If the only thing which distinguishes one particle or system from the next is its state, then identical states cannot be considered separate or different.
Teleportation does not seem to be about matter but about state. I feel this may be thought-evidence for consciousness continuity or some kind of existence fidelity (if one considers consciousness as something describable by quantum physics).
One day perhaps teleportation will be viewed as we see flight today: simple fundamentals and devilish engineering.
An ounce of documentation is worth a pound of analysis.
This is my mantra. I recently took-over network administration after a sudden firing of the sole administrator. I arrived at work to folders and folders of random word, excel and text files from 3 different predecessors.
Those before me had that philosophy of "it's what I know that makes me valuable".
For me, I'm an adherent to the notion of "it's not what I know, but what I can do."
I've found that documentation has allowed me to do so much more. I don't have to waste the mental cycles to bring-up older knowledge or to reconstruct some installation procedure from months past.
Friends of mine say that my excessive documentation is a liability: "they can just fire you and a monkey could read your notes and do your job."
If only that were true - imagine how successful I would be if I had a reputation for eliminating uneeded IT jobs. The bright-side has turned-out to be the fact that most IT jobs can't actually be eliminated so easily - because they are roles and not jobs. Thus, documentation and knowledge-dumping has no negative repercussions that I've noticed.
The only drawback to Documentation is the time, but with a wiki it's very easy to take 5 minutes here, 1 minute or 30 seconds there and the occasional hour spent looking at random articles for rectification, updates and corroboration.
Personally, I think that these perceptions have more to do with the so called "praise generation" which was raised by their parents with statements like "you're special", "award for participation", and "it's not important what other people think, but only how you feel about yourself".
I tend to agree with your assessment, though I would see the oposite treatment (beratement and low-self value) as being more detremental to an individual's future success.
As with most things in life, the solution is probably some mix of the two poles. In other words, I suppose neither the Carrot nor the Stick work as well as the Carrot AND the Stick.
Life is so amazing. Is it not currently the biological opinion that basically all (complex) life is programmed to self-destruct? I've heard it said that death itself (from 'old age') may have been an evolutionary convention - in fact, evolution seems to require it to operate at all.
This tree is a pretty extraordinary instance, however. Though I do think there are other organisms which self-sacrifice in order to propagate - so it is not exactly unprecedented.
Let us say that theoretically it is possible to extract some kind of evidence from an advanced neurological scan that would show an event or even a conversation had indeed happened. Let's go further and imagine that some of the details of this conversation could be extracted. Further than that even, let us speculate that it can be possible to distinguish between false memory and real memory to such a degree as to make human memory admissible as evidence.
I bring up this situation because I think that one day, perhaps in the not to distant future, there will be human memory enhancements which will essentially record every moment of an individual's life. Blue tooth headsets now, data monocles not to far off.
Am I the only person who has actively concealed themselves from prying online eyes?
I've been a pretty affluent internet creature since the mid 90's (yes, a latecomer in this crowd, I understand) and since my first forays onto the www I've filled-out registration information with bogus info. Having done this for more than a decade, I can in fact google myself, but only via usernames and other pseudonyms.
Even my myspace and facebook profiles are semi-bogus. I understand that certain high-profile instances will launch your true identity into the limelight (any bit of media publicity for example), but I constantly hear about individuals who are googleable, not because of a media instance, but simply because they have placed themselves into the great index.
Who has willfully made themselves searchable, and why? I have enjoyed a fruitful, successful life in the IT industry this whole time and I have not yet needed to put my personal info into a publicly searchable and available location.
What are the benefits? I ask, because to me, being a very private person, I see mostly, maybe overwhelmingly, negative results.
Good point, I do treasure both freedom and privacy greatly. But I wonder if they are truly the same.
Privacy seems individual and freedom seems both individual and universal. I have the freedom to choose to go to a nude beach where there is a certain lack of privacy - but I choose this. Freedom would also allow me the ability to chain myself to a tree and throw away the key - I can actually use freedom to remove itself: I do not think privacy has these same properties.
Enforcment of privacy seems problematic to me whereas enforcement of freedom seems necessary. Perhaps freedom is a superset of privacy.
Freedom is a right. You don't earn it, you protect it.
That is a good way of putting it. I think we are both saying essentially the same thing. After all, freedom has, however, been earned many times in the past because it was not granted. Freedom is, however, a natural right as you say.
