Whoa, sorry to hear that! Swine, avian, or otherwise, the flu sucks.:P
the doctor told me that maybe I have H1N1 but it wasn't worth testing specifically since it's no different from regular flu. To which I said "That's what I thought. So why did you make me come in?". He didn't have a good answer.
You're shitting me. When I started reading your post, I seriously thought it was going to end up that yeah they wanted to make sure just for tracking purposes, or that there was some other benefit to seeing a doctor that I had missed. But you're telling me they did actually tell you to go in, and that they subsequently told you that there was actually no good reason for you to have done so? Fuuuuuck.
Just doing my part to contribute to skyrocketing health care costs...
Sure the Hubble, being an instrument first and foremost, uses filters and digital photography to analyze structures in space, and see things humans can't see.
But fundamentally the Hubble is still a near-visible light telescope of the reflector type, fundamentally not much different than many common hobbyist scopes. Just bigger, much more precisely made, and in outer fucking space. Oh and with a ton of instruments, filters, etc attached.
What I want is to get those out of the way, attach an eyepiece, and put my ass on a rocket up there so I can take a peek. I know that most things would not look like the NASA-generated images because they have the advantage of being able to do long exposures and see frequencies I can't. Nevertheless, it would still be the most spectacular view you could have with your own eye, which is a huge difference, and would be a completely mind-blowing experience way beyond looking at the processed images.
Of course this wet dream of mine of tourist trips to space telescopes is way more outlandish than my dream of seeing earth from space. That one has a decent chance of happening, especially if I start compromising on "space".:)
Ha! I see that the Electric Police Force (aka The Faraday Fuzz) aren't nearly as corruptible as they around around here. A Benjamin or two to grease the wheels of Electric Justice, and they'll turn a blind eye to just about anything.
Hell, the other day I was running 100A through a 1k ohm load off a 9V battery, and my local Electric Police Officer just gave me a knowing smile and a tip of the hat before carrying on his merry way.
I heard down in Mexico you can do pretty much whatever you want if you just tell them you're in a cartel.
So this guy's device probably works, but has a "hidden cost" that of course isn't going to be discussed much.
Huh, I guess it didn't occur to me that 'bug' would imply only bacterial infections... It's so far removed from what it's actually describing anyway. *shrug* live and learn I guess.
You're crazy. Ron Perlman makes everything better. Whatever it is. He'd be a perfect Bilbo Baggins. Or at least the voice of Smaug. Or better yet, just dress him up in a big Smaug costume!
If you do test positive for swine flu then proper public health measures can be taken.
It's the fucking flu! Have you never had the flu before?
WTF do you think "proper public health measures" are for a highly infectious, incurable disease that in normal situations runs its course in under a week? CLUE: It does NOT involve going into a hospital where you can infect other especially vulnerable people only to have a doctor tell you what you SHOULD already know, which is that he can't do anything for you!
I really don't get this disconnect people are having. It's called "swine flu" just to distinguish it from every other strain of flu that hits every year, but it is still essentially the same bug.
It's like the news reports I see on CNN where the info bar at the bottom will have "Symptoms of Swine Flu", and then lists the symptoms of THE FLU. In fact, maybe if instead of actually listing the symptoms, it just said "Symptoms of Swine Flu: Same as Every Other Flu" people would be less freaked out and slightly less ignorant about what Swine Flu really is -- THE FLU.
Seriously, FFS, if you think you have Swine Flu, pretend you have the "normal" flu (which you do) and act accordingly by staying home and not bothering your doctor.:P
We're not building brains. You can tweak your simulation any way you want.
Hypothetically, but practically it may be impossible. We haven't actually build this simulation, we don't actually know how, but most people are fairly sure that whatever Intelligence our Artificial Intelligence will have will be an emergent phenomenon.
Even today in relatively primitive neural networks, the ultimate behavior of that network in classifying or controlling is largely an emergent behavior. We are not able to reach into the middle, tweak a couple connection weights by hand, and know that the output will be what we want. You can't just say "Okay, find the part of the network that identifies blue skies versus gray skies, and raise the threshold of 'blueness'". Changes to those networks are done via testing and feedback algorithms that eventually guide it towards the goal, but only by observing the emergent behavior. These algorithms even break down in more complicated networks, and then you have to start using algorithms like simulated annealing or genetic algorithms, which are literally "guess and check" forms of modification, and the result is not always what you wanted, or done in the way you wanted.
So, it's very not-obvious to me that we'll be able to tweak our emergent AIs "any way we want".
My neurons tell me not to kill humans, don't yours?
Which neurons? Can you point these neurons out to me? Can you isolate them from the same neurons that coordinate all your higher thought processes? Could you selectively eliminate these neurons, turning a human that would not kill into one that would without compunction, without essentially lobotomizing them?
I'm guessing not. However, with some time, expertise, and a complete lack of morals, I'm sure someone could be "reprogrammed" to have no compunction about killing. However the point is that you're interfacing with the person at the level of their intelligence, not the underlying mechanisms behind that intelligence. You're not reaching in and changing neuron connections manually, you're applying certain stimuli to the input neurons and hoping that creates the correct organization inside. But you are never truly sure that this has happened, because you can't actually verify the new organization does exactly what you hope it does. So the programming may appear to have worked perfectly, but it could fail at an inopportune time.
