This is nonsense. I had sort of a long and aggravated response, so I posted it on my blog instead.
Short version: it's not Walmart versus Reasonable Viewpoints, it's Wikipedia versus All Viewpoints. NPOV isn't about hearing all viewpoints, it's about hearing none. An encyclopedia is a collation of information, not a presentation of judgements.
Actually, it's a false bifurcation (also known as a false dichotomy, or occasionally just as a bifurcation.) A straw man is where you openly misrepresent someone else's beliefs in order to attack them specifically. Note that the grandparent wasn't speaking specifically about how Wikipedia sees POV, but rather about the nature of POV itself; by reducing the nature of the problem to two hoary possibilities, rather than to attack Wikipedia, he's attacked the notion of a neutral POV itself.
False bifurcations take a remarkably visible format, once you've seen a polarized enough example. My personal favorite is "All politicians are murderers or rapists. Therefore no politician can be trusted." Whereas that's obviously false - the number's probably closer to 5% - it also shows how a false bifurcation works: artificially reduce the available options to two (or several) untenable options, then exclude each option to suggest the exclusion of the parent.
Note please that this isn't always a fallacy; you need to be careful. (Here it is; I'm not defending anything.) As a trivial example, you can display that there are no complex numbers on a set of dice, because all numbers represented are either positive even integers or positive odd integers; similarly you can display that there are no white M&Ms, because M&Ms are { Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Brown, Dark Brown.} (Yes, I know that's not true, but it's close to true, and it's easy to understand, so run with it.)
It's all well and good to say the industry is in great shape, tools are getting easier and so on. Funding, however, gets harder to find every day, and sequelitis is turning into a religion regarding how not to lose money in gaming.
they would immediately jump into the car business and make far more money that way than they could selling oil.
They've been in the car business for about fifteen years. And, no, they make much more money on the oil, for the same reason that Xerox undersells copiers and Gilette undersells razor bases: the ink and the blades may not have as large a flat cost as the things they're refilling, but the comparative margin is huge. Big Oil's getting almost seventy cents on the dollar profit to oil, compared to about nine cents on the dollar for GM. Take a sum of how much you spend on gasoline for a solid month, some time, then do the math. You'll find that oil is wildly more profitable, and that's before you consider the obscene prices at which oil goes in other parts of the world.
Quit spewing this ludicrious, repeatedly-refuted myth.
It's repeatedly refuted by people who need to be refuted themselves. Vapor carbuerators do exist and do get on the order of 70-80 MPG, but they can't start instantly, so they'd require essentially half of a complete second engine setup. You'd spend more adding to the machine and performing maintenance than you'd save on fuel, not to mention the safety implications and the fuel consumption implications of all that extra weight.
Myth refuted. Please move along.
You got two different statistics wrong by an order of magnitude, and your refutation is staggered by less than two orders of magnitude. Making up statistics then using them to prove things is absurdly fallacious.
Umm ok except that works for 20 years tops. That's how long a patent lasts, they aren't perpetual.
You mean you really don't see the value of extending the oil oligopoly for 22 years, and getting two decades to purchase the outfits that would become the irresistable competition?
That's why big oil invested in and half-took-over car companies: because otherwise, the car companies would have gotten into a feature war over dropping fuel use. The important thing isn't getting it buried forever. The important thing is getting 20 years with their superdeep pockets to take over the next market segment.
Never make the mistake of thinking Big Oil is anything other than agile. They've made their way through three fundamental energy sector changes already. This is their mechanic: postpone it long enough to maneuver into owning it, so that when the inevitable change comes, it's still them who ends up winning.
Domain speculators serve tremendous numbers of ads. 99% of google's revenue is ad-based. QED.
For what it's worth, just think it over. These people own sometimes upwards of 20k domains. We always say "there's no way they could sell a tenth of a percent of their $5k domains." Okay, so what if that's true? Buying domains in bulk they're like fifty cents each; if we assume a turnover of one tenth of one percent, and a return of $5k each, then they've made $100k off of a $10k investment.
Yes, they're making money, or they wouldn't still be doing it. These guys buy domains as quickly as they can think them up.
The main thing keeping the click trade going is Google.
Oh, nonsense. Less than one in eight domain squatters use Google. The domain squatting game existed years before Google did. Google doesn't even run the kind of scam ads that most squatters do.
What is it with people like you believing that without Google, the entire Internet goes away? Do you honestly believe Google's the only ad broker on earth? That all these advertisers will just say nevermind? That these content providers will go "well that's the end of my business," and close up shop? There are ad brokers out there that pay much better dividends than Google does - AdBrite and Chitika come to mind.
Wake up. Google is an advertising agency, and you're falling for it hook, line and sinker. Without Google, the state of advertising gets shaken up for a month or two, the internet goes elsewhere, 2-3% of sites don't switch because it's not worth the time, and life goes on.
You're thinking about it wrongly. The reason it's worth 1/10 to 1/4 what buy.com is is because 75-90% of a domain's value is people going "huh, i wonder if i can [verb] things on [verb].com."
