Really? The entire thing boots up, works snappily with Leopard 10.5, and because one feature doesn't work you consider it a failure?
Yeah, it's a shortcoming, but you can easily download the required updates from Apple using your browser.
Considering that all of this has been done without Apple's legal sanction, I'd say it's as successful as it's ever going to be.
On a side note, have we heard any response from the makers of this machine in defense of their address changes, or are they just going to let the machines speak for themselves?
Really? While I don't doubt Tolkien's status as one of the great authors of the 20th century, I'm fairly sure he was writing in the early-mid 20th century, when great literature had already been being written for 3000 years. I think you're overstating his literary importance here.
you mean 6000 years ago, and if by a drought you mean a flood, and if by 2000 human beings, you mean one bad-ass yachtsman named Noah and his hot wife Jessica Alba, then I would be inclined to agree.
Otherwise I'm afraid this is just another godless article passed off as 'science' by Lucifer-worshipping scientists and their ilk over at CNN.
Yes, "I"(whatever I am in actuality) have qualitative experience of thoughts, sights, tastes, smells, sounds, and touches. This cannot be doubted, even if it is not me who would be doing the doubting anyway.
It is perhaps the only thing we can be certain of. We can't even be certain of that our certainty is ours.
It's quite possible that someone is doubting my mind for me. I can't prove otherwise. In this regard we must go farther than Descartes in his first meditation. For some reason he concluded that he could think - but he didn't truly know that his thoughts originate in him.
All I know is that it feels like I am doubting my mind. The only thing I an be certain of is that I do experience my thoughts and sensory reality.
What I meant to say really is that the self is not metaphysically differentiable from our physical bodies, which flies in the face of Cartesian dualism. It is an emergent phenemonon of our physical brain, and in that sense the self is not just not an idea, it is quite real. So I agree with you.
Kant also had a quite compelling proof of the empirical world, called transcendental idealism. I happen to believe in the reality of the external world, as I'm sure you do. But it's weird that Cartesian skepticism is not seen to have been adequately refuted by many philosophers.
Yes, but many of these arguments(by St. Anselm, St. Aquinas, St. Augustine, Descartes etc) are ways to justify or rationalize our common-sense intuition that we are free agents in the world. There is plenty of merit in discussing them. But when you read them you come to realize that these philosophers tend to start off with an idea from their religious or common-sense beliefs and then seek a rational means with which to justify them. Of course the arguments at first don't appear this way, but upon further inspection, they tend to fall apart once you locate the step that they derived from their religious faith. Of course they all follow very good logic and they are very good philosophers, but there have been serious(I think fatal) objections to many of their arguments.
I think belief in free will is much more problematic if you throw away ALL of your preconceptions and beliefs and reason from the only evidence you have - your immediate thoughts and perceptions. Many more modern philosophers have done this and come to the conclusion that we are not only not free - we are not even truly agents. The freedom of our thought and behavior are mere sensations. "I" is a concept of our mind, which scientists will most likely argue(and are increasingly discovering) is an emergent phenomenon of our brain.
Of course philosophers have always disagreed on these matters and will never answer the question reliably. The way we're going to find justifiable hypotheses is through scientific inquiries into the workings of our brain. And even then, in the end, we're not going to ever finally settle the question - science is always free to be challenged. As it should be.
Not at all. 'Conscious rationality' is the deterministic(or if you wish, probabilistic) process of the biochemical reactions of your brain. Why would your brain be exempt from the physical laws of the universe?
Having had a neurological disorder myself, which has affected the workings of my frontal cortex at times(thankfully not permanently), I have become acutely aware of this. I have come to the opinion a priori that even my most conscious thoughts merely feel spontaneous - but my apprehension of them is no different than my apprehension of my sense perceptions, and I have very little control over my sense perceptions. Even though qualitatively my thoughts are diffferent than, say, my vision, in the end, everything I see, hear, touch, taste, smell, and think is a mere representation of my mind - and I cannot locate the origin of these representations no matter how hard I try. My best hypothesis(since I take my sense representations to originate in empirical reality - that is something that we must assume, for philosophical proofs of this fact have been scandalously weak) is that they are the workings of my brain. Thus even my concept of myself is an elaborate orchestration of my brain's physical functioning.
The sentence "I will choose by own free will to open the bathroom window" is not incorrect because there is no "will" - it's meaningless because there is no intelligible "I" that we can locate as separate from physical reality.
