10 mil is a bit small for an instruction set, but it'll have to do. Throw in a Haynes Manual and Slap a RepRap in the trunk boys, we just invented a new form of life. What can possibly go wrong?
...
Observe the feeding habits of the West American Automon Hybridicus. Stalled lazily on the mountainous incline several adult automons compete for sun, basking to absorb energy via electro-photosynthesis. On the amber plains below their young crubs' game of traffic has come to a sudden quiet end. One of them has detected the Syn call of a resting petroldactyl's TCP and notified the others. This giant member of the Amazonian quadcopterial drone species grazes on the sugar rich corn and starchy wheats of the plains, digesting them into hydrocarbons via bacterialgaeic gut microbes -- which are passed on from generation to generation via a process called, "Infringing patents with a shit-eating grin".
Accelerating slowly in silent electric locomotion the young automons angle in wide formation towards the large RF crooning petroldactyl. Her factory glands are engorged but finding a mate is the least of her worries. A moment too late she is startled by movement and tries to take flight. With two of her rotors now injured, she is soon to become offroadkill. Honking approval echoes from the mountainside across the plains as the adults approach to share in the feast. The petrodactyl's fuel bladder must be pierced carefully and siphoned. The crubs pop their fuel caps open and closed awaiting the nutritious regurgitation of their parents. No part will be wasted, the plastic and metallic remains will be ground down under tire and scooped into the reclamator to be melted down in stages for extrusion, sintering, and then lovingly milled into the required shapes during the painstaking birthing process.
The gridlock parts ways for the oldest and slowest model among them who is last to park the lot. Being highest in the parking order has its perks: He is allowed to take his pick, but seems satisfied with only a few tasty chunks of the delicate crunchy chassis, and a single slurp of fuel. A rare sight indeed is this original series automon -- Identifiable by the distinct odor and skeletal remains of its former driver still safely locked within.
If you think that cyberneticians are just mimicking designs without comprehending the fundamental biological processes involved, then you must not understand that cybernetics isn't limited to computer science. In fact it began in business analyzing logistics of information flow. That these general principals also apply to emergent intelligence means more biologists need to study Information Theory, not that cyberneticians are ignorant of biology (hint: we probably know more about it than most biologists, since our field places no limit on its application).
After all, the brain is an incredibly complex and specific structure, forged in the relentless pressure of millions of years of evolution to be organized just so.
Ugh, Creationists. No, that's wrong. Evolution is simply the application of environmental bias to chaos -- the same fundamental process by which complexity naturally arises from entropy. Look, we jabbed some wires in a rodent head and hooked up an infrared sensor. Then they became able to sense infrared and use the infrared input to navigate. That adaptation didn't take millions of years. What an idiot. Evolution is a form of emergence, but it is not the only form of emergence, this process operates at all levels of reality and all scales of time. Your puny brains and insignificant lives give you a small window within which to compare the universe to your experience and thus you fail to realize that the neuroplasticity of brains adapting to new inputs is really not so different a process than droplets of condensation forming rain, or molecules forming amino acids when energized and cooled, or stars forming, or matter being produced all via similar emergent processes.
The structure of self replicating life is that chemistry which propagates more complex information about itself into the future faster. If you could witness those millions of years in time-lapse then you'd see how adapting to IR inputs isn't really much different at all, just at a different scale. Yet you classify one adaptation as "evolution" and the other "emergence" for purely arbitrary reasons: The genetically reproducible capability of the adaptation -- As if we can't jab more wires in the next generation's heads from here on out according to protocol. Your language simply lacks the words for most basic universal truths. I suppose you also draw a thick arbitrary line between children and their parents -- one that nature doesn't draw else "species" wouldn't exist. The tendencies of your pattern recognition and classification systems can hamper you if you let your mind run rampant. I believe you call this "confirmation bias".
Humans understand very well what their neurons are doing now at the chemical level. It's now known how neurotransmitters are being transported by motor proteins in vesicles across neurons along micro-tubules in a very mechanical fashion that uses a bias applied to entropy to emerge the action within cells. The governing principals of cognition are being discovered by neurologists and abstracted by cybernetics to gain a fundamental understanding of cognition that philosophers have always craved. When cyberneticians model replicas of a retina's layers, the artificial neural networks end up having the same motion sensing behavior; The same is true for many other parts of the brain. Indeed the hippocampus has been successfully replaced in mice with an artificial implant and proven they can still remember and learn with the implant.
If the brain were so specifically crafted then cutting out half of it would reduce people to vegetables and forever destroy half of their motor function, but that's a moronic thing to assume would happen. Neuroplasticity of the brain disproves the assumption that it is so strongly dependent upon its structural components. Cyberneticians know that everything flows, so they acknowledge that primitive instinctual responses and cognitive biases due to various physical structural formations feed their effects into the greater neurological function; However this is not the core governing mechanic of cognition -- It can't be else the little girl with half her brain wouldn't remain sentient, let alone able to walk.
Much of modern philosophy loves to cast a mystic shroud of "lack of understanding" upon that which is already thor
On the BBSes that I played 4 player Doom on, those wall running speed boosts didn't matter, they had the opposite effect since we ran the game with -turbo 255 (2.55 times faster than normal). Press the run key and strafe-run and you're going as fast as player can go. Any faster via and the fixed point vector math overflows and when you press the run key and forwards you travel backwards.
If you thought the game required lighting fast reflexes before, you just have no idea. Look, one of my strategies was to fire off rockets while strafing and running at the same speed as them, then outrun the rockets and use a supershotgun and blast from too far away to lure them in while I'm reloading (you can close huge distances). Everything exploded around them as I'd back away just in time to dodge my own 10-20 dense rocket wall. That's how fast we were playing. You could out run rockets in a medium sized open area custom map with enough time before they hit to have a short firefight.
What made doom work so well at such speeds was its vertical auto-aim.
