Ever use a PC? Do you like how any there is not way to be sure as where your applications really come from? Let's see how well that works out.
So you would prefer that Windows and OS X refuse to run any applications not specifically approved by Microsoft or Apple? That would do wonders for innovation.
But if you're good at, say, chess, you're screwed no matter what your personality is like.
I suspect the causation runs the other way. If you're socially skilled and thus have the choice of getting laid or poring over the Karo-Cann Defense, which are you going to choose?
the express card slot is slightly less worthless... I can think of only a single purpose for it (that is not duplicated by the firewire port, firewire does nearly everything for expansion purposes), a 3G card
eSATA is the other big one. It's faster than FireWire (even FW800) and on OS X supports SMART monitoring so you can get warnings before your drive fails.
Their "power to the people" is just a demagogic smokescreen to hide the fact that, like any right-wing political party, they really mean " power to the more powerful people/croporations ", which has been the norm for unevolved societies throughout History.
Take a look at who's handing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to politically connected corporations these days. Hint: not libertarians.
A better question is why is there so little competition in SMS prices - is there collusion to avoid competition?
Yes. The marginal cost is very close to zero, so when all the telecoms raise prices nearly simultaneously as they did a few years ago, collusion is by far the most likely explanation.
"It's a real problem right now and it's a loophole that people are using, and we're getting cut out of that model," Denis Dyack, president of developer Silicon Knights, said at a gaming conference in the spring.
Depressingly, that would be far less harmful than lots of things government does. (And the private sector as well). Throwing money in a hole doesn't actually destroy wealth; the money outside the hole becomes proportionally more valuable. The only loss is the cost to operate the hole and print the money for it.
The democrats owe their political power to people who believe in science.
Once Democrats start talking about economics they're as deep into magical thinking as the Republicans. And there are quite a few rational conservatives.
What I'm saying is that the "mid tower" you describe *likely* doesn't differ significantly from the iMac
The main difference is that it could be much cheaper with the same profit margin. The problem with the iMac and AIO desktops in general is that they're more expensive than buying the equivalent pieces individually, so if you don't place a large positive value on the integration then it's not a good deal.
Given that #2 and #3 are substantially less useful in online poker
Physical tells are unavailable, but they're overrated anyway. Identifying the betting patterns of your opponents (and making your own patterns not obvious) is more valuable and works just as well online.
the experience of consciousness cannot be a result of "software", nor "hardware" -- it cannot be the result of atoms, molecules, and electrons. Isn't that obvious to anyone else?
Monopolies inevitably become excessive. Free markets are just another buzzword for leave me alone, I want to suck as much out of something as I can without regulation or pesky rules to get in my way.
Established corporations hate free markets. That means competition and choice, including the choice to not give them your money. Much better to bribe governments to block competitors, either directly with legally enforced monopolies, or indirectly with webs of regulations that stifle newcomers.
If you want to see an actual free market, look at microprocessors. Mostly unregulated and effectively a duopoly between Intel and AMD, and yet we keep getting better and cheaper products.
"Smartphones". If they're so damn smart, why can't I use them to their full potential?
My understanding is that this is primarily due to the marketroids at the carriers who are terrified that you might be able to achieve useful functionality without paying them repeatedly. Look at the dustups over "tethering"; it's ridiculous that that's even considered a separate feature, when it's just running a proxy server on a machine that has a wireless connection. Bandwidth caps or per-byte charges are fine; arbitrarily disallowing specific applications is not.
SSD storage, and rotation-free storage in general. It is not living up to expectations or promises
Eh, the promises were "fast and expensive", which they seem to be.
All true. But for most normal consumer uses, USB2 is "good enough". I wish Apple had put more effort into it; perhaps we could be running FW3200 today and be rid of slow USB drives and eSATA hacks. But as it stands now, FireWire will be reduced to a few obscure niches once USB3 is widely available.
Machines have deprived millions of people of a decent living under their own control.
