I recall a vector-drawn coin-op version of SpaceWar from around 1979... myself and a friend used to play it religously, but I never saw it anywhere again before or after...
Sorry, I don't want to be a thicko but I'm still confused.
If I were to generate a string of 1 million random digits from, say, radioactive decay measurements or something, I would have thought that I wouldn't be able (at least most of the time) to derive a simple formula which would allow me to predict the 500000th number. Yet with Pi I can determine the value of any artibrary digit. Can I get this kind of formula for any old randomly generated string of digits?
Other things which were inevitable: Slavery, the Holocaust, Prohibition, the Divine Right of Kings, God Emperors, Flower Power, IBM, the Triumph of the Will, Rule Brittania, The Triumph of Communism, the Raj, Christendom, etc etc etc
Nothing in human society is inevitable. The powers that be always want us to believe otherwise.
Big businesses hide behind "Free market! Invisible hand!" in meatspace, but they're sorely outmatched inside the network
LOL. I'm sure it drives the execs absolutely nuts that they can spend $20 million on a web site to sell worthless crap, and then their expensive packets are given equal priority to some college student with $200 and a bright idea.
Gasp! It's a level playing field! Quick, buy the goalposts!
My favourite line: "It's too big, too important, too political to be treated as something for only a band of talented engineers to preside over."
This is precisely why it should be left in the hands of an apolitical group. Leaving it in the hands of sociopathic businessmen and/or spineless politicians would be the worst possible fate the could befall it.
It became huge because it was based upon pure functionality. Making it bend to the will of Disney and AOL will turn it into crap.
I really take offence to that. I posted a link to a perfectly respectable site offering an alternate hypothesis.
Anyway, we'll have a pretty good idea of where things are headed in a few months. Mars Observer will either find indications of carbonates and subsurface water, or it won't. My money is on "won't".
While there certainly frozen water at the poles, an argument can be made that most of the "water" features seen across Mars were made by carbon dioxide in a process comparable to pyroclastic flows from Earth's volcanos.
NASA has a vested interest in finding water on Mars, and while it's understandable there's no excuse for ignoring valid alternate hypotheses.
Re:Speculating about AI in this way is ignorant
on
A.I. and the Future
·
· Score: 1
Once we have a theory of conciousness that stands up
I think this is the key - the notion of true AI is a pipe dream until we understand the phenomenon under consideration. Right now we're trying to build a car by designing electronic gizmos that make "VRRROOOOOM" and "SCREEECH" sounds. Strangely, the "car" doesn't move.
I think this is a revolution for another generation. Once a truly meaningful understanding of consciousness is attained, creation of artificial ones will fall out as a logical consequence. Next thing you know, there will be an artificial awareness Microsoft, and a host of truly strange applications.
There's a limit to how much an understanding of neuron function is going to tell us about Beethoven's brain. Right now modelling is either too low-level (simple little neural nets) or too high-level (Cyc). The vastly important middle space of interactivity that actually produces our awareness is a blank.
Just for reference, it's worth checking out the whole story as presented in the TIGHAR archives. In particular check out the Tarawa file as it has some really interesting details dug up from the archives of that area in the 30's.
Like everyone else I find the two pixels less than impressive, but the corroboration with an extensively documented history of findings on the island which could really match up with the Earhart flight leaves open the possibility.
I really think we've all turned a sad corner when even the techno-geeks aren't immune to the fin de siecle weariness and impatience with all things that might make us all a bit more than a bunch of angry apes scrabbling around in the PCB-laced dirt, fighting over the few last scraps of The Good Life.
Or maybe we were just lied to or mislead - maybe we bought in too late to the endless boomtime dream of the postwar era. The Salad Days have never gone on forever, and it's our misfortune to have been led down an illusory path of expansion and plenty when the world around us was contracting, getting smaller and meaner. Neat little essays by the likes of Niven and Clark and Asimov will litter the path behind us along with a host of broken Star Wars toys and a few really cool pictures from outer reaches of the solar system, but the road ahead expects us to Get On With Business.
Maybe I'm just feeling pessimistic today, but I don't believe the zeitgeist is on our side.
Horses are made of chromium steel. And little fat men shall ride them. George Orwell
The largest gap between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' is knowledge.
