What I find interesting is the connection between motor control and speech abilities.
In the philosophy paper I'm writing, I go on a bit about communication as a source of knowledge being the ability to recognize certain observations as being indicative as originating from other like entities, i.e. when I hear certain sounds, that indicates not just something about my environment, but about another being like myself.
This applies pretty clearly not only to sound-making (speech) and hearing, but also to other forms of behavior (see sign language in humans for a pretty incontroversial example of non-spoken communication behavior). The reason I find this 'motor control' / 'speech ability' link interesting is that motor control indicates that it's not the systems responsible for causing movement, but he systems responsible for controlling movement, for selecting specific actions for specific reasons.
It seems to me that this biological link between communication abilities and a sort of 'willed' (controlled) action makes perfect sense; on the one hand it's responsible for putting meaning into things the individual is doing, instead of a blind stimulus-response, and on the other hand it's responsible for assigning meaning to what other individuals do.
In a sense, it seems to be somewhat responsible for any type of 'social' thought and action at all, both for understanding that when I do this, I mean that, and that when I see this, it means that; as opposed to making observations of the world and reacting to them without any meaning associated. This is not limited only to vocalization but to any type of behavior which may by association convey information to another; dog marking their terrirory is communication by scent, sign language and writing is communication by sign, all sorts of noise-making is communication by sound...
From a simple beginning like this it's possible to see how more advanced social mechanisms could build. Once the individual has begun to recognize on some level that other things it sees and hears are not just a part of its environment but other beings like itself, possible with useful information: from there you can begin to develop empathy and sympathy and whole forms of social interaction not often seen outside of mammalian and avian species. Which makes perfect sense, if this neural feature is found in common between both humans and birds.
No, not depriving someone of possible revenue, but actual revenue generated by the owner's property.
If I were to do that, I would have to first wait for the owner to generate revenue, then go hack into their bank account or what have you and STEAL THAT. Preventing someone from making money is NOT the same as stealing money they have already made.
Also, re: "something that you do not own the rights to", see my other post in this thread about rights and why "copyright" is a misnomer.
Also, then, by your definition "identity theft" is not theft. But, if I copy your identity and use it illegally, is that theft or not? I haven't deprived you of your identity, or prevented you from using it; I'm just using your identity even though I don't own your identity, and I am using it with possible detrimental effects to you.
Identity theft is not theft, it's impersonation. "Identity theft" is just a colloquialism, like "Competitor X is stealing our customers." You don't own your customers as property, even though they are "your" customers; likewise you don't own your identity as property, it is something intrinsic to you. Someone producing a facsimile of your identity is something entirely different from someone removing your identity from you.
think j-turkey pointed out a more cogent problem: we didn't define theft. Please refer to his post, and my subsequent response for more detail.
How's this: an action which deprives a person of some thing which they possess. Work for you?
If you refer to it this way, I expect you to start talking about your Fair Use Privileges in future posts.
I don't tend to talk about "Fair Use Rights" in general because I consider any use of 'intellectual property' to be fair use by right; any limitation on it is deviation from the natural way of things, albeit supposedly toward noble ends. So any use if fair use and it doesn't deserve its own term.
That said, if I were to talk about "fair use" as a limited subset of uses, I would still call them rights, because the fair use laws are limitations on OTHER limitations of natural rights; a double negative makes a positive, a limitation on limitation on right just leave you with your rights again.
You can violate somebody's property rights without stealing property. For example, by damaging it, defacing it, or otherwise compromising its value to the owner of that property.
I'll agree with that aside from the latter part. If compromising something's value without directly doing something TO that something (like defacing or stealing it) was theft, then anything which harm's anyone's bottom line would be theft. No competition allowed, no negative reviews, nothing; it might compromise the value of the company's stock, and that would violate the shareholders' property laws, by your logic.
You'll have to define universal right before I can really interpret what you mean by this statement.
The universal or natural rights, as I would state them, fall into two categories: the first is interpersonal right, which include "security" and "expression". That is, you have the right to do anything you like (expression), so long as you're not directly doing something TO someone that they dislike (security). Each of these has a corresponding responsibility, of course: to respect the same rights in others, not to limit their personal expression or violate their personal security.
Then there are the basic economic rights to "posession" and "environment" - that is to say, the right to possession of resources (actual, material property), with corresponding responsibility not to deprive someone of them or damage them; and the right to use any freely available resources (like air and water), with the corresponding responsibility not to deprive any one of these resources or to depreciate them.
Again, I'm stumbling over your use of the term right. I think you're adopted a conveniently naive definition. If you think "life" is a right, then you must be in favor of abolishing abortion, no? If you think "the pursuit of happiness" is a right, then at what point does one man's happiness end and another begins? I'm not happy unless I can download my movies for free. The owners of the copyrights on those movies aren't happy unless they get material compensation for my copy. Who wins? This is why we have laws, and the law says that the copyright owner's right here wins.
Amongst "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", I'd say that "life" covers what I'm calling "security" above, "liberty" covers both security and expression (freedoms "of" and freedoms "from"), and "the pursuit of happiness" covers what I call "expression" above. Elsewhere (I don't recall where) is mentioned "life, liberty, and property", which covers also what I call "possession". Environmental laws generally don't seem covered by the constitution.
To answer your question, "at what point does one man's happiness end and another begins", see my above paragraph on interpersonal rights: your right to expression ends when it violates my right to security. So by those interpersonal laws, if copyright is to be viewed as a law regarding personal expression (freedom of speech and the like), then how is distributing a copy of some information (a form of expression) directly violating anyone's security? Or preventing them from distributing (expressing) the information themselves?
Or, if you look at it as an economic issue, how is making a copy of something defacing the origin
"The problem with your narrow definition is that when you make an illegal copy of a copyrighted work and distribute it without permission, you will take revenue away from the rightful owner of that work, if they are selling it. This is because there will be some subset of people who a) would normally purchase that work but b) would rather get it free of charge, and if there is no degradation of quality and the means to obtain a free copy are available, will do so."
But this is still not *theft* of the owner's right to copy, nor of their actual copy, which are the only things they own. They still have the right to copy their work, and they still have their original copy of it. If you're going to say that depriving someone of possible revenue is "theft", then any competition is theft, and reporting poor business practices or problems with a product is theft. All these things deprive someone of profits, and perhaps in colloquial terms one would say that a competitor is "stealing our customers", but you do not own potential revenue any more than you own your customers, and so is not legally *theft*.
In the case of copyright it is violating a law, but those laws are not property rights laws: they are regulations restricting natural rights in an attempt to promote a greater good.
