It also depends on what one's definition of "truth" is.
Truth can have different definitions, depending on context - in this context (because there are many contexts under which one would want to define truth, i.e. including the "model" of reality that is formal logic).
In the context of philosophy - what role does Truth or Falsehood play? Truth is not a thing to be defined in this context - instead, it defines something else: How I Decide to Act.
If I believe that it is TRUE that I will burn in hell eternally, if I sleep with my best friend's wife, (for example) then I will likely choose not to do so; no matter how hot she is, and no matter how much of a dork he is.
On the other hand, I may not believe that is TRUE, and I may believe that sleeping with my best friend's wife might lead to some bad consequences for our families, our children, society in general, and there's a high likely hood of some undesirable side effects, just from the hurt-feelings perspective, then again, I will likely not choose to commit this act, even if it is a purely deterministic, predictable choice, there would be consequences that I would be unhappy with, and regret (which is not exactly the same as moral guilt).
Either way, I'm making a choice, based on values and reasoning, and weighing likelihood of consequences. Neither possible TRUTH upon which I might make this decision, will alone determine my actions - though they'll influence the decision.
So one might define TRUTH as; a belief value that informs decisions. No truth, in this context, is binary. Nobody believes in such abstractions either, 100%. The most faithful among us have doubts about hell, if not now, at other points in their life. And in the "moral atheist" scenario, one might still be tempted to give into the physical lust, even with the high likelihood of these horrible material consequences.
Can you plug these values into a mathematical model of human behavior, and theoretically predict the outcome, without a human being?
This is the question they're trying to answer by proving or disproving the existence of "free will" - (and attached to that, the existence of a "soul" and the existence of "God", etc.) So, of course there is a hidden agenda in this very question. Just as there is also a hidden agenda in propagating the "hell" idea.
Is Free Will a Truth? Are my decisions influenced by the fact that I believe that free will exists, or does not exist? - well, yes, in this sense it is. And the degree to which my decisions are influenced, DEPENDS on how strongly, on that day, I believe that Free Will (and moral consequence) exists!
I can say that, in the past, during a time where I was an atheist, and I believed that Free Will did not exist, I made choices that I would not make today, based on a supposed lack of moral consequence.
Because I chose NOT to believe in the existence of Free Will (and personal responsibility for actions)?
It sure as hell WAS designed to run on computers from 4 years ago.
To the point where the time-sharing algorithm between the audio player and network bandwidth was HARD-CODED to work well with slower, single-core pentium CPU's without SSE support.
Modern computers didn't have as much of a problem finding CPU bandwidth to process audio, while simultaneously doing network transfers, yet they suffered from an inappropriate throttling mechanism nonetheless.
In this regard, Vista was designed SPECIFICALLY for computers from 4 years ago - and NOT for current, modern, multi-core pentiums.
(however, Vista also seems to be designed for the Video cards that will be available 4 years from now.)
Well, it's sort of a "maximum income" system, as far as karma goes. Most of us 4-digit guys hit max karma before the year 2000.
I have not seen any other benefits from a 4-digit ID; neither in metamod selection, nor in acceptance of posting articles. (I don't think I've ever had a submitted article accepted!)
Well, in a way, 9/11 was a form of social engineering as well.
The premise was: American Civilians believe that they are non-combatants. So if the terrorists make the passengers believe that if they cooperate, they will not be killed, then terrorists can commandeer a plane, and do whatever they want. As long as the passengers are compliant.
However, Flight 93 proved that 5 armed terrorists can not successfully commandeer a planeload of civilians who know that they ARE combatants, and will be killed according to the most savage set of rules: survival of the fittest.
The mistake the Flight 93 terrorists made was to let the passengers use their cell phones, and find out the truth.
The THREAT of this attack vector ended the moment the first cell-phone call made it out of Flight 93. NOW: no planeload of passengers is likely to EVER AGAIN cooperate with terrorists. Terrorists know this. That is why they've never tried this plan again since 9/11. They get onto planes all the time, and it's certainly trivial to smuggle weapons on board a plane. But they now know they have no chance in hell of gaining control of a plane.
The reality that Americans didn't like, is learning that their civilians were now combatants. This reality has been strongly rejected - but it's still real. Cognitive Dissonance.
