No it really didn't. Han could have been plucked out of any Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon radio serial. The Princess had virtually no character development. The Aunt and Uncle of Luke didn't have enough screen time. Obi Wan, despite Alec's performance didn't have much development beyond touching foreheads and babbling on about the Force. Vader didn't have any development and neither did Boba Fett. The only decent character was Luke that had any real development, motivation, etc.
An interesting archetypical character is better than one who's a completely original piece of cardboard (not that they were original). A character with personality and little character arc is much better than one with no personality and no character arc. Yes Luke had by far the most development over the film and films, but it was his story. The other characters were actual characters with recognizable personality traits other than "boring". They were more than just automatons making the plot go.
A: How does a princess from a planet that doesn't have any weapons becomes a member of a rebellion? And if it is a peaceful planet why would they care one way or another about the Empire? She was a prop with no identity except to be saved in the first movie.
LOL. Because she was lying, genius! You might as well ask "how can the rebel base be where Leia said it was but also somewhere else?!" And I guess you didn't notice her role in her own rescue, or how in three lines of dialogue during the rescue she showed more personality than Amidala showed in three movies.
B: Why is Han partnered up with a 7 foot tall carpet?
Because this is Star Wars and humans working with aliens isn't something that requires some complicated explanation? And gee, what use would a criminal have for a pilot who can also rip people's arms out of their sockets. Hmmmm.... Also, his beef with the Empire was they made his job harder than it was under the Republic, and the reason he turned around is because hanging out with Luke and Leia inspired him to care about something more than just money -- that's called character development.
D: Why was Uncle Owen so bitchie about Ben Kenobi?
Yeah, it's almost like they new more about him than they let on, and had reason to think he was trouble and might tempt Luke to fly off and join the rebellion.
I mean shit I could go on and pick apart the original 3 as badly as that guy picked apart the prequels... sans the trapped hooker in the basement.
You could try, but if these are examples then you'd suck at it. "Why did they introduce a new character who had an unexplained history with one of the other characters?" Really? That's supposed to be "picking apart" Star Wars? LOL.
You're making my point for me here!
They persist because of nostalgic hype, nothing more. They are, at best, average movies. The prequels are also average films.
Such nonsense. Nostalgia can make something seem better in your memory. It can't make the actual re-watching enjoyable, as so many examples from my own life have shown -- Transformers: The Movie, animated The Tick, and so on. But Star Wars is actually a very good film that's held up surprisingly well, and the prequels are mediocre except on the most superficial, surface-presentation level.
Nostalgia made me want to love the prequels, and I tried tell myself I enjoyed them just as much, but I couldn't hide the fact that something was obviously... crappy... starting with the opening crawl. You can claim nostalgia is the only thing that makes people think one movie is better than another, but that just doesn't hold water.
Nostalgia isn't going to save the prequels, either. Kids who watched Ep. I are going to rewatch it in thirty years and realize the plot they didn't care about as kids still makes no sense and neither do the characters, and that they should just skip ahead to the lightsaber fight at the end.
Cell phones clearly thwarted a attack on the capital on 9/11, but the use of cell phones on planes continues to be banned.... despite no evidence that cell phones pose any risk to navigation equipment (despite years of claims otherwise without scientific proof).
Fool! There's lots of proof that the cell phone's wi-fi power fluctuations and, uh, midichlorians will disrupt the plane's navigation system and flux capacitor and make the plane crash into the nearest school for bunnies. There will be screaming bunnies on fire if you use your phone on the plane!
Seriously, I'm all for ending the stupidity in airline security, but let's just let this one slide, okay? Do you hate the guy who talks loudly on his cell phone while at a coffee shop or on the bus? Now imagine being crammed next to that guy for five hours. Seriously, flying sucks enough as it is without every jackass with a phone flapping away and going "Can you hear me now? No? I'll talk louder then!"
If there's an emergency, you can still bust out your phone and use it just like you can today.
I bet if todays CGI were available back then, Lucas would have used it to the detriment of character interaction.
I honestly don't think so, because I think that the tools he had were perfectly sufficient to ruin the movie with if that was the route he was going to take. Back then, Lucas said that special effects were just tools for helping to tell a story, and were pointless if they weren't helping tell the story, and I think he really meant it.
