You can buy the DVD to pay for the right to watch the movie, then download it
Heh, that seems quite fair to me. Several times I've bought a physical CD I didn't actually want because I wanted the music and wanted to support the artist. I wish I could have just said "keep the CD", so it wouldn't clutter up my place and waste them money.
While I agree to some degree, and in all honesty sometimes operate under the same guidelines, there's a little hand-waving going on here.
The implicit agreement of the market is something to the effect of "if you don't like the price, don't buy it". But an assumption built into "don't buy it" is that you're not going to have the same benefits as having bought it, either. The high ground here is to just not watch the movie.
But you did, because you were willing to spend the time to get it illegally. Let's say it was $1. Does that mean that the movie should be sold for $1? Only if that would cause about 14X more people to buy it, and that is also a faulty assumption. Here's a fairly sound assumption: if it was trivially easy for everyone to get a free version that was just as good as the pay version, there would be no pay version. Luckily for us, it takes some extra effort to get a free version and it's usually not quite as good, thus enough people keep paying into the system.
Incidentally, in some ways the free version is superior to the pay versions as they stand now: instant gratification (as compared to amazon), easier storage (as compared to a DVD), more flexible playback (as compared to iTunes), etc. And I think these things are as much to blame for piracy as the near-zero-cost.
In the end, I don't believe it is right to download stuff you haven't paid for, though I don't think it cuts into sales nearly as much as businesses claim. It's still fairly amoral, by which I mean it eventually has some negative indirect effects.
I do think that if some company got the instant gratification, storage, quality, flexibility, and pricing right, they'd be able to re-capture a lot of the pirate market and make at least a bit more money than they do now by whining. So I don't have a lot of sympathy either.
This problem is not going to be solved simply by adding bandwidth to the network, any more than the problem of slow web page loading was solved that way in the late 90's
As far as I remember, the problem of slow web page loading _was_ solved by adding bandwidth in the late nineties. I had dialup, then I got DSL, and I no longer worried about slow page loading.
So you agree that they're lying, or that this is a scam?
Possibly. Or they could be confused about where the power is actually coming from. Or there is a remote possibility that they're right. In any case there's no point in being so accusatory about it. Either it works or it doesn't.
Think about this for a moment, though. If someone discovered a way to extract energy from water "for free" (i.e. no "hidden fuels" like aluminum), this would completely revolutionize energy production in the world. This would be the most significant invention in human history.
So you're implying that huge technological leaps are not possible? I agree extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. That doesn't mean extraordinary claims are apriori wrong. And I'm not sure it would be the most significant invention in human history: we've found all sorts of ways to use the Earth's raw materials to do work for us, from the stone age up until today. Plentiful gooey black gunk from the ground can power machines that are more powerful than any living thing? Preposterous! Refining silicon (sand!) results in being able to do billions of calculations per second? Not a chance!
Oxygen and hydrogen can combust. It's just not efficient to do so with current technology. I'm not holding my breath for someone to figure it out, but I'm not going to dismiss the concept until someone proves it's impossible.
And they're marketing it to power a car?
Sure: isn't that what a ton of research is being poured into now? This part doesn't surprise me at all, actually.
And lying about how it works?
We don't know that. We're just a couple guys on Slashdot. But yes, they could be lying about it.
Ahh, but it's only when you "get technical" do you actually get at the truth. The water powers nothing. No energy is "extracted" from the water. The evaporation of the water cools the beak, but it's really the temperature differential that produces the energy.
Right, but my point is that there is a device which does mechanical work by "just adding water". If you want to get technical everything needs to run in an environment. Current cars can't run in a vacuum, or in severe temperature extremes, but they run in our environment. So we take some liberties.
There's one way of extracting energy from water: fusion.
How sure are you of that? I know we don't have another way on hand at the moment, but what research proves that there is no possible way to, for example, beat the efficiency of electrolysis? I'm willing to be educated here if there is some proof that power cannot be extracted via chemical reactions between air and water. Yes, we get to use air because gasoline gets to use air.
And heck, even if it does involve other parts that wear out... let's say an aluminum substrate that becomes ineffective over time. So what? As long as replacing the aluminum substrate is cost competitive compared to maintenance of other vehicles (nothing runs forever), it's still a win. Regular cars take all sorts of outside help to keep functioning beyond a few thousand miles. I'm sure this is no different.
I would hope that the person inventing fusion in a package suitable to power a car would do more with this humanity-altering invention than that.
Funny you should say that. Seems to me that most invention is funneled pretty quickly into market toys. Not that such is good or right, just what I seem to have observed. The internal combustion engine was a world-changing breakthrough, and what was it used for?
What these guys are claiming is impossible. Other ways of extracting energy from water are completely impractical, and, if they ever become practical, are unlikely to be announced to the world in a press release suggesting a new way to power your car.