I have a cell phone for pretty much one reason only: In case someone needs to contact me in an emergency. (okay - two reasons, in case *I* need to contact someone in an emergency).
This means that; no, I'm not constantly on my phone talking/texting other people with "small-talk". On the other hand, if a call comes in, on the assumption that the person NEEDS to contact me, it interrupts face-to-face activities, in most cases.
Often, I'll let it go, and wait for the other person to try to call me a second time - to ensure it's REALLY important. Especially if the ID'd caller has a history of trivial calls.
I have become REALLY tired of Will Smith movies, where he ALWAYS plays his "Fresh Prince" character. Every time. It really got me pissed off when he did it to Wild Wild West.
I was delighted to see him do something different for once in I Am Legend.
What sucks - REALLY sucks, is when the naive 60% accuse you of being paranoid, negative, a downer, depressed, etc. that's supposed to help? I'll tell you what helps. Watching naive people get victimized because they were too stupid to protect themselves. Much nicer being a smug ant, than a starving grasshopper any day.
The very interesting thing about Ron Paul is that he became quickly very UNPOPULAR among people who found out on their own about him. The truth about his past, his little radical newspaper, and the racist opinions he used to push.
Yeah - the real truth.
Ron Paul was just another phony politician, who's 15 minutes got stretched out a little too long.
Second - - - DirectX Reason 2.1: Writing Games for other platforms SUCKS ASS. Reason 2.2: They cannibalized the existing WINDOWS gaming market for XBox - the DirectX expertise that was already in place, was shifted to XBox development, and game companies suddenly had a broader (cheaper) pool of developer talent with cheaper tools to choose from. It is MUCH cheaper (in terms of man-hours, test-effort, and tools maturity) to develop games for XBox than for PlayStation or other consoles. And you get the PC platform for free, pretty much.
This strategy probably would have worked just as well without having bought Bungie when they did. But with Bungie/Halo, it was a freaking slam dunk. Where did Microsoft drop the ball? Guitar Hero. And with the 360's release/reliability problems. The gaming market's tastes shifted from shooters to music and sports.
Also, keep in mind that an official diagnosis is important for insurance purposes.
Yes, of course!
Must keep the accountants and lawyers happy, by all means necessary! (methinks there is a diagnosable mental disorder in there somewhere as well, but I guess since this one gets money flowing to shareholders, it's not going to end up in anyone's handbook)
And the truly tragic thing about this is: Yes - some individuals have anxiety disorders which manifest with symptoms of internet obsessiveness. But other individuals' disorders manifest with other symptoms; gambling, pornography and sexual behavior, alcohol and drugs, collecting their urine in jars, etc.
The problem with defining a SYMPTOM as a disorder, is that someone who has a legitimate, and healthy use of the internet as a resource or hobby, can now be accused by nosy busybodies, of being "sick".
Better still; medication can be prescribed, and pharmaceutical company stockholders can profit from this! win-win, eh?
Yes, but with an "AI" - the training can be done automatically. (ie. computer can teach a computer - machine "learning" can be automated.) This fact alone; regardless of whether we have any clue, right now, whether we're on the right track, is going to make the task happen much more quickly than you are supposing.
True enough: we (humans) can't even DEFINE what intelligence is, let alone create it.
But maybe we don't have to create it. Maybe we can just simulate it. And what's the difference, anyway? - in the end, it is an engineering problem, which is ultimately defined by a set of use-cases. What's the use-case for AI? From the standpoint of a Turing Test - the use-case is: Fool a person into thinking they're talking to a real person. Well, frankly, that's really not that hard. Okay? Fool a person of above-average intelligence into thinking they're talking to a real person. . . a bit harder, and what is the Market Requirement for this anyway? Lonely geeks?
The Market Requirement for AI is: (presumably) automated control of machines without human intervention to perform certain tasks like: navigating difficult terrain (done), assisting humans in locating information (done, to some relatively weak degree, in search engines), okay. . . how about the following:
- Control a machine that can navigate through a farm-field, distinguish and care for "good plants", pull weeds.
- Control a machine that can take a simple verbal command like "cook me dinner" - derive a detailed meaning like (my owner likes the following foods: {x, y, z} (but I've fixed him x several times this week, ingredients for y are not in stock, so I will make z)) - and perform the physical robotic tasks for preparing "z". You could go on all day.
