Anyone else notice, in their scuba diving, that the images for the area always have such colorful reefs from pics? There's the expected tourism pamphlets, but even images in nearby museum-style informative places, showing the area 20 years ago. Then when you go down, it's mostly grey? That's my experience anyway. I've only been down 8 times, mostly the Caribbean.

I guess the most likely reason is marketing decisions by the tourism wing of local government. But I have to suspect at least part of it is just a trend of dying reefs everywhere - related I'd guess to climate change. Maybe some experts can reply with more info - is this a valid theory?

An arbitrarily large collection of of perceptrons groups that only demonstrate linear seperability can solve any problem. The issue is that it quickly becomes impractical to train them.

The same foolhardy approach was demonstrated by Minsky... "Define road. Define tree. Drive down road." Except that in certain lighting and visibility conditions road looks like tree, and tree looks like road, leading to an infinite number of exceptions and rules.

Minksy's sin was attacking the scientist, not just his science.

Minsky wrote the book Perceptrons (with Seymour Papert), attacking the work of Frank Rosenblatt, which became the foundational work in the analysis of artificial neural networks. This book is the center of a controversy in the history of AI, as some claim it to have had great importance in discouraging research of neural networks in the 1970s, and contributing to the so-called "AI winter".[24] He also founded several other famous AI models. His book A framework for representing knowledge created a new paradigm in programming.

"Minsky must have been strongly influenced by this feeling that computers and brains were the same sort of thing because his thesis was on what we now call “neural networks”. In those days you didn’t simulate such machines using general purpose computers – you built them using whatever electronics came to hand.

In 1951 Minsky built a large machine, the first randomly wired neural network learning machine (called SNARC, for Stochastic Neural-Analog Reinforcement Computer), based on the reinforcement of simulated synaptic transmission coefficients."

So he did nothing eh? If you re-read this thread you might be able to figure out the non-sequitur needed to tie what he did at MIT with what he did in his life. The assertion: if he did it it prior to MIT he didn't do it is absurd.

I accept your apology.

Incorrect... we conservatives want EVERYBODY to own guns and defend that right for all.

And no, the 2nd amendment didn't, by definition or otherwise, change the constitution. Like the rest of the bill of rights, it clearly delineated the rights of the people that the government could not infringe upon. That's why progressives hate it so much, because it limits their all powerful government concept. It's also why it's so amusing when clowns like you try to pretend the 2A applies to the militia... the entire BoR applies exclusively to rights of the people but hey, "let's just switch tone for a second here on number 2 and talk about rights of a governmental armed force".

It's different because it was hotter, and the current problem isn't cooling, it's warming.

It's similar in that heating and cooling are both problems. What we want is relative stasis. We could conceivably survive significant warming, but we are neither preparing adequately for that eventuality, nor effectively avoiding it.

We tolerated vile AC spam for many many years. This is almost certainly a new policy triggered by the 8chan stuff. Everyone is shitting themselves about anonymous forums now.

Sorry boys and girls, you'll have to find a new site to be horrible to each other. Slashdot is no longer the cool hang out for expressing your deepest, darkest nerd rage.

But Elvis went home! I saw him on the flying saucer. He was sitting next to bigfoot.

Now all they need to do is correct the moderation issues. Which is much more of a problem than the AC trolls. AC are easy to ignore. Mod abuse isn't.

Moderation didn't result in stemming the flow of hate posts that contain content that is illegal in much of the developed world. The 8chan fiasco, where the shooter posted a manifesto bragging about his hatred of immigrants, forced 8chan off the net. Nobody wants to be the next 8chan because of assholes who are too lazy to create an account and don't want to be subject to account deletion. There's no obligation to provide a platform for hate speech, and plenty of business incentives not to - in particular search engines down ranking sites with hate content.

Reddit had to dump their incel forums because of death threats to women. If someone wants to host that crap, good luck, but it's now toxic. Can't find a hosting company willing to host your website? Host it from home and be ready for a knock at the door followed by the SWAT team half a second later.

I'm not a part of any militia... I'm a part of the people, who's rights shall not be infringed.

I know English is a complicated language but the 2A (and the rest of the bill of rights) deals with the rights of the people, in contrast to those of the militia. Since it's a given that a well regulated militia would be necessary to secure the free states, the founding fathers ensured that the people would maintain arms as well... you know, just in case we ever had to fight a war against a tyrannical state militia as they'd just finished doing.

It is.

We can speculate and even come to a consensus that we will codify because the hypothesis works well enough.

And then we can continue to work the problem with little expectation of success.

"I Dreamed A Dream"
(from "Les Misérables")

Not to worry... American gun owners have already stockpiled over 1,000,000,000 rounds of ammunition.

Agreed 12-13 is pushing it. It might be that there is better information than I found with a quick search on what they are talking about which indicated 15-16 for at least this particular girl. It's hard to say without being there. I'm skeptical of the idea that a pack of 16yr old girls in a billionaire's private entourage didn't know exactly what 'massage' was code for and I'm certain the people paying for massages knew exactly what it was code for.

