When it involves the physical sciences,fine. But there is no such thing as "science"when it comes to intelligence and consciousness. There are no theories that can fit the evidence.
Oddly enough, your sig here very relevant.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
One "broken arrow" incident still affects an area in Spain more than 40 years later.
From the wiki article you linked to:
Despite the cost and number of personnel involved in the cleanup, forty years later there remain traces of the contamination. Snails have been observed with unusual levels of radioactivity.[22] Additional tracts of land have also been appropriated for testing and further cleanup. However, no indication of health issues has been discovered among the local population in Palomares.
This is not even remotely as bad as what would have happened had even one of the bombs been armed and gone off on impact. There would have been an actual (probably large) death toll, in that case, and considerably more contamination. There are many more much more contaminated and dangerous sites around the world, many not even having anything to do with nuclear weapons, fuel, or byproducts.
I strongly disagree with you about it being better than external AV solutions; I haven't seen that it can fix much at all. I see numerous computers with it installed that are just plain hosed.
As to the latter I am referring to the high cost of Microsoft tech support for the average home user. Last I checked it was 2 free incidents then $35 PER INCIDENT.
...and many more computers running Microsoft products, as well.
I'll probably catch hell for this here, but here's an example of programming stupidity that has irked me for a while, and I ran into when I tried to "friend" you (so that I'd see your posts, the whole reason for the "friend" modifier in the first place):
You have over 200 friends and foes at the moment.
Oh noes!!!!!!!!!!!
I know it's an arbitrary number... but I haven't been able to friend/foe anyone for about five years now, because of that arbitrary limit.
Note to Jamie: This is ridiculous. I know it's just a basic database limit, is there some reason you guys haven't upped this yet?
but because the AV industry is terrible at writing software,
Oh, an astroturfer. What fun;=)
The solutions I use are what have proven to me to work in the field.
Neither Defender nor the Microsoft Security Essentials do. I go with what works; what fixes the problems for my customers. That is how I make a living. My customers don't care to pay high dollars for to fix their problems; they aren't "business" accounts.
Microsoft is in the best position to develop an anti-virus product for Windows due to their close knowledge.
Jeez, I think I said that. Then perhaps they should fix their own operating system; or, at the least, provide solutions for customers who buy their operating system to do so, at no charge - they sold a product, then support it.
Since they have not, it has fallen on third party vendors and outside technicians to do it for them.
My sincere apologies if I refuse to bleed for them.
Oh, I agree. I also think that scientists can be blinded by process, as well - that it can blind us to the obvious facts in front of our faces.*
The same caveat wrt fooling oneself applies there; it's just not quite as formalised. Read about the "nature vs. nurture" debate, genetics "vs" environment, sometime. You may be surprised at what you find.
* There is no such thing as a human scientist without bias, nor experiment without bias, when it comes to "measurement" of intelligence. We are biased by our very definitions of it. Which is why I prefer subjective measurements; I can be fooled, but in this respect, I can repeat the experiment daily, and "take observations" continually.
I spent over a decade and a half observing that cat, within situations that no researcher could ever dream up. I know what I saw, saw it repeatedly; there are no other explanations.
As has been often said, there are things one can observe in reality that cannot be duplicated in a lab.
And yes, I loved him - he was one of the best friends I ever had - but if that is a condition that precludes me objectively observing him, by the definition of modern science wrt intelligence, then I don't want anything to do with "modern" science in that respect, as the blinders have fallen over it, and that blindness will forever exclude it from ever explaining intelligence and consciousness.
One can't seperate the thing you are trying to explain from it's surroundings and ever hope to find out how it works.
I think it's more intended as an emergency tool to clean up widespread overnight threats, like Blaster, or for dangerous infections like keyloggers.
Come on, now. Microsoft surely has the resources to write the best antivirus/anti-rootkit/anti-malware solutions for their own code.
At the very least they could work with the community to close the holes they already have, and to develop better solutions to detection and mitigation.
