If one is trying to calculate within our universe, yes, the most efficient way would be to just let it run. However, if the universe is a computer model or something of that sort, we can't assume that our universe is running at full speed. From our perspective within the simulation, it always runs at the maximum rate. We would never know it if the owner of the simulation chose to put us on full stop, copy the universe or some part of it, run that copy to check something, then knowing the outcome, put our universe back into play.
This is not as silly as it may seem. If we're slowly dilating on a hyperbolic space, then the circumference of the circle may be getting bigger...
Yes, yes, but pi is a constant on a Euclidian plane, and therefore always has, is, and will be the same value. Whether or not the universe is Euclidian or not is debatable.
But are you talking about the phenominal world or the nouminal world? At the presision our senses operate, the outside world appears Euclidian, so our internal representation of the world, the nouminal world, all that we experience, IS Euclidian, and pi is always the same. But the world is, in fact, not Euclidian at all. Everything 'out there' operates according to a set of rules that operates very much like the set of rules 'in here', but not quite.
If we someday build a true artificial intelligence, it would be interesting to build it such that its internal view of the world was based not on our own Euclidian, newtonian minds, but instead on what we know to be a representation closer to actual external reality. What advances a research assistant that truely groked QM could bust out. Probably have a wicked curve ball too.
Feeding starving people is like feeding tribbles, the end up multiplying, taking up all the space, making a general nusance of themselves and pissing off all the Klingons. er, well, the space thing anyway.
What we need to figure out is how to get them to turn their local natural resources into sustainable profit-generating assets, so they can become a viable market for the big corps.
'Making space exploration easier' can't be the primary reason for doing it -- you need something that returns tangible value to justify the initial investment
It's not necessary for an owner of an asset to ever see it. If valuable, ownable items were present off-earth, there would be investors willing to purchase them, allow them to be developed, and then sell them at a profit, regardless of whether or not any product ever came back to earth.
Do we really want every person on the show wearing big banners on their chest for whatever product is paying the most?
Hmm, remember in Spiderman when the green goblin makes his appearance during the parade, and he goes flying around that huge Singular wireless billboard? It would have been cooler if he'd blown it up.
Yup. There are tons of great sci-fi books and shorts out there. Even if they don't put blockbuster effort into it, it would be great to see some of them adapted for TV. Thats one of the things I love about Outer Limits, good and great sci-fi, and none of the limitations of being stuck with the same characters and situations.
I can't really answer the question, but I have played with the concept. I took a 5 inch speaker, cut away most of the cone and screwed a thin, springy piece of steel across the basket. From there a bolt goes down to the dust cap, which is then covered in epoxy, so the voice coil, dustcap, bolt and steel leaf are a rigid unit. mass is added to the strap to adjust the resonant frequency. The entire thing can be attached to walls or tables or whatever, turning the entire surface into a speaker with really nasty resonant peaks at harmonics of the drivers resonant freq.
Regardless of the sound quality of this particular setup, a 4x8 piece of sheetrock actually makes a fair speaker at resonable volumes, its fine for watching TV or casual radio listening. I used it in my workshop for several months just for the novalty. If you desire very high SPL though, more standard technology would probably be a better investment.
Enlighten us, explain how football pays for itself.
Around here (texas) its not uncommon for the athletics department to consume fully half of the entire school budget. Naturally I don't have a problem with teaching physical fitness, but I do have a problem with spending more on it than the rest of the school, particularly when program focuses on teaching students not how to stay physically fit, but instead makes a few top players high school football stars.
Judging by the average body fat percentage around here, the enormous PE budgets are extremely wasteful.
Re:Chinese Rooms and Software Guys
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 2
The chinese room argument against strong AI is so absurd as to be insulting. All it does is to demonstrate that a strictly deterministic system of arbitrarly complexity does not give rise to a mind. Well duh. Searle doesn't seem to know enough about the field to understand what strong AI is about.
Re:Chinese Rooms and Software Guys
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 2
who needs God when you have magically emergent properties.
There is an entire branch of science that studies emergent properties of systems. It isn't magical, its just behavor that is complex and (currently) very difficult or impossible to predict from the rules of the system. If we were smarter, the domain of emergent properties that are unpredictable would shrink.