I don't think you are using the word "impossible" correctly. Improbable, sure. If we want to go after people about precision, we should probably be precise ourselves.
As far as I can tell they make no claim that the "output is water" -- they say the water is consumed in the process. They even say that a liter of water will run the car about 80 miles. Again, they may be full of it, but I don't think the laws of thermodynamics outlaw this claim.
It's all muddled a bit by the line "no external input is needed", which would be impossible, but that line is followed up with "as long as you have a bottle of water in the car with you". Well sure, no external input is needed for a gasoline car either, as long as you have some gasoline in the car with you. So taking the line in full context, no laws are being broken.
There's no need for cold fusion -- the components of water can in fact burn under the right circumstances. It's just that with current technology, creating the right circumstances is not efficient. That doesn't mean it's impossible. That's all I'm saying.
I must be missing something, because while I don't believe it likely this car works as advertised, I also don't see how in theory water can't provide power. Everyone is acting like they're making perpetual motion machine claims, but it's _nothing_ like a perpetual motion machine: you have to keep adding water. For example, the drinking bird is a real machine powered only by water (and the environment, if you want to get technical).
I'll assume they're not using evaporation to build a heat engine. Nevertheless, water is still matter, and matter contains energy. Either atomically or chemically, and it can in theory be acted upon to extract this energy. On some level it's no different than gasoline, except that we discovered a very simple means to extract energy from gasoline (i.e. adding a spark).
We don't know of a means to extract energy efficiently from water yet, but I don't see any reason we might not be able to in theory. There's no magic surplus of energy being created if we do, we're just transferring energy from one form (a chemical or atomic bond in the water) to another, right? We destroy the water, and release some simpler by product + energy.
So even though this company is probably full of it, and even though we're all having a good laugh, I don't think we're right that such a thing is impossible.
Depends what you do, I guess. The finder is less buggy, sure. And I bet there are other areas that have improved. But I've had awful problems with airport connectivity since installing (and re-installing) Leopard. There's been a lot of discussion about it online. Quicktime has also become far more troublesome, crashing and freezing on all manner of normal tasks (I think this is why they talk about Quicktime X). Safari seems a bit more crash prone, too.
But I don't intend to be too harsh: OSX is still overall the best computing experience I've had and I've tried nearly everything. 10.4 seemed a little more stable than 10.5, but has enough niceties (mainly time machine) that it's worth the tradeoff. I'm just glad that in the next version I probably won't have to make a tradeoff at all:)
You'd call stability and performance the basis of every operating system? Man, I want to live in your world!
But seriously: like it or not stability and performance _are_ features. It's just that they are vague enough and lied about enough that people don't like paying for them. Yet they pay for them anyways: in trouble and time. Just because you expect them to be there doesn't mean they are. I've spent far too much time struggling with buggy software to believe otherwise.
I noticed that 10.5 seemingly has more stability problems than previous versions of OSX since 10.1. Is it unfair? Maybe. Whatever: I'm glad Apple is going to focus on stability for a year. If that's what it costs in manpower, and they succeed in stabilizing things, I'm willing to pay for it. If you're not... enjoy your buggy system. It is what it is, right?
It depends what you mean by "optimize". I do think we can make a model of the human brain using a different medium i.e. IC's instead of neurons, which will be optimized in the sense of speed. It could probably run through ideas far faster than any human could. However I think it will still be limited by the nature of understanding: it will be limited by things like the halting problem, it will see Cantor's Diagonal Argument, it will wonder at the paradoxes of self-reference. These are not limitations of the human mind: they are limitations in logic and the fabric of the universe. And those are just in mathematics and logic -- if you get into more open ended understanding, like morality and such it gets even messier and harder to "understand" or "resolve".
What I do think might be possible is that by thinking faster, they'll be able to figure out bits of the unknown faster. This could be called "smarter", but then it's really just an issue of time. Looking at the human collective as one, it took some millions of man-years to figure out the theory of relativity. An artificial brain might have been able to come to that conclusion more quickly. But what is interesting to me is that despite how long it took for us to get there, you and I can understand relativity quite easily. Thus it wasn't a problem in understanding, just in the discovery. So I think we'll be able to keep some sort of pace with our artificial counterparts down the road.
Of course all this is speculation on both sides, so I have to accept that you might be right. But I would remind that factually speaking, we are the smartest thing we've ever seen, as self-congratulatory as that sounds. And our efforts to make something "smarter" have failed spectacularly. So, at the very least, there's something to us.
The singularity, in contrast, is the idea that once we develop artificial intelligence that is as smart as the smartest scientists, there is the possibility that the AI could design an improved (i.e. smarter, faster) version of itself.
My take, which sounds very anthrocentric, is that it won't work like that. I have a belief, which might be scary. It goes like this: we are as smart as it gets.
