It's no longer a "daft" game if serious amounts of money are involved and why the need for encryption of bets if everything is innocent and above board?
It looks cool but I though at times it looks to good to be true.
Actually you get a hint as to how they did it when they show a very brief clip of video at full speed in space and everything is spinning rapidly and its hard to see anything. So clearly these clips of things majestically floating there are slow motion and in reality each piece is spinning and tumbling rapidly on the edge of space before it falls back down to Earth.
If you pay someone $100 to punch someone else in the face, you've still committed a crime. Encouraging irresponsible behavior in others is irresponsible.
There is a huge difference between paying someone to do something which is clearly illegal and having a daft game where people can compete completely legally. If you believe snapchat is guilty then does that also make say a day care centre which charges exorbitant late pick up fees liable too because it encourages parents to speed so they get there in time? or would whoever delayed them be liable?
Going this route leads to madness. If a person chooses to avoid a legal way to complete some task and makes a conscious decision to choose an illegal route in order to get a better outcome then the responsibility for that decision must lie with them. Let's face it the only reason snapchat is getting sued here is because they have money. The person at fault here is the idiot driving at 107mph but they probably won't make much money of someone stupid enough to be doing that so they go after the person with the money no matter how unjustifiable it is.
You were lucky t'have 640K. Real gamers used t'have t'wait for games t'load off scratchy cassette recordings which often had to be rewound multiple times and even then most of the 32K of memory was tak'n up by the display so parts of the 8-bit OS were overwritten for the game to run.
But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.
It's hard to prove that free will exists but easy to show that the conclusions of this study are not proven. All they have shown is that the brain can subconsciously process information and provide it to the conscious mind. The very fact that when given longer the people got more answers wrong proves that the conscious mind can choose to ignore that information and hence free will can still exist in that choice.
The high speed reaction results suggest that we can program our low level, high speed firmware to return the result we are looking for which makes sense from a survival perspective because you don't need to have higher level reasoning and choice take place when a predator jumps out of a bush at you. So, if free will does exist, all they have shown is that we can use it to pre-program our brains to react to certain situations in a predetermined way. However the choice to do that was still potentially a free one and although some of these reactions may have been pre-programmed at birth there is nothing to say that they cannot be changed later.
The question is, what is the most influential, not the most beneficial.
...and I would still argue that this is the printing press. Part of the reason I would say that it is far more influential than the iPhone is that it has been around for longer which has given it more of a chance to influence society.
Seems to me that the printing press has probably brought down more governments and effected more change that the gun. Indeed if it had not been for the gun it would probably have done this with fewer people dying.
When a car stops in the middle of a difficult situation because the AI is confused they will make that situation even worse... humans need to take over quickly and keep traffic moving if possible.
If I have to sit in a self-driving car fully alert of the surrounding traffic and always poised to take over from the computer then exactly how is this any better than normal car? I might as well save the money and drive myself.
You obviously underestimate the complexity of biological life.
It's not the complexity that matters but the fraction of combinations which give rise to a viable, and virulent, organism. I expect that this is probably a very low fraction but I suspect it is also one that is very hard to calculate accurately since we don't know all the viable forms DNA-based life can take.
Actually what I would be more worried about is how long will it be before someone's computer file turns out encode into a real virus and we have some new, nasty disease on our hands simply because some holiday photo produces the right DNA sequence for a new variant of Ebola.
Fortunately I'm not American so the US presidential race is not worth paying attention to under any circumstances...unless it is to get a sense of relief that even though our own politicians are bad at least they are not THAT bad! Good luck with the Great Wall of Mexico!;-)
How is calling into question several of the basic assumptions underlying the later derivations "irrelevant"? If your "proof" that the universe is a simulation relies on assumptions which are baseless and/or wrong then your proof is equally baseless and/or wrong.
In my opinion, capitalism is the only market form that works reasonably effective and ensures progress and freedom...
Capitalism absolutely does not protect individual freedoms and there are increasing examples of this. Just look at copyrights and patents to see how companies would like to severely restrict our freedom in order to make money. Other companies support laws to prevent grey imports so they can charge more in some countries than others etc. If individual freedom gets in the way of a company making more money then they are only too happy for us to lose it.
Capitalism works when companies are small in size because small companies need the same freedoms which individuals want in order to compete and they lack the resources to manipulate countries into passing favourable laws. However once you get huge companies they seem to switch (with a few exceptions) from innovation and growth to aggressively defending their existing wealth generation mechanisms by actively trying to restrict the innovation and freedoms of others. This is where capitalism fails although, like Winston Churchill said about democracy, it's the worst form of economic system except for all the others which have ever been tried.