This may scan well for readers of Wired, but I'm not sure it has anything to do with reality.
Knowing how to keep your water clean or rotate your fields is of no use whatsoever if the government (or the rebels, or the multinational representatives, whatever the local power blocs are) won't allow seed, farming equipment, medicine, or any other materially useful items into your village.
90% of the knowledge we can give them is just so much noise until the people themselves are empowered to act upon that knowledge.
Damn good question. My suspicion is that if there are people selling "How To Make A Million Really Fast In Internet Porn" classes, then we're probably pretty close to the saturation point.
No personal offence meant, but this argument is typical of the misinformation that surrounds this issue. Said farmer in Canada almost certainly knew perfectly damn well what was growing in his fields and chose to ignore a free and easily available option to have the company come and clean up the contaminated crops. He was trying to get something for nothing and got caught.
That this idea can be stated and accepted by the MBAs indicates just one thing: a plateau in tech (specifically computer jobs which can be done by someone with a couple of years worth of training) has been reached.
I mean, come on, how many tech support/system setup/windows installation/incompetent network admin/elementary programming people do you know? Quite a few, I'm guessing. So does everyone else. Just knowing the difference between NT and 98 is no longer enough. The market is finally flooded and the Big Money people imagine they're going to make isn't there anymore.
Supply has met demand. The dream of infinite growth in an imaginary new economy is over.
With a few exceptions, the easy money is gone.
Greatest Book of All Time? - Tolkien's Great Sin
on
Lord of the Geeks
·
· Score: 1
Was to go against the enshrined literary dialectic of the 20th century. Serious literature is small, tedious, and acceptable to aging, serious, and tedious English professors at major universities. Instead he wrote a cracking good story which was, worst of all, increasingly popular with time.
It's not for us to judge whether the Lord of the Rings will be a true classic. The real test is whether or not it will be able to transcend time and culture change to continue speaking to the sensibilties of people many many years from now. The indications look good, though.
The Lord of the Rings has informed and lighted the lives of a great many people for decades now. It's had an undeniable impact on popular culture. That it offends a particular subset of the literary intelligentsia as they drive themselves into irrelevance in unimportant. At the end of the day, the importance of the book will be decided by the ordinary people who do or don't choose to read and reread it.
Did literature professors keep Shakespeare alive? Well, maybe a bit, but his enduring popularity derives from the fact that once you get past the language he's a hell of a screenwriter. He knew how to drive a story, and when to throw in a few fart jokes to keep the peons amused. His "great" qualities are only part of the story. Ditto Melville - Moby Dick is a rowsing adventure novel with a few really striking moments of vision about the nature of fate thrown in. He's still popular because people _enjoy_ his writing.
It probably grates on the Literary Establishment to no end that their ever-so-insighfull little pieces of crap will be forgotten two minutes after they're dead, whereas authors like Tolkien and (like it or not) Stephen King will be enshrined in literary history.
This isn't a new notion by a long stretch. The first time I recall seeing an article on wood enclosures was in Interface Age magazine in about 1977. If you ever find an archive of old old computer magazines (Interface Age, Creative Computing etc) you'll find several articles on this topic (Build A Classy Enclosure For Your Super-Hot 6502 System!) between the 70's and 80's.
Funny - that's just what they said on the eve of the First World War - the economies of the European nations were clearly far too interlinked now for the to ever be another general war.
I can look up the reference for this if need be - I know there's a discussion of it in Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August...
Actually I think I agree with you. I my original post I said "start a business" not "form a corporation". There's a big difference. A corporation is a very specific legal entity, and the assignment of this status to a business should probably be more tightly regulated than it is (along with entities such as "religous institution", and "charity").
That being said, I can't help being a small-c conservative. I want to exist in a country (AND world!) which is under the Rule of Law. However, I think governments should stay out of our lives to the maximum extent practical. The notion of the "free market" finding answers to problems has been abused and contorted for the political ends of all sorts of unscrupulous people over the last couple of decades, but at the core there's an important point there.
Leaving people to their own devices typically causes them to find a balance that works for them. The legal framework is there to act as a constraint (high cost) to simple but grossly unfair solutions. Communism took things to the other extreme - leaving nothing unregulated in an attempt to maximize fairness. The result was an unmitigated disaster which scarred the face of the 20th century and will likely echo through most of the 21st. A more ecological (in the true sense of the word) approach is usually more successful.
