What's worse is you can't even tell whether you were the same "you" a year or even the smallest fraction of a second ago. All you know is that whatever "you" are, you can observe one particular brain's lifetime of memories at this particular instant in time. The sense of continuity could just be an illusion caused by instantaneous access to that one particular brain's short term memory. It's funny because the mind's sense of continuity of consciousness and self identity seems to be one of the very strongest connections it has. Trying to rationalise this and realise it's just an assumption that "you" remain the same person from one moment to the next doesn't help much because I get the feeling that ignorance is bliss in this respect.
Whether it would be the same "you" or not is another question, but really it wouldn't matter. It would be you in all ways that count.
"All the ways that count" are only the ways that matter to other people, if it's not the same you. In that case it no longer matters to the original "you" also as they are lost - but it certainly should matter to that original "you" before they step into the teleporter! Your argument implies that for hermit who has never and will never interact with another living thing, it does not "count" whether or not they commit suicide - just because no-one is aware afterwards of the effects if they do do it, themselves included - but it would matter to them - particularly before the event!
Well, one thing's for sure: build one and we'd know right away whether "souls" exist. Copying the state of running software by copying the hardware it's running on just seems wonky to me, though.
No we really wouldn't know whether "souls" exist, though. That's the terrifying thing about the teleporter idea.
Billy is terrified of stepping into the teleporter, as he realises that he will be killed, and only a perfect copy of him, with all his memories will be created at the other side, which is cold comfort to him; but all his friends and family emerge from teleporters saying "Really, I was scared too, it's perfectly safe. You have nothing to fear"- etc. Except in reality, they all died, and they are perfect clones with cloned memories that are doing the reassuring. This is the problem. If a teleporter actually kills the person that enters it, and they don't experience a continuity of consciousness with the copy that emerges, then no-one will ever know (even the person who entered) - as the only person it really made any difference to is dead. It would remain a philosophical question whether that were actually true and it's quite frightening to imagine how quickly that issue could be dismissed or not even considered by a majority of the population.
I heard one theoretical solution to transferring consciousness to a copy would be to replace parts of the persons body and brain very gradually, just as cells and tissues are replaced naturally during a person's life. That might only work to make a local copy though and again there is no way at all of proving whether it works or not (other than doing it to yourself, and even then you will only know if it does work - if it doesn't - you die).
As you said yourself, various companies (including MS) were putting out much more detailed or extravagant logos in the 80s. It was only the cars back then that were plain and ugly and boxy, mainly due to economics I think.
Really? I think almost all contemporary cars are ugly now, except for some with genuinely retro styling (Dodge Challenger is nice) and some super cars.
I also think that, in general, cars have got visually less and less attractive over the decades since the 1930s.
Now they're designed around protecting jaywalkers above most other considerations.
Oh, and to get back on topic, I hate all this touch screen / tablet / (not) Metro / plain squares / no shading / bland logos / ribbon stuff Microsoft is doing! Yes the logo looks crap and Windows 8 looks so much like Windows 3.1!
1. The dog ate it.
2. You sent it by email and Outlook ate it.
3. Our email servers broke, again.
4. You sent it by post and the PO lost it.
5. What? I didn't hear you. Could you repeat that please.
This can go on for a while. Best get some popcorn.
i think it would be easiest to have a mens a womens an a other section. if you have xx and no penis your a woman, you have a xy and a penis your a man, else you compete in other.
If every job can be done by machines and we decide to implement them, then it will no longer be necessary to work. If it is no longer necessary to work, it will no longer be necessary to deal with money. People will be able to consume whatever product they want in whatever quantity they want because the machines can produce enough of all products as a condition of this hypothetical scenario. Without considering the deeper philosophy of happiness, this sounds a lot like a utopia.
That's exactly right, and the only major barrier to that utopia is intense competition over land ownership.
Everyone is trying to make a profit out of other people so their money can buy them a little patch of land they can call home for a while.
This wouldn't be an issue if humans weren't so keep on expanding their population.
I think this has to be forgiven as millions of years of evolution have made it a fairly strong urge.
