The only way to provide global education and health care services in coming decades at reasonable cost and broad coverage is via space-based communication systems.
Interesting! I wasn't aware that the internet has already been declared useless in that regard.
Goal #1 - For the strongest possible economy, we need to create the largest possible pool of consumers, and those consumers need to have money to spend.
I thought the first goal was not to injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
I worked down at Kennedy Space Center, in the old Flight Crew Training building. It had a crawlspace that was used to run wires, which was accessible by pulling up one of the big, heavy floor tiles (there was a special tile-pulling tool). The crawlspace was maybe three feet deep -- with the bottom foot or so consisting of old cables, dating back to the Apollo days. Pulling up a floor tile always reminded me of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark -- all that was missing was a dropped torch and Indy saying "Snakes... Why did it have to be snakes?" Anyway, every time they tried to clean out these wires, they ended up knocking out something important, so eventually they just let them accumulate.
One time we had to run a network cable from one end of the building to the other -- nearly 100 meters -- and the only way we could figure out to do it was to send someone down there to crawl it through. I'm glad I didn't draw the short straw that day...
Maybe not three hundred. But what if the number were a millon? An immortal being (i.e., one for whom there was no such thing as a natural cause of death) would probably be very risk-averse. [...] If alien civilizations discovered immortality first, then why would they risk life and limb in something as reckless as space travel?
Nope, I disagree. People would go along with their day-to-day routines as they always would, without any greater risk-aversion. It's fairly common to live to 100 now, but the knowledge that this is possible doesn't make people live any more carefully.
A lot of science fiction writers like to envision some new technology causing a sea change in people's attitudes around the world. The truth is that we're creatures of habit and instinct, and despite what Star Trek suggests, recklessness and bigotry and cruelty and any other negative human trait you can imagine will survive indefinitely long into the future.
I almost posted this exact same thing, but luckily decided to scan the comments first.
Yes, there are problems with the idea, as others pointed out (namely that investors might somehow encourage terrorism). Whether there might be some remedy to these problems is unsure. But, to use a horribly overused cliche, Poindexter was thinking outside the box, and decided to examine the worth of an idea that was effective at predicting other difficult-to-predict events.
It is said in advertising that the average consumer can only remember one sentence about any product. Unfortunately most people, with the help of the media, seem to already have their One Sentence formed about Poindexter, and as such, will treat any new idea of his as misguided.
We have allready seen the reaction "Property Holders" over downloading music, what is the likely upshot of being able to copy physical objects[?]
Interesting to think about, but in all likelihood, the fallout will not be as scary as the current RIAA witchhunt -- for two reasons.
One, it's a lot easier for a layperson to design, say, a chair than to write a good song. There will be plenty of designs floating around for freeware versions of most household objects.
Two, song swapping is easy because you can copy the original product very simply. Physical objects are far different in this regard -- there is no way in the foreseeable future to copy them, given the object itself. It's not like you can just snap a picture of your blender, feed it into your computer, and have it print one out for you. Designs will have to start from scratch, and as such, will typically end up rather different from the original.
What scares me is the idea of people trading designs that are a far cry from being UL listed...
Sure, spam has cost me a lot over the years, but if this deal comes through helping Mrs. Mariam Sese-Seko (widow of late president Mobuto Sese-Seko of Zaire) transfer her money out of the country, I'll have more than broke even!
I'm going to host one of these in November. Everyone will gather in a bar beforehand. Then I'll hand everybody a slip a paper that says, "Go and VOTE."
But the EXACT SAME PROBLEMS of planning and learning are there to solve in a simulated environment. And you can vary the environment and rerun the simulation with a few mouse clicks. Or run it ten thousand times if you want.
People just like to work with robots because they're cool.
Our computers are probably 10,000 times faster than they were twenty years ago. But operating them is much more complex. You all have experienced a PC crash or the disappearance of a large Internet site.
Oh yeah. My TRS-80 used to NEVER crash twenty years ago when I accessed LARGE INTERNET SITES.
I was fairly engaged with this article (despite a little too much anthropomorphising of the results of deep computations) until the ridiculous conclusions at the end!
Yeah, every chess program has a huge openings library to consult with, while a man has none.
Baloney. A man is allowed to memorize as many openings as he wants, just as the computer has "memorized" them.
Having found no other way to make the program good at endgame, program developers started feeding them databases of common endgames.
Again, so? Humans are allowed to memorize as much endgame stuff as they want. Why should computers be disallowed this?
The above-described matches were played between a man and a multi-processor machine. The processors were prompting to each other and exchanging ideas. This doesn't seem fair.
Awwww... Why the hell not? Human brains aren't single processor; why should computer opponents have to be?
Chess programs have a lot of memory at hand. It's like they have a million of chessboards to make moves on. And the human has none.
The same fallacy, repeated over and over again. The human doesn't have none, he has as many as he cares to remember.
If I were Kasparov or Kramnik, I would come to the match against the computer with my own board and played all variants on it. The PC can't see, you know.
And if I were on the computer team, I'd let you. Knock yourself out! Go ahead and fiddle with your chessboard when you could be considering countless more positions in your head.