I don't think it's the tools, I think it's Lucas that changed. He forgot what makes a story good. He forgot why you can't plaster over the holes in your plot with special effects, CGI or otherwise. He forgot that the reason people loved Star Wars wasn't the mythos, it was the characters. And he forgot to have anyone around him who dared tell him that his ideas weren't totally awesome.
Personally, I bet that if CGI had never been invented that the prequels still would have sucked, especially in the character department. It's not like Qui Gon, Anakin, or Padme didn't have enough screen time to establish themselves as characters. It was how they were written that sapped them of all life.
The older movies had less special effects and more character development. That works universally better than pure CGI.
Actually the older movies were stuffed full of state-of-the-art special effects, which they won an Oscar for. But they also had character development. Which is why they're the better movies.
the original star wars movies were extremely cheesy and mark hamill, carrie fisher, et al., were terrible actors. when i watch the original movies i get chills of embarrassment for them.
And yet the characters they created are a hundred times more real and more memorable than any in the prequels with vastly superior actors. Natalie Portman could act circles around Carrie Fisher*, yet Princess Leia is dynamic, interesting, and memorable while Princess Amidala was as flat and boring as possible. Portman could do nothing to make her interesting, because there was nothing interesting about her. Leia had personality, Padme had none.
Characters is the number one reason why the original trilogy is good, and the prequels are crap.
as for the story... let's see. a moon-size space station that is destroyed from a tiny fighter with a single shot... i can go on.
Yeah because it had the stereotypical reactor that would explode like a gigantic bomb at the tiniest hit. And? You're complaining because the plot included something that was physically improbable? You forgot to mention that the fighter pilot used magic to make the shot!
That's not what makes a plot good or bad. A plot is good if it's reasonable and engaging. The story of Star Wars was simple, but it progressed in a straightforward and logical way and at an engaging pace. The Rebels try to steal plans to the Empire's super weapon, but are captured, so the droids get sent to find someone who can help rescue the Princess and get the plans to the Rebels. They succeed, but the Empire tracks them back to their hidden base so they have to attack and destroy the Death Star before it can destroy them.
Clear motivations on the parts of all characters, logical actions, logical conclusions.
I'm not even going to try to summarize TPM. I would get about two words in and start having to talk about trade routes and treaties that never made any sense and never really mattered anyway even though it defines what's at stake and why. Characters, especially villains, act against their own interests, even their "secret" ones and it only comes together because it has to.
the real difference between episodes 4-6 and 1-3 is *you*, not the films.
Nonsense. I'm perfectly capable of seeing when something I liked as a kid is really crap, and there's plenty of kids movies that I first saw as an adult that I love. Nostalgia made me want to watch Transformers: The Movie again. Nostalgia couldn't hide the fact that after the first five minutes (when they've finished clearing the slate for a new batch of toys) that movie is painful to watch.
when you are a child, you don't tend to get caught up in bad acting and less than stellar plots. your mind is flexible enough to fill in the blanks, skip inconsistencies, and expand on ideas. now that you are an adult, you want the whole thing laid in front of you perfectly
I'm a lot better at filling in the blanks and expanding on ideas now, actually. I quite enjoy mentally filling in back story for things that aren't explained in the movies. But in reality it's the prequels that laid everything out in front of you "perfectly", and by "perfectly" I mean in agonizing, complicated, nonsensical and yet ultimately irrelevant detail. I guarantee you there aren't any children out there who even followed the plot of Phantom Menace, much less "expanded on ideas". They probably did "skip inconsistencies", as in the everything having to do with trade and treaties and votes of no confidence and basically the whole plot itself. A kid probably is happy just knowing that an evil droid army is attacking Naboo without really caring why. That doesn't mean there's no difference between a plot that a kid can follow and a plot they don't care that they can't!
fine if you don't like episodes 1-3, but don't pretend that 4-6 were any better.
