If that comes with names, dates of birth, mother's maiden name, home addresses, telephone number, etc. then I'll take 10,000 of 'em, preferably Caucasian males around age 36. I have some, uh, special projects I want to use them for.
the device is not dangerous(or at the very least, is incredibly unlikely to be dangerous)
An infrared beam that penetrates 3 cm, through the skull? I could imagine that being dangerous. For example, it might have enough energy to damage tissue. I assume that they've tried to rule that out, but sometimes the messy reality doesn't match the theory.
My reply was a snipe at the first poster, specifically because there really isn't any reason to bring in that particular rant in this thread;
If you're not familiar with the idea of outsourcing testing of devices on humans, the OP's point is an understandable one to raise. It doesn't necessarily reflect poorly on the company in this case, but it's an interesting related issue.
Darn, I blew my cover. Yes, as you guessed, I'm the representative from Canopus, here to record the final years of human life on Earth. As it happens, Slashdot is where our projections say the trigger event will occur, so I have to keep a close eye on the place. The projections differ on what the trigger event will be - some say it'll be the release of Duke Nukem Forever. Did I say years? I meant decades.
I'm really disturbed by the degree of originality in these "Netcraft confirms - X is dying" posts lately. I remember a time when these cut & paste jobs were just that: cut and paste the original comment with some minor changes of "BSD" for e.g. "bee". But this new breed of "X is dying" posts contain all sorts of relevant information, as though someone actually spent time and effort writing them. What is Slashdot coming to? If we're not careful, we'll soon start seeing original jokes, and then where will we be?
Great, now we have shills for the Inuit weighing in to retain their right to hunt polar bears. Keep at it, humanity. Your short-sightedness and stupidity knows no bounds.
Very good idea, thanks. I actually tried checking.us originally myself (it has 56 million), but of course no self-respecting US company uses the.us domain.;)
Wow, you're sure projecting a whole lot of stuff there. I didn't say anything about "smarter", "less talented", "more talented", or "non-talent" on either side. Nor did I say "overpriced". It's just a simple economic fact that a U.S. dollar goes a hell of a lot further in South Africa than it does in the U.S. As it happens, I'm originally South African myself, I just happen to be living in the U.S. -- to exploit rich customers, you might say. So I have some experience of both sides.
The whole point of "exploiting cheap talent" is the assumption that the talent in question is at least roughly of equal quality. Whether it's a bit better or worse isn't important, compared to the huge freaking inequality in costs. You can list as many other possible factors as you like, but cheaper labor is by far the primary one, because of the simple fact that in software development, labor is by far the biggest single cost. I'm a software developer, and I do work for companies that also do outsourcing of their development to various places, and my experience in talking to the managers involved is that it's all about cost, which stands to reason if you have any idea of the relative costs involved.
This is a world economy afterall; are you belly-aching because our asses are getting handed to us?
No bellyaching here, I love the fact that it's a world economy. I have no idea whose asses you're talking about -- I'll guess "American programmers", but in that case you've maybe mistaken me for Lou Dobbs.
Googling for "site:za" brings up 16 million hits, so there's some activity there, but compare that to 7 billion pages in the.com domain. That's obviously not an entirely fair comparison, since.com is used globally, but it gives some idea.
Companies like Amazon have development offices in South Africa, to exploit cheap talent. But in general, although South Africa is industrialized, the proportion of the population wealthy enough to have Internet access is pretty small. Here's an article, Internet Access in South Africa, 2002, which suggests 3.1 million users at the end of 2002, and that number wasn't growing fast. Costs for Internet access are still relatively high.
I think we can make up for that by building aerodynamical houses and buildings.
I'm as much in favor of green technology as the next guy, but there's no way I'm attaching my house to an aluminum tether and relocating into the middle of the jetstream!
Why, just because someone put a really retarded sounding name on the concept of writing web pages, is blogging such a hyped thing?
You seem to be confusing your dislike of the term "blog" (which I don't like either) with whether the term has a specific and useful meaning. It does. It's much more specific than just "the concept of writing web pages". It refers to a particular type of web page, and in many ways it's a more interesting type of web page than say, a page selling books, because it usually involves individuals discussing ideas, rather than, say, companies pushing products. Further, blogs often participate in distributed conversations, which is quite an interesting phenomenon, a bit like a less austere Usenet perhaps, but in many respects more accessible to the average person (you don't need a newsreader, just a web browser).
