"There is every reason to believe that human consciousness is just a glorified version of the above program." Afaik, there is _absolutely_ no reason to believe that. You simply don't understand the problem.
Oh, and another thing, sonny: those hamburger menus are *precisely* why I refuse to use Chrome. (I understand Apple forces them to do real menus on OSX. One of the few times I'll cheer Apple.)
Tell me, mister hamburger: when Chrome chooses to display a web page in the wrong encoding, how do you fix the display? A not infrequent occurrence with the web pages I look at. (What's that you say? You *prefer* diamond-questionMark-diamond to a left double quote? Glad that works for you.) Or how do you see the source code of the page? These things are easy in Firefox (and its derivatives), or even on IE or Edge.
As the little old lady said about her hamburger, "Where's the beef?"
In Windows, some apps do remember, but in my experience most don't, and it's very annoying. Every day I start up my PC at work, I have to launch six or so apps (I don't have control over my Start menu, and no, don't ask why), then move 4 of those 6 apps to the same place they were yesterday. Sheez...
Dunno about applications that don't need titles, but it sounds like he doesn't need one. Or rather, it would be good if he were reassigned to the position of "Director of". Then other people could (I hope) be freed to do useful things, rather than implement his rants.
If I understand what you're saying, then the latest versions of Adobe Acrobat (which I have to use at work) are a perfect example. There are a couple things I use almost every time I open a doc: re-size the document to a full page view, and zoom in (the latter in case I need to check out some small font or formatting issue). And where are these commands located? Three layers down in the menu, below everything I don't use. The entire menu/ toolbar (with humongous black-and-white icons)/ extra tools panels in Acrobat seem designed to prevent me from seeing anything in the document, or doing anything useful.
If Adobe wants a model of how to design a PDF reader/ editor, they need look no further than my favorite, PDF-XChange Editor (which I use at home). (Although for quick-and-dirty reading, MuPDF seems very good.)
"Frankly, everybody who stopped using plain words in their programs, but uses only abstract icons instead, can die."
Amen, brother, been saying s.t. like this for a long time: There's a reason no one could decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphics until Champollion and the Rosetta Stone, because they're indecipherable on their own. So why we went from menus with alphabetically spelled words, to ribbons with hieroglyphics, is more than I know.
Ron Goulart, "Into the Shop" I read it in 1970 (or 1964?) in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but since this topic keeps coming up, I bought myself a (used) copy of his book "What's become of Screwloose? and other Inquiries", where the story was reprinted. (The book has a stamp from the Seton Catholic High School. Gotta love those Jesuits, or whatever brand of Catholic bought this.) The story should be required reading for anybody who proposes this kind of nonsense.
"Atmospheric CO2 concentration affects temperatures." Of course, but if warming were due only to CO2, there would be very little of it--maybe a degree C under projected CO2 rises. The rest of the projected warming is due to other effects that the models assume, such as clouds. And most of the reason why the models have such a range of predictions is that they assume different things about the other effects. It's even possible that these other effects, rather than increasing the temp rise as most models assume, will actually counter it, so the temp rise would be less than that expected if CO2 were the only effect.
Along the same lines, the word for 'cat' (the domestic animal) in nearly all indigenous languages of Central or South America where Spanish is the predominant language is something like 'mis' or 'mish'. The reason is that cats were introduced by the Spaniards, and the Spanish word for calling a cat to come is 'mis'.
One language where this is not the word is Waorani, a language isolate of Ecuador. Their word for 'cat' sounds like the English word 'kitty', since cats were introduced to this tribe by English-speaking missionaries in the 1960s.
One reason for binary equivalency would be that if I buy a new motherboard or new computer, I should be able to take the hard drive from my old PC and drop it into my new one. Now that's not to say that there might not be driver diffs, but they would presumably be self-contained modules, loadable at boot time.
I saw a presentation back around 1976 by someone who had been briefed on the US and/or Canadian experiments. They were well aware that the Nazis had done the experiments you describe, but there was a big difference: the survival times (as extrapolated, obviously) were much longer for the participants in the more recent experiments. In fact they the recent participants were more or less fine (if acutely uncomfortable) for considerably longer than the Dachau people. The briefer attributed this to their state of health going in, and in particular to their nourishment.
Ok AC, I'll bite: what do you mean? And are you implying that CygWin was superfluous (before the Linux subsystem came).
