I guess if you were to press me on the issue, then I'd still stick to the idea that rocks are "conscious." It's an illusion, yes, but not therefore entirely untrue. The special thing about ourselves is that we have this information-processing brain that says "this is me" and "that is not me," and this separation of self from not-self is itself an artifice. The advantage that non-thinking entities have is that there is no separation. And I think that this is the central insight of meditation. When you stop reinforcing the self-nonself dichotomy your brain gets a great insight! You realize that you are not a separate entity but wholly integral to the expansive present.
This is why I feel that consciousness is itself a more primary element than the atom or electron - or you might say it is a holistic quality of the present moment. It seems that everything is made of this luminous substance of which we are a tiny part, and this substance is the present total existence, from which we can never separate ourselves - as much as we may ignore it while attending to "gross" pattern-awareness. We don't have nerve tendrils that reach into every corner of existence, and so we can't coherently integrate the whole universe into our discursive thoughts. However, we can directly experience the dissolution of self, identification with "the all," and come away from the experience profoundly affected, inspired, awed, and moved in many other ways.
Generally, we're moved to tell others about it... but why tell them when you can show them? And this is where it becomes important to just do your meditation and such, and be an inspiration for others who are interested in what you... don't know.
I read a blurb in a science mag awhile ago. A mathematician turned entomologist was studying bees, and in their dance motions found patterns similar to six-dimensional mathematics which she had done a thesis on or something. She surmised that the bees' dances could be understood as conveying 6 dimensional data.
You know what? That's not a bad bloody idea. If everyone on SlashDot agreed to run Tor - for a day, a week, or a month... call it "The Month Tor Got SlashDotted." I imagine the speed of Tor would go way up, wouldn't it?
I think the observer problem is relatively simple, but then I'm kind of crazy.
I accept certain premises in order to reach my understanding:
- An observation is exactly the same thing as a physical interaction
- On this level, a human observer is no different than a particle detector
An "observer" is a physical system that exists in parallel with myriad outside, unobserved physical systems.
It is valid to say: If a physical system X exists, and a physical system Y exists, but those systems have absolutely no measurable interaction, they are two entirely separate universes.
An observation is no more than a "change" in the observational physical system brought about by interaction with the event observed. Or, you could call it the unification of two "event systems." When any interaction occurs, both interacting systems fall into a state of historical consensus. In other words, present interactions create the past that explains them. This could be seen as the same thing as the creation of a new branch.
The only philosophical question I can see implicated by this feature of reality is, do the physical systems "exist" even when they don't interact?
My answer to this is: "Existence" is also the same thing as "interaction." This doesn't preclude other universes having their own internal consistencies. Nor does it imply that other physical systems in our universe don't "exist" because we never observe them. What it speaks to is the nature of "experience" itself.
So my answer to the question of whether an "observer" must be "conscious" or not, I would have to say: Yes and No. For, you see it's an artificial distinction. Our particular experience happens to involve a machine that processes information, and that information processing system is able to reflect on its experience. But all of that stuff, from the particle interaction to the self-reflection of the observer... it's all the same phenomena: interaction of systems.
Just to avoid confusion, we have to be very careful how we define the term "consciousness." Most people here on SlashDot use the word "consciousness" to mean a thinking thing. I am very careful not to draw the line there, but to be open to all conscious experience. When you really sit and look at your experience, and let it go forward on its own, and when we look at the features of our immediate experience, there are some striking features that cannot be explained simply as computational results.
This is why the question of "quantum phenomena" enters into the picture. The immediate experience of sight is the most striking example I can think of. When we experience visual phenomena, we experience the excitation state of millions of brain-cells simultaneously. This visual experience is taken by our awareness as a single event, yet there is no "single place where it all comes together" and you may note that it arrives and is gone faster than we can possibly integrate it all into a discursive thought.
I think it is clear from this example that in a sense all physical systems can be considered a "consciousness" in the sense that everything "experiences" the present moment's interactions, every interacting system is affected by those interactions, every system changes in reponse to those interactions, and every system forms a link in the chain of events that subsequently follow from that initial interaction. The only qualitative difference between the interactions a stone has with light, and those our eyeballs have with light is the informational coherence that emerges in its attached physical system.
I hope I don't come across as seeming to put anthropomorphic terms towards impersonal phenomena. My point is merely to illustrate a more holistic view of phenomena, one that makes fewer distinctions between ourselves and mud. It's also meant to be completely non-mystical, in a sense. I don't believe we "conscious" systems are "special" in terms of the quality of our constituent parts than any other physical phenomena. W
I got it directly from the artist's web site, and I paid them directly using PayPal. Was that counted for these statistics?
To give the artist even more credit, they put their *entire album* on their website inside a Flash player so I couldn't have downloaded it, but I suppose I could have hijacked the audio from my web browser. I bought the album because it's damn good, and I wanted to support the artist, and - of course - I wanted to be able to play the tracks in any order and on my iPod.
Kudos to the band Winterpills for showing just how to sell a damn album! .
Here's my theory in a nutshell: If more and more organizations embrace the Linux desktop in one form or another, there are twenty-thousand developers ready to step up and serve the needs of the user community. The real question is, how does a giant ad-hoc system -- y'all -- engender trust in this huge, anxiously waiting user-base? Redhat, Mandrake, Ubuntu, Suse, Debian, and other aggregators have done their part to create pretty packages for Linux, but is that enough?
What do corporations - especially that sad old hack Microsoft - have to offer this huge hungry population that Linux doesn't? Dell is taking a bold step in partnering with this large distributed community. What if they started contracting Linux developers? What if Dell started to look more like Apple: creating Dell hardware and making their own Linux flavor tightly integrated, and found it so impressive they started putting a Dell logo on the Linux desktop?
Seems to me this is what's about to happen. Dell is going to get into direct competition with Microsloth as an OS vendor. And the savvy Linux developer should be anxious to get involved.
I have a related problem that I've been trying to understand and cope with. One day while searching for information to further my OSS project TabletMagic I discovered a discussion board where someone had simply modified an older version of my driver to work on TabletPC computers, and he was claiming that he'd "started from scratch" in creating it. I downloaded the binary and examined it, and it was clearly built from a modified version of my source code. It even had my name and original copyright message in it, and printed these to Terminal when started.
