Bullshit! A timing light and feeler guage costs what? 20$ maybe? What's a laptop, cables, and software cost....? Forgot to mention keeping the OS up to date, keeping the dirt/rust/dust out of it, running an extension cord when the batt dies...
Open the hood on a any 68 model year with a v8 in it (ok, except for the Boss 427's;-)... I could almost climb in and close the hood while working on it (I could on my old full size pickup, and I'm 6' tall...) Change a water pump? 20 minutes. Remove the valve covers and clean the gunk out of the returns? 20 min. Pull the whole damn engine? 90 min or less with a good hoist and hard floor.
Take a wild guess how many vehicles out there right now have a broken sensor(s) and are running with the default value tables in ROM because the owner is ignoring the idiot light... More than likely 70+ percent.
Which type of vehicle would you want to have to fix in the middle of nowhere if your life absolutely depended on it? "Shit, my laptop battery is dead...", "I can't reach the hose to get some duct tape around it", "WTF are all of these wires melted into a ball?"
Efficiency, higher mileage, reduced emissions, etc are to be applauded, but I think that the auto industry absolutely sucks when it comes to building vehicles. "Lets cover up the oil filter by bolting this onto that, then cover it with this, then route 20 wiring harnesses over/under it. Oh yeah, don't forget to design in a bunch of nooks and crannies for the salt and mud to hide in." "Lets design a $500 part with 10 stepper motors and 3 micro controllers to control the environmental controls too...."
After all, they want you back in the showroom before the current one is paid off, and would rather have you come into the dealership for pricey profitable service.
Makes sense when you think about it for a minute... Most Americans spend all spare time in front of the tube digesting whatever is fed to them as fact.
P.S. If anyone is interested, I have two fully functioning Toshiba T1000's headed for the scrap heap. One has an XT IDE interface with drive. I'd prefer they go to a loving home.
Self awareness is just a side effect of a much more crucial low level function, "decision". I have an idea that at the center of higher intelligence is like a binary construct. Sort of like an iron sphere with few layers, and an onion with many layers.
The "iron" chunk is the instinctual side, packed with hard coded rules that rarely ever (but can) change with extended verification of a requirement for change. Executing commands out of say an EEPROM in response to information from a basic sensory network. The kind of thing commonly found in most robots, but with the ability to re-burn the EEPROM periodically as necessary Think tolerance to pain or overcoming fear as abilities are acquired and confirmed (to go a step further, think of the scientific method...)
The "onion" chunk is the ability to reason and weigh possible answers to a question. Sorting and archiving input, analyzing results of decisions, and forming new questions. The "onion" builds layers much more easily and rapidly through trial and error analysis, and as masses of data are acquired. The onion is in reality expanded rulesets based on the simplistic rules in the "iron" chunk.
As an example, the iron code would check power levels, and report on a low condition, then pass that info to the onion (i.e. hunger.) The onion would sort through previous data (images of a wall socket for comparison, cables, batteries, plug types, code to search the current environment to find a suitable power source, code to move to and engage the power source, and even negotiation to use the power source.) The data would be sorted questions raised and a plan would form to get to, and to consume, the power. Failure could be thought of as an ego bruise and a loss of a layer on the onion, success could add a new layer to the onion (one of many strategies, courses of action, or "layers" to get needed items...)
Eventually "self awareness" shows up as a natural side effect of need. "My plug is wearing out, I need a new one." Is a simplistic case of self improvement. Mirrors were invented as a tool to check our outward appearance. If a robot had the ability to analyze facial expressions and change it's appearance based on reaction to it, then using the mirror as a tool would be intersting, but still just another layer in the decision based onion. Looking at a mirror and saying "hey, that's me!" instead of saying "o.b.j.e.c.t.d.e.t.e.c.t.e.d" is just a minor technical advance.
To be truly "self aware", this robot would need quite a few prerequsites beyond looking in a mirror and determining it is looking at itself. Can this robot form it's own introspective critical questions? Can it ask "What do I like about myself?", "What do I need?", "How can I change to be better?" or even "Who invented liquid soap and why?"
I've actually been chuckling to myself imagining a robot with a rainbow colored afro wig on it's head looking into a mirror and for approval from a bunch of unshaven robot hackers;-)
To get into the corp networks, it often has to travel via sneaker net on laptops... It's not uncommon to see a "rebirth" in corp networks after the net calms down a bit.
