Exactly. Coming up with an original and creative architectural design cannot be estimated with much precision. But a construction schedule is only made after all the variables are known, design is complete, and so on. At this point in the game, you know exactly where every brick is supposed to lay, where every cross-beam will be bolted, and so on.
For software engineering, the design and construction are simultaneous. Once you're done figuring out exactly how to put everything together, it has already been put together.
Now there are "design documents" that are often written before programming a project, so one might say that there is design that goes prior to construction of software. But these design docs are largely a farce. If a programmer knew exactly how the "construction" of software would take place, he would have already written the software. The case is not similar to building bridges.
Every programmer, sys-admin, developer, designer, de-bugger, support-desk jockey, etc. that I know DESPISES their job and can't wait to get home.
You've got bigger problems if you despise your work. I've worked at two companies, one where worked sucked, and one where work was great. I enjoyed reading dilbert and userfriendly throughout my stay at both companies.
You obviously don't understand IT if you think no one would program anything if it were not for money.
What you talking about? Talent is cheap in this day and age. If you want to switch to Linux, lay off 40% of IT, put in an opening on monster.com saying your looking for Linux experience, and BOOM, you have 5000 resumes to sort through. You'll be able to revamp your entire department with very talented people at an ultra low price. This is not at all an exaggeration. I personally know many very talented people with master's degrees that can't even get an interview.
However, Businesses are too scared to do anything. They are too scared to switch to a lower cost solution, even if it would save them money within a year. After all, what do you think was the purpose of all the software and hardware made during the big boom? Was it to increase expenses? No, all software is designed to save money in some way. Software is designed to make information processing more efficient, and thus save money on personel. But no one is adopting new software, for no better reason than that they are scared of changing anything in this day and time. It has nothing to do with saving money, it's all about avoiding risk.
Come on, 256MB is cheap, cheap, cheap. You can get a single chip 256MB SDRAM module from retail outlets like Circuit City for only $80 (and that's in Manhattan!). If you go to Mom 'N Pop Computers, you'll probably get it for even less. There's no excuse not to upgrade your memory.
$15.00 + 4.5% sales tax = $15.68, which is not an even number. The cashier will be forced to open the register even if the prices on the pretaxed items are nice and round.
Then, it's a simple matter of a small aperture (which can be directed), a positively-charged grid, and the xenon leaves in the direction opposite the spacecraft goes.
Won't you run out of xenon eventually? If you use up your propellant, why not stick to the traditional jet fuels?
You think it is fact that the country is superior. It is arrogant to assume what you think is reality. What you are saying is an example of the arrogance.
Depends on what is being measured. I'm not talking moral superiority. America assumes that is has more military power, and more economic resources than any other country. Neither of these assumptions is arrogant, because they are both true. The thing is, the poster I was replying to never said what it was America was "arrogant" about. And I responded as I did because what sometimes seems arrogant is just honesty.
And you can't assume what I think is not reality, because you have no idea what I aspect of America I was analogizing as being like chess. So you cannot say whether I was being arrogant or not. And because you assume what you cannot know, your statement, accusing me of arrogance, is in fact arrogance where mine was not.
A chess grandmaster can easily beat me at chess. He mentions this fact in a non-chalant manner. Is this arrogance? Stating superiority that is fact is not arrogance.
As for the "self-interested" part of foreign policy. That made me laugh. What nation's foreign policy is not self-interested? You may as well describe a business's policies as "profit-driven". It's self-evident, and not interesting.
Regardless of what Bush had in mind when he said "Freedom itself was attacked today," I think his statement was correct in the respect I mentioned before. Osama bin Laden's stated goal is to reduce the United States into the Divided States. A single terrorist act is not going to bring us to war with ourselves, but it will induce paranoia, and willingness to accept a police-like state. If bin Laden reduces us to this, he has already won half the battle.
I live in Manhattan, was myself close to the carnage, and I'd have to disagree. Normally a liberal/libertarian, this week I have been almost totally behind Bush's way of handling this calamity. The US is a great nation, and we have to defend it. But I am totally opposed to giving up all of our freedoms, and instituting upon ourselves a Stalinesque government. For if this happens, the US will no longer be a great nation. There will be nothing in this nation worth defending. If we lose all our freedoms because of this terrorist act, I will personally leave this nation in disgust.
