Awareness and understanding of what, exactly? Human suffering? Religion? Politics? Culture? Do we really want a population designed to universally uphold the ethics that society dictates as 'proper' at any moment in time?
Not only would it clash with the ideals of free will and self-determination, but the consequences of many popular ethics would be disastrous if universally applied. Society is not built upon the categorical imperative.
Let's not muck with people's morals (or the awareness and understanding that causes them to form these morals). Moral diversity is necessary for individual health and a functional society.
But he's a crackpot that people take seriously. The very existence of this university is a testament to that. It'd be great if I could just get Google and NASA to donate tons of money and a campus for the school I'm trying to build, and then have some Nobel winners and Will Wright rush to sign up as faculty. Somehow I doubt that this would have played out in that way if it weren't Kurzweil heading it, however.
Sorry, but education has been going in the opposite direction. Presumably as there is now much more to learn, PhDs are becoming longer and longer on average. The average age of a first significant discovery has increased as well.
Yes, but stem cell transplantations carry a significant risk of treatment-related mortality. The transplant was performed because the patient had recurrent leukemia, IIRC - a scenario in which the mortality associated with the leukemia itself made the risk of treatment worth it.
Something like this is less invasive, if less permanent. Periodic treatments could result in lasting immunocompetence even with HIV, since there will always be an available reserve of T-cells that the virus cannot infect. That is, until the virus mutates (as it is very prone to do) to infect the cells lacking CCR5-Delta32 and we start from square one again.
In the best case, the immune system might fight the virus itself, although this would probably result in a remission rather than a complete cure.
Although this is a strange way of implementing it, the idea of a broad university that gathers together thinkers from across disciplines and teaches them how to think both convergently within their fields and divergently across them is a good one. Current schools don't do a very good job of the latter. However, it is not something that can be done in 3-10 days (or even 9 weeks), with an emphasis on only the problems posed by "the Singularity" (look at the subjects in each track), or in a manner that fails to unite the principles (and not just the people) from the different disciplines.
But it's Google and NASA, so whatever. If anyone could make it work, it would be them.
I'm posting this from Callisto. I also have systems named Europa and Ganymede. My laptop naming scheme is slightly different: I have two of them, named Perihelion and Aphelion.
You're right; it probably was shaped by our evolution (from a certain standpoint, I guess everything we do is:)). What I meant was more along the lines of morality not being integrated into the laws of physics, of reality permitting us to do much more than we morally should - if we so chose.
Nature holds no distinction between "can" and "should". Morality is a product of idealism and virtue, both properties primarily ascribed to sentient beings: we have chosen a way to live that we consider "right" (whatever that is) and we are willing to restrict our behavior to accommodate this ideal.
It's one of the noblest things about us, and I hope that sentient extraterrestrial life would also possess a sense of morality. But don't think for a second that nature itself is moral. Nature is completely impartial and completely absolute. How good or evil someone is does not factor into how quickly he falls if he walks off of a cliff.
If that sentient life poses a threat to us, we can attempt to resist to the limits of our power. Should our capacity prove inadequate, we will be destroyed no matter how much morality we possess or how much morality that alien civilization lacks. Is it "ok"? No, it's awful! But that is how reality works. Species go extinct, volcanoes erupt, and people starve despite our best efforts. We can't shape reality by our whims alone; we can only try to change things by working within its rules.
This is true irrespective of religion. Unless you believe God is going to save us from the aliens... in which case maybe He already is, by keeping them from contacting us. Now there's an interesting solution to the Fermi paradox.
True, the degree will not get you very far, as so many people have them (because everyone is special and "deserves" to be college educated, whether or not they can truly handle it). But there are many other career advantages that you can accumulate during college (both on and off campus), and some of these will set you up for some very high paying jobs. Even something as simple as having a high GPA or a history of leadership/accomplishment helps.
I also think someone going to college solely for the purpose of getting a well-paying job is largely missing the point. It's an amazing and unique learning opportunity, which you should endeavor to make the most of for its own sake.
Sort of. The problem is that there is no one process that will work well for everyone (that would be the holy grail of education), but if you can:
a. Devise a process that works for a certain type of learner. b. Enroll only the people whom that process will actually benefit.
