Of course, ideologues like the limitless possibilities censorship offers when it comes to shaping the thoughts of the population by making inconvenient material unavailable. It also helps them get re-elected. But in this case, censorship has a very clear business aspect: it means that if you as a publisher don't pay up, they have the power to make your product disappear. Not only will your website disappear from view, the censorship filter makes it impossible for people to even talk about your product. So this is about corruption, clear and simple.
In other news, "researchers" with a less Luddite agenda might have drawn the reverse conclusion: depressive people are more likely to heavily use the internet.
While there are many causes of depression, we can be reasonably sure that the internet is not causing any of it. However, depressive persons suffer from social problems as a result of their disease and those are problems that can be partially compensated by substituting actual face to face activities (that are often difficult for patients suffering from depression) with interaction through the internet.
A true political spectrum runs from libertarian-anarchy on the far right to absolute totalitarian on the far left.
Ah, I see what the misunderstanding is, you got left and right confused. Anarchy is usually considered extreme left and absolute totalitarian regimes can be both, but are right if they are fascist and/or nationalistic. Since you won't believe me, allow me to cite Wikipedia (I know, not an official source but it'll have to do for now):
Traditionally, the Left includes: social liberals, social democrats, socialists, communists and anarchists while the Right includes: conservatives, libertarians, fascists, reactionaries, monarchists and nationalists. The classification of capitalism as right-wing or left-wing varies from country to country.
While I agree with you there is not much difference between dictators who consider themselves right as opposed to regimes who are supposedly on the left, in this case you can hopefully see why your reasoning is problematic because you turned the definitions of "left" and "right" on their heads. The right-left categorization as a concept is certainly severely flawed, but there can be no doubt that the Nazis were decidedly on the Right! Drawing parallels to Obama's borderline leftish politics doesn't make sense whichever way you turn it.
A finer point of debate could be whether absolutist regimes can even be correctly categorized as "left", because the whole idea of an oppressor state is a "right" concept to begin with. Of course, every implementation of Communism (and even Socialism) can only end up becoming a totalitarian state, but the ideology itself is tragically incompatible with the inevitable political outcome. I'm not trying to be polemic towards right-wingers here, I'm just talking about the original definition and meaning of the words we're using. It is a tragedy that certain influential elements in the US have succeeded in redefining huge parts of the political and social vocabulary, thereby making it virtually impossible for people to have a meaningful conversation without getting mired in intentionally corrupted semantics. (Compare Orwell's 1984 for more info on how exactly that works)
I am sorry, you seem to be unaware of the fact that the Nazi Party was the National Socialist Party.
In the context of what I explained above, it becomes clear that the Nazis were not in fact real socialists but first and foremost fascists and, consequently, were to the far right and not the left.
The main difference between the Nazis and the Communists in pre-World War II Germany was that the Nazis were nationalists and the Communists were internationalists.
Oh, it went a lot deeper than that. But at the end of the day, both Stalin and Hitler were monstrous dictators responsible for atrocities beyond description. However, one could argue that Hitler's ideology lines up very well with what he was actually doing, whereas Stalin was preaching one thing while doing something completely different.
Because their political ideals are closer than one would expect. Go read up on nazism, and fascism. You'll see the similarities these ways of thinking have with Obama's "progressive" initiatives.
1. Assuming I'm uneducated is, well, uneducated. 2. I never mentioned socialism or socialist nations. 3. I've been to almost all the nations you cite, none are like Nazi Germany and I have no problem with modern socialism. 4. The comments I made ARE verifiable and objective. Hitler and Obama were both "Men of the Year", they both support leftist, progressive, and fringe-science ideas and their fundamentals were/are rooted in fascism. Look it up.
I think the assumption that you're uneducated is a fair charge. I don't even know where to begin, except maybe to suggest you should read an actual history book, probably starting with the definition of important terms. Hitler's idea of a state was a genocidal, deeply racist, right-wing extremist, fascist junta presiding over a society run purely on hierarchical peer pressure, a state further corrupted and held in power by an overreaching military-industrial complex. It was the poster child of a surveilance state that really deserved the label "totalitarian".
If you absolutely must compare today's political ideologies with that you'd find that our contemporary right-wing parties are actually much closer to this than the left - but even Dick Cheney and Pat Robertson are not quite in the same leage as Hitler, and that's saying something. By the way, the actual socialists came in the time after Nazi Germany - so comparing Obama to Honnecker would probably make more sense for the charges you are making, which are incidentally also complete bullshit.
I'm sorry, I don't normally go for ad hominem attacks like this, but I'm a German (so please excuse my English) and I feel very strongly about people getting their facts right as opposed to the mindless parroting of hopelessly corrupt historical fiction.
I can't help but wonder: why didn't you people cry out when our civil liberties were taken away progressively in the time after 9/11? Now that was a lost opportunity, that was the last time when freedom was actually at stake. Not only did we lose that fight so thoroughly during the Bush administration, Obama is now actually legitimizing those changes. That would have been a fight worth our time. That would have been the moment to stand up for liberty. What did you do to prevent that? I sincerely hope you didn't just sit on your ass like I did.
On an outpost that is hopefully* going to be permanently manned, 8 years seems a little short sighted. And if we're honest with ourselves, even those 8 years are not a realistic estimate. Consider that this thing has lots of movable parts and a very volatile coolant system all of which needs to withstand the extraordinary stress of launch and landing.