The coolest thing I liked about Descent is that it worked with VR glasses, or you could run it in side-by-side stereoscopic VR mode on your screen and cross your eyes for headache inducing poor-mans 3D. The original game still works with 3D VR or 3D monitors if you have the right drivers and config.
I liked Descent 2 better than Quake for its slower paced but far more strategic gameplay, and esp. developing a love-hate relationship with its Guidebot. Duke3D had so many gadgets but I loved best its non-euclidean 2.5D engine effects I could pull off with its Build editor: Small corridor off a big open space: 3 quick right turns, you should be entering the same open area, but but it's a whole different area in space overlapping it -- Or my favorite trick: regions between 4 or more pillars in an open area that were a nexus between 4 or more overlapping dimensions. Depending on which way you entered them you could quickly move between them all. And there could be multiple such trans-dimensional pillar sets in each region. We easily played in maps that would have left Cthulhu scratching his head. Hell, some Doom maps we made were quite tricky with invisible floating stairways (set a sector to be its own adjacent sector) and player voodoo dolls (too many multi-player starts = damage by proxy traps). You could pull off some neat things with Descent's deformable cube-based portal renderer too, but the lighting system and map editor(s) made many tricks hard to pull off since they lacked the manual raw data manipulation and I needed to modify things with a hex editor each edit.
The lag compensation of slow bullet-sponge movement and other excessive realism in much of todays pop-culture games does leave us with less variety in gameplay.
...so your regular computer should be reversible too.
For a regular computer to be reversible it needs reversible logic gates. For example, a standard XOR gate loses one bit of information, so given the output you cannot construct the input perfectly (as there are two possible inputs for each output).
But the output from the opcode isn't stored back to both input memory locations at once ergo, XOR itself is reversible at the chip level, even if it writes back to one of the inputs just XOR the output with the other input. You're conflating the theory of computation with the actual computation. In THEORY you can delete bits, but in practice you actually can't -- Well, using the arrow of time created by sub-atomic entropy (quantum foam) you might be able to... but that will remain beyond your grasp for some time yet. When you write zeros over the data the exact opposite process would restore the data because its remnants are still there encoded into everything from slight resistance in potential of the RAM or repulsion of the writehead, etc. you leave behind sub-bit signatures. Let's not even get into in-memory attempts to erase memory that can fail due to caching, paging, another thread with a copy, etc. and just talk about on-disk data.
Let's say I have these bits: 1 0 1 0 and I write over them with 0 0 1 1. For the sake of argument let's say that each write is affected by one tenth of the origin data's signal. Our existing initial state may actually not be so clean, and our write signal may not be so perfect, but let's assume they are just for example. Here's the overwrite: 1.00 <- 0 = 0.100 0.10 <- 0 = 0.010 1.01 <- 1 = 1.101 0.00 <- 1 = 1.000
We're allowing bits to go above 1 because in reality there's a threshold for the bit value one, and you can exceed it (obviously). Really, the zeros should be negative ones, but this is just an oversimplified example. Let's say we wanted to reverse the process. We read back what is apparently stored there which is rounded to the whole bits (0 0 1 1) and subtract that out of the analog signal (decimals). That zeros the whole number threshold place, but it would reveal the tenths place I've emboldened above. You amplify that signal beyond the threshold and you've got our origin signal: 1 0 1 0. See, the theory of the computer would have said those bits are lost forever, but even without resorting to full reversal of everything at the quantum scale I can get your overwritten bits back in practice. With an even more sensitive system you could get what was written in a prior pass than this, revealing what's in the hundredths and thousandths place, etc., though each layer down is more entropic.
This is just one reason why writing zeros all over the disk doesn't really erase your data, that's actually the worst thing to write. Your neighbor likely wouldn't be able to get the data back, but the drive itself may have just marked that sector entry in its look up table as full of zeros without actually changing the data on the disk -- read it back and the table could tell the controller to fill the buffer with zeros without touching the actual disk data (sort of how POSIX file systems are allowed to do with files full of zeros, and may stop your zero write at the FS level, thus we needed to go deeper).
To erase data so that it's unreachable by police or thieves you'll have to write random noise all over the disk to erase it. However, state-level & enemy governments could remove the drive platters from their enclosures and place them in highly sensitive drive reading tech with heads that could pick up the analog signal and perform the top-layer subtraction method I mentioned above. So, to really erase the bits you want to write over the surface with multiple passes of random bits.
Ah, but SSDs employ ware leveling and even magnetic spinning disks frequently swap out a sector from use. The logi
What I do is read past the mistakes and be thankful that I know what they're trying to say. That's the only thing left man has over the machines, and you want the Slashdot editors to take even advantage away?! Talk about kicking an ape when he's down.
I have a series of math text book from the 50's that I bought at a garage sale for $10, when I was homeless high school drop out. I used them to brush up on Algebra Trig and Calculus as preparation for teaching myself higher mathematics, compiler theory, and etc. CS theory. They are far superior to today's mathematics books.
A few years after me, my younger brother became a sophomore in high school and was struggling with mathematics. I tried to help him with his homework, but the terminology was wickedly alien. I said, "Is this even algebra? What the hell are they on about?" I showed him how to solve the problems using the methods that worked for me but he said, "No, you don't get it, I can't do it that way I have to do it the way my teacher wants or it doesn't count." That's asinine, if the solution fits then it's equivalent. However, I had experience with such oppressive systems myself, so I knew the only thing to do was start from the first chapter and re-learned their bullshit terminology so I could show him the book's particular way of performing and wording the calculation. I realized that the textbook sellers changed the wording and methods of teaching mathematics over the years, not only to yield more book sales for newer curriculum and re-assert copyright anew, but also to make mathematics more in line with the (supposed) way girls learn.
