I predict that, far from scoring a point for physicists over psychics, this technology will be used as fodder for psychics as a possible explanation for how remote viewing might have an actual basis in real science.
It doesn't matter that they don't understand the mechanisms behind the proposal.
It doesn't matter that this technology requires extra apparatus that wouldn't be there for a human doing remote viewing.
It doesn't matter that they have not yet firmly established that remote viewing even exists.
If people want to believe in something enough, anything that sounds like supporting evidence will be accepted.
If you worked in the building -- sure, you'd want it made of better materials, but in the meantime, would you want the instructions for making it collapse widely disseminated?
How many times can people from a parallel universe visit ours before we start considering this parallel universe part of our own? Sheesh, these parallel universe people are starting to outnumber Klingons.
The only way Trek could be any worse would be if it was sung.
Who are the "experts" they claim to have fooled? Where are the transcripts of the session? Where is the web interface to the program? I've seen enough similar claims to bet that it's monumentally disappointing.
AI is full of boastful claims. This article is full of them, but practically devoid of any useful details.
So you're saying that any claims of conciousness should have to be reviewed by peers who (by your own admission) can't agree on what conciousness is? This makes no sense to me.
What's important for those working in AI who make some claim of machine conciousness is to define up front what definition of conciousness they are working with. Sure, every definition of conciousness will have its opponents, especially if it is rigorous. There are those who will never admit that it can even be defined, for to do so would (in their opinion) reduce our brains to algorithmic machines. But I have no beef with those who make claims of machine conciousness, as long as they define what they mean.
I worked last year for a startup in the on-demand book business, so let me try to address some of the issues and questions raised here.
1. Besides the industry-wide drying up of venture capital, the big problem we had was a cart-before-the-horse sort of thing. That is, no bookstore wanted us there without a huge database of titles, and no publisher wanted to supply us with titles unless we were in a lot of bookstores. Still, there was more than a modicum of interest expressed by a number of the major book distributors.
2. Don't kid yourself that these books printed on demand will be cheaper. Nobody will start charging you less for your books out of the goodness of their hearts. There are even justifications for increasing the price.
3. New books that you have stored as PDF or something are a snap, but there is considerable labor involved in scanning in existing books so that they can be printed on-demand. Basically, chop the cover off, scan it, (rescan it because the colors are all off;-), feed the pages into a scanner, digitally remove the scanner shadow from along the binding edge for each page, look over everything to make sure the pictures scanned okay and no pages stuck... It's a huge pain in the ass.
4. As someone else pointed out, the big win here is getting access to books that are out-of-print. Once you have the database built up, there's no reason any book should ever go out of print. A lot of our short-order print requests were for long out-of-print manuals and such. And the other big win is for new writers; there's no risk at all for a publisher to put a new writer's book into the database and if it succeeds, great.
It's an idea whose time will come, obviously. I forget the exact statistic, but something like 40% of the people who request a particular book from the Barnes and Noble information counter come away disappointed, despite their having hundreds of thousands of books in stock. The lost sales figures are staggering.
Here's another very interesting possible application for you to stew over -- machines on the street corner that print you up the daily paper on demand.
Fifty quatloos to the first person to set up a
web site that people can go to that will use this
"feature" to automatically run the patch install
on their machines.
If the war on drugs is any indication, this figure is a gross exaggeration. Whenever you talk of the "street value" of the narcotics confiscated in a bust, know that you're hearing total bull. Why? It makes the "good" guys feel more important, and the bad guys worse. (Very stupid, actually, because the real effect is that kids hear the figures and think, "Wow, you can make some serious jack selling drugs.") I wouldn't be at all surprised if the same sort of crap going in the sensationalized war on viruses.
Don't get me wrong, I think virus writers should be strung up by their eyelids...
"Technology people never gave their stuff away," Schroeder says. "But now folks are saying, 'You mean the New England Journal of Medicine is charging people?' "
What planet is she talking about, where technology people never gave their stuff away?
"We wanted to put people's fingers into light sockets," Schroeder says of this year's agenda. "You don't have to look at polls to know how young people like to get their music: for free."
Ah, willful ignorance. Um, maybe Ms. Schroeder should look at a poll or two.
