I casually perused CR here and there, but I'd never really known much about them until a relative gifted me with a subscription. Here are a few things I like about them:
1. They pay their own way. They purchase *all* of the products that they test and destroy, since cozying up to get sample products would tarnish their credibility. 2. They don't accept any advertising dollars within their magazine, since that might bias their reporting and tarnish their credibility. 3. They take a strong stand on protecting consumers beyond just good product recommendations. They do editorials and special reports on subjects that/.ers care about, like RFID and general privacy protection; taking strong pro-consumer stances that you don't see in other national publications.
When my gift subscription runs out, I plan on purchasing my own. Not only because I find the product articles useful and interesting; but because the Consumer's Union does other good things with my money.
I watched some of the vides and I read a bunch of that myspace page. It set off my "religion detectors" at every turn. Arguments, like:
You can see that the majority of the damage was done to one of the corners of the building and that most of the fuel did indeed explode outside. The impact of this plane could not possibly have damaged the entirety of the south towers core
... are complete bullshit. From photos like that, you can't see what happened at the core of the building. You obviously can't begin to imagine the force caused by such a large fuel-filled object hitting the building at a high speed. What in the hell does this person know about "could not possibly"? Obviously, not much. The myspace page is filled with unscientifically-worded rhetoric like the above. It's normally the kind of rhetoric you read on "intelligent design" sites... "living organisms could not possibly have been created through electrical and chemical processes"... yeah, whatever.
A few verbal slips and some video that you don't understand as a lay person do not a huge conspiracy make. Occam's Razor should be applied, as usual.
The way that Survivor is set up, it too often promotes purely selfish back-stabbing behavior. It really brings out the worst in people, and more often than not when there are finally repercussions at the end of the game when the ousted contestants get to vote for the real winner... it's too late. They're stuck with two assholes and having to choose from the lesser of two evils.
This is one of the reasons that I prefer a show like "The Apprentice", where merit is the constant driving force in the game, rather than subterfuge.
During the last episodes of Survivor, I'm normally repulsed at what keeps those people in the game. During the final weeks of The Apprentice, I'm usually rooting for several people and happy to see any of them get their just rewards.
Just answering the/. questions/comments as they're posted beats the heck out of one of those interviews where/. picks the top-rated posts and you get this long carefully-planned monologue-type response two weeks later.
Good luck with the software patents thing. You obviously understand how important it is, and many of us here do too. Thanks for spending your time on it.
That's the key that I've only seen Logitech truly grasp at this point, the recharging base. You need a nice small convenient one for every device you have, including your keyboard.
Built-in bluetooth in your laptop and all peripherals, then easy recharging bases with quality batteries. Manufacturers who get all three of those points will have my business.
I used the Mighty Mouse for a few days while setting up my in-laws with a new iMac, and I have to admit that I *really* liked the freedom of the little scroll ball thing.
It's funny, however, the way that we finally got rid of all of the gunk-collecting balls on the bottom of the mouse by replacing them with a laser... now there's a gunk-collecting ball on the top!
I guess you could use a laser to track your index finger motions on TOP of the mouse, just like you do with the bottom. Manufacturers might be more concerned with the liability from the laser's hitting people in the eyes, though.
I guess something else could trigger the acceleration, but AI is one of those convenient black boxes that we understand the concept of enough to imagine that we know what might happen when we create it.
Well, no, I don't think you're quite getting the whole argument. It's not just about extrapolating the current trend of accelleration of technology growth to the point where the curve looks vertical. It's directly tied to AI or computer-enhanced human beings that are effectively AI. At the point where you have some type of artificial intelligence that can be self-aware enough to modify its own programming, the theory is that it (or they) will be able to improve itself, add to its resources, and make new discoveries completely beyond our ability to keep up with it. What happens then is anyone's guess. Maybe it will be benevolent and give us a leg up, helping us all to achieve its level of sentience. Maybe it will be malevolent and destroy us all. Maybe it will disappear one day into a rift in time and space, leaving us to return to our previous rate of progression until we create something similar again.
Regardless, it's the addition of the new AI that causes the rate of discovery to go vertical.
