Why does everyone seem to equate "long half-life" with "bad" and "short half-life" with "good"?
That is an oversimplification, true, but it's not entirely irrational. Things with really long half-lives are essentially stable, things with somewhat long half-lives aren't. If we were able to transmute a material that is somewhat dangerous for centuries to a material that's really dangerous for a day and then not at all dangerous, that could be helpful. It may be more practical to strictly control exposure for a day than to control it even a little for several centuries.
Mass-mooing can work well in situations where a group of people are being "herded" around. Not everyone will join in, of course, but enough will to get a laugh.
If there are a lot of people really wound up and excited (and maybe a little drunk), that may be a good time for a mass-howl. I started a mass-howl at a First Night (public New Year's Eve celebration) in Boston a few years ago. The echoing of howls off of office buildings was pretty cool.
Step #2: Make 100 anonymous $1,000 purchases to "friends"
Step #3: "Friends" make legitamate purchases from you on Ebay.
You forgot Step #1a: Spend all day standing at a machine feeding in five thousand $20 bills.
No, some of your drug customers might conceivably pay with this system -- just like they now pay with cash -- but you'd still have to funnel the accumulated funds through the accounts of legitimate-looking businesses to launder it.
Some wealthy do-gooder could pay amazon to use this feature to the public's benefit, linking words such as "porn" to self-help books about sex-addiction...
How about linking searches for self-help books to a book on addiction to self-help books?
... and "bomb-making" to a similar book about dealing with pent-up anger...
Better yet, link to a book about non-violent ways of dealing with a society that's been fucked up by the manipulations of rich assholes.
Seriously, though, to whatever extent this can be meaningfully described as an addiction, I think it might be better compared to over-eating disorders (bingeing) than to drug addictions, at least in terms of treatment.
With drug addictions, the idea is to minimize the dosage, hopefully to zero or at least to some very low "maintenance level". But with over-eating disorders, it's not just a matter of avoiding food, but eating healthy amounts of healthy food, and giving your body time to digest it properly. The analogy to treating a compulsive information disorder seems obvious. (Ob:IANAD.)
One could also make obvious comparisons to the ubiquity of unhealthy food in much of society and the ubiquity of bad information. Not just incorrect information, but badly prepared information from bad "ingredients", presented in ways that can't be meaningfully "digested".
Also, I bet there's an information-access disorder analogous to anorexia -- people who avoid as much information as they can.
Of course, public fear of nuclear power has absolutely nothing to do with the people responsible for Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the people who'll happily build a nuclear reactor on top of a fault line as long as the right bribes will get you the necessary permits. Nope, it's all Nader's fault.
Right.
Look, I agree that much of the public response to nuclear energy is irrational, but it's hardly as simple as you portray it. I'd happily live next to a nuclear power plant -- if the people who financed it, the people who signed the permits for it, the people who designed it, the people who built it, and the people who ran it all lived on my block.
And as far as nuclear irrationality goes, it's hard to top the fact that some people think that there's some point to keeping 10,000 nuclear weapons on hand. And the fact that so many people obviously don't think about that.
Won't it only be useful for travel away from the sun?
Nope. They could maneuver in a way similar to that sailing ships use to go upwind. By angling the sails correctly and using the sun's gravity field, a solar sail vessel can fly "upwind" toward the sun. See this NASA reference for a basic primer.
... that they still cost 10 times as much as gold.
"Economy of scale: Reduction in cost per unit resulting from increased production, realized through operational efficiencies. Economies of scale can be accomplished because as production increases, the cost of producing each additional unit falls."
Or to put it another way, the prototype of the CPU in your computer probably costed a hell of a lot more than "10 times as much as gold", but you probably didn't pay that much for yours.
It's entirely predictable and unsurprising that some of the possible uses of nanotubes will be designed and sometimes prototyped before nanotubes are available in sufficient quantity, quality, and economy to make those uses widely available. The R&D of cheaper production techniques that feed into (and are fed by) economies of scale wouldn't even begin without speculations and prototypes.
The real kicker is expecting people to jump to a completely other hardware platform just to indulge in OS 10 niftiness.
Well, maybe I'm just a twisted, freakish excuse for a human being, but that's exactly what I did. And I know a couple of other people who did, too. (Before the Switch campaign started.)
Sure, it didn't hurt that Apple makes good-quality hardware, but "OS X niftiness" was the deciding factor.
As a PC user, I was used to buying a machine and having a processor with double the clockspeed a year down the line... And now Apple has pulled the same trick:(
Yeah, they oughta just stop making faster processors.
