Yes, it's probably easier if learned from an early age where the brain is more plastic, but basically anyone with decent hearing can learn it.
I have a hard time believing you. Yes, perhaps sighted people can learn to listen for the sounds produced by echoes of their own movement off nearby objects, like a wall. But I don't think they can acquire face sense:
Blind people sometimes feel the presence of nearby objects as a light touch on their faces, like a veil or spider-web. It turns out that this sensation, which is experienced as tactile, actually derives from auditory stimulation, since the sensation goes away when the people have their ears blocked with putty.
From TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.5 No.6 June 2001, The 'feel' of seeing:an interview with J. Kevin O'Regan. Actually, I really don't like that source. But I can't find anything else relevant in a preliminary Googling. Maybe I'm full of shit.
Some people still aren't getting what you're saying, so I'd like to break it down again. 'Scuse me.
The three huge glaring holes: 1) As Asimov illustrated (though I've never read), the well-intentioned three laws, applied perfectly, lead to a million problems and contradictions.
2) As Cavio explained, if some people can't write a secure email client, who would believe that every future robot vendor could properly implement the three laws?
3) And I emphasize: By the time we figure out AI to the point that computers could build plans and goals based on abstract priorities (required in order to follow the three laws in even the most rudimentary form), most all of our robotic needs will already be satisfied, and we will have achieved safety via other means. Asimov's three laws are way, way beyond the abilities of AI right now, and we're not exactly getting there soon.
It seems like the AI tasks that Asimov expected to be difficult will be easier than he thought, while the AI tasks that he expected to be possible will be harder than he thought. We can create AIs that will build and execute plans in an extremely limited, concrete problem set. Of course the first hurdle that researchers aimed for and overcame was ensuring that at no point in the plan would their goals be violated. If the AI comes across a plan that violates one of its goals 10 steps down the line... it backs up and attempts to figure out a new plan. Circular contradictions are neatly avoided.
As other commenters are pointing out, the three laws are more interesting as an examination of human ethics.
The Hyper-X program may be cancelled (I didn't know that.) but I don't think the National Aerospace Initiative has been cancelled, which was Ron Sega's thing.
But your point is taken. Would this program be useful for further reducing the delivery time of bombs, or do you feel that it must have some other primary purpose (or both)?
I don't know what it is about your comment that makes me feel like I have to argue against you. Anyway:
To give an example, after the attacks on our country in September of 2001, a person who I was driving with off campus just giggled at the "threat rating" outside the DoD in Monterey. I said to myself wow you'd think this retard forgot that thousands of people died in order to "warn" him that the threat to our country had risen and he's giggling about it.
Your friend already had his warning. The Dept. of Homeland Security "Threat Advisory" system was laughable when first implemented. We'll only find out if it's still laughable when there's a more open administration, so that we can know whether the rise and fall of the threat indicator is due to special intelligence or politicial necessity.
Developing a new warplane now days would yeild responses such as: "why are you building an Iraqi civilian killing machine?". This is evidenced by "funny" rated posts above that toy around with the idea that the only reason this is being developed is to circumvent ICBM treaties.
The only other reason that this is being developed is because it's faster than ICBMs. In the distant future, this technology could be used to launch a payload into space, and perhaps there would be something about this method that would make it more cost effective than our current solutions. Until then, these are killing machines we're talking about. I don't know that that is a problem. I guess I don't feel like we need to be able to bomb anywhere on the Earth in 15 minutes. Our current level of military dominance is apparently tempting enough that our politicians (right & left together) go too lightly into war.
Yeah a nuclear bomb is bad, but I'm facinated about it, just like Einstien. Even someone as liberal and intelligent as him realised that in today's world it is those who inovate beyond "scanctions" that live through the Darwinian world in which we live.
Einstein wasn't fascinated by the idea of a nuclear bomb. He said he hadn't considered the possibility of a chain reaction until after someone told him about German attempts to build a nuclear bomb. He signed a letter to Roosevelt recommending that he begin a similar effort. After the war, Einstein said he regretted writing the letter. That was the extent of his involvement in the development of the atomic bomb.
And I'm not sure what you're saying about sanctions and "the Darwinian world in which we live", but it smells bad from over here.