So I challenged this person's disingenuous claim that he'd created it "from scratch" and asked him to make his source code available, as he should do under the GPL.
Instead he pretended to be indignant, continued to insist he'd "started over," and removed (!) the binary he'd posted (you know, because of his overwhelming indignation). Rather than let him conceal the binary under dispute I reposted it, which caused him to feign even more indignation and call me names. There was some back-and-forth in which I continued to press him for an admission, and in which he continued to stick to his position, and to insult and ridicule me.
After a few exchanges he posted a new build of the driver with various strings hastily replaced. For example, he replaced the word "Magic" with the string "Khash" (same number of letters... odd since he has the source code) and replaced the copyright message with one of his own (again, same number of letters), and he replaced the CVS-generated "Revision" number with a value (0.31) that CVS could never produce. Anyhow, I kept giving him rope, and he kept hanging himself with it.
Eventually, I softened my stance and let things lie, and just asked him to share with me either source code or information to help me get my driver working on TabletPC. He didn't provide either one, and instead he deleted all his posts (smart, because they were very embarrassing) and went on to work on other Hackintosh driver issues. Fortunately, I had been saving his posts all along with the hope of writing an article about "FOSS usurpation" on my website.
I'm happy to say I did manage to get TabletMagic working on TabletPC systems, but even now I could still use some of this madman's insights into ISD-V4 digitizers. Despite his lack of character, this guy is no dummy.
What still astounds me is the striking similarity between this person and other hackers who have done this sort of thing in the past. You might remember a few years ago a hacker had modified a bunch of Mac shareware binaries and was distributing them under different titles, and more recently "CherryOS" was found to be a rip-off of PearPC. What's striking is that whenever these guys are challenged they display very characteristic behavior, producing indecipherable denials that border on the insane, and insulting those who challenge them. In the end they always end up making themselves look bad, and they always give themselves away by the illogic of their denials and their exaggerated bluster.
Now in my case I was lucky. This person had modified my code for use on an unsupported platform and as far as I know he was not planning to sell his work. And when I think about it, it doesn't seem he could do much harm to my project. Nevertheless, it alerted me to one of the more annoying aspects of FOSS software, and my powerlessness against it. To his credit, he did push me to add TabletPC support to my driver which otherwise I might not have done so soon. But overall this experience has been very unpleasant.
Is there really anything an OSS developer can do to combat this kind of annoyance? Are there any smart tools out there for comparing binaries to see if they come from similar source codes? Does the Free Software Foundation or Sourceforge have any kind of policy or resource to help poor saps like me? And in the end, what does it all mean?
The article says that hitting the 100-kW level, at which point it would become interesting as a battlefield weapon, could be less than a year away. Why wait, when we could start using them against unarmed protesters right now!
Of course, what I'm really excited about is that new phase plasma rifle with a 40 watt range.
If you're not impressed, I gather you haven't looked too closely. I think that if you ever got into programming Mac OS X and became intimate with its underpinnings, you'd be forever in love with it. You'd also wonder just why just about every other OS has such a lame set of APIs.
I guess I can justify my love for Mac OS X on a similar basis as my love for the *idea* of Linux, which is that they both adhere to the *nix Way. The fact that Microsoft hasn't tossed rebuilt their aging OS fro the ground up just baffles me. *nix is the future, and Windows is a relic.
We might as well see this as an opportunity for 3rd parties to step up and support the scads of "obsolete" hardware that are being abandoned by their manufacturers with every system upgrade.
As for scanners and cameras that are going to be unsupported on Vista, I urge everyone to have a look at SilverFast, whose bread and butter is in picking up the slack for scanner and camera manufacturers that drop driver support long before their hardware is in any sense truly obsolete.
It's my opinion that hardware manufacturers have a good-faith obligation to provide drivers for as long as their hardware can be expected to last and for as long as that hardware can be connected to a PC. I mean, how much difference in USB or serial APIs could there really be from one system version to another? Since there is no technical justification for dropping support, you can only chalk it up to shortsightedness. But I've noticed that scanner makers are especially lame when it comes to driver support.
In the long run, it will probably be up to the open source community to jump in and pick up the slack for hardware manufacturers. When Wacom dropped support for their serial model tablets in Mac OS X, I did initially cry to Wacom, but it was hard to justify such a demand given that no shipping Mac has built-in serial ports. So I started up XCode and wrote my own driver with invaluable assistance from Wacom's developer documentation.
I urge everyone with the requisite skillz to consider doing the same for their pet hardware.
Couldn't the system simply have a filter that removes the wave signature of what it is outputting before processing input as a command? This is relatively simple technology, as compared to voice recognition itself. In fact, Apple's iChat software does just this. You can hear a little bit of aliasing in the sound where the computer's own output waveforms have been subtracted, but it's pretty thorough at removing the noise. Also, Karaoke machines have been able to do this for a long while with a combination of dynamic EQ and fuzzy logic. There's nothing to prevent Microsoft from incorporating these and other methods to improve its interpretation of sound, assuming it has a single unified API for sound that ensures all output goes through a single bottleneck.
Well, actually some programs - like Acquisition for example - do treat the Zoom button as if it were a Maximize button - but that's just because the "snap-to-fit" size happens to be the full desktop. And some - like iTunes and my application FretPet - treat it as a window-mode button. iTunes toggles the appearance between the browser window and the player window.
"You know you're really using a Mac to good effect when you're moving stuff effortlessly from window to window, app to app, and treating windows like children of parent applications."
I've been feeling that power user feeling lately, since I discovered that you can go in and out of Exposé and Dashboard and the Command-Tab Application Switcher all you want while doing a drag. And the fact that you can drag - literally - any type of content from one window to another and nearly all programs "do the right thing" when you drop it. This is just one example of the bonus aspects you get from having such a full-featured OS. Articles don't capture it; you can only appreciate when you're using the system to get work done.
The mighty mouse isn't much better in my book either. My friend was tearing his hair out the other day because his restaurant's computer was "acting up" and all it was was the right button getting pressed by people who didn't know it was a two button mouse. We changed the mouse settings to treat the second button as primary, and all was well.
The puck mouse, well that was a sneaky trick by Apple to create demand for third-party Mac peripherals. The butterfly effect, they employ it constantly.
