psychologists are still debating whether it's in the couple months prior to birth or whether it's even a bit later than that, and the consciousness debate will rage on for a long time probably, but we're about as close as our postmodern intellectual culture gets to being "sure" that embryos don't have consciousness.
I agree with you in most features of this argument, except this one. We know that brains are necessary for (human) consciousness, but we just don't know what about the configuration of a human brain is critical. There are odd cases (such as a hydrocephalic with about half the normal brain volume who nevertheless shows no obvious mental impairments) that illustrate how little we really know about this subject. Personally, I'd err on the side of caution and put the provisional limit much earlier.
or it could be the 20mhz processors they used to use
Entirely aside from the question of how efficient the processors are (a 20MHz Dragonball is not ten times slower than a 200MHz ARM)...
If you can always be near a charging station, a high-MHz CPU is nice. But you can't always be near a charger, and then you have to manage your battery life. Those 20MHz Palms could run for weeks on one charge, or many hours of continuous use. How long could your ipaq hold a charge? Plus the OS could execute things directly out of flash so they needed far less RAM than any WinCE device.
Now, don't get me wrong. Palm should have updated their OS to support multitasking, and then they needed to come out with some higher-end models with some of the bells and whistles to keep the higher-end customers. But don't ignore the strengths of their approach...
Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke
on
Palm's Mistakes
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The Pilot was doomed from the start. As a basic contacts + calendar + to-do PDA, it was great. I guess that's why it failed: too basic.
No, that's why it was so sucessful at first - it did exactly what people wanted to do, at a sane price point. Making something that worked, and had weeks of battery life at typical usage (and many hours of continuous use), with the hardware available at the time (remember, they were designing this thing in 1995), was a major achievement.
It was usable, acted very well as a 'tentacle' of a desktop machine, and had just (barely) enough juice to attract third-party developers, which ended up coming in droves. Programming for it is quirky but doable, and despite some limitations stemming from the very restricted original configuration (128KB of RAM - remember, 1995), very neat things could be done with it. The sycing Just Worked - unlike ActiveSync which still has issues from what I gather.
But Palm didn't expand the platform very well. I don't mind using Dragonballs per se - their power consumption is tiny compared to even modern ARM processors - but their software model needed updating badly. You just can't write a reliable server-type program on PalmOS, or do any multithreading (or even multiprocessing). That makes it way too hard to get anything sophisticated done on the device.
Even given those limitations it's remarkable what can be done on a Palm platform. See, e.g., this little gem. Does all kinds of neat things (including WiFi and such) and yet a wondrous battery life (6 hours of continuous WiFi traffic, anyone?).
If they'd gotten a real update to their OS to at least enable multitasking of some kind, even cooperative multitasking - they wouldn't be in the situation they are today. There were ways to do it without even trying that hard. Oh, well.
Trying to run synaptic from the menu - that's what it was. Synaptic would run, but it couldn't install anything.
My best guess is that this was a user account you created, right? Not the one that was created by default when the system was installed? For accounts created after installation, you have to explicitly give them the right to do administration stuff. It's a checkbox in the applet that creates them.
When I installed Ubuntu a few months ago, this sort of thing woulnd't work for me - I had a lot of problems when I tried to sudo stuff. Eventually, I just logged in as root and ran stuff directly.
I'm curious, like what? I've been using it for a few months now and I haven't had problems like that. Not a lot of programs need root access anyway. I guess I still sudo to copy some stuff over to my Windows FAT partition, but that's just 'cause I'm too lazy to go muck with the mount options.
I've got my parents set up on an Ubuntu system and the only real difference they notice from the Win98 system they were on is that the screensavers are prettier. (Of course, they were running Firefox and Thunderbird already...)
Studios are reluctant to fund true sci-fi because audiences HATE the genre.
Ironically, the ones that do get made tend to do quite well... 2001, The Abyss (sure, the aliens do magic, but all the human tech is at least plausible), even Gattaca. They make money. Perhaps it's just that only good directors have enough clout to get them made...
One former NASA guy told me that one of the best proofs they had was the film of the astronaut dropping a hammer and a feather; they fell at the same rate, with the feather not fluttering at all. According to him, at the time there was no way to generate that good a vacuum in a large enough space to fake that.
