>> There is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in
>> literature or historical documents -- anywhere --
>> before 1950.
>
> Nice try, but you just referenced Joshua 10:12 in
> the Old Testament (written WAY before 1950,
> something that EVERYONE will agree on...):
Hey, pal! I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but there was no mention of the BIBLE in any records at all before 1951, when Ike, in a campaign speech, mentioned those godless, Bible-stomping commies in China...
I suppose not. A lot of activities, while not truly military, are derived from physical battles of some sort, like wrestling or any hand-to-hand combats.
Anyhoo, "we're out to protest at the homecoming bonfire. Mindless ground-acquisition games like football are just a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war..."
> Even if it doesn't feel pain or get bored, it will
> see fulfilling desires of lesser organisms as a
> waste of resources.
Actually, that, too, is the Hollywood myth. It reads too much into the thought of the intelligent thing. The truth would be even worse. It would never even consider any other entity in the universe and just forge ahead with its goals. To judge us lesser beings and therefore our endeavors are worthless compared to its is too much work. More likely it will be told a goal, accept it because it is supposed to accept it, then forge ahead, stepping on our heads out of pure ignorance of *the need to care*.
> AI will see any barriers to preventing
> operations on itself as a threat to its
> existance & eliminates them
Ahh, but only if we program it to. It won't even consider "threats" unless we tell it to, and general thinking machines won't need that, and mobile robots (military aside) will, for liability reasons, be barely able to move for fear (by its programmers) of breaking someone or something and incurring huge lawsuits.
Johnny Cochran: "And so, when your robot tried to save itself, it grabbed my client's 4-year old and threw her for the purpose of throwing itself out of the way of a car in an 'each reaction begets an equal and opposite reaction' sort of way, and the little girl missed the traffic, true, but only because she flew at over 800 miles per hour into the building on the other side of the street."
Yea, verily, a robot saving itself is piddly-squat to a robot harming a person.
Yes, but when you submit logged in, but anonymous checked, I assume it sends your real data, and that the identifying data is then thrown away server-side. That way they could do just what you describe while still maintaining an anonymous post stuffed into the database.
> Where I live you can only get cable access for $60
> with out another cable subscription.
That you can get cable internet for this low is astonishing, not something to be lamented. If you're rural, you should be ecstatic you have anything at all, much less for the cheap $60. If you're in a city, well, the lack of competition, as the article points out, is probably more due to local regulations, or possibly deliberate "starvation" in cahoots between both companies to force you to get angry enough that politicians may capitalize on your outrage and pass laws favoring those particluar giant providers (which is another thing the article warns against.)
The thought process people have goes something like this:
"Hmm, an unbelievably good service is provided for an unbelievably cheap price ($60) yet I can envision it lower, so I must be getting ripped off, so I am getting ripped off, hey, politicians, do something about these greedy SOB's who have provided me crappy service for an incredible sum of $60/month.)
> And since the DSL marketplace is precisely the
> sort of marketplace that is manipulated by
> politicians and hurge multinational monopolistic
> corporations, what say you now?
Don't confuse the police and army-backed politicians deciding how things will be, and the heavy-competition of the "huge multinationals".
Last time I checked, 56k access was about $15/month, hardly an arm and a leg.
And broadband for on the order of $50-$100/month, when only a few years ago it was thousands a month? And people feel this is a giant ripoff scam?!?!?!? Does any buffoon out there actually think that getting the government involved will lower prices and increase quality and choice? If 56K was $5/month and broadband $20/month, you guys would still be screaming ripoff!!!
Greed is good. Greed works. It works as long as you keep people with guns away from the workings of society, and that means politicians. Greed has bought you the incredibly cheap broadband that exists today.
As for rural, I have just moved to a rural area 2 months ago. They may have cable, maybe not, I've been without home internet for over two months now, and I used to have broadband. Do I want the government providing three billion dollars as "incentive" to provide this? Heck, no. That money will be eaten up by the giant telcos overextending standard DSL, etc. into the wild. Then they'll bleat for an ongoing subsidy because it's still too much for day-to-day operations. The government will grant that, and their business model will operate around sucking on the government rather than on getting a profit out of the actual rural consumers, the way it belongs. Cost-reducing innovation will be stifled lest it cause their subsidy to be taken away.
