I hope you fed them something. Those kids' lives have to suck. Think about it. The first thing you have to do on a mission is learn to take rejection. Not just "Thanks but I'm not interested." We're talking about the "sic the rotweiler on 'em" type rejection. "Let fly the rotten tomatoes of despair" rejection. "The car pulls in, the driver sees the missionaries at the door, the driver pulls out and spins off at ninety" rejection. Yet they keep on trudging along.
Even worse than all the doors slammed, all the miles trudged, all the dog bites, and all the times that someone has tried to run them down with their cars, is the alternative. There are people out there so pathetic, so lonely, so shamefully pathetically lonely, that a Mormon missionary at their door could easily qualify as the highlight of their year. These people generally fall into two categories: Old people who only have six teeth left and who keep jabbering on about "the War," and serial killers with a fetish for polyester suits. [Note to any Mormon missionaries who are reading this: 1) Get off the Internet now! What would President Hinckley think of you? 2) If someone's living room is strewn with bike parts, ties from ZCMI, or black nametags, run. Don't politely excuse yourself. Don't offer to leave him with a word of prayer. Just get the hell out of there, and don't stop even when you hear your companion's gurgling scream.]
Then they have to learn to completely shut down their hormones. Remember that these boys haven't had significant female contact for months, and the sweet little things that promised their "eternal faithfulness" have probably broken up with them and are now married to their best friends. Repeat after me: "My ex-girlfriend is getting laid and I'm not." That's gotta suck.
Oh, and did I mention they're paying $400 a month for these privilege? So do something good for your fellow man. Invite them in. As a slashdotter, you probably have an IQ above 100, and are therefore not a member of their target demographic anyways [this advice does not apply to anyone who has ever authored a penisbird post]. They'll be thrilled to get out of the heat/cold/wet/smog, and if you feed them something they'll love you forever. If you're a female under the age of 40, show up to the door naked. Hell, maybe even let them give you one of their "discussions," as long as they comply with the rules of your home (the word "God" must never be used, but replaced with "phlegm-boy."] And offer them a shot of whiskey. If they're smart, they'll take you up on it.
Well, since we're totally OT anyways, might as well join in.
I used to be a Mormon*, and I've run through the "Are Mormons Christians" arguments a hundred times. Usually, the claim that Mormons aren't Christians is brought up by evangelical Christians. As they see it, the Mormon Church pretends to hold "Christian" beliefs so that they can snare unwary folk into their evil cult.
But LDS laypeople are put off by the idea that someone thinks they aren't Christian. After all, isn't their church named after Christ? Don't they pray to God "in the name of Jesus Christ?" They find the idea baffling, and for the most part they don't understand the basis for the claims.
The truth is, it all depends on one's definition of "Christian." If you mean "someone who claims to follow the teachings of Christ," they undoubtedly qualify. If you mean "someone who follows traditionally Christian teachings such as the Nicean Creed and salvation by grace," they undoubtedly do not. If you mean, "Not going to Hell," then every religion gets to make up its own definition, and it's no more useful than arguing with someone over whether yogurt "tastes good."
I think the evangelicals, despite being somewhat nutty, have a good point about the Mormons. There are a lot of points of theology that differ wildly from traditional Christianity. I have no problem with that, and I honestly believe that LDS theology makes more sense than mainstream Christianity on some points. But those clean-cut missionaries aren't going to tell you about the LDS belief in an infinite regression of gods, or that human beings can become gods themselves. They're also not going to mention polygamy, or that the Church waited until 1978 to give blacks full fellowship. A lot of people I've met feel like they were victims of a "bait and switch."
Intellectually, I think that the "Mormons aren't Christian" message is a gross oversimplification of some relatively complex issues. It's sad that such simplistic memes are more catchy than honest explanations.
* The Church's vast P.R. wing has formally announced its distaste for the term "Mormon," and requests instead that it be referred to in the media as "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" on the first mention, and "The Church" in subsequent references. Screw 'em.
You don't need a DNS server to do this. If you're running Windows, all you need is to add a file called "hosts" to c:\windows\. A really cool sample hosts file can be found here. The only downside is that you have to keep clicking through "Connection refused by ad.doubleclick.com" messages. Oh, and they did have Freshmeat blacklisted for a little while, so you'll have to edit it to taste.
More important, redirecting "evilcompany.com" isn't going to solve all your problems. As others have already mentioned, simple Javascript can force WMP to reveal its identifier unless you've disabled it or uninstalled WMP. They call it the "Supercookie."
Okay, I had a stupid idea. If someone could figure out which file in WMP actually contained the ID, then one of us could volunteer to give copies of that file to everyone, to drop into the appropriate folder. Instead of being a unique identifier, it would be an identifier that could only link you to a pool of hundreds or thousands of people.
Of course, the person who offered this file to the masses would end up getting mountains of spam, junk mail, and lawsuits. But his sacrifice to save us all would make him an object of reverence and devotion for generations to come.
The fact that Winamp does CDDB lookups is overlooked precisely because it hasn't been shown that Winamp sends a computer-specific ID along with the request. Therefore, it's impossible to tell who is doing the lookup if you're using a proxy or have a dynamic IP.
This isn't a non-story that's been blown way out of proportion by the Slashdot Hordes. This is a real story that's been blown way out of proportion by the Slashdot Hordes.
"It's just a client side cache. That's all. The windows CD player has done this since at least windows 3.1 (although the user had to enter the track titles by hand.)"
'Scuse me? No, it's just a client-side cache that sends unique information out that tells the info server precisely who is making the request. There is no way for the user to know what happens to that information once it reaches the server. Is it immediately deleted? Is it used for "aggregate statistical purposes?" Is it used to blackmail people who have been a pain in Microsoft's arse? We have no evidence, other than Microsoft's assurances, to answer that question.
Now, WMP 7 (the version I never use, but which is nevertheless on my computer) has a checkbox saying "allow sites to uniquely identify my player." If such a thing exists in WMP 8, it would be hard to complain that they were hiding something. Still, it's just more proof that Microsoft is more worried about user convenience than user security.
