"use Iran as a warning to the rest of the world that we're crazy and will do anything to get our way."
War is the failure of politics, the people left standing do not "win", they simply survive to fight in the next one. The strategy "I'm violent and crazy so give up" did not work in Vietnam, did not work for Hitler and nor did it end the cold war, why do you think it would work in Iran?
I have to say I find your suggestion the most repulsive idea I have ever read on slashdot. It is born from the same "us and them" philosophy fertilizes terrorisim.
"I simply believe that there's no way to deter Iran from using nuclear weapons- the best option would be to get the hell out and leave them alone."
The MAD theory of strategic balance says that either everyone "wins" or everone dies. It depends apon all sides having nukes but no side is willing to risk destroying themselves by striking first. The best option would be a lasting peace (MAD or otherwise), the second best is trade and diplomacy. I don't belive the US can stop Iran obtaining nukes if it is determined to do so but I doubt it will attack Israel for the same reason Pakistan did not attack India when it eventually obtained nukes. Iran has seen the enormous boost in international respect given to Pakistan since it joined the MAD group, why would Iran not want to follow suit?
That clause is also the reason the recent talks on the treaty fell to bits.
Israel has at least 200 nukes on Iran's doorstep and has made numerous threats against Iran. Iran makes for a formidible enemy even without nukes. It has a large, sophisticated military that gives it the potential to shut down the oil trade via the strait of Hormuz and rain missles down on Israel. The US know Iran will not be "pushed around" as easily as Iraq, but that won't stop them from rattling their sabre. On a more optomistic note, the rest of the world seems to be sick of hearing wolf cries from the whitehouse and are refusing to help remake the middle east in GWB's image.
"You don't believe, despite their own claims to be doing so, that Iran is developing nuclear weapons"
Try getting your news from more than one source otherwise you might as well be living in China.
Have you ever thought this might be about oil. Did you know Iran is opening an international oil exchange in March. It is backed by OPEC and will trade exclusively in EUROS, we all know how pissed the US was at Saddam....did you know he switched to selling oil in EUROS in 2000? Did you know that pentagon war games show a shitty outcome for the west if the US (or their proxy Isreal) attacks Iran. Why did Putin scare the shit out of Europe by turning down the gas in the middle of winter? Why was Rice in such a rush to declare there was a "consensus" amongst the UNSC permenant mebers when it is now obvious this was not the case?
The world did not change with 9/11, the 5 permenant members of the UNSC are still using smaller countries to fight proxy wars with each other. The US would be stupid to use overt force against Iran in the present circumstances but that does not rule out covert options. Anyhow, welcome to the start of the oil wars my friend, we are about to flush civilization down the toilet fighting over the worlds shrinking oil deposits.
As for nukes, instead of spending time attacking your straw man I will simply point out that it is strategically more logical to focus on the "have's" rather than the "might have's" and "have not's".
Climate scientists refer to Crithon's book as State of confusion. Some in the US government are clutching to the FICTIONAL straws he is offering.
"Conveniently enough it's also right when they're having some sort of fundraiser or selling a new book."
The one spinning outrageous fiction for political and personal gain is Crithon, Lovelock actually belives in what he is saying as is evidenced by his consistent message over the last 40yrs or so. He also belives that modular reactors are the way forward in the medium term and this has marginalised him in the environmental movement he helped to create.
"Monty Python & the Holy Grail... had no idea what peasants did on the Middle Ages"
You may want to check out the accuracy and origins of the following scenes in the Holy Grail...
The peasant ranting about politics in the fields...
Bring out your dead...
The french using rotted animal carcases as amunition...
The knee deep mud, horse shit and open sewers of overcrowded urban streets.
The writers of the holy grail took snipets from the chronicals of the middle ages and turned them into a kind of black humour spoof of the crusades.
I also disagree that tribal/cave people are portrayed as filthy by Hollywood movies, most have nice stylish hair-do's and beautiful skin (especially the women), only the bad-guys are ugly.
Humans are as tough at surviving as any other mammal, either all are "filthy" or all are "a part of nature", depends on your definition of "filth" I suppose. The aim of civilzation seems to be to clean up all the shit, unfortunately I think we end up just creating more shit.
Haasts Eagle evolved to dine on Moa, a flighless bird that weighed up to 200kg. Since it was the top predator on the Island nothing except maybe another eagle would dare interupt it's meal, it did not have to lift it's prey.
Now when humans arrived, standing on two legs and about the same height as a Moa, the Eagle would not have thought twice about trying something new for lunch. As witnessed by the Eagle's rapid extinction, modern humans do not tolerate that kind of behaviour from a bird.