There are members of the field that hold that the emergent properties are not explainable in terms of the parts of the system. While I'm not an expert in the field, this sounds absurd. Just because they aren't smart enough or don't have good enough tools to figure it out doesn't mean it can't be done.
considering that I've met plenty of people who are unbelivably dense (we're talking approching their swartzchild radius, they are on the verge of spontainously collapsing into a dimensionless point of human stupidity), it shouldn't take much to get a computer to eumlate this. Just convince the tester that they are talking with someone residing in a marvelous mobile manor and the task will be enormously simplified. The next step will be to set the machine up answering the phone at the local pizza joint.
Re:The hardware is the software
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 2
John Searle would probably throw out that stupid chinese room argument again. For the uninitated, the chinese room is a person in a room with a box of rules that define what to do when someone passes in a message in chinese. The ruleset is sufficently large that anyone outside the room can pass in any chinese message and get back a response that will allow the room to pass the turing test.
Searle argues (correctly) that the room does not understand chinese, as it has syntax but no symantics. He goes on pointing out stupid things like how you could model thirst on a computer and make it print out 'could someone please give me a drink!', but it still wouldn't be thirsty.
Searles arguments are of course childish and insulting to any strong AI researchers. He is almost completely clueless about the field and while he is interesting to listen to, his objections are easy to dismiss. He insists on equating the brain with a 'digital computer' and the mind as 'software', despite the obvious facts that the brain has aspects of both analog and digital function, and that the mind is clearly not analogous to software running on hardware.
Basicly, all he does is demonstrate that a rigid set of syntatic rules are not sufficent to form a mind.
Presuming the drain is a ground (ie, you live in an older structure without PVC pipes), much of the voltage will be dropped across the water, depending on the resistance of the water, your body, and the relative distances through each.
One of the problems with being in close proximity to a lightning strike is the gradient of voltages that it produces. If you are standing with your feet a foot apart and lightning strikes a few feet to your side, you can still be electrocuted. The ground around the strike conducts the voltage, dropping voltage like a big resistor. The difference in voltage across your feet can cause enough current flow to kill.
The only problem I have with rate caps is if they aren't progressive. As long as the rate limits start to kick in after I hit, say, 70% of my monthly data limit, its cool. Then when I hit 90+ it drops again and stays there until next month (or I go to their website and pay for some more bandwidth, which immediately removes my cap).
AOL already has, or had, in development a version of the AOL software that runs/ran on linux. An early beta was leaked a year or two ago. I had the download, but never attempted to dial up with it.
I definately agree with the robotic cars. Although I'd rather see differential GPS systems installed around the city for use by such vehicles. I'd also like to see them designed such that the cars signal between themselves to keep track of traffic conditions so they can adjust speed and course automaticly to keep traffic flowing. By taking human drivers out of the equation, traffic flow on the highways would be drasticly improved.
We hereby grant to you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use the Player and Content on your personal computer solely for your own personal, non-commercial use. You understand and agree that you may not reproduce, modify, display, distribute or otherwise use the Player or Content except as expressly provided herein, and you may not attempt to separate the Player or Content from the CD on which you received them. You may not authorize, encourage or allow the Player or any Content to be reproduced, modified, displayed, distributed or otherwise used by any other party, and you agree that you will take all reasonable steps to prevent any unauthorized reproduction and/or use of them.
In other words, you may listen to the music by yourself, but not if you have friends around. You also may not lend the disk to a friend, nor may you take the music off the CD so that it can be played without scrounging up the disk every time.
Talk about missing the boat, they've completely and totally broken it for all the features people like about having music on their computers. What total dumbasses.
I'd have made it sound workable to investors, and given myself a huge salary while developing a service I knew would be worthless. Bank it all and when it all dies, walk away with a bank account full of money.
Just in case anyone didn't notice, a resist pen is also known as a 'Sharpie'. Just draw your circuit on the copper with a standard sharpie, and make sure its nice and opaque. Protect any large areas with a quick coat of fingernail polish, and etch in nice hot etchant. It ain't pretty, but its effective.
If you dont' want to mess with drivers, just get one of those aftermarket LCD panels they use for installing TV's into headrests and such. Most have NTSC inputs, so you just use a video card with a TV out, like a matox or something (or a scan coverter). A few have VGA inputs, but they tend to be pretty pricy.
My dream is to remove all the dash equipment, install three wide-screen 7" LCDs (two vertical beside the steering column, one horizontal above it) with touch screen controls on them, and have a fully configurable dash running linux.
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Who said anything about cheap? Of the useful things one has access to on the moon, power is probably the most available.
Can it get rid of those stupid animations that show up on top of the page you are trying to read?