There was a brief Linux system for Windows that came out some years--maybe a decade?--ago. My recollection was that it was experimental, buggy, and was removed soon thereafter.
To be honest, I doubt there's any such warehouse; so the whole question is bogus. But if there were, it does seem possible that we might not be able to identify the secret sauce, or reproduce the alloy.
I have a vague recollection (which could be totally wrong) that if a scientist from the 1930s were somehow given a transistor, they could not distinguish the P-doped and N-doped regions, because the doping levels were below the sensitivity of their tests. Nor, even if they were told about doping, could they re-create a transistor, because they couldn't produce sufficiently pure samples of silicon or germanium to start with. I suppose s.t. analogous to this could be true for alien alloys--they could have some crucial property which, for one reason or another, we could not detect and/or reproduce. Not necessarily a component that we could not detect, but maybe a configuration of a component that we could not detect. (By "configuration", I mean s.t. like the difference among graphene, diamond, and soot.)
It's also possible that the word "alloy" in this report means something other than blend of metals.
"The vertical space used by the default toolbars and menu in Office 2003": Only an idiot kept the default toolbars. I had no toolbars whatsoever, because they required mousing (IIRC), and I prefer leaving my hands on the keyboard. Besides, the toolbars did nothing that I couldn't do with the menu. And the menu auto-hid (and of course the Ribbon can too, but when it's open it's huge).
If someone wanted to make improvements to Word, a good place would have been (and would still be, to this day) the section numbering system. Try to get legal numbering (1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.2.1...). It has never worked since Word version 1, and if anything it's worse now than it was ten years ago. (For the record, LaTeX does this correctly without breaking a sweat.) Or for a trivial fix, make dialog boxes automagically avoid covering the part of the Word window that contains the cursor and the part that contains the search term you just found. Or...
I could go on. But I won't. The Ribbon is a mess; it contains lots of stuff I never want to use, and doesn't contain stuff I do want.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't have a consciousness, why do you bother posting here? Or are you saying your computer posts stuff itself while you're asleep?
"There is every reason to believe that human consciousness is just a glorified version of the above program." Afaik, there is _absolutely_ no reason to believe that. You simply don't understand the problem.
Oh, and another thing, sonny: those hamburger menus are *precisely* why I refuse to use Chrome. (I understand Apple forces them to do real menus on OSX. One of the few times I'll cheer Apple.)
Tell me, mister hamburger: when Chrome chooses to display a web page in the wrong encoding, how do you fix the display? A not infrequent occurrence with the web pages I look at. (What's that you say? You *prefer* diamond-questionMark-diamond to a left double quote? Glad that works for you.) Or how do you see the source code of the page? These things are easy in Firefox (and its derivatives), or even on IE or Edge.
As the little old lady said about her hamburger, "Where's the beef?"
In Windows, some apps do remember, but in my experience most don't, and it's very annoying. Every day I start up my PC at work, I have to launch six or so apps (I don't have control over my Start menu, and no, don't ask why), then move 4 of those 6 apps to the same place they were yesterday. Sheez...
Dunno about applications that don't need titles, but it sounds like he doesn't need one. Or rather, it would be good if he were reassigned to the position of "Director of". Then other people could (I hope) be freed to do useful things, rather than implement his rants.
If I understand what you're saying, then the latest versions of Adobe Acrobat (which I have to use at work) are a perfect example. There are a couple things I use almost every time I open a doc: re-size the document to a full page view, and zoom in (the latter in case I need to check out some small font or formatting issue). And where are these commands located? Three layers down in the menu, below everything I don't use. The entire menu/ toolbar (with humongous black-and-white icons)/ extra tools panels in Acrobat seem designed to prevent me from seeing anything in the document, or doing anything useful.
If Adobe wants a model of how to design a PDF reader/ editor, they need look no further than my favorite, PDF-XChange Editor (which I use at home). (Although for quick-and-dirty reading, MuPDF seems very good.)
And if that corner happens to be covered up by some other window, sonny?
There's a reason most coffee mugs have handles, you know.
"Frankly, everybody who stopped using plain words in their programs, but uses only abstract icons instead, can die."
Amen, brother, been saying s.t. like this for a long time: There's a reason no one could decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphics until Champollion and the Rosetta Stone, because they're indecipherable on their own. So why we went from menus with alphabetically spelled words, to ribbons with hieroglyphics, is more than I know.
Prevyet, tavarish!
(can't do cyrillic at \...)
