RoadRunner (provided by Time Warner in Austin, TX) requires you to purchase basic cable in addition to your cable Internet service. I'm sure AT&T will soon follow suit.
it's known that, contrary to popular belief, fingerprints are not unique.
Who exactly has proven this? Fingerprint development is a stochastic process, and will almost certainly result in no two people having any fingerprints that are the same. Besides the normal measured features (such as overall pattern, islands, dead ends, etc.), depth of the features can be measured as well, adding an entirely new dimension to the possible fingerprint "keyspace".
The reason it might be possible to appear to detect duplicate fingerprints is due to technological limitations. Because processing power and storage space used to be extraordinarily expensive, fingerprint databases stored relatively few distinct features for identifying a print. Now it would be easily possible to increase the number of features measured so that the probability of finding a "duplicate" print would be so close to nil as to be utterly negligible.
Even now, it is certainly less than someone stealing your credit card.;)
Do you run around telling people "Check out the new Moving Pictures Experts Group - Layer 3 player I got!!"
No, of course not. "OV player" or "Vorbis player" would work just as well.
(slightly OT) I do have problems with stupid product names, though. How could you be a linux advocate and try to steer people (especially large organizations) to a distro called "Phat Linux". The sites for many of these distros are so goofy and unprofessional, it's no wonder the general public doesn't go for more open source software.
Microsoft could easily make a DMCA case out of this. If you delete your copy of Windows and give away the computer, you must have intended to violate the EULA. Since the EULA could conceivably be considered a copy-protection device (even though all it does is ask you not to copy the software!), you'd be in immediate violation of the law.
And we all know the government/big corporation position on being "guilty until proven innocent". Just look at Dmitri... or anyone who has been audited by the Infernal Revenue Stealers.
I always assembled my own systems because I get better components. Now you have to do it to keep from getting arrested if you decide to change operating systems.;)
At Disney World, they use the shape of your first two fingers' bones to ID you for season passes. You stick your fingers, V-shaped, into a little scanner for verification. Slick, eh? But what happens if you don't remember to keep your hands inside the car at all times? Hope you weren't planning on coming back.
I still like retinal scanners better. Modern ones detect the slight jiggle and changes in pupil size that are only found in a living eyeball, so no hi-res photo will do. If you combined this with a retinal scan, an extremely hi-res movie of an eyeball wouldn't work, either. The only way to get around it would be to kidnap the person and force them to hold their eye up to the scanner. With traditional security, if you wanted access you didn't have you could still kidnap the person and force them to reveal their passwords/security cards, so there really isn't a big difference there in personal safety.
And what about people with no eyeballs? There are plenty of ways to identify someone biometrically. Perhaps a quick X-ray shot of someone's facial bone structure that would uniquely identify them? After all, you could lose finger or go blind, but you don't see many people walking around without facial bones. In the horrible event that yours were traumatically injured, you could go to an identity verification place and have the ID system recalibrated to your new facial structure. This is probably the most insecure point in the process, but with accurate records, modern data storage and retrieval, and DNA analysis, security concerns can be kept to a minimum.
Personally, I'm waiting for the Mark of the Beast! Team Satan: Go 666!
There must be some kind of numerical limit to the total phase space, but there seems to be a complication. The original message points out a lot of subtle things such as firing rates and intensities that are effected by neurotransmitters. (All this also assumes that both of those are discretized and not analog values. If firing rate and intensity are analog, all this would seem pointless.)
Let's scale it back, though. Let's ignore the subtle stuff, and trim the number of neurons back to something more manageable, like 9. Of course, a neural net is based on the connections, not the individual neurons, so with 9 neurons, there are 36 connections. Since each CONNECTION can be "on or off", you now have 2^36 (or 68719476736) possible states. [I realize in a true neural net that each neuron is not connected to all the others. This is just an upper-bound.] Here's where the fun starts. Add ONE neuron to the mix and connect it with the others. You now have 45 connections, which yields 3.518437208883e+13 possible states. This is 512 times the previous number of states. Adding an 11th neuron increases the number of states by 1024 times to 3.602879701896e+16. You can see where this is headed. Imagine the numbers you'll get with a trillion neurons. It would seem that if a thought is just one of the possible phase space states that can exist in your brain, you'll gain an unbelievable number of new possibilities just by adding a neuron. Or two. The number of connections available with One Trillion neurons is 4.999999999995e+23. The possible phase space states is 2 ^ 4.999999999995e+23. THAT is a big number. Now add just ONE neuron to that... 2 ^ 5.000000000005e+23.
