The article is misleading on key points
on
More on Spintronics
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The paper is blocked behind a pay wall, so this is what I got from the
article.
The discussion on spin is wrong. Spin has nothing to do with the
rotation of macroscopic objects like the Earth, it's an intrinsic
quantum property of particles like the electronic with no macroscopic
analog. The best explanation I've heard of spin that doesn't involve
explaining the details goes like this: spin is a measurement of the
number of rotations required to bring a particle back to its initial
state. One-half spin particles, like the electron, require,
counterintuitively, two full rotations to go back to their initial
state.
The physical situation seems to have very little to do with Ohm's Law
except in the loosest sense. They're describing a current consisting
of electron spins under an external electric field. This has some interesting properties (I'd like to poke at the math, if I could read the paper), one of which seems to be that it is predicted to persist at much higher temperatures than the best superconductors. If so, because this spin current seems to be dissipationless, this would allow information to be transmitted without generating heat.
Interesting stuff; a pity the article was so poor.
I've done this. Sometimes, I admit, I do it to annoy people, or to try to impress them (not often that, these days). However, what I most often intend to do is to share these neat things I've learned about something. This can be anything; the other day I was subjecting my family to facts about rat vision (did you know that rats, along with most mammals, are dichromats? And that albino rats are almost blind?). Of course, my listeners sometimes don't share my enthusiasm for the topic; sometimes I don't care, and tell them anyways, or more often I just shut up.
To summarize, I'm not pleading for attention, I'm just having a different kind of conversation.
Notwithstanding the holding of US citizens as enemy combatants, the US Constitution doesn't make an explicit separation of citizens and noncitizens. The Fourth Amendment refers to "people," not "citizens." It's not unreasonable to read the enumerated rights as applying only to citizens, but applying them to all human beings is an equally reasonable interpretation.
That's not true. Artists have refused to continue before. The two instances that come to mind are Gary Larson and Bill Watterson, who stopped making their still (economically) viable comics because they decided that the quality was declining, or would decline. There are many examples of artists who continue long past the point of the decline of their series, but not everyone does.
These behaviors may indeed begin as attempts to escape. However, they are not. The animals persist in them even though their situation doesn't change.
Imagine if you were locked in a room proportional to your size in the same ratio as these mice are. You, initially, might try to escape by searching the floors, the walls, and the ceiling for openings, panels, locks, or doors. You might do this three or four times to make sure you didn't miss anything on the previous passes. However, the analogy to the behaviors of these mice would be compulsively searching the surfaces of your prison for about eight hours a day (~50% of your waking time) every day for twenty years. That is not normal behavior.
Just because animals aren't as smart as humans doesn't mean they're dumb. They can learn how to achieve their goals and also things they shouldn't do. When an animal is pursuing a self-destructive or pointless behavior, ask the same questions you would when you see a human being doing the same.
My suspicion is that most lab animals suffer from, among other things, terminal boredom. Mice and rats are inveterate, if timid, explorers. Being locked in an unchanging cage for my entire life would drive me insane; why wouldn't the same happen to a rat?
I'm not sure I buy the article's argument that "humans" came close to extinction. I think another possibility is that what they're looking at is a speciation event: that's the point that homo sapiens sapiens branched off from immediate predecessors. If that group had been killed, we wouldn't be here, but I'm not sure the homo genus would have died off.
My handwriting has gotten worse every year since I got out of elementary school. I looked back at stuff I had written in 6th grade not too long ago and thought, "My writing was much prettier back then."
I print, rather than using cursive; I was forced to learn cursive, but I could always print faster and as far as I can tell, there's no difference in writing speed between my writing and someone who uses cursive. And other things I've read back me up on this.
But I don't think it's due to lack of practice. If anything, I spend more time writing now than I did in elementary school (though a good portion of what I write now I didn't encounter until later, i.e. Greek letters and mathematical symbols). The difference, as far as I've been able to tell, is time. I used to spend time trying to make a given piece of writing look better. Now I don't care. I don't have the time, amidst all the other things I have to do, to make a given piece of handwriting look good. It's just like art: a hastily scribbled sketch will not be as attractive as something the artist spends several hours on.