Ha! Don't pretend they're the same! Despite the cheese, the or
If we agree, then your point all along is that humans demonstrably suck at random number generation. Saying you did "better" than random.org, using a test that doesn't measure randomness, in a discussion about random number generation, which anyone reading could only take to imply meant "better" at random number generation, is indeed a pretty bad way to state that point.
I think the point that was actually made by your post is a good one though: Humans have a mental model of what "random" means that doesn't have much relation to true randomness, and we can in fact do "better" at producing numbers that match our false notion of random. For example a person picking random numbers tends to pick a number because they haven't picked it in a while, and this leads to a more even distribution (particularly in small samples) than what even an actual truly random and perfectly fair die would produce.
The test I used checks if the distribution of results is near to that of a completely fair die.
No, it's a test of fairness of the distribution, period. Not a test of randomness. That's the other half of "fair die" that you aren't testing. Chi^2 can only tell you if a source of numbers that you know are random are also evenly distributed. It does not tell you that you did a good job of picking random numbers.
And you didn't. Humans are demonstrably bad at it.
Actually, the point (of the original quote, not the OP's) is that what matters is that subs move through the ocean, that's what they're designed for, and whether or not they do it by "swimming" is irrelevant.
Similarly, what we want out of AI is a machine that is capable of abstract general-purpose problem solving, and whether or not the mechanism it uses can be called "thinking" is also irrelevant.
You could consider it an indirect answer to the Chinese Room puzzle which asks "If a person in a room follows rote instructions to translate Chinese to English, do they really understand Chinese?", and Dijkstra is answering "Who cares, as long as the translations are good?"
His administration flat-out says in the article that Americans enjoy no "reasonable expectation of privacy."
No reasonable expectation of privacy regarding the location of their phone. And in part because it's only a "general" indication of location.
Which is still complete bullshit -- thank God the meat of the article is about a Magistrate denying them this ability. But they're not denying expectation of privacy ever exists.
No, no, this is just another case of the Obama DoJ defending actions taken by the federal government during the Bush administration, using the fucked-up arguments required to do so. I mean, okay, so we aren't going to prosecute federal agents who were acting in accordance with the retarded legal opinions of AG Gonzalez. Fine. And if they didn't argue that the FBI's actions were legitimate, if they admitted that the evidence was illegally obtained, then the conviction of the Scarecrow Gang could be overturned.
Well you know what? Maybe that's what has to happen. There has to be some consequence for violating the Constitution, even if your boss at the time assured you that you weren't, and if having the perps walk free is the only consequence we can get, then so be it. So yeah, fuck this argument, fuck this case, and may the sanity shown by Magistrate Judge Lenihan spread throughout the Judiciary (as the phrase from TFA "Only a minority [of Judges] has sided with the Justice Department, however." gives me some hope for).
If you can't think of any reasons why Star Wars was an objectively better made movie than Phantom Menace then you're hopeless.
You can relate to Firefly/Serenity better because it has better characters. Star Wars had great characters. It had characters even no-name actors could bring life to and make memorable. Phantom Menace has characters so boring even outstanding actors can't do anything with them.
You can relate to Firefly because it has intelligent dialogue that developed the characters. Star Wars can't measure up here, but it had quite a few good moments of banter and dialogue that made the characters seem like real people you could relate to. Phantom Menace was a disaster in this respect.
You can relate to Firefly because it had plots that got from Point A to Point B in a reasonable manner. Star Wars had a classic story told with tight pacing and without extraneous crap. Phantom Menace had a train wreck of a plot which it's completely laughable that a child could even follow or care about, with random segues thrown in because Lucas had to shoe-horn in all the characters in even if it made no sense for them to show up.
Basically, the reason Firefly and Star Wars are better than the prequels isn't because of age groups they're targeting vs when I saw them. There's lots of movies "targeted at kids" that I absolutely love, because they're great movies. The reason they're better is because they are well made and tell good stories with good characters. Lucas once knew how to make good movies. Even Jedi is a well crafted movie. The prequels go against every precept of quality moviemaking except in some of the most basic mechanical aspects.
Basically, as a functionalist, you should be saying we essentially don't have a complete understanding of human cognitive processes and how the brain works. I agree.
