I think it's fairly obvious what they mean. Obviously 32 kg of water do not fit into a chip (simple test, does a chip weigh 32 kg?) and therefore are not "consumed" in the way that you are thinking.
However, I suspect that what the article means is that 32 kg of water are combined with said noxious/toxic chemicals to create each chip. Such water would be useless unless purified by some expensive process and should be considered consumed for all practical intents and purposes.
And no, I doubt very much that the water is reused for different chips. It's probably mixed with chemicals and sprayed on at some point and then dribbles through catchbasins. It would be fairly foolish of them to reuse said water for such a delicate piece of hardware, who knows what particles of impurity it might pick up.
I'm discouraged that the/. crowd is going nuts over a very sensible measure.
This is a tool to help children manage their children, exactly what everyone has been crying for. Kids can still get them with consent, just like they can see an R rated movie with their parent.
Get some perspective people, sometimes the gubment does the right thing.
Some sort of accountability must exist on the internet, just as it does in other forms of communication (phone, broadcast). If someone were making prank calls to a corporation from a phone, it's perfectly reasonable that said company be able to take action against them. The same would hold true if a person were broadcasting a pirate radio station. Noone would shed a tear if the FCC tracked them down at the request of the legitimate companies. We must compromise certain things to live in a civilized society.
We always talk about how the RIAA shouldn't be sueing providers, but sueing the pirates themselves.
Well now they're doing it. Let's not get our panties knotted when the RIAA actually follows the correct legal/moral path in their struggle to survive.
Besides, I sure as hell don't recall reading any privacy guarantees in my cable modem contract.
Re:Playing Games you don't understand.
on
Spammers Busted
·
· Score: 1
Someday you'll probably have to come to grips with the realities of senile dementia, whether in yourself or in someone close to you. Blood vessels stop working well at that age and parts of your brain just... die. Lucky for you that you haven't had to deal with it yet.
You will someday though.
Re:Playing Games you don't understand.
on
Spammers Busted
·
· Score: 1
I hope you'll keep that perspective in mind if an aged parent of yours is fooled by a get rich quick scheme like this and blows half your inheritance.
Your view only works if you presume that everyone is smart or competent enough to see through such things. Many aren't. That's life. This is why fraud is illegal.
Another point, there's a very slippery slope between blatant fraud like this and more subtle scams that might fool someone as competent as you.
"The server for Mavav.org traces here: drakhath.net [216.226.142.104] To a devious clan site, no less! There are definately some good bits on that parody, it is my hope that they take a major media outlet for a ride with it. Answer requests for interviews, etc."
You can't keep on earning a salary that allows you to buy/lease a new car every year, computer upgrades every 6 months, eating out every night, and living like a king to produce a product in a global economy where people with the same skill set are starving and willing to do the same job for much less.
You can in a world without globalization. We've been doing it for decades. And somehow the idealistic demonstrators fail to realize that by protesting the Globalization movement, they are fighting to do just what they are most concerned about.
Those people are throwing bricks through starbucks windows to keep people in third world countries poor, they just don't know it.
It's damned sad is what it is. I've protested other things, but I did my homework about it first. I wish these people would focus their energy on thinking about the problem rather than railing against the system just because it's the flavor of the month.
Frankly, I can't imagine using such a thing. PDA's are tough enough at that size, but a watch? The huge sacrifices in usability are certainly not worth the tiny size. Also, it's going to take a tremendous amount of abuse on your wrist, as opposed to a PDA hiding safely in a breast pocket most of the time.
This is, IMO, a perfect example of a gee-whiz product that has minimal practically for all but the most determined gadget freak.
Let's face it, CPU/Memory are no longer the major limiting factors in PDA design. The real issue is(or should be) how to interact with the damn thing in a convenient and rapid manner using our clumsy fingers. A PDA watch is a step in the wrong direction.
NASA spends $15,000 to convince people that it's worth spending $15,000 to convince people that the moon landings weren't faked.
Cmon, get off their backs, $15,000 is a drop in the bucket for something this important. It would be worth a news item if the sum were 15 million, but this tiny sum isn't worth worrying about.