Groping/etc depends on context. In normal circumstances completely inappropriate but when you've paid an escort/hooker? I know with an escort/nude massage arrangement the money supposed to be for time/massage but that is a technicality to keep it legal and facilitate upsell because you can't openly say the money is for sex. It certainly isn't a smooth approach but isn't the whole point that people get the result without putting in the time/effort to be smooth?

Aww... look at you threatening to bomb American citizens. Gosh, I wonder why anyone would be reluctant to surrender their guns with folks like you around.

terrible. slashdot is a socialist utopia now. great.

I think executable is an odd term. Actually, an oxymoron. I mean, think about it. If you execute a program, it starts running. If you execute a person, it stops running.

Why even trust just that layer? If it's really a backup, and not something frequently accessed, why isn't it encrypted locally before transmitting to the cloud? It's painfully easy. Anyone can GPG a tar.gz file or use a Veracrypt volume. This is just plain retardedness.

Sometimes high intelligence produces a sense of privilege.

I agree.

An interesting read is how many times physics has been declared dead.

"We have little else to discover." "We will, shortly, know all there is to know." "Scientists are working on the few remaining mysteries."

As it is, we have too much to learn.

i was going to say, if she was so smart, why was she the one that got caught and imprisoned? The smarter chimps are living like Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Jimh, they have libraries and light bulbs and doors in their sprawling caves underground, and reading about Sarah makes them sad....

Which is why "but these policies increase GDP" isn't the only thing that matters when deciding on policies.

Brexit is a good example. To an external observer, remain arguments seem to amount to "but GDP!" plus some name-calling. Same thing for pro-immigration/open borders arguments in the US.

If you actually care about your countrymen, then there are additional considerations that argue for a middle ground approach. If you don't care about your countrymen (or if you're just dumb), then keep it up with "but GDP!' plus name-calling. Your countrymen are seeing you more and more clearly.

Sounds like you are a knowledgeable photographer. Also, not an astronomer. You are thinking in terms of 2X magnification, not 200X.

Your inverse square law comment works for terrestrial objects, because they are all about the same distance from the sun. Jupiter is much further from the sun than our moon is, or our atmosphere. Imagine I shine a flashlight at a sheet of paper on my desk, in my office. Then imagine I turn the flashlight to point toward YOUR office. You'll find that my flashlight in Dallas doesn't light up your paper very well.

If you have a telescope, or even binoculars, try looking at the moon during the day, at disk, and at midnight. Just try it.

> All you have to do is use an eyepiece with a higher magnification

There are at least three different things that limit magnification. So you CAN'T "just use more magnification" to reduce excessive contrast. At magnification levels that let you see Jupiter's red spot, or Saturn's rings, the planet will transit across your view in under a minute - meaning it's almost gone by the time you step away from the scope and get kiddo with her eye looking right. Especially with a high-magnification eyepiece, which has a tiny lens.

At 200X, using a hobby-grade instrument, the small vibrations from a breeze will be noticeable, blurring the image. Remember the vibrations are magnified 200X.

Lastly, your puppy is about 7mm. So in a refraction telescope you can't go smaller (higher power) than 7mm without simply wasting more and more of the image. In a reflector, the secondary mirror and spider takes up 25%-45% of the aperture, so you need an eyepiece of at least 10-15mm minimum.

All of these things mean the most magnification you can use without just making things blurry is about 50X per inch of telescope aperture (diameter).

Too bad he's not hanging around. Maybe it's all the spam that has taken over the site. It's like an abandoned housing project around here.

Yes, I do it with my health insurance. I make a lot of money, so I pay a lot. Others make less money, they pay less. I sure as hell pay WAY more in insurance than I'll ever get out of it.

If I'm lucky.

I pity the poor souls that come out ahead in that deal.

That's not correct.

Dark matter surfaced when velocity gradients across distances from the center of galaxies didn't fit the Standard model.

The outlier components are moving just as fast as the interior ones!

For that to happen, it would APPEAR that there is matter spread almost evenly from the center, out.

Black holes aren't really black. It's a term coined early on in jest in response to the radical idea.

That's what happened with dark matter. "Matter," is a presumption that has been ruled out for now because it doesn't fit.

What we're actually observing is "invisible gravity," source unknown.

--

The universe is expanding, as discovered by Hubble. what we didn't know until recently is that the expansion is not constant.

It is accelerating.

In the calculus of expansion, we have the total mass of the universe counteracting the expansion. We knew that the expansion was going to win that battle, but we didn't know to what extent.

Enter the acceleration of the expansion. We did not see that one coming.

Something other than velocity vs mass is happening. There appears to be a force "pushing" on the mass. That force has an energy that we cannot locate, hence the (probably misnomer, too) "dark energy" moniker.

Appreciate that not only is dark energy accelerating the universe, it's accelerating the dark matter.

That's a lot of invisible energy.

Instead of having feudal serfs tied to the land, we charge them rent. It's the same peasant class as we've always had. The system works as intended.

If someone taught you that class-based society is wrong and that we are all equal. Well, the short answer is that person is reading an a different set of rules than Western civilization does in general, and American specifically.

One person, one vote. Unless you're too busy cleaning houses on election day.