Reminds me of something I've read a long time ago. Suppose you could replace a real neuron with an artificial one and you would replace one by one the neurons of a person by those artificial ones. Each time checking if his brain still functions normaly.
Now when you've replaced all of them, you copy the artificial neuron's configuration to a powerfull computer, programmed to simulate the neuron net.
I find this an intresting thought experiment. Would this person be the same before and after the replacement? Would he be still alive? When copied to the computer, how would that feel?
Both intresting and creeping...
What's more realistic?
Some magical creature created the universe out of nothing and wants us to follow its intructions, but refuses to give any evidence of its existance.
Or
You're a delusional brainwashed individual.
I'll give you some help. The next list consists of made up characters. They do not exist, but people love to make their children believe in them.
* Santaclaus
* Fairies
* The Boogyman
* God
* The monster under the bed
* The toothfairy
* Dwarfs
* Witches
* Vampires (excluding the bat species with the same name)
* Ghosts
* The members of the QA team of any TV channel
I know it's tough, but part of growing up involves growing out of these juvenile fantasies. Don't worry, you'll get over it.
And how am I suppose to pay? Probably by credit card. That's nice but for the major part of my game playing life I did not have one. We don't have a credit card tradition like the US has. What other options are there? Paypal? That's about as secure as letting the cat guard the milk. Other than that? Money transfer, now instead of driving to the store, buying the game and driving home, I can transfer the money and in a day or two I get to spend an hour or 2 waiting for the download to complete (which takes away almost half my ISP allowens), followed by half an hour while the game gets updated and then, perhaps, I get to the "loading" screen.
Even if I buy a game that way. How long will I have it? When they decide to end the products life, I 'll end up without my precious game. Unless, ofcourse, they, in their limitless goodness, would allow me to download an ISO.
If I could download an ISO, then sure, I'd go along, but I really doubt they would allow this. After all we're all stinkin' pirates, right?
and power it with a nuclear reactor, you could sell the electricity being produced when you arent launching things
Actually this may may not be as simple as you would think. I suppose you'd build a reactor that's not magnitudes too powerfull for the mass driver, so when you do are launching things you'll not be delivering much electricity. The problems lays with that that electricity has to come from somewhere else. And generators that can start fairly quick, diesel powered generators for example, are expensive to run. Slow starting reactors are less expensive to run, but would waste a lot of energy between being started and being used and between running and shutting down.
In essence it's pretty much the same issue as with wind power generators.
I doubt grey goo is possible. To make a replicator you'll need a number of differend atoms, now not all atoms are equaly abundant or even available everywhere. So grey goo would form until it used up one of its required materials (like any other chemical reaction).
If you want to fear a scenario, picture what some madman (m/f) could do with nanobots. Don't like a particular group of people? Figure out some genetic simularity, program your nanobot-virus and release. Lots of possibilities there.
You're stating Commander Data is useless?;-)
Seriously, sufficently advanced robots of this form could be very practical. But probably only in a small nich market. Robobutlers for example, could benefit from human locomotion, since houses are designed to be navigated by humans.
Humanoid robots won't be around (in the way microwave ovens are around) for a significant amount of time, since they need better artificial muscles and todays artificial muscles are too bulky (Shape memory alloys use too much power, airmuscles require a pressurized air source).
I don't think that weatherprediction is just an issue with the number of variables. More an issue with how each of the variables influences the others. You can't really apply a divide and conquer strategy on such systems without making a significant error. Take the ideal gas law. It started with a number of laws in which two parameters of a volume of gas were considered. (the others were kept constant). These laws were brought together as a single law (ideal gas law, which approximated the behaviour of hydrogin gas at a very high temperature and very low pressure) and later this law received a number of correction factors for it to work correctly with real life gasses. I believe weather prediction would follow a similar, but much more complicated, traject. Starting with explaining the elements of weather, e.g. wind, temperature, rain,... and then combining the theories and correcting them to hold up for real weather.
3D realms can't cancel quitely. 1500 (ex-)fans tearing down the building and beating up the employees in sheer frustration is going to make a whole lot of noise.
