Ah but sir, you err. It is a materialistic viewpoint but it is neither modern nor scientific. It accepts as axiomatic fact that existence in any appreciable sense ends contrary to the robust debate that exists in the cosmology community that says we don't know. That first acceptance pushes it outside of the realm of science and in to dogma. Which makes it a belief with as much validity as any two bit theogague's interpretation of the heavenly choirs.
The idea of quantum immortality has been around for some time, but I don't think it could really be considered a mainstream scientific view until we at least know whether Many-Worlds is the correct interpretation of QM. Even if true, the fact that existence would end in all but the most improbable worlds would still hold. I'll admit after thinking about this post that the uncertainty is worth more acknowledgement than I would have given it before.
You should be careful, your dualistic interpretation of consciousness is showing. By saying mind is linked to the physical brain you are already implying a disconnection between the physical brain and the non-physical mind. If you were to accept the mind as a structural feature that arises from the configuration of matter known as a brain, the remaining difficulties regarding the continuity of consciousness vanish. We use that approximation everyday. I assume you have a consciousness similar to mine because you possess a configuration of matter between your ears that is no doubt similar to my own, at least in some higher order description.
I don't have a dualistic interpretation of consciousness, I'm making use of dualistic language for the sake of convenience, in much the same way it's convenient to refer to "heat" rather than "the average vibration rates of a bunch of molecules". I thought I made it pretty clear that I consider the mind a labeling for certain physical processes of the brain. That doesn't mean said processes can't be replicated or approximated elsewhere, as you note yourself. But I'll stop using the word "mind" to avoid any confusion.
The continuity of consciousness derives from consciousness being a structural component of the brain. Any configuration of particles that is the same as my own will have the same consciousness. Asserting otherwise is to leap headlong into the crevasse of dualistic thinking.
I think my problem with this idea is more semantic than conceptual, in that "consciousness" is a convenient labeling rather than an exact property. I don't think a consciousness can really be said to be the same structure from one second to the next (so in a sense I'm always "dying and being replaced by a clone with my memories"), but there is a direct evolutionary relationship between past and present brain-states, and said relationship is what I would call a singular consciousness. A version of myself that came together spontaneously or even as a result of similar developmental processes elsewhere wouldn't be influenced by said chain of brain-states, which is why I wouldn't consider it part of "my" consciousness, even if it were functionally identical. It's just a labeling difference as to whether one assigns the identity of a consciousness based on its momentary state or its entire worldline through time.
Also, presumably it would be impossible to conclusively identify two brain-states as exactly identical due to quantum uncertainty, but one could just get around that by using an approximate definition of "identical".
If you don't think that our consciousness can continue on even after our perceived death is a transcendent idea, than I suggest you consider what it means to " punch through the pasteboard mask." If you don't think that perceiving a means to eternal consciousness and moving beyond the short-term view of death is a transcendental thought, then we have no basis of communication in this particular conversation. The ideas I've posted are clearly continuations of transcendent themes
I'm tired of this constant internet trope that the matter of existence is solved and after we die thats all there is.
It's not really an "Internet trope" so much as the normal modern scientific materialist viewpoint.
That regularly repeated idea is as much a matter of faith as a heaven populated by buxom virgins waiting on you hand and foot unto eternity.
Not really. It's not an absolute certainty, because those don't exist (ironically definitive statement), but it seems the most likely explanation of what happens at death. The brain is clearly linked to the phenomenon of "mind" as shown by vast amounts of evidence, and in fact the mind appears to be wholly dependent on the brain. There is no evidence that the mind can exist outside the physical substrate of the brain, although theoretically it should by possible to transfer or recreate it in a different physical substrate that has the same structure.
Our CURRENT understanding of physics and thermodynamics allows for the possibility of the recombination of matter to form this very existence again at some time in the very distant future.
If by this existence you mean this planet and it's people, it's technically true that due to quantum uncertainty it would technically be possible for our world to be recreated exactly as it is now, memories and all, by random chance, but it is also vastly improbable. As in, has little chance of happening before the heat death of the universe. At least under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics- under the Everett-DeWitt "Many-Worlds" version it might be more reasonable, but I lack the technical knowledge to say for sure.