Let's use the DARPA challenges as an example of technology which is available to the individual and for which no superior technology existed for the govt. The vehicles from these competitions are created by private citizens and the government did not have anything better.
As image recognition technology progresses it will probably be just as advanced for the individual as for the government. This will probably be because it will be created, not in some government lab, but at Google or perhaps Hans' garage in Berlin. Perhaps the govt will have server-farms all using the image recognition tech to mass view images, but the fundamental algorithms (the tech) will be the same.
I guess my point is that the stuff coming out of government labs these days doesn't really strike me as far superior to that which private labs are producing. In other words, the governments advantage has shifted from quality of technology to quantity.
Is is safe to say that the distance between govt technologies and those available to citizens has and continues to narrow?
For example, is it likely that the processing innards of this device will not be extraordinary, super-computing devices? Is it likely that the batteries will be some kind of lithium-ion battery, and not some exotic, crazy technology.
I recently saw something about regular people developing an autonomous RC-type airplane which would navigate itself using GPS - isn't that just a UAV?
It seems to me that back in the day the govt actually built machines which far outstripped anything available to regular folks. However, I think that nowadays the seperation between the individual and the government is not a technical one so much as an economic one. In other words, the govt doesn't have better tech which is unavailable - they have better tech because they payed for it, and you could too if you had the money.
This universe is amazing in all the ways it runs. Supernovas are inevitable, obviously, and thus the new elements they create are destined to be dispersed. Astronomy has shown that these heavier elements inevitably form into new stars and planets. Physics shows that these elements inevitably form molecules. Chemistry shows that the molecules inevitably bind together to form complex substances. Biology shows that these complex substances will further form replicate themselves.
We began by connecting the dots in the sky to form images of heroes, gods and monsters. Who knew that when we finally connected them all together it would be a picture of ourselves?
if great minds have grappled with a given subject matter and the answer has remained inconclusive to them, then it is certain that a definitive absolute final answer to the mystery will be found in the comments section of slashdot
Our eyes are so amazingly beyond any other organism's, that I say humans have abilities which are truly cosmic in scale. Think of the most powerful biological eye - probably a hawk or eagle's - and then compare the light-gathering and resolving power of it to the resolution and light gathered from an astronomical observation. It is a truly stellar distance, the separation.
Yes, the biological human eye does not compare, but I consider our technology to be a part of us. After all, humans aren't really that well equipped by default - we don't survive without our technology and therefore I consider our technology to be as much a part of us as a colony is a part of the ant organism.
And yet with this power of sight, this ability to see the dangers of this universal landscape, we still seem to lack the foresight to compare. I guess it is easier to increase our vision than to have increased vision.
It's not just about mutiple-threads, it's about coordination between those threads in a real-time manner.
As you know, multiple threads in a program do not actually execute concurrently - processing is still serial, it's just so fast that threads can appear to execute simultaneously - and it's not just about queuing execution either.
With multiple cores we have the ability to multiply the processing potential, but there is still a coordination issue - what good is it to process x amount of data if you must still wait for the Y data to finish processing before you can use it?
Here's an interesting article about Valve software's difficulties as they begin to experiment with the multi-core architecture paradigm. Some of their solutions are most interesting, including this little tidbit which has stuck with me: "In additional to failing to scale well, coarse threading also introduced an element of latency. Valve had to enable the networking component of the engine to keep the client and server systems synchronized, even with the single-player game."
It's interesting that they already had a 'solution' in place, but that this solution was created for a different reason yet with a useful outcome.
Who hasn't had a crush on a fictional character? As you are largely geeks reading this, I submit that many of you find at least some Anime girls hot - even though you know full well that they are not real: the human heart can vast in its ability to accept.
I had a huge crush on Ryoko from the Tenchi Muyo animes. This crush didn't even require the physical contact that would be present with a robotic hottie. There is little room for doubt that our emotionally sticky limbic system can latch onto unusual objects of affection - I believe it's not unusual to be loved by anyone...or to love anything.
Slashdot Mirror
If the only thing which distinguishes one particle or system from the next is its state, then identical states cannot be considered separate or different.
Teleportation does not seem to be about matter but about state. I feel this may be thought-evidence for consciousness continuity or some kind of existence fidelity (if one considers consciousness as something describable by quantum physics).
