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Skicross and snowboardcross are fantastic sports! They look suuuper fun, definitely invented by a generation brought up on video games... Anyway, I feel like I should put in a differing opinion from a local here as my experience has definitely differed somewhat from connect_icut's above. Short...

The singularity for AI is not about making an AI that can learn, it's about making an AI that can write an AI smarter than itself (which then makes an AI smarter than itself, etc etc). Neural nets learn, but they haven't, as yet, learned how to make something better at learning than a neural...

Essentially then, this program sinks or swims on whether these assets are truly worthless or actually just undervalued? Krugman's (and other's) retort is that the assets are worthless, they were valued based on an assumption of unlimited growth, on a housing boom that they themselves helped...

Thinking about this some more, there certainly are similarities between a bank's Risk Management group and an engineering QA department (QA = quality assurance = testing) as they both have the same general purpose: "make sure we don't fuck up!" The one thing that makes a QA process better than a...

The way I figure it, if the global financial market can now be seen as essentially one large distributed software system, then the current financial meltdown, as triggered by the above mentioned copula function, can be seen as a software bug which entered the system due to an insufficient...

After much thought I have decided that I would like a drug that gave me direct conscious control over my low-level perceptual processes that are usually completely non-conscious and automatic. That way I could swap color channels in my vision, mess with my 3D spatial perception...and generally...

That statement reads equally as true with "Capitalist" swapped for "Marxist" y'know. Also, y'know, if positions were swapped and we lived in a communist world economy, with some failed capitalists states smattered around, I'm pretty sure people who favored capitalism would have a really hard...

The adbuster article is of their usual poorly written rant quality, and no, hipsters do not represent *THE* threat to modern society. But is anyone really going to defend hipsterism as some vital and important social movement?? It has no political program other than the development of personal...

I randomly dug out Sven Vath's "Accident in Paradise" from '92 last night, and it actually sounds great! Definitely still showing a strong tangerine dream influence as well as general new age hippy craziness. But there's some great tunes on there: the first few tracks, L'esperanza, the title...

Had the pleasure of seeing Andy Butler DJ on Saturday night and let me tell you it was not a melancholy affair by any means. He played mostly fucking great upbeat disco, the dance floor was packed, good times were had. It was a very trendy crowd, but they all seemed up for it and having a great...

Having gone through both a BSc and an MSc at one of Canada's top universities I feel confident in saying that I know as many university educated morons as I do non-university educated morons. The primary thing higher education tests is your ability to stubbornly stick to a task and bring it to...

Thanks nomad, that's kinda what I thought. People seem to be starting from the assumption that a communist economy couldn't ever be popular with people, based mostly on the evidence that all centrally planned communist economies so far have ended up failing miserably and being very unpopular...

Yeah basically I was wondering if you could have a communist economy without any of the authoritarian garbage, and instead have regular elections, freedom of the press and things like that. This is, of course, assuming broad based support for communism, but if a communist economy could function...

So I've always wondered this, and it's probably something very obvious covered in Communism 101, but what exactly is the stopping point of having a democratically elected communist government? (I once almost started a "Questions you are dying to ask but are too scared to because of...

I feel bad, working for the man has totally killed my dissensus posting. There keep being things I want to post or reply to but then I have all these cooworkers wandering around behind me making it real hard to do so (well, except for friday right before I go home, apparently). Woe is me! (ps...

Yes totally! I'm just listening to it for the first time right now and loving it. It is such a contrast to modern minimal, the tunes are so much more physical, the beat way more upfront, really more...dancey, I guess. Good fucking stuff. In another ten years we can look back and have a 90's...

My two beefs with facebook: 1. In my experience its primary use is as a really really big, really really fast gossip network. Fuck caty gossip. 2. It makes keeping up with your friends and browsing through books at amazon.com into disturbingly similar activities.

Depending on your nerdiness factor and your home setup, why not setup your own proxy server? Or, perhaps a bit simpler, install vnc at home, which will allow you to connect remotely to you home desktop, and then browse from there. VNC would require that your sys admins haven't disabled java on...

Me too! Having recently exited the student world and entered the working world, I now have the free time and disposable income to try and learn how to mix :D I have a bunch of records but also a whole wack of mp3s and I would like to be able to mix using both (using ableton or tractor I...

My first impression on reading about this was actually more along the lines of the State becoming more and more like just another corporation on the global market. Sovereign wealth funds as really just a further step down the complete hegemony of global corporate capitalism, rather than move in...