bascule

We know humans are intelligent. One of the most straightforward approaches is to copy the human brain inside a computer. That's what the BlueBrain project is trying: http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/

Simple. Narrow AI has immediate military applications. Strong AI does not.

Greenspan tried to move us towards a more deregulated system. The experiment was a failure.

Yeah, Al Franken and Alan Grayson are definitely the two standout Democrats of this Congress who actually seem willing to take a stand and call out their opponents. I was beginning to think the Democrats don't have a spine.

I find it interesting that even in 20/20 hindsight of this and the financial crisis, people still oppose more stringent regulation of these markets (derivatives and securities)

I think the important issue with the Austrian school is: is it pragmatic? I am very tired of hearing about its idealistic virtues. Pick a country that can adopt it today, and push it there. I don't think the country is America. I also think most of Europe would laugh at the suggestion. Even Switzerland.

This is hilarious: _QAvkFS_cgk

I think this video speaks for itself... YDR47EKTrCQ Wow. The common themes that run through the video are rather... pronounced. Socialism. Communism. The state of journalism (yes apparently if you're not hypercritical of Obama, you're not doing your job as a news organization). I don't know what can be done about the Fox Noise problem, other than trying to get all reasonably minded people to recognize that it's about as effective a news organization as Pravda. Except in this case, it's anti-government propaganda, at least now that the Democrats are in power. I think the video does a good job of showing that the anti-Obama vitriol isn't just limited to the bigger mouths on the network like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly. It's a systematic, across-the-board attack from as many talking heads as they can muster. What do you think? Is Obama right for calling them out?

And this really is the critical issue. Credit is as essential to our economy as oil is to an engine. It would seem abskebabs thinks that were there no bailout, the economy would recover in relatively short order, despite the ensuing credit crunch as major financial institutions collapsed as the toxic debt burned through them one by one. In FreeMarketVision, smaller institutions should spring up to accommodate the demand for credit when the larger ones fail. Citigroup was in danger of failure. Citigroup holds $1.93 trillion in assets. The failure of Citigroup would be worse than 3 Lehman Brothers failing at once. In the event of that scale happened, do you really think small lenders are going to be willing to extend the amount of credit needed to keep our economy running, much less able? Unfortunately, abskebabs never replied to the thread asking if the bailouts were a good idea, sharing with us what he believes would've happened had the bailouts not happened, so it's really hard to gauge exactly how he thinks the world would recover from such a collapse of the credit system.

There's just not a lot of professional desktop software for Linux. Period.

7680 x 4320 is approximately 33 megapixels. According to some random web site, the human eye's equivalent in megapixels is approximately 576 megapixels. So... yes, and then some.

Was that what he was doing here? And that's certainly not the only time he's questioned the ability of his opponents to reason about economics (specifically myself). Do you see any of the science experts around here doing that? Every time I see him doing that it makes me want to ignore him. Because pointing out that insulting your opponents is a left/right issue? Zuh?

For what it's worth, much of the software I use at work (and I'm not just talking about Office/productivity software) is only available for Windows. For example, you're not going to find a Linux version of something like this: http://www.elecard.com/products/products-pc/consumer/streameye-tools/ So you might add "professionals" to your list there...

One way to model thoughts is as the four dimensional evolution of the contents of the thalamus: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Consciousness_Studies/Table_Of_Theories

For us yanks across the pond, what's the dilly?

Heh, never thought of a tail...

I have to agree... you're quite the blowhard. Cutting people down like that is not helpful in a discussion. I have seen many, many cases of experts in hard sciences on these very forums having meaningful discussions on hard science topics with laymen. Perhaps if you didn't take every remark someone makes as an opportunity to get on your Austrian school soapbox and bore everyone to death, but instead discussed the issues broached within the scope of the original discussion you'd find people more willing to engage with you. Then again...

Ubuntu has a server distribution that works well. In other news, Slate has declared Windows 7 as the best OS on the market: http://www.slate.com/id/2233294/ I just got a new workstation, and my planned configuration is an OS X host with a Windows 7 guest.

I started on Slackware 2.3, with a 1.2.8 kernel. Yourself? I think the fanbase is largely Linux users, and if I had to guess it was created by a self-deprecating Linux user. I guess some people don't have a sense of humor.

I concur. In the meantime you can report them as spam.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/cheney-slams-obama-on-afghanistan-policy/?hp After some 8 years of bumbling on Afghanistan, letting it descend into the leading producer of opium and while power slipped into the hands of drug cartels, Cheney has decided the problem is: Obama! It seems the Bush Administration did a review of Afghanistan and created a report, which the Obama Administration didn't use, instead deciding to put together their own report. I'm getting a bit of deja vu here. You see, Clinton left the Bush Administration with a plan for fighting al Qaeda, which the Bush Administration ignored. Pot. Kettle. Black. Etc. So what's the difference between the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration? After the Bush Administration ignored Clinton's plan, they did nothing to combat Al Qaeda in the interim, and then 9/11 happened. Obama has his own plans for Afghanistan.

I remember during what I believe was the move from hardy to intrepid they switched all device references from files to UUIDs and it royally hosed my LVM+MD RAID A random member drive ended up getting attached to a phantom md array, and the real array never started, at least on its own. To restore my RAID I had to remove the drive from the phantom array, shut that array down, then reassemble my real RAID with all drives. Unfortunately I had to do this every time the system booted, and each time it required a RAID resync. This is perhaps the one case I've ever seen of "re-install Linux, problem solved." After getting tired of having to manually reassemble the RAID whenever the box went down, I blew away its current install and threw on a fresh install of Jaunty. Haven't had any problems since. I emailed the LKML about it and they admitted it was a nasty problem which at the very least needed to be better documented.

It's possible for video files to take up a terabyte. For example, there's Super Hi-Vision: The storage space required by video increases exponentially with the resolution (since there are vertical and horizontal components)

Reported as spam

Indeed, and one of the mantras coming out of the financial crisis was "If it's too big to fail then it's too big to exist!" It's hard to say when "too big to fail" happens exactly, but Lehman Brothers and many other institutions certainly surpassed it. The Fed/Treasury experimented with the "let it fail" approach. Everyone expected the government to bail out Lehman Brothers, and it didn't, fearing the effect it might have on how other institutions might assume risk. The result was the financial crisis. It seems the failure of one of these sorts of institutions is enough to freeze up credit worldwide. I hate to think what would happen if an institution the size of Citigroup were to fail.