Agree with you very much that biology will drive a lot of progress throughout the 21st century. There will be indescribable advances in genetic engineering of enhancements or replacements to ourselves and artificial organisms. Imagine custom made bacteria for chemical manufacturing, purpose built insects, implantation of additional of genes into humans like the enzymes to digest cellulose like a termite, etc.
I think one day years from now, altering your DNA will be like the current body modifications or tattoos. Anyone can do it in any city in the world, with standard equipment and acceptable risk of side effects (like an infection from a dirty needle).
I completely, completely agree that it would be unconstitutional discrimination if that were the case, and it would be rightful to sue them. However, it appears that they are a private organization (now) and can legally do as they wish.
What a lazy, entitled way to think. If you care so much create your own organization of atheist-friendly naturalists and get recruiting. That is your right to do so.
Same here. I have been using firefox since the 0.x phoenix days and I can recall maybe one time, years ago, where I got bit by a memory leak. I virtually never close the browser and instead leave it open for months with a dozen tabs open, and always just sleep/hibernate the computer. Hosts include practically anything you can name, 2k-7 (32 and 64 bit), OSX (10.5-10.7), Linux (too many to recall, mostly ubuntu).
My memory usage is always great, and has been for at least the past couple of years. It definitely uses less memory than Chrome.
Who are these people and what version of FF are they using? Maybe these people have never heard of Adblock and Flashblock, and maybe there really is a memory leak when you browse the web like a savage without them.
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Malawi and Zambia are set to win hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. infrastructure grants in the next two years due to steady improvements in the way they are run, U.S. aid officials said on Tuesday.... The MCC [the U.S. government's Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) ], which has committed $5.1 billion to Africa over five years -- most of it in infrastructure investment -- has a $10 million project to reduce corruption and help civil society in Uganda, which it regards as a 'threshold' country.
The problem is the rampant anarchy and thievery destroying those investments. Raw materials being stolen in the middle of the night, improper or no maintenance being done. If African dictatorships have trouble dividing up crates of free food among the populace, what makes you think they can handle taking care of a first-world electrical grid and highway system?
Primary school enrolment in African countries is among the lowest in the world. Limited funds and a lack of adequate teachers, classrooms, and learning materials adversely affect the educational environment throughout most of Africa. The President's Africa Education Initiative (AEI) is a $600-million multi-year initiative that focuses on increasing access to quality basic education in 39 sub-Saharan countries through scholarships, textbooks, and teacher training programs. Eighty million African children will have benefited from AEI by 2010.
[Parent post:] Since rich nations obviously have an interest in keeping the status quo, there is little actual help.
Finally, and this should be easy because it's so "obvious", but [Citation Needed]. What is it that you think rich nations gain by doing this? Cheap blood diamonds?
While I agree with you and also see the analogies between electrons orbiting in atoms clustered to form cells, and planets, stars and galaxies and wonder, I don't think it's fair to call the SETI guys closed minded for not. You are basically espousing fantasy, not open-mindedness. The speed of light is fundamental, and so is information theory. You can't have intelligent life the size of an electron, there isn't anywhere for their intelligence to be stored. An alien the size of the universe would be impossible to communicate with in any meaningful way for us humans. It would take 14 (90?) billion years just for it to "sense" something with its "nerves" from one side to the other. It's almost pointless to think about it. It is pointless to spend a single dollar investigating.
I firmly believe that, based on the laws of physics, aliens are going to be similar and instantly recognizable to us. Evolution is likely a universal law as well, so I expect them to have recognizable behavior (evolutionary psychology). Co-locating decision making and sensory perception to improve reaction time (i.e. a head) seems likely as well.
"The giant interneuron and the Kenyon cells form a simple negative feed-back loop: the more strongly it is activated by the Kenyon cell population, the more strongly it curtails their activity in return", explains Laurent. The interneuron itself does not generate any action potentials, but inhibits Kenyon cells via nonspiking and graded release of the neurotransmitter GABA (gamma aminobutyric acid).
There is a negative feedback loop. I wonder if this could lead to side-effects like our lowered sensitivity to a smell over time. Some say the smell is just not registering in our conscious, I wonder if the smell is not even registering on the olfactory nerves at all.
Totally unrelated to what you are saying... but here's some more nerd street-cred in the article:
"They had run into a puzzling incongruity: Assange said the data included dispatches from the beginning of 2004 through the end of 2009, but the material on the spreadsheet ended abruptly in April 2009. A considerable amount of material was missing. Assange, slipping naturally into the role of office geek, explained that they had hit the limits of Excel. Open a second spreadsheet, he instructed. They did, and the rest of the data materialized — a total of 92,000 reports from the battlefields of Afghanistan. "
Who else but a nerd would know exactly about excel's row limit. I am amused.
