Then those are your goals. They aren't enevitable. And even if they are progress for you, they still aren't Progress (note the capital P), since there is no such animal.
I have this doubt that human beings are the optimum form of life, and if we are, then that's pretty sad.
Of course, that's assuming that there is an optimum form of life. Most people look at evolution and natural selection as having some purpose or goal. It doesn't. It's simply organisms reacting with the environment, trying to continue to exist. There is no optimum form of life, just like there is no external meaning to it. Meaning and goodness are applied to life by intelligence, trying to make some sense of it. There is nothing intrinsically better about being a human, or being a cyborg. If a human thinks they are better off being a human, then that's fine. If a human thinks that they're better off being a cyborg (or a pure computer) then that's fine. Just don't force everyone else into it! This singularity may be able to think faster, or be more creative, or whatever. It doesn't matter. Progress is defined by ourselves. It's not needed, and it isn't even really very important. It's just a filter through which we see change. Yes, it's a good way to measure movement towards a goal, but always remember that these goals are never external, never fated, always created by ourselves.
anyway, no, unionizing is not necessary. if your job sucks, leave it and find one that doesn't.
Keep telling yourself that when the next recession hits. Assuming you aren't laid off (you will be willing to put up with a lot more (individually) than a union would be. Remember, unions are the organizations that gave us 40 hour work weeks, 2 day weekends, health benefits, and vacation time. I wouldn't knock them.
First of all, Rochester University does not exist. It's the University of Rochester, or UR. Second of all, Rochester Institute of Technology, or RIT, is a different school, even in a different town. I looked at both, and graduated from UR. We UR people really don't like getting confused with RIT. UR is a science and humanities school. Our Computer Science program is a science program, not a technical one. RIT is a technical school. UR is smaller, but its reputation is much greater, and has been invited at least once to join the Ivy League.
Run programs Alter system settings Allow your programs to communicate with each other (drag and drop, calling up a browser when you click on a URL)
Actually, I don't think that's the case. I mean, the second two I agree with. But I don't think that the user (as opposed to server) interface should specifically let you run programs. Look at OpenDoc, and how it's being implemented in KDE 2.0. It says that documents/objects/files (however you want to refer to them. I prefer objects, actually) can be manipulated by the user through the interface. Programs are there only as a gateway to those objects. Within that realm, I agree with you about what a user interface should do. But objects should be the centerpiece, not programs.
I live in Fairfax, VA, and, actually, all I had to do was get a library card. You needed a valid driver's license or similar ID, but you can just walk in, sit down, and start resuesting books. The stacks are off limits to the public (for good reasons, I think) but you can request anything and it'll be on your table about 30 minutes later.
Wrong. Factually incorrect. Propaganda of the system. Go read some books on the history of education. Literacy was at a higher rate in the US before mandatory schooling. And I point out to you that al-Andalus under Muslim rule had a higher rate of literacy than we do in the US.
Actually, the definition of literacy has changed over the years. Originally, a literate person was someone who could speak Latin (which is where the word came from). 100 years ago, it meant someone who was able to read the bible. Before mandatory education, this was still true. Now, a literate person is someone who can read newspaper-level writing, write effectively (as in not just be able to spell the words right) perform all arithmetic (but not necessarially algebra+) and knows some critical thinking skills and science background. Not to mention, someone who knows about the history of the world and our country. Soon, it will also be a matter of knowing how to use a computer. 100 years from now, it may include differential equations, neural net design, symbolic logic, whatever advances in writing we have made, genetic analysis, and xeno-sociology. We would be literate by our standards, but complete rubes by theirs.
You are correct about the pressure of conformity, but there are many practical issues to resolve in education before that stops being a common practice. Actually, in many classrooms today, teachers (you may have had some poor ones. their quality is very uneven) don't need to resort to those tactics. I know mine didn't.
Then again, I seem to remember somewhere that Mataeya (sp?) was a Hindi goddess of fertility or life.
Maytreya is from Buddhism, and is supposed to be the next Buddha to arrive after Siddharta Gautama (the "original", or current, Buddha). Of course, he won't show up until everyone forgets everything about buddhism. Some people suggest that this is already happening.