It's unconscionable for teachers to remain willfully ignorant that boys and girls think differently in general; Only a complete moron would think that brains were immune to sexual dimorphism that had such drastic effects on the rest of the human body. It was common knowledge that men and women have different personalities in general, but strangely research was lacking in the area of sex differences in behavior. However, the feminist mantra that men and women are not different drowns out opposing facts. Strange when you consider that they lobbied for changes to the way mathematics and sciences were taught to make them more easy for girls to learn them. Drop the damn stereotyped learning, everyone goes at different rates and different methods are better for different folks, and yes, sexual dimorphism will cause a trend in certain graphs, but that doesn't mean we can't embrace outliers too. Just consider the student as individuals for once: If a boy or girl is having trouble learning via one method, then teach them the other. If that means you wind up more girls or boys in the class that teaches more event based and auditory methods vs visual and hands-on methods then THAT'S OK. If you want to end sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. you have to consider the individual's experience regardless of any group you classify them as being; Stop using identity politics, they only create more inequality in the name of equality.
The feminists leveraged their sexist ideology and identity politics quite effectively by pointing to the disparity in female enrollment and graduation from college, especially in STEM fields. What they failed to realize is that my mom was in the slide-rule club in high school, and she didn't need sex tailored teaching. Their changes didn't help girls to learn, they merely made it harder for some to learn than others. The textbooks I have from the 50's and 60's teach mathematics in concise and plain terms. They don't use too many ridiculous analogies and mental gymnastics. Word problems weren't a focal point past elementary levels. It wasn't that all girls learn different than all boys, it was that there are different methods to teaching that individuals are better at understanding, and there is a trend in which methods boys and girls favor. However, these changes just muddled the methods and muddied the waters.
Another problem has been brewing in education for a wile now too: Standardized Testing AKA Poor Penalization.
There is no competition in broadband services today because the largest companies have slanted the laws so hard in their favor that all competition is legally shut out.
You know nothing of the industry. There are hundreds of ISPs for sale in the United States RIGHT NOW.
I have hardware in my garage that I can use to build a free mesh network using shortwave radios. I started working on it in the BBS days. There are no unregulated slices of public spectrum available to run it on, even though spectrum belongs to the public. It's illegal for me to test it beyond 30ft, outside of my garage's Faraday cage which is the only place I'm allowed to tinker without the regulatory captured FCC throwing me in fucking jail. Now, how much do we not know of "the industry"? HAL-PC was an ISP in my neighborhood I used, they resold AT&T, and thus their prices and service quality aren't much better -- They're subject to the same sorts of throttling shenanigans everyone else is otherwise we'd all resell Comcast and AT&T much closer to the cost to actually rent the hardware and put the big bastards out of business or at least force them to compete -- But we can't do that, because Internet Service Providers aren't classified as Title II communication service providers. But now we're digressing into Net Neutrality Territory.
Go buy one. It'll cost you a few million for a small one.
You're talking out your fucking ass, moron. The dinky dying local computer club can afford one for far less. Regardless of bullshit tap-ready wired providers, I can obliviate the need to pay more than a one time fee for an antenna, (software defined) radio, and caching server -- It's basically self organizing Fidonet using always on frequency hopping signal strength moderating (for channel reuse) radio modems (which escape the one-to-many problems of wired networks via the nature of EM fields) -- Except that wireless ISPs fight to ensure the common people themselves don't have ANY unlicensed spectrum to compete in and so unlicensed Store-and-Forward packet radio is illegal, even on the family band... So, yeah, the emboldened statement above remains true in so many ways it's not funny. Meshnets can and do work, but they've never been given a chance. This shit's not even capitalism anymore, it's corporatism.
Yeah, did you know doom had a story? Even was going to have male and female selectable player characters, with different stats.
Quake was going to be the first FPS MMO based loosely on the dice and paper RPGs the guys liked to play. The Kill Cube would fly over Quakes head (the player character); I think that spinning cube graphic is the spawn cube the boss at the end of Doom2 uses.
Now, You, Carmack or anyone can arbitrarily make up shit after the fact based on shit they cut from the game -- But there were gameplay features AND story on that damn chopping block, so I'm not seeing how such idiots make the distinction. Eg: to say that a lot of what made FF7 popular wasn't the story when we've got low polygon models walking around for most of it is just daft as fuck. You think Portal would be half the game it was without the story? That's Stupid, is all I can say if that's what you think.
Romero left and the games became the same engine after another with no real grasp of what makes games fun. Romero had to beg Carmack to keep multi-player modes in Doom. Romero had to convince Carmack to not do stupid shit like send threatening letters to WAD modders -- Carmack saw us as competition, when our user maps were boosting sales as evidenced by correlation in sales spikes between our underground releases. That's the evidence Romero used to finally get Carmack to open the node builder for Doom levels AFTER we had already reverse engineered the BSP format and created a better nodebuilder ourselves.
Yeah, Romero started Ion Storm and made a crap game called Daikatana, so what, ever played Hovertank or Catacombs - The Abyss? Ugh. Keen was far better in terms of design. However, look at what came out of Ion Storm: Deus Ex. Just because Carmack is ignorant when it comes to what players want (Multiplayer, Cars Racing in a FPS? Now THAT's Rage), and sucks at stories and game mechanics doesn't mean they can't be every bit as valuable as the engine or art. Just because Carmack can't put all the pieces together himself, doesn't mean that an engine is all you need for a good game.
What makes a game first and foremost is the mechanics. The interplay between input and rulesets. Not all games need a story, but that doesn't mean story isn't important. Thomas Was Alone is a great example where giving the game some narrative really made it stand out -- It was demonstrably important.
Good story in a game is like a nice sized cock in intercourse. If you've got a one, it's awesome. If you don't then you just lie to yourself and say it doesn't matter.
Which is it? Do you cerebral and intelligent so that you can have something to think about for a while, or do you want mindless fun?
Ah yes, the false dichotomy program is clouding your mind. The Matrix Has You, Trekkie God.
The fact remains that since time exists there is more than one event in a movie. Thus, a more competent film maker could achieve both a cerebral and intelligent plot with lots of "mindless" fun, all while remaining in the cannon universe. The mark of skilled creators and craftsman, and indeed even Hackers, is their ability to pull off amazing feats in a limited medium. Only a pathetic unimaginative fool dismisses such a fertile wealth of world crafting to tell new stories.
