If there is just one civilization, that just means that it is very hard for a single universe to get the parameters right for life. There is no particular reason to think that only our set of parameters exists. According to Big Bang theory, the number of non-circular dimensions and some nature constants where set early on. But according to the many-worlds (which I would argue is almost certainly more correct than the Copenhagen interpretation) interpretation of quantum physics all the other possible parameters were also tried.
You simply find yourself in a universe well suited for life, because of observational bias (for the same reason that you find yourself on a planet well-suited for life). If it is the case that most sets of paramers will just give a sterile, boring universe, then it would seem very likely that almost every life-bearing universe would have only one civilization.
1) As has already been stated - Kaspy is black on Tuesday.
2) Almost all chess programs have book learning, meaning that it keeps statistics over how well it has done in it's different book lines ("book" meaning something like predecided moves in the opening, that it does not have to think about). It will play lines with poor statistics less frequently.
3) Which brings us to the fact that a computer randomly picks from a choice of a couple of moves on every move for the first eight moves or so. So getting into the same line is very hard anyway.
4) In this particular case, I think that the Fritz team is allowed to make changes to its opening book between games, just to fine-tune it to be anti-Kasparov. So they could simply stop Fritz from playing the same thing again. Furthermore, I think they are even allowed to make changes to the positional parameters of Fritz between games, to make it evaluate the position differently.
5) Finally, a computer works on the position when it is your move as well (a feature called "pondering"), so in order to be certain that it will make exactly the same move in the same position, you have to make _your_ moves in exactly the same amount of time as the first time you played the game.
Surely asking Saddam Hussein for military advice would be better than asking almost anyone else? He has IIRC an extensive military training, with years in the Iraqi intelligence and even more years as military leader of a medium sized country. He has so far managed to hide from an enormous invading army with the stated primary goal of killing him.
While there probably are hundreds of people who would know military strategy even better than he, the same would be true when asking a lawyer for legal advice.
Have I misunderstood? Are you implying that asking slashdot is a good way of obtaining legal information?
Include an external javascript-file with a function that makes a document.write() on the email-adresses that you want.
The spambots will never bother trying to run javascript, especially if it means downloading an external file. And using, for example, mozilla's command-line js-engine will not help, because without an attached browser most of the scripts will reference objects that does not exists (like windows and such).
Dynamically generated documents are a pain in the ass for web-spiders. I know. I have programmed spiders professionally for quite some time.
I agree. Free speech is certainly only free if you can freely express extremely unpopular views.
However, the reason many european countries ban certain types of "hate speech" is because there really is a fuzzy grey line of what we can tolerate. In USA you certainly don't allow me to make death threats to a single person, right? What if my deeply felt political view is that you and your family should be tortured to death by me and my buddies. Am I allowed to make these threats to you? How large does the group has to be, before it is OK for me to tell them that I plan to make soap of them?
PS - God loves you and longs for relationship with you.
Watch out for that guy, I used to go out with him a few thousand years ago. He was violent, vain and had a bad temper. A classic anal/territorial military type. When I broke up with him, he went completely psycho and tried to smite my first-born.
I doubt he'll violate the restraining order though. My current gf, Reason, can be pretty fierce when she has to.
Make one of the many funny possible mistakes involved in installing the CPU fan:
1) Put it on 90 degrees wrong, so that most of the CPU core is left uncooled (have a friend who did that) 2) Use loads and loads of cooling paste (it must be there for something, right?) 3) Apply the enormous amount of force necessary to fasten the hooks, but apply it unevenly so that the underlying CPU cracks. (the most common way to destroy your computer when building it yourself nowadays, according to my favorite computer store) 4) When applying said force, slip with the screw driver/tool of choice and redesign your motherboard (another classic) 5) Attach the power cable to the wrong connector. Preferably some random jumpers. Alternatively become so proud of succesfully getting the damn thing hooked on, that you forget to plug the insignificant little cable in. 6) Become intimidated and decide to try to run the computer without it. Smile smugly when it turns out that the computer indeed can run without it. For a while. (have a friend who did that too)
It should be called blue simply because it looks blue most of the time. It is a red/yellow filter, though. But unlike "normal" filters it does not absorb the wavelengths that are filtered, but instead scatters them, redistributing that color all over the rest of the sky.
IMHO things have the color that we percieve them to have, with the possible exception of cases where there is an obviously more pure way of experiencing them, as in the case of the yellow sun.
Of course the sky is blue. Look out your window and see for yourself. The sky is the cause of it's own blueness (by scattering those wavelengths better), thus it is truly blue.
