Perhaps sentience can only arise as a result of our brains being "jump" started in some way (cosmic radiation, genetic preprograming or whatever)? To start the AI you would have to "copy" an existing brain or play with random starting states... Could be unpredictable.
Does a human baby seem sentient to you? They are helpless - they cannot feed, clothe or protect themselves. They exhibit no indication of logical thought. However, a baby has the capacity to learn and to reprogram its brain on the fly to reinforce what it has learned. The first sentient AIs probably won't seem sentient when they first get turned on, there will be a learning process just as with a child.
That is pretty crappy:( I pay $109 a month at home for Comcast Business (which work pays for, since I work from home). 22mbps down, 5mbps up. 8 static IPs. No port blocking, throttling, limits or caps.
That's pretty crappy. I pay $36 (what's actually charged to my card, not price before taxes, fees, additional overcharges, etc.). for 15/15 fiber. If I want 50 Mb symmetrical, I'll pay about double that.
Questions such as "In Defender, the protagonist rides on the back of (A) An Elephant (B) A Horse (C) An Ostrich (D) A Camel?"
How about (E) None of the above? I think you're thinking of Joust, Defender was set in space and I don't remember any animals there. Of course the computer isn't going to get the question right if there is not a correct answer.
I would possibly like to see such a public network run as a wholesale service whereby the service providers buy capacity and resell it with their own packages. This would completely level out the playing field and make true market competition possible. This is evident in the way that the incumbent telcos are trying to get bills passed to prevent this from happening; they are scared shitless by the possibility that the power they have to completely rape their customers for as much money as possible for as shoddy service as they can get away with, would be neutralised.
Networks like this already exist, I am on the Utopia network and I couldn't be happier. Any provider can provide data, TV or voice over the network. I currently have a 15 Mb symmetrical connection for $36/mo. with a local ISP. And it's nothing like cable or DSL, if I am doing something that requires the bandwidth it is all there, I always see full speed to anyone that provides it. Since I can choose my own ISP, I chose one that has Linux mirrors so I don't even have to hit the net to download an ISO or do an update.
The incumbent telcos (Qwest and Comcast) DID fight against it when it was being built but now that it is in place they have to up their service offerings in order to be able to compete in the areas where Utopia provides service. It has been beneficial to the consumer, even the ones that don't actually use the network.
IIRC CAN-SPAM (might as well just add some words to the name and call it the CAN-HAS-SPAM act, but whatever) makes specific exemptions for political advertisements and solicitations by nonprofits, but says nothing about whether the content is commercial or not.
Not according to the article:
Waddoups, on Tuesday, confirmed he would attempt to pursue legal action under the federal CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.
While that law carries a punishment of up to $11,000 in fines, it covers "e-mail whose primary purpose is advertising or promoting a commercial product or service," according to the Federal Trade Commission.
What is that reason? Usually if a product is in final testing it is labeled "Beta", if it is earlier than that in the development phase it is labeled "Alpha". If it not yet Alpha it is "pre-Alpha" or "in development". Gamma would imply that it is past Alpha and past Beta and instead of going into production it is gone into some new development phase.
This thing looks just like the MSI Hetis 915 and it has similar specs. I don't know if they sell the Hetis anymore, but I bought one several years ago for a MythTV frontend and it cost about the same. Neuros is selling oldish tech at fairly high prices for what you get.
This box is only going to be useful for a HDTV, since it doesn't seem to have a S-Video or composite output. I don't know how well it will serve as a HDTV box since it has an ATI graphics adapter. I don't think the ATI linux drivers allow any offloading of the decoding (like XvMC or NVidia's new VDPAU. It has no hard drive thus can't serve as a media storage or recording box. It doesn't appear to have an optical drive and you control it using a clunky keyboard rather than a remote. This doesn't look like a very good HTPC to me.
Hopefully boxes based on the ION platform will be coming soon and will bridge the divide between cheap, attractive and capable.
In Utah, the maximum alcohol content of beer, ANY beer, is capped at 3.2%
Actually, that is not strictly true. Beer that you can buy in a convenience store is 3.2%, as is beer served in taverns. Beer that is bought in a liquor store or private club can be at whatever alcohol content. You can get your bottle of Le Terrible, you just have to go to a liquor store to do it.
The problem with the USB mouse interface is that there is no polling mechanism. You get the events when the mouse thinks you want them. You can't control the period and you can't be sure the time-frame in which all the clicks happened.
Older mice with USB and PS/2 connectors (US witha PS/2 adapter) exhibit this behavior on USB yet work fine using PS/2.
