What if you really are supposed to believe in the Miracle of Transubstantiation, reality be damned? It's just so uncertain.
But what if you implicitly assumed you would never be among the damned, because you're a good/chosen person? And that even if you did some of the same things as bad people, that you would naturally be forgiven? And meanwhile you have the satisfaction of knowing that your enemies, who are inherently bad, will suffer for every grievance against you?
The trick of worshipping a wrathful god is being the kind of person who assumes He always pulls for your side in football matches.
Death wouldn't be so bad if it didn't have to involve every memory you ever had being erased from existence. Written word and other recordings are completely inadequate to compensate for everything that is lost when a person dies.
Facebook taught us that 99.999% of our lives are redundant anyways. We're all living the same life as millions of other people, tweaked ever so slightly, doing all the same things but in slightly different proportions. Moreover, the vast (vast!) majority of what you've ever perceived or known, you have already forgotten anyways.
Grow up. Lots of cars have these already and they have nothing to do with paranoid fantasies. If you object because of the extra cost this would add to your next new car, fine.
Why do you think companies like amazon and paypal would sever their profitable business dealings with wikileaks in the first place? Here's a clue:
The move to Amazon helped WikiLeaks remain online, but that was only the start of the problem. A day later politics entered the picture. Senator Joseph Lieberman is said to have called Amazon on December 1, to complain about their hosting of Wikileaks.
The assumption that Lieberman caused Amazon to boot WikiLeaks comes from a statement the Senator released that said in part, "After reading press reports that Amazon was hosting the Wikileaks website, Committee staff contacted Amazon Tuesday for an explanation."
"[Amazon's] decision to cut off Wikileaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies Wikileaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material. I call on any other company or organization that is hosting
Wikileaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them," Lieberman's statement added.
In any case, no, it does not necessarily follow that businesses should have some right just because people do. Why would they? Businesses aren't people. An obvious example is the right to vote.
Imagine a ( memristor brain | android | doppleganger ) which has no soul *or* consciousness, but which reacts to all stimuli exactly the same as a real human.
Uh, isn't that the nightmare we all had when we were 13? That for all we knew, we were the only "real" person alive, with no way to know that everybody else wasn't some elaborate illusion to make us think we weren't alone? (For that matter, maybe this life is just a dream of mine in another "more real" one?)
It all ultimately comes down to the same question, of how you can know anything "for sure." And the answer is, you can't.
The summary really only promises enhanced speed and efficiency, but after reading the article, I agree with your complaint: "Researchers have suspected for decades that real artificial intelligence can't be done on traditional hardware, with its rigid adherence to Boolean logic and vast separation between memory and processing." Huh?
Now, I have some sympathy for the pragmatic argument that getting good tools into enough hands is the best way to raise the odds of cracking hard problems. Some people will point out (for example) that a modern 3d game like Crysis might have been emulated (at a fraction of real-time speed) 20 years ago, but nobody figured out how, or bothered to do so, (and no, Castle Wolfenstein doesn't count) because hardware limitations made it too cumbersome and only a few parties had the resources to even try.
Even so, claiming it "can't be done" is going too far. People are building conventional computers that simulate neurons on the order of a cat brain, but programming them is the problem.
All those are nearly interchangeable, since power consumption, size, and cost are all tightly related; it doesn't matter anyways, because Moore's law is in its final years. Transistor size is down to 30 nm, and cannot go below about 10 nm in silicon. At best, new materials like graphenemight get down to a nanometer - someday. But none of these proposed transistor materials are anywhere near being manufactured on the scale or cost of silicon. I am not dumb enough to say something will "never" happen, but Moore's law has a specific start date and specific growth rate, and it is increasingly unlikely that any next-generation material will be ready to replace silicon when it peters out.
When I was in college I proposed a research paper exploring the max MHz of CPUs, and my instructor said it was a dumb idea because "they" always figure a way around any barrier. Well, "they" didn't, and clock speed hit a brick wall. Transistor density will do the same, I think within 10 years.
Dilbert coined the term confusopoly for this: "a group of companies with similar products who intentionally confuse customers instead of competing on price."
Obama advanced Elizabeth Warren for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and she has railed against this problem for years: "Today, the big banks churn out page after page of incomprehensible fine print to obscure the cost and risks of checking accounts, credit cards, mortgages and other financial products. The result is that consumers can't make direct product comparisons, markets aren't competitive, and costs are higher."