Oh good grief. Machines and technology in general are the only reason any of us have a "decent living" in the first place.
The initial promise of machines was that they would free us from the drudgery of work, but all they have done is make us work in boring jobs
As opposed to the hotbed of excitement in subsistence farming? Well, I suppose there's a certain thrill in finding out each week whether or not you're going to starve.
So tell me again about how the Luddites were wrong.
Because your romanticized version of the past never existed.
Moore's law is losing steam. The GHz race is over, and multiple cores have not delivered yet.
The second sentence doesn't imply the first. Moore's Law refers to the density or transistors, not how they translate into performance. We've hit a scaling wall at 4GHz or so, and it's *because* Moore's Law has kept going that everything is multicore now. We can put more transistors on a chip, but we can't increase the clock speed, so the best alternative is to just have more smaller cores. And brains are massively parallel so that architecture is fine for AI; we just need the right algorithms, which admittedly is not an easy task.
This assumes that human consciousness is only software and contains no hardware component (an awfully big assumption).
More specifically, that it contains no hardware that can't be emulated in software. That's really not that big an assumption, because the alternative is literally magic.
Further, our own consciousness may not be digital, meaning that the exact state of consciousness and memory might not be able to be copied exactly (a sort of Heisenberg principle applied biologically).
Reality itself may be digital at the lowest level. If not, with enough bits it should be close enough. Clearly an *exact* duplication isn't necessary; you're pretty much the same you that you were yesterday, even though trillions of trillions of your atoms have been swapped out.
We hardly know what consciousness is, much less if it can be replicated without replicating the physical form encasing it.
it's easier to achieve "success" than if they had the machine do something more free-form... e.g., read a novel and generate a plot summary or, heavens forbid, actually understand real human conversation
Which is insanely difficult, so they're starting with a task that's merely extremely difficult. Why is that a bad thing?
So no video camera to perform text recognition? No speech recognition (IBM afraid of the "wreck a nice beach" vs. "recognize speech" problem tripping up their theatrics?)
Nor will the computer drive itself to the Jeopardy studio, but none of that is relevant to the problem IBM is trying to solve. (In fact, audio input could actually make some questions easier, since that would disambiguate words that have the same spelling and different pronunciations).
Re:Evolution versus artificial modification
on
Cosmetic Neurology
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
it feels like we're cheating evolution
Yes, and that's a good thing. Unless you want nearsighted people to be eaten by bears.
Perhaps evolution could come up with many of these modifications (intelligence/less drowsiness) naturally.
Quite possibly, but I'd rather have them in 20 years instead of 200 million.
Assuming the "rich" software engineers you're referring to made less than $250K last year, they actually got a tax cut from Obama.
This year in nominal dollars, perhaps. But how are the impending multi-trillion dollar deficits going to be repaid? Either substantially higher future taxes, or much higher inflation. Funny how liberals who were (correctly) angered by Bush's financial irresponsibility have now decided that Cheney was right and deficits don't matter.
Libertarians are almost always people who are well off and don't like the idea of helping those who weren't dealt as good a hand as they were.
Oh good, unfounded stereotypes are an excellent way to advance rational discourse. I can play too: liberals are almost always elitist busybodies who think they can run your life better than you can, while distracting you from their power grabs by blaming all problems on people who make slightly more than you do.
Now that the two minutes hate is out of the way: I'm a moderate libertarian. I support capitalism because it usually produces more efficient results with less government intrusion, but I recognize that in its pure form it leaves many people unable to provide for themselves. Therefore I support a safety net to make sure that nobody goes without essentials, and I would prefer to achieve this by giving poor people money directly rather than via dozens of overlapping government programs.
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Ever use a PC? Do you like how any there is not way to be sure as where your applications really come from? Let's see how well that works out.
So you would prefer that Windows and OS X refuse to run any applications not specifically approved by Microsoft or Apple? That would do wonders for innovation.
But if you're good at, say, chess, you're screwed no matter what your personality is like.