The other 10-25% comes from domains working the way they're supposed to - someone goes out and actually builds something there, then gets the word out, and people go hit the site. In the case of two- and three-letter domains, the value there is drastically inflated, because they're so much easier to remember, even if you're not particularly trying. In the case of simple-word domains, especially verbs and conjunctions, that's *massively* up-valued by the flexibility of the domain.
However, these people are trying to bilk you. There's a very, very profitable way to deploy this specific domain, and they want the golden goose. Nobody buys things at their real value; they buy low and try to make back the margin. These people are telling you 10-25% because it sounds likely, because in most cases they'd be correct. In the case of by.net, there is a specific use which would hideously up-value the domain.
Think hard enough and you'll see it. Otherwise, email me, and I'll take a tiny slice in exchange for showing you how to turn that into a bucket of gold.
Just to be clear, fuel cells aren't a power generation mechanism. They're a power/storage/ mechanism, like batteries. The reason they're an environmental savings is that the generation of the hydrogen can be done in large-scale standing power plants, which can work with much larger economies of scale and have far more effective pollution control systems than can an engine car. This is not terribly different than electric cars - we're just centralizing the power generation into a facility far better equipped to handle the downsides than we can do with a small moving vehicle.
Actually, I'm one of the strong AI folks myself. I just don't think that making wild, baseless and patently false claims to garner media attention is ethical. Actually, I've had the pleasure of debating this directly with Searle, Dreyfuss, Brandom, Conant, Belnap and so on; I remain firm in the belief that computers can be intelligent and that it's essentially a matter of programming. I just don't expect it to be finished within my lifetime.
One can believe "real" (strong) AI is possible, without believing it'll happen any time soon.;)
Can we please stop using this "missing link" terminology? It's one of those terms often bandied about by creationists, but it has very little meaning in science.
Nonsense. Creationism would preclude the notion of a missing link, because creationism denies that there's anything to link from. The Missing Link is in fact an intensely evolutionary perspective - it's simply an observation that there is a part of the human evolutionary record of which we do not yet have evidence. It's the link, which is currently missing. How is that creationism? Actually, the term was coined by Darwin in response to creationists: they insisted that cromagnon man must not be part of the human family tree because the leap was huge according to Darwin's own classification system. Darwin said "no, there are just some missing links in the path; I am sure they will be found with time."
Unsurprisingly, he was right.
By the way, as long as you're playing amateur semantician, you're making a pretty egregious error of your own. There has never been a challenge to evolution by the creationists or the intelligent designers; evolution is a simple physical process, and can be observed in (for example) crystallization, fire and the weather. What they're decrying is called "natural selection," and is the supposition that the evolutionary process combined with a fitness dynamic can account for speciation.
Next time you want to correct someone, please be correct yourself.
Do you honestly believe that Nintendo (or anyone) anticipated Nintendogs to sell more than 6 Million units world-wide, Mario Kart DS and Animal Crossing to each sell more than 4 Million units world wide, and for Brain Training to sell more than 2 Million units in Japan Alone?
Yes, yes, yes and no, respectively. In fact, MKDS undersold expectations. Brain training was the only surprise in that set. The Nintendo forecast was low because they're done in ratios of market share, and Nintendo expected the PSP to be a more threatening rival than it has turned out to be.
Oh, or maybe you didn't know their future expectations were public knowledge? You can call them, and ask for something called an "investor's prospectus." They'll send it to you for free; it will be on the order of 25 pages, very nicely made, and jam-packed with data over which to salivate. That's how they get people to buy their stock. It's common for American and Asian corporations, and in certain parts of Europe (primarily the Germanic, English and Scandanavian nations.)
Wait, isn't XNA and the Xbox development kit super expensive? Thus cutting out the "two guys moonlighting" entirely?... no. It's less than a thousand dollars for the Live Arcade XNA platform, and if they like your plan, they'll give it to you for free. The expensive part is making a glass master and burning fifty thousand discs, putting them in boxes and paying for WalMart shelf space.
Thanks to XBox Live Arcade, the XBox 360 is now the cheapest platform to target. I'm a Nintendo developer, so this both angers and scares me. (Then again, the GBA kit is also now free, if Nintendo believes you're competant, so whatever.)
The math represented thus becomes quite different, and, given a simple extrapolation of accelerating returns regarding computing power per cost, show that within a decade we *will* have the processing ability to create a functional digital brain at the complexity level of a human brain.
Yes yes, they've been saying this since the early 1960s. Then, everyone discovers some new physical process in the brain, everyone gasps, the line is moved back ten years, many backs are patted, and we trick ourselves into thinking that this time we really do have the whole picture. Hell, I've been alive through two revelations in the understanding of the physical universe, and many argue that one's also going on right now.
Every time someone says "we will have brains in ten years," I just laugh to myself. Why? Because we don't understand how the brain works yet. How can we possibly predict the complexity of a system we don't even understand?
I'm not saying we'll never model the brain. What I'm saying is we don't have enough information yet to predict when that modelling will occur. We can barely get simple machine vision working, but little retarded bugs see just fine. I'd be hella surprised if we could model the brain of a stag beetle in ten years, let alone a human.