Now, I know this admission opens me up to criticisms - most problematically, how can you rely on the word of someone who admits to having had a brain disease?
To this I answer: how can you rely on the word of anybody?
You can't. You have to reason from first principles yourself.
The only real argument for OS superiority that MS has right now is that only Windows will run all Windows software, past and present. This keeps IT pros tied to Windows, because their co-workers demand being able to use the same software, and uninformed IT drones susceptible to purchasing successive versions of the increasingly crappy OS due to deceptive marketing.
This is not a winning business model in the long-term, as people will someday realize, hey, I saw this other OS out there that is lighter, faster, more secure, and easier to use. But in the short term it keeps people from tossing out their support contracts and Windows licenses so that they can run their old software. This has turned the war against Windows into a war of attrition.
It would seem so at first, yes. But then, I would argue, the person who has made a game that was meant to run on hardware that doesn't exist yet might be more qualified to comment on rendering methods that run on hardware that doesn't exist yet.
It's a little more complex than is indicated by the examples we're using. There are different rules that govern a game than govern real life. You get psychological points for helping little old grannies across the road, just as you get psychological points for playing ruthless chess, because that's what's asked for by the game. But I imagine you might also seize an opportunity for professional self-advancement just as aggressively as you play chess if a fair one presented to you and you could capture it within your moral rules and the rules of society at large.
Even our most altruistic actions require a reward, even if it is only personal satisfaction.
Games != real life, but there is a relationship between behavior in a game and behavior in real life, even if it's not based on killing people. Someone who is very competitive in a video game is probably also very competitive in his real-life behavior, even if this doesn't translate literally to killing people in real life. Behavior and success in a game must be based on some aspect of the mind of the player, and it isn't unreasonable to say that the same psychology which compels us to succeed in the game will compel us to succeed in different ways in real life. It's connected with our pleasure-reward system. I might kill you in a game to win points, but in real life I might accuse you of charging too much to your expense account in front of our boss so that he/she promotes me to your position(obviously this is an extreme example). Same actors, same psychological tendency, same pleasure reward, different circumstances.
Furthermore, I'm sure that many would agree that a predisposition towards ruthlessness often comes with a predisposition towards viewing one's day to day interactions as a kind of game where the goal is to win. So this sort of enhances any transfer of any game behavior into real life interactions.
Blizzard executives went to the crack-addled streets of inner-city LA, bought a bunch of it, gave it to their employees, and said to them, "Figure out how to make this crack into a computer game. Feel free to try some of it too."
The crack enabled them to stay up late enough to think of WoW.
I took the AB exam when it was in C++ and somehow managed a 5, even though I swear I couldn't even read the code I was scrawling. My handwriting was terrible, and on top of that our class hadn't finished studying the material. Our class was a joke, and we spent most of our time playing games. During the exam, I had a headache from all the iteration I was trying to work through in my head, I'm pretty sure I misunderstood some of the questions. I really don't think I penned syntactically correct code at all. Maybe if the exam were graded in pseudo-code it would have been correct algorithmically. Perhaps the grader, seeing my handwriting and not wanting to slog through the mess, just gave me the benefit of the doubt and marked it 5.
This, combined with your experience, points to maybe some serious irregularities with the College Board's grading system.
Or maybe there are other explanations. Perhaps they gave me the wrong person's score. Sigh.
As for the fact that he doesn't name the wireless carrier, the article mentions that his claims were identical with claims found in a lawsuit where the culprit was Verizon Wireless. So I was merely using that name for the joke.
Look, we already know that there's wiretapping going on without FISA warrants. It's not far off to think that this mysterious DS-3 circuit could be in place linking up phone companies with federal law enforcement.
Go to your Verizon Wireless-serviced cell phone, call a friend in a foreign country, and have a normal conversation, but make sure to throw in a few key "red flag" words and phrases here and there. Examples of "red flags" are:
"Bomb" "Subways" "Code Green" "Statue of Liberty" "Monuments" "Airplanes" "Buildings" "I hate George Bush and think the Justice Department is a corrupt pile of shit"
Say goodbye to your friend once a few or all of these phrases have been sprinkled into your conversation. Then sit back in your favorite Barca lounger, take out your stopwatch, measure how many minutes it takes for one or more black SUVs to park across from your driveway.
