Open the AVG Control Panel (by double-clicking on icon in the icon tray on your start bar), then, looking at the list of AVG8 components, right click on the LinkScanner component... the option you're looking for is "ignore component state"
There - no more ugly warning messages from the linkscanner. The antivir and antispiware warnings will be unaffected.
Two new DNA bases? In terms of potential gene expression - this is like the art world getting two new visible base colors, which can mix with the usual red, green, blue, black and white in new ways to create further complex colors... oh, yes it'll take a very long time to figure out what they mean in all these contexts, but the potential there is absolutely huge.
We're still limited to the same physical limits we've ever had - but the potential for efficient complexity and new expressions using genetic systems is what is possibly improved here. Of course, perhaps we'll discover that some non-DNA systems can be more efficient at everything DNA systems do by the time we can really explore these new DNA bases, but at the same time, assuming that these bases will self-replicate in the wild, we've also found new ways for "life to find a way" using good old DNA. This is really, really important science being explored here in any case.
Destruction derbies are going to be so awesome in a couple months time, once value of the bigger SUVs drops to scrap value. They still have those things, don't they? I always saw them advertised on TV when I lived in Alabama in the 80's.
This green revolution made so much more sense when it didn't have the all the hype. Bring back the old timers!
Well, that depends on how you define the Green Revolution. I prefer to define it in terms of agriculture and human production standards. In terms of the work of Norman Borlaug and other scientists' contribution, rather than as a way to dismiss folks as leftist, which these folks in particular are not. That work has likely saved the lives of more people than almost any other act in human history.
That said, there's a lot to be said for currently 'leftist' ideas like biodiversity, climate change, and such - but none of those are as much a critical bottleneck to saving lives from suffering and death as the core ideas of food and energy production. It's very much correct to worry if these processes are removing quality and sustainability to life too, over the longer term - but the core issues with the green revolution are far closer to the 'old timers' than the hippies you may associate the words with.
This sounds as practical as trying to harness the 'incredible power' of our stomach acid for energy generation. I'm sure we could power a lot of lightbulbs in a lot of ways - but I think there are better options than relying on extracted energy from human movement. It's like relying on whale and pig fat as a major power source - it just doesn't scale past a small market segment.
What we want is to use something more scalable, like algae-based oils, using arid and other unfarmable land, and not using fresh water sources for production. That, plus increases in solar power efficiency are much more direct ways of gathering usable energy, which could scale far beyond our current needs in a sustainable way. That way, we raise the standard of living of people by increasing energy production, rather than make them stick battery chargers on their feet.
Ultimately, food and fresh water will be bigger concerns going forward - and I don't think we'll be able to grow sustainable crops in our shoes with any toys either.
The Japanese Rom of the DS title had the complete English translation contained within it, minus a couple bits of the intro, and of some bonus content. The entire game was playable with a simple patch (google it) to the rom and a copy to a DS flash cart.
The conversion on the DS is a quite nice job, actually. It's definitely my favorite of the Dragon Quest series - classic simple Dragon Quest gameplay, with excellent characters, and a driving sense of progress that is a bit missing from the later games.
I don't disagree that what you argue here may be true... but I would argue that is also might not make a difference.
First off, presuming some detailed information can be read from the mind, let's say that you can never replicate a person's memories and brain together to the point of having that same person even casually in reality again. Fine - then you still would presumably have the ability to store the data and query it. That means, you don't get Grandma back, but you can still 'ask grandma a question', which still makes for a profound change to society, and the countless things we don't notice we lose with each individual.
Next, let's say that a simulacrum of an individual's mind and personality can be replicated in some kind of computer-like environment. Even if it's not the same person, it is the same personality, and the same memories. Society may not have the same person - but they have something that can last longer than a mere 100 years, that can carry real human experience further than ever before.