United States law recognizes no universal right to limit the distribution of information. (Rights like "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", or those enumerated in the Bill of Rights; though it's important to note that when the constitution was framed, many opposed specifically enumerating any rights in the Bill of Rights because it was considered that everybody naturally had the right to do ANYTHING unless specifically disallowed, and enumerating them could lead people to limit themselves to JUST those rights).
Despite its poor name, "copyright" laws grant a limited exclusive PRIVILEGE to copy information. In other words, they are restricting the natural way of things in hopes of achieving some greater good. (Anyone can copy anything, naturally, as per the assumed right to do whatever you like unless otherwise limited; copyright law is the limit, not the right).
Infringing on copyright law is *not theft*. You have not deprived the original owner of any property, and thus have violated no property rights. You have infringed on a law, sure, but that law is not based on any universal right.
Given that, you're right that there's no right to cheap drugs or insurance either. Which just puts these two issues on the same footing: trying to regulate a naturally unregulated system in order to achieve some greater good. No natural rights violations are being violated in either case.
I believe the GP poster was merely expressing his disdain that things are being regulated in favor of the corporations, instead of in favor of the people.
I'm writing a philosophy paper which covers, in part, what intelligence is. I would say, in my completely unprofessional but well-thought opinion, that the measure of whether something is "intelligent" - or more precisely, whether something "thinks" or perhaps is "a person" (as distinguished from "a human") - is dependent on four key criteria:
Observation/Stimulation ("Senses")- the ability to receive input from the surrounding world and react to it, and to select from / focus on / filter various available inputs. All animals and some AI programs share this in common. It's the basic stimulus half of a 'stimulus-response' system.
Communication/Behavior ("Society") - the ability to interpret signals sent to it, and in kind, to transmit appropriate signals (be these electrical, audio, movement, etc). Again, animals and many computers have all got this down just fine - ALICE is doing something like this, and perhaps a little more. This is just the 'response' part of a stimulus-response system.
Intuition/Expression ("Emotion") - Pattern recognition, as you've already covered here, and the internal state-change that corresponds to it. This is one of the two criteria which differentiate a thinking entity like a human from an unthinking one like most animals or computers. It is built effectively upon recursive, internal observations and self-stimulation; observing things within oneself and behaving to achieve change in those things. In this sense, emotion is half of the criteria needed for a truly self-aware system.
Logic/Expectation ("Reason") - Symbolic manipulation, memory, and the ability to make predictions. This is the ability to manipulate symbols and link them into relationships, from which a sort of causality or rationality can be derived (if this then that; this, therefore that) to make theoretical predictions. This is built upon recursive, internal communication - in essence, talking to oneself, an internal dialogue. The ability to communicate propositions to oneself and evaluate them. This internal narration is also the basis of meaningful memory, one's personal story. As an internal, recursive process, like emotion, reason is the other half of self-awareness, and necessary for an entity to be truly a thinking thing, or a person.
All four of these criteria (really eight, if you count the dual aspects of each) may vary in their strengths within an individual person, but so long as all four are present in some degree, the entity in question could be considered a person.
The key element in all of this is recursion, the internalization of normally external stimulus-response systems. The stimulus-response must still be present (otherwise you'd have an inert box), and feeds into the self-aware part of the system, but the self-awareness is what makes the system "intelligent".
A simple stimulus-response system will always give the same responses for the same exact stimuli, but a self-aware system will change internally with every stimulus, and change in turn with every sensation of its own change, and so have a continually changing maps of certain stimuli to certain responses, the makeup of which is only very indirectly caused by the actual stimuli themselves.
This dynamic nature and self-evolving, and the fact that much of the cause of change is hidden 'inside' the system and only hinted at in its responses to certain stimuli, makes predicting the behavior of such a system extremely difficult, lending the illusion that it is free from causality and has its own "free will" or "volition" somehow separate from the rest of the universe.
But, don't take any of this as absolute truth. I'm not a programmer or a neurologist or in any way a professional about any of this. I'm just a self-aware little box sitting here running thoughts recursively through my mind until something that appears to be true comes out...
Indexing was introduced with V-Twin (find by content) in the original Sherlock with 8.5. I have it turned off because I hate scheduled index times while I'm working and I leave my computer off when I'm not (for noise considerations), and I don't really use search much anyway since I keep my FS well-organized.
So what is new with this "new" indexing? Does it happen all the time, in the background, without system slowdowns? If so, then *that* is pretty cool.
Actually, now I think about it, I don't recall anywhere in OSX *to* turn on or off or set an indexing schedule, and I've never seen my system indexing... so either it does it invisibly in the background already (in which case what's the new big deal?), or they took out indexing at some point (in which case I can see why this is a new big deal). But indexing itself is certainly not new - maybe it's just making a big comeback?
So with the exception of image-specific data, how is this at all different from the search features that have been build into Mac OS for aeons? System 7 (or at least 7.5?) "Find File" would allow you to search by creation and modification dates, file types and creators, file sizes, labels (a kind of user-input meta-data), visibility, and of course name - all relative (greater than or less than dates, sizes, etc), and in whatever domain you'd like (select volumes or folders).
The only new thing added in Sherlock was integration of Copland's V-Twin text indexing and search technology, now called just "Find by Content" (fbc). Later versions of Sherlock added general Internet meta-search (across multiple search engines), and then later fancy specialized search modules (for movies, travel, etc).
I still don't understand what exactly Google Desktop Search or any of these other "desktop search" utilities add that is new or interesting. All I hear so far is "you can find by content!" and "you can search by meta data!" Like finding by anything other than just name is new and impressive? Even the basic Windows Find does some meta-data, doesn't it?
All I can tell so far that's new is filetype-specific metadata: image resolutions, MP3 tags, that sort of thing. I hope there's a plugin architecture so you can add your own search modules too. Like what Sherlock does for category-specific Internet searches, except on your desktop. Is that it?
Even this whole "the search results come up as you type!" isn't new: the built-in search field in every Finder window does that under Panther. It would be cool to see that in a general search, but that's not exactly revolutionary.
So is that it? Filetype-specific metadata searches and realtime results? That's neat and all, but is that the only thing that this hubbub is all about?
How does having sex and being surreptitiously videotaped damage a person's credibility? I'd say whoever did the videotaping is the one whose credibility would be damaged.
You think the police have nothing better to do that harass you?
In some places, yes. I used to live in the small town of Ojai, CA. Pretty much the entire town closed at 5PM and almost nobody was out past 10 or 11PM.