You should listen to Bush himself. He said it well, "Freedom itself was attacked today..." We are not just protecting our lives, we are protecting our way of life. If we give up all our freedom just to feel a little more safe. then there is no reason we should live in the US. We may just as well live in China, or Singapore, or Oceana.
You shouldn't do it that way. Slashdot will randomly insert spaces into really long words to keep the tables lined up correctly. Otherwise, everytime someone put in a really long word like thisssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss it would cause the page to be much wider than it should be. As it is, since spaces are inserted, the rendering of your page is not screwed up.
Anyway, since Slashdot allows href tags you should use them, and links will work fine, like this.
You originally said, " I would bet all that I own that there are hundreds if not thousands of farmers in any given state who could out-think the best of the dot-commers".
If you know anything about statistics, you'll know that when X% of some group measures higher on some scalar value than 100% of another group, that as X increases marginally, the averages between the two groups wildly diverge.
That is, if there exist 3000 farmers (from every state no less) "smarter" than every single dot commer, then this implies that farmers are on average much much smarter than dot commers. I would wager that the farmers would have to have at least twice the "smartness" than the dot commers, on average, for your statement to be true. This is simply statistical inference. And it shows the absurdity of your statement.
It would be equally false for me to say that there exist 3000 dot commers more intelligent than any farmer. It's simply not true, nor is almost any statement of its kind. You were indeed implying that farmers are vastly more intelligent than dot commers, whether you realized it or not.
As for "skill sets", I am simply saying apples are not oranges, and you seem to disagree. That is, I said that farmers do not have the skill set or the drive to obtain it. The skill set I am referring to is that of programming commerce. I am not referring to "skill" as some scale from 1 to a 100 where every single worker of every single occupation can be ranked.
There are many very skilled artisans who have no desire to do much, if anything, with a computer. They don't have the skill set to program internet related applications, and they do not have the drive to obtain these skills. This does not mean that they lack *all* skill, or that they have *no* drive. You are attacking a strawman.
Some people do have more enjoyment of menial work than the more "white collar" jobs. There are times myself when I long for the simplicity of the days I worked in fast food. But the simple truth is, if someone is given the choice between investing their time in being skilled in a white or blue collar occupation, they will almost always don the white collar.
The reasons are varied and numerous. And not everyone thinks this way. There is a great strand of anti-intellectuallism among those you describe as having superior intellect. I'm tempted to describe it as "sour grapes" but I'd hate to use an ad hominem.
You don't often hear of child geniuses saying, "My ultimate plan is to settle down to the simple life on a farm." Perhaps the nature of their curiosity causes them to want to avoid situations that are not rich in intellectually stimulating factors. The relative simplicity of the tasks can be easily gauged. The average programmer seeing the workings of a farm for the first time will not be as confused as a farmer seeing the workings of a computer for the first time. If computers were trivial and required no intelligence to use or learn, then there never would have been a demand for those knowledgable with them.
Playing outside, with other things, people, parents, etc.
I agree that social interaction would probably exercise different areas of the brain than playing video games solo would. But I was comparing it to "playing outside" which does not necessarily indicate that friends are present. As a kid I would climb trees, explore the forest, kick a ball up against a wall, and so on. None of these things involved social interaction.
I also agree that getting outside and away from video games is a good thing to do every once and a while. I just don't think that the brain will be affected much differently. What will be affected is all of the things stimulated by physical exersion. Getting some physical exercise will keep your body in good shape, which is important to having a balanced mind.
What I disagree with is implying that playing outside will stimulate areas other than vision and motion. Playing outside is good not because of the mental areas it stimulates, but because it keeps the body healthy.
It only exercises the whole mind because the mental exercise is novel. Why do you think that? There was nothing in the study to support that idea.
It's a bit of conjecture. But it is obvious that more brain activity comes from novel activities than repeated, mundane activities. You know what the sum 3+5 is with barely any thought. Give that problem to a kid who hasn't even seen a '+' sign before, and she will take plenty of time to ponder the answer. I'm just saying it's more likely that the children use more of their brain with math than video games because math is a more novel experience.