Actually, I'd be surprised if we can model a stag beetle's brain in my lifetime. But, that's just based on actually having done these things, and knowing what I'm talking about, so don't mind me. "But Kurtzweil does these things too! He's famous for it!" No, he's famous for writing about the things he's done. A scientist should be measured by their output. Despite being a scientist, Kurtzweil's honestly more of a science writer, like Gleick. It's just that Gleick has no pretenses about whom he is. Kurtzweil has a lab, Kurtzweil dumps all this money into AI, Kurtzweil wrote all these books. Blah blah blah, I know. He's a better man than I am, and he understands these things better than I do. The problem is, he's still a science writer, and he's been saying "it's ten years away" for almost fourty years now.
Yes, he's a brilliant man. He's also an uncurable unrealistic optimist. It's just that his level of understanding is so far over most people's heads and his writing is of such high quality that nobody realizes he's saying we'll have a skyscraper that touches the moon by next thursday.
The last time he said "AI who can argue you down playing the dozens in Manhattan in a decade," I called bullshit. Everyone told me I was wrong, I was full of shit, I didn't know what I'm talking about, my god it's Kurtzweil, how dare you argue with the man. And you know what? I'm arguing with the man. I was right last time and I'm right this time. AI in the future? Humans on a chip? Sure.
10 years? You're dreaming. 10 years we won't even have real machine vision, natural language probably won't even be fully handled, muscle coordination is still a joke, we aren't gonna have any non-symbolic communication (body language, hand gestures, implication and subverbalization, sarcasm and irony, et cetera.) Machine learning will still be limited to trivial domains like the rules of a single game. Even with specialty hardware and the massive safety benefits, we won't have automatic car driving down yet. Intuition and emotion will exist only in Kurzweil's next "ten years" speech.
Yes, these things will come to pass, but I highly doubt most of them will be during our lifetimes, even to the degree which a six year old human can bring to bear. It's understandable: random processes took several billion years to work these things out. It's okay for us to take a thousand; that's still a breakneck pace, and besides, we only got started in earnest around World War 2.
If they can simulate something else than a virus (because I don't think viruses are intelligent) could they by this way obtain intelligence by simulating an intelligent animal?
This argument made Kuhn famous in the 1950s. You may be entertained to read Artificial Intelligence: the Very Idea, which addresses this line of thinking, both how it can be supported and how it can be denied. The book isn't neutral; it takes both sides in the effort to give you material to come to your own beliefs, and in my opinion succeeds admirably.
Er. This is falsely reductionist. It's not that a tree is deciduous or not deciduous; rather, a tree is deciduous, evergreen, dioecious, gymnofruiting or so on. The creature isn't a fish or not a fish; rather it's a fish or a bird or a dog or a shark. The rock might be igneous, volcanic, sedimentary, ocyllic, crystalline, meteoric or obsidianic.
Sure, we tend to enumerate things, but the comparison you're actually making is that something can have or not have one particular characteristic. That's tautological: of course something which either is or isn't can be referred to as boolean (not binary, which means counting integers in radix two.) However, just because you can say that something is red or not red doesn't mean that its color characteristic is boolean; rather that the color characteristic happens to be any one given label is boolean.
The debate over whether something is alive or not suffers this same tautology. There are other things than alive and inert. Biologists don't wrestle with this issue any further than the author's pen; if one learns one's science from somewhere other than Wikipedia, one finds the term "proto-life," to refer to autonomous molecules which reveal some but not all of the characteristics of independant life. Viruses fall neatly into proto-life: they can perform several of the capacities of independant life, and generally reproduce by overriding the parallel native capacities in a host organism. The debate over life comes in when one sees gigantic viruses which are nearly cellular, greying the boundary between life and proto-life, or things like prions and satellite nucleics, greying the boundary between proto-life and inertness.
That latter example bears some explanation, because it can be confusing to refer to proto-foo as something exhibiting some of the characteristics of foo, then to refer to something else as greying the boundary between partial and no implementation. The problem with prions is a matter of perspective and belief. There are good arguments that prions are just long-term runaway chemical chain reactions, rather than independant evolved agents (though, there are also good arguments that such a distinction is nonsensical.) The best explanation I ever heard of the conundrum was from someone I'd just spent explaining the problem to for several hours - not a scientist, but an old and dear friend who was a car mechanic.
He proposed that in the future, I describe these things in terms of oil iron particulate. See, in your car, when you run the car, the metal in the pistons strikes the surrounding metal constantly under high force and temperature. The purpose of engine oil is to lubricate the space inbetween the piston and cylinder so that the parts can fit together more tightly, meaning that the repeated shock has less room in which to build up parallel force and therefore can do less damage. Put more simply, the better the fit, the less rattle, and therefore the less wear and tear.
The way wear and tear actually presents in engines is as microscopic iron flakes breaking off of the engine and into the oil. This is the reason for oil changes: the oil doesn't become worn out. Rather, a buildup of iron powder slowly turns the oil into an abrasive - liquid iron-based sandpaper, if you will. As the iron buildup gets worse, so does the breakaway rate, and thusly you need to frequently change your oil or it gets out of control.