All the games the computer won in the above-described matches were won due to blunders of the human opponents. They blundered everything: a piece, a checkmate, a draw, an opening. The cheater can't win without that.
So, the humans are cheaters then, because they capitalized on computer blunders?
When Asimov conceived of psychohistory... [...] As you might have guessed I'm a big fan of the books and all of Asimov's writings. His writing style was not what you would call sublime, but you can't beat his production of great ideas and well-conceived universes.
N.b.: Asimov didn't conceive of psychohistory; it was his editor who supplied that backbone and told Asimov to go off and write a story around it.
It is you who is being ignorant. Read a book on chaos theory already, you obviously have no conception of it. All the scientists you mentioned DID think in terms of lost causes; it's just that they only worked on things that they DIDN'T think were lost causes. I'm sure each of them in turn would put psychohistory in the same bin as astrology.
Where are the scientists working on psychohistory today? It would appear all the world's scientists agree with me. Including some of the ones you listed who are still alive.
I know I said you can't predict the future, but I will make this one prediction: no progress will ever be made towards any working theory of how psychohistory might even begin to be feasible. And Asimov fans will forever be saying that it's possible. The burden of proof is on them.
Remember, they laughed at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Spot on. And in addition, chance accidents and natural occurrences can have significant effects on the direction that societal progress takes. Faulty O-rings or chunks of ice can delay or put an end to space programs. New viruses like SARS springing up can depress economies and change people's migration patterns. Hanging chads can lead to countries being invaded. Etc. etc. etc. They say that you should never say something can't be done, but I'm sorry, trying to predict the future this way is a lost cause. Psychohistory is psychobabble.
SARS is a virus, not a bacteria. Whatever decreased resistance to bacteria (if any) we have due to anti-bacterial agents has NO effect on our resistance to viruses.
If you KNEW your friend survey wasn't a statistically good sampling, how can you use it to support your argument?
Singapore is a western country, with a high GDP, a less corrupt government than the US (read corporate influence). The racial mix of SG is Malay, Chinese and others, christian, muslim and buddhist in strong numbers. There is no clear majority [do all people with 'slitty eyes' look the same to you?].
Oh really. Funny, the references I come across seem to indicate that 75% of the population is of Chinese descent. Is that not a clear enough majority to you? Don't counter the original poster's misinformation with more misinformation.
the New York Times reported that Coke was testing a vending machine that could sense the outside temperature and "automatically raise prices for its drinks in hot weather
Just moved to Singapore from the states, and I was amazed to see that when it rains here, stores DROP the price of umbrellas, on the spot. From something like S$9 to S$6 (which is only about US $4, for a pretty nice umbrella!) It's downright unAmerican, I'd say...
Slashdot Mirror
...for those bands that choose not to get in bed with the RIAA, and allow their music to be distributed freely.
Interesting! I wasn't aware that the internet has already been declared useless in that regard.
I thought the first goal was not to injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
I hate "Me, too!" style posts, but let me just say, "Hear, hear!". I read his "The Terminal Experiment", and it was excrutiating...
I worked down at Kennedy Space Center, in the old Flight Crew Training building. It had a crawlspace that was used to run wires, which was accessible by pulling up one of the big, heavy floor tiles (there was a special tile-pulling tool). The crawlspace was maybe three feet deep -- with the bottom foot or so consisting of old cables, dating back to the Apollo days. Pulling up a floor tile always reminded me of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark -- all that was missing was a dropped torch and Indy saying "Snakes... Why did it have to be snakes?" Anyway, every time they tried to clean out these wires, they ended up knocking out something important, so eventually they just let them accumulate.
One time we had to run a network cable from one end of the building to the other -- nearly 100 meters -- and the only way we could figure out to do it was to send someone down there to crawl it through. I'm glad I didn't draw the short straw that day...
Those screen shots look two-dimensional to me.
Maybe not three hundred. But what if the number were a millon? An immortal being (i.e., one for whom there was no such thing as a natural cause of death) would probably be very risk-averse. [...] If alien civilizations discovered immortality first, then why would they risk life and limb in something as reckless as space travel?
Nope, I disagree. People would go along with their day-to-day routines as they always would, without any greater risk-aversion. It's fairly common to live to 100 now, but the knowledge that this is possible doesn't make people live any more carefully.
A lot of science fiction writers like to envision some new technology causing a sea change in people's attitudes around the world. The truth is that we're creatures of habit and instinct, and despite what Star Trek suggests, recklessness and bigotry and cruelty and any other negative human trait you can imagine will survive indefinitely long into the future.
Dear Georgy:
What do the fortune-cookie fortunes taped to your monitor say?
http://www.georgyforgov.com/pics.htm
Also, I notice the problem of over-breeding of stuffed animals has spread to your office. What would you do to control their proliferation?
I almost posted this exact same thing, but luckily decided to scan the comments first.
Yes, there are problems with the idea, as others pointed out (namely that investors might somehow encourage terrorism). Whether there might be some remedy to these problems is unsure. But, to use a horribly overused cliche, Poindexter was thinking outside the box, and decided to examine the worth of an idea that was effective at predicting other difficult-to-predict events.