I suspect the causation runs the other way. If you're socially skilled and thus have the choice of getting laid or poring over the Karo-Cann Defense, which are you going to choose?
the express card slot is slightly less worthless... I can think of only a single purpose for it (that is not duplicated by the firewire port, firewire does nearly everything for expansion purposes), a 3G card
eSATA is the other big one. It's faster than FireWire (even FW800) and on OS X supports SMART monitoring so you can get warnings before your drive fails.
Their "power to the people" is just a demagogic smokescreen to hide the fact that, like any right-wing political party, they really mean " power to the more powerful people/croporations ", which has been the norm for unevolved societies throughout History.
Take a look at who's handing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to politically connected corporations these days. Hint: not libertarians.
A better question is why is there so little competition in SMS prices - is there collusion to avoid competition?
Yes. The marginal cost is very close to zero, so when all the telecoms raise prices nearly simultaneously as they did a few years ago, collusion is by far the most likely explanation.
"It's a real problem right now and it's a loophole that people are using, and we're getting cut out of that model," Denis Dyack, president of developer Silicon Knights, said at a gaming conference in the spring.
Just wow.
Very interesting theory. It would explain why I feel tacky using a coupon for a free item, but not if it's for 50% off.
Very briefly around 10 years ago, when it was a clear improvement over C++ and hadn't yet been infested by architecture astronauts.
Depressingly, that would be far less harmful than lots of things government does. (And the private sector as well). Throwing money in a hole doesn't actually destroy wealth; the money outside the hole becomes proportionally more valuable. The only loss is the cost to operate the hole and print the money for it.
The democrats owe their political power to people who believe in science.
Once Democrats start talking about economics they're as deep into magical thinking as the Republicans. And there are quite a few rational conservatives.
That is of course false.
What I'm saying is that the "mid tower" you describe *likely* doesn't differ significantly from the iMac
The main difference is that it could be much cheaper with the same profit margin. The problem with the iMac and AIO desktops in general is that they're more expensive than buying the equivalent pieces individually, so if you don't place a large positive value on the integration then it's not a good deal.
Given that #2 and #3 are substantially less useful in online poker
Physical tells are unavailable, but they're overrated anyway. Identifying the betting patterns of your opponents (and making your own patterns not obvious) is more valuable and works just as well online.
the experience of consciousness cannot be a result of "software", nor "hardware" -- it cannot be the result of atoms, molecules, and electrons. Isn't that obvious to anyone else?
Well, it's "obvious" to creationists that DNA is too complex to have arisen without supernatural intervention. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. Even if your theory of extra dimensions is correct, consciousness would still be a result of the interactions of atoms; they'd just be interacting in ways that were previously unknown.
Monopolies inevitably become excessive. Free markets are just another buzzword for leave me alone, I want to suck as much out of something as I can without regulation or pesky rules to get in my way.
Established corporations hate free markets. That means competition and choice, including the choice to not give them your money. Much better to bribe governments to block competitors, either directly with legally enforced monopolies, or indirectly with webs of regulations that stifle newcomers.
If you want to see an actual free market, look at microprocessors. Mostly unregulated and effectively a duopoly between Intel and AMD, and yet we keep getting better and cheaper products.
But even if that never happens, it's still better to choose the party of least corruption
That is generally going to be the party out of power. So it's actually not a bad idea.
"Smartphones". If they're so damn smart, why can't I use them to their full potential?
My understanding is that this is primarily due to the marketroids at the carriers who are terrified that you might be able to achieve useful functionality without paying them repeatedly. Look at the dustups over "tethering"; it's ridiculous that that's even considered a separate feature, when it's just running a proxy server on a machine that has a wireless connection. Bandwidth caps or per-byte charges are fine; arbitrarily disallowing specific applications is not.
SSD storage, and rotation-free storage in general. It is not living up to expectations or promises
Eh, the promises were "fast and expensive", which they seem to be.