Next, let's say that a mind can be restored through copying to a brain - but it's just a copy-person. I don't see how society couldn't quickly adjust to considering such restored copies as the same as the original that was lost. Just like the Star Trek crew after beaming-up back to the ship - an atomically new captain, but in practice is the same trusted mind as ever before, even if the ostensibly 'real' captain was disintegrated long ago.
What ends up actually panning out should be interesting. But I think the draw of developing the ability to copy minds, even if fruitless, is far more inherently compelling than even the allure of artificially intelligent agents - though you may end up needing one to develop the other.
Artificial intelligence would be a nice tool to use to reach towards, or to use to understand ourselves... but rare is there a circumstance that demands, or is worth the risks involved with making a truly intelligent agent.
The real implication to me, is that it will be possible to have machines capable of running the same 'software' that runs in our own minds. To be able to 'back up' people's states and memories, and all the implications behind that.
Artificial intelligence is a nice goal to reach for - but it is nothing compared the the siren's call of memories being able to survive the traditional end of existence, cellular death.
Yes. Superior robotic ethics. A regular Ghandi-bot, saving only those who are threatened, willing to die rather than kill in doubt.
That's all well and good... but what of the men who send these robots into battle? What happens to their sense of ethics? Do they begin to believe that their sending troops into pacify a landscape over political differences is a morally superior action? Do they begin to believe that death-by-algorithm is a morally superior way of dealing with irrational people?
There's an endless array of rationalizations man can make for war, and subjugation of those who disagree with them. Taking the cost of friendly human lives out of the equation of war, and replace it with an autoturret enforcing your wishes doesn't make for a 'morally superior' political game. For many, it would make for an endgame in terms of justifying a military police as the default form of political governance.
Drat - should have added a dash between re- and creation, otherwise it looks like a word for relaxation (which itself looks like a rather funny word in that context). Darn you again, written english!
If full-on analog teleportation using raw physics isn't possible in the short-to-mid term, what about recreation of a person at the endpoint?
What I mean by that, is you are able to identify what in a person's brain (and related nervous systems) that allows them to be their own unique person, and can store that as some kind of information, if that can be sent to a far-off location, to a reusable body or synthetic equivalent. This body could then perform the same role that the original would. You could afterwards read what changed in the meantime to find out what happened.
Of course, like all teleportation/copying ideas, it would challenge our definitions of what makes any of us unique, and the underlying nature of our definition of self.
Just for the sake of curiosity, what do you think of George Bush as an orator and a representative of our nation to the rest of the world?
I think that world reaction after September 11th, 2001 has been quite appropriate - we Americans, and the rest of the world, gave him an honest chance for a QUITE a long while, and at every opportunity, President Bush (II) represented the US as a completely idiotic nation. The transformation of world reaction to America, from public opinion down to basic currency, has been fully reflective of this dynamic.
I mean, I can live with Hillary - but for the life of me, I can't empathize with why someone would vote FOR her.
To my understanding, despite the usual 'common sense' about presidents, presidents don't make so many actual decisions of their own volition. They veto or sign bills into law. They have limited abilities to make executive orders (despite Bush's attempts to expand this). They guide some military decisions under some circumstances. They really don't guide much actual lawmaking beyond veto threats and ceremonial suggestions.
The key part about a presidential candidate to me is that most of their role is to give speeches, and represent us to the world. The part where I have no empathy with those who vote for Hillary is why anyone would choose to have Hillary Clinton represent them in that capacity. True, she's not the worst candidate in that capacity - but she just seems to have the worst personality for my tastes out of the Democratic candidates.
What is it in Hillary that makes people want her to represent them? Or is it really more of a strategic choice for those voting for her?
Is the domestic violent crime rate down because all the violent video gamers have joined the military or Blackwater and shipped out overseas?;)
If that were true, then Thomson's (insane) argument would have an interesting twist: Turning a majority of the potentially violent population into "professional killers" actually reduces the random incidence of violence, and makes for a more militarily secure nation. Instead of being a harm to society, this stupid theory would insist that video games focus violent intent towards (relatively) responsible outcomes.
