I wasn't making a claim to any special knowledge of this area but I do have a healthy scepticism of scientific claims in general. In this particular case it's easy to see that either there's lots of "dark stuff" floating around out there, or our theory of gravitation is incorrect. Given the history of scientific discovery, my money would be on the latter.
I have to agree with ghostdoc. IANAP but my instinct tells me that rather than create a new entity and adding it into current orthodoxy to explain difficult facts, one should examine current orthodoxy. The theory of Epicycles was a pretty good explanation of the movements of heavenly bodies in the Ptolemaic system, but quite wrong. I'm reminded of quite a nice quote:
"Really new trails are rarely blazed in the great academies. The confining walls of conformist dogma are too dominating. To think originally, you must go forth into the wilderness."
That's true. Some of us may be carriers but never show symptoms (I've never had a cold-sore but am pretty certain I must have been exposed by now!).
None of my grandparents have had Alzheimer's, but one of them currently has Vascular Dementia, which is also common but unrelated.
Yes, this is one of the things I dislike about it compared to owning hard-copy. At the very least you'd think Steam would implement a feature where I could pay some small sum to transfer it to someone else's account. It's a delicate balance as a business proposition because it's possible you'd buy it for them anyway (as a gift perhaps), or that they would want to play it so much they'd buy it for themselves as full price. I suppose the egg-heads could optimise the price of transfer in such a way as to hit the sweet spot.
Hes using almost always in the same way that you say water is almost always wet
Well, sometimes water is steam and only has the quality `wet' when it condenses.
As I have scientific background, I'm loathe to say "always" or 100%, because I don't have the facts in front of me (only Steam do). However, if anecdotal evidence is good enough for you, I can say that I don't know anyone innocent who has been banned from Steam. Moreover I do know that Terms and Conditions are worthless if a court decides them to be unreasonable and it's possible that this may be the case if Steam were to ban an account without evidence of wrong-doing. I'm not saying it's necessarily right, only that the benefits for me as a gamer outweigh the negatives and that's why I continue to use and support Steam.
IANAL, but you should have legal redress if you haven't broken the TOS. My nephew got a VAC ban for using a "wall hack". In effect he had to start a brand new steam account because he only played VAC based multi-player games. In fact the only people I've heard about who have had their accounts disabled or VAC bans are almost always cheating/hacking in some way or engaged in some other nefarious activity.
So the trade-off with Steam is as follows: you have the convenience of having a delivery platform you can take anywhere, it's easy to purchase/patch new games, you don't have to faff about with CD's. The downside is you share ownership with Steam - which means you can't hack/crack/etc. without the possibility of losing your purchases. In my view the benefits to me as a gamer outweigh the costs, because I don't hack to run cracked/downloaded games.
I don't agree necessarily. Sometimes the state has to take a view on a particular direction in terms of policy. For example the state may decide that sending $500,000,000,000 every year from its economy into rather disagreeable regimes elsewhere in the world in return for the oil that its economy is utterly dependent upon is a decidedly bad thing to do. In which case one possible solution is to aid the private sector in the development of technologies that might at least mitigate some of this dependency.
Indeed, there is no body with legal powers to disbar me from writing software, so technically I'm not a "professional". However, in software I think "professional" is more about your attitude and work practices than your associations.
I concede the point on the analogy (I'm running out of them). But to extend it to absurdity, if the nipple coloured ones were feed-forward and the white ones feed-back but you didn't know what colour they were (let's say you're wearing a blindfold!), the issue of trust in your MD is probably the more important factor.
Why is it hidden? Yes we do hide some features in our software, but they are usually either concerned with testing or debugging - for example, a window that pops up and lists smart pointer references, with the option to search for circular references (and even then, only available in debug releases). We don't waste time with windows containing pictures of mooning developers however. That's the difference in attitude between an amateur and a professional in my opinion.