I don't think this is a problem. I confess, I hate handwriting stuff. Before my family had a computer, back in elementary school, I took all sorts of shortcuts, legitimate and otherwise, to minimize the amount of writing I had to because I hated it so much. It had nothing to do with the conceptual process of writing, and everything to do with the mechanical process of putting pen/pencil to paper.
Now, I type faster than I write. I can handwrite mathematics faster than I can type, so often I handwrite mathematics if I don't need them to look pretty. Everything else, I try to type, because it looks better and minimizes the effort I need to spend. I have a hobby of fiction writing; if I didn't have a computer, I would never have bothered.
So, for me, the computer and sloppy handwriting have been a liberation.
What are the real arguments for continuing to try to enforce the old order? Penmanship as art? Sure, I can accept that, if we view it as a choice like playing a musical instrument.
Ed Boell's sarcasm about e-mail in the article is unwarranted; in truth, third graders don't say deep things too often (I didn't, when I was in third grade). Now, I do have a library of e-mails that I would be upset to lose, because my friends have said insightful and interesting things in them. And I'll be damned if I've retained a single personal hardcopy letter, ever.
Michael Sull's discussion about musculature et al. is crap. There's no reason someone can't learn good typing skills and how to hold a pencil.
So, for people who are interested in pretty handwriting, I encourage you to study it. But don't force everyone else have your passion for it. Aren't there are enough real deficiencies in what's taught in American schools that chasing down red herrings like the demise of cursive?
The article-cum-press-release lacks entirely technical details. I quote: "When the plasma reaches certain temperature and density parameters;" of course, they neglect to provide those parameters.
From what I know about other, similar plasmas used in research, though, and the fact that this plasma valve is used to prevent vacuum seals from being breached, my guess is that the density of this plasma is so low that even though it's at 1.5e4 K, the amount of thermal energy it carries is negligible. In other words, if you were to stick your hand in it, it would be like sticking your hand in a vacuum: not good for you, by any stretch of the imagination, but it would not result in a crispy hand. And I am very skeptical that the plasma could exert enough pressure to hold back a solid object like a hand.
Policymakers, US or otherwise, have not yet faced head-on the central problem of energy policy: there are two viable choices, either fossil fuels or nuclear fission. Renewable energy sources are either too expensive, impratical because they don't generate a constant source of power, or both.
Fossil fuels produce greenhouse gases and other forms of air pollution. Nuclear power produces waste that is dangerous and very long-lasting, has minuscule risks of catastrophic accident, and more relevant risks of intentional sabotage.
Fusion won't magically solve this dilemma, either. A fusion reactor produces huge quantities of fast neutrons, and that will generate radioactive nuclear waste when it hits the walls and other components of the reactor.
In other words, we get to pick our poison: air pollution and global warming, or nuclear waste and problems with terrorism.
My rats have all died from upper respiratory or tumors. However, I wouldn't worry about it: rats and mice in the wild don't live long enough for cancer to be serious break on their population growth.
"So, American McGee's creative propensities amuse us. What would happen if he turned his dark gaze on one of those sweet girls' toys from the eighties, like Rainbow Brite or Sweet Secrets or My Little Pony? No, I've got it: Strawberry Shortcake."
You see, American McGee, regardless of what you think of his work, had the wisdom to choose something outside the domain of our ludicrous "intellectual property" law. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written in 1900. That's about 30 years before the event horizon of copyright (c. 1928). And that event horizon is why you'll never see American McGee perverting many of the other icons you might expect (*cough* Disney's junk *cough*).
Well, there are two reasons I chose that phrasing. First, there's some disagreement about whether non-relativistic quantum theory is complete, because of the question of what constitutes an observation and surrounding issues. Second, QED, as far as we know, is right. It, and the rest of the Standard Model, have passed every experimental test we've put them to. There are good reasons for thinking the Standard model isn't correct, but we don't have any evidence that it is yet. Also, of course, the Standard Model doesn't include general relativity, so it's arguably also not complete.
