Is there any evidence for string theory? I was under the impression that this is somewhat-elegant-but-not-great-friends-with-Occams 's-razor theory which is a long, long way from getting any empirical support. Don't hold your breath. It's not the sort of subject where empirical evidence is easily available. Nowadays string theory has evolved into m-theory, which basically adds another dimension to our already burgeoning universe. Check out here
Having experienced what it's like to have defamatory stuff published about me and several friends on newsgroups, I'm not too sure where I stand on this one. My suggestion is not to confuse the crime and the punishment. Should defamation be illegal and punishable? Absolutely. But if he wrote this defamation on the school blackboard, would he be barred from using chalk? Another question to ask is whether the ramblings of a teenager against his teachers constitutes libel. If I read a page where some rambling schoolkid called his classmates sluts and his teachers drunks, I'd be less than inclined to believe what I was reading. If no-one believes it, is it still libel? I'd call it a disciplinary problem, and a reason to talk to the kid. But not a reason to have the cops confiscsate his computer.
You just know you're in for a fascinating read when the server FAQ contains the question "how often do you change the potatos" But I'd really like to know: do potatos taste as good when they've had all their electricity taken out? There's also the possiblity of sponsorship here. If it were powered by burgers instead of fries, they could put up one of those 'one billion served' banners.
That CD-ROM is a great toy for SF-loving geeks Gosh diddly-darn it, howcum I never heard of these CDs? Can they still be got? As for the Hugo nominee, if memory serves the book came third in 1993, after joint winners A Fire Upon the Deep and Doomsday Book. I personally thought it was better than the former and at least as good as the latter.
A question: was I the only one that was disappointed by Half the Day is Night? It was a good book, but by no means as good as China Mountain Zhang.
I recently registered robertelliott.org . Am I now going to have to change it to ROBERTELLIOTT.ORG? And what about the universities? Will harvard.edu be changed to HARVARD.EDU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?
We're obviously gonna have to set some sort of standard for exclamation marks, now. I suggest 5 for a.com^H^H^HCOM, seven for a.ORG and nineteen for a.EDU. This has the added benefit of making life more difficult for spammers; they'll no longer be able to catch your attention via tasteful XXX PICS HERE!!!!!!!!!!; they'll have to use lower case and good grammar to differentiate between themselves and the masses.
Looking at the list, I expected to find some specific examples of engineering. I mean, 'spacecraft'? 'Highways'? And what the fuck is a 'household appliances'? Instead, I'd have suggested Mir and, er, a big road. And the multi-region DVD with remote control and a free copy of the Matrix. This list, basically, covers every major engineering feat of the 20th century. I challenge y'all to come up with something that isn't in one of these categories.
Does this mean that if one flies in a spaceship far enough, they can "fall" off the end of the universe? Don't be silly. There's no gravity at the end of the universe. Didn't you see the sign?
Should we send a "Columbus" probe out to find out?
It's already been done. Columbus 1 was launched in 1978 as part of NASA's top secret "Top Secret" programme. It used a quantum tetryon drive to transport itself instantly to Zeta Reticuli, where it claimed the planet in the name of the Earth. It then spent the next twenty years slaughtering the native population and replacing it with Earthmen and women. The new population has a lot of wacky ideas that they're trying to foist on the rest of the universe, like the freedom to bear tactical nuclear weapons and a literal interpretation of Lord of the Rings.
Just think... when the water gets too hot, you can use it to make coffee. As long as you don't have to crack open the CPU to get at it; the silicon adds a bitter aftertaste, particularly on milder blends, such as Colombian. Which I probably spelt wrong. Question: would the computer work faster if you used Jolt instead of water?
A bad decision in the Daemon UK case, (IIRC a basically bigmouthed person successfully sued the ISP for not removing some inflammatory information about him) and now the British ISP's are so worried about being sued that they overreact and start pulling crap like this on their customers (my boldies) The bigmouthed person in question contacted Demon several times about content that was libellous; it wasn't 'inflammatory information'. It was after Demon refused to remove the posts that alluded to our chum's child-molesting tendencies that he sued.