Well, Obama is half-white and was raised in a middle-class household in Hawaii and Indonesia. He's not exactly living like a lot of other black Americans, many of whom live in ghettos and are poor because they'e been denied the equal opportunities that America should hold as a promise. But simply by being a person of color and having worked to improve those areas of African-American life, he shares a lot of the black experience.
When we talk about poor minorities we're not really talking about the kind of family Barack comes from, but I can draw out a point from some of what you said - the emphasis should be on "poor" rather than "minorities." Still, a disproportionate number of black people, disadvantaged by the lingering effects of segregation and discrimination, are still poor.
Besides, I think the word "black" is generally becoming less stigmatized and less politically incorrect. People - both white and black - are using it more freely than before.
(I'm an Obama supporter, but it doesn't have to do with the fact that he's black. I'm a young white man, and am mainly in it for the inspiration and coalition-building, and to a lesser degree an (arguably) more palatable health care plan).
I would have to speculate that one reason is that the data the servers contain can withstand just about anything....The truth won't get lost in time, even if the rest of Earth sits through a nuclear holocaust.
Besides, you can restore a connection to the internet trivially, but you can't trivially restore servers with data on them that have been stolen.
I understand now that you may try to point out my contradiction. When I said "particular set of atoms" the first time I mean - the set of atoms X that comprises our brain at time Y. This set may not be the same set that comprises our brain at time Z. However, as long as the substituted particles maintain similar relations to the overall structure of our brain, the continuity of our experience persists.
Notice how I said "organizational structure" - not the atoms themselves. What you say about cells being replaced is true - but even more often than entire cells are replaced, the atoms that compose our cells are being cycled in and out constantly. The set of atoms that make up our bodies - brain and all - today is not the same set as the one that made it up when we were born or even when we were a couple years younger. So I am by no means attaching the individual consciousness to a particular set of atoms - rather I believe that it is the organizational structure(the physical relations) of those atoms over time that allows for the emergent phenemonon we refer to as "consciousness" to happen. The organization of our brain gives us the clear idea that we persist, we feel, we experience from one moment to the next.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? The entire thing boots up, works snappily with Leopard 10.5, and because one feature doesn't work you consider it a failure? Yeah, it's a shortcoming, but you can easily download the required updates from Apple using your browser. Considering that all of this has been done without Apple's legal sanction, I'd say it's as successful as it's ever going to be. On a side note, have we heard any response from the makers of this machine in defense of their address changes, or are they just going to let the machines speak for themselves?
Really? While I don't doubt Tolkien's status as one of the great authors of the 20th century, I'm fairly sure he was writing in the early-mid 20th century, when great literature had already been being written for 3000 years. I think you're overstating his literary importance here.
was wearing an in-house version of this hat before he decided to release Vista. Unfortunately, the hat was running Vista.
you mean 6000 years ago, and if by a drought you mean a flood, and if by 2000 human beings, you mean one bad-ass yachtsman named Noah and his hot wife Jessica Alba, then I would be inclined to agree. Otherwise I'm afraid this is just another godless article passed off as 'science' by Lucifer-worshipping scientists and their ilk over at CNN.
And all I know is....I also don't get any tail the other 24 days.
Yes, "I"(whatever I am in actuality) have qualitative experience of thoughts, sights, tastes, smells, sounds, and touches. This cannot be doubted, even if it is not me who would be doing the doubting anyway. It is perhaps the only thing we can be certain of. We can't even be certain of that our certainty is ours.
It's quite possible that someone is doubting my mind for me. I can't prove otherwise. In this regard we must go farther than Descartes in his first meditation. For some reason he concluded that he could think - but he didn't truly know that his thoughts originate in him. All I know is that it feels like I am doubting my mind. The only thing I an be certain of is that I do experience my thoughts and sensory reality.
What I meant to say really is that the self is not metaphysically differentiable from our physical bodies, which flies in the face of Cartesian dualism. It is an emergent phenemonon of our physical brain, and in that sense the self is not just not an idea, it is quite real. So I agree with you. Kant also had a quite compelling proof of the empirical world, called transcendental idealism. I happen to believe in the reality of the external world, as I'm sure you do. But it's weird that Cartesian skepticism is not seen to have been adequately refuted by many philosophers.