All true. But for most normal consumer uses, USB2 is "good enough". I wish Apple had put more effort into it; perhaps we could be running FW3200 today and be rid of slow USB drives and eSATA hacks. But as it stands now, FireWire will be reduced to a few obscure niches once USB3 is widely available.
Machines have deprived millions of people of a decent living under their own control.
Oh good grief. Machines and technology in general are the only reason any of us have a "decent living" in the first place.
The initial promise of machines was that they would free us from the drudgery of work, but all they have done is make us work in boring jobs
As opposed to the hotbed of excitement in subsistence farming? Well, I suppose there's a certain thrill in finding out each week whether or not you're going to starve.
So tell me again about how the Luddites were wrong.
Because your romanticized version of the past never existed.
Moore's law is losing steam. The GHz race is over, and multiple cores have not delivered yet.
The second sentence doesn't imply the first. Moore's Law refers to the density or transistors, not how they translate into performance. We've hit a scaling wall at 4GHz or so, and it's *because* Moore's Law has kept going that everything is multicore now. We can put more transistors on a chip, but we can't increase the clock speed, so the best alternative is to just have more smaller cores. And brains are massively parallel so that architecture is fine for AI; we just need the right algorithms, which admittedly is not an easy task.
This assumes that human consciousness is only software and contains no hardware component (an awfully big assumption).
More specifically, that it contains no hardware that can't be emulated in software. That's really not that big an assumption, because the alternative is literally magic.
Further, our own consciousness may not be digital, meaning that the exact state of consciousness and memory might not be able to be copied exactly (a sort of Heisenberg principle applied biologically).
Reality itself may be digital at the lowest level. If not, with enough bits it should be close enough. Clearly an *exact* duplication isn't necessary; you're pretty much the same you that you were yesterday, even though trillions of trillions of your atoms have been swapped out.
We hardly know what consciousness is, much less if it can be replicated without replicating the physical form encasing it.
So let's find out.
it's easier to achieve "success" than if they had the machine do something more free-form... e.g., read a novel and generate a plot summary or, heavens forbid, actually understand real human conversation
Which is insanely difficult, so they're starting with a task that's merely extremely difficult. Why is that a bad thing?
So no video camera to perform text recognition? No speech recognition (IBM afraid of the "wreck a nice beach" vs. "recognize speech" problem tripping up their theatrics?)
Nor will the computer drive itself to the Jeopardy studio, but none of that is relevant to the problem IBM is trying to solve. (In fact, audio input could actually make some questions easier, since that would disambiguate words that have the same spelling and different pronunciations).
it feels like we're cheating evolution
Yes, and that's a good thing. Unless you want nearsighted people to be eaten by bears.
Perhaps evolution could come up with many of these modifications (intelligence/less drowsiness) naturally.
Quite possibly, but I'd rather have them in 20 years instead of 200 million.
Assuming the "rich" software engineers you're referring to made less than $250K last year, they actually got a tax cut from Obama.
This year in nominal dollars, perhaps. But how are the impending multi-trillion dollar deficits going to be repaid? Either substantially higher future taxes, or much higher inflation. Funny how liberals who were (correctly) angered by Bush's financial irresponsibility have now decided that Cheney was right and deficits don't matter.
Libertarians are almost always people who are well off and don't like the idea of helping those who weren't dealt as good a hand as they were.
Oh good, unfounded stereotypes are an excellent way to advance rational discourse. I can play too: liberals are almost always elitist busybodies who think they can run your life better than you can, while distracting you from their power grabs by blaming all problems on people who make slightly more than you do.
Now that the two minutes hate is out of the way: I'm a moderate libertarian. I support capitalism because it usually produces more efficient results with less government intrusion, but I recognize that in its pure form it leaves many people unable to provide for themselves. Therefore I support a safety net to make sure that nobody goes without essentials, and I would prefer to achieve this by giving poor people money directly rather than via dozens of overlapping government programs.