Then I moved up here to Santa Barbara, an hour away. This meant that visiting my girlfriend (still in Ojai) became rare and special and so I would stay down there until the early hours in the morning, 1 or 2 AM, and then head home. Almost *every time* I did this, once or twice a week, I would be pulled over by a cop on my way out of town, asked for me ID, had my ID run and then let go without so much as an accusation.
But, obviously, I'm driving an old car late at night, so I must be some kind of criminal! They just wanted to make sure I wasn't - one of them even told me as much once - and pulled me over to check my ID. Once, one of them heard from another cop over the radio while running my ID that "someone named Forrest" was on probation and not supposed to be out at night, so the other cop drove over to see if he recognized me. (It was a different Forrest). Doesn't that come up on my record when you run my ID? They're just looking for some reason to arrest or at least ticket somebody!
I mean why not? It's reasonable, they spend all day cruising around and ignoring the lame-ass wannabe gang-bangers in that town, harassing the homeless, and confiscating drugs for their own use. They've got to get some actual bookings in there somewhere and the town is just SO BORING that there's never anyone to book!
Of course, making it explicitly legal to refuse ID wouldn't change much. Then they'd just hold you until they could find *some* tiny infraction and get you on that. ID is the least of our problems. The entire legal code needs to be VASTLY simplified such that the average citizen can understand it in its entirety; otherwise, there is no justification for holding someone accountable under laws they can't be reasonably expected to know.
I know it's bad form to reply to the same topic twice, but I realized I wanted to add something...
It's like being able to use a microscope, but not being able to talk about the microscope itself.
No, it's like being unable to put the microscope under itself. It's just not possible, and never will be. An eye cannot look at itself and examine the lenses and optic nerves; an ear cannot hear its own mechanism, only the 'sound' they make; the taste buds on your tongue cannot possibly taste themselves. On a non-sensory level, the Incompleteness Theorem has shown that no system of logic can prove its own validity.
Any method of examining something, be it sensory or logical, or emotional (your cannot justify your intuition WITH your intuition), or communicative (you cannot take someone's word that they are telling the truth), or anything.... no source of ideas can examine or verify even its own existence.
We cannot perceive our own perception. But, like an eye looking in the mirror, or at another eye, we can perceive the METHOD of our perception, and other methods of perception, and understand that when this part of a brain physically does that, then the subjective experience is this. There is no distinction between the two, they are actually one and the same, and there is no reason to think otherwise; it's only a matter of perspective.
o, why are we here? Why are we in the theater, watching the show, rather than there just being a theater playing the story of the universe, but nobody's watching it?
Because the theater is showing a live feed of a camera trained on the theater itself. We are *in* the movie as well as watching it. That we experience the movie is an essential element *of* the movie; otherwise, it would be a different movie.
This is just the Anthropic Principle all over again. There are other, empty theaters with nobody watching themselves on the screen, and thus nobody in those theaters is marveling at their own existence on screen and wondering how they got there. In our theater, there are people, and many of them think it's really weird and strange that they can see themselves and everyone in the movie.
Others just realize that we are the movie and enjoy the show.
Which TWO of these coins has NEVER been minted in the U.S.?
Penny Two cent Three cent Nickle Dime Quarter Half dollar Dollar
Most people will immediately say two cent and three cent, which you, Kula, would probably recognize as false.
The correct answers are Penny and Nickle. No coins by those names have ever been minted in the United States. They are one-cent and five-cent pieces.:-)
Another related joke:
I hold in my hands TWO currently minted U.S. coins whose total value equals 55 cents. One of them is NOT a nickle (or 5 cent piece, for that matter). What are the two coins?
People usually get stumped here, because the only combination is a 50 cent and a 5 cent. Which is the correct answer.
One of them is not a nickle. That one is a half dollar. The OTHER one is a nickle. (Hey, I never said NEITHER was a nickle, just one of them...)
Actually it is commonly held that birds and mammals had a common ancestor - reptiles. More specifically, an early type of warm-blooded lizard which predated the dinosaurs, being the common ancestor of both them (who later evolved into birds) and early mammals. Morphologically and genetically, birds are a much further offshoot from this common ancestor than modern mammals or even specifically humans, whom we consider such a far point in evolution.
Humans are actually very closely descended from early placental mammals, which are in turn far more closely related to warm-blooded reptiles than any birds ever were. If I recall correctly, simple reptiles such as lizards, alligators and crocodiles are even more closely related to their fish ancestors than even amphibians are (that is to say, amphibians were a separate offshoot of fish than reptiles, not an intermediate step; both evolving from lunged, air-breathing fish).
It seems keeping to the straight and narrow on the evolutionary path - not diverging so much from out ancestors, avoiding overspecialization - has done our line of evolution some good.
Before I begin.... I know the parent was a troll, but it's a good place to get into a topic I wanted to write about anyway. My message is not meant to be inflammatory in any way.
Thus spake the Anonymous Coward: George W. Bacteria declared war on the infidels that threaten the single cellular life way of life.
Actually, I'd say it it's closer to say that these couple of new, big jellyfish are busy fighting each other over who gets to eat all of us poor bacteria. (Apologies for any biological inaccuracies there).
This is something that has often bothered me, as someone with very libertarian views on things. I see functional, ethical problems with the majority of large organizations (governments, interest groups, corporations, labor unions, etc), in that they often fail to truly address the concerns and genuine well being of their constituent individuals. Certainly, they are concerned with the general survival and productivity of the individuals, but for the selfish purposes of the organization, and not in the interest of their constituents.
This worries me because of the obvious parallels with the evolution of multicellular life. I, as a multicellular organism, am very concerned with the survival of my cells, but only for the purpose that these cells support my own survival. If an individual cell, or thousands thereof, die for my benefit, then that is good for me. And just by being a part of a multicellular organism, my cells are faced with a slightly longer-term version of the problem that the cells of some "superorganisms" mentioned in the article face: ultimately, only those cells in my gonads get to really reproduce. The rest of the cells are limited in reproduction by the age of my body.
Thus I am faced with an apparent hypocrisy. How can I consistently and non-hypocritically support the aggregation of smaller units at a loss (or at least, a risk) to themselves up to the level of complex multicellular organisms, but then oppose the aggregation of those units into larger "superorganism" societies at a loss or risk to themselves?
Is it perhaps that our organization in societies is not yet structured in the same way as that of a true multicellular organism? As libertarian as my views are I'm still very fond of cooperation and see the mutual benefits in it, so long as the cooperation is supported from the bottom up, and not enforced from the top down. Are multicellular organisms closer to extremely complex networks of similar, but specialized, symbiotic cells - more like an open source project than a commercial project, in Slashdot terms?