Yes, but many of these arguments(by St. Anselm, St. Aquinas, St. Augustine, Descartes etc) are ways to justify or rationalize our common-sense intuition that we are free agents in the world. There is plenty of merit in discussing them. But when you read them you come to realize that these philosophers tend to start off with an idea from their religious or common-sense beliefs and then seek a rational means with which to justify them. Of course the arguments at first don't appear this way, but upon further inspection, they tend to fall apart once you locate the step that they derived from their religious faith. Of course they all follow very good logic and they are very good philosophers, but there have been serious(I think fatal) objections to many of their arguments. I think belief in free will is much more problematic if you throw away ALL of your preconceptions and beliefs and reason from the only evidence you have - your immediate thoughts and perceptions. Many more modern philosophers have done this and come to the conclusion that we are not only not free - we are not even truly agents. The freedom of our thought and behavior are mere sensations. "I" is a concept of our mind, which scientists will most likely argue(and are increasingly discovering) is an emergent phenomenon of our brain. Of course philosophers have always disagreed on these matters and will never answer the question reliably. The way we're going to find justifiable hypotheses is through scientific inquiries into the workings of our brain. And even then, in the end, we're not going to ever finally settle the question - science is always free to be challenged. As it should be.
Not at all. 'Conscious rationality' is the deterministic(or if you wish, probabilistic) process of the biochemical reactions of your brain. Why would your brain be exempt from the physical laws of the universe? Having had a neurological disorder myself, which has affected the workings of my frontal cortex at times(thankfully not permanently), I have become acutely aware of this. I have come to the opinion a priori that even my most conscious thoughts merely feel spontaneous - but my apprehension of them is no different than my apprehension of my sense perceptions, and I have very little control over my sense perceptions. Even though qualitatively my thoughts are diffferent than, say, my vision, in the end, everything I see, hear, touch, taste, smell, and think is a mere representation of my mind - and I cannot locate the origin of these representations no matter how hard I try. My best hypothesis(since I take my sense representations to originate in empirical reality - that is something that we must assume, for philosophical proofs of this fact have been scandalously weak) is that they are the workings of my brain. Thus even my concept of myself is an elaborate orchestration of my brain's physical functioning. The sentence "I will choose by own free will to open the bathroom window" is not incorrect because there is no "will" - it's meaningless because there is no intelligible "I" that we can locate as separate from physical reality. Now, I know this admission opens me up to criticisms - most problematically, how can you rely on the word of someone who admits to having had a brain disease? To this I answer: how can you rely on the word of anybody? You can't. You have to reason from first principles yourself.
The only real argument for OS superiority that MS has right now is that only Windows will run all Windows software, past and present. This keeps IT pros tied to Windows, because their co-workers demand being able to use the same software, and uninformed IT drones susceptible to purchasing successive versions of the increasingly crappy OS due to deceptive marketing. This is not a winning business model in the long-term, as people will someday realize, hey, I saw this other OS out there that is lighter, faster, more secure, and easier to use. But in the short term it keeps people from tossing out their support contracts and Windows licenses so that they can run their old software. This has turned the war against Windows into a war of attrition.
It would seem so at first, yes. But then, I would argue, the person who has made a game that was meant to run on hardware that doesn't exist yet might be more qualified to comment on rendering methods that run on hardware that doesn't exist yet.
It's a little more complex than is indicated by the examples we're using. There are different rules that govern a game than govern real life. You get psychological points for helping little old grannies across the road, just as you get psychological points for playing ruthless chess, because that's what's asked for by the game. But I imagine you might also seize an opportunity for professional self-advancement just as aggressively as you play chess if a fair one presented to you and you could capture it within your moral rules and the rules of society at large. Even our most altruistic actions require a reward, even if it is only personal satisfaction.
Games != real life, but there is a relationship between behavior in a game and behavior in real life, even if it's not based on killing people. Someone who is very competitive in a video game is probably also very competitive in his real-life behavior, even if this doesn't translate literally to killing people in real life. Behavior and success in a game must be based on some aspect of the mind of the player, and it isn't unreasonable to say that the same psychology which compels us to succeed in the game will compel us to succeed in different ways in real life. It's connected with our pleasure-reward system. I might kill you in a game to win points, but in real life I might accuse you of charging too much to your expense account in front of our boss so that he/she promotes me to your position(obviously this is an extreme example). Same actors, same psychological tendency, same pleasure reward, different circumstances. Furthermore, I'm sure that many would agree that a predisposition towards ruthlessness often comes with a predisposition towards viewing one's day to day interactions as a kind of game where the goal is to win. So this sort of enhances any transfer of any game behavior into real life interactions.
