Rember that most people pick a position, then use arbitrary arguments to support it.
For example, the right of a woman to her body is allowed if it gives the right to an abortion, but not if it is to sell her body for sex for money. Completely illogical and dishonest? Yes. It works though, because politics is the art of swaying the masses, usually via outrage at something. These are the same masses that watch John Edwards and Miss Cleo, convinced it is real.
> This Court ruling was made on imagination and
> inference, not the actual document itself.
>
> There is no constitutional right to privacy, of
> course. Maybe there should be. However, it
> should be added through the amendment process,
> rather than through the abuse of power of
> supreme court justices
The Constitution lists some rights, but explicitely states that those are not all the rights, and that those rights are retained by the people (or the states.)
The founding fathers were worried that enumerating some of the rights would lead people to think, as you do, that those were all there were. Some didn't want the rights listed because they were afraid this would happen (which did.) Others wanted to list the rights lest the presumption that legislative powers cover all domains. The listing of rights is theoretically redundant.
Technically, it doesn't even limit government
on
David Brin on Privacy
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
What it does is even more severe. The constitution creates a government with a defined set of powers, and no others. To set limits hints that the government may do anything except what is forbidden, when in theory (sadly, not in fact) it is the other way around.
The government doesn't have rights -- only individual people have rights. The government has powers over those rights, as granted by the people, who can change or revoke it.
Of course, this limited government has a budget for this year of 2.1 trillion dollars. It is the most bloated thing ever to exist.
Now your corporation has to worry about people choking on the broken pieces fished out of the garbage. Talk about going from the frying pan into the fire.
How about the universe will be rebooted since this universe is a virtual one (in a sense, even if physically real) used by those post-singularity intelligences to ensure that new intelligences have some kind of moral center to them. Indeed, they probably reboot themselves from time to time, every few subjective centuries, to prevent the loss of that moral center over time. Those that develop poorly are rebooted, reincarnated, etc.
I'm switching to Corona now since the other beer is getting bitter...
Re:Riker would get pasted....
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 0
> If a machine as smart and adaptable as Data
> existed, it would bankrupt Riker - easy.
He could and did beat the pants off some wizened poker players in that time travel story with Mark Twain. Perhaps he looked at the reflection of the cards in their eyeballs, or by learning the identities of cards by noticing subtle printing differences and wear and tear on their backs, all of which, presumably, he refrains from doing with his Star Fleet buddies.
As for pure facial and body language bluffing, I also agree he could easily catalog thousands of minute observations and then correlate them roughly with quality of hands for all the players.
If you copied the brain structure and "woke it up", what would happen? Would the subjective perceptual experience happen for that being? Would it lay there dormant? Would it act normally, but just not have any inner "I"? Would it "attract" a "soul" the way a flesh body and mind do?
If you found a clever way to hook the brain and the computer up such that the person perceived himself moving from one into the other (having four lobes, so to speak, at the same time) then gradually shut down the physical one, that would be satisfying to me. After all, your two lobes are really two independent brains that somehow merge into one "me."
I remember from philosophy class, if you had a bike and replaced a part, is it the same bike? What if you replaced another, then another? Eventually the whole bike is replaced, but it is the same bike. What, now, if someone else was gathering up all those parts and put them together. Don't they now have your bike?
Well, what about the brain? Replacing cells with electronic equivalents, or, using more recent developments, with more of your own actual brain cells developed in the lab and grown to duplicate every last dendrite of each of your own individual brain cells, then replaced.
What about an atom-for-atom swap?
In Star Trek, your actual subatomic particles are beamed down and reassembled. I'd say you'd survive. In other sci-fi novels, your atoms are disassembled and thrown away and only the info is transmitted and you are reassembled with local matter at the destination. I'd say that you were dead as a doornail and that a copy of you now existed.
Of course that's all highly illogical because there are no differences between atoms and particles aside from location.
"Me" may be a "now-only" property. The you of four seconds ago is as dead as someone who was transported in the second manner. If that's the case, then all the logical difficuty disappears.