All that said, I'm not a "true believer" in the coming technological singularity. For one thing, the time scale that futurists throw around is always conveniently "within our lifetime". It could well be a couple of hundred years before we're able to build functioning AI, if at all. We human beings seem to tend to think we understand the basic nature of the problem more than we actually do, and are usually optimistic in how long it will take us to solve problems that have numerous and most likely unknown intervening layers of complexity. Look at the space elevator crowd for a good example of this kind of optimism, but that's a much simpler problem than creating a real AI.
Maybe it won't be possible for an AI to immediately improve itself at such an amazing rate. Maybe we'll find that it's only incrementally an improvement over us in some ways, and we'll begin long cycles of enhancing it and/or ourselves. Then you don't really have a singularity, clouding the future, you have a lot of time clouding the future -- which is the way it's always been.
I was with you until the "Avoid going too low on your carbs" part. One thing that I've found is that everyone is different when it comes to carbs. Personally, when I went through the Atkins diet's strict "induction" phase, I got a natural and lasting boost of energy and mental clarity. Before then, my insulin levels were all over the map. If I had something sugary or just carby for breakfast, I was shaking by noon and ready to bite someone's head off if I wasn't about to eat lunch.
After going on Atkins, I conveyed how great I felt to some other people who were trying it. The reactions I received were mixed -- some people felt similarly to the way I had, others really didn't notice that much of a difference. I also knew one guy who was practically passing out when he tried induction, so he quit before getting very far into it.
How your body's insulin levels react to glucose or lack of it, then how your cells change their glucose absorption as a result of the amount of insulin in your bloodstream seems to really vary from person to person.
7 Million dollars from Queensland alone... Isn't that just mind-blowing?
There are some really really greedy and stupid people out there. It just serves as a reminder of how dumb people are and how isolated I must be from people like that for one reason or another. I really don't think I even KNOW someone dumb enough to fall for one of those scams.
Where are these people? How is it that they have any money at all? It's just staggering to think that they're allowed to vote.
It makes it fairly obvious why spamming works so well. I'd speculate that the people just dumb enough to make spamming a lucrative business are a lot smarter than the ones needed to make 419 scams successful.
It feels like standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, where you're just in awe at the magnitude of it all.
It's not impossible. Thousands of animals have teeth that grow continuously. Humans are saddled with defective DNA, but the cells are still there.
This isn't about whether or not it would be possible to force teeth to grow. I believe that it might be possible to coax teeth to grow somehow. I'm just highly doubtful of press releases announcing patents with little or no peer-group testing (a dozen patients? Come on...). With ultrasound?
You just don't see REAL discoveries made like this.
Look at the recent announcement on using stem cells to repair nerve damage in rats, for example. That smells like science. When I read the initial annoucement, I believed that the results of well-done experiments were being reported. Scientists the world over have been experimenting with stem cells for a decade, trying to figure out how to use their unique properties to heal the human body. We've been reading about little steps of progress here or there, but these big breakthroughs are never free. They take time for scientists to work out all the problems. Even now, they're not ready to use this particular technique on human beings. They'll spend years experimenting on pigs, then chimps before they start working on human beings. If (big "if") they can get the same types of results with human beings that they did with the rats, it's still another 5 to 10 years away.
So, I'm not so much arguing what's possible. I'm just pointing out how easily the Slashdot community (seems to) believe any press release that surfaces. It's an almost religious-like gullibility, with belief in science fiction replacing belief in an afterlife.
The sad thing to me is that capital will be wasted on this junk science, rather than going to more likely successes like the aforementioned stem cell research.
I'm curious... when you folks read an article like this, do you automatically believe it?
Personally, when I see "filed for a patent earlier this month", "testing it on a dozen patients", and "commercialization in two years" -- coupled with a science-fiction-like technology -- I think "BULLSHIT".
Just add it to the list of other bullshit vaporware impractical/impossible inventions that show up every once in a while trying to grab funding/sucker dollars: holographic memory, ridiculous compression technologies, flying cars, perpetual motion machines, etc.
I find it pretty amazing that almost all of the responses in this thread just assume that these guys are telling the truth about their "discovery". I'd love to be proven wrong. I'd love to see a new miraculous bone and tooth growing technology be discovered... but scientific and religious claims are easy to make. It's easy to put out a press release. It's hard to prove miraculous things. It's hard to provide evidence for the seemingly-unbelievable.
IBM doesn't want to point their customers and potential customers to web sites that describe how to use MySQL, then have to tack on a "... and then here's how you can use OUR product with it."