Similarly we might be able to "program" as in "teach" a robot the Three Laws, but just because it's a "simulation" that doesn't mean we can necessarily build those laws right into the brain as inviolable facts as Asimov speculated. Of course the whole point of I, Robot was showing how even if you could build the laws in as fundamental aspects of the AIs, the laws still were anything but perfect... but there are a lot of models for AI where even that would be impossible.
It's not just neurons; there are axions and a lot of other different cells. And I'm no neuroscientist but I'd bet that it isn't on/off; the signals are mostly chemical, meaning the strength of the signals between neurons can vary depending on the amount of chemical. IE, brains are analog, not binary.
Not just analog, but non-linear. Which is also why any decent neural network uses non-linear connections too.
Not that neural networks are necessarily the answer for AI. But I do think that the ultimate solution will have some similar properties: Non-linear, complex (as in chaotic in a mathematical sense), and with the desired intelligence being an emergent property and thus not something so easily tweaked to our preferences as "if/else" logic.
That page is 100% hearsay, gossip column and TMZ-esque gossip presented as fact and wikiality.
Yeah, if you don't count all the references and links to well-established facts in examples of Hollywood Accounting.
Which of course you don't count, because your post is 100% garbage anti-WP FUD. You said nothing of value to the human race. The WP page has you beat on that count by miles and miles.
Have you ever been to ANWR? I work right next door to it, and I can tell you, there ain't shit to protect out there. Seriously. Do you know what tundra is? It is literally frozen dirt with short grass growing on top. It isn't exactly an eco-paradise.
I haven't been to ANWR, but I have been to other Alaskan tundras. And you're being very naive about what constitutes an ecosystem worth protecting. Just because you don't see many large animals there, and because you don't consider it paradise, doesn't mean it's lifeless. Do you think deserts are lifeless and unworthy of protection?
ANWR won't free us from dependance on foreign oil, but it would boost our capacity by about 20% or more, and that's nothing to sneeze at.
I'm sneezing at it. That's not going to reduce the price of oil much, not that simply lowering the price of fuel temporarily is a worthy goal on its own. It's not going to reduce our dependence on foreign oil significantly, and will only justify continuing to avoid the change we all know we need to make. Keep those reserves for when we need them, and hopefully if we plan correctly that day will never come. Drilling in ANWR is the complete opposite of what we need today.
If I were President, I'd tax the crap out of imported oil, and open up Anwar and California. You might not like everything about it, but sitting complaining about EVERY SOLUTION presented is NOT an option any longer.
ANWR is just a drop in the bucket. It's so not-a-solution to foreign oil that it makes no sense to damage that ecosystem just to immeasurably affect our situation. In fact I'd much rather save that drop until a single drop would affect our situation because we're gagging for any fuel at all, a 'who cares about environmental concerns if we can't deliver groceries' situation. Heaven forbid it comes to that. But even worse is burning up our own reserves, and then having to come begging to the foreign powers we were trying to be free from.
Treating ANWR as a "solution" for today's problems only makes such a situation more likely. We need not-oil to be the solution. All the not-oil solutions you proposed are fine, great even (cept hydro simply because nearly all the best locations are already tapped, so the opportunity here is much less). But more drilling isn't the answer, because we can't drill enough to free ourselves of foreign oil. The only way to end our addiction to foreign oil is to end our addiction to oil.
One of the first major books on the subject uses the sensational title Three Mile Island: Thirty Minutes to Meltdown (1982)
The sad part is that the only reason that's sensational rather than merely dramatic is because of the automatic association between the words "meltdown" and "mushroom cloud". This was a delusion that I myself believed for many years because it's not like I knew anything about real reactors and everything in pop culture said "nuclear plants are basically atom bombs barely under control". Just as an example, the first time I saw Aliens it never even occurred to me to question the plot line where a few rounds of small arms fire near some coolant pipes means a few hours later the plant will blow like a fucking hydrogen bomb and there's nothing you can do to stop it*.
So, I think if there's been a sea change on opinions regarding nuclear power, it has to in part be because of simple education. I think most people are at least vaguely aware that the Hollywood representation of nuclear plant failure modes isn't accurate, which is why most of the debate is around the waste not so much plant safety itself. As people become more educated about waste issues (i.e. knowing that fundamentally the properties "lasts a really, really, long time" and "is dangerously radioactive" are inversely related), that becomes better too.
There's still opposition and there's still reason for it. I'm all for nuclear, though, and very happy about the change in opinions.
* And for the sake of future enjoyment of the movie, I'm just going to tell myself that just as casting Paul Riser as Burke was no accident, the Weyland-Yutani Company designing a reactor with such flagrant disregard for the safety of the colonists was no accident either. It was a physical manifestation of the Company's amoral greed and scorn for little people, much like Riser's Burke. Also I'm going to not really care.:)
IFR-style (Integral Fast Reactor) was designed around a slightly different principle of nuclear physics, such that you aren't even trying to prevent a meltdown, because the very physics of the reaction is such that if it starts getting 'too hot', the nuclear reaction itself starts to shutdown
I thought that there were many designs that were in part based around this idea, not just IFRs. I've heard the nuclear physicist types call it "Negative Something" where "something" is the ratio between temperature and reaction rate.
What do you think would happen if we told them that radio waves are generated using a quartz crystal oscillator? Head explosion? Rending of clothes and gnashing of teeth?
See, you're thinking at once too deeply, and not deeply (retarded) enough. Bad crystals like in radios create evil radiation, good crystals like the ones they're hawking protect you from it.
