I'm not a neurobiologist, but I expect that it's probably not so easy to teach anything even vaguely similar to human language to a group of just 25000 neurons.
Ethical concerns not just for the religious
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Flying By Brain
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I don't think it's reasonable how quickly most of you are dismissing the possibility of things like this having potential ethical concerns.
Being totally scientific about this, there is absolutely no reason to conclude that artificial "brains" we may make from neurons will not have consciousness. Certainly not consciousness at the level of humans, but it's still a completely valid concern.
If we go by the idea that the size of a brain is a good general indication of the degree to which it is conscious, then having manufactured devices containing these might not be horribly creepy, perhaps similar to having flies locked inside our devices. However, that principle of brain-size-to-consciousness corellation isn't at all proven, so we really don't know what we're doing here.
And if the size of anything like this ever approaches the order of magnitude of a mouse brain, I think then it could be considered quite distinctly creepy. Not to say it should never be done, but I think it would be good to keep potential ethical concerns in mind. At that point we would really be creating new types of sentient beings, which I think would raise quite a lot of complicated issues.
Saying that you "don't know anything specific" about the term "recursion" is a pretty ridiculous thing to say. If you're a programmer and don't know very clearly what recursion is (it's an extremely simple concept), then you're not just not a "good programmer", you're a fscking moron.
Now, having to think about how to do a specific thing recursively or something like that, that's completely different. And it doesn't sound like that's what the original poster meant.
I'll admit one thing I'm pretty naive about is how people get jobs.
If it's really as common as you say for rich people to get jobs from other rich people you know, then I totally agree you've got a point.
But all I was asking in the first place is whether someone hiring for a position would care at all if an applicant went to a well-known highly competitive school.
Though now that you bring it up, a bunch of rich people giving jobs to each other and making it harder for other equally qualified people to get jobs sounds pretty likely. And it sounds like a pretty fucking big problem.
I just wasn't thinking like that, I was thinking if employers think college is any sort of indicator of how good an employee someone will be. That question might be pretty irrelevant if people don't actually get jobs based on merit, I just didn't think of that. I guess I've just always assumed people get good jobs by demonstrating they're the best for the position, but I wouldn't be too surprised if that's mostly not true.
Just goes to show how naive rich little ivy league kids are. "Ohh, but that black kid got in, see it's not for just rich people."
Yeah, there are a lot of rich people. But the only explanation I see for that is that rich people generally do better in high school and on the SATs. Improving public education in poor areas sounds like the only way of fixing that to me. Or should schools just give up on academic standards entirely and admit people randomly?
I'm not sure what we're arguing here really, I just wanted to point out that being rich doesn't really have much to do with going to an Ivy league school; it's being well-educated and intelligent (at least as related to high school) that matters, which I admit corresponds pretty heavily with wealth at the moment.
All I was asking in my original post was whether employers EVER care about what college you went to. It seems to me that they shouldn't put much emphasis on it, but I really don't know anything about it.
I don't know what you mean by "ideals of someone like this"... there's definitely a problem if mostly people from rich families are getting an education and well-paying jobs, but I don't see how you can blame colleges for that.
And I still think your idea of Ivy league students all being obscenely rich is a little off... about half of the students get financial aid grants, and most of the rest have to take out a lot of loans.
For one thing, having extremely wealthy parents isn't necessary to go here... I know several people who go here for free because their parents don't make a lot of money. That's not just a fluke, it's that way for everyone who's not rich. The school pays for everything past the level it determines your parents should pay based on their income. That means, for the less wealthy, that they won't have to pay any more than they would to go to a state college; probably it will be considerably less. The people who don't get need-based financial aid pay for most of their education with loans they'll have to pay back themselves after college.
Going to an Ivy league school is much MORE possible for poor people than going to any other private schools, since they have excellent financial aid programs.
Also, I just don't think a business would be willing to hire someone they didn't consider the best candidate, just to support the "aristocracy".
Had Half-Life 2 been released about 6 months ago when it was planned for, I know lots of people who had intended to buy it... and these are even people who never buy anything, since downloading games is so easy. HL2's graphics would have been so very advanced had it not been delayed repeatedly, but by now it won't really have much advantage over other games' graphics by the time it comes out this summer. I expect it'll still be a great game, with pretty exceptional graphics, but a lot more people were excited by it before.
The way this article is described by the submitter and poster, the law appears to force all software to be Free Software, which I totally disagree with.
As a law that would force only the government to use Free Software, which would give the government and the people full knowledge of the workings of important government software, I think it is very reasonable.
Linux is what nearly all of the owners of developer model VR3s use. It is done by connecting the VR3 to the serial port on the PC using a cradle and cable, and connecting to a pppd on the PC with software included on the VR3.
I've had a developer model VR3 for a few months now, which I believe has little to no significant differences from the just-released consumer model.
I really like it. Probably the biggest benefit is that it runs Linux and X, giving it a huge amount of software that can easily be cross-compiled to run on the VR3.
The posts I've read so far seem to indicate that people are unsure of this... ALL OF THE VR3 SOFTWARE IS OPEN SOURCE, which gives all the typical advantages that I won't mention.
The developer unit was completely upgradeable, as in you can totally replace the entire OS, including the kernel, if you want to, and that seems to also be the case with the consumer unit.
The VR3 seems so much more versatile and open than the typical PDA's, and software can be written and ported to it very easily because of the familiar programs and libraries it uses.
If they can do this, they should be able to soon have people able to control things that aren't normally part of the human body with their brains. It seems that the idea of dragoons in Starcraft (robots controlled by crippled warriors as if it was their body) is nearly possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a neurobiologist, but I expect that it's probably not so easy to teach anything even vaguely similar to human language to a group of just 25000 neurons.