It's reprisal, not reprise. And this is like saying how stupid it is that it's possible to go over the speed limit without being pulled over. If the authorities did actually have knowledge of every instance of piracy that happened, would they throw a quarter of America in jail? Or turn a blind eye except in extreme cases?
Uh huh. I'm sure the amount of spam you received would drop like a stone if you just blacklisted the.us TLD.
Personally, I receive as much spam from AOL users as I do from China. The problem, of course, is that I'm corresponding with people from AOL. I'd be seriously torqued if my ISP decided to ignore AOL.
It's not just volume that has to be taken into account; it's signal/noise ratio. The fact that most American ISPs are more helpful in stopping abuse than most Asian ISPs is also a motivating factor.
They're not talking about ISPs who refuse to spy on all the mail sent out by the customers. They're talking about ISPs who, when faced with legitimate complaints of abuse, ignore them. Simply put, the ISPs may not have control over what their customers send out, but they do have a choice of not serving customers who cause problems for other people on the Net.
You're just playing into the hands of corporate critics with that attitude. You're saying that "Nike, as a business, has no responsibility to its employees except to get maximum productivity out of them with minimal compensation.
Better advice for him would be to tell him to scale back his lifestyle, and use the excess to buy stock in Nike. If the primary responsibility of a corporation is to please its shareholders, and you don't like what it's doing, become a shareholder to provide a little bit of muscle for your criticisms.
$895 billion dollars. Sheesh. I just want to know if he's off by a factor of a hundred or a thousand. He's smoking something.
In some cases, I think a truly useful AI would be seriously limited in its intelligence. For example, a self-driving car is more useful if it only knows its immediate surroundings, the rules of the road, and has some way of prioritizing outcomes. A car that couldn't prioritize between a child and a cat, or worse, a child and a paper bag, would not be allowed on the road.
But if you start giving it more generalized capabilities (self-awareness, for example), you may go out to your garage and find that, due to the horrifying death toll of a flood in Belize, the car doesn't see any point in starting. I'd much rather have a conversation with that car than the one I described before. But I don't want a conversation; I want to get to work.
I guess the point is that giving machines generalized intelligence just so they can perform certain rote functions is a bad idea from a functional point of view, ethical considerations aside. Throw in the idea that you basically have an intelligent slave driving your car, and it seems better to just let them stay "unthinking machines."
Good point. I think he was trying to say that it wasn't necessary for an AI to have direct storage access, not that it wouldn't be possible. By the same token, it would be really cool if we had a few hundred neurons wired up as a perfect, lightning quick calculator. It's theoretically possible; it just hasn't evolved in our species.
"I had a full ethics class on that one, and we didn't even scratch the surface of things. Day 1 we tore the Turing Test apart, proved it was more pathetic than my predictions above."
Pardon me, but it sounds to me like your ethics teacher doesn't have a clue what she's talking about. If you think that successfully passing the Turing test doesn't demonstrate both intelligence and sentience, I can't deny that you may be correct. But you've got some damned serious brainpower backing the alternative position, and I really don't think that could happen if the T-test was so pathetic that a group of freshman college students could rip it apart.
I think it was Descartes who came up with the idea of automatons. They're creatures who walk around the world in human form, carrying out all the day to day tasks of ordinary human beings, but without any real consciousness working inside their skulls. Some of them may have been sitting in your freshman ethics class, contributing valuable insights to discussions.
I don't believe that automatons are possible. But the only way to seriously believe that a computer could pass the Turing test without being both intelligent and self-aware is to presume that they are. In order to do what an automaton is supposed to do, it has to at least have information about the outside world, and a way to measure what's going on outside against a system of rules which mediates its reactions. That system of rules needs to encode all the things that humans know. Finally, it would have to be aware of its own actions, have the ability to make short and long-term plans, and flexibility in the face of novel situations. Sounds a lot like us.
The most famous response to the Turing test (Searle's "Chinese Room" argument) basically says that a computer might pass the test by simply understanding the formal properties of a language without understanding the semantics of the words its using. For example, it would know that a DUCK can go UNDER WATER without becoming WET, without really understanding any of the terms involved (only their interrelations).
I think the example Searle chose to illustrate his point (found here) is misleading. While the person doing the actual input and output of the symbols doesn't really understand Chinese, he is part of a system which does. Complaining that an entire system cannot be intelligent because none of the individual parts making up the system have "understanding" of what they're doing is misleading. None of your neurons understand what they're doing; they just fire or don't fire depending on the electrochemical inputs they receive. The little bit of your neural system which turns the words you've chosen into sounds by manipulating your voice box doesn't understand the meaning of the words.
Searle tries to get around the problem by internalizing all the rules of the Chinese Room inside the person who was doing the translating, and claiming that he still doesn't understand Chinese. But the rules which have been encoded inside the person are so advanced and complex that the stream of characters he is outputting is sufficient to pass the Turing test.
In order to pass the test, these rules have to have the ability to remember the conversation that came before, and adjust the outputs accordingly. If you ask the same question twenty times in a row, and get precisely the same response each time, you can be assured that you're dealing with a computer with no self-awareness. So the rules are constantly changing, not just to reflect the course of the conversation, but to reevaluate the accuracy of the old rules. The more I think about it, the harder a time I have of believing that a human being, however intelligent, could internalize all the rules and constantly modify them to accurately mimic a human conversation, independent of any understanding of their actual meaning.
The biggest problem that I see with the Turing test is that it is a sufficient demonstration of intelligence, but not a necessary one. That is, computers will probably be intelligent long before they understand enough about our expectations of other humans to deceive us properly.
Example: We generally understand that dolphins are intelligent, but their intelligence is of a rather alien sort. Even if we mastered their language, a dolphin could easily be distinguished from a human in a Turing test because their life experiences and way of looking at the world is completely alien to us. I think the best the dolphin could hope for was to try and imitate a five year old who really enjoyed swimming.:) From my reading, it seems that Turing himself recognized that the odds were unfairly weighted against the machine.
