Fallacy. All humans are human, no matter what they do. Being "more than human" is more an expression of a want to deviate from a norm.
Counterpoint: The attributes of trying to be something outside an expected 000norm is not unique to humans.
Assertion: An animal in social situation 'A' exhibits deviant behavior not characteristic to all dogs (in a similar situation it might not exhibit this behavior). Whether or not this is an accident or conditioning or whatever is not argued and is irrelevant.
Conclusion: The animal is no different than an exceptional human. This is not a human trait.
Mutations may occur in one generation and only be expressed in another, or depend on activation by many later, "innocent" mutations. Or they may only have minor effects on fitness but in aggregate cause a later drastic change in fitness.
Sometimes the stability and success of a population in a changing ecosystem (where other independant variables are evolving) cause delayed external effects. The extinction of a prey species, for example, may not initially put pressure on a predator until many generations later when an unrelated shift in resource competetion causes a second, competeting predator to follow a herd of an unrelated prey into the area now vacated.
Nothing is linear and independant. The variables in the system are many, sometimes correlated, other times not, sometimes visible and evident, other times not. The complexity is only "irreducible" if you choose to use a naive, inapplicable model for the system.
Our dog has specific attention-seeking behaviors. * When she wants to play, she finds a toy or personal item and tries to lure us away from whatever we may be doing * When she wants food, water, or to go outside, she barks noisily and with increasing alarm until someone attends to her. If we're not otherwise occupied, she will sit by the door or her food bowl without barking. * When she wants someone to just keep her company, she will insert herself in front of that person (pushing a book away if you're reading), snout-push them in the legs, lick them, etc.
The growl-talking is a behavior we only see if we're having an animated conversation. She finds a visible but unobtrusive position (i.e., not trying to be the center of attention), and then tries to join the discussion. OTH, if she actually wants attention because the conversation is growing very long she will paw-up onto someone and pull them away from it for 1 on 1 time.
I really don't see any reason for her to do this other than to try to fit in. Dogs are social animals and you should expect to see behavior like that, but it's not far off from what _people_ do in similar situations and that's where I have the problem with people making such vast distinctions.
There are other things that she does that seem abnormal, and she does them even if no one is around:
* Watch TV on the couch. * Catch fireflies (specifically) * Is cogniscant of her collar, bandana, and leash. I.E. she won't leave them if you forget them if req.d * Closes doors behind herself. Here I'm sure she's just copying us, but it's bizarre.
We didn't train her to do this stuff. She just took it upon herself. I'm not about to speculate as to "why" she does these things but take that for what it's worth.
It doesn't matter. The point is that an induction argument with steps (where each step is only dependant on the last) is not a good example.
So let's say N is a vector of "current time" arguments. So N_1 is parameter one, N_2 parameter two, and so forth, and X(N) is the fitness function of this generation. Y(N) is a fitness function of a different, symbiotic species under similar conditions.
X(N) could be dependant on X(N-1), X(N-3), and Y(N-10), but only if Y(N-4)+X(N_1) is greater than Y(N-1_2)... mathematical induction is to simple an analytic argument to apply here.
Each container can contain a container with a hypervisor. Turtles... all the way down. Does that construct speak to a higher intelligence, even if each layer is a complete cast and abstraction of the next, in both directions?
Uh, people tend to look at athiests as Athiests where they strongly believe in the non-existance of god. To a point where even if they'd lose that bet, they'd still refuse to believe, and just move the goalposts back, saying that whatever it is that the OTB considered to be a God is infact a natural phenomenon and therefore nothing special.
But presumably the Athiest wouldn't take the bet unless they believed that the discriminator would actually have a chance of proving the faithful wrong in a decisive way (otherwise they'd be just throwing away $1000). So if it swung the other way, if they actually were rational then they'd have to accept that counter evidence and presumably they could no longer be "Athiest".
Essentially, what I'm saying is that Athiesm is still a conditional belief. It can have varying levels of certainty but that's dependant on how much philosophical soul searching you've done, or how much exposure you had to alternate belief systems at a young age. Agnostics tend to feel that only they hold a conditional belief, and that somehow makes it a "safe" position. But in fact what they really feel is that they are on the fence; just as someone stuck between Buddhism and Christianity or Islam or whatever.
If you ask an Agnostic whether they think there really is a God, and the answer comes back "probably not". Then you're not Agnostic, you're actually athiest.