Consider RTGs on the other hand. They have no moving parts, a much longer lifespan, and a very well known failure mode (continuous degradation of the fission core and thermoelectric elements). While they do degrade considerably over several decades, they do not ever need maintenance and they don't fail suddenly like this very expensive and complex reactor will. Of course 40kW is an energy budget that could only be satisfied by several of these modules, but on the plus side this would promote a decentralized power architecture for the presumed offworld base. The reactor behemoth on the other hand will just fail spectacularly one day (probably after a long series of notorious problems that started on launch day) and Earth will need to ship a fucking big replacement package all the way up there while the Mars ground crew sits in the dark and with minimal life support, taking very shallow breaths.
* the reason I use that word here is because we probably will have just one phenomenally expensive mission that lasts a few weeks at the outset and after that we won't ever go there again. If the Moon mission era is any indication.
At least for the Schufa, that's not true. You can have a look at the data they keep on you for free if you ask at one of their offices.
You have to go to a major city to do that and when you're there, they won't give you anything on paper. You basically have to take notes while a condescending clerk reads your database entry aloud. Awesome.
Here in Germany, collection agencies and credit report companies run amok, they're even sometimes the same entity. Pretty much anyone who pays the credit report company's membership fee can write whatever they want into your database entry, you don't have any recourse. Oh, and you have to pay money in order to get insight into the record they keep on you.
But from some observer's reference frame you will have traveled back in time and broken causality by arriving at your destination before you left, simply by moving faster than c relative to them.
If that were true, quantum entanglement would break causality. Actually, what we perceive as causality is a symptom, not the cause. Hence it's an illegal assumption that time travel would _have_ to occur every time local effects shift (for lack of a better word) between two points in space faster than it would take a photon to traverse.
Time may pass differently for the travelers relative to some reference frame, but remember there are no privileged reference frames in Relativity. You can break causality if you go FTL relative to any reference frame, and if you aren't traveling FTL with respect to any reference frame, then you can't really be said to be traveling FTL can you?
I think most people here, including possibly myself, already know about relativistic effects, there is no need to preach. The whole discussion was _not_ based on the idea of actually accelerating any quantity of matter to causality-breaking, faster-than-light speeds to begin with. There is simply no propulsion system that can do that. What we may be able to build, however, is a system that achieves the same effect by bending spacetime in a very neat way. This is what SciFi nerds call FTL. It's a theoretical system with theoretical properties. But _if_ it works, it's not a time machine simply because it teleports matter between two points "faster" than it would take a ray of light to do so.
Having an FTL drive doesn't mean it's a time machine. The actual method of travel is important here. It's impractical to go at relativistic speeds that are a considerable fraction of the speed of light, and it's pretty darn impossible to accelerate even beyond 99% of c. Theoretically, going faster than c could mean going back in time, but there is simply no way to accelerate normal matter in this fashion.
It's very likely any FTL drive technology would have to employ other means, like bending spacetime so the external distance traveled is way bigger than the subjective distance for the spacecraft in question. This could be done with a wormhole-like mechanism for example. Whether or not time flows differently for the travelers (relative to the galactic frame of reference) depends entirely on the details of this technology that we do not yet have access to.
For example, if I arrive at Alpha Centauri in two minutes from now, and come back to Earth in two more minutes Earth time, that doesn't necessarily mean I have traveled back in time 8 years. It just means there is no way I could have done that as a lump of ordinary matter traversing the entire distance through normal space.
With this life, is there something more that can also be described as a critical ingredient for intelligence? Presuming that there is a soul (yeah, a huge leap of logic here, but bear with me) the presumption here is that somehow this "soul" is interacting with the physical and tangible world. Something that can be quantified and measured at least in some degree. What that "soul" may do is certainly something that is arguably abstract and currently is mainly a bunch of guess work, but so is so much of the field of artificial intelligence as well right now.
Yet the entirety of human scientific experience shows no such interaction between any "magical force" and the physical world. In fact every last bit of knowledge and theory suggests that the rich patterns and interactions of what religious people look down on as "the material realm" are more than capable of giving form to all the aspects of life on their own.
I also don't get how people immediately postulate magic when confronted with something good, beautiful, or complex. Why do they deny the world the capability to produce nice and meaningful things once in a while? Stop disrespecting our home, the universe, in favor of some unprovable, unknowable entity! I think you're also disrespecting the people (or pets) you love and care about, by deciding they must be controlled by some magical force instead of accepting and valuing them for what they are by themselves.
No, not on binary circuits we can't. We might simulate the brain, or even model the brain, but we won't imprint it.
Correct, we lack the ability to scan biological brains for the information they contain. But we're getting closer, as the spacial resolution of scanning technologies follows a Moore's Law-style progression curve. When we finally are able to gather the synaptic configuration of an entire brain (plus the state of the relevant biochemical modulators) we still need to translate this "format" into functionality. And this is an important step, because it's needed to re-encode that functionality into whatever Turing-complete hardware we might want.
Amping up raw processing power and creating massive neurochips is a very brute force approach to intelligence. And we still lack the software (or configuration, if you will) to execute an actual mind on these platforms. Raw processing power alone won't be helpful. In fact, some AGI researchers argue that a moderate server rack should be enough to run an intelligent mind these days, if only we had the appropriate algorithm.