Don't get me wrong, I'm as much for small government as anyone, but there's an additional point here.
We have laws and penalties for a reason - to even out the playing field as much as possible. The sensible argument that you or I should be able to start a business with as little government interference as possible DOES NOT SCALE when we're talking about corporations with budgets bigger than many countries.
To maintain that this principle must be adhered to mindlessly, regardless of its practical effects is simply dogmatic. Big companies represent substantial power blocs within society. If they can do as they wish with no legal control, then we are left with Corporate Anarchy.
The desire to make corporations exists within an enforceable legal framework is NOT communism.
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws our country. - Thomas Jefferson, 1816
While I can understand the hi-fi purists objections to mp3 compression, as a general rule I couldn't give a rat's ass if I have slightly degraded sound quality compared to CD for 90% of the music I listen to. Most people use mp3s for listening to (a) disposable music (think Hanson), (b) old stuff that they would never pay a dime for anyway, and (c) trying out new music. Even the most fanatical mp3 collectors will still shell out for the CD if they actually care about the highest sound quality.
My point is that an mp3 stereo component fills a significant niche - most people don't want the computer in their living rooms, but would like to not have to sit beside the damn computer just to hear the music. I'll be lining up for mine.
I know exactly what you mean. My personal favourite is the old floodgate supervisor identified as being 84 years old in 1909. This is a great color photo of a man who was born when the American Revolution was still in the realm of living memory. It's the kind of thing that gives me a real sense of the continuity of history. These photos are some of the coolest things I've seen on the net in ages.
Slashdot Mirror
I recall a vector-drawn coin-op version of SpaceWar from around 1979... myself and a friend used to play it religously, but I never saw it anywhere again before or after...
Anyone know who made it and when?
Sorry, I don't want to be a thicko but I'm still confused.
If I were to generate a string of 1 million random digits from, say, radioactive decay measurements or something, I would have thought that I wouldn't be able (at least most of the time) to derive a simple formula which would allow me to predict the 500000th number. Yet with Pi I can determine the value of any artibrary digit. Can I get this kind of formula for any old randomly generated string of digits?
Or am I missing something?
Other things which were inevitable: Slavery, the Holocaust, Prohibition, the Divine Right of Kings, God Emperors, Flower Power, IBM, the Triumph of the Will, Rule Brittania, The Triumph of Communism, the Raj, Christendom, etc etc etc
Nothing in human society is inevitable. The powers that be always want us to believe otherwise.
Big businesses hide behind "Free market! Invisible hand!" in meatspace, but they're sorely outmatched inside the network
LOL. I'm sure it drives the execs absolutely nuts that they can spend $20 million on a web site to sell worthless crap, and then their expensive packets are given equal priority to some college student with $200 and a bright idea.
Gasp! It's a level playing field! Quick, buy the goalposts!
My favourite line: "It's too big, too important, too political to be treated as something for only a band of talented engineers to preside over."
This is precisely why it should be left in the hands of an apolitical group. Leaving it in the hands of sociopathic businessmen and/or spineless politicians would be the worst possible fate the could befall it.
It became huge because it was based upon pure functionality. Making it bend to the will of Disney and AOL will turn it into crap.
Shame on you.
I really take offence to that. I posted a link to a perfectly respectable site offering an alternate hypothesis.
Anyway, we'll have a pretty good idea of where things are headed in a few months. Mars Observer will either find indications of carbonates and subsurface water, or it won't. My money is on "won't".
Sheesh. If I could post and mod at the same time I'm mod my own post down. Misread your question. Sorry.
Water + sunlight + solar cells = oxygen and rocket fuel. Less to pack.
It's probably all meaningless anyway. There's likely never been any significant amount of water on Mars. Once Mars Surveyor gets there and fails to find anything this whole discussion will start to seem laughable.
I'm a bit confused about this.
My phone rings chussssh chussssh chussssh
Someone's car backs up chussssh chussssh chussssh
A fire engine goes past chussssh chussssh chussssh
An elevator is available chussssh chussssh chussssh
Some idiot with a chussssh chussssh chussssh-sound maker goes chussssh chussssh chussssh
How long before I become acclimatized to chussssh chussssh chussssh?
