So then they'll simply generate more laws to keep themselves in power! After all, most politicians are former lawyers, at least where I am from (Germany).
I mean, this is the time where there is a new law being thought out to push/mandate a new (but essentially useless) product. I have seen that pattern several times now...
To be more specific, the molecular weight of normal He to He with one muon attached is roughly 4.1/4.0. The change in pitch relative to breathing He should be the square root of that ratio, which is a change of about 1.2%. For someone with absolute pitch, it may be possible to hear the difference of tone of a musical instrument. But I doubt anyone will hear a difference when a person speaks.
Well, to relate to this, there has been this expensive system implemented in Germany for the toll on the Autobahn (used only for truck drivers so far).
But why is an expensive, technical solution needed at all if it could also be done with a sticker and the police which checks for its existence from time-to-time? They are already doing their patrols anyway.
Just make not-having-a-sticker-when-checked expensive enough with an appropriate fine.
All these sophisticated technical systems smell like corruption/ 'subvention' of the companies profiting from this stuff to me. Technical toll systems are simply unneccessary.
Well, I have to agree with you that you have to draw the line somewhere and there are probably also cases where intervention is the only right thing to do.
Certainly, there need to be laws to keep people from violating the freedom of other people. And this is also very true for the children of abusive alcoholic parents.
That said, I am highly doubtful and even suspicious about the measures being implemented to do this. Of course, the right balance has to be found through proper discussion.
But I think that there a lot of points to consider in this case.
There are probably already laws in place in the UK (I'm from germany) to keep children from their parents if needed, and if dertermined to be so by a court. So I think that the first thing the pro-CCTV-in-homes fraction should do to convince people is to make the arguments that support the additional CCTV measure. I have not seen any real ones yet, apart from the very diffuse 'we have to do something'.
That said, all power you give to the state will be abused. Maybe not yet by the all powerful dictator, but the people running the comissions to decide about such video surveillance will surely be at least partly staffed by authoritarian, nanny-type persons. I am personally (without any proof, just my impression from dealing with authority figures) convinced that positions which have power (police etc.) will be mostly sought-for by people who want to wield such power (anyone having a reference on this?). Then there is incompetence. In my field (technical and should therefore be a lot easier than working with people) I could already see in various ways the effects human nature has on getting to the right decisions (which is quite often simply not happening). Mistakes by myself included, mistakes by people with a lot of authority and knowledge included. Now, I do not believe that outside of the 'technical nerd subculture', people are so much more infallible and better that they can be trusted to have to much influence on the private lives on other people. Just watch the news for that...
IMHO, the core problem here is that still to many people believe that they are right in every regard and that anyone else is a stupid idiot to be controlled by the government in their actions and more often than not also in their thoughts. (Interesting side note: The older I get, the more anti-authoritarian I become; I shared some of such authoritarian views ten years back but the more I see other, even quite bright people argue for authority and getting into very muddy waters along the way, the more I like the personal freedom POV)
And this nanny-state mode of governing is so prevalent that it already has hurt a lot of innocent people along the way of implementing 'the perfect world' (which I think is simply not possible) that even if you are purely utilitarian in nature, you should calculate the losses on both sides before implementing such legislation.
And I am sure that it will not be clear-cut at all.
I generally agree with your post, but I still think that one needs to better separate concepts in the discussion here.
After we have a working model of the device, we can build the actual physical device, the brain, which does not "compute" its actions, it just works.
Well, one needs do define 'compute'. A computer also just works and is a man made machine. Put the supercomputer into a black box and you have your 'brain that just works'.
I do not think that there is any qualitative difference between 'computing' something and having a machine that 'just works'. For example, in the embedded world, you would say that a PID controller is a PID controller, regardless of whether it is implemented analogue (doing real integrations in a capacitor) or digital (approximating the integration with digital counts, i.e. a 'simulation' of a real capacitor).
That said, I think the point of such simulations can only be the validation of functional models of the brain. We already have a way of 'producing' conscious beings, which is effective enough (given the overpopulation concerns). It is also a highly energy efficient way of implementing the 'conscious machine'.
Given that artificial consciousness is possible at all:
Implementing something like consciousness on a large supercomputer would give a lot of insights into ourselves.
Implementing consciousness in a box that consumes less power and takes less space than the human brain would be more of a serious technological breakthrough than a scientific advance.
