Are you sure it really was the printer that was to blame in both cases?
I just bought a new box of off-brand discount laser/copier paper from the local wholesaler, and suddenly my veteran HPLJ-IIID is jamming on every page. If I put the old paper in, it works fine; but the new paper doesn't want to be pulled out of the tray - the eccentric rubber rollers which grab onto it just can't seem to get a purchase on it.
Sure there is bound to be some wear on these parts so that an overhaul and some judicious parts replacement might enable the machine to cope, but it's quite telling when the machine only seems to have problems with certain makes of paper.
I simply distrust politicians - the whole damn lot of them, national or supranational. Apparently the only way of curtailing their desires is to stick several dozen of them from many nations in a room and get them to argue eachother down. Eventually, whatever crazy scheme's got neutered to the point of being useless.
That's the very same reason why I favour elections based on proportional representation. Detractors complain that PR would mean a constantly hung parliament, with no party ever able to assert a meaningful majority. To which I say: "Yes exactly, that's the whole frikkin' point". All the political ideologies would cancel each other out; let them vent their spleens on each other, keep them busy watering down each others proposals so they don't have the time or resources to be constantly changing the rules around, let us get on with our lives without this constant disruptive interferance from the state.
Yes. Because "consciousness" is only our word for a special kind of spatio-temporal pattern sustained by suitable material substrates (of which organic brains are the only known kind, to date). But I have argued here that conciousness is an invented human label to which we have attempted to accrue meaning, to very little avail - because consciousness does not even actually exist, in any objective sense of the term.
You sound like the perfect scientist: until it is proven false it must be true.
If that is how you believe science operates, you clearly don't know the first thing about science or scientists. I bet you get all your "science" from the National Enquirer and the Discovery Channel.
Cognitive awareness is not taught and learned and something that is not living will never have cognitive awareness.
Oh, really. And when, and by whom, was this demonstrated exactly? Oh I see - you made it up.
Being an ignorant fool, therefore, it would probably be best for you to shut up and leave the talking to those who are able to think straight, and who know the difference between evidence and logic on the one hand, and unthinking assumption on the other.
I mean, just how many people here would really be interested in acquiring this collection? No, that site is only down because thousands of slashdot geeks couldn't resist the chance to ogle a wanton display of naked tubery. It's like... geek porn!
It should be obvious to everybody from since about the time of the dotcom crash that Republicrat conservatives (and their equivalents in all other countries) absolutely detest the internet, because it empowers ordinary people to organize themselves into power blocs, disturbs the status quo and therefore threatens their stranglehold on power.
What easier way could there be to eliminate this menace than to clog it up with sewage and drown out the voice of the people in the noise? No - spam, and the website equivalents of spam, are surely the ruling elite's friend.
That is not just a funny remark. I find it extremely heartening that in a world still ruled by the ignorant, the warlike, the greedy, the hard-nosed etc - there will still be a few places where ordinary bright guys - who are *not* out to scam anyone - can make the bigtime and (most importantly) greatly improve their chances of reproductive success*. Maybe the human race won't die out just yet.
*by reproductive success I mean (a) marry a more beautiful woman and thus have more beautful children which in turn...etc and (b) get to shag truckloads of chicks on the side, some of whom will fall pregnant. 'Cos that's the way it works.
Do you come from some other planet? Don't be silly, the rewards will be for the development teams only. That doesn't include the desktop support guy, or the server support guy, or the guy who comes in to clean the toilets.
Yeah. Consciousness is bunk. Any reasonable person should conclude that we just *imagine* we are conscious - because there is no evidence to prove otherwise. And a properly programmed and any (sufficiently intelligent, sufficiently creative) AI is capable of imagining the same thing about themselves.
Consciousness? LOL! One might as well talk about fairies, or a sky made of crystal spheres.
If consciousness exists (and we are talking about the mystical consciousness of qualia and feelings of selfhood etc rather than Crick's attentional binding), then it is only an emergent property, and moreover (and this is key) it resides only at the highest level of abstraction, with *no independent existence* of its own, and no ability to affect anything.
Obviously there must be a certain minimum level of complexity, as there must be for any information processing task. However I am sure brute force alone is not the answer. Truly huge machines have already been built and yet they don't spontaneously become self aware because they are not programmed to do so. However, get the software architecture right...
Disappointment with early connectionist architectures caused a shift towards more traditional techniques and most current serious efforts appear to take the view that effect is everything, and are using rule-based processing.