Before you dismiss, here's the thing: intelligence and processing power are not the same thing. I know that computers will process much more raw information much more quickly than a human mind, but there's no understanding there. I also believe that at some distant point we'll be able to build a computer "brain" that does have the ability to understand as we do. What I don't believe is that just because it can function faster it will suddenly understand better.
Despite the enormous amount of completely idiotic stuff humans do, the best and brightest humans in their best and brightest moments are nothing short of amazingly intelligent. Compared to what? Compared to everything else that we've ever encountered. This very interview is a good example. People like Hofstatder are dealing not with a lack of processing power, but running up against the very ambiguities of the universe itself. You've absolutely got to read GEB if you don't understand what I mean by that.
So yeah: as little evidence as I have, I believe that humans are capable of (though not usually engaged in) the highest form of intelligence possible. I don't think a computer brain that runs 10x faster would be 10x smarter. It'll get the same tasks done more quickly, but it's overall comprehension will be within an order of magnitude of anything the best humans can do.
Let me say this to: while I respect the AI field, we've already got 6 billion and counting super-high-tech neural networks on this planet right now that can blow the pants off any computer in comprehension and creativity. Yet we are shit at benefitting from all that. I don't think mechanized versions are going to cause a dramatic improvement. It's a complex world.
I think the idea of protecting the health of institutions is an easier sell to people than saying, "Hey, that's unethical."
You're right, but what I think is interesting is that in my (perhaps minority) opinion, it's exactly the same thing. Ethics are a means to descibe things that while perhaps good for the individual in the immediate sense, are bad for the structures that same individual depends on -- thus they are bad for the individual indirectly.
People have got this wacky idea in their head that ethics is about altruism. Or that the ethics come from arbitrary religious rule and have no bearing on reality. But as far as I can tell, ethics are essentially secondary laws of the universe, loose but significant forms of cause and effect. Even if there was no punishment for stealing, if lots more people started stealing, our relatively comfortable society would collapse.
Anyways, just some thoughts on ethics that have been bouncing around my head recently.
My mother is pre-diabetic (type 2). All the professional suggestions were to eat low fat, low sugar, high complex carb, and get on some medications. Since it wasn't at a life-critical point, we instead tried going low carb and staying off the drugs. We have been successful in keeping her blood sugar well below the dangerous 140 point 24/7 for the past year. This is better than any of the doctors expected, better than many drug taking patients. I've found many reports of people online having similar results. The home blood sugar testing kits have made hacking your own diabetic diet through continuous testing possible. Still, it's not considered a serious option.
Doctors are people. Health is complex. As much respect as I have for their work the medical community very often falls short.
If glucose restriction impedes cancer growth, is it possible that extreme carb restriction (which forces the body to run off ketones instead) would imede cancer growth as well? There's still a small amount of glucose required for the brain, I believe, but perhaps the level would be low enough to slow things down, or help in conjunction with other treatments?
If they were truly going with "don't be evil", the only reason they'd patent such a thing would be so nobody could do it: patent it, then deep six the idea.
Yeah, that's why I said "stop aging" as opposed to just "live forever". Although if I go much further I'd want to say "reverse aging":)
I totally agree we are more or less different people as time goes on. I'm 34 but I can hardly relate to the person I was 20 years ago for example. Quite likely then if I lived for 500 years, I'd go through many phases.
But I wouldn't say that my body of knowledge and beliefs feels like "self" to me. Self seems very tied to my awareness and even if all my knowledge and beliefs were transcribed, a form of eternal life, I wouldn't be all that thrilled. I like actually being alive and aware:)
Actually, what you said at the end there makes me think -- in a society with limitless replication technology, some garbage collectors would be the most sought after people in the world. Unless there was a limitless disposal technology too:)
My guess is that limitless energy and material aren't possible in this universe. Though I suppose if we can just get enough energy and material to build a perfect virtual reality then there could be limitless energy and material there. In any case, it's hard for me to imagine how such a world would operate. I'd certainly like to see it, though. Thus my desire to live longer -- it won't be happening in my natural lifetime!
Although I wonder how the world would work if material scarcity were eliminated... it happened with digital creative works online and society hasn't adapted yet (admittedly it's been only 10 years at most). I guess all business would be service related? Maybe that would be a good thing? It's hard to imagine:)
But yes: for every grumpy old coot I've met, I meet an inspiring old person who seems luminous in their balance and understanding, and it's a tragedy to watch them disappear.
Depends what that work is -- as I move through life I seem to get closer and closer to "work" that I love:) I don't look forward to retirement; I look forward to doing work that is more in line with my natural goals. Who wants to sit in a retirement home when you can run your own dream company or direct movies!