Look around you. Hollywood is stuck in a retarding reboot loop that not even the faster than light Sci-Fi franchises could escape. Realize the truth: Rebooting doesn't solve any problem, it's primarily the mark of an amateur. ST TNG proved that the world can live on, that your past characters and plots can pass into the world's history and the future can march forward birthing new stars with their own unique and interesting characteristics.
I understand the appeal of diverging from the themes Star Trek had, but if you must destroy the universe do that, then they are not Star Trek movies anymore by definition: If the universe we know is thrown out the window then what remains is merely name recognition. Novices would be better off using a different universe to tell their story if they can't figure out how to play well with others.
whether a robotic car should kill its owner, if it means saving two strangers.
Honestly, this question of ethics is retarding, literally. Human brains can navigate quite safely at walking or even running speeds. We have already built automobiles -- Machines which let humans propel themselves faster than their reflexes are known to operate effectively. Now you want to talk about some fucking ethics? Get real, idiot. Ever been in a very high speed loss of control or accident? I have been in several. Cars are not racecars. They don't corner on rails. Humans can't focus on all the things they need to to avoid most accidents even at moderate highway speeds -- We get along because we're playing follow the leader and relativity presents a space wherein the changes to the state of nearby vehicles appear to be happening at slower relative speeds. However, the ground exists and the tweaks to the controls at the speeds we're traveling along it are different at different speeds. Namely: Since streetcars aren't Formula One racecars and human reflexes and cognitive processing happen slower than the required rate, there's really nothing humans can do in most collision scenarios. #1 statement after a wreck, "It all happened so fast."
Throw a robot sentry into the mix with sensors operating millions of times faster than ours detecting a full 360 degree map, and even if the ONLY ethics were some STUPID SOPHOMORIC BULLSHIT like "Preserve the life of the driver". It would still be FAR safer and more capable than a glacial organic cogitatior with forward facing stereoscopic vision who's easily distracted and that frequently panics in emergencies.
Hey Philosophical Nitwits: We scientists don't guess at this shit like you idiots. What we do is put the actual systems in place and TEST the fucking rulesets to PROVE what the best response is. Get wrecked retards.
At a young age I learned to read beyond the words of humans. Frequently the ignorant will have valid points when they talk on subjects even if they are unable to speak on the pertinent issue with the nuance it requires.
I wrote my first wireframe 3D game while stoned. I hadn't been taught trig yet so I invented vector math independently after discovering what you'd call the "unit circle" by drawing a radiant diagram of line slope ratios represented in decimal form; Ultimately I ended up creating the equivalent to sin(), cos() and dot() functions because I didn't know what those were useful for (seriously 'online' documentation sucks sans Internet). It was one of the most productive nights of my young life. I doubt I'd have come to the conclusions about connectedness between the mathematic properties in geometry with just a knowledge of linear equations, a glorified graphing calculator, and no mind expanding chemicals. The next school year I realized there was no such thing as Genius. I couldn't understand the reverence my teacher had for these dead dudes: If a stoned kid could discover in a single night much of what took Pythagoras decades to do when confronted with the same problem spaces, then maybe we're just teaching kids wrong... I digress.
We do have a bit of research which found that downers are less common among Hackers. We typically don't like things that make us stupid or slow. Today's Marijuana is very potent compared to the 70's or even 90's, so many Hackers tend to shy away from what I would call an overdose (meaning above recommended, the term does not imply lethal). IMHO, a brownie shouldn't put you out of commission; Eat herbal confections responsibly. However, for those that Marry Jane doesn't dance with in 'detrimental' ways it's not uncommon to do some light buzzed hacking sometimes with surprisingly clever results (especially for harder problems). Indeed, after I woke the next afternoon I was refreshed and amazed at my output. I was only confounded by a single block of dense hand optimized code with only the comment,// Refactored symbiotic slope system to remove branching. Whether such "here be dragons" comments in code should be taken as quite literal statements or if they arise from the ceremonial chemistry itself is still a great mystery each code-fu master must overcome for themselves. Mine turned out to be matrix math sans matrix idiom.
Think about it: Hackers like exploiting systems for interesting or clever results; Drugs are the tools we hack organic computers with... Well, that and tDCS, but the latter may blow your fuses before our stem-cell and n.net replacements are ready. As with even alcohol, caffeine or self modifying instructions: Moderation is the key when dealing in any form of computer altering substance.
Now reconsider the GP's post: Here is someone who has since the early 90's never heard of anyone enjoying recreational mind expanding chemicals in programming. However, when we polled Usenet via trial balloon that's not what we found at all among hackers. Consider that the corporate-clone workplace strongly filters against non-authoritarian approved drug use with the help of the state. The environment itself even hackers find somewhat hostile. Consider that many people sacrifice their pleasures if these are made to cause their livelihood risk. Consider that Hackers do have ways of defeating many unjust social systems such as these. Consider that we may be letting some great minds slip through the cracks for no other reason than a form of Orwellian thought control. Even consider that GP is posting AC and propagating anti-drug propaganda, just as we've seen since the 60's and 70's. With a bit of context even a seemingly dumb comment can stir up the probability matrix quite well. The trick is not to assume anything absolutely or concretely,
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The Amazonian ones are known to roost atop warehouses near airports.
10 mil is a bit small for an instruction set, but it'll have to do. Throw in a Haynes Manual and Slap a RepRap in the trunk boys, we just invented a new form of life. What can possibly go wrong?
Observe the feeding habits of the West American Automon Hybridicus. Stalled lazily on the mountainous incline several adult automons compete for sun, basking to absorb energy via electro-photosynthesis. On the amber plains below their young crubs' game of traffic has come to a sudden quiet end. One of them has detected the Syn call of a resting petroldactyl's TCP and notified the others. This giant member of the Amazonian quadcopterial drone species grazes on the sugar rich corn and starchy wheats of the plains, digesting them into hydrocarbons via bacterialgaeic gut microbes -- which are passed on from generation to generation via a process called, "Infringing patents with a shit-eating grin".