If these results had been an attack on some aspect non-relativistic quantum mechanics or quantum field theory (like I thought when I first read the title), that would have been very surprising and almost certainly wrong.
The problems with quantum theory seem to have come with some of the proposed properties of a merger with general relativity. In other words, this isn't going to affect non-relativistic quantum mechanics or even QED, except insofar as those theories are already incomplete or incorrect. Briefly, the scientists looked at Hubble photographs for signs of the quantization of space and time expected by many working on general relativity/quantum theory mergers, and didn't find any evidence of it. Interesting, if true, but not earth-shattering yet.
At the risk of being rated redundant, another high-rated comment linked to this page: http://www.google.com/jobs/benefits.html. It looks like they have almost everything you list.
I think the answer is "It depends"
on
AI in Sci-Fi
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The article consists of a discussion of a bunch of possible aims for AI's, canvassing most of the traditional sci-fi possibilities: AI's who turn against humanity, God-like AI's, AI's who worship humanity, AI separatists, etc. My personal bet is that the goals of any specific AI will depend on how and for what purpose it was constructed.
I think the future will be filled with many different varieties of intelligence. I strongly suspect that self-awareness and agency of the kind we're familiar will not be necessary for most tasks. Most AI's may not be self-aware or have goals and motivations like we're used to, but will still be be capable of cognitive tasks that exceed human abilities. Self-awareness will be one possible emergent behavior of intelligent systems, but not the only one; and the others may be more interesting because we won't have seen them before. Moreover, different AI's will have different purposes, both intrinsic and extrinsic.
I also think the assumptions that AI's will be vastly more intelligent than humans right off the bat is quite wrong. I'm skeptical that the first Turing-test AI will be able to chug along at supercomputer speeds in its consciousness. Our computers are very fast at solving specific types of simple problems, like arithmetic. But when you get to more complex problems, like the ones humans deal with day in and day out, we discover that the complexity slows the computers down too. Modern chess engines, for instance, can calculate absurd numbers of possible move trees each second, but when it comes to playing chess, they are only comparable to the best human players; the apparent speed advantage at a lower level of abstraction vanishes when you consider chess as a whole. And chess is a simple, well-posed problem: compared to many of the problems humans encounter, it's downright easy. After we study the problem for decades or centuries, I don't doubt AI's with intelligences that dwarf ours will be possible, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the first generation to overleap our capabilities.
From the program guide for the shorts, I quote, "May there be mercy on man and machine for their sins." In The Matrix, the machines do come across as evil: after all, regardless of the past, they now enslave all humanity to a false reality. The implication I see is that both the humans and the machines have done wrong.
A possible creative direction for the Matrix sequels to take is that, as another poster said, both humans and machines must be freed. It is often said that jailors are just as trapped as their prisoners, and it is somehow fitting that Neo must free the machines, as well as the humans.
The Matrix was conclusive, in some senses. I was surprised to learn they were making sequels, and I wondered where they would go with the story. Most of the directions I thought of were boring, more-of-the-same type stuff. I can hope that they might be aiming for something better. On the other hand, it's always possible they could screw up like George Lucas has with the Star Wars prequels: there are many interesting directions he could have gone with the story, but none of which he did, leaving them tepid.
As for Agent Smith, it's clear in The Matrix he's an aberration. The exact cause can be debated, but from the way he sends away his companions and the interaction when they announce that Neo and Trinity are coming to break Morpheus out, it's clear that his behavior is not sanctioned (though it is tolerated, for whatever reasons).
Overpopulation in developed countries would be a problem if the populations were increasing, which they aren't. The birthrates in most developed countries have fallen below the replacement rate; the US population continues to grow only because of immigration.
Re:aS A Drunk biochemist i'll lend my thoughts...
on
Speeding up Evolution
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· Score: 1
Here is the trade-off. More bloodcells = slightly better performance & slightly increased risk of clogging your arteries. My opinion is nature worked out the proper ratio.
