The question is, how can we reconcile all of this complexity with the relatively small number of genes in our genome (possibly as few as 25,000 - compare to 18,000 for a worm, same number as a fruit fly.)
The simple answer? We can't. The information content simply is not there, it defies the laws of mathematics. All of this consciousness and complexity crap is obviously some sort of mistake on our part - or it would be if we were sufficiently intelligent to make mistakes.
Timmy! Are you writing a symphony again? BAD *WHACK* TIMMY *WHACK* STOP *WHACK* VIOLATING *WHACK* LAWS *WHACK* OF *WHACK* NATURE *WHACK*. Get back into your corner and resume drooling and scratching yourself RIGHT NOW young man!
That's the problem with slashdot, any time anyone posts an *actually funny* comment, it doesn't get modded up.
It's like the moderators have seen humor described in a book, but have no real first hand experience with it.
Obviously this happens extensively (what the grandparent proposes) but it's a barrier to communication, and all such barriers make organization of dissident and populist movements - never easy - even harder.
But I'll spell it out for anyone who's managed to avoid knowing: the Japanese are only interested in building household robots so that they can have kinky sex with them.
This is a cold, intcontrevertible fact. Whatever sappy fantasy's you may have about cultural relativism, or about the generally futuristic aspirations of the Japanese are sheer delusion - and in a world where cultural dysfunctional sararimen go home every day to splooge in the faces of their stable of cat-eared britney-spears-bots, you cannot afford them. The time to act is now: nuke Japan again!
Two things: 1) Apples don't have much potassium in them. You could have eaten those.
If you are potassium deficient, drink ORANGE juice.
2) Low potassium can also stop your heart. In order for your heart to function the potassium potential difference (inside vs. outside) the cells must be in a certain range. Too little potassium, and you don't have enough potassium to put into the cells. Too much potassium, and you potassium starts to accumulate in the area outside of the cells. Either way you can have a heart attack.
Should the environmental movement favor nuclear power?
Who cares!
The four subjects he raises are fringe distractions from the major policy questions which have the largest impact on our environment, which are merely a symptom of wider deficits in our nation's democratic culture.
Population growth is becoming a non-issue.
I favor nuclear power as long as the details are right - if the public is going to take all the risks, we shouldn't allow some private entity to reap the profits off of it.
I favor genetically modified organisms which are designed in a way that benefits farmers and/or the environment, rather than maximizing the profits of entrenched power.
Likewise, urbanization is fine if it leads to prosperity, but as a result of people being driven off of the land by thugs (e.g. Columbia) it is a bad thing.
The devil is in the details, as has always been the case. In ten years time the details may have changed enough that the present situation becomes unrecognizable; so I think trying to predict what we will be trying to do ten years from now is futile and silly.
This isn't to bash futurism generally - we can't know what to work towards now if we don't have some concept of what the future will be like. But trying to predict the future of activism? Waste of time.
Can anyone tell me how many times these high and mighty evolution scientists have already backpedalled and changed their version of the truth to fit some new finding? I've already lost the count... pathetic, really.
Gosh.... yeah, it's awful how scientists are always changing their mind on encountering new data.
If we had any guts, we'd still believe in ether.
I don't think the parent is really a creationist at all; it's an anonymous coward trolling by pretending to be a creationist, providing a particularly easy straw man argument for us to knock down.
Which is utterly mysterious because there are plenty of authentic nutcases on slashdot.
People who've received vaccines, or had a family member in a coma, or lost relatives to ethnic cleansing, etc. never find *anything* funny. At least, not any of my jokes.
So that can't be a consideration, can it?
That said, it was humor by double inversion - the only way a cool, cynical person such as myself can offer praise of any sort to someone for doing something decent. So obviously, you don't think the Gates' foundation deserves acclamation for their humanitarian works.
blanks, why do you hate the poor suffering people of the world *so much*? Bono is gonna kick your ass, man.
Don't you realize that every time you say something nice about Microsoft, Bill and Melinda dine on one of those Indian babies they've "saved" from HIV? How to serve man, indeed!
In all seriousness, the spam epidemic is actually caused by a relatively tiny number of people, so it would seem that this is a workable strategy - but the cause will just be taken up by people outside of our jurisdiction (Russians, mostly.)
First off, you are mistaken about the logical end-point of the grandparents "thought". Since we are working under conditions of diminishing returns, it makes sense to spread money/effort between a number of different problems - so even if AIDS is more important as a health problem than cancer, we still want to spend money on both of them.
