Your statement is the opposite of the truth. Addiction is "Psychological Addiction", period. Some substances such as heroin, caffeine and chocolate(to take an example from the original poster's list of non-chemical addictions) work a direct chemical change on the body to which it becomes accustomed over time. This acclimatization can greatly increase negative withdrawal effects. It is not however the case that only substances which produce this acclimatization are addictive. In fact, most so-called psychological addictions can, in certain cases produce physical withdrawal effects at least as potent as those observed in "chemical addictions". In fact, in scientific studies of "chemical addiction", the physical acclimatization has been shown to be one of the least significant factors.
On another note. To all those people who say that if you want to stop an addictive behavior, you simply need to stop doing it: you might as well tell a schizophrenic to stop hallucinating. Addicitive behaviour is not under direct conscious control. Behaviour patterns which have ceased to be rational can not be corrected by rational arguments.
This is videogaming we're talking about. Legacy support is one of the most important features you can offer. The Playstation 2 owes a large portion of its success to its ability to play the massive library of existing PS1 games. Ditto for the Game Boy Advance. What's more, Nintendo would have to be insane to release an entirely new handheld system with an entirely library of completely incompatible games so hot on the heels of the wildly successful GBA. Introducing a new game format without legacy is a certain death notice for the old format(games are still developed for PS1, but there are no developers i know of working on the N64). The backlash from angry GBA users would be deadly to Nintendo.
Even if what you are saying is true and including legacy support limits your ability to progress in unexplored directions(and i'm not admitting it does until you show some pretty convincing evidence. I see no reason why an entirely new format couldn't be defined and then have an emulator which runs the old format inside the new scheme. Considering that each new console generation includes large hardware advances it is a necessary truth that games in the previous format will be less demanding and so emulation is a viable option). Even then, providing legacy support would still be the right choice in the video game industry. Now that Sony has pushed the envelope, I doubt you will see many future consoles without legacy support.
the project itself is pretty interesting, but something rubs me the wrong way about the term "automated turing test". The turing test is based on the idea that sentience can not be defined in any simple mechanizable way.
maybe it's just my cognitive science degree making me touchy, but i'd prefer the term "automated coherence filter" or something(even "automated intelligence test" would be an improvement).
Joe Clark has written
a book. Does anyone else notice a striking similarity between the cover photo and a certain infamous image.
Sorry, not meaning to troll. I like Joe Clark, I also work in accessiblity. It's just that that image(the book cover) is right on his main page, and I can't go there without having my visual memory of things I would rather not remember activated.
Is that the REAL signals will obviously be coming from starships in nearby space which have either warp/hyperdrive and will therefore be NOWHERE near where they were when the signal was first detectred months or years ago.
> If this does work, I think the precedent will > be that fans are willing to pool together and > pay a LOT of money to get the quality content > they want. Groups could form to fund their own > content, which they could release into the > public domain. P2P could distribute them.
I think that you may have a bit too much experience with the hacker open-source community. From a sociological perspective, I don't think your hypothetical model could ever take off. The problem is that even if all these people were willing to go into this project with no thought of profit, simply to make something wonderful, once it was done, you would see a lot more resistance than you might expect to releasing it into the public domain.
In the end, things that cost resources to produce end up belonging to someone because of the "Why should they get it for free when I had to pay for it" mentality.
> As it is now, you're paying for all your fave
> shows, and for some you don't like. If you
> only pay for the ones you don't like,
> they get less money. Not the best way to keep
> the shareholders happy.
(emphasis added)
Not the best way to keep the viewer happy either. (chuckle)
For a good long while, the primary copy of "Do androids..." that you could find in book stores had a sketch of Harrison Ford on the cover and said "BLADE RUNNER" across the top in huge letters with "or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" below in much smaller letters. This is not the movie novelization, it is Dick's original story. There is a new trade paperback out now with the original title and a nod to the movie on the back cover(thanks to a renewed interest in Dick's work, maybe related to Minority Report).