I was a college student at the University of Central Florida at the time, and had worked at the space center the previous summer. I was up early for a class when I saw on the TV that it was about to launch, so I went outside to the open space between the dorms. This was about 25-30 miles away. Saw Challenger's exhaust trail draw a line upward from behind the university buildings, and then suddenly and unexpectedly split in two. One of the other students standing out there said, "Is it supposed to do that?" And I said, "No, it isn't..."
I loved Ender's Game, and Speaker for the Dead. But, about halfway through Xenocide, something began to dawn on me. I had seen these characters before.
All the characters, I noticed suddenly, had the same goody-goody intelligence, the same over-analyze-everything nature, and the same (or diametrically opposing) moral compass. It included everyone -- good or bad, human or alien, biological or computer. Ender. Peter. The piggies. Jane. The hive queen.
I don't think there's a single good resource for what you're looking for, but there are some near misses... Here are my recommendations:
1. http://travel.yahoo.com/ -- if you find your country under their "Featured destinations", it will have an "Essentials" link that leads to "Money and Costs". From this you can get a rough estimate of at least meal costs, from which you can extrapolate.
2. http://www.overseasjobs.com has a "Resources" link that has a few items about living overseas. You can also gather a fair estimation of typical salaries by rooting through their job listings. This doesn't necessarily tell you about the cost of living there, but it's a start.
3. http://www.realrates.com also has some salary comparisons; mostly for the US, but some overseas. Again, this isn't exactly cost of living. But they have some other resources at that site that might be useful.
4. Plug in "international AND consulting" into any of the plethora of job search engines and see what companies are offering (and what resume submitters are expecting).
Hope this helps.
From the IOCCC page (www.ioccc.org):
What's New?
13 Oct 2000: Good news! The main judge (Landon Curt Noll) is back! We hope that the judging will go faster now.
I suspect the number of entries each year is growing exponentially. Patience, folks! There's a big workload, and the judges are doing on a strictly voluntary basis.
>You don't initialize b before using it in the condition of the for loop.
Ah, but a variable declared globally will be initialized to zero.
>An ANSI "main" must have return type int.
I don't believe the IOCCC requires ANSI. I know many winning submissions have not done this.
Slashdot Mirror
Lucas didn't sell out... NSYNC did.
It used to be about the music, man!
Tell me that thing doesn't look like the underwater flapping alien in The Abyss.
First use of the phrase "cow orker" -- May of 1989:
g ar d.Midgard.MN.ORG&output=gplain
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1070%40mid
I predict that, far from scoring a point for physicists over psychics, this technology will be used as fodder for psychics as a possible explanation for how remote viewing might have an actual basis in real science.
It doesn't matter that they don't understand the mechanisms behind the proposal.
It doesn't matter that this technology requires extra apparatus that wouldn't be there for a human doing remote viewing.
It doesn't matter that they have not yet firmly established that remote viewing even exists.
If people want to believe in something enough, anything that sounds like supporting evidence will be accepted.
...and when he went around to open the door for her, hanging from the door handle was a BLOODY VOLT METER!
If you worked in the building -- sure, you'd want it made of better materials, but in the meantime, would you want the instructions for making it collapse widely disseminated?
How many times can people from a parallel universe visit ours before we start considering this parallel universe part of our own? Sheesh, these parallel universe people are starting to outnumber Klingons.
The only way Trek could be any worse would be if it was sung.
Who are the "experts" they claim to have fooled? Where are the transcripts of the session? Where is the web interface to the program? I've seen enough similar claims to bet that it's monumentally disappointing.
AI is full of boastful claims. This article is full of them, but practically devoid of any useful details.
So you're saying that any claims of conciousness should have to be reviewed by peers who (by your own admission) can't agree on what conciousness is? This makes no sense to me. What's important for those working in AI who make some claim of machine conciousness is to define up front what definition of conciousness they are working with. Sure, every definition of conciousness will have its opponents, especially if it is rigorous. There are those who will never admit that it can even be defined, for to do so would (in their opinion) reduce our brains to algorithmic machines. But I have no beef with those who make claims of machine conciousness, as long as they define what they mean.
