EvaPeron

You just know this was an op run by Harry Pierce and company, lol!

Godspeed, Veeger. Godspeed.

I am getting this on my holiday list: http://www.amazon.com/A-Madman-Dreams-Turing-Machines/dp/140...

The statement that translating an outcome in a mathematical model into the physical world is, in quantum mechanics, a probabilistic operation simply depends on one's viewpoint. The Schrodinger Equation IS deterministic. As always, this is simply a matter of how one views quantum mechanics.

Stating the obvious here, but at what point do we drop the word "simulation" and just say IBM has electronically re-created a macaque monkey brain? Doing that would then entail ethical issues, just like if it were a real monkey. Does not sound like they are quite "there" yet, but they sound close. Let's quit "monkeying about" with weasel words like "simulation" and start tackling the inevitable ethical considerations head-on.

And this is why, boys and girls, we don't do bath salts.

Yes, I call cannibalistic tribes murderers (provided any still exist, hopefully not). But my point is to not rush to make simplistic categories. My attitude on these and related issues is that it is enough work, more than enough work, for me to figure out how to live my own life ethically, without spending energies casting judgements upon others. Personally, I would never hunt dolphins or whales - I don't like hunting anyway and would not do that, heck, I take insects outside when I find them inside rather than stepping on them, lol - more seriously, yes, I find this research very compelling and for these reasons the concept of harming sentient beings is very troubling to me, and would not want to hunt a dolphin or a whale any more than, say, a visitor from another planet. That said, these are still complex issues which science can inform upon, but we need also to understand that in nature, in biology, one's own species is the priority, and so the "better angels of our nature" may and hopefully do go towards wanting humane treatment for more sentient creatures, but also let's not get on a bully pulpit on sensitive and complex matters. Again, I have found it is hard enough to try and be an ethical person for oneself, without trying to be judge and jury over others. That is my only point with the Eskimo tribe reference. :-)

Cool problem. I LOVE optimization problems like this, lol. A good "start up" kind of idea too. Scheduling ambulances. Requires not just optimizing for streets, etc., but for time, times of night there are more calls, etc. Requires forecasting, historical data, and so on. Really a very cool problem. In a nutshell, you need a probablistic model of what times have more calls, and where these are likely to come from, and spread out your buses accordingly. Perfect for machine learning solutions. You could have a neural net to give you your probablistic model, then some kind of cost-based heuristic to make decisions based upon the model and real-time data. The coolest problems are the ones with no one right answer, but with "better" and "worse" answers, because, well, they are just more fun, lol. Contact me at FrankErdman2000 AT yahoo dot com if you want to discuss more - I can't get into too many details on a public forum due to things like NDA etc. :-) Put bus scheduling or something in subject line. Seriously though, thanks for this post. Anything to prevent boredom. :-)

We need to be very careful here. There are those (not myself) who would contend that a fetus is a "person", thereby implying that abortion is "murder". I disagree with that, but if we say cetaceans are "persons" than is whaling then "murder"? Are we calling the Eskimo tribes who to this day hunt whales as part of their cultural tradition "murderers"? I am all for conservation, don't get me wrong, but willy-nilly throwing around the word "person" is not helpful, it is not helpful in the debate about reproductive choice and it is not helpful in the conservation debate either.

A more general idea that the more "conscious" (variously defined) an entity is, the more it should be treated humanely. That makes sense to me, and to most people I would think. But we need to figure out how to do this with getting into ethical quandaries like the ones outlined.

If we are on the subject of what animals it is ethical to hunt, etc., how about more strongly protecting the Great Apes (chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans) as they are our closest cousins in nature? Whales are more a rival, than anything else.

I thought recently what makes some people forever poor and some people forever prosperous. Really, it is mentality. The poor will burn principle as soon as they get it. The rich will not. That simple. The rich stay rich by not touching principle, only interest, and then, not even all of the interest. The poor stay poor by burning principle as soon as they have it. It really is quite simple. Change mentality, change results.

