It is well known that planets do radiate their own energy,s ome of it left over from the formation of the planets. I've often wondered what would happen to Earth if Geothermal energy were deployed on massive scales. If you think of the earth's crust as an insulating blanket, then every whole punched into it is letting the heat out where it can radiate into space. Natural volcanos are one thing, but I wonder what effect massive geothermal deployment would have. Would tha mantle cool down and become less molten or even solid, slowing down plate tectonics?
Woudl it be possible for Firefox to somehow ne stubbed in as a replacement for IE? I know a lto of things rely on the IWebBRowser2 COM interface to use a browser component... what if FireFox implemented that too? COuld it start to be a drop-in replacement fro IE so it could become a "web browser component", not just a web browsing application?
I mean, you hear a lot of liberal arts majors complaining that they can't find a job
Oh, I get it. My father's electrical engineerign job that he hots was just a liberal arts job, not a real job.
Of course, he was able to find a new job after 9 months of looking for a suitable replacement: answering phones for On Star. And since a job is a job to those who spout statistics like you, then he was fully receovered even though he was working for about 1/4th the salary.
I suppose he could've looked into signing up for one of Bush's retraining programs. That way, after 3 years, he could look for a 5-year job to tide him over until his retirement doing something new and exciting, like, I dunno, particle physics. After all, electrical engineering was a skilless job, so retraining makes sense.
But now I have to eat crow. Because after 9 months of unemployment, and then 9 months of answering phones, the government again needed the company he worked for to clean up more of their messes, so his former employer is now again his present employer.
And what about atheists who have no religiion? Do they equal time? If every other religion each gets 60 seconds for a morning prayer, is there also a moment of silence where everyone's mind goes blank (after all, if the atheist must experience the thiests verbal prayers, then shouldn't the theist have to experience the atheists nothingness?)
Auditing is good and all, btu I Don't think we'll ever be able to be 100% confident in the votes. 90%, definitely. 99%, probably, but not 100%.
And in cases like 2000-FL, where there was a very small margin, I think we shoudl consider that difference statistically insignificant and find a way to resolve the issue coarsely.
Perhaps splitting electoral votes, or some sort of a showdown (i.e. candidates compete in a game of connect four).
If the people can't decide, then don't try to make a decision based on their indecision. Split the decision, or find another way to make the decision.
DId you lose your tinfoil hat? Of course the discrepency was within the margin of error. That is the best place to fudge the results so that it won't appear statistically significant while still affecting the outcome of the election.
Parties are like a living organism adapting and trying to srvive. They don't transform overnight, but they gradually pick up new ideas and drop old ones as they see their grip slipping.
I suspect the Democrats are behind closed doors somewhere trying to decide how they can modify their views slightly to pick up some of the people they apparently alienated while still staying as opposite of Republican's as possible.
Now, when the hour has come to get rid of an enemy that treacherously attacked in NY and Washingto DC, many are balking at the cost.
I don't see anyone balking at the cost of operations in Afghanistan. I for one wish they'd spend more there and catch Osama to at least give the world a sense of progress against terror.
Now, Iraq, that's where people are balking at costs.
Overall, I would suggest that your characterization of lying, while not without merit, does not prove the "Bush led us into war with nothing but lies"
Agreed. I'd say its more of a pattern of either the president being misinformed, or the president misinforming us. In either case, I'd say the president is the one to be held accoutnable for this
I have heard it estimated that between 50 and 75 percent of pregnencies end in miscarriage before people even realize they are pregnent
Discover had an article back in May of 2004 that talked about this. In fact, it seems, the viability of a pregnancy is sometimes determined even before fertilization.
Actually, I thnk one of the recent P2P decisions said that the person who initiates the copying by requestng to download a shared file is the one doign the infringing, not the person who is hosting the file.
Anyone remember the case?
Re:And what is consciousness?
on
Flying By Brain
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
What does it take before a bundle of cells will start to exhibit conscious behaviour. Are there degrees of consciousness?
