No. It provides a more entertaining product... for stupid people. Anyone who has any knowledge of the subject matter or is intelligent enough to note the inconsistencies will be put off by it and dislike the writers for it.
While the age of hackers in movies seems to have increased lately (Die Hard 4, the most braindead one yet when you ignore television shows them as paranoid 20-somethings), they aren't shown as particularly mature.
My point is not that machines can be sentient, it's that sentience is essentially just a level of abstraction from biological machines. The trouble is that biological machines work through evolution, which electronic machines can't - they don't reproduce and there is no "survival of the fittest"... Oh, sorry, I was just picturing a group of Phenom IIs hunting a Celeron.
Yes, but this work has as much purpose as the USSR employing people in factories just to give them a job (which it did, way back when). It just distracts people from more important things and wastes time and money.
Sentience is what we define it to be, and machines aren't sentient.
Also, it wasn't a joke. Nothing close. Your little "oh machines talk on forums" wasn't what we couldn't accept - it was the idea of machines liking music... instinctively? No machine, AFAIK, has been programmed to "like" music. It'd be a huge leap of AI development if there was one that did.
You realize what you're saying? That even if we found life on another planet, we should... ignore it? Also, "at this time"? Is there EVER a good time for long-term public projects? Also, if you think the fact that life truly does exist on other planets would not affect society, you're mistaken. If life really was discovered, it could galvanize space exploration and benefit science enormously. So which would you prefer... an over-crowded Earth that has to implement draconian population control measures to save space, or an Earth that is the centre of space exploration and is starting colonies on other worlds?
This is essentially the same concept and execution as Virtual Bach, which was (as far as I can tell) an earlier version of Emmy that David Cope made in the 1980s. What's changed, exactly? As far as I can recall, Virtual Bach took a composer of your choice, was given a sample of his music, and then created a "new" piece based on patterns that it recognized. I don't know the particulars, but perhaps Emmy can write in an original style now.
Indeed, you could almost say that music is open-source software. Isn't composition essentially another type of programming, just creating a sequence of commands that are processed by the musician? The only exception to it is the essence of randomness.
But, to return to my starting sentence. Why is it OSS? Think about it. Someone publishes their code (composition), it is viewed and heard by a variety of people, and if it is well-liked it is tweaked and introduced into other programs (pieces of music). The amount of tribute compositions and variations on themes by other composers in classical music is huge; most composers were aware of each other and their predecessors, and would use themes from existing music in their own. It resulted in nothing but improvement... at least until pop music, then it kind of got derailed.
It's not only a good analogy; it's a perfect analogy, and I'm surprised no one has thought of it sooner.
The main catalyst with creativity is simply randomness. The whole purpose of creativity is to provide a way for us to express our ideas and to think about things, and to work out emotions. It's healthy for us psychologically and helps with new ideas.
The point is that humans are simply very complex machines which operate through the interaction of an unbelievably large number of small computers (cells) which have component parts, store memory, and complete tasks. The interaction of these computers works on a hardware level, but through the process of evolution has given rise to increasing layers of complexity and abstraction. One of our many strengths is inexactness - a possible parallel would be our brains running Quake at 60fps and using 1% CPU, but not getting the sprites quite right and making everybody look like clowns. It's designed for situations where we need to make snap decisions, and can't stop to consider all the possibilities.
Machines don't have this, mostly because of our mindset towards them - we see computers as ways of calculating numbers to accomplish a task. This is why AI is so hard and why robotics is still so (relatively) primitive. For instance, in Asimov's positronic robot short stories, the main advancement that spawned the huge developments in robots was the invention of the positronic brain. It allowed robots to make snap decisions and to understand nebulous concepts like ethics. It made the famous Three Laws possible - any conventional computer would be constrained by thinking of the endless consequences and permutations of an action. Essentially, it made robots less computer and more human - some people have even defined them more as "electronic homunculi", at least in Asimov's stories. His whole intention was to showcase the fact that, in the event of a race that was superior in every way - smarter, faster, perfectly ethical, and, above all other things, immortal. This more or less culminated in The Bicentennial Man, where a robot effectively became human by swapping out his parts. Essentially, humans are afraid of things that are better than them, and a race that they have created which is superior to them and only obeys them because of the Three Laws would be very frightening indeed.