This has happened to me. I went overboard like the author of this article and posted a very critical reply in a support thread. Apple not only deleted my post but barred me from posting for several months with no notification.
So I took the time to read Apple's posting guidelines. More than that I tried to read between the lines to see what it is Apple's support forums are trying to be. And, I had to agree with Apple. Whether I "liked" their response or not, it made the appropriate impression.
People get pissed off when their technical junk doesn't work, but knee-jerk reactions do no one any good. The author's post was inappropriate for the atmosphere Apple is trying to create in its forums.
The best way to deal with Apple's forums is to ask short, exploratory questions. Explain your problem and ask if it is a known issue. In the author's case, he was asking Apple about a bug he saw in Warcraft, not one that appears to affect the whole system. But he could test this easily by allocating 2GB of RAM and then running any OpenGL software on his system - like Chess for example.
If he has indeed gone to these lengths, the next thing to do is to ask Apple if they know about it. The issue will go up the chain and get tested, and if Apple can release a patch, they will. It will happen on their time, in tandem with all the other issues they face. If it turns out to be a wide-scale problem without a software fix then Apple will offer a replacement to affected customers. (This is what they did with the problematic G4 power supplies in 2001, and there are many other examples.)
So overall, the author should have simply limited his comments to: "Hey I have this problem and it seems to be.... Just thought you should know." and then just do himself a favor and restart his machine before playing 3D games.
Frankly, it sounds more to me like he has a bad RAM stick.
Well, it would make sense to move towards XML for all its useful qualities:
* A simple, open standard
* Conveniently human-readable
* Platform Agnostic - unknown tags and attributes can be ignored
* Data Includes clear type information
The HTML / XHTML / CSS rendering engines are powerful things. They provide a worthy layout system, which is what some email calls-for, and in the case of XHTML/CSS it provides a means to distribute information in a human- and machine-readable way that includes rich contextual information. Most importantly, it's a simple open standard that any application can adopt, and it avoids duplication of effort for the purpose of device-agnostic layout.
Microsoft is making a blunder by doing this. It's an echo of their days of trying to knock down Netscape by leveraging their platform. They are now trying to do the same thing to open standards. As a monopoly, you might argue that Microsoft is using their monopoly position to lock out a viable competitor. Standards represent something analogous to software, and having a monopoly on standards is not different than having a monopoly on software.
If the case were clearer, maybe the EFF would take it up.
If all you think about these issues is that they are well-meant personal opinions transmigrating - as they will - into political policies, you need to wake up.
The corporate, monied, powerful, those with a voice - are not you and I. We are the manipulated, oppressed, and stupid. Simply put, it's all a big show. Bill O'Reilly is not promoting conservative or liberal ideas, he's just a funny monkey to distract you. What masquerades as Conservative politics is just the spirit of Fascism speaking its usual bullshit. Truly, deeply, contentful and meaningful discussion doesn't happen on FOX News or frankly anywhere in the media. University ampitheaters, hookah bars, artist conclaves, and theaters are bulging at the seams with the deeper meaning of shit, but you won't see it in the mainstream.
The churches and pulpits are just flailing their arms to keep us all in submission to the emerging World Capitalist Fascist movement. We're being fattened for the slaughter, the sacrifice of our lives to the profiteers. Hooking all of us on pharmaceuticals and antibiotics to fix what ails us, generally caused by the sugary, salty, fatty food they got us hooked on from birth.
The homunculus of American culture is swallowing everything in its dark path, while we the barking sheep bicker over which fucking brand of fairy-dust to sprinkle on our legal documents. Wake up. The whole thing is screwed up. We need to get past the need for God and Exxon and Bush and O'Reilly. And we need to outgrow the swill that passes for thoughtful insight in this country.
We meditate as instructed by words, philosophize and idealize, play with ideas and stories, and somehow out of this process we become stupid fearful primates sometimes. Now who's framing the story - you really think YOU are?
A key thing to understand is that Abortion itself is NOT THE ISSUE in the Abortion debate. We know what abortion is and what it does, and that fetuses "want" (in the biological sense) to develop. But the issue is about the individual right to be self-determined and to be responsible for their own personal universal sphere. (Their own set of narratives, if you will).
A woman has the right to *choose* whether you or myself or the majority likes it. Call it "inalienable." To put it bluntly, the law ends where the individual begins. That's why there are no laws barring you from saying or writing or creating what you wish, so long as it does not harm any individual's interests or encroach on any other individual's universal sphere - the personal domain where they create all the rules. Whether anyone likes it or not, the womb is outside of our jurisdiction.
Abortion is even more deeply a technological and a power issue. Humans have become very knowledgeable, and through this have developed the means to do new things, including safely aborting embryos and fetuses prior to the onset of complex self-awareness. We are immensely powerful beings. Humanity as a whole, in the use of its immense power, oppresses every other species in the world, and more powerful groups oppress less powerful groups, and powerful individuals overpower powerless individuals. This is a stream running backwards, consuming itself, climbing over itself to escape... what? To escape the oppression we ourselves manifest.
When the abortion debate is presented in the media you don't get what it's more deeply about. Nothing in the media analyzes our own deeper political-personal-psychological-spiritual trends. No one really digs and digs into them. WTF?!
If you think FOX News - or any major media outlet that wears an official face - represents a genuine, important, coherent, collective point of view which serves the people's interests, well bully for you. I look forward to feeling your warm jackboot on my neck one day.;-)
We don't exactly know what causes BSE or vJKD, we only know it involves screwy prions. So the essential questions are: "Are screwy prions caused by a transmissible (non-prion) agent?" and "Do human naturally carry susceptible prions?"
Until we know the answers to these questions, it would be very unwise to replace all cattle with a new breed that only hides the problem.
More healthy? It depends on what you mean by that term.
With every diet there's a trade-off. You may be getting slightly bigger boost of available nutrients by eating meat, but coming up with a vegetarian diet that clogs your arteries, stresses your kidneys, and acidifies your blood as much as a meat-centric diet does would be very hard indeed. The fact is that (a) you don't need all that much iron, Vitamin B12, etc., and supplements abound; (b) protein should be only around 5% of your dietary intake; and (c) as a meat-eater you're probably not getting nearly enough fiber. Check out The China Study for more.
