The author acknowledges the possibility that they'll be freed by the appeals court, but doesn't think that will save them. His point is that the public perception of Microsoft is where the real damage was done, and having the appeals court let them off won't fix that. Instead, it'll just make it look like they got away with it.
Check out worldforge for a very similar sounding project that's been underway for some time. They've made alot of progress but there's a long way to go.
Great to see another one.
I can't help but think these designs will require wireless transmission to reach their full potential. With wireless, you can do away with all electrical interconnections between modules (assuming they're self-powered). This means your only remaining concern is structural connections, and that's going to make the design alot easier.
This is not fundamentally different than any other medical breakthrough technology and they will test it the same way they do in every other case. After extensive animal trials moving from mice to primates they will use it on terminally ill people who volunteer for an experiment that may save their lives. Only after these work will they begin moving down the risk ladder.
It's a pragmatic and straightforward approach that works well.
Nothing makes this that much more dangerous than other medical treatment. Even Caffeinne has the potential to kill you in the right dose.
As for your Darwin's point, unlike most of your responders I'm willing to agree that we are screwing with natural selection as describes "fitness", and this is only the tip of the iceberg.
A point I will make is that "only the fittest survive" is a misnomer. It should read "only the fittest reproduce". Evolution stops caring about you the moment you stop reproducing. It's like an event horizon, it can't see past your last child. So if life extension technology keeps millionaires living to 150, it will have no effect on evolution unless they keep cranking out kids. But they likely won't, the wealthy rarely have many children.
So if you count the wealthy as the fittest in our society, natural selection is going in the opposite direction. And this isn't an armchair hypothesis either, rather it's been brought up before in stastitical analyses of reproduction patterns.
They would deter myself and countless millions of other people from clicking refresh every time they have 5 seconds to spare, which only rarely turns into 5 minutes of reading some unexpected story.
I would still read of course, but I like to think I would waste less time checking for updates too frequently.
Also, this would foment the creation of utilities to monitor webpages, and report to you any significant update (presumably through a standardized low byte count protocol that big name websites could adopt). So you could have a window up that popped a message whenever a monitored site got something new, and you could then give your $.02 to check it out.
Honestly I think I sometimes waste more time per day checking for news that isn't new than actually reading.
This would have the nice side effect of reducing bandwidth and server load for many of these sites.
Looking at the diagram in the Sunday Times, one sees the little "radiation waves" emanating from the earpiece, as opposed to the antenna. Perfect ammo for those selling the ineffective protective earpieces that completely ignore the antenna.
You want protection against a danger that may or may not exist? At least use something that actually addresses the problem like an earpiece that lets you put the cell phone at your waist. Of course there's always plenty of dangerous cancers down there as well:(
While the brain loses alot of plasticity, it is always able to adapt to changing neuromotor situations because it has to. As we age, things stop working, or change their properties, so the brain has to adjust.
Also, experiments have been done in VR which have demonstrated a remarkable ability even for adults to adapt to extra limbs within hours.
Don't sell the brain short.:)
It enhances immersion. The brain is exquisitely tuned to such details and improving such mundane details as posture, eye-movements and the physics of its movements will do much more to fool your brain into thinking it's dealing with reality than more cerebral enhancements (like improved AI and dialog) ever could.
So if you're looking to enhance the immersion factor of your game (and thereby enhance its ability to let you "escape") this is a very important detail.
God forbid we desire children who are intelligent and resistant to disease. All loving parents should want their children to be sickly morons.
I understand what you're saying about the slippery slope, but bear in mind that nature has been doing this kind of selection from day 1, and many parents do it in their choice of mates. This is just a more direct way of doing the same selection.
I've heard the opposite in a biography of the creators of ENIAC. That Astantoff stole ideas from ENIAC. There was a huge debate and a court case and ENIAC lost.
But all that means is that Astantoff swung the court case, possibly with big bucks from Sperry.
I'm not sure what the actual truth is. We all know how malleable the court system is when lots of money is involved, and this certainly wouldn't be the first time that the true inventors of something (the ENIAC guys:Presper Eckert and John Mauchly) were passed over in favor of the big ego and bigger checkbook.
The amount of nostalgic distortion on this board is a bit disturbing. Many seem to suffer from the all-to-common phenomenon of distorting the memories of a past. People talk about how the game designers of old really knew how to make a game, and that modern day designers need to study human psychology.