I find it interesting that you're not advocating dualism per se, just a materialistic version of reincarnation that would be no different from creating a clone of someone and somehow copying over their memories. I don't think having a doppelganger far in the future is really most people's conception of an "afterlife", though- for one thing, it still takes place in the same physical universe, and there's no continuity between the two beings. (If you're deriving this from Nietzsche's concept of the eternal recurrence, it's my understanding that it was more of a philosophical illustration, not a serious scientific theory)
Given a long enough time frame the probability of any allowable combination of matter occurring approaches 1. Denying the possibility of some existence after death denies the observed universe and is far less scientific a position than its proponents pretend.
I think the question here would be whether it's really the same existence, as the original consciousness would have no bearing on the recreated one aside from coincidental similarity in your scenario.
So stop it with this fatalistic nihilism you dopes.
Why? Said "fatalistic nihilism", as you label the reasonable idea that once our bodies stop functioning our consciousness ceases permanently (reasonable given that our consciousness can be made to cease temporarily by something as minor as a knock on the head) seems like the best explanation at present. And who are you calling a dope, dummy?
Just because the superstitions of the past were wrong doesn't mean some of the transcendent ideas of humanity are by extension wrong.
You do realize you haven't actually proposed anything actually transcendent, right? This universe being a computer simulation and our consciousnesses being allowed to exist in another part of the simulation after "death" would be closer.
And in the event that a many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics is an appropriate framework:
The only branches of existence we as individuals will be aware of are those wherein we are conscious. If there exists a probability that we can remain conscious in some fashion it follows that the only worlds we will be aware of are the ones in which we are conscious. The
I fail to see what any of that has to do with not using a condom, if people *are* having sex outside of marriage and don't intend to have children. Presumably because you never remotely addressed it.
After all, going from a deficit of $459 billion to 1.4 TRILLION sure is a good thing right?
If the alternative was going through another Great Depression, then I'd have to say yes, it was likely worth it. It's hard to bring down the national debt if there's no economy left to tax. I think the bailout and stimulus could have in many instances been done in ways that were more helpful to individual homeowners, more punitive towards those who caused the crash (it's only recently that officials have started talking about doing something regarding the credit rating agencies, who gave ridiculous AAA ratings to securities full of bad loans), and more efficient in general, but overall they were necessary steps.
Your other points are beyond the time I have to respond at the moment. I don't disagree with them entirely, but they seem to betray a disturbingly simplistic view of events (How many tens of thousands of civilians would have to be killed by our "liberation" before it was no longer worth it, for instance? Keeping in mind that 9/11 was about 3,000 people, and Iraq is a much smaller country than the US...)
No matter in how much detail you examine the hardware of a computer, you can tell nothing about it until you turn it on, that is until it becomes alive so to speak. The basic performance characteristics of a computer are not determined by hardware, but by software. Software is not subject to the usual laws of physics, such for example gravity. Because software is not a material object, it can be transmitted at the speed of light and can be endlessly copied. Even if computer hardware could be made as complex as the human brain, it would still have to be programmed.
You're being silly. Stop being silly. If you examine the hard drive platters of a computer in the correct way, you can indeed see the encoding of the software. If you similarly studied the rest of the hardware in enough detail, you would be able to understand how the software interacts with the hardware (assuming you're able to grasp that the PC is supposed to be hooked to a power source). This would be difficult, but is indeed possible, and similar things have been done in real-world reverse engineering.
In the same way, I see no reason in principle that the brain can't by understood completely by a fine-grained enough understanding of all its physical components and how they interact. Which is easier said than done, given the complexity of the brain, but we're talking general principles here.
"Software", and "information" are useful abstract grouping concepts, but that doesn't make them magic. Information has to have some representation in the physical world (whether it be in the neural patterns of a human, a stone tablet, etc) otherwise it can't be said to exist.