That (presumeably violent) video game use correlates with a massive secret drive towards violence, that is somehow counterbalanced in the overall violent crime rate, or that this (now) extremely common form of entertainment is at worst, on average, a similar factor in people's lives as movies or books?
True, the ever-shifting and politically influenced definition of violent crime may have shifted definition over the years too, but I highly doubt any theories on that line would be able to mask the accusations Thomson makes about the use of video games in society.
In order to match Thomson's account to reality in any way, you'd have to start making up any number of wild inventions to force the facts into place... kind of like what he's doing here.
...Which in turn were Paul Bunyan jokes, which in turn were inspired by countless other competitive American legend jokes, which in turn were inspired by countless European tall tale jokes (Baron Münchhausen), which in turn were inspired by countless fantasy folk tales, going back and back to the likes of the Epic of Gilgamesh (about a couple of men so tough, it really does rival Chuck Norris stories) , and likely much further, to the dawn of boasting and storytelling itself.
Ryan Fenton
Did the guy who titled this know what the term Numerology means? It's usually associated with wild "magical thinking" about numbers, and is at best a rather silly form of pseudomathematics. </Skeptical Nitpick>
Honestly though, most of my favorite works in gaming have involved professional writers really taking the time to craft a great work of fiction in a game (especially Planescape: Torment.)
I always presumed it was telemarketers who, in order to act more efficiently, would call multiple targets at once, then only connect to the first who picked up the phone, dumping the rest. This avoids the statistically costly tedium of reaching answering machines after x rings, or just waiting for 5 rings to hang up. After all, if you're in a state of existence where telemarketing or managing telemarketers is your main concern in life, a little extra inconvenience for random phone users would not be a key concern compared to profit ratio over time.
Would you have any suggestions of what literature would be appropriate for someone specifically interested in computational neuroscience? What I'd love to see if discussions on the methods that can be used to ask one neural cell something about its neighbors' state, and it's neighbors' neighbors state, and so on. This is something like how the brain has to work, if I'm able to speak about something I remember, then any functional cells should be able to ask eachother about their states in one way or anther - I'd love to read what the latest is on that.
I'm specifically interested in computational neuroscience because I'd love to create the tools and environments needed for further study of the brain, now that I've paid my dues as a professional programmer simply working for money.
This is kind of what I'd expect, actually. Even if an adult mind was completely plastic, as people learn of the type of experiences that will come to them, they're going to quickly learn to categorize them, and which kinds of categories tend to work with more and more experiences.
It's like as a programmer learns of which coding constructs work for which situations... they learn it becomes more important to worry about understandability rather than speed, and to code with clear structures they can pick up later if and when they need to clean up misunderstandings later. The default practice becomes a sort of robust defensive form, that requires the fewest changes over the widest plausible set of needs - while still doing the job of completely enumerating the problem set needed.
I'd expect that even with minds unhindered by age, the same sort of defensive practices programmers pick up would have analogues in most other realms of experience that mankind goes through. That would then, be easily confused with a mind unable to rapidly change, because such wide change is then rarely observed.
That said - there are more concrete bits of evidence that complicate things - such as rates of new language adoption between adults and children... but again, there's also evidence that some adults can still pick up new languages rapidly. Perhaps those same defensive practices act as a 'language censor' to 'wasting time with confusing sentence structure' - or perhaps there really is some factor of truth to the hardware limitations of an aging brain. Hard to know for sure until we get the computational nuerobiology tools in place to be able to strictly test such things... I'm really happy to see the progress so far though.
Slashdot Mirror
Open the AVG Control Panel (by double-clicking on icon in the icon tray on your start bar), then, looking at the list of AVG8 components, right click on the LinkScanner component... the option you're looking for is "ignore component state"
There - no more ugly warning messages from the linkscanner. The antivir and antispiware warnings will be unaffected.
Ryan Fenton
Cool - If that's all that is, then yeah, not quite the potential I thought it could be.
