I've been the biggest proponent of Wikipedia for all my life, and avidly used it in school (citing it, and the sources it cited, to my teacher's ire) since 5th grade. But jesus, just hearing about this causes my heart to ache. Encyclopedia's are great endeavors, and are important as a long term collection of knowledge that could help restart civilization in case, I don't know, Israel and Iran start throwing nukes.
The original article called it "Apple's Plant" I changed the headline of the article to specify that it was a Foxconn facility, and the story is meant to imply that this plant in particular only produces iPads and iPhones, thus, it is an Apple plant, in a sense. Though good distinction, and people should realize it. I bought an Intel SSD recently and saw that it had Foxconn emblazoned on it, to which I yelled "NOOOOOO!" quite loudly upon opening.
I think you are completely right when it comes to issues of personal freedoms, but completely wrong when it pertains to things companies care about. Congressmen need money to be elected, corporations provide that. The "win" we saw for civil liberties was only because facebook, google, and wikipedia spoke out against it. If this issue just limited our rights for the benefit of all those corporations, I'm sure we'd see a different result.
Huh. That got me thinking quite a bit! Wikipedia shows it's a questions that's been pondered since the father of gradual change himself, Darwin: He though that self replicating structures could happen, but that... "at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed." And on that subject, "No new notable research or theory on the subject appeared until 1924, when Alexander Oparin reasoned that atmospheric oxygen prevents the synthesis of certain organic compounds that are necessary building blocks for the evolution of life."
It seems like there were some specific circumstances to get life going down a certain path. But now with changed initial conditions and FIERCE competition for resources EVERYWHERE new self reproducing structures don't get too far.
Yeah, the problem is most people here about these things third hand. And the first few people who relay act like a megaphone with high distortation. NASA's original release just said that this discovery "will impact the search for extraterrestrial life." Which CANNOT be interpreted as 'ZOMG WE FOUND ET!' Yet the second sounds far more awesome, so it gets propagated more and faster then the original message... so you shouldn't be disappointed, NASA was honest about what this would be!
Also... we need to start filtering things, and relaying only backed up, reasonable messages, not just the catchy-ist ones, or we'll just fall into insane blathering about terrorists, communist fascists (ironic, huh?), and aliens who want to eat your babies
Yeah, that sounds like a good nitpick of the organization, who does have the right to choose what the public should and shouldn't know? What should be released and what held in? Why is Assange such an ass? I think for most of the non-government stuff that has been released the obvious answer is EVERYTHING. Corporate scandals, milk cut with plastic, evil banks, all these should be exposed if they can be. Wikileaks may have a US bias, and possible holds back leaks that it doesn't want to show, but there is no other platform like wikileaks to release them. Wikileaks isn't just a chat board, or a newspaper, is a tightly run organization with layers of security and complexity. And you know what? It's information we'd probably never hear about any ways if not for them. So I'll take what I can get, and view any more disclosure of information as a good thing, because it's stuff we wouldn't have known any way. It'd probably be good if there was another platform like wikileaks, with it's own crazy leader (cause trust me, it takes a crazy half genius leader to run a sinking ship like that), then people could just leak to both of them. Go start it, it'd help the world.
So far I am finding the original article an interesting read. (it's in the original article NYT article) It states that the bubble may be related to an ejection of the super massive black hole in the past 10 million years or so. You know those other galaxies that have giant lazer beams shooting out of them? Well, ours could have been like that at some point 10 million years ago. Kind makes sense that those SM black holes only occasionally and intermittently shoot stuff off, seems like just emissions like that would be hard to sustain for long periods of time. (and holy mother of Bohr, it was hard to not fall into sexual innuendo there) Also, as far as it being a data anomaly (which I thought first due to it's symmetry and the fact that we apparently never knew about it), it apparently correlates with "hard-spectrum excess known as the WMAP haze (and) the edges of bubble also line up with features in the ROSAT X-ray maps at 1.5 - 2 KeV."
And I don't mean to come off as hating on chatbots, or suzette. What they do is very cool, and I found the bot interesting and funny to talk with. I am more just griping that these feel like they're offering canned responses, and are just databases that lock down what someone is saying, relate it to a similar store comment, and then spit out one of the given replies for that situation.