The government's role should become the responsibility to disincentivise this population expansion - and in a gentle way - more carrot than stick - to discourage people having more than two children.
If the human population was a lot smaller, everyone could theoretically live in luxury.
Neither capitalism nor communism can achieve such a goal though as they are both obsessed with growth, employment and competition.
None of those things are necessarily positive, and they can in certain circumstances have very negative implications.
Apparently they've just made their first ever quarterly loss this year also. Oh and something called "Windows 8" is coming out. It's all downhill from here, I guess.
2+2=4 is obviously using Integers, and there is no 2.x in the set of Integers.
But 2.99999[...] is an integer!
Did everybody just get a lot stupider overnight?
dict integer:... (Or "whole number") One of the {finite} numbers in the infinite set..., -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3,...
That "finite" and "whole number" ought to be screaming blue, bloody murder at you right now. This isn't even Math. It's Arithmetic!
If you're here, you ought to know that 2 + 0.99999... is not an Integer operation. Mix Integers with Floating Point and it becomes a float operation, to preserve accuracy.
I will not be hiring you to write code for me.
Who said anything about code? I was talking mathematics, not types in programming languages. Sure, if you foolishly attempted to represent the number 3 in a similar form in program source code by typing in lots of 9s you're doomed to failure; but I'm sure in this case the poster was referring to a recurring decimal - hence there are infinite 9s, in which case this is accepted by orthodox mathematicians as being equal to the corresponding integer i.e. 0.99999... (recurring) = 1, 2.99999.. (recurring) = 3 and so on.
Their post had nothing to do with rounding. It was a joke. Slightly pedantic, perhaps, but a joke nonetheless.
You might have a case that the representation of the value 1 in the form 0.99999... cannot be called an integer, but I don't have enough grounding in number (or set?) theory to comment further on that. If it's applied maths / engineering / coding you're interested in then this is probably all largely irrelevant, most of the time.
2+2=4 is obviously using Integers, and there is no 2.x in the set of Integers.
But 2.99999[...] is an integer!
Did everybody just get a lot stupider overnight?
dict integer:
integer
(Or "whole number") One of the {finite} numbers
in the infinite set..., -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3,...
That "finite" and "whole number" ought to be screaming blue, bloody murder at you right now. This isn't even Math. It's Arithmetic!
Whoosh!
0.999999..... = 1 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999... )
=> 2 + 0.99999.... = 2 + 1
=> 2.99999..... = 3
and 3 is an integer
=> 2.9999.... is an integer.
That being said, I've never much liked recurring decimals.
Agent Smith: It seems that you've been living two lives. One life, you're Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number, pay your taxes, and you... help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias "Neo" and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not.
Just hang four tellies on the wall. Or twelve if you're really popular. It then just needs something to identify which viewer is supposed to be watching which TV as it could get annoying if it adjusted for one of the other viewers glancing at it from the other side of the room, but I imagine that could be even more of an issue with the single TV. Face tracking biased to whoever has been looking at the current show the longest?
Ah, looks like it doesn't do face tracking anyway and could work for multiple viewers. My bad.
Just hang four tellies on the wall. Or twelve if you're really popular. It then just needs something to identify which viewer is supposed to be watching which TV as it could get annoying if it adjusted for one of the other viewers glancing at it from the other side of the room, but I imagine that could be even more of an issue with the single TV. Face tracking biased to whoever has been looking at the current show the longest?
Apple's trouble is when even a judge is calling their device "cool", and every metrosexual media employee has been indoctrinated into loving their devices, then they cease to be truly cool because they're just another lame fashion accessory. Too "cool" to be cool.
Cool is an elusive concept. Apple and their billion dollar marketing team are trying too hard to hold onto it. When a product becomes 100% mainstream and run of the mill it's become reality TV. So last decade.
The Galaxy Tab is the underdog and underdogs can be cool.
*post = "ac"; is not reassigning the pointer. The * is dereferencing the pointer so you're actually attempting to write a value to the memory location addressed in post. The memory address in post wouldn't change. Also you'd likely get errors if your C compiler does type checking as you're trying to assign an array of chars to a single char location. *post = 'a'; would be valid and *(post+1) = 'c';. Of course, if it was initialised in ROM this will fail miserably.