The proper ratio to what end? Without more context, this is hard to know: after all, your average modern human has very different activity patterns and diet than even humans who lived 5,000 thousand years ago. Moreoever, the human population has natural variation in this characteristic; that's what makes exceptional athletes exceptional. I am not inclined to underestimate the value of natural selection's solutions to difficult problems, but without more analysis (that we probably don't have the understanding to do yet), I'm not ocnfident that they're best. It's also good to keep in mind that we don't share all of natural selection's goals: if I can enhance my reproductive success by dying, natural selection will be happy to help it along, but that isn't what I want.
How can they show NGE on American television?
on
Giant Mecha News
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· Score: 1
The first 20 or so episodes won't be too much of problem, but won'y the amount of cutting in the last 6 or so reduce them to nothing? At least if I'm remembering correctly, it has been awhile since I've seen it.
There are lots of practical problems with this. For instance, many of these "contracts" are sprung upon the user after purchase. This is a common problem with proprietary software: you buy the software, and then during the installation process some annoying "click-through" agreement is pressed upon you. And, since you've already opened the software, no returns are accepted. How is this reasonable? It seems to me that for a contract to be valid, the terms must be disclosed up-front, before purchase. For that to happen, it has to be written into the law governing contracts.
Another important point to remember is that contracts are created by law in the first place. The laws governing contracts are defined (in the United States) by laws passed by Congress and the Constitution. For instance, in the U.S., it is illegal to buy or sell humans as property. The Constitution forbids slavery, so you can't sign a contract that turns you into a slave. I believe that societal judgements on what kinds of contracts are permissible are important, and should be encoded in contract law. Now I'll discuss an example.
In modern society, we encounter many situations where a single entity is selling something to many other entities (normally, a corporation to individual humans, but not always). The amount of time it takes for the creator of the product to write up a nasty contract designed to obfuscate the ugliness of its terms is far, far less than the effort the many purchasers have to spend in analyzing the contract to discover just how bad it is. This problem is exacerbated by the complexity of legal language in our society: for some contracts, it takes years of study to know what the outcome of signing it would be. In these cases, I think that the legislature needs to safeguard the public interest by making inappropriate terms unenforceable and moreover, forcing reasonable implied contracts on the creators of products. Thus implied warranties and the like. For some reason, software has been immunized from these kinds of provisions, but, e.g., toasters have not. I don't understand why.
I'll share my own experience on these issues. My earliest memories date from when I was four.
I remember distinctly playing in a bathtub with a kid who was usually not very nice and whom my mother had warned me to stay away from. While I know this memory is true (my mother confirmed it), I've never heard anyone else tell me about it unless I specifically prodded them.
I also remember, vaguely, being chased by the neighbors' dogs (Doberman Pinschers) when I was about the same age. This memory has almost no details attached to it, other than the feeling of panic at being unable to find my mother (who was down the street at the time). I "recall" a few details, but these were almost wholly created afterwards.
The reason I trust these memories is that I remember remembering them, throughout my life. I have also noted the development of false details along the way, so I have some idea of what parts to trusts and which not.
I also have a false memory of a hurricane which swept through where lived at that time; I'm fairly sure that memory was created by my parents telling stories.
As for summer's length, I'd argue that the perceived length was longer. I am convinced that our perception of time is relative, depending on how much time we have experienced. In other words, time seems to pass more quickly when you get older. I once read a calculation suggesting that if this supposition is true, the life of an eighty-year-old is half-over (measured by perceived time) by age seven (IIRC). Depressing, ne?
This story doesn't say anything interesting, just that there exist speculative theories which violate postulates of relativity. They have neither convincing experimental backing, nor strong theoretical reasons why they should be true. It's not news when someone says, "I have thought of a theory which violates Einstein's postulates." I can do that too, and chances are my theories will be worthless. If someone produces an experiment or observation which clearly violates relativity, or a self-consistent theory of quantum gravity with testable predictions, then it's time to get excited. Meanwhile, journalists' interpretations of theorists' speculations are not that interesting.