The Bible characterizes a person as being essentially a living spirit or soul, living in a physical body. It tells us that someday, after we die physically, the software of the soul will be loaded into a new more capable body which lives forever.
Interestingly, you have something in common with proponents of strong AI and mind uploading in this, in that you consider the mind and consciousness to be information, and hence transferrable to substrates other than the original body. The difference being that they don't posit a substrate "outside of the physical world", which is almost literally a meaningless phrase unless you can describe it more fully.
We have to take all this on faith at the present time
Who's this "we" you speak of? Not to put too fine a point on it, but some of us like having actual reasons for the things we think, which is pretty much the exact opposite of faith. (Although in practice, people who take things on faith generally do have reasons for their beliefs, just not very good ones from the point of view of rationality [i.e. "believing X makes me feel better about the universe, whether or not it's true"] )
Satellite signals are beamed all over the country, they are not the same as cars, more like data.
Imagine if you had your Wireless network set up, and your next door neighbor uses a Wireless cracking program to crack your WPA key, and then uses it to surf for porn and other stuff, that your Internet account gets accused of doing. Would you get upset at your neighbor for hacking your Wireless network, or just let him/her get all of the free Internet and you foot the bill and the responsibility?
This is also a bad analogy. If your neighbor is just passively decrypting the signals your router is already broadcasting due to your own browsing, you could make the argument that it's on you to use a stronger version of the encryption if you're going to be beaming electromagnetic waves into his house and don't want them deciphered. But once he actively hacks into your router and uses it to browse himself, he's actually depriving you of something. His activity counts toward your bandwidth cap, decreases the available bandwidth if you're using it at the same time, puts an extra load on your equipment, and depending on the model may cause the router to configure itself to connect better to his PC, potentially degrading the signal quality to your own devices. Plus, as you said, he might do something illegal using your connection. In character if not scope, it would be like hacking into one of Dish Network's satellites and changing its orbit so you get a better signal. Which isn't what's under discussion.
As it see it, actual consciousness requires a model of the internal world as well as the external, which means the "data structure" you mentioned would have to contain a simplified model of itself, changes is which could be analyzed and acted upon in much the same way as external data (and which analysis would then go into the data structure to be analyzed, as well as the analysis of the analysis, etc., with enough simplifications and limits at each level to prevent an infinite recursive loop). I would argue that this type of feedback loop is at the root of what we experience as "consciousness". Humans' awareness of our own cognitive processes is very high-level, abtract, and limited, but it is there.
Building a true AI seems fairly simple in concept:
Step 1: Create a program that is good at noticing, categorizing and analyzing patterns in arbitrary data that is fed to it, can create some form of output, and will notice when this changes the data it is receiving.
Step 2: Once it's up and running being given encyclopedias, TV feeds, etc., have it devote half its resources to analyzing *itself* as the data set.
Step 3: Profit?? (Or possibly just time-travelling killer Cyborgs with Austrian accents)
Of course, this is nothing new, and the hard part is doing that first step.
Amazon gets around this very simply, by having two options, one for "I own it", one for "not interested". Netflix should do the same.
And I heartily agree with knocking the entire series out of recommendations for one genuine "not interested". I ordered the first few Battle Angel Alita mangas a while and then lost interest in it, and now my Amazon recommendations are filled with the entire 20-something volume series.
The coffee thing is a myth. It was a valid case. The coffee was FAR too hot (no one expects to be hospitalized for spilling coffee on themselves), and internal memos showed they knew this.
It's not a myth. No purveyor of coffee expects the customers to dump it in their lap. Coffee is made by boiling water. If you boiled a pot of water on the stove and then poured it on your lap, you wouldn't expect to end up in the hospital?
If the woman had injured her mouth from sipping it, she might have had a (non-stupid) case.
Another question: do you like playing games like GTA? If the answer is yes then you probably would love to be/are a total asshole in real life.
You're right, of course. The reason I play Mario games is that I want to be a fat Italian plumber who can't for the life of him get his girlfriend to put out in any way other than giving him baked goods, and who drowns his sorrows in "special" mushrooms that make him feel like a big man.