They also don't alite onto couches and watch the boob tube in a stupor. It's not just my dog that does this, many indoor dogs will do some of these things.
Whether you believe the dog thinks it can be a person (or be like a person), or whether it is reinforcement learning is a dubious distinction.
To return to the original example, as a human I should believe that if I try really hard to do something I can make my dreams come true (which is what the grandparent is essentially claiming makes us different than animals). This reinforcement learning is delivered to me by Disney, elementary school, my parents, etc. They show me a story of an exceptional person who overcomes adversity and is happy. I should be like that. I get praise when I overcome adversity.
So why is what the dog does any different? Just trying to fit in and do things it believes are good and to her future benefit?
Even if the anecdote is a fabrication. WTF is up with Big-N's production line because it is utter bullshit that I cannot pick up a system anywhere. I WANT TO PLAY MANHUNT 2 DAMNIT. AND I WANT THE EXTRA GRUESOME DEATH SCENES. And I am going to play it on a shitty SD television through a 3rd party coax converter tuned to the wrong channel and the coax sheath freyed so it has a realistic gritty snow effect making the game even more INTENSE.
You would be genuinely surprised if during an interplanetary voyage you discovered a large, red magic teapot. Let alone a blue one!
I use this argument on understanding divisions theist vs. agnostic vs. atheist and how some people misrepresent them.
Suppose there was an OTB that allowed you to wager on the existance or non-existance of a major deity (or dieties). The minimum wager was $10,000, and the odds are something like 1:10 against existance of the diety.
Theists would take the long bet, because their faith was strong. Agnostics wouldn't bet $10,000; that's irresponsible and a wasted payment on that new house.
Athiests would take the "sure bet". Hey, easy grand. On the flip side, if they lost (and here's the kicker), they'd know there was a deity.
You'd think people think athiests would just explode into a puff of smoke if something came along to change their minds! You can't just stick your fingers in your ears and shout "La la la". The OTB has your $10000!!!
They wouldn't be athiest anymore after something like that. That's what it means to be athiest.
The VMWare environment doesn't even have a way of TALKING about anything outside the environment. The memory space starts at 0, goes to 0xFFFFFFFF, and wraps around. It "disappears" when you "shut off" the host, but of course the VM isn't even aware of it... this is the way we want it.
Since we create environments with inner containers, we could speculate about the existance of outer containers. But they have no predictive power, utility, or detectability, so there's little point to argue either way.
This is the position we actually hold. We don't know, we can't know, and there's no way to find out.
It is more like function Q(a,b,c....x,y,z) has a fitness with many codependancies among the pairwise, triple, quads, and so on.
Q(a',b,c...x,y,z) may be worse. Q(a',b',c...x,y,z) may be better, provided enough a' survives long enough to have descendants with b' that crowd out the a/b.
There may be many base cases. It's not so simple and linear. People who use irreducible complexity-type arguments applied to evolution are like people who do statistical analysis of a word problem that ignore correlated events and then complain when the probabilities don't add up, or don't understand why you should _always_ change your door on Let's Make a Deal.
My bird wants to be a dog. He's jealous of our dog because the dog interacts with us more. So he makes dog sounds, tries to play with the dog, etc, as if the dog had some "in" with us, the bearers of food and treats.
Meanwhile the dog thinks its a person. This is partly pack behavior but it's pretty clear that the dog doesn't really distinguish us on a social level, even if it does at a physical one.
This is most telling when the dog attempts to enter into group conversations. She tries to talk. It's not growling or attention-grabbing barking... just moan-inflection-babble she interjects. If we're all around a table or counter, she'll paw up onto it and engage us... not because she wants something in particular, but because she feels that she be involved in the social interaction.
Weird, huh?
Animals can want to be other things too given the right stimuli. By examining the majority of society I say that what most people want is actually pretty base and it is not normal to want to be something more, other than well off.
I think you're confused. Every X "server" is a framebuffer or framebuffer emulator and input device nexus. It also houses a clipboard, font resources, and some other less used facilities.
No client to receive the video is required unless the XServer is actually a proxy (i.e. Xnest, XVnc, or whatever).
Now what you're thinking about with Unix sockets is when X clients (like firefox or konqueror or the display manager) which are running local to the machine that is running the XServer on the console; these connect via a local socket or shared memory for fast graphic display.
