Even worse [link target in German]: According to the linked page,
Der Entwurf sehe daher vor, dass es für die Strafverfolger mÃglich sei, "in Echtzeit" direkt beim Provider auf die IP-Adressen der "Nutzer" des virtuellen Warnschilds zuzugreifen. Eine Strafbarkeit liege schon in dem Moment vor, wenn nicht nachgewiesen werden kÃnne, dass es sich um ein Versehen oder eine automatische Weiterleitung gehandelt habe.
Translation (emphasis by me):
The draft therefore allows that it's possible for criminal prosecutors to access "in real time" directly at the provider the IP addresses of the "users" of the virtual warning sign. Criminal liability already exists a when it cannot be proven that it was a mistake or an automatic redirection."
That is, if you happen to access a blocked page (for whatever reason) you have to prove that you were in error. This may be quite hard.
As a concrete example how you might get problems: There was once an Open Source project to implement a free OS (AllianceOS). At one time I decided to check what happened with that project, and therefore typed the URL of their home page (which I remembered). To my great surprise what opened was not the home page of the project, but a porn site. Googling around taught me that the domain had expired and then taken by some porn provider. Now imagine it had been a blocked child porn site: I would have had a very hard time to prove that I reached the site in error. After all I explicitly typed in the URL!
Well, [ & ] can be hit with a single key, whereas require the shit key to be hit as well.
Well, my keyboard doesn't have a shit key. I understand that you wouldn't want to touch that quite often. Maybe you should get one with a shift key instead.:-)
BTW, I never understood what problems people have with pressing shift. I don't have any problems with it (not even when writing German, where there are a lot of upper case letters). OTOH, on German keyboards, the [ and ] characters are some of the hardest characters to type: You have to press, at the same time, the AltGr key (on US keyboards there's the right Alt key at that position) and the keys 8 resp. 9.
Well, that's as easily done by just blindly replacing any < with < and every > with > (thus automatically disabling any HTML tags) and then handling sequences like <i> just like you would handle [i] with bbcode. As an additional advantage, such an implementation wouldn't just silently remove anything which remotely resembles an HTML tag, but just change that into an "inactive" text form which most likely was intended anyway.
You'll probably have to wear gloves and long-sleeved clothes in tests. The test gloves and clothes will be supplied by the school so you cannot use some with built-in features.
It gets interesting when they start to provide displays directly in your eyes (maybe even without any light, just directly activating retina cells).
Yes, bbcode is one of the most useless inventions. After all, it's just selected HTML tags written with different brackets. I cannot see the advantage of writing [i] instead of <i> (or even the usually more correct <em>)
From TFA: "Java was the first strongly-typed language, in which everything must have a type (or share a Form) before it is being used"
The author obviously doesn't know Pascal. Not only does everything in Pascal have a type, and must be declared as such, Pascal doesn't even have the concept of a typecast. And much less implicit conversions than Java (the only way to get from a real to an integer is through a function like round or trunc). In Pascal, an array of 5 integers is a different type than an array of 6 integers (actually, you don't give a number, but a type for indexing, which may be an integer subrange type like 0..4, but might as well be e.g. an enumeration type).
Well, of course the colloqial term "chaos" and the scientific term "chaos" are not identical. What most ordinary people mean when they say "chaos" would in scientific terms usually be disorder or randomness.
Of course there's a difference between gradually replacing the neurons and just mapping them: With just mapping them, you get a copy of yourself. There's still the original you, which lives outside the computer.
In terms of pure bit rate of calculations, we should have commodity desktop computers capable of outperforming our own brains within a decade. This paper (from 1997, but I doubt human brains have changed much since then) estimates our brainpower at 100 million MIPS, or 10^14 calculations per second. By comparison a Radeon HD4870 x2 graphics card is 2.4 TFlops (2.4 million MIPS at 1 flop/instruction), or roughly 1/5th of a human brain.
OK, so a brain is worth five graphics cards.
But then, the brain only needs about 20 Watt. With five graphics cards, that would be 4 Watt per graphics card.
Well, I think someone from Northern Germany will probably not understand someone really speaking Austrian (as opposed to speaking standard German with a mere Austrian accent).
No, Slashdot clearly is fantasy. The magic power of knocking out servers using a magic spell (although you have to type instead of cast it). That magic spell starts with <a href="http:// an ends with </a>
And all science fiction is just fantasy. All you need is to have some magic creating all those machines, aliens etc., either in some part of the real world, or as make-belive for the main character. Every single science fiction story could end with the magic just being stopped, e.g. the wizzard got weak, or the main character by chance happened to speak the magic words which undo the magic, or someone else undoes the magic.
I guess humans are not intelligent, then. After all, humans do have a system (emotions, conscience) which are not easily overcome. Yes, we can act against our emotions and our conscience, but that is an act of strong will, and will certainly not happen just because a five-year old tells us that it's OK to break the rules (BTW adding a judgement system on which sources to trust would certainly be a necessity in any AI anyway). Indeed, almost any time we act against our emotions or out conscience is when our systems say contradicting things (so you have no chance to act according to any of them). It's very rare that a person does things without either her emotions or her conscience telling him/her to do it (note that things like fear are also emotions, so if you are doing something you wouldn't normally do because of some external threat, it's still acting according to your feelings).
And further, the rules can act even beyond the AI level. Again an example from humans: While you can decide to hold your breath, you simply cannot decide to hold your breath up to death. A lower system in your brain will step in and make you breath again, even against your will.
Slashdot Mirror
Even worse [link target in German]: According to the linked page,
Translation (emphasis by me):
That is, if you happen to access a blocked page (for whatever reason) you have to prove that you were in error. This may be quite hard.