I think this is a bit misguided. However the past decade has seen incredible advances in our understanding of the human brain, and it is probably *already* possible *now* to model the brain in enough detail that we could begin building connectionist models which incorporate most of what really needs to be there.
Funnily enough there has historically been some resistance to bulding computer models in the neuroscience world. I really don't understand why this should be. But since this is going to be a largely trial-and-error effort, I strongly suspect that the necessary work will get done by amateurs anyway. When the Sony Cell arrives, some enterprising open source AI freak only needs to get a Seti At Home/Protein Folding screensaver setup going with thousands of volunteers and there will be enough computer power to run the most elaborate connectionist simulations.
Heh. I had the same thought about this distributed network computer plan of Sony's.
Imagine a virus infecting a PS3 game which installs itself on millions of PS3's (and other Cell-equipped appliances) across the world. The virus, when it finally activates, bootstraps a highly redundant virtual machine (either contained in the virus or else loaded at activation time from somewhere on the net) with one little piece running on each Cell. The virtual machine in turn bootstraps an AI program from an anonymous server somewhere else.
The AI program is now running on a distributed virtual computer supported by millions of very powerful processors. There is no way to turn it off without shutting down all those Cell boxes simultaneously.
Doomsayers predicted that this would happen on the internet proper more or less as it is now, but truly distributed network processing is still very much the exception, and the Cell is intended to change that. Also of course the Cell itself is inherently parallel and therefore very well suited to running connectionist AI simulations. Whether or not this doomsday is just a fantasy, I expect AI researchers to be very interested in the Cell.
I disagree. I think you forgot what "equation" actually means. It doesn't mean "algebraic formula" or "expression", which are things that can be used not only in equations but also in inequalities and also on their own. "Equation" means only this: that two things are equal.
The grandparent poster didn't claim that the *algebra* was the reason for certain physical effects. He claimed (correctly) that the equality or *identity* of the two quantities on either side of the equals sign is the reason for those effects. Which is what the written formula of the equation means.
So when you say "this physics equation is the reason that X happens", that actually expands out to "the fact that these two quantities are kept equal by physical law is the reason that X happens". Which is perfectly reasonable and correct.
What *you* said only makes sense if you are postulating that the numerical equality itself did not actually exist until Einstein discovered it. Which rejects any notion of an objective external reality, and I think most people won't buy that (certain quantum mechanics theorists excepted).
Right now, just above these here posts, an animated flash Microsoft ad is playing, banging on about Windows' supposed lower Total Cost of Ownership, according to 7-11. What the hell is OSDN doing selling advertising to these jerks?! Inviting them right here into the enemy camp to peddle their propaganda?!
Still, I suppose it *could* be worse. Imagine if every time you logged into slashdot you risked having a bug-eyed Steve Ballmer shouting at you (shudder). I think I'll keep the silent flash ads.
You'd have to start by freezing the critter to 0 degrees K so no life processes got interrupted and the locale of each cell would be constant long enough to [a] know exactly where it was so you could [b] put it back exactly where it belonged...the damn things wiggle like crazy in living tissue!
I strongly suspect this will be unnecessary. I am sure nobody will mind too much if most cells dont all arrive at the exact same relative location they started in so long as they are all healthy and are all joined up correctly. That's the sort of job that could be done by error correction. This won't reduce the resolution at which scanning needs to be done (which would still need to be on a molecular level at the very least), but it will mean that it won't need to be completed instantaneously. And without freezing.
I say molecular resolution scanning rather than quantum subatomic, because even if the first successful experiments do go all the way down to that level, it would be a very long time before we could transport macroscopic objects that way. However a cheap version relying on a form of data compression which only records the DNA in anything like full detail, but identifies other cell components as standard types. Even, perhaps, only identifying cells as standard types. So that what gets transmitted is:
your basic genome (which itself can be described as a list of deviations from some reference type, which would compress it substantially
a 3D map of the body showing what cell types go where, connected how, and overlaid on an intercellular cytoskeleton that looks like *this*
each cell type references a list of somatic gene modifications from your basic genome.
each cell *location* gets a descriptor listing acceptable quantum states for that cell's DNA (Note: "acceptable", not necessarily "original")
This will do for the body and brain, though the brain will probably need to be stored at a higher level of detail as not only the synapses need to be stored accurately, but also the quantum states of all the neurotransmitters and all the proteins in the cell membranes. Otherwise you will arrive unconscious, insane or worse. If the brain *could* be done instantaneously then you would arrive with your train of thought uninterrupted.