Eventually, this should be very easy. Because of the Kparts system, you should be able to create a kparts-enabled text editor of your own, and then once KDevelop starts using Kparts, just switch to that. It should be a simple matter of choosing mime types. Currently, I beleive that you can simply replace kwrite with your own text editor by overwriting the kwrite binary. I haven't looked into this, but I'd hack into the kwrite code to add the stuff you want, rather than doing it from scratch, so that you don't have to worry about any hooks that you might miss.
I usually put in a solid 40 hours a week. Of course, my employer tries to be an employee-friendly workplace. However, I recently fell behind on a project because of bad scheduling on my part, mostly because I was a rookie handling an entire project myself. Because of this, I ended up working upwards of 60 hour weeks. But its over now, and mostly occurred because of my inexperience with scheduling. My employer doesn't expect more than 40 hours, but they do expect we get the job done when we say it will be done. Is anywhere else like that?
Add to this x2vnc (which is available here) which allows you to have a dual-head system with Unix and whatever else. I can just roll my mouse over to my NT box, and do stuff there!
A little O/T, but an interesting companion piece to Brave New World is Island. It's about the downfall of a real Utopia, and it also by Huxley. It's not quite as Sci-Fi, though.
I'm also going to second A Wrinkle In Time, but for different reasons. I picked up the book after Madeline L'Engle visited my class in the 3rd grade. I hadn't really been interested in Sci-Fi at all before, but hell, I wanted to see what she was talking about, and she was Real Author visiting my nothing (so I thought) school. There was so much in there, I read it several times over, eventually breaking the binding. It's about the best book that you can give a kid to get them into Sci Fi. It's the only book that'll get a kid asking their parents what a Tesseract is, anyway.
Same here, except 20 pounds and 2-3 inches in that time. I feel a lot better, and I get more energized when I'm done exersizing. Hell, I even lost my programmer's gut!! I didn't think that I could ever really get rid of it, but it's gone. Mine was hereditary (my father and his brother's have one, my brother has one, etc) but at the very end it just shrank out of sight.
Very cool weight loss program, even cooler new palm pilot version.
I beleive, If I remember correctly, that the Zeroth ltw was postulated by Daneel and Giskard in Robots and Empire. Giskard became inactive after discovering it, since his circuitry couldn't handle it (the three laws were fundamental to a robot's architecture, I'm not sure how, but that was Asimov's premise behind the robot novels. Apparently, Daneel could handle it, since he was a very human-looking robot (apparently, his archetitecture reflected that somehow). He didn't take over humanity, as you suggest, but simply then posulated the existence of "psychohistory," or the ability to control events in the universe through mass-influence. But he didn't do this himself (he somehow decided that self-determination was also a good thing), but instead set into motion the eventual founding of the Foundation, and was with Hari Seldon in the first of the Foundation preludes (I beleive it was Prelude to Foundation), and convinced Seldon to work on psychohistory. but Seldon did all the work, with the help of his team.
Asimov also hints that Daneel may have helped found Gia, which was in the last two books in the series' timeline.
My own personal (I don't claim that it has any grounding in reality, it it just a suggested definition that seems general enough, but not overly so) definition is a living organism is one that has the following features:
It is extended in some sort of space.
It actively maintains a boundry within that spatial extension.
It actively maintains, within that boundry, a level of entropy that is lower than the level of entropy in its surroundings.
How predetermined is out number of senses and limbs? If I was to implant some device like this into my brain would it always a) feel unnatural b) necesserily interfere with the movement of my arm or c) eventually behave entierly unconciously just like the movement of my arm does now.
That is a really interesting question. The short of it is, we don't know yet. The long of it is that new senses cannot be imprinted into the structure of the brain. Where would you plug it? Despite what popular culture says about people only using 10% of their brain, (that was years ago when no one knew what 90% of the brain did) every single neuron in the brain has some sort of purpose. The ones that don't will kill themselves off. (this is, in fact, a learning process) So there is no where to "plug" in a new sense or motor command. The whole thing is so interconnected, to get a new I/O in would require growing new neurons (lots and lots of new neurons) and would be very disconcerting, to say the least. Motor skills happen all over the brain, in the cortex, the thalamus, and in the cerebellum.
That said, we could read and write over existing senses/motor commands very easily. But the problem with that is control. You'd need (eventually) to grow new connections to control whether or not the device should be paid attention to. But that's mainly a training problem.
Would the answers be differnt is we implanted the devices in utero?