They want to keep the user firmly in their court for the entire exercise, so this approach makes sense from their perspective.
Plus, it's easier to follow one tutorial than to have to skip around multiple ones.
Just look for the links to job sites and the job-finding recommendations here. Ignore all the morons with the "great advice" on how to live life. Shit, we're all nerds here reading slashdot. We may know about finding computer-related work, but we know nothing about having real lives.;)
On an individual level, that can be true; although for anyone who has played competition paint ball, you know that even modern warfar survival keenly depends upon your skills in battle.
However, look at it at the macro level. The overall outcome of the war isn't an accident. The strongest/most skillful armies tend to win.
Somewhere along the way it became taboo, but this was more of a social change than a religious one.
At first, religion could be magnanimous with Science. There was just so staggeringly much in the universe that man didn't understand, that the gains from our understanding a little more of it were worth the loss of a little of the mystery of the unknown that fuels religious power.
Over time, though, those losses added up. People began to realize that if we were able to understand so many of the mysteries that we once believed were solely the domain of the gods... maybe *all* of the mysteries of the gods were capable of being understood. When that happened, religions got scared. They slammed down hard as a defensive measure.
So, NO, the way that religions turned away from Science wasn't just some curious social shift caused by mysterious factors. It was a direct response by religion against an encroacher upon the base of its power.
We should rid ourselves of the silly idea that God cannot exist and that everything must be only present within our own three dimensions.
This is really just a straw man. Find a mainstream or even published atheist who is of the "strong" variety who claims to know that a God or god-like things cannot exist somewhere in the unknown places of existence. I (and most intellectually-grounded atheists) would be willing to brand such strong atheists as crackpots who are just as guilty of illogical thinking as the most raving Islamic fanatic. So in reality, there aren't many (if any) scientists out there claiming that God *cannot* exist in some form or fashion. That whole stereotype is mostly a concoction of religious types who want an absurd-sounding target to shoot at.
The logic of faith is as solid as a rock. You just have to look below the covers to see it. For example, religion is about the power to control human beings. It makes perfectly logical sense that in order to maximize that control, you have to keep some dominion over things that are "only for God". If human beings felt like there was no other source of knowledge or power in the universe that they could tap into (God), then they would have no need of worship.
Sure, there's no real logic in the statements of the religious, but there's a strong logic in why those lies are so strongly propagated by them through the rest of society. I'm not saying that the Pope is intentionally lying, by the way. The memes around religion are so strong that they lead to those lies... but the memes themselves are entirely logical.
Slashdot Mirror
I casually perused CR here and there, but I'd never really known much about them until a relative gifted me with a subscription. Here are a few things I like about them:
/.ers care about, like RFID and general privacy protection; taking strong pro-consumer stances that you don't see in other national publications.
1. They pay their own way. They purchase *all* of the products that they test and destroy, since cozying up to get sample products would tarnish their credibility.
2. They don't accept any advertising dollars within their magazine, since that might bias their reporting and tarnish their credibility.
3. They take a strong stand on protecting consumers beyond just good product recommendations. They do editorials and special reports on subjects that
When my gift subscription runs out, I plan on purchasing my own. Not only because I find the product articles useful and interesting; but because the Consumer's Union does other good things with my money.
A few verbal slips and some video that you don't understand as a lay person do not a huge conspiracy make. Occam's Razor should be applied, as usual.
The way that Survivor is set up, it too often promotes purely selfish back-stabbing behavior. It really brings out the worst in people, and more often than not when there are finally repercussions at the end of the game when the ousted contestants get to vote for the real winner... it's too late. They're stuck with two assholes and having to choose from the lesser of two evils.
This is one of the reasons that I prefer a show like "The Apprentice", where merit is the constant driving force in the game, rather than subterfuge.
During the last episodes of Survivor, I'm normally repulsed at what keeps those people in the game. During the final weeks of The Apprentice, I'm usually rooting for several people and happy to see any of them get their just rewards.
Apple did more than just design what people wanted. They designed what people didn't even realize they wanted.
Now we're done for. That will be the one that wipes us all out.
Just answering the /. questions/comments as they're posted beats the heck out of one of those interviews where /. picks the top-rated posts and you get this long carefully-planned monologue-type response two weeks later.