I've personally chosen to stop eating all animal products despite the extra effort required. On the one hand both my father and grandfather were avid meat-eaters, and both died in their mid-50's from heart attacks brought on by arterial congestion. So I'm partially driven by my natural wish to be around longer than another 15 years. But also, as an aware person desiring harmony I find that meat-eating is simply incompatible with my knowledge and understanding, and hinders the development of deeper compassion.
Regardless of whether or not meat can be digested by humans, I feel that since I am in an elite position to make a choice then I should choose wisely and compassionately. The more deeply I seek to understand myself and the world, and the more I understand about human physiology, the more impossible it becomes to justify eating meat or dairy. Meat production is cruel, wasteful, and polluting. Knowing this, I see meat-eating as a habit a lot like smoking: It's an unhealthy practice that supports a vile industry, and therefore fosters personal denial.
I understand that very few people are apt to cease their pleasurable habits, but I like the challenge, and I feel clearer in every way - intestinally, spiritually, mentally.
From my personal experience I believe that will-power is a central issue, but in your case your beliefs are the blocker - not willpower. For the moment your will is short-circuited by the belief that meat-eating is necessary and good. If you knew or felt differently about meat-eating, or were more invested in animal welfare and environmental issues, your willpower would presumably be directed differently. Your belief that meat-eating is "more healthy" - likely augmented by cultural conditioning, sentimental attachment to the familiar, and the sensual pleasure associated with meat-eating - trumps will altogether.
If people understood what their bodies needed, were more capable of denying themselves the pleasurable sensations associated with meat and dairy consumption, and were more aware of the devastation and suffering caused by meat-production... well, it would be a much kinder and more viable world. Sustainability is a big issue facing the world, and one of the most straightforward solutions -- reducing meat consumption -- isn't all that easy! Humans are easily hooked, and the industry is hooking more of them all the time.
I wasn't born with a vegan spoon in my hand. I've been on a totally vegan diet now for only 14 months, but I've considered myself a "vegetarian" (if dairy, eggs, and fish are vegetables) for 20 years. As recently as 20 months ago, I would sometimes backslide and eat meat every so often. But at this point I'm developmentally beyond all chance of recidivism. What happened? I've been spending time at Farm Sanctuary working with animals, giving technical assistance to environmental organizations, and practicing meditation. All these experiences have helped me to understand the issue more directly, more deeply, and more broadly. The extra effort required to cook thoroughly nutritious vegan meals is more than made-up-for by the benefits of clarity, energy, and well-being that I feel every day.
I should disclaim that I am a co-host of Vegan Radio, and webmaster of both Vegani
I disagree with your characterization of Apple's development methodology. In fact they have a lot of salaried people working directly on the kernel, incorporating the functionality Mac OS X needs for features like Disk Journaling, Spotlight and Time Machine, the design and incorporation of which are determined by the OS team. It's true that Apple includes a lot of open-source software and established standards in the OS, but frankly both Apple and Microsoft suffered for a long time from the Not-Invented-Here prejudice. I see Apple's willingness to use well-designed open source tools and standards as a refreshing change.
Also, although the Mac OS X kernel uses BSD in its subsystems, it is not "mostly BSD." The kernel is a hybrid of Mach 2.5 with BSD subsystems available. But you don't even need the BSD subsystem to use Mac OS X. The BSD subsystem is an optional part of the OS installation. Just in terms of raw bytes, the majority of the OS resides in the frameworks. The lowest-level frameworks like Foundation and ApplicationServices were originally developed by NeXT and are brilliantly executed. The choice of Objective-C may seem like a strange choice now, but it's lean, easy to learn, and makes software development far simpler. If NeXT/Apple only ever used what they could get out of the Darwin project, there wouldn't be very much to excite us about Leopard. So frankly, Apple is far more innovative than most Windows fanboys think.
The transition from Motorola 680x0 to PPC is a good example of Apple innovation at its best. The transition was sometimes ugly, but overall amazingly smooth. The transition from IBM Power64 to Intel Core was perhaps less innovative, simply because they were using a state-of-the-art kernel. Nevertheless, the transition was almost completely transparent from a developer point of view. I'm amazed how quickly I made my Application into a Universal Binary.
You really have to give Apple some credit here. A lot of salaried guys at Apple worked long hours for years to keep Mac OS X running well on Intel hardware when no one else was aware of it. The kernel source is just endian-agnostic, it's not rocket science. There wasn't anything much deeper than that to build Mac OS X on Intel. But where they deserve serious credit is in making the developer tools, the headers, the excellent developer documentation... and providing it all for FREE and nicely ahead of their OS releases. Microsoft doesn't come close in its support of developers, nor in having the courage to revisit and rip out the crumbling foundations of their OS.
I agree that technically Windows in the 90's had some better things going on under the hood than Mac OS 7 through 9, but I still preferred Mac OS during those years. The main thing that kept me on the Apple platform was the consistency, aesthetics, organization, and manageability of the OS. Some of the things that bothered me about Windows at that time were:
- The centralized and cryptic registry (vs Mac OS Preferences folder) - DLL Hell (vs Mac OS Extensions folder) - BSOD from several fronts (vs Mac OS mysterious lockups) - That flat, gray feeling (vs Mac OS sleekness) - Inconsistent menus and interfaces (vs Mac OS well-established Human Interface Guidelines) - Inconsistent text editing behavior (vs consistent Mac OS text services) - Ugly font rendering (vs Mac OS decent typography) - The word "Microsoft" preceding everything (vs no market-speak in Mac OS)
Meanwhile, there were some things that bothered me about Mac OS at the time:
- Mysterious lockups, requiring several long Conflict Catcher sessions - Rare use of threading in software, system-modal dialogs - No free developer tools - No protected memory, often making software development into a reboot-fest - The best VM system was third-party - Expensive! hardware - Not even an option to show the folder hierarchy in a Finder sidebar (Apple should copy MS here) - Mac OS toolbox tedious to use (but lots of cool APIs and SDKs) - The dark years (3rd-party licensing, dwindling marketshare, Copland...)
