Any question to which we do not want the prefabricated response might have to be asked before the major debates. Of course, I have little idea as to how to be kept up-to-date with all potential candidates as we find them, so this is really challenging for those of us only with internet connection and not Washington presence. How do we find the superheroes out of the set of possible political candidates?
It would be interesting to see politicians citing references and other guys to go talk with, rather than dodging bullets in questions. It would show that they are in fact connected and maybe slightly informed.
The head of my high school's science department is young enough to still be trying to get rid of his cards. He even occassionally catches students using words like 'charizard' instead of 'chameleon', of which I have been lucky enough to experience myself.
I seem to remember this old post re: China and their internet attack techniques and the dangers of assuming any sort of traditional warfare tactics. China, as well as any other connected country, can build mobile computation networks that would consist of hardcore hackers-- the typo who happen to also be tough-as-nails, rip phonebooks with their bare hands, and have the classic "scruffy looking" persona about them, in transit from one location to the next. Just small towns, nothing really spectacular. Satellite-tracking of these groups would be reduced since they are travelling separately in various cars, trucks, planes, basically it would look like a group of guys on a road trip. Furthermore, they could have entire botnets installed in their targets. Lots of possible tactics, and they all sound fun yet dangerously easy with the right brains behind the operation.
Not good. Imagine our vehicles consuming all of these autotrophs that are getting photons from sunlight and that we harvest like crazy (think the Matrix). The population would quickly fall as we exponentially increase the number of glucose engines.
On the other hand. Maybe it's not too bad, if it worked like that we would have incentive to expand the biosphere perhaps off of the planet (think hydroponics).
If voting systems use anything too complex to be understood by a school leaver with passing grades in all subjects, they're too complex full stop.
Unfortunately, even paper and pen causes a full stop. Most of us do not know what graphite actually is, nothing of the chemical structure of the ballot paper ("patriot paper," no doubt), nothing of the dyes and inks used in the tip of the pen. Are they erasable? What about paper ballots? Can the paper be punched back into the hole?
Particularly what internet protocols are you using, or equivalently how are you accessing these banks electronically? As an example: are we talking Financial Information eXchange or something different?
Sounds like Pascal's wager, with slightly less religious fixings. And, it is possible to remove the question of 'free will' and use something even less religious to formulate yet an even further reduced, yet still just as useful, version of Pascal's wager. Good luck finding/making it.:)
In philosophy we talk about "possible worlds"--a "possible world" is a world that doesn't contradict itself. The world we live in is a possible world, of course, but it is also the actual world (according to the conventional interpretation),
In the words of Leibniz, all that which will exist is that which is unnecessarily nonexistant and thus possible. There is lots of gunk to our theories that have us making wild predictions that are not necessarily true, but we say they are 'possible'. Each time the possible does not become actuality, it is a problem with our theories in predicting that which is possible. We may never be able to capture nature in the most perfect metaphor, but we can try. "In theory," is usually used to signify idealizations, like Newtonian mechanics where cows become spheres and time becomes an unexplained axiom. Slowly are we working towards more detailed models, theories, or metaphors. Like this..
Traditionally, time has been associated with thermodynamics and the idea of entropy (energy unavailable to some system). Entropy is not disorder. Thanks to Aristotle, Leibniz, Boltzmann, Chaitin, etc., we know that causality, thermodynamics, and time are more related to each other than usually mentioned. Prigogine recently did more work with reversible-state reactions in statistical thermodynamics. As far as I can tell, the most that we know of 'time' is that action makes up the arrow of time. As entropy increases, the 'time' variable increases-- at least, locally. To know entropy, time, and the great arrow, we must know energy.
If 'no action' is an action then does something doing nothing age? As long as we see no universal time variable permeating the fabric of space, the idea of a "time dimension" is weak. I wonder what physics would look like when we give energy its own dimension. Remember, though we may know that the basis of energy is quanta via photons, we still do not know what the energy is. In the famous words of Feynman, "Nobody knows what energy is." Much like our state of affairs in psychology (which could be reformulated into developmental coping tools) and neuroscience re: 'memory'.