. . . Now - each of these Market Requirements, presumably includes a requirement for "do it cheaper than a human can do it". (as in, "weld a car together". Or generate java marshalling code from WSDL.)
Otherwise - there's really no point to "soft AI".
Or maybe the goal of AI is: "design a machine that is capable of designing a machine, that is capable of propelling a spacecraft at speeds greater than that of C, within a certain limited amount of energy consumption. . . " or "write a sonnet" or "produce a painting". This gets into the whole "hard AI/soft AI" argument.
I don't know if we'll ever do quite THAT. But I do see all the pieces there for "soft AI" (ie. Simulated Intelligence - or "seems smart enough to me, here's some money $$$" ) - and I don't see it all that far off.
I think that a congress of nerds *IS* the way to go.
Because what we have now; Democracy being what it is - (essentially, a popularity contest), the job attracts folks who are narcissistic schmoozing used-car-salesmen. This leads to bribery, corruption, earmarks, tax-n-spend, borrow-n-spend, policies backed by wedge-issues instead of actual substance, war, poverty, and ultimately, economic destruction, I'm afraid.
If we put people in office who are nerds; and I don't care if they're nerds about science, or nerds about computers, or nerds about public policy (also-known-as: wonks) - then they'll be paying less attention to how to please their golfing buddies and various bribery/extortion partners, and more attention on how to please voters.
And THAT is how Democracy *should* be.
But then again, I guess I'm wishing we had more VOTERS who are nerds.
..Keep in mind, though, that it's the US and it's military dominance that allows other western countries, like Canada and the Netherlands, to spend all of their revenue on social programs while nearly ignoring their militaries....
Well, at the rate the FED is printing dollars, that dominance can't last long, (maybe we can pay our troops in pesos?) (yeah, we know this is all secretly Bush's stealth-plan to end all the illegal immigration; Mexicans are going to want to stay home after he's through with America).
So if the Right is so concerned about all these Dutch and Canadian babies we're killing because we protect the world from the Russians - why don't we just stop doing it? (Israel too!) Make them stand up for themselves and pay for their own defense? Oh yeah - forgot about the CORPORATE WELFARE FOR THE US DEFENSE INDUSTRY that we'd have to end.
That's the problem with Limbaugh's Oxycontin-driven logic. If you sit down and think about it for a minute or two, it just gives you fits of the giggles.
Maybe the process that granted him those options needs improvement, but there isn't really anything offensive about him exercising them(unless you hate people making large sums of money).
The money has to come from somewhere - so you present a false and dishonest argument with the statement "... unless you hate people making large sums of money..." - and the answer is YES - in cases like these, I hate people being rewarded for incompetence while many, many others are being deprived in exchange for hard work. It goes against my sense of right and wrong. Furthermore; it is counterproductive to the basis of our entire economic system to reward incompetent people inappropriately, at the expense of others who are productive. It discourages the promotion of competence, it discourages productivity, and wastes tremendous amounts of resources. I think I would much rather see schools, roads, and hospitals built on the revenues of the income tax, had that money been instead, invested into expanding the business, and paid towards salaries of workers, rather than cynically socked away into securities that were taxed at the idiotic "capital gains" rate; where they pretty much just go into this guy's swimming pools, luxury condos, and bank accounts in the Caymans, and produce nothing of value or note for anybody except the one guy, who managed to fuck things up for everyone else.
So yeah, I'd much rather see hard working employees who have a stake in the success of their company being rewarded with huge sums of money, than to see assholes like this getting bailed out with golden parachutes on the way to their next golf game.
Having witnessed SSRI withdraw firsthand, there is a period of about 2 weeks (varies per individual and dosage) where there is extreme irritability (along with dizziness, nausea, "buzzing" sensations, sleeplessness, profuse sweating - leading to dehydration in some cases, etc), which is completely unrelated to the original symptoms that prompted medication in the first place.
So yeah - psychotic goes on meds, is stable, goes off meds, is unstable. Mildly anxious person goes on meds, is "happy" - goes off meds, and CAN become unstable for a short period of time. I've seen it happen. Went on "SSRI withdraw" discussion boards, and talked with other people who were going through or have gone through the same exact thing my significant other went through.
And yes - some of them became suicidal, and violent during withdraw.
The medical establishment needs to much more closely monitor SSRI usage.