"It's terrible to kill and eat animals. It's not natural." "If wolves became self-aware and stopped eating meat, they'd become sick and maybe die. They have evolved to be carnivores." "Yeah but humans haven't, we have molars." "We also have incisors." "That's for berries."
LOL, berries. Berries. Yeah, "it's not natural" is hilarious bullcrap. On the other hand, unlike wolves we can live in quite good health on vegetable matter alone, and in the modern world this is often a viable choice. And choices are what ethics are all about. Even arguing about "natural" kinda misses the point.
I'll be sure to ponder that on my way to pick up my Meat Eaters pizza. I'll probably have forgotten by the time I'm wolfing it down though.
The last page of the last book. There, a surprise, instead of the usual page-filling drawing of intricate details, once intriguing and exciting but now just annoying and yawn-inducing, there's only a corner with the usual crowd next to a lake. A deep lake that you can see into; its depths cover most of the page. Where's Waldo?
There he is. At the bottom of the lake. Still, cold, and alone.
And no, there aren't two equal but opposing viewpoints regarding EM. There's right and wrong. Fact and fiction.
Oh, that's just your viewpoint, which is equally valid as my viewpoint, which is that right and wrong are subjective and decided largely by volume of ranting and by a sense of fairness, such that even my made up bullshit gets to be right for a day every once in a while.
And on that day, AM radio towers will cure cancer. I demand an equal amount of airtime for my view as for you and ELF on the non-AM media channels.
I don't see why monopoles should imply perpetual motion.
It implies perpetual motion under conditions of ignorance of how fields work.:)
There's apparently a lot of people who think magnetic fields are some crazy magic thing where if there wasn't a north or south then they could do anything. But... if you actually posit a magnetic monopole, and look at the field it would generate, you get... nothing particularly special. It's still just a magnetic field, perfectly understandable, perfectly normal, and with extremely well understood implications.
Likewise, many physicists persist in their belief in magnetic monopoles because the concept is beautiful, or some other such rubbish. Look! It even makes Maxwell's equations symmetric. So what? What's so important about having symmetric equations. Unsymmetrical ones are so much more interesting!
Yeah "beautiful" in that it explains and fits with other things that we've observed, like quantization of charge. And yes scientists do like theories where the pieces fit together to explain each other elegantly, and such things have often turned out to be true. It's not just a coincidence with no ramifications for physics that electromagnetic energy is quantized.
That's not anything like proof, it just means it isn't completely boneheaded to look for the elegant solution.
The one, only, and final arbiter is the experiment. An honest to gods experiment. It finds things. It separates truth from fiction. You can try to twist the meaning of the result this way and that, throw back the grenade and carry on with your fire and motion, but in the end the results of all those experiments will finally weigh down your dishonesty and halt your advance.
Yeah and oh look there's an experiment suggesting they exist! Yeah calling it "overwhelming evidence" is premature -- we'll see what happens between now and when the study actually gets peer-reviewed and published. But they're doing exactly what it is you say they should be doing, so if your whole point is that the words you use and people you convince don't matter, then don't pay attention to the words and pay attention to the experiment and the paper that describes it.
There are no magnetic monopoles. You can try to separate north and south pole. You can even construct models of "magnetic charge" and dipoles if you like. But in the end, you can't get a north pole without having a corresponding south pole, very, very close by.
I don't know why you and others are so sure of this, when there's really no theoretical reason for that to be the case. Nothing in theory rules it out. I don't see why you'd be so positive then outside of it feeling "right" in an aesthetic sense, the same thing you accuse the scientists of. Experimentation up until now has not definitively shown them to exist, but lots of things were hypothesized a long time before they were measured because a lot of things in modern physics are hard to measure or find.
I'm not affirming the research, by the way. I'm not convinced they've found it yet, and I'm not convinced monopoles do exist. I just find all this "lol of course they didn't that's impossible" talk to be misguided. You don't know that, and if you think you do, then you don't know physics as well as you think you do. Come up with a modified theory of electromagnetism that rules out monopoles, conduct an experiment like you say is how it should be done to verify, and then say "There are no magnetic monopoles" like it's a fact and not opinion.
Unending magnetic field lines and a particle with a net magnetic charge does not result in "perpetual motion", where that term always means "perpetual motion in the face of friction or other counteracting forces", because minus that "perpetual motion" is just Newton's 1st Law and completely uninteresting.
In the case of a magnetic monopole, it's actually little different than electricity (I know you think otherwise but you're wrong, look at the force equation), and in the case of electric fields, a charged particle in that field has a certain amount of potential energy, and that potential energy may be converted into kinetic, and that kinetic energy may be enough to reach escape velocity for the universe, but it isn't perpetual motion.
I know it's pointless explaining this to the deliberately dumb troll, since even if you wanted to understand it'd require you knowing some of the actual theory and math behind the physics you only understand through inaccurate analogy, but it's entertaining anyway.
There was no specification of "all out war" or "real war" or "total war."
I didn't call two buildings being knocked over "all out war", I called it war.
Yes there was and yes you did. You're the one who specified "all out war in 2001." Read your own damn post please.
And I was of course talking about "real" war, and "total" war, because I was talking about what civilians went through in WWII. I thought you were trying to make a point, not ignore the context of the discussion in order to be pedantic.
The fact of the matter is, there was "real, all out and total war" on the Great Plains and Southwestern United States from 1865-1890.