I am not a mathematician. I had to use Pascal's Triangle to come up with the numbers until I figured out an easy way to get the relationships. (To get the number of connections, subtract one from the number of neurons, multiply that by.5, then multiply that by the original number.)
Now that we have the "upper-bound", we can reduce it a little. If each neuron connected to only 10000 others, you still have 5.000000000005e+15 possible connections, and thus 2 ^ 5.000000000005e+15 possible states. That still seems like plenty to work with... especially once you take the firing rates and intensities back into consideration. Someone else please feel free to post something taking those into account.;) I've taxed my sad mathematical abilities far too much for one day.
Hopefully, one day we will learn how to "transcend" biology... What if your mind didn't exist in your brain, but was "connected" in the very fabric of space and time, free to grow without bound? Every nanometer increase would be a tremendous increase in capacity, phase space, and processing power. Eventually, a mind (or a collection of minds) would grow to encompass the entirity of existence and become god-like.
Or maybe we'll wipe ourselves out next week and never realize our full potential. Who knows?
bytesmythe
p.s. If I've really bungled the numbers, feel free to let me know. But please, be nice.;)
Civilization (as we practice it) seems to have effectively ended our biological evolution, but perhaps it hasn't. A really interesting book that touches on this subject is called _The Age of Spiritual Machines_ by Ray Kurzweil. It basically extends Moore's Law (you know... processing power doubles every 18 months) back in time and instead of limiting it to just talking about digital computer circuits, it uses it to talk about information processing in general. Thus, he explains, it has been going on since the beginning of the universe. We are now at the point in the exponential curve where it will very shortly skyrocket. You think the past 20 years have been a big deal? Wait for the NEXT 20!:) The idea is that evolution is not the evolution of a biological organism, but of self-replicative information processors. (Those two things coincide so far, but we have the power to side step the "biological" bit and make evolution go faster than before, so we'll keep Moore's law going by making ourselves evolve more and more quickly.) In THAT sense, we're far more advanced because of civilization. We may even transcend physical bodies in the future. (As Scott Adams mentions in _The Dilbert Future_, the holodeck will be society's last invention.:)
But, seen from a strictly biological perspective, we're screwing ourselves over. We are helping "less fit" organisms remain in the gene pool. Of course, there are really two reasons we notice the strange "new" diseases in the human population. 1) There are more people, so you're more likely to run across any given disease, and 2) people are living so much longer, it increases their chances of developing a disease. We wouldn't be getting inheritable diseases if they weren't already in our genetic makeup. They've been passed along for hundreds of thousands of years, but a couple of hundred years ago, most people wouldn't have lived long enough to actually come down with these diseases!
And we won't even get into the resistant bacteria strains we're creating by using anti-bacterial EVERYthing. Antibiotics in soap? Feeding them to cattle, farm-raised fish, and other animals raised for food? Toothpaste? (Yes... Colgate Total has Triclosan in it, but you have to read the ingredients to find that out.) This, along with bad medical practices involving antibiotic medication, is going to make us vulnerable. Maybe soon we will develop the technology to "escape" our physical bodies and live "in a computer". Then we'd have to worry about the ExplorerZip virus... Instead of going to the doctor, you'd just update your copy of VirusScan. And of course, when someone you don't like moves onto your disk partition... well, You have to get PartitionMagic to move, and hope it doesn't crash in mid-copy or you're really screwed. Hope you made a backup!:)
I realize this post is funny, so no one flame me for not having a sense of humor. I just wanted to mention that it demonstrates an idea that is still very common in "popular" psychology.
Quote from original: "storing history and what-not, never deleting any experiences"
A great many people still think the brain is a giant recorder that takes down every bit of information and records it for posterity. If you can't remember, hypnosis will bring it back with perfect clarity!