First degree conciousness starts on average with 33 billion neurons. Some examples have been noted in simpler cases, but beyond 33 billion, examples of 1st degree conciousness abound. The second and third degrees of conciousness occur at roughly equal spacings: 48 and 63 billion. For reasons not yet fully understood, fourth degree conciousness like our own doesn't occur until 100 billion neurons.
OK, that was complete bullshit:)
Seriously, number of neuirons isn't very important. Blue whales have the largest brain on earth, but they're not the most "conscious" as far as I know.
More interesting is the measure of brain size to body size. Plotting that line from the tinitest organism with a brain all the way up to the blue whale, you see a very constant ratio. There are a couple of notable exceptions, though: humans, and... dolphins. We both have abnormally large brains for our body size. In fact, especially with humans, we have ridiculously large heads for our size and probably look quite silly to the rest of the animal kingdom.
My bet is that conciousness is just a label we attach to certain complex behavior that we don't yet fully understand. We have hundreds of billions of neorons and trillions of connections between them -- all receiving input from visual stimuli, audio, tactile, chemical, etc. sources. AD.com's simulationsi a grand attempt to see what we can get out of an articifial neural network of similar capacity to that of the human brain. But event hough they took care to pre-organize their brain into a human-brain-like structure, iut may be trumped by our crude understanding of our own brain's structure. Perhaps they'll find something, but I don't think it will be conciousness on day 1.
The bigger problem is how you define conciousness. Some people will sit and chat to Eliza-like programs and not realize it isn't a human. Other people will be biased and say a machine 10-times more capable than our own brain and won't be concious by definition that it is a machine.
Seriously, you would want to use something with a life span of more than a few years - besides, how do you do backups? how do you transfer existing knowledge to the new, untrained brain? (I mean more efficiently than us humans manage to using our existing I/O ports).
That's the beauty of an artificial neural-network. Artificial or real, you don't explicitly program them, you train them and they learn. BUt with an artificial one, you can suspend it at any time to examine the weighted connection values and back them up, clone them to a new network, etc.
Your problem is that you place too much value on the word "consciousness". It is an abstract word used to describe something that is not fully understood. However, it seems it is something you have gone further than "not fully understand" and taken it be "cannot fully understand because it is mystical".
You go build yoruself a 100-billion neuron artificial neural-network with appropriate interfaces ot the world, and you'll have a conciousness in silicon. And when that thing pleads with you not to turn off the power switch of the computer its running in, what will you think then?
plate has 25,000 neurons in a roughly two-dimensonal matrix (from the Wired article), so it's probably not even as smart as a bug so far (I am just guessing about this, does anyone have figures to compare this to?), but given enough space and time, might it not become sentient?
I recall reading elsewhere that each neuron has on average 10 connections (remember, a neuron is useles without its connections). That that comes out to 1 trillion connections!
Compare that to this 25,000 neuron petri dish where applying the same 10-connection rule yields only a quarter-million connections. That's only.000025% of the number of connections in a human brain. The 25,000 neurons have roughly 1/4,000,000th of the power of a human brain
This is an exmaple of why I'm so baffled when people think that the human brain is something mystical. Why do they so easily discount the power of a neural network? It takes a t neuron ANN (artificial neural network) to do decent text-to-speech. A 35 neuron ANN steered a car by vision to keep it on the road. This 25,000 neuron experiment to fly a plain is probably a grotesquely ineffecient use of that many neurons, but still only a drop in a bucket.
Some time ago, on TV, I was watching a show on intelligent computers. They highlighted one project in which a program designed to learn word associations was left alone for a long time with huge quantities of texts. When the researchers came back, the computer had made associations like "father" and "president". THey looked into its associations to see how it came to this conclusion, and it made sense. I don't remember the exact connections it used, but in many ways, the president is like a transient father of our country.
So, I do not doubt computers will begin to understand meaning. Of course, that program took a long time, but it was also years ago that I saw this. Given the constant increase in computing power, it may one day be a possibility.
However, I don't think that day is today. Probably not tomorrow, either.