Which I guess is stupid of me... Cause I can't think of any other way to do it which wouldn't involve something that thought and wrote original replies... which would be quite hard.
Dreaming a bit... maybe just taking that same system that analyzes a comment and relates it to prior ones and add another that tracked the topic of a comment, and the conclusion of it, and then made sure that that related to future comments. Or that if that topic was brought up again, consider the prior comments of that topic, and spit out a reply based on the conjunction of them? That still be very complex and involve catagorizing conversations, finding topics, conclusions, and synthesizing stuff... mm...
I've spent some time talking to these bots (elbot, suzette, others.. possibly out of sad boredom and want of company). And they're fairly interesting, but quite flawed. They seem to lack any short term memory of the conversation more then the immediate reply. That seems like the next step for these things, but would also mean they'd need a far more robust AI...
Another thing is they they are boxed off from being self referential in any way due to the nature of the test. They have to convince someone they are human, so if you do try asking them what their short term memory is, or if they online version of them is a truncated version of the one used for tests, they don't answer. Which makes sense given what they're designed for, but takes away from interest and complexity of conversations.
From the article "Because this technique needs heated gas to push the particles around, it can't work in the vacuum of outer space like the tractor beams in Star Trek."
Also it needs lasers on both sides of the object and "tiny glass particles" near the object.This technique can in no way mimic the properties of what I consider a tractor bream: a beam of energy that pulls and object toward it. It's just a better way at moving stuff with light, which is still nifty.
With the Mountain Dew game fuel, charging money for direct TV view of blizzcon, WoW being used to advertise Toyota trucks... I wonder: did you guys sell out on your own accord, or did it have to do with the merger with Activision?
I read that.
Part of the hilarity was one of the highest ranked books by the panel contained only blank pages (the publishers hadn't finished it yet so they just submitted the cover).
Everyone gave it high notes except Feynman --he was the only one who actually read it.
The article didn't say they refused out of privacy concerns, it said they refused because of an unpaid bill. I would agree with you on the privacy issue though, they shouldn't be allowed to randomly turn on your phone and track you just because the police say so, unless, they have the permission of a concerned relative/spouse. If there's a means to find a lost and sorely missed loved one, it should be used.
That would be an immense technological feat. Where already doing something similar with a telescope that looks for planets by seeing the slight dimming of stars caused by the planet eclipsing then star. It was compared to seeing a fly pass by a headlight a mile away.
Detecting a minor variation in the handedness of the light that the planet happens to catch on the surface then reflect back into space, which is light years away, whose feeble light is VASTLY over powered by it's home star. I'm guessing will have to wait many years for this, and there maybe a more feasible technique that comes along before it.
You appear to be wrong on a few big things...
-most compounds are not chiral, so even if a dead planet had some pure enantiomers, they would be insignificant compared to one with life, life produces a crazy large amount of them
-no one has quite figured out why life has the handedness it does, some say it could be because of silicon catalyzing a certain handedness, others disagree, there is not an answer to this question yet, but it makes sense that life would evolve to have a specific handedness so all the parts could be interchangeable and we don't have bizzaro ecoli floating around that can exchange DNA with normal ecoli
-since when does polarized light catalyze chiral reactions?? UV light can catalyze reactions, and chiral molecules can cause a reaction to form with a specific handedness, but only chiral MOLECULES can catalyze reactions to cause a more enantiomericly pure product
So your dismissing the whole benefit of it?
A friend of a friend (yes, someone I didn't know) died a less then a week ago. He had an infection that escalated because of the immune system inhibitors he took.
These systems will, and should, improve. Organ harvesting needs to be combated separately, hopefully stem cell can be used to grow new organs, or maybe someday we will be able to have spare organs at hospitals that could be transplanted to any patient with this! Yes organ harvesting is one of the sickest things going on these days, but that shouldn't halt future discoveries.
Females have all the eggs made before they're born, so how could the genetic material in them be affect by the conditions that the mother grew up in?
Sperm DNA seems like it could be modified by the father according to living conditions, but it seems odd to think that environmental information in the brain would be passed down to the testes and such...
It seems more plausible to think it's just the mice had a better mother.