I've known about this game for years, thanks to Mystery Videogame Theater 3000. I can't read Seanbaby's review at the moment due to being at work, but my guess is the one just linked is better.
It's pretty hilarious. Then again, Mario 2 featured a transexual dinosaur who ejected eggs from its snout which you then threw back at ver, so I suppose Snacks'n Jaxson isn't all that beyond the pale for videogame weirdness.
Bluetooth in fact, according to this. (Then again, he's a marketing head, he might not be the most knowledgeble person technically...)
I'm guessing if they really are using triangulation to determine the controller position, there would have to be another sensor point in the console iteself in addition to the two external ones.
I hope you actually used capitalization in the email, otherwise you probably just reinforced whatever perception Ebert may have of gamers. Honestly people, Shift key. It's right there. It's three times the size of regular keys. USE IT!
That said, Ebert seems pretty reasonable from what I've read in his print reviews. I'm sure if someone were to sit him down in front of, say, Planescape: Torment for a while, he would admit that in some cases game can have artistic and cultural value. I'd say his current position is the result of someone who's only vaguely familiar with game as "those loud thing kids play where they blow stuff up" (but considering that that's about the same description as many of the movies he reviews, one would think he could give the medium as a whole the benefit of the doubt)
No, he's correct. Computer frames are being created by the computer, so unless motion-blur is applied to the frames (which is rather resource-intensive) they'll be perfectly clear within the limitations of the display device (antialiasing aside). Motion picture frames come by their motion blur inherently, from the extended amount of time the light is hitting the film (or image sensor, for digital video cameras). By comparison, computer-rendered images without motion blur are equivalent to still frames taken with a shutter speed of infinity. The game isn't "flashing" it's drawing frames.
Really, higher frame rates for motion pictures would be nice as well, especially for things like fast pans. The individual frames just wouldn't be as blurry.
As to where the upper bound is past which there's no advantage even for fast pans and the like, it varies from person to person, but I'm pretty sure it's generally higher than 60 FPS.
My cousin, on the other hand, between growing up wrestling us (his cousins, older than him by five years) and playing violent games is a serious bully at school, and whenever he sees an ad for a game with guns his instant reaction is "that game looks awesome!
But are you sure the bullying is due to wrestling and video games, and not just him being big for his age/a jerk/etc.? I mean, you yourself just said you grew up similarly, and yet never became a bully.
I'm not saying video games can't have some emotional or cognitive impact- pretty much any medium can, but I haven't seen much to indicate a large causal relationship between fictional and real violence. Certainly not enough to consider the regulation of it a public safety, rather than a public standards/obscenity matter.
I would imagine that's part of the point. He's like Spiderman/Peter Parker's evil twin, as it were. They're probably playing up that angle in the movie.
From the article, it makes it sound as though the brightness is going to adjust automatically, e.g. as you move from a light area to a dark one it will look dark for a moment until your virtual "eyes" adjust. Couldn't this cause pretty serious gameplay issues, especially if it's used in multiplayer in the future? It wouldn't be much fun to be shot at by an enemy you can't see while waiting for the brightness adjustment to catch up, or by one outside a window who's obscured by the glare of sunlight...
Re:Omegathon?
on
PAX05 Writeup
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Atari Combat on the 2600. More info on their forums here, including pictures.
Yes. (Including the Citadel sequence which some didn't like but I thought was an excellently done "falling action" epilogue after the proper climax of the battle with multiple striders). You mind saying what you didn't like about the game? Personally, I consider it to be the best single-player FPS ever made. The only way I can see for someone to really hate it is if they don't like, y'know, shooting things. Which is generally considered something of a given when you buy a First Person Shooter.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah but sir, you err. It is a materialistic viewpoint but it is neither modern nor scientific. It accepts as axiomatic fact that existence in any appreciable sense ends contrary to the robust debate that exists in the cosmology community that says we don't know. That first acceptance pushes it outside of the realm of science and in to dogma. Which makes it a belief with as much validity as any two bit theogague's interpretation of the heavenly choirs.