I've got news, many of those early game designers also didn't know thing 1 about technology. They were usually the geekiest throwbacks from their graduating class.
The truth is that the new games aren't intrinsically worse than these mythical games of old, rather we have become jaded over time. Old game features no longer appeal to us because we are used to them. We know how to solve puzzle X, even if it wears a different face.
Then of course there's the graphics.
Implicit in these statements is the implication that if I were to take one of the new games back in time to 1985, the lucky gamer I gave it to would eventually stop playing and go back to his C-64. Frankly, I can't imagine that happening until the game was well played out.
We're jaded, we're the old men sitting on the porch saying "these kids don't know what a good game is!".
I for one refuse to believe that game design studios with multiple developers and multi-million dollar budgets cannot outperform a high school kid with a few hours of free time per day. These *are* good games we're seeing, some of them at any rate.
Instead of banning these individuals that receive a certain quota of complaints, perhaps Ebay should put them on an "unpreferred customer" list. These individuals are subject to random delays in net connectivity, including occasional 404's. Their bids are often "lost", their auction items as well.
The hope is that these specific individuals assume its a general internet problem and eventually decide it's not worth the trouble.
Obviously if word gets around that this is being done, these people will switch accounts just as they now do to circumvent bannings. But it might be more effective than outright bans until such time as they do realize what the problem is.
Obviously it won't cure all of the problem and some individuals will persist in obnoxious behavior no matter what you do, but it might help reduce the problem a bit.
While I agree with alot of what was said in this article, the idea that there is no competition in the open source model is incorrect from my perspective. Each feature and each version of each feature is in constant competition with its peers.
Yes all the good and the bad are swept along for the ride, but from the perspective of the end-user (me) only the good are made easy to access, and given sufficient documentation. The bad are in there somewhere, but you have to know what you're looking for to find them.
This process isn't perfect: some of the bad is well documented and vice versa, but it is definitely a form of competition.
As far as I can tell, they did find an effect: >Most importantly, participants who had played >Wolfenstein 3D delivered significantly longer >noise blasts after lose trials than those who >had played the nonviolent game Myst (M s = 6.81 >and 6.65), F(1, 187) = 4.82, p.05, MSE =.27. Now don't get me wrong, I disagree with the idea that video games are Bad with a capital B. People will do as they will do. But as far as I can tell, their study did find an effect. -Illserve
Usually, I am more reserved. It's when people demonstrate themselves to be willfully anti-reason that I write them off as being fools.
Actually I checked your post history, this kind of response seems par for the course.
Granted. That's also wholly irrelevant. I could just as easily say "well, when we become gods, then we'll be able to compute anything"--but unless I present a theory which shows how we can become gods and compute anything, I haven't challenged the existing theory at all. What you're doing is standing on the sidelines and throwing rocks at the underpinnings of modern physics when you're too much of an intellectual coward to brave the arena yourself by presenting new theories and ideas.
It's hardly irrelevant to correct you when you put words in my mouth.
But I'm perfectly willing to put my nuts on the chopping block, I just don't have enough knowledge about this particular thing to make a fairly sensible argument, other than giving my opinion that you probably don't know enough to give the "X is impossible".
But for the sake of argument, because I do so love to and it's obvious you'd rather argue intelligently than batter at me with insults....
There's always the quantum computer which could change all the rules, but I'm willing to bet you know more about that than I.
But how about this for a theory... who's to say our universe is closed? Maybe there's some other universe 100 jillion times bigger that our universe can tap into? Creationists argue evolution is impossible because of thermodynamics, but they mistakenly view the Earth as a closed system.
Maybe we're just being run as a simulation on some ultra powerful entity's computer? If that were the case the laws of physics could be arbitrary parameter settings that we can change at our leisure when we learn how.
Anyone can belittle the existing state of affairs, whether it be in politics, in literature, in civic life or in science.
I belittle nothing. I'm not bashing thermodynamics, just saying it may not be the whole story. You are reading an antagonistic bent where this is honestly none. You sound like a smart guy, I wish you weren't quite so antagonistic because this would be more productive.
I have no use for these critics, these mean and petty souls who, fearing defeat, mock those who brave it.
Oh now I'm the one mocking? Reread this whole thread. You're doing all the mocking friend.