Anyway, my point is that calling the book "Blade Runner" is an easy mistake to make, even if you have actually read the original.
i suppose, but then you run into the problem of needing to release a new DVD everytime month or so to catch all the version updates in that free software. Either that or fall so far behind the curve that you won't even be able to see it.
Still, Knoppix is great for at least one thing. It gives prospective Linux users an easy way to test the waters before they dive in by partitioning my hard drive.
Actually.. I'm a little surprised that they named the project the Arrow, considering the fate of the last Canadian Arrow(My girlfriend's father was one of the engineers on the project).
Seriously, the Avro Arrow is one of the things that every Canadian learns about in history class and there certainly wouldn't be a canadian aerospace engineer who wasn't familiar with the story. So I'm wondering if the name is some sort of inside joke to them or if possibly some suit decided it was a good name and the engineers couldn't explain the stigma that goes along with it.
It's true. We live in a country(I'm actually canadian, but the argument is the same in either nation) where ignorance of the law is not a valid defence and yet the countries COMPLETE legislation could not be read by a single person in their entire lifetime.
BTW, my given first name is Duff so(although the product in my case is fictional) I have a lot of experience with the name/trademark crossover. I don't own duff.com(warning... porno), but if I did, you can bet I would raise all hell if FOX tried to take it from me.
Bayesian technique is very good for the sort of abstract classification task that spam represents. It would be an interesting hack to try and train a network to categorize based solely on message body... i do however hope that their team has opted for practicality over just hack value and the network will also use such extremely relevant data as header information and comparing address versus address book(an e-mail from someone not in your address book is not necesarrily spam... but it is more likely to be).
Don't they know that Carbon is the most sinister of the basic elements. Superficially less threatening than Plutonium, Carbon can change into diamond, graphite OR coal at will! Nothing can hope to compete with sucha a combination of hardness and combustibility. We are all doomed.
Mankind must vacate Asia at once and put all our resources into developing some Element Hero to combat this element villain so foolhardily released.
Rumor has it that Carbon bonds freely with Hydrogen... perhaps this can be a clue to it's weakness... we can only hope.
> What freaks me out is the possibility that > this very clause is deemed illegal by a court > - now that's where it gets really interesting
nice try at a Hofstadter-style self-reference loop. In this case however, if that clause is deemed illegal, the contract would be invalidated since the only thing preventing it's invalidation had been itself invalidated.
shouldn't this be: never overestimate the American Judicial system.
btw, i'm a canadian, but you can assume that all disparaging statements about the US apply to my country as well(unless they're about drug legislation or health care).
actually.. there would be almost no tidal effect at the edge of a black hole and the radiation would be nearly negligible.[according to Roger Penrose... who is smarter than I am]
The general theory of relativity predicts the formation of singularities, but when taken into consideration along with quantum theory as both Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose have, they become astronomically unlikely(but not impossible). The formation of a black hole would require a mass at least as large as the one in the centre of our galaxy to form a true point singularity and it would have to compress in a mathematically exact symmetrical fashion. Most black holes should have a radius according to modern theories which use both relativity and quantum mechanics rather than ignoring one in favor of the other. Mind you, that radius should by phenomenally tiny.
The discussion you refer to is the one about Hawking radiation. Stephen Hawking has demonstrated that Black Holes do actually(counter to intuition) radiate an extroardinarily small amount of energy. There is considerable debate as to whether it is possible for this radiation to ever cause the black hole to dissipate.
Slashdot Mirror
Your statement is the opposite of the truth. Addiction is "Psychological Addiction", period. Some substances such as heroin, caffeine and chocolate(to take an example from the original poster's list of non-chemical addictions) work a direct chemical change on the body to which it becomes accustomed over time. This acclimatization can greatly increase negative withdrawal effects. It is not however the case that only substances which produce this acclimatization are addictive. In fact, most so-called psychological addictions can, in certain cases produce physical withdrawal effects at least as potent as those observed in "chemical addictions". In fact, in scientific studies of "chemical addiction", the physical acclimatization has been shown to be one of the least significant factors.
