I can't remember what it's called but the thing about looking at a clock and it seeming to pause for a while before starting is a known phenomenon. Something to do with the fact that your brain has no visual knowledge of previous ticks, but that the whole pipeline from light hitting eyes to recognition of an event in your environment is around half a second, so you end up with up to a phantom half-second pause where you haven't perceived the last tick.
That, or our virtual reality's heuristics for starting and stopping silly environmental things like clocks can be up to half a second slow. I've never walked into a room and seen a glowing torch in the room suddenly burst into flame as the particle system starts, though...
Bullshit. Just because it gets disconnected from the stimuli of the senses doesn't mean it's dead. If you had ever had a lucid dream, you'd know it.
And contrariwise, if you've ever been that damn tired that your head hits the pillow and you're out like a light, and you wake up 9 hours later not having moved and feeling like you only minutes have passed, then you'd know that consciousness isn't always maintained during sleep.
If you build a conscious computer by simulating a brain, can you ethically shut it off without committing murder?
Of course you can, just like you can ethically sedate a human without committing murder. The 'murder' part of shutting off a human is the part where the human is permanently destroyed, not the part where the human is unconscious for a period of time.
I've never understood people who arbitrarily say that X nonhuman doesn't have Y human attribute. I've never seen anything remotely approaching justification for or reasoning behind such statements, but the people who make them seem curiously reticent to test them, even if otherwise they've built a career on scientific investigation.
A good example is the blanket statement that "animals don't have souls". Why? Why not? Nope, no justification needed because "well everyone knows".
Another example, one that horrified me when I found out, is that until maybe 15 years ago, surgeons believed (despite all evidence to the contrary) that infant humans were physiologically incapable of feeling pain. And so when infants required surgery, it was done with no anaesthetic:
However, surveys of medical professionals indicate that as recently as 1986 infants as old as 15 months were receiving no anesthesia during surgery at most American hospitals.
I think if an entity is conscious, then the 'enslave' action becomes the act of forcing it (by design) to 'enjoy' its role as servitor. It's just like helping a human build an addiction to a drug that you can supply, and then withholding the drug to make them 'want' to serve you.
Of course, in any case, ethics issues remain.. "may you switch 'it' off..." etc. - which I feel are much too complicated to warrant cramming any of my armchair philosophy thoughts in here...:-)
One thing I very seldom see mentioned here is that 'switching off' a conscious entity is not intrinsically a bad thing. We do it regularly to humans with general anaesthetics during surgery. The ethical dilemma comes when it's not possible to switch the entity back on in a similar state - for example, completely deactivating a human generally kills them. With a sentient virtual entity, assuming their state is persisted, they may be deactivated without any harm.
That said, do you wash the tap-knobs before washing your hands? I wonder how clean those can be...
That's why I love the newer automatic bathroom taps with IR sensors. Just hold your hands under them, no touching needed. Most of the public toilets I've used have automatic sensor-based hand dryers but still have manual taps, I was surprised and pleased when I visited mainland Europe to find that while the blow dryers still required a button press (I probably looked like a right fool waving my hands under it then frowning at it for a couple of minutes before realising I had to actually press a button), the taps turn on and off automatically and the urinals auto-flush.
When the first video game was made, it was the best video game in the world. When there were a dozen titles, more than 80% of games were in the top ten.
Excellent point. It's like the way fans of 'classic' music complain about "this crappy music they make these days". There're maybe half a dozen bands from the 50s and 60s that are still played regularly today, and they're still played because their music was and is good. In 2060 there'll be maybe half a dozen bands from the '90s and '00s that get played regularly because they were good. Probably more because the world is so much bigger a place now, but the principle applies.
Like you say, new stuff that comes out has to compete with the best of the best of historical media.
The devs back then had to spend a lot of time on the level layouts. When you can't rely on gfx or sfx to make your game a success, you have to spend a lot of time ensuring every aspect of the game is high quality.
I'd turn that around on you, and say that when you don't have to spend most of your development budget on graphics and sound effects, you can spend a lot of time on level layouts, gameplay, etc.
