At least this would get me out of my chair and into motion more. A sign of playing too much is that not only do I know what kind of character he is playing and his approximate level, but also exactly where he is in the Warcraft world.
A Creative Commons license would seem to be a much better approach than trying to use the GPL. They even have a section explicitly for educators. Since SCO hasn't tried to sue MIT yet, most people are probably unaware that it is available.
Straw man! Nobody will be operating a jammer thousands, even hundreds of feet from the nearest person, particularly in the middle of the night. Jamming is a reaction to obnoxious rude cell phone users in one's immediate vicinity; when they start being more considerate, the need/desire for jammers will disappear. Now if they just made a voice jammer for the rude teenagers behind you at the cinema.
There was a short story by Arthur Clarke in one of the Tales From the White Hart books about a composer who noticed how some tunes stick in your head - think It's a Small World from Disney[land/world]. The composer sets out to maximize the effect by working with the brainwave patterns and eventually succeeds, but goes catatonic because the music is so closely matched to his brainwaves that it consumes all his brain activity.
I normally read at +2 so didn't see the original of this, but you might also tell him/her that those ancient civilizations also inserted intercalary days at various times to keep their calendars synchronized with the seasons (except the Egyptians, who didn't seem to care that the seasons marched through their calendar).
I remember during the hysteria in the hours following the Oklahoma City bombing, it was reported that a "middle-eastern person" had been detained at a nearby airport because he was in possession of "bomb making tools", some of which were a hammer and pliers. Now, how many bomb makers do you suppose use a hammer to make bombs?
To quote from February's Sky & Telescope magazine: "XEphem, the brainchild of programmer Elwood Downey, is a star-charting, sky-simulating, ephemeris-generating celestial virtuoso that can do just about everything that the usual Windows and Macintosh star-charting software can do -- and sometimes quite a bit more. And it's completely free. What's not to like?" It runs on almost any *NIX, and was just recently updated - now at version 3.4. You can even track earth satellites, with push-button TLE updates off the web. See it at http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem.
Re:A Clean Alternative
on
Solar Sails
·
· Score: 1
Space is hardly pristinely pure - it is full of extremely energetic radiation. Outside the Van Allen belts, the contribution of an Orion spacecraft would hardly be noticed. Inside is a different story; it could get really nasty down here if Orions lifted off the surface.
Privista's privacy policy sounds good, but they use JavaScript on their web site, which doesn't inspire a high degree of confidence that they know what they are doing. They also say they use the Privacy Council to audit their site. Those guys also use JavaScript. I sent Privista a note and referred them to http://www.w3.org/Security/Faq/wwwsf7.html.
There seems to be an underlying assumption that the current human brain is optimal for thinking and also necessary for "being intelligent", whatever that means. A lot of the components of the brain that evolution has tried out in the several million years it took us to get here were superseded along the way, yet are still present, but serving no useful function in today's environment. An efficient brain could dispense with those subsystems and reduce its support requirements substantially. Also, a large number of the remaining subsystems, like temperature regulation, blood chemistry monitoring and such, could be removed to remote subsystems; there is no obvious reason that all this has to be collocated with whatever generates "intelligence".
The pace of evolution has suddenly increased by orders of magnitude. We don't have to wait for a particular successful mutation to reproduce itself enough times to replace its predecessor. Just make hundreds or millions of whatever, all slightly different, and cull out the 95% that don't meet the criteria of whatever you are doing. Take the results and replicate by n, again making all of them slightly different, cull again, and repeat until you get what you want. Poof! Directed evolution, efficient, without generations of unnecessary competition for scarce resources.
The great crippling factor for lot of AI work is the notion that we need to understand what "thinking" is, so that we can design a system to "do that". What we really need to do is define what we will accept as intelligence, something like an updated Turing Test, and then use directed evolution of suitable systems to approach that goal. I think work in neural nets is going in the right direction. It is not so important that we understand how it works, just that we recognize it when we get there.
Moral and ethical issues for this method as self-awareness is approached are left as an exercise for the reader.