If you want me to take you seriously, then present an idea, a hypothesis, some way which will show thermodynamics to be wrong. But as long as you merely throw rocks, you're an imbecile and useless.
Actually my very first message included 3 ideas, and you've just battered at me from the get go. But there's a few more above, go nuts.
If you want to throw rocks, climb down here in the mud with the rest of us who are actually trying to build something. Get dirty, soiled and sweaty. Get your hands calloused and the mud blood-soaked. Build something better than what we presently have, and you'll find that to be ten thousand times more effective than any pebble you could hurl from the bleachers.
Sorry, physics ain't my bag, and I don't pretend to have the mathematical fortitude to someday understand it.
But I am in the trenches, just a different one. I'm the one saying the mind is nothing more than a deterministic box that we can crack and I'm trying every goddamn day to make it so. That's my idea, my hypothesis, and it's pretty unpopular with alot of people, let me tell you...
What arrogance you have, to sit idly by and tell the flawed, valorous people who are actually doing things that what they do does not matter, that it's all going to fall by the wayside anyway.
Again, you mischaracterize and misquote everything I say. I never said it doesn't matter, and I don't believe that. I said we expand on the old ideas. You really honestly seriously need to get a handle on your method of arguing and stop misreading things people write as attacks on your person. I'm telling you this not to attack you, but because I think you'd be one hell of a debater if you didn't make and take everything personally. Maybe this is just an online persona to get out your aggressions or something.
If you wish to challenge the accepted worldview, by all means, feel free--but you must challenge it by presenting something better, as Copernicus and Galileo did.
One does not need to one-up Stephen Hawking to challenge the wisdom of rigid adherence to his principles. Often insights come to a field from those completely outside because those doing the work are too immersed in it to see the obvious. I'm sure if you walked into my lab, you could point out something I've been doing stupidly for years and I'd smack my forehead and say "oh yea".
Remember that people also laugh at circus clowns who twist balloons into animal shapes.
Actually I like making people laugh. Does anyone ever laugh at something you've done on purpose or otherwise?
Until such time as you come up with a better theory, thermodynamics is the only theory we have. What? Are we to discard thermodynamics merely because it may have flaws, without first seeing what those flaws are, without first having a competing theory which successfully explains those flaws?
Again, no I'm not saying thermodynamics is useless and should be discarded.
I refuse to let incompetent, marginal hacks like you impose your insecurities upon me.
Good thing too, because it's obvious you've got plenty of your own. The more this goes on, the more shocked I am at how riled you are getting. Each time I keep thinking: ok now he'll chill out, he can't possibly top the last message.
Oh, I know I'm not right about the future. What I do know, though, is that you're even less right than I am. I am working within the constraints which all of our best scientific evidence of the last two hundred years suggests as absolute. You are working within the undefined paradigm of "well, maybe not".
While I love science and think it will spiral us upwards forever, I've also learned to accept lessons from history. It repeats itself because we humans are still made of the same neural goop we were 2000 years ago.
Don't sit back in the bleachers and jeer at those of us who are actually doing the work. Don't consider yourself to be "above" the awful, wretched, and common work of exerting yourself wholly in a challenge which you will most likely fail at.
Either contribute to the process of the development of human knowledge, or else shut up and don't interfere with or naysay those hardy few who possess the mental acumen and the intestinal fortitude to wake up every morning, realize the Sisyphean task before them, and go ahead with it anyway.
If you want to contribute, the way is clear. Contribute a theory, an idea, an observation, an empirical measurement. Build something of your own, something which is better than what currently exists.
Do that, and all the things you wish to see brought low will collapse in the most glorious heap of rubble.
But until you are willing to do that, you possess no company in the fractious band of brothers who do their imperfect best to perfect knowledge.
That's a nice speech, honestly, but you're preaching to the choir. I get my hands bloody, sometimes in a very literal sense, on a daily basis.
But I've said my piece about thermodynamics, as much as my limited understanding of physics allows, now I'm just trying to help you see that your attacks on me are 10fold more vicious than I deserve in the hope that you cut your next victim some slack. Who do you think you're helping by being so vigorous? I might have been made to feel belittled and inferior had you not overreached in your reproach. As it is, I see you as a very intelligent person who's got some communication issues that will hamper you in life.
As for my armchair theories above, tear'em up. I'm all ears.
Work on the tone. This name calling is pointless and inappropriate.