I don't think today's cashiers do much mental arithmetic.
As for cashiers, it's not really an important point, but even in the US cashiers do plenty of math. Yes, the register says, "Change = 4.63". But then the person still has to break down 63 cents into 2 quarters, 1 dime, and 3 pennies. It's still arithmetic, just not adding or subtracting. It's more like changing between binary and decimal, except the system being translated into is US currency, where the units are quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies.
The researcher says that playing video games stimulates vision and motion centers of the mind. He then compares this to doing arithmetic exercises, which stimulates many portions of the brain, frontal lobe included. But then at the end of the article, he says that parents should spend more time playing outside with their children. This is a total non-sequitor! Playing outside is probably no better to the brain than playing video games. I would imagine that playing outside stimulates--guess what--vision and motion centers of the brain, exactly the same as was found for playing video games.
Comparing to math is totally invalid. Most children do very little math, trying to avoid it as much as possible. It only exercises the whole mind because the mental exercise is novel. If doing simple arithmetic exercises made us better people mentally, then every cashier, who does tons of arithmetic exercises on the brain every day, should be a better person (mentally) than anyone else. The only other person who does more math (maybe not even) is a math professor.
Adobe wants to be able to say that anyone and everyone who breaks their encryption should be punished to the full extent of the law. No they've backed themselves away from the hardline. You can be guaranteed that they will have to answer to stock holders as to why they "caved" in to the EFF.
Many in the industry hailed Dmitry's arrest. Some of the glory has just been taken out of their celebration. It's more of a moral loss for Adobe, but that's what it was about from the beginning.
After all, arresting someone doesn't make your product more secure. Adobe wanted Dmitry arrested so that they could say, "See, people that violate the DCMA are really bad criminals that deserved to be locked up with drug dealers." With this most recent release, they don't have that anymore. So it is a concession, even if it seems hollow at this point.
They noted one teenager who played for 70 hours and had withdrawal symptoms when he abstained for 3 days. When you see someone mentioning such an extreme case, it is clear they have an agenda to push. There will always be people who are very obsessed with any thing of their choice. It could be a rock star (groupie), their weight (bulemic), or any of an infinitude of things that a person can be obsessed about. The fact that such a person is mentioned along with normal gamers just exposes the researchers hidden agenda.
Despite the fact that they are rare, you do not see the media giving tons of coverage to every person struck by lightning. People by now realize that even though being struck by lightning is rare, there is nothing spectacular about it. So the media doesn't cover it. If only the media would get over shark attacks. Sheesh. In any case, many people play video games, and many of them have different reasons for doing so: hobby, relaxation, obsession... Which type of person a media outlet chooses to cover as representing "gaming" tells more about the media outlet than it does about gamers themselves. Thankfully this article was mostly positive. Maybe I won't feel so sheepish about admitting to other adults that I play video games.
Re:Exploration sucked.
on
Review: A.I.
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· Score: 2
Your a moron pretend you know what they could do or how AI works.
Actually, I have degrees in philosophy and computer science, which is about as close as you can get to being knowledgable in a field that is far from perfected.
the imprint just told the program that she was his mom and his name was david.
Explain to me how you would alter a human brain to do these "simple" changes. You have no idea how much processing goes into such "simple" things as recognizing your mother. This is not something you can just turn off and on. You're thinking in folk-psychology terms.
We communicate to each other ideas such as:
Bob loves Mary.
Bob is jealous of Mary's love for Todd.
Mary does not desire Bob's affection.
But there isn't a chalk board in our brain where we can just change these things around. The information is stored in many places, and in many pieces.
Developing a robot to think like a human would almost certainly require some isometry to the way that humans think. If you start from the basics of human thought, the idea of information stored in neural nets, you end up with something that is not easy to manipulate, except through its inputs and outputs (i.e., talking to it).
So I'm not really against the "irreversible" part of the imprinting idea, I'm against the idea that you could imprint at all. If you disagree, tell me how it could be done! There's a lot that we don't know about the human brain, and what it would take to replicate it, but we do know that it wouldn't be this easy.