My freedom is in not watching. Why bother with advertising, DRM, subscription fees in the first place? There's hardly anything worth watching anyways. Do you really view all of that stimulation as an inalienable right? With all of this in-fighting and territorial control by companies over "mindshare", viewership, eyeballs, I take it as a sign we're on the wrong track.
Great post, wish I had mod points. I agree that we need to find a well-defined event, one that is measurable and scientifically derived. However, I fear that it will be a very long time until there is consensus. In my mind this problem is reminiscent of, in AI, defining consciousness in scientific or mathematical terms. It may be that we simply don't have the understanding yet to answer it one way or another, and so are left with the blind leading the blind.
Additionally, thank you for pointing out the obvious. In all my thought regarding other key events such as development of beating heart, brain structure, and birth, etc, I never realized that there was another that occurred so early. Probably because I do not consider an embryo a human, and I was mentally lazy. I like undermining my own prejudices with new information and logic. But opinions aside, formation of unique DNA has a lot going for it, logically.
It just occurred to me what he should have done - emailed Jobs. Cut out the middle man and talk to somebody who would definitely know about the phone's existence. As we all know Jobs does in fact read his email and respond. Did the guy find it in the bar back in March? That is a lot of time with it sitting around (accounting for when the story broke this month, and say, a week or two to settle the deal with Gizmodo) - I wonder how long he really had the phone is his possession before he decided to make some cash off of it.
I'm with you. I don't ever update, run anti-virus, or do realtime anything. My box always runs as fast as the day I installed it. All of my anecdotal evidence tells me that 100's of layers of patched windows dll's slows the system down, even without antivirus/firewall running. The registry and file system themselves are permanently thrashed, no way around it.
If I'm behind 3 layers of hardware firewalls, know better than to click FreePorn.jpg.exe, then I consider it a license to administer my systems however I please.
I liken running realtime antivirus and installing constant hotfixes to getting a daily colonoscopy "just in case".
Unfortunately, no. I suffer this same problem every day too. VS6 only supports the 16 basic colors for color customization (red,light magenta,dark magenta,etc.), and doesn't do anything even remotely close to the pastels and undertones needed by zenburn.
I read his statement as "we know that the Wii's graphics will look absolutely dated vs the 360's and PS3's in 2 years or so", and that they want to prepare everyone for releasing a new set of hardware earlier than everyone else, out of cycle.
Now I say that as a person who bought a Wii for the gameplay and not the graphics, and I don't really have a problem with that. In a few years we'll get a deal similar with the Wii, updated graphics power for a lower cost than everyone else by using smaller and cheaper versions of yesterdays's technology. Something like a Wii2, which is a Wii with better graphics (but not amazing) and backwards compatibility for 250 dollars. I'd buy it.
I really think this has to be the case because as much money they are making with the DS, I don't think it would make sense to release a new portable and fragment that market.
Or.... Maybe take all of what I said about the Wii and apply it to the DS. Maybe a more powerful DS-like portable, but with backwards compatibility, which wouldn't fragment the DS market as much. I could see Nintendo eyeing that strategy now in preparation for the slowdown of the DS in the future.
Poster, don't listen to this person. He/she is completely exagerating.
First, Kanji are hard, but not insanely hard. The basic jist is that each kanji has a pronunciation when used by itself, and a pronunciation when used in a group. Of course there are exceptions. The general meaning of an individual kanji stays about the same. Each kanji by itself is a word. You get new words by combining them. Wow. What's nice is that these new compound words are the japanese words you were learning anyways. To say it's a second language is to say that english compound words like fireman and keyboard are a second language.
Second, you don't use different numbers. Just a different suffix.
Third, hehe. I won't argue with the whole politeness and deference thing. There are many rules to it. I'd say it's akin to the difference in how you speak when chatting via IM, and how you speak during an interview. It's a combination of sentence structure and word choice. Except in japanese they take it more seriously. But nobody's expecting you to know it anyways. So you just take the easy approach and learn to speak generally on the polite side no matter what.
Exaggeration aside, the parent post is right about one thing: Learning just for anime is a waste of time. Here's what listening to the native japanese tells you:
- Female 1 chooses words that insinuate that she's a young cute thing, but ever so polite and mannerful. - Female 2 chooses words that are more masculine because she's a brute. - Guy 1 chooses boastful words because of his elevated testosterone levels and prideful nature. - Guy 2 is scary because he constantly says humbling things until he stabs you in the back.
So, it gets you nothing that doesn't come across in the subs or dubs.
