> Whether or not you deny the existence of gods or doubt them, it does not nullify the rights they bestow upon you.
Huh? If something does not exist it cannot grant me any rights, can it? When you insist that your rights are granted by $DIETY, then that is not good enough a reason for me, an athiest, to not acknowledge these rights. What if your religion gives people with 12 fingers the 'right' to steal my stuff and keep it?
Can't we just accept that people have no rights at all by default? You have rights because some time ago a few people came together and decided it would be nice to have rights, so they agreed on some rules about how they wanted to be treated by eachother.
You'd be suprised how little time it takes for the air to escape from a relatively small container such as the Enterprise into a practically infinite vacuum through a hole a few inch in diameter.
What bothers me more is the smoke in the left side of the picture. Anyone here knows how smoke 'should' behave in space?
Don't be ridiculous. The problem isn't that people can't resist, the problem is that they don't. They don't care. Giving every person in the UK a gun is not going to change anything.
"The key to the computer equipment is no different to the key to a locked drawer," the court found. "The contents of the drawer exist independently of the suspect; so does the key to it. The contents may or may not be incriminating: the key is neutral."
I guess we can conclude that destroying those cards wouldn't even be destroying evidence, since they are apperantly 'neutral' and independent of the incriminating stuff.
I think it is safe to assume they will make a copy of your HD. Your thumb 'trick' is a great way to get screwed for attempting to destroy evidence or something like that.
I'm sure many people said they were going to fly, just moments before they died from impact with the ground. These Wright guys had a plan, and an educated person in their time could have looked at their plan and said: 'this might actually work.'
The CO2 to fuel thing is more like saying 'I'm going to fly!' while jumping of a high building while flapping your arms and making bird noises.
5 client names can be sorted with bogosort, without seeing the source you'd never notice the crappy algorithm. How about a list of 5000 names from a file...
Sorting is fun. Sorting huuuuuge lists as fast as possible is even more fun.
> Hogwash. Top-quality teachers are probably just as hard if not harder to find than top-quality athletes.
Mostly because it's so hard to tell who is a top-quality teacher. It is extremely easy to measure the quality of an athlete, because quality is very well defined. With teachers it is much harder to measure how good they are.
> The sheer volume of data contained within a single strand of DNA flies in the face of the idea that something the size of an ant can't have a complex form of intelligence.
Well I could say the same about bacteria, or potatoes. I wouldn't be suprised at all if someone could name a plant with more genes than an ant. The thought that something that happens to have lots of genes must therefore be intelligent is ridiculous.
> As another poster pointed out, your abstraction of "do something to [the input] in your brain" covers up much of the difference between human and computer. It's like saying "the Earth is a basketball! They are both round!" It is, quite frankly, irresponsible, and it's a shame that this viewpoint is so widespread.
The oversimplification is obviously wrong (Well, technically it is of course correct that the Earth is kinda round and so is a basketball, but this doesn't prove that they have other properties in common.), but I don't see how it is irresponsible. Could you explain?
Suppose someone created an huge lookup table (impossible because the thing would be so huge, but its size would be finite) that mapped ALL possible neural inputs over a period of a hundred years (in time slices of 1 Planck time in length) to some neural output, and then created a human that didn't have a brain but used the created lookup table. This hypothetical human would be unable to think or learn, but with the right lookup table its behavior would be impossible to distinguish from a 'real' human (at least until the 100 years were over...).
With a large enough lookup table, can't we just say the table itself is intelligent?
> Just tell it a reasonably non-trivial joke and ask the machine to explain what is funny there. Call me when machine can handle that one without having a database of all the jokes in the world.
Suppose someone writes a program that does just that. Will that make you say 'This machine is intelligent!'? I'm sure it won't. You will say, hah, this machine may be able to do X, but it will never handle Y! Call me when you have a machine that can handle Y.
We've seen this kind of thing over and over again. I believe the last X was chess?
> Unless the Quantum Mind theory is true however (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind).
The whole 'maybe the conciousness has something to do with quantum stuff!' thing has always struck me as something that was made up by people who didn't like the thought that the human mind may just be the effect of a complex chemical reaction, and wanted to come up with something that allows for more 'magic'. But I must admit that isn't a good reason to reject the theory. Having said that I see little reason to focus on the Quantum Mind thing while we still don't understand the non-quantum part of the brain (that we know to be important and to exist, unlike the quantum part which may have no significant influence at all).
> Also, we humans all _feel_ that we are alive. If we are dead, we stop feeling that we are alive. A cash register does not _feel_ that it is alive. How can we ever measure, or say for certain, whether a machine _feels_ it is alive in an identical way, or is just the functional equivalent of a cash register that looks up memories and responds according to rules?
Well, since you insist on bringing this up, how can we ever measure, or say for certain, whether another human _feels_ he/she is alive? Maybe all other humans merely pretend to think and have feelings.