"One of the joint transformational technology initiatives is the National Aerospace Initiative (NAI), which consists of research and development in hypersonic flight technology, affordable and responsive space launch, and enhanced on-orbit space technologies. In the FY04 budget request, the Department focused the increased investment into hypersonic technology, investing over $150M additional funds in hypersonics. We seek Congressional support for the FY04 budget request for the increased hypersonic technology work and the integrated technologies of NAI. Hypersonic technology could be truly transformative as it could provide increased capability through speed in several mission areas. For example, hypersonics could provide the opportunity to conduct tactical strikes from strategic distance in a short amount of time.
Technology has progressed to the point where we believe that demonstrations of a Mach number per year, reaching Mach 12 by 2012, are within reach. The development of hypersonic technology could reduce vulnerability of future systems, while potentially providing a flexible capability to strike quickly and effectively deny enemy sanctuary anywhere in the world. Additionally, a hypersonic roadmap, developed cooperatively by DoD and NASA provides long term potential for affordable access to space. In short, the National Aerospace Initiative is one of those technology opportunities that has the potential to capture American interest in technology, much like the race to the moon in the 1960's, while providing needed technical capability for the warfighter. The National Aerospace Initiative is the right initiative for America as we celebrate the first century of manned flight."
There are not supporting facts in the Wired blurb because it's public record. The thing in Wired is a little easier to read.
Does anyone know of a Spotlight-like search mechanism for Win2K? No, I'm not interested in WinFS. I want something that will index every local file/email and let me search it via a live query like Spotlight will.
I know there are shareware projects like this for the Mac. Does anyone have any experience with shareware products like this for the PC? Anything you like?
This is unrelated to passenger travel. We are conducting this research so that we can drop a bomb on any location on Earth in under an hour. From Wired Magazine:
Ron Sega Director, Office of Defense Research and Engineering, DOD
ADVISES: Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld
WHY HE MATTERS: Responsible for bringing the missile shield to life.
TECH CRED: IEEE fellow and NASA astronaut who used to teach electrical and computer engineering at the University of Colorado.
ON HIS RADAR: Dominating outer space through hypersonics. He foresees superfast missiles and spaceships that can zap any target. His goal is to increase US flight capabilities by one Mach a year until 2012.
Why is that his goal? You tell me. (Nice way of avoiding ICBM treaties, BTW.)
If you never use your eyes, your occipital lobe ("visual cortex") is never dedicated to processing vision, and is instead used for other tasks.
Otherwise, your occipital lobe is almost exclusively used for processing visual information. Losing your eyesight later in life won't change that. Music practice certainly won't change that.
Some congenitally blind subjects can develop a "face sense" that allows them to hear and process the sound of their own movements echoing off nearby objects, and thus detect their presence and general location. Music practice certainly won't change that either.
Ask a lawyer. Maybe the legal departments of large companies won't allow them to do business in Canada because they don't want to incur the expense of complying with Canadian law.
From the articles, it is unclear why anyone would need this technology, nationalism (racism?) aside.
There are a million different ways this chip could have been implemented, and very few of them would actually increase the security of whatever database they're talking about. I hope we get more details.
Since gays make up a small fraction of the audience, primarily gay-themed games will have a similar market to primarily gay themed movies. They will, by financial necessity, have smaller budgets, smaller scope and smaller development staff.
I hope you're trying to talk about the pragmatics of financial success in our extremely homophobic society. I assume that gay people most often watch primarily straight-themed movies. There's no reason to assume that our population will ignore good movies or videogames with gay characters.
Hell. The Wachowski bros have built their career by making a mainstream movie centered around lesbian characters and a mainstream movie centered around black characters (and they pitched Neo to Will Smith first). If the entertainment industry does it, and does it right, gay themes shouldn't limit their market at all.
Personally I hope when the first "gay" character comes out of the closet it actually has something to do with the storyline of the game, rather than it be just window dressing.
Personally, I don't. Just as a character being straight doesn't need to have anything to do with the plot of a game, a character being gay doesn't either.
In regards to the "how much longer" question, I thought Solid Snake seemed pretty fruity. Maybe that was just my fantasy life getting out of control.
Google Zeitgeist doesn't differentiate between OS X and System 9. Apple says there are as many OS X machines as there are old Macs, and I'd guess that the OS X machines would be more likely to be on the internet. So, OS X at 2% would be perhaps overestimating while OS X at 1% would be perhaps underestimating.
Game companies were all going nuts over the obscene amount of money they could make via MMORPG subscriptions. Why Americans can put up with that crap, I'll never know.
The Windows multi-user environment has been hacked so lamely on top of what was written as a single-user system that it is unusable.