Then you can accelerate learning. Doing so is quite a challenge, however, and is nigh impossible in a public school system that mixes the entire population into one classroom and proposes a uniform style of instruction for everyone.
If there were life on Titan using hydrocarbons as we use water?
I'm sure there are several reasons why this is chemically infeasible, but I just wanted to throw the possibility out there. We tend to get into bad habits of assuming that extraterrestrial life would function just as terrestrial life would.
If my gradually fading secondhand knowledge of history is still accurate, it was more the rate of the USSR's modernization that was so alarming. Stalin began industrialization initiatives that, though absolutely brutal on the people, did result in rapid modernization. They saw no alternative: "modernize or perish".
Then there was Sputnik... imagine seeing that (the booster was essentially the first ICBM) in 1957 and then hearing that the USSR was building missile bases in direct striking distance of the USA five years later. It would have certainly freaked me out, and secondhand as my knowledge of the Cuban Missile Crisis may be, I'm old enough to remember the air raid drills that still took place three decades after it ended.
No, you have two thresholds. The region in between them is indeterminate, while the region above the upper threshold is 1 and the one below the lower threshold is 0. The distance between the two could be determined based on the signal-to-noise ratio.
At least, I'm pretty sure that's what the GP was getting at.
I am not a physicist and I could easily be totally wrong about this, but from our (outside) perspective, wouldn't the matter never reach the event horizon? It should appear to freeze as it approaches, shouldn't it?
Not that it would be a smart idea to try and retrieve it in any case.
It does bring up a fascinating point about attempts to copy a current model being doomed to failure, though. The current model becomes something that could be sustained only because it was built up from a completely different model in the past. Yet people have short recollections, and the new model eventually becomes the model everyone assumes the organization began with. Then they try to copy it that way from launch and wonder why it fails to take off.
Slashdot Mirror
The .name TLD is still pretty unused (unless you have a very common name), and was created for exactly that purpose.
The challenges of hosting this solution in space greatly exacerbate the problem, though.
Ah, you must be a Bayesian!
Awareness and understanding of what, exactly? Human suffering? Religion? Politics? Culture? Do we really want a population designed to universally uphold the ethics that society dictates as 'proper' at any moment in time?
Not only would it clash with the ideals of free will and self-determination, but the consequences of many popular ethics would be disastrous if universally applied. Society is not built upon the categorical imperative.
Let's not muck with people's morals (or the awareness and understanding that causes them to form these morals). Moral diversity is necessary for individual health and a functional society.
But he's a crackpot that people take seriously. The very existence of this university is a testament to that. It'd be great if I could just get Google and NASA to donate tons of money and a campus for the school I'm trying to build, and then have some Nobel winners and Will Wright rush to sign up as faculty. Somehow I doubt that this would have played out in that way if it weren't Kurzweil heading it, however.
Sorry, but education has been going in the opposite direction. Presumably as there is now much more to learn, PhDs are becoming longer and longer on average. The average age of a first significant discovery has increased as well.
Yes, but stem cell transplantations carry a significant risk of treatment-related mortality. The transplant was performed because the patient had recurrent leukemia, IIRC - a scenario in which the mortality associated with the leukemia itself made the risk of treatment worth it.
Something like this is less invasive, if less permanent. Periodic treatments could result in lasting immunocompetence even with HIV, since there will always be an available reserve of T-cells that the virus cannot infect. That is, until the virus mutates (as it is very prone to do) to infect the cells lacking CCR5-Delta32 and we start from square one again.
In the best case, the immune system might fight the virus itself, although this would probably result in a remission rather than a complete cure.
Although this is a strange way of implementing it, the idea of a broad university that gathers together thinkers from across disciplines and teaches them how to think both convergently within their fields and divergently across them is a good one. Current schools don't do a very good job of the latter. However, it is not something that can be done in 3-10 days (or even 9 weeks), with an emphasis on only the problems posed by "the Singularity" (look at the subjects in each track), or in a manner that fails to unite the principles (and not just the people) from the different disciplines.
But it's Google and NASA, so whatever. If anyone could make it work, it would be them.
They keep taking steps and people keep saying "don't worry, they're still far away".
How close is too close? They've already passed the point they need for peaceful nuclear energy.
