"They also didn't spend as many cycles idling waiting for user input."
Which is irrelevant, because modern cpus don't consume significant power "idling".
As to your larger point, if you make the new CPUs run entirely different software doing lots of computations that you then don't count, the old CPUs look good? Thanks for the news flash. Though, actually I think you'd have a hard time coming up with enough crap-ware to actually make that comparison work out the way you assume it does. Power consumption is just radically better than it was.
Run the stock software on any of the recent sub-notebooks, and nothing 10 years old will get your document processed for under ten times the power consumed.
"I also have a few nice embedded 800MHz boards that also have heatsink-less CPUs and need 5 Watts." And this is relevant to the discussion of re-cycling old PCs how?
I don't think he disagrees with you; you're just using "naturally" to mean different things.
The way plants grow without human interference, they don't provide enough food to support the current human population. Having 7 billion people on earth is not "natural".
"there is nothing positive about modern agriculture" Not unless you like food.
"Billions" of deaths over any short period is probably a high estimate; it's just too high a percentage of the total. Your opinion may vary. In any case, it seems clear to me the original mentioner of "billions" way up the thread was just picking a big number.
"You shouldn't need a 800 core computer to play a game you can teach a child to play."
Why not, when the childs brain is by any standard more powerful than that?
"This guy doesn't try to come up with the *right* answer."
Neither do human Go players. They guess, based on factors not even the good ones can fully explain.
"Just like 800 kindergartners who all guessed the answer to a calculus problem and getting pretty close didn't 'do calculus'."
If the 800 kindergarteners perform some algorithm that produces a single answer, and it's right, then they do calculus. Producing the correct answer to calculus problems is what "doing calculus" is.
Producing winning Go moves is what playing Go is. Any system that produces winning Go moves plays Go.
If you want to claim that the machine plays Go, but doesn't think, that's different. Before you can meaningfully discuss that, you'll have to define what thinking is, and establish that the human does it. Good luck with that.
But we have a perfectly nice definition of what playing Go means, and the machine does it very well.
As bad as Rand is though, it seems like to really get off the ground she needed to make the writing even worse, throw in some obviously fantastical elements, let some other people document how she made parts of it up, and then claim it's not fiction at all, but impossibly perfect documentary, even the parts that directly contradict each other.
You seem to be saying the computer and the human both succeed due to the "the sheer size of the network of simple elements it consists of". Therefore you're not impressed by one of them?
"but there's never any real thought behind it."
Why do you assume there is thought behind you? If the machine plays Go, it plays Go. I think it's highly doubtful AI research will ever do anything at all in the judgment of critics who insist it must not only achieve things, but achieve them in ways that are not defined or understood.
That's easy; Candy Land is a solved game.
Some might tell you the game has no strategy at all; that without any decisions to be made, it's merely an elaborate coin flip. However, the winning strategy is so simple, both my children mastered it under the age of four:
On your turn, pick up someone else's piece and chew on it a bit. Then draw a card and try to feed it to the dog. Become distracted by the dog and chase him across the room. When your parent/opponent suggest packing up the game since you don't seem to want to play, scream "No!!!" as you careen across the room, trip over the board, and (crucially) knock over the deck. Ignore the fact that your parent/opponent takes a bit long to put the deck back together, and that their shuffling is somewhat irregular.
Draw your next card, which will be the ice cream cone, catapulting you into the lead. You will win 2-3 turns after this, depending on your parent/opponents mood and/or efficiency at finding the apropriate double-move cards.
Well, for the record, I think it's possible to be an atheist and still speak meaningfully of things being good and evil. I'd probably agree good and evil are relative, but many things are relative without being meaningless.
But in any case, I know it's possible to be an atheist and think Ayn Rand is an idiot, because I am and do:)
His sig is an Ayn Rand reference. She argued that altruism is actually immoral, so I'm guessing that's where he got the idea. If you want all the details, you could read her work.
However, the argument is couched in incredibly long, tedious, badly written fiction. So if you want to save yourself some time you could just note that the idea is obviously idiotic. Ergo anyone who's lifes work is dedicated to advancing it must be an idiot; along with anyone convinced of it by incredibly long, tedious, badly written fiction.
There aren't any Knights Templar descendants. As an order of monks, having children would violate their vow of celibacy and invalidate their membership.
I didn't get it backward, it's the same thing. Population will drive expansion into space only if boosting people into space is a reasonable strategy for reducing population density for someone. It isn't; for either the colonists getting boosted, or those left behind. I said population will expand to fill whatever "space you provide"; that includes the tiny amount of space left by departing colonists and the tiny amount of space created in space habitats, both.