How would cutting the amount paid put more people out of work? What you would probably want to do is have a buffer of savings to damp out any wild swings. This would give people time to adjust to reductions, or increases, in the amount. However if the payments drop you still keep your job if you have one but you'll just get less from the state.
The simulation argument is based on some very reasonable assumptions and simple math that no one disputes
I dispute it. He invents the existence of planet sized computers and then contradicts himself when he says that even these cannot simulate the quantum nature of the universe but that they will simulate the human brain. However that human brain may well need the quantum nature of the universe in order to operate so you do need to simulate its nature.
However the most completely unbelievable part of this utterly preposterous argument is that it assumes that the simulation has no bugs. Not once is the potential for a bug in the simulation code ever discussed. The chances of such a massive program have no bugs is incredibly small. The only exception would of course be if whoever created the simulation was infallible...at which point the creator of the simulation really starts to sound exactly like god.
Until now where a bunch have turned up with what is effectively "how to vote cards"
If that's what they had done it would be hard to argue with them but instead they have "how to vote for the people we think should win" cards which is not quite the same. Until both sides can put aside their politics and vote based on who writes great science fiction the Hugo awards are not worth paying attention to.
This is particularly sad because one of the things which great science fiction often does is translate a current issue into a setting where the entrenched baggage of the real world does not get in the way of thinking about it. Science fiction which rams one ideology or another down your throat is a wasted opportunity and, I would argue, not at all prizeworthy.
But if THE universe has infinite mass and energy then it can simulate an infinite number of other universes, including other infinite universes.
By definition such a universe would have to contain an infinite number of regions which look exactly like our universe, and an infinite number of simulations of it too. Hence if we use the same hopelessly stupid maths used to justify the original argument the existence of such a place means there is a 50/50 chance of our universe being a simulation because there are infinite numbers of both.
I think your argument's own assumptions have failed you here, in particular that "real" universe must be finite just because ours appears to be.
No - if you assume a truly infinite universe then the original argument becomes wholly unnecessary as outlined above because you have infinite numbers of regions which will look just like our universe: no need for a simulation at all.
Are you sure about that? What if you only need to simulate the parts that are observed?
Again the logical fails if you take this to the ultimate conclusion. In this case nothing which is not being looked at needs to be simulated in which case anything which is not observed will just disappear. This is then not a universe simulation but a matrix-like illusion. Indeed you could get even dafter: how do we know that the simulation was not started yesterday with false memories to make it feel like it has been around for longer? At this point you are just running around in logical loops getting nowhere. This is not science, it's not even good science fiction (well perhaps one movie's worth of good science fiction).
You have to make some basic assumptions that are impossible to test
About the only assumption that science makes is that there are a series of laws out there which govern how the universe behaves...which ironically is something which is not true for a simulation since whoever runs the simulation can presumably change it on a whim.
The idea needs to be tested thoroughly, before being tried on the scale of, say, the US, or even the UK.
Exactly - on the face of it it seems to offer many advantages: it massively simplifies the system of welfare payments and could also make a lot of employment laws unnecessary e.g. minimum wage, unemployment insurance etc. However if it means that lots of people will sit around and do nothing it will have a huge negative impact on the economy. In fact perhaps what is needed is some negative feedback system so the fewer people working the less the payments are this way the more people who sit around not working the less everyone gets until more people start to work.
The problem with this argument is that it contains several wrong assumptions. First we don't have an infinite timeline because our universe has a finite lifetime and will eventually end in one of a variety of different scenarios e.g. heat death and the "big rip". Next you cannot simulate a universe as complex as ours inside our universe since such a system must have as many possible states as our universe. This would require all the energy and matter in our universe leaving nothing with which to construct the simulator.
This means that each simulation must be simpler than the universe it runs in and so there will be a finite limit on how long the chain can be before the most complex simulation possible resembles Pacman. Hence the assumption that there is an infinite chain running for an infinite time is simply not logically consistent.
Slashdot Mirror
It's no longer a "daft" game if serious amounts of money are involved and why the need for encryption of bets if everything is innocent and above board?
how did they fasten the cameras to a rocket traveling at 3,796 mph?
I'm reasonably certain that they didn't. They attached it to the rocket while it was stationary.