Except not for anime. I just enjoy the language. Ok... maybe I'd like to play imported video games and know what's going on.:)
First, learn hiragana and katakana. You have to do this. Without these you are basically illerate, no matter how well your speaking or kanji-reading skills are. Depending on romajii will set you back hard. I didn't bother really learning these for a while. What a waste of time before that. I'm more of a visual learner, so being able to see the language in it's native form is huge.
Then buy these books http://www.thejapanshop.com/home.php?cat=270/. They are college-level books and used in many college courses. There are two levels, I and II. Each book corresponds to a year of college study. I have them and they are absolutely wonderful. I goofed off for a few years on and off trying out different books and worthless audio lessons on cd, like Pimsleur's. The Genki series kicks total ass. Everything progresses in a smooth manner, and there are tons, *tons*, of practice activities to give you enjoyable stuff to do at your skill level.
Some of the activities are where you have conversations or play mini-games with a partner, which is something you really only can get in a classroom. I've found that playing both parts of the conversation helps.:)
Make sure to get the workbook and the accompanying cd's. The workbook is nothing but exercises that correspond to whatever you are learning in the book. Perfect for making sure that you do learn everything you're supposed to. It's easy to skim through the main textbook and "think" you know everything. Doing the exercises in the workbook makes sure you really do.
The audio cd's are for listening comprehension tests. Also awesome. They really help to force you to think quicker and prevent the possibility that you continue to do runtime translation in your head, and instead make you think in japanese.
Also get the answer key. Absolutely essential for obvious reasons. I can't stress that enough.
Ok, so I know I just told you buy like 100 bucks worth of stuff. But it's all worth it. If you seriously want to learn you have to do it on multiple fronts. Reading, writing, speaking, listening. It's either all or none, really.
How do you know? I would think that any Revolution game that supports the wavebird-like shell would also support a regular gamecube controller. The shell may just be offered as an accessory for new customers who don't have gamecube controllers, or for those that just want a wireless GC controller (I don't know if the wavebird receiver attachment will fit the ports on the Revolution.)
Slashdot Mirror
Agree with you very much that biology will drive a lot of progress throughout the 21st century. There will be indescribable advances in genetic engineering of enhancements or replacements to ourselves and artificial organisms. Imagine custom made bacteria for chemical manufacturing, purpose built insects, implantation of additional of genes into humans like the enzymes to digest cellulose like a termite, etc.
I think one day years from now, altering your DNA will be like the current body modifications or tattoos. Anyone can do it in any city in the world, with standard equipment and acceptable risk of side effects (like an infection from a dirty needle).
I completely, completely agree that it would be unconstitutional discrimination if that were the case, and it would be rightful to sue them. However, it appears that they are a private organization (now) and can legally do as they wish.
What a lazy, entitled way to think. If you care so much create your own organization of atheist-friendly naturalists and get recruiting. That is your right to do so.
?
0x implies hexadecimal, not binary. 0x10000 = 65536 words = 128KB of memory.
Same here. I have been using firefox since the 0.x phoenix days and I can recall maybe one time, years ago, where I got bit by a memory leak. I virtually never close the browser and instead leave it open for months with a dozen tabs open, and always just sleep/hibernate the computer. Hosts include practically anything you can name, 2k-7 (32 and 64 bit), OSX (10.5-10.7), Linux (too many to recall, mostly ubuntu).
My memory usage is always great, and has been for at least the past couple of years. It definitely uses less memory than Chrome.
Who are these people and what version of FF are they using? Maybe these people have never heard of Adblock and Flashblock, and maybe there really is a memory leak when you browse the web like a savage without them.
I have several objections.
First, the US does invest in african infrastructure. http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE6210FP20100302
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Malawi and Zambia are set to win hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. infrastructure grants in the next two years due to steady improvements in the way they are run, U.S. aid officials said on Tuesday. ...
The MCC [the U.S. government's Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) ], which has committed $5.1 billion to Africa over five years -- most of it in infrastructure investment -- has a $10 million project to reduce corruption and help civil society in Uganda, which it regards as a 'threshold' country.
The problem is the rampant anarchy and thievery destroying those investments. Raw materials being stolen in the middle of the night, improper or no maintenance being done. If African dictatorships have trouble dividing up crates of free food among the populace, what makes you think they can handle taking care of a first-world electrical grid and highway system?