But all that is behind us, thank goodness! The future is in Unix and Unix-like systems with all the great strengths we had only been dreaming of all those years.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess if you were to press me on the issue, then I'd still stick to the idea that rocks are "conscious." It's an illusion, yes, but not therefore entirely untrue. The special thing about ourselves is that we have this information-processing brain that says "this is me" and "that is not me," and this separation of self from not-self is itself an artifice. The advantage that non-thinking entities have is that there is no separation. And I think that this is the central insight of meditation. When you stop reinforcing the self-nonself dichotomy your brain gets a great insight! You realize that you are not a separate entity but wholly integral to the expansive present.
... don't know.
This is why I feel that consciousness is itself a more primary element than the atom or electron - or you might say it is a holistic quality of the present moment. It seems that everything is made of this luminous substance of which we are a tiny part, and this substance is the present total existence, from which we can never separate ourselves - as much as we may ignore it while attending to "gross" pattern-awareness. We don't have nerve tendrils that reach into every corner of existence, and so we can't coherently integrate the whole universe into our discursive thoughts. However, we can directly experience the dissolution of self, identification with "the all," and come away from the experience profoundly affected, inspired, awed, and moved in many other ways.
Generally, we're moved to tell others about it... but why tell them when you can show them? And this is where it becomes important to just do your meditation and such, and be an inspiration for others who are interested in what you
I read a blurb in a science mag awhile ago. A mathematician turned entomologist was studying bees, and in their dance motions found patterns similar to six-dimensional mathematics which she had done a thesis on or something. She surmised that the bees' dances could be understood as conveying 6 dimensional data.
Interesting...
You know what? That's not a bad bloody idea. If everyone on SlashDot agreed to run Tor - for a day, a week, or a month... call it "The Month Tor Got SlashDotted." I imagine the speed of Tor would go way up, wouldn't it?
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I think the observer problem is relatively simple, but then I'm kind of crazy.
I accept certain premises in order to reach my understanding:
- An observation is exactly the same thing as a physical interaction
- On this level, a human observer is no different than a particle detector
An "observer" is a physical system that exists in parallel with myriad outside, unobserved physical systems.
It is valid to say: If a physical system X exists, and a physical system Y exists, but those systems have absolutely no measurable interaction, they are two entirely separate universes.
An observation is no more than a "change" in the observational physical system brought about by interaction with the event observed. Or, you could call it the unification of two "event systems." When any interaction occurs, both interacting systems fall into a state of historical consensus. In other words, present interactions create the past that explains them. This could be seen as the same thing as the creation of a new branch.
The only philosophical question I can see implicated by this feature of reality is, do the physical systems "exist" even when they don't interact?
My answer to this is: "Existence" is also the same thing as "interaction." This doesn't preclude other universes having their own internal consistencies. Nor does it imply that other physical systems in our universe don't "exist" because we never observe them. What it speaks to is the nature of "experience" itself.
So my answer to the question of whether an "observer" must be "conscious" or not, I would have to say: Yes and No. For, you see it's an artificial distinction. Our particular experience happens to involve a machine that processes information, and that information processing system is able to reflect on its experience. But all of that stuff, from the particle interaction to the self-reflection of the observer... it's all the same phenomena: interaction of systems.
Just to avoid confusion, we have to be very careful how we define the term "consciousness." Most people here on SlashDot use the word "consciousness" to mean a thinking thing. I am very careful not to draw the line there, but to be open to all conscious experience. When you really sit and look at your experience, and let it go forward on its own, and when we look at the features of our immediate experience, there are some striking features that cannot be explained simply as computational results.
This is why the question of "quantum phenomena" enters into the picture. The immediate experience of sight is the most striking example I can think of. When we experience visual phenomena, we experience the excitation state of millions of brain-cells simultaneously. This visual experience is taken by our awareness as a single event, yet there is no "single place where it all comes together" and you may note that it arrives and is gone faster than we can possibly integrate it all into a discursive thought.
I think it is clear from this example that in a sense all physical systems can be considered a "consciousness" in the sense that everything "experiences" the present moment's interactions, every interacting system is affected by those interactions, every system changes in reponse to those interactions, and every system forms a link in the chain of events that subsequently follow from that initial interaction. The only qualitative difference between the interactions a stone has with light, and those our eyeballs have with light is the informational coherence that emerges in its attached physical system.
I hope I don't come across as seeming to put anthropomorphic terms towards impersonal phenomena. My point is merely to illustrate a more holistic view of phenomena, one that makes fewer distinctions between ourselves and mud. It's also meant to be completely non-mystical, in a sense. I don't believe we "conscious" systems are "special" in terms of the quality of our constituent parts than any other physical phenomena. W
I got it directly from the artist's web site, and I paid them directly using PayPal. Was that counted for these statistics?
To give the artist even more credit, they put their *entire album* on their website inside a Flash player so I couldn't have downloaded it, but I suppose I could have hijacked the audio from my web browser. I bought the album because it's damn good, and I wanted to support the artist, and - of course - I wanted to be able to play the tracks in any order and on my iPod.
Kudos to the band Winterpills for showing just how to sell a damn album!
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Here's my theory in a nutshell: If more and more organizations embrace the Linux desktop in one form or another, there are twenty-thousand developers ready to step up and serve the needs of the user community. The real question is, how does a giant ad-hoc system -- y'all -- engender trust in this huge, anxiously waiting user-base? Redhat, Mandrake, Ubuntu, Suse, Debian, and other aggregators have done their part to create pretty packages for Linux, but is that enough?
What do corporations - especially that sad old hack Microsoft - have to offer this huge hungry population that Linux doesn't? Dell is taking a bold step in partnering with this large distributed community. What if they started contracting Linux developers? What if Dell started to look more like Apple: creating Dell hardware and making their own Linux flavor tightly integrated, and found it so impressive they started putting a Dell logo on the Linux desktop?
Seems to me this is what's about to happen. Dell is going to get into direct competition with Microsloth as an OS vendor. And the savvy Linux developer should be anxious to get involved.
I have a related problem that I've been trying to understand and cope with. One day while searching for information to further my OSS project TabletMagic I discovered a discussion board where someone had simply modified an older version of my driver to work on TabletPC computers, and he was claiming that he'd "started from scratch" in creating it. I downloaded the binary and examined it, and it was clearly built from a modified version of my source code. It even had my name and original copyright message in it, and printed these to Terminal when started.