I'm posting this from Callisto. I also have systems named Europa and Ganymede. My laptop naming scheme is slightly different: I have two of them, named Perihelion and Aphelion.
You're right; it probably was shaped by our evolution (from a certain standpoint, I guess everything we do is :)). What I meant was more along the lines of morality not being integrated into the laws of physics, of reality permitting us to do much more than we morally should - if we so chose.
Nature holds no distinction between "can" and "should". Morality is a product of idealism and virtue, both properties primarily ascribed to sentient beings: we have chosen a way to live that we consider "right" (whatever that is) and we are willing to restrict our behavior to accommodate this ideal.
It's one of the noblest things about us, and I hope that sentient extraterrestrial life would also possess a sense of morality. But don't think for a second that nature itself is moral. Nature is completely impartial and completely absolute. How good or evil someone is does not factor into how quickly he falls if he walks off of a cliff.
If that sentient life poses a threat to us, we can attempt to resist to the limits of our power. Should our capacity prove inadequate, we will be destroyed no matter how much morality we possess or how much morality that alien civilization lacks. Is it "ok"? No, it's awful! But that is how reality works. Species go extinct, volcanoes erupt, and people starve despite our best efforts. We can't shape reality by our whims alone; we can only try to change things by working within its rules.
This is true irrespective of religion. Unless you believe God is going to save us from the aliens... in which case maybe He already is, by keeping them from contacting us. Now there's an interesting solution to the Fermi paradox.
True, the degree will not get you very far, as so many people have them (because everyone is special and "deserves" to be college educated, whether or not they can truly handle it). But there are many other career advantages that you can accumulate during college (both on and off campus), and some of these will set you up for some very high paying jobs. Even something as simple as having a high GPA or a history of leadership/accomplishment helps.
I also think someone going to college solely for the purpose of getting a well-paying job is largely missing the point. It's an amazing and unique learning opportunity, which you should endeavor to make the most of for its own sake.
Sort of. The problem is that there is no one process that will work well for everyone (that would be the holy grail of education), but if you can:
a. Devise a process that works for a certain type of learner.
b. Enroll only the people whom that process will actually benefit.
Then you can accelerate learning. Doing so is quite a challenge, however, and is nigh impossible in a public school system that mixes the entire population into one classroom and proposes a uniform style of instruction for everyone.
If there were life on Titan using hydrocarbons as we use water?
I'm sure there are several reasons why this is chemically infeasible, but I just wanted to throw the possibility out there. We tend to get into bad habits of assuming that extraterrestrial life would function just as terrestrial life would.
Vista was the beta.
If my gradually fading secondhand knowledge of history is still accurate, it was more the rate of the USSR's modernization that was so alarming. Stalin began industrialization initiatives that, though absolutely brutal on the people, did result in rapid modernization. They saw no alternative: "modernize or perish".
Then there was Sputnik... imagine seeing that (the booster was essentially the first ICBM) in 1957 and then hearing that the USSR was building missile bases in direct striking distance of the USA five years later. It would have certainly freaked me out, and secondhand as my knowledge of the Cuban Missile Crisis may be, I'm old enough to remember the air raid drills that still took place three decades after it ended.
No, you have two thresholds. The region in between them is indeterminate, while the region above the upper threshold is 1 and the one below the lower threshold is 0. The distance between the two could be determined based on the signal-to-noise ratio.
At least, I'm pretty sure that's what the GP was getting at.
I am not a physicist and I could easily be totally wrong about this, but from our (outside) perspective, wouldn't the matter never reach the event horizon? It should appear to freeze as it approaches, shouldn't it?
Not that it would be a smart idea to try and retrieve it in any case.
It does bring up a fascinating point about attempts to copy a current model being doomed to failure, though. The current model becomes something that could be sustained only because it was built up from a completely different model in the past. Yet people have short recollections, and the new model eventually becomes the model everyone assumes the organization began with. Then they try to copy it that way from launch and wonder why it fails to take off.
It's called XPS and Windows 7 comes bundled with a viewer for it :)
No, no... In Soviet Russia, the System operates YOU!
In theory.
That doesn't actually remove IE. It's still on the system.
Yes, but do we like them? :)