Oh geeze, yeah, against the natives. War on the least populated parts of the U.S. at the time (and still) is technically on U.S. soil, so again score one for pedantry. Sure if you were a homesteader or a remote town aka settlement, you were in danger, but when was Dallas or any other U.S. population center ever threatened by this "real, all out and total war"?
As for this ideal that the Europeans are less likely to start wars because they have a more recent experience with it, I don't see that in recent history.
Meh I know that Eurasian countries aren't paragons of pacifist virtue. I was going along with the idea presented in the post I replied to -- that accepting the reality of the horrors of war will result in less wars being started -- because it's the absence of this virtue that explains why the United States and its people have been cavalier about war and its "horror" because that hasn't been visited upon us since Sherman marched to sea.
Other things explain other country's military mis-adventures. An absence of cultural understanding of the human consequences of war is not the reason. For rants like the one I originally replied to? Absofucking-lutely it is.
The United States had war on its soil until 1890 (119 years ago), mass terrorism in 1993, 1995 and all out war in 2001. Or don't you remember the 3000 people dying back then?
See, this is perfectly illustrates my point regarding the American civilian perspective on and experience of the horrors of war.
You think two whole buildings getting knocked down is "all out war". You think one guy setting off one bomb in OK City who wasn't even part of an extensive network like al Qaeda, or the singular bomb exploded in the first WTC attack, is "mass terrorism". You think mopping up native resistance in the western half of the country gives you a perspective into knowing what it is like to be terrorized in your own home in the city.
"Mass terrorism" is when multiple, coordinated attacks by extensive networks are conducted on a regular basis, like a typical day in Iraq. Mass terrorism is when you know there's going to be an explosion that day, and the only question is if its close enough to kill you. It's not one dude with one bomb. I feel silly even having to point this out, but that's the complete opposite of "mass"!
No survivor of the Bombing of Warsaw, the Battle of Britain, or the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo, or any number of other battles where entire cities were targeted with mass bombardment for days, weeks, and months in addition to troops and tanks rolling down their streets is going to call two freaking airplanes on a suicide mission "all out war". You tell a Londoner in 1940 that "all out war" is coming, and then two freaking buildings fall down and then its over, and they're going to thank their lucky stars that you were so wrong! They're going to wonder what you were so hysterical about. You explain to them about "9/11", and they're going to laugh politely and tell you that your 9/11 isn't all-out-war until you don't call it "9/11" but "your average Tuesday in war-torn America".
The last time American civilians really experienced war was 1865. This was apparently too long ago for many Americans today to have any perspective on what real war is like.
It's not that the things you list weren't awful. It's that by elevating them to the level of "all out war" and acting like that's the same experience as people living in European cities in WWII, perfectly illustrates how mentally ill-prepared Americans are to deal with real war, because they have no idea what real war is like.
That post gave me the image of a constipated Luke Skywalker sitting on the john and straining, when Obi Wan's voice comes to him from beyond saying "Luke! Use the Force! Let go!"
The population of the west today just doesn't get that war is ugly, they've pacified themselves culturally to believe that war is NOT the ugly horrible thing it always was, and always will be,
Uh, no, only Americans have convinced themselves that due to not having a war on their own soil in 150 years. Europeans (both West and East) are damn fucking well aware of how nasty and horrible war is.
That's why they've been generally more reluctant to start wars, because they know how nasty they are and thus aren't as likely to buy the "We're bombing the shit out of them for their own good! We promise only bad guys will be killed in the bombings!" bullshit that so many of my fellow Americans sucked down like Jamba Juice for years.
The war is still horrible, but because the people starting it are unaware and unaffected, it doesn't actually prevent the war.
I don't really care that I'll get modded as flamebait/troll because this is the fact of life in western society. They've been pussified since WW2 and can't handle a real war. God forbid the chinese or russians ever decide to have a real war with another country, the citizenry of the west will collectively shit their pants and break down into tears at the 'atrocities' they'll hear about that happen in what a real war should/does look like.
Please. You could easily argue that Western Europe was "pussified" after WWI and some of the most horrific fighting the world has ever seen -- and you can even see the negative effects of this in the attempts to appease Hitler and prevent a war they believed would be even more horrific. But when the shit hit the fan and war came to roost, they didn't shit their pants and break down into tears, they fought. So, not liking war and not being able to handle actual war aren't the same thing.
Frankly I'm much more worried about what would happen if war actually came to us here in the States. I can't help but notice that you assume that this "real" war will happen "over there" like we were lucky enough to have it happen in WWI and II. Even Pearl Harbor, while an attack on U.S. soil, was separated from the mainland by a couple thousand miles of ocean. We lost our collective shit when two buildings got knocked over. What would we do if that was a daily occurrence? If it wasn't just our young uniformed men who faced death daily, but you in your home? Probably lose our shit even worse, but eventually we'd harden up and afterwards we'd probably find ourselves a lot more sympathetic to the European point of view.
It's easy to be cavalier about the horrors of war and "collateral damage" when it's happening to someone else.
It's real fucking easy to say "Boo Fuckity Hoo" and "war is SUPPOSED to be horrible!" with regard to breaking the rules of war that try to mitigate that horror somewhat by banning blinding/maiming weapons or regulating how prisoners must be treated when you aren't even imagining that you could possibly be on the receiving end of this philosophy.