Of course, in any case, ethics issues remain.. "may you switch 'it' off..." etc. - which I feel are much too complicated to warrant cramming any of my armchair philosophy thoughts in here...:-)
Instead of increasing bandwidth, what about using traffic-shaping instead? I'm not sure if this is something that could be automated, or if it would need to be done manually [shudder].
Well, in europe there are tools supplied which each network connection. Those allow online traffic shapping, in the case of congestion.
The only thing you really want to avoid on this kind of network is peer-to-peer communication!
As a german, I like to point out that the nazis got the power largely by being voted for! So... it's not like the germans were overrun by a hostile government - the people here voted for the nazi idiots!
I think that the idea of freedom of speech in a very basic way like it is written in the U.S. constitution is actually one of the few things which should be imported to Europe.
The stupid german prohibition on nazi propaganda is already doing a lot of harm by being supported by overzealous politicians (according to the other post, more people should trust goverments to do the right thing - how can you think like this with the current political climate?!):
Some ISPs in Dusseldorf were (are?) required to ban access to U.S. nazi pages. I'm sorry, but why do I need such a nanny state which prescribes what ideas (no matter how stupid and disgusting) I am allowed to see? What is so wrong being curious about the ideology of the neo nazis? If you want to fight them, how do you do that without knowing how they think??
Do not even get me started on how those and other politicians try to suppress and censor even basic knowledge here in germany.
And then there are the large religious pressure groups trying to implement (or extend already existing) 'blasphemy' laws (for example to outlaw mohammed cartoons).
No, I like the idea of freedom of speech and more generally the principle of trying to extend the idea 'do not mess with other's private issues' as far as possible.
That said, I still think that youtube as a private company has every right to constrain the set of videos they host. -
You can natively compare two v4 addresses by using a == b (which will translate into a single assembly instruction). You cannot do that on a 129 bit data item. Your choices are - memcmp, or defined operation (compare first 4 bytes, then next 4 bytes, then next, then next:) ). This is inefficient, prone to error and makes code less maintainable.
Well, without showing any 'authority card' here, I'd like to ask/comment on how much your argument is valid:
"this is inefficient": On endpoints, this hardly matters anymore, don't you think? On routers, what's the problem with synthesizing a 128bit comparison instead of a 32bit one into the chip?
I also do not think that anyone cares about the number of assembly instructions anymore. Apart maybe from embedded devices, but I doubt there exist too many which have a high load because of all these 4x longword comparisons needed for IPv6. If they are that network centric, they will have specialized VLSIs (e.g. routers as I mentioned above).
"prone to error and makes code less maintainable": Well, only in C system level code (i.e. probably just IP layer of the network stack in the OS), C++ should be able to map this quite conveniently and most application developers are probably using a higher level language anyway.
Well, this behaviour can for example be explained by the popularity of a single another language having most of the change and affecting the popularity of the others in relative terms.
Say delphi,python have '25% popularity' (whatever that means) in that chart and C++ has 50%.
Now, if C++ popularity drops to 20% because its programmers leave the IT field, delphi and python will have a popularity of 40% afterwards if the amount of programmers voting for these didn't change.
The people proposing this law are actual violent criminals, advocating violence against otherwise innocent people they just don't like.
Well, I start to think that the people proposing the new laws in the UK seem to have a very weird form of a fetish to control/have power over other people's (most of the targeted are completely innocent!) personal sexuality.
It seems to me that available power in the goverment attracts just the wrong people which are prone to abusing this power. And those who are most aggressive get the most powerful positions over time. It starts with random assaults by the 'toy police' (security guards), goes on with general police brutality and ends with soldiers torturing captured people in the most nasty ways they can imagine. Investigations after reported abuse often progress mysteriously slowly if they come close to the 'private sex lives' of politicians and other high officials in the goverment.
[Of course, most guards, policemen or soldiers do their jobs just fine.]
And people with just a small, harmless kink are being utterly destroyed by those perverts
For example, the arrest of the guy with the bike-fetish is outright medieval.
I thought that western societies progressed so far to agree on:
a.) allowing any sexual practice (between consenting partners) which does not harm anyone.
b.) not prosecuting any thought crimes
It is iterated over-and-over again how bad dictatorships such as in iran are. This is the wrong forum to complain, I known, but can we please try to not emulate these??