This movie was based on "SuperToys Last All Summer Long", which if I'm not mistaken, was written in the late 1960's. So the movie is all about what people thought of the possibilities of AI back then. We know a lot more now about AI, mainly that the theories presented here are bunk.
Bad Science #1:It is hard to make an AI "love". On the contrary, this is the easiest thing to do. In its simplest state, its just a variable that you set, i.e, Emotion = CONSTANT.LOVE, or Emotion = CONSTANT.HATE. The real tricky part is giving that constant meaning. But to build a robot with the capabilities of AI's David, love would be one of the first things you program. Without love, hate, and a host of other emotions, it would be impossible to make a robot learn all the things they need to know to be human. Emotions, along with basic needs for survival, are the building blocks of motivation. Without motivation, nothing has reason to learn.
Bad Science #2: It would be easy to create innumerable copies of David. False. David isn't something that you could just straight-out
program. There is simply so much information that goes into being a human that it would be impossible to list it all. Even if you could, it's too dynamic to represent with simplistic "if then" clauses. No, a being such as David would have to be programmed to program itself, either through evolutionary or neural programming. This process of programming would not be able to start at 5 or 10 years of age. It would have to start from birth. Think of how long it took you to realize the basic functions of society. It was a very long time. I'm 23 and still learning. There may be things we could do to speed this up, but it would not change the basic process. Furthermore, this process would not be replicable: each "David" would have it's own unique personality based on it's experiences. Personality similarities would be about what we see between human twins, no more that about 50%.
Bad Science #3:David would get stuck in a rut and sit there by the Blue Ferry for 2000 years. Bzzt. For the reasons mentioned above, the mere amount of intelligence that went into David would necessitate him not being able to get stuck in a "mental rut" like this.
Bad Science #4:Irreversible imprinting. It would be impossible to program something like David to magically change alter its mind to fit our primitive notions of folk-psychology. You wouldn't just be able to open up an AI's mind and cause it to "love" someone, any more than you could open up George W. Bush's mind and cause him to be Democrat. The representation at that point in David's life would be too complex to even understand. Our scientists would only know enough to get the mental learning process going, not to alter it once it's long on its way. Thoughts such as "love for mommy" are not a switch in the brain that can be turned on or off. Similarly, to program something of this complexity would necessitate at least a roughly isometric representation, which would imply the same, that you could not alter something as simple as "love for mommy" with a switch, or a sequence of random words.
Bad Science #5:"We can only bring a human back for a day, because once a space-time path is explored, it can never be explored again." This is just pure bullshit, intended for a tidy ending. I did like the robots at the end however, they were really cool.
But overall, the movie was good. The acting was realistic enough to make me suspend disbelief, despite all of the above.
But blaming the "Corporate Republic" is an intellectual cop-out. First of all, the entire concept is a load of bullshit. You better damn well believe that if the government had any real desire to shut down Microsoft or AOL, they could.
Funny, I thought the point being made is that the government really is really a puppet of corporate interests. Money buys you everything. Money buys you eyeballs, and recognition. Money also buys you a good image. And thus money buys you votes.
Corporations give money. Lot's of money. They give money to both sides. No matter who the "winner" of the election is, corporate America has them in its pocket. I'm sure some politicians stand up and say, "I will not take your money." But if there principles are firm, and they say this to enough companies, the politico will not have the money warchest to get elected again.
So we are only left with corporations that are bought. This is not to say that corporations want to turn us all into mindless slaves. But it is certainly the case that representation in government is more a representation of business than it is a representation of the populous.
The saving grace of this system is that there are many corporations, with differing interests. When corporations consolidate or end up with a ludicrous (sp?) market share, those who wish to participate in a given market (i.e., using an operating system) are subject to the whims of the one corporation that dominates all others.
Related to this, Microsoft is beating every other company the same way the US beat the USSR in the 80's--resources. Microsoft simply has too many resources, and it can bleed and bleed and bleed money until it dominates a product. Witness DirectX, IE, Windows. All of these were outclassed by current products on the market for many iterations. But Microsoft always has the money to keep plodding ahead, whereas the garage startup doesn't have the capital to work through 10 versions without any payback.
