Why does it have to be dementia (that is, forgetting new information)? Wouldn't it make more sense to forget old information which is no longer of any use? I still remember things I'm sure I'll never ever need again. I'd not care losing things like that to make place for new information.
Of course it is questionable that we ever reach the knowledge needed to make that happen. But it is equally questionable that we ever achieve potential immortality anyway.
Besides, it's not like there's a serious risk of baby shortage -- the only reason we don't want to grow old is not because of any greater high ideal, but that we fear death.
No. It's because when getting old, the body degrades (and sometimes also the mind, that's called dementia). Of course fighting ageing would mean fighting those symptoms.
Fear of death of course also exists, but that's independent from that. Indeed the only way to avoid death as long as possible is to get as old as possible.
Anyway, one key mechanism which makes us eventually die (namely, the limited number of cell divisions) is at the same time our body's most effective defence against cancer (a cell cannot mutate into a cancer cell without disabling that mechanism). Therefore I guess if we kill that mechanism, the result will be a much higher rate of cancer. Indeed, it may turn out that switching off that mechanism will reduce your life expectancy due to that.
No. Evolution doesn't work for the good of anyone or anything. There are no actors in evolution, only evolutionary forces. We define the "winners" as those who survive, and then note that the winners survive. But that's just because we defined them that way, not because there's something inherent in evolution which makes the "right" genes survive.
Of course it will be. You know, everything we do to make earth inhabitable by humans is a net win for the planet. Yes, there will be a huge number of species which will die out around the same time as humans do. But then, the earth has recovered from mass extinctions more than once, and even from more extreme conditions than we could ever cause. It's the humans who will not survive a radically changing environment. The planet will recover in a geologically short time span, and evolution will get a boost to fill all the ecological niches freed by the human-caused mass extinction. And there will be no humans left to interfere with that.
Bottom line: We cannot destroy the planet (at least with our current abilities). Before we get even close to that, we will remove ourselves from the equation.
Distracting visuals are very different from audible distractions when it comes to a task that requires hand to eye coordination.
Yet we put distracting visuals in the streets, in the form of electronic, animated advertising displays. Mostly at crowded places where you need your concentration most.
But I can prove the moon landing never happened! Because otherwise they would have found the Nazis hiding on the moon and waiting for the chance to come back! And BTW, the Nazis have made a contract with the aliens which guarantees them exclusive access to the moon. Any attempted landing by anyone but a Nazi on the moon would cause an alien attack. That's the true reason why the Americans hired Wernher von Braun: They tried to convince the aliens that it would actually be the Nazis landing if the US land on the moon. But the aliens are not that easy to trick. Kennedy was the driving force behind the moon landing plans and couldn't be convinced to stop the efforts, therefore the aliens arranged him to be shot (yes, it was aliens who were on that hill). The following president had a problem: They knew a landing was no option, but they couldn't just tell the people that the aliens won't allow it, given that the existence of aliens was top secret. But they also couldn't think of a good public reason to stop it. Thus they decided to fake it. The Russians came to similar conclusions. The reason why the USA won the "moon race" was that while the Russians had the superior rocket technology, the USA had the better filming technology, thanks to Hollywood. The aliens helped with the fake by actually sending the pre-recorded signals from the position where they had to originate, so everything looked real. The rocket starts were real, but the space ships actually entered an earth orbit and switched to silence on earthly communication channels; they could still communicate using alien communication technology which was not detectable by amateurs. The aliens took the part of sending the pre-recorded messages and images, as well as as relaying any live communication as needed for keeping the illusion, from exactly the places where they should have come from had the moon landing actually been performed. That's why nobody could notice the fake by checking the origin of the signals.
SCNR;-)
(And for those who didn't get it: None of the above is meant seriously, of course.)
Where are the keys generated? If they are generated at Google and then transmitted to you, then this doesn't really give additional security. Only if the key is generated on your computer and provably never goes to Google, it gives better security than just trusting Google. Of course that means you have to manage it yourself (back it up — not on the cloud, of course —, copy it onto all of your devices — again, not per cloud synchronization, but either through a direct encrypted connection like ssh, or in a way not involving the internet (e.g. per LAN or USB stick). Any solution that doesn't give you that burden also doesn't give you the associated security.
That's akin to turning off Flash to get rid of ads. Sounds like a good - no, great - idea, until you run into the problem of so many sites depending on it.
Not very many sites depend on Flash. Mainly video and online game sites. And there's always the option to whitelist.
I guess he could have studied the NoScript code (and the Firefox code it interacts with) in detail to make sure that NoScript indeed does what it is supposed to do in all cases. However he decided to not do that work, but instead to trust the author of NoScript to provide what he advertises. Probably encouraged by the fact that there seem to be no publicly known failures of NoScript in this regard.
