That's kind of my point. We're currently willing to slaughter pigs for bacon.
So if we start making pigs yet more intelligent it makes us even more of monsters if we do "destructive R&D" on them.
As for the animal-human "flip". It's a legal issue not a tech issue. The laws and courts will decide.
When does a mixture of flour, eggs, sugar, water, etc legally become cake? Someone draws that line. Yes the line will be arbitrary and stupid. But there'll be more problems if you refuse to draw the line;). I just hope it won't be too arbitary and stupid.
Thing is if we decided to not make cake yet, we wouldn't have to draw the line. The world might be worse off as a result, or not... So do we really need transgenic animals now or in the near future?
Nah, if we are not careful the monsters could be the scientists and rest of us.
From the link: > However, there is no evidence the chimeric mice began to contemplate the meaning of life. We need to give such chimeric mice no more or less moral consideration than we already give laboratory mice.
Really? How do they know that - they don't speak mice.
And what about the humans who don't contemplate the meaning of life? Most of us don't contemplate the meaning of life every minute of our lives.
OK say 1% human is still not human enough. At what percentage does a subject become too human to experiment on?
Yes, look at it that way.
And they'd probably do things the other way round too - start adding nonhuman (not necessarily animal) parts to humans.
So maybe you might decide to reject an "upgrade" because you would be no longer be classed as human and thus be no longer eligible for human-only medical insurance or "NHS".
Just because the tech is ready, doesn't mean the laws, systems and societies are ready.
Unfortunately I believe people will cross many such lines way before human society is ready.
A lot of scientists (and other people) seem to think just because it can be done, it should be done (and if they don't someone else will do it anyway).
Will human society be willing to give such transgenic mice, chimps and pigs the full rights as other humans? If we aren't, we shouldn't be doing stuff like this.
Even if such research can benefit humans in one way, it will cause big problems.
People may ask: nut who then decides what is allowed and how? If people could manage to decide that certain classes of experiments/research on humans are banned, I'm sure they can figure other stuff out.
And they should start figuring it out. It's clear we're like toddlers stumbling headlong without looking where we might end up.
Don't forget: if we start putting too many human genes into animals, it starts to be "experimenting on humans". And I think most of us would prefer to live in a world where certain experiments shouldn't be done on humans.
There's no end of other things to do. So do those first instead.
So you're saying the network equipment ASICs and stuff are still in the P4 era?
Does that mean the power consumption for the network stuff will drop soon? Coz my current computer uses a lot less power than my old one (despite being way faster).
And that's how some people make a lot of money and how others end up losing a lot.
There are a lot of things bundled and not bundled in the final price. Stuff that most economists are clueless about.
Q: How many economists does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Economists don't change lightbulbs - they continue writing papers in the dark while waiting for the invisible hand to do it.
An economist can help tell you which bulb is more economical to use, or whether it's better to change the bulb or sit in the dark.
But if you want to understand the "invisible hand", you'd have better luck asking someone who actually understands people.
Actually in my opinion, many of these MMOGs could have epic endings as part of the game. Then you restart it again (or not if you have the next version ready).
I used to play an online webgame where the ending was part of the game AND inevitable. Players could also do stuff to cause the game to end early - so there would be people who'd choose to try to end the game early, and others who would try to stop them.
While some people might not like the idea of having to regrind to build their chars up again, they could just reduce the amount of grind involved in getting the chars up.
Because it doesn't matter that the players get to heroic levels fast, you need them at heroic levels for the ending. And after the ending they start again from scratch.
I figure the biggest problem is almost everyone might be online for the ending and that'll crash the servers:).
Another thing: elections don't just have to be fair, they have to be seen as fair.
Or at worst case fair enough so it's only a few hundred protesting/rioting on the streets rather than tens of thousands.
With paper voting done right, the various parties can actually have representatives present at the counting. They can keep watch over the ballot boxes - so that they aren't swapped or removed/added.
The big trouble so far is with postal ballots. But that will be a problem with digital systems as well.
People may say - oh in Country X, the paper ballots are rigged so the Dictator gets 98%. When the country is that deep in shit, any system would provide whatever result the Dictator wants.
If we can't build enough fission reactors now to supply demand, I doubt we can build enough fusion reactors especially of the ITER style.
The expensive ITER approach is the wrong horse to bet on if you're desperate.
Heck it's probably a better investment to throw a hundred million or so into cold fusion. Even if it turns out to not be fusion, it's extremely likely that there's some interesting scientific phenomenon there, and maybe we just might get another type of battery (energy storage device).
Chucking billions into ITER and committees that take years to decide on where stuff is going to be built, is an incredible waste.
It's like betting all your money on a horse that has not won a single race in decades.
If we are really desperate, I think we better spread smaller bets on many other horses.