It is said in advertising that the average consumer can only remember one sentence about any product. Unfortunately most people, with the help of the media, seem to already have their One Sentence formed about Poindexter, and as such, will treat any new idea of his as misguided.
We have allready seen the reaction "Property Holders" over downloading music, what is the likely upshot of being able to copy physical objects[?]
Interesting to think about, but in all likelihood, the fallout will not be as scary as the current RIAA witchhunt -- for two reasons.
One, it's a lot easier for a layperson to design, say, a chair than to write a good song. There will be plenty of designs floating around for freeware versions of most household objects.
Two, song swapping is easy because you can copy the original product very simply. Physical objects are far different in this regard -- there is no way in the foreseeable future to copy them, given the object itself. It's not like you can just snap a picture of your blender, feed it into your computer, and have it print one out for you. Designs will have to start from scratch, and as such, will typically end up rather different from the original.
What scares me is the idea of people trading designs that are a far cry from being UL listed...
Sure, spam has cost me a lot over the years, but if this deal comes through helping Mrs. Mariam Sese-Seko (widow of late president Mobuto Sese-Seko of Zaire) transfer her money out of the country, I'll have more than broke even!
I'm going to host one of these in November. Everyone will gather in a bar beforehand. Then I'll hand everybody a slip a paper that says, "Go and VOTE."
So, how long before they make a t-shirt out of this stuff, so I can program what it says?
But the EXACT SAME PROBLEMS of planning and learning are there to solve in a simulated environment. And you can vary the environment and rerun the simulation with a few mouse clicks. Or run it ten thousand times if you want.
People just like to work with robots because they're cool.
human thought is not the be-all and end-all, and you can argue that it's not even that useful a problem.
Please do! I'd be curious to see such an argument. How in the HELL could it not be useful?
Oh yeah. My TRS-80 used to NEVER crash twenty years ago when I accessed LARGE INTERNET SITES.
Baloney. A man is allowed to memorize as many openings as he wants, just as the computer has "memorized" them.
Again, so? Humans are allowed to memorize as much endgame stuff as they want. Why should computers be disallowed this?
Awwww... Why the hell not? Human brains aren't single processor; why should computer opponents have to be?
The same fallacy, repeated over and over again. The human doesn't have none, he has as many as he cares to remember.
And if I were on the computer team, I'd let you. Knock yourself out! Go ahead and fiddle with your chessboard when you could be considering countless more positions in your head.
So, the humans are cheaters then, because they capitalized on computer blunders?
You want to impress me, build a helicopter so small it CAN'T drop a sugar cube into your cup of coffee.
When Asimov conceived of psychohistory...
[...]
As you might have guessed I'm a big fan of the books and all of Asimov's writings. His writing style was not what you would call sublime, but you can't beat his production of great ideas and well-conceived universes.
N.b.: Asimov didn't conceive of psychohistory; it was his editor who supplied that backbone and told Asimov to go off and write a story around it.
It is you who is being ignorant. Read a book on chaos theory already, you obviously have no conception of it. All the scientists you mentioned DID think in terms of lost causes; it's just that they only worked on things that they DIDN'T think were lost causes. I'm sure each of them in turn would put psychohistory in the same bin as astrology.
Where are the scientists working on psychohistory today? It would appear all the world's scientists agree with me. Including some of the ones you listed who are still alive.
I know I said you can't predict the future, but I will make this one prediction: no progress will ever be made towards any working theory of how psychohistory might even begin to be feasible. And Asimov fans will forever be saying that it's possible. The burden of proof is on them.
Remember, they laughed at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Spot on. And in addition, chance accidents and natural occurrences can have significant effects on the direction that societal progress takes. Faulty O-rings or chunks of ice can delay or put an end to space programs. New viruses like SARS springing up can depress economies and change people's migration patterns. Hanging chads can lead to countries being invaded. Etc. etc. etc. They say that you should never say something can't be done, but I'm sorry, trying to predict the future this way is a lost cause. Psychohistory is psychobabble.
Judging from the review of American Gods, I have to ask... Is there any science in it?
SARS is a virus, not a bacteria. Whatever decreased resistance to bacteria (if any) we have due to anti-bacterial agents has NO effect on our resistance to viruses.
If you KNEW your friend survey wasn't a statistically good sampling, how can you use it to support your argument?
Singapore is a western country, with a high GDP, a less corrupt government than the US (read corporate influence). The racial mix of SG is Malay, Chinese and others, christian, muslim and buddhist in strong numbers. There is no clear majority [do all people with 'slitty eyes' look the same to you?].
Oh really. Funny, the references I come across seem to indicate that 75% of the population is of Chinese descent. Is that not a clear enough majority to you? Don't counter the original poster's misinformation with more misinformation.
An American in Singapore
Just moved to Singapore from the states, and I was amazed to see that when it rains here, stores DROP the price of umbrellas, on the spot. From something like S$9 to S$6 (which is only about US $4, for a pretty nice umbrella!) It's downright unAmerican, I'd say...