In a way, I'm glad you threw in that little slam against the Turing test, because writing this post was way more interesting than just nodding my head in agreement. I thought your points about the nature of prediction were uncannily accurate.
Hmm. . . Does JonKatz bash movies? Certainly some of them. But I don't think his record would bear out your assertion that JK spends all his time slamming movies. Let's see:
Collateral Damage: JK sez: Might have been an OK action flick prior to 9/11. Now it seems too out of touch with reality, and Schwarzenegger is getting a bit old for these flicks.
Kung Pow: Very disappointing movie. Every funny scene was in the trailer.
Black Hawk Down: "I think Black Hawk Down is an amazing movie. This story is no cartoon." [I can't vouch for his political analysis of Somalia]
Orange County: Disjointed, with some major plot holes and some mixed messages. Also some genuine laughs, and some human moments that really work. [Generally, I thought it was a positive review]
Not Another Teen Movie: A hilarious spoof on teen movies and suburban life. [I know, I know. He was the only one on the planet who liked this movie.]
Behind Enemy Lines: "a tight, highly entertaining and patriotic war thriller about soldiers heading into harm's way..." "The action is fast-paced and non-stop." All in all, he had very high praise for this one.
The One: "Even passionate martial arts movie lovers can skip this one without regret, though two or three of the fight sequences were first rate."
K-PAX: At times charming, though the actors can be strangely detached at times. Keeps the audience interested, and has a very inventive ending.
Training Day: Great first hour, but then it devolves into a violent and cartoony mess.
Zoolander: "This is a scathingly wonderful movie, as amusing as it is on target." He seems to have had his "1337 intellectual needs" fulfilled by the vicious rips on the shallowness of pop culture.
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is less of a coherent movie than a series of one-liners, set gags, set-ups and cultural in-jokes and spoofs. [...] But it will still probably be the funniest movie you've seen all summer."
Rush Hour 2: Not technically brilliant, but still very enjoyable.
Planet of the Apes: More than good enough to see, but a vast disappointment when compared to the original.
Katz has panned some bad movies, and praised some good ones (and vice versa). JK may not be the greatest movie critic of our age, but he generally makes interesting points. I enjoy movies more after reading his reviews, because I'm looking at them more carefully. And I think it would be a great disservice to ask him only to review "good movies," if only because with some movies, their only redeeming value is that they allow critics to write humorously insulting reviews.
If it were just Katz trying to cultivate a "no movie can hope to appeal to my massive brain" persona, I'd say fire him. But his track record indicates otherwise. Your advice is off the mark.
Grammar checker: They suck. Grammar checkers have no imagination at all.
Looser integration: Excellent idea. In fact, I think that things like the newsreader, the HTML editor, and Chatzilla should be broken out into separate applications. Then make the little toolbar customizable, so that you could launch any app from it.
If everything worked according to plan, Mozilla could *BE* your desktop!
Maybe this wouldn't work at all. I don't know why they've got the composer and newsreader and whatnot all in one app (except that they use the same rendering engine), so maybe they'd be losing something under my plan.
Window cloning: I would say, ick. When I open a new window, it's usually because I want to go somewhere completely different. But I've seen cases of supposedly computer literate people rejecting all Netscape/Mozilla variants solely on this difference in behavior.
Other protocols: The idea of having a single app that handled all the different protocols would be nice. But as important as Mozilla is to the world of Linux, the project shouldn't be courting legal trouble by reimplementing proprietary protocols. IIRC, IRC is an open standard. Legal issues aside, the Yahoo, MSN, and AOL people could change their protocols any time, and the Mozilla people would have to play catch up.
Multiple processes: I think this was an intentional design decision. Saved RAM, or something.
I'd never seen a picture of Alan Cox before. Before today, I always wondered why, in the RedHat 7.2 install, the "Kernel Development" package had an icon of Jesus wearing sunglasses. Just a case of mistaken identity.
If the data was that important, you should have made a backup. A system like this would store more copies of files that were frequently accessed. Your letters to Aunt Gracie, however valuable to you, aren't going to be seen as high priority.
The cost of storage keeps plummeting. As that happens, the cost of that bit of platter turf becomes less important than the cost of distributing it. Of course, this will be counteracted by the fact that people are saving bigger and bigger files.
But the cost of bandwidth is also going down (though your cable bill probably doesn't reflect the fact). Same with processor speed, bus speed, and every other metric which would bottleneck any potential distributed app.
I also think you're looking at it in a "glass is half empty" sort of way. Sure, every chunk of data may have to be replicated several times on the system as a whole. But Joe Raiddisk simply doesn't have the HDD capacity to store every bit of content he might be even remotely interested in viewing. With a well-tuned "IOS", you end up using *less* storage, because there aren't more copies than are necessary to serve the actual demand.
It would help if people stuck to posting things to the system that they knew would be of general (or at least niche) interest, rather than using it as their own personal exabyte backup tape.
There are some serious issues that need to be resolved before this thing becomes a reality. But the idea of tapping into the massive resources that millions of computers waste every day is too good to pass up.
Point 1: For 95% of what the average person does, Windows is interchangeable with GNOME, Office is interchangeable with StarOffice, and the Big Blue 'E' can be replaced with Mozilla. They're not "used to Windows," per se. They're used to being able to drag-and-drop, use familiar key sequences like Ctrl-X, and have things start when they double-click. When my Windows drive went all wahooni-shaped, my family's full "retraining" consisted of "double-click the dragon to get your web browser."
Point 2: is completely valid, and I'm not going to argue it.
Point 3: As someone already pointed out, the value of knowledge of a particular application has a half-life that can be measured in months. Going from I.E. to Mozilla is only slightly more jarring than going from Explorer 4 to Explorer 6. Further, since you correctly pointed out that Microsoft pretty much owns the world, the users are probably going to become familiar with their applications elsewhere.