I sure wouldn't want to be one of those white blood cells "ordered" to die by my body, any more than I'd want to be a veteran soldier ordered to die so my govt doesn't have to pay veterans benefits.
I guess what it comes down to is, it seems that if my libertarian beliefs are right, and it is ethically (a nonscientific term, I know) better to avoid centralizing power and to build systems from the bottom up and support the individual, then by that logic colonies of bacteria are "ethically" better for the cells than humans are (as strange as it is to apply ethics to single cells).
Or conversely, if it is ethically better for the individual to sacrifice itself for the survival of the whole, even when it means that most if not all individuals are making such sacrifices for the benefit of something which is not any one individual, but some ephemeral concept of the "organism" (or "country") then anyone who opposes the aggregation of centralized power and fights to maintain individual rights is equivalent to nothing but a parasite, or at best, doomed to be outpaced as a lone single-celled organism floating adrift in the sea, while the great multicellular beasts conquer the world.
Or maybe my understanding of biology is wrong and some biologist with a touch of philosophy in him can resolve this dilemma for me?
I once knew a rather interesting circle of people who considered themselves "dorks" in a positive way, the same way many of us here consider ourselves "geeks" or "nerds" (pick your preferred term). They made me realize that any label can be taken for its positive or its negative connotations:
For the three examples you've given:
GEEK Negative: People overly obsessed with trivial, minor things of no real importance. And ok, they're kinda smart too. Positive: People capable of devoting their full attention to the complete comprehension of any interesting topic.
NERD Negative: People who are too damn smart for their own good AND have no grasp of what's cool or popular. Positive: People who care more about high intelligence and technical competence than trivial status symbols.
DORK Negative: People who just have no grasp of what's cool or popular, and are probably too dumb to be able to anyway. Positive: People who just don't care what's popular, including geeky meritocracies. "Genuine", unabashed people.
Almost any application of a social clique label can be applied the same way. I know people who use "goth" or "hippie" as insults, while others take one or the other as compliments, whichever they consider themselves. I personally am happy to be considered myself a 'member' of both cliques - hey, both groups of people like me, who's to complain? - but if say, a 'hippie' calls me a 'goth' as an insult, I can still be insulted just by the intent behind it. It doesn't make me ashamed of my 'gothic' tendencies. Same deal if a 'goth' tried to insult me by calling me a 'hippie'.
These labels are all used both by one group to isolate another group, and for the target group to find solidarity amongst themselves. Like "nigger" it can be good or bad depending on who uses it. But other than for descriptive purposes, as a short hard to refer to 'people with these common qualities', either use is harmful in that it is exclusive thinking. If you think that geeks/goths/yourclique are better than jocks/hippies/theirclique, that's just as bad as the jocks/hippies/theirclique thinking they're better than you.
People are all different. Labels can be useful as jargon to refer to those differences, but using labels for identity is nothing less than groupthink and leads to the type of us-vs-them thinking that is the root of most of mankind's social problems.
Be who you are, and if you match the description of some 'clique' archetype and they (the clique) like you the better for it, good for you, you're popular. If they don't like something about you because it doesn't match their archetype, screw them and their closed-minded thinking.
Firewall: Software to protect computers against hackers
A) The term he's looking for is "cracker" (someone who attempts to gain unauthorized access to a computer system for malicious gain), not "hacker" (someone who enjoys tweaking, exploiting, and otherwise pushing systems to their limits for fun and for the learning experience).
B) Firewalls are also used to protect against non-human threats, or even to "protect" against things that aren't always threats (campus networks blocking P2P apps, ISPs blocking web or mail servers on domestic connections, etc).
I would have said instead something like:
Firewall: Software which limits outside access to certain systems in a computer.
It's still not entirely accurate from a technical point of view but it gets the right message across, which the given definition does not.
Come now. Plenty of us like vegetarians. Far leaner and juicier than carnivores, much less those bottom-feeders and carrion-eaters you catch at fast food joints. I especially like the macrobiotics. Stir fried, with tamari and red pepper... mmmmmmm....
Despite the name, Photoshop is not only used for photo manipulation. I don't even own a digital camera and I use Photoshop extensively in the creation of textures for video games, abstract art, graphic design (as in logos and banners and such), interface design, and so forth. For all of these things, Photoshop is wonderful, and what you probably consider "gimmicks" in the realm of photo manipulation are indisposable tools for some of the things that I do.
All that said, I could certainly think up ways to redesign the interface from scratch a lot better, since I generally don't like monolithic apps like this on principle; but given that that's the paradigm we're working in, with an app-centric monolithic world, I think Photoshop does a pretty decent job of what it does.
I used to live in a room that was taller than it was wide, so to make efficient use of it I built a support structure on top of which I put my bed, and under which was my closet. This meant my bed was about 5ft off the ground and I had to jump to get in or out of it.
I had so much trouble with just turning my alarm off in the morning and going back to sleep that I set the alarm clock clear across the room, requiring me to quickly wake up and LEAP out of bed (literally!) to kill it. Eventually, I got the muscle memory down so perfect that I could throw off my covers, leap down and smack the snooze, and just reverse the motion and be back in bed again.
I don't think any amount of snooze annoyance will keep someone dedicated to sleeping in from doing so. Chances are if I had this Clocky thing, I'd get so fscking annoyed with it I'd break it and then sleep in a few hours late just out of spite for having been annoyed.
The other responses to this thus far are completely off. Dark matter and dark energy are not (by any current theory at least) related anything like how normal matter and energy relate via e=mc^2.
Dark Matter is a hypothetical unknown "stuff" with normal mass just like regular matter but which we cannot observe with light; it doesn't appear to be emitting or noticably obscuring any kind of radiation. But we see the movement of galaxies in such a way that they appear to be responding to the mass of something that we can't see. Hence "dark matter" - we can't see it, but it seems to be some sort of matter. Think of it like leaves blowing in the wind - we can't see the wind, but we see the motion is causes.
Dark Energy is another hypothetical unknown "stuff" that seems to be adding, somehow, to the velocity of all objects in the universe. It is postulated because the universe appears to be accelerating in its expansion, which does not make sense given an empty, neutral vaccum and a bunch of matter in it. It should be slowing down or at best, expanding at a steady rate. Hence "dark energy" - we can't detect it, but some source of energy which is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.
Slashdot Mirror
What I find interesting is the connection between motor control and speech abilities.
In the philosophy paper I'm writing, I go on a bit about communication as a source of knowledge being the ability to recognize certain observations as being indicative as originating from other like entities, i.e. when I hear certain sounds, that indicates not just something about my environment, but about another being like myself.