Secondly, the argument is not only that there are many causes more worthy of their several million dollars, but that this particular cause has no worthy or socially redeeming value at all! They are using donations to prop up a for-profit enterprise (ahyuck! I made a funny!). If they wanted to take that money, produce a sci-fi show, and give it away to the general public, that would be worthy.
Yeah, that would be ideal, and I agree that it would be an excellent business decision for Hasbro/WOTC, but I think it's unlikely that they would see it that way.
They want people to develop 3rd party material for their products - but only if it helps them sell their products. Not if they have no product to sell....
They could give away the code to ToEE and then force licensing fees from people trying to sell scenarios or the like.
More likely, however, they'd want to charge money for the engine (which means keeping it closed) and then let 3rd parties sell modules. There was a Mac game called Realmz that did this but it wasn't (I believe) a very successful businessm model.
I believe, but am not a lawyer, that the OGL specifically excludes video-game implementations.
If you are correct, then of course you'd simply distribute scripts to implement WOTC's own material under-the-radar.
What about the ToEE codebase?
on
Troika Games Closes
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
With mods and patches the game was very nice - as someone else pointed out Atari forced them to ship an unfinished game (see also Master of Orion 3) but fortunately it was still salvageable.
So - now that the bugs are ironed out ToEE is an excellent engine for making D&D 3rd ed. single player scenarios. Does Troika still exist enough to lease out access to that Code to other design studios? You also need a WOTC license, of course.
I'm able to use my synaesthetic powers to detect complete bullshit!
It's true that there is definitely a region of the brain that manages anxiety - and that all sorts of things can make people anxious - seemingly for no reason!
However, neurotic != psychic. There are no *new senses* under discussion here, just a better understanding of how the brain manages that feeling of impending doom you sometimes get.
Do other mammals have similar brain structures? Yes.
Do they probably use them to avoid danger, incl. forest fires and tsunamis? Almost certainly.
Do we, higher mammals, probably retain whatever hard-coded sensory cues cause our little forest friends to flee natural disasters? We probably do, yes. When someone is in the supermarket and they have a panic attack for no reason, might it be because the kiwi display is triggering the same mechanism that is supposed to make us flee from a tsunami? Maybe.
"In the past, we found activity in the ACC when people had to make a difficult decision among mutually exclusive options, or after they made a mistake," Brown said. "But now we find that this brain region can actually learn to recognize when you might make a mistake, even before a difficult decision has to be made. So the ACC appears to act as an early warning system -- it learns to warn us in advance when our behavior might lead to a negative outcome, so that we can be more careful and avoid making a mistake."
This has nothing to do with psychic powers! Fucking idiot journalists.
Remember the story about the computer program that is supposed to pick out hit songs?
Is there some computer somewhere telling people to make Beowulf clones?
I mean, I can see why a studio trying to cash in on the latest formula (Lord of the Rings) would be making a movie of Beowulf (I was surprised to see only one King Arthur movie) but two of them at once? Come on!
The label's marketing department are promoting him to the Norah Jones audience. But Polyphonic's analysis has shown that the crooner's song patterns are more similar to Linkin Park, Aerosmith and JayZ.
future HSS developer: You know who I really hate? The record industry.
future HSS collaborator: Well, you should do something about that.
future HSS developer: You're right! Recording execs are really, really, stupid. I bet it'd be easy. I've got a plan.
future HSS collaborator: Sigh... fine, what's your plan?
future HSS developer: They pay us $6000, and we tell them if their song will be a hit or not, then give them some printouts with, you know, clusters of dots on them, random numbers, whatever. Then we say "Artificial intelligence! The magic boxes say this will be a hit because it resembles Tupac Shakur and Wagner!"
future HSS collaborator: You know, unlike your plan to hack people's PVRs to make them think they're gay.... this would actually work. Let's do it. Get me a dartboard.
Re:What about the budget
on
Carnivore No More
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Someone is perhaps unaware of how the economy *actually* works.
The FBI paid to develop carnivore - and then the developers took side jobs developing these commercial equivalents, which they sold to the FBI. These commercial equivalents would never have come into existence if the Feds hadn't taken on the cost of the initial phase of development, and, from the look of things, provided an initial customer base for this software. The exact same thing happened with total information awareness (now a product being sold out of a cayman islands holding corporation or the like), in case you were not paying attention.
You may not like this sort of arrangement, but in that case you must really hate all the money the Feds wasted on information technology, automation, container shipping, or avionics, all of which were developed more-or-less the same way.
Of course, you can approve of this sort of arrangement without approving of it's use in this particular case, but that isn't the objection you raise.