> Subsequently, Schäuble suggested to change Bundesrat's voting procedures to discount abstention votes from the total
Wow...
> Schäuble was the target of an assassination attempt by Dieter Kaufmann,[11] who fired three shots at Schäuble after an election campaign event in Oppenau, injuring a bodyguard and Schäuble's spinal cord and face severely. Schäuble has been paralysed and confined to a wheelchair ever since. The assassin was declared mentally ill by the judges and committed to a clinic because of psychoneurosis.
If Schauble keeps doing stuff like that "changing vote procedures" thing, people might start to think the Kaufmann wasn't so mentally ill after all...
Nah I think I have a built-in "Murphy Field Intensifier".
Because Win XP Pro SP3 works fine for me. No blue screens. Same goes for Ubuntu.
In contrast it probably wouldn't survive the Gabriel Effect/Field.
Oh yeah, if you ever boot up Win98, try pressing the windows key just as/before it reaches the desktop. On the system I tried that on, it kinda caused Win98 to misbehave...
When I was using Win95 I tended to press the winkey ASAP, because I use that to launch stuff on boot up. I set up my start menu so that Winkey-3 = email, Winkey-4 = command prompt, etc. It worked well for me.
That didn't work so good for Win98. So Win98 failed my "Murphy Field Intensifier" test.
I don't think I did anything that exceptional did I?:)
> 10 seconds is an order of magnitude less power than you stated. > 100 seconds is two orders of magnitude less power than you stated.
Go read again. I gave values for 1, 10 and 100 seconds in my original post. I guess you prefer to concentrate more on arguing with people than on figuring out what they are trying to say (or actually say).
Yes you're right about the lightning values, and I'm wrong about it - I got my figures from an incorrect source.
But if you don't think 200kWh could blow stuff up, fine. Meanwhile I hope the race car people think different and take enough precautions.
Wasn't a barrier for me, just an acceptable disadvantage. It'll be nice if it could use less but it's nothing in the big picture.
Airconditioning will cost far more (one airconditioner = 1500W). 2 hours x 1 airconditioner > 24 hours of my PC. If more than one room uses airconditioning...
Then there's the fridge, washing machine, oven, etc. So no biggie.
You might not have had problems, but so far a lot of people have had problems.
Maybe it's the initial stuff that was crap. But you know what, that makes it an even better reason to stay with what works. Stuff that has more of the bugs fixed.
I was using Win2K after WinXP SP2 came out. And Win2K was quite stable. The few blue screens in years was due to hardware going bad, or a bad NIC driver.
I'm now using WinXP SP3 on the desktop and ubuntu for my server. And both have been stable. I wouldn't use WinXP "the original release".
I tried vista on a test box at work and I got it to blue screen quite quickly - just logged in and out a few times, dunno what happened. I seem to have a knack of crashing or hanging stuff. When the first imacs came out (the colourful ones), I went to an apple shop and checked a demo unit out, and for some reason it hung on me. I don't think I did anything really unusual. Just clicked about using stuff. I also crashed a demo unit Atari ST. I've crashed someone's Forth webserver on my first test...
I think I'll skip Vista. Maybe Win7 or something else would be stable enough for me:).
Don't get me wrong I'm grateful for the guinea pigs and early adopters. It's just not a good idea for everyone to be an early adopter and go Vista.
Personally, I've seen Vista and Win7, and it sure looks like MS has gone nuts. They've changed a lot of "tech" UI stuff for no apparent good reason.
Slashdot Mirror
> but I'm not aware of any generalizations of complexity theory to cover coroutines.
:).
And most of the computer industry expects users to figure out whether a program is safe to run or not... e.g. "Do you want to give access to XYZ?"
Even though the users:
1) have no meaningful access to the source code
2) have no idea what all the inputs are (there's network access, etc)
IMO they're being asked to solve something harder than the halting problem. Kind of unfair
We should make things easier and safer for users. Oh well...
When we start making cake, the courts and legislators will soon have to decide what can legally be called cake, and what can't.
If nobody makes cake yet, they don't need to.
Are they ready to make a decent decision yet? Are we ready to accept the decision?
We already have enough problems figuring out whether people are legally alive or dead...
Do the benefits outweigh the costs if we take that path now? We can take it later...
If we are going to survive and thrive for the long term we should start considering such questions more and more as technology increases our power.
Why should we give YOU rights? What makes you legally human?
;).
Would it be wrong for me to euthanize or enslave all you stupid unthinking animals?
Anyway I figure some smart sociopathic world leaders already have answered that question with "don't care" or "no as long as it benefits me".
So it's not really going to matter that much anyway
That's kind of my point. We're currently willing to slaughter pigs for bacon.
;). I just hope it won't be too arbitary and stupid.
So if we start making pigs yet more intelligent it makes us even more of monsters if we do "destructive R&D" on them.