I agree with your points in general, but to paint Demon as a noble ISP standing up for free speech is to misrepresent the case rather grossly.
Nor do I think that this is an example of prejudice; more like an unhappy combination of trigger-happy lawyers and outright cowardice. There can be no doubt that case law does indeed help in the persecution of the differently [whatevered], but that's not the case here.
Just for the record, I am MMFM (monogamous married hetero male), so I'm as far from gay as a man could get Lucky you said that; you wouldn't want us all to think you were an arse bandit. Let's hear it for the 'IANAQ But' posts!
This isn't the first time this has happened. During the Gulf war, something very similar occured. Even more serious, several months ago Bono lost his laptop that had the lyrics for U2's next album. Fortunately, he got it back and all was well.
Look at it this way: they're not called 'portable' for nothing. It'll happen.
In short - this universe will never become one huge black hole To take the long view: assuming the universe will expand forever, we'll all end up not in black holes, but as radiation. Black holes don't live forever, just a very, very, very,... very long time. We may see (okay, we won't see, but you know what I mean) a time when the universe consists of nothing but black holes. These will eventually evaporate, and matter may result from this explosion. But that won't last long either. If you take a long enough time frame, everything will decay, and there'll be nothing left but radiation. In the long run, we are all radiation. Personally, I find this rather depressing, and would rather believe that we're all going to crunch, and perhaps form another universe. That'd be nice.
Second sentence: if the trend of increasing performance continues, a quantum computer that triples today's fastest computers could be built in five years, according to physicist Raymond Laflamme
Last sentence: "On my optimistic days I think we will have quantum computers in 20, 30, 40 years maybe," he said. "On my pessimistic days, I think quantum computing is crazy."
Still, it's cool. Personally, I think that ten years is the most likely timeframe, but that the uneducated guess of an uninformed amateur.
Given that even the slightest physical contact will leave DNA, howzabout examining JFK's magic bullet? Obviously you'd have to discount all the CIA DNA because they investigated the cubans and would probably have to handle the bullet. Oh, and the FBI probably examined it too. The mafia probably sold the bullet to Oswa^Hthe killer, so all that mafia dna would have to be thrown out as well. And if the CIA were talking to the cubans, then Castro's DNA could be eliminated as well. All that superfluous DNA would probably mask Oswald's, so his probably wouldn't appear on the bullet. But as we've eliminated everyone else, it must have been him.
The paper was only intended for the internal use and for the public, did not say Kiel. Worrying should not be doing, because obviously just decision internal was, knickers should not be twisted until elucidation forthcomes. Open source still may be option that is by the government preferred.
As mentioned in the article, though, owners of potential pollution sources (like landfills) are liable for any pollution that they cause down the road. This gives them a strong incentive to take measures _now_ to prevent themselves from having to shell out a lot of money later.
I don't mean to belabour the point (but I will anyway), but such incentives are only effective if the landfill owners think in the long term. If they think they can circumvent punitive fines by acting doing nothing in the short term, then selling up and getting the hell out of Dodge before sewage happens, that's what they'll do.
Tax incentives also help with this, again by providing a short-term reason to do things, but can be politically difficult to implement Woo, there's my point again. 'Politically difficult' is practically synonymous with 'no short-term gain'.
For decades, we've more or less all been aware that environmental protection makes economic sense; I don't think anyone doubts that. Unfortunately, it rarely makes immediate- or short-term sense, which is why we see millions of hectares of rainforest disappearing annually. Basically, you can't rely on human beings to act in their own self interest in anything but the short term.
We're now looking at Ecolovillage. We want to build a suburb of clustered housing, a small retirement village. That's what we want to do-and treat all the water on-site, really get focused on solid waste management, and grow enough carbon that we have a good running start to be even greenhouse-gas cyclic. You take a field and, instead of putting two-acre mini- mansions on it, you go out there, cluster housing, and keep the rest of the land either in productive agriculture or productive prairie, with wetlands and ecological diversity.