I didn't say "thermodynamics is flawed" I said I don't have as much confidence in the limits it provides. Why not? We have systematically expanded and deepened our understanding of every ruleset about the cosmos in recorded history.
So while I can't tell you precisely why I think we may eventually be able to transcend thermodynamics, I can say that history is probably right and it'll happen. What arrogance you portray trying to tell me that THIS time we have it right. THIS time the equations cover all the bases and define the absolutes of the universe with no possible exceptions.
Actually I guess I shouldn't be too surprised at being called an idiot. I'm sure Copernicus and Gallileo were called far worse when they challenged the accepted world view of their day.
Now I'm sure you've got a comback ready, telling me how the church's worldview wasn't based on Mathematics and how at least Copernicus and Gallileo had data and weren't just playing armchair philospher as I am. But you're barking up the wrong tree, because I'm not telling you how things are definitely going to be, I'm just telling you that you don't know enough to say how they won't be.
As you continue your almost unbroken string of negatory, insulting and cynical attacks on your fellow Slashdotters pause a moment and ask yourself why everyone but you has to be so wrong about the possible future. You're not that smart. Even Stephen Hawking isn't that smart.
I'm guessing we have different styles of argumentation. You want assurance and proof, I have none to offer. But I bristle anytime someone says "X is always going to be impossible" and you're not going to get me to accept it no matter how inflammatory your reply.
Actually, I'm not quite as confident in the fundamental limits of computational power as defined by heat death as you are. I have no idea in what form the solutions might occur, but I've seen enough of history to never say never.
I never said the brain is a universal turing machine. I said it's reducible to a turing machine, all this requires is determinism.
Yes I realize this determinism is an assumption and I should have stated it as such, but it's one I take for granted because I have yet to see evidence of anything in the mind that is not entirely reducible to the interactions of molecules or electrotonic forces.
Consider the possibility that I'm not quite as ignorant as you assume.
The quantity of neurons and synapses is entirely irrelevant. Assuming it is deterministic in some way is all you need to run a simulation of the whole thing on a turing machine. I know this may strike you as ridiculous, but it's as true.
I'd probably disagree with most of this book. There's no reason that even a Turing machine couldn't simulate a problem solving device as complex as the human brain, provided you'd figured out all of the physiological properties that contribute to intelligence.
But even before that goal is reached, computers are going to go a very long way in enhancing our own intelligence and problem solving capabilities. Hell they already have.
Another point is that the solution to some of these problems may not take the form this guy expects. We could change the laws of physics by building a virtual reality indistinguishable from reality, putting everyone into it and then changing the rules.
Computers are tools and they will solve whatever problems we tell them to, eventually.
To reiterate a point someone above(or perhaps below for you) made, biology has provided adequate solutions to these problems.
Cells in the developing embryo don't need to communicate with a central intelligence to figure out what to do, rather the central intelligence is built in to each. They communicate with their neighbors to figure out what to become, roughly speaking.
As for accidentally creating a globe eater, I don't think it's that easy to create an unstoppable menace *accidentally*. You can insert faults in your nanites that may be triggered by, say, a certain wavelength of light, or perhaps a frequency band of sound. Boom, no more nanites.
Our cells have their own arsenal of self destructive codes. Yes they still go ballistic sometimes (cancer) but we're here to learn from Nature's mistakes, not necessarily repeat'em.
Even without built in faults, experimental populations could be contained by climate shields, areas of projected temperature too hot or cold for nanites to thrive in.
Yes we have something to fear from mad scientists, but I think we have a bigger chance of being wiped out by tailor made virus's before nanites can do the same.
Imagine a disease as lethal, incurable, and slow developing as AIDS, but transmittable by air. *brrr*. I think I'd rather face an amorphous blob of crust eaters with a flamethrower.
And one more point, as unethical as it may seem, nanties will be able to enact population and drug controls. That is to say, we can create and saturate the world with nanites that will render reproduction impossible and illegal druge use useless, unless specific counter nanites are administered to an individual in question. Endless food != endless people.
Slashdot Mirror
The author acknowledges the possibility that they'll be freed by the appeals court, but doesn't think that will save them. His point is that the public perception of Microsoft is where the real damage was done, and having the appeals court let them off won't fix that. Instead, it'll just make it look like they got away with it.
Check out worldforge for a very similar sounding project that's been underway for some time. They've made alot of progress but there's a long way to go. Great to see another one.