I'd say that, above all things, people just fear inferiority. It's why an anti-"nerd" culture exists in the first place, forget any bullshit about nerds not fitting in to society.
Yes. You can tell someone who is bad at web design because of the way he formats ebooks - a lot of people try to overload the formatting and use absolute hr tags (providing a specific length). Someone who can format an (ePub, especially, since it's in XHTML 1.1 Strict) ebook properly is usually a good web designer, since they can make something look good on a smartphone, a PDA, a PC, an ebook reader... they have to be some of the most versatile things around.
No. There is plenty of support for older stuff - look at Apache 1.
You're saying "oh well, open-source devs should support users who update once every ten years." Why? If you have obsolete software, you suffer consequences like additional exploits and fewer features. This is a bad thing, and the companies' idea that they can just install something and then leave it written in stone is bad, and lazy, and should stop.
The trick is readability and organization. all formats that are based on (X)HTML can look very presentable and adaptable to different screen sizes and resolutions if you don't use absolutes.
It depends on how the senders and receivers think about the information. I know people who kept every postcard and letter they'd ever received - I doubt you could say the same about that with email. People still just don't consider email a serious medium.
Part of the problem is of manpower - geocities was just so massive, and Yahoo gave them very little time to archive anything properly, so most of it was simply a dash to copy as much as they could before it was deleted. When you look at public domain audio, video, and texts, you'll see that things have been done much better.
Archive.org is the solution, and this is just one of those problems where throwing money at it actually works - give them more bandwidth, more contributors, and more disk space, and they could work wonders.
The problem is that very few identifiably Greek writings survive. In ancient times, copying was a bit like playing telephone - writing at the time was very politicized, so scribes would often alter works while copying them, mostly to give a local slant or simply changing the names. This makes it frustrating to trace things like legends (see: Noah's Ark/Epic of Gilgamesh and its infinite variations with every other culture that existed nearby). A lot of Greek and Roman writings are now quite simply lost for good, but almost certainly inspired works that aren't lost. For instance, the Odyssey and the Iliad were originally just two parts of the epic story of Troy (out of, AFAIK, four or five parts in total), and the set of works that we derive most of our knowledge of Rome from, Ab Urbe Conditum, are only partially preserved - it was a set that chronicled the history of Rome from its founding to when they volumes stopped being produced, and there were hundreds, enough to fill entire libraries. It was only in the Renaissance that anyone tried to assemble a collection, and we've only been able to come up with about 30 - if we had the full set, we would know a great deal more about Rome than we do now.
I'm not talking about image and adult apps vs child-friendly. I'm simply making the point that any vendor controlling what software can be used on its hardware is fundamentally wrong. It destroys the hardware platform's usefulness and discourages third-party development, since it has to be officially sanctioned by the vendor.
If nothing else works though, that hope does help them mentally so is that really that bad?
That is the argument that psychics use - "it makes them feel happy." This is fundamentally different and worse than psychics, though - some people will trust it enough to forego other treatments, including proper medical treatments, and when it doesn't work, they would be more devastated than if they had just undergone a proper medical treatment. Why can't they have faith in chemo, as well as the magical super-herb that does absolutely nothing to help them?
What part of "discussing this is a waste of everybody's time" didn't come across to you?
I'm not saying every person who has ever used a Mac is part of this. I'm talking about the way Apple has organized its products' structure and its corporate image to encourage fanaticism as a way of trying to screw people out of their money. Mac users themselves aren't at fault - it's the company that is doing the manipulating.
Slashdot Mirror
Kudos to you for actually having him prove your argument for you.
No. It provides a more entertaining product... for stupid people. Anyone who has any knowledge of the subject matter or is intelligent enough to note the inconsistencies will be put off by it and dislike the writers for it.