First off, I believe as you do that we'll eventually figure out the brain.
However, a potential stumbling block is that because of limitations in human cognition, there are levels of complexity in design that we will never master. We'll just hit a wall that we can't push past because no person or group of people are able to comprehend and think about the concepts involved.
I don't think this limitation exists (because we can use tools to enhance our cognitive abilities), but it's a good argument.
Overture charges them per time their links are clicked on through an overture search.
"You set the price you're willing to pay for each sales lead and pay only when your customers click through to your site. Independent research shows that advertisers receive the highest ROI from pay-for-placement search when compared to other forms of advertising"
As I said clearly in my post, the economic advantage of the anti-global warming sentiment has not penetrated the agencies responsibile for grant funding.
Yes GW Bush is in the white house, but he's not the one sitting on grant review committees. Those people are not flushed out with each admnisitration.
Do you seriously believe that they're just making up the results to acquire federal funding? Furthermore, do you seriously believe the government is more likely to fund research that indicates we cannot continue our current economic activity without grave consequences to the environment?
Yes, I do. There is a huge pro-warming political mood in Washington, and yes, projects that indicate global warming is occurring are more likely to get funding at present, paradoxical as that may seem.
The economic pressures of the global warming findings haven't really penetrated the agencies that provide funding.
It's that 30% that really makes a difference. A 30% jitter in hand movement turns a brain surgeon into a useless wreck.
And that 30% is extremely expensive. Don't think that they could capture it just by samping an extra 30 neurons. The #of neurons required to increase the fidelity of a signal increases in a highly nonlinear fashion.
Apes are certainly physiologically equipped to build their own society. They have the digits to construct things, they have the basic insights into using tools and they have very rudimentary language capabilities.
They're just too stupid.
The ability to adapt in impressive ways is just the way the brain is wired up and says little about their intelligence. Even rats often come up with impressive tricks to shortcut their way to a reward that the experimenters hadn't thought of. It doesn't make the rats sentient or smarter than the scientist, it just means they are very efficient at picking up correlations in the environment in the same way a computer might if it were designed to do so.
What sets us apart is our language and sentience. It is not a mundane detail, nor is it something that can be taught to apes at a better than 4 year old level.
Now, you can argue that it's wrong to experiment on them, I'm not defending or proposing animal experimentation, I'm just stating a fact, on the scale of humans, with or without language, apes are just plain stupid.
Remove humans from earth and fast forward 5 million years and chimps could very likely evolve into a human-like species (again), but they're nowhere close yet.
And yes, it's legitimate to compare brain volume. Brain volume allows manual coordination, executive decision making, memory, image processing. Discounting brain volume puts you dangerously close to separating mind from brain, and if you want to go down that road, I surrender.
Looks like someone needs an education about the evils of monopolies and how much damage they can do. Anti-trust legislation was established for a reason. A well run monopoly has enough money that it basically destroy the free market within its subdomain, preventing, at least for a number of decades, the rise of any commercially viable alternative.
Now, you can argue that in the end, all monopolies will fall, which is true. However, it's also true that in the end, we'll all die, the earth will be destroyed by the sun and the universe will settle into heat death.
These "eventually's" are small comfort to the people that will suffer for many decades under the rules of monopolies if they are permitted to grow without bound.
Economic theories are useless if not applicable to the here and now, and that is where monopolies hold the greatest sway.
If the best example of monopolies you can come up with is the phone companies, try rolling the clock back a few decades before anti-trust legislation was enacted, back to the steel cartels that prompted this legislation. Families starving to death would certainly disagree with your assessment.
If there were a reasonable amount of danger from milk, we would have noticed something by now.
When someone's statement baldly contradicts thousands of years of experience, I'm inclined to disregard it unless they can cough up some fairly convincing data.
Even the new milk, chock full of horomones though it may be, has been tested on the buying public for quite a few years.
The burden of proof is most definitely on you.
The one thing you New-Age organic people seem to fail to realize is that our bodies are not fragile, and waiting to do. We are extremely resilient creatures with complex homeostatic mechanisms. We can handle a lot of abuse.