Copyright began as censorship. Government began as thugs demanding "protecting" people from abuses by other thugs. Does that mean government is bad? Many modern practices had ignoble origins, but I don't think that means that we should discard them.
Most art produced prior to copyright consisted of commisioned works. Artists had to have a wealthy patron to support them, because they couldn't make money off their work. The result was that much art was hagiographic propaganda. Ever read the Aeneid? It's a good example. Other old tales are replete with examples where the noble family lines of the "modern day" were traced back to the illustrious heroes of yore. Many old paintings are good examples: pictures of nobles as they liked to appear, or depictions of scenes as they thought they should be. Similarly with religious works: most religious depictions followed the dictates of the Catholic Church (at least until the Reformation, at which point it followed the Catholic Church or the correct Protestant denomination). There were exceptions, but in general art which did not appeal to the wealthy only appeared after copyright.
Without copyright, creators depend on either donations from the public or patronage. The latter is preferable in most cases, because it is more lucrative and more reliable. Those dependent on the former tend to be impoverished (see: typical street musician).
All property distinctions, intellectual or otherwise, are a matter of social and governmental convention. Marxists want to eliminate all private property, but I don't agree with them. I think that copyright should be curtailed, but eliminating it will cause a whole host of other problems.
Slashdot Mirror
The discussion on spin is wrong. Spin has nothing to do with the rotation of macroscopic objects like the Earth, it's an intrinsic quantum property of particles like the electronic with no macroscopic analog. The best explanation I've heard of spin that doesn't involve explaining the details goes like this: spin is a measurement of the number of rotations required to bring a particle back to its initial state. One-half spin particles, like the electron, require, counterintuitively, two full rotations to go back to their initial state.
The physical situation seems to have very little to do with Ohm's Law except in the loosest sense. They're describing a current consisting of electron spins under an external electric field. This has some interesting properties (I'd like to poke at the math, if I could read the paper), one of which seems to be that it is predicted to persist at much higher temperatures than the best superconductors. If so, because this spin current seems to be dissipationless, this would allow information to be transmitted without generating heat.
Interesting stuff; a pity the article was so poor.
To summarize, I'm not pleading for attention, I'm just having a different kind of conversation.
Notwithstanding the holding of US citizens as enemy combatants, the US Constitution doesn't make an explicit separation of citizens and noncitizens. The Fourth Amendment refers to "people," not "citizens." It's not unreasonable to read the enumerated rights as applying only to citizens, but applying them to all human beings is an equally reasonable interpretation.
That's not true. Artists have refused to continue before. The two instances that come to mind are Gary Larson and Bill Watterson, who stopped making their still (economically) viable comics because they decided that the quality was declining, or would decline. There are many examples of artists who continue long past the point of the decline of their series, but not everyone does.
These behaviors may indeed begin as attempts to escape. However, they are not. The animals persist in them even though their situation doesn't change. Imagine if you were locked in a room proportional to your size in the same ratio as these mice are. You, initially, might try to escape by searching the floors, the walls, and the ceiling for openings, panels, locks, or doors. You might do this three or four times to make sure you didn't miss anything on the previous passes. However, the analogy to the behaviors of these mice would be compulsively searching the surfaces of your prison for about eight hours a day (~50% of your waking time) every day for twenty years. That is not normal behavior. Just because animals aren't as smart as humans doesn't mean they're dumb. They can learn how to achieve their goals and also things they shouldn't do. When an animal is pursuing a self-destructive or pointless behavior, ask the same questions you would when you see a human being doing the same. My suspicion is that most lab animals suffer from, among other things, terminal boredom. Mice and rats are inveterate, if timid, explorers. Being locked in an unchanging cage for my entire life would drive me insane; why wouldn't the same happen to a rat?
This link probably contains more detail than you ever wanted to know about how Xenosaga was censored: The 'Ethos' Sanctuary.
I'm not sure I buy the article's argument that "humans" came close to extinction. I think another possibility is that what they're looking at is a speciation event: that's the point that homo sapiens sapiens branched off from immediate predecessors. If that group had been killed, we wouldn't be here, but I'm not sure the homo genus would have died off.