I don't notice much difference in the pictures. In fact, they look almost the same. Hey, wait! They are the same image! What are you trying to pull here?
"Like what has John Kerry been doing for the last 20 years"
Some more recent items, courtesy OnTHeIssues,org:
Top Ten Bills which Kerry introduced in the Senate:
* 2004: Increase subsidies for women-owned non-profit business * 2003: Small Business loans for child care businesses * 2003: Tax credits to promite home ownership in distressed areas * 2003: Establish a National Affordable Housing Trust Fund * 2003: Increase funding to combat the global HIV/AIDS epidemic * 2002: Include pickup trucks in CAFE; include hybrids in HOV lanes * 2001: Make Election Day a national holiday * 2001: Allow same-day voter registration on election day * 2001: Invest funds to alleviate the nursing shortage * 2001: $500 tax credit for each employee who telecommutes
Top Ten Bills which Kerry co-sponsored that became law:
* 2003: Fund nanotechnology research & development * 2001: Increase SBA loan subsidies for small businesses * 2001: Establish Maritime Security grants for ports and vessels * 2001: Federalize aviation security * 1997: Collect data on birth defects and present to the public * 1997: Fund 2,500 Boys and Girls Clubs in underserved areas * 1996: Establish an FBI registry of sexual offendors * 1996: Educational assistance to survivors of injured federal police * 1995: Fund studies of sustainable fisheries * 1995: Move the US Embassy to Jerusalem
Slashdot Mirror
...start condiering South Carolinians to be humans in the first place?
George W. was still jealous from the last election because Al Gore invented the last Internet, so he wanted one he could call his own.
It is well known that planets do radiate their own energy,s ome of it left over from the formation of the planets. I've often wondered what would happen to Earth if Geothermal energy were deployed on massive scales. If you think of the earth's crust as an insulating blanket, then every whole punched into it is letting the heat out where it can radiate into space. Natural volcanos are one thing, but I wonder what effect massive geothermal deployment would have. Would tha mantle cool down and become less molten or even solid, slowing down plate tectonics?
Woudl it be possible for Firefox to somehow ne stubbed in as a replacement for IE? I know a lto of things rely on the IWebBRowser2 COM interface to use a browser component... what if FireFox implemented that too? COuld it start to be a drop-in replacement fro IE so it could become a "web browser component", not just a web browsing application?
I mean, you hear a lot of liberal arts majors complaining that they can't find a job
Oh, I get it. My father's electrical engineerign job that he hots was just a liberal arts job, not a real job.
Of course, he was able to find a new job after 9 months of looking for a suitable replacement: answering phones for On Star. And since a job is a job to those who spout statistics like you, then he was fully receovered even though he was working for about 1/4th the salary.
I suppose he could've looked into signing up for one of Bush's retraining programs. That way, after 3 years, he could look for a 5-year job to tide him over until his retirement doing something new and exciting, like, I dunno, particle physics. After all, electrical engineering was a skilless job, so retraining makes sense.
But now I have to eat crow. Because after 9 months of unemployment, and then 9 months of answering phones, the government again needed the company he worked for to clean up more of their messes, so his former employer is now again his present employer.
as long as all religions are allowed
And what about atheists who have no religiion? Do they equal time? If every other religion each gets 60 seconds for a morning prayer, is there also a moment of silence where everyone's mind goes blank (after all, if the atheist must experience the thiests verbal prayers, then shouldn't the theist have to experience the atheists nothingness?)
Auditing is good and all, btu I Don't think we'll ever be able to be 100% confident in the votes. 90%, definitely. 99%, probably, but not 100%.
And in cases like 2000-FL, where there was a very small margin, I think we shoudl consider that difference statistically insignificant and find a way to resolve the issue coarsely.
Perhaps splitting electoral votes, or some sort of a showdown (i.e. candidates compete in a game of connect four).
If the people can't decide, then don't try to make a decision based on their indecision. Split the decision, or find another way to make the decision.