Because of the lack of determinism in the USB mouse protocol it isn't well suited. In a practical sense, and in keeping with the $500 "close enough" philosophy, it can probably work. It will have trouble in low speed precision movement, but will work well enough on cumulative "cross the room" motion.
The biggest issue you will have is "dead reckoning" because on the diametrically opposed motor design, the relative motion of the two wheels has to be pretty accurate. Then again, inconsistent surfaces are probably a greater source of error.
It hasn't been too much of an issue, on the surface it seems to work as well as the PS2 interface. The reason I changed to a USB mouse was because after I moved the bot to a 2.6 kernel none of the PS/2 mice I have would allow me to set the [resolution|scaling] (I forget which). I could only read up to 127 clicks per loop, so it really limited my top speed (or would make the PID run away if the target was higher than 127). With the Linux EVDEV interface there is no overflow (as far as I can tell) so I don't have this issue. Functionally, the robot seems to perform the same with either interface so it all works out for me. The odometry is combined from information from an array of IR sensors to input into an Adaptive Monte Carlo Localization driver for player, so as long as the odometry is relatively accurate the bot can localize itself on a map. I really don't need pinpoint accuracy, with all the other slop in the bot it would probably be wasted.
With USB, I could not get the mouse to send events unless and until it wanted too. The PS/2 interface allowed a fairly stable polling system from which I could calculate the interval for PID. We you able to get a stable PID system or, like most of the project, "stable enough" for actual work.
Mostly just "stable enough", I am still working on tuning it since I switched to the Arduino for motor control. The event interface seems to provide the data quickly enough to fit into my loop but I don't know enough about what is going on underneath to know if the mouse is sending events as it gets them. "Close enough for Government work" is the phrase that comes to mind.
I have a project on-line that allows you to build a basic robot for $500. It has PWM motor control and basic tips on building the base. It uses a PS/2 mouse to do wheel encoders. (cheap) and using a USB A-D/D-A board to control stuff.
I am a current user of your software, I found your site when looking for a way to implement wheel encoders for my robot. It has been extremely useful to me.
For the I/O hardware on my robot, I have implemented drivers for both a Pontech SV203 and Arduino Diecimila board. I also wrote an encoder driver to use the Linux event interface rather than the ps2 interface so I could use a USB mouse encoder. On top of your software I have written a Player driver to allow me to use the robot within their framework, opening up a massive amount of new high-level functions for the robot.
I just wanted to thank you for making your software freely available, it has helped me transform my robot from nothing to something that can localize, navigate and avoid obstacles. It has done real work sanding my deck and vacuuming my floor, now if I can only get a snowblower attachment going I will be set.
Simple. Season 3 was good, and people are just whiners.
The show has, imnsho, been extremely high quality from start to finish. I never have understood, and probably never will understand, where people get this idea that the show has gone downhill.
The show went downhill when they changed the show from science fiction to fantasy. When cancer started being cured by miracles. When Starbuck could "feel" the way to Earth. When Balthar became a religious figure. But for me most of all it was when Roslin refused to die. We are told in the first episode that she has three months to live but she just would not go away.
In 0.21, just tell Myth to browse the filesystem (it's part of the MythVideo config). That's how I have the List mode set up and it works great. Coupled with Azureus and some scripting magic to automatically played downloaded content in the correct locations, and I have a system that's incredibly convenient. I just add torrents through the web interface, wait a bit, and the content shows up in Myth when it's ready.
That sounds very cool. I don't s'pose you kept notes on how you set it up?
I don't anything about his scripting magic, but to turn browse mode on in MythVideo go to Utilities/Setup->Setup->Media Settings->Videos Settings->General Settings. Page 2 has options for "Video (Browser | Gallery | List) browses files", select the one that corresponds to your listing method (or just select all 3). Your rescanning days are over.
To say "likely that you would refuse to grant religious groups any positive attributes" would be totally false and nowhere in my post did I indicate anything of the sort. I don't have a "visceral revilement" of religion. I have no particular axe to grind but the fact remains there is a long tradition of Christian censorship. Destroying literary works is so ingrained into the Chrisitan culture that it is in the Bible:
Acts 19: 18-20 18 And many that believed came, and confessed, and shewed their deeds. 19 Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. 20 So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed.
So I guess if you have books about "curious arts" (today books about the theory of evolution by natural selection would fall into that category) it is the correct thing to destroy them so that the word of God will prevail, at least according to the Bible.
