
Or: Salesman points out that these days there are women who cost 5500 US dollars an hour to bend over, and in light of such inflationary realities Joe Consumer is forced to pity his current state of affairs and just dish the 400 f*cking dollars out.
The geeks discovered that Bayesian filters do a reasonable learning job, but like all simple things in AI, fail the Turing test? To be fair, detecting SPAM is objectively less difficult than deciding on "humanness" because of the nature of email. While it is a very hard problem, Google and many other mail servers have recently become very proficient at spam blocking, but not perfect.
In conclusion: whenever you hear the word "totally solve" being associated with anything involving uncertain/probabilistic reasoning, you are probably being lied to.
Take issue with whoever is representing you in parliament/government. If you can't do that (get in touch with elected authority), and if a large number of people can't do that either, democracy has failed.
The internet is a good (or perhaps a bad) way to bring together "large numbers" of unsatisfied people. Market niche: web portal that simplifies concerted efforts to reach government officials in both free and not-so-free nations, divided by locale. You heard it here first.
Well, certainly there are lots of people who individually take issue with evolution. There are also lots of people who individually believe they've been abducted by aliens. That doesn't mean there's any controversy over alien abductions. Humble objections: You are putting the disbelief in the idea that human beings randomly evolved from arbitrary cosmic incident, at the same level of disbelief in alien abduction. Scientifically speaking, the latter is mythical BS whereas the former is fully established and has been demonstrated in labs at a small scale. Also, I don't think you fully understand how many people disbelieve in evolution (or have some ridiculous god-hand version of it) compared to the UFO dudes. People who talk about aliens abducting them are generally ridiculed by the public, whereas people who talk about how the world could never come to be through "chance" are perfectly acceptable by most church-going folk I know. Ditto jews and muslims.
And btw, don't forget that re-interpretations of religion today that allow the things previously thought of as "divine knowledge" to be peacefully handed over to science, do not mean there is no conflict. The people who threatened Galileo and Darwin were probably more religious than the cardinals of today, and they followed the same books, perhaps with a deeper and more complete understanding as well. I'm not trying to stir up conflict here, I'm just asserting that traditional religion has always depended on mystery (God did it!) while science aims to replace mystery with knowledge and logic. That is why it is silly to pretend that there is no problem and that the typical religious (or even non religious "believer") folk are like the UFO gang.
Yeah, I was about to say that if they can zip huge files while using power "like a 100-watt lightbulb" then why the hell can't they unzip them just as effortlessly? Or even better, why can't they play Crysis or run Vista while using the said likeliness of lightbulb consumption? Or do you automatically need more power (lots of lighbulb-watt stuff) for Vista? Is running Vista like running a Christmas tree compared to the lightbulb of file zipping? This is just so unfair, and I hope Ballmer squirts some education into the summary writer's mail box. I am so not going to RTFA.
I agree the reality is different, but I would not change my values on the battlefield because others in the "free world" have decided to cause fatal diseases among a civilian populace by bombing water stations, or engaged in organized (literally sanctioned) brutal sexual humiliation, or gang rape and murder of 14 year old girls and their families. Our governments need to work with OUR values, not the other way round.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. You cannot fight stupidity while keeping on corporate America's side of the fence. But as silly as it may sound, they are actually doing something necessary by offering this. People ARE stupid. They sometimes NEED to be told not to do certain things "on the internet" because their understanding of the internet is that it's some different mysterious place. One would think that they'd be more prudent (xenophobic) online, but kids don't think that way. Sitting at home gives them feelings of safety..etc.
My objection is that this is mandatory. I am in VA right now, and I would rather see this widely advertised but OPTIONAL. If you can't educate your kids, send them to us for a short seminar. Hopefully by the time my age group (20's) reaches the teenage children-raising age, we will be an entirely different demographic of parents, and this will be laughable. There are already parents joining social networking sites. This thing will be scrapped in 10-15 years time.
Yes, humans have actually evolved instincts for this, closely related to emotional relation to parents. It helps get past the grim nature of life and hence allows sentient beings who would otherwise have killed themselves in earlier, less interesting ages, to go on. Read the GP post again and try to see the absurdity of what this supreme being we invented wants us to "believe".