I print, rather than using cursive; I was forced to learn cursive, but I could always print faster and as far as I can tell, there's no difference in writing speed between my writing and someone who uses cursive. And other things I've read back me up on this.
But I don't think it's due to lack of practice. If anything, I spend more time writing now than I did in elementary school (though a good portion of what I write now I didn't encounter until later, i.e. Greek letters and mathematical symbols). The difference, as far as I've been able to tell, is time. I used to spend time trying to make a given piece of writing look better. Now I don't care. I don't have the time, amidst all the other things I have to do, to make a given piece of handwriting look good. It's just like art: a hastily scribbled sketch will not be as attractive as something the artist spends several hours on.
I don't think this is a problem. I confess, I hate handwriting stuff. Before my family had a computer, back in elementary school, I took all sorts of shortcuts, legitimate and otherwise, to minimize the amount of writing I had to because I hated it so much. It had nothing to do with the conceptual process of writing, and everything to do with the mechanical process of putting pen/pencil to paper.
Now, I type faster than I write. I can handwrite mathematics faster than I can type, so often I handwrite mathematics if I don't need them to look pretty. Everything else, I try to type, because it looks better and minimizes the effort I need to spend. I have a hobby of fiction writing; if I didn't have a computer, I would never have bothered.
So, for me, the computer and sloppy handwriting have been a liberation.
What are the real arguments for continuing to try to enforce the old order? Penmanship as art? Sure, I can accept that, if we view it as a choice like playing a musical instrument.
Ed Boell's sarcasm about e-mail in the article is unwarranted; in truth, third graders don't say deep things too often (I didn't, when I was in third grade). Now, I do have a library of e-mails that I would be upset to lose, because my friends have said insightful and interesting things in them. And I'll be damned if I've retained a single personal hardcopy letter, ever.
Michael Sull's discussion about musculature et al. is crap. There's no reason someone can't learn good typing skills and how to hold a pencil.
So, for people who are interested in pretty handwriting, I encourage you to study it. But don't force everyone else have your passion for it. Aren't there are enough real deficiencies in what's taught in American schools that chasing down red herrings like the demise of cursive?
The article-cum-press-release lacks entirely technical details. I quote: "When the plasma reaches certain temperature and density parameters;" of course, they neglect to provide those parameters. From what I know about other, similar plasmas used in research, though, and the fact that this plasma valve is used to prevent vacuum seals from being breached, my guess is that the density of this plasma is so low that even though it's at 1.5e4 K, the amount of thermal energy it carries is negligible. In other words, if you were to stick your hand in it, it would be like sticking your hand in a vacuum: not good for you, by any stretch of the imagination, but it would not result in a crispy hand. And I am very skeptical that the plasma could exert enough pressure to hold back a solid object like a hand.
Policymakers, US or otherwise, have not yet faced head-on the central problem of energy policy: there are two viable choices, either fossil fuels or nuclear fission. Renewable energy sources are either too expensive, impratical because they don't generate a constant source of power, or both. Fossil fuels produce greenhouse gases and other forms of air pollution. Nuclear power produces waste that is dangerous and very long-lasting, has minuscule risks of catastrophic accident, and more relevant risks of intentional sabotage. Fusion won't magically solve this dilemma, either. A fusion reactor produces huge quantities of fast neutrons, and that will generate radioactive nuclear waste when it hits the walls and other components of the reactor. In other words, we get to pick our poison: air pollution and global warming, or nuclear waste and problems with terrorism.
My rats have all died from upper respiratory or tumors. However, I wouldn't worry about it: rats and mice in the wild don't live long enough for cancer to be serious break on their population growth.
You see, American McGee, regardless of what you think of his work, had the wisdom to choose something outside the domain of our ludicrous "intellectual property" law. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written in 1900. That's about 30 years before the event horizon of copyright (c. 1928). And that event horizon is why you'll never see American McGee perverting many of the other icons you might expect (*cough* Disney's junk *cough*).