Is that your way of saying "A ridiculous pipe dream with no supporting evidence whatsoever?" Mining and refining equipment is heavy, assuming there was anything on the moon to make fuel out of, which there does not appear to be to the best of our knowledge.
"Overpulation pressure is a great long term motivator for space exploration."
I disagree. Expansion beyond earth will never have a significant effect in terms of relieving population pressure; the population can expand to fill any space you provide far too easily. In one of this books Issac Asimov calculated the date at which, assuming the current birth/death rates continued, humanity would be a single mass expanding outward at the speed of light. It was this millennium. You can't boost your way out of geometric expansion.
Meanwhile, I'd guess problems stemming from overpopulation will have a significant disruptive effect on space exploration.
Why? There are multiple witnesses confirming the story as printed, and one mother with an obvious motive to lie claiming it's false. But she must be right, because the press are the bad guys!
Filing a lawsuit doesn't make the other guy wrong.
In this particular case, it looks like they did check their sources, and had good reason to believe the reports were true. Taking into account all the information now available my best estimation is still that the reports are true, but that admitting it's all true would be problematic for the mothers ongoing divorce case.
Protecting yourself from losing legitimate libel suits is a good idea. Protecting yourself from having frivolous libel suits filed against you is impossible.
People spend all day going fast in very cold weather on a ski slope, and complain bitterly about the cold after five minutes on a road. If you're not an artic explorer, people have gotten by fine in much colder weather than what you're considering unbearable.
You're not cold because the weather is so bad, you're cold because you didn't dress for it.
"What percentage of the population can live in areas which support car-free life. "
Today, or at some future point as cars continue to get more expensive? Infrastructure will change and people will move, because cars will keep getting more expensive, even as we do more things to make them somewhat cheaper. Energy is getting more expensive so compare mass of vehicle to mass of stuff being moved, and you'll see that cars are a losing proposition.
"we are talking about actually interacting with someone here. not just reading their posts"
Incorrect. The statement of yours I quoted and was replying to specifically mentioned just reading posts.
But, I'll throw in replying to my posts, and interacting by having ongoing discussions of all the things I have ongoing discussions about online, and no, I don't think you'll have as good an impression of who I am as the guy I eat lunch with once a week (I don't attend pubs). YMMV.
For example, in "real life" I'm extremely easy going and accepting. Online, if you want to keep conversing with me, please find your shift key.
"the way to know people online is through their text, and whats contained therein. read the comments in this thread for example. and just keep on following those people around other threads. keep it up 6 months, and youll eventually get a good understanding of what kind of people each are. "
Gotta disagree. I interact a fair bit here and various other online forums, and have for years. Yet you could read every post I've made everywhere in the last decade, and there would be vast swaths of my life you'd know nothing about. You'd have detailed knowledge of my opinions on C++ programming, and my obsessions with obscure abstract strategy games and archaic bicycle drive train designs. But you'd have no idea if I have a family. And you'd have a wildly distorted view of my personality. The way I, or anyone, interacts through text with semi-anonymous strangers is not a good guide to how they interact in other contexts.
I've had the experience of meeting people in person I've thought I knew online on a few occasions. It was jarring every time.
Makes perfect sense to me, except for the part where I'm a housewife...
I've got an EEE running the stock Linux. When it comes to OSes, my preference is not having to care. My EEE runs Firefox, and it runs rdesktop to turn it into a remote terminal for my Windows box at work. That's all it ever runs. I'm sure XP would do those too, but probably slower and more expensively.
For the things an EEE is good for for most people, you don't have to care what the OS is, so most people take linux because it's cheaper. If you're actually doing something on an EEE where you have to care what the OS is, you've got to be a geek.
My point is, it is not wrong to use infrastructure that exists over infrastructure that does not. It is right, to the extent you can call anything right or wrong that is unavoidable.
Is there any better way to deliver bandwidth into my house today than cable TV coax or telephone copper? No. There is nothing that can possibly compare to these options on one ultimate deal-killing feature: they exist and nothing else does.
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"They also didn't spend as many cycles idling waiting for user input."
Which is irrelevant, because modern cpus don't consume significant power "idling".
As to your larger point, if you make the new CPUs run entirely different software doing lots of computations that you then don't count, the old CPUs look good? Thanks for the news flash. Though, actually I think you'd have a hard time coming up with enough crap-ware to actually make that comparison work out the way you assume it does. Power consumption is just radically better than it was.
