Not quite true. Many hallucinogens ( indole-ring alkaloids, IIRC ) have a level of toxicity so great that you reasonably couldn't consume enough to actually die from the physiological effects. I think this may also be true for THC. R That being said, you might have a negative mental health effects from consuming too much hallucinogens.
To be fair to Newton, Alchemy was considered semi-respectable until the 18th century and was the predecessor in a number of ways of modern chemistry.
OK, then, by the same fairness token we can forgive Kurzweil for buying into and hyping up singularity and eternal life. We've had incredible technological change over the last 150 years thanks to scientific medicine and technology, and for someone who grew up during this time, there's no reason to think it wouldn't continue forever, into infinity ( which is basically what singularity and eternal life posit -- endless scientific knowledge and benefit ), just as people of the 16th century thought they would be turning lead into gold "any day now".
You know what? The human brain isn't really that big of a deal. We can't computers to do hard AI problems that tiny brains are already able to do. For instance, pigeons can be trained to pick out styles of paintings, and even identify paintings by their painter for paintings they have never seen before, only been trained on other paintings by that painter. Oh yeah, and they can fly also. Their brain weighs 0.4 grams. Couldn't find any numbers about number of nuerons or connections. But shouldn't we be able to model tiny brains now, and have all these hard AI problems solved?
You might be able to argue that he's a charlatan now but in my mind he's Thomas Edison turned Nostradamus.
Or how about Newton, who discovered or developed a lot of things, but was also crazy about some other things, like alchemy and trying to get the Pope's name to add up to 666.
OK, that's fine; I'll take your word for it. I read it too fast and 'chose' to install the toolbar.
What's more worrysome is the URL re-director that was installed, that was not mentioned in the installer, and did not go away when I disabled the toolbar plug-in in Firefox. I had to uninstall PDFCreator altogether to get rid of the stealth re-director.
As I explained in my post, I unticked the 'install toolbar' option, yet I still got a toolbar. Slimy.
On top of that, I got a URL re-director that was *not* mentioned in the install, and didn't go away once I uninstalled the toolbar plug-in in firefox. I had to uninstall the whole application to get rid of the re-director. That is slime on top of slime.
How much overlap is in the audience, really? I really only enjoy RTS games; I don't like MMORPGs. I've never played WoW and don't plan on investing time in building a character. When SCII comes out, I will buy it, play it obsessively for a week, and then probably pay an occasional game online if I don't have to pay a revolving monthly fee.
With AviSynth, you can write scripts for complex video editing tasks. AviSynth with do mixing on the fly in your video player when you run the script. Very nice; it moves complex video editing from the world of point-and-click GUIs to coding!
PDFCreator!? I just downloaded and installed it yesterday on a Vista machine at work. I got a Yahoo search toolbar installed after specifically telling the installer app not to do so, and then I also got a 404 redirector installed too!
This was from the installer I downloaded from sourceforge...
You keep stating that Microsoft is a monopoly over and over so frequently I believe it's a repetition tactic. You know, you repeat something often enough and it becomes the truth for you.
Ten years ago called, and they're tapping you on the head with the receiver:
The last serious commercial competitor to Microsoft Windows for the desktop PC that I remember before Apple switched to the same x86 platform capable of running Windows, was IBM with OS/2.
So you claim that the last competitor was OS/2, and now that MS has no competitors, it's still not a monopoly? My friend, if there is no competition, that is the definition of monopoly!
I haven't seen the painting you describe, but I saw one that was equally impressive. Giger had an image of the 'life cycle' of the alien in a human astronaut, but it looked like it was carved in relief, like a hieroglyph. It made it seem much more terrifying, that there was some ancient knowledge about a life form that lives as a parasite to a human host. It was a more humbled view of humanity's place in the cosmos and the food chain. "There's aliens out there that mature by growing inside of us and killing us, and there's nothing we can do about it. That's our place in the web of life."
It seemed like it may have been an inspiration for AvP, which blew. This painting was awesome, and cosmically terrifying.
3. Wrong physics. Outside the bow-shock of a sun, radio works a lot different than we thought.
3 is very unlikely, since we pick up radio emissions from natural sources all the time.
Yes, but we've never picked up radio emissions from outside the solar system without our bow-shock colored glasses. It could look very different once we take them off.
Well, I think there gets to be a point when "out of the box thinking" about what alien life might look like becomes so out-of-the-box that you start asking the questions "What is life?" and "What is consciousness" and "What is a conscious being?"
I think the chances of finding something "like" us -- humans with antennae, say -- are pretty rare.