So yeah, I don't see this as the viewpoint of a non-pussified person/culture. I see it as being no different than the "Internet Tough Guy" -- a pussy who's more than willing to talk tough because they think themselves completely safe.
Slashdot Mirror
I came back from PAX with a fever.
Whoa, sorry to hear that! Swine, avian, or otherwise, the flu sucks. :P
the doctor told me that maybe I have H1N1 but it wasn't worth testing specifically since it's no different from regular flu. To which I said "That's what I thought. So why did you make me come in?". He didn't have a good answer.
You're shitting me. When I started reading your post, I seriously thought it was going to end up that yeah they wanted to make sure just for tracking purposes, or that there was some other benefit to seeing a doctor that I had missed. But you're telling me they did actually tell you to go in, and that they subsequently told you that there was actually no good reason for you to have done so? Fuuuuuck.
Just doing my part to contribute to skyrocketing health care costs...
Yeah, we're so doomed.
Sure the Hubble, being an instrument first and foremost, uses filters and digital photography to analyze structures in space, and see things humans can't see.
But fundamentally the Hubble is still a near-visible light telescope of the reflector type, fundamentally not much different than many common hobbyist scopes. Just bigger, much more precisely made, and in outer fucking space. Oh and with a ton of instruments, filters, etc attached.
What I want is to get those out of the way, attach an eyepiece, and put my ass on a rocket up there so I can take a peek. I know that most things would not look like the NASA-generated images because they have the advantage of being able to do long exposures and see frequencies I can't. Nevertheless, it would still be the most spectacular view you could have with your own eye, which is a huge difference, and would be a completely mind-blowing experience way beyond looking at the processed images.
Of course this wet dream of mine of tourist trips to space telescopes is way more outlandish than my dream of seeing earth from space. That one has a decent chance of happening, especially if I start compromising on "space". :)
I'm completely unconcerned, of course. Swine Flu = Flu + Hysteria.
Which, as anyone with a high school education can see, means that Swine = Hysteria.
Finally, proof of what I've been saying for years!
There's no getting around Ohm's law...
Ha! I see that the Electric Police Force (aka The Faraday Fuzz) aren't nearly as corruptible as they around around here. A Benjamin or two to grease the wheels of Electric Justice, and they'll turn a blind eye to just about anything.
Hell, the other day I was running 100A through a 1k ohm load off a 9V battery, and my local Electric Police Officer just gave me a knowing smile and a tip of the hat before carrying on his merry way.
I heard down in Mexico you can do pretty much whatever you want if you just tell them you're in a cartel.
So this guy's device probably works, but has a "hidden cost" that of course isn't going to be discussed much.
Huh, I guess it didn't occur to me that 'bug' would imply only bacterial infections... It's so far removed from what it's actually describing anyway. *shrug* live and learn I guess.
You're crazy. Ron Perlman makes everything better. Whatever it is. He'd be a perfect Bilbo Baggins. Or at least the voice of Smaug. Or better yet, just dress him up in a big Smaug costume!
If you do test positive for swine flu then proper public health measures can be taken.
It's the fucking flu! Have you never had the flu before?
WTF do you think "proper public health measures" are for a highly infectious, incurable disease that in normal situations runs its course in under a week? CLUE: It does NOT involve going into a hospital where you can infect other especially vulnerable people only to have a doctor tell you what you SHOULD already know, which is that he can't do anything for you!
I really don't get this disconnect people are having. It's called "swine flu" just to distinguish it from every other strain of flu that hits every year, but it is still essentially the same bug.
It's like the news reports I see on CNN where the info bar at the bottom will have "Symptoms of Swine Flu", and then lists the symptoms of THE FLU. In fact, maybe if instead of actually listing the symptoms, it just said "Symptoms of Swine Flu: Same as Every Other Flu" people would be less freaked out and slightly less ignorant about what Swine Flu really is -- THE FLU.
Seriously, FFS, if you think you have Swine Flu, pretend you have the "normal" flu (which you do) and act accordingly by staying home and not bothering your doctor. :P
We're not building brains. You can tweak your simulation any way you want.
Hypothetically, but practically it may be impossible. We haven't actually build this simulation, we don't actually know how, but most people are fairly sure that whatever Intelligence our Artificial Intelligence will have will be an emergent phenomenon.
Even today in relatively primitive neural networks, the ultimate behavior of that network in classifying or controlling is largely an emergent behavior. We are not able to reach into the middle, tweak a couple connection weights by hand, and know that the output will be what we want. You can't just say "Okay, find the part of the network that identifies blue skies versus gray skies, and raise the threshold of 'blueness'". Changes to those networks are done via testing and feedback algorithms that eventually guide it towards the goal, but only by observing the emergent behavior. These algorithms even break down in more complicated networks, and then you have to start using algorithms like simulated annealing or genetic algorithms, which are literally "guess and check" forms of modification, and the result is not always what you wanted, or done in the way you wanted.
So, it's very not-obvious to me that we'll be able to tweak our emergent AIs "any way we want".
My neurons tell me not to kill humans, don't yours?
Which neurons? Can you point these neurons out to me? Can you isolate them from the same neurons that coordinate all your higher thought processes? Could you selectively eliminate these neurons, turning a human that would not kill into one that would without compunction, without essentially lobotomizing them?