The idea of quantum immortality has been around for some time, but I don't think it could really be considered a mainstream scientific view until we at least know whether Many-Worlds is the correct interpretation of QM. Even if true, the fact that existence would end in all but the most improbable worlds would still hold. I'll admit after thinking about this post that the uncertainty is worth more acknowledgement than I would have given it before.
You should be careful, your dualistic interpretation of consciousness is showing. By saying mind is linked to the physical brain you are already implying a disconnection between the physical brain and the non-physical mind. If you were to accept the mind as a structural feature that arises from the configuration of matter known as a brain, the remaining difficulties regarding the continuity of consciousness vanish. We use that approximation everyday. I assume you have a consciousness similar to mine because you possess a configuration of matter between your ears that is no doubt similar to my own, at least in some higher order description.
I don't have a dualistic interpretation of consciousness, I'm making use of dualistic language for the sake of convenience, in much the same way it's convenient to refer to "heat" rather than "the average vibration rates of a bunch of molecules". I thought I made it pretty clear that I consider the mind a labeling for certain physical processes of the brain. That doesn't mean said processes can't be replicated or approximated elsewhere, as you note yourself. But I'll stop using the word "mind" to avoid any confusion.
The continuity of consciousness derives from consciousness being a structural component of the brain. Any configuration of particles that is the same as my own will have the same consciousness. Asserting otherwise is to leap headlong into the crevasse of dualistic thinking.
I think my problem with this idea is more semantic than conceptual, in that "consciousness" is a convenient labeling rather than an exact property. I don't think a consciousness can really be said to be the same structure from one second to the next (so in a sense I'm always "dying and being replaced by a clone with my memories"), but there is a direct evolutionary relationship between past and present brain-states, and said relationship is what I would call a singular consciousness. A version of myself that came together spontaneously or even as a result of similar developmental processes elsewhere wouldn't be influenced by said chain of brain-states, which is why I wouldn't consider it part of "my" consciousness, even if it were functionally identical. It's just a labeling difference as to whether one assigns the identity of a consciousness based on its momentary state or its entire worldline through time.
Also, presumably it would be impossible to conclusively identify two brain-states as exactly identical due to quantum uncertainty, but one could just get around that by using an approximate definition of "identical".
If you don't think that our consciousness can continue on even after our perceived death is a transcendent idea, than I suggest you consider what it means to " punch through the pasteboard mask." If you don't think that perceiving a means to eternal consciousness and moving beyond the short-term view of death is a transcendental thought, then we have no basis of communication in this particular conversation. The ideas I've posted are clearly continuations of transcendent themes
I'm tired of this constant internet trope that the matter of existence is solved and after we die thats all there is.
It's not really an "Internet trope" so much as the normal modern scientific materialist viewpoint.
That regularly repeated idea is as much a matter of faith as a heaven populated by buxom virgins waiting on you hand and foot unto eternity.
Not really. It's not an absolute certainty, because those don't exist (ironically definitive statement), but it seems the most likely explanation of what happens at death. The brain is clearly linked to the phenomenon of "mind" as shown by vast amounts of evidence, and in fact the mind appears to be wholly dependent on the brain. There is no evidence that the mind can exist outside the physical substrate of the brain, although theoretically it should by possible to transfer or recreate it in a different physical substrate that has the same structure.
Our CURRENT understanding of physics and thermodynamics allows for the possibility of the recombination of matter to form this very existence again at some time in the very distant future.
If by this existence you mean this planet and it's people, it's technically true that due to quantum uncertainty it would technically be possible for our world to be recreated exactly as it is now, memories and all, by random chance, but it is also vastly improbable. As in, has little chance of happening before the heat death of the universe. At least under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics- under the Everett-DeWitt "Many-Worlds" version it might be more reasonable, but I lack the technical knowledge to say for sure.