"Or maybe its just bullshit. Birds hunting the smartest animals on the planet, lol."
It is belived that Haast's eagle preyed on early New Zealanders.
"Most every animal on the planet washes his arse, but not proto-Human"
If you got close to a wild animal you would find it "filthy" and riddled with parasites, I have never seen one "wash it's arse" unless you count licking. If that is what you have to do to "wash" I would rather have a dirty arse.
"They hunt in groups, but jump around and make more noise than a herd of elephants."
They are the "beaters" that are jumping around, the purpose is to drive prey toward an ambush. It is a simple and very effective way to hunt in groups, wild chimps have been filmed hunting monkeys in a similar fashion.
"[Why] do we paint pre humans this way?"
Because it is the way they lived, many people don't have a clue of what it takes to live like a caveman. These people simply conclude the strange actions of "filthy" cavemen are "stupid" (or there is a conspiracy to portray them as filthy and stupid).
Ummm, it's not his Sun machine it's his employers and a bussiness could reasonably be expected to have a more stable IT system than your average g/f.
Also if the data is actually worth recovering, the applications and their settings do matter in any recovery attempt on any O/S. But what the hell it's cool to be clueless and blame your ignorance on Windows.
We have Turing's UCM and Godel's incompleteness theorum, not bad for a new field, but you make the mistake of assuming we need a working theroetical model. There are 6 billion working examples (and plenty of broken ones), remeber that people were making and using levers long before some greek guy came up with a theoretical model.
"We can't yet peer inside the black box."
Poppycock, we can see right down to the atomic level. The brain appears to be a massively parrallel, asyncronous computer based on calcium ion pump technology, unfortuately the documentation is encrypted in DNA. It's "purpose" is to run a simulation of reality that is benifitial to the survival prospects of our genes.
"basic brain functions, such as emotion, have been totally ignored"
The imaginary western divide between emotional and rational (art and science) is due to a lack of understanding of the "blind logic" behind our emotions, ie: If emotions were totally irrational then none of us would survive to wonder about them.
The core of Picasso's, Roger Penrose's and your arguments attack the AI camps assumption that the human mind is an implementation of Turing's UCM. The rest of the argument then endless examples of the "spark" that fires the human mind. The book loads of evidence I have seen that support your argument do not tell us anything usefull about the "spark", it is normaly just a tour around the (admittedly pityfull) limits of current technology. I prefer to apply occams razor and belive (for now) that the assumption is correct. After much searching (by greater minds than mine) there is nothing that contradicts it. Your enthusiasim for Picasso's position is in my opinion a tad premature. You should really wait until another artist/philosopher can refute by showing that Turing's UCM does not apply to the human brain and nervous system. This could be done either by showing us why a "spark" could not emerge in a machine or why humans cannot be viewed as elaborate machines. Pointing out the obvious absence of it in current computers is simply saying: "AI is impossible because it hasn't been invented yet". I realise Picasso was a genius but that sort of logic does not make for a convincing argument.
"I'm no computer scientist or whatever, but I think the Turing test is dumb. My sig line says it all. Quoting Pablo Picasso..."
Disclaimers:
I am a Computer Scientist.
Turing is the God of Computer Science.
Picasso is the God of abstract.
First up you may think you understand the Turing test but you don't, this does not mean you are "dumb", simply uniformed. To pass the Turing test an AI machine must be able to convince people it is human (so convinced that they incorrectly pick the computer as the real human 50% of the time). In your particular case it would have to rapidly convince you it can "wonder" without ever having "met" you before. I belive if a machine can pass the Turing test then it has also passed us in "understanding" since it has the potential of understand that it is a machine but at the same time understand humans well enough to succesfully impersonate one.
The fact that the Turing test exists has already presented the human race with some very deep philosophical questions about ourselves that in my opinion are stranger than quantum mechanics. eg: If a machine can "fake" being human then what does it mean to be human, am I a naturally occuring universal computing machine? Is my "mind and soul" nothing more than an elaborate computation? Is life simply a spontaneous algorithim based on the geometry of certain molecules? What does it mean if more than 50% of people were to be fooled by a machine in a Turing test?
Picasso was certainly one of the great artists of the 20th century, (my art teacher cried when anouncing his death to the class). With apologies to my art teacher, the quote you are so fond of is arrogant and uniformed. To see what I mean, turn it around and imagine Alan Turing saying "Art is useless, it has no answers". Anyone with a clue about art would instantly realise Turing did not understand it. Since I do have a clue about computer science I can assure you Picasso did not.