I'm guessing not. However, with some time, expertise, and a complete lack of morals, I'm sure someone could be "reprogrammed" to have no compunction about killing. However the point is that you're interfacing with the person at the level of their intelligence, not the underlying mechanisms behind that intelligence. You're not reaching in and changing neuron connections manually, you're applying certain stimuli to the input neurons and hoping that creates the correct organization inside. But you are never truly sure that this has happened, because you can't actually verify the new organization does exactly what you hope it does. So the programming may appear to have worked perfectly, but it could fail at an inopportune time.
Similarly we might be able to "program" as in "teach" a robot the Three Laws, but just because it's a "simulation" that doesn't mean we can necessarily build those laws right into the brain as inviolable facts as Asimov speculated. Of course the whole point of I, Robot was showing how even if you could build the laws in as fundamental aspects of the AIs, the laws still were anything but perfect... but there are a lot of models for AI where even that would be impossible.
It's not just neurons; there are axions and a lot of other different cells. And I'm no neuroscientist but I'd bet that it isn't on/off; the signals are mostly chemical, meaning the strength of the signals between neurons can vary depending on the amount of chemical. IE, brains are analog, not binary.
Not just analog, but non-linear. Which is also why any decent neural network uses non-linear connections too.
Not that neural networks are necessarily the answer for AI. But I do think that the ultimate solution will have some similar properties: Non-linear, complex (as in chaotic in a mathematical sense), and with the desired intelligence being an emergent property and thus not something so easily tweaked to our preferences as "if/else" logic.
That page is 100% hearsay, gossip column and TMZ-esque gossip presented as fact and wikiality.
Yeah, if you don't count all the references and links to well-established facts in examples of Hollywood Accounting.
Which of course you don't count, because your post is 100% garbage anti-WP FUD. You said nothing of value to the human race. The WP page has you beat on that count by miles and miles.
Have you ever been to ANWR? I work right next door to it, and I can tell you, there ain't shit to protect out there. Seriously. Do you know what tundra is? It is literally frozen dirt with short grass growing on top. It isn't exactly an eco-paradise.
I haven't been to ANWR, but I have been to other Alaskan tundras. And you're being very naive about what constitutes an ecosystem worth protecting. Just because you don't see many large animals there, and because you don't consider it paradise, doesn't mean it's lifeless. Do you think deserts are lifeless and unworthy of protection?
ANWR won't free us from dependance on foreign oil, but it would boost our capacity by about 20% or more, and that's nothing to sneeze at.
I'm sneezing at it. That's not going to reduce the price of oil much, not that simply lowering the price of fuel temporarily is a worthy goal on its own. It's not going to reduce our dependence on foreign oil significantly, and will only justify continuing to avoid the change we all know we need to make. Keep those reserves for when we need them, and hopefully if we plan correctly that day will never come. Drilling in ANWR is the complete opposite of what we need today.
If I were President, I'd tax the crap out of imported oil, and open up Anwar and California. You might not like everything about it, but sitting complaining about EVERY SOLUTION presented is NOT an option any longer.
ANWR is just a drop in the bucket. It's so not-a-solution to foreign oil that it makes no sense to damage that ecosystem just to immeasurably affect our situation. In fact I'd much rather save that drop until a single drop would affect our situation because we're gagging for any fuel at all, a 'who cares about environmental concerns if we can't deliver groceries' situation. Heaven forbid it comes to that. But even worse is burning up our own reserves, and then having to come begging to the foreign powers we were trying to be free from.
Treating ANWR as a "solution" for today's problems only makes such a situation more likely. We need not-oil to be the solution. All the not-oil solutions you proposed are fine, great even (cept hydro simply because nearly all the best locations are already tapped, so the opportunity here is much less). But more drilling isn't the answer, because we can't drill enough to free ourselves of foreign oil. The only way to end our addiction to foreign oil is to end our addiction to oil.
One of the first major books on the subject uses the sensational title Three Mile Island: Thirty Minutes to Meltdown (1982)
The sad part is that the only reason that's sensational rather than merely dramatic is because of the automatic association between the words "meltdown" and "mushroom cloud". This was a delusion that I myself believed for many years because it's not like I knew anything about real reactors and everything in pop culture said "nuclear plants are basically atom bombs barely under control". Just as an example, the first time I saw Aliens it never even occurred to me to question the plot line where a few rounds of small arms fire near some coolant pipes means a few hours later the plant will blow like a fucking hydrogen bomb and there's nothing you can do to stop it*.
So, I think if there's been a sea change on opinions regarding nuclear power, it has to in part be because of simple education. I think most people are at least vaguely aware that the Hollywood representation of nuclear plant failure modes isn't accurate, which is why most of the debate is around the waste not so much plant safety itself. As people become more educated about waste issues (i.e. knowing that fundamentally the properties "lasts a really, really, long time" and "is dangerously radioactive" are inversely related), that becomes better too.
There's still opposition and there's still reason for it. I'm all for nuclear, though, and very happy about the change in opinions.
* And for the sake of future enjoyment of the movie, I'm just going to tell myself that just as casting Paul Riser as Burke was no accident, the Weyland-Yutani Company designing a reactor with such flagrant disregard for the safety of the colonists was no accident either. It was a physical manifestation of the Company's amoral greed and scorn for little people, much like Riser's Burke. Also I'm going to not really care. :)
IFR-style (Integral Fast Reactor) was designed around a slightly different principle of nuclear physics, such that you aren't even trying to prevent a meltdown, because the very physics of the reaction is such that if it starts getting 'too hot', the nuclear reaction itself starts to shutdown
I thought that there were many designs that were in part based around this idea, not just IFRs. I've heard the nuclear physicist types call it "Negative Something" where "something" is the ratio between temperature and reaction rate.