Today's specimin: the PETA troll, not a type you often see here in Slashdot, but they've all but overrun their natural habitats and are starting to turn up even here.
You'll note the complete lack of factual backup for the alarmist warnings about milk, making the claim difficult to verify or deny. It's likely a distorted paraphrase of some legitimate literature.
Note also the New-Agey reference to "imbalanced body chemistry", also with no linkage or factual backing. These are indeed classic troll droppings.
This must be one of the young however, for its trap is easily detected. A more clever one would have lured us in with some more reasonable prose before jumping straight to the propaganda.
Enjoy the rest of your stay, and remember to never feed the trolls!
Um, SOMEONE had to be losed mechanized power if other people were gaining it. Otherwise you are proposing that trucks and jeeps sprouted from the earth sponteanously.
Let them pass whatever DRM stuff they want and wait for it to collapse under its own weight. Joe Consumer isn't going to care about DRM issues until it bites him in the ass when he can't play his legally purchased CD because the SONY license server was down. And it won't bite him in the ass until this stuff gets through.
The longer and harder we fight the media conglomerates, the better developed their tactics will be and the harder it will be to undo the damage they've already done. Let them race ahead with blind and untested confidence and make the inevitable mistakes we can forsee, then nail'em hard and make it permanent.
They did not grow in a "non-directed" fashion at all. Evolution has very clear directions (for each of its millions of species), it's just spread out over millions of years, so it doesn't seem directed when taken compared to computer design on the timescale of 1-2 years.
I have much more respect for Wallace after reading this reply. He's a deeply insightful individual and doesn't appear to be taken in by much of the bullshit of the AI field.
One point I disagree with him about is this:
>I always say, if I wanted to build a computer >from scratch, the very last material I would >choose to work with is meat. I'll take >transistors over meat any day. Human >intelligence may even be a poor kludge of the >intelligence algorithm on an organ that is >basically a glorified animal eyeball. From an >evolutionary standpoint, our supposedly >wonderful cognitive skills are a very recent >innovation. It should not be surprising if they >are only poorly implemented in us, like the lung >of the first mudfish. We can breathe the air of >thought and imagination, but not that well yet.
While it's true that our brains are not well adapted to the problems of the 20th cetury (remembering list of facts, for example, would be a great thing to be able to do innately), I think Wallace doesn't posses a very deep understanding of neurophysiology when he compares neural function to transistors and silicon.
The idea that neurons simply summate incoming information, apply a threshold, and then output is very outdated. A single neuron is more like an entire computer than a transistor. There is evidence that a single neuron posseses an extraordinarily rich array of computational mechanisms, such as complex comparisons within the dendrite. In fact, the dendrite might be where the majority of computation is performed within the brain.
A neuron is constantly adapting to its inputs and outputs, and this includes such things as growing new spines, (inputs) and axons (outputs). And within the cell, we are just beginning to see the enormous range of chemical modulations that change its functional characteristics in an dynamic fashion. A neuron can even change its own RNA to effect long term changes in its synaptic gain that are perhaps specific to a given synapse (1 of 10,000).
The messy wetness of neural tissue, for which we pay the price of very slow signal transmission is precisely what gives it the ability to change itself in such a dynamic manner. They're slow, but they make up for it with massive parallel dynamics of outrageous complexity. The neuron is *not* a clumsy kludge implementation. It is a finely tuned and well oiled machine, the result of millions of years of tinkering by evolution.
While it's probably that we can concoct innovations that might improve on the basic neuron (for example, long axonal segments could probably be replaced with electrical wires for a speed gain without much loss of computational power), the neuron itself should not be so quickly discarded
The issue isn't whether these pathways come from the LGN or some earlier part of the optic pathway. Rather it's a question of what will be missed by skipping the entire region and going straight for V1
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's fairly obvious what they mean. Obviously 32 kg of water do not fit into a chip (simple test, does a chip weigh 32 kg?) and therefore are not "consumed" in the way that you are thinking.