So I challenged this person's disingenuous claim that he'd created it "from scratch" and asked him to make his source code available, as he should do under the GPL.
Instead he pretended to be indignant, continued to insist he'd "started over," and removed (!) the binary he'd posted (you know, because of his overwhelming indignation). Rather than let him conceal the binary under dispute I reposted it, which caused him to feign even more indignation and call me names. There was some back-and-forth in which I continued to press him for an admission, and in which he continued to stick to his position, and to insult and ridicule me.
After a few exchanges he posted a new build of the driver with various strings hastily replaced. For example, he replaced the word "Magic" with the string "Khash" (same number of letters... odd since he has the source code) and replaced the copyright message with one of his own (again, same number of letters), and he replaced the CVS-generated "Revision" number with a value (0.31) that CVS could never produce. Anyhow, I kept giving him rope, and he kept hanging himself with it.
Eventually, I softened my stance and let things lie, and just asked him to share with me either source code or information to help me get my driver working on TabletPC. He didn't provide either one, and instead he deleted all his posts (smart, because they were very embarrassing) and went on to work on other Hackintosh driver issues. Fortunately, I had been saving his posts all along with the hope of writing an article about "FOSS usurpation" on my website.
I'm happy to say I did manage to get TabletMagic working on TabletPC systems, but even now I could still use some of this madman's insights into ISD-V4 digitizers. Despite his lack of character, this guy is no dummy.
What still astounds me is the striking similarity between this person and other hackers who have done this sort of thing in the past. You might remember a few years ago a hacker had modified a bunch of Mac shareware binaries and was distributing them under different titles, and more recently "CherryOS" was found to be a rip-off of PearPC. What's striking is that whenever these guys are challenged they display very characteristic behavior, producing indecipherable denials that border on the insane, and insulting those who challenge them. In the end they always end up making themselves look bad, and they always give themselves away by the illogic of their denials and their exaggerated bluster.
Now in my case I was lucky. This person had modified my code for use on an unsupported platform and as far as I know he was not planning to sell his work. And when I think about it, it doesn't seem he could do much harm to my project. Nevertheless, it alerted me to one of the more annoying aspects of FOSS software, and my powerlessness against it. To his credit, he did push me to add TabletPC support to my driver which otherwise I might not have done so soon. But overall this experience has been very unpleasant.
Is there really anything an OSS developer can do to combat this kind of annoyance? Are there any smart tools out there for comparing binaries to see if they come from similar source codes? Does the Free Software Foundation or Sourceforge have any kind of policy or resource to help poor saps like me? And in the end, what does it all mean?
Of course, what I'm really excited about is that new phase plasma rifle with a 40 watt range.
Ah, so that explains why my cell-phone minutes were so far over on my January 35th bill.
As subjects of the Queen, couldn't he also be knighted?
Having just now watched The Andromeda Strain I am dubious about our chances...
Accused witch who weighs the same as a duck:
Well that's a fair cop.
If you're not impressed, I gather you haven't looked too closely. I think that if you ever got into programming Mac OS X and became intimate with its underpinnings, you'd be forever in love with it. You'd also wonder just why just about every other OS has such a lame set of APIs.
I guess I can justify my love for Mac OS X on a similar basis as my love for the *idea* of Linux, which is that they both adhere to the *nix Way. The fact that Microsoft hasn't tossed rebuilt their aging OS fro the ground up just baffles me. *nix is the future, and Windows is a relic.
We might as well see this as an opportunity for 3rd parties to step up and support the scads of "obsolete" hardware that are being abandoned by their manufacturers with every system upgrade.
As for scanners and cameras that are going to be unsupported on Vista, I urge everyone to have a look at SilverFast, whose bread and butter is in picking up the slack for scanner and camera manufacturers that drop driver support long before their hardware is in any sense truly obsolete.
It's my opinion that hardware manufacturers have a good-faith obligation to provide drivers for as long as their hardware can be expected to last and for as long as that hardware can be connected to a PC. I mean, how much difference in USB or serial APIs could there really be from one system version to another? Since there is no technical justification for dropping support, you can only chalk it up to shortsightedness. But I've noticed that scanner makers are especially lame when it comes to driver support.
In the long run, it will probably be up to the open source community to jump in and pick up the slack for hardware manufacturers. When Wacom dropped support for their serial model tablets in Mac OS X, I did initially cry to Wacom, but it was hard to justify such a demand given that no shipping Mac has built-in serial ports. So I started up XCode and wrote my own driver with invaluable assistance from Wacom's developer documentation.
I urge everyone with the requisite skillz to consider doing the same for their pet hardware.
"Something, something, something... freedom to innovate.
Something, something, something... complete."
Bob Eubanks : "Where's the strangest place you ever Google'd Yahoo?"
Contestant : "That would be up the butt, Bob."
Well, actually some programs - like Acquisition for example - do treat the Zoom button as if it were a Maximize button - but that's just because the "snap-to-fit" size happens to be the full desktop. And some - like iTunes and my application FretPet - treat it as a window-mode button. iTunes toggles the appearance between the browser window and the player window.
"You know you're really using a Mac to good effect when you're moving stuff effortlessly from window to window, app to app, and treating windows like children of parent applications."
I've been feeling that power user feeling lately, since I discovered that you can go in and out of Exposé and Dashboard and the Command-Tab Application Switcher all you want while doing a drag. And the fact that you can drag - literally - any type of content from one window to another and nearly all programs "do the right thing" when you drop it. This is just one example of the bonus aspects you get from having such a full-featured OS. Articles don't capture it; you can only appreciate when you're using the system to get work done.
The mighty mouse isn't much better in my book either. My friend was tearing his hair out the other day because his restaurant's computer was "acting up" and all it was was the right button getting pressed by people who didn't know it was a two button mouse. We changed the mouse settings to treat the second button as primary, and all was well.
The puck mouse, well that was a sneaky trick by Apple to create demand for third-party Mac peripherals. The butterfly effect, they employ it constantly.
This has happened to me. I went overboard like the author of this article and posted a very critical reply in a support thread. Apple not only deleted my post but barred me from posting for several months with no notification.