Good luck with the software patents thing. You obviously understand how important it is, and many of us here do too. Thanks for spending your time on it.
That's the key that I've only seen Logitech truly grasp at this point, the recharging base. You need a nice small convenient one for every device you have, including your keyboard.
Built-in bluetooth in your laptop and all peripherals, then easy recharging bases with quality batteries. Manufacturers who get all three of those points will have my business.
Here's an interesting analysis of a selective framing incident.
Matt Damon isn't too bad. As long as Ben Afsuck doesn't get to play Spock, I think we'll be okay.
I used the Mighty Mouse for a few days while setting up my in-laws with a new iMac, and I have to admit that I *really* liked the freedom of the little scroll ball thing.
It's funny, however, the way that we finally got rid of all of the gunk-collecting balls on the bottom of the mouse by replacing them with a laser... now there's a gunk-collecting ball on the top!
I guess you could use a laser to track your index finger motions on TOP of the mouse, just like you do with the bottom. Manufacturers might be more concerned with the liability from the laser's hitting people in the eyes, though.
I guess something else could trigger the acceleration, but AI is one of those convenient black boxes that we understand the concept of enough to imagine that we know what might happen when we create it.
Well, no, I don't think you're quite getting the whole argument. It's not just about extrapolating the current trend of accelleration of technology growth to the point where the curve looks vertical. It's directly tied to AI or computer-enhanced human beings that are effectively AI. At the point where you have some type of artificial intelligence that can be self-aware enough to modify its own programming, the theory is that it (or they) will be able to improve itself, add to its resources, and make new discoveries completely beyond our ability to keep up with it. What happens then is anyone's guess. Maybe it will be benevolent and give us a leg up, helping us all to achieve its level of sentience. Maybe it will be malevolent and destroy us all. Maybe it will disappear one day into a rift in time and space, leaving us to return to our previous rate of progression until we create something similar again.
Regardless, it's the addition of the new AI that causes the rate of discovery to go vertical.
All that said, I'm not a "true believer" in the coming technological singularity. For one thing, the time scale that futurists throw around is always conveniently "within our lifetime". It could well be a couple of hundred years before we're able to build functioning AI, if at all. We human beings seem to tend to think we understand the basic nature of the problem more than we actually do, and are usually optimistic in how long it will take us to solve problems that have numerous and most likely unknown intervening layers of complexity. Look at the space elevator crowd for a good example of this kind of optimism, but that's a much simpler problem than creating a real AI.
Maybe it won't be possible for an AI to immediately improve itself at such an amazing rate. Maybe we'll find that it's only incrementally an improvement over us in some ways, and we'll begin long cycles of enhancing it and/or ourselves. Then you don't really have a singularity, clouding the future, you have a lot of time clouding the future -- which is the way it's always been.
I was with you until the "Avoid going too low on your carbs" part. One thing that I've found is that everyone is different when it comes to carbs. Personally, when I went through the Atkins diet's strict "induction" phase, I got a natural and lasting boost of energy and mental clarity. Before then, my insulin levels were all over the map. If I had something sugary or just carby for breakfast, I was shaking by noon and ready to bite someone's head off if I wasn't about to eat lunch.
After going on Atkins, I conveyed how great I felt to some other people who were trying it. The reactions I received were mixed -- some people felt similarly to the way I had, others really didn't notice that much of a difference. I also knew one guy who was practically passing out when he tried induction, so he quit before getting very far into it.
How your body's insulin levels react to glucose or lack of it, then how your cells change their glucose absorption as a result of the amount of insulin in your bloodstream seems to really vary from person to person.
How far away is Chernobyl?
7 Million dollars from Queensland alone... Isn't that just mind-blowing?
There are some really really greedy and stupid people out there. It just serves as a reminder of how dumb people are and how isolated I must be from people like that for one reason or another. I really don't think I even KNOW someone dumb enough to fall for one of those scams.
Where are these people? How is it that they have any money at all? It's just staggering to think that they're allowed to vote.
It makes it fairly obvious why spamming works so well. I'd speculate that the people just dumb enough to make spamming a lucrative business are a lot smarter than the ones needed to make 419 scams successful.
It feels like standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, where you're just in awe at the magnitude of it all.
I'm an idiot for not being a gullible boob?
I claim that you're, at best, someone who is a sucker for press releases -- although it's also possible that you're a scum-sucking AC sock puppet.