I don't know if the distinction between analog and digital alone is that important, since we need to translate data anyway if we're going to port information between biological and technological systems. For instance, synaptic firing patterns and modal responses can be modeled mathematically and then replicated in software already. Likewise, I don't think there is a need for an in-depth simulation of synaptic chemistry just to run software that replicates the behavior of a nervous system.
Yes, the first result is Why are Mac's So Expensive?, BUT reading the actual text of the first 4 hits displayed on the Bing page, it goes like this:
Why are Mac's So Expensive? - Yahoo! Answers Why are Mac's So Expensive?... Linux is free, and arguably better than both Windows and Macs. Both Apple and Microsoft are...
Is Windows getting more expensive? - CNET News More headlines related to "why is microsoft windows so expensive":... products, yet it is evil for Microsoft to have created Microsoft Windows, a...
Tech-no-media: Microsoft reminds us that Windows is f*cking expensive 41 Responses to "Microsoft reminds us that Windows is f*cking expensive":... Mobile Bandwidth: why it is so expensive; Hulu's lack of international...
Why Windows 7 on Netbooks Won't Save Microsoft - RoughlyDrafted more expensive Edition of Windows Vista/7). That didnâ(TM)t work in the 90s for Microsoft... Why Windows 7 on Netbooks Wonâ(TM)t Save Microsoft... So after windows ME, Microsoft did a...
So, if you look more closely, those results are actually pretty devastating to Windows. I don't think there's an actual bias here, just poor phrase parsing technology at work.
And yes, the assignment of a personality disorder depends on the culture you are part of.
The term "disorder" is a misnomer then, as it is often used synonymously with "illness" in other medical contexts. A more appropriate label would perhaps be "irregularity", then? Disorder should be reserved for clear dysfunctions, not deviations from a standard that is itself so soft, a troubled person can hop into a car, drive a few miles, and get diagnosed by another professional as disorder-free just because they're in another country now.
The point (and many people seem to mis this point) of psychology is to map why a certain person does not feel well and/or funtion well within his social surroundings, and help solve that.
It's an easy point to miss because psychology, especially when it comes to therapy, consistently positions itself far beyond the scope you describe. Whatever the case, it is becoming more clear to me now that psychology is not at all a (medical) science, it's an assortment of often anecdotal and deeply biased observations based on whatever cultural norms the researchers happen to believe in. As such, it is most probably not fit for treatment of any mental problems, even though current popular usage patterns suggests otherwise and can be more accurately described as "anything brain-related which cannot be medicated or operated on is within the scope of psychology".
On the other hand, TFA is rooted in actual biological research and thus shouldn't have anything to do with psychology. The term sociopathy definitely shouldn't have appeared in this discussion in the first place then. Anyway, thanks for clearing that up!
Sociopaths on the other hand behave in a way that is regarded as anti-social and criminal by society, but not by the sub-culture to which the sociopath belongs. Morover, sociopaths can have a well-developed conscience and a normal capacity for empathy, guilt, and loyalty: "but their sense sense of right and wrong is based on the norms and expectations of their subculture or group".
So we're all certifiable sociopaths in respect to many other cultures except our own? For example, I'm a sociopath to Muslim extremists and thus would have to classify as having a mental illness because my atheist subculture has views that are diametrically opposed to the majority of people who are religious fundamentalists?
Wow, if that's the best contemporary psychiatry can come up with (culturally and morally relativistic diagnostics based on majority traditions) we're even further behind than I thought. I mean, that's acceptable in social studies and all, but don't we need more concrete definitions for medical sciences?
I think people like stereotypes and consequently try to change themselves so they can fit into them - not the other way around. For example, if most successful relationship books deal with caveman-style guys and submissive girls, that's because many people draw comfort from these role models, it's something that they can "aspire" to and those stereotypes can be used to explain away anything and everything that comes up in regard to social issues (no actual insight required).
That's the reason why most people always try to become more jock-like or cheerleader-like as the case may be. If you have typical jock/cheerleader problems, your relationship is perceived as normal, you can then go out and buy books that tell you "it's normal because guys are always that way and girls are always that way", most of them purporting (without a real scientific basis of course) that's how it's always been and evolution forces us to be jocks and cheerleaders anyway. On the other hand, if you have real and deeply special problems, you're perceived as a freak and your issues are quickly attributed to failure to be a real jock or cheerleader.
So you basically have to decide if you want to be a conformist who is striving to be a stereotype or whether you want to be yourself. Either way you'll be paying dearly for the path you choose.
Agreed, in fact it's the utter lack of a language and definitions consensus that is causing the most trouble here, and in AI research in general. Just as social Darwinist professors tend to equate charisma with competence, Narrow AI researchers tend to equate the ability to perform well against an arbitrary fitness function with intelligence.
Now, what we're all waiting for is General Artificial Intelligence (AGI, as opposed to Narrow AI), but it has a very bad image in the science community. Between that and the constant highjacking of phrases for ridiculous purposes (as portrayed by the article and our reaction to it), AGI isn't going anywhere, which is a shame.
For the record, the definition of "intelligence" most people can agree on is quite simple: the capability of a mind to understand arbitrary environments and build predictive models of them while also being self-aware. Problem is just, this simple statement breaks down hard as soon as people try to define more accurately what that actually means.
If Wikipedia is indeed a good base for a lot of your company knowledge, you can do something dead simple: build a single PHP (or whatever language you prefer) page with an IFrame in it. Inside the IFrame you let users browse Wikipedia or any other web resource. Outside, in the parent document, there is a script that looks at the current IFrame URL and checks a local database for additional information. This could be additional text or even a stream of internal comments on this URL.