Check out the White Mars hypothesis.
While there certainly frozen water at the poles, an argument can be made that most of the "water" features seen across Mars were made by carbon dioxide in a process comparable to pyroclastic flows from Earth's volcanos.
NASA has a vested interest in finding water on Mars, and while it's understandable there's no excuse for ignoring valid alternate hypotheses.
Once we have a theory of conciousness that stands up
I think this is the key - the notion of true AI is a pipe dream until we understand the phenomenon under consideration. Right now we're trying to build a car by designing electronic gizmos that make "VRRROOOOOM" and "SCREEECH" sounds. Strangely, the "car" doesn't move.
I think this is a revolution for another generation. Once a truly meaningful understanding of consciousness is attained, creation of artificial ones will fall out as a logical consequence. Next thing you know, there will be an artificial awareness Microsoft, and a host of truly strange applications.
There's a limit to how much an understanding of neuron function is going to tell us about Beethoven's brain. Right now modelling is either too low-level (simple little neural nets) or too high-level (Cyc). The vastly important middle space of interactivity that actually produces our awareness is a blank.
Just for reference, it's worth checking out the whole story as presented in the TIGHAR archives. In particular check out the Tarawa file as it has some really interesting details dug up from the archives of that area in the 30's.
Like everyone else I find the two pixels less than impressive, but the corroboration with an extensively documented history of findings on the island which could really match up with the Earhart flight leaves open the possibility.
You're missing one.
"If I can get it for free I will use it, and if I cannot I will not use it. In no case will I ever pay for it."
A sale is only lost if someone was actually going to purchase the product and was dissuaded from doing so by free availability.
The end-user's position in this case is of course immoral, but all the same it's stretching the bounds of reason to define this as a "lost sale".
Or maybe we were just lied to or mislead - maybe we bought in too late to the endless boomtime dream of the postwar era. The Salad Days have never gone on forever, and it's our misfortune to have been led down an illusory path of expansion and plenty when the world around us was contracting, getting smaller and meaner. Neat little essays by the likes of Niven and Clark and Asimov will litter the path behind us along with a host of broken Star Wars toys and a few really cool pictures from outer reaches of the solar system, but the road ahead expects us to Get On With Business.
Maybe I'm just feeling pessimistic today, but I don't believe the zeitgeist is on our side.
Horses are made of chromium steel.
And little fat men shall ride them.
George Orwell
This may scan well for readers of Wired, but I'm not sure it has anything to do with reality.
Knowing how to keep your water clean or rotate your fields is of no use whatsoever if the government (or the rebels, or the multinational representatives, whatever the local power blocs are) won't allow seed, farming equipment, medicine, or any other materially useful items into your village.
90% of the knowledge we can give them is just so much noise until the people themselves are empowered to act upon that knowledge.
Damn good question. My suspicion is that if there are people selling "How To Make A Million Really Fast In Internet Porn" classes, then we're probably pretty close to the saturation point.
No personal offence meant, but this argument is typical of the misinformation that surrounds this issue. Said farmer in Canada almost certainly knew perfectly damn well what was growing in his fields and chose to ignore a free and easily available option to have the company come and clean up the contaminated crops. He was trying to get something for nothing and got caught.
That this idea can be stated and accepted by the MBAs indicates just one thing: a plateau in tech (specifically computer jobs which can be done by someone with a couple of years worth of training) has been reached.
I mean, come on, how many tech support/system setup/windows installation/incompetent network admin/elementary programming people do you know? Quite a few, I'm guessing. So does everyone else. Just knowing the difference between NT and 98 is no longer enough. The market is finally flooded and the Big Money people imagine they're going to make isn't there anymore.
Supply has met demand. The dream of infinite growth in an imaginary new economy is over.
With a few exceptions, the easy money is gone.
Was to go against the enshrined literary dialectic of the 20th century. Serious literature is small, tedious, and acceptable to aging, serious, and tedious English professors at major universities. Instead he wrote a cracking good story which was, worst of all, increasingly popular with time.
