It's been "in development" for 10 years now. In the software business, "in production" means that an installation master has successfully passed QA and you have started the process of making the CDs, boxes, and manuals. If it really is in production then the only things that could stop it from being on shelves soon are:
Running out of money to pay the CD/Box/Manual factories;
A terrorist attack on all facilities of that kind destroying capacity;
A terrorist attack destroying all copies of the source code (including off-site copies);
A nuclear attack on the head office (assuming off-site backups are nearby);
Some idiot in Congress deciding it needs to be banned; or
the easiest way I can put it is that morals are subjective to a person, ethics are subjective to a group of persons
Not quite. Morals are standards of conduct that do not require objective justification - they may, for instance, claim to be handed down by a deity. Ethics are standards of conduct that are based on objective justifications (although it is not necessary that the objective justification be incapable of being disputed).
That is not to say that particular standards of conduct in a system of morals are incapable of objective justification - merely that objective justification is seen as unnecessary for "moral" standards. The standard "just is".
It is entirely possible for it to be impossible to comply with both a moral standard and an ethical one at the same time.
Does talking backward smarter make you sound? Hmmmmm?
As somebody else mentioned already, some languages have the word ordering Yoda uses. Yoda is based on a blend of Japanese mystics, Samurai and martial-arts masters. Guess what word order is used in Japanese.
>One must wonder why water cores don't exist in real life...
Well, perhaps the answer lies in how the planets formed to begin with.
At least one star system in the Star Wars universe (Corellia - Han Solo's home system) was constructed artificially in the long-forgotten past. While Corellia involved relocating planets from other star systems, it seems reasonable to assume planet construction may also have been an option, and given Naboo seems to be a tranquil paradise it may well have been constructed for wealthy beings in pre old-republic days.
On the other hand we don't know for sure that there are no water-core planets "in real life" - in fact all we know about is the limited planets around an insignificant yellow star in an unfashionable area of the galaxy, together with the existence of a few gas giants and even fewer rocky worlds around some nearby stars.
Your attempt at simplicity has turned into a UI nightmare.
I did not suggest it would be ideal - just that it is not impossible ("there is no way you can"), as the original post claimed. All of the actions you describe would be possible with a six button remote by having the actions take place via a menu - even one involving a small set of icons at the bottom/top/left/right of the screen. Ever used a Playstation 2 for watching DVDs without buying the separate remote? It has a scheme very much like this (using the game controller) that is perfectly adequate for basic DVD viewing.
Everyone knows the Welsh language has no vowels and is impossible to understand even to Welsh people
Welsh has more vowels than English ('w' is a vowel in Celtic languages, equivalent to "oo" as in "spook")*, but it is true that it is impossible to pronounce. Especially the sound corresponding to "LL".
* - There is a tiny street in a suburb of Sydney called "Clwdyn Place". If you are "clued in" you know how to pronounce it.
The interesting thing if is they do as USA (And as Norwegian government tried to do), to make it illegal to circumvent copyright protection measurments.
It is illegal to circumvent what are called Technological Protection Measures, but the High Court has effectively neutered the provision by saying that the measure must prevent the actual copying, not merely make the copy useless. Since you can always make a bit-for-bit copy, there is really no space left for the provisions to operate in, except perhaps cartridge games where there is a measure embedded in the cartridge.
there was a time, when I first started using computers, I would look for "Intel Inside" badge on the PC case as a mark of quality
I never saw "Intel Inside" as a sign of quality, but I did order Intel systems exclusively. Why? Because we write software for business and government customers and you don't want CPU compatibility issues to result in the software doing something different on your system to on the customer's system - you want "bug compatibility" as far as possible..
I'm starting to introduce AMD systems into the mix though, for the same reason.
More and more people record shows off television simply so they can watch it later to skip through the adverts. If advertisers stop paying premium rates for prime time television, then there is a big risk the quality of the shows will go down
The quality shows all end up on cable anyway, where they get much better treatment than they get at the free-to-air networks. As with so many things, "you get what you pay for".
top-posting... only exists because of certain popular proprietary mailers
Not really. It's a usability thing - it presumes people are most interested in what is being said to them, and leaves the earlier content there as context if the recipient needs it.