Pebble beds are another example I recall.
But yeah, you gotta admit, "self-limited by the laws of physics even in worst case failure scenarios" is a pretty sweet safety design philosophy.
And they have two nuke reactors? I demand five, minimum.
What do you think would happen if we told them that radio waves are generated using a quartz crystal oscillator? Head explosion? Rending of clothes and gnashing of teeth?
See, you're thinking at once too deeply, and not deeply (retarded) enough. Bad crystals like in radios create evil radiation, good crystals like the ones they're hawking protect you from it.
"It's terrible to kill and eat animals. It's not natural."
"If wolves became self-aware and stopped eating meat, they'd become sick and maybe die. They have evolved to be carnivores."
"Yeah but humans haven't, we have molars."
"We also have incisors."
"That's for berries."
LOL, berries. Berries. Yeah, "it's not natural" is hilarious bullcrap. On the other hand, unlike wolves we can live in quite good health on vegetable matter alone, and in the modern world this is often a viable choice. And choices are what ethics are all about. Even arguing about "natural" kinda misses the point.
I'll be sure to ponder that on my way to pick up my Meat Eaters pizza. I'll probably have forgotten by the time I'm wolfing it down though.
Picture it.
The last page of the last book. There, a surprise, instead of the usual page-filling drawing of intricate details, once intriguing and exciting but now just annoying and yawn-inducing, there's only a corner with the usual crowd next to a lake. A deep lake that you can see into; its depths cover most of the page. Where's Waldo?
There he is. At the bottom of the lake. Still, cold, and alone.
Aaaaahhhh. Sweet closure.
And no, there aren't two equal but opposing viewpoints regarding EM. There's right and wrong. Fact and fiction.
Oh, that's just your viewpoint, which is equally valid as my viewpoint, which is that right and wrong are subjective and decided largely by volume of ranting and by a sense of fairness, such that even my made up bullshit gets to be right for a day every once in a while.
And on that day, AM radio towers will cure cancer. I demand an equal amount of airtime for my view as for you and ELF on the non-AM media channels.
Speaking of which, I feel a cigarette has done me wrong, so I'm going to burn one rather than reading any more about Nutjubs Inc. :)
Yeah, tha fuckin' cigarette is trying to give you cancer, man! Burn that mother fucker!
I don't see why monopoles should imply perpetual motion.
It implies perpetual motion under conditions of ignorance of how fields work. :)
There's apparently a lot of people who think magnetic fields are some crazy magic thing where if there wasn't a north or south then they could do anything. But... if you actually posit a magnetic monopole, and look at the field it would generate, you get... nothing particularly special. It's still just a magnetic field, perfectly understandable, perfectly normal, and with extremely well understood implications.
Yeah "beautiful" in that it explains and fits with other things that we've observed, like quantization of charge. And yes scientists do like theories where the pieces fit together to explain each other elegantly, and such things have often turned out to be true. It's not just a coincidence with no ramifications for physics that electromagnetic energy is quantized.
That's not anything like proof, it just means it isn't completely boneheaded to look for the elegant solution.
Yeah and oh look there's an experiment suggesting they exist! Yeah calling it "overwhelming evidence" is premature -- we'll see what happens between now and when the study actually gets peer-reviewed and published. But they're doing exactly what it is you say they should be doing, so if your whole point is that the words you use and people you convince don't matter, then don't pay attention to the words and pay attention to the experiment and the paper that describes it.
I don't know why you and others are so sure of this, when there's really no theoretical reason for that to be the case. Nothing in theory rules it out. I don't see why you'd be so positive then outside of it feeling "right" in an aesthetic sense, the same thing you accuse the scientists of. Experimentation up until now has not definitively shown them to exist, but lots of things were hypothesized a long time before they were measured because a lot of things in modern physics are hard to measure or find.
I'm not affirming the research, by the way. I'm not convinced they've found it yet, and I'm not convinced monopoles do exist. I just find all this "lol of course they didn't that's impossible" talk to be misguided. You don't know that, and if you think you do, then you don't know physics as well as you think you do. Come up with a modified theory of electromagnetism that rules out monopoles, conduct an experiment like you say is how it should be done to verify, and then say "There are no magnetic monopoles" like it's a fact and not opinion.
Unending magnetic field lines and a particle with a net magnetic charge does not result in "perpetual motion", where that term always means "perpetual motion in the face of friction or other counteracting forces", because minus that "perpetual motion" is just Newton's 1st Law and completely uninteresting.
In the case of a magnetic monopole, it's actually little different than electricity (I know you think otherwise but you're wrong, look at the force equation), and in the case of electric fields, a charged particle in that field has a certain amount of potential energy, and that potential energy may be converted into kinetic, and that kinetic energy may be enough to reach escape velocity for the universe, but it isn't perpetual motion.
I know it's pointless explaining this to the deliberately dumb troll, since even if you wanted to understand it'd require you knowing some of the actual theory and math behind the physics you only understand through inaccurate analogy, but it's entertaining anyway.
P.S. Yes you're insane and yes you're stupid.
Yes there was and yes you did. You're the one who specified "all out war in 2001." Read your own damn post please.