I've always wondered if Slashdot's "Post Anonymously" button that appears in the post dialog for a logged-in, registered user truly anonymizes the post, or does slashdot track the actual poster internally.
If someone's lawyers attacked, would slashdot's database record the actual poster's ID, or does the act of checking the button completely sever the poster's real id? For that matter, is the data truly anonymous (whether the box is checked, or it is posted from a non-logged in person) or does it track your IP address and other data (browser info, whatever.)
> well, with lack of a better term, freedom robbing.
> This is a very distressing issue indeed.
Not really. That's the Hollywood myth.
Intelligent computers, unless deliberately designed around actual physical brain geometry, will not "get bored" or "feel pain" or so on because they won't have been programmed for it. More like Commander Data.
If you put in more horsepower than you need, you're wasting millions of dollars across hundreds of thousands of units. Across millions of units, its worth it to have engineers shave out a few pennies here and there.
> but there is no path to having two lenses, to
> allow you to zoom in (that's why no animals have
> such a feature
Actually, eagles have some kind of a bulge on their lense that acts as a magnifier, allowing them to detect mouse movement at a distance of 2 miles. I don't know if it is in the form of 2 lenses or not, but I could see 2 lenses evolving this way.
You could probably get a kind of Fresnel lense evolved out of a compound insect eye, for that matter.
Hehe, this reminds me of one of the few episodes of Sliders I watched, waaaay-outclassing Spock's Brain for stupid SF episode of all time.
Quinn (I think that was his name) was a college "sports star" in a weird game where they played basketball and shouted solutions to Science Quiz-type shows as they played to gain extra points.
> Let's face it, pretty soon the World Chess
> Champion will be a human only because computers
> are excluded from play.
Well, how soon we forget and forget again that weightlifting does, or shortly will, suffer from the "humans only" badge of honor, i.e. limited ability monkey sideshows of the real stuff.
It's about physical activity. The Biathlon derives from military activities (as do any shooting activities. Is Archery in there?) The Marathon run might, too, as might horse events. Don't know the origin of the steeple chase nor the triple jump.
Anyway, the more cereberal among us should applaud the addition of brain games in a world where mere physical skill pointlessly is held up over mental abilities.
And speaking of military, let's not forget the brutal, bloody carnage that is the real-world counterpart to synchronized swimming.
No, not drugs. They'll have to ban things like listening to classical music for an hour or two before the match. It's been shown to help on standardized tests.
IMO, every game since Quakeworld, using client-side prediction, suffers from a complete lack of realism as things warp around.
Quake, as much as you had to have a good connection if not broadband, was much more realistic. I'd like to see modern FPS games have Quake-like network code, at least as an option.
Actually, I thought it up myself about 8 years ago as a.sig for my participation in an Objectivist mailing list. Didn't participate more than a couple of months as some of the participants were rather clueless about certain things. (Objectivist certainty gave them a false sense of certitude in non-philosophical areas, a dangerous thing.)
Don't quote me, but it's my understanding SOD was a game-engine sequal (used the same engine) to Wolf 3D, and that there was one game prior to Wolf 3D, but was that the same company again?
These broke the mold from the static 3D where you would move square-by-square, jumping 10 feet at a time ala AD&D and the game would draw the hallway in front of you.
Cross dressing (pink and purple pimp hats, dresses in UO)
Stealing cash and stuff from an unconscious or dead body
Gang-jumping wary travellers and murdering them for fun and profit
Soddomy (aligned correctly in UO, in your underwear, you can bend over and say "Ow" to the AFK person right behind you...That guy's char was drunk, too. It was quite the party...)
Necrophelia (backward and forward tilting of your body when aligned with a sprawled, dead corpse on a 2' ledge in Quake.)
Slashdot Mirror
> Example: Two is the only even prime number. Proof:
> Two can be divided by one and two. Viola!
Well, what about four, smart guy? Your proof doesn't explain or disprove the existance of four.
Sheesh.
>> There is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in
>> literature or historical documents -- anywhere --
>> before 1950.
>
> Nice try, but you just referenced Joshua 10:12 in
> the Old Testament (written WAY before 1950,
> something that EVERYONE will agree on...):
Hey, pal! I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but there was no mention of the BIBLE in any records at all before 1951, when Ike, in a campaign speech, mentioned those godless, Bible-stomping commies in China...