The summary didn't say, but the colors MUST be false color, since atoms are smaller than light wavelengths. But will it allow you to photograph atoms without destroying them? (yes the link is humorous, but the question I ask is serious) No. Nothing says that a single atom can't send or receive single photons. The size of "the EM field belonging to the photon" may be much larger, but so what? Look here for an example.
Of course I know the modern style and work of a compiler and the programmer, and that this quite different to what existed in the 80s:-) Out of pure interest, I'm still looking for a really good C compiler (which is very probably a cross-compiler:) for 6502.
Hi Mr. Simhacker,
The original SimCity code written in C ran just fine of an 8 bit 1.02 MHz 6510. I'm really curious: What compiler was used to compile that simcity C code to 6502 assembly? I'm sometimes playing around with various OSS compilers for 6502/10 (lcc, cc65, sdcc,...) and they all produce really bloated machine code compared to hand-optimized assembly.
1. Solar cells are made from silicon, which carried in trucks and hence not carbon neutral. Every power source is not carbon neutral since it has manufactured components that were transported at some point. Of course once you have plentiful power from the nuke plants you might change that...
Impracticality? I mean, moving a star takes a tremendous amount of energy. Correct, but maybe we're closer in moving stars than we may think (Yes, I'm speculating... but I always thought about this idea and I never saw it discussed, so please tell me where I'm wrong in the following::-)
Maybe we could exploit the chaotical movement of stars (or other big masses) and, with a really powerful simulator, could predict which small nudge could change the positions of the stars in a (short timescale) predictable way. This maybe would enable us to produce large scale patterns in the universe - Exploit the amplification bvehaviour of chaos to yield something useful. I'm thinking about something like the 'planetery superhighway' for space probes, just the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
So then they'll simply generate more laws to keep themselves in power! After all, most politicians are former lawyers, at least where I am from (Germany).
I mean, this is the time where there is a new law being thought out to push/mandate a new (but essentially useless) product. I have seen that pattern several times now...
A muon has about a tenth the mass of a proton/neutron. An electron only has only about a 1/2000th the mass of a proton/neutron.
To be more specific, the molecular weight of normal He to He with one muon attached is roughly 4.1/4.0. The change in pitch relative to breathing He should be the square root of that ratio, which is a change of about 1.2%. For someone with absolute pitch, it may be possible to hear the difference of tone of a musical instrument. But I doubt anyone will hear a difference when a person speaks.
Well, to relate to this, there has been this expensive system implemented in Germany for the toll on the Autobahn (used only for truck drivers so far).
But why is an expensive, technical solution needed at all if it could also be done with a sticker and the police which checks for its existence from time-to-time? They are already doing their patrols anyway.
Just make not-having-a-sticker-when-checked expensive enough with an appropriate fine.
All these sophisticated technical systems smell like corruption/ 'subvention' of the companies profiting from this stuff to me. Technical toll systems are simply unneccessary.
Well, I have to agree with you that you have to draw the line somewhere and there are probably also cases where intervention is the only right thing to do.
Certainly, there need to be laws to keep people from violating the freedom of other people. And this is also very true for the children of abusive alcoholic parents.
That said, I am highly doubtful and even suspicious about the measures being implemented to do this. Of course, the right balance has to be found through proper discussion.
But I think that there a lot of points to consider in this case.
There are probably already laws in place in the UK (I'm from germany) to keep children from their parents if needed, and if dertermined to be so by a court. So I think that the first thing the pro-CCTV-in-homes fraction should do to convince people is to make the arguments that support the additional CCTV measure. I have not seen any real ones yet, apart from the very diffuse 'we have to do something'.
That said, all power you give to the state will be abused. Maybe not yet by the all powerful dictator, but the people running the comissions to decide about such video surveillance will surely be at least partly staffed by authoritarian, nanny-type persons. I am personally (without any proof, just my impression from dealing with authority figures) convinced that positions which have power (police etc.) will be mostly sought-for by people who want to wield such power (anyone having a reference on this?). Then there is incompetence. In my field (technical and should therefore be a lot easier than working with people) I could already see in various ways the effects human nature has on getting to the right decisions (which is quite often simply not happening). Mistakes by myself included, mistakes by people with a lot of authority and knowledge included. Now, I do not believe that outside of the 'technical nerd subculture', people are so much more infallible and better that they can be trusted to have to much influence on the private lives on other people. Just watch the news for that...