And many of the great pagan works (Plato, Aristotle, etc) were cared for and perpetuated by the church during the dark ages. You can thank organized religion for their stewardship of the ancient authors at least.
For every example of religion saving a great work there are ten examples of religion destroying a great work because it conflicted with their dogma. It would be horrifically difficult to quantify, but I doubt religion has been a positive force in literature.
Yes, it's in the Preamble, and as I've already pointed out, the Preamble delegates no powers whatever to the Federal Governemnt.
Please read the Constitution before attempting to discuss it. You might even try including the Tenth Amendment in your reading.
It is mentioned again in Article I, Section 8:
"pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States."
The Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Butler that this clause is indeed a distinct enumeration of power to Congress to tax the people and spend it on things that provide for the general well-being of the United States (as opposed to local welfare). The point is moot anyway, the interpretation of the commerce clause has become so broad that congress has the power to do pretty much anything they want without even invoking the general welfare clause.
Oh, and please don't tell me to read the Constitution when you obviously haven't done so yourself. You spout off a load of crap about how the federal government providing health care is illegal (IN ALL CAPS!!1one!) with absolutely no references or basis, then tell ME to read it? I'm glad we are going to get an actual constitutional scholar for president instead of someone who has only read the second amendment or someone who thinks it's "just a goddamn piece of paper".
Bottom line: ANY kind of "health care" (in the context we're discussing it, of course) at the Federal level is unconstitutional, and therefore illegal.
Got a problem with it, go amend the Constitution. Then come back here and we can discuss it. Right now there is nothing to discuss, because WHAT WE'RE DISCUSSING IS ILLEGAL.
"form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty"
It's in the Preamble. You know, the part of the Constitution that states exactly what the founding fathers were attempting to accomplish with the document. Please read the Constitution before discussing amending it.
Slashdot Mirror
*queue smartass replies with inches per hour in scientific notation*
queue != cue
I don't know that there's enough fuel on the shuttle to bring it down to a geosynchronous orbit.
If they rode the shuttle down to a low geosynchronous orbit
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Geosynchronous
Perhaps sentience can only arise as a result of our brains being "jump" started in some way (cosmic radiation, genetic preprograming or whatever)? To start the AI you would have to "copy" an existing brain or play with random starting states... Could be unpredictable.
Does a human baby seem sentient to you? They are helpless - they cannot feed, clothe or protect themselves. They exhibit no indication of logical thought. However, a baby has the capacity to learn and to reprogram its brain on the fly to reinforce what it has learned. The first sentient AIs probably won't seem sentient when they first get turned on, there will be a learning process just as with a child.
That is pretty crappy :( I pay $109 a month at home for Comcast Business (which work pays for, since I work from home). 22mbps down, 5mbps up. 8 static IPs. No port blocking, throttling, limits or caps.
That's pretty crappy. I pay $36 (what's actually charged to my card, not price before taxes, fees, additional overcharges, etc.). for 15/15 fiber. If I want 50 Mb symmetrical, I'll pay about double that.
Questions such as "In Defender, the protagonist rides on the back of (A) An Elephant (B) A Horse (C) An Ostrich (D) A Camel?"
How about (E) None of the above? I think you're thinking of Joust, Defender was set in space and I don't remember any animals there. Of course the computer isn't going to get the question right if there is not a correct answer.
I would possibly like to see such a public network run as a wholesale service whereby the service providers buy capacity and resell it with their own packages. This would completely level out the playing field and make true market competition possible. This is evident in the way that the incumbent telcos are trying to get bills passed to prevent this from happening; they are scared shitless by the possibility that the power they have to completely rape their customers for as much money as possible for as shoddy service as they can get away with, would be neutralised.
Networks like this already exist, I am on the Utopia network and I couldn't be happier. Any provider can provide data, TV or voice over the network. I currently have a 15 Mb symmetrical connection for $36/mo. with a local ISP. And it's nothing like cable or DSL, if I am doing something that requires the bandwidth it is all there, I always see full speed to anyone that provides it. Since I can choose my own ISP, I chose one that has Linux mirrors so I don't even have to hit the net to download an ISO or do an update.
The incumbent telcos (Qwest and Comcast) DID fight against it when it was being built but now that it is in place they have to up their service offerings in order to be able to compete in the areas where Utopia provides service. It has been beneficial to the consumer, even the ones that don't actually use the network.
IIRC CAN-SPAM (might as well just add some words to the name and call it the CAN-HAS-SPAM act, but whatever) makes specific exemptions for political advertisements and solicitations by nonprofits, but says nothing about whether the content is commercial or not.
