Instead of everyone spending all afternoon typing out the same pro/anti Warming,US,Oil,Bush arguments, we all just go re-read the last global warming thread, and spend the time we've saved doing some kind of service job (washing dishes, etc) and donate that money to our favorite charity.
Whether a wiring job eventually deteriorates or not is up to you, not the setup you've chosen. If you have the kind of personality and drive to keep it clean, you will, no matter what setup you use.
There is no magic bullet arrangement of cables and velcro that is immune to entropy.
Poker chips, also, are currency in a game. Like ISK's, they have an exchange rate with real dollars that is not determined by law, or a government.
Yet it is not legal to steal them from another person. I assure you that if I went to a casino and was caught grabbing someone else's chips, I would very quickly find myself in some kind of significant legal turmoil.
It may not end up coming to pass in this particular instance, but it is inevitable that, eventually, some virtual environment's currency will end up being protected by real world law.
The issue will be determined by how many people care, because if enough people care about something, it ends up in the law books.
Let's give this guy some credit. He clearly has some degree if competence if he's selected to showboat the app at a major presentation, at least enough to know that you need to train, or at least test, a voice recognition demo.
A far more likely scenario, in my mind, is that he trained and tested it 100 times and got it working nearly flawlessly, but in a different room and with a different setup. In fact he may have overtrained it. Programs like this can behave very badly when they end up overfitting the data.
On the day in question he may have had a different mic and the acoustics were certainly different and the program went whacko.
The bottleneck in the transmission it the optic nerve, not the retina. Because of this, the retina does an immense amount of pre-processing and filtering before the information is even dispatched to your brain.
What this article describes is akin to gauging the speed of transmission by assuming a bitmap file is sent through the tubes, when really it's a jpeg compressed version of the bitmap.
These computer analogies to brain function are interesting, and inspire the imagination, but they are frequently grossly misleading, or just plain incorrect.
The primary result of advances in military technology in the last 50 years has been a drastic reduction in the number of people killed. A primary goal of military R&D is to apply force to the specific location with as little collateral damage as possible and it's worked wonders. As much as it sucks to hear about casualties on both sides of the Iraq war, consider how few people are actually dying, relative to blood baths in the past like the world wars and Vietnam.
It is meaningless to talk about brains and clock speed. The brain's speed varies wildly depending on the complexity of the operations and how well they fit into the brain's underlying functional architecture.
For simple addition tasks, an "operation" can take seconds.
For calculating the kinetics of arm motion needed to juggle 5 balls, there aren't even any "operations" to clock the speed of. It's just a continuous dynamical system.
There are so many unfounded or incorrect assumptions in this post that I'm forced to comment.
A synapse is not a FLOP. Dendrites are computational devices in themselves, and a synaptic activation at one point along the dendritic branch will affect how a synaptic activation elsewhere affects the soma. Also, when neurons fire, the spikes propagate backwards down the dendrite to allow the synapses to learn. Simulating this to even a crude degree of accuracy requires a compartmental model of the dendritic tree as a series of compartments. The equations involved in doing this are expensive to say the least.
The computer needed to do this at a brain level would probably be about the size of the moon.
And even if you built such a thing, you still wouldn't understand how it works, it would just be an equally mysterious human intelligence implemented in a moon sized computer. Also, we are nowwhere near understanding the anatomy of the brain to a degree that would permit us to make our moon-sized replication.
So really, reproducing the function of the brain is going to come from an understanding of its principles of organization and function, not from a piecemeal replication at a cellular level. There are substantially complicated bits of brain function that can be replicated with a single Dell desktop if you abstract yourself away from the neural implementation.
The point being, these comparisons between number of synapses and CPU's as a metric of us simulating a brain are uninformative and terribly misleading.
Although I have to say from a selfish perspective, for the degree to which ideas like this excite public interest and generate funding in my field of research, knock yourself out.
I hate Microsoft as much as the next card carrying slashdot reader but I'm glad they're doing this. I'm sure they have a profit motive of some kind, but this funding scheme can't help but to improve the state of education.
I have to wonder what kind of robots these are that cost so much money however. Robots like this should cost about $100 -$300 tops.
