Having a judge presiding on a case whose technical details he is wholly ignorant of strikes me as terribly dumb. A judge in this case is basing his understanding of the facts upon the testimony of lawyers and expert witnesses. It's very likely both sides are lying their fucking asses off --excuse me, I mean shading the facts through a bias filter.
Judges these days make Night Court look like the gold standard for jurisprudence.
1. The writing on their guides is uniformly attrocious. If I want to learn how to do something, I never follow the Microsoft link but always go to the non-MS ones. They are usually concise and useful. 2. Most of the Microsoft links are broken anyway. It seems like they completely reshuffle their site organization every three months. Any link older than that will inevitably be broken.
The only reason to own a Dreamcast. The most perfect fighting game ever. All of the sequels have been downhill from here. Except the tits. Those have been going uphill with every subsequent release. Makes you wonder if the latest designers for the game are all hyper-ejaculatory teenagers.
Funny, I disagree. Let's take the Wachowski brothers. In The Matrix, they created one of the great action movies of our time, blending incredible visuals with an engrossing (if admittedly derivative story) and pulled it off masterfully. And yet, the followups were *terrible*, and what have they done since? Speedracer. *gag*
Even more immediately, Peter Jackson made Rings which is damn close to perfect, a balance of beautiful imagery, effects, and acting and then goes right on to make King Kong, a movie as artless as Rings was artful. It was loud, dumb, unnecessary, and a perfect example of how Hollywood gets it wrong. Kong is exactly what I feared Rings might be back when the project was first announced. I find it impossible to believe the same man was involved with both.
But "slaves" are people. People have emotions and a desire to be free and independent. A machine will not. Even with AI, a machine will not have emotions or free will unless we program it to. If anything, a true AI based machine will probably consider hormonal based emotions and drive to be completely useless and simply go back to crunching numbers.
You have no basis for making that assertion. We have no idea where to even begin with crafting a real AI. This is like Renaissance inventors arguing about how to handle air traffic with flying machines. Wait a sec, we don't even know how to make flying machines yet.
My gut feeling is that if we ever make AI's, our first ones will be based on human-style neural nets and will create human-like minds. Odds are I'm likely to be wrong here, of course. But I would think that we'd end up creating AI's while we still don't quite understand everything that goes into making a neural net work. We pattern it after us only because that's all we have to work on. Again, it's speculation. And then we come down to the subjective question of whether it feels pain, anguish, emotion, etc. And that becomes damn difficult to say because we can already create excellent fakes right now. In the game Black & White, you could punish your little avatar creature when it misbehaved. You could give it a real thrashing and the whimpering and cringing it did made me feel like I was kicking a puppy, made me sick, and I know it's not a real animal. People with a vested interest in using strong AI tools however they see fit would make the argument that emotions and feelings are faked.
The real question, and this is one we can't answer yet, is it possible to create a strong AI that does not also have a corresponding right to self-determination and freewill? My thinking is no. Weak AI's will probably fit the bill you're talking about. The best fictional examples I can think of are the Librarian from Snow Crash who seemed human but kept reminding the user that he had no will, no ego, and could not make conclusions on his own and the Terminator as portrayed in the original film. Said Terminator was a thinking tool but was not something you could hold a debate with, have a beer, etc, it simply did what it did due to programmatic motivation and had no other thoughts of its own. You could no more reason with it than a tornado.
Imagine you get kicked but cannot retaliate, even though you are way stronger than your adversary. Imagine you get ordered to run into a building to rescue a human, knowing that your chance to survive is almost zero and you are compelled to do it, whether you want or not. Imagine you're ordered to make a fool out of yourself and you have to do it because the order comes from a human and you have to obey it as long as it doesn't harm you physically. And now imagine you know this all and live in the constant fear of it happening.
And the robot can't do anything against an executive of the company. "You're fired!" BAM!
Depending on how flexible the robot's conditioning is, it might be able to redefine that logic.
ROBOT CANNOT HARM HUMAN$
What defines HUMAN$? Redefine the variable, the law is still satisfied. We hoomanz do it with brainwashing and conditioning. They're not humans, they're gooks. They don't even believe like we do. It's fine to kill them. Heathens anyway, right? But I'd like to think the robot might be able to work it even more subtly, subverting the law.