The beauty of this idea is that you don't need a local copy of WP, and you don't need any HTML scraping. And it'll work with other only resources besides Wikipedia as well. You make the URL the reference point for the internal database lookup and you're done. It also has the benefit that your users will be able to easily distinguish between public and proprietary content on the page, because those two will be clearly separated.
And, you can set this up within a few hours.
I am only serious to the extent that Taubes' book and the research he cites say these things. None of this is my own research.
This isn't my field of research either, but I am a scientist and I do know from first hand observations (such as characteristic tissue staining for microscopy) that fat cells contain mainly one thing: fat. In fact, they contain so much fat that most of them have just one big fat-filled vacuole which makes up most of their mass. I also do know the high energy content of the lipids involved. I know the basic metabolic pathways that derive energy from sugars, fats and proteins (some of which I did experiments on), in addition I know how the body in turn synthesizes these substances for its own use and the mechanism that leads to both glycogen and fat deposits.
I don't mean to come across as a know-it-all asshole, but all of this knowledge doesn't really leave much room for speculation...
He suggests that research is needed to confirm whether eating too much (and of what) and being too sedentary causes us to be fat, or whether being fat causes us to eat too much (and of the wrong things).
It is true that fat cells and their supporting tissue "infrastructure" do require additional energy to sustain themselves. It is also true that they tend to give off all kinds of chemical signals, some of which might very well lead to additional increase in food uptake. However, there is no doubt whatsoever where these fat cells get their content from. It's chemically impossible to make fat without having the energy to assemble those lipid molecules. We get that energy directly from our food. If we had chloroplasts, exposure to sunlight would make us fat as well.
The psychological reasons for overeating vary with each individual, and some people clearly have hormonal imbalances that predispose them to consuming way too much. Sure, it also makes a difference if they eat a thousand kcal worth of sugars as opposed to, say, the same amount of proteins (because their metabolic pathways have different yields). But all in all, obesity is a direct function of energy intake. Otherwise, and I'm repeating my mantra here, it would be scientifically impossible to produce the fat to begin with.
Numerous studies over the years failed to link high-calorie diet with weight gain, but this fact was overlooked because it challenged nutritional and medical orthodoxy.
Are you serious? I hope not. The fact that high-calorie diets lead to consistently fat animals in testing is the basis for most obesity-related research. For example, this is what scientists do when they need, say, ten overweight mice: they put them on a high-calorie diet. Ten out of ten mice get fat from high-calorie diets.
And the same goes for humans as well, by the way. Obese people eat a lot of food. I know, because I eat a lot of food.
There are exactly two reasons why we need food: first, to extract the chemical energy needed for driving our metabolism. Second, we need a lot of chemicals to keep our cells going - mainly in the form of organic compounds that consist to a large part of carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. Now, obesity is caused by a very simple process. Whenever we absorb more chemical energy than we actually need, our body stores it in the form of a high-energy substance called fat.
It doesn't actually matter how you acquired that chemical energy, be it through the uptake of sugar, fat or proteins. While those three categories have different energy conversion efficiencies, it's still the overall amount of usable energy contained in them that matters. So a reduction in energy uptake will eventually cause your body to start burning those reserves. It's what fat storage cells are for.
There are a few other factors to consider. The energy demand of your body varies with age, weight, lifestyle, genetic background, gender, illnesses, et cetera. Certain foods also alter your "energy settings". And to make matters even more complex, reducing your energy uptake can put your body into one of several possible energy conservation modes.
Granted, it's a lot to think about, but as cybernetic mechanisms go, it's not all that mysterious. It's certainly not mysterious enough to invoke some kind of vast medical conspiracy over.
Catch a kid stealing candy in the act, and punish them, and they're far less likely to become thieves later in life
This is the typical punishment argument, but it does nothing to make perpetrators understand the wrongness of their actions. All it does is produce people who are more careful not to get caught next time. Moral values cannot be conveyed through punishment or any form of taboo. On the contrary.
It's like that freak that tried to kill someone after watching Dexter. Plant a seed, watch it grow. There's many people with messed up soil, but without the seed they probably won't turn into murders/rapists/thieves/etc.
Again, I have to call bullshit. The Dexter copycat was ready to kill before he watched the show, and any kind of event could have pushed him over the edge. Maybe it would have happened a week later if his girlfriend broke up with him or whatever. Works of fiction do not convert people into murders/rapists/thieves/etc, those are severe mental illnesses that are developed independently for lots of reasons. So, yeah, if a psychotic killer reads Dracula, he's more likely to stake his next victim, but the overall probability of killing his next victim stays the same.
Oh, and to combine those two arguments: punishment does not deter mental illness. There shouldn't even be a discussion about this.
The only reason for hostility would be that they want something we have, and that could really only be the planet.
Two other categories come to mind: the alien equivalent of religious fanaticism and some form of paranoia causing them to consider a pre-emptive strike against us. There may be many more reasons we can't fathom just yet. However, I don't disagree with you. We're probably of little interest to anyone out there, as we and our world are likely not compatible enough in any significant way.