Anyway, the blogobuzz[*] isn't going away any time soon, so you may as well get used to it.
It's disingenuous to be a proponent of free speech and then clamor to shut someone up.
This is a logical error. "Free speech" is a term with a specific meaning relating to a constitutional protection (in the U.S. context). In the "clamor to shut someone up", no-one suggested violating Imus' constitutionally protected right to free speech. There's no conflict here.
No, you're not being trolled. You yourself are the troll, coming here to insult someone who is revered by many.
Regarding Slaughterhouse 5, you should google it yourself. You have some issue with it which you haven't explained, and you confuse your misunderstanding of an interesting work with the work itself. I've read all of Vonnegut's well-known books, and many of his less well-known ones, and that is precisely why I take issue with your comments about him. I think you have not only misunderstood his message, but you show the weaknesses in your own character in the way you react to that message.
I would value your wisdom if you were saying anything wise, but all you have said so far is empty, you have said nothing of substance. Why not mention specifically what you see as the problem with Slaughterhouse 5? Perhaps you are afraid that you have indeed misunderstood its message?
Past Turing-equivalent? That comment alone proves you're full of shit.
You seem to have experienced a reading comprehension issue. It is common to refer to the capabilities and limitations of computing devices in terms of Turing equivalence, and no-one is suggesting that physical limitations can somehow be overcome -- in fact if you read my post a bit more carefully, you'll see that I was pointing out just the opposite. The Bekenstein bound is usually assumed, in the same way that other physical constraints are assumed, when talking about real computing devices in the real world.
...that would violate the Bekenstein Bound (and thus even brains are limited by Turing).
You might want to re-check your logic. It is true that the Bekenstein Bound applies to brains, but it doesn't follow that Turing applies to brains. In fact, if you could show that, you'd have a pretty good paper on your hands.
What's more, my "decades away" should have read "decades, centuries, or millennia away (but it's coming)"
In that case we agree.
...future scientific progress can only be met with unbounded optimism. Any other view is clearly ludicrous in perspective.
With one caveat: sometimes people get carried away and ignore the laws of physics. For example, one sometimes sees (or used to see) people speculating about what would be possible with networks with effectively infinite bandwidth, but forgetting that latency is limited by the speed of light -- actually quite a serious limitation for many applications. Similarly, very small things operating very fast are still subject to the laws of thermodynamics like everything else. So I'd prefer "optimism bounded only by the laws of physics" to "unbounded optimism".
There's not a chance in hell (trying to use your frame of reference here) of us producing "brains" that are *MERELY* as good as nature created in humans, because the equations that underpin ordinary physics and chemistry (and therefore molecular nanotechnology) say otherwise. Instead, you can expect "brains" a billion times our mental capacity and a trillion times our mental speed in due course. We know that it's possible (from theory, and by observing protein nanomachines doing it very poorly), but we lack the infrastructure to do it ourselves at present. It's many decades away, but hey, we're working on it.:-)
You could probably switch your units to "centuries" instead of "decades" and be closer to the mark. We still have no clue (Jeff Hawkins notwithstanding) how to move past computing devices that are Turing equivalent. Faster hardware is unlikely to fix that on its own. In the '80s, they were busily building big parallel machines and thinking that strong AI was just decades away. Two decades later, in some respects we've moved backwards because most research programs are either less ambitious than they were (i.e., have realistic goals) or are doomed to be little more than curiosities (e.g. Cyc).
Also, your faith in our materials science seems a bit excessive: don't forget we've already run pretty close to some hard physical limits in the semiconductor arena, and the physics says that switching materials or going "nano" can't eliminate the fundamental barriers. (Going "quantum" might help, but there are some big question marks in that area, too.)
Perhaps incredible optimism is what allows people to work on problems like this without giving up, but if you're having an argument with religious wingnuts, dramatically optimistic extrapolations of our technological capabilities makes your own position look a little shaky, and it starts to seem a bit as though you're just like your opponent, except that you place your unquestioning faith in what technology will bring us in future, instead. The point of a scientific attitude is avoid unquestioning faith in anything.