That's one way to put it, but I would go farther. It's not just that we haven't fully comprehended how the brain works and how it is organized. It's that we really don't comprehend why that organization creates human intelligence, or self-awareness. To the extent that we can even define what it should look like, it's very abstract. I would say that we don't "understand consciousness" in a way that's very meaningful to trying to create an artificial analogue.
If "something more than that" meant saying our lack of understanding means it's impossible to recreate, because our brains are special and magical, then yeah, uh, no. Clearly it's possible for a sapient entity to be constructed from chemicals, it happens all the damn time. I don't really think that's what the OP was getting at though.
Not to take anything away from their research, but "modeled something with as many neurons and connections as half a mouse brain" isn't really the same as "modeled half a mouse brain". Not in the sense that you could replace that half of a mouse's brain with the simulation and it would act the same. Having some simple aspects of the simulation behave in similar ways to how biological brains behave isn't the same as duplicating the functionality, as they admit.
That said, I've long felt that brute force simulation of human brains is our best bet for actually achieving AI, since progress is so abysmal on the algorithms side. But there's more to it than just taking that mouse-brain-sized neural network and waiting for Moore's Law to scale it up to human size.
Only if you want to cling to silly quasi-dualistic Searle-inspired objections towards functionalism.
Uh, no.
I'm totally a functionalist -- if it looks and acts like "intelligence" or "consciousness", then it is.
But we still have no clue what makes "consciousness" or "intelligence" tick, and we're no closer to creating a functional replica of them.
What we've actually accomplished in "weak" AI is pretty impressive from a practical standpoint. But they aren't stepping stones to an actual looks-like-intelligence AI. Coming from the angle of studying the known example of intelligence, we've made lots of strides in understanding the human brain, but we're still not anywhere near understanding it well enough to build a replica from scratch.
Barring some extreme advances in our understanding, the most likely solution to "hard" AI I see is to brute force it and simply run a complete simulation of a human brain. I doubt we'll have the ability to do that in 20 years, though it's always possible.
It is neither an empty threat, nor foreshadowing of an attack on Israel (or any other country).
The "punch" is going to be Revolutionary Guard, Basij Islamic militia, and regular police taking to the streets to violently oppress the peaceful opposition protesters who will also be taking to the streets on the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, which is Feb. 11. They will thus stun the opposition, and indirectly "the West" who the Iranian government claims is responsible for organizing the protesters.
The BBC article gets it right. The WorldNetDaily article and your post are piles of FUD-mongering dung.
What, is crushing a peaceful pro-democracy movement by killing its own citizens in the name of peace not bad enough for you?
Also, while man-made objects aren't necessarily directly related to astronomy, the International Space Station is also quite visible with the naked eye; I'm sure a telescope would make the observation much better.
I've never tried looking at the ISS with a telescope, but I've seen it going overhead and it usually seems to be going pretty fast. Seems like it'd be a huge pain to track!
With a dark sky, Andromeda is an easy naked-eye object, and I think it's pretty impressive just in my 50mm binos. It's anything but barely visible.
Without a dark sky, the whole exercise is pointless. Except for the moon, so I guess I'll have to agree that this is probably the best thing to look at.
Clusters (globular, open, etc) may be a bit harder to find and harder to see, but some of them are impressive with even a 4" telescope. The Messier objects shouldn't be too hard to find with a star chart.
I have no experience with 4" telescopes (I have my own 50mm binoculars, and I mooch off my friends who have 8" scopes and one awesome 20"). I would think globular clusters are one of the most immediately impressive objects to look at, but some are brighter than others. I know in my binos most are just fuzzy blobs, but some you can actually kinda tell what you're looking at.
Do you know of any specific globs that look good in a 4"?
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No it really didn't. Han could have been plucked out of any Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon radio serial. The Princess had virtually no character development. The Aunt and Uncle of Luke didn't have enough screen time. Obi Wan, despite Alec's performance didn't have much development beyond touching foreheads and babbling on about the Force. Vader didn't have any development and neither did Boba Fett. The only decent character was Luke that had any real development, motivation, etc.