I would say the prospect of creating a new race of slaves is almost as horrifying as the standard sci-fi nightmare of our creations rising up against us. However, I do believe that we should try to recreate the spark of consciousness that makes us into what we are, we just have to be especially careful. The reasoning goes like this:
As humans we are part of two worlds. One of them is the realm of pure biology, it gives us the very mechanics by which we are allowed to exist. But it's also the only form of procreation available to us. Nobody thinks it's morally questionable to clone and mix two human sets of DNA to create a new entity and then assert heavy influence over its mental development for at least the first decade of its life. Yet, we acknowledge that it's a great responsibility.
The other realm is the realm of thought and mind, and it's probably even more important to us than our biological origin in a lot of ways. It's not just the dimension of pure logic and knowledge, it's also the platform for all that makes us special: the ability to love, to empathize, to understand, our innate curiosity and the desire to advance. Now for the first time, when we're thinking about creating artificial intelligence and consciousness, we have the opportunity to procreate following this path as well. Again, we know that it must be done with great care. But I believe that in a way it's "natural" for us to do that, not only to create new life but also to learn from it and to infuse new perspectives into our (then) shared society.
You were talking about human augmentation which is also very important and most anxiously awaited by many, myself included. I don't believe augmentation research competes with AI research. On the contrary, concepts and knowledge from one field often translates well to the other. We should do both.
And if you get better and better at this, and eventually manage to create a new person that exhibits all of the traits of the dead person... in what way is that not the same person?
I allege that there is hardly enough info around to do that accurately and that extrapolating meaningfully from these known patterns may be computationally infeasible. But even if that wasn't the case, the viewpoint that a person equals nothing more than the external state it presents to its environment is at best autistic if not downright psychopathic. To really be that person you have to replicate their (richer) internal state and that's exactly what is lost to entropy shortly after brain death.
The reasoning behind this is that we are much more than we display outwardly. A simple question to ask yourself in this context is "do you think your essence could be recreated based on the behavior you displayed to some people?". Neurologically, there is a lot of wiring that makes up the internals of your mind and that cannot be replicated by reverse engineering from, say, the sum of all slashdot articles you ever wrote. It's not just a problem of "enough data", the nature of the data is not sufficient to recover the inner workings of the system that created it.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, ideologues like the limitless possibilities censorship offers when it comes to shaping the thoughts of the population by making inconvenient material unavailable. It also helps them get re-elected. But in this case, censorship has a very clear business aspect: it means that if you as a publisher don't pay up, they have the power to make your product disappear. Not only will your website disappear from view, the censorship filter makes it impossible for people to even talk about your product. So this is about corruption, clear and simple.
In other news, "researchers" with a less Luddite agenda might have drawn the reverse conclusion: depressive people are more likely to heavily use the internet.
While there are many causes of depression, we can be reasonably sure that the internet is not causing any of it. However, depressive persons suffer from social problems as a result of their disease and those are problems that can be partially compensated by substituting actual face to face activities (that are often difficult for patients suffering from depression) with interaction through the internet.
No, if it's a string containing the characters "72.6", it will silently convert it to float and return 100. (Which is actually pretty nice)
Ah, I see what the misunderstanding is, you got left and right confused. Anarchy is usually considered extreme left and absolute totalitarian regimes can be both, but are right if they are fascist and/or nationalistic. Since you won't believe me, allow me to cite Wikipedia (I know, not an official source but it'll have to do for now):
While I agree with you there is not much difference between dictators who consider themselves right as opposed to regimes who are supposedly on the left, in this case you can hopefully see why your reasoning is problematic because you turned the definitions of "left" and "right" on their heads. The right-left categorization as a concept is certainly severely flawed, but there can be no doubt that the Nazis were decidedly on the Right! Drawing parallels to Obama's borderline leftish politics doesn't make sense whichever way you turn it.
A finer point of debate could be whether absolutist regimes can even be correctly categorized as "left", because the whole idea of an oppressor state is a "right" concept to begin with. Of course, every implementation of Communism (and even Socialism) can only end up becoming a totalitarian state, but the ideology itself is tragically incompatible with the inevitable political outcome. I'm not trying to be polemic towards right-wingers here, I'm just talking about the original definition and meaning of the words we're using. It is a tragedy that certain influential elements in the US have succeeded in redefining huge parts of the political and social vocabulary, thereby making it virtually impossible for people to have a meaningful conversation without getting mired in intentionally corrupted semantics. (Compare Orwell's 1984 for more info on how exactly that works)
In the context of what I explained above, it becomes clear that the Nazis were not in fact real socialists but first and foremost fascists and, consequently, were to the far right and not the left.
Oh, it went a lot deeper than that. But at the end of the day, both Stalin and Hitler were monstrous dictators responsible for atrocities beyond description. However, one could argue that Hitler's ideology lines up very well with what he was actually doing, whereas Stalin was preaching one thing while doing something completely different.
I think the assumption that you're uneducated is a fair charge. I don't even know where to begin, except maybe to suggest you should read an actual history book, probably starting with the definition of important terms. Hitler's idea of a state was a genocidal, deeply racist, right-wing extremist, fascist junta presiding over a society run purely on hierarchical peer pressure, a state further corrupted and held in power by an overreaching military-industrial complex. It was the poster child of a surveilance state that really deserved the label "totalitarian".
If you absolutely must compare today's political ideologies with that you'd find that our contemporary right-wing parties are actually much closer to this than the left - but even Dick Cheney and Pat Robertson are not quite in the same leage as Hitler, and that's saying something. By the way, the actual socialists came in the time after Nazi Germany - so comparing Obama to Honnecker would probably make more sense for the charges you are making, which are incidentally also complete bullshit.