But management at Microsoft told the OS dev teams to can it before it went gold. NT 4 on archs other than the x86 was pretty much a disaster. It had a chicken and egg problem w.r.t. hardware and legacy software... although NT4 on Alpha apparently still has a following. Old copies of VC6 turning out ports of apps like PuTTY and whatnot.
AMD made sure that (of all things) NetBSD ran on the K8 architecture 18 months before engineering samples were available. What do you want from them? They just bought ATI and frankly their software development team was a mess, AMD is just beginning to untangle that.
It doesn't matter what OS they use, large companies usually have this kind of retarded inertia. If it's not one thing, it's another - it comes with the territory.
1) The business models are _not_ expensive. $1500 gets you a beast if you know what to get. 2) The consumer models really fucking suck, and the support sucks. That's part of why you pay $1000+-- support on "business" models is actually pleasant. 3) Linux is fully supported on models it is installed on. 4) Red Hat and SuSE will support you if you have _any_ Dell hardware; all of it is supported stock anyway because it is so common.
FYI, the Xeons are Core2-based. X5355s or some such. They only sell the stuff that's in the sweet spot of the power/throughput/cost curve; they're doing half the work for you. 18 months ago they were selling Celerons and Pentium Dxxx parts for like NAS-roles but they are getting out of that market since everyone else sells that stuff too. For example... Dell PE860, with a Pentium D935 and 1GB RAM and RHEL 5 WS is like $1500... no point trying to compete with that.
But like the Altus 3400? Dell didn't have anything like that until the 6950 and even then it's like 50% more expensive through Dell.
Also, FYI... The same company manufactures most Compaq/HP, Sun, and Penguin x86-type servers. Penguin is usually the cheapest for what is essentially the same stuff in the high-volume segment.
I don't know what the hell people in this discussion are smoking. Dell most definitely supports linux on many of their configurations for small/large business and government divisions. They don't sell SuSE on most of the laptops or desktops, but the higher-end workstation ones do have them as options. They sell RHEL service contracts on the servers, and even go through the trouble of making the configurators hide options that different OSs don't support. And they will never tell you that you voided your warranty because you installed a different OS (no matter what it is).
Home/Home Office is the shitty, loss-leader part of Dell. Don't deal with them. Ever.
Sun knows that it is impossible to switch Linux to another license. Even if a majority of people in the contributors list all said tomorrow "Let's use license X" (nearly impossible) there are still missing and _dead_ contributors who effectively lock it into a 70 year GPL configuration (at which point it goes public domain and could be re-licensed).
Sun just recently got a chance to sit down with their lawyers decide how they wanted to license OpenSolaris (Nevada, Solaris 11, whatever), as a whole.
Their lawyers modeled the CDDL on the Mozilla Developer License. They wanted to get the code out there without losing sole control, and to be able to option/exert patent influence on people who got access to the technology.
But unlike AOL/Mozilla, they did not dual license it under the GPL. This probably because they knew that Linux could not incorporate OpenSolaris code at all without violating the GPL and CDDL clauses. This preventing Linux from becoming more competetive with Solaris by means of appropriation (they don't want to hurt their own technology advantage and cannabolize sales of licensed/supported Solaris).
But both camps could really use each other's code. It sounds like upper management at Sun is going to change the license for Solaris (as they have the authority to do so; this is impossible for the Linux community to do effectively) to allow this soon, on the heels of GPL'ing java (which has done wonders for its acceptance in the development community).
Project inertia will guarantee that Linux will be Linux, and Solaris will be Solaris. Sun doesn't have anything to fear. Perhaps they were testing the waters with the initial code release to see what the reaction would be.
No, yum and apt-get are cross-package technology now. But they typically stay with a distro (yum for fedora-likes, apt for debian-likes). If you've used one, you're halfway to figuring the other out.
In fact such cells have 4 states, but only two are valid states (which encode 0 and 1). The other two states are unstable and decay to the 0 and 1 states, except the 0/0 state which is stable when you remove the power:-)
In any case, there's no way to retrieve information from them.
Slashdot Mirror
Assumption: A human can be more than a human.
Fallacy. All humans are human, no matter what they do. Being "more than human" is more an expression of a want to deviate from a norm.
Counterpoint: The attributes of trying to be something outside an expected 000norm is not unique to humans.