So I took the time to read Apple's posting guidelines. More than that I tried to read between the lines to see what it is Apple's support forums are trying to be. And, I had to agree with Apple. Whether I "liked" their response or not, it made the appropriate impression.
People get pissed off when their technical junk doesn't work, but knee-jerk reactions do no one any good. The author's post was inappropriate for the atmosphere Apple is trying to create in its forums.
The best way to deal with Apple's forums is to ask short, exploratory questions. Explain your problem and ask if it is a known issue. In the author's case, he was asking Apple about a bug he saw in Warcraft, not one that appears to affect the whole system. But he could test this easily by allocating 2GB of RAM and then running any OpenGL software on his system - like Chess for example.
If he has indeed gone to these lengths, the next thing to do is to ask Apple if they know about it. The issue will go up the chain and get tested, and if Apple can release a patch, they will. It will happen on their time, in tandem with all the other issues they face. If it turns out to be a wide-scale problem without a software fix then Apple will offer a replacement to affected customers. (This is what they did with the problematic G4 power supplies in 2001, and there are many other examples.)
So overall, the author should have simply limited his comments to: "Hey I have this problem and it seems to be.... Just thought you should know." and then just do himself a favor and restart his machine before playing 3D games.
Frankly, it sounds more to me like he has a bad RAM stick.
Well, it would make sense to move towards XML for all its useful qualities:
* A simple, open standard
* Conveniently human-readable
* Platform Agnostic - unknown tags and attributes can be ignored
* Data Includes clear type information
The HTML / XHTML / CSS rendering engines are powerful things. They provide a worthy layout system, which is what some email calls-for, and in the case of XHTML/CSS it provides a means to distribute information in a human- and machine-readable way that includes rich contextual information. Most importantly, it's a simple open standard that any application can adopt, and it avoids duplication of effort for the purpose of device-agnostic layout.
Microsoft is making a blunder by doing this. It's an echo of their days of trying to knock down Netscape by leveraging their platform. They are now trying to do the same thing to open standards. As a monopoly, you might argue that Microsoft is using their monopoly position to lock out a viable competitor. Standards represent something analogous to software, and having a monopoly on standards is not different than having a monopoly on software.
If the case were clearer, maybe the EFF would take it up.
I can't believe the naïveté I'm witnessing.
;-)
If all you think about these issues is that they are well-meant personal opinions transmigrating - as they will - into political policies, you need to wake up.
The corporate, monied, powerful, those with a voice - are not you and I. We are the manipulated, oppressed, and stupid. Simply put, it's all a big show. Bill O'Reilly is not promoting conservative or liberal ideas, he's just a funny monkey to distract you. What masquerades as Conservative politics is just the spirit of Fascism speaking its usual bullshit. Truly, deeply, contentful and meaningful discussion doesn't happen on FOX News or frankly anywhere in the media. University ampitheaters, hookah bars, artist conclaves, and theaters are bulging at the seams with the deeper meaning of shit, but you won't see it in the mainstream.
The churches and pulpits are just flailing their arms to keep us all in submission to the emerging World Capitalist Fascist movement. We're being fattened for the slaughter, the sacrifice of our lives to the profiteers. Hooking all of us on pharmaceuticals and antibiotics to fix what ails us, generally caused by the sugary, salty, fatty food they got us hooked on from birth.
The homunculus of American culture is swallowing everything in its dark path, while we the barking sheep bicker over which fucking brand of fairy-dust to sprinkle on our legal documents. Wake up. The whole thing is screwed up. We need to get past the need for God and Exxon and Bush and O'Reilly. And we need to outgrow the swill that passes for thoughtful insight in this country.
We meditate as instructed by words, philosophize and idealize, play with ideas and stories, and somehow out of this process we become stupid fearful primates sometimes. Now who's framing the story - you really think YOU are?
A key thing to understand is that Abortion itself is NOT THE ISSUE in the Abortion debate. We know what abortion is and what it does, and that fetuses "want" (in the biological sense) to develop. But the issue is about the individual right to be self-determined and to be responsible for their own personal universal sphere. (Their own set of narratives, if you will).
A woman has the right to *choose* whether you or myself or the majority likes it. Call it "inalienable." To put it bluntly, the law ends where the individual begins. That's why there are no laws barring you from saying or writing or creating what you wish, so long as it does not harm any individual's interests or encroach on any other individual's universal sphere - the personal domain where they create all the rules. Whether anyone likes it or not, the womb is outside of our jurisdiction.
Abortion is even more deeply a technological and a power issue. Humans have become very knowledgeable, and through this have developed the means to do new things, including safely aborting embryos and fetuses prior to the onset of complex self-awareness. We are immensely powerful beings. Humanity as a whole, in the use of its immense power, oppresses every other species in the world, and more powerful groups oppress less powerful groups, and powerful individuals overpower powerless individuals. This is a stream running backwards, consuming itself, climbing over itself to escape... what? To escape the oppression we ourselves manifest.
When the abortion debate is presented in the media you don't get what it's more deeply about. Nothing in the media analyzes our own deeper political-personal-psychological-spiritual trends. No one really digs and digs into them. WTF?!
If you think FOX News - or any major media outlet that wears an official face - represents a genuine, important, coherent, collective point of view which serves the people's interests, well bully for you. I look forward to feeling your warm jackboot on my neck one day.
Excellent point. Extremely insightful.
We don't exactly know what causes BSE or vJKD, we only know it involves screwy prions. So the essential questions are: "Are screwy prions caused by a transmissible (non-prion) agent?" and "Do human naturally carry susceptible prions?"
Until we know the answers to these questions, it would be very unwise to replace all cattle with a new breed that only hides the problem.
More healthy? It depends on what you mean by that term.
With every diet there's a trade-off. You may be getting slightly bigger boost of available nutrients by eating meat, but coming up with a vegetarian diet that clogs your arteries, stresses your kidneys, and acidifies your blood as much as a meat-centric diet does would be very hard indeed. The fact is that (a) you don't need all that much iron, Vitamin B12, etc., and supplements abound; (b) protein should be only around 5% of your dietary intake; and (c) as a meat-eater you're probably not getting nearly enough fiber. Check out The China Study for more.
