I really dont see much news in this, other than the tendency to call it 'mind doping' and 'mind-enhancing' rather than 'doing drugs'.
What's new - if not yet, then soon - is the quality of the enhancement. So far, for the most part, cognitive enhancement comes with high doses of uncertainty and risk, as well as tangible side effects. There's no reason to think we will fail to improve in those areas, and it's certainly time to raise awareness of what's coming.
I like how it's "perhaps quite good" right up to the line you personally draw, and after that it's "desperation for success" along with inevitable unpersonhood. People draw different lines. Even you might draw a different line someday, at which point you will of course move the "desperation vs. quite good" delineation to match.
I was the original owner of usenet.com - I registered it in 1994 or thereabouts. I sold it to someone (not sure if the present owner or not) for six figures in the late '90s.
Heh, a google search for paulp@usenet.com (my address at the time) yields exactly one result.
When you are evaluating bill gates's prognostication ability, do not forget to consider this prediction: in January, Mr Gates predicted that technology would make spam "a thing of the past" within two years.
I wonder how the airlines are going to keep inappropriate video (i.e. porn or even just movies like "Snakes on a Plane [CC]" or "Alive [CC]") from appearing on the seat-back displays.
Yeah, we've only had portable DVD players for about eight years, so the issue has never come up before. I assume they'll put several viewing enforcement marshalls on every flight - that's the most straightforward answer, anyway.
I (paul phillips) made three WPT final tables and three WSOP final tables in the last year but I was a programmer until I started playing cards full time a few years ago. Apparently I even still read slashdot from time to time. Finally, a thread where I feel completely qualified to post.
Programmers have a better foundation for poker analysis than most but this is a very incomplete predictor of success. Much more valuable is the ability to play your A-game all the time, and I haven't seen that programmers are any better at this than anyone else.
Poker is as much a test of self-discipline (and many other things) as it is of logic and knowledge. Being a brilliant analyst is of no use is you fail in other areas.
I write a lot about the tournament poker life in my blog.
Not-often-used word, how slashdot. If you can reach your mid-20s without seeing the word "gerrymander" 100 times, you just don't read the news. Not that this stops the local population from speculating wildly about everything under the sun; I just think it's funny that a post defining this extremely common word is +5 informative. Informative!?
Slashdot should be renamed SpeculateAndWaitForCorrectionsDot.
When considering purchases such as this, keep in mind that sharp unapologetically spammed many members of debian-laptop with an ad. They harvested the addresses of people who had posted to the list. When I called them to complain about this their response was that they would "take me off the list."
Punish spammers. Don't buy sharp. A sampling of the spam I received:
Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 16:05:25 -0700
From: Sharp Systems Marketing
To: Paul Phillips
Subject: ADV: Special Offer from Sharp Systems
Award Winning Sharp Products
Paul Phillips
Sharp Systems of America is offering it's award-winning products for a
breakthrough price!
We invite you to visit our website to learn more about the Actius
notebook family and Sharp family of LCD monitors.
Fascinating to see something I wrote almost ten years ago turn up on slashdot as "new."
I wrote it on a dare, sort of. There weren't any single process web servers at the time and a friend of mine said "it shouldn't be that hard..."
I named it boa because my pet at the time was -- wait for it! -- a boa constrictor.
Gee, that's it. Yay for open source living ten years on its own.
It doesn't even have a cd burner. This is a huge oversight: if I'm going to store all my audio on a device it needs to be able to generate CDs for my MP3 playing car stereo.
All in all it looks like a loser at that price with those features... though clearly there is room for this sort of combination device. It ought to be a tivo, too, no reason for my storage to be compartmentalized between incompatible devices.
I wasn't able to read the original article, either because the site is being slashslammed or because half the net seems unreachable, but...
If someone wanted to write a virus to do really lasting damage, it wouldn't do boring stuff like delete files or steal credit card information. Come on, who cares.
The road to immortality is to hack people, to change relationships permanently. So here's what you do: propagate like iloveyou, but with vastly more discretion. When launched on a new machine, take the following steps:
Dig through all the places typical mail clients store mail. Build up a list of all the subject's correspondents.
Send the virus along to various correspondents, but do so with a very plausible looking reply to their last email. If you really want to go to town, emulate the subject's writing style, but some brief nondescript text should be sufficient. Lots of optimizations here, all with the goal of getting the subject to execute the attached program.
Now, after enough delay to get that thing propagating a bit, search all the mail looking for mentions of people in the third person. Then package it all up and send it anonymously over. Thus, every mail our subject "Foo" has ever received mentioning "Bar", or ever sent mentioning "Bar", is now in Bar's hands. Repeat for everyone else in their mail.
It should be obvious how devastating this would be, especially at cutthroat companies. The effects of such a virus getting much propagation would be felt for a long, long, long time.