And what's with those silly auto-mobiles? I just bought a new horse! It's not like anyone really needs to go faster than a horse can run, after all.
(To be honest, though, I know what you mean. I'm already feeling like my poor 2-year-old 500MHz G3 iMac is hopelessly oudated, even though it runs my everyday stuff just fine.)
I am shocked, shocked ...
on
Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 1
... to see that Intel picked today to announce a faster Pentium 4. Gosh, what a coincidence!
Re:Reference Source
on
Nanotechnology
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· Score: 0, Troll
Most of what I've read about nanotechnology has come from Scientific American. From a layman's point of view their nanotech section is probably the best reference there is.
Yeah, it's pretty good. Which is kind of ironic, given their original foot-in-mouth reaction to Drexler's original speculations.
(It's worth mentioning that Drexler's speculations have actually tended more toward the conservative, all things considered. He's evidently been exasperated at times by some of the, um, let's say "overly enthusiastic" nanotech cheerleaders. See: Abrupt Change, Nonsense, Nobels, and Other Topics, especially the section titled "The Problem of Nonsense in Nanotechnology".)
Re:Where do you keep the batteries?
on
Nanotechnology
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· Score: 2, Insightful
biology, or rather evolution, has come up with some fairly novel ways for cells to create energy, ie. metabolize stuff via reduction, etc. cockroaches don't seem to have any problem, do they?
reproduction, on the other hand, probably isn't desired of nanobots. certainly not uncontrolled reproduction (ask Bill Joy;). biological organisms spend huge amounts of energy on reproduction. lift that requirement and the bot may be able to scavenge enough to survive.
Right. And "free-floating" nanobots wouldn't have to spend as much energy scavenging, either. It's not like they'll just be dumped into a vat of seawater; presumably fuel/nutrients will be provided as relatively ready-to-hand as the materials they'll need to build whatever they're gonna build.
Substrate-based molecular manufacturing is probably more straightforward (and therefore may happen first). Free-floating molecular manufacturing may end up being more flexible (and therefore also worth working toward). Actually, what may end up being best is a mixed approach, some kind of substrate-in-soup thing, and/or different approaches used for different desired results.
Besides which, does anyone know how long it takes to make a jet engine now, starting from raw materials? Weeks? Months?
These media conglomarates also come with a political point of view.
And even if they didn't come with an overt political point of view, they support one by default. Nearly every commercial ad is, in effect, a political ad marketing the corporatist socioeconomic world view.
My point is simply that we haven't even begun to understand consciousness in any way shape or form. People who say it's a result of a soul, or it doesn't really exist, or is the result of a complex thinking machine, are all deluding themselves. At this point, there is simply no way anyone can seriously speculate about it. We don't even completely understand the ways in which physical matter interacts in our universe, nor whether what we know as physical matter is all there is that is here.
It's beyond us right now, and is likely to remain so for a long time.
If there's no way anyone can seriously speculate about it, then there's no way of meaningfully speculating how far beyond us it is and how long it will remain that way.
Soldering, repairing, and fixing mechanics has nothing to do with AI. Its just mechanics. Like car repairing. I can't see an engineer getting his degree for oil and lube change. I see the MIT students fixing little robots just the same. Its cool, its mechanics, but I don't see how's connected to AI engineering.
How much do you know about AI in general and about robotics-based approaches to AI? No offense meant, but unless you have a better understanding of both those things than it sounds like you do, why would you think it matters to anyone that you don't see how they're connected?
Re:Sci-fi has already taught us the answer.
on
AI Going Nowhere?
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· Score: 1
Every sci-fi disaster involving AI has been a result of giving the AI too much control. How dangerous would the computer in Wargames have been if all it could do was turn on a green light that said "launch nukes now, please!"
Well, that depends on the thought processes of whoever saw the green light, and the general context in which they were seeing it. The former is relatively easy to address -- make sure that the people watching for the green light don't assume that it's correct. The latter is trickier -- even if you don't assume that the green light is correct, will you have any way of checking whether it's correct? Or will you be put in a situation where you pretty much have to take its advice, because that's the only information you have and/or there's no time to doublecheck?
Putting humans in the loop means nothing if there's only one loop.
I thought we already covered all of this a long, long time ago.
Only in the sense of "covered" that means "repeatedly hand-waved away with simplistic responses, usually without reading what the person actually has to say".