I've personally chosen to stop eating all animal products despite the extra effort required. On the one hand both my father and grandfather were avid meat-eaters, and both died in their mid-50's from heart attacks brought on by arterial congestion. So I'm partially driven by my natural wish to be around longer than another 15 years. But also, as an aware person desiring harmony I find that meat-eating is simply incompatible with my knowledge and understanding, and hinders the development of deeper compassion.
Regardless of whether or not meat can be digested by humans, I feel that since I am in an elite position to make a choice then I should choose wisely and compassionately. The more deeply I seek to understand myself and the world, and the more I understand about human physiology, the more impossible it becomes to justify eating meat or dairy. Meat production is cruel, wasteful, and polluting. Knowing this, I see meat-eating as a habit a lot like smoking: It's an unhealthy practice that supports a vile industry, and therefore fosters personal denial.
I understand that very few people are apt to cease their pleasurable habits, but I like the challenge, and I feel clearer in every way - intestinally, spiritually, mentally.
From my personal experience I believe that will-power is a central issue, but in your case your beliefs are the blocker - not willpower. For the moment your will is short-circuited by the belief that meat-eating is necessary and good. If you knew or felt differently about meat-eating, or were more invested in animal welfare and environmental issues, your willpower would presumably be directed differently. Your belief that meat-eating is "more healthy" - likely augmented by cultural conditioning, sentimental attachment to the familiar, and the sensual pleasure associated with meat-eating - trumps will altogether.
If people understood what their bodies needed, were more capable of denying themselves the pleasurable sensations associated with meat and dairy consumption, and were more aware of the devastation and suffering caused by meat-production... well, it would be a much kinder and more viable world. Sustainability is a big issue facing the world, and one of the most straightforward solutions -- reducing meat consumption -- isn't all that easy! Humans are easily hooked, and the industry is hooking more of them all the time.
I wasn't born with a vegan spoon in my hand. I've been on a totally vegan diet now for only 14 months, but I've considered myself a "vegetarian" (if dairy, eggs, and fish are vegetables) for 20 years. As recently as 20 months ago, I would sometimes backslide and eat meat every so often. But at this point I'm developmentally beyond all chance of recidivism. What happened? I've been spending time at Farm Sanctuary working with animals, giving technical assistance to environmental organizations, and practicing meditation. All these experiences have helped me to understand the issue more directly, more deeply, and more broadly. The extra effort required to cook thoroughly nutritious vegan meals is more than made-up-for by the benefits of clarity, energy, and well-being that I feel every day.
I should disclaim that I am a co-host of Vegan Radio, and webmaster of both Vegani
Kind of like a class of Special Ed students who have read Machiavelli and think they know how to run the world.
What do you mean, "Kind of" ?
I disagree with your characterization of Apple's development methodology. In fact they have a lot of salaried people working directly on the kernel, incorporating the functionality Mac OS X needs for features like Disk Journaling, Spotlight and Time Machine, the design and incorporation of which are determined by the OS team. It's true that Apple includes a lot of open-source software and established standards in the OS, but frankly both Apple and Microsoft suffered for a long time from the Not-Invented-Here prejudice. I see Apple's willingness to use well-designed open source tools and standards as a refreshing change.
Also, although the Mac OS X kernel uses BSD in its subsystems, it is not "mostly BSD." The kernel is a hybrid of Mach 2.5 with BSD subsystems available. But you don't even need the BSD subsystem to use Mac OS X. The BSD subsystem is an optional part of the OS installation. Just in terms of raw bytes, the majority of the OS resides in the frameworks. The lowest-level frameworks like Foundation and ApplicationServices were originally developed by NeXT and are brilliantly executed. The choice of Objective-C may seem like a strange choice now, but it's lean, easy to learn, and makes software development far simpler. If NeXT/Apple only ever used what they could get out of the Darwin project, there wouldn't be very much to excite us about Leopard. So frankly, Apple is far more innovative than most Windows fanboys think.
The transition from Motorola 680x0 to PPC is a good example of Apple innovation at its best. The transition was sometimes ugly, but overall amazingly smooth. The transition from IBM Power64 to Intel Core was perhaps less innovative, simply because they were using a state-of-the-art kernel. Nevertheless, the transition was almost completely transparent from a developer point of view. I'm amazed how quickly I made my Application into a Universal Binary.
You really have to give Apple some credit here. A lot of salaried guys at Apple worked long hours for years to keep Mac OS X running well on Intel hardware when no one else was aware of it. The kernel source is just endian-agnostic, it's not rocket science. There wasn't anything much deeper than that to build Mac OS X on Intel. But where they deserve serious credit is in making the developer tools, the headers, the excellent developer documentation... and providing it all for FREE and nicely ahead of their OS releases. Microsoft doesn't come close in its support of developers, nor in having the courage to revisit and rip out the crumbling foundations of their OS.
I agree that technically Windows in the 90's had some better things going on under the hood than Mac OS 7 through 9, but I still preferred Mac OS during those years. The main thing that kept me on the Apple platform was the consistency, aesthetics, organization, and manageability of the OS. Some of the things that bothered me about Windows at that time were:
- The centralized and cryptic registry (vs Mac OS Preferences folder)
- DLL Hell (vs Mac OS Extensions folder)
- BSOD from several fronts (vs Mac OS mysterious lockups)
- That flat, gray feeling (vs Mac OS sleekness)
- Inconsistent menus and interfaces (vs Mac OS well-established Human Interface Guidelines)
- Inconsistent text editing behavior (vs consistent Mac OS text services)
- Ugly font rendering (vs Mac OS decent typography)
- The word "Microsoft" preceding everything (vs no market-speak in Mac OS)
Meanwhile, there were some things that bothered me about Mac OS at the time:
- Mysterious lockups, requiring several long Conflict Catcher sessions
- Rare use of threading in software, system-modal dialogs
- No free developer tools
- No protected memory, often making software development into a reboot-fest
- The best VM system was third-party
- Expensive! hardware
- Not even an option to show the folder hierarchy in a Finder sidebar (Apple should copy MS here)
- Mac OS toolbox tedious to use (but lots of cool APIs and SDKs)
- The dark years (3rd-party licensing, dwindling marketshare, Copland...)
But all that is behind us, thank goodness! The future is in Unix and Unix-like systems with all the great strengths we had only been dreaming of all those years.