This is exactly the issue the GP was referring to: the captchas must be randomly computer-generated to create a suitably large search space, but they mustn't be computer-solvable.
Not yet knowing what humans are capable of (they are always surprising us), I wonder if we can get a proof that there are some set A of tasks that do not belong to set B of tasks that computers can solve. The only tasks that I can think of off the top of my head are those that are physical and rely on wetware. But that would get awkward, and fast. Rethinking the system could potentially get rid of situations where we need to moderate for spam, unless we can hack up a proof (from bare-bones logic).
Reminds me of that somewhat bizarre subplot in Vinge's latest novel "Rainbow's End" where there was a big project to digitize all the university libraries, and some guy came up with the fastest way to do it: just throw all the books into a giant shredder, and then gave lots of cameras taking pictures of every last bit from every andle as it comes blowing out the other end...then re-assemble it all in a computer.
And the experimental captcha program is out there, let me go find the link.
* reCaptcha
* Distributed Proofreaders- not captchas, but entire pages.
With the likes of BugMeNot.com, which people can use to distribute usernames and passwords for websites, there is little incentive to collectively continuously register. Look at how many websites are eating us and desperately trying to hold our attention to feed them users. Maybe there is another model, one better than subscription-based?
I wonder what the artificial memory seemed like to the critter in the jar. Probably something like "whoa, I'm tripping!"
Technically the chemical in question could be one of the many neurotoxins, just as lead (Pb) acts as one of the many human toxins. Injection of picrotoxin might be stimulating neurons in some fashion that is abnormal or detrimental, not to mention that these results only had imprints lasting days and not years. And maybe it is an equivalent psychadelic? Maybe not.
... and injection of microdroplets (10 microliters) at a rate of one every 20 sec of 100 micromoles picrotoxin dissolved in neuron growth medium [an ionotropic gamma-aminobutyric acid GABA antagonist, which reduces the influence of inhibitory synapses [20]].
Eventually, the hope is that we can find some set of chemicals that produces neurobehavior much like we see under fMRI and other scanning methodologies. And I think there is a theory out there on the internet, maybe this is just leftover from religious institutions, basically the claim that there are different neurostructures that produce different 'intelligences' or information processing tools, so our memory-in-the-jar might not be able to remember much of itself. Not sure if we are ready to classify neuroprocessing yet.
My knee-jerk reaction was an agreement, since we all could be using hyperlinks in journalism (little reason not to); but, the trick on the WWW is to not scream when we come into incompetence-- or lack of imagination re: linking. Not all people have not been introduced to the Way of the internet.
Nah, information overlook is the killer. The "overload" craze may still be with us, but really the problem is overlook and managing attention. And don't hide information just because it may overload some browsing users, some of us really do want to see thousands of search results per page instead of having to continuously return to the mouse or tabbing keys to get to the next page of search results, etc.
Addressing new features can cause programmers to go back and improve previous functions. Wasn't that the idea of code reuse?
Drop down boxes are not appropriate. Side panel scrollbox of opened tabs is the way to go. Firefox has plugins that allow for vertical tabbing and there is native support in Opera.
Yeah, and it would also be useful to integrate queues and session management with this sort of tab trees, such as migrating a branch towards the history archive, or queueing up numerous links to go explore at some later date. Maybe more useful would be the ability to restructure the currently opened content (either the paged content or the tabs themselves) via some quick Javascripting, to account for whatever new forms of information we find on the big WWW. There is little difference between opening up new tabs and forking attention, so the adoption of ideas from kernel memory management could work. (Go bug Massalin?)
Maybe it is time that we seriously discuss the state of browsing the world wide web and suggest some new browser features to implement, not just "bookmark tagging". Can't we come up with something to increase browsing productivity more than "bookmark sharing" ? Brainstorming in groups is useful in this situation.
I use the Opera browser to open up 200+ tabs in one single session at a time, and it would be useful if they implemented more session management, such as the ability to add tabs to specifically saved sessions. Same goes for Firefox.