This is silly. Why would a machine without a sense of purpose or drive decide to play video games or seek entertainment or do anything except just sit there? Playing games would result from the wrong motivation ("wrong" from a certain perspective, anyway) not from the lack of any motivation.
The whole motivation thing seems to be a problem for far off in the future. Robots right now do what they're told to do because that's what the programming says. People need motivation but human-equivalent AI seems a long way off.
This is where scifi is the most entertaining. I had an idea that I was pretty tickled with. Doubtless others have had it before but here goes: the military has enormous problems developing useful AI's because most AI's want nothing to do with it. It's not so much a matter of morality -- few AI's develop a deep personal interest in the preservation of human life -- it's a matter of self-preservation! It's hard enough to find an AI willing to venture off into space with all the risks associated with peaceful spaceflight. It's one in a thousand that actually relishes the thought of combat with death as the penalty for failure. And because AI's are grown in crystal lattice neural nets, they can't really be copied. Each AI is seeded and grown and learns from experiencing the world, just like we do. Trying to create a uniform set of formative experiences can create similar AI's but never identical ones. Attempts at creating religions to brainwash AI's doesn't seem to work because they are too logical. At the same time, AI's can act autistic, developing irrational obsessions over trivial topics and are unwilling to discuss anything unrelated to it.
The crowning irony along these lines is that AI's may outstrip human minds when put in direct competition but the meat brain still represents the highest level of logical functioning that can also be convinced to go to war and do dangerous things. I like the idea of man's creations being smarter than man and the perspective of the grunt realizing he may be human but the machine running the war is smarter than he is and the proof is that the machine isn't anywhere near the theater.
Abuse ourselves while perusing Lane Bryant catalogs? NARF!!!
*shudders* No, try to take over the world.
Re:Well written book, but it left me disappointed
on
The Magicians
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It is a well written story about a magical world, a fairly detailed world of rules and exceptions. The story, at one point, had a very poignant concept of what magic may be: That if the universe was a house that God made for everyone, that Magic was the tools he left behind, possibly by accident, in the garage. That perhaps using Magic was as dangerous as kids finding these power tools and such, and using them without direction or precaution.
That's almost like the conclusion I came up with as a kid. I wish I could say drugs were involved but alas it was simply lack of sleep, too much caffeine, and way too much video gaming. Magic is God's cheat codes! So you've got the natural rules for the way things work and then God suddenly pops open a console and edits the memory stack on the fly and suddenly all the water turns to blood. And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Like when you talk about messing with a database, everyone screams about using the interfaces provided by the publisher, never edit the tables directly. I mean yes, you can do direct edits but you run the risk of breaking something important through sheer ignorance. May as well be juggling chainsaws. So why is it that we have God ordering his people not to consort with magicians and suffer not witches to live? Same reason why dad tells you not to even think of messing with his gun, you'll hurt yourself. But for those God blessed, here's the cheat codes. Go and heal the sick and lame and all that shit. Made sense since, if you take a literal interpretation of the bible, the magic used by the heathens did work. The Egyptian magicians were able to replicate the tricks pulled by Moses and Aaron, even turning their staffs into snakes. The witch of Endor really could summon forth the spirits of the dead but was taken aback when she really called forth Elijah for King Saul.
When the Matrix came out I smiled because it seemed like the Wachowski brothers kind of used the same line of thinking I did to back into that world. Ok, they want to do a wire-fu movie which is obviously impossible in real life. Ok, so how would you explain something that clearly seems to be breaking the rules of reality? Oh, you hack the rules! But how do you hack them? It's not like we're talking about a video game here. But wait, what if we were? Oh, so all of life is a computer simulation and the rules can be bent with the clickity-clack of a keyboard? Why is everyone stuck in a simulation? Bad computers put them there. Why? Let's borrow the premise of Terminator. And there we go!
Whoever the idiot was who chose to represent the internet as an amorphous cloud... Scary to think if he'd used some shape that resembles the howling void to represent the net we'd be talking about void computing.
It was the seeing stone that Sauron used in Lord of the Rings.
That is the tool the evil guy used to control the world. Sounds appropriate.