Obviously real geeks are in a different position, having learnt the "proper" way long ago, but for untrained people, top-posting comes across as more usable.
You're still right, the robots have not achieved self-awareness
There is a much deeper problem in the title than this. It is, quite simply, impossible for one being to prove its self-awareness to another. We may be able to make some sort of educated guess as to things being self-aware, but there is no way we can directly observe or experience the self-awareness of another being. This is by definition, since self-awareness is that recognition of one's own existence a a separate entity that is unique to and inseparable from that entity - it is not merely the reaction of the bio-machine to its environment no matter how complex and seemingly independent that reaction.
The Star Trek TNG episode "The Measure of A Man" gives a fairly good explanation of the problem.
Even if we develop a non-biological machine that mimics in all respects the behaviour of a human, down to the finest of details, we will have no way of determining whether that machine is self-aware. A corollory of this is that we have no way of determining if any particular machine is not self-aware. You are probably fairly confident your computer is not self-aware, but just try proving it.
If you think that you can prove something is, or is not, self-aware, then you have probably not understood the problem.
I think Wikipedia is flawed. It is based on NPOV but there is no such thing. This is discussed in depth by post modernistis.
Bah. The post modernists are biased, I take anything they say with a grain of salt... if you can call a 5 pound lump a grain. Post modernists are also boring, but that is a topic for another day.
I think the reason Wikipedia arouses such fervor is the apparent audacity of the concept.
The reason I dislike Wikipedia is because it is polluting search engine results. When some of my Google searches return Wikipedia articles as every result on the first page, the search has been seriously diminished in value. This is something that has been getting much worse over the pasts 6 months. You can't even avoid it by excluding the domains because, Wikipedia articles appear under different mirror names as well as unmapped IP addresses.
In my opinion Wikipedia should be removed from Google (and all other search engines). Actually they should just have a robots.txt that excludes everything (except, perhaps from the entry point pages). If people want Wikipedia, they know where to find it - there really is no need for every Wikipedia article to be listed in Google, even once, let alone once for every mirror as seems to be the case more often than not.
A side-effect of getting Wikipedia out of Google is that the incentive for spamming Wikipedia would be radically diminished, so you would think the Wikipedia mob would be happy to do it.
I don't expect it to happen though. It seems to me that Wikipedia is run by a collection of phenomenal egos who, while they don't want people spamming Wikipedia, are quite happy to be spamming the search engines so as to prevent us from finding other content.
it's not usually because they don't know how (technically), it's usually because they ran out of time to produce a totally cross-platform site
This is not always true. Our marketdroids produced a site at one point that would not work with anything other than IE. When told of this they said they didn't care. As it happens the geeks here had more influence with the CEO, and so this attitude was readjusted toute suite, but in many organisations marketing has the hold of the CEO's attention (since they are seen, rightly or wrongly, as the people who bring cash in, as opposed to productive people who are "just" cost centres), and in such cases this sort of thing won't be caught.
Time has proven that the Department of Homeland Security, the regular milatary, and, heck, even the local police force do NOT appreciate help from citizens when dealing with "the enemy".
Of course in "helping" doesn't necessarily mean getting out with a Smith'n'Wesson attached to your hip to hunt down bad guys. Knowledge of the "enemy" is also important to participating rationally in democratic policy formation - something every voter has not just a right to do in a democracy, but in my opinion a duty. This is especially so when we are talking about the leading issue of our time. If you haven't been ordering (or reading) books about a certain terrorist then you are probably in dereliction of your duty as a citizen of a democratic nation.
Uh huh. If I tell you I don't own something and then offer to sell it to you I've broken no laws.
That is not the case here. You would have to be very clear up-front that you don't own it. This guy goes to great lengths to make the claim he does own it. Courts will not hesitate to treat it as a serious claim, no matter how ridiculous the claim is, if you go to great lengths to support the claim.
On the other hand, if the Lunar Embasy claims to to the embasy for a government that 'owns' the moon, then it falls (and fails) under the treaty.