Slashdot Mirror
The webserver I wrote in 1995 still powers http://images.slashdot.org/
I really dont see much news in this, other than the tendency to call it 'mind doping' and 'mind-enhancing' rather than 'doing drugs'.
What's new - if not yet, then soon - is the quality of the enhancement. So far, for the most part, cognitive enhancement comes with high doses of uncertainty and risk, as well as tangible side effects. There's no reason to think we will fail to improve in those areas, and it's certainly time to raise awareness of what's coming.
- Paul Phillips
I like how it's "perhaps quite good" right up to the line you personally draw, and after that it's "desperation for success" along with inevitable unpersonhood. People draw different lines. Even you might draw a different line someday, at which point you will of course move the "desperation vs. quite good" delineation to match.
- Paul Phillips (the guy in the article)
Heh, a google search for paulp@usenet.com (my address at the time) yields exactly one result.
When you are evaluating bill gates's prognostication ability, do not forget to consider this prediction: in January, Mr Gates predicted that technology would make spam "a thing of the past" within two years.
Yes, that was January 2004.
I wonder how the airlines are going to keep inappropriate video (i.e. porn or even just movies like "Snakes on a Plane [CC]" or "Alive [CC]") from appearing on the seat-back displays.
Yeah, we've only had portable DVD players for about eight years, so the issue has never come up before. I assume they'll put several viewing enforcement marshalls on every flight - that's the most straightforward answer, anyway.
But there was recently a tournament broadcast live (actually with a 5 minute delay to avoid the possibility of cheating)
Glad you liked it; I was at that final table. Briefly, unfortunately, when I put it all-in with AQ against ivey's AK and landed fifth.
I (paul phillips) made three WPT final tables and three WSOP final tables in the last year but I was a programmer until I started playing cards full time a few years ago. Apparently I even still read slashdot from time to time. Finally, a thread where I feel completely qualified to post.
Programmers have a better foundation for poker analysis than most but this is a very incomplete predictor of success. Much more valuable is the ability to play your A-game all the time, and I haven't seen that programmers are any better at this than anyone else.
Poker is as much a test of self-discipline (and many other things) as it is of logic and knowledge. Being a brilliant analyst is of no use is you fail in other areas.
I write a lot about the tournament poker life in my blog.
Not-often-used word, how slashdot. If you can reach your mid-20s without seeing the word "gerrymander" 100 times, you just don't read the news. Not that this stops the local population from speculating wildly about everything under the sun; I just think it's funny that a post defining this extremely common word is +5 informative. Informative!?
Slashdot should be renamed SpeculateAndWaitForCorrectionsDot.
Punish spammers. Don't buy sharp. A sampling of the spam I received:
Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 16:05:25 -0700
From: Sharp Systems Marketing
To: Paul Phillips
Subject: ADV: Special Offer from Sharp Systems
Award Winning Sharp Products
Paul Phillips
Sharp Systems of America is offering it's award-winning products for a breakthrough price!
We invite you to visit our website to learn more about the Actius notebook family and Sharp family of LCD monitors.
Very amusing coincidence, that boa definition! But, a coincidence only.
Fascinating to see something I wrote almost ten years ago turn up on slashdot as "new."
I wrote it on a dare, sort of. There weren't any single process web servers at the time and a friend of mine said "it shouldn't be that hard..." I named it boa because my pet at the time was -- wait for it! -- a boa constrictor.
Gee, that's it. Yay for open source living ten years on its own.
-- psp
All in all it looks like a loser at that price with those features... though clearly there is room for this sort of combination device. It ought to be a tivo, too, no reason for my storage to be compartmentalized between incompatible devices.
Some day.
If someone wanted to write a virus to do really lasting damage, it wouldn't do boring stuff like delete files or steal credit card information. Come on, who cares.
The road to immortality is to hack people, to change relationships permanently. So here's what you do: propagate like iloveyou, but with vastly more discretion. When launched on a new machine, take the following steps:
- Dig through all the places typical mail clients store mail. Build up a list of all the subject's correspondents.
- Send the virus along to various correspondents, but do so with a very plausible looking reply to their last email. If you really want to go to town, emulate the subject's writing style, but some brief nondescript text should be sufficient. Lots of optimizations here, all with the goal of getting the subject to execute the attached program.
- Now, after enough delay to get that thing propagating a bit, search all the mail looking for mentions of people in the third person. Then package it all up and send it anonymously over. Thus, every mail our subject "Foo" has ever received mentioning "Bar", or ever sent mentioning "Bar", is now in Bar's hands. Repeat for everyone else in their mail.
It should be obvious how devastating this would be, especially at cutthroat companies. The effects of such a virus getting much propagation would be felt for a long, long, long time.Nobody should do this, of course!