It's all well and good that the slashdot readership is so well informed on the licensing issue, but if the general public isn't, we're screwed.
The slip up in this article isn't just a sign of crappy reporting, it's a sign that this purchase-a-license idea is permeating into the general public which is scary as hell. I don't care what the law says right now, if people start thinking in terms of licenses, the laws will eventually change to reflect that new idea. The RIAA will propose the legislation through their congress monkeys and it'll pass without a whimper.
I think there's also a tendency for the average guy on the street to feel proud that he's on top of some of these issues, so he'd be eager to jump to this licensing mindset because it's the "way things are going". People are excited by change itself, without understanding the implications through. I can easily imagine my uncle, who is pushing 70 but loves to talk about the digital age, with wide-eyed enthusiasm about this change to a license-based media system.
Normally I would agree with you. A great deal of crappy research gets hyped up because of an inappropriate analogy to biology... but this isn't one of them.
Stopping "spam" is almost exactly the problem that our immune system has to deal with. It has to go through reams of data (i.e. every cell in your body) and figure out what is junk and what isn't, and it does this by learning through exposure positive and negative examples. It's not perfect either, sometimes it goes berzerk, producing false positives (autoimmune disorders).
There's a great deal to be learned from our immune system for the sake of solving the spam problem. Don't be so quick to dismiss it.... this time.
Not that the internet isn't useful, changed the world, etc, but this guy's gimmick is only indicative of the power of the internet to spread fads. It might work a second time for someone else, and possibly even a third time, but this kind of thing is basically a one-trick pony.
It's the pet rock all over again.
And that guy got more than a crummy farmhouse for his gimmick.
The brain as a virtual machine argument is somewhat off base. It has processing modules that are highly dedicated to particular tasks and, when destroyed, those capabilities are wiped out. Partial recovery can occur but it takes years of retraining and is always a sloppy imitation of the original function.
Evolution has focussed very tightly on specializiation within a given organism.
Although you could make an argument that evolution virtualizes over time. Body parts and brain areas originally evolved for one purpose often end up getting used to do something else as the organism's role in the ecology changes.
this is why the opponents of SETI are so rabid to shut it down
Or maybe they are dying of cancer.
Who knows why someone might think SETI is a gross waste of our global computational resource? Perhaps they hate science, but maybe it's a far more wholesome reason.
To me moral choices are decisions for which the ends don't justify the means.
Hitler may have been on to something with Eugenics. Artificially eliminating certain genetic mutations from our DNA by restricting who is allowed to breed may result in a long term benefit for humanity (hypothetically)
However, regardless of its ends, the means of Eugenics are unacceptable in a moral society so we draw a line in the sand there. For stealing, on the other hand, sometimes the ends do justify the means. A starving child stealing a loaf of bread from a rich bakery, for example, can be strongly argued as justified. You'd be hard pressed to describe that scenario as "morally wrong" to anyone.
So you don't believe stealing is a matter of morality? Then why does the government regulate ownership? Because people have realized that stealing is morally wrong and unacceptable. People have a moral right to retain their property without interference.
No, people have realized that society cannot exist in its current form without protected ownership. Morality has nothing to do with it, it's pragmatism.
The amount of time and effort spent in turning an average Joe on the street into a flight certified astronaut is probably a bit staggering, especially when you factor in all the costs training an washing out the 99.99% of people who apply and don't end up going for one reason or another.
Dollarwise, those astronauts that set foot on the orbiter on launch day are some of the most expensive people in history.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of everyone spending all afternoon typing out the same pro/anti Warming,US,Oil,Bush arguments, we all just go re-read the last global warming thread, and spend the time we've saved doing some kind of service job (washing dishes, etc) and donate that money to our favorite charity.
We would earn millions.
Whether a wiring job eventually deteriorates or not is up to you, not the setup you've chosen. If you have the kind of personality and drive to keep it clean, you will, no matter what setup you use.
There is no magic bullet arrangement of cables and velcro that is immune to entropy.
Chamberlin did not "stand up to Hitler"
As I recall, Chamblerin was folding like a wet mattress.
*Churchill* stood up to Hitler.
For the RIAA, this is about far more than money. This is about control.
It's about control.... to enable them to make more money.