Not if it's not a party to the treaty. However it is still illegal to sell land on the moon, and the real reason does not require recourse to any issues of international law. There is a basic principle of law that you cannot sell what you do not own (lawyers like to use the Latin "nemo dat quod non habet" - nobody can give what they do not have). As this guy does not own any part of the moon, he cannot sell it. Attempting to do so involves as a necessary step a claim that he does own it, and that is a fraud. There is simply no recognised means by which he could, even in the most fanciful of mechanisms, have established such ownership at any time.
I put my 27" CRT TV on the shelf above my fireplace when I moved in to my house two years ago, and haven't moved it since.
This is a really bad place to put a TV (especially a CRT) unless you don't use the fireplace. Televisions can be quite sensitive to excess heat, so you will have a much lower time to failure.
Slashdot Mirror
Then it's not "in production", it's "in development".
It's been "in development" for 10 years now. In the software business, "in production" means that an installation master has successfully passed QA and you have started the process of making the CDs, boxes, and manuals. If it really is in production then the only things that could stop it from being on shelves soon are:
Not quite. Morals are standards of conduct that do not require objective justification - they may, for instance, claim to be handed down by a deity. Ethics are standards of conduct that are based on objective justifications (although it is not necessary that the objective justification be incapable of being disputed).
That is not to say that particular standards of conduct in a system of morals are incapable of objective justification - merely that objective justification is seen as unnecessary for "moral" standards. The standard "just is".
It is entirely possible for it to be impossible to comply with both a moral standard and an ethical one at the same time.
How about they strip Gnome, put in KDE and call if Kanoodle?
As somebody else mentioned already, some languages have the word ordering Yoda uses. Yoda is based on a blend of Japanese mystics, Samurai and martial-arts masters. Guess what word order is used in Japanese.
Well, perhaps the answer lies in how the planets formed to begin with.
At least one star system in the Star Wars universe (Corellia - Han Solo's home system) was constructed artificially in the long-forgotten past. While Corellia involved relocating planets from other star systems, it seems reasonable to assume planet construction may also have been an option, and given Naboo seems to be a tranquil paradise it may well have been constructed for wealthy beings in pre old-republic days.
On the other hand we don't know for sure that there are no water-core planets "in real life" - in fact all we know about is the limited planets around an insignificant yellow star in an unfashionable area of the galaxy, together with the existence of a few gas giants and even fewer rocky worlds around some nearby stars.
They do in Spain
Hasn't somebody warned you against listening to those voices in your head?
It seems we will get to find out soon enough.
I did not suggest it would be ideal - just that it is not impossible ("there is no way you can"), as the original post claimed. All of the actions you describe would be possible with a six button remote by having the actions take place via a menu - even one involving a small set of icons at the bottom/top/left/right of the screen. Ever used a Playstation 2 for watching DVDs without buying the separate remote? It has a scheme very much like this (using the game controller) that is perfectly adequate for basic DVD viewing.
Left, Right, Up, Down, Select, Cancel
The "any" key brings up the on-screen menu if you are not already in it. I'm sure there are other combinations that will work too.
Welsh has more vowels than English ('w' is a vowel in Celtic languages, equivalent to "oo" as in "spook")*, but it is true that it is impossible to pronounce. Especially the sound corresponding to "LL".
* - There is a tiny street in a suburb of Sydney called "Clwdyn Place". If you are "clued in" you know how to pronounce it.
Bah. I'd rather a chick proved to me that she was one out of 18 people!
It is illegal to circumvent what are called Technological Protection Measures, but the High Court has effectively neutered the provision by saying that the measure must prevent the actual copying, not merely make the copy useless. Since you can always make a bit-for-bit copy, there is really no space left for the provisions to operate in, except perhaps cartridge games where there is a measure embedded in the cartridge.
I never saw "Intel Inside" as a sign of quality, but I did order Intel systems exclusively. Why? Because we write software for business and government customers and you don't want CPU compatibility issues to result in the software doing something different on your system to on the customer's system - you want "bug compatibility" as far as possible..
I'm starting to introduce AMD systems into the mix though, for the same reason.
The quality shows all end up on cable anyway, where they get much better treatment than they get at the free-to-air networks. As with so many things, "you get what you pay for".