That is an even more interesting question than your first. The flip side of that is this: does a person who has always been blind not see anything or simply not see period? Actually, anyone out there who knows/is a congenitally blind person? Which is it? The brain may wire itself up for a new modality, but it may not know to look for it. It would be a matter of laying down the proper chemical paths to get the new neurons to connect up with the device. That's what's needed for ennervation of muscles and sensory organs (the skin, for example).
There is apparently a level of clearence merely called 'Q', which I found when I was applying for a position at Lockheed Martin. There were check boxes for:
Confidential
Top Secret
Q
Beyond this, I really don't know what Q is supposed to be, but I distinctly remember seeing it on there.
I don't work there, but my company (myself included) writes software for them, and we sure do read/. And I run Mandrake there too.:-)
I work in Natural Language Processing at my company, and I work on summarization software for them. It seems that it's difficult (damn near impossible) to keep up with the flood of information that is now available in the open. Never mind the encrypted stuff! I don't know what exactly is going on there, but they listen to everything they can. FWIW, one of my co-workers claims that they are very good about avooinding listening to anything involving a US citizen once they know they are. All I can say is that if they are doing something they shouldn't, well, most people in my department are also very strong advocates of strong crypto, and wouldn't trust anything that the NSA approves.
Slashdot Mirror
Then those are your goals. They aren't enevitable. And even if they are progress for you, they still aren't Progress (note the capital P), since there is no such animal.
First of all, Rochester University does not exist. It's the University of Rochester, or UR. Second of all, Rochester Institute of Technology, or RIT, is a different school, even in a different town. I looked at both, and graduated from UR. We UR people really don't like getting confused with RIT. UR is a science and humanities school. Our Computer Science program is a science program, not a technical one. RIT is a technical school. UR is smaller, but its reputation is much greater, and has been invited at least once to join the Ivy League.
A user interface should let you:
Run programs
Actually, I don't think that's the case. I mean, the second two I agree with. But I don't think that the user (as opposed to server) interface should specifically let you run programs. Look at OpenDoc, and how it's being implemented in KDE 2.0. It says that documents/objects/files (however you want to refer to them. I prefer objects, actually) can be manipulated by the user through the interface. Programs are there only as a gateway to those objects. Within that realm, I agree with you about what a user interface should do. But objects should be the centerpiece, not programs.Alter system settings
Allow your programs to communicate with each other (drag and drop, calling up a browser when you click on a URL)
I live in Fairfax, VA, and, actually, all I had to do was get a library card. You needed a valid driver's license or similar ID, but you can just walk in, sit down, and start resuesting books. The stacks are off limits to the public (for good reasons, I think) but you can request anything and it'll be on your table about 30 minutes later.
Actually, the definition of literacy has changed over the years. Originally, a literate person was someone who could speak Latin (which is where the word came from). 100 years ago, it meant someone who was able to read the bible. Before mandatory education, this was still true. Now, a literate person is someone who can read newspaper-level writing, write effectively (as in not just be able to spell the words right) perform all arithmetic (but not necessarially algebra+) and knows some critical thinking skills and science background. Not to mention, someone who knows about the history of the world and our country. Soon, it will also be a matter of knowing how to use a computer. 100 years from now, it may include differential equations, neural net design, symbolic logic, whatever advances in writing we have made, genetic analysis, and xeno-sociology. We would be literate by our standards, but complete rubes by theirs.
You are correct about the pressure of conformity, but there are many practical issues to resolve in education before that stops being a common practice. Actually, in many classrooms today, teachers (you may have had some poor ones. their quality is very uneven) don't need to resort to those tactics. I know mine didn't.
Maytreya is from Buddhism, and is supposed to be the next Buddha to arrive after Siddharta Gautama (the "original", or current, Buddha). Of course, he won't show up until everyone forgets everything about buddhism. Some people suggest that this is already happening.
Eventually, this should be very easy. Because of the Kparts system, you should be able to create a kparts-enabled text editor of your own, and then once KDevelop starts using Kparts, just switch to that. It should be a simple matter of choosing mime types. Currently, I beleive that you can simply replace kwrite with your own text editor by overwriting the kwrite binary. I haven't looked into this, but I'd hack into the kwrite code to add the stuff you want, rather than doing it from scratch, so that you don't have to worry about any hooks that you might miss.