Let's increase the number of pages that we can view per day. When you look at the numbers, we view a surprisingly small percentage of the content available on the WWW re: nearly any subject. The fact that the limit to the number of tabs that can be opened in one active browsing session is somewhat dependent on how much the browser can handle at once seems silly- cached tabs and an ability to predict which tabs the user might pull up next would be useful (though no fancy prediction algorithms, that would be too much).
There is a suggestion on the Opera discussion boards about a "rush mode" for viewing tabs such that you can strategize which tabs you are to go to next when you close the current tab. That would be a useful plugin to implement. Speaking of which, where do we draw the line between plugin and component to distribute with the browser?
The web history features can also be improved, perhaps graphical illustrations of the pathways through the world wide web would be an improvement, such that there is no longer this linear time dependency, when in truth we go through many tabs and have many separate histories building at once. There's lots of information being lost in current history tracking.
And, does anybody else use browsers as extensively as I do? I would be interested in meeting with some of you and discussing strategies for increasing web browsing and content consumption rates.
And if they're not fully knowable, then we should recognize the point at which we can learn no more and stop wasting our time. We're nowhere near that point, of course. But the idea that there will always be some new rule of the universe we don't know defeats the purpose of science entirely.
All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions...
Gödel showed that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiom system is involved...
How can you figure out if you are sane?... Once you begin to question your own sanity, you get trapped in an ever-tighter vortex of self-fulfilling prophecies, though the process is by no means inevitable. Everyone knows that the insane interpret the world via their own peculiarly consistent logic; how can you tell if your own logic is "peculiar' or not, given that you have only your own logic to judge itself? I don't see any answer. I am reminded of Gödel's second theorem, which implies that the only versions of formal number theory which assert their own consistency are inconsistent.
The other metaphorical analogue to Gödel's Theorem which I find provocative suggests that ultimately, we cannot understand our own mind/brains... Just as we cannot see our faces with our own eyes, is it not inconceivable to expect that we cannot mirror our complete mental structures in the symbols which carry them out? All the limitative theorems of mathematics and the theory of computation suggest that once the ability to represent your own structure has reached a certain critical point, that is the kiss of death: it guarantees that you can never represent yourself totally.
More vividly, imagine science as if approaching an asymptote in some unknown number of dimensions via all sorts of interesting theories, all of which contribute to some sort of ecology of supporting ideas and technologies, but never can any or all provide an Absolute.
Slashdot Mirror
Any question to which we do not want the prefabricated response might have to be asked before the major debates. Of course, I have little idea as to how to be kept up-to-date with all potential candidates as we find them, so this is really challenging for those of us only with internet connection and not Washington presence. How do we find the superheroes out of the set of possible political candidates?
It would be interesting to see politicians citing references and other guys to go talk with, rather than dodging bullets in questions. It would show that they are in fact connected and maybe slightly informed.
The head of my high school's science department is young enough to still be trying to get rid of his cards. He even occassionally catches students using words like 'charizard' instead of 'chameleon', of which I have been lucky enough to experience myself.
I seem to remember this old post re: China and their internet attack techniques and the dangers of assuming any sort of traditional warfare tactics. China, as well as any other connected country, can build mobile computation networks that would consist of hardcore hackers-- the typo who happen to also be tough-as-nails, rip phonebooks with their bare hands, and have the classic "scruffy looking" persona about them, in transit from one location to the next. Just small towns, nothing really spectacular. Satellite-tracking of these groups would be reduced since they are travelling separately in various cars, trucks, planes, basically it would look like a group of guys on a road trip. Furthermore, they could have entire botnets installed in their targets. Lots of possible tactics, and they all sound fun yet dangerously easy with the right brains behind the operation.
Not good. Imagine our vehicles consuming all of these autotrophs that are getting photons from sunlight and that we harvest like crazy (think the Matrix). The population would quickly fall as we exponentially increase the number of glucose engines.
On the other hand. Maybe it's not too bad, if it worked like that we would have incentive to expand the biosphere perhaps off of the planet (think hydroponics).
Internet != WWW.