This applies pretty clearly not only to sound-making (speech) and hearing, but also to other forms of behavior (see sign language in humans for a pretty incontroversial example of non-spoken communication behavior). The reason I find this 'motor control' / 'speech ability' link interesting is that motor control indicates that it's not the systems responsible for causing movement, but he systems responsible for controlling movement, for selecting specific actions for specific reasons.
It seems to me that this biological link between communication abilities and a sort of 'willed' (controlled) action makes perfect sense; on the one hand it's responsible for putting meaning into things the individual is doing, instead of a blind stimulus-response, and on the other hand it's responsible for assigning meaning to what other individuals do.
In a sense, it seems to be somewhat responsible for any type of 'social' thought and action at all, both for understanding that when I do this, I mean that, and that when I see this, it means that; as opposed to making observations of the world and reacting to them without any meaning associated. This is not limited only to vocalization but to any type of behavior which may by association convey information to another; dog marking their terrirory is communication by scent, sign language and writing is communication by sign, all sorts of noise-making is communication by sound...
From a simple beginning like this it's possible to see how more advanced social mechanisms could build. Once the individual has begun to recognize on some level that other things it sees and hears are not just a part of its environment but other beings like itself, possible with useful information: from there you can begin to develop empathy and sympathy and whole forms of social interaction not often seen outside of mammalian and avian species. Which makes perfect sense, if this neural feature is found in common between both humans and birds.
No, not depriving someone of possible revenue, but actual revenue generated by the owner's property.
If I were to do that, I would have to first wait for the owner to generate revenue, then go hack into their bank account or what have you and STEAL THAT. Preventing someone from making money is NOT the same as stealing money they have already made.
Also, re: "something that you do not own the rights to", see my other post in this thread about rights and why "copyright" is a misnomer.
Also, then, by your definition "identity theft" is not theft. But, if I copy your identity and use it illegally, is that theft or not? I haven't deprived you of your identity, or prevented you from using it; I'm just using your identity even though I don't own your identity, and I am using it with possible detrimental effects to you.
Identity theft is not theft, it's impersonation. "Identity theft" is just a colloquialism, like "Competitor X is stealing our customers." You don't own your customers as property, even though they are "your" customers; likewise you don't own your identity as property, it is something intrinsic to you. Someone producing a facsimile of your identity is something entirely different from someone removing your identity from you.
think j-turkey pointed out a more cogent problem: we didn't define theft. Please refer to his post, and my subsequent response for more detail.
How's this: an action which deprives a person of some thing which they possess. Work for you?
If you refer to it this way, I expect you to start talking about your Fair Use Privileges in future posts.
I don't tend to talk about "Fair Use Rights" in general because I consider any use of 'intellectual property' to be fair use by right; any limitation on it is deviation from the natural way of things, albeit supposedly toward noble ends. So any use if fair use and it doesn't deserve its own term.
That said, if I were to talk about "fair use" as a limited subset of uses, I would still call them rights, because the fair use laws are limitations on OTHER limitations of natural rights; a double negative makes a positive, a limitation on limitation on right just leave you with your rights again.
You can violate somebody's property rights without stealing property. For example, by damaging it, defacing it, or otherwise compromising its value to the owner of that property.
I'll agree with that aside from the latter part. If compromising something's value without directly doing something TO that something (like defacing or stealing it) was theft, then anything which harm's anyone's bottom line would be theft. No competition allowed, no negative reviews, nothing; it might compromise the value of the company's stock, and that would violate the shareholders' property laws, by your logic.
You'll have to define universal right before I can really interpret what you mean by this statement.
The universal or natural rights, as I would state them, fall into two categories: the first is interpersonal right, which include "security" and "expression". That is, you have the right to do anything you like (expression), so long as you're not directly doing something TO someone that they dislike (security). Each of these has a corresponding responsibility, of course: to respect the same rights in others, not to limit their personal expression or violate their personal security.
Then there are the basic economic rights to "posession" and "environment" - that is to say, the right to possession of resources (actual, material property), with corresponding responsibility not to deprive someone of them or damage them; and the right to use any freely available resources (like air and water), with the corresponding responsibility not to deprive any one of these resources or to depreciate them.
Again, I'm stumbling over your use of the term right. I think you're adopted a conveniently naive definition. If you think "life" is a right, then you must be in favor of abolishing abortion, no? If you think "the pursuit of happiness" is a right, then at what point does one man's happiness end and another begins? I'm not happy unless I can download my movies for free. The owners of the copyrights on those movies aren't happy unless they get material compensation for my copy. Who wins? This is why we have laws, and the law says that the copyright owner's right here wins.
Amongst "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", I'd say that "life" covers what I'm calling "security" above, "liberty" covers both security and expression (freedoms "of" and freedoms "from"), and "the pursuit of happiness" covers what I call "expression" above. Elsewhere (I don't recall where) is mentioned "life, liberty, and property", which covers also what I call "possession". Environmental laws generally don't seem covered by the constitution.
To answer your question, "at what point does one man's happiness end and another begins", see my above paragraph on interpersonal rights: your right to expression ends when it violates my right to security. So by those interpersonal laws, if copyright is to be viewed as a law regarding personal expression (freedom of speech and the like), then how is distributing a copy of some information (a form of expression) directly violating anyone's security? Or preventing them from distributing (expressing) the information themselves?
Or, if you look at it as an economic issue, how is making a copy of something defacing the origin
"The problem with your narrow definition is that when you make an illegal copy of a copyrighted work and distribute it without permission, you will take revenue away from the rightful owner of that work, if they are selling it. This is because there will be some subset of people who a) would normally purchase that work but b) would rather get it free of charge, and if there is no degradation of quality and the means to obtain a free copy are available, will do so."
But this is still not *theft* of the owner's right to copy, nor of their actual copy, which are the only things they own. They still have the right to copy their work, and they still have their original copy of it. If you're going to say that depriving someone of possible revenue is "theft", then any competition is theft, and reporting poor business practices or problems with a product is theft. All these things deprive someone of profits, and perhaps in colloquial terms one would say that a competitor is "stealing our customers", but you do not own potential revenue any more than you own your customers, and so is not legally *theft*.
In the case of copyright it is violating a law, but those laws are not property rights laws: they are regulations restricting natural rights in an attempt to promote a greater good.
United States law recognizes no universal right to limit the distribution of information. (Rights like "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", or those enumerated in the Bill of Rights; though it's important to note that when the constitution was framed, many opposed specifically enumerating any rights in the Bill of Rights because it was considered that everybody naturally had the right to do ANYTHING unless specifically disallowed, and enumerating them could lead people to limit themselves to JUST those rights).