Assertion: An animal in social situation 'A' exhibits deviant behavior not characteristic to all dogs (in a similar situation it might not exhibit this behavior). Whether or not this is an accident or conditioning or whatever is not argued and is irrelevant.
Conclusion: The animal is no different than an exceptional human. This is not a human trait.
Mutations may occur in one generation and only be expressed in another, or depend on activation by many later, "innocent" mutations. Or they may only have minor effects on fitness but in aggregate cause a later drastic change in fitness.
Sometimes the stability and success of a population in a changing ecosystem (where other independant variables are evolving) cause delayed external effects. The extinction of a prey species, for example, may not initially put pressure on a predator until many generations later when an unrelated shift in resource competetion causes a second, competeting predator to follow a herd of an unrelated prey into the area now vacated.
Nothing is linear and independant. The variables in the system are many, sometimes correlated, other times not, sometimes visible and evident, other times not. The complexity is only "irreducible" if you choose to use a naive, inapplicable model for the system.
I'm not saying it's not conditioning.
But who's to say that what _we_ do that makes us think we're special isn't conditioning either?
That was my point. You might have noticed my flippant and sarcastic tone describing the behavior.
Our dog has specific attention-seeking behaviors.
* When she wants to play, she finds a toy or personal item and tries to lure us away from whatever we may be doing
* When she wants food, water, or to go outside, she barks noisily and with increasing alarm until someone attends to her. If we're not otherwise occupied, she will sit by the door or her food bowl without barking.
* When she wants someone to just keep her company, she will insert herself in front of that person (pushing a book away if you're reading), snout-push them in the legs, lick them, etc.
The growl-talking is a behavior we only see if we're having an animated conversation. She finds a visible but unobtrusive position (i.e., not trying to be the center of attention), and then tries to join the discussion.
OTH, if she actually wants attention because the conversation is growing very long she will paw-up onto someone and pull them away from it for 1 on 1 time.
I really don't see any reason for her to do this other than to try to fit in. Dogs are social animals and you should expect to see behavior like that, but it's not far off from what _people_ do in similar situations and that's where I have the problem with people making such vast distinctions.
There are other things that she does that seem abnormal, and she does them even if no one is around:
* Watch TV on the couch.
* Catch fireflies (specifically)
* Is cogniscant of her collar, bandana, and leash. I.E. she won't leave them if you forget them if req.d
* Closes doors behind herself. Here I'm sure she's just copying us, but it's bizarre.
We didn't train her to do this stuff. She just took it upon herself. I'm not about to speculate as to "why" she does these things but take that for what it's worth.
It doesn't matter. The point is that an induction argument with steps (where each step is only dependant on the last) is not a good example.
So let's say N is a vector of "current time" arguments. So N_1 is parameter one, N_2 parameter two, and so forth, and X(N) is the fitness function of this generation.
Y(N) is a fitness function of a different, symbiotic species under similar conditions.
X(N) could be dependant on X(N-1), X(N-3), and Y(N-10), but only if Y(N-4)+X(N_1) is greater than Y(N-1_2)... mathematical induction is to simple an analytic argument to apply here.
Consider Xen on a paravirtualizing processor.
Each container can contain a container with a hypervisor. Turtles... all the way down. Does that construct speak to a higher intelligence, even if each layer is a complete cast and abstraction of the next, in both directions?
Uh, people tend to look at athiests as Athiests where they strongly believe in the non-existance of god. To a point where even if they'd lose that bet, they'd still refuse to believe, and just move the goalposts back, saying that whatever it is that the OTB considered to be a God is infact a natural phenomenon and therefore nothing special.
But presumably the Athiest wouldn't take the bet unless they believed that the discriminator would actually have a chance of proving the faithful wrong in a decisive way (otherwise they'd be just throwing away $1000). So if it swung the other way, if they actually were rational then they'd have to accept that counter evidence and presumably they could no longer be "Athiest".
Essentially, what I'm saying is that Athiesm is still a conditional belief. It can have varying levels of certainty but that's dependant on how much philosophical soul searching you've done, or how much exposure you had to alternate belief systems at a young age. Agnostics tend to feel that only they hold a conditional belief, and that somehow makes it a "safe" position. But in fact what they really feel is that they are on the fence; just as someone stuck between Buddhism and Christianity or Islam or whatever.
If you ask an Agnostic whether they think there really is a God, and the answer comes back "probably not". Then you're not Agnostic, you're actually athiest.