We have pretty good evidence that dolphin language has as complex a grammatical structure as our own. As far as the tree of life on Earth is concerned, human beings and dolphins are practically twin organisms, compared to plants, fungus, trichordates, bacteria, slime molds, etc. Yet we have almost no idea how to communicate with them. And mostly we don't care, we don't even care when they go extinct, like the yellow river dolphin.
What if there are electromagnetic vortexes in interstellar gas clouds that are conscious, but have no body and are not alive in the sense that we think of a living organism? Would we look for them? Could we communicate? How? What would they think about? If they didn't have a body, they certainly wouldn't be desperately pre-occupied with day-to-day existence like we are. Do they have any sensory apparatus, or are they solely clouds of consciousness, forever living in their own thought worlds, perhaps doing math? How could they even become aware of us?
Actually, I think they would have a problem making the same movie with today's special effects. Part of what makes suspense suspenseful is the unknown, the surprising. That's why classic thrillers and horror films don't give monsters all that much camera time -- not just because the effects were cheesey. You only see the monster in the shadows for a brief second. That way, your mind is at an information disadvantage, always wondering, "What's going to happen next?"
Now when they do movies and they spend three months building a model of the creature they want to get as much mileage out of it as they can, so they do close ups, zoom in on it, show it eating, hanging out, waiting in its lair, hissing, do a slow mo wrap-around camera shot of it clawing its victim...
There's been a decades-long wave of politically correct attempts to broaden intelligence to include other things, like "emotional intelligence", which might indeed be important, useful, and worthy of study, but aren't really what the word "intelligence" means, so should probably get new names instead of being shoehorned in there
The concept of intelligence has had a problem since the get go. Time was, intelligence used to mean the ability to do higher math, play chess, understand logic and reason, and all that. Only smart people could do it. Then, we build computers that operated purely on logic themselves. They could reason, solve logic puzzles, do higher math, and routinely beat average humans at chess. People thought it was only a short time until robots dominated our society, and C3POs would be walking around everywhere. Then we tried to get these 'intelligent' systems to do routinely stupid shit that retarded people can do, like walk down a street, recognize a face, pick out an object in the environment, or tell when somebody is upset. Turns that that these simple, 'unintelligent' tasks that any moron, ape, dog, or bird can do are insanely complicated! And in fact, the traditional notion of 'intelligence' hasn't really helped all that much! Instead we have a class of machines that are like idiot savants, who can do enormously complicated math, but can't tie their own shoes, hold down a job or a conversation.
So if you think object or face recognition is some politically correct task, well... are you a fan of Judge Wapner?
"Please talk to the new tty maintainer whoever that ends up. I no longer
care."
You know what really gets on my nerves? When people say they no longer care, when in reality they do. If he really didn't care, he would have typed the first sentence and stopped.
You know what I find entertaining? People who are smart enough to see through a fairly transparent dysfunctional coping mechanism, and then continue to let it bother them after they've encountered it for the nth time. "Hey, he really does care! He's *lying* to us..."
Ok, here you validate your claim of knowing the definition of monopoly by simply stating that Microsoft is a de facto monopoly (with some attempt to further that position with a quote from Wikipedia).
No, I simply refuted your claim that I don't know what a monopoly is, using the same standard of evidence that you did to claim that I didn't -- simply stating so. Then, I stated that MS is a de facto monopoly. To help our discussion and make sure we weren't talking at cross points, I included a definition of monopoly.
Also, if I am the sole inventor, manufacturer, patent holder, trademark holder, copyright holder, etc.; it seems you are arguing that I should not have the right to determine the MSRP nor which retailers I may supply to.
I am not saying that. I don't have a problem with you negotiating terms with partners in a competitive marketplace; I have a problem with a monopolies in the marketplace, because there can be no negotiation, only dictation of terms.
The OS is a different beast that many other consumer goods and commodities. First, it runs on a hardware platform, and secondly, end-user software runs on top of it. Typically, home users don't buy an OS because they want the OS itself; they want it because it runs on the hardware platform they purchased, and because of the applications and peripherals ( scanners, printers, wireless cards ) that run in the OS. Apple/Macintosh is not a competitor to Windows, because it does not run on the same hardware ( I'm talking about desktop computers, not 386 instruction sets ) and it does not run the same applications ( just applications that happen to have been written to be multi-platform). Linux is not truly a competitor either, because while it runs *mostly* on the same hardware ( except for certain video card drivers -- it's up to you whether you want to consider printers, scanners, and wireless adapters to be hardware platform or peripherals ), it certainly doesn't run the applications windows users want as well.