(1) Good theory, but I remember seeing the calendar tell me that "tomorrow" was "today" even if there were remaining tasks to do today.
Another idea: The calendar does indeed use UTC, but the relevant testing happened to be performed in the UK where UTC and local time agree (or, in the summer, are only one hour different, where the only time a discrepancy can be seen is in the middle of the night). Indeed, even if the testing was elsewhere in Europe, it is very likely that it didn't turn up during working hours. And even when testing in India, the bug would definitely surface only outside the office hours. And in Japan, if your testing happens after 9am in the morning, you'll also not notice the bug.
Or in short, unless you either explicitly think about that possibility, or happen to test in the US, it's unlikely that such a bug will get noticed.
It has been tried in the past, read some of the mathematical texts from people that did not have suitable formalism at their disposal.
Older mathematical texts are hard to read because the mathematicians lacked the abstractions we have today. For example, the statement "the vectors form an orthonormal basis" is a very complex statement if you don't have the vector space abstraction. It's complicated both when written in formulas and when written in text. Basically you have to state explicitly that there's no non-trivial linear combination which gives zero, and you have to state that for every single component (but without being aware that those are components of vectors, and therefore not being able to use that fact in the formula or text). That's definitely not pretty. As soon as you know the concept of a vector space, it's the simple statement I've given above (and BTW, I wouldn't know an equally simple formula expressing the same fact).
Also I never claimed that formulas don't have an advantage when actually doing or seriously using mathematics. However it is not true that language is necessarily inexact or fuzzy. It generally takes more words to say the same thing. But then, it's easier to remove irrelevant details without getting wrong. Note that removing irrelevant details is not fuzziness or inexactness, but conciseness. Anyway, you lost the context: We are not speaking about mathematical texts communicating mathematical content to other mathematicians, we are talking about journalistic texts communicating to non-mathematicians essentially non-mathematical content which happens to contain some applications of mathematics.
You are falling for the same fallacy as people that claim COBOL is self-documenting and the code is "natural language" after all.
You are comparing apples and oranges here. But then, I hope you don't claim that it is impossible to create well-written programs in COBOL. Which would be the closest analogy to your claim that replacing mathematical formulas with natural language inevitably gets fuzzy and inexact.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what "Plain Old Text" is for.
Why does it have to be dementia (that is, forgetting new information)? Wouldn't it make more sense to forget old information which is no longer of any use? I still remember things I'm sure I'll never ever need again. I'd not care losing things like that to make place for new information.
Of course it is questionable that we ever reach the knowledge needed to make that happen. But it is equally questionable that we ever achieve potential immortality anyway.
No. It's because when getting old, the body degrades (and sometimes also the mind, that's called dementia). Of course fighting ageing would mean fighting those symptoms.
Fear of death of course also exists, but that's independent from that. Indeed the only way to avoid death as long as possible is to get as old as possible.
Anyway, one key mechanism which makes us eventually die (namely, the limited number of cell divisions) is at the same time our body's most effective defence against cancer (a cell cannot mutate into a cancer cell without disabling that mechanism). Therefore I guess if we kill that mechanism, the result will be a much higher rate of cancer. Indeed, it may turn out that switching off that mechanism will reduce your life expectancy due to that.
No. Evolution doesn't work for the good of anyone or anything. There are no actors in evolution, only evolutionary forces. We define the "winners" as those who survive, and then note that the winners survive. But that's just because we defined them that way, not because there's something inherent in evolution which makes the "right" genes survive.
The past tense of pay is paid.
Thank you. I already feared I'd have to pay it myself.
Discussing on Slashdot about wasting time most definitely is wasting time ... damn, now I'm wasting time, too! :-)
Of course it will be. You know, everything we do to make earth inhabitable by humans is a net win for the planet. Yes, there will be a huge number of species which will die out around the same time as humans do. But then, the earth has recovered from mass extinctions more than once, and even from more extreme conditions than we could ever cause. It's the humans who will not survive a radically changing environment. The planet will recover in a geologically short time span, and evolution will get a boost to fill all the ecological niches freed by the human-caused mass extinction. And there will be no humans left to interfere with that.
Bottom line: We cannot destroy the planet (at least with our current abilities). Before we get even close to that, we will remove ourselves from the equation.
Yet we put distracting visuals in the streets, in the form of electronic, animated advertising displays. Mostly at crowded places where you need your concentration most.
It's another possible distraction when driving.
You wake up in the garage at 2 AM.
"Car, was it interesting?"
(in Siri-like voice) "Yes. It. Was. Interesting".
"Car, why does it smell like 10W 40 in here?"
"I do not know. What. You are talking. About".
Nor do I.