If you were actually wanting to reassign the pointer's address so it points to your different string it would be const char * other = "hello"; post = other;
Your story reminds me of a BBC show..... a sci-fi future where people ride bikes, play games, and are forced to watch ads in their bedrooms (unless they pay to get rid of them). Day after miserable day.
I can get a Xbox 360 with a Kinect for $200. So, why should I pay more for just the hardware? Wasn't the hardware just on sale for Christmas for like $99?
Fun PC gaming always has to be more expensive otherwise why would anyone bother buying one of their stupid consoles? Oh, OK, all their friends have one, and they even call it a "computer" (Pedants: yes the consoles do compute but they're hardly as general purpose as PCs without some work). Sorry about the sarcasm but I'm sick of PC gaming (and by many young people even PCs) being sidelined and often limited to crappy console ports delivered late.
Kinect for Windows is still kinda cool though. Maybe they'll drop the price at some point.
No, even with higher DPI than the eye can resolve, you still need AA sometimes, as aliasing can present other problems than the jagged lines you're familiar with (e.g. moiré patterns).
True, although even the eye itself can exhibit moiré patterns when looking at certain objects.
Slashdot Mirror
What's worse is you can't even tell whether you were the same "you" a year or even the smallest fraction of a second ago. All you know is that whatever "you" are, you can observe one particular brain's lifetime of memories at this particular instant in time. The sense of continuity could just be an illusion caused by instantaneous access to that one particular brain's short term memory. It's funny because the mind's sense of continuity of consciousness and self identity seems to be one of the very strongest connections it has. Trying to rationalise this and realise it's just an assumption that "you" remain the same person from one moment to the next doesn't help much because I get the feeling that ignorance is bliss in this respect.
Whether it would be the same "you" or not is another question, but really it wouldn't matter. It would be you in all ways that count.
"All the ways that count" are only the ways that matter to other people, if it's not the same you. In that case it no longer matters to the original "you" also as they are lost - but it certainly should matter to that original "you" before they step into the teleporter! Your argument implies that for hermit who has never and will never interact with another living thing, it does not "count" whether or not they commit suicide - just because no-one is aware afterwards of the effects if they do do it, themselves included - but it would matter to them - particularly before the event!
Well, one thing's for sure: build one and we'd know right away whether "souls" exist. Copying the state of running software by copying the hardware it's running on just seems wonky to me, though.
No we really wouldn't know whether "souls" exist, though. That's the terrifying thing about the teleporter idea.
Billy is terrified of stepping into the teleporter, as he realises that he will be killed, and only a perfect copy of him, with all his memories will be created at the other side, which is cold comfort to him; but all his friends and family emerge from teleporters saying "Really, I was scared too, it's perfectly safe. You have nothing to fear"- etc. Except in reality, they all died, and they are perfect clones with cloned memories that are doing the reassuring. This is the problem. If a teleporter actually kills the person that enters it, and they don't experience a continuity of consciousness with the copy that emerges, then no-one will ever know (even the person who entered) - as the only person it really made any difference to is dead. It would remain a philosophical question whether that were actually true and it's quite frightening to imagine how quickly that issue could be dismissed or not even considered by a majority of the population.
I heard one theoretical solution to transferring consciousness to a copy would be to replace parts of the persons body and brain very gradually, just as cells and tissues are replaced naturally during a person's life. That might only work to make a local copy though and again there is no way at all of proving whether it works or not (other than doing it to yourself, and even then you will only know if it does work - if it doesn't - you die).
Well, for some reason, they already rejected my suggestion: "OS X Pussy"
or vagina.
As you said yourself, various companies (including MS) were putting out much more detailed or extravagant logos in the 80s. It was only the cars back then that were plain and ugly and boxy, mainly due to economics I think.
Really? I think almost all contemporary cars are ugly now, except for some with genuinely retro styling (Dodge Challenger is nice) and some super cars.