IMHO, the core problem here is that still to many people believe that they are right in every regard and that anyone else is a stupid idiot to be controlled by the government in their actions and more often than not also in their thoughts. (Interesting side note: The older I get, the more anti-authoritarian I become; I shared some of such authoritarian views ten years back but the more I see other, even quite bright people argue for authority and getting into very muddy waters along the way, the more I like the personal freedom POV)
And this nanny-state mode of governing is so prevalent that it already has hurt a lot of innocent people along the way of implementing 'the perfect world' (which I think is simply not possible) that even if you are purely utilitarian in nature, you should calculate the losses on both sides before implementing such legislation.
And I am sure that it will not be clear-cut at all.
And finally there is no, zero, zilch scientific evidence that quantum processes play a role in neurons.
Too simple answer :-)
If you throw around 'scientific evidence', better be careful with your wording
And, yes, I also think that Penrose's ideas are a bit off.
I generally agree with your post, but I still think that one needs to better separate concepts in the discussion here.
After we have a working model of the device, we can build the actual physical device, the brain, which does not "compute" its actions, it just works.
Well, one needs do define 'compute'. A computer also just works and is a man made machine. Put the supercomputer into a black box and you have your 'brain that just works'.
I do not think that there is any qualitative difference between 'computing' something and having a machine that 'just works'. For example, in the embedded world, you would say that a PID controller is a PID controller, regardless of whether it is implemented analogue (doing real integrations in a capacitor) or digital (approximating the integration with digital counts, i.e. a 'simulation' of a real capacitor).
That said, I think the point of such simulations can only be the validation of functional models of the brain. We already have a way of 'producing' conscious beings, which is effective enough (given the overpopulation concerns). It is also a highly energy efficient way of implementing the 'conscious machine'.
Given that artificial consciousness is possible at all:
Implementing something like consciousness on a large supercomputer would give a lot of insights into ourselves.
Implementing consciousness in a box that consumes less power and takes less space than the human brain would be more of a serious technological breakthrough than a scientific advance.
Of course, in any case, ethics issues remain.. "may you switch 'it' off..." etc. - which I feel are much too complicated to warrant cramming any of my armchair philosophy thoughts in here... :-)
Instead of increasing bandwidth, what about using traffic-shaping instead? I'm not sure if this is something that could be automated, or if it would need to be done manually [shudder].
Well, in europe there are tools supplied which each network connection. Those allow online traffic shapping, in the case of congestion.
The only thing you really want to avoid on this kind of network is peer-to-peer communication!
But you can do better than focused x-ray laser beams with already existing pencil shaped beams of charged particles.
The problem is not that the beam can not be focused (a long chunk of lead with a hole in the middle is a perfect collimator for xrays/gammas).
The problem is that the penetrating depth needs to be controlled.
And the bragg peak for charged particle radiation helps in this much better than the e^{-x} absorption law of photons.
Maybe he just made a typo and really meant 1e4 + 3 cups per day. That'd be a lot :-)
Thank you very much, you just summed up what I was thinking for quite some while about the whole 'we need everything to be safe' issue!
--
Hey mods,
this is a very insightful post and should deserve some points!
And "dran" also means 'attached', so 'arm dran' means being badly off as well as 'arm is attached'.
Which leads to the saying:
"Lieber arm dran als Arm ab"
Better be badly off than to lose an arm :-)
If the tech community makes enough buzz about this, it's likely that we can put the pin back in this grenade.
This ironically reminds me of the title of a nice (and rather old) text, which sadly sounds almost like prophecy now.
Well, a volume of vacuum is lighter than the same volume of air, so just make the parts in your tubes small enough and they'll take off ;-)
As a german, I like to point out that the nazis got the power largely by being voted for! So... it's not like the germans were overrun by a hostile government - the people here voted for the nazi idiots!
I think that the idea of freedom of speech in a very basic way like it is written in the U.S. constitution is actually one of the few things which should be imported to Europe.
The stupid german prohibition on nazi propaganda is already doing a lot of harm by being supported by overzealous politicians (according to the other post, more people should trust goverments to do the right thing - how can you think like this with the current political climate?!):
Some ISPs in Dusseldorf were (are?) required to ban access to U.S. nazi pages. I'm sorry, but why do I need such a nanny state which prescribes what ideas (no matter how stupid and disgusting) I am allowed to see? What is so wrong being curious about the ideology of the neo nazis? If you want to fight them, how do you do that without knowing how they think??