This is completely wrong, and the idea was discarded some time ago. The human memory is notoriously unreliable. (Eyewitness testimony at a trial is the LAST thing you want.) Fingerprints don't lie very easily, but your mind plays very neat tricks on you. (Misleading questions such as "What color glasses was the robber wearing?" will prompt a confident response of something like "brown", even if the robber was not wearing glasses at all.) There are lots of very interesting books about how easy it is to trick the brain into remembering something that never happened.
The brain doesn't store information like a computer. It's a neural net... information all just gets chunked in together, some weights get reset, and it's in there. When you want to remember something, your brain recreates the scene BASED ON the information it has. It doesn't store everything; just kind of a "template", and fills in the details. Sometimes it has a more complete template than others, so the memories are more "accurate", but they are still largely recreated.
Just for fun, I'll mention something else that is semi-related. A neural net is non-addressable, so, you can't have a "pointer" to a chunk of memory and move it around. Information is holistically contained in the brain. A "state" of the neural net can not be "saved off" and copied back into place like an operating system on a hard drive. Thus, your consciousness, as a state of the neural net that is your brain, has no place to "go" when you are unconscious. That pattern (and thereby your consciousness) simply ceases to exist. When you are totally unconscious, you are as good as dead [from a "consciousness" point of view. This is not to make ANY metaphysical or biological claims.]. Your consciousness has to be recreated when you wake up again. So, the "you" that wakes up in the morning isn't exactly the same as the "you" that went to sleep the night before. Your long term memory links you to the person you were the day before, so you FEEL like you're the same.
Hope that brightens your day.;)
The original post also mentions that "the higher lifeforms chose to just kill us after a certain amount of time, rather than write a stack pop function". I think they TRIED to write one, but it's just buggy. There are some null pointers in the stack, and when you hit one, you're toast. "Blue Screen of Death" never had such a literal meaning.;) (Too bad we weren't implemented with linux instead, so only that process would dump core instead of taking us with it!)
Slashdot Mirror
RoadRunner (provided by Time Warner in Austin, TX) requires you to purchase basic cable in addition to your cable Internet service. I'm sure AT&T will soon follow suit.
Then are particle physicists violating the DMCA? Won't be long before the WIPO is trying to shut down CERN, Fermi, et al.
Who exactly has proven this? Fingerprint development is a stochastic process, and will almost certainly result in no two people having any fingerprints that are the same. Besides the normal measured features (such as overall pattern, islands, dead ends, etc.), depth of the features can be measured as well, adding an entirely new dimension to the possible fingerprint "keyspace".
The reason it might be possible to appear to detect duplicate fingerprints is due to technological limitations. Because processing power and storage space used to be extraordinarily expensive, fingerprint databases stored relatively few distinct features for identifying a print. Now it would be easily possible to increase the number of features measured so that the probability of finding a "duplicate" print would be so close to nil as to be utterly negligible.
Even now, it is certainly less than someone stealing your credit card. ;)
bytesmythe
Do you run around telling people "Check out the new Moving Pictures Experts Group - Layer 3 player I got!!"
No, of course not. "OV player" or "Vorbis player" would work just as well.
(slightly OT)
I do have problems with stupid product names, though. How could you be a linux advocate and try to steer people (especially large organizations) to a distro called "Phat Linux". The sites for many of these distros are so goofy and unprofessional, it's no wonder the general public doesn't go for more open source software.
bytesmythe
The Jesux page was last updated in 1999... Apparently it isn't coming back, either.
bytesmythe
Microsoft could easily make a DMCA case out of this. If you delete your copy of Windows and give away the computer, you must have intended to violate the EULA. Since the EULA could conceivably be considered a copy-protection device (even though all it does is ask you not to copy the software!), you'd be in immediate violation of the law.
;)
And we all know the government/big corporation position on being "guilty until proven innocent". Just look at Dmitri... or anyone who has been audited by the Infernal Revenue Stealers.
I always assembled my own systems because I get better components. Now you have to do it to keep from getting arrested if you decide to change operating systems.
-- bytesmythe
At Disney World, they use the shape of your first two fingers' bones to ID you for season passes. You stick your fingers, V-shaped, into a little scanner for verification. Slick, eh? But what happens if you don't remember to keep your hands inside the car at all times? Hope you weren't planning on coming back.