This is one of the things that REALLY killed indie game development as a serious contender (although I'll grant it's coming back with casual and mobile gaming, huzzah!). Back in the 8-bit era, a programmer could create a near-commercial-quality sprite sheet in an afternoon. For a larger game, you'd have an artist and a coder.
Now you need a team of 10 just to make a single high-rez model with all of its various material map components, shaders, animation rigging, etc. A simple courtyard scene will have over 100mb of textures where before it'd just need a few happy snaps of the bricks and plants outside the office. There's just so much work that goes into building and displaying a near-photorealistic environment that there's not time to really polish the 'real' stuff that makes a game a game.
What's scary is that even with excellent success rates, that's going to be a lot of misfires. 15,000 faces/sec is 54 million faces an hour. At 'five nines' accuracy (which is far beyond what facial recognition can do as yet) that's still 540 false IDs per hour. It'd really suck to be one of those 540.
Now, a real human female breast growing out of the top of a computer mouse would sell like crazy.
When I went to Singapore a few years ago, I brought back a mouse mat with an ergonomic wrist rest for a friend of mine... only the mouse mat was a picture of a woman's face, and the wrist rest was the lady's ample bosom. I don't think I've ever seen anyone (male or female) look at that mouse mat for the first time without copping a squeeze.:P
Isn't this extremely old news? Companies have been making BPA-free plastic bottles now for a long long time, including baby bottles.
Well I couldn't have told you exactly what chemical causes it, but I doubt you could find anyone who'd argue that fresh clean water left in a plastic container for a few days *doesn't* taste 'plasticky'. If the water tastes different when it comes out of the plastic container than when it went in, then either something has been removed (unlikely given that it's tap water in a sealed container) or there's something new in it, and unless you believe in homeopathy, that something new is a chemical.
The human sense of taste is fascinating, it's like 'the lab' from NCIS except it's made out of a few square inches of meat.
Well... both. It's upgrading your license for the product, but it's also most definitely uncrippling it. If I were to buy a slave, and that slave was missing a foot, then that slave would be crippled, no? Regardless of whether I was aware of the deformity beforehand?
Heh, reminds me of when I was in year 9 and thought I knew all there was to know about maths... I couldn't see what more there was to learn. Then I got to year 10 and met Calculus and realised how wrong I was...:P
That said, I like the direction they're taking with defining netbooks. Netbooks are not subnotebooks, they're different. If a desktop computer is an SUV and a smartphone is a hatchback, a netbook is a dune buggy. It's small and light and cheap, and offers most of the utility of a car while not attempting to just be a small car.
Yeah, the way I've seen it put is: You kill a dragon, to get a sword, to kill a bigger dragon, to get a better sword. Then you kill a bigger dragon, and get a better sword, so you can...
I think you guys are missing the point entirely. What would be the point of copyright or patents when all goods can be made for free?
Not at all, that IS the entire point!
If replicators come to being, the only thing that would have any real worth is energy.
When you can manufacture any item you have the pattern for, at trivial cost, and energy and raw materials are cheap, the only thing remaining that has value is the design of that object. Physical objects and devices will be in exactly the same situation that media are in now, with fast digital transmission and perfect reproduction leading to unwieldy attempts to legislate the flow of information.
Girlfriend definitely cuts down the play time but you can still play when she's not around (or when she's asleep, if you live together). The only thing that can really help you quit, though, is getting bored with the game. I've been playing WoW since three months after release, and in that time I've:
Spent two months playing obsessively, 18 hours a day
Gone cold turkey and went travelling, not played the game for 6 months
Played fairly obsessively again for a couple of months while looking for work
Virtually stopped playing when I met my wife
Got slowly back into the game
I only play maybe 10-20 hours a week now, mostly on the weekends. It's still fun, so I still play, but it's slowly getting boring, so I don't know if I'll last to the next expansion.
When it comes down to it, the only people I know who've quit ANY addiction are the ones who want to quit.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't remember what it's called but the thing about looking at a clock and it seeming to pause for a while before starting is a known phenomenon. Something to do with the fact that your brain has no visual knowledge of previous ticks, but that the whole pipeline from light hitting eyes to recognition of an event in your environment is around half a second, so you end up with up to a phantom half-second pause where you haven't perceived the last tick.