"A touch, a touch I do confess." (Hamlet) LOL. Yes, "mapping" is a better term than "operation" for reasons you put forward. :-)

Seriously, "true that", and that is why although most of my "day jobs" deal with Java, C is cooler, lol.

A function is a type, is a set, is a number. And that, frankly, is difficult to get around. Coming from the C / Java world, it is hard to understand that "types" are really sets (in a mathematical sense) which in turn, are numbers (i.e. the set of natural integers), and a function (in terms of the value it returns) is a number as well and can be considered as being an "operation" upon a set, i.e., put set A into set B and one has set C. Function == Type == Set == Number, or, perhaps, a Number is simply an instance of a Set which in turn is another way of saying Type, so, basically, Function == Set. What makes it conceptually difficult is that the word "function" entails "operation", which entails "time", when, really, one could think of "function" as sort of being "those steps one has to go through in order to define a set of type S".

A set is a theorem, so now we have, Theorum == Type == Set == Number. A function is simply the way of defining or proving the Theorum, e.g. if set A == B, and B == C, then A == C is a function, which itself is a Set, conjoining A and C.

The "type" of an object (integer, char, whatever) is really a Set, and the way to construct that set (also being itself a set) is a function, which is what one might call a "program".

These things are different ways of looking at the same thing. A "type" (set) is the Theorum, its proof is the function (program which constructs the Theorum or Set).

The only difference between function/program and Set/Theorum is the former "constructs" the later, the former being "temporal" the latter being "eternal" or put it another way, the former being the "building blocks" the latter being the "finished product".

So yes pointers are numbers, which though are Sets, constructed by functions and these sets construct the Theorums. The type is the Theorum, the function is the construction of that Theorum, done vis-a-vis Sets and that is what (IMHO) that thing which we call "computer science" is all about. :-)

I like Tesla too, but dude, this sounds like the Chinese water torture cell that felled Houdini. Sometimes the greatest finally go too far. Being protected by a Faraday cage, this stunt is unlikely to kill him, but the affect upon the brain would appear to be unknown. Part of me says it is a great experiment, the other part of me says, dude, that is what lab rats are for, lol.

At any rate, as AC/DC says, "For those about to rock, we salute you." :-)

I might imagine one day C.S. departments might merge back into the Maths department, where (IMHO) C.S. most properly belongs.

Sour.Grapes.

Let's recall when Jobs was ousted - worked out real well for Apple, now did it not? He had to be dragged in later to turn the ship around. FB has made some mistakes no doubt, but do not underestimate the power of a visionary like a Jobs or a Zuckerberg. Investors should give him more patience.

One could of course write a wrapper function to create strings, like char* someString = makeAString("A String"); where makeAString takes a char* as input, allocates the memory it needs via malloc (I prefer calloc though as it is safer by setting the allocated memory to a default value, IMO), and returns a char* as output, thus saving lines of code whenever one wants to make a string. Probably stating the obvious I guess, but if one takes a few days to make some wrappers like that one saves time down the road. Were it my boss, I would say, OK, we can do it in C, but you need to give me time to make some wrappers that I need in order to get this done efficiently. Just a thought. :-)

No. assholes. ever.

As a physics buff, I'm sure this is fascinating, but I just could not bring myself to watch the video - I love my cats too darn much, lol.

To all the "haters" on this thread, I will simply say this:

Senator, I worked with Darl McBride. I knew Darl McBride. Darl McBride was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Darl McBride.

:-)

What I mean is it does not collapse "all by itself", rather, it needs environmental interference in order to "collapse" from the observer's point of view. In the view of the many-worlds theory, though, it never really collapses, only appears to from the observer point of view, due to environmental interference.