As a concrete example how you might get problems: There was once an Open Source project to implement a free OS (AllianceOS). At one time I decided to check what happened with that project, and therefore typed the URL of their home page (which I remembered). To my great surprise what opened was not the home page of the project, but a porn site. Googling around taught me that the domain had expired and then taken by some porn provider. Now imagine it had been a blocked child porn site: I would have had a very hard time to prove that I reached the site in error. After all I explicitly typed in the URL!
You already have one shark?
X as in Xmas?
No he meant, of course, grand(aleph64)son.
Well, my keyboard doesn't have a shit key. I understand that you wouldn't want to touch that quite often. Maybe you should get one with a shift key instead. :-)
BTW, I never understood what problems people have with pressing shift. I don't have any problems with it (not even when writing German, where there are a lot of upper case letters). OTOH, on German keyboards, the [ and ] characters are some of the hardest characters to type: You have to press, at the same time, the AltGr key (on US keyboards there's the right Alt key at that position) and the keys 8 resp. 9.
Well, that's as easily done by just blindly replacing any < with < and every > with > (thus automatically disabling any HTML tags) and then handling sequences like <i> just like you would handle [i] with bbcode. As an additional advantage, such an implementation wouldn't just silently remove anything which remotely resembles an HTML tag, but just change that into an "inactive" text form which most likely was intended anyway.
You'll probably have to wear gloves and long-sleeved clothes in tests. The test gloves and clothes will be supplied by the school so you cannot use some with built-in features.
It gets interesting when they start to provide displays directly in your eyes (maybe even without any light, just directly activating retina cells).
Yes, bbcode is one of the most useless inventions. After all, it's just selected HTML tags written with different brackets. I cannot see the advantage of writing [i] instead of <i> (or even the usually more correct <em>)
From TFA:
"Java was the first strongly-typed language, in which everything must have a type (or share a Form) before it is being used"
The author obviously doesn't know Pascal. Not only does everything in Pascal have a type, and must be declared as such, Pascal doesn't even have the concept of a typecast. And much less implicit conversions than Java (the only way to get from a real to an integer is through a function like round or trunc). In Pascal, an array of 5 integers is a different type than an array of 6 integers (actually, you don't give a number, but a type for indexing, which may be an integer subrange type like 0..4, but might as well be e.g. an enumeration type).
Well, of course the colloqial term "chaos" and the scientific term "chaos" are not identical. What most ordinary people mean when they say "chaos" would in scientific terms usually be disorder or randomness.
Well, AFAIK there are theories that the brain is a chaotic system. But chaos is not mere randomness; you have things like strange attractors there.
Of course there's a difference between gradually replacing the neurons and just mapping them: With just mapping them, you get a copy of yourself. There's still the original you, which lives outside the computer.
Which of course raises the question: Would it be ethical to treat an artificial brain like this?
In terms of pure bit rate of calculations, we should have commodity desktop computers capable of outperforming our own brains within a decade. This paper (from 1997, but I doubt human brains have changed much since then) estimates our brainpower at 100 million MIPS, or 10^14 calculations per second. By comparison a Radeon HD4870 x2 graphics card is 2.4 TFlops (2.4 million MIPS at 1 flop/instruction), or roughly 1/5th of a human brain.
OK, so a brain is worth five graphics cards.
But then, the brain only needs about 20 Watt. With five graphics cards, that would be 4 Watt per graphics card.
Well, I think someone from Northern Germany will probably not understand someone really speaking Austrian (as opposed to speaking standard German with a mere Austrian accent).
I would be surprised if GR didn't know what GR has to say about such things, because, after all, he was GR himself. :-)
(Yes, I understand that GR in your post actually meant General Relativity, but I just couldn't resist.)
No, Slashdot clearly is fantasy. The magic power of knocking out servers using a magic spell (although you have to type instead of cast it). That magic spell starts with <a href="http:// an ends with </a>
"My God, it's full of stars!"
Must be Hollywood!
And all science fiction is just fantasy. All you need is to have some magic creating all those machines, aliens etc., either in some part of the real world, or as make-belive for the main character. Every single science fiction story could end with the magic just being stopped, e.g. the wizzard got weak, or the main character by chance happened to speak the magic words which undo the magic, or someone else undoes the magic.
And what if a bulimic character is lowered to the stage instead? Diabolus ex machina? :-)
No, you certainly must also keep the output of ls -lR
I guess humans are not intelligent, then. After all, humans do have a system (emotions, conscience) which are not easily overcome. Yes, we can act against our emotions and our conscience, but that is an act of strong will, and will certainly not happen just because a five-year old tells us that it's OK to break the rules (BTW adding a judgement system on which sources to trust would certainly be a necessity in any AI anyway). Indeed, almost any time we act against our emotions or out conscience is when our systems say contradicting things (so you have no chance to act according to any of them). It's very rare that a person does things without either her emotions or her conscience telling him/her to do it (note that things like fear are also emotions, so if you are doing something you wouldn't normally do because of some external threat, it's still acting according to your feelings).
And further, the rules can act even beyond the AI level. Again an example from humans: While you can decide to hold your breath, you simply cannot decide to hold your breath up to death. A lower system in your brain will step in and make you breath again, even against your will.
...what happens in the singularity stays in the singularity.
That's not always true. What happened in the big bang singularity indeed did spread throughout the whole universe.
Well, if you manage to switch it on before you die, it just shines until it's destroyed. But nobody from outside could see it.
Sure. It's not possible that the program itself contains experimenter bias!
And programs never have bught, right.
You mean, it won't tell the lab equipment what it's doing?
Or did you think of having the robot do experiments with humans?
What? You won't test the medicine on the robot instead of a human, would you?
Just as computers doing numerics calculations has much reduced the egos in theory departments?