They rarely do (I know some will say that they do. If so, then why are there so many free and much more effective antivirus solutions offered by third parties? Why are there so many free and effective rootkit removal tools available - that actually WORK? I could go on and on... )
Which is only a small fraction of the real infections out there. I've cleaned thousands of infected computers since MS introduced that tool, and I've yet to see one which the tool dealt with adequately.
(Don't bother to say "Yeah, but if it dealt with it, you wouldn't see the computer!" If they really believed that tool was effective, then Microsoft wouldn't include the warning "you don't appear to have an antivirus solution installed" in their security center warning, now, would they?)
That bit about delivery drivers, neighborhood children, etc, is just smokescreen bullshit.
If the delivery drivers, kids, whomever, comes on to my property, and tampers with my property, that is still legally actionable - that includes government agents without warrants.
A BBC article from 2004 reported that intelligence agencies routinely employ the remote-activiation method. "A mobile sitting on the desk of a politician or businessman can act as a powerful, undetectable bug," the article said, "enabling them to be activated at a later date to pick up sounds even when the receiver is down."
Since it's been "known" for a while, now, anyone with any intelligence committing serious crimes will simply not even have cellphones or similar equipment in the room or on them when they are doing their deals. (Actually any criminal who knows anyone with any real technological knowledge probably had this figured out before this. Signals counter-intelligence is almost as old as radio. )
All of which means that the really serious criminals won't be caught, just the stupid ones.
Chalk up another blow in the technological war on terrorism and big crime syndicates/sarcasm
Perhaps NASA should start considering that stable couples might have more "socially stable relationships" in long term close quarter living situations than a bunch of strangers;-)
But that would probably not be politically correct.
The only way that I can possibly respond to that is to say that you did not live with him and get to know him. I've had enough scientific training that I believe I can differentiate between my bias and objective interpretations. I may be wrong, but after a decade and a half of observing his behaviour, I don't think I am. It may or may not be relevant, but nearly all the "cat people" I know think that I am too objective in the way I treat them (they don't understand the fascination I find in watching them, even as they accept the fact that I love them - many cat people find it objectionable that I find cats "fascinating" as well as good companions. I find that viewpoint to be pretty narrow.
It might be that because he lived in a household with humans who tended towards that sort of humour that he picked up on the behaviour - he had plenty of years to do so. However, I don't think so - many of his jokes did not reflect anything we would have done in that situation; IOW original; and because of that I believe that they were his own invention. He was certainly inventive enough, in the mischief he'd get in to!
I realize that a scientific study would require a randomized, controlled environment to determine what we've been talking about. At the risk of sounding biased, I will say that cats may not necessarily behave the same way in a controlled study as they would when they are living with people they trust and not being scrutinised closely - which, if I may say so, might very well be a problem with humans in such studies as well ( and such has been documented) - in that they know they are being scrutinised and will act differently within that knowledge.
I suspect that it's probably impossible to study a conscious, living being without any sort of introduced bias if the subject of the study knows they are being studied; whether they are informed of it or not, any living being capable of conscious thought is likely going to be at least somewhat aware of the scrutiny. One could argue that any living being with conscious awareness which doesn't notice the surveillance isn't really very aware of it's surroundings; but technology is changing that rather rapidly. Still, in any sort of scientific medical study, given the ethical guidelines they have to operate under, such awareness is a given.
Anyone who says that cats aren't aware of human scrutiny has never lived with one.
Gets complicated, don't it?;-) Seriously, anyone who thinks that there aren't people who lie to their shrinks, control scientists, (or confessors, etc) is living in a fantasy world... as was pointed out in a New Scientist article recently, "white lies" are the basis of much of the social glue which keeps us from killing each other. That has of course been pointed out many times over the thousands of years of human syphilization.
Look; I think the scientific method is the best way to really find out how the world works. I also think it has it's blind spots, and it's flaws, and that we have a long way to go to improve what we are doing now.
On a more emotional level: We can't even treat the members of our own species as equals (look at the controversy, even in the scientific community, over the discovery of genetic differences between various "races" of humans; and then tell me how competent we are to determine whether or not other mammals share at least some of the traits of consciousness and intelligence; or that perhaps some of them may be better...