Slashdot Mirror
At least this would get me out of my chair and into motion more. A sign of playing too much is that not only do I know what kind of character he is playing and his approximate level, but also exactly where he is in the Warcraft world.
You can get DWG or PDF drawings of the original prototype - the one in London - at Long Now's shop page, http://longnow.org/shop/free-downloads/
Straw man! Nobody will be operating a jammer thousands, even hundreds of feet from the nearest person, particularly in the middle of the night. Jamming is a reaction to obnoxious rude cell phone users in one's immediate vicinity; when they start being more considerate, the need/desire for jammers will disappear. Now if they just made a voice jammer for the rude teenagers behind you at the cinema.
There was a short story by Arthur Clarke in one of the Tales From the White Hart books about a composer who noticed how some tunes stick in your head - think It's a Small World from Disney[land/world]. The composer sets out to maximize the effect by working with the brainwave patterns and eventually succeeds, but goes catatonic because the music is so closely matched to his brainwaves that it consumes all his brain activity.
I normally read at +2 so didn't see the original of this, but you might also tell him/her that those ancient civilizations also inserted intercalary days at various times to keep their calendars synchronized with the seasons (except the Egyptians, who didn't seem to care that the seasons marched through their calendar).
Some of it is recoupment of development cost, but I'll bet a lot is various forms of malpractice and liability insurance premiums.
Whatever floats your boat, but my girlfriend's colon is not the part I'm interested in.
I remember during the hysteria in the hours following the Oklahoma City bombing, it was reported that a "middle-eastern person" had been detained at a nearby airport because he was in possession of "bomb making tools", some of which were a hammer and pliers. Now, how many bomb makers do you suppose use a hammer to make bombs?
To quote from February's Sky & Telescope magazine: "XEphem, the brainchild of programmer Elwood Downey, is a star-charting, sky-simulating, ephemeris-generating celestial virtuoso that can do just about everything that the usual Windows and Macintosh star-charting software can do -- and sometimes quite a bit more. And it's completely free. What's not to like?" It runs on almost any *NIX, and was just recently updated - now at version 3.4. You can even track earth satellites, with push-button TLE updates off the web. See it at http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem.
Space is hardly pristinely pure - it is full of extremely energetic radiation. Outside the Van Allen belts, the contribution of an Orion spacecraft would hardly be noticed. Inside is a different story; it could get really nasty down here if Orions lifted off the surface.
"God bless Saint Liebowitz!"
Privista's privacy policy sounds good, but they use JavaScript on their web site, which doesn't inspire a high degree of confidence that they know what they are doing. They also say they use the Privacy Council to audit their site. Those guys also use JavaScript. I sent Privista a note and referred them to http://www.w3.org/Security/Faq/wwwsf7.html.
There seems to be an underlying assumption that the current human brain is optimal for thinking and also necessary for "being intelligent", whatever that means. A lot of the components of the brain that evolution has tried out in the several million years it took us to get here were superseded along the way, yet are still present, but serving no useful function in today's environment. An efficient brain could dispense with those subsystems and reduce its support requirements substantially. Also, a large number of the remaining subsystems, like temperature regulation, blood chemistry monitoring and such, could be removed to remote subsystems; there is no obvious reason that all this has to be collocated with whatever generates "intelligence".
The pace of evolution has suddenly increased by orders of magnitude. We don't have to wait for a particular successful mutation to reproduce itself enough times to replace its predecessor. Just make hundreds or millions of whatever, all slightly different, and cull out the 95% that don't meet the criteria of whatever you are doing. Take the results and replicate by n, again making all of them slightly different, cull again, and repeat until you get what you want. Poof! Directed evolution, efficient, without generations of unnecessary competition for scarce resources.
The great crippling factor for lot of AI work is the notion that we need to understand what "thinking" is, so that we can design a system to "do that". What we really need to do is define what we will accept as intelligence, something like an updated Turing Test, and then use directed evolution of suitable systems to approach that goal. I think work in neural nets is going in the right direction. It is not so important that we understand how it works, just that we recognize it when we get there.
Moral and ethical issues for this method as self-awareness is approached are left as an exercise for the reader.