Despite its poor name, "copyright" laws grant a limited exclusive PRIVILEGE to copy information. In other words, they are restricting the natural way of things in hopes of achieving some greater good. (Anyone can copy anything, naturally, as per the assumed right to do whatever you like unless otherwise limited; copyright law is the limit, not the right).
Infringing on copyright law is *not theft*. You have not deprived the original owner of any property, and thus have violated no property rights. You have infringed on a law, sure, but that law is not based on any universal right.
Given that, you're right that there's no right to cheap drugs or insurance either. Which just puts these two issues on the same footing: trying to regulate a naturally unregulated system in order to achieve some greater good. No natural rights violations are being violated in either case.
I believe the GP poster was merely expressing his disdain that things are being regulated in favor of the corporations, instead of in favor of the people.
I'm writing a philosophy paper which covers, in part, what intelligence is. I would say, in my completely unprofessional but well-thought opinion, that the measure of whether something is "intelligent" - or more precisely, whether something "thinks" or perhaps is "a person" (as distinguished from "a human") - is dependent on four key criteria:
Observation/Stimulation ("Senses")- the ability to receive input from the surrounding world and react to it, and to select from / focus on / filter various available inputs. All animals and some AI programs share this in common. It's the basic stimulus half of a 'stimulus-response' system.
Communication/Behavior ("Society") - the ability to interpret signals sent to it, and in kind, to transmit appropriate signals (be these electrical, audio, movement, etc). Again, animals and many computers have all got this down just fine - ALICE is doing something like this, and perhaps a little more. This is just the 'response' part of a stimulus-response system.
Intuition/Expression ("Emotion") - Pattern recognition, as you've already covered here, and the internal state-change that corresponds to it. This is one of the two criteria which differentiate a thinking entity like a human from an unthinking one like most animals or computers. It is built effectively upon recursive, internal observations and self-stimulation; observing things within oneself and behaving to achieve change in those things. In this sense, emotion is half of the criteria needed for a truly self-aware system.
Logic/Expectation ("Reason") - Symbolic manipulation, memory, and the ability to make predictions. This is the ability to manipulate symbols and link them into relationships, from which a sort of causality or rationality can be derived (if this then that; this, therefore that) to make theoretical predictions. This is built upon recursive, internal communication - in essence, talking to oneself, an internal dialogue. The ability to communicate propositions to oneself and evaluate them. This internal narration is also the basis of meaningful memory, one's personal story. As an internal, recursive process, like emotion, reason is the other half of self-awareness, and necessary for an entity to be truly a thinking thing, or a person.
All four of these criteria (really eight, if you count the dual aspects of each) may vary in their strengths within an individual person, but so long as all four are present in some degree, the entity in question could be considered a person.
The key element in all of this is recursion, the internalization of normally external stimulus-response systems. The stimulus-response must still be present (otherwise you'd have an inert box), and feeds into the self-aware part of the system, but the self-awareness is what makes the system "intelligent".
A simple stimulus-response system will always give the same responses for the same exact stimuli, but a self-aware system will change internally with every stimulus, and change in turn with every sensation of its own change, and so have a continually changing maps of certain stimuli to certain responses, the makeup of which is only very indirectly caused by the actual stimuli themselves.
This dynamic nature and self-evolving, and the fact that much of the cause of change is hidden 'inside' the system and only hinted at in its responses to certain stimuli, makes predicting the behavior of such a system extremely difficult, lending the illusion that it is free from causality and has its own "free will" or "volition" somehow separate from the rest of the universe.
But, don't take any of this as absolute truth. I'm not a programmer or a neurologist or in any way a professional about any of this. I'm just a self-aware little box sitting here running thoughts recursively through my mind until something that appears to be true comes out...
Indexing was introduced with V-Twin (find by content) in the original Sherlock with 8.5. I have it turned off because I hate scheduled index times while I'm working and I leave my computer off when I'm not (for noise considerations), and I don't really use search much anyway since I keep my FS well-organized.
So what is new with this "new" indexing? Does it happen all the time, in the background, without system slowdowns? If so, then *that* is pretty cool.
Actually, now I think about it, I don't recall anywhere in OSX *to* turn on or off or set an indexing schedule, and I've never seen my system indexing... so either it does it invisibly in the background already (in which case what's the new big deal?), or they took out indexing at some point (in which case I can see why this is a new big deal). But indexing itself is certainly not new - maybe it's just making a big comeback?
So with the exception of image-specific data, how is this at all different from the search features that have been build into Mac OS for aeons? System 7 (or at least 7.5?) "Find File" would allow you to search by creation and modification dates, file types and creators, file sizes, labels (a kind of user-input meta-data), visibility, and of course name - all relative (greater than or less than dates, sizes, etc), and in whatever domain you'd like (select volumes or folders).
The only new thing added in Sherlock was integration of Copland's V-Twin text indexing and search technology, now called just "Find by Content" (fbc). Later versions of Sherlock added general Internet meta-search (across multiple search engines), and then later fancy specialized search modules (for movies, travel, etc).
I still don't understand what exactly Google Desktop Search or any of these other "desktop search" utilities add that is new or interesting. All I hear so far is "you can find by content!" and "you can search by meta data!" Like finding by anything other than just name is new and impressive? Even the basic Windows Find does some meta-data, doesn't it?
All I can tell so far that's new is filetype-specific metadata: image resolutions, MP3 tags, that sort of thing. I hope there's a plugin architecture so you can add your own search modules too. Like what Sherlock does for category-specific Internet searches, except on your desktop. Is that it?
Even this whole "the search results come up as you type!" isn't new: the built-in search field in every Finder window does that under Panther. It would be cool to see that in a general search, but that's not exactly revolutionary.
So is that it? Filetype-specific metadata searches and realtime results? That's neat and all, but is that the only thing that this hubbub is all about?
How does having sex and being surreptitiously videotaped damage a person's credibility? I'd say whoever did the videotaping is the one whose credibility would be damaged.
You think the police have nothing better to do that harass you?
In some places, yes. I used to live in the small town of Ojai, CA. Pretty much the entire town closed at 5PM and almost nobody was out past 10 or 11PM.
Then I moved up here to Santa Barbara, an hour away. This meant that visiting my girlfriend (still in Ojai) became rare and special and so I would stay down there until the early hours in the morning, 1 or 2 AM, and then head home. Almost *every time* I did this, once or twice a week, I would be pulled over by a cop on my way out of town, asked for me ID, had my ID run and then let go without so much as an accusation.