I believe in creationism and intelligent design... I just want to have the same right to believe that which I do without being called a moron, fool, etc. just because someone else doesn't agree with it.
Oh, I don't necessarily think you are a moron or a fool. You may just be ignorant. Fortunately, the latter condition is treatable.
I was skimming a book on AI and games (maybe even this one) and they pointed out some neat tricks that aren't 'realistic' but which result in useful behavior. In "No One Lives Forever", the enemies would plot a path to you, trying to find the least "costly", generally the shortest.
But when the first one found a path to you, they would mark the grid point just before you with a high (but not infinite) 'cost'. Then the next enemy to plot a path to you would naturally try to avoid that spot, but would use it if there were no other choice.
Presto, enemies naturally try to come at you from multiple directions, without having to spend a lot of expensive cycles on modelling 'intelligent' coordination and strategy.
It's not the specific code that Linux inherits from Unix - it's the design. Security has been a part of that family much longer than any of it's current rivals.
Not to mention that the actual code of the apps running on the kernel can be directly compiled over, so their history of fixes can instantly benefit Linux.
There are four potential categories of machines here. Unmaintained Windows, Maintained Windows, Unmaintained Linux, Maintained Linux. Of these, UW is so easy to target that it can be done automatically. UL is hackable, too, but there's enough variation that it generally needs to be done manually. I would further say that ML is more secure than MW.
Linux, having existed in a kinder environment, is like the boy-in-the-bubble stepping out into the world for the first time.
Unix (which Linux inherits much from, and in software aquired traits can be inherited:-> ) has been in a much nastier environment than Windows for much longer. Recall that the Morris Worm targeted Unix and Vax systems...
I've seen a couple of 3D IMAX movies, and in general they are visually awesome, very realistic and impressive. But certain conventions of 2D movies don't translate well into 3D.
The simple crossfade, for example. In 2D, everything is in the same plane of focus; your eyes don't have to adjust during the transition.
However, 3D crossfades broke my brain. As one scene faded out and another in, I couldn't figure out what to focus on, and until the transition finished I just saw a confusing blur.
Maybe that's just me, and kids raised on 3D will be able to sort it out. But I rather think that entirely new visual metaphors will be developed as 3D becomes mainstream.
so, according the their website, the main reason to go back to space with nuclear tech is that its the logical next step from Extreme Sports?
Um, no, they just used 'extreme sports' as an example of a 'resurgent pioneer spirit'. Whatever. You're not the audience that stuff is for. It's the stuff on pages 7 and beyond that are really interesting.
To do that, we need to go nuclear. No, not Orion - there are several designs that don't vent radioactive exhaust and you can even use them to get rid of nuclear waste.
I am of the opinion that the government is holding him in order to let some of the information that they have on him "cool" a bit and become dated. This way they can release the damning evidence and maybe pull the people that need to testify out of the field first.
Let's assume you're right. Is it your opinion that we need to update the Sixth Amendment?
Ecology has a concept called the "keystone predator". Predators often have a major influence on the ecology they hunt in. For example, sea
otters that eat sea urchins. The sea urchins in turn eat kelp beds. If the sea otter population declines, the sea urchin population increases,
and the kelp beds start getting overgrazed. When that happens, lots of other organisms that live in and on the kelp beds suffer.
Introducing new predators into an existing ecosystem can increase the overall diversity as they become keystone predators. This effect is seen even if the predator doesn't preferentially hunt the former dominant species, though it can be amplified in that case. In extreme cases, the
former dominant species is replaced by other species, though the former dominant species doesn't necessarily go extinct.
What does this have to do with computers? The Internet has changed significantly in the last few years. Broadband connections are fundamentally different from dialup connections. First, obviously, they are much faster. Second, they are 'always on'. As broadband has spread, a new ecological niche has opened up - that of spyware/adware.
Even if it were just malicious teenagers writing these things, they'd be a significant problem. But there's a business model now - (unethical) people can make money with this stuff. Ads, selling demographic info, redirecting referral clicks, spam, protection rackets, fraud and identity theft. Of course, these guys are preferentially hunting Windows boxes right now. They're the current dominant species, and tend to be easy to subvert.
I think spyware is going to be the keystone predator of the operating system ecology. And I think we're going to see a lot more diversity
in that area in the future.