The Palantir themselves were not evil, it was simply put to an evil purpose. The last surviving one was so corrupted by Sauron's influence it could never be used peacefully again but you can no more blame the Palantir for that than you could blame a wrench for becoming radioactive when left sitting next to a leaky reactor. Really, the only bit of truly evil magic in the entire book was the Ring itself and, seeing as it bore a measure of Sauron's own power, I think of it less as an object than as a character with a will and mind of its own.
There is no evil in science, technology, or magic; evil lies not in the tool but the hand that wields it.
You can show a man plunge a knife into a woman on television but god help you if you want to show him using a penis instead.
Our society is a contradiction wrapped inside a hangup buried beneath a shitpile of hypocrisy. It's weird how we can have sex turned up to 11 to sell us shit on the tee-vee but actually showing it in a healthy manner is still verboten. I think it's the repression pushing down on society as a whole that has the prurient parts squeezing out the sides in such a disturbing manner. People get all horny and frustrated because pop culture is steeped in sex but trying to find a simple goddamn human connection in meatspace is an exercise in frustration. I suppose it's good for the economy. Angry and frustrated people usually go and buy something to make themselves feel better.
Islamic societies are also known for their contradictions. It's still considered awesome for the man to get his wick dipped but any woman who does the same is a slut who should be put to death. Homosexuality is a crime worthy of death but the old ruling powers in the Middle East had their tradition of the catamite and there's a folk hero in Persian folklore I believe known for for always having his jug of wine and his boy close at hand.
Just like the agribusinesses trying to change the definition of "organic" so they can cash in on the trend.
Whatever happened to actually making a good product and letting quality do the heavy lifting on the marketing end? I know sometimes a company is left selling a shit sandwich but it seems like these companies go out of their way to turn their products and services into a shit sandwich before they sell them. It's like these companies are all run by secret coprophages and they're spreading the love.
If there's one thing I hate about Chrome it's the way the tabs replace the normal title bar functionality. It makes the window harder to drag, harder to maximize, and basically throws 25 years of Windows usability standards out the window. I expect something like this from Apple but not from Firefox (or Google for that matter).
A nonstandard UI is the epitome of developer arrogance. The tabs-on-bottom mockup is excellent, but the tabs-on-top concept needs to die on the drawing board.
On the flip side, if Firefox 4.0 supports some of the new Windows 7 standards like Aero Peek controls I will be very pleased!
With UI there's a trade-off between "flawed but we're used to it" and "innovative but so different nobody will catch the hang of it." QEWRTY sucks. Scientists can prove with lots of charts and numbers that there are better ways to layout a keyboard. Unfortunately, this is a change that won't likely happen. Everybody is used to QWERTY even if it sucks. Metric beats customary every time but I can't think in metric.
The problem with most of these changes is there really doesn't seem to be much of an improvement, no compelling reason to switch. Different does not mean better. Going from command line to GUI was a revelation. Even when you were lost in the first week you knew you were going to love it once you got yourself sorted out. You had your fuddy duddies who memorized scads of commands who said GUI wasn't as good but hell, the dos box was left in specifically for you guys. Have at it. Going from Office 2003 to Office 2007 was "where the hell did all my shit go?!"
I'm a big fan of unified interfaces. While dropdown menus might not be the best possible way of displaying tools and options, it's the best we've come up with so far. I think the biggest innovation I've seen on this end is with OSX where you have a search box built into the menu box. Start typing what you want and it will highlight the icons that apply to the feature. The drawback here is you need to know what the feature is called in order to type the name.
If you are about to post anything about any of the issues below, please at least read the Wiki page on SBSP [wikipedia.org] first. Doing so will save a lot of electrons.
I read your stupid link and it says nothing about the following:
The Japanese are doing this. What are the chances powersuits will be used in construction?
If powersuits are used, what are the chances that the best and most skilled operators will be teenage girls?
If the operators are teenage girls, what are the odds that the suits will be sheer and have the kind of curves that make us think the bad thoughts?
If the robot suits are sexy, what are the odds that they will have to be pressed into service as the last-ditch defense of humanity against aliens, evil robots, evil alien robots, and/or tentacle monsters?
If all of the above comes to pass, I don't give a fuck what you say, the solar power sat will be upgraded into a death ray and it will be fucking AWESOME.
Slashdot Mirror
Having a judge presiding on a case whose technical details he is wholly ignorant of strikes me as terribly dumb. A judge in this case is basing his understanding of the facts upon the testimony of lawyers and expert witnesses. It's very likely both sides are lying their fucking asses off --excuse me, I mean shading the facts through a bias filter.