It's not hard to see the tie between confusopoly and the mortgage meltdown that wrecked the economy, either - and here I include not only under-educated sub-prime borrowers, but bankers creating and selling complex derivatives that were not well understood by ratings agencies, regulators, nor even the bankers themselves.
However, Republicans slammed the bill creating the CFPB as "a government takeover of the economy. The President and Democrats today gave financial regulators the power to create years worth of financial uncertainty, which will only lead to more struggling businesses and fewer jobs." Just as with the Credit Card Reform Act of 2009.
I agree the killing of Alexander Litvinenko was reprehensible, and roughly comparable to killing Bradley Manning overseas without trial if he were to escape the US.
I don't think it's fair to simply assume that. The Soviets never managed to keep it a secret when they were doing those kinds of things (granted it was on a vastly larger scale - at least as practiced in the nations they annexed - making it harder to conceal).
Executing, no. But are there any other nations arresting/kidnapping people from various countries and shipping them to secret prisons around the globe for indefinite incarceration and torture without ever standing trial? It's not a rhetorical question. I can't think of any other nations that do that.
There are also a outcry from surprisingly mainstream figures in the US for the summary murder of Julian Assange. I can't think of any people from other countries who talk that way about US citizens, other than people we call terrorists. So, I'm curious why you say it's universal. Again, not a rhetorical question, what I'm asking for is a example or two of where else this is happening.
There is an obvious precedent here: the Prius. It was sold at a loss for the first few years, but lately has been highly profitable, and they keep making it cheaper to manufacture year after year.
MANY businesses and product lines lose money at first.
General answer: you don't. How would you propose to know anything about the quality of anybody's search results? Did you think you understood google's algorithms before? You didn't.
So it all comes back to: how well does it find things you already know are there, how well does it line up with other (presumably unrelated) engines' results, etc, etc. But it's not like there's an objective answer to the question of what the first hit for "shopping" should be (nor any other search).
Oh, I wasn't claiming cell service rates in the US are any good. I use a tracphone for heaven's sake. Maybe that's why 5GB/mo on a phone sounds like a lot to me. I'm waiting for some Australian to chime in on how his home connection is capped at 5 GB/mo. Now that does sound bad.
Let's do the math, shall we? A basic youtube stream is 1 mbit/s. That's 1/21 of 21 mbit/s, the rate at which the cap lasts 32 minutes. So, 32 * 21 = 672, or a little over 11 hours.
So, you could watch a little over 11 hours of youtube-quality video per month on your phone. Seems pretty reasonable to me. Your expectations may vary.
I think it's more accurate to call them her "twins." That's the natural way to get genetically identical individuals in a sexually reproducing species.
I wonder if optical interconnects couldn't be a great boon to volumetric (3d) chip design. Unlike wires, lasers going different directions can pass right through each other (can't they?) Think about a bunch of people on different levels of a big atrium in a tall hotel, all signalling to each other with lasers. You make a CPU with a hole in the middle which is ringed with optical ports aimed up and down at different angles. Now stack them up (like a roll of Life Savers candy) alternating with ring-shaped heat sinks, and make a vacuum in the center chamber (to eliminate dust and refraction from heated air). With specialized cores following a standardized format, you could easily make a multiprocessor with the right number of cores and different mixes of cores (encryption, GPU, h264 codec, RAM,...) without any changes to silicon or wiring.
Palin's popularity is just an extension of the trend started by Bush - the celebration of naiveté and simplemindedness.
Uh, ever hear of Ronald Reagan? Reagan's presidency actually set more of a precedent because, Unlike G. W. Bush, Reagan's presidency is widely held as being successful, because it coincided with the fall of Communism and the end of a serious recession.
(Actually, I think Obama's administration is likely to benefit the same way, since the timing is good for economic recovery by the end of his first term, even though the government's influence on economics is hugely overstated IMHO.)
And the best part for ISPs is, NAT turns the Internet from its inherent peer-to-peer nature into a client/server architecture where all home users can be relegated to "content consumers" under cover of IP4 address shortages. Score!
If the problem were simply an imbalance between Comcast and L3, then Comcast could demand payment to make up the shortfall. But if, as appears to be the case, Comcast threatens to resolve this by targeting video traffic specifically (which in practice means netflix), then they're in the wrong.
Net Neutrality shouldn't mean giving as much bandwidth to anybody as they want, for free. It should mean not targeting specific packets on the basis of content, including whether they're "video packets" etc.
