Re:If you believe that we are biological machines.
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"Exactly. So instead of building a smart computer program, we build a simple computer program: a brain/nerve tissue simulator/interpreter. This requires very little understanding of how consciousness actually works. It does however require a very good computer, and a lot of medical research to understand how neurons really work."
I think you are assuming that if we know how neurons really work we could make a self aware computer. I believe that logic is non sequitur.
If you believe that we are biological machines...
on
Download Your Brain
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· Score: 1
If you believe that we are biological machines and nothing more than that they it is conceivable that we could make other types of machines conscious. I have a fairly heavy background in both electronics and computer programming and I have my doubts.
"If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine"
Computers are great tools for what they do. They manipulate a series of 1s and 0s, store and retrieve the 1s and 0s on various media etc. The one thing that a computer has never done and I don't think ever will is to understand the significant of the stream of 1s and 0s that it is manipulating. That would require true consciousness and TRUE consciousness is part of our minds. It is very different to program a computer to say "I am a computer." than it is for the computer itself to say it AND REALLY UNDERSTAND. No mater how good we get at simulating consciousness I don't believe that we will ever be able to take machine consciousness beyond the simulation into reality.
An OS company selling software to protect its OS from malicious software designed to exploit flaws in that OS!
Can you say conflict of interest! Sure you can!
Well at least their AV software should work better than other companies AV software. At least I'm assuming that Microsoft SHOULD know where all the holes are...
I take this as Microsoft's first phase of an manufactured "grass roots campaign." They are offering a chance to win a $2000.00 prize and a free trip to London to people who send them a films of regular people saying how despicable it is to build on other people's ideas. Warping the public mind set into a favorable environment for a future patent lawsuit campaign against Open Source maybe?
We need real films that haven't been paid for that tells the truth.
The problem is not with copyright law. The problem is with our Congress. They get campaign finance money from the movie and record industries. So to ensure that the money keeps flowing in they whore themselves by passing legislation to extend copyright length. Our constitution prohibits an infinite time period for copyright. So instead of making it forever which would be unconstitutional they just keep extending it. I say they should put it back to fourteen years as it was intended or stop pretending that they care about enriching our culture and just make the length twenty-five billion years and be done with it. F**king whores.
There seems to be a lot of weight put on web page freshness. I host a friend's site containing the collection of poems by Ella Wheeler Wilcox. She lived in the 1800s so one cannot expect to see any new material from her.
The site is mostly static but is rich with cultural value. It's currently the number one hit on Google. I'm hoping that Google's emphasis on "freshness" won't make his site fall in ranking.
...we get to watch the Congress whore itself to the movie industry by giving the FCC the authority the movie industry wants the FCC to have so that they can further circumvent our fair use rights. The fact that these rights are guaranteed by our constitution be damned.
1. Wait for a winning product. 2. Duplicate its functionality 3. Integrate product into monopoly OS. 4. Hire lawyer's to argue that using its OS monopoly to crush competition in other business sectors somehow isn't breaking antitrust laws. 5. Payoff politicians so that they turn a blind eye. 6. Wait for the competition to run out of money. 7. Go to step one.
This is not a troll or flamebait. I really wonder how much longer the concept of running Windows applications on Linux will be relevant? WINE has been a slow moving product. I remember playing around with it ten years ago and to this day most applications fail to run properly under WINE. This isn't a statement about the quality of the development team but rather the difficulty in porting the libraries from a closed source OS that is continuously changing.
It just seems to me that Linux is coming into it's own. How much longer will it be before many programs are released for Windows and Linux? As more and more applications are released for both platforms WINE becomes less and less important.
I haven't purchased a new Windows program for some time now as Linux comes with everything I need for my day to day work. It would be nice to be able to run some of my older stuff under Linux but that's mostly games. I've supported WineX or whatever they are calling their product now days for years with monthly donations in the hopes that it will become very useful but still there are only a handful of games that run perfectly under WineX. Most don't run at all.
I'm thinking that rather that rewrite the Windows libraries we should concentrate on libraries like SDL that can be installed on both Windows and Linux thus giving the developer a uniform API that can targeted both OSes.
Personally, I don't think they should let someone who molesters children out EVER so this shouldn't be an issue. I've heard that this is a crime in which the perpetrator can not be rehabilitated. If that is true why let them out at all?
"Yes, I can see it now - entire industries undoing their time-tested, battle hardend PDF-based workflows with free and open files all for the chance to use patented, pay-for-use Microsoft proprietary workflows, software, and files. Good luck with that, guys."
You don't get it do you? Microsoft controls a monopoly OS and they aren't afraid of breaking the law by using its monopoly in that sector to extend its power into other sectors.
They'll just bundle it in their OS and if they're afraid that they'll be forced to remove it they'll integrate it into their OS and flip the US legal system the bird.