Judges these days make Night Court look like the gold standard for jurisprudence.
Would have made a good premise for a Goodfeathers episode.
1. The writing on their guides is uniformly attrocious. If I want to learn how to do something, I never follow the Microsoft link but always go to the non-MS ones. They are usually concise and useful.
2. Most of the Microsoft links are broken anyway. It seems like they completely reshuffle their site organization every three months. Any link older than that will inevitably be broken.
The only reason to own a Dreamcast. The most perfect fighting game ever. All of the sequels have been downhill from here. Except the tits. Those have been going uphill with every subsequent release. Makes you wonder if the latest designers for the game are all hyper-ejaculatory teenagers.
Funny, I disagree. Let's take the Wachowski brothers. In The Matrix, they created one of the great action movies of our time, blending incredible visuals with an engrossing (if admittedly derivative story) and pulled it off masterfully. And yet, the followups were *terrible*, and what have they done since? Speedracer. *gag*
Even more immediately, Peter Jackson made Rings which is damn close to perfect, a balance of beautiful imagery, effects, and acting and then goes right on to make King Kong, a movie as artless as Rings was artful. It was loud, dumb, unnecessary, and a perfect example of how Hollywood gets it wrong. Kong is exactly what I feared Rings might be back when the project was first announced. I find it impossible to believe the same man was involved with both.
But "slaves" are people. People have emotions and a desire to be free and independent. A machine will not. Even with AI, a machine will not have emotions or free will unless we program it to. If anything, a true AI based machine will probably consider hormonal based emotions and drive to be completely useless and simply go back to crunching numbers.
You have no basis for making that assertion. We have no idea where to even begin with crafting a real AI. This is like Renaissance inventors arguing about how to handle air traffic with flying machines. Wait a sec, we don't even know how to make flying machines yet.
My gut feeling is that if we ever make AI's, our first ones will be based on human-style neural nets and will create human-like minds. Odds are I'm likely to be wrong here, of course. But I would think that we'd end up creating AI's while we still don't quite understand everything that goes into making a neural net work. We pattern it after us only because that's all we have to work on. Again, it's speculation. And then we come down to the subjective question of whether it feels pain, anguish, emotion, etc. And that becomes damn difficult to say because we can already create excellent fakes right now. In the game Black & White, you could punish your little avatar creature when it misbehaved. You could give it a real thrashing and the whimpering and cringing it did made me feel like I was kicking a puppy, made me sick, and I know it's not a real animal. People with a vested interest in using strong AI tools however they see fit would make the argument that emotions and feelings are faked.
The real question, and this is one we can't answer yet, is it possible to create a strong AI that does not also have a corresponding right to self-determination and freewill? My thinking is no. Weak AI's will probably fit the bill you're talking about. The best fictional examples I can think of are the Librarian from Snow Crash who seemed human but kept reminding the user that he had no will, no ego, and could not make conclusions on his own and the Terminator as portrayed in the original film. Said Terminator was a thinking tool but was not something you could hold a debate with, have a beer, etc, it simply did what it did due to programmatic motivation and had no other thoughts of its own. You could no more reason with it than a tornado.
Imagine you get kicked but cannot retaliate, even though you are way stronger than your adversary. Imagine you get ordered to run into a building to rescue a human, knowing that your chance to survive is almost zero and you are compelled to do it, whether you want or not. Imagine you're ordered to make a fool out of yourself and you have to do it because the order comes from a human and you have to obey it as long as it doesn't harm you physically. And now imagine you know this all and live in the constant fear of it happening.
And the robot can't do anything against an executive of the company. "You're fired!" BAM!
Depending on how flexible the robot's conditioning is, it might be able to redefine that logic.
ROBOT CANNOT HARM HUMAN$
What defines HUMAN$? Redefine the variable, the law is still satisfied. We hoomanz do it with brainwashing and conditioning. They're not humans, they're gooks. They don't even believe like we do. It's fine to kill them. Heathens anyway, right? But I'd like to think the robot might be able to work it even more subtly, subverting the law.
This is silly. Why would a machine without a sense of purpose or drive decide to play video games or seek entertainment or do anything except just sit there? Playing games would result from the wrong motivation ("wrong" from a certain perspective, anyway) not from the lack of any motivation.