Now, here's where his metaphor comes in. One of Jeremiah's hobbies was rebuilding classic cars, and performing modifications. He described the pulling of an air supercharger from an old Mustang, and putting it into his Frankenstein (it was a car build from the parts of several other kinds of car.) The supercharger is in direct contact with the oil base of an engine. So, you have to be careful during transplant to flush the old oil, which may have the iron powder buildup from an old engine, before you put into your new engine.
In that respect, we cross the exact same boundary that prio
This can be shown more dramatically in other biological definitions as well: when is a fetus "alive?"
This has always struck me as more of a cheerleader call from anti-abortion-rights groups. Single celled organisms are alive; why shouldn't foetii be? I mean, they're the combination of two different lives; the eggs are alive; the sperm are alive. At no point is there a death involved.
For whatever it's worth, I'm pro-choice. I just don't think that fetuses are ever anything *but* live. Making generalizations like that is, in my opinion, an attempt to use a slogan to bury the difficult moral issue of whether we can treat the parent as superior to the child, when the child is still as simple as things like bacteria colonies which we wipe out without a thought.
Watch TV and see how we advertise bright orange death serums, genociding baccilae as a matter of course.
Gothic: "of the Goths," Gmc. people who lived in Eastern Europe c. 100 A.D. (O.E. Gota, L.L. Goth, Gk. Gothoi), from Goth. guthiuda (*) "Gothic people," the first element cognate with O.N. gotar "men." "The sense 'men' is usually taken to be the secondary one, but as the etymology of the word is unknown, this is uncertain" [Gordon]. The unhistorical -th- in Eng. is from L.L. Used in sense of "savage despoiler" (1663) in reference to their sack of Roman cities, 5c. (see vandal). Gothic was used by scholars to mean "Germanic, Teutonic" (1647), hence its evolution as a term for the art style that emerged in northern Europe in the Middle Ages, and the early 19c. literary style that used medieval settings to suggest horror and mystery. The word was revived 1983 as the name for a style of music and the associated youth culture; abbreviated form goth is attested from 1986. Gothic revival in reference to architecture and decorating first recorded 1869 in writing of C.L. Eastlake.
(*) : This is misspelled. The correct word is gut(thorn)iuda, but the Slashdot filter is disallowing the letter each by entity, unicode callout and direct insertion. Sorry: I tried. Some people would transliterate t(thorn) as th, some as tpth, some as tuth; i'm going with th, and if you disagree with me, well, whatever.
Ironically the term was coined by the baroque.
Well, except that
The word is several hundred years older than that,
The Baroque is a time period, and therefore it would be inappropriate to attribute to it an action, and
Good luck to you. Given what you are doing - I think you will have or will get a good understanding that having an idea and writing some code is just the first part. Something that is lost on many people here.
Yeah. Actually, writing code wouldn't even have been the first part for me, except that the basis of the product comes out of my hobby work. The startup capital requirements for this plan are in fact higher than are typical of the Nintendo DS development world, though the total cost won't be nearly as bad.
Then theres marketing (slashdot seems to do a good job of that),
Actually, we have a firm on retainer already.
patents,
About half paid for already.
creating revenue,
Given the nature of the business, this won't be terribly hard; coming to market is a lot more difficult in gaming than benefitting from one's market position.
building the business,
Yeah, this has turned out to be surprisingly difficult. Luckily for me, I have an experienced business partner with more than a dozen successful businesses under her belt.
Documentation and "white papers" are the last things on our mind right now, and the least of our concerns.
attracting investors...
Actually investors seem to be finding me, oddly enough. It comes rather as a surprise to me, but it turns out that one really needs one's patents in place before one can safely accept investment. The mines aren't where I expected for them to be.
Did I mention revenue?
Yes.
Doing this on a shoestring (which I think is *very* healthy) requires determination and inventiveness.
I'm not doing this on a shoestring. What I'm doing could not in fact be done on a shoestring.
A S/W engine for Nintendo DS eh?
Yep. I'm an authorized developer, and it won't be my first. It will, however, be the first one solely for my personal economic benefit. I'm sick to death of the bonehead maneuvers that developer companies make, watering their games down for the lowest common denominator then being surprised when they end up with crap. I want direct control of my work, so that I can see it through to its appropriate output. That means I can't take publisher money until the game is done, because that's the most common way to get control taken away, and to get quality stomped into the ground.
Or to put it another way - just how many million dollar concepts have you turned into reality recently?
I've been working on one for the last four months, actually. Yes, some concepts are obvious, and for those concepts, all it takes is the gumption to sit still for a significant chunk of a year. Other concepts, though, aren't obvious at all. If you're curious, watch that URL - once my patents are in, it's going to start screaming what I'm up to loud and proud.
Slashdot Mirror
That's just because you're not willing to experiment on pets, and if it's small and cheap and a land creature, then someone has it as a pet.
Yes, let's all click your shop link, kaleidojewel-20. Did you know that Amazon's terms of service explicitly prohibit forum spamming?