DId you lose your tinfoil hat? Of course the discrepency was within the margin of error. That is the best place to fudge the results so that it won't appear statistically significant while still affecting the outcome of the election.
Parties are like a living organism adapting and trying to srvive. They don't transform overnight, but they gradually pick up new ideas and drop old ones as they see their grip slipping.
I suspect the Democrats are behind closed doors somewhere trying to decide how they can modify their views slightly to pick up some of the people they apparently alienated while still staying as opposite of Republican's as possible.
So, don't follow your pary. Follow your mind.
No wonder, 50 isn't enough to trigger the sleeper. // (c) 2004 Diebold, Inc.
if((voteCount-1) % 50 == 0) {
votes[BUSH] ++;
}
else {
votes[candidateIndex] ++;
}
voteCount ++;
Now, when the hour has come to get rid of an enemy that treacherously attacked in NY and Washingto DC, many are balking at the cost.
I don't see anyone balking at the cost of operations in Afghanistan. I for one wish they'd spend more there and catch Osama to at least give the world a sense of progress against terror.
Now, Iraq, that's where people are balking at costs.
Overall, I would suggest that your characterization of lying, while not without merit, does not prove the "Bush led us into war with nothing but lies"
Agreed. I'd say its more of a pattern of either the president being misinformed, or the president misinforming us. In either case, I'd say the president is the one to be held accoutnable for this
Dog slow, though
I never understood that saying: Dog slow
Perhaps that's due to the findings of the Iraq survey group that there were programs to produce them.
Can you point us to a reference, please?
I have heard it estimated that between 50 and 75 percent of pregnencies end in miscarriage before people even realize they are pregnent
Discover had an article back in May of 2004 that talked about this. In fact, it seems, the viability of a pregnancy is sometimes determined even before fertilization.
Actually, I thnk one of the recent P2P decisions said that the person who initiates the copying by requestng to download a shared file is the one doign the infringing, not the person who is hosting the file.
Anyone remember the case?
What does it take before a bundle of cells will start to exhibit conscious behaviour. Are there degrees of consciousness?
First degree conciousness starts on average with 33 billion neurons. Some examples have been noted in simpler cases, but beyond 33 billion, examples of 1st degree conciousness abound. The second and third degrees of conciousness occur at roughly equal spacings: 48 and 63 billion. For reasons not yet fully understood, fourth degree conciousness like our own doesn't occur until 100 billion neurons.
OK, that was complete bullshit :)
Seriously, number of neuirons isn't very important. Blue whales have the largest brain on earth, but they're not the most "conscious" as far as I know.
More interesting is the measure of brain size to body size. Plotting that line from the tinitest organism with a brain all the way up to the blue whale, you see a very constant ratio. There are a couple of notable exceptions, though: humans, and... dolphins. We both have abnormally large brains for our body size. In fact, especially with humans, we have ridiculously large heads for our size and probably look quite silly to the rest of the animal kingdom.
My bet is that conciousness is just a label we attach to certain complex behavior that we don't yet fully understand. We have hundreds of billions of neorons and trillions of connections between them -- all receiving input from visual stimuli, audio, tactile, chemical, etc. sources. AD.com's simulationsi a grand attempt to see what we can get out of an articifial neural network of similar capacity to that of the human brain. But event hough they took care to pre-organize their brain into a human-brain-like structure, iut may be trumped by our crude understanding of our own brain's structure. Perhaps they'll find something, but I don't think it will be conciousness on day 1.
The bigger problem is how you define conciousness. Some people will sit and chat to Eliza-like programs and not realize it isn't a human. Other people will be biased and say a machine 10-times more capable than our own brain and won't be concious by definition that it is a machine.
Seriously, you would want to use something with a life span of more than a few years - besides, how do you do backups? how do you transfer existing knowledge to the new, untrained brain? (I mean more efficiently than us humans manage to using our existing I/O ports).