Perhaps you are thinking of the sun? One could argue that it is not really yellow, since outside of our atmospheric filter it is actually white.
But rather than reinforce the word to the child, the doll lets them know that it's a bad word. The same way just about any responsible parent would if their kid said the word in front of them.
What utter crap! Any responsible parents would do exactly what my parents did and explain how there are no inherently bad words and that people just make up which words are bad and which words are not. After that, the tantalising forbidden mystery surrounding saying "fuck!" sort of disappears. Refusing to speak certain words limits your vocabulary and your ability to express yourself.
I have a friend who was raised by his parents into thinking that certain words are "bad". Now, an adult, he gets of on cursing and can't buy albums without "explicit lyrics" printed on it and actually counts how many times they say "fuck" and "bitch" in movies to determine if he liked it.
Can't we just lose that unhealthy Christian sklaven-moral already? Please?
Game playing comes second only to porn as the driver of new technologies.
And since DNA is already involved in porn and sex in so many ways, this was basically the logical continuation. As long as I'm not DNA-spammed by malevolent viruses, I'm happy.
I'd imagine that someone who patched your system after breaking in, would do it just to stop others from exploiting the same hole, which would increase the probability of admins noticing and doing a full re-install.
If you have acquired root, others will too, unless you patch.
Your post is nonsensical. How can you speak of non-simultaneous observations and at the same time (no pun...) refer to time as a subjective illusion? Are you talking about "the flow of time in one direction"?
There can be no useful distinction between what is "really real" and what models seem to match our sensory data. For example, in string theory you use multi-dimensional membranes where different vibrational harmonics represent different elementary particles. Is this just a practical mathematical model or do these membranes really exist? The question is meaningless. "Das Ding an sich", as postulated by Kant is meaningless.
In quantum mechanics particles and energy can interact over small distances of time (see the Heisenberg uncertainty principle), just as they interact over small distances of space. Also in the theory of relativity time and space are handled almost identically by the equations with the speed of light, c, being just a convertional factor between distances in time and distances in space (almost like converting between meters and feet).
Thus both our best physics models of the world and our subjective understanding of time wants to treat it like a separate real dimension (not a SciFi dimension that you walk through, but a mathematical dimension - a separate orthogonal axis). What further criterions for something "existing" can you have?
The flow of time seems to be purely an illusion though.
Yeah, yeah, so we all know that the 10%-thing is used mostly by scientologists and other peddlers of pop psychology and pseudo science. It has little to do with the actual article, though. The thought that the brain can temporarily specialize (or concentrate if you will) on one particular task is hardly strange.
There are several parameters regarding your brains functioning that ought to be tuned differently for different situations, for example: Plasticity (a parameter used in Artificial Neural Networks) - How impressionable are we to new information vs. How much do we trust what we already know. Creativity (a parameter sometimes modified by drugs) - When solving a problem do we search depth-first or breadth-first, how "strange" do we allow our reasoning to become. Heuristics - Do we observe general patterns or detailed data, as the example in the article about the autistics who couldn't find their way because the shadows were different, they remembered the details but not the general pattern.
I am sure that there are many more examples, I'm no expert. The point is that we already know that these parameters can be changed, either genetically or by accidents or drugs. Is it really so far-fetched that this guy has found a way to modify these traits by strong electromagnetic fields, which are apparently already used to treat various psychological disorders?
If the slashdotters brains are not plastic enough to see that as a possibility, I think they might need some serious tuning.
What do you base this on? Half of/. readers will be below the median (assuming an even number of readers and a scale that is fine-grained enough) but you have to make some (IMHO) unfounded assumptions regarding intelligence distribution to claim that half will be below the arithmetic mean.
But then again, English is not my native language. Perhaps "average" does not mean what I think it means?
are not all the same person. You see, we are different people with different opinions. Is this a difficult concept to grasp? A surprisingly common reaction when dude A from camp X expresses an idea different from that of dude B from camp Y, is that this is somehow a sign of stupid slashdotters contradicting themselves.
"What?! Now you like BSD? But I saw a poster say that BSD is crap! Heh... stupid slashdotters, can't make up their minds on anything"
Different people dislike different parts of MS and their strategies. Personally I just bash them so the chicks will think I'm cool.
Quantum physics predicts that given tunneling and vaccuum energy and such, you don't even need any monkeys or typewriters. In an infinite amount of time all of Shakespeare's novels will have assembled themselves from any given starting medium, even from vaccuum.