However, I suspect that what the article means is that 32 kg of water are combined with said noxious/toxic chemicals to create each chip. Such water would be useless unless purified by some expensive process and should be considered consumed for all practical intents and purposes.
And no, I doubt very much that the water is reused for different chips. It's probably mixed with chemicals and sprayed on at some point and then dribbles through catchbasins. It would be fairly foolish of them to reuse said water for such a delicate piece of hardware, who knows what particles of impurity it might pick up.
It fits in with movies just fine.
/. crowd is going nuts over a very sensible measure.
I'm discouraged that the
This is a tool to help children manage their children, exactly what everyone has been crying for. Kids can still get them with consent, just like they can see an R rated movie with their parent.
Get some perspective people, sometimes the gubment does the right thing.
Some sort of accountability must exist on the internet, just as it does in other forms of communication (phone, broadcast). If someone were making prank calls to a corporation from a phone, it's perfectly reasonable that said company be able to take action against them. The same would hold true if a person were broadcasting a pirate radio station. Noone would shed a tear if the FCC tracked them down at the request of the legitimate companies. We must compromise certain things to live in a civilized society.
We always talk about how the RIAA shouldn't be sueing providers, but sueing the pirates themselves.
Well now they're doing it. Let's not get our panties knotted when the RIAA actually follows the correct legal/moral path in their struggle to survive.
Besides, I sure as hell don't recall reading any privacy guarantees in my cable modem contract.
Someday you'll probably have to come to grips with the realities of senile dementia, whether in yourself or in someone close to you. Blood vessels stop working well at that age and parts of your brain just... die. Lucky for you that you haven't had to deal with it yet.
You will someday though.
I hope you'll keep that perspective in mind if an aged parent of yours is fooled by a get rich quick scheme like this and blows half your inheritance.
Your view only works if you presume that everyone is smart or competent enough to see through such things. Many aren't. That's life. This is why fraud is illegal.
Another point, there's a very slippery slope between blatant fraud like this and more subtle scams that might fool someone as competent as you.
Copied from PA's first page:
"The server for Mavav.org traces here:
drakhath.net [216.226.142.104]
To a devious clan site, no less! There are definately some good bits on that parody, it is my hope that they take a major media outlet for a ride with it. Answer requests for interviews, etc."
You can't keep on earning a salary that allows you to buy/lease a new car every year, computer upgrades every 6 months, eating out every night, and living like a king to produce a product in a global economy where people with the same skill set are starving and willing to do the same job for much less.
You can in a world without globalization. We've been doing it for decades. And somehow the idealistic demonstrators fail to realize that by protesting the Globalization movement, they are fighting to do just what they are most concerned about.
Those people are throwing bricks through starbucks windows to keep people in third world countries poor, they just don't know it.
It's damned sad is what it is. I've protested other things, but I did my homework about it first. I wish these people would focus their energy on thinking about the problem rather than railing against the system just because it's the flavor of the month.
Frankly, I can't imagine using such a thing. PDA's are tough enough at that size, but a watch? The huge sacrifices in usability are certainly not worth the tiny size. Also, it's going to take a tremendous amount of abuse on your wrist, as opposed to a PDA hiding safely in a breast pocket most of the time.
This is, IMO, a perfect example of a gee-whiz product that has minimal practically for all but the most determined gadget freak.
Let's face it, CPU/Memory are no longer the major limiting factors in PDA design. The real issue is(or should be) how to interact with the damn thing in a convenient and rapid manner using our clumsy fingers. A PDA watch is a step in the wrong direction.
NASA spends $15,000 to convince people that it's worth spending $15,000 to convince people that the moon landings weren't faked.
Cmon, get off their backs, $15,000 is a drop in the bucket for something this important. It would be worth a news item if the sum were 15 million, but this tiny sum isn't worth worrying about.
Yes, I can.
First off, I believe as you do that we'll eventually figure out the brain.
However, a potential stumbling block is that because of limitations in human cognition, there are levels of complexity in design that we will never master. We'll just hit a wall that we can't push past because no person or group of people are able to comprehend and think about the concepts involved.
I don't think this limitation exists (because we can use tools to enhance our cognitive abilities), but it's a good argument.