If the FBI were a company... heads would roll. This wouldn't be acceptable.
How adorable! A Capitalist! Does woo believe in the free market? Does woo? Yes woo does!
As any engineer can tell you, there are always trade-offs in any design change. In this case, those trade-offs are "side effects".
It may be possible to optimize human beings for some particular task using drugs of various sorts - but what criterion will we use to determine what changes we will make?
I envisage a sort of corporate dystopia, in which people optomize themselves to maximize their utility to their employers, altering their own brain chemistry to make themselves into perfect employees - we can argue what traits such a human tool would have, but they're probably not very laudable.
On the other hand, people ought to be able to have any neurochemistry they want; under more generally egalitarian social arrangements, such drugs would simply enable people to do that, which would be good.
Maybe I've just been reading too much science fiction.
Only 20% of the population goes to the movies EACH MONTH. Movie viewing is much more evenly distributed among the population generally - with many people going to the movies 1/year.
Relatively few people buy one video game a year, on the other hand. The average among people who buy any at all is probably somwhere north of 3.
So the portion of the population that goes to movies - ever - is more than 3 times as great as the portion of the population that buys a video-game - ever.
Think about your own sphere of acquantances - how many people do you know who've never gone to see a movie? Even the Amish neighbors of the family farm in the midwest had gone to see a movie at least once in their lives, for christ's sake.
On the other hand, many of the people I know have never bought a video-game for themselves, but my little brother owns dozens and (counting the ones I bought when I was a kid) so do I; and the people I know are far more likely to be gamers than the general population.
Slashdot Mirror
The question is, how can we reconcile all of this complexity with the relatively small number of genes in our genome (possibly as few as 25,000 - compare to 18,000 for a worm, same number as a fruit fly.)
The simple answer? We can't. The information content simply is not there, it defies the laws of mathematics. All of this consciousness and complexity crap is obviously some sort of mistake on our part - or it would be if we were sufficiently intelligent to make mistakes.
Timmy! Are you writing a symphony again? BAD *WHACK* TIMMY *WHACK* STOP *WHACK* VIOLATING *WHACK* LAWS *WHACK* OF *WHACK* NATURE *WHACK*. Get back into your corner and resume drooling and scratching yourself RIGHT NOW young man!
Oh, lordy.
That's the problem with slashdot, any time anyone posts an *actually funny* comment, it doesn't get modded up.
It's like the moderators have seen humor described in a book, but have no real first hand experience with it.
Obviously this happens extensively (what the grandparent proposes) but it's a barrier to communication, and all such barriers make organization of dissident and populist movements - never easy - even harder.
But I'll spell it out for anyone who's managed to avoid knowing: the Japanese are only interested in building household robots so that they can have kinky sex with them.
This is a cold, intcontrevertible fact. Whatever sappy fantasy's you may have about cultural relativism, or about the generally futuristic aspirations of the Japanese are sheer delusion - and in a world where cultural dysfunctional sararimen go home every day to splooge in the faces of their stable of cat-eared britney-spears-bots, you cannot afford them. The time to act is now: nuke Japan again!
Two things:
1) Apples don't have much potassium in them. You could have eaten those.
If you are potassium deficient, drink ORANGE juice.
2) Low potassium can also stop your heart. In order for your heart to function the potassium potential difference (inside vs. outside) the cells must be in a certain range. Too little potassium, and you don't have enough potassium to put into the cells. Too much potassium, and you potassium starts to accumulate in the area outside of the cells. Either way you can have a heart attack.
Should the environmental movement favor nuclear power?
Who cares!
The four subjects he raises are fringe distractions from the major policy questions which have the largest impact on our environment, which are merely a symptom of wider deficits in our nation's democratic culture.
Population growth is becoming a non-issue.
I favor nuclear power as long as the details are right - if the public is going to take all the risks, we shouldn't allow some private entity to reap the profits off of it.
I favor genetically modified organisms which are designed in a way that benefits farmers and/or the environment, rather than maximizing the profits of entrenched power.
Likewise, urbanization is fine if it leads to prosperity, but as a result of people being driven off of the land by thugs (e.g. Columbia) it is a bad thing.
The devil is in the details, as has always been the case. In ten years time the details may have changed enough that the present situation becomes unrecognizable; so I think trying to predict what we will be trying to do ten years from now is futile and silly.
This isn't to bash futurism generally - we can't know what to work towards now if we don't have some concept of what the future will be like. But trying to predict the future of activism? Waste of time.