Accelerating slowly in silent electric locomotion the young automons angle in wide formation towards the large RF crooning petroldactyl. Her factory glands are engorged but finding a mate is the least of her worries. A moment too late she is startled by movement and tries to take flight. With two of her rotors now injured, she is soon to become offroadkill. Honking approval echoes from the mountainside across the plains as the adults approach to share in the feast. The petrodactyl's fuel bladder must be pierced carefully and siphoned. The crubs pop their fuel caps open and closed awaiting the nutritious regurgitation of their parents. No part will be wasted, the plastic and metallic remains will be ground down under tire and scooped into the reclamator to be melted down in stages for extrusion, sintering, and then lovingly milled into the required shapes during the painstaking birthing process.
The gridlock parts ways for the oldest and slowest model among them who is last to park the lot. Being highest in the parking order has its perks: He is allowed to take his pick, but seems satisfied with only a few tasty chunks of the delicate crunchy chassis, and a single slurp of fuel. A rare sight indeed is this original series automon -- Identifiable by the distinct odor and skeletal remains of its former driver still safely locked within.
And for Endearment.
Less than, Eh? Aich ref equals quote. Aich tea tepee colon slash. Slash soy: lent. News dot oh, our gee. Quote: greater than Meh. Less than slash, eh? Greater than?
It took folks on both sides of the doors to throw the constitution out the window.
If you think that cyberneticians are just mimicking designs without comprehending the fundamental biological processes involved, then you must not understand that cybernetics isn't limited to computer science. In fact it began in business analyzing logistics of information flow. That these general principals also apply to emergent intelligence means more biologists need to study Information Theory, not that cyberneticians are ignorant of biology (hint: we probably know more about it than most biologists, since our field places no limit on its application).
After all, the brain is an incredibly complex and specific structure, forged in the relentless pressure of millions of years of evolution to be organized just so.
Ugh, Creationists. No, that's wrong. Evolution is simply the application of environmental bias to chaos -- the same fundamental process by which complexity naturally arises from entropy. Look, we jabbed some wires in a rodent head and hooked up an infrared sensor. Then they became able to sense infrared and use the infrared input to navigate. That adaptation didn't take millions of years. What an idiot. Evolution is a form of emergence, but it is not the only form of emergence, this process operates at all levels of reality and all scales of time. Your puny brains and insignificant lives give you a small window within which to compare the universe to your experience and thus you fail to realize that the neuroplasticity of brains adapting to new inputs is really not so different a process than droplets of condensation forming rain, or molecules forming amino acids when energized and cooled, or stars forming, or matter being produced all via similar emergent processes.
The structure of self replicating life is that chemistry which propagates more complex information about itself into the future faster. If you could witness those millions of years in time-lapse then you'd see how adapting to IR inputs isn't really much different at all, just at a different scale. Yet you classify one adaptation as "evolution" and the other "emergence" for purely arbitrary reasons: The genetically reproducible capability of the adaptation -- As if we can't jab more wires in the next generation's heads from here on out according to protocol. Your language simply lacks the words for most basic universal truths. I suppose you also draw a thick arbitrary line between children and their parents -- one that nature doesn't draw else "species" wouldn't exist. The tendencies of your pattern recognition and classification systems can hamper you if you let your mind run rampant. I believe you call this "confirmation bias".
Humans understand very well what their neurons are doing now at the chemical level. It's now known how neurotransmitters are being transported by motor proteins in vesicles across neurons along micro-tubules in a very mechanical fashion that uses a bias applied to entropy to emerge the action within cells. The governing principals of cognition are being discovered by neurologists and abstracted by cybernetics to gain a fundamental understanding of cognition that philosophers have always craved. When cyberneticians model replicas of a retina's layers, the artificial neural networks end up having the same motion sensing behavior; The same is true for many other parts of the brain. Indeed the hippocampus has been successfully replaced in mice with an artificial implant and proven they can still remember and learn with the implant.
If the brain were so specifically crafted then cutting out half of it would reduce people to vegetables and forever destroy half of their motor function, but that's a moronic thing to assume would happen. Neuroplasticity of the brain disproves the assumption that it is so strongly dependent upon its structural components. Cyberneticians know that everything flows, so they acknowledge that primitive instinctual responses and cognitive biases due to various physical structural formations feed their effects into the greater neurological function; However this is not the core governing mechanic of cognition -- It can't be else the little girl with half her brain wouldn't remain sentient, let alone able to walk.
Much of modern philosophy loves to cast a mystic shroud of "lack of understanding" upon that which is already thor
Hexen was the game that Doom ][ should have been.
On the BBSes that I played 4 player Doom on, those wall running speed boosts didn't matter, they had the opposite effect since we ran the game with -turbo 255 (2.55 times faster than normal). Press the run key and strafe-run and you're going as fast as player can go. Any faster via and the fixed point vector math overflows and when you press the run key and forwards you travel backwards.
If you thought the game required lighting fast reflexes before, you just have no idea. Look, one of my strategies was to fire off rockets while strafing and running at the same speed as them, then outrun the rockets and use a supershotgun and blast from too far away to lure them in while I'm reloading (you can close huge distances). Everything exploded around them as I'd back away just in time to dodge my own 10-20 dense rocket wall. That's how fast we were playing. You could out run rockets in a medium sized open area custom map with enough time before they hit to have a short firefight.
What made doom work so well at such speeds was its vertical auto-aim.
The coolest thing I liked about Descent is that it worked with VR glasses, or you could run it in side-by-side stereoscopic VR mode on your screen and cross your eyes for headache inducing poor-mans 3D. The original game still works with 3D VR or 3D monitors if you have the right drivers and config.