It's well for your case that you ignore BeOS because it clearly demonstrates the monopoly power MS had to shut out competition. As long as you can ignore facts it's fairly simple to win arguments:)
So what are you saying? That the height of the population of feudal Europe was, on average, like ours? Or simply that pristine battle armor is not a good indicator of average human height of the time?
That monopolies stifle progress? Monopoly and Efficiency, from wikipedia. "It is often argued that monopolies tend to become less efficient and innovative over time, becoming "complacent giants", because they do not have to be efficient or innovative to compete in the marketplace."
Also, I do not think that word means what you think it means, monopoly. Aside from your citation, please also explain how Microsoft is actually a monopoly, and not just some company you love to hate. IMHO dominating the market place is different than running the marketplace.
I know what monopoly means. MS is a de facto monopoly. From Wikipedia, "In economics, a monopoly (from Greek monos , alone or single + polein , to sell) exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it." MS has sufficient control over the end-user desktop OS market that they are a monopoly. The US DOJ won a court case saying that MS is a monopoly. I'll believe them and my own lying eyes over your opinion.
For a demonstration of MS' monopoly, have a look at the BeOS situation. BeOS was installed as a boot option alongside Windows on certain machines, but MS threatened to withdrawal those manufacturers' ability to license Windows on dual-boot machines. BeOS remained on the hard drive, but the boot option for it was removed from the boot loader. MS forces manufacturers to disable competition on the manufacturers' machines. That's anti-competitive behavior, which they could only do because of their monopoly power.
"A few years ago, Be's CEO Jean-Louis Gassée used the phrase "peaceful co-existence with Windows" to describe his company's intended relationship with Microsoft on the consumer's hard drive. Later, when it became clear that Microsoft had no intention of co-existing with a rival OS vendor peacefully, Gassée recanted, saying, "I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense -- I deserve it." "
OK, that's fine, but people still were shorter back in the day. In fact, they were shorter up until the 1950s, and if you travel to countries with poor nutrition, like South America and Southeast Asia, you will find a lot of short people. It's not all genetics.
Slashdot Mirror
Men were not made for monogamy, your stupid culture made you believe so.
Only men, huh? Then just who are these inmonogamous men having sex with? Other men?
Hey I just spent a week trying to figure it out. What would you recommend instead?
Literally ALL drugs are poisons.
Not quite true. Many hallucinogens ( indole-ring alkaloids, IIRC ) have a level of toxicity so great that you reasonably couldn't consume enough to actually die from the physiological effects. I think this may also be true for THC. R
That being said, you might have a negative mental health effects from consuming too much hallucinogens.
To be fair to Newton, Alchemy was considered semi-respectable until the 18th century and was the predecessor in a number of ways of modern chemistry.
OK, then, by the same fairness token we can forgive Kurzweil for buying into and hyping up singularity and eternal life. We've had incredible technological change over the last 150 years thanks to scientific medicine and technology, and for someone who grew up during this time, there's no reason to think it wouldn't continue forever, into infinity ( which is basically what singularity and eternal life posit -- endless scientific knowledge and benefit ), just as people of the 16th century thought they would be turning lead into gold "any day now".
Have you heard of the cemi theory, and if so, can you tell me what you think of it?
You know what? The human brain isn't really that big of a deal. We can't computers to do hard AI problems that tiny brains are already able to do. For instance, pigeons can be trained to pick out styles of paintings, and even identify paintings by their painter for paintings they have never seen before, only been trained on other paintings by that painter. Oh yeah, and they can fly also. Their brain weighs 0.4 grams. Couldn't find any numbers about number of nuerons or connections. But shouldn't we be able to model tiny brains now, and have all these hard AI problems solved?
You might be able to argue that he's a charlatan now but in my mind he's Thomas Edison turned Nostradamus.
Or how about Newton, who discovered or developed a lot of things, but was also crazy about some other things, like alchemy and trying to get the Pope's name to add up to 666.
He wasn't an inventor, though, I guess.
OK, that's fine; I'll take your word for it. I read it too fast and 'chose' to install the toolbar.
What's more worrysome is the URL re-director that was installed, that was not mentioned in the installer, and did not go away when I disabled the toolbar plug-in in Firefox. I had to uninstall PDFCreator altogether to get rid of the stealth re-director.
As I explained in my post, I unticked the 'install toolbar' option, yet I still got a toolbar. Slimy.
On top of that, I got a URL re-director that was *not* mentioned in the install, and didn't go away once I uninstalled the toolbar plug-in in firefox. I had to uninstall the whole application to get rid of the re-director. That is slime on top of slime.