Even if we somehow had all the information about the universe stored a Divine Encyclopedia, I find it hard to imagine one could actually finish reading that thing during a lifetime (best look for 'Secret of Life Eternal' in the index...). Even if we never learned anything new about the universe a human could still spend a lifetime learning the stuff we already know (I doubt a single human brain can remember that much stuff).
Re:How does the observation get considered?
on
No Naked Black Holes
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· Score: 1
Beyond the event horizon the only possible path for all things is towards the center, not away from it. So you can never see what is in the center, but you could look back where you came from and wave goodbye to your friends and family (who would be unable to observe this since you passed the event horizon...).
I hear funny stuff happens with ring-shaped singularities, so I'm not sure what would happen in that case, but when the singularity is a single point in the center of the black hole, you can never observe it even from inside the event horizon.
> Anything based on a computer simulation is based on our arbitrarily incomplete knowledge. To base even the least significant conclusions upon it seems laughably irresponsible and unscientific.
None of our knowledge about the world is 100% certain and we can never know if our knowledge of the universe is complete. However, would you say it is laughably irresponsible and unscientific for me to predict that when I push you off a cliff that you are going to accelerate towards ground? Maybe gravity will make an exception for you, because trombones happen to be its favorite instruments and it likes the number 75. I can't say with 100% certainty that it won't.
The whole point of creating models to describe the universe is to use them to predict stuff. These predictions can be compared to our observations, and then we can say 'The prediction appears to be correct!' or 'This model appears to be unable to make an accurate prediction under these circumstances (so it's either wrong or incomplete, or we screwed up the experiment)'. Our current models are pretty accurate and to try and use them to conclude stuff about the universe is not unscientific in any way (provided you are prepared to abandon these conclusions when you make observations than contradict them).
Slashdot Mirror
> It may be that the purpose for biological intelligence is to create machine intelligence.
On what evidence do you base this statement? Please convince me, I'd love to have a purpose.
I see you own a computer. Surely you could have sent your money to Africa instead?
Yes, let's pretend it is impossible to torture someone without causing long-term damage.
Why not remove the middle-man and take a pill that makes you happy? Let's be honest that is what your suggestion is all about.
> Whether or not you deny the existence of gods or doubt them, it does not nullify the rights they bestow upon you.
Huh? If something does not exist it cannot grant me any rights, can it? When you insist that your rights are granted by $DIETY, then that is not good enough a reason for me, an athiest, to not acknowledge these rights. What if your religion gives people with 12 fingers the 'right' to steal my stuff and keep it?
Can't we just accept that people have no rights at all by default? You have rights because some time ago a few people came together and decided it would be nice to have rights, so they agreed on some rules about how they wanted to be treated by eachother.
You'd be suprised how little time it takes for the air to escape from a relatively small container such as the Enterprise into a practically infinite vacuum through a hole a few inch in diameter.
What bothers me more is the smoke in the left side of the picture. Anyone here knows how smoke 'should' behave in space?
Don't be ridiculous. The problem isn't that people can't resist, the problem is that they don't. They don't care. Giving every person in the UK a gun is not going to change anything.
That is awesome. From the article:
"The key to the computer equipment is no different to the key to a locked drawer," the court found. "The contents of the drawer exist independently of the suspect; so does the key to it. The contents may or may not be incriminating: the key is neutral."
I guess we can conclude that destroying those cards wouldn't even be destroying evidence, since they are apperantly 'neutral' and independent of the incriminating stuff.
I like your card thingy.
I think it is safe to assume they will make a copy of your HD. Your thumb 'trick' is a great way to get screwed for attempting to destroy evidence or something like that.
Vista is teaching is to solve captchas?
I'm sure many people said they were going to fly, just moments before they died from impact with the ground. These Wright guys had a plan, and an educated person in their time could have looked at their plan and said: 'this might actually work.'
The CO2 to fuel thing is more like saying 'I'm going to fly!' while jumping of a high building while flapping your arms and making bird noises.
Technically men have the complete source, just no compiler.
5 client names can be sorted with bogosort, without seeing the source you'd never notice the crappy algorithm. How about a list of 5000 names from a file...
Sorting is fun. Sorting huuuuuge lists as fast as possible is even more fun.
> Hogwash. Top-quality teachers are probably just as hard if not harder to find than top-quality athletes.
Mostly because it's so hard to tell who is a top-quality teacher. It is extremely easy to measure the quality of an athlete, because quality is very well defined. With teachers it is much harder to measure how good they are.
'I gave it some tuna and then it wouldn't stop following me'?
> The sheer volume of data contained within a single strand of DNA flies in the face of the idea that something the size of an ant can't have a complex form of intelligence.