I liked Descent 2 better than Quake for its slower paced but far more strategic gameplay, and esp. developing a love-hate relationship with its Guidebot. Duke3D had so many gadgets but I loved best its non-euclidean 2.5D engine effects I could pull off with its Build editor: Small corridor off a big open space: 3 quick right turns, you should be entering the same open area, but but it's a whole different area in space overlapping it -- Or my favorite trick: regions between 4 or more pillars in an open area that were a nexus between 4 or more overlapping dimensions. Depending on which way you entered them you could quickly move between them all. And there could be multiple such trans-dimensional pillar sets in each region. We easily played in maps that would have left Cthulhu scratching his head. Hell, some Doom maps we made were quite tricky with invisible floating stairways (set a sector to be its own adjacent sector) and player voodoo dolls (too many multi-player starts = damage by proxy traps). You could pull off some neat things with Descent's deformable cube-based portal renderer too, but the lighting system and map editor(s) made many tricks hard to pull off since they lacked the manual raw data manipulation and I needed to modify things with a hex editor each edit.
The lag compensation of slow bullet-sponge movement and other excessive realism in much of todays pop-culture games does leave us with less variety in gameplay.
...so your regular computer should be reversible too.
For a regular computer to be reversible it needs reversible logic gates. For example, a standard XOR gate loses one bit of information, so given the output you cannot construct the input perfectly (as there are two possible inputs for each output).
But the output from the opcode isn't stored back to both input memory locations at once ergo, XOR itself is reversible at the chip level, even if it writes back to one of the inputs just XOR the output with the other input. You're conflating the theory of computation with the actual computation. In THEORY you can delete bits, but in practice you actually can't -- Well, using the arrow of time created by sub-atomic entropy (quantum foam) you might be able to... but that will remain beyond your grasp for some time yet. When you write zeros over the data the exact opposite process would restore the data because its remnants are still there encoded into everything from slight resistance in potential of the RAM or repulsion of the writehead, etc. you leave behind sub-bit signatures. Let's not even get into in-memory attempts to erase memory that can fail due to caching, paging, another thread with a copy, etc. and just talk about on-disk data.
Let's say I have these bits: 1 0 1 0 and I write over them with 0 0 1 1. For the sake of argument let's say that each write is affected by one tenth of the origin data's signal. Our existing initial state may actually not be so clean, and our write signal may not be so perfect, but let's assume they are just for example. Here's the overwrite:
1.00 <- 0 = 0.100
0.10 <- 0 = 0.010
1.01 <- 1 = 1.101
0.00 <- 1 = 1.000
We're allowing bits to go above 1 because in reality there's a threshold for the bit value one, and you can exceed it (obviously). Really, the zeros should be negative ones, but this is just an oversimplified example. Let's say we wanted to reverse the process. We read back what is apparently stored there which is rounded to the whole bits (0 0 1 1) and subtract that out of the analog signal (decimals). That zeros the whole number threshold place, but it would reveal the tenths place I've emboldened above. You amplify that signal beyond the threshold and you've got our origin signal: 1 0 1 0. See, the theory of the computer would have said those bits are lost forever, but even without resorting to full reversal of everything at the quantum scale I can get your overwritten bits back in practice. With an even more sensitive system you could get what was written in a prior pass than this, revealing what's in the hundredths and thousandths place, etc., though each layer down is more entropic.
This is just one reason why writing zeros all over the disk doesn't really erase your data, that's actually the worst thing to write. Your neighbor likely wouldn't be able to get the data back, but the drive itself may have just marked that sector entry in its look up table as full of zeros without actually changing the data on the disk -- read it back and the table could tell the controller to fill the buffer with zeros without touching the actual disk data (sort of how POSIX file systems are allowed to do with files full of zeros, and may stop your zero write at the FS level, thus we needed to go deeper).
To erase data so that it's unreachable by police or thieves you'll have to write random noise all over the disk to erase it. However, state-level & enemy governments could remove the drive platters from their enclosures and place them in highly sensitive drive reading tech with heads that could pick up the analog signal and perform the top-layer subtraction method I mentioned above. So, to really erase the bits you want to write over the surface with multiple passes of random bits.
Ah, but SSDs employ ware leveling and even magnetic spinning disks frequently swap out a sector from use. The logi
When you reverse a black hole it's called a white hole, AKA, big bang.
Wish this was more than just introductory
Well, that's the only lesson that really counts, "RTFM: man man".
If it was a bit more advanced I'd sign up in a heartbeat
You call that Advanced? No, you're thinking Comp. Sec, and that bug got patched.
Proofread this horrendous summary?
Have a little chat with yourself.
What I do is read past the mistakes and be thankful that I know what they're trying to say. That's the only thing left man has over the machines, and you want the Slashdot editors to take even advantage away?!
Talk about kicking an ape when he's down.
You assume thugs need math. They don't.
It takes a few smart folks to set up the systems, and a bunch of dumb ones to follow the flow charts and deploy the automated exploit vectors.
They don't really need hackers at the FBI. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to shill online forums and manage the perception of "national security".
The education system sucks because a well educated public is the hardest to control.
I have a series of math text book from the 50's that I bought at a garage sale for $10, when I was homeless high school drop out. I used them to brush up on Algebra Trig and Calculus as preparation for teaching myself higher mathematics, compiler theory, and etc. CS theory. They are far superior to today's mathematics books.
A few years after me, my younger brother became a sophomore in high school and was struggling with mathematics. I tried to help him with his homework, but the terminology was wickedly alien. I said, "Is this even algebra? What the hell are they on about?" I showed him how to solve the problems using the methods that worked for me but he said, "No, you don't get it, I can't do it that way I have to do it the way my teacher wants or it doesn't count." That's asinine, if the solution fits then it's equivalent. However, I had experience with such oppressive systems myself, so I knew the only thing to do was start from the first chapter and re-learned their bullshit terminology so I could show him the book's particular way of performing and wording the calculation. I realized that the textbook sellers changed the wording and methods of teaching mathematics over the years, not only to yield more book sales for newer curriculum and re-assert copyright anew, but also to make mathematics more in line with the (supposed) way girls learn.