Can anyone tell me how many times these high and mighty evolution scientists have already backpedalled and changed their version of the truth to fit some new finding? I've already lost the count... pathetic, really.
Gosh.... yeah, it's awful how scientists are always changing their mind on encountering new data.
If we had any guts, we'd still believe in ether.
I don't think the parent is really a creationist at all; it's an anonymous coward trolling by pretending to be a creationist, providing a particularly easy straw man argument for us to knock down.
Which is utterly mysterious because there are plenty of authentic nutcases on slashdot.
People who've received vaccines, or had a family member in a coma, or lost relatives to ethnic cleansing, etc. never find *anything* funny. At least, not any of my jokes.
So that can't be a consideration, can it?
That said, it was humor by double inversion - the only way a cool, cynical person such as myself can offer praise of any sort to someone for doing something decent. So obviously, you don't think the Gates' foundation deserves acclamation for their humanitarian works.
blanks, why do you hate the poor suffering people of the world *so much*? Bono is gonna kick your ass, man.
Don't you realize that every time you say something nice about Microsoft, Bill and Melinda dine on one of those Indian babies they've "saved" from HIV? How to serve man, indeed!
In all seriousness, the spam epidemic is actually caused by a relatively tiny number of people, so it would seem that this is a workable strategy - but the cause will just be taken up by people outside of our jurisdiction (Russians, mostly.)
So, in the spirit of female liberation everywhere, let me be the first to say - that little girl is seriously hot. Yowza.
First off, you are mistaken about the logical end-point of the grandparents "thought". Since we are working under conditions of diminishing returns, it makes sense to spread money/effort between a number of different problems - so even if AIDS is more important as a health problem than cancer, we still want to spend money on both of them.
Secondly, the argument is not only that there are many causes more worthy of their several million dollars, but that this particular cause has no worthy or socially redeeming value at all! They are using donations to prop up a for-profit enterprise (ahyuck! I made a funny!). If they wanted to take that money, produce a sci-fi show, and give it away to the general public, that would be worthy.
Yeah, that would be ideal, and I agree that it would be an excellent business decision for Hasbro/WOTC, but I think it's unlikely that they would see it that way.
They want people to develop 3rd party material for their products - but only if it helps them sell their products. Not if they have no product to sell....
They could give away the code to ToEE and then force licensing fees from people trying to sell scenarios or the like.
More likely, however, they'd want to charge money for the engine (which means keeping it closed) and then let 3rd parties sell modules. There was a Mac game called Realmz that did this but it wasn't (I believe) a very successful businessm model.
Any such outcome would be pretty cool, of course.
I believe, but am not a lawyer, that the OGL specifically excludes video-game implementations.
If you are correct, then of course you'd simply distribute scripts to implement WOTC's own material under-the-radar.
With mods and patches the game was very nice - as someone else pointed out Atari forced them to ship an unfinished game (see also Master of Orion 3) but fortunately it was still salvageable.
So - now that the bugs are ironed out ToEE is an excellent engine for making D&D 3rd ed. single player scenarios. Does Troika still exist enough to lease out access to that Code to other design studios? You also need a WOTC license, of course.
I'm able to use my synaesthetic powers to detect complete bullshit!
It's true that there is definitely a region of the brain that manages anxiety - and that all sorts of things can make people anxious - seemingly for no reason!
However, neurotic != psychic. There are no *new senses* under discussion here, just a better understanding of how the brain manages that feeling of impending doom you sometimes get.
Do other mammals have similar brain structures? Yes.
Do they probably use them to avoid danger, incl. forest fires and tsunamis? Almost certainly.
Do we, higher mammals, probably retain whatever hard-coded sensory cues cause our little forest friends to flee natural disasters? We probably do, yes. When someone is in the supermarket and they have a panic attack for no reason, might it be because the kiwi display is triggering the same mechanism that is supposed to make us flee from a tsunami? Maybe.
"In the past, we found activity in the ACC when people had to make a difficult decision among mutually exclusive options, or after they made a mistake," Brown said. "But now we find that this brain region can actually learn to recognize when you might make a mistake, even before a difficult decision has to be made. So the ACC appears to act as an early warning system -- it learns to warn us in advance when our behavior might lead to a negative outcome, so that we can be more careful and avoid making a mistake."
This has nothing to do with psychic powers! Fucking idiot journalists.
Are you saying that it is *impossible* for a computer equipped with something like MythTV to emulate a cable descrambler in software?
The reason I still have to rent a cable box is because my incoming signal comes in scrambled.