This is exciting to me because it seems to make the Everett "Many Worlds" view inevitable, because if A) the wave function exists (which this article seems to indicate) and B) if it never collapses spontaneously (and 50 years of research into this would seem to say no it does not), then necessarily one gets "many worlds", i.e., a large number of co-existing universes inhabiting an N-dimensional Hilbert Space, or, to put it differently, there are worlds in which Schrodinger's cat lives, and ones where it does not.

All very cool, but I still am not planning to sign up for the quantum suicide experiment to test for quantum immortality just yet. ;)

I think this author has confused "writing code" with "computer science". Ultimately, what I love about computer SCIENCE, is that it is just that, a science, a subset of maths. And maths are awesome. I would suggest he go back and read about Godel, Wittgenstein, Hilbert, Turing, and their compatriots, all of whose work influences computer science today. These giants were not "geeks" or "code monkeys". They were scientists. If one keeps in mind the august underpinnings of the field, one can remain inspired, even though surely the author is correct in that working for non-technical managers sucks. But if that is the case, then time to move to another job, or go into teaching, but do not abandon the field just because of one sucky work experience.

Also, I did not like the nativist, xenophobic remarks in the article. Literally half or more of the folks I work with on a daily basis are from India or various parts of Asia and they are all brilliant, hard-working, gracious people whom I consider it an honor and a priviledge to work for, and I am speaking as a white American. Nativism has no place in any serious discussion.

It has been a while since I have played around with HTML (do Java at work, mostly) but surely one can do tables in HTML 5, as in previous versions? If not, something wrong there, IMO...

I might get some flack for this, but, honestly, read Ayn Rand's classic novel, "Atlas Shrugs" because its epistemology (theory about how we know things) is very much from Aristotle and Nietzsche (by her own description of her influences). I don't 100% always agree with her politics, but in terms of basic philosophical ideas, her work is a fun and easy way to get acquainted with mainstream classic Western philosophy. Again, not to get into politics, but if you want an easy way to understand a lot of what Aristotle was saying, her novel "Atlas Shrugged" really draws on these basic ideas (Law of Non-Contradiction, and so on).

Seeing this, I rather have the reaction Thomas Huxley had when reading the theory of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin - "How utterly stupid of me not to have thought of that myself!" :-) Brilliant, brilliant idea. Seriously. I totally would go to such a theme park. Zombies in Detroit. Awesome!

I feel your pain also as someone who is often called "talented" but seems to not quite be able to work corporate politics enough to land very overdue promotions. Unfortunately the IT field seems like any other field - talent is one thing, but "playing the game" also is needed, something to this day I neither relish nor do particularly well, not seeming to have the stomach for it. If there is one thing I could proffer by way of advise (at the risk of blind leading the blind, ha) - doing websites/IT work for friends / family on a contract basis I do from time to time to try and cover over some financial rough spots - i.e. just charge a flat hourly rate (say, $50/hr) to help with somebody's website/LAN issue/what-have-you. Needless to say the blogosphere, so-called, is saturated, so it is more difficult than ever to "monetize" any site, however good. So just going the route of saying, hey, I'll do your website for you for X amount per hour is at least one way of raking in some dough, speaking from personal experience. As Socrates might tell one, sometimes being smart is not enough to get around political bullcrap, sometimes the smart folks end up with the hemlock. :-) So from personal experience I really feel where you are coming from. So best thing I can say is while it is good to continue to think long-term of how to monetize your sites and so on, for short-term pain, one might want to think of doing individual contract type of projects, to sort of tied one over the hump as it were, something I have done more than once. Good luck.

I think the 1614 Roman rite of exorcism was "updated" after this incident, i.e., exorcisms do still transpire, but in a different way i.e., not talking to "the demon" a la the movie "The Exorcist" but more praying for healing and so forth, reason being, if the subject is not really processed by some other entity, addressing said entity aloud directly might make the situation worse by the power of suggestion. So (to my knowledge anyway) I think exorcisms do still take place, but they try and be a bit more aware of the delicacies of those sorts of situations.