AI - in computer terms - is software that can mimic human intuition and decision making. Since humans tend to define intelligence as that which we use to understand and respond to outside stimuli, I don't see that there can be any other definition. The software out there that recognizes faces, that's not really intelligence, just very sophisticated image parsing software.
Consciousness would be something entirely different; nobody really knows what it is and we don't have any real definition. There appear to be many "levels" of consciousness, even in humans.
Can hardware/software systems become conscious? Probably, given a certain level of sophistication and self-programmability... the human brain is just a bio/electrochemical computer...
I liked the conundrum that Larry Niven introduced in in Ringworld Engineers better.
The Ringworld is doomed, unless solar flares can be focused on a portion of it's arc in order to feed fuel to the attitude jets. The flares impact on the Ringworld's surface will kill billions of hominids, but the Protector Teela Brown cannot kill a few billion hominids to save trillions of hominids, because of her intelligence, she can visualize all the deaths, and it violates her genetically programmed geas to save all breeders, therefore she allows the humans (who dont' have her geas, and can kill billions to save trillions) to kill her and find the mechanisms to turn the solar flares on that part of the Ringworld...
Indeed. Anyone who considers something the size of a cat not dangerous, has never tried to bathe a cat.
I tried. Once. He is 23lbs of gentle, loving, lazy tomcat with a permanent dander problem. That was five years and some odd months ago. I still have scars. I have the section of denim jeans I was wearing, that he tore four ragged six inch rips in (and the flesh underneath, 20 stitches). He didn't bite me, wasn't even after me in any serious manner, he just wanted to get the hell out of the bathtub.
Just because they are small, furry, and cute, does not mean they are harmless. Think of what one of the critters like the one in the article could do if it decided to take you out while you were sleeping...
My understanding (and this is from bits of info picked up over the years) is that domestic cats are the only species that we know of who can be born completely deaf - there are other mammals who can be born with limited and deteriorating hearing, but the latter is likely because of diseases picked up at or before birth. I've heard - and take this with a big grain of salt - that kittens who are born deaf do not vocalize from day one, as many newborn kittens will when trying to find momma's teats.
I'm no expert on the subject however, would love to hear more about it from someone who knows more. Something else to research someday...
I did this experiment a few years ago on our three (now two) cats. It's definitely the sound of the can opener, they associate it with tuna cans; but I can open any other can and they come running.
The interesting thing about it is that when my youngest cat was just a few months old, he did not associate the sound of the can with tuna treat - until he observed the other cats running for the kitchen, then he followed along and got a snack. It only took a couple of repetitions before he was responding the same way they did. So it's definitely a learned ability.
Cats hearing is incredible. I can go outside and down to the mailbox (about 100 ft), open a can, and they'll be waiting for me at the door when I return, even if the windows are closed.
Cats are extremely intelligent and besides making wonderful companions, are absolutely fascinating to observe. Our oldest, whom we lost about a year and a half ago, was a regular practical joker - he'd pull all sorts of funny stunts clearly designed just to get a laugh out of the humans - and if I pulled the camera out would go extremely photogenic - he clearly knew what it was for. He wasn't just begging for treats, either, we determined that early on - if we tried to give him a treat for his "trick" he'd sniff in a disdainful manner and walk away.
He was nearly twenty when we lost him and I had the opportunity to watch him refining his "acts" over a decade and a half. My youngest tomcat, mentioned above, is following right along in his path - it does seem that toms, and particularly mixed breed toms, have a considerable amount more awareness than female or purebred cats.
We miss that old tom a great deal. If one of us was depressed or tired he'd go to extremes to make us laugh, then come and look in our eyes for a while... he was unique in my experience of many cats.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what's worse; the silliness of the EOTW Mayan BS or the fact that people are still wasting valuable bandwidth posting about it ;-0
SB
When it involves the physical sciences,fine. But there is no such thing as "science"when it comes to intelligence and consciousness. There are no theories that can fit the evidence.
Oddly enough, your sig here very relevant.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
SB
One "broken arrow" incident still affects an area in Spain more than 40 years later.