An interesting archetypical character is better than one who's a completely original piece of cardboard (not that they were original). A character with personality and little character arc is much better than one with no personality and no character arc. Yes Luke had by far the most development over the film and films, but it was his story. The other characters were actual characters with recognizable personality traits other than "boring". They were more than just automatons making the plot go.
A: How does a princess from a planet that doesn't have any weapons becomes a member of a rebellion? And if it is a peaceful planet why would they care one way or another about the Empire? She was a prop with no identity except to be saved in the first movie.
LOL. Because she was lying, genius! You might as well ask "how can the rebel base be where Leia said it was but also somewhere else?!" And I guess you didn't notice her role in her own rescue, or how in three lines of dialogue during the rescue she showed more personality than Amidala showed in three movies.
B: Why is Han partnered up with a 7 foot tall carpet?
Because this is Star Wars and humans working with aliens isn't something that requires some complicated explanation? And gee, what use would a criminal have for a pilot who can also rip people's arms out of their sockets. Hmmmm.... Also, his beef with the Empire was they made his job harder than it was under the Republic, and the reason he turned around is because hanging out with Luke and Leia inspired him to care about something more than just money -- that's called character development.
D: Why was Uncle Owen so bitchie about Ben Kenobi?
Yeah, it's almost like they new more about him than they let on, and had reason to think he was trouble and might tempt Luke to fly off and join the rebellion.
I mean shit I could go on and pick apart the original 3 as badly as that guy picked apart the prequels... sans the trapped hooker in the basement.
You could try, but if these are examples then you'd suck at it. "Why did they introduce a new character who had an unexplained history with one of the other characters?" Really? That's supposed to be "picking apart" Star Wars? LOL.
You're making my point for me here!
They persist because of nostalgic hype, nothing more. They are, at best, average movies. The prequels are also average films.
Such nonsense. Nostalgia can make something seem better in your memory. It can't make the actual re-watching enjoyable, as so many examples from my own life have shown -- Transformers: The Movie, animated The Tick, and so on. But Star Wars is actually a very good film that's held up surprisingly well, and the prequels are mediocre except on the most superficial, surface-presentation level.
Nostalgia made me want to love the prequels, and I tried tell myself I enjoyed them just as much, but I couldn't hide the fact that something was obviously... crappy... starting with the opening crawl. You can claim nostalgia is the only thing that makes people think one movie is better than another, but that just doesn't hold water.
Nostalgia isn't going to save the prequels, either. Kids who watched Ep. I are going to rewatch it in thirty years and realize the plot they didn't care about as kids still makes no sense and neither do the characters, and that they should just skip ahead to the lightsaber fight at the end.
From an object
Cell phones clearly thwarted a attack on the capital on 9/11, but the use of cell phones on planes continues to be banned.... despite no evidence that cell phones pose any risk to navigation equipment (despite years of claims otherwise without scientific proof).
Fool! There's lots of proof that the cell phone's wi-fi power fluctuations and, uh, midichlorians will disrupt the plane's navigation system and flux capacitor and make the plane crash into the nearest school for bunnies. There will be screaming bunnies on fire if you use your phone on the plane!
Seriously, I'm all for ending the stupidity in airline security, but let's just let this one slide, okay? Do you hate the guy who talks loudly on his cell phone while at a coffee shop or on the bus? Now imagine being crammed next to that guy for five hours. Seriously, flying sucks enough as it is without every jackass with a phone flapping away and going "Can you hear me now? No? I'll talk louder then!"
If there's an emergency, you can still bust out your phone and use it just like you can today.
I bet if todays CGI were available back then, Lucas would have used it to the detriment of character interaction.
I honestly don't think so, because I think that the tools he had were perfectly sufficient to ruin the movie with if that was the route he was going to take. Back then, Lucas said that special effects were just tools for helping to tell a story, and were pointless if they weren't helping tell the story, and I think he really meant it.
I don't think it's the tools, I think it's Lucas that changed. He forgot what makes a story good. He forgot why you can't plaster over the holes in your plot with special effects, CGI or otherwise. He forgot that the reason people loved Star Wars wasn't the mythos, it was the characters. And he forgot to have anyone around him who dared tell him that his ideas weren't totally awesome.
