bascule

Long ago OS developers discovered a wacky solution that proved useful for a variety of circumstances. If a program attempts to access memory which doesn't exist, a page fault is triggered. This executed the BIOS's page fault handler. However, an OS could substitute any page fault handler they so desired. And thus virtual memory was born... Today virtual memory is a little more elegant than that... CPUs now include a memory management unit (in protected mode it prevents programs from writing into each other's address space). It can be used for many other nifty things, such as swap or memory mapped IO: write to an address in memory, and the data will be written out somewhere completely different. It could be a file. It could be an entirely different piece of hardware (memory map the Linux framebuffer device, for instance, and you can draw directly into it by writing to RAM). But, there's a price: Those virtual addresses eat up address space that can be used by physical RAM. That upper megabyte is reserved for all sorts of memory mapped IO operations between various peripherals in your computer and the OS. And depending on what devices you have you may not even be able to get 3GB... video RAM will be mapped into the system address space, meaning if you have some fancy pants 512MB video card, you'll lose 512MB of address space that could've been used for physical RAM.

That's no slight on their intelligence. IMM was brilliant, but alas, posts here no longer...

I just bought two terabyte hard drives and made them into a ZFS array, then consolidated all of my data. I filled it up before I could finish. Fortunately ZFS is expandable so I'll probably just buy another 1TB drive and throw it in the pool. HDTV is going to be a huge consumer of bandwidth. Your average feature length film, in HD, will run in the 25-35GB range. Lowballing it, 4TB is approximately 160 HD movies. And that says nothing about Ultra High Definition, which will run you 360GB for a two hour film (encoded in a codec like H.264) A 4 TB hard drive will store about 11 of those...

All I have to say is: GOBAMA! and F*CKABEES! (if you don't catch the reference to the latter you have missed one of the best movies in recent history)

Not true, the percentage of neurons active at any given time fluctuates wildly. Putting any fixed number like "10%" on it is silly. Also not true, the neocortical hierarchy is constantly processing vast quantities of both sensory and state information in a highly parallel manner. The interesting part about neocortical behavior is that only unexpected patterns move up the hierarchy. Patterns which were predicted at lower levels are handled at that level. There's also a multitude of feedback loops between sense processing and motor control (i.e. the cerebellum) that can bypass the neocortex entirely. Think of the multitude of movements that must be accomplished in unison in order to accomplish any given task. I like to think of Marvin Minsky's example of walking through a coffee shop talking to your friend while balancing a coffee cup on a saucer... You are not constantly switching your attention between moving your feet and processing sense data from them as well as the entirety of your body (kinesthesia) to ensure you don't fall, ensuring the coffee cup remains balanced on the saucer, and processing your friend's speech while formulating your response. Instead different sense areas are processing all of this information in parallel. For your average adult, the act of walking and balancing the saucer is effectively "unconscious" until the lower levels of your neocortical hierarchy sense something is amiss. The speech processing is also unconscious. Your conscious attention is devoted to processing the meaning of your friend's speech, and formulating your response. The rest of it is being handled concurrently in an unconscious manner by several different brain systems working in unison. There's no "task switching" involved (although you can be sure the higher levels of your neocortex will come into play as soon as you realize you tripped and/or spilled your coffee) Bottom line: your brain isn't a von Neumann architecture. It's massively concurrent and fully asynchronous. I think Glider's point was more along the lines of Dennett's "Joycean Machine" (as described in Consciousness Explained): consciousness operates by rerepresenting a single series of symbols to itself. That's why you can't have two inner monologues that talk over each other (unless you're schizophrenic)

I think most of the ones who posted here regularly got scared away

December 21st, 2012 is the end of the Mayan Calendar and the end of Timewave Zero. Depending on what brand of 2012 speculation you're dealing with, it's the important end date.

That's generally a moot point with laptops...

If this were the real national election I'd have some thinking to do... I'll withhold a vote for now Update: I voted for Obama. Kucinich endorsed him. And as much as I'd like Paul to try to trim down our federal budget, he's just got too many flaws for me to seriously endorse him as a mainstream candidate.

I guess Paul gets a bye on stem cell funding because he doesn't want to fund anything

Yes, I consider science immensely important from a public policy perspective. I'm afraid candidates who decide to cherrypick their scientific facts will not do a good job applying science to public policy.

He claims to have used this one: [math]P(A|B) = \frac{P(B | A)\, P(A)}{P(B)}[/math] [math] \propto L(A | B)\, P(A) [/math] Not really sure how a 50/50 starting probability figures into that, but I can't say I really understand it...

December 22nd, 2012 should be sufficient

I'm just wondering if this guy is really blowharding up his credentials in order to sell this as somehow being scientific...

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/sciences/story/0,12243,1164894,00.html Using Bayes theorem, a PhD physicist has calculated the probability of God's existence to be 67%! I see no flaws in his methodology and must accept his results! He also maintains his personal ad hoc out-of-the-blue calculation places the probability of God's existence in the 95% realm. Since the value calculated with Bayes theorem is lower, it's clear evidence that it's correct! God probably exists. QED.