I imagine microfilm wouldn't be needed for resumes; anything that was more than 50 years ago wouldn't be relevant anyways;)
Out of all the tech that could be made, this is the only one that allows you to see all the tech that could be invented down the line. Time has become to me my most precious and scarce resource. By the time I've got things worked out well enough to really be great, I'll have very little time left. I could easily enjoy 500 years of life. Beyond that I can't say for sure, but I'd like to see.
I predict that at some point in the distant future, the idea that people let themselves die when they didn't really want to will be considered absurd. To the degree that it is possible for us to solve aging, our current apathy about it is a little like voluntary genocide. Of course there are certain odd implications when people can live as long as they like, but population scaling is something we have to deal with in any case.
People are working on this, the notion of the afterlife (just about the most tenuous fairy-tale idea I can imagine) keeps us from really making it a priority.
(I realize that solving current diseases and war and such are just as important and in the same vein, but we're talking outlandish tech here.)
ditch the platform when the costs of maintaining it become greater than the cost of switching.
Yeah, sounds so simple -- except you've missed a critical variable: how much does it cost to maintain after the switch.
If the cost of post-switch maintenance is only 80% as much per year as the pre-switch cost (a generous estimate in most cases), and the switch takes you only six months (another generous estimate), it's a 2.5 year ROI. Meaning you'll actually be behind where you would have been for 2.5 years before getting any advantage out of the switch. How many businesses can weather that?
I've never seen anyone correctly estimate the cost of switching. Partly because they underestimate the costs of maintenance after switching, believing in the glowing code Utopia of the promised platform. And partly because rebuilding from scratch is usually much more time consuming than people expect: most working systems have lots of tedious, forgettable, but absolutely critical code that must be rewritten and debugged.
To answer the original poster's question: if you've got a substantial working system (read: reasonable performance and reliability) stick with it. Almost any platform can be set up well enough that a decent programmer can work well with it. If the maintenance is such trouble it may be that the programmer sucked, not the platform. In that case, a good programmer can slowly replace the most troublesome components and bring it in line for probably less than the cost of a full switch.
If you can't find programmers who are expert in your platform, look for programmers who are generally experienced and hungry to learn your platform. They're often better anyways.
If the system as it stands doesn't work (read: has major performance or reliability problems), then a switch is a more reasonable option.
Oh there's plenty of complaining about legal immigrants too. In fact it's only recently that the complaint seemed to switch to illegal immigration because the complainers weren't making any friends complaining about the legal folks.
Regardless of your position on immigration, it's worth noting that just because something is illegal doesn't actually make it bad or wrong. If you don't understand that, then, well, you should go read some history books.
I agree with the sentiment expressed in your post, but factually I don't believe the Bush/Cheney war has surpassed Saddam's death toll yet. Most famously he massacred around 100,000 Kurds between 1986 and 1989. He did plenty of other awful things too. The Iraqi body count has the war approaching 90,000.
Of course, both of these numbers are absolutely abominable, and this war is not about those killings (the US was buddies with him back then), so it's not like one is the cost of stopping the other. Still, it's worth noting that Saddam was a bad, bad man.
Last I checked, every attempt at socialism had failed.
Liberalism isn't socialism any more than conservatism is fascism. You are right that pure socialism has not done well. You might just as well note that nations attempting to run without any social services have not done well either. Can you point out a country with few or no social services where you'd like to live?
Unions are part of a free market, aren't they? Your other option is government regulation, so I don't see your point there.
I thought public education is generally superior in europe (based on testing) and they'd call American liberals "centrist".
Go to a left wing meeting and say you think blacks are genetically less intelligent.
Apparently you don't understand the difference between fact and opinion. Debates are for opinion. This question has been factually resolved for quite a while now. There's no need for anyone to get shrill about it, but there's not much point talking about it either other than to educate people who are ignorant about it.
I really fail to see the relevance here. (Some) right wingers hate gays, (some) left wingers hate men, the middle class, whites, Christians and their own country. How does anyone of that automatically verify someone's beliefs?
I can tell you live firmly in one camp and have bought into what the people around you say without much thought. I'm sorry about that, but you might want to take more than a cursory glance at other humans who have formed opinions different from your own. I am fortunate in that I have a very conservative side of my family and a very liberal side of my family. And I'll tell you this: the conservative side really does hates gays yet the liberal side does not hate any of the things you mention. I love both sides of my family, so there's no bias here: I'm just reporting a data point.
It's funny to me how your post illustrates several of the points that you're railing against. Good luck being a little less self incriminating in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
You can buy the DVD to pay for the right to watch the movie, then download it
Heh, that seems quite fair to me. Several times I've bought a physical CD I didn't actually want because I wanted the music and wanted to support the artist. I wish I could have just said "keep the CD", so it wouldn't clutter up my place and waste them money.
While I agree to some degree, and in all honesty sometimes operate under the same guidelines, there's a little hand-waving going on here.