Personally, I bet that if CGI had never been invented that the prequels still would have sucked, especially in the character department. It's not like Qui Gon, Anakin, or Padme didn't have enough screen time to establish themselves as characters. It was how they were written that sapped them of all life.
The older movies had less special effects and more character development. That works universally better than pure CGI.
Actually the older movies were stuffed full of state-of-the-art special effects, which they won an Oscar for. But they also had character development. Which is why they're the better movies.
the original star wars movies were extremely cheesy and mark hamill, carrie fisher, et al., were terrible actors. when i watch the original movies i get chills of embarrassment for them.
And yet the characters they created are a hundred times more real and more memorable than any in the prequels with vastly superior actors. Natalie Portman could act circles around Carrie Fisher*, yet Princess Leia is dynamic, interesting, and memorable while Princess Amidala was as flat and boring as possible. Portman could do nothing to make her interesting, because there was nothing interesting about her. Leia had personality, Padme had none.
Characters is the number one reason why the original trilogy is good, and the prequels are crap.
as for the story ... let's see. a moon-size space station that is destroyed from a tiny fighter with a single shot ... i can go on.
Yeah because it had the stereotypical reactor that would explode like a gigantic bomb at the tiniest hit. And? You're complaining because the plot included something that was physically improbable? You forgot to mention that the fighter pilot used magic to make the shot!
That's not what makes a plot good or bad. A plot is good if it's reasonable and engaging. The story of Star Wars was simple, but it progressed in a straightforward and logical way and at an engaging pace. The Rebels try to steal plans to the Empire's super weapon, but are captured, so the droids get sent to find someone who can help rescue the Princess and get the plans to the Rebels. They succeed, but the Empire tracks them back to their hidden base so they have to attack and destroy the Death Star before it can destroy them.
Clear motivations on the parts of all characters, logical actions, logical conclusions.
I'm not even going to try to summarize TPM. I would get about two words in and start having to talk about trade routes and treaties that never made any sense and never really mattered anyway even though it defines what's at stake and why. Characters, especially villains, act against their own interests, even their "secret" ones and it only comes together because it has to.
the real difference between episodes 4-6 and 1-3 is *you*, not the films.
Nonsense. I'm perfectly capable of seeing when something I liked as a kid is really crap, and there's plenty of kids movies that I first saw as an adult that I love. Nostalgia made me want to watch Transformers: The Movie again. Nostalgia couldn't hide the fact that after the first five minutes (when they've finished clearing the slate for a new batch of toys) that movie is painful to watch.
when you are a child, you don't tend to get caught up in bad acting and less than stellar plots. your mind is flexible enough to fill in the blanks, skip inconsistencies, and expand on ideas. now that you are an adult, you want the whole thing laid in front of you perfectly
I'm a lot better at filling in the blanks and expanding on ideas now, actually. I quite enjoy mentally filling in back story for things that aren't explained in the movies. But in reality it's the prequels that laid everything out in front of you "perfectly", and by "perfectly" I mean in agonizing, complicated, nonsensical and yet ultimately irrelevant detail. I guarantee you there aren't any children out there who even followed the plot of Phantom Menace, much less "expanded on ideas". They probably did "skip inconsistencies", as in the everything having to do with trade and treaties and votes of no confidence and basically the whole plot itself. A kid probably is happy just knowing that an evil droid army is attacking Naboo without really caring why. That doesn't mean there's no difference between a plot that a kid can follow and a plot they don't care that they can't!
fine if you don't like episodes 1-3, but don't pretend that 4-6 were any better.
Ha! Don't pretend they're the same! Despite the cheese, the or
If we agree, then your point all along is that humans demonstrably suck at random number generation. Saying you did "better" than random.org, using a test that doesn't measure randomness, in a discussion about random number generation, which anyone reading could only take to imply meant "better" at random number generation, is indeed a pretty bad way to state that point.
I think the point that was actually made by your post is a good one though: Humans have a mental model of what "random" means that doesn't have much relation to true randomness, and we can in fact do "better" at producing numbers that match our false notion of random. For example a person picking random numbers tends to pick a number because they haven't picked it in a while, and this leads to a more even distribution (particularly in small samples) than what even an actual truly random and perfectly fair die would produce.