I find it interesting that you're not advocating dualism per se, just a materialistic version of reincarnation that would be no different from creating a clone of someone and somehow copying over their memories. I don't think having a doppelganger far in the future is really most people's conception of an "afterlife", though- for one thing, it still takes place in the same physical universe, and there's no continuity between the two beings. (If you're deriving this from Nietzsche's concept of the eternal recurrence, it's my understanding that it was more of a philosophical illustration, not a serious scientific theory)
Given a long enough time frame the probability of any allowable combination of matter occurring approaches 1. Denying the possibility of some existence after death denies the observed universe and is far less scientific a position than its proponents pretend.
I think the question here would be whether it's really the same existence, as the original consciousness would have no bearing on the recreated one aside from coincidental similarity in your scenario.
So stop it with this fatalistic nihilism you dopes.
Why? Said "fatalistic nihilism", as you label the reasonable idea that once our bodies stop functioning our consciousness ceases permanently (reasonable given that our consciousness can be made to cease temporarily by something as minor as a knock on the head) seems like the best explanation at present. And who are you calling a dope, dummy?
Just because the superstitions of the past were wrong doesn't mean some of the transcendent ideas of humanity are by extension wrong.
You do realize you haven't actually proposed anything actually transcendent, right? This universe being a computer simulation and our consciousnesses being allowed to exist in another part of the simulation after "death" would be closer.
And in the event that a many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics is an appropriate framework: The only branches of existence we as individuals will be aware of are those wherein we are conscious. If there exists a probability that we can remain conscious in some fashion it follows that the only worlds we will be aware of are the ones in which we are conscious. The
I fail to see what any of that has to do with not using a condom, if people *are* having sex outside of marriage and don't intend to have children. Presumably because you never remotely addressed it.
After all, going from a deficit of $459 billion to 1.4 TRILLION sure is a good thing right?
If the alternative was going through another Great Depression, then I'd have to say yes, it was likely worth it. It's hard to bring down the national debt if there's no economy left to tax. I think the bailout and stimulus could have in many instances been done in ways that were more helpful to individual homeowners, more punitive towards those who caused the crash (it's only recently that officials have started talking about doing something regarding the credit rating agencies, who gave ridiculous AAA ratings to securities full of bad loans), and more efficient in general, but overall they were necessary steps.
Your other points are beyond the time I have to respond at the moment. I don't disagree with them entirely, but they seem to betray a disturbingly simplistic view of events (How many tens of thousands of civilians would have to be killed by our "liberation" before it was no longer worth it, for instance? Keeping in mind that 9/11 was about 3,000 people, and Iraq is a much smaller country than the US...)
We don't need a wholesale takeover by a government monopoly
Why, we certainly don't! Just curious, who exactly proposed this "wholesale takover" you speak of?
I'll wait.
No matter in how much detail you examine the hardware of a computer, you can tell nothing about it until you turn it on, that is until it becomes alive so to speak. The basic performance characteristics of a computer are not determined by hardware, but by software. Software is not subject to the usual laws of physics, such for example gravity. Because software is not a material object, it can be transmitted at the speed of light and can be endlessly copied. Even if computer hardware could be made as complex as the human brain, it would still have to be programmed.
You're being silly. Stop being silly. If you examine the hard drive platters of a computer in the correct way, you can indeed see the encoding of the software. If you similarly studied the rest of the hardware in enough detail, you would be able to understand how the software interacts with the hardware (assuming you're able to grasp that the PC is supposed to be hooked to a power source). This would be difficult, but is indeed possible, and similar things have been done in real-world reverse engineering.
In the same way, I see no reason in principle that the brain can't by understood completely by a fine-grained enough understanding of all its physical components and how they interact. Which is easier said than done, given the complexity of the brain, but we're talking general principles here.
"Software", and "information" are useful abstract grouping concepts, but that doesn't make them magic. Information has to have some representation in the physical world (whether it be in the neural patterns of a human, a stone tablet, etc) otherwise it can't be said to exist.
The Bible characterizes a person as being essentially a living spirit or soul, living in a physical body. It tells us that someday, after we die physically, the software of the soul will be loaded into a new more capable body which lives forever.
Interestingly, you have something in common with proponents of strong AI and mind uploading in this, in that you consider the mind and consciousness to be information, and hence transferrable to substrates other than the original body. The difference being that they don't posit a substrate "outside of the physical world", which is almost literally a meaningless phrase unless you can describe it more fully.