DGPS already takes care of the increased precision necessary, and some accelerometers could probably pick up the slack for the fine resolution.
If one is trying to calculate within our universe, yes, the most efficient way would be to just let it run. However, if the universe is a computer model or something of that sort, we can't assume that our universe is running at full speed. From our perspective within the simulation, it always runs at the maximum rate. We would never know it if the owner of the simulation chose to put us on full stop, copy the universe or some part of it, run that copy to check something, then knowing the outcome, put our universe back into play.
Obvious I guess.
This is not as silly as it may seem. If we're slowly dilating on a hyperbolic space, then the circumference of the circle may be getting bigger...
Yes, yes, but pi is a constant on a Euclidian plane, and therefore always has, is, and will be the same value. Whether or not the universe is Euclidian or not is debatable.
But are you talking about the phenominal world or the nouminal world? At the presision our senses operate, the outside world appears Euclidian, so our internal representation of the world, the nouminal world, all that we experience, IS Euclidian, and pi is always the same. But the world is, in fact, not Euclidian at all. Everything 'out there' operates according to a set of rules that operates very much like the set of rules 'in here', but not quite.
If we someday build a true artificial intelligence, it would be interesting to build it such that its internal view of the world was based not on our own Euclidian, newtonian minds, but instead on what we know to be a representation closer to actual external reality. What advances a research assistant that truely groked QM could bust out. Probably have a wicked curve ball too.
Feeding starving people is like feeding tribbles, the end up multiplying, taking up all the space, making a general nusance of themselves and pissing off all the Klingons. er, well, the space thing anyway.
What we need to figure out is how to get them to turn their local natural resources into sustainable profit-generating assets, so they can become a viable market for the big corps.
'Making space exploration easier' can't be the primary reason for doing it -- you need something that returns tangible value to justify the initial investment
It's not necessary for an owner of an asset to ever see it. If valuable, ownable items were present off-earth, there would be investors willing to purchase them, allow them to be developed, and then sell them at a profit, regardless of whether or not any product ever came back to earth.
Seems like energy is one of the few useful things one would have more than enough of on the moon.
Do we really want every person on the show wearing big banners on their chest for whatever product is paying the most?
Hmm, remember in Spiderman when the green goblin makes his appearance during the parade, and he goes flying around that huge Singular wireless billboard? It would have been cooler if he'd blown it up.
Is there a chapter about how we still want beanbag chairs and free soda?
I hope so, I won't work anywhere that doesn't have free soda.
Yup. There are tons of great sci-fi books and shorts out there. Even if they don't put blockbuster effort into it, it would be great to see some of them adapted for TV. Thats one of the things I love about Outer Limits, good and great sci-fi, and none of the limitations of being stuck with the same characters and situations.
I can't really answer the question, but I have played with the concept. I took a 5 inch speaker, cut away most of the cone and screwed a thin, springy piece of steel across the basket. From there a bolt goes down to the dust cap, which is then covered in epoxy, so the voice coil, dustcap, bolt and steel leaf are a rigid unit. mass is added to the strap to adjust the resonant frequency. The entire thing can be attached to walls or tables or whatever, turning the entire surface into a speaker with really nasty resonant peaks at harmonics of the drivers resonant freq.
Regardless of the sound quality of this particular setup, a 4x8 piece of sheetrock actually makes a fair speaker at resonable volumes, its fine for watching TV or casual radio listening. I used it in my workshop for several months just for the novalty. If you desire very high SPL though, more standard technology would probably be a better investment.
Around here (texas) its not uncommon for the athletics department to consume fully half of the entire school budget. Naturally I don't have a problem with teaching physical fitness, but I do have a problem with spending more on it than the rest of the school, particularly when program focuses on teaching students not how to stay physically fit, but instead makes a few top players high school football stars.
Judging by the average body fat percentage around here, the enormous PE budgets are extremely wasteful.
The chinese room argument against strong AI is so absurd as to be insulting. All it does is to demonstrate that a strictly deterministic system of arbitrarly complexity does not give rise to a mind. Well duh. Searle doesn't seem to know enough about the field to understand what strong AI is about.
who needs God when you have magically emergent properties.
There is an entire branch of science that studies emergent properties of systems. It isn't magical, its just behavor that is complex and (currently) very difficult or impossible to predict from the rules of the system. If we were smarter, the domain of emergent properties that are unpredictable would shrink.