It's not that they are giving products away for free. IE is not free. You think that just because you don't pay $150 for the OS and $50 for the browser that the browser is free. No, they package the browser with the OS and suddenly the OS is $200. Those who have been using computers for more than a few years know that Microsoft has continually increased the price of its OS while packaging extra features into the OS for "free".
Bleh, I could go on forever. In any case, there is good reason to be suspect of corporate America. Calling your opponents words "bullshit" doesn't change that.
Fight Club was about anarchy, not nirvana. The movie was about making those things that made us humans first matter more. That is, life is more interesting and engaging when you have to fight to live, fight to eat, and so on. You never hear of people in starving African tribes going through existential crisis. That only comes when you have everything else. When you have all the basics, you can strive to acheive "unimportant" things, like status and money, you can simply not care, like the original poster was suggesting, or you can throw it all away and try to get it again, like Fight Club was suggesting. But this last option is anarchy, a far cry from inner peace.
Slashdot Mirror
Sundance and IFC come standard. Kinda cool.
It mentions Metropolis, which will not be released in the US until 25th of January, 2002. Quite new actually.
Exactly. Coming up with an original and creative architectural design cannot be estimated with much precision. But a construction schedule is only made after all the variables are known, design is complete, and so on. At this point in the game, you know exactly where every brick is supposed to lay, where every cross-beam will be bolted, and so on.
For software engineering, the design and construction are simultaneous. Once you're done figuring out exactly how to put everything together, it has already been put together.
Now there are "design documents" that are often written before programming a project, so one might say that there is design that goes prior to construction of software. But these design docs are largely a farce. If a programmer knew exactly how the "construction" of software would take place, he would have already written the software. The case is not similar to building bridges.
You've got bigger problems if you despise your work. I've worked at two companies, one where worked sucked, and one where work was great. I enjoyed reading dilbert and userfriendly throughout my stay at both companies.
You obviously don't understand IT if you think no one would program anything if it were not for money.
BTW, adequacy.org sucks.
What you talking about? Talent is cheap in this day and age. If you want to switch to Linux, lay off 40% of IT, put in an opening on monster.com saying your looking for Linux experience, and BOOM, you have 5000 resumes to sort through. You'll be able to revamp your entire department with very talented people at an ultra low price. This is not at all an exaggeration. I personally know many very talented people with master's degrees that can't even get an interview.
However, Businesses are too scared to do anything. They are too scared to switch to a lower cost solution, even if it would save them money within a year. After all, what do you think was the purpose of all the software and hardware made during the big boom? Was it to increase expenses? No, all software is designed to save money in some way. Software is designed to make information processing more efficient, and thus save money on personel. But no one is adopting new software, for no better reason than that they are scared of changing anything in this day and time. It has nothing to do with saving money, it's all about avoiding risk.
Come on, 256MB is cheap, cheap, cheap. You can get a single chip 256MB SDRAM module from retail outlets like Circuit City for only $80 (and that's in Manhattan!). If you go to Mom 'N Pop Computers, you'll probably get it for even less. There's no excuse not to upgrade your memory.
$15.00 + 4.5% sales tax = $15.68, which is not an even number. The cashier will be forced to open the register even if the prices on the pretaxed items are nice and round.
Won't you run out of xenon eventually? If you use up your propellant, why not stick to the traditional jet fuels?
Depends on what is being measured. I'm not talking moral superiority. America assumes that is has more military power, and more economic resources than any other country. Neither of these assumptions is arrogant, because they are both true. The thing is, the poster I was replying to never said what it was America was "arrogant" about. And I responded as I did because what sometimes seems arrogant is just honesty.
And you can't assume what I think is not reality, because you have no idea what I aspect of America I was analogizing as being like chess. So you cannot say whether I was being arrogant or not. And because you assume what you cannot know, your statement, accusing me of arrogance, is in fact arrogance where mine was not.
A chess grandmaster can easily beat me at chess. He mentions this fact in a non-chalant manner. Is this arrogance? Stating superiority that is fact is not arrogance.
As for the "self-interested" part of foreign policy. That made me laugh. What nation's foreign policy is not self-interested? You may as well describe a business's policies as "profit-driven". It's self-evident, and not interesting.