I'm sorry, I don't normally go for ad hominem attacks like this, but I'm a German (so please excuse my English) and I feel very strongly about people getting their facts right as opposed to the mindless parroting of hopelessly corrupt historical fiction.
I can't help but wonder: why didn't you people cry out when our civil liberties were taken away progressively in the time after 9/11? Now that was a lost opportunity, that was the last time when freedom was actually at stake. Not only did we lose that fight so thoroughly during the Bush administration, Obama is now actually legitimizing those changes. That would have been a fight worth our time. That would have been the moment to stand up for liberty. What did you do to prevent that? I sincerely hope you didn't just sit on your ass like I did.
And it's not limited to guys either. Within my group of friends, there are more female players than male. Go figure ;-)
On an outpost that is hopefully* going to be permanently manned, 8 years seems a little short sighted. And if we're honest with ourselves, even those 8 years are not a realistic estimate. Consider that this thing has lots of movable parts and a very volatile coolant system all of which needs to withstand the extraordinary stress of launch and landing.
Consider RTGs on the other hand. They have no moving parts, a much longer lifespan, and a very well known failure mode (continuous degradation of the fission core and thermoelectric elements). While they do degrade considerably over several decades, they do not ever need maintenance and they don't fail suddenly like this very expensive and complex reactor will. Of course 40kW is an energy budget that could only be satisfied by several of these modules, but on the plus side this would promote a decentralized power architecture for the presumed offworld base. The reactor behemoth on the other hand will just fail spectacularly one day (probably after a long series of notorious problems that started on launch day) and Earth will need to ship a fucking big replacement package all the way up there while the Mars ground crew sits in the dark and with minimal life support, taking very shallow breaths.
* the reason I use that word here is because we probably will have just one phenomenally expensive mission that lasts a few weeks at the outset and after that we won't ever go there again. If the Moon mission era is any indication.
You have to go to a major city to do that and when you're there, they won't give you anything on paper. You basically have to take notes while a condescending clerk reads your database entry aloud. Awesome.
Here in Germany, collection agencies and credit report companies run amok, they're even sometimes the same entity. Pretty much anyone who pays the credit report company's membership fee can write whatever they want into your database entry, you don't have any recourse. Oh, and you have to pay money in order to get insight into the record they keep on you.
If that were true, quantum entanglement would break causality. Actually, what we perceive as causality is a symptom, not the cause. Hence it's an illegal assumption that time travel would _have_ to occur every time local effects shift (for lack of a better word) between two points in space faster than it would take a photon to traverse.
I think most people here, including possibly myself, already know about relativistic effects, there is no need to preach. The whole discussion was _not_ based on the idea of actually accelerating any quantity of matter to causality-breaking, faster-than-light speeds to begin with. There is simply no propulsion system that can do that. What we may be able to build, however, is a system that achieves the same effect by bending spacetime in a very neat way. This is what SciFi nerds call FTL. It's a theoretical system with theoretical properties. But _if_ it works, it's not a time machine simply because it teleports matter between two points "faster" than it would take a ray of light to do so.
Having an FTL drive doesn't mean it's a time machine. The actual method of travel is important here. It's impractical to go at relativistic speeds that are a considerable fraction of the speed of light, and it's pretty darn impossible to accelerate even beyond 99% of c. Theoretically, going faster than c could mean going back in time, but there is simply no way to accelerate normal matter in this fashion.
It's very likely any FTL drive technology would have to employ other means, like bending spacetime so the external distance traveled is way bigger than the subjective distance for the spacecraft in question. This could be done with a wormhole-like mechanism for example. Whether or not time flows differently for the travelers (relative to the galactic frame of reference) depends entirely on the details of this technology that we do not yet have access to.
For example, if I arrive at Alpha Centauri in two minutes from now, and come back to Earth in two more minutes Earth time, that doesn't necessarily mean I have traveled back in time 8 years. It just means there is no way I could have done that as a lump of ordinary matter traversing the entire distance through normal space.
Yet the entirety of human scientific experience shows no such interaction between any "magical force" and the physical world. In fact every last bit of knowledge and theory suggests that the rich patterns and interactions of what religious people look down on as "the material realm" are more than capable of giving form to all the aspects of life on their own.
I also don't get how people immediately postulate magic when confronted with something good, beautiful, or complex. Why do they deny the world the capability to produce nice and meaningful things once in a while? Stop disrespecting our home, the universe, in favor of some unprovable, unknowable entity! I think you're also disrespecting the people (or pets) you love and care about, by deciding they must be controlled by some magical force instead of accepting and valuing them for what they are by themselves.
Correct, we lack the ability to scan biological brains for the information they contain. But we're getting closer, as the spacial resolution of scanning technologies follows a Moore's Law-style progression curve. When we finally are able to gather the synaptic configuration of an entire brain (plus the state of the relevant biochemical modulators) we still need to translate this "format" into functionality. And this is an important step, because it's needed to re-encode that functionality into whatever Turing-complete hardware we might want.
Amping up raw processing power and creating massive neurochips is a very brute force approach to intelligence. And we still lack the software (or configuration, if you will) to execute an actual mind on these platforms. Raw processing power alone won't be helpful. In fact, some AGI researchers argue that a moderate server rack should be enough to run an intelligent mind these days, if only we had the appropriate algorithm.