I would also point out that any HR-type who would throw out a resume because someone has WordPerfect or StarOffice experience instead of MSOffice experience should be taken out and beaten with a cluestick. In many ways, an office suite is an office suite is an office suite. The vast majority of the knowledge learned from one can be transferred to another.
Ooh, yeah! Mod parent way up! This guy just "gets it."
As a horrible poker player, I would have to dispute the notion that the ability to play poker is a proper demonstration of intelligence. And it seems horribly unfair to deny the possibility that computers can be sentient until they're able to read the emotions expressed in human faces.
It's arrogant to presume that human beings are the be all and end all of intelligence. Yet some people insist on measuring intelligence precisely by how close it comes to displaying "human" intelligence.
So I ask: What specific attributes of human intelligence do A.I.-detractors consider so unattainable? The ability to speculate on future events? The occasional hormone-triggered emotional outburst that often overrides the thought process? The first one is obviously well within the purview of modern software, though it is seldom implemented because people get their shorts in a bunch whenever the computer acts on a wrong prediction. The second is probably not a necessary component of intelligence, or even sentience.
I think the ability to plan ahead, speculate on possible future events based on the memory of past events, and the ability to recognize one's self as a distinct--and thought thinking--entity is the most vital component of intelligence and sentience.
Consciousness Explained is an incredible book on the nature of intelligence. I would suggest it to anyone, anywhere, who has ever had, or ever plans to have a thought.
I've never actually been to one of these protests, and I'm sure that a lot of arguments tend to get boiled down to single sentences. I'm also well aware that, whatever issue is under discussion, there will be a lot of people on both sides who feel very strongly about it without having a real grasp of the issues involved. Finally, you're no doubt correct that the overwhelming majority of the protesters would like to get laid.
I once subscribed to the Ayn Rand-ish belief that all corporations need to turn the world into a utopia was for governments to get out of their way. Now I realize that it's more intricate than that.
Corporations don't look out for people. That is just the way it is. By law, a publicly traded corporation is obligated to maximize shareholder value. Of course, in order to function as a corporation, they need to treat their employees well enough that they don't leave, and abide by environmental and business regulations closely enough that they don't get shut down.
But corporations can become powerful political entities in their own right. They can influence legislation to suit their agenda (often to the detriment of people). When this happens, the entire political process suffers.
Then there's the issue of cultural imperialism. Let's take the world of cinematography, for example. The American film industry is rich beyond belief. Our films dominate in every country that doesn't ban them at the border (and even some that do). I'm not even going to touch the issue of whether India's films are better or worse than come out of Hollywood. It doesn't matter. The problem is, four or five major studios, whose movies almost invariably have American themes, are producing just about everything most people see. The result is a culturally poorer, more homogeneous society.
Similar themes of corporate dominance can be found everywhere you turn. Coca-Cola is hard at work convincing tea-drinking societies to switch over to more carbonated products. Russian teenagers listen to Britney Spears on their Sony CD players. Microsoft Windows runs most every desktop everywhere in the world.
Cultural diversity is roughly analogous to ecological diversity. It's far easier for a corporation to advertise a competing practice or idea into oblivion than for it to become the facilitator of such practices. What about leaving well enough alone? Sorry, but corporations are designed in such a way as to make that avenue impossible when it would be profitable to do otherwise.
By their nature, corporations are useful tools. They have an adaptiveness and efficiency that you seldom see in the public sector. But they cannot be trusted to look out for public interests without oversight by a duly elected government. Like the robots which prompted the original article, useful tools can become dangerous masters.
I think the purpose of building the base at sea is so that it can "drift" around somewhat. Building at sea doesn't provide any additional safety, because the cable is very long, and is going to "wrap" rather than fall straight down.
Look at me. One reading of "Red Mars" and I think I'm some sort of expert or something.
I'm not so sure about the "melting harmlessly" thing. Even if that's true (and it could be made more likely by lining the upper portion of the cable with explosives:), there's still a nuclear lot of energy being released. I wonder if it would end up frying every computer within a thousand miles of the Equator.
If I understand your analysis correctly, you've made a couple of very important errors.
First, unless there's a mechanism built into the cable for shattering it in an emergency, then you can't treat each bit of the cable as a separate point mass. Each piece of cable is connected to each other piece of cable (very tightly, in fact. These are carbon nanotubes we're talking about).
Second, you say that anything above low-earth orbit will be "safe." If only that were the case. In fact, in order to keep the elevator as a single unit, anything below geosynchronous orbit (about 22,000 miles, if I remember) has to be traveling slower than it would if it were freely in orbit. For instance, the Space Shuttle orbits the planet every nineteen minutes, while the elevator at the same height is orbiting every 24 hours. So the bits of elevator from that height are going to fall.
It turns out that anything below the breakpoint is going to fall to Earth, while everything above the break is going to float off into the aether. Since you're dealing with 22,000 miles of cable, it's going to wrap almost fully around the equator. Given the amount of potential energy stored at the top of the cable, some serious damage would result towards the end of its fall.
The people at Microsoft are disappointed by UTV's poor showing against the X-Box per se. UltimateTV just sold badly, period. The article says that they've refused to release sales figures, and speculates that they've sold less than 100,000 units.
The "neato" feature on UTV ('sides the WebTV stuff that never really caught on) was the fact that you could set it up to record two programs airing at the same time. But to do that, you need two separate feeds to the box.
With DirecTV and Dish, the satellite dishes usually come set up for two feeds, max. To get more, you either have to have a second dish or a cable multiplier. So for most people, the choice is between having two TVs with satellite service and having one TV which can record two shows at once. So UltimateTV's most hyped feature didn't do much for those not willing to cough up even more money.
The other guy mentioned the lifetime subscription. Another thing to point out is that (IIRC) you don't technically need their service, if you know what time things start and stop.
BTW, if you get rid of the Tivo after the first month, you don't get a refund on the Lifetime. So you may want to pay the $10 and try the service for a month.
Don't worry, the Recording Industry Artists of America is cranking out Britney Spears clones as fast as it can. It is expected that the supply of clones should exceed all possible demand by early 2004.