I can't help but think these designs will require wireless transmission to reach their full potential. With wireless, you can do away with all electrical interconnections between modules (assuming they're self-powered). This means your only remaining concern is structural connections, and that's going to make the design alot easier.
This is not fundamentally different than any other medical breakthrough technology and they will test it the same way they do in every other case. After extensive animal trials moving from mice to primates they will use it on terminally ill people who volunteer for an experiment that may save their lives. Only after these work will they begin moving down the risk ladder.
It's a pragmatic and straightforward approach that works well.
Nothing makes this that much more dangerous than other medical treatment. Even Caffeinne has the potential to kill you in the right dose.
As for your Darwin's point, unlike most of your responders I'm willing to agree that we are screwing with natural selection as describes "fitness", and this is only the tip of the iceberg.
A point I will make is that "only the fittest survive" is a misnomer. It should read "only the fittest reproduce". Evolution stops caring about you the moment you stop reproducing. It's like an event horizon, it can't see past your last child. So if life extension technology keeps millionaires living to 150, it will have no effect on evolution unless they keep cranking out kids. But they likely won't, the wealthy rarely have many children.
So if you count the wealthy as the fittest in our society, natural selection is going in the opposite direction. And this isn't an armchair hypothesis either, rather it's been brought up before in stastitical analyses of reproduction patterns.
They would deter myself and countless millions of other people from clicking refresh every time they have 5 seconds to spare, which only rarely turns into 5 minutes of reading some unexpected story.
I would still read of course, but I like to think I would waste less time checking for updates too frequently.
Also, this would foment the creation of utilities to monitor webpages, and report to you any significant update (presumably through a standardized low byte count protocol that big name websites could adopt). So you could have a window up that popped a message whenever a monitored site got something new, and you could then give your $.02 to check it out.
Honestly I think I sometimes waste more time per day checking for news that isn't new than actually reading.
This would have the nice side effect of reducing bandwidth and server load for many of these sites.
Looking at the diagram in the Sunday Times, one sees the little "radiation waves" emanating from the earpiece, as opposed to the antenna. Perfect ammo for those selling the ineffective protective earpieces that completely ignore the antenna.
:(
You want protection against a danger that may or may not exist? At least use something that actually addresses the problem like an earpiece that lets you put the cell phone at your waist. Of course there's always plenty of dangerous cancers down there as well
~Ill
While the brain loses alot of plasticity, it is always able to adapt to changing neuromotor situations because it has to. As we age, things stop working, or change their properties, so the brain has to adjust. Also, experiments have been done in VR which have demonstrated a remarkable ability even for adults to adapt to extra limbs within hours. Don't sell the brain short. :)
You know a robotech geek came up with that name.
It enhances immersion. The brain is exquisitely tuned to such details and improving such mundane details as posture, eye-movements and the physics of its movements will do much more to fool your brain into thinking it's dealing with reality than more cerebral enhancements (like improved AI and dialog) ever could.
So if you're looking to enhance the immersion factor of your game (and thereby enhance its ability to let you "escape") this is a very important detail.
-Illserve
I found this link at the bottom of the article to present other sides of this issue with remarkable clarity
a nge/tuning.html
http://www.infidel.org/library/modern/theodore_dr
And what makes you think it can't already? I can see him watching me, with those little beady eyes....
God forbid we desire children who are intelligent and resistant to disease. All loving parents should want their children to be sickly morons. I understand what you're saying about the slippery slope, but bear in mind that nature has been doing this kind of selection from day 1, and many parents do it in their choice of mates. This is just a more direct way of doing the same selection.
I've heard the opposite in a biography of the creators of ENIAC. That Astantoff stole ideas from ENIAC. There was a huge debate and a court case and ENIAC lost.
But all that means is that Astantoff swung the court case, possibly with big bucks from Sperry.
I'm not sure what the actual truth is. We all know how malleable the court system is when lots of money is involved, and this certainly wouldn't be the first time that the true inventors of something (the ENIAC guys:Presper Eckert and John Mauchly) were passed over in favor of the big ego and bigger checkbook.
-Illserve
The amount of nostalgic distortion on this board is a bit disturbing. Many seem to suffer from the all-to-common phenomenon of distorting the memories of a past. People talk about how the game designers of old really knew how to make a game, and that modern day designers need to study human psychology.