Trying to insinuate that Senator Larry Craig would be fired for being gay, when he is in fact (avoiding) being fired for ETHICS VIOLATIONS like; pleading guilty to a misdemeanor, not reporting to the ethics committee as Senat rules demand, then trying to reverse his SWORN STATEMENT.
Nobody cares if he's gay (except maybe a few rightwing whackjobs, and maybe his wife and family). We should care if he's a liar. We should care if ANY public servant is a liar.
And this is why living in a society that allows gays to be systematically and institutionally ostracized, breeds dishonesty, lying, and dishonor, as people are forced to lead double lives to cover up their true nature in order to "fit in" (or get a job as say, a Republican Senator).
Larry Craig's sad, twisted life demonstrates exactly why his politics are not just dumb, but also (capital-W) Wrong.
We know this. Dumb-ass slashdotters KNOW that negative campaigning works - and it works best as a quick, last-minute tactic, when the opponent has to react quickly (and often poorly) (thus inventing the 2000-2004 tactic called the "Rove-a-dope": leak a false, mild accusation about your own candidate, even better, make it look like it came from your opponent, wait for your opponent to grossly over-react, and look like a radical reactionary to the mainstream media).
So - after decades of this being common knowledge; why don't people who run CLEAN campaigns (like Obama's) PREPARE themselves for these inevitable last-minute slime-jobs? They *had* to know it was coming. Why didn't they have nuanced responses prepared? Why did they not even prime the communication channels with anticipatory themes to short circuit the anticipated attacks? (We all *KNEW* that Clinton would attack Obama's experience: because that's all she's got - Obama should lever this as his strength: "America is looking for candidates who don't have the kind of experience that Clinton and McCain have - the kind of experience with dealing with lobbyists, corporations, and wealthy foreign donors. .." such an attack would have made the 3am commercial look trite by comparison.
At least I'm not as frustrated with Obama as I was with Kerry 04, who just sat on his ass for 30 days while the SBVT slime machine ran nonstop, completely unopposed.
Someday, we'll get a good leader who hires political consultants capable of running a competent, AND CLEAN campaign.
Heh; the STUPIDEST thing about the no-MMS, is that when someone sends YOU an MMS message, you get this message telling you to go to a web site to view the picture, and enter a complicated logon id and password - yet, they don't even have the decency to give you a frickin hyperlink.
So you've got to memorize the URL, username, and password, switch apps from SMS to Safari, enter the URL to get to the stinkin MMS site, then enter the username and password. And the screen's got all this junk on it, and the picture does not fit well, and in terms of usability - this interface is just the worst piece of crap I've seen in years. Stacked next to all the other really cool innovations on the iPhone, I'm just left scratching my head and wondering what someone was thinking.
Yes, they purchased their election business, (before the 2000 election, mind you.) - In fact, they're not the only (nor are they nearly the worst) player in the "bad voting machines" business; they're just the most publicly known.
The worst part is: to be legitimately doing this business, they are supposed to follow rigorous testing, documentation, and change-control processes. They have demonstrated over and over that they are incapable of doing so - in violation of the contracts they signed with the government.
The people at fault here - are really the government election officials who brokered the deals with these companies, and allowed these machines to be used for several election cycles, in violation of the contracts under which they were purchased, and in many cases, in blatant violation of US and state law. Yet these machines continue to be used.
Diebold *DOES* use rigorous process controls in the design and production of its ATM machines - but refuses to push these practices down to their vote machine business.
And now a defense contractor is going to buy them?
Eisenhower warned us about the Military Industrial Complex: we're stuck in a $3 Billion war that we can't even get an honest discussion going for, in our supposedly "independent" press. And we're going to let the defense industry (which already owns NBC) - to own the voting machines too?
The ONLY thing that will save this screwed up nation is that we'll eventually run out of money and go bankrupt.
Slashdot Mirror
the bottom line is still, between the Democrats and Republicans, there is no right lizard.
My cat hunts lizards, brings them into the house, and plays with them until they are in small, bloody pieces.
Clearly, we need to invent a "growth ray", and point it at my cat, and we'll solve this Democrats and Republicans problem.
It also depends on what one's definition of "truth" is.
Truth can have different definitions, depending on context - in this context (because there are many contexts under which one would want to define truth, i.e. including the "model" of reality that is formal logic).