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I hope you fed them something. Those kids' lives have to suck. Think about it. The first thing you have to do on a mission is learn to take rejection. Not just "Thanks but I'm not interested." We're talking about the "sic the rotweiler on 'em" type rejection. "Let fly the rotten tomatoes of despair" rejection. "The car pulls in, the driver sees the missionaries at the door, the driver pulls out and spins off at ninety" rejection. Yet they keep on trudging along.
Even worse than all the doors slammed, all the miles trudged, all the dog bites, and all the times that someone has tried to run them down with their cars, is the alternative. There are people out there so pathetic, so lonely, so shamefully pathetically lonely, that a Mormon missionary at their door could easily qualify as the highlight of their year. These people generally fall into two categories: Old people who only have six teeth left and who keep jabbering on about "the War," and serial killers with a fetish for polyester suits. [Note to any Mormon missionaries who are reading this: 1) Get off the Internet now! What would President Hinckley think of you? 2) If someone's living room is strewn with bike parts, ties from ZCMI, or black nametags, run. Don't politely excuse yourself. Don't offer to leave him with a word of prayer. Just get the hell out of there, and don't stop even when you hear your companion's gurgling scream.]
Then they have to learn to completely shut down their hormones. Remember that these boys haven't had significant female contact for months, and the sweet little things that promised their "eternal faithfulness" have probably broken up with them and are now married to their best friends. Repeat after me: "My ex-girlfriend is getting laid and I'm not." That's gotta suck.
Oh, and did I mention they're paying $400 a month for these privilege?
So do something good for your fellow man. Invite them in. As a slashdotter, you probably have an IQ above 100, and are therefore not a member of their target demographic anyways [this advice does not apply to anyone who has ever authored a penisbird post]. They'll be thrilled to get out of the heat/cold/wet/smog, and if you feed them something they'll love you forever. If you're a female under the age of 40, show up to the door naked. Hell, maybe even let them give you one of their "discussions," as long as they comply with the rules of your home (the word "God" must never be used, but replaced with "phlegm-boy."] And offer them a shot of whiskey. If they're smart, they'll take you up on it.
Well, since we're totally OT anyways, might as well join in.
I used to be a Mormon*, and I've run through the "Are Mormons Christians" arguments a hundred times. Usually, the claim that Mormons aren't Christians is brought up by evangelical Christians. As they see it, the Mormon Church pretends to hold "Christian" beliefs so that they can snare unwary folk into their evil cult.
But LDS laypeople are put off by the idea that someone thinks they aren't Christian. After all, isn't their church named after Christ? Don't they pray to God "in the name of Jesus Christ?" They find the idea baffling, and for the most part they don't understand the basis for the claims.
The truth is, it all depends on one's definition of "Christian." If you mean "someone who claims to follow the teachings of Christ," they undoubtedly qualify. If you mean "someone who follows traditionally Christian teachings such as the Nicean Creed and salvation by grace," they undoubtedly do not. If you mean, "Not going to Hell," then every religion gets to make up its own definition, and it's no more useful than arguing with someone over whether yogurt "tastes good."
I think the evangelicals, despite being somewhat nutty, have a good point about the Mormons. There are a lot of points of theology that differ wildly from traditional Christianity. I have no problem with that, and I honestly believe that LDS theology makes more sense than mainstream Christianity on some points. But those clean-cut missionaries aren't going to tell you about the LDS belief in an infinite regression of gods, or that human beings can become gods themselves. They're also not going to mention polygamy, or that the Church waited until 1978 to give blacks full fellowship. A lot of people I've met feel like they were victims of a "bait and switch."
Intellectually, I think that the "Mormons aren't Christian" message is a gross oversimplification of some relatively complex issues. It's sad that such simplistic memes are more catchy than honest explanations.
* The Church's vast P.R. wing has formally announced its distaste for the term "Mormon," and requests instead that it be referred to in the media as "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" on the first mention, and "The Church" in subsequent references. Screw 'em.
You don't need a DNS server to do this. If you're running Windows, all you need is to add a file called "hosts" to c:\windows\. A really cool sample hosts file can be found here. The only downside is that you have to keep clicking through "Connection refused by ad.doubleclick.com" messages. Oh, and they did have Freshmeat blacklisted for a little while, so you'll have to edit it to taste.
More important, redirecting "evilcompany.com" isn't going to solve all your problems. As others have already mentioned, simple Javascript can force WMP to reveal its identifier unless you've disabled it or uninstalled WMP. They call it the "Supercookie."
Okay, I had a stupid idea. If someone could figure out which file in WMP actually contained the ID, then one of us could volunteer to give copies of that file to everyone, to drop into the appropriate folder. Instead of being a unique identifier, it would be an identifier that could only link you to a pool of hundreds or thousands of people.
Of course, the person who offered this file to the masses would end up getting mountains of spam, junk mail, and lawsuits. But his sacrifice to save us all would make him an object of reverence and devotion for generations to come.
Do it, dude. You'd be bigger than Jesus.
The fact that Winamp does CDDB lookups is overlooked precisely because it hasn't been shown that Winamp sends a computer-specific ID along with the request. Therefore, it's impossible to tell who is doing the lookup if you're using a proxy or have a dynamic IP.
This isn't a non-story that's been blown way out of proportion by the Slashdot Hordes. This is a real story that's been blown way out of proportion by the Slashdot Hordes.
'Scuse me? No, it's just a client-side cache that sends unique information out that tells the info server precisely who is making the request. There is no way for the user to know what happens to that information once it reaches the server. Is it immediately deleted? Is it used for "aggregate statistical purposes?" Is it used to blackmail people who have been a pain in Microsoft's arse? We have no evidence, other than Microsoft's assurances, to answer that question.
Now, WMP 7 (the version I never use, but which is nevertheless on my computer) has a checkbox saying "allow sites to uniquely identify my player." If such a thing exists in WMP 8, it would be hard to complain that they were hiding something. Still, it's just more proof that Microsoft is more worried about user convenience than user security.