Ron Goulart, "Into the Shop" I read it in 1970 (or 1964?) in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but since this topic keeps coming up, I bought myself a (used) copy of his book "What's become of Screwloose? and other Inquiries", where the story was reprinted. (The book has a stamp from the Seton Catholic High School. Gotta love those Jesuits, or whatever brand of Catholic bought this.) The story should be required reading for anybody who proposes this kind of nonsense.
I believe that Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon has a computer made in part out of a pipe organ. Or perhaps that's what you were referring to?
or perhaps Alan Morgan's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable from a genuine kook."
"Rather, it limits the kinds of questions that one can address with science." I could be wrong, but I believe that was scatbomb's point.
"Atmospheric CO2 concentration affects temperatures." Of course, but if warming were due only to CO2, there would be very little of it--maybe a degree C under projected CO2 rises. The rest of the projected warming is due to other effects that the models assume, such as clouds. And most of the reason why the models have such a range of predictions is that they assume different things about the other effects. It's even possible that these other effects, rather than increasing the temp rise as most models assume, will actually counter it, so the temp rise would be less than that expected if CO2 were the only effect.
Along the same lines, the word for 'cat' (the domestic animal) in nearly all indigenous languages of Central or South America where Spanish is the predominant language is something like 'mis' or 'mish'. The reason is that cats were introduced by the Spaniards, and the Spanish word for calling a cat to come is 'mis'.
One language where this is not the word is Waorani, a language isolate of Ecuador. Their word for 'cat' sounds like the English word 'kitty', since cats were introduced to this tribe by English-speaking missionaries in the 1960s.
"sponsoring the likes of Judith Currie and Anthony Watts": You're a liar.
One reason for binary equivalency would be that if I buy a new motherboard or new computer, I should be able to take the hard drive from my old PC and drop it into my new one. Now that's not to say that there might not be driver diffs, but they would presumably be self-contained modules, loadable at boot time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I saw a presentation back around 1976 by someone who had been briefed on the US and/or Canadian experiments. They were well aware that the Nazis had done the experiments you describe, but there was a big difference: the survival times (as extrapolated, obviously) were much longer for the participants in the more recent experiments. In fact they the recent participants were more or less fine (if acutely uncomfortable) for considerably longer than the Dachau people. The briefer attributed this to their state of health going in, and in particular to their nourishment.
Ok AC, I'll bite: what do you mean? And are you implying that CygWin was superfluous (before the Linux subsystem came).
There was a brief Linux system for Windows that came out some years--maybe a decade?--ago. My recollection was that it was experimental, buggy, and was removed soon thereafter.
To be honest, I doubt there's any such warehouse; so the whole question is bogus. But if there were, it does seem possible that we might not be able to identify the secret sauce, or reproduce the alloy.
I have a vague recollection (which could be totally wrong) that if a scientist from the 1930s were somehow given a transistor, they could not distinguish the P-doped and N-doped regions, because the doping levels were below the sensitivity of their tests. Nor, even if they were told about doping, could they re-create a transistor, because they couldn't produce sufficiently pure samples of silicon or germanium to start with. I suppose s.t. analogous to this could be true for alien alloys--they could have some crucial property which, for one reason or another, we could not detect and/or reproduce. Not necessarily a component that we could not detect, but maybe a configuration of a component that we could not detect. (By "configuration", I mean s.t. like the difference among graphene, diamond, and soot.)
It's also possible that the word "alloy" in this report means something other than blend of metals.
Putin is in Iraq?
Dunno about UFOs, but those OVNIs, now...
And you know this how?
"The vertical space used by the default toolbars and menu in Office 2003": Only an idiot kept the default toolbars. I had no toolbars whatsoever, because they required mousing (IIRC), and I prefer leaving my hands on the keyboard. Besides, the toolbars did nothing that I couldn't do with the menu. And the menu auto-hid (and of course the Ribbon can too, but when it's open it's huge).
If someone wanted to make improvements to Word, a good place would have been (and would still be, to this day) the section numbering system. Try to get legal numbering (1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.2.1...). It has never worked since Word version 1, and if anything it's worse now than it was ten years ago. (For the record, LaTeX does this correctly without breaking a sweat.) Or for a trivial fix, make dialog boxes automagically avoid covering the part of the Word window that contains the cursor and the part that contains the search term you just found. Or...
I could go on. But I won't. The Ribbon is a mess; it contains lots of stuff I never want to use, and doesn't contain stuff I do want.