One day perhaps teleportation will be viewed as we see flight today: simple fundamentals and devilish engineering.
It sounds to me that life has evolved to evolve.
An ounce of documentation is worth a pound of analysis.
This is my mantra. I recently took-over network administration after a sudden firing of the sole administrator. I arrived at work to folders and folders of random word, excel and text files from 3 different predecessors.
Those before me had that philosophy of "it's what I know that makes me valuable".
For me, I'm an adherent to the notion of "it's not what I know, but what I can do."
I've found that documentation has allowed me to do so much more. I don't have to waste the mental cycles to bring-up older knowledge or to reconstruct some installation procedure from months past.
Friends of mine say that my excessive documentation is a liability: "they can just fire you and a monkey could read your notes and do your job."
If only that were true - imagine how successful I would be if I had a reputation for eliminating uneeded IT jobs. The bright-side has turned-out to be the fact that most IT jobs can't actually be eliminated so easily - because they are roles and not jobs. Thus, documentation and knowledge-dumping has no negative repercussions that I've noticed.
The only drawback to Documentation is the time, but with a wiki it's very easy to take 5 minutes here, 1 minute or 30 seconds there and the occasional hour spent looking at random articles for rectification, updates and corroboration.
Why don't they make a "love" weapon instead.
After all, I thought the US was supposed to have a reputation for turning enemies into friends.
I tend to agree with your assessment, though I would see the oposite treatment (beratement and low-self value) as being more detremental to an individual's future success.
As with most things in life, the solution is probably some mix of the two poles. In other words, I suppose neither the Carrot nor the Stick work as well as the Carrot AND the Stick.
Life is so amazing. Is it not currently the biological opinion that basically all (complex) life is programmed to self-destruct? I've heard it said that death itself (from 'old age') may have been an evolutionary convention - in fact, evolution seems to require it to operate at all.
This tree is a pretty extraordinary instance, however. Though I do think there are other organisms which self-sacrifice in order to propagate - so it is not exactly unprecedented.
Let us say that theoretically it is possible to extract some kind of evidence from an advanced neurological scan that would show an event or even a conversation had indeed happened. Let's go further and imagine that some of the details of this conversation could be extracted. Further than that even, let us speculate that it can be possible to distinguish between false memory and real memory to such a degree as to make human memory admissible as evidence.
I bring up this situation because I think that one day, perhaps in the not to distant future, there will be human memory enhancements which will essentially record every moment of an individual's life. Blue tooth headsets now, data monocles not to far off.
Where does the line become drawn in this case.
With a homepage like that on your profile, I can see how you've maintained an impressive 30:1 ratio! :)
Am I the only person who has actively concealed themselves from prying online eyes?
I've been a pretty affluent internet creature since the mid 90's (yes, a latecomer in this crowd, I understand) and since my first forays onto the www I've filled-out registration information with bogus info. Having done this for more than a decade, I can in fact google myself, but only via usernames and other pseudonyms.
Even my myspace and facebook profiles are semi-bogus. I understand that certain high-profile instances will launch your true identity into the limelight (any bit of media publicity for example), but I constantly hear about individuals who are googleable, not because of a media instance, but simply because they have placed themselves into the great index.
Who has willfully made themselves searchable, and why? I have enjoyed a fruitful, successful life in the IT industry this whole time and I have not yet needed to put my personal info into a publicly searchable and available location.
What are the benefits? I ask, because to me, being a very private person, I see mostly, maybe overwhelmingly, negative results.
I vote.
Good point, I do treasure both freedom and privacy greatly. But I wonder if they are truly the same.
Privacy seems individual and freedom seems both individual and universal. I have the freedom to choose to go to a nude beach where there is a certain lack of privacy - but I choose this. Freedom would also allow me the ability to chain myself to a tree and throw away the key - I can actually use freedom to remove itself: I do not think privacy has these same properties.
Enforcment of privacy seems problematic to me whereas enforcement of freedom seems necessary. Perhaps freedom is a superset of privacy.
Interesting stuff.
That is a good way of putting it. I think we are both saying essentially the same thing. After all, freedom has, however, been earned many times in the past because it was not granted. Freedom is, however, a natural right as you say.