While the age of hackers in movies seems to have increased lately (Die Hard 4, the most braindead one yet when you ignore television shows them as paranoid 20-somethings), they aren't shown as particularly mature.
My point is not that machines can be sentient, it's that sentience is essentially just a level of abstraction from biological machines. The trouble is that biological machines work through evolution, which electronic machines can't - they don't reproduce and there is no "survival of the fittest"... Oh, sorry, I was just picturing a group of Phenom IIs hunting a Celeron.
Yes, but this work has as much purpose as the USSR employing people in factories just to give them a job (which it did, way back when). It just distracts people from more important things and wastes time and money.
Sentience is what we define it to be, and machines aren't sentient.
Also, it wasn't a joke. Nothing close. Your little "oh machines talk on forums" wasn't what we couldn't accept - it was the idea of machines liking music... instinctively? No machine, AFAIK, has been programmed to "like" music. It'd be a huge leap of AI development if there was one that did.
You realize what you're saying? That even if we found life on another planet, we should... ignore it? Also, "at this time"? Is there EVER a good time for long-term public projects? Also, if you think the fact that life truly does exist on other planets would not affect society, you're mistaken. If life really was discovered, it could galvanize space exploration and benefit science enormously. So which would you prefer... an over-crowded Earth that has to implement draconian population control measures to save space, or an Earth that is the centre of space exploration and is starting colonies on other worlds?
This is essentially the same concept and execution as Virtual Bach, which was (as far as I can tell) an earlier version of Emmy that David Cope made in the 1980s. What's changed, exactly? As far as I can recall, Virtual Bach took a composer of your choice, was given a sample of his music, and then created a "new" piece based on patterns that it recognized. I don't know the particulars, but perhaps Emmy can write in an original style now.
Indeed, you could almost say that music is open-source software. Isn't composition essentially another type of programming, just creating a sequence of commands that are processed by the musician? The only exception to it is the essence of randomness.
But, to return to my starting sentence. Why is it OSS? Think about it. Someone publishes their code (composition), it is viewed and heard by a variety of people, and if it is well-liked it is tweaked and introduced into other programs (pieces of music). The amount of tribute compositions and variations on themes by other composers in classical music is huge; most composers were aware of each other and their predecessors, and would use themes from existing music in their own. It resulted in nothing but improvement... at least until pop music, then it kind of got derailed.
It's not only a good analogy; it's a perfect analogy, and I'm surprised no one has thought of it sooner.
The main catalyst with creativity is simply randomness. The whole purpose of creativity is to provide a way for us to express our ideas and to think about things, and to work out emotions. It's healthy for us psychologically and helps with new ideas.
The point is that humans are simply very complex machines which operate through the interaction of an unbelievably large number of small computers (cells) which have component parts, store memory, and complete tasks. The interaction of these computers works on a hardware level, but through the process of evolution has given rise to increasing layers of complexity and abstraction. One of our many strengths is inexactness - a possible parallel would be our brains running Quake at 60fps and using 1% CPU, but not getting the sprites quite right and making everybody look like clowns. It's designed for situations where we need to make snap decisions, and can't stop to consider all the possibilities.
Machines don't have this, mostly because of our mindset towards them - we see computers as ways of calculating numbers to accomplish a task. This is why AI is so hard and why robotics is still so (relatively) primitive. For instance, in Asimov's positronic robot short stories, the main advancement that spawned the huge developments in robots was the invention of the positronic brain. It allowed robots to make snap decisions and to understand nebulous concepts like ethics. It made the famous Three Laws possible - any conventional computer would be constrained by thinking of the endless consequences and permutations of an action. Essentially, it made robots less computer and more human - some people have even defined them more as "electronic homunculi", at least in Asimov's stories. His whole intention was to showcase the fact that, in the event of a race that was superior in every way - smarter, faster, perfectly ethical, and, above all other things, immortal. This more or less culminated in The Bicentennial Man, where a robot effectively became human by swapping out his parts. Essentially, humans are afraid of things that are better than them, and a race that they have created which is superior to them and only obeys them because of the Three Laws would be very frightening indeed.