But, obviously, I'm driving an old car late at night, so I must be some kind of criminal! They just wanted to make sure I wasn't - one of them even told me as much once - and pulled me over to check my ID. Once, one of them heard from another cop over the radio while running my ID that "someone named Forrest" was on probation and not supposed to be out at night, so the other cop drove over to see if he recognized me. (It was a different Forrest). Doesn't that come up on my record when you run my ID? They're just looking for some reason to arrest or at least ticket somebody!
I mean why not? It's reasonable, they spend all day cruising around and ignoring the lame-ass wannabe gang-bangers in that town, harassing the homeless, and confiscating drugs for their own use. They've got to get some actual bookings in there somewhere and the town is just SO BORING that there's never anyone to book!
Of course, making it explicitly legal to refuse ID wouldn't change much. Then they'd just hold you until they could find *some* tiny infraction and get you on that. ID is the least of our problems. The entire legal code needs to be VASTLY simplified such that the average citizen can understand it in its entirety; otherwise, there is no justification for holding someone accountable under laws they can't be reasonably expected to know.
Hey now, not ALL philosophers are gay!
Some of us are just bisexual.
I know it's bad form to reply to the same topic twice, but I realized I wanted to add something...
It's like being able to use a microscope, but not being able to talk about the microscope itself.
No, it's like being unable to put the microscope under itself. It's just not possible, and never will be. An eye cannot look at itself and examine the lenses and optic nerves; an ear cannot hear its own mechanism, only the 'sound' they make; the taste buds on your tongue cannot possibly taste themselves. On a non-sensory level, the Incompleteness Theorem has shown that no system of logic can prove its own validity.
Any method of examining something, be it sensory or logical, or emotional (your cannot justify your intuition WITH your intuition), or communicative (you cannot take someone's word that they are telling the truth), or anything.... no source of ideas can examine or verify even its own existence.
We cannot perceive our own perception. But, like an eye looking in the mirror, or at another eye, we can perceive the METHOD of our perception, and other methods of perception, and understand that when this part of a brain physically does that, then the subjective experience is this. There is no distinction between the two, they are actually one and the same, and there is no reason to think otherwise; it's only a matter of perspective.
o, why are we here? Why are we in the theater, watching the show, rather than there just being a theater playing the story of the universe, but nobody's watching it?
Because the theater is showing a live feed of a camera trained on the theater itself. We are *in* the movie as well as watching it. That we experience the movie is an essential element *of* the movie; otherwise, it would be a different movie.
This is just the Anthropic Principle all over again. There are other, empty theaters with nobody watching themselves on the screen, and thus nobody in those theaters is marveling at their own existence on screen and wondering how they got there. In our theater, there are people, and many of them think it's really weird and strange that they can see themselves and everyone in the movie.
Others just realize that we are the movie and enjoy the show.
Video games all look really cool until someone breaks out the Tinker Toys....
That would be the jewler's screwdriver set and the soldering iron, right?
It`s nice but you will have to drink a lot off bear in a lot`s off places ;) maybe i`am going to help you :)
By the way you're writing it looks like you've already started.
Reminds me of a great riddle I heard once...
:-)
Which TWO of these coins has NEVER been minted in the U.S.?
Penny
Two cent
Three cent
Nickle
Dime
Quarter
Half dollar
Dollar
Most people will immediately say two cent and three cent, which you, Kula, would probably recognize as false.
The correct answers are Penny and Nickle. No coins by those names have ever been minted in the United States. They are one-cent and five-cent pieces.
Another related joke:
I hold in my hands TWO currently minted U.S. coins whose total value equals 55 cents. One of them is NOT a nickle (or 5 cent piece, for that matter). What are the two coins?
People usually get stumped here, because the only combination is a 50 cent and a 5 cent. Which is the correct answer.
One of them is not a nickle. That one is a half dollar. The OTHER one is a nickle. (Hey, I never said NEITHER was a nickle, just one of them...)
Actually it is commonly held that birds and mammals had a common ancestor - reptiles. More specifically, an early type of warm-blooded lizard which predated the dinosaurs, being the common ancestor of both them (who later evolved into birds) and early mammals. Morphologically and genetically, birds are a much further offshoot from this common ancestor than modern mammals or even specifically humans, whom we consider such a far point in evolution.
Humans are actually very closely descended from early placental mammals, which are in turn far more closely related to warm-blooded reptiles than any birds ever were. If I recall correctly, simple reptiles such as lizards, alligators and crocodiles are even more closely related to their fish ancestors than even amphibians are (that is to say, amphibians were a separate offshoot of fish than reptiles, not an intermediate step; both evolving from lunged, air-breathing fish).
It seems keeping to the straight and narrow on the evolutionary path - not diverging so much from out ancestors, avoiding overspecialization - has done our line of evolution some good.
Before I begin.... I know the parent was a troll, but it's a good place to get into a topic I wanted to write about anyway. My message is not meant to be inflammatory in any way.
Thus spake the Anonymous Coward:
George W. Bacteria declared war on the infidels that threaten the single cellular life way of life.
Actually, I'd say it it's closer to say that these couple of new, big jellyfish are busy fighting each other over who gets to eat all of us poor bacteria. (Apologies for any biological inaccuracies there).
This is something that has often bothered me, as someone with very libertarian views on things. I see functional, ethical problems with the majority of large organizations (governments, interest groups, corporations, labor unions, etc), in that they often fail to truly address the concerns and genuine well being of their constituent individuals. Certainly, they are concerned with the general survival and productivity of the individuals, but for the selfish purposes of the organization, and not in the interest of their constituents.
This worries me because of the obvious parallels with the evolution of multicellular life. I, as a multicellular organism, am very concerned with the survival of my cells, but only for the purpose that these cells support my own survival. If an individual cell, or thousands thereof, die for my benefit, then that is good for me. And just by being a part of a multicellular organism, my cells are faced with a slightly longer-term version of the problem that the cells of some "superorganisms" mentioned in the article face: ultimately, only those cells in my gonads get to really reproduce. The rest of the cells are limited in reproduction by the age of my body.
Thus I am faced with an apparent hypocrisy. How can I consistently and non-hypocritically support the aggregation of smaller units at a loss (or at least, a risk) to themselves up to the level of complex multicellular organisms, but then oppose the aggregation of those units into larger "superorganism" societies at a loss or risk to themselves?
Is it perhaps that our organization in societies is not yet structured in the same way as that of a true multicellular organism? As libertarian as my views are I'm still very fond of cooperation and see the mutual benefits in it, so long as the cooperation is supported from the bottom up, and not enforced from the top down. Are multicellular organisms closer to extremely complex networks of similar, but specialized, symbiotic cells - more like an open source project than a commercial project, in Slashdot terms?