Regardless of what Bush had in mind when he said "Freedom itself was attacked today," I think his statement was correct in the respect I mentioned before. Osama bin Laden's stated goal is to reduce the United States into the Divided States. A single terrorist act is not going to bring us to war with ourselves, but it will induce paranoia, and willingness to accept a police-like state. If bin Laden reduces us to this, he has already won half the battle.
I live in Manhattan, was myself close to the carnage, and I'd have to disagree. Normally a liberal/libertarian, this week I have been almost totally behind Bush's way of handling this calamity. The US is a great nation, and we have to defend it. But I am totally opposed to giving up all of our freedoms, and instituting upon ourselves a Stalinesque government. For if this happens, the US will no longer be a great nation. There will be nothing in this nation worth defending. If we lose all our freedoms because of this terrorist act, I will personally leave this nation in disgust.
You should listen to Bush himself. He said it well, "Freedom itself was attacked today..." We are not just protecting our lives, we are protecting our way of life. If we give up all our freedom just to feel a little more safe. then there is no reason we should live in the US. We may just as well live in China, or Singapore, or Oceana.
You shouldn't do it that way. Slashdot will randomly insert spaces into really long words to keep the tables lined up correctly. Otherwise, everytime someone put in a really long word like thisssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss it would cause the page to be much wider than it should be. As it is, since spaces are inserted, the rendering of your page is not screwed up.
Anyway, since Slashdot allows href tags you should use them, and links will work fine, like this.
You originally said, " I would bet all that I own that there are hundreds if not thousands of farmers in any given state who could out-think the best of the dot-commers".
If you know anything about statistics, you'll know that when X% of some group measures higher on some scalar value than 100% of another group, that as X increases marginally, the averages between the two groups wildly diverge.
That is, if there exist 3000 farmers (from every state no less) "smarter" than every single dot commer, then this implies that farmers are on average much much smarter than dot commers. I would wager that the farmers would have to have at least twice the "smartness" than the dot commers, on average, for your statement to be true. This is simply statistical inference. And it shows the absurdity of your statement.
It would be equally false for me to say that there exist 3000 dot commers more intelligent than any farmer. It's simply not true, nor is almost any statement of its kind. You were indeed implying that farmers are vastly more intelligent than dot commers, whether you realized it or not.
As for "skill sets", I am simply saying apples are not oranges, and you seem to disagree. That is, I said that farmers do not have the skill set or the drive to obtain it. The skill set I am referring to is that of programming commerce. I am not referring to "skill" as some scale from 1 to a 100 where every single worker of every single occupation can be ranked.
There are many very skilled artisans who have no desire to do much, if anything, with a computer. They don't have the skill set to program internet related applications, and they do not have the drive to obtain these skills. This does not mean that they lack *all* skill, or that they have *no* drive. You are attacking a strawman.
Some people do have more enjoyment of menial work than the more "white collar" jobs. There are times myself when I long for the simplicity of the days I worked in fast food. But the simple truth is, if someone is given the choice between investing their time in being skilled in a white or blue collar occupation, they will almost always don the white collar.
The reasons are varied and numerous. And not everyone thinks this way. There is a great strand of anti-intellectuallism among those you describe as having superior intellect. I'm tempted to describe it as "sour grapes" but I'd hate to use an ad hominem.
You don't often hear of child geniuses saying, "My ultimate plan is to settle down to the simple life on a farm." Perhaps the nature of their curiosity causes them to want to avoid situations that are not rich in intellectually stimulating factors. The relative simplicity of the tasks can be easily gauged. The average programmer seeing the workings of a farm for the first time will not be as confused as a farmer seeing the workings of a computer for the first time. If computers were trivial and required no intelligence to use or learn, then there never would have been a demand for those knowledgable with them.
If this is GPLed, where's the source?
When it's machine code, the binary is the source. You just need to use hexdump to view it.
I agree that social interaction would probably exercise different areas of the brain than playing video games solo would. But I was comparing it to "playing outside" which does not necessarily indicate that friends are present. As a kid I would climb trees, explore the forest, kick a ball up against a wall, and so on. None of these things involved social interaction.