If you want your business to remain successful, particularly in a reccession, then you really need to stop embedding "jokes" into your software and start improving the quality. It's nothing personal against you, just a difference in philosophy. If I had to choose between the MD who jokingly gave me an electric shock and the serious MD who was monitoring my heart rhythm, I think I'd choose the latter.
You don't expect a "jack in the box" pop-up doll on a spring to jump out at you when you open the hood on your new car, do you? And if such a thing were to happen, would you say to yourself, "wow, those guys at Aston Martin, don't they have a great sense of humour!"? Frankly, I suspect you'd see it as being a bit weird.
Quite frankly that is a ridiculous comparison. Your methods may remain private and of course they mostly do, but you are demonstrating something about your mentality to a customer (and your managers) if you choose to spend your time in such a way.
Speaking as a Software Engineer (I consider myself a professional); you are undermining the customer's trust in your product simply to massage your own ego. Customers are naturally concerned about integrity and security (more so today than ever before). Once you've demonstrated a desire to hide "secret features" in their products, they may start to wonder what other (perhaps malign functionality) is lurking in the code.
Unlike say, Climate Scientists, the scientists who are involved in commercial geological exploration are held to a much higher standard as their "results" can potentially swing share prices one way or another. The Securities Commission require full disclosure.
I may also say that those concerned about our destroying the giant squid eco-system should think very carefully. We have killed so many Sperm Whales in the past (their main predator) it wouldn't surprise me if their population were much higher today than it has been historically.
Again, you are assuming a reductionist mental state and also may I say, a slight arrogance in assuming understanding of basic physical principles is present when in fact it is not.
"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." (Richard Feynman).
When people post in threads like this, there is an almost universal application of (1) reductionist ideas and (2) the computational (i.e. turing machine - like) paradigm, as if we already know this is how biological systems actually work. In future, I fully expect mimicking biological intelligence, even at the level of a cat, will require a different kind of machine; one that takes advantage of currently unknown physical principles.
I studied A.I. for 5 years at University and the one lesson I took away from it was that in the theory, practice and philosophy of A.I. there was a significant missing ingredient. I'm sure that we will find it, eventually, but researchers need to make a major conceptual/theoretical leap before we can even begin to try.
The reason its a vague concept is because nobody really understands what the `thing' in Consciousness really is. Dennett thinks it an illusion, Chalmers thinks it's `information', Davis thinks it a property of the Universe. When you remove from the world everything that can be understood through reason, what you're left with is Transcendent, literally. It's a little arrogant to assume everything can be reductively explained.
I don't agree that Consciousness is simply "an emergent property of a complex system", i.e. that if we make something complex enough it will be conscious. That is like saying, "The brain is complex. The brain is conscious. Therefore, consciousness = complexity". Completely wrong-headed.
I am more inclined to think of Consciousness as a fundamental property of the Universe and everything in it. I would have no problem saying that an electron for example, has some level of consciousness (a very small amount of it) and that biological systems and brains have a lot more of it because they are structured to take advantage of the benefits of consciousness at a very basic level.
Machines as we know them today do not have the properties required of a conscious system and no level of complexity internally (or in software) could ever make them so. A new kind of machine, one that takes advantage of whatever physical systems produce consciousness, would be required. At this moment in time we only have subtle hints as to what this might look like.
I refer the interested reader to the following volumes:
The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose
The Consciousness Mind - In search of a fundamental theory - David Chalmers
The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life - Evin Harris Walker
No, take a given sport for instance. There are 11 players in a soccer team and 20 teams in the top league. So, there are only so many top class players the league can support. Given that success is relative (I'm not considered successful, but I earn as much today as the Duke Of Gloucester would have earned in the 12th century), it stands to reason that not everyone can be a success.
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I wasn't making a claim to any special knowledge of this area but I do have a healthy scepticism of scientific claims in general. In this particular case it's easy to see that either there's lots of "dark stuff" floating around out there, or our theory of gravitation is incorrect. Given the history of scientific discovery, my money would be on the latter.