We handled this gracefully. "Sorry Sir... Your disk failed during servicing, and we couldn't recover the data, but for a small fee we can install a fresh copy of Windows 95 for you." Actually that should have been "Father" not "Sir", and no I'm not kidding or trolling... It's amazing how informative IE's cache folder is, and how for once "findgifs.bat" was disturbing instead of entertaining.
Were putting down the fact that it doesn't have to be their only option. As stated above, WINCE is only $5, but in the $1000 to $6000 per year tax bracket, $5 makes a difference. What's wrong with unlocking the BIOS for people who want to hack the box into a cheap low power web/cluster/ldap/dns/etc box? Are people in the $1000 to $6000 bracket the only people who should be eligable for a lower elec bill?
For a large chunk of my life, this would have been me. Something like this would have made my career take off years ago. I suppose there was some value to writing and debugging.asm on paper.
How about parking a "shutter" in between a star (say ours), opening and closing it in a pattern to make our star appear to blink in a mathematical pattern. Much cheaper than building a Dyson Sphere, visible over great distances, and you would get your "quasar" effect. Wouldn't have to be that large either.
...and no plans to get it. Life is definately richer. The only things I kinda miss are the Simpsons, a few things on the Discovery or History channels, and the News. I usually read the news in the paper and on the web. The Simpsons episodes will eventually be out on DVD...
"Boies is noted in the computing industry for working on the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust case against Microsoft and for defending music-sharing site Napster. He also represented Al Gore in the Florida vote-counting controversy during the 2000 presidential elections. "
With a track record like that, we don't have a thing to worry about...
Slashdot Mirror
"crotch-tingling"? *blushes*
Well, maybe not..
What are "you" talking about? "I" don't write realtime code or design my app.... WAIT A MINUTE. Are you ceiling cat?
Bullshit! A timing light and feeler guage costs what? 20$ maybe? What's a laptop, cables, and software cost....? Forgot to mention keeping the OS up to date, keeping the dirt/rust/dust out of it, running an extension cord when the batt dies...
Open the hood on a any 68 model year with a v8 in it (ok, except for the Boss 427's
Take a wild guess how many vehicles out there right now have a broken sensor(s) and are running with the default value tables in ROM because the owner is ignoring the idiot light... More than likely 70+ percent.
Which type of vehicle would you want to have to fix in the middle of nowhere if your life absolutely depended on it? "Shit, my laptop battery is dead...", "I can't reach the hose to get some duct tape around it", "WTF are all of these wires melted into a ball?"
Efficiency, higher mileage, reduced emissions, etc are to be applauded, but I think that the auto industry absolutely sucks when it comes to building vehicles. "Lets cover up the oil filter by bolting this onto that, then cover it with this, then route 20 wiring harnesses over/under it. Oh yeah, don't forget to design in a bunch of nooks and crannies for the salt and mud to hide in." "Lets design a $500 part with 10 stepper motors and 3 micro controllers to control the environmental controls too...."
After all, they want you back in the showroom before the current one is paid off, and would rather have you come into the dealership for pricey profitable service.
I think that this image is appropriate... I do not own this image... It belongs to Sacha Goedegebure of BlenderArtists.org
Makes sense when you think about it for a minute... Most Americans spend all spare time in front of the tube digesting whatever is fed to them as fact.
P.S. If anyone is interested, I have two fully functioning Toshiba T1000's headed for the scrap heap. One has an XT IDE interface with drive.
I'd prefer they go to a loving home.
Those things had the PLCC'd 25mhz 486SLC (SlowLousyComputer) chip... Closer to a 386 than a 486. Yuck.
Amazing how much it looks like Enlightenment. Has anyone checked for Rasterman's comments in the code ;-)
Self awareness is just a side effect of a much more crucial low level function, "decision".
;-)
I have an idea that at the center of higher intelligence is like a binary construct. Sort of like an iron sphere with few layers, and an onion with many layers.
The "iron" chunk is the instinctual side, packed with hard coded rules that rarely ever (but can) change with extended verification of a requirement for change. Executing commands out of say an EEPROM in response to information from a basic sensory network. The kind of thing commonly found in most robots, but with the ability to re-burn the EEPROM periodically as necessary Think tolerance to pain or overcoming fear as abilities are acquired and confirmed (to go a step further, think of the scientific method...)