It's unconscionable for teachers to remain willfully ignorant that boys and girls think differently in general; Only a complete moron would think that brains were immune to sexual dimorphism that had such drastic effects on the rest of the human body. It was common knowledge that men and women have different personalities in general, but strangely research was lacking in the area of sex differences in behavior. However, the feminist mantra that men and women are not different drowns out opposing facts. Strange when you consider that they lobbied for changes to the way mathematics and sciences were taught to make them more easy for girls to learn them. Drop the damn stereotyped learning, everyone goes at different rates and different methods are better for different folks, and yes, sexual dimorphism will cause a trend in certain graphs, but that doesn't mean we can't embrace outliers too. Just consider the student as individuals for once: If a boy or girl is having trouble learning via one method, then teach them the other. If that means you wind up more girls or boys in the class that teaches more event based and auditory methods vs visual and hands-on methods then THAT'S OK. If you want to end sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. you have to consider the individual's experience regardless of any group you classify them as being; Stop using identity politics, they only create more inequality in the name of equality.
The feminists leveraged their sexist ideology and identity politics quite effectively by pointing to the disparity in female enrollment and graduation from college, especially in STEM fields. What they failed to realize is that my mom was in the slide-rule club in high school, and she didn't need sex tailored teaching. Their changes didn't help girls to learn, they merely made it harder for some to learn than others. The textbooks I have from the 50's and 60's teach mathematics in concise and plain terms. They don't use too many ridiculous analogies and mental gymnastics. Word problems weren't a focal point past elementary levels. It wasn't that all girls learn different than all boys, it was that there are different methods to teaching that individuals are better at understanding, and there is a trend in which methods boys and girls favor. However, these changes just muddled the methods and muddied the waters.
Another problem has been brewing in education for a wile now too: Standardized Testing AKA Poor Penalization.
They don't want to be broken up, but I may have located a compromise just Beyond Thunderdome:
Two corps enter, One corp leaves.
We're receiving a faint transmission in an ancient Earth encoding...
Intriguing, the message indicates it's from a time before CVS.
There is no competition in broadband services today because the largest companies have slanted the laws so hard in their favor that all competition is legally shut out.
You know nothing of the industry. There are hundreds of ISPs for sale in the United States RIGHT NOW.
I have hardware in my garage that I can use to build a free mesh network using shortwave radios. I started working on it in the BBS days. There are no unregulated slices of public spectrum available to run it on, even though spectrum belongs to the public. It's illegal for me to test it beyond 30ft, outside of my garage's Faraday cage which is the only place I'm allowed to tinker without the regulatory captured FCC throwing me in fucking jail. Now, how much do we not know of "the industry"? HAL-PC was an ISP in my neighborhood I used, they resold AT&T, and thus their prices and service quality aren't much better -- They're subject to the same sorts of throttling shenanigans everyone else is otherwise we'd all resell Comcast and AT&T much closer to the cost to actually rent the hardware and put the big bastards out of business or at least force them to compete -- But we can't do that, because Internet Service Providers aren't classified as Title II communication service providers. But now we're digressing into Net Neutrality Territory.
Go buy one. It'll cost you a few million for a small one.
You're talking out your fucking ass, moron. The dinky dying local computer club can afford one for far less. Regardless of bullshit tap-ready wired providers, I can obliviate the need to pay more than a one time fee for an antenna, (software defined) radio, and caching server -- It's basically self organizing Fidonet using always on frequency hopping signal strength moderating (for channel reuse) radio modems (which escape the one-to-many problems of wired networks via the nature of EM fields) -- Except that wireless ISPs fight to ensure the common people themselves don't have ANY unlicensed spectrum to compete in and so unlicensed Store-and-Forward packet radio is illegal, even on the family band... So, yeah, the emboldened statement above remains true in so many ways it's not funny. Meshnets can and do work, but they've never been given a chance. This shit's not even capitalism anymore, it's corporatism.
the
Yeah, did you know doom had a story? Even was going to have male and female selectable player characters, with different stats.
Quake was going to be the first FPS MMO based loosely on the dice and paper RPGs the guys liked to play. The Kill Cube would fly over Quakes head (the player character); I think that spinning cube graphic is the spawn cube the boss at the end of Doom2 uses.
Now, You, Carmack or anyone can arbitrarily make up shit after the fact based on shit they cut from the game -- But there were gameplay features AND story on that damn chopping block, so I'm not seeing how such idiots make the distinction. Eg: to say that a lot of what made FF7 popular wasn't the story when we've got low polygon models walking around for most of it is just daft as fuck. You think Portal would be half the game it was without the story? That's Stupid, is all I can say if that's what you think.
Romero left and the games became the same engine after another with no real grasp of what makes games fun. Romero had to beg Carmack to keep multi-player modes in Doom. Romero had to convince Carmack to not do stupid shit like send threatening letters to WAD modders -- Carmack saw us as competition, when our user maps were boosting sales as evidenced by correlation in sales spikes between our underground releases. That's the evidence Romero used to finally get Carmack to open the node builder for Doom levels AFTER we had already reverse engineered the BSP format and created a better nodebuilder ourselves.
Yeah, Romero started Ion Storm and made a crap game called Daikatana, so what, ever played Hovertank or Catacombs - The Abyss? Ugh. Keen was far better in terms of design. However, look at what came out of Ion Storm: Deus Ex. Just because Carmack is ignorant when it comes to what players want (Multiplayer, Cars Racing in a FPS? Now THAT's Rage), and sucks at stories and game mechanics doesn't mean they can't be every bit as valuable as the engine or art. Just because Carmack can't put all the pieces together himself, doesn't mean that an engine is all you need for a good game.
What makes a game first and foremost is the mechanics. The interplay between input and rulesets. Not all games need a story, but that doesn't mean story isn't important. Thomas Was Alone is a great example where giving the game some narrative really made it stand out -- It was demonstrably important.
Good story in a game is like a nice sized cock in intercourse. If you've got a one, it's awesome. If you don't then you just lie to yourself and say it doesn't matter.
Which is it? Do you cerebral and intelligent so that you can have something to think about for a while, or do you want mindless fun?