That, or our virtual reality's heuristics for starting and stopping silly environmental things like clocks can be up to half a second slow. I've never walked into a room and seen a glowing torch in the room suddenly burst into flame as the particle system starts, though...
Turning Test? Not sure my mother would always pass that one.
If a machine is aware enough of its environment and itself to navigate public roads and parallel park, then it gets MY thumbs up. :)
Bullshit. Just because it gets disconnected from the stimuli of the senses doesn't mean it's dead. If you had ever had a lucid dream, you'd know it.
And contrariwise, if you've ever been that damn tired that your head hits the pillow and you're out like a light, and you wake up 9 hours later not having moved and feeling like you only minutes have passed, then you'd know that consciousness isn't always maintained during sleep.
If you build a conscious computer by simulating a brain, can you ethically shut it off without committing murder?
Of course you can, just like you can ethically sedate a human without committing murder. The 'murder' part of shutting off a human is the part where the human is permanently destroyed, not the part where the human is unconscious for a period of time.
Mandatory: In Soviet Russia, a Beowulf cluster of these imagines YOU!
A good example is the blanket statement that "animals don't have souls". Why? Why not? Nope, no justification needed because "well everyone knows".
Another example, one that horrified me when I found out, is that until maybe 15 years ago, surgeons believed (despite all evidence to the contrary) that infant humans were physiologically incapable of feeling pain. And so when infants required surgery, it was done with no anaesthetic:
However, surveys of medical professionals indicate that as recently as 1986 infants as old as 15 months were receiving no anesthesia during surgery at most American hospitals.
- N.Y. Times
I think if an entity is conscious, then the 'enslave' action becomes the act of forcing it (by design) to 'enjoy' its role as servitor. It's just like helping a human build an addiction to a drug that you can supply, and then withholding the drug to make them 'want' to serve you.
Of course, in any case, ethics issues remain.. "may you switch 'it' off..." etc. - which I feel are much too complicated to warrant cramming any of my armchair philosophy thoughts in here... :-)
One thing I very seldom see mentioned here is that 'switching off' a conscious entity is not intrinsically a bad thing. We do it regularly to humans with general anaesthetics during surgery. The ethical dilemma comes when it's not possible to switch the entity back on in a similar state - for example, completely deactivating a human generally kills them. With a sentient virtual entity, assuming their state is persisted, they may be deactivated without any harm.
Yeah, until Yogg-saron escapes via some poorly executed hacking attempt and takes up residence in the Internet at large. Ai, ai, f'thangan!
That said, do you wash the tap-knobs before washing your hands? I wonder how clean those can be...
That's why I love the newer automatic bathroom taps with IR sensors. Just hold your hands under them, no touching needed. Most of the public toilets I've used have automatic sensor-based hand dryers but still have manual taps, I was surprised and pleased when I visited mainland Europe to find that while the blow dryers still required a button press (I probably looked like a right fool waving my hands under it then frowning at it for a couple of minutes before realising I had to actually press a button), the taps turn on and off automatically and the urinals auto-flush.
When the first video game was made, it was the best video game in the world. When there were a dozen titles, more than 80% of games were in the top ten.
Excellent point. It's like the way fans of 'classic' music complain about "this crappy music they make these days". There're maybe half a dozen bands from the 50s and 60s that are still played regularly today, and they're still played because their music was and is good. In 2060 there'll be maybe half a dozen bands from the '90s and '00s that get played regularly because they were good. Probably more because the world is so much bigger a place now, but the principle applies.
Like you say, new stuff that comes out has to compete with the best of the best of historical media.
The devs back then had to spend a lot of time on the level layouts. When you can't rely on gfx or sfx to make your game a success, you have to spend a lot of time ensuring every aspect of the game is high quality.
I'd turn that around on you, and say that when you don't have to spend most of your development budget on graphics and sound effects, you can spend a lot of time on level layouts, gameplay, etc.