They also don't alite onto couches and watch the boob tube in a stupor. It's not just my dog that does this, many indoor dogs will do some of these things.
Whether you believe the dog thinks it can be a person (or be like a person), or whether it is reinforcement learning is a dubious distinction.
To return to the original example, as a human I should believe that if I try really hard to do something I can make my dreams come true (which is what the grandparent is essentially claiming makes us different than animals). This reinforcement learning is delivered to me by Disney, elementary school, my parents, etc. They show me a story of an exceptional person who overcomes adversity and is happy. I should be like that. I get praise when I overcome adversity.
So why is what the dog does any different? Just trying to fit in and do things it believes are good and to her future benefit?
Even if the anecdote is a fabrication. WTF is up with Big-N's production line because it is utter bullshit that I cannot pick up a system anywhere. I WANT TO PLAY MANHUNT 2 DAMNIT. AND I WANT THE EXTRA GRUESOME DEATH SCENES.
And I am going to play it on a shitty SD television through a 3rd party coax converter tuned to the wrong channel and the coax sheath freyed so it has a realistic gritty snow effect making the game even more INTENSE.
You would be genuinely surprised if during an interplanetary voyage you discovered a large, red magic teapot. Let alone a blue one!
I use this argument on understanding divisions theist vs. agnostic vs. atheist and how some people misrepresent them.
Suppose there was an OTB that allowed you to wager on the existance or non-existance of a major deity (or dieties). The minimum wager was $10,000, and the odds are something like 1:10 against existance of the diety.
Theists would take the long bet, because their faith was strong.
Agnostics wouldn't bet $10,000; that's irresponsible and a wasted payment on that new house.
Athiests would take the "sure bet". Hey, easy grand. On the flip side, if they lost (and here's the kicker), they'd know there was a deity.
You'd think people think athiests would just explode into a puff of smoke if something came along to change their minds! You can't just stick your fingers in your ears and shout "La la la". The OTB has your $10000!!!
They wouldn't be athiest anymore after something like that. That's what it means to be athiest.
The VMWare environment doesn't even have a way of TALKING about anything outside the environment. The memory space starts at 0, goes to 0xFFFFFFFF, and wraps around. It "disappears" when you "shut off" the host, but of course the VM isn't even aware of it... this is the way we want it.
Since we create environments with inner containers, we could speculate about the existance of outer containers. But they have no predictive power, utility, or detectability, so there's little point to argue either way.
This is the position we actually hold. We don't know, we can't know, and there's no way to find out.
Far from it.
It is more like function Q(a,b,c....x,y,z) has a fitness with many codependancies among the pairwise, triple, quads, and so on.
Q(a',b,c...x,y,z) may be worse. Q(a',b',c...x,y,z) may be better, provided enough a' survives long enough to have descendants with b' that crowd out the a/b.
There may be many base cases. It's not so simple and linear. People who use irreducible complexity-type arguments applied to evolution are like people who do statistical analysis of a word problem that ignore correlated events and then complain when the probabilities don't add up, or don't understand why you should _always_ change your door on Let's Make a Deal.
My bird wants to be a dog. He's jealous of our dog because the dog interacts with us more. So he makes dog sounds, tries to play with the dog, etc, as if the dog had some "in" with us, the bearers of food and treats.
Meanwhile the dog thinks its a person. This is partly pack behavior but it's pretty clear that the dog doesn't really distinguish us on a social level, even if it does at a physical one.
This is most telling when the dog attempts to enter into group conversations. She tries to talk. It's not growling or attention-grabbing barking... just moan-inflection-babble she interjects. If we're all around a table or counter, she'll paw up onto it and engage us... not because she wants something in particular, but because she feels that she be involved in the social interaction.
Weird, huh?
Animals can want to be other things too given the right stimuli. By examining the majority of society I say that what most people want is actually pretty base and it is not normal to want to be something more, other than well off.
I think you're confused. Every X "server" is a framebuffer or framebuffer emulator and input device nexus. It also houses a clipboard, font resources, and some other less used facilities.
No client to receive the video is required unless the XServer is actually a proxy (i.e. Xnest, XVnc, or whatever).
Now what you're thinking about with Unix sockets is when X clients (like firefox or konqueror or the display manager) which are running local to the machine that is running the XServer on the console; these connect via a local socket or shared memory for fast graphic display.