The implicit agreement of the market is something to the effect of "if you don't like the price, don't buy it". But an assumption built into "don't buy it" is that you're not going to have the same benefits as having bought it, either. The high ground here is to just not watch the movie.
But you did, because you were willing to spend the time to get it illegally. Let's say it was $1. Does that mean that the movie should be sold for $1? Only if that would cause about 14X more people to buy it, and that is also a faulty assumption. Here's a fairly sound assumption: if it was trivially easy for everyone to get a free version that was just as good as the pay version, there would be no pay version. Luckily for us, it takes some extra effort to get a free version and it's usually not quite as good, thus enough people keep paying into the system.
Incidentally, in some ways the free version is superior to the pay versions as they stand now: instant gratification (as compared to amazon), easier storage (as compared to a DVD), more flexible playback (as compared to iTunes), etc. And I think these things are as much to blame for piracy as the near-zero-cost.
In the end, I don't believe it is right to download stuff you haven't paid for, though I don't think it cuts into sales nearly as much as businesses claim. It's still fairly amoral, by which I mean it eventually has some negative indirect effects.
I do think that if some company got the instant gratification, storage, quality, flexibility, and pricing right, they'd be able to re-capture a lot of the pirate market and make at least a bit more money than they do now by whining. So I don't have a lot of sympathy either.
Cheers
This problem is not going to be solved simply by adding bandwidth to the network, any more than the problem of slow web page loading was solved that way in the late 90's
As far as I remember, the problem of slow web page loading _was_ solved by adding bandwidth in the late nineties. I had dialup, then I got DSL, and I no longer worried about slow page loading.
Cheers.
So you agree that they're lying, or that this is a scam?
Possibly. Or they could be confused about where the power is actually coming from. Or there is a remote possibility that they're right. In any case there's no point in being so accusatory about it. Either it works or it doesn't.
Think about this for a moment, though. If someone discovered a way to extract energy from water "for free" (i.e. no "hidden fuels" like aluminum), this would completely revolutionize energy production in the world. This would be the most significant invention in human history.
So you're implying that huge technological leaps are not possible? I agree extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. That doesn't mean extraordinary claims are apriori wrong. And I'm not sure it would be the most significant invention in human history: we've found all sorts of ways to use the Earth's raw materials to do work for us, from the stone age up until today. Plentiful gooey black gunk from the ground can power machines that are more powerful than any living thing? Preposterous! Refining silicon (sand!) results in being able to do billions of calculations per second? Not a chance!
Oxygen and hydrogen can combust. It's just not efficient to do so with current technology. I'm not holding my breath for someone to figure it out, but I'm not going to dismiss the concept until someone proves it's impossible.
And they're marketing it to power a car?
Sure: isn't that what a ton of research is being poured into now? This part doesn't surprise me at all, actually.
And lying about how it works?
We don't know that. We're just a couple guys on Slashdot. But yes, they could be lying about it.
Ahh, but it's only when you "get technical" do you actually get at the truth. The water powers nothing. No energy is "extracted" from the water. The evaporation of the water cools the beak, but it's really the temperature differential that produces the energy.
Right, but my point is that there is a device which does mechanical work by "just adding water". If you want to get technical everything needs to run in an environment. Current cars can't run in a vacuum, or in severe temperature extremes, but they run in our environment. So we take some liberties.
There's one way of extracting energy from water: fusion.
How sure are you of that? I know we don't have another way on hand at the moment, but what research proves that there is no possible way to, for example, beat the efficiency of electrolysis? I'm willing to be educated here if there is some proof that power cannot be extracted via chemical reactions between air and water. Yes, we get to use air because gasoline gets to use air.
And heck, even if it does involve other parts that wear out... let's say an aluminum substrate that becomes ineffective over time. So what? As long as replacing the aluminum substrate is cost competitive compared to maintenance of other vehicles (nothing runs forever), it's still a win. Regular cars take all sorts of outside help to keep functioning beyond a few thousand miles. I'm sure this is no different.
I would hope that the person inventing fusion in a package suitable to power a car would do more with this humanity-altering invention than that.
Funny you should say that. Seems to me that most invention is funneled pretty quickly into market toys. Not that such is good or right, just what I seem to have observed. The internal combustion engine was a world-changing breakthrough, and what was it used for?
What these guys are claiming is impossible. Other ways of extracting energy from water are completely impractical, and, if they ever become practical, are unlikely to be announced to the world in a press release suggesting a new way to power your car.
I don't think you are using the word "impossible" correctly. Improbable, sure. If we want to go after people about precision, we should probably be precise ourselves.
Cheers.
As far as I can tell they make no claim that the "output is water" -- they say the water is consumed in the process. They even say that a liter of water will run the car about 80 miles. Again, they may be full of it, but I don't think the laws of thermodynamics outlaw this claim.