In the context of philosophy - what role does Truth or Falsehood play? Truth is not a thing to be defined in this context - instead, it defines something else: How I Decide to Act.
If I believe that it is TRUE that I will burn in hell eternally, if I sleep with my best friend's wife, (for example) then I will likely choose not to do so; no matter how hot she is, and no matter how much of a dork he is.
On the other hand, I may not believe that is TRUE, and I may believe that sleeping with my best friend's wife might lead to some bad consequences for our families, our children, society in general, and there's a high likely hood of some undesirable side effects, just from the hurt-feelings perspective, then again, I will likely not choose to commit this act, even if it is a purely deterministic, predictable choice, there would be consequences that I would be unhappy with, and regret (which is not exactly the same as moral guilt).
Either way, I'm making a choice, based on values and reasoning, and weighing likelihood of consequences. Neither possible TRUTH upon which I might make this decision, will alone determine my actions - though they'll influence the decision.
So one might define TRUTH as; a belief value that informs decisions. No truth, in this context, is binary. Nobody believes in such abstractions either, 100%. The most faithful among us have doubts about hell, if not now, at other points in their life. And in the "moral atheist" scenario, one might still be tempted to give into the physical lust, even with the high likelihood of these horrible material consequences.
Can you plug these values into a mathematical model of human behavior, and theoretically predict the outcome, without a human being?
This is the question they're trying to answer by proving or disproving the existence of "free will" - (and attached to that, the existence of a "soul" and the existence of "God", etc.) So, of course there is a hidden agenda in this very question. Just as there is also a hidden agenda in propagating the "hell" idea.
Is Free Will a Truth?
Are my decisions influenced by the fact that I believe that free will exists, or does not exist? - well, yes, in this sense it is. And the degree to which my decisions are influenced, DEPENDS on how strongly, on that day, I believe that Free Will (and moral consequence) exists!
I can say that, in the past, during a time where I was an atheist, and I believed that Free Will did not exist, I made choices that I would not make today, based on a supposed lack of moral consequence.
Because I chose NOT to believe in the existence of Free Will (and personal responsibility for actions)?
It sure as hell WAS designed to run on computers from 4 years ago.
To the point where the time-sharing algorithm between the audio player and network bandwidth was HARD-CODED to work well with slower, single-core pentium CPU's without SSE support.
Modern computers didn't have as much of a problem finding CPU bandwidth to process audio, while simultaneously doing network transfers, yet they suffered from an inappropriate throttling mechanism nonetheless.
In this regard, Vista was designed SPECIFICALLY for computers from 4 years ago - and NOT for current, modern, multi-core pentiums.
(however, Vista also seems to be designed for the Video cards that will be available 4 years from now.)
Well, it's sort of a "maximum income" system, as far as karma goes. Most of us 4-digit guys hit max karma before the year 2000.
I have not seen any other benefits from a 4-digit ID; neither in metamod selection, nor in acceptance of posting articles. (I don't think I've ever had a submitted article accepted!)
There can be only one explanation for why power grid control systems are accessible on the Internet.
A catastrophic failure of Requirements Analysis.
Well, in a way, 9/11 was a form of social engineering as well.
The premise was:
American Civilians believe that they are non-combatants. So if the terrorists make the passengers believe that if they cooperate, they will not be killed, then terrorists can commandeer a plane, and do whatever they want. As long as the passengers are compliant.
However, Flight 93 proved that 5 armed terrorists can not successfully commandeer a planeload of civilians who know that they ARE combatants, and will be killed according to the most savage set of rules: survival of the fittest.
The mistake the Flight 93 terrorists made was to let the passengers use their cell phones, and find out the truth.
The THREAT of this attack vector ended the moment the first cell-phone call made it out of Flight 93. NOW: no planeload of passengers is likely to EVER AGAIN cooperate with terrorists. Terrorists know this. That is why they've never tried this plan again since 9/11. They get onto planes all the time, and it's certainly trivial to smuggle weapons on board a plane. But they now know they have no chance in hell of gaining control of a plane.
The reality that Americans didn't like, is learning that their civilians were now combatants. This reality has been strongly rejected - but it's still real. Cognitive Dissonance.
However. . .
I have a cell phone for pretty much one reason only:
In case someone needs to contact me in an emergency.