I've got news, many of those early game designers also didn't know thing 1 about technology. They were usually the geekiest throwbacks from their graduating class.
The truth is that the new games aren't intrinsically worse than these mythical games of old, rather we have become jaded over time. Old game features no longer appeal to us because we are used to them. We know how to solve puzzle X, even if it wears a different face.
Then of course there's the graphics.
Implicit in these statements is the implication that if I were to take one of the new games back in time to 1985, the lucky gamer I gave it to would eventually stop playing and go back to his C-64. Frankly, I can't imagine that happening until the game was well played out.
We're jaded, we're the old men sitting on the porch saying "these kids don't know what a good game is!".
I for one refuse to believe that game design studios with multiple developers and multi-million dollar budgets cannot outperform a high school kid with a few hours of free time per day. These *are* good games we're seeing, some of them at any rate.
-Illserve
Instead of banning these individuals that receive a certain quota of complaints, perhaps Ebay should put them on an "unpreferred customer" list. These individuals are subject to random delays in net connectivity, including occasional 404's. Their bids are often "lost", their auction items as well.
The hope is that these specific individuals assume its a general internet problem and eventually decide it's not worth the trouble.
Obviously if word gets around that this is being done, these people will switch accounts just as they now do to circumvent bannings. But it might be more effective than outright bans until such time as they do realize what the problem is.
Obviously it won't cure all of the problem and some individuals will persist in obnoxious behavior no matter what you do, but it might help reduce the problem a bit.
What do you think sirs?
While I agree with alot of what was said in this article, the idea that there is no competition in the open source model is incorrect from my perspective. Each feature and each version of each feature is in constant competition with its peers.
Yes all the good and the bad are swept along for the ride, but from the perspective of the end-user (me) only the good are made easy to access, and given sufficient documentation. The bad are in there somewhere, but you have to know what you're looking for to find them.
This process isn't perfect: some of the bad is well documented and vice versa, but it is definitely a form of competition.
As far as I can tell, they did find an effect: >Most importantly, participants who had played >Wolfenstein 3D delivered significantly longer >noise blasts after lose trials than those who >had played the nonviolent game Myst (M s = 6.81 >and 6.65), F(1, 187) = 4.82, p .05, MSE = .27. Now don't get me wrong, I disagree with the idea that video games are Bad with a capital B. People will do as they will do. But as far as I can tell, their study did find an effect. -Illserve
Usually, I am more reserved. It's when people demonstrate themselves to be willfully anti-reason that I write them off as being fools.
Actually I checked your post history, this kind of response seems par for the course.
Granted. That's also wholly irrelevant. I could just as easily say "well, when we become gods, then we'll be able to compute anything"--but unless I present a theory which shows how we can become gods and compute anything, I haven't challenged the existing theory at all. What you're doing is standing on the sidelines and throwing rocks at the underpinnings of modern physics when you're too much of an intellectual coward to brave the arena yourself by presenting new theories and ideas.
It's hardly irrelevant to correct you when you put words in my mouth.
But I'm perfectly willing to put my nuts on the chopping block, I just don't have enough knowledge about this particular thing to make a fairly sensible argument, other than giving my opinion that you probably don't know enough to give the "X is impossible".
But for the sake of argument, because I do so love to and it's obvious you'd rather argue intelligently than batter at me with insults....
There's always the quantum computer which could change all the rules, but I'm willing to bet you know more about that than I.
But how about this for a theory... who's to say our universe is closed? Maybe there's some other universe 100 jillion times bigger that our universe can tap into? Creationists argue evolution is impossible because of thermodynamics, but they mistakenly view the Earth as a closed system.
Maybe we're just being run as a simulation on some ultra powerful entity's computer? If that were the case the laws of physics could be arbitrary parameter settings that we can change at our leisure when we learn how.
Anyone can belittle the existing state of affairs, whether it be in politics, in literature, in civic life or in science.
I belittle nothing. I'm not bashing thermodynamics, just saying it may not be the whole story. You are reading an antagonistic bent where this is honestly none. You sound like a smart guy, I wish you weren't quite so antagonistic because this would be more productive.
I have no use for these critics, these mean and petty souls who, fearing defeat, mock those who brave it.
Oh now I'm the one mocking? Reread this whole thread. You're doing all the mocking friend.