But I can prove the moon landing never happened! Because otherwise they would have found the Nazis hiding on the moon and waiting for the chance to come back! And BTW, the Nazis have made a contract with the aliens which guarantees them exclusive access to the moon. Any attempted landing by anyone but a Nazi on the moon would cause an alien attack. That's the true reason why the Americans hired Wernher von Braun: They tried to convince the aliens that it would actually be the Nazis landing if the US land on the moon. But the aliens are not that easy to trick. Kennedy was the driving force behind the moon landing plans and couldn't be convinced to stop the efforts, therefore the aliens arranged him to be shot (yes, it was aliens who were on that hill). The following president had a problem: They knew a landing was no option, but they couldn't just tell the people that the aliens won't allow it, given that the existence of aliens was top secret. But they also couldn't think of a good public reason to stop it. Thus they decided to fake it. The Russians came to similar conclusions. The reason why the USA won the "moon race" was that while the Russians had the superior rocket technology, the USA had the better filming technology, thanks to Hollywood. The aliens helped with the fake by actually sending the pre-recorded signals from the position where they had to originate, so everything looked real. The rocket starts were real, but the space ships actually entered an earth orbit and switched to silence on earthly communication channels; they could still communicate using alien communication technology which was not detectable by amateurs. The aliens took the part of sending the pre-recorded messages and images, as well as as relaying any live communication as needed for keeping the illusion, from exactly the places where they should have come from had the moon landing actually been performed. That's why nobody could notice the fake by checking the origin of the signals.
SCNR ;-)
(And for those who didn't get it: None of the above is meant seriously, of course.)
Well, the question is whether only you have the keys.
Where are the keys generated? If they are generated at Google and then transmitted to you, then this doesn't really give additional security. Only if the key is generated on your computer and provably never goes to Google, it gives better security than just trusting Google. Of course that means you have to manage it yourself (back it up — not on the cloud, of course —, copy it onto all of your devices — again, not per cloud synchronization, but either through a direct encrypted connection like ssh, or in a way not involving the internet (e.g. per LAN or USB stick). Any solution that doesn't give you that burden also doesn't give you the associated security.
No. Most will just think "Windows is slow again." Or maybe "Damn antivirus."
So the next time someone complains about your athlete's foot, tell him it's your secondary brain. :-)
Terribly distorted video. I couldn't stand watching it.
Not very many sites depend on Flash. Mainly video and online game sites. And there's always the option to whitelist.
Only if it gets executed. Why would you enable the JavaScript from ad networks to execute on your browser?
I guess he could have studied the NoScript code (and the Firefox code it interacts with) in detail to make sure that NoScript indeed does what it is supposed to do in all cases. However he decided to not do that work, but instead to trust the author of NoScript to provide what he advertises. Probably encouraged by the fact that there seem to be no publicly known failures of NoScript in this regard.
So there's no difference between the instruction on how to create a substance and the substance itself?
Another idea: The calendar does indeed use UTC, but the relevant testing happened to be performed in the UK where UTC and local time agree (or, in the summer, are only one hour different, where the only time a discrepancy can be seen is in the middle of the night). Indeed, even if the testing was elsewhere in Europe, it is very likely that it didn't turn up during working hours. And even when testing in India, the bug would definitely surface only outside the office hours. And in Japan, if your testing happens after 9am in the morning, you'll also not notice the bug.
Or in short, unless you either explicitly think about that possibility, or happen to test in the US, it's unlikely that such a bug will get noticed.
I do, too. But in the end, it's still only an assumption that they are trustworthy.
I didn't know Obama runs a finger server.
Older mathematical texts are hard to read because the mathematicians lacked the abstractions we have today. For example, the statement "the vectors form an orthonormal basis" is a very complex statement if you don't have the vector space abstraction. It's complicated both when written in formulas and when written in text. Basically you have to state explicitly that there's no non-trivial linear combination which gives zero, and you have to state that for every single component (but without being aware that those are components of vectors, and therefore not being able to use that fact in the formula or text). That's definitely not pretty. As soon as you know the concept of a vector space, it's the simple statement I've given above (and BTW, I wouldn't know an equally simple formula expressing the same fact).
Also I never claimed that formulas don't have an advantage when actually doing or seriously using mathematics. However it is not true that language is necessarily inexact or fuzzy. It generally takes more words to say the same thing. But then, it's easier to remove irrelevant details without getting wrong. Note that removing irrelevant details is not fuzziness or inexactness, but conciseness. Anyway, you lost the context: We are not speaking about mathematical texts communicating mathematical content to other mathematicians, we are talking about journalistic texts communicating to non-mathematicians essentially non-mathematical content which happens to contain some applications of mathematics.
You are comparing apples and oranges here. But then, I hope you don't claim that it is impossible to create well-written programs in COBOL. Which would be the closest analogy to your claim that replacing mathematical formulas with natural language inevitably gets fuzzy and inexact.
No. The journalist's job is to inform you about what's happening, and provide necessary background information you need to form your own opinion.