The possible downsides of technological advances and possible ways of ameliorating them are always worth discussing, but Slashdot is obviously not a good place for that to happen. Anyone got any pointers to places where real discussions like this can happen?
No offence, but how exactly is someone knowing your email address getting "burned"? Can we please get a little perspective? You weren't mugged or shot. You weren't targeted by the government because of your beliefs. You weren't even called by those annoying telemarketers. You got some email, that you probably filtered out anyway. Or deleted it in.5 seconds.
I hate spam too, but please think outside the monitor every once in a while. This is why people don't treat geeks seriously.
You mean because many of us will jump on a casual use of a word and blow that particular usage all out of proportion? Yeah, I don't blame some people for losing patience over that sort of lame pedantry.
(If I were mugged, shot, and/or targetted by a government because of my beliefs, I think I might use a less mild word than "burned", unless I were going for humorous understatement. If you were at least being an accurate pedant, you would note that "burned" has a common usage of "taken advantage of". Which could easily be argued to be an appropriate usage in the context in which it was used.)
Before long... they will be interested in patenting web content next. I can see it now, "No really, we are the ones who came up with the idea that websites could have 'information'."
I hereby nominate you as a competitor in the Long Jump category in the next Olympics.
Slashdot Mirror
Pedant -> pedantry
That is an oversimplification, true, but it's not entirely irrational. Things with really long half-lives are essentially stable, things with somewhat long half-lives aren't. If we were able to transmute a material that is somewhat dangerous for centuries to a material that's really dangerous for a day and then not at all dangerous, that could be helpful. It may be more practical to strictly control exposure for a day than to control it even a little for several centuries.
Mass-mooing can work well in situations where a group of people are being "herded" around. Not everyone will join in, of course, but enough will to get a laugh.
If there are a lot of people really wound up and excited (and maybe a little drunk), that may be a good time for a mass-howl. I started a mass-howl at a First Night (public New Year's Eve celebration) in Boston a few years ago. The echoing of howls off of office buildings was pretty cool.
Step #1: Earn $100,000 selling cocaine.
Step #2: Make 100 anonymous $1,000 purchases to "friends"
Step #3: "Friends" make legitamate purchases from you on Ebay.
You forgot Step #1a: Spend all day standing at a machine feeding in five thousand $20 bills.
No, some of your drug customers might conceivably pay with this system -- just like they now pay with cash -- but you'd still have to funnel the accumulated funds through the accounts of legitimate-looking businesses to launder it.
How about linking searches for self-help books to a book on addiction to self-help books?
Better yet, link to a book about non-violent ways of dealing with a society that's been fucked up by the manipulations of rich assholes.
Seriously, though, to whatever extent this can be meaningfully described as an addiction, I think it might be better compared to over-eating disorders (bingeing) than to drug addictions, at least in terms of treatment.
With drug addictions, the idea is to minimize the dosage, hopefully to zero or at least to some very low "maintenance level". But with over-eating disorders, it's not just a matter of avoiding food, but eating healthy amounts of healthy food, and giving your body time to digest it properly. The analogy to treating a compulsive information disorder seems obvious. (Ob:IANAD.)
One could also make obvious comparisons to the ubiquity of unhealthy food in much of society and the ubiquity of bad information. Not just incorrect information, but badly prepared information from bad "ingredients", presented in ways that can't be meaningfully "digested".
Also, I bet there's an information-access disorder analogous to anorexia -- people who avoid as much information as they can.
Right.
Look, I agree that much of the public response to nuclear energy is irrational, but it's hardly as simple as you portray it. I'd happily live next to a nuclear power plant -- if the people who financed it, the people who signed the permits for it, the people who designed it, the people who built it, and the people who ran it all lived on my block.
And as far as nuclear irrationality goes, it's hard to top the fact that some people think that there's some point to keeping 10,000 nuclear weapons on hand. And the fact that so many people obviously don't think about that.
Nope. They could maneuver in a way similar to that sailing ships use to go upwind. By angling the sails correctly and using the sun's gravity field, a solar sail vessel can fly "upwind" toward the sun. See this NASA reference for a basic primer.
"Economy of scale: Reduction in cost per unit resulting from increased production, realized through operational efficiencies. Economies of scale can be accomplished because as production increases, the cost of producing each additional unit falls."
Or to put it another way, the prototype of the CPU in your computer probably costed a hell of a lot more than "10 times as much as gold", but you probably didn't pay that much for yours.