Yeah, but there was always the question of whether it inspired true spirituality rather than simply aping it just to avoid the hammer.
Now we know there's no worries on that account, so let the hammering continue!
The test I used checks if the distribution of results is near to that of a completely fair die.
No, it's a test of fairness of the distribution, period. Not a test of randomness. That's the other half of "fair die" that you aren't testing. Chi^2 can only tell you if a source of numbers that you know are random are also evenly distributed. It does not tell you that you did a good job of picking random numbers.
And you didn't. Humans are demonstrably bad at it.
Actually, the point (of the original quote, not the OP's) is that what matters is that subs move through the ocean, that's what they're designed for, and whether or not they do it by "swimming" is irrelevant.
Similarly, what we want out of AI is a machine that is capable of abstract general-purpose problem solving, and whether or not the mechanism it uses can be called "thinking" is also irrelevant.
You could consider it an indirect answer to the Chinese Room puzzle which asks "If a person in a room follows rote instructions to translate Chinese to English, do they really understand Chinese?", and Dijkstra is answering "Who cares, as long as the translations are good?"
That's a lot of songs though. Maybe the number would be more manageable if they used movies, like "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Imager".
His administration flat-out says in the article that Americans enjoy no "reasonable expectation of privacy."
No reasonable expectation of privacy regarding the location of their phone. And in part because it's only a "general" indication of location.
Which is still complete bullshit -- thank God the meat of the article is about a Magistrate denying them this ability. But they're not denying expectation of privacy ever exists.
No, no, this is just another case of the Obama DoJ defending actions taken by the federal government during the Bush administration, using the fucked-up arguments required to do so. I mean, okay, so we aren't going to prosecute federal agents who were acting in accordance with the retarded legal opinions of AG Gonzalez. Fine. And if they didn't argue that the FBI's actions were legitimate, if they admitted that the evidence was illegally obtained, then the conviction of the Scarecrow Gang could be overturned.
Well you know what? Maybe that's what has to happen. There has to be some consequence for violating the Constitution, even if your boss at the time assured you that you weren't, and if having the perps walk free is the only consequence we can get, then so be it. So yeah, fuck this argument, fuck this case, and may the sanity shown by Magistrate Judge Lenihan spread throughout the Judiciary (as the phrase from TFA "Only a minority [of Judges] has sided with the Justice Department, however." gives me some hope for).
If you can't think of any reasons why Star Wars was an objectively better made movie than Phantom Menace then you're hopeless.
You can relate to Firefly/Serenity better because it has better characters. Star Wars had great characters. It had characters even no-name actors could bring life to and make memorable. Phantom Menace has characters so boring even outstanding actors can't do anything with them.
You can relate to Firefly because it has intelligent dialogue that developed the characters. Star Wars can't measure up here, but it had quite a few good moments of banter and dialogue that made the characters seem like real people you could relate to. Phantom Menace was a disaster in this respect.
You can relate to Firefly because it had plots that got from Point A to Point B in a reasonable manner. Star Wars had a classic story told with tight pacing and without extraneous crap. Phantom Menace had a train wreck of a plot which it's completely laughable that a child could even follow or care about, with random segues thrown in because Lucas had to shoe-horn in all the characters in even if it made no sense for them to show up.
Basically, the reason Firefly and Star Wars are better than the prequels isn't because of age groups they're targeting vs when I saw them. There's lots of movies "targeted at kids" that I absolutely love, because they're great movies. The reason they're better is because they are well made and tell good stories with good characters. Lucas once knew how to make good movies. Even Jedi is a well crafted movie. The prequels go against every precept of quality moviemaking except in some of the most basic mechanical aspects.
Basically, as a functionalist, you should be saying we essentially don't have a complete understanding of human cognitive processes and how the brain works. I agree.
That's one way to put it, but I would go farther. It's not just that we haven't fully comprehended how the brain works and how it is organized. It's that we really don't comprehend why that organization creates human intelligence, or self-awareness. To the extent that we can even define what it should look like, it's very abstract. I would say that we don't "understand consciousness" in a way that's very meaningful to trying to create an artificial analogue.