It looks cool but I though at times it looks to good to be true.
Actually you get a hint as to how they did it when they show a very brief clip of video at full speed in space and everything is spinning rapidly and its hard to see anything. So clearly these clips of things majestically floating there are slow motion and in reality each piece is spinning and tumbling rapidly on the edge of space before it falls back down to Earth.
If you pay someone $100 to punch someone else in the face, you've still committed a crime. Encouraging irresponsible behavior in others is irresponsible.
There is a huge difference between paying someone to do something which is clearly illegal and having a daft game where people can compete completely legally. If you believe snapchat is guilty then does that also make say a day care centre which charges exorbitant late pick up fees liable too because it encourages parents to speed so they get there in time? or would whoever delayed them be liable?
Going this route leads to madness. If a person chooses to avoid a legal way to complete some task and makes a conscious decision to choose an illegal route in order to get a better outcome then the responsibility for that decision must lie with them. Let's face it the only reason snapchat is getting sued here is because they have money. The person at fault here is the idiot driving at 107mph but they probably won't make much money of someone stupid enough to be doing that so they go after the person with the money no matter how unjustifiable it is.
Let me amend that. There are not a lot of chimps posting on /.
No, mostly they moderate.
It's the trolls that post.
You were lucky t'have 640K. Real gamers used t'have t'wait for games t'load off scratchy cassette recordings which often had to be rewound multiple times and even then most of the 32K of memory was tak'n up by the display so parts of the 8-bit OS were overwritten for the game to run.
But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.
[Cue ZX81 owner...]
If you are so sure it exists, just prove it
It's hard to prove that free will exists but easy to show that the conclusions of this study are not proven. All they have shown is that the brain can subconsciously process information and provide it to the conscious mind. The very fact that when given longer the people got more answers wrong proves that the conscious mind can choose to ignore that information and hence free will can still exist in that choice.
The high speed reaction results suggest that we can program our low level, high speed firmware to return the result we are looking for which makes sense from a survival perspective because you don't need to have higher level reasoning and choice take place when a predator jumps out of a bush at you. So, if free will does exist, all they have shown is that we can use it to pre-program our brains to react to certain situations in a predetermined way. However the choice to do that was still potentially a free one and although some of these reactions may have been pre-programmed at birth there is nothing to say that they cannot be changed later.
The question is, what is the most influential, not the most beneficial.
the gun
Seems to me that the printing press has probably brought down more governments and effected more change that the gun. Indeed if it had not been for the gun it would probably have done this with fewer people dying.
When a car stops in the middle of a difficult situation because the AI is confused they will make that situation even worse ... humans need to take over quickly and keep traffic moving if possible.
If I have to sit in a self-driving car fully alert of the surrounding traffic and always poised to take over from the computer then exactly how is this any better than normal car? I might as well save the money and drive myself.
Also, you don't need to simulate a universe in real time.
Speed isn't the issue it's storing the states of all the matter and energy you are simulating.
You obviously underestimate the complexity of biological life.
It's not the complexity that matters but the fraction of combinations which give rise to a viable, and virulent, organism. I expect that this is probably a very low fraction but I suspect it is also one that is very hard to calculate accurately since we don't know all the viable forms DNA-based life can take.
Which happens to be impossible to prove due to fundamental restrictions of how reality works.
Since when has being consistent with reality ever concerned the law?
Actually what I would be more worried about is how long will it be before someone's computer file turns out encode into a real virus and we have some new, nasty disease on our hands simply because some holiday photo produces the right DNA sequence for a new variant of Ebola.
copywrite and patents dont really have to have anything to do with a free market.
No but they are an excellent example of how capitalism does not always want a free market and so is sometimes against freedom which was my point.
Fortunately I'm not American so the US presidential race is not worth paying attention to under any circumstances...unless it is to get a sense of relief that even though our own politicians are bad at least they are not THAT bad! Good luck with the Great Wall of Mexico! ;-)
How is calling into question several of the basic assumptions underlying the later derivations "irrelevant"? If your "proof" that the universe is a simulation relies on assumptions which are baseless and/or wrong then your proof is equally baseless and/or wrong.
In my opinion, capitalism is the only market form that works reasonably effective and ensures progress and freedom...
Capitalism absolutely does not protect individual freedoms and there are increasing examples of this. Just look at copyrights and patents to see how companies would like to severely restrict our freedom in order to make money. Other companies support laws to prevent grey imports so they can charge more in some countries than others etc. If individual freedom gets in the way of a company making more money then they are only too happy for us to lose it.