Run the stock software on any of the recent sub-notebooks, and nothing 10 years old will get your document processed for under ten times the power consumed.
"I also have a few nice embedded 800MHz boards that also have heatsink-less CPUs and need 5 Watts."
And this is relevant to the discussion of re-cycling old PCs how?
And it ran just as fast as a modern CPU? Amazing!
GP is wrong. Measured by any reasonable standard (operations per watt maybe) cpus have gotten radically more efficient.
I don't think he disagrees with you; you're just using "naturally" to mean different things.
The way plants grow without human interference, they don't provide enough food to support the current human population. Having 7 billion people on earth is not "natural".
"there is nothing positive about modern agriculture"
Not unless you like food.
"Billions" of deaths over any short period is probably a high estimate; it's just too high a percentage of the total. Your opinion may vary. In any case, it seems clear to me the original mentioner of "billions" way up the thread was just picking a big number.
"You shouldn't need a 800 core computer to play a game you can teach a child to play."
Why not, when the childs brain is by any standard more powerful than that?
"This guy doesn't try to come up with the *right* answer."
Neither do human Go players. They guess, based on factors not even the good ones can fully explain.
"Just like 800 kindergartners who all guessed the answer to a calculus problem and getting pretty close didn't 'do calculus'."
If the 800 kindergarteners perform some algorithm that produces a single answer, and it's right, then they do calculus. Producing the correct answer to calculus problems is what "doing calculus" is.
Producing winning Go moves is what playing Go is. Any system that produces winning Go moves plays Go.
If you want to claim that the machine plays Go, but doesn't think, that's different. Before you can meaningfully discuss that, you'll have to define what thinking is, and establish that the human does it. Good luck with that.
But we have a perfectly nice definition of what playing Go means, and the machine does it very well.
Certainly reminds me of a few things...
As bad as Rand is though, it seems like to really get off the ground she needed to make the writing even worse, throw in some obviously fantastical elements, let some other people document how she made parts of it up, and then claim it's not fiction at all, but impossibly perfect documentary, even the parts that directly contradict each other.
You seem to be saying the computer and the human both succeed due to the "the sheer size of the network of simple elements it consists of". Therefore you're not impressed by one of them?
"but there's never any real thought behind it."
Why do you assume there is thought behind you? If the machine plays Go, it plays Go. I think it's highly doubtful AI research will ever do anything at all in the judgment of critics who insist it must not only achieve things, but achieve them in ways that are not defined or understood.
That's easy; Candy Land is a solved game.
Some might tell you the game has no strategy at all; that without any decisions to be made, it's merely an elaborate coin flip. However, the winning strategy is so simple, both my children mastered it under the age of four:
On your turn, pick up someone else's piece and chew on it a bit. Then draw a card and try to feed it to the dog. Become distracted by the dog and chase him across the room. When your parent/opponent suggest packing up the game since you don't seem to want to play, scream "No!!!" as you careen across the room, trip over the board, and (crucially) knock over the deck. Ignore the fact that your parent/opponent takes a bit long to put the deck back together, and that their shuffling is somewhat irregular.
Draw your next card, which will be the ice cream cone, catapulting you into the lead. You will win 2-3 turns after this, depending on your parent/opponents mood and/or efficiency at finding the apropriate double-move cards.
Well, for the record, I think it's possible to be an atheist and still speak meaningfully of things being good and evil. I'd probably agree good and evil are relative, but many things are relative without being meaningless. :)
But in any case, I know it's possible to be an atheist and think Ayn Rand is an idiot, because I am and do
His sig is an Ayn Rand reference. She argued that altruism is actually immoral, so I'm guessing that's where he got the idea. If you want all the details, you could read her work.
However, the argument is couched in incredibly long, tedious, badly written fiction. So if you want to save yourself some time you could just note that the idea is obviously idiotic. Ergo anyone who's lifes work is dedicated to advancing it must be an idiot; along with anyone convinced of it by incredibly long, tedious, badly written fiction.
There aren't any Knights Templar descendants. As an order of monks, having children would violate their vow of celibacy and invalidate their membership.
I didn't get it backward, it's the same thing. Population will drive expansion into space only if boosting people into space is a reasonable strategy for reducing population density for someone. It isn't; for either the colonists getting boosted, or those left behind. I said population will expand to fill whatever "space you provide"; that includes the tiny amount of space left by departing colonists and the tiny amount of space created in space habitats, both.