Well I could say the same about bacteria, or potatoes. I wouldn't be suprised at all if someone could name a plant with more genes than an ant. The thought that something that happens to have lots of genes must therefore be intelligent is ridiculous.
> As another poster pointed out, your abstraction of "do something to [the input] in your brain" covers up much of the difference between human and computer. It's like saying "the Earth is a basketball! They are both round!" It is, quite frankly, irresponsible, and it's a shame that this viewpoint is so widespread.
The oversimplification is obviously wrong (Well, technically it is of course correct that the Earth is kinda round and so is a basketball, but this doesn't prove that they have other properties in common.), but I don't see how it is irresponsible. Could you explain?
Why else would we try to eat your brain? Qualiaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Qualiaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
Suppose someone created an huge lookup table (impossible because the thing would be so huge, but its size would be finite) that mapped ALL possible neural inputs over a period of a hundred years (in time slices of 1 Planck time in length) to some neural output, and then created a human that didn't have a brain but used the created lookup table. This hypothetical human would be unable to think or learn, but with the right lookup table its behavior would be impossible to distinguish from a 'real' human (at least until the 100 years were over...).
With a large enough lookup table, can't we just say the table itself is intelligent?
> Just tell it a reasonably non-trivial joke and ask the machine to explain what is funny there. Call me when machine can handle that one without having a database of all the jokes in the world.
Suppose someone writes a program that does just that. Will that make you say 'This machine is intelligent!'? I'm sure it won't. You will say, hah, this machine may be able to do X, but it will never handle Y! Call me when you have a machine that can handle Y.
We've seen this kind of thing over and over again. I believe the last X was chess?
> Unless the Quantum Mind theory is true however (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind).
The whole 'maybe the conciousness has something to do with quantum stuff!' thing has always struck me as something that was made up by people who didn't like the thought that the human mind may just be the effect of a complex chemical reaction, and wanted to come up with something that allows for more 'magic'. But I must admit that isn't a good reason to reject the theory. Having said that I see little reason to focus on the Quantum Mind thing while we still don't understand the non-quantum part of the brain (that we know to be important and to exist, unlike the quantum part which may have no significant influence at all).
> Also, we humans all _feel_ that we are alive. If we are dead, we stop feeling that we are alive. A cash register does not _feel_ that it is alive. How can we ever measure, or say for certain, whether a machine _feels_ it is alive in an identical way, or is just the functional equivalent of a cash register that looks up memories and responds according to rules?
Well, since you insist on bringing this up, how can we ever measure, or say for certain, whether another human _feels_ he/she is alive? Maybe all other humans merely pretend to think and have feelings.
Even if we somehow had all the information about the universe stored a Divine Encyclopedia, I find it hard to imagine one could actually finish reading that thing during a lifetime (best look for 'Secret of Life Eternal' in the index...). Even if we never learned anything new about the universe a human could still spend a lifetime learning the stuff we already know (I doubt a single human brain can remember that much stuff).
Beyond the event horizon the only possible path for all things is towards the center, not away from it. So you can never see what is in the center, but you could look back where you came from and wave goodbye to your friends and family (who would be unable to observe this since you passed the event horizon...).
I hear funny stuff happens with ring-shaped singularities, so I'm not sure what would happen in that case, but when the singularity is a single point in the center of the black hole, you can never observe it even from inside the event horizon.
I feel like a pedant here, but there is but one way you can colide with another thing head-on, regardless of the number of dimensions involved:
Suppose we have an object A. We have n dimensions and the speed of A in a dimension x is A_x.
We have an object B that is going to collide head-on with A. How is B moving? Exactly opposite to A, like this:
B_1 = - A_1 ...
B_2 = - A_2
B_3 = - A_3
B_(n-1) = - A_(n-1)
B_n = - A_n
The only way to collide head-on with multiple things at the same time is to move into multiple directions at once, which is tricky.
> Anything based on a computer simulation is based on our arbitrarily incomplete knowledge. To base even the least significant conclusions upon it seems laughably irresponsible and unscientific.
None of our knowledge about the world is 100% certain and we can never know if our knowledge of the universe is complete. However, would you say it is laughably irresponsible and unscientific for me to predict that when I push you off a cliff that you are going to accelerate towards ground? Maybe gravity will make an exception for you, because trombones happen to be its favorite instruments and it likes the number 75. I can't say with 100% certainty that it won't.
The whole point of creating models to describe the universe is to use them to predict stuff. These predictions can be compared to our observations, and then we can say 'The prediction appears to be correct!' or 'This model appears to be unable to make an accurate prediction under these circumstances (so it's either wrong or incomplete, or we screwed up the experiment)'. Our current models are pretty accurate and to try and use them to conclude stuff about the universe is not unscientific in any way (provided you are prepared to abandon these conclusions when you make observations than contradict them).