"but if the road is dry, the stop time will be much shorter if the wheels lock and you skid."
Only if you are talking about gravel roads, on a normal road skiding does not help you slow down faster, it does the opposite. Perhaps it is because you are comparing a heavier SUV to a sedan??
"I bet the passengers aboard that plane were very glad they had a old pilot who knew about gliders"
I belive that is standard procedure for loss of power in a passanger jet and a jumbo can glide better than you might think. It is also standard procedure to nose dive in order to clear volcanic ash from the engines, that manouver usually scares the shit out of everyone on board.
"It would be even better if I could step into my car with a latte, cell phone, and laptop, ask the car to take me to the airport, and read slashdot along the way."
Exactly what I want, public transport without the, errr, ummm, public.
"which does not have an infinite extent in the time direction."
Don't need it if you have infinite extent in 3D space (a reasonable assumption), everything that can happen is happening right now, not once but an infinite number of times. God is outside the Universe so the question of wether God can exist or not is philosophical.
"Are we paying taxes to fund schools to train our replacements ???"
No, as far as I know no government funds foriegn students with taxpayers money, foriegn students are self funded. Here in Australia there are still plenty of jobs for someone with a computer science degree. I myself have had no trouble taking home more than the average wage for the past 15yrs.
They have been saying that for decades and have got nowhere, H is useable NOW and it can be generated from seawater by electricity. The question of sources that everyone goes on about is asking how to generate that electricity. Regardless of the source, H is a much cleaner and more efficient way to store some of that energy for use in personal transport than any foreseebale battery technology. The trick is learning to use H as a safe and convinient substitute for oil, batteries will probably still be much the same a decade from now. They are unsuitable as a replacement for oil in a family car.
Slashdot Mirror
"use Iran as a warning to the rest of the world that we're crazy and will do anything to get our way."
War is the failure of politics, the people left standing do not "win", they simply survive to fight in the next one. The strategy "I'm violent and crazy so give up" did not work in Vietnam, did not work for Hitler and nor did it end the cold war, why do you think it would work in Iran?
I have to say I find your suggestion the most repulsive idea I have ever read on slashdot. It is born from the same "us and them" philosophy fertilizes terrorisim.
"I simply believe that there's no way to deter Iran from using nuclear weapons- the best option would be to get the hell out and leave them alone."
The MAD theory of strategic balance says that either everyone "wins" or everone dies. It depends apon all sides having nukes but no side is willing to risk destroying themselves by striking first. The best option would be a lasting peace (MAD or otherwise), the second best is trade and diplomacy. I don't belive the US can stop Iran obtaining nukes if it is determined to do so but I doubt it will attack Israel for the same reason Pakistan did not attack India when it eventually obtained nukes. Iran has seen the enormous boost in international respect given to Pakistan since it joined the MAD group, why would Iran not want to follow suit?
That clause is also the reason the recent talks on the treaty fell to bits.
Israel has at least 200 nukes on Iran's doorstep and has made numerous threats against Iran. Iran makes for a formidible enemy even without nukes. It has a large, sophisticated military that gives it the potential to shut down the oil trade via the strait of Hormuz and rain missles down on Israel. The US know Iran will not be "pushed around" as easily as Iraq, but that won't stop them from rattling their sabre. On a more optomistic note, the rest of the world seems to be sick of hearing wolf cries from the whitehouse and are refusing to help remake the middle east in GWB's image.
"You don't believe, despite their own claims to be doing so, that Iran is developing nuclear weapons"
Try getting your news from more than one source otherwise you might as well be living in China.
Have you ever thought this might be about oil. Did you know Iran is opening an international oil exchange in March. It is backed by OPEC and will trade exclusively in EUROS, we all know how pissed the US was at Saddam....did you know he switched to selling oil in EUROS in 2000? Did you know that pentagon war games show a shitty outcome for the west if the US (or their proxy Isreal) attacks Iran. Why did Putin scare the shit out of Europe by turning down the gas in the middle of winter? Why was Rice in such a rush to declare there was a "consensus" amongst the UNSC permenant mebers when it is now obvious this was not the case?
The world did not change with 9/11, the 5 permenant members of the UNSC are still using smaller countries to fight proxy wars with each other. The US would be stupid to use overt force against Iran in the present circumstances but that does not rule out covert options. Anyhow, welcome to the start of the oil wars my friend, we are about to flush civilization down the toilet fighting over the worlds shrinking oil deposits.