Hands up anyone out there who believes that more than an tiny minority of the peole who can afford mini-mansions would go for this?
Don't get me wrong; I was mightily impressed by this interview, and it convinced me to look further into the project. I don't, however, believe you can rely on the asshole that is the typical human to go along with it.
Mutation and recombination can be random processes but evolution includes natural selection which is decidedly not random... Just as evolution has no intrinsic purpose Nothing WANTS to evolve To say that natural selection isn't random would, to my mind, imply that there's an ideal form for survival in a specific environment. I don't think this is the case. The 'fittest' that survive are fit only relative to other species. Chance also plays a part; there may have existed in the past a life form -- possibly humanoid -- who was perfectly suited to its environment. However, if it got hit by a bus/meteor/Linus Torvalds before it could reproduce, it doesn't matter a damn how well suited it was. Its mutation may well be lost forever. If you're 'growing' a brain, you can eliminate traits that you think won't contribute to that brain's improvement, and include any you think may be beneficial. This eliminates a lot of the randomness (although you could say that the POV of the person running the experiment is a form of chaotic influence).
Does a forest have a purpose? Or is it just a byproduct of trees and foliage... Which is more likely to survive, the tree that's alone in the middle of a plain, or the tree that's in the middle of a forest?
In some ways, yes, the brain is an emergant system arising from a requisite level of complexity in its makeup, but it's also the result of billions of years of evolution I don't think that's a valid comparison; evolution is essentially a random process, and one that changes only generationally (if that's a word). With AI, even if you're using some manner of evolutionary algorithm, the changes will happen much quicker; many thousands of 'mutations' a day may be checked for efficacy.
The brain is not just a large neural net, and IMHO it will take far more understanding of both sapience and sentience before AI becomes a reality. True(ish). Just as evolution has no intrinsic purpose, so it may be possible to 'grow' an electronic brain without fully understanding it. That brain could then be used to make a smarter brain (that even it may not understand), and so it goes.
Undestanding would be nice, but I don't think it'll be necessary.
Superintelligent robots won't suddenly appear. Instead, they will slowly improve, and around the same time, I firmly believe that hardware will start being connected to human brains and human limbs.
I disagree; you're right up to a point, but some time in the next (x|x > 10 && x < 60) years these robots will reach critical mass, whereby robots will because intelligent enough to build a smarter robot, which will in turn... Once the first generation of smart robot figures out how to build a smarter descendent, we'll see new generations coming along almost as fast as they can be built.
OK, color Palm is cool. Perhaps; that's what they said about the colour game boy. Have you tried playing tetris in low light on a colour gb? It's damn difficult. I love my palm (so to speak), and I can't really imagine life improving because of colour. It's indispensible, but only for text and books. Game-boy-off-topic-aside: upon buying the aforementioned GB, the sales drone insisted that I needed a copy of Pokemon. The conversation went something like this: SD:Pokemon is only IR30. ME:I don't want pokemon. I want tetris. SD:But Pokemon is really popular. YOu can use it to play against other players. ME:I'm thirty fucking years old. How many ten-year-old pokemon players do you think I know. SD:BUt it's very good. ME:Look, I'm only buying this because I want something portable that I can play tetris on. I'm buying tetris, not the game boy. SD:But you can still play Pokemon. ME:Are you getting a commission? Or are you secretly working for Team Rocket? SD:What? ME:Never mind. Just give me tetris. SD:Okay. Are you sure you don't want pokemon as well?
Slashdot Mirror
Is there any evidence for string theory? I was under the impression that this is somewhat-elegant-but-not-great-friends-with-Occams 's-razor theory which is a long, long way from getting any empirical support.
Don't hold your breath. It's not the sort of subject where empirical evidence is easily available. Nowadays string theory has evolved into m-theory, which basically adds another dimension to our already burgeoning universe. Check out here
Having experienced what it's like to have defamatory stuff published about me and several friends on newsgroups, I'm not too sure where I stand on this one.