Despite the fact you very well maybe right, a pet owner is more likely to humanize their pet then anyone else. People are notorious for anthropomorphizing things, like cars... so a definitive study on personality would be important.
Also, does life span have any effect on personality? Do mice have personalities as much as cats? It seems logical that shorter lived creatures wouldn't have as much time to develop them, having less environmental stimuli, less memories, so they'd need to inherit reasoning skills. But I also have the feeling I may be quite wrong.
So these kids were asked to track their own violent behavior when they played video games?
People have been ingraining in society the idea that video games are bad, and that kids would be more apt to consider themselves violent, or would in general consider themselves more violent when playing a violent video games. The media needs to find something else to hyper focus on.
I would assume it would work in much the same way.
Artists would get reimbursed according to how many people listened to our downloaded their songs.
It would probably be an even more precise way of tracking popularity.
No matter what people are going to be listening to mindless trash, this system doesn't seem to necessarily support it.
The good thing is, this looks like an opening to destroy the whole network of music industry if anyone could publish their music through this system. But seeing that the big record labels may go with this... it's very not good. They'll just stick around and continue to leach money from the artists, despite being useless because no one will need them for distribution.
I wasn't saying that. Yes raw power doesn't equate to random sentience popping out of thin air.
But if you can simulate a neuron, or a group of neurons, or a region of neurons...
Or, hey, trillions of neurons, then you can simulate the human brain if you have the neurons down right and organized in a correct manner. Which we are learning more about every day.
If computational power is increasing at a exponential rate, and shows that this will be possible in a number of years, then it seems like a reasonable assumption.
It's nice to see progress is being made. It's scary how accurate Ray Kurzwiel's predictions seem to be,
he said that by early 2010 we'll have simulated a human brain. (he's a technological analyst and author of "The Singularity is Near").
Todays desktops are faster then the super computers of the 90's. I can't wait till I'm able to get a laptop smarter then me in every way (queue joke about how stupid I am), that'll be a cool time to live in. Seems it's only a matter of decades away. Probably 20 years.
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I've been the biggest proponent of Wikipedia for all my life, and avidly used it in school (citing it, and the sources it cited, to my teacher's ire) since 5th grade. But jesus, just hearing about this causes my heart to ache. Encyclopedia's are great endeavors, and are important as a long term collection of knowledge that could help restart civilization in case, I don't know, Israel and Iran start throwing nukes.
The original article called it "Apple's Plant" I changed the headline of the article to specify that it was a Foxconn facility, and the story is meant to imply that this plant in particular only produces iPads and iPhones, thus, it is an Apple plant, in a sense.
Though good distinction, and people should realize it. I bought an Intel SSD recently and saw that it had Foxconn emblazoned on it, to which I yelled "NOOOOOO!" quite loudly upon opening.
I think you are completely right when it comes to issues of personal freedoms, but completely wrong when it pertains to things companies care about.
Congressmen need money to be elected, corporations provide that. The "win" we saw for civil liberties was only because facebook, google, and wikipedia spoke out against it. If this issue just limited our rights for the benefit of all those corporations, I'm sure we'd see a different result.
Huh. That got me thinking quite a bit! Wikipedia shows it's a questions that's been pondered since the father of gradual change himself, Darwin:
He though that self replicating structures could happen, but that... "at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed."
And on that subject, "No new notable research or theory on the subject appeared until 1924, when Alexander Oparin reasoned that atmospheric oxygen prevents the synthesis of certain organic compounds that are necessary building blocks for the evolution of life."
It seems like there were some specific circumstances to get life going down a certain path. But now with changed initial conditions and FIERCE competition for resources EVERYWHERE new self reproducing structures don't get too far.
My bad, I thought it was a virus and posted it as RNA and virus, instead of DNA, bacterium. At least it's consistent!
Yeah, the problem is most people here about these things third hand. And the first few people who relay act like a megaphone with high distortation. NASA's original release just said that this discovery "will impact the search for extraterrestrial life." Which CANNOT be interpreted as 'ZOMG WE FOUND ET!' Yet the second sounds far more awesome, so it gets propagated more and faster then the original message... so you shouldn't be disappointed, NASA was honest about what this would be!