Not according to the article:
But how does grub get loaded from the boot sector of drive 0 in the first place if the drive is broken?
IIRC, if you are using a RAID 1, Grub will write the boot block to both disks.
In further news, the State of Illinois passes a law regulating the value of pi to exactly 3.000.
You realize that happened, right? Only it isn't 3.0, it's 3.2
It's labeled "Gamma" for a reason
What is that reason? Usually if a product is in final testing it is labeled "Beta", if it is earlier than that in the development phase it is labeled "Alpha". If it not yet Alpha it is "pre-Alpha" or "in development". Gamma would imply that it is past Alpha and past Beta and instead of going into production it is gone into some new development phase.
This thing looks just like the MSI Hetis 915 and it has similar specs. I don't know if they sell the Hetis anymore, but I bought one several years ago for a MythTV frontend and it cost about the same. Neuros is selling oldish tech at fairly high prices for what you get.
This box is only going to be useful for a HDTV, since it doesn't seem to have a S-Video or composite output. I don't know how well it will serve as a HDTV box since it has an ATI graphics adapter. I don't think the ATI linux drivers allow any offloading of the decoding (like XvMC or NVidia's new VDPAU. It has no hard drive thus can't serve as a media storage or recording box. It doesn't appear to have an optical drive and you control it using a clunky keyboard rather than a remote. This doesn't look like a very good HTPC to me.
Hopefully boxes based on the ION platform will be coming soon and will bridge the divide between cheap, attractive and capable.
In Utah, the maximum alcohol content of beer, ANY beer, is capped at 3.2%
Actually, that is not strictly true. Beer that you can buy in a convenience store is 3.2%, as is beer served in taverns. Beer that is bought in a liquor store or private club can be at whatever alcohol content. You can get your bottle of Le Terrible, you just have to go to a liquor store to do it.
The problem with the USB mouse interface is that there is no polling mechanism. You get the events when the mouse thinks you want them. You can't control the period and you can't be sure the time-frame in which all the clicks happened.
Older mice with USB and PS/2 connectors (US witha PS/2 adapter) exhibit this behavior on USB yet work fine using PS/2.
Because of the lack of determinism in the USB mouse protocol it isn't well suited. In a practical sense, and in keeping with the $500 "close enough" philosophy, it can probably work. It will have trouble in low speed precision movement, but will work well enough on cumulative "cross the room" motion.
The biggest issue you will have is "dead reckoning" because on the diametrically opposed motor design, the relative motion of the two wheels has to be pretty accurate. Then again, inconsistent surfaces are probably a greater source of error.
It hasn't been too much of an issue, on the surface it seems to work as well as the PS2 interface. The reason I changed to a USB mouse was because after I moved the bot to a 2.6 kernel none of the PS/2 mice I have would allow me to set the [resolution|scaling] (I forget which). I could only read up to 127 clicks per loop, so it really limited my top speed (or would make the PID run away if the target was higher than 127). With the Linux EVDEV interface there is no overflow (as far as I can tell) so I don't have this issue. Functionally, the robot seems to perform the same with either interface so it all works out for me. The odometry is combined from information from an array of IR sensors to input into an Adaptive Monte Carlo Localization driver for player, so as long as the odometry is relatively accurate the bot can localize itself on a map. I really don't need pinpoint accuracy, with all the other slop in the bot it would probably be wasted.
With USB, I could not get the mouse to send events unless and until it wanted too. The PS/2 interface allowed a fairly stable polling system from which I could calculate the interval for PID. We you able to get a stable PID system or, like most of the project, "stable enough" for actual work.
Mostly just "stable enough", I am still working on tuning it since I switched to the Arduino for motor control. The event interface seems to provide the data quickly enough to fit into my loop but I don't know enough about what is going on underneath to know if the mouse is sending events as it gets them. "Close enough for Government work" is the phrase that comes to mind.
I have a project on-line that allows you to build a basic robot for $500. It has PWM motor control and basic tips on building the base. It uses a PS/2 mouse to do wheel encoders. (cheap) and using a USB A-D/D-A board to control stuff.
I am a current user of your software, I found your site when looking for a way to implement wheel encoders for my robot. It has been extremely useful to me.
For the I/O hardware on my robot, I have implemented drivers for both a Pontech SV203 and Arduino Diecimila board. I also wrote an encoder driver to use the Linux event interface rather than the ps2 interface so I could use a USB mouse encoder. On top of your software I have written a Player driver to allow me to use the robot within their framework, opening up a massive amount of new high-level functions for the robot.