Here's the interesting part - I think this was probably what happened the first time they were produced as well (although in a roundabout way).
Slashdot Mirror
Heh... I almost used that quote myself ;). Douglas Adams was always an excellent observer.
If there is just one civilization, that just means that it is very hard for a single universe to get the parameters right for life. There is no particular reason to think that only our set of parameters exists. According to Big Bang theory, the number of non-circular dimensions and some nature constants where set early on. But according to the many-worlds (which I would argue is almost certainly more correct than the Copenhagen interpretation) interpretation of quantum physics all the other possible parameters were also tried.
You simply find yourself in a universe well suited for life, because of observational bias (for the same reason that you find yourself on a planet well-suited for life). If it is the case that most sets of paramers will just give a sterile, boring universe, then it would seem very likely that almost every life-bearing universe would have only one civilization.
entee
1) As has already been stated - Kaspy is black on Tuesday.
2) Almost all chess programs have book learning, meaning that it keeps statistics over how well it has done in it's different book lines ("book" meaning something like predecided moves in the opening, that it does not have to think about). It will play lines with poor statistics less frequently.
3) Which brings us to the fact that a computer randomly picks from a choice of a couple of moves on every move for the first eight moves or so. So getting into the same line is very hard anyway.
4) In this particular case, I think that the Fritz team is allowed to make changes to its opening book between games, just to fine-tune it to be anti-Kasparov. So they could simply stop Fritz from playing the same thing again. Furthermore, I think they are even allowed to make changes to the positional parameters of Fritz between games, to make it evaluate the position differently.
5) Finally, a computer works on the position when it is your move as well (a feature called "pondering"), so in order to be certain that it will make exactly the same move in the same position, you have to make _your_ moves in exactly the same amount of time as the first time you played the game.
In short - no way...
Why you tell me this?
I don't get your sig.
Surely asking Saddam Hussein for military advice would be better than asking almost anyone else? He has IIRC an extensive military training, with years in the Iraqi intelligence and even more years as military leader of a medium sized country. He has so far managed to hide from an enormous invading army with the stated primary goal of killing him.
While there probably are hundreds of people who would know military strategy even better than he, the same would be true when asking a lawyer for legal advice.
Have I misunderstood? Are you implying that asking slashdot is a good way of obtaining legal information?
Include an external javascript-file with a function that makes a document.write() on the email-adresses that you want.
The spambots will never bother trying to run javascript, especially if it means downloading an external file. And using, for example, mozilla's command-line js-engine will not help, because without an attached browser most of the scripts will reference objects that does not exists (like windows and such).
Dynamically generated documents are a pain in the ass for web-spiders. I know. I have programmed spiders professionally for quite some time.
I agree. Free speech is certainly only free if you can freely express extremely unpopular views.
However, the reason many european countries ban certain types of "hate speech" is because there really is a fuzzy grey line of what we can tolerate. In USA you certainly don't allow me to make death threats to a single person, right? What if my deeply felt political view is that you and your family should be tortured to death by me and my buddies. Am I allowed to make these threats to you? How large does the group has to be, before it is OK for me to tell them that I plan to make soap of them?
Watch out for that guy, I used to go out with him a few thousand years ago. He was violent, vain and had a bad temper. A classic anal/territorial military type. When I broke up with him, he went completely psycho and tried to smite my first-born.
I doubt he'll violate the restraining order though. My current gf, Reason, can be pretty fierce when she has to.
Article, Manual, Source
Make one of the many funny possible mistakes involved in installing the CPU fan:
1) Put it on 90 degrees wrong, so that most of the CPU core is left uncooled (have a friend who did that)
2) Use loads and loads of cooling paste (it must be there for something, right?)
3) Apply the enormous amount of force necessary to fasten the hooks, but apply it unevenly so that the underlying CPU cracks. (the most common way to destroy your computer when building it yourself nowadays, according to my favorite computer store)
4) When applying said force, slip with the screw driver/tool of choice and redesign your motherboard (another classic)
5) Attach the power cable to the wrong connector. Preferably some random jumpers. Alternatively become so proud of succesfully getting the damn thing hooked on, that you forget to plug the insignificant little cable in.
6) Become intimidated and decide to try to run the computer without it. Smile smugly when it turns out that the computer indeed can run without it. For a while. (have a friend who did that too)
It should be called blue simply because it looks blue most of the time. It is a red/yellow filter, though. But unlike "normal" filters it does not absorb the wavelengths that are filtered, but instead scatters them, redistributing that color all over the rest of the sky.