Ah yes, the false dichotomy program is clouding your mind. The Matrix Has You, Trekkie God.
The fact remains that since time exists there is more than one event in a movie. Thus, a more competent film maker could achieve both a cerebral and intelligent plot with lots of "mindless" fun, all while remaining in the cannon universe. The mark of skilled creators and craftsman, and indeed even Hackers, is their ability to pull off amazing feats in a limited medium. Only a pathetic unimaginative fool dismisses such a fertile wealth of world crafting to tell new stories.
Look around you. Hollywood is stuck in a retarding reboot loop that not even the faster than light Sci-Fi franchises could escape. Realize the truth: Rebooting doesn't solve any problem, it's primarily the mark of an amateur. ST TNG proved that the world can live on, that your past characters and plots can pass into the world's history and the future can march forward birthing new stars with their own unique and interesting characteristics.
I understand the appeal of diverging from the themes Star Trek had, but if you must destroy the universe do that, then they are not Star Trek movies anymore by definition: If the universe we know is thrown out the window then what remains is merely name recognition. Novices would be better off using a different universe to tell their story if they can't figure out how to play well with others.
whether a robotic car should kill its owner, if it means saving two strangers.
Honestly, this question of ethics is retarding, literally. Human brains can navigate quite safely at walking or even running speeds. We have already built automobiles -- Machines which let humans propel themselves faster than their reflexes are known to operate effectively. Now you want to talk about some fucking ethics? Get real, idiot. Ever been in a very high speed loss of control or accident? I have been in several. Cars are not racecars. They don't corner on rails. Humans can't focus on all the things they need to to avoid most accidents even at moderate highway speeds -- We get along because we're playing follow the leader and relativity presents a space wherein the changes to the state of nearby vehicles appear to be happening at slower relative speeds. However, the ground exists and the tweaks to the controls at the speeds we're traveling along it are different at different speeds. Namely: Since streetcars aren't Formula One racecars and human reflexes and cognitive processing happen slower than the required rate, there's really nothing humans can do in most collision scenarios. #1 statement after a wreck, "It all happened so fast."
Throw a robot sentry into the mix with sensors operating millions of times faster than ours detecting a full 360 degree map, and even if the ONLY ethics were some STUPID SOPHOMORIC BULLSHIT like "Preserve the life of the driver". It would still be FAR safer and more capable than a glacial organic cogitatior with forward facing stereoscopic vision who's easily distracted and that frequently panics in emergencies.
Hey Philosophical Nitwits: We scientists don't guess at this shit like you idiots. What we do is put the actual systems in place and TEST the fucking rulesets to PROVE what the best response is. Get wrecked retards.
Like gay marriage the prohibition of marijuana will start falling state by state.
Those lucky gay bastards. Hetero marriage doesn't get you stoned, you'd just have to be so to do so.
You let humans operate heavy machinery on this planet?! That's insane!
Must be true. You are statistically significant.
At a young age I learned to read beyond the words of humans. Frequently the ignorant will have valid points when they talk on subjects even if they are unable to speak on the pertinent issue with the nuance it requires.
I wrote my first wireframe 3D game while stoned. I hadn't been taught trig yet so I invented vector math independently after discovering what you'd call the "unit circle" by drawing a radiant diagram of line slope ratios represented in decimal form; Ultimately I ended up creating the equivalent to sin(), cos() and dot() functions because I didn't know what those were useful for (seriously 'online' documentation sucks sans Internet). It was one of the most productive nights of my young life. I doubt I'd have come to the conclusions about connectedness between the mathematic properties in geometry with just a knowledge of linear equations, a glorified graphing calculator, and no mind expanding chemicals. The next school year I realized there was no such thing as Genius. I couldn't understand the reverence my teacher had for these dead dudes: If a stoned kid could discover in a single night much of what took Pythagoras decades to do when confronted with the same problem spaces, then maybe we're just teaching kids wrong... I digress.
We do have a bit of research which found that downers are less common among Hackers. We typically don't like things that make us stupid or slow. Today's Marijuana is very potent compared to the 70's or even 90's, so many Hackers tend to shy away from what I would call an overdose (meaning above recommended, the term does not imply lethal). IMHO, a brownie shouldn't put you out of commission; Eat herbal confections responsibly. However, for those that Marry Jane doesn't dance with in 'detrimental' ways it's not uncommon to do some light buzzed hacking sometimes with surprisingly clever results (especially for harder problems). Indeed, after I woke the next afternoon I was refreshed and amazed at my output. I was only confounded by a single block of dense hand optimized code with only the comment, // Refactored symbiotic slope system to remove branching. Whether such "here be dragons" comments in code should be taken as quite literal statements or if they arise from the ceremonial chemistry itself is still a great mystery each code-fu master must overcome for themselves. Mine turned out to be matrix math sans matrix idiom.
Think about it: Hackers like exploiting systems for interesting or clever results; Drugs are the tools we hack organic computers with... Well, that and tDCS, but the latter may blow your fuses before our stem-cell and n.net replacements are ready. As with even alcohol, caffeine or self modifying instructions: Moderation is the key when dealing in any form of computer altering substance.
Now reconsider the GP's post: Here is someone who has since the early 90's never heard of anyone enjoying recreational mind expanding chemicals in programming. However, when we polled Usenet via trial balloon that's not what we found at all among hackers. Consider that the corporate-clone workplace strongly filters against non-authoritarian approved drug use with the help of the state. The environment itself even hackers find somewhat hostile. Consider that many people sacrifice their pleasures if these are made to cause their livelihood risk. Consider that Hackers do have ways of defeating many unjust social systems such as these. Consider that we may be letting some great minds slip through the cracks for no other reason than a form of Orwellian thought control. Even consider that GP is posting AC and propagating anti-drug propaganda, just as we've seen since the 60's and 70's. With a bit of context even a seemingly dumb comment can stir up the probability matrix quite well. The trick is not to assume anything absolutely or concretely,