I'm an American and proud of what this country SHOULD be. I am ashamed of what this country has become. Honestly, have you ever considered that the majority of people in power are whores to corporate interests.
Actually that's a very nasty thing to say so I'll apologize. Most prostitutes don't deserve to be lumped together with the political low lives in Washington DC.
I don't think the poster meant to tear down all Christians only the far right zealots that have perverted our political process. They have embarked on a campaign of lies and half truths. They spin their religious beliefs into the political system in an attempt to paint anyone who does not share their set of values into Godless scum that have no values themselves.
The fact is that the reason you're beginning to hear the kind of statements that you objected to is because the far right is guilty of EXACTLY what you are complaining about.
"He explains that Microsoft wanted to focus on fewer legislations and that the anti-discrimination bill was one of the bills that they didn't have the resources to follow."
Oh, I see... Your monopoly with 40 billion in the bank "doesn't have the resources to follow this issue."
If you just want to teach your students word processing, Open Office is a very powerful suite that will do the job and doesn't cost you an arm and leg. If you want to teach them MS Word then you're best bet is to bite the bullet and shell out the thousands of dollars for the real thing.
I don't much like the idea of training high school students to use a particular products as they change. By the time your freshmen are ready for college, this years Word will be out of date anyway.
It's not a boycott that they worry about. They just don't want to piss off the far (far, far) right that is controlling our government right now. It would make it more difficult to push through laws that they need to kill Open Source and maintain their monopoly position.
"Odd, given their previous accolades from the GLBT community, and their prior public support for the bill."
What's odd about it? The far right is controlling our government right now and they are controlled by a few religious fanatics. Microsoft wants to continue whoring political favors so that they can gain unfair advantages through legislation. It's only natural that they wouldn't want to support anything that would anger these religious zealots.
That's not exactly true. Unless the user starts the virus as root.
I run Linux all the time and I rarly su to root. My system starts automatic updates that run as root but even if I get a virus it would have to execute some kind of exploit to gain root access.
In this world of software viruses and trogans I can't think of any reason to run as root. A virus will run with the permissions of the user who starts it. That is reason enough not to run as the root user unless you really need to.
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"Exactly. So instead of building a smart computer program, we build a simple computer program: a brain/nerve tissue simulator/interpreter. This requires very little understanding of how consciousness actually works. It does however require a very good computer, and a lot of medical research to understand how neurons really work."
I think you are assuming that if we know how neurons really work we could make a self aware computer. I believe that logic is non sequitur.
If you believe that we are biological machines and nothing more than that they it is conceivable that we could make other types of machines conscious. I have a fairly heavy background in both electronics and computer programming and I have my doubts.
"If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine"
Computers are great tools for what they do. They manipulate a series of 1s and 0s, store and retrieve the 1s and 0s on various media etc. The one thing that a computer has never done and I don't think ever will is to understand the significant of the stream of 1s and 0s that it is manipulating. That would require true consciousness and TRUE consciousness is part of our minds. It is very different to program a computer to say "I am a computer." than it is for the computer itself to say it AND REALLY UNDERSTAND. No mater how good we get at simulating consciousness I don't believe that we will ever be able to take machine consciousness beyond the simulation into reality.
An OS company selling software to protect its OS from malicious software designed to exploit flaws in that OS!
Can you say conflict of interest! Sure you can!
Well at least their AV software should work better than other companies AV software. At least I'm assuming that Microsoft SHOULD know where all the holes are...
I take this as Microsoft's first phase of an manufactured "grass roots campaign." They are offering a chance to win a $2000.00 prize and a free trip to London to people who send them a films of regular people saying how despicable it is to build on other people's ideas. Warping the public mind set into a favorable environment for a future patent lawsuit campaign against Open Source maybe?
We need real films that haven't been paid for that tells the truth.
"This just gives Borland ideas I'm sure. They don't have any products to sell these days do they? Why not expand into the litigation market."
I haven't heard ANY evidence that Borland intends to enter into the "litigation market." Let's not let SCO make us all cynical.
The problem is not with copyright law. The problem is with our Congress. They get campaign finance money from the movie and record industries. So to ensure that the money keeps flowing in they whore themselves by passing legislation to extend copyright length. Our constitution prohibits an infinite time period for copyright. So instead of making it forever which would be unconstitutional they just keep extending it. I say they should put it back to fourteen years as it was intended or stop pretending that they care about enriching our culture and just make the length twenty-five billion years and be done with it. F**king whores.
There seems to be a lot of weight put on web page freshness. I host a friend's site containing the collection of poems by Ella Wheeler Wilcox. She lived in the 1800s so one cannot expect to see any new material from her.
The site is mostly static but is rich with cultural value. It's currently the number one hit on Google. I'm hoping that Google's emphasis on "freshness" won't make his site fall in ranking.
...we get to watch the Congress whore itself to the movie industry by giving the FCC the authority the movie industry wants the FCC to have so that they can further circumvent our fair use rights. The fact that these rights are guaranteed by our constitution be damned.