The "onion" chunk is the ability to reason and weigh possible answers to a question. Sorting and archiving input, analyzing results of decisions, and forming new questions. The "onion" builds layers much more easily and rapidly through trial and error analysis, and as masses of data are acquired. The onion is in reality expanded rulesets based on the simplistic rules in the "iron" chunk.
As an example, the iron code would check power levels, and report on a low condition, then pass that info to the onion (i.e. hunger.) The onion would sort through previous data (images of a wall socket for comparison, cables, batteries, plug types, code to search the current environment to find a suitable power source, code to move to and engage the power source, and even negotiation to use the power source.) The data would be sorted questions raised and a plan would form to get to, and to consume, the power. Failure could be thought of as an ego bruise and a loss of a layer on the onion, success could add a new layer to the onion (one of many strategies, courses of action, or "layers" to get needed items...)
Eventually "self awareness" shows up as a natural side effect of need. "My plug is wearing out, I need a new one." Is a simplistic case of self improvement. Mirrors were invented as a tool to check our outward appearance. If a robot had the ability to analyze facial expressions and change it's appearance based on reaction to it, then using the mirror as a tool would be intersting, but still just another layer in the decision based onion. Looking at a mirror and saying "hey, that's me!" instead of saying "o.b.j.e.c.t.d.e.t.e.c.t.e.d" is just a minor technical advance.
To be truly "self aware", this robot would need quite a few prerequsites beyond looking in a mirror and determining it is looking at itself. Can this robot form it's own introspective critical questions? Can it ask "What do I like about myself?", "What do I need?", "How can I change to be better?" or even "Who invented liquid soap and why?"
I've actually been chuckling to myself imagining a robot with a rainbow colored afro wig on it's head looking into a mirror and for approval from a bunch of unshaven robot hackers
10 years and still in beta.
To get into the corp networks, it often has to travel via sneaker net on laptops... It's not uncommon to see a "rebirth" in corp networks after the net calms down a bit.
We handled this gracefully. "Sorry Sir... Your disk failed during servicing, and we couldn't recover the data, but for a small fee we can install a fresh copy of Windows 95 for you." Actually that should have been "Father" not "Sir", and no I'm not kidding or trolling... It's amazing how informative IE's cache folder is, and how for once "findgifs.bat" was disturbing instead of entertaining.
I wonder what reading sheet music sounds like?
Apparently I was a bit too sarcastic...
What kind of file is that?
100% downtime on my mailserver = 100% decrease in spam ;-)
Were putting down the fact that it doesn't have to be their only option. As stated above, WINCE is only $5, but in the $1000 to $6000 per year tax bracket, $5 makes a difference. What's wrong with unlocking the BIOS for people who want to hack the box into a cheap low power web/cluster/ldap/dns/etc box? Are people in the $1000 to $6000 bracket the only people who should be eligable for a lower elec bill?
.asm on paper.
For a large chunk of my life, this would have been me. Something like this would have made my career take off years ago. I suppose there was some value to writing and debugging
How about parking a "shutter" in between a star (say ours), opening and closing it in a pattern to make our star appear to blink in a mathematical pattern. Much cheaper than building a Dyson Sphere, visible over great distances, and you would get your "quasar" effect. Wouldn't have to be that large either.
would point to Bush falling off of one in Kennebunk.
...and no plans to get it. Life is definately richer. The only things I kinda miss are the Simpsons, a few things on the Discovery or History channels, and the News. I usually read the news in the paper and on the web. The Simpsons episodes will eventually be out on DVD...
I'll bet some horrifying data could be gathered on the speed...
Or on the amount of heat generated by a pair of "ass brakes".
I'm patching right now. I'll be patching from 10 P.M. to 5:00 A.M., and from 9:00 to 1:00 A.M. tomorrow night as well.
If you read about me in the paper, it'll be about me cracking Bill in the nose.
"Boies is noted in the computing industry for working on the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust case against Microsoft and for defending music-sharing site Napster. He also represented Al Gore in the Florida vote-counting controversy during the 2000 presidential elections. "
With a track record like that, we don't have a thing to worry about...
I backup to floppies, and stick them to the
cabinet with a magnet.