I don't think it's reasonable how quickly most of you are dismissing the possibility of things like this having potential ethical concerns.
Being totally scientific about this, there is absolutely no reason to conclude that artificial "brains" we may make from neurons will not have consciousness. Certainly not consciousness at the level of humans, but it's still a completely valid concern.
If we go by the idea that the size of a brain is a good general indication of the degree to which it is conscious, then having manufactured devices containing these might not be horribly creepy, perhaps similar to having flies locked inside our devices. However, that principle of brain-size-to-consciousness corellation isn't at all proven, so we really don't know what we're doing here.
And if the size of anything like this ever approaches the order of magnitude of a mouse brain, I think then it could be considered quite distinctly creepy. Not to say it should never be done, but I think it would be good to keep potential ethical concerns in mind. At that point we would really be creating new types of sentient beings, which I think would raise quite a lot of complicated issues.
Saying that you "don't know anything specific" about the term "recursion" is a pretty ridiculous thing to say. If you're a programmer and don't know very clearly what recursion is (it's an extremely simple concept), then you're not just not a "good programmer", you're a fscking moron.
Now, having to think about how to do a specific thing recursively or something like that, that's completely different. And it doesn't sound like that's what the original poster meant.
I'll admit one thing I'm pretty naive about is how people get jobs.
If it's really as common as you say for rich people to get jobs from other rich people you know, then I totally agree you've got a point.
But all I was asking in the first place is whether someone hiring for a position would care at all if an applicant went to a well-known highly competitive school.
Though now that you bring it up, a bunch of rich people giving jobs to each other and making it harder for other equally qualified people to get jobs sounds pretty likely. And it sounds like a pretty fucking big problem.
I just wasn't thinking like that, I was thinking if employers think college is any sort of indicator of how good an employee someone will be. That question might be pretty irrelevant if people don't actually get jobs based on merit, I just didn't think of that. I guess I've just always assumed people get good jobs by demonstrating they're the best for the position, but I wouldn't be too surprised if that's mostly not true.
Just goes to show how naive rich little ivy league kids are. "Ohh, but that black kid got in, see it's not for just rich people."
Yeah, there are a lot of rich people. But the only explanation I see for that is that rich people generally do better in high school and on the SATs. Improving public education in poor areas sounds like the only way of fixing that to me. Or should schools just give up on academic standards entirely and admit people randomly?
I'm not sure what we're arguing here really, I just wanted to point out that being rich doesn't really have much to do with going to an Ivy league school; it's being well-educated and intelligent (at least as related to high school) that matters, which I admit corresponds pretty heavily with wealth at the moment.
All I was asking in my original post was whether employers EVER care about what college you went to. It seems to me that they shouldn't put much emphasis on it, but I really don't know anything about it.
I don't know what you mean by "ideals of someone like this"... there's definitely a problem if mostly people from rich families are getting an education and well-paying jobs, but I don't see how you can blame colleges for that.
And I still think your idea of Ivy league students all being obscenely rich is a little off... about half of the students get financial aid grants, and most of the rest have to take out a lot of loans.
Huh, most of that sounds like bullshit to me.
For one thing, having extremely wealthy parents isn't necessary to go here... I know several people who go here for free because their parents don't make a lot of money. That's not just a fluke, it's that way for everyone who's not rich. The school pays for everything past the level it determines your parents should pay based on their income. That means, for the less wealthy, that they won't have to pay any more than they would to go to a state college; probably it will be considerably less. The people who don't get need-based financial aid pay for most of their education with loans they'll have to pay back themselves after college.
Going to an Ivy league school is much MORE possible for poor people than going to any other private schools, since they have excellent financial aid programs.
Also, I just don't think a business would be willing to hire someone they didn't consider the best candidate, just to support the "aristocracy".
I've seen people say this lots of times: "Unless you went to an Ivy League school, no one cares what college you went to."
My question is, does going to an Ivy League school (as I do) actually help in getting jobs?
Had Half-Life 2 been released about 6 months ago when it was planned for, I know lots of people who had intended to buy it... and these are even people who never buy anything, since downloading games is so easy.
HL2's graphics would have been so very advanced had it not been delayed repeatedly, but by now it won't really have much advantage over other games' graphics by the time it comes out this summer. I expect it'll still be a great game, with pretty exceptional graphics, but a lot more people were excited by it before.
You clearly didn't read the article.
He goes on to explain what he means by those statements, and nothing in your comment has any relevance to what he wrote.
The way this article is described by the submitter and poster, the law appears to force all software to be Free Software, which I totally disagree with.
As a law that would force only the government to use Free Software, which would give the government and the people full knowledge of the workings of important government software, I think it is very reasonable.
Linux is what nearly all of the owners of developer model VR3s use. It is done by connecting the VR3 to the serial port on the PC using a cradle and cable, and connecting to a pppd on the PC with software included on the VR3.
I've had a developer model VR3 for a few months now, which I believe has little to no significant differences from the just-released consumer model.
I really like it. Probably the biggest benefit is that it runs Linux and X, giving it a huge amount of software that can easily be cross-compiled to run on the VR3.
The posts I've read so far seem to indicate that people are unsure of this... ALL OF THE VR3 SOFTWARE IS OPEN SOURCE, which gives all the typical advantages that I won't mention.
The developer unit was completely upgradeable, as in you can totally replace the entire OS, including the kernel, if you want to, and that seems to also be the case with the consumer unit.
The VR3 seems so much more versatile and open than the typical PDA's, and software can be written and ported to it very easily because of the familiar programs and libraries it uses.
If they can do this, they should be able to soon have people able to control things that aren't normally part of the human body with their brains. It seems that the idea of dragoons in Starcraft (robots controlled by crippled warriors as if it was their body) is nearly possible.
I think it's mainly disgusting, though also quite a bit stupid.