Privacy is like Freedom: It is not granted, it is earned.
If you need a locksmith to open your safe, you can't expect him to overlook the dead body inside.
How could Microsoft pass up that offer!?
I should have given examples, you're right.
Let's use the DARPA challenges as an example of technology which is available to the individual and for which no superior technology existed for the govt. The vehicles from these competitions are created by private citizens and the government did not have anything better.
As image recognition technology progresses it will probably be just as advanced for the individual as for the government. This will probably be because it will be created, not in some government lab, but at Google or perhaps Hans' garage in Berlin. Perhaps the govt will have server-farms all using the image recognition tech to mass view images, but the fundamental algorithms (the tech) will be the same.
I guess my point is that the stuff coming out of government labs these days doesn't really strike me as far superior to that which private labs are producing. In other words, the governments advantage has shifted from quality of technology to quantity.
Is is safe to say that the distance between govt technologies and those available to citizens has and continues to narrow?
For example, is it likely that the processing innards of this device will not be extraordinary, super-computing devices? Is it likely that the batteries will be some kind of lithium-ion battery, and not some exotic, crazy technology.
I recently saw something about regular people developing an autonomous RC-type airplane which would navigate itself using GPS - isn't that just a UAV?
It seems to me that back in the day the govt actually built machines which far outstripped anything available to regular folks. However, I think that nowadays the seperation between the individual and the government is not a technical one so much as an economic one. In other words, the govt doesn't have better tech which is unavailable - they have better tech because they payed for it, and you could too if you had the money.
This universe is amazing in all the ways it runs. Supernovas are inevitable, obviously, and thus the new elements they create are destined to be dispersed. Astronomy has shown that these heavier elements inevitably form into new stars and planets. Physics shows that these elements inevitably form molecules. Chemistry shows that the molecules inevitably bind together to form complex substances. Biology shows that these complex substances will further form replicate themselves.
We began by connecting the dots in the sky to form images of heroes, gods and monsters. Who knew that when we finally connected them all together it would be a picture of ourselves?
Right you are! and here it is: "42"
But you already knew that.
But have you seen the new lipstick? It uses subsurface scattering and revolutionary new food-stain shaders.
Our eyes are so amazingly beyond any other organism's, that I say humans have abilities which are truly cosmic in scale. Think of the most powerful biological eye - probably a hawk or eagle's - and then compare the light-gathering and resolving power of it to the resolution and light gathered from an astronomical observation. It is a truly stellar distance, the separation.
Yes, the biological human eye does not compare, but I consider our technology to be a part of us. After all, humans aren't really that well equipped by default - we don't survive without our technology and therefore I consider our technology to be as much a part of us as a colony is a part of the ant organism.
And yet with this power of sight, this ability to see the dangers of this universal landscape, we still seem to lack the foresight to compare. I guess it is easier to increase our vision than to have increased vision.
Well, they do call them the "heavens" and we all know the fictional works that term comes from.
It's not just about mutiple-threads, it's about coordination between those threads in a real-time manner.
As you know, multiple threads in a program do not actually execute concurrently - processing is still serial, it's just so fast that threads can appear to execute simultaneously - and it's not just about queuing execution either.
With multiple cores we have the ability to multiply the processing potential, but there is still a coordination issue - what good is it to process x amount of data if you must still wait for the Y data to finish processing before you can use it?
Here's an interesting article about Valve software's difficulties as they begin to experiment with the multi-core architecture paradigm. Some of their solutions are most interesting, including this little tidbit which has stuck with me: "In additional to failing to scale well, coarse threading also introduced an element of latency. Valve had to enable the networking component of the engine to keep the client and server systems synchronized, even with the single-player game."
It's interesting that they already had a 'solution' in place, but that this solution was created for a different reason yet with a useful outcome.
...the predators will flourish.
Well, not on purpose at least, right?
Who hasn't had a crush on a fictional character? As you are largely geeks reading this, I submit that many of you find at least some Anime girls hot - even though you know full well that they are not real: the human heart can vast in its ability to accept.
I had a huge crush on Ryoko from the Tenchi Muyo animes. This crush didn't even require the physical contact that would be present with a robotic hottie. There is little room for doubt that our emotionally sticky limbic system can latch onto unusual objects of affection - I believe it's not unusual to be loved by anyone...or to love anything.