Well, from the way things are going you may not have more files, but they'll be larger. Take digital cameras, every so often a better one is trown on the market. With each such generation the file size of such a picture goes up as well. You may still have only 100 pictures as before, but now they're twice as big. Same for MP3, higher quality formats will be used in a few years.
One of the things I suspect on holding down the filesizes of higher quality MP3s and pictures is download and upload speed. When I first started with online stuff, (accessing a local BBS with a 1200Baud modem) downloading a whole MB was something rare (not to mention time consuming). Now (with broadband) I regulary download catalogs 20Mb to 50Mb in pretty short times. Downloading a 650Mb ISO isn't that much of an issue either.
Now picture what we'll be up and downloading when we've got fibre instead of broadband. By then we might be uploading CD audio tracks rather than MP3s.
Don't worry, when those multi-TB drives are available, you'll have a lot new stuff to store. When those 50Mb drives were hot, nobody had digital photo, digital TV recording or MP3 collections.
The man is right, you know. We all should put down those videogames and study law. Then when we grow up we can spend our time contructively by finding something other people like to do and rage a political war against it. A few generations of that and we'll have a society where no time is wasted and everyone is either working or sleeping. Just picture what a great world that would be.
You do are aware computers are very good in sorting and removing duplicate data? How long do you think it would take to write a script to remove the duplicates?
Most of the exams I had in college were the kind where cheating was pretty much impossible. These exams involved getting 2 or 3 questions (each covered a nice part of your course notes), answer them on a piece of paper. Then go to the professor(s) and do the answering oraly (the papers weren't important). They'dd ask a few extra questions about what you wrote on the papers (which gave you a chance to correct mistakes if you knew the material). They easily knew if you actually understanded the subject or just memorised your course notes.
Slashdot Mirror
I can! And I even have enough left to buy a candy bar...
If you'd replace a persons mind with artifial neurons, that would do away with the magicaly "soul", wouldn't it?
Reminds me of something I've read a long time ago. Suppose you could replace a real neuron with an artificial one and you would replace one by one the neurons of a person by those artificial ones. Each time checking if his brain still functions normaly.
Now when you've replaced all of them, you copy the artificial neuron's configuration to a powerfull computer, programmed to simulate the neuron net.
I find this an intresting thought experiment. Would this person be the same before and after the replacement? Would he be still alive? When copied to the computer, how would that feel?
Both intresting and creeping...
I bet afterwarts the celebrate the test with pancakes! Well, I would...
What's more realistic?
Some magical creature created the universe out of nothing and wants us to follow its intructions, but refuses to give any evidence of its existance.
Or
You're a delusional brainwashed individual.
I'll give you some help. The next list consists of made up characters. They do not exist, but people love to make their children believe in them.
* Santaclaus
* Fairies
* The Boogyman
* God
* The monster under the bed
* The toothfairy
* Dwarfs
* Witches
* Vampires (excluding the bat species with the same name)
* Ghosts
* The members of the QA team of any TV channel
I know it's tough, but part of growing up involves growing out of these juvenile fantasies. Don't worry, you'll get over it.
Why not? Remember Donkey Konga? Definitly not a game you'd call a clone. Not to mention the special controller is a very nice way to prevent copying.
Ofcourse they didn't detect brain activity. Politician have MIBO-registers (Money In, Bullshit Out), not brains.
And how am I suppose to pay? Probably by credit card. That's nice but for the major part of my game playing life I did not have one. We don't have a credit card tradition like the US has. What other options are there? Paypal? That's about as secure as letting the cat guard the milk. Other than that? Money transfer, now instead of driving to the store, buying the game and driving home, I can transfer the money and in a day or two I get to spend an hour or 2 waiting for the download to complete (which takes away almost half my ISP allowens), followed by half an hour while the game gets updated and then, perhaps, I get to the "loading" screen.
Even if I buy a game that way. How long will I have it? When they decide to end the products life, I 'll end up without my precious game. Unless, ofcourse, they, in their limitless goodness, would allow me to download an ISO.