How much overlap is in the audience, really? I really only enjoy RTS games; I don't like MMORPGs. I've never played WoW and don't plan on investing time in building a character. When SCII comes out, I will buy it, play it obsessively for a week, and then probably pay an occasional game online if I don't have to pay a revolving monthly fee.
With AviSynth, you can write scripts for complex video editing tasks. AviSynth with do mixing on the fly in your video player when you run the script. Very nice; it moves complex video editing from the world of point-and-click GUIs to coding!
PDFCreator!? I just downloaded and installed it yesterday on a Vista machine at work. I got a Yahoo search toolbar installed after specifically telling the installer app not to do so, and then I also got a 404 redirector installed too!
This was from the installer I downloaded from sourceforge...
You keep stating that Microsoft is a monopoly over and over so frequently I believe it's a repetition tactic. You know, you repeat something often enough and it becomes the truth for you.
Ten years ago called, and they're tapping you on the head with the receiver:
Judge calls Microsoft a "monopoly"
The last serious commercial competitor to Microsoft Windows for the desktop PC that I remember before Apple switched to the same x86 platform capable of running Windows, was IBM with OS/2.
So you claim that the last competitor was OS/2, and now that MS has no competitors, it's still not a monopoly? My friend, if there is no competition, that is the definition of monopoly!
I haven't seen the painting you describe, but I saw one that was equally impressive. Giger had an image of the 'life cycle' of the alien in a human astronaut, but it looked like it was carved in relief, like a hieroglyph. It made it seem much more terrifying, that there was some ancient knowledge about a life form that lives as a parasite to a human host. It was a more humbled view of humanity's place in the cosmos and the food chain. "There's aliens out there that mature by growing inside of us and killing us, and there's nothing we can do about it. That's our place in the web of life."
It seemed like it may have been an inspiration for AvP, which blew. This painting was awesome, and cosmically terrifying.
Ah, here it is.
3. Wrong physics. Outside the bow-shock of a sun, radio works a lot different than we thought.
3 is very unlikely, since we pick up radio emissions from natural sources all the time.
Yes, but we've never picked up radio emissions from outside the solar system without our bow-shock colored glasses. It could look very different once we take them off.
Well, I think there gets to be a point when "out of the box thinking" about what alien life might look like becomes so out-of-the-box that you start asking the questions "What is life?" and "What is consciousness" and "What is a conscious being?"
I think the chances of finding something "like" us -- humans with antennae, say -- are pretty rare.
We have pretty good evidence that dolphin language has as complex a grammatical structure as our own. As far as the tree of life on Earth is concerned, human beings and dolphins are practically twin organisms, compared to plants, fungus, trichordates, bacteria, slime molds, etc. Yet we have almost no idea how to communicate with them. And mostly we don't care, we don't even care when they go extinct, like the yellow river dolphin.
What if there are electromagnetic vortexes in interstellar gas clouds that are conscious, but have no body and are not alive in the sense that we think of a living organism? Would we look for them? Could we communicate? How? What would they think about? If they didn't have a body, they certainly wouldn't be desperately pre-occupied with day-to-day existence like we are. Do they have any sensory apparatus, or are they solely clouds of consciousness, forever living in their own thought worlds, perhaps doing math? How could they even become aware of us?
Actually, I think they would have a problem making the same movie with today's special effects. Part of what makes suspense suspenseful is the unknown, the surprising. That's why classic thrillers and horror films don't give monsters all that much camera time -- not just because the effects were cheesey. You only see the monster in the shadows for a brief second. That way, your mind is at an information disadvantage, always wondering, "What's going to happen next?"
Now when they do movies and they spend three months building a model of the creature they want to get as much mileage out of it as they can, so they do close ups, zoom in on it, show it eating, hanging out, waiting in its lair, hissing, do a slow mo wrap-around camera shot of it clawing its victim...
In the Alien franchise, only one character matters. It is big, black and has acid for blood.
Michael Clarke Duncan has acid for blood?
There's been a decades-long wave of politically correct attempts to broaden intelligence to include other things, like "emotional intelligence", which might indeed be important, useful, and worthy of study, but aren't really what the word "intelligence" means, so should probably get new names instead of being shoehorned in there
The concept of intelligence has had a problem since the get go. Time was, intelligence used to mean the ability to do higher math, play chess, understand logic and reason, and all that. Only smart people could do it. Then, we build computers that operated purely on logic themselves. They could reason, solve logic puzzles, do higher math, and routinely beat average humans at chess. People thought it was only a short time until robots dominated our society, and C3POs would be walking around everywhere. Then we tried to get these 'intelligent' systems to do routinely stupid shit that retarded people can do, like walk down a street, recognize a face, pick out an object in the environment, or tell when somebody is upset. Turns that that these simple, 'unintelligent' tasks that any moron, ape, dog, or bird can do are insanely complicated! And in fact, the traditional notion of 'intelligence' hasn't really helped all that much! Instead we have a class of machines that are like idiot savants, who can do enormously complicated math, but can't tie their own shoes, hold down a job or a conversation.