I'd also like to say that the analogy with pagerank is a little off-base. I realize this is a Stanford professor, but trust me neither the machine learning people nor the information retrieval folks know what the other side is talking about at a deep level, mostly because IR is a hack-ish, "sciencified" topic (I'm quoting a very well-known man in the field) while statistical inference is a little more formal. They each have completely different goals and challenges, though they do overlap in places.
Simply put: weighting results from an queried index is one problem, trying to classify a movie rating from a training set is another. And the approach of each regarding heuristics/hacks are similarly worlds apart.
I am only vaguely familiar with the netflix prize but I think you are asking a rather open-ended question here. Relevant data always improves classifiers, and some classifiers are better than others depending on the domain. Talking in relative terms isn't going to achieve much.
Ironclad Security only exists when you have Chuck Norris on the shift. Do we really have to discuss this?
Thank you for putting up the numbers, saved me a whole lot of searching as I was infuriated by the GP. 3 Trillion kind of makes a difference.
About the casualties(drifting slightly off-topic) I think the most alarming are the psychological effects.
There may be 4000 soldiers dead, but those returning home after an utterly meaningless time spent in a country thousands of miles away, are the ones tearing my heart apart. It is one thing to lose a limb or an eye. That is terrible, but at least you can try to move on with your life. But to have your body whole and yet be wandering like a madman (or literally as a madman) with a gun at night, in the streets of your home town, because some ABSOLUTE MORON decided to send you to war with a secular country that had nothing whatsoever to do with us.. I think that is the saddest thing in the world. My heart goes out to all the people we killed, and all the soldiers we lost, and all the money that could have saved millions and done miracles in supporting science and human welfare. War is such a bitch.
I feel a disturbance in the Force, as if a million quantum-physicists on slashdot cried out in agreement and were suddenly silenced...
You're right, I be silly for not reading right. One point though: reducing the resolution by a little did not seem to have an effect when I was trying the game out on very high. I never actually played (no time anymore :( ) but I had to see what it was like, and if these cards can survive the beating my machine took, they may be worth their cost in a few months time. The graphics were a feat of engineering.
Yes, the discourse between imaginative minds is an amazing and truly capturing phenomenon whatever the domain of discourse it may be. I would also have liked to be a fly on the wall in Max Born's office when he talked to Heisenberg, or to have listened to the tornados of mathematical rhetoric that went on betwen Feynman and Bohr when they talked over the phone to discuss the things that nobody else in the world could understand, or bear to hear. Maybe that wouldn't have been as entertaining as the distant worlds Clarke would have talked about, but it was still imagination, and imagination is such a darn beautiful thing. It is born of reflection, and reflection is what marks human kind, because it embodies the sentience/self-awareness/abstraction of concepts and physical symbols that makes us so "special". Actually, take away the quotes there. We are very lucky, and very special.
So it is no exaggeration to say that these are the people who have really lived. The least we can do, so that we ourselves can be said to have lived, is read what they wrote down.
RIP Mr. Clarke. Thank you for everything.
It makes you eye your furniture warily, with a discomfort that you can't quite understand.
50FPS is not decent? Are you..human?
Note also that we have evolved our morals/instinctive reactions to "injustice" (insert definition here involving underdog, undeserved damage/harm... etc) in part because they motivated the individuals who have these feelings to bring order/prevent destructive chaos, hence aiding survival of the group. In other words, the two are related; we don't have our emotions/moral reasoning for no practical reason. I'd be willing to argue, for at least certain groups/types of laws, that justice is relative depending on your perspective. I agree, and that is exactly the case here. What some lawmakers have seen as just is seen by many people knowledgeable in the domain as unjust and uninformed. There is no chaos being withheld society by having these pathetic laws as they stand, because the NORM is that they are violated anyway, and by (arguably) the same number of people who would violate them if they were not there (I am talking about free sharing of digital info, not commercialized distribution).