But management at Microsoft told the OS dev teams to can it before it went gold.
NT 4 on archs other than the x86 was pretty much a disaster. It had a chicken and egg problem w.r.t. hardware and legacy software... although NT4 on Alpha apparently still has a following. Old copies of VC6 turning out ports of apps like PuTTY and whatnot.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoo m/0,,51_104_543_5730~32703,00.html
AMD made sure that (of all things) NetBSD ran on the K8 architecture 18 months before engineering samples were available.
What do you want from them? They just bought ATI and frankly their software development team was a mess, AMD is just beginning to untangle that.
Do you like throwing money away? Good thing you went with the Asus. (Now try getting support... I've had nothing but problems with them).
It doesn't matter what OS they use, large companies usually have this kind of retarded inertia. If it's not one thing, it's another - it comes with the territory.
1) The business models are _not_ expensive. $1500 gets you a beast if you know what to get.
2) The consumer models really fucking suck, and the support sucks. That's part of why you pay $1000+-- support on "business" models is actually pleasant.
3) Linux is fully supported on models it is installed on.
4) Red Hat and SuSE will support you if you have _any_ Dell hardware; all of it is supported stock anyway because it is so common.
FYI, the Xeons are Core2-based. X5355s or some such. They only sell the stuff that's in the sweet spot of the power/throughput/cost curve; they're doing half the work for you.
18 months ago they were selling Celerons and Pentium Dxxx parts for like NAS-roles but they are getting out of that market since everyone else sells that stuff too. For example... Dell PE860, with a Pentium D935 and 1GB RAM and RHEL 5 WS is like $1500... no point trying to compete with that.
But like the Altus 3400? Dell didn't have anything like that until the 6950 and even then it's like 50% more expensive through Dell.
Also, FYI... The same company manufactures most Compaq/HP, Sun, and Penguin x86-type servers. Penguin is usually the cheapest for what is essentially the same stuff in the high-volume segment.
I don't know what the hell people in this discussion are smoking. Dell most definitely supports linux on many of their configurations for small/large business and government divisions. They don't sell SuSE on most of the laptops or desktops, but the higher-end workstation ones do have them as options. They sell RHEL service contracts on the servers, and even go through the trouble of making the configurators hide options that different OSs don't support. And they will never tell you that you voided your warranty because you installed a different OS (no matter what it is).
Home/Home Office is the shitty, loss-leader part of Dell. Don't deal with them. Ever.
Sun knows that it is impossible to switch Linux to another license. Even if a majority of people in the contributors list all said tomorrow "Let's use license X" (nearly impossible) there are still missing and _dead_ contributors who effectively lock it into a 70 year GPL configuration (at which point it goes public domain and could be re-licensed).
Sun just recently got a chance to sit down with their lawyers decide how they wanted to license OpenSolaris (Nevada, Solaris 11, whatever), as a whole.
Their lawyers modeled the CDDL on the Mozilla Developer License. They wanted to get the code out there without losing sole control, and to be able to option/exert patent influence on people who got access to the technology.
But unlike AOL/Mozilla, they did not dual license it under the GPL. This probably because they knew that Linux could not incorporate OpenSolaris code at all without violating the GPL and CDDL clauses. This preventing Linux from becoming more competetive with Solaris by means of appropriation (they don't want to hurt their own technology advantage and cannabolize sales of licensed/supported Solaris).
But both camps could really use each other's code. It sounds like upper management at Sun is going to change the license for Solaris (as they have the authority to do so; this is impossible for the Linux community to do effectively) to allow this soon, on the heels of GPL'ing java (which has done wonders for its acceptance in the development community).
Project inertia will guarantee that Linux will be Linux, and Solaris will be Solaris. Sun doesn't have anything to fear. Perhaps they were testing the waters with the initial code release to see what the reaction would be.
No, yum and apt-get are cross-package technology now. But they typically stay with a distro (yum for fedora-likes, apt for debian-likes). If you've used one, you're halfway to figuring the other out.
Any more scans?
SRAM works via flip flops (look it up). They're power hungry but very fast. Remove power, and all the state is lost.n g
:-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:6t-SRAM-cell.p
In fact such cells have 4 states, but only two are valid states (which encode 0 and 1). The other two states are unstable and decay to the 0 and 1 states, except the 0/0 state which is stable when you remove the power
In any case, there's no way to retrieve information from them.