My suggestion is not to confuse the crime and the punishment. Should defamation be illegal and punishable? Absolutely. But if he wrote this defamation on the school blackboard, would he be barred from using chalk?
Another question to ask is whether the ramblings of a teenager against his teachers constitutes libel. If I read a page where some rambling schoolkid called his classmates sluts and his teachers drunks, I'd be less than inclined to believe what I was reading. If no-one believes it, is it still libel? I'd call it a disciplinary problem, and a reason to talk to the kid. But not a reason to have the cops confiscsate his computer.
You just know you're in for a fascinating read when the server FAQ contains the question "how often do you change the potatos"
But I'd really like to know: do potatos taste as good when they've had all their electricity taken out?
There's also the possiblity of sponsorship here. If it were powered by burgers instead of fries, they could put up one of those 'one billion served' banners.
That CD-ROM is a great toy for SF-loving geeks
Gosh diddly-darn it, howcum I never heard of these CDs? Can they still be got?
As for the Hugo nominee, if memory serves the book came third in 1993, after joint winners A Fire Upon the Deep and Doomsday Book. I personally thought it was better than the former and at least as good as the latter.
A question: was I the only one that was disappointed by Half the Day is Night? It was a good book, but by no means as good as China Mountain Zhang.
I recently registered robertelliott.org . Am I now going to have to change it to ROBERTELLIOTT.ORG?
.com^H^H^HCOM, seven for a .ORG and nineteen for a .EDU. This has the added benefit of making life more difficult for spammers; they'll no longer be able to catch your attention via tasteful XXX PICS HERE!!!!!!!!!!; they'll have to use lower case and good grammar to differentiate between themselves and the masses.
And what about the universities? Will harvard.edu be changed to HARVARD.EDU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?
We're obviously gonna have to set some sort of standard for exclamation marks, now. I suggest 5 for a
Spammers are the future!
Looking at the list, I expected to find some specific examples of engineering. I mean, 'spacecraft'? 'Highways'? And what the fuck is a 'household appliances'?
Instead, I'd have suggested Mir and, er, a big road. And the multi-region DVD with remote control and a free copy of the Matrix.
This list, basically, covers every major engineering feat of the 20th century. I challenge y'all to come up with something that isn't in one of these categories.
Does this mean that if one flies in a spaceship far enough, they can "fall" off the end of the universe?
Don't be silly. There's no gravity at the end of the universe. Didn't you see the sign?
Should we send a "Columbus" probe out to find out?
It's already been done. Columbus 1 was launched in 1978 as part of NASA's top secret "Top Secret" programme. It used a quantum tetryon drive to transport itself instantly to Zeta Reticuli, where it claimed the planet in the name of the Earth. It then spent the next twenty years slaughtering the native population and replacing it with Earthmen and women. The new population has a lot of wacky ideas that they're trying to foist on the rest of the universe, like the freedom to bear tactical nuclear weapons and a literal interpretation of Lord of the Rings.
Just think... when the water gets too hot, you can use it to make coffee. As long as you don't have to crack open the CPU to get at it; the silicon adds a bitter aftertaste, particularly on milder blends, such as Colombian. Which I probably spelt wrong.
Question: would the computer work faster if you used Jolt instead of water?
A bad decision in the Daemon UK case, (IIRC a basically bigmouthed person successfully sued the ISP for not removing some inflammatory information about him) and now the British ISP's are so worried about being sued that they overreact and start pulling crap like this on their customers
(my boldies)
The bigmouthed person in question contacted Demon several times about content that was libellous; it wasn't 'inflammatory information'. It was after Demon refused to remove the posts that alluded to our chum's child-molesting tendencies that he sued.
I agree with your points in general, but to paint Demon as a noble ISP standing up for free speech is to misrepresent the case rather grossly.
Nor do I think that this is an example of prejudice; more like an unhappy combination of trigger-happy lawyers and outright cowardice. There can be no doubt that case law does indeed help in the persecution of the differently [whatevered], but that's not the case here.