On another note. To all those people who say that if you want to stop an addictive behavior, you simply need to stop doing it: you might as well tell a schizophrenic to stop hallucinating. Addicitive behaviour is not under direct conscious control. Behaviour patterns which have ceased to be rational can not be corrected by rational arguments.
-transient0
cognitive scientist
Are you joking?
This is videogaming we're talking about. Legacy support is one of the most important features you can offer. The Playstation 2 owes a large portion of its success to its ability to play the massive library of existing PS1 games. Ditto for the Game Boy Advance. What's more, Nintendo would have to be insane to release an entirely new handheld system with an entirely library of completely incompatible games so hot on the heels of the wildly successful GBA. Introducing a new game format without legacy is a certain death notice for the old format(games are still developed for PS1, but there are no developers i know of working on the N64). The backlash from angry GBA users would be deadly to Nintendo.
Even if what you are saying is true and including legacy support limits your ability to progress in unexplored directions(and i'm not admitting it does until you show some pretty convincing evidence. I see no reason why an entirely new format couldn't be defined and then have an emulator which runs the old format inside the new scheme. Considering that each new console generation includes large hardware advances it is a necessary truth that games in the previous format will be less demanding and so emulation is a viable option). Even then, providing legacy support would still be the right choice in the video game industry. Now that Sony has pushed the envelope, I doubt you will see many future consoles without legacy support.
the project itself is pretty interesting, but something rubs me the wrong way about the term "automated turing test". The turing test is based on the idea that sentience can not be defined in any simple mechanizable way.
maybe it's just my cognitive science degree making me touchy, but i'd prefer the term "automated coherence filter" or something(even "automated intelligence test" would be an improvement).
Joe Clark has written a book. Does anyone else notice a striking similarity between the cover photo and a certain infamous image.
Sorry, not meaning to troll. I like Joe Clark, I also work in accessiblity. It's just that that image(the book cover) is right on his main page, and I can't go there without having my visual memory of things I would rather not remember activated.
Is that the REAL signals will obviously be coming from starships in nearby space which have either warp/hyperdrive and will therefore be NOWHERE near where they were when the signal was first detectred months or years ago.
> If this does work, I think the precedent will
> be that fans are willing to pool together and
> pay a LOT of money to get the quality content
> they want. Groups could form to fund their own
> content, which they could release into the
> public domain. P2P could distribute them.
I think that you may have a bit too much experience with the hacker open-source community. From a sociological perspective, I don't think your hypothetical model could ever take off. The problem is that even if all these people were willing to go into this project with no thought of profit, simply to make something wonderful, once it was done, you would see a lot more resistance than you might expect to releasing it into the public domain.
In the end, things that cost resources to produce end up belonging to someone because of the "Why should they get it for free when I had to pay for it" mentality.
Just some return food for thought.
> As it is now, you're paying for all your fave
> shows, and for some you don't like. If you
> only pay for the ones you don't like,
> they get less money. Not the best way to keep
> the shareholders happy.
(emphasis added)
Not the best way to keep the viewer happy either. (chuckle)
For a good long while, the primary copy of "Do androids..." that you could find in book stores had a sketch of Harrison Ford on the cover and said "BLADE RUNNER" across the top in huge letters with "or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" below in much smaller letters. This is not the movie novelization, it is Dick's original story. There is a new trade paperback out now with the original title and a nod to the movie on the back cover(thanks to a renewed interest in Dick's work, maybe related to Minority Report).
Anyway, my point is that calling the book "Blade Runner" is an easy mistake to make, even if you have actually read the original.
i suppose, but then you run into the problem of needing to release a new DVD everytime month or so to catch all the version updates in that free software. Either that or fall so far behind the curve that you won't even be able to see it.
Still, Knoppix is great for at least one thing. It gives prospective Linux users an easy way to test the waters before they dive in by partitioning my hard drive.
yep... that's the one.
grin. But hey, if you replace all occurences of neptune with "A point 200 light years away from earth" then the rest works out fine.