As for nukes, instead of spending time attacking your straw man I will simply point out that it is strategically more logical to focus on the "have's" rather than the "might have's" and "have not's".
"In this sense, skeptics are good for science."
Ummm, science is formalised skepticism.
Climate scientists refer to Crithon's book as State of confusion. Some in the US government are clutching to the FICTIONAL straws he is offering.
"Conveniently enough it's also right when they're having some sort of fundraiser or selling a new book."
The one spinning outrageous fiction for political and personal gain is Crithon, Lovelock actually belives in what he is saying as is evidenced by his consistent message over the last 40yrs or so. He also belives that modular reactors are the way forward in the medium term and this has marginalised him in the environmental movement he helped to create.
"Probably a way to take better advice from this is to design your pages so they load *FAST*..."
Not only should they be displayed fast (at the click of a button!) they should be designed to "load" who and what they represent into your mind fast.
"Monty Python & the Holy Grail ... had no idea what peasants did on the Middle Ages"
You may want to check out the accuracy and origins of the following scenes in the Holy Grail...
The peasant ranting about politics in the fields...
Bring out your dead...
The french using rotted animal carcases as amunition...
The knee deep mud, horse shit and open sewers of overcrowded urban streets.
The writers of the holy grail took snipets from the chronicals of the middle ages and turned them into a kind of black humour spoof of the crusades.
I also disagree that tribal/cave people are portrayed as filthy by Hollywood movies, most have nice stylish hair-do's and beautiful skin (especially the women), only the bad-guys are ugly.
Humans are as tough at surviving as any other mammal, either all are "filthy" or all are "a part of nature", depends on your definition of "filth" I suppose. The aim of civilzation seems to be to clean up all the shit, unfortunately I think we end up just creating more shit.
Haasts Eagle evolved to dine on Moa, a flighless bird that weighed up to 200kg. Since it was the top predator on the Island nothing except maybe another eagle would dare interupt it's meal, it did not have to lift it's prey.
Now when humans arrived, standing on two legs and about the same height as a Moa, the Eagle would not have thought twice about trying something new for lunch. As witnessed by the Eagle's rapid extinction, modern humans do not tolerate that kind of behaviour from a bird.
"Or maybe its just bullshit. Birds hunting the smartest animals on the planet, lol."
It is belived that Haast's eagle preyed on early New Zealanders.
"Most every animal on the planet washes his arse, but not proto-Human"
If you got close to a wild animal you would find it "filthy" and riddled with parasites, I have never seen one "wash it's arse" unless you count licking. If that is what you have to do to "wash" I would rather have a dirty arse.
"They hunt in groups, but jump around and make more noise than a herd of elephants."
They are the "beaters" that are jumping around, the purpose is to drive prey toward an ambush. It is a simple and very effective way to hunt in groups, wild chimps have been filmed hunting monkeys in a similar fashion.
"[Why] do we paint pre humans this way?"
Because it is the way they lived, many people don't have a clue of what it takes to live like a caveman. These people simply conclude the strange actions of "filthy" cavemen are "stupid" (or there is a conspiracy to portray them as filthy and stupid).
"You know I think that Bhutan is the one country where pigs do fly."
It has been said that the ultimate goal of AI is to make a robot that can sing the words to the Flinstones tune but forgets to pay the bills.
Ummm, it's not his Sun machine it's his employers and a bussiness could reasonably be expected to have a more stable IT system than your average g/f.
Also if the data is actually worth recovering, the applications and their settings do matter in any recovery attempt on any O/S. But what the hell it's cool to be clueless and blame your ignorance on Windows.
"we don't even have a theoretical model"
We have Turing's UCM and Godel's incompleteness theorum, not bad for a new field, but you make the mistake of assuming we need a working theroetical model. There are 6 billion working examples (and plenty of broken ones), remeber that people were making and using levers long before some greek guy came up with a theoretical model.
"We can't yet peer inside the black box."
Poppycock, we can see right down to the atomic level. The brain appears to be a massively parrallel, asyncronous computer based on calcium ion pump technology, unfortuately the documentation is encrypted in DNA. It's "purpose" is to run a simulation of reality that is benifitial to the survival prospects of our genes.
"basic brain functions, such as emotion, have been totally ignored"
The imaginary western divide between emotional and rational (art and science) is due to a lack of understanding of the "blind logic" behind our emotions, ie: If emotions were totally irrational then none of us would survive to wonder about them.