> [Computer-uploaded Bob] might be far most
> capable mentally than the old Bob.
Asks the Turing Tester, "Say, 'Bob', if two trains are 345 miles apart and they head towards each other, one at 60 MPH and the other at 75 MPH, how soon will they biff?"
Answers Bob, "I don't know," in less than 4 nanoseconds.
Actually the PC was emulated inside the Mac box in software a long time ago, Windows included.
To make it as realistic as possible, when you double-clicked SoftPC, a command prompt window opened, complete with a sound file playing the tinny grunting of a PC's floppy disk drives checking for disks.
But for speed, it was a PC.
And after the Power PC came out, the fastest 68040-based Mac was the emulation mode inside the Power PC.
Re:The hardware is the software
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 0
In "Immortal Coil", a Star Trek novel about Data, the next generation of androids have "holotronic" brains, an adaptave hologram-based version of a positronic brain.
So that's a valid scientific theory, anyway, given the validity of a positronic brain.
Dang! I'm at -1 and they've taken away my anonymous button. Ehh, well...
Re:The hardware is the software
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 0
Note that, trivially, a Turing machine could simulate all known physical phenomena to any degree of accuracy, including to such accuracy that there is no difference over billions of years (butterfly effect of quantum processes aside.) If you could, for example, show there are things that a human mind could calculate that a Turing machine could not, you have demonstrated that such physical models are necessarily lacking because a human mind in the Turing world could not do what the real world one could.
Precisely what the difference is is the big question.
I must have missed the part where Hillary's plan jailed people who arrived at private (not public) agreements with doctors for care.
I also must have missed the part where Canada's system did the same thing.
What you call straw men, tying something to the ground before hitting it, I call a real-world horror situation that this country fortunately avoided. To tell someone they cannot negotiate with doctors for better care is completely immoral.
Re:We (probably) won't ever actually ACHIEVE AI
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 0
> it's an emergent property of complex adaptive
> systems. I'd say people don't recognize it
> where it is, since they're looking for something
> mystical and revolutionary
Emergent properties are the same thing as dualist spiritualism, and will remain so until someone explains the physics. Until then, it remains nothing more than an observation with an unsatisfying "explanation" of spiritualism.
Just what is it that causes the subjective perceptual experience, anyway? Quite frankly, I don't think that has anything to do with thinking or reacting to the environment. I can easily conceive of a human with all the capacities of anyone else, that refers to itself as "I", but that lacks the internal perceiver that I, and hopefully most of you have.
I'm with Hillary! Get rid of the greedy and nationalize all health care. Make it illegal to seek health care independent of what the government provides. After all, since the government's is the best and won't have long lines and poor service, there will be no need for you to pay more to formerly free doctors for superior service which is impossible.
Now all that's left is to crush medical development such that no one bothers to try to grow organs in the lab for later transplantation use.
Greed, greedy bastards all!
What have they ever given us? Besides growing healthy, transplantable organs from stem cells, the possibility of acephalous clones for more organ transplantation, massive farming clones reducing the cost and increasing the quality of plants and animals, an understanding of genetics allowing the curing of many diseases, and the cures for those many diseases.
Greedy bastards! Shut them down. Now. Before they save our lives decades ahead of heavy-handed, desirable socialist medical systems.
> Is "habbit" something mythical like hobbits or
> habits a hobbit has?
Slowly Frodo reached down. He had been held close to the heaving breast of Liv Tyler for over fourty five minutes now as they fled for the Elven city of Areolae. Her intoxicating scent superseded every notion of things other than Her, his Elven goddess and protector. Her bouncing flesh, so soft against his aching head, rose to meet him as he fell to the horse, and in turn then fell to meet him as he was flipped back up again. Over and over again this process repeated itself every four hoof beats.
Though dim of mind, the lower parts of his brain activated an old habbit. He couldn't take it anymore. Liv was just too much. His hand finally, carefully, with infinite secrecy reached its destination and latched onto it. His shank, already streched, was covered with long hair right out to the tip.