Actually.. I'm a little surprised that they named the project the Arrow, considering the fate of the last Canadian Arrow(My girlfriend's father was one of the engineers on the project).
Seriously, the Avro Arrow is one of the things that every Canadian learns about in history class and there certainly wouldn't be a canadian aerospace engineer who wasn't familiar with the story. So I'm wondering if the name is some sort of inside joke to them or if possibly some suit decided it was a good name and the engineers couldn't explain the stigma that goes along with it.
Well, redardless, good luck to them.
self promotion(I write a comic about a scientist):
Comic 1
Comic 2
I know that there's an error in the calculation in the second comic, i just haven't fixed it yet. If you spot it you win... nothing.
oh... and here's the link to the comic's website.
This is much more in line with the over-arching ideology of the W3C as an organization than the archaich RAND system.
Now when is WCAG2.0 final coming out?
It's true. We live in a country(I'm actually canadian, but the argument is the same in either nation) where ignorance of the law is not a valid defence and yet the countries COMPLETE legislation could not be read by a single person in their entire lifetime. BTW, my given first name is Duff so(although the product in my case is fictional) I have a lot of experience with the name/trademark crossover. I don't own duff.com(warning... porno), but if I did, you can bet I would raise all hell if FOX tried to take it from me.
Bayesian technique is very good for the sort of abstract classification task that spam represents. It would be an interesting hack to try and train a network to categorize based solely on message body... i do however hope that their team has opted for practicality over just hack value and the network will also use such extremely relevant data as header information and comparing address versus address book(an e-mail from someone not in your address book is not necesarrily spam... but it is more likely to be).
My God! what were they thinking?
Don't they know that Carbon is the most sinister of the basic elements. Superficially less threatening than Plutonium, Carbon can change into diamond, graphite OR coal at will! Nothing can hope to compete with sucha a combination of hardness and combustibility. We are all doomed.
Mankind must vacate Asia at once and put all our resources into developing some Element Hero to combat this element villain so foolhardily released.
Rumor has it that Carbon bonds freely with Hydrogen... perhaps this can be a clue to it's weakness... we can only hope.
> What freaks me out is the possibility that
> this very clause is deemed illegal by a court
> - now that's where it gets really interesting
nice try at a Hofstadter-style self-reference loop. In this case however, if that clause is deemed illegal, the contract would be invalidated since the only thing preventing it's invalidation had been itself invalidated.
a civilization of alien potheads who have hotboxed an entire atmosphere?
or maybe the worlds biggest overclocked processor.
I can't think of any other reasonable theory to account for this moon radiating so much heat.
but which is the blasphemy?
that not everyone agrees with them or suggesting that they have some good ideas?
hmm?
So I'll finally be able to verify whether or not that's a REAL picture of Britney Spears getting it on with a dalmation?
SWEET!
shouldn't this be: never overestimate the American Judicial system.
btw, i'm a canadian, but you can assume that all disparaging statements about the US apply to my country as well(unless they're about drug legislation or health care).
kind of off-topic.... but funny as hell...
A Mapquest Experience
yes, i know, but hawking seems to think that this could lead to black hole dissipation somehow... i don't understand it personally.
actually.. there would be almost no tidal effect at the edge of a black hole and the radiation would be nearly negligible.[according to Roger Penrose... who is smarter than I am]
The general theory of relativity predicts the formation of singularities, but when taken into consideration along with quantum theory as both Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose have, they become astronomically unlikely(but not impossible). The formation of a black hole would require a mass at least as large as the one in the centre of our galaxy to form a true point singularity and it would have to compress in a mathematically exact symmetrical fashion. Most black holes should have a radius according to modern theories which use both relativity and quantum mechanics rather than ignoring one in favor of the other. Mind you, that radius should by phenomenally tiny.
The discussion you refer to is the one about Hawking radiation. Stephen Hawking has demonstrated that Black Holes do actually(counter to intuition) radiate an extroardinarily small amount of energy. There is considerable debate as to whether it is possible for this radiation to ever cause the black hole to dissipate.