I also think that, in general, cars have got visually less and less attractive over the decades since the 1930s.
Now they're designed around protecting jaywalkers above most other considerations.
Oh, and to get back on topic, I hate all this touch screen / tablet / (not) Metro / plain squares / no shading / bland logos / ribbon stuff Microsoft is doing! Yes the logo looks crap and Windows 8 looks so much like Windows 3.1!
This is easy:
1. The dog ate it. 2. You sent it by email and Outlook ate it. 3. Our email servers broke, again. 4. You sent it by post and the PO lost it. 5. What? I didn't hear you. Could you repeat that please.
This can go on for a while. Best get some popcorn.
6. Yeah I know, it's "in the cloud".
i think it would be easiest to have a mens a womens an a other section. if you have xx and no penis your a woman, you have a xy and a penis your a man, else you compete in other.
Or vagina.
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/12/06/11/1141253/raunchy-dance-routine-a-pr-nightmare-for-microsoft
Sorry, that should have read "This wouldn't be an issue if humans weren't so keen on expanding their population."
If every job can be done by machines and we decide to implement them, then it will no longer be necessary to work. If it is no longer necessary to work, it will no longer be necessary to deal with money. People will be able to consume whatever product they want in whatever quantity they want because the machines can produce enough of all products as a condition of this hypothetical scenario. Without considering the deeper philosophy of happiness, this sounds a lot like a utopia.
That's exactly right, and the only major barrier to that utopia is intense competition over land ownership.
Everyone is trying to make a profit out of other people so their money can buy them a little patch of land they can call home for a while.
This wouldn't be an issue if humans weren't so keep on expanding their population.
I think this has to be forgiven as millions of years of evolution have made it a fairly strong urge.
The government's role should become the responsibility to disincentivise this population expansion - and in a gentle way - more carrot than stick - to discourage people having more than two children.
If the human population was a lot smaller, everyone could theoretically live in luxury.
Neither capitalism nor communism can achieve such a goal though as they are both obsessed with growth, employment and competition.
None of those things are necessarily positive, and they can in certain circumstances have very negative implications.
Or GTFO.
Or vagina.
This looks like another 'PR Nightmare for Microsoft'.
Apparently they've just made their first ever quarterly loss this year also. Oh and something called "Windows 8" is coming out. It's all downhill from here, I guess.
Goddamn I hate the fucking irony threads on Fark, goddamn pedantic fucks need to SHUT THE FUCK UP BECAUSE NO ONE FUCKING GIVES SHIT!
If you care about the proper use of irony, strap a lot of bombs to you and find someone in marketing and blow yourself up.
Thank you.
Err, sorry, were you being ironic?
2+2=4 is obviously using Integers, and there is no 2.x in the set of Integers.
But 2.99999[...] is an integer!
Did everybody just get a lot stupider overnight? dict integer: ... (Or "whole number") One of the {finite} numbers in the infinite set ..., -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, ...
That "finite" and "whole number" ought to be screaming blue, bloody murder at you right now. This isn't even Math. It's Arithmetic!
Whoosh!
0.999999..... = 1 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999... ) => 2 + 0.99999.... = 2 + 1
If you're here, you ought to know that 2 + 0.99999... is not an Integer operation. Mix Integers with Floating Point and it becomes a float operation, to preserve accuracy.
I will not be hiring you to write code for me.
Who said anything about code? I was talking mathematics, not types in programming languages. Sure, if you foolishly attempted to represent the number 3 in a similar form in program source code by typing in lots of 9s you're doomed to failure; but I'm sure in this case the poster was referring to a recurring decimal - hence there are infinite 9s, in which case this is accepted by orthodox mathematicians as being equal to the corresponding integer i.e. 0.99999... (recurring) = 1, 2.99999.. (recurring) = 3 and so on.
Their post had nothing to do with rounding. It was a joke. Slightly pedantic, perhaps, but a joke nonetheless.
You might have a case that the representation of the value 1 in the form 0.99999... cannot be called an integer, but I don't have enough grounding in number (or set?) theory to comment further on that. If it's applied maths / engineering / coding you're interested in then this is probably all largely irrelevant, most of the time.