A odd thing to say to a Buddhist from an asian country.
You're not a Buddhist. A true Buddhist would not, on hearing of a fellow human's death, say "well let me use my civil rights to say good riddance to trash." You should be ashamed of yourself.
Slaughterhouse 5 was rubbish. Its message was appalling.
What message was that? Are you sure you understood the message? Vonnegut was imprisoned in Dresden by the Germans at age 23, and was there during the massive Allied bombing. Slaughterhouse 5 was in large part a reaction to that experience. I seriously doubt you've understood Vonnegut's message, just as you don't understand the message of Buddhism.
Y'know, I've welcomed a lot of overlords in my time, but I draw the line at plants. If a plant starts getting uppity, you just stop watering it, and cover it to make sure it doesn't get any sunlight. Problem solved.
Given the argument you made, anything else would have been overkill.
Maybe i thought his books sucked and his politics despicable?
Since you haven't given me anything to go on, I'm guessing you're objecting to things like this:
For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.
"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!
If so, then you're a Bush-supporter who believes we're fighting a real war in Iraq, which confirms my suspicion that you don't read but rather get your knowledge of life from the Fox news channel. Did God or Jesus say "Blessed are the ignorant" somewhere, maybe?
I wouldn't worry about it, all the smartest people in Denmark seem to be doing computerscience, which is good. (Somehow the latter page omitted Danvy.) I recommend outsourcing your garbage handling to a dumber country.
That's a good note to self! I might not have had a problem with the subtlety if Firexplorer didn't actually exist...
For the record: (1) I did wonder why you didn't link to Firexplorer. I was quite impressed to find it on mozdev.org. (2) I thought it was strange that you should be having CSS problems etc., but didn't want to criticize without knowing more about it. For all I know, it could have been a problem with stylesheets being picked up by the container (IE) rather than the plugin, or something like that, since unless the plugin does its own network comms, it might have issues with access to content that has extensions that IE wants to handle. And I regularly deal with developers who don't quite understand the issues they're working on, so I thought you might be one of those. (3) The only mention of Interzilla I could find was "A project to run Bugzilla on Interbase", so in hindsight, that was really the biggest clue, since you implied that Interzilla was the more established project.
Slashdot Mirror
If that comes with names, dates of birth, mother's maiden name, home addresses, telephone number, etc. then I'll take 10,000 of 'em, preferably Caucasian males around age 36. I have some, uh, special projects I want to use them for.
Darn, I blew my cover. Yes, as you guessed, I'm the representative from Canopus, here to record the final years of human life on Earth. As it happens, Slashdot is where our projections say the trigger event will occur, so I have to keep a close eye on the place. The projections differ on what the trigger event will be - some say it'll be the release of Duke Nukem Forever. Did I say years? I meant decades.
I'm really disturbed by the degree of originality in these "Netcraft confirms - X is dying" posts lately. I remember a time when these cut & paste jobs were just that: cut and paste the original comment with some minor changes of "BSD" for e.g. "bee". But this new breed of "X is dying" posts contain all sorts of relevant information, as though someone actually spent time and effort writing them. What is Slashdot coming to? If we're not careful, we'll soon start seeing original jokes, and then where will we be?
Great, now we have shills for the Inuit weighing in to retain their right to hunt polar bears. Keep at it, humanity. Your short-sightedness and stupidity knows no bounds.
I'm happen to know that mine dad can beat up you're dad.
Very good idea, thanks. I actually tried checking .us originally myself (it has 56 million), but of course no self-respecting US company uses the .us domain. ;)
The whole point of "exploiting cheap talent" is the assumption that the talent in question is at least roughly of equal quality. Whether it's a bit better or worse isn't important, compared to the huge freaking inequality in costs. You can list as many other possible factors as you like, but cheaper labor is by far the primary one, because of the simple fact that in software development, labor is by far the biggest single cost. I'm a software developer, and I do work for companies that also do outsourcing of their development to various places, and my experience in talking to the managers involved is that it's all about cost, which stands to reason if you have any idea of the relative costs involved.No bellyaching here, I love the fact that it's a world economy. I have no idea whose asses you're talking about -- I'll guess "American programmers", but in that case you've maybe mistaken me for Lou Dobbs.