Second, the US does invest in African education. http://www.usaid.gov/locations/sub-saharan_africa/initiatives/aei.html
Primary school enrolment in African countries is among the lowest in the world. Limited funds and a lack of adequate teachers, classrooms, and learning materials adversely affect the educational environment throughout most of Africa. The President's Africa Education Initiative (AEI) is a $600-million multi-year initiative that focuses on increasing access to quality basic education in 39 sub-Saharan countries through scholarships, textbooks, and teacher training programs. Eighty million African children will have benefited from AEI by 2010.
[Parent post:] Since rich nations obviously have an interest in keeping the status quo, there is little actual help.
Finally, and this should be easy because it's so "obvious", but [Citation Needed]. What is it that you think rich nations gain by doing this? Cheap blood diamonds?
My god, I thought you were joking.... then I read TFA. This man... this man is a genius.
While I agree with you and also see the analogies between electrons orbiting in atoms clustered to form cells, and planets, stars and galaxies and wonder, I don't think it's fair to call the SETI guys closed minded for not. You are basically espousing fantasy, not open-mindedness. The speed of light is fundamental, and so is information theory. You can't have intelligent life the size of an electron, there isn't anywhere for their intelligence to be stored. An alien the size of the universe would be impossible to communicate with in any meaningful way for us humans. It would take 14 (90?) billion years just for it to "sense" something with its "nerves" from one side to the other. It's almost pointless to think about it. It is pointless to spend a single dollar investigating.
I firmly believe that, based on the laws of physics, aliens are going to be similar and instantly recognizable to us. Evolution is likely a universal law as well, so I expect them to have recognizable behavior (evolutionary psychology). Co-locating decision making and sensory perception to improve reaction time (i.e. a head) seems likely as well.
What are the reasons?
Something interesting from the article:
There is a negative feedback loop. I wonder if this could lead to side-effects like our lowered sensitivity to a smell over time. Some say the smell is just not registering in our conscious, I wonder if the smell is not even registering on the olfactory nerves at all.
What about a nerd that has to work with journalists everyday? shudder
Totally unrelated to what you are saying... but here's some more nerd street-cred in the article:
"They had run into a puzzling incongruity: Assange said the data included dispatches from the beginning of 2004 through the end of 2009, but the material on the spreadsheet ended abruptly in April 2009. A considerable amount of material was missing. Assange, slipping naturally into the role of office geek, explained that they had hit the limits of Excel. Open a second spreadsheet, he instructed. They did, and the rest of the data materialized — a total of 92,000 reports from the battlefields of Afghanistan. "
Who else but a nerd would know exactly about excel's row limit. I am amused.
One place? Which city is it that you want to nuke, Seattle or Cupertino?
My freedom is in not watching. Why bother with advertising, DRM, subscription fees in the first place? There's hardly anything worth watching anyways. Do you really view all of that stimulation as an inalienable right? With all of this in-fighting and territorial control by companies over "mindshare", viewership, eyeballs, I take it as a sign we're on the wrong track.
It's a spin on a Yogi Berra quote.
"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
Great post, wish I had mod points. I agree that we need to find a well-defined event, one that is measurable and scientifically derived. However, I fear that it will be a very long time until there is consensus. In my mind this problem is reminiscent of, in AI, defining consciousness in scientific or mathematical terms. It may be that we simply don't have the understanding yet to answer it one way or another, and so are left with the blind leading the blind.
Additionally, thank you for pointing out the obvious. In all my thought regarding other key events such as development of beating heart, brain structure, and birth, etc, I never realized that there was another that occurred so early. Probably because I do not consider an embryo a human, and I was mentally lazy. I like undermining my own prejudices with new information and logic. But opinions aside, formation of unique DNA has a lot going for it, logically.
I believe this is known as Cognitive Dissonance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
Thank you for this truly entertaining post.
It just occurred to me what he should have done - emailed Jobs. Cut out the middle man and talk to somebody who would definitely know about the phone's existence. As we all know Jobs does in fact read his email and respond. Did the guy find it in the bar back in March? That is a lot of time with it sitting around (accounting for when the story broke this month, and say, a week or two to settle the deal with Gizmodo) - I wonder how long he really had the phone is his possession before he decided to make some cash off of it.
I would argue that original software from 2003 is Security Through Obscurity. Malware will be targeting bugs in current versions of software.
I'm with you. I don't ever update, run anti-virus, or do realtime anything. My box always runs as fast as the day I installed it. All of my anecdotal evidence tells me that 100's of layers of patched windows dll's slows the system down, even without antivirus/firewall running. The registry and file system themselves are permanently thrashed, no way around it.
If I'm behind 3 layers of hardware firewalls, know better than to click FreePorn.jpg.exe, then I consider it a license to administer my systems however I please.
I liken running realtime antivirus and installing constant hotfixes to getting a daily colonoscopy "just in case".