Ryan Fenton
Two new DNA bases? In terms of potential gene expression - this is like the art world getting two new visible base colors, which can mix with the usual red, green, blue, black and white in new ways to create further complex colors... oh, yes it'll take a very long time to figure out what they mean in all these contexts, but the potential there is absolutely huge.
We're still limited to the same physical limits we've ever had - but the potential for efficient complexity and new expressions using genetic systems is what is possibly improved here. Of course, perhaps we'll discover that some non-DNA systems can be more efficient at everything DNA systems do by the time we can really explore these new DNA bases, but at the same time, assuming that these bases will self-replicate in the wild, we've also found new ways for "life to find a way" using good old DNA. This is really, really important science being explored here in any case.
Ryan Fenton
Destruction derbies are going to be so awesome in a couple months time, once value of the bigger SUVs drops to scrap value. They still have those things, don't they? I always saw them advertised on TV when I lived in Alabama in the 80's.
Ryan Fenton
Well, that depends on how you define the Green Revolution. I prefer to define it in terms of agriculture and human production standards. In terms of the work of Norman Borlaug and other scientists' contribution, rather than as a way to dismiss folks as leftist, which these folks in particular are not. That work has likely saved the lives of more people than almost any other act in human history.
That said, there's a lot to be said for currently 'leftist' ideas like biodiversity, climate change, and such - but none of those are as much a critical bottleneck to saving lives from suffering and death as the core ideas of food and energy production. It's very much correct to worry if these processes are removing quality and sustainability to life too, over the longer term - but the core issues with the green revolution are far closer to the 'old timers' than the hippies you may associate the words with.
Ryan Fenton
This sounds as practical as trying to harness the 'incredible power' of our stomach acid for energy generation. I'm sure we could power a lot of lightbulbs in a lot of ways - but I think there are better options than relying on extracted energy from human movement. It's like relying on whale and pig fat as a major power source - it just doesn't scale past a small market segment.
What we want is to use something more scalable, like algae-based oils, using arid and other unfarmable land, and not using fresh water sources for production. That, plus increases in solar power efficiency are much more direct ways of gathering usable energy, which could scale far beyond our current needs in a sustainable way. That way, we raise the standard of living of people by increasing energy production, rather than make them stick battery chargers on their feet.
Ultimately, food and fresh water will be bigger concerns going forward - and I don't think we'll be able to grow sustainable crops in our shoes with any toys either.
Ryan Fenton
The Japanese Rom of the DS title had the complete English translation contained within it, minus a couple bits of the intro, and of some bonus content. The entire game was playable with a simple patch (google it) to the rom and a copy to a DS flash cart.
The conversion on the DS is a quite nice job, actually. It's definitely my favorite of the Dragon Quest series - classic simple Dragon Quest gameplay, with excellent characters, and a driving sense of progress that is a bit missing from the later games.
Ryan Fenton
Who's going to play the Tachikoma?
I'm hoping the Original Actor, seen here having fun in Japan.
I don't know if this is one that Jim Carrey could pull off.
Ryan Fenton
I don't disagree that what you argue here may be true... but I would argue that is also might not make a difference.
First off, presuming some detailed information can be read from the mind, let's say that you can never replicate a person's memories and brain together to the point of having that same person even casually in reality again. Fine - then you still would presumably have the ability to store the data and query it. That means, you don't get Grandma back, but you can still 'ask grandma a question', which still makes for a profound change to society, and the countless things we don't notice we lose with each individual.
Next, let's say that a simulacrum of an individual's mind and personality can be replicated in some kind of computer-like environment. Even if it's not the same person, it is the same personality, and the same memories. Society may not have the same person - but they have something that can last longer than a mere 100 years, that can carry real human experience further than ever before.
Next, let's say that a mind can be restored through copying to a brain - but it's just a copy-person. I don't see how society couldn't quickly adjust to considering such restored copies as the same as the original that was lost. Just like the Star Trek crew after beaming-up back to the ship - an atomically new captain, but in practice is the same trusted mind as ever before, even if the ostensibly 'real' captain was disintegrated long ago.