I believe this is the correct tense. By some point in time A in the past, I had been doing X.
Same thing goes for "I had taken 4 years..."
Also, as vernacular, although "humpin" should have an apostrophe at the end, as in "I couldn't be humpin' it at some store..." it is a perfectly fine sentence given artistic license. There is nothing awkward about it in the usual sense of "awkward" applied to sentence construction.
Now you know why I switched from Mac to PC for home use in the mid 90's. I got sick and tired of seeing a 100:1 game ratio between the two machines.
As a matter of daily gaming life on the Mac, you usually only got the extremely hot games, ported, about a year after the PC.
I could use Word on either machine. I could surf using Netscape or IE on either machine. I could use Excel on either machine. What else is there? Games. The decision was clear.
That's why Apple spurning the gaming developers served it not, and why MS trying to slide it's foot into the game development via Direct X so games are dependent on MS is a good idea.
Lawyer allow as in "GM is now suing us, NBC, for half a billion dollars because we faked up an exploding truck, so you, Mr. Stone Phillips, will read this mewling and puking grovelling apology on the air or you will experience a new definition of pain and suffering as you are slowly digested over a thousand years in the belly of the all-powerful Sarlacc."
EverQuest is a bloated whale of a Hutt of tangled infield fly rules.
Probably the best was disallowing a levitation spell in the land of floating islands, a land that is perfectly designed for such a spell...
And the second best is disallowing pet-casting classes from casting up an army.
The third best was making the warrior (!) one of the weakest offensively. Heck, even a thief can backstab a moving monster from behind better than a 10-foot ogre with a 12 foot sword could lop the guy's head off from behind.
Slashdot Mirror
Rember that most people pick a position, then use arbitrary arguments to support it.
For example, the right of a woman to her body is allowed if it gives the right to an abortion, but not if it is to sell her body for sex for money. Completely illogical and dishonest? Yes. It works though, because politics is the art of swaying the masses, usually via outrage at something. These are the same masses that watch John Edwards and Miss Cleo, convinced it is real.
> This Court ruling was made on imagination and
> inference, not the actual document itself.
>
> There is no constitutional right to privacy, of
> course. Maybe there should be. However, it
> should be added through the amendment process,
> rather than through the abuse of power of
> supreme court justices
The Constitution lists some rights, but explicitely states that those are not all the rights, and that those rights are retained by the people (or the states.)
The founding fathers were worried that enumerating some of the rights would lead people to think, as you do, that those were all there were. Some didn't want the rights listed because they were afraid this would happen (which did.) Others wanted to list the rights lest the presumption that legislative powers cover all domains. The listing of rights is theoretically redundant.
What it does is even more severe. The constitution creates a government with a defined set of powers, and no others. To set limits hints that the government may do anything except what is forbidden, when in theory (sadly, not in fact) it is the other way around.
The government doesn't have rights -- only individual people have rights. The government has powers over those rights, as granted by the people, who can change or revoke it.
Of course, this limited government has a budget for this year of 2.1 trillion dollars. It is the most bloated thing ever to exist.
I recall an article I once read that showed children who primarily type instead of writing with their hand did have language difficulties.
In other words, manual expression of words is not "plug and play" with typing. You lose ability when you only type as a child.
> drawing outside the lines,
I got spanked in first grade because I colored outside the lines.
Now your corporation has to worry about people choking on the broken pieces fished out of the garbage. Talk about going from the frying pan into the fire.
How about the universe will be rebooted since this universe is a virtual one (in a sense, even if physically real) used by those post-singularity intelligences to ensure that new intelligences have some kind of moral center to them. Indeed, they probably reboot themselves from time to time, every few subjective centuries, to prevent the loss of that moral center over time. Those that develop poorly are rebooted, reincarnated, etc.
I'm switching to Corona now since the other beer is getting bitter...