If these results had been an attack on some aspect non-relativistic quantum mechanics or quantum field theory (like I thought when I first read the title), that would have been very surprising and almost certainly wrong.
Just nit-picking in response to your nit-pick :).
The problems with quantum theory seem to have come with some of the proposed properties of a merger with general relativity. In other words, this isn't going to affect non-relativistic quantum mechanics or even QED, except insofar as those theories are already incomplete or incorrect. Briefly, the scientists looked at Hubble photographs for signs of the quantization of space and time expected by many working on general relativity/quantum theory mergers, and didn't find any evidence of it. Interesting, if true, but not earth-shattering yet.
At the risk of being rated redundant, another high-rated comment linked to this page: http://www.google.com/jobs/benefits.html. It looks like they have almost everything you list.
I think the future will be filled with many different varieties of intelligence. I strongly suspect that self-awareness and agency of the kind we're familiar will not be necessary for most tasks. Most AI's may not be self-aware or have goals and motivations like we're used to, but will still be be capable of cognitive tasks that exceed human abilities. Self-awareness will be one possible emergent behavior of intelligent systems, but not the only one; and the others may be more interesting because we won't have seen them before. Moreover, different AI's will have different purposes, both intrinsic and extrinsic.
I also think the assumptions that AI's will be vastly more intelligent than humans right off the bat is quite wrong. I'm skeptical that the first Turing-test AI will be able to chug along at supercomputer speeds in its consciousness. Our computers are very fast at solving specific types of simple problems, like arithmetic. But when you get to more complex problems, like the ones humans deal with day in and day out, we discover that the complexity slows the computers down too. Modern chess engines, for instance, can calculate absurd numbers of possible move trees each second, but when it comes to playing chess, they are only comparable to the best human players; the apparent speed advantage at a lower level of abstraction vanishes when you consider chess as a whole. And chess is a simple, well-posed problem: compared to many of the problems humans encounter, it's downright easy. After we study the problem for decades or centuries, I don't doubt AI's with intelligences that dwarf ours will be possible, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the first generation to overleap our capabilities.
A possible creative direction for the Matrix sequels to take is that, as another poster said, both humans and machines must be freed. It is often said that jailors are just as trapped as their prisoners, and it is somehow fitting that Neo must free the machines, as well as the humans.
The Matrix was conclusive, in some senses. I was surprised to learn they were making sequels, and I wondered where they would go with the story. Most of the directions I thought of were boring, more-of-the-same type stuff. I can hope that they might be aiming for something better. On the other hand, it's always possible they could screw up like George Lucas has with the Star Wars prequels: there are many interesting directions he could have gone with the story, but none of which he did, leaving them tepid.
As for Agent Smith, it's clear in The Matrix he's an aberration. The exact cause can be debated, but from the way he sends away his companions and the interaction when they announce that Neo and Trinity are coming to break Morpheus out, it's clear that his behavior is not sanctioned (though it is tolerated, for whatever reasons).
I tried the last one with mplayer, but didn't have much luck. Anyone know if there are some gymnastics I can perform?
Overpopulation in developed countries would be a problem if the populations were increasing, which they aren't. The birthrates in most developed countries have fallen below the replacement rate; the US population continues to grow only because of immigration.
The proper ratio to what end? Without more context, this is hard to know: after all, your average modern human has very different activity patterns and diet than even humans who lived 5,000 thousand years ago. Moreoever, the human population has natural variation in this characteristic; that's what makes exceptional athletes exceptional. I am not inclined to underestimate the value of natural selection's solutions to difficult problems, but without more analysis (that we probably don't have the understanding to do yet), I'm not ocnfident that they're best. It's also good to keep in mind that we don't share all of natural selection's goals: if I can enhance my reproductive success by dying, natural selection will be happy to help it along, but that isn't what I want.
The first 20 or so episodes won't be too much of problem, but won'y the amount of cutting in the last 6 or so reduce them to nothing? At least if I'm remembering correctly, it has been awhile since I've seen it.