No magnet field on the moon, young ones.
Wrong! Styrofoam would still be around on the moon all over the place even after billions of years.
I suppose not. A lot of activities, while not truly military, are derived from physical battles of some sort, like wrestling or any hand-to-hand combats.
Anyhoo, "we're out to protest at the homecoming bonfire. Mindless ground-acquisition games like football are just a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war..."
> Even if it doesn't feel pain or get bored, it will
> see fulfilling desires of lesser organisms as a
> waste of resources.
Actually, that, too, is the Hollywood myth. It reads too much into the thought of the intelligent thing. The truth would be even worse. It would never even consider any other entity in the universe and just forge ahead with its goals. To judge us lesser beings and therefore our endeavors are worthless compared to its is too much work. More likely it will be told a goal, accept it because it is supposed to accept it, then forge ahead, stepping on our heads out of pure ignorance of *the need to care*.
> AI will see any barriers to preventing
> operations on itself as a threat to its
> existance & eliminates them
Ahh, but only if we program it to. It won't even consider "threats" unless we tell it to, and general thinking machines won't need that, and mobile robots (military aside) will, for liability reasons, be barely able to move for fear (by its programmers) of breaking someone or something and incurring huge lawsuits.
Johnny Cochran: "And so, when your robot tried to save itself, it grabbed my client's 4-year old and threw her for the purpose of throwing itself out of the way of a car in an 'each reaction begets an equal and opposite reaction' sort of way, and the little girl missed the traffic, true, but only because she flew at over 800 miles per hour into the building on the other side of the street."
Yea, verily, a robot saving itself is piddly-squat to a robot harming a person.
Yes, but when you submit logged in, but anonymous checked, I assume it sends your real data, and that the identifying data is then thrown away server-side. That way they could do just what you describe while still maintaining an anonymous post stuffed into the database.
> Where I live you can only get cable access for $60
> with out another cable subscription.
That you can get cable internet for this low is astonishing, not something to be lamented. If you're rural, you should be ecstatic you have anything at all, much less for the cheap $60. If you're in a city, well, the lack of competition, as the article points out, is probably more due to local regulations, or possibly deliberate "starvation" in cahoots between both companies to force you to get angry enough that politicians may capitalize on your outrage and pass laws favoring those particluar giant providers (which is another thing the article warns against.)
The thought process people have goes something like this:
"Hmm, an unbelievably good service is provided for an unbelievably cheap price ($60) yet I can envision it lower, so I must be getting ripped off, so I am getting ripped off, hey, politicians, do something about these greedy SOB's who have provided me crappy service for an incredible sum of $60/month.)
Sorry, no.
> And since the DSL marketplace is precisely the
> sort of marketplace that is manipulated by
> politicians and hurge multinational monopolistic
> corporations, what say you now?
Don't confuse the police and army-backed politicians deciding how things will be, and the heavy-competition of the "huge multinationals".
Last time I checked, 56k access was about $15/month, hardly an arm and a leg.
And broadband for on the order of $50-$100/month, when only a few years ago it was thousands a month? And people feel this is a giant ripoff scam?!?!?!? Does any buffoon out there actually think that getting the government involved will lower prices and increase quality and choice? If 56K was $5/month and broadband $20/month, you guys would still be screaming ripoff!!!
Greed is good. Greed works. It works as long as you keep people with guns away from the workings of society, and that means politicians. Greed has bought you the incredibly cheap broadband that exists today.
As for rural, I have just moved to a rural area 2 months ago. They may have cable, maybe not, I've been without home internet for over two months now, and I used to have broadband. Do I want the government providing three billion dollars as "incentive" to provide this? Heck, no. That money will be eaten up by the giant telcos overextending standard DSL, etc. into the wild. Then they'll bleat for an ongoing subsidy because it's still too much for day-to-day operations. The government will grant that, and their business model will operate around sucking on the government rather than on getting a profit out of the actual rural consumers, the way it belongs. Cost-reducing innovation will be stifled lest it cause their subsidy to be taken away.
I've always wondered if Slashdot's "Post Anonymously" button that appears in the post dialog for a logged-in, registered user truly anonymizes the post, or does slashdot track the actual poster internally.