Ajax doesn't matter until we get raw headers and server push. Until then, it's limited to server-pull, polling, and web servers.
Thank god - I expected Adople.
This is nonsense. I had sort of a long and aggravated response, so I posted it on my blog instead.
Short version: it's not Walmart versus Reasonable Viewpoints, it's Wikipedia versus All Viewpoints. NPOV isn't about hearing all viewpoints, it's about hearing none. An encyclopedia is a collation of information, not a presentation of judgements.
Whitedust is just missing the point.
Actually, it's a false bifurcation (also known as a false dichotomy, or occasionally just as a bifurcation.) A straw man is where you openly misrepresent someone else's beliefs in order to attack them specifically. Note that the grandparent wasn't speaking specifically about how Wikipedia sees POV, but rather about the nature of POV itself; by reducing the nature of the problem to two hoary possibilities, rather than to attack Wikipedia, he's attacked the notion of a neutral POV itself.
.} (Yes, I know that's not true, but it's close to true, and it's easy to understand, so run with it.)
False bifurcations take a remarkably visible format, once you've seen a polarized enough example. My personal favorite is "All politicians are murderers or rapists. Therefore no politician can be trusted." Whereas that's obviously false - the number's probably closer to 5% - it also shows how a false bifurcation works: artificially reduce the available options to two (or several) untenable options, then exclude each option to suggest the exclusion of the parent.
Note please that this isn't always a fallacy; you need to be careful. (Here it is; I'm not defending anything.) As a trivial example, you can display that there are no complex numbers on a set of dice, because all numbers represented are either positive even integers or positive odd integers; similarly you can display that there are no white M&Ms, because M&Ms are { Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Brown, Dark Brown
It's all well and good to say the industry is in great shape, tools are getting easier and so on. Funding, however, gets harder to find every day, and sequelitis is turning into a religion regarding how not to lose money in gaming.
The status quo is becoming established, at best.
they would immediately jump into the car business and make far more money that way than they could selling oil.
They've been in the car business for about fifteen years. And, no, they make much more money on the oil, for the same reason that Xerox undersells copiers and Gilette undersells razor bases: the ink and the blades may not have as large a flat cost as the things they're refilling, but the comparative margin is huge. Big Oil's getting almost seventy cents on the dollar profit to oil, compared to about nine cents on the dollar for GM. Take a sum of how much you spend on gasoline for a solid month, some time, then do the math. You'll find that oil is wildly more profitable, and that's before you consider the obscene prices at which oil goes in other parts of the world.
Quit spewing this ludicrious, repeatedly-refuted myth.
It's repeatedly refuted by people who need to be refuted themselves. Vapor carbuerators do exist and do get on the order of 70-80 MPG, but they can't start instantly, so they'd require essentially half of a complete second engine setup. You'd spend more adding to the machine and performing maintenance than you'd save on fuel, not to mention the safety implications and the fuel consumption implications of all that extra weight.
Myth refuted. Please move along.
You got two different statistics wrong by an order of magnitude, and your refutation is staggered by less than two orders of magnitude. Making up statistics then using them to prove things is absurdly fallacious.
Umm ok except that works for 20 years tops. That's how long a patent lasts, they aren't perpetual.
You mean you really don't see the value of extending the oil oligopoly for 22 years, and getting two decades to purchase the outfits that would become the irresistable competition?
That's why big oil invested in and half-took-over car companies: because otherwise, the car companies would have gotten into a feature war over dropping fuel use. The important thing isn't getting it buried forever. The important thing is getting 20 years with their superdeep pockets to take over the next market segment.
Never make the mistake of thinking Big Oil is anything other than agile. They've made their way through three fundamental energy sector changes already. This is their mechanic: postpone it long enough to maneuver into owning it, so that when the inevitable change comes, it's still them who ends up winning.
Domain speculators serve tremendous numbers of ads. 99% of google's revenue is ad-based. QED.
For what it's worth, just think it over. These people own sometimes upwards of 20k domains. We always say "there's no way they could sell a tenth of a percent of their $5k domains." Okay, so what if that's true? Buying domains in bulk they're like fifty cents each; if we assume a turnover of one tenth of one percent, and a return of $5k each, then they've made $100k off of a $10k investment.
Yes, they're making money, or they wouldn't still be doing it. These guys buy domains as quickly as they can think them up.
The main thing keeping the click trade going is Google.
Oh, nonsense. Less than one in eight domain squatters use Google. The domain squatting game existed years before Google did. Google doesn't even run the kind of scam ads that most squatters do.
What is it with people like you believing that without Google, the entire Internet goes away? Do you honestly believe Google's the only ad broker on earth? That all these advertisers will just say nevermind? That these content providers will go "well that's the end of my business," and close up shop? There are ad brokers out there that pay much better dividends than Google does - AdBrite and Chitika come to mind.
Wake up. Google is an advertising agency, and you're falling for it hook, line and sinker. Without Google, the state of advertising gets shaken up for a month or two, the internet goes elsewhere, 2-3% of sites don't switch because it's not worth the time, and life goes on.