It's all muddled a bit by the line "no external input is needed", which would be impossible, but that line is followed up with "as long as you have a bottle of water in the car with you". Well sure, no external input is needed for a gasoline car either, as long as you have some gasoline in the car with you. So taking the line in full context, no laws are being broken.
There's no need for cold fusion -- the components of water can in fact burn under the right circumstances. It's just that with current technology, creating the right circumstances is not efficient. That doesn't mean it's impossible. That's all I'm saying.
Cheers.
I must be missing something, because while I don't believe it likely this car works as advertised, I also don't see how in theory water can't provide power. Everyone is acting like they're making perpetual motion machine claims, but it's _nothing_ like a perpetual motion machine: you have to keep adding water. For example, the drinking bird is a real machine powered only by water (and the environment, if you want to get technical).
I'll assume they're not using evaporation to build a heat engine. Nevertheless, water is still matter, and matter contains energy. Either atomically or chemically, and it can in theory be acted upon to extract this energy. On some level it's no different than gasoline, except that we discovered a very simple means to extract energy from gasoline (i.e. adding a spark).
We don't know of a means to extract energy efficiently from water yet, but I don't see any reason we might not be able to in theory. There's no magic surplus of energy being created if we do, we're just transferring energy from one form (a chemical or atomic bond in the water) to another, right? We destroy the water, and release some simpler by product + energy.
So even though this company is probably full of it, and even though we're all having a good laugh, I don't think we're right that such a thing is impossible.
Cheers.
Depends what you do, I guess. The finder is less buggy, sure. And I bet there are other areas that have improved. But I've had awful problems with airport connectivity since installing (and re-installing) Leopard. There's been a lot of discussion about it online. Quicktime has also become far more troublesome, crashing and freezing on all manner of normal tasks (I think this is why they talk about Quicktime X). Safari seems a bit more crash prone, too.
:)
But I don't intend to be too harsh: OSX is still overall the best computing experience I've had and I've tried nearly everything. 10.4 seemed a little more stable than 10.5, but has enough niceties (mainly time machine) that it's worth the tradeoff. I'm just glad that in the next version I probably won't have to make a tradeoff at all
Cheers.
You'd call stability and performance the basis of every operating system? Man, I want to live in your world!
But seriously: like it or not stability and performance _are_ features. It's just that they are vague enough and lied about enough that people don't like paying for them. Yet they pay for them anyways: in trouble and time. Just because you expect them to be there doesn't mean they are. I've spent far too much time struggling with buggy software to believe otherwise.
I noticed that 10.5 seemingly has more stability problems than previous versions of OSX since 10.1. Is it unfair? Maybe. Whatever: I'm glad Apple is going to focus on stability for a year. If that's what it costs in manpower, and they succeed in stabilizing things, I'm willing to pay for it. If you're not... enjoy your buggy system. It is what it is, right?
Cheers.
It depends what you mean by "optimize". I do think we can make a model of the human brain using a different medium i.e. IC's instead of neurons, which will be optimized in the sense of speed. It could probably run through ideas far faster than any human could. However I think it will still be limited by the nature of understanding: it will be limited by things like the halting problem, it will see Cantor's Diagonal Argument, it will wonder at the paradoxes of self-reference. These are not limitations of the human mind: they are limitations in logic and the fabric of the universe. And those are just in mathematics and logic -- if you get into more open ended understanding, like morality and such it gets even messier and harder to "understand" or "resolve".
What I do think might be possible is that by thinking faster, they'll be able to figure out bits of the unknown faster. This could be called "smarter", but then it's really just an issue of time. Looking at the human collective as one, it took some millions of man-years to figure out the theory of relativity. An artificial brain might have been able to come to that conclusion more quickly. But what is interesting to me is that despite how long it took for us to get there, you and I can understand relativity quite easily. Thus it wasn't a problem in understanding, just in the discovery. So I think we'll be able to keep some sort of pace with our artificial counterparts down the road.
Of course all this is speculation on both sides, so I have to accept that you might be right. But I would remind that factually speaking, we are the smartest thing we've ever seen, as self-congratulatory as that sounds. And our efforts to make something "smarter" have failed spectacularly. So, at the very least, there's something to us.
Cheers.
The singularity, in contrast, is the idea that once we develop artificial intelligence that is as smart as the smartest scientists, there is the possibility that the AI could design an improved (i.e. smarter, faster) version of itself.
My take, which sounds very anthrocentric, is that it won't work like that. I have a belief, which might be scary. It goes like this: we are as smart as it gets.
Before you dismiss, here's the thing: intelligence and processing power are not the same thing. I know that computers will process much more raw information much more quickly than a human mind, but there's no understanding there. I also believe that at some distant point we'll be able to build a computer "brain" that does have the ability to understand as we do. What I don't believe is that just because it can function faster it will suddenly understand better.