> If a machine as smart and adaptable as Data
> existed, it would bankrupt Riker - easy.
He could and did beat the pants off some wizened poker players in that time travel story with Mark Twain. Perhaps he looked at the reflection of the cards in their eyeballs, or by learning the identities of cards by noticing subtle printing differences and wear and tear on their backs, all of which, presumably, he refrains from doing with his Star Fleet buddies.
As for pure facial and body language bluffing, I also agree he could easily catalog thousands of minute observations and then correlate them roughly with quality of hands for all the players.
If you copied the brain structure and "woke it up", what would happen? Would the subjective perceptual experience happen for that being? Would it lay there dormant? Would it act normally, but just not have any inner "I"? Would it "attract" a "soul" the way a flesh body and mind do?
If you found a clever way to hook the brain and the computer up such that the person perceived himself moving from one into the other (having four lobes, so to speak, at the same time) then gradually shut down the physical one, that would be satisfying to me. After all, your two lobes are really two independent brains that somehow merge into one "me."
I remember from philosophy class, if you had a bike and replaced a part, is it the same bike? What if you replaced another, then another? Eventually the whole bike is replaced, but it is the same bike. What, now, if someone else was gathering up all those parts and put them together. Don't they now have your bike?
Well, what about the brain? Replacing cells with electronic equivalents, or, using more recent developments, with more of your own actual brain cells developed in the lab and grown to duplicate every last dendrite of each of your own individual brain cells, then replaced.
What about an atom-for-atom swap?
In Star Trek, your actual subatomic particles are beamed down and reassembled. I'd say you'd survive. In other sci-fi novels, your atoms are disassembled and thrown away and only the info is transmitted and you are reassembled with local matter at the destination. I'd say that you were dead as a doornail and that a copy of you now existed.
Of course that's all highly illogical because there are no differences between atoms and particles aside from location.
"Me" may be a "now-only" property. The you of four seconds ago is as dead as someone who was transported in the second manner. If that's the case, then all the logical difficuty disappears.
> [Computer-uploaded Bob] might be far most
> capable mentally than the old Bob.
Asks the Turing Tester, "Say, 'Bob', if two trains are 345 miles apart and they head towards each other, one at 60 MPH and the other at 75 MPH, how soon will they biff?"
Answers Bob, "I don't know," in less than 4 nanoseconds.
Actually the PC was emulated inside the Mac box in software a long time ago, Windows included.
To make it as realistic as possible, when you double-clicked SoftPC, a command prompt window opened, complete with a sound file playing the tinny grunting of a PC's floppy disk drives checking for disks.
But for speed, it was a PC.
And after the Power PC came out, the fastest 68040-based Mac was the emulation mode inside the Power PC.
In "Immortal Coil", a Star Trek novel about Data, the next generation of androids have "holotronic" brains, an adaptave hologram-based version of a positronic brain.
So that's a valid scientific theory, anyway, given the validity of a positronic brain.
Dang! I'm at -1 and they've taken away my anonymous button. Ehh, well...
Note that, trivially, a Turing machine could simulate all known physical phenomena to any degree of accuracy, including to such accuracy that there is no difference over billions of years (butterfly effect of quantum processes aside.) If you could, for example, show there are things that a human mind could calculate that a Turing machine could not, you have demonstrated that such physical models are necessarily lacking because a human mind in the Turing world could not do what the real world one could.
Precisely what the difference is is the big question.
I must have missed the part where Hillary's plan jailed people who arrived at private (not public) agreements with doctors for care.
I also must have missed the part where Canada's system did the same thing.
What you call straw men, tying something to the ground before hitting it, I call a real-world horror situation that this country fortunately avoided. To tell someone they cannot negotiate with doctors for better care is completely immoral.
> it's an emergent property of complex adaptive
> systems. I'd say people don't recognize it
> where it is, since they're looking for something
> mystical and revolutionary
Emergent properties are the same thing as dualist spiritualism, and will remain so until someone explains the physics. Until then, it remains nothing more than an observation with an unsatisfying "explanation" of spiritualism.