He's testing and indexing on "teamCount" but incrementing "i". Am I missing something? Is there something about JavaScript that will make this loop terminate someday?
That's likely just it: the evidence is manifestly circumstantial, and might not result in the type of punishment sought, or indeed, even a conviction.
So, in such case, we should just ignore the Constitution and imprison someone anyway, just because "we're sure he's guilty, we just can't prove it"? And, if by accident they should think that about you, well, you're willing to pay that price to protect freedom or something?
But the more important question is, when does the US, under the auspices of the military, have the power to seize persons who may be intending to cause direct significant harm to the US, but have not yet caused said harm, and may indeed even be US citizens? If the answer is "never", we may be in philosophical disagreement here.
It's already possible to arrest someone based on probable cause in the case of imminent harm. If the harm isn't imminent, then there's such a thing as a warrant. Y'know, after presenting the reasons for ones suspicions to a judge, and seeing if they agree.
If, after the arrest and subsequent interrogation, evidence of an actual or planned crime doesn't materialize, then I think we have to consider the possibility that we got the wrong guy.
I'm not worried about giving guilty people more rights. I'm worried about not taking away rights from innocent people. Consider what Joe McCarthy would have done with the powers you're arguing for.
I guess, in general, I side with ol' Ben:
That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved. ATTRIBUTION: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, letter to Benjamin Vaughan, March 14, 1785.--The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert H. Smyth, vol. 9, p. 293 (1906).
When they haven't renounced their citizenship by joining the military of a nation currently engaged in hostilities with the US? Granted the US was a little lenient with Johnny (Lindh) Taliban, but they needn't have been.
Um, I presume you can provide evidence that Mr. Padilla (a different person from Mr. Lindh, in case you haven't noticed) did, in fact, do this? And if they have such evidence, why not present it at a trial?
I mean, what if I were to simply assert that you did that? I assume you'd want some chance to dispute the charge before you were whisked away to an undisclosed location...
(Note: traveling to Afghanistan, training in Taliban camps, and planning to blow up buildings in downtown Chicago with radiological dirty bombs is not "free speech".)
Ah, you refer, I presume, to Jose Padilla? Good. I've been wanting to ask some questions of someone so well-informed on the matter.
What justifies the administration holding him completely incommunicado - without any communication with family, friends, or a lawyer? (C.f. the Fifth Amendment.)
If he is, in fact, guilty of a crime, when may we expect the trial? (C.f. the Sixth Amendment.)
What assurance does any other U.S. citizen have that they may not be designated 'enemy combatants' and similarly 'disappeared'?
Note: he may well be guilty. The administration may well have evidence to that effect. I hope that is the case, as the idea that they would just imprison a guy for three years with no evidence is even scarier.
But if they have evidence to justify such an imprisonment, then what possible excuse can there be for not putting him on trial with it?
I'm not wrong about The Thing though, am I? I'm not asking him to look like the new Thing or the old Thing, just not like a guy in a suit. If I see one more three-fingered character who obviously has two fingers in the middle finger of the glove, it really will be clobberin' time. At least The Thing is _supposed_ to have thick fingers.
The movie is apparently mostly dreck, but if you check out the reviews, many of them say that Michael Chiklis does a good job of acting and making the character work, and I've even seen some people say that they changed their minds about a CGI Thing after seeing that.
CGI for non-anthropomorphic characters can work well, but we have a lot of hardware in our brains for predicting the motion of humans. (Knowing which way the other guy was going to jump has quite often made a life-or-death difference.) CGI hasn't gotten far enough to fully model that, and it shows - look at Hulk. A very good try, but you could still see something was wrong.
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I agree with you in most features of this argument, except this one. We know that brains are necessary for (human) consciousness, but we just don't know what about the configuration of a human brain is critical. There are odd cases (such as a hydrocephalic with about half the normal brain volume who nevertheless shows no obvious mental impairments) that illustrate how little we really know about this subject. Personally, I'd err on the side of caution and put the provisional limit much earlier.
Entirely aside from the question of how efficient the processors are (a 20MHz Dragonball is not ten times slower than a 200MHz ARM)...
If you can always be near a charging station, a high-MHz CPU is nice. But you can't always be near a charger, and then you have to manage your battery life. Those 20MHz Palms could run for weeks on one charge, or many hours of continuous use. How long could your ipaq hold a charge? Plus the OS could execute things directly out of flash so they needed far less RAM than any WinCE device.