Another important point to remember is that contracts are created by law in the first place. The laws governing contracts are defined (in the United States) by laws passed by Congress and the Constitution. For instance, in the U.S., it is illegal to buy or sell humans as property. The Constitution forbids slavery, so you can't sign a contract that turns you into a slave. I believe that societal judgements on what kinds of contracts are permissible are important, and should be encoded in contract law. Now I'll discuss an example.
In modern society, we encounter many situations where a single entity is selling something to many other entities (normally, a corporation to individual humans, but not always). The amount of time it takes for the creator of the product to write up a nasty contract designed to obfuscate the ugliness of its terms is far, far less than the effort the many purchasers have to spend in analyzing the contract to discover just how bad it is. This problem is exacerbated by the complexity of legal language in our society: for some contracts, it takes years of study to know what the outcome of signing it would be. In these cases, I think that the legislature needs to safeguard the public interest by making inappropriate terms unenforceable and moreover, forcing reasonable implied contracts on the creators of products. Thus implied warranties and the like. For some reason, software has been immunized from these kinds of provisions, but, e.g., toasters have not. I don't understand why.
I'll share my own experience on these issues. My earliest memories date from when I was four.
I remember distinctly playing in a bathtub with a kid who was usually not very nice and whom my mother had warned me to stay away from. While I know this memory is true (my mother confirmed it), I've never heard anyone else tell me about it unless I specifically prodded them.
I also remember, vaguely, being chased by the neighbors' dogs (Doberman Pinschers) when I was about the same age. This memory has almost no details attached to it, other than the feeling of panic at being unable to find my mother (who was down the street at the time). I "recall" a few details, but these were almost wholly created afterwards.
The reason I trust these memories is that I remember remembering them, throughout my life. I have also noted the development of false details along the way, so I have some idea of what parts to trusts and which not.
I also have a false memory of a hurricane which swept through where lived at that time; I'm fairly sure that memory was created by my parents telling stories. As for summer's length, I'd argue that the perceived length was longer. I am convinced that our perception of time is relative, depending on how much time we have experienced. In other words, time seems to pass more quickly when you get older. I once read a calculation suggesting that if this supposition is true, the life of an eighty-year-old is half-over (measured by perceived time) by age seven (IIRC). Depressing, ne?
This story doesn't say anything interesting, just that there exist speculative theories which violate postulates of relativity. They have neither convincing experimental backing, nor strong theoretical reasons why they should be true. It's not news when someone says, "I have thought of a theory which violates Einstein's postulates." I can do that too, and chances are my theories will be worthless. If someone produces an experiment or observation which clearly violates relativity, or a self-consistent theory of quantum gravity with testable predictions, then it's time to get excited. Meanwhile, journalists' interpretations of theorists' speculations are not that interesting.
Copyright began as censorship. Government began as thugs demanding "protecting" people from abuses by other thugs. Does that mean government is bad? Many modern practices had ignoble origins, but I don't think that means that we should discard them.
Most art produced prior to copyright consisted of commisioned works. Artists had to have a wealthy patron to support them, because they couldn't make money off their work. The result was that much art was hagiographic propaganda. Ever read the Aeneid? It's a good example. Other old tales are replete with examples where the noble family lines of the "modern day" were traced back to the illustrious heroes of yore. Many old paintings are good examples: pictures of nobles as they liked to appear, or depictions of scenes as they thought they should be. Similarly with religious works: most religious depictions followed the dictates of the Catholic Church (at least until the Reformation, at which point it followed the Catholic Church or the correct Protestant denomination). There were exceptions, but in general art which did not appeal to the wealthy only appeared after copyright.
Without copyright, creators depend on either donations from the public or patronage. The latter is preferable in most cases, because it is more lucrative and more reliable. Those dependent on the former tend to be impoverished (see: typical street musician).
All property distinctions, intellectual or otherwise, are a matter of social and governmental convention. Marxists want to eliminate all private property, but I don't agree with them. I think that copyright should be curtailed, but eliminating it will cause a whole host of other problems.