Also... we need to start filtering things, and relaying only backed up, reasonable messages, not just the catchy-ist ones, or we'll just fall into insane blathering about terrorists, communist fascists (ironic, huh?), and aliens who want to eat your babies
Yeah, that sounds like a good nitpick of the organization, who does have the right to choose what the public should and shouldn't know? What should be released and what held in? Why is Assange such an ass? I think for most of the non-government stuff that has been released the obvious answer is EVERYTHING. Corporate scandals, milk cut with plastic, evil banks, all these should be exposed if they can be.
Wikileaks may have a US bias, and possible holds back leaks that it doesn't want to show, but there is no other platform like wikileaks to release them. Wikileaks isn't just a chat board, or a newspaper, is a tightly run organization with layers of security and complexity. And you know what? It's information we'd probably never hear about any ways if not for them. So I'll take what I can get, and view any more disclosure of information as a good thing, because it's stuff we wouldn't have known any way. It'd probably be good if there was another platform like wikileaks, with it's own crazy leader (cause trust me, it takes a crazy half genius leader to run a sinking ship like that), then people could just leak to both of them. Go start it, it'd help the world.
So far I am finding the original article an interesting read. (it's in the original article NYT article)
It states that the bubble may be related to an ejection of the super massive black hole in the past 10 million years or so. You know those other galaxies that have giant lazer beams shooting out of them? Well, ours could have been like that at some point 10 million years ago. Kind makes sense that those SM black holes only occasionally and intermittently shoot stuff off, seems like just emissions like that would be hard to sustain for long periods of time. (and holy mother of Bohr, it was hard to not fall into sexual innuendo there)
Also, as far as it being a data anomaly (which I thought first due to it's symmetry and the fact that we apparently never knew about it), it apparently correlates with "hard-spectrum excess known as the WMAP haze (and) the edges of bubble also line up with features in the ROSAT X-ray maps at 1.5 - 2 KeV."
And I don't mean to come off as hating on chatbots, or suzette. What they do is very cool, and I found the bot interesting and funny to talk with. I am more just griping that these feel like they're offering canned responses, and are just databases that lock down what someone is saying, relate it to a similar store comment, and then spit out one of the given replies for that situation.
Which I guess is stupid of me... Cause I can't think of any other way to do it which wouldn't involve something that thought and wrote original replies... which would be quite hard.
Dreaming a bit... maybe just taking that same system that analyzes a comment and relates it to prior ones and add another that tracked the topic of a comment, and the conclusion of it, and then made sure that that related to future comments. Or that if that topic was brought up again, consider the prior comments of that topic, and spit out a reply based on the conjunction of them? That still be very complex and involve catagorizing conversations, finding topics, conclusions, and synthesizing stuff... mm...
I've spent some time talking to these bots (elbot, suzette, others.. possibly out of sad boredom and want of company). And they're fairly interesting, but quite flawed. They seem to lack any short term memory of the conversation more then the immediate reply. That seems like the next step for these things, but would also mean they'd need a far more robust AI...
Another thing is they they are boxed off from being self referential in any way due to the nature of the test. They have to convince someone they are human, so if you do try asking them what their short term memory is, or if they online version of them is a truncated version of the one used for tests, they don't answer. Which makes sense given what they're designed for, but takes away from interest and complexity of conversations.
From the article "Because this technique needs heated gas to push the particles around, it can't work in the vacuum of outer space like the tractor beams in Star Trek."
Also it needs lasers on both sides of the object and "tiny glass particles" near the object.This technique can in no way mimic the properties of what I consider a tractor bream: a beam of energy that pulls and object toward it. It's just a better way at moving stuff with light, which is still nifty.
With the Mountain Dew game fuel, charging money for direct TV view of blizzcon, WoW being used to advertise Toyota trucks... I wonder: did you guys sell out on your own accord, or did it have to do with the merger with Activision?
I read that.
Part of the hilarity was one of the highest ranked books by the panel contained only blank pages (the publishers hadn't finished it yet so they just submitted the cover).
Everyone gave it high notes except Feynman --he was the only one who actually read it.