As soon as you can prove that you realize you're playing a game of chess, I'll be impressed.
Patently false. I've written a chess program that beats me consistently.
>Then why hasn't a computer been able to beat >humans consistenly?
From the article:
That not good enough for you?1. Besides the industry-wide drying up of venture capital, the big problem we had was a cart-before-the-horse sort of thing. That is, no bookstore wanted us there without a huge database of titles, and no publisher wanted to supply us with titles unless we were in a lot of bookstores. Still, there was more than a modicum of interest expressed by a number of the major book distributors.
2. Don't kid yourself that these books printed on demand will be cheaper. Nobody will start charging you less for your books out of the goodness of their hearts. There are even justifications for increasing the price.
3. New books that you have stored as PDF or something are a snap, but there is considerable labor involved in scanning in existing books so that they can be printed on-demand. Basically, chop the cover off, scan it, (rescan it because the colors are all off ;-), feed the pages into a scanner, digitally remove the scanner shadow from along the binding edge for each page, look over everything to make sure the pictures scanned okay and no pages stuck... It's a huge pain in the ass.
4. As someone else pointed out, the big win here is getting access to books that are out-of-print. Once you have the database built up, there's no reason any book should ever go out of print. A lot of our short-order print requests were for long out-of-print manuals and such. And the other big win is for new writers; there's no risk at all for a publisher to put a new writer's book into the database and if it succeeds, great.
It's an idea whose time will come, obviously. I forget the exact statistic, but something like 40% of the people who request a particular book from the Barnes and Noble information counter come away disappointed, despite their having hundreds of thousands of books in stock. The lost sales figures are staggering.
Here's another very interesting possible application for you to stew over -- machines on the street corner that print you up the daily paper on demand.
Fifty quatloos to the first person to set up a web site that people can go to that will use this "feature" to automatically run the patch install on their machines.
Here's some random text so that the lame lameness filter doesn't accuse me of using all caps. 2001-03-13 11:23:31
Don't get me wrong, I think virus writers should be strung up by their eyelids...
I was a college student at the University of Central Florida at the time, and had worked at the space center the previous summer. I was up early for a class when I saw on the TV that it was about to launch, so I went outside to the open space between the dorms. This was about 25-30 miles away. Saw Challenger's exhaust trail draw a line upward from behind the university buildings, and then suddenly and unexpectedly split in two. One of the other students standing out there said, "Is it supposed to do that?" And I said, "No, it isn't..."
All the characters, I noticed suddenly, had the same goody-goody intelligence, the same over-analyze-everything nature, and the same (or diametrically opposing) moral compass. It included everyone -- good or bad, human or alien, biological or computer. Ender. Peter. The piggies. Jane. The hive queen.
Where had I seen these people before?
Then it dawned on me.
Orson Scott Card, stop watching Star Trek.
I don't think there's a single good resource for what you're looking for, but there are some near misses... Here are my recommendations: 1. http://travel.yahoo.com/ -- if you find your country under their "Featured destinations", it will have an "Essentials" link that leads to "Money and Costs". From this you can get a rough estimate of at least meal costs, from which you can extrapolate. 2. http://www.overseasjobs.com has a "Resources" link that has a few items about living overseas. You can also gather a fair estimation of typical salaries by rooting through their job listings. This doesn't necessarily tell you about the cost of living there, but it's a start. 3. http://www.realrates.com also has some salary comparisons; mostly for the US, but some overseas. Again, this isn't exactly cost of living. But they have some other resources at that site that might be useful. 4. Plug in "international AND consulting" into any of the plethora of job search engines and see what companies are offering (and what resume submitters are expecting). Hope this helps.
From the IOCCC page (www.ioccc.org): What's New? 13 Oct 2000: Good news! The main judge (Landon Curt Noll) is back! We hope that the judging will go faster now. I suspect the number of entries each year is growing exponentially. Patience, folks! There's a big workload, and the judges are doing on a strictly voluntary basis.
>You don't initialize b before using it in the condition of the for loop. Ah, but a variable declared globally will be initialized to zero. >An ANSI "main" must have return type int. I don't believe the IOCCC requires ANSI. I know many winning submissions have not done this.