I just wanted to thank you for making your software freely available, it has helped me transform my robot from nothing to something that can localize, navigate and avoid obstacles. It has done real work sanding my deck and vacuuming my floor, now if I can only get a snowblower attachment going I will be set.
Okay, unRaid is not particularly fast compared to an optimized system, but it's expandable, had redundancy, is expandable
Good thing your post has redundancy as well, otherwise we wouldn't know it was expandable.
Will these feminizing chemicals mean women who were already women end up with larger... tracks of land?
<pedantic>
tracts of land
</pedantic>
Simple. Season 3 was good, and people are just whiners.
The show has, imnsho, been extremely high quality from start to finish. I never have understood, and probably never will understand, where people get this idea that the show has gone downhill.
The show went downhill when they changed the show from science fiction to fantasy. When cancer started being cured by miracles. When Starbuck could "feel" the way to Earth. When Balthar became a religious figure. But for me most of all it was when Roslin refused to die. We are told in the first episode that she has three months to live but she just would not go away.
You can filter out salt with a membrane system?
Reverse Osmosis systems have been used for desalination for some time.
In 0.21, just tell Myth to browse the filesystem (it's part of the MythVideo config). That's how I have the List mode set up and it works great. Coupled with Azureus and some scripting magic to automatically played downloaded content in the correct locations, and I have a system that's incredibly convenient. I just add torrents through the web interface, wait a bit, and the content shows up in Myth when it's ready.
That sounds very cool. I don't s'pose you kept notes on how you set it up?
I don't anything about his scripting magic, but to turn browse mode on in MythVideo go to Utilities/Setup->Setup->Media Settings->Videos Settings->General Settings. Page 2 has options for "Video (Browser | Gallery | List) browses files", select the one that corresponds to your listing method (or just select all 3). Your rescanning days are over.
To say "likely that you would refuse to grant religious groups any positive attributes" would be totally false and nowhere in my post did I indicate anything of the sort. I don't have a "visceral revilement" of religion. I have no particular axe to grind but the fact remains there is a long tradition of Christian censorship. Destroying literary works is so ingrained into the Chrisitan culture that it is in the Bible:
Acts 19: 18-20
18 And many that believed came, and confessed, and shewed their deeds.
19 Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.
20 So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed.
So I guess if you have books about "curious arts" (today books about the theory of evolution by natural selection would fall into that category) it is the correct thing to destroy them so that the word of God will prevail, at least according to the Bible.
And many of the great pagan works (Plato, Aristotle, etc) were cared for and perpetuated by the church during the dark ages. You can thank organized religion for their stewardship of the ancient authors at least.
For every example of religion saving a great work there are ten examples of religion destroying a great work because it conflicted with their dogma. It would be horrifically difficult to quantify, but I doubt religion has been a positive force in literature.
Yes, it's in the Preamble, and as I've already pointed out, the Preamble delegates no powers whatever to the Federal Governemnt.
Please read the Constitution before attempting to discuss it. You might even try including the Tenth Amendment in your reading.
It is mentioned again in Article I, Section 8:
"pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States."
The Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Butler that this clause is indeed a distinct enumeration of power to Congress to tax the people and spend it on things that provide for the general well-being of the United States (as opposed to local welfare). The point is moot anyway, the interpretation of the commerce clause has become so broad that congress has the power to do pretty much anything they want without even invoking the general welfare clause.
Oh, and please don't tell me to read the Constitution when you obviously haven't done so yourself. You spout off a load of crap about how the federal government providing health care is illegal (IN ALL CAPS!!1one!) with absolutely no references or basis, then tell ME to read it? I'm glad we are going to get an actual constitutional scholar for president instead of someone who has only read the second amendment or someone who thinks it's "just a goddamn piece of paper".
Bottom line: ANY kind of "health care" (in the context we're discussing it, of course) at the Federal level is unconstitutional, and therefore illegal.
Got a problem with it, go amend the Constitution. Then come back here and we can discuss it. Right now there is nothing to discuss, because WHAT WE'RE DISCUSSING IS ILLEGAL.
"form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty"
It's in the Preamble. You know, the part of the Constitution that states exactly what the founding fathers were attempting to accomplish with the document. Please read the Constitution before discussing amending it.
And since 1989 I don't think we've improved upon lossless compression much,
PNG is somewhat better than TIFF last time I checked.
PNG != lossless
due to positron-antipositron annihilation
Am I missing something? Isn't a "antipositron" an electron? Generally the anti- prefix goes with the antimatter, not the matter.