If you want me to take you seriously, then present an idea, a hypothesis, some way which will show thermodynamics to be wrong. But as long as you merely throw rocks, you're an imbecile and useless.
Actually my very first message included 3 ideas, and you've just battered at me from the get go. But there's a few more above, go nuts.
If you want to throw rocks, climb down here in the mud with the rest of us who are actually trying to build something. Get dirty, soiled and sweaty. Get your hands calloused and the mud blood-soaked. Build something better than what we presently have, and you'll find that to be ten thousand times more effective than any pebble you could hurl from the bleachers.
Sorry, physics ain't my bag, and I don't pretend to have the mathematical fortitude to someday understand it.
But I am in the trenches, just a different one. I'm the one saying the mind is nothing more than a deterministic box that we can crack and I'm trying every goddamn day to make it so. That's my idea, my hypothesis, and it's pretty unpopular with alot of people, let me tell you...
What arrogance you have, to sit idly by and tell the flawed, valorous people who are actually doing things that what they do does not matter, that it's all going to fall by the wayside anyway.
Again, you mischaracterize and misquote everything I say. I never said it doesn't matter, and I don't believe that. I said we expand on the old ideas. You really honestly seriously need to get a handle on your method of arguing and stop misreading things people write as attacks on your person. I'm telling you this not to attack you, but because I think you'd be one hell of a debater if you didn't make and take everything personally. Maybe this is just an online persona to get out your aggressions or something.
If you wish to challenge the accepted worldview, by all means, feel free--but you must challenge it by presenting something better, as Copernicus and Galileo did.
One does not need to one-up Stephen Hawking to challenge the wisdom of rigid adherence to his principles. Often insights come to a field from those completely outside because those doing the work are too immersed in it to see the obvious. I'm sure if you walked into my lab, you could point out something I've been doing stupidly for years and I'd smack my forehead and say "oh yea".
Remember that people also laugh at circus clowns who twist balloons into animal shapes.
Actually I like making people laugh. Does anyone ever laugh at something you've done on purpose or otherwise?
Until such time as you come up with a better theory, thermodynamics is the only theory we have. What? Are we to discard thermodynamics merely because it may have flaws, without first seeing what those flaws are, without first having a competing theory which successfully explains those flaws?
Again, no I'm not saying thermodynamics is useless and should be discarded.
I refuse to let incompetent, marginal hacks like you impose your insecurities upon me.
Good thing too, because it's obvious you've got plenty of your own. The more this goes on, the more shocked I am at how riled you are getting. Each time I keep thinking: ok now he'll chill out, he can't possibly top the last message.
Oh, I know I'm not right about the future. What I do know, though, is that you're even less right than I am. I am working within the constraints which all of our best scientific evidence of the last two hundred years suggests as absolute. You are working within the undefined paradigm of "well, maybe not".
While I love science and think it will spiral us upwards forever, I've also learned to accept lessons from history. It repeats itself because we humans are still made of the same neural goop we were 2000 years ago.
Don't sit back in the bleachers and jeer at those of us who are actually doing the work. Don't consider yourself to be "above" the awful, wretched, and common work of exerting yourself wholly in a challenge which you will most likely fail at.
Either contribute to the process of the development of human knowledge, or else shut up and don't interfere with or naysay those hardy few who possess the mental acumen and the intestinal fortitude to wake up every morning, realize the Sisyphean task before them, and go ahead with it anyway.
If you want to contribute, the way is clear. Contribute a theory, an idea, an observation, an empirical measurement. Build something of your own, something which is better than what currently exists.
Do that, and all the things you wish to see brought low will collapse in the most glorious heap of rubble.
But until you are willing to do that, you possess no company in the fractious band of brothers who do their imperfect best to perfect knowledge.
That's a nice speech, honestly, but you're preaching to the choir. I get my hands bloody, sometimes in a very literal sense, on a daily basis.
But I've said my piece about thermodynamics, as much as my limited understanding of physics allows, now I'm just trying to help you see that your attacks on me are 10fold more vicious than I deserve in the hope that you cut your next victim some slack. Who do you think you're helping by being so vigorous? I might have been made to feel belittled and inferior had you not overreached in your reproach. As it is, I see you as a very intelligent person who's got some communication issues that will hamper you in life.
As for my armchair theories above, tear'em up. I'm all ears.
Work on the tone. This name calling is pointless and inappropriate.