Unfortunately, no. I suffer this same problem every day too. VS6 only supports the 16 basic colors for color customization (red,light magenta,dark magenta,etc.), and doesn't do anything even remotely close to the pastels and undertones needed by zenburn.
I read his statement as "we know that the Wii's graphics will look absolutely dated vs the 360's and PS3's in 2 years or so", and that they want to prepare everyone for releasing a new set of hardware earlier than everyone else, out of cycle.
Now I say that as a person who bought a Wii for the gameplay and not the graphics, and I don't really have a problem with that. In a few years we'll get a deal similar with the Wii, updated graphics power for a lower cost than everyone else by using smaller and cheaper versions of yesterdays's technology. Something like a Wii2, which is a Wii with better graphics (but not amazing) and backwards compatibility for 250 dollars. I'd buy it.
I really think this has to be the case because as much money they are making with the DS, I don't think it would make sense to release a new portable and fragment that market.
Or.... Maybe take all of what I said about the Wii and apply it to the DS. Maybe a more powerful DS-like portable, but with backwards compatibility, which wouldn't fragment the DS market as much. I could see Nintendo eyeing that strategy now in preparation for the slowdown of the DS in the future.
Poster, don't listen to this person. He/she is completely exagerating.
First, Kanji are hard, but not insanely hard. The basic jist is that each kanji has a pronunciation when used by itself, and a pronunciation when used in a group. Of course there are exceptions. The general meaning of an individual kanji stays about the same. Each kanji by itself is a word. You get new words by combining them. Wow. What's nice is that these new compound words are the japanese words you were learning anyways. To say it's a second language is to say that english compound words like fireman and keyboard are a second language.
Second, you don't use different numbers. Just a different suffix.
Third, hehe. I won't argue with the whole politeness and deference thing. There are many rules to it. I'd say it's akin to the difference in how you speak when chatting via IM, and how you speak during an interview. It's a combination of sentence structure and word choice. Except in japanese they take it more seriously. But nobody's expecting you to know it anyways. So you just take the easy approach and learn to speak generally on the polite side no matter what.
Exaggeration aside, the parent post is right about one thing: Learning just for anime is a waste of time. Here's what listening to the native japanese tells you:
- Female 1 chooses words that insinuate that she's a young cute thing, but ever so polite and mannerful.
- Female 2 chooses words that are more masculine because she's a brute.
- Guy 1 chooses boastful words because of his elevated testosterone levels and prideful nature.
- Guy 2 is scary because he constantly says humbling things until he stabs you in the back.
So, it gets you nothing that doesn't come across in the subs or dubs.
Except not for anime. I just enjoy the language. Ok... maybe I'd like to play imported video games and know what's going on. :)
:)
First, learn hiragana and katakana. You have to do this. Without these you are basically illerate, no matter how well your speaking or kanji-reading skills are. Depending on romajii will set you back hard. I didn't bother really learning these for a while. What a waste of time before that. I'm more of a visual learner, so being able to see the language in it's native form is huge.
Then buy these books http://www.thejapanshop.com/home.php?cat=270/. They are college-level books and used in many college courses. There are two levels, I and II. Each book corresponds to a year of college study. I have them and they are absolutely wonderful. I goofed off for a few years on and off trying out different books and worthless audio lessons on cd, like Pimsleur's. The Genki series kicks total ass. Everything progresses in a smooth manner, and there are tons, *tons*, of practice activities to give you enjoyable stuff to do at your skill level.
Some of the activities are where you have conversations or play mini-games with a partner, which is something you really only can get in a classroom. I've found that playing both parts of the conversation helps.
Make sure to get the workbook and the accompanying cd's. The workbook is nothing but exercises that correspond to whatever you are learning in the book. Perfect for making sure that you do learn everything you're supposed to. It's easy to skim through the main textbook and "think" you know everything. Doing the exercises in the workbook makes sure you really do.
The audio cd's are for listening comprehension tests. Also awesome. They really help to force you to think quicker and prevent the possibility that you continue to do runtime translation in your head, and instead make you think in japanese.
Also get the answer key. Absolutely essential for obvious reasons. I can't stress that enough.
Ok, so I know I just told you buy like 100 bucks worth of stuff. But it's all worth it. If you seriously want to learn you have to do it on multiple fronts. Reading, writing, speaking, listening. It's either all or none, really.
How do you know? I would think that any Revolution game that supports the wavebird-like shell would also support a regular gamecube controller. The shell may just be offered as an accessory for new customers who don't have gamecube controllers, or for those that just want a wireless GC controller (I don't know if the wavebird receiver attachment will fit the ports on the Revolution.)