"conjecture and not definitive yet"
Is that your way of saying "A ridiculous pipe dream with no supporting evidence whatsoever?" Mining and refining equipment is heavy, assuming there was anything on the moon to make fuel out of, which there does not appear to be to the best of our knowledge.
"Overpulation pressure is a great long term motivator for space exploration."
I disagree. Expansion beyond earth will never have a significant effect in terms of relieving population pressure; the population can expand to fill any space you provide far too easily. In one of this books Issac Asimov calculated the date at which, assuming the current birth/death rates continued, humanity would be a single mass expanding outward at the speed of light. It was this millennium. You can't boost your way out of geometric expansion.
Meanwhile, I'd guess problems stemming from overpopulation will have a significant disruptive effect on space exploration.
"I hope that they succeed."
Why? There are multiple witnesses confirming the story as printed, and one mother with an obvious motive to lie claiming it's false. But she must be right, because the press are the bad guys!
"if they DID check those facts, then that's how they know. It wasn't clear from the summary."
So you didn't RTFA and check the facts?
Filing a lawsuit doesn't make the other guy wrong.
In this particular case, it looks like they did check their sources, and had good reason to believe the reports were true. Taking into account all the information now available my best estimation is still that the reports are true, but that admitting it's all true would be problematic for the mothers ongoing divorce case.
Protecting yourself from losing legitimate libel suits is a good idea. Protecting yourself from having frivolous libel suits filed against you is impossible.
"It's almost impossible to live in the US without a car - at least if you want any quality of life."
I find the quality of life as a cyclist superior. Cars are for suckers.
No, I'm not a badass, I just dress appropriately.
People spend all day going fast in very cold weather on a ski slope, and complain bitterly about the cold after five minutes on a road. If you're not an artic explorer, people have gotten by fine in much colder weather than what you're considering unbearable.
You're not cold because the weather is so bad, you're cold because you didn't dress for it.
I ride a bicycle all winter in Colorado, and have done so in Maine. Get a jacket.
"What percentage of the population can live in areas which support car-free life. "
Today, or at some future point as cars continue to get more expensive? Infrastructure will change and people will move, because cars will keep getting more expensive, even as we do more things to make them somewhat cheaper. Energy is getting more expensive so compare mass of vehicle to mass of stuff being moved, and you'll see that cars are a losing proposition.
"we are talking about actually interacting with someone here. not just reading their posts"
Incorrect. The statement of yours I quoted and was replying to specifically mentioned just reading posts.
But, I'll throw in replying to my posts, and interacting by having ongoing discussions of all the things I have ongoing discussions about online, and no, I don't think you'll have as good an impression of who I am as the guy I eat lunch with once a week (I don't attend pubs). YMMV.
For example, in "real life" I'm extremely easy going and accepting. Online, if you want to keep conversing with me, please find your shift key.
"the way to know people online is through their text, and whats contained therein. read the comments in this thread for example. and just keep on following those people around other threads. keep it up 6 months, and youll eventually get a good understanding of what kind of people each are. "
Gotta disagree. I interact a fair bit here and various other online forums, and have for years. Yet you could read every post I've made everywhere in the last decade, and there would be vast swaths of my life you'd know nothing about. You'd have detailed knowledge of my opinions on C++ programming, and my obsessions with obscure abstract strategy games and archaic bicycle drive train designs. But you'd have no idea if I have a family. And you'd have a wildly distorted view of my personality. The way I, or anyone, interacts through text with semi-anonymous strangers is not a good guide to how they interact in other contexts.
I've had the experience of meeting people in person I've thought I knew online on a few occasions. It was jarring every time.
Makes perfect sense to me, except for the part where I'm a housewife...
I've got an EEE running the stock Linux. When it comes to OSes, my preference is not having to care. My EEE runs Firefox, and it runs rdesktop to turn it into a remote terminal for my Windows box at work. That's all it ever runs. I'm sure XP would do those too, but probably slower and more expensively.
For the things an EEE is good for for most people, you don't have to care what the OS is, so most people take linux because it's cheaper. If you're actually doing something on an EEE where you have to care what the OS is, you've got to be a geek.
Chicks dig it.
What wrong?
My point is, it is not wrong to use infrastructure that exists over infrastructure that does not. It is right, to the extent you can call anything right or wrong that is unavoidable.
Is there any better way to deliver bandwidth into my house today than cable TV coax or telephone copper? No. There is nothing that can possibly compare to these options on one ultimate deal-killing feature: they exist and nothing else does.