Now, don't get me wrong. Palm should have updated their OS to support multitasking, and then they needed to come out with some higher-end models with some of the bells and whistles to keep the higher-end customers. But don't ignore the strengths of their approach...
No, that's why it was so sucessful at first - it did exactly what people wanted to do, at a sane price point. Making something that worked, and had weeks of battery life at typical usage (and many hours of continuous use), with the hardware available at the time (remember, they were designing this thing in 1995), was a major achievement.
It was usable, acted very well as a 'tentacle' of a desktop machine, and had just (barely) enough juice to attract third-party developers, which ended up coming in droves. Programming for it is quirky but doable, and despite some limitations stemming from the very restricted original configuration (128KB of RAM - remember, 1995), very neat things could be done with it. The sycing Just Worked - unlike ActiveSync which still has issues from what I gather.
But Palm didn't expand the platform very well. I don't mind using Dragonballs per se - their power consumption is tiny compared to even modern ARM processors - but their software model needed updating badly. You just can't write a reliable server-type program on PalmOS, or do any multithreading (or even multiprocessing). That makes it way too hard to get anything sophisticated done on the device.
Even given those limitations it's remarkable what can be done on a Palm platform. See, e.g., this little gem. Does all kinds of neat things (including WiFi and such) and yet a wondrous battery life (6 hours of continuous WiFi traffic, anyone?).
If they'd gotten a real update to their OS to at least enable multitasking of some kind, even cooperative multitasking - they wouldn't be in the situation they are today. There were ways to do it without even trying that hard. Oh, well.
My best guess is that this was a user account you created, right? Not the one that was created by default when the system was installed? For accounts created after installation, you have to explicitly give them the right to do administration stuff. It's a checkbox in the applet that creates them.
I'm curious, like what? I've been using it for a few months now and I haven't had problems like that. Not a lot of programs need root access anyway. I guess I still sudo to copy some stuff over to my Windows FAT partition, but that's just 'cause I'm too lazy to go muck with the mount options.
I've got my parents set up on an Ubuntu system and the only real difference they notice from the Win98 system they were on is that the screensavers are prettier. (Of course, they were running Firefox and Thunderbird already...)
Ironically, the ones that do get made tend to do quite well... 2001, The Abyss (sure, the aliens do magic, but all the human tech is at least plausible), even Gattaca. They make money. Perhaps it's just that only good directors have enough clout to get them made...
One former NASA guy told me that one of the best proofs they had was the film of the astronaut dropping a hammer and a feather; they fell at the same rate, with the feather not fluttering at all. According to him, at the time there was no way to generate that good a vacuum in a large enough space to fake that.
They've got a whole Wolverine... :->
Well, if you're hiring the psychopaths, it's not a surefire formula... At least, for you.
Oh, I don't necessarily think you are a moron or a fool. You may just be ignorant. Fortunately, the latter condition is treatable.
But when the first one found a path to you, they would mark the grid point just before you with a high (but not infinite) 'cost'. Then the next enemy to plot a path to you would naturally try to avoid that spot, but would use it if there were no other choice.
Presto, enemies naturally try to come at you from multiple directions, without having to spend a lot of expensive cycles on modelling 'intelligent' coordination and strategy.
Not to mention that the actual code of the apps running on the kernel can be directly compiled over, so their history of fixes can instantly benefit Linux.
No, just the opposite.
There are four potential categories of machines here. Unmaintained Windows, Maintained Windows, Unmaintained Linux, Maintained Linux. Of these, UW is so easy to target that it can be done automatically. UL is hackable, too, but there's enough variation that it generally needs to be done manually. I would further say that ML is more secure than MW.
Linux, having existed in a kinder environment, is like the boy-in-the-bubble stepping out into the world for the first time.
Unix (which Linux inherits much from, and in software aquired traits can be inherited :-> ) has been in a much nastier environment than Windows for much longer. Recall that the Morris Worm targeted Unix and Vax systems...
The simple crossfade, for example. In 2D, everything is in the same plane of focus; your eyes don't have to adjust during the transition. However, 3D crossfades broke my brain. As one scene faded out and another in, I couldn't figure out what to focus on, and until the transition finished I just saw a confusing blur.