That's not exactly right. The Windows single-user environment encouraged application developers to write whereever the hell they wanted, and thus the potentially excellent multi-user design of the NT kernel was nerfed in favor of backwards compatibility.
Easier than installing Windows 2k. Dunno about XP, but I never would have figured out how to get 2k to work with my HD controller without expert advice.
It's not like running as root, except for when it comes to modifying the/Application directory, in which case it is like running as root. As far as I can tell, you do not need to enter your password to drag Safari.app out of/Applications and replace it with a modified copy of Safari.app. This will not compromise your computer, but it will change Safari for everyone. That's good enough for me.
Installing as a non-priviledged user is not supposed to be difficult. You should be able to install for yourself only, without switching to admin. In Linux you use ~/bin and in Mac OS X you use ~/Applications.
PS. Show me one OS, whose default user is NOT an administrator.
Most Linux distributions make it very difficult to install the OS without creating a non-root user. Most Linux desktops strongly discourage logging into the GUI as root.
The reason that the argument has fallen apart is this: Admin user priviledges do not need to be re-authenticated in Panther when installing a new application. A rogue process with the privs of the default user could remove Safari.app and replace it with malware.
Most other potentially caustic actions are protected by requiring reauthentication. The OS is mostly secure. This hole is not the end of the world, and I'm sure this behavior is a choice. Users that seriously care about there security will log in as non-admin users. Yes, that is better than Windows, as logging in as a non-admin can be a pain. If this behavior is ever exploited, I'm sure Apple could fix it in a heartbeat. That is also better than Windows, as this behavior could not be changed without breaking applications. But it's not as secure as Linux, by default, and in this particular regard, it's no better than Windows, by default.
The default user is an admin. If the argument is that Macs are more secure than Windows, then it has just fallen apart. It is also possible to configure Windows so that non-admin users cannot install programs.
Slashdot Mirror
(Post Script: When typing out this message, at first I accidentally started typing <blackalicious> rather than <blockquote>.)
I have a hard time believing you. Yes, perhaps sighted people can learn to listen for the sounds produced by echoes of their own movement off nearby objects, like a wall. But I don't think they can acquire face sense: From TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.5 No.6 June 2001, The 'feel' of seeing:an interview with J. Kevin O'Regan. Actually, I really don't like that source. But I can't find anything else relevant in a preliminary Googling. Maybe I'm full of shit.
Some people still aren't getting what you're saying, so I'd like to break it down again. 'Scuse me.
The three huge glaring holes:
1) As Asimov illustrated (though I've never read), the well-intentioned three laws, applied perfectly, lead to a million problems and contradictions.
2) As Cavio explained, if some people can't write a secure email client, who would believe that every future robot vendor could properly implement the three laws?
3) And I emphasize: By the time we figure out AI to the point that computers could build plans and goals based on abstract priorities (required in order to follow the three laws in even the most rudimentary form), most all of our robotic needs will already be satisfied, and we will have achieved safety via other means. Asimov's three laws are way, way beyond the abilities of AI right now, and we're not exactly getting there soon.
It seems like the AI tasks that Asimov expected to be difficult will be easier than he thought, while the AI tasks that he expected to be possible will be harder than he thought. We can create AIs that will build and execute plans in an extremely limited, concrete problem set. Of course the first hurdle that researchers aimed for and overcame was ensuring that at no point in the plan would their goals be violated. If the AI comes across a plan that violates one of its goals 10 steps down the line... it backs up and attempts to figure out a new plan. Circular contradictions are neatly avoided.
As other commenters are pointing out, the three laws are more interesting as an examination of human ethics.
I like that Will Smith. He raps happy.
The Hyper-X program may be cancelled (I didn't know that.) but I don't think the National Aerospace Initiative has been cancelled, which was Ron Sega's thing.
But your point is taken. Would this program be useful for further reducing the delivery time of bombs, or do you feel that it must have some other primary purpose (or both)?
And I'm not sure what you're saying about sanctions and "the Darwinian world in which we live", but it smells bad from over here.
So is mine:There are not supporting facts in the Wired blurb because it's public record. The thing in Wired is a little easier to read.
Does anyone know of a Spotlight-like search mechanism for Win2K? No, I'm not interested in WinFS. I want something that will index every local file/email and let me search it via a live query like Spotlight will.
I know there are shareware projects like this for the Mac. Does anyone have any experience with shareware products like this for the PC? Anything you like?