I don't know if the distinction between analog and digital alone is that important, since we need to translate data anyway if we're going to port information between biological and technological systems. For instance, synaptic firing patterns and modal responses can be modeled mathematically and then replicated in software already. Likewise, I don't think there is a need for an in-depth simulation of synaptic chemistry just to run software that replicates the behavior of a nervous system.
So I just searched for Why is Microsoft Windows so expensive?.
Yes, the first result is Why are Mac's So Expensive?, BUT reading the actual text of the first 4 hits displayed on the Bing page, it goes like this:
So, if you look more closely, those results are actually pretty devastating to Windows. I don't think there's an actual bias here, just poor phrase parsing technology at work.
The term "disorder" is a misnomer then, as it is often used synonymously with "illness" in other medical contexts. A more appropriate label would perhaps be "irregularity", then? Disorder should be reserved for clear dysfunctions, not deviations from a standard that is itself so soft, a troubled person can hop into a car, drive a few miles, and get diagnosed by another professional as disorder-free just because they're in another country now.
It's an easy point to miss because psychology, especially when it comes to therapy, consistently positions itself far beyond the scope you describe. Whatever the case, it is becoming more clear to me now that psychology is not at all a (medical) science, it's an assortment of often anecdotal and deeply biased observations based on whatever cultural norms the researchers happen to believe in. As such, it is most probably not fit for treatment of any mental problems, even though current popular usage patterns suggests otherwise and can be more accurately described as "anything brain-related which cannot be medicated or operated on is within the scope of psychology".
On the other hand, TFA is rooted in actual biological research and thus shouldn't have anything to do with psychology. The term sociopathy definitely shouldn't have appeared in this discussion in the first place then. Anyway, thanks for clearing that up!
So we're all certifiable sociopaths in respect to many other cultures except our own? For example, I'm a sociopath to Muslim extremists and thus would have to classify as having a mental illness because my atheist subculture has views that are diametrically opposed to the majority of people who are religious fundamentalists?
Wow, if that's the best contemporary psychiatry can come up with (culturally and morally relativistic diagnostics based on majority traditions) we're even further behind than I thought. I mean, that's acceptable in social studies and all, but don't we need more concrete definitions for medical sciences?
I agree completely, throw the books away!
I think people like stereotypes and consequently try to change themselves so they can fit into them - not the other way around. For example, if most successful relationship books deal with caveman-style guys and submissive girls, that's because many people draw comfort from these role models, it's something that they can "aspire" to and those stereotypes can be used to explain away anything and everything that comes up in regard to social issues (no actual insight required).
That's the reason why most people always try to become more jock-like or cheerleader-like as the case may be. If you have typical jock/cheerleader problems, your relationship is perceived as normal, you can then go out and buy books that tell you "it's normal because guys are always that way and girls are always that way", most of them purporting (without a real scientific basis of course) that's how it's always been and evolution forces us to be jocks and cheerleaders anyway. On the other hand, if you have real and deeply special problems, you're perceived as a freak and your issues are quickly attributed to failure to be a real jock or cheerleader.
So you basically have to decide if you want to be a conformist who is striving to be a stereotype or whether you want to be yourself. Either way you'll be paying dearly for the path you choose.
Agreed, in fact it's the utter lack of a language and definitions consensus that is causing the most trouble here, and in AI research in general. Just as social Darwinist professors tend to equate charisma with competence, Narrow AI researchers tend to equate the ability to perform well against an arbitrary fitness function with intelligence.
Now, what we're all waiting for is General Artificial Intelligence (AGI, as opposed to Narrow AI), but it has a very bad image in the science community. Between that and the constant highjacking of phrases for ridiculous purposes (as portrayed by the article and our reaction to it), AGI isn't going anywhere, which is a shame.
For the record, the definition of "intelligence" most people can agree on is quite simple: the capability of a mind to understand arbitrary environments and build predictive models of them while also being self-aware. Problem is just, this simple statement breaks down hard as soon as people try to define more accurately what that actually means.
If Wikipedia is indeed a good base for a lot of your company knowledge, you can do something dead simple: build a single PHP (or whatever language you prefer) page with an IFrame in it. Inside the IFrame you let users browse Wikipedia or any other web resource. Outside, in the parent document, there is a script that looks at the current IFrame URL and checks a local database for additional information. This could be additional text or even a stream of internal comments on this URL. The beauty of this idea is that you don't need a local copy of WP, and you don't need any HTML scraping. And it'll work with other only resources besides Wikipedia as well. You make the URL the reference point for the internal database lookup and you're done. It also has the benefit that your users will be able to easily distinguish between public and proprietary content on the page, because those two will be clearly separated. And, you can set this up within a few hours.
This isn't my field of research either, but I am a scientist and I do know from first hand observations (such as characteristic tissue staining for microscopy) that fat cells contain mainly one thing: fat. In fact, they contain so much fat that most of them have just one big fat-filled vacuole which makes up most of their mass. I also do know the high energy content of the lipids involved. I know the basic metabolic pathways that derive energy from sugars, fats and proteins (some of which I did experiments on), in addition I know how the body in turn synthesizes these substances for its own use and the mechanism that leads to both glycogen and fat deposits.
I don't mean to come across as a know-it-all asshole, but all of this knowledge doesn't really leave much room for speculation...