It's entirely predictable and unsurprising that some of the possible uses of nanotubes will be designed and sometimes prototyped before nanotubes are available in sufficient quantity, quality, and economy to make those uses widely available. The R&D of cheaper production techniques that feed into (and are fed by) economies of scale wouldn't even begin without speculations and prototypes.
Linus doesn't need one of his own. The Linux RDF exists as a distributed system.
(And the Microsoft RDF is generated by the flow of cash through their marketing department.)
Well, maybe I'm just a twisted, freakish excuse for a human being, but that's exactly what I did. And I know a couple of other people who did, too. (Before the Switch campaign started.)
Sure, it didn't hurt that Apple makes good-quality hardware, but "OS X niftiness" was the deciding factor.
Okay, that's it. It's now official. I'm old .
Yeah, they oughta just stop making faster processors.
And what's with those silly auto-mobiles? I just bought a new horse! It's not like anyone really needs to go faster than a horse can run, after all.
(To be honest, though, I know what you mean. I'm already feeling like my poor 2-year-old 500MHz G3 iMac is hopelessly oudated, even though it runs my everyday stuff just fine.)
... to see that Intel picked today to announce a faster Pentium 4. Gosh, what a coincidence!
I could've sworn I previewed that. Try again.
Yeah, it's pretty good. Which is kind of ironic, given their original foot-in-mouth reaction to Drexler's original speculations.
(It's worth mentioning that Drexler's speculations have actually tended more toward the conservative, all things considered. He's evidently been exasperated at times by some of the, um, let's say "overly enthusiastic" nanotech cheerleaders. See: Abrupt Change, Nonsense, Nobels, and Other Topics, especially the section titled "The Problem of Nonsense in Nanotechnology".)
reproduction, on the other hand, probably isn't desired of nanobots. certainly not uncontrolled reproduction (ask Bill Joy ;). biological organisms spend huge amounts of energy on reproduction. lift that requirement and the bot may be able to scavenge enough to survive.
Right. And "free-floating" nanobots wouldn't have to spend as much energy scavenging, either. It's not like they'll just be dumped into a vat of seawater; presumably fuel/nutrients will be provided as relatively ready-to-hand as the materials they'll need to build whatever they're gonna build.
Substrate-based molecular manufacturing is probably more straightforward (and therefore may happen first). Free-floating molecular manufacturing may end up being more flexible (and therefore also worth working toward). Actually, what may end up being best is a mixed approach, some kind of substrate-in-soup thing, and/or different approaches used for different desired results.
Besides which, does anyone know how long it takes to make a jet engine now, starting from raw materials? Weeks? Months?
They could, but maybe they have personal reasons for wanting to stay in the US.
And even if they didn't come with an overt political point of view, they support one by default. Nearly every commercial ad is, in effect, a political ad marketing the corporatist socioeconomic world view.
It's beyond us right now, and is likely to remain so for a long time.
If there's no way anyone can seriously speculate about it, then there's no way of meaningfully speculating how far beyond us it is and how long it will remain that way.
How much do you know about AI in general and about robotics-based approaches to AI? No offense meant, but unless you have a better understanding of both those things than it sounds like you do, why would you think it matters to anyone that you don't see how they're connected?
Well, that depends on the thought processes of whoever saw the green light, and the general context in which they were seeing it. The former is relatively easy to address -- make sure that the people watching for the green light don't assume that it's correct. The latter is trickier -- even if you don't assume that the green light is correct, will you have any way of checking whether it's correct? Or will you be put in a situation where you pretty much have to take its advice, because that's the only information you have and/or there's no time to doublecheck?
Putting humans in the loop means nothing if there's only one loop.
Only in the sense of "covered" that means "repeatedly hand-waved away with simplistic responses, usually without reading what the person actually has to say".
The possible downsides of technological advances and possible ways of ameliorating them are always worth discussing, but Slashdot is obviously not a good place for that to happen. Anyone got any pointers to places where real discussions like this can happen?
I hate spam too, but please think outside the monitor every once in a while. This is why people don't treat geeks seriously.
You mean because many of us will jump on a casual use of a word and blow that particular usage all out of proportion? Yeah, I don't blame some people for losing patience over that sort of lame pedantry.
(If I were mugged, shot, and/or targetted by a government because of my beliefs, I think I might use a less mild word than "burned", unless I were going for humorous understatement. If you were at least being an accurate pedant, you would note that "burned" has a common usage of "taken advantage of". Which could easily be argued to be an appropriate usage in the context in which it was used.)
I hereby nominate you as a competitor in the Long Jump category in the next Olympics.