Just for the record, I am MMFM (monogamous married hetero male), so I'm as far from gay as a man could get
Lucky you said that; you wouldn't want us all to think you were an arse bandit. Let's hear it for the 'IANAQ But' posts!
It's a pity they didn't thing to include a subliminal "don't reverse engineer the encryption" message.
This isn't the first time this has happened. During the Gulf war, something very similar occured.
Even more serious, several months ago Bono lost his laptop that had the lyrics for U2's next album. Fortunately, he got it back and all was well.
Look at it this way: they're not called 'portable' for nothing. It'll happen.
In short - this universe will never become one huge black hole ... very long time. We may see (okay, we won't see, but you know what I mean) a time when the universe consists of nothing but black holes. These will eventually evaporate, and matter may result from this explosion. But that won't last long either. If you take a long enough time frame, everything will decay, and there'll be nothing left but radiation. In the long run, we are all radiation.
To take the long view: assuming the universe will expand forever, we'll all end up not in black holes, but as radiation.
Black holes don't live forever, just a very, very, very,
Personally, I find this rather depressing, and would rather believe that we're all going to crunch, and perhaps form another universe. That'd be nice.
Second sentence:
if the trend of increasing performance continues, a quantum computer that triples today's fastest computers could be built in five years, according to physicist Raymond Laflamme
Last sentence:
"On my optimistic days I think we will have quantum computers in 20, 30, 40 years maybe," he said. "On my pessimistic days, I think quantum computing is crazy."
Still, it's cool. Personally, I think that ten years is the most likely timeframe, but that the uneducated guess of an uninformed amateur.
Given that even the slightest physical contact will leave DNA, howzabout examining JFK's magic bullet? Obviously you'd have to discount all the CIA DNA because they investigated the cubans and would probably have to handle the bullet. Oh, and the FBI probably examined it too. The mafia probably sold the bullet to Oswa^Hthe killer, so all that mafia dna would have to be thrown out as well. And if the CIA were talking to the cubans, then Castro's DNA could be eliminated as well.
All that superfluous DNA would probably mask Oswald's, so his probably wouldn't appear on the bullet. But as we've eliminated everyone else, it must have been him.
The paper was only intended for the internal use and for the public, did not say Kiel.
Worrying should not be doing, because obviously just decision internal was, knickers should not be twisted until elucidation forthcomes.
Open source still may be option that is by the government preferred.
As mentioned in the article, though, owners of potential pollution sources (like landfills) are liable for any pollution that they cause down the road. This gives them a strong incentive to take measures _now_ to prevent themselves from having to shell out a lot of money later.
I don't mean to belabour the point (but I will anyway), but such incentives are only effective if the landfill owners think in the long term. If they think they can circumvent punitive fines by acting doing nothing in the short term, then selling up and getting the hell out of Dodge before sewage happens, that's what they'll do.
Tax incentives also help with this, again by providing a short-term reason to do things, but can be politically difficult to implement
Woo, there's my point again. 'Politically difficult' is practically synonymous with 'no short-term gain'.
For decades, we've more or less all been aware that environmental protection makes economic sense; I don't think anyone doubts that. Unfortunately, it rarely makes immediate- or short-term sense, which is why we see millions of hectares of rainforest disappearing annually.
Basically, you can't rely on human beings to act in their own self interest in anything but the short term.
We're now looking at Ecolovillage. We want to build a suburb of clustered housing, a small retirement village. That's what we want to do-and treat all the water on-site, really get focused on solid waste management, and grow enough carbon that we have a good running start to be even greenhouse-gas cyclic. You take a field and, instead of putting two-acre mini- mansions on it, you go out there, cluster housing, and keep the rest of the land either in productive agriculture or productive prairie, with wetlands and ecological diversity.
Hands up anyone out there who believes that more than an tiny minority of the peole who can afford mini-mansions would go for this?
Don't get me wrong; I was mightily impressed by this interview, and it convinced me to look further into the project. I don't, however, believe you can rely on the asshole that is the typical human to go along with it.