There are members of the field that hold that the emergent properties are not explainable in terms of the parts of the system. While I'm not an expert in the field, this sounds absurd. Just because they aren't smart enough or don't have good enough tools to figure it out doesn't mean it can't be done.
considering that I've met plenty of people who are unbelivably dense (we're talking approching their swartzchild radius, they are on the verge of spontainously collapsing into a dimensionless point of human stupidity), it shouldn't take much to get a computer to eumlate this. Just convince the tester that they are talking with someone residing in a marvelous mobile manor and the task will be enormously simplified. The next step will be to set the machine up answering the phone at the local pizza joint.
John Searle would probably throw out that stupid chinese room argument again. For the uninitated, the chinese room is a person in a room with a box of rules that define what to do when someone passes in a message in chinese. The ruleset is sufficently large that anyone outside the room can pass in any chinese message and get back a response that will allow the room to pass the turing test.
Searle argues (correctly) that the room does not understand chinese, as it has syntax but no symantics. He goes on pointing out stupid things like how you could model thirst on a computer and make it print out 'could someone please give me a drink!', but it still wouldn't be thirsty.
Searles arguments are of course childish and insulting to any strong AI researchers. He is almost completely clueless about the field and while he is interesting to listen to, his objections are easy to dismiss. He insists on equating the brain with a 'digital computer' and the mind as 'software', despite the obvious facts that the brain has aspects of both analog and digital function, and that the mind is clearly not analogous to software running on hardware.
Basicly, all he does is demonstrate that a rigid set of syntatic rules are not sufficent to form a mind.
Presuming the drain is a ground (ie, you live in an older structure without PVC pipes), much of the voltage will be dropped across the water, depending on the resistance of the water, your body, and the relative distances through each.
One of the problems with being in close proximity to a lightning strike is the gradient of voltages that it produces. If you are standing with your feet a foot apart and lightning strikes a few feet to your side, you can still be electrocuted. The ground around the strike conducts the voltage, dropping voltage like a big resistor. The difference in voltage across your feet can cause enough current flow to kill.
The only problem I have with rate caps is if they aren't progressive. As long as the rate limits start to kick in after I hit, say, 70% of my monthly data limit, its cool. Then when I hit 90+ it drops again and stays there until next month (or I go to their website and pay for some more bandwidth, which immediately removes my cap).
AOL already has, or had, in development a version of the AOL software that runs/ran on linux. An early beta was leaked a year or two ago. I had the download, but never attempted to dial up with it.
I definately agree with the robotic cars. Although I'd rather see differential GPS systems installed around the city for use by such vehicles. I'd also like to see them designed such that the cars signal between themselves to keep track of traffic conditions so they can adjust speed and course automaticly to keep traffic flowing. By taking human drivers out of the equation, traffic flow on the highways would be drasticly improved.
The license says:
We hereby grant to you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use the Player and Content on your personal computer solely for your own personal, non-commercial use. You understand and agree that you may not reproduce, modify, display, distribute or otherwise use the Player or Content except as expressly provided herein, and you may not attempt to separate the Player or Content from the CD on which you received them. You may not authorize, encourage or allow the Player or any Content to be reproduced, modified, displayed, distributed or otherwise used by any other party, and you agree that you will take all reasonable steps to prevent any unauthorized reproduction and/or use of them.
In other words, you may listen to the music by yourself, but not if you have friends around. You also may not lend the disk to a friend, nor may you take the music off the CD so that it can be played without scrounging up the disk every time.
Talk about missing the boat, they've completely and totally broken it for all the features people like about having music on their computers. What total dumbasses.
I'd have made it sound workable to investors, and given myself a huge salary while developing a service I knew would be worthless. Bank it all and when it all dies, walk away with a bank account full of money.
Just in case anyone didn't notice, a resist pen is also known as a 'Sharpie'. Just draw your circuit on the copper with a standard sharpie, and make sure its nice and opaque. Protect any large areas with a quick coat of fingernail polish, and etch in nice hot etchant. It ain't pretty, but its effective.
If you dont' want to mess with drivers, just get one of those aftermarket LCD panels they use for installing TV's into headrests and such. Most have NTSC inputs, so you just use a video card with a TV out, like a matox or something (or a scan coverter). A few have VGA inputs, but they tend to be pretty pricy.
My dream is to remove all the dash equipment, install three wide-screen 7" LCDs (two vertical beside the steering column, one horizontal above it) with touch screen controls on them, and have a fully configurable dash running linux.