I didn't say "thermodynamics is flawed" I said I don't have as much confidence in the limits it provides. Why not? We have systematically expanded and deepened our understanding of every ruleset about the cosmos in recorded history.
So while I can't tell you precisely why I think we may eventually be able to transcend thermodynamics, I can say that history is probably right and it'll happen. What arrogance you portray trying to tell me that THIS time we have it right. THIS time the equations cover all the bases and define the absolutes of the universe with no possible exceptions.
Actually I guess I shouldn't be too surprised at being called an idiot. I'm sure Copernicus and Gallileo were called far worse when they challenged the accepted world view of their day.
Now I'm sure you've got a comback ready, telling me how the church's worldview wasn't based on Mathematics and how at least Copernicus and Gallileo had data and weren't just playing armchair philospher as I am. But you're barking up the wrong tree, because I'm not telling you how things are definitely going to be, I'm just telling you that you don't know enough to say how they won't be.
As you continue your almost unbroken string of negatory, insulting and cynical attacks on your fellow Slashdotters pause a moment and ask yourself why everyone but you has to be so wrong about the possible future. You're not that smart. Even Stephen Hawking isn't that smart.
I'm guessing we have different styles of argumentation. You want assurance and proof, I have none to offer. But I bristle anytime someone says "X is always going to be impossible" and you're not going to get me to accept it no matter how inflammatory your reply.
Idiot indeed.
Actually, I'm not quite as confident in the fundamental limits of computational power as defined by heat death as you are. I have no idea in what form the solutions might occur, but I've seen enough of history to never say never.
Open your mind a bit. Just because a problem is intractible doesn't mean a computer can't find a reasonable solution in finite time.
And NP doesn't mean a turing machine can't solve it ever. It means it can't solve it in polynomial time.
Next time you flame someone, make sure you know what you're talking about.
I never said the brain is a universal turing machine. I said it's reducible to a turing machine, all this requires is determinism.
Yes I realize this determinism is an assumption and I should have stated it as such, but it's one I take for granted because I have yet to see evidence of anything in the mind that is not entirely reducible to the interactions of molecules or electrotonic forces.
Consider the possibility that I'm not quite as ignorant as you assume.
The quantity of neurons and synapses is entirely irrelevant. Assuming it is deterministic in some way is all you need to run a simulation of the whole thing on a turing machine. I know this may strike you as ridiculous, but it's as true.
I'd probably disagree with most of this book. There's no reason that even a Turing machine couldn't simulate a problem solving device as complex as the human brain, provided you'd figured out all of the physiological properties that contribute to intelligence.
But even before that goal is reached, computers are going to go a very long way in enhancing our own intelligence and problem solving capabilities. Hell they already have.
Another point is that the solution to some of these problems may not take the form this guy expects. We could change the laws of physics by building a virtual reality indistinguishable from reality, putting everyone into it and then changing the rules.
Computers are tools and they will solve whatever problems we tell them to, eventually.
To reiterate a point someone above(or perhaps below for you) made, biology has provided adequate solutions to these problems.
Cells in the developing embryo don't need to communicate with a central intelligence to figure out what to do, rather the central intelligence is built in to each. They communicate with their neighbors to figure out what to become, roughly speaking.
As for accidentally creating a globe eater, I don't think it's that easy to create an unstoppable menace *accidentally*. You can insert faults in your nanites that may be triggered by, say, a certain wavelength of light, or perhaps a frequency band of sound. Boom, no more nanites.
Our cells have their own arsenal of self destructive codes. Yes they still go ballistic sometimes (cancer) but we're here to learn from Nature's mistakes, not necessarily repeat'em.
Even without built in faults, experimental populations could be contained by climate shields, areas of projected temperature too hot or cold for nanites to thrive in.
Yes we have something to fear from mad scientists, but I think we have a bigger chance of being wiped out by tailor made virus's before nanites can do the same.
Imagine a disease as lethal, incurable, and slow developing as AIDS, but transmittable by air. *brrr*. I think I'd rather face an amorphous blob of crust eaters with a flamethrower.
And one more point, as unethical as it may seem, nanties will be able to enact population and drug controls. That is to say, we can create and saturate the world with nanites that will render reproduction impossible and illegal druge use useless, unless specific counter nanites are administered to an individual in question. Endless food != endless people.
-Illserve