Posts by Russ Williams

@Robin Bradshaw

"what are they planning on doing to harness this free energy? Plant windmill seeds?"

What?! Genetically Modified crops? You don't think the greenies supporting wind power are going to stand for that, do you?

@I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects

While "foist" has a meaning of breaking wind, as does the etymology of "petard", the common usage almost certainly comes from Shakespeare (Hamlet, III.iv.185-6):

"For 'tis the sport to have the enginer

Hoist with his own petar;"

(Of other note is the use of "enginer" - someone who operates an "engine" - one of the roots of "engineer" in modern English... which is why we have "protein-oxidisation equalisation engineers" instead of burger flippers)

Paris, because the rest of that line is "and 't shall go hard".

Two words: combinatorial complexity

The data requirements for automatically generating any sort of reasonable interpolative model are obscene - just consider the number of runs vs precision in the pin-dropping Monte Carlo method of finding pi. 10000 samples will get you a value of ~3.17, and you're well into the millions before you get even as close as 22/7.

As others have noted, extrapolating from such a black-box is almost impossible, even given infinite data - if you don't have an idea of what it's doing, or an extremely good fit to a trivial model (e.g. linear), you're stuffed as soon as you go out of the range of inputs previously seen.

Data mining is not, and never has been, a replacement for inference. It might throw up some unusual correlations to investigate, and it might simplify testing of a hypothesis, but it can't replace the crucial step in the middle: understanding.

Self-inflicted

Having spent a decade working in games, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that this is pure bullshit.

The games industry requires the same skills as at least a dozen other fields but is completely unwilling to pay for any training or development of staff. Demanding that universities fill your niche training requirements is arrogant, ineffectual and the cause of the so-called "skills shortage".

@Christopher Martin

Actually, HTML *is* just for two-dimensional screen markup. It may be fashionable to try to retcon it into some generic XML/SGML-style container, but that's neither the origin nor the usage.

In any case, web pages are mostly designed for the overwhelming majority of non-blind users, and so any screen-reader worth its salt will have to treat <i> tags the same as it would treat <em>