Googling for "site:za" brings up 16 million hits, so there's some activity there, but compare that to 7 billion pages in the .com domain. That's obviously not an entirely fair comparison, since .com is used globally, but it gives some idea.
Companies like Amazon have development offices in South Africa, to exploit cheap talent. But in general, although South Africa is industrialized, the proportion of the population wealthy enough to have Internet access is pretty small. Here's an article, Internet Access in South Africa, 2002, which suggests 3.1 million users at the end of 2002, and that number wasn't growing fast. Costs for Internet access are still relatively high.
I'm happen to be an expert in grammatical structures. Why would you doubted me?
Anyway, the blogobuzz[*] isn't going away any time soon, so you may as well get used to it.
[*]
We need a new mod category: -1, Gratuitous Godwin
No, you're not being trolled. You yourself are the troll, coming here to insult someone who is revered by many.
Regarding Slaughterhouse 5, you should google it yourself. You have some issue with it which you haven't explained, and you confuse your misunderstanding of an interesting work with the work itself. I've read all of Vonnegut's well-known books, and many of his less well-known ones, and that is precisely why I take issue with your comments about him. I think you have not only misunderstood his message, but you show the weaknesses in your own character in the way you react to that message.
I would value your wisdom if you were saying anything wise, but all you have said so far is empty, you have said nothing of substance. Why not mention specifically what you see as the problem with Slaughterhouse 5? Perhaps you are afraid that you have indeed misunderstood its message?
With one caveat: sometimes people get carried away and ignore the laws of physics. For example, one sometimes sees (or used to see) people speculating about what would be possible with networks with effectively infinite bandwidth, but forgetting that latency is limited by the speed of light -- actually quite a serious limitation for many applications. Similarly, very small things operating very fast are still subject to the laws of thermodynamics like everything else. So I'd prefer "optimism bounded only by the laws of physics" to "unbounded optimism".
You could probably switch your units to "centuries" instead of "decades" and be closer to the mark. We still have no clue (Jeff Hawkins notwithstanding) how to move past computing devices that are Turing equivalent. Faster hardware is unlikely to fix that on its own. In the '80s, they were busily building big parallel machines and thinking that strong AI was just decades away. Two decades later, in some respects we've moved backwards because most research programs are either less ambitious than they were (i.e., have realistic goals) or are doomed to be little more than curiosities (e.g. Cyc).
Also, your faith in our materials science seems a bit excessive: don't forget we've already run pretty close to some hard physical limits in the semiconductor arena, and the physics says that switching materials or going "nano" can't eliminate the fundamental barriers. (Going "quantum" might help, but there are some big question marks in that area, too.)
Perhaps incredible optimism is what allows people to work on problems like this without giving up, but if you're having an argument with religious wingnuts, dramatically optimistic extrapolations of our technological capabilities makes your own position look a little shaky, and it starts to seem a bit as though you're just like your opponent, except that you place your unquestioning faith in what technology will bring us in future, instead. The point of a scientific attitude is avoid unquestioning faith in anything.
The people you're referring to are "special", alright, just not in the way they think they are.
That's all very well, but you ignore the latest blogobuzz at your own peril!
Y'know, I've welcomed a lot of overlords in my time, but I draw the line at plants. If a plant starts getting uppity, you just stop watering it, and cover it to make sure it doesn't get any sunlight. Problem solved.
I wouldn't worry about it, all the smartest people in Denmark seem to be doing computer science, which is good. (Somehow the latter page omitted Danvy.) I recommend outsourcing your garbage handling to a dumber country.
That's a good note to self! I might not have had a problem with the subtlety if Firexplorer didn't actually exist...
For the record: (1) I did wonder why you didn't link to Firexplorer. I was quite impressed to find it on mozdev.org. (2) I thought it was strange that you should be having CSS problems etc., but didn't want to criticize without knowing more about it. For all I know, it could have been a problem with stylesheets being picked up by the container (IE) rather than the plugin, or something like that, since unless the plugin does its own network comms, it might have issues with access to content that has extensions that IE wants to handle. And I regularly deal with developers who don't quite understand the issues they're working on, so I thought you might be one of those. (3) The only mention of Interzilla I could find was "A project to run Bugzilla on Interbase", so in hindsight, that was really the biggest clue, since you implied that Interzilla was the more established project.