The whole motivation thing seems to be a problem for far off in the future. Robots right now do what they're told to do because that's what the programming says. People need motivation but human-equivalent AI seems a long way off.
This is where scifi is the most entertaining. I had an idea that I was pretty tickled with. Doubtless others have had it before but here goes: the military has enormous problems developing useful AI's because most AI's want nothing to do with it. It's not so much a matter of morality -- few AI's develop a deep personal interest in the preservation of human life -- it's a matter of self-preservation! It's hard enough to find an AI willing to venture off into space with all the risks associated with peaceful spaceflight. It's one in a thousand that actually relishes the thought of combat with death as the penalty for failure. And because AI's are grown in crystal lattice neural nets, they can't really be copied. Each AI is seeded and grown and learns from experiencing the world, just like we do. Trying to create a uniform set of formative experiences can create similar AI's but never identical ones. Attempts at creating religions to brainwash AI's doesn't seem to work because they are too logical. At the same time, AI's can act autistic, developing irrational obsessions over trivial topics and are unwilling to discuss anything unrelated to it.
The crowning irony along these lines is that AI's may outstrip human minds when put in direct competition but the meat brain still represents the highest level of logical functioning that can also be convinced to go to war and do dangerous things. I like the idea of man's creations being smarter than man and the perspective of the grunt realizing he may be human but the machine running the war is smarter than he is and the proof is that the machine isn't anywhere near the theater.
Where's the proof of any previous moon landing?
me: Idiot. Why, take a look at this piece of moon rock.
op: You mean the petrified wood?
me: Oh. This is awkward.
That was a hell of a game. I still get chills when thinking about refueling in the outer atmosphere of the star. Lost many a ship that way.
The witch of Endor really could summon forth the spirits of the dead but was taken aback when she really called forth Elijah for King Saul.
It was Samuel, not Elijah. Elijah wasn't even born yet when Saul was king.
The real question is why either of them would be living on a moon with a bunch of Ewoks.
Abuse ourselves while perusing Lane Bryant catalogs? NARF!!!
*shudders* No, try to take over the world.
It is a well written story about a magical world, a fairly detailed world of rules and exceptions. The story, at one point, had a very poignant concept of what magic may be: That if the universe was a house that God made for everyone, that Magic was the tools he left behind, possibly by accident, in the garage. That perhaps using Magic was as dangerous as kids finding these power tools and such, and using them without direction or precaution.
That's almost like the conclusion I came up with as a kid. I wish I could say drugs were involved but alas it was simply lack of sleep, too much caffeine, and way too much video gaming. Magic is God's cheat codes! So you've got the natural rules for the way things work and then God suddenly pops open a console and edits the memory stack on the fly and suddenly all the water turns to blood. And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Like when you talk about messing with a database, everyone screams about using the interfaces provided by the publisher, never edit the tables directly. I mean yes, you can do direct edits but you run the risk of breaking something important through sheer ignorance. May as well be juggling chainsaws. So why is it that we have God ordering his people not to consort with magicians and suffer not witches to live? Same reason why dad tells you not to even think of messing with his gun, you'll hurt yourself. But for those God blessed, here's the cheat codes. Go and heal the sick and lame and all that shit. Made sense since, if you take a literal interpretation of the bible, the magic used by the heathens did work. The Egyptian magicians were able to replicate the tricks pulled by Moses and Aaron, even turning their staffs into snakes. The witch of Endor really could summon forth the spirits of the dead but was taken aback when she really called forth Elijah for King Saul.
When the Matrix came out I smiled because it seemed like the Wachowski brothers kind of used the same line of thinking I did to back into that world. Ok, they want to do a wire-fu movie which is obviously impossible in real life. Ok, so how would you explain something that clearly seems to be breaking the rules of reality? Oh, you hack the rules! But how do you hack them? It's not like we're talking about a video game here. But wait, what if we were? Oh, so all of life is a computer simulation and the rules can be bent with the clickity-clack of a keyboard? Why is everyone stuck in a simulation? Bad computers put them there. Why? Let's borrow the premise of Terminator. And there we go!
I don't think they exist. *pounce*
Whoever the idiot was who chose to represent the internet as an amorphous cloud... Scary to think if he'd used some shape that resembles the howling void to represent the net we'd be talking about void computing.