The article didn't say they refused out of privacy concerns, it said they refused because of an unpaid bill. I would agree with you on the privacy issue though, they shouldn't be allowed to randomly turn on your phone and track you just because the police say so, unless, they have the permission of a concerned relative/spouse. If there's a means to find a lost and sorely missed loved one, it should be used.
That would be an immense technological feat. Where already doing something similar with a telescope that looks for planets by seeing the slight dimming of stars caused by the planet eclipsing then star. It was compared to seeing a fly pass by a headlight a mile away.
Detecting a minor variation in the handedness of the light that the planet happens to catch on the surface then reflect back into space, which is light years away, whose feeble light is VASTLY over powered by it's home star. I'm guessing will have to wait many years for this, and there maybe a more feasible technique that comes along before it.
You appear to be wrong on a few big things...
-most compounds are not chiral, so even if a dead planet had some pure enantiomers, they would be insignificant compared to one with life, life produces a crazy large amount of them
-no one has quite figured out why life has the handedness it does, some say it could be because of silicon catalyzing a certain handedness, others disagree, there is not an answer to this question yet, but it makes sense that life would evolve to have a specific handedness so all the parts could be interchangeable and we don't have bizzaro ecoli floating around that can exchange DNA with normal ecoli
-since when does polarized light catalyze chiral reactions?? UV light can catalyze reactions, and chiral molecules can cause a reaction to form with a specific handedness, but only chiral MOLECULES can catalyze reactions to cause a more enantiomericly pure product
So your dismissing the whole benefit of it?
A friend of a friend (yes, someone I didn't know) died a less then a week ago. He had an infection that escalated because of the immune system inhibitors he took.
These systems will, and should, improve. Organ harvesting needs to be combated separately, hopefully stem cell can be used to grow new organs, or maybe someday we will be able to have spare organs at hospitals that could be transplanted to any patient with this! Yes organ harvesting is one of the sickest things going on these days, but that shouldn't halt future discoveries.
Females have all the eggs made before they're born, so how could the genetic material in them be affect by the conditions that the mother grew up in? Sperm DNA seems like it could be modified by the father according to living conditions, but it seems odd to think that environmental information in the brain would be passed down to the testes and such... It seems more plausible to think it's just the mice had a better mother.
The argument I was making was intelligence doesn't implies personality.
Despite the fact you very well maybe right, a pet owner is more likely to humanize their pet then anyone else. People are notorious for anthropomorphizing things, like cars... so a definitive study on personality would be important. Also, does life span have any effect on personality? Do mice have personalities as much as cats? It seems logical that shorter lived creatures wouldn't have as much time to develop them, having less environmental stimuli, less memories, so they'd need to inherit reasoning skills. But I also have the feeling I may be quite wrong.
So these kids were asked to track their own violent behavior when they played video games? People have been ingraining in society the idea that video games are bad, and that kids would be more apt to consider themselves violent, or would in general consider themselves more violent when playing a violent video games. The media needs to find something else to hyper focus on.
I would assume it would work in much the same way. Artists would get reimbursed according to how many people listened to our downloaded their songs. It would probably be an even more precise way of tracking popularity. No matter what people are going to be listening to mindless trash, this system doesn't seem to necessarily support it. The good thing is, this looks like an opening to destroy the whole network of music industry if anyone could publish their music through this system. But seeing that the big record labels may go with this... it's very not good. They'll just stick around and continue to leach money from the artists, despite being useless because no one will need them for distribution.
I think I'm going to cry.
I wasn't saying that. Yes raw power doesn't equate to random sentience popping out of thin air. But if you can simulate a neuron, or a group of neurons, or a region of neurons... Or, hey, trillions of neurons, then you can simulate the human brain if you have the neurons down right and organized in a correct manner. Which we are learning more about every day. If computational power is increasing at a exponential rate, and shows that this will be possible in a number of years, then it seems like a reasonable assumption.
It's nice to see progress is being made. It's scary how accurate Ray Kurzwiel's predictions seem to be, he said that by early 2010 we'll have simulated a human brain. (he's a technological analyst and author of "The Singularity is Near"). Todays desktops are faster then the super computers of the 90's. I can't wait till I'm able to get a laptop smarter then me in every way (queue joke about how stupid I am), that'll be a cool time to live in. Seems it's only a matter of decades away. Probably 20 years.