I still like retinal scanners better. Modern ones detect the slight jiggle and changes in pupil size that are only found in a living eyeball, so no hi-res photo will do. If you combined this with a retinal scan, an extremely hi-res movie of an eyeball wouldn't work, either. The only way to get around it would be to kidnap the person and force them to hold their eye up to the scanner. With traditional security, if you wanted access you didn't have you could still kidnap the person and force them to reveal their passwords/security cards, so there really isn't a big difference there in personal safety.
And what about people with no eyeballs? There are plenty of ways to identify someone biometrically. Perhaps a quick X-ray shot of someone's facial bone structure that would uniquely identify them? After all, you could lose finger or go blind, but you don't see many people walking around without facial bones. In the horrible event that yours were traumatically injured, you could go to an identity verification place and have the ID system recalibrated to your new facial structure. This is probably the most insecure point in the process, but with accurate records, modern data storage and retrieval, and DNA analysis, security concerns can be kept to a minimum.
Personally, I'm waiting for the Mark of the Beast! Team Satan: Go 666!
bytesmythe
Proud Member of Satan's Secret Agents
Now I'm wondering something...
.5, then multiply that by the original number.)
;) I've taxed my sad mathematical abilities far too much for one day.
;)
There must be some kind of numerical limit to the total phase space, but there seems to be a complication. The original message points out a lot of subtle things such as firing rates and intensities that are effected by neurotransmitters. (All this also assumes that both of those are discretized and not analog values. If firing rate and intensity are analog, all this would seem pointless.)
Let's scale it back, though. Let's ignore the subtle stuff, and trim the number of neurons back to something more manageable, like 9. Of course, a neural net is based on the connections, not the individual neurons, so with 9 neurons, there are 36 connections. Since each CONNECTION can be "on or off", you now have 2^36 (or 68719476736) possible states. [I realize in a true neural net that each neuron is not connected to all the others. This is just an upper-bound.] Here's where the fun starts. Add ONE neuron to the mix and connect it with the others. You now have 45 connections, which yields 3.518437208883e+13 possible states. This is 512 times the previous number of states. Adding an 11th neuron increases the number of states by 1024 times to 3.602879701896e+16. You can see where this is headed. Imagine the numbers you'll get with a trillion neurons. It would seem that if a thought is just one of the possible phase space states that can exist in your brain, you'll gain an unbelievable number of new possibilities just by adding a neuron. Or two. The number of connections available with One Trillion neurons is 4.999999999995e+23. The possible phase space states is 2 ^ 4.999999999995e+23. THAT is a big number. Now add just ONE neuron to that... 2 ^ 5.000000000005e+23.
I am not a mathematician. I had to use Pascal's Triangle to come up with the numbers until I figured out an easy way to get the relationships. (To get the number of connections, subtract one from the number of neurons, multiply that by
Now that we have the "upper-bound", we can reduce it a little. If each neuron connected to only 10000 others, you still have 5.000000000005e+15 possible connections, and thus 2 ^ 5.000000000005e+15 possible states. That still seems like plenty to work with... especially once you take the firing rates and intensities back into consideration. Someone else please feel free to post something taking those into account.
Hopefully, one day we will learn how to "transcend" biology... What if your mind didn't exist in your brain, but was "connected" in the very fabric of space and time, free to grow without bound? Every nanometer increase would be a tremendous increase in capacity, phase space, and processing power. Eventually, a mind (or a collection of minds) would grow to encompass the entirity of existence and become god-like.
Or maybe we'll wipe ourselves out next week and never realize our full potential. Who knows?
bytesmythe
p.s. If I've really bungled the numbers, feel free to let me know. But please, be nice.