Despite the enormous amount of completely idiotic stuff humans do, the best and brightest humans in their best and brightest moments are nothing short of amazingly intelligent. Compared to what? Compared to everything else that we've ever encountered. This very interview is a good example. People like Hofstatder are dealing not with a lack of processing power, but running up against the very ambiguities of the universe itself. You've absolutely got to read GEB if you don't understand what I mean by that.
So yeah: as little evidence as I have, I believe that humans are capable of (though not usually engaged in) the highest form of intelligence possible. I don't think a computer brain that runs 10x faster would be 10x smarter. It'll get the same tasks done more quickly, but it's overall comprehension will be within an order of magnitude of anything the best humans can do.
Let me say this to: while I respect the AI field, we've already got 6 billion and counting super-high-tech neural networks on this planet right now that can blow the pants off any computer in comprehension and creativity. Yet we are shit at benefitting from all that. I don't think mechanized versions are going to cause a dramatic improvement. It's a complex world.
Cheers.
I think the idea of protecting the health of institutions is an easier sell to people than saying, "Hey, that's unethical."
You're right, but what I think is interesting is that in my (perhaps minority) opinion, it's exactly the same thing. Ethics are a means to descibe things that while perhaps good for the individual in the immediate sense, are bad for the structures that same individual depends on -- thus they are bad for the individual indirectly.
People have got this wacky idea in their head that ethics is about altruism. Or that the ethics come from arbitrary religious rule and have no bearing on reality. But as far as I can tell, ethics are essentially secondary laws of the universe, loose but significant forms of cause and effect. Even if there was no punishment for stealing, if lots more people started stealing, our relatively comfortable society would collapse.
Anyways, just some thoughts on ethics that have been bouncing around my head recently.
Cheers.
My mother is pre-diabetic (type 2). All the professional suggestions were to eat low fat, low sugar, high complex carb, and get on some medications. Since it wasn't at a life-critical point, we instead tried going low carb and staying off the drugs. We have been successful in keeping her blood sugar well below the dangerous 140 point 24/7 for the past year. This is better than any of the doctors expected, better than many drug taking patients. I've found many reports of people online having similar results. The home blood sugar testing kits have made hacking your own diabetic diet through continuous testing possible. Still, it's not considered a serious option.
Doctors are people. Health is complex. As much respect as I have for their work the medical community very often falls short.
Best of luck with your cancer.
Cheers.
If glucose restriction impedes cancer growth, is it possible that extreme carb restriction (which forces the body to run off ketones instead) would imede cancer growth as well? There's still a small amount of glucose required for the brain, I believe, but perhaps the level would be low enough to slow things down, or help in conjunction with other treatments?
Just a thought.
If they were truly going with "don't be evil", the only reason they'd patent such a thing would be so nobody could do it: patent it, then deep six the idea.
Yeah, that's why I said "stop aging" as opposed to just "live forever". Although if I go much further I'd want to say "reverse aging" :)
:)
I totally agree we are more or less different people as time goes on. I'm 34 but I can hardly relate to the person I was 20 years ago for example. Quite likely then if I lived for 500 years, I'd go through many phases.
But I wouldn't say that my body of knowledge and beliefs feels like "self" to me. Self seems very tied to my awareness and even if all my knowledge and beliefs were transcribed, a form of eternal life, I wouldn't be all that thrilled. I like actually being alive and aware
Cheers.
I'm not sure I understand your comment?
Actually, what you said at the end there makes me think -- in a society with limitless replication technology, some garbage collectors would be the most sought after people in the world. Unless there was a limitless disposal technology too :)
My guess is that limitless energy and material aren't possible in this universe. Though I suppose if we can just get enough energy and material to build a perfect virtual reality then there could be limitless energy and material there. In any case, it's hard for me to imagine how such a world would operate. I'd certainly like to see it, though. Thus my desire to live longer -- it won't be happening in my natural lifetime!
Cheers.
Good points.
:)
Although I wonder how the world would work if material scarcity were eliminated... it happened with digital creative works online and society hasn't adapted yet (admittedly it's been only 10 years at most). I guess all business would be service related? Maybe that would be a good thing? It's hard to imagine
But yes: for every grumpy old coot I've met, I meet an inspiring old person who seems luminous in their balance and understanding, and it's a tragedy to watch them disappear.
Cheers.
Depends what that work is -- as I move through life I seem to get closer and closer to "work" that I love :) I don't look forward to retirement; I look forward to doing work that is more in line with my natural goals. Who wants to sit in a retirement home when you can run your own dream company or direct movies!
;)
I imagine microfilm wouldn't be needed for resumes; anything that was more than 50 years ago wouldn't be relevant anyways
Out of all the tech that could be made, this is the only one that allows you to see all the tech that could be invented down the line. Time has become to me my most precious and scarce resource. By the time I've got things worked out well enough to really be great, I'll have very little time left. I could easily enjoy 500 years of life. Beyond that I can't say for sure, but I'd like to see.