(okay - two reasons, in case *I* need to contact someone in an emergency).
This means that; no, I'm not constantly on my phone talking/texting other people with "small-talk". On the other hand, if a call comes in, on the assumption that the person NEEDS to contact me, it interrupts face-to-face activities, in most cases.
Often, I'll let it go, and wait for the other person to try to call me a second time - to ensure it's REALLY important. Especially if the ID'd caller has a history of trivial calls.
I have to agree.
I have become REALLY tired of Will Smith movies, where he ALWAYS plays his "Fresh Prince" character. Every time. It really got me pissed off when he did it to Wild Wild West.
I was delighted to see him do something different for once in I Am Legend.
What sucks - REALLY sucks, is when the naive 60% accuse you of being paranoid, negative, a downer, depressed, etc. that's supposed to help? I'll tell you what helps. Watching naive people get victimized because they were too stupid to protect themselves. Much nicer being a smug ant, than a starving grasshopper any day.
The very interesting thing about Ron Paul is that he became quickly very UNPOPULAR among people who found out on their own about him. The truth about his past, his little radical newspaper, and the racist opinions he used to push.
Yeah - the real truth.
Ron Paul was just another phony politician, who's 15 minutes got stretched out a little too long.
XBox succeeded for the following reasons:
First and foremost - - - HALO.
Second - - - DirectX
Reason 2.1: Writing Games for other platforms SUCKS ASS.
Reason 2.2: They cannibalized the existing WINDOWS gaming market for XBox - the DirectX expertise that was already in place, was shifted to XBox development, and game companies suddenly had a broader (cheaper) pool of developer talent with cheaper tools to choose from. It is MUCH cheaper (in terms of man-hours, test-effort, and tools maturity) to develop games for XBox than for PlayStation or other consoles. And you get the PC platform for free, pretty much.
This strategy probably would have worked just as well without having bought Bungie when they did. But with Bungie/Halo, it was a freaking slam dunk. Where did Microsoft drop the ball? Guitar Hero. And with the 360's release/reliability problems. The gaming market's tastes shifted from shooters to music and sports.
Also, keep in mind that an official diagnosis is important for insurance purposes.
Yes, of course!
Must keep the accountants and lawyers happy, by all means necessary!
(methinks there is a diagnosable mental disorder in there somewhere as well, but I guess since this one gets money flowing to shareholders, it's not going to end up in anyone's handbook)
And the truly tragic thing about this is:
Yes - some individuals have anxiety disorders which manifest with symptoms of internet obsessiveness.
But other individuals' disorders manifest with other symptoms; gambling, pornography and sexual behavior, alcohol and drugs, collecting their urine in jars, etc.
The problem with defining a SYMPTOM as a disorder, is that someone who has a legitimate, and healthy use of the internet as a resource or hobby, can now be accused by nosy busybodies, of being "sick".
Better still; medication can be prescribed, and pharmaceutical company stockholders can profit from this! win-win, eh?
Yes, but with an "AI" - the training can be done automatically. (ie. computer can teach a computer - machine "learning" can be automated.) This fact alone; regardless of whether we have any clue, right now, whether we're on the right track, is going to make the task happen much more quickly than you are supposing.
True enough: we (humans) can't even DEFINE what intelligence is, let alone create it.
But maybe we don't have to create it. Maybe we can just simulate it. And what's the difference, anyway? - in the end, it is an engineering problem, which is ultimately defined by a set of use-cases. What's the use-case for AI? From the standpoint of a Turing Test - the use-case is: Fool a person into thinking they're talking to a real person. Well, frankly, that's really not that hard. Okay? Fool a person of above-average intelligence into thinking they're talking to a real person. . . a bit harder, and what is the Market Requirement for this anyway? Lonely geeks?
The Market Requirement for AI is:
(presumably)
automated control of machines without human intervention to perform certain tasks like: navigating difficult terrain (done), assisting humans in locating information (done, to some relatively weak degree, in search engines), okay. . . how about the following:
- Control a machine that can navigate through a farm-field, distinguish and care for "good plants", pull weeds.
- Control a machine that can take a simple verbal command like "cook me dinner" - derive a detailed meaning like (my owner likes the following foods: {x, y, z} (but I've fixed him x several times this week, ingredients for y are not in stock, so I will make z)) - and perform the physical robotic tasks for preparing "z". You could go on all day.