Civilization (as we practice it) seems to have effectively ended our biological evolution, but perhaps it hasn't. A really interesting book that touches on this subject is called _The Age of Spiritual Machines_ by Ray Kurzweil. It basically extends Moore's Law (you know... processing power doubles every 18 months) back in time and instead of limiting it to just talking about digital computer circuits, it uses it to talk about information processing in general. Thus, he explains, it has been going on since the beginning of the universe. We are now at the point in the exponential curve where it will very shortly skyrocket. You think the past 20 years have been a big deal? Wait for the NEXT 20! :) The idea is that evolution is not the evolution of a biological organism, but of self-replicative information processors. (Those two things coincide so far, but we have the power to side step the "biological" bit and make evolution go faster than before, so we'll keep Moore's law going by making ourselves evolve more and more quickly.) In THAT sense, we're far more advanced because of civilization. We may even transcend physical bodies in the future. (As Scott Adams mentions in _The Dilbert Future_, the holodeck will be society's last invention. :)
:)
But, seen from a strictly biological perspective, we're screwing ourselves over. We are helping "less fit" organisms remain in the gene pool. Of course, there are really two reasons we notice the strange "new" diseases in the human population. 1) There are more people, so you're more likely to run across any given disease, and 2) people are living so much longer, it increases their chances of developing a disease. We wouldn't be getting inheritable diseases if they weren't already in our genetic makeup. They've been passed along for hundreds of thousands of years, but a couple of hundred years ago, most people wouldn't have lived long enough to actually come down with these diseases!
And we won't even get into the resistant bacteria strains we're creating by using anti-bacterial EVERYthing. Antibiotics in soap? Feeding them to cattle, farm-raised fish, and other animals raised for food? Toothpaste? (Yes... Colgate Total has Triclosan in it, but you have to read the ingredients to find that out.) This, along with bad medical practices involving antibiotic medication, is going to make us vulnerable. Maybe soon we will develop the technology to "escape" our physical bodies and live "in a computer". Then we'd have to worry about the ExplorerZip virus... Instead of going to the doctor, you'd just update your copy of VirusScan. And of course, when someone you don't like moves onto your disk partition... well, You have to get PartitionMagic to move, and hope it doesn't crash in mid-copy or you're really screwed. Hope you made a backup!
bytesmythe
I realize this post is funny, so no one flame me for not having a sense of humor. I just wanted to mention that it demonstrates an idea that is still very common in "popular" psychology.
;)
;) (Too bad we weren't implemented with linux instead, so only that process would dump core instead of taking us with it!)
Quote from original:
"storing history and what-not, never deleting any experiences"
A great many people still think the brain is a giant recorder that takes down every bit of information and records it for posterity. If you can't remember, hypnosis will bring it back with perfect clarity!
This is completely wrong, and the idea was discarded some time ago. The human memory is notoriously unreliable. (Eyewitness testimony at a trial is the LAST thing you want.) Fingerprints don't lie very easily, but your mind plays very neat tricks on you. (Misleading questions such as "What color glasses was the robber wearing?" will prompt a confident response of something like "brown", even if the robber was not wearing glasses at all.) There are lots of very interesting books about how easy it is to trick the brain into remembering something that never happened.
The brain doesn't store information like a computer. It's a neural net... information all just gets chunked in together, some weights get reset, and it's in there. When you want to remember something, your brain recreates the scene BASED ON the information it has. It doesn't store everything; just kind of a "template", and fills in the details. Sometimes it has a more complete template than others, so the memories are more "accurate", but they are still largely recreated.
Just for fun, I'll mention something else that is semi-related. A neural net is non-addressable, so, you can't have a "pointer" to a chunk of memory and move it around. Information is holistically contained in the brain. A "state" of the neural net can not be "saved off" and copied back into place like an operating system on a hard drive. Thus, your consciousness, as a state of the neural net that is your brain, has no place to "go" when you are unconscious. That pattern (and thereby your consciousness) simply ceases to exist. When you are totally unconscious, you are as good as dead [from a "consciousness" point of view. This is not to make ANY metaphysical or biological claims.]. Your consciousness has to be recreated when you wake up again. So, the "you" that wakes up in the morning isn't exactly the same as the "you" that went to sleep the night before. Your long term memory links you to the person you were the day before, so you FEEL like you're the same.
Hope that brightens your day.
The original post also mentions that "the higher lifeforms chose to just kill us after a certain amount of time, rather than write a stack pop function". I think they TRIED to write one, but it's just buggy. There are some null pointers in the stack, and when you hit one, you're toast. "Blue Screen of Death" never had such a literal meaning.
bytesmythe