From the wiki article you linked to:
Despite the cost and number of personnel involved in the cleanup, forty years later there remain traces of the contamination. Snails have been observed with unusual levels of radioactivity.[22] Additional tracts of land have also been appropriated for testing and further cleanup. However, no indication of health issues has been discovered among the local population in Palomares.
This is not even remotely as bad as what would have happened had even one of the bombs been armed and gone off on impact. There would have been an actual (probably large) death toll, in that case, and considerably more contamination. There are many more much more contaminated and dangerous sites around the world, many not even having anything to do with nuclear weapons, fuel, or byproducts.
SB
I strongly disagree with you about it being better than external AV solutions; I haven't seen that it can fix much at all. I see numerous computers with it installed that are just plain hosed.
As to the latter I am referring to the high cost of Microsoft tech support for the average home user. Last I checked it was 2 free incidents then $35 PER INCIDENT.
SB
Then don't post AC.
SB
I'll probably catch hell for this here, but here's an example of programming stupidity that has irked me for a while, and I ran into when I tried to "friend" you (so that I'd see your posts, the whole reason for the "friend" modifier in the first place):
You have over 200 friends and foes at the moment.
Oh noes!!!!!!!!!!!
I know it's an arbitrary number... but I haven't been able to friend/foe anyone for about five years now, because of that arbitrary limit.
Note to Jamie: This is ridiculous. I know it's just a basic database limit, is there some reason you guys haven't upped this yet?
SB
All statistics are pointless; because the numbers depend on who compiles them. Which is a small part of what I was trying to point out. ;-)
SB
but because the AV industry is terrible at writing software,
Oh, an astroturfer. What fun ;=)
The solutions I use are what have proven to me to work in the field.
Neither Defender nor the Microsoft Security Essentials do. I go with what works; what fixes the problems for my customers. That is how I make a living. My customers don't care to pay high dollars for to fix their problems; they aren't "business" accounts.
Microsoft is in the best position to develop an anti-virus product for Windows due to their close knowledge.
Jeez, I think I said that. Then perhaps they should fix their own operating system; or, at the least, provide solutions for customers who buy their operating system to do so, at no charge - they sold a product, then support it.
Since they have not, it has fallen on third party vendors and outside technicians to do it for them.
My sincere apologies if I refuse to bleed for them.
SB
Oh, I agree. I also think that scientists can be blinded by process, as well - that it can blind us to the obvious facts in front of our faces.*
The same caveat wrt fooling oneself applies there; it's just not quite as formalised. Read about the "nature vs. nurture" debate, genetics "vs" environment, sometime. You may be surprised at what you find.
* There is no such thing as a human scientist without bias, nor experiment without bias, when it comes to "measurement" of intelligence. We are biased by our very definitions of it. Which is why I prefer subjective measurements; I can be fooled, but in this respect, I can repeat the experiment daily, and "take observations" continually.
I spent over a decade and a half observing that cat, within situations that no researcher could ever dream up. I know what I saw, saw it repeatedly; there are no other explanations.
As has been often said, there are things one can observe in reality that cannot be duplicated in a lab.
And yes, I loved him - he was one of the best friends I ever had - but if that is a condition that precludes me objectively observing him, by the definition of modern science wrt intelligence, then I don't want anything to do with "modern" science in that respect, as the blinders have fallen over it, and that blindness will forever exclude it from ever explaining intelligence and consciousness.
One can't seperate the thing you are trying to explain from it's surroundings and ever hope to find out how it works.
SB
I think it's more intended as an emergency tool to clean up widespread overnight threats, like Blaster, or for dangerous infections like keyloggers.
Come on, now. Microsoft surely has the resources to write the best antivirus/anti-rootkit/anti-malware solutions for their own code.
At the very least they could work with the community to close the holes they already have, and to develop better solutions to detection and mitigation.
They rarely do (I know some will say that they do. If so, then why are there so many free and much more effective antivirus solutions offered by third parties? Why are there so many free and effective rootkit removal tools available - that actually WORK? I could go on and on... )
The Emperor has no clothes.
SB
Which is only a small fraction of the real infections out there. I've cleaned thousands of infected computers since MS introduced that tool, and I've yet to see one which the tool dealt with adequately.