Mutation and recombination can be random processes but evolution includes natural selection which is decidedly not random ... Just as evolution has no intrinsic purpose Nothing WANTS to evolve
To say that natural selection isn't random would, to my mind, imply that there's an ideal form for survival in a specific environment. I don't think this is the case. The 'fittest' that survive are fit only relative to other species. Chance also plays a part; there may have existed in the past a life form -- possibly humanoid -- who was perfectly suited to its environment. However, if it got hit by a bus/meteor/Linus Torvalds before it could reproduce, it doesn't matter a damn how well suited it was. Its mutation may well be lost forever.
If you're 'growing' a brain, you can eliminate traits that you think won't contribute to that brain's improvement, and include any you think may be beneficial. This eliminates a lot of the randomness (although you could say that the POV of the person running the experiment is a form of chaotic influence).
Does a forest have a purpose? Or is it just a byproduct of trees and foliage...
Which is more likely to survive, the tree that's alone in the middle of a plain, or the tree that's in the middle of a forest?
In some ways, yes, the brain is an emergant system arising from a requisite level of complexity in its makeup, but it's also the result of billions of years of evolution
I don't think that's a valid comparison; evolution is essentially a random process, and one that changes only generationally (if that's a word). With AI, even if you're using some manner of evolutionary algorithm, the changes will happen much quicker; many thousands of 'mutations' a day may be checked for efficacy.
The brain is not just a large neural net, and IMHO it will take far more understanding of both sapience and sentience before AI becomes a reality.
True(ish). Just as evolution has no intrinsic purpose, so it may be possible to 'grow' an electronic brain without fully understanding it. That brain could then be used to make a smarter brain (that even it may not understand), and so it goes.
Undestanding would be nice, but I don't think it'll be necessary.
Superintelligent robots won't suddenly appear. Instead, they will slowly improve, and around the same time, I firmly believe that hardware will start being connected to human brains and human limbs.
I disagree; you're right up to a point, but some time in the next (x|x > 10 && x < 60) years these robots will reach critical mass, whereby robots will because intelligent enough to build a smarter robot, which will in turn...
Once the first generation of smart robot figures out how to build a smarter descendent, we'll see new generations coming along almost as fast as they can be built.
what DID V.I.N.C.E.N.T stand for again...
Vital Information Necessary, CENTralised. Twenty years later, and I still remember one of the worst acronyms ever.
So I ask the question: Is online better?
"Hey, boss. There's a sysadmin conference on, and it's vital for the security of our network that I attend."
"Sure thing. We'll spring for expenses and we'll just struggle on for the week that you're away."
"no need. It's online. I'll just have to stay in work for an extra couple of hours each day while it's on."
"Gosh, the internet's great."
"Yeah."
A metabolic switch that triggers algae to turn sunlight into large quantities of hydrogen gas
This is the very first sentence. Of course, it means that sunlight is used to convert water.
Bitching aside, this is cool. Beyond cool, in fact. We may survive to see the twenty-second century, after all.
The above looked fine and formatted in preview. I promise!
Sorry.
OK, color Palm is cool. Perhaps; that's what they said about the colour game boy. Have you tried playing tetris in low light on a colour gb? It's damn difficult. I love my palm (so to speak), and I can't really imagine life improving because of colour. It's indispensible, but only for text and books. Game-boy-off-topic-aside: upon buying the aforementioned GB, the sales drone insisted that I needed a copy of Pokemon. The conversation went something like this: SD:Pokemon is only IR30. ME:I don't want pokemon. I want tetris. SD:But Pokemon is really popular. YOu can use it to play against other players. ME:I'm thirty fucking years old. How many ten-year-old pokemon players do you think I know. SD:BUt it's very good. ME:Look, I'm only buying this because I want something portable that I can play tetris on. I'm buying tetris, not the game boy. SD:But you can still play Pokemon. ME:Are you getting a commission? Or are you secretly working for Team Rocket? SD:What? ME:Never mind. Just give me tetris. SD:Okay. Are you sure you don't want pokemon as well?