We have to take all this on faith at the present time
Who's this "we" you speak of? Not to put too fine a point on it, but some of us like having actual reasons for the things we think, which is pretty much the exact opposite of faith. (Although in practice, people who take things on faith generally do have reasons for their beliefs, just not very good ones from the point of view of rationality [i.e. "believing X makes me feel better about the universe, whether or not it's true"] )
That is a wrong analogy.
Satellite signals are beamed all over the country, they are not the same as cars, more like data.
Imagine if you had your Wireless network set up, and your next door neighbor uses a Wireless cracking program to crack your WPA key, and then uses it to surf for porn and other stuff, that your Internet account gets accused of doing. Would you get upset at your neighbor for hacking your Wireless network, or just let him/her get all of the free Internet and you foot the bill and the responsibility?
This is also a bad analogy. If your neighbor is just passively decrypting the signals your router is already broadcasting due to your own browsing, you could make the argument that it's on you to use a stronger version of the encryption if you're going to be beaming electromagnetic waves into his house and don't want them deciphered. But once he actively hacks into your router and uses it to browse himself, he's actually depriving you of something. His activity counts toward your bandwidth cap, decreases the available bandwidth if you're using it at the same time, puts an extra load on your equipment, and depending on the model may cause the router to configure itself to connect better to his PC, potentially degrading the signal quality to your own devices. Plus, as you said, he might do something illegal using your connection. In character if not scope, it would be like hacking into one of Dish Network's satellites and changing its orbit so you get a better signal. Which isn't what's under discussion.
As it see it, actual consciousness requires a model of the internal world as well as the external, which means the "data structure" you mentioned would have to contain a simplified model of itself, changes is which could be analyzed and acted upon in much the same way as external data (and which analysis would then go into the data structure to be analyzed, as well as the analysis of the analysis, etc., with enough simplifications and limits at each level to prevent an infinite recursive loop). I would argue that this type of feedback loop is at the root of what we experience as "consciousness". Humans' awareness of our own cognitive processes is very high-level, abtract, and limited, but it is there.
Building a true AI seems fairly simple in concept:
Step 1: Create a program that is good at noticing, categorizing and analyzing patterns in arbitrary data that is fed to it, can create some form of output, and will notice when this changes the data it is receiving.
Step 2: Once it's up and running being given encyclopedias, TV feeds, etc., have it devote half its resources to analyzing *itself* as the data set.
Step 3: Profit?? (Or possibly just time-travelling killer Cyborgs with Austrian accents)
Of course, this is nothing new, and the hard part is doing that first step.
Dark Star, I believe.
No, it's remote-controlled, something both the summary and most of the posters in this thread seem to be missing.
For instance, the greatest NES platformer ever (DuckTales)
Notice: You will be (rightfully) killed by hordes of Mario 3 fans in 3... 2... 1...
Amazon gets around this very simply, by having two options, one for "I own it", one for "not interested". Netflix should do the same.
And I heartily agree with knocking the entire series out of recommendations for one genuine "not interested". I ordered the first few Battle Angel Alita mangas a while and then lost interest in it, and now my Amazon recommendations are filled with the entire 20-something volume series.
The coffee thing is a myth. It was a valid case. The coffee was FAR too hot (no one expects to be hospitalized for spilling coffee on themselves), and internal memos showed they knew this.
It's not a myth. No purveyor of coffee expects the customers to dump it in their lap. Coffee is made by boiling water. If you boiled a pot of water on the stove and then poured it on your lap, you wouldn't expect to end up in the hospital?
If the woman had injured her mouth from sipping it, she might have had a (non-stupid) case.
Another question: do you like playing games like GTA? If the answer is yes then you probably would love to be/are a total asshole in real life.
You're right, of course. The reason I play Mario games is that I want to be a fat Italian plumber who can't for the life of him get his girlfriend to put out in any way other than giving him baked goods, and who drowns his sorrows in "special" mushrooms that make him feel like a big man.