Sony didn't wait to see if blu-ray took off before putting it in the PS3. They used the PS3 to push blu-ray (despite large short-term losses in doing so) and it was very successful. (Don't forget at the time HD-DVD was a serious threat to blu-ray).
IMHO gaming is the single most compelling application of 3d displays, because games actually have 3d environments that let you change perspective. I enjoy driving simulators which would greatly benefit from 3d.
I also want to see consoles support 1080p (not just the resolution, but the refresh rate of 60 full frames per second), plus antialiasing. My XBox 360, with 720p resolution and no antialising, looks too jagged, especially when playing split-screen games.
I take issue with that, and with Schneier's analysis for the same reason - it assumes hurting us is the objective, rather than a means to some end. Is their goal really just to make us spend money and feel bad inside? No, just as those are not our endgoals in conducting psy-ops and disrupting their sources of funding.
So If we spend a billion dollars to counter a threat that only cost them $10K, that doesn't mean they've "won" anything? Not unless that furthers their objective of reducing US intervention in the middle east, or whatever it is they want. (Just as smashing all opposition in Iraq doesn't mean we've "won" anything of value to us). And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying their ultimate objectives are acceptable to us, either. Only that it's a classic error in human nature to assume the enemy is motivated purely by vindictive sentiment, when the real issue is you're blocking them from getting something they want. At least then you can start addressing the real issues.
Slashdot Mirror
But what if you implicitly assumed you would never be among the damned, because you're a good/chosen person? And that even if you did some of the same things as bad people, that you would naturally be forgiven? And meanwhile you have the satisfaction of knowing that your enemies, who are inherently bad, will suffer for every grievance against you?
The trick of worshipping a wrathful god is being the kind of person who assumes He always pulls for your side in football matches.
Facebook taught us that 99.999% of our lives are redundant anyways. We're all living the same life as millions of other people, tweaked ever so slightly, doing all the same things but in slightly different proportions. Moreover, the vast (vast!) majority of what you've ever perceived or known, you have already forgotten anyways.
Have a nice day! :)
Grow up. Lots of cars have these already and they have nothing to do with paranoid fantasies. If you object because of the extra cost this would add to your next new car, fine.
In any case, no, it does not necessarily follow that businesses should have some right just because people do. Why would they? Businesses aren't people. An obvious example is the right to vote.
Uh, isn't that the nightmare we all had when we were 13? That for all we knew, we were the only "real" person alive, with no way to know that everybody else wasn't some elaborate illusion to make us think we weren't alone? (For that matter, maybe this life is just a dream of mine in another "more real" one?)
It all ultimately comes down to the same question, of how you can know anything "for sure." And the answer is, you can't.
Now, I have some sympathy for the pragmatic argument that getting good tools into enough hands is the best way to raise the odds of cracking hard problems. Some people will point out (for example) that a modern 3d game like Crysis might have been emulated (at a fraction of real-time speed) 20 years ago, but nobody figured out how, or bothered to do so, (and no, Castle Wolfenstein doesn't count) because hardware limitations made it too cumbersome and only a few parties had the resources to even try.
Even so, claiming it "can't be done" is going too far. People are building conventional computers that simulate neurons on the order of a cat brain, but programming them is the problem.
When I was in college I proposed a research paper exploring the max MHz of CPUs, and my instructor said it was a dumb idea because "they" always figure a way around any barrier. Well, "they" didn't, and clock speed hit a brick wall. Transistor density will do the same, I think within 10 years.
Obama advanced Elizabeth Warren for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and she has railed against this problem for years: "Today, the big banks churn out page after page of incomprehensible fine print to obscure the cost and risks of checking accounts, credit cards, mortgages and other financial products. The result is that consumers can't make direct product comparisons, markets aren't competitive, and costs are higher."
It's not hard to see the tie between confusopoly and the mortgage meltdown that wrecked the economy, either - and here I include not only under-educated sub-prime borrowers, but bankers creating and selling complex derivatives that were not well understood by ratings agencies, regulators, nor even the bankers themselves.
However, Republicans slammed the bill creating the CFPB as "a government takeover of the economy. The President and Democrats today gave financial regulators the power to create years worth of financial uncertainty, which will only lead to more struggling businesses and fewer jobs." Just as with the Credit Card Reform Act of 2009.
I agree the killing of Alexander Litvinenko was reprehensible, and roughly comparable to killing Bradley Manning overseas without trial if he were to escape the US.