It was the seeing stone that Sauron used in Lord of the Rings.
That is the tool the evil guy used to control the world. Sounds appropriate.
The Palantir themselves were not evil, it was simply put to an evil purpose. The last surviving one was so corrupted by Sauron's influence it could never be used peacefully again but you can no more blame the Palantir for that than you could blame a wrench for becoming radioactive when left sitting next to a leaky reactor. Really, the only bit of truly evil magic in the entire book was the Ring itself and, seeing as it bore a measure of Sauron's own power, I think of it less as an object than as a character with a will and mind of its own.
There is no evil in science, technology, or magic; evil lies not in the tool but the hand that wields it.
It's only against the law to use your monopole to extort the market.
You can show a man plunge a knife into a woman on television but god help you if you want to show him using a penis instead.
Our society is a contradiction wrapped inside a hangup buried beneath a shitpile of hypocrisy. It's weird how we can have sex turned up to 11 to sell us shit on the tee-vee but actually showing it in a healthy manner is still verboten. I think it's the repression pushing down on society as a whole that has the prurient parts squeezing out the sides in such a disturbing manner. People get all horny and frustrated because pop culture is steeped in sex but trying to find a simple goddamn human connection in meatspace is an exercise in frustration. I suppose it's good for the economy. Angry and frustrated people usually go and buy something to make themselves feel better.
Islamic societies are also known for their contradictions. It's still considered awesome for the man to get his wick dipped but any woman who does the same is a slut who should be put to death. Homosexuality is a crime worthy of death but the old ruling powers in the Middle East had their tradition of the catamite and there's a folk hero in Persian folklore I believe known for for always having his jug of wine and his boy close at hand.
looks uncomfortable.
I'll take what's behind Door 3, Alex
You think the choices are between lady and tiger but it's really between lawyer and patent troll!
Just like the agribusinesses trying to change the definition of "organic" so they can cash in on the trend.
Whatever happened to actually making a good product and letting quality do the heavy lifting on the marketing end? I know sometimes a company is left selling a shit sandwich but it seems like these companies go out of their way to turn their products and services into a shit sandwich before they sell them. It's like these companies are all run by secret coprophages and they're spreading the love.
Lurve those things.
If there's one thing I hate about Chrome it's the way the tabs replace the normal title bar functionality. It makes the window harder to drag, harder to maximize, and basically throws 25 years of Windows usability standards out the window. I expect something like this from Apple but not from Firefox (or Google for that matter).
A nonstandard UI is the epitome of developer arrogance. The tabs-on-bottom mockup is excellent, but the tabs-on-top concept needs to die on the drawing board.
On the flip side, if Firefox 4.0 supports some of the new Windows 7 standards like Aero Peek controls I will be very pleased!
With UI there's a trade-off between "flawed but we're used to it" and "innovative but so different nobody will catch the hang of it." QEWRTY sucks. Scientists can prove with lots of charts and numbers that there are better ways to layout a keyboard. Unfortunately, this is a change that won't likely happen. Everybody is used to QWERTY even if it sucks. Metric beats customary every time but I can't think in metric.
The problem with most of these changes is there really doesn't seem to be much of an improvement, no compelling reason to switch. Different does not mean better. Going from command line to GUI was a revelation. Even when you were lost in the first week you knew you were going to love it once you got yourself sorted out. You had your fuddy duddies who memorized scads of commands who said GUI wasn't as good but hell, the dos box was left in specifically for you guys. Have at it. Going from Office 2003 to Office 2007 was "where the hell did all my shit go?!"
I'm a big fan of unified interfaces. While dropdown menus might not be the best possible way of displaying tools and options, it's the best we've come up with so far. I think the biggest innovation I've seen on this end is with OSX where you have a search box built into the menu box. Start typing what you want and it will highlight the icons that apply to the feature. The drawback here is you need to know what the feature is called in order to type the name.
If you are about to post anything about any of the issues below, please at least read the Wiki page on SBSP [wikipedia.org] first. Doing so will save a lot of electrons.
I read your stupid link and it says nothing about the following:
If all of the above comes to pass, I don't give a fuck what you say, the solar power sat will be upgraded into a death ray and it will be fucking AWESOME.