That's the beauty of an artificial neural-network. Artificial or real, you don't explicitly program them, you train them and they learn. BUt with an artificial one, you can suspend it at any time to examine the weighted connection values and back them up, clone them to a new network, etc.
they directly affect consciousness
Your problem is that you place too much value on the word "consciousness". It is an abstract word used to describe something that is not fully understood. However, it seems it is something you have gone further than "not fully understand" and taken it be "cannot fully understand because it is mystical".
You go build yoruself a 100-billion neuron artificial neural-network with appropriate interfaces ot the world, and you'll have a conciousness in silicon. And when that thing pleads with you not to turn off the power switch of the computer its running in, what will you think then?
plate has 25,000 neurons in a roughly two-dimensonal matrix (from the Wired article), so it's probably not even as smart as a bug so far (I am just guessing about this, does anyone have figures to compare this to?), but given enough space and time, might it not become sentient?
The human brain has roughly 100 billion neurons.
I recall reading elsewhere that each neuron has on average 10 connections (remember, a neuron is useles without its connections). That that comes out to 1 trillion connections!
Compare that to this 25,000 neuron petri dish where applying the same 10-connection rule yields only a quarter-million connections. That's only .000025% of the number of connections in a human brain. The 25,000 neurons have roughly 1/4,000,000th of the power of a human brain
This is an exmaple of why I'm so baffled when people think that the human brain is something mystical. Why do they so easily discount the power of a neural network? It takes a t neuron ANN (artificial neural network) to do decent text-to-speech. A 35 neuron ANN steered a car by vision to keep it on the road. This 25,000 neuron experiment to fly a plain is probably a grotesquely ineffecient use of that many neurons, but still only a drop in a bucket.
Some time ago, on TV, I was watching a show on intelligent computers. They highlighted one project in which a program designed to learn word associations was left alone for a long time with huge quantities of texts. When the researchers came back, the computer had made associations like "father" and "president". THey looked into its associations to see how it came to this conclusion, and it made sense. I don't remember the exact connections it used, but in many ways, the president is like a transient father of our country.
So, I do not doubt computers will begin to understand meaning. Of course, that program took a long time, but it was also years ago that I saw this. Given the constant increase in computing power, it may one day be a possibility.
However, I don't think that day is today. Probably not tomorrow, either.
I don't notice much difference in the pictures. In fact, they look almost the same. Hey, wait! They are the same image! What are you trying to pull here?
"Like what has John Kerry been doing for the last 20 years"
Some more recent items, courtesy OnTHeIssues,org:
Top Ten Bills which Kerry introduced in the Senate:
* 2004: Increase subsidies for women-owned non-profit business
* 2003: Small Business loans for child care businesses
* 2003: Tax credits to promite home ownership in distressed areas
* 2003: Establish a National Affordable Housing Trust Fund
* 2003: Increase funding to combat the global HIV/AIDS epidemic
* 2002: Include pickup trucks in CAFE; include hybrids in HOV lanes
* 2001: Make Election Day a national holiday
* 2001: Allow same-day voter registration on election day
* 2001: Invest funds to alleviate the nursing shortage
* 2001: $500 tax credit for each employee who telecommutes
Top Ten Bills which Kerry co-sponsored that became law:
* 2003: Fund nanotechnology research & development
* 2001: Increase SBA loan subsidies for small businesses
* 2001: Establish Maritime Security grants for ports and vessels
* 2001: Federalize aviation security
* 1997: Collect data on birth defects and present to the public
* 1997: Fund 2,500 Boys and Girls Clubs in underserved areas
* 1996: Establish an FBI registry of sexual offendors
* 1996: Educational assistance to survivors of injured federal police
* 1995: Fund studies of sustainable fisheries
* 1995: Move the US Embassy to Jerusalem
Most of the IE "extensions" are for some sort of commercial gain.
Did you even look at the link? It was telling you how to make extensions, not selling them to ya.
Consider how easy it is to install extensions to the browser; click, install, restart browser. (emphasis mine)
There's a problem right there! Yes, it is more difficult to program frameworks that load/unload plugins dynamically, but it certainly is possible.