. . .
Now - each of these Market Requirements, presumably includes a requirement for "do it cheaper than a human can do it".
(as in, "weld a car together". Or generate java marshalling code from WSDL.)
Otherwise - there's really no point to "soft AI".
Or maybe the goal of AI is: "design a machine that is capable of designing a machine, that is capable of propelling a spacecraft at speeds greater than that of C, within a certain limited amount of energy consumption. . . " or "write a sonnet" or "produce a painting". This gets into the whole "hard AI/soft AI" argument.
I don't know if we'll ever do quite THAT. But I do see all the pieces there for "soft AI" (ie. Simulated Intelligence - or "seems smart enough to me, here's some money $$$" ) - and I don't see it all that far off.
I think that a congress of nerds *IS* the way to go.
Because what we have now; Democracy being what it is - (essentially, a popularity contest), the job attracts folks who are narcissistic schmoozing used-car-salesmen. This leads to bribery, corruption, earmarks, tax-n-spend, borrow-n-spend, policies backed by wedge-issues instead of actual substance, war, poverty, and ultimately, economic destruction, I'm afraid.
If we put people in office who are nerds; and I don't care if they're nerds about science, or nerds about computers, or nerds about public policy (also-known-as: wonks) - then they'll be paying less attention to how to please their golfing buddies and various bribery/extortion partners, and more attention on how to please voters.
And THAT is how Democracy *should* be.
But then again, I guess I'm wishing we had more VOTERS who are nerds.
..Keep in mind, though, that it's the US and it's military dominance that allows other western countries, like Canada and the Netherlands, to spend all of their revenue on social programs while nearly ignoring their militaries....
Well, at the rate the FED is printing dollars, that dominance can't last long, (maybe we can pay our troops in pesos?) (yeah, we know this is all secretly Bush's stealth-plan to end all the illegal immigration; Mexicans are going to want to stay home after he's through with America).
So if the Right is so concerned about all these Dutch and Canadian babies we're killing because we protect the world from the Russians - why don't we just stop doing it? (Israel too!) Make them stand up for themselves and pay for their own defense? Oh yeah - forgot about the CORPORATE WELFARE FOR THE US DEFENSE INDUSTRY that we'd have to end.
That's the problem with Limbaugh's Oxycontin-driven logic. If you sit down and think about it for a minute or two, it just gives you fits of the giggles.
And the guy who came up with the idea?
John Poindexter - CONVICTED FELON of the Iran-Contra scandal.
Folks just don't talk about these things in the mainstream newsmedia.
Maybe the process that granted him those options needs improvement, but there isn't really anything offensive about him exercising them(unless you hate people making large sums of money).
The money has to come from somewhere - so you present a false and dishonest argument with the statement "... unless you hate people making large sums of money..." - and the answer is YES - in cases like these, I hate people being rewarded for incompetence while many, many others are being deprived in exchange for hard work. It goes against my sense of right and wrong. Furthermore; it is counterproductive to the basis of our entire economic system to reward incompetent people inappropriately, at the expense of others who are productive. It discourages the promotion of competence, it discourages productivity, and wastes tremendous amounts of resources. I think I would much rather see schools, roads, and hospitals built on the revenues of the income tax, had that money been instead, invested into expanding the business, and paid towards salaries of workers, rather than cynically socked away into securities that were taxed at the idiotic "capital gains" rate; where they pretty much just go into this guy's swimming pools, luxury condos, and bank accounts in the Caymans, and produce nothing of value or note for anybody except the one guy, who managed to fuck things up for everyone else.
So yeah, I'd much rather see hard working employees who have a stake in the success of their company being rewarded with huge sums of money, than to see assholes like this getting bailed out with golden parachutes on the way to their next golf game.
Having witnessed SSRI withdraw firsthand, there is a period of about 2 weeks (varies per individual and dosage) where there is extreme irritability (along with dizziness, nausea, "buzzing" sensations, sleeplessness, profuse sweating - leading to dehydration in some cases, etc), which is completely unrelated to the original symptoms that prompted medication in the first place.
So yeah - psychotic goes on meds, is stable, goes off meds, is unstable. Mildly anxious person goes on meds, is "happy" - goes off meds, and CAN become unstable for a short period of time. I've seen it happen. Went on "SSRI withdraw" discussion boards, and talked with other people who were going through or have gone through the same exact thing my significant other went through.