Blizzard executives went to the crack-addled streets of inner-city LA, bought a bunch of it, gave it to their employees, and said to them, "Figure out how to make this crack into a computer game. Feel free to try some of it too." The crack enabled them to stay up late enough to think of WoW.
I took the AB exam when it was in C++ and somehow managed a 5, even though I swear I couldn't even read the code I was scrawling. My handwriting was terrible, and on top of that our class hadn't finished studying the material. Our class was a joke, and we spent most of our time playing games. During the exam, I had a headache from all the iteration I was trying to work through in my head, I'm pretty sure I misunderstood some of the questions. I really don't think I penned syntactically correct code at all. Maybe if the exam were graded in pseudo-code it would have been correct algorithmically. Perhaps the grader, seeing my handwriting and not wanting to slog through the mess, just gave me the benefit of the doubt and marked it 5.
This, combined with your experience, points to maybe some serious irregularities with the College Board's grading system.
Or maybe there are other explanations. Perhaps they gave me the wrong person's score. Sigh.
Something I've noticed is the attractiveness of women is directly proportional to how insulted they are when a computer scientist asks them out.
Hold onto her! It's very rare to find someone open-minded enough to date someone with just one eye, even if it is wandering.
I assure you I was just joking.
As for the fact that he doesn't name the wireless carrier, the article mentions that his claims were identical with claims found in a lawsuit where the culprit was Verizon Wireless. So I was merely using that name for the joke.
Look, we already know that there's wiretapping going on without FISA warrants. It's not far off to think that this mysterious DS-3 circuit could be in place linking up phone companies with federal law enforcement.
Hmmm. How about we try to get some?
Go to your Verizon Wireless-serviced cell phone, call a friend in a foreign country, and have a normal conversation, but make sure to throw in a few key "red flag" words and phrases here and there. Examples of "red flags" are:
"Bomb"
"Subways"
"Code Green"
"Statue of Liberty"
"Monuments"
"Airplanes"
"Buildings"
"I hate George Bush and think the Justice Department is a corrupt pile of shit"
Say goodbye to your friend once a few or all of these phrases have been sprinkled into your conversation. Then sit back in your favorite Barca lounger, take out your stopwatch, measure how many minutes it takes for one or more black SUVs to park across from your driveway.
Well, Obama is half-white and was raised in a middle-class household in Hawaii and Indonesia. He's not exactly living like a lot of other black Americans, many of whom live in ghettos and are poor because they'e been denied the equal opportunities that America should hold as a promise. But simply by being a person of color and having worked to improve those areas of African-American life, he shares a lot of the black experience.
When we talk about poor minorities we're not really talking about the kind of family Barack comes from, but I can draw out a point from some of what you said - the emphasis should be on "poor" rather than "minorities." Still, a disproportionate number of black people, disadvantaged by the lingering effects of segregation and discrimination, are still poor.
Besides, I think the word "black" is generally becoming less stigmatized and less politically incorrect. People - both white and black - are using it more freely than before.
(I'm an Obama supporter, but it doesn't have to do with the fact that he's black. I'm a young white man, and am mainly in it for the inspiration and coalition-building, and to a lesser degree an (arguably) more palatable health care plan).
General Lord - what a fucking sweet name! Good Lord!
In other news, I'm so glad to see that, finally, our international crises are going to be able to be settled by a game of Unreal Tournament.
I would have to speculate that one reason is that the data the servers contain can withstand just about anything....The truth won't get lost in time, even if the rest of Earth sits through a nuclear holocaust.
Besides, you can restore a connection to the internet trivially, but you can't trivially restore servers with data on them that have been stolen.
I understand now that you may try to point out my contradiction. When I said "particular set of atoms" the first time I mean - the set of atoms X that comprises our brain at time Y. This set may not be the same set that comprises our brain at time Z. However, as long as the substituted particles maintain similar relations to the overall structure of our brain, the continuity of our experience persists.
Notice how I said "organizational structure" - not the atoms themselves. What you say about cells being replaced is true - but even more often than entire cells are replaced, the atoms that compose our cells are being cycled in and out constantly. The set of atoms that make up our bodies - brain and all - today is not the same set as the one that made it up when we were born or even when we were a couple years younger. So I am by no means attaching the individual consciousness to a particular set of atoms - rather I believe that it is the organizational structure(the physical relations) of those atoms over time that allows for the emergent phenemonon we refer to as "consciousness" to happen. The organization of our brain gives us the clear idea that we persist, we feel, we experience from one moment to the next.