Particularly what internet protocols are you using, or equivalently how are you accessing these banks electronically? As an example: are we talking Financial Information eXchange or something different?
Universe: everything that exists anywhere;
If 'no action' is an action then does something doing nothing age? As long as we see no universal time variable permeating the fabric of space, the idea of a "time dimension" is weak. I wonder what physics would look like when we give energy its own dimension. Remember, though we may know that the basis of energy is quanta via photons, we still do not know what the energy is. In the famous words of Feynman, "Nobody knows what energy is." Much like our state of affairs in psychology (which could be reformulated into developmental coping tools) and neuroscience re: 'memory'.
* reCaptcha
* Distributed Proofreaders- not captchas, but entire pages.
With the likes of BugMeNot.com, which people can use to distribute usernames and passwords for websites, there is little incentive to collectively continuously register. Look at how many websites are eating us and desperately trying to hold our attention to feed them users. Maybe there is another model, one better than subscription-based?
I have collected an assortment of market links re: daytrading, financial information exchange protocols, etc.. And if we can find any better links, that would be useful- the stock markets do not need to remain hidden from our eyes.
Eventually, the hope is that we can find some set of chemicals that produces neurobehavior much like we see under fMRI and other scanning methodologies. And I think there is a theory out there on the internet, maybe this is just leftover from religious institutions, basically the claim that there are different neurostructures that produce different 'intelligences' or information processing tools, so our memory-in-the-jar might not be able to remember much of itself. Not sure if we are ready to classify neuroprocessing yet.
My knee-jerk reaction was an agreement, since we all could be using hyperlinks in journalism (little reason not to); but, the trick on the WWW is to not scream when we come into incompetence-- or lack of imagination re: linking. Not all people have not been introduced to the Way of the internet.
Towards neuro-memory-chip: Imprinting multiple memories in cultured neural networks; Itay Baruchi and Eshel Ben-Jacob. 2007. What interesting device combinations can we imagine with the awesome 2003 P. P. Irazoqui neurotransceiver?
Addressing new features can cause programmers to go back and improve previous functions. Wasn't that the idea of code reuse?
And I like the idea of users == fighter pilots.
Drop down boxes are not appropriate. Side panel scrollbox of opened tabs is the way to go. Firefox has plugins that allow for vertical tabbing and there is native support in Opera.
Maybe it is time that we seriously discuss the state of browsing the world wide web and suggest some new browser features to implement, not just "bookmark tagging". Can't we come up with something to increase browsing productivity more than "bookmark sharing" ? Brainstorming in groups is useful in this situation.
I use the Opera browser to open up 200+ tabs in one single session at a time, and it would be useful if they implemented more session management, such as the ability to add tabs to specifically saved sessions. Same goes for Firefox.
Let's increase the number of pages that we can view per day. When you look at the numbers, we view a surprisingly small percentage of the content available on the WWW re: nearly any subject. The fact that the limit to the number of tabs that can be opened in one active browsing session is somewhat dependent on how much the browser can handle at once seems silly- cached tabs and an ability to predict which tabs the user might pull up next would be useful (though no fancy prediction algorithms, that would be too much).
There is a suggestion on the Opera discussion boards about a "rush mode" for viewing tabs such that you can strategize which tabs you are to go to next when you close the current tab. That would be a useful plugin to implement. Speaking of which, where do we draw the line between plugin and component to distribute with the browser?
The web history features can also be improved, perhaps graphical illustrations of the pathways through the world wide web would be an improvement, such that there is no longer this linear time dependency, when in truth we go through many tabs and have many separate histories building at once. There's lots of information being lost in current history tracking.
And, does anybody else use browsers as extensively as I do? I would be interested in meeting with some of you and discussing strategies for increasing web browsing and content consumption rates.
Ah, you are talking of Gödel's incompleteness theorem and the kiss of death:
More vividly, imagine science as if approaching an asymptote in some unknown number of dimensions via all sorts of interesting theories, all of which contribute to some sort of ecology of supporting ideas and technologies, but never can any or all provide an Absolute.