By the way, the Utah-GLX project can be found here: http://utah-glx.sourceforge.net.
I usually put in a solid 40 hours a week. Of course, my employer tries to be an employee-friendly workplace. However, I recently fell behind on a project because of bad scheduling on my part, mostly because I was a rookie handling an entire project myself. Because of this, I ended up working upwards of 60 hour weeks. But its over now, and mostly occurred because of my inexperience with scheduling. My employer doesn't expect more than 40 hours, but they do expect we get the job done when we say it will be done. Is anywhere else like that?
Add to this x2vnc (which is available here) which allows you to have a dual-head system with Unix and whatever else. I can just roll my mouse over to my NT box, and do stuff there!
A little O/T, but an interesting companion piece to Brave New World is Island. It's about the downfall of a real Utopia, and it also by Huxley. It's not quite as Sci-Fi, though.
I'm also going to second A Wrinkle In Time, but for different reasons. I picked up the book after Madeline L'Engle visited my class in the 3rd grade. I hadn't really been interested in Sci-Fi at all before, but hell, I wanted to see what she was talking about, and she was Real Author visiting my nothing (so I thought) school. There was so much in there, I read it several times over, eventually breaking the binding. It's about the best book that you can give a kid to get them into Sci Fi. It's the only book that'll get a kid asking their parents what a Tesseract is, anyway.
Very cool weight loss program, even cooler new palm pilot version.
I beleive, If I remember correctly, that the Zeroth ltw was postulated by Daneel and Giskard in Robots and Empire. Giskard became inactive after discovering it, since his circuitry couldn't handle it (the three laws were fundamental to a robot's architecture, I'm not sure how, but that was Asimov's premise behind the robot novels. Apparently, Daneel could handle it, since he was a very human-looking robot (apparently, his archetitecture reflected that somehow). He didn't take over humanity, as you suggest, but simply then posulated the existence of "psychohistory," or the ability to control events in the universe through mass-influence. But he didn't do this himself (he somehow decided that self-determination was also a good thing), but instead set into motion the eventual founding of the Foundation, and was with Hari Seldon in the first of the Foundation preludes (I beleive it was Prelude to Foundation), and convinced Seldon to work on psychohistory. but Seldon did all the work, with the help of his team.
Asimov also hints that Daneel may have helped found Gia, which was in the last two books in the series' timeline.
That is a really interesting question. The short of it is, we don't know yet. The long of it is that new senses cannot be imprinted into the structure of the brain. Where would you plug it? Despite what popular culture says about people only using 10% of their brain, (that was years ago when no one knew what 90% of the brain did) every single neuron in the brain has some sort of purpose. The ones that don't will kill themselves off. (this is, in fact, a learning process) So there is no where to "plug" in a new sense or motor command. The whole thing is so interconnected, to get a new I/O in would require growing new neurons (lots and lots of new neurons) and would be very disconcerting, to say the least. Motor skills happen all over the brain, in the cortex, the thalamus, and in the cerebellum.
That said, we could read and write over existing senses/motor commands very easily. But the problem with that is control. You'd need (eventually) to grow new connections to control whether or not the device should be paid attention to. But that's mainly a training problem.
Would the answers be differnt is we implanted the devices in utero?
That is an even more interesting question than your first. The flip side of that is this: does a person who has always been blind not see anything or simply not see period? Actually, anyone out there who knows/is a congenitally blind person? Which is it? The brain may wire itself up for a new modality, but it may not know to look for it. It would be a matter of laying down the proper chemical paths to get the new neurons to connect up with the device. That's what's needed for ennervation of muscles and sensory organs (the skin, for example).
- Confidential
- Top Secret
- Q
Beyond this, I really don't know what Q is supposed to be, but I distinctly remember seeing it on there.I work in Natural Language Processing at my company, and I work on summarization software for them. It seems that it's difficult (damn near impossible) to keep up with the flood of information that is now available in the open. Never mind the encrypted stuff! I don't know what exactly is going on there, but they listen to everything they can. FWIW, one of my co-workers claims that they are very good about avooinding listening to anything involving a US citizen once they know they are. All I can say is that if they are doing something they shouldn't, well, most people in my department are also very strong advocates of strong crypto, and wouldn't trust anything that the NSA approves.
What a prick...
It doesn't sound like he likes the idea of you getting work done. Too bad for him that his temper gets in the way of business.