It's reprisal, not reprise. And this is like saying how stupid it is that it's possible to go over the speed limit without being pulled over. If the authorities did actually have knowledge of every instance of piracy that happened, would they throw a quarter of America in jail? Or turn a blind eye except in extreme cases?
Hmm. . . more likely they'd send a bill. Dang it.
Uh huh. I'm sure the amount of spam you received would drop like a stone if you just blacklisted the .us TLD.
Personally, I receive as much spam from AOL users as I do from China. The problem, of course, is that I'm corresponding with people from AOL. I'd be seriously torqued if my ISP decided to ignore AOL.
It's not just volume that has to be taken into account; it's signal/noise ratio. The fact that most American ISPs are more helpful in stopping abuse than most Asian ISPs is also a motivating factor.
They're not talking about ISPs who refuse to spy on all the mail sent out by the customers. They're talking about ISPs who, when faced with legitimate complaints of abuse, ignore them. Simply put, the ISPs may not have control over what their customers send out, but they do have a choice of not serving customers who cause problems for other people on the Net.
You're just playing into the hands of corporate critics with that attitude. You're saying that "Nike, as a business, has no responsibility to its employees except to get maximum productivity out of them with minimal compensation.
Better advice for him would be to tell him to scale back his lifestyle, and use the excess to buy stock in Nike. If the primary responsibility of a corporation is to please its shareholders, and you don't like what it's doing, become a shareholder to provide a little bit of muscle for your criticisms.
$895 billion dollars. Sheesh. I just want to know if he's off by a factor of a hundred or a thousand. He's smoking something.
In some cases, I think a truly useful AI would be seriously limited in its intelligence. For example, a self-driving car is more useful if it only knows its immediate surroundings, the rules of the road, and has some way of prioritizing outcomes. A car that couldn't prioritize between a child and a cat, or worse, a child and a paper bag, would not be allowed on the road.
But if you start giving it more generalized capabilities (self-awareness, for example), you may go out to your garage and find that, due to the horrifying death toll of a flood in Belize, the car doesn't see any point in starting. I'd much rather have a conversation with that car than the one I described before. But I don't want a conversation; I want to get to work.
I guess the point is that giving machines generalized intelligence just so they can perform certain rote functions is a bad idea from a functional point of view, ethical considerations aside. Throw in the idea that you basically have an intelligent slave driving your car, and it seems better to just let them stay "unthinking machines."
Good point. I think he was trying to say that it wasn't necessary for an AI to have direct storage access, not that it wouldn't be possible. By the same token, it would be really cool if we had a few hundred neurons wired up as a perfect, lightning quick calculator. It's theoretically possible; it just hasn't evolved in our species.
Pardon me, but it sounds to me like your ethics teacher doesn't have a clue what she's talking about. If you think that successfully passing the Turing test doesn't demonstrate both intelligence and sentience, I can't deny that you may be correct. But you've got some damned serious brainpower backing the alternative position, and I really don't think that could happen if the T-test was so pathetic that a group of freshman college students could rip it apart.
I think it was Descartes who came up with the idea of automatons. They're creatures who walk around the world in human form, carrying out all the day to day tasks of ordinary human beings, but without any real consciousness working inside their skulls. Some of them may have been sitting in your freshman ethics class, contributing valuable insights to discussions.
I don't believe that automatons are possible. But the only way to seriously believe that a computer could pass the Turing test without being both intelligent and self-aware is to presume that they are. In order to do what an automaton is supposed to do, it has to at least have information about the outside world, and a way to measure what's going on outside against a system of rules which mediates its reactions. That system of rules needs to encode all the things that humans know. Finally, it would have to be aware of its own actions, have the ability to make short and long-term plans, and flexibility in the face of novel situations. Sounds a lot like us.
The most famous response to the Turing test (Searle's "Chinese Room" argument) basically says that a computer might pass the test by simply understanding the formal properties of a language without understanding the semantics of the words its using. For example, it would know that a DUCK can go UNDER WATER without becoming WET, without really understanding any of the terms involved (only their interrelations).
I think the example Searle chose to illustrate his point (found here) is misleading. While the person doing the actual input and output of the symbols doesn't really understand Chinese, he is part of a system which does. Complaining that an entire system cannot be intelligent because none of the individual parts making up the system have "understanding" of what they're doing is misleading. None of your neurons understand what they're doing; they just fire or don't fire depending on the electrochemical inputs they receive. The little bit of your neural system which turns the words you've chosen into sounds by manipulating your voice box doesn't understand the meaning of the words.
Searle tries to get around the problem by internalizing all the rules of the Chinese Room inside the person who was doing the translating, and claiming that he still doesn't understand Chinese. But the rules which have been encoded inside the person are so advanced and complex that the stream of characters he is outputting is sufficient to pass the Turing test.
In order to pass the test, these rules have to have the ability to remember the conversation that came before, and adjust the outputs accordingly. If you ask the same question twenty times in a row, and get precisely the same response each time, you can be assured that you're dealing with a computer with no self-awareness. So the rules are constantly changing, not just to reflect the course of the conversation, but to reevaluate the accuracy of the old rules. The more I think about it, the harder a time I have of believing that a human being, however intelligent, could internalize all the rules and constantly modify them to accurately mimic a human conversation, independent of any understanding of their actual meaning.
The biggest problem that I see with the Turing test is that it is a sufficient demonstration of intelligence, but not a necessary one. That is, computers will probably be intelligent long before they understand enough about our expectations of other humans to deceive us properly.
Example: We generally understand that dolphins are intelligent, but their intelligence is of a rather alien sort. Even if we mastered their language, a dolphin could easily be distinguished from a human in a Turing test because their life experiences and way of looking at the world is completely alien to us. I think the best the dolphin could hope for was to try and imitate a five year old who really enjoyed swimming.
In a way, I'm glad you threw in that little slam against the Turing test, because writing this post was way more interesting than just nodding my head in agreement. I thought your points about the nature of prediction were uncannily accurate.