You're thinking about it wrongly. The reason it's worth 1/10 to 1/4 what buy.com is is because 75-90% of a domain's value is people going "huh, i wonder if i can [verb] things on [verb].com."
The other 10-25% comes from domains working the way they're supposed to - someone goes out and actually builds something there, then gets the word out, and people go hit the site. In the case of two- and three-letter domains, the value there is drastically inflated, because they're so much easier to remember, even if you're not particularly trying. In the case of simple-word domains, especially verbs and conjunctions, that's *massively* up-valued by the flexibility of the domain.
However, these people are trying to bilk you. There's a very, very profitable way to deploy this specific domain, and they want the golden goose. Nobody buys things at their real value; they buy low and try to make back the margin. These people are telling you 10-25% because it sounds likely, because in most cases they'd be correct. In the case of by.net, there is a specific use which would hideously up-value the domain.
Think hard enough and you'll see it. Otherwise, email me, and I'll take a tiny slice in exchange for showing you how to turn that into a bucket of gold.
Just to be clear, fuel cells aren't a power generation mechanism. They're a power /storage/ mechanism, like batteries. The reason they're an environmental savings is that the generation of the hydrogen can be done in large-scale standing power plants, which can work with much larger economies of scale and have far more effective pollution control systems than can an engine car. This is not terribly different than electric cars - we're just centralizing the power generation into a facility far better equipped to handle the downsides than we can do with a small moving vehicle.
Actually, I'm one of the strong AI folks myself. I just don't think that making wild, baseless and patently false claims to garner media attention is ethical. Actually, I've had the pleasure of debating this directly with Searle, Dreyfuss, Brandom, Conant, Belnap and so on; I remain firm in the belief that computers can be intelligent and that it's essentially a matter of programming. I just don't expect it to be finished within my lifetime.
;)
One can believe "real" (strong) AI is possible, without believing it'll happen any time soon.
Can we please stop using this "missing link" terminology? It's one of those terms often bandied about by creationists, but it has very little meaning in science.
Nonsense. Creationism would preclude the notion of a missing link, because creationism denies that there's anything to link from. The Missing Link is in fact an intensely evolutionary perspective - it's simply an observation that there is a part of the human evolutionary record of which we do not yet have evidence. It's the link, which is currently missing. How is that creationism? Actually, the term was coined by Darwin in response to creationists: they insisted that cromagnon man must not be part of the human family tree because the leap was huge according to Darwin's own classification system. Darwin said "no, there are just some missing links in the path; I am sure they will be found with time."
Unsurprisingly, he was right.
By the way, as long as you're playing amateur semantician, you're making a pretty egregious error of your own. There has never been a challenge to evolution by the creationists or the intelligent designers; evolution is a simple physical process, and can be observed in (for example) crystallization, fire and the weather. What they're decrying is called "natural selection," and is the supposition that the evolutionary process combined with a fitness dynamic can account for speciation.
Next time you want to correct someone, please be correct yourself.
Do you honestly believe that Nintendo (or anyone) anticipated Nintendogs to sell more than 6 Million units world-wide, Mario Kart DS and Animal Crossing to each sell more than 4 Million units world wide, and for Brain Training to sell more than 2 Million units in Japan Alone?
Yes, yes, yes and no, respectively. In fact, MKDS undersold expectations. Brain training was the only surprise in that set. The Nintendo forecast was low because they're done in ratios of market share, and Nintendo expected the PSP to be a more threatening rival than it has turned out to be.
Oh, or maybe you didn't know their future expectations were public knowledge? You can call them, and ask for something called an "investor's prospectus." They'll send it to you for free; it will be on the order of 25 pages, very nicely made, and jam-packed with data over which to salivate. That's how they get people to buy their stock. It's common for American and Asian corporations, and in certain parts of Europe (primarily the Germanic, English and Scandanavian nations.)
Wait, isn't XNA and the Xbox development kit super expensive? Thus cutting out the "two guys moonlighting" entirely? ... no. It's less than a thousand dollars for the Live Arcade XNA platform, and if they like your plan, they'll give it to you for free. The expensive part is making a glass master and burning fifty thousand discs, putting them in boxes and paying for WalMart shelf space.
Thanks to XBox Live Arcade, the XBox 360 is now the cheapest platform to target. I'm a Nintendo developer, so this both angers and scares me. (Then again, the GBA kit is also now free, if Nintendo believes you're competant, so whatever.)
The math represented thus becomes quite different, and, given a simple extrapolation of accelerating returns regarding computing power per cost, show that within a decade we *will* have the processing ability to create a functional digital brain at the complexity level of a human brain.
Yes yes, they've been saying this since the early 1960s. Then, everyone discovers some new physical process in the brain, everyone gasps, the line is moved back ten years, many backs are patted, and we trick ourselves into thinking that this time we really do have the whole picture. Hell, I've been alive through two revelations in the understanding of the physical universe, and many argue that one's also going on right now.
Every time someone says "we will have brains in ten years," I just laugh to myself. Why? Because we don't understand how the brain works yet. How can we possibly predict the complexity of a system we don't even understand?