And yes - some of them became suicidal, and violent during withdraw.
The medical establishment needs to much more closely monitor SSRI usage.
I guess my question (about the definition between Cult and Religion:) is Ayn Rand dead long enough?
Definition of UNETHICAL:
Trying to insinuate that Senator Larry Craig would be fired for being gay, when he is in fact (avoiding) being fired for ETHICS VIOLATIONS like; pleading guilty to a misdemeanor, not reporting to the ethics committee as Senat rules demand, then trying to reverse his SWORN STATEMENT.
Nobody cares if he's gay (except maybe a few rightwing whackjobs, and maybe his wife and family).
We should care if he's a liar. We should care if ANY public servant is a liar.
And this is why living in a society that allows gays to be systematically and institutionally ostracized, breeds dishonesty, lying, and dishonor, as people are forced to lead double lives to cover up their true nature in order to "fit in" (or get a job as say, a Republican Senator).
Larry Craig's sad, twisted life demonstrates exactly why his politics are not just dumb, but also (capital-W) Wrong.
What I don't get is;
." such an attack would have made the 3am commercial look trite by comparison.
We know this. Dumb-ass slashdotters KNOW that negative campaigning works - and it works best as a quick, last-minute tactic, when the opponent has to react quickly (and often poorly) (thus inventing the 2000-2004 tactic called the "Rove-a-dope": leak a false, mild accusation about your own candidate, even better, make it look like it came from your opponent, wait for your opponent to grossly over-react, and look like a radical reactionary to the mainstream media).
So - after decades of this being common knowledge; why don't people who run CLEAN campaigns (like Obama's) PREPARE themselves for these inevitable last-minute slime-jobs? They *had* to know it was coming. Why didn't they have nuanced responses prepared? Why did they not even prime the communication channels with anticipatory themes to short circuit the anticipated attacks? (We all *KNEW* that Clinton would attack Obama's experience: because that's all she's got - Obama should lever this as his strength: "America is looking for candidates who don't have the kind of experience that Clinton and McCain have - the kind of experience with dealing with lobbyists, corporations, and wealthy foreign donors. .
At least I'm not as frustrated with Obama as I was with Kerry 04, who just sat on his ass for 30 days while the SBVT slime machine ran nonstop, completely unopposed.
Someday, we'll get a good leader who hires political consultants capable of running a competent, AND CLEAN campaign.
windows+R->cmd.exe to open a dos shell. navigate to the location, mkdir . qed.
Heh; the STUPIDEST thing about the no-MMS, is that when someone sends YOU an MMS message, you get this message telling you to go to a web site to view the picture, and enter a complicated logon id and password - yet, they don't even have the decency to give you a frickin hyperlink.
So you've got to memorize the URL, username, and password, switch apps from SMS to Safari, enter the URL to get to the stinkin MMS site, then enter the username and password. And the screen's got all this junk on it, and the picture does not fit well, and in terms of usability - this interface is just the worst piece of crap I've seen in years. Stacked next to all the other really cool innovations on the iPhone, I'm just left scratching my head and wondering what someone was thinking.
Yes, they purchased their election business, (before the 2000 election, mind you.) -
In fact, they're not the only (nor are they nearly the worst) player in the "bad voting machines" business; they're just the most publicly known.
The worst part is: to be legitimately doing this business, they are supposed to follow rigorous testing, documentation, and change-control processes. They have demonstrated over and over that they are incapable of doing so - in violation of the contracts they signed with the government.
The people at fault here - are really the government election officials who brokered the deals with these companies, and allowed these machines to be used for several election cycles, in violation of the contracts under which they were purchased, and in many cases, in blatant violation of US and state law. Yet these machines continue to be used.
Diebold *DOES* use rigorous process controls in the design and production of its ATM machines - but refuses to push these practices down to their vote machine business.
And now a defense contractor is going to buy them?
Eisenhower warned us about the Military Industrial Complex: we're stuck in a $3 Billion war that we can't even get an honest discussion going for, in our supposedly "independent" press. And we're going to let the defense industry (which already owns NBC) - to own the voting machines too?
The ONLY thing that will save this screwed up nation is that we'll eventually run out of money and go bankrupt.