Capitalism works when companies are small in size because small companies need the same freedoms which individuals want in order to compete and they lack the resources to manipulate countries into passing favourable laws. However once you get huge companies they seem to switch (with a few exceptions) from innovation and growth to aggressively defending their existing wealth generation mechanisms by actively trying to restrict the innovation and freedoms of others. This is where capitalism fails although, like Winston Churchill said about democracy, it's the worst form of economic system except for all the others which have ever been tried.
How would cutting the amount paid put more people out of work? What you would probably want to do is have a buffer of savings to damp out any wild swings. This would give people time to adjust to reductions, or increases, in the amount. However if the payments drop you still keep your job if you have one but you'll just get less from the state.
The simulation argument is based on some very reasonable assumptions and simple math that no one disputes
I dispute it. He invents the existence of planet sized computers and then contradicts himself when he says that even these cannot simulate the quantum nature of the universe but that they will simulate the human brain. However that human brain may well need the quantum nature of the universe in order to operate so you do need to simulate its nature.
However the most completely unbelievable part of this utterly preposterous argument is that it assumes that the simulation has no bugs. Not once is the potential for a bug in the simulation code ever discussed. The chances of such a massive program have no bugs is incredibly small. The only exception would of course be if whoever created the simulation was infallible...at which point the creator of the simulation really starts to sound exactly like god.
Until now where a bunch have turned up with what is effectively "how to vote cards"
If that's what they had done it would be hard to argue with them but instead they have "how to vote for the people we think should win" cards which is not quite the same. Until both sides can put aside their politics and vote based on who writes great science fiction the Hugo awards are not worth paying attention to.
This is particularly sad because one of the things which great science fiction often does is translate a current issue into a setting where the entrenched baggage of the real world does not get in the way of thinking about it. Science fiction which rams one ideology or another down your throat is a wasted opportunity and, I would argue, not at all prizeworthy.
But if THE universe has infinite mass and energy then it can simulate an infinite number of other universes, including other infinite universes.
By definition such a universe would have to contain an infinite number of regions which look exactly like our universe, and an infinite number of simulations of it too. Hence if we use the same hopelessly stupid maths used to justify the original argument the existence of such a place means there is a 50/50 chance of our universe being a simulation because there are infinite numbers of both.
I think your argument's own assumptions have failed you here, in particular that "real" universe must be finite just because ours appears to be.
No - if you assume a truly infinite universe then the original argument becomes wholly unnecessary as outlined above because you have infinite numbers of regions which will look just like our universe: no need for a simulation at all.
Are you sure about that? What if you only need to simulate the parts that are observed?
Again the logical fails if you take this to the ultimate conclusion. In this case nothing which is not being looked at needs to be simulated in which case anything which is not observed will just disappear. This is then not a universe simulation but a matrix-like illusion. Indeed you could get even dafter: how do we know that the simulation was not started yesterday with false memories to make it feel like it has been around for longer? At this point you are just running around in logical loops getting nowhere. This is not science, it's not even good science fiction (well perhaps one movie's worth of good science fiction).
You have to make some basic assumptions that are impossible to test
About the only assumption that science makes is that there are a series of laws out there which govern how the universe behaves...which ironically is something which is not true for a simulation since whoever runs the simulation can presumably change it on a whim.
The idea needs to be tested thoroughly, before being tried on the scale of, say, the US, or even the UK.
Exactly - on the face of it it seems to offer many advantages: it massively simplifies the system of welfare payments and could also make a lot of employment laws unnecessary e.g. minimum wage, unemployment insurance etc. However if it means that lots of people will sit around and do nothing it will have a huge negative impact on the economy. In fact perhaps what is needed is some negative feedback system so the fewer people working the less the payments are this way the more people who sit around not working the less everyone gets until more people start to work.
The problem with this argument is that it contains several wrong assumptions. First we don't have an infinite timeline because our universe has a finite lifetime and will eventually end in one of a variety of different scenarios e.g. heat death and the "big rip". Next you cannot simulate a universe as complex as ours inside our universe since such a system must have as many possible states as our universe. This would require all the energy and matter in our universe leaving nothing with which to construct the simulator.
This means that each simulation must be simpler than the universe it runs in and so there will be a finite limit on how long the chain can be before the most complex simulation possible resembles Pacman. Hence the assumption that there is an infinite chain running for an infinite time is simply not logically consistent.