You just don't see REAL discoveries made like this.
Look at the recent announcement on using stem cells to repair nerve damage in rats, for example. That smells like science. When I read the initial annoucement, I believed that the results of well-done experiments were being reported. Scientists the world over have been experimenting with stem cells for a decade, trying to figure out how to use their unique properties to heal the human body. We've been reading about little steps of progress here or there, but these big breakthroughs are never free. They take time for scientists to work out all the problems. Even now, they're not ready to use this particular technique on human beings. They'll spend years experimenting on pigs, then chimps before they start working on human beings. If (big "if") they can get the same types of results with human beings that they did with the rats, it's still another 5 to 10 years away.
So, I'm not so much arguing what's possible. I'm just pointing out how easily the Slashdot community (seems to) believe any press release that surfaces. It's an almost religious-like gullibility, with belief in science fiction replacing belief in an afterlife.
The sad thing to me is that capital will be wasted on this junk science, rather than going to more likely successes like the aforementioned stem cell research.
I'm curious... when you folks read an article like this, do you automatically believe it?
Personally, when I see "filed for a patent earlier this month", "testing it on a dozen patients", and "commercialization in two years" -- coupled with a science-fiction-like technology -- I think "BULLSHIT".
Just add it to the list of other bullshit vaporware impractical/impossible inventions that show up every once in a while trying to grab funding/sucker dollars: holographic memory, ridiculous compression technologies, flying cars, perpetual motion machines, etc.
I find it pretty amazing that almost all of the responses in this thread just assume that these guys are telling the truth about their "discovery". I'd love to be proven wrong. I'd love to see a new miraculous bone and tooth growing technology be discovered... but scientific and religious claims are easy to make. It's easy to put out a press release. It's hard to prove miraculous things. It's hard to provide evidence for the seemingly-unbelievable.
I've got some mod points, but unfortunately there's no choice for "completely missed the sarcasm".
IBM doesn't want to point their customers and potential customers to web sites that describe how to use MySQL, then have to tack on a "... and then here's how you can use OUR product with it."
They want to keep the user firmly in their court for the entire exercise, so this approach makes sense from their perspective.
Plus, it's easier to follow one tutorial than to have to skip around multiple ones.
Secondly, its "paid", not payed. Just FYI. ;-)
;-)
It's "it's", not "its". Just FYI.
Just look for the links to job sites and the job-finding recommendations here. Ignore all the morons with the "great advice" on how to live life. Shit, we're all nerds here reading slashdot. We may know about finding computer-related work, but we know nothing about having real lives. ;)
On an individual level, that can be true; although for anyone who has played competition paint ball, you know that even modern warfar survival keenly depends upon your skills in battle. However, look at it at the macro level. The overall outcome of the war isn't an accident. The strongest/most skillful armies tend to win.
Over time, though, those losses added up. People began to realize that if we were able to understand so many of the mysteries that we once believed were solely the domain of the gods... maybe *all* of the mysteries of the gods were capable of being understood. When that happened, religions got scared. They slammed down hard as a defensive measure.
So, NO, the way that religions turned away from Science wasn't just some curious social shift caused by mysterious factors. It was a direct response by religion against an encroacher upon the base of its power.
This is really just a straw man. Find a mainstream or even published atheist who is of the "strong" variety who claims to know that a God or god-like things cannot exist somewhere in the unknown places of existence. I (and most intellectually-grounded atheists) would be willing to brand such strong atheists as crackpots who are just as guilty of illogical thinking as the most raving Islamic fanatic. So in reality, there aren't many (if any) scientists out there claiming that God *cannot* exist in some form or fashion. That whole stereotype is mostly a concoction of religious types who want an absurd-sounding target to shoot at.
The logic of faith is as solid as a rock. You just have to look below the covers to see it. For example, religion is about the power to control human beings. It makes perfectly logical sense that in order to maximize that control, you have to keep some dominion over things that are "only for God". If human beings felt like there was no other source of knowledge or power in the universe that they could tap into (God), then they would have no need of worship.
Sure, there's no real logic in the statements of the religious, but there's a strong logic in why those lies are so strongly propagated by them through the rest of society. I'm not saying that the Pope is intentionally lying, by the way. The memes around religion are so strong that they lead to those lies... but the memes themselves are entirely logical.