It's not for us to judge whether the Lord of the Rings will be a true classic. The real test is whether or not it will be able to transcend time and culture change to continue speaking to the sensibilties of people many many years from now. The indications look good, though.
The Lord of the Rings has informed and lighted the lives of a great many people for decades now. It's had an undeniable impact on popular culture. That it offends a particular subset of the literary intelligentsia as they drive themselves into irrelevance in unimportant. At the end of the day, the importance of the book will be decided by the ordinary people who do or don't choose to read and reread it.
Did literature professors keep Shakespeare alive? Well, maybe a bit, but his enduring popularity derives from the fact that once you get past the language he's a hell of a screenwriter. He knew how to drive a story, and when to throw in a few fart jokes to keep the peons amused. His "great" qualities are only part of the story. Ditto Melville - Moby Dick is a rowsing adventure novel with a few really striking moments of vision about the nature of fate thrown in. He's still popular because people _enjoy_ his writing.
It probably grates on the Literary Establishment to no end that their ever-so-insighfull little pieces of crap will be forgotten two minutes after they're dead, whereas authors like Tolkien and (like it or not) Stephen King will be enshrined in literary history.
Youngsters. Bah.
This isn't a new notion by a long stretch. The first time I recall seeing an article on wood enclosures was in Interface Age magazine in about 1977. If you ever find an archive of old old computer magazines (Interface Age, Creative Computing etc) you'll find several articles on this topic (Build A Classy Enclosure For Your Super-Hot 6502 System!) between the 70's and 80's.
Funny - that's just what they said on the eve of the First World War - the economies of the European nations were clearly far too interlinked now for the to ever be another general war.
I can look up the reference for this if need be - I know there's a discussion of it in Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August...
Actually I think I agree with you. I my original post I said "start a business" not "form a corporation". There's a big difference. A corporation is a very specific legal entity, and the assignment of this status to a business should probably be more tightly regulated than it is (along with entities such as "religous institution", and "charity").
That being said, I can't help being a small-c conservative. I want to exist in a country (AND world!) which is under the Rule of Law. However, I think governments should stay out of our lives to the maximum extent practical. The notion of the "free market" finding answers to problems has been abused and contorted for the political ends of all sorts of unscrupulous people over the last couple of decades, but at the core there's an important point there.
Leaving people to their own devices typically causes them to find a balance that works for them. The legal framework is there to act as a constraint (high cost) to simple but grossly unfair solutions. Communism took things to the other extreme - leaving nothing unregulated in an attempt to maximize fairness. The result was an unmitigated disaster which scarred the face of the 20th century and will likely echo through most of the 21st. A more ecological (in the true sense of the word) approach is usually more successful.
Don't get me wrong, I'm as much for small government as anyone, but there's an additional point here.
We have laws and penalties for a reason - to even out the playing field as much as possible. The sensible argument that you or I should be able to start a business with as little government interference as possible DOES NOT SCALE when we're talking about corporations with budgets bigger than many countries.
To maintain that this principle must be adhered to mindlessly, regardless of its practical effects is simply dogmatic. Big companies represent substantial power blocs within society. If they can do as they wish with no legal control, then we are left with Corporate Anarchy.
The desire to make corporations exists within an enforceable legal framework is NOT communism.
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws our country. - Thomas Jefferson, 1816
Yeah that Jefferson - what a damn pinko.
While I can understand the hi-fi purists objections to mp3 compression, as a general rule I couldn't give a rat's ass if I have slightly degraded sound quality compared to CD for 90% of the music I listen to. Most people use mp3s for listening to (a) disposable music (think Hanson), (b) old stuff that they would never pay a dime for anyway, and (c) trying out new music. Even the most fanatical mp3 collectors will still shell out for the CD if they actually care about the highest sound quality.
My point is that an mp3 stereo component fills a significant niche - most people don't want the computer in their living rooms, but would like to not have to sit beside the damn computer just to hear the music. I'll be lining up for mine.
I know exactly what you mean. My personal favourite is the old floodgate supervisor identified as being 84 years old in 1909. This is a great color photo of a man who was born when the American Revolution was still in the realm of living memory. It's the kind of thing that gives me a real sense of the continuity of history. These photos are some of the coolest things I've seen on the net in ages.