Do not even get me started on how those and other politicians try to suppress and censor even basic knowledge here in germany.
And then there are the large religious pressure groups trying to implement (or extend already existing) 'blasphemy' laws (for example to outlaw mohammed cartoons).
No, I like the idea of freedom of speech and more generally the principle of trying to extend the idea 'do not mess with other's private issues' as far as possible.
That said, I still think that youtube as a private company has every right to constrain the set of videos they host.
-
You can natively compare two v4 addresses by using a == b (which will translate into a single assembly instruction). You cannot do that on a 129 bit data item. Your choices are - memcmp, or defined operation (compare first 4 bytes, then next 4 bytes, then next, then next :) ). This is inefficient, prone to error and makes code less maintainable.
Well, without showing any 'authority card' here, I'd like to ask/comment on how much your argument is valid:
"this is inefficient": On endpoints, this hardly matters anymore, don't you think? On routers, what's the problem with synthesizing a 128bit comparison instead of a 32bit one into the chip?
I also do not think that anyone cares about the number of assembly instructions anymore. Apart maybe from embedded devices, but I doubt there exist too many which have a high load because of all these 4x longword comparisons needed for IPv6. If they are that network centric, they will have specialized VLSIs (e.g. routers as I mentioned above).
"prone to error and makes code less maintainable": Well, only in C system level code (i.e. probably just IP layer of the network stack in the OS), C++ should be able to map this quite conveniently and most application developers are probably using a higher level language anyway.
Well, this behaviour can for example be explained by the popularity of a single another language having most of the change and affecting the popularity of the others in relative terms.
Say delphi,python have '25% popularity' (whatever that means) in that chart and C++ has 50%.
Now, if C++ popularity drops to 20% because its programmers leave the IT field, delphi and python will have a popularity of 40% afterwards if the amount of programmers voting for these didn't change.
The people proposing this law are actual violent criminals, advocating violence against otherwise innocent people they just don't like.
Well, I start to think that the people proposing the new laws in the UK seem to have a very weird form of a fetish to control/have power over other people's (most of the targeted are completely innocent!) personal sexuality.
It seems to me that available power in the goverment attracts just the wrong people which are prone to abusing this power. And those who are most aggressive get the most powerful positions over time.
It starts with random assaults by the 'toy police' (security guards), goes on with general police brutality and ends with soldiers torturing captured people in the most nasty ways they can imagine.
Investigations after reported abuse often progress mysteriously slowly if they come close to the 'private sex lives' of politicians and other high officials in the goverment.
[Of course, most guards, policemen or soldiers do their jobs just fine.]
And people with just a small, harmless kink are being utterly destroyed by those perverts
For example, the arrest of the guy with the bike-fetish is outright medieval.
I thought that western societies progressed so far to agree on:
a.) allowing any sexual practice (between consenting partners) which does not harm anyone.
b.) not prosecuting any thought crimes
It is iterated over-and-over again how bad dictatorships such as in iran are. This is the wrong forum to complain, I known, but can we please try to not emulate these??
Look here for an example.
...Other than a strange obsession with Cricket... You're sure your colleagues were not camouflaged white robots?Thank you alot for your post!
:-) :) for 6502.
Of course I know the modern style and work of a compiler and the programmer, and that this quite different to what existed in the 80s
Out of pure interest, I'm still looking for a really good C compiler (which is very probably a cross-compiler
I'm sometimes playing around with various OSS compilers for 6502/10 (lcc, cc65, sdcc,
1. Solar cells are made from silicon, which carried in trucks and hence not carbon neutral. Every power source is not carbon neutral since it has manufactured components that were transported at some point. Of course once you have plentiful power from the nuke plants you might change that...
And to further elaborate on this: There is this concept called Energy Returned on Energy Invested. (And even more refined indicators).
I have heard this flawed argument against nuclear power so often that it is not really funny anymore.
Maybe we could exploit the chaotical movement of stars (or other big masses) and, with a really powerful
simulator, could predict which small nudge could change the positions of the stars in a (short timescale) predictable way. This maybe would
enable us to produce large scale patterns in the universe - Exploit the amplification bvehaviour of chaos to yield something useful.
I'm thinking about something like the 'planetery superhighway' for space probes, just the other way around.
Well....... but the only thing known to physics
which can apply a force in mid-air is either a moving
airfoil or a rocket/jet.
Both methods are pretty inefficient.