Hmm. . . Does JonKatz bash movies? Certainly some of them. But I don't think his record would bear out your assertion that JK spends all his time slamming movies. Let's see:
Collateral Damage: JK sez: Might have been an OK action flick prior to 9/11. Now it seems too out of touch with reality, and Schwarzenegger is getting a bit old for these flicks.
Kung Pow: Very disappointing movie. Every funny scene was in the trailer.
Black Hawk Down: "I think Black Hawk Down is an amazing movie. This story is no cartoon." [I can't vouch for his political analysis of Somalia]
Orange County: Disjointed, with some major plot holes and some mixed messages. Also some genuine laughs, and some human moments that really work. [Generally, I thought it was a positive review]
Not Another Teen Movie: A hilarious spoof on teen movies and suburban life. [I know, I know. He was the only one on the planet who liked this movie.]
Behind Enemy Lines: "a tight, highly entertaining and patriotic war thriller about soldiers heading into harm's way..." "The action is fast-paced and non-stop." All in all, he had very high praise for this one.
The One: "Even passionate martial arts movie lovers can skip this one without regret, though two or three of the fight sequences were first rate."
K-PAX: At times charming, though the actors can be strangely detached at times. Keeps the audience interested, and has a very inventive ending.
Training Day: Great first hour, but then it devolves into a violent and cartoony mess.
Zoolander: "This is a scathingly wonderful movie, as amusing as it is on target." He seems to have had his "1337 intellectual needs" fulfilled by the vicious rips on the shallowness of pop culture.
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is less of a coherent movie than a series of one-liners, set gags, set-ups and cultural in-jokes and spoofs. [...] But it will still probably be the funniest movie you've seen all summer."
Rush Hour 2: Not technically brilliant, but still very enjoyable.
Planet of the Apes: More than good enough to see, but a vast disappointment when compared to the original.
Katz has panned some bad movies, and praised some good ones (and vice versa). JK may not be the greatest movie critic of our age, but he generally makes interesting points. I enjoy movies more after reading his reviews, because I'm looking at them more carefully. And I think it would be a great disservice to ask him only to review "good movies," if only because with some movies, their only redeeming value is that they allow critics to write humorously insulting reviews.
If it were just Katz trying to cultivate a "no movie can hope to appeal to my massive brain" persona, I'd say fire him. But his track record indicates otherwise. Your advice is off the mark.
Grammar checker: They suck. Grammar checkers have no imagination at all.
Looser integration: Excellent idea. In fact, I think that things like the newsreader, the HTML editor, and Chatzilla should be broken out into separate applications. Then make the little toolbar customizable, so that you could launch any app from it.
If everything worked according to plan, Mozilla could *BE* your desktop!
Maybe this wouldn't work at all. I don't know why they've got the composer and newsreader and whatnot all in one app (except that they use the same rendering engine), so maybe they'd be losing something under my plan.
Window cloning: I would say, ick. When I open a new window, it's usually because I want to go somewhere completely different. But I've seen cases of supposedly computer literate people rejecting all Netscape/Mozilla variants solely on this difference in behavior.
Other protocols: The idea of having a single app that handled all the different protocols would be nice. But as important as Mozilla is to the world of Linux, the project shouldn't be courting legal trouble by reimplementing proprietary protocols. IIRC, IRC is an open standard. Legal issues aside, the Yahoo, MSN, and AOL people could change their protocols any time, and the Mozilla people would have to play catch up.
Multiple processes: I think this was an intentional design decision. Saved RAM, or something.
I'd never seen a picture of Alan Cox before. Before today, I always wondered why, in the RedHat 7.2 install, the "Kernel Development" package had an icon of Jesus wearing sunglasses. Just a case of mistaken identity.
Great interview, BTW.
A few points:
If the data was that important, you should have made a backup. A system like this would store more copies of files that were frequently accessed. Your letters to Aunt Gracie, however valuable to you, aren't going to be seen as high priority.
The cost of storage keeps plummeting. As that happens, the cost of that bit of platter turf becomes less important than the cost of distributing it. Of course, this will be counteracted by the fact that people are saving bigger and bigger files.
But the cost of bandwidth is also going down (though your cable bill probably doesn't reflect the fact). Same with processor speed, bus speed, and every other metric which would bottleneck any potential distributed app.
I also think you're looking at it in a "glass is half empty" sort of way. Sure, every chunk of data may have to be replicated several times on the system as a whole. But Joe Raiddisk simply doesn't have the HDD capacity to store every bit of content he might be even remotely interested in viewing. With a well-tuned "IOS", you end up using *less* storage, because there aren't more copies than are necessary to serve the actual demand.
It would help if people stuck to posting things to the system that they knew would be of general (or at least niche) interest, rather than using it as their own personal exabyte backup tape.
There are some serious issues that need to be resolved before this thing becomes a reality. But the idea of tapping into the massive resources that millions of computers waste every day is too good to pass up.
Point 1: For 95% of what the average person does, Windows is interchangeable with GNOME, Office is interchangeable with StarOffice, and the Big Blue 'E' can be replaced with Mozilla. They're not "used to Windows," per se. They're used to being able to drag-and-drop, use familiar key sequences like Ctrl-X, and have things start when they double-click. When my Windows drive went all wahooni-shaped, my family's full "retraining" consisted of "double-click the dragon to get your web browser."
Point 2: is completely valid, and I'm not going to argue it.
Point 3: As someone already pointed out, the value of knowledge of a particular application has a half-life that can be measured in months. Going from I.E. to Mozilla is only slightly more jarring than going from Explorer 4 to Explorer 6. Further, since you correctly pointed out that Microsoft pretty much owns the world, the users are probably going to become familiar with their applications elsewhere.
I would also point out that any HR-type who would throw out a resume because someone has WordPerfect or StarOffice experience instead of MSOffice experience should be taken out and beaten with a cluestick. In many ways, an office suite is an office suite is an office suite. The vast majority of the knowledge learned from one can be transferred to another.
Ooh, yeah! Mod parent way up! This guy just "gets it."