(Don't bother to say "Yeah, but if it dealt with it, you wouldn't see the computer!" If they really believed that tool was effective, then Microsoft wouldn't include the warning "you don't appear to have an antivirus solution installed" in their security center warning, now, would they?)
SB
Or a bicycle ;-)
SB
That bit about delivery drivers, neighborhood children, etc, is just smokescreen bullshit.
If the delivery drivers, kids, whomever, comes on to my property, and tampers with my property, that is still legally actionable - that includes government agents without warrants.
SB
From the linked article:
A BBC article from 2004 reported that intelligence agencies routinely employ the remote-activiation method. "A mobile sitting on the desk of a politician or businessman can act as a powerful, undetectable bug," the article said, "enabling them to be activated at a later date to pick up sounds even when the receiver is down."
Since it's been "known" for a while, now, anyone with any intelligence committing serious crimes will simply not even have cellphones or similar equipment in the room or on them when they are doing their deals. (Actually any criminal who knows anyone with any real technological knowledge probably had this figured out before this. Signals counter-intelligence is almost as old as radio. )
All of which means that the really serious criminals won't be caught, just the stupid ones.
Chalk up another blow in the technological war on terrorism and big crime syndicates /sarcasm
SB
On the other hand the Holocaust was enabled by conformism. ... and fear of government thugs.
SB
Perhaps NASA should start considering that stable couples might have more "socially stable relationships" in long term close quarter living situations than a bunch of strangers ;-)
But that would probably not be politically correct.
(Mod this post redundant)
SB
The only way that I can possibly respond to that is to say that you did not live with him and get to know him. I've had enough scientific training that I believe I can differentiate between my bias and objective interpretations. I may be wrong, but after a decade and a half of observing his behaviour, I don't think I am. It may or may not be relevant, but nearly all the "cat people" I know think that I am too objective in the way I treat them (they don't understand the fascination I find in watching them, even as they accept the fact that I love them - many cat people find it objectionable that I find cats "fascinating" as well as good companions. I find that viewpoint to be pretty narrow.
It might be that because he lived in a household with humans who tended towards that sort of humour that he picked up on the behaviour - he had plenty of years to do so. However, I don't think so - many of his jokes did not reflect anything we would have done in that situation; IOW original; and because of that I believe that they were his own invention. He was certainly inventive enough, in the mischief he'd get in to!
I realize that a scientific study would require a randomized, controlled environment to determine what we've been talking about. At the risk of sounding biased, I will say that cats may not necessarily behave the same way in a controlled study as they would when they are living with people they trust and not being scrutinised closely - which, if I may say so, might very well be a problem with humans in such studies as well ( and such has been documented) - in that they know they are being scrutinised and will act differently within that knowledge.
I suspect that it's probably impossible to study a conscious, living being without any sort of introduced bias if the subject of the study knows they are being studied; whether they are informed of it or not, any living being capable of conscious thought is likely going to be at least somewhat aware of the scrutiny. One could argue that any living being with conscious awareness which doesn't notice the surveillance isn't really very aware of it's surroundings; but technology is changing that rather rapidly. Still, in any sort of scientific medical study, given the ethical guidelines they have to operate under, such awareness is a given.
Anyone who says that cats aren't aware of human scrutiny has never lived with one.
Gets complicated, don't it? ;-) Seriously, anyone who thinks that there aren't people who lie to their shrinks, control scientists, (or confessors, etc) is living in a fantasy world... as was pointed out in a New Scientist article recently, "white lies" are the basis of much of the social glue which keeps us from killing each other. That has of course been pointed out many times over the thousands of years of human syphilization.
Look; I think the scientific method is the best way to really find out how the world works. I also think it has it's blind spots, and it's flaws, and that we have a long way to go to improve what we are doing now.
On a more emotional level: We can't even treat the members of our own species as equals (look at the controversy, even in the scientific community, over the discovery of genetic differences between various "races" of humans; and then tell me how competent we are to determine whether or not other mammals share at least some of the traits of consciousness and intelligence; or that perhaps some of them may be better...
that's enough for tonight...