I'm not saying we'll never model the brain. What I'm saying is we don't have enough information yet to predict when that modelling will occur. We can barely get simple machine vision working, but little retarded bugs see just fine. I'd be hella surprised if we could model the brain of a stag beetle in ten years, let alone a human.
Actually, I'd be surprised if we can model a stag beetle's brain in my lifetime. But, that's just based on actually having done these things, and knowing what I'm talking about, so don't mind me. "But Kurtzweil does these things too! He's famous for it!" No, he's famous for writing about the things he's done. A scientist should be measured by their output. Despite being a scientist, Kurtzweil's honestly more of a science writer, like Gleick. It's just that Gleick has no pretenses about whom he is. Kurtzweil has a lab, Kurtzweil dumps all this money into AI, Kurtzweil wrote all these books. Blah blah blah, I know. He's a better man than I am, and he understands these things better than I do. The problem is, he's still a science writer, and he's been saying "it's ten years away" for almost fourty years now.
Yes, he's a brilliant man. He's also an uncurable unrealistic optimist. It's just that his level of understanding is so far over most people's heads and his writing is of such high quality that nobody realizes he's saying we'll have a skyscraper that touches the moon by next thursday.
The last time he said "AI who can argue you down playing the dozens in Manhattan in a decade," I called bullshit. Everyone told me I was wrong, I was full of shit, I didn't know what I'm talking about, my god it's Kurtzweil, how dare you argue with the man . And you know what? I'm arguing with the man. I was right last time and I'm right this time. AI in the future? Humans on a chip? Sure.
10 years? You're dreaming. 10 years we won't even have real machine vision, natural language probably won't even be fully handled, muscle coordination is still a joke, we aren't gonna have any non-symbolic communication (body language, hand gestures, implication and subverbalization, sarcasm and irony, et cetera.) Machine learning will still be limited to trivial domains like the rules of a single game. Even with specialty hardware and the massive safety benefits, we won't have automatic car driving down yet. Intuition and emotion will exist only in Kurzweil's next "ten years" speech.
Yes, these things will come to pass, but I highly doubt most of them will be during our lifetimes, even to the degree which a six year old human can bring to bear. It's understandable: random processes took several billion years to work these things out. It's okay for us to take a thousand; that's still a breakneck pace, and besides, we only got started in earnest around World War 2.
If they can simulate something else than a virus (because I don't think viruses are intelligent) could they by this way obtain intelligence by simulating an intelligent animal?
This argument made Kuhn famous in the 1950s. You may be entertained to read Artificial Intelligence: the Very Idea, which addresses this line of thinking, both how it can be supported and how it can be denied. The book isn't neutral; it takes both sides in the effort to give you material to come to your own beliefs, and in my opinion succeeds admirably.
Er. This is falsely reductionist. It's not that a tree is deciduous or not deciduous; rather, a tree is deciduous, evergreen, dioecious, gymnofruiting or so on. The creature isn't a fish or not a fish; rather it's a fish or a bird or a dog or a shark. The rock might be igneous, volcanic, sedimentary, ocyllic, crystalline, meteoric or obsidianic.
Sure, we tend to enumerate things, but the comparison you're actually making is that something can have or not have one particular characteristic. That's tautological: of course something which either is or isn't can be referred to as boolean (not binary, which means counting integers in radix two.) However, just because you can say that something is red or not red doesn't mean that its color characteristic is boolean; rather that the color characteristic happens to be any one given label is boolean.
The debate over whether something is alive or not suffers this same tautology. There are other things than alive and inert. Biologists don't wrestle with this issue any further than the author's pen; if one learns one's science from somewhere other than Wikipedia, one finds the term "proto-life," to refer to autonomous molecules which reveal some but not all of the characteristics of independant life. Viruses fall neatly into proto-life: they can perform several of the capacities of independant life, and generally reproduce by overriding the parallel native capacities in a host organism. The debate over life comes in when one sees gigantic viruses which are nearly cellular, greying the boundary between life and proto-life, or things like prions and satellite nucleics, greying the boundary between proto-life and inertness.
That latter example bears some explanation, because it can be confusing to refer to proto-foo as something exhibiting some of the characteristics of foo, then to refer to something else as greying the boundary between partial and no implementation. The problem with prions is a matter of perspective and belief. There are good arguments that prions are just long-term runaway chemical chain reactions, rather than independant evolved agents (though, there are also good arguments that such a distinction is nonsensical.) The best explanation I ever heard of the conundrum was from someone I'd just spent explaining the problem to for several hours - not a scientist, but an old and dear friend who was a car mechanic.
He proposed that in the future, I describe these things in terms of oil iron particulate. See, in your car, when you run the car, the metal in the pistons strikes the surrounding metal constantly under high force and temperature. The purpose of engine oil is to lubricate the space inbetween the piston and cylinder so that the parts can fit together more tightly, meaning that the repeated shock has less room in which to build up parallel force and therefore can do less damage. Put more simply, the better the fit, the less rattle, and therefore the less wear and tear.