It is true that fat cells and their supporting tissue "infrastructure" do require additional energy to sustain themselves. It is also true that they tend to give off all kinds of chemical signals, some of which might very well lead to additional increase in food uptake. However, there is no doubt whatsoever where these fat cells get their content from. It's chemically impossible to make fat without having the energy to assemble those lipid molecules. We get that energy directly from our food. If we had chloroplasts, exposure to sunlight would make us fat as well.
The psychological reasons for overeating vary with each individual, and some people clearly have hormonal imbalances that predispose them to consuming way too much. Sure, it also makes a difference if they eat a thousand kcal worth of sugars as opposed to, say, the same amount of proteins (because their metabolic pathways have different yields). But all in all, obesity is a direct function of energy intake. Otherwise, and I'm repeating my mantra here, it would be scientifically impossible to produce the fat to begin with.
Are you serious? I hope not. The fact that high-calorie diets lead to consistently fat animals in testing is the basis for most obesity-related research. For example, this is what scientists do when they need, say, ten overweight mice: they put them on a high-calorie diet. Ten out of ten mice get fat from high-calorie diets.
And the same goes for humans as well, by the way. Obese people eat a lot of food. I know, because I eat a lot of food.
There are exactly two reasons why we need food: first, to extract the chemical energy needed for driving our metabolism. Second, we need a lot of chemicals to keep our cells going - mainly in the form of organic compounds that consist to a large part of carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. Now, obesity is caused by a very simple process. Whenever we absorb more chemical energy than we actually need, our body stores it in the form of a high-energy substance called fat.
It doesn't actually matter how you acquired that chemical energy, be it through the uptake of sugar, fat or proteins. While those three categories have different energy conversion efficiencies, it's still the overall amount of usable energy contained in them that matters. So a reduction in energy uptake will eventually cause your body to start burning those reserves. It's what fat storage cells are for.
There are a few other factors to consider. The energy demand of your body varies with age, weight, lifestyle, genetic background, gender, illnesses, et cetera. Certain foods also alter your "energy settings". And to make matters even more complex, reducing your energy uptake can put your body into one of several possible energy conservation modes.
Granted, it's a lot to think about, but as cybernetic mechanisms go, it's not all that mysterious. It's certainly not mysterious enough to invoke some kind of vast medical conspiracy over.
I'm sorry, but no.
This is the typical punishment argument, but it does nothing to make perpetrators understand the wrongness of their actions. All it does is produce people who are more careful not to get caught next time. Moral values cannot be conveyed through punishment or any form of taboo. On the contrary.
Again, I have to call bullshit. The Dexter copycat was ready to kill before he watched the show, and any kind of event could have pushed him over the edge. Maybe it would have happened a week later if his girlfriend broke up with him or whatever. Works of fiction do not convert people into murders/rapists/thieves/etc, those are severe mental illnesses that are developed independently for lots of reasons. So, yeah, if a psychotic killer reads Dracula, he's more likely to stake his next victim, but the overall probability of killing his next victim stays the same.
Oh, and to combine those two arguments: punishment does not deter mental illness. There shouldn't even be a discussion about this.
Two other categories come to mind: the alien equivalent of religious fanaticism and some form of paranoia causing them to consider a pre-emptive strike against us. There may be many more reasons we can't fathom just yet. However, I don't disagree with you. We're probably of little interest to anyone out there, as we and our world are likely not compatible enough in any significant way.
I would say the prospect of creating a new race of slaves is almost as horrifying as the standard sci-fi nightmare of our creations rising up against us. However, I do believe that we should try to recreate the spark of consciousness that makes us into what we are, we just have to be especially careful. The reasoning goes like this:
As humans we are part of two worlds. One of them is the realm of pure biology, it gives us the very mechanics by which we are allowed to exist. But it's also the only form of procreation available to us. Nobody thinks it's morally questionable to clone and mix two human sets of DNA to create a new entity and then assert heavy influence over its mental development for at least the first decade of its life. Yet, we acknowledge that it's a great responsibility.
The other realm is the realm of thought and mind, and it's probably even more important to us than our biological origin in a lot of ways. It's not just the dimension of pure logic and knowledge, it's also the platform for all that makes us special: the ability to love, to empathize, to understand, our innate curiosity and the desire to advance. Now for the first time, when we're thinking about creating artificial intelligence and consciousness, we have the opportunity to procreate following this path as well. Again, we know that it must be done with great care. But I believe that in a way it's "natural" for us to do that, not only to create new life but also to learn from it and to infuse new perspectives into our (then) shared society.
You were talking about human augmentation which is also very important and most anxiously awaited by many, myself included. I don't believe augmentation research competes with AI research. On the contrary, concepts and knowledge from one field often translates well to the other. We should do both.
I allege that there is hardly enough info around to do that accurately and that extrapolating meaningfully from these known patterns may be computationally infeasible. But even if that wasn't the case, the viewpoint that a person equals nothing more than the external state it presents to its environment is at best autistic if not downright psychopathic. To really be that person you have to replicate their (richer) internal state and that's exactly what is lost to entropy shortly after brain death.
The reasoning behind this is that we are much more than we display outwardly. A simple question to ask yourself in this context is "do you think your essence could be recreated based on the behavior you displayed to some people?". Neurologically, there is a lot of wiring that makes up the internals of your mind and that cannot be replicated by reverse engineering from, say, the sum of all slashdot articles you ever wrote. It's not just a problem of "enough data", the nature of the data is not sufficient to recover the inner workings of the system that created it.