I have to agree with ghostdoc. IANAP but my instinct tells me that rather than create a new entity and adding it into current orthodoxy to explain difficult facts, one should examine current orthodoxy. The theory of Epicycles was a pretty good explanation of the movements of heavenly bodies in the Ptolemaic system, but quite wrong. I'm reminded of quite a nice quote:
"Really new trails are rarely blazed in the great academies. The confining walls of conformist dogma are too dominating. To think originally, you must go forth into the wilderness."
We need more Scientists in the wilderness.
That's true. Some of us may be carriers but never show symptoms (I've never had a cold-sore but am pretty certain I must have been exposed by now!). None of my grandparents have had Alzheimer's, but one of them currently has Vascular Dementia, which is also common but unrelated.
Forgive me Alain, but "fun" is not a word I tend to associate with Perl!
Yes, this is one of the things I dislike about it compared to owning hard-copy. At the very least you'd think Steam would implement a feature where I could pay some small sum to transfer it to someone else's account. It's a delicate balance as a business proposition because it's possible you'd buy it for them anyway (as a gift perhaps), or that they would want to play it so much they'd buy it for themselves as full price. I suppose the egg-heads could optimise the price of transfer in such a way as to hit the sweet spot.
Well, sometimes water is steam and only has the quality `wet' when it condenses.
As I have scientific background, I'm loathe to say "always" or 100%, because I don't have the facts in front of me (only Steam do). However, if anecdotal evidence is good enough for you, I can say that I don't know anyone innocent who has been banned from Steam. Moreover I do know that Terms and Conditions are worthless if a court decides them to be unreasonable and it's possible that this may be the case if Steam were to ban an account without evidence of wrong-doing. I'm not saying it's necessarily right, only that the benefits for me as a gamer outweigh the negatives and that's why I continue to use and support Steam.
IANAL, but you should have legal redress if you haven't broken the TOS. My nephew got a VAC ban for using a "wall hack". In effect he had to start a brand new steam account because he only played VAC based multi-player games. In fact the only people I've heard about who have had their accounts disabled or VAC bans are almost always cheating/hacking in some way or engaged in some other nefarious activity.
So the trade-off with Steam is as follows: you have the convenience of having a delivery platform you can take anywhere, it's easy to purchase/patch new games, you don't have to faff about with CD's. The downside is you share ownership with Steam - which means you can't hack/crack/etc. without the possibility of losing your purchases. In my view the benefits to me as a gamer outweigh the costs, because I don't hack to run cracked/downloaded games.
But no occassionally naked Trisha Helfer, so I won't be watching.
I don't agree necessarily. Sometimes the state has to take a view on a particular direction in terms of policy. For example the state may decide that sending $500,000,000,000 every year from its economy into rather disagreeable regimes elsewhere in the world in return for the oil that its economy is utterly dependent upon is a decidedly bad thing to do. In which case one possible solution is to aid the private sector in the development of technologies that might at least mitigate some of this dependency.
Yes, we have an About box. We don't generally "graffiti" our products.
Indeed, there is no body with legal powers to disbar me from writing software, so technically I'm not a "professional". However, in software I think "professional" is more about your attitude and work practices than your associations.
I concede the point on the analogy (I'm running out of them). But to extend it to absurdity, if the nipple coloured ones were feed-forward and the white ones feed-back but you didn't know what colour they were (let's say you're wearing a blindfold!), the issue of trust in your MD is probably the more important factor.
Why is it hidden? Yes we do hide some features in our software, but they are usually either concerned with testing or debugging - for example, a window that pops up and lists smart pointer references, with the option to search for circular references (and even then, only available in debug releases). We don't waste time with windows containing pictures of mooning developers however. That's the difference in attitude between an amateur and a professional in my opinion.