Not really. It's a usability thing - it presumes people are most interested in what is being said to them, and leaves the earlier content there as context if the recipient needs it.
Obviously real geeks are in a different position, having learnt the "proper" way long ago, but for untrained people, top-posting comes across as more usable.
There is a much deeper problem in the title than this. It is, quite simply, impossible for one being to prove its self-awareness to another. We may be able to make some sort of educated guess as to things being self-aware, but there is no way we can directly observe or experience the self-awareness of another being. This is by definition, since self-awareness is that recognition of one's own existence a a separate entity that is unique to and inseparable from that entity - it is not merely the reaction of the bio-machine to its environment no matter how complex and seemingly independent that reaction.
The Star Trek TNG episode "The Measure of A Man" gives a fairly good explanation of the problem. Even if we develop a non-biological machine that mimics in all respects the behaviour of a human, down to the finest of details, we will have no way of determining whether that machine is self-aware. A corollory of this is that we have no way of determining if any particular machine is not self-aware. You are probably fairly confident your computer is not self-aware, but just try proving it. If you think that you can prove something is, or is not, self-aware, then you have probably not understood the problem.
Bah. The post modernists are biased, I take anything they say with a grain of salt... if you can call a 5 pound lump a grain. Post modernists are also boring, but that is a topic for another day.
The reason I dislike Wikipedia is because it is polluting search engine results. When some of my Google searches return Wikipedia articles as every result on the first page, the search has been seriously diminished in value. This is something that has been getting much worse over the pasts 6 months. You can't even avoid it by excluding the domains because, Wikipedia articles appear under different mirror names as well as unmapped IP addresses.
In my opinion Wikipedia should be removed from Google (and all other search engines). Actually they should just have a robots.txt that excludes everything (except, perhaps from the entry point pages). If people want Wikipedia, they know where to find it - there really is no need for every Wikipedia article to be listed in Google, even once, let alone once for every mirror as seems to be the case more often than not.
A side-effect of getting Wikipedia out of Google is that the incentive for spamming Wikipedia would be radically diminished, so you would think the Wikipedia mob would be happy to do it.
I don't expect it to happen though. It seems to me that Wikipedia is run by a collection of phenomenal egos who, while they don't want people spamming Wikipedia, are quite happy to be spamming the search engines so as to prevent us from finding other content.
This is not always true. Our marketdroids produced a site at one point that would not work with anything other than IE. When told of this they said they didn't care. As it happens the geeks here had more influence with the CEO, and so this attitude was readjusted toute suite, but in many organisations marketing has the hold of the CEO's attention (since they are seen, rightly or wrongly, as the people who bring cash in, as opposed to productive people who are "just" cost centres), and in such cases this sort of thing won't be caught.
Of course in "helping" doesn't necessarily mean getting out with a Smith'n'Wesson attached to your hip to hunt down bad guys. Knowledge of the "enemy" is also important to participating rationally in democratic policy formation - something every voter has not just a right to do in a democracy, but in my opinion a duty. This is especially so when we are talking about the leading issue of our time. If you haven't been ordering (or reading) books about a certain terrorist then you are probably in dereliction of your duty as a citizen of a democratic nation.
That is not the case here. You would have to be very clear up-front that you don't own it. This guy goes to great lengths to make the claim he does own it. Courts will not hesitate to treat it as a serious claim, no matter how ridiculous the claim is, if you go to great lengths to support the claim.
Not if it's not a party to the treaty. However it is still illegal to sell land on the moon, and the real reason does not require recourse to any issues of international law. There is a basic principle of law that you cannot sell what you do not own (lawyers like to use the Latin "nemo dat quod non habet" - nobody can give what they do not have). As this guy does not own any part of the moon, he cannot sell it. Attempting to do so involves as a necessary step a claim that he does own it, and that is a fraud. There is simply no recognised means by which he could, even in the most fanciful of mechanisms, have established such ownership at any time.
This is a really bad place to put a TV (especially a CRT) unless you don't use the fireplace. Televisions can be quite sensitive to excess heat, so you will have a much lower time to failure.