I don't think it's fair to simply assume that. The Soviets never managed to keep it a secret when they were doing those kinds of things (granted it was on a vastly larger scale - at least as practiced in the nations they annexed - making it harder to conceal).
There are also a outcry from surprisingly mainstream figures in the US for the summary murder of Julian Assange. I can't think of any people from other countries who talk that way about US citizens, other than people we call terrorists. So, I'm curious why you say it's universal. Again, not a rhetorical question, what I'm asking for is a example or two of where else this is happening.
MANY businesses and product lines lose money at first.
General answer: you don't. How would you propose to know anything about the quality of anybody's search results? Did you think you understood google's algorithms before? You didn't.
So it all comes back to: how well does it find things you already know are there, how well does it line up with other (presumably unrelated) engines' results, etc, etc. But it's not like there's an objective answer to the question of what the first hit for "shopping" should be (nor any other search).
Elegant ideas are catchy, but they never hold up for long in the real world.
Yeah Hillary, don't just go around giving spying orders and expecting to stay above it all. You never know when the truth might come out.
Oh, I wasn't claiming cell service rates in the US are any good. I use a tracphone for heaven's sake. Maybe that's why 5GB/mo on a phone sounds like a lot to me. I'm waiting for some Australian to chime in on how his home connection is capped at 5 GB/mo. Now that does sound bad.
Let's do the math, shall we? A basic youtube stream is 1 mbit/s. That's 1/21 of 21 mbit/s, the rate at which the cap lasts 32 minutes. So, 32 * 21 = 672, or a little over 11 hours.
So, you could watch a little over 11 hours of youtube-quality video per month on your phone. Seems pretty reasonable to me. Your expectations may vary.
I think it's more accurate to call them her "twins." That's the natural way to get genetically identical individuals in a sexually reproducing species.
Not a tetris fan, I see?
I wonder if optical interconnects couldn't be a great boon to volumetric (3d) chip design. Unlike wires, lasers going different directions can pass right through each other (can't they?) Think about a bunch of people on different levels of a big atrium in a tall hotel, all signalling to each other with lasers. You make a CPU with a hole in the middle which is ringed with optical ports aimed up and down at different angles. Now stack them up (like a roll of Life Savers candy) alternating with ring-shaped heat sinks, and make a vacuum in the center chamber (to eliminate dust and refraction from heated air). With specialized cores following a standardized format, you could easily make a multiprocessor with the right number of cores and different mixes of cores (encryption, GPU, h264 codec, RAM, ...) without any changes to silicon or wiring.
Uh, ever hear of Ronald Reagan? Reagan's presidency actually set more of a precedent because, Unlike G. W. Bush, Reagan's presidency is widely held as being successful, because it coincided with the fall of Communism and the end of a serious recession.
(Actually, I think Obama's administration is likely to benefit the same way, since the timing is good for economic recovery by the end of his first term, even though the government's influence on economics is hugely overstated IMHO.)
And the best part for ISPs is, NAT turns the Internet from its inherent peer-to-peer nature into a client/server architecture where all home users can be relegated to "content consumers" under cover of IP4 address shortages. Score!
Net Neutrality shouldn't mean giving as much bandwidth to anybody as they want, for free. It should mean not targeting specific packets on the basis of content, including whether they're "video packets" etc.
IMHO gaming is the single most compelling application of 3d displays, because games actually have 3d environments that let you change perspective. I enjoy driving simulators which would greatly benefit from 3d.
I also want to see consoles support 1080p (not just the resolution, but the refresh rate of 60 full frames per second), plus antialiasing. My XBox 360, with 720p resolution and no antialising, looks too jagged, especially when playing split-screen games.
I take issue with that, and with Schneier's analysis for the same reason - it assumes hurting us is the objective, rather than a means to some end. Is their goal really just to make us spend money and feel bad inside? No, just as those are not our endgoals in conducting psy-ops and disrupting their sources of funding.
So If we spend a billion dollars to counter a threat that only cost them $10K, that doesn't mean they've "won" anything? Not unless that furthers their objective of reducing US intervention in the middle east, or whatever it is they want. (Just as smashing all opposition in Iraq doesn't mean we've "won" anything of value to us). And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying their ultimate objectives are acceptable to us, either. Only that it's a classic error in human nature to assume the enemy is motivated purely by vindictive sentiment, when the real issue is you're blocking them from getting something they want. At least then you can start addressing the real issues.