If someone's lawyers attacked, would slashdot's database record the actual poster's ID, or does the act of checking the button completely sever the poster's real id? For that matter, is the data truly anonymous (whether the box is checked, or it is posted from a non-logged in person) or does it track your IP address and other data (browser info, whatever.)
> Cyc, (pronounced Psych)
Well, that clears it up.
> well, with lack of a better term, freedom robbing.
> This is a very distressing issue indeed.
Not really. That's the Hollywood myth.
Intelligent computers, unless deliberately designed around actual physical brain geometry, will not "get bored" or "feel pain" or so on because they won't have been programmed for it. More like Commander Data.
It's exactly for that reason: the price.
If you put in more horsepower than you need, you're wasting millions of dollars across hundreds of thousands of units. Across millions of units, its worth it to have engineers shave out a few pennies here and there.
> but there is no path to having two lenses, to
> allow you to zoom in (that's why no animals have
> such a feature
Actually, eagles have some kind of a bulge on their lense that acts as a magnifier, allowing them to detect mouse movement at a distance of 2 miles. I don't know if it is in the form of 2 lenses or not, but I could see 2 lenses evolving this way.
You could probably get a kind of Fresnel lense evolved out of a compound insect eye, for that matter.
> * I calmly explained, "Cape Cod is in
> Massachusetts, Cape Town is in South Africa." her
> response....click.
Hehe, how about the Simpsons episode where Homer goes to space:
Welcome to Cape Canaveral
Formerly Cape Kennedy
Formerly Cape Arbuckle
Big rocket go now!
Hehe, this reminds me of one of the few episodes of Sliders I watched, waaaay-outclassing Spock's Brain for stupid SF episode of all time.
Quinn (I think that was his name) was a college "sports star" in a weird game where they played basketball and shouted solutions to Science Quiz-type shows as they played to gain extra points.
Whatever happened to a good old 6' 2-hander made of thousand-fold carbon steel?
> Let's face it, pretty soon the World Chess
> Champion will be a human only because computers
> are excluded from play.
Well, how soon we forget and forget again that weightlifting does, or shortly will, suffer from the "humans only" badge of honor, i.e. limited ability monkey sideshows of the real stuff.
Yeah, the Mvthletes.
> The Olympics are about physical sports.
It's about physical activity. The Biathlon derives from military activities (as do any shooting activities. Is Archery in there?) The Marathon run might, too, as might horse events. Don't know the origin of the steeple chase nor the triple jump.
Anyway, the more cereberal among us should applaud the addition of brain games in a world where mere physical skill pointlessly is held up over mental abilities.
And speaking of military, let's not forget the brutal, bloody carnage that is the real-world counterpart to synchronized swimming.
No, not drugs. They'll have to ban things like listening to classical music for an hour or two before the match. It's been shown to help on standardized tests.
IMO, every game since Quakeworld, using client-side prediction, suffers from a complete lack of realism as things warp around.
Quake, as much as you had to have a good connection if not broadband, was much more realistic. I'd like to see modern FPS games have Quake-like network code, at least as an option.
Actually, I thought it up myself about 8 years ago as a .sig for my participation in an Objectivist mailing list. Didn't participate more than a couple of months as some of the participants were rather clueless about certain things. (Objectivist certainty gave them a false sense of certitude in non-philosophical areas, a dangerous thing.)
Don't quote me, but it's my understanding SOD was a game-engine sequal (used the same engine) to Wolf 3D, and that there was one game prior to Wolf 3D, but was that the same company again?
These broke the mold from the static 3D where you would move square-by-square, jumping 10 feet at a time ala AD&D and the game would draw the hallway in front of you.
> You name the character trait,
Cross dressing (pink and purple pimp hats, dresses in UO)
Stealing cash and stuff from an unconscious or dead body
Gang-jumping wary travellers and murdering them for fun and profit
Soddomy (aligned correctly in UO, in your underwear, you can bend over and say "Ow" to the AFK person right behind you...That guy's char was drunk, too. It was quite the party...)
Necrophelia (backward and forward tilting of your body when aligned with a sprawled, dead corpse on a 2' ledge in Quake.)
Yeah, all the good stuff is in there.