One benefit of doing it this way is that the template for basic cell types will describe a cell in a healthy state, so you can arrive at your destination feeling healthy, refreshed, and free from any disease symptoms! Genetic diseases will only be cured if the DNA description is tweaked, but this should be a simple job taking only a few minutes. I've no doubt this too could be automated only requiring the user to tick a box on the ticketing screen: "Yes, I would like my DNA updated with service pack 2". In fact, goodbye to ageing altogether as long as you keep paying to use this service.
Interesting that you should say that. I note that similar predictions (about the end of the rise in speed and a new focus on Power consumption) are being made by senior chip engineers. eg. the recent interview with the guy who designed the DEC Alpha, recently linked from Slashdot.
I say it's interesting because we now also have Microsoft claiming that they are about to develop better network processing capabilities for their operating systems.
It's not hard to see how these tie up. People buy new software only when it's more functional, which requires more processing power. If processors will no longer get faster, then who will be able to sell software upgrades? New software will therefore need to better at sharing tasks out over the network. At the moment, only Unix descendants are able to do this very well, which puts Microsoft in a dangerous position.
While "virus" is still used (in academic writing) as both singular and plural, "viruses" has already become correct for everyday usage and "geniuses" has already been correct English usage for as long as I can remember.
In any case you would be doing us all a favour if you'd just focus your efforts on stamping out usage of the odious "virii", which doesn't even properly exist at all but frequently crops up on Slashdot. Deal with that, and let the rest go.
Information which is stored as a semantic net (as it is with CYC), can be converted to any other representation. The information will a be useful starting point *even if* we ended up having to assign fresh weights to every semantic relationship. A lot of CYC's work about how to manipulate this information in order to create intelligence, that may or may not pan out. But the semantic net they arecreating is an uploadable understanding of the world, and its easily convertible to a lowest common denominator format. "Wrong" just doesn't enter into it. It's fundamental.
I don't think you quite understand. CYC comprises an utterly huge amount of data. The captured semantic relationships will be useful to future AI researchers no matter what happens. Even if it contains mistakes these will be caught and corrected eventually - just like the unfortunate fellow in the Readers Digest short who thought "hirsute" meant "nevertheless".
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure it really was the printer that was to blame in both cases?
I just bought a new box of off-brand discount laser/copier paper from the local wholesaler, and suddenly my veteran HPLJ-IIID is jamming on every page. If I put the old paper in, it works fine; but the new paper doesn't want to be pulled out of the tray - the eccentric rubber rollers which grab onto it just can't seem to get a purchase on it.
Sure there is bound to be some wear on these parts so that an overhaul and some judicious parts replacement might enable the machine to cope, but it's quite telling when the machine only seems to have problems with certain makes of paper.
Naw, take a look at the parent poster's (sheetrock's) sig. This is clearly a new and subtle form of trolling.
That's the very same reason why I favour elections based on proportional representation. Detractors complain that PR would mean a constantly hung parliament, with no party ever able to assert a meaningful majority. To which I say: "Yes exactly, that's the whole frikkin' point". All the political ideologies would cancel each other out; let them vent their spleens on each other, keep them busy watering down each others proposals so they don't have the time or resources to be constantly changing the rules around, let us get on with our lives without this constant disruptive interferance from the state.
Yes. Because "consciousness" is only our word for a special kind of spatio-temporal pattern sustained by suitable material substrates (of which organic brains are the only known kind, to date). But I have argued here that conciousness is an invented human label to which we have attempted to accrue meaning, to very little avail - because consciousness does not even actually exist, in any objective sense of the term.
If that is how you believe science operates, you clearly don't know the first thing about science or scientists. I bet you get all your "science" from the National Enquirer and the Discovery Channel.
Oh, really. And when, and by whom, was this demonstrated exactly? Oh I see - you made it up.
Being an ignorant fool, therefore, it would probably be best for you to shut up and leave the talking to those who are able to think straight, and who know the difference between evidence and logic on the one hand, and unthinking assumption on the other.
I mean, just how many people here would really be interested in acquiring this collection? No, that site is only down because thousands of slashdot geeks couldn't resist the chance to ogle a wanton display of naked tubery. It's like... geek porn!
Or how about something like this
OK. I see what you mean. What a grubby scenario.