The core of Picasso's, Roger Penrose's and your arguments attack the AI camps assumption that the human mind is an implementation of Turing's UCM. The rest of the argument then endless examples of the "spark" that fires the human mind. The book loads of evidence I have seen that support your argument do not tell us anything usefull about the "spark", it is normaly just a tour around the (admittedly pityfull) limits of current technology. I prefer to apply occams razor and belive (for now) that the assumption is correct. After much searching (by greater minds than mine) there is nothing that contradicts it. Your enthusiasim for Picasso's position is in my opinion a tad premature. You should really wait until another artist/philosopher can refute by showing that Turing's UCM does not apply to the human brain and nervous system. This could be done either by showing us why a "spark" could not emerge in a machine or why humans cannot be viewed as elaborate machines. Pointing out the obvious absence of it in current computers is simply saying: "AI is impossible because it hasn't been invented yet". I realise Picasso was a genius but that sort of logic does not make for a convincing argument.
"I'm no computer scientist or whatever, but I think the Turing test is dumb. My sig line says it all. Quoting Pablo Picasso..."
Disclaimers:
I am a Computer Scientist.
Turing is the God of Computer Science.
Picasso is the God of abstract.
First up you may think you understand the Turing test but you don't, this does not mean you are "dumb", simply uniformed. To pass the Turing test an AI machine must be able to convince people it is human (so convinced that they incorrectly pick the computer as the real human 50% of the time). In your particular case it would have to rapidly convince you it can "wonder" without ever having "met" you before. I belive if a machine can pass the Turing test then it has also passed us in "understanding" since it has the potential of understand that it is a machine but at the same time understand humans well enough to succesfully impersonate one.
The fact that the Turing test exists has already presented the human race with some very deep philosophical questions about ourselves that in my opinion are stranger than quantum mechanics. eg: If a machine can "fake" being human then what does it mean to be human, am I a naturally occuring universal computing machine? Is my "mind and soul" nothing more than an elaborate computation? Is life simply a spontaneous algorithim based on the geometry of certain molecules? What does it mean if more than 50% of people were to be fooled by a machine in a Turing test?
Picasso was certainly one of the great artists of the 20th century, (my art teacher cried when anouncing his death to the class). With apologies to my art teacher, the quote you are so fond of is arrogant and uniformed. To see what I mean, turn it around and imagine Alan Turing saying "Art is useless, it has no answers". Anyone with a clue about art would instantly realise Turing did not understand it. Since I do have a clue about computer science I can assure you Picasso did not.
"I thought it was "The one who dies with the most stuff wins!!""
No, the one that inherits the stuff "wins". My aim is to die with a smile on my face.
"but if the road is dry, the stop time will be much shorter if the wheels lock and you skid."
Only if you are talking about gravel roads, on a normal road skiding does not help you slow down faster, it does the opposite. Perhaps it is because you are comparing a heavier SUV to a sedan??
"I bet the passengers aboard that plane were very glad they had a old pilot who knew about gliders"
I belive that is standard procedure for loss of power in a passanger jet and a jumbo can glide better than you might think. It is also standard procedure to nose dive in order to clear volcanic ash from the engines, that manouver usually scares the shit out of everyone on board.
"It would be even better if I could step into my car with a latte, cell phone, and laptop, ask the car to take me to the airport, and read slashdot along the way."
Exactly what I want, public transport without the, errr, ummm, public.
I'm confused, if we are marooned aliens then did apes evolve from us?
"The fact that innocent algae have to be subjugated to digest our waste will still irk some environmentalists."
If you knew anything about "environmentalists" you would realize they love frollicing in compost.
"there is no shortage of trees in the world."
You sure about that?
"which does not have an infinite extent in the time direction."
Don't need it if you have infinite extent in 3D space (a reasonable assumption), everything that can happen is happening right now, not once but an infinite number of times. God is outside the Universe so the question of wether God can exist or not is philosophical.
"Are we paying taxes to fund schools to train our replacements ???"
No, as far as I know no government funds foriegn students with taxpayers money, foriegn students are self funded. Here in Australia there are still plenty of jobs for someone with a computer science degree. I myself have had no trouble taking home more than the average wage for the past 15yrs.
I doubt it will come to that, the survivors will probably eat all the horses well before they start thinking about crops.
"(probably have better battery tech then)."
They have been saying that for decades and have got nowhere, H is useable NOW and it can be generated from seawater by electricity. The question of sources that everyone goes on about is asking how to generate that electricity. Regardless of the source, H is a much cleaner and more efficient way to store some of that energy for use in personal transport than any foreseebale battery technology. The trick is learning to use H as a safe and convinient substitute for oil, batteries will probably still be much the same a decade from now. They are unsuitable as a replacement for oil in a family car.