Which is why discussions and refutations from us here are a good thing despite the fact that the law is against us in some places. We (the geeks) are hopefully more understanding of what is happening and have a better idea of what *is* just and "orderly" in this domain, so we can hopefully change the reality imposed on us by the current system. It is not just that I buy a piece of digital media with stuff on it and then be told that I can't put that it on another CD, or give it to someone for free at my expense. It is not just that our freedom to do as we please with the things we buy (or are given for free) be violated by corporations for profit. Copyright is, in *some* cases (like the one being discussed today) completely orthogonal to basic human ideals of freedom, particularly that of information (read: free speech).
Technology has moved very fast in the engineering world, but the ethical philosophy has sadly lagged behind, and innocent people have suffered.
I hate to participate in an off-topic discussion, but Israel's treatment of its Arab population (a highly debatable topic with a profound history btw) would be contrary to its own purpose if it is as you say. The whole idea was to establish a "Jewish" nation, so by definition the creation of the state was a very racist mistake indeed. The Arabs living "happily" in Israel are no measure in number to the others whose land is being stolen daily to new settlements being built on it, and who are being mercilessly massacred with their families if they attempt to fight back, where the settlement building is a daily series of facts being created and not something that happened a "long time ago". There are people losing, as we speak, the land that belonged to them for centuries because they do not happen to belong to a particular race. Lasers will not change how utterly disgusting that is, or the those people's efforts to fight back in whatever desperate way they can.
For the record: I do not condone attacks on civilians by either side, and am as disgusted at the Arab militants as I am at the Israelis. It's just that you're making it sound like Arabs are welcome to live in Israel, whereas this is obviously not true "by definition". Indeed, that's what the whole right-of-return issue with the Palestinian Arabs is all about.
Or: Salesman points out that these days there are women who cost 5500 US dollars an hour to bend over, and in light of such inflationary realities Joe Consumer is forced to pity his current state of affairs and just dish the 400 f*cking dollars out.
The geeks discovered that Bayesian filters do a reasonable learning job, but like all simple things in AI, fail the Turing test? To be fair, detecting SPAM is objectively less difficult than deciding on "humanness" because of the nature of email. While it is a very hard problem, Google and many other mail servers have recently become very proficient at spam blocking, but not perfect.
In conclusion: whenever you hear the word "totally solve" being associated with anything involving uncertain/probabilistic reasoning, you are probably being lied to.
Take issue with whoever is representing you in parliament/government. If you can't do that (get in touch with elected authority), and if a large number of people can't do that either, democracy has failed.
The internet is a good (or perhaps a bad) way to bring together "large numbers" of unsatisfied people. Market niche: web portal that simplifies concerted efforts to reach government officials in both free and not-so-free nations, divided by locale. You heard it here first.
Oh. My. God. I am closing my browser very quickly now.
Yeah well 50% isn't fairly well either (FF3 score). These tests are a difficult philosophical question.
And btw, don't forget that re-interpretations of religion today that allow the things previously thought of as "divine knowledge" to be peacefully handed over to science, do not mean there is no conflict. The people who threatened Galileo and Darwin were probably more religious than the cardinals of today, and they followed the same books, perhaps with a deeper and more complete understanding as well. I'm not trying to stir up conflict here, I'm just asserting that traditional religion has always depended on mystery (God did it!) while science aims to replace mystery with knowledge and logic. That is why it is silly to pretend that there is no problem and that the typical religious (or even non religious "believer") folk are like the UFO gang.
Yeah, I was about to say that if they can zip huge files while using power "like a 100-watt lightbulb" then why the hell can't they unzip them just as effortlessly? Or even better, why can't they play Crysis or run Vista while using the said likeliness of lightbulb consumption? Or do you automatically need more power (lots of lighbulb-watt stuff) for Vista? Is running Vista like running a Christmas tree compared to the lightbulb of file zipping? This is just so unfair, and I hope Ballmer squirts some education into the summary writer's mail box. I am so not going to RTFA.
The 1600's called, they want their "Thus" word back, and they're pissed.
Also, this is the funniest thing I have read in a long time. Holy didn't-see-that-punchline-coming, batman!
I agree the reality is different, but I would not change my values on the battlefield because others in the "free world" have decided to cause fatal diseases among a civilian populace by bombing water stations, or engaged in organized (literally sanctioned) brutal sexual humiliation, or gang rape and murder of 14 year old girls and their families. Our governments need to work with OUR values, not the other way round.