It should be obvious to everybody from since about the time of the dotcom crash that Republicrat conservatives (and their equivalents in all other countries) absolutely detest the internet, because it empowers ordinary people to organize themselves into power blocs, disturbs the status quo and therefore threatens their stranglehold on power.
What easier way could there be to eliminate this menace than to clog it up with sewage and drown out the voice of the people in the noise? No - spam, and the website equivalents of spam, are surely the ruling elite's friend.
That is not just a funny remark. I find it extremely heartening that in a world still ruled by the ignorant, the warlike, the greedy, the hard-nosed etc - there will still be a few places where ordinary bright guys - who are *not* out to scam anyone - can make the bigtime and (most importantly) greatly improve their chances of reproductive success*. Maybe the human race won't die out just yet.
*by reproductive success I mean (a) marry a more beautiful woman and thus have more beautful children which in turn...etc and (b) get to shag truckloads of chicks on the side, some of whom will fall pregnant. 'Cos that's the way it works.
Do you come from some other planet? Don't be silly, the rewards will be for the development teams only. That doesn't include the desktop support guy, or the server support guy, or the guy who comes in to clean the toilets.
Thank you for that. Truly funny. Still laughing!
Yeah. Consciousness is bunk. Any reasonable person should conclude that we just *imagine* we are conscious - because there is no evidence to prove otherwise. And a properly programmed and any (sufficiently intelligent, sufficiently creative) AI is capable of imagining the same thing about themselves.
Consciousness? LOL! One might as well talk about fairies, or a sky made of crystal spheres.
If consciousness exists (and we are talking about the mystical consciousness of qualia and feelings of selfhood etc rather than Crick's attentional binding), then it is only an emergent property, and moreover (and this is key) it resides only at the highest level of abstraction, with *no independent existence* of its own, and no ability to affect anything.
Obviously there must be a certain minimum level of complexity, as there must be for any information processing task. However I am sure brute force alone is not the answer. Truly huge machines have already been built and yet they don't spontaneously become self aware because they are not programmed to do so. However, get the software architecture right...
Disappointment with early connectionist architectures caused a shift towards more traditional techniques and most current serious efforts appear to take the view that effect is everything, and are using rule-based processing.
I think this is a bit misguided. However the past decade has seen incredible advances in our understanding of the human brain, and it is probably *already* possible *now* to model the brain in enough detail that we could begin building connectionist models which incorporate most of what really needs to be there.
Funnily enough there has historically been some resistance to bulding computer models in the neuroscience world. I really don't understand why this should be. But since this is going to be a largely trial-and-error effort, I strongly suspect that the necessary work will get done by amateurs anyway. When the Sony Cell arrives, some enterprising open source AI freak only needs to get a Seti At Home/Protein Folding screensaver setup going with thousands of volunteers and there will be enough computer power to run the most elaborate connectionist simulations.
Heh. I had the same thought about this distributed network computer plan of Sony's.
Imagine a virus infecting a PS3 game which installs itself on millions of PS3's (and other Cell-equipped appliances) across the world. The virus, when it finally activates, bootstraps a highly redundant virtual machine (either contained in the virus or else loaded at activation time from somewhere on the net) with one little piece running on each Cell. The virtual machine in turn bootstraps an AI program from an anonymous server somewhere else.
The AI program is now running on a distributed virtual computer supported by millions of very powerful processors. There is no way to turn it off without shutting down all those Cell boxes simultaneously.
Doomsayers predicted that this would happen on the internet proper more or less as it is now, but truly distributed network processing is still very much the exception, and the Cell is intended to change that. Also of course the Cell itself is inherently parallel and therefore very well suited to running connectionist AI simulations. Whether or not this doomsday is just a fantasy, I expect AI researchers to be very interested in the Cell.
I disagree. I think you forgot what "equation" actually means. It doesn't mean "algebraic formula" or "expression", which are things that can be used not only in equations but also in inequalities and also on their own. "Equation" means only this: that two things are equal.
The grandparent poster didn't claim that the *algebra* was the reason for certain physical effects. He claimed (correctly) that the equality or *identity* of the two quantities on either side of the equals sign is the reason for those effects. Which is what the written formula of the equation means.
So when you say "this physics equation is the reason that X happens", that actually expands out to "the fact that these two quantities are kept equal by physical law is the reason that X happens". Which is perfectly reasonable and correct.
What *you* said only makes sense if you are postulating that the numerical equality itself did not actually exist until Einstein discovered it. Which rejects any notion of an objective external reality, and I think most people won't buy that (certain quantum mechanics theorists excepted).