IMHO things have the color that we percieve them to have, with the possible exception of cases where there is an obviously more pure way of experiencing them, as in the case of the yellow sun.
Of course the sky is blue. Look out your window and see for yourself. The sky is the cause of it's own blueness (by scattering those wavelengths better), thus it is truly blue.
Perhaps you are thinking of the sun? One could argue that it is not really yellow, since outside of our atmospheric filter it is actually white.
What utter crap! Any responsible parents would do exactly what my parents did and explain how there are no inherently bad words and that people just make up which words are bad and which words are not. After that, the tantalising forbidden mystery surrounding saying "fuck!" sort of disappears. Refusing to speak certain words limits your vocabulary and your ability to express yourself.
I have a friend who was raised by his parents into thinking that certain words are "bad". Now, an adult, he gets of on cursing and can't buy albums without "explicit lyrics" printed on it and actually counts how many times they say "fuck" and "bitch" in movies to determine if he liked it.
Can't we just lose that unhealthy Christian sklaven-moral already? Please?
you would have realized that if you and your gf started now, you would have a three year old child in four years.
And since DNA is already involved in porn and sex in so many ways, this was basically the logical continuation. As long as I'm not DNA-spammed by malevolent viruses, I'm happy.
I'd imagine that someone who patched your system after breaking in, would do it just to stop others from exploiting the same hole, which would increase the probability of admins noticing and doing a full re-install.
If you have acquired root, others will too, unless you patch.
Your post is nonsensical. How can you speak of non-simultaneous observations and at the same time (no pun...) refer to time as a subjective illusion? Are you talking about "the flow of time in one direction"?
There can be no useful distinction between what is "really real" and what models seem to match our sensory data. For example, in string theory you use multi-dimensional membranes where different vibrational harmonics represent different elementary particles. Is this just a practical mathematical model or do these membranes really exist? The question is meaningless. "Das Ding an sich", as postulated by Kant is meaningless.
In quantum mechanics particles and energy can interact over small distances of time (see the Heisenberg uncertainty principle), just as they interact over small distances of space. Also in the theory of relativity time and space are handled almost identically by the equations with the speed of light, c, being just a convertional factor between distances in time and distances in space (almost like converting between meters and feet).
Thus both our best physics models of the world and our subjective understanding of time wants to treat it like a separate real dimension (not a SciFi dimension that you walk through, but a mathematical dimension - a separate orthogonal axis). What further criterions for something "existing" can you have?
The flow of time seems to be purely an illusion though.
I thought I was the only one who played typing of the dead...
Truly a great game
I assumed he was talking about our distributed slashdotting attacks.
There are several parameters regarding your brains functioning that ought to be tuned differently for different situations, for example: Plasticity (a parameter used in Artificial Neural Networks) - How impressionable are we to new information vs. How much do we trust what we already know. Creativity (a parameter sometimes modified by drugs) - When solving a problem do we search depth-first or breadth-first, how "strange" do we allow our reasoning to become. Heuristics - Do we observe general patterns or detailed data, as the example in the article about the autistics who couldn't find their way because the shadows were different, they remembered the details but not the general pattern.
I am sure that there are many more examples, I'm no expert. The point is that we already know that these parameters can be changed, either genetically or by accidents or drugs. Is it really so far-fetched that this guy has found a way to modify these traits by strong electromagnetic fields, which are apparently already used to treat various psychological disorders?
If the slashdotters brains are not plastic enough to see that as a possibility, I think they might need some serious tuning.
That was the funniest (+5: Funny)-comment that I have read in ages!
What do you base this on? Half of /. readers will be below the median (assuming an even number of readers and a scale that is fine-grained enough) but you have to make some (IMHO) unfounded assumptions regarding intelligence distribution to claim that half will be below the arithmetic mean.
But then again, English is not my native language. Perhaps "average" does not mean what I think it means?
are not all the same person. You see, we are different people with different opinions. Is this a difficult concept to grasp? A surprisingly common reaction when dude A from camp X expresses an idea different from that of dude B from camp Y, is that this is somehow a sign of stupid slashdotters contradicting themselves.
"What?! Now you like BSD? But I saw a poster say that BSD is crap! Heh... stupid slashdotters, can't make up their minds on anything"
Different people dislike different parts of MS and their strategies. Personally I just bash them so the chicks will think I'm cool.
Here's the interesting part - I think this was probably what happened the first time they were produced as well (although in a roundabout way).