I also agree that getting outside and away from video games is a good thing to do every once and a while. I just don't think that the brain will be affected much differently. What will be affected is all of the things stimulated by physical exersion. Getting some physical exercise will keep your body in good shape, which is important to having a balanced mind.
What I disagree with is implying that playing outside will stimulate areas other than vision and motion. Playing outside is good not because of the mental areas it stimulates, but because it keeps the body healthy.
It's a bit of conjecture. But it is obvious that more brain activity comes from novel activities than repeated, mundane activities. You know what the sum 3+5 is with barely any thought. Give that problem to a kid who hasn't even seen a '+' sign before, and she will take plenty of time to ponder the answer. I'm just saying it's more likely that the children use more of their brain with math than video games because math is a more novel experience.
As for cashiers, it's not really an important point, but even in the US cashiers do plenty of math. Yes, the register says, "Change = 4.63". But then the person still has to break down 63 cents into 2 quarters, 1 dime, and 3 pennies. It's still arithmetic, just not adding or subtracting. It's more like changing between binary and decimal, except the system being translated into is US currency, where the units are quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies.
Comparing to math is totally invalid. Most children do very little math, trying to avoid it as much as possible. It only exercises the whole mind because the mental exercise is novel. If doing simple arithmetic exercises made us better people mentally, then every cashier, who does tons of arithmetic exercises on the brain every day, should be a better person (mentally) than anyone else. The only other person who does more math (maybe not even) is a math professor.
Did you notice the user id is 666?
You don't see cool info like this every day.
Many in the industry hailed Dmitry's arrest. Some of the glory has just been taken out of their celebration. It's more of a moral loss for Adobe, but that's what it was about from the beginning.
After all, arresting someone doesn't make your product more secure. Adobe wanted Dmitry arrested so that they could say, "See, people that violate the DCMA are really bad criminals that deserved to be locked up with drug dealers." With this most recent release, they don't have that anymore. So it is a concession, even if it seems hollow at this point.
Despite the fact that they are rare, you do not see the media giving tons of coverage to every person struck by lightning. People by now realize that even though being struck by lightning is rare, there is nothing spectacular about it. So the media doesn't cover it. If only the media would get over shark attacks. Sheesh. In any case, many people play video games, and many of them have different reasons for doing so: hobby, relaxation, obsession... Which type of person a media outlet chooses to cover as representing "gaming" tells more about the media outlet than it does about gamers themselves. Thankfully this article was mostly positive. Maybe I won't feel so sheepish about admitting to other adults that I play video games.
Actually, I have degrees in philosophy and computer science, which is about as close as you can get to being knowledgable in a field that is far from perfected.
Explain to me how you would alter a human brain to do these "simple" changes. You have no idea how much processing goes into such "simple" things as recognizing your mother. This is not something you can just turn off and on. You're thinking in folk-psychology terms.
We communicate to each other ideas such as:
- Bob loves Mary.
- Bob is jealous of Mary's love for Todd.
- Mary does not desire Bob's affection.
But there isn't a chalk board in our brain where we can just change these things around. The information is stored in many places, and in many pieces.Developing a robot to think like a human would almost certainly require some isometry to the way that humans think. If you start from the basics of human thought, the idea of information stored in neural nets, you end up with something that is not easy to manipulate, except through its inputs and outputs (i.e., talking to it).
So I'm not really against the "irreversible" part of the imprinting idea, I'm against the idea that you could imprint at all. If you disagree, tell me how it could be done! There's a lot that we don't know about the human brain, and what it would take to replicate it, but we do know that it wouldn't be this easy.
Bad Science #1: It is hard to make an AI "love". On the contrary, this is the easiest thing to do. In its simplest state, its just a variable that you set, i.e, Emotion = CONSTANT.LOVE, or Emotion = CONSTANT.HATE. The real tricky part is giving that constant meaning. But to build a robot with the capabilities of AI's David, love would be one of the first things you program. Without love, hate, and a host of other emotions, it would be impossible to make a robot learn all the things they need to know to be human. Emotions, along with basic needs for survival, are the building blocks of motivation. Without motivation, nothing has reason to learn.