JWZ=Jamie Zawinski. Senior hacker on mosaic/netscape since the very beginning.
I don't know if Jamie claims sole credit for the Gecko bottom up rewrite, though.
Right now, just above these here posts, an animated flash Microsoft ad is playing, banging on about Windows' supposed lower Total Cost of Ownership, according to 7-11. What the hell is OSDN doing selling advertising to these jerks?! Inviting them right here into the enemy camp to peddle their propaganda?!
Still, I suppose it *could* be worse. Imagine if every time you logged into slashdot you risked having a bug-eyed Steve Ballmer shouting at you (shudder). I think I'll keep the silent flash ads.
I strongly suspect this will be unnecessary. I am sure nobody will mind too much if most cells dont all arrive at the exact same relative location they started in so long as they are all healthy and are all joined up correctly. That's the sort of job that could be done by error correction. This won't reduce the resolution at which scanning needs to be done (which would still need to be on a molecular level at the very least), but it will mean that it won't need to be completed instantaneously. And without freezing.
I say molecular resolution scanning rather than quantum subatomic, because even if the first successful experiments do go all the way down to that level, it would be a very long time before we could transport macroscopic objects that way. However a cheap version relying on a form of data compression which only records the DNA in anything like full detail, but identifies other cell components as standard types. Even, perhaps, only identifying cells as standard types. So that what gets transmitted is:
- your basic genome (which itself can be described as a list of deviations from some reference type, which would compress it substantially
- a 3D map of the body showing what cell types go where, connected how, and overlaid on an intercellular cytoskeleton that looks like *this*
- each cell type references a list of somatic gene modifications from your basic genome.
- each cell *location* gets a descriptor listing acceptable quantum states for that cell's DNA (Note: "acceptable", not necessarily "original")
This will do for the body and brain, though the brain will probably need to be stored at a higher level of detail as not only the synapses need to be stored accurately, but also the quantum states of all the neurotransmitters and all the proteins in the cell membranes. Otherwise you will arrive unconscious, insane or worse. If the brain *could* be done instantaneously then you would arrive with your train of thought uninterrupted.One benefit of doing it this way is that the template for basic cell types will describe a cell in a healthy state, so you can arrive at your destination feeling healthy, refreshed, and free from any disease symptoms! Genetic diseases will only be cured if the DNA description is tweaked, but this should be a simple job taking only a few minutes. I've no doubt this too could be automated only requiring the user to tick a box on the ticketing screen: "Yes, I would like my DNA updated with service pack 2". In fact, goodbye to ageing altogether as long as you keep paying to use this service.
Well, it works on Star Trek anyway...
Yes. A very pertinent comment.
Interesting that you should say that. I note that similar predictions (about the end of the rise in speed and a new focus on Power consumption) are being made by senior chip engineers. eg. the recent interview with the guy who designed the DEC Alpha, recently linked from Slashdot.
I say it's interesting because we now also have Microsoft claiming that they are about to develop better network processing capabilities for their operating systems.
It's not hard to see how these tie up. People buy new software only when it's more functional, which requires more processing power. If processors will no longer get faster, then who will be able to sell software upgrades? New software will therefore need to better at sharing tasks out over the network. At the moment, only Unix descendants are able to do this very well, which puts Microsoft in a dangerous position.
While "virus" is still used (in academic writing) as both singular and plural, "viruses" has already become correct for everyday usage and "geniuses" has already been correct English usage for as long as I can remember.
In any case you would be doing us all a favour if you'd just focus your efforts on stamping out usage of the odious "virii", which doesn't even properly exist at all but frequently crops up on Slashdot. Deal with that, and let the rest go.
Information which is stored as a semantic net (as it is with CYC), can be converted to any other representation. The information will a be useful starting point *even if* we ended up having to assign fresh weights to every semantic relationship. A lot of CYC's work about how to manipulate this information in order to create intelligence, that may or may not pan out. But the semantic net they arecreating is an uploadable understanding of the world, and its easily convertible to a lowest common denominator format. "Wrong" just doesn't enter into it. It's fundamental.
I don't think you quite understand. CYC comprises an utterly huge amount of data. The captured semantic relationships will be useful to future AI researchers no matter what happens. Even if it contains mistakes these will be caught and corrected eventually - just like the unfortunate fellow in the Readers Digest short who thought "hirsute" meant "nevertheless".
I went to the site expecting to see a computer case built in the shape of a tesseract. Damn!