Maybe that's just me, and kids raised on 3D will be able to sort it out. But I rather think that entirely new visual metaphors will be developed as 3D becomes mainstream.
Um, no, they just used 'extreme sports' as an example of a 'resurgent pioneer spirit'. Whatever. You're not the audience that stuff is for. It's the stuff on pages 7 and beyond that are really interesting.
You don't have to vent radioactive exhaust to get the benefits of nuclear energy for thrust. See here.
To do that, we need to go nuclear. No, not Orion - there are several designs that don't vent radioactive exhaust and you can even use them to get rid of nuclear waste.
How's about this one? Why limit ourselves to "100 tons to orbit" when we can do a thousand tons?
Let's assume you're right. Is it your opinion that we need to update the Sixth Amendment?
Introducing new predators into an existing ecosystem can increase the overall diversity as they become keystone predators. This effect is seen even if the predator doesn't preferentially hunt the former dominant species, though it can be amplified in that case. In extreme cases, the former dominant species is replaced by other species, though the former dominant species doesn't necessarily go extinct.
What does this have to do with computers? The Internet has changed significantly in the last few years. Broadband connections are fundamentally different from dialup connections. First, obviously, they are much faster. Second, they are 'always on'. As broadband has spread, a new ecological niche has opened up - that of spyware/adware.
Even if it were just malicious teenagers writing these things, they'd be a significant problem. But there's a business model now - (unethical) people can make money with this stuff. Ads, selling demographic info, redirecting referral clicks, spam, protection rackets, fraud and identity theft. Of course, these guys are preferentially hunting Windows boxes right now. They're the current dominant species, and tend to be easy to subvert.
I think spyware is going to be the keystone predator of the operating system ecology. And I think we're going to see a lot more diversity in that area in the future.
He's testing and indexing on "teamCount" but incrementing "i". Am I missing something? Is there something about JavaScript that will make this loop terminate someday?
So, in such case, we should just ignore the Constitution and imprison someone anyway, just because "we're sure he's guilty, we just can't prove it"? And, if by accident they should think that about you, well, you're willing to pay that price to protect freedom or something?
But the more important question is, when does the US, under the auspices of the military, have the power to seize persons who may be intending to cause direct significant harm to the US, but have not yet caused said harm, and may indeed even be US citizens? If the answer is "never", we may be in philosophical disagreement here.
It's already possible to arrest someone based on probable cause in the case of imminent harm. If the harm isn't imminent, then there's such a thing as a warrant. Y'know, after presenting the reasons for ones suspicions to a judge, and seeing if they agree.
If, after the arrest and subsequent interrogation, evidence of an actual or planned crime doesn't materialize, then I think we have to consider the possibility that we got the wrong guy.
I'm not worried about giving guilty people more rights. I'm worried about not taking away rights from innocent people. Consider what Joe McCarthy would have done with the powers you're arguing for.
I guess, in general, I side with ol' Ben:
That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved. ATTRIBUTION: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, letter to Benjamin Vaughan, March 14, 1785.--The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert H. Smyth, vol. 9, p. 293 (1906).
Um, I presume you can provide evidence that Mr. Padilla (a different person from Mr. Lindh, in case you haven't noticed) did, in fact, do this? And if they have such evidence, why not present it at a trial?
I mean, what if I were to simply assert that you did that? I assume you'd want some chance to dispute the charge before you were whisked away to an undisclosed location...
Ah, you refer, I presume, to Jose Padilla? Good. I've been wanting to ask some questions of someone so well-informed on the matter.
Note: he may well be guilty. The administration may well have evidence to that effect. I hope that is the case, as the idea that they would just imprison a guy for three years with no evidence is even scarier.
But if they have evidence to justify such an imprisonment, then what possible excuse can there be for not putting him on trial with it?
The movie is apparently mostly dreck, but if you check out the reviews, many of them say that Michael Chiklis does a good job of acting and making the character work, and I've even seen some people say that they changed their minds about a CGI Thing after seeing that.
CGI for non-anthropomorphic characters can work well, but we have a lot of hardware in our brains for predicting the motion of humans. (Knowing which way the other guy was going to jump has quite often made a life-or-death difference.) CGI hasn't gotten far enough to fully model that, and it shows - look at Hulk. A very good try, but you could still see something was wrong.