I'd say that, above all things, people just fear inferiority. It's why an anti-"nerd" culture exists in the first place, forget any bullshit about nerds not fitting in to society.
Which makes you wonder about what it would be like for people to cheer for them. "fap fap fap fap fap!"?
Yes. You can tell someone who is bad at web design because of the way he formats ebooks - a lot of people try to overload the formatting and use absolute hr tags (providing a specific length). Someone who can format an (ePub, especially, since it's in XHTML 1.1 Strict) ebook properly is usually a good web designer, since they can make something look good on a smartphone, a PDA, a PC, an ebook reader... they have to be some of the most versatile things around.
IBM might have been better if it had kept MySQL going. It's possible that Oracle will try to sneakily phase out MySQL.
No. There is plenty of support for older stuff - look at Apache 1.
You're saying "oh well, open-source devs should support users who update once every ten years." Why? If you have obsolete software, you suffer consequences like additional exploits and fewer features. This is a bad thing, and the companies' idea that they can just install something and then leave it written in stone is bad, and lazy, and should stop.
Considering the volume of stuff on geocities and the manpower available to archive.org, a month wasn't enough notice. Six months, maybe.
Also, I think their approach is good and they've already got a lot of stuff archived - what exactly would you suggest as an alternative?
The trick is readability and organization. all formats that are based on (X)HTML can look very presentable and adaptable to different screen sizes and resolutions if you don't use absolutes.
It depends on how the senders and receivers think about the information. I know people who kept every postcard and letter they'd ever received - I doubt you could say the same about that with email. People still just don't consider email a serious medium.
Part of the problem is of manpower - geocities was just so massive, and Yahoo gave them very little time to archive anything properly, so most of it was simply a dash to copy as much as they could before it was deleted. When you look at public domain audio, video, and texts, you'll see that things have been done much better.
Archive.org is the solution, and this is just one of those problems where throwing money at it actually works - give them more bandwidth, more contributors, and more disk space, and they could work wonders.
The problem is that very few identifiably Greek writings survive. In ancient times, copying was a bit like playing telephone - writing at the time was very politicized, so scribes would often alter works while copying them, mostly to give a local slant or simply changing the names. This makes it frustrating to trace things like legends (see: Noah's Ark/Epic of Gilgamesh and its infinite variations with every other culture that existed nearby). A lot of Greek and Roman writings are now quite simply lost for good, but almost certainly inspired works that aren't lost. For instance, the Odyssey and the Iliad were originally just two parts of the epic story of Troy (out of, AFAIK, four or five parts in total), and the set of works that we derive most of our knowledge of Rome from, Ab Urbe Conditum, are only partially preserved - it was a set that chronicled the history of Rome from its founding to when they volumes stopped being produced, and there were hundreds, enough to fill entire libraries. It was only in the Renaissance that anyone tried to assemble a collection, and we've only been able to come up with about 30 - if we had the full set, we would know a great deal more about Rome than we do now.
I'm not talking about image and adult apps vs child-friendly. I'm simply making the point that any vendor controlling what software can be used on its hardware is fundamentally wrong. It destroys the hardware platform's usefulness and discourages third-party development, since it has to be officially sanctioned by the vendor.
Same bullshit, different name. I don't think I can say it any clearer than that.
If nothing else works though, that hope does help them mentally so is that really that bad?
That is the argument that psychics use - "it makes them feel happy." This is fundamentally different and worse than psychics, though - some people will trust it enough to forego other treatments, including proper medical treatments, and when it doesn't work, they would be more devastated than if they had just undergone a proper medical treatment. Why can't they have faith in chemo, as well as the magical super-herb that does absolutely nothing to help them?
What part of "discussing this is a waste of everybody's time" didn't come across to you?
I'm not saying every person who has ever used a Mac is part of this. I'm talking about the way Apple has organized its products' structure and its corporate image to encourage fanaticism as a way of trying to screw people out of their money. Mac users themselves aren't at fault - it's the company that is doing the manipulating.
And this is right too? Consoles are ruining gaming.