What ends up actually panning out should be interesting. But I think the draw of developing the ability to copy minds, even if fruitless, is far more inherently compelling than even the allure of artificially intelligent agents - though you may end up needing one to develop the other.
Ryan Fenton
Artificial intelligence would be a nice tool to use to reach towards, or to use to understand ourselves... but rare is there a circumstance that demands, or is worth the risks involved with making a truly intelligent agent.
The real implication to me, is that it will be possible to have machines capable of running the same 'software' that runs in our own minds. To be able to 'back up' people's states and memories, and all the implications behind that.
Artificial intelligence is a nice goal to reach for - but it is nothing compared the the siren's call of memories being able to survive the traditional end of existence, cellular death.
Ryan Fenton
Yes. Superior robotic ethics. A regular Ghandi-bot, saving only those who are threatened, willing to die rather than kill in doubt.
That's all well and good... but what of the men who send these robots into battle? What happens to their sense of ethics? Do they begin to believe that their sending troops into pacify a landscape over political differences is a morally superior action? Do they begin to believe that death-by-algorithm is a morally superior way of dealing with irrational people?
There's an endless array of rationalizations man can make for war, and subjugation of those who disagree with them. Taking the cost of friendly human lives out of the equation of war, and replace it with an autoturret enforcing your wishes doesn't make for a 'morally superior' political game. For many, it would make for an endgame in terms of justifying a military police as the default form of political governance.
Ryan Fenton
Drat - should have added a dash between re- and creation, otherwise it looks like a word for relaxation (which itself looks like a rather funny word in that context). Darn you again, written english!
Ryan Fenton
If full-on analog teleportation using raw physics isn't possible in the short-to-mid term, what about recreation of a person at the endpoint?
What I mean by that, is you are able to identify what in a person's brain (and related nervous systems) that allows them to be their own unique person, and can store that as some kind of information, if that can be sent to a far-off location, to a reusable body or synthetic equivalent. This body could then perform the same role that the original would. You could afterwards read what changed in the meantime to find out what happened.
Of course, like all teleportation/copying ideas, it would challenge our definitions of what makes any of us unique, and the underlying nature of our definition of self.
Ryan Fenton
Just for the sake of curiosity, what do you think of George Bush as an orator and a representative of our nation to the rest of the world?
I think that world reaction after September 11th, 2001 has been quite appropriate - we Americans, and the rest of the world, gave him an honest chance for a QUITE a long while, and at every opportunity, President Bush (II) represented the US as a completely idiotic nation. The transformation of world reaction to America, from public opinion down to basic currency, has been fully reflective of this dynamic.
Ryan Fenton
I mean, I can live with Hillary - but for the life of me, I can't empathize with why someone would vote FOR her.
To my understanding, despite the usual 'common sense' about presidents, presidents don't make so many actual decisions of their own volition. They veto or sign bills into law. They have limited abilities to make executive orders (despite Bush's attempts to expand this). They guide some military decisions under some circumstances. They really don't guide much actual lawmaking beyond veto threats and ceremonial suggestions.
The key part about a presidential candidate to me is that most of their role is to give speeches, and represent us to the world. The part where I have no empathy with those who vote for Hillary is why anyone would choose to have Hillary Clinton represent them in that capacity. True, she's not the worst candidate in that capacity - but she just seems to have the worst personality for my tastes out of the Democratic candidates.
What is it in Hillary that makes people want her to represent them? Or is it really more of a strategic choice for those voting for her?
Ryan Fenton
Is the domestic violent crime rate down because all the violent video gamers have joined the military or Blackwater and shipped out overseas? ;)
If that were true, then Thomson's (insane) argument would have an interesting twist: Turning a majority of the potentially violent population into "professional killers" actually reduces the random incidence of violence, and makes for a more militarily secure nation. Instead of being a harm to society, this stupid theory would insist that video games focus violent intent towards (relatively) responsible outcomes.