2+2=4 is obviously using Integers, and there is no 2.x in the set of Integers.
But 2.99999[...] is an integer!
Did everybody just get a lot stupider overnight?
dict integer: integer
(Or "whole number") One of the {finite} numbers in the infinite set ..., -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, ...
That "finite" and "whole number" ought to be screaming blue, bloody murder at you right now. This isn't even Math. It's Arithmetic!
Whoosh!
0.999999..... = 1 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999... )
=> 2 + 0.99999.... = 2 + 1
=> 2.99999..... = 3
and 3 is an integer
=> 2.9999.... is an integer.
That being said, I've never much liked recurring decimals.
Agent Smith: It seems that you've been living two lives. One life, you're Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number, pay your taxes, and you... help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias "Neo" and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not.
So useless for TV.
Just hang four tellies on the wall. Or twelve if you're really popular. It then just needs something to identify which viewer is supposed to be watching which TV as it could get annoying if it adjusted for one of the other viewers glancing at it from the other side of the room, but I imagine that could be even more of an issue with the single TV. Face tracking biased to whoever has been looking at the current show the longest?
Ah, looks like it doesn't do face tracking anyway and could work for multiple viewers. My bad.
So useless for TV.
Just hang four tellies on the wall. Or twelve if you're really popular. It then just needs something to identify which viewer is supposed to be watching which TV as it could get annoying if it adjusted for one of the other viewers glancing at it from the other side of the room, but I imagine that could be even more of an issue with the single TV. Face tracking biased to whoever has been looking at the current show the longest?
Apple's trouble is when even a judge is calling their device "cool", and every metrosexual media employee has been indoctrinated into loving their devices, then they cease to be truly cool because they're just another lame fashion accessory. Too "cool" to be cool.
Cool is an elusive concept. Apple and their billion dollar marketing team are trying too hard to hold onto it. When a product becomes 100% mainstream and run of the mill it's become reality TV. So last decade.
The Galaxy Tab is the underdog and underdogs can be cool.
If you think not being cool makes you inferior, you were either a bullied or the bullied in school.
Only someone uncool would say that.
*post = "ac"; is not reassigning the pointer. The * is dereferencing the pointer so you're actually attempting to write a value to the memory location addressed in post. The memory address in post wouldn't change. Also you'd likely get errors if your C compiler does type checking as you're trying to assign an array of chars to a single char location. *post = 'a'; would be valid and *(post+1) = 'c';. Of course, if it was initialised in ROM this will fail miserably.
If you were actually wanting to reassign the pointer's address so it points to your different string it would be const char * other = "hello"; post = other;
I love C.
Did it spend the entire conversation talking about boobies?
Or vagina?
Oh, come on, dude! What the world needs now is MORE BEATS! MORE!!!
Actually it needs more cowbell.
Or vagina.
Your story reminds me of a BBC show..... a sci-fi future where people ride bikes, play games, and are forced to watch ads in their bedrooms (unless they pay to get rid of them). Day after miserable day.
Black Mirror.
I can get a Xbox 360 with a Kinect for $200. So, why should I pay more for just the hardware? Wasn't the hardware just on sale for Christmas for like $99?
Fun PC gaming always has to be more expensive otherwise why would anyone bother buying one of their stupid consoles? Oh, OK, all their friends have one, and they even call it a "computer" (Pedants: yes the consoles do compute but they're hardly as general purpose as PCs without some work). Sorry about the sarcasm but I'm sick of PC gaming (and by many young people even PCs) being sidelined and often limited to crappy console ports delivered late. Kinect for Windows is still kinda cool though. Maybe they'll drop the price at some point.
AA is a crutch to get around a lack of DPI
No, even with higher DPI than the eye can resolve, you still need AA sometimes, as aliasing can present other problems than the jagged lines you're familiar with (e.g. moiré patterns).
True, although even the eye itself can exhibit moiré patterns when looking at certain objects.
Hear hear! Wish I had some mod points....