I sure wouldn't want to be one of those white blood cells "ordered" to die by my body, any more than I'd want to be a veteran soldier ordered to die so my govt doesn't have to pay veterans benefits.
I guess what it comes down to is, it seems that if my libertarian beliefs are right, and it is ethically (a nonscientific term, I know) better to avoid centralizing power and to build systems from the bottom up and support the individual, then by that logic colonies of bacteria are "ethically" better for the cells than humans are (as strange as it is to apply ethics to single cells).
Or conversely, if it is ethically better for the individual to sacrifice itself for the survival of the whole, even when it means that most if not all individuals are making such sacrifices for the benefit of something which is not any one individual, but some ephemeral concept of the "organism" (or "country") then anyone who opposes the aggregation of centralized power and fights to maintain individual rights is equivalent to nothing but a parasite, or at best, doomed to be outpaced as a lone single-celled organism floating adrift in the sea, while the great multicellular beasts conquer the world.
Or maybe my understanding of biology is wrong and some biologist with a touch of philosophy in him can resolve this dilemma for me?
I once knew a rather interesting circle of people who considered themselves "dorks" in a positive way, the same way many of us here consider ourselves "geeks" or "nerds" (pick your preferred term). They made me realize that any label can be taken for its positive or its negative connotations:
For the three examples you've given:
GEEK
Negative: People overly obsessed with trivial, minor things of no real importance. And ok, they're kinda smart too.
Positive: People capable of devoting their full attention to the complete comprehension of any interesting topic.
NERD
Negative: People who are too damn smart for their own good AND have no grasp of what's cool or popular.
Positive: People who care more about high intelligence and technical competence than trivial status symbols.
DORK
Negative: People who just have no grasp of what's cool or popular, and are probably too dumb to be able to anyway.
Positive: People who just don't care what's popular, including geeky meritocracies. "Genuine", unabashed people.
Almost any application of a social clique label can be applied the same way. I know people who use "goth" or "hippie" as insults, while others take one or the other as compliments, whichever they consider themselves. I personally am happy to be considered myself a 'member' of both cliques - hey, both groups of people like me, who's to complain? - but if say, a 'hippie' calls me a 'goth' as an insult, I can still be insulted just by the intent behind it. It doesn't make me ashamed of my 'gothic' tendencies. Same deal if a 'goth' tried to insult me by calling me a 'hippie'.
These labels are all used both by one group to isolate another group, and for the target group to find solidarity amongst themselves. Like "nigger" it can be good or bad depending on who uses it. But other than for descriptive purposes, as a short hard to refer to 'people with these common qualities', either use is harmful in that it is exclusive thinking. If you think that geeks/goths/yourclique are better than jocks/hippies/theirclique, that's just as bad as the jocks/hippies/theirclique thinking they're better than you.
People are all different. Labels can be useful as jargon to refer to those differences, but using labels for identity is nothing less than groupthink and leads to the type of us-vs-them thinking that is the root of most of mankind's social problems.
Be who you are, and if you match the description of some 'clique' archetype and they (the clique) like you the better for it, good for you, you're popular. If they don't like something about you because it doesn't match their archetype, screw them and their closed-minded thinking.
The article contained:
Firewall: Software to protect computers against hackers
A) The term he's looking for is "cracker" (someone who attempts to gain unauthorized access to a computer system for malicious gain), not "hacker" (someone who enjoys tweaking, exploiting, and otherwise pushing systems to their limits for fun and for the learning experience).
B) Firewalls are also used to protect against non-human threats, or even to "protect" against things that aren't always threats (campus networks blocking P2P apps, ISPs blocking web or mail servers on domestic connections, etc).
I would have said instead something like:
Firewall: Software which limits outside access to certain systems in a computer.
It's still not entirely accurate from a technical point of view but it gets the right message across, which the given definition does not.
Come now. Plenty of us like vegetarians. Far leaner and juicier than carnivores, much less those bottom-feeders and carrion-eaters you catch at fast food joints. I especially like the macrobiotics. Stir fried, with tamari and red pepper... mmmmmmm....
A) There's nothing universally wrong with using a passive voice.
B) He was using an active voice. He even begins each sentence with "I"!
C) You missed the joke.
Despite the name, Photoshop is not only used for photo manipulation. I don't even own a digital camera and I use Photoshop extensively in the creation of textures for video games, abstract art, graphic design (as in logos and banners and such), interface design, and so forth. For all of these things, Photoshop is wonderful, and what you probably consider "gimmicks" in the realm of photo manipulation are indisposable tools for some of the things that I do.
All that said, I could certainly think up ways to redesign the interface from scratch a lot better, since I generally don't like monolithic apps like this on principle; but given that that's the paradigm we're working in, with an app-centric monolithic world, I think Photoshop does a pretty decent job of what it does.
I used to live in a room that was taller than it was wide, so to make efficient use of it I built a support structure on top of which I put my bed, and under which was my closet. This meant my bed was about 5ft off the ground and I had to jump to get in or out of it.
I had so much trouble with just turning my alarm off in the morning and going back to sleep that I set the alarm clock clear across the room, requiring me to quickly wake up and LEAP out of bed (literally!) to kill it. Eventually, I got the muscle memory down so perfect that I could throw off my covers, leap down and smack the snooze, and just reverse the motion and be back in bed again.
I don't think any amount of snooze annoyance will keep someone dedicated to sleeping in from doing so. Chances are if I had this Clocky thing, I'd get so fscking annoyed with it I'd break it and then sleep in a few hours late just out of spite for having been annoyed.
The other responses to this thus far are completely off. Dark matter and dark energy are not (by any current theory at least) related anything like how normal matter and energy relate via e=mc^2.
Dark Matter is a hypothetical unknown "stuff" with normal mass just like regular matter but which we cannot observe with light; it doesn't appear to be emitting or noticably obscuring any kind of radiation. But we see the movement of galaxies in such a way that they appear to be responding to the mass of something that we can't see. Hence "dark matter" - we can't see it, but it seems to be some sort of matter. Think of it like leaves blowing in the wind - we can't see the wind, but we see the motion is causes.
Dark Energy is another hypothetical unknown "stuff" that seems to be adding, somehow, to the velocity of all objects in the universe. It is postulated because the universe appears to be accelerating in its expansion, which does not make sense given an empty, neutral vaccum and a bunch of matter in it. It should be slowing down or at best, expanding at a steady rate. Hence "dark energy" - we can't detect it, but some source of energy which is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.
Hope this helps.