If "something more than that" meant saying our lack of understanding means it's impossible to recreate, because our brains are special and magical, then yeah, uh, no. Clearly it's possible for a sapient entity to be constructed from chemicals, it happens all the damn time. I don't really think that's what the OP was getting at though.
Oh look, the news is full of stories about protests and clashes with security forces. Color me surprised.
Not to take anything away from their research, but "modeled something with as many neurons and connections as half a mouse brain" isn't really the same as "modeled half a mouse brain". Not in the sense that you could replace that half of a mouse's brain with the simulation and it would act the same. Having some simple aspects of the simulation behave in similar ways to how biological brains behave isn't the same as duplicating the functionality, as they admit.
That said, I've long felt that brute force simulation of human brains is our best bet for actually achieving AI, since progress is so abysmal on the algorithms side. But there's more to it than just taking that mouse-brain-sized neural network and waiting for Moore's Law to scale it up to human size.
Yeah? And when's the last time a Coca-Cola represented estimated the odds of catastrophe for the human race as a result their product at 60%?
Why would a super-intelligent being work for pennies?
Because they're robots, and they crave the zinc and copper!
Only if you want to cling to silly quasi-dualistic Searle-inspired objections towards functionalism.
Uh, no.
I'm totally a functionalist -- if it looks and acts like "intelligence" or "consciousness", then it is.
But we still have no clue what makes "consciousness" or "intelligence" tick, and we're no closer to creating a functional replica of them.
What we've actually accomplished in "weak" AI is pretty impressive from a practical standpoint. But they aren't stepping stones to an actual looks-like-intelligence AI. Coming from the angle of studying the known example of intelligence, we've made lots of strides in understanding the human brain, but we're still not anywhere near understanding it well enough to build a replica from scratch.
Barring some extreme advances in our understanding, the most likely solution to "hard" AI I see is to brute force it and simply run a complete simulation of a human brain. I doubt we'll have the ability to do that in 20 years, though it's always possible.
*ALL* religions were pulled out of someone's ass at some point. Not just the ones you don't personally like.
Ah, but not all religions were pulled out of the ass of someone I don't personally like. :)
I gotta say I can't wait for 3D BluRay discs to come out. I keep accidentally losing the 2D ones between the atoms of my couch!
It is neither an empty threat, nor foreshadowing of an attack on Israel (or any other country).
The "punch" is going to be Revolutionary Guard, Basij Islamic militia, and regular police taking to the streets to violently oppress the peaceful opposition protesters who will also be taking to the streets on the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, which is Feb. 11. They will thus stun the opposition, and indirectly "the West" who the Iranian government claims is responsible for organizing the protesters.
The BBC article gets it right. The WorldNetDaily article and your post are piles of FUD-mongering dung.
What, is crushing a peaceful pro-democracy movement by killing its own citizens in the name of peace not bad enough for you?
Yeah, definitely have to at least try the double cluster. It's one of the easiest clusters to spot, and looks pretty cool just through binos.
Also, while man-made objects aren't necessarily directly related to astronomy, the International Space Station is also quite visible with the naked eye; I'm sure a telescope would make the observation much better.
I've never tried looking at the ISS with a telescope, but I've seen it going overhead and it usually seems to be going pretty fast. Seems like it'd be a huge pain to track!
M31: A faint, barely visible blur
With a dark sky, Andromeda is an easy naked-eye object, and I think it's pretty impressive just in my 50mm binos. It's anything but barely visible.
Without a dark sky, the whole exercise is pointless. Except for the moon, so I guess I'll have to agree that this is probably the best thing to look at.
Clusters (globular, open, etc) may be a bit harder to find and harder to see, but some of them are impressive with even a 4" telescope. The Messier objects shouldn't be too hard to find with a star chart.
I have no experience with 4" telescopes (I have my own 50mm binoculars, and I mooch off my friends who have 8" scopes and one awesome 20"). I would think globular clusters are one of the most immediately impressive objects to look at, but some are brighter than others. I know in my binos most are just fuzzy blobs, but some you can actually kinda tell what you're looking at.
Do you know of any specific globs that look good in a 4"?