Yeah. Or maybe they're just assholes...
If I can trash one of Microsofts vulnerable products you'll give me another??
1. Wait for a winning product.
2. Duplicate its functionality
3. Integrate product into monopoly OS.
4. Hire lawyer's to argue that using its OS monopoly to crush competition in other business sectors somehow isn't breaking antitrust laws.
5. Payoff politicians so that they turn a blind eye.
6. Wait for the competition to run out of money.
7. Go to step one.
This is not a troll or flamebait. I really wonder how much longer the concept of running Windows applications on Linux will be relevant? WINE has been a slow moving product. I remember playing around with it ten years ago and to this day most applications fail to run properly under WINE. This isn't a statement about the quality of the development team but rather the difficulty in porting the libraries from a closed source OS that is continuously changing.
It just seems to me that Linux is coming into it's own. How much longer will it be before many programs are released for Windows and Linux? As more and more applications are released for both platforms WINE becomes less and less important.
I haven't purchased a new Windows program for some time now as Linux comes with everything I need for my day to day work. It would be nice to be able to run some of my older stuff under Linux but that's mostly games. I've supported WineX or whatever they are calling their product now days for years with monthly donations in the hopes that it will become very useful but still there are only a handful of games that run perfectly under WineX. Most don't run at all.
I'm thinking that rather that rewrite the Windows libraries we should concentrate on libraries like SDL that can be installed on both Windows and Linux thus giving the developer a uniform API that can targeted both OSes.
Personally, I don't think they should let someone who molesters children out EVER so this shouldn't be an issue. I've heard that this is a crime in which the perpetrator can not be rehabilitated. If that is true why let them out at all?
"'We're going to have to figure out how to build some bridges between the various parts of our industry,' he said. Eric Raymond"
Microsoft doesn't have a problem with building bridges... As long as they're toll bridges...
And Lindows != Windows
Oh, wait!
"Yes, I can see it now - entire industries undoing their time-tested, battle hardend PDF-based workflows with free and open files all for the chance to use patented, pay-for-use Microsoft proprietary workflows, software, and files. Good luck with that, guys."
You don't get it do you? Microsoft controls a monopoly OS and they aren't afraid of breaking the law by using its monopoly in that sector to extend its power into other sectors.
They'll just bundle it in their OS and if they're afraid that they'll be forced to remove it they'll integrate it into their OS and flip the US legal system the bird.
I'm an American and proud of what this country SHOULD be. I am ashamed of what this country has become. Honestly, have you ever considered that the majority of people in power are whores to corporate interests.
Actually that's a very nasty thing to say so I'll apologize. Most prostitutes don't deserve to be lumped together with the political low lives in Washington DC.
I don't think the poster meant to tear down all Christians only the far right zealots that have perverted our political process. They have embarked on a campaign of lies and half truths. They spin their religious beliefs into the political system in an attempt to paint anyone who does not share their set of values into Godless scum that have no values themselves.
The fact is that the reason you're beginning to hear the kind of statements that you objected to is because the far right is guilty of EXACTLY what you are complaining about.
"He explains that Microsoft wanted to focus on fewer legislations and that the anti-discrimination bill was one of the bills that they didn't have the resources to follow."
Oh, I see... Your monopoly with 40 billion in the bank "doesn't have the resources to follow this issue."
ROFLMAO!
If you just want to teach your students word processing, Open Office is a very powerful suite that will do the job and doesn't cost you an arm and leg. If you want to teach them MS Word then you're best bet is to bite the bullet and shell out the thousands of dollars for the real thing.
I don't much like the idea of training high school students to use a particular products as they change. By the time your freshmen are ready for college, this years Word will be out of date anyway.
It's not a boycott that they worry about. They just don't want to piss off the far (far, far) right that is controlling our government right now. It would make it more difficult to push through laws that they need to kill Open Source and maintain their monopoly position.
"Odd, given their previous accolades from the GLBT community, and their prior public support for the bill."
What's odd about it? The far right is controlling our government right now and they are controlled by a few religious fanatics. Microsoft wants to continue whoring political favors so that they can gain unfair advantages through legislation. It's only natural that they wouldn't want to support anything that would anger these religious zealots.
That's not exactly true. Unless the user starts the virus as root.
I run Linux all the time and I rarly su to root. My system starts automatic updates that run as root but even if I get a virus it would have to execute some kind of exploit to gain root access.
In this world of software viruses and trogans I can't think of any reason to run as root. A virus will run with the permissions of the user who starts it. That is reason enough not to run as the root user unless you really need to.
Non-MS products running on a MS OS that is. Lockin does occur.
BTW I do understand active X and have written ActiveX components for my Department.
What made me switch to VOIP was a house guest that stuck me with a $250.00 long distance bill.
I don't much care for surprizes of that kind.