As someone put it:
"we may be more complicated than we are smart"
The surest way to ensure the DMCA is repealed is to have it interpreted in the strictest and most rigorous sense.
Having the DMCA interpreted with a lenient bent is like having the constitution amended to allow "just a little" slavery.
If we truly want all or nothing vis a vis the DMCA, let's not plead for a lenient interpretation.
Overture charges them per time their links are clicked on through an overture search.
"You set the price you're willing to pay for each sales lead and pay only when your customers click through to your site. Independent research shows that advertisers receive the highest ROI from pay-for-placement search when compared to other forms of advertising"
But those dollar values seem a bit high.
As I said clearly in my post, the economic advantage of the anti-global warming sentiment has not penetrated the agencies responsibile for grant funding.
Yes GW Bush is in the white house, but he's not the one sitting on grant review committees. Those people are not flushed out with each admnisitration.
Do you seriously believe that they're just making up the results to acquire federal funding? Furthermore, do you seriously believe the government is more likely to fund research that indicates we cannot continue our current economic activity without grave consequences to the environment?
Yes, I do. There is a huge pro-warming political mood in Washington, and yes, projects that indicate global warming is occurring are more likely to get funding at present, paradoxical as that may seem.
The economic pressures of the global warming findings haven't really penetrated the agencies that provide funding.
It's that 30% that really makes a difference. A 30% jitter in hand movement turns a brain surgeon into a useless wreck.
And that 30% is extremely expensive. Don't think that they could capture it just by samping an extra 30 neurons. The #of neurons required to increase the fidelity of a signal increases in a highly nonlinear fashion.
Apes are certainly physiologically equipped to build their own society. They have the digits to construct things, they have the basic insights into using tools and they have very rudimentary language capabilities.
They're just too stupid.
The ability to adapt in impressive ways is just the way the brain is wired up and says little about their intelligence. Even rats often come up with impressive tricks to shortcut their way to a reward that the experimenters hadn't thought of. It doesn't make the rats sentient or smarter than the scientist, it just means they are very efficient at picking up correlations in the environment in the same way a computer might if it were designed to do so.
What sets us apart is our language and sentience. It is not a mundane detail, nor is it something that can be taught to apes at a better than 4 year old level.
Now, you can argue that it's wrong to experiment on them, I'm not defending or proposing animal experimentation, I'm just stating a fact, on the scale of humans, with or without language, apes are just plain stupid.
Remove humans from earth and fast forward 5 million years and chimps could very likely evolve into a human-like species (again), but they're nowhere close yet.
And yes, it's legitimate to compare brain volume. Brain volume allows manual coordination, executive decision making, memory, image processing. Discounting brain volume puts you dangerously close to separating mind from brain, and if you want to go down that road, I surrender.
Looks like someone needs an education about the evils of monopolies and how much damage they can do. Anti-trust legislation was established for a reason. A well run monopoly has enough money that it basically destroy the free market within its subdomain, preventing, at least for a number of decades, the rise of any commercially viable alternative.
Now, you can argue that in the end, all monopolies will fall, which is true. However, it's also true that in the end, we'll all die, the earth will be destroyed by the sun and the universe will settle into heat death.
These "eventually's" are small comfort to the people that will suffer for many decades under the rules of monopolies if they are permitted to grow without bound.
Economic theories are useless if not applicable to the here and now, and that is where monopolies hold the greatest sway.
If the best example of monopolies you can come up with is the phone companies, try rolling the clock back a few decades before anti-trust legislation was enacted, back to the steel cartels that prompted this legislation. Families starving to death would certainly disagree with your assessment.
Ahem
Humanity has been drinking milk for MILLENIA.
If there were a reasonable amount of danger from milk, we would have noticed something by now.
When someone's statement baldly contradicts thousands of years of experience, I'm inclined to disregard it unless they can cough up some fairly convincing data.
Even the new milk, chock full of horomones though it may be, has been tested on the buying public for quite a few years.
The burden of proof is most definitely on you.