Bad Science #2: It would be easy to create innumerable copies of David. False. David isn't something that you could just straight-out program. There is simply so much information that goes into being a human that it would be impossible to list it all. Even if you could, it's too dynamic to represent with simplistic "if then" clauses. No, a being such as David would have to be programmed to program itself, either through evolutionary or neural programming. This process of programming would not be able to start at 5 or 10 years of age. It would have to start from birth. Think of how long it took you to realize the basic functions of society. It was a very long time. I'm 23 and still learning. There may be things we could do to speed this up, but it would not change the basic process. Furthermore, this process would not be replicable: each "David" would have it's own unique personality based on it's experiences. Personality similarities would be about what we see between human twins, no more that about 50%.
Bad Science #3: David would get stuck in a rut and sit there by the Blue Ferry for 2000 years. Bzzt. For the reasons mentioned above, the mere amount of intelligence that went into David would necessitate him not being able to get stuck in a "mental rut" like this.
Bad Science #4: Irreversible imprinting. It would be impossible to program something like David to magically change alter its mind to fit our primitive notions of folk-psychology. You wouldn't just be able to open up an AI's mind and cause it to "love" someone, any more than you could open up George W. Bush's mind and cause him to be Democrat. The representation at that point in David's life would be too complex to even understand. Our scientists would only know enough to get the mental learning process going, not to alter it once it's long on its way. Thoughts such as "love for mommy" are not a switch in the brain that can be turned on or off. Similarly, to program something of this complexity would necessitate at least a roughly isometric representation, which would imply the same, that you could not alter something as simple as "love for mommy" with a switch, or a sequence of random words.
Bad Science #5: "We can only bring a human back for a day, because once a space-time path is explored, it can never be explored again." This is just pure bullshit, intended for a tidy ending. I did like the robots at the end however, they were really cool.
But overall, the movie was good. The acting was realistic enough to make me suspend disbelief, despite all of the above.
Funny, I thought the point being made is that the government really is really a puppet of corporate interests. Money buys you everything. Money buys you eyeballs, and recognition. Money also buys you a good image. And thus money buys you votes.
Corporations give money. Lot's of money. They give money to both sides. No matter who the "winner" of the election is, corporate America has them in its pocket. I'm sure some politicians stand up and say, "I will not take your money." But if there principles are firm, and they say this to enough companies, the politico will not have the money warchest to get elected again.
So we are only left with corporations that are bought. This is not to say that corporations want to turn us all into mindless slaves. But it is certainly the case that representation in government is more a representation of business than it is a representation of the populous.
The saving grace of this system is that there are many corporations, with differing interests. When corporations consolidate or end up with a ludicrous (sp?) market share, those who wish to participate in a given market (i.e., using an operating system) are subject to the whims of the one corporation that dominates all others.
Related to this, Microsoft is beating every other company the same way the US beat the USSR in the 80's--resources. Microsoft simply has too many resources, and it can bleed and bleed and bleed money until it dominates a product. Witness DirectX, IE, Windows. All of these were outclassed by current products on the market for many iterations. But Microsoft always has the money to keep plodding ahead, whereas the garage startup doesn't have the capital to work through 10 versions without any payback.
It's not that they are giving products away for free. IE is not free. You think that just because you don't pay $150 for the OS and $50 for the browser that the browser is free. No, they package the browser with the OS and suddenly the OS is $200. Those who have been using computers for more than a few years know that Microsoft has continually increased the price of its OS while packaging extra features into the OS for "free".
Bleh, I could go on forever. In any case, there is good reason to be suspect of corporate America. Calling your opponents words "bullshit" doesn't change that.
Fight Club was about anarchy, not nirvana. The movie was about making those things that made us humans first matter more. That is, life is more interesting and engaging when you have to fight to live, fight to eat, and so on. You never hear of people in starving African tribes going through existential crisis. That only comes when you have everything else. When you have all the basics, you can strive to acheive "unimportant" things, like status and money, you can simply not care, like the original poster was suggesting, or you can throw it all away and try to get it again, like Fight Club was suggesting. But this last option is anarchy, a far cry from inner peace.