As for the animal-human "flip". It's a legal issue not a tech issue. The laws and courts will decide.
When does a mixture of flour, eggs, sugar, water, etc legally become cake? Someone draws that line. Yes the line will be arbitrary and stupid. But there'll be more problems if you refuse to draw the line
Thing is if we decided to not make cake yet, we wouldn't have to draw the line. The world might be worse off as a result, or not... So do we really need transgenic animals now or in the near future?
Nooooo!
Oh well, on the bright side that means there's lots of medication and tech out there that is proven to work for me.
But what if it's networked? Then humans and other stuff can send it all sorts of stuff.
The same input today could produce a very different output tomorrow.
Oh I'm pretty sure the malware authors will find it very useful.
How long? I'm not sure whether it'll be a few minutes or hours after hackers get to play with it :).
It was the first thing I thought of after reading "adds scripting capabilities"- worms etc.
It's not like Google has had a great security track record (cross site scripting, unauthorized access to picasa pictures, etc).
Nah, if we are not careful the monsters could be the scientists and rest of us.
From the link:
> However, there is no evidence the chimeric mice began to contemplate the meaning of life. We need to give such chimeric mice no more or less moral consideration than we already give laboratory mice.
Really? How do they know that - they don't speak mice.
And what about the humans who don't contemplate the meaning of life? Most of us don't contemplate the meaning of life every minute of our lives.
OK say 1% human is still not human enough. At what percentage does a subject become too human to experiment on?
Yes, look at it that way.
And they'd probably do things the other way round too - start adding nonhuman (not necessarily animal) parts to humans.
So maybe you might decide to reject an "upgrade" because you would be no longer be classed as human and thus be no longer eligible for human-only medical insurance or "NHS".
Just because the tech is ready, doesn't mean the laws, systems and societies are ready.
Unfortunately I believe people will cross many such lines way before human society is ready.
A lot of scientists (and other people) seem to think just because it can be done, it should be done (and if they don't someone else will do it anyway).
Will human society be willing to give such transgenic mice, chimps and pigs the full rights as other humans? If we aren't, we shouldn't be doing stuff like this.
Even if such research can benefit humans in one way, it will cause big problems.
People may ask: nut who then decides what is allowed and how? If people could manage to decide that certain classes of experiments/research on humans are banned, I'm sure they can figure other stuff out.
And they should start figuring it out. It's clear we're like toddlers stumbling headlong without looking where we might end up.
Don't forget: if we start putting too many human genes into animals, it starts to be "experimenting on humans". And I think most of us would prefer to live in a world where certain experiments shouldn't be done on humans.
There's no end of other things to do. So do those first instead.
So you're saying the network equipment ASICs and stuff are still in the P4 era?
Does that mean the power consumption for the network stuff will drop soon? Coz my current computer uses a lot less power than my old one (despite being way faster).
But what are the figures for:
concurrent clients/watts
concurrent clients/$$$
concurrent clients/rack space
While ARMs are lower power than Intel x86 CPUs, the x86 stuff nowadays provides very good CPU performance/watt.
There certainly appears to be no shortage of fools and idiots.
But some of us are running out of patience and good humour.
It's not always "all encapsulated" in the price.
:).
And that's how some people make a lot of money and how others end up losing a lot.
There are a lot of things bundled and not bundled in the final price. Stuff that most economists are clueless about.
Q: How many economists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Economists don't change lightbulbs - they continue writing papers in the dark while waiting for the invisible hand to do it.
An economist can help tell you which bulb is more economical to use, or whether it's better to change the bulb or sit in the dark.
But if you want to understand the "invisible hand", you'd have better luck asking someone who actually understands people.
The invisible hand does so much stuff
Actually in my opinion, many of these MMOGs could have epic endings as part of the game. Then you restart it again (or not if you have the next version ready).
:).
I used to play an online webgame where the ending was part of the game AND inevitable. Players could also do stuff to cause the game to end early - so there would be people who'd choose to try to end the game early, and others who would try to stop them.
While some people might not like the idea of having to regrind to build their chars up again, they could just reduce the amount of grind involved in getting the chars up.
Because it doesn't matter that the players get to heroic levels fast, you need them at heroic levels for the ending. And after the ending they start again from scratch.
I figure the biggest problem is almost everyone might be online for the ending and that'll crash the servers
Another thing: elections don't just have to be fair, they have to be seen as fair.
Or at worst case fair enough so it's only a few hundred protesting/rioting on the streets rather than tens of thousands.
With paper voting done right, the various parties can actually have representatives present at the counting. They can keep watch over the ballot boxes - so that they aren't swapped or removed/added.
The big trouble so far is with postal ballots. But that will be a problem with digital systems as well.
People may say - oh in Country X, the paper ballots are rigged so the Dictator gets 98%. When the country is that deep in shit, any system would provide whatever result the Dictator wants.