Ryan Fenton
Really, folks - which is a simpler explanation for these graphs:
Violent crime rate
Video game sales
That (presumeably violent) video game use correlates with a massive secret drive towards violence, that is somehow counterbalanced in the overall violent crime rate, or that this (now) extremely common form of entertainment is at worst, on average, a similar factor in people's lives as movies or books?
True, the ever-shifting and politically influenced definition of violent crime may have shifted definition over the years too, but I highly doubt any theories on that line would be able to mask the accusations Thomson makes about the use of video games in society.
In order to match Thomson's account to reality in any way, you'd have to start making up any number of wild inventions to force the facts into place... kind of like what he's doing here.
Ryan Fenton
...Which in turn were Paul Bunyan jokes, which in turn were inspired by countless other competitive American legend jokes, which in turn were inspired by countless European tall tale jokes (Baron Münchhausen), which in turn were inspired by countless fantasy folk tales, going back and back to the likes of the Epic of Gilgamesh (about a couple of men so tough, it really does rival Chuck Norris stories) , and likely much further, to the dawn of boasting and storytelling itself. Ryan Fenton
Did the guy who titled this know what the term Numerology means? It's usually associated with wild "magical thinking" about numbers, and is at best a rather silly form of pseudomathematics.
</Skeptical Nitpick>
Ryan Fenton
Games that require laugh tracks.
Honestly though, most of my favorite works in gaming have involved professional writers really taking the time to craft a great work of fiction in a game (especially Planescape: Torment.)
Ryan Fenton
I always presumed it was telemarketers who, in order to act more efficiently, would call multiple targets at once, then only connect to the first who picked up the phone, dumping the rest. This avoids the statistically costly tedium of reaching answering machines after x rings, or just waiting for 5 rings to hang up. After all, if you're in a state of existence where telemarketing or managing telemarketers is your main concern in life, a little extra inconvenience for random phone users would not be a key concern compared to profit ratio over time.
Ryan Fenton
Never as now, has the phrase, "Nothing to see here. Move along" been more appropriate.
Ryan Fenton
Would you have any suggestions of what literature would be appropriate for someone specifically interested in computational neuroscience? What I'd love to see if discussions on the methods that can be used to ask one neural cell something about its neighbors' state, and it's neighbors' neighbors state, and so on. This is something like how the brain has to work, if I'm able to speak about something I remember, then any functional cells should be able to ask eachother about their states in one way or anther - I'd love to read what the latest is on that.
I'm specifically interested in computational neuroscience because I'd love to create the tools and environments needed for further study of the brain, now that I've paid my dues as a professional programmer simply working for money.
Ryan Fenton
This is kind of what I'd expect, actually. Even if an adult mind was completely plastic, as people learn of the type of experiences that will come to them, they're going to quickly learn to categorize them, and which kinds of categories tend to work with more and more experiences.
It's like as a programmer learns of which coding constructs work for which situations... they learn it becomes more important to worry about understandability rather than speed, and to code with clear structures they can pick up later if and when they need to clean up misunderstandings later. The default practice becomes a sort of robust defensive form, that requires the fewest changes over the widest plausible set of needs - while still doing the job of completely enumerating the problem set needed.
I'd expect that even with minds unhindered by age, the same sort of defensive practices programmers pick up would have analogues in most other realms of experience that mankind goes through. That would then, be easily confused with a mind unable to rapidly change, because such wide change is then rarely observed.
That said - there are more concrete bits of evidence that complicate things - such as rates of new language adoption between adults and children... but again, there's also evidence that some adults can still pick up new languages rapidly. Perhaps those same defensive practices act as a 'language censor' to 'wasting time with confusing sentence structure' - or perhaps there really is some factor of truth to the hardware limitations of an aging brain. Hard to know for sure until we get the computational nuerobiology tools in place to be able to strictly test such things... I'm really happy to see the progress so far though.
Ryan Fenton
Cool - thanks for the correction then. Sounds quite cool!
Ryan Fenton