As a horrible poker player, I would have to dispute the notion that the ability to play poker is a proper demonstration of intelligence. And it seems horribly unfair to deny the possibility that computers can be sentient until they're able to read the emotions expressed in human faces.
It's arrogant to presume that human beings are the be all and end all of intelligence. Yet some people insist on measuring intelligence precisely by how close it comes to displaying "human" intelligence.
So I ask: What specific attributes of human intelligence do A.I.-detractors consider so unattainable? The ability to speculate on future events? The occasional hormone-triggered emotional outburst that often overrides the thought process? The first one is obviously well within the purview of modern software, though it is seldom implemented because people get their shorts in a bunch whenever the computer acts on a wrong prediction. The second is probably not a necessary component of intelligence, or even sentience.
I think the ability to plan ahead, speculate on possible future events based on the memory of past events, and the ability to recognize one's self as a distinct--and thought thinking--entity is the most vital component of intelligence and sentience.
Consciousness Explained is an incredible book on the nature of intelligence. I would suggest it to anyone, anywhere, who has ever had, or ever plans to have a thought.
Maybe it's flamebait, but I'm going for it.
I've never actually been to one of these protests, and I'm sure that a lot of arguments tend to get boiled down to single sentences. I'm also well aware that, whatever issue is under discussion, there will be a lot of people on both sides who feel very strongly about it without having a real grasp of the issues involved. Finally, you're no doubt correct that the overwhelming majority of the protesters would like to get laid.
I once subscribed to the Ayn Rand-ish belief that all corporations need to turn the world into a utopia was for governments to get out of their way. Now I realize that it's more intricate than that.
Corporations don't look out for people. That is just the way it is. By law, a publicly traded corporation is obligated to maximize shareholder value. Of course, in order to function as a corporation, they need to treat their employees well enough that they don't leave, and abide by environmental and business regulations closely enough that they don't get shut down.
But corporations can become powerful political entities in their own right. They can influence legislation to suit their agenda (often to the detriment of people). When this happens, the entire political process suffers.
Then there's the issue of cultural imperialism. Let's take the world of cinematography, for example. The American film industry is rich beyond belief. Our films dominate in every country that doesn't ban them at the border (and even some that do). I'm not even going to touch the issue of whether India's films are better or worse than come out of Hollywood. It doesn't matter. The problem is, four or five major studios, whose movies almost invariably have American themes, are producing just about everything most people see. The result is a culturally poorer, more homogeneous society.
Similar themes of corporate dominance can be found everywhere you turn. Coca-Cola is hard at work convincing tea-drinking societies to switch over to more carbonated products. Russian teenagers listen to Britney Spears on their Sony CD players. Microsoft Windows runs most every desktop everywhere in the world.
Cultural diversity is roughly analogous to ecological diversity. It's far easier for a corporation to advertise a competing practice or idea into oblivion than for it to become the facilitator of such practices. What about leaving well enough alone? Sorry, but corporations are designed in such a way as to make that avenue impossible when it would be profitable to do otherwise.
By their nature, corporations are useful tools. They have an adaptiveness and efficiency that you seldom see in the public sector. But they cannot be trusted to look out for public interests without oversight by a duly elected government. Like the robots which prompted the original article, useful tools can become dangerous masters.
I think the purpose of building the base at sea is so that it can "drift" around somewhat. Building at sea doesn't provide any additional safety, because the cable is very long, and is going to "wrap" rather than fall straight down.
:), there's still a nuclear lot of energy being released. I wonder if it would end up frying every computer within a thousand miles of the Equator.
Look at me. One reading of "Red Mars" and I think I'm some sort of expert or something.
I'm not so sure about the "melting harmlessly" thing. Even if that's true (and it could be made more likely by lining the upper portion of the cable with explosives
Hey, if they didn't read the memo, it's not our fault. They were given proper warning.
If I understand your analysis correctly, you've made a couple of very important errors.
First, unless there's a mechanism built into the cable for shattering it in an emergency, then you can't treat each bit of the cable as a separate point mass. Each piece of cable is connected to each other piece of cable (very tightly, in fact. These are carbon nanotubes we're talking about).
Second, you say that anything above low-earth orbit will be "safe." If only that were the case. In fact, in order to keep the elevator as a single unit, anything below geosynchronous orbit (about 22,000 miles, if I remember) has to be traveling slower than it would if it were freely in orbit. For instance, the Space Shuttle orbits the planet every nineteen minutes, while the elevator at the same height is orbiting every 24 hours. So the bits of elevator from that height are going to fall.
It turns out that anything below the breakpoint is going to fall to Earth, while everything above the break is going to float off into the aether. Since you're dealing with 22,000 miles of cable, it's going to wrap almost fully around the equator. Given the amount of potential energy stored at the top of the cable, some serious damage would result towards the end of its fall.
The people at Microsoft are disappointed by UTV's poor showing against the X-Box per se. UltimateTV just sold badly, period. The article says that they've refused to release sales figures, and speculates that they've sold less than 100,000 units.
The "neato" feature on UTV ('sides the WebTV stuff that never really caught on) was the fact that you could set it up to record two programs airing at the same time. But to do that, you need two separate feeds to the box.
With DirecTV and Dish, the satellite dishes usually come set up for two feeds, max. To get more, you either have to have a second dish or a cable multiplier. So for most people, the choice is between having two TVs with satellite service and having one TV which can record two shows at once. So UltimateTV's most hyped feature didn't do much for those not willing to cough up even more money.
The other guy mentioned the lifetime subscription. Another thing to point out is that (IIRC) you don't technically need their service, if you know what time things start and stop.
BTW, if you get rid of the Tivo after the first month, you don't get a refund on the Lifetime. So you may want to pay the $10 and try the service for a month.
Don't worry, the Recording Industry Artists of America is cranking out Britney Spears clones as fast as it can. It is expected that the supply of clones should exceed all possible demand by early 2004.
Thank you for your patience in this matter.
Sincerely,
Hilary Rosen