Since ZFS is licensed under the CDDL, a proper port (i.e. linked into the kernel) isn't possible because the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL. Someone's trying to run it on FUSE, but last I read he was encountering data corruption (due to bugs in FUSE itself) and beyond that, painfully slow performance. Your best bet for ZFS is probably FreeBSD 7.0 (RC1 is out now) or Nexenta (Ubuntu/OpenSolaris)

If you have a computer program fluent in natural language it shouldn't greatly matter what natural language(s) it's fluent in, unless you want try to apply the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to AI systems.

From what I understand the device is actually filesystem aware and only copies filesystem data and metadata, rather than being just a dumb storage device which ensures the entire disk is properly mirrored whether there is data on it or not. So it's not so much that the disks were small as there wasn't that much actual data on them. It's a lot closer to Sun's ZFS: http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/

Other techniques are also successful with a lower rate of false positives, or at least that's what I gather from the people experienced in this matter who have been testifying. John Kiriakou seems to be arguing the same angle as Pangloss in that it was successful in the instance of Zubaydah. However, Kiriakou at least conceeds waterboarding is torture. And when the person you're torturing doesn't actually know anything but feeds you false information for the sole purpose of ending his torture? You've both tortured an innocent person and wasted valuable time.

I don't think something with is correct one time out of a million can be considered effective by any stretch of the imagination. Call it counterspin... Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin had himself waterboarded and concluded: waterboarding is torture. Former CIA operative John Kiriakou defended the utility of waterboarding while conceeding: it is torture. Former U.S. Navy instructor Malcolm Wrightson Nance says: "Waterboarding is torture, period" Lt. Col. V. Stuart Couch, a judge on the Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals, maintains: waterboarding is torture. You're not exactly finding sources who argue it isn't torture, much less sources who themselves have undergone waterboarding. Instead you've taken a neutral position, ostensibly for the purpose of dodging the moral issue entirely. Because you're effectively sidestepping the moral repercussions of waterboarding at the same time you defend its use as an interrogation technique. You think torture is an issue of political correctness? Wow... Pangloss, I point out specific flaws in your reasoning, and you recoil with "You're clearly being rude towards me" (ad hominem), "Bascule distracts and deflects" (ad hominem), "politically correct rhetoric from Bascule" (ad hominem) Your argumentation is consistently riddled with logical fallacies, and furthermore, even in cases where you argument contains a textbook example of a logical fallacy, it takes me some ten posts of back and forth before you'll even admit it. Can you improve the substance of your arguments, rather than constantly attacking me as a person?

Oh please, we have high ranking military intelligence officials testifying before the House Judiciary Committee that waterboarding produces false information and is torture: http://www.abajournal.com/news/waterboarding_is_torture_and_ineffective_military_witnesses_tell_house_pane/ Let's call it quid pro quo To spin that in the other direction... you're defending torture

Yes, he relies on unnamed sources like Daniel Coleman attest to Zubaydah being crazy... Do you have any actual counterargument against the false positives, or are you just going to lodge an ad hominem argument supported by strawmen and outright falsehoods? Or do you even care? Your original argument as stated completely glosses over false positives. One positive result equals success! Never mind how many false positives there were.

Oh man, Add this to my bin of "Threads with really interesting sounding topics which have an OP that takes the thread in a totally different direction than I thought it was going" So, I posted a thread for where I thought this thread was going given the topic alone: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?p=380499

If you were trying to program an AI system, what language would you use? The canonical answer seems to be Lisp/Scheme, although any functional programming weenie would probably tout their language of choice simply because they believe functional voodoo is perfect for everything. Long ago there was Prolog, the "natural language of artificial intelligence," which has since fallen into disuse. Nowadays, I'd say Erlang. But not necessarily as a functional weenie. The brain uses a shared nothing message passing architecture to achieve massive concurrency. Neurons are discrete and don't have anything like shared memory, such as the type multiple threads (the canonical concurrency mechanism) inside your computer do. Neurons are much like little processes, which store state, mutate it depending on the messages they receive (or don't receive) in realtime, and use the combination of the incoming (or expected) messages and internal state to generate output. Numenta, perhaps the only people on this planet working on a high level computer model of the mammalian neocortex (BlueBrain is working on an extremely low level model in comparison) have devised a simulation for the neocortical hierarchy, which operates as a shared nothing process architecture, except the level of granularity is raised to that of a neocortical column which is the fundamental building block of the mammalian neocortex. Neocortical columns, much like neurons, are a shared nothing architecture which uses message passing, and likewise so is the NuPIC software (although that's written in C++) So, all that said, what's the best language for Artificial Intelligence? Well, ostensibly one that uses a shared nothing message passing architecture. So, Erlang!

When it comes to preserving the integrity of my data, I wouldn't go with a random free service from a no name person you can't even contact. Peer to peer backup is hard. Tahoe, which is the software underlying Allmydata, breaks your data up into chunks and typically sends (I believe) 12 chunks to individual peers, only 4 of which you actually need to get a particular chunk of your data back (it uses erasure encoding) With this software, you have no clue what they're actually doing, beyond it being P2P, and as far as I can tell there's no one to vouch for it whatsoever. You might check out Drobo, but it certainly doesn't fall into the cheap category: http://www.drobo.com/