To phrase it more succinctly, you're an idiot.
I've known about this game for years, thanks to Mystery Videogame Theater 3000. I can't read Seanbaby's review at the moment due to being at work, but my guess is the one just linked is better.
It's pretty hilarious. Then again, Mario 2 featured a transexual dinosaur who ejected eggs from its snout which you then threw back at ver, so I suppose Snacks'n Jaxson isn't all that beyond the pale for videogame weirdness.
Digital photography is fun and all but the quality just does not yet match medium format.
I know a few Canon 1Ds Mark II users who would take issue with that statement.
Granted, that's a camera with a MSRP of $8,000.
I don't think they ever stated whether it used RF
Bluetooth in fact, according to this. (Then again, he's a marketing head, he might not be the most knowledgeble person technically...)
I'm guessing if they really are using triangulation to determine the controller position, there would have to be another sensor point in the console iteself in addition to the two external ones.
I hope you actually used capitalization in the email, otherwise you probably just reinforced whatever perception Ebert may have of gamers. Honestly people, Shift key. It's right there. It's three times the size of regular keys. USE IT!
That said, Ebert seems pretty reasonable from what I've read in his print reviews. I'm sure if someone were to sit him down in front of, say, Planescape: Torment for a while, he would admit that in some cases game can have artistic and cultural value. I'd say his current position is the result of someone who's only vaguely familiar with game as "those loud thing kids play where they blow stuff up" (but considering that that's about the same description as many of the movies he reviews, one would think he could give the medium as a whole the benefit of the doubt)
Linux is a highly maintainable car [...]
Nonsense, everyone knows Linux is a tank.
No, he's correct. Computer frames are being created by the computer, so unless motion-blur is applied to the frames (which is rather resource-intensive) they'll be perfectly clear within the limitations of the display device (antialiasing aside). Motion picture frames come by their motion blur inherently, from the extended amount of time the light is hitting the film (or image sensor, for digital video cameras). By comparison, computer-rendered images without motion blur are equivalent to still frames taken with a shutter speed of infinity. The game isn't "flashing" it's drawing frames.
Really, higher frame rates for motion pictures would be nice as well, especially for things like fast pans. The individual frames just wouldn't be as blurry.
As to where the upper bound is past which there's no advantage even for fast pans and the like, it varies from person to person, but I'm pretty sure it's generally higher than 60 FPS.
So bah, yourself!
My cousin, on the other hand, between growing up wrestling us (his cousins, older than him by five years) and playing violent games is a serious bully at school, and whenever he sees an ad for a game with guns his instant reaction is "that game looks awesome!
But are you sure the bullying is due to wrestling and video games, and not just him being big for his age/a jerk/etc.? I mean, you yourself just said you grew up similarly, and yet never became a bully.
I'm not saying video games can't have some emotional or cognitive impact- pretty much any medium can, but I haven't seen much to indicate a large causal relationship between fictional and real violence. Certainly not enough to consider the regulation of it a public safety, rather than a public standards/obscenity matter.
I would imagine that's part of the point. He's like Spiderman/Peter Parker's evil twin, as it were. They're probably playing up that angle in the movie.
From the article, it makes it sound as though the brightness is going to adjust automatically, e.g. as you move from a light area to a dark one it will look dark for a moment until your virtual "eyes" adjust. Couldn't this cause pretty serious gameplay issues, especially if it's used in multiplayer in the future? It wouldn't be much fun to be shot at by an enemy you can't see while waiting for the brightness adjustment to catch up, or by one outside a window who's obscured by the glare of sunlight...
Atari Combat on the 2600. More info on their forums here, including pictures.
Did anyone actually finish HL2?
Yes. (Including the Citadel sequence which some didn't like but I thought was an excellently done "falling action" epilogue after the proper climax of the battle with multiple striders). You mind saying what you didn't like about the game? Personally, I consider it to be the best single-player FPS ever made. The only way I can see for someone to really hate it is if they don't like, y'know, shooting things. Which is generally considered something of a given when you buy a First Person Shooter.