I predict that at some point in the distant future, the idea that people let themselves die when they didn't really want to will be considered absurd. To the degree that it is possible for us to solve aging, our current apathy about it is a little like voluntary genocide. Of course there are certain odd implications when people can live as long as they like, but population scaling is something we have to deal with in any case.
People are working on this, the notion of the afterlife (just about the most tenuous fairy-tale idea I can imagine) keeps us from really making it a priority.
(I realize that solving current diseases and war and such are just as important and in the same vein, but we're talking outlandish tech here.)
Cheers.
ditch the platform when the costs of maintaining it become greater than the cost of switching.
Yeah, sounds so simple -- except you've missed a critical variable: how much does it cost to maintain after the switch.
If the cost of post-switch maintenance is only 80% as much per year as the pre-switch cost (a generous estimate in most cases), and the switch takes you only six months (another generous estimate), it's a 2.5 year ROI. Meaning you'll actually be behind where you would have been for 2.5 years before getting any advantage out of the switch. How many businesses can weather that?
I've never seen anyone correctly estimate the cost of switching. Partly because they underestimate the costs of maintenance after switching, believing in the glowing code Utopia of the promised platform. And partly because rebuilding from scratch is usually much more time consuming than people expect: most working systems have lots of tedious, forgettable, but absolutely critical code that must be rewritten and debugged.
To answer the original poster's question: if you've got a substantial working system (read: reasonable performance and reliability) stick with it. Almost any platform can be set up well enough that a decent programmer can work well with it. If the maintenance is such trouble it may be that the programmer sucked, not the platform. In that case, a good programmer can slowly replace the most troublesome components and bring it in line for probably less than the cost of a full switch.
If you can't find programmers who are expert in your platform, look for programmers who are generally experienced and hungry to learn your platform. They're often better anyways.
If the system as it stands doesn't work (read: has major performance or reliability problems), then a switch is a more reasonable option.
Cheers.
Oh there's plenty of complaining about legal immigrants too. In fact it's only recently that the complaint seemed to switch to illegal immigration because the complainers weren't making any friends complaining about the legal folks.
Regardless of your position on immigration, it's worth noting that just because something is illegal doesn't actually make it bad or wrong. If you don't understand that, then, well, you should go read some history books.
Cheers.
I agree with the sentiment expressed in your post, but factually I don't believe the Bush/Cheney war has surpassed Saddam's death toll yet. Most famously he massacred around 100,000 Kurds between 1986 and 1989. He did plenty of other awful things too. The Iraqi body count has the war approaching 90,000.
Of course, both of these numbers are absolutely abominable, and this war is not about those killings (the US was buddies with him back then), so it's not like one is the cost of stopping the other. Still, it's worth noting that Saddam was a bad, bad man.
Cheers
Having lived in a couple of the worst inner cities in the US, and visited the third world, I can tell you haven't.
Thanks for calling him out on this. In my experience as well he's talking from a place of enormous ignorance.
I also wonder what is supposed to happen if we completely pull welfare... thus emulating the third world... yet suddenly it gets better? How exactly?
Sure, there is much room for improvement in the welfare system. But it's sad to me how long and shallow the discussions end up being.
Last I checked, every attempt at socialism had failed.
Liberalism isn't socialism any more than conservatism is fascism. You are right that pure socialism has not done well. You might just as well note that nations attempting to run without any social services have not done well either. Can you point out a country with few or no social services where you'd like to live?
Unions are part of a free market, aren't they? Your other option is government regulation, so I don't see your point there.
I thought public education is generally superior in europe (based on testing) and they'd call American liberals "centrist".
Go to a left wing meeting and say you think blacks are genetically less intelligent.
Apparently you don't understand the difference between fact and opinion. Debates are for opinion. This question has been factually resolved for quite a while now. There's no need for anyone to get shrill about it, but there's not much point talking about it either other than to educate people who are ignorant about it.
I really fail to see the relevance here. (Some) right wingers hate gays, (some) left wingers hate men, the middle class, whites, Christians and their own country. How does anyone of that automatically verify someone's beliefs?
I can tell you live firmly in one camp and have bought into what the people around you say without much thought. I'm sorry about that, but you might want to take more than a cursory glance at other humans who have formed opinions different from your own. I am fortunate in that I have a very conservative side of my family and a very liberal side of my family. And I'll tell you this: the conservative side really does hates gays yet the liberal side does not hate any of the things you mention. I love both sides of my family, so there's no bias here: I'm just reporting a data point.
It's funny to me how your post illustrates several of the points that you're railing against. Good luck being a little less self incriminating in the future.
Cheers.