The way wear and tear actually presents in engines is as microscopic iron flakes breaking off of the engine and into the oil. This is the reason for oil changes: the oil doesn't become worn out. Rather, a buildup of iron powder slowly turns the oil into an abrasive - liquid iron-based sandpaper, if you will. As the iron buildup gets worse, so does the breakaway rate, and thusly you need to frequently change your oil or it gets out of control.
Now, here's where his metaphor comes in. One of Jeremiah's hobbies was rebuilding classic cars, and performing modifications. He described the pulling of an air supercharger from an old Mustang, and putting it into his Frankenstein (it was a car build from the parts of several other kinds of car.) The supercharger is in direct contact with the oil base of an engine. So, you have to be careful during transplant to flush the old oil, which may have the iron powder buildup from an old engine, before you put into your new engine.
In that respect, we cross the exact same boundary that prio
This can be shown more dramatically in other biological definitions as well: when is a fetus "alive?"
This has always struck me as more of a cheerleader call from anti-abortion-rights groups. Single celled organisms are alive; why shouldn't foetii be? I mean, they're the combination of two different lives; the eggs are alive; the sperm are alive. At no point is there a death involved.
For whatever it's worth, I'm pro-choice. I just don't think that fetuses are ever anything *but* live. Making generalizations like that is, in my opinion, an attempt to use a slogan to bury the difficult moral issue of whether we can treat the parent as superior to the child, when the child is still as simple as things like bacteria colonies which we wipe out without a thought.
Watch TV and see how we advertise bright orange death serums, genociding baccilae as a matter of course.
And it took 13 days...That's one slow simulation.
Eh, it's Perl, what're you gonna do...
Uh, what?
Gothic: "of the Goths," Gmc. people who lived in Eastern Europe c. 100 A.D. (O.E. Gota, L.L. Goth, Gk. Gothoi), from Goth. guthiuda (*) "Gothic people," the first element cognate with O.N. gotar "men." "The sense 'men' is usually taken to be the secondary one, but as the etymology of the word is unknown, this is uncertain" [Gordon]. The unhistorical -th- in Eng. is from L.L. Used in sense of "savage despoiler" (1663) in reference to their sack of Roman cities, 5c. (see vandal). Gothic was used by scholars to mean "Germanic, Teutonic" (1647), hence its evolution as a term for the art style that emerged in northern Europe in the Middle Ages, and the early 19c. literary style that used medieval settings to suggest horror and mystery. The word was revived 1983 as the name for a style of music and the associated youth culture; abbreviated form goth is attested from 1986. Gothic revival in reference to architecture and decorating first recorded 1869 in writing of C.L. Eastlake.
(*) : This is misspelled. The correct word is gut(thorn)iuda, but the Slashdot filter is disallowing the letter each by entity, unicode callout and direct insertion. Sorry: I tried. Some people would transliterate t(thorn) as th, some as tpth, some as tuth; i'm going with th, and if you disagree with me, well, whatever.
Ironically the term was coined by the baroque.
Well, except that
Good luck to you. Given what you are doing - I think you will have or will get a good understanding that having an idea and writing some code is just the first part. Something that is lost on many people here.
Yeah. Actually, writing code wouldn't even have been the first part for me, except that the basis of the product comes out of my hobby work. The startup capital requirements for this plan are in fact higher than are typical of the Nintendo DS development world, though the total cost won't be nearly as bad.
Then theres marketing (slashdot seems to do a good job of that),
Actually, we have a firm on retainer already.
patents,
About half paid for already.
creating revenue,
Given the nature of the business, this won't be terribly hard; coming to market is a lot more difficult in gaming than benefitting from one's market position.
building the business,
Yeah, this has turned out to be surprisingly difficult. Luckily for me, I have an experienced business partner with more than a dozen successful businesses under her belt.
support, releases, maintenance, bugfixing, delivery,
Nothing new here.
revenue, documentation, white papers,
Documentation and "white papers" are the last things on our mind right now, and the least of our concerns.
attracting investors...
Actually investors seem to be finding me, oddly enough. It comes rather as a surprise to me, but it turns out that one really needs one's patents in place before one can safely accept investment. The mines aren't where I expected for them to be.
Did I mention revenue?
Yes.
Doing this on a shoestring (which I think is *very* healthy) requires determination and inventiveness.
I'm not doing this on a shoestring. What I'm doing could not in fact be done on a shoestring.
A S/W engine for Nintendo DS eh?
Yep. I'm an authorized developer, and it won't be my first. It will, however, be the first one solely for my personal economic benefit. I'm sick to death of the bonehead maneuvers that developer companies make, watering their games down for the lowest common denominator then being surprised when they end up with crap. I want direct control of my work, so that I can see it through to its appropriate output. That means I can't take publisher money until the game is done, because that's the most common way to get control taken away, and to get quality stomped into the ground.
Or to put it another way - just how many million dollar concepts have you turned into reality recently?
I've been working on one for the last four months, actually. Yes, some concepts are obvious, and for those concepts, all it takes is the gumption to sit still for a significant chunk of a year. Other concepts, though, aren't obvious at all. If you're curious, watch that URL - once my patents are in, it's going to start screaming what I'm up to loud and proud.