I know this is slashdot but let's keep things in a reasonable perspective. The RIAA is about money, not control for control's sake.
That's the government's job.
As much as you know about war, you're pretty naive about WWII.
The Russians won in WWII. We were just racing to get to Berlin before they did.
Bad idea!
If the point is for security, I don't buy it. There must be ways to reconstruct the content after it disappears.
If the point is for saving paper, I don't buy it. no paper that's been in my hands for more than 30 seconds is going to fit back into the paper tray!
So what's the point?
Poker chips, also, are currency in a game. Like ISK's, they have an exchange rate with real dollars that is not determined by law, or a government.
Yet it is not legal to steal them from another person. I assure you that if I went to a casino and was caught grabbing someone else's chips, I would very quickly find myself in some kind of significant legal turmoil.
It may not end up coming to pass in this particular instance, but it is inevitable that, eventually, some virtual environment's currency will end up being protected by real world law.
The issue will be determined by how many people care, because if enough people care about something, it ends up in the law books.
Wonder if any of the large PC vendors are paying attention, When was the last time Dell or HP sold 1 million+ Windows boxes in one shot?
I'm sure that the marketing guru's at Dell are aware that if they lowered prices they would sell more units.
In fact, I used to play this game called Lemonade on my Apple II and I noticed the same curious phenomenon.
Let's give this guy some credit. He clearly has some degree if competence if he's selected to showboat the app at a major presentation, at least enough to know that you need to train, or at least test, a voice recognition demo.
A far more likely scenario, in my mind, is that he trained and tested it 100 times and got it working nearly flawlessly, but in a different room and with a different setup. In fact he may have overtrained it. Programs like this can behave very badly when they end up overfitting the data.
On the day in question he may have had a different mic and the acoustics were certainly different and the program went whacko.
Adding to this poster's excellent comments:
The bottleneck in the transmission it the optic nerve, not the retina. Because of this, the retina does an immense amount of pre-processing and filtering before the information is even dispatched to your brain.
What this article describes is akin to gauging the speed of transmission by assuming a bitmap file is sent through the tubes, when really it's a jpeg compressed version of the bitmap.
These computer analogies to brain function are interesting, and inspire the imagination, but they are frequently grossly misleading, or just plain incorrect.
The primary result of advances in military technology in the last 50 years has been a drastic reduction in the number of people killed. A primary goal of military R&D is to apply force to the specific location with as little collateral damage as possible and it's worked wonders. As much as it sucks to hear about casualties on both sides of the Iraq war, consider how few people are actually dying, relative to blood baths in the past like the world wars and Vietnam.
It is meaningless to talk about brains and clock speed. The brain's speed varies wildly depending on the complexity of the operations and how well they fit into the brain's underlying functional architecture.
For simple addition tasks, an "operation" can take seconds.
For calculating the kinetics of arm motion needed to juggle 5 balls, there aren't even any "operations" to clock the speed of. It's just a continuous dynamical system.
There are so many unfounded or incorrect assumptions in this post that I'm forced to comment.
A synapse is not a FLOP. Dendrites are computational devices in themselves, and a synaptic activation at one point along the dendritic branch will affect how a synaptic activation elsewhere affects the soma. Also, when neurons fire, the spikes propagate backwards down the dendrite to allow the synapses to learn. Simulating this to even a crude degree of accuracy requires a compartmental model of the dendritic tree as a series of compartments. The equations involved in doing this are expensive to say the least.
The computer needed to do this at a brain level would probably be about the size of the moon.
And even if you built such a thing, you still wouldn't understand how it works, it would just be an equally mysterious human intelligence implemented in a moon sized computer. Also, we are nowwhere near understanding the anatomy of the brain to a degree that would permit us to make our moon-sized replication.
So really, reproducing the function of the brain is going to come from an understanding of its principles of organization and function, not from a piecemeal replication at a cellular level. There are substantially complicated bits of brain function that can be replicated with a single Dell desktop if you abstract yourself away from the neural implementation.
The point being, these comparisons between number of synapses and CPU's as a metric of us simulating a brain are uninformative and terribly misleading.
Although I have to say from a selfish perspective, for the degree to which ideas like this excite public interest and generate funding in my field of research, knock yourself out.