Just what is it that causes the subjective perceptual experience, anyway? Quite frankly, I don't think that has anything to do with thinking or reacting to the environment. I can easily conceive of a human with all the capacities of anyone else, that refers to itself as "I", but that lacks the internal perceiver that I, and hopefully most of you have.
I'm with Hillary! Get rid of the greedy and nationalize all health care. Make it illegal to seek health care independent of what the government provides. After all, since the government's is the best and won't have long lines and poor service, there will be no need for you to pay more to formerly free doctors for superior service which is impossible.
Now all that's left is to crush medical development such that no one bothers to try to grow organs in the lab for later transplantation use.
Greed, greedy bastards all!
What have they ever given us? Besides growing healthy, transplantable organs from stem cells, the possibility of acephalous clones for more organ transplantation, massive farming clones reducing the cost and increasing the quality of plants and animals, an understanding of genetics allowing the curing of many diseases, and the cures for those many diseases.
Greedy bastards! Shut them down. Now. Before they save our lives decades ahead of heavy-handed, desirable socialist medical systems.
> hawk, now trying to figure out if the abbreviation for Amanda is 'manda or 'Manda . . .
Mandy, as in that song "Oh, Mandy." Have that running thru your head all day...
> Is "habbit" something mythical like hobbits or
> habits a hobbit has?
Slowly Frodo reached down. He had been held close to the heaving breast of Liv Tyler for over fourty five minutes now as they fled for the Elven city of Areolae. Her intoxicating scent superseded every notion of things other than Her, his Elven goddess and protector. Her bouncing flesh, so soft against his aching head, rose to meet him as he fell to the horse, and in turn then fell to meet him as he was flipped back up again. Over and over again this process repeated itself every four hoof beats.
Though dim of mind, the lower parts of his brain activated an old habbit. He couldn't take it anymore. Liv was just too much. His hand finally, carefully, with infinite secrecy reached its destination and latched onto it. His shank, already streched, was covered with long hair right out to the tip.
"No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die."
And, of course, the greatest name of them all: P00sy Galore.
Alotta Fagina, ehehehehe...that still makes me laugh.
Let me put it this way as to which sucks more: I haven't seen a James Bond film in twelve years.
> "Well, I had been screwing" --- improper tense;
I believe this is the correct tense. By some point in time A in the past, I had been doing X.
Same thing goes for "I had taken 4 years..."
Also, as vernacular, although "humpin" should have an apostrophe at the end, as in "I couldn't be humpin' it at some store..." it is a perfectly fine sentence given artistic license. There is nothing awkward about it in the usual sense of "awkward" applied to sentence construction.
Now you know why I switched from Mac to PC for home use in the mid 90's. I got sick and tired of seeing a 100:1 game ratio between the two machines.
As a matter of daily gaming life on the Mac, you usually only got the extremely hot games, ported, about a year after the PC.
I could use Word on either machine. I could surf using Netscape or IE on either machine. I could use Excel on either machine. What else is there? Games. The decision was clear.
That's why Apple spurning the gaming developers served it not, and why MS trying to slide it's foot into the game development via Direct X so games are dependent on MS is a good idea.
Lawyer allow as in "GM is now suing us, NBC, for half a billion dollars because we faked up an exploding truck, so you, Mr. Stone Phillips, will read this mewling and puking grovelling apology on the air or you will experience a new definition of pain and suffering as you are slowly digested over a thousand years in the belly of the all-powerful Sarlacc."
EverQuest is a bloated whale of a Hutt of tangled infield fly rules.
Probably the best was disallowing a levitation spell in the land of floating islands, a land that is perfectly designed for such a spell...
And the second best is disallowing pet-casting classes from casting up an army.
The third best was making the warrior (!) one of the weakest offensively. Heck, even a thief can backstab a moving monster from behind better than a 10-foot ogre with a 12 foot sword could lop the guy's head off from behind.