If you want your business to remain successful, particularly in a reccession, then you really need to stop embedding "jokes" into your software and start improving the quality. It's nothing personal against you, just a difference in philosophy. If I had to choose between the MD who jokingly gave me an electric shock and the serious MD who was monitoring my heart rhythm, I think I'd choose the latter.
You don't expect a "jack in the box" pop-up doll on a spring to jump out at you when you open the hood on your new car, do you? And if such a thing were to happen, would you say to yourself, "wow, those guys at Aston Martin, don't they have a great sense of humour!"? Frankly, I suspect you'd see it as being a bit weird.
Quite frankly that is a ridiculous comparison. Your methods may remain private and of course they mostly do, but you are demonstrating something about your mentality to a customer (and your managers) if you choose to spend your time in such a way.
Speaking as a Software Engineer (I consider myself a professional); you are undermining the customer's trust in your product simply to massage your own ego. Customers are naturally concerned about integrity and security (more so today than ever before). Once you've demonstrated a desire to hide "secret features" in their products, they may start to wonder what other (perhaps malign functionality) is lurking in the code.
The mere fact that you are asking this question tells me you lack any kind of professional integrity.
Unlike say, Climate Scientists, the scientists who are involved in commercial geological exploration are held to a much higher standard as their "results" can potentially swing share prices one way or another. The Securities Commission require full disclosure.
I may also say that those concerned about our destroying the giant squid eco-system should think very carefully. We have killed so many Sperm Whales in the past (their main predator) it wouldn't surprise me if their population were much higher today than it has been historically.
"Quantum effects are unknown?"
Again, you are assuming a reductionist mental state and also may I say, a slight arrogance in assuming understanding of basic physical principles is present when in fact it is not.
"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." (Richard Feynman).
When people post in threads like this, there is an almost universal application of (1) reductionist ideas and (2) the computational (i.e. turing machine - like) paradigm, as if we already know this is how biological systems actually work. In future, I fully expect mimicking biological intelligence, even at the level of a cat, will require a different kind of machine; one that takes advantage of currently unknown physical principles.
I studied A.I. for 5 years at University and the one lesson I took away from it was that in the theory, practice and philosophy of A.I. there was a significant missing ingredient. I'm sure that we will find it, eventually, but researchers need to make a major conceptual/theoretical leap before we can even begin to try.
The reason its a vague concept is because nobody really understands what the `thing' in Consciousness really is. Dennett thinks it an illusion, Chalmers thinks it's `information', Davis thinks it a property of the Universe. When you remove from the world everything that can be understood through reason, what you're left with is Transcendent, literally. It's a little arrogant to assume everything can be reductively explained.
It's called the Transcendent. If you don't sense it, you probably are a machine.
I don't agree that Consciousness is simply "an emergent property of a complex system", i.e. that if we make something complex enough it will be conscious. That is like saying, "The brain is complex. The brain is conscious. Therefore, consciousness = complexity". Completely wrong-headed.
I am more inclined to think of Consciousness as a fundamental property of the Universe and everything in it. I would have no problem saying that an electron for example, has some level of consciousness (a very small amount of it) and that biological systems and brains have a lot more of it because they are structured to take advantage of the benefits of consciousness at a very basic level.
Machines as we know them today do not have the properties required of a conscious system and no level of complexity internally (or in software) could ever make them so. A new kind of machine, one that takes advantage of whatever physical systems produce consciousness, would be required. At this moment in time we only have subtle hints as to what this might look like.
I refer the interested reader to the following volumes:
The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose
The Consciousness Mind - In search of a fundamental theory - David Chalmers
The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life - Evin Harris Walker
No, take a given sport for instance. There are 11 players in a soccer team and 20 teams in the top league. So, there are only so many top class players the league can support. Given that success is relative (I'm not considered successful, but I earn as much today as the Duke Of Gloucester would have earned in the 12th century), it stands to reason that not everyone can be a success.