NOW - if I buy a cable descrambler, that would be illegal, right?
But surely you can set up MythTV or the like to do the same thing in software (I assume the cable box does it in firmware but I don't actually know.)
So - would software that does the same thing be illegal, or not?
And can MythTV do this?
So, what he is saying is, that in spite of all temptation to belong to other nations, he remains an Englishman?
Remember the story about the computer program that is supposed to pick out hit songs?
Is there some computer somewhere telling people to make Beowulf clones?
I mean, I can see why a studio trying to cash in on the latest formula (Lord of the Rings) would be making a movie of Beowulf (I was surprised to see only one King Arthur movie) but two of them at once? Come on!
The dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, you twit.
m ian.htm
We're talking about the Permian Extinction - which, by the way, no-one actually calls the "Great Dying".
I could tell y'all about it but it would be a duplication of effort. Do yourself a favor and read something:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/darwin/exfiles/per
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_extinction
The label's marketing department are promoting him to the Norah Jones audience. But Polyphonic's analysis has shown that the crooner's song patterns are more similar to Linkin Park, Aerosmith and JayZ.
future HSS developer: You know who I really hate? The record industry.
future HSS collaborator: Well, you should do something about that.
future HSS developer: You're right! Recording execs are really, really, stupid. I bet it'd be easy. I've got a plan.
future HSS collaborator: Sigh... fine, what's your plan?
future HSS developer: They pay us $6000, and we tell them if their song will be a hit or not, then give them some printouts with, you know, clusters of dots on them, random numbers, whatever. Then we say "Artificial intelligence! The magic boxes say this will be a hit because it resembles Tupac Shakur and Wagner!"
future HSS collaborator: You know, unlike your plan to hack people's PVRs to make them think they're gay.... this would actually work. Let's do it. Get me a dartboard.
Someone is perhaps unaware of how the economy *actually* works.
The FBI paid to develop carnivore - and then the developers took side jobs developing these commercial equivalents, which they sold to the FBI. These commercial equivalents would never have come into existence if the Feds hadn't taken on the cost of the initial phase of development, and, from the look of things, provided an initial customer base for this software. The exact same thing happened with total information awareness (now a product being sold out of a cayman islands holding corporation or the like), in case you were not paying attention.
You may not like this sort of arrangement, but in that case you must really hate all the money the Feds wasted on information technology, automation, container shipping, or avionics, all of which were developed more-or-less the same way.
Of course, you can approve of this sort of arrangement without approving of it's use in this particular case, but that isn't the objection you raise.
If the FBI were a company... heads would roll. This wouldn't be acceptable.
How adorable! A Capitalist! Does woo believe in the free market? Does woo? Yes woo does!
Who cares about being able to bench cars? Admit to yourself how rarely this would be useful and grow as a human being.
Of course, usefulness has little to do with the first cybernetic implant on *my* christmas list in 2020.
The Mr Stud's Implant.
Every robot will have a 12" steel johnson.
The little speck in the lower-left hand corner?
We assume that it is a giant killer crab robot that the ancient orionids left in orbit to defend their treasure trove of super science.
Of course, without the Improved Space Scanner we can't be sure.
As any engineer can tell you, there are always trade-offs in any design change. In this case, those trade-offs are "side effects".
It may be possible to optimize human beings for some particular task using drugs of various sorts - but what criterion will we use to determine what changes we will make?
I envisage a sort of corporate dystopia, in which people optomize themselves to maximize their utility to their employers, altering their own brain chemistry to make themselves into perfect employees - we can argue what traits such a human tool would have, but they're probably not very laudable.
On the other hand, people ought to be able to have any neurochemistry they want; under more generally egalitarian social arrangements, such drugs would simply enable people to do that, which would be good.
Maybe I've just been reading too much science fiction.
Only 20% of the population goes to the movies EACH MONTH. Movie viewing is much more evenly distributed among the population generally - with many people going to the movies 1/year.
Relatively few people buy one video game a year, on the other hand. The average among people who buy any at all is probably somwhere north of 3.
So the portion of the population that goes to movies - ever - is more than 3 times as great as the portion of the population that buys a video-game - ever.
Think about your own sphere of acquantances - how many people do you know who've never gone to see a movie? Even the Amish neighbors of the family farm in the midwest had gone to see a movie at least once in their lives, for christ's sake.
On the other hand, many of the people I know have never bought a video-game for themselves, but my little brother owns dozens and (counting the ones I bought when I was a kid) so do I; and the people I know are far more likely to be gamers than the general population.