So if you think object or face recognition is some politically correct task, well... are you a fan of Judge Wapner?
"Please talk to the new tty maintainer whoever that ends up. I no longer care."
You know what really gets on my nerves? When people say they no longer care, when in reality they do. If he really didn't care, he would have typed the first sentence and stopped.
You know what I find entertaining? People who are smart enough to see through a fairly transparent dysfunctional coping mechanism, and then continue to let it bother them after they've encountered it for the nth time. "Hey, he really does care! He's *lying* to us..."
Ok, here you validate your claim of knowing the definition of monopoly by simply stating that Microsoft is a de facto monopoly (with some attempt to further that position with a quote from Wikipedia).
No, I simply refuted your claim that I don't know what a monopoly is, using the same standard of evidence that you did to claim that I didn't -- simply stating so. Then, I stated that MS is a de facto monopoly. To help our discussion and make sure we weren't talking at cross points, I included a definition of monopoly.
Also, if I am the sole inventor, manufacturer, patent holder, trademark holder, copyright holder, etc.; it seems you are arguing that I should not have the right to determine the MSRP nor which retailers I may supply to.
I am not saying that. I don't have a problem with you negotiating terms with partners in a competitive marketplace; I have a problem with a monopolies in the marketplace, because there can be no negotiation, only dictation of terms.
:)
The OS is a different beast that many other consumer goods and commodities. First, it runs on a hardware platform, and secondly, end-user software runs on top of it. Typically, home users don't buy an OS because they want the OS itself; they want it because it runs on the hardware platform they purchased, and because of the applications and peripherals ( scanners, printers, wireless cards ) that run in the OS. Apple/Macintosh is not a competitor to Windows, because it does not run on the same hardware ( I'm talking about desktop computers, not 386 instruction sets ) and it does not run the same applications ( just applications that happen to have been written to be multi-platform). Linux is not truly a competitor either, because while it runs *mostly* on the same hardware ( except for certain video card drivers -- it's up to you whether you want to consider printers, scanners, and wireless adapters to be hardware platform or peripherals ), it certainly doesn't run the applications windows users want as well.
It's well for your case that you ignore BeOS because it clearly demonstrates the monopoly power MS had to shut out competition. As long as you can ignore facts it's fairly simple to win arguments
So what are you saying? That the height of the population of feudal Europe was, on average, like ours? Or simply that pristine battle armor is not a good indicator of average human height of the time?
Citation needed.
That monopolies stifle progress? Monopoly and Efficiency, from wikipedia. "It is often argued that monopolies tend to become less efficient and innovative over time, becoming "complacent giants", because they do not have to be efficient or innovative to compete in the marketplace."
Also, I do not think that word means what you think it means, monopoly. Aside from your citation, please also explain how Microsoft is actually a monopoly, and not just some company you love to hate. IMHO dominating the market place is different than running the marketplace.
I know what monopoly means. MS is a de facto monopoly. From Wikipedia, "In economics, a monopoly (from Greek monos , alone or single + polein , to sell) exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it." MS has sufficient control over the end-user desktop OS market that they are a monopoly. The US DOJ won a court case saying that MS is a monopoly. I'll believe them and my own lying eyes over your opinion.
For a demonstration of MS' monopoly, have a look at the BeOS situation. BeOS was installed as a boot option alongside Windows on certain machines, but MS threatened to withdrawal those manufacturers' ability to license Windows on dual-boot machines. BeOS remained on the hard drive, but the boot option for it was removed from the boot loader. MS forces manufacturers to disable competition on the manufacturers' machines. That's anti-competitive behavior, which they could only do because of their monopoly power.
"A few years ago, Be's CEO Jean-Louis Gassée used the phrase "peaceful co-existence with Windows" to describe his company's intended relationship with Microsoft on the consumer's hard drive. Later, when it became clear that Microsoft had no intention of co-existing with a rival OS vendor peacefully, Gassée recanted, saying, "I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense -- I deserve it." "
OK, that's fine, but people still were shorter back in the day. In fact, they were shorter up until the 1950s, and if you travel to countries with poor nutrition, like South America and Southeast Asia, you will find a lot of short people. It's not all genetics.
In other words, do you honestly believe that success stifles progress?
No, but monopolies do.