If you never use your eyes, your occipital lobe ("visual cortex") is never dedicated to processing vision, and is instead used for other tasks.
Otherwise, your occipital lobe is almost exclusively used for processing visual information. Losing your eyesight later in life won't change that. Music practice certainly won't change that.
Some congenitally blind subjects can develop a "face sense" that allows them to hear and process the sound of their own movements echoing off nearby objects, and thus detect their presence and general location. Music practice certainly won't change that either.
I was going for "I Am Not A Lawyer But I Play One On TV."
Ask a lawyer. Maybe the legal departments of large companies won't allow them to do business in Canada because they don't want to incur the expense of complying with Canadian law.
Just a guess.
From the articles, it is unclear why anyone would need this technology, nationalism (racism?) aside.
There are a million different ways this chip could have been implemented, and very few of them would actually increase the security of whatever database they're talking about. I hope we get more details.
Since gays make up a small fraction of the audience, primarily gay-themed games will have a similar market to primarily gay themed movies. They will, by financial necessity, have smaller budgets, smaller scope and smaller development staff.
I hope you're trying to talk about the pragmatics of financial success in our extremely homophobic society. I assume that gay people most often watch primarily straight-themed movies. There's no reason to assume that our population will ignore good movies or videogames with gay characters.
Hell. The Wachowski bros have built their career by making a mainstream movie centered around lesbian characters and a mainstream movie centered around black characters (and they pitched Neo to Will Smith first). If the entertainment industry does it, and does it right, gay themes shouldn't limit their market at all.
Linking to GIMP would have been funnier.
Personally I hope when the first "gay" character comes out of the closet it actually has something to do with the storyline of the game, rather than it be just window dressing.
Personally, I don't. Just as a character being straight doesn't need to have anything to do with the plot of a game, a character being gay doesn't either.
In regards to the "how much longer" question, I thought Solid Snake seemed pretty fruity. Maybe that was just my fantasy life getting out of control.
Google Zeitgeist doesn't differentiate between OS X and System 9. Apple says there are as many OS X machines as there are old Macs, and I'd guess that the OS X machines would be more likely to be on the internet. So, OS X at 2% would be perhaps overestimating while OS X at 1% would be perhaps underestimating.
How is this different than SFU on 2k, XP, or 2k3?
Can someone post that article? Slow as hell.
(See subject.)
Game companies were all going nuts over the obscene amount of money they could make via MMORPG subscriptions. Why Americans can put up with that crap, I'll never know.
The Windows multi-user environment has been hacked so lamely on top of what was written as a single-user system that it is unusable.
That's not exactly right. The Windows single-user environment encouraged application developers to write whereever the hell they wanted, and thus the potentially excellent multi-user design of the NT kernel was nerfed in favor of backwards compatibility.
Easier than installing Windows 2k. Dunno about XP, but I never would have figured out how to get 2k to work with my HD controller without expert advice.
It's not like running as root, except for when it comes to modifying the /Application directory, in which case it is like running as root. As far as I can tell, you do not need to enter your password to drag Safari.app out of /Applications and replace it with a modified copy of Safari.app. This will not compromise your computer, but it will change Safari for everyone. That's good enough for me.
Installing as a non-priviledged user is not supposed to be difficult. You should be able to install for yourself only, without switching to admin. In Linux you use ~/bin and in Mac OS X you use ~/Applications.
PS. Show me one OS, whose default user is NOT an administrator.
Most Linux distributions make it very difficult to install the OS without creating a non-root user. Most Linux desktops strongly discourage logging into the GUI as root.
The reason that the argument has fallen apart is this: Admin user priviledges do not need to be re-authenticated in Panther when installing a new application. A rogue process with the privs of the default user could remove Safari.app and replace it with malware.
Most other potentially caustic actions are protected by requiring reauthentication. The OS is mostly secure. This hole is not the end of the world, and I'm sure this behavior is a choice. Users that seriously care about there security will log in as non-admin users. Yes, that is better than Windows, as logging in as a non-admin can be a pain. If this behavior is ever exploited, I'm sure Apple could fix it in a heartbeat. That is also better than Windows, as this behavior could not be changed without breaking applications. But it's not as secure as Linux, by default, and in this particular regard, it's no better than Windows, by default.
The default user is an admin. If the argument is that Macs are more secure than Windows, then it has just fallen apart. It is also possible to configure Windows so that non-admin users cannot install programs.