I hate Microsoft as much as the next card carrying slashdot reader but I'm glad they're doing this. I'm sure they have a profit motive of some kind, but this funding scheme can't help but to improve the state of education.
I have to wonder what kind of robots these are that cost so much money however. Robots like this should cost about $100 -$300 tops.
It's all well and good that the slashdot readership is so well informed on the licensing issue, but if the general public isn't, we're screwed.
The slip up in this article isn't just a sign of crappy reporting, it's a sign that this purchase-a-license idea is permeating into the general public which is scary as hell. I don't care what the law says right now, if people start thinking in terms of licenses, the laws will eventually change to reflect that new idea. The RIAA will propose the legislation through their congress monkeys and it'll pass without a whimper.
I think there's also a tendency for the average guy on the street to feel proud that he's on top of some of these issues, so he'd be eager to jump to this licensing mindset because it's the "way things are going". People are excited by change itself, without understanding the implications through. I can easily imagine my uncle, who is pushing 70 but loves to talk about the digital age, with wide-eyed enthusiasm about this change to a license-based media system.
Normally I would agree with you. A great deal of crappy research gets hyped up because of an inappropriate analogy to biology... but this isn't one of them.
Stopping "spam" is almost exactly the problem that our immune system has to deal with. It has to go through reams of data (i.e. every cell in your body) and figure out what is junk and what isn't, and it does this by learning through exposure positive and negative examples. It's not perfect either, sometimes it goes berzerk, producing false positives (autoimmune disorders).
There's a great deal to be learned from our immune system for the sake of solving the spam problem. Don't be so quick to dismiss it.... this time.
Not that the internet isn't useful, changed the world, etc, but this guy's gimmick is only indicative of the power of the internet to spread fads. It might work a second time for someone else, and possibly even a third time, but this kind of thing is basically a one-trick pony.
It's the pet rock all over again.
And that guy got more than a crummy farmhouse for his gimmick.
The brain as a virtual machine argument is somewhat off base. It has processing modules that are highly dedicated to particular tasks and, when destroyed, those capabilities are wiped out. Partial recovery can occur but it takes years of retraining and is always a sloppy imitation of the original function.
Evolution has focussed very tightly on specializiation within a given organism.
Although you could make an argument that evolution virtualizes over time. Body parts and brain areas originally evolved for one purpose often end up getting used to do something else as the organism's role in the ecology changes.
this is why the opponents of SETI are so rabid to shut it down
Or maybe they are dying of cancer.
Who knows why someone might think SETI is a gross waste of our global computational resource? Perhaps they hate science, but maybe it's a far more wholesome reason.
Well, what would you consider a moral choice?
To me moral choices are decisions for which the ends don't justify the means.
Hitler may have been on to something with Eugenics. Artificially eliminating certain genetic mutations from our DNA by restricting who is allowed to breed may result in a long term benefit for humanity (hypothetically)
However, regardless of its ends, the means of Eugenics are unacceptable in a moral society so we draw a line in the sand there.
For stealing, on the other hand, sometimes the ends do justify the means. A starving child stealing a loaf of bread from a rich bakery, for example, can be strongly argued as justified. You'd be hard pressed to describe that scenario as "morally wrong" to anyone.
So you don't believe stealing is a matter of morality? Then why does the government regulate ownership? Because people have realized that stealing is morally wrong and unacceptable. People have a moral right to retain their property without interference.
No, people have realized that society cannot exist in its current form without protected ownership. Morality has nothing to do with it, it's pragmatism.
First prize... is a 12 cylinder BMW
Second prize... is a hundred thousand dollars
Third prize... we steal your code
ABC
A Always
B Be
C Coding!
I'm sure the people who've effectively lost their vision would have posted similar praise before the problems began.
People are cheap.
Trained and capable astronauts are not.
The amount of time and effort spent in turning an average Joe on the street into a flight certified astronaut is probably a bit staggering, especially when you factor in all the costs training an washing out the 99.99% of people who apply and don't end up going for one reason or another.
Dollarwise, those astronauts that set foot on the orbiter on launch day are some of the most expensive people in history.
I have no idea how you could get from the one statement to the other.