This is one of the things that REALLY killed indie game development as a serious contender (although I'll grant it's coming back with casual and mobile gaming, huzzah!). Back in the 8-bit era, a programmer could create a near-commercial-quality sprite sheet in an afternoon. For a larger game, you'd have an artist and a coder.
Now you need a team of 10 just to make a single high-rez model with all of its various material map components, shaders, animation rigging, etc. A simple courtyard scene will have over 100mb of textures where before it'd just need a few happy snaps of the bricks and plants outside the office. There's just so much work that goes into building and displaying a near-photorealistic environment that there's not time to really polish the 'real' stuff that makes a game a game.
No wonder this generation will die younger than their parents!
That's a pretty big call there.
I knew it, I knew it, glass bottled beer ftw.
If you can't have it on tap, at least drink it from glass. Bottles or a pint glass, either or.
I've only tried canned beer a couple of times but it tastes fuggin horrible.
"Hey, that's a nice set of soybeans on that blond over there, I really like to soak her overnight in water and then give her a wet grinding."
Pedobear approves without quite knowing why.
What's scary is that even with excellent success rates, that's going to be a lot of misfires. 15,000 faces/sec is 54 million faces an hour. At 'five nines' accuracy (which is far beyond what facial recognition can do as yet) that's still 540 false IDs per hour. It'd really suck to be one of those 540.
Now, a real human female breast growing out of the top of a computer mouse would sell like crazy.
When I went to Singapore a few years ago, I brought back a mouse mat with an ergonomic wrist rest for a friend of mine... only the mouse mat was a picture of a woman's face, and the wrist rest was the lady's ample bosom. I don't think I've ever seen anyone (male or female) look at that mouse mat for the first time without copping a squeeze. :P
Isn't this extremely old news? Companies have been making BPA-free plastic bottles now for a long long time, including baby bottles.
Well I couldn't have told you exactly what chemical causes it, but I doubt you could find anyone who'd argue that fresh clean water left in a plastic container for a few days *doesn't* taste 'plasticky'. If the water tastes different when it comes out of the plastic container than when it went in, then either something has been removed (unlikely given that it's tap water in a sealed container) or there's something new in it, and unless you believe in homeopathy, that something new is a chemical.
The human sense of taste is fascinating, it's like 'the lab' from NCIS except it's made out of a few square inches of meat.
It's nobody's business but the Turks'.
Well... both. It's upgrading your license for the product, but it's also most definitely uncrippling it. If I were to buy a slave, and that slave was missing a foot, then that slave would be crippled, no? Regardless of whether I was aware of the deformity beforehand?
Heh, reminds me of when I was in year 9 and thought I knew all there was to know about maths... I couldn't see what more there was to learn. Then I got to year 10 and met Calculus and realised how wrong I was... :P
That said, I like the direction they're taking with defining netbooks. Netbooks are not subnotebooks, they're different. If a desktop computer is an SUV and a smartphone is a hatchback, a netbook is a dune buggy. It's small and light and cheap, and offers most of the utility of a car while not attempting to just be a small car.
Yeah, the way I've seen it put is: You kill a dragon, to get a sword, to kill a bigger dragon, to get a better sword. Then you kill a bigger dragon, and get a better sword, so you can...
It's the Red Queen's race.
I think you guys are missing the point entirely. What would be the point of copyright or patents when all goods can be made for free?
Not at all, that IS the entire point!
If replicators come to being, the only thing that would have any real worth is energy.
When you can manufacture any item you have the pattern for, at trivial cost, and energy and raw materials are cheap, the only thing remaining that has value is the design of that object. Physical objects and devices will be in exactly the same situation that media are in now, with fast digital transmission and perfect reproduction leading to unwieldy attempts to legislate the flow of information.
Implementation uses a combination of B.E.E.R. for the boys and V.O.D.K.A. for the ladies.
An alternate configuration uses a T.E.Q.U.I.L.A. provider for all.
I only play maybe 10-20 hours a week now, mostly on the weekends. It's still fun, so I still play, but it's slowly getting boring, so I don't know if I'll last to the next expansion.
When it comes down to it, the only people I know who've quit ANY addiction are the ones who want to quit.