If I could download an ISO, then sure, I'd go along, but I really doubt they would allow this. After all we're all stinkin' pirates, right?
Lets do a better test of this new system.
I'm gonna shoot some Americans!
Negative. No knock on the door.
I'm gonna blow up the empire state building!
Negative again.
I'm gonna poisen the American food supplies!
Negative yet again. Damn I might as well stop and start downloading some mp3s...
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK!
In essence it's pretty much the same issue as with wind power generators.
I fail to see what's so funny about Professional Object Oriented Programming.
I doubt grey goo is possible. To make a replicator you'll need a number of differend atoms, now not all atoms are equaly abundant or even available everywhere. So grey goo would form until it used up one of its required materials (like any other chemical reaction).
If you want to fear a scenario, picture what some madman (m/f) could do with nanobots. Don't like a particular group of people? Figure out some genetic simularity, program your nanobot-virus and release. Lots of possibilities there.
You're stating Commander Data is useless? ;-)
Seriously, sufficently advanced robots of this form could be very practical. But probably only in a small nich market. Robobutlers for example, could benefit from human locomotion, since houses are designed to be navigated by humans.
Humanoid robots won't be around (in the way microwave ovens are around) for a significant amount of time, since they need better artificial muscles and todays artificial muscles are too bulky (Shape memory alloys use too much power, airmuscles require a pressurized air source).
I don't think that weatherprediction is just an issue with the number of variables. More an issue with how each of the variables influences the others. You can't really apply a divide and conquer strategy on such systems without making a significant error. Take the ideal gas law. It started with a number of laws in which two parameters of a volume of gas were considered. (the others were kept constant). These laws were brought together as a single law (ideal gas law, which approximated the behaviour of hydrogin gas at a very high temperature and very low pressure) and later this law received a number of correction factors for it to work correctly with real life gasses. I believe weather prediction would follow a similar, but much more complicated, traject. Starting with explaining the elements of weather, e.g. wind, temperature, rain, ... and then combining the theories and correcting them to hold up for real weather.
3D realms can't cancel quitely. 1500 (ex-)fans tearing down the building and beating up the employees in sheer frustration is going to make a whole lot of noise.
Well, from the way things are going you may not have more files, but they'll be larger. Take digital cameras, every so often a better one is trown on the market. With each such generation the file size of such a picture goes up as well. You may still have only 100 pictures as before, but now they're twice as big. Same for MP3, higher quality formats will be used in a few years.
One of the things I suspect on holding down the filesizes of higher quality MP3s and pictures is download and upload speed. When I first started with online stuff, (accessing a local BBS with a 1200Baud modem) downloading a whole MB was something rare (not to mention time consuming). Now (with broadband) I regulary download catalogs 20Mb to 50Mb in pretty short times. Downloading a 650Mb ISO isn't that much of an issue either.
Now picture what we'll be up and downloading when we've got fibre instead of broadband. By then we might be uploading CD audio tracks rather than MP3s.
Don't worry, when those multi-TB drives are available, you'll have a lot new stuff to store. When those 50Mb drives were hot, nobody had digital photo, digital TV recording or MP3 collections.
I'm sorry Lucre Lucifer, but the BFG is in another castle.
Easy, TV studio equipment is a lot cheaper now than it was in the sixties.
Easy: Find a radar station and hold them in front of the radar antenna.
The man is right, you know. We all should put down those videogames and study law. Then when we grow up we can spend our time contructively by finding something other people like to do and rage a political war against it. A few generations of that and we'll have a society where no time is wasted and everyone is either working or sleeping. Just picture what a great world that would be.
You do are aware computers are very good in sorting and removing duplicate data? How long do you think it would take to write a script to remove the duplicates?
Most of the exams I had in college were the kind where cheating was pretty much impossible. These exams involved getting 2 or 3 questions (each covered a nice part of your course notes), answer them on a piece of paper. Then go to the professor(s) and do the answering oraly (the papers weren't important). They'dd ask a few extra questions about what you wrote on the papers (which gave you a chance to correct mistakes if you knew the material). They easily knew if you actually understanded the subject or just memorised your course notes.