SB
AI - in computer terms - is software that can mimic human intuition and decision making. Since humans tend to define intelligence as that which we use to understand and respond to outside stimuli, I don't see that there can be any other definition. The software out there that recognizes faces, that's not really intelligence, just very sophisticated image parsing software.
Consciousness would be something entirely different; nobody really knows what it is and we don't have any real definition. There appear to be many "levels" of consciousness, even in humans.
Can hardware/software systems become conscious? Probably, given a certain level of sophistication and self-programmability... the human brain is just a bio/electrochemical computer...
SB
I liked the conundrum that Larry Niven introduced in in Ringworld Engineers better.
The Ringworld is doomed, unless solar flares can be focused on a portion of it's arc in order to feed fuel to the attitude jets. The flares impact on the Ringworld's surface will kill billions of hominids, but the Protector Teela Brown cannot kill a few billion hominids to save trillions of hominids, because of her intelligence, she can visualize all the deaths, and it violates her genetically programmed geas to save all breeders, therefore she allows the humans (who dont' have her geas, and can kill billions to save trillions) to kill her and find the mechanisms to turn the solar flares on that part of the Ringworld...
SB
Indeed. Anyone who considers something the size of a cat not dangerous, has never tried to bathe a cat.
I tried. Once. He is 23lbs of gentle, loving, lazy tomcat with a permanent dander problem. That was five years and some odd months ago. I still have scars. I have the section of denim jeans I was wearing, that he tore four ragged six inch rips in (and the flesh underneath, 20 stitches). He didn't bite me, wasn't even after me in any serious manner, he just wanted to get the hell out of the bathtub.
Just because they are small, furry, and cute, does not mean they are harmless. Think of what one of the critters like the one in the article could do if it decided to take you out while you were sleeping...
SB
My understanding (and this is from bits of info picked up over the years) is that domestic cats are the only species that we know of who can be born completely deaf - there are other mammals who can be born with limited and deteriorating hearing, but the latter is likely because of diseases picked up at or before birth. I've heard - and take this with a big grain of salt - that kittens who are born deaf do not vocalize from day one, as many newborn kittens will when trying to find momma's teats.
I'm no expert on the subject however, would love to hear more about it from someone who knows more. Something else to research someday...
SB
I did this experiment a few years ago on our three (now two) cats. It's definitely the sound of the can opener, they associate it with tuna cans; but I can open any other can and they come running.
The interesting thing about it is that when my youngest cat was just a few months old, he did not associate the sound of the can with tuna treat - until he observed the other cats running for the kitchen, then he followed along and got a snack. It only took a couple of repetitions before he was responding the same way they did. So it's definitely a learned ability.
Cats hearing is incredible. I can go outside and down to the mailbox (about 100 ft), open a can, and they'll be waiting for me at the door when I return, even if the windows are closed.
Cats are extremely intelligent and besides making wonderful companions, are absolutely fascinating to observe. Our oldest, whom we lost about a year and a half ago, was a regular practical joker - he'd pull all sorts of funny stunts clearly designed just to get a laugh out of the humans - and if I pulled the camera out would go extremely photogenic - he clearly knew what it was for. He wasn't just begging for treats, either, we determined that early on - if we tried to give him a treat for his "trick" he'd sniff in a disdainful manner and walk away.
He was nearly twenty when we lost him and I had the opportunity to watch him refining his "acts" over a decade and a half. My youngest tomcat, mentioned above, is following right along in his path - it does seem that toms, and particularly mixed breed toms, have a considerable amount more awareness than female or purebred cats.
We miss that old tom a great deal. If one of us was depressed or tired he'd go to extremes to make us laugh, then come and look in our eyes for a while... he was unique in my experience of many cats.
SB
The preferences dialog didn't come until 0.6.1, the GP posts are probably using the older version.
The newer binaries for Lucid (and Maverick) are here.
SB
So what you are basically saying is that professional scientists can't homeschool?
No fifth grader ever said, "I want to be a middle manager," but we need plenty of those.
No, we need less of them; and better ones.
SB
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
From one shadow citizen to another, I find that an excellent observation.
SB