The one thing you New-Age organic people seem to fail to realize is that our bodies are not fragile, and waiting to do. We are extremely resilient creatures with complex homeostatic mechanisms. We can handle a lot of abuse.
Today's specimin: the PETA troll, not a type you often see here in Slashdot, but they've all but overrun their natural habitats and are starting to turn up even here.
You'll note the complete lack of factual backup for the alarmist warnings about milk, making the claim difficult to verify or deny. It's likely a distorted paraphrase of some legitimate literature.
Note also the New-Agey reference to "imbalanced body chemistry", also with no linkage or factual backing. These are indeed classic troll droppings.
This must be one of the young however, for its trap is easily detected. A more clever one would have lured us in with some more reasonable prose before jumping straight to the propaganda.
Enjoy the rest of your stay, and remember to never feed the trolls!
Um, SOMEONE had to be losed mechanized power if other people were gaining it. Otherwise you are proposing that trucks and jeeps sprouted from the earth sponteanously.
Let them pass whatever DRM stuff they want and wait for it to collapse under its own weight. Joe Consumer isn't going to care about DRM issues until it bites him in the ass when he can't play his legally purchased CD because the SONY license server was down. And it won't bite him in the ass until this stuff gets through.
The longer and harder we fight the media conglomerates, the better developed their tactics will be and the harder it will be to undo the damage they've already done. Let them race ahead with blind and untested confidence and make the inevitable mistakes we can forsee, then nail'em hard and make it permanent.
They did not grow in a "non-directed" fashion at all. Evolution has very clear directions (for each of its millions of species), it's just spread out over millions of years, so it doesn't seem directed when taken compared to computer design on the timescale of 1-2 years.
I have much more respect for Wallace after reading this reply. He's a deeply insightful individual and doesn't appear to be taken in by much of the bullshit of the AI field.
One point I disagree with him about is this:
>I always say, if I wanted to build a computer >from scratch, the very last material I would >choose to work with is meat. I'll take >transistors over meat any day. Human >intelligence may even be a poor kludge of the >intelligence algorithm on an organ that is >basically a glorified animal eyeball. From an >evolutionary standpoint, our supposedly >wonderful cognitive skills are a very recent >innovation. It should not be surprising if they >are only poorly implemented in us, like the lung >of the first mudfish. We can breathe the air of >thought and imagination, but not that well yet.
While it's true that our brains are not well adapted to the problems of the 20th cetury (remembering list of facts, for example, would be a great thing to be able to do innately), I think Wallace doesn't posses a very deep understanding of neurophysiology when he compares neural function to transistors and silicon.
The idea that neurons simply summate incoming information, apply a threshold, and then output is very outdated. A single neuron is more like an entire computer than a transistor. There is evidence that a single neuron posseses an extraordinarily rich array of computational mechanisms, such as complex comparisons within the dendrite. In fact, the dendrite might be where the majority of computation is performed within the brain.
A neuron is constantly adapting to its inputs and outputs, and this includes such things as growing new spines, (inputs) and axons (outputs). And within the cell, we are just beginning to see the enormous range of chemical modulations that change its functional characteristics in an dynamic fashion. A neuron can even change its own RNA to effect long term changes in its synaptic gain that are perhaps specific to a given synapse (1 of 10,000).
The messy wetness of neural tissue, for which we pay the price of very slow signal transmission is precisely what gives it the ability to change itself in such a dynamic manner. They're slow, but they make up for it with massive parallel dynamics of outrageous complexity. The neuron is *not* a clumsy kludge implementation. It is a finely tuned and well oiled machine, the result of millions of years of tinkering by evolution.
While it's probably that we can concoct innovations that might improve on the basic neuron (for example, long axonal segments could probably be replaced with electrical wires for a speed gain without much loss of computational power), the neuron itself should not be so quickly discarded
-Brad
We'll likely have the technology to do the artificial eye correctly (full optical pathway) before we understand that.
:)
By your argument, we should cease any and all prosthesis efforts for 100 years
The issue isn't whether these pathways come from the LGN or some earlier part of the optic pathway. Rather it's a question of what will be missed by skipping the entire region and going straight for V1