And I was of course talking about "real" war, and "total" war, because I was talking about what civilians went through in WWII. I thought you were trying to make a point, not ignore the context of the discussion in order to be pedantic.
The fact of the matter is, there was "real, all out and total war" on the Great Plains and Southwestern United States from 1865-1890.
Oh geeze, yeah, against the natives. War on the least populated parts of the U.S. at the time (and still) is technically on U.S. soil, so again score one for pedantry. Sure if you were a homesteader or a remote town aka settlement, you were in danger, but when was Dallas or any other U.S. population center ever threatened by this "real, all out and total war"?
As for this ideal that the Europeans are less likely to start wars because they have a more recent experience with it, I don't see that in recent history.
Meh I know that Eurasian countries aren't paragons of pacifist virtue. I was going along with the idea presented in the post I replied to -- that accepting the reality of the horrors of war will result in less wars being started -- because it's the absence of this virtue that explains why the United States and its people have been cavalier about war and its "horror" because that hasn't been visited upon us since Sherman marched to sea.
Other things explain other country's military mis-adventures. An absence of cultural understanding of the human consequences of war is not the reason. For rants like the one I originally replied to? Absofucking-lutely it is.
The United States had war on its soil until 1890 (119 years ago), mass terrorism in 1993, 1995 and all out war in 2001. Or don't you remember the 3000 people dying back then?
See, this is perfectly illustrates my point regarding the American civilian perspective on and experience of the horrors of war.
You think two whole buildings getting knocked down is "all out war". You think one guy setting off one bomb in OK City who wasn't even part of an extensive network like al Qaeda, or the singular bomb exploded in the first WTC attack, is "mass terrorism". You think mopping up native resistance in the western half of the country gives you a perspective into knowing what it is like to be terrorized in your own home in the city.
"Mass terrorism" is when multiple, coordinated attacks by extensive networks are conducted on a regular basis, like a typical day in Iraq. Mass terrorism is when you know there's going to be an explosion that day, and the only question is if its close enough to kill you. It's not one dude with one bomb. I feel silly even having to point this out, but that's the complete opposite of "mass"!
No survivor of the Bombing of Warsaw, the Battle of Britain, or the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo, or any number of other battles where entire cities were targeted with mass bombardment for days, weeks, and months in addition to troops and tanks rolling down their streets is going to call two freaking airplanes on a suicide mission "all out war". You tell a Londoner in 1940 that "all out war" is coming, and then two freaking buildings fall down and then its over, and they're going to thank their lucky stars that you were so wrong! They're going to wonder what you were so hysterical about. You explain to them about "9/11", and they're going to laugh politely and tell you that your 9/11 isn't all-out-war until you don't call it "9/11" but "your average Tuesday in war-torn America".
The last time American civilians really experienced war was 1865. This was apparently too long ago for many Americans today to have any perspective on what real war is like.
It's not that the things you list weren't awful. It's that by elevating them to the level of "all out war" and acting like that's the same experience as people living in European cities in WWII, perfectly illustrates how mentally ill-prepared Americans are to deal with real war, because they have no idea what real war is like.
Literally LOL.
That post gave me the image of a constipated Luke Skywalker sitting on the john and straining, when Obi Wan's voice comes to him from beyond saying "Luke! Use the Force! Let go!"
Followed shortly by a cut away to this
Uh, no, only Americans have convinced themselves that due to not having a war on their own soil in 150 years. Europeans (both West and East) are damn fucking well aware of how nasty and horrible war is.
That's why they've been generally more reluctant to start wars, because they know how nasty they are and thus aren't as likely to buy the "We're bombing the shit out of them for their own good! We promise only bad guys will be killed in the bombings!" bullshit that so many of my fellow Americans sucked down like Jamba Juice for years.
The war is still horrible, but because the people starting it are unaware and unaffected, it doesn't actually prevent the war.
Please. You could easily argue that Western Europe was "pussified" after WWI and some of the most horrific fighting the world has ever seen -- and you can even see the negative effects of this in the attempts to appease Hitler and prevent a war they believed would be even more horrific. But when the shit hit the fan and war came to roost, they didn't shit their pants and break down into tears, they fought. So, not liking war and not being able to handle actual war aren't the same thing.
Frankly I'm much more worried about what would happen if war actually came to us here in the States. I can't help but notice that you assume that this "real" war will happen "over there" like we were lucky enough to have it happen in WWI and II. Even Pearl Harbor, while an attack on U.S. soil, was separated from the mainland by a couple thousand miles of ocean. We lost our collective shit when two buildings got knocked over. What would we do if that was a daily occurrence? If it wasn't just our young uniformed men who faced death daily, but you in your home? Probably lose our shit even worse, but eventually we'd harden up and afterwards we'd probably find ourselves a lot more sympathetic to the European point of view.
It's easy to be cavalier about the horrors of war and "collateral damage" when it's happening to someone else.
It's real fucking easy to say "Boo Fuckity Hoo" and "war is SUPPOSED to be horrible!" with regard to breaking the rules of war that try to mitigate that horror somewhat by banning blinding/maiming weapons or regulating how prisoners must be treated when you aren't even imagining that you could possibly be on the receiving end of this philosophy.
So yeah, I don't see this as the viewpoint of a non-pussified person/culture. I see it as being no different than the "Internet Tough Guy" -- a pussy who's more than willing to talk tough because they think themselves completely safe.