Desperately need fusion?
If we can't build enough fission reactors now to supply demand, I doubt we can build enough fusion reactors especially of the ITER style.
The expensive ITER approach is the wrong horse to bet on if you're desperate.
Heck it's probably a better investment to throw a hundred million or so into cold fusion. Even if it turns out to not be fusion, it's extremely likely that there's some interesting scientific phenomenon there, and maybe we just might get another type of battery (energy storage device).
Chucking billions into ITER and committees that take years to decide on where stuff is going to be built, is an incredible waste.
It's like betting all your money on a horse that has not won a single race in decades.
If we are really desperate, I think we better spread smaller bets on many other horses.
noop scheduler != support for SSDs.
Sequential writes in common Flash SSDs are faster than random writes. Sequential reads are also usually faster than random reads.
See: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531
For RAM + battery based SSDs, while there's still a difference the difference should be unnoticeable for drive workloads.
How about rocks? They're useful for clue applications.
:).
And many of them are at least 6000 years old
> Subsequently, Schäuble suggested to change Bundesrat's voting procedures to discount abstention votes from the total
Wow...
> Schäuble was the target of an assassination attempt by Dieter Kaufmann,[11] who fired three shots at Schäuble after an election campaign event in Oppenau, injuring a bodyguard and Schäuble's spinal cord and face severely. Schäuble has been paralysed and confined to a wheelchair ever since. The assassin was declared mentally ill by the judges and committed to a clinic because of psychoneurosis.
If Schauble keeps doing stuff like that "changing vote procedures" thing, people might start to think the Kaufmann wasn't so mentally ill after all...
Nah I think I have a built-in "Murphy Field Intensifier".
:)
Because Win XP Pro SP3 works fine for me. No blue screens. Same goes for Ubuntu.
In contrast it probably wouldn't survive the Gabriel Effect/Field.
Oh yeah, if you ever boot up Win98, try pressing the windows key just as/before it reaches the desktop. On the system I tried that on, it kinda caused Win98 to misbehave...
When I was using Win95 I tended to press the winkey ASAP, because I use that to launch stuff on boot up. I set up my start menu so that Winkey-3 = email, Winkey-4 = command prompt, etc. It worked well for me.
That didn't work so good for Win98. So Win98 failed my "Murphy Field Intensifier" test.
I don't think I did anything that exceptional did I?
> 10 seconds is an order of magnitude less power than you stated.
> 100 seconds is two orders of magnitude less power than you stated.
Go read again. I gave values for 1, 10 and 100 seconds in my original post. I guess you prefer to concentrate more on arguing with people than on figuring out what they are trying to say (or actually say).
Yes you're right about the lightning values, and I'm wrong about it - I got my figures from an incorrect source.
But if you don't think 200kWh could blow stuff up, fine. Meanwhile I hope the race car people think different and take enough precautions.
Wasn't a barrier for me, just an acceptable disadvantage. It'll be nice if it could use less but it's nothing in the big picture.
Airconditioning will cost far more (one airconditioner = 1500W). 2 hours x 1 airconditioner > 24 hours of my PC. If more than one room uses airconditioning...
Then there's the fridge, washing machine, oven, etc. So no biggie.
And they were right. XP was crap when it first came out. So it wasn't such a good idea to buy a great computer just to run it.
Today, XP SP3 is a lot better than XP SP1 or XP "The Original Release" in terms of stability and security.
Similarly, why buy a great computer just to run Vista SP1 or Vista "The Original Release"?
You might not have had problems, but so far a lot of people have had problems.
:).
Maybe it's the initial stuff that was crap. But you know what, that makes it an even better reason to stay with what works. Stuff that has more of the bugs fixed.
I was using Win2K after WinXP SP2 came out. And Win2K was quite stable. The few blue screens in years was due to hardware going bad, or a bad NIC driver.
I'm now using WinXP SP3 on the desktop and ubuntu for my server. And both have been stable. I wouldn't use WinXP "the original release".
I tried vista on a test box at work and I got it to blue screen quite quickly - just logged in and out a few times, dunno what happened. I seem to have a knack of crashing or hanging stuff. When the first imacs came out (the colourful ones), I went to an apple shop and checked a demo unit out, and for some reason it hung on me. I don't think I did anything really unusual. Just clicked about using stuff. I also crashed a demo unit Atari ST. I've crashed someone's Forth webserver on my first test...
I think I'll skip Vista. Maybe Win7 or something else would be stable enough for me
Don't get me wrong I'm grateful for the guinea pigs and early adopters. It's just not a good idea for everyone to